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Quotes of the Day:
"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
– Thomas Jefferson
"Success is not fain, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts."
– Winston Churchill
"Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched."
– Aldous Huxley
1. New Missile for Truck-Based Himars Launchers Has China in Its Sights
2. Trump is off to a good start with an AI action plan
3. Taiwan: Defense and Military Issues (CRS Report)
4. Six months later, US soft power feels effects of USAID cuts
5. Russia depletes Soviet arms, heavily relies on foreign supplies for Ukraine war, analysis suggests
6. Special Operations News – July 28, 2025
7. These wargames explored drone attacks on US military bases
8. Work on annual defense authorization bill will wait until September
9. Starlink outage impacted Starshield, its defense communications service
10. China faces off against US for domination of the DR Congo’s critical minerals industry
11. Trump covets rare earth riches, but Greenland plans to mine its own business
12. China’s yuan reshaping global order – but US-backed stablecoins seen as a threat
13. ‘The Bomb Lady’ shows how immigrants power national defense
14. The Intifada That Hasn’t Arrived: Why Have Israel’s Recent Wars Led to Little Terrorism and No Mass Uprising?
15. Amazon Warns Accounts Are Under Attack—You Must Act Now
16. Liberalism Doomed the Liberal International Order – A Less Legalistic System Would Help Protect Democracies
17. In the Pacific, Army leaders expect today’s fiction to be near-term reality
18. ‘Mom, It’s My Duty’ – American Killed Fighting in Ukraine Honored in Congress
19. Taiwan and South Korea: Bridging the Cybersecurity Gap
20. The Other Fentanyl Threat Requires Readiness
21. 'Putin Is Mocking You': The 4 Words That Sparked Trump's Dramatic U-Turn on Ukraine
22. Ukraine Just Bombed Russia's Top Electronic Warfare Factory
23. Mine Warfare and the Second Chimurenga in Zimbabwe
1. New Missile for Truck-Based Himars Launchers Has China in Its Sights
New Missile for Truck-Based Himars Launchers Has China in Its Sights
The precision strike missile, or PrSM, could help the U.S. control waterways in the Pacific
https://www.wsj.com/world/new-missile-for-truck-based-himars-launchers-has-china-in-its-sights-8c9685cc
By Mike Cherney
Follow
July 28, 2025 5:39 am ET
A precision strike missile, or PrSM, was launched Friday at a demonstration in Australia, marking the first time it was fired by a U.S. ally. Photo: Mike Cherney/WSJ
Key Points
What's This?
- The US military is upgrading its Himars missile system with a longer-range missile, PrSM, that can hit moving targets at sea.
- The PrSM missile has a range of 310 miles, can carry two missiles per pod, and is more precise than its predecessor, ATACMS.
- The US and Australia are partnering to develop PrSM, aiming to deter potential adversaries in the Indo-Pacific region.
DARWIN, Australia—The truck-based missile launchers known as Himars have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine, helping Kyiv blunt Russia’s advance due to their mobility, ability to hide and the precision rockets they can fire.
Now, the decades-old High Mobility Artillery Rocket System is getting an upgrade that could be crucial in another potential conflict—one with China.
The upgrade comes in the form of a longer-range missile that will eventually be able to hit moving targets at sea, making it easier for the U.S. and its allies to control key waterways if there is a fight over Taiwan. China has pledged to take the island, by force if necessary.
The new weapon, called the precision strike missile, or PrSM, was launched Friday at a demonstration in Australia, marking the first time it was fired by a U.S. ally. It will be able to hit targets about 310 miles away—compared with a range of about 190 miles for the older ATACMS missile, or Army Tactical Missile System, that it is replacing—and is a critical milestone for the U.S. as it seeks to improve the Himars.
Each launch pod will be able to hold two PrSM missiles, compared with just one ATACMS. The ATACMS is also more susceptible to jamming, said Alex Miller, the U.S. Army’s chief technology officer.
Extended Range
The precision strike missile, or PrSM, is a new, longer range missile that can be fired from mobile launchers. It will help the U.S. control key terrain and waterways in the Pacific as the U.S. seeks to make its forces more agile in response to China's military buildup.
Range: 310 miles
Rounds per pod: 2
Compatibility: Himars and MLRS
GPS antenna
The guidance system also includes inertial navigation; future models are planned to have seeker modes for hitting moving targets.
Rocket motor
The missile’s range could eventually extend to about 620 miles in later models.
Approximate size
Warhead
PrSM
Later versions of the missile could feature a more lethal warhead than the initial model.
Soldier
Source: Lockheed Martin
Jemal R. Brinson/WSJ
In the Pacific, Himars deployed to islands could strike enemy ships from afar. That would complicate any effort by China to send an invasion force across the Taiwan Strait, or to blockade the island with its huge navy.
“If you look at the way conflict is unfolding now, what is not being rewarded is large, massive presences with static locations and big footprints and signatures,” said U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who watched the missile launch in Australia. “What is being rewarded is the ability to be agile, hide your signature and move quickly.”
The U.S. is rethinking its military strategy in response to China, which has been building up an arsenal of missiles, ships and aircraft that would pose a threat to large U.S. bases. Instead, the U.S. wants its units to be more nimble, more widely dispersed and more capable of operating in island environments, making them harder to find but still capable of inflicting heavy damage on an adversary.
Land-based, mobile missile launchers are important to the strategy. Earlier in July, the U.S. fired its Typhon missile system in Australia—which can shoot Tomahawk missiles and the Standard Missile 6—for the first time in the region. Another U.S. missile system, called Nmesis, features an antiship missile launcher mounted on a remote-control truck.
U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, in civilian clothes, watched the missile launch in Australia on Friday. Photo: Mike Cherney/WSJ
China has criticized the U.S. missile capabilities. Earlier this year, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said the deployment of the Typhon system in the Philippines disrupts peace and security in the region, and called it a strategic offensive weapon.
The U.S. has been looking to upgrade Himars in several ways. The basic guided missile for Himars comes in pods of six, but only has a range of about 44 miles. An extended range version is now being produced that goes to 93 miles.
Australia is buying 42 Himars launchers from the U.S., and is also joining with Washington to develop the PrSM. Eventually, Australia could make PrSMs domestically, augmenting U.S. manufacturing lines.
Like other U.S. allies in the region, Australia has been beefing up its military as tensions in the region grow, and has highlighted long-range strike and island maneuvers as priorities. It recently fired its new Himars units with the U.S. and Singapore in a training exercise.
“This is all about extending deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, all about signaling to any potential adversary that pain can be inflicted,” Pat Conroy, Australia’s defense industry minister, said at the PrSM live-fire demonstration.
A video feed at the Australian training ground shows a precision strike missile moments before it hits a target some 190 miles away. Photo: Mike Cherney/WSJ
At the event, in a vast training area in northern Australia, the Australian troops simulated a land-based strike on an enemy ship. They fired one PrSM from a Himars launcher that took about four minutes to hit a target about 190 miles away. It hit within 3 feet of the target point, Australian military officials said.
In real life, the missile hit a stack of shipping containers. A live video of the target on a giant screen showed the stack being engulfed in an explosion.
“For most missiles that our armies have used over time, you point it in the right direction and you do the math for where it’s going to fly,” said Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer.
“With this missile and this technology, we are going to be able to add more precision,” he added. “Rather than saying, hey, it might hit a rugby-pitch-size area, we’re going to say it’s going to hit somewhere that’s the size of this chair.”
Ukrainian M142 Himars in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ
Future versions of the missile will have enhanced capability. The initial version is for hitting fixed targets. According to manufacturer Lockheed Martin, it uses inertial navigation, which involves motion sensors, and GPS for its guidance system.
A coming version aims to add so-called seeker technology that will enable it to hit moving land and maritime targets. That could include things such as tracking an enemy using radar, or with sensors that pick up heat or radio signatures.
Another version of the missile plans to extend the range to some 620 miles. Other plans include developing more lethal warheads or novel payloads, such as using the missile to deploy a drone-like weapon called a loitering munition.
The U.S. wants to expand its arsenal of PrSMs, though Army officials at Friday’s event didn’t provide a specific figure. Lockheed Martin said in March that the U.S. Army had awarded it a contract worth up to $4.94 billion to produce additional PrSMs.
The new missile is a “big leap forward,” said Marcus Hellyer, head of research at Strategic Analysis Australia. Still, whether Himars could be a game-changer in the Pacific is uncertain. Hellyer pointed out that moving launchers around islands quickly will require lots of transport aircraft.
“You can hide them in buildings, you can hide them under trees and things like that, but you’ve still got that issue of, you’ve got to get it there,” Hellyer said. “The jury is still kind of out in some ways here.”
Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com
2. Trump is off to a good start with an AI action plan
From the Washington Post Editorial Board.
Conclusion:
That said, these are caveats, not killers. Overall, the president’s plan represents an excellent start. But it is also only a start. There is still a very long race to run, and until it is won, the whole team needs to lock in.
Opinion
Editorial Board
Trump is off to a good start with an AI action plan
The administration’s policy is taking shape. But there’s still a lot more work to be done.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/27/ai-china-trump-plan/
July 27, 2025 at 6:30 a.m. EDTYesterday at 6:30 a.m. EDT
A view of the shadow of President Donald Trump as he speaks during the "Winning the AI Race" summit on Wednesday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The most important question for the United States regarding artificial intelligence right now is not how it will be used, or even how it will affect the economy and culture. It is whether the U.S. will maintain AI dominance. The race to own the technology of the future is a race we must not lose, because if superintelligence really is possible, there might be no prize for second place.
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China, our leading AI competitor, is also our biggest geostrategic rival. This adversary has long sought to use its commercial products to export its totalitarian censorship regime to other nations, including the U.S.. That becomes even scarier in the dawning age of AI.
Reuters reported recently on State Department tests that show Chinese AI models are “significantly more likely to align their answers with Beijing’s talking points than their U.S. counterparts.” At the moment, censorship appears to be most visible on issues of relatively minor importance to Americans, such as Tiananmen Square or territorial claims to islands in the South China Sea. But it’s obvious how that kind of control could be exploited to much more inimical ends if China becomes the dominant provider of AI services to the rest of the world.
The U.S. cannot reform the Chinese government’s illiberal instincts. But Washington can take bold action to ensure that American AI remains at the cutting edge. It’s heartening that President Donald Trump wants to lead on this issue, even if some of his policy actions over the past six months haven’t been conducive to AI dominance.
The administration published a lengthy AI action plan this past week, which provides a promising blueprint for accelerating development, retooling the federal government to harness its powers and promoting the use of American AI models abroad. It directs the federal government to seek and destroy regulatory bottlenecks; encourages “open source” or “open weight” models that offer more flexibility for users, as well as more transparency for researchers and regulators; nurtures a “dynamic, ‘try-first’ culture for AI” across industry; invests in skills training and research; develops performance standards; bolsters cybersecurity; develops complementary infrastructure such as electricity production and semiconductor manufacturing capacity; and beefs up export controls that hinder Chinese AI development.
That’s a long list. But it’s a reflection of the challenges ahead. If anything, it is not long enough.
Trump’s proposal is only a down payment on the policy changes that must be undertaken to ensure AI dominance. It is critical to settle the copyright disputes over training data to ensure that intellectual property rights are protected. That problem goes unaddressed in the action plan. It is also essential to increase U.S. electrical generation and transmission capacity. While China’s installed generation capacity increased by 16 percent in 2024, the U.S.’s has been stagnant for years.
The Trump plan calls for stabilizing the existing grid and embracing “new energy generation sources at the technological frontier,” but this section is vague and unsatisfying given the urgency of the task. Accelerating AI will require the administration to work with Congress and state legislatures on permitting reform and other initiatives to hasten infrastructure build-out.
The administration will need to compromise on other policy priorities to meet the moment. Immigration, for example, remains critical to securing tech talent: The list of researchers recently hired by Meta for its superintelligence lab is heavy on first- and second-generation immigrants. Yet NeurIPS, a leading machine-intelligence conference, recently announced its annual gathering in San Diego will have a second physical location in Mexico City to cope with “skyrocketing attendance and difficulties in obtaining travel visas.”
The recent tax bill throttled renewable energy. This is a bad mistake when the U.S. needs an “all of the above” strategy to meet growing electricity demand. China, relentlessly focused on energy dominance, installed almost 250 gigawatts of solar and wind to its grid in the first five months of the year. The United States should be equally flexible, rather than letting partisan fights over climate change turn a vital part of the energy portfolio into a political football.
Nor should the culture wars infect AI policy, as happened with Trump’s recent executive order on Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government. The best that can be said is that it was not as bad as it could have been. But the risk that American AI will be too woke pales in comparison with the risk that it will be too underpowered against Chinese models. This is a waste of time and political capital, when the U.S. has neither to spare. U.S. freedom from government censorship should be a selling point for AI models abroad. The United States won’t beat China by offering a competing censorship regime.
That said, these are caveats, not killers. Overall, the president’s plan represents an excellent start. But it is also only a start. There is still a very long race to run, and until it is won, the whole team needs to lock in.
The Post’s View | About the Editorial Board
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board: Deputy Opinion Editors Mary Duenwald and Stephen Stromberg, as well as writers Robert Gebelhoff, James Hohmann, Megan McArdle, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.
What readers are saying
The comments reflect a strong skepticism about the United States' approach to maintaining AI dominance, particularly under the Trump administration. Many commenters express concerns about the lack of regulation, potential job losses, and environmental impacts associated with AI... Show more
This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.
3. Taiwan: Defense and Military Issues (CRS Report)
The 3 page PDF can also be downloaded here: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12481/IF12481.16.pdf
Taiwan: Defense and Military Issues
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12481
CRS Product Type:In FocusCRS Product Number:IF12481Referenced Legislation:H.R. 4016; P.L.117-263; P.L.118-159; P.L.118-47; P.L.118-50; P.L.96-8Topics:Defense & Intelligence; Foreign AffairsPublication Date:07/25/2025Author:Campbell, Caitlin
Overview
The People's Republic of China (PRC, or China) claims but has never controlled Taiwan, a self-governing democracy of 23.4 million people located across the Taiwan Strait from mainland China. PRC leaders have stated their preference to unify peacefully with Taiwan, but have insisted on the right to use force to bring Taiwan under PRC control. U.S. policy toward Taiwan (which formally calls itself the Republic of China, or ROC) has prioritized the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. For more than 75 years, the U.S. government has sought to strengthen Taiwan's and its own ability to deter PRC military aggression. The PRC, for its part, has claimed the United States uses Taiwan as a "pawn" to "contain" China. Congress has played a role in supporting U.S.-Taiwan defense ties, and has authorized new programs and appropriated funds to support Taiwan's defense since 2022. For more background on cross-Strait relations and U.S. policy toward Taiwan, see CRS In Focus IF10275, Taiwan: Background and U.S. Relations, by Susan V. Lawrence.
Figure 1. TaiwanSource: Graphic by CRS.
Taiwan's Security Situation
The Communist Party of China's military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), has undergone a decades-long modernization program focused primarily on developing the capabilities needed to annex Taiwan. Some observers assess that the PLA is, or soon would be, able to execute a range of military campaigns against Taiwan, including missile strikes, seizures of Taiwan's small outlying islands, blockades, and—what would be the riskiest and most challenging campaign for the PLA—an amphibious landing and takeover of Taiwan's main island. In 2023, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency William Burns said PRC leader Xi Jinping had instructed the PLA "to be ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion" of Taiwan; Burns noted this was a goal related to military capabilities, not necessarily an indication of Xi's intent to start a war.
Among Taiwan's advantages in the face of the threat of PRC aggression is U.S. political and military support (see below). Another advantage is geography. The Taiwan Strait is roughly 70 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, and weather conditions make the Strait perilous to navigate at certain times of the year. Taiwan's mountainous terrain and densely populated west coast are poorly-suited for amphibious landing and invasion operations.
Taiwan's government has initiated programs to strengthen military readiness and increased its defense budget, which grew at an average rate of nearly 5% per year from 2019 to 2023. In 2024, Taiwan spent roughly 2.5% of its GDP on defense; Taiwan's president has said he intends to increase defense spending to more than 3% of GDP in 2025. President Donald Trump has suggested that Taiwan spend 10% of its GDP on defense.
Taiwan faces domestic challenges in realizing its defense goals, and its policymakers disagree over how best to deter the PRC from using force against Taiwan. While both of Taiwan's leading political parties say they support increased investment in Taiwan's defense, budget fights between its executive branch and opposition-controlled legislature in 2025 exacerbated concerns held by some about Taiwan's ability to ensure adequate defense funding. Taiwan's military struggles to recruit, train, and retain personnel, and some observers argue Taiwan's civil defense preparedness is insufficient. Taiwan's energy, food, water, communications, and other infrastructure is vulnerable to external disruption. At a societal level, it is not clear what costs—in terms of economic security, physical safety, and lives—Taiwan's people would be willing or able to bear in the face of a cross-Strait war.
PRC "Gray Zone" Activities Targeting Taiwan
In addition to training for large-scale military operations against Taiwan, the PRC engages in persistent non-combat operations that erode Taiwan's military advantages and readiness. These "gray zone" actions include frequent military exercises and near-daily patrols in the vicinity of Taiwan (including frequent sorties across the so-called "median line," an informal north-south line bisecting the Strait that PLA aircraft rarely crossed prior to 2022); cyber operations; uncrewed combat aerial vehicle flights encircling Taiwan; and stepped-up law enforcement activities near the Taiwan-administered Kinmen Islands located just off the PRC coast. These activities offer the PLA training and intelligence-gathering opportunities and strain Taiwan's forces, which face growing operational and maintenance costs from responding to PLA activities.
The normalization of PLA operations ever closer to Taiwan's islands in peacetime could undermine Taipei's ability to discern whether the PLA is using such activities to obscure preparations for an attack. Gray zone tactics could also have strategic value for the PRC. Some observers assess the PRC uses these activities to sow doubt about Taiwan's military capabilities among Taiwan civilians and to create political pressure for Taipei to acquiesce to Beijing's insistence on unification. Many observers believe PRC leaders may prefer to gradually assume control over Taiwan through gray zone coercion and political warfare rather than to risk a large-scale conflict that could possibly draw the PRC and the United States—two nuclear powers—into war.
U.S. Support for Taiwan's Defense
The United States has maintained unofficial defense ties with Taiwan since the United States terminated diplomatic relations with the ROC in 1979 and a mutual defense treaty in 1980. The defense relationship encompasses arms transfers, routine bilateral defense dialogues and planning, and military training.
A challenge for U.S. policymakers is supporting Taiwan's defense without triggering the conflict that U.S. policy seeks to prevent. PRC leaders have warned their U.S. counterparts that Taiwan is "the first red line that cannot be crossed" in U.S.-China relations. The PRC has responded to U.S. military support for Taiwan and high-level U.S.-Taiwan engagements by accusing the United States of "playing with fire," and by escalating gray zone coercion against Taiwan. Following then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's 2022 visit to Taiwan, the PRC stepped up military operations near Taiwan and established a "new normal" for the PLA's presence in the area.
U.S. Strategy and Policy
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA, P.L. 96-8; 22 U.S.C. §§3301 et seq.) includes multiple security-related provisions. Among other things, the TRA states that it is U.S. policy to "make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability" and "to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan."
The TRA does not require the United States to defend Taiwan, but by stating it is U.S. policy to maintain the capacity to do so, the TRA creates "strategic ambiguity" about potential U.S. actions in the event of a PRC attack. Some observers advocate making a more formal U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan. Supporters of such a shift argue that "strategic clarity" is necessary to deter an increasingly capable and assertive PRC. Supporters of strategic ambiguity argue that the long-standing policy encourages restraint by both Beijing and Taipei and incentivizes Taipei to invest more in its own defense.
Successive U.S. administrations have encouraged Taiwan to pursue an "asymmetric" defense strategy (sometimes called a "porcupine strategy"), the goal of which is to make Taiwan difficult for the PRC to quickly subdue or "swallow." This approach envisions Taiwan investing in capabilities intended to stymie an amphibious invasion through a combination of anti-ship missiles, naval mines, and other similarly small, distributable, and relatively inexpensive weapons systems. Taiwan's government has adopted this approach to some extent, but some (including stakeholders in Taiwan's defense establishment) argue that Taiwan must continue to invest in conventional capabilities (e.g., fighter jets and large warships) to deter gray zone coercion short of an invasion. Uncertainty as to whether, how, and for how long the United States might aid Taiwan in the event of a cross-Strait war informs these debates.
Arms Transfers and Security Cooperation
U.S. arms transfers have been the most concrete U.S. contribution to Taiwan's defense capabilities. Most of these transfers are Foreign Military Sales (FMS). From 2015 to 2025, the executive branch notified Congress of more than $28 billion in FMS to Taiwan.
Beyond FMS, the 117th Congress authorized new avenues to transfer arms to Taiwan with the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act (TERA; Title LV, Subtitle A of the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act [NDAA] for FY2023, P.L. 117-263). TERA made Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA; 22 U.S.C. 2318(a)(3)) available to Taiwan for the first time, authorizing the provision to Taiwan of defense articles and services directly from U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) stocks. The provision reflected congressional concerns about long FMS delivery timelines. Since TERA's enactment, the executive branch has announced three PDA packages for Taiwan totaling $1.5 billion. TERA also for the first time authorized the provision of Foreign Military Financing (FMF; 22 U.S.C. 2763; essentially, loans or grants a foreign government may use to purchase U.S. arms) for Taiwan. Since then, Congress has appropriated funds for FMF to Taiwan through TERA and other authorities.
U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation includes training in the United States and in Taiwan, which, although generally not widely publicized, appears to be expanding. Taiwan began receiving training through the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program in 2023.
The 118th Congress established the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative (TSCI) in the FY2025 NDAA (P.L. 118-159), authorizing assistance to "enable Taiwan to maintain sufficient self-defense capabilities." The FY2026 NDAA bills reported out of the House and Senate armed services committees include provisions related to Taiwan and the TSCI. The House Committee on Armed Services-reported bill would authorize $1 billion for the TSCI for FY2026; the House-passed DOD Appropriations Act, 2026 (H.R. 4016) would appropriate $500 million for the TSCI, $100 million more than the FY2025 enacted level. The President's FY2026 budget request includes $1 billion for the TSCI.
4. Six months later, US soft power feels effects of USAID cuts
Excerpts:
Since its inception, USAID had constituted an important tool of US soft power, strengthening US influence through humanitarian aid, economic partnerships and institutional development. By fostering goodwill, the agency bolstered diplomatic relationships, promoted political and economic models favourable to US interests, and worked to mitigate instability. This tool has now essentially gone, eroding decades of trust and partnerships, while signalling a clear message of unreliability in the international sphere.
There have been documented cases of China stepping in to fund programs when US foreign assistance stopped. Beijing announced funding for child literacy and nutrition programs in Cambodia just a week after US-funded programs ‘with almost identical goals’ were cancelled. Russian and Chinese teams were among the first to deploy to Myanmar following an earthquake in March in contrast to a lacklustre US response. The head of Russia’s international assistance agency has spoken openly about taking advantage of the void USAID’s demise has left.
Perhaps the most vivid demonstration was the recent United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development, held only once a decade. The US withdrew from negotiations and sent no delegation. This did not stop more than 15,000 people attending a gathering that produced an international agreement, an international business forum and a platform for action of 130 initiatives. On a topic that most of the world cares about deeply, the US was simply irrelevant.
