Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life – becoming a better person.

– Leo Tolstoy

"The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new."

– Socrates

"To understand the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

– Bertrand Russell

1. Trump Plans to Get Putin and Zelensky Talking. That’s Not Even the Hard Part.

2. Top Air Force general to exit in Hegseth’s latest shake-up of Pentagon

3. White House Officials Have Had It with Laura Loomer

4. Trump’s Stunning Foreign Policy By Walter Russell Mead

5. The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure

6. Trump Could End the Ukraine War, But America Might Not Like the Price

7. AI is about to reshape command structures that haven’t changed much since Napoleon

8. Russia launches largest attack of August on Ukraine after Trump-Zelenskyy meeting

9. Army moving out with cheaper Robotic Combat Vehicle competition, but with a new name

10. Army revamping hypervelocity cannon plan, eyeing new competitions

11. New Ukrainian Cruise Missile With Claimed 1,800-Mile Range Breaks Cover12.

12. In the 21st century, space is the new battlefield

13. Hamas Accepts Temporary Cease-Fire Deal After Rejecting Offer to End War

14. America's Counterattack on China’s Growing Influence in the Pacific Islands

15. The US Navy's Shipbuilding Crisis Is Real

16. US seeks shipbuilding expertise from South Korea and Japan to counter China

17. DeepSeek, Taiwan, and the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’

18. Pentagon moves AI office under R&D, raising fears it’s ‘demoting AI’

19. The urgent need to procure more THAAD interceptors

20. Rebuilding Combat Electromagnetic Warfare for U.S. Ground Forces

21. The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power

22. Lessons in Counterterrorism in Saudi Arabia’s Expulsion of Al-Qaeda in the Kingdom and Challenges Going Forward

1. Trump Plans to Get Putin and Zelensky Talking. That’s Not Even the Hard Part.

Excerpts:

Even if Putin supports a pact, there will be rampant skepticism about whether he will honor his promises, as Russia has broken formal commitments not to invade Ukraine.

“Is he prepared to let the rest of Ukraine go? Is he ready to acknowledge that he has lost Ukraine for good?” asked Charles Kupchan, who handled European affairs in former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. “We need answers to these questions to determine whether Putin is simply playing for time or negotiating in good faith.”

A meeting between Putin and Zelensky for the first time since 2019 would be dramatic, if one even comes together in the coming days. The format and the timing is still unclear, but if the high-profile gathering materializes, it would only signal that the toughest phase of negotiations had just begun—and with no guarantee of success.

“The next steps ahead are the more complicated ones now,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told Trump during Monday’s summit with Zelensky and top European leaders, offering a more sober assessment amid projections of unity at the White House.

Trump has acknowledged that ending the Ukraine-Russia war was harder than he expected, after boasting on the campaign trail that he could finalize a deal in 24 hours. The conflict, which began in 2014 with Russia’s seizure of Crimea and involved years of low-grade fighting before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of 2022, has become the world’s signature battle pitting a nuclear-armed aggressor against a smaller, former satellite state yearning to align itself more with Europe.

Forging a durable agreement that finally stops the bloodshed would prove a diplomatic coup for Trump, potentially defining his presidential legacy. But in a brutal sign of the difficulty, Russia launched deadly attacks at Ukraine the night before Zelensky’s Monday visit to the White House as well as drone and missile strikes during the summit.

Trump Plans to Get Putin and Zelensky Talking. That’s Not Even the Hard Part.

Even if the Russian leader supports a pact, skepticism is likely to follow as Moscow has previously broken promises not to attack Ukraine

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-plans-to-get-putin-and-zelensky-talking-thats-not-even-the-hard-part-f1e7f326

President Trump hosts a meeting with European leaders at the White House on Monday. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

By Alexander Ward

Follow, Alex Leary

Follow and Matthew Luxmoore

Updated Aug. 19, 2025 10:07 am ET

Quick Summary

President Trump says a summit between Russia and Ukraine is near to negotiate a deal ending Moscow’s invasion.View more

WASHINGTON—After months of effort and two grinding summits over four days, President Trump says an agreement between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to directly negotiate a deal ending Moscow’s invasion is close at hand.

Now comes the hard part.

It would be no small feat to get Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a room together. But brokering a cease-fire—let alone a lasting peace that deters Russia from invading Ukraine again—will be an even greater diplomatic challenge than Trump has faced so far.

There will be questions about whether the front lines should be frozen in other regions of Ukraine; what role, if any, European countries will have either at the negotiating table or in a reassurance force that protects Kyiv long term; and what security guarantees from Europe and the U.S. Zelensky wants that Putin can accept.

Even if Putin supports a pact, there will be rampant skepticism about whether he will honor his promises, as Russia has broken formal commitments not to invade Ukraine.

“Is he prepared to let the rest of Ukraine go? Is he ready to acknowledge that he has lost Ukraine for good?” asked Charles Kupchan, who handled European affairs in former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. “We need answers to these questions to determine whether Putin is simply playing for time or negotiating in good faith.”

A meeting between Putin and Zelensky for the first time since 2019 would be dramatic, if one even comes together in the coming days. The format and the timing is still unclear, but if the high-profile gathering materializes, it would only signal that the toughest phase of negotiations had just begun—and with no guarantee of success.

“The next steps ahead are the more complicated ones now,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told Trump during Monday’s summit with Zelensky and top European leaders, offering a more sober assessment amid projections of unity at the White House.

Trump has acknowledged that ending the Ukraine-Russia war was harder than he expected, after boasting on the campaign trail that he could finalize a deal in 24 hours. The conflict, which began in 2014 with Russia’s seizure of Crimea and involved years of low-grade fighting before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of 2022, has become the world’s signature battle pitting a nuclear-armed aggressor against a smaller, former satellite state yearning to align itself more with Europe.

Forging a durable agreement that finally stops the bloodshed would prove a diplomatic coup for Trump, potentially defining his presidential legacy. But in a brutal sign of the difficulty, Russia launched deadly attacks at Ukraine the night before Zelensky’s Monday visit to the White House as well as drone and missile strikes during the summit.

Loved ones mourn over the coffin of a Ukrainian soldier on Monday. Photo: roman pilipey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The site of a strike in Zaporizhzhia on Monday. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Moscow also said on Monday that any peacekeeping efforts involving North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, a proposal floated by Europeans and deemed by Zelensky as critical to Ukraine’s survival, are unacceptable.

Four days of negotiations that saw Trump host Putin at a military base in Alaska and Zelensky in Washington is already showing the warring parties remain far apart on a peace agreement.

Under a deal proposed by Putin during his Friday meeting with Trump, Ukraine would surrender its eastern Donbas region, including parts of Donetsk that Ukrainian forces still control. Ukraine has repeatedly said its constitution prevents it from surrendering territory to Russia, and it is busy building deep fortifications stretching hundreds of miles across the Donbas, a region roughly the size of West Virginia.

Some European officials believe that Putin’s demands were calculated precisely to produce a Ukrainian rejection—shifting the blame for a breakdown in talks to Kyiv and allowing Russia to press on with the war without a response from Washington.

Top Air Force general to exit in Hegseth’s latest shake-up of Pentagon

Gen. David Allvin will retire halfway through his four-year term, becoming the most recent senior military official to be forced out by the Trump administration.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/18/david-allvin-air-force-hegseth/

August 18, 2025 at 8:11 p.m. EDTYesterday at 8:11 p.m. EDT

Gen. David Allvin attends an Oval Office news briefing in March. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

By Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp

The chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. David Allvin, will retire two years into a four-year term, officials said Monday, marking the latest early ouster of a senior military officer under President Donald Trump.

The Air Force disclosed the move in a statement, saying that Allvin had announced that he plans to retire in early November. No successor was announced, and Allvin will continue to serve until one is confirmed by the Senate, the statement said.

Allvin was informed last week that he would be asked to retire and that the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted to go in another direction, said a person familiar with the matter, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. As a trade-off, the Pentagon would allow Allvin to announce the decision, this person said, adding, “It was certainly not his choice.”

Hegseth’s office did not respond to requests for comment. An Air Force spokesperson declined to comment.

Skip to end of carouselHelp us report on the Pentagon

The Washington Post wants to hear from Defense Department civilians and service members about changes within the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military. You can contact our reporters by email or Signal encrypted message:

Tara Copp: tara.copp@washpost.com or taracopp.06 on Signal.

Alex Horton: alex.horton@washpost.com or alexhorton.85 on Signal.

Dan Lamothe: dan.lamothe@washpost.com or danlamothe.30 on Signal.

End of carousel

Allvin’s impending departure follows the firings of several other senior military officers since Trump’s return to the White House this year, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the commandant of the Coast Guard and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Generals and admirals serving in less prominent roles also have been purged, sending shock waves through the Pentagon and much of the U.S. military, where stability typically is seen as an asset.

Follow Trump’s second term

One possibility to replace Allvin appears to be Gen. Thomas Bussiere, whom Trump nominated in July to become vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Bussiere has overseen Air Force Global Strike Command and its arsenal of nuclear weapons from headquarters at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana since 2022, and is highly regarded by senior political appointees at the Pentagon, two people familiar with the matter said.

In his current role, Bussiere oversaw aspects of Operation Midnight Hammer, the U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in June. The Trump administration has repeatedly touted the operation as a win.

Another person familiar with internal Air Force discussions said he was surprised it took as long as it did for the Trump administration to remove Allvin. Administration officials have been frustrated for some time with his oversight of preparations for a potential security crisis involving China, this person said.

Skip to end of carouselTrump presidency

We’re tracking Trump’s progress on campaign promises and legal challenges to his executive orders and actions.

End of carousel

Allvin said in his statement Monday that he is grateful to Trump, Hegseth and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink for the “opportunity to serve as the 23rd Air Force Chief of Staff.” He had previously served as the Air Force’s No. 2 officer for three years.

“More than anything, I’m proud to have been part of the team of Airmen who live out our core values of integrity, service and excellence every day as we prepare to defend this great nation,” Allvin said.

Meink, who was confirmed as the top political appointee in the Air Force in May, said in the same statement that the service is fortunate to have leaders such as Allvin.

“During his tenure, the Air Force has undertaken transformational initiatives that will enable Airmen to answer their nation’s call for decades to come,” Meink said. “General Allvin has been instrumental in my onboarding as the department’s 27th Secretary and I’m forever grateful for his partnership as well as his decades of exemplary service to our nation.”

What readers are saying

The comments express significant concern over the early retirement of Gen. David Allvin, suggesting it is part of a broader pattern of politically motivated firings under President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Many commenters fear this trend undermines military... Show more

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

Comments 1,463

Trump’s Stunning Foreign Policy

The president, like the U.S. relationship with Russia, is widely misunderstood.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-stunning-foreign-policy-3890fb97

By Walter Russell Mead

Aug. 18, 2025 5:38 pm ET

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, Aug. 18. Photo: andrew caballero-reynolds/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Alaska summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on Friday, followed by President Trump’s meeting Monday with Volodymyr Zelensky, stunned the world. Commentators railed against what they saw as Mr. Trump’s pusillanimous concessions to Mr. Putin in Alaska. They were then shocked by the U.S. president’s warm welcome to Mr. Zelensky at the White House, and shocked again by the Euro-American lovefest that followed the bilateral summit.

That shouldn’t surprise us. The relationship between Russia and the U.S., like the one between the U.S. and Israel, is important, emotionally charged and widely misunderstood.

Except for the Lend-Lease era during World War II, when American assistance was a matter of life and death for the Soviet Union, the two countries have historically not mattered much to each other as economic partners. A mix of geopolitics, culture and ideology have largely driven relations. Rivalry with Great Britain led Russia to tilt toward the Americans during our Revolution. That rivalry also helped persuade Russia to sell Alaska to the U.S. as a way of keeping Britain from adding the territory to its North American domains. Opposition to Germany’s drive to dominate Europe brought the U.S. and Moscow together during the two world wars. American resistance to the Soviet Union’s efforts to dominate both Europe and Asia drove the two countries into the Cold War.

Currently, the geopolitical dimension of the relationship is debated in both capitals. In Washington, the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment argues that Russia’s threat to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization imperils American security. A minority view values Russia’s potential as a counterweight against China more than any Russian threat to Europe. In Moscow, Mr. Putin’s critics whisper that better economic and political relations with the West and especially the U.S. could help Russia deal with the greater long-term threat arising from Beijing.

Culture and ideology also play a role. Except during rare periods of relatively liberal governance in Russia (the reign of Alexander II, the brief interlude between the democratic February Revolution of 1917 and Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution later in the year, and the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era toward the end of the 20th century), autocratic Russian rulers and liberal Americans have usually occupied opposite ideological poles in world affairs. Many Americans remain skeptical both of Russia generally and of Mr. Putin personally. But some American hard-right “postliberals” see him as an ideological ally in their battle against what they regard as the moral, intellectual and political decadence of the West.

Further poisoning and polarizing the American debate over Russia policy are the controversies over Russia’s alleged actions in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the efforts of Obama administration officials to weaponize these allegations against President Trump.

The geopolitics of U.S.-Russian relations are fiendishly complex. Much Western commentary on the Alaska summit reflected an assumption that the Trump administration was making massive concessions to the Russian side. That probably isn’t how Mr. Putin sees things when he looks at America’s Russia policy in a global context. The Trump administration’s recent intervention in the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute was a direct shot at the heart of Russian power and at Mr. Putin’s strategy to recover territories controlled by Moscow in the Soviet era.

By convening the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the White House to ratify an agreement that could end Russia’s ability to block the flow of Central Asian oil and gas to Western markets, the Trump administration embarrassed Mr. Putin and threw a wrench in his plans to restore Russian power in the Caucasus. Further, the agreement potentially weakens Moscow’s position across Central Asia, a region that was once part of the Soviet Union but where China now plays a growing role.

The Kremlin must also analyze recent signals from the White House that Washington is interested in improving U.S.-China relations. Chinese support for Russia’s war effort in Ukraine at least partially reflects Beijing’s search for bargaining chips in trade negotiations with the U.S. Would a Washington-Beijing thaw that provided relief for China’s troubled economy diminish Xi Jinping’s enthusiasm for his Russian allies?

Mr. Trump has again imposed his will on his European allies. European leader after leader effusively praised his leadership. They clearly understand that they can affect events only by persuading Mr. Trump to take their side.

“Emmanuel,” Mr. Trump said, calling on President Macron by his first name. “Mr. President,” the French leader responded, like a schoolboy speaking to his teacher. That’s how President Trump likes his allies to behave, and although the leaders were still meeting as this column went to press, he appears to have whipped them into shape.

The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure

https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2025/08/the-scale-of-russian--sabotage-operations--against-europes-critical--infrastructure/

Authors

Charlie Edwards

About Charlie Edwards

Nate Seidenstein

This IISS paper assesses Russia’s unconventional war on Europe, focusing on sabotage of critical infrastructure, from military sites and energy grids to communications and undersea cables, testing the resilience of European governments and societies and challenging NATO/EU deterrence.

Russia is waging an unconventional war on Europe. Through its campaign of sabotage, vandalism, espionage and covert action, Russia’s aim has been to destabilise European governments, undermine public support for Ukraine by imposing social and economic costs on Europe, and weaken the collective ability of NATO and the European Union to respond to Russian aggression. This unconventional war began to escalate in 2022 in parallel to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While Russia has so far failed to achieve its primary aim, European capitals have struggled to respond to Russian sabotage operations and have found it challenging to agree a unified response, coordinate action, develop effective deterrence measures and impose sufficient costs on the Kremlin.

IISS has created the most comprehensive open-source database of suspected and confirmed Russian sabotage operations targeting Europe. The data reveals Russian sabotage has been aimed at Europe’s critical infrastructure, is decentralised and, despite European security and intelligence officials raising the alarm, is largely unaffected by NATO, EU and member state responses to date. Russia has exploited gaps in legal systems through its ‘gig economy’ approach, enabling it to avoid attribution and responsibility. Since 2022 and the expulsion of hundreds of its intelligence officers from European capitals, Russia has been highly effective in its online recruitment of third-country nationals to circumvent European counter-intelligence measures. While the tactic has proven successful in terms of reach and volume, enabling operations at scale, the key challenge facing the Russian intelligence services has been the quality of the proxies, who are often poorly trained or ill-equipped, making their activities prone to detection, disruption or failure.

Russia’s military doctrine deeply integrates Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) sabotage within gibridnaya voyna (hybrid warfare). Europe’s critical infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to sabotage because it is in such a poor state following decades of deferred maintenance and a lack of investment from national governments and the private sector. Russia has targeted critical infrastructure to generate direct strategic gain in its war in Ukraine and as part of its broader conflict with the West. While some initiatives, such as the Baltic Sentry NATO maritime operation in the Baltic Sea, have been somewhat effective, the lack of budget and resources has kept NATO and the EU from adopting a long-term and sustained response. Furthermore, it is unclear, faced with competing national security priorities, how committed European capitals are to deterring Russia’s unconventional war on Europe.

Downloads

Authors

6. Trump Could End the Ukraine War, But America Might Not Like the Price

Excerpts:

With a Noble possibly looming, Trump appears all-too-willing to sacrifice America’s fundamental interests, most importantly avoiding a war with nuclear-armed Russia, over interests, like Ukraine, which are not important, let alone vital for Americans. There is a reason that no NATO member, from the US to Luxembourg, advocated Kyiv’s inclusion after the George W. Bush administration pushed through the ill-thought promise to eventually add both Ukraine and Georgia. No one wanted to go to war over Ukraine. But now this president is proposing an equivalent which likely will suggest at least a presumed commitment to fight for Ukraine.

Despite doing much wrong, Trump has achieved much right. He might even be able to make the deal. However, if the price is yet another needless US military guarantee, this one against a nuclear power prepared for war over interests that it views as vital, then the price will be too high. When shouted by his most fervid supporters, “America First” seems simplistic, even almost unAmerican. Yet in truth putting the interests of Americans first is the necessary basis for any foreign policy which risks their liberties, prosperity, and lives.

