Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."

– Mahatma Gandhi

"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well."

– Aristotle

"Hate has caused a lot of problems in this world, but it has not solved one yet.

– Maya Angelou

1. The Inevitable Invasion is Over, Now What? Resistance in a Post-Invasion Taiwan

2. Special Operations News – August 18, 2025

3. ‘My Life Became a Living Hell’: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit

4. That USSR Sweatshirt at the Alaska Summit Said Everything

5. Zelensky Heads Back to Washington Under Pressure From Putin

6. What Kind of Peace in Ukraine?

7. This Isn't 1991: Why Putin's Russia is Facing a Different Kind of Collapse

8. Quarterly 1st SOF Truth event spotlights steps being taken in mitigating blast overpressure

9. How the West Can Halt Putin’s Battlefield Momentum

10. The Russians Are Spooked, With Reason

11. Why Xi Still Doesn’t Have the Military He Wants

12. Russia’s Imperial Black Sea Strategy

13. Inside the US military’s quest for ‘drone dominance’

14. Navy Moving Away from ‘Optionally Manned’ Vessels as Service Mulls Unmanned Future

15. Democratized Intelligence: How Open-Source Intelligence is Reshaping Asymmetric Advantage

16. Zelensky and European Leaders Press for Security Guarantees in Meeting with Trump

17. Breaking NATO’s Cult of the Urban Offense

18. Zelensky survives another episode of the Trump show

19. Russia's missile salvoes stretch US defenses from Kyiv to Taipei

20. America Needs a 'China Tech Power Report' to Fight the New Cold War

21. The Enlightened Warrior: Applying Reason and Critical Thinking in Special Forces

1. The Inevitable Invasion is Over, Now What? Resistance in a Post-Invasion Taiwan

Conclusion:

In considering the possibility of a successful PLA invasion of Taiwan, this article has examined a crucial yet often overlooked dimension of such a conflict: the post-invasion insurgency. While much discourse rightly focuses on how Taiwan might defend against an initial attack, equal attention must be given to the enduring struggle that could follow. By assessing the possible insurgent strategies, evidence suggests Taiwan could put up a resistance should the PLA successfully invade. However, more preparation in asymmetric warfare by Taiwan’s government is necessary for them to stand a chance.

Ultimately, the likely outcome of such a conflict would be deeply uncertain. A swift PLA military victory could give way to a long-term insurgency that frustrates efforts to govern and destabilizes the region. The broader implications for regional and global security would be profound. Whether the outcome is PRC consolidation, a negotiated settlement, or a never-ending low-intensity conflict, the strategic choices made today will shape not only the fate of Taiwan but also the future security architecture of the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

The Inevitable Invasion is Over, Now What? Resistance in a Post-Invasion Taiwan

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/18/the-inevitable-invasion-is-over-now-what-resistance-in-a-post-invasion-taiwan/

by Tyler Rodriguez

08.18.2025 at 06:00am

Abstract: As tensions rise across the Taiwan Strait, the prospect of China’s People Liberation Army successfully invading Taiwan can no longer be dismissed as purely hypothetical. While existing scholarship often focuses on invasion and defense, this article explores how a Taiwan-based insurgency could emerge in a post-occupation environment, analyzing resistance strategies through a multidimensional military, political, economic, and social lens. By examining potential strengths, vulnerabilities, and preparation pathways for asymmetric resistance, the study offers forward-looking insights for strengthening Taiwan’s long-term resilience and informing strategic planning efforts for defense planners and policymakers.

Introduction

What if China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) successfully invaded and conquered the island of Taiwan? Due to the rising tensions surrounding the Taiwan Strait, the proposed question isn’t merely hypothetical but is increasingly becoming a possible scenario. In this context, Taiwan needs to start thinking about certain questions. For example, how would a Taiwan insurgency form and operate following an invasion? And how could Taiwan prepare now to put up an effective resistance campaign against the PLA? While significant analysis has been dedicated to a potential invasion and defense of Taiwan, far less attention has been paid to the post-conflict environment in which civil resistance, guerrilla tactics, and subversion may arise as part of a broader insurgency. This article aims to fill that gap by analyzing insurgency strategies through a multidimensional framework.

To examine these questions, it is important to first provide a background and the strategic importance of Taiwan. Next, we will consider how geography may play a factor (i.e., Taiwan’s complex urban and mountain terrain) and who could make up the Taiwan insurgency. We will then turn to the likely asymmetric tactics Taiwan should consider now and not be afraid to implement, even if they may seem extreme. Also, we will analyze the political and social movements Taiwan could utilize, leveraging international assistance and mobilizing mass support from diaspora networks both domestically and internationally. Finally, we will explore future projections and implications of resistance, primarily focusing on long-term viability and possible endgame scenarios. This multidisciplinary lens will enable a holistic understanding of the conflict environment and provide actionable insights for policymakers, defense planners, and scholars alike.

Foundations of Resistance: Strategic, Geographic, and Political Dimensions of an Occupied Taiwan

Background and Strategic Importance

The Taiwan Strait conflict has long stood as one of the most volatile flashpoints in the Indo-Pacific region, with the potential to spark a major power confrontation involving China, the United States (U.S.), and its allies. The roots of this enduring geopolitical tension trace back to the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949), which concluded with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) establishing the PRC on the mainland following the defeat of the Kuomintang (KMT) government. After Mao Zedong’s communist armies defeated the KMT Nationalist Party and its military, their supporters fled to the island of Taiwan, where they maintained themselves as a separate political entity from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). To prevent Mao from invading Taiwan, U.S. President Harry Truman sent the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait, preventing an invasion of the island by communist armies. This brief historical snapshot brings us to the current situation in place today. Since then, the PRC has asserted that Taiwan is an inseparable part of the PRC and has viewed reunification as a core national interest. Separately, Taiwan has developed a distinct democratic identity and governance structure. This divergence has created a precarious status quo, characterized by de facto independence under the threat of military coercion.

One of the more consequential laws passed creating the current state of play was the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of 1979. The TRA was enacted by the U.S. after it shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing following formal recognition of the PRC, but it also authorized de facto diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The TRA commits the U.S. to provide Taiwan with defensive arms and maintain the capacity to resist coercion. Yet, it does not guarantee U.S. military intervention and was designed to be deliberately ambiguous on whether the U.S. would intervene in a conflict. This policy of “strategic ambiguity” has served as a stabilizing factor within the region. However, increasing military parity across the strait and broader U.S.-China strategic competition have made the longstanding balance more fragile.

Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the PRC

The strategic importance of Taiwan extends well beyond its historical and ideological significance to the PRC. Geographically, the island sits astride key maritime routes in the Western Pacific, serving as a critical node in the first island chain. This first island chain is a string of allied and partner territories that the U.S. relies on to project power and contain PRC naval ambitions. Control over Taiwan would give the PLA Navy direct access to the broader Pacific Ocean, bypassing current chokepoints and undermining the regional security architecture upheld by the U.S. and its allies. For Beijing, this is not only about sovereignty but about reversing a perceived history of a “century of humiliation” and restoring China’s status as a global power.

Economically, Taiwan’s relevance to global technology supply chains makes it irreplaceable. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is central to global manufacturing, producing the world’s most advanced semiconductors. These chips are foundational to industries ranging from consumer electronics and telecommunications to advanced military systems. Any disruption in TSMC’s operations would have cascading effects across the global economy. Both China and the U.S. have made securing semiconductor supply chains a national priority, further raising the stakes in the Taiwan conflict. Taiwan also serves as a symbol of ideological contrast between authoritarianism and liberal democracy. Taiwan’s successful transition to a pluralistic democratic society stands in sharp contrast to the centralized control of the CCP. As such, the fate of Taiwan is viewed by many in the West not only as a matter of regional security but also as a litmus test for the resilience of democratic governance in the face of authoritarian revisionism. In this light, Taiwan becomes not just a contested territory, but an ideological battleground with implications for the future of the international order.

Geographic Concerns and Insurgency Personnel

As defined by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Guide to Analysis of Insurgency, “insurgency is a protracted political-military activity directed toward completely or partially controlling the resources of a country through the use of irregular military forces and illegal political organizations. Insurgent activity – including guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and political mobilization – is designed to weaken government control and legitimacy while increasing insurgent control and legitimacy.” In the event of a successful PLA invasion and occupation of Taiwan, it is likely that a determined and multifaceted insurgency would arise to resist the occupation. The foundation for resistance lies in Taiwan’s unique political identity, technological sophistication, and deep societal aversion to rule by the CCP. Drawing on military, civilian, and external actors, a Taiwan insurgency would likely pursue an asymmetric strategy, combining guerrilla tactics, cyber operations, and economic sabotage with political and social mobilization both domestically and internationally.

The World Factbook 2024. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2024.

Taiwan’s terrain is advantageous for urban and rural resistance. Urban areas like Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung offer dense, complex environments that can neutralize many PLA advantages in mobility and firepower. Civilian infrastructure, underground transit networks, and civilian populations would serve as cover for insurgents. Conversely, Taiwan’s mountainous regions and dense forests represent two-thirds of the eastern side of the island and would provide ideal terrain for rural guerrilla bases, logistical hubs, and ambushes. However, we cannot ignore that Taiwan’s status as an island poses significant challenges for any sustained insurgency. Primarily due to the inherent geographic isolation limiting the flow of resources, places of safe-haven, and external support. Unlike insurgent movements on continental landmasses, Taiwan’s insurgents would be cut off once the PLA secures maritime and aerial dominance. This isolation would create a struggle to import weapons, medical supplies, communication equipment, and other critical resources. While covert maritime resupply from the U.S. and its allies via submarines or small crafts might be possible, it would be risky and limited in scale. Safe-haven would also be a struggle since insurgents on the island could not easily retreat to regroup or train in territory abroad. With no contiguous borders with other countries, it’d be very difficult to attempt to flee. The PLA would most likely monitor and intercept electronic communications, physically patrol maritime approaches, or even deploy anti-access/area denial capabilities to isolate Taiwan further. Taiwan’s island geography presents a double-edged sword. While its terrain offers strong defensive potential and compartmentalization for guerrilla tactics, its isolation makes sustained insurgency logistically difficult.

Regardless, the composition of a Taiwan insurgency would be diverse and most likely decentralized. As of 2024, Taiwan’s active-duty military personnel are estimated to be around 169,000. These include special operations, intelligence, and cyber warfare personnel. They would form the backbone of early resistance networks, alongside Taiwan’s large reserve force. As of 2022, estimates have Taiwan with roughly 1.66 million reservists who can serve as a latent pool for recruitment and leadership. Taiwan also hosts a large population that served in mandatory conscription, with service recently increasing from four months to one year. This increases the pool for insurgent recruitment and allows conscripts to be better prepared in case of invasion. Along with military personnel, civilians would likely be integral to the resistance. Civilians of interest include software engineers, community leaders, logistics personnel, and medical professionals who could support sabotage, communication, and information operations. Organizationally, the insurgency would likely adopt a cell-based structure to maximize operational security and adaptability. Coordination between cells could be maintained via encrypted communication networks and supported by intelligence-sharing efforts led by a government-in-exile or clandestine command infrastructure. A decentralized model allows cells to operate independently while pursuing shared strategic objectives.

Preparing for Strategic Resistance

Given the PLA’s conventional superiority and Taiwan’s geographic isolation, insurgents would need to prioritize guerrilla warfare and other asymmetric tactics. Operations would include ambushes, sabotage of logistics lines, attacks on key military and government installations, and harassment of occupying forces. Insurgents would try to avoid direct engagement and seek to wear down PLA forces through persistent, low-intensity conflicts that erode morale and stretch PLA supply lines. Some of this can be done through cyber warfare since it is the least physically risky domain for asymmetric escalation. Resistance forces could use cyberattacks to disrupt PLA communications, hack surveillance systems, spread propaganda to undermine the legitimacy of the occupation, and collect battlefield intelligence through civilian digital networks. Taiwan and its allies’ cyber forces could pre-designate targets inside mainland China, attacking critical infrastructure and deploying sleeper malware or logic bombs for activation during a conflict. Critical infrastructure locations would vary but could include transportation networks, power grids, financial systems, and communication nodes. Coordinated cyberattacks would paralyze civilian logistics, int chaos in major urban centers, and overload state response mechanisms. This would undermine both domestic confidence and PLA operational planning.

The World Factbook 2024. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2024.

In parallel, Taiwan could place covert action units inside mainland China prior to or during any significant invasion. These units would be trained specifically in sabotage, espionage, and psychological operations. These operatives could be drawn from special forces, intelligence agencies, and diaspora networks, recruiting Mandarin-speaking assets with knowledge of Chinese terrain and urban environments. Pre-war infiltration or post-invasion insertion of these cells could facilitate acts of sabotage and create cascading effects across China. Strategic bombings or coordinated arson against soft targets, like warehouses and transportation hubs, could generate insecurity and economic volatility without needing to defeat the PLA in open combat. Another avenue would involve psychological and political warfare targeting vulnerable regions within mainland China. Taiwan and its allies could establish covert channels to support disaffected groups in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, or among Hong Kong pro-democracy activists. These efforts could spark unrest or diversionary movements that force the PRC to reallocate security forces away from Taiwan. This would effectively open a second front without requiring a conventional military force and mitigating geographic isolation concerns with a resistance only being on the island. While risky, these asymmetric strategies would raise the costs of invasion exponentially by creating instability within China’s own borders. It would transform Taiwan from a passive target into an active and unpredictable threat, forcing the PLA to consider not just maintaining occupation on the island but surviving its long-term consequences.

Political and Social Movements of the Insurgency

The success of resistance depends on political and social mobilization as much as it does on geography, personnel, or military strategy. Taiwan’s population has grown increasingly opposed to unification with the PRC, and national identity polling shows that a majority identify exclusively as Taiwanese. This sense of nationalism towards an occupying force would likely produce widespread public support for insurgents. Taiwan’s civil society could become key pillars of resistance and could include religious organizations, unions, and student groups. These actors might assist with humanitarian support, spread anti-occupation messaging, and sustain morale through underground media and local governance in contested areas. If Taiwan’s government was to prepare for an invasion now, it could incorporate these civil society groups into a robust “Territorial Defense Corps”, similar to the Estonian Defense League. “These units should be recruited from the communities in which they will train and, in the event of war, fight. Their volunteers should have access to well-stocked armories with sufficient numbers of modern weapons, ammunition, and protective gear… They can make it much harder for China to achieve a quick, surprise victory by showing that the Taiwanese people have the ability to quickly resist and recover from acts of sabotage, subversion, assassination, and war.” If Taiwan creates a force of this nature, it could provide meaningful morale for the population and a message that all citizens would be playing an active role in the event of an invasion.

Assuming the Taiwan government survived abroad post-invasion, they would provide political legitimacy and serve as the international face of the insurgency. The government in exile could coordinate aid distribution, issue diplomatic communiqués, and represent Taiwan in international forums. Moreover, its existence would signal continued resistance and provide a political focal point for organizing both domestic and diaspora support. External backing would be vital, and a contingency plan to get key members of the government out of the country is crucial. The U.S. and its allies have strategic interests in preserving Taiwan’s autonomy and would likely provide behind-the-scenes assistance to prolong PLA difficulties and prevent normalization of the occupation. Covert support could include arms transfers, intelligence sharing, cyber warfare assistance, or financial aid. However, financing a protracted insurgency requires a mix of domestic and foreign resources. Taiwan’s pre-invasion government may be able to secure funds abroad or divert them before collapse. Domestically, insurgents could rely on private donations, black market networks, and contributions from sympathetic business elites. Additionally, Taiwan’s extensive diaspora community may play a crucial role in financing resistance efforts and advocating for independence on the global stage. Such action could contribute to political pressure on the PRC. Yet to significantly impact the PRC, a high degree of consensus and coordination among nations willing to impose economic penalties would be required, and even then, the effects would take time to materialize.

Future Projections and Implications

As the possibility of invasion looms, future scenarios involving a prolonged insurgency must be rigorously assessed. As this article has already suggested, an invasion of Taiwan is very likely, and proactive planning by Taiwan now is imperative. Unfortunately, Taiwan’s government has shown more ambivalence toward asymmetric defense than experts would like. “Taiwan’s military has made some progress toward implementing asymmetric defense, but the Ministry of National Defense has resisted a full transformation.” Without fully committing to asymmetric warfare now, Taiwan’s insurgency force will be unprepared and incapable of maintaining an insurgency. The long-term viability of an insurgency will determine whether the PLA can establish sustainable control or if Taiwan becomes the PRC’s next geopolitical quagmire.

As for possible endgame scenarios post-invasion, there are only a few outcomes that could come to pass. These scenarios include PLA victory, prolonged insurgency, or political settlement. In the scenario of a PLA victory, the PLA would have successfully suppressed resistance through sustained military and political coercion, combined with economic integration and censorship. This scenario would likely require years of occupation, internment of dissenters, and a heavy counterinsurgency footprint. The cost would be enormous and might leave the PLA victorious in name but weakened in regional influence and global standing. A more probable medium-term outcome is a drawn-out insurgency that continues to drain PLA resources and legitimacy. In this scenario, Taiwan becomes akin to Afghanistan during the Soviet or U.S. occupations. This would mean large areas that are ungovernable, vulnerable to sabotage, and a source of ongoing instability. The PLA may be overstretched, economic backlash from international sanctions could occur, and continued unrest could erode the PRC’s control over time. The final scenario, although unlikely immediately after an invasion, would be a political settlement. This scenario could emerge under intense domestic or international pressure, especially if the conflict becomes unsustainable. This could take the form of semi-autonomy, a ceasefire, or power-sharing with a local transitional authority. However, this outcome depends on PRC’s willingness to compromise, which currently appears low given Xi Jinping’s emphasis on national unification.

The future of a Chinese-occupied Taiwan remains uncertain, but a sustained insurgency is viable under the right conditions. The effectiveness of external support, combined with Taiwan’s internal resilience and proactive planning, could transform the island into an enduring symbol of resistance. For PRC, the risk of a protracted, destabilizing insurgency raises questions about the long-term wisdom of attempting military reunification at all.

Conclusion

In considering the possibility of a successful PLA invasion of Taiwan, this article has examined a crucial yet often overlooked dimension of such a conflict: the post-invasion insurgency. While much discourse rightly focuses on how Taiwan might defend against an initial attack, equal attention must be given to the enduring struggle that could follow. By assessing the possible insurgent strategies, evidence suggests Taiwan could put up a resistance should the PLA successfully invade. However, more preparation in asymmetric warfare by Taiwan’s government is necessary for them to stand a chance.

Ultimately, the likely outcome of such a conflict would be deeply uncertain. A swift PLA military victory could give way to a long-term insurgency that frustrates efforts to govern and destabilizes the region. The broader implications for regional and global security would be profound. Whether the outcome is PRC consolidation, a negotiated settlement, or a never-ending low-intensity conflict, the strategic choices made today will shape not only the fate of Taiwan but also the future security architecture of the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

Tags: China-Taiwan, Defense Partnership, Insurgency Strategy, Resistance Movements

About The Author

Tyler Rodriguez
A seasoned national security and international affairs professional, Tyler Rodriguez brings extensive experience in foreign military sales, security cooperation, international cybersecurity, and strategic defense partnerships across the DoD. He has advised senior leaders on global military education programs, coordinated U.S. cyber engagements with foreign partners, and developed international strategies aligned with DoD modernization priorities. Tyler’s expertise spans policy development, program management, and cross-cultural defense cooperation.

2. Special Operations News – August 18, 2025

Special Operations News – August 18, 2025

https://sof.news/update/20250818/

August 18, 2025 SOF News Update 0

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: U.S. Naval Special Warfare (NSW) operators transit underwater using a diver propulsion device during joint maritime training with Marine Raiders assigned to U.S. Marine Forces Special Operations Command as part of Exercise Talisman Sabre 25 in Sydney, Australia, July 11. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class David Rowe)

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SOF News

Mike Vining. One retired member of Delta, Mike Vining, is well-known in the SOF community. Mostly because of his splendid reputation in the Army; but also because of the presence of a variety of memes repeatedly posted on social media. Read about it in “The career of Mike Vining, the Internet’s most badass military meme”, We Are The Mighty, August 13, 2025.

Green Berets Teach Air Force Cadets. The U.S. Air Force Academy recently concluded its inaugural Cadet Warfighter Instructor Course (CWIC), an 11-day program held from July 22 to August 1, 2025. This new addition to the Cadet Military Education and Training Plan gives cadet instructors the tools to teach lower-class cadets basic warfighting skills at the individual and small-unit levels. The 10th Special Forces Group provided instructors for the program. “The Cadet Warfighter Instructor Course enhances basic warfighting skills”, DVIDS, August 1, 2025.

PANAMAX-Alpha 2025. Amy Forsythe reports how U.S. SOF are playing a critical role in advising and assisting Panamanian security forces to enhance regional security cooperation. “U.S. Special Operations Forces Train with Panamanian Security Forces During PANAMAX-Alpha 2025”, Medium, August 2025.

Women in Delta. A less than favorable report on the work environment of women working within one of the nation’s most elite units. The story of Countney Williams, a female who worked at FBNC for Delta in a support role. “My Life Became a Living Hell: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit”, by Seth Harp, Politico, August 12, 2025.

Special Forces Identity Crisis? Greg E. Metzgar examines the historical roots of the Green Berets, the Afghanistan mission, mission drift, why identity matters, and restoring identity and meaning. “Who Are the Green Berets Supposed to Be?”, JSOU Press, August 6, 2025.

