Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"it is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

– Voltaire

“Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.”

– Wisława Szymborska

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given circumstances."

– Viktor Frankl

1. Russia Has High Hopes for Trump-Putin Summit. Peace Isn’t One of Them.

2. The Putin Stakes for Trump

3. Russian Military Makes Surprise Push in Ukraine Ahead of Trump Talks

4. Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

5. The Critical Importance of Ukraine’s Fortress Belt in Donetsk Oblast

6. This isn’t how wars are ended: a veteran diplomat puts Trump-Putin summit in context

7. Documents detail China's AI-powered propaganda push

8. China Creates World’s No. 1 Shipbuilder, Driven by Rivalry With U.S.

9. Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest

10. American Support for Israel Is Faltering

11. Vietnam and Afghanistan – Shared Failure

12. Decoding Intent in Irregular Warfare: Lessons from Venezuela, Iran, and the Strategic Use of Ambiguity

13. How Trump Is Expanding the Role of the American Military on U.S. Soil

14. The Dawn of Automated Warfare: Artificial Intelligence Will Be the Key to Victory in Ukraine—and Elsewhere

15. Amid shakeup, Army plans to replace Gray Eagle and Shadow drones

16. Republicans, Democrats alike exhort Trump: Keep security pact with Australia and UK alive

17. Johns Hopkins is building classified versions of its AI wargaming tools for DoD, IC

18. Why is Trump being so generous to China?

19. Meet Neurosymbolic AI, Amazon’s Method for Enhancing Neural Networks

20. Marcos says the Philippines will be pulled into any war over Taiwan, despite China's protest

21. Vladimir Putin Could Be Laying a Trap

22. Ukraine Isn’t the Model for Winning the Innovation War

1. Russia Has High Hopes for Trump-Putin Summit. Peace Isn’t One of Them.

Excerpts:

Trump has let his self-imposed deadline on sanctions against Russia lapse ahead of the summit, a move European diplomats fear signals to Russia that no serious additional U.S. pressure will be placed on the Kremlin whatever happens with Ukraine.

“Putin is absolutely convinced, as the General Staff continues to tell him, that with a little more pushing, the Ukrainian front will collapse,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a former adviser to Russia’s central bank.

That doesn’t mean that Russia will oppose a pause on its own terms, such as a stop to weapons supplies for Ukraine, that would make its next round of offensives easier, she said.

One possible concession in Alaska, some Moscow-based analysts indicated, would be for Putin to offer a limited cease-fire in the air, ending missile attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians in Ukrainian cities in recent months. Such a move would be in Russia’s interest because Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks have caused significant damage to Russian oil refineries and military industries, while also disrupting Russian civil aviation.

Air attacks could resume once Russia stockpiled enough missiles and drones and repaired the damage.

Russia Has High Hopes for Trump-Putin Summit. Peace Isn’t One of Them.

The meeting represents a victory for Putin, who seeks to end international isolation and separate Russian ties with the U.S. from the fate of Ukraine

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/trump-putin-meeting-russia-goals-327d4d4c

By Yaroslav Trofimov

Aug. 11, 2025 11:00 pm ET

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President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a G-20 summit in 2017. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

Quick Summary

Kremlin officials are hopeful that the summit between Putin and Trump will reset relations, potentially leading to deals.View more

Expectations in Russia are running high ahead of Friday’s planned summit between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and President Trump.

Moscow sees an opening to reset relations with Washington, with Kremlin officials hinting at the potential for deals with the U.S. on infrastructure and energy in the Arctic and beyond, as Russia’s state media plays up what it bills as a looming entente between two equal great powers.

“Neocons and other warmongers won’t be smiling” when the two leaders meet, said senior Putin aide Kirill Dmitriev. “The Putin-Trump dialogue will bring hope, peace and global security.”

Though the “Ukrainian question” has been declared to be the main item of the agenda, “much more important global issues” would be raised in Alaska, including ambitious plans for economic and infrastructure cooperation in the Arctic, senior Russian lawmaker Sergey Gavrilov said.

Alexander Yakovenko, a former ambassador who headed Russia’s foreign-service academy until last year, wrote in an op-ed for the state RIA news agency that “settling the war in Ukraine, which has been lost by the West a long time ago, has become a secondary issue in relations between the United States and Russia—nothing more than an obstacle to normalization that we must overcome together.”

Ever since the summit was announced, Russian media has been replete with stories about special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Dmitriev sharing fried dumplings at a restaurant in the Russian capital, and about the site of a future Moscow hotel, described as a possible Trump Tower Moscow, that the two men visited last week.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, with Putin aide Kirill Dmitriev following directly behind him, arrived for talks in April with Putin in Moscow. Photo: Kristina Kormilitsyna/Sputnik/AP

But when it comes to Ukraine, where Europe’s bloodiest war in generations has raged for more than three years, there has been little indication that Putin intends to make a meaningful compromise. The Russian president’s offer, as relayed by Witkoff, is a cease-fire if Kyiv agrees to give up territory—including major urban areas that Russian forces have been unable to capture.

Western diplomats and Russian analysts say that Putin thinks he is winning on the battlefield and that his original goal of replacing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a puppet regime in Kyiv might finally be within reach now that Washington has stopped paying for Ukrainian weapons.

“To avoid having a clash with Trump, he may agree to secondary concessions—but he won’t end the war,” predicts Russian political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who now lives abroad and is a critic of the Kremlin.

“The ideal scenario for Putin would be to divorce the issue of relations with America from the issue of Ukraine, hoping that other political and economic matters would make Ukraine of little relevance to Trump,” Gallyamov said.

The very fact of the summit with Trump—and in the U.S., no less—is already a win for Putin, helping restore the international standing of a man treated as a pariah in much of the West and facing an arrest warrant on war-crimes charges from the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

“He can say: ‘Look, you have tried to isolate me, but I am meeting with the American president while you Europeans have to crawl on your knees and call him ‘Daddy,’” said Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University.

Residents carry their belongings out a damaged building following a Russian drone strike Sunday in Bilozerske, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Photo: Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images

“The image of standing tall and proud on equal terms with the United States,” Radchenko said, “that’s what Russia has always wanted, and that’s what is really important to Putin.”

Trump has let his self-imposed deadline on sanctions against Russia lapse ahead of the summit, a move European diplomats fear signals to Russia that no serious additional U.S. pressure will be placed on the Kremlin whatever happens with Ukraine.

“Putin is absolutely convinced, as the General Staff continues to tell him, that with a little more pushing, the Ukrainian front will collapse,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a former adviser to Russia’s central bank.

That doesn’t mean that Russia will oppose a pause on its own terms, such as a stop to weapons supplies for Ukraine, that would make its next round of offensives easier, she said.

One possible concession in Alaska, some Moscow-based analysts indicated, would be for Putin to offer a limited cease-fire in the air, ending missile attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians in Ukrainian cities in recent months. Such a move would be in Russia’s interest because Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks have caused significant damage to Russian oil refineries and military industries, while also disrupting Russian civil aviation.

Air attacks could resume once Russia stockpiled enough missiles and drones and repaired the damage.

Russian troops this summer have stepped up a ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, aiming to encircle the towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. Meanwhile, protests against attempts to curb Ukrainian anticorruption authorities have also shown widespread discontent with Zelensky.

Still, total Russian advances over the past two years account for less than 1% of Ukrainian territory. No strategic breakthroughs have been achieved, and the much-heralded Russian offensive earlier this year on the northern region of Sumy has collapsed with high losses.

Ukrainian servicemen got ready to launch a long-range drone in February. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

The Russian proposal ahead of the Alaska summit, as relayed by Witkoff to European leaders and Ukraine, calls for Kyiv to surrender to Russia the heavily fortified northern part of the Donetsk region in exchange for a cease-fire. That is an area larger than the entire West Bank, with big industrial cities.

Zelensky has rejected the demand, saying he won’t give away Ukrainian land and pointing to Russia’s long history of violating cease-fires and diplomatic agreements. European leaders backed Kyiv, saying any territorial concessions must be reciprocal and accompanied by security guarantees.

Trump said Monday that his meeting with Putin is meant to “feel out” whether a peace deal was possible. Trump threatened to abandon the negotiations if he sensed no agreement could be made. “I’m going to go and see the parameters now,” he said. “I may leave and say, ‘Good luck,’ and that’ll be the end. I may say this is not going to be settled.”

He added that he will seek a Russian withdrawal from some occupied parts of Ukraine. They have occupied some “very prime territory,” he said. “We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”

What the Russian public has been told to expect is a Ukrainian surrender rather than a cease-fire, let alone a Russian withdrawal.

Alexander Sladkov, a top war propagandist on Russian state TV, wrote on Telegram that any cease-fire with Kyiv would last six months at most. “After that, there will be more war, with a stronger and rearmed enemy,” he said. “A victory of Russia in the special military operation is inevitable.”

Such declarations seem to reflect the dominant message on Russian TV screens. “We need to win. To win. A horrible war is under way, and it won’t end with the meeting in Alaska,” Vladimir Solovyov, one of Russia’s top TV personalities, said in a recent broadcast.

Kirill Fedorov, a Russian military analyst, agreed. “The special military operation is a zero-sum game, and it can only be concluded with total victory,” he wrote on Telegram. “Both the Zelensky folks and the Kremlin understand that—while Trump is a 1990s businessman in a president’s chair, so he just keeps imagining deals.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Appeared in the August 12, 2025, print edition as 'Putin Harbors High Hopes For Talks In Alaska'.

2. The Putin Stakes for Trump

Excerpts:

Mr. Trump wants to be known as a peacemaker, especially in Ukraine. But peace is easy to reach if you concede what an aggressor wants. If the U.S. President wants a lasting peace, he’ll need a settlement that gives Ukraine the freedom to determine its own future and the security to defend itself when Mr. Putin inevitably returns to grab more Ukrainian territory.

The Putin Stakes for Trump

A cease-fire won’t last if it doesn’t have security guarantees for Ukraine.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-putin-stakes-for-trump-932c942a

By The Editorial Board

Aug. 11, 2025 5:43 pm ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin Photo: Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin Pool/Zuma Press

President Trump and Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Alaska on Friday, and trepidation is high in Ukraine, Europe and among Kyiv’s American friends. Mr. Trump’s legacy and American security interests are as much on the line as the future of Ukraine and the NATO alliance.

Presidential summitry has its uses, though it’s high-risk when the contours of a deal aren’t clear in advance. A cause for concern in this case is Mr. Trump’s 180-degree turn after weeks of expressing frustration at Mr. Putin’s refusal to negotiate a cease-fire. He let his Friday deadline pass for imposing new sanctions without taking new action.

Opinion: Potomac Watch

Will Trump and Putin’s Alaska Summit Lead to a Ukraine Cease-Fire?

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It isn’t clear what changed. Mr. Trump sent envoy Steve Witkoff to meet Mr. Putin in Moscow, and contradictory details of a land-swap deal have leaked. One version says Russia would stop bombing Ukraine’s cities if Kyiv cedes to Russia all of Donetsk oblast in eastern Ukraine, including parts Russia doesn’t now hold. Mr. Putin wants all of Donetsk because Ukraine has built a key defensive line there going back to 2014. Ukraine might also get some land back that Russia now holds in the east, but it isn’t clear what or when that would happen.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rejecting that outline, and understandably so given Mr. Putin’s many previous broken promises. He signed two cease-fires known as Minsk I and II only to violate them soon thereafter. No one in Ukraine believes he will keep his word this time. Ukraine will need security guarantees from the West, not Mr. Putin, before it will agree to even a de facto concession on territory Russia now holds.

It is also worrying that Messrs. Putin and Trump will meet without Ukraine represented. It’s hard to see how a realistic peace can be negotiated without Mr. Zelensky and his government at the table. Mr. Trump said Monday Mr. Zelensky will be invited to his next meeting with Mr. Putin.

The optimistic pitch is that Mr. Trump can use the face-to-face meeting to test Mr. Putin’s sincerity. That’s the line from Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general.

“My absolute conviction on Friday is that this is President Trump making sure that Putin is serious, and if he is not, then it will stop there. If he is serious, then from Friday onwards, the process will continue. Ukraine getting involved, the Europeans being involved,” Mr. Rutte said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.

He said the U.S. is coordinating so everyone is “on the same page,” including support for the continuing flow of weapons to Ukraine.

The abiding reality, however, is that Mr. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine to emerge from this war as an independent country free to join the European Union if its people want. He wants Ukraine to be part of a Greater Russian bloc, another Belarus. He may accept a short-term cease-fire if he can get favorable enough terms. But he will only accept a real armistice if he believes the war begins to jeopardize his political control inside Russia.

The best way to achieve such a result is to increase the economic pressure on Moscow while giving Ukraine the means to defend itself. Mr. Trump’s hawkish turn in recent weeks toward Mr. Putin may have got the Russian’s attention, and last week Mr. Trump risked U.S. ties with India to punish New Delhi with tariffs for buying Russia’s discount oil.

But Mr. Trump still hasn’t played other cards, such as sanctions on China for buying Russian oil, or working with Europe to confiscate all of Russia’s $300 billion in reserves now in the West. A Senate sanctions bill is on deck to pass with big majorities as soon as Mr. Trump gives the word.

Mr. Trump wants to be known as a peacemaker, especially in Ukraine. But peace is easy to reach if you concede what an aggressor wants. If the U.S. President wants a lasting peace, he’ll need a settlement that gives Ukraine the freedom to determine its own future and the security to defend itself when Mr. Putin inevitably returns to grab more Ukrainian territory.

Appeared in the August 12, 2025, print edition as 'The Putin Stakes for Trump'.

3. Russian Military Makes Surprise Push in Ukraine Ahead of Trump Talks

Trying to establish conditions for the Trump Putin talks?

Russian Military Makes Surprise Push in Ukraine Ahead of Trump Talks

Ukrainian president describes the situation as most difficult across the front

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russian-military-makes-surprise-push-in-ukraine-ahead-of-trump-talks-bf032007

By James Marson

Follow and Matthew Luxmoore

Updated Aug. 12, 2025 2:31 pm ET

Damaged buildings in Dobropillya, Ukraine, earlier this year. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Quick Summary

Russian forces advanced several miles near Dobropillya, a rare move after struggling to gain ground in Ukraine.View more

Russian forces made a sudden thrust in eastern Ukraine in recent days, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin seeks a battlefield advantage ahead of talks with President Trump on Friday.

The infantry penetration, which officials and soldiers said stretched several miles deep near the Ukrainian city of Dobropillya, is a rare move in a war where defenses have gained the upper hand and Russia has struggled to add to the around 20% of Ukraine that it has occupied for much of its 3½-year invasion.

Ukraine’s military said it was counterattacking in the area against what it said were small groups of Russian soldiers that had pierced the first line of Ukrainian defenses and skirted a belt of fortifications Ukraine had been building for months. It said another such penetration in another part of the front had been defeated last week.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the situation in the area as the most difficult across the front, but said his forces had located and killed or taken prisoner some of the Russian troops, who he said advanced with no more equipment than the weapons in their hands.

“The rest will also be found and destroyed soon,” he told reporters.

He said the goal of the Russian move appeared to be “showing that Russia is moving forward and Ukraine is losing.”

The question now is whether Russia can build on its advance by widening the breach and moving farther into territory with less-prepared defenses. If the Russian forces are successful, they will be able to bring more pressure to bear on cities still controlled by Kyiv in the eastern Donetsk region, a key target for the Kremlin.

The Russian offensive might strengthen Putin’s hand as he prepares for the talks in Alaska this week. The Kremlin claims Donetsk as part of Russia and will push for U.S. recognition of Russian control there and in other areas during the summit.

Use of artillery and explosive drones has made any attempt to advance in the war a costly and often futile exercise for either side. Mostly, Russia’s army has inched forward tree line by tree line and block by block, while sustaining thousands of casualties a month.

Ukrainian soldiers said Russia had used similar tactics around Dobropillya but had massed sufficient forces to take advantage of a weak point in Ukrainian lines once they found it.

Holding and reinforcing the small spit of land will be difficult for Russian forces, as troops there will face constant attacks on their exposed flanks.

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

Adam Goldman, Glenn Thrush, Mattathias Schwartz

Aug. 12, 2025, 3:14 p.m. ET

NY Times · by Mattathias Schwartz ·

Federal officials are scrambling to assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have vulnerabilities.

Listen to this article · 6:12 min Learn more

The Justice Department previously issued guidance in early 2021 about protecting federal court documents after the case management system was first hacked.Credit...Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

Aug. 12, 2025, 3:14 p.m. ET

Investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least in part responsible for a recent hack of the computer system that manages federal court documents, including highly sensitive records that might contain information that could reveal sources and people charged with national security crimes, according to several people briefed on the breach.

It is not clear what entity is responsible, whether an arm of Russian intelligence might be behind the intrusion or if other countries were also involved, which some of the people familiar with the matter described as a yearslong effort to infiltrate the system. Some of the searches included midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames.

The disclosure comes as President Trump is expected to meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Alaska on Friday, where Mr. Trump is planning to discuss his push to end the war in Ukraine.

Administrators with the court system recently informed Justice Department officials, clerks and chief judges in federal courts that “persistent and sophisticated cyber threat actors have recently compromised sealed records,” according to an internal department memo and reviewed by The New York Times. The administrators also advised those officials to quickly remove the most sensitive documents from the system.

“This remains an URGENT MATTER that requires immediate action,” officials wrote, referring to guidance that the Justice Department had issued in early 2021 after the system was first infiltrated.

Documents related to criminal activity with an overseas tie, across at least eight district courts, were initially believed to have been targeted. Last month, the chief judges of district courts across the country were quietly warned to move those kinds of cases off the regular document-management system, according to officials briefed on the request. They were initially told not to discuss the matter with other judges in their districts.

In recent weeks, judges of the Eastern District of New York have been taking corrective measures. On Friday, the chief judge of the district, Margo K. Brodie, issued an order prohibiting the uploading of sealed documents to PACER, the searchable public database for documents and court dockets. Ordinarily, sealed documents would be uploaded to the database, but behind a wall, in theory preventing people without the proper authority from seeing them. Now those sensitive documents will be uploaded to a separate drive, outside PACER.

Peter Kaplan, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which helps administer the system, declined to comment.

A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.

Federal officials are scrambling to determine the patterns of the breach, assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have serious vulnerabilities that could be exploited by foreign adversaries.

Last week, administrators with the U.S. court system publicly announced they were taking additional steps to protect the network, which includes the Case Management/Electronic Case Files system used to upload documents and PACER.

They did not address the origin of the attack, or what files had been compromised. The breach also included federal courts in South Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Arkansas, said an official who requested anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation.

