Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts."

– C.S. Lewis

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's'opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

– Oscar Wilde

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

– Rudyard Kipling

1. The Pentagon’s Policy Guy Is All In On China

2. Heritage Foundation Establishes Defense Advisory Panel with 13 Retired Officers from Five Military Branches

3. Trump, Losing Patience With Putin, Says He Will Shorten Deadline to End Ukraine War

4. ‘Stop Them Cold’: Gen. Petraeus Issues Stark Warning on Path to Ukraine Peace

5. Trump’s New Timeline for Putin

6. An Inside Look at Putin’s Brutal, Bloody Mercenaries from a War Crimes Expert

7. No US stopover for Taiwanese leader could ease path to Xi-Trump meeting this year

8. Trump's reported snub of Taiwan president spurs concerns over deference to China

9. The U.S. Fired 25% of Its Best Missile Interceptors in Just 12 Days. It Will Take a Decade to Replace Them.

10. Preparing for Tomorrow’s Wars: Resilience, Resistance in the 21st Century

11. UAV Update – Recent News about Drones

12. Pentagon Shifting $200 Million to Border Wall Project in Arizona

13. Pentagon unit seeks Ukraine-like conditions for drone testing

14. Did the West Provoke Putin’s War on Ukraine?

15. Trump Administration Weakens "Aggressive" Export Controls and Threatens National Security

16. The Real National Security Betrayal Isn’t Who Leaves—It’s What Gets Dismantled

17. ‘Own the story’: China urged to control narrative and engage Asia to counteract the West

18. Eastern Stars Rising: The Rise of China’s Commercial Space Industry

19. Netanyahu Is Spoiling Trump’s Chance for Peace – But America Can Still Use Its Leverage to End the War in Gaza

20. Actions create consequences – “cracked consensus” a warning by Dr. Cynthia Watson

21. 'Fort Bragg Has a Lot of Secrets. It's Its Own Little Cartel'

22. Chinese research ship detected off Alaskan coast, Coast Guard says

23. NASA Unveils Nuclear Fuel Stronger Than Plutonium and Scientists Say “We’re Entering a New Age of Space Dominance”

1. The Pentagon’s Policy Guy Is All In On China

This is the intellectual center of gravity at the Pentagon and in our national security community and potentially a future SECDEF..

Excertps:

More recently, Colby has come to the view that to meet the supreme challenge of China, other priorities will have to be sacrificed.

“We see with Colby’s recent comments a shift towards a military almost entirely focused on one region and one opponent,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told us. “And the question is: What drove that change? The only thing that seems to have changed is the political zeitgeist within the Republican Party.”

During an October speech at Dartmouth, Colby argued that the threat from Beijing was paramount—and that the U.S. was ill-equipped to deal with it. The U.S., he told the audience, faces “the possibility of a World War III in the coming years. We’re not prepared.” America needs “to prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.”

...

Colby has earned fans in the MAGA movement for his efforts to push U.S. allies to spend more on their own defense. His emphasis on China has won praise from within the administration and from key outside advisers including Steve Bannon. Supporters tout him as a future secretary of defense or state. But he’s also made enemies among more traditionally hawkish Republicans, who fear that focusing on China will let Russian President Vladimir Putin off the hook. Those concerns were magnified when, at his confirmation hearings, he repeatedly refused to say Putin had attacked Ukrain

The Pentagon’s Policy Guy Is All In On China

Elbridge Colby wants the U.S. military to pivot toward Asia, even if it means turning away from Europe and the Middle East.

By Nancy A. Youssef, Jonathan Lemire, and Missy Ryan

The Atlantic · by Nancy A. Youssef, Jonathan Lemire, Missy Ryan · July 28, 2025

Elbridge Colby believes that China is the only country on the planet that has the ambition, resources, and military might to knock the United States off its pedestal as the world’s leading superpower.

Most in President Donald Trump’s administration agree. But even by the standards of MAGA world, Colby is a divisive figure. And the Pentagon policy master’s prescription for how to counter China’s rise explains why. The only way to stop Beijing’s bid for global dominance, he has argued, is for the U.S. to pour everything it can into securing the western Pacific, even if doing so comes at the expense of combating Russia or maintaining U.S. influence in the Middle East.

That is, to remain superpowerful, the U.S. may need to temporarily stop superpowering.

Colby didn’t always think this way. During Trump’s first term, he wrote a strategy document that advocated continuing to try to do it all, as superpowers do. But his attitude has evolved, and along the way, he has amped up the ire among his enemies—including fellow Republicans and U.S. allies abroad.

Colby’s worldview was at the root of U.S. indecision this summer over whether to provide Ukraine with badly needed weapons. When the U.S. military canceled an expected shipment late last month, catching even the White House off guard, the blame—and the credit—went to Colby.

Read: The Real Trouble With America’s Flip-Flop on Ukrainian Weapons

It was an unlikely moment in the spotlight for a policy wonk whose stances had, until recently, been little-noticed beyond the world of Beltway think tanks. Some on the right, including hawkish GOP senators, seized upon the decision as evidence that Colby should be ousted, and began pushing the White House to act. Others in the MAGA movement cheered the suspension—Tucker Carlson is a longtime Colby fan—and described the move as evidence of a truly “America First” national-security strategy.

Both wings of the movement were ultimately disappointed: Within days of the pause, Trump not only reversed it, he went a step further in providing new support to Kyiv. And far from being fired, Colby appears secure in his position at the Pentagon, his influence undiminished.

In some ways, Colby personifies an ongoing shift within the Republican Party. Trump has moved away from positioning the U.S. as defender of the post–Cold War order and toward preserving its resources for threats that directly affect the U.S. homeland—with China at the top of the list.

During Trump’s first term, Colby led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. The document concluded that the U.S. must be prepared to confront a wide range of threats beyond China, including from Russia, and also must be able to “counter rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran, defeat terrorist threats to the United States, and consolidate our gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.”

More recently, Colby has come to the view that to meet the supreme challenge of China, other priorities will have to be sacrificed.

“We see with Colby’s recent comments a shift towards a military almost entirely focused on one region and one opponent,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told us. “And the question is: What drove that change? The only thing that seems to have changed is the political zeitgeist within the Republican Party.”

During an October speech at Dartmouth, Colby argued that the threat from Beijing was paramount—and that the U.S. was ill-equipped to deal with it. The U.S., he told the audience, faces “the possibility of a World War III in the coming years. We’re not prepared.” America needs “to prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.”

The 45-year-old Yale and Harvard graduate—who goes by “Bridge,” speaks animatedly, and is known for his thick head of blond hair—comes to the role of Pentagon undersecretary with a pedigree as a consummate Washington institutionalist and foreign-policy intellectual. The grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, he spent part of his childhood in Japan and much of his adulthood cycling between government and think tanks, at times working across bipartisan lines on issues including nuclear-weapons policy and the Middle East. He wasn’t always a Trump supporter—but was never a Never Trumper. Now he has gone all in for Trump and the president’s norm-breaking approach to world affairs.

Over the past decade, China has developed a bigger navy, launched more sophisticated cyber warfare and missile systems, and expanded its global footprint, all while the U.S. has been divided over how to stop its advances. Under Colby’s strategy, the U.S. can both focus on China and deploy troops to protect the homeland. But it likely can’t do those missions and also sustain air-defense systems and naval ships in the Middle East, not to mention tens of thousands of troops in Europe. Those regions need to do more for themselves, Colby has said.

Since taking over the Pentagon’s No. 3 position in April, he has argued that support for allies such as Israel and Ukraine risks coming at the expense of U.S. interests in Asia. He has proposed moving Pentagon funding away from the Army toward the services that would spearhead the fight against Beijing—the Navy and the Air Force. That suggestion has forced the Army to scramble to prove its continued relevance. Colby advocates withdrawing forces from Europe and redistributing them around the Asia-Pacific region. The nation’s main geopolitical goal, he believes, should be deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan—and defending the island if deterrence fails.

His critics have been unnevered by some of his early moves. After taking the post, Colby told his British counterparts that the Royal Navy should focus on threats from Russia and leave the U.S. Navy to lead in the western Pacific, defense officials told us. Colby also helped trigger a review of former President Joe Biden’s multibillion-dollar U.S.-U.K.-Australia submarine pact, out of concern that the Australians might not deploy U.S.-provided submarines during a U.S.-led campaign on Chinese forces in the event of an assault on Taiwan. (Lawmakers from both parties have urged the Pentagon to go ahead with the deal.)

Detractors charge that Colby wants to jettison an international-security approach that has held for the past 80 years and replace it with an overly simplistic alternative.

“His belief is that we can only accomplish one thing at a time and that we can’t maintain troops or defensive positions worldwide,” one Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told us. “That is counter to what most national-security experts believe and what the U.S. has done since World War II.”

Threats from China and Russia are too intertwined to have a strategy for one nation but not the other, European officials told us. Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s push in the South China Sea reflect their shared territorial ambitions. Allied diplomats bristle at the idea that they should leave such a massive part of the world to the Americans when Europe has its own economic and security interests in Asia that must be defended.

“We agree on the basic principle that we in Europe should lead our security. We also feel we have a role in the Asia-Pacific,” one European official told us.

Although Colby has not spoken extensively in public since taking up his new post, he has outlined parts of his approach on social media. Earlier this month, after the president’s announcement that aid to Ukraine would go ahead, Colby wrote: “Central to President Trump’s common sense, America First message is that our alliances have to be fair and equitable for them to be sustainable. This is eminently reasonable but was treated for many years as heresy.”

Colby narrowly secured the undersecretary job on a largely party-line confirmation vote. Opposition from within the GOP, such as it was, came from those who questioned whether he would be tough on other adversaries aside from China. Colby was at pains to insist he could be. He had previously said that if Iran obtained nuclear arms, the U.S. could contain it, but in his hearings he insisted that Washington must avoid that possibility at all costs. In response to questioning from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, he said using American tankers and bombers to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities were options that “I would raise for the consideration of the secretary and ultimately the president.”

Colby may not be well known among the general public, but he is considered highly influential within the Pentagon. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth focuses on his TV appearances and rooting out symptoms of a “woke” military, Colby has been working quietly in the background.

Colby has earned fans in the MAGA movement for his efforts to push U.S. allies to spend more on their own defense. His emphasis on China has won praise from within the administration and from key outside advisers including Steve Bannon. Supporters tout him as a future secretary of defense or state. But he’s also made enemies among more traditionally hawkish Republicans, who fear that focusing on China will let Russian President Vladimir Putin off the hook. Those concerns were magnified when, at his confirmation hearings, he repeatedly refused to say Putin had attacked Ukraine.

The suspension of military aid to Kyiv came at a particularly inopportune moment: just as a growing number of senators from both parties had signed onto a bill calling for more sanctions on Russia, reflecting their frustration with Moscow’s continued attacks on Ukraine.

Colby had in previous months led the development of a memorandum evaluating Ukrainian weapons requests and how they lined up (or didn’t) with America’s own needs. Officials said the framework, which was presented to Hegseth and other senior officials, was “outcome agnostic” and contained no recommendation to pause weapons shipments to Ukraine. But Colby’s critics blamed his memo for influencing the decision to suspend aid, noting that though it didn’t explicitly state a position, it made clear that providing Ukraine more weapons could put a strain on missions elsewhere, a position Hegseth ultimately adopted.

Read: When Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Tenure Started Going Sideways

Senator Mitch McConnell, the former majority leader, who opposed Colby’s confirmation, complained to the White House about the pause. Other Republicans, including Cotton, have also expressed unhappiness, an administration official and another White House aide told us. “The strategic incoherence of underfunding our military and restricting lethal assistance to partners like Ukraine is measured in the avoidable erosion of American credibility with allies and the mounting deaths of innocents,” McConnell said in a statement at the time of the pause.

Since reversing the move, Trump has adopted a tougher approach to Russia—for now. No evidence suggests that Trump held Colby responsible for temporarily suspending the aid, and Colby’s allies in the administration were quick to absolve him of blame.

Although Colby declined to speak to us for this story, multiple administration allies and GOP senators sent us unsolicited quotes of support once we reached out to the White House for comment. “President Trump has an extremely knowledgeable and fiercely loyal advisor in Elbridge Colby,” Vice President J. D. Vance, who introduced Colby at his confirmation hearing, told us in a statement. “The commitment Bridge has demonstrated to President Trump’s foreign policy goals is unmatched throughout this administration, and we are incredibly grateful to have him as a part of our national security team.”

Christopher Landau, Marco Rubio’s deputy at the State Department, called Colby “a creative thinker in fields that haven’t seen a lot of creative thinking in decades.”

A White House official suggested that the flap over the Ukraine memo was shrugged off internally and was instead simply evidence of Colby—“a consummate policy guy,” the official told us—presenting a series of options in line with Trump’s views.

Trump-administration officials working on Asia are sometimes divided into three categories: “primacists,” who believe that the U.S. must lead the global response to threats around the world, a onetime Colby position; “restrainers,” who want a foreign policy based primarily on U.S. economic interests; and “prioritizers,” which Colby is frequently described as personifying. Prioritizers want Washington to focus above all on threats from China, and move away from concerns over Russia and Iran.

Those who have worked with Colby—who bears the name of his great-grandfather, an Army officer who served in China—describe his views as an amalgamation of the three approaches. He is not an isolationist, they say, but rather a proponent of a precise use of American assets with the goal of defending its economic and military interests across Asia. He believes that the U.S., more than any other nation, should lead the world effort to combat threats from China, which he sees as singular.

Colby’s defenders say that Trump likewise encapsulates all three tendencies, advocating the use of force in discreet ways and leveraging U.S. influence to get allies to take up more of the shared defense burden.

Colby’s advocacy of moving away from legacy American missions in the Middle East and Europe has an impact on U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacific region, opponents argue. They note that if the U.S. doesn’t support Ukraine and allows Russia to prevail, it will diminish American credibility with allies like Japan and South Korea, which are key to combating threats from China.

Read: Why China Isn’t a Bigger Player in the Middle East

Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, where Colby worked between Trump terms, told us there is broad agreement across the administration that the United States must devote greater resources to Asia and do more to prioritize the threat posed by China’s military rise.

But some—whom he put in the “Asia only” camp—would be more willing to accept risk or trade-offs in other areas, such as the Middle East and Europe. Those people, Fontaine told us, “seem to dismiss Europe as a distraction from the real game, which is in the Indo-Pacific.”

Of course, there may be another way to contain China while maintaining American commitments elsewhere. Colby’s approach, the Hudson Institute’s Clark explained, presumes that the U.S. can halt Beijing’s advances only through a large-scale deployment to the western Pacific. But less military power, he told us, could be equally effective: “The U.S. just has to be smarter about how it deploys and orchestrates its power.”

The Atlantic · by Nancy A. Youssef, Jonathan Lemire, Missy Ryan · July 28, 2025

2. Heritage Foundation Establishes Defense Advisory Panel with 13 Retired Officers from Five Military Branches

The list of the 13 is below and can be downloaded at this link: https://static.heritage.org/-2025/DefenseAdvisoryPanel.pdf

I am not familiar with most of the names on the list though one is my old battalion commander and another I worked indirectly for when I was the Chief of SF officer assignments.

Heritage Foundation Establishes Defense Advisory Panel with 13 Retired Officers from Five Military Branches

heritage.org

WASHINGTON—Today, The Heritage Foundation announced the establishment of a Defense Advisory Panel (DAP) of thirteen retired General and Flag Officers to counsel the Allison Center for National Security.

The DAP’s members represent more than 440 years of uniformed military service, with representatives from five of the six branches of the U.S. Armed Forces— the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. Furthermore, its members have extensive experience in air defense artillery, armor, aviation, cavalry, infantry, intelligence, mobility, ordnance, special operations, and surface warfare communities.

Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at Heritage, added:

“We are honored to have this impressive group of national security leaders join The Heritage Foundation as we seek to rebuild our military, build credible deterrence, and improve the lethality of our armed forces.”

Panel members will serve as authoritative advisors to the Allison Center as it publishes the eleventh edition of the Index of U.S. Military Strength. This flagship publication assesses the military’s ability to protect the homeland, defend U.S. interests, and deter and defeat its adversaries.

Heritage Director of the Allison Center for National Security Robert Greenway stated:

“The strength of the U.S. military will be immeasurably enhanced through the advice, insights, and subject-matter expertise of this incredibly accomplished group. The Allison Center will greatly benefit from their robust knowledge and wisdom, and we look forward to actively working with these incredible patriots.”

Learn more about Heritage’s defense priorities and policy recommendations here.

heritage.org

Defense Advisory Panel

he Defense Advisory Panel (DAP) serves as a resource for the The Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for National Security. The DAP’s members represent over 440 years of uniformed militaryservice and includes representatives from the U.S. Navy, U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Further, its members have extensive experience in the Surface Warfare, Aviation, Infantry, Mobility, Special Operations, Air Defense Artillery, Armor, Cavalry, Intelligence, and Ordnance communities.

Its members will serve as authoritative advisors to the Allison Center as it publishes the 11th edition of the Index of U.S. Military Strength. The Index is The Heritage Foundation’s flagship publication diagnostically assessing the U.S. military’s ability to protect our homeland, defend U.S. interests, and deter and defeat America’s adversaries.

BIOGRAPHIES

Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, USA (ret.)

Lieutenant General Boykin graduated from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He was one of the original members of the U.S. Army’s Delta Force. His final assignment was as the Commanding General, United States Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Lieutenant General Dennis D. Cavin, USA (ret.)

Lieutenant General Cavin received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from the University of Tennessee at Martin and a master’s degree in management from Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri. His final assignment was as the Commanding General U.S. Army Accessions Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

Vice Admiral William “Dean” Lee, U.S. Coast Guard (ret.)

Vice Admiral Lee graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Alabama and a master’s degree from George Washington University. His final assignment was as Commander, Atlantic Area.

Rear Admiral Victorino G. Mercado, USN (ret.)

Rear Admiral Mercado graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. He earned a master’s degree in systems technology in Joint Command, Control and Communications from the Naval Postgraduate School. His final assignment was as the Director, Maritime Operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Major General Joaquin Malavet, USMC (ret.)

Major General Malavet graduated from Pennsylvania State University and earned his Masters of Arts degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College

and a Masters of International Public Policy from The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. His final assignment was as the Director for Strategic Planning and Policy (J5 Directorate), U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Major General James S. Hartsell, USMC (ret.)

Major General Hartsell graduated from the University of South Alabama. His final assignment was as the as the Mobilization Assistant to the Commander, as J5 Strategic Planning & Policy Director, Chief of Staff, and the Director of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies at the U.S. Pacific Command.

Major General Richard Perraut, USAF (ret.)

Major General Perraut graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy. He holds a Masters of Science in Industry and Technology from Texas A&M University-Commerce and a Masters of Arts degree in National Security and Strategic Studies, Naval War College. His final assignment was as the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force, International Affairs, Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, D.C.

Major General John Deyermond, USA (ret.)

Major General Deyermond received his Bachelor of Science in Public Administration from the University of Nebraska and a Master’s in Management from Webster College, Saint Louis, Missouri. His final assignment was as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Logistics (G3/G4), Army Materiel Command (AMC).

Rear Admiral Pete Brown, U.S. Coast Guard (ret.)

Rear Admiral Brown graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. He completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Chemistry as well as a Juris Doctorate. His final military assignment was as the commanding officer of the 7th Coast Guard District in Miami, Florida.

Rear Admiral Donald P. Loren, USN (ret.)

Rear Admiral Loren graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. He has done additional graduate work at Old Dominion University among other institutions. His final assignment was as Deputy Director, Strategic Plans and Policy for Politco-Military Affairs on the Joint Staff.

Brigadier General Mitchell M. Zais, USA (ret.)

General Zais is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He also earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in Social Psychology and Organizational Behavior from the University of Washington. He was also awarded a Master of Arts degree in Military Operations and Planning from the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His final assignment was as the Pentagon‘s chief of conventional war plans.

Brigadier General Chris Petty, USA (ret.)

General Petty graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He has Masters Degrees from the U.S. Army War College and Colorado State University. His final assignment was at United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) where he served as the Deputy Director

of Operations, managing Ballistic Missile Defense, Information Operations, Intelligence and Reconnaissance Operations, and various contingency operations for the command.

Brigadier General Ernest C. Audino, USA (ret.)

General Audino graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He has a Masters of Law, Cum Laude, Vermont Law School, a Juris Doctorate, Vermont Law School, and

a Masters of National Security and Strategic Studies, U.S. National War College. His final assignment was as the Deputy Director of Operations for Headquarters, U.S. Army,

in the Pentagon.

3. Trump, Losing Patience With Putin, Says He Will Shorten Deadline to End Ukraine War

It is good that POTUS recognizes the problem (Putin) and is willing to change course.

Excerpts:

“We thought we had that settled numerous times,” he said, adding he was “very disappointed” with the Russian leader. “And then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city…bodies lying all over the street.”

He added that on several occasions he had what he thought were positive talks with Putin, only to see attacks on Ukraine intensify, sometimes only hours after the pair had spoken. “You know, this has happened on too many occasions, and I don’t like it,” Trump said. He declined to say that Putin was lying to him but said he was “not so interested in talking anymore” to him.

Trump, Losing Patience With Putin, Says He Will Shorten Deadline to End Ukraine War

‘We just don’t see any progress being made,’ U.S. president says

https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-losing-patience-with-putin-says-he-will-shorten-deadline-to-end-ukraine-war-ed19e302

By Max Colchester

Follow and Tarini Parti

Updated July 28, 2025 1:17 pm ET

‘Stop Them Cold’: Gen. Petraeus Issues Stark Warning on Path to Ukraine Peace

Only battlefield change can halt Russia’s war, Petraeus says, as Trump reiterates his “disappointment” with Putin and sets new ceasefire deadline of “about 10 or 12 days from today.”

by Alex Raufoglu | July 29, 2025, 8:24 am

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57137?utm

General David Petraeus, Former Commander of US Central Command, speaks at the Home Front Cares annual fundraising event on Nov. 4th, 2009 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (DoD Photo by USAF Staff Sgt. Bradley A. Lail)

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WASHINGTON DC – Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Monday that a ceasefire in Ukraine is unlikely until Western aid allows Kyiv to dramatically shift the battlefield dynamic.