Best Ranger Competition. Kevin Maurer provides a description of the annual event that Ranger teams compete in that is very physical and demanding. “Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World?”, The Atlantic, August 13, 2025. (subscription)

SOF History

August 22, 1955, marks the anniversary of the Department of the Army approving the Special Forces (SF) Shoulder Sleeve Insignia (SSI). The SSI, or ‘unit patch,’ with the arrowhead shape and three lightning flashes, was designed by Captain John W. Frye, 77th SF Group, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. For more information on the history of SF insignia visit: http://spr.ly/6184GmmCM

On August 25, 1961, the first Finnish conscript paratrooper course graduated with a parachute jump in Utti, Finland. Since then, first the Finnish Defence Force Paratrooper School and now the Special Jaeger Battalion (Erikoisjaakaripataljoona) have celebrated this day as their anniversary / tradition day.

On 23 August 1968 a large force hit a MAC-V SOG FOB and mission launch site on Marble Mountain in Da Nang. The attacking NVA numbered at least 100 and were armed with AKs, grenades, satchel charges, and RPG-2 launchers (or B-40s). Over two dozen Americans and 40 Montagnards who manned the Recon Teams or the Hatchet Force alongside Americans.

On August 26, 2021, thirteen U.S. service members and almost 200 Afghans died in a terrorist bombing at Abbey Gate of the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Kabul airlift (NEO) was in the final days of execution. https://afghan-report.com/news/abbey-gate-bombing/

National Security and Commentary

CIA Website Hacked. Unidentified hackers recently compromised a major intelligence website used by the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies. “Hackers breach intelligence website used by CIA”, Washington Times, July 24, 2025.

Erik Prince Firm in Haiti – 10 Year Contract. An agreement with the Haitian government has provided Vectus Global, a Prince company, with a long-term contract to fight the country’s criminal gangs and then take a role in restoring the country’s tax-collection system. Reuters, August 14, 2025. Read an Associated Press article on the same topic. Read a more detailed account in “Blackwater’s Erik Prince Muscles Back Into the Mercenary Business”, The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2025.

U.S. – Losing Its Voice. Russia and China are increasing their efforts of disinformation campaigns in Africa at the same time the the United States is gutting its ability to win in the global information war. Next on the chopping block is the Voice of America. It would appear we are ceding the information domain to our enemies. “As America silences its voice in Africa, China and Russia amplify theirs”, The Hill, August 15, 2025.

New AFRICOM Commander. U.S. Africa Command held a change of command ceremony Aug. 15, 2025, at Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany, as Marine Corps Gen. Michael E. Langley formally transferred command to Air Force Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson. A former commander of Special Operations Command Africa, Anderson is no stranger to the role of the U.S. military in Africa. “U.S. Africa Command Gets New Leader”, DoD News, August 15, 2025.

U.S. Military Forces to Caribbean. The deployment of air and naval forces to the southern Caribbean Sea is taking place to address threats from Latin American drug cartels. They will be targeting drug gangs that have been designated as global terrorist organizations. “US military deploying forces to southern Caribbean against drug groups”, Reuters, August 14, 2025.

Ukraine Conflict

Alaska Talks. Most analysts believe that not much of value – at least as it is currently understood – came out of the talks between President Putin and President Trump on Friday, August 15, 2025 in Alaska. The three hour discussion did not lead to any progress for a ceasefire. Later, after the meeting, Trump called selected European leaders and President Zelensky to update them personally. There are some reports indicating that Trump now believes that the best way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a peace agreement. Zelensky is scheduled to meet with Trump in Washington on Monday, August 18, 2025. He may have the company of other European leaders as well.

Putin probably achieved his objectives with the meeting. It proved that he is willing to talk, he was able to put off the implementation of secondary sanctions on the oil and gas sector previously threatened by Trump, and he created a situation where his demands place Zelenskyy in bad light if Ukraine says no. Most news analysis suggest that Putin wants Ukraine to cede all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and to freeze the front lines in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts. The future of Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts seem to be in question.

Russian Breakthrough. Last week a large number of small infantry teams of Russians managed to cross through Ukrainian lines and established positions deep in Ukrainian-held territory. Most of the advance seems to have halted with some Russian personnel in that breakthrough now isolated in pockets that have been encircled. According to OSINT mapping posts on Twitter the Ukrainians have halted the advance and are now recapturing lost territory. The Russians achieved an initial breakthrough but were unable to exploit it; resulting in lost troops and equipment.

Report – Russian Concept of Future Warfare. A recently published report examines Russian military strategy after three years of conflict in Ukraine. This study extends into the air, sea, and ground domains of warfare. The conflict in Ukraine has presented some surprising outcomes for Russia: they could not establish air dominance, their Black Sea fleet is ineffective, and it is unable to wage effective combined arms offensives. Despite these changes in modern warfare Russian views on armed conflict have not evolved in the past three years. This detailed report dives deep into this topic. Russian Concepts of Future Warfare Based on Lessons from the Ukraine War”, Center of Naval Analysis (CNA), July 2025, PDF, 98 pages. https://www.cna.org/reports/2025/08/Russian-Concepts-of-Future-Warfare-Based-on-Lessons-from-the-Ukraine-War.pdf

“Big Soviet Army Beats Little Soviet Army”. In the initial invasion of Ukraine a few years back the Russians were surprised with the resolute defense the Ukrainian army presented. Heroism, quickly mounted defense, and unconventional tactics delayed and stopped the Russian thrust to take Kyiv. Over the next year counterattacks by the Ukrainians retook much of the lost territory. Special operations units and the introduction of tactical drones quickly put the Russians on their heels. But over the past few years the war has become stalemated and has transitioned to an infantry war fought over meters each day. The Russian advantage in personnel and military equipment (larger population, bigger industrial base, and larger military) is taking its toll in a war of attrition. One important reason, according to many junior members of the Ukraine military, is the reliance by senior Ukrainian commanders on old style Soviet Army doctrine and tactics. A comprehensive explanation of this divide between the rank-and-file and the top brass is presented by Marcus Walker, Ian Lovett, and Ievgeniia Sivorka. “Ukraine’s Once Nimble Army Is Mired in Soviet Decision-Making”, The Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2025. (subscription)

References:
Interactive Map. Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine by the Insitute for the Study of War and Critical Threats. On storymaps.arcgis.com See also https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/maps.html
U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine, Congressional Research Service, CRSIF12040, periodically updated, PDF, 3 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12040
Ukraine Conflict, National Security Info. https://www.national-security.info/ukraine-conflict.html

SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.

Asia

A Path Forward for Myanmar. Jim Webb proposes a road forward for the Trump administration in its interaction with a country with 55 million people and vast natural resources. Webb served as a Marine in Vietnam, as Secretary of the Navy, and as a United States Senator. He has visited Myanmar several times. He believes that the U.S. should move forward in recognizing the determined opposition that is fighting the military junta. “Myanmar: Asia’s Forgotten Prize”, The National Interest, August 8, 2025.

CRS Report: Taiwan: Background and U.S. Relations. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has updated its “In Focus” report on Taiwan. Topics include U.S.-Taiwan unofficial relationship, modern history, current politics, U.S. policy toward Taiwan, and relations across the Taiwan Strait. August 15, 2025, IF10275.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10275

Europe

Riots in Serbia. While all eyes are on Ukraine, Israel, and Alaska things are heating up in eastern Europe. There have been several nights of large-scale protests in Serbian cities.

Poland – On Receiving End of Hybrid War. Poland is Europe’s frontline against Russian agression but it is battling a wave of Russia-linked sabotage that threatens its stability. Numerous arson incidents and acts of sabotage have taken place in Poland over the past year that are targeting, either directly or indirectly, critical and military infrastructure. “Russia’s Hybrid War on Poland”, by Filip Styczynski, The National Interest, August 12, 2025.

Afghanistan

Zero Units of Afghanistan. Geeta Bakshi is the founder of the nonprofit Famil and a 14-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to include a significant amount of time in Afghanistan. She is the guest of The Afghanistan Project Podcast and the topic of the video, hosted by Beth Bailey, is about the CIA-trained Afghan National Strike units – more commonly known as the Zero Units. These units played an important role is clearing and securing the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in August 2021 during the takeover by the Taliban of Afghanistan and the Kabul non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO). Some of the members of the Zero Units made it to the United States. However, many of them still have not been processed for Special Immigrant Visas and are reaching the end of their humanitarian parole. Zero Units during the Afghanistan withdrawal and today, August 11, 2025, YouTube, 58 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3kiOrO8dps

More News From Afghanistan. Anti-Taliban groups in Afghanistan are continuing their attacks against the Taliban in isolated incidents. The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) is still present in Afghanistan and the Taliban conduct operations against it from time to time – usually in the northeast of the country.

Middle East

Iran and Proxy War. Much of the diplomatic, political, and military power that Iran enjoys in the Middle East is through something national security commentators refer to as ‘proxy war’. A concept of working through other nations or non-state actors to extend a nations power into a country or region of the world. Iran has used proxy power (SOF News, Jan 21, 2025) for decades – with its state and non-state allies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, and Yemen. However, the past year has seen the limits of Iran’s proxies. The Israeli operations against Hamas and Hezbollah have curtailed or restrained these groups. The change of regime in Syria in December 2024 has also weakened Iran’s power projection. In addition, the results of Operation Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer (SOF News, June 22, 2025) have temporarily set back Iran’s nuclear program, caused it humiliation, and severely degraded its military. Read more in “The Collapse of Iran’s Proxy Strategy Exposes the Limits of Asymmetric Warfare”, by Rufat Ahmadzada, Small Wars Journal, August 14, 2025.

Books, Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Publication – Security Assistance Training Management Manual. A guide for security assistance managers has been published by the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL). Published in August 2025, it has eight chapters and eleven appendices. It outlines the process of how security assistance teams direct the development, management, excution, and support of U.S. Army SATs provided to friendly foreign governments and U.S. allies. (PDF, 170 pages).

https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/2025/08/11/099294bd/no-25-998-security-assistance-training-management-manual-aug-25.pdf

IWC Spotlight. The Irregular Warfare Center newsletter for July 2025 has been posted online. (PDF, 3 pages). https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2025-07-IWC-Spotlight.pdf

Book Review – Brutal Catalyst: What Ukraine’s Cities Tell Us About Recovery from War. Dr. Russell W. Glenn’s book, published in 2024, offers a comparative analysis of Ukraine’s wartime urban challenges alongside historical postwar reconstruction in large cities of other past conflicts. These include Sarajevo, Manila, Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Berlin. The book provides a strategic framework for Ukraine’s redevelopment. It focuses in on the Ukraine cities of Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol. Kharkiv and Kherson are very much on the frontlines of the Ukraine conflict and have suffered significant damage while Mariupol is ‘temporarily occupied’ by the Russians. Susan Siegrist Thomas, the book reviewer, gives us a detailed synopsis of this book. Small Wars Journal, August 13, 2025.

Video – Why Special Operations Must Unite to Win the Next Flight. Col (Ret) Stu Braden is interviewed on SOF Week 2025 and the Global SOF Foundation. The Jedburgh Podcast, August 14, 2025, YouTube, 40 minutes. The Jedburgh Podcast is part of the Green Beret Foundation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THrcITyTY5Q

Video – Former DIA Officer Shares Insider Threat Secrets. Shawnee Delaney, a former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) office is interviewed by Gavin Stone about her time with the DIA, training at “The Farm”, cyber security and intelligence, and more. YouTube, June 2025, 53 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM3q2A13gaw&t=1s

CA – Call for Papers. The Civil Affairs Association has issued its 2025-26 “Call for Papers”.

https://www.civilaffairsassociation.com/post/2025-26-civil-affairs-issue-papers-call-for-papers

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3. ‘My Life Became a Living Hell’: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit

This is an incredible story on so many levels. Not only about the allegations of the treatment of this person but also about the extensive exposure of possible tradecraft and operations techniques.

‘My Life Became a Living Hell’: One Woman’s Career in Delta Force, the Army’s Most Elite Unit

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/12/fort-bragg-delta-force-women-military-hegseth-00495824

Politico

WAR ROOM

Courtney Williams wanted to serve her country. What happened next shocked her.

By Seth Harp08/12/2025 10:00 AM EDT

Seth Harp is an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent, as well as a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He is the author of The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, from which this story is adapted.

Illustration by Nash Weerasekera for POLITICO

Courtney Williams was 24 years old when she learned of an intriguing job opportunity at an unnamed “special mission unit” at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the top secret Joint Special Operations Command. It was 2010, and she was coming off a four-year enlistment in the Army, in which she’d been an interrogator and Arabic linguist but never deployed. She was recruited at a job fair by K2 Solutions, a contractor in Southern Pines, North Carolina run by former members of Delta Force, the Army component of JSOC.

The day of her interview, Williams noticed something unusual. All five women being considered for the job looked exactly like her. “We were all young, petite, attractive, well dressed and blond,” she said. The applicants even had on similar outfits: black pantsuits with blue dress shirts and high heels. “What are the odds?” they asked each other, laughing. At the time, it seemed like a coincidence.

The job opening was in the mission support troop of the intelligence support squadron of Delta Force, a covert commando unit that has been at the bleeding edge of every American war since 2001. Because the job of the MST was to create and maintain fictitious cover identities for Delta Force operators to use on clandestine missions, and because of the widespread perception that most of the troop’s employees were women hired principally for their good looks, everyone in the unit referred to them, informally, as the Cover Girls.

One of Williams’s former colleagues, Esther Licea, said that most MST employees fit a distinct physical profile. “The general type,” she said, “was white, in shape, with blond hair.” In short, “a pretty girl.” Licea herself didn’t fit the mold, being bigger and brown-skinned. She was hired not for her appearance but for certain internet technology skills. Back then, “there were only three Latinas in the whole Building,” she said, using a discreet metonym to refer to the unmarked compound on Fort Bragg that houses the Delta Force headquarters.

I thought of the Cover Girls last year, when President Donald Trump appointed Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. In his confirmation hearing, Hegseth faced tough questions about his past comments on women in the military. He had previously argued that women should not serve in combat roles, armor units, artillery or special mission units like Delta Force. “We need moms,” he once said. “But not in the military, especially in combat roles.” A National Guard veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth has adopted the attitude and style of a heavily tattooed special operator and positioned himself as a fierce defender of the special operations community, an institution ridden with prejudice and violence against women.

I first learned about the Cover Girls in the course of reporting my new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. My investigation began in December 2020, when two veteran special operations soldiers, including an active-duty member of Delta Force named Billy Lavigne, turned up murdered in the woods on Fort Bragg. I soon learned that there had been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg, dozens of fatal overdoses and a pattern of coverups and collusion between military and civilian police. There was even a shadowy drug ring, made up of paratroopers and Green Berets as well as a local cops and marines from Camp Lejeune, that was trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine into the United States from Mexico and allegedly smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan. Underlying it all was a cartoonishly macho culture of drinking, drugs, sex and lawlessness.

As the new military leadership scrutinized so-called “DEI” initiatives aimed at gender equity, I thought of the vicious harassment that Williams faced during her eight years at Delta Force. Her story is a cautionary tale for just how bad it can get for female service members and civilian employees in elite units shrouded in secrecy and steeped in privilege and impunity. It is a rebuke to those who believe, wrongly, that the military panders to women and minorities.

Eight years have passed since Williams left Delta Force, but with American-sponsored shadow wars and proxy conflicts raging in places like Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine and Gaza, the unit’s preeminent role in the new American way of making war is more integral than ever. Things haven’t improved much for women, either. Since Williams left the force, female servicemembers have continued to fear retaliation should they report rape. The phrase “murder-suicide” shows up in news copy all too often, with female servicemembers being killed by their male partners, and male veterans killing their wives and girlfriends.

A spokesperson for the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) declined to comment on Williams’ experience or the broader problems with Delta Force. The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in an emailed statement that “the Department applauds all of the work the Special Operations Community does to keep our nation safe. This Department has a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of harassment. Additionally, no matter what skin color our warfighters are, they bleed red. Our nation is grateful to the honorable, upstanding men and women who serve our country.”

It’s not just women who are sidelined and denigrated in this hyper-competitive, ultra-macho environment. Delta Force, which is overwhelmingly male, has plenty of Black and brown men serving as support soldiers. But in Williams’ time, less than one in 100 of the actual operators were nonwhite. “It is very, very, very rare,” said former Fort Bragg paratrooper Jordan Terrell, who felt out of place simply being a Black man in the airborne infantry. The Army as a whole is tremendously diverse, but the infantry is mostly white, the Special Forces is even whiter and Delta Force is the whitest of all. “I could not believe, mathematically,” said Licea, “that there were not more minorities.”

For the most ambitious officers, the high-speed West Point studs looking to rise in the ranks, Delta Force is a steppingstone to the highest echelons of the Army and the Pentagon. “All those unit commanders have their paths laid out for them,” said Licea. “Next stop is probably USASOC. Then MacDill Air Force Base as some sort of SOCOM [United States Special Operations Command] deputy CO,” she said, using an acronym for commanding officer. “Eventually, they all make general.”

In his memoir, former JSOC commander Stanley McChrystal obliquely critiques Army special operators for being excessively tribalistic, insular, strong-willed, opinionated, arrogant and entitled. In a telling passage, he writes of feeling intimidated and eager to make a good impression when he came down from the Pentagon to take command of JSOC. He had risen in the ranks through the 75th Ranger Regiment, not the Delta Force “old boys’ club,” as he calls it, and was susceptible to the pangs of an inferiority complex.

The imprimatur that the unit leaves on top officers is invisible to outsiders, but looking at photos of known ex-commanders, you begin to develop an eye for the signature steely-eyed, square-jawed look of the generals who came up through the Delta Force mafia. You see the physiognomic continuity, too, when you walk down the spine of the building, past portrait after portrait of former commanders in an unbroken sequence that does not include a single Black or brown face. “That makes an impression,” said Williams.

Both women said that the unit was even less tolerant of gays and lesbians, who were not represented even in support roles. At work, Licea heard homophobic slurs uttered “all the time.” There was one longtime contractor rumored to be gay, said Williams, but “he sure as hell wasn’t talking about it.”

Williams’ official job title was “signature reduction specialist.” For a base salary of $80,000 a year, she served as the custodian of a controlled repository of valid but fictitious passports, identity documents and financial instruments, which were issued to operators upon deployment and checked back in when they returned from overseas. “Everything is accountable,” she said. “Whether it’s a passport, driver’s license or credit card, it’s all logged. Sign it out, sign it back in, just like you would a gun or anything else that’s sensitive, so that the backstory stays consistent.”

Williams’ experience on the job provides a unique window into how the military carries out some of America’s most classified national security operations, involving plainclothes troops in civilian guises living undercover in foreign countries, where they abduct or assassinate high-value targets on orders from the White House, or conduct espionage and bugging missions against hostile governments.

The State Department, Social Security Administration, postmaster general, credit card companies and motor vehicle departments of most American states have memorandums of understanding with the military to provide Delta Force with “fully backstopped personas,” said Licea, including real passports and Social Security numbers issued to nonexistent people. These enable operators to travel internationally, disguised as civilians and blending in with the populace, without leaving a digital trail traceable back to an actual person.

“The things you see on TV and think they don’t exist, they really do exist,” said Williams. At first it was “shocking,” she said, to see how the government counterfeited its own instruments for the purposes of international espionage and assassinations. But over time, “it becomes day-to-day life,” she said. “I’ve got to get this guy a driver’s license. Got to get him a Social. New name, new identity, new backstory, new passport. Sitting at your desk doing paperwork.”

Part of her job was to support a compartmented element of the unit called G Squadron, made up of 40 or 50 veteran Delta Force men and a very small number of female operators, the only ones in the unit. “They are the most professional soldiers,” said Williams. “The most well rounded and mature. The top tier of operators.”

G Squadron’s missions are truly covert. They are the blackest of black ops, the dirty deeds that official representatives of the White House, Pentagon and State Department will stand behind a lectern and falsely disavow with the utmost apparent sincerity. “High-level, specialized ‘read ins’ with no ties to the U.S. government,” said Williams, describing a process by which participants are granted access to “sensitive compartmented information,” which involves taking a polygraph, undergoing a background check, signing a nondisclosure agreement and being “read in” or indoctrinated about the specifics of an above-top-secret program.

“We worked with DIA, CIA,” she continued. “All the agencies worked with JSOC together. We’d get executive-level orders from the White House to either collect information or capture a target, or to kill, depending on what the mission was.” She added, “Usually we were going after high-profile targets that nobody knew the American government was after.”

Besides fake identities, it was Williams’ job to maintain the existence of front companies used by G Squadron operatives as “commercial cover” when they deployed on “alias operations,” she said. Her duties included paying rent and utility bills on behalf of spurious business entities used as cutouts, work that often entailed expenditures of her time and taxpayer money that she saw as wasteful. She recalled taking a chartered flight to a small town in Maine simply to check the mail at an empty office. The MST would send people on monthly rotations to a city in Florida merely to be seen walking in and out of a vacant building. They once sent Williams to California with $10,000 in cash to buy a bunch of cell phones straight from the factory — no receipt needed.

Another time, a pipe burst in the untenanted suite of a front company in Washington, causing the landlord to become suspicious because the place flooded and no one was around to open the door. Williams and a co-worker jumped into one of the unit’s brand-new sport-utility trucks and drove at top speed all the way to D.C. to deal with the situation. “Sorry,” they told the incredulous landlord. “Everybody’s away.”

Williams’ time in the unit was a roller-coaster eight years of her life. She was expected to wear a pager at all times and be at the Building within an hour of it going off. She juggled multiple cell phones, and when one would ring, she’d have to remind herself which front company it pertained to, and what role she played in relation to that fictitious entity. “In two seconds,” she said, “you have to swap mentally.” Staffers were routinely dragooned into supporting training exercises, and in airline hijacking scenarios Williams was invariably cast in the part of a damsel in distress. “I got shot a bunch of times in the face with a paintball gun,” she wryly recalled. The operators were forever playing pranks on the Cover Girls, packing their desks with plastic explosives, for example, or coming down from the team bays with savage war dogs straining against their leashes to frighten the women who were afraid of dogs. “It was not a professional environment,” said Williams, and Licea agreed. “Having worked in corporate America prior to going to the unit,” Licea said, “this stuff would never fly. You’d be fired.”

