Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“With the object of establishing an armistice which will insure a complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until a final peaceful settlement is achieved...”

– Preamble to the Korean Armistice Agreement, July 27, 1953

“We will never be bound by this armistice. “There is no substitute for unification. Korea must be unified — whatever the cost.”

– President Syngman Rhee, July 1953

"By mid-June 1954, Clark’s hopeful political solution died with the failure of the delegation talks in Switzerland, as both Korean governments stubbornly affirmed that unification and elections were impossible without one side’s complete abdication, leaving only the cease-fire armistice. The Korean War cost the UN Command over 500,200 soldiers, with 94,000 killed. The United States lost 33,629 soldiers [other estimates of to 36,576] while 103,284 were wounded and 5,178 were missing in action or prisoners of war at the time of the cease-fire. The ROK lost 58,217 soldiers with 175,743 wounded. North Korean and Chinese forces losses remained unclear, with estimations as high as 1.5 million. Estimations placed civilian losses in both North and South Korea at over a million each."

– Capt. Michael Anderson, U.S. Army, 2019

1. We are China hawks. Don’t pivot to Asia!

2. A Cosmic Mystery: Is China Building the World’s Biggest Telescope?

3. The Navy secretary is trying to limit a deputy's role — before he's even confirmed

4. Trump says Thailand, Cambodia agree to hold immediate ceasefire talks

5. Public anger, calls for accountability after 6 Chinese students die at Inner Mongolia mining facility

6. Hegseth team told to stop polygraph tests after complaint to White House

7. DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations

8. The Depopulation Bomb

9. Israel Says It Is Pausing Fighting in Parts of Gaza to Allow Aid In

10. China Strong-Armed Japan Over Rare Earths. It’s a Lesson for the U.S.

11. Can the Nazis Teach Us Anything?

12. US and its allies unprepared to repel saturation missile attacks

13. Learning from Mao's ‘nightmare’ youth revolution in China

14. US Foreign Aid With Chinese Characteristics

15. Hegseth’s ousting of female leaders may have ‘chilling effect’ at Pentagon

16. Back on the Brink ...Could ‘Black Americans’ become stateless in their own country? By Dr. Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III

17. The Big Five - 27 July edition by Mick Ryan

18. A Response from an SF CSM in the Regiment

19. 7 Brilliant Acts of Psychological Warfare in History

1. We are China hawks. Don’t pivot to Asia!

I concur.

I made a similar point (in a minor way) in London earlier this month.

My remarks:

Let us begin by examining the terrain we are navigating. I use Asia-Indo-Pacific quite deliberately because I do not believe we can neglect Asia in our description. I know the policymakers will argue Asia is within the Indo-Pacific. But Asia is at the center of the Indo-Pacific, and it is where the military, political and economic power reside. Although beyond the scope of this presentation, I would argue that due to the increasing interconnectedness and the shrinking of the globe, we should also always talk in terms of Eurasia.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2025/07/15/korea-perspective-david-maxwell-speech/8541752588776/

From Kahatiri and Mazza (which will be rejected by certain factions within the Administration):

This requires American leaders to accept that Eurasia is best understood as a cohesive political space, rather than a collection of disparate subregions. Eurasian order is unitary: It is not possible to ensure tranquility anywhere on the continent without ensuring it everywhere.

Rather than pivot, rebalance, or prioritize, the wise choice is for the United States to grow its military and recommit to exercising hegemony in Eurasia, the role it adopted in the wake of World War II. It should set its eyes on remaining the dominant economic, scientific, and military power in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. The world’s wealthiest country can afford this.

Asked what guided his administration, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is alleged to have said, “Events, my dear boy, events.” The United States should actively maintain the Eurasian order if it wishes to contain China and prevent distracting events in Europe and the Middle East. Otherwise, it will not be until war with China breaks out that the pivoters finally get their wish.

We are China hawks. Don’t pivot to Asia! - Breaking Defense

The US should not pivot to Asia, but instead focus on the Eurasian continent as a whole, write Shay Khatiri and Michael Mazza in this op-ed.

breakingdefense.com · by Shay Khatiri, Michael Mazza · July 25, 2025

Chinese Vice President Han Zheng meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, Russia, Sept. 4, 2024. (Photo by Wang Ye/Xinhua via Getty Images)

American B-2s just set the Iranian nuclear problem back by years. Syria is no longer a basket case. And the Trump administration has secured a commitment by NATO members to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense.

The United States can finally pivot to Asia, right? Wrong.

Every president of the 21st century has sought to reorient the American ship of state to focus on the Indo-Pacific, where China’s rise has increasingly threatened US national security interests. But Europe and the Middle East keep getting in the way.

The desire to pivot, a phrase coined by former secretary of state Hilary Clinton, is understandable. The People’s Republic of China is a totalitarian state that believes it is entitled to inherit the earth, one with unlimited economic, territorial, and nuclear ambitions that, if realized, would leave the postwar world the United States shaped in tatters.

Yet attempted pivots — particularly those under President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump’s first term, and President Joe Biden — fostered the chaos elsewhere that led those attempts to fail.

Obama’s announcement of a rebalance to Asia and subsequent withdrawal from Iraq created a vacuum that Iran, the Islamic State, and Turkey were delighted to atrociously fill. His disdain for Europe and desperation to make nice with Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, paved the way for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. The Obama administration spent the years after its initial shift to Asia moving forces back into the Middle East and Europe to quell the violence and deter further aggression.

Trump reoriented America’s China policy, labeling Beijing a strategic competitor and launching initial efforts to constrain its growing power. The administration looked at Russia and malevolent Middle East actors as, respectively, second- and third-order priorities. Biden adopted this approach and carried out the Afghanistan withdrawal his predecessor had negotiated with the Taliban. The result should not have come as a surprise to the many Obama veterans in the Biden administration, including the president himself: the largest land war in Europe since World War II and a Middle Eastern war in which Israel fought on seven fronts.

Both Ukraine and Israel are escalations of existing, years-long, low-intensity wars, which broke out and continued due to the downsizing of the US presence in the respective regions. The Obama administration reduced military capabilities in Europe in its first term; when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, there was not a single American tank in Europe for the first time in decades. The rise of the Islamic State was a result of withdrawal from Iraq and a conscious decision to husband resources and abstain from intervention in the Syrian Civil War. The Islamic Republic’s deployment of its military to Syria and close to the Israeli border set off the shadow war between the two.

China took advantage of these escalations. It fed Russia’s war machine and kept the Russian economy afloat with energy purchases and the provision of materiel. After Oct. 7, 2023, China openly sided with Hamas and sought to use that support to stoke discontent on the “Arab street,” creating political challenges for America’s regional allies. The Biden pivot to Asia was, like its forebears, abortive. The administration shifted from prosecuting a competition with China to managing it so it could focus its energies on hot wars elsewhere.

The current Trump administration entered office with a bias toward “prioritizing” Asia, but reality again intervened. The administration has had to dedicate time and resources to the conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. For reasons of economics, security, and values, both regions remain enormously important to the United States — and to America’s allies and partners in Asia, which depend on energy imports from the Persian Gulf and on trade with the European Union.

Pivots to Asia are destined to fail as long as there are bad actors elsewhere on the Eurasian continent. If the United States is serious about containing China, it must ensure that events elsewhere do not disrupt Asia policy. Otherwise, China will grow ever stronger and ever more disruptive.

This requires American leaders to accept that Eurasia is best understood as a cohesive political space, rather than a collection of disparate subregions. Eurasian order is unitary: It is not possible to ensure tranquility anywhere on the continent without ensuring it everywhere.

Rather than pivot, rebalance, or prioritize, the wise choice is for the United States to grow its military and recommit to exercising hegemony in Eurasia, the role it adopted in the wake of World War II. It should set its eyes on remaining the dominant economic, scientific, and military power in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. The world’s wealthiest country can afford this.

Asked what guided his administration, UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is alleged to have said, “Events, my dear boy, events.” The United States should actively maintain the Eurasian order if it wishes to contain China and prevent distracting events in Europe and the Middle East. Otherwise, it will not be until war with China breaks out that the pivoters finally get their wish.

Shay Khatiri is vice president of development and senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute. Michael Mazza is a senior director at the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (formerly the Project 2049 Institute) and senior non-resident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.

breakingdefense.com · by Shay Khatiri, Michael Mazza · July 25, 2025

2. A Cosmic Mystery: Is China Building the World’s Biggest Telescope?

What are they up to? (An "entry-level drug" for STEM?)

Excerpts:

The leading Chinese astronomer and his institute, a national research organization that appears to be in charge of the telescope, didn’t return requests for comment for this article.

If China is building the big scope, that raises another question.

“Why the hell are they doing that?” said Matt Mountain, head of the nonprofit organization that manages observatories, as well as the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Mountain has two hypotheses. First, astronomical advances benefit both scientific and military purposes, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson highlighted in his book “Accessory to War.” Huge telescopes can look at military satellites, not just stars and planets.

The second hypothesis: Beijing is investing in astronomy to inspire children to enter the sciences—so it can surpass the U.S. in a couple of decades.

“Astronomy is an entry-level drug for science, technology, engineering and math,” said Mountain.

A Cosmic Mystery: Is China Building the World’s Biggest Telescope?

Top American astronomers hunt for clues about a 48-foot-wide giant that Beijing isn’t talking about

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/a-cosmic-mystery-is-china-building-the-worlds-biggest-telescope-d436cdef

By Stu Woo

July 26, 2025 10:00 am ET

There are signs that China is building a giant telescope to explore the universe. Photo: Cfoto/DDP/Zuma Press

Key Points

What's This?

Astronomer Robert Kirshner is investigating whether China is building a 48-foot telescope.
China has not acknowledged the observatory, which could threaten U.S. technological leadership.
Kirshner is seeking funding for a U.S. telescope and hopes to show China is building one too.

Astronomer Robert Kirshner investigates some of the universe’s biggest questions: What happens when a star explodes? Is the universe still expanding?

He recently added a new mystery to the list: Is China quietly building the world’s biggest telescope? He would like to know, because he leads a rival telescope project in the U.S.

There are clues. In January, state-owned Nanjing Astronomical Instruments said on social media that it won a $22 million bid for a dome to surround a 48-foot telescope. In an April social-media post, students visiting a science institute mentioned researchers showing them mirror arrangements for such a telescope. And a top Chinese astronomer told state media he wanted to finish the telescope before he retires.

Yet Chinese officials haven’t directly acknowledged the observatory, which would threaten American technological leadership and potentially give Beijing a military advantage.

“You would expect, normally, some kind of chest thumping,” said Kirshner, a Harvard emeritus professor.

The leading Chinese astronomer and his institute, a national research organization that appears to be in charge of the telescope, didn’t return requests for comment for this article.

If China is building the big scope, that raises another question.

“Why the hell are they doing that?” said Matt Mountain, head of the nonprofit organization that manages observatories, as well as the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Mountain has two hypotheses. First, astronomical advances benefit both scientific and military purposes, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson highlighted in his book “Accessory to War.” Huge telescopes can look at military satellites, not just stars and planets.

The James Webb space telescope’s mirror has a 21-foot diameter. Photo: Laura Betz/NASA/AP

The second hypothesis: Beijing is investing in astronomy to inspire children to enter the sciences—so it can surpass the U.S. in a couple of decades.

“Astronomy is an entry-level drug for science, technology, engineering and math,” said Mountain.

American institutes are the New York Yankees of modern astronomy. By Kirshner’s count, 18 of the 23 astrophysics-focused Nobel Prize winners in the last half-century worked in the U.S.

While space telescopes such as the James Webb get more attention these days, those on the ground still matter. They are easier to service and much bigger, offsetting disadvantages such as light pollution and atmospheric distortions.

Bigger telescopes mean sharper images, making it easier to determine the distance between faraway objects, Kirshner said. Astronomers can then discover more planets orbiting stars in the Goldilocks temperature range that could support life.

The Hubble and Webb space telescopes have mirrors with diameters of about 8 feet and 21 feet, respectively. The four biggest ones currently on Earth—one in Spain and three in the U.S.—are all roughly 33 feet in diameter.

If China completes a 48-foot telescope soon, it would be the world’s biggest, unless a delayed 128-foot European telescope in Chile is finished first.

Kirshner’s Thirty Meter Telescope group, an international project with U.S., Canadian, Indian and Japanese institutions, proposes a 98-foot telescope on Hawaii’s Big Island. Instead of making one massive mirror, which would require mountain transport and the construction of an unfeasibly huge furnace, it would use 492 hexagonal segments, each 4.7 feet wide.

These giant telescopes cost roughly $1 billion to $2 billion, Mountain said, and costs rise with size. They also take years to build.

Drawing on political rather than scientific wisdom, Kirshner realized it would help make the case in Washington for big-telescope funding if he could show China was building one too.

Kirshner’s best sources have been Chinese-speaking peers who informally confirmed the development of a telescope site in the Tibetan Plateau, in China’s southwest. Mountain says Chilean astronomers told him China was also exploring a Southern Hemisphere observatory in Chile.

A 128-foot European telescope, set to be the world’s biggest, is under construction in Chile. Photo: rodrigo arangua/AFP/Getty Images

Armed with the information, Kirshner met congressional staffers and National Science Foundation officials.

He ran into a roadblock in May, when President Trump proposed to Congress that the NSF’s annual budget be cut to $4 billion from $9 billion. Trump’s science and technology adviser said then that scientific progress had stalled in some fields and more federal money wouldn’t necessarily mean more scientific impact.

In its budget request, the NSF proposed advancing only the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is backed by a California-headquartered consortium. At 83 feet wide, the Magellan would be bigger than China’s but smaller than Kirshner’s proposed telescope. Like the European telescope, this observatory would be in Chile.

The Magellan’s location would leave China with the Northern Hemisphere’s biggest telescope. Earth’s curvature means each hemisphere offers different views.

Kirshner got a reprieve in mid-July. A Senate spending committee recommended minimal cuts to the NSF, and said it supported both the Magellan project and Kirshner’s Thirty Meter Telescope.

Kirshner called on Congress to endorse what he called a “vigorous response to China’s efforts.”

Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com

3. The Navy secretary is trying to limit a deputy's role — before he's even confirmed

This does not sound good.

The Navy secretary is trying to limit a deputy's role — before he's even confirmed

John Phelan and his chief of staff are taking control of the duties that would have gone to the future Navy undersecretary.

By Jack Detsch, Paul McLeary, Daniel Lippman and Joe Gould07/26/2025 08:00 AM EDT

Politico

While power struggles at the Pentagon are not uncommon, the people said it was rare for a service secretary to act on concerns about a Senate-confirmed position. Lawmakers are expected to vote on Cao’s nomination next week.

Cao’s office “will be there to go to meetings but not be a source of analysis or decision-making,” said one of the people. The undersecretary “will basically just implement decisions from the front office.”

The moves follow another power struggle in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office this year, which led to the departure of his senior aides. And it signals more upheaval at the top of the Pentagon, which could hamper the Navy’s ability to salvage a long-delayed shipbuilding program as the U.S. struggles to compete with China’s industrial might. Harrison is a key figure. He asked that correspondence for the undersecretary go straight to him, according to the people familiar with the situation and a memo addressed to top Navy and Marine Corps officials, obtained by POLITICO.

The memo, signed by then-Acting Navy Secretary Terence Emmert, directed deputies to report to both Harrison and the undersecretary. But the acting undersecretary, Brett Seidle, has not been given a role in key Navy decisions and advising Phelan, the people said.

The shift, according to another one of the four people, appears poised to put the Navy’s Research and Development office more directly under Phelan’s control. The office is responsible for shipbuilding and developing uncrewed vessels — two of the service’s top priorities, in which the undersecretary plays a major role.

Phelan and Harrison “are going to make it extremely difficult for Hung to get anything done,” said another one of the people. “They’re consolidating power.”

Phelan’s spokesperson, Capt. Adam Clampitt, said the notion that Phelan and Harrison are wary of Cao and trying to undercut him was “completely untrue.”

Cao also has close ties to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, according to a former government official and another person familiar with their relationship, who like others, were granted anonymity to speak candidly. Feinberg and Phelan, both former financiers and influential players inside the Pentagon, appear to have a tense relationship, they said.

“Feinberg and Phelan come from similar backgrounds and are pursuing similar objectives so it makes sense that they see each other as natural rivals,” the person familiar said.

Clampitt said the two have a “close personal working relationship” and eat dinner together regularly. Phelan “is positioning the office to best tackle the Navy’s challenges and put people in the right positions to succeed,” he said.

Phelan, in an emailed statement, said the Navy was “making changes to foster an adaptable and accountable culture,” and that the service planned to announce “even more organizational changes” to improve shipbuilding and the quality of life for sailors and Marines. Cao, he said, “will have a significant and visible role.”

Seidle said in an emailed statement that he had “close and wide-ranging access” to Phelan and other Defense Department leaders. “To suggest otherwise is not true.”

Harrison and Cao did not respond to requests for comment.

Feinberg “has a great relationship with Navy Secretary Phelan and looks forward to working with Hung Cao once he is confirmed,” said Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. “The accusation that there is division within the Navy is more fake news trash.”

White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly commended Phelan’s work and said “reorganizational changes will empower — not diminish — proven leaders like Hung Cao, ensuring they have the authority and tools needed to execute the President’s mission to restore readiness and lethality at the DOD.”

Cao had his Senate confirmation hearing in June and is awaiting a vote, which could come as early as next week.

