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Quotes of the Day:
"An individual is as superb as a nation when has the qualities which make a superb nation."
– Walt Whitman
"Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm."
– Miyamoto Musashi
"A person's worth is measured by the worth of what he values."
– Marcus Aurelius
1. Hunting Russian Drones in a Prop Plane With Shotguns
2. Expecting on the Front Lines: Motherhood in Ukraine’s Military
3. What’s Next for Ukraine After All That Diplomacy?
4. Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader
5. Special Operations News – August 25, 2025
6. How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City
7. Hybrid Autonomy Sabotage: Innovation Anchored in Tradition
8. U.S., Philippine Forces to Hold 500 Military Exercises in 2026
9. Restructuring Our Military for a Multi-Front War
10. Steel and Silicon: The Case for Teaming Armored Formations with UAVs
11. What is Key Terrain? Rethinking a Fundamental Military Concept in the Age of Economic Warfare
12. How to Keep Generative AI from Crashing in Combat
13. America’s Coming Crash
14. Putin’s New Cyber Empire
15. Should Asia Make It Official? The Prospect of an “Asian NATO”
16. Chinese President Xi Jinping sends independence day greetings to Ukraine
17. Will China’s ‘Great Green Wall’ expand to Mongolia in joint desertification fight?
18. China vows to stand maritime ground as Vietnam ‘expands’ Spratlys construction
19. Why Ukraine Won’t Give Up Donetsk
20. Global Perspective: Comprehensive security is needed to counter Russia's hybrid war
21. What Are the New US ERAM Missiles Ukraine Just Got That Threaten Every Russian Base 400 Km Away
22. Hard rivalry for Buddhism's soft power
1. Hunting Russian Drones in a Prop Plane With Shotguns
Hunting Russian Drones in a Prop Plane With Shotguns
Ukrainian defenders use an array of unusual methods to fend off attacks while preserving stockpiles of more advanced tools
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-russia-drone-hunting-e2fea5fc
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In scenes reminiscent of World War I, Ukrainian gunners lean out of propeller planes to shoot down Russian drones. WSJ goes inside the amateur squadron fighting a new kind of war with old technology. Photo: Joseph Sywenkyj/WSJ
By Alistair MacDonald
Follow and Ievgeniia Sivorka | Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for WSJ
Aug. 24, 2025 11:00 pm ET
Quick Summary
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Ukrainian pilots use a Yak-52 to hunt Russian drones, employing rifles and shotguns.View more
This month, a beaten-up, Soviet-era propeller-driven plane taxied to a halt on a rural runway and two of Ukraine’s top air aces clambered out, one carrying a rifle. The pair, clad in olive-drab flight suits, are part of a low-tech solution to the high-tech problem of Russian drones.
The 56-year-old pilot, who learned to fly as a hobby before the war, and the gunner, 38, a former auto mechanic who had never been in a plane before the invasion, are part of a squadron dedicated to knocking down the unmanned Russian attack and reconnaissance aircraft that are the bane of ground troops and civilians.
In the past year, these two unlikely air warriors have flown around 300 combat missions as part of the 11th Army Aviation Brigade and downed almost half the unit’s total of 120 drones eliminated, according to its deputy commander, Col. Mykola Lykhatskiy.
A Ukrainian pilot and gunner in a Yak-52, a Soviet-era training aircraft.
Ukraine has some of the West’s most advanced air defenses, including the Patriot missile system. It also has F-16 jets that it sometimes uses to down missiles and drones. But it has also developed a series of lower-cost tactics to counter the threat from the skies, ranging from nets to signal jamming.
Soldiers and volunteers also man pickup truck-mounted heavy machine guns to try to take out explosive-laden Shahed drones. Others use vintage Soviet missiles fired from launchers made out of reused shipping containers.
Then there are the men and flying machines of the 11th. When a drone appears on military radar screens, crews scramble to their two-seater Yak-52 trainers, with a sliding glass canopy reminiscent of World War II fighters. Usually, they are airborne within 15 minutes.