Fat people on the support staff were relentlessly mocked. A soldier of Asian descent was called a “chink” to his face. The boozing in the team bays inevitably degenerated into obstreperous roughhousing. “That’s it, we’re not fucking drinking anymore,” a sergeant major would bellow in frustration. “You guys are out of control.” But the dry spells never lasted long. “It was like they were trying to herd cattle,” said Williams, “or take care of a bunch of children.”

The operators who came down to Williams’ office for paperwork purposes routinely propositioned her for sex. “The comments were just ridiculous,” she said. “Don’t you think your job would be better,” one man said, boldly looking her right in the eyes, “if you were under the desk sucking my dick?” Others massaged her shoulders, took big whiffs of her hair, made comments about the size of her breasts or drunkenly proposed marriage. A besotted sergeant major often seen walking around with a beer in one hand and a tomahawk in the other once punctuated his declarations of affection by hurling his ax into the wall.

On two occasions that both Williams and Licea recalled, aggrieved women came on base and went to the front gate of the unit demanding to speak to the commander. One claimed that an operator had attempted to rape her at his apartment after a date. The other was an operator’s wife who had learned that her husband had married another woman while working under an alias identity in Jordan. On neither occasion did the commander grant an audience. The unit sent counterintelligence personnel to placate the women and pretend that something would be done about their complaints.

“There is zero respect for women in that community,” said Valeria Zavala, a psyops soldier who deployed to Afghanistan with JSOC. “I know this is specifically about Delta Force,” she said, “but it’s like this across the whole of USASOC.”

Some operators, said Williams, “were more mature” and resented the madhouse atmosphere. Ryan Savard, who was killed by machine-gun fire in Kunduz in 2012, was one of them, she recalled. “He’d come down and talk to me about this a lot. He wanted to start a family and be faithful to his wife,” and was annoyed by the unit’s aggressively virile culture of philandering, seduction and conquest.

“‘I’m so frustrated with this fraternity-like mentality,’” she quoted Savard as saying. “But no one in their right mind would choose to leave Delta and go back to the regular Army,” Williams said. “Because at Delta, you didn’t have to be at work at nine. As long as you got your training, paperwork and pre-deployment stuff done, you just showed up whenever the fuck you felt like it. So even if they were sick of the culture, they’d vent to me about it, but they’d rather die than go back to the regular Army.”

One day over lunch in the dining facility, seated across the table from the commander of the intelligence squadron, Williams raised the possibility of deploying with the unit overseas, as support staff often do, and which would have been a boon to her professionally. Her boss’s reaction caught her completely off guard. He started laughing hysterically, hitting the table with his hands. “You’re not hired to be deployed with the operators,” he told her once he’d regained his composure. “You were hired for your assets,” he said, making a hefting gesture at chest level, “and if they want you to deploy with them, it’s because they all want to fucking run a train on you.”

Williams stood up without a word and walked out of the cafeteria. She managed to get into the hallway before the tears began to flow. “It was like everything that I already knew and feared, he just said to my face,” she said. “How I had been made to feel for the whole time that I had been working there. Those were the exact words that he used.”

Previously, the same lieutenant colonel had called Williams into his office for a supposed dress code violation. Concerned that her white pants were transparent, he and the squadron sergeant major had directed her to turn around and bend over to assess whether her underwear could be seen through the fabric. Williams had complied, but got the impression that their real intention was to humiliate her. “So that I could walk out of their office,” she said, “and make them laugh.” Licea learned about the white pants incident afterward and witnessed the interchange in the cafeteria firsthand. I interviewed her separately from Williams, and she confirmed that both of these incidents took place, and that Williams was “unfairly targeted.” But Williams made things worse for herself by never backing down from a conflict, Licea said. As a mellow Southerner whose family comes from a Caribbean island, Licea sympathized with Williams’ plight, but had trouble relating to her acerbic Yankee pugnacity. “A lot of times I felt like telling her, ‘Dude, Courtney, pick your battles,’” she said. “But to Courtney, everything was a battle.”

Williams filed a grievance at the squadron and unit level, but nothing was done. The next time she came up for a performance review, she received a mediocre rating. Now she was really angry. “My work,” she said, “was immaculate.” She appealed the performance review, submitted a complaint with USASOC’s inspector general and eventually filed a discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“Once she started speaking up,” said Licea, “things kept getting worse and worse for her. They came after her hard.” If Williams were one minute late, she received a counseling statement. If she rushed home to take care of her sick daughter, she was clapped with an AWOL. Then, in 2016, the unit yanked her security clearance on the grounds that her dispute with the leadership made her a security risk. “From that point on,” said Williams, “my life became a living hell.”

Still employed but unable to view classified material, she had to wear a big red badge on her arm and be escorted everywhere in the Building, even to the bathroom. They moved her desk into a cramped storage closet and assigned her the task of proofreading a spreadsheet that contained some 8 million entries. Such drudgery would have driven another person insane, but Williams’ irrational tenacity powered her through the tedious labor for more than a year. “I’m one of those people,” she said. “I’m so fucking stubborn. I was not going to let this happen to me.”

She was never going to win this battle of wills, though. She was up against a force much bigger than herself. Not wanting to get crosswise of the Special Forces command, none of the attorneys in Moore County Williams reached would represent her, forcing her and her husband to burn through their savings on out-of-town lawyers. Then the administrative law judge overseeing the EEOC hearing granted a motion to protect classified information contained in the materials at issue, greatly increasing the cost of continuing to prosecute the case. That ruling is what finally broke her. “I was trapped,” she said. “I’d exhausted everything. I had lost years of my life and was just completely drained.”

Given enough time, anyone who has adverse dealings with an entity like Delta Force will inevitably drift into paranoia. Williams was sitting at a traffic light in Fayetteville when it first occurred to her that she was mired in a rancorous legal dispute with an organization that kills people in secret. The question of whether she was putting her own life at risk necessarily followed. “Am I going to be one of these people,” she asked herself, “who dies in a car crash and it’s not really a car crash?”

Finally, she agreed to sit down to settlement talks. The unit’s lawyers initially offered her pittances in the realm of $5,000 or $10,000, but a changeover in leadership at USASOC in the summer of 2018 resulted in a significantly more amenable offer, a sum sufficient “to buy a small house in North Carolina,” she said. She took the money and was medically retired so that she and her kids didn’t lose their health insurance.

Politico

4. That USSR Sweatshirt at the Alaska Summit Said Everything

Excerpt:

To hammer the point home, he would do well to teach the President and his advisors a well-known Russian adage—the one which posits that “the appetite comes with the eating.”

That USSR Sweatshirt at the Alaska Summit Said Everything

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Ilan Berman · August 18, 2025

Ukraine War

Published

7 minutes ago

President Donald Trump poses for a photo with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Billy Mitchell Room at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Friday, August 15, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Ahead of last week’s summit in Alaska between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, many feared the meeting would result in some sort of grand bargain that abandoned Ukraine to the Kremlin’s predations.

That, however, didn’t happen.

The talks, though cordial, were inconclusive and ended without an agreement. Moreover, further consultations between the senior advisors of both sides were called off – suggesting there wasn’t enough agreement between the principals even to hammer out a tentative compromise.

To jittery Russia-watchers, this has provided a measure of comfort. After all, no deal is clearly better than a bad one. But as additional details of the Alaska summit continue to trickle out, Russia’s diplomatic strategy is becoming clearer – and more worrisome. That’s because Moscow is making an effort to convince Washington to embrace “land for peace” as a formula to resolve the conflict that it itself started.

In their closed-door deliberations, Russia’s president apparently rejected the idea of any sort of temporary ceasefire with Kyiv. Rather, he insisted, Ukraine needs to fully withdraw from the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, pull back from other occupied areas as well, and give up its claims to the Crimea Peninsula, which Russia unilaterally annexed back in 2014. In other words, the Kremlin’s is offering up the promise of peace in exchange for significant territorial concessions on the Ukrainian side. It’s a decidedly bad bargain, and Middle Eastern history tells us why.

Over the past forty years, successive Israeli governments have tried repeatedly to offer territorial concessions to the Palestinians in order to achieve an end to the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. These included the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s, the year 2000 Camp David Summit, the Olmert peace offer of 2008, and many more overtures besides.

All of these initiatives sought to trade territorial concessions for the promise of normalization and security. And all of them fell short, for a simple reason. The formula they articulated failed to account for the ideological impulse that led the Palestinian leadership, whatever its composition, to consistently seek the outright elimination of the Jewish state.

Russia feels much the same way. In recent years, the Kremlin has embraced a broad, neo-imperial ethos that seeks to recreate an expanded sphere of geopolitical influence Moscow believes it rightly deserves. And Ukraine, which played a central role in successive Russian empires for the better part of a millennium, is a key part of these plans.

Thus, the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was prefigured by a long treatise by the Russian president himself (one still readily available on the Kremlin website) in which he extolled the “historical unity of the Russians and Ukrainians” – and laid out the intellectual justification for the war to come.

And those impulses clearly persist; Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived at the Alaska summit sporting a USSR sweatshirt in a not-so-subtle signal of this persistent imperial objective.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets with President Trump later today, he’ll need to remind him of that ideology, and what it means for his country. He must also make clear that, faced with such an implacable adversary, trading territory for peace is guaranteed to only be a temporary solution.

To hammer the point home, he would do well to teach the President and his advisors a well-known Russian adage—the one which posits that “the appetite comes with the eating.”

About the Author: Ilan Berman

Mr. Berman is a member of the Associated Faculty at Missouri State University’s Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, as well as an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

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Written By Ilan Berman

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. An expert on regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation, he has consulted for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as well as the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and has also provided assistance on foreign policy and national security issues to a range of governmental agencies and congressional offices. He has been called one of America's "leading experts on the Middle East and Iran" by CNN. Mr. Berman is a member of the Associated Faculty at Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Studies. A frequent writer and commentator, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post and USA Today, among many other publications. Mr. Berman is the editor of six books: Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), co-edited with J. Michael Waller; Taking on Tehran: Strategies for Confronting the Islamic Republic (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Iran's Strategic Penetration of Latin America (Lexington Books, 2015), co-edited with Joseph Humire; The Logic of Irregular War: Asymmetry and America’s Adversaries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Digital Dictators: Media, Authoritarianism, and America’s New Challenge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); and, most recently, Wars of Ideas: Theology, Interpretation and Power in the Muslim World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Ilan Berman · August 18, 2025

5. Zelensky Heads Back to Washington Under Pressure From Putin

Excerpts:

Coming on the heels of Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin, the stakes are high for Ukraine and its European supporters who are also striving to avoid a rift in the Western alliance and keep Trump focused on Putin as the aggressor and obstacle to peace.

Demonstrating the scale of that task, ahead of Monday’s meeting Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Zelensky “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.”

Ukraine has long said it is ready for a cease-fire, which Russia has refused to sign on to.

A Russian drone attack struck an apartment block in the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Monday morning, killing four people, including a child, and injuring 17 others, according to Ukrainian emergency services.

Of all the issues Putin has set out as conditions for peace, the Russian leader’s territorial demands will be the hardest for Zelensky to accept, including the possible exchange of territory within Ukraine to adjust the front line.

Zelensky Heads Back to Washington Under Pressure From Putin

European leaders to join Ukrainian president in visit to Oval Office seeking a path to end war with Russia

https://www.wsj.com/world/zelensky-heads-back-to-washington-under-pressure-from-putin-1a33fe01

By Michael R. Gordon

Follow and James Marson

Updated Aug. 18, 2025 2:10 am ET

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is likely to find Moscow’s territorial demands difficult to accept. Photo: simon wohlfahrt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Quick Summary

Zelensky is set to meet with Trump in Washington amid disagreements over security guarantees and Russian territorial demands.View more

Nearly six months ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked to leave the White House after a televised confrontation with President Trump over “real security guarantees” the Ukrainian leader insisted upon for any peace agreement with Russia.

When Zelensky returns to the Oval Office on Monday the gap over security guarantees will have narrowed, but a chasm over Moscow’s territorial demands remains. That leaves Zelensky with a dilemma: how to sustain Trump’s support while responding to Russian territorial proposals he feels compelled to refuse.

Zelensky will have some important allies accompanying him to Washington this time, including the leaders of the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Finland and the European Union. North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who has developed a personal rapport with Trump, will also attend.

But the diplomatic terrain threatens to be just as treacherous. While Trump administration officials have expressed fresh, if still vague, support for providing security guarantees, the White House has shelved its persistent demand that Russian President Vladimir Putin agree to an immediate cease-fire or face much tougher economic sanctions.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin, the stakes are high for Ukraine and its European supporters who are also striving to avoid a rift in the Western alliance and keep Trump focused on Putin as the aggressor and obstacle to peace.

Demonstrating the scale of that task, ahead of Monday’s meeting Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Zelensky “can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.”

Ukraine has long said it is ready for a cease-fire, which Russia has refused to sign on to.

A Russian drone attack struck an apartment block in the northern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Monday morning, killing four people, including a child, and injuring 17 others, according to Ukrainian emergency services.

Of all the issues Putin has set out as conditions for peace, the Russian leader’s territorial demands will be the hardest for Zelensky to accept, including the possible exchange of territory within Ukraine to adjust the front line.

A destroyed building in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Three years of full-scale war have left dozens of cities and towns razed. Photo: genya savilov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“It is for the Ukrainians to decide how they might land swap,” special envoy Steve Witkoff told “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s why Zelensky and the Europeans are coming to the White House on Monday to make those decisions themselves.”

In Ukraine, many say Putin wants to drive a wedge between Kyiv and Washington by using the negotiations with Trump to try to put Zelensky in the position of losing U.S. support or facing a crisis at home if he were to make concessions to Russia.

“Putin wants all of Ukraine. It’s not about territory,” said Kostyantyn Batozsky, a political analyst in Kyiv. Ukraine would continue to fight, even if Trump walked away, Batozsky said.

Under a deal outlined by Putin on Friday, Ukraine would surrender its eastern Donbas region, including parts of Donetsk that Ukrainian forces still control. In exchange, Russia would freeze the conflict along the current contact line in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and give up some area in those regions.

A total withdrawal from Donetsk would create vulnerabilities for Ukraine militarily because some of its most robust defenses are there, former U.S. officials and experts say.

“Ceding those defenses would position Russia to reattack in the future with more of an advantage,” said David Shimer, a former National Security Council official during the Biden administration, who is now a scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

What Kind of Peace in Ukraine?

A good or bad agreement may depend on the quality of Western security guarantees.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/what-kind-of-peace-in-ukraine-russia-summit-trump-putin-f5daf72f

By The Editorial Board

Aug. 17, 2025 4:24 pm ET

This Isn't 1991: Why Putin's Russia is Facing a Different Kind of Collapse

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Reuben Johnson · August 18, 2025

PUBLISHED on August 18, 2025, 9:40 AM EDT, Key Points and Summary – While the theory that Russia could collapse under the strain of the Ukraine war is popular, a direct comparison to the fall of the USSR is flawed.

-Unlike the Soviet Union’s final years, which saw a rapid turnover of leadership and liberalizing reforms under Gorbachev, Putin’s Russia is a stable, repressive regime.

-However, this analysis argues that the current system faces its own unique pressures: major state-owned companies like Gazprom are hemorrhaging money, and a rising tide of violent crime from returning convicts is creating deep social instability that could lead to a different kind of collapse.

The Russia Collapse Theory: What We Know

One of the popular theories connected to Russia’s war in Ukraine is that this could cause the collapse of the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin—and that Russia as a nation-state could even splinter into numerous, new independent nations.

The theory in this instance is that under the weight of massive military spending that is growing at the expense of scores of vital government services, the economy begins to come apart, and the system no longer functions.

Three times in modern history—1905, 1917, and then again in 1990—Russian governments collapsed due to unsustainable military spending. The current war with Ukraine is creating numerous shocks to the economy that are chipping away at internal stability.

Therefore, there are those who believe that Putin’s regime could fall apart at any moment. These predictions are based on the thesis that “the USSR was a powerful and totalitarian system, no one thought it would collapse.” The difficulty with this scenario is that today’s situation is a far cry from the circumstances that existed in the waning years of the USSR.

One of the major differences was that the Soviet Union experienced a dramatic turnover in personnel. In the period December 1980 to March 1985, seven key leadership figures of the regime died within a year or two of each other: Aleksei Kosygin, Mikhail Suslov, Leonid Brezhnev, Arvid Pelshe, Yuri Andropov, Dmitri Ustinov, and Konstantin Chernenko.

Within a year, at least four more senior leaders—Nikolai Tikhonov, Grigory Romanov, Viktor Grishin, Andrei Gromyko—were removed from real power by the group around the new Soviet Communist Party General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. A comparable current-day equivalent would be if long-time Putin loyalists like Nikolai Patrushev, Mikhail Mishustin, Valentina Matvienko, Aleksandr Bortnikov, Andrei Belousov, Sergei Lavrov, Sergei Chemezov, Igor Sechin, and Putin were all deposed and replaced within a short time.

But such a comprehensive turnover in personnel is not happening—and is not likely to transpire—in today’s Russia.

Change Is Not on The Agenda

When Gorbachev came to power, he instituted major changes across the board in policy that transformed the Soviet Union. Many of these new policies were not thought through and failed to achieve their objectives. But those changes did open up society in a way that allowed for freedom of expression and open political activities, which in their aggregate led to the collapse of the USSR. In contrast, Putin’s regime has worked overtime to create a repressive system that even surpasses that of the Soviet era in numerous respects and brooks no criticism from any quarter.

In foreign policy, Gorbachev had worked to normalize relations with the West. When the Soviet bloc nations—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary—began to revolt and leave Moscow’s orbit, no Soviet troops were sent in to enforce Moscow’s will. Again, Putin has taken the exact opposite course by invading his neighbors on multiple occasions and has used the rationale that justifies foreign intervention to bolster a dictatorial regime at home.

In short, more aspects of today’s Russia are the polar opposite of what existed in the last years of the Soviet Union than there are parallels between then and now. If there is a pattern of events that would lead to Putin’s regime cracking and breaking, it would not be a repeat of the late 1980s.

Indications of Decline

But just because Putin and the country’s troubles bear no relation to what transpired in the USSR does not mean that there is no instability and no prospect of the state disintegrating. For one, the impact of the war in Ukraine continues to create economic disruptions to the point where the once mighty revenue producer of Gazprom, the natural gas consortium, became Russia’s least profitable company in 2023.

At one time, the company was responsible for more than 5 percent of Russia’s total GDP, but it is now not expected to be profitable until 2035. This is largely due to the loss of customers resulting from Ukraine war sanctions and the failure of major export projects, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to come to fruition.

The gas giant has plenty of company in the form of other major corporate giants that are also in the red. The Russian e-commerce firm Ozon suffered $450 million in net losses in 2023, as did the state aerospace and defense industrial corporation Rostec with losses of $360 million, and the social network VK, which is Russia’s answer to Facebook, at $360 million. These firms were among the five most unprofitable Russian companies in 2023—and the red ink continues.

Russia is also facing a mounting security threat from within. The tens of thousands of veterans returning home from the Ukraine war include considerable numbers of convicted criminals. They are causing a spike in violence, social instability, and organized crime, the latter of which utilizes their skills with weaponry and battlefield experience.

In a December 2024 article from Russia’s Novaya Gazeta reports from one municipality in Russia that “not a day goes by without an ‘incident’ with a former Wagnerite [mercenary] or just a former serviceman returning from battle who beat, cut or even killed someone.”

The head of Transparency International, Ilya Shumanov, told the same newspaper on another date, “I think that with the weakening of the state apparatus and all state bodies, there will be more violence. The reasons are the growing number of people who have experienced military action, the illegal flow of weapons, and the degradation of the justice system.”

In short, Russia faces numerous serious problems that are likely to worsen in the future compared to its current state. If Putin’s regime continues on its present course, sooner or later these trends will intersect and exacerbate one another—and with potentially seriously destabilizing consequences.

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.

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nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Reuben Johnson · August 18, 2025

8. Quarterly 1st SOF Truth event spotlights steps being taken in mitigating blast overpressure

Quarterly 1st SOF Truth event spotlights steps being taken in mitigating blast overpressure

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/545851/quarterly-1st-sof-truth-event-spotlights-steps-being-taken-mitigating-blast-overpressure

Photo By Michael Bottoms | U.S. Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, commander, U.S. Special Operations Command, hosted the... read more

MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES

08.18.2025

Story by Michael Bottoms

U.S. Special Operations Command

Hundreds of leaders participated in the latest 1st SOF Truth event, held July 30, 2025, where SOCOM’s senior leaders and experts from the medical research and practitioner communities discussed the dangers of blast overpressure (BOP) and what SOCOM is doing to mitigate such risks to its force.

Rooted in the ethos "humans are more important than hardware," the 1st SOF Truth Forums are quarterly events that spotlight human-related topics critical to the special operations community. These forums aim to foster awareness, drive discussion, and deliver actionable resources to the force. Gen. Bryan Fenton has led nine such events during his tenure as commander of SOCOM.

Blast overpressure (BOP) refers to the rapid changes in air pressure caused by explosions, such as those resulting from firing weapons. Unlike Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which is a medical diagnosis with various causes, BOP specifically describes the physical shockwave and its cumulative effects on the human body.

Colby Jenkins, performing the duties of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and an Army Special Forces combat veteran, opened the conference.

“We knew that exposure to blast overpressure was not good,” said Jenkins. “And, now the science has caught up to show us just how bad it can be for our operators. Injuries can be hidden. Symptoms may not appear right away. But…the long-term, cumulative effects can be debilitating.”