The changes occur as the Navy prepares to receive $43 billion from the megabill recently passed by Congress to buy 16 new ships. Phelan and Harrison— whose experience is in the private sector rather than the Navy — will manage the massive one-time injection of cash.

Another person briefed on the plans said the Navy is “wasting this golden opportunity” to fix its decades-long shipbuilding problems because many experienced officers will have much of their decision-making abilities taken away.

The service is also cutting into the services in an effort to follow Hegseth’s orders to reduce staff. POLITICO reported earlier this month that the Navy is considering eliminating as many as five high-level admiral positions critical to shipbuilding and construction.

Phelan last week put in three acting political appointees to replace the civil servants who were serving as Navy assistant secretaries. Elmer Roman took over for Brenda Johnson Turner as chief for energy, installations and environment; Scott Duncan replaced Jenn Latorre as the Navy’s chief for manpower and reserve affairs; and Tim Dill supplanted Catherine Kessmeier as general counsel.

Clampitt said the civil servants had returned to their jobs as deputies to the acting political appointees. One person reassigned in the undersecretary’s office had ended a temporary detail, he said, and the other was a military aide and had not been hired through the standard selection process.A former defense official said that top Navy officials made it clear after Trump’s inauguration that they would replace assistant Navy secretaries and their principal civilian deputies — typically career civil servants —with political appointees.

“This is just uncharted territory,” said one of the people familiar with the situation. “They just want their people in there to keep an eye” on Cao.

Politico

4. Trump says Thailand, Cambodia agree to hold immediate ceasefire talks

I guess it is true that trade is at the center of all US foreign policy.

Trump says Thailand, Cambodia agree to hold immediate ceasefire talks

Trump said he warned Cambodian PM Hun Manet and Thai PM Phumtham Wechayachai that he would not make trade deals with either if the border conflict continued.

27 Jul 2025 02:24AM

(Updated: 27 Jul 2025 06:56AM)

channelnewsasia.com

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Saturday (Jul 26) that the leaders of Cambodia and Thailand had agreed to meet immediately to quickly work out a ceasefire, as he sought to broker peace after three days of fighting along their border.

Thailand's acting prime minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, thanked Trump and said Thailand "agrees in principle to have a ceasefire in place" but "would like to see sincere intention from the Cambodian side".

Phumtham was responding in a Facebook post to a series of social media posts by Trump during a visit to Scotland. Trump said he had spoken to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Phumtham and warned them that he would not make trade deals with either if the border conflict continued.

"Both parties are looking for an immediate Ceasefire and Peace," Trump wrote as he gave a blow-by-blow account of his diplomatic efforts.

Phumtham also said he had asked Trump "to convey to the Cambodian side that Thailand wants to convene a bilateral dialogue as soon as possible to bring forth measures and procedures for the ceasefire and the eventual peaceful resolution of the conflict".

More than 30 people have been killed and more than 130,000 people displaced in the worst fighting between the Southeast Asian neighbours in 13 years.

Before Trump spoke to the two leaders, clashes on the Thai-Cambodian border persisted into a third day and new flashpoints emerged as both sides said they had acted in self-defence in the border dispute and called on the other to cease fighting and start negotiations.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is deeply concerned by the clashes and "urges both sides to immediately agree to a ceasefire and to address any issues through dialogue," Deputy UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said in a statement.

Haq said Guterres "condemns the tragic and unnecessary loss of lives" and "remains available to assist in any efforts towards a peaceful resolution of the dispute".

Trump offered no details on the ceasefire negotiations he said Thailand and Cambodia had agreed to hold.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions on the timing and venue for talks and the Thai and Cambodian embassies in Washington also did not immediately respond.

There were clashes early on Saturday, both sides said, in the Thai coastal province of Trat and Cambodia's Pursat Province, a new front more than 100km from other conflict points along the long-contested border.

The countries have faced off since the killing of a Cambodian soldier late in May during a brief skirmish. Troops on both sides of the border were reinforced amid a full-blown diplomatic crisis that brought Thailand's fragile coalition government to the brink of collapse.

As of Saturday, Thailand said seven soldiers and 13 civilians had been killed, while Cambodia said five soldiers and eight civilians had been killed.

Displaced Cambodians receive water at the Battkhao Resettlement Camp in Oddar Meanchey Province, Cambodia, Jul 26, 2025 as border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia entered its third day. (Photo: AP/Anton L Delgado)

Trump's direct involvement followed US calls for restraint on both sides. He said he spoke to each leader and relayed messages back and forth.

"They have agreed to immediately meet and quickly work out a Ceasefire and, ultimately, PEACE!" Trump wrote, saying both countries wanted to get back to the "trading table".

He has sought to reach separate deals with dozens of countries by Aug 1 in response to his announcement of wide-ranging tariffs on imports to the US.

"When all is done, and peace is at hand, I look forward to concluding our trading agreements with both!" Trump said.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, chair of the ASEAN regional bloc, said he would continue to push a ceasefire proposal. Cambodia has backed Anwar's plan, while Thailand has said it agreed with it in principle.

SECURITY COUNCIL MEETING

Thailand's UN ambassador told a Security Council meeting on Friday that soldiers had been injured by newly planted land mines in Thai territory on two occasions since mid-July – claims Cambodia has strongly denied – and said Cambodia had then launched attacks on Thursday morning.

On Saturday, Cambodia accused Thailand of "a deliberate, unprovoked, and unlawful military attack" and said "military preparations reveal Thailand's intent to expand its aggression and further violate Cambodia's sovereignty".

It called for the international community to condemn Thailand's "aggression" and prevent an expansion of its military activities, while Bangkok says it wants to resolve the dispute bilaterally.

Southeast Asia expert Gregory Poling of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies said it would be positive if Trump could help speed up ceasefire talks, but cautioned:

"Neither Cambodia nor Thailand – or their publics – will appreciate the threat to weaponise trade to make it happen. And if they do reach a ceasefire and either or both still don't get a trade deal before Aug 1, they are likely to view it as a US betrayal."

Thailand and Cambodia have bickered for decades over undemarcated points along their 817km land border, with ownership of the ancient Hindu temples Ta Moan Thom and the 11th century Preah Vihear central to the disputes.

Preah Vihear was awarded to Cambodia by the International Court of Justice in 1962, but tension escalated in 2008 after Cambodia attempted to list it as a UNESCO World Heritage site, and skirmishes over several years brought at least a dozen deaths.

Cambodia said in June it had asked the court to resolve its disputes with Thailand, which says it has never recognised the court's jurisdiction and prefers a bilateral approach.

Source: Reuters/fs/mi

Newsletter

5. Public anger, calls for accountability after 6 Chinese students die at Inner Mongolia mining facility

What a terrible way to die.

Excerpts:

“What a pity. Six students from six families,” wrote Weibo user Yin Qiaoqiao. “I cannot imagine what their parents and families must be feeling right now. A thorough probe is needed.”

Others scrutinised photos and videos of the facility and raised questions about how the tank’s safety platform could have given way and why the students had not been wearing safety ropes.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” said a Weibo user by the handle Xiao Yi. “The substandard quality of the metal grates and lack of awareness of the load-bearing capacity led to this. Who should be held accountable?”

Chinese news reports have called it a national tragedy.

In a commentary published on Thursday, the Xinhua state news agency said the tragedy was a “wake-up call” for safety standards and practices when entering dangerous environments like industrial facilities and other enterprises.

The Paper, a Shanghai digital news outlet, said large mining conglomerates and companies, with huge investments and sales, had a responsibility to uphold safety measures.

“Lives are priceless. They should not become casualties of neglected maintenance, lax oversight or unfilled safety responsibilities,” it said.

Public anger, calls for accountability after 6 Chinese students die at Inner Mongolia mining facility

In the accident on Jul 23, the students were observing an industrial flotation tank when the grating panel they were standing on collapsed, causing them to fall and drown.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-university-students-deaths-mining-facility-anger-safety-measures-5258276

A photo of the mining plant belonging to Zhongjin Gold, a subsidiary of China National Gold Group. (Photo: WeChat/China National Gold Group's Inner Mongolia mining company)

25 Jul 2025 05:22PM

Bookmark

Read a summary of this article on FAST.

FAST

BEIJING: A Chinese gold mining conglomerate has apologised following the deaths of six university students at its processing plant in Inner Mongolia on Wednesday (Jul 23) as public anger and calls grow for stricter safety measures and accountability.

The students, part of a group from Northeastern University in Shenyang, Liaoning, were visiting a facility run by Zhongjin Gold, a subsidiary of the China National Gold Group Corporation, a state-owned mining enterprise and one of the country’s largest gold producers.

They were observing an industrial flotation tank when the grating panel they were standing on collapsed, causing them to fall and drown in the slurry-filled tank.

Despite rescue efforts, all six students, aged between 20 and 22, were pronounced dead by medical workers at the scene, according to a statement released by the company on Thursday.

“All six students were confirmed drowned after being pulled from the tank. One teacher was also injured,” the statement said.

The first student was pulled from the tank at around noon, while the last was removed at around 12.40pm, it added.

The company confirmed it had activated an emergency plan and reported the incident to relevant local government departments. It also said the facility had halted production.

“The company expresses profound grief for the unfortunate victims, extends sincere condolences to the injured and the families of the deceased, and deeply apologises for the social impact caused by this incident,” it said.

NATIONAL GRIEF, CALLS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY

The incident drew national attention in China, becoming one of the most searched topics on Chinese social media sites.

On the Sina Weibo microblogging site, netizens expressed their shock, anger and grief at the sudden loss of six young lives.

Commentary: How ending mine disasters could help China’s energy security

“What a pity. Six students from six families,” wrote Weibo user Yin Qiaoqiao. “I cannot imagine what their parents and families must be feeling right now. A thorough probe is needed.”

Others scrutinised photos and videos of the facility and raised questions about how the tank’s safety platform could have given way and why the students had not been wearing safety ropes.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” said a Weibo user by the handle Xiao Yi. “The substandard quality of the metal grates and lack of awareness of the load-bearing capacity led to this. Who should be held accountable?”

Chinese news reports have called it a national tragedy.

In a commentary published on Thursday, the Xinhua state news agency said the tragedy was a “wake-up call” for safety standards and practices when entering dangerous environments like industrial facilities and other enterprises.

The Paper, a Shanghai digital news outlet, said large mining conglomerates and companies, with huge investments and sales, had a responsibility to uphold safety measures.

“Lives are priceless. They should not become casualties of neglected maintenance, lax oversight or unfilled safety responsibilities,” it said.

Source: Agencies/lk(ht)

6. Hegseth team told to stop polygraph tests after complaint to White House

Hegseth team told to stop polygraph tests after complaint to White House

The White House intervention, which has not previously been reported, came in the form of a phone call by a person close to the administration.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/07/26/pete-hegseth-leak-investigation-trump/

UpdatedJuly 26, 2025 at 6:23 p.m. EDTtoday at 6:23 p.m. EDT

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, at the White House on Tuesday with other senior Trump administration officials. (John McDonnell/For The Washington Post)

By Dan Lamothe and Ellen Nakashima

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of polygraph tests to search for people leaking information to the news media was stopped at the direction of the White House after a senior adviser to Hegseth raised alarm to senior officials there about being targeted, U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter said.

The adviser, Patrick Weaver, complained to White House officials this spring with concerns that he could soon be directed by Hegseth or another member of his team to submit to a polygraph test, the people familiar with the matter said. The possibility angered Weaver, an immigration hawk seen within the administration as a loyal foot soldier to President Donald Trump and associate of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for reprisal from the Trump administration.

The White House intervention, which has not previously been reported, came in the form of a phone call by an individual close to the administration after Hegseth’s team had begun administering polygraph tests to people around the defense secretary in April, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to identify the individual.

Before they were stopped, multiple tests were carried out over several weeks with approval by Hegseth and advice from Tim Parlatore, who has served as both Hegseth’s private attorney and a part-time military aide on his staff.

Follow Trump’s second term

Weaver had previously served as a Republican congressional staff member and as an aide in the first Trump administration on the White House’s National Security Council and in the Department of Homeland Security. He remains an adviser to Hegseth.

By the time he approached the White House, polygraph tests already had been administered to members of the Joint Service Interagency Advisory Group, a team in Hegseth’s front office that was assembled to examine how to counter drug cartels and enhance security on the southern border, people familiar with the matter said. The team includes numerous Special Operations troops and representatives from other government agencies, including the FBI.

Col. Ricky Buria, a military aide whom Hegseth has since made a senior adviser, also took a polygraph test and received inconclusive results, officials said, a detail first reported by the Guardian. He submitted paperwork to retire from the Marine Corps and become a political appointee in April.

Tests also had been threatened by Hegseth against others, including two top military officers: Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims, the director of the Joint Staff. Those threats were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Hegseth later decided to bypass promoting Sims to a four-star general, despite an earlier plan to do so and intervention from Gen. Dan Caine, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior Pentagon officials, people familiar with the matter said. That decision, first reported by the New York Times on Saturday, has irked a number of senior officers who thought Sims had acted in an apolitical manner and deserved better.

The Pentagon declined to respond directly to the reporting about the polygraph tests.

“The Department will not comment on an ongoing investigation,” spokesman Sean Parnell said in a written statement. “The Fake News Media’s obsession with months old workplace gossip is a reflection of the sad and pathetic state of ‘journalism’ in Washington.”

Parnell also said that Hegseth is grateful for Sims’s years of service. “We wish him well in his future endeavors,” he said.

The White House referred questions about the matter to the Pentagon. Weaver and Buria did not respond to requests for comment, while Parlatore declined to comment.

Patrick Weaver, far left, is seen at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in June with Hegseth and other senior administration officials. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The polygraphs came during a period of tremendous upheaval in Hegseth’s inner circle that included the defense secretary’s firing of three senior Pentagon appointees in April and accusing them of leaking to the media. The aides — Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll and Darin Selnick — disputed that and accused the Pentagon of slandering them. Hegseth’s team has presented no evidence to back its claims.

The leak investigation began in March with a memo from Joe Kasper, then Hegseth’s chief of staff, saying that “unauthorized disclosures of national security information” demanded “thorough investigation.”

“The use of polygraphs in the execution of this investigation will be in accordance with applicable law and policy,” Kasper wrote in the March 21 memo. The investigation would “culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense” and “include a complete record of unauthorized disclosures within the Department of Defense and recommendations to improve such efforts.”

The turmoil was compounded just days later by the “Signalgate” affair, in which Hegseth and other senior national security officials discussed a forthcoming bombing campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen in an unclassified group chat message that inadvertently included an editor from the Atlantic magazine.

Hegseth’s role in the Signalgate matter has become especially controversial, since his account of planning for the strike, posted on the unclassified app, shared detailed information about the operation before it commenced.

The administration has repeatedly said that none of the information was classified. But witnesses later told the Defense Department inspector general’s office as part of its ongoing investigation that the shared operational details were taken from a classified email labeled “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning release of the information to the public was considered potentially damaging to national security and should not include foreign officials.

Kasper voluntarily departed his role as chief of staff in April after months of infighting among Hegseth’s senior staff, shifting to the private sector and a part-time Pentagon role as a special government employee. As he backfilled his inner circle around the same time, Hegseth named Buria, Parnell, Weaver and Justin Fulcher, an aide who had just had a falling out with colleagues at the U.S. DOGE Service, as senior advisers.

Fulcher also has since departed, exiting his role within days of a Washington Post report that he joined Hegseth’s team after storming out of a meeting with a DOGE team leader at the Pentagon and claiming that law enforcement had been summoned to find him. Hegseth angrily confronted the DOGE leader, Yinon Weiss, who told others he had reported Fulcher to another government employee at the Pentagon rather than to the police.

Fulcher’s actions had also drawn White House scrutiny after he told colleagues that he knew of surveillance measures that could be used to find leakers at the Pentagon, people familiar with the matter said, a detail first reported by the Guardian in June. He was assigned to work with Parlatore on the matter, but administration officials at the White House and the Pentagon later determined that Fulcher had exaggerated his usefulness and the purported evidence he alluded to did not exist, people familiar with the matter said.

Fulcher and Hegseth’s team have said that his departure from the administration was a mutual decision. Others have questioned that, saying that it appears he was pushed out after losing the faith of senior administration officials.

What readers are saying

The comments reflect widespread criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership and the use of polygraph tests within the Department of Defense. Many commenters express skepticism about the reliability of polygraphs and view their use as indicative of poor leadership and... Show more

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By Dan Lamothe

Dan Lamothe joined The Washington Post in 2014 to cover the U.S. military. He has written about the Armed Forces since 2008, traveling extensively, embedding with five branches of service and covering combat in Afghanistan.follow on X@danlamothe

By Ellen Nakashima

Ellen Nakashima is an intelligence and national security reporter at The Washington Post. She's been a member of three Pulitzer prizewinning teams, for probing the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the hidden scope of government surveillance. Send her secure tips on Signal at Ellen.626 follow on X@nakashimae

7. DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations

I am all for removing unnecessary, wasteful, and harmful regulations.

However, we also need to consider that regulation is a fundamental act of governance. We should keep in mind the commerce clause of our Constitution. I wonder if the DOGE recommendations are tempered by including the commerce clause and its full constitutional interpretations. Did they include the Constitution in the construction of their algorithm or was it only to reduce regulation to the minimum number? It probably was written to use the original and narrowest interpretation of the commerce clause.