Their squadron has brought military aviation back to its very beginnings in World War I, engaging the enemy at close range with a marksman leaning out of his cockpit with a gun.
The Yak-52 is so basic that it has no radar of its own and has to fly in the daytime, when the crew is guided by radio before visual contact. Their cockpit gets so cold in the winter they need thick jackets, gloves and old-school, fur-lined flying helmets.
Pilots in World War I also engaged the enemy at close range.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, Getty Images
Pilots sit near their planes waiting for the command to scramble. Like World War II pilots, they stencil drones they have shot down onto the side of their plane, which was later destroyed in a Russian missile attack on their air base. They now have another Yak.
Their main targets are Orlan and Zala reconnaissance drones, and Shahed explosive drones. The propeller-driven Orlan and Zala look like a miniature plane and kite, respectively, while the distinctive triangular shape of the Shahed has become one of the most recognizable sights of this war. The propeller-powered models of these drones fly at speeds of up to 115 miles an hour, making them easy to chase for the Yak, which can fly at over 180 miles an hour.
The successes of these planes and helicopters account for around 10% to 12% of the drones intercepted by Ukraine on a typical day, said Lykhatskiy.
The Ukrainian squadron uses the Yak-52 to target Russian drones.
Last month, around 11% of all long-range drones launched by Russia got through Ukraine’s air defenses, according to data analyzed by the Center for Information Resilience, a U.K.-based open-source investigations organization.
The Ukrainian prop planes will typically fly within 200 to 300 feet of the drone before the gunner opens the canopy, leans out and fires.
“There is such great new technology now, yet I am still hanging out of the cockpit shooting at drones with a shotgun,” said the auto mechanic-turned gunner. He likened the experience to shooting a gun while riding a horse. The gunner has tried a number of weapons and currently favors a German Haenel MK55 automatic rifle.
Sometimes pilots get so close they can use their plane’s wings to tilt the drone’s wings and send it off course, said Lykhatskiy. British pilots used that tactic in World War II against Germany’s V-1, widely considered the world’s first missile.
An image provided by a Ukrainian pilot shows the moment a Russian reconnaissance drone was shot down by a Yak-52. Photo: Uncredited
Russia is continually updating its technology and tactics. That includes putting cameras at the back of Orlan drones, allowing them to spot approaching planes or missiles and trigger evasive action, said Lykhatskiy.
The antidrone squadron’s aircraft are also targets for the Russians, whose air-defense missiles now cover as much as half of Ukraine, said Lykhatskiy, who still flies helicopter missions. The Yaks go closer to the front line because they are more maneuverable than helicopters.
Last year, the pilot, known by the call sign Maestro, and his gunner, called Ninja, said they spent 40 minutes trying to destroy an Orlan drone that began flying in tight circles after they approached.
Maestro said he flew the Yak underneath the Orlan and tried to match its movements but on a wider radius to allow Ninja time to line up his shot.
The Yak-52 has no radar and has to fly in the daytime.
“Get ready,” Maestro would shout each time he took it within the sights of Ninja’s gun. Eventually they scored a hit, sending the Russian craft spiraling to the ground.
In May last year, they said their plane came under attack from a Russian air-defense missile, forcing them to descend at speed in an evasive maneuver.
Russia has targeted the squadron more directly. In July, its commander, Kostyantyn Oborin, was killed when the hangar he was in was hit by a ballistic missile.
Write to Alistair MacDonald at Alistair.Macdonald@wsj.com
Appeared in the August 25, 2025, print edition as 'Drone-Hunters Employ Low Tech'.