Throughout the event, panels of experts discussed previous and ongoing research into the effects of BOP, described the symptoms as they understand them now, and covered various mitigation factors. Included was a demonstration of nascent software being produced by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command that allows service members to map the blast overpressure zones of weapons in varying terrain to help them minimize the risk involved during training events.

Dr. Brian Edlow, a critical care neurologist and Associate Director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery, shared updates on ReBlast Precision, a longitudinal study aimed at establishing protocols for early detection of repeated blast injuries. Building on a 2023 pilot study, this initiative seeks to improve diagnostics for active-duty special operations forces.

Gen. Fenton emphasized the importance of these events that educate the team and push resources to those who need them most.

“We’re here to share information to the force,” said Fenton. “We need to flip the chain of command upside down. This information needs to get to the lowest level.”

While the event served as a conduit of information down the chain of command, it was also an opportunity for senior leaders to hear from leaders at the tactical level. Command teams from across the enterprise provided awareness of mitigation strategies that are being used in the field now, including using 3D printed charges to reduce the blast pressure, retrofitting shoot houses and breaching ranges with pressure-absorbing materials, using suppressors and simulation rounds, using augmented reality and virtual reality for “less reps in the dirt,” and using blast monitors to assess BOP exposure.

Importantly, Gen. Fenton pushed back on the notion that reducing exposure to overpressure would lead to reduced readiness.

“We can absolutely do both. We can reduce exposure and remain lethal,” Fenton said.

As Gen. Fenton closed the forum, he reaffirmed SOCOM’s commitment to understanding and addressing the health implications of BOP exposure. While progress has been made, he acknowledged that the journey is far from over, calling for continued collaboration and innovation to safeguard the force.

9. How the West Can Halt Putin’s Battlefield Momentum

Excerpts:

To slow Mr. Putin’s war machine, the U.S. and Europe could lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western weapons to strike within Russia. That would let Kyiv target where Russia produces and launches missiles and drones. Secondary sanctions on Russian oil also would cut into Russia’s military financing.

America has many ways to chip away at Russia’s lead. Mr. Putin’s momentum isn’t unstoppable, especially if Ukraine can rely on a key resource: Western will.

How the West Can Halt Putin’s Battlefield Momentum

Russia leads Ukraine in resources and manpower, but sanctions, weapons and funds can change that.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-the-west-can-halt-putins-battlefield-momentum-f526844f

By Jillian Kay Melchior

Aug. 18, 2025 2:10 pm ET

A Ukrainian National Guard serviceman of 3rd brigade, Spartan, prepares a Penguin UAV for flight near the frontline in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, Aug. 6. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

Kyiv, Ukraine

The Russians are closing in on Pokrovsk. The eastern Ukrainian city, once a logistics hub, has held back Russian forces in southern Donetsk for about a year. Its fall would be the first operationally significant victory of Russia’s summer offensive. And Vladimir Putin wants to use this moment to convince Donald Trump that his momentum is unstoppable—with Pokrovsk an example of Russia’s greater resources.

Ukraine has long used technology to make up for its disadvantage in manpower. Now Russia is using a relatively new type of unmanned vehicle that is straining Ukraine’s outmanned troops: fiber-optic drones. They are invulnerable to jamming and spoofing because they are controlled by tiny cables that stretch like kite strings for as long as 10 miles. Russia uses these drones to impede Ukrainian movement around Pokrovsk by attacking troops rotating from the front, combat medics evacuating the wounded, and couriers of supplies.

Ukraine has the same technology, but not as much. Around Pokrovsk, Russian fiber-optic drones outnumber Ukrainian ones about 7 to 1, says Ivan Kutiepov, deputy commander for unmanned aerial systems for Ukraine’s 59th Separate Assault Brigade.

Ukrainians haven’t found an adequate countermeasure against this type of drone. Shooting down a fiber-optic drone with a rifle requires good aim and steady nerves. Land drones can conduct some battlefield functions so men don’t have to, but their supply varies across the front. Metal cages installed on transport vehicles can sometimes reduce the likelihood of a direct strike or mute the explosive effect, but Russians can overcome them with large payloads or multiple strikes.

In Pokrovsk, the Russians are advancing with a brutal approach: Force troops forward, often on foot, to their almost certain death, boast about the progress of the few who survive, and then see if their luck holds the next day. Earlier this year Russians were reportedly suffering 14,000 to 15,000 casualties a month near Pokrovsk. But “the Russians can afford to lose manpower. We cannot afford to lose men,” says Lt. Col. Viktor Tregubov, spokesman of the Dnipro Operational Strategic Group of Forces, a joint command of several dozen brigades that oversees the eastern front of the war.

Moscow’s resource advantage is also changing the dynamic in Ukraine’s skies. Russia learned from Iran how to make long-range drones, and in early July it churned out between 100 and 170 daily. Last month Russia launched 6,297 drones and 198 missiles at Ukraine—up from 447 drones and 85 missiles a year ago, according to the Institute for the Study of War. The Russians have “basically found a way to achieve some of the effects of strategic bombing without having air superiority by using these drone-missile packages,” says Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.

Israel and its partners have fended off large Iranian strikes on occasion, but Russia’s huge attacks now happen a few times weekly. “No one has dealt with the sustained intensity of combined strikes like this,” Mr. Kagan says.

The West’s options to mitigate Russia’s resource advantage also have battlefield implications. For procurement, Kyiv has been promoting the Danish Model, a plan pioneered by Copenhagen to supply Ukraine with weapons. Western partners including Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Canada and Norway make financial donations and the EU sends interest from frozen Russian assets to pay for Ukraine to make its own weapons. Russia also has about $300 billion in reserves in the West, which Europe could confiscate, turning the money over to Ukraine to ramp up production.

Ukraine has figured out how to make some weapons less expensively, and it benefits from breakthroughs like Shahed-intercepting drones. But Russia’s aerial attacks can still overwhelm air defenses, leaving high-value targets vulnerable. Ukraine has made its command and logistics centers mobile, but weapons manufacturing is less flexible. For the Danish Model to work, the West would need to provide air-defense systems that Ukraine can’t produce to protect weapons-manufacturing facilities and the energy infrastructure that supports them. Western nations could team up with Ukrainian arms developers to establish production facilities elsewhere in Europe. In June Copenhagen announced an agreement for one such $78 million project in Denmark.

To slow Mr. Putin’s war machine, the U.S. and Europe could lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western weapons to strike within Russia. That would let Kyiv target where Russia produces and launches missiles and drones. Secondary sanctions on Russian oil also would cut into Russia’s military financing.

America has many ways to chip away at Russia’s lead. Mr. Putin’s momentum isn’t unstoppable, especially if Ukraine can rely on a key resource: Western will.

Ms. Melchior is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

WSJ Opinion: The Trump-Putin Summit: An Analysis

Play video: WSJ Opinion: The Trump-Putin Summit: An Analysis

Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews General Jack Keane.

10. The Russians Are Spooked, With Reason

Do we still have the tools?

Excerpts:

For decades, during the Cold War, America operated a sophisticated propaganda war against expansionist Soviet Communism. We supported an alphabet soup of agencies that worked to undermine Soviet legitimacy at home and in the captured nations of Eastern Europe. We won the Cold War, and we can repeat this success story.

However, it’s unclear whether the United States government still has the proper tools to undertake a new, decades-long mission to convince Russian elites and the general public that Russia's future lies with its Western neighbors. The United States Information Agency (USIA) might have taken on this role in years past. However, the USIA has been rolled up into the stifling bureaucracy known as the Department of State and is now its largely ineffective appendage.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might be an appropriate home for a new propaganda agency with a focus on Russia. The CIA still has many experts who are familiar with Russian history and the thinking of current Russian elites. The CIA could create open-source and anonymous multimedia materials that would be consumed by the general Russian population as well as Russian elites. An alternative to the CIA might be a new, highly specialized agency under the control of the Director of National Intelligence or a new private company specializing in deceptive marketing.

The time to start is now.

The Russians Are Spooked, With Reason

By James Fay

August 18, 202

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/08/18/the_russians_are_spooked_with_reason_1129318.html

Russia’s new master in Beijing

On June 10, the New York Times published a front-page article detailing how the Russian security and intelligence elite are getting extremely uneasy about President Putin’s growing “no-limits” partnership with China.

The full-page Times article, which is based on a leaked document from the top Russian counterintelligence agency, the FSB, goes into great detail about how China has created a widespread spying network in Russia and is extensively recruiting Russian scientists to report back to their Chinese handlers. The FSB, Russia’s “spooks,” refers to China as “the enemy.”

Russia has a centuries-long historical memory of menace from the East. For over two centuries, the Mongols and Tatars ruled Russia. This degrading historic memory of invasion, defeat, and occupation lingers in the Russian mind and was commemorated in a scene from the classic Russian film, “Alexander Nevsky” by Sergei Eisenstein.

Is Russia a European or an Asian society?

The Russians are much more “Western” than they often like to admit.

The Russian Orthodox religion emerged from Byzantine Christianity. Its founding saints, Cyril and Methodius, were Greek. Their Slavic language is Western, not Asian. Their science, literature, music, art, architecture, and dance are firmly in the Western mode. Peter the Great modernized Russia by looking to the West, not to the East. Russia’s contemporary elites prefer to shop and vacation in the West. The Russian establishment doesn’t send its children to schools in China. They much prefer the United States and Europe. Russia’s major cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow, are over 3,600 miles from Beijing, but only 800 miles from Warsaw. Moscow is only one time zone away from Berlin, but five time zones from Beijing.

In short, Russia and China are not a good fit, historically, geographically, culturally, or spiritually. This is not a marriage, much less a warm partnership, which is destined to last.

What can the West do?

But what should the United States and our EU/NATO partners do to undercut the Moscow/Beijing Axis? How can our legislative and executive leaders pry these two despotic powers apart and significantly weaken their ill-conceived liaison?

A critical Western goal to undermine Putin’s brutal dictatorship must be to chip away at its legitimacy at home. Emphasizing Moscow’s almost servile relationship with China, the United States, and the EU should play on the fear of both average Russians and the Russian elites.

We should strive to instill a sense of fear that Russia, the junior partner, is slowly being absorbed into a distant and foreign civilization and economy: China.

We should relentlessly accuse the Putin-led kleptocracy of selling out Russia’s culture and heritage, its soul, to its eventual Chinese masters.

Action

Starting immediately, the United States and our EU/NATO allies should launch a broadly based propaganda war against Putin and his Russian cronies.

We’ve done it before

The United States has a decades-long propaganda experience in planting ideas and materials in Eastern Europe and Russia to undercut the old Soviet establishment. Now the target is the corrupt Putin establishment. America needs to screen volumes of internal Russian military, diplomatic, and intelligence documents that demonstrate the risks of closer ties to Beijing. We also must comb through popular and social media to find messages that will delegitimate the Moscow-Beijing alliance. Then we must plant these subversive ideas in the Russian heartland.

The Instruments

We need a creative and believable amalgam of stories, ideas, factoids, quotes, pictures, observations, puns, doggerel, shanties, statistics, jokes, satire, graphs, cartoons, photos, caricatures, limericks, rhymes, and anagrams that all play on the same theme. Russia is being consumed by China. The American/EU propaganda effort should enlist the help of Russia’s Slavic neighbors, like Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Poland, who know it well and can provide insights into Russian thinking and anxieties. We should sponsor contests where creative types suggest new and imaginative ways to portray China as the apex predator and Russia as prey.

The new propaganda campaign against Russia must also use the latest advances in AI to overwhelm Russian countermeasures. Placing subversive jokes and comments into the mouths of lookalike Russian celebrities, journalists, musicians, athletes, and politicians would enhance the value of misinformation. It would also create a viral word-of-mouth onslaught on Putin’s misadventure.

Who can do the job today?

The time to start is now.

James S. Fay is a California attorney, political scientist, and semi-retired college administrator. His articles have appeared in social science and law journals, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and RealClearDefense. He served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Germany.

11. Why Xi Still Doesn’t Have the Military He Wants

Are we executing a dissent and discord PSYOP program against the PLA? If not, why not?

Excerpts:

Xi’s overbearing approach to the PLA not only ensures Xi’s military objectives, it also serves his political objectives. Keeping senior officers uncertain about their career prospects and reliant on Xi for their promotions and livelihoods allows Xi to cultivate multiple channels of information from within the PLA so that he can puncture that wall of insularity and triangulate what he hears from different sources. This tactic is especially important as the PLA modernizes to conduct twenty-first-century warfare and becomes even more impenetrable for senior party civilian leaders.

For many observers, Xi’s approach may seem counterproductive. Stringent management of the PLA and the relentlessness of Xi’s anticorruption campaign is probably both humiliating and demoralizing for senior officers. Yet Xi probably sees such suffering among the high command as having a salutary effect. Xi’s own father was ousted from power and imprisoned multiple times during his long career in the CCP—trials that seem to have deepened his loyalty to the party rather than undermined it.

For more than 40 years, the PLA has been a peacetime military unbloodied by actual conflict. Without challenges or tests of loyalty, Xi knows it is at risk of growing complacent. He wants a military that is inured to such trials and ready to take on the most difficult missions, whether that is punishing its purported compatriots in Taiwan and fending off a potential U.S. intervention, or even employing violence to protect the party from its fellow citizens. As Xi noted in his first speech to the PLA after becoming commander in chief, the Soviet Union fell because “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” Xi is obsessed with ensuring that the PLA’s men would resist if need be—but he is still not confident they would.

Why Xi Still Doesn’t Have the Military He Wants

Foreign Affairs · by More by Jonathan A. Czin · August 18, 2025

China’s Force Has Been Remade—but Can It Be Trusted?

August 18, 2025

Chinese President Xi Jinping walking past soldiers in Beijing, September 2024 Florence Lo / Reuters

JONATHAN A. CZIN is the Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He is a former member of the Senior Analytic Service at the CIA and was Director for China at the National Security Council from 2021 until 2023.

JOHN CULVER is a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings. He served for 35 years as a CIA officer, including as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2015 to 2018.

More by John Culver

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For the high command of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi Jinping’s third term as China’s president has been a period of almost operatic tumult. Altogether, at least 21 senior officers have been removed since Xi started his third term in 2022, including three of the seven members of the party’s supreme military body, the Central Military Commission. Many of the members of the PLA’s most senior ranks, including the defense minister and the officer who oversaw just about every general officer promotion for over a decade, have been disgraced. By the end of his tenure, Xi could well exceed the mercurial Mao Zedong in his body count of officers who have been purged.

Although Xi oversaw military purges earlier in his career and even imposed a sweeping overhaul of the PLA’s command structure in 2015, this recent shakeup has raised eyebrows since many of the affected men were Xi’s putative allies rather than potential political rivals. The ousting of senior officers who were once considered untouchable has fed a flurry of rumors that Xi is losing his grip over the PLA—and even prompted more extreme claims that Xi’s own political demise might be imminent.

But rather than Xi’s diminution, the recent moves more likely reflect Xi’s continued dominance of the military. Much like a Mafia don, Xi has shown that he considers even his associates to be disposable. More important, the staggering political casualties reflect that he is losing patience with his military rather than his control over it. The moves demonstrate his continued dissatisfaction with the PLA’s high command and can be seen as part of an ongoing process of achieving his larger goals of bending the military to his will. Indeed, Xi wants to ensure he can employ violence with confidence, but Xi’s confidence seems to be the rarest and most precious commodity for an otherwise well-resourced military.

Xi sees his military agenda as a centerpiece of his legacy. Whereas Xi’s predecessors focused their political firepower primarily on advancing major economic reforms, some of the most dramatic reforms of the Xi era have occurred in the military. Two goals have driven his unforgiving management of the PLA. His paramount aim is ensuring the military is thoroughly politicized and thus willing to fulfill its role as the ultimate guarantor of the party’s rule should it be challenged by internal unrest. And Xi also wants a military that can fight if he needs it to do so, including against the U.S. military.

In other words, Xi’s iron grip on the military not only endures, it is also indicative of his obsession with breaking the PLA’s insularity and endemic corruption and ensuring that, should he need to bet the regime on the military’s prowess, it will not fail.

FRIENDLY FIRE

The recent purges of CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong and Director of the Political Work Department Admiral Miao Hua have garnered the most attention in the rumor mill. The two men overlapped with Xi in Fujian Province earlier in their careers and were believed to enjoy a special relationship as a result. But He is now missing (he hasn’t been seen in public since March), and Miao was removed from his post in November 2024.

Analysts have gravitated to two hypotheses. The more mundane is that these purges reflect embarrassingly poor judgment by Xi in his choice of subordinates. The more extravagant is that they reflect a burgeoning movement among disaffected party and military leaders who now seek to challenge or even remove Xi.

Neither of these hypotheses stand up to scrutiny, however. Both share the unlikely premise that these purges have somehow loosened Xi’s grip on the military. If the political turmoil inside the PLA was in fact embarrassing to Xi, it would be covered up rather than publicly acknowledged, as most of these cases have been. If the party excels at nothing else, it is adept at propagandizing and protecting the leadership’s image, particularly Xi’s.

Historically, the Chinese military has been loath to wade too deeply into politics.

Moreover, if Xi were in fact in political trouble with the military, the question would be: why now? After a decade of seemingly supine obeisance, there is no obvious reason why the military leadership would suddenly rouse itself to oppose Xi. The PLA actively thwarted the efforts of Xi’s predecessors when they tried to reform the high command. But so far, the PLA has not only succumbed to Xi’s sweeping reforms, it also seems to be earnestly preparing for Xi’s order to provide military options for a Taiwan contingency by 2027.

Historically, the PLA has been loath to wade too deeply into politics. Even after filling the administrative vacuums left by the Cultural Revolution or the turmoil of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, the military was content to relinquish its political role and go “back to the barracks.” Indeed, Leninist regimes tend to effectively inoculate themselves against the prospect of military coups that bedevil other authoritarian systems because of their reliance on purges and political commissars to enforce party discipline.

Rather than a split between Xi and the PLA, it seems more likely that the recent purges are the result of an intramural game of thrones within the PLA. Xi still has close ties to key senior officers, after all, especially CMC Vice Chairman General Zhang Youxia, whom Xi has known for decades and whose father was close friends with Xi’s father. Xi has even allowed Zhang to remain CMC vice chairman after he exceeded the party’s informal retirement age—a remarkable and clear sign of Xi’s trust in him. Zhang has also survived Xi’s anticorruption campaign unscathed despite having previously run the PLA’s Equipment Development Department, which has been a focal point of the most recent round of purges.

The ousted officers, by contrast, could simply be in the outer orbit of Xi’s political circle. And given that corruption is such a widespread reality of life in the PLA, especially since Xi initiated his pricey military modernization program, the recently purged officers may have miscalculated that their ties to Xi would allow them to line their pockets with impunity.

RED ARMY, RED FLAGS

The scale and drama of these machinations in the high command, however, raise deeper questions about why Xi has been so fixated on the military—and so ruthless in his management of it. His biography offers some clues.

As the son of a leader who played a major role in China’s civil war, Xi was more comfortable with military affairs than his two predecessors—both of whom were engineers with little prior exposure to the military. Xi’s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, had few if any identifiable allies among senior PLA officers and struggled to exercise full control over the military. Since many of his fellow princelings served in the senior ranks, however, Xi was better attuned to the politics within the military. And he had a greater appreciation for the political importance of the PLA, intuitively understanding that control of the military was indispensable for his ability to dominate Chinese politics.

Yet in 2010 when Xi became a member of the CMC and the Chinese Communist Party’s heir apparent, he was probably alarmed by what he discovered at PLA headquarters. Thanks to the domination of generals loyal to former leader Jiang Zemin, who sustained his influence throughout the Hu era (2002–2012), the PLA had become an insular and unwieldy institution that was spending more time protecting its own parochial interests than operating as a joint force globally or even regionally.

Xi was more comfortable with military affairs than his two predecessors.

Indeed, Xi started his tenure as commander in chief by promulgating the idea that the PLA needed to be prepared “to fight and win battles,” a turn of phrase that rather patronizingly implied that the PLA was not currently prepared to do so. Xi also likely found that behind the wall of PLA insularity, there was extensive corruption. As one of Xi’s princeling allies famously commented, corruption had become so rife in the PLA that “only our own corruption can defeat us.”

The insularity of the PLA is hard to fathom from afar. It is a sprawling, opaque, and technologically advanced empire unto itself within the party apparatus, and even civilian Communist Party leaders often can’t understand, penetrate, or control it. Although the Communist Party has a monopoly on the use of force, the PLA has a near monopoly on military expertise. Unlike in the United States, there is no cadre of civilian experts on military affairs either inside or outside the PLA. There is no equivalent to the Pentagon’s Office of the Secretary of Defense, which helps ensure civilian control of the military.

Paradoxically, this has bred an increasing degree of professionalism: senior officers in the PLA are neutral experts focused on warfighting and not on politics. Although an apolitical military appeals to democracies such as the United States, this trend would have startled rather than mollified Xi. In the Chinese political system, the military is supposed to be thoroughly politicized: virtually all officers are required to be party members and both senior commanders and the rank and file devote considerable time to ideological education and other tasks that are ancillary to military proficiency. In fact, the PLA’s chief periodical regularly publishes diatribes against the notion of an apolitical military. That focus stems in large part from the PLA’s primary mission and its true raison d’être—protecting the CCP and its rule, not defending the Chinese state per se.

COURSE CORRECTION

In 2011, a mere year into Xi’s tenure on the CMC, the question of whether the PLA would serve as guarantor of the party became acute because of the Arab Spring. In the face of public discontent, security forces across the Middle East melted away and regimes fell. During China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, the PLA’s support for quashing the protesters in Tiananmen Square rested on a narrow consensus; many senior PLA officers opposed martial law and the military was paralyzed for a month before paramount leader Deng Xiaoping could sway the outcome. After the Arab Spring, one could imagine senior CCP leaders asking, “If Tiananmen happened today, would the PLA again save the party?”