The article below makes no mention of the US Constitution or the commerce clause.

The commerce clause as interpreted over the years here from my "research assistant" (AI).

The Commerce Clause, found in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, grants Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several states, and with Indian tribes. It is a cornerstone of federal power, allowing Congress to shape economic activity and policy across state lines.

Commerce clause in the US constitution

The Commerce Clause, found in Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, gives Congress the authority to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".

Key aspects and interpretation

Federal Legislative Power: It's a major source of Congress's power to regulate various economic and sometimes non-economic activities.
Balance of Power: Its interpretation has significantly influenced the balance of power between the federal government and states, leading to ongoing discussion.
Definition of "Commerce": The Constitution doesn't define "commerce," leading to different interpretations, from a narrow view of trade to a broader view including commercial and social interactions.
Evolving Interpretation: The Supreme Court's interpretation has changed over time.
Early Era: Initially, the Court interpreted it narrowly, focusing on direct movement of goods across state lines.
New Deal Era: A broader interpretation emerged, allowing regulation of activities with a "substantial economic effect" on interstate commerce. Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 established the "substantial effects doctrine".
Modern Era (Post-1995): Cases like United States v. Lopez (1995) led to a more restrictive view. However, rulings such as Gonzales v. Raich (2005) have shown a willingness to uphold federal regulation of intrastate activities that could affect national markets.
Dormant Commerce Clause: This implied doctrine prevents states from enacting laws that discriminate against or burden interstate commerce, even without explicit federal action.
It aims to prevent states from favoring local businesses over those from other states.
An example is West Lynn Creamery Inc. v. Healy, where a Massachusetts milk tax was found discriminatory against out-of-state businesses.

Examples of application

The Commerce Clause has been the basis for federal laws in many areas, including:

Civil rights, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Environmental protection.
Regulation of various industries like transportation and agriculture.

The Commerce Clause is a vital part of the US Constitution, empowering Congress to regulate commerce that crosses state lines. Its interpretation has been a continuous source of debate and has shaped the relationship between federal and state powers throughout American history.

DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations

An internal proposal suggests how the Trump administration is planning to slash federal regulations, but obstacles loom.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/07/26/doge-ai-tool-cut-regulations-trump/

UpdatedJuly 26, 2025 at 12:41 p.m. EDTtoday at 12:41 p.m. EDT

People outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington on July 15. (Eric Lee/For The Washington Post)

By Hannah Natanson, Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond and Rachel Siegel

The U.S. DOGE Service is using a new artificial intelligence tool to slash federal regulations, with the goal of eliminating half of Washington’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and four government officials familiar with the plans.

The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback. The PowerPoint also suggests the AI tool will save the United States trillions of dollars by reducing compliance requirements, slashing the federal budget and unlocking unspecified “external investment.”

The tool has already been used to complete “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections” at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in under two weeks, according to the PowerPoint, and to write “100% of deregulations” at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Three HUD employees — as well as documents obtained by The Post — confirmed that an AI tool was recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations at that agency and suggest edits or deletions.

The tool was developed by engineers brought into government as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE project, according to two federal officials directly familiar with DOGE’s work, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations they were not authorized to discuss publicly.

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Conservatives have long argued that the federal government issues far too many regulations that constrain economic growth and hurt the private sector. Many liberals have emphasized that there are reasons federal regulations are in place, such as protecting the environment and ensuring food safety.

Follow Trump’s second term

Asked about the AI-fueled deregulation, White House spokesman Harrison Fields wrote in an email that “all options are being explored” to achieve the president’s goal of deregulating government. Fields noted that “no single plan has been approved or green-lit,” cautioning that the work is “in its early stages and is being conducted in a creative way in consultation with the White House.”

Fields added: “The DOGE experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business and are embarking on a never-before-attempted transformation of government systems and operations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.”

No decisions have been completed on using AI to slash regulations, a HUD spokesperson said. The agency is having “ongoing discussions” to consider how to make government more efficient. “We are not disclosing specifics about how many regulations are being examined or where we are at in the broader process,” the spokesperson said, adding, “the process is far from final.”

The spokesperson continued: “The intent of the developments is not to replace the judgment, discretion and expertise of staff but be additive to the process.”

One former member of DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in a text message that the team did everything it could to come up with legal and technological solutions to repeal as many regulations as possible within Trump’s term.

“Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress in that finite amount of time,” wrote James Burnham, who served as chief attorney for DOGE and is now managing partner at King Street Legal.

The proposed use of AI to accomplish swift, massive deregulation expands upon the Trump administration’s work to embed AI across the government — using it for everything from fighting wars to reviewing taxes. And it dovetails with the administration’s aim to unwind regulations government-wide, even without AI. But it’s unclear whether a new, untested technology could make mistakes in its attempts to analyze federal regulations typically put in place for a reason.

On Jan. 31, Trump issued an executive order to “unleash prosperity through deregulation,” which required agencies to repeal 10 rules for every new rule issued. Since then, some departments have engaged in what almost appears to be a competition to cut. In May, the Transportation Department declared it had deleted 52 regulations and more than 73,000 words from the Federal Register. This month, the Labor Department announced plans to nix more than 60 regulations.

Still, Republicans have grown frustrated by the relatively slow pace of deregulatory actions. During the first six months of Trump’s first term, his administration cut costs by about $550 million and paperwork hours by 566,000, according to the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank that tracks regulations. Through July of this year, the Trump administration has achieved nearly all its cost reductions by repealing one rule regarding what businesses must report about their ownership ties. Without that, the Trump administration would have increased regulatory costs by $1.1 billion and paperwork hours by 3.3 million, according to the think tank.

“They’re way behind where they were in 2017 on the numbers, no question about it,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. “I thought this was going to be something they crushed because they did so in 2017. I’ve been baffled by this.”

The AI tool is intended to massively accelerate the deregulation process, with every federal agency able to develop a list of regulations to eliminate in less than four weeks, according to the PowerPoint. The agencies are supposed to finish their lists by Sept. 1, and this month, DOGE is supposed to start training staff at agencies on how to use the AI tool, the PowerPoint states.

Read the full PowerPoint here.

While DOGE had pushed earlier this year to take a larger role in the deregulatory effort, the Musk-led team was frequently rebuffed by agency employees who worried about outsourcing decisions and their authorities, according to three people who have participated in deregulatory conversations at the White House and the agency level who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. Federal officials also questioned whether DOGE had the subject matter expertise to comb through highly technical regulations and find appropriate targets for cuts, the people said.

As DOGE’s influence waned following Musk’s departure, the administration has remained focused on Trump’s deregulatory order, the people said. White House staff are also using internal trackers to monitor how quickly agencies are paring regulations, while leaders at every major agency are meeting regularly to discuss how quickly they can meet Trump’s ambitions and which cuts “count” toward the president’s order, according to the people.

In some cases, DOGE’s campaign to fire federal workers and dramatically shrink the federal workforce has hampered the deregulatory effort, the three people said.

“The White House wants us higher on the leader board,” said one of the three people. “But you have to have staff and time to write the deregulatory notices, and we don’t. That’s a big reason for the holdup.”

Can DOGE delete rules?

Trump officials have tried to use AI to roll back regulations before. At the Department of Health and Human Services, a 2020 “Regulatory Clean Up Initiative” drew on an AI tool to identify and remove archaic language, defunct federal provisions and outdated terms from federal rules.

Trump has pushed the limits of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs repealing federal regulations, most notably through an executive order ending a rule that restricted the water flow of showerheads. It is unclear if courts will allow the administration to void rules. Meanwhile, private-sector companies tend to be uncomfortable ignoring a rule that was illegally repealed, said Nicholas Bagley, an administrative law expert at the University of Michigan.

“There’s been some flashy sideshow efforts to avoid the legal strictures, but in general, they don’t stick,” Bagley said of Trump’s unilateral efforts to cut regulations.

DOGE officials may be concerned about the legality of the AI tool. One page of the slideshow says four people identified as “DOGE lawyers” — Burnham, Austin Raynor, Jacob Altik and Ashley Boizelle — each “vetted and endorsed” the AI deregulation tool. Raynor, Altik and Boizelle could not be reached for comment.

Federal regulations, as they stand now, can be divided into three categories, the PowerPoint says: 50 percent are not required by law, 38 percent are statutorily mandated and 12 percent are “Not Required but Agency Needs.” By ending the rules that are both unnecessary by law and to agency operations, the PowerPoint states, the government could recover $3.3 trillion a year. But the PowerPoint also suggests it would take 3.6 million “man-hours” to nix 100,000 regulations under the current system. It is not clear how the PowerPoint’s authors arrived at these figures.

That’s where the AI tool comes in, the PowerPoint proposes. The tool will save 93 percent of the human labor involved by reviewing up to 500,000 comments submitted by the public in response to proposed rule changes. By the end of the deregulation exercise, humans will have spent just a few hours to cancel each of the 100,000 regulations, the PowerPoint claims.

A case study at HUD

The PowerPoint lists two case studies as examples of how well its AI tool can work, detailing recent efforts to slash regulations at HUD and CFPB.

CFPB did not respond to questions. The Post was not able to independently confirm the use of AI at the agency.

At HUD, efforts to use AI to kill regulations began three months ago, according to three employees familiar with the matter and emails obtained by The Post. A message sent to some of the agency’s Public and Indian Housing staff on April 18 announced a “DOGE team” would be “learning how AI will be able to analyze all PIH regulations looking for and flagging discrepancies between them and the underlying statute.”

“This is a major effort,” the email continued. “We are working with the lawyers to simplify the [Administrative Procedure Act] process … use AI for drafting, and use AI for complying notices in the future.”

The overall goal, the email noted, was to deploy AI to reduce the time staff had to spend on deregulation. Another document, signed “HUD DOGE Team” and sent to staff, detailed how DOGE team members wanted federal staffers to engage the AI tool. Staffers were supposed to look over the tool’s recommendations for proposed regulatory eliminations and mark whether they agreed, disagreed or believed deletions should go further.

One HUD employee who participated in this process said the AI tool made several errors. It delivered an analysis saying those who drafted various agency regulations had misunderstood the law in several places, said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal conversations. But the AI tool was sometimes wrong, the employee said.

“There were a couple places where the AI said the language was outside of the statute,” the employee said, “and actually, no — the AI read the language wrong, and it is actually correct.”

After its tryout at HUD, the AI deregulation tool is supposed to deploy across the rest of government in coming months, according to the DOGE PowerPoint.

Over the next five months, agencies will work with the AI tool to identify regulations to kill, respond to public comments about the proposed deletions and submit formal deregulation proposals, the PowerPoint says. The goal is to wrap everything up and “Relaunch America on Jan. 20, 2026,” the PowerPoint states.

Lauren Kaori Gurley and Ian Duncan contributed to this report.

The Depopulation Bomb

As global fertility rates drop, two economists make the case for humans

https://www.wsj.com/economy/global/the-depopulation-bomb-b8b4fd1e?st=xDCRsq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Crowds of people in New York City in 2016. The world population currently is 8 billion. GETTY IMAGES

By Greg Ip

July 27, 2025 5:30 am ET

If humanity’s existence were threatened by plague, nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, people would surely demand action.

But what if the threat came from our own, passive acceptance of decline? This is not some theoretical curiosity: It is a reasonable extrapolation of globally declining fertility rates.

People aren’t demanding action. In fact, some think a smaller population is actually a good thing.

Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, economists at the University of Texas at Austin specializing in demographics, want to change that. Their book “After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People” is a deep dive into the facts and consequences of depopulation, and an impassioned argument against letting it happen.

They rest their argument not on the familiar need for workers to propel economic growth or shore up Social Security but on a more fundamental proposition: More people is a good thing in and of itself.

The numbers

Global fertility—the number of babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—averaged 2.25 last year, the United Nations estimates, the lowest in recorded history, barely above the replacement rate of 2.1 that keeps population stable.

Where fertility levels out is unknown. But the authors note that depopulation will happen so long as it goes below two, and two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in countries with fertility below two. In most others, including throughout sub-Saharan Africa, fertility is generally falling.

World population, with projection based on a fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman

Note: Projection assumes a global fertility rate—the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime—of 1.6, the current U.S. rate.

Sources: Our World In Data (actual); Michael Geruso and Dean Spears (projection)

If global fertility fell to the current U.S. fertility rate of 1.6, world population will rise from 8 billion now to a peak of 10.2 billion in 2080 and then start to decline. “It will not fall to 6 billion or 4 billion or 2 billion and hold there,” they write. “Humanity could hasten its own extinction if birth rates stay too low for a long time.”

The authors aren’t predicting literal extinction. But, compared to a stable world population, depopulation has serious downsides.

Who’s listening?

In his 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb,” Paul Ehrlich predicted world overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and destitution. No serious demographer worries about overpopulation now, but Ehrlich casts a long shadow. Today, many people, especially on the progressive left, equate increased population with environmental degradation and climate change.

Demographic decline has become an obsession of “national conservatives” such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and U.S. Vice President JD Vance. They aren’t concerned with falling population per se, but within their own borders: They want more native-born babies and fewer immigrants.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, left, and U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Rome in April. Photo: Riccardo Antimiani/EPA/Shutterstock

By contrast, Geruso and Spears, who identify as center-left, are concerned with all humanity, not any single country. “We want to convince our fellow liberals and progressives that…other people’s lives aren’t just good for those people, but for them, too,” Geruso said in an interview.

In that they are on common ground with economic and social conservatives, notes Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, who see people as a resource, not a drain on resources. It was a free-market economist, Julian Simon, who demolished Ehrlich’s thesis by betting him, back in 1980, that a basket of commodity prices would decline over the next decade. He won.

In that spirit, Spears and Geruso show how humans, through ingenuity and behavioral change, have reduced pollution and expanded available resources as their numbers grew. For example, in 2013, China’s smog was among the world’s worst. Over the next decade its population grew by 50 million, but particulate air pollution fell by half. As India’s population has grown, so has the average height of its children thanks to better nutrition and sanitation.

Britain’s per capita carbon emissions have fallen by half since the 1950s. With industrialization now in the past for most countries, “the lifetime climate footprint of an extra baby has been declining,” the authors note.

Heavy smog in London, left, circa 1952. High-rise buildings under heavy haze in Shanghai, right, in 2013.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images, AP

Population growth actually makes challenges such as resource scarcity easier to solve. Assume a fixed share of people become idea generators: scientists, entrepreneurs or inventors. The greater the population, the more ideas.

Solving most problems also involves fixed costs. Developing a vaccine or a smartphone costs the same whether for one person or 8 billion. The bigger the population, the more such investments become financially feasible.

The most provocative argument that Spears and Geruso make for population has nothing to do with economics. “It’s better if there is more good in the world,” they write. “That includes good lives: it’s better if there are more good lives.”

It sounds touchy-feely, but has a utilitarian logic. While there will always be some suffering and poverty, over time people are becoming healthier, wealthier and more fulfilled, so a larger population will raise both aggregate, and average, health, wealth and fulfillment. Who wouldn’t want that?

The first step to solving depopulation

Spears and Geruso don’t have a solution for falling fertility. They do manage to knock down the most popular theories on the left and right for it, such as the high cost of raising children, lack of family-friendly policies, abortion, or declining marriage and religious observance.

Dean Spears, left, and Michael Geruso Photo: Sasha Haagensen

Scandinavian countries have more generous child care and parental leave policies than the U.S.—and lower fertility. Canada has cheaper college tuition, and lower fertility. In India, religious observance and marriage rates are high, and fertility is below the replacement rate. South Korea has among the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, and lowest fertility rates.

Their somewhat unsatisfying explanation is what economists call opportunity cost: There are things parents (or would-be parents) would rather spend their resources on than children.

The first step in solving a problem is to acknowledge the problem. Right now, falling fertility isn’t broadly seen as a problem. There are no randomized control trials to determine what raises fertility, as there are for maternal health or childhood nutrition. Spears hopes their book will “invite people to pause there for a second and not welcome depopulation by default, but ask the question, would stabilization be better?”

Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com

9. Israel Says It Is Pausing Fighting in Parts of Gaza to Allow Aid In

Excerpts:

The GHF’s four distribution sites have frequently been overrun by massive crowds of hungry Palestinians, causing chaotic scenes that have turned deadly. Israeli soldiers have shot at crowds they said came too close to military positions near the sites.

Palestinian health authorities say more than 1,000 people have been killed while trying to get aid from GHF and other aid groups, including U.N. agencies. Israel’s military says the death toll is overstated.

The U.N. and other aid groups say desperation caused by scarcity is leading many Palestinians to risk their lives in an effort to get food for their families.

There are currently just two border crossings through which aid can enter Gaza, which has a population of more than two million people. The U.N. says the entire population of Gaza is reliant on humanitarian assistance.

Last week, Israel accused the U.N. of refusing to pick up hundreds of truckloads of goods waiting at the border. The U.N. humanitarian office says that in addition to unsafe conditions for staff and civilians, constraints imposed by Israeli authorities have hampered their ability to operate. It cited long wait times for clearance, last-minute route changes and denial of movement.

Israel Says It Is Pausing Fighting in Parts of Gaza to Allow Aid In

A deadly hunger crisis is spreading across the enclave

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-it-is-pausing-fighting-in-parts-of-gaza-to-allow-aid-in-43966641

By Feliz Solomon

Updated July 27, 2025 5:02 am ET

Palestinians carry food parcels in the al-Mawasi camp in Rafah, southern Gaza. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

TEL AVIV—Israel announced a tactical pause in military activity in parts of the Gaza Strip and the establishment of safe routes for humanitarian aid, as a deadly hunger crisis spreads across the enclave.