2. Expecting on the Front Lines: Motherhood in Ukraine’s Military
Expecting on the Front Lines: Motherhood in Ukraine’s Military
Pregnant Ukrainian soldiers say they are fighting for the future of their country and for their children.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/world/europe/ukraine-military-war-pregnancy.html
Nadia, a military radio operator, getting an ultrasound at the Poltava hospital in central Ukraine in January. She served until she was eight and a half months pregnant.Credit...Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times
By Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr Chubko
Reporting from Kyiv and Sloviansk, Ukraine
Aug. 25, 2025,
5:46 a.m. ET
Crouching in a trench on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Olena felt the ovulation app on her phone buzz.
“I realized that I really needed to be at home making a baby, not sitting in this trench,” recalled Olena, a combat medic. But that wasn’t an immediate option, and her desire to start a family was as strong as her need to serve.
After about six months of trying — navigating appointments with fertility doctors around her limited leave — “it finally happened,” said Olena, who like other women interviewed for this article requested that only her first name be used for reasons of military protocol. She got pregnant, but continued to serve.
While some people might think fighting a war while pregnant is crazy, Olena said, she sees it “a bit differently.” She added, “War is war, but life goes on.”
Ukraine’s military is finding it hard to recruit young men as the war with Russia grinds on, but women — all volunteers — are a bright spot. The number of women serving has grown more than 20 percent to about 70,000 since Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Those who become pregnant often serve in tough conditions under relentless shelling, living without heat in the winter, or running water and proper toilets.
“It’s terrifying — every single day,” said Nadia, 25, who served as a frontline radio operator until she was eight and half months pregnant. “You wake up wondering if everything is OK, if everyone is still alive,” she said, describing how every morning she would brush plaster off her bed that had fallen from the ceiling after a night of explosions.
Pregnancy, she said, made it even more difficult. The clinic where she would get ultrasounds closed. So did many nearby hospitals.
“You’re constantly thinking about your child’s well-being,” said Nadia, who gave birth to a boy, Yaroslav, in February. “It was nonstop stress every day, combined with constant physical activity.”
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Nadia giving birth by C-section in February. She said she had wanted to prove to herself and her comrades in the 111th Territorial Defense Brigade that she “wouldn’t let anything stop me.”Credit...Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times
While the U.S. Army and many other militaries remove pregnant soldiers from combat zones, Ukrainian women usually serve until their seventh month. And that is in a military that doctors and soldiers say is ill-equipped to support them — from uniforms that don’t fit pregnant women, to a lack of prenatal care and nurseries — amid the costs and challenges of fighting the war.
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Despite the hardships, many pregnant soldiers say they understand the military has more pressing priorities and that they are motivated to serve for the future of Ukraine — and their children.
“Our children are the future of this country,” said Olya, 39, a combat medic in eastern Ukraine who gave birth to a girl in May. “We have to protect our children. And we have to liberate the country for their future.”
Once they give birth, women also face wrenching decisions about how long to stay home with their babies, or whether to return to a military that desperately needs them.
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Nadia said that after her baby was born, she was allowed 126 days of paid leave if she wanted to return to the front. Otherwise, she could take off three years, unpaid.
“How can I leave him?” she said she wondered, before deciding to take the three years, with the intention of returning to service after that.
Valentyna cut short her maternity leave to return to service.
In the military since 2019, she had worked as an infantry mechanic before the full-scale invasion — an unusual role for a woman.
“I wanted to challenge society by saying that a woman in a complex combat position can perform her duties on an equal footing with a man,” Valentyna said.
She had initially been hesitant to return to service after giving birth in late 2021, worried that a military salary would not support her family. The Russian invasion changed everything, she said.
“Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions to make things better,” she said.
Finding a unit to accept her back wasn’t easy, Valentyna said, partly because of the sexism that experts say is pervasive in the Ukrainian military. Several turned her down, including one whose commander said she should stay home with her baby. She did not get approval until August 2023 — when her son was 18 months old.