His comments came as President Donald Trump announced a drastically shortened deadline for Russia to agree to a truce. Speaking at a Hudson Institute event in Washington DC, Petraeus, also a former CIA director, emphasized that Ukraine needs substantial assistance to make Russian President Vladimir Putin realize he cannot achieve further gains at an acceptable cost.

“I don’t foresee a ceasefire deal between Russia and Ukraine until the US, European and other Western countries provide so much assistance to Ukraine that they can change the dynamic on the battlefield,” said Petraeus, now a chairman of the KKR Global Institute.

He pointed to Putin’s high tolerance for casualties, noting Russia has sustained “one million killed and wounded,” with more than 500,000 unable to return to the front lines.

“That’s the kind of cost he’s been willing to bear. So you would have to do something very dramatic. You have to stop them cold on the battlefield,” he said.

Petraeus, reflecting on his own experiences writing condolence letters during his combat commands, expressed difficulty comprehending the scale of losses in Ukraine. He also suggested that Russian commanders, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late leader of the Wagner mercenary group, may have become “somewhat crazed” from witnessing so many deaths.

For Putin to consider a realistic settlement, Petraeus said, Ukraine must be able to “stop them cold, perhaps even push them back a bit.”

He dismissed Russia’s current demands – including the replacement of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the demilitarization of Ukraine, and a ban on NATO membership – as “obviously unacceptable to President Zelensky and really to the Ukrainian people.”

Meanwhile, President Trump on Monday dramatically tightened his deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine, reducing it to less than two weeks from the 50 days he initially announced.

Trump said he was “very disappointed” in Putin over the ongoing bombing of Ukrainian cities. “There’s no reason in waiting,” he told reporters, adding: “We just don’t see any progress being made.”

Earlier this month, Trump had stated that if Russia failed to agree to a ceasefire within 50 days, the US would impose secondary tariffs of up to 100 percent on goods from countries continuing to do business with Russia.

That timeline would have pushed a deal to around the end of August. But on Monday, he moved the goalposts, saying: “I’m going to make a new deadline of about 10 or 12 days from today.”

Despite previously stating, “I’ve spoken to President Putin a lot, I’ve gotten along with him very well,” Trump lamented that the Russian leader “goes out and starts launching rockets into some city, like Kyiv, and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever, you have bodies lying all over the street.”

Russia had already rejected the initial 50-day deadline as “unacceptable.”

Trump alluded to his frustration with continued Russian aggression even after talks.

“I’m not so interested in talking anymore,” Trump said of Putin, explaining that after seemingly productive conversations, “the following day, the Russians killed more Ukrainians.”

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.

5. Trump’s New Timeline for Putin

Trump’s New Timeline for Putin

The President seems to realize the Russian doesn’t want a cease-fire.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-cease-fire-keir-starmer-7cbce703?mod=hp_opin_pos_4

By The Editorial Board

July 28, 2025 5:36 pm ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin Photo: kremlin pool/epa/shutterstock/Shutterstock

Good news from Scotland on Monday, as President Trump said he’s now giving Vladimir Putin only another 10-12 days to reach a cease-fire with Ukraine. “We just don’t see any progress being made,” Mr. Trump said as he met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

No one can say Mr. Trump hasn’t been patient with the Russian dictator. His last offer was 50 days to make a deal or face sanctions, but Mr. Putin shows no sign of giving up his war aim of making Ukraine a de facto Russian colony.

Mr. Trump said he thought he had an agreement with the Russia leader more than once. “And then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city,” leaving “bodies lying all over the street,” he said.

The President said that in the absence of progress he’s likely to impose sanctions in the form of tariffs on Russia or “secondary” sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil and gas. He has a ready-made vehicle in the Senate bill sponsored by Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal for 500% secondary tariffs that would hit China and India especially hard.

Faced with this threat, Mr. Putin might announce again his desire for peace. But without a cease-fire, his promises are worthless.

Appeared in the July 29, 2025, print edition as 'Trump’s New Timeline for Putin'.

6. An Inside Look at Putin’s Brutal, Bloody Mercenaries from a War Crimes Expert

Excertps:

Ultimately, her book is not just about Russian criminality—it is also a critique of the West’s failure to act. Putin’s “war on the cheap,” built on hybrid warfare and plausible deniability, has long been visible to Washington and its closest allies. Yet Western leaders have often looked away, unwilling to confront the atrocities, sabotage, and subversion orchestrated by Wagner, Prigozhin, and Putin himself.

But consequences may come regardless of Western inaction. Back in the late 1980s, unprecedented domestic protests over the deaths of 15,000 Russian soldiers in its Afghan war presaged the downfall of the Soviet Union. The Ukraine war has claimed many multiples of that—250,000 dead and counting. Russia’s cities and economy are unprepared to absorb tens of thousands of returning, traumatized men. Many, including ex-convicts and addicts, may channel their trauma into violence and unrest. Economic strain will only worsen the reckoning.

Rondeaux’s message is clear: in Putin’s world, everyone is disposable. He may soon find that history won’t spare him either. ###

An Inside Look at Putin’s Brutal, Bloody Mercenaries from a War Crimes Expert

Candace Rondeaux’s “Putin’s Sledgehammer" chronicles the fortunes of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group

https://www.spytalk.co/p/an-inside-look-at-putins-brutal-bloody?utm

John Sipher

Jul 29, 2025

If and when Vladimir Putin falls from power, scholars will examine several key events for signs of his regime’s decline. Chief among them will be the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But the most serious challenge to his rule since 1999, beside the 2012 protests against the rigged election that returned him to the presidency, was the Wagner Group’s June 24, 2023, uprising and march on Moscow. It exposed deep vulnerabilities in Putin’s power structure and foreshadowed future threats from within. When that reckoning comes, Putin’s Sledgehammer, Candace Rondeaux’s compelling new book on Wagner and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, will be an essential resource.

As a former KGB officer, Putin has long relied on hybrid warfare abroad and the security services at home to suppress dissent and entrench his rule. Early in his presidency, he turned to Prigozhin, a trusted associate from St. Petersburg, to build a covert military-logistics network for Kremlin operations. The result was the Wagner Group, a shadowy force blurring the line between state and private actors that could shield the Kremlin from direct accountability. Over time, Wagner became more than a mercenary outfit—it evolved into a key tool for projecting Russian power in Putin’s confrontation with the West.

Gray Zone

For the first two decades of his rule, Putin sought to further weaken the West without provoking open conflict. Wagner emerged from this strategy, enabling low-cost, deniable operations in Syria, Ukraine, and across Africa. Its success turned Russia into a patron of rogue regimes and helped subvert sanctions, even as it left behind a trail of war crimes.

Putin and Prigozhin first connected in their native St. Petersburg in the twilight of the Soviet Union. Putin had just returned from a KGB posting in East Germany; Prigozhin had just been released from prison after serving time for robbery and assault. After opening a Western-style grocery store, Prigozhin expanded into restaurants, casinos, and alcohol distribution—often with assistance from Putin, who managed business licensing in the corrupt mayor’s office. His upscale venues attracted the city’s elite, including organized crime figures. As Putin rose in politics, he relied on Prigozhin to host foreign dignitaries. After catering an event for George W. Bush in 2003, Prigozhin earned the nickname “Putin’s chef”—and a reputation for discreet effectiveness.

Yevgeny Prigozhin at the top of his game in 2016 (Mikhail Metze/TASS).

He later proved even more useful. With deep ties to Russia’s criminal underworld and a talent for navigating illicit networks, Prigozhin became a go-to operator. As Putin struggled to reform Russia’s bloated military in the mid-2000s, private military companies emerged as a workaround. Through his Concord holding company, Prigozhin entered government contracting, weapons smuggling, internet influence operations, and paramilitary work. What this gave the Kremlin was a deniable instrument to project power and evade sanctions, with fighters and proxies operating in Georgia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Syria, Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Mali, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

As his empire expanded, so did Prigozhin’s wealth—and his value to Putin. Wagner became a sprawling enterprise, offering war on the cheap while maintaining plausible deniability. Its fighters brought atrocities, criminality, and assassinations in their wake—well earning Prigozhin the “sledgehammer” sobriquet. Meanwhile, his internet operations pioneered the weaponization of social media for disinformation and political interference.

But it was in Ukraine that Wagner emerged from the shadows—setting the stage for Prigozhin’s downfall.

After his army of “little green men” seized Crimea, Wagner supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Then, following the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Russian-backed fighters, Prigozhin’s propagandists launched aggressive misinformation campaigns and attacks on journalists. By 2022, as Russia’s full-scale Ukraine invasion floundered, Wagner became critical to battlefield operations—recruiting prisoners with promises of freedom and pay. In reality, tens of thousands of Wagner fighters were killed in human-wave assaults against Ukrainian defenses.

When Putin sent Wagner Group’s “little green men” into Crimea in 2014, masked and without unit patches, the Kremlin kept changing its story. (RFE/RL)

Over time, Prigozhin gained public prominence. That gave him a platform to openly accuse Kremlin and military leaders of corruption and negligence. His dramatic criticism culminated in a viral tirade blaming Defense Minister Shoigu and Army Chief Gerasimov for mass casualties:

“And now listen to me you bastards! These are somebody’s fathers. These are somebody’s sons. And the scumbags who are refusing us ammunition will be eating their innards in hell…Where is the fucking ammo? You scum sit there in your expensive clubs. Your kids are getting off on YouTube recording all the details of their little lives…These men came here as volunteers and they’re dying so that you can get fat in your mahogany rich offices.”

Overreach

While Russia’s elite viewed Prigozhin as a growing liability, his popularity among troops and ordinary citizens surged. The conflict came to a head in June 2023, when he ordered 25,000 fighters to march on Moscow. He condemned the war as a sham orchestrated by corrupt elites to deceive both Putin and the Russian people. In a strange twist, the coup appeared aimed not at Putin himself, but at punishing those around him—on his behalf.

What followed was one of the most surreal episodes in modern Russian history. As Wagner advanced, Russian border troops failed to stop them. Putin stayed silent. Security officials were paralyzed. Wagner forces shot down military aircraft sent to intercept them. Only a last-minute deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko stopped them just hours from Moscow. In over two decades, Putin had never appeared so weak.

When Putin finally addressed the public, he dropped the fiction that Wagner was independent—admitting that the state had funded the group, despite its record of war crimes and assassinations.

Putin needed to reassert control and eliminate Prigozhin—without making him a martyr. For months, Prigozhin continued to travel and act as Wagner’s leader. But his usefulness to the Kremlin had come to an end: He died when the jet he and two top aides were traveling in exploded over central Russia. While the details remain murky, most observers believe Putin ordered his assassination.

Rondeaux’s book is a meticulously researched and richly detailed account of Prigozhin, Wagner, and Putin’s covert war machine. Though dense and complex—perhaps daunting for the casual reader—her ability to illuminate their deliberately hidden networks is striking.

A former foreign correspondent and bureau chief for The Washington Post, who is a recognized expert on transnational crime, Rondeaux asks a pressing question: How long can Russia sustain its shadow army before the world demands accountability?

Candace Rondeaux, a former foreign correspondent and war zone bureau chief for The Washington Post, is the Senior Director for the Future Frontlines program at New America, ‘an open-source public intelligence service for next-generation security and democratic resilience.’ (New America photo)

Ultimately, her book is not just about Russian criminality—it is also a critique of the West’s failure to act. Putin’s “war on the cheap,” built on hybrid warfare and plausible deniability, has long been visible to Washington and its closest allies. Yet Western leaders have often looked away, unwilling to confront the atrocities, sabotage, and subversion orchestrated by Wagner, Prigozhin, and Putin himself.

But consequences may come regardless of Western inaction. Back in the late 1980s, unprecedented domestic protests over the deaths of 15,000 Russian soldiers in its Afghan war presaged the downfall of the Soviet Union. The Ukraine war has claimed many multiples of that—250,000 dead and counting. Russia’s cities and economy are unprepared to absorb tens of thousands of returning, traumatized men. Many, including ex-convicts and addicts, may channel their trauma into violence and unrest. Economic strain will only worsen the reckoning.

Rondeaux’s message is clear: in Putin’s world, everyone is disposable. He may soon find that history won’t spare him either. ###

John Sipher retired in 2014 after a 28-year career in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, which included serving in Moscow and running the CIA’s Russia operations. He is the co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment and co-host of the podcast, “Mission Implausible.”

Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos Public Affairs, 2025.

7. No US stopover for Taiwanese leader could ease path to Xi-Trump meeting this year

Excerpts:

Citing people familiar with the decision, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Washington told Lai he could not stop in New York on the way to South America, where he was earlier reported to be planning to visit Paraguay, Guatemala and Belize.

The decision is expected to remove significant obstacles to a possible leaders’ meeting between Beijing and Washington. Both sides are also holding their third round of trade negotiations in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.

Reuters reported that Lai’s overseas trip was not cancelled but rather delayed until later this year, and that stopovers would include Texas and another city on the US mainland.

Taiwanese Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo said the decision not to travel was based on ongoing rehabilitation efforts in southern Taiwan following a recent typhoon, regional developments, and US tariffs.

The South China Morning Post reported earlier this month that Lai was planning a US “stopover” in August that could take him to New York and Texas en route to South America, a move that was bound to anger Beijing.

No US stopover for Taiwanese leader could ease path to Xi-Trump meeting this year

Proposed stop in New York reportedly declined by Washington as Taipei says there are no immediate plans for overseas travel

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3319916/no-us-stopover-taiwanese-leader-could-make-room-xi-trump-meeting-year?module=top_story&pgtype=homepage

Alyssa ChenandZhao Ziwen

Published: 9:51am, 29 Jul 2025Updated: 6:17pm, 29 Jul 2025

Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te has no immediate plans for overseas travel, his office said on Monday, following reports that his proposed stopover in the United States was declined by the Donald Trump administration.

Citing people familiar with the decision, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Washington told Lai he could not stop in New York on the way to South America, where he was earlier reported to be planning to visit Paraguay, Guatemala and Belize.

The decision is expected to remove significant obstacles to a possible leaders’ meeting between Beijing and Washington. Both sides are also holding their third round of trade negotiations in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.

Reuters reported that Lai’s overseas trip was not cancelled but rather delayed until later this year, and that stopovers would include Texas and another city on the US mainland.

Taiwanese Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo said the decision not to travel was based on ongoing rehabilitation efforts in southern Taiwan following a recent typhoon, regional developments, and US tariffs.

The South China Morning Post reported earlier this month that Lai was planning a US “stopover” in August that could take him to New York and Texas en route to South America, a move that was bound to anger Beijing.

The reported cancellation of Lai’s planned US transit is another setback for his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), following its failure on the weekend to unseat 24 lawmakers from the main opposition Kuomintang in recall votes.

The Post has approached the US State Department for comment.

Proposed US stopover by Taiwanese leader William Lai reportedly blocked by Washington

The Taiwan issue remains the most sensitive point of contention between Beijing and Washington, often overshadowing other aspects of their relationship.

Beijing opposes any form of official interaction between Taipei and Washington, including visits to the US by Taiwanese leaders, and has warned that the issue is highly sensitive.

At the foreign ministry’s daily press conference on Tuesday, spokesman Guo Jiakun urged Washington to deal with the Taiwan issue “with utmost caution”.

“We hope that the United States will adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués, handle the Taiwan issue with the utmost caution, and work together to promote the stable, healthy, and sustainable development of China-US relations,” he said.

In 2023, the Joe Biden administration allowed then-Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen to make a stop in New York on her way to Belize and Guatemala. Lai made stopovers in Hawaii and Guam last year during his visit to Pacific island countries but has not set foot on the US mainland.

The Post has reported that Trump is keen to visit China, and high-level officials in Beijing and Washington have shared a consensus and are working to secure a trip in coming months.

Many sources say that any meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping would be likely to occur on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, taking place in late October and early November in South Korea. Another option is a carve-out trip to Beijing from Gyeongju.

Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a part of China to be reunited by force if necessary, has intensified military pressure on the island since Lai took office in May last year and provoked Beijing with what it said were “separatist” and pro-independence remarks.

The United States, like most countries, does not recognise self-governed Taiwan as independent. However, it is opposed to any unilateral change to the status quo and is committed to supplying Taipei with weapons for defence.

Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific programme, said that Washington might have “discouraged” Lai’s transit.

While the reasons given for Taipei’s decision to not schedule any overseas trips for the Taiwanese leader, “may all be true, it is also possible that the Trump administration discouraged Lai from making a transit in the sensitive period leading up to the Trump-Xi summit”, she said.

David Sacks, an Asia studies fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the White House was trying “to set the table” for a Trump-Xi meeting, “as though the top priority for the administration, as it relates to China, is getting a leader-level meeting ... which they hope would lead to a trade deal”.

Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the reported US move would help to alleviate Beijing’s concerns about the Trump administration leveraging the Taiwan issue.

“This could help rebuild and strengthen mutual trust between China and the US, potentially removing one obstacle to a summit. However, this single move is unlikely to eliminate all barriers in areas like trade and technology,” he said.

Xin added that it would be unrealistic to expect Washington to permanently block transit attempts by Taiwanese leaders, and that such stopovers would be likely to occur again in the future.

James Yifan Chen, a professor of diplomacy and international relations at Tamkang University in New Taipei City, said that the choice of transit location for the Taiwanese leader was always a political consideration.

New York – as the closest major city to Washington – would naturally attract the greatest level of attention and scrutiny, he added.

“The US decision to deny transit through New York sends a warning signal to Lai ... that, amid ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing, Washington may no longer prioritise Taiwan to the same extent as it did during the Biden administration.”

According to Chen, if Lai’s true intention was to visit Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, alternative transit routes remained viable, citing the example of former leader Chen Shui-bian’s unexpected stop in Abu Dhabi in 2005.

James Siebens, a fellow with the Stimson Centre, said Lai would not risk upsetting Trump by “doing anything to jeopardise” a meeting between the US president and Xi.

“The substance of the eventual Trump-Xi meeting will likely determine how the administration deals with Taipei moving forward,” he said.

According to Michael Swaine, senior research fellow with the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Programme, the apparent cancellation of Lai’s New York transit “might have been in response to a Chinese protest over the transit, which is usual”.

“But this time, Trump might have thought that satisfying China on this issue was useful for his trade negotiations with Beijing,” he said.

Additional reporting by Lawrence Chung

Alyssa Chen

Alyssa joined the Post in 2023 as a reporter on China desk to cover diplomacy. Her interests lie in cross-strait relations and Sino-Japan relations. Previously, she was the Asia Correspondent for the Japan Times, and graduated from the University of Hong Kong.

Zhao Ziwen

Ziwen joined the Post in 2022, covering China’s foreign affairs. He holds degrees from Beijing Foreign Studies University and Hong Kong Baptist University. He worked for Caixin in Beijing, completed a study exchange in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and undertook a reporting stint in Washington, D.C.

8. Trump's reported snub of Taiwan president spurs concerns over deference to China

Excerpts:

The White House did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. However, a State Department source familiar with the matter indicated that the Trump administration continues to be committed to the government's long-standing one China policy, rooted in the Taiwan Relations Act, joint diplomatic agreements with China and longstanding pledges crafted by the government in regard to Taiwan and China.

Despite being in line with longstanding government policy, the move still garnered criticism from some Asia policy experts and critics of Trump.

Lyle Morris, a senior fellow on foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society's Center for China Analysis, said the "first concrete move" under Trump's second term regarding Taiwan is "a cause for concern."

"The assumption is this decision was made in the context of ongoing US-China trade negotiations and a possible Trump-Xi meeting," Morris said on X. "Still, not a good sign for enduring US-Taiwan relations."

Trump's reported snub of Taiwan president spurs concerns over deference to China

Step marks 'first concrete move' Trump has taken during his second term in regard to Taiwan, says expert

By Alec Schemmel Fox News

Published July 28, 2025 9:01pm EDT

foxnews.com · by Alec Schemmel Fox News

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Taiwan begins largest war exercises aimed at warding off a future Chinese invasion

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin has the latest on the operations on 'Special Report.'

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The Trump administration is reportedly blocking Taiwan's president from stopping over in New York City, en route to a diplomatic meeting in Central America, following pressure from China.

The Financial Times reported Monday that the administration has denied Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te the opportunity to stop over in New York City during a planned trip to Paraguay, Guatemala and Belize — all countries that recognize Taiwan as its own independent country.

However, on Monday, the office of the president in Taiwan released a statement indicating that Lai "currently has no plans to go on an overseas visit," according to Taiwan-state media. A source familiar with the matter at the State Department confirmed that no formal travel plans for President Lai have been announced.

TAIWAN ENVOY URGES CONGRESSIONAL ACTION, WARNS OF RISING CHINA THREAT AFTER MEETING LAWMAKERS

President Lai’s public engagements at home continue, as reports emerge the Trump White House barred him from a New York City layover en route to Central America. (Ann Wang/Reuters)

"In consideration of the ongoing rehabilitation efforts in southern Taiwan following a recent typhoon and regional developments including the United States' tariffs, the president currently has no plans to go on an overseas visit," the statement from President Lai said.

According to the Financial Times, which spoke with unnamed sources said to be intimately familiar with the alleged trip, Lai's decision not to travel came after he was informed that he would not be able to stop in New York City on his way to Central America.

Lai's trip was also reportedly supposed to include a stop in Dallas, but it is unclear if the Trump administration was also planning to bar Lai from stopping there as well, according to the Financial Times.

PILLSBURY: TRUMP TO HOLD ‘TENSE’ TRADE TALKS WITH CHINA

U.S.-Taiwan solidarity has long included symbolic gestures — but critics suggest that the Trump administration may be undermining that relationship in a bid to engage China on trade. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)

The White House did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. However, a State Department source familiar with the matter indicated that the Trump administration continues to be committed to the government's long-standing one China policy, rooted in the Taiwan Relations Act, joint diplomatic agreements with China and longstanding pledges crafted by the government in regard to Taiwan and China.

Despite being in line with longstanding government policy, the move still garnered criticism from some Asia policy experts and critics of Trump.

Lyle Morris, a senior fellow on foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society's Center for China Analysis, said the "first concrete move" under Trump's second term regarding Taiwan is "a cause for concern."