Xi was likely not assured. The command structure of the PLA at the time looked like a joint force at first glance, with each service having a representative on the party’s supreme military body—but in fact, this structure made it even more difficult to control the high command since no officer had the authority to corral the various service chiefs. For any civilian leader, this state of affairs would be troubling. But for a Leninist leader like Xi, it was unacceptable.

Soon after becoming commander in chief, Xi initiated a risky blitzkrieg against the military chieftains who had turned the PLA into a near state within a state. He arrested and purged two retired but influential vice chairmen of the CMC for accepting bribes before purging several other senior officers across a wide swath of the PLA. He then went on to diminish the role of the PLA’s Ground Force, which had traditionally enjoyed a dominant position in the PLA, through a major overhaul of the PLA’s command structure. (Unlike their brethren in the navy or the air force, the ground forces did not consider themselves a mere service among several in the PLA. Rather, they were the PLA itself because they had conquered China for the Communist Party.)

Xi’s reforms wrested operational control from the services and handed it over to a novel command structure that is streamlined and reflects Xi’s dual emphasis on strict party control and joint operations. Today, the Ground Force, which has been somewhat clumsily renamed the People’s Liberation Army Army, must operate as a peer with its fellow services, which in many ways are at the forefront of the PLA’s dramatic military modernization.

This is a marked shift from just 20 years ago, when the ground forces still dominated the PLA’s priorities and institutions. The “Army Army” no longer dominates membership of the CMC, and the Joint Theater command staff and the other services now receive a greater share of the budget, especially for weapons acquisitions. Those services have grown, meanwhile, while the army has been cut by almost 500,000 since 2010.

‘KILL THE MONKEYS’

The sheer scope and scale of the institutional reforms that Xi imposed on the PLA a decade ago are not to be underestimated. They are tantamount to the U.S. military experiencing both the 1947 National Security Act, which subjugated the Navy and War Departments to a unified Department of Defense, and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which sought to oust the service chiefs from the operational chain of command, simultaneously. Although the United States has a long tradition of civilian control of the military, both reforms provoked intense public hostility as well as opposition from the high command, including the famous “Revolt of the Admirals” in 1949 when navy officers publicly opposed the Truman administration’s defense policy.

Given the audacity of Xi’s purges and reforms, many analysts have expected—or even hoped for—some kind of backlash against Xi for more than a decade. Yet Xi made these extensive renovations to the high command with no visible sign of dissent. By going straight for the metaphorical jugular of the PLA, Xi flipped on its head the oft-used phrase that Chinese leaders “kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.” Instead of purging the protégés of PLA elites to send a message to the top, he decapitated the leadership itself. It was a gamble, but the moves effectively bludgeoned resistance and seemed to enhance Xi’s stature.

Indeed, power in Chinese politics tends to accrue like compound interest rather than depreciate, and the potential for opposition to Xi has dissipated rather than coalesced over time. This dynamic was most vividly on display at the last party congress in 2022, when Xi not only evicted the already marginalized allies of his predecessor Hu from the leadership lineup but also had Hu himself physically removed from the proceedings while Xi looked on impassively. Twice in his tenure, Xi has even hauled the entire high command to historic revolutionary sites where Mao institutionalized the party’s control of the military, reinforcing the military’s role as the armed wing of the Communist Party.

Xi’s focus on reforming the PLA is often portrayed in the West as a myopic obsession with unification with Taiwan. But it is more symbolic than that. Throughout his tenure, Xi has demonstrated a keen fondness for centenary celebrations, and 2027 will mark the 100th anniversary of the creation of the PLA. Serendipitously for Xi, 2027 will also coincide with the start of his potential fourth term in office, and Xi and the military will inevitably use the occasion to publicly extol the considerable advances the PLA has made toward his objectives. Behind closed doors, however, Xi is likely to remain relentless in pushing the PLA to do more.

COMBAT READY?

Xi’s overbearing approach to the PLA not only ensures Xi’s military objectives, it also serves his political objectives. Keeping senior officers uncertain about their career prospects and reliant on Xi for their promotions and livelihoods allows Xi to cultivate multiple channels of information from within the PLA so that he can puncture that wall of insularity and triangulate what he hears from different sources. This tactic is especially important as the PLA modernizes to conduct twenty-first-century warfare and becomes even more impenetrable for senior party civilian leaders.

For many observers, Xi’s approach may seem counterproductive. Stringent management of the PLA and the relentlessness of Xi’s anticorruption campaign is probably both humiliating and demoralizing for senior officers. Yet Xi probably sees such suffering among the high command as having a salutary effect. Xi’s own father was ousted from power and imprisoned multiple times during his long career in the CCP—trials that seem to have deepened his loyalty to the party rather than undermined it.

For more than 40 years, the PLA has been a peacetime military unbloodied by actual conflict. Without challenges or tests of loyalty, Xi knows it is at risk of growing complacent. He wants a military that is inured to such trials and ready to take on the most difficult missions, whether that is punishing its purported compatriots in Taiwan and fending off a potential U.S. intervention, or even employing violence to protect the party from its fellow citizens. As Xi noted in his first speech to the PLA after becoming commander in chief, the Soviet Union fell because “nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.” Xi is obsessed with ensuring that the PLA’s men would resist if need be—but he is still not confident they would.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Jonathan A. Czin · August 18, 2025

12. Russia’s Imperial Black Sea Strategy

Excerpts:

The United States has an interest in a Europe that is whole, free, and at peace—and thus in enhancing freedom in the Black Sea region. Strengthening U.S. support for NATO and EU initiatives can have an outsize impact at relatively low cost. Following the Trump-Putin Alaska summit, however, it is unclear whether Trump will exert pressure on Russia to end the conflict, which may continue for some time. Yet halting Moscow’s expansionist aims must start with ending that war. Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure has already pushed millions from their homes and entrenched Russian domination in occupied Ukrainian lands.

The Kremlin is likely to persist in these efforts until international actors understand that the fight for Ukraine is also a fight for the future of the Black Sea. Efforts to end the war must be paired with a robust strategy to prevent Moscow’s dominance in the greater Black Sea region. North American and European policymakers should prioritize initiatives designed to improve the region’s democratic governance and economic development and assure the secure production and transit of commodities. If such steps fail to stabilize the region, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine may well extend to Moldova and Georgia and could even balloon into a direct confrontation with NATO states that border the Black Sea—the consequences of which would ripple across markets worldwide and threaten an even wider variety of U.S. and European interests.

Russia’s Imperial Black Sea Strategy

Maritime Power and the Quest for Regional Dominance

Daniel S. Hamilton and Angela Stent

August 18, 2025

Foreign Affairs · by More by Daniel S. Hamilton · August 18, 2025

August 18, 2025

A Ukrainian serviceman on a patrol boat in the Black Sea, February 2024 Thomas Peter / Reuters

DANIEL S. HAMILTON is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He has served as Associate Director of the Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs. He is a co-editor of The Wider Black Sea Region in the Twenty-First Century.

ANGELA STENT is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Professor Emerita at Georgetown University. She has served in the Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia. She is the author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.

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Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and other neighbors is transforming the Black Sea into Eurasia’s strategic frontier. Russia has disrupted flows of energy, food, and other commodities; generated millions of migrants; and heightened insecurity not just in Ukraine but also across the entire Black Sea region. These efforts constitute part of a much longer and larger strategy. Russia does not merely seek to dominate Ukraine. It wants to render each of the other five states that border the Black Sea—as well as Moldova, which borders Romania and Ukraine and whose waters flow into the sea—subservient to its interests so that it can exercise veto power over choices these countries make. Moscow also aspires to use the Black Sea as a platform from which to project power and influence throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Caucasus.

Russia's quest to become the dominant force in the Black Sea is an essential element in its strategy to reassert itself as a great power. The Kremlin believes that a failure to establish a commanding presence in the region would leave Russia exposed to Western encroachment, render it less able to influence adjoining areas and disrupt commodity exports that are critical to the Russian economy. Turkey poses the greatest obstacle to Russian objectives in the region because it is the only Black Sea state that Russia has not historically dominated and it is a NATO member. But even after the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin retained considerable levers of influence over the former Soviet empire’s Black Sea space in Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine.

In recent decades, Russia has sought to further subordinate these states to Moscow through a combination of persuasion and coercion. Increasing Russia’s Black Sea presence is also at the heart of President Vladimir Putin’s decades-long plan to resurrect the country’s maritime power. He prioritized modernizing the Black Sea Fleet, whose interventions proved critical in supporting Russia’s Mediterranean Squadron and its 2015 intervention in Syria. Putin has ignored internationally recognized borders to seize a great expanse of Black Sea coastline, including Georgia’s territory of Abkhazia in 2008, Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014, and the Ukrainian part of the Sea of Azov coast in 2022. Although Ukraine has prevented Russia from taking all of its Black Sea coast, Moscow has deployed naval mines as well as blockaded and bombed Ukrainian ports to sever Ukraine’s sea access and minimize the presence of other navies.

While the world has focused on Russia’s battle for Ukraine, Moscow has often advanced these goals under the radar—extending the war, skirting sanctions, disrupting markets, and enhancing its influence in the Middle East and North Africa. Other key leaders should work with Black Sea countries to build a region more resilient to Russian pressure. Failing to do so will likely prolong the war, further enable Russia’s massive human rights violations, exacerbate refugee flows, and provoke turbulence in global energy and commodity markets. Regional insecurities are, in turn, likely to spill over into the Caucasus, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.

Black Swan

For centuries, the Black Sea has served as a critical junction for the movement of people and commodities. Russia has long believed that controlling the sea is essential for its security: in 1783, Catherine the Great annexed Crimea from the Ottoman Empire to increase the Russian Empire’s control over the Black Sea. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Russia competed with the Ottoman Empire and Europe’s major powers for influence in and around the sea. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union became the region’s leading power. Turkey was its main competitor, but Moscow came to dominate all the other Black Sea coastal states.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Russia’s regional role changed dramatically. Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine became independent countries and pursued closer ties to the West. Bulgaria and Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007. As a result, Russia lost its access to parts of the Black Sea coastline. In March 2014, Putin justified the annexation of Crimea by warning that otherwise, “NATO ships would have ended up in the city of Russian navy glory, Sevastopol.” Between 2014 and 2022, the Kremlin tripled the amount of Black Sea coastline under its de facto control and strengthened its influence by wielding a combination of military, diplomatic, economic, energy, and disinformation tactics.

Today, the Black Sea is a central hub for Russia’s energy trade: Russian oil and oil products account for most of the cargo flowing out of Novorossiysk, the largest port in Russia and the Black Sea basin and the fifth-largest in Europe. The country’s remaining westward pipeline gas routes run under the Black Sea to Turkey and then on to southeastern Europe. The sea is also vital to Russian agriculture: Russia routes almost all of its grain exports and a significant proportion of its fertilizer and other agricultural goods through its ports there. These flows enable Moscow to increase revenue, create new markets, establish trading systems less reliant on the U.S. dollar, and gain influence in recipient countries.

Russia now employs a variety of interference tactics to swing Black Sea states toward Moscow. Hard power, of course, remains a crucial element of its strategy, and not only in Ukraine. The 1991–93 civil war in Georgia unsettled that country’s political life and granted Moscow opportunities for influence; in 2008, Russia invaded and defeated Georgia in a brief war and recognized the separatist enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. About eight percent of Georgians have been internally displaced because of that invasion and other Russian efforts to exploit the country’s ethnic conflicts.

But military campaigns are not the only way Russia has sought to bring the Black Sea region to heel. The Kremlin has frequently used disinformation to persuade populations in post-communist countries to align with Russia over what the Kremlin calls pro-Western elites, appealing to people disillusioned with their governments’ failures. Moscow has also supported pro-Russian political parties, interfered in elections, and sought to carry out coups against incumbents.

And historically, Russia has leveraged Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine’s dependence on Russian energy to influence each country’s elites. Moscow cut all gas transit through Ukraine to Europe several times before its initial 2014 incursion and shut off gas supplies to Bulgaria in 2022 and Moldova in early 2025. It has restricted food flows, banning wheat exports to Georgia or limiting Moldovan wine exports to Russia, for instance, to discipline Georgia and Moldova when it believes that either is diverging from Moscow’s priorities. And Russian interference extends to the cultural: the Russian Orthodox Church appeals to its counterparts abroad to battle “satanic” or “woke” Western culture. The Kremlin also deploys espionage and sabotage to destabilize these societies.

Mixed Record

Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine both accelerated its efforts to dominate the Black Sea and revealed the benefits of the groundwork it laid earlier to solidify control. Its ability to disrupt maritime traffic has scrambled regional energy flows: although Russia’s gas exports to Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine have declined significantly since February 2022, its exports to Georgia and Turkey have increased substantially as each of those countries has refused to join sanctions on Russia. Turkey has become the world’s largest buyer of Russian refined oil products. Many of these imports are relabeled in Georgia and Turkey and then reexported to circumvent the European Union’s import ban.

The sea has also become a major staging area for Russia’s “shadow fleet” of unregistered ships, which it uses to circumvent Western sanctions. Russia has used its access to the Black Sea to disrupt its agricultural competitors. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev calls food Russia’s “silent weapon.” The Kremlin has stolen Ukrainian agricultural products and bombed Ukraine’s farmlands, agricultural infrastructure, and ports to undercut a primary source of Kyiv’s revenue and gain new markets for Moscow.

Russia’s efforts to destabilize other Black Sea states are a tale of uneven successes and setbacks. The region’s weakest links are Georgia and Moldova. Russian forces are stationed in each country’s breakaway regions, and broader domestic discontent provides fertile ground for subversive Russian tactics. Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, has turned toward Russia, suspending accession negotiations with the EU in November 2024 and later introducing legislation that represses freedom of speech and assembly. Although a large segment of Georgian society opposes these moves, the party has managed to win successive elections; many Georgians fear that if the country continues along a pro-EU path, Russia will invade again. Intimidation apparently works. The victory of pro-Western candidates in recent Moldovan and Romanian elections illustrates the limits of Russian interference, but the Kremlin is working hard to manipulate Moldova’s fall 2025 parliamentary elections to boost pro-Russian parties.

The fight for Ukraine is also a fight for the future of the Black Sea.

Moscow has secured access to key grain markets at Ukraine’s expense, but flexing its agricultural power has aggravated tensions with recipient countries. African leaders have told Putin that the war has created food insecurity: in July 2023, for instance, the Kenyan diplomat Korir Sing’Oei called Russia’s withdrawal from a pact that allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea “a stab on the back.” Although Moscow has managed to leverage the sea to evade sanctions, generate revenue, and access critical technology, that effort has required developing elaborate and inefficient trading and shipping schemes, and some Black Sea countries have also sought alternative energy sources. The war in Ukraine has also forced Moscow to contend with the largest outflow of its own people since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Ukraine’s success in denying sea control to Russia and inflicting heavy damage on its Black Sea Fleet has crimped Moscow’s influence over nearby regions. So did Turkey’s decision to close the Turkish straits to Russian military vessels days after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ankara has complex ties with Moscow: Turkey is a significant trading partner and purchaser of Russian oil, as well as a key transit route for Russian gas. Yet Ankara’s choice to close the Turkish straits not only limited Moscow’s ability to wage naval war against Ukraine; it also stopped Russia from using the sea to project naval power in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Moscow remains a significant player in the South Caucasus but has lost its role as the regional hegemon; Turkey now plays a much more important regional role than it did before 2022. Until 2023, Russia acted as Armenia’s protector in its conflict with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, but when Azerbaijan attacked Armenia in 2023, Russia, its military overextended, did not come to Armenia’s assistance. After decades of fighting, in August 2025, Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a peace agreement to end the conflict—but they signed it at the White House, not the Kremlin, highlighting the limits of Russian influence in the region. Strains to its military capabilities also forced Moscow to prioritize its war in Ukraine over its support for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. After the ouster of Assad’s regime last December, the Kremlin is scrambling to regain influence with Damascus’s new leadership. It needs such influence: the loss of Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base and Tartus Naval Base in Syria would complicate Moscow’s efforts to expand its operations in the Mediterranean and Africa. And Russia now faces rising competition in the Black Sea and Central Asia from China and the European Union, each of which is building out its economic and political presence.

Sea Change

Policymakers seeking to exploit Moscow’s mixed record in the Black Sea must overcome several challenges. The region’s post-communist countries continue to struggle, leaving them vulnerable to Russian influence. The end of U.S. foreign assistance programs in Ukraine and other states in the region geared toward fighting corruption, supporting an independent news media, and promoting economic development, health, and good governance has left a gap that only EU and NATO allies can fill. EU accession negotiations with Moldova and Ukraine are moving slowly and face opposition from some member states.

The EU and NATO have each put forth new strategies for the region, but both face obstacles to implementation. Brussels’s plan is full of good intentions but lacks concrete commitments and has no budget. NATO has focused on defending its northeastern flank, even though Russia’s last three invasions have taken place in the Black Sea, not the Baltic. In the past three years, EU and NATO countries have prioritized their own resilience strategies; now they must develop plans to stabilize vulnerable Black Sea partners.

Brussels must mobilize funding to match the ambitious rhetoric it presented in May 2025 on a so-called connectivity agenda with Black Sea states and the Caucasus, Eurasia, and the Middle East. The EU should forge West-East corridors that link the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas––circumventing Russia and including Turkey, which EU plans have thus far avoided. Additionally, members of the Three Seas Initiative, which seeks to build digital, energy, and transport links between the Adriatic, Black, and Baltic Seas, should invite Ukraine and Moldova to become full members

Black Sea states should further develop their own considerable energy resources. Bulgaria, Georgia, and Romania are already constructing an underwater Black Sea energy cable that would bypass Russia and directly connect Azerbaijan’s renewable energy resources to Europe’s energy grid. Romania’s recent offshore gas discoveries, once fully exploited, could lead Bucharest to become the EU’s largest gas producer. Turkey’s Sakarya gas field holds similar promise. The war has limited Ukraine’s ability to exploit its gas resources, but in peacetime, EU and U.S. energy companies and international financial assistance could help the country become a major gas producer.

Building Blocks

Turkey will be central to any strategy to prevent Russia from controlling the Black Sea. Ankara often diverges from its NATO allies on the nature of regional challenges: it has armed Ukraine and refused to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, for instance, but maintains lucrative commercial ties with Moscow. European and U.S. policymakers should recognize this complexity and build on shared interests such as strengthening regional supply chains and infrastructure links as well as upholding freedom of navigation and curbing Russian expansionism in the Black Sea.

Turkey opposes a formal NATO maritime presence in the sea involving countries outside its immediate coastal region. But Ankara is offering concrete material support for Bulgaria’s and Romania’s defense modernization efforts. By 2030, NATO plans to make its installation near Constanta, Romania, its principal Black Sea site and its largest base in Europe. The alliance could bolster its forward presence by improving air defense capabilities and deploying additional forces to its multinational battle groups in Bulgaria and Romania. NATO could rotate ships and allied maritime groups in the Black Sea complemented by regular air patrols and exercises. Enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance could better monitor Russian activities.

The United States has an interest in a Europe that is whole, free, and at peace—and thus in enhancing freedom in the Black Sea region. Strengthening U.S. support for NATO and EU initiatives can have an outsize impact at relatively low cost. Following the Trump-Putin Alaska summit, however, it is unclear whether Trump will exert pressure on Russia to end the conflict, which may continue for some time. Yet halting Moscow’s expansionist aims must start with ending that war. Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure has already pushed millions from their homes and entrenched Russian domination in occupied Ukrainian lands.

The Kremlin is likely to persist in these efforts until international actors understand that the fight for Ukraine is also a fight for the future of the Black Sea. Efforts to end the war must be paired with a robust strategy to prevent Moscow’s dominance in the greater Black Sea region. North American and European policymakers should prioritize initiatives designed to improve the region’s democratic governance and economic development and assure the secure production and transit of commodities. If such steps fail to stabilize the region, Russia’s aggression in Ukraine may well extend to Moldova and Georgia and could even balloon into a direct confrontation with NATO states that border the Black Sea—the consequences of which would ripple across markets worldwide and threaten an even wider variety of U.S. and European interests.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Daniel S. Hamilton · August 18, 2025

13. Inside the US military’s quest for ‘drone dominance’

Video at the link.

Inside the US military’s quest for ‘drone dominance’

https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/military/us-military-drone-dominance/

Mills Hayes

Updated: Aug 16, 2025 / 06:50 PM CDTInside the US military’s quest for ‘drone dominance’

Unmute

0:22

Duration

14:43

INDIANAPOLIS (NewsNation) — Just outside of Indianapolis, the U.S. military is loudly building its arsenal.

NewsNation traveled to the Muscatatuck Training Center with the U.S. Army and Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael for an inside look at the Department of Defense’s largest and most realistic training center for the military and law enforcement.

The training area consists of a sunken city, a hospital and crumbling buildings in order to create what the Army calls the “Disneyland of the warfighter.”

And these days, it’s all about drones.

“Usually, you deliver a big weapons system to your troop, they read the manuals, they understand how to use them. Now, we’re going to rely on the warfighters to be part of the innovation loop,” said Michael.

Michael says the military is trying new things when it comes to innovation.

“It has to be modular, or it has to be able to change both software and hardware consistently,” he said.

To do so, the Defense Department is turning to some of the biggest and brightest private companies and innovators from the U.S.

Innovators come to Camp Atterbury in Indiana twice a year to put their technology to the test and potentially earn contracts with the U.S. military.

“Now, we’re up to 7 to 8 people, and we’re continuing to grow, so maybe with this recent order we may have to scale a little bit faster,” said Uzi Ibrahim, vice president of strategic operations at Sentien Robotics.

Practice makes perfect in America’s heartland to stay at the top of the game on the global stage.

“You know, when I was in Silicon Valley, there was some hesitance to cooperate with the U.S. military. That is gone,” said Michael. “Those days are over. We’re trying to open that door wide. So they come in, and we’re giving them real-time feedback and giving them quicker ‘Yes’s and quicker ‘No’s. So they go back to their drawing board. If it’s not working, it can work better next time.”