Israel’s military said on Sunday that it would suspend its activity from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day until further notice in accordance with government directives. Secure routes for the passage of aid will be permanently established, open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., it added.

The announcement follows growing pressure from Arab and Western officials over what residents and humanitarian workers say is the worst hunger crisis to grip the enclave since the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 sparked the war in Gaza.

Israel blocked the flow of aid into Gaza in March before allowing it to resume in May, backing a new program that has distributed supplies at much lower levels.

The United Nations says thousands of children are being treated for malnutrition, while its medical partners have reported that more than a dozen children have starved to death this month alone. Food shortages are widespread, affecting all parts of the Strip and all classes of people—leaving children, women, the elderly and those with injuries especially vulnerable.

A World Food Programme official greets a truck driver carrying aid at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. Photo: Mohammed Arafat/Associated Press

In a sign of how desperate the situation has become, Israel’s air force resumed airdrops of aid overnight, parachuting seven loads including flour, sugar and canned food, the military said. Airdrops are typically a method of last resort, as they are costly and can only deliver small volumes, and falling pallets can be dangerous or even deadly—as they were when used during an earlier hunger crisis in Gaza in the spring of 2024.

Since a cease-fire collapsed in March, Israel’s military has taken control of about 70% of the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials say, and issued widespread evacuation orders that have pushed much of the population into a small area along the coast. The tactical pause announced Sunday will begin in areas where the armed forces aren’t currently operating, the military said, namely the major population centers of Al Mawasi, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City.

Israel began a total blockade of the Gaza Strip in early March, banning the entry of all aid and commercial goods, to put pressure on Hamas as talks to release more hostages held by the group faltered. Israel says Hamas steals aid and uses it to fund its war effort, which the group denies. Humanitarian groups say they have seen no evidence of systemic diversion of aid.

Supplies stockpiled during the cease-fire earlier this year had largely run out by May, when Israel unveiled a new U.S.-backed aid-distribution system meant to circumvent the one led by the United Nations. Since its launch later that month, the new system, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has been beset by problems.

The GHF’s four distribution sites have frequently been overrun by massive crowds of hungry Palestinians, causing chaotic scenes that have turned deadly. Israeli soldiers have shot at crowds they said came too close to military positions near the sites.

Palestinian health authorities say more than 1,000 people have been killed while trying to get aid from GHF and other aid groups, including U.N. agencies. Israel’s military says the death toll is overstated.

The U.N. and other aid groups say desperation caused by scarcity is leading many Palestinians to risk their lives in an effort to get food for their families.

There are currently just two border crossings through which aid can enter Gaza, which has a population of more than two million people. The U.N. says the entire population of Gaza is reliant on humanitarian assistance.

Last week, Israel accused the U.N. of refusing to pick up hundreds of truckloads of goods waiting at the border. The U.N. humanitarian office says that in addition to unsafe conditions for staff and civilians, constraints imposed by Israeli authorities have hampered their ability to operate. It cited long wait times for clearance, last-minute route changes and denial of movement.

Write to Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@wsj.com

10. China Strong-Armed Japan Over Rare Earths. It’s a Lesson for the U.S.

Can we be wise and learn from the mistakes of others?

This is a another data point that supports assessment that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan).

China Strong-Armed Japan Over Rare Earths. It’s a Lesson for the U.S.

After a 2010 clash, Tokyo understood Beijing’s coercive power, but it still wasn’t ready this year

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-strong-armed-japan-over-rare-earths-its-a-lesson-for-the-u-s-230f8379

By Yoko Kubota

Updated July 27, 2025 12:02 am ET

Japan did a deal with Lynas Rare Earths, which has a processing plant in Western Australia. Photo: Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg News

Key Points

What's This?

Japan’s reliance on China for rare-earth minerals highlights supply chain vulnerabilities, echoing a 2010 dispute.
Despite efforts to diversify, Japan still depends on China for 70% of rare-earth imports, impacting its auto industry.
After a past crisis, Japan’s urgency to diversify waned, a lesson for the U.S. amid renewed Chinese export controls.

TOKYO—The U.S. found out this year that China could use its chokehold on rare-earth minerals as a coercive tool when Beijing imposed export controls. For Japan, it was déjà vu: It had been the victim 15 years earlier.

Tokyo vowed in 2010 to be ready for next time and over the years put hundreds of millions of dollars into Australian supplies.

Yet as of last year, it was still relying on China for some 70% of its imports of rare earths, which are widely used in electronics, cars and weapons, according to the government-owned Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security. When China restricted rare-earth exports in April, some of Japan’s automakers again got hit.

Japan’s experience drives home lessons for the U.S., where the Pentagon recently agreed to take a stake in Las Vegas-based MP Materials so it can mine and refine rare earths on American soil.

Tokyo found that partially reducing dependence still leaves Beijing with plenty of leverage. At the same time, complete independence costs billions of dollars, not millions. After the crisis passed and China resumed exports to Japan, the urgency to diversify supplies waned.

That points to the danger of complacency in the U.S. After it was hit by Chinese rare-earth export controls earlier this year, the U.S. recently got Beijing to reopen the spigot as part of a trade deal.

If costs don’t matter, cutting reliance on China might be feasible, but businesses can’t swallow high costs, said Kazuto Suzuki, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Public Policy.

People in Japan “understood that there was a vulnerability, but everyone still relied on China because the conclusion was that there weren’t other options,” Suzuki said.

Four decades ago, a Japanese scientist named Masato Sagawa invented the most powerful type of permanent magnets containing a rare-earth element called neodymium. The breakthrough underlies the magnets widely used today.

Japanese scientist Masato Sagawa. Photo: Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images

By early this century, it was China, not Japan, that had come to dominate supplies of the 17 rare-earth elements as well as the refining of the metals and manufacture of magnets containing them. In 2009, 85% of Japan’s rare-earth imports came from China.

Beijing realized it had a diplomatic tool and used it in 2010, when a Chinese trawler collided with Japanese patrol vessels near islands controlled by Japan and claimed by China. Japan detained the captain and crew, sparking a diplomatic clash. Japanese users of rare earths reported severe delivery disruptions, although Beijing denied doing anything.

The captain was released under Chinese pressure, and tensions eased after a few months. But Japan sought alternative suppliers.

“We’re going to pursue a variety of risk hedges,” said Japan’s foreign minister at the time. “It isn’t good to lean too much on one country.”

Tokyo’s biggest initiative from that era was a deal with Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths that, in hindsight, helped somewhat but didn’t go nearly far enough or contribute quickly enough to undercut China’s dominance.

The government body now called the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security, or Jogmec, as well as trading company Sojitz provided Lynas a $225 million loan to secure rare earths for Japan.

The Lynas project didn’t help Japan with securing a subset of rare-earth elements known as heavy rare earths, which are generally less common than the light ones. The heavy elements include dysprosium and terbium, which are commonly used alongside neodymium, a light rare-earth element, in strong permanent magnets.

The rare-earth elements tend to be intermingled. Miners are reluctant to invest in specialized equipment for processing the relatively small quantities of heavy rare earths that they extract alongside the light elements.

Some of Japan’s automakers recently got hit by Chinese export curbs. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Meanwhile, in the field of rare-earth magnets that Japan had once led, it actually deepened its dependence on China after the 2010 showdown.

Japan’s biggest companies formed partnerships with Chinese magnet makers in the 2010s, reasoning that they could protect themselves from political blackmail if they had friends in China with secure supplies. Among the deals was a joint venture formed in 2013 by Tokyo-based TDK with China’s state-backed Rising Nonferrous Metals Share.

The Japanese companies had production know-how that made them attractive partners at the time in China. Afterward, China’s dominance grew. In 2013, Japan’s share in the global neodymium-magnet market was at 23% while China held about three-quarters. By 2021, Japan’s share fell to 15% while China’s rose to about 84%, according to government figures based on data from research firm Fuji Keizai.

It took more than a decade for Japan to do something about the gap in its policy. In 2023, the Japanese government body, Jogmec, and Sojitz invested an additional 200 million Australian dollars, equivalent to around $130 million today, in Lynas. The company recently started to produce dysprosium and terbium, up to 65% of which is headed to Japan under the deal.

Separately, Jogmec and energy firm Iwatani said in March they would invest 110 million euros, equivalent to $129 million, in a subsidiary of France’s Carester to support a project that could supply a fifth of Japan’s demand for dysprosium and terbium.

Japan now says it wants to beef up production of neodymium magnets, develop magnets using smaller amounts of rare earths and step up recycling.

Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

11. Can the Nazis Teach Us Anything?

Excerpts:

Despite the weariness of the subject, I have to ask about the charge of “fascism” in contemporary American politics, so persistently does it arise in some quarters. “I’ve been interviewed on that topic a lot,” Mr. Weber says. “I was asked to write a chapter for a book, ‘Fascism in America: Past and Present,’ and I was the odd one out. I just said—I think irritating my friends a little—that ‘fascism’ is the wrong invocation.”

The people “most often described as fascists—Donald Trump is one but there are many others—they are deeply individualistic,” Mr. Weber points out. “They reject collectivism. In many ways they reject the power of the state, or want to limit it. . . . Sure, you can come up with some kind of definition of fascism in which collectivism and a strong state are no longer essential criteria. But in that case fascism has just become”—back to that Orwell line—“another word for ‘bad things’ or ‘things we don’t like.’ ”

I gather that what bothers Mr. Weber most about loose charges of fascism is that they relieve everyone—accused and accuser alike—of the duty to study the inner lives and motivations of the original fascists. “We make a mistake, I think, when we don’t take these perpetrators seriously, or when we assume they’re all stupid and driven by revenge and pure emotion,” Mr. Weber says. “Hitler was a man of ideas. . . . He really wanted to understand the nature of things. People dismiss this. They say, Yeah, he read with confirmation bias. Well who doesn’t?”

Mr. Weber suggests the failure to understand the Nazi era, even among academic historians, may arise from a deficit in self-reflection. “It’s very easy to dismiss stupid and vicious beliefs of people in other times. But we also have to think about our own time, and maybe of our own propensity to believe stupid and vicious things.”

Can the Nazis Teach Us Anything?

Historian Thomas Weber shows how a trove of interviews with fugitive Reich officers reminds us how dangerous human nature can be.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-the-nazis-teach-us-anything-e7cbd3ca

By Barton Swaim

July 25, 2025 1:24 pm ET

Thomas Weber Illustration: Ken Fallin

Stanford, Calif.

It is a melancholy irony that the most cataclysmic event of the 20th century—the rise and fall of Nazi Germany—has so little ability to instruct us in the 21st. The facile use of “Nazi” and “Hitler” against political enemies, the use of “holocaust” and “genocide” about any grim event, histrionic worries that this or that politician is the next fascist dictator, and a thousand movies replete with stiff, trench-coated officers of the Reich—all of it conspires to make what happened in Germany from 1933-45 seem cartoonish, unreal. Nearly 80 years have passed since George Orwell observed that the word “fascism” has “now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ” That’s still basically true.

Now would be a fine time to figure out how to talk about Hitler and the Nazis in more thoughtful ways. Consider:

Miscreants in the grip of lies wander the streets of Western cities looking for Jews to menace. Students on America’s finest campuses harass Jews and celebrate Hamas. Every week brings appalling headlines: the residence of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor set afire by an arsonist; two Israeli embassy staffers murdered by a man saying he “did it for Palestine”; elderly people firebombed by an ogre in Colorado; a man known for loathing the Jewish state nominated as Democrats’ candidate for New York mayor.

The problem comes from the left, but not exclusively so. Just as progressives’ flirtation with “anti-Zionism” blossomed into old-fashioned Jew hatred, a collection of young male would-be intellectuals on the unruly right proudly dabble in “revisionist” interpretations of World War II: Maybe the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was far lower than six million, says one; maybe the war’s real villain wasn’t Hitler but Winston Churchill, says another. Podcasters Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have each given respectful hearings to these sophomoric prophets of the “manosphere.”

Till recently I thought it impossible for 21st-century Americans to learn anything useful from Germany’s Nazi experience, so prone are we to reduce the whole episode to bromides. But a conversation with Thomas Weber, a German-born historian associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, gave me a little hope.

The occasion for my visit to Stanford’s campus was Hoover’s recent purchase of a large collection of interviews with former Nazi officers recorded in the 1970s and ’80s. The interviews—which took place mostly in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile, where the subjects had fled—were conducted by the photojournalist Gerd Heidemann and preserved on cassette tapes, now digitized and available online. Heidemann died in December at 93.

Among the officers interviewed by Heidemann: Walter Rauff, an inventor of the mobile gas chamber used to murder 100,000 Jews; Willem Sassen, an SS officer and war propagandist; Karl Wolff, a senior aide to both Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler; and Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Vichy France—“the Butcher of Lyon,” as he was known—who supervised the torture and murder of Jews and members of the French resistance.

The Heidemann interviews were of course conducted in German, but they are accompanied by artificial intelligence-generated English translations. The translations contain significant inaccuracies, but Mr. Weber and colleagues are improving them.

The testimonies available in these recordings have a unique importance. The Nazi fugitives interviewed by Heidemann assumed, wrongly, that he sympathized with their cause and plight. They believed he was assisting Wolff with his memoirs, although this was likely a bit of disinformation fed to them by Heidemann to gain their trust. Other things he did to gain their trust weren’t so easy to explain: He bought a yacht once owned by Hermann Göring and hosted a party on it attended by former Nazi officials. This attracted accusations that he admired the Nazis. Heidemann disputed this charge. His most persuasive argument: credible evidence that he coordinated with the Israeli Mossad in finding Nazis hiding in South America.

His aim, he maintained, was to find and interview Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, and Josef Mengele, the diabolical “doctor” of Auschwitz. He could only do this by seeming to befriend their Nazi confrères. In fact, Bormann had died in 1945, Mengele in February 1979, but this wasn’t known at the time. On the evidence, Heidemann wasn’t a Nazi admirer at all but a journalist willing to go to insane lengths to break stories that satisfied his readers’ curiosity.

The Nazi fugitives’ misreading of Heidemann, in any case, led them to speak to him frankly, without euphemizing what they’d done or pretending they hadn’t done it—very much in contrast to the courtroom testimonies of other former Nazi officials in the postwar years. Barbie, for example, recalls with delight an occasion when he and others killed and rounded up Jews in Amsterdam. “It was a house-to-house fight,” he tells Heidemann in one interview, laughing. “The Jews from upstairs and us from the street. They threw chamber pots at us, and we threw grenades back. Hahaha!” Later the same night, he adds, “We had a party. Man, we were wasted. It was such a good group of guys, a camaraderie I never found again.”

Another chilling moment: Rauff recalls the expulsion of Jews from Tunis. “We won’t start with a massacre—we’re short of people,” he says. “We’ll start a Jewish labor camp.” He goes on, in the self-exculpating way war criminals often speak, to claim that his actions probably saved Jewish lives.

The striking thing about the recordings, to my ear, is how unscripted, faltering and entirely human the interviewees sound. There is something to Hannah Arendt’s argument about the “banality of evil”—that Nazi functionaries appeared normal in most areas of life but were too weak and selfish to resist the evil when it came—but her idea lets off human nature too easily, or puts the source of evil neatly elsewhere. Mr. Weber mentions Thomas Mann’s 1939 essay “Bruder Hitler,” in which the German novelist admitted that he could see something of himself in the psychopathic dictator who at that time held Europe under his fist.

“I was involved with the film ‘Goebbels and the Führer,’ which came out last summer,” Mr. Weber tells me. “The filmmaker [Joachim Lang] and I were often asked, Are you worried that you’re humanizing Hitler and humanizing Goebbels? Our answer was, ‘No, we would be worried if we were not humanizing them.’ Because they were human, and if you make them demons, well that is very comforting, but it is not reality.”

Mr. Weber can speak with authority on the point. His books “Hitler’s First War” (2010) and “Becoming Hitler” (2017) explode the image the Nazi leader projected of himself in “Mein Kampf” as a determined nationalist from his youth. In fact, Hitler in the years after World War I was ideologically adrift and nearly settled on communism as his lodestar. He may have been a sociopathic manipulator, but he was still a confused, arrogant man. A human, alas, not a demon.

Our conversation turns to the nature of evil, and to Mr. Weber’s frustration with scholars and media commentators who define Nazis as uncomplicated in their malevolence and so forestall any useful discussion about what they thought they were doing and why. The Nazis, he says, “didn’t wake up in the morning and think, ‘What evil can we do today?’ ”

This is a point I hadn’t appreciated until I recently read Claudia Koonz’s book “The Nazi Conscience” (2003). Nazi officers and functionaries didn’t see themselves as genocidal monsters at all; they were convinced that their behavior was virtuous and promoted the interests of the German Volk.

Here Mr. Weber makes an arresting point. He thinks almost everything written about Hitler gets his conception of evil completely wrong. “Almost all the biographies say that for Hitler, Jews were the personification of evil.” But that is wrong, Mr. Weber says. “The Jews, for him, were a great danger, but not because they themselves were evil. He explicitly said it’s totally beside the point if individual Jews were good or evil. Some were good, some were evil. For Hitler, Jews endangered the Reich because of their Rassenbestimmung” —Mr. Weber pauses to think of the right way to translate the term—“because of their racial destiny or racial determination, which made it impossible for them to act in any other ways than parasitically.”