"The assumption is this decision was made in the context of ongoing US-China trade negotiations and a possible Trump-Xi meeting," Morris said on X. "Still, not a good sign for enduring US-Taiwan relations."

News broke Monday afternoon that the Trump administration was allegedly blocking Taiwan's president from making a stop in New York City en route to a diplomatic trip to Central America. However, sources familiar with the matter have indicated no travel plans for Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te have been formally announced. (Getty Images/Reuters)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"Denying President Lai a transit is a deeply concerning break with bipartisan precedent and sends a reckless signal to Beijing that our partnership with Taiwan is on the negotiating table," added Democrat Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., in a post on X following the news about President Lai's alleged travel.

"American leadership is now seen as deeply unreliable, with Trump’s fits and starts with Ukraine, NATO allies, and other key partners. I urge President Trump to reverse course and do what presidents of both parties have done and allow a transit, and ask my colleagues in Congress to join me in that call."

News of the Trump administration's decision to prohibit the Taiwanese president from stopping in New York City comes as the president is reportedly feeling out a potential trip to Beijing himself, alongside major U.S. CEOs. Nothing so far has been set in stone regarding Trump's trip, however.

foxnews.com · by Alec Schemmel Fox News

9. The U.S. Fired 25% of Its Best Missile Interceptors in Just 12 Days. It Will Take a Decade to Replace Them.

Holy.... a decade?

The U.S. Fired 25% of Its Best Missile Interceptors in Just 12 Days. It Will Take a Decade to Replace Them.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Jack Buckby · July 28, 2025

Published

16 hours ago

A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, Alaska, during Flight Experiment THAAD (FET)-01 on July 30, 2017 (EDT). During the test, the THAAD weapon system successfully intercepted an air-launched, medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) target.

Key Points and Summary – The recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran exposed a “critical supply gap” in America’s most advanced missile defenses.

-The U.S. reportedly fired between 100 and 150 THAAD interceptors—costing nearly $2 billion—to help defend Israel, depleting as much as a quarter of its entire stockpile.

-The crisis is magnified by the fact that the U.S. only produces about 12 of these interceptors per year, meaning it would take over a decade to replace what was used.

-This unsustainable burn rate helps explain President Trump’s hesitancy to send similar advanced systems to Ukraine.

U.S. Missile Interceptor Supply Gap Exposed After Iran Strikes

The United States reportedly used as much as one quarter of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor missiles to help down missiles launched at Israel by Iran during the 12-day war.

Between 100 and 150 THAAD rockets, part of the United States’ most advanced and strategically important missile defense system, were used at a cost of roughly $12.7 million each – or almost $2 billion in total.

The news comes from reports by CNN and The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the cooperation. The revelation exposes a critical supply gap at a time when the White House is not only working to modernize its own forces, but also resuming arms shipments to Ukraine following a brief pause.

Reports suggest that the United States provided the rockets after learning that Israel was short on Arrow interceptors, with officials concerned that the country was only weeks away from running out. Israel, however, denied the reports.

Missile Questions: What Is THAAD?

The THAAD ballistic missile defense system, designed and manufactured by Lockheed Martin, has been in service since 2008. The system is designed to intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles in their descent or reentry phase. Its missiles do not carry a warhead, instead relying on kinetic energy to destroy missiles before they reach their intended targets.

CNN reports that the United States produced only 11 THAAD interceptor missiles last year and is expected to produce just 12 more this year – far short of replacing the more than 150 expended during the recent conflict. With officials in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem all warning of the potential for renewed hostilities, replenishing these interceptors may now become a strategic priority for the U.S. Department of Defense. In the event of another large-scale exchange, THAAD could again prove vital for defending Israeli territory or shielding U.S. forces in the region, particularly at key sites such as the Al Udeid Air Base, which came under direct Iranian missile attack following Operation Midnight Hammer.

Is This Why Trump Is Hesitant To Help Ukraine?

While President Trump was initially reluctant to resume arms shipments and aid to Ukraine, believing Kyiv lacked the leverage to negotiate with Moscow and that early concessions could have ended the war. That strategy has so far failed to deliver a ceasefire. As President Trump moves to rearm Ukraine, concerns about dwindling U.S. stockpiles of sophisticated air-defense weaponry – especially systems like THAAD – have been exposed as a significant political constraint.

With Trump’s 50-day deadline for peace set to expire soon, with the president stating this week that he will shorten it, his administration has shifted tactics, focusing instead on selling weapons to Ukraine rather than donating them outright. Should Putin fail to agree to a peace deal in the coming weeks, Trump has promised to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia and its global trading partners. In other words, Trump is doing everything he can to prevent further conflict overseas – whether in Iran or Ukraine – while attempting to preserve U.S. defense capabilities at home.

The use of over 150 THAAD interceptors during the Israel-Iran conflict has demonstrated just how quickly America’s most advanced weapons systems can be depleted. Trump himself has publicly argued that the U.S. must preserve advanced air defense capabilities for its own protection, raising doubts about how far Washington can go in sustaining Ukraine’s air defense needs without compromising its own readiness.

The Weapons Stockpile Challenge

And while weapons stockpiles are likely a key concern, President Trump has repeatedly emphasized his desire to end wars overseas – not escalate them. With no clear off-ramp in Iran or Ukraine, and no major diplomatic breakthroughs on the horizon, Trump is now navigating a complex balancing act of preserving U.S. military readiness, managing political risk, and shaping his legacy during a particularly volatile moment in global security.

About the Author:

Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society. His latest book is The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency.

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nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Jack Buckby · July 28, 2025

10. Preparing for Tomorrow’s Wars: Resilience, Resistance in the 21st Century

Excellent podcast. Well worth the time to listen to. I found it educational and informative and an excellent companion to Rob's new book from JSOU. It was a 30 minute seminar on the full spectrum resistance and resilience.

At The Boundary

Preparing for Tomorrow’s Wars: Resilience, Resistance in the 21st Century

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2231197/episodes/17562821-preparing-for-tomorrow-s-wars-resilience-resistance-in-the-21st-century

July 28, 2025

•

Season 3

•

Episode 92

Audio Player

00:00 | 36:37

Show Notes
Transcript

Text the ATB Team! We'd love to hear from you!

In this episode of the “At the Boundary” podcast, GNSI’s Jim Cardoso speaks with Dr. Rob Burrell, Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, about GNSI’s new research initiative on the Future of Warfare. Dr. Burrell also introduces his upcoming book, Resilience and Resistance, and outlines a fresh analytical framework for understanding irregular warfare in the 21st century.

The conversation explores how resistance movements evolve—from nonviolent protest to full-scale civil war—and how emerging technologies like AI and cyber tools are reshaping the battlespace. Burrell also previews future episodes in this new podcast series, featuring leading experts such as General Charles Cleveland and Dr. Chris Mason.

Whether you’re a defense strategist, policymaker, or curious listener, this episode offers critical insights on how the U.S. must prepare for an era of complex, unconventional conflict.

Links from the episode:

• 2025 Notes from Cambridge Blog

• 2025 Cyber Bay Event Link

• Link to “Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare” by Robert S. Burrell

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

A "boundary" is a place, either literal or figurative, where two forces exist in close proximity to each other. Sometimes that boundary is in a state of harmony. More often than not, that boundary has a bit of chaos baked in. The Global and National Security Institute will live on the boundary of security policy and technology and that's where this podcast will focus.

The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

Look for our other publications and products on our website publications page.

People on this episode

Jim Cardoso

Host

Tad Schnaufer, II, PhD

Host

11. UAV Update – Recent News about Drones

UAV Update – Recent News about Drones

https://sof.news/drones/20250729/

July 29, 2025 SOF News Drones 0

Below the reader will find recent news about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are used in conflicts (Ukraine, Africa, etc.), new developments in drone use, and training by militaries for using drones during combat operations. Curated articles on the topics below are provided:

First Person View (FPV) Drones
PSYOP and Drones
C-UAS and Sensor Fusion
Ukraine and Drone Techonology
Russia’s Drone Production
China’s Wingman Drones
PRC Concepts for UAV Swarms
North Korea’s Drones
Taiwan’s Drone Production
Medical Delivery in Latin America
Denmark Buys four MQ-9B SkyGuardian Drones

First Person View (FPV) Drones

First Person View (FPV) drones are unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with a camera that transmit live video to a pilot on the ground, allowing them to control the drone as if they were onboard. The pilots typically wear goggles (or use a monitor) to view the real-time feed. They rely on a combination of onboard cameras, video transmitters, and ground-based receivers enabling precise control at high speeds.

In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, FPV drones are used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces for reconnaissance, precision strikes, and psychological warfare. These FPV drones enable operators to conduct time-sensitive surveillance, identify enemy positions, and attack targets (personnel, tanks, bunkers, etc.) with explosives, often using low-cost kamikaze drones that crash into targets. Their affordability – sometimes costing less than $500 – allows them to strike with precision, disrupt logistics, and target high-value assets deep behind enemy lines. The small, inexpensive FPV drones have significantly altered battlefield dynamics and contribute to a high percentage of casualties, especially on the Russian side.

U.S. and Drones

PSYOP and Drones. The topic of military influence operations and cognitive dynamics are discussed in this article about the psychological impact of drones on the battlefield. The UAVs are taking a growing mental toll on both soldiers and civilians. Drones can be used for purposes well beyond just kinetic strikes. They can create distraction, displacement, immobilization, conditioning, and more. The U.S. needs to investigate the strategic potential of drones for influence operations. J.D. Maddox explores this phenonomen in “It’s Time to Think About (and Fear) Drones and Psychological Operations”, War on the Rocks, July 24, 2025.

C-UAS and Sensor Fusion. The DOD must come up with two critical solutions to counter drones. One is to develop a command-and-control (C2) system for all services and the second is to implement a network architecture to share the sensor data from the tactical to the strategic levels. Major Anthony Padalino is the executive officer in the U.S. Army chief technology office where he takes part in the planning and execution of Army transformation priorities – to include counter-UAS. He prescribes five recommendations for the DOD to take immediate action on. “Frontline Fusion: The Network Architecture Needed to Counter Drones”, Modern War Institute at West Point, July 23, 2025.

Rewrite of U.S. Military Tactics. The DOD, through its Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), is increasing it focus on development and testing of combat-ready drone technology – spurred on by events in the Ukraine – Russia War. Ukraine has become a proving ground for next-generation drone warfare. The drone operators face daily threats from electronic jamming, signal loss, and tactical demands on the battlefield. Much U.S. testing is being done in Alaska – with its remote regions, minimally populated airspace, and fewer GPS concerns. “How Ukraine’s Drone Tactics Are Rewriting US Military Strategy in Real Time”, United24Media, July 28, 2025.

Squad Level Drone Proficiency. Benjamin Reed, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, served as an infantryman and drone operator in Ukraine. He writes on the importance of integrating drone training at the squad level. “Infanteering in the Drone Age”, SOFREP, July 28, 2025.

Drones and the Ukraine – Russia Conflict

A Coming Drone Storm. Russia is now just steps away from having the capacity to launch thousands of drones at the same time in a single coordinated strike that would completely overwhelm Ukraines entire air defense system. Moscow now produces about 2,700 Shahed drones each month, however, its production of drones is increasing each month. There are estimates that Ukraine could face seven times more drone attacks in 2025 than it experienced in 2024. In addition to quantity, the Russians are also improving the quality of their drones. Ukraine needs western assistance to defeat the ever increasing drone threat from Russia. “Russia built Ukraine’s drone storm over three years – 2025 is when it finally breaks”, Euromaiden Press, July 25, 2025.

Russia’s Drone Production Increases. The expansion of Russia’s production of Shahed-type drones is likely to keep growing. Their production capacity has resulted in increased attacks against Ukraine’s cities – now occuring every three to four days – with hundreds of drones attacking at a time. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate estimates that Russian industries can manufacture about 170 Shahed-type drones per day. “Russia seen as boosting combat-drone output, switching attack angles”, Defense News, July 21, 2025.

Chinese Drones Shipped to Russia. A decoy drone recently captured by Ukrainian forces reveal that it is made entirely of Chinese components. The drone, made by CUAV Technology – a Chinese drone manufacturing company – can be used for reconnaissance as well as to drop munitions. The drones have a delta-wing fuselage that is similar to the Iranian-made Shahed-I36 drones. “Fully Chinese-made drone found in Ukraine for first time”, Telegraph, July 23, 2025.

Jet-Powered Shahed Drones? Russia may be sending faster drones into Ukraine’s cities. The Shahed drone is currently propeller driven – thus slow and subject to interception during flight. A jet-powered drone will be much faster and therefore more difficult to intercept before it reaches its intended target. “Ukraine Urged to Prepare for Jet-Powered Shahed Drones”, United24Media, July 28, 2025.

Ukraine Maintains Lead in Drone Technology. As Russia is preparing to mount its summer offensive, the defenders of Ukraine are maintaining their edge in drone technology. Drones are now responsible for most of the Russian deaths on the battlefield, they are assisting in the evacuation of wounded, and they are an important element of the resupply and logistics system for the frontline troops. Currently, more sophisticated counter-drone methods are being researched; to include, FPV-borne lasers that can cut the fiber-optic cables of attack drones. Also on the horizon are FPVs using artificial intelligence, which like fiber-optic cable drones, would not be affected by electronic jamming. “On Ukraine’s Front Line, a Sky Full of Killer Robots”, by Marcus Walker, and Ievgeniia Sivorka, The Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2025.

VEOs and Drones – What is the Future? The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the usefulness of drones in conventional combat. It also has demonstrated that special operations forces can use UAVs with significant results – as seen in Operation Spiderweb in June 2025 where Ukrainian drones positioned in a trailer were launched at Russian airbases deep behind enemy lines. Certainly violent extremist organizations (VEOs) are taking notice. Small drones were first used by terrorists in 2014 by the Islamic State in Iraq. This detailed article by David Hambling explains the different types of drones, how the drones can contribute to the terror threat, and some proposed countermeasures to combat the drone terrorist threat. “Moving Targets: Implications of the Russo-Ukrainian War for Drone Terrorism”, CTC Sentinel, Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point, July 2025.

Drones Around the World

China’s Drones. China is developing and probably ready to deploy drones that will be ‘wingmen’ for manned military aircraft. “China’s New Drone Wingmen Look Set For Military Parade Unveiling”, The War Zone, July 21, 2025. See also “China improves Rainbow UAV capabilities”, Janes.com, July 14, 2025.

China’s Drone Swarms Coming in Future. A report by Timothy Ditter provides an insight into the Chinese defense establishment’s views on unmanned aerial vehicles and the use of drone swarms for both offensive and defensive operations. PRC Concepts for UAV Swarms in Future Warfare, Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), July 11, 2025, PDF, 25 pages.

North Korea’s Drone Program. With help from China and Russia, North Korea has made rapid advancement in its drone development and acquisition processes. This poses a big threat to South Korean and could be a huge factor should a confict ever break out on the peninsular. “North Korea’s Deadly Drone Bonanza is Coming to a Penisular Near You”, War on the Rocks, July 22, 2025.

Taiwan’s Drone Production. UAV exports by Taiwan have grown by nearly 750% in the first half of 2025. The top buyer was Poland – followed by the U.S., Germany, and Czech Republic. The top five buyers made up 97% of the purchases – totaling almost $12 million. The European Union is beefing up its military strength in the face of recent Russian aggression as well as using the drones for border security, homeland monitoring, and anti-drone defense. The EU shift from non-PRC supply chains has allowed the Taiwanese suppliers to gain ground in the European and American markets. “Taiwan’s drone exports soar nearly 750% in H1”, Focus Taiwan, July 27, 2025.

Medical Delivery in Latin America. The Gale Force drone can deliver up to 10 kilograms of medications, vaccines, blood samples, and other medical cargo. The drone uses SpaceX Starlink connectivity and Nvidia artificial intelligence to get medical supplies quickly to remote areas and for first respons or disaster relief. “Medical Delivery Drones Take Flight in Latin America”, Flying Magazine, July 17, 2025.

Denmark Buys Four MQ-9B SkyGuardian Drones. To be delivered between 2028 and 2029, four drones will provide the capability to monitor happenings in the Arctic region. Russia’s presence and activities have been increasing over the years in the Arctic and the acquisition of the drones – which are suited for extreme cold weather operations – will provide ISR for the Arctic region. (Defense News, Jul 23, 2025)

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Image. Generated by Grok AI.

12. Pentagon Shifting $200 Million to Border Wall Project in Arizona

I wish we could dedicate some of these funds to the planning and execution of irregular warfare.

Pentagon Shifting $200 Million to Border Wall Project in Arizona

military.com · by Drew F. Lawrence · July 28, 2025

The Pentagon recently asked Congress to shift $200 million in funding -- originally allocated for projects such as barracks, aircraft hangars and military-operated elementary schools -- to construct a roughly 20-mile-long, 30-foot-high barrier across the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona.

The proposed wall would replace a smaller mesh barrier at a desert training complex adjacent to the border known as the Barry M. Goldwater Range, or BMGR, a 1.9 million-acre training area shared between the Air Force and Marine Corps, according to a letter the Pentagon sent to Congress on May 28.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that construction of the permanent barrier, replete with gates and a patrol lane, was "necessary to obtain full operational control of the border," adding that the civilian heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force deemed the project "vital to national security," according to the letter.

The request splits the cost between the Department of Defense, Navy, Air Force and Army -- which also uses the range -- in $50 million increments from funding appropriated as far back as fiscal 2021.

The letter characterized the relocation of funding as "savings" from projects the Pentagon estimated cost less than their original appropriation. This practice, known as reprogramming, involves the Pentagon asking for congressional approval to shift money that lawmakers originally allocated for specific military programs elsewhere.

For example, it is requesting more than $11 million from a Marine barracks complex and bachelor enlisted quarters at Kadena Air Base in Japan for the BMGR project. The Pentagon is also seeking to reallocate millions from an F-35 Lightning II hangar in California; a V-22 Osprey airfield in Virginia; and tens of millions of dollars from two military-run elementary schools, one in Germany and the other in Kentucky.

Military.com reported in May that the Pentagon was reallocating $1 billion meant for Army barracks to fund troop deployments to the U.S.-Mexico border as the military becomes increasingly involved in immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump's administration.

In 2023, Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, which owns part of the BMGR, said in a report that, "as a result of its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, the entire BMGR is potentially subject to the presence of undocumented aliens and smuggling traffic," and was therefore patrolled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

A representative for the Pentagon acknowledged Military.com's questions about BMGR on Monday, to include whether such border crossing traffic was the impetus for the shifting of funds, but did not respond by publication.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon requisitioned 140 miles of federal land in Arizona, including near BMGR, as part of its sweeping effort to militarize areas of the border to prevent crossings under Trump's immigration crackdown.

military.com · by Drew F. Lawrence · July 28, 2025

13. Pentagon unit seeks Ukraine-like conditions for drone testing

Of course the most Ukraine-like conditions are in... Ukraine.

Pentagon unit seeks Ukraine-like conditions for drone testing

Defense News · by Courtney Albon · July 28, 2025

For most of the firms that participated in a late June drone trial staged by the Defense Innovation Unit in remote Alaska, it was the first time their systems had flown outside of a lab setting.

The five companies brought drones and radio prototypes to a range near the U.S. Army’s Fort Wainright to see how they’d fare against simulated electronic warfare systems looking to jam their navigation and command-and-control capabilities. DIU was assessing whether any of them were ready to transition to the military services for further development or fielding.

With a few exceptions, the lack of field testing showed. While several companies made progress by the end of the four-day test event, they struggled initially to maintain targets and navigate flight routes. Some of that was due to jamming and some of it was because their technology wasn’t as mature as expected.

That outcome is not unusual for a prototype demonstration, DIU officials told Defense News during the event. In fact, the government team in Alaska wanted to see how the companies responded when the systems failed and whether they could iterate and come back the next day with a better solution.

That process is vital for both the DOD and the companies, but most small, commercial firms don’t have access to test space where they can learn and refine their products under the types of conditions they might face in the field. That’s a problem for the Defense Department, whose leaders want to field technology — and drones in particular — from a broader pool of companies and at faster rates.

DIU’s Trent Emeneker, who leads several autonomy projects for the organization and helped facilitate the Alaska testing, said in order to field systems that meet the needs of troops on the ground, DOD needs to change the way it tests in two key ways — by providing more opportunities for small tech companies to wring out their systems, and staging those tests in the field with military operators.

“If we want to succeed, we have to embed engineers with warfighters, and we have to be out in the field testing,” he said. “We have to do it all the time.”

Commercial access

Helping DOD get to that “all-the-time” testing cadence is a rising priority for DIU.

In June, it announced a prize challenge called Project G.I., which calls for “ready-now” uncrewed systems that can help increase the effectiveness of small military cells operating in low-bandwidth environments with disrupted communications. Companies selected will participate in a live demonstration with military operators and a subset of those will advance for a chance to either receive funding to mature their systems or contracts to deliver capabilities to military units for further testing or prototyping.

A second effort, DIU’s new Range Strike Group, was launched earlier this summer to take a wholistic look at the testing challenge. Will Ryan, autonomy program manager at DIU and one of the leaders of the task force, said the group is still in the early phases of defining the problem and formulating ideas for how to address it. From there, it will craft recommendations and identify offices within DOD that are best positioned to move them forward.

Ryan told Defense News that improving test access for a wider swath of companies benefits not only the firms themselves but the Defense Department — especially as it looks to field technology that both works and can be delivered on faster timelines.

“Providing an opportunity for these companies to assess their products in a contested environment against a notional threat is really valuable, one, for the DOD to assess their product in that way,” he said. “But it’s also important for the companies to see where they’re succeeding or where they’re falling short so they can make tweaks and have a better product.”

One of the group’s early tasks is to identify the policy hurdles that programs have to clear in order organize an EW test event. DOD has its own policies around spectrum management as do the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission, which require programs to go through an approval process to perform any testing that interferes with GPS or communications signals.

Programs that are testing outside of a military installation also need waivers from the FAA to fly aircraft at distances that extend further than what an operator can see, or beyond the visual line of sight. Some requirements are eased for testing on DOD bases because the airspace around the installations is restricted.