The damage to US power, to global stability and to individual lives was all foreseeable six months ago. The tragedy is that the people who made the decision did not care about these consequences.
Six months later, US soft power feels effects of USAID cuts | The Strategist
28 Jul 2025|Melissa Conley Tyler and Heather Wrathall
aspistrategist.org.au · by Melissa Conley Tyler · July 27, 2025
Six months ago, the Trump administration paused almost all foreign assistance. As more than US$60 billion of programs suddenly stopped, we predicted that people would die, the world would become less fair and US soft power would fizzle. In a spirit of holding ourselves accountable, we ask has this happened?
There is no doubt that people have died as a direct result of this decision. Individual cases were documented in the days following the decision, and this effect has continued to be tracked. A recent study published in leading medical journal The Lancet has put together the effect of the program cuts—the vaccinations and medication not delivered, the food and clean water not provided—and projects 14 million additional deaths because of this policy decision. Boston University estimates nearly 90,000 people have died in the past six months because of the funding freeze on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) alone, just one of many programs to get the chop.
To give another example, one of the devastating consequences was an immediate increase in the number of children dying from hunger. Before the cuts, the US Agency for International Development directly funded around 50 percent of the world’s production of ready-to-use therapeutic foods specifically designed to treat severe malnutrition. Considered a miracle food, ready-to-use therapeutic foods have a 90 percent success rate in saving children from severe acute malnutrition. While the Trump administration has subsequently pledged US$50 million to fund ready-to-use therapeutic foods, disruptions to supply chains have already caused many of the world’s poorest to miss out on the prescription food they need to stave off death. And because malnourished children have weakened immune systems, they were more likely to die from common childhood illnesses. Broader health cuts meant that there is little to no funding for tuberculosis, malaria, HIV immunisation or basic health needs.
The world has become less fair and less stable as a result. As feared, most programs that received stop work orders never returned. The pause in foreign assistance was followed by a decision to permanently cut 83 percent of all development aid provided through USAID. Then on 1 July the agency was permanently closed and its remaining functions rolled into the State Department.
This means a permanent shift towards greater inequality and instability. The United States had been the biggest overseas development assistance (ODA) funder—in 2024 it spent more than twice the amount of the second biggest donor (Germany), accounting for 30 percent of total ODA that year. As former senior AusAID official Robyn Davies puts it: ‘When that much of a thing goes missing, it’s clearly at risk of collapse.’ Worse, other countries have followed the US’s lead, most notably Britain.
This is a false economy that is storing up more crises for the future. Development funding is preventive security. Supporting a poor country’s health system prevents a disruptive pandemic. Staving off government collapse prevents a failed state exporting crime and violence. Helping countries adapt to climate change avoids migration crises.
Finally, there has been a demonstrable reduction in US soft power, detectable in conversations among global foreign policy elites. And not everyone is mourning this. At the Raisina Dialogue in March 2025, Ayoade Alakija, chair of the African Vaccine Delivery Alliance was quoted saying: ‘Let our countries be independent. Let us stand up and look after our own people …. Let the world shift. This is a conversation about the global system.’
Since its inception, USAID had constituted an important tool of US soft power, strengthening US influence through humanitarian aid, economic partnerships and institutional development. By fostering goodwill, the agency bolstered diplomatic relationships, promoted political and economic models favourable to US interests, and worked to mitigate instability. This tool has now essentially gone, eroding decades of trust and partnerships, while signalling a clear message of unreliability in the international sphere.
There have been documented cases of China stepping in to fund programs when US foreign assistance stopped. Beijing announced funding for child literacy and nutrition programs in Cambodia just a week after US-funded programs ‘with almost identical goals’ were cancelled. Russian and Chinese teams were among the first to deploy to Myanmar following an earthquake in March in contrast to a lacklustre US response. The head of Russia’s international assistance agency has spoken openly about taking advantage of the void USAID’s demise has left.
Perhaps the most vivid demonstration was the recent United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development, held only once a decade. The US withdrew from negotiations and sent no delegation. This did not stop more than 15,000 people attending a gathering that produced an international agreement, an international business forum and a platform for action of 130 initiatives. On a topic that most of the world cares about deeply, the US was simply irrelevant.
The damage to US power, to global stability and to individual lives was all foreseeable six months ago. The tragedy is that the people who made the decision did not care about these consequences.
Melissa Conley Tyler is executive director and Heather Wrathall is senior policy analyst at the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D).
Image: USAID in Africa/Flickr.
aspistrategist.org.au · by Melissa Conley Tyler · July 27, 2025
5. Russia depletes Soviet arms, heavily relies on foreign supplies for Ukraine war, analysis suggests
Could Ukraine win a war of exhaustion? Or will foreign suppliers fill the weapons gap?
Russia depletes Soviet arms, heavily relies on foreign supplies for Ukraine war, analysis suggests
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-depletes-soviet-arms-heavily-relies-on-foreign-supplies-for-ukraine-war-analysis-suggests/
July 28, 2025 8:07 am
• 2 min read
by Olena Goncharova
Russian T-90M tanks drive through central Moscow, Russia, during a rehearsal for the Victory Day parade on May 3, 2025. (Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images)
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Russia has significantly depleted its extensive stockpiles of Soviet-era weaponry since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the flow of military goods from storage facilities to the front lines now returning to pre-2022 levels, according to a new analysis of logistics data by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) Institute.
According to the KSE Institute's findings, shipments originating near Russia’s primary storage fields are projected to fall from a peak of 242,000 tons in 2022 to 119,000 tons in 2025.
"Russia is now sending less materiel for refurbishment and repair than we know the repair stations can handle. The better quality and easily-restored equipment would have been the first to be moved," Pavlo Shkurenko, an analyst at the KSE Institute, told the Financial Times (FT).
Since 2022, Russia has actively sought to refit mothballed equipment for deployment to the front lines. This includes a large number of T-72 and T-80 tanks, originally produced in the 1970s, which have been observed in Ukraine. Even some T-54 tanks, which began production in the late 1940s, have reportedly seen combat.
Some military analysts, however, advise against interpreting the reduced front-line deliveries of armored vehicles as a definitive sign that Russian forces are "losing combat effectiveness," according to FT. These experts point out that Russia’s battlefield tactics have adapted to employ fewer such vehicles, and additionally, they observe that "the Russian armed forces are also spending heavily to build up new stocks."
The KSE analysis also points to Russia's increasing reliance on its Asian allies as its domestic resources have dwindled. Russia's defense industry now depends on supplies from China, while its military receives the majority of its ammunition from North Korea.
By weight, approximately 52 percent of shipments labeled as "explosive materials" to Russia’s arsenals in 2024 originated from Nakhodka, a port region on the Sea of Japan used by North Korea. Shipments from this area surged from zero prior to the war to 250,000 tonnes by 2024.
The KSE’s analysis aligns with the assessment of Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, who said this month that North Korea supplied 40% of Russia’s ammunition. Additionally, Russia plans to spend around $1.1 trillion on rearmament over the next 11 years in preparation for a potential large-scale war, according to Budanov.
A South Korean intelligence assessment similarly suggested North Korea had sent 28,000 containers to Russia, and Pyongyang is also known to have provided ballistic missiles, howitzers, and even troops to Russia.
The KSE analysis additionally identified around 13,000 tons of explosive material likely sourced from Iran, based on their entry points into the logistics chain near the Caspian Sea.
Moscow cancels Navy Day parade in St. Petersburg as nearly 100 drones reportedly downed across western Russia
UkraineRussiaWarRussian weaponsNorth Korea
Olena Goncharova
Head of North America desk
Olena Goncharova is the Head of North America desk at The Kyiv Independent, where she has previously worked as a development manager and Canadian correspondent. She first joined the Kyiv Post, Ukraine's oldest English-language newspaper, as a staff writer in January 2012 and became the newspaper’s Canadian correspondent in June 2018. She is based in Edmonton, Alberta. Olena has a master’s degree in publishing and editing from the Institute of Journalism in Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. Olena was a 2016 Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellow who worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for six months. The program is administered by the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia.Read more
6. Special Operations News – July 28, 2025
Special Operations News – July 28, 2025
https://sof.news/update/20250728/
July 28, 2025 SOF News Update 0
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.
Photo / Image: U.S. Air Force personnel jump out the back of an HC-130J Combat King II assigned to the 81st Expeditionary Rescue Squadron (ERQS) over Djibouti, May 9, 2023. The 81st ERQS is a rapidly deployable combat search and rescue force that can conduct tactical air refueling, airdrop and airland of personnel and/or equipment during day or night operations in support of combat personnel recovery within Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa area of responsibility. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Irvin)
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SOF News
SOF, Space, and the Polar Regions. The U.S. is in strategic competition with China and Russia forcing transformation of special operations forces. Along with this transformation there is a need to consider the space domain as well as the polar regions. This article proposes “two enhanced roles for combined SOF in the competition sphere” – as Space Joint Terminal Attack Controller (SJTAC) function and the concept of “reverse” security force assistance. Both of these “roles” converge in the Arctic region where special operations forces will require space-based capabilities as well as expertise in operations in the “High North”. The authors of this article describe how SOF will be a “space enabler” and how the Nordic countries will help U.S. SOF with assistance and expertise in conducting missions in the Arctic region in a “reverse SFA” role. “Space and Ice: Envisioning Special Operations Forces’ Role in Future Operational Environments”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, July 24, 2025.
CJSOTF-10, Ukraine, and Strategic Lethality. Spencer Meredith III provides a detailed explanation of how Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR) and the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force 10 organized the advising and training effort prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and afterwards. “Building Strategic Lethality: Special Operations Models for Joint Force Learning and Leader Development”, Joint Force Quarterly, 2025, PDF, 12 pages.
SF and Philosophical Foundations. Col (Ret) David Maxwell describes how the SF soldier is not just a skilled practitioner of unconventional warfare but also a statesman-philosopher. “Statecraft, Strategy, and the Special Forces Soldier: The Philosophical Foundations of Unconventional and Political Warfare”, Small Wars Journal, July 22, 2025.
Russia’s PMC Vega. A Russian private military company formed in 2011 has been busy advancing Russia’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East and in Africa. Learn more in an article by Alec Bertina entitled “Vega Strategic Services: PMC Vega”, Grey Dynamics, July 21, 2025.
Former Navy SEAL Released by Venezuela. Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Wilbert Castaneda was released in mid-July after being detained in Venezuela for nearly a year. “Former Navy SEAL accused of being part of CIA plot freed from Venezuela”, Task & Purpose, July 22, 2025.
Military Advising. The Pentagon is dismantling one of the U.S. military’s most effective tools at a time that advising is becoming increasingly important in today’s contemporary operating environment. Military advising has had many successes (and failures) and it needs substantial changes in order to be more consistently effective. Military advising is a cheap but effective way to strenghten security partners and preserve U.S. interests around the world. Plans to deactivate two of the Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) are a step in the wrong direction. “How to Reform Military Advising”, Lawfare Blog, June 29, 2025.
SAS Secrecy Tightens Up. The UK Ministry of Defence has issued new guidance to regimental associations that has advice on how to avoid security breaches in publications. “MOD Warns Regimental Associations After Data Breach”, Forces News, July 24, 2025.
Cutting SFABs: A Bad Decision. In May 2025, DOD announced it was planning to cut two of the Army’s six security force assistance brigades and downsize the Security Force Assistance Command. This action ignores the history of ad hoc advisory efforts and how the SFABs were designed to professionalize the advisory efforts of the U.S. Army. SFABs shape the battlespace before, during, and after a conflict and have strategic value. Read more in “The Consequences of Cutting the Army’s Security Force Assistance Capability”, Modern War Institute at West Point, July 22, 2025.
Preparing Advisors for Conflict . . . and Time. Maj Robert Rose is a member of the 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade. He has cited the advisor experiences of the Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) during the Korean War to argue that time is the limiting factor in advisor effectiveness. It takes time to develop a relationship with a partner force and to learn about the country where the advising is taking place. “Awake Before the Sound of the Guns”, Military Review, May-June 2025.
SOF History
Started in July 1943, the 7th Amphibious Scouts trained in jungle survival, unarmed combat, reconnaissance, and shoreline sketching.
On July 27, 1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, ending the Korean War. About 37,000 Americans lost their lives, 92,000 were wounded, and 8,000 missing. DoD News.
On July 30, 1994, elements of the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) and the 325th Airborne Infantry (82nd) land at the Rwandan capital of Kigal to secure the airport for an international aid effort as days of tribal conflict ensued.
Ukraine Conflict
Spies and Kyiv. Ukraine occupies a critical space in the constant battle between the intelligence agencies of the west and of Russia and its allies. The traditional intelligence operations involving human interaction, to some extent, have been supplanted by methods of advanced cyber warfare. Ukraine is at the center of this transformation. During the Cold War, Berlin served as the battleground of intelligence operatives. Now, decades later, Kyiv has emerged as the battleground for espionage. The battle is less tradecraft and more digital – both cyber and narrative. “Kyiv as the New Berlin: Ukraine’s Role in Modern Espionage Conflict”, Small Wars Journal, July 22, 2025.
Report – How Russia Fights. A compendium of Troika observations on Russia’s Special Military Operation. The 166-page tract covers how Russia has fought from February 2022 to June 2024 in Ukraine. Published by the United States Army Europe and Africa, this report covers several topics: command & control, movement & maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, protection, and more. Available at this link.
Ukraine’s SOF Selection Process. Before you enter the Ukrainian qualification course for special operations you must pass ‘selection’. This is a week of relentless tests and assessments. Training doesn’t take place during selection – survival is the main activity for the potential Ukrainian special operators. The test are physical and psychological in nature. If one passes selection then he goes on to the four-month long qualification course. “Inside the Rigorous Selection Process for Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces”, United24 Media, July 22, 2025.
National Security and Commentary
Report on SOUTHCOM. The Congressional Research Service has published a three-page report on U.S. Southern Command. USSOUTHCOM is responsible for command and control of U.S. military forces, contingency planning, and security cooperation across the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. Read more about the background, mission, organization, components, budget, and primary challenges of SOUTHCOM in Defense Primer: U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), CRS IF13067, updated July 21, 2025.
Robotics Education is Essential. The Ukraine war has demonstrated the importance of drones on the battlefield. A lesser known activity is taking place on the ground. Resupply of troops, medical evacuation, and reconnaissance by ground unmanned robotic vehicles. Colonel Kevin Bradley argues that the time is now to invest in education and training tailored to robotic integration. “Fighting with Robots: The Time to Prepare is Now”, Modern War Institute at West Point, July 10, 2025.
No More Think Tank Conferences for DOD? Apparently the Pentagon seems to think that senior defense officials and military leaders should not take part in conferences where defense issues are discussed. The Pentagon has suspended participation in all think tank and research events. This will sideline the military leaders from participating events where they could present their views to the national security establishment (both government and academia) and educate the public on national security issues. “Pentagon suspends participation in think tank events”, Politico, July 24, 2025.
Report on Army Transformation Initiative. The Congressional Research Service has published a report on the 2025 ATI Force Structure and Organizational Proposals. The intent of ATI is to “implement a comprehensive transformation strategy, streamline its force structure, eliminate wasteful spending, reform the acquisition process, modernize inefficient defense contracts, and overcome parochial interests to rebuild our Army, restore the warrior ethos, and reestablish deterrence.” (July 22, 2025, PDF, 18 pages)
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R48606/R48606.1.pdf
Questions on SECDEF Hegseth. The recent refusal of Pete Hegseth to promote a senior Army officer is an example of his style of leadership since taking over the Department of Defense. Mistrust of senior military officers have defined much of the defense secretary’s first six months on the job. In addition, Signalgate and not being in synch with the president on weapons transfers to Ukraine have raised questions on whether Hegseth is suited for leading a large, multifaceted organization the size of DOD. “A Clash Over a Promotion Puts Hegseth at Odds With His Generals”, The New York Times, July 26, 2025. (subscription)
Information Operations and Hybrid Threats
Coordinated Action Against Hybrid Threats. The European Union (EU) and nations in the Indo-Pacific have issued a warning about hybrid threats from both Russia and China. The EU is recognizing that it has security interests in the Pacific region as well and is endorsing a coordinated global response. Russia operates not only in Europe but across the globe. China’s activities go beyond the Pacific – into Africa, the Americas, and other regions of the world. There are indications that the Asian nations and European nations will further their coordination and cooperation in opposing the world-wide hybrid threats posed by Russia and China. “Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific united in response to hybrid threats”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), July 21, 2025.
AFree App for Africans. Baktibek Batyrkanov, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AFree, announced the introduction of a mobile application that will provide social networking and communications capablities in countries like Kenya, Cameroon, Morocco, and others. It includes features such as instant messaging, calling, video comms, social media, and more. There are some online sources that infer that AFree is associated with the African Initiative news agency which has been described as part of Russian propaganda efforts. “AFree App launches operations in Kenya”, KBC.co.ke, September 12, 2024; “How Russia resorted to cleverly messaged communications targeting Africa after Wagner”, The Standard (Kenya), July 11, 2025; and “AFree Sparks Namibas Tech Future”, New Era Live, June 28, 2025.
Report – AI and Influence. The RAND Corporation did a 48-page study on using generative artificial intelligence to improve the U.S. Department of Defence influence activities. July 2025.
PSYOP and Some History. Military strategist have long used PSYOP that weaponizes fear, confusion, and deception to outwit the enemy. Here are seven historical examples where psychological operations was used to great effect. “7 Brillant Acts of Psychological Warfare in History”, History.com, July 23, 2025.
Strategic Competition
Russia’s Eyes on Svalbard Worries Norway. Russia is stepping up its Arctic efforts, challenging Norway’s control over Svalbard (Google Maps). It is reviving its former settlements on the island. The United States puzzling stance on the acquisition of Greenland (for U.S. and Greenland’s security) has opened the door for an emboldend stance by Russia on an island in the Arctic Sea. Svalbard is situated midway between the North Pole and Norwegian mainland. The island has a strategic location which offers a good position for monitoring Russian access routes into the Atlantic Ocean and the interdiction of Russia’s Northern Fleet on the Kola Peninsula. Russian political pressure on Norway is likely to increase; but how far it goes will depend on the Trump administration. “Norway under pressure in the Arctic“, by Stefan Hedlund, Geopolitical Intelligence Services (GIS), July 14, 2025.
Russian Intel Ops in UK. HUMINT and cyber activities are a central focus of Russian intelligence activities in the United Kingdom. Espionage operations conducted by Russian intelligence organizations are posing a variety of hybrid threats. “Russian Intel Ops in the UK: Spy Rings, Cyber Targeting, Wagner Assets”, by Daneil Blanco Paz, Grey Dynamics, July 25, 2025. (subscription)
Beijing Transforming Indo-Pacific. China’s increasing military activities and economic influence in the Pacific region is transforming the regional security landscape. Beijing has been growing its military ambitions which extend well beyond the South China Sea. Its navy is presenting new challenges to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States maritime positions and strategy. Its military exercises are extending beyond Taiwan and into Oceania. In the southwest Pacific China’s naval activities have alarmed Australia and New Zealand; particularly some live-fire naval drills in the Tasman Sea located between Australia and New Zealand. “China’s military expansion toward the Southwest Pacific and Oceania”, by Riley Walters, Geopolitical Intelligence Services, July 15, 2025.
USAID Gone, So Is “Soft Power”. The demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development has seen a drastic reduction in medical assistance and food aid across many of the troubled areas of the world. This is resulting in greater instability in many areas of the world and a loss of U.S. influence. “Six months later, US soft power feels effects of USAID cuts”, The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), July 28, 2025.
U.S. Steps Back and Rivals Fill the Gap. As the United States is cutting back on foreign aid and its public messaging activities, its adversaries are stepping up filling the gaps and expanding their influence. Russia and China are both taking advantage of this ‘soft power withdrawal’ by the U.S. “Surrendering the Narrative: How U.S. Cuts to Soft Power are Empowering Rivals”, Intelbrief, The Soufan Center, July 23, 2025.
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.
Asia
Another Conflict Brewing? Cambodia and Thailand (Google Maps) may be on the brink of war due to an ongoing disputed border situation that has lasted many decades. Both countries have closed their borders and started moving troops. Some social media accounts state that rocket attacks and airstrikes have taken place in the past several days. This most recent dustup appears to revolve around the Ta Muan Thom Temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site controlled by Thailand but claimed by Cambodia. Thailand’s military is larger, better-funded, and more advanced – especially in air and naval capabilities. In a future large-scale conflict, Thailand’s superior military capability would very likely prevail.
CRS Report – Taiwan: Defense and Military Issues, The Congressional Research Service has published a paper on Taiwan’s security situation, China’s ‘gray zone’ activities targeting Taiwan, U.S. support for Taiwan, and U.S. strategy and policy. IF12181, July 25, 2025.
Kachin State and the Myranmar Revolution. Micheal Martin provides some commentary about the ongoing fight between rebel forces and Myranmar’s government forces. In this article he concentrates on the fight for Kachin State led by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). “The Importance of Kachin State to Myanmar’s Revolution”, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), July 22, 2025.
Middle East
Iran’s Militia Allies – Rearming Taking Place. Over the past year or more Iran has seen its proxy forces in the Middle East reduced in influence as a result of Israel military actions against Hamas, Hezbollah, and other alled organizations. The rebuilding process is taking place to reestablish and reinforce these proxy forces – key elements of Iranian hybrid warfare in the region. “Iran is Moving to Rearm Its Militia Allies”, The Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2025.
Food Aid in Gaza. One of the primary vehicles for food distribution inside Gaza is via a U.S. and Israeli-backed operation. The private sector endeavor is heavily criticized by traditional humanitarian non-governmental aid organizations as well as the United Nations. Karen DeYoung and Cate Brown explore the origins and back story of how this food distribution arrangement, with some former SOF personnel involvement, evolved and its current status. “The for-profit companies behind Israeli-U.S. nonprofit Gaza aid plan”, The Washington Post, July 21, 2025. (subscription)
Africa
Wagner Group a Terrorist Group? Should Russia’s Africa Corps and Wagner Group be designated as a terrorist organization? The debate on this topic in the United States and Europe is ongoing. A recent paper explores this debate in detail. Read Justifications, (Dis)Advantages and Implications of Designating Proxy Actors: The Case of the Wagner Group/Africa Corps, by Tanya Mehra and Meryl Demuynck, International Centre for Counter Terrorism (ICCT), July 2025, PDF, 29 pages.
Hungarian Advisors to Chad – On Hold. Plans for the deployment of 200 military trainers from Hungary to deploy to Chad are currently being stalled due to internal domestic politics. “Deby’s Presidency stalls Hungary’s military deployment to Chad”, Military Africa, July 24, 2025.
Al-Shabaab’s 2025 Offensive. The insurgent group’s momentum in southern and central Somalia continues largely unchecked. It now controls a strategic triangle across central Somalia, enabling it to encircle government positions and sever supply lines. “Al-Shabaab’s 2025 Offensive and the Unraveling of Somalia’s Federal Counterinsurgency”, Intelbrief, The Soufan Center, July 24, 2025.
Books, Podcasts, Videos, and Movies
Pub – Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare, Joint Special Operations University Press, PDF, 576 pages, July 18, 2025.
https://jsou.edu/Press/PublicationDashboard/284
CTC Sentinel. The July 2025 issue by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has been posted online. Topics include drone terrorism, online radicalization of lone attackers, and escalation of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/july-2025/
Book Review – Training for Victory: U.S. Special Forces Advisory Operations from El Salvador to Afghanistan. Frank Sobchak’s book of SF advisory efforts is reviewed by Wyatt Thielen in Small Wars Journal, July 25, 2025.