“Sensitive documents can be targets of interest to a range of threat actors,” the authors of last week’s notice wrote. “To better protect them, courts have been implementing more rigorous procedures to restrict access to sensitive documents under carefully controlled and monitored circumstances.”

Politico earlier reported that the system had been under attack since early July by an unnamed foreign actor.

Concerns about the hacking of the courts’ electronic filing system predate this summer. The courts announced in January 2021 that there had been a cyberattack but did not name Russia.

Former federal law enforcement officials said Russia was behind that hacking. It was not clear if other countries also exploited vulnerabilities in the system, but the former officials described the breach as extremely serious.

After the announcement in 2021, federal investigators were told to take significant precautions to mitigate the intrusion. That meant hand-delivering search warrants with potential source information to the courts and filing sensitive complaints or indictments by hand — at least in some districts, particularly in the Southern District of New York, where prosecutors were encouraged to file documents on paper.

Former Justice Department officials said their efforts to keep filings secret, while an improvement, did not entirely mitigate the risk given the vast scale of the system and complexity of the cases.

The courts had already begun taking defensive measures by the spring of last year, according to two court officials. Judges were barred from gaining access to internal court filing systems while traveling overseas, and were sometimes given burner phones and new email addresses to communicate with their own chambers and court clerks. And in May, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced that it would institute multifactor authentication to gain access to the system.

In 2022, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, claimed he had obtained information that the court system’s computer network had been breached by three unnamed foreign entities, dating to early 2020.

Matthew Olsen, then the director of the Justice Department’s national security division, later testified that he was working with court officials to address cybersecurity issues in the courts — but downplayed the effect on cases his unit was investigating.

Santul Nerkar contributed reporting.

Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security for The Times. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.

See more on: U.S. Politics, U.S. Justice Department

NY Times · by Mattathias Schwartz ·

5. The Critical Importance of Ukraine’s Fortress Belt in Donetsk Oblast

Read the full report at the link.

The Critical Importance of Ukraine’s Fortress Belt in Donetsk Oblast

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/critical-importance-ukraine%E2%80%99s-fortress-belt-donetsk-oblast

The Critical Importance of Ukraine's

Fortress Belt in Donetsk Oblast

August 12, 2025

Kremlin officials are reportedly demanding that Ukraine cede to Russia strategically vital unoccupied territory in Donetsk Oblast and freeze the frontline in other areas as part of a ceasefire agreement. The surrender of the rest of Donetsk Oblast as the prerequisite of a ceasefire with no commitment to a final peace settlement ending the war would force Ukraine to abandon its "fortress belt," the main fortified defensive line in Donetsk Oblast since 2014, with no guarantee that fighting will not resume. Putin's reported proposal reportedly demands that Ukraine concede this critical defensive position, which Russian forces currently have no means of rapidly enveloping or penetrating, apparently in exchange for nothing. The precise terms of Putin's position remain unclear as of August 9; however, Trump Administration officials, particularly US Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff, have offered four different presentations of Putin's terms.

Ceding Ukrainian-held parts of Donetsk Oblast would place Russian forces on the borders of Donetsk Oblast, a position that is significantly less defensible than the current line.

Allowing Russian forces to take up positions along the Donetsk Oblast border would require Ukrainian forces to urgently build up massive defensive fortifications along the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblast border areas, whose terrain is poorly suited to act as a defensive line.

Potential Ukrainian defensive lines in this area would run through open fields, and natural obstacles such as the Oskil and Siverskyi Donets rivers are too far east to serve as defensive positions for Ukrainian forces defending the Donetsk Oblast border.

A potential ceasefire along the Donetsk Oblast border would also require large-scale investment in infrastructure compatible with a large-scale, long-term ceasefire monitoring mission.

6. This isn’t how wars are ended: a veteran diplomat puts Trump-Putin summit in context

This isn’t how wars are ended: a veteran diplomat puts Trump-Putin summit in context

Hastily convened without Ukrainian input, the summit is "amateurish and is unlikely to yield real results," says Donald Heflin, now a Tufts professor.

By Donald Heflin and Naomi Schalit,

August 11, 2025 06:15 PM ET

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/08/isnt-how-wars-are-ended-veteran-diplomat-explains-how-trump-putin-summit-amateurish-and-politically-driven/407374/?oref=defenseone_today_nl

A hastily arranged summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is set for Aug. 15, 2025, in Alaska, where the two leaders will discuss a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not attend, barring a last-minute change. The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed longtime diplomat Donald Heflin, now teaching at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to get his perspective on the unconventional meeting and why it’s likely to produce, as he says, a photograph and a statement, but not a peace deal.

How do wars end?

Wars end for three reasons. One is that both sides get exhausted and decide to make peace. The second, which is more common: One side gets exhausted and raises its hand and says, “Yeah, we’re ready to come to the peace table.”

And then the third is – we’ve seen this happen in the Mideast – outside forces like the U.S. or Europe come in and say, “That’s enough. We’re imposing our will from the outside. You guys stop this.”

What we’ve seen in the Russia-Ukraine situation is neither side has shown a real willingness to go to the conference table and give up territory.

So the fighting continues. And the role that Trump and his administration are playing right now is that third possibility, an outside power comes in and says, “Enough.”

Now you have to look at Russia. Russia is maybe a former superpower, but a power, and it’s got nuclear arms and it’s got a big army. This is not some small, Middle Eastern country that the United States can completely dominate. They’re nearly a peer. So can you really impose your will on them and get them to come to the conference table in seriousness if they don’t want to? I kind of doubt it.

How does this upcoming Trump-Putin meeting fit into the history of peace negotiations?

The analogy a lot of people are using is the Munich Conference in 1938, where Great Britain met with Hitler’s Germany. I don’t like to make comparisons to Nazism or Hitler’s Germany. Those guys started World War II and perpetrated the Holocaust and killed 30 or 40 million people. It’s hard to compare anything to that.

But in diplomatic terms, we go back to 1938. Germany said, “Listen, we have all these German citizens living in this new country of Czechoslovakia. They’re not being treated right. We want them to become part of Germany.” And they were poised to invade.

The prime minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, went and met with Hitler in Munich and came up with an agreement by which the German parts of Czechoslovakia would become part of Germany. And that would be it. That would be all that Germany would ask for, and the West gave some kind of light security guarantees.

Czechoslovakia wasn’t there. This was a peace imposed on them.

And sure enough, you know, within a year or two, Germany was saying, “No, we want all of Czechoslovakia. And, P.S., we want Poland.” And thus World War II started.

Can you spell out the comparisons further?

Czechoslovakia wasn’t at the table. Ukraine’s not at the table.

Again, I’m not sure I want to compare Putin to Hitler, but he is a strongman authoritarian president with a big military.

Security guarantees were given to Czechoslavakia and not honored. The West gave Ukraine security guarantees when that country gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994. We told them, “If you’re going to be brave and give up your nuclear weapons, we’ll make sure you’re never invaded.” And they’ve been invaded twice since then, in 2014 and 2022. The West didn’t step up.

So history would tell us that the possibilities for a lasting peace coming out of this summit are pretty low.

What kind of expertise is required in negotiating a peace deal?

Here’s what usually happens in most countries that have a big foreign policy or national-security establishment, and even in some smaller countries.

The political leaders come up with their policy goal, what they want to achieve.

And then they tell the career civil servants and foreign service officers and military people, “This is what we want to get at the negotiating table. How do we do that?”

And then the experts say, “Oh, we do this and we do that, and we’ll assign staff to work it out. We’ll work with our Russian counterparts and try to narrow the issues down, and we’ll come up with numbers and maps.”

With all replacement of personnel since the inauguration, the U.S. not only has a new group of political appointees – including some, like Marco Rubio, who, generally speaking, know what they’re doing in terms of national security – but also many who don’t know what they’re doing. They’ve also fired the senior level of civil servants and foreign service officers, and a lot of the mid-levels are leaving, so that expertise isn’t there.

That’s a real problem. The U.S. national security establishment is increasingly being run by the B team – at best.

How will this be a problem when Trump meets Putin?

You have two leaders of two big countries like this, they usually don’t meet on a few days’ notice. It would have to be a real crisis.

This meeting could happen two or three weeks from now as easily as it could this week.

And if that happened, you would have a chance to prepare. You’d have a chance to get all kinds of documents in front of the American participants. You would meet with your Russian counterparts. You’d meet with Ukrainian counterparts, maybe some of the Western European countries. And when the two sides sat down at the table, it would be very professional.

They would have very similar briefing papers in front of them. The issues would be narrowed down.

None of that’s going to happen in Alaska. It’s going to be two political leaders meeting and deciding things, often driven by political considerations, but without any real idea of whether they can really be implemented or how they could be implemented.

Could a peace deal possibly be enforced?

Again, the situation is kind of haunted by the West never enforcing security guarantees promised in 1994. So I’m not sure how well this could be enforced.

Historically, Russia and Ukraine were always linked up, and that’s the problem. What’s Putin’s bottom line? Would he give up Crimea? No. Would he give up the part of eastern Ukraine that de facto had been taken over by Russia before this war even started? Probably not. Would he give up what they’ve gained since then? OK, maybe.

Then let’s put ourselves in Ukraine’s shoes. Will they want to give up Crimea? They say, “No.” Do they want to give up any of the eastern part of the country? They say, “No.”

I’m curious what your colleagues in the diplomatic world are saying about this upcoming meeting.

People who understand the process of diplomacy think that this is very amateurish and is unlikely to yield real results that are enforceable. It will yield some kind of statement and a photo of Trump and Putin shaking hands. There will be people who believe that this will solve the problem. It won’t.

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

defenseone.com · by Donald Heflin

7. Documents detail China's AI-powered propaganda push

Unrestricted warfare on steroids with AI.

Documents detail China's AI-powered propaganda push

A trove of documents from a Chinese firm reveal influence operations that run at unprecedented speed and precision, Vanderbilt University researchers say.

By David DiMolfetta

Cybersecurity Reporter, Nextgov/FCW

August 11, 2025 05:56 PM ET

defenseone.com · by David DiMolfetta

The Chinese government is enlisting a range of domestic AI firms to develop and run sophisticated propaganda campaigns that look far more lifelike than past public manipulation efforts, according to a cache of documents from one such company reviewed by Vanderbilt University researchers.

The company, GoLaxy, has built data profiles for at least 117 sitting U.S. lawmakers and more than 2,000 other American political and thought leaders, according to the researchers that assessed the documentation. GoLaxy also appears to be tracking thousands of right-wing influencers, as well as journalists, their assessments show.

“You start to imagine, when you bring these pieces together, this is a whole new sort of level of gray zone conflict, and it’s one we need to really understand,” said Brett Goldstein, a former head of the Defense Digital Service and one of the Vanderbilt faculty that examined the files.

Goldstein was speaking alongside former NSA director Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads Vanderbilt’s National Security Institute, in a gathering of reporters on the sidelines of the DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“We are seeing now an ability to both develop and deliver at an efficiency, at a speed and a scale we’ve never seen before,” said Nakasone, recalling his time in the intelligence community tracking past campaigns from foreign adversaries to influence public opinion.

Founded in 2010 by a research institute affiliated with the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, GoLaxy appears to operate in step with Beijing’s national-security priorities, although there is no public confirmation of direct government control. Researchers said the documents indicate the firm has worked with senior intelligence, party and military elements within China’s political structure.

The firm has launched influence campaigns against Hong Kong and Taiwan, and uses a propaganda dissemination system dubbed “GoPro” to spread content across social media, according to the researchers.

Goldstein, as well as his Vanderbilt colleague Brett Benson, first detailed the research in a New York Times guest essay. The Times then separately reported on the findings and confirmed the efforts, citing current and former U.S. officials.

The cache was sent to Vanderbilt from a security researcher in April, Goldstein told reporters. Nearly all of the documentation was written in Mandarin, he added.

The firm has recently altered content on its website that removed references to its work with Beijing and denied the findings. A since-removed blog post, for instance, reveals GoLaxy pitched its AI tools to senior Chinese police and security officials.

“GoLaxy’s products are mainly based on open-source data, without specially collecting data targeting U.S. officials,” the firm told the Times.

“To my knowledge, China is rapidly building an AI governance system with distinct national characteristics. This approach emphasizes a balance between development and security, featuring innovation, security and inclusiveness,” said Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.. “The government has introduced major policy plans and ethical guidelines, as well as laws and regulations on algorithmic services, generative AI, and data security. Together, these frameworks aim to improve the safety, fairness, and governance capacity of AI technologies in China.”

China’s use of GoLaxy’s technology is not the first time a U.S. adversary has leveraged AI to conduct influence operations at scale, but GoLaxy’s operation goes further, said Max Lesser, a senior emerging threats analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“While AI can certainly augment influence operations, it remains unclear whether it increases their impact,” he told Nextgov/FCW.

The Trump administration has largely dismantled offices that track influence operations, amid accusations that they have in the past censored Americans’ online speech when they coordinated with social media platforms to remove false information about contentious topics like the 2020 election and COVID-19 vaccine efficacy.

Under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the White House has also sought to diminish previous intelligence community findings that determined Russia launched an influence campaign to sway the outcome of the 2016 election in favor of President Donald Trump. Multiple reviews, including a comprehensive bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to help Trump win.

ODNI under former President Joe Biden tracked influence operations launched by Russia, China and other foreign adversaries in the lead-up to the 2024 election. But they were never able to provide an assessment of the campaigns’ effectiveness because it would require intelligence analysts to pore through Americans’ social media posts and compromise their free speech rights, officials previously said.

Asked about whether the intelligence community should be drilling down on the effectiveness of influence campaigns, Nakasone said that the spy community needs to use its already given authorities to track threats overseas, but that there’s a “private sector piece” as well.

“You’re going to need a team, and it’s going to be a team that needs to think how they’re going to do this effectively and also creatively in the future,” he said.

That may require a regulatory structure. But Goldstein dismissed the idea of new regulations to solve the budding problem of more advanced influence operations.

“How do we have better detect methods, and how do we spur that research, academically [with the] private sector? Pieces like that,” he said. “I don’t know how regulation gets at that. I would be growing the private sector ecosystem. I’d be focused on academic research.”

The documents also suggest that there are accounts and personas hiding on Chinese-aligned infrastructure that can be taken down through standard U.S. operations that have dismantled launch points for hacks, Goldstein said.

“I think I come back to the concept of persistent engagement,” Nakasone said. “We should always be involved with our adversaries here. This is a really good case study of: it’s out there, and we need to find it and we need to be able to take it down.”

defenseone.com · by David DiMolfetta

8. China Creates World’s No. 1 Shipbuilder, Driven by Rivalry With U.S.

China Creates World’s No. 1 Shipbuilder, Driven by Rivalry With U.S.

In $16 billion deal, Beijing looks to counter Trump’s moves to rebuild American shipyards

By Clarence Leong

Follow and Costas Paris

Aug. 11, 2025 11:00 pm ET

China has hundreds of times the shipbuilding capacity of the U.S., thanks to shipyards in cities such as Qingdao. Photo: Cfoto/Zuma Press

Quick Summary

China is merging two state-controlled shipbuilders, creating the world’s largest, as the U.S. seeks to find a way back into the industry.View more

A $16 billion merger of two state-controlled shipbuilders in China is set for completion this week, creating the world’s biggest shipbuilder while the U.S. searches for a path back into the business.

American shipbuilders are playing catch-up after decades of maritime-industry decline, though President Trump’s ambitious plans to revive American shipbuilding have hit snags recently. In the shorter term, Trump’s threat to impose higher fees on ships made in China is giving South Korean and Japanese rivals an opening to win back market share.

The Chinese champion is called China State Shipbuilding, or CSSC. This week it is scheduled to absorb its merger partner, China Shipbuilding Industry, and take the sole listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange after regulators recently approved the deal.

The merged company hopes to use its bulk to cut costs and help it ride out industry turmoil brought on by Trump’s moves.

The two companies were originally one and split up in 1999, when the government wanted to promote competition. These days, Beijing is looking to consolidate state-led companies in sensitive industries, particularly those connected with the military.

CSSC’s main business is commercial, but it is also an important contractor for the Chinese navy. The company it is absorbing designed and built China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier, the Shandong.

China’s aircraft carrier, the Shandong, in the waters off Hong Kong. Photo: LEUNG MAN HEI/EPA/Shutterstock

The company said the merger will allow it to better fulfill the navy’s need for advanced equipment.

“This is a key milestone in China’s long-term push to dominate global shipbuilding,” said Matthew Funaiole, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Together, the companies accounted for almost 17% of the global market last year, based on new-orders data from Clarksons Research. The merged company’s combined order book will total more than 530 vessels and 54 million deadweight tons, the most in the world, with an annual revenue of around $18 billion, based on the latest annual reports.

“It strengthens Beijing’s ability to execute its military-civil fusion strategy,” Funaiole said. “Commercial and naval production are increasingly integrated, sharing technology, talent and infrastructure.”

Beijing set its sights on dominating the shipbuilding industry decades ago, and now Chinese shipbuilders make up more than half of the global market. China-built ships accounted for about 55% of global tonnage last year, compared with less than 0.05% for the U.S., data from the United Nations show. China possesses 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the U.S., according to the U.S. Navy.

But recent data suggest China is facing rougher times because the prospect of U.S. port fees on Chinese-made ships has prompted owners to look at non-Chinese shipyards. In addition, Trump’s tariffs and countries’ focus on domestic supply chains have raised the specter of less global trade overall, meaning fewer ships would be needed to carry goods.

Singapore-listed Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, China’s biggest private yard, received orders for 14 ships worth $540 million in the first half of 2025, compared with 126 vessels worth $14.6 billion for all of last year. Clarksons data show global new ship orders fell 48% year on year in the first half of 2025.

Yangzijiang said the sector faces “macroeconomic uncertainties and geopolitical tensions.”

Meanwhile, smaller rivals in Japan are looking to reclaim market share after decades of being pushed into a corner by lower-cost Chinese and South Korean rivals.

Imabari Shipbuilding President Yukito Higaki, who is also head of the Shipbuilders’ Association of Japan, said in June that the country aimed to raise its market share to 20% by 2030 from around 9% currently. The association is “uniting Japanese ship and vessel companies under an ‘All Japan’ strategy to counter China and South Korea,” he said.

Japan commanded around half of all shipbuilding output in the 1990s.

A proposal in June from Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party calls for extensive subsidies for local shipyards to protect national security, including a $6.7 billion public-private fund. “If we fail to act now, Japan risks losing its shipbuilding industry entirely, as Europe and the United States did,” the party said.