Military

14. Navy Moving Away from ‘Optionally Manned’ Vessels as Service Mulls Unmanned Future

Navy Moving Away from ‘Optionally Manned’ Vessels as Service Mulls Unmanned Future

https://news.usni.org/2025/08/15/navy-moving-away-from-optionally-manned-vessels-as-service-mulls-unmanned-future

Sam LaGrone

August 15, 2025 6:00 PM

The unmanned surface vessel (USV) Ranger from Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One (USVDIV-1) returns to its homeport, Naval Base Ventura County, in Port Hueneme, California, concluding Integrated Battle Problem (IBP) 23.2, Jan. 15, 2024. US Navy Photo

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Navy is placing less weight on optionally manned surface vehicles as it refines requirements for a new type of vessel that will support the surface fleet, officials said this week.

Speaking at an event at the U.S. Naval Institute on Thursday, three service officials responsible for crafting requirements for unmanned vehicles, developing new vessels and operating the current fleet of experimental craft said their preference was to keep sailors off the next generation of unmanned vessels.

“When you introduce that capability to operate with people on board, it creates a lot of other requirements and cost and complications,” Capt. Matt Lewis, program manager for unmanned maritime systems told USNI News on Thursday. “The solicitation that went out for industry… it was open, and we are eager to get proposals as we review them, to look at the proposals that don’t have people on board.”

Capt. Garrett Miller, commander of the San Diego-based Surface Development Group One who oversees the Navy’s experimental unmanned fleet, was more direct.

“We definitely want unmanned. Period. I mean, it’s that simple,” Miller said.

Comments from Miller and Lewis follow the July release of a notice to industry for a fast unmanned craft that could keep pace with the Navy’s manned surface ships.

The pre-solicitation notice for a Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) calls for a vessel that would carry up to two 40-foot shipping containers and cruise at a sailing speed of 25 knots for up to 2,500 nautical miles in sea state four, according to the posting. The Navy and Army have experimented with the MK 70 Typhon launcher that’s capable of fielding up to four Standard Missile 6s in the space of a 40-foot container. In the past year, the Navy has consolidated its requirements for medium and large unmanned surface vessels into a single-sized concept.

Overall, the sea service has been developing its new unmanned surface systems for the last few years in two tracks — small unmanned vehicles in the near-term and a longer term goal of developing platforms like MASC that would serve as adjunct magazines or offboard sensors for manned surface ships.

On the larger end, the Navy has been experimenting with a few surface craft that were developed for larger Defense Department but has suffered from stops and starts while refining the larger scope of the program. The early concepts for the large and medium surface USVs were to base the craft on offshore oil and gas production vessels that were optionally manned. For the majority of the time, the craft would be crewed but when the circumstances demanded, sailors would be removed and the craft would maneuver and fire at the direction of a manned combatant.

On the smaller end, the Navy has been developing concepts parallel to a larger Pentagon effort to create swarms of air and sea drones to deter opponents as part of the so-called Replicator initiative to blunt an amphibious invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army.

Two Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Crafts (GARC), from Unmanned Surface Vessel Squadron 3 (USVRON 3), operate near Naval Amphibious Base Coronado May 15, 2024. US Navy Image

Last year, the Navy stood up “Hell Hounds” of Unmanned Surface Vessel Squadron 3 armed with Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft to be the first unit to field an unmanned surface vehicle capability.

Looking ahead, the surface force is planning out an overall vision for unmanned, and the Navy will deploy a carrier strike group next year with an unmanned vessel assigned to the strike group.

Coinciding with the hardware developments, the Navy created an enlisted robotics rating to operate and maintain the new generation of unmanned craft.

The first cohort of robotics sailors went through “A” school at Carnegie Mellon University, while the Navy is developing its own school house, Rear Adm. Derek Trinque, the Navy’s surface warfare director (OPNAV N96) said Thursday.

“They’re developing new schools for them,” Trinque said. “The idea is they’re going to be able to operate and maintain robotic and autonomous systems for the fleet.”

At the same time, the Navy is developing an unmanned career path for surface warfare officers.

“It’s going to be very similar to our nuke pipeline. So instead of SWO-[Nuclear], it’ll be SWO-Unmanned,” Trinque said.

The notion is for the unmanned SWOs to alternate between conventional and unmanned assignments in a similar pattern to the SWO nukes.

“This has to be mainstream. It can’t be weird,” he said. We have to grow these people and establish a career path that goes up to major command. It’s the right way to go.”

2 Navy Ghost Fleet Unmanned Ships Now in the Western Pacific

September 21, 2023

In "News & Analysis"

CNO: Navy to Finalize Large Unmanned Surface Vessel Requirements Later This Year

April 5, 2023

In "Industry"

Navy to Field ‘Optionally Unmanned’ Vessels to Supplement Future Surface Combatant

June 25, 2018

In "News & Analysis"

Sam LaGrone

Sam LaGrone is the editor of USNI News. He has covered legislation, acquisition and operations for the Sea Services since 2009 and spent time underway with the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and the Canadian Navy.

Follow @samlagrone

15. Democratized Intelligence: How Open-Source Intelligence is Reshaping Asymmetric Advantage

Excerpts:

The OSINT revolution represents a structural rather than temporary transformation in the global intelligence landscape. As commercial satellite resolution improves, machine learning tools become increasingly accessible, and analytical methodologies evolve, the capability gap between institutional and open-source intelligence will likely narrow further.

For military and intelligence practitioners, this environment requires fundamental reassessment of operational security assumptions, collection priorities, and analytical frameworks. Operations must be planned with the assumption of continuous observation rather than periodic collection. Collection should prioritize information unavailable through open sources rather than duplicating publicly accessible data. Analysis must integrate open-source insights alongside classified information to develop comprehensive understanding exceeding what either approach alone could generate.

Perhaps most significantly, this transformation requires conceptual evolution beyond traditional notions of “intelligence as information monopoly” toward understanding it as an analytical advantage within transparent environments. When multiple actors can access similar information, advantage shifts from exclusive collection toward superior analysis, contextual understanding, and effective utilization rather than information control alone. This conceptual shift represents perhaps the most challenging but essential adaptation for traditional security organizations navigating this transformed landscape.

The democratization of intelligence through open-source methods has shattered state information monopolies. That visibility shifts the center of gravity in irregular warfare from hidden collection to rapid analysis and transparent proof. Commanders who ignore this shift will fight blind while adversaries shape the narrative and exploit newly unmasked vulnerabilities. The answer is not tighter secrecy but smarter fusion—pairing classified sensors with public feeds, stress-testing plans against commercial satellites, and training every staff cell to validate OSINT at speed. In a battlespace where anyone can see, verify, and broadcast, advantage belongs to forces that turn radical transparency into faster, sharper decisions.

Democratized Intelligence: How Open-Source Intelligence is Reshaping Asymmetric Advantage

irregularwarfare.org · by Josh Luberisse · August 18, 2025

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 passengers. Russian-backed separatists and the Russian government denied involvement despite the world pointing in their direction. Russia promoted multiple alternative explanations, which a small team of online investigators at Bellingcat systematically disproved. Using only publicly available satellite imagery, social media, and digital forensics, Bellingcat analysts identified the Russian missile system responsible, tracked it from Russia to Ukraine, and documented its return with one missile missing. Their investigation, conducted without classified intelligence access, subpoenaed records, or state resources, proved more comprehensive and transparent than many official accounts. Independent analysts clearly demonstrated that they could compete with state powers in intelligence.

This watershed moment fundamentally transformed global intelligence capabilities. States have long monopolized intelligence work through sophisticated collection and analysis techniques. Barriers to entry were high and required states to expend the resources to build satellite networks, deploy human intelligence networks, and develop specialized analytical capabilities. Today, that monopoly has eroded dramatically as open-source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities previously requiring massive state investment are now accessible to non-state actors, researchers, advocacy groups, and individuals of modest means.

This democratization creates unprecedented opportunities in irregular warfare. Less-resourced actors can now develop sophisticated intelligence capabilities without corresponding institutional infrastructure. Understanding this transformation is essential for practitioners confronting an operational environment where information superiority no longer remains a guaranteed advantage, and all actors play on a more level playing field in intelligence.

The OSINT Revolution

The foundation of this intelligence democratization rests on three converging developments: technological accessibility, methodological transparency, and analytical tool democratization. Together, these factors have transformed capabilities once requiring billions in state investment into accessible functions available to any motivated actor with internet access and modest technical skills.

In terms of technological accessibility, commercial satellite imagery represents the most visible capability shift. Once the exclusive means of states with space programs, companies like Maxar, Planet, and BlackSky provide sub-meter resolution imagery capable of distinguishing objects smaller than one meter across – only requiring minimal commercial subscriptions for daily access. The cost asymmetry is staggering. Accessing imagery would have required a national satellite program 20 years ago, but now costs a few thousand dollars monthly. Resolution and coverage are constantly improving. When Russian forces began massing on Ukraine’s borders in 2021, open-source analysts identified and tracked specific unit movements and equipment buildups with precision comparable to government intelligence assessments. Unlike government assessments, these came with full public transparency and minimal delay.

Beyond raw collection capabilities, methodology transparency is similarly significant. Techniques once carefully guarded within intelligence agencies are now taught openly through online courses, YouTube tutorials, and dedicated communities. These techniques include geolocation through shadow analysis, which measures shadows to determine location; chronolocation via vegetation patterns, which analyzes foliage changes to date imagery; and pattern-of-life analysis, which maps routes as well as individual and organizational routines. The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) exemplifies this trend, having developed sophisticated open-source methodologies for tracking illicit shipping, sanctions evasion, and proliferation networks rivaling government capabilities.

Digital forensics tools have undergone similar democratization through both commercial development and open-source projects. Software for verifying images, analyzing metadata, tracking online activities, and processing large datasets now exists in user-friendly forms accessible to researchers with minimal technical background. When Syrian troops used chemical weapons in Douma, open-source investigators leveraged free tools to establish attack timelines and identify responsible military units with forensic precision rivaling traditional intelligence analysis.

Such capability diffusion creates asymmetric opportunities where small organizations can develop targeted intelligence functions meeting their specific needs without building comprehensive agencies or infrastructure. The resource asymmetry is striking. RAND studies and congressional testimony show that small OSINT cells can generate 70–90 percent of the analytic value of classified collection while operating at roughly two percent of the cost of a comparable government program. This cost‑utility ratio is most dramatic in mission areas such as conflict documentation, attribution investigation, tracking sanctions evasion, and pattern‑of‑life analysis—all functions central in irregular warfare.

Case Study: The Bellingcat Effect

Bellingcat’s emergence as a non-state intelligence organization represents a paradigm shift for conducting sophisticated analysis outside of traditional structures. Founded by Eliot Higgins, who began as a blogger analyzing weapons in Syrian social media posts, the organization has evolved into a globally recognized investigative unit whose findings regularly influence foreign policy, legal proceedings, and public understanding of complex security events.

Bellingcat’s methodology demonstrates how networked approaches can replace traditional intelligence hierarchies. Rather than building comprehensive in-house capabilities, Bellingcat leverages distributed expertise across a global network of contributors with specialized skills in areas including satellite imagery analysis, weapons identification, data visualization, and regional expertise. This networked model—where capabilities emerge from connectivity rather than centralization—creates organizational resilience and analytical depth exceeding what similarly resourced traditional organizations could achieve.

Bellingcat’s impact has inspired similar organizations worldwide, creating a growing ecosystem of specialized OSINT entities with distinct focuses. The Syrian Archive documents war crimes through digital preservation of evidence. The Digital Forensic Research Lab analyzes disinformation operations and digital manipulation. C4ADS tracks illicit networks through data fusion approaches. Collectively, these organizations represent an emerging “fifth estate” conducting oversight, investigation, and analysis functions traditionally reserved for state intelligence without corresponding institutional constraints or classification limitations.

The expansion of non‑state analytic hubs raises a credibility paradox. On one hand, Bellingcat, C4ADS, and the Syrian Archive often gain greater public trust because their methods and data are transparent—any reader can replicate a geolocation or satellite comparison. On the other hand, because they lack sovereign authority and sometimes formal oversight, governments can dismiss their findings as “unverified” or fake news. The decisive variable is methodological transparency: open datasets, step‑by‑step sourcing, and peer replication have become the new currency of credibility, often offsetting the absence of state imprimatur.

Strategic Implications

For non-state actors engaged in irregular warfare, this intelligence democratization creates unprecedented strategic opportunities. Insurgent organizations can develop sophisticated understanding of adversary deployments, identify protection vulnerabilities, and document human rights violations for narrative advantage without requiring state sponsorship or specialized technical assistance. The resulting intelligence asymmetry fundamentally alters irregular warfare dynamics by reducing the information advantages state actors historically maintained.

Ukraine’s use of OSINT networks during the current conflict demonstrates this advantage. By combining government intelligence with crowdsourced reporting, commercial satellite analysis, and specialized OSINT organizations tracking Russian deployments, they developed battlefield awareness exceeding their own institutional capabilities. This enabled precision targeting and strategic communication supported by publicly verifiable evidence that shapes international narratives while maintaining operational security advantages.

For traditional intelligence agencies, this transformation creates both challenges and opportunities. The greatest challenge emerges through operational security implications: activities once conducted with reasonable invisibility now risk potential documentation through publicly available means. This transparency pressure fundamentally changes covert action risk calculations, as operations historically conducted with plausible deniability now face substantial attribution risks through OSINT methods regardless of traditional tradecraft quality.

This transformation also creates personnel challenges as government agencies increasingly compete with private OSINT organizations for analytical talent. Intelligence professionals now have unprecedented opportunities outside of traditional agencies, forcing institutional adaptation through revised career paths, compensation structures, and operational practices to retain specialized expertise.

However, traditional agencies can also leverage this ecosystem through what former CIA Deputy Director Carmen Medina calls “intelligence integration,” where classified collection focuses on gaps that open sources cannot fill while leveraging public analysis for context, corroboration, and amplification. This combination of open and classified sources can create more comprehensive understanding than either approach alone, particularly when addressing complex transnational challenges.

Military operations face disruption through this intelligence democratization. Movements once hidden from adversary collection now face monitoring through commercial satellites, enabling even modestly resourced opponents to track deployments, identify patterns, and target vulnerabilities with precision. The 2022 Russian invasion planning became public months before execution, in part, through commercial satellite documentation of their buildup, demonstrating how even major powers can no longer shield operational preparations from global observation regardless of classification measures or information control attempts.

For policymakers, perhaps the most significant implication emerges through narrative competition. When civilian airline MH17 was shot down, Russian authorities expected to control the narrative through traditional information dominance. Instead, Bellingcat’s comprehensive open-source investigation established an evidence-based counter-narrative that progressively gained credibility through its transparency and methodological rigor. Open-source investigations’ ability to challenge official narratives creates fundamentally different information environments, which require sophisticated engagement strategies beyond traditional classification-based approaches.

Despite these advantages, OSINT has important limitations. Verification remains challenging without corroborating classified sources, especially when actors deliberately manipulate open sources and the truth is ambiguous at best. Questions of reliability persist—some view non-state OSINT as more credible due to its transparency and independence from government narratives, while others question its legitimacy without official sanction. Additionally, OSINT organizations struggle with sustainability challenges, uncertain funding models, and potential legal vulnerabilities when handling sensitive information without institutional protections.

The Future of Intelligence Democratization

The OSINT revolution represents a structural rather than temporary transformation in the global intelligence landscape. As commercial satellite resolution improves, machine learning tools become increasingly accessible, and analytical methodologies evolve, the capability gap between institutional and open-source intelligence will likely narrow further.

For military and intelligence practitioners, this environment requires fundamental reassessment of operational security assumptions, collection priorities, and analytical frameworks. Operations must be planned with the assumption of continuous observation rather than periodic collection. Collection should prioritize information unavailable through open sources rather than duplicating publicly accessible data. Analysis must integrate open-source insights alongside classified information to develop comprehensive understanding exceeding what either approach alone could generate.

Perhaps most significantly, this transformation requires conceptual evolution beyond traditional notions of “intelligence as information monopoly” toward understanding it as an analytical advantage within transparent environments. When multiple actors can access similar information, advantage shifts from exclusive collection toward superior analysis, contextual understanding, and effective utilization rather than information control alone. This conceptual shift represents perhaps the most challenging but essential adaptation for traditional security organizations navigating this transformed landscape.

The democratization of intelligence through open-source methods has shattered state information monopolies. That visibility shifts the center of gravity in irregular warfare from hidden collection to rapid analysis and transparent proof. Commanders who ignore this shift will fight blind while adversaries shape the narrative and exploit newly unmasked vulnerabilities. The answer is not tighter secrecy but smarter fusion—pairing classified sensors with public feeds, stress-testing plans against commercial satellites, and training every staff cell to validate OSINT at speed. In a battlespace where anyone can see, verify, and broadcast, advantage belongs to forces that turn radical transparency into faster, sharper decisions.

Josh Luberisse is a researcher and author specializing in asymmetric warfare, cybersecurity, and intelligence studies. He writes at the intersection of emerging technologies and irregular conflict, with a focus on how non-state actors are leveraging new capabilities to challenge traditional power structures.

Views expressed in this article solely reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Main Image: Image generated by ChatGPT using DALL·E, OpenAI (August 14, 2025).

16. Zelensky and European Leaders Press for Security Guarantees in Meeting with Trump

LiveUpdated

Aug. 18, 2025, 4:26 p.m. ET17 minutes ago

Live Updates: Zelensky and European Leaders Press for Security Guarantees in Meeting with Trump

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that a full prisoner exchange was also essential to ending the war. Other European leaders also expressed their support for a cease-fire.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/18/us/trump-zelensky-ukraine-putin

Here’s the latest.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met with President Trump and an extraordinary delegation of European leaders at the White House on Monday, seeking to defend his nation’s interests as Mr. Trump presses for a quick peace agreement with Russia that would require Ukraine to make sweeping concessions.

Wearing a black suit instead of his usual military clothing, and backed by European presidents and prime ministers who had rushed to Washington to support him, Mr. Zelensky was greeted warmly by Mr. Trump. Inside the Oval Office, the two presidents showed few signs of their once-frayed relationship, talked positively about the United States’ playing a role in security guarantees for Ukraine, and expressed their eagerness to arrange a trilateral meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

But details of any progress toward peace were scarce. And Mr. Zelensky, now three and a half years into a war instigated by Russia, is expected to soon confront a difficult choice: surrender territory in exchange for vague promises for Ukraine’s future security, or hold his ground and risk reigniting Mr. Trump’s anger.

During the portion of a meeting with European leaders and Mr. Zelensky that was open to reporters, Mr. Trump listened as the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and President Emmanuel Macron of France pressed for a cease-fire, something Mr. Trump had said on Friday he wanted but abandoned as a condition after he met on Friday with Mr. Putin in Alaska.

The initial interactions were a striking departure from the combative tone of Mr. Zelensky’s previous visit to the White House in February, when Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated him in the Oval Office on live television. Mr. Vance said nothing this time, and both presidents were genial. Mr. Zelensky absorbed jokes about his black suit and handed Mr. Trump a letter his wife had written to the first lady, Melania Trump.

On Monday, Mr. Trump, a skeptic of multilateral alliances and deeply desiring of a Nobel Peace Prize, was not specific about what security guarantees for Ukraine would look like, although he said the U.S. would help in some way, and he did not rule out involving American troops. He said he believed he could secure a joint meeting with Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky “if everything works out well today,” and that there was a “reasonable chance in ending the war” through such a meeting.

Mr. Trump told reporters, with Mr. Zelensky sitting beside him, that he had communicated indirectly with Mr. Putin earlier on Monday, and would speak with him later in the day.

Mr. Trump also continued to push back on criticism that he had given Mr. Putin a major diplomatic victory by hosting him for a summit in Alaska, asserting that it had been difficult for Mr. Putin to come to the United States. In reality, it was the first time Mr. Putin had been warmly embraced in the West since the war made him an international pariah, and he seemed to delight at the opportunity to take part.

While Mr. Zelensky said he was ready for a trilateral meeting, he has steadfastly rejected ceding land to Russia. But as Mr. Trump has aligned more closely with Russia after his warm meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Zelensky now faces increased pressure to persuade the United States that Ukraine should get a better deal.

Mr. Trump has swung between saying in their last Oval Office meeting that Mr. Zelensky does not hold “the cards” in the war, to more recently expressing public frustration that Mr. Putin was stringing him along and agreeing to sell more arms to European nations that would be earmarked for Ukraine. Asked at the outset of their Monday meeting which side was in better position now, Mr. Trump said he didn’t want to discuss that, and repeated his oft-stated desire an end to the fighting.

In a sign of the alarm among allies, a posse of European leaders — including Keir Starmer of Britain, Mr. Macron, and two leaders whom Mr. Trump generally likes, Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Alexander Stubb of Finland — had rushed to join Monday’s meetings in an effort to show solidarity with Ukraine and “to defend the interests of the Europeans,” according to Mr. Macron.

Several top European officials have warned that if Mr. Putin, who has a history of breaking diplomatic commitments, is not stopped in Ukraine, he could try to take more European territory by force.

Here’s what else to know:

Suiting up: During his famously acrimonious meeting with Mr. Trump in March, Mr. Zelensky’s military-style attire became a talking point. On Monday, perhaps wary of a repeat, the Ukrainian president adopted a more statesmanlike ensemble: black field jacket, black shirt and black slacks. Mr. Trump took note.
Deadly strikes: Hours before the meetings in Washington, Russian attacks in the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia killed at least 10 people, including a child, and injured dozens of others, the Ukrainian authorities said. Mr. Zelensky condemned the strikes as a deliberate attempt to put pressure on Ukraine amid the talks.
Putin’s plan: Before meeting with Mr. Putin on Friday in Alaska, Mr. Trump had said that there would be “severe consequences” if the Russian leader did not agree to a cease-fire. But since the meeting, Mr. Trump has backed Mr. Putin’s plan for skipping cease-fire discussions and proceeding to a sweeping peace agreement based on Ukraine ceding land to Russia, which now occupies almost 20 percent of Ukraine.