Another challenge: Many military ranges aren’t equipped with the infrastructure to support EW testing — and if they are, program managers looking to schedule a test have to navigate a slew of policy and safety restrictions to minimize the impact of GPS disruption on nearby cities or towns as well as commercial aircraft.

DOD’s most advanced ranges, like White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, are in high demand by some of the military’s most complex systems, making it hard for smaller programs and companies to access them.

John Sawyer, a UAS analyst in the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office who helped coordinate the Alaska testing, said all of these challenges add up for programs who don’t have access to significant resources and are running tight schedules.

“If you’re looking to do it on the cheap with a very minimal budget and you’re looking to do it on an accelerated timeline, it’s tough,” he told Defense News.

Ryan said the Range Strike Group may be able to help find new testing locations and explore ways to either streamline them or ease them under certain conditions to ease the burden on test organizers.

“It’s not throwing them away or ignoring them — it’s how can we streamline them or assume the right amount or risk whatever set of environmental conditions exist. Like here,” he said, referring to the remote Alaska test site, “Do those policies apply as much as they do somewhere that’s closer to New York City?”

Location, location

Knowing it would take time to find the right location for DIU’s recent EW tests, Emeneker started scouting locations for the electronic warfare last summer. He cast a wide net, putting Ukraine at the top of the list.

“There’s no better place in the world to test,” he said.

Drones have been a major feature of the war and Ukraine’s battle-tested approach to bottom-up development and rapid fielding and iteration is one the U.S. military and its allies want to replicate — or at least draw lessons from.

Since the early days of the war, well-connected and funded U.S. companies have traveled to the front lines to test their systems against live EW threats and get a better understanding of what capabilities Ukrainian drone operators most needed.

Chris Bonzagni is a former DIU program manager who now runs a defense consulting firm that helps U.S. drone firms test in Ukraine. Since leaving DIU in 2022, he’s traveled to the country many times and seen firsthand how the urgency of war has driven innovation and experience for the military and for the commercial firms that support it.

“In Ukraine, these guys are not afraid to fail and they’re doing it because they have to do it and there’s necessity there,” said Bonzagni, who was on the ground in Alaska supporting EW testing. “The difference between those guys and here is they have access to ranges and they just do reps and reps and reps and reps. Here, you see how much we have to do to get all the resources.”

However, without support, it’s not feasible for most small firms to navigate the process for in-country testing, Bonzagni told Defense News.

“The logistics are hard to get in,” he said. “The well-capitalized startups that can invest that time and invest that equipment are able to do so and the smaller startups are definitely prohibited.”

Bonzagni said this is an area where the Defense Department could help create a process to send firms to Ukraine, but the U.S. military has long been wary of formal involvement. Following President Donald Trump’s election to his second term last November, the growing political strain between the incoming administration and the Ukrainian government has made it harder.

For DIU, that meant the odds of getting the approvals to stage DOD-sponsored testing in Ukraine grew slimmer and ultimately wasn’t feasible, Emeneker said.

His team explored other international locations, but the flight and spectrum restrictions there are similar to those in the U.S.

So, DIU opted for Alaska, which Emeneker said is one of the few suitable domestic options for EW testing. It’s remote, which means there are fewer concerns about signal disruption impacting nearby cities. And its long summer days, bringing nearly 21 hours of daylight in late June, make room for early morning testing that can extend well into the evening testing.

DIU and other Pentagon offices coordinated with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, who supported the testing and provided the EW effects, for help scheduling the tests and getting the appropriate waivers.

Equipment shortfalls

During the first day of testing, as companies conducted baseline flights and the 11th ABN’s EW operators tested their equipment, it became clear that the effectors the unit was equipped with weren’t having the impact DIU had hoped for.

Much of the kit was more than 20 years old, designed to counter threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the more high-tech, software-defined systems that modern militaries use today that can shift frequencies and evade detection.

An operator in the U.S. Army's 11th Airborne Division experiments with equipment that can disrupt uncrewed systems' command-and-control capabilities. (Courtney Albon, Defense News)

A lack of suitable test EW equipment is a known issue in DOD. A 2021 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine highlighted these concerns.

“Most tests are run against old threat systems, and they do not have the software-defined agile threat systems that would allow testing against more representative threats,” the report found.

Because of limited testing resources, units do their best with the older systems and adapt their tactics to try to make the most of them. That was the case for the 11th ABN, according to Sgt. Peter Spurgeon, an EW operator in the division.

“We’re trying to take a two-decade-old piece of equipment and tool it to a modern day [threat],” he said.

By the end of day two, the division showed some improvement, partly because the testing shifted focus from command-and-control effects — which its equipment wasn’t suited for — to Global Navigation Satellite System, or GNSS jamming.

Lt. Col. Scott Smith, the division’s director for non-lethal effects, said he saw the operators get better at figuring out which equipment worked best in different scenarios and finding new ways to disrupt frequencies.

Smith said testing like this is crucial for operators to practice troubleshooting and learn new techniques against a live system. From an advocacy perspective, it also helps raise awareness of the significant equipment gaps and will hopefully create momentum around getting more testing resources to the unit.

Zooming in on failure to push for more funding can be a difficult line to walk, Smith noted, but he pointed to efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative — which aims to restructure and upgrade the service’s processes and systems — as a sign that there’s an appetite for improvement.

“The Army Transformation Initiative that was recently pushed out, it’s like ‘Hey, we’ve got to get more agile and more flexible,’” he said. “We think this fits right in with that.”

About Courtney Albon

Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

14. Did the West Provoke Putin’s War on Ukraine?

Excerpts:

NATO May Be the Excuse, but It Is Not the Cause of Putin’s War

Russian-Ukrainian discord did not begin with Putin’s rise to power. Relations between the two countries have been fractious since the emergence of an independent Ukrainian state following the collapse of the USSR. Given this strained history and given Putin’s long-held desire to make Russia a great power again – an important component of which is bringing Ukraine to heel – it seems simplistic to argue that Putin’s invasion is a reaction to NATO’s years-old declaration regarding eventual Ukrainian membership. Such an assertion fits neither with the vision for Russia that Putin has held since his politically formative years in St. Petersburg, nor with the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations since the collapse of the USSR. Nor does the idea that Putin is reacting to NATO’s actions align with his agenda and behavior. Since becoming Russian president, Putin has been proactively attempting to achieve his goals for Russia, not reacting to the actions of others.

Putin’s current view of NATO as an adversary did not develop in recent years. Its origins can be traced to his KGB days in the GDR. In this sense, it is probably NATO’s continued attractiveness to smaller countries in Europe seeking freedom from Russian domination, rather than any NATO actions per se, that has aroused Putin’s ire and served as his self-justification for making war on Ukraine.

Throughout history, there have been numerous examples of smaller powers trying to escape the shadow of larger powers, while larger powers aim to maintain their positions of dominance. The war in Ukraine fits this mold. Ukraine’s desire to join NATO – and also the EU – is another example of a small country seeking to escape domination by a large one. Putin launched his war in what is perhaps a final effort, after a string of failures, to prevent Ukraine’s escape. The conflict was not caused, as the realist critique would have it, by Western initiatives to contest Russian control over Ukraine. Rather – as Ukraine’s success and determination on the battlefield continue to show – it is the Ukrainians themselves who are contesting Putin’s self-proclaimed right to dominate them.

Essay| The Latest

Did the West Provoke Putin’s War on Ukraine?

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/07/29/did-the-west-provoke-putins-war-on-ukraine/

by Andrew Goodman

07.29.2025 at 06:00am

Image by anggri lukman

Abstract: A number of prominent scholars, journalists, and politicians have advanced the thesis that the West provoked Putin into attacking Ukraine by enlarging NATO into Central and Eastern Europe and by declaring in 2008 that Ukraine would become a member as well. The dubious assumptions on which this thesis is based are contradicted by my personal experiences at NATO and with Vladimir Putin, which show, first, that the Russian Government has always known that NATO’s 2008 declaration was essentially hollow; and second, that well before he became Russian President, Putin saw the West as an adversary and believed Ukraine naturally belonged to Russia’s sphere of influence. Putin’s war against Ukraine is best seen, therefore, as Putin’s last-ditch effort to stifle Ukrainian efforts to escape from Russia’s orbit rather than the result of Great Power competition.

Did the West Provoke Putin’s War on Ukraine?

I would argue that attributing responsibility to the West for provoking Putin ignores that he has long been on a quest to return Russia to a position of dominance over Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. During his politically formative years in the 1980s and 90s, Putin served as a KGB operative in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and then as a city official in St. Petersburg. His words and deeds over these years demonstrate that his original and enduring goal has been to return Russia to great power status with all the trappings that accompany such a position, including the domination of neighboring states.

From this perspective, the war in Ukraine would primarily be the result of Putin’s desire to end Ukraine’s persistent efforts to escape the Russian orbit. Rather than try to explain the war in Ukraine as a consequence of great power competition, it seems to me more likely that the war is the outcome of great power/lesser power dynamics.

Critiquing the Thesis of Western Responsibility

The current debate over responsibility for the war in Ukraine effectively began with an article written by John Mearsheimer in 2014, which argued that the West was at fault for the events leading up to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Mearsheimer sees the ongoing conflict in Ukraine as a consequence of NATO’s 2008 declaration that Ukraine would (someday) become a member of the Alliance. On several occasions since the war began in February 2022, Mearsheimer has reiterated his view that NATO’s engagement with Ukraine sparked Putin’s decision to take military action.

Recently, Mearsheimer has – if anything – dug in on his thesis of Western responsibility, advancing seven reasons to reject the conventional wisdom and an additional three reasons why NATO enlargement was the cause of the war that are readily contradicted by facts accessible to almost any reader. Despite the dubious nature of some of Mearsheimer’s assertions, his view has attracted a number of influential adherents, including a prominent expert on Russia’s economy, a former fellow at the CATO Institute, and President Trump’s personal envoy to Putin.

This thesis of Western responsibility makes a number of assumptions that are open to question. Among these are: first, that great power competition is the driving force behind all international conflicts; second, that the real purpose of NATO enlargement, regardless of NATO’s explanations for how enlargement has come about, was to expand Western influence; third, that NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Declaration that Ukraine (and Georgia) would join NATO was an operational declaration; and fourth, that Putin has not been proactive, but reactive in his policy decisions, which, presumably, would be relatively benign in the absence of Western “provocations.”

The last two assumptions are especially pivotal. My own experience at NATO from 2000 to 2002, engaging with diplomats assigned to the Russian Mission to NATO, convinces me that the Russian Government has a very clear understanding of how NATO operates. From personal involvement in similar communiques, I know that documents such as the Bucharest Declaration are the product of compromises between NATO members desiring to find common language on key issues. I also know – as the Russian Government must know – that a declaration supporting membership without establishment of a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Ukraine means there will be no concrete steps towards membership, despite the wording of the declaration.

The MAP was established in 1999 to assist countries aspiring to join NATO meet certain political, economic and military criteria, including a democratic political system; a market economy; fair treatment of minority populations; an ability to make a military contribution to NATO operations; and a commitment to democratic civil-military relations, among other requirements. While the MAP has not been a prerequisite for membership (e.g., Finland and Sweden, as long-standing democracies did not need one before being admitted to NATO), for the states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia, it became a virtual necessity. NATO has insisted that participation in the MAP does not imply a timeframe nor a guarantee of admittance to the Alliance (which requires a unanimous vote of current members), but in practice, successful completion of the MAP indicates a country has become a functioning democracy and is ready for membership.

Participation in the MAP also means a country obtains guidance from NATO in defining the goals it must achieve to fulfill NATO’s criteria and receives assistance from NATO in fulfilling those goals. Without such guidance and assistance, it would be hard for a country like Ukraine to meet the requirements for admission to NATO, as evidenced by the fact that for almost 17 years since the Bucharest Declaration, Ukraine appears almost no closer to membership now than it was then.

The Problem of Pinpointing Putin’s Views

The fourth key assumption of Putin being reactive, rather than proactive, is even more critical to the debate. If, from the start of his Presidency or even earlier, Putin saw a need to obtain control over Ukraine, then the argument that the West bears responsibility for the war in Ukraine is considerably weakened.

It is not a simple matter, however, to decipher what Putin thought and when. There is very little public record of his attitudes and beliefs before he became a Russian national political figure in 1999. Putin did not stand for elective office and made no campaign speeches. To the extent that Putin made public statements while he served in the St. Petersburg city government in the 1990s, these were in the form of official announcements rather than speeches on policy. Until he ran for President in 2000, there was simply no reason for Putin to make his views public.

There are several sources, however, that help delineate Putin’s attitudes and beliefs during their formative period. First, there are Putin’s own written works, published at the time he became a national political figure. His article, Russia at the Turn of the Millennium, was published on 29 December 1999 (and reprinted as an appendix to his later so-called “autobiography“). The article serves as a political campaign document that contains Putin’s ideas for rectifying Russia’s “groping in the dark without having a clear understanding of national objectives and advances which would ensure Russia’s standing as a developed, prosperous and great country of the world.” It contains an analysis of Russia’s economic situation at the time, lessons to be learned from Russia’s Communist past and the immediate post-Communist decade, and Putin’s proposals for Russia’s future as a strong, centralized state with a robust economy.

A second written work that appeared in early 2000 was Putin’s book, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President, which is generally referred to as his “autobiography” even though it is not an autobiography in the traditional sense, but a compilation of Putin’s (propagandistic) responses to questions posed to him in a series of sessions with selected journalists. The autobiography recounts Putin’s views on his life, career, politics, and world events, including his KGB service in the GDR and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Chechnya, the NATO intervention in the war between Serbia and Kosovo, and relations between Russia and NATO. That both works appeared at the start of Putin’s national political career suggests that they reflect thoughts he already held before he ascended to national office.

The accounts of Putin’s rise to power produced by notable journalists and scholars are also helpful in discerning the attitudes motivating Putin’s behavior. While these authors have not uncovered pronouncements by Putin on his worldview during his politically formative period – a problem highlighted by Hill and Gaddy, in particular – their detailed accounts of Putin’s childhood, his service in the KGB, and his deeds and misdeeds as a city official in St. Petersburg, all serve to define the framework within which Putin’s ideas developed.

Putin has Always Viewed the West as an Adversary

A final source for understanding Putin’s thinking consists of statements Putin made in private about his views on politics and the world. Most of these statements were to colleagues and subordinates in the St Petersburg city government, who have generally been reluctant to reveal what Putin said to them. Because Putin was my designated interlocutor in the city government when I served at the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, as I have reported elsewhere, I was able to hold extensive personal conversations with him over a period of almost18 months, outside of our official interactions, that allowed me to plumb Putin’s views on Russia’s place in the world.

Putin’s personal history makes clear that from the beginning of his adult life, he viewed the West as an adversary. In his autobiography, Putin characterizes his work as a KGB operative in the GDR as “political intelligence.” He states that, “we were interested in any information about the ‘main opponent,’ as we called them, and the main opponent was considered NATO.” It would seem unlikely that a person with this particular background might evolve into a pro-Western politician, and evidence indicates that Putin did not. In our frank discussions in St Petersburg, Putin expressed to me his deep mistrust of the West. He believed Western leaders would help Russia only so long as it was to their own benefit. Friction with the West was inevitable because Russia’s interests were bound to diverge from those of other countries. Russia would have to stand up for its own interests.

Despite serving as deputy to the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin was not enamored of Western democracy. Masha Gessen states that Putin was always trying to get the mayor “to see the disadvantages of the democratic system.” In our private discussions, Putin denigrated legislators as representatives of special interests, a criticism he repeated later in his autobiography, where he explains his poor relations with the city council as the result of its elected members lobbying someone’s interests. In several conversations with me, Putin disparaged political parties for the same reason. He also disparaged the idea of a free press and other democratic institutions.

Putin’s Break with the West as Russian President

At the time he assumed national office, Putin’s view of Western democracy had not changed. In his Millennium article, Putin writes that Russia will not become a second edition of the U.S. or Britain, “in which liberal values have deep historic traditions.” Instead, he argues for a state with a strong executive authority that will take the primary role in promoting, but also controlling, economic development, and will be the driving force behind change in Russia.

From virtually the start of his presidency, scholars such as Lilia Shevtsova detected Putin’s determination to be less deferential towards the West than he felt that Boris Yeltsin had been. Still, Putin’s anti-Western perspective was tempered by his pragmatic recognition that Western investment would be needed to help Russia’s economy catch up to the West. In both his autobiography and in his private conversations with me, Putin said his experience in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had convinced him that economic reform would be the only way for Russia to recover from mistakes made under communism.

After assuming national office, Putin initially continued to cooperate with the West, despite his criticism of Western actions, such as NATO’s intervention in the conflict between Kosovo and Serbia (designated by NATO as “Operation Allied Force”), that was justified by NATO on humanitarian grounds, but which Putin characterized in his autobiography as a “direct violation of UN decisions.” Within a short period, however, Putin began to feel that his cooperative gestures, such as offering support for U.S. use of former Soviet military bases in Central Asia in the War on Terror, and his acceptance of U.S. terms on how to reduce strategic nuclear weapons in the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), were not reciprocated.

Once Putin found that the United States continued its criticism of his domestic policies and was unwilling to treat Russia as an equal internationally, he saw little reason to maintain cooperation with the U.S. In particular, Putin was angered by the unwillingness of the U.S. to modify its international behavior to accommodate Russian interests and by U.S. support for the so-called “color” revolutions in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005) that brought about changes in the governments of those states that threatened to undermine Russian hegemony in the so-called Near Abroad (the former parts of the Soviet Union that became independent countries after the collapse of the USSR). In his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin abandoned his pragmatic approach, denouncing the U.S. in Soviet-style language that reflected a renewed adversarial perspective and effectively put an end to cooperation with the West.

Putin’s Quest to Return Russia to Great Power Status

In his conversations with me in the early 1990s, Putin repeatedly made clear his view that Russia would have to rely on itself to regain its “rightful” status as a great power. This rightful status included acceptance by the U.S. and its allies that Russia’s sphere of influence included the Near Abroad and Eastern Europe. In this connection, Putin particularly emphasized that it was “in the natural order of things” for the states making up the Near Abroad to act in harmony with Russia.

At the time that Putin became a national political figure, his goal for Russia had not changed. In his Millennium article, Putin states flatly that, “Russia was and will remain a great power.” He goes on to delineate a long-term strategy for rebuilding Russia’s economy as a means of achieving a position of strength. Putin was more circumspect in discussing Russia’s relations with its neighbors, but at several points in his autobiography, he revealingly bemoans the “loss of the Soviet position in Europe” as his only regret pertaining to the collapse of communism.

As Russian President, Putin has attempted to dominate neighboring countries, including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, through military integration (through the Collective Security Treaty Organization) and economic integration (through the Eurasian Economic Union). He has also sought leverage over Eastern and Western Europe by creating dependencies on Russian energy or exploiting existing dependencies.

Putin’s Campaign Against Ukraine

Ukraine occupied a special place in Putin’s plans because of its history and geography. After assuming the Russian presidency, Putin repeatedly intervened in Ukraine’s domestic affairs to try to steer Ukraine to a pro-Russia course. Initially, Putin’s efforts involved manipulation of Ukrainian politics and elections, but those were thwarted when the so-called Orange Revolution led to the invalidation of the rigged election of pro-Russia presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych in 2004.

Almost ten years later, another Putin effort to pressure Ukraine backfired. In November 2013, Yanukovych – who had been legitimately elected Ukraine’s president in 2010 – reneged on signing a trade and association agreement with the European Union (EU) at Putin’s urging, sparking popular protests. A heavy-handed police reaction, combined with the government’s adoption of repressive laws and Yanukovych’s announced intention to sign an economic agreement with Russia instead of the EU, led to an escalation of the protests that in early 2014 turned into the so-called Maidan Revolution. Unable to maintain control, Yanukovych fled the country and was voted out of office by the Ukrainian parliament, an act both he and Putin later characterized as a coup.

Putin responded to the crisis by annexing Crimea and providing support for pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region. Evidence suggests this also marked the origin of Putin’s planning for an eventual invasion. Following the election of Volodymyr Zelensky as Ukrainian President in 2019, negotiations directly between the two men failed to resolve the situation in the Donbas. Subsequent actions and public comments on both sides exacerbated their political disagreements and their personal animosity to the extent that Putin presumably felt he had no other option but to resort to Russian military might to achieve his goals in Ukraine, just as he has done in Moldova, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.

In this context, it is important to note the continuity in Putin’s perspective as demonstrated by his statement that he is emulating Peter the Great in taking back territory that once belonged to Russia, and by his speeches and screeds disputing Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent country. More evidence may be found in Russia’s December 2021 proposal, immediately rejected by NATO because of its potential limits on the rights of sovereign states, for a security deal with the West that would require NATO to cease all military activities in Eastern Europe and the states making up the Near Abroad.

NATO May Be the Excuse, but It Is Not the Cause of Putin’s War

Russian-Ukrainian discord did not begin with Putin’s rise to power. Relations between the two countries have been fractious since the emergence of an independent Ukrainian state following the collapse of the USSR. Given this strained history and given Putin’s long-held desire to make Russia a great power again – an important component of which is bringing Ukraine to heel – it seems simplistic to argue that Putin’s invasion is a reaction to NATO’s years-old declaration regarding eventual Ukrainian membership. Such an assertion fits neither with the vision for Russia that Putin has held since his politically formative years in St. Petersburg, nor with the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations since the collapse of the USSR. Nor does the idea that Putin is reacting to NATO’s actions align with his agenda and behavior. Since becoming Russian president, Putin has been proactively attempting to achieve his goals for Russia, not reacting to the actions of others.

Putin’s current view of NATO as an adversary did not develop in recent years. Its origins can be traced to his KGB days in the GDR. In this sense, it is probably NATO’s continued attractiveness to smaller countries in Europe seeking freedom from Russian domination, rather than any NATO actions per se, that has aroused Putin’s ire and served as his self-justification for making war on Ukraine.