According to Hitler, says Mr. Weber, “just as it would be pointless to put moral blame on the tuberculosis bacillus for destroying the body, it is pointless to call the Jews evil for what they’re doing. You still had to exterminate them.”

The Nazis’ nihilistic solution won’t be repeated, God willing. But the dark logic described by Mr. Weber has soft imitations in our own time. Today’s antisemites are forever explaining that they don’t condemn Jews, as Jews, at all; they are anti-Zionists, or they revile the Israel “lobby,” or the settlements, or the Netanyahu government.

Another remarkable feature of these interviews—also, unfortunately, a deeply human one—is the absence of any acknowledgment of personal wrongdoing. From the mid-1930s to 1945 these men knew they were obeying the dictates of science and reason, their brutality supported by a century of academic inquiry on Nordic racial fitness and the corruption that was Jewry. All any of it had brought was ruin and shame on a world-historical scale, but these exiles acknowledge no sins and asked for no remission.

Some of the exiled Nazis, Mr. Weber explains, say, or imply, that “it was wrong to kill so many Jews, but they blame it all on Müller or Himmler”—the Gestapo chief and SS head—“who thought they had to go that far for the Führer.” Some of them excuse what they did by denying the scale of the Holocaust (I note Barbie speaks often of the die Sechs-Millionen Lüge—the six million lie—also a popular trope in the antisemitic manosphere.) But mostly, Mr. Weber says, they still thought “the Jews really had been the greatest threat to the survival of Germany and Europe. So in their minds they were right to try to kill them.”

Thus did these men join, as Churchill memorably put it, “that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind.”

The recordings probably would be better known if Heidemann hadn’t ruined his credibility in 1983 by claiming to have acquired Hitler’s memoirs, supposedly lost after the war. The so-called Hitler Diaries, published in the German magazine Stern to global fanfare, turned out to be a forgery (though one sufficiently sophisticated to have also fooled the famous Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who vouched for them).

Despite the weariness of the subject, I have to ask about the charge of “fascism” in contemporary American politics, so persistently does it arise in some quarters. “I’ve been interviewed on that topic a lot,” Mr. Weber says. “I was asked to write a chapter for a book, ‘Fascism in America: Past and Present,’ and I was the odd one out. I just said—I think irritating my friends a little—that ‘fascism’ is the wrong invocation.”

The people “most often described as fascists—Donald Trump is one but there are many others—they are deeply individualistic,” Mr. Weber points out. “They reject collectivism. In many ways they reject the power of the state, or want to limit it. . . . Sure, you can come up with some kind of definition of fascism in which collectivism and a strong state are no longer essential criteria. But in that case fascism has just become”—back to that Orwell line—“another word for ‘bad things’ or ‘things we don’t like.’ ”

I gather that what bothers Mr. Weber most about loose charges of fascism is that they relieve everyone—accused and accuser alike—of the duty to study the inner lives and motivations of the original fascists. “We make a mistake, I think, when we don’t take these perpetrators seriously, or when we assume they’re all stupid and driven by revenge and pure emotion,” Mr. Weber says. “Hitler was a man of ideas. . . . He really wanted to understand the nature of things. People dismiss this. They say, Yeah, he read with confirmation bias. Well who doesn’t?”

Mr. Weber suggests the failure to understand the Nazi era, even among academic historians, may arise from a deficit in self-reflection. “It’s very easy to dismiss stupid and vicious beliefs of people in other times. But we also have to think about our own time, and maybe of our own propensity to believe stupid and vicious things.”

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'Can the Nazis Teach Us Anything?'

12. US and its allies unprepared to repel saturation missile attacks

This is quite depressing information. Our allies (and us) must own their defense burden. We must shift from burden sharing to burden owning which in the long run will result in improved mutual defense.

Excerpts;

The United States’ Asian allies Japan and South Korea also have limited air defenses, mainly relying on their own Patriot systems or on Patriot plus AEGIS in the case of Japan. Taiwan has Patriot PAC-3, but not enough systems or missiles. The US, at present, would find it extremely difficult to backstop NATO against a massive attack by Russia, or to support Japan and South Korea, let alone Taiwan, with de minimis stockpiles and too few systems.

There is THAAD in Korea, but not in Japan or Taiwan. Japan even rejected AEGIS Ashore to protect its territory, although it does have four AEGIS-equipped ships. Taiwan publicly rejected THAAD, an incredibly foolish move.

To make a long story short, the US and its allies are not well prepared against saturation missile attacks and don’t have enough coverage to protect military installations, command and control centers, airfields, naval ports or even logistic centers and factories (putting aside attacks focused on critical infrastructure, as we see on a daily basis in Ukraine).

It should be obvious that the US industrial base is not ready for the challenge, that there are not enough factories and that efficiency (understood in terms of output) is low. The Pentagon is still relying on ordering missile production from existing factories rather than really trying to reform the manufacturing infrastructure so we can match the output of Russia, China or even Iran.

US and its allies unprepared to repel saturation missile attacks - Asia Times

Results from a new study of missile defenses show limited supply, slow manufacturing

asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · July 25, 2025

Between June 13 and 24 Iran launched 574 missiles attacking Israel. Some of them got through, despite Israeli and US efforts to stop them. Until now we have lacked convincing data allowing some cogent analysis of the results of missile defenses. That information is partly supplied by a new study by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a Washington-based think tank that is pro-US defense and pro-Israel.

There are some surprises. The biggest one is the role of THAAD operated by US personnel in Israel and in the Gulf.

THAAD is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system. It is designed to intercept short-, medium- and long-range ballistic missiles. THAAD interceptors cost $12.7 million each, making them expensive, but not nearly as costly as the AEGIS SM-3 Block 2A interceptor that is priced at just under $28 million per shot.

THAAD is a hit-to-kill, or kinetic kill, interceptor that does not use explosives. It has an operational ceiling of around 92 miles, so it is not capable of exoatmospheric intercepts (310 to 620 miles). Israel’s high altitude interceptor, Arrow 3, is said to be capable of intercepts in the exoatmosphere.

According to the JINSA report, in the June conflict THAAD intercepted 47.7 percent of all the missiles fired at Israel, an unexpectedly high proportion. In doing so, the US expended at least 14% of its total THAAD interceptor stockpile. JINSA says it will take Lockheed, which manufactures the THAAD interceptors, around eight years to replenish the US stockpile, assuming the rate of production is not significantly increased.

Take Note: We only know the number of Iranian missiles shot down by THAAD (92). We do not know how many THAAD interceptors were launched to shoot down the Iranian missiles. The 14% figure represents the claimed kills, not the actual number fired. Thus the remaining inventory of THAAD interceptors may be smaller than stated in the report.

There are a couple of important caveats. The first is that the US is supplying other countries with THAAD systems. Saudi Arabia has a THAAD system delivered from the United States and 50 interceptors. However, it has ordered 360 interceptors, which will take years to manufacture.

Saudi THAAD personnel. Photo: Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense

The UAE reportedly has 192 THAAD interceptors, although it is not clear all have been delivered.

The US also has THAAD systems in South Korea (where there are now reports North Korea is boosting its missile production) and in Hawaii, Guam and Wake Island. Given the Chinese missile threat and regional volatility, the US may have to beef up supplies for the Pacific. The alternative is to reply on AEGIS, a very expensive system that operates at sea and therefore is not capable of fully protecting US and allied bases in the region.

The second problem is intercepting hypersonic missiles. Iran reportedly used some of these attacking Israel. China and Russia already have them (e.g., DF-17 with DF-2F hypersonic glide vehicles and Russia’s Avangard and Oreshnik ballistic missiles, plus Kinzhal and Zircon). THAAD probably needs to have longer range and speed to counter hypersonic missiles, something that has been proposed (THAAD-ER) but not yet approved.

Israel has Arrow 2 and Arrow 3, the latter able to operate in the exoatmosphere. In the recent conflict, Israel says it intercepted more than 200 Iranian missiles, Another 258 missiles were not intercepted because Israel determined they were not going to hit populated areas or critical infrastructure. THAAD intercepted 92 Iranian missiles.

According to Israeli reports, that left 57 Iranian missiles that got through and did damage.

What the information tells us is that more than half of Iran’s missiles were inaccurate (for one reason or another). It tells us that Israel does not have an adequate missile intercept inventory or launcher capability. Apparently Israel recognizes this shortcoming, but it depends on US manufacturing to help fill the gaps.

It also tells us that Israel cannot defend its territory without the United States. The great importance of THAAD for defending Israel is critical.

The JINSA report does not take into account Iranian and other drones fired at Israel. However, that threat will also multiply in future. (Israel has Iron Dome and Iron Beam, and can also use its air force to shoot down drones,)

Patriot also played a role in the conflict, mainly to defend al Udeid air base in Qatar. The Iranians fired 14 short and medium range missiles at the air base on the last day of the conflict, and the US was warned about the attack ahead of time by Iran. In response the US launched 30 Patriots and intercepted 13 out of 14 Iran’s missiles. One missile got through and damaged a communications dome on the base.

Before and after photos of damage at Al Udeid Air Base last month. Photo: Planet Labs

In practice this means it takes at least two Patriot interceptors for every enemy missile fired. As is well known, the US is in short supply of Patriot, which the US, its allies and friends rely on for air defense. This has caused significant controversy in connection with supplies of Patriots for Ukraine. The Pentagon has made clear that stockpiles are at a critical level and it does not want to deplete them further in support of Ukraine.

Instead, at President Donald Trump’s initiative, Germany has agreed to supply Patriot interceptors (model unclear, as there are different Patriot interceptors, the most important PAC-3), but Germany does not have enough. The German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, is negotiating with his European counterparts, to “find” the missiles Ukraine needs. Allegedly, Germany will pick up the bill for replacing them later., but the Germans now want US guarantees.

The JINSA paper also points out that Israel destroyed some 250 Iranian missile launchers (only after they fired their missiles). This is a luxury that Ukraine, for example, does not have and it is a challenge for the US and its Pacific allies, because finding and destroying adversary launchers (e.g., potentially China’s or Russia’s) is a far bigger challenge than Iran.

The future

The US and Israeli ability to manufacture air defense missiles is inadequate against Russian, Chinese, Iranian and maybe North Korean factories’ ability to produce ballistic missiles. What is true for the defense of Israel, supplementation of Israel’s local air defenses with US assets, also is true for Europe and Asia. NATO has very limited air defenses, well below what Israel has but a need to protect a massively bigger territory.

The United States’ Asian allies Japan and South Korea also have limited air defenses, mainly relying on their own Patriot systems or on Patriot plus AEGIS in the case of Japan. Taiwan has Patriot PAC-3, but not enough systems or missiles. The US, at present, would find it extremely difficult to backstop NATO against a massive attack by Russia, or to support Japan and South Korea, let alone Taiwan, with de minimis stockpiles and too few systems.

There is THAAD in Korea, but not in Japan or Taiwan. Japan even rejected AEGIS Ashore to protect its territory, although it does have four AEGIS-equipped ships. Taiwan publicly rejected THAAD, an incredibly foolish move.

To make a long story short, the US and its allies are not well prepared against saturation missile attacks and don’t have enough coverage to protect military installations, command and control centers, airfields, naval ports or even logistic centers and factories (putting aside attacks focused on critical infrastructure, as we see on a daily basis in Ukraine).

It should be obvious that the US industrial base is not ready for the challenge, that there are not enough factories and that efficiency (understood in terms of output) is low. The Pentagon is still relying on ordering missile production from existing factories rather than really trying to reform the manufacturing infrastructure so we can match the output of Russia, China or even Iran.

Stephen Bryen, a special correspondent to Asia Times and a former US deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, also previously served as executive director of the JINSA think tank. This article, which originally appeared in his Substack newsletter Weapons and Strategy, is republished with permission.

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asiatimes.com · by Stephen Bryen · July 25, 2025

13. Learning from Mao's ‘nightmare’ youth revolution in China

Yes, quite a story. What can we learn from this about China?

Excerpts:

The book starts with the years 1949–66, giving readers a taste of how Mao, motivated by political neurosis, set out to foment a new revolution.

Having established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, he became increasingly worried about the “capitalist, feudalist and revisionist” elements he believed had infiltrated the PRC government and Chinese society. He wanted to ensure China did not stray from its socialist values. But he also wanted to remove his detractors from the Party ranks and reassert his authority.

So he encouraged Chinese youth to take part in the struggle against the “capitalists” and “bourgeois.” This led to the emergence, in 1966, of a number of cultural and social features that later came to be uniquely associated with the Cultural Revolution.

One was the Red Guard. Primarily high school and university students, these militant young people played a key role in carrying out Mao’s mission to eliminate the perceived enemies of socialism and uphold proletarian ideology of class struggle, anti-intellectualism and the need for permanent revolution.

The Red Guards attacked intellectuals, destroyed cultural artefacts and persecuted “counter-revolutionaries” who held “bourgeois” values such as individualism and cultural elitism.

The Red Guards, workers and other rebel groups were prolific producers of dazibao, or “big-character posters.” These posters were often written to denounce teachers, officials or anyone seen as opposing Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideals.

Another social phenomenon was chuanlian: the widespread travel of Red Guards across China to exchange revolutionary ideas and spread Maoist propaganda. Endorsed by Mao himself, millions of young people used free train passes and government support to visit Red Guard groups in other major cities.

Chuanlian led to widespread disorder, the disruption of transport systems and the escalation of violent confrontations between rival Red Guard factions.

...

The book will appeal to a number of different readerships. For those in the Chinese diaspora who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand, it is a chance to relive the nightmare, but in the comfort of knowing it is now firmly in the past – as long we remain alert to the risk of history repeating itself.

For non-Chinese readers, Jaivin’s narrative flair and sense of drama give new life to what is almost certainly the sorriest period in recent Chinese history.

Learning from Mao's ‘nightmare’ youth revolution in China - Asia Times

New book brings to dramatic life what was almost certainly the sorriest period in recent Chinese history

asiatimes.com · by Wanning Sun · July 26, 2025

In the 1960s and 70s, the youth of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia rebelled by protesting against the Vietnam War, trying psychedelic drugs, embracing free love and discovering the Beatles. Meanwhile, what their contemporaries in China were getting up to was just as transformative.

The key difference, as Linda Jaivin’s book shows, is that the young Chinese rebels’ actions had profoundly destructive consequences – and their senseless behavior was masterminded by their “great leader,” Mao Zedong.

Review: Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China – Linda Jaivin (Black Inc.)

Bombard the Headquarters! is a compelling but disturbing account of what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. In just over 100 pages, alternating between broad brush strokes and a fine-grained touch, Jaivin’s book takes the reader on a tumultuous journey through the political upheavals in China from 1966 to 1976.

She is a consummate storyteller. This, when combined with an intimate knowledge of Chinese language and a solid grounding in existing scholarship on China, equips her well for the mammoth challenge of making sense of the most indelible national trauma of 20th-century China.

A new revolution

The book starts with the years 1949–66, giving readers a taste of how Mao, motivated by political neurosis, set out to foment a new revolution.

Having established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, he became increasingly worried about the “capitalist, feudalist and revisionist” elements he believed had infiltrated the PRC government and Chinese society. He wanted to ensure China did not stray from its socialist values. But he also wanted to remove his detractors from the Party ranks and reassert his authority.

So he encouraged Chinese youth to take part in the struggle against the “capitalists” and “bourgeois.” This led to the emergence, in 1966, of a number of cultural and social features that later came to be uniquely associated with the Cultural Revolution.

One was the Red Guard. Primarily high school and university students, these militant young people played a key role in carrying out Mao’s mission to eliminate the perceived enemies of socialism and uphold proletarian ideology of class struggle, anti-intellectualism and the need for permanent revolution.

The Red Guards attacked intellectuals, destroyed cultural artefacts and persecuted “counter-revolutionaries” who held “bourgeois” values such as individualism and cultural elitism.

The Red Guards, workers and other rebel groups were prolific producers of dazibao, or “big-character posters.” These posters were often written to denounce teachers, officials or anyone seen as opposing Mao Zedong’s revolutionary ideals.

Another social phenomenon was chuanlian: the widespread travel of Red Guards across China to exchange revolutionary ideas and spread Maoist propaganda. Endorsed by Mao himself, millions of young people used free train passes and government support to visit Red Guard groups in other major cities.

Chuanlian led to widespread disorder, the disruption of transport systems and the escalation of violent confrontations between rival Red Guard factions.

Epic drama

The years 1967–69 witnessed the most violent and chaotic phase of the Cultural Revolution. The movement spread from universities and the cultural realm to factories, rural areas and the public service sector in local governments.

Jaivin takes readers to Shanghai, Wuhan, Inner Mongolia – and then back to the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing. We learn that public humiliation, beatings, torture and forced confessions were common.

Many people were imprisoned without trial, or were even driven to suicide. Violent clashes also occurred between rival Red Guard factions and later between civilians and the military, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people.

The following period, 1970–76, saw a number of transformative events, including the deaths of Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976 and then Mao in September.

In 1971, Lin Biao suddenly exited the Chinese leadership. A close ally of Mao during the early years, Lin later rose to become his designated successor. In 1971, however, Mao grew suspicious of Lin’s ambition. Lin fell from power under mysterious circumstances, after allegedly plotting a coup. He died in a plane crash in Mongolia while reportedly fleeing China, and the Chinese government later denounced him as a traitor.