Show less

Aug. 18, 2025, 4:15 p.m. ET28 minutes ago

Neil MacFarquhar

Russia reaffirms opposition to deploying NATO troops in Ukraine as part of a security guarantees.

Image

NATO troops at a military exercise in June.Credit...Louisa Gouliamaki/Reuters

Russia, seeking to emphasize its stance on peace negotiations as European leaders gathered in the White House, issued a lengthy statement on Monday rejecting the deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine as part of any security guarantees.

The statement, issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry, also criticized Britain for pushing the idea, part of a long tradition of blaming London for Western moves that Moscow deems hostile to Russia.

The statement raised further questions about what the United States and Russia discussed in the Alaska summit on Friday. Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, said on CNN on Sunday that Moscow had agreed that Washington and its European allies could extend security guarantees to Ukraine that would resemble NATO’s collective defense mandate as part of any deal to end the conflict.

“We reaffirm our repeatedly stated position of categorical rejection of any scenarios involving the presence of a military contingent from NATO countries in Ukraine,” the Foreign Ministry said in its statement.

Aside from Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, the leaders of various members of the military alliance were at the White House on Monday, including from Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Finland.

Just before his meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, President Trump was asked whether the United States would send American troops to Ukraine as part of any peacekeeping effort. Mr. Trump did not answer the question directly, but said that there would be a lot of help when it comes to security.

“We’re going to help them out, also, we’ll be involved,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly pushed for security guarantees for Ukraine to make sure that Russia won’t just agree to a deal and then invade Ukraine again after regrouping. When asked by a reporter what kind of security guarantees he wanted, Mr. Zelensky said: “Everything.”

Sitting next to the Ukrainian leader, Mr. Trump continued offering vague statements about Kyiv’s security guarantees.

“We will give them very good protection and very good security,” Mr. Trump said, without offering specifics.

Kim Barker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

17. Breaking NATO’s Cult of the Urban Offense

Excerpts:

History provides clear examples. In Ortona in December 1943, German forces lured Canadian troops into a school with light resistance, then detonated pre-planted explosives and killed an entire section. They used the same tactic days later against a full platoon in another building. These deceptions worked so well that Canadian forces began using similar methods.

Nearly eighty years later, Ukrainian forces applied the same principle in Bakhmut. On March 27, 2023, they set charges in a building later occupied by Russian troops. Once the enemy was inside, they brought it down, killing those within.

These are not relics of past wars. They are enduring lessons in dispersion, deception, and timing. NATO forces must stop treating survivability as fixed protection and start treating it as active control over the enemy’s decision-making process.

Defense is not simply the absence of offense. It is a complementary function that requires its own mindset, planning, and discipline. Effective urban defense demands deliberate integration of deception, maneuver, timing, and resilience.

Urban defense lacks glamour. It does not resemble parade-ground doctrine. It is complex, costly, and often thankless. Yet history shows that when defenders succeed in cities, it is usually because they were well prepared or because the attackers employed poor operational planning and tactics. Russia has demonstrated the latter repeatedly in Ukraine.

NATO already has the doctrine. What it lacks is urgency. In the next war, especially in the opening days, urban defense may be the only factor that prevents forward units from being destroyed. NATO was built to deter war through strength. That strength begins with the recognition that the first blow may fall on its defenders. They must be ready to absorb it with discipline and adaptation, not outdated assumptions.

NATO must be able to hold cities under fire, counterattack with precision, delay until reinforcements arrive, and transition to the offensive when conditions allow. Offense and defense are not opposites. They are interdependent. To focus on only one is to plan for failure.

The cult of the urban offense must end.

Breaking NATO’s Cult of the Urban Offense - Modern War Institute

John Spencer, Stuart Lyle and Jayson Geroux | 08.16.25

mwi.westpoint.edu · by John Spencer · August 16, 2025

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In doctrine, dogma dies hard. Nowhere is this more evident than in NATO’s enduring obsession with the offense, particularly in the terrain of the urban environment. Despite being a fundamentally defensive alliance, most NATO exercises, training courses, and operational plans focus on seizing ground, breaching defenses, and clearing strongpoints. The result is a dangerous conceptual imbalance: armies that are prepared to attack in cities but not to defend them. In reality, they will likely have to do the latter before they ever do the former.

This is not an abstract concern. If conflict erupts in NATO’s sphere of interest, the first units to make contact will almost certainly be defending, not attacking. An adversary is likely to have the important first-mover advantage, seizing the initiative by making the opening moves. Initial objectives in such conflicts will undoubtedly include those large urban areas that straddle the main transportation infrastructure leading farther toward the adversary’s objectives. Potential adversaries know this in advance. They will plan to mass fires, integrate uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) with thermobaric payloads, and conduct urban shaping operations before launching a combined arms assault. They will not wait for NATO to organize a counterattack. War will come to the defenders.

Why, then, are NATO militaries still preparing to assault someone else’s trenches instead of holding their own?

The Cult of the Urban Offense

The roots of this imbalance lie in what can only be described as a cult of the urban offense. It is baked into NATO doctrine, into training centers, and into the very language of tactical education. Urban warfare is taught almost exclusively through the narrow lens of clearing buildings, breaching doors, assaulting intersections, and suppressing enemy strongpoints. The imagery is kinetic, aggressive, and built around a World War II model of urban combat that focuses almost entirely on the tactical level.

That model is outdated. NATO instructors still teach tactics developed to defeat Axis defenders in fortified cities. But modern adversaries are not relying on bunkers and machine gun nests. They are using thermobaric weapons, precision-guided bombs, loitering munitions, tandem-charge rocket-propelled grenades, and multispectral UAV reconnaissance. A shoulder-fired rocket that once might have created a breach in a wall now flattens a room, an entire floor, or even a whole building. In Ukraine, even basic UAVs are delivering thermobaric payloads through second-story windows.

Yet our tactics have not caught up. NATO battalions in the Baltics still train to assault trench lines. But whose trenches? If Russia crosses the border, NATO’s first mission is to hold ground, not to seize it. We are preparing to storm positions that we should already be occupying.

How Training Shapes Thinking

The problem runs deeper than doctrine. The way we train shapes the way we think. When soldiers spend months rehearsing assaults but never practice layered defense or mobile delay operations, they internalize a false belief that success only comes from attacking. Urban exercises often end at the point of entry (the break-in), not with the enemy’s inevitable counterattack. There is little emphasis on hasty defense after seizure, even though many major urban battles such as Stalingrad, Ortona, Aachen, Grozny, Fallujah, Mosul, Marawi, and Sieverodonetsk required forces to shift from offense to defense, sometimes repeatedly.

Urban training environments make this worse. Most NATO sites are sterile and overly simplified. They consist of a few one- or two-story buildings arranged in a grid, with no interior clutter, no civilian presence, no collateral damage, and no realistic fire effects. These facilities are useful for rehearsing movement drills but do not prepare troops to survive real contact. No NATO unit trains under thermobaric blasts crashing through upper floors or autocannon fire ripping through multiple walls. No site simulates the violence of joint fires in dense terrain or the intensity of enemy shaping operations that strike everything around a defensive position.

Effective urban defense involves three integrated components:

Perimeter force shapes enemy forces’ approach and contests their initial entry into the urban area.
Disruption force engages enemy forces after a break-in, imposing delays, attrition, and disorganization as they attempt to exploit their gains.
The main defensive area holds the majority of the defending force, positioned where the attacker—already shaped and degraded—will be halted or defeated.

Most training areas are too small to field all three layers together. Without scale, units cannot rehearse the complex command and control needed for modern urban defense. In many cases, the attacking force already knows where defensive positions will be, which eliminates the need for deception, reconnaissance, or adaptive planning.

This failure to replicate real-world conditions reinforces outdated thinking. If soldiers only train in sanitized environments, they will not learn how quickly a position can be located, targeted, and destroyed. If they never experience fire effects such as rounds passing through concrete, they will not understand the limits of cover or the importance of dispersion, concealment, and movement.

The lack of depth also prevents defenders from practicing fallback routes, alternate positions, and layered deception. Units become conditioned to static defense. And yet, many NATO militaries still express confidence in their ability to conduct urban operations at scale.

The British Army’s Land Operating Concept, published in 2023, sets out how the British Army thinks it will fight peer adversaries in conventional wars. It states:

Whilst fighting hard to survive, [the deployed force] will spoil the enemy’s advance up to the urban fringe, contest the break-in battle, block avenues of approach, and conduct dynamic urban defence to drive the enemy’s early culmination.

This concept is sound, but it assumes a level of strength, initiative, and air superiority that may not exist at the outset of a high-end war. It also assumes a level of training that currently remains insufficient.

We must stop thinking of defense as a temporary pause before resuming the offense. Counterattacks are essential, but they succeed only when built on a foundation of preparation, terrain shaping, and flexible maneuver. Urban defense demands the same intensity of training, resourcing, and doctrinal clarity as any offensive operation. NATO must learn not just how to seize cities, but how to hold them.

A Call for Mobile Urban Defense

It is time to reset. NATO must train for mobile urban defense, not just offensive clearing. This requires a doctrinal and cultural shift—starting with a new mindset that treats defense as an active, adaptive operation, not a static pause before the next assault. Such a shift should be built on key, fundamental principles.

First, defending forces must limit the attacker’s options. One of the defender’s most pressing challenges in urban terrain is poor situational awareness in the surrounding environment. Line of sight is limited, and urban clutter obscures movement and intent. While this affects both sides, attackers often retain the initiative and usually enjoy better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance coverage from the outset. This gives them more options for break-in points than most defenders can realistically cover.

The solution is shaping the battlespace before contact. Urban defenders must find ways to constrain enemy maneuver and channel it into predictable, killable avenues. At the operational level, this can be done through terrain denial, as seen when Ukrainian forces flooded areas north of Kyiv in 2022, limiting Russian avenues of approach. At the tactical level, it can mean reducing road access into urban zones—much like the German defense in Ortona (1943), where the defenders funneled Canadian troops into narrow axes of advance to lure them into kill zones. The goal is economy of force: to avoid expending combat power on areas that will be bypassed or isolated and to instead focus on decisive terrain.

Second, dispersion within the local urban environment must be maximized. NATO forces must abandon the one building, one squad mentality. Instead, available construction and fortification materials should be used to reinforce a distributed network of mutually supporting buildings. This creates layered strongpoints that can deliver interlocking fields of fire, absorb attrition in stages, and delay the enemy’s tempo.

Defenders should prepare loopholes for overlapping fires, establish mouseholes for concealed movement and fallback, and construct alternate positions that are ready for rapid displacement. These routes should be obscured from overhead observation to reduce vulnerability to UAV detection and indirect fire. Camouflage and concealment remain essential. Avoiding enemy intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance entirely is all but impossible, so survivability depends on signature reduction so fighting positions are not targetable or worth the attacker’s munition.

During the early phases of the 2022 Battle of Mariupol, Ukrainian Marines employed this principle effectively—operating in dispersed teams of ten to fifteen soldiers across multiple low-rise buildings. Each position provided mutual support with antitank guided missiles, snipers, and machine guns. Because the positions were spread out and not obviously fortified, Russian forces had to expend significant effort to clear each one—often under fire and only with artillery or armor support. When encirclement became a threat, Ukrainian units withdrew in good order to secondary defensive lines.

Third, building fortified strongpoints is important, but commanders must also enable repositioning through a mobile defense. NATO doctrine still emphasizes heavily hardened static defenses, often with substantial construction materials inside and outside buildings. This approach consumes time, attracts attention, and becomes a magnet for precision fires.

Once a building is visibly fortified, it presents the attacker with two simple choices: bypass or destroy. Either way, the defender loses. The better approach is to build strongpoints that do not appear as such. They should offer enough protection to survive the first exchange, deliver damage, and then be abandoned before they are destroyed. When the trap is sprung and the attacker reacts with firepower, the defender must already be displacing to alternate positions.

Commanders must plan for this. Pre-sited indirect fire should cover withdrawal routes and threaten enemy flanks. By combining minimal signature strongpoints with constant mobility, defenders can stretch the attacker’s resources, preserve their own force, and set conditions for the next phase: the counterattack.

NATO’s Way Ahead

Breaking free of dogma is difficult, and breaking up the cult of the urban offense will be challenging. But there are things the alliance and its members can do now to begin meeting this challenge and develop a more lethal force, ready for all the military problems cities will present to them. First and foremost, it is understanding the modern threat is vital. NATO forces must prepare for the tools and tactics adversaries are already using. These include thermobaric weapons, massed UAVs, large-caliber autocannons, and layered reconnaissance systems. Defenders need to understand enemy arming distances, anticipate shaping fires on known positions, and grasp how targets are identified and struck in real time.

The ongoing war in Ukraine provides a clear warning. Russia has employed thermobaric rockets, loitering munitions, and precision drone-guided fires to overwhelm fixed defenses. In Mariupol and Bakhmut, they systematically struck hide sites, logistics nodes, command centers, and fallback routes before committing ground forces.

These threats are not hypothetical. They are present now. NATO units must train under conditions that reflect this reality. Thermobarics can destroy a strongpoint from within. UAVs can direct fire with real-time accuracy. Any defense plan that ignores these capabilities is flawed from the start.

The modern urban battlefield will not forgive unprepared forces. NATO must stop planning for yesterday’s war and start training for the threats already in play.

Second, NATO militaries’ preparation for defending cities must recognize the importance of counterattacks. Counterattacks are not optional in urban defense. They are essential. Well-timed strikes can stall the attacker’s momentum, inflict disproportionate casualties, and create critical windows to reposition, reset, withdraw, or buy time for reinforcements to arrive.

History makes this clear. During the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet 62nd Army repeatedly counterattacked to hold ground. The October 1944 counterattack by the 1st SS Battalion in Aachen forced US forces to regroup and rewrite their assault plan. It did not win the battle, but it delayed the American advance and inflicted significant cost. In Grozny in 1994, Chechen fighters inflicted heavy losses through urban counterattacks, forcing Russian forces to withdraw and replan. In Mosul from 2016 to 2017, Islamic State fighters launched daily counterattacks with suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, UAVs, and small units. These actions disrupted Iraqi tempo and conditioned coalition units to wait for additional firepower before each movement. The same approach was seen in Marawi and Sieverodonetsk, where defenders counterattacked after nearly every engagement. In Sieverodonetsk, Ukraine’s International Legion repeatedly forced Russian units to resecure ground they had just seized.

Finally, decentralizing survivability is vital. Urban defenders must be positioned in ways that make them difficult to target decisively. This does not mean avoiding detection altogether. It means creating uncertainty. Enemy forces should never be confident about what to strike or whether a position is still occupied. The goal is to waste their time, effort, and firepower chasing ghosts.

Every building enemy units target should either be empty or deliberately used as bait. Either way, they expend resources and lose tempo. Survivability depends less on hardened positions and more on forcing the attacker into repeated mistakes.

History provides clear examples. In Ortona in December 1943, German forces lured Canadian troops into a school with light resistance, then detonated pre-planted explosives and killed an entire section. They used the same tactic days later against a full platoon in another building. These deceptions worked so well that Canadian forces began using similar methods.

Nearly eighty years later, Ukrainian forces applied the same principle in Bakhmut. On March 27, 2023, they set charges in a building later occupied by Russian troops. Once the enemy was inside, they brought it down, killing those within.

These are not relics of past wars. They are enduring lessons in dispersion, deception, and timing. NATO forces must stop treating survivability as fixed protection and start treating it as active control over the enemy’s decision-making process.

Defense is not simply the absence of offense. It is a complementary function that requires its own mindset, planning, and discipline. Effective urban defense demands deliberate integration of deception, maneuver, timing, and resilience.

Urban defense lacks glamour. It does not resemble parade-ground doctrine. It is complex, costly, and often thankless. Yet history shows that when defenders succeed in cities, it is usually because they were well prepared or because the attackers employed poor operational planning and tactics. Russia has demonstrated the latter repeatedly in Ukraine.

NATO already has the doctrine. What it lacks is urgency. In the next war, especially in the opening days, urban defense may be the only factor that prevents forward units from being destroyed. NATO was built to deter war through strength. That strength begins with the recognition that the first blow may fall on its defenders. They must be ready to absorb it with discipline and adaptation, not outdated assumptions.

NATO must be able to hold cities under fire, counterattack with precision, delay until reinforcements arrive, and transition to the offensive when conditions allow. Offense and defense are not opposites. They are interdependent. To focus on only one is to plan for failure.

The cult of the urban offense must end.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.

Stuart Lyle is the urban operations research lead for the UK-based Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). His work is varied and has included designing force concepts for the British Army to improve effectiveness in urban combat. He led Dstl’s Future Cities study which looked at global trends in urbanization and their implications for military operations.

Major Jayson Geroux is an infantry officer with The Royal Canadian Regiment and is currently with the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre. He has been a fervent student of and has been involved in urban operations training for over two decades. He is an equally passionate military historian and has participated in, planned, executed, and intensively instructed on urban operations and urban warfare history for the past twelve years. He has served thirty years in the Canadian Armed Forces, which included operational tours to the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Afghanistan.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. Wesley Riley, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by John Spencer · August 16, 2025

18. Zelensky survives another episode of the Trump show

Excerpts:

Perhaps the most important signal from the meeting was Mr Trump’s apparent openness to security guarantees for Ukraine. Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy, who was also present in the Oval Office meeting, had suggested a day earlier that America was open to “Article Five-like” guarantees and that Russia had accepted this idea. It is not clear what that would mean in practice. Mr Trump said Ukraine would have a “lot of help” as part of any deal. European forces would be the “first line of defence”, he said, perhaps alluding to British-French-led plans for a military deployment in Ukraine, but “we’re going to help them out, we’ll be involved.”

Mr Zelensky, having learnt from the acrimony earlier in the year, was fulsome in his praise of Mr Trump, avoiding any hint of disagreement. But in practice, he faces a difficult task. The notion of Ukraine voluntarily giving up the heavily fortified western sections of the Donbas, a region in the south-east of Ukraine, is anathema to a vast majority of Ukrainians. As well as worsening Ukraine’s military position, it could also destabilise the country politically. Mr Zelensky said that he had shown Mr Trump “a lot of details on the battlefield” on a map in the Oval Office.

In contrast, Ukrainian officials are more open to the idea of a freeze. “The baseline is stopping at the line of conflict,” says a senior Ukrainian official. There is confidence that a short term deal is within reach, but many doubts over how long it will last. “We will be in conflict with each other for a while, that’s for sure,” says the official. “Hundreds of years of shared history tell us that.”

Europe | A cordial meeting

Zelensky survives another episode of the Trump show

America hints at providing security guarantees for Ukraine

https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/08/18/zelensky-survives-another-episode-of-the-trump-show?etear=nl_today_1

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Photograph: Getty Images

Aug 18th 2025

4 min read

“I

CAN’T BELIEVE it,” said Donald Trump, America’s president, as he greeted Volodymyr Zelensky, his Ukrainian counterpart, outside the White House on August 18th. “I love it.” Mr Trump was referring to Mr Zelensky’s decision to bow to American pressure and wear a suit-like garment to the meeting, an issue that had contributed to an acrimonious blow-up in the Oval Office in February. It was a promising start to a pivotal summit, with a clutch of European leaders waiting in the wings to join the talks.

The meeting in Washington was the result of another summit, between Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, in Alaska last week. That meeting yielded what Mr Putin vaguely called “understandings”, with America giving up its demand for an upfront ceasefire in favour of a broader peace deal that would reportedly require Ukraine to hand over unoccupied territory in exchange for Russian promises to stop the war.

An on-camera discussion between Mr Trump and Mr Zelensky in the Oval Office shed little light on the details of the deal on the table. But the mood between the two men was surprisingly positive. Mr Zelensky handed Mr Trump a letter from his wife, Olena Zelenska, to Melania Trump, the first lady, who last week had written to Mr Putin about the plight of children caught up in the war. Mr Zelensky traded jokes with the American journalist who had provoked the row over his outfit in February and teased Mr Trump that he, too, might like to suspend national elections. It was a far cry from the last meeting between the two men, which had ended with Mr Zelensky being booted out of the White House. The conversation was “very good”, said Mr Zelensky, this time, as Mr Trump nodded in assent.

Photograph: Getty Images

On substantive matters, both men deflected the hard questions, at least in public. Mr Trump said that he had indirectly spoken to Mr Putin prior to the meeting and that he would call the Russian president afterwards to arrange a trilateral meeting—one that Mr Zelensky said he would welcome. Mr Trump explained why he had changed his mind on the question of a ceasefire, which he said was no longer needed: it could “disadvantage” one side, he suggested. “We’re not talking about a two-year peace, and then we end up in this mess again. We’re going to make sure that everything’s good.” In his later meeting with European leaders, Mr Trump acknowledged that leaders would “need to discuss…possible exchanges of territory.” But that seemed to stop well short of dictating such swaps, as has been feared.

Perhaps the most important signal from the meeting was Mr Trump’s apparent openness to security guarantees for Ukraine. Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s envoy, who was also present in the Oval Office meeting, had suggested a day earlier that America was open to “Article Five-like” guarantees and that Russia had accepted this idea. It is not clear what that would mean in practice. Mr Trump said Ukraine would have a “lot of help” as part of any deal. European forces would be the “first line of defence”, he said, perhaps alluding to British-French-led plans for a military deployment in Ukraine, but “we’re going to help them out, we’ll be involved.”