China won’t give up easily, said Kenneth G. Huang, a professor at the National University of Singapore who studies Chinese state-owned enterprises. “Shipbuilding is a core capability that China wants to build,” he said, “and the rivalry with the U.S. is going to push them to upgrade faster.”

Write to Clarence Leong at clarence.leong@wsj.com and Costas Paris at costas.paris@wsj.com

9. Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest

Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest

Documents reviewed by The Post detail a new National Guard mission that, if adopted, would require hundreds of troops to be ready around-the-clock.

https://wapo.st/46UGmic

55 minutes ago

National Guard troops and law enforcement officers in Los Angeles in June. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

By Alex Horton and David Ovalle

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.

Cost projections outlined in the documents indicate that such a mission, if the proposal is adopted, could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars should military aircraft and aircrews also be required to be ready around-the-clock. Troop transport via commercial airlines would be less expensive, the documents say.

The proposal, which has not been previously reported, represents another potential expansion of President Donald Trump’s willingness to employ the armed forces on American soil. It relies on a section of U.S. Code that allows the commander in chief to circumvent limitations on the military’s use within the United States.

Follow Trump’s second term

The documents, marked predecisional, are comprehensive and contain extensive discussion about the potential societal implications of establishing such a program. They were compiled by National Guard officials and bear time stamps as recent as late July and early August. Fiscal year 2027 is the earliest this program could be created and funded through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process, the documents say, leaving unclear whether the initiative could begin sooner through an alternative funding source.

It is also unclear whether the proposal has been shared yet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Spokespeople for the Defense Department declined to comment. The National Guard Bureau did not return a request for comment.

While most National Guard commands have fast-response teams for use within their home states, the proposal under evaluation by the Trump administration would entail moving troops from one state to another.

The National Guard tested the concept ahead of the 2020 election, putting 600 troops on alert in Arizona and Alabama as the country braced for possible political violence. The test followed months of unrest in cities across the country, prompted by the police murder of George Floyd, that spurred National Guard deployments in numerous locations. Trump, then nearing the end of his first term, sought to employ active-duty combat troops while Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other Pentagon officials urged him to rely instead on the Guard, which is trained to address civil disturbances.

Trump has summoned the military for domestic purposes like few of his predecessors. He did so most recently on Monday, authorizing the mobilization of 800 D.C. National Guard troops to bolster enhanced law enforcement activity in Washington that he said is necessary to address violent crime. Data maintained by the D.C. police shows such incidents are in decline; the city’s mayor called the move “unsettling and unprecedented.”

President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the White House on Monday. (Eric Lee/For The Washington Post)

Earlier this year, over the objections of California’s governor and other Democrats, Trump dispatched more than 5,000 National Guard members and active-duty Marines to the Los Angeles area under a rarely used authority permitting the military’s use for quelling insurrection. Administration officials said the mission was necessary to protect federal personnel and property amid protests denouncing Trump’s immigration policies. His critics called the deployment unnecessary and a gross overreach. Before long, many of the troops involved were doing unrelated support work, including a raid on a marijuana farm more than 100 miles away.

The Trump administration also has dispatched thousands of troops to the southern border in a dramatic show of force meant to discourage illegal migration.

National Guard troops can be mobilized for federal missions inside the United States under two main authorities. The first, under Title 10, puts troops under the president’s direction, where they can support law enforcement activity but not perform arrests or investigations.

The other kind, Title 32, is a federal-state status where troops are controlled by their state governor but federally funded. It also allows more latitude to participate in law enforcement missions. National Guard troops from other states arrived in D.C. under such circumstances during racial justice protests in 2020.

The proposal being evaluated now would allow the president to mobilize troops and put them on Title 32 orders in a state experiencing unrest. The documents detailing the plan acknowledge the potential for political friction should the governor refuse to work with the Pentagon.

Some legal scholars expressed apprehension about the proposal.

The Trump administration is relying on a shaky legal theory that the president can act broadly to protect federal property and functions said Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in legal issues germane to the U.S. military’s domestic activities.

“You don’t want to normalize routine military participation in law enforcement,” he said. “You don’t want to normalize routine domestic deployment.”

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The strategy is further complicated by the fact that National Guard members from one state cannot operate in another state without permission, Nunn said. He also warned that any quick-reaction force established for civil unrest missions risks lowering the threshold for deploying National Guard troops into American cities.

“When you have this tool waiting at your fingertips, you’re going to want to use it,” Nunn said. “It actually makes it more likely that you’re going to see domestic deployments — because why else have a task force?”

The proposal represents a major departure in how the National Guard traditionally has been used, said Lindsay P. Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. While it is not unusual for National Guard units to be deployed for domestic emergencies within their states, including for civil disturbances, this “is really strange because essentially nothing is happening,” she said.

“Crime is going down. We don’t have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states” to federal immigration policies, she said. “There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon,” said Cohn, who stressed she was speaking in her personal capacity and not reflecting her employer’s views.

Moreover, Cohn said, the proposal risks diverting National Guard resources that may be needed to respond to natural disasters or other emergencies.

National Guard personnel load food and water into a Black Hawk helicopter for delivery to rural areas in North Carolina that were devastated by Hurricane Helene last year. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The proposal envisions a rotation of service members from Army and Air Force National Guard units based in multiple states. Those include Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee, the documents say.

Carter Elliot, a spokesperson for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), said governors and National Guard leaders are best suited to decide how to support law enforcement during emergencies. “There is a well-established procedure that exists to request additional assistance during times of need,” Carter said, “and the Trump administration is blatantly and dangerously ignoring that precedent.”

One action memo contained in the documents, dated July 22, recommends that Army military police and Air Force security forces receive additional training for the mission. The document indicates it was prepared for Hegseth by Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s under secretary for policy.

The 300 troops in each of the two headquarters’ locations would be outfitted with weapons and riot gear, the documents say. The first 100 would be ready to move within an hour, with the second and third waves ready to move within two and 12 hours notice, the documents note, or all immediately deployed when placed on high alert.

The quick-reaction teams would be on task for 90 days, the documents said, “to limit burnout.”

The documents also show robust internal discussions that, with unusual candor, detail the possible negative repercussions if the plan were enacted. For instance, such short-notice missions could “significantly impact volunteerism,” the documents say, which would adversely impact the military’s ability to retain personnel. Guard members, families and civilian employers “feel the significant impacts of short notice activations,” the documents said.

The documents highlight several other concerns, including:

• Reduced Availability for Other Missions: State-Level Readiness: States may have fewer Guard members available for local emergencies (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes).

• Strain on Personnel and Equipment: Frequent domestic deployments can lead to personnel fatigue (stress, burnout, employer conflicts) and accelerated wear and tear on equipment, particularly systems not designed for prolonged civil support missions.

• Training Disruptions: Erosion of Core Capabilities: Extensive domestic deployments can disrupt scheduled training, hinder skill maintenance and divert units from their primary military mission sets, ultimately impacting overall combat readiness.

• Budgetary and Logistical Strains: Sustained operations can stretch budgets, requiring emergency funding or impacting other planned activities.

• Public and Political Impact: National Guard support for DHS raises potential political sensitivities, questions regarding the appropriate civil-military balance and legal considerations related to their role as a nonpartisan force.

— National Guard planning documents reviewed by The Post

Officials also have expressed some worry that deploying troops too quickly could make for a haphazard situation as state and local governments scramble to coordinate their arrival, the documents show.

One individual cited in the documents rejected the notion that military aviation should be the primary mode of transport, emphasizing the significant burden of daily aircraft inspections and placing aircrews on constant standby. The solution, this official proposed, was to contract with Southwest Airlines or American Airlines through their Phoenix and Atlanta operations, the documents say.

“The support (hotels, meals, etc.) required will fall onto the general economy in large and thriving cities of the United States,” this official argued. Moreover, bypassing military aircraft would allow for deploying personnel to travel “in a more subdued status” that might avoid adding to tensions in their “destination city.”

Tara Copp, Dan Lamothe and Noah Robertson contributed to this report.

40 Comments

By Alex Horton

Alex Horton is a national security reporter for The Washington Post focused on the U.S. military. He served in Iraq as an Army infantryman. Send him secure tips on Signal at alexhorton.85follow on X@AlexHortonTX

By David Ovalle

David Ovalle is a reporter for the Health & Science team who covers opioids and addiction. He previously worked for the Miami Herald, where he covered crime, justice and hurricanes.follow on X@davidovalle305

Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest

Documents reviewed by The Post detail a new National Guard mission that, if adopted, would require hundreds of troops to be ready around-the-clock.

August 12, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT55 minutes ago

10. American Support for Israel Is Faltering

American Support for Israel Is Faltering

The Jewish state’s security is at higher risk as Western public sentiment shifts.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/american-support-for-israel-is-faltering-war-gaza-palestine-4534f527

By William A. Galston

Aug. 12, 2025 12:20 pm ET

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest in Manhattan, Aug. 1. Photo: charly triballeau/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Israeli government’s push to widen the war in Gaza faces staunch opposition from the military leadership and much of the Israeli public. It also comes against a backdrop of declining Western support for Israel.

American attitudes toward Israel are changing. An early August Economist/YouGov survey offers a snapshot of current views. Seventy-one percent of Americans believe that there is a “hunger crisis” in Gaza. Seventy-eight percent favor an immediate cease-fire. By a margin of more than 3 to 1, those who favor cutting military aid to Israel outnumber those who favor increasing it.

It gets worse. Only 32% of Americans view Israel’s response to Hamas as justified by the threat that the fanatical Islamist group poses, while 41% see Israel’s response as unjustified. Forty-three percent of Americans say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza; only 28% disagree, while the remainder aren’t sure. Only 29% of Americans sympathize more with Israelis than with Palestinians; almost as many have the opposite sentiment.

Support for Israel is especially low among younger adults. This is troubling because young people’s attitudes will shape future American policies toward Israel, which needs U.S. support to maintain its security in a region not yet reconciled to its existence. Only 18% of Americans under 30 sympathize more with Israelis than with Palestinians, compared with 41% who have the opposite sentiment. Even among the next-oldest cohort, those 30 to 44, Palestinian sympathizers outnumber Israeli ones.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted this spring shows that Americans’ support for Israel has eroded over the past few years. Between March 2022 and March 2025, the share of Americans expressing an unfavorable view of Israel rose from 42% to 53%.

Articulating a common Republican view, Matt Brooks, who leads the Republican Jewish Coalition, says that these changes mostly have been confined to the Democratic Party. “Today, there is only one pro-Israel party, and that’s the Republican Party.” This isn’t entirely true: While Republicans are still more favorably inclined toward Israel than are Democrats, the share of Republicans with unfavorable views rose from 27% in 2022 to 37% this year. (The share of Democrats with unfavorable views of Israel rose more, from 53% to 69%.)

Most of the change in Republican sentiment has occurred among Republicans under 50, whose negative share has risen from 35% to 50%. Among Republicans 50 and older, the share with negative views has barely budged and now stands at 23%.

The pattern has been different among Democrats. While negative attitudes toward Israel among Democrats under 50 rose by 9 points, from 62% to 71%, negative views increased by a startling 23 points, from 43% to 66%, among older Democrats. The result: When sorting by age and party affiliation, majority support for Israel is now confined to a single cohort—older Republicans—who will be replaced over time by younger members of their party, who now hold less positive views.

In response to events in Gaza and the American public’s reaction to them, Democratic elected officials have begun what may be a momentous shift on U.S. relations with Israel. On July 30, a majority of the Senate Democratic caucus voted for a resolution that called for stopping exports of automatic assault rifles to the Israel National Police. Many Democrats supported a parallel measure urging a stop to the export of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel. Although these measures failed, some longtime Democratic supporters of Israel have mused that this growing split may be irreparable.

Similar shifts in public opinion are forcing the hands of Western democracies that have long supported Israel. Canada, France and the U.K. recently declared their intention to recognize Palestine as a state next month. Australia has joined them, and New Zealand may follow suit. Last week, Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, whose unswerving support for Israel has been rooted in the legacy of the Holocaust, announced the suspension of arms sales to Israel. Thorsten Brenner, director of a Berlin think tank, has described this as the “biggest rupture” between Germany and Israel since the relationship began in the 1950s.

Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens—as staunch a supporter of Israel as there is—wrote that “being pro-Israel means looking at Gaza through the wider lens of Israel’s overall interests,” which include the rehabilitation of Israel’s international reputation and the resumption of diplomacy to turn Israel’s regional military successes into enduring political gains. Mr. Stephens closed with a warning: If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “makes the colossal mistake of trying to reoccupy Gaza for the long term, then no thoughtful person can be pro-Israel without also being against him.”

Whatever Mr. Netanyahu may say about his government’s decision to seize Gaza City, its likely consequence will be the long-term occupation of Gaza. In the event of such an occupation, Israel would likely lose even more of its remaining American supporters. What would that mean for Israel’s future?

11. Vietnam and Afghanistan – Shared Failure

Excerpts:

Conclusions

Afghanistan was the closest experience to Vietnam that America suffered since Vietnam. America’s decades-long failed involvement in both countries has left a legacy of a divided country and discredited foreign policy. The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars are eerily similar in that the U.S. found itself entangled with unclear goals, soaring costs, and little chance for success. Both conflicts featured blurry battle lines, nebulous objectives, undefinable victories, and inhospitable terrain that nullified the U.S. airpower and physically punished its ground forces. The parallels between the lessons in Vietnam and the lessons relearned during the occupation of Afghanistan are glaring. Successful COIN or nation-building requires an effective, legitimate government. Safe havens, which allow insurgents to rest and recover, prolong the conflict and increase the difficulty in defeating them or compelling them to the negotiating table. Terrain can mitigate U.S. technological superiority. And a lack of an identified end state and tangible steps to achieve that end state will lead to a drawn-out conflict and the eventual loss of popular support. The legacy of the Vietnam war resulted in a new strategy for warfighting– using military only if there was a clear, attainable goal, employing overwhelming force, and having a defined exit strategy. These lessons appeared to have been forgotten post 9/11 to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan.

Like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan will likely have little lasting strategic achievements as the Taliban reconstitute their oppressive rule, now aided by a sense of victory and abandoned U.S. military equipment. However, the U.S. should endeavor to codify the lessons learned again in Afghanistan. The second Trump administration is facing challenges across the globe, from near peer competitors, failed states, and drug cartels and now a possible regional conflict in the Middle East. When deciding if or when to intervene in a foreign country, the failures of Vietnam and Afghanistan should be a crucial influence in whatever foreign policy decision the administration makes. Clearly defining objectives, installing or supporting a legitimate partner, understanding and adapting tactics to the terrain, and denying the enemy a safe haven should be critical factors in defining an engagement strategy, wherever in the world it may happen.

Vietnam and Afghanistan – Shared Failure

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/12/vietnam-and-afghanistan-shared-failure/

by Joe Swiecki

08.12.2025 at 06:00am

Picture from the fall of Saigon marking the end of the Vietnam war (L). A helicopter above USA's embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan (R). | FIle Photo (L)/ AFP (R)

Abstract: As conflict looms throughout the world, the United States must again learn lessons from its failed conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Both conflicts featured blurry battle lines, nebulous objectives, undefinable victories, and inhospitable terrain that nullified the U.S. airpower and physically punished its ground forces. For a Presidential administration deciding if or when to intervene in a foreign country, the failures of Vietnam and Afghanistan should be a crucial influence in whatever foreign policy decision the administration makes.

Introduction

As a possible conflict in the Middle East looms, it is a prescient time to look back at America’s two longest wars and the lessons learned in blood. In the almost fifty years since the fall of South Vietnam and five years since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, it has become clear that the outcomes of both conflicts had one comparable result: failure. But what lessons can be learned from the parallels and differences in the two conflicts, and can those lessons give policymakers a greater understanding of future challenges? To compare America’s two longest wars and create lessons learned, this article will look at four variables: policy objectives, popular support, tactics and terrain, and government partners. The comparisons between the conflicts are not limited to these variables, but this article will restrict the scope of the analysis to these four critical topics.

Policy Objectives

In both Afghanistan and Vietnam there appeared to be a slow descent rather than a deliberate commitment to full-scale intervention. This failure to initially develop clear, accurate strategic goals and tangible steps to achieve those goals hamstrung efforts in both countries.

After the shocking events of 9/11, the United States and its coalition partners invaded Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda and deny terrorists a safe haven to plan further attacks against the United States and its allies. This remained a key aim of the conflict, but over nineteen years other objectives took precedence. As the conflict stretched, nation-building became the primary objective, namely providing security to the population, assisting the government, and funding development projects. In 2011, then Commander, United States Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A), General Stanley McChrystal claimed the new strategy was analogous to nation-building with 95% of the coalition effort focused on supporting the population and 5% on targeting insurgents. This mission creep, combined with an undefined end-state frustrated multiple presidential administrations and stretched the conflict out while never accomplishing the original, primary mission: denying terrorists a safe haven.

In Vietnam, the main policy objective was to avert communist expansion in Southeast Asia. Policymakers thought a communist Vietnam would be the first domino in a wave of communist takeovers in Thailand, Laos, and throughout the region. The strategy on the ground was to support the South Vietnamese government from both an internal threat, the Viet Cong guerrillas, and an external threat, the North Vietnam government. Unlike Afghanistan, American strategy did not initially focus on nation-building. The South Vietnamese had a functioning government that was in place before America’s intervention, but its ineffectiveness hampered U.S. efforts. This strategy turned a local insurgency into an existential threat and confused U.S. policymakers and warfighters. The U.S. Strategy in Vietnam seemed to change and morph with new administrations, without committing to one effective path. As Lyndon Johnson claimed in his 1971 memoir, Vietnam “was a political war, an economic war, and a fighting war—all at the same time.” U.S. support to South Vietnam began with an advisory presence, escalated to conventional warfare, then eventually to a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam and its neighbors to try and force a peace settlement.

An inability to accurately define and adhere to strategic goals and then combine those goals with obtainable tactical objectives resulted in mission creep and a quagmire in both countries. The initial strategic goals of both conflicts were dramatically different, but both saw the tactical objectives change significantly over time. Eventually presidential administrations in both conflicts realized they could neither accomplish the goals, nor “declare victory and get out.” As the conflicts wound down, the overall strategy shifted to finding a diplomatic solution and attempting to preserve credibility, secure even small gains, and not abandon allies.

Popular Support

Both Vietnam and Afghanistan dragged on too long at too high a cost to sustain public support. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden were each unable to reverse a slowly declining rate of public approval as more and more Americans became disillusioned with the war and their support changed to opposition.