Another turning point involved a curious encounter between some Chinese and American ping-pong players in 1971. This encounter led to the well-known ping-pong diplomacy that eventuated in the normalization of US–China relations, as marked by President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

In 1976, the Tangshan Earthquake, considered one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history, killed half of that city.

Like a scriptwriter for an epic historical film with an innate sense of the dramatic, Jaivin conjures up these historical moments.

Radioactive memories

The Cultural Revolution officially ended with the 1976 arrest of the “Gang of Four.” This is a group of four political figures – one of them Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife – who were closely aligned with Mao and played a key role in promoting his ultra-leftist radical politics. It has cast a long shadow.

In the final pages of the book, Jaivin offers her summary of the Cultural Revolution this way:

It was supposed to imbue the nation with such a strong ethos of egalitarianism and self-sacrifice that corruption, bureaucratism and “bourgeois tendencies” would forever be banished from China. Instead, it has become a cautionary tale that cannot be told, a radioactive memory and a source of multi-generational trauma.

And her assessment of Mao, the instigator of the Cultural Revolution, is equally concise:

A complex, contradictory and often cantankerous figure, larger than life and all too human in his flaws, Mao was capable of the grandest revolutionary visions but also the pettiest manipulations. He was both an inspirational leader and a remorseless tyrant.

New life to a sorry period

One benchmark for the success of a short book on a “devilishly complex” topic is whether readers are left wanting to know more. Measured against this benchmark, Jaivin has certainly succeeded. For this reader, the book provokes many questions.

What was the psychology behind the mass hysteria of the Red Guards, and what led them to commit acts of violence that call to mind what Hannah Arendt dubbed “the banality of evil”? What lessons can we learn about the dangers of personality cults and the worship of authoritarian dictators – which, in the case of Mao and numerous others throughout history, has enabled a single strong man (most often it is a man) to consolidate authority, suppress opposition and legitimise his dominance for many years?

Another benchmark for the success of a book dealing with collective traumas with lasting impacts is whether readers can still enjoy reading the book, without being overwhelmed by its seriousness.

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Jaivin by no means makes light of the massive scale of violence, death and human suffering inflicted by the Cultural Revolution. But she approaches her topic as an epic tale featuring Mao as the central figure, with a big cast of characters including party leaders, the Gang of Four, the Red Guards and rebels and prominent victims.

The human drama of the power struggles and power plays involving these characters is gripping and disturbing in equal measure. Jaivin has a gift for keeping her readers engaged.

The book will appeal to a number of different readerships. For those in the Chinese diaspora who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand, it is a chance to relive the nightmare, but in the comfort of knowing it is now firmly in the past – as long we remain alert to the risk of history repeating itself.

For non-Chinese readers, Jaivin’s narrative flair and sense of drama give new life to what is almost certainly the sorriest period in recent Chinese history.

Wanning Sun is a professor of media and cultural studies, University of Technology Sydney.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

asiatimes.com · by Wanning Sun · July 26, 2025

14. US Foreign Aid With Chinese Characteristics

An interesting take on development and comparison between US and Chinese philosophies.

Excerpts:

Largely due to IDFC activity, nonconcessional development finance flows jumped from 4 percent of overall U.S. aid spending in 2020 to 36 percent in 2021. Among the major projects funded by the IDFC are investments related to the Lobito Corridor in Southern Africa, which aims to create transportation links allowing Western firms to access critical minerals that are presently monopolized by China.

Ironically, this growing Western emphasis on nonconcessional, commercialized development finance with an emphasis on infrastructure development comes at a time when China has scaled back the BRI (largely due to growing evidence that many recipient countries have exceeded their borrowing capacities) and begun allocating more resources to “soft” aid through the Global Development Initiative.

An obvious drawback of the blended finance model is that it diverts attention and resources from traditional concessional aid and the investment in health, education, and disaster assistance that remain essential.

But even on its own terms, the effectiveness of the Wall Street Consensus remains in doubt. A 2020 report by the Center for Global Development concluded that the overall flow of blended finance had been disappointing and that the great bulk of MDB-mobilized private financing was directed to middle-income rather than low-income countries. A 2019 study by ODI Global reached similar conclusions. In low-income countries, on average, each $1 in public development financing mobilized only $0.37 in private finance.

Blended finance was constrained by the low risk tolerance of both public and private actors in the face of environments hampered by poor governance and few profitable investment opportunities. Since most blended finance flowed to middle-income countries and to “hard” sectors, such as transport and energy, as opposed to social sectors, the report suggested that the increased priority given such investments came at the expense of programs that more directly targeted poverty in low-income countries.

Indeed, the proposed doubling in the funding cap for the IDFC cannot substitute for the human costs that follow from the cuts to U.S. Official Development Assistance, which one study suggests will lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years. Traditional aid may have drawbacks, whether evaluated as a tool of U.S. foreign policy or in terms of development effectiveness, but abandoning it in favor of the privatization of development finance is neither wise nor humane.

US Foreign Aid With Chinese Characteristics

The dismantling of USAID is the culmination of a decade-long realignment of Western approaches to development, inspired by China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/07/us-foreign-aid-with-chinese-characteristics/

By David Skidmore

July 24, 2025

The GSEZ Mineral Port in Gabon, one of the projects supported by public-private partnership via the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.

Credit: U.S. International Development Finance Corporation

As President Donald Trump takes a chainsaw to U.S. foreign aid programs, it would be easy to attribute such extreme measures to MAGA isolationism or DOGE zealotry. While anti-globalist and anti-government ideologies certainly played a role, the shift away from traditional foreign aid is not limited to the U.S. and does not represent a full-scale abandonment of development finance. Indeed, Trump’s moves represent the culmination of a decade-long realignment of Western approaches to development, inspired by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The retreat from traditional foreign assistance cuts across the Western world. By 2026, estimates hold that foreign aid budgets will have fallen by over one-quarter in Canada and Germany and by close to 40 percent in Britain, compared with 2023 levels. Overall, G-7 countries, which account for 75 percent of foreign assistance, spent 28 percent less in 2025 than in 2024.

Yet even as Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cut foreign aid, it also provided new funding – a $3 billion revolving fund – for the International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC), which was created by the 2017 BUILD Act. The IDFC is up for renewal this year, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee has already voted in support of authorizing its operations for another seven years with a lending cap of $120 billion, double the initial level.

The IDFC was intended as an answer to China’s BRI, which represented an alternative to traditional Western approaches to aid.

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – a club of Western donor countries – defines Official Development Assistance (ODA) as concessional finance directed toward developmental projects in low- and middle-income countries. The DAC encourages transparency and discourages the tying of aid to purchases of goods and services from the donor country. Most DAC countries emphasize “soft” aid, focused on health, education, and humanitarian assistance. ODA typically draws upon budgeted funds that must be renewed annually.

Very little of Chinese development finance meets these criteria. Instead, China’s development finance is commercial in orientation. Most loans are initiated by policy banks – the China Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank – that raise funds by issuing bonds to investors. Loans carry near-market interest rates and must be repaid in full. Much of Chinese development finance has been channeled through the BRI, which focuses on infrastructure construction. Loans through these policy banks and others have amounted to well over a trillion dollars over the past decade.

Western countries have followed China’s lead both in commercializing development finance and in driving more resources toward infrastructure development. The latter move has transpired under the guise of various initiatives: the BUILD Act (U.S.), Build Back Better World (U.S.), the Global Gateway initiative (European Union), the Blue Dot Network (U.S., Australia, Japan), the Quality Infrastructure Investment Initiative (Japan), and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (G-7).

The competitive ambitions of the West have been limited by a paucity of available public funds, which makes it difficult to match the scale of China’s BRI. This problem gave rise to efforts to leverage public money to mobilize private capital for development purposes through blended finance initiatives.

At the multilateral level, a group of multilateral development banks issued a planning document titled “From Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance” in 2015. This paper outlined a vision for mobilizing private financial resources toward Global South infrastructure and other developmental needs. This was followed by the World Bank’s “Maximizing Finance for Development” initiative and the United Nation’s “Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance.”

These projects and those discussed below constituted what Daniela Gabor characterized as a “Wall Street Consensus.” Many types of infrastructure take the form of public (or semi-public) goods. Public goods, by their nature, are underproduced relative to their social utility because producers cannot exclude consumers from benefiting once the goods are produced. The Wall Street Consensus aims to make infrastructure projects “bankable” or attractive to private investors by shifting the risk of unprofitability to the state. If successful, private money is pooled with public funding through blended financing models such as syndicated bond issues. In this “development as derisking” model, private capital is “escorted” into the process of financing infrastructure through the creation of new asset classes freed of investor risk. In 2018, the G-20 declared support for a Roadmap to Infrastructure as an Asset Class.

Two types of risks must be minimized for private investors: regulatory risk and financial risk. Reducing regulatory risk includes lower environmental and safety standards, guaranteed grid access, legal protections against nationalization, and liability limits. Financial risk is managed through guaranteed toll revenues, preferential credit, loan guarantees, tax relief, or subsidies. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) or DAC donors help build state capacity in project identification and development, provide expertise in securitizing infrastructure assets for the market, and offer partial financing or loan guarantees.

The necessity for subsidies and other forms of state support arises from the fact that more than half of infrastructure projects in emerging economies do not promise sufficient cash flow to attract private investors. Even projects with dedicated revenue streams often carry demand risks, meaning they turn unprofitable if demand for the service declines. Governments may be compelled to include contract provisions that promise to cover revenue shortfalls with public funds when demand falls below certain thresholds.

Seth Schindler, Ilias Alami, and Nicholas Jepson noted that what Gabor referred to as the “derisking state” becomes both more dependent upon global finance and increasingly interventionist in shaping market outcomes. This contrasts with the Washington Consensus, which counseled state neutrality vis-à-vis the market, but also differs from the East Asian development model, where state intervention sought to shape the behavior of national capital rather than global capital.

By relieving private investors of risk, states aim to amplify the capital that can be mobilized toward critical development needs beyond national savings or the resources of MDBs and bilateral donors. The trade-off is the acceptance of risk by the developing state, a danger highlighted when the COVID-19 pandemic and rising interest rates threatened the solvency of many highly indebted countries.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation fits this model. The BUILD Act described its purpose as to “provide countries a robust alternative to state-directed investments by authoritarian governments and United States strategic competitors.” With a financing authority of $60 billion, the IDFC seeks to “crowd-in” private capital with a flexible toolkit that includes nonconcessional loans, loan guarantees, export credits, political risk insurance, equity investments, and technical assistance.

Authors

Guest Author

David Skidmore

David Skidmore is a professor of Political Science at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He is author of the forthcoming book “China, the West, and the Global Development Finance Regime: Competitive Convergence” (Edward Elgar).

15. Hegseth’s ousting of female leaders may have ‘chilling effect’ at Pentagon

Excerpts:

All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles.

Asked about the reasoning for the firing of Franchetti, Short and Chatfield, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson appeared to indicate there was an issue with their overall performances, even as no glaring mistakes had come to light while all three were in their previous roles.

“Under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth, the Department of Defense no longer makes personnel decisions on the basis of sex,” she said in a statement to The Hill. “Promotions, reassignments, and removals are all decided on the basis of merit and overall performance.”

While numerous male senior military officials also have been removed under the Trump administration — most notably the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown — the already few female generals and admirals make firing five “a disproportionately large number,” Bensahel said.

Hegseth’s ousting of female leaders may have ‘chilling effect’ at Pentagon

by Ellen Mitchell - 07/26/25 5:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5421346-pentagon-reassigns-women-leadership/

he unexplained removal of the first female head of the U.S. Naval Academy last week is the latest in a string of top military women who have either been fired or redelegated to largely invisible roles under the Trump administration.

The ousting of Vice Adm. Yvette Davids from her post as the first female superintendent of the academy in Annapolis, Md., makes her one of at least five senior female service members who have been moved out of their roles since January.

That trend, coupled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s well-documented antipathy toward women in combat roles prior to becoming Pentagon chief, could have a chilling effect on women enlisting in the armed forces, experts say.

“It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that it’s going to weaken our military force by undermining the role of women who have become, I believe, an intrinsic part of our military capability,” said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary in the Obama administration.

Panetta, who in 2013 announced that all combat roles would soon be open to women — a shift that eventually came in 2015 — told The Hill that the Trump administration’s removal of female leaders from the ranks, often without explanation, will have impacts on morale for female service members.

“Just to remove commanders from their positions without cause sends a clear signal that this is not about merit, it’s not about performance, it’s about the fact that they’re women. It’s the only conclusion you can come to,” he said.

Davids was not outright fired, instead moved to deputy chief of naval operations, a senior position but largely out of the public eye. But the shift was only after she had led the academy for 18 months rather than the typical three- or four-year tenure of the school’s superintendent.

Nora Bensahel, a professor of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, said the fact that she was removed from the Naval Academy ”really sends a message from the Pentagon that they do not think that a woman is qualified to be in charge of educating and training the next generation of fighters.”

“This sends a terrible message to the women who are currently serving in the U.S. military, or young women and girls who are thinking about joining the U.S. military — that they are not welcome at the highest levels,” Bensahel told The Hill.

The purge of top female officers began the day President Trump was inaugurated, with Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Lee Fagan fired only hours after he was sworn in. She had been in the role since June 2022 and was the first uniformed woman to lead the military branch.

At the time, officials at the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the Coast Guard, reportedly said the reasons for her firing were issues with border security and an “excessive focus” on diversity, equity and inclusion that diverted “resources and attention from operational imperatives.”

That was followed by the February ouster of Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, who served as the senior military assistant to the secretary of Defense. Both of those came without explanation, though Hegseth has called Franchetti, who boasted a four-decade career that included numerous command posts, a “DEI hire.”

And in April, Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the sole female flag officer on NATO’s Military Committee, was fired reportedly due to her long-time advocacy for DEI within the armed forces, including a Women’s Equality Day presentation she gave in 2015.

All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles.

Asked about the reasoning for the firing of Franchetti, Short and Chatfield, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson appeared to indicate there was an issue with their overall performances, even as no glaring mistakes had come to light while all three were in their previous roles.

“Under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth, the Department of Defense no longer makes personnel decisions on the basis of sex,” she said in a statement to The Hill. “Promotions, reassignments, and removals are all decided on the basis of merit and overall performance.”

While numerous male senior military officials also have been removed under the Trump administration — most notably the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown — the already few female generals and admirals make firing five “a disproportionately large number,” Bensahel said.

She added that with 18 percent of the force made up of women, the military may not hit its recruiting numbers without them.

Hegseth had made no secret of his views on female service members since last year, when in his book titled “The War on Warriors”he allowed that women have performed well in support roles in combat but “women in the infantry — women in combat on purpose — is another story.”

“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units,” he pointedly wrote.

And only a week before he was named as Trump’s pick for Defense secretary, Hegseth poignantly said he was “straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles,” while on a podcast.

“It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated,” he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast, which aired Nov. 7. “We’ve all served with women, and they’re great. But our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where, traditionally — not traditionally, over human history — men in those positions are more capable.”

To win confirmation as Pentagon chief, however, Hegseth publicly softened his stance to receive votes from Republican senators who expressed misgivings about his previous comments on female troops. Among them was Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard who commanded troops in Iraq and Kuwait.

At his nomination hearing, Hegseth said that he wasn’t against women in combat jobs, but seemed to suggest that standards for such roles have been lowered to meet diversity quotas — a claim that past defense officials say there’s no evidence of.

“Yes, women will have access to ground-combat roles, given the standards remain high,” Hegseth told Ernst, who later voted yes to confirm him in a narrow 51–50 vote.

Once in the building, Hegseth quickly got to work dismantling any program or effort with a whiff of DEI — an obsession in Trump’s second term. On Jan. 29, he moved to strike race and sex as considerations for military promotions, with plans for a new Pentagon task force to promote “merit-based, color-blind policies” throughout the armed forces. DEI efforts, Hegseth has claimed, are damaging to recruiting and force readiness.

In April he took an axe to a Pentagon program meant to advance women’s participation in peace building and conflict prevention, known as Women, Peace & Security (WPS), calling it a “UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists,” and claiming that “troops HATE it.”

The program was created in part by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, then a member of the House representing South Dakota, co-sponsored by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, and signed into law by Trump in his first term.

Also this spring, Hegseth moved ahead with an effort to review and potentially overhaul combat and physical-fitness standards – viewed by some as a backdoor effort to keep women out of combat roles.

But Panetta said taking the steps to undermine the role of women in the military doesn’t make a lot of sense if Hegseth is indeed only looking to maintain a strong military, as he has claimed.

“It’s been clear that he’s been opposed to women in the military for a long time. That attitude is now impacting our military capability. I think bottom line is that it weakens our force,” Panetta said.

Women “ought to be judged, like every other military warrior, by their capability, by their ability to do the job. That’s why I felt it was important to give them that opportunity,” he added. “They had to meet the standard, they had to be able to do the job, that’s exactly what they’ve been able to do.”

16. Back on the Brink ...Could ‘Black Americans’ become stateless in their own country? By Dr. Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III

Excerpts:

Toward a Civic Reckoning, Not Retreat

To name the possibility of Black statelessness is not to invite it. It is to resist its quiet normalization.

We must be sober about what is at stake. A republic cannot survive the selective denial of citizenship. Nor can it claim legitimacy if belonging is contingent on one’s genome, ancestry, or ideological conformity.