Throughout history, there have been numerous examples of smaller powers trying to escape the shadow of larger powers, while larger powers aim to maintain their positions of dominance. The war in Ukraine fits this mold. Ukraine’s desire to join NATO – and also the EU – is another example of a small country seeking to escape domination by a large one. Putin launched his war in what is perhaps a final effort, after a string of failures, to prevent Ukraine’s escape. The conflict was not caused, as the realist critique would have it, by Western initiatives to contest Russian control over Ukraine. Rather – as Ukraine’s success and determination on the battlefield continue to show – it is the Ukrainians themselves who are contesting Putin’s self-proclaimed right to dominate them.

Tags: Bucharest Declaration, Great Powers, NATO Expansion, Vladimir Putin, War on Ukraine

About The Author

Andrew Goodman
Andrew Goodman retired from the Senior Foreign Service in 2009 after over 30 years, mostly devoted to dealing with the USSR and Russia. He has taught courses on Russian foreign policy at several academic institutions, including Columbia University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has previously published a number of articles about Vladimir Putin’s attitudes and policies.

15. Trump Administration Weakens "Aggressive" Export Controls and Threatens National Security

See the chart at the link below.

Excerpts:

The immediate question is whether the latest policy guidance from the White House includes any or all of the emerging technologies? The above chart was published to highlight what the Trump administration originally wanted to curtail using export controls.

It is normal whenever new US export controls or guidance is proposed for the Commerce Department to publish the policy for comment before it is approved. In the comment period, the public (most often industry) comments on the proposed rule. It is far from clear if Commerce will publish guidance for the latest policy change, but it should do so. Moreover, the Commerce Department should explain the national security implications as it understands them.

There also is the question of interagency coordination, a non-trivial part of the US export control process. Will the Defense Department and other agencies (especially the intelligence community) be consulted, or will the Department of Commerce ignore the other agencies? Typically the Defense Department concerns itself with the impact of approving export licenses that might undermine national security and the military mission. Beyond that, many of the emerging technologies are critical to US defense systems, and represent areas where the Defense Department has invested billions of dollars.

The latest decisions contradict the Action Plan on AI and potentially compromise export control protection of critical emerging technologies. In turn the decisions damage US national security as defined, in part, by the administration itself.

Trump Administration Weakens "Aggressive" Export Controls and Threatens National Security

https://weapons.substack.com/p/trump-administration-weakens-aggressive?utm

Stephen Bryen

Jul 28, 2025

Recent US export control decisions imperil national security and threaten not only US artificial intelligence "dominance" but potentially many other emerging technologies critical to military programs.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

While legal US exports of AI-related semiconductors were blocked, China got at least $1 billion worth of Nvidia chips illegally, mostly in "packages" of data-center-ready racks. The packages being sold in China are labeled as Supermicro, Dell and Asus. The chip packages, that include software, were sold at a 50% markup over US prices. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that the Trump administration has decided to lift "aggressive" strategic export controls and has directed the Commerce Department's Bureau Industry and Security to implement the new directive.

Under the US export control system, commercial exports, also known as dual use exports, are controlled by the Department of Commerce. However, the Commerce Department is supposed to coordinate with the Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security and US intelligence.

By law US export controls support national security, short supply and US foreign policy. These are broad categories. The US is also supposed to coordinate its export controls multilaterally, but since the dissolution of COCOM in 1994 and the weak substitute Wassenaar arrangement, very often the US resorts to unilateral export controls.

It is not clear what "aggressive" strategic export controls are, nor is it clear how it impacts the interagency deliberative process. One presumes that the Commerce Department's Bureau of Export Controls will try to come up with some sort of export licensing guidelines to cover the White House directive. Neither Commerce, nor the other involved agencies, apparently played any role in the White House directive.

Prior to the White House decision, the President previously told Nvidia it could restart chip exports to China, apparently a quid pro quo where China released rare earth exports to the United States.

Twenty former US officials say allowing Nvidia to export chips to China was a strategic misstep.

The latest White House move, lifting “aggressive” strategic export controls, is designed to facilitate trade negotiations between the US president and China's president, Xi Jinping. Looked at objectively, Chinese export restrictions trumped Trump (pun intended). Some expected that Trump would go to China in September when Russian President Vladimir Putin also is expected. However, it appears that idea has been nixed, and Trump won't meet with Xi and Putin together, and will come to China later in the Fall, probably after the APEC meeting in South Korea. News reports say that China and the US are working on an agenda and a date for a high level meeting.

The immediate impact on removing "aggressive" export controls impacts technology for artificial intelligence. The Trump administration has released an AI Action Plan. The Plan calls for removing "red tape" that delays AI investments and initiatives, investing more in AI, and boosting government investment, especially by the Defense Department. The Plan describes the US effort in AI as a "race" like the "space race" in the past and it seeks "American dominance" in AI.

The latest decisions on export controls, and specifically on Nvidia, compromise the Action Plan. They are totally incompatible.

The lifting of export controls on Nvidia, which is the premier component in AI-data centers, and the subsequent order lifting "aggressive" export controls not only subverts the billions of investment already made in AI, but leaves uncertain what other critical US technologies will be sold off.

There is little doubt China is aggressively pursuing AI and is investing billions in the effort. According to Morgan Stanley, China is a sleeping giant that is now awakened and is seeking global AI dominance by 2030. It is important to note that US companies like Nvidia, will directly assist China by sharing know-how and technology.

There are many sensitive emerging technologies that are quite important and in many cases national security sensitive. The chart below illustrates some of them:

The immediate question is whether the latest policy guidance from the White House includes any or all of the emerging technologies? The above chart was published to highlight what the Trump administration originally wanted to curtail using export controls.

It is normal whenever new US export controls or guidance is proposed for the Commerce Department to publish the policy for comment before it is approved. In the comment period, the public (most often industry) comments on the proposed rule. It is far from clear if Commerce will publish guidance for the latest policy change, but it should do so. Moreover, the Commerce Department should explain the national security implications as it understands them.

There also is the question of interagency coordination, a non-trivial part of the US export control process. Will the Defense Department and other agencies (especially the intelligence community) be consulted, or will the Department of Commerce ignore the other agencies? Typically the Defense Department concerns itself with the impact of approving export licenses that might undermine national security and the military mission. Beyond that, many of the emerging technologies are critical to US defense systems, and represent areas where the Defense Department has invested billions of dollars.

The latest decisions contradict the Action Plan on AI and potentially compromise export control protection of critical emerging technologies. In turn the decisions damage US national security as defined, in part, by the administration itself.

16. The Real National Security Betrayal Isn’t Who Leaves—It’s What Gets Dismantled

Excerpts:

The real risk is not just who might turn—but that we are dismantling the systems that once kept betrayal rare. Continuous vetting, structured oversight, exit protocols, peer networks, professional development—all are being hollowed out. The result is not just vulnerability, but dilution: as purged professionals migrate into the private sector, their skills and access can be redirected in ways national institutions can no longer monitor or guide. This is not classic defection. It is strategic erosion.

That erosion is worsened by the public narrative itself. Painting dismissed officials as latent threats imposes reputational damage, sows mistrust inside agencies, and reframes counterintelligence from protection to punishment. Surveillance becomes deterrence. Whistleblowing becomes risk. And fear becomes policy.

Rebuilding national resilience begins by restoring the capacity we knowingly let degrade. The scale of the purge was visible in advance. Its consequences were predictable. Yet no parallel investment in safeguarding systems accompanied the dismissals. No surge in counterintelligence staff. No reinforcement of analytic triage. In some cases, even basic exit protocols were discarded. That is not a failure of foresight. It is a failure of design.

This is not just a warning against exaggerated fears. It is a call to resist false framing. The betrayal to fear is not from those pushed out, but from a system that let itself be dismantled—and now lacks the institutional confidence to distinguish vulnerability from inevitability. That failure, more than any one act of espionage, is the defining national security risk of this moment.

The Real National Security Betrayal Isn’t Who Leaves—It’s What Gets Dismantled

By Brian O'Neill

Published on July 28, 2025

Brian O'Neill

Brian O’Neill (LinkedIn) is a professor of practice at Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, where he teaches strategic intelligence.

justsecurity.org · by Brian O'Neill · July 28, 2025

The Trump administration’s dismantling of the federal government has not come in a single rupture, but through a long, calculated disassembly. While the first term laid rhetorical and procedural groundwork, the second has delivered its full expression. The U.S. Supreme Court has delayed some actions, upheld others, but largely deferred to executive discretion. The firings in early July of 1,300 State Department employees—roughly 9 percent of its workforce—represented the latest wave in that sustained campaign: senior regional experts, arms control lawyers, and public health advisors abruptly dismissed to advance an enduring political strategy.

National security professionals for months have been raising the alarm—not just about operational disruption, but about the deeper degradation of analytic integrity, continuity, and institutional capacity. The primary concern, voiced by both former officials and outside observers, has been about the erosion of the Intelligence Community’s ability to detect threats before they manifest.

Alongside these institutional concerns, several former intelligence and cybersecurity officials have suggested that the scale and manner of the administration’s dismissals will lead to deliberate acts of espionage by disgruntled former public servants. Some have described the situation as a “numbers game,” arguing that a larger pool of displaced personnel inevitably raises the odds that one or more will be recruited by a foreign intelligence service. One former National Security Agency (NSA) counterintelligence officer put it bluntly: “Someone is going to go rogue. It’s just a question of how bad it will be.”

Russia and China are certainly watching. The risk of targeting is real and should not be dismissed. It is the reason national security roles require rigorous vetting, compartmented access, and continuous evaluation. It is why insider threat programs exist, why the FBI aggressively investigates infiltration attempts, and why counterintelligence remains a pillar of national defense.

But here, a distinction must be made. The danger of foreign exploitation is structural, not moral. To acknowledge that laid-off federal employees may be more visible to adversary recruiters is not the same as forecasting that they are more likely to betray the country. Yet that conflation is happening, often implicitly, in press coverage and public commentary.

This actuarial logic—that betrayal scales with volume—rests on flawed assumptions. It misreads how insider threats develop, misattributes motive, and redirects institutional focus away from adversary tradecraft toward internal suspicion. It casts former public servants not as vulnerable targets, but as latent traitors. That shift distorts counterintelligence priorities and risks legitimizing loyalty tests, intrusive surveillance, or retaliatory scrutiny under the guise of prevention. It also reinforces the Trump administration’s framing: that those purged were never trustworthy to begin with.

The real risk is not the presumed disloyalty of those pushed out. It is that the institutions designed to prevent betrayal have been hollowed out. The very systems that detect, deter, and respond to insider threats—continuous evaluation, exit protocols, counterintelligence oversight—are being dismantled without replacement. No surge in vulnerability was accompanied by a surge in protection. No new hotlines. No surge in staffing of cleared counterintelligence personnel.

What matters now is not speculation about who might turn, but recognition of what has already been turned off: the systems meant to detect compromise, manage exits, and sustain institutional memory. The greater threat is not betrayal by individuals—but the dismantling of the structures built to withstand it.

The Betrayal Forecast

At the core of warnings that former civil servants will “go rogue” is a simple premise: mass firings increase the pool of disaffected, financially strained, and professionally displaced individuals with knowledge of sensitive government operations. Foreign intelligence services, particularly those of Russia and China, are seen as poised to exploit this moment. Modern espionage no longer depends on walk-ins or chance meetings. Online professional networks, résumé databases, and shell companies have made it easier to identify, contact, and cultivate potential assets under the guise of consulting work or employment outreach. The digital footprint left by newly unemployed officials can become a targeting list for adversary services.

What gives this argument force is its appeal to statistical reasoning. Positing this as “a numbers game” implies that espionage risk scales predictably with the number of displaced personnel. In this framing, betrayal is not an aberration but a probabilistic outcome. Some estimates—circulated in public discussion but not derived from official data—suggest that 1 to 1.5 percent of those terminated could represent insider threats. The larger the number pushed out, the higher the actuarial certainty that at least a few will defect, knowingly or otherwise.

This line of thinking is neat, measurable, and rooted in familiar logic of risk modeling. But it also suggests a straight line from grievance to betrayal, from targeting to defection. It treats motive as a background variable and opportunity as a catalyst. It reduces espionage—one of the most complex challenges in national security—to a numbers game, driven by volume rather than motive.

What the Data Reveals

Espionage, unlike insurance claims or workplace attrition, does not follow regular statistical patterns. The available data—and the history of insider betrayal in the United States—tell a different story: one marked by psychological complexity, operational patience, and institutional blind spots, not actuarial inevitability.

The Defense Personnel and Security Research Center, which has tracked insider threats since its establishment after the John A. Walker Jr. espionage case, found that post–Cold War cases of American espionage (1990–2015) were driven primarily by financial motives (28 percent), followed by divided loyalties (22 percent). But these financial drivers often reflected greed, not hardship—many offenders were still employed, with access to sensitive material, when they chose to betray their country. Dismissal or financial desperation following job loss rarely appeared as a primary catalyst.

Between 1990 and 2019, only 1,485 individuals were identified as having committed espionage or related crimes on U.S. soil, despite over four million Americans holding active security clearances during that time. Among those with Top Secret clearances—estimated at 1.3 million—the annual likelihood of betrayal was vanishingly small, amounting to less than one conviction per 100,000 cleared individuals. These are not the statistics of a system prone to mass disloyalty.

Behavioral studies reinforce this picture. Dr. Ursula Wilder, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) psychologist who interviewed dozens of imprisoned American spies, concluded that betrayal typically arises from a convergence of personality dysfunction, acute personal crisis, and opportunity. Her findings emphasized that espionage is seldom impulsive or situational. It is a cultivated outcome—often the product of long-term targeting, reinforced by ego wounds, unmet needs, or deeply held grievances that go unrecognized and unaddressed over time.

Espionage is not spontaneous combustion. It is a deliberate, cultivated process by hostile intelligence services. As scholars have shown, true insider threats tend to be slow-burning, concealed, and bureaucratically invisible until they are not. When betrayals do occur, they are far more often traced to longstanding institutional blind spots than sudden emotional responses to perceived injustice.

Well-known espionage cases reflect this slow burn. CIA officer Aldrich Ames was not dismissed before he turned as a spy for the Russians—he was promoted. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Robert Hanssen remained in place working for Russia for years, despite behavioral flags. Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Montes was considered a model employee until the day she was arrested for spying for Cuba. And NSA contractor Edward Snowden left on his own terms. Their betrayals were the end stage of long-running psychological and operational arcs that institutions failed to detect or act upon.

The System Is Being Stripped from Within

Espionage is not an unanticipated risk in U.S. national security—it is a known one. The system was built with that expectation in mind. From background investigations and compartmentalized access to insider threat programs and exit briefings, the federal government has relied on layered controls to reduce both the likelihood and impact of betrayal. These mechanisms were designed not to guarantee loyalty, but to contain the damage one insider could do.

What has made espionage rare is not the absence of grievance, but the presence of structure—rigorous clearance reviews, continuous evaluation of risk, and active counterintelligence efforts to monitor adversary attempts at recruitment. The system is imperfect, but it is built on the assumption that betrayal will happen—and must be detected, contained, and deterred. The danger now is not just that more people may be vulnerable. It is that the architecture that made betrayal manageable is being quietly dismantled.

What once made the system resilient—its layered safeguards—is being dismantled piecemeal under the guise of reform.

At the Department of Justice (DOJ), most of the senior leadership in the National Security Division’s (NSD) had been displaced in March—by dismissal, reassignment, or resignation. Acting division head Devin DeBacker was removed in February. His deputy, veteran counterintelligence prosecutor George Toscas, was also reassigned, alongside Eun Young Choi, Brad Wiegmann, Melissa MacTough, and Scott Damelin. DOJ’s FY 2026 request cuts NSD funding by 8.4% and staff positions by around 10%, eliminating 35 jobs.

At the FBI, a parallel process unfolded. According to former Counterintelligence Director Peter Stork, the Bureau’s internal posture is now “strained,” leaving it “in a greater vulnerability than there was prior to Kash Patel showing up.” There has been a cascading loss of leadership: executive assistant directors pushed out, followed by assistant directors overseeing counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and criminal divisions. Stork warned that, without senior leadership, critical decisions were being made by officials “who have no idea what they’re doing—not due to personal failings, but because they had not been given the time or mentorship to develop the necessary expertise.”

Meanwhile, the capacity of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to monitor insider threats has been weakened. Agencies that once maintained formal exit briefings and post-employment tracking have made these processes inconsistent or, in some cases, abandoned them entirely. Reuters reported in February that multiple personnel with high-level security clearances were dismissed without standard security debriefings—leaving potential intelligence targets in circulation with no formal contact point and diminished institutional ties.

The most direct blow may come from Congress. In June, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Tom Cotton introduced legislation to cap the ODNI at 650 full-time staff—down from 1,800 at the beginning of the year. Director Tulsi Gabbard has already confirmed a 25 percent workforce reduction. Cotton’s bill, if passed into law, would go further, eliminating core institutions such as the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) and the National Intelligence University.

As the NCSC underscores in its 2024 strategy, the importance of institutional resilience, proactive detection, and sustained internal vigilance are critical elements of the U.S. counterintelligence posture. To advance these goals, the guidance calls for strengthening insider threat programs, enhancing continuous vetting, and reinforcing the professional capacity of security and intelligence agencies. Yet, the very institutions responsible for implementing this strategy—analytic and oversight bodies, including the NCSC itself—are now being dismantled, degrading the safeguards they were built to maintain.

Conclusion

The United States has never seen a dismantling of its federal institutions at this scale or velocity—least of all in its national security infrastructure. The coordinated dismissal of career professionals, the erosion of oversight mechanisms, and the political recasting of loyalty as ideology are not isolated threats. They are the dismantling of the very structures built to detect and deter betrayal.

This moment carries genuine risk. No prior period offers a direct analogue. We do not know what happens when thousands of professionals—some with sensitive access, others with institutional memory—are cast out under suspicion, stripped of structure, and left without protective scaffolding. The Intelligence Community has faced internal betrayals before. But it has never faced this scale of dislocation, nor this depth of strategic neglect. If new betrayals occur, they will not emerge from nowhere. They will be cultivated—by adversaries, by desperation, or by the very vacuum the government has helped create.

But to leap from that uncertainty to predictions of mass treason is both analytically unsound and politically dangerous. The actuarial logic now gaining traction—suggesting that betrayal is a statistical inevitability tied to volume—is seductive in its simplicity. But it misreads how insider threats emerge and misattributes motive. A betrayal rate of even 1.25 percent would represent an unprecedented counterintelligence collapse—one not supported by historical data, known behavior patterns, or psychological profiles. These projections are not warnings. They are fear instruments masquerading as analysis.

The real risk is not just who might turn—but that we are dismantling the systems that once kept betrayal rare. Continuous vetting, structured oversight, exit protocols, peer networks, professional development—all are being hollowed out. The result is not just vulnerability, but dilution: as purged professionals migrate into the private sector, their skills and access can be redirected in ways national institutions can no longer monitor or guide. This is not classic defection. It is strategic erosion.

That erosion is worsened by the public narrative itself. Painting dismissed officials as latent threats imposes reputational damage, sows mistrust inside agencies, and reframes counterintelligence from protection to punishment. Surveillance becomes deterrence. Whistleblowing becomes risk. And fear becomes policy.

Rebuilding national resilience begins by restoring the capacity we knowingly let degrade. The scale of the purge was visible in advance. Its consequences were predictable. Yet no parallel investment in safeguarding systems accompanied the dismissals. No surge in counterintelligence staff. No reinforcement of analytic triage. In some cases, even basic exit protocols were discarded. That is not a failure of foresight. It is a failure of design.

This is not just a warning against exaggerated fears. It is a call to resist false framing. The betrayal to fear is not from those pushed out, but from a system that let itself be dismantled—and now lacks the institutional confidence to distinguish vulnerability from inevitability. That failure, more than any one act of espionage, is the defining national security risk of this moment.

FEATURED IMAGE: Visualization of a man in front of data (via Getty Images)

justsecurity.org · by Brian O'Neill · July 28, 2025

17. ‘Own the story’: China urged to control narrative and engage Asia to counteract the West

This is where lessons from the Cold War combined with modern tactics, techniques, (and technology) and procedures could help us compete successfully against Chinese narratives if we do not cede the information domain to China and all of the CRInK.

And with all due respect, tweets from the US administration are not effective for this competition.

‘Own the story’: China urged to control narrative and engage Asia to counteract the West

Discourse power has become a key arena of international competition, according to experts in Chinese politics, media and party ideology

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3319853/own-story-china-urged-control-narrative-and-engage-asia-counteract-west

Meredith Chen

Published: 3:03pm, 29 Jul 2025Updated: 3:06pm, 29 Jul 2025

China must leverage its new cultural symbols and stay open to interacting with scholars across Asia to reshape its global messaging, Chinese experts have said, urging Beijing to counterbalance what they say is a historically dominant Western narrative.

They also noted that Beijing should take a more proactive role in shaping international rules and norms in emerging fields to align soft power with China’s growth, especially as the foundations of the United States’ hard power appeared increasingly fragile.

Zheng Yongnian, a prominent political scientist, said China must take a leading role in shaping the “Asian narrative” with an open and inclusive mind, invite more Asian scholars to engage, seek common ground and promote dialogue to push back against an entrenched dominance of Western discourse.

‘Made in China 2025’: how has the nation changed 10 years after setting its manufacturing blueprint?

Asian values were rooted in the principle of “harmony and diversity” and the region should return to its tradition of consensus-based politics, he said in an interview published on July 17 by China International Communications Group (CICG) Asia-Pacific, a state-owned organisation operated by the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department.

“For a long time, Western discourse held absolute dominance, and most Chinese scholars were educated within that framework. As a result, China had struggled to project its voice internationally. Today, that is beginning to change – but it will take time,” he said.

“China must take the lead in the next stage of shaping an Asian discourse. We must approach this with an open mindset. You can’t have a ready-made narrative to forcibly impose on others – like the US does.”

As global power dynamics change – with the US shifting from international engagement to a more domestic focus, and emerging economies, such as the Global South and the Brics bloc, seeking a more active role in global governance – discourse power has become a key arena of international competition, according to experts.

The US announced its decision this month that it would quit the United Nations’ cultural and education agency Unesco, adding to Trump’s second-term drive to pull the US out of a series of global bodies, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Human Rights Council.

This month, the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, officially halted its foreign assistance programmes.