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7. These wargames explored drone attacks on US military bases
Everytime I drive on a military base and see the sign informing us that drones are prohibited on the installation I wonder if the bad guys have seen the sign and how that regulation can be enforced. (yes that is a snarky sarcastic comment - I know those signs are not meant for the bad guys but for regular people and family members who might want to play with drones. - again please note my sarcasm)
On a serious note, there are no longer rear areas and all bases are vulnerable. Those two oceans no longer protect us from this threat. Imagine what would happen if we found one container in a US port or one truck coming across the Mexico or Canadian borders carrying a truck load of ready to launch attack drones. All it would take is one and we would have to shut down the ports and border crossing while every container is inspected. And we will never know what has gotten through undetected until the bad guys decide to launch them.
These wargames explored drone attacks on US military bases
militarytimes.com · by Michael Peck · July 25, 2025
In March 2025, the U.S. government conducted a wargame on how to defend military bases in the United States from drone attacks.
Just three months later, what had seemed a theoretical possibility became frighteningly close to reality. In June 2025 came Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb. Ukrainian agents had spent months smuggling hundreds of drones deep inside Russia. In a coordinated strike, more than 100 small drones destroyed 20 to 40 Russian warplanes on five airbases scattered from Moscow to Siberia.
The damage extended to more than Russian airpower or the Kremlin’s pride. The drone’s-eye videos of burning bombers sent a chilling signal to nations around the world. If this could happen to Russia, then it could happen to any country — including the United States.
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Allvin calls Ukraine drone strikes a wake-up call for US air defense
The Air Force's top uniformed leader said that planners need to consider vulnerabilities at military sites once thought untouchable by enemy forces.
Since 2022, the U.S. Army’s Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO, and the RAND Corp. think tank have held six wargames on how to mitigate the drone threat.
“We are trying to understand the policies and authorities we have in place to prevent us from contending with a scenario like Operation Spiderweb,” said Paul Lushenko, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College who helped run the drone wargame.
Many of the details of these wargames are classified, but one key finding is that protecting domestic U.S. bases can’t be just the military’s job.
“The tabletop exercise emphasized the need for a framework to integrate, enable, and synchronize state, local, tribal, and territorial authorities into counter-drone operations at or near military bases,” noted an essay by the game’s designers. But this, in turn, raises a slew of jurisdictional and communication issues.
This image, taken from video released June 1, 2025, by a source in the Ukrainian Security Service, shows a Ukrainian drone striking Russian planes deep in Russia's territory during Operation Spiderweb. (Ukrainian Security Service via AP)
By itself, Operation Spiderweb would have been an unpleasant reminder that the advent of small, easily transportable drones means that even installations thousands of miles from the battlefield aren’t safe. This is especially true for the U.S., which has been protected for centuries by two oceans and the absence of any significant adversary on its borders. Until recently, military bases had more to fear from terrorists or a crazed gunman crashing the gate, rather than a gaggle of small attack drones executing a miniature airstrike.
But, in fact, there have also been omens for years that drones were becoming a threat to U.S. installations. In 2016, the use of small weaponized drones by the Islamic State in Iraq made some American commanders uneasy. Then, in 2023, came a wave of mysterious drones that overflew Langley Air Force Base, causing no damage but generating much buzz about potentially hostile unmanned aerial vehicles in U.S. airspace. The U.S. government estimates that there were 350 drone incursions over military installations in 2024. While most came from careless or curious drone enthusiasts, the potential for hostile reconnaissance or attack is there.
Initially, the JCO/RAND wargames focused on the technical challenges of counter-drone defense. But the March 2025 exercise tackled a much more complex question: Who exactly has the responsibility — and the authority — for defending bases from drones?
“Let’s say you’ve got a drone flying down the Potomac,” said Christopher Pernin, a RAND researcher who helped run the drone wargames. “Maybe the FAA has signed off that the drone is approved to fly. Well, how can the people at the Pentagon know? They have to interrogate the system and look it up. Well, guess what? You’ve got 67 seconds to figure this out.”
In particular, the March wargame explored the conditions under which U.S. Northern Command — which is already responsible for securing North American airspace — would coordinate counter-drone defense of military bases. The exercise also explored how the joint military services and government agencies can maximize data sharing and situational awareness, as well as how to foster the use of counter-drone technologies such as jamming GPS signals.
Using Fort Bliss, Texas, and Joint Base Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as the targets, the tabletop game included scenarios where the defender faced attacks by drones launched at various altitudes, bearings and distances. This served as a backdrop to stimulate discussions by over 100 participants from more than 30 federal and state agencies in what Lushenko described as “the largest interagency tabletop exercise in five years.”
The wargame identified three conditions under which NORTHCOM could support anti-drone defense of homeland bases.
“These include drone incursions that overwhelm the organic defensive capabilities of the services; are simultaneously conducted at different military bases, especially those performing essential missions; and, undermine public trust in the military and government,” the RAND essay said.
The exercise also endorsed the idea of NORTHCOM’s “flyaway kits,” which consist of mobile counter-drone systems and trained personnel that can be deployed via commercial aircraft as needed. However, these kits can do more than supplement what ideally would be a multilayered defense at military installations, including jamming, microwave and laser weapons and kinetic weapons such as machine guns.
Interestingly, the wargames suggested that the National Guard could play a crucial role in defending homeland military installations. Especially valuable would be the National Guard’s Civil Support Teams, which are available 24/7, can be deployed with 90 minutes and “have large budgets that can offset the equipping and training costs for counter-drone operations,” the RAND essay noted.
“There are some imaginative things we can do to further optimize our state-based military, through the National Guard, to respond to these drone incursions,” Lushenko added.
The defense of military bases is as much a matter of law as it is a matter of technology. For example, per Section 130i under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the commanders of some bases are authorized to use force against drone intrusions, while others could face prosecution.
Compounding the problem is that with around 500 military installations around the U.S, there are a hodgepodge of different rules of engagement. At some sites, the instructions from commanders are “‘no drones on my installation, you have carte blanche to do whatever you need,’” said Pernin.
“They know exactly what they’re doing and they know what their goals are. I suspect there are a lot of places that don’t have that kind of goal setting. They see a UAV flying on the other side of the installation, and they think, ‘I’m not sure if I should take it out or just let it go.’”
Ultimately, the drone wargames were valuable simply by bringing together people from different agencies.
“We had a lot of crosstalk that I don’t think had happened before,” Pernin recalled. “We had a lot of occasions where people said, ‘I think this is so-and-so’s role.’ But that person was in the room, and they would say, ‘no, it’s not ours.’”
8. Work on annual defense authorization bill will wait until September
A long term poll: Will we ever again have a defense budget before 1 October?
Work on annual defense authorization bill will wait until September
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/07/28/work-on-annual-defense-authorization-bill-will-wait-until-september/
By Leo Shane III
Jul 27, 2025, 08:00 PM
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (left), and Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. and chairman of the panel, listen during a hearing on July 11, 2023, on Capitol Hill. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Senators have one more week of work on Capitol Hill before their August recess, but the to-do list doesn’t include the annual defense authorization bill anymore.
Lawmakers had hoped the measure might be brought up for a chamber vote before the break. But on Thursday, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said that chamber leaders will move to put the must-pass budget policy bill on the floor this week, pushing work on the legislation to September.
He said he hopes the measure will be “the first agenda item when we come back” from break.
Both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have passed their respective drafts of the defense authorization bill with wide bipartisan margins. But reaching a final compromise draft is still expected to take months of work.
Despite lawmakers’ focus on passing the authorization bill annually, the measure has not been finalized until after Thanksgiving in 12 of the past 15 years. It has only been adopted before the start of the new fiscal year four times since 2000.
But lawmakers remain optimistic the work will be done at some point this fall, and lawmakers can maintain their streak of more than six decades of annual adoption of the budget policy legislation.
Tuesday, July 29
Senate Foreign Relations — 10:30 a.m. — 419 Dirksen
Nominations
The committee will consider several pending nominations.
Wednesday, July 30
Senate Homeland Security — 10 a.m. — 342 Dirksen
Pending Legislation
The committee will consider several pending bills.
Senate Foreign Relations — 10 a.m. — Capitol S-116
Pending Legislation
The committee will consider several pending bills.
Senate Foreign Relations — 2:30 p.m. — 419 Dirksen
U.S.-Africa Partnerships
State Department officials will testify on critical mineral mining in Africa and opportunities for U.S. partnerships with countries there.
Thursday, July 31
Senate Armed Services — 9:15 a.m. — G-50 Dirksen
Nominations
The committee will consider several pending nominations, including Michael Powers to be comptroller for the Defense Department.
Senate Appropriations — 9:30 a.m. — 106 Dirksen
Defense Appropriations
The full committee will mark up its draft of the FY26 defense appropriations bill and education appropriations measure.
About Leo Shane III
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.
9. Starlink outage impacted Starshield, its defense communications service
Are we overly dependent on Starlink? Achilles meert heel.
Excerpts:
Earlier this week, FedScoop reported that Starlink is increasingly showing up at both state and federal agencies, with subpar customer service support cited for some government customers. Experts who spoke to FedScoop also expressed concern about the government’s increasing dependency on primarily one satellite internet provider for certain high-stakes and remote applications.
Starlink outage impacted Starshield, its defense communications service
Several civilian federal agencies said they weren’t aware of any effect on operations.
By
Rebecca Heilweil
fedscoop.com · by rheilweil · July 25, 2025
An outage this week of Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, did have an impact on some services in the federal government.
While several civilian federal agencies told FedScoop that the service interruption didn’t disrupt operations, the U.S. Space Force confirmed that Starshield, the military-focused communications service on the Starlink network, was taken offline during the outage.
“The Space Systems Command Commercial SATCOM Communications Office procures Starshield Global Access services over the Starlink Satellites/network,” a spokesperson for Space Systems Command told FedScoop.
The spokesperson continued: “As such, the global outage did affect CSCO customers for the entire duration of the outage (~2.5hrs for most users). Services had a partial restoration midway through the outage and a complete restoration by the stated end time.”
Defense customers are currently able to access Starshield through the Space Force, among other procurement mechanisms, SpaceX’s website states. SpaceX says Starshield is for “national defense use cases” while Starlink “is not intended for any military end-uses or end-users.”
Several branches of the U.S. military are currently testing or using Starshield, including the Air Force and the Navy. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard told FedScoop earlier this month that the agency began installing both Starlink and Starshield back in 2023.
Meanwhile, several other civilian agencies said they weren’t affected heavily by the Starlink outage. Others didn’t respond by publication time.
For instance, there was no known impact to operations at Customs and Border Protection, which uses the technology for video and personal location information, a spokesperson told FedScoop.
Marshall Thompson, from the National Interagency Fire Center, said he wasn’t aware of the Starlink outage impacting any fire response efforts, at least in regard to radio operations and communications kits they use.
A spokesperson for the National Science Foundation said employees in Antarctica who use the service were unaffected since Starlink was not used for primary operations.
Earlier this week, FedScoop reported that Starlink is increasingly showing up at both state and federal agencies, with subpar customer service support cited for some government customers. Experts who spoke to FedScoop also expressed concern about the government’s increasing dependency on primarily one satellite internet provider for certain high-stakes and remote applications.
On Friday, Reuters reported that Musk ordered SpaceX staff to cut off Starlink during a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive. The move, which left Ukrainian troops without communications access, raises ongoing concerns that the world’s richest man might use his control over the service to influence political and military outcomes.
The Starlink outage had mostly been resolved as of Thursday night.
“Starlink has now mostly recovered from the network outage, which lasted approximately 2.5 hours,” Michael Nicolls, a vice president of engineering at SpaceX, said in a tweet. “The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network. We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”
Written by Rebecca Heilweil
Rebecca Heilweil is an investigative reporter for FedScoop. She writes about the intersection of government, tech policy, and emerging technologies. Previously she was a reporter at Vox's tech site, Recode. She’s also written for Slate, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. You can reach her at rebecca.heilweil@fedscoop.com. Message her if you’d like to chat on Signal.
In This Story
fedscoop.com · by rheilweil · July 25, 2025
10. China faces off against US for domination of the DR Congo’s critical minerals industry
Strategic competition.
I am told by an informed person that the US has all the rare earths we need (and I know he will correct me if I misspeak here). The problem is that we export them offshore for refining, to include in China and then import the refined rare earths back into the US.
The question is, given the administration's priorities will companies now invest in sufficient refining capabilities in the US?
Excerpts:
Chris Berry, head of US-based commodities advisory firm House Mountain Partners, said the view on critical minerals in Washington had significantly shifted under the Trump administration.
“Rather than a focus on ESG or ‘green growth’ the focus is now on national defence and self-sufficiency in critical mineral access,” Berry said, using the acronym for “environmental, social and governance” factors.
He noted that while onshoring as much of this as possible would obviously be ideal, the private sector was clearly now encouraged to acquire assets offshore, as evidenced by the proposed Chemaf deal.
“China has a strong presence in the DR Congo and I don’t see that abating any time soon, so the US and other Western players who want to establish a presence here will be getting much more aggressive in deal making,” Berry said.
On Congo’s dispute with Australia’s AVZ, he said all stakeholders needed to come to the table and work together on some sort of agreement.
“Manono has been a controversial asset for quite some time and clearly this disagreement only deepens that view.”
China faces off against US for domination of the DR Congo’s critical minerals industry
China’s pushback includes envoy to Congo underlining Beijing’s commitment to supporting the central African country address its crises
Jevans Nyabiage
Published: 6:06pm, 28 Jul 2025Updated: 6:16pm, 28 Jul 2025
After years of largely unchallenged control over the DR Congo’s critical minerals, China now faces growing US competition – a battle that Beijing is determined to win.
The US reportedly pressured the Democratic Republic of Congo last year to block a Chinese firm from acquiring Chemaf Resources.
Now, a US consortium – including firms led by ex-military executives – has bid for the operator of the Etoile copper-cobalt mine. Meanwhile, KoBold Metals, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, secured a deal with the DR Congo to explore the Manono lithium deposit, despite an ongoing legal dispute with Australia’s AVZ Minerals.
The deals come shortly after a US-brokered “minerals-for-security” agreement between the DR Congo and Rwanda, signed last month to help end the decades-long conflict in the eastern Congo. It aims to secure peace and stability, and in return the United States and its companies will gain access to critical minerals essential for the green energy transition and advanced technologies.
However, Joseph Cihunda, who teaches law at the University of Kinshasa, said the Congolese government was trying to balance relations to avoid becoming a battleground between China and the US, even if Washington sought to escalate competition.
“Even in Congolese public opinion, they do not want such a confrontation,” Cihunda said.
Despite Congo’s ongoing discussions with the US, Cihunda said President Félix Tshisekedi received Chinese officials about two weeks ago specifically to reassure them.
A miner holds a cobalt stone at a mine near Kolwezi, DR Congo. In 2024, the country produced 76 percent of the world’s cobalt, according to the US Geological Survey. Photo: AFP
“Minerals are abundant in the DR Congo and there is room for everyone, American, European and Chinese,” Cihunda said, adding that the Congolese government maintained its right to resize a research permit granted to any holder.
China, deeply entrenched in Congo’s mining sector, is pushing back, with its ambassador reaffirming Beijing’s non-interference policy and commitment to supporting the central African country.
In response to the growing US competition and the recent US-brokered Congo-Rwanda peace agreement, Beijing has sought to highlight its consistent approach to international conflicts and politics.
Speaking at Kinshasa University earlier this month, Chinese ambassador Zhao Bin addressed what he described as “discordant voices” in the public sphere that suggested China had ignored Congo while the US acted as its “true friend”.
Refuting such claims, Zhao said: “We have neither treated the DR Congo as a bargaining chip nor imposed any discriminatory measures against it.”
Outlining China’s commitment to its diplomatic principle of non-interference in internal affairs, Zhao said that Beijing had leveraged its strengths to provide Congo with practical and effective support, including military aid, economic assistance and trade cooperation. This, he said, offered strong guarantees for the Congolese side to effectively address its crises.
Sun Yun, director of the China programme at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington, said any US-China competition over natural resources in the DR Congo was a fair one.
“The US is catching up on its critical mineral vulnerability and it will have to vigorously push for more assets and security in its supply chain,” Sun said.
The US had tremendous leverage in the region, as shown in the recent Congo-Rwanda peace deal, he added.
Last year, US officials reportedly lobbied state-owned miner Gecamines to review the sale of Chemaf to Norin Mining – a subsidiary of China’s state-owned defence company Norinco.
Chemaf is also developing Mutoshi, one of Congo’s largest pipeline copper-cobalt projects. The US consortium’s bid for Chemaf aims to bring Mutoshi under American influence, given its strategic importance for global supply chains.
These deals underscore the intensifying US-China competition for critical minerals in the DR Congo, the world’s second-biggest copper producer and largest source of cobalt, as Washington seeks to secure critical minerals for its green transition. Copper and cobalt are critical minerals used in electric-vehicle batteries and military equipment.
Congo is by far the world’s largest source of cobalt, accounting for about 70 per cent of global production, and a key source of copper and other critical metals such as tin, gold, lithium and tantalum.
Chinese companies are heavily embedded in the DR Congo’s mining sector, having secured several of the country’s key assets in the past decade as Western countries ceded many of these interests to China.
Among their acquisitions was the sale by US-based Freeport-McMoran of two of the world’s largest cobalt assets – the Tenke Fungurume mine and Kisanfu project – to CMOC, formerly China Molybdenum Co, in 2016 and 2020, respectively.
Chris Berry, head of US-based commodities advisory firm House Mountain Partners, said the view on critical minerals in Washington had significantly shifted under the Trump administration.
“Rather than a focus on ESG or ‘green growth’ the focus is now on national defence and self-sufficiency in critical mineral access,” Berry said, using the acronym for “environmental, social and governance” factors.
He noted that while onshoring as much of this as possible would obviously be ideal, the private sector was clearly now encouraged to acquire assets offshore, as evidenced by the proposed Chemaf deal.
“China has a strong presence in the DR Congo and I don’t see that abating any time soon, so the US and other Western players who want to establish a presence here will be getting much more aggressive in deal making,” Berry said.
On Congo’s dispute with Australia’s AVZ, he said all stakeholders needed to come to the table and work together on some sort of agreement.
“Manono has been a controversial asset for quite some time and clearly this disagreement only deepens that view.”
Jevans Nyabiage
Kenyan journalist Jevans Nyabiage is the South China Morning Post's first Africa correspondent. Based in Nairobi, Jevans keeps an eye on China-Africa relations and also Chinese investments, ranging from infrastructure to energy and metal, on the continent.
11. Trump covets rare earth riches, but Greenland plans to mine its own business
Please go to the link to view this article in proper format with the graphics.
https://wapo.st/41epnDF
Trump covets rare earth riches, but Greenland plans to mine its own business
By William Booth and Laris Karklis
July 27, 2025 at 6:15 a.m. EDTYesterday at 6:15 a.m. EDT
QAQORTOQ, Greenland — It is hard to miss, the looming mass of dark rock at the top of the fjord. There are circling ravens and towering waterfalls, but not a green thing growing on the outcrop. A Mordor vibe. The fisherman cuts the engine.
This magic mountain at the southern tip of Greenland contains one of the largest deposits of rare earth minerals on the planet, according to the company that owns the license to mine it. These are the exotic metals that make the 21st century what it is — the raw materials for war and peace, for electric vehicles and wind turbines, for laser-guided missiles and F-35 stealth fighters.
Interest in the island’s untapped geological riches is soaring, driven in part by President Donald Trump, who has vowed that “one way or another” the United States must “get” Greenland, a semiautonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.
Greenland wants to be a mining nation. But it’s not much of one — not yet.
There are deposits of diamonds, graphite, lithium, copper, nickel, gallium, plus those rare earths with the sci-fi names — like dysprosium, neodymium and terbium.
A government-backed ruby mine here went bust. A long-running gold operation was open, then closed, and is now trying to reopen to capture a near-historic peak in the market. Greenland banned uranium mining in 2021; it is enmeshed in a billion-dollar lawsuit over the moratorium.
Companies have spent years prospecting, but the projects are seldom launched, because the markets are too soft or the costs too steep, to break ground in a frozen, roadless wilderness with pitiless winters and a tiny workforce.
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“If you want to build a mine in Greenland, you have to build everything yourself,” said Bent Olsvig Jensen, a managing director at Lumina Sustainable Materials, the only mine now operating in Greenland, which employs fewer than 50 people to extract anorthosite, a silicate mineral — also found on the moon — used for making fiberglass and paints.
“In Greenland, only 1 in a 100 will succeed and they never talk about the 99,” Jensen said. “No modern mine in Greenland has ever reached profitability.”
His goal? “To break even next year.”
The Port of Qaqortoq, on the island's south.
The ship Arpaarti Arctica of the Royal Arctic Line delivers supplies to the village of Qassiarsuk. Most transport for towns in Greenland is by boat or aircraft.
Whatever the obstacles, Trump has gone full-tilt carrot-and-stick, alternatively threatening Denmark with punishing tariffs while promising to make Greenlanders “rich.” He has not ruled out the use of military force.
Trump is not alone in his covetous gaze. Greenland sits in the middle of the North Atlantic, between Europe and America, whose industries hunger for the rare earth minerals now mostly controlled by China.
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Like Trump, Greenlanders say they are looking for deals. If they are ever going to be able to afford their independence from Denmark, they know they need more than a prawn fishery to run a modern economy. They also want tourism and mining.
The newly elected prime minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, proclaims the island is “open for business.” His mining minister told The Washington Post that Greenland is keen for European and American investment — and wary of the Chinese.
Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Greenland's prime minister.
The slightly less hostile southern tip of the island has some of the greatest potential, but a visit makes clear why exploiting the area’s riches will be difficult, with or without Trump’s intervention.
An hour’s boat ride up the fjords from Qaqortoq lies the site of the proposed Tanbreez mine, the name an acronym based on major materials contained in the intrusion — tantalum (Ta), niobium (Nb), rare earth elements (REE) and zirconium (Zr).
A satellite image of southern Greenland, showing the location of the Tanbreez deposit just north of Qorqotoq
Qaqortoq region
The average winter temperature is 23°F, while the average
summer temperature ranges from 39°F to 50F.
Narsarsuaq
Qassiarsuk
Tanbreez
deposit
Detail
Igaliku
Narsaq
Qorlortorsuaq
Hydroelectric
Dam
Power line
Qaqortoq
Eqalugaarsuit
Ammassivik
Saarloq
Ship access routes
Alluitsup
Paa
The 100-meter-deep natural fjord at Tanbreez, which can contain icebergs, allows ships carrying up to 60,000 metric tons to reach the site.
Julianehåb
Bay
Nanortalik
10 MILES
The purity and emptiness of the site would have looked familiar to the Viking explorer Erik the Red when he arrived here a millennium ago. There is nothing much altered by humans, except for a curious matrix of 440 small circular holes in the outcropping, left by diamond bits that drilled core samples in summers past.
The site of the proposed Tanbreez mine is largely unaltered, except for hundreds of small circular holes in the outcropping.
Cable used to detonate explosives at the Tanbreez mining site.