To meet this moment, we must:

Reinforce the legal foundations of inclusive citizenship through constitutional and statutory renewal.

Guard against techno-authoritarianism, demanding ethical oversight of biopolitical tools and biometric systems.

Foster civic identity rooted in principle, not bloodline—a republic held together by shared norms, not curated chromosomes.

And above all, we must remember that exclusion by design is not new. But neither is resistance.

The question is not whether history will repeat. The question is whether we are willing to interrupt its return.

Back on the Brink ...

substack.com · by Isaiah Wilson III

By Dr. Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III

Founder & CEO, Wilson W.i.S.E. Consulting LLC | Author, “Compound Security, Unlocked”

Introduction: A Republic in Recoil

As the United States has entered its 250th year, a quiet but grave question presses at the edges of civic discourse:

Could ‘Black Americans’ become stateless in their own country?

Not through secession or mass deportation, but through the deliberate erosion of legal protections, targeted dismantling of rights, and bureaucratic normalization of exclusion.

This is no alarmist projection. It is a question born of patterns already in motion.

From executive-led attacks on the civil service to Project 2025’s blueprint for federal overreach, from judicial doctrines poised to unravel birthright citizenship to the rise of biopolitical technologies marketed as “choice”—the architecture of a de facto statelessness is under construction. Quietly. Incrementally. And dangerously.

The premise is this: Statelessness is not merely a condition of being without a passport. It is the systematic denial of belonging—political, legal, and social.

And for Black Americans, it is an historical phantom that continues to haunt the present.

Clarifying Terms: What I Mean by “Black Americans”

Before going further, it’s important to be clear about terms—especially when the stakes involve identity, history, and citizenship.

When I refer to Black Americans, I do so deliberately, and distinctively, from the broader label of African Americans.

African American is a category that rightly includes a wide diaspora—immigrants from the continent of Africa and the Caribbean, naturalized citizens, recent arrivals, and descendants of voluntary migration. It’s a term of pride, cultural richness, and pan-African solidarity. But it is also, in practice, a generalization.

Black Americans, as I use the term here, refers specifically to those whose lineage is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade and who are descended from those historically enslaved and emancipated within the territorial United States.

These are the people whose civic identity—whose very legal existence—has been uniquely shaped by the 14th Amendment, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the long, uneven arc of racial struggle that followed.

Why does that distinction matter?

Because Black Americans are the only group in the United States whose claim to citizenship was not originally granted, but constructed—retroactively, and conditionally—through an act of constitutional amendment (the 14th, ratified in 1868). They are also the only population for whom that citizenship has been repeatedly contested, revoked in practice, and litigated across centuries.

The birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was written largely because of Black Americans—because of the need to clarify that people who had been enslaved, dehumanized, and systematically excluded were, in fact, citizens. That was not a given. It had to be stated.

Today, that same clause—“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens…”—is once again under legal and political scrutiny. Right-wing legal frameworks like “heritage originalism” now seek to reinterpret or dismantle birthright citizenship. Some do so under the guise of immigration policy; others with a more targeted intent.

So, when I speak of Black statelessness, I am not talking about metaphor. I am talking about the very real possibility that the group who were once constitutionally defined into citizenship could be the first to be defined back out—not by name, but by implication.

Because if birthright citizenship becomes conditional—or genetically qualified—then Black Americans, who were once the reason for its guarantee, may once again become the first to lose it.

This concern is not abstract. It is a compound security threat: legal, political, cultural, and moral. And it requires clarity of language, clarity of history, and clarity of purpose.

That’s why I say Black Americans—not out of exclusion, but out of precision.

A Slow Reversal of Reconstruction

We’ve been here before. Not in the era of genetic barcodes, but in the years following emancipation.

From 1877 through the mid-20th century, Black Americans lived in a functional state of statelessness under Jim Crow: stripped of voting rights, excluded from public goods, and subject to state violence without recourse.

Reconstruction promised freedom. Redemption clawed it back.

Citizenship, nominally granted by the Fourteenth Amendment, was hollowed out by poll taxes, literacy tests, lynchings, and legal impunity.

The lesson is clear: rights can be granted by law but voided in practice.

And today, we see signs of a similar unmaking.

The rollback of Voting Rights Act protections under Shelby County v. Holder (2013) has already enabled a resurgence of voter suppression tactics—purges, ID laws, gerrymandering.
The administrative weakening of equal protection enforcement, particularly in education and housing, is widening racial inequities under the guise of deregulation.
The racialization of civic trust, amplified through disinformation and delegitimization campaigns, undermines public faith in institutions among both minorities and the broader electorate.

These are not isolated acts. They are the preconditions of exclusion.

Share Compound Security, Unlocked

Citizenship Under Siege: The Legal Pathways to Exile

Current judicial and legislative trends are creating a civic terrain where the link between race, ancestry, and rights is becoming dangerously flexible:

Efforts to redefine birthright citizenship—championed by elements of Project 2025 and supported by recent Supreme Court appointees—could enable selective interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
State-level attempts to reassert “heritage-based” qualifications for civic participation—whether through curriculum mandates or voting eligibility—lay groundwork for biological or cultural tests of loyalty.
The privatization of genomic services, unchecked by robust federal oversight, opens the door to “soft eugenics”—consumer-driven decisions that may quietly segregate opportunity by inherited code.

The tools are already on the table. The intent is not hypothetical. And the Black community, as both a political scapegoat and historical barometer of American justice, remains uniquely vulnerable.

What Would Statelessness Look Like in Practice?

It won’t come with a mass revocation of citizenship. It won’t come with internment camps….at least not so far.

It will come with:

Denied voting rights under “proof-of-heritage” clauses.
Blocked access to services based on “non-compliant genomic profiles.”
Hyper-policed zones for “provisional residents.”
Stripped federal protections under the guise of “state sovereignty.”

It will be couched in language of “efficiency,” “integrity,” and “heritage.” But make no mistake: it would amount to the strategic erasure of Black civic life.

This is not speculation—it is a scenario already taking shape in doctrine, policy proposals, and social tech infrastructures.

Toward a Civic Reckoning, Not Retreat

To name the possibility of Black statelessness is not to invite it. It is to resist its quiet normalization.

We must be sober about what is at stake. A republic cannot survive the selective denial of citizenship. Nor can it claim legitimacy if belonging is contingent on one’s genome, ancestry, or ideological conformity.

To meet this moment, we must:

Reinforce the legal foundations of inclusive citizenship through constitutional and statutory renewal.
Guard against techno-authoritarianism, demanding ethical oversight of biopolitical tools and biometric systems.
Foster civic identity rooted in principle, not bloodline—a republic held together by shared norms, not curated chromosomes.

And above all, we must remember that exclusion by design is not new. But neither is resistance.

The question is not whether history will repeat. The question is whether we are willing to interrupt its return.

Thanks for reading Compound Security, Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

1. Indo-Pacific Stronghold

2. America and its Allies

3. Building Out the Defence Industrial Base

4. North Korean Learning from Ukraine

5. AI and Kill Chains

It is good to see north Korea mentioned once in awhile.

The Big Five

The Big Five - 27 July edition

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-big-five-27-july-edition?utm

My regular update on global conflict & confrontation. This week: the envelopment of Pokrovsk, Russia’s war on Ukraine’s cities and its protracted saturation strategy, and Exercise Talisman Sabre.

Mick Ryan

Jul 27, 2025

Image: @COMUKCSG

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Big Five.

This week’s edition has been written during my ongoing visit to Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, Australia. I had the opportunity to attend, and present to, a gathering of senior military joint commanders from across the Indo-Pacific region. Hosted by the Australian Commander of Joint operations, the event was an opportunity to reflect of the ongoing changes of the character of war, as well as the lessons from this year’s Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025.

In this edition of The Big Five, I explore issues concerning the war in Ukraine from the past week, as well as news from the Pacific region. As always, I have included my top five national security and war reads.

Ukraine

Ukraine’s Political Battle over Countering Corruption. The big story for this week was the new legislation put forward by the Zelenskyy administration, and passed by the parliament, to constrain the activities of domestic anti-corruption authorities. It resulted in the first public protests against the Zelenskyy government since February 2022. Later in the week, Zelenskyy hinted that additional legislation might be forthcoming to amend or roll back the earlier changes.

A good primer on this issue from the Kyiv Independent is available here.

There is a lot of analysis out there on this issue. And while there are quite a few points of view on this topic, the one that stands out for me is the strategic messaging to Ukraine’s foreign supporters. Ukraine needs to not only win the war, but win the story of the war.

Ukraine’s narrative of being a resilient, open democratic society this week was dented by the new anti-corruption legislation. While the protests showed that Ukrainian people holding the government accountable was alive and well, the legislation was an unforced error. It gave Putin comfort, and material for his propaganda. And it allows authoritarians and social media trolls everywhere to propagate a narrative of western nations supporting a ‘corrupt’ Ukraine.

The Battle of Pokrovsk. The Russians appear to be in the final phases of their double envelopment of the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk. The Russian campaign for Pokrovsk, which has been a long series of large and small battles, has been underway for more than a year. The Pokrovsk axis of advance has been the main effort of Russian ground forces in eastern Ukraine for the entirety of this period. Even the Ukrainian campaign in Kursk did not shift the Russian main effort on the ground, even though the Russian military did dedicate significant forces to clearing the Ukrainians from Kursk (which remains an incomplete undertaking).

The ongoing Russian double envelopment of Pokrovsk. Source: ISW

This takes me back to a continuing theme in Russia’s ground force operations in Ukraine. There is little doubt that they have made some gains over the past three and a half years. There is also little doubt that they have learned, and learned how to learn better, which has resulted in adaptation in tactics, drone employment, EW, and the ability to orchestrate the operations of high and low quality force elements.

The problem is that the Russians have had to expend massive resources in order to achieve these gains, and to learn and adapt. The graph below, from the Russia Matters update, clearly shows that the casualties suffered by Russian forces has only bought them tiny returns, at least so far. From a tactical perspective, the Russian ground forces are effective, but at the lower end of any spectrum that might assess the tactical effectiveness of military forces.

Source: Russia Matters

The problem however is that Putin does not care about tactical effectiveness. He does care about a narrative of constant Russian advances, even if those advances are in metres. He cares about this because he can exploit this for his strategic narratives to influence western citizens and politicians and convince them that more support for Ukraine is pointless. Putin also cares about the ‘constant advances’ narrative because he can leverage it to convince his own people that the Russian losses so far in this war are worth it, as is the militarisation of the Russian nation.

Putin since late 2022 has employed a strategy of protraction that has two key elements: 1. Wait out Ukraine’s key supporters (Europe and the U.S.); and, 2. Slowly strangle Ukraine by attriting its military, degrade its economy and destroy civilian morale. His slow, steady but enormously expensive ground operations in the eastern Ukraine, supported by smaller operations in the north east and south of Ukraine, are a central part of Putin’s implementation of this strategy.

For an excellent recent analysis of the Russian campaign to seize Pokrovsk, this article by Kyiv Independent journalist Francis Farrell is well worth reading.

Russia’s War on Ukrainian Cities. Russia continued its large scale bombardment of Ukraine’s cities this week, targeting infrastructure and civilian morale. The largest attack in the past week was on 21 July, when the Russians launched 450 missiles and drones against targets inside Ukraine. Over the past week, the following attacks have taken place:

26 July: 235 drones and missiles launched, 200 intercepted.
25 July: 63 drones and missiles launched, 54 intercepted.
24 July: 107 drones and missiles launched, 91 intercepted.
23 July: 71 drones and missiles launched, 27 intercepted, 18 lost.
22 July: 42 drones and missiles launched, 26 intercepted, 7 lost.
21 July: 450 drones and missiles launched, 224 intercepted, 203 lost.

Despite the good interception rates, and the number of additional Russian drones and missiles lost due to jamming or failure to reach targets, missiles and drones continue to reach their targets in Ukraine’s cities. And, as the chart below shows, these raids are now continuous and are executed with much larger numbers of drones and missiles on the evenings when Russia surges.

This saturation strategy, which is not all that different in method to Russia’s meat tactics on the ground, seeks to use Russia’s main source of advantage over Ukraine - mass - to attempt to win the war, or at least project the idea that Russia is winning the war. The response required is the step up in industrial production in Ukraine and Europe to increase Russian casualties and intercept rates for Russian drones and missiles even further. While this is occurring, it may not be happening fast enough to out match Russia’s step up in massed ground and aerial attacks.

Assessment. The two key factors at play in this phase of the war pursued by Russia - protraction and saturation - offer a variety of insights for Western defence planners, as well as for Russia’s partners such as China and North Korea.

For European and US defence planners, preparations for countering the protraction of war require both political and societal adaptation. The strategies pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was possible to deploy professional military forces over and over again, are not even remotely fit for purpose in this strategic environment. Societal resilience is essential. But so too is the political courage to have honest conversations with citizens about the true nature of the threat from authoritarian regimes, and resources needed to deter them.

And, further investment in industrial production capacity is essential in Europe, America, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. No single country has the capacity required to counter the growing Arsenal of Authoritarians.

Both China and North Korea, already inclined towards strategies of protraction and saturation, will be learning that the protraction and saturation method is a viable strategy for them as well if they decide to engage in military campaigns against Taiwan and South Korea.

The Pacific

China’s Aircraft Carrier Deployments. This week, an excellent analysis of China’s recent dual aircraft carrier exercises in the western Pacific region was published by The Jamestown Foundation. Written by Yu-cheng Chen and K. Tristan Tang, the report looks at the 2025 deployment of two aircraft carriers concurrently in the western Pacific. Their analysis compares this deployment to previous deployments of aircraft carrier battle groups in the past few years.

Source: PLA Navy Shifts Training Focus from Near-Shore to Blue-Water Operations

The authors find that there are two key implications that can be drawn from the analysis of the PLAN’s latest dual aircraft carrier deployment. The first implication is that China has started shifting its military focus from training in near-seas comprehensive operations to a greater emphasis on far-seas mobile operations. The second implication is that the Central Military Commission has potentially determined that the PLA now possesses comprehensive near-seas combat capabilities, which are crucial to military operations around Taiwan.

You can read the full report at this link.

Source: Dept of Defence

Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025. Finally, Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025 comes to a close today. It has seen military forces from 19 countries participate in a series of exercises across the northern and eastern parts of Australia. At its high point, 43,000 military personnel were involved, as well as dozens of ships and hundreds of aircraft. There were also multiple live fire exercises with long-range land and maritime strike missiles, amphibious operations, aerial and maritime combat as well as a myriad of logistic support activities.

One part of the exercise even saw a Canadian C-17 airlift a U.S. Army HIMARS launcher and Australian Army ground troops to Christmas Island.

Additionally, the exercise saw the Australian Army fire its first Precision Strike Missile, the new long-range HIMARS launched missile, for the first time. The launch occurred at a northern Australia military training area. You can watch a video of the PrSm firing at this link.

First PrSM fired by Australian Army’s 14th Regiment this week. Source: Dept of Defence

These types of large-scale exercises are crucial to developing coalition warfighting capability across all domains. They rehearse higher level command and control, and operational logistics. Importantly, they develop trust and enhanced understanding between different military forces across the region.

*********

It’s time to cover this week’s recommended readings.

I have included a new article from Foreign Affairs that examines America’s changing relationship with it allies. There is a new report from CSBA on fortifying northern Australia’s military support areas as well as a CSIS report on Ukraine’s drone manufacturing capabilities. Finally, there is an article on what North Korea is learning in Kursk and Ukraine, and the future of AI-enabled kill chains.

As always, if you only have time to read one of my recommendations, the first one is my read of the week.

Happy reading!

1. Indo-Pacific Stronghold

This week, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis released a new report that examined northern Australia as a key military support area for operations in the Indo-Pacific. The report finds that if “Australia is to remain a gateway to the Indo-Pacific region, it must be fortified into a stronghold. Northern Australia in particular is a critical piece of real estate with strategic relevance. Northern Australia can serve as a venue where friendly forces train and experiment in peacetime, as the base from which they deploy, and as a hub that sustains them in wartime.” You can read the full report at this link.

2. America and its Allies

In this piece, Margaret MacMillian explores the degradation of the U.S. network of alliances, and the potential decrease in its global influence. As she notes, “the past offers plenty of examples of world powers falling out with erstwhile alliance partners or seeking new ones. But it’s hard to think of a case in which the leader of a major alliance has so casually and brutally cast aside allies that, for the most part, have been dependable and have accepted its writ.” You can read the full piece here.

3. Building Out the Defence Industrial Base

The expansion and ongoing development of Ukraine’s defence industry since 2022 has been an important contributor to the defence of Ukraine. In this report, the author explores how this industrial expansion has been achieved, and lessons that can be drawn from it. As she notes, “serious effort to prepare for the wars of the future must incorporate options for radical decentralisation, bottom-up innovation, and competitive dynamism within the defense industrial base.” The full report is available here.

4. North Korean Learning from Ukraine

The topic of what North Korea is learning from the war in Ukraine has gained great impetus recently. Not only is this a topic of what battlefield lessons are being shared between Russia and North Korea, it is also about sharing production methods and more strategic insights. This article looks at the strategic impact of North Korea’s learning in Ukraine, and can be read at this link.

5. AI and Kill Chains

This article, published by the Modern War Institute, explores the application of AI in speeding up decision-making about targeting in military operations. As the author notes, “in multidomain operations, accelerating sensor-to-shooter kill chains, reducing cognitive burden, and improving commanders’ decision-making in contested environments is the goal.” The full article is available at this link.