Zheng said the US had placed too much emphasis on so-called soft power while neglecting the “hard power” – particularly its manufacturing base – that supported it. He said true soft power was the soft application of hard strength.

Asian countries, particularly China and Asean members, were well-equipped with a strong foundation of civilisation, economy and society to shape an Asian narrative, he added.

Zheng Yongnian, adviser to Beijing’s policymakers, said China had not yet built its own “knowledge system” that would support its narrative. Photo: CUHK-Shenzhen

But, according to Cheng Manli, a professor at the school of journalism and communication at Peking University, China’s cultural soft power had yet to catch up with its growing hard power, and its voice was still limited on the global stage, lacking clarity and effective reach.

“China faces an increasingly complex and challenging international public opinion environment, which makes it all the more urgent to enhance its global communication capacity and break through the Western-dominated narrative barriers surrounding China,” she wrote in a commentary first published on July 22 in the Economic Daily, a newspaper directly under the State Council.

And Chen Jin, a lecturer at the Central Party School, wrote in the party journal Theory Construction this month that despite the growing role of emerging economies, the global discourse landscape remained the unbalanced “strong West, weak East”, a phrase long used in Chinese political and academic spheres.

He said Western politicians, so-called China experts and media outlets sought to frame China’s modernisation as contradictory to the global political and economic system through a Western lens of democracy, rule of law, civil society and free speech.

For example, according to Chen, some Western countries linked China’s advances in AI, chip manufacturing, quantum communication and drones to security and privacy concerns, “attempting to frame China’s tech development as a potential threat to the international community”.

“If China’s modernisation is not presented objectively and accurately in international discourse, it will harm China’s global image and reduce opportunities for cooperation in global governance, trade and technological exchange.”

In one example, he said China must prevent the Western narrative from excluding it from the definition of the Global South.

Cheng, of Peking University, wrote: “China must move away from an image shaped by others and instead take control of its own narrative – one that presents the country as credible, lovable and respectable to the world.”

She cited Chinese tech and cultural products that had sparked phenomenal discussion worldwide in recent years, including DeepSeek AI, the video game Black Myth: Wukong and the record-breaking animated film Ne Zha.

How do China’s panda loans work and how has panda diplomacy evolved?

“These emerging cultural forms have opened up broader space for China’s international communication, while also prompting deeper reflection on its future direction – how to better plan the use of new technologies and methods to break information barriers, build discourse power and ultimately change the current imbalance in global information dissemination,” Cheng wrote.

Central Party School lecturer Chen said the lack of global standards and norms for emerging technologies presented a historically strategic opportunity to shift China from being a rule follower to a rule maker to boost its global competitiveness and enable more Chinese products to go global.

He cited the example of AI governance as a possible sphere in which China could lead.

On Saturday, Chinese Premier Li Qiang called for the establishment of an international centre to better coordinate global cooperation on artificial intelligence, so it did not become an “exclusive game” for a select few. It followed Beijing’s move in 2023 to propose a framework called the Global AI Governance Initiative.

Chen said that during the standard setting process, it was essential to convert hi-tech talent into standardisation experts, and research institutes and major private tech firms should be encouraged to take part in the bodies that set international standards to enhance China’s influence in shaping global technological and industrial norms.

Meredith Chen

Meredith Chen joined the Post in 2023 and covers China politics and diplomacy. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong. Previously, she had stints with both international and Chinese-language media outlets, focusing on affairs in Asia.

18. Eastern Stars Rising: The Rise of China’s Commercial Space Industry

Excerpts:

To ensure America’s leadership in space, the U.S. government should actively support U.S. startups and integrate them at scale into missions of national importance. This includes further streamlining space export controls to allow startups to compete in foreign markets, revamping regulations to allow for a faster launch cadence, more closely tracking Chinese commercial technology industries to inform U.S. acquisition, and supporting space startups with major contracting opportunities.

...

Supporting startups with contracting opportunities can help address gaps in critical mission areas, including satellite communications, Earth observation, space domain awareness, space traffic management, space control, and more. Several Booz Allen Venture portfolio companies could play a role, including: Quindar, whose mission management platform enables the safe and efficient command and control of spacecraft; Albedo, whose very low Earth orbit imaging satellites can provide detailed Earth imaging and non-Earth imaging data; and Starfish Space, which maximizes the value and security of satellites on orbit with its Otter servicing vehicle — a satellite designed for autonomous docking and maneuverability.

As China’s commercial space sector rapidly matures, the United States cannot afford complacency. Sustaining leadership in the new space race will require a renewed commitment to the ingenuity, agility, and risk-taking that define the American startup ecosystem. By fully empowering private space innovators, the United States can outpace China and ensure that the future of space is shaped by American innovation and vision.

Eastern Stars Rising: The Rise of China’s Commercial Space Industry - War on the Rocks

Ryan Nelson, Taylor Rhoten, and Brian MacCarthy

July 29, 2025

warontherocks.com · July 29, 2025

The startup principle “fail fast, learn faster” has defined the American space industry for much of the 21st century. The U.S. private sector has pushed the technical boundaries in rocket launch, low Earth orbit satellites, imagery analytics, and other areas, and through this innovation has become the driving force behind America’s leadership in space.

But the United States is no longer alone at the vanguard. China has watched and learned from America’s space startups to accelerate its own dynamic commercial space sector. While state-owned enterprises have historically dominated China’s space market, the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly looking to China’s commercial companies to fulfill its ambition to become the world’s preeminent space power — and supporting them with streamlined regulations and investment.

China’s rapidly advancing commercial space industry should be highly concerning to the United States and its allies. As companies on both sides race to launch more satellites, develop better rockets, and build new space infrastructure, the outcome will determine who sets the terms for global connectivity, commerce, and security in the decades ahead. Should the United States fail to respond decisively, China will use space to erode America’s military edge and control the backbone of the global economy.

Staying ahead in this new space competition will require America to double down on its commercial space ecosystem with forward-leaning regulations and expanded pathways to do business with the U.S. government. Given that our roles at Booz Allen involve analyzing, investing in, and partnering with emerging startups, we do have a commercial interest in seeing such changes. Nonetheless, we strongly believe that only by empowering our innovators can America secure its place as the dominant nation in space amidst a rising China.

BECOME A MEMBER

The Evolution of China’s Space Industry

China’s space industry was conceived in 1958 with Mao Zedong’s “Two Bombs, One Satellite” program, a strategic initiative to indigenously develop nuclear weapons, missiles, and satellites. China viewed these capabilities as critical to ensuring its long-term security against both the United States (which had threatened nuclear strikes against China in 1955 during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis), and the Soviet Union (which China viewed as intentionally keeping it dependent on Soviet technologies). In 1970, China successfully launched its first satellite — DFH-1 (Dong Fang Hong-1, “The East is Red”) — making it the fifth nation to independently launch a satellite and marking the birth of the nation’s space era.

For more than four decades after the launch of DFH-1, China’s space industry maintained an entirely state-run model, with defense enterprises developing launch vehicles and placing dozens of remote sensing and communications satellites into orbit. Despite this progress, by 2010 China remained a second-rate space power far behind the United States. As Beijing watched private American firms become the industry’s innovation leaders, its own bloated enterprises alone seemed unlikely to lead China to supremacy in space. China foresaw this as a major challenge. Then it adapted.

Starting in 2014, China began to deliberately foster its commercial space sector. That year, the State Council released a policy directive to open certain areas of the nation’s space industry — including Earth observation and launch — to private investment. Over the following decade, China passed a host of guidelines to bolster its commercial space companies: in 2015 it called on China’s space industry to “grasp the transformative” innovation from commercial development; in 2019 it provided greater regulatory clarity to commercial launch companies; in 2022 it further opened up procurement and research projects to private companies; in 2023 it designated commercial space as a “strategic emerging industry,” spurring numerous local governments to foster local commercial space sectors; and in 2025 the China National Space Administration began working on a development plan to strengthen China’s commercial space sector from 2026 to 2035. This plan will likely further streamline licensing and permitting for commercial launch and open access to major national test facilities previously restricted to only government projects.

Our own analysis suggests that such policies have catalyzed hundreds of venture capital-backed Chinese space startups across launch, Earth observation, satellite communications, in-orbit servicing, thrusters, semiconductors, and other areas. These commercial companies, inherently dual-use, are at the core of why China is rapidly narrowing the gap with the United States in space.

Impact to Defense, Commerce, and Global Influence

China’s commercial space companies are having outsized impact in three segments in particular: satellite communications (to include internet connectivity), Earth observation, and launch.

In the satellite communications market, Chinese communications satellites will comprise the majority of all Chinese satellites by the end of 2025. Funded by government and private venture capital, five companies — Shanghai Spacecom, China SatNet, Huawei, Honqing Technology, and Geespace — could potentially launch a combined ~54,000 satellites within the next decade to provide internet connectivity from low Earth orbit. This surge in Chinese bandwidth is expected to flood international markets starting this year, capturing billions of users worldwide and expanding the reach of China’s Digital Silk Road as this user base grows.

Shanghai Spacecom — which is developing the 15,000-satellite “Thousand Sails” constellation — has already launched 90 satellites in under a calendar year and plans to launch 648 more by the end of 2025. While Western competitors like SpaceX’s Starlink already operate thousands of satellites servicing well over 100 countries, the important point is that China may significantly close this gap through this decade. In the case of Shanghai Spacecom, it has agreements to provide internet in domestic China, Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan, and is in similar talks with more than two dozen nations, mostly in the Global South.

Chinese control over connectivity in these markets would extend Beijing’s wall of digital censorship and serve as a massive intelligence gathering apparatus for China’s Ministry of State Security. At the same time, it would grant China’s military a robust satellite communications infrastructure to support military operations as it attempts to operate further and further from the shores of mainland China.

In Earth observation, Chinese companies are proliferating low earth orbit with constellations that feature advanced heterogeneous sensors, and increasingly, edge compute capabilities. One such company is Chang Guang Satellite. A late-stage startup spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014, Chang Guang now boasts one of the largest optical remote sensing constellations in the world. As part of its Jilin-1 constellation, Chang Guang has deployed more than 130 multispectral, infrared, video, and hyperspectral satellites. A recent study comparing global remote sensing capabilities found that the company ranked among the top three global providers in revisit rate, video quality, and mid- and long-wave infrared sensing. In addition to its close Chinese military connections, Chang Guang has provided geospatial intelligence to Russia’s Wagner Group and Yemen’s Houthis, the latter of whom has used the intelligence to directly target American warships.

China’s rapid expansion in Earth observation has also resulted in an oversupply of geospatial data, outpacing domestic demand and prompting leading firms to seek international markets. Major players like Chang Guang are attempting to sell their data at cut-rate prices internationally — as low as 10 yuan ($1.40) per square kilometer — to gain market share. As in the satellite communications sector, this influx of cheap, technically capable Chinese geospatial services poses risks to U.S. security by undercutting Western remote sensing startups.

While China has made strides in satellites, the primary constraint to its commercial space industry is its limited rocket launch capacity. Although the pace of launches has steadily increased, with 68 rockets launched last year carrying 270 satellites into orbit, this rate must accelerate dramatically to meet the demands of deploying tens of thousands of satellites. SpaceX, for example, launched more than double the number of rockets in 2024 than did the entire Chinese nation. While state-owned Long March rockets have handled the majority of China’s launches, their scheduling prioritizes government and scientific objectives and their launchpads are restricted for use. This means commercial operators must wait in line or depend on a commercial launch sector that is still maturing in reliability and capacity.

However, dozens of Chinese launch startups are vying to solve this blockage. CAS Space, LandSpace, and several other startups are introducing reusable first stage boosters in new rockets this year, aiming to increase launch cadence and reduce costs. More recently founded startups, such as CosmoLeap and Yushi Space, plan to employ the “chopstick” method of “catching” returning rockets after they deliver satellites to orbit. Infrastructure improvements are also underway, including the opening of China’s first dedicated commercial spaceport on the island province of Hainan, which aims to alleviate some access constraints for commercial launches.

While China’s launch capability trails that of the West for now, it is poised for significant maturation. China’s expanded launch capacity will proliferate access to space for Chinese dual-use satellite companies, allow the Chinese military more “quick turn” tactical launch options in the event of a conflict, and enable the placement of infrastructure to support China’s ambitions to dominate the emerging lunar economy. Moreover, Chinese launch will almost certainly increase the number of satellites in orbit from other hostile and less sophisticated actors, increasing the likelihood of debris-creating collisions detrimental to the space operational environment.

Recommendations and Conclusion

To ensure America’s leadership in space, the U.S. government should actively support U.S. startups and integrate them at scale into missions of national importance. This includes further streamlining space export controls to allow startups to compete in foreign markets, revamping regulations to allow for a faster launch cadence, more closely tracking Chinese commercial technology industries to inform U.S. acquisition, and supporting space startups with major contracting opportunities.

Streamline Export Control Compliance

To ensure U.S. startups can fairly compete against Chinese competitors in international markets, the U.S. government should continue to loosen burdensome export controls on relevant dual-use space products. The U.S. government has already taken significant steps to relax controls, including moving most commercial communications satellites, many types of Earth observation platforms, and tens of thousands of component parts, from the International Traffic in Arms Regulations munitions list to the Commerce Department’s more flexible dual-use regime. More recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scrapped restrictive licenses on U.S. remote sensing satellites operating abroad, and new 2024 rules under the Biden Administration let U.S. companies sell many spacecraft and components license-free to trusted allies.

Building off these successes, U.S. regulators should ensure a streamlined compliance process for startups going forward. This will require both the State and Commerce Departments to more frequently coordinate with industry and adapt their export control lists as space technology rapidly evolves. Moreover, the current U.S. export control system is fragmented across multiple agencies and their disparate systems, processes, and forms. For early-stage companies, understanding and complying with U.S. export rules can prove especially burdensome. As such, the U.S. government should consider building a modern, easy to use digital system to help startups understand and follow export rules. Doing so would allow our innovators to expend less energy on onerous government compliance, and more energy on building innovative products for the United States and its allies.

Streamline Launch and Reentry Regulations

While Beijing is setting clear rules to support China’s commercial launch companies, the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulatory apparatus has unnecessarily slowed down Western launch companies. In an attempt to streamline launch and reentry licensing, the Federal Aviation Administration released a set of regulations in 2021 known as “Part 450.” While well-meaning, Part 450 ballooned into a 53-page rule filled with unclear requirements — including onerous environmental reviews — that has delayed companies from obtaining licenses for launch and reentry. By law, the Federal Aviation Administration must provide licensing determinations within 180 days, a timeline which it says it has met 98% of the time. But this does not account for the lengthy pre-application period — which involves back-and-forth correspondence between the Federal Aviation Administration and a company to ensure the licensing application is successful upon submission. This pre-application period can take several years to complete, according to Wayne Monteith, who led the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation from 2019 to 2022.

Shackling private launch innovators gives China a prime opportunity to catch up, an unacceptable risk that must be rectified. In a welcome development, a Federal Aviation Administration committee is currently reviewing Part 450 and plans to update regulations to “foster more clarity, flexibility, efficiency, and innovation.” To keep up with private sector innovation while ensuring safety, the updated rule should offer simpler guidance on how companies can comply, reduce the administrative steps in the pre-application period, and include the pre-application period within the 180-day statutory review clock.

Expand Open-Source Intelligence on China’s Commercial Industries

Legacy intelligence practices of analyzing Chinese military space systems are vital, but they do not give the U.S. government a full picture of Chinese advancements. Department of Defense and intelligence community leaders need a deeper understanding of China’s private sector, from which the Chinese military increasingly procures dual-use space technologies. The U.S. government should more widely adopt commercial open-source intelligence software and data to identify Chinese startups and proactively track them from their earliest stages. Doing so will help the United States understand China’s actual status in key technology areas, while informing the America’s own space investment and acquisition priorities. As much as possible, the U.S. government should also routinely share the latest counterspace threat information with cleared Western space startups to help inform their product development roadmaps. The U.S. Space Force’s initial rollout of Orbital Watch, a platform meant to enhance threat information sharing with the private sector, is a big step in the right direction.

Expand Contract Opportunities for Commercial Startups

The Defense Department should also open more programs of record to commercial solutions to rapidly execute requirements. An important first step should be to identify current and future requirements that can be fulfilled through commercial capabilities. The Defense Innovation Unit has had several successes in bridging the gap between startups and operational end users. This model of actively connecting commercial technology directly with the end user and real mission needs can eliminate the valley of death for important startup capabilities and should be scaled across the Defense Department.

Additionally, many of the opportunities startups could target are out of reach due to lack of facility clearance levels — a determination made by the government that a contractor is eligible for access to classified information. The government should find ways to more actively and rapidly sponsor facility clearance levels to promising startups, ensuring they don’t miss opportunities due to classification requirements. DARPA’s BRIDGES program — a pilot program to connect innovators to the challenging classified problems — is a good example of how this might work.

On the requirements front, the U.S. government should also refrain from overly prescriptive requirements where possible. It should tell companies “where it wants to go” rather than “how to get there.” This outcomes-based approach will align incentives between primes and startups in a way that puts space solutions built and integrated together on a firm-fixed-price basis. Getting commercial startup capabilities on contract can also be rapidly scaled with a further expansion of vehicles such as Other Transaction Authorities and Commercial Solutions Opening. Although each has gained prominence in recent years, an expansion of their use will reduce administrative burdens associated with traditional contractor compliance rules that often slow innovative entrants.

Supporting startups with contracting opportunities can help address gaps in critical mission areas, including satellite communications, Earth observation, space domain awareness, space traffic management, space control, and more. Several Booz Allen Venture portfolio companies could play a role, including: Quindar, whose mission management platform enables the safe and efficient command and control of spacecraft; Albedo, whose very low Earth orbit imaging satellites can provide detailed Earth imaging and non-Earth imaging data; and Starfish Space, which maximizes the value and security of satellites on orbit with its Otter servicing vehicle — a satellite designed for autonomous docking and maneuverability.

As China’s commercial space sector rapidly matures, the United States cannot afford complacency. Sustaining leadership in the new space race will require a renewed commitment to the ingenuity, agility, and risk-taking that define the American startup ecosystem. By fully empowering private space innovators, the United States can outpace China and ensure that the future of space is shaped by American innovation and vision.

BECOME A MEMBER

Ryan Nelson is a lead associate on Booz Allen’s Tech Scouting and Intelligence team, where he leads research on foreign technology markets. Ryan previously served as a military legislative assistant on Capitol Hill.

Taylor Rhoten is an investor with Booz Allen Ventures, where he invests in early-stage defense and deep tech startups. He is an MBA candidate at the Berkeley Haas School of Business and previously held strategy and market intelligence roles at Viasat and Booz Allen.

Brian MacCarthy is a Booz Allen senior vice president that leads the Booz Allen Ventures and Tech Scouting and Intelligence teams. He has over 20 years of experience in the federal and commercial sectors, spanning software, hardware, cloud, AI, cyber security, and health operations.

Image: Shujianyang via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · July 29, 2025

19. Netanyahu Is Spoiling Trump’s Chance for Peace – But America Can Still Use Its Leverage to End the War in Gaza

Excerpts:

Achieving all this would likely have been too tall an order for most U.S. presidents over the past three decades. But the war in Gaza has cost the United States an extraordinary amount. According to estimates from the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the United States provided Israel with at least $22.7 billion during the war’s first 12 months. That was far above the annual cap of $3.8 billion mandated in a ten-year memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel that extends until 2028. On top of this monetary assistance, the U.S. government has been roped into a game of international whack-a-mole on Israel’s behalf to prevent countries such as France and the United Kingdom from imposing sanctions on Israel or recognizing a Palestinian state.

Rather than expend such resources and political energy to win Israel’s forever war in Gaza—one that the United States’ Arab partners oppose—the Trump administration must recalibrate U.S. policy toward winning the peace. Trump has been uniquely willing to break with Israel on many issues—for instance, by making deals with the Houthi militant group in Yemen and opening a diplomatic dialogue with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, despite his past alignment with al-Qaeda. Trump will have to break with Netanyahu again, regardless of the implications for the Israeli leader’s political future. He should walk back his previous statement supporting the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza and make the case directly to Israelis that their security is tied to the security of Palestinians and the rest of the region. With a recent Pew poll indicating that more than 80 percent of Jewish Israelis have confidence in Trump as a world leader, he can credibly argue that opposing Palestinian self-determination will undermine Israeli security and preclude normalization with Arab states and Israel’s regional integration.

When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, Trump’s administration has already shown flexibility by breaking with Washington orthodoxy to open channels of communication with Hamas to secure the release of an American held in Gaza. Now, putting American interests first requires brokering an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza. If Trump goes further, he might have a peace-prize-worthy achievement—but not if Gaza starves.

Netanyahu Is Spoiling Trump’s Chance for Peace

Foreign Affairs · by More by Zaha Hassan · July 29, 2025

But America Can Still Use Its Leverage to End the War in Gaza

Zaha Hassan

July 29, 2025

An Israeli soldier near the Israel-Gaza border, May 2025 Amir Cohen / Reuters

ZAHA HASSAN is a Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Following the Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and the subsequent Iranian-Israeli cease-fire, another agreement seemed to be close at hand, this time in Gaza. Late last week, however, both the United States and Israel halted their participation in the negotiations, accusing Hamas of a lack of coordination and good faith. Hamas, the Islamist organization and de facto authority in the Gaza Strip, wants the United States to guarantee that the cease-fire will become permanent, Israel to withdraw its military, and the UN and other aid providers to surge humanitarian assistance to Palestinians who are facing mass starvation.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued deference to Israel and his withdrawal from the talks are a huge mistake. Unless a deal can be made, Trump’s desire to preside over a broader regional peace that includes the normalization of diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be dead in the water. Such a comprehensive regional agreement is desperately needed after 21 months of death and destruction in Gaza and persistent conflict between Israel and much of the Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultranationalist governing coalition, however, have not shown any signs that they are ready to prioritize a durable peace. Even if the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas since October 2023 are released, Netanyahu has emphasized that an end to the war in Gaza is impossible until Hamas is completely disarmed and its leaders exiled. And even then, he wants Israel to maintain security control over Gaza and the West Bank indefinitely. Meanwhile, as Egyptian, Qatari, and U.S. mediators were shuttling back and forth between the Palestinian and Israeli negotiators, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz advanced a plan for relocating Gaza’s population into a so-called humanitarian city—what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refers to as a “concentration camp”—built on the ruins of Rafah near the enclave’s southern edge. Under Katz’s proposal, over two million Palestinians would be held in an area a third the size of Washington, D.C., until they can be resettled abroad.