The initial invasion of Afghanistan had almost unanimous U.S. approval. On September 14, 2001, Congress passed Senate Joint Resolution 23 authorizing the use of military force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks 98-0 with two non-votes. And in November 2001, a poll by CNN/Gallup/USA Today indicated that 92% of Americans backed military action in Afghanistan. Eighteen years later, U.S popular support for troops fighting abroad was not so overwhelming. In a 2019 survey, only 38% of respondents believed it was the correct decision to send troops to Afghanistan and just 19% believed the invasion was a success. The existential call to arms Americans felt immediately after 9/11 faded during 19 years of unending combat. Afghanistan was the longest war in American history and U.S. soldiers who were not even born on 9/11 were deployed to Afghanistan by the end of the war.

Unlike the war in Afghanistan, the war in Vietnam had no clear beginning. But for the American populace, 1965 and its massive influx of troops and sustained bombing campaign served as the overt starting point for American intervention in the country. In 1965, support for the Vietnam war was at its highest point with 63% of respondents supporting the conflict. Support remained high in 1966 but then started a slow and gradual decline till its lowest point of only 32% of respondents supporting the war in March 1970. The decline in support for the Vietnam conflict was quicker than the decline in Afghanistan, but Vietnam did not have the same strong unifying event that 9/11 initially provided.

Like Afghanistan, American support for military intervention in Vietnam and the defense of democracy was initially high but slowly faded as casualties increased and the stalemate dragged on. Both conflicts point toward a certain lesson: the longer a conflict goes on without an identified end state or clear policy objective, the public will become less likely to support continued commitment of U.S. blood and resources.

Tactics and Terrain

Both conflicts were composed of conventional tactics and counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in daunting, unforgiving terrain. Modern technology like precision bombing and night vision aided in Afghanistan, but ultimately the COIN tactics remained markedly similar. Taliban guerillas are similar in many aspects to Viet Cong guerillas, with both consisting of decentralized fighting groups and shadow political leadership who used their familiarity with the terrain to mitigate the U.S.’s technological superiority. And in both conflicts’ safe havens in Pakistan or Cambodia and Laos played key roles in supporting the insurgent force.

Post-invasion, Afghanistan became the modern implementation of COIN strategy through attempts to build up governance and win the hearts and minds of the populace to delegitimize and ultimately defeat the insurgency. In Afghanistan, COIN strategy emphasized improving Afghan security forces, enhancing intelligence, and developing infrastructure. But soldiers faced an enemy that used the rugged mountains and karez systems to avoid conventional engagements and choose their own time and place for attacks, usually against the very government systems the U.S. was attempting to legitimize. The Taliban had great success attacking Afghan security forces who were separated from coalition forces. The enemy was adept at employing cover and concealment, surprise, and hasty retreat to live to fight another day. Safe havens in Pakistan created a “fighting season” during the summer and fall months before fighters and leadership would retreat across the mountain for rest and recovery as winter snow closed the passes.

From 1965 to mid-1968, America’s tactic in Vietnam was to cause sufficient casualties among the North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas that they would quit or sue for peace. From 1968 to 1972, COIN operations came to the forefront. The U.S. tried to enable the local South Vietnamese forces and build the legitimacy of the government but the conventional search and destroy mission continued. The Combined Action Program, which peaked in 1970, was an example of a successful COIN strategy but it was limited and never received sufficient support to make a difference in the conflict. Like Afghanistan, battles in Vietnam were distinguished by punishing terrain. Vietnam was fought in thick underbrush and dense jungles. Most firefights occurred between dismounted infantry units and lasted for several hours before the insurgents would disappear back into the jungle. And like the Taliban, Vietnamese fighters were also able to use safe havens in neighboring countries to rest, refit, and resupply.

Despite a concerted COIN campaign in Afghanistan, and because of a half-hearted campaign in Vietnam, the United States failed to win the hearts and minds of the population sufficiently to rally the populace and deny the enemy support. The belligerents were then able to implement a strategy of wearing down and outlasting the United States and did not need to win conventional battles. This strategy was boosted by the Taliban and Viet Cong’s access to external safe havens. Although tactics evolved and changed, the brutal nature of the terrain favored insurgency in Afghanistan and Vietnam and the presence of sanctuaries greatly aided the enemy. The thick jungle and rugged mountains limited the success of American airpower. When the U.S. was able to deploy air support, the enemy could melt away and avoid decisive engagements. COIN strategy had some limited tactical success in both countries, but the inadequate commitment of resources, shortcomings of the partners in both countries, and insurgents’ safe havens hamstrung COIN efforts.

Government Partners

The Central governments in both Afghanistan and Vietnam had rampant corruption, were inept, and considered to be puppets of the United States. This created a lack of public support for America’s allies and drastically increased the difficulty of COIN operations. The illegitimate government in Vietnam helped the Viet Cong recruit and in Afghanistan prompted most Afghans to support neither the Taliban nor the government, a win for the insurgent group.

The lack of government legitimacy in Afghanistan complicated the U.S.’s COIN strategy. Hamid Karzai became the first President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan during national elections held in October 2004 after heading the Afghan Interim and Transitional Authority since 2002. Karzai’s administration was dogged by allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness throughout his tenure. Ashraf Ghani succeeded Karzai as President of Afghanistan in 2014 and reelected in 2019. But Ghani’s legitimacy was questioned throughout his time in leadership. Allegations of electoral fraud resulted in protracted stalemates, and finally a power-sharing agreement with his primary opponent, Abdullah Abdullah. The successive governments in Afghanistan were so ineffective that in some areas the Taliban’s shadow governance was considered more legitimate and delivered needed services and security that the government could not.

Like Afghanistan, the series of South Vietnam Government figures that the U.S. partnered with were corrupt and illegitimate in the eyes of the Vietnamese people. The government of Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem was unable to rally the populace due to corruption and authoritarian rule. He was overthrown by General Duong Ban Ming who was replaced in 1964 by General Nguyen Khanh. Finally, as America began to dramatically increase its participation in the war, another coup resulted in General Nguyen Van Thieu becoming the nominal head of state. In 1967, South Vietnam held its first elections under a new bicameral system. Thieu was elected with a majority of the popular vote, quickly consolidated power, and ran unopposed in 1971 in a sham election. The series of authoritarian, military dictatorships and fraudulent elections created a corrupt and illegitimate government that negatively affected U.S. operations and South Vietnamese support for the conflict.

Counterinsurgency operations are difficult under the best of circumstances, but working by, with, and through a corrupt state makes COIN almost impossible. In COIN, the U.S.’ primary role is to enable a host nation that must be capable of providing civil control and security. If the host government is incapable or unwilling to provide basic security, the best outcome COIN operations could hope to achieve is a stalemate.

Conclusions

Afghanistan was the closest experience to Vietnam that America suffered since Vietnam. America’s decades-long failed involvement in both countries has left a legacy of a divided country and discredited foreign policy. The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars are eerily similar in that the U.S. found itself entangled with unclear goals, soaring costs, and little chance for success. Both conflicts featured blurry battle lines, nebulous objectives, undefinable victories, and inhospitable terrain that nullified the U.S. airpower and physically punished its ground forces. The parallels between the lessons in Vietnam and the lessons relearned during the occupation of Afghanistan are glaring. Successful COIN or nation-building requires an effective, legitimate government. Safe havens, which allow insurgents to rest and recover, prolong the conflict and increase the difficulty in defeating them or compelling them to the negotiating table. Terrain can mitigate U.S. technological superiority. And a lack of an identified end state and tangible steps to achieve that end state will lead to a drawn-out conflict and the eventual loss of popular support. The legacy of the Vietnam war resulted in a new strategy for warfighting– using military only if there was a clear, attainable goal, employing overwhelming force, and having a defined exit strategy. These lessons appeared to have been forgotten post 9/11 to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan.

Like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan will likely have little lasting strategic achievements as the Taliban reconstitute their oppressive rule, now aided by a sense of victory and abandoned U.S. military equipment. However, the U.S. should endeavor to codify the lessons learned again in Afghanistan. The second Trump administration is facing challenges across the globe, from near peer competitors, failed states, and drug cartels and now a possible regional conflict in the Middle East. When deciding if or when to intervene in a foreign country, the failures of Vietnam and Afghanistan should be a crucial influence in whatever foreign policy decision the administration makes. Clearly defining objectives, installing or supporting a legitimate partner, understanding and adapting tactics to the terrain, and denying the enemy a safe haven should be critical factors in defining an engagement strategy, wherever in the world it may happen.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the US Government, US Department of Defense or its components, including the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

Tags: Counter-insurgency, nation-building, partnership, Vietnam War, war in afghaistan

About The Author

Joe Swiecki
Joe Swiecki is a Professor at the U.S. Naval War College and the George H. W. Bush Chair of National Intelligence. He teaches policy analysis in the National Security Affairs Department and electives on intelligence. In more than 29 years of U.S. military and government service he has held senior positions in Washington D.C. and the foreign field. In his career he has worked closely with the National Security Council, Congress, and other governmental agencies on the creation and implementation of critical U.S. government initiatives.

12. Decoding Intent in Irregular Warfare: Lessons from Venezuela, Iran, and the Strategic Use of Ambiguity

Excerpts:

Conclusion

Venezuela is not drifting—it is maneuvering. What appears to be disorder may in fact be deliberate control. The regime survives not by restoring the state, but by exploiting its collapse, turning ambiguity into advantage.

This is irregular warfare. It thrives in the space between categories—bending humanitarianism, exploiting legality, and masking aggression. It persists not because it’s unseen, but because its intent goes unrecognized.

Policymakers must learn to read the signals. Intent reveals itself through repetition, coherence, and irregularity. Once understood, the mask falls away.

Ambiguity is the tactic. Intent is the message. Venezuela and Iran are speaking it. It’s time we listen.

Decoding Intent in Irregular Warfare: Lessons from Venezuela, Iran, and the Strategic Use of Ambiguity

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/12/decoding-intent-in-irregular-warfare/

by Ron MacCammon

08.12.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

The nature of warfare in the 21st century has changed. Open confrontations have been replaced by unconventional pressure and blurred authority. State actors increasingly rely on proxies, criminal networks, disinformation, and technological asymmetries to weaken adversaries—undermining political stability, social cohesion, and institutional trust—without triggering conventional responses. The result is a battlespace defined less by geography and more by narrative, influence, and legitimacy.

In this context, intent has become a central—but often overlooked—signal in irregular warfare. Unlike conventional conflict, where capabilities and declarations often precede action, irregular warfare demands that analysts and policymakers infer intent from patterns, alignments, and behaviors that rarely announce themselves clearly. But when viewed over time, these acts form a coherent strategy.

This article argues that intent in irregular warfare can be identified through an analytical triad: repeated behaviors, alignment with strategic outcomes, and the systematic use of irregular means. It draws from operational practice and doctrinal sources, including the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Annex and the work of David Kilcullen. This framework is then applied to Venezuela and its alignment with Iran, whose shared use of proxies, criminal networks, and information warfare illustrates how states weaponize ambiguity to advance their agendas without triggering traditional conflict thresholds.

These elements are not incidental—they are deliberate. They explicitly state what is often left implied: ambiguity is not the absence of intent; it is the tactic used to mask it. Recognizing this pattern allows threats that once seemed diffuse or deniable to be understood—and challenged—for what they are.

Defining Intent in Irregular Warfare

Intent, in this context, does not depend on a formal declaration. It can be assessed through three interlocking elements: repeated behaviors, strategic alignment, and the systematic use of irregular means. These components form a triad—a grounded framework that reflects how intent emerges in irregular warfare.

Surrounding this triad is a fourth element: the calculated use of ambiguity. While not itself a form of intent, ambiguity is the tactic that obscures intent. It allows irregular campaigns to unfold beneath the threshold of retaliation, using deniability and dispersion to mask coherence. In that sense, ambiguity is the operational veil cast over the triad—not a pillar of intent, but its camouflage.

This analytical structure enables a disciplined assessment of irregular campaigns in environments where clarity is deliberately denied. It is not revealed through a manifesto or a speech, but through the accumulation of action. A single proxy deployment, or a criminal alliance, or an act of cyber disruption may not carry meaning on its own. But when these acts repeat, when they reliably serve the same set of strategic interests, and when they rely on irregular mechanisms, intent becomes visible.

First, repeated behaviors signal persistence. An isolated event may be opportunistic or accidental; a series of them—especially when varied in form but consistent in effect—suggests design. This is a foundational element in military intelligence analysis, and its relevance in the gray zones of irregular warfare is even more acute.

Second, strategic alignment refers to the coherence between a regime’s actions and its long-term political objectives. If a state consistently benefits—politically, economically, or geopolitically—from ambiguous and deniable acts, those acts should be considered part of a strategy, not aberrations.

Third, systematic use of irregular means marks the method of execution. Modern irregular warfare is characterized by its reliance on indirect, unconventional methods, such as criminal proxies, cyber tools, clandestine financial networks, or the exploitation of humanitarian crises. It allows the state to blur lines of attribution and legitimacy.

Taken together, these three indicators form a framework for assessing intent in an environment where the traditional tools of attribution fall short. Interpreting intent in irregular warfare, however, is not without danger. The same ambiguity that masks strategy also opens space for distortion. Analysts may highlight incidents that support a preferred narrative while ignoring others that complicate it.

Of course, identifying intent in ambiguous environments is risky. Analysts may read too much into isolated acts or build patterns where none exist. The answer is discipline: focus on repetition, check the alignment, and stay grounded in what can be observed. Don’t chase shadows—but don’t ignore what those shadows suggest.

The Case of Venezuela

The Maduro regime in Venezuela provides a revealing test case. It is not strategically sophisticated in the traditional sense. It has mismanaged the economy, overseen the collapse of its petroleum industry, and gutted its own institutions. But irregular warfare does not demand high-capacity governance. It rewards adaptation, deniability, and the exploitation of systemic decay.

The regime has learned to turn collapse into leverage—outsourcing control, weaponizing migration, and forging opaque alliances that serve its survival. This is not grand strategy. This is improvised statecraft in the gray zone, and it works.

Three elements are salient: forced migration, proxy criminality, and foreign alignment.

Taken together, these three behaviors reveal a campaign that is irregular in method, coherent in objective, and deliberate in design. Intent is not found in any one act, but in the consistency with which the Maduro regime blends collapse with control. The ambiguity surrounding each element is part of the architecture—not a symptom of disorder, but a tool of statecraft. Its activities over the past decade cannot be understood as the chaotic flailing of a failing state. They reflect a coherent strategy of regime preservation, asymmetric advantage, and external disruption.

The most visible feature of this strategy is the forced migration of over 7.7 million Venezuelans. What began as a humanitarian exodus has evolved into a tool of geopolitical disruption. The regime, by negligence or design, facilitated this movement without regard for regional consequences.

Neighboring states have been strained, borders destabilized, and political tensions inflamed. The Maduro government, meanwhile, remains insulated—shielded in part by the chaos it has helped unleash.

This mass displacement is not a singular act. It is part of a repeated behavior: a tolerance for, or orchestration of, structural collapse that serves a larger purpose. That purpose includes destabilizing adversaries, extracting remittances, and creating bargaining leverage with international actors.

In 2023, Venezuelan migrants sent over $5 billion in remittances back home—about 6% of the country’s GDP—often routed through regime-linked financial intermediaries that siphon off revenue for the government. These informal channels—complemented by fixed exchange‑rate mechanisms and service fees imposed by parallel currency markets—mean the Maduro regime benefits directly, turning the outward migration of Venezuelans into a recurrent source of foreign currency. It aligns consistently with the regime’s interest in weakening regional consensus and disrupting US-led initiatives.

The second key component is the strategic deployment—or at least strategic tolerance—of criminal networks. The Tren de Aragua (TdA), a violent transnational gang rooted in Venezuela’s prison system, now operates across South America and has established a presence inside the United States. Its growth does not seem to have been meaningfully opposed by the Maduro regime.

Evidence suggests a permissive environment—an absence of significant crackdown—even as prisons like Tocorón fell under gang control before being retaken with limited transparency. The group not only generates revenue but also serves as an informal arm of state influence—sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in July 2024 for its transnational criminal activity.

It’s important to note, however, there is debate about the level of cooperation. A National Intelligence Council assessment found no high-level coordination between TdA and the Maduro government—though it acknowledged tolerance of the gang’s activities within Venezuela.

Its presence is no longer speculative. On June 27, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the arrest of over 2,700 Tren de Aragua members in the United States since January. Both she, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and President Donald Trump have publicly warned of the threat the gang poses to American communities—underscoring that what began as a Venezuelan prison gang has evolved into a transnational security challenge with direct implications for US homeland defense.

The regime’s tolerance of the group resembles historical patterns—states using irregular forces to harass enemies while denying responsibility. Venezuela takes part in international diplomacy as a sovereign actor while enabling criminal chaos. This contrast is deliberate. It’s the strategy.

The third dimension involves external partnerships, especially with Iran. Venezuela has hosted Iranian military personnel, deepened intelligence ties, and reportedly engaged in drone training and technology transfers. These developments do not exist in a vacuum. They reflect repeated behaviors, serve clear strategic goals, and rely on irregular means—covert transfers, disinformation, and institutional camouflage.

Recent imagery and leaked purchase orders suggest Venezuela produces approximately 50 ANSU-100 drones per year, with sub-kits for the stealthier ANSU-200 still in development. These systems, based on Iranian designs, were showcased during a 2022 military parade by Maduro. Their existence signals a maturing capacity for indigenous drone production with external support—demonstrating both technological diffusion and intent.

Additionally, Iran has supplied Venezuela with fast boats capable of carrying anti-ship missiles. These have been paired with Iranian-origin loitering munitions in recent Venezuelan saturation-strike exercises, consistent with IRGC-affiliated visions of building “Houthis of the Caribbean”—small, missile-armed craft designed to deny US or allied naval access to the southern Atlantic.

This pattern—forced migration, criminal proxy use, foreign alignment—is not ideological improvisation. None of these elements alone prove intent. But taken together—repeated actions, clear benefits, and use of irregular means—they show a pattern. What’s visible isn’t improvisation. It’s practiced behavior.

A Pattern Missed: Iran’s Intent and the Price of Delay

Iran’s strategic use of proxy forces—Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis—has been acknowledged for years. US and allied intelligence services understood the connections, tracked the weapons flows, and observed the coordination. What was lacking was not awareness, but response. The error was in treating each group as a localized or compartmentalized threat, rather than recognizing the shared logic behind them.

Iran was executing a regional irregular warfare campaign—slowly, methodically, and with plausible deniability. But recognition without response is not a challenge. By failing to confront the strategy behind the proxies, the West allowed ambiguity to become an advantage.