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Maj. Viktoria Kravchenko playing with her children at home in Kyiv. “I am grateful that I am bringing children into the world,” she said. “Considering how many lives we are losing now, I also see it as my divine mission.”Credit...Oksana Parafeniuk for The New York Times
Maj. Viktoria Kravchenko has served in Ukraine’s military for over 16 years and is a psychologist who has researched the issue of sexism in the armed forces. She said women who get pregnant can face considerable barriers, like commanders who question their decision to return to the fight after having babies or their fitness to serve.
“It’s no secret that gender bias exists,” Major Kravchenko said as her daughter, chewed a mango slice in her arms at their home in Kyiv last winter.
She added that financial concerns were also a challenge.
In Ukraine, the military covers 126 days of maternity leave. After that, the state provides about $170 a month for the child.
A number of private entities are helping out. One group, Zemliachky, makes and sends maternity uniforms to serving soldiers. Kvitna, a nonprofit, provides free women’s health care from a mobile clinic.
“There was an urgent need,” said Taras Yeftemii, a gynecologist with Kvitna. On one recent rotation, he said, the mobile clinic screened 573 female soldiers. Five were pregnant.
The Ukrainian military did not respond to questions about how many women were pregnant or had given birth in the ranks, or about prenatal care for soldiers.
Dr. Vita Marchenko, 62, has cared for pregnant soldiers at her hospital in Sloviansk, eastern Ukraine. It lacks the staff and equipment for advanced testing but can deliver babies.
“I never thought we would have so many women at war,” Dr. Marchenko said. A female soldier’s pregnancy only differs from a civilian’s in that it provides “more purpose,” Dr. Marchenko said. “They are reminded what they are fighting for.”
Olya, the senior combat medic in eastern Ukraine, said she was surprised to find out she was pregnant last September. “I did not plan to get pregnant. When I went to war, I wanted to fight until victory,” she said.
Image
Olya, in Sloviansk, Ukraine, in January, could no longer button her pants and was awaiting a maternity uniform from Zemliachky. A combat medic, she said she went “with the guys to all combat positions, to trenches” in a mud-covered Nissan pathfinder, side-doors stuffed with tourniquets and lip gloss in the center console.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
She initially kept her pregnancy a secret, fearful she might get reassigned.
But when bleeding landed her in the hospital for a week in December, Olya had to inform her commander. Doctors advised her to “take it easy,” according to Olya. She said that was hard to do as she was the only medic in her company and “the guys still need medical help.” Her commander made some adjustments, and Olya stopped going into combat positions.
Still, war was all around her for the duration of her pregnancy. Olya said she talked to her unborn baby, to tell her what was going on around them. And to tell her that she loved her, that they were going to be OK, and that they were doing an important task.
She bristled at the suggestion that some might question her priorities. “I’m ready to assume responsibility that I am near the combat zone with my child. I do everything to protect her,” Olha said. “I have to stay and help here.”
In late May, she gave birth to a baby, Iryna.
While Olya has officially quit the military, she plans to re-enlist in a year or so. “We have very few people left with the necessary level of experience and professionalism,” she said. “And this is a long game, so we are needed.”
Eve Sampson and Nataliia Novosolova contributed reporting.
3. What’s Next for Ukraine After All That Diplomacy?
Excerpts:
Fighting rages in several regions of Ukraine, causing heavy casualties on both sides. Moscow has recaptured Russia’s Kursk Province, but little Ukrainian territory has changed hands in the past year, although Moscow appears to have the momentum.
Russian forces, which have been on the offensive all year, are trying to press forward in the north of the Donetsk region and capture the city of Pokrovsk. Both are in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which has been the epicenter of fighting recently and throughout much of the war. Moscow is currently trying to take the last 2,500 square miles of the Donbas that Ukraine still controls.
Increasingly, surveillance and attack drones are dominating the battlefield, making troop movements near the front line difficult. At the same time, Russia has continued its aerial assaults on Ukraine, using drones and missiles to attack towns and cities.
What’s Next for Ukraine After All That Diplomacy?