“We are destroying more and more homes, and they have nowhere to return to,” Netanyahu said of Gaza’s population in May. “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.” So even if he were to agree to a short-term cease-fire, addressing Palestinians’ right to self-determination cannot be part of any deal because he considers the notion of an independent Palestinian state to be a threat to Israel, as the Israeli prime minister stated during a visit to the White House on July 7.

But Netanyahu’s formula to end conflict in the Middle East is not fit for purpose. No Arab government will entertain the forced displacement of Palestinians. Moreover, Arab states have made it increasingly clear that they are no longer willing to deepen their ties or normalize relations with Israel until Israel accepts a sovereign Palestinian state. France, meanwhile, has announced that it will recognize the state of Palestine. The British government is under growing domestic pressure to go beyond the sanctions it has imposed on specific Israeli cabinet ministers and approve a full embargo on arms exports to Israel and support the International Criminal Court’s prosecutions of Netanyahu and the former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes, including for the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population.

If left unchecked, Netanyahu may soon succeed in forcing a mass displacement of Palestinians, preventing Trump from properly recalibrating the United States’ Middle East policy and from reducing the U.S. military footprint in the region. The blunt truth is that Netanyahu is one of a small handful of regional actors whose interests do not broadly align with Trump’s. And Trump has more room to maneuver than any other recent American president. He must deploy the full weight of U.S. power to force Netanyahu to end his territorial ambitions and accept a peace that enables recognition of an independent state of Palestine. That is the only way Trump can be a genuine peacemaker in the Middle East.

IMMOVABLE OBJECT

Netanyahu has been an obstacle to Trump’s objectives in the Middle East since the U.S. president’s first term in the White House. Back then, Trump hoped to make a grand Middle East peace deal his signature achievement. But by allowing Netanyahu to have a hand in drafting his 2020 plan for a comprehensive regional peace, Trump killed any chance he had for success. That plan sought to resolve all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians in Israel’s favor: there would be no Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank, no evacuation of any Israeli settlements, and no right of return for Palestinian refugees, either to Israel or to the Palestinian territories. Predictably, Palestinians refused to accept their permanent subjugation under a regime that the International Court of Justice judged in 2024 to be equivalent to apartheid rule. Netanyahu’s strategy allowed him to appear a peacemaker while denying Trump a true peace deal that addressed Palestinian rights head on and cleared the way for Israel’s integration into the region.

Trump may not have fully appreciated the extent to which Netanyahu’s political identity was founded on denying Palestinians’ national identity. “Everyone knows that I am the one who, for decades, has blocked the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, asserted last year. He was not being braggadocious; he spoke the truth. For over two decades, he has been instrumental in putting obstacles in front of any agreement that would further Palestinian self-determination.

Netanyahu’s strategy is to deny Trump a true peace deal.

Netanyahu is now better positioned than ever to not only prevent the creation of a Palestinian state but also annex the occupied Palestinian territories for Israeli settlement. Days after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence submitted a plan to Netanyahu—versions of which had been in circulation since 2018—recommending the depopulation of Gaza under the guise of “humanitarian voluntary evacuation.” The Israeli government went on to prosecute a military campaign that destroyed most of the enclave and its agricultural land; what buildings still stand are being methodically leveled in controlled bombings.

Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that killing Palestinians—the toll stands at more than 59,000 Palestinians—and rendering Gaza unlivable was necessary to destroy Hamas. His critics often counter that he has prolonged the war in Gaza to keep himself in office as he battles corruption charges in court. But his underlying goals are bigger, and if not for the ongoing trial, Netanyahu would likely be pursuing the same policies in Gaza. His government has established a bureau to find willing third countries to take Palestinians from Gaza. And in the West Bank—where there is no Hamas enemy to point to—the Israel Defense Forces launched the so-called Operation Iron Wall mission in January to, as Katz, the Israeli defense minister, explicitly put it, apply the lessons of what the military accomplished in Gaza. More than 40,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, the greatest displacement in the area since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Essential infrastructure and symbols of Palestinian national identity were destroyed, and streets were widened to make way for future Israeli tanks. Netanyahu also seized control of the Palestinian land registry in the West Bank to expedite the transfer of Palestinian private land to Israeli settlers.

Netanyahu has no intention of deviating from the platform of his Likud party, which states that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” As he stated in December 2022, his government’s guiding principles are that “Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right” to settle in the entirety of “Judea and Samaria,” encompassing all the West Bank. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Zionist parties to the left of Likud have shifted toward his position. In July 2024, the Israeli parliament overwhelmingly approved a bill opposing the establishment of any Palestinian state that included territory west of the Jordan River; last week, an even larger parliamentary majority called for annexing the West Bank.

MORAL MAJORITY

If October 7, 2023, and its aftermath established anything for key Arab states, however, it is that the need for regional peace and security is urgent—and that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is indivisible from this aim. The lack of a resolution has become a national-security noose around the neck of every state in the Middle East—whether because of the spillover of fighting since October 7, the threat of refugee flows across borders, or the impact of persistent regional turmoil on states’ ability to act on essential national development goals. Even if some appetite still exists among Arab leaders to deepen relations with Israel, they are now constrained by the fact that their populations’ opinions of Israel are overwhelmingly negative, as Michael Robbins and Amaney Jamal wrote in Foreign Affairs in January.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been clear: after what he referred to as Israel’s “collective genocide” in Gaza, his country can accept only a normalization process that resembles the one proposed by the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, adopted at an Arab League summit: Israel must first accept a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and only then will Saudi Arabia normalize relations. In early July, the crown prince’s foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan, reiterated that position, saying that a cease-fire in Gaza must be “a prelude to the establishment of a Palestinian state.” And despite statements in June by Trump administration officials that Lebanon and Syria might be on the cusp of embracing Israel as a neighbor, the Israeli air attacks that have pounded eastern Lebanon and the heart of Damascus this month make that unlikely.

Significant elements of Trump’s domestic base, meanwhile, want him to prioritize American interests, which they believe diverge from Netanyahu’s vision for the Middle East. Figures such as Tucker Carlson question the unconditional financial, military, and diplomatic support the U.S. government gives to Israel. Others go further: in June, for instance, the influential podcaster Theo Von called out Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians during an interview with Vice President JD Vance. These MAGA influencers are not outliers; they are reflective of broader changes in the Republican Party and the country. A March survey by the Pew Research Center found that 37 percent of Republicans overall and half of Republicans under 50 now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. And according to a poll released in May by Ipsos and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, over 60 percent of Americans now agree that Israel is playing a negative role in “resolving key challenges in the Middle East.”

CLEAR PATH

This offers Trump some freedom to break from Washington’s decades-long approach mandating that there be “no daylight” between Israeli and U.S. policy in the Middle East. The president should listen to his public and shift the U.S. government’s relationship with Israel so it better reflects Americans’ preferences, as well as the desires of most U.S. partners in the Middle East. That means preventing Netanyahu from thwarting a permanent cease-fire; accepting that it is impossible, in the near term, to eliminate Hamas from Palestinian society; helping strengthen Palestinian institutions; and putting Palestinian statehood at the center of any regional agreement. Any peace deal that Trump proposes or backs will have to look very different than the one he put forward in 2020, when Netanyahu stood beside him at the White House without a Palestinian counterpart.

Trump should aim for a deal that draws support from a wide variety of stakeholders in the Middle East, throughout the Muslim world, and in Europe. He will need many governments in those regions on his side to help provide the many billions of dollars necessary to fund Gaza’s reconstruction. The essential elements of a cease-fire deal that could lay the foundation for a more comprehensive regional peace already exist in two documents: the so-called 2024 Beijing Declaration (which the major Palestinian political factions, including Fatah and Hamas, signed last year) and the Arab League’s Plan for the Early Recovery, Reconstruction, and Development of Gaza, backed by the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation and by France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. According to Jeremy Scahill’s reporting at Drop Site News, Hamas negotiators have offered Israel an “all for all” formula as long as the United States guarantees that Israel will not resume its attacks after Israeli hostages are freed.

To take advantage of this opportunity, Trump must be willing to hold Israel to a commitment not to restart hostilities anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories. Then he would have to secure an agreement from Israel to allow international peacekeeping forces into Gaza, and eventually the West Bank, as a broader political accord is negotiated. Egyptian and EU forces were successfully deployed during the short-lived cease-fire that began in January, and they should be called on again. Their presence could allow signatories to implement the Beijing Declaration, in which Hamas agreed to hand over governance and security control in Gaza to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Fatah agreed to hold elections and begin a process to integrate Hamas into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Successful solutions to other once intractable conflicts, such as the decades of sectarian and civil strife in Northern Ireland, show that enduring peace is possible only when all stakeholders are invited in. And Hamas is hardly the only entity that seeks the outcome delineated in the Beijing Declaration. A March poll conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic Progress, a think tank based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, found that more than 60 percent of Palestinians in Gaza supported a unity government for postwar rule and that over half said they would also support rule by the Palestinian Authority.

Only when Gaza and the West Bank come under one authority can the enormous task of healing and rebuilding in Gaza begin. And only a unified and legitimate Palestinian leadership can guarantee that the terms of any future political agreement with Israel will be upheld. Ultimately, to broker a real peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Trump will need the PLO, the internationally recognized interlocutor possessing the legal capacity to sign an agreement on behalf of all Palestinians. And by supporting the inclusion of Hamas under the organization’s umbrella, he would mitigate the potential for spoilers.

BREAK THE MOLD

Achieving all this would likely have been too tall an order for most U.S. presidents over the past three decades. But the war in Gaza has cost the United States an extraordinary amount. According to estimates from the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the United States provided Israel with at least $22.7 billion during the war’s first 12 months. That was far above the annual cap of $3.8 billion mandated in a ten-year memorandum of understanding between the United States and Israel that extends until 2028. On top of this monetary assistance, the U.S. government has been roped into a game of international whack-a-mole on Israel’s behalf to prevent countries such as France and the United Kingdom from imposing sanctions on Israel or recognizing a Palestinian state.

Rather than expend such resources and political energy to win Israel’s forever war in Gaza—one that the United States’ Arab partners oppose—the Trump administration must recalibrate U.S. policy toward winning the peace. Trump has been uniquely willing to break with Israel on many issues—for instance, by making deals with the Houthi militant group in Yemen and opening a diplomatic dialogue with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, despite his past alignment with al-Qaeda. Trump will have to break with Netanyahu again, regardless of the implications for the Israeli leader’s political future. He should walk back his previous statement supporting the resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza and make the case directly to Israelis that their security is tied to the security of Palestinians and the rest of the region. With a recent Pew poll indicating that more than 80 percent of Jewish Israelis have confidence in Trump as a world leader, he can credibly argue that opposing Palestinian self-determination will undermine Israeli security and preclude normalization with Arab states and Israel’s regional integration.

When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, Trump’s administration has already shown flexibility by breaking with Washington orthodoxy to open channels of communication with Hamas to secure the release of an American held in Gaza. Now, putting American interests first requires brokering an immediate and permanent cease-fire in Gaza. If Trump goes further, he might have a peace-prize-worthy achievement—but not if Gaza starves.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Zaha Hassan · July 29, 2025

20. Actions create consequences – “cracked consensus” a warning by Dr. Cynthia Watson

Some critical analysis for reflection. Ezra Klein's OpEd is long and linked below.

Actions create consequences

“cracked consensus”

a warning

https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/cracked-consensus?utm=

Cynthia Watson

Jul 28, 2025

Millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere are likely to remain indoors today as the late July heat persists for another few days. I suggest using some of the indoor time to read an opinion essay, “Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another,” from Saturday’s New York Times. While the author, Ezra Klein, appropriately focused on divisions between Jews in mid-2025, his argument resonates for a broader appreciation of contemporary America, if not other societies.

We are seeing a multitude of divides (duh, Cynthia) meriting both acknowledgement and exploration; I hope we can reconcile most of our differences. While Klein focuses on the one he sees across the Jewish community in the United States, it’s evident that a series of divides are actually more broadly at work: generational, intra-religious, as well as cross-religious, socio-economic, gender, political, and pretty much any other topic we can conjure up. Nothing about that statement probably seems all that radical.

Klein’s subtext, however, “the consensus that held them {Jews} together for generations is breaking down”, is why I see this as a worthy piece for your time because it strikes me as an accurate diagnosis at the heart of this nation’s current condition when you get to his subtext. Substitute the term Americans for Jews in his title to consider one of the most fundamental points we are dancing around as a society.

Societies run by consensus, whether we like it or not. That is what elections are about as they provide evidence of preferences for governance.

The only sentence of Klein’s second paragraph encapsulates so much: “Every component of that consensus has cracked”.

To reiterate, Klein is asking the reader to consider Judaism, Israel, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and a host of concerns affecting Jews. But the heart of his argument about the erosion, at best, if not outright end of consensus, coalitions, attempts to create a broader understanding, and so much more, is a far more encompassing concern under threat for anyone within the bounds of this country calling her or himself American.

I could list the topics on which we are struggling, but it’s easier to concede that the list includes virtually every single aspect of our society. I have a hard time finding a topic upon which we have much agreement, but perhaps that is my inherent Scottish heritage pessimism.

Far more relevant, where does that take us? Klein’s op-ed does not provide solutions, either, for his target audience. Still, I worry that the consequences of a fractured consensus, seemingly on everything, are far more profound when it involves 340+ million people.

An employee departing from a firm often does so because she no longer shares objectives or orientation with the leadership. Marriages break apart when a couple has irreparable differences on the mechanics, day in and day out, of a life built together, or the lack of trust replaces the shared vision for the future. Religions splinter when one group feels its beliefs no longer align with the path others seek to follow. The list of consequences resulting from cracked consensus is long, occasionally violent, and often profound.

It’s simple to argue about who is right and why the other side is wrong, but the implications for a society are so much more enduring for many. Of course, reconciliations occur, as with our own Civil War, but we failed to reconstruct a shared meaning on several things, such as our history.

“Actions create consequences” is one woman’s attempt to raise issues and engender conversation to find solutions to those problems. It represents a minute fraction of the country, but it serves as a discussion forum rather than a platform for seeking retribution against those whose views differ. How can we apply that more broadly?

Thank you for your time. Do keep cool in these beastly temperatures and on fraught days. We are not going to live on Mars, nor are the overwhelming majority of us fleeing this country, so examining steps to rebuild shared beliefs and goals has to be a priority. Note that I advocate shared actions and values as more effective than imposed ones, as that is the heart of our history, to which I expect any hopes for the future must default.

I would appreciate your thoughts on Ezra Klein’s article on societal cohesion and any other topic. Every response, whether offline to me or as a paid subscriber for everyone’s consideration, adds to thinking, debate, and reconsideration in my book, but is wholly insufficient as a sole conclusion. I welcome your thoughts on how we can work towards finding consensus because current processes do not look healthy nor do I have confidence that current peaceful conditions are genuinely sustainable. I may be an alarmist but general agreement or concord, as the dictionary defines consensus, had its distinct value for Americans in late 1941, for example, as we threw ourselves into defeating adversaries. Today, we too often see defeating those who differ with us on personal preferences as the sole objective which does not address the problems confronting us.

The problems will not disappear magically, often intensifying instead in terrible ways. That does not bode well for future generations we all profess to care about.

We encountered the guy below as we concluded our walk this morning before the temperature fired up. Foxes are predators, hardly sharing, kind, or engaging creatures humans consider themselves. Foxes represent how badly things can go awry for some when a balance in life (another way to consider consensus, in a way) shatters in the service of only self-satisfaction.

Keep cool, be well, and be safe. FIN

Ezra Klein, “Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another“, NewYorkTimes.com, 26 July 2025, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/antisemitism-american-jews-israel-mamdani.html?searchResultPosition=2https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/opinion/antisemitism-american-jews-israel-mamdani.html?searchResultPosition=2

21. 'Fort Bragg Has a Lot of Secrets. It's Its Own Little Cartel'

Certainly a bizarre story in Rolling Stone.

'Fort Bragg Has a Lot of Secrets. It's Its Own Little Cartel'

An exclusive excerpt from Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Harp’s new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, reveals new details about a violent drug ring embedded in the U.S. Army Special Forces and the Airborne Corps

By Seth Harp

July 28, 2025

Rolling Stone · by Seth Harp · July 28, 2025

It has been more than four years since a pair of elite special operations soldiers were found murdered in the woods on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and no one has been convicted of the crime. Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne II, an active-duty Delta Force operator, and Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas Sr., a logistics and supply soldier attached to the elite Joint Special Operations Command, had no shortage of potential enemies. Both men were deeply disillusioned with their military service, dealt drugs on base, worked with Mexican drug cartels to traffic cocaine by the kilo, and were heavy users in their own right. Both had killed people in the past, on American soil, and gotten away with it. And both were said to be writing tell-all books about their time in service and what they knew about organized crime in the Special Forces. So when their bodies turned up riddled with bullets and dumped on a remote training range of Fort Bragg on December 2, 2020, the victims of an apparently professional hit by skilled assassins, few were very surprised that they had been murdered. But all these years later, the identity of the perpetrator or perpetrators remains a mystery.

In a surprise twist in a story that I have covered for the better part of five years, the Department of Justice in 2023 accused an unexpected person of orchestrating the hits on the 37-year-old Lavigne and 44-year-old Dumas. He has pleaded not guilty and his trial is expected to begin in early 2026. Meanwhile, there is another man, a profoundly corrupt police officer, who admits that he had a motive to kill Lavigne and Dumas and that, in the immediate aftermath of the murders, most of his underworld associates suspected him of the double homicide. His name is Freddie Wayne Huff II.

Freddie Wayne Huff, a North Carolina lawman born in 1980, never served in the military. All the same, his story of early promise, high achievement, subsequent disillusionment, loss of faith, turning against his former employer, and descent into addiction, drug trafficking, and violent crime closely paralleled the downward trajectories of Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas. Although the bare bones of his criminal exploits were reported in a few North Carolina publications, authorities kept his connection to events at Fort Bragg under wraps.

Freddie Huff joined the Lexington police force not long after high school. A self-described “obsessive perfectionist” who worked tirelessly to improve himself during the mania phases of his bipolar disorder, he quickly distinguished himself as a highly motivated young K9 officer with a preternatural ability to find drug money at traffic stops. Many a cartel courier, passing through North Carolina, lost a five- or six-figure sum to Officer Huff, a tall, solidly built, pink-skinned white man with hooded eyes and a high-and-tight haircut.

Courtesy of Viking Publishing

In 2009, Huff was deputized as a DEA task force officer and assigned to the El Paso Intelligence Center, or EPIC, the agency’s main source of intelligence on Mexican drug cartels. There, he became friends with a terminally ill DEA analyst, a bespectacled Black man named Karl Culberson, whose long and varied career working for the federal government included a self-reported stint with the CIA. Nearing death from pancreatic cancer, Culberson confessed something that changed the course of Huff’s life.

“What you think you’re doing is noble,” Culberson told Huff. “But they want it here. You’re a pawn. Everything you’re doing is in vain.”

Huff was quietly troubled by Culberson’s words, which he took to mean that the American government could stop the flow of drugs into the United States at any time but chooses not to. Nevertheless, he continued to work as a narcotics agent.

In 2010, Huff returned to the police force in Lexington, which lies about two hours north of Fort Bragg, and went back to doing what he did best: correctly guessing which passing motorists were carrying drug money, pulling them over, and confiscating the cash. A partial but revealing set of police records show that between 2010 and 2013, Huff seized $1.3 million from 25 motorists whom he detained for traffic infractions. All of the stops took place on the stretch of Interstate 85 between Charlotte and Greensboro, and every one of the suspects was a nonwhite man whom Huff pulled over for failing to signal, following too closely, going slightly over the speed limit, having obstructed state tags or a broken taillight, or some other minor offense.

On June 17, 2010, for instance, Huff stopped 33-year-old Felipe Fabela for tailgating. Lo and behold, Fabela turned out to have $449,360 concealed in a hidden compartment of his 1998 Mazda minivan. Three months earlier, Huff had pulled over 44-year-old Herman Alonso Rojas driving the same inconspicuous model of Mazda, which also had a concealed hiding place, and relieved him of $93,920. Rojas had been doing 75 in a 70.

With the money that Huff brought in, which he said amounted to more than $9 million, the police department built a new training facility in Lexington, bought a fleet of late-model vehicles, and invested in an arsenal of black assault rifles fresh from the factory. Huff moved up to the state highway patrol in 2013 but in spite of his stellar performance lasted scarcely a year on the job.

On March 16, 2014, Trooper Huff pulled over an inebriated insurance executive from Asheville who — he later learned — was a donor to North Carolina’s then-governor, Pat McCrory. Throughout the duration of the stop, the punch-drunk businessman repeatedly warned Huff that he was going to have his job, but Huff ticketed him anyway, for driving under the influence. Before the month was out, Huff had been fired on the petty pretense that he’d lied about having sold a pair of state-issued shoes on the auction site eBay, a trivial breach of department regulations.

Getting summarily canned for ticketing a crony of the governor’s, as Huff saw it, left him embittered toward the law enforcement profession. “When they fired me,” he said, “I lost everything. Lost my certifications. Lost my expert witness status. They blacklisted me.”

Recalling Culberson’s cynical words about the true power behind the global drug trade, Huff vowed then and there that if he ever had the opportunity, he would use his granular understanding of how police detect drug smugglers to make a killing in the game. “I told myself that if anything ever fell in my lap,” he recalled, “I was going to use every fucking thing I had known, learned, and taught against them.”

Huff’s opportunity to break bad was not long in coming. Thirty-five years old and in need of income to support himself, his wife, two children, and three adopted kids whom the Huffs had taken in from a household broken by poverty and abuse, Huff found work buying up damaged and defective appliances from a home improvement chain store and shipping them down to the Mexican border to be refurbished and resold. This mundane enterprise turned out to be reasonably remunerative. Huff was making enough money to get by, but sweating on the loading docks behind Lowe’s, grunting and grappling with heavy and cumbersome washers and dryers, he couldn’t stop thinking like a cop or a crook.