Identifying and acting on the pattern earlier—considering repeated behaviors, strategic alignment, and the use of irregular means—could have shifted policy from containment to disruption. We could have interdicted smuggling routes, pressured proxy infrastructure, and incentivized host governments to reject Iranian entrenchment.

Stronger deterrence, earlier information campaigns, and more coordinated multilateral efforts might have limited Iran’s ability to escalate with impunity. Instead, the absence of strategic challenge contributed to crises like the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, and arguably set the conditions for the October 7th Hamas massacre in Israel.

Whether October 7th was a tactical surprise is less relevant than the fact that it should not have been a strategic one. The indicators—stockpiled weapons, renewed coordination, rising incitement—were all present. What remained unacknowledged was the intent: to shock, to provoke, and to reset the regional narrative in Iran’s favor.

Clarifying intent in irregular warfare is not an academic exercise; it is a tool of prevention. It shifts policy from reaction to anticipation. US doctrine explicitly warns that adversaries “will continue to use irregular warfare as a component of their strategy to challenge the United States and its interests” (Irregular Warfare Annex, p. 2), and that “actors may not overtly reveal their intent, instead relying on proxy forces, disinformation, and deniability” (JP 3-24, p. I-6). The challenge lies in treating those warnings as operational guidance—not just theory.

Strategic Implications

If ambiguity is the tactic, intent is the signal. Recognizing this changes how irregular threats should be analyzed and countered.

Too often, irregular acts are viewed as symptoms of internal dysfunction. A migration wave is treated as a refugee crisis. TdA’s emergence is seen as a law enforcement problem. A drone program is labeled a curiosity. What this misses is the possibility that these events, together, form a pattern of strategic behavior.

US and allied responses have frequently faltered in this space. Ambiguity is mistaken for disorder, and tactical incidents are treated as unrelated. This results in a reactive posture, one that struggles to connect the dots and almost never challenges the architecture behind the behavior.

By contrast, analyzing intent through repeated behavior, strategic alignment, and irregular means offers a way to see the architecture. It allows policymakers to shift from responding to symptoms to challenging the logic of the campaign itself.

The Pentagon’s defense strategy urges a whole-of-government approach to addressing irregular threats. It emphasizes persistent engagement, partner enablement, and narrative competition. But what it does not fully develop is how to assess intent under conditions of ambiguity. This is where analytic rigor is most needed.

David Kilcullen’s writings, including Counterinsurgency and Out of the Mountains, argue that irregular warfare is about manipulating systems rather than holding ground. Actors exploit urban density, network effects, and institutional gaps. But beneath this disruption lies intent—the desire to undermine, outlast, and disorient the adversary.

When a regime like Venezuela repeatedly uses irregular methods that align with strategic goals, we should no longer consider it merely dysfunctional. We should understand it as executing an irregular campaign.

From Doctrine to Practice

Identifying intent is not a speculative exercise. This grounding is in the same logic that drives pattern-of-life analysis in counterterrorism, or target selection in covert action. The challenge in irregular warfare is that the “targets” are not always people or sites—they are behaviors, alliances, and narratives. And the goal is not elimination but neutralization: denying the adversary the ability to advance through ambiguity.

This requires a different kind of intelligence collection, one that privileges open-source material, migratory flows, financial forensics, and social media dynamics. It also demands policy tools that are calibrated to address indirect threats—legal, economic, and informational—as much as kinetic ones.

With Venezuela, the US and its allies should treat repeated behaviors as indicators of strategy, not noise. The Tren de Aragua is not just a gang; it is a proxy actor. Mass migration is not just a humanitarian outcome; it is a strategic weapon. Iran-Venezuela military cooperation is not just symbolic—it’s a strategic marker.

Iranian agents have entered Latin America on direct flights from Tehran to Caracas, where they are reportedly issued Venezuelan passports—allowing them to move freely across the region without drawing suspicion. As early as 2008–09, a former Venezuelan immigration official under then–Vice President Tarek El Aissami estimated that some 10,000 Middle Easterners per year were receiving such documents. Intelligence sources suggest this practice has expanded in recent years.

Iranian-linked terror finance and logistics operations have also spread beyond the well-known Tri-Border Area (Brazil–Argentina–Paraguay) to include locations such as the Chilean port of Iquique, Margarita Island in Venezuela, and Colón, Panama.

The implications extend beyond Venezuela and Latin America. The triad proposed here can assess other ambiguous threats, from Russian private military companies in Africa to Chinese influence operations in Southeast Asia. What matters is not whether these actors fit our existing categories, but whether their behavior reveals intent.

Conclusion

Venezuela is not drifting—it is maneuvering. What appears to be disorder may in fact be deliberate control. The regime survives not by restoring the state, but by exploiting its collapse, turning ambiguity into advantage.

This is irregular warfare. It thrives in the space between categories—bending humanitarianism, exploiting legality, and masking aggression. It persists not because it’s unseen, but because its intent goes unrecognized.

Policymakers must learn to read the signals. Intent reveals itself through repetition, coherence, and irregularity. Once understood, the mask falls away.

Ambiguity is the tactic. Intent is the message. Venezuela and Iran are speaking it. It’s time we listen.

Tags: Iran, irregular warfare, Venezuela

About The Author

Ron MacCammon
Ron MacCammon, Ed.D., is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel and a former Political-Military Officer with the Department of State. He has worked in Africa, Afghanistan, and throughout Latin America. Substack: https://ronmaccammon.substack.com X (Twitter): https://x.com/RonMacCammon

13. How Trump Is Expanding the Role of the American Military on U.S. Soil

I am reminded of the late Secretary of State Albirght who asked what good is it to have a military if you can't use it. Perhaps a slightly different context though.

How Trump Is Expanding the Role of the American Military on U.S. Soil

Deployment of the National Guard in D.C. comes as president plans to broaden the use of U.S. military bases for immigrant detention centers

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-national-guard-dc-military-role-3027c35e

By Michael R. Gordon

Follow, Vera Bergengruen

Follow and Lara Seligman

Aug. 11, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Quick Summary

President Trump announced he would deploy 800 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., alleging the city was overrun by criminals.View more

President Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., is his boldest move to date to expand the use of military power on U.S. soil.

The deployment of 800 National Guard troops to Washington, which the president alleges has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” amplifies the law-and-order themes that play well with his political base. He buttressed this announcement Monday by effectively federalizing the Washington police department, putting it under the control of the Trump administration.

In making these moves, he alleged the actions were warranted for a number of reasons that ranged from crime to homelessness.

The announcement was the latest in a series of moves by Trump to push the boundaries of how U.S. troops can be deployed in American territory, triggering a fierce legal debate over the U.S. military’s expanding footprint at home. Trump is also using U.S. military bases for migrant detention centers and has deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles and on the Southern U.S. border.

“The most benign interpretation is that this is an attempt to gain a public-relations victory by claiming credit for the already historically low crime rates in D.C.,” said Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a former professor at the U.S. Army War College. “The worst-case interpretation is that it is a test run for more legally dubious uses of military forces in other American cities.”

National Guard vehicles outside the D.C. Armory on Thursday. Photo: Andrew Leyden/Zuma Press

The same day as Trump’s announcement about the National Guard in D.C., a federal trial began in San Francisco over California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s challenge to Trump’s move to federalize state National Guard units there two months ago. The case might be the opening salvo in a much broader battle over the use of military force in the nation’s streets when the president’s claims of emergency are widely disputed.

Trump has long leaned on the threat of using U.S. military force to respond to domestic problems. In the first administration, chief of staff John Kelly told others that one of his biggest challenges was dissuading the president from using the military on U.S. soil. He said that Trump didn’t understand that the military was only meant to be deployed domestically in rare circumstances, according to a person familiar with the exchanges.

After returning to the White House earlier this year, Trump increasingly began to notice homeless encampments when his motorcade drove through the city to go to his golf course in Sterling, Va., or to the Kennedy Center, according to a senior administration official. “He’s staying in D.C. a lot more this term, and he pays attention to the news in D.C.,” the person said.

The Dawn of Automated Warfare

Foreign Affairs · by More by Eric Schmidt · August 12, 2025

Artificial Intelligence Will Be the Key to Victory in Ukraine—and Elsewhere

August 12, 2025

A Ukrainian soldier with a Leleka drone in Kharkiv region, Ukraine, July 2025 Serhii Korovainyi / Reuters

ERIC SCHMIDT is CEO and Chair of Relativity Space and Chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project. He previously served as CEO and Chair of Google and is a co-author, with Henry Kissinger and Craig Mundie, of Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit.

GREG GRANT is an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. He previously served as Special Assistant to Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, and as a speechwriter for Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Chuck Hagel.

More by Greg Grant

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When Russia first launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the conflict drew comparisons to wars of the twentieth century. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery dominated the battlefield, and both sides’ infantry were dug into trenches. We witnessed this old-school style of war when we made our first visit to Ukraine in September 2022. Since then, we have made regular trips to Ukraine, affording us firsthand insight into a monumental transformation: the beginning of a new kind of warfare.

In summer 2023, the commander of Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade’s Drone Unit, whom we’ll call Fil (not his real name), told us that a new weapon had begun to change the conflict: first-person-view drones. These small, cheap, maneuverable quadcopters transmit real-time footage to their operators and detonate kamikaze-style on their targets. That year, Ukraine flooded the field with thousands of them and Russia soon followed suit. Today, hundreds of thousands of these drones fill the Ukrainian skies.

What began as a war with drones has become a war of drones. Indeed, two years ago, a Ukrainian brigade’s strength was judged mostly by its inventory of Western-supplied tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery. Since 2023, however, drones have become the most important weapon on the battlefield. Because of their low cost, speed, and precision, drones have now largely supplanted traditional weaponry, including antitank missiles, mortars, tanks, and even artillery and aircraft. Today, a unit’s power and resilience are dictated by its number of skilled drone operators and its ability to deploy drones at scale. (One of us, Schmidt, has been a longtime investor in defense technology companies, and is currently an investor in companies supplying drones to Ukraine.)

This represents a profound shift in warfare, largely instigated by Ukraine to compensate for its shortfalls in conventional weapons and manpower. In the world’s first drone war, drones determine how battles are won and how soldiers die: Ukrainian drone strikes now account for 90 percent of destroyed Russian tanks and armored vehicles and 80 percent of Russian casualties. They also have made it possible for each side to attack far past the frontlines without having to gain air superiority over the battlefield. Ukraine, for example, hit Russian airbases 5,000 miles from Kyiv in June by smuggling drones across the border and launching them from the beds of trucks.

Russia, for its part, was originally slower to field drones in large numbers. But it has dramatically increased its production of first-person-view drones, as well as those used for strategic bombardment, such as the Iranian-designed Shahed. Today, Moscow matches Kyiv’s extraordinary rate of technological adaptation. It has developed equally capable models, such as the Orlan, which is used for surveillance, and the Lancet, which loiters over a target before exploding on impact.

Because Russia and Ukraine are constantly iterating on hardware, software, and tactics, the war changes at a breathtaking rate. The saturation of drone surveillance, for example, has made nearly all troop movement visible and therefore vulnerable, creating a transparent battlefield: anything that moves near the frontline is struck within a matter of minutes. Drone pilots have become prime targets, and with many traditional weapons rendered obsolete, drones are increasingly fighting other drones. Amid this cycle of innovation, the two sides are inching toward a new frontier: entirely automated warfare.

EYES EVERYWHERE

Surveillance and reconnaissance drones have become so ubiquitous that both Russian and Ukrainian forces scarcely move in the daylight. During a recent visit, we witnessed the motion of a single Russian van, five miles from the frontline, cause a sensation among drone operators, who then destroyed it. To avoid detection, movement near the frontline tends to take place during sunrise and sunset, when neither the daylight video cameras nor night-vision infrared cameras operate properly.

The fight for information advantage is always important in war, but even more so in this one, where it means the ability to form and maintain resilient drone-based sensor networks over the battlefield. If a unit is “blinded”—unable to maintain surveillance drones overhead—it becomes exceedingly vulnerable. For that reason, roughly 3,000 Ukrainian troops work around the clock to operate reconnaissance drones, mostly Chinese-made DJI Mavics, along the entire 750-mile frontline. Ukrainian brigade command centers display as many as 60 of these drone feeds around the clock.

This transparency means that the military maxim “what can be seen can be hit” is truer on today’s battlefield than at any point in history. It is nearly impossible for either side to mass and maneuver forces along the frontline, as troops are now easily spotted forming up for attack. The Russian army has historically relied on its ability to deliver impressive firepower through concentrated tube and rocket artillery fire, but these tactics are useless when any attempt to amass forces is identified within minutes. Russian guns are now widely dispersed, deeply dug in, and operate primarily at night.

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces scarcely move in the daylight.

Fil says his team has expanded from 400 troops in 2023 to over 1,000 now, and he expects it to continue to grow in the coming months. The brigade’s frontline operations are driven by data, of which there is more every day. Fil’s brigade, for example, tracks every engagement, drone mission, and vehicle or piece of equipment hit. That data, in turn, drives decision-making, including over the kinds and quantities of drones to procure. Fil’s team spends nearly $2 million each month on small quadcopters, mostly Mavics, for frontline reconnaissance and upward of $500,000 per month for longer-range fixed-wing surveillance drones, such as Sharks or Lelekas, that can be used to see much farther from the frontline.

This is expensive, but one new battle tank costs more than $10 million. A tank was long regarded as the best weapon to defeat another tank; now, a first-person-view drone costing less than $800 is, thanks to its ability to strike with precision and move much faster than any ground vehicle. No armored vehicle—no matter its camouflage or anti-drone barriers—can survive for long on the modern, drone-swept battlefield. As a result, Ukrainian soldiers believe tank-led assaults to be suicidal. Russia still launches them occasionally, but most do not make it to the front line.

In response, Russia has shifted primarily to infantry assaults. It is no surprise, then, that more than 75 percent of Ukrainian drones now target infantry. Because surveillance drones have a difficult time spotting scattered infantry in urban terrain and forests, the Russians are deploying small assault groups, typically consisting of five or six teams of two to three people, to simultaneously attack a concentrated area. In recent months, the Russians have turned to motorcycles to more rapidly cross no-man’s land—a shocking contrast to the line of tanks that rolled toward Kyiv in the earliest days of the conflict. When surviving members of a Russian assault group reach a building, they immediately dig in. Gradually, more soldiers join them. Over days or even weeks, the Russians gather their forces until they judge that they have sufficient strength to make the next bound toward Ukrainian positions. According to an officer from Ukraine’s Azov Brigade, Russia’s “cheap infantry”—its disregard for soldiers’ survival—allows for this kind of constant experimentation.

DRONE ON DRONE

Because drones have become so important to almost all battlefield operations, destroying them has become critical. Drone-on-drone battle is now a central part of the war. Last year, an estimated 1,200 Russian surveillance drones were operating behind Ukrainian lines on a given day, so Ukraine built the first drone-based air defense system to fend them off. Its forces began using first-person-view drones to chase down larger, slower, and much more expensive surveillance drones. Russian surveillance drones now fly higher to avoid Ukrainian interception. Still, roughly 80 percent of all surveillance drones that cross the frontline, be they Russian or Ukrainian, are shot down by either interceptors or traditional air defenses. Because of these changes, Russia has dramatically reduced its use of Lancet drones. Instead, it has developed smaller, faster, and camouflaged surveillance drones, including some with rear-facing cameras, that let operators spot and evade pursuing drones.

Unsurprisingly, drone pilots and their control stations have become prime targets for both sides. Fil’s unit has found that a successful attack on Russian Mavic operators can pause enemy activity for three days. Because pilots have become such a precious resource, integral to defending the infantry, Ukraine is working to relocate as many of them as possible away from the frontlines to integrated remote operations. In an attempt to further decrease the number of forward-deployed soldiers, Ukraine is now working to establish a so-called drone line along its entire frontline—a layered defense corridor six or seven miles wide, made up of obstacles such as ditches, minefields, and razor wire, and hundreds of drone teams that wait at the ready to destroy any targets before they reach Ukrainian positions. Once this barrier is in place, and more drone functions are automated, far fewer troops will need to defend the frontline. Ukraine hopes that this approach will help alleviate its manpower shortfalls and save lives.

Behind the frontlines, tactics are evolving just as fast. On a nightly basis, Russia launches hundreds of Shahed long-range drones at Ukraine, particularly its major cities. Russia increasingly uses sequenced launches and circuitous route planning so that multiple drones arrive at their target simultaneously from different directions; these attacks amount to manually coordinated “drone swarms.” Short of air defense systems, Ukraine has prioritized the development and production of interceptor drones to counter these swarms. Russia also sends dozens of cheaper “dummy” drones—drones without real capabilities—into Ukrainian airspace, forcing air defense radars to reveal their locations. Russian ballistic and cruise missiles then route around the defenses to strike their targets.

ITERATION OR OBLITERATION

The speed of technological adaptation and iteration—or innovation power—is a new measure of combat strength. The key to adaptation is the lightning-fast feedback loop from operator to engineer. The best Ukrainian drone pilots, therefore, are both tactician and technician, able to make modifications and improvements on the fly.

Consequently, the most important progress in drone development is happening at the front. Operators are supported by research and development labs and manufacturing and repair facilities located near the frontlines. Drone teams constantly test and deploy new radios, antennas, and circuit boards; software updates are pushed out on a near-daily basis. To create an effective weapon now requires adapting and iterating against an equally adaptive adversary, resulting in a highly dynamic contest of action and reaction.

Once a new weapon or technique is introduced to the battlefield, it has a limited window of utility before the opponent develops countermeasures. New kinds of drones appear at a rapid rate: two years ago, the Russian Lancet was the most threatening model. Last year, it was the first-person-view drone. Now, strike drones controlled by fiber-optic cables, first fielded by the Russians, have taken hold of the frontline.

Unlike drones that run on standard radio frequency, these quadcopters spool up to 25 miles of fiber-optic cable in their wake, leaving them hard-wired to their operator. Though these drones are slow and limited by the length of their wire, they are impervious to jamming, relay clear images, and can operate outside radio line of sight, which means that they are well suited for hilly and urban terrain. Since they do not emit radio signals, their pilot’s location cannot be identified by electronic means, and they strike with shocking precision.