If the mine opens in the next year or two, as its Australian owners wager, all this could change — and so, too, might Greenland, a former colony sustained by the export of Atlantic cod and the import of Danish welfare services, home to just 57,000 people, most of them Arctic Inuit.
But the past indicates the odds of success might be long.
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At last count, Greenland’s mining ministry lists 67 active exploration licenses, held by both “junior” outfits and major mining interests, which give an entity the right to poke holes in the ground and collect samples. Just eight companies hold permits for commercial mining. By comparison, there are 561 active mines in South Africa.
The White House says control of Greenland is imperative for U.S. national security. It has become clear the administration is especially focused on the establishment of a new secure supply chain for the critical materials the West needs to make advanced magnets and chips, used in MRI scanners, nuclear submarines and AI computers.
“Greenland is a wonderful place for geology, and it does have plenty of rare earths, which really aren’t so rare, but they’ve been hard to exploit,” said Thomas Kokfelt, senior researcher at GEUS, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland in Copenhagen, whose institute produces the most detailed maps of the ice-covered territory.
Rare earth core samples from the Tanbreez site.
Kokfelt said that Greenland has deposits of 25 of the 34 minerals considered critical by the European Union and more than two-thirds of the 50 metals deemed crucial by the United States. Geologists estimate that Greenland holds the eighth largest reserves of rare earth elements on the planet, tantalizingly close to U.S. shores.
Rare earths became the geopolitical “it” minerals because today China holds a near-monopoly on them. China extracts an estimated 70 percent of those metals from its own mines and controls more than 90 percent of processing. China sent shock waves through global supply chains when in April — in response to Trump tariffs — it temporarily restricted exports of seven rare earths.
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By comparison, the U.S. — which is a top 10 mining nation alongside China, Russia, Australia and Canada — has just one rare earth mine, on the California-Nevada border. Even there, nearly all the ore extracted from the Mountain Pass mine is shipped to China for processing. There are no rare earth mines in the European Union.
Scientists are developing laboratory methods for manufacturing rare earth minerals, or substitute materials, but viability for industrial production remains uncertain and seems a distant prospect. A Minnesota company, Niron Magnetics, is building magnets using nitrogen and iron without rare earths. For now, however, rare earths remain essential.
Greg Barnes is a 76-year-old geologist from Western Australia who first visited Tanbreez in 1992. “I was hungover, that’s the honest truth,” he told The Post, when he asked his buddy the helicopter pilot to land so he could relieve himself. He still remembers how the earth changed colors when he urinated, as the acidic stream struck the alkaline rock.
Barnes called it “one of the top 10 places a geologist must see before he dies.”
Tanbreez just might make him rich.
Barnes spent $50 million and more than two decades exploring the site and seeking permission to mine it. He was finally awarded an exploitation license in 2020. He owes the government a plan for how the new mine will pay for its closure and cleanup when its shuts down. Barnes finds this funny because he believes the mine has enough minerals to operate for 1,000 years.
During the first Trump administration, his phone rang in the middle of the night in Perth. He was being invited to the White House. He hung up, thinking it a friend was pulling a prank.
As it turned out, Barnes briefed officials at the White House in 2019 about Greenland’s mineral deposits. He never met Trump — but soon after his visit the president started talking about “buying” Greenland.
A mountain next to the Tanbreez site.
This year, Barnes’s outfit merged with a company called Critical Metals Corp., run by another high-flying Australian mineral investor named Tony Sage, former owner of the professional soccer team in Perth. Sage called his Tanbreez project “a game-changing rare earth mine for the West.”
The deposit is immense: 15 square kilometers and 300 meters deep. The mine could be worth $3 billion in the initial phase, according to a preliminary economic assessment done by an independent contractor, who estimated it would cost $200 million to ready the site and begin to exploit it. There is no guarantee Sage can raise that much money.
To extract the minerals, Critical Metals will have to start from nothing. It must build an open pit quarry, roads, a processing plant, housing for 60 workers, alongside a floating deepwater port to handle the dozen cargo ships a year to ferry the minerals to Europe, North America or wherever.
A perspective map of the Tanbreez mining site
The landscape at the potential open mining site is characterized by relatively high and steep mountains and the long, narrow
Kangerluarsuk Fjord. The port and most processing infrastructure would be located near the head of the fjord.
3,448 feet
The mining site lies
1.2 miles from existing
hydroelectric infrastructure.
Planned
roads
2,929 feet
Kakortokite is a layered igneous rock that has high concentrations of rare metals and rare earth elements. Unlike other similar deposits, Tanbreez has low levels of radioactive elements.
Power line
The lower pit would be mined first
because of its proximity to the coast
and facilities. Mining the upper pit
would not start until more than
five years into operations.
Upper pit
Plant site
Port
Lower
pit
2,509 feet
Waste rock (tailings) would
be hauled to Fosterso Lake,
which is devoid of fish.
Drew Horn, who served as chief of staff for the Office of International Affairs at the Energy Department during the first Trump administration, has visited the site. Horn is now CEO of a company called GreenMet, which calls itself “the new American conduit between private capital, government, and critical mineral innovation.”
Sage and Barnes confirmed that U.S. officials — whom they declined to name — told Barnes he should not bring in Chinese partners.
Sage said he believes that Trump ultimately will get what he wants, which is not ownership of Greenland but favored access to mining deals that benefit U.S. manufacturers and defense contractors.
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To that end, Sage’s company in June received a “letter of interest” from the U.S. Export-Import Bank for a loan of up to $120 million to fund the opening of Tanbreez. This would mark the Trump administration’s first overseas investment in a mining project under the bank’s new Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative, designed to compete with China by building markets for rare earth elements with “trusted partner countries.”
Asked whether Critical Metals was an American company, Sage replied, “That’s a good question.” The company is traded on the Nasdaq and run by Australians, with additional funding from Wall Street investment banks, including Cantor Fitzgerald, he said. Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, is a former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald; upon joining the administration he agreed to divest his business interests in his old company.
Fishermen in the Tunulliarfik Fjord. Southwestern Greenland, where the mine would be, supports a robust fishing industry as well as scattered sheep farms.
Cod in the fjord near the Tanbreez site.
The mine is in southwestern Greenland, which supports a robust fishing industry as well as scattered sheep farms. Even in such an isolated place, there is some opposition.
Asked whether he wanted to see mining on the Kangerluarsuk Fjord, the fisherman who ferried Post journalists to the site, Nuka Mark Nielsen, said simply: “No.”
On a good day, working his baited longline, Nielsen can fill his boat with fat cod coming to spawn. The fjord supports 10 families, he said. He is worried the noise and the shipping will scare away the fish.
Two hours north by boat, outside the small settlement of Qassiarsuk, Sori Paviasen was working alongside her father-in-law, building a small house for her sister on a family farm with 440 sheep.
“Mining is good for the government, because they want the money,” Sori Paviasen said. “But is it good for Greenland farmers?”
Paviasen said she is wary of the pollution that mining might bring. “Mining is good for the government, because they want the money,” Paviasen said. “But is it good for Greenland farmers?”
There were 31 sheep farms in southern Greenland a few years ago, she said. There are 25 now. The farmers are challenged by rising costs for imported feed and fertilizer, low lamb prices and extreme weather — more rain, early snow — brought on by climate change.
Greenland’s mining minister, Naaja Nathanielsen, said in an interview that Greenland is “a pro-mining country” and “we are a pro-mining people,” that her government understands that the West needs a secure supply chain of rare earth metals, and that Greenland needs to develop its economy.
The village of Qassiarsuk, near the Tanbreeze mine.
There were 31 sheep farms in southern Greenland a few years ago, Paviasen said. There are 25 now.
The minister offered a pragmatic vision of Greenland.
“I do think in 20 years we will have six or seven active mines at any one time, a mix of smaller and bigger mines,” Nathanielsen said. “We don’t need to be the greatest mining country in the world. To run a small country and a small economy like ours, we need a good stable income over time that benefits the people and protects the environment.”
Karklis reported from Washington.
About this story
Map sources: March 2025 technical assessment report from Critical Metals Corp., Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Danish Climate Data Agency, Danish Mineral Resources Authority, qgreenland.org, National Snow and Ice Data Center, ArcticDEM-Polar Geospatial Center and ESA.
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William Booth
William Booth is an International Correspondent for The Washington Post based in London. He was previously bureau chief in London, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Miami.@boothwilliam
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Laris Karklis
Laris Karklis is a senior graphics reporter specializing in cartography. He has been working at the Post since 2000.@karklisCarto
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12. China’s yuan reshaping global order – but US-backed stablecoins seen as a threat
Excerpts:
Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives passed landmark stablecoin legislation that was signed into law by President Donald Trump. For the first time, it established federal oversight for dollar-pegged stablecoins.
At the forum, Li Lihui, former president of the Bank of China, said Washington’s moves aimed to anchor stablecoins to the dollar to “secure global monetary and financial hegemony in the digital era” and expand demand for US Treasury bonds.
This would effectively tie the risks of the crypto asset market to those of the traditional financial system, he added.
“If the US fails to address its twin deficits, it could trigger a financial crisis. An unstable US economy and dollar would inevitably undermine the stability of dollar-backed stablecoins.”
China’s yuan reshaping global order – but US-backed stablecoins seen as a threat
New study shows yuan’s influence growing, but Washington’s digital finance push seen as risk to international monetary order
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3319844/chinas-yuan-reshaping-global-order-us-backed-stablecoins-seen-threat
Sylvia Ma
Published: 5:30pm, 28 Jul 2025Updated: 5:33pm, 28 Jul 2025
The yuan’s internationalisation remains on an upwards, if uneven, trajectory and is gradually reshaping the global monetary order, according to a new study released at a high-profile economic forum in Beijing – though some participants warned US efforts to dominate digital finance pose risks.
The yuan internationalisation index, which tracks the currency’s global use, rose by about 11 per cent in 2024 to 6.06, according to the Renmin University report released at this year’s International Monetary Forum, co-hosted with Nankai University on Sunday.
By comparison, the US dollar scored 51.13 in 2024, down from 51.52 the previous year, while the euro slipped 3.8 per cent to 24.07 on the index.
Meanwhile, the yuan ranked ahead of the British pound and Japanese yen, which scored 4.47 and 3.69 respectively. The report predicted the Chinese currency would strengthen further and widen the gap with both.
Beijing has worked to steadily increase the yuan’s global use – especially as it doubles down on efforts to manage risks in cross-border capital flows.
“The spillover effects of geoeconomic shocks have not only weighed on China’s real economy and financial markets, but also disrupted global trade and investment systems, supply chains and international financial markets,” the report’s authors wrote.
“Promoting the yuan’s internationalisation and leveraging it to push for reform of the global monetary system is a key strategy to mitigate geoeconomic risks.”
The report added that the upwards trend remains unchanged and is “driving a gradual adjustment in the international monetary landscape”.
If the US fails to address its twin deficits, it could trigger a financial crisis
Li Lihui, former president of the Bank of ChinaBut forum participants raised concerns that the growing influence of US-backed stablecoins could consolidate the dollar’s dominance and introduce new systemic risks.
“In the past two years, certain countries have sought to push forward premature regulatory frameworks for stablecoins through legislation and long-arm jurisdiction, while also suppressing and excluding the development space for other nations’ digital currencies,” said Chen Yulu, former vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, at the forum.
“If this trend is allowed to spread unchecked, it could pose significant systemic risks to the global economic and financial system.”
Chen, now president of Nankai University, warned the trend could “expose the global financial system to major risks from single-asset volatility” – with shocks to the US dollar and Treasury bonds potentially spreading from stablecoins to the broader crypto ecosystem and even global financial markets.
While stablecoins can be pegged to any fiat currency, more than 99 per cent are currently backed by the US dollar or dollar-denominated assets – far outstripping the greenback’s roughly 50 per cent share in global payments and 58 per cent share in global foreign exchange reserves.
Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives passed landmark stablecoin legislation that was signed into law by President Donald Trump. For the first time, it established federal oversight for dollar-pegged stablecoins.
At the forum, Li Lihui, former president of the Bank of China, said Washington’s moves aimed to anchor stablecoins to the dollar to “secure global monetary and financial hegemony in the digital era” and expand demand for US Treasury bonds.
This would effectively tie the risks of the crypto asset market to those of the traditional financial system, he added.
“If the US fails to address its twin deficits, it could trigger a financial crisis. An unstable US economy and dollar would inevitably undermine the stability of dollar-backed stablecoins.”
Sylvia Ma
Sylvia Ma joined the Post in 2023 and covers China economy. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong and a bachelor’s degree in English from Fudan University.
13. ‘The Bomb Lady’ shows how immigrants power national defense
Excerpts:
Duong, a Vietnamese immigrant who fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975, went on to become a leading weapons scientist at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Md. There, she played a pivotal role in developing “bunker buster” bombs that eventually led to the weapons used in the recent U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. For her ingenuity and dedication, she earned the nickname “the Bomb Lady.”
Her story is remarkable not only because of what she achieved, but because of what it symbolizes: the extraordinary, often overlooked contributions that immigrants make to American national security and technological innovation. In the current debates over immigration, we rarely hear about people like Anh Duong—but we should.
...
Her life underscores a basic truth: Innovation does not come from exclusion. It comes from inclusion.
If the United States is to maintain our military-technological edge against authoritarian states like China, it must nurture the conditions that allow innovation to flourish: open institutions, free inquiry, and a steady influx of new minds from every corner of the globe.
Anh Duong’s legacy is a reminder of what that future can look like—if we are wise enough to embrace it.
‘The Bomb Lady’ shows how immigrants power national defense
Just when the United States should be nurturing this source of strength, we are doing the opposite.
By Frank A. Rose
President, Chevalier Strategic Advisors
July 25, 2025
defenseone.com · by Frank A. Rose
In an era when immigration policy is often reduced to threats and responses, we would do well to remember the story of Nguyet Anh Duong, a retired U.S. civil servant and one of the quiet heroes behind a vital piece of modern American military capability.
Duong, a Vietnamese immigrant who fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon in 1975, went on to become a leading weapons scientist at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Md. There, she played a pivotal role in developing “bunker buster” bombs that eventually led to the weapons used in the recent U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear sites. For her ingenuity and dedication, she earned the nickname “the Bomb Lady.”
Her story is remarkable not only because of what she achieved, but because of what it symbolizes: the extraordinary, often overlooked contributions that immigrants make to American national security and technological innovation. In the current debates over immigration, we rarely hear about people like Anh Duong—but we should.
Duong’s journey from refugee to weapons designer encapsulates what has long made the United States exceptional: not just its material wealth or military strength, but its ability to attract, absorb, and empower global talent, especially during moments of national crisis. She is not an outlier. Immigrants have been critical to nearly every major scientific and technological breakthrough in modern American history, from the Manhattan Project to Silicon Valley.
This point is not merely sentimental; it is strategic.
In his 2017 book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, historian Paul Kennedy explores how the Allied victory was shaped not only by battlefield heroism, but by the ingenuity of engineers and scientists who solved daunting operational problems. From designing better radar and long-range aircraft to developing amphibious landing craft and cracking German codes, it was technological adaptation, fueled by open societies and free inquiry, that gave the Allies the edge.
As Evan Thomas wrote in his review of the book, “Culture, as much as material strength, played a critical role in the Allied victory.” The Allies thrived not because they had the most tanks or ships, but because their societies—unlike their fascist adversaries—fostered experimentation, welcomed dissent, and valued creative problem-solving. The United States, in particular, benefited from a wave of scientists and engineers who had fled authoritarian regimes in Europe. In many ways, America’s openness was its ultimate asymmetric advantage.
Today, that lesson is more relevant than ever. We are once again locked in a long-term geopolitical and technological competition, this time with China. As we confront the implications of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic weapons, and biological threats, the nation that most effectively harnesses human capital will shape the geopolitical and strategic future.
And yet, at precisely the moment when the United States should be doubling down on immigration as a source of strength, we are witnessing a dangerous political trend toward restriction, suspicion, and retrenchment. Debates about immigration often center on illegal border crossings, but government policy and actions increasingly target legal immigrants, including scientists, engineers, students, and entrepreneurs who are essential to America’s innovation ecosystem.
Let me be clear: I am not advocating for open borders. U.S. immigration laws must be fully and consistently enforced. Border security is a core function of national sovereignty. But we must also ensure that our immigration laws are fully aligned with our broader national interests—especially when it comes to retaining and recruiting the world’s top talent. Our challenge is to balance lawful immigration with strategic foresight.
The risk is not just economic stagnation. It is strategic decline.
As Thomas also notes in his review, Kennedy’s earlier work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, outlines what happens when empires turn inward. In his sweeping study of history’s dominant states—from Imperial Spain to Napoleonic France and Victorian Britain—Kennedy shows how great powers faltered when they prioritized elite entrenchment over mobility, protectionism over openness, and short-term political gain over long-term investment.
In the most enduring examples of decline, ruling elites erected barriers to talent, drained national resources to protect their own interests, and suffocated the very dynamism that had made them powerful. These were not merely tactical failures; they were cultural and institutional breakdowns.
What has historically set the United States apart is its ability to renew itself through immigration and social mobility, injecting new energy, perspective, and talent into every generation. This “culture of renewal” has fueled America’s dominance in fields ranging from aerospace to biotechnology to defense.
The U.S. military, in particular, has benefited immensely from immigrant talent. During the Cold War, immigrant physicists and mathematicians laid the groundwork for missile defense, satellite reconnaissance, and nuclear deterrence. In more recent years, immigrants have led the way in cybersecurity, unmanned systems, and AI-enabled defense applications. Today, more than 40 percent of Ph.D. scientists and engineers working in the United States are foreign-born.
To be clear, no one is suggesting that immigration alone is a substitute for strategy or sound governance. But it is a force multiplier—a vital resource that no great power can afford to squander. In an age where demographic decline is already constraining the industrial base and labor supply in countries like Japan and Russia, America’s openness to immigration remains a unique strategic asset.
This makes the story of Anh Duong all the more instructive. She was not born in the United States. She did not inherit its privileges. But she believed in its promise. And she repaid that belief a hundredfold—not just with ideas, but with inventions that protected the lives of American service members and strengthened the nation’s deterrent posture.
Her life underscores a basic truth: Innovation does not come from exclusion. It comes from inclusion.
If the United States is to maintain our military-technological edge against authoritarian states like China, it must nurture the conditions that allow innovation to flourish: open institutions, free inquiry, and a steady influx of new minds from every corner of the globe.
Anh Duong’s legacy is a reminder of what that future can look like—if we are wise enough to embrace it.
Frank A. Rose is President of Chevalier Strategic Advisors, a strategic advisory firm focused on geopolitics and defense technology.
defenseone.com · by Frank A. Rose
14. The Intifada That Hasn’t Arrived: Why Have Israel’s Recent Wars Led to Little Terrorism and No Mass Uprising?
Excerpts:
The number of Israeli dead is dwarfed by the number of people killed by Israel across the region in the last two years. Some estimates place the casualties Iran suffered during the 12-day war close to 1,000, with hundreds of civilians slain. Israeli strikes in Lebanon left almost 4,000 dead, many of whom were civilians, while Israel has killed dozens of Yemenis and approximately 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7. Civilian deaths in Gaza are far higher, with tens of thousands dying (in total, close to 60,000 Gazans have perished, a figure that includes Hamas fighters).
Beyond the carnage, Israeli authorities also appear to be pursuing an expansionist ideological agenda long harbored by the country’s far right. Actions in Gaza and the West Bank have led to the mass displacement of Palestinians. In the West Bank, counterterrorism operations in refugee camps dovetail with the goal of extreme right-wing politicians to dislodge their residents and to divide the West Bank into isolated enclaves, preventing Palestinians from establishing a contiguous state. Many Israelis may not care or may see their country’s conduct as a necessary evil in a fundamentally just campaign against terrorist groups and the governments that support them. Israel’s reputation, however, has plummeted around the world, including in the United States. That fall does not hinder Israeli operations today, but it may shape them tomorrow.
Nor is the threat of international terrorism necessarily diminished. Hamas has not hit Israeli targets outside Israel or the Palestinian territories, but the risk of attacks from Iran and Hezbollah remains high. A suspected Iranian operative was arrested this year in Denmark for scouting Jewish sites in Berlin, including the German-Israeli Society.
Israel’s military-heavy approach also reduces the feasibility of other options. Although the October 7 terrorist attacks raised some hopes that a two-state solution or other negotiated settlement might be the final outcome of Israel’s destruction of Hamas, Israeli leaders and the public have little faith that peace talks could work. On the other side, Israel’s demolition and occupation of much of Gaza has made Palestinians all the less willing to reconcile with and forgive Israel. Israel’s actions in the West Bank have further undermined the officials of the Palestinian Authority and others who have sought to negotiate with Israel.
With no political solution in sight, Israel will likely continue its “mow the grass” approach to Gaza and the wider region. It will focus on reducing the capacities of its enemies, acknowledging that any military campaign will have only temporary effects and that Israel will eventually need to do it again and again to keep the threat from growing back. Such a strategy may succeed in protecting Israelis from terrorist violence. But it will invariably harm civilians and reduce the chances of a political settlement in the long term. In seeking to protect itself from terrorism, Israel will be creating costly occupations and forever wars that will drain its economy, worsen social divisions, and deepen the country’s international isolation.
The Intifada That Hasn’t Arrived
Foreign Affairs · by More by Daniel Byman · July 28, 2025
Why Have Israel’s Recent Wars Led to Little Terrorism and No Mass Uprising?
July 28, 2025
The sun setting over Gaza, July 2025 Amir Cohen / Reuters
DANIEL BYMAN is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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The Middle East is in crisis, and Israel is at the center of the storm. Since Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7, 2023, that killed around 1,200 Israelis, the Israeli military has assailed and occupied much of the Gaza Strip, ramped up operations in the West Bank, struck Houthi targets in Yemen, devastated Hezbollah in Lebanon, hit nuclear and military sites in Iran, and bombed parts of Syria. All these adversaries have links to terrorism: in the decades before October 7, Hamas and Hezbollah used terrorism against Israel, killing over 1,000 civilians as well as many soldiers. Through its proxies and on its own, Iran has attacked Israeli and Jewish targets around the world. The Trump administration recently redesignated the Houthis as a terrorist group, while the new ruler of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, led a group once affiliated with al-Qaeda.
In the circumstances, Israel appears to be courting a new wave of terrorist attacks, maybe even a wider uprising. The war in Gaza has caused tremendous civilian suffering. At the same time, Israel is squeezing the West Bank with raids on suspected terrorist hideouts. Those operations have caused approximately 1,000 deaths and displaced tens of thousands more Palestinians. Along with the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and numerous Jewish settler depredations there, Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel have many reasons to be outraged at Israel.