18. A Response from an SF CSM in the Regiment

A Response from an SF CSM in the Regiment

Sal Artiaga

Irregular Warfare & National Security Strategist | Intelligence & Latin America Professional | Opinions = my own. Sharing ≠ endorsement.

Published Jul 26, 2025

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7354925301178515457/

The role of a Green Beret remains one of the most unique and critical within the U.S. military, rooted in their mastery of the human domain, a core strength that sets them apart from other special operations forces. Green Berets, as part of the U.S. Army Special Forces, are not just warriors but also diplomats, teachers, and cultural experts who excel in unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, and building relationships with local populations. Their ability to understand and navigate the human domain, engaging with diverse cultures, fostering trust, and enabling partner forces, is what makes them indispensable in complex, non-linear battlefields where influence, perception, and local alliances often outweigh raw firepower. This focus on the human element allows Green Berets to create strategic effects through small, deliberate actions, such as training indigenous forces or shaping local governance, which can shift the trajectory of entire regions.

Regarding the trend of JSOC officers assuming key leadership roles within USASOC and 1st Special Forces Command, it’s a double-edged sword. JSOC leaders are undeniably exceptional, with a proven track record of executing high-stakes, tactical missions, think operations like the bin Laden raid or the elimination of high-value targets. These missions, while tactical in execution, often carry strategic weight, disrupting terrorist networks or altering the course of conflicts. However, JSOC’s focus is on direct action, special reconnaissance, and counterterrorism, which typically involve small, elite teams operating with precision and speed. Leading a JSOC unit doesn’t require managing large formations of soldiers, as their units are lean and highly specialized, often numbering in the dozens rather than hundreds or thousands.

In contrast, USASOC and 1st Special Forces Command oversee much larger and more diverse organizations, including Special Forces Groups, Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, and sustainment units, with thousands of personnel. These commands demand a broader skill set, including organizational leadership, resource allocation, and a deep understanding of unconventional warfare’s long-term, human-centric objectives. While JSOC officers bring invaluable operational experience, their expertise in short-duration, high-intensity missions may not fully translate to the nuanced, protracted engagements that define Special Forces operations. If USASOC commanders are bypassing systems like CCAP and BCAP to handpick JSOC officers for Group Commander roles, it raises questions about whether the selection process prioritizes tactical prowess over the strategic and cultural acumen required for leading Special Forces units. This could risk diluting the Green Berets’ unique identity as masters of the human domain.

On the question of 1st Special Forces Command’s focus, the human domain remains its cornerstone, but there’s a growing tension between low-tech, human-centric approaches and the allure of technological solutions. Green Berets have historically thrived in low-tech environments, leveraging language skills, cultural knowledge, and interpersonal relationships to achieve outsized impacts. However, the “technology trap, "an overreliance on advanced systems like drones, AI, or cyber tools, threatens to pull resources and focus away from this core competency. Technology can enhance operations, but it’s not a substitute for the trust and influence built through face-to-face engagement. If 1st Special Forces Command leans too heavily into tech-driven solutions, it risks losing the adaptability and resilience that define Green Berets in austere, unpredictable environments.

The balance between irregular warfare and electronic warfare/information operations is another critical issue. Irregular warfare, encompassing unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and foreign internal defense, remains the Green Berets’ bread and butter. It’s about enabling local partners, disrupting adversaries through proxies, and operating in the gray zone. Electronic warfare and information operations, while increasingly vital in the modern multi-domain battlefield, are more technical and less human-focused. These domains involve disrupting enemy communications, countering propaganda, or leveraging cyber capabilities, which are critical but often fall under the purview of specialized units like the 389th Military Intelligence Battalion or cyber-focused elements within USSOCOM. For Green Berets, the challenge is integrating these tools without letting them overshadow the human-centric skills that make irregular warfare effective. A Green Beret’s ability to train a local militia or counter an adversary’s narrative on the ground is often more decisive than a cyber strike.

The idea of combining Civil Affairs (CA) and Psychological Operations (PSYOP) is not new but has gained traction with the 2014 establishment of 1st Special Forces Command, which unified Special Forces, CA, and PSYOP under one headquarters. This integration makes sense on paper—CA builds relationships with civilian populations, while PSYOP shapes perceptions, and both amplify the human domain focus of Special Forces. Recent updates, like the Army’s 2024 deactivation of the 1st Information Operations Command, suggest a shift toward broader, multi-domain approaches, such as Theater Information Advantage Detachments, which blend information operations, cyber, and electronic warfare. However, combining CA and PSYOP risks diluting their distinct roles if not carefully managed. CA requires deep cultural and governance expertise, while PSYOP demands precision in messaging and behavioral influence. Merging them too closely could lead to a loss of specialization, reducing their effectiveness in supporting Special Forces missions.

In summary, Green Berets are vital because they operate in the human domain, where trust, influence, and cultural understanding create strategic outcomes that technology alone cannot achieve. JSOC officers are phenomenal leaders for tactical, high-impact missions, but their experience commanding small, elite teams may not fully prepare them for the broader, human-focused leadership required in USASOC. The command must stay true to its low-tech, irregular warfare roots while judiciously integrating technology and information operations. Combining CA and PSYOP can enhance synergy but must preserve their unique contributions to avoid diminishing their impact.

Vires per Scientia … Victoria per Verum

19. 7 Brilliant Acts of Psychological Warfare in History

PSYOP ≠ psyops

7 Brilliant Acts of Psychological Warfare in History

history.com · July 23, 2025

By: Mark Piesing

World War II

Military strategists have long used 'psyops' that weaponize fear, confusion and deception to outwit the enemy.

Mark Piesing

Alamy Stock Photo

Published: July 23, 2025

Last Updated: July 23, 2025

Long before the term “psychological operations”—or “psyops”—entered modern military jargon, the art of manipulating perception to influence enemy behavior has shaped the course of history. From the famed Trojan Horse ruse to Gulf War leaflets and covert broadcasts, psyops have played a vital, often hidden role in warfare. These tactics aim not to wound the body but to unnerve the mind—demoralizing, confusing or coercing without firing a shot.

The most effective psyops have weaponized the universal and timeless levers of human behavior—fear, faith, illusion, disinformation, the desire to belong—to undermine, deceive or destabilize an opponent. But some psyops have proven more ingenious than others. Here are seven:

Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.)

Alexander the Great was a master of battlefield strategy—but the Macedonian king also wielded psychological warfare to intimidate enemies long before swords were drawn. His most effective tool? Exploiting local superstitions to portray himself as a godlike, unstoppable conqueror. "Alexander the Great used myth-making and identity-sharing by absorbing the culture of the lands he conquered,” says psychological warfare historian Dr. James Crossland, author of Rogue Agent. That way, he could “present himself as the embodiment of local gods or the local beliefs."

In Persia, he adopted the royal customs and divine titles of the Achaemenid kings, calling himself "King of Kings" and dressing in traditional Persian royal attire. In Egypt, priests portrayed him as pharaoh, an incarnate god.

He reinforced his image with kinship myths, claiming descent from Herakles and Achilles, paragons of strength and warrior prowess. Egyptian priests even declared him the son of Zeus-Ammon, the hybrid Greek-Egyptian deity, cementing his role as a spiritual bridge between empires.

The cult of personality he created made his soldiers believe the gods favored him—and terrified his enemies. Ancient accounts say some foes threw themselves from cliffs rather than face him in battle.

Alexander’s psyops proved remarkably effective. Though Macedonia lacked the wealth or cultural clout of Mediterranean city-states like Athens, he conquered the mighty Persian Empire, and forged a vast dominion stretching to modern-day Pakistan. “I am the person you have been waiting for is a very effective narrative,” says Crossland, “because it plays to the human need to have a simple explanation for why this person has laid waste to everything in his path.”

Alexander the Great

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Genghis Khan (1206-1227)

Genghis Khan wielded terror as a calculated weapon, turning psychological warfare into a cornerstone of his conquests. “Like Attila the Hun before him and Vlad the Impaler after him, Genghis Khan used rumor to inflate his reputation ahead of whatever military operation is to come,” says Crossland.

He instilled fear in his opponents with mass killings—slaughtering nearly everyone in a city, but deliberately sparing a few. These survivors would then spread word of Mongol brutality, helping convince the next city to surrender without a fight.

On the battlefield, he unleashed sensory overload. Synchronized drums, horns and bloodcurdling battle cries created a deafening wall of sound to disorient and terrify his enemies. He attacked from multiple directions to keep an opposing army, or city defenders, tense and off-balance, unable to anticipate his next move.

His strategies were remarkably effective. Genghis Khan conquered more territory in 25 years than Rome did in 400—largely through fear. “These are classic examples of psyops, and the fundamentals have not changed since then,” says Crossland. “Genghis Khan used the marketplace to spread his rumors. We use social media.”

Mongol warriors, shown in an illustration to 'Jami al-tawarikh,' a 14th-century world history that includes the Mongol conquests. Bilbiotheque Nationale, Paris.

Photo12/Universal Images Group v

7 Insane Military Gambles That Changed the World

From the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE to Operation Mincemeat in WWII, discover 7 risky gambles that ended up changing world history.

'Der Chef’ (1941-43)

During World War II, many Germans unknowingly tuned in to bogus British-run radio stations created by the country's Political Warfare Executive, a clandestine body that produced war propaganda. Their mission: to manipulate public opinion, sap morale and erode faith in Hitler’s regime from within. One of its most popular voices was “Der Chef,” a fictional insider who seemed to speak with authority from within the Third Reich.

Der Chef was a fictional Nazi officer broadcast on a fake radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins (GS1). Posing as an old-school Prussian general, he used supposed insider knowledge to rail against Nazi leaders—accusing them of corruption, buffoonery and sexual deviancy—all while claiming allegiance to the regime.

In 1945, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA) took the deception further with Operation Cornflake—a bold plan to infiltrate Hitler’s mail system by air-dropping fake anti-Nazi newspapers and letters addressed to ordinary Germans. The effort fizzled in the war’s final chaos, but it remains one of the most audacious psychological stunts of the conflict.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ propaganda chief, certainly thought the fake broadcasts and newspapers were effective. “People believed it was real,” says Crossland. “Der Chef’s ability to speak German, knowledge of German culture, knowledge of the Nazis, created a convincing figure that people believed in. “He’s asking questions that ordinary folks in Germany in 1942–43 are starting to ask.”

Operation Mincemeat (1943)

In 1943, the Spanish authorities found the body of “Major William Martin” of the Royal Marines off the coast of Spain. He carried theater ticket stubs, love letters, a photograph of his fiancée—and classified documents suggesting the Allies would invade Greece, not Sicily.

The British pleaded for the documents’ return. Convinced by the deception, the Germans redeployed troops from Sicily to Greece.

But “Major Martin” never existed. The body was that of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man who had died from rat poison. The scheme—Operation Mincemeat—helped the Allies conquer Sicily in just a month and paved the way for the invasion of Italy.

Operation Mincemeat was a highly successful "act of misdirection, using one of the cleverest ploys ever devised,” says Crossland. “It worked because it made sense to the Germans at the time that the body was found by the Spanish, and with all the evidence suggesting he would have had access to these plans.”

Operation Fortitude (1944)

In 1944, Adolf Hitler knew the Allies would invade France—but not where. He suspected the Pas-de-Calais, the English Channel’s narrowest point. Normandy and Norway were also options. The Allies decided to convince Hitler that he was right.

As part of Operation Fortitude, they staged a massive hoax: Hundreds of inflatable tanks were set up in Kent, across the Channel from Calais, alongside the fictional First U.S. Army Group, allegedly led by General George S. Patton. Fake radio chatter completed the illusion.

Meanwhile, double agent Juan Pujol García (codename: Garbo) fed Berlin a steady stream of false intelligence from a network of entirely fictional spies.

The ruse worked. The 150,000 German forces stayed pinned at Calais even after D-Day, letting the Allies establish their beachhead in Normandy. According to Crossland, Operation Fortitude worked on several levels. “There was deception; the inflatables were a neat trick. It was also playing on Hitler’s pre-existing belief that the Allies would invade in the Pas-de-Calais, and then inflated that belief, and distorted reality around it.”

Inflatable dummy tanks like this were used during World War II's Operation Fortitude in 1944 in two ways—to make Germans think the Allies had more tanks than they did; and to divert attention from the location of their real tanks.

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

'Vampire' Monster (early 1950s)

During the communist Huk rebellion in the Philippines, the Filipino army—assisted by the CIA—weaponized folk superstition in one of history’s bloodiest psyops.

To exploit local fears of the asuang, a vampire-like shapeshifting monster from Filipino folklore, army “psywar” squads spread rumors that one was stalking the hills controlled by Huk rebels. They gave the tale five days to take root in nearby villages and mountain camps.

Then, under cover of night, they set an ambush. As the Huk patrol passed by, the squad silently snatched the last man. They punctured his neck with fang-like wounds, drained his blood and left his body on the path for his comrades to discover—evidence, it seemed, of a supernatural predator.

The vampire psyop appeared to work. When the Huks found the bloodless corpse, they abandoned the area—unsure whether the threat was an asuang or violent American operatives.

Though it appears to have been just a single operation, the Huk rebellion became a “laboratory” for psychological warfare. Other tactics included flying over rebel territory while broadcasting curses at farmers suspected of aiding fighters, and painting ominous symbols—like “the eye of God”—on the homes of suspected sympathizers. In the end, it was more traditional tactics, and mounting fatigue, that finally brought the conflict to a close in 1954.

Operation Wandering Soul (1969–1970)

During the night of February 10, 1970, eerie cries and shrieks echoed through the jungle surrounding a U.S. Army base in Hau Nghia Province, South Vietnam. Hidden loudspeakers projected ghostly voices sobbing in Vietnamese, “My friends, I have come back to let you know that I am dead… I am dead! It’s hell… I’m in hell!”

This was the Wandering Soul tape, a psychological weapon designed to exploit Vietnamese spiritual beliefs about death and burial. Many Viet Cong feared dying far from home and becoming cursed “wandering souls,” forever trapped in the jungle without proper rites.

The tape's effectiveness is hard to measure. “It certainly exploited the Vietnamese’s pre-existing beliefs about the importance of a proper burial and combined it with the reality of that war and used audio recordings to enhance it,” says Crossland. “There were some instances of Viet Cong sending out burial parties, or defecting.” Around 150 Viet Cong fighters defected one night when the psyops unit mixed the ghost tape with the sounds of tigers from Bangkok zoo.

Wandering Soul may have rattled nerves and stirred superstitions—but, as Crossland points out, “by itself, it didn’t win America the war.”

A Viet Cong guerrilla surrenders to Republic of Vietnam soldiers after seeing psychological warfare leaflets dropped by U.S. Air Force commandos, Nha Trang, Vietnam, February 16, 1966.

Underwood Archives/Getty Images

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The term “Gordian knot,” commonly used to describe a complex or unsolvable problem, can be traced back to a legendary chapter in the life of Alexander the Great. As the story goes, in 333 B.C. the Macedonian conqueror marched his army into the Phrygian capital of Gordium in modern day Turkey. Upon arriving in the […]

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About the author

Mark Piesing

Mark Piesing, a freelance journalist based in Oxford, UK, was a finalist for Media Aviation Awards in both 2024 and 2025. He is author of N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia. Learn more more at markpiesing.com or follow him @MarkPiesing.

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Article title

7 Brilliant Acts of Psychological Warfare in History

Author

Mark Piesing

Website Name

History

Date Accessed

July 24, 2025

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A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

July 23, 2025

Original Published Date

July 23, 2025

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history.com · July 23, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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The numbers

Who’s listening?

The first step to solving depopulation

Israel Says It Is Pausing Fighting in Parts of Gaza to Allow Aid In

A deadly hunger crisis is spreading across the enclave

China Strong-Armed Japan Over Rare Earths. It’s a Lesson for the U.S.

After a 2010 clash, Tokyo understood Beijing’s coercive power, but it still wasn’t ready this year

Can the Nazis Teach Us Anything?

Historian Thomas Weber shows how a trove of interviews with fugitive Reich officers reminds us how dangerous human nature can be.

US and its allies unprepared to repel saturation missile attacks - Asia Times

Learning from Mao's ‘nightmare’ youth revolution in China - Asia Times

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US Foreign Aid With Chinese Characteristics

Hegseth’s ousting of female leaders may have ‘chilling effect’ at Pentagon

Back on the Brink ...

1. Indo-Pacific Stronghold

2. America and its Allies

3. Building Out the Defence Industrial Base

4. North Korean Learning from Ukraine

5. AI and Kill Chains

The Big Five - 27 July edition

My regular update on global conflict & confrontation. This week: the envelopment of Pokrovsk, Russia’s war on Ukraine’s cities and its protracted saturation strategy, and Exercise Talisman Sabre.

Ukraine

The Pacific

1. Indo-Pacific Stronghold

2. America and its Allies

3. Building Out the Defence Industrial Base

4. North Korean Learning from Ukraine

5. AI and Kill Chains

7 Brilliant Acts of Psychological Warfare in History

Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.)

Genghis Khan (1206-1227)

7 Insane Military Gambles That Changed the World

'Der Chef’ (1941-43)

Operation Mincemeat (1943)

Operation Fortitude (1944)

'Vampire' Monster (early 1950s)

Operation Wandering Soul (1969–1970)

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