After President Trump held talks with President Vladimir V. Putin, he said the Russian leader would be willing to meet with Ukraine’s president. That seems less and less likely.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-whats-next-summits.html
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Trump at the White House last week.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg
Aug. 25, 2025
Updated 5:21 a.m. ET
In the last 10 days, Ukraine has seen one of the most intense bursts of diplomatic activity since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than three years ago.
First, President Trump held a summit in Alaska with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Days later, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and seven other European leaders met with Mr. Trump in Washington.
Now that the dust has settled, here’s a look at what is next for Ukraine, both on and off the battlefield.
What’s next for diplomacy?
The summits ended with no peace deal or cease-fire.
Despite optimistic statements, they also did not appear to generate much momentum toward a resolution of the war — and major sticking points remain. There seems to be little immediate prospect of a summit between Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky, even though the Ukrainian president has repeatedly said he would be ready for one, calling it the only way to negotiate an end to the war. After the Alaska summit, the White House said that Mr. Putin had agreed to Mr. Trump’s effort to broker such a meeting.
But the White House has since sounded a more pessimistic note. And Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that no meeting was planned and, anyway, an agenda would need to be agreed on first.
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On the U.S. side, Mr. Trump followed up the meetings by giving Secretary of State Marco Rubio the task of proposing security guarantees for Ukraine if and when hostilities end.
How is Russia being pressured?
In July, Mr. Trump said he would give Russia about 10 to 12 days to end the war before imposing new sanctions on the country, and perhaps tariffs on its trading partners. Mr. Trump then announced a summit with his Russian counterpart in Alaska, and the deadline passed. Mr. Trump on Friday again said he might impose new “massive sanctions” on Russia. But in a sign of the intensely personal style of Mr. Trump’s diplomacy, he also showed reporters a photograph sent to him by Mr. Putin of the two men in Alaska and said he was treating it as a sign of honor and respect.
The United States has imposed stiff sanctions on Russian individuals and companies since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022 but has not managed to stop Russia’s trading across borders or imposed economic pain sufficient to force Moscow to sue for peace. And targeting Russia’s major trading partners, like China, could create global financial instability. India, a large buyer of Russian oil, has said it would maintain the imports even if Mr. Trump follows through on a threat to impose a 50 percent tariff on the country starting Wednesday.
Image
Buildings damaged this month in a Russian attack near Pokrovsk, Ukraine, a city in the east that Russia is trying to capture.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
What’s expected in battle?
Fighting rages in several regions of Ukraine, causing heavy casualties on both sides. Moscow has recaptured Russia’s Kursk Province, but little Ukrainian territory has changed hands in the past year, although Moscow appears to have the momentum.
Russian forces, which have been on the offensive all year, are trying to press forward in the north of the Donetsk region and capture the city of Pokrovsk. Both are in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which has been the epicenter of fighting recently and throughout much of the war. Moscow is currently trying to take the last 2,500 square miles of the Donbas that Ukraine still controls.
Maps: How Ukraine’s Frontline Has Moved
Increasingly, surveillance and attack drones are dominating the battlefield, making troop movements near the front line difficult. At the same time, Russia has continued its aerial assaults on Ukraine, using drones and missiles to attack towns and cities.
What sticking points remain?
Despite more optimistic talk, major issues divide the two sides, including the division of territory and security guarantees.
Mr. Putin has demanded that Ukraine cede all of the Donbas region, which is made up of Luhansk and Donetsk, in the east of the country. At present, Russia controls almost all of Luhansk and about three-quarters of Donetsk. But Ukraine holds a string of fortress cities in Donetsk that Russia has been unable to seize despite years of fighting — territory that is both defensively and politically important to Kyiv.
Ukraine also wants to ensure that any peace deal puts in place protections against future Russian aggression.
The government in Kyiv sees NATO membership as its best security guarantee, but that is probably off the table in the short term.
In the meantime, France, Britain and Estonia, acting as a so-called