Despite that anger and despite Israel’s long slate of adversaries, the number of terrorist attacks within Israel since October 7 has been surprisingly low. Israel has not seen high-casualty terrorist attacks or even a sustained series of low-level incidents. A third intifada, in which Palestinians would rise up against the Israeli occupation as they did between 1987 and 1993 and between 2000 and 2005, remains a distant prospect. That is in large part attributable to the success of Israel’s campaigns against its enemies, the disarray of its foes, its vice-like grip on the Palestinian territories, and its stiffened internal defenses. And yet that success comes with deep costs. In addition to killing many civilians, Israel’s aggressive approach threatens to foreclose potential political resolutions to the many conflicts it is embroiled in. By trying to stave off its adversaries and protect itself from terrorist attacks, Israel will in fact be entering a state of permanent war.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Israeli civilians, of course, remain under threat. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis have used rockets, missiles, and drones to strike Israel in the last two years. But these incidents have more in common with the evolving nature of conventional warfare, as seen in Ukraine, for example, than they do with the suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and car rammings that formed the familiar repertoire of terrorists against Israelis in recent decades. The single worst episode of that kind in the last two years occurred in October 2024 when two Hamas-linked militants killed seven people in a shooting and stabbing spree on a light-rail train in Jaffa. According to media reports, terrorists have killed an estimated 20 Israeli civilians within Israel itself since October 2023 and another 14 in the West Bank. The Israeli military has also lost approximately 17 soldiers in Israel and the West Bank. And those numbers are falling: the first three months of 2025 saw only 18 attacks in the West Bank, while the same time period in 2024 saw 72 attacks. Terrorists have also not successfully targeted Israeli facilities or Israelis overseas, as they did famously in the twentieth century.
Given Israel’s constant state of war in the last two years, this death toll from terrorism seems like a relatively small number. Indeed, Israel has not suffered anything on the scale of what it endured during past periods of heightened violence. In the 1990s, car bombs, suicide attacks, and kidnappings, such as the 1996 suicide bombing at a bus station in Jerusalem that killed 26 people and another a week later that killed 19, helped derail peace talks. In the second intifada, Israel endured a staggering 138 suicide bombings, including 53 just in 2002, in addition to thousands of shootings and other less lethal forms of attack. Over 1,000 Israelis died during that period.
In addition to substate groups, such as Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iran regularly used terrorism against Israel, often working with Hezbollah, its closest proxy. Among other attacks, in 1992, Iran and Hezbollah bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. In 1994, they killed 84 people when they bombed a Jewish community center in Argentina (Iran and Hezbollah regularly claim that Jewish and Israeli targets are identical). A suspected Hezbollah-linked suicide bomber blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012, killing five Israelis and the Bulgarian bus driver. All these attacks, Iran and Hezbollah claimed, were revenge for Israeli offenses, including the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and the targeting of Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon.
And yet now, amid the ongoing devastation of Gaza and after Israel has acted aggressively and provocatively throughout the Middle East, Israelis both at home and abroad have not faced the same level of threat. Israel’s adversaries certainly should not be short of motivation. In June, Israel conducted a sustained bombing campaign that destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear program. It assassinated numerous Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists. In addition to the human and technical losses, the Israeli offensive was a humiliation for the Iranian regime, which had defined itself in large part by its dogged defiance of Israel. In September and October 2024, following a sustained low-level war, Israel defanged Hezbollah through a slew of assassinations, including the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s revered longtime leader. Israeli intelligence targeted thousands of Hezbollah operatives in a stunning, bloody bombing spree that rigged pagers and walkie-talkies to explode, and the Israeli military launched a devastating bombing campaign against the group’s leadership and military infrastructure (in the process killing and maiming many civilians). Hezbollah, like Iran, had derived its legitimacy and popular appeal from its fight against Israel. With Hezbollah’s vulnerabilities profoundly exposed, the one-sided conflict in 2024 was an abject humiliation for the once much-vaunted group.
Hamas, of course, has faced an all-out assault from Israel, losing almost its entire leadership and thousands of fighters. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to destroy the group. Hamas, in contrast to Iran and Hezbollah, has little incentive to refrain from attacks: Israel’s campaign is relentless, and old forms of terrorism may be the best way to get revenge and demonstrate Hamas’s continued relevance. Israel has also greatly expanded operations in the West Bank, targeting Hamas and other Palestinian militants there, as well as allowing Israeli settlers to run amok and harass, assault, and even kill Palestinians. Settler attacks in the first few months of 2025 increased 30 percent over the previous year.
These attacks on Palestinians could easily engender large-scale retaliatory violence. And yet they have not, despite all the anger and horror that Israeli behavior has inspired among Palestinians and in the wider region in recent years.
Deadly Deterrence
Several factors explain why Israel has not suffered a spate of more traditional terrorist attacks. Israel has devastated, and then devastated again, the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, and now Iran. As Israeli campaigns against Hamas in the past have demonstrated, killing terrorist group leaders, especially at a rapid pace, can undermine the overall effectiveness and capacity of these outfits. The constant churn of senior figures creates confusion among the rank-and-file and makes it difficult to stage operations. Guarding against Israeli strikes also creates its own logistical problems. Leaders must avoid phones, email, and other forms of communication for fear of having their locations revealed. They must trust few people and meet with fewer. In short, they cannot perform the functions of leadership if they want to stay alive.
To be sure, disrupting the leadership of terrorist groups does not stop all terrorism. Moreover, uncoordinated attacks, often by motivated individuals acting on their own, can still occur, as has happened in Israel since 2023. But without structures of coordination and direction, terrorists will struggle to pull off more complex operations that have a better chance of success and can kill large numbers of people.
Israel’s military and intelligence activities in the West Bank have also constrained Hamas and other militant groups even as they have hurt Palestinians. Israeli forces have flooded into the West Bank, arresting suspected terrorists and killing others. Operation Iron Wall, for instance, conducted in January right after the announcement of a cease-fire in Gaza, saw Israeli troops and tanks swarm into Jenin as well as over 100 air and drone strikes on Palestinian targets. Israeli officials insist that they are simply seeking to snuff out launch points for attacks into Israel, but the Israeli military appears to be preparing for a long-term presence in Jenin, Tulkarm, and other areas in the West Bank that it considers hot spots of Palestinian militancy.
Israel has also greatly expanded its use of administrative detention in the West Bank and cut off some parts of the territory from others, hindering militants—and ordinary Palestinians—from moving back and forth. Such a heavy-handed approach has, at least according to Israeli official statistics, yielded positive results: compared with 2024, terrorist plots originating in the West Bank are down significantly.
Israel has also blocked many Palestinians from entering Israel itself. In addition to cutting off Gaza, Israel suspended around 150,000 work permits for Palestinians in the West Bank, preventing them from crossing into Israel. These movement restrictions, both within the West Bank and between the West Bank and Israel, will no doubt have made it harder for militants to stage operations in Israel proper. Israeli authorities have claimed that it foiled over 1,000 significant plots in 2024 in the West Bank.
Israeli soldiers standing guard in Hebron, in the West Bank, July 2025 Mussa Qawasma / Reuters
In addition, Israel has hardened its internal defenses and borders. After the October 7 attacks, Israel quickly repaired the breached security barrier along its border with Gaza. The Israeli military has also established buffer zones inside Gaza itself and maintained forces at several posts inside Lebanon. It has deployed troops along Egypt’s border with Gaza and Jordan’s border with the West Bank to clamp down on weapons smuggling into Palestinian territories. And it has bolstered its forces along its borders with Lebanon and Syria. These steps make it harder for Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militant groups to infiltrate operatives into Israel.
Israeli authorities have stepped up monitoring of Palestinian citizens of Israel; Arabs constitute roughly a fifth of the total Israeli population (excluding the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Members of this community were among the victims of October 7, but the scale of Israel’s retaliation in Gaza and the West Bank has no doubt radicalized some Israeli Arabs against the country. The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security and counterintelligence service, has increased its surveillance of neighborhoods with high proportions of Arabs and has arrested hundreds.
With Israel on the front foot in military campaigns in Gaza and the West Bank and with settlers on the rampage, Palestinian militants are focusing on operations in these areas rather than finding targets within Israel. Palestinian militants, for instance, frequently use roadside bombs against Israeli forces in the West Bank. But the vast majority of militant attacks on Israeli troops have not resulted in casualties.
Fatigue and disillusionment may be setting in among the Palestinians. Polling in May indicated that 75 percent of West Bank Palestinians fear the war will spread into the West Bank, leading to the kind of destruction seen in Gaza. Although approximately half of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank still support Hamas’s decision to attack on October 7, this support has fallen from a high of 72 percent in December 2023. Many Palestinians still believe that fighting Israel is appropriate, but the devastation of Gaza is causing many to think twice about the costs of violence.
For Hezbollah and perhaps Iran, another factor is in play—deterrence. Both before and after the 2024 Israeli campaigns, Hezbollah did not want to escalate the war, worried that it would lose, as indeed happened. Iran, too, sought to walk a fine line before the 12-day war in June, using missiles and drones to attack Israel but signaling that it sought to avoid escalation, even alerting Israeli officials in advance so that civilians could reach shelters and that Israel could ready its defenses.
It is probable that, today, Israel has succeeded in deterring both Iran and Hezbollah from attacking it, at least for a little while. Iran has little interest in renewing an all-out war with Israel. Iranian-supported terrorist attacks would disrupt the fragile cease-fire and any negotiations toward a peace deal, leading to a resumption in fighting, possibly with further American involvement. Hezbollah, reeling from the blows it received last year, was unable to support Iran militarily in its ill-fated war with Israel.
The Cost of Success
Israel’s devastating campaigns against a wide range of groups and its efforts to subdue Palestinians have, so far, been effective, but sustaining these efforts requires a high operational tempo that is draining the country. Its military, which relies heavily on reserves, is not designed for long, grinding campaigns, such as what it is conducting in Gaza. Israel has had to raise taxes to finance the war, and constant fighting has created labor shortages as well as an uncertain environment for investors. Weary Israeli reservists are exhausted by repeated deployments and increasingly bitter toward ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are exempt from mandatory service in the armed forces, an exception that is fostering social and political divisions.
The Israeli military’s death toll is also considerable. Over 400 Israeli soldiers have died fighting in Gaza, and another 80 have died on the northern front fighting Hezbollah. Twenty-eight Israelis died from missile attacks in the latest exchanges with Iran. These numbers pale in comparison with the military losses suffered by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, but they are still large numbers for a small, casualty-sensitive state.
The number of Israeli dead is dwarfed by the number of people killed by Israel across the region in the last two years. Some estimates place the casualties Iran suffered during the 12-day war close to 1,000, with hundreds of civilians slain. Israeli strikes in Lebanon left almost 4,000 dead, many of whom were civilians, while Israel has killed dozens of Yemenis and approximately 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7. Civilian deaths in Gaza are far higher, with tens of thousands dying (in total, close to 60,000 Gazans have perished, a figure that includes Hamas fighters).
Beyond the carnage, Israeli authorities also appear to be pursuing an expansionist ideological agenda long harbored by the country’s far right. Actions in Gaza and the West Bank have led to the mass displacement of Palestinians. In the West Bank, counterterrorism operations in refugee camps dovetail with the goal of extreme right-wing politicians to dislodge their residents and to divide the West Bank into isolated enclaves, preventing Palestinians from establishing a contiguous state. Many Israelis may not care or may see their country’s conduct as a necessary evil in a fundamentally just campaign against terrorist groups and the governments that support them. Israel’s reputation, however, has plummeted around the world, including in the United States. That fall does not hinder Israeli operations today, but it may shape them tomorrow.
Nor is the threat of international terrorism necessarily diminished. Hamas has not hit Israeli targets outside Israel or the Palestinian territories, but the risk of attacks from Iran and Hezbollah remains high. A suspected Iranian operative was arrested this year in Denmark for scouting Jewish sites in Berlin, including the German-Israeli Society.
Israel’s military-heavy approach also reduces the feasibility of other options. Although the October 7 terrorist attacks raised some hopes that a two-state solution or other negotiated settlement might be the final outcome of Israel’s destruction of Hamas, Israeli leaders and the public have little faith that peace talks could work. On the other side, Israel’s demolition and occupation of much of Gaza has made Palestinians all the less willing to reconcile with and forgive Israel. Israel’s actions in the West Bank have further undermined the officials of the Palestinian Authority and others who have sought to negotiate with Israel.
With no political solution in sight, Israel will likely continue its “mow the grass” approach to Gaza and the wider region. It will focus on reducing the capacities of its enemies, acknowledging that any military campaign will have only temporary effects and that Israel will eventually need to do it again and again to keep the threat from growing back. Such a strategy may succeed in protecting Israelis from terrorist violence. But it will invariably harm civilians and reduce the chances of a political settlement in the long term. In seeking to protect itself from terrorism, Israel will be creating costly occupations and forever wars that will drain its economy, worsen social divisions, and deepen the country’s international isolation.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Daniel Byman · July 28, 2025
15. Amazon Warns Accounts Are Under Attack—You Must Act Now
A public service announcement.
Never click on a link in an email.
Amazon Warns Accounts Are Under Attack—You Must Act Now
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/07/27/amazon-warns-attacks-underway-update-your-account-now/
By Zak Doffman
Forbes
Jul 27, 2025
Amazon has confirmed its users are now under attack. Fraudulent emails that seem to come from Amazon actually open “a fake Amazon login page.” This steals your username and password, enabling attackers to gain access to your account. You must act now and ensure you have the right account security settings in place.
Those emails, Amazon warns, claim “Amazon Prime subscriptions will automatically renew at an unexpected price,” and have been personalized with stolen data “to appear legitimate.” The warning was issued to more than 200 million customers.
If that’s not worrying enough, the security team at Guardio has also just warned that a separate attack is also surging — up 5000% in just two weeks. This time it’s texts instead of emails, and fake refunds instead of fake price increases. But the result is the same — a fake login page stealing your credentials to access your account.
Amazon says it has taken down “55,000 phishing websites and 12,000 phone numbers” in the last year, “as part of impersonation schemes.” But still the attacks come. Amazon has now issued “6 practical tips to help you stay safe and avoid impersonation scams.”
America’s FTC also warns “scammers are pretending to be Amazon again. This time, they’re sending texts claiming there’s a problem with something you bought.” But there is no refund. “It’s a phishing scam to steal your money or personal information.”
Amazon is keen to stress that it invests heavily to prevent users falling victim to these attacks. Its responsiveness to these latest attacks is impressive. But the reality is that the only way for account holders to stay safe is to update the safeguards on their accounts.
You should do two things to secure your account. And you should do both today.
First, ensure you have “two-step verification (2SV)” enabled from within the “Login & Security” settings, which you can find when you click on “Accounts & Lists.”
The default option is to use your primary mobile number to send one-time passcodes by SMS. This is the worst form of 2SV. Instead you should use an authenticator app from a major provider — Apple’s Passwords or Google’s Authenticator for example.
Zak Doffman's stories. Zak Doffman writes about security, surveillance and privacy.
If you already have SMS 2SV enabled, “you’ll need to clear your two-step verification settings” to use an app instead. “To do so, tap or click disable, then tick the box next to ‘Also clear my two-step verification settings’ on the window that appears. Lastly, re-enable two-step verification using your authenticator app as your preferred method.”
With that done, your account is much safer. But there’s still a chance an attacker can trick you into sharing a one-time passcode through a fraudulent sign-in page. So you should also add a passkey to your account and use that as your default.
Passkeys are “phishing resistant.” They link your Amazon sign-in to your physical device’s security — for example, the biometrics or PIN on your phone. There is no 2SV code to steal or bypass or trick a user into sharing.
You can find instructions on adding an Amazon passkey here. [ https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=TPphmhSWBgcI9Ak87p ]
If you make these changes, it’s not possible for an attacker to steal your username and password and gain access to your account. At a minimum they would need you to open your authenticator app and share the code. They will not know you’re using an app.
Passkeys are still better. And if you make a rule to never use anything but your passkey on one of your trusted devices, you cannot be compromised. Change those settings today, given that attacks are underway. Don’t leave it too late.
16. Liberalism Doomed the Liberal International Order – A Less Legalistic System Would Help Protect Democracies
Excerpts:
Finally, a more durable, cooperative global order would ground its legitimacy not in supposedly neutral technocratic governance but in expressly political exchanges. Inclusive, representative political bodies sometimes end up representing such a broad range of views and interests that they cannot make headway toward concrete goals: consider how few tangible results the NPT’s consensus-oriented review conferences have managed to produce in recent years. To correct this, smaller, selective multilateral groupings should be convened under the NPT’s aegis and seek agreement on concrete questions of proliferation, escalation, and safety. The existing nuclear powers would likely still exert significant sway at these bargaining tables, but formally bringing in specialized bodies, such as the current Nuclear Suppliers Group, would give nonnuclear weapons states and activists more influence over selective subgroups’ agendas, procedures, and deliberations.
Multilateral organizations must also reconnect their decision-making processes with national politics. Although international institutions should set broad goals—such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions—much of the enforcement should be left to national governments rather than supranational bureaucratic mechanisms. This was the approach taken by the Paris climate accord, which generated a useful collective financial infrastructure to support climate-related policies. With good reason, critics doubt that countries can or will effectively implement or enforce international programs, but unresponsive global governing bodies lose legitimacy and effectiveness anyway. International agreements are durable to the extent that they are backed by, not shielded from, national politics. National leaders need to persuade their citizens of the value of collective action, not hide behind distant international judges and bureaucrats.
Improving the links between international order and national political legitimacy will also require all states, and especially liberal democracies, to renew their commitment to nonintervention in other countries’ domestic affairs. Nationalist critics of the liberal international order have gotten enormous traction from the claim that they are the order’s victims and that its institutions have subverted national interests. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, points to the influx of pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations into the post-Soviet space as the reason for Russian insecurity, the so-called color revolutions, and ultimately the war in Ukraine. Populists in Europe and the United States assail the WTO for undercutting their manufacturing sectors.
A pragmatic and pluralistic international order need not legitimize political repression. It would not require its members to keep their mouths shut in the face of massive violations of human rights. It would, however, place clear bounds on the policies that liberals adopt in such circumstances: they should not use coercive material instruments—military or economic—to effect change or support liberal forces in other countries by covert means. Liberals must turn to more humble but still powerful instruments: persuasion and demonstration.
A pluralistic, multilateral global order might not quite live up to liberal aspirations, but it would foster transnational cooperation and would be more adaptable, responsive, and resilient. By decreasing the chances of catastrophic conflict between major powers and tackling a key set of global challenges, such an order would help maintain a world in which liberal democracy could flourish. It is the best we can hope for—and it would be quite enough.
Liberalism Doomed the Liberal International Order
Foreign Affairs · by More by Stacie E. Goddard · July 28, 2025
A Less Legalistic System Would Help Protect Democracies
July 28, 2025
Dutch police and soldiers patrolling ahead of a NATO summit in The Hague, June 2025 Yves Herman / Reuters
STACIE E. GODDARD is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost for Wellesley in the World at Wellesley College.
RONALD R. KREBS is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.
CHRISTIAN KREUDER-SONNEN is Junior Professor of Political Science and International Organizations at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
BERTHOLD RITTBERGER is Chair of International Relations at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science at the University of Munich.
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The liberal international order is dying, and its transatlantic backers are grieving. During the first Trump administration, many were in denial, but few are now. Some are angry, denouncing a villain—usually U.S. President Donald Trump—for having unnecessarily destroyed what they hold dear and vowing to step forward to bolster global institutions: in March, for instance, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared that “a ruthless time has begun in which we must defend the rules-based international order and the strength of law more than ever against the power of the strongest.” Others, such as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, hope they can bargain—that by coming on bended knee to the White House and flattering Trump, they can persuade the United States to reinvest in its historic alliances and defend key principles such as territorial sovereignty. Still others are depressed, resigned to the order’s demise but unable to imagine an alternative future.
Few of these mourners seem truly ready to accept the order’s passing. But they should. Praying for its resurrection is not just naive; it is counterproductive. All of these responses misdiagnose the order’s deepest illness and thus prescribe the wrong remedy. The liberal international order’s crisis cannot be blamed on Trump’s peculiar brand of nihilistic politics, nor on the hard neoliberal turn that the order took in the 1990s, nor on the rise of revisionist, illiberal powers such as China and Russia.
These factors did play a role, but the postwar order ultimately decayed because what many saw as its greatest strength—how its institutions, norms, and rules were grounded in liberal principles—was actually a source of weakness. By providing universally acknowledged public goods, creating inclusive institutions, and committing to the rule of law, its backers believed that the order would prove particularly hardy.
The unexpected consequence, however, was an order that was rigid and unresponsive, which only encouraged the forces clamoring for its demise. Paradoxically, if a multilateral, cooperative international order that facilitates peace and prosperity and allows liberal democracies to thrive is to be revived, its structure and procedures cannot be too rigidly pinned to liberal principles. Instead, it should be resurrected in a much more pragmatic and pluralistic form that replaces liberal proceduralism with greater political contestation.
TALL TALES
There are many narratives about the postwar international order’s demise, but they typically share a common origin point and their first chapters overlap. In the late 1940s, Western leaders were gripped by a sincere desire to avoid the self-interested and shortsighted mistakes that had given rise to fascism and World War II. Led by the United States, they created institutions such the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to protect state borders; encourage the freer flow of goods, money, and ideas; promote economic development and monetary stability; and beat back communism and other illiberal political forces. These norms and institutions established an international order that defined legitimate state behavior in line with liberal commitments. For a time, according to the dominant accounts of its demise, the postwar international order largely succeeded, especially in the West. And its acknowledged leader, the United States, was a remarkably benevolent hegemon.
The narratives then diverge. One story line traces the order’s fall to its underlying, often hidden hypocrisy. In this telling, the order never fully delivered the public goods it had pledged because the United States and other powerful actors rigged it to ensure they would seize a disproportionate share of the gains. They never permitted truly free flows of trade, investment, ideas, and people because they feared a world of real equality. As a result, those on the periphery were always running but never catching up. The solution: fully eliminate power and privilege from the international order so it finally lives up to its claimed liberal ideals.
A second, more tragic narrative blames the order’s decline on post–Cold War triumphalism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the overweening power the United States and its allies possessed allowed them to try to perfect the world of “liberty under law” about which they had long fantasized. They imposed excessively high standards of liberal governance in too many policy domains too quickly. They granted authority to a swelling array of international bureaucracies and tribunals that lacked the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections and that seemed, and often were, distant and unaccountable. The solution: restore the kind of order that had thrived in the decades immediately following World War II, when the network of international institutions was less dense and those institutions operated with a lighter touch.
A third story line attributes the order’s collapse to sabotage. In this account, after the Cold War, the United States and its allies selectively welcomed illiberal states such as China and Russia into the order’s institutions in the hope their inclusion in the order would encourage their liberalization. But this strategy of engagement failed. China’s rise and Russia’s return weakened the order from within. Meanwhile, the more the order succeeded in producing prosperity, the more it provoked a backlash from aggrieved people in Europe, North America, and Australia, who believed that “the rise of the rest,” in the journalist’s Fareed Zakaria’s phrase, had come at their expense. The solution: evict those states that are not true believers.
What all three narratives share is a nostalgic desire to return to a moment when the international order worked. They envision traveling back in time to just before things went awry. Yet all three narratives fall short because they fail to see that the order’s death was foreordained. The disease that ultimately proved fatal to the postwar international order was encoded into its liberal DNA.
FIRST PRINCIPLES
American power built and sustained the international order that took shape after World War II, but liberal rhetoric defined its purpose, underpinned its design, and gave the order legitimacy. Its defenders argued that an international order would advance the universal interests for which all rational individuals yearn. Because all people crave the freedom to pursue their interests as they see fit, the order would remove the economic and political impediments to that freedom.
The order’s founders and backers also maintained that its institutions were necessary because the public goods they ensured would otherwise be in short supply. Consistent with individualistic liberal premises, supporters maintained that even if everyone wants common goods, such as collective security and free trade, they would prefer that others pay the costs of providing those goods. This appeared to be the clear lesson of interwar international politics, when beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies led to self-defeating protectionism, and shortsighted self-interest undermined the League of Nations.