Mr Zelensky, having learnt from the acrimony earlier in the year, was fulsome in his praise of Mr Trump, avoiding any hint of disagreement. But in practice, he faces a difficult task. The notion of Ukraine voluntarily giving up the heavily fortified western sections of the Donbas, a region in the south-east of Ukraine, is anathema to a vast majority of Ukrainians. As well as worsening Ukraine’s military position, it could also destabilise the country politically. Mr Zelensky said that he had shown Mr Trump “a lot of details on the battlefield” on a map in the Oval Office.

In contrast, Ukrainian officials are more open to the idea of a freeze. “The baseline is stopping at the line of conflict,” says a senior Ukrainian official. There is confidence that a short term deal is within reach, but many doubts over how long it will last. “We will be in conflict with each other for a while, that’s for sure,” says the official. “Hundreds of years of shared history tell us that.”

After Mr Trump’s meeting with Mr Zelensky concluded, the two men walked out with no evidence of any disagreement in the Oval Office once the cameras had left. They were then joined by Mark Rutte, Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, Friedrich Merz, Keir Starmer, Alexander Stubb and Ursula von der Leyen, the leaders of NATO, France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Finland and the European Commission respectively—a significant show of diplomatic muscle designed to buttress Mr Zelensky’s position and shape Mr Trump’s thinking. Mr Trump lavished praise on each ally in turn. Negotiations over the exact nature of a security guarantee to Ukraine are expected to last for hours. But the prospect of an extraordinary meeting involving Mr Trump, Mr Putin and the man the Russian has sought to overthrow and kill, Mr Zelensky, could be drawing closer. ■

19. Russia's missile salvoes stretch US defenses from Kyiv to Taipei

But one positive aspect is that perhaps we can learn from these experiences and apply them to Korea. But missile defense is an expensive "business." Like terrorism you have to defend against all the threats (you have to be right all the time), but the bad guys just have to be successful once to achieve potential strategic effects. The prioritization of defense with high demand, low density assets has to be one of our most difficult challenges.

Russia's missile salvoes stretch US defenses from Kyiv to Taipei - Asia Times

Flagging missile defenses no longer just a Ukraine war problem but a global stress test of US strategy and capability

asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · August 18, 2025

Russia’s missiles are outpacing Ukraine’s defenses—and the implications reach well beyond Europe. From South Korea to Taiwan, the US and its allies face the same looming test: intercepting smarter, faster salvos before magazines run dry.

That picture is already visible in Ukraine, where the US Special Inspector General’s latest quarterly report says Kyiv is struggling to stop Russian ballistic missiles because Moscow has adapted its missile tactics in ways that strain Western-supplied air defense systems.

The Special Inspector General’s report notes that Russia has incorporated trajectory-shifting capabilities and mid-course maneuvering into its missiles, preventing them from flying along traditional, predictable arcs that systems like the US-made Patriot are designed to intercept.

Those adaptations have coincided with sharply worse outcomes. In a June 28 attack, Ukrainian forces shot down only one of seven incoming ballistic missiles, while during a massed July 9 strike—the largest since the war began—Ukraine managed to down or suppress just seven of 13 ballistic missiles, according to the same Inspector General report.

The battlefield math is compounded by saturation tactics: hundreds of drones and missiles launched in overlapping waves, forcing Ukraine to spread already limited interceptors thin. Ukrainian defenses, though bolstered by Western deliveries, remain insufficient in scale, and pauses in US assistance have further weakened readiness.

The inability to consistently intercept maneuvering ballistic missiles carries broader consequences. Those lessons resonate in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korea and China are integrating similar technologies into their arsenals, suggesting that Ukraine’s struggles foreshadow what US allies such as South Korea, Japan or Taiwan might face in a barrage.

North Korea may be an indirect beneficiary of Russia’s campaign. Starting in December 2023, Russia has fired North Korean ballistic missiles at Ukraine, with the accuracy of those systems improving from one–three kilometers to 50–100 meters Circular Error Probable (CEP) in February 2025.

The contours of that threat were sketched out earlier. Stéphane Delory and others note in a 2022 report for the Hague Code of Conduct (HCoC) against the Proliferation of Ballistic Missiles that the KN-23, KN-24, and KN-25 give North Korea a formidable short-range strike arsenal designed with defense penetration in mind.

Delory and others note that the KN-23 and KN-24 employ quasi-ballistic flight paths and skipping maneuvers, allowing erratic terminal-phase changes that complicate interception, while the KN-25 can fly at low trajectories to reduce exposure to defenses.

At the same time, they note North Korea has expanded its production infrastructure, including facilities for solid propellants and transporter-erector-launchers (TEL), giving it the capacity to manufacture and field these systems at scale.

The combination of maneuverability and mass production creates a credible saturation threat, with the potential to overwhelm the limited interceptor inventories available to Seoul and Tokyo in a crisis.

Taiwan faces a similar problem, with the added factor that China—whose economy is many times larger than those of Russia and North Korea—could deploy more advanced missile types and in greater quantities than either.

Noting Taiwan’s significant missile defense gaps, Tianran Xu mentions in an April 2025 Open Nuclear Network report that despite operating 21 Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC) and Tien Kung batteries, Taipei faces a severe interceptor shortfall, with only ~380 PAC-3 Cost Reduction Initiative (CRI) missiles and limited PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) deliveries expected by 2026.

Xu contrasts this shortfall by saying that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fields over 900 short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM), air-launched ballistic missiles (ALBM), and hundreds of guided rockets, overwhelming Taipei’s ability to sustain layered defense.

He also points out that the dual-use of surface-to-air missiles (SAM) against both aircraft and missiles strains stockpiles, while reliance on high-value interceptors for low-cost threats accelerates depletion.

US missile-defense units—overstretched and undersupplied—could be hard-pressed to defend US bases in South Korea and Japan, and current production rates may be insufficient to prepare Taiwan to stand up to a concerted effort to exhaust its defenses under blockade.

The War Zone (TWZ) mentions in July 2025 that the US Army’s Patriot force is critically overstretched, with only 14 deployable battalions strained by prolonged global deployments, including a 500-day rotation in CENTCOM.

TWZ notes this thin distribution leaves just three battalions assigned to the Indo-Pacific, raising strategic concerns should conflict erupt with China or North Korea.

It also states that the recent redeployment of a Patriot unit from the Pacific to Qatar underscores the vulnerability of US forces in South Korea and Japan, where layered missile defense is vital.

Industrial capacity is not keeping pace with demand. Business Insider reports this month that while US manufacturing is ramping rapidly—with Lockheed Martin expected to surpass 600 PAC-3 MSE interceptors this year and Raytheon increasing output of PAC-2 and Guidance Enhanced Missile (GEM-T)—global demand remains relentless, fueled by growing threats from Russia, Iran, and China.

Business Insider points out that despite industry investments and expanded supply chains, production timelines lag operational needs. The report warns that even if projected output increases to 1,130 interceptors by 2027, it may fall short in a high-intensity conflict.

Near term, Washington could still push for greater allied self-sufficiency by easing export controls, expanding licensing, and selectively sharing technology rather than relying exclusively on US-made Patriots.

Japan’s Type 03 Chu-SAM is the most realistic candidate for scaling, as US financing and access to critical subsystems would accelerate an already mature, indigenous program.

South Korea’s KM-SAM could benefit from targeted cooperation, though Seoul’s preference for autonomy and industrial competition with US firms may limit the depth of collaboration.

Taiwan’s Tien Kung, by contrast, is far more constrained by political sensitivities with China, making discreet US component support more plausible than overt funding or technology transfer.

Washington and its allies are also pursuing alternatives that could ease the arithmetic of defense. The US and its partners are accelerating the development of directed-energy weapons such as lasers and high-power microwaves, while railguns could also help address interceptor shortages, but adoption will depend on how quickly weight, power, cooling, durability, and cost issues are resolved.

Even if those hurdles are cleared, such systems would not arrive as a silver bullet. They would enter mixed defensive networks that still depend on kinetic interceptors for many targets, and any transition would have to be paced against mounting operational demands.

The convergence of missile threats in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific shows that no theater exists in isolation. Missile adaptations tested in Ukraine echo in North Korea’s barrages and point toward China’s far larger and more sophisticated arsenal, while US forces juggle finite interceptors across three fronts. Missile defense is no longer a regional problem but a global stress test of US strategy.

Unless Washington moves decisively to expand production, build allied capacity and advance technological solutions, adversaries will keep exploiting seams between these conflicts — stretching US defenses toward a breaking point.

asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · August 18, 2025

20. America Needs a 'China Tech Power Report' to Fight the New Cold War

America Needs a 'China Tech Power Report' to Fight the New Cold War

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Yuichiro Kakutani · August 18, 2025

Published on August 18, 2025 – 3:19 PM EDT – Key Points and Summary: The U.S.-China technology competition is being hindered by a lack of agreed-upon facts, leading to a fractured and ineffective policy debate.

-To solve this, Congress should mandate an annual “China Tech Power” report, mirroring the Pentagon’s influential “China Military Power” report.

-This unclassified document, supported by declassified intelligence, would provide a trusted, public baseline on China’s technological capabilities in areas like AI and semiconductors, the effectiveness of U.S. export controls, and the extent of Beijing’s military-civil fusion.

-Such a report is critical for aligning government and private sector strategies in this new Cold War.

The U.S. Needs A “China Tech Power Report”

The U.S.-China technology competition is heating up, but increasingly, policy discussions are playing out on a split screen. Take recent debates over technology export controls.

On one side, critics argue that export controls have failed to meaningfully delay Chinese tech development, pointing to impressive achievements of Chinese AI tools such as DeepSeek. On the other side, proponents claim that export controls have stalled Beijing’s progress in critical sectors and are essential for maintaining U.S. technological supremacy.

Vibrant debate on the U.S.-China tech competition is welcome. But sometimes it seems as though stakeholders are operating on completely different sets of facts.

For example, Jensen Hwang, CEO of U.S. technology firm NVIDIA, recently claimed that the Chinese military is not using chips produced by his company. Yet open-source researchers disagree, pointing to NVIDIA chips discovered in People’s Liberation Army (PLA) contracts.

There’s similar widespread disagreement on the scale of Chinese chip-smuggling activities.

Some former administration officials estimate that China has only smuggled 25,000 banned NVIDIA chips into the country. Other think tanks estimate that anywhere from 10,000 to several hundred thousands of banned chips may have been smuggled into China (with a median estimate of around 140,000). Lennart Heim, a RAND researcher, estimates that nearly 3 million TSMC chips that violated U.S. export controls likely ended up with Huawei.

The stakes of this debate could not be higher. And to have a proper debate, all sides must work from the same set of facts. Over the last decade, Washington has enacted wide-ranging export controls and sanctions to restrict Chinese access to U.S. technology. At the same time, the U.S. government has sought to accelerate technological development inside America’s borders.

These market interventions affect tens of billions of dollars in capital allocation, as well as the balance sheets of key technology firms – and they may well determine the balance of power in the China-U.S. New Cold War.

The Need for a China Tech Power Report

To solve the current factual disagreement, Congress should direct the Defense and Commerce Departments to work in consultation with the intelligence community to publish an annual China Tech Power report. The report should aspire to be the most detailed and trusted publicly available source of information on China’s technological capabilities.

Conceptually, this report would be similar to the Department of Defense’s annual China Military Power report, which plays an essential role in creating a baseline set of facts for D.C. policymakers to debate the state of the U.S.-China military balance.

Based on open-source information and declassified intelligence, the tech report would survey Chinese advances in critical technology areas from AI to robotics, identifying key government and corporate actors in China driving the research. It should also assess China’s access to semiconductors, gauging the impact of U.S. export controls and of Chinese efforts to circumvent those restrictions.

Such a report is critical, as key decisionmakers are non-government, private sector actors who do not have access to classified intelligence. And like the China Military Power report, this report could be published in unclassified form, with a classified annex as appropriate.

Currently, the China Military Power report plays a critical role in fostering informed debate by providing new information or confirming datapoints for which PLA watchers had only circumstantial evidence. A China Tech Power report could play a similar role in the tech domain.

In June, a senior Commerce Department official confirmed that U.S. export controls forced Huawei to cap Ascend chip production to 200,000 chips in 2025, a number far too low to meet Chinese domestic demand. A China Tech Power report could disclose the updated figures annually, thus keeping stakeholders informed.

A China Tech Power Report could also reaffirm facts that are widely suspected but not authoritatively confirmed. After DeepSeek’s new AI model astonished Western audiences, analysts quickly started to speculate about the company’s ties to the Chinese military. In June, the U.S. government confirmed that the Chinese AI company is aiding China’s military and intelligence operations.

A report could provide an opportunity for the government to publicly declare whether Chinese technology companies have ties to the PLA and China’s military-industrial complex.

Among other things, a future China Tech Power Report should include:

-A general assessment of Chinese technological advances in key areas such as AI, quantum, robotics, biotech, etc. For each tech area, this assessment should include: a list of major Chinese corporate, academic, and state actors active in the field; gap analysis of whether the U.S. or China is ahead; evidence of PLA civil-military fusion; and an assessment of whether China is benefiting from licit and illicit tech transfers from the West.

-An assessment of what dual-use defense-applicable technology is currently reaching China from the United States or from American allies. This assessment would inform debate on what export controls are needed to keep defense technology out of the hands of the People’s Liberation Army.

-Key datapoints regarding China’s semiconductor industry and the impact of export controls, including: an estimate of China’s total high-end chip production capacity; assessment of the number of controlled chips that China has illegally acquired through smuggling; an assessment of the proportion of Chinese and Western chips in the server stacks of key Chinese companies such as DeepSeek; an estimate of the total number of high-end controlled chips that China has stockpiled prior to the imposition of export controls; an analysis on China’s efforts to develop a domestic alternative to controlled Western inputs such as EDA and chip-making tools; an analysis of Chinese domestic chips and how their technical capabilities compare with their U.S. counterparts; and the number of export licenses given to Chinese companies on the Entity List.

When it comes to U.S.-China relations, the technological power balance is becoming just as important as the military balance of power. It is long past time for the U.S. government to produce a China Tech Power report, which could prove even more consequential than the China Military Power report.

About the Author:

Yuichiro Kakutani is a Policy Advisor at The Heritage Foundation.

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nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Yuichiro Kakutani · August 18, 2025

21. The Enlightened Warrior: Applying Reason and Critical Thinking in Special Forces

My latest article but it is the photo below that is really interesting.

Please note the photo the great editorial team at Small Wars Journal chose for this article. Maj Gen Michael Martin is the former commander of Special Operations Command Korea (and I knew him at the National War College) and he appears to be visiting the US and a Special Operations unit with his Korean Special Forces counterparts. And note the painting of President Kennedy in the background who of course is the godfather of Special Forces having authorized the Green Beret for the Special Forces Regiment. I think our editorial team chose this photo because they know I am in Korea this month.

The Enlightened Warrior: Applying Reason and Critical Thinking in Special Forces

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/18/enlightened-warrior-special-forces/

by David Maxwell

08.18.2025 at 06:00am

Enlightenment values of reason and critical thinking are essential for Special Forces operators to effectively analyze complex situations and make sound decisions in the field.

In an era marked by complexity, ambiguity, and persistent threats in the gray zone of conflict, the modern Special Forces operator must be more than a warrior, he must be an Enlightened Warrior. Drawing from the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Locke, Kant, and Camus, the Special Forces soldier embodies a rare fusion of tactician, strategist, philosopher, and statesman. This essay argues that Enlightenment values, especially reason, critical thinking, and the pursuit of human dignity, are not only relevant but essential to the modern Special Forces (SF) practitioner, particularly within the realms of irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and political warfare.

The Enlightenment and the Warrior Ethos

The Enlightenment, often called the Age of Reason, championed the capacity of human beings to think for themselves. Immanuel Kant famously described it as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” which he defined as “the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another.” For the Special Forces soldier, this ethos of independent thinking is fundamental. Operating in austere environments, often with incomplete information and high political stakes, SF personnel must rely on their capacity for reasoned judgment and moral clarity.

The SF soldier is “a Locke-ian liberal, a Burke-ian conservative, and a Stoic pragmatist,” reflecting a nuanced blend of tradition and critical inquiry. Enlightenment values provide the intellectual framework for this synthesis. The ability to question assumptions, challenge dominant narratives, and think dialectically is not just a philosophical luxury; it is a tactical and strategic necessity.

The Philosophical Warrior: Locke and Kant in the Field

John Locke’s theory of government by consent and the right of revolution against tyranny offers a philosophical foundation for the Special Forces motto: De Oppresso Liber which loosely translated “to free the oppressed.” Locke asserts that when governments breach the social contract, the people retain the right to resist and establish new forms of governance. In this way, Special Forces support to resistance movements is not mere interference; it is aligned with a universal principle of self-determination.

Kant’s categorical imperative, to treat all individuals as ends in themselves and never as means, informs the ethical dimension of SF missions. Whether building indigenous capacity or conducting operations against violent non-state actors, the SF soldier must apply moral judgment. Kant warns of the dangers of treating individuals or communities instrumentally. Therefore, even in clandestine or kinetic missions, the Enlightened Warrior must remain grounded in moral law, not simply in tactical expediency.

Critical Thinking and the Irregular Battlespace

Irregular warfare (IW) demands adaptive thinking. As T.E. Lawrence wrote, “irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.” The irregular battlespace is human-centric, driven by political grievances, cultural complexity, and moral dilemmas. It is in this space. the liminal zone between peace and war, that Enlightenment principles offer clarity.

Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shifts is relevant here. Kuhn argued that scientific progress does not occur linearly but through revolutions in understanding. Similarly, SF must recognize when old models of counterinsurgency or foreign internal defense are no longer sufficient and must be replaced with new, situation-specific approaches. Kuhn’s notion of incommensurability, the idea that two paradigms may be incompatible, is critical when navigating the tension between national interests (sovereignty) and universal values (human rights and self-determination). Recognizing and resolving this tension requires dialectical reasoning.

The Quiet Professional and the Just War Tradition

Drawing from Cicero, Augustine, and the just war tradition, the Special Forces soldier is one who embodies prudence, justice, courage, and restraint. Enlightenment ethics do not demand pacifism but rather call for measured, morally defensible action. As Cicero wrote, “Wars, then, ought to be undertaken for this purpose, that we may live in peace, without injustice.”

In practice, this means that SF missions must be guided by clear political objectives, legitimate authority, and a just cause. Reason tempers aggression, ensuring that violence remains a last resort and that operations serve the higher purpose of enabling peace and justice. It also provides the foundation for discriminating between combatants and civilians, between legitimate resistance and terrorism, distinctions essential to ethical irregular warfare.

Postmodern Critique and Enlightenment Resilience

Some may argue that postmodernism has eroded the Enlightenment’s utility. Thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard critique grand narratives and universal truths, suggesting a relativism that seems antithetical to military ethics. However, postmodernism can sharpen the Enlightenment project rather than destroy it. As Nietzsche wrote, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Exposure to critique forces deeper reflection and more robust reasoning.

Albert Camus, for instance, acknowledges the absurdity of existence but still affirms the power of rebellion. His insistence that one can live ethically in an absurd world offers an existential grounding for resistance movements, particularly those supported by Special Forces. For Camus, rebellion is not nihilism; it is the assertion of human dignity in the face of oppression. This aligns directly with De Oppresso Liber and the SF commitment to aiding oppressed peoples in achieving freedom on their own terms.

The Intellectual Arsenal of the Modern SF Soldier

The future of conflict is cognitive as much as kinetic. Information warfare, influence campaigns, and ideological battles are fought not just with weapons, but with narratives and logic. As such, the Enlightened Warrior must be as skilled in reading Clausewitz and Cicero as in employing advanced weapons systems.

This demands a reimagination of Special Forces education. There is a need for a philosophical foundation akin to a modern De Officiis from Cicero – a guide to duties – for the SF soldier. Such a manual would integrate Locke’s social contract, Kant’s ethical imperatives, Camus’ moral rebellion, and Burke’s cautious conservatism. It would empower warriors not just to act, but to think—to assess what ought to be done, not merely what can be done.

Conclusion: Reason, Freedom, and the Warrior’s Calling

The Enlightened Warrior is not a contradiction. He is the culmination of centuries of philosophical evolution and the pragmatic needs of modern conflict. In the age of strategic competition, where gray zone threats dominate, it is not overwhelming force but reasoned judgment, ethical clarity, and intellectual resilience that will define victory.

Enlightenment values of reason, critical thinking, freedom, dignity are not abstract luxuries for the battlefield philosopher. They are practical tools for the Special Forces operator, guiding him through the moral fog of irregular warfare and enabling him to serve not as a conqueror, but as a liberator. By embracing these values, the SF soldier becomes not just a protector of the free world but a living embodiment of its highest ideals.

Tags: Army SOF, enlightened soldier, enlightenment, SOF, Special Forces soldier, United States Army Special Forces

About The Author

David Maxwell
David Maxwell is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel who has spent more than 30 years in the Asia Pacific region (primarily Korea, Japan, and the Philippines) as a practitioner, specializing in Northeast Asian Security Affairs and irregular, unconventional, and political warfare. He is the Vice President of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. He commanded the Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines during the war on terrorism and is the former J5 and Chief of Staff of the Special Operations Command Korea, and G3 of the US Army Special Operations Command. Following retirement, he was the Associate Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is a member of the board of directors of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the OSS Society, on the board of advisers of Spirit of America, and is a contributing editor to Small Wars Journal.

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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Conclusion:

The Inevitable Invasion is Over, Now What? Resistance in a Post-Invasion Taiwan

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Foundations of Resistance: Strategic, Geographic, and Political Dimensions of an Occupied Taiwan

Geographic Concerns and Insurgency Personnel

Preparing for Strategic Resistance

Political and Social Movements of the Insurgency

Future Projections and Implications

Conclusion

About The Author

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The Enlightened Warrior: Applying Reason and Critical Thinking in Special Forces