A Ukrainian soldier with a Vampire drone, Donetsk, Ukraine, April 2025 Oleksandr Ratushniak / Reuters

Fiber-optic drones are effective ambush weapons. Russians fly them across the frontline and park these models on roads or rooftops and wait for passing vehicles. Their high-quality control signal and camera resolution allows them to be maneuvered with pinpoint accuracy into tight areas, such as buildings and bunkers, that normal first-person-view drones, which rely on radio, cannot access. Russia now has elite units of drone pilots using fiber-optic drones stationed along heavily contested parts of the frontline in order to target Ukrainian drone operators, attack enemy supply lines, and ultimately isolate forward units.

Drone innovation is not just about making drones better but also about driving down their cost. Over the course of the past year, both Ukrainian and Russian drone units have replaced the pricey few with the inexpensive plenty. Expensive drones, including the Russian Lancet and the American Switchblade 600, which each cost between $65,000 and $150,000, are being pushed aside in favor of fixed-wing strike drones, such as the Russian Molniya and the Ukrainian Dart, both of which cost less than $3,000. Because Molniya kamikaze drones are so cheap, Russia uses them as a mass strike weapon, sometimes launching 15 at a single target.

For the most part, Ukraine still uses first-person-view drones because they are cheap, relatively easy to use, and readily available. Brigades on the most active fronts consume more than 5,000 of them per month. But because their rate of success in striking a target is low, estimated at no more than ten percent for the average unit, many frontline units favor larger bomber-type drones for their versatility, reusability, and modular configurations. A single Ukrainian-made Vampire hexacopter drone, for example, can drop antitank mines or rain down munitions on enemy infantry, achieving the same effect as dozens of artillery rounds, and with greater precision. And because they are both reusable and have a larger payload than first-person-view drones, bomber drones can saturate the ground with high explosives much more rapidly and at much lower cost. They are also better at targeting infantry when repelling assaults and can collapse buildings with a few accurately placed explosives that would otherwise have taken hundreds of artillery rounds.

Bomber drones can also place mines, a tactic that is quickly becoming one of the most effective ways to halt Russian assaults. Russian units on the attack must use largely predictable routes due to terrain, so Ukrainian forces create a dynamic, mobile minefield by dropping mines in their path. Ukrainian forces then use first-person-view drones to herd Russian vehicles toward the mines. One Ukrainian brigade estimates that 50 percent of enemy vehicle kills in recent months have resulted from drone mining. Ukrainians also use bomber drones to run continuous waves of attacks, similar to artillery bombardments, to keep Russian infantry suppressed, underground, and unable to advance.

Ukraine still employs its legacy systems, such as artillery, to support its drone tactics. When Russian infantry are protecting a valuable target, for instance, Ukrainian troops use artillery to suppress the infantry so that Ukrainian bomber drones can destroy the target without being shot down. Ukrainian troops will also use surveillance drones to ascertain where Russian drone pilots are before shelling those locations. These approaches allow Ukraine to minimize its use of expensive legacy systems that can be difficult to acquire; Russia, by contrast, has less of a need to adapt its use of these systems because it can afford to expend shells in quantities that Ukraine cannot.

SWARM AND ATTACK

Automating drones with artificial intelligence would solve a range of problems facing the modern warfighter. A large number of drones are lost to pilot error. And the Ukrainian battlefield is saturated with systems that jam and spoof signals across the electromagnetic spectrum, making it difficult to rely on any technology that requires constant radio connection to a human operator. Thousands of Ukrainian troops operate Mavics all day, every day, a function that could certainly be automated. Collecting and processing surveillance data automatically—ideally from multiple layers of sensors across the frontline—would save hundreds of man-hours a week. And current systems require drone pilots to operate close to the frontline, putting them at risk.

Today, algorithms can augment human control of the battlefield. They reduce error by helping pilots detect, track, approach, and strike targets. AI targeting systems are trained nightly on combat footage to adjust to Russian countermeasures, such as camouflage or decoys. Ukrainian and Western companies are creating software that supports drone pilots even more, by selecting routes, stabilizing flights, navigating to waypoints, recognizing targets, and guiding toward the destination. If these efforts are successful, becoming a drone pilot will require fewer skills and less experience.

In particular, defense firms are keen to develop AI tools that make it easier to carry out the final phase of an attack. The Ukrainian battlefield is a challenge for machine learning because enemy tanks and artillery pieces constantly change appearance with added armor and camouflage. Algorithms also perform poorly at identifying scattered infantry, particularly in dense forests or other complex terrain. AI-assisted target acquisition and terminal guidance have already proved effective even in the face of radio signal jamming. Though the future of fully autonomous drones is unclear, a more autonomous drone strike complex—one that combines reconnaissance and strike drones to identify, track, and hit moving targets—would enormously improve Ukraine’s ability to defend against Russian attacks.

The next phase of the war will be determined by software.

Defense companies are also racing to create AI that can coordinate attacks by multiple drones in an automated drone swarm—the holy grail of drone operations. Today, Ukrainian forces can form a carousel of drones over a target to repeatedly strike at it, but doing so requires multiple pilots and operators. With an automated drone swarm, a single pilot could guide many drones, flying independent routes, to overwhelm defenses and saturate a target.

To pull off such a feat, defense firms will need to develop AI-powered systems that enable drones to communicate automatically—not just with one another, but also with a host of sensors. These networks exist, but not at the required scale. And the task is getting harder each day: as the drone-versus-drone war escalates, the quantity of drones deployed in each operation will grow from hundreds to thousands, making their automated coordination increasingly difficult.

Eventually, Ukraine will need its own version of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense network to protect its cities and factories from Russia’s constant drone and missile raids. Of course, Ukraine’s vast size makes this a daunting challenge, but it can begin by shielding its major cities. Greater automation will be key to fending off Russian attacks. Whereas the first phase of the war was defined by hardware, with each side competing to invent new kinds of drones, payload, and munitions, the next phase of the war will be determined by software.

WAR OF FACTORIES

Drones have upended the old ways of war. Military doctrine, tactics, and organization will never be the same. Armies everywhere will need to completely revamp their doctrine and training to reflect the realities of fighting on a drone-swept battlefield. And the best way to prepare for the future of combat is to speak to those fighting this war.

Historians often call World War II a “war of factories.” The same is true for the war in Ukraine today. Ukraine produced more than two million drones in 2024 and plans to make over four million by the end of 2025. Its adversary is also getting better at drone production: last year, Russia was building 300 Shahed drones a month. Now, it can produce 5,000 in the same time frame. The side that consistently builds the most drones is the one most likely to prevail. And it is in the interest of the West, and of the United States in particular, to support the Ukrainian people in their dogged determination to win that fight—not only for Ukraine’s sake, but also for its own, so it can learn to reckon with this new reality of war.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Eric Schmidt · August 12, 2025

15. Amid shakeup, Army plans to replace Gray Eagle and Shadow drones

Amid shakeup, Army plans to replace Gray Eagle and Shadow drones - Breaking Defense

After the Army Transformation Initiative shook up drone plans, the service wants a replacement for older Gray Eagles in 2028 and the Shadow in 2026, according to a service official.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 12, 2025

WASHINGTON — Soldiers inside divisions and brigades will not be left without replacements for Gray Eagle and RQ-7B Shadow drones, according to a US Army leader who says new plans to replace both are in the works.

Since the service unveiled its Army Transformation Initiative (ATI) in May, questions have swirled about the path ahead for both since it halted future buys of General Atomics’ Gray Eagle drone and cancelled the Future Tactical Uncrewed Aircraft System (FTUAS) competition designed to replace the now shelved Shadow fleet. Col. Nick Ryan, director of the Army Capability Manager for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, told reporters today that plans are shaping up to acquire new drones for both echelons.

The evolving plan, according to Ryan, is to keep the newer Gray Eagles, which are medium-altitude, long endurance aircraft made by General Atomics, in inventory and upgrade them, while phasing out the older variants around the fiscal 2028 timeframe. To make sure division commanders still have reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting, and acquisition drones, the Army wants to buy a new group 4 or 5 platform that doesn’t necessarily need a runway.

After releasing a request of information in June 2024, Ryan now expects senior leaders to make a final requirements decision in the next two to three months so that the service can begin fielding the short takeoff and landing (STOL)/ vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft with a “target date” of FY28.

“What actually happens, what actually is approved, what actually is funded could play out differently,” Ryan said.

While Ryan did not discuss details of a forthcoming competition, in September 2024 another Army official told Breaking Defense that there were more than 10 responses to that RFI, and General Atomics, spokesman C. Mark Brinkley has previously said his company at least is all in for a potential competition.

“We were excited to see the RFI, and happy to respond with details and plans for our Gray Eagle 25M and Gray Eagle STOL aircraft,” Brinkley wrote in a statement to Breaking Defense last year. “General Atomics envisions Gray Eagle 25M and Gray Eagle STOL as a true 1-2 punch for Army aviation moving into the future.”

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Out Of The Shadows

As Army officials pave the path ahead for a new division-level drone, Ryan said the brigades are not being left out.

“ATI obviously stopped the Future Tactical UAS program, and then we’ve already been without a Shadow for a couple years now. So, brigades don’t have a capability at this time,” Ryan said. “[But], the requirement for a brigade to have that type of capability for an unmanned aircraft system is still valid and still exists.”

Soldiers used the more tactical Shadow, a group 3 UAS that’s smaller than a Gray Eagle, for a couple of decades for everything from reconnaissance and surveillance to targeting.

While the FTUAS program had encountered delays over the years, drone-makers Griffon and Textron were vying for the contract when the service dropped the axe on the competition. Despite the cancellation there was an “appetite” to find the right solution at a quicker clip, according to Ryan.

So, service leaders decided to lean on an already existing brigade UAS directed requirement designed to rapidly field a commercial-off-the-shelf solution instead of the FTUAS program of record.

“We reopened the competition and allowed the two vendors from FTUAS — which was Griffin and Textron — [and] allowed them to also enter that competition and compete against the other vendors,” Ryan explained.

Before the service announces the winner or winners, senior Army leaders need to sign off on the plan and ensure funding is in place. That decision could come quickly, and the service could begin buying the new drones in fiscal 2026, while it looks for future platforms to fill the brigade’s needs.

“Most likely group 3 UAS will be kind of a tranche one capability. But then we already rapidly planning to iterate,” he added. “What does tranche two look like? What does tranche three, … tranche four look like?”

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · August 12, 2025

16. Republicans, Democrats alike exhort Trump: Keep security pact with Australia and UK alive

Don't just keep it alive, expand it. There is so much potential for this relationship to support mutual interests in the Asia-Indo-Pacific beyond submarines and technology.

AUKUS Special Operations Forces in Strategic Competition, Integrated Deterrence, and Campaigning: Resistance to Malign Activities

https://securityanddefenceplus.plusalliance.org/essays/aukus-special-operations-forces-in-strategic-competition-integrated-deterrence-and-campaigning-resistance-to-malign-activities/

Republicans, Democrats alike exhort Trump: Keep security pact with Australia and UK alive

By ALBEE ZHANG

Updated 10:00 AM GMT+9, August 12, 2025

AP · August 12, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. lawmakers from both parties are urging the Trump administration to maintain a three-way security partnership designed to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines — a plea that comes as the Pentagon reviews the agreement and considers the questions it has raised about the American industrial infrastructure’s shipbuilding capabilities.

Two weeks ago, the Defense Department announced it would review AUKUS, the 4-year-old pact signed by the Biden administration with Australia and the United Kingdom. The announcement means the Republican administration is looking closely at a partnership that many believe is critical to the U.S. strategy to push back China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific. The review is expected to be completed in the fall.

“AUKUS is essential to strengthening deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and advancing the undersea capabilities that will be central to ensuring peace and stability,” Republican Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan and Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois wrote in a July 22 letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Moolenaar chairs the House panel on China and Krishnamoorthi is its top Democrat.

The review comes as the Trump administration works to rebalance its global security concerns while struggling with a hollowed-out industrial base that has hamstrung U.S. capabilities to build enough warships. The review is being led by Elbridge Colby, the No. 3 Pentagon official, who has expressed skepticism about the partnership.

“If we can produce the attack submarines in sufficient number and sufficient speed, then great. But if we can’t, that becomes a very difficult problem,” Colby said during his confirmation hearing in March. “This is getting back to restoring our defense industrial capacity so that we don’t have to face these awful choices but rather can be in a position where we can produce not only for ourselves, but for our allies.”

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US cannot build enough ships

As part of the $269 billion AUKUS partnership, the United States will sell three to five Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, with the first delivery scheduled as soon as 2032. The U.S. and the U.K. would help Australia design and build another three to five attack submarines to form an eight-boat force for Australia.

A March report by the Congressional Research Service warned that the lack of U.S. shipbuilding capacities, including workforce shortage and insufficient supply chains, is jeopardizing the much-celebrated partnership. If the U.S. should sell the vessels to Australia, the U.S. Navy would have a shortage of attack submarines for two decades, the report said.

The Navy has been ordering two boats per year in the last decade, but U.S. shipyards have been only producing 1.2 Virginia-class subs a year since 2022, the report said.

“The delivery pace is not where it needs to be” to make good on the first pillar of AUKUS, Admiral Daryl Caudle, nominee for the Chief of Naval Operations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.

Australia has invested $1 billion in the U.S. submarine industrial base, with another $1 billion to be paid before the end of this year. It has agreed to contribute a total of $3 billion to uplift the U.S. submarine base, and it has sent both industry personnel to train at U.S. shipyards and naval personnel for submarine training in the United States.

“Australia was clear that we would make a proportionate contribution to the United States industrial base,” an Australian defense spokesperson said in July. “Australia’s contribution is about accelerating U.S. production rates and maintenance to enable the delivery of Australia’s future Virginia-class submarines.”

The three nations have also jointly tested communication capabilities with underwater autonomous systems, Australia’s defense ministry said on July 23. Per the partnership, the countries will co-develop other advanced technologies, from undersea to hypersonic capabilities.

At the recent Aspen Security Forum, Kevin Rudd, the Australian ambassador to the United States, said his country is committed to increasing defense spending to support its first nuclear-powered sub program, which would also provide “massively expensive full maintenance repair facilities” for the U.S. Indo-Pacific fleet based in Western Australia.

Rudd expressed confidence that the two governments “will work our way through this stuff.”

AUKUS called ‘crucial to American deterrence’

Bruce Jones, senior fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology, told The Associated Press that the partnership, by positioning subs in Western Australia, is helping arm the undersea space that is “really crucial to American deterrence and defense options in the Western Pacific.”

“The right answer is not to be content with the current pace of submarine building. It’s to increase the pace,” Jones said.

Jennifer Parker, who has served more than 20 years with the Royal Australian Navy and founded Barrier Strategic Advisory, said it should not be a zero-sum game. “You might sell one submarine to Australia, so you have one less submarine on paper. But in terms of the access, you have the theater of choice from operating from Australia, from being able to maintain your submarines from Australia,” Parker said. “This is not a deal that just benefits Australia.”

Defense policy is one of the few areas where Republican lawmakers have pushed back against the Trump administration, but their resolve is being tested with the Pentagon’s review of AUKUS. So far, they have joined their Democratic colleagues in voicing support for the partnership.

They said the U.S. submarine industry is rebounding with congressional appropriations totaling $10 billion since 2018 to ensure the U.S. will have enough ships to allow for sales to Australia.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told the AP that support for AUKUS is strong and bipartisan, “certainly on the Armed Services Committee.”

“There is a little bit of mystification about the analysis done at the Pentagon,” Kaine said, adding that “maybe (what) the analysis will say is: We believe this is a good thing.”

AP · August 12, 2025

17. Johns Hopkins is building classified versions of its AI wargaming tools for DoD, IC

Johns Hopkins APL does incredible work. Their national security division is really a great organization. (they do not just do physics - they helped us build the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project).

Johns Hopkins is building classified versions of its AI wargaming tools for DoD, IC - Breaking Defense

Developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, the GenWar and SAGE wargaming systems take different approaches to exploiting generative AI while guarding against its tendency to make stuff up.

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · August 8, 2025

LAUREL, Md. — As the Trump Administration tries to jumpstart American AI amidst concerns about AI ethics and hallucinations, experts here believe they’ve found a low-risk, high-payoff way to leverage Large Language Models right now: wargames.

At least some federal agencies are receptive: Elements of the Defense Department, Energy Department, and intelligence community are asking the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to take the AI-enhanced wargaming tools it’s developed, called GenWar and the Strategic AI Gaming Engine (SAGE), and upgrade them to run on classified networks using “highly classified data about our adversaries,” said James Miller, APL’s assistant director for policy and analysis.

“It’s going to be somewhat straightforward to move this onto TS/SCI networks,” Miller told a wargaming conference here last week, using the official shorthand for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information. “We have one sponsor that’s very keen to do it quickly and others are interested as well.”

A former undersecretary of defense himself, Miller preaches that “wargaming is a critical tool” for everything from long-term budget planning — for example, simulating how a proposed new weapon might affect a future war before investing billions to build it — to brainstorming the next move in the middle of a crisis. His fellow enthusiasts crammed into the conference to recount how they got senior Pentagon officials to throw handfuls of polyhedral dice to determine policy outcomes, or how they trained military officers in long-term planning by using poker chips to represent the command’s budget and then forcing them to improvise with random-events cards like “the Marine Corps grounds all V-22s.”

But such traditional wargames are labor intensive and time consuming, Miller and his fellow APL experts explained, which limits how often they can be used.

Counterintuitively, that’s also true of high-end simulations where the computer “plays” against itself, like the widely used Advanced Framework for Simulation, Integration, and Modeling (AFSIM). Yes, the model can run through multiple scenarios at machine speed — but only after humans have input all the proper parameters: the forces on each side, their tactics, the terrain, etc. Worse, that process is so complex and not user friendly that it often takes a team of specialists a month or more to set up a scenario.

“I took AFSIM training for a week and I still can’t do anything in it,” said Kelly Diaz, head of Advanced Concepts and Capabilities at APL. “It feels like you need a PhD.”

What about low-tech options? Many Pentagon wargames are just complex versions of the kind of board game on sale at hobby stores. Others resemble freeform roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, where participants discuss their next move around a table and then ask a neutral adjudicator how it all turns out. While these games don’t require the technical skill of programming an AFSIM run, they can still take hours for the players and, behind the scenes, weeks of design and setup.

That’s time that Pentagon officials rarely have. So, Miller and his colleagues thought, what if they used AI to replace some, or all, of the human prep-time and players? The two APL wargaming systems, GenWar and SAGE, apply this idea in two different ways.

GenWar works with the old-school high-fidelity models to make them easier to use. (Currently, that means AFSIM, but the plan is to add other DoD simulations in the future). In essence, GenWar replaces human scenario-builders with a customized chatbot. That allows a policymaker or commander to say what they want to simulate in plain English, and then a Large Language Model turns those words into inputs the simulation can understand in minutes, not months.