Finally, the postwar international order would, like liberal national constitutions, invoke the rule of law to tame power politics. Its institutions would be transparent and its rules binding, even for those who wrote the rules. Decision-making and enforcement would be shielded from countries’ naked exercise of power. According to the historian Mark Mazower, the postwar order envisioned “the possibility of carving out a politics-free zone.”
The international order’s liberalism became its undoing.
These arguments, derived from liberal premises and framed in liberal language, cropped up across policy domains. A rules-bound international trading regime, U.S. President Harry Truman declared in 1949, would mean that “all countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources.” Collective security organizations, such as the United Nations and NATO, were founded because of the universal truth that, as Carlo Sforza, Italy’s minister of foreign affairs, put it at the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty signing ceremony, “no nation in the world can feel secure in its prosperity and peace if all its neighbors are not as safely marching towards the same goals of prosperity and security.” Because NATO advanced the good of all, Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak declared, all “the peoples of the world have . . . the right to rejoice over it.”
A generation later, the text of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty stated that its aim was to avoid “the devastation that would be visited upon all mankind by a nuclear war.” Despite the inequality the NPT formalized between nuclear haves and have-nots, it purported to be legitimate because it had rules to which its signatories had freely consented and that technocrats at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would impartially enforce. When he signed the NPT, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson promised that “the United States is not asking any country to accept any safeguards that we are not willing to accept ourselves.”
Many of these claims were aspirational, and some were hypocritical. Empires—both liberal and communist—dominated huge swaths of the globe, pervasive poverty and inequality belied the promise of economic prosperity for all, and protectionist carve-outs were built into the emerging trading regime. At times, the Anglo-American architects of the postwar order embraced power politics even as they cloaked their exercise of might in a rhetoric of liberal rights.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss the liberal language that legitimized the postwar order as mere rhetoric. Liberal principles dictated how the order’s defenders reacted to and channeled demands for reform—and ended up undermining the order’s ability to adapt to the changing tectonics of world politics. The international order’s liberalism became its undoing.
PATH DEPENDENCE
All international orders are contested; even the most inclusive order distributes costs and benefits unevenly. In the 1970s, critics from what was then known as the Third World saw the global trading system as skewed in favor of the wealthy and advocated for what they called a New International Economic Order, which would address economic inequality by improving the terms of trade, allowing poorer countries greater access to the markets of richer ones, and promoting development aid and technology transfer. Later, as China became an economic powerhouse, it demanded more say in the World Trade Organization (WTO). More recently, India’s leaders have asked why their country’s growing wealth has not resulted in a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. After globalization transferred manufacturing jobs out of wealthy, industrialized economies, populists in those countries promised to use state power to rein in markets.
But the postwar liberal international order was supposed to be uniquely capable of channeling this kind of discontent into reforms that sustained the order’s principles and its basic shape. Because the order provided public goods, everyone should have a stake in its survival. Because its institutions were open to all, everyone could lodge complaints and seek redress through existing processes. And if those processes failed, because institutional rules and procedures were open to debate, challenges could result in deeper institutional reforms. Grievances could be accommodated and revolution avoided.
That was the theory. But in practice, the liberal rhetoric that underpinned the order set off processes that eventually led to the suppression of contestation. Justifying the order in terms of universal interests and public goods meant that those charging it with systemic injustice could be—and often were—dismissed. If all rational, moral individuals wanted what the order provided, then critics were either irrational and uninformed or immoral and disingenuous. When critics from the global South advanced a competing vision of trade centered on developing countries’ national interests, defenders such as Peter Thomas Bauer, a prominent British economist, sneered at them as “intellectual barbarians” who failed to grasp the “basic tenets of economics.” When the entrepreneur Ross Perot assailed the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement in his 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, predicting in a debate that year that it would result in “a giant sucking sound going south,” mainstream economists such as Paul Krugman accused him of “telling malicious whoppers.” Democratic vice-presidential candidate Al Gore alleged that Perot was merely selling a “politics of negativism and fear” for his own benefit. Twenty-five years later, Trump’s protectionism was part of what made him and his backers “deplorables.” Countries that sought nuclear weapons, regardless of their very real security concerns, were frequently stigmatized as “rogues,” “outlaws,” “mavericks,” “renegades,” or even “demons.”
The postwar order was supposed to be uniquely capable of channeling discontent into reforms.
Even when the order’s defenders acknowledged that critics had a point, they responded in ways that left those critics thwarted and discouraged. Rather than directly addressing substantive complaints, the defenders implemented procedural reforms consistent with the order’s liberal legitimizing logic. If critics accused wealthy Western countries of not abiding by the rules, then the liberal answer was straightforward: eliminate loopholes, make laws more binding, and grant more authority to international courts and organizations.
As a result, in response to waves of challenges, the order’s rational-legal architecture flowered. Faced with persistent debates in the WTO over agriculture and intellectual property—often pitting wealthy countries in the global North against poorer nations in the global South—international trade officials did not adjust the rules to reflect diverse national interests but instead tried to better specify the law and eliminate imprecision. Consequently, countries had less flexibility to accommodate their domestic interests as they strove to adhere to the WTO’s laws. To attempt to insulate rule enforcement from power politics, the WTO was outfitted with trade courts, armed with the power to adjudicate disputes and interpret and discharge the law.
The International Criminal Court was set up to hold individuals, including state officials, accountable for particularly grievous crimes. Binding arbitration through the World Bank became the heart of the international investment regime. The IAEA extended its inspection authority to undeclared facilities, authorized its inspectors to employ more intrusive methods, and required states to submit more comprehensive reports. International bureaucrats came to govern matters large and small, from crimes against humanity to safety standards for cruise ships. According to the Yearbook of International Organizations, between 1990 and 2020, the global cohort of international organizations (including nongovernmental organizations) ballooned from around 6,000 to 72,500.
For liberals, arbitrariness is the enemy of legitimacy in political orders and legal systems, and uncertainty is a wellspring of conflict. Transparent processes that are grounded in clear rules and that yield predictable outcomes are the foundation of both order and justice. Eliminating exceptions and stamping out imprecision are, from a liberal vantage point, necessary steps to perfect the order’s congenital flaws.
LEGAL JEOPARDY
The postwar order had once been more tolerant of ambiguity in international rules and institutions. The order’s creators understood that ambiguity is often the grease that turns the wheels of international agreement. The GATT, which was signed in 1947 after the prospects for an International Trade Organization dimmed, allowed states to breach some of their obligations for reasons of “national security” and largely permitted states to define national security for themselves. GATT-sponsored multilateral negotiations gradually reduced tariffs and quotas around the world, paved the way for growing global prosperity, and made the WTO’s founding possible. If free-trade purists had been in charge, the GATT would have failed as badly as the ITO.
Broad support never would have coalesced around the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights if it had outlined rights in detail and insisted on binding domestic or international enforcement. Instead, its signatories agreed, “every individual and every organ of society”—not member states—“shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms”—not by coercion—and “by progressive measures, national and international”—over some indeterminate period of time—“to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance”—but not punishment for their violation.
The 1968 NPT, meanwhile, passed muster only because its ambiguous text left both nuclear and nonnuclear states some wiggle room. Existing nuclear powers committed “to pursue negotiations in good faith . . . on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control,” but not on an explicit or enforceable timeline. Non-nuclear states accepted the inequality enshrined in the NPT but only because the treaty itself was subject to review and renewal every five years. Had nonnuclear states insisted on a binding process by which the nuclear powers had to rid themselves of their weapons, the NPT would never have been signed, and many more states may well have acquired nuclear weapons by now.
Such ambiguous provisions and loopholes, however, were always in tension with the liberal conceptual architecture and language that the postwar international order’s most ardent supporters believed gave the order legitimacy. When complaints arose, internationalists could not easily defend the status quo without contradicting the order’s founding principles. So it came to seem that the only consistent way forward was to tighten up the rules, eradicate ambiguities, and make enforcement more binding. In contrast with the GATT, for instance, the WTO made the national security exceptions that countries sought to attain reviewable and subject to reversal. A litany of new human rights treaties and protocols subjected the domestic conduct of states to judicial review. In 1995, the NPT was extended indefinitely, further legalizing the nuclear nonproliferation regime.
Ambiguity is the grease that turns the wheels of international agreement.
Yet these very steps, taken to preserve the order, ultimately made it more brittle and fragile. Conflicts of interest do not simply disappear. If the aggrieved are denied the opportunity to express their discontent within institutions, they will seek solutions elsewhere. To distance international institutions from the pitfalls of power politics is also to divorce them from the rejuvenating spring of national politics. Politics, as the democratic tradition rightly stresses, is a critical source of legitimacy. It connects policy outputs to the interests of individuals and countries. As that connection withered, decisions made by international judges and technocrats seemed arbitrary despite their expertise and despite the supposed fairness of their procedures. Increasingly precise laws and regulations shone a bright light on the persistent, unpunished hypocrisy of the privileged. Flagrant violations across diverse policy realms suggested that the order’s commitment to the rule of law was rhetorical window dressing. Absent a steady stream of feedback from national politics, absent forums and procedures that permitted adjustments on that basis, international institutions became rigid sites of rules application.
Critics of the international trade regime had long charged that inequity was baked into the order’s rules, but these allegations resonated more widely as the rules became more elaborate and legalistic with the WTO’s founding. Protectionist U.S. and EU agricultural policies were, for instance, increasingly called out as evidence of systemic rot. As India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry Arun Jaitley put it in 2003, these rules stood “against equity, justice and fair play.” The scholar Matthew Stephen’s analysis of speeches made by representatives of global South countries at WTO meetings confirms that, between 2001 and 2013, officials not only objected to Western hypocrisy on trade but raised growing doubts about the core values of reciprocity and open trade on which the postwar regime was based.
As new rules piled up in the nuclear domain, non-nuclear states began to question more openly the definition of the public good that the order’s institutions claimed to uphold. After the NPT was made permanent, nuclear powers showed little interest in taking meaningful steps toward nuclear abolition, and the broader nuclear regime rested on the premise that nuclear deterrence remained a vital pillar of global stability. India’s foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1998 that the world’s nuclear powers were propping up a system of “nuclear apartheid,” suggesting that the system was intrinsically corrupt and beyond reform. Critics charged the nuclear powers with hypocrisy, for example by turning a blind eye to Israel’s hidden nuclear deterrent and by granting India a waiver from the nuclear export control regime, which prompted one diplomat to quip to Reuters: “NPT RIP?” Thanks to the NPT’s legitimacy deficit, the “Humanitarian Initiative,” which denied the value of nuclear deterrence to national and human security, swiftly gathered steam. In 2017 a large majority of UN member states—but not a single nuclear weapons power—fundamentally challenged the existing nuclear regime by approving the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, more commonly known as the Nuclear Ban Treaty.
Doubts about the trading order’s legitimacy also gave rise to increasingly existential challenges. Critics in the global South, such as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, began to invoke the language of “commercial apartheid” to delegitimize the WTO. In the wealthy global North, people who perceived that giant multinational corporations had excessive influence also called for the order’s radical reconstruction. Famously, over 50,000 protesters converged on Seattle in 1999 to disrupt the WTO’s Third Ministerial conference.
Rhetorically grounding the postwar international order in the provision of global public goods also created space for narratives of victimhood to arise in the order’s core. If a cooperative global order served the global good, and if constructing it was an act of global generosity, could it really be in core countries’ national interest? Critics of multilateralism, detractors of foreign aid, and skeptics of free trade had long advanced this claim. As liberal order morphed into global governance, and as international law became more elaborate and enforceable—in domains as diverse as trade, investment, human rights, and nuclear materials—this line of argument found greater support in wealthy countries. The costs of providing a growing array of public goods seemed endless, and the benefits to the country appeared more amorphous. Populist nationalists such as Trump, the United Kingdom’s Brexiteers, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban found the political terrain increasingly fertile.
NEW ORDER
The liberal international order’s authority was already fragile before Trump returned to the Oval Office. Gazing mournfully at the wreckage, some of its supporters are, understandably, calling on its most ardent defenders to rebuild and shore up liberal international institutions. That was the strategy liberals pursued during the Cold War, when they excluded the Soviet Union and its allies from key international institutions. But this approach is no longer feasible, thanks in large measure to the successes the liberal international order produced. Despite the rise in near-shoring and “friend shoring,” despite increased protectionism and tariffs, the world’s economic interdependence remains impressive by historical standards. Processes of globalization have brought prosperity. But they have also created new challenges, such as climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, that demand international collaboration. And there are more nuclear powers arranged in less tightly integrated alliance blocs, so curbing proliferation is a more complicated task.
Some kind of global order is not optional. It is a necessity. States must agree to some rules of the road to prevent escalation in contested zones such as the South China Sea and to regulate artificial intelligence. Nuclear states need forums to limit their arsenals, construct mechanisms to manage crises, and curtail further proliferation. Collective action at the global level is necessary to blunt the worst effects of climate change and nip future pandemics in the bud.
A multilateral, cooperative, and durable international order can rise from the ashes. But not if world leaders cling to legalism, technocratic governance, and the language of universal public goods. This new order must exchange proceduralism for pragmatism, universalism for pluralism, and technocracy for politics. A pragmatic order must limit itself to issues that most countries agree are significant threats to peace and prosperity. To take just one example, there is little disagreement that the spread of nuclear weapons is dangerous. Yet the NPT review conference has failed to produce a consensus document since 2010. The 2020 NPT review conference (held in 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic) failed to produce agreement after ancillary matters derailed it. Sticking points included Russia’s objections to phrasing about the war in Ukraine, contention over a proposed zone in the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, and disputes about the Nuclear Ban Treaty. A pragmatic approach would focus more narrowly on advancing shared commitments to nuclear safety and arms limitations. With the next review conference a year away, nuclear states should seek to agree on this pragmatic agenda and to grow the circle of like-minded pragmatists.
States must agree to some rules of the road.
Establishing a new, more resilient global order also requires a shift from universalism to pluralism. The liberal order envisioned eliminating difference: inspired by its allegedly universal values, it denied legitimacy to non-liberal political communities and sought to transform them into good liberals, whether through coercion or engagement. A more durable order must acknowledge, embrace, and even celebrate the reality of a world marked by deep differences in values. One means toward such a pluralistic end would be to encourage the strengthening of regional institutions—not as an alternative to current global institutions but as a complement. Regional bodies are less likely than their global counterparts to face an irresolvable variety of political commitments, economic circumstances, and cultural values. Historically, when thorny international problems were addressed in smaller regional blocs, this smoothed over differences and promoted regional trust; countries gained experience in negotiating difference. The political scientist Katherine Beall has shown, for instance, that Latin American countries that resisted international efforts to secure human rights proved willing to create regional organizations to enforce these norms.
Going forward, regional institutions should facilitate local arrangements on issues such as trade, pollution, and migration. Regional development banks, which are closer to the ground than the World Bank, should set investment priorities, and regional security institutions such as the African Union’s Peace and Security Architecture should be empowered to engage in more diplomacy and peacebuilding. Regional agreements may serve as a platform to establish the cross-regional and global deals that have, until now, been impossible to achieve.
Encouraging regional institutions also advances pluralism through the familiar mechanism of the balance of power. The postwar liberal order’s answer to preventing great powers from trampling smaller ones was to strengthen laws and procedures. The WTO could level the playing field somewhat between, say, the EU and Ecuador on an issue such as banana imports. Wealthy and powerful states and blocs, however, continued to wield disproportionate influence through such legalized processes, which undermined those processes’ legitimacy. In a more pragmatic and pluralistic order in which regional coalitions were empowered, smaller states could more effectively balance individual great powers through collective action.
Pluralism does not mean that either liberal states or regional institutions must abandon their liberal commitments. They could still vocally advocate for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. When possible, they could partner with existing rights-oriented regional institutions such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, whose efforts to call out violations of human rights may seem less self-righteous than when liberal outsiders take the lead. In an international order that acknowledges difference, however, liberal actors must recognize that a variety of morally defensible formulas exist for balancing competing rights and responsibilities.
THE POWER OF POLITICS
Finally, a more durable, cooperative global order would ground its legitimacy not in supposedly neutral technocratic governance but in expressly political exchanges. Inclusive, representative political bodies sometimes end up representing such a broad range of views and interests that they cannot make headway toward concrete goals: consider how few tangible results the NPT’s consensus-oriented review conferences have managed to produce in recent years. To correct this, smaller, selective multilateral groupings should be convened under the NPT’s aegis and seek agreement on concrete questions of proliferation, escalation, and safety. The existing nuclear powers would likely still exert significant sway at these bargaining tables, but formally bringing in specialized bodies, such as the current Nuclear Suppliers Group, would give nonnuclear weapons states and activists more influence over selective subgroups’ agendas, procedures, and deliberations.
Multilateral organizations must also reconnect their decision-making processes with national politics. Although international institutions should set broad goals—such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions—much of the enforcement should be left to national governments rather than supranational bureaucratic mechanisms. This was the approach taken by the Paris climate accord, which generated a useful collective financial infrastructure to support climate-related policies. With good reason, critics doubt that countries can or will effectively implement or enforce international programs, but unresponsive global governing bodies lose legitimacy and effectiveness anyway. International agreements are durable to the extent that they are backed by, not shielded from, national politics. National leaders need to persuade their citizens of the value of collective action, not hide behind distant international judges and bureaucrats.
Improving the links between international order and national political legitimacy will also require all states, and especially liberal democracies, to renew their commitment to nonintervention in other countries’ domestic affairs. Nationalist critics of the liberal international order have gotten enormous traction from the claim that they are the order’s victims and that its institutions have subverted national interests. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, points to the influx of pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations into the post-Soviet space as the reason for Russian insecurity, the so-called color revolutions, and ultimately the war in Ukraine. Populists in Europe and the United States assail the WTO for undercutting their manufacturing sectors.
A pragmatic and pluralistic international order need not legitimize political repression. It would not require its members to keep their mouths shut in the face of massive violations of human rights. It would, however, place clear bounds on the policies that liberals adopt in such circumstances: they should not use coercive material instruments—military or economic—to effect change or support liberal forces in other countries by covert means. Liberals must turn to more humble but still powerful instruments: persuasion and demonstration.
A pluralistic, multilateral global order might not quite live up to liberal aspirations, but it would foster transnational cooperation and would be more adaptable, responsive, and resilient. By decreasing the chances of catastrophic conflict between major powers and tackling a key set of global challenges, such an order would help maintain a world in which liberal democracy could flourish. It is the best we can hope for—and it would be quite enough.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Stacie E. Goddard · July 28, 2025
17. In the Pacific, Army leaders expect today’s fiction to be near-term reality
In the Pacific, Army leaders expect today’s fiction to be near-term reality
Service secretary envisions drone-and-soldier teams within just a few years.
By Jennifer Hlad
Managing Editor, Defense One
July 25, 2025
defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad
SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii—In a few years, visitors to this Army installation northwest of Honolulu will likely see something that today is still in the realm of fiction, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said Tuesday.
“I think what you will see in a couple of years when you drive back on this base is you’ll see an infantry squad vehicle going out into training with some autonomously led robots beside it, and some drones that are capable of swarming flying above it. And I think you’ll start to see this mixture of human and machine in a way that used to be kind of science fiction, but we’re right on the edge of it.”
Driscoll and Army Chief Gen. Randy George stopped in Hawaii this week as part of a trip through the Indo-Pacific that includes visits to Australia, for the massive Talisman Sabre exercise, and to the Philippines. Friday, they watched as a Lockheed Martin Precision Strike Missile was fired from an Australian HIMARS, marking the first time the long-range missile was fired west of the international date line and the first time it was fired in Australia.
“Our soldiers deserve the best capabilities and today we just demonstrated one of the newest munitions in our arsenal,” Driscoll said.
The PrSM—pronounced “prism”—has a range of about 300 miles, and can hit moving targets on land or at sea. Two of the missiles can be fired from one HIMARS.
On Tuesday, standing before two of the 25th Infantry Division’s new HIMARS rocket launchers with division commander Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, Driscoll underscored the importance of the region to the service.
“The threat in INDOPACOM is more real than ever before,” he said, noting that during their tour of training areas and units here, “what the soldiers were telling us is a lot of the equipment we’ve been giving them for the last decade or two—the Humvees, the [Joint Light Tactical Vehicles]—it just doesn’t work in this terrain. When they’re deploying to the Philippines, it doesn’t work.”
What the Army is doing instead, Driscoll said, is give them new capabilities that do work, such as the Infantry Squad Vehicle and new types of drones. It’s part of the Army’s ongoing transformation initiative, called “transformation in contact.”
The HIMARS, of which the division will receive 16 in total, are part of that transformation.
George noted that 25th ID “is kind of leading a lot of the [transformation] efforts that we have across the whole Army,” and as a result the service is learning a lot about how the new gear works in Pacific environments.
“This unit is moving fast. The Army is moving fast to make sure that we’re transforming.”
The Army talks “a lot about what’s changing on the modern battlefield,” and 25th ID is also figuring out how to train differently, he said.
In Australia on Friday, Driscoll told reporters that the U.S. is “actively designing our Army so that we are capable of responding to any threat from China,” but noted that “if you look at how warfare has unfolded throughout human history, most humans have gotten guesses wrong about where war will happen,” so the service is also focused on being “flexible, and agile, and innovative” enough to respond anywhere.
defenseone.com · by Jennifer Hlad
18. ‘Mom, It’s My Duty’ – American Killed Fighting in Ukraine Honored in Congress
‘Mom, It’s My Duty’ – American Killed Fighting in Ukraine Honored in Congress
An American mother tells Kyiv Post about her son’s last words before dying in Ukraine.
by Alex Raufoglu | July 28, 2025, 5:28 am
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57066
Robert “Bobby“ Pietrangelo, an American killed fighting in Ukraine in January 2025. (Photo courtesy: Dana Fancher, Pietrangelo’s mother.)
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ABINGTON, Pennsylvania – A Pennsylvania man who answered the desperate call to defend freedom in Ukraine, ultimately sacrificing his life on the brutal front lines, was honored last week by the US Congress.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) stood on the House floor to deliver a poignant eulogy for Robert “Bobby” Edward Pietrangelo, just 23 years old from Abington, Pa. Fitzpatrick hailed him as a “courageous advocate” who made the ultimate sacrifice against invading Russian forces, a stark testament to his conviction.
But for his heartbroken mother, Dana Fancher, the public acknowledgment only sharpens the edges of a private agony – the searing memory of their last conversation, a desperate farewell exchanged just hours before he deployed to his death.
‘It’s my duty’: a mother’s final call
“Mom, it’s my duty. I must go,” Bobby told her on Jan. 2, his voice unwavering, even as his mother pleaded with him to come home. He was supposed to be on leave, a brief respite from the grinding conflict, but the escalating war held him fast in Ukraine.
Fancher, speaking to Kyiv Post in Pennsylvania on Sunday, vividly recalls the terror she felt, knowing the overwhelming Russian forces her son was facing down.
But Bobby’s conviction was absolute. “They don’t fight out in the middle of nowhere. They just come in and take over. And I can’t let that happen,” he explained, his words echoing with a fierce determination that defied logic.
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Ukraine honors defenders and civilians who died in captivity, vowing justice for Russian war crimes and urging global pressure on Moscow’s brutal treatment of POWs.