One of the intermediaries that Huff used to export inoperable appliances to Mexico was an unassuming establishment in Laredo, Texas, called Aguilar Appliance Repair. Through intuition and a little research, Huff ascertained that the import-export shop, housed in a pair of portable trailers on a dirt lot in one of the poorest neighborhoods of hot and sunny Laredo, was owned by relatives of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, who as Huff knew from his time at EPIC was one of the most notorious drug lords in the world. Until 2013, Treviño Morales had been the ruthless leader of the Nuevo Laredo–based paramilitary cartel known as Los Zetas.

Of all the drug cartels in Mexico, Los Zetas was by far the most feared. They were not just narcos. They were real soldiers, elite ones, trained in the United States. The cartel traced its origins to a joint project between the United States and Mexico to create a Mexican commando unit modeled on the Green Berets, called the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or Airborne Special Forces Group. The original members of the GAFE, as the unit was known by its initials in Spanish, were schooled in irregular warfare at none other than Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as well as Fort Benning, Georgia, and also received instruction from Israeli trainers. Around the year 2000, the majority of the unit defected from the Mexican state and went to work directly for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel, a powerful smuggling mafia that controlled the underside of the Texas border, serving as its armed wing and enforcer corps. Not long after, the rogue commandos again betrayed their employers, struck out on their own, and formed a rival cartel. “Los Zetas” was a reference to the alphanumeric call sign used by the group’s first boss, a Mexican special forces officer named Arturo Guzmán Decena.

The tools of the trade: guns, money, and drop phones that Freddie Huff and Timothy Dumas employed while trafficking cocaine to Fort Bragg soldiers. Courtesy of Freddie Huff

The advent of Los Zetas inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history. Trained in marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations, Los Zetas used overt military force to consolidate control over most of the Texas border and the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz. Augmented by the state and local police forces that they co-opted, as well as an endless supply of short-lived hit men recruited from the lumpen class of the northern borderlands, Los Zetas wore paramilitary uniforms, drove around in homemade armored vehicles called monstruos, and, to sow terror, filmed themselves committing sickening atrocities. Countless thousands died in their raids, assaults, and sprees of arson. Countless thousands more were abducted and disappeared.

‘You’re the Most Badass White Boy I Ever Met‘

When the proprietor of Aguilar Appliance Repair came up to North Carolina in 2016 to pick up a load of washers and dryers, Huff invited her over to his house to meet his wife and kids. Though he looked, on first glance, like a big dumb gringo, Huff was cunning, charismatic, and street smart. Concealing the fact that he had been a state trooper and DEA task force agent, Huff gained the woman’s trust, gathered that she really was plugged into the Mexican drug world, and gradually let it be known that he was interested in buying wholesale narcotics. After a months-long courtship in which each side felt the other out, Ruben Treviño Morales, one of Miguel Ángel and Óscar Omar’s 15-odd siblings, agreed to meet Huff in person.

The improbable rendezvous took place in the parking lot of a Tex-Mex restaurant in McAllen, Texas. “He screamed cartel,” Huff recalled of his first look at the lesser-known Treviño Morales brother. “He wore super expensive designer clothes. He had a long pinkie nail,” for taking bumps of cocaine up his nose. “He looked like a Mexican Kenny Rogers.”

That an Anglo who spoke only broken Spanish and lacked any familial ties to Mexico could simply approach an exceedingly dangerous transnational crime syndicate like Los Zetas and arrange to become one of their distributors in the United States would seem like an implausible plot point in an unrealistic movie, yet that is exactly what Freddie Wayne Huff did, court records show. From 2016 to 2021, he was Los Zetas’ main man in the Carolinas, with an operation extending into Georgia and Virginia. He went on running his appliance business, which was profitable in its own right, and used it as a cover for trafficking cocaine. He rented a warehouse in High Point, a muggy, traffic-ridden suburb of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, bought moving trucks and tractor trailers, and hired employees. At the peak of his criminal career, Huff was moving 50 to 100 kilos of cocaine every seven to 10 days, putting him in the top tier of all traffickers in the United States. “You’re the most badass white boy I ever met,” Huff proudly recalled Treviño Morales telling him.

Drawing on his past work as a K9 officer, Huff helped Los Zetas’ border smugglers understand how to pack and conceal shipments to thwart drug-sniffing dogs by wrapping the kilos in shop towels soaked in ammonia, vacuum sealing them in plastic, and then repeating the process, enveloping the bricks in multiple fail-safe layers of a sharply pungent chemical that dogs will do anything to avoid. To defeat X-ray machines, he procured a tractor trailer whose rear differential axle had been hollowed out and lined with lead, a custom job that cost $50,000. “It took 13 bolts to take apart, but it looked much more complicated,” said Huff, who understood how to exploit the ordinary human laziness of customs agents, among other weaknesses in the narcotics-interdiction apparatus. He also advised the cartel’s couriers on how to hide money in cars. “It was like I was teaching a fucking school,” he said.

“Huff used the very information that he had gained as a law enforcement officer to then thwart law enforcement in order to improve his drug-dealing activity,” said the federal prosecutor Randall Galyon, an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina.

‘He Told Me About a Drug-Trafficking Organization Within the Military‘

For a personal hideout and base of operations, Huff rented a large redbrick house on Peppermill Drive in Lexington that had a four-car garage and basement, which he converted into a combination game room and home gym, replete with hidden compartments operated by means of electric motors activated by magnetic switches, in which stacks of money and kilos of cocaine were stored. There he received gangsters from across the state, as well as southern Virginia and northern Georgia, including Atlanta, as well as hustlers and mobsters from New Jersey, Connecticut, and Illinois. During his first two years in business, before he developed a sales pipeline to Fort Bragg, Huff mainly sold to street gangs in Raleigh, Charlotte, and the Piedmont Triad, a sprawling agglomeration of suburbs, strip malls, and office parks, home to some 1.6 million people, with High Point near its center. Shot callers from the Bloods, Crips, and Gangster Disciples would come to his McMansion of trap house to buy kilos at the wholesale price of forty grand, product that they broke up and distributed on the street.

For personal protection, Huff carried two identical subcompact handguns that were easy to conceal. “I had two Glocks, .380,” he told me. “They were really small. They only held six rounds but were very accurate. That’s why I always carried one on my ankle. If I ran out of bullets on top, I could go down on one knee and grab the one off my ankle, and that gave me 12 rounds maximum.”

Additional security came from a coterie of trained wingmen, almost all of whom were or had been police officers, sheriff’s deputies, marines from Camp Lejeune, or soldiers from Fort Bragg. Huff was effectively Los Zetas’ franchisee in North Carolina, and like Los Zetas his little cartel was made up almost entirely of cops and soldiers. “They were former law enforcement, former military,” said Randall Galyon, the federal prosecutor, of Huff’s accomplices. “Mr. Huff knew that they provided a set of skills that would be useful to him.”

One day in 2018, a pair of FBI agents showed up at Huff’s warehouse in High Point, an unexpected visit that shot a bolt of fear through his heart because he had $700,000 in drug money stashed in a washing machine in plain view. But it turned out that the agents only wanted to talk to him about one of his warehouse employees, Robert Seward, a bearded Black man from Fayetteville who had converted to Islam. A few years earlier, Seward had traveled to Syria and joined the Islamic State, only to become disillusioned with the austere path of jihad, escape from a training camp, and return to America. “You can’t make this shit up,” said Huff.

The FBI agents seemed to be keeping tabs on Seward, not looking to make an arrest. Huff gave them minimal information and kept Seward on as an employee, because he was well aware of what was packed inside of the washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, and stoves that it was his job to unload. “Robert knew what was going on,” said Huff. “He lived in one of the warehouses, and he turned a blind eye to shit. And one day he comes to me and he says, ‘I got this friend of mine who used to move a lot of cocaine. Would it be OK if I introduced you to him?’” Huff said yes.

Not long after, a quad-cab Dodge Ram, black with Alabama license plates, pulled up to the warehouse towing a flatbed trailer. In the driver’s seat was Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas. “He gets out,” said Huff, “and he’s got on a Thin Blue Line bracelet, and he’s a very fit, muscular kind of guy.”

Dumas, a baldheaded, broad-chested Black man who woke up every morning around five o’clock to run and lift weights, and often wore a three-piece suit, fit the profile of the kind of man with whom Huff liked to work. “I preferred to deal with older, more mature people,” Huff said, “not thugs with their pants hanging around their ass.” Once they got to know each other, Huff and Dumas became not only business partners but best friends. “He was an amazing man,” said Huff. “Probably the most amazing guy I’ve ever met. No homo,” he hastened to add.

More than a million dollars’ worth of drugs in the basement of Freddie Huff’s stash house in Lexington, North Carolina. Courtesy of Freddie Huff

It’s one thing to traffic drugs internationally and smuggle them across the country undetected. It’s another, often more fraught thing to convert stacks of bulk cocaine into cash. What made Dumas such a valuable partner to Huff was that he could liquidate wholesale product at an incredible rate. The secret to his mercantile alacrity was Fort Bragg.

“Tim told me about basically a gang,” said Huff, “a drug-trafficking organization within the military,” made up of “an unspoken group of soldiers that policed themselves.” The bricks of coke that he passed off to Dumas were in turn distributed among the group, a confederation of semi-independent dealers in and around Fayetteville.

The core members of the underground military mafia, in Dumas’ telling, were Special Forces soldiers who had gone over to the dark side during deployments to Afghanistan. The main players were “guys that are trained killers, that have already killed people,” Huff said. As such, they played by cartel rules. In order to settle debts and resolve disputes, they “would resort to anything,” Huff said, “including murder.”

‘It Was Seriously Incriminating Shit’

Besides dealing drugs on base and off, “they were taking grenades,” Huff said, “taking automatic arms,” stealing them from Fort Bragg armories, and reselling them on the black market. Dumas’ role in the gun-trafficking portion of the conspiracy, before he was kicked out of the Army, was to falsify entries in the property book accounting system to keep anyone from noticing the disappearing items. “That was his job,” said Huff. “Maintaining records.”

During the second decade of the Global War on Terrorism, criminal organizations in the United States sourced much of their weaponry from corrupt members of all four branches of the armed forces. The Florencia 13 street gang bought assault rifles from marines stationed at Twentynine Palms, California; a Navy SEAL sold machine guns to the Mongols outlaw motorcycle club; and the Gangster Disciples obtained the pistols used in Chicago shootings from soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to name a few cases. American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines participate significantly in that clandestine “river of iron” that keeps Mexico’s paramilitary cartels, especially Los Zetas and their progeny, better supplied than the Mexican government with military-grade machine guns, grenades, antitank bazookas, helicopter-mounted rotary cannons called miniguns, and plastic explosives, as well as advanced laser optics and night-vision goggles.

In 2018, a pair of Fort Bragg soldiers attempted to sell dozens of stolen assault rifles and blocks of C‑4 to men whom they believed to be representatives of Los Zetas in El Paso. In June 2021, Associated Press published a multipart series, the product of a decade-long investigation, on the Army’s massive unacknowledged losses of weapons, and detailed the case of a single pistol stolen from Fort Bragg that was used in four shootings in New York. The soldier who diverted it to the black market was never identified.

Dumas introduced Huff to two of his closest cronies, both of whom had served at Fort Bragg. One was a Puerto Rican man named David Garcia, whom Dumas presented as his oldest Army buddy. “This is my brother,” he told Huff. “I’d do anything for him. I’d kill for him. I’d die for him.”

Dumas also introduced Huff to Orlando Fitzhugh, another 40-year-old Black man and former soldier. Fitzhugh, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, had been investigated for dealing drugs on Fort Bragg in the 1990s and served time in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth before being separated in 2000. He would go on to be convicted federally of trafficking cocaine in 2023.

Huff asked Garcia and Fitzhugh about the “military groups that trap narcotics,” but neither man was willing to discuss the subject. Huff was left with the impression that they were afraid of the repercussions of naming names. “Which was weird,” said Huff, “because these are people who are not scared of anything.”

One day in late 2019, Dumas came to the basement, handed Huff a thumb drive, and told him to keep it in a safe place. On the memory stick was a blackmail letter that Dumas had previously shown to two other people: his teenage son, Timothy Dumas, Jr., and a Waffle House waitress whom he used to hook up with named Brianna Woods. The younger Dumas and Woods both told me that the document contained allegations of drug crime in the Special Forces and that Dumas had written it with the intention of exerting leverage on the Army to reinstate his forfeited pension.

So far, Dumas had not carried out his threat to reveal the contents of the letter. Now, he told Huff, he wanted to use it as a kind of dead man’s switch. If anything happened to him, he wanted it made public. “It was like his insurance policy,” said Huff.

Huff stashed the thumb drive in the drawer of a minibar in the basement of his house in Lexington. But before doing so, he plugged it into his computer and opened the word processing document. “I read the whole thing in depth,” he said. “It was seriously incriminating shit.”

Although four sources independently attested to the existence of Dumas’ “insurance policy,” and described its contents in broadly similar terms, Huff alone claimed to have actually read the text. According to him, the lengthy letter was addressed to a high-ranking general and alleged that “soldiers were involved in bringing opiates from Afghanistan and distributing it on Fort Bragg.” The letter specifically identified the service members who were supposedly transporting commercial quantities of occupied Afghanistan’s marquee national product into the United States. “It names each one of them dudes,” Huff said.

Several years had gone by and Huff was unable to recall any of their identities from memory except one. Subsequent events ensured that he would not forget one particular dealer with whom Dumas worked: a white guy in the Army known to Huff, as well as Dumas, as Will Lavigne. “He was dispersing methamphetamine and cocaine,” Huff said of Lavigne, on Fort Bragg itself and “to military personnel in and around Fayetteville.”

He added, “Fort Bragg has a lot of secrets. A lot of underground narcotics secrets. It’s its own little cartel.”

2025 by Seth Harp, to be published by Viking on Aug. 12, 2025.

Rolling Stone · by Seth Harp · July 28, 2025

22. Chinese research ship detected off Alaskan coast, Coast Guard says

Testing limits and response?

Chinese research ship detected off Alaskan coast, Coast Guard says

CBS News · by Faris Tanyos News Editor

A China-flagged research vessel was detected Friday off the coast of Alaska, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard reported Saturday that the Xue Long 2, an icebreaker, was detected about 290 nautical miles north of Utqiagvik, Alaska, in the North American Arctic.

The Xue Long 2 is operated by China's Polar Research Institute.

A Coast Guard C-130J Hercules aircrew from Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak detects and responds to the China-flagged research ship Xue Long 2 on the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf in the U.S. Arctic, approximately 290 nautical miles north of Utqiagvik, Alaska, on July 25, 2025. U.S. Coast Guard photo courtesy of Air Station Kodiak

The ship was in the U.S.'s Extended Continental Shelf, or ECS, which is a portion of the continental shelf that goes beyond 200 miles nautical miles off the coast, according to the State Department. The ship was determined to be 130 nautical miles inside the ECS.

"The U.S. has exclusive rights to conserve and manage the living and non-living resources of its ECS," the Coast Guard said in its news release.

A Coast Guard C-130J Hercules, a long-range surveillance aircraft, responded to the ship. The Coast Guard also released a photo of the vessel.

"The U.S. Coast Guard, alongside partners and other agencies, vigilantly monitors and responds to foreign government vessel activity in and near U.S. waters to secure territorial integrity and defend sovereign interests against malign state activity," said Rear Adm. Bob Little, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard Arctic District, in a statement.

CBS News reached out the Coast Guard for clarification on how it was dealing with the vessel.

Earlier this week, Canada's CBC News reported that the Canadian military was monitoring the movements of the Xue Long 2 in the Arctic.

In a statement provided to the CBC Tuesday, Maj. Alexander Naraine, a spokesperson for the military's joint operations centre said that the Xue Long 2 was "not currently in Canadian territorial waters."

Canada was using a Lockheed CP-140 Aurora aircraft based out of Alaska to "actively" monitor the Chinese ship, Naraine said.

This comes after four Russian military planes were spotted and tracked flying near the Alaskan coast Tuesday by North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The aircraft flew through a section of international airspace called the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone. While the Alaska ADIZ is considered part of international airspace, it is defined as an area where sovereign U.S. airspace ends but "that requires the ready identification of all aircraft in the interest of national security," according to NORAD.

In January, American and Canadian fighter jets were scrambled after Russian warplanes were also spotted in the Arctic, NORAD said. The Russian warplanes remained in international airspace.

And in July 2024, the U.S. intercepted several Chinese or Russian bombers near the Alaskan coast. At the time, a U.S. defense officials said it marked the first time ever that Russian and Chinese aircraft have jointly entered the Alaska ADIZ, and the first time Chinese H-6s have encroached off Alaska.

Eleanor Watson, Emily Mae Czachor and Stephen Smith contributed to this report.

Faris Tanyos

Faris Tanyos is a news editor for CBSNews.com, where he writes and edits stories and tracks breaking news. He previously worked as a digital news producer at several local news stations up and down the West Coast.

CBS News · by Faris Tanyos News Editor

23. NASA Unveils Nuclear Fuel Stronger Than Plutonium and Scientists Say “We’re Entering a New Age of Space Dominance”

Images at the link.

NASA Unveils Nuclear Fuel Stronger Than Plutonium and Scientists Say “We’re Entering a New Age of Space Dominance”

https://www.energy-reporters.com/news/nasa-unveils-nuclear-fuel-stronger-than-plutonium-and-scientists-say-were-entering-a-new-age-of-space-dominance/

NASA's latest breakthrough in nuclear fuel technology, featuring the promising americium-241, could revolutionize deep space exploration by providing longer-lasting and more reliable power for spacecraft operating far from the Sun.

Rosemary PotterJuly 27, 2025 at 7:58 AM40 oogle News

Illustration of NASA's innovative americium-241 nuclear fuel technology for deep space exploration, generated by artificial intelligence.

IN A NUTSHELL NASA is testing a new nuclear fuel, americium-241, that could revolutionize deep space exploration.
The Stirling generator design allows for continuous operation with minimal wear, even in the event of a convertor failure.
With a half-life of 432 years, americium-241 presents a viable alternative to plutonium-238, promising longer-lasting power.
NASA’s collaboration with the University of Leicester builds on European advancements, enhancing global efforts in space travel technology.

NASA is once again pushing the boundaries of space exploration, this time with a groundbreaking development in nuclear fuel technology. The agency is testing a new type of nuclear fuel that promises to outperform the traditional plutonium-238, potentially revolutionizing the way we power spacecraft destined for the far reaches of our solar system. This innovative effort is part of NASA’s broader mission to enhance the reliability and longevity of space missions, ensuring that spacecraft can operate efficiently even in the most challenging environments. As space agencies worldwide race to explore the cosmos, NASA’s latest endeavor could redefine the future of space travel.

Fueling Farther, Cheaper, Longer

Earlier this year, NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland took a significant step forward by collaborating with the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. Together, they tested a Stirling generator powered by americium-241 heat source simulators. These simulators mimic the thermal output of americium decay, allowing engineers to evaluate the generator’s performance and reliability without the risks of handling radioactive materials.

The Stirling convertor, unlike conventional heat engines, employs floating pistons without a crankshaft or rotating bearings. This design enables the generator to operate continuously for decades with minimal wear. A remarkable feature of the Stirling generator is its ability to continue producing power even if one convertor fails. This reliability is crucial for missions that cannot afford power losses in deep space.

Salvatore Oriti, a mechanical engineer at Glenn, emphasized the swift progress made from concept to prototype, highlighting the synergy between NASA and the University of Leicester. The successful performance and efficiency tests have paved the way for developing a next-generation testbed aimed at lower mass and higher fidelity, prepared for environmental testing. If successful, americium-241 could expand NASA’s power options for missions to the outer solar system, where sunlight is scarce and reliability is paramount.

Power That Outlasts Decades

NASA’s focus on americium-241 comes at a time when the demand for long-lived, compact, and efficient power systems is greater than ever. This need is not only for robotic spacecraft but also for future crewed missions and lunar surface operations. With a half-life of 432 years, americium-241 offers a compelling alternative to plutonium-238, which is more expensive and difficult to produce at scale.

The collaboration between NASA and the University of Leicester builds on years of development by the European Space Agency. The Glenn team is working on the next version of the testbed, aiming for a design that is lighter, more efficient, and capable of withstanding the environmental extremes of launch and space travel.

Upcoming tests will subject the system to vibration, thermal cycling, and vacuum conditions, ensuring it can endure the rigors of real-world missions. If fully realized, americium-fueled Stirling generators could power science instruments, landers, or small surface habitats in environments where sunlight is weak or unreliable, such as the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon or the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Expanding the Horizons of Space Exploration

The potential of americium-241 as a power source for deep space missions is immense. Its ability to provide long-lasting, reliable power could enable spacecraft to venture farther into the solar system than ever before. This capability is essential for exploring regions where solar power is not feasible due to distance from the Sun or other environmental factors.

NASA’s innovative approach to testing and developing this new fuel source reflects its commitment to advancing space exploration technologies. By partnering with international research institutions, NASA is leveraging global expertise to overcome the challenges of space travel. The successful implementation of americium-241 could set a new standard for powering future space missions, enhancing the capabilities of both robotic and human explorers.

The Future of Space Power

The development of americium-241 as a nuclear fuel source represents a significant leap forward in the quest for sustainable and efficient space power solutions. The ongoing research and testing efforts by NASA and its partners are crucial for addressing the growing demand for power systems that can support long-duration missions. As space exploration endeavors become more ambitious, the need for reliable and long-lasting energy sources will only increase.

By focusing on innovations like the americium-fueled Stirling generator, NASA is paving the way for future missions that could unlock the mysteries of the outer solar system and beyond. These advancements not only promise to enhance our understanding of the universe but also inspire new generations of scientists and engineers to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

As NASA continues to explore the potential of americium-241 and other advanced technologies, the future of space exploration looks brighter than ever. How will these innovations shape the next frontier of human discovery in the cosmos?

This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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