“It’s very intuitive,” said Diaz. “It’s a chatbot: You sit down and you talk to it.”

The chatbot portion of GenWar can hallucinate, of course. But the LLM isn’t running the simulation: It’s just acting as a translator between the human user and the actual high-fidelity model, which will reject any nonsensical inputs from the chatbot.

“It forces the AI to only do things that follow the laws of physics,” said Andrew Mara, head of national security analysis at APL. “It can’t spin off into ‘I landed 16 aircraft on the moon.’”

APL’s other AI-enhanced wargaming tool, SAGE, enters beta testing this week with former senior Pentagon officials among its playtesters. SAGE is in some ways even more ambitious than GenWar: It uses generative AI to replace human players.

In it simplest form, a SAGE wargame simulates a National Security Council meeting or similar policy discussion, where various policymakers sit around a table and argue out a course of action — except that some, or all, of those policymakers are actually chatbots. SAGE can also simulate the staff advising a human player, the agencies executing their orders, the foreign countries responding to US actions, the adversary leaders opposing them, or even the neutral arbiter that compares both sides’ plans and adjudicates the outcome.

The immediate value of SAGE is as a training and brainstorming tool, allowing a single human to wargame on demand without assembling a whole team of players. But it’s also possible to have SAGE play itself, with every participant in the game being a chatbot.

Without human reality checks, the all-AI mode currently “loves to go off the rails,” Miller admitted to the conference. But even the crazier outcomes can provide the human user food for thought, he argued. And because the AI plays itself at superhuman speed, you can run hundreds of wargames in days, then look for patterns in the results.

“The goal isn’t to find ‘the answer,’” Mara told Breaking Defense. The value of AI wargaming is to explore a wider range of alternatives than humans could with assistance, discover strange outliers no human would have considered, and find recurring patterns, he said: “That’s where you point the humans and go, ‘hey … you really need to think through this.’”

Updated Friday at 6:10 pm with additional detail from APL.

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · August 8, 2025

18. Why is Trump being so generous to China?

Why is Trump being so generous to China? – DW – 08/12/2025

Nik Martin

8 hours ago8 hours ago

Donald Trump slashed tariffs and softened his stance on China, while imposing steep duties on India and Brazil. What leverage does Beijing hold that others don't?

DW · by Nik Martin

After months as a trade pariah, China is now at the heart of US President Donald Trump's efforts to reset relations and avoid another tariff spiral. Back in April, Trump labeled China "the greatest threat to America," saying it had "cheated" the world's largest economy for decades. He then slapped massive tariffs of 145% on Chinese goods.

Just months later, the tone has shifted. Trump has extended the tariff pause on China, praised President Xi Jinping as "a strong leader," and floated the idea of a US-China summit this fall. Meanwhile, countries like India and Brazil now face the steepest penalties — up to 50% tariffs — while China's rate is capped at a more manageable 30%.

Trump has several reasons for giving China an easier ride. He wants to avoid a tariff spike just as US retailers stock up on Chinese imports for the crucial holiday season. Trump is also buying time to allow negotiations on a broader trade deal that could include technology, energy and rare earth minerals.

As China is the only country to firmly confront Washington's aggressive policy stance, Antonio Fatas, economics professor at INSEAD Business School, thinks Beijing's strategy may have left Trump scrambling for leverage.

"From the beginning, it was clear that China was more willing than the US to have a full-blown trade war," Fatas told DW, which would bring "economic consequences that the Trump administration cannot afford."

Trump extends China tariff deadline by 90 days

China's secret weapon: rare earths

China's dominance in rare earths — needed to produce everything from electric vehicles to missile guidance systems — is arguably Beijing's strongest card. With US industries heavily reliant on Chinese supply, these minerals have become a decisive factor in the trade standoff.

After Trump announced sky-high tariffs in April, China, which controls about 60% of global rare earth production and nearly 90% of refining, imposed export controls on seven rare earth elements and permanent magnets, hitting US industries hard, including carmakers.

Washington is also pushing for tighter restrictions on China's access to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips, while pressuring Beijing to cut imports of Russian oil, warning of secondary sanctions — including steep tariffs — if volumes continue to rise.

Further down the list of priorities, Trump is urging China to quadruple its purchases of US soybeans — a boost to American farmers and last year's $295.5 billion (€254.5 billion) trade deficit between the world powers. China is by far the world's largest soybean importer, accounting for more than 60% of global demand, mostly for livestock feed and cooking oil.

China, on the other hand, is seeking a lasting rollback in US tariffs, especially around technology and manufacturing. Beijing also wants safeguards for Chinese firms from US sanctions and assurances over access to cutting-edge US chips.

At the same time, the Chinese government is now actively discouraging the use of Nvidia's H20 processor, the most advanced US chip currently allowed for export to China. Analysts say this move is a public show that the country is becoming less reliant on the US for high-end technology.

Trump is seeking better access to the Chinese market for US farmersImage: Jack Kurtz/ZUMA/picture alliance

Trump shifts spotlight to domestic issues, Ukraine

Economist Alicia Garcia-Herrero, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, noted Trump's many trade, domestic and geopolitical challenges — like Friday's peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska — as other reasons he's giving China more leeway.

"Trump has enough on his plate... and has no choice but to offer China more [time] than other countries," she told DW.

Now that the tariff truce has been extended until early November, negotiators can zero in on the most contentious issues. Chief among them is avoiding a return to triple-digit tariffs — 145% on Chinese goods and 125% on US exports. Both sides agree such a move would be economically damaging.

China's current 30% average tariff rate remains significantly above most other countries. Chinese copper and steel exports to the US are subject to a 50% levy.

Trump flips script on India

While China enjoys extra time, India's fall from favored partner at the start of Trump's second term to trade villain has been swift. The country now faces a punishing tariff of up to 50% — 25% on general goods and an additional 25% on Russian oil purchases that's expected to kick in on August 27.

INSEAD's Fatas noted that "India has neither the economic size of China, exports crucial for US industry, nor the power to inflict damage on the US economy," calling on New Delhi to work with allies to show collective strength and secure a better tariff.

While China may appear to have the upper hand in negotiations, Han Shen Lin, China Managing Director of strategic advisory firm The Asia Group, warned against complacency from the Chinese side. After all, Trump's flair for chaos leaves room for unexpected moves.

"We can't underestimate the US's ability to add more shock value [to negotiations]," Han told Reuters news agency. "I suspect the type of leverage the US has, as the largest consumer market in the world, will be a factor that will cause other countries to think cautiously."

Every year, nearly 15% of all Chinese exports are bound for the United StatesImage: Michael Kappeler/dpa/picture alliance

Escalation avoided, economic pressure stepped up

Despite softening his tone, Trump is keeping up the pressure on China in other ways. Chinese exporters have been rerouting goods meant for the US through Southeast Asian countries, especially Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. The objective is to obscure their origin and avoid direct US tariffs.

In response, Trump has imposed a sweeping 40% transshipment tariff on all nations suspected of facilitating Chinese rerouting, which took effect last week.

With US-China negotiations expected to stretch until the deadline, Garcia-Herrero, who is also chief economist for Asia-Pacific at French investment bank Natixis, foresees a partial trade thaw that benefits US firms while sidelining key allies.

"We'll likely get movement on both export controls on high-end chips from the US side and rare-earth from Beijing," Garcia-Herrero told DW. " China will likely see a slightly lower [base] tariff and US companies will get better access to the Chinese market, to the detriment of the European Union, South Korea and Japan."

Edited by: Ashutosh Pandey

DW · by Nik Martin

19. Meet Neurosymbolic AI, Amazon’s Method for Enhancing Neural Networks

Meet Neurosymbolic AI, Amazon’s Method for Enhancing Neural Networks

A hybrid approach to AI is powering Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant and cutting-edge warehouse robots

https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-neurosymbolic-ai-amazons-method-for-enhancing-neural-networks-620dd81a

By Steven Rosenbush

Aug. 12, 2025 11:00 am ET

Amazon’s Vulcan robot, deployed this spring at the company’s fulfillment center Hamburg, Germany, employs automated reasoning to optimize space in bins and identify items without the need to scan bar codes. Photo: Amazon

Quick Summary

Neurosymbolic AI, a hybrid approach combining neural networks and symbolic reasoning, is gaining traction as developers push AI beyond its limits.View more

Neural networks aren’t the only game in artificial intelligence, but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise after the hot streak sparked by ChatGPT’s arrival in 2022.

That model’s abilities, shocking at the time and bracing even now, set off a fundraising, spending and development binge that has largely eclipsed a neural-network alternative known as symbolic reasoning. Instead of the statistical, data-driven processes of neural networks, it uses logic and symbols to solve problems that can be expressed in code.

But now a hybrid approach called neurosymbolic AI is gaining traction with a few companies, notably including Amazon, as developers push AI beyond neural networks’ comfort zone.

ChatGPT and other generative AI tools can predict the next word in a sentence astonishingly well, but they can’t always determine whether something is true when there are only limited examples to rely on. And they can deliver even extraordinarily wrong answers with irrational confidence. That can’t be tolerated as models begin to take action on behalf of people or companies.

“It isn’t a problem that can be solved simply by throwing more compute at it, as mathematical theorems define these limitations,” said Grant Passmore, co-founder and co-CEO of Imandra, an AI startup based in Austin, Texas. “Neurosymbolic AI is the solution because it combines the statistical modeling of LLMs with the axiomatic, logical approach of symbolic reasoning.”

Imandra’s hybrid models combine neural networks with a form of symbolic AI called automated reasoning to serve markets including financial services, autonomous systems and government and defense.

Neurosymbolic AI has another advantage, according to Passmore: cost. Unlike pure LLM deployments requiring clusters of expensive graphics processing units, neurosymbolic agents split their workloads. They use GPUs to handle language understanding and standard CPUs to manage complex reasoning and verification.

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Amazon has about 20 teams building automated reasoning in combination with other techniques for various uses across the company.

Its new Vulcan warehouse robots at fulfillment centers in Spokane, Wash., and Hamburg, Germany, for example, use automated reasoning for spatial problems such as figuring out the optimal place to pick up an item or put it down. Neural networks meanwhile enable them to handle perception tasks including categorizing images.

The Vulcan system can pick and stow approximately 75% of the types of items stored at the fulfillment centers, at speeds comparable to human workers, Amazon said.

Automated reasoning also provides a foundation for Rufus, a neurosymbolic AI shopping assistant that Amazon made available last year. The bot uses an LLM to conversationally help customers navigate the vast range of products on the platform and relies on automated reasoning to make its responses more relevant and avoid errors.

The symbolic element of a hybrid model can be applied to any problem that can be encoded, in real time and on a large scale, said Byron Cook, a vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon who established the company’s automated reasoning group.

“We know that the Pythagorean theorem is true, even though we can’t enumerate all possible triangles,” said Cook, also a researcher at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “But mathematical logic allows for a finite proof, in which each step is verifiable. This same principle is applied to code, where code is treated as a formula to prove its correctness against desired properties.”

A new neurosymbolic feature announced on Aug. 6 called Automated Reasoning checks minimizes AI hallucinations, identifying correct model responses with up to 99% accuracy, Amazon said, calling it the first and only generative AI safeguard to do so. It can be used to formalize truth in specific domains such as healthcare or returns policies, Cook said.

The same approach can be applied to reason about the truth of multi-agent systems and their coordination, he said.

The rival approaches over the years have led to heated public debate over the nature of intelligence, with authorities including AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton suggesting that neural networks understand more than they are given credit for, and that their capacity to espouse a convincing fiction makes them more similar to humans, not less.

“Anybody who has studied memory … knows that people are just like these large language models,” Hinton said in a lecture last year. “They just invent stuff, and for us, there’s no hard line between a true memory and a false memory.”

Cognitive scientist and AI researcher Gary Marcus has long argued that the limits of LLMs should be offset in neurosymbolic models.

While Marcus says today’s hybrid systems still need to incorporate innovations such as better “world models” that help them infer stable representations of the real world from data, they are a major step forward after decades of viewing AI as two separate branches.

“Neither neural networks nor classical AI can really stand on their own. We must find ways to bring them together,” Marcus wrote in an essay last month. “After a 30-year journey, I believe that neurosymbolic AI’s moment has finally arrived.”

Write to Steven Rosenbush at steven.rosenbush@wsj.com

20. Marcos says the Philippines will be pulled into any war over Taiwan, despite China's protest

Marcos says the Philippines will be pulled into any war over Taiwan, despite China's protest

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · August 11, 2025

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said Monday his country would inevitably be drawn “kicking and screaming” into any war over Taiwan due to its proximity to the self-ruled island and the presence of large numbers of Filipino workers there, despite China’s strong protest over such remarks.

Marcos also told a news conference that the Philippines’ coast guard, navy and other vessels defending its territorial interests in the South China Sea would never back down and would stand their ground in the contested waters after the Chinese coast guard on Monday staged dangerous blocking maneuvers and used a powerful water cannon to try to drive away Philippine vessels from the hotly disputed Scarborough Shoal.

It’s the latest flare-up of long-simmering territorial disputes in the busy waterway, a key global trade route, where overlapping claims between China and the Philippines have escalated in recent years. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also lay claims to parts of the contested waters.

Relations between China and the Philippines have been severely strained after Marcos, who took office in mid-2022, and his administration emerged as some of the most vocal critics in Asia of China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. The Marcos administration deepened its treaty alliance engagements with the United States and started broadening security alliances with other Western and Asian countries like Japan, Australia, India and some EU member states to strengthen deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness.

China protested last week and accused Marcos of interfering in its domestic affairs and violating its “One China” policy when he told reporters on the sidelines of a visit to India that there was no way the Philippines could stay out of a possible war in Taiwan because of his country’s proximity to it and the presence of about 200,000 Filipino workers on the self-ruled island. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and has repeatedly threatened to annex it, by force if necessary.

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The Chinese Foreign Ministry then said through a spokesperson that “‘geographic location’ and a ‘large volume of Filipinos’ in Taiwan should not be used as pretexts to interfere in the internal and sovereign affairs of other countries” and urged the Philippines “to earnestly abide by the One China principle” and “refrain from playing fire on issues bearing on China’s core interests.”

Asked to comment on China’s protest, Marcos said he was perplexed and could not understand Beijing’s concern.

“I don’t know what they’re talking about, playing with fire? I was just stating facts. We do not want to go to war, but I think if there is a war over Taiwan, we will be drawn, we will be pulled in whether we like it or not, kicking and screaming,” Marcos said. “We will be drawn and dragged into that mess. I hope it doesn’t happen, but, if it does, we have to plan for it already.”

Separately, Philippine Coast Guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese coast guard ships chased and staged dangerous blocking maneuvers on Monday against Philippine coast guard and fishing vessels in the Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing atoll in the South China Sea off the northwestern Philippines. A Philippine coast guard ship managed to evade being hit by a Chinese coast guard water cannon during the melee, he said.

While chasing a Philippine coast guard vessel, a Chinese coast guard ship accidentally collided with a Chinese navy ship, Tarriela said. The Chinese coast guard ship sustained “substantial damage” and the Philippine coast guard offered to provide help, including medical assistance, to the Chinese side, he said.

There was no immediate comment from Chinese officials on Tarriela’s statements.

Asked if the Philippine vessels would be instructed to withdraw from the disputed shoal, Marcos said his government would never back away from any fight.

“There is no silver bullet that if you fire it, all our problems would be solved,” Marcos said. “What will happen is, we will continue to be present, we will continue to defend our territory, we will continue to exercise our sovereign rights and despite any opposition from anyone, we will continue to do that as we have done in the past three years.”

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · August 11, 2025

21. Vladimir Putin Could Be Laying a Trap

Vladimir Putin Could Be Laying a Trap

Donald Trump badly wants a deal to end the war in Ukraine. What is he willing to give up?

By Jonathan Lemire

The Atlantic · by Jonathan Lemire · August 12, 2025

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Vladimir Putin has had a tough few months. His military’s much-feared summer offensive has made incremental gains in Ukraine but not nearly the advances he had hoped. His economy has sputtered. Donald Trump has grown fed up with Putin’s repeated defiance of his calls for a cease-fire and, for the first time, has targeted the Russian president with consistently harsh rhetoric. Last week, Trump slapped one of Russia’s major trading partners, India, with sanctions.

Putin needs to buy time to change the trajectory of the conflict. So the former KGB spymaster has given Trump something that the U.S. president has wanted for months: a one-on-one summit to discuss the end of the conflict. Trump leaped at the chance. But as the two men prepare to meet in Alaska on Friday, foreign-policy experts—and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—are warning that Trump could be walking into a trap that the Russian leader is setting on American soil.

“Putin has already won. He is the leader of a rogue state, and he’ll get a picture on U.S. soil with the president of the United States,” John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisers, told me. “Trump wants a deal. And if he can’t get one now, he may walk away from it entirely.”

Putin has shown no sign of compromising his positions. His demands to reach an end to hostilities remain maximalist: He wants Russia to keep the territory it conquered, and Ukraine to forgo the security guarantees that could prevent Moscow from attacking again. Those terms are nonstarters for Ukraine and the European nations that have rallied to its defense.

Having promised an end to the war during his campaign, Trump, above all, is desperate for the fighting to stop, and observers fear that, as a result, he might agree to Putin’s terms regardless of what Ukraine wants. Trump has already said in recent days that Russia and Ukraine will need to “swap lands” (without specifying which ones). But it is not clear that Russia is willing to give up anything. And if Zelensky were to reject a deal, no matter how one-sided it might be, in Trump’s mind, Kyiv would suddenly be the primary obstacle to peace. That could lead Trump to once again unleash his wrath on Zelensky, with potentially disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting the war.

Read: Trump invites Putin to set foot in America

“Clearly Putin’s strategy is to delay and play the president: string him along, concede nothing, exclude Zelensky,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, told me. “My preeminent fear is a bad deal that Zelensky rejects, and then he becomes the bad guy, and that then Trump, once again in his classic mixture of vengeance and vanity, will turn against Ukraine.”

Trump has made clear that he wants peace. He also wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Several of his closest allies have told me that the fact that President Barack Obama received one infuriates Trump. He has taken to declaring that he has “ended six wars” in his second term. Fact-checkers say this claim is exaggerated, though it’s true that his administration has focused on global hot spots in recent weeks, receiving acclaim for brokering peace agreements between Cambodia and Thailand, India and Pakistan, and Azerbaijan and Armenia. The world’s most high-profile conflicts, in Gaza and in Ukraine, however, have only escalated in recent months. The situation in Gaza appears to be deteriorating, and Trump has not done anything to stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial plan to occupy Gaza.