Their final talk was brutally, painfully honest.
“We talked about, if you die, you will die in Ukraine, and I may never have your body back. And he said, ‘That’s okay. I understand,’” Fancher revealed, her voice still raw with emotion.
“I’m glad that we did. We knew it was our last conversation.”
That agonizing discussion, a mother’s greatest fear spoken aloud, has offered a strange, bittersweet comfort in the crushing aftermath, a shared understanding forged in the shadow of impending loss.
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A patriot’s path: from boyhood dreams to battlefield
Born on Dec. 14, 2001, Bobby was a patriot from the start. His family boasts a lineage that includes a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and, from a young age, he was captivated by the heroism of World War II veterans, not sports stars or pop culture icons. He saw genuine valor in those who fought for freedom.
“They were his heroes who didn’t worship football players or baseball players,” Fancher told Kyiv Post. “He felt like the heroes were these men... These are the real heroes of the world.”
He meticulously collected their signed books and photographs, nurturing those connections until his final day, drawing inspiration from their courage and sacrifice. He pursued history courses at Bucks County Community College while still in high school, developing a deep understanding of Ukraine’s long history of oppression, even educating his mother on the subject.
Bobby wanted nothing more than to be a US Marine, but a kidney issue medically disqualified him.
“It devastated him,” his mom recalled, the memory of his crushed dreams still palpable.
Still, his drive to serve never faltered. An Eagle Scout from Boy Scout Troop 354, he honed his archery and rifleman skills, always believing they’d eventually lead him to the fight, meticulously preparing himself for the moment he could make a difference.
From medic to frontline fighter: the unwavering call to arms
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Bobby – then just 20 – was among the first Americans to answer the call. He traveled to Ukraine, navigating significant financial hurdles and logistical nightmares just to get to the war zone and join an informal military group.
“He was running toward this hard and determined, and nothing was stopping him,” his mother said, describing his singular, unwavering focus.
He initially took on humanitarian roles, where his youth and compassion shone through. He became a “combat life-saver trainer” with the Believe Family Foundation, delivering vital medical supplies and aiding those caught in the brutal crossfire.
Yet, his sights were always set on the front. He grew to love Ukraine, its people, its beauty, even planning to live there permanently after the war.
“He felt like he belonged,” Fancher said. “He loved it. He loved the people. He loved the beauty of the country. He loved everything about it.”
In April or May 2024, Bobby officially enlisted in the Ukrainian military, a moment of immense pride for him and his family. He served on the front multiple times, staring down death and surviving a drone attack in October 2024 that left him with a severe concussion and brain injury.
“I’m not coming home until the war is over,” he told his mother when she begged him to return, desperately pleading for his safety. He returned to combat as soon as he was medically cleared, displaying a “true determination and spirit” that astonished even those who knew him best.
Fancher described her son as “fearless,” clarifying that this didn’t mean he lacked fear, but rather that he was not afraid to face it.
“He went toward danger and did what he needed to do,” she affirmed, her voice filled with both grief and profound admiration. “He couldn’t stand what he saw. The maternity wards were bombed and, you know, women and children were injured and killed, and he helped to clear that out.”
Bobby Pietrangelo was part of a small brigade; only two survivors emerged from his final engagement.
Congressman Fitzpatrick honored him on the House floor, emphasizing that Bobby “gave his life to protecting the people of Ukraine” in defense of Pokrovsk. “A true hero,” Fitzpatrick concluded, “who transformed his values into action.”
His sacrifice underscores the ongoing human cost of the war in Ukraine, and the unwavering conviction of those who choose to fight for what they believe is right, even when it means giving their lives thousands of miles from home.
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Alex Raufoglu
Alex Raufoglu is Kyiv Post's Chief Correspondent in Washington DC. He covers the US State Department, regularly traveling with US Secretary of State. Raufoglu has worked extensively in the South Caucasus and Black Sea regions for several international broadcast outlets, such as VoA, BBC, RFE/RL, etc. He holds an MA in Interactive Journalism from American University, Washington DC.
19. Taiwan and South Korea: Bridging the Cybersecurity Gap
Taiwan and South Korea: Bridging the Cybersecurity Gap
https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/taiwan-and-south-korea-bridging-the-cybersecurity-gap/
Opinion - July 24, 2025
By Davide Campagnola
In 2024, Taiwan’s Government Service Network faced an average of 2.4 million daily cyberattacks. Meanwhile, South Korean public institutions dealt with 1.62 million daily cyberattacks in 2023. These numbers, driven in large part by North Korean and Chinese state actors, have made Taiwan and South Korea the first and second most targeted geographies in the Asia-Pacific.
And the toll is increasing. South Korea reported a 48% rise in cyber incidents in 2024 compared to 2023, jumping from 1,277 to 1,887 cases. Taiwan likewise experienced a steep rise, from around 990 incidents in 2023 to over 1,400 in 2024. Government networks, critical infrastructure, and the high-tech sector are all primary targets.
Yet, despite facing similar digital threats, Taiwan and South Korea remain largely disconnected in the cybersecurity sphere. In June 2023, Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang met with South Korea’s newly appointed representative in Taipei to explore opportunities for collaboration on digital resilience and cybersecurity defense. At the Summit for Democracy in Seoul in 2024, Tang emphasized Taiwan’s experience countering AI-enabled threats to democratic integrity. These moments signal emerging but still insufficient cooperation.
That deficiency is no longer just a missed opportunity—it is a strategic vulnerability. The logic for cooperation is clear. The costs of non-cooperation, however, remain overlooked. Without coordinated resilience, an attacker can exploit the weakest link, ricochet across sectors, and destabilize entire systems.
The Case for Taiwan-ROK Cybersecurity Collaboration
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Securing the Semiconductor Industry. South Korea and Taiwan are two pillars of the global semiconductor industry. Advanced semiconductor production is geographically concentrated in these two countries, creating a chokepoint in global supply chains. This level of technological dominance makes both countries tempting targets for espionage and data theft. A coordinated cyberattack on either country’s tech infrastructure could trigger a chain reaction across the global supply chain, disrupting economic security far beyond East Asia. That vulnerability, coupled with an increasingly hostile digital environment, demands a joint response. This is not simply about common values or regional identity; it is about shared exposure, shared risk, and a shared stake in future stability.
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Responding to a New Era of Hybrid Warfare. The digital threat environment is evolving. Cyberattacks are increasingly coupled with disinformation campaigns and AI techniques—part of a broader strategy of cognitive warfare aimed at weakening trust in democratic institutions and stability, as the current political situation in Taiwan shows. By enhancing cooperation, they can better prepare for the next wave of hybrid threats, especially during electoral cycles and crisis moments. In this context, cybersecurity becomes a matter of democratic resilience.
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Closing the Regional Security Gap. While South Korea has deepened cyber collaboration with the United States, Taiwan remains isolated due to its unique diplomatic status. This gap is not only detrimental to Taipei but represents a breach in regional digital stability. Given Taiwan’s cyber resilience, Taipei has the capacity, experience, and institutional commitment to contribute to regional cybersecurity, yet its isolation prevents information sharing, global engagement, and broader strategic alignment. As cyber threats increasingly transcend borders, this fragmentation makes the entire region more vulnerable. Without cooperation between Taiwan and partners like South Korea, regional cybersecurity is left with exploitable seams in what should be a coordinated defense. A more connected Taiwan strengthens not just its own security posture but that of its neighbors as well.
Areas of Strategic Synergy
Both Seoul and Taipei have recognized the need to enhance their digital resilience. South Korea’s 2024 cybersecurity strategy outlines a multidimensional approach: strengthening information system security, implementing minimum-security requirements for infrastructure operators, deploying rapid response teams, and introducing an incident classification framework. Taiwan, for its part, has pushed, through the sixth (2021-2024) and seventh (2025-2028) phases of the National Cybersecurity Development Program, to improve critical infrastructure cyber security defense measures, promote cyber security awareness, and develop its domestic cybersecurity industry.
Both strategies stress public–private collaboration and seek to reinforce cybersecurity postures described as offensive—though their substance is more proactive than aggressive. Yet, instead of building parallel defenses in isolation, Taiwan and South Korea should exchange good practices and identify shared priorities, common weaknesses, and complementary strengths.
The potential for cooperation is broad, but in light of their current cybersecurity strategies, a few areas stand out as particularly relevant:
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Critical infrastructure protection remains a shared imperative. Cyberattacks have the potential to paralyze essential services and disrupt economic activity. Both countries acknowledge this vulnerability. South Korea’s 2024 strategy and Taiwan’s Cybersecurity Management Act of 2018 both emphasize resilience and strict safeguards. These complementary efforts reflect common ground where lessons and good practices could be quietly exchanged.
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Both governments are grappling with the rapid evolution of AI-powered cyber threats and potential. Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs has taken a proactive lead, unveiling the seventh phase of the National Cybersecurity Development Program to strengthen resilience in the age of AI. For South Korea, observing Taiwan’s experience could offer useful insights.
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Existing multilateral frameworks offer potential low-profile avenues for engagement. As chair of the Asia Pacific Computer Emergency Response Team (APCERT), South Korea is in a position to support broader technical exchanges, such as CERT to CERT exchanges. Taiwan is already a participating member of APCERT. Expanding cooperation through such venues, even informally, would align with Seoul’s 2024 strategy explicitly prioritizing cooperation with like-minded nations to establish a secure digital environment. There is no clearer case than Taipei.
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Both nations are moving toward more assertive postures in cyberspace. South Korea’s 2024 strategy openly refers to developing offensive cyber capabilities in line with its alliances. Taiwan, for its part, has established the Information Communication Electronic Force Command (ICEF) to centralize its cybersecurity offensive capabilities. Sharing strategic thinking on deterrence, origins of threats or technological innovation could help both countries adapt to a rapidly changing cyber landscape.
Cybersecurity as Non-Traditional Diplomacy
Because of Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation, formal cooperation will remain politically delicate. But that should not prevent Taipei and Seoul from finding practical, if informal, ways to work together. South Korea’s caution in articulating a Taiwan policy is understandable given its strategic need to balance ties with Beijing and its US alliance. However, Taipei’s strategic relevance to Seoul’s own national security is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
This does not mean the two governments must sign a formal cybersecurity pact overnight. But structured, informal cooperation is well within reach. Cybersecurity offers a rare window for pragmatic engagement outside of traditional diplomatic structures. Governments, civil society actors, and the private sector can foster cooperation through track 1.5 or track 2 diplomacy, academic partnerships, and industry-led information sharing. Quiet coordination today could prevent a dangerous vacuum tomorrow.
A Role for Washington
Washington also has a stake in fostering this cooperation. US defense systems, communications networks, and strategic industries all rely on the uninterrupted flow of semiconductors from South Korea and Taiwan. Moreover, the United States already supports Taiwan’s cybersecurity development and works closely with Seoul on cybersecurity as part of the Mutual Defense Treaty.
Washington could help facilitate trilateral exchanges, or simply backchannel support for a Taiwan–South Korea cyber dialogue. Encouraging Taipei and Seoul to converge, even informally, would enhance regional resilience and serve US strategic interests at once.
Building the Firewall Together
The threats are real. The capabilities exist. The logic is sound. What is missing is political imagination. Cyberattacks are not slowing down. They are growing bolder, faster, and more sophisticated. Taiwan and South Korea have the tools and the experience to push back. But they will be stronger together. A Taiwan–South Korea cybersecurity partnership does not need to be loud—it needs to be smart, structured, and quietly effective.
In an era of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and geopolitical tensions, building that firewall together may be the most strategic move either can make. With advanced cyber capabilities and a shared threat landscape, Taiwan and South Korea have both the means and the motive to make cooperation work.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author(s) alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.
20. The Other Fentanyl Threat Requires Readiness
Excerpts:
There are steps America typically takes to fill any readiness gaps.
Our strategic national stockpile exists for public health threats and ensures ready access to sufficient volumes of countermeasures. Availability to life-saving countermeasures are scaled to include civilian emergency response systems and high-risk infrastructure.
A coordinated operational response plan for mass poisoning scenarios equips federal agencies to manage and mitigate such an unthinkable event. Enhanced training for first responders on chemical attack protocols, decontamination procedures, and rapid administration of readily available countermeasures saves lives.
For example, wherever the threat of a fentanyl attack might occur, naloxone should be required equipment for military personnel, intelligence assets and diplomatic staff. This would equip one with another level of self-defense and safety in the event of an attack, much like we do for other CBRN threats.
While widespread deployment used to seem unlikely, the threat of weaponized fentanyl is no longer theoretical. Small, targeted attacks could wreak unthinkable carnage if American communities are not prepared. Even more unthinkable would be looking back after an attack knowing that we had the antidote within our defense capabilities but didn’t take the steps necessary to have it in place to save lives. Let’s continue to work on this issue!
Fentanyl is more than a public health issue. With the weaponization capabilities of illicit fentanyl, naloxone is our best armor.
The Other Fentanyl Threat Requires Readiness
By Brad Wenstrup
July 28, 2025
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/07/28/the_other_fentanyl_threat_requires_readiness_1125285.html
It’s the nightmare scenario few in Washington want to talk about—and even fewer are prepared to confront - and that is the use of illicit fentanyl as a weapon. Although medicinal fentanyl is used safely in anesthesia, illicit fentanyl is widely known as the deadly synthetic opioid driving America’s deadly overdose crisis. Fentanyl has been, and is now, further emerging as a credible chemical weapon in the hands of state and non-state actors. The question is not whether fentanyl can be used as a weapon. It already has. The question now is whether America is taking all the appropriate steps needed to prepare for the worst. In the 118th Congress, I had proposed that illicit fentanyl be classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
Over the last several years, illicit fentanyl has been inflicted upon us through deception in drugs – both prescription and recreational. Under the previous administration, overdose deaths reached over 100,000 every year. If that is not bad enough, it can be worse.
In 2002, Russian special forces deployed aerosolized fentanyl analogues during the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis in Moscow. The gas incapacitated the Chechen terrorists holding over 900 hostages. The aerosolized fentanyl also killed 130 of those hostages—innocent civilians. The Russian government seemingly lacked either the means or the will to administer enough overdose reversal agents in time. That tragedy revealed a chilling truth: fentanyl can be weaponized, militarily and for terrorism, and when it is, the results can be deadly.
More than two decades later, the threat has only grown. Research conducted at Iranian military-affiliated universities shows clear interest in aerosolized synthetic opioids as incapacitating agents, possibly to be deployed via drones. The raw materials to manufacture illicit and weaponized fentanyl are inexpensive to produce, particularly in countries that turn a blind eye to its production. Illicit fentanyl’s reach into every American community is a proof point of how easy it has become for dangerous criminals to obtain and distribute the drug.
The Departments of Defense and Justice once explored fentanyl’s potential as a non-lethal incapacitating agent. Those efforts were shelved in the United States due to the inability to dose the drug effectively without risking death. Russia clearly did not share that hesitation. Knowing what we do about the current Iranian regime, the largest state sponsor of terror, it seems unlikely that they would hesitate to use this dangerous weapon.
Unlike other banned chemical agents such as tear gas, fentanyl and its analogues exist in a gray zone: common in hospital operating rooms and illicit drug markets alike, but just as lethal when aerosolized and released in a confined public space.
The U.S. Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) program has confirmed that this threat is real.
Currently, most public spaces that stock naloxone—restaurants, transportation hubs, schools—carry only two to four doses. First responders are typically equipped for one or two overdoses at a time. This is a great effort to try to save everyday overdose victims, and has had success, along with the Trump administrations effort to reduce the illicit fentanyl supply. These stoic efforts, however, would not be nearly enough for a subway station full of poisoned commuters.
Having served as a Physician / Soldier engaged in the Intelligence Community, it has become intuitive to me to prepare for the worst and to be prepared to save lives.
There are steps America typically takes to fill any readiness gaps.
Our strategic national stockpile exists for public health threats and ensures ready access to sufficient volumes of countermeasures. Availability to life-saving countermeasures are scaled to include civilian emergency response systems and high-risk infrastructure.
A coordinated operational response plan for mass poisoning scenarios equips federal agencies to manage and mitigate such an unthinkable event. Enhanced training for first responders on chemical attack protocols, decontamination procedures, and rapid administration of readily available countermeasures saves lives.
For example, wherever the threat of a fentanyl attack might occur, naloxone should be required equipment for military personnel, intelligence assets and diplomatic staff. This would equip one with another level of self-defense and safety in the event of an attack, much like we do for other CBRN threats.
While widespread deployment used to seem unlikely, the threat of weaponized fentanyl is no longer theoretical. Small, targeted attacks could wreak unthinkable carnage if American communities are not prepared. Even more unthinkable would be looking back after an attack knowing that we had the antidote within our defense capabilities but didn’t take the steps necessary to have it in place to save lives. Let’s continue to work on this issue!
Fentanyl is more than a public health issue. With the weaponization capabilities of illicit fentanyl, naloxone is our best armor.
Once fentanyl is in the air, the clock is ticking.
Rep. Wenstrup represented Ohio’s 2nd Congressional district from 2013-2025 and served as co-chair of the GOP Doctor’s Caucus. He is a physician, Army Iraq War veteran and he served on the Ways and Means and House Intelligence Committees.
21. 'Putin Is Mocking You': The 4 Words That Sparked Trump's Dramatic U-Turn on Ukraine
'Putin Is Mocking You': The 4 Words That Sparked Trump's Dramatic U-Turn on Ukraine
nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Reuben Johnson · July 28, 2025
Key Points and Summary – A single, secret phone call on July 4th from Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski, reportedly triggered President Trump’s dramatic policy U-turn on Ukraine.
-Sikorski informed Trump’s envoy that Russia had just launched a massive attack on Kyiv that struck the Polish consulate, framing the move as Vladimir Putin personally “mocking” Trump’s peace efforts.
-The insult, coming just after a Trump-Putin phone call, reportedly infuriated the President.
-He immediately ordered the Pentagon to reverse a freeze on military aid, a pivotal moment that led directly to resumed Patriot missile shipments and a tougher U.S. stance on Russia.
Why Trump Changes His Mind on Ukraine
WARSAW, POLAND – It was early morning on July 4 – a Friday and one of the biggest annual US holidays.
US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, was hoping to take a rest for at least part of the weekend.
Suddenly, Kellogg’s mobile phone lit up with a phone call with a +48 prefix, the country code for Poland.
On the line from Warsaw and six hours ahead of US East Coast time was Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.
What he had to say to the American presidential envoy may very well end up changing the course of this war that has been on-going since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Sikorski had two kinds of news to relay to Kellogg: the bad kind and the worse kind.
The bad news was that overnight, Russia had mounted another one of its massive attacks on Ukrainian cities.
No less than 11 missiles and 539 drones had been launched at Kyiv alone. At the time this was the largest Russian barrage against the Ukrainian capital since the war began.
(Although, since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military has exceeded even these numbers in subsequent attacks.)
One of the sites in the Ukrainian capital that was hit, as Sikorski reported, was the Polish consulate in central Kyiv, which took damage to the roof of the building in this barrage.
As the London Daily Telegraph, which is one of the outlets that broke the story this weekend, reported, “during the phone call, it was the heads-up about the embassy strike that appeared to resonate most with Gen. Kellogg.”
“As a retired three-star general, he knew this was the type of incident that leads to wars escalating and eventually spiralling out of control. What happened next can be seen as the first in a series of events which ushered in Mr Trump’s pivot on Ukraine.”
The “what happened next” was the worse news.
“Putin is mocking your peace efforts,” the Oxford-educated Polish Foreign Minister continued with Kellogg.
There was only one way to turn this around and change the dynamic between Washington and Moscow, so that it no longer appeared Russia’s dictator and former KGB Lt. Col. was making a fool out of the White House.
“Please restore supplies of anti-aircraft ammunition to Ukraine,” he told Kellogg.
Trump Does an About-Face on Ukraine
The Pentagon, apparently without any coordination with those around Trump, had abruptly frozen shipments of weapon systems to Ukraine two days before.
The impression left with many parties, to include those watching the chain of events in Moscow, was that the Trump administration was on the verge of abandoning Ukraine and leaving it at the mercy of Russia’s war on Ukrainian cities.
Sikorski’s initiative to vector directly to Kellogg may very well turn out to be that pivotal moment that changed the course of this war – and what prompted Trump’s turnabout on support for Ukraine.
As soon as he had ended his call with Sikorski, Gen. Kellogg rang the president’s number. Kellogg reportedly began the call by wishing Trump an enjoyable July 4th weekend and congratulated him on successfully managing to have his “one, big, beautiful bill” passed by Congress.
Then Kellogg switched topics to the business of Ukraine. He reported on what Sikorski had told him. The fact that this massive strike on Kyiv had come only hours after Putin and Trump had spoken on the telephone to discuss ending the war did not go down well with the 47th President of the US.
Trump had become increasingly frustrated with Putin’s refusal to curtail these massive strikes on Ukrainian cities, while at the same time dismissing any American proposals for a ceasefire.
Kellogg filled in Trump on the details of the latest attack on Kyiv and how the consulate of America’s NATO ally, Poland, had been hit in the process. He then laid out the rationale for resuming deliveries of Patriot air and missile defense systems to Ukraine.
Trump Responds
Trump’s response was to immediately order the Pentagon to release the Patriot PAC-3 systems that a temporary freeze had held up on deliveries of US military aid.
The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby, made the recommendation and then passed it on to Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, for his action.
The rationale from the DoD official was that there needed to be a determination of the state of US weapons stockpiles.
To ensure the logjam was broken, the American president directed Kellogg to call Hegseth and pass on his direct order that these deliveries to Kyiv be resumed.
Chain of Command
Trump had instructed Kellogg to contact Hegseth because he did not want a repeat of the previous announcement that deliveries of arms to Ukraine had been suspended.
That decision had been made without the White House or Congress being advised in advance.
Kellogg, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and even Trump himself only learned of Hegseth’s directive when they read about it in the press.
There would be no repeat of the previous communications breakdown, which Kellogg ensured by calling the Defense Secretary himself and informing him directly of Trump’s decision to resume shipments of Patriot missiles to Ukraine.
He also told Hegseth that if he did not believe him, he should call the president himself.
On this same day, the US president also promised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a phone call, that he would now come to Kyiv’s aid in addressing their air defence requirements.
A Major Change in Direction on Ukraine
This reversal of much of Trump’s previous position is being seen as a watershed moment.
It was only then that Trump finally comprehended that deal-making, schmoozing, cajoling, and trying to offer incentives – this tack would not work with Putin.
Only the application of American military might would ever get the Russian president to the negotiating table.
But, even with the US president’s direct order, it was reportedly still four days or more before the first batch of Patriot missiles began moving into Ukraine.
There had been a small number of PAC-3 interceptor missiles that were released by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, that were en route to Ukraine.
However, only 12 of these were immediately released after the call between Trump and Kellogg.
One Call Was a Game-Changer
Ten days later, Trump met in the Oval Office with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and announced his $10 billion military aid package.
Additionally, he proposed 100 percent secondary trade tariffs on Russia and any country that continued to buy gas and oil from Moscow. This entire chain of events began with the phone call from Sikorski.
By the end of that week, a Patriot air-defence system and more interceptor missiles were already in Ukraine, after a deal that Washington struck with Germany.
Earlier this past week, Berlin announced an agreement with the US to donate another five batteries to Ukraine.
And the rest, as they say, will turn out to be history.