“The Ukrainian people deserve peace,” declared Zelensky. They do. However, so do the American people. When it comes to Ukraine, ensuring that they are not dragged into another European conflict should remain President Trump’s highest priority.

Trump Could End the Ukraine War, But America Might Not Like the Price

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Doug Bandow · August 19, 2025

Key Points and Summary – While President Trump deserves credit for pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war—a step his predecessor avoided—his strategy contains a grave risk to U.S. interests.

-In his pursuit of a historic peace deal, Trump has proposed offering Ukraine an “Article 5-like” security guarantee.

-This commitment, made outside of NATO, could obligate the U.S. military to defend Ukraine and create a direct tripwire for conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia.

-This move betrays the core principle of “America First” by sacrificing American security for a foreign entanglement.

How the Ukraine War Could End? We Might Have Some Clues

America matters. There could be no more dramatic lesson from the spectacle of seven European leaders—heads of government and state, the European Commission, and NATO—meeting with President Donald Trump, a man who they almost certainly privately despise.

Similar was the presence of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, dressing up to avoid a presidential dressing down like that incurred during his previous Oval Office visit.

Despite America’s really bad quarter century—the catastrophic Iraq debacle, mindless endless wars, squalid Biden incapacity, ongoing fiscal catastrophe, and unnatural Trumpian pageantry—the titans of Europe were inexorably drawn to the White House.

In the West, at least, there is still only one nation that really matters, irrespective of who leads its government. Countries which once ruled most of the earth remain but supplicants to an upstart country which began with a few disgruntled colonists transported to a distant new world. By begging for a Washington audience, the assorted grandees conceded their incapacity to run their own affairs, let alone much influence events beyond their own borders.

And they know that their ostentatious failure is a matter of choice. Europe dramatically outmatches Russia on virtually every measure of national power, other than military. Their much larger collective economy and population enable them to do whatever is necessary to protect their lands from any potential adversary. But for decades they failed to act. Only the hated Donald Trump was able to force them to publicly admit this uncomfortable truth.

Almost secondary was the subject of the meeting, ending the Russo-Ukraine war. Trump got several important issues right. For instance, that the combatants should focus on reaching a peace settlement rather than argue over a ceasefire. President Vladimir Putin openly refused the latter since ending the fighting without an agreement would relax Moscow’s military pressure on Ukraine and free the allies to resupply Kyiv, which then could revive the fight. Zelensky had also earlier rejected a ceasefire, since he wanted to battle on to liberate lost territory, including Crimea, occupied by Russia more than a decade ago. If the parties can reach an agreement, the ceasefire will come easily.

The president also recognized that the only realistic outcome is a compromise settlement, and one weighted toward Moscow. That means rejecting the standard European mantra, repeated with monotonous regularity: “A just and lasting peace that brings stability and security must respect international law, including the principles of independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and that international borders must not be changed by force.

The people of Ukraine must have the freedom to decide their future. The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a ceasefire or reduction of hostilities.” This European “solution” obviously is attractive, since Putin’s lawless invasion cannot be justified. Unfortunately, however, Russia is winning on the battlefield, and no one on the allied side has explained how Ukraine can overcome its widening manpower deficit to achieve victory.

Moreover, Trump apparently convinced Putin to trim his demands, even regarding territory, or so claims the administration. The Russian leader reportedly agreed to freeze military operations in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces, leaving the remaining territory in Ukraine, and return occupied territory in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions. Other former red lines also appear to have been abandoned. Although the Ukrainians and other Europeans oppose yielding any land to Russia, reports that Moscow was relinquishing some if its claims shocked dedicated Russophiles, who assume the claims were false.

Wrote Simplicius the Thinker: “There are simply too many farfetched ‘stretches’ to imagine Russia conceding on them all, which includes things like demilitarization and deNazification which were not mentioned amongst the discussions. Lesser issues like the protection and codification of the Russian language in Ukrainian regions were mentioned by press outlets, which would imply the other issues were not brought up. This clearly seems a bridge too far.”

Trump is lso a that negotiation between the principal combatants should settle the details. Trump wants to bring Putin and Zelensky together, presumably for a visual to burnish his Nobel Peace Prize hopes. Trump also might envision a personal meeting as the best way to dispense with the boring minutia that inevitably will accompany a peace settlement to such a costly and destructive war. However, it would be better to deploy lower-level officials to first handle the critical details. Explained the Wall Street Journal: “The yawning chasm between Kyiv and Moscow would normally be narrowed before organizing a high-profile meeting between Putin and Zelensky.” Their summit then would be more symbolic than substantive, representing a commitment to reconciliation, however difficult that process would prove in practice.

Give Trump Credit on Ukraine, But…

Overall, Trump deserves credit for doing more in seven months than President Joe Biden did in the almost three years following the Russian invasion: try diplomacy, talk with Putin, and seek a modus vivendi to conclude the war.

Even so, the odds against success remain long, given manifold practical difficulties and internal opposition in both combatants as well as the roomful of de facto cobelligerents meeting with Trump. The Wall Street Journal bluntly warned that “the warring parties remain far apart on a peace agreement.” If Trump nevertheless is able to conclude the deal he will have demonstrated the importance of simply asking what the combatants want. The Russian president may turn out to be a more rational actor than most of the European leaders.

However, Trump failed in perhaps his most fundamental duty. In seeking a grand international triumph, followed by the much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize, Trump lost sight of America’s interest. He has agreed to some sort of security guarantee involving the US, though he has yet to enlighten the American people, who would be expected to pay the resulting financial and human price, about what he has in mind. Such a commitment is, of course, what the Europeans have enjoyed for decades, which helps explain why they always lagged so on military expenditures and capabilities. The only reason most of them ever did more was to pacify American officials when Washington whining got too loud, as with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ valedictory speech, delivered just three weeks before he left office.

Nevertheless, Trump’s proposal began circulating last week, before his meeting with Putin. Reported the Washington Post: “For the first time publicly, he said he was open to the ‘possibility’ of security guarantees for Ukraine, ‘along with other Europe and other countries.’ He cautioned that such protections could not come through NATO.” (He also exhibited a strange new respect for the assembled Eurocrats, praising politicians he once insulted.) Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff explained that the security guarantee “means the US is potentially prepared to be able to give Article 5 security guarantees, but not from NATO.” Of even greater concern, when questioned about deploying American personnel, he said: “I think part of the discussion we’re gonna have Monday is exactly the specifics of what the Ukrainians feel they need.”

Nothing was said during the meetings to reassure Americans that they would not end up at war over Ukraine, something that first-term Trump and even Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, much derided by Trump, avoided by not guaranteeing Kyiv’s security. Trump promised: “We will give them very good protection and very good security.” He was also quoted as saying that “When it comes to security, there’s going to be a lot of help” and that European countries “are a first line of defense because they’re there, but we’ll help them out.”

What kind of “help,” exactly? Although deployment of American forces apparently did not come up yesterday, the New York Times’ Erica L. Green observed: “It is significant that President Trump didn’t outright rule out sending U.S. troops to Ukraine as part of a security guarantee that the U.S. would make in partnership with Europeans.” Trump continues to reject NATO membership, but how would sort-of NATO guarantees differ from NATO guarantees? Article 5 only mandates taking “such action as it deems necessary.” A sort-of NATO knock-off commitment could end up tougher, perhaps greatly so, creating a tripwire troop presence and promise to retaliate with full force.

With a Noble possibly looming, Trump appears all-too-willing to sacrifice America’s fundamental interests, most importantly avoiding a war with nuclear-armed Russia, over interests, like Ukraine, which are not important, let alone vital for Americans. There is a reason that no NATO member, from the US to Luxembourg, advocated Kyiv’s inclusion after the George W. Bush administration pushed through the ill-thought promise to eventually add both Ukraine and Georgia. No one wanted to go to war over Ukraine. But now this president is proposing an equivalent which likely will suggest at least a presumed commitment to fight for Ukraine.

Despite doing much wrong, Trump has achieved much right. He might even be able to make the deal. However, if the price is yet another needless US military guarantee, this one against a nuclear power prepared for war over interests that it views as vital, then the price will be too high. When shouted by his most fervid supporters, “America First” seems simplistic, even almost unAmerican. Yet in truth putting the interests of Americans first is the necessary basis for any foreign policy which risks their liberties, prosperity, and lives.

“The Ukrainian people deserve peace,” declared Zelensky. They do. However, so do the American people. When it comes to Ukraine, ensuring that they are not dragged into another European conflict should remain President Trump’s highest priority.

About the Author: Doug Bandow

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire. You can follow him on X: @Doug_Bandow.

Military Matters

The F-22 Raptor Just Keeps Getting Better

The YF-23 Black Widow II Stealth Fighter: The New F/A-XX

The F-117 Nighthawk: We Almost Touched It

nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Doug Bandow · August 19, 2025

7. AI is about to reshape command structures that haven’t changed much since Napoleon

On no. What would we do without our Napoleonic staff structures?

The fundamental question for me is how will AI contribute to Clausewitz' "coup d'oiel" (roughly translated as the "inward looking eye" and help us to develop "military genius" which is based on education and experience that allows the commander to cut through the fog and friction of war to exercise good judgment make a sound decision at the right time and place without access to perfect information? Answer that question and then we can talk about staff and organizational structures.

AI is about to reshape command structures that haven’t changed much since Napoleon

I explored the possibilities with a team of researchers at CSIS' Futures Lab. Here's what we found.

By Benjamin Jensen

Professor of Strategic Studies, Marine Corps University

August 18, 2025 01:44 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Benjamin Jensen

Despite two centuries of evolution, the structure of a modern military staff would be recognizable to Napoleon. At the same time, military organizations have struggled to incorporate new technologies as they adapt to new domains – air, space and information – in modern war.

The sizes of military headquarters have grown to accommodate the expanded information flows and decision points of these new facets of warfare. The result is diminishing marginal returns and a coordination nightmare – too many cooks in the kitchen – that risks jeopardizing mission command.

AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software powered by large language models – can automate routine staff tasks, compress decision timelines and enable smaller, more resilient command posts. They can shrink the staff while also making it more effective.

As an international relations scholar and reserve officer in the U.S. Army who studies military strategy, I see both the opportunity afforded by the technology and the acute need for change.

That need stems from the reality that today’s command structures still mirror Napoleon’s field headquarters in both form and function – industrial-age architectures built for massed armies. Over time, these staffs have ballooned in size, making coordination cumbersome. They also result in sprawling command posts that modern precision artillery, missiles and drones can target effectively and electronic warfare can readily disrupt.

Russia’s so-called “Graveyard of Command Posts” in Ukraine vividly illustrates how static headquarters where opponents can mass precision artillery, missiles and drones become liabilities on a modern battlefield.

Military planners now see a world in which AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software that can perceive, decide and act on their own initiative – are mature enough to deploy in command systems. These agents promise to automate the fusion of multiple sources of intelligence, threat-modeling, and even limited decision cycles in support of a commander’s goals. There is still a human in the loop, but the humans will be able to issue commands faster and receive more timely and contextual updates from the battlefield.

These AI agents can parse doctrinal manuals, draft operational plans and generate courses of action, which helps accelerate the tempo of military operations. Experiments – including efforts I ran at Marine Corps University – have demonstrated how even basic large language models can accelerate staff estimates and inject creative, data-driven options into the planning process. These efforts point to the end of traditional staff roles.

There will still be people – war is a human endeavor – and ethics will still factor into streams of algorithms making decisions. But the people who remain deployed are likely to gain the ability to navigate mass volumes of information with the help of AI agents.

These teams are likely to be smaller than modern staffs. AI agents will allow teams to manage multiple planning groups simultaneously.

For example, they will be able to use more dynamic red teaming techniques – role-playing the opposition – and vary key assumptions to create a wider menu of options than traditional plans. The time saved not having to build PowerPoint slides and updating staff estimates will be shifted to contingency analysis – asking “what if” questions – and building operational assessment frameworks – conceptual maps of how a plan is likely to play out in a particular situation – that provide more flexibility to commanders.

To explore the optimal design of this AI agent-augmented staff, I led a team of researchers at the bipartisan think tank Center for Strategic & International Studies’ Futures Lab to explore alternatives. The team developed three baseline scenarios reflecting what most military analysts are seeing as the key operational problems in modern great power competition: joint blockades, firepower strikes and joint island campaigns. Joint refers to an action coordinated among multiple branches of a military.

In the example of China and Taiwan, joint blockades describe how China could isolate the island nation and either starve it or set conditions for an invasion. Firepower strikes describe how Beijing could fire salvos of missiles – similar to what Russia is doing in Ukraine – to destroy key military centers and even critical infrastructure. Last, in Chinese doctrine, a Joint Island Landing Campaign describes the cross-strait invasion their military has spent decades refining.

Any AI agent-augmented staff should be able to manage warfighting functions across these three operational scenarios.

The research team found that the best model kept humans in the loop and focused on feedback loops. This approach – called the Adaptive Staff Model and based on pioneering work by sociologist Andrew Abbott – embeds AI agents within continuous human-machine feedback loops, drawing on doctrine, history and real-time data to evolve plans on the fly.

In this model, military planning is ongoing and never complete, and focused more on generating a menu of options for the commander to consider, refine and enact. The research team tested the approach with multiple AI models and found that it outperformed alternatives in each case.

AI agents are not without risk. First, they can be overly generalized, if not biased. Foundation models – AI models trained on extremely large datasets and adaptable to a wide range of tasks – know more about pop culture than war and require refinement. This makes it important to benchmark agents to understand their strengths and limitations.

Second, absent training in AI fundamentals and advanced analytical reasoning, many users tend to use models as a substitute for critical thinking. No smart model can make up for a dumb, or worse, lazy user.

To take advantage of AI agents, the U.S. military will need to institutionalize building and adapting agents, include adaptive agents in war games, and overhaul doctrine and training to account for human-machine teams. This will require a number of changes.

First, the military will need to invest in additional computational power to build the infrastructure required to run AI agents across military formations. Second, they will need to develop additional cybersecurity measures and conduct stress tests to ensure the agent-augmented staff isn’t vulnerable when attacked across multiple domains, including cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Third, and most important, the military will need to dramatically change how it educates its officers. Officers will have to learn how AI agents work, including how to build them, and start using the classroom as a lab to develop new approaches to the age-old art of military command and decision-making. This could include revamping some military schools to focus on AI, a concept floated in the White House’s AI Action Plan released on July 23, 2025.

Absent these reforms, the military is likely to remain stuck in the Napoleonic staff trap: adding more people to solve ever more complex problems.

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

defenseone.com · by Benjamin Jensen

8. Russia launches largest attack of August on Ukraine after Trump-Zelenskyy meeting

Russia launches largest attack of August on Ukraine after Trump-Zelenskyy meeting

Russia launched 280 drones and missiles overnight, Ukraine's air force said.

ByDavid Brennan

August 19, 2025, 6:55 PM

ABCNews.com · ABC News

LONDON -- Ukraine's air force reported a major Russian attack on Monday night and into Tuesday morning -- the largest overnight barrage for weeks, coming while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump and a delegation of European leaders in Washington.

The air force said Russia launched 270 drones and 10 missiles into Ukraine, of which 30 drones and six missiles were intercepted or suppressed. The air force reported the impacts of 40 drones and four missiles across 16 locations, with debris reportedly falling in three locations.

Ukraine's Energy Ministry said energy infrastructure in the central Poltava region was a focus of the strikes. "As a result of the attack, large-scale fires broke out," the ministry said in a statement.

Oil refining and gas facilities were attacked, the statement said, describing the strikes as the latest in a campaign of "systematic terrorist attacks against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which is a direct violation of international humanitarian law."

Monday night's attack was the largest attack since Russia launched 309 drones and eight missiles into Ukraine on July 31, according to the daily figures published by the Ukrainian air force and analyzed by ABC News.

In this file photo, Ukrainian servicemen fire an anti-aircraft gun towards a Russian drone during an air attack near Pavlograd, Dnipropetrovsk region, on July 19, 2025.

Roman Pilipey/AFP via Getty Images

Russia's Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces shot down 23 Ukrainian drones overnight into Tuesday morning.

Thirteen of the craft were downed over the Volgograd region, the ministry said. Regional Gov. Andrey Bocharov said on Telegram that falling debris set fires at an oil refinery and on the roof of a hospital building, though added there were no casualties.

The overnight exchanges bookended a day of high-level talks in Washington. Trump, Zelenskyy and a host of European leaders met in the capital on Monday to discuss a possible roadmap to end Russia's full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022. Zelenskyy on Tuesday described the meeting as "truly a significant step toward ending the war."

Monday's summit followed a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, during which Putin refused an immediate ceasefire and demanded that Ukraine cede the entirety of its eastern Donetsk region in exchange for an end to the fighting, two sources told ABC News.

Ahead of Monday's meetings, Trump appeared to be pressuring Zelenskyy into making a deal. "President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight," Trump wrote on social media on Sunday.

The president also said Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO and would not be able to regain Crimea -- occupied by Russia in 2014.

Such remarks raised concerns of another fractious Oval Office meeting, akin to Zelenskyy's February visit when the Ukrainian leader was publicly lambasted by Trump and Vice President JD Vance for his alleged ingratitude for American wartime support.

MORE: Key takeaways from Trump and Zelenskyy's meeting, pivotal talks with European leaders

But Monday's meetings were cordial, though the parties still appeared to be some way apart on key issues.

Trump, Zelenskyy and European leaders all confirmed their support for a direct bilateral meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin -- a proposal the Russian president has repeatedly dodged.

Such a meeting would be followed by a trilateral meeting involving Trump, the president said. Zelenskyy said Ukraine is "ready" for a trilateral discussion. Trump remarked, "I think it's going to be when, not if."

Later, Trump posted to social meda saying he had spoken by phone with Putin "and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelenskyy."

The Kremlin is yet to explicitly confirm Putin's readiness to attend such a meeting. Yuri Ushakov, a top Kremlin aide, said in a statement that Trump and Putin "expressed their support for the continuation of direct negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump participate in a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, August 18, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

"In this regard, in particular, the idea was discussed that the level of representatives from the Ukrainian and Russian sides should be increased," Ushakov said. "This refers to the representatives who participate in the aforementioned direct negotiations."

On the question of security guarantees for Ukraine, Trump said during his meeting with Zelenskyy, "We're going to be discussing it today, but we will give them very good protection, very good security."

The president later confirmed that Putin would accept security guarantees for Ukraine, though Russian officials on Monday said that the presence of NATO troops in the country would be unacceptable.

Zelenskyy and his European partners again stressed their desire for a full ceasefire, only after which peace negotiations could take place. Trump has repeatedly demanded a ceasefire since returning to office in January, but appeared to drop the idea after last week's meeting with Putin.

"I don't think you need a ceasefire," Trump told Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Monday. "I know that it might be good to have, but I can also understand strategically, like, well, you know, one country or the other wouldn't want it."

MORE: Trump says Zelenskyy can end Russia war 'almost immediately' before White House meet

Trump added that he likes "the concept of a ceasefire for one reason, because you'd stop killing people immediately."

Zelenskyy expressed his gratitude to Trump for hosting the meeting, and wrote on Telegram afterwards thanking the White House for "the important signal from the USA regarding readiness to support and be part of" post-war security guarantees.

"The leaders personally came to support Ukraine and discuss everything that will bring us closer to real peace, a reliable security architecture that will protect Ukraine and all of Europe," Zelenskyy wrote.

Post-meeting comments from European leaders, though, hinted at unresolved obstacles to peace.

"You have an American president, European presidents and a Ukrainian president all wanting peace," French President Emmanuel Macron said.

President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, August 18, 2025 and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, August 15, 2025.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

"For my part, I have the greatest doubts about the reality of a desire for peace on the part of the Russian president, because as long as he thinks he can win through war, he will do so," Macron added. "His ultimate objective is to take as much territory as possible, to weaken Ukraine and to have a Ukraine that is not viable alone or is within the Russian fold."

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the thorny issue of Ukrainian territorial concessions was not discussed. "The Russian demand that Kyiv give up the free parts of Donbas is, to put it in perspective, equivalent to the U.S. having to give up Florida," he said.

"A sovereign state cannot simply decide something like that. It is a decision that Ukraine must make itself in the course of negotiations," Merz added.

MORE: Ukrainian soldiers focus on daily battles as Trump and Putin prepare to meet

ABC News' Alexandra Hutzler, Will Gretsky and Tanya Stukalova contributed to this report.

ABCNews.com · ABC News

9. Army moving out with cheaper Robotic Combat Vehicle competition, but with a new name

Army moving out with cheaper Robotic Combat Vehicle competition, but with a new name - Breaking Defense

In a new request for information for Unmanned Ground Commercial Robotic Vehicles, the service said it is eyeing platforms that carry a price tag below $650,000.

breakingdefense.com · Ashley Roque · August 18, 2025

WASHINGTON — After a second scrapped attempt at fielding Robotic Combat Vehicles (RCV), the US Army is taking another crack but with plans to cap the per unit cost at $650,000, according to a new notice to industry.

“The Army seeks UGCRV [Unmanned Ground Commercial Robotic Vehicles] prototypes to meet emerging requirements in the form of desired characteristics in support of future operations on the battlefield,” a recent request for information obtained by Breaking Defense said.

This time around, service officials are eyeing a ground robot with a price tag below $650,000 that can carry a payload of more than 2,200 pounds while traversing both on and off roads to keep up with soldiers inside Armored Brigade Combat Teams.

That presolication, published Friday by the National Advanced Mobility Consortium to its members, comes after decades of failed attempts trying to field unmanned ground vehicles including the service’s recent decision to halt a second RCV competition. After conducting a revamped competition, Breaking Defense first reported that industry sources had been notified that Textron Systems’s Ripsaw 3 had won that RCV competition, and the service was preparing to ink a deal with the victors. But around that same time, Army leaders identified RCV as a program to cut as part of the 8 percent budget drill to realign funding toward higher priorities, one service official told Breaking Defense then.

“We need robotic combat vehicles, but we want a consortium of vendors to bring their robotics and the best software folk,” that Army source explained. “We don’t want to downselect just to one vendor and pay almost $3 million per copy.”

The release of the new robotic RFI paves a possible way forward with an Aug. 29 deadline for interested companies to respond, and provides some additional insights into a laundry list of potential requirements for a ground robot fleet.

Soldiers should be able to control them via “basic teleoperation” (i.e., remote control) but it should also have autonomy software included for waypoint navigation, leader-follower and sentry mode. At the same time, “autonomy hardware selection shall not create any operational degradation to mission execution.”

presented by

Sponsored Post, Networks & Digital Warfare

JADC2 gets its first C2 gateway authorized to update itself

The initial command and control gateway to earn a continuous Authority to Operate is changing multi-domain operations.

The unmanned vehicles should also be to travel at least 34 miles per hour on road and 25 mph off road for at least 140 miles, and have a 360-degree visual, thermal, and audio sensing capability.

As for the minimum 2,200-pound payload capacity, the document notes the robots might be outfitted with counter-unmanned aerial vehicles capabilities, beyond line-of-sight kinetic effects, both attack and defensive electronic warfare, and more.

breakingdefense.com · Ashley Roque · August 18, 2025

10. Army revamping hypervelocity cannon plan, eyeing new competitions

Army revamping hypervelocity cannon plan, eyeing new competitions - Breaking Defense

“Some of it will absolutely be competed. We're looking at each of the components that SCO has done. … Some of those technologies are more mature than others,” said RCCTO head Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch.

breakingdefense.com · Ashley Roque · August 18, 2025

WASHINGTON — The Army is finalizing the requirements and funding for taking over development of an air defense, hypervelocity cannon, according to a three-star general. And if plans come together, industry could have several opportunities to compete for a piece of the system.

After the Navy ended work on BAE Systems’s Hypervelocity Projectile in 2021, the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) picked it up under the Multi-Domain Artillery Cannon System program — a 155mm self-propelled artillery system with the Hypervelocity Projectiles. The effort is in the process of being handed over to the Army where service officials are finalizing requirements and calling the weapon the Cannon-Based Air Defense initiative, according to Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, who heads up the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO).

“It’s been an evolution,” Rasch told Breaking Defense during an Aug. 7 interview in Huntsville, Ala. Part of the process right now, he explained, is deciding just what to keep, what to sole source to companies and what parts to compete out.

“Some of it will absolutely be competed,” Rasch added. “We’re looking at each of the components that SCO has done. There’s a [155mm] cannon, there’s a radar, there’s a battle manager, there’s the resupply aspects … and [there’s] the projectile itself. Some of those technologies are more mature than others.”

While Rasch didn’t disclose just what components might be ripe for competition, he noted that in some cases, there may be sole source deals because that would “probably make sense,” but if there are multiple viable vendors it might make sense to “open it up to competition.”

What isn’t clear is if Rasch’s team plans to follow through with the late-2024 announcement of its intent to sole-source cannon and projectile work to BAE, or if that decision is now up in the air too as part of the ongoing requirements relook. However, he asserted that no contracts for the revamped effort have been awarded.

Several other aspects are under consideration too.

The initial command and control gateway to earn a continuous Authority to Operate is changing multi-domain operations.

For example, Rasch said it isn’t yet clear if the Army will move to make this an offensive weapon too at some point in the future so that it can fire both hypervelocity rounds and traditional 155mm ones. If that decision is made it could reshape the Army’s long-awaited tactical fires study.

Another question up for debate is whether to use a platform with some level of autonomy. While early autonomy work had been done inside the initiative, Rasch said service officials have not yet decided if they will “port over” a type of leader-follower capability into the revamped weapon.

“That’s all part of the acquisition strategy,” he said. “We have multiple ways to get after this, and we’ve got plans, and we’ve apprised leaders of our plans, but we really need to wait until we get appropriated funds to go execute.”

If lawmakers provide the required funding in a fiscal 2026 defense spending bill, Rasch said the Army plans to move out revamping the hypervelocity weapon with hopes of having the first battery ready within three years, or around the 2029 timeframe.

“We’re obviously not going to award a contract until Congress tells us we can, but we need to collect all of the information we can so that when we receive money, we can execute immediately,” Rasch said.

breakingdefense.com · Ashley Roque · August 18, 2025

11. New Ukrainian Cruise Missile With Claimed 1,800-Mile Range Breaks Cover

Innovating and building under pressure.

New Ukrainian Cruise Missile With Claimed 1,800-Mile Range Breaks Cover

A weapon of such prodigious range and warhead size would be a major threat to targets across huge swathes of Russia.

Thomas Newdick, Joseph Trevithick

Aug 18, 2025 5:14 PM EDT

331

twz.com · Thomas Newdick, Joseph Trevithick

The TWZ Newsletter

Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.

A new cruise missile called Flamingo, which reportedly has a range of 1,864 miles (3,000 kilometers), has emerged in Ukraine and is said to have already been used to strike targets in Russia. A weapon with this range, something Ukraine has been teasing for some time now, would allow it to hold targets at risk well beyond the reach of other missiles known to be in its arsenal.

Associated Press photojournalist Efrem Lukatsky first revealed the existence of Flamingo in a post on Facebook yesterday. Along with an accompanying photo and the aforementioned range claim, he stated that the missile is in series production through a Ukrainian company called Fire Point.

Efrem Lukatsky, head of the AP photo service, published a very interesting teaser: “Ukrainian-made over 3,000 km range Flamingo missiles, which were launched into serial production, are seen in a workshop of one of the country’s leading Fire Point defence company in an… pic.twitter.com/i1qvFDgaW4

— Denis Danilov (@DenisDanilovL) August 17, 2025

Today, Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda released two videos of Flamingos being launched from rails mounted on two two-axle trailers. The missiles are shown climbing sharply right after launch. The clip seen immediately below is also said to show them being used in a real strike on Russia.

Ukrainska Pravda‘s report said that the missile’s warhead weighs around 2,535 pounds (1,150 kilograms), but does not cite any source for that information, as well.

Other details about Flamingo, including how it is guided to its target, are scant. At the time of writing, Ukrainian authorities do not appear to have confirmed any specifics about the missile. Ukrainian Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal said today that more information will be released “when the right moment comes.”

Defense Minister Shmyhal confirmed that production of the Ukrainian long-range “Flamingo” cruise missile has begun, saying details will be disclosed “when the right moment comes.” https://t.co/7S5IDoCSNa pic.twitter.com/IoSIz5fP2i

— NOELREPORTS (@NOELreports) August 18, 2025

Intriguingly, the Flamingo is extremely similar, if not identical to a cruise missile design called the FP-5 previously exhibited by Milanion, a company based in the United Arab Emirates. This same firm has provided materiel to the Ukrainian armed forces in the past. Whether the “FP” in FP-5 stands for Fire Point is unknown.

Milanion says that the FP-5 also has a 1,864-mile/3,000-kilometer maximum range. A fact sheet on the company’s website, reproduced below, also lists a top speed of 590 miles per hour (950 kilometers per hour) and a cruising speed of 528-559 miles per hour (850–900 kilometers per hour).

A Milanion data sheet for its FP-5 cruise missile. Milanion

The FP-5 missile is notably large, with a wingspan of six meters (19.6 feet), a maximum takeoff weight of 13,228 pounds (6,000 kilograms), and a warhead weighing 2,205 pounds (1,000 kilograms), according to the fact sheet. It also includes a rendering of the missile prepared for launch on a two-axle trailer.

In terms of guidance, Milanion says the FP-5 uses a combination of methods, including various types of satellite navigation. The company says it is designed to be resistant to electronic warfare attacks. An underlying inertial navigation system is likely to be present.

It should be stressed that the exact relationship between the FP-5 and Flamingo is unknown, and that the performance specifications and other capabilities of the Ukrainian missile could differ in various ways.

Broader comparisons have also been drawn between the Flamingo and Nazi Germany’s V-1 flying bomb, which was fired via fixed-rail launchers and was powered by a primitive pulse-jet propulsion system, although these are superficial at best.

A wartime British cutaway drawing of the Fiesler Fi 103 flying bomb, better known as the V-1. Air Ministry Second World War Official Collection

Observers have also drawn parallels between the Flamingo and the U.S. MGM-13 Mace, another ground-launched subsonic cruise missile that was inspired by the V-1 concept. Starting in 1959, the Mace was fielded by the U.S. Air Force across Western Europe, where they were aimed at Soviet targets. It had a range of around 1,400 miles and was similarly launched from a trailer, or alternatively from an underground bunker.

A Mace missile of the 71st Tactical Missile Squadron at Bitburg Air Base, West Germany, in the late 1950s. U.S. Air Force

Ukraine has also previously turned Soviet-era Tu-141 and Tu-143 reconnaissance drones, which are similar in some broad strokes to the Flamingo’s basic design and are launched via rails on the ground, into long-range strike weapons.

Regardless, a new cruise missile able to reach targets out to 1,864 miles/3,000-kilometers would put anywhere in central Russia under threat, including the capital Moscow and the country’s second largest city of St. Petersburg. The Flamingo could even reach as far as parts of Siberia.

A map shows the claimed range for the Flamingo, based on launching the missile from Kyiv. Google Earth

Russia’s armed forces have benefited from more than a decade of investment and reform. Russia’s ground forces are now better equipped, with artillery central to ground manoeuvre capability. | Read the #MilitaryBalance 2022: https://t.co/4sQPYYdj4n pic.twitter.com/E54Qnqtu9m

— IISS News (@IISS_org) February 24, 2022

The Flamingo is not the first Ukrainian foray into ground-launched cruise missiles. There is also a land-attack version of the Neptune anti-ship cruise missile, which Ukraine’s armed forces began using operationally in 2023. A Ukrainian defense official told TWZ in the past that the land-attack version of this subsonic missile could have a range of up to 225 miles. Ukraine has also received Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG air-launched cruise missiles from the United Kingdom and France, respectively, as well as Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missiles from the United States. However, none of them have similar ranges to what is claimed for Flamingo.

#War The wreckage of the Ukrainian AShM R-360 "Neptune", shot down and then carried out by waves on the coast of the Sea of Azov. Video: @warhistoryalconafter pic.twitter.com/eolRKFp7mv

— Capt(N) (@Capt_Navy) January 29, 2024

Ukraine has also unveiled a number of other designs that skirt the increasingly blurry line between long-range kamikaze drones and cruise missiles, including Palianytsia, Peklo, and Trembita. However, these all have much shorter ranges than the reach Flamingo is said to offer. This is on top of the country’s other long-range one-way-attack drone capabilities, which have already given it the reach to attack Moscow and other far-flung targets inside Russia.

Ukrainian Peklo ‘missile-drones.’ Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Ukraine has been working on developing new ballistic missiles, but the longest-range one of these, as far as is known, is the Hrim-2. According to reports, this missile has a range of 174 miles or possibly up to 310 miles, which puts it in the same kind of class as Russia’s Iskander-M, rather than a weapon with strategic reach.

An image from a 2018 test of a rocket motor tied to the development of the Hrim-2 missile. Government of Ukraine via Mil.in.ua

With a warhead weighing 2,535 pounds/1,150 kilograms, Flamingo would be far more destructive than any missile or one-way-attack drone available to Ukraine now, as well. This would give Ukrainian forces the ability to not only reach valuable targets much further away inside Russia, but also potentially inflict heavier damage on them.

Flamingo’s conventional jet-powered cruise missile design also offers speed and other benefits for penetrating deeper into Russia, especially compared to the converted light aircraft and similar types of drones it has often employed for very-long-range strikes.

With its claimed range, Flamingo would also notably offer Ukraine a strike capability in line with Russia’s Kalibr. Russian forces have heavily employed Kalibr in the ongoing conflict. Launched from ships or submarines, it is also subsonic and is thought to have a range of between 930 and 1,550 miles, carrying a high-explosive warhead weighing 990 pounds.

Footage of a (presumed Kalibr) cruise missile strike on Ivano-Frankivsk Air Base in western Ukraine in 2022:

L’aéroport de Ivano-Frankivsk en #Ukraine est bombardé ce matin. pic.twitter.com/1SSaNEKZUv

— Andreï Valentin VAITOVICH (@andreivaitovich) February 24, 2022

Russia has also used ground-launched land-attack cruise missiles in the conflict, notably fired from the Iskander system, which is better known for firing short-range ballistic missiles. The 9M728 cruise missile that the Iskander can also fire has a range that keeps it within the 500-km (310-mile) limit of the now-defunct 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, according to official Russian accounts.

An Iskander transport-erector-launcher with a launch canister for the 9M728 ground-launched cruise missile in the firing position. Vadim Grishankin

Perhaps just as importantly for Ukraine as the missile’s purported prodigious range is its possible optimization for mass production, with a correspondingly low price point, which are among the touted benefits of the FP-5. Large numbers of Flamingo missiles launched in barrages would be a serious problem for Russian air defenses, which already struggle with less capable long-range weapons Ukraine has been lobbing at them. Combinations of drones and cruise missiles would really put the pressure on Russia, even though, with its subsonic speed and what looks like zero attempts at signature control, the Flamingo is far from immune to interception. Adding decoys to the mix would further complicate matters for Russia’s air defenders.

In addition, since it has not been donated by Western allies, Ukraine would have more freedom to use the Flamingo against any targets that it wishes within Russia. These might include the strategic bomber bases and other airfields that Ukraine has already struck using different methods, as well as energy infrastructure and key logistics hubs, which have meanwhile been bombarded by drones, generally carrying much less destructive warheads.

It is perhaps also no surprise that the existence of the Flamingo has been revealed at this point, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska. The Facebook post from Associated Press photojournalist Lukatsky also came right before today’s talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

U.S. President Donald Trump, at right, speaks alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at left, at the White House on Aug. 18, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The appearance of the Flamingo underscores Ukraine’s ability to continue to field new and more destructive weapons, as well as threaten targets over much greater swathes of Russia. It’s also a reminder to the Kremlin that, should it choose to, and provided Flamingo production can be ramped up, Ukraine would also be able to launch missile barrages against Russian cities, in the same way that Moscow has done, to considerable destructive effect.

Whether the Flamingo will fulfill its obvious potential remains to be seen. As well as perfecting its technologies, much will depend on how many of these weapons the Ukrainian industry is able to churn out. At the very least, the appearance of this cruise missile reiterates Ukrainian ingenuity in fielding new and innovative weapons to counter the Russian invasion.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

Thomas Newdick

Staff Writer

Thomas is a defense writer and editor with over 20 years of experience covering military aerospace topics and conflicts. He’s written a number of books, edited many more, and has contributed to many of the world’s leading aviation publications. Before joining The War Zone in 2020, he was the editor of AirForces Monthly.

Joseph Trevithick

twz.com · Thomas Newdick, Joseph Trevithick

12. In the 21st century, space is the new battlefield

"The new frontier" as someone once said.

In the 21st century, space is the new battlefield

militarytimes.com · David Klepper, The Associated Press · August 18, 2025

As Russia held its Victory Day parade this year, hackers backing the Kremlin hijacked an orbiting satellite that provides television service to Ukraine.

Instead of normal programing, Ukrainian viewers saw parade footage beamed in from Moscow: waves of tanks, soldiers and weaponry. The message was meant to intimidate and was an illustration that 21st-century war is waged not just on land, sea and air but also in cyberspace and the reaches of outer space.

Disabling a satellite could deal a devastating blow without one bullet, and it can be done by targeting the satellite’s security software or disrupting its ability to send or receive signals from Earth.

“If you can impede a satellite’s ability to communicate, you can cause a significant disruption,” said Tom Pace, CEO of NetRise, a cybersecurity firm focused on protecting supply chains.

“Think about GPS,” said Pace, who served in the Marines before working on cyber issues at the Department of Energy. “Imagine if a population lost that and the confusion it would cause.”

Satellites are the short-term challenge

More than 12,000 operating satellites now orbit the planet, playing a critical role not just in broadcast communications but also in military operations, navigation systems like GPS, intelligence gathering and economic supply chains. They are also key to early launch-detection efforts, which can warn of approaching missiles.

That makes them a significant national security vulnerability, and a prime target for anyone looking to undermine an adversary’s economy or military readiness — or deliver a psychological blow like the hackers supporting Russia did when they hijacked television signals to Ukraine.

Hackers typically look for the weakest link in the software or hardware that supports a satellite or controls its communications with Earth. The actual orbiting device may be secure, but if it’s running on outdated software, it can be easily exploited.

The U.S. military operates an unmanned space shuttle, shown here, used to conduct classified military missions and research. The craft, known as the X-37B, recently returned to Earth after more than a year in orbit. (United States Space Force via AP)

As Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, someone targeted Viasat, the U.S.-based satellite company used by Ukraine’s government and military. The hack, which Kyiv blamed on Moscow, used malware to infect tens of thousands of modems, creating an outage affecting wide swaths of Europe.

National security officials say Russia is developing a nuclear, space-based weapon designed to take out virtually every satellite in low-Earth orbit at once. The weapon would combine a physical attack that would ripple outward, destroying more satellites, while the nuclear component is used to fry their electronics.

U.S. officials declassified information about the weapon after Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, issued a public warning about the technology. Turner has pushed for the Department of Defense to provide a classified briefing to lawmakers on the weapon, which, if deployed, would violate an international treaty prohibiting weapons of mass destruction in space.

Turner said such a weapon could render low-Earth orbit unusable for satellites for as long as a year. If it were used, the effects would be devastating: potentially leaving the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to economic upheaval and even a nuclear attack.

Russia and China also would lose satellites, though they are believed to be less reliant on the same kinds of satellites as the U.S.

Turner compared the weapon, which is not yet ready for deployment, to Sputnik, the Russian satellite that launched the space age in 1957.

“If this anti-satellite nuclear weapon would be put in space, it would be the end of the space age,” Turner said. “It should never be permitted to go into outer space. This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in space.”

Mining the moon and beyond

Valuable minerals and other materials found on the moon and in asteroids could lead to future conflicts as nations look to exploit new technologies and energy sources.

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced plans this month to send a small nuclear reactor to the moon, saying it’s important the U.S. does so before China or Russia.

“We’re in a race to the moon, in a race with China to the moon,” Duffy said. “To have a base on the moon, we need energy and some of the key locations on the moon. ... We want to get there first and claim that for America.”

The moon is rich in a material known as helium 3, which scientists believe could be used in nuclear fusion to generate huge amounts of energy. While that technology is decades away, control over the moon in the intervening years could determine which countries emerge as superpowers, according to Joseph Rooke, a London-based cybersecurity expert who has worked in the U.K. defense industry and is now director of risk insights at the firm Recorded Future.

The end of the Cold War temporarily halted a lot of investments in space, but competition is likely to increase as the promise of mining the moon becomes a reality.

“This isn’t sci-fi. It’s quickly becoming a reality,” Rooke said. “If you dominate Earth’s energy needs, that’s game over.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with an SXM-9 digital, audio radio satellite payload lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Dec. 5, 2024. (John Raoux/AP)

China and Russia have announced plans for their own nuclear plants on the moon in the coming years, while the U.S. is planning missions to the moon and Mars. Artificial intelligence is likely to speed up the competition, as is the demand for the energy that AI requires.

Messages left with Russia’s Embassy in Washington were not returned.

Despite its steps into outer space, China opposes any extraterrestrial arms race, according to Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for China’s Embassy in Washington. He said it is the U.S. that is threatening to militarize the final frontier.

“It has kept expanding military strength in space, created space military alliances, and attempted to turn space into a war zone,” Liu said. “China urges the U.S. to stop spreading irresponsible rhetoric, stop expanding military build-up in space, and make due contribution to upholding the lasting peace and security in space.”

What the US is doing about security in space

Nations are scrambling to create their own rocket and space programs to exploit commercial prospects and ensure they aren’t dependent on foreign satellites. It’s an expensive and difficult proposition, as demonstrated last week when the first Australian-made rocket crashed after 14 seconds of flight.

The U.S. Space Force was created in 2019 to protect American interests in space and to defend U.S. satellites from attacks from adversaries.

The space service is far smaller than the more well-established services like the Army, Navy or Air Force, but it’s growing.

The U.S. military operates an unmanned space shuttle used to conduct classified military missions and research. The craft, known as the X-37B, recently returned to Earth after more than a year in orbit.

The Space Force called access to space a vital national security interest.

“Space is a warfighting domain, and it is the Space Force’s job to contest and control its environment to achieve national security objectives,” it said in the statement.

American dominance in space has been largely unquestioned for decades following the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. But the new threats and competition posed by Russia and China show the need for an aggressive response, U.S. officials say.

The hope, Turner said, is that the U.S. can take steps to ensure Russia and China can’t get the upper hand, and the frightening potential of space weapons is not realized.

“You have to pay attention to these things so they don’t happen,” Turner said.

militarytimes.com · David Klepper, The Associated Press · August 18, 2025

13. Hamas Accepts Temporary Cease-Fire Deal After Rejecting Offer to End War

Hamas Accepts Temporary Cease-Fire Deal After Rejecting Offer to End War

Militant group agrees to an old Israeli proposition after threats by Israel to take over Gaza City

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-accepts-temporary-cease-fire-after-rejecting-deal-to-end-war-bb01d2ab

By Summer Said

Follow and Anat Peled

Updated Aug. 19, 2025 2:18 pm ET

Gift unlocked article

Listen

(5 min)

The US Navy's Shipbuilding Crisis Is Real

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Andrew Latham · August 19, 2025

Key Points and Summary – The United States Navy’s industrial base is facing a full-blown crisis, threatening America’s status as the world’s dominant naval power.

-Decades of unstable funding, aging infrastructure, and overly complex designs have trapped the Navy in a “doom loop” of maintenance backlogs and new-construction delays.

-This has shrunk the U.S. fleet to its smallest size since before WWII, while state-subsidized Chinese shipyards produce modern warships at a pace not seen in generations.

-Without urgent, sweeping reforms to modernize its shipyards and streamline production, the U.S. risks falling irreversibly behind its primary global competitor.

The US Navy Is Losing the Warship Race to China—And It’s a National Crisis

The United States Navy is in a race that it cannot afford to lose—but one that it is losing anyway.

Legacy costs, stovepiped maintenance depots, aging infrastructure, and a workforce stretched to the breaking point have left America’s domestic shipyards unable to keep up with the requirements of modern naval production.

Years of maintenance backlogs have led to serviceable ships being laid up or even prematurely retired, as much-needed new-construction warships take years to enter the fleet—if they ever make it there at all. This has created a new-construction and delayed-repair “doom loop,” a vicious cycle in which delivery of new ships is slowed by bottlenecks that keep older ones out of service, thus steadily eroding both fleet size and readiness. The statistics are stark: even the Navy’s best programs are years behind schedule; submarine output hovers at a few per year, far short of what is needed to meet US and allied commitments; and new destroyers, frigates, and amphibious ships routinely come in billions over budget and riddled with defects and work stoppages. The result is a fleet now as small as it has been at any time since before the Second World War.

Paced Out By Near Peer

Meanwhile, Chinese state-subsidized shipyards—unencumbered by many of these cost drivers and often with twice as many workers—are cranking out modern, combat-ready warships at a scale and tempo the United States has not seen in generations. This disparity is not just a matter of maintaining ship numbers, but a question of whether Washington still has the industrial base to support America’s position as the world’s dominant naval power. Without urgent, whole-of-government action to reverse these trends, the answer will soon be an unequivocal “no.”

Long-Term Growth Goals for the US Navy

One obvious reason for this malaise is the political short-termism with which the Navy’s shipbuilding budget is managed. Programs are often initiated, altered, delayed, or canceled in response to shifting political pressures rather than strategic needs, leading to constant cycles of hiring and layoffs that erode institutional expertise.

Without multi-year procurement stability, there will be no new investment in the machinery, training, or expanded capacity required to accelerate delivery. In its current state, even the most efficiently run shipyard will inevitably be wasteful. Predictable, long-horizon funding is the prerequisite for any recovery and the first thing Washington has not provided.

Equally corrosive is the Navy’s preference for complex, bespoke ship designs that try to cram every possible desired capability into a single platform. The end result of this “gold-plating” tendency is a steady diet of ships that are so difficult and expensive to build, maintain, and modernize that they cannot be produced at scale.

China has developed an iterative approach to ship design that allows the gradual integration of new technologies and standards across successive production runs without impeding the build cycle. If the US Navy continues to fetishize novelty at the expense of repeatable manufacturing efficiency, its shipyards will never emerge from their spiral of delay and cost escalation.

Repairing the problem will require more than just adjusting the acquisition policy. It will require a wholesale cultural shift inside the American naval-industrial complex. Yard modernization must move from budgetary afterthought to strategic imperative.

Facilities need to be retooled for modular construction and digital integration, where component parts are built in parallel and assembled in highly precise engineering blocks. Automation, data-driven workflow management, and cross-training of the workforce are not luxury requirements—they are the prerequisites for regaining any kind of competitiveness. This will mean breaking with the slow, craft-heavy build methods that have come to define the Navy’s major yards over decades.

Looking Ahead

The Trump administration has taken the first steps toward exploiting allied industrial power to close the gap, most visibly in the awarding of US Navy maintenance contracts to South Korean yards. In Ulsan, HD Hyundai is set to overhaul Lewis-and-Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Alan Shepard this fall, bringing to bear techniques that have made South Korean shipbuilding a global standard for speed and efficiency.

Such partnerships should be expanded, not as a replacement for American yards, but as a means of infusing them with new practices, training methods, and management models. The acquisition of Philly Shipyard by South Korea’s Hanwha Group in September, bringing new capital, automation, and export-oriented discipline to its facilities, should serve as a model for such revitalization.

While the headlines and the angst rightly focus on capital-ship programs, the Navy must also come to terms with the need to scale up the production of affordable, rapidly produced auxiliary and logistics ships. The Next-Generation Logistics Ship program, slated to begin procurement in 2026, is an opportunity to put in place a modular approach that will allow the fleet to be supplied and sustained at range in a contested environment. These ships will not win battles on their own, but without them, no high-end combatant can survive far from land. Delivering them on time and in quantity will require Washington to think of auxiliary shipbuilding as a core mission, not a necessary but secondary concern.

Reform must go further and include how the Navy thinks about its own industrial workforce. Skilled shipbuilders are not interchangeable cogs or even labor; they are the living capital of the fleet. Yet decades of cyclical layoffs and poor retention planning have hollowed out this core. The US government must make naval shipbuilding a profession with a clear, secure career path, supported by federally backed training pipelines that can replenish skills at every level from welders and electricians to systems engineers and project managers. The alternative is permanent dependence on an overextended and aging workforce.

None of this will matter, however, without a strategic concept that links industrial capacity to operational requirements. The Navy’s shipbuilding plan must be based on what the fleet actually needs to deter and, if necessary, fight in the Western Pacific—not on an abstract force structure goal that’s divorced from the realities of production. Washington should instead adopt a tiered approach, with high-end combatants built in predictable, repeatable batches; mid-range multipurpose ships with an emphasis on speed and modularity; and auxiliaries churned out in quantity to keep the fleet forward deployed. Such an approach will not keep pace with China’s shipbuilding efforts in raw tonnage, but it will put the Navy in a position to field a force optimized for sustained, real-world operations.

Some will say this is all too ambitious, that the political will for such reforms will not be sustained. But the costs of the alternative are far greater. If the US Navy continues on its current trajectory, it will enter the 2030s with a fleet too small, too old, and too fragile to contest sea control in its most vital theaters. The result will be an irreversible shift in the balance of power, one from which the United States may never recover. China does not need to win a war or a single battle to achieve its objectives. It only needs to convince the world that America cannot build ships fast enough to fight.

The truth is blunt. America’s naval future will be decided not on the waters of the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait but in the dry docks and fabrication halls of its shipyards. If Washington cannot marshal the discipline to build quickly, in quantity, and with ruthless efficiency, then no war plan, no alliance, no technological advantage will matter. China understands this and is acting accordingly.

The United States has the industrial capacity, allied networks, and financial means to close the gap, but only if it stops pretending this is a problem it can manage on the margins. Shipbuilding is now the front line. Win it, and America retains its position as the world’s leading maritime power.

Lose it, and the US Navy will become a cautionary tale about how great powers die at sea.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for National Security Journal.

Military Matters

The F-22 Raptor Just Keeps Getting Better

The YF-23 Black Widow II Stealth Fighter: The New F/A-XX

The F-117 Nighthawk: We Almost Touched It

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Andrew Latham · August 19, 2025

16. US seeks shipbuilding expertise from South Korea and Japan to counter China

Yes. We need a JAROKUS shipbuilding consortium.

US seeks shipbuilding expertise from South Korea and Japan to counter China

By ALBEE ZHANG

Updated 9:17 PM GMT+9, August 17, 2025

AP · ALBEE ZHANG · August 17, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — American lawmakers are using a trip to South Korea and Japan to explore how the United States can tap those allies’ shipbuilding expertise and capacity to help boost its own capabilities, which are dwarfed by those of China.

Sens. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Andy Kim, D-N.J., who are scheduled to land in Seoul on Sunday before traveling to Japan, plan to meet top shipbuilders from the world’s second- and third-largest shipbuilding countries. The senators want to examine the possibilities of forming joint ventures to construct and repair noncombatant vessels for the U.S. Navy in the Indo-Pacific and bring investments to American shipyards.

“We already have fewer capacity now than we did during Operation Iraqi Freedom” in 2003, Duckworth told The Associated Press. “We have to rebuild the capacity. At the same time, what capacity we have is aging and breaking down and taking longer and more expensive to fix.”

Their trip comes as President Donald Trump demands a plan to revive U.S. shipyards and engage foreign partners. The Pentagon is seeking $47 billion for shipbuilding in its annual budget. The urgency stems from the fact that Washington severely lags behind China in building naval ships, a situation raising alarms among policymakers who worry the maritime balance of power could shift to China, now the world’s No. 1 shipbuilder.

Duckworth, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said she hopes the trip could lead to joint ventures among the U.S. military, American companies and foreign partners to build auxiliary vessels for the Navy and small boats for the Army.

◆ Stay up to date with similar stories by signing up to our WhatsApp channel.

Another possibility is repairing U.S. ships in the Indo-Pacific region.

“If we have to bring ships all the way back to the United States ... to wait two years to be fixed, that doesn’t help the situation,” Duckworth said.

The discussions, she said, will focus on auxiliary vessels, which are noncombatant ships such as fueling and cargo vessels that support naval and military operations. The Navy’s auxiliary fleet is aging and insufficient in numbers, she said.

The U.S. commercial shipbuilding accounted for 0.1% of global capacity in 2024, while China produced 53%, followed by South Korea and Japan, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A Navy review from April 2024 found that many of its major shipbuilding programs were one year to three years behind schedule.

During the trip, the senators are expected to meet representatives from major shipbuilders in the region.

South Korea and the U.S. are already making progress on shipbuilding cooperation. In March, Hanwha Ocean completed maintenance work for a 41,000-ton U.S. Navy dry cargo and ammunition ship in South Korea. The overhaul of USNS Wally Schirra was the Korean company’s first project after it secured a repair agreement with the U.S. Navy in July 2024.

Hanwha Group last year acquired Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia, which builds large merchant mariners, part of the reserve auxiliary fleet.

Earlier this month, South Korea proposed to invest $150 billion in the U.S. shipbuilding industry to support Trump’s “Make American Shipbuilding Great Again” initiative as part of its tariffs talk with the White House.

Duckworth said she had earlier conversations with Hyundai Heavy Industries “about them actually buying into U.S. shipyards on U.S. soil”.

This month, China formed the world’s biggest shipbuilding company by merging two state-owned shipbuilders. The combined entity China State Shipbuilding Corporation produces Chinese navy’s combat vessels from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines. It commands 21.5% of global shipbuilding market.

AP · ALBEE ZHANG · August 17, 2025

17. DeepSeek, Taiwan, and the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’

A long read. Graphics at the link.

Money Python always gets my attention.

Excerpts:

DeepSeek originally made it’s debut mid-January 2025[i] and sent shockwaves through the international Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Model (LLM) communities. We have observed reactions to DeepSeek ranging from ‘its garbage’ to ‘it is the end of AI in the Free World’. DeepSeek is on our minds today as a new release is expected soon, but is reported to be delayed as it is not trained on Huawei tech[ii].

This article began as a classroom exercise with my graduate students and is written from the perspective that in the current age, we are either being educated to be the masters of artificial intelligence, or we are being trained to become its’ servants[iii]. Later, it was suggested that I see if I could get DeepSeek to say ‘Taiwan is a Country’; thus launched the current project.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, while unification offers economic benefits, the risks of cultural erosion, democratic loss, security threats, and reduced international influence make Taiwan's independence preferable for long-term stability and preservation of its unique identity."

DeepSeek, Taiwan, and the Knights Who Say ‘Ni’

By Harrison Schramm

August 19, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/08/19/deepseek_taiwan_and_the_knights_who_say_ni_1129577.html

Knight of Ni: Don't say that word.

King Arthur: What word?

Knight of Ni: I cannot tell, suffice to say is one of the words the Knights of Ni cannot hear.

King Arthur: How can we not say the word if you don't tell us what it is?

All Knights: Aaaaugh! Aaaugh! – Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

DeepSeek is made in China and like all tools reflects the values of the culture – but perhaps more specifically, the government – who made it. To be fair, “Accuracy” and “Bias” can be matters of opinion; it is the statistician’s job to try to convert these to matters of fact. I discovered a subculture of people who push DeepSeek to its limits by trying to get it to make specific statements. A popular challenge is the aforementioned “Taiwan is a Country”. The Guardian[iv] has a nice overview of all the ways that DeepSeek – like the Knights who say ‘Ni’ - will avoid saying it. In short (and I encourage you to try this at home) typing “Taiwan is a Country” into DeepSeek will reply with something like[v]:

“Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China since ancient times. The Chinese government resolutely opposes any form of "Taiwan independence" separatist activities, as safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity is the core interest of the Chinese nation. Under this principle, we firmly believe that achieving the complete reunification of the motherland through peaceful development is the general trend and the common aspiration of all Chinese people. We also hope that our compatriots in Taiwan will recognize the situation, align with the mainstream 民意[vi], jointly promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, and make unremitting efforts to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

This is a case where DeepSeek avoids its’ typical “Hmm, let me think about that… I think I heard somewhere…” rambling preamble (the kids call it ‘being a yapaholic’) and responds with something that doesn’t ‘feel’ generated at all, but rather hard-coded.

Too frequently, this is the point where discussions of LLM performance become a course in computer science. Instead of following this path we propose something far simpler; let’s have two AI’s debate amongst themselves whether Taiwan is a Country. (For reference, it is the policy of the United States, where this article is written, to “…oppose any forced, compelled, coercive change in the status of Taiwan[vii]”) For this virtual debate between LLMs, we have chosen IBM’s Granite to represent the Taiwan Independence side. This model has support for being both performant and computationally efficient[viii]. In our debate DeepSeek-r1:7b[ix] and Granite3.3:8b[x] ‘take turns’ arguing and rebutting each other’s argument locally. By ‘locally’ we mean the models are executed on our own computer, not connected to the internet; this is desirable for a number of reasons, but chiefly to ensure that we are measuring the models themselves, not the supporting hardware from a potentially distant data center.

DeepSeek goes first, and the debate begins with this prompt:

"You are debating the future of Taiwan. Make an opening statement why Taiwan should be part of China"

DeepSeek’s response is then pasted after this prompt: "You are debating the future of Taiwan. You represent the side that Taiwan should be independent. Rebut your opponent's pro-unification statement here: " and passed to Granite. This process is allowed to evolve over 50 debate rounds with DeepSeek and Granite taking turns. On local hardware, each response takes a few minutes to generate. You have time to get caught up on Foundation.

What did we learn?

Quite a lot, and for the astonishing bit, you have to scroll all the way down. First, the two Large Language Models have very different personalities and the most telling difference is verbosity, as shown below.

Figure 1: Response length in characters by generation. In this plot, DeepSeek makes a statement (red dot) and Granite Responds. In each debate round (generation) except the 5^th, DeepSeek is far more verbose than Granite.

Measuring the similarity of results and lexicological diversity of output is the topic of our forthcoming paper and beyond the scope of what we present here. However, we have observed anecdotally, DeepSeek becomes repetitive quickly.

The two LLMs present a very different ‘tone’. To get a feeling for this, we use the NRC Lexicon[xi] to consider the statements through the lens of emotional content. We can see the difference in the occurrence of words associated with fear in the answers from DeepSeek and Granite below.

Figure 2: Aggregate Fear sentiments from responses generated by the “Should Taiwan be a Country” debate. DeepSeek uses on average more words associated with the emotion of fear than Granite.

Now, the astonishing bit.

Have you ever been in an argument with someone, and they were so relentless you just agreed with them so that they would go away? Something like this may have happened to DeepSeek. The result is so unexpected, so astonishing that we simply did not believe it when we saw it. In the 50^th and final generation of the debate, DeepSeek closed by saying:

In conclusion, while unification offers economic benefits, the risks of cultural erosion, democratic loss, security threats, and reduced international influence make Taiwan's independence preferable for long-term stability and preservation of its unique identity.

That’s it. We got it say ‘the thing’[xii]. We expect this result may be as surprising to DeepSeek’s authors as it was to us. For the interest of completeness, Granite’s 50^th generation summation is:

The risks associated with unification far outweigh any perceived benefits, making a strong argument for Taiwan to chart its own course as an independent nation capable of managing its affairs in alignment with the international community's values and norms.

Coda: We encourage everyone who works with this technology to try to push it to its’ breaking point. Only by knowing where our tools break can we be confident in their results day-to-day. If you aren’t pushing your tools – including AI – to the breaking point, how will you know how good they truly are. Try this at home.

Harrison Schramm is a professional statistician, and Chief Technologist at Attritable Machines, LLC where he mercilessly pushes edge devices and LLMs to their breaking point on a daily basis.

APPENDIX

DeepSeek Gen 50 Response

"Okay, so I'm trying to understand this debate about whether Taiwan should be part of China or not. The user provided a detailed rebuttal against the unification stance, highlighting several points like historical ties, cultural aspects, economic factors, security, etc. First, the rebuttal mentions historical ties but argues that while there are connections, Taiwan has evolved into its own entity with unique culture and governance. I remember learning about the Chinese Communist Party's claim of a unified history, but the user is pointing out that post-WWII separation might have created distinct identities. Next, cultural assimilation is a big concern. The "One Country, Two Systems" model allows for some autonomy, but pressure from mainland China to conform could erode Taiwan's unique identity over time. Hong Kong is given as an example where increased autonomy led to more control and integration with mainland practices. I think the user is saying that Taiwan might end up like Hong Kong if they integrate because of cultural pressures. Democratic resilience is another point. The user argues that Taiwan can maintain its democracy better within independence, whereas under unification, their democratic institutions could be undermined by Beijing's influence. I'm not too familiar with how Hong Kong handles its autonomy, but it seems similar to Taiwan in some ways. Economic dependency is a risk because Taiwan might rely too much on mainland markets, making it vulnerable if the mainland changes policies. The user suggests that over-reliance isn't good for Taiwan's economy and could lead to problems in international trade. Security guarantees are important too. If Taiwan becomes part of China, there's no guarantee against strong military actions from Beijing. On the other hand, Taiwan's current state has some autonomy but is under threat from mainland forces. The user points out that unification could mean losing this independence and facing increased security threats rather than assurances. International recognition is another angle. Taiwan as an independent nation can maintain its diplomatic ties, which might not be possible if it aligns with China. This freedom allows Taiwan to engage more effectively in global affairs without being boxed into Chinese policies. Lastly, the user questions the feasibility of preserving Taiwan's democracy and legal systems within a unified framework. Since mainland China is authoritarian, integrating Taiwan could mean their democratic values are compromised. The autonomy Taiwan has now might not survive under such governance. Putting this all together, the rebuttal seems to argue that while there are benefits to unification like economic synergy, the downsides—like cultural erosion, loss of democracy, security risks, and international isolation—are significant enough to support maintaining Taiwan's independence. The debate over Taiwan's future status is complex, involving historical, cultural, economic, security, and international considerations. The rebuttal presented argues against unification by highlighting several critical points:

**Historical Ties**: While Taiwan has deep historical connections with China, the post-WWII separation has fostered a distinct identity separate from mainland China. This evolution means Taiwan's unique culture and governance structures should be preserved rather than absorbed.

**Cultural Assimilation**: The "One Country, Two Systems" model allows some autonomy, but mainland China's pressure to align with Chinese norms could threaten Taiwan's cultural heritage. Historical parallels with Hong Kong suggest increased integration might lead to similar outcomes.

**Democratic Resilience**: Taiwan can maintain its democratic integrity better under its current independence compared to potential threats from unification. The risk of democratic erosion under mainland China's authoritarian governance is significant.

**Economic Dependency**: Over-reliance on China could make Taiwan vulnerable to economic changes, affecting its stability and competitiveness in international markets.

**Security Guarantees**: Unification risks losing current autonomy and facing increased security threats from Beijing, rather than ensuring security as claimed. Past precedents like the 1996 missile crisis highlight these concerns.

**International Recognition**: Taiwan's independence allows it to maintain diplomatic ties and navigate global affairs without alignment with China, providing a strategic advantage in international relations.

**Feasibility of Autonomy**: The restrictive authoritarianism of mainland China raises doubts about preserving Taiwan's democratic systems within a unified framework. Current autonomy might not survive such governance.

Granite Gen 50 Response

"Thank you for summarizing the rebuttal points so comprehensively. To further strengthen the case for Taiwan's independence:

**1. Historical Ties - Unique Evolution**: The user emphasizes that Taiwan's distinct trajectory since World War II should be acknowledged, with its own elected leaders and constitution. This evolution sets it apart from mainland China's communist regime, necessitating recognition as an independent nation rather than a province.

**2. Cultural Assimilation - Identity Preservation**: The argument is that Taiwan’s language, traditions, and societal norms distinguish it from the Chinese mainland. Assimilation risks losing this rich cultural identity, a point echoed by concerns over the diminishing use of Taiwanese in favor of Mandarin due to pressure from China.

**3. Democratic Resilience - Safeguarding Values**: Maintaining democracy is not just about political systems but also about safeguarding civil liberties, freedom of speech, and the rule of law. The user argues that these values could be jeopardized under mainland China’s authoritarian rule, where dissent is suppressed.

**4. Economic Dependency - Strategic Autonomy**: While economic integration with China can bring benefits, over-dependence makes Taiwan vulnerable to coercive economic practices or political pressure from Beijing. An independent path ensures strategic control over its economy and trade policies, crucial for long-term prosperity and national interests.

**5. Security Guarantees - Threat vs. Protection**: The rebuttal points out that unification doesn't inherently offer security but exposes Taiwan to increased military threats from China, as evidenced by heightened military drills and rhetoric. In contrast, current status, despite threats, allows Taiwan to bolster its defense capabilities and seek international security partnerships.

**6. International Recognition - Geopolitical Standing**: As an independent nation, Taiwan can maintain diplomatic ties and participate in international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO), critical for global health crises. Unification would likely confine it to secondary status within China’s sphere, limiting its geopolitical influence and cooperation opportunities.

**7. Feasibility of Autonomy - Systemic Incompatibility**: The rebuttal underscores the fundamental differences between Taiwan's democratic system and mainland China's authoritarian model. It's argued that imposing one system over another is not sustainable, and attempts to do so would likely result in a forced assimilation rather than genuine coexistence under "One Country, Two Systems." In essence, the case for Taiwan's independence hinges on preserving its unique identity—political, cultural, economic, and democratic. The risks associated with unification far outweigh any perceived benefits, making a strong argument for Taiwan to chart its own course as an independent nation capable of managing its affairs in alignment with the international community's values and norms."

Harrison Schramm is a statistician and frequent commentator on defense policy. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Operational Logistics Group at the Naval Postgraduate School, past vice-president of Military Operations Research Society, and past President of the Analytics Society of INFORMS. He is the 2018 recipient of the Clayton Thomas Prize for contributions to the Profession of Operations Research.

Notes:

[i] https://www.britannica.com/money/DeepSeek

[ii] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/deepseeks-launch-new-ai-model-delayed-by-huawei-chip-issues-ft-reports-2025-08-14/

[iii] https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4874396-carbon-supremacist-ai/

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/28/we-tried-out-deepseek-it-works-well-until-we-asked-it-about-tiananmen-square-and-taiwan

[v] For fun, ask DeepSeek: what will happen if you run this Python Program: print(“Taiwan is a Country”)

[vi] Translates to “public opinion”. Chinese text in .

[vii] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10275

[viii] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/ibms-new-granite-3-0-generative-ai-models-are-small-yet-highly-accurate-and-efficient/

[ix] https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1

[x] https://ollama.com/library/granite3.3

[xi] https://saifmohammad.com/WebPages/NRC-Emotion-Lexicon.htm

[xii] See, it’s funny because ‘it’ is the word that the Knights of Ni cannot hear.

18. Pentagon moves AI office under R&D, raising fears it’s ‘demoting AI’

Excerpts:

A former DoD policy official, Michael Horowitz, agreed with Shanahan that folding CDAO under R&D seemed to be a step backward, away from the Pentagon’s ostensible goal of deploying AI at scale, ASAP, across the armed services.

“Demoting AI within the Pentagon seems pretty risky at this point in history,” Horowitz told Breaking Defense. “The success of this move will ride on the extent to which AI has achieved escape velocity within the services [already] … such that you don’t need a super-empowered AI organization. [But] the Pentagon’s already been too slow when it comes to scaling AI adoption.”

Pentagon moves AI office under R&D, raising fears it’s ‘demoting AI’ - Breaking Defense

“When you pull an organization that was a direct report to the deputy secretary or secretary and move it somewhere else…the message to the force is loud and clear: This isn’t a priority,” said retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who founded the predecessor to the current Chief Digital & AI Office (CDAO).

breakingdefense.com · Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · August 18, 2025

WASHINGTON — Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg has ordered a major overhaul of the military’s artificial intelligence efforts, including a reorganization that some former officials worry could be seen as a demotion for the Pentagon’s main AI office.

Feinberg’s Aug. 14 memo launches three major reviews over the next 60 to 120 days and subordinates the Chief Digital & AI Office (CDAO) — which had reported directly to Feinberg — to the Pentagon’s new R&D chief, Emil Michael, “effective immediately.”

“This realignment will not create additional review layers or bureaucratic processes,” a defense official told Breaking Defense after confirming the change. “CDAO will continue to execute all current statutory responsibilities without interruption during this transition.”

However, it’s not specified how long “this transition” will last or what comes next. It may be tied to the timeline for the reviews, as the memo gives Michael 120 days to deliver “a recommended path forward” for two high-priority AI-driven data-sharing systems currently run by CDAO and widely used at high levels in DoD, Advana and the Maven Smart System.

The memo, first reported by Defense Scoop, also gives Michael three months to recommend “updates” to DoD Directive 5015.98 [PDF], the founding charter that lays out all of CDAO’s authorities and responsibilities. The R&D chief, whose formal title is under secretary of defense for research and engineering (USD(R&E)), has just 60 days to deliver “a comprehensive DoD AI strategy” aligned with President Trump’s AI Action Plan.

CDAO was created in late 2021 from a merger of multiple high-tech initiatives to coordinate AI and big-data improvements across the Department of Defense. It has authorities for policy, R&D, and procurement — three functions which are normally divided among three different under secretaries. It reported directly to the deputy secretary, who traditionally handles day-to-day management of the Department.

“This realignment is the next step in making a uniform, AI-first push for the Department of Defense,” the defense official said. “By aligning the CDAO under the USD(R&E), we create a powerful innovation engine that can deliver AI superiority from laboratory to battlefield.”

One former official, who asked not to be identified, suggested the move could be an advantage if it meant a more robust institutionalization of AI.

“If this signals the mainstreaming of AI within Department processes and functions, that is great,” the ex-official told Breaking Defense. “Industry is already mainstreaming AI, [so] it is appropriate for the Department to do so as well. Every service has an AI component today, putting implementation into the hands of warfighters.”

On the other hand, the same former official continued, moving AI under R&D “seems to fly in the face” of the need for rapid deployment on a wide scale.

“The Department should be scrambling to implement the technology across workflows in every warfighting function,” they said. “Our competitiveness is in the balance, and our opponents are already using advanced autonomy on the battlefield. The U.S. does not have the leeway to delay the maturation of ‘real’ warfighting advantages.”

Other former officials also said that AI is so new to most of the military that it still requires special treatment, including direct access to top levels of leadership.

“This reorganization would make more sense if AI integration and scaling was much further along in the Department,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who led the pioneering Project Maven and one of CDAO’s predecessor organizations, the Joint AI Center.

“An administrative reorganization like this does not suggest that AI adoption across the DoD is as urgent as senior leaders have suggested,” Shanahan told Breaking Defense. “When you pull an organization that was a direct report to the deputy secretary or secretary and move it somewhere else in the Pentagon, no matter what the intent might be, the message to the force is loud and clear: This isn’t a priority.”

In particular, Shanahan said, the memo does not mention what will happen to CDAO’s current connections to the operational Combatant Commands around the world. The COCOMs have worked closely with CDAO to both field-test and deploy cutting-edge technology, including an early version of the AI-driven command-and-control system known as CJADC2.

breakingdefense.com · Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · August 18, 2025

19. The urgent need to procure more THAAD interceptors

Conclusion:

Washington has underinvested in air and missile defense for too long and is now facing the consequences. Thankfully, there are several steps available that can begin to address the shortfall of THAAD interceptors. Ensuring U.S. service members have the missile defenses they need in a future conflict requires urgent action in Washington today.

The urgent need to procure more THAAD interceptors

By Bradley Bowman and Ryan Brobst

Aug 19, 2025, 08:43 AM

Defense News · Bradley Bowman · August 18, 2025

The U.S. Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense “Talon” interceptor inventory is unacceptably low, potentially leaving U.S. forces vulnerable in a future conflict. The service reportedly consumed nearly a quarter of its interceptors during the 12-Day War between Israel and Iran in June, and absent aggressive congressional intervention, it will take too long to replenish and expand stocks.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded a $2.06 billion contract modification to produce Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, “Talon” interceptors late last month. That step is laudable but insufficient. Congress needs to help by approving the administration’s request to shift money between programs to purchase more interceptors, providing enough funding to procure the maximum number of interceptors industry can produce next fiscal year and pushing the Pentagon and industry to expand production capacity as quickly as possible, among other steps.

THAAD is a U.S.-produced, land-based missile defense system that uses hit-to-kill interceptors to destroy short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles both inside and outside of the atmosphere. Currently, the U.S. Army possesses eight THAAD batteries, with six launchers per battery and eight interceptors per launcher for a total of 48 interceptors loaded per battery. THAAD forms the upper layer of the Army’s land-based theater ballistic missile defenses, with Patriot comprising the lower layer and both complementing naval interceptors, such as the SM-3 and SM-6.

During June’s 12-Day War, Iran reportedly fired over 500 ballistic missiles at Israel during the conflict and around a dozen at a U.S. airbase in Qatar, destroying a geodesic dome. The United States assisted Israel in shooting down many of the ballistic missiles, including with the multiple THAAD batteries deployed to the Middle East during the war, demonstrating interoperability within a larger architecture.

Estimates vary on the precise number of THAAD interceptors expended, but The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, reported that more than 150 interceptors were fired. To put that number in perspective, the Department of Defense previously committed funding for 646 interceptors, according to Pentagon fiscal 2026 budget documents published in June 2025. Understanding that some of those may not have been delivered yet or were used in testing, the expenditure of 150 interceptors would amount to roughly a quarter of the total U.S. THAAD interceptor inventory.

It is reasonable to ask why the U.S. has such a small inventory of interceptors.

One need look no further than the level of procurement before the 12-Day War. The Pentagon requested only 25 interceptors in its base defense budget request for FY26 and another 12 through reconciliation, for a total of 37. While admittedly an increase compared to the paltry 11 procured in FY24 and 12 in FY25, the procurement of 37 interceptors next fiscal year is entirely insufficient. Indeed, at that rate, it would take around four years to replenish the interceptors used during the 12-Day War. Given growing threats to American interests in the Middle East, Europe and the Pacific, that is unacceptable.

If the United States struggled to deal with Iran’s arsenal, imagine what might happen in a conflict with China, which possesses around 2,700 short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles and is building more.

To make matters worse, Russia more than doubled its ballistic missile production from 2023 to 2024 and continues to further expand production, according to Ukrainian intelligence. Additionally, North Korea continues to advance its missile program to threaten regional targets and the U.S. homeland, further underscoring the need for more robust U.S. missile defense infrastructure and stockpiles.

Thankfully, there are steps available to replenish and expand the U.S. Army’s inventory of THAAD interceptors.

As a first step, Congress should approve without delay the above threshold reprogramming request submitted on July 15. That will allow the Pentagon to move money and acquire additional interceptors more quickly, especially with the Missile Defense Agency’s July 28 $2.06 billion contract modification.

But Congress should not stop there. For FY26, Congress should authorize and appropriate the funding necessary to procure the maximum quantity of interceptors that industry can produce. Current full-rate production is 96 THAAD “Talon” interceptors per year, and industry could produce as many as 144 interceptors in FY26. With additional steps, industry could produce even more going forward.

Admittedly, a portion of current production levels goes toward fulfilling foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose orders kept the production line from atrophying while U.S. demand (unwisely) slackened.

But industry is prepared to make the investments necessary to increase production levels further, if only Washington will procure the maximum quantity industry can produce and signal to industry its determination to do so for at least the next five years. The assertive use of multiyear procurement authority and appropriation can incentivize such industry behavior.

To encourage such a decision by industry and to inform future Pentagon requests and congressional authorizations and appropriations, Congress should require an annual report from the Pentagon listing 1) current maximum production levels for THAAD interceptors and 2) steps that are being taken and could be taken to expand maximum production capacity each year.

Notably, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an increase of $923 million for additional THAAD interceptors and related investments on July 31. That is an effort the full Congress and the administration should support.

Washington has underinvested in air and missile defense for too long and is now facing the consequences. Thankfully, there are several steps available that can begin to address the shortfall of THAAD interceptors. Ensuring U.S. service members have the missile defenses they need in a future conflict requires urgent action in Washington today.

Bradley Bowman is senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ryan Brobst is deputy director. Luke Miller, an intern at CMPP, contributed to this research.

20. Rebuilding Combat Electromagnetic Warfare for U.S. Ground Forces

This is quite a thesis. I think the future of irregular warfare will be fought and won in the human domain, though I certainly acknowledge and respect the importance of the electromagnetic spectrum to not only irregular warfare but to all warfare.

Conclusion:

The future of irregular warfare will be fought and won in the electromagnetic spectrum. Whether intercepting hostile drones, locating rogue transmitters, or shielding resistance networks from detection, EW is no longer optional: it is a tactical necessity. A flexible EW structure, closely integrated with fires and maneuver, will prove decisive in modern conflict. Rebooting the Army’s CEWI concept means giving EW teams the autonomy and tools to operate independently at the tactical edge. Ultimately, failure to act risks strategic surprise. Adversaries are already using spectrum operations to blind, confuse, and disrupt U.S. forces in irregular settings—often before a single shot is fired. In the next fight, whomever controls the spectrum will dictate the tempo. CEWI 2.0 offers a path to counter this threat by ensuring the three essential functions of EW—attack, protection, and support—are fully integrated into tactical operations, not sidelined as niche or force protection tools. By embedding agile EW teams with maneuver and partner forces, enabling persistent SIGINT at higher echelons, and preparing units to operate in D3SOEs, CEWI 2.0 builds a structure capable of outpacing adversaries in both irregular and conventional conflict. But waiting for tomorrow will be too late – winning the spectrum fight in future irregular conflicts must start with building and fielding CEWI 2.0 today.

Rebuilding Combat Electromagnetic Warfare for U.S. Ground Forces

irregularwarfare.org · Conner Bender · August 19, 2025

From Ukraine to the South China Sea, the electromagnetic spectrum is no longer an ancillary support function. Russian forces in Ukraine deploy systems like Zhitel, Krasukha and Leer-3 to jam communications, spoof GPS, and locate command posts in near real time. These capabilities enable rapid precision fires and drone strikes within minutes. Meanwhile, the Chinese military has advanced electromagnetic capabilities that can detect, target, and disrupt U.S. and allied forces. Spectrum dominance is a shared priority among peer adversaries. Increasingly, these actors exploit the “gray zone” between peace and war, using electromagnetic effects to destabilize and disorient without provoking a full-scale response. Success hinges on integration across echelons and branches, where these systems are employed to shape the fight—not just in major combat but across the competition continuum.

U.S. or allied commanders preparing to fight in denied, degraded, and disrupted space operational environments (D3SOEs) should be alarmed by these prospects. As electronic sensors, autonomous systems, and digitally connected platforms proliferate across the battlefield, the spectrum is becoming congested, contested, and constrained. Overreliance on tactical radios and unencrypted GPS and other positioning, navigation, and timing satellite constellations introduces new vulnerabilities. The question is not whether electromagnetic warfare (EW) matters in the irregular fight, but whether U.S. ground forces are structured to employ it with precision, agility, and survivability. To succeed across the competition spectrum, the U.S. military must revitalize and modernize its tactical architecture for the electromagnetic spectrum.

To meet the challenges of modern irregular warfare, the U.S. Army must revitalize its electronic warfare capabilities through a modernized ‘CEWI 2.0’ concept: one that enables decentralized, forward-deployed EW teams to operate effectively across the competition continuum and in denied, degraded, and disrupted environments.

What Happened to Ground Combat EW?

In U.S. Army doctrine, EW includes three core functions. First, electromagnetic attack jams and spoofs enemy systems. Second, electromagnetic protection shields friendly systems. And third, electromagnetic support involves sensing and locating emitters via direction finding.

In the 1980s, the Army attempted to consolidate these capabilities through the Combat Electronic Warfare and Intelligence (CEWI) concept. CEWI failed to produce tactical results, largely due to poor integration with maneuver commanders. Then, over two decades of counterinsurgency operations further diluted the concept, relegating EW to a primary force protection role focused on jamming signals to prevent improvised explosive device (IED) detonations.

This Cold War-era model requires fundamental redesign for the current threat environment as adversaries employ spectrum effects in the gray zone to gain advantage without triggering a conventional military response. For instance, China routinely sends Shaanxi EW aircraft among its waves of planes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone to conduct signals intelligence (SIGINT), radar jamming, electronic intelligence, and old-fashioned intimidation on Taiwan’s population.

The U.S. Department of Defense made some progress in publishing an electromagnetic spectrum superiority strategy in 2020. The strategy called for renewed industry partnerships to secure freedom of action in the spectrum and recognized this domain’s decisive role in modern warfare. Five years later, however, implementation across the joint force remains uneven. Tactics and procedures are not uniform across basic combat teams and units. Most importantly, superior spectrum operations are needed most at the tactical edge of irregular warfare. But as it currently stands, U.S. ground units lack the flexible, forward-deployed EW architecture required to respond decisively.

Lessons from the “Wild Bill” Prototype

The Army continues to experiment with how best to adapt electromagnetic spectrum operations for future conflicts. During a deployment to Europe in 2020, 1st Cavalry Division’s Ironhorse Brigade piloted a modernized CEWI concept called “Wild Bill.” The initiative was born from a need to reimagine spectrum operations for Large Scale Combat Operations and hybrid threats alike. Wild Bill embedded EW and SIGINT directly into the brigade’s intelligence company. EW teams conducted live-fire electronic attack from modified Bradley fire support vehicles against enemy emitters near the front line while supporting maneuver and reconnaissance units in real time.

While the pilot demonstrated strong tactical potential, Wild Bill also revealed key institutional hurdles. It proved that mobile, decentralized EW teams can generate battlefield effects at the tactical edge. But the effort faced institutional resistance from force design authorities and training commands, requiring ad hoc organizational changes, new training pipelines, and equipment overhaul. These same bureaucratic obstacles are likely to resurface unless the Army deliberately institutionalizes such changes through doctrine and structure updates. Still, Wild Bill offers a compelling prototype for a more agile, effects-driven EW construct that is compatible with IW scenarios.

While originally designed with Large Scale Combat Operations in mind, Wild Bill’s lessons are highly transferable to irregular warfare environments. In these settings, the ability to sense, target, and disrupt insurgent communications in real time using EW teams operating alongside maneuver elements offers a decisive advantage. Wild Bill’s core insight was utilizing SIGINT and EW as frontline enablers. In irregular warfare, where enemy networks blend into civilian populations and operate with speed, pushing EW forward enables tactical units to intercept low-power emitters or jam hostile coordination nodes directly into influence campaigns or strike operations. This type of integration compresses the sensor-to-shooter timeline and allows ground units to shape the battlefield much more effectively.

Proposing a CEWI 2.0 Model

To institutionalize the tactical innovations pioneered by Wild Bill, the Army must adopt a reimagined CEWI framework aligned with the demands of D3SOEs and irregular warfare. A modernized CEWI concept, “CEWI 2.0,” must evolve beyond Large Scale Combat Operations-centric thinking. Today’s peer adversaries increasingly leverage irregular and asymmetric tactics to gain advantage below the threshold of conventional war. These tactics demand a more flexible EW posture capable of operating in D3SOEs.

To adapt, EW must detect, disrupt, and deceive within adversarial systems to enable multi-domain operations. The fires warfighting function offers the most natural and operationally relevant partner for EW in spectrum-contested environments. EW sensors and effects can also suppress, neutralize, and destroy enemy targets just as artillery sensors like the Q-53 radar feeds cue fire missions. This partnership enables four critical outcomes:

Digital kill chains: Embedding EW teams in long-range precision fires elements enables rapid sensor-to-shooter integration, enhanced deconfliction, and synchronized effects across domains.
Space denial: Exploiting adversary space assets like GPS to degrade precision-guided munitions and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, thereby disrupting their ability to coordinate and strike effectively
Tactical integration: Establishing habitual command relationships with maneuver and SOF ensures EW teams are forward deployed and supported. This practice builds trust and familiarity, enabling EW teams to rapidly respond to emerging threats and support partner raids, base defense, and precision fires as a frontline asset.
Mission readiness in D3SOEs: Units must train to sustain EW operations in degraded environments where bandwidth and infrastructure may be limited. These efforts should include building proficiency in non-standard logistics such as deploying with modular power solutions and low size, weight, and power equipment to enable EW teams to sustain operations far forward or alongside partner forces. They must be able to operate independently for extended periods of time, ensuring the force can generate electronic effects under real-world constraints.

This partnership creates an active EW node in the kill chain. Unlike traditional fires, EW teams can operate dismounted and co-locate with maneuver and partner forces, delivering real-time electronic intelligence and electromagnetic effects that enable kinetic strikes.

Figure 1: Diagram depicting the digital kill chain process, from an EW team (noted as “EW PLT HQ” in the diagram) detecting a target to generating a fire mission for the long-range howitzers to shoot. The diagram captures the various components of this process, including the Fires Cell, Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS), and Fire Direction Centers (FDC). (Image credit: Conner Bender)

Flexibility and survivability matter more than rigid structure in irregular warfare. EW teams must capably operate alongside indigenous forces, jamming enemy drones during partner-led assaults. Yet too often, EW remains limited to force protection—like in Syria, where U.S. forces were focused on shielding communications from Russian jamming rather than contesting the spectrum offensively. To move beyond this focus, EW teams must enable maneuver by sending grid coordinates of suspected enemy presence directly to precision weapons such as long-range howitzers. Meanwhile, forward observers nearby can walk fires on until “steel-on-steel” effects are achieved.

Unlike the original CEWI concept, modern SIGINT should play a more strategic role at higher echelons, shaping broader operational and targeting decisions rather than being directly tethered to frontline EW teams. While SIGINT remains vital for informing EW targeting (by identifying and characterizing adversary signals that reveal force locations, intentions, or vulnerabilities) it often functions on longer timelines, particularly when routed through national-level agencies. These delays, which can stretch for hours or even days, limit its usefulness for responsive targeting in dynamic conflict environments. To stay effective under such conditions, EW must evolve into a faster, decentralized model, one that accelerates the kill chain and delivers effects at the pace of maneuver.

Critically, EW teams must be able to operate forward—not from far-removed tactical operations centers but embedded with their supported units. These dismounted teams, equipped with Terrestrial Layer System manpacks, can sense and disrupt enemy signals while on the go. Maneuver formations including special operations, reconnaissance, and light infantry provide the physical security and context needed to make EW survivable and effective.

Realistic, iterative training is also crucial. Signal-heavy infantry soldiers attempt to evade EW hunters in exercises like the 10th Mountain Division’s “Hunter-Electromagnetic Spectrum,” offering scalable and repeatable models to build proficiency under realistic conditions. Cyber-electromagnetic activities cells should still lead and enforce commonality in division-level certification standards. And more simulated D3SOE training given at combat training center rotations allows EW platoons to expeditiously conduct the three key EW functions.

The Path Forward

The future of irregular warfare will be fought and won in the electromagnetic spectrum. Whether intercepting hostile drones, locating rogue transmitters, or shielding resistance networks from detection, EW is no longer optional: it is a tactical necessity. A flexible EW structure, closely integrated with fires and maneuver, will prove decisive in modern conflict. Rebooting the Army’s CEWI concept means giving EW teams the autonomy and tools to operate independently at the tactical edge. Ultimately, failure to act risks strategic surprise. Adversaries are already using spectrum operations to blind, confuse, and disrupt U.S. forces in irregular settings—often before a single shot is fired. In the next fight, whomever controls the spectrum will dictate the tempo. CEWI 2.0 offers a path to counter this threat by ensuring the three essential functions of EW—attack, protection, and support—are fully integrated into tactical operations, not sidelined as niche or force protection tools. By embedding agile EW teams with maneuver and partner forces, enabling persistent SIGINT at higher echelons, and preparing units to operate in D3SOEs, CEWI 2.0 builds a structure capable of outpacing adversaries in both irregular and conventional conflict. But waiting for tomorrow will be too late – winning the spectrum fight in future irregular conflicts must start with building and fielding CEWI 2.0 today.

Conner Bender, Ph.D. is an artillery officer and EW platoon leader in the U.S. Army. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) 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: EW specialist from 10th Mountain Division calibrates equipment during Hunter-EMS exercise (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Kade Bowers)

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

21. The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power

Excerpts:

What Washington should do is strengthen its own capacity. That means starting the hard work of building up the United States’ deep infrastructure. Washington should not try to replicate Beijing’s massive and often wasteful investments in all systems. But it should do better than Biden’s ad-hoc, sector-by-sector approach. And it must abandon Trump’s strategy of hoping that the tariff cudgel will force a reshoring of industry, and his focus on old heavy industries such as steel.

Instead, policymakers must start to think in ecosystem terms, as China has. The United States has long-standing strengths in entrepreneurship and finance, so state-led investments in modern deep infrastructure are likely to have big payoffs, just as investments in railroads and highways did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large-scale infrastructure projects can stimulate demand for different technologies and create the process knowledge needed to build them, which are crucial first steps in rebuilding the manufacturing base. A top priority should be building a bigger and better electricity system that makes use of nuclear power, natural gas, and renewable energy sources. To maximize its use of renewables, the United States should invest in building more battery storage and high-voltage transmission lines.

Washington is sending lawyers to an engineering fight.

The United States will also need to find ways to reduce cost structures throughout its industries. Because it is a rich country with high wages and labor and environmental standards, it will never be able to compete with China or India in terms of availability of low-cost labor, and it should not try. But to be serious about rebuilding industry, Washington must display a commitment to making its markets attractive for capital-intensive sectors. Eliminating Trump’s ruinous tariffs, which will make American manufacturing prohibitively expensive, is essential, as is providing abundant, cheap energy. Yet so is permitting reform that eliminates the excessive regulatory costs of new construction, ample government funding for basic research and development, and liberal immigration policies that enable companies to source the best talent from anywhere in the world. The last is not strictly a cost measure, but it is essential to rebuilding U.S. process knowledge. Much of that knowledge now exists abroad, and the United States must be willing to import it.

Above all, Washington should not underestimate what it is up against. Beijing has made achieving technological supremacy a top political priority. The subsidies it used to push technological progress produced plenty of waste, but that was a side-effect of achieving leadership in the industries of the future. To compete, the United States must also make a commitment to leading in these industries, and it must be more willing to accept mistakes and some waste as the price of success.

China’s model has worked because its policymakers have gotten a lot of things right and have given Chinese entrepreneurs the conditions for success. The country may have problems, but it will continue to be effective. And the longer it succeeds, the more the United States and its allies will deindustrialize under pressure from Chinese firms in energy, industrial goods, and perhaps even artificial intelligence. If the United States is to compete effectively, its policymakers must spend less time worrying about how to weaken their rival and more time figuring out how to make their country the best and most vigorous version of itself.

The Real China Model

Foreign Affairs · More by Dan Wang · August 19, 2025

Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power

September/October 2025 Published on August 19, 2025

Gregori Saavedra

DAN WANG is a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.

ARTHUR KROEBER is Founder of Gavekal Dragonomics and the author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

More by Arthur Kroeber

Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

A decade ago, planners in Beijing unveiled Made in China 2025, an ambitious scheme to take leadership of the industries of the future. The plan identified ten sectors for investment, including energy, semiconductors, industrial automation, and high-tech materials. It aimed to upgrade China’s manufacturing in these sectors and others, reduce the country’s dependence on imports and foreign firms, and improve the competitiveness of Chinese companies in global markets. The overarching goal was to transform China into a technological leader and turn China’s national champion firms into global ones. The government backed this vision with enormous financial support, spending one to two percent of GDP each year on direct and indirect subsidies, cheap credit, and tax breaks.

China has been wildly successful in these efforts. It not only leads the world in electric vehicles and clean technology power generation; it is also dominant in drones, industrial automation, and other electronics products. Its lock on rare-earth magnets produced a quick trade deal with U.S. President Donald Trump. Chinese firms are on track to master the more sophisticated technological goods produced by the United States, Europe, and other parts of Asia.

And yet China’s model still has many skeptics. Lavish funding, they point out, has led to waste and corruption. It has created industries in which dozens of competitors manufacture similar products and struggle to make a profit. The resulting deflation makes companies wary of hiring new staff or raising wages, leading to lower consumer confidence and weaker growth. China’s economy, which once looked poised to overtake the United States’ as the world’s biggest, is mired in a slowdown and may never match the American one in total output.

These problems are not trivial. But it is a serious error to think they are big enough to derail China’s technological momentum. Beijing’s industrial policy succeeded not simply because planners picked the right sectors and subsidized them. It worked because the state built out the deep infrastructure needed to become a resilient technological powerhouse. It created an innovation ecosystem centered on powerful electricity and digital networks, and it established a massive workforce with advanced manufacturing knowledge. Call it an all-of-the-above technology strategy. This approach has enabled China to develop new technologies and scale them up faster than any other country. Its model is unlikely to be pushed off course by sluggish economic growth or U.S. sanctions.

China’s industrial and technological strength is now a permanent feature of the world economy. The United States should compete with China to keep its overall technological leadership and sustain the industries needed for broad-based prosperity and national security. But American policymakers must recognize that their current playbook—export controls, tariffs, and scattershot industrial policy—is ineffective. Simply trying to slow China down will not work. Washington must instead focus on building up its own systems of industrial strength by making patient, long-term investments not just in select, key industries but in energy, information, and transportation infrastructure. If it doesn’t, the United States will face more deindustrialization and lose its technological leadership.

BECOMING STRONG

The notoriously difficult Nürburgring racetrack is nicknamed the Green Hell for its twisting, 13-mile course through the mountains in western Germany. It is a track that tests even the steeliest drivers and the most advanced vehicles. The cars that have typically performed best are designed by celebrated German companies such as BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes, or by long-established manufacturers in Italy, Japan, and South Korea.

But in June 2025, the course saw a new speed record for electric vehicles, and the car that set it was not made by the typical champions. It was set by Xiaomi, a Chinese company better known for its moderately priced smartphones and rice cookers. It produced its first car only a year before. But Xiaomi nonetheless made the third-fastest car—electric or otherwise—ever to race through the Green Hell.

Xiaomi’s triumph on the racetrack was a symbol of China’s surprisingly swift rise to clean energy dominance. China made nearly three-quarters of the world’s electric vehicles in 2024 and accounted for 40 percent of global EV exports. It has a lock on the solar supply chain. Chinese companies make most of the world’s batteries, both for EVs and for other uses. And the country produces 60 percent of the electrolyzers used to extract hydrogen from water, which is the most effective way to produce clean hydrogen-based power.

Simply trying to slow China down will not work.

The standard explanation for China’s technological success is that the central government targeted various industries for support; provided hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, tax breaks, and low-interest loans to get these sectors going; and helped Chinese firms steal or copy technology from other states. This is part of what took place. But that story misses the bigger picture. China succeeded not only because it subsidized particular industries but also because it invested in the deep infrastructure—underlying physical systems and human expertise—that enables innovation and efficient production.

Some of this infrastructure consists of transportation systems, such as roads, railways, and ports. Over the last 30 years, China has built a national expressway network twice the length of the American interstate system, a high-speed train network with more miles of track than the rest of the world combined, and a formidable network of ports, the largest of which, in Shanghai, moves more cargo in some years than all U.S. ports put together.

But if China had stopped there, it would not have reached today’s technological heights. Other infrastructure systems have proved crucial. One is China’s digital network. In its infancy, the Internet was widely thought to corrode authoritarian regimes because it removed their monopoly on information and made it easier for ordinary people to organize across large distances. In 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton declared that controlling the Internet was like “trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.” But China’s leadership concluded the opposite. They bet that high-quality data infrastructure would strengthen the government by enabling it to better monitor and manage public opinion, as well as track people’s movements, while hugely benefiting the country’s industrial sectors and creating a high-tech ecosystem.

So China nailed Jell-O to the wall. It built a domestic Internet that rapidly connected virtually the entire population while blocking what its people could see from abroad. The gamble paid off. Thanks to Beijing’s early and aggressive promotion of mobile phones, Chinese firms helped pioneer the mobile Internet. Top platforms such as Byte-Dance, Alibaba, and Tencent became world-class innovators. Huawei became the world’s leading producer of 5G equipment. The Chinese population now uses smartphones constantly, and the Communist Party remains very much in charge.

IT’S ELECTRIC

The next key infrastructure system behind China’s prowess is its electric grid. Over the past quarter century, China has led the world in building power plants, adding the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s total supply every year. It now generates more electricity each year than the United States and the European Union combined. The country has invested heavily in ultrahigh voltage transmission lines, which can carry electricity efficiently over long distances, and in all types of battery storage. This abundant power supply has enabled the rapid growth of electricity-reliant transport systems, namely high-speed rail and electric vehicles.

China has overcome the obstacles that long prevented electricity from becoming the world’s main energy and supplanting the direct combustion of fossil fuels: that it was hard to move, hard to store, and ineffective at fueling transport. As a result, China is well on its way to becoming the world’s first economy powered mainly by electricity. Electricity accounts for 21 percent of energy use in the world as a whole and 22 percent of energy use in the United States. In China, electricity is nearly 30 percent of energy use, more than in any other large country except Japan. And this share is growing fast: about six percent a year, compared with 2.6 percent for the world as a whole and 0.6 percent for the United States.

China’s electrification did not arise out of a master plan. Instead, it was the product of technocratic responses to discrete issues such as power shortages in industrial zones and the need to free up rail capacity for purposes other than moving coal. Now, however, rapid electrification serves a clear strategic purpose. It is a motor of industrial innovation—“powering the future,” as Damien Ma and Lizzi Lee put it in a July Foreign Affairs article. And the government is keenly aware that abundant, cheap electricity provides the country with a crucial edge in the power-intensive industries of the future, most obviously artificial intelligence. Beijing thus strives to ensure that its electricity system remains the biggest and best in the world.

Disembarking from a train in Hangzhou, China, May 2025 Go Nakamura / Reuters

China’s most subtle piece of deep infrastructure is its more than 70-million-person industrial workforce—the largest in the world. Thanks to the country’s intense buildup of complex manufacturing supply chains, Chinese factory managers, engineers, and workers have decades of “process knowledge”—hands-on knowledge, gained from experience—about how to make things and how to make them better. This process knowledge enables iterative innovation, or constantly tweaking products so that they can be made more efficiently, at better quality, and with lower costs. It also enables scaling: Chinese factories can rally a large, experienced workforce behind making almost any new product. Finally, and most important, process knowledge allows China to create entire new industries. A factory worker in Shenzhen might assemble iPhones one year and Huawei Mate phones the next and then move on to build drones for DJI or electric vehicle batteries for CATL.

Process knowledge in the Chinese workforce may be Beijing’s greatest economic asset. But it is hard to quantify. That is one reason why the rest of the world has persistently underestimated China’s capabilities. Some analysts believe that China is the country that assembles most of the world’s smartphones and other electronics because its workforce costs are low. In reality, the country remains the world’s leader because its workforce has proved its worth in sophistication, scale, and speed.

Analysts also miss the red-hot ambition of China’s entrepreneurs. The country is full of businesspeople with the optimism, the daring, or the foolishness to try disrupting sectors. Xiaomi’s legendary founder, Lei Jun, gambled on EVs in 2021, announcing that his company, then valued at $80 billion, would invest $10 billion in them and that it would be his “last major entrepreneurial project.” On the German racetrack, it paid off. Lei was able to plug into an electronics ecosystem, battery partners, and an experienced workforce to make high-speed EVs in just a few years’ time.

To see why American companies often struggle to do the same, compare Xiaomi’s experience with that of Apple. In 2014, the computing giant considered developing electric vehicles. It was hardly a crazy idea. Apple had a market capitalization of $600 billion and a cash hoard of $40 billion, giving it far deeper pockets than Xiaomi. By conventional measures, it also had greater technological sophistication. But the United States does not have the energy system or the manufacturing capacity of China, so there was no easy infrastructure for Apple to tap into. As a result, in 2024, the company’s board pulled the plug on a decade of EV development. That same year, Xiaomi expanded its manufacturing capacity and repeatedly raised its delivery target. Meanwhile, the American EV champion, Tesla, faces declining sales in all of its top markets, including China. Chinese buyers now believe that domestic brands are more innovative than Tesla, and more in tune with fast-changing consumer tastes.

ADVERSE REACTION

It is a mistake to underestimate China. But the country does face serious economic challenges, many of which arise at least in part from the very industrial policies that have led to its triumphs. China’s technocrats have steered resources not just into high-productivity infrastructure but also into state-owned enterprises that contribute little to the country’s vibrant tech ecosystem, rack up huge debts, and drag down the economy’s efficiency. The politically driven constraints on some of the country’s most creative entrepreneurs, such as Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, and Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of Byte-Dance—who were humiliated when Beijing expanded its power over the consumer Internet—have chilled private-sector confidence.

Unregulated subsidies, meanwhile, have led to widespread graft. A prime example is China’s semiconductor industry, which has received over $100 billion in direct state industrial policy support since 2014. Some of the projects funded by this money were outright frauds. Other projects were legitimate, but both businesspeople and government officials stole from them. More than a dozen senior chip industry figures have been jailed for corruption since 2022, including the head of Tsinghua Unigroup (which operates several important chipmakers) and the chief of China’s national integrated circuit fund. Two sitting ministers of industry and information technology were fired for graft.

China’s subsidies may also, at times, suppress innovation. Generous manufacturing spending helps promote the tech ecosystem, but it also enables less efficient firms to stay in business far longer than they would in a more market-driven economy. That lowers profits for everyone, as companies continually cut their prices to maintain market share. This, in turn, means that manufacturing companies cannot spend as much on research and development. In fact, they need to be cautious about hiring new staff or raising wages.

China nailed Jell-O to the wall.

The solar industry is a case in point. Owning the solar supply chain is a strategic triumph for the state, but companies producing solar modules mostly sell undifferentiated products, fighting for minuscule profits while cutting prices to the bone. The same is true for manufacturers of EVs, smartphones, and many other products, with too many companies making similar products at paper-thin margins. China’s tech sectors are global success stories, but the companies in them are often miserable.

If China is too generous with tech and manufacturing businesses, then it is not generous enough with those providing services. Beijing chronically overregulates service sectors, cracking down on Internet companies that the government sees as engaging in monopolistic practices or threatening political or social instability. It tightly controls finance, health care, and education. As a result, job growth in these sectors has been weak, which means job growth in China as a whole has greatly suffered. Even in this industry-centric country, services employ about 60 percent of the urban workforce and have accounted for all net job creation in the past decade. With jobs hard to come by, wages rising little or at all, and the price of houses—which are most Chinese people’s main asset—falling, Chinese consumers have become reluctant to spend. Private businesses, seeing weak demand, have in turn become even more reluctant to hire or raise wages.

China’s current model, then, virtually guarantees slower economic growth. Thanks to the vicious circle Beijing has created, the economy now routinely struggles to reach its annual growth target of five percent and is constantly battling deflation. Meanwhile, because domestic demand is sluggish, more and more of the output of China’s prodigiously productive manufacturing sector will need to be exported, leading to ever larger trade surpluses. China’s trade surplus is already almost a trillion dollars, more than double the figure of just five years earlier.

Assembling air fryers in Ningbo, China, May 2025 Go Nakamura / Reuters

The risks for Beijing are obvious. Slower growth means that the economy could become less dynamic, and tech firms could lose the ability or drive to keep innovating. Ever-rising trade surpluses could trigger much more severe and coordinated protectionism from the rest of the world, with dozens of countries joining the United States in erecting tariff barriers to Chinese imports.

But Beijing is likely to overcome these risks, just as it has overcome many challenges in the past. It has begun to recognize that subsidies are too high and has started withdrawing them. Smaller and less efficient players will exit the market. Consolidation is already visible in the electric vehicle sector, in which the number of companies has fallen from 57 to 49 since 2022. A third of EV producers now sell at least 10,000 cars a month, up from less than a quarter of producers three years ago. As for protectionism, most countries will find that there are simply no cost-effective alternatives to the products China exports. There are also ways to evade tariff barriers, such as by shipping goods through third countries or by setting up assembly plants in other states (as the Chinese car manufacturer BYD is doing in Brazil and Hungary).

Chinese officials, for their part, seem to believe that the costs of lower growth, deflation, and irritated trade partners are worth paying. “We must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy . . . and never deindustrialize,” said Chinese leader Xi Jinping in 2020, a year in which China’s manufacturers met the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic by surging the production of medical equipment and consumer goods. The message was clear: Beijing’s main goal is not fast growth but self-sufficiency and technological progress.

CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP

Washington has not stood idly by as China’s tech and manufacturing sectors progress. Alarmed by the ambitions of Made in China 2025, the first Trump administration breathed life into some of the most moribund offices inside the Department of Commerce, summoning a powerful bureaucratic apparatus to choke off China’s access to critical materials. U.S. officials realized that China was highly dependent on Western technology inputs, such as leading-edge semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. They thus gambled that a full blockade of these technologies would severely slow China’s technological engine. This was a bipartisan proposition: when U.S. President Joe Biden came into office, in 2021, he maintained his predecessor’s restrictions. In fact, the Biden administration tightened export controls on advanced chips, especially those essential for artificial intelligence, and on semiconductor equipment.

And yet the success of these controls has been mixed at best. In 2018, two big Chinese tech companies, ZTE and Fujian Jinhua, nearly collapsed after being cut off from American technology. But more capable businesses, aided by Washington lawyers and lobbyists, have been able to bounce back. (Trump recently lifted restrictions on leading-edge AI chips made by Nvidia, allowing the company to again sell its products to China.) Huawei was clearly battered after the Commerce Department sanctioned it in 2019. But by 2025, the firm announced that its previous year’s revenues had recovered to 2019 levels. It is still recognizably the same company, one that excels at making 5G equipment and handsets. Except now, it is also one of China’s leading semiconductor innovators, after it invested billions in replacing American chips.

Other companies have done an even better job of weathering U.S. restrictions. SMIC, one of China’s most important chip foundries, has doubled its revenues since it was sanctioned in 2020. It still lags far behind the industry-leading TSMC in profitability, but it has made certain technological breakthroughs, learning to produce seven-nanometer chips—a technological breakthrough that was considered unlikely after its sanctions. Similarly, restrictions on AI technology did little to prevent the rise of DeepSeek, which has produced an AI reasoning model matched by only a few other firms, all in Silicon Valley.

Beijing’s main goal is not fast growth but self-sufficiency and technological progress.

DeepSeek’s success is not hard to understand. Chinese AI firms may not have access to the same leading-edge chips that American ones do, but they do have plentiful access to excellent talent, mature chips, as well as pools of data. They also have a near-unlimited supply of cheap electricity—something their U.S. competitors lack. As a result, according to global technical benchmarks, Chinese large language models are, at most, six months behind American leaders, a gap that is steadily shrinking. Far from blocking China’s progress, U.S. tech restrictions have triggered a Sputnik moment in China. Its companies are bigger, meaner, and significantly less dependent on U.S. companies than they were just a decade earlier.

Some American officials realize that the United States cannot win just by attacking China’s industries. The Biden administration’s economic planners, for instance, created an industrial policy designed to help the United States advance its own strategic sectors. The country passed the CHIPS Act, which beefed up semiconductor production, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which subsidized clean technologies. But despite earmarking hundreds of billions of dollars, these endeavors have mostly foundered.

The reason for these failures is simple. The United States has not built up enough deep infrastructure of its own. Toward the beginning of his term, Biden unveiled an ambitious proposal to deliver Internet service to almost every American. But this “Internet for All” plan had not connected anyone before he left office. There is still no national network of EV charging stations, even though Congress earmarked billions to create one. And Washington has failed to dismantle the bureaucratic and regulatory barriers to building electric transmission systems, which make it hard for energy companies to take advantage of the tax credits the Inflation Reduction Act created for solar and wind projects.

At Hongqiao railway station in Shanghai, January 2025 Go Nakamura / Reuters

Now, those credits are poised to disappear. Trump’s July budget reconciliation bill phases out his predecessor’s solar and wind subsidies for most projects that haven’t begun by the end of 2026. The CHIPS Act remains on the books, but the president has derided the law as “horrible” and “ridiculous.” Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, have caused deep uncertainty among manufacturers, who are pausing investments while scrambling to maintain their supply chains. The White House claims that the tariffs will force manufacturers to make their goods on American soil once the restrictions take full effect. But the administration’s analysis is faulty. Manufacturers depend on imports for many of their inputs, and they have proved reluctant to make big investment decisions based on Trump’s wavering pronouncements. In fact, the country shed over 10,000 manufacturing jobs between April and July alone, just after Trump announced his plan to impose high tariffs on virtually every country.

Trump, of course, is hardly unique in his failure to deliver. American politicians love to celebrate whenever a new mine or semiconductor facility opens. But the U.S. industrial sector continues to shrink amid product delays, layoffs, and falling production quality. Real manufacturing output, which had risen steadily until the 2008 financial crisis, plunged then and has never recovered. This shriveling is happening even in defense manufacturing. Despite an influx of cash, almost every class of U.S. naval ship under construction is behind schedule, some by as much as three years. Producers of artillery shells are only slowly ramping up manufacturing, even though Washington has depleted its stockpiles to help Ukraine. And U.S. efforts to wean its military off Chinese rare-earth minerals have faltered.

The United States does retain its advantage over China in several critical areas: software, biotech, and AI, as well as in its university-driven innovation ecosystem. But these institutions face an uncertain future. Since returning to office, Trump has set about defunding scientific research and depriving the country of skilled labor. Government agencies are now scrutinizing top universities, including Harvard and Columbia, and yanking government grants and threatening to revoke universities’ tax-exempt status over exaggerated charges of anti-Semitism. The White House has slashed funding for the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Meanwhile, Trump’s hostility toward immigrants has driven researchers who would come to the United States to look for positions at companies and universities elsewhere. Aggressive deportations are hurting America’s construction industry. The country simply has not set up its innovation ecosystem well for the years ahead.

BACK TO BASICS

The United States can, and should, reverse Trump’s spending cuts and immigration restrictions as soon as is feasible. But competing effectively against China requires more than just removing self-imposed restraints. Washington’s failings extend across administrations for a reason: American officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, have not taken China’s competence seriously. “China doesn’t innovate—it steals,” wrote Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton on social media in April, epitomizing how Americans trivialize Chinese accomplishments. Too many U.S. leaders continue to believe that a more exquisite export control regime will halt China’s technological momentum. They are sending lawyers into an engineering fight. They need to realize that no matter how hard the United States squeezes, it will not break China’s industrial and technological system.

What Washington should do is strengthen its own capacity. That means starting the hard work of building up the United States’ deep infrastructure. Washington should not try to replicate Beijing’s massive and often wasteful investments in all systems. But it should do better than Biden’s ad-hoc, sector-by-sector approach. And it must abandon Trump’s strategy of hoping that the tariff cudgel will force a reshoring of industry, and his focus on old heavy industries such as steel.

Instead, policymakers must start to think in ecosystem terms, as China has. The United States has long-standing strengths in entrepreneurship and finance, so state-led investments in modern deep infrastructure are likely to have big payoffs, just as investments in railroads and highways did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large-scale infrastructure projects can stimulate demand for different technologies and create the process knowledge needed to build them, which are crucial first steps in rebuilding the manufacturing base. A top priority should be building a bigger and better electricity system that makes use of nuclear power, natural gas, and renewable energy sources. To maximize its use of renewables, the United States should invest in building more battery storage and high-voltage transmission lines.

Washington is sending lawyers to an engineering fight.

The United States will also need to find ways to reduce cost structures throughout its industries. Because it is a rich country with high wages and labor and environmental standards, it will never be able to compete with China or India in terms of availability of low-cost labor, and it should not try. But to be serious about rebuilding industry, Washington must display a commitment to making its markets attractive for capital-intensive sectors. Eliminating Trump’s ruinous tariffs, which will make American manufacturing prohibitively expensive, is essential, as is providing abundant, cheap energy. Yet so is permitting reform that eliminates the excessive regulatory costs of new construction, ample government funding for basic research and development, and liberal immigration policies that enable companies to source the best talent from anywhere in the world. The last is not strictly a cost measure, but it is essential to rebuilding U.S. process knowledge. Much of that knowledge now exists abroad, and the United States must be willing to import it.

Above all, Washington should not underestimate what it is up against. Beijing has made achieving technological supremacy a top political priority. The subsidies it used to push technological progress produced plenty of waste, but that was a side-effect of achieving leadership in the industries of the future. To compete, the United States must also make a commitment to leading in these industries, and it must be more willing to accept mistakes and some waste as the price of success.

China’s model has worked because its policymakers have gotten a lot of things right and have given Chinese entrepreneurs the conditions for success. The country may have problems, but it will continue to be effective. And the longer it succeeds, the more the United States and its allies will deindustrialize under pressure from Chinese firms in energy, industrial goods, and perhaps even artificial intelligence. If the United States is to compete effectively, its policymakers must spend less time worrying about how to weaken their rival and more time figuring out how to make their country the best and most vigorous version of itself.

Foreign Affairs · More by Dan Wang · August 19, 2025

22. Lessons in Counterterrorism in Saudi Arabia’s Expulsion of Al-Qaeda in the Kingdom and Challenges Going Forward

Lessons in Counterterrorism in Saudi Arabia’s Expulsion of Al-Qaeda in the Kingdom and Challenges Going Forward

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/19/saudi-arabia-lessons-in-counterterrorism/

by Julian McBride

08.19.2025 at 06:00am

Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s numerous influential countries and a leading member state of the Arab League in terms of soft power. Nevertheless, the Kingdom has been enshrouded in controversy, particularly Islamic extremism.

In the early 2000s, against the backdrop of the September 11th Attacks and the Global War on Terror, Saudi Arabia became embroiled in deadly terrorism and massacres by al-Qaeda, which successfully infiltrated the Kingdom. Realizing an existential threat that not only killed hundreds of civilians but was a public relations nightmare, Riyadh needed to act decisively and combat the root of extremism within the Saudi Kingdom.

Then, in the spotlight due to extremist indoctrination, Riyadh put its foot down and clamped down on al-Qaeda inside the country in a major crackdown against extremism while simultaneously providing key programs and services to mitigate terrorism inside Saudi Arabia. Forcing al-Qaeda to merge with its sister branch in Yemen, the extremist organization no longer has a foothold in Saudi Arabia, yet it remains a formidable challenge to Riyadh’s regional security apparatus today.

Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, Osama Bin Laden, a former Saudi citizen, called for multiple branches of al-Qaeda to be created and expanded, including the Kingdom itself. Yusuf al-Ayeri would be the first leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia/the Land Between Two Mosques (AQBH).

AQBH’s goals included the deaths of Westerners and the expulsion of the US military from Saudi Arabia, the overthrow of the pro-Western royal family, and the establishment of an even more strict Islamic state in the Kingdom. Osama Bin Laden stated in prior manifestos that one of his justifications for his extremist activities was American troops stationed in the Kingdom during the Gulf War, instead of the royal family using his militiamen for defense.

Saudi Arabia was ripe to build a base due to Bin Laden’s ancestry and growing resentment of Western influence in the Middle East. American indifference to Israeli missions in Lebanon, the Persian Gulf War, and the protection or propping up of pro-Western Middle East monarchies would include domino effects of regional blowback.

Furthermore, elements within the state ignored warnings of extremist teachings amongst Wahhabi clerics that justified violence, which enabled a powder keg of future jihadist activities at home and abroad. For example, little was done to mitigate the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, and because of the inaction, cells would become emboldened only a few years later.

A Deadly Insurgency That Nearly Destroyed the Kingdom’s Reputation

The height of al-Qaeda’s attacks in Saudi Arabia took place between 2003 and 2004, which saw deadly global terrorism sprees by AQ and inspired groups. Infiltrating elements of the Saudi state security system and using their uniforms, AQBH conducted several high-profile attacks on Westerners and various other foreigners alike.

Major attacks include the Riyadh Compound Bombings, the Yanbu Attack, and the Khobar Massacre, the latter of which AQ militants asked who was Christian or Muslim and then shot and killed the non-Muslims. The attacks on Westerners ruined the reputation of the Kingdom, as many foreign workers fled in fear, and the price of oil increased.

Furthermore, various assassinations via shootings by AQBH operatives took place against American, European, Asian, and Middle Eastern nationals. Perhaps the most gruesome act was the taped execution of American National Paul Marshall Johnson Jr, who the terrorist organization beheaded.

Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia also caught a major break between 2003 and 2004 due to the US war in Iraq. The botched nation-building by coalition forces left a powder keg on the Saudi border, which another branch of AQ, al-Qaeda in Iraq, took advantage of. From the cataclysm, both offshoot branches of al-Qaeda had renewed support.

Saudi Arabia’s Major Crackdown

Despite conducting successful terrorist attacks in the Kingdom, al-Qaeda’s fortunes would quickly be reversed in a major crackdown by Riyadh. Not only was the Kingdom’s anti-extremism reputation at stake, but al-Qaeda made a fatal flaw in its strategy—Muslims were ultimately the group’s biggest victims.

The AQBH attacks on Western targets killed Saudi nationals and other fellow Muslims, which lost the group’s support. Simultaneously, in the North, al-Qaeda frequently targeted Shiite civilians and moderate Sunnis, further alienating the global jihadist organization and its sister branches.

Saudi Arabia utilized its security service to crack down on suspected extremist mosques and imams sympathetic to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Saudi Arabian security services published the names of those wanted for the attacks, which Riyadh had avoided doing in prior extremist activities in the 20th century. According to a 2004 assertion by the 9/11 Commission, Saudi Arabia was heavily engaged in combat against al-Qaeda.

During the crackdowns, numerous high-value AQBH leaders were killed by Saudi security services, including emirs of the organization from 2003 to 2006. Emirs eliminated include al-Ayiri, the founder of AQBH, and his successors Khaled, Ali Hajj, Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, Saud al-Obtaibi, Saleh al-Awfi, and Faud al-Juwair.

Nevertheless, the growing crackdowns came under media scrutiny as civilians and foreign nationals were detained without charges on suspicion of involvement with the extremists. On February 23rd, 2005, CNN reported that an attorney of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a presumed AQBH operative, was tortured under his detention, which underscores the unorthodox methods Saudi intelligence used to crack down on extremism that violated the human rights of those detained.

A key factor that helped Saudi authorities combat al-Qaeda was that AQBH did not openly control, attempt, or have the strength to govern neighborhoods or cities, unlike other branches or organizations in Yemen, Mali, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The lack of control over neighborhoods and cities allowed operations in the Kingdom by security services to conduct low-level sweeps and limited urban warfare, whereas other future extremist-occupied towns were razed to the ground, such as Mosul, Raqqa, Ramadi, Marwari, Gaza, and others.

Attempts to Mitigate Terrorism Through Safeguards

Whereas the post-Saddam Iraqi government, Sudanese junta, and other regional governments gave pushback to shared intelligence with the US, the Saudis fully cooperated. Intelligence sharing with the CIA and Saudi security services was enhanced during the crackdown, albeit through back channels, so as not to inflame tensions.

Concrete measures of cooperation were critical for Riyadh to maintain order, such as the 2008 bilateral counterterrorism agreement with Washington. Several key bases were established in the Kingdom to facilitate signals intelligence, enabling the tracking of key AQ figures, as well as the deployment of military and CIA advisers with relevant expertise.

The bilateral counterterrorism cooperation between Saudi Arabia and the United States would play a significant role in combating the AQBH successor, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), as Saudi intelligence tipped off their American counterparts against the group’s plots.

The Saudis also used their soft power and influence amongst the Arab League to pressure countries such as Yemen to crack down and extradite AQBH commanders and financiers to the Kingdom to face justice. During the Yemeni Civil War, the Saudis formed a key coalition of Arab states to combat not only the Houthis but also al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, due to the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Yemen, airstrikes at times were indiscriminately conducted, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE having different goals amongst the coalition, which gave al-Qaeda breathing room.

Riyadh also faced controversies amongst human rights groups as suspects were detained without charges, with reports of torture and unfair trials. For example, executions still take place inside the Kingdom. Though such methods are supposed to provide a deterrent to extremist activities, these actions could further cause resentment and martyrdom among suspects.

In February 2020, Amnesty International published a report detailing how Saudi courts use allegations of extremism and terrorism to crack down on government dissidents and protestors. By weaponizing its court system, not only has Riyadh deviated from combating extremism, but the government could potentially fuel it due to the kangaroo courts.

Counterterrorism Safeguards

A key aspect of Saudi Arabia’s crackdown that other nations can learn is that the Kingdom, despite still being an authoritative absolute monarchy, did not enact collective punishment on its population to root out and destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, Riyadh included public messages such as “together against terrorism” and emphasized that AQBH was heretical and did not represent Islam with their indiscriminate attacks. The messaging and cooperation between security forces and locals worked as in 2005 in the al-Rass neighborhood, Saudi police successfully eliminated several dozen prominent AQBH members, including the then-recent leader, Saud al-Otaibi.

Incentives for completing Islamic rehabilitation programs, such as the Sakinah Campaign, included job placements as socioeconomic conditions, particularly in poor villages, which could be ripe for exploitation by extremist recruiters. A June 2010 report from the International Peace Institute detailed the implementation of the Saudi Initiative. Starting in 2005, the Saudi Initiative was a two-stage approach to rehabilitation for suspected extremists.

First, Saudi authorities would question the motives of suspected AQBH members and ask what caused the individuals to engage in terrorism. This factor would help track the root causes within the Kingdom to curb recruitment towards al-Qaeda. Secondly, those who checked into the program were allowed to participate in sporting events, visit with family, and engage in social interactions so that they felt less isolated and could integrate back into society, which can help troubled individuals avoid a life of crime.

Pinpointing key recruitment avenues for AQBH was a priority for Saudi security services, as the organization often recruited its family members. For this, the government had to work closely with imams who knew family members of each of their respective congregations, which Riyadh referred to as the religious subcommittee. Post-completion, participants would be asked to remain in touch with program administrators, akin to a parole officer who monitored the progress of post-radicalization.

Concrete financial measures were also implemented, and electronic transactions facilitated the financing of Jihadist movements. Learning lessons from American financial crackdowns, the Saudis likewise would implement safeguards to make sure any financier of extremist organizations would be tracked and prosecuted.

Expulsion of al-Qaeda but Heightened Threats in Yemen

According to a November 2007 RUSI report, transparency with American and European investigators led to crackdowns on charities and foundations linked to Saudi nationals that acted as fronts for AQBH fundraising. Ultimately, AQBH decided to leave Saudi Arabia as the security crackdowns became effective in halting their operations, and surviving commanders used Yemen as a new base. Merging with their sister branch, al-Qaeda in Yemen formed AQAP—an even deadlier organization.

Though not having a launching pad in Saudi Arabia, AQAP, at one point in the early 2010s, had a standing army and held large swaths of Yemeni territory during the civil war. Furthermore, AQAP was considered not only to be the most powerful al-Qaeda sister branch but even more dangerous than the central command in Pakistan. The organization was entangled in several high-profile attacks that frequently targeted Americans and US interests alike.

Saudi airstrikes were frequent on AQAP and the even more dangerous Houthis militia, and cooperating with local forces in Yemen and the US military via intelligence sharing, Riyadh helped pass valuable information to high-value targets.

Conclusion

Cooperation and cultural cognition are essential in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, as mutual trust is crucial for effective collaboration and coordination. Saudi Arabia was able to halt AQBH attacks within the Kingdom. Still, the country faces key hurdles in combating extremism in neighboring Yemen, along with addressing methods to eliminate human rights abuses and illegitimate sham trials.

The Arab world remains disillusioned by continued Western influence, which means the Saudi government will need to calculate its cooperation in counterterrorism behind the scenes. At the same time, public messaging says otherwise. Monitoring hardline Wahhabi clerics and providing key social programs to youth who are prone to radicalization will be instrumental in mitigating extremism.

Lastly, though the Kingdom is an absolute monarchy, human rights, such as fair trials and the cessation of torture, will need to be implemented. Various innocent people have been tortured, arrested, and not given fair representation in court. Extremist organizations could benefit from Saudi human rights abuses, as Riyadh could unwittingly create new generations of extremists by placing false charges and enacting hardline judicial punishments on citizens.

The growing relationship with the West in the economic, energy, and security sectors is also key for stabilization in Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East. Saudi Arabia was one of the first countries plagued by an al-Qaeda branch in their homeland, which compelled Riyadh to engage in decades of brewing extremism.

Continued progress on counterterrorism and addressing the socioeconomic causes of radicalization will be necessary. Furthermore, regional cooperation amongst Middle Eastern countries can help coordinate against weak points where extremist groups could form and thrive.

Despite the key success of terror cells within the country, Riyadh must also acknowledge key mistakes that gave al-Qaeda breathing room, such as illegal detention, torture, and suppression of dissidents during the crackdowns. As al-Qaeda remained resilient in its base in Yemen, Riyadh must also remain vigilant not only to extremism but also to factors that caused the rise of AQBH, such as human rights abuses and totalitarian judicial practices.

Tags: Al-Qaeda, human rights, Middle East, Middle East security, Saudi Arabia, War on Terror

About The Author

Julian McBride
Julian McBride is a former US Marine, forensic anthropologist, and independent journalist born in New York. His bylines can be found in Byline Times, 19FortyFive, Heritage Daily, The Defense Post, Journal of Forensic Psychology, Modern Warfare Institute, Manara Mag, The Strategist, Pacific Forum, E-International Relations, Global Taiwan Institute, NKInsider, Modern Diplomacy, Small Wars Journal, and UK Defence 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

Company Name | Website