So Trump sees an opportunity with Ukraine. The bloodiest war in Europe since World War II has become deadlier this year, and the warring sides have expanded their arsenals with weapons capable of striking deep into enemy territory.

The White House dismissed the notion that Trump could be outfoxed by Putin. “What have any of these so-called foreign policy ‘experts’ ever accomplished in their lives, other than criticizing Donald Trump?” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement. “President Trump has solved seven global conflicts in six months, and he has made extensive progress in ending the Russia-Ukraine War, which he inherited from our foolish previous president, Joe Biden.” Some Trump allies believe that he will stand up to Putin, and that he is appropriately skeptical of the Russian leader. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for instance, invoked the Cold War when he posted on social media on Friday that he was “confident President Trump will walk away – like Reagan – if Putin insists on a bad deal.”

Trump has been burned by Putin before. In recent months, the president has complained that Putin would tell him one thing in their phone calls and then act entirely differently on the battlefield. Trump reiterated that complaint to reporters yesterday at the White House. “I believe he wants to get it over with,” Trump said of Putin. “Now, I’ve said that a few times, and I’ve been disappointed. Because I’d have a good call with him and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place, and you’d have 60 people laying on a road dying.”

The summit was thrown together so quickly that, with days to go, U.S. officials are still scrambling to finalize the details. Trump yesterday characterized the summit as “a feel-out meeting,” perhaps hinting that no final deal would be reached in Alaska. That was taken as a hopeful sign by some who are skeptical of having the summit at all. “The least-bad outcome is that the men would have an exchange of views, but that Trump would stay noncommittal and no deal would be reached. That would be okay, even perhaps a small first step,” Richard Haass, who worked in three Republican administrations before leading the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The fear is that the president wants an agreement too much and will carry far too much of Moscow’s water.”

But if history is any indication, Putin might be able to use the summit to again curry Trump’s favor. Several times in both his first and second terms, Trump followed up a meeting or call with Putin by repeating Kremlin talking points. Most infamously, this occurred during a 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki, when I asked Trump if he believed U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. And yesterday, after Putin had signaled his interest in the summit, Trump took a swipe at Zelensky, who has strenuously objected to giving any territory to Russia and has noted that the Ukrainian constitution requires that any cessation of land must be done by national vote.“I get along with Zelensky. But you know, I disagree with what he’s done. Very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody.”

Tom Nichols: It was an ambush

Since his blow-up with Trump in the Oval Office in February and Washington’s brief pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, Zelensky has tried to remain on Trump’s good side, with some success. He managed to secure a positive one-on-one meeting with Trump on the sidelines of Pope Francis’s funeral at the Vatican in late April. And he has refrained from criticizing the president by name when voicing reservations about U.S. policy toward Ukraine, including a weapons pause in June. Although he has expressed dismay at being excluded from the Alaska summit, Zelensky has not gone after Trump. “We understand Russia’s intention to try to deceive America—we will not allow this,” Zelensky said in an address to his nation on Sunday.

Originally, Trump agreed to the Putin summit under the condition that a second meeting would be held with both Putin and Zelensky. But the Kremlin balked at that plan, and Trump dropped it. Trump said yesterday that he would instead brief European leaders shortly after the summit, potentially even from Air Force One on the flight back to Washington. He also will partake in a virtual meeting with leaders, including Zelensky, this week before heading to Alaska.

Europe has watched the summit run-up warily. Several European nations have vowed to fortify Ukraine with weapons if the United States bows out of the conflict. Vice President J. D. Vance, one of the administration’s loudest isolationist voices, this weekend declared, “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business” and said the United States would soon only be willing to sell arms to Europe to give to Ukraine. But Europe seems unlikely to be able to sustain the level of arms and intelligence that Ukraine would need to defend itself. And if Putin manages to secure a victory in Ukraine, he could soon look to expand his war aims elsewhere.

All of which heightens the stakes of the summit in Alaska. “Putin kept pushing Trump and eventually went further than Trump was willing to be pushed. He got mad, so Putin gave him this summit,” Bolton told me. “Now he wants to work his KGB magic on Trump and get him back in line.”

The Atlantic · by Jonathan Lemire · August 12, 2025

22. Ukraine Isn’t the Model for Winning the Innovation War

Excerpts:

Despite the dominance of the Ukrainian experience in media and public discourse, its value must be assessed with caution — especially on topics such as procurement decentralization, leveraging startup ecosystems for scalability in defense, the growing role of low-cost remotely controlled drones, and more. It offers lessons in what to do when your defense ecosystem has collapsed, but it does not answer how to build a mature defense model for the long term. What could truly be valuable is a comparative analysis, integrated with an understanding of how long-term engineering, technological processes, and ecosystems are organized in competing countries like China and Russia.

Ukraine’s defense startup ecosystem cannot be seen as a strategic alternative to mature state systems. It falls short when it comes to mass production, architectural compatibility, export viability, and resilience. It is suitable for short-term mobilization — but not for systemic competition.

The United States and its allies may benefit from looking beyond the dynamics of the current conflict and considering the nature of potential wars that could emerge over the next two to three years — conflicts likely to require a fundamentally different scale and level of technological coordination. Meeting those future demands will likely depend on the ability to scale rapidly, concentrate efforts, and invest in long-term engineering platforms. Notably, China and Russia appear to be moving in this direction by streamlining the number of platforms, aligning with industrial partners, and planning across multi-year horizons.

In such a strategic landscape, the decisive factor may not be the sheer number of startups or low-cost drones, but rather a nation’s capacity to develop deeply integrated, scalable, and resilient defense ecosystems. While the Ukrainian experience offers valuable lessons — especially in terms of agility and mobilization — it should be adopted with care. Transplanting that model wholesale, without accounting for the structural differences in Western defense institutions and industrial bases, could actually undermine the effectiveness of Western strategies in the long run.

Ukraine Isn’t the Model for Winning the Innovation War - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · August 12, 2025

For a few years now, Western observers have breathlessly praised Ukraine’s successes in defense innovation, from AI to drones to decentralization and an ecosystem of defense startups. But all is not well in Ukraine.

Until recently, it was very difficult to publicly question such materials due to the lack of publicly available battlefield statistics. But by 2025, many observers acknowledge that Russia may have surpassed Ukraine in certain areas of innovation adoption.

This is now publicly acknowledged by various experts, including Ukraine’s former top military commander, Michael Kofman, and others. This provides an opportunity for a more open discussion about which parts of Ukraine’s real experience are actually effective and applicable — and which are not — for the United States and Western Europe.

I have been directly involved in shaping the core concepts of the Ukrainian tech ecosystem. For example, I was chairman of the AI Development Committee from 2019 to 2023 and led in the development of the AI roadmap for defense. It is important to understand the context and reasons why the Ukrainian ecosystem developed the way it did under the conditions of war.

There are systemic issues and open questions that should prompt reflection within the Western expert community. Specifically, are Ukrainian models and technological solutions truly applicable to future U.S. competition with China and Russia? Or might they instead limit the potential of the Western defense industry? Is there a need for closer examination of developments in Russia and China since 2022?

My goal here is not to critique or be a Monday morning quarterback, but to take a closer look from different angles at the popularized models based on Ukraine’s experience. Indeed, in many ways (not all) Ukraine, the country I was born in, was doing its best with what it had available to it. But it is important to critically consider, or at least raise questions about, whether Ukraine’s experience of defense innovation offers a truly useful model for Western countries in a future conflict against major powers such as China or Russia.

BECOME A MEMBER

Decentralization Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

At the start of the active phase of the war, Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index. The standard drone certification procedure took one year. The state budget for 2022 was reduced, while the budget for road construction in 2022 was increased threefold.

With the start of the active phase of the war, the state procurement system was effectively paralyzed. One could argue at length with government officials that the system was not paralyzed — but I personally had to buy helmets, vehicles, etc. for friends during the first week of combat. In the second week, I had to procure underwear and socks for an entire battalion near Kyiv. This batch was delivered via commercial mail — Nova Poshta —to the closest non-occupied branch, and the battalion picked it up a week later.

Viewed holistically, something very unusual occurred: due to the paralysis of the state procurement system, military units were allowed to procure everything they needed themselves. At the same time, various charitable foundations and private donors became active players in military procurement, supplying uniforms, food, and weapons directly to units. To meet the demand, volunteers began creating ad hoc information technology procurement systems when the war was only four months old.

All this led to total de-bureaucratization and partial de-corruption of procurement, producing a very interesting phenomenon: Military units and charitable foundations became more stable and predictable customers than the state. As a result, some technology companies producing drones grew within these ecosystems, reinvesting earnings into development — following the example of Ukrspecsystems in 2014 and 2015, which originally raised funds for drones via PeopleProject and became market leaders by 2021.

Sounds like a success story? Probably, yes — but by 2025, this system revealed major systemic problems: Military units began procuring equipment independently with minimal oversight, and corruption spread down to the unit level as a result.

Such decentralization could make it more difficult for the state to focus resources on promising developments or to ensure integration among military products acquired by different units. I’m not even touching on real costs, potential savings from scale, or interoperability between systems.

In all military conflicts, competition takes place not just on the battlefield but also in logistics systems. And the procurement system that actually developed in Ukraine addressed very different problems than those facing the U.S. in competition with China and Russia. A decentralized system may turn out to be far less effective than centralized procurement systems — and Russia is already demonstrating this on the battlefield in 2025.

Zoo of Tech Platforms Are Not Scalable

Since 2022, Ukraine’s decentralized procurement system sparked a surge in small defense businesses. Thousands of companies began producing drones, components, software, and providing services for the front lines. This movement became massive — it was hard to ignore. It truly bolstered Ukraine’s combat capacity at a critical moment. But in terms of quality and sustainability, it’s increasingly being compared to China’s “Great Leap Forward” in the 1950s, when the Communist Party encouraged citizens to smelt steel in backyard furnaces.

In 2024, the Ministry of Digital Transformation officially proposed that people assemble drones at home. After a wave of criticism, the idea was scrapped, but its public launch became a troubling marker of the decision‑making quality.

By 2025, it became clear that only 20 to 40 percent of first-person view remote-controlled drones actually reached their targets. As a result, the true cost of destroying a single tank was far higher than the advertised $500 price tag per drone. This discrepancy was largely due to Russia’s advanced and rapidly scalable electronic warfare capabilities. On the Ukrainian side, few efforts were made to develop systems capable of evading such interference or anticipating future threats — such as fiber-optic drones or autonomous navigation in GPS-denied environments.

The core issue was a lack of both government expertise and engineering capacity. Developing such systems requires deep knowledge in software, electronics, and systems architecture — yet most newly formed companies were little more than “assembly workshops,” lacking the technical depth to go beyond basic assembly. As a result, Ukraine failed to respond effectively to emerging threats: specifically, short-range fiber-optic drones and long-range drones with autonomous navigation.

In contrast, Russia has reportedly taken a more centralized approach, relying on a pre-selected group of major defense firms to develop core technologies and platforms. These companies focus on a limited set of systems — such as the Geran / Shahed drones — and refine them methodically by incorporating advanced AI capabilities, improved electronic components, and standardized architectures. As a result, Russia is steadily building a more unified and resilient defense technology stack — better suited for mass production, long-term iteration, and sustained conflict under modern warfare conditions.

The Ukrainian model, on the other hand, produced a zoo of solutions — fragmented, often incompatible systems without standards or architecture. This zoo cannot be scaled. Already inside Ukraine, discussions are underway about what to do: the system is losing competitiveness and is hard to develop further. Yes, some criticism comes from large industry players seeking to push small companies — those working directly with the military — out of the market. But these critics have a systemic point: Small teams rarely achieve the kind of complex systems engineering or high-volume serial production needed for advanced weapons. Ukraine’s wartime experience, unfortunately, has so far borne this out.

To be sure, production decentralization played a crucial role in the early phase of the war. Without it, much would not have been possible. That experience is valuable. But as the conflict wore on and quality demands rose, it became increasingly apparent that more centralized, structured approaches tend to outperform decentralized ones by providing not only results but also predictability.

Is there anything in the Ukrainian experience that might be useful for the West? Yes, but only specific techniques, discoveries, and team flexibility. These are valuable, but Ukraine’s overall decentralized model is not. You cannot scale a zoo of disparate systems in a long war; modern war demands solutions that can be scaled.

A Strategic Illusion?

As of 2021, Ukraine’s defense sector was in extremely poor condition. The dominant player remained the state-owned conglomerate Ukroboronprom (renamed to Ukrainian Defense Systems), which united over 130 enterprises, most of them founded back in the Soviet era — including Antonov and a number of factories engaged in weapons production and equipment repair for export to Africa and the Middle East.

However, Ukroboronprom’s main task before 2022 was not to produce modern weaponry, but to undergo corporatization and implement corporate governance systems.

The private defense sector remained very limited in both scale and capability. Despite the ongoing armed conflict with Russia since 2014, there had been no emergence of new engineering schools or a significant number of competitive businesses in this sector — apart from a few exceptions.

By early 2022, the only talent pool remotely related to engineering consisted of professionals from the software as a service, financial technology, and entertainment information technology sectors — those who had worked for export pre-war and were part of the startup community that knew how to organize grants, pitches, and small funds. When the war began, they turned to what they knew best: Within a few months after February 24, defense startup events, competitions, and accelerators began to appear.

But there was no systematic research, no analysis of the enemy’s technological development, and no articulation of the actual needs of the front. There was no strategy. Most of the funded solutions turned out to be experiments without context — shots in the dark.

The most publicly visible initiative was Brave1, essentially an events organizer and loose network of mentors funding individual teams. It offered networking and pitch opportunities, but conducted no deep analysis of Russian tech trends, no rigorous scenario planning, and developed no unified architectural design. The funding provided by the platform was largely symbolic given the scale of the challenges: by 2025, Brave1 had disbursed only about $8 million in grants and helped attract around $25 million in private investment — roughly equivalent to a single Series A round for one startup in Silicon Valley.

The format that emerged in Ukraine was a consequence of what resources — time, people, and money — were available under the shock of war. It wasn’t the result of strategic planning; rather, it was a reactive solution.

For low-complexity tasks — where hundreds of simple solutions need to be quickly produced — such a model may be useful. But in long-term systemic competition — China and Russia versus the West — the startup-based model doesn’t scale, because its goal is rapid prototyping and problem-solving, not scalability.

The Ukrainian experience revealed something important: you need infrastructure that allows for rapid development, testing, and iteration of a product within a single loop — specifically, with testing conducted directly on the battlefield. But that’s more a conclusion about the importance of engineering and manufacturing discipline — not a case for adopting the startup approach as the core framework for capability development.

The main challenge isn’t to build such a loop during conflict. The conflict will force it to happen. The challenge is how to make it sustainable in peacetime, when there’s no urgency, but there is competition for talent, attention, and resources.

China, for example, manages this at scale: its top engineers work at firms like DJI that operate commercially and for export. Different sources estimate that around 60 percent of the foreign components in Russian drones and up to 80 percent of those used by Ukrainian manufacturers are sourced from China. This continuous market-driven production keeps the entire system — from design to logistics — in practice and in shape.

No cluster of small startups, no matter how creative, can by itself solve such problems. A startup ecosystem lacks the scale and cannot achieve the procurement volume or the systems integration required for national defense architecture. In short, it’s a different beast. Building a sustainable defense engineering platform is not about grants and meetups; it requires the art of strategic statecraft — long-term investment, coordination, and planning at the national level.

The Limits of Agility

The war in Ukraine has undeniably exposed deep systemic problems in military production across the United States and Western Europe, while also clearly highlighting the technological development trajectories of China and Russia. These two countries are emerging as the primary benchmark players in future non-nuclear conflicts — with a focus on system coherence, scalability, and technological maturity.

In contrast, at the outset of the war, Ukraine had a degraded defense ecosystem. The state sector was focused on internal reforms and maintaining export contracts inherited from Soviet times, while a private defense sector barely existed. The only model that could be rapidly deployed was a decentralized supply system, based on small manufacturers, low-tech solutions, and grassroots startup community initiatives.

This improvised system did indeed provide significant support during the early years of the war. It mobilized thousands of teams, enabled rapid response, and supported the front line. But its limitations were obvious. A lack of strategic planning, fragmented solutions, an inability to scale, and a weak engineering base resulted in the model reaching its limit by 2024-2025. The result was a zoo of technological platforms — uncoordinated, unintegrated, and often ineffective under conditions of modern electronic warfare.

Despite the dominance of the Ukrainian experience in media and public discourse, its value must be assessed with caution — especially on topics such as procurement decentralization, leveraging startup ecosystems for scalability in defense, the growing role of low-cost remotely controlled drones, and more. It offers lessons in what to do when your defense ecosystem has collapsed, but it does not answer how to build a mature defense model for the long term. What could truly be valuable is a comparative analysis, integrated with an understanding of how long-term engineering, technological processes, and ecosystems are organized in competing countries like China and Russia.

Ukraine’s defense startup ecosystem cannot be seen as a strategic alternative to mature state systems. It falls short when it comes to mass production, architectural compatibility, export viability, and resilience. It is suitable for short-term mobilization — but not for systemic competition.

The United States and its allies may benefit from looking beyond the dynamics of the current conflict and considering the nature of potential wars that could emerge over the next two to three years — conflicts likely to require a fundamentally different scale and level of technological coordination. Meeting those future demands will likely depend on the ability to scale rapidly, concentrate efforts, and invest in long-term engineering platforms. Notably, China and Russia appear to be moving in this direction by streamlining the number of platforms, aligning with industrial partners, and planning across multi-year horizons.

In such a strategic landscape, the decisive factor may not be the sheer number of startups or low-cost drones, but rather a nation’s capacity to develop deeply integrated, scalable, and resilient defense ecosystems. While the Ukrainian experience offers valuable lessons — especially in terms of agility and mobilization — it should be adopted with care. Transplanting that model wholesale, without accounting for the structural differences in Western defense institutions and industrial bases, could actually undermine the effectiveness of Western strategies in the long run.

BECOME A MEMBER

Vitaliy Goncharuk is an American entrepreneur with Ukrainian roots, known for his work in autonomous navigation and AI. In 2022, his company Augmented Pixels was acquired by Qualcomm.

From 2019 to 2023, Vitaliy served as chairman of the AI Committee of Ukraine, sat on the External Innovation Board of UkrOboronProm (renamed to Ukraine Defense Systems), and advised the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine for Temporarily Occupied Territories, who later became Minister of Defense.

Image: ArmyInform via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · August 12, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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