Ukraine may finally, almost three and a half years since the war began, find a way to “close the skies” over its country.
About the Author
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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22. Ukraine Just Bombed Russia's Top Electronic Warfare Factory
Ukraine Just Bombed Russia's Top Electronic Warfare Factory
nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Reuben Johnson · July 28, 2025
Key Points and Summary – In a significant strategic victory, Ukrainian drones appear to have struck deep inside Russia, badly damaging the Signal Radio Plant, a critical factory for military electronics.
-The plant, located 330 miles from Ukraine, is a leading producer of vital Russian electronic warfare (EW) and radar systems.
-The strikes reportedly hit workshops containing expensive, imported machinery that will now be “impossible to replace” due to Western sanctions.
-The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), in a rare admission of responsibility, confirmed the attack is part of a systematic campaign to degrade Russia’s military-industrial capacity.
Ukraine’s Drones Appear to Again Hit Deep Inside Russia
WARSAW, POLAND – Video footage posted on local Russian social media sites shows a Ukrainian drone striking a critical Russian defense industrial site this past weekend.
This factory is responsible for many of Moscow’s most vital defense electronics systems.
What We Know: Ukraine Strikes Again…
The company, known as the Signal Radio Plant, is located in the Stavropol region of Russia and is about 330 miles from Ukraine, demonstrating that the drone warriors in Kyiv continue to be able to hit targets progressively deeper inside Russia’s rear area.
The Signal plant is one of Russia’s leading producers of defense electronic systems, including radar, electronic warfare equipment for front-line aircraft, active jamming systems, remote weapon-control modules, systems for air defense batteries, and other radio-electronic equipment, said an unidentified Ukraine Security Service (SBU) official.
Among the more well-known products the facility manufactures in the electronic warfare category are systems such as Smalta, Gardenia, and Topol-E, which are used on both aircraft and ground vehicles.
“The SBU continues to systematically disable enemy [Russian] facilities working for the war against Ukraine,” the SBU source said. “Each such attack stops production processes and reduces the enemy’s military potential. This work will continue.”
While Ukraine’s cities have been suffering almost constant Russian bombardment, the Ukrainian military has instead concentrated its drone attacks on Russian military targets.
The statement by the SBU is unusual in that Ukraine’s military usually does not claim responsibility for these attacks or offer any other kind of commentary.
Details of the Signal Plant
The attack on the Signal radio plant took place overnight Friday, according to a source in the SBU, which was picked up and reported by the Kyiv Independent.
An official from the SBU told the Reuters news agency that there were two separate facilities at the Signal plant, which were severely damaged in this attack.
The Dnipro OSINT project published images and identified at least three impact sites: two of those strikes were executed using Ukrainian-made An-196 Liutyi drones. In contrast, the third drone used in the attack is unidentified, although its fuselage resembles that of a Shahed-type UAV produced in Ukraine.
The strikes hit the roofs of the plant’s administrative and production buildings, with one impacting the facade of the main administrative facility.
The Kyiv paper also revealed details about the sections of the plant that were damaged and why they were targeted.
According to their sources, the drone attack hit one section that houses expensive imported equipment used in production processes, including computer numerical control machines.
A second drone strike hit another building, which was the central workshop for electronic devices.
The entire facility is sanctioned by Japan, in addition to the EU and the US, which may make purchasing replacement hardware for the equipment destroyed in the attack impossible.
Another pro-Ukraine Telegram channel posted that “the Signal facility includes 7 production workshops, a testing center, and 2 design bureaus.”
Founded in 1971, the Signal plant remains one of the largest defense enterprises in the North-Caucasian Federal District.
It operates as one of the leading enterprises under the Corporation for Radio-Electronic Technology (KRET), which controls and administers many enterprises from the old Soviet-era Ministry of Radio Industry.
Another Case of Sanctions Evasion
The Signal Plant has been under sanctions since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
These sanctions affect it disproportionally because of all the defense enterprises in Russia, it “was probably one of the most dependent on imported foreign components,” said a Ukrainian defense electronics executive who had worked with the plant in the past.
“This company was also utilizing numerous examples of foreign-made machinery and production systems,” he continued. “Those that were destroyed in this attack will be impossible to replace since their import into Russia is now embargoed as well. Imagine what the US military would do if one of Raytheon’s major suppliers was bombed and put out of commission and there was no way to replace that production capacity.”
Sources who spoke to National Security Journal pointed out that the Signal plant had continued to operate for the past three years by acquiring foreign-sourced components in violation of U.S. sanctions regimes.
The company, like so many other Russian enterprises, has found ways to bypass embargoes on the importation of Western components.
Signal has also been involved in identifying and purchasing Chinese electronics to replace other foreign components it still could not acquire illegally.
“As the war continues on, more and more Russian defense sites are becoming dependent on sourcing what they need from China in order to maintain production,” said the Ukrainian defense electronics executive.
About the Author
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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23. Mine Warfare and the Second Chimurenga in Zimbabwe
Excertps:
Mine warfare was used as an operational tactic during the Second Chimurenga. It was intended to multiply the workforce and level of violence against the backdrop of a lean Rhodesian military. Minefields were set to surveil and impede nationalist movements across the borders. The Rhodesian military turned to landmines because they were cheap to manufacture, and South Africa partly bankrolled their procurement.
Nationalist forces sparingly used landmines, particularly the ATs, but did not construct minefields. They also did not manufacture landmines; they relied on military aid packages from external sponsors like Russia. Furthermore, nationalists used to breach the Rhodesian minefields, capture and repurpose the landmines. Mine warfare highly impacted the Rhodesian military, by damaging vehicles, slowing operational tempo, ensnaring the military units in their minefields and at times, committing fratricide.
As a tactic, mine warfare could not be decisive. The RF failed to compel the nationalist to abandon their rebellions. Consequently, the RF could not manage to stay in power. For nationalists, mine warfare was buttressed by guerrilla tactics, international solidarity, and diplomacy to meet the objective of majority rule. Nevertheless, the Second Chimurenga gives suggestions on political developments and counterinsurgency doctrine.
Political developments must be evaluated to determine what can be pursued militarily. On political developments that require military intervention, military units must think through the last step before taking on the first one. They then need to apply the right type of force and the sequencing of the workforce to avoid defeat. Mine warfare and a limited workforce could not provide the right type of force for the Rhodesian military. In case of limited knowledge about opponents and terrain, military units need to scale down expectations as insurgents are capable of coming up with surprises.
Mine Warfare and the Second Chimurenga in Zimbabwe
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/07/28/mine-warfare-second-chimurenga-zimbabwe/
by Fradreck J. Mujuru
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07.28.2025 at 06:00am
Introduction
The Second Chimurenga (1964 – 1980) was a protracted armed conflict that happened in Rhodesia. It was between the Rhodesian Front (RF) and two nationalist forces, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA). ZANLA was a military wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and ZIPRA of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) political parties.
Conceptually, the Second Chimurenga can be characterized as a small war for various reasons. One of the reasons is that the RF, unlike the nationalists, had a regular army capable of providing security across the country. The Second Chimurenga highlighted that wars, including small wars, have a political motive. And the RF used war as an instrument of state security policy.
The RF Foreign Minister, P.K. van der Byl, claimed that the Second Chimurenga was to suppress black terrorists and white-skinned communists. His bold expression and labelling nationalists as terrorists and the white-skinned people who supported the nationalists as communists characterized the existence of a small war. This was a kind of moral force attack, where the minister unmistakably tried to prove the RF’s might, authority, and legitimacy.
Contrastingly, one of the nationalist military wings, ZANLA, claimed that its objective of attacking the RF was to seize power by means of destruction of the racist political-military machine and its replacement by the people in arms to change the existing economic and social order. ZANLA refused to cooperate with the RF without majority rule. Therefore, it started to attack the Rhodesian army, the white minority population, and their infrastructure without any declaration of war.
ZANLA and ZIPRA, although they later combined forces, had some similarities and differences. On the theory of attack, ZANLA, which was trained by the Chinese, used Maoist or guerrilla tactics. ZANLA forces knew their terrain well and could easily conceal their presence and identity. They usually avoided direct contact with the Rhodesian military since they used light weapons. ZANLA had a flexible concentration and dispersion capacity on the battlefield.
ZIPRA forces had similar tactics. They avoided the Rhodesian security forces for various reasons. For example, under Rhodesian law, activities of nationalist forces were acts of terrorism, hence illegal. ZIPRA forces were trained by the Soviets and other Eastern European countries. On attack, ZIPRA was partly capable of engaging in conventional attacks, using the Rhodesian captured weapons. It also used weapons donated by Russia and other Eastern Europeans that were left from World War II.
To provide context of the conflict, Britain, which had annexed Southern Rhodesia in 1922, gave RF self-governance status as its colony. It then directed RF to allow majority rule in Southern Rhodesia. The RF rejected the directive and chose to dissociate from Britain through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965. Britain considered RF rogue and reported it to the United Nations. The United Nations declared RF an illegal regime and a threat to international peace and security. Hence, the international society was supposed not to recognize it. The United Nations further enacted mandatory economic sanctions on RF.
De jure, Rhodesia functioned as an unrecognized state. This was because, under the prevailing norms, Britain, as a colonial power, had the right to grant independence to Rhodesia. The lack of recognition of Rhodesia by the international community deprives it of the legal personality and legitimacy of statehood. Nevertheless, recognition of the government proved not to be the only precondition for Rhodesia to be seen as a state.
De facto, Rhodesia continued to function. It had a government, fixed territory, and a population. Rhodesia freed itself from colonial Britain and showed a probability of permanency. This challenged the international legal personality and statehood that were fixed to recognition. Rather, recognition became a consequence of the reality of the existence of Rhodesia. The de facto understanding of Rhodesia as a state led to the Second Chimurenga being viewed as a civil war. Nevertheless, some push back on the notion of civil war, saying that a colonial resistance by natives cannot be equated with civil war.
The RF had a lean military and a small defense budget. Since 1965, it has been internationally isolated, unrecognized, under sanctions, and without any military pacts except unofficial collaborations with South Africa and the Portuguese regime in Mozambique. As a result, the military was unable to counter the growing number, hostility, and attacks of nationalist forces.
By the early 1970s, the Rhodesian military developed mine warfare as a robust tactic to counter nationalist forces. This study argues that mine warfare did not help in suppressing the nationalist uprising and keeping the RF in power. Furthermore, it articulates how mine warfare was pursued, including its effectiveness and the actors involved, as part of a small war discourse.
Mine warfare
War demands that opponents’ military units equip themselves with the inventions of art and science. Inventions like landmines increase the chances of compelling and rendering the opponent powerless. A landmine is a munition designed to be placed under, on, or near the ground or the surface. It is exploded by the presence, proximity, or contact of a person or vehicle. Landmines are generally categorized into Anti-personnel (AP) and Anti-Tank or Anti-Vehicular (AT) mines.
ATs are bigger in size and filled with more explosives than APs. Their purpose is to immobilize heavy and armored vehicles, including injuring and killing the occupants. APs are small, usually between 60 – 140mm in diameter, and are typically victim-operated. However, some can be remotely commanded or triggered due to the passage of time. In an attack, landmines rely on the effect of the contained explosive to injure or kill victims.
For example, blast APs generate lots of toxic gases and energy that act as demolition power. After detonation, the gases would rise and spread in the air with very high velocity, temperature, and concentration, choking, injuring, and killing people. Other types of landmines, like fragmentation APs, use their explosive content to drive metal fragments into the victims. They are usually triggered through trip wires. Fragmentation APs can kill and injure several victims at once.
Landmines can be tactically employed in huge quantities and patterns across an area to create a minefield. The invention, modernization, and tactical use of landmines are explicit signs that the advancements in civilizations have nothing practical to alter the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the idea of war. Instead, the lethality and indiscriminatory nature of landmines prove that war has no logical limit to the application of force and violence.
The totality of violence generated by landmines as instruments of war gives a perspective that wars do not genuinely follow legal and moral standards. Any legal and moral observance arguably may likely result in the worst mistakes or logical absurdities that the opponent can capitalize on. This could be the logic why military units sidestep international law, norms and morals to act with unlimited decisive violence.
Minefields in Rhodesia
Minefields in Rhodesia were established by the Rhodesian military during the Second Chimurenga. ZANLA and ZIPRA used landmines, especially ATs, on a small scale and did not construct minefields. The Rhodesian military resorted to mine warfare for a number of reasons. It had had a workforce shortage. Despite having superior weapons, the growing number of nationalist forces was threatening Rhodesian military effectiveness. And the Rhodesian military resorted to landmines to multiply its workforce and level of violence.
Landmines were used to guard the borders of Rhodesia, particularly at the northern and eastern sides, to impede the communication channels of nationalist forces. ZANLA and ZIPRA used to infiltrate the borders, together with war supplies, from their bases in Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. Furthermore, the Rhodesian military used landmines because they were generally cheap to procure and manufacture. Partly, the military relied on South Africa to bankroll their procurement.
The construction of minefields was under the Rhodesian Engineering Corps (RhE). The prototype was imported from the Israeli Defense Forces – the blue line minefield, which was at the border of Israel and Lebanon. In a personal interview with an 81-year-old former sergeant of the RhE in April 2024, who led the initial minelaying in Rhodesia, the minefields increasingly differed with time and place. One RhE unit could not breach another unit’s minefield.
According to the former sergeant interviewee, the minefields in Rhodesia were constructed in six different operations: Hurricane (1972), Thrasher (1976), Repulse (1976), Tangent (1977), Grapple (1977), and Splinter (1978). The first five operations were along the northern and eastern borders, and only Operation Splinter was inland and to the south. The planning, monitoring, and advising of minefields was under the Mine Warfare Committee, also known as the Geisha Committee.
Minefields provided obstacles that molded particular terrains in Rhodesia. They guaranteed the control and retention of certain areas from nationalist forces. Minefields were also used to concentrate and track nationalist forces to designated areas, where the Rhodesian military would capture or shoot them. This entails that minefields were used as free firing zones and no-go areas that impede nationalists from crossing the border. The establishment of minefields depopulated borderlands by moving people into protected camps.
During the Second Chimurenga, the Rhodesian military had a close relationship with the South African Defense Forces, to the extent of collaborating in the South African Defense industry. The South African defense industry included private actors operating under the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. One of the companies, Denel Limited, is credited with designing and manufacturing two types of APs – the R2M1 and the R2M2. These landmines were widely used during the Second Chimurenga.
Later, the Rhodesian military successfully produced two main APs: the RAP1, which was nicknamed the carrot, and the RAP2, nicknamed Adams Grenade. It also developed claymores and ploughshares. RAP1 and RAP2 were considered dangerous to manufacture, handle, and deploy. And after a series of accidents and fatalities, their production was stopped in 1977. The Rhodesian army then relied on South Africa to supply landmines until the end of the war.
There are signs that minefields in Rhodesia were established following the Geneva Conventions and Protocols on the engagement in armed conflicts. One such sign was on the minefields being a “cordon sanitaire.” A cordon sanitaire is a military barrier system that includes fencing and signage to restrict access. Generally, if the Convention on the engagement in armed conflict is not followed, the military commanders of any war are charged with war crimes.
Nevertheless, there are also signs and events that show that mine warfare in Rhodesia failed to follow international standards. For example, according to the former sergeant of RhE interviewee, the Rhodesian army and the Geisha Committee used to protest against the erection of fences and the putting up of signs. They attributed it to the advertisement of minefields, which was against their purpose and nature to work in concealment. The Deka minefield was one of the proofs of the protests, with no perimeter fence and signs.
Not putting perimeter fences and warning signs at the Deka minefield proved that during a war, there is no respect for treaties, laws, and other positive prevailing norms. The main objective was to compel and destroy the nationalists at any cost. It is arguably an unwritten rule in warfare that, at every opportunity, opponents have to be conquered. If met with a shrewd opponent, an omission to such a totality understanding can never be rectified.
Similar to other wars, the Second Chimurenga was a theatre of contingencies. When some plans or approaches failed to inspire the goal of the war to be met, they were quickly substituted with others. For example, according to the 81-year-old former sergeant, all minefields were supposed to follow the international border. However, there were exceptions when a rugged terrain would make it impossible. Thus, a new route would be proposed.
It was the duty of the Rhodesian military high command to assess the situation before approving the new route of the minefields. Afterwards, the proposal would then be forwarded to the parliament through the Engineer Directorate to the Army Commander of the Combined Operations (COMOPS). The inputs from the parliament were necessary because the military proposal required political input in case the minefield route may encroach on private land and property, as well as cultural sites like graveyards and national parks. According to the former sergeant interviewee, many proposals did not pass through parliament due to the advertence pressure brought by war.
Mine warfare in Rhodesia showed that it required support from diverse actors. It also highlighted the need for constant planning, the understanding of geography, and its resultant impacts on war. For example, the clearance and fencing of land before minefields were done by the North Eastern Border Game Fence (NEBGF), commonly called the Fly Men. The NEBGF was a civilian unit specialized in tsetse fly control.
Geographically, along the northeastern border of Rhodesia, in areas like Mukumbura, tsetse fly is an epidemic due to the presence of valleys, high temperatures, a large number of game animals and livestock. Tsetse feeds on blood. Therefore, the NEBGF put fences along the borders to limit the migration of humans and animals. This was a mechanism to depopulate the area and suffocate the reproduction of tsetse flies as they would find no blood to feed on.
The erection of fences by the NEBGF became strategic and a prerequisite for establishing minefields. According to the former RhE sergeant, they formed a symbiotic association with NEBGF because they wanted to be provided with food, especially bush meat, which only the unit has the legal right to kill. In return, the NEBGF used to get security cover from the Protection Unit, which was a division of the Rhodesian army that specialized in counter-terrorism.
According to the 81-year-old former sergeant, they started laying the Portuguese M969, then the South African R2M1 and R2M2. The Rhodesian-made RAP1 and RAP2 followed, and later the Italian VS50. Landmines were employed as they were procured. Other mines that were later used were MAPS and ploughshares. The interviewee claimed that sappers, people who lay mines, used to have a daily target of laying 3,000 mines per square kilometer per day.
A cordon sanitaire had three rows (A, B, and C). The rows were equidistant and ran parallel, covering a width of 25 meters. As a result of wear and tear and breaches by the nationalist forces, the Rhodesian military was forced to add extra minefield belts, inland of the cordon sanitaire. Henceforth, a ploughshare minefield was established using directional fragmentation ploughshares and was protected by the sub-surface APs like MAPS.
Directional fragmentation ploughshares are a variant of AP fragmentation designed to direct the main explosive force outwards on detonation. They are generally used in front of defensive positions, and are command-detonated in the presence of human waves to cause frontal assaults. The ploughshare minefield had three rows, a width of 400 meters, an average of 100 ploughshares, and 300 sub-surface APs per square kilometer frontage.
In some areas, like Gomo, close to Mukumbura, the Rhodesian military put a third belt called the reinforced ploughshare minefield. It comprised directional fragmentation ploughshares mixed with sub-surface mines like the R2M2. The minefield had four rows with a width of 400 meters. Nevertheless, the former sergeant interviewee had a different view. He recalled reinforced minefields having three rows and the same density of mines with ploughshare minefields, except in a few cases.
The Rhodesian military faced challenges in using mine warfare as a military tactic. For example, the 81-year-old interviewee claimed that some sub-surface landmines were left exposed due to uncleared land, rugged terrain, fatigue, inexperience and a workforce shortage. In 1974, along the Musengezi-Mukumbura minefield, the former sergeant claimed that a whole square kilometer could not be armed and concealed due to errors from the new sappers. It was discovered after a month.
One of the minefield belts, the Musengezi, Mukumbura, Nyamapanda to Rwenya, had electronic and alarm systems. Their installation was done by the Rhodesian Corps of the Signals (Rh Sigs). The first electronic system was the YEAL. However, it was deemed too sensitive to be triggered by wind and animals. It was replaced by the DTR 78, which only covered 50 of the 359 kilometers of the minefield. The electronic system relied on the workforce for rapid response, which the Rhodesian army lacked. This caused it to be abandoned in 1975.
Mine warfare frustrated and brought violence to the Rhodesian army and opponents alike. The Rhodesian military admitted that it was exacting a toll on its vehicles and operations. In 1974, 57 civilians were killed; 34 were natives, and the remainder were white. By 1980, there were 2,405 incidents recorded, some involving vehicles triggering nationalists emplaced landmines, and all caused 632 deaths and 4,410 injuries.
Landmines caused problems than their warfare promise. According to the former sergeant, the Rhodesian military was ensnared in its minefield several times and suffered fratricide. This limited mobility and operational tempo against a highly mobile nationalist force. Furthermore, minefields required constant maintenance from breaches by nationalists or other environmental disturbances.
The former sergeant interviewee said that maintaining a minefield was a dreadful and perilous task that could not be compared to initial minelaying. A record of over 30 deaths of sappers during the minefield maintenance phase was recorded. For the injured, 97 sappers had amputations, and 96 lost either eyes, ears, fingers, or hands.
Due to increased fatalities, the former sergeant halted minefield maintenance. One of the Rhodesian Air Special Services officers argued that mine warfare was a waste of time and resources as a military strategy. This view is supportable because mine warfare failed to compel nationalists to abandon their rebellions, and it could not help the RF to stay in power.
It took an assortment of isolated mine warfare, guerrilla tactics, and diplomacy for the nationalists to achieve their goal of majority rule. Mine warfare failed to be decisive for both conflicting parties in Rhodesia. After the Second Chimurenga, people continue to face danger from the impacts of landmine remnants in Zimbabwe.
Conclusion
Mine warfare was used as an operational tactic during the Second Chimurenga. It was intended to multiply the workforce and level of violence against the backdrop of a lean Rhodesian military. Minefields were set to surveil and impede nationalist movements across the borders. The Rhodesian military turned to landmines because they were cheap to manufacture, and South Africa partly bankrolled their procurement.
Nationalist forces sparingly used landmines, particularly the ATs, but did not construct minefields. They also did not manufacture landmines; they relied on military aid packages from external sponsors like Russia. Furthermore, nationalists used to breach the Rhodesian minefields, capture and repurpose the landmines. Mine warfare highly impacted the Rhodesian military, by damaging vehicles, slowing operational tempo, ensnaring the military units in their minefields and at times, committing fratricide.
As a tactic, mine warfare could not be decisive. The RF failed to compel the nationalist to abandon their rebellions. Consequently, the RF could not manage to stay in power. For nationalists, mine warfare was buttressed by guerrilla tactics, international solidarity, and diplomacy to meet the objective of majority rule. Nevertheless, the Second Chimurenga gives suggestions on political developments and counterinsurgency doctrine.
Political developments must be evaluated to determine what can be pursued militarily. On political developments that require military intervention, military units must think through the last step before taking on the first one. They then need to apply the right type of force and the sequencing of the workforce to avoid defeat. Mine warfare and a limited workforce could not provide the right type of force for the Rhodesian military. In case of limited knowledge about opponents and terrain, military units need to scale down expectations as insurgents are capable of coming up with surprises.
Tags: chimurenga, decolonization, guerrilla tactics, Landmines, Rhodesia, small wars
About The Author
- Fradreck J. Mujuru
- Fradreck J. Mujuru is a Ph.D. Scholar of international security, examining the concept of security through the objects of landmines. Other areas of interest are African Studies, Cognition, Politics and Psychology, International Law and Foreign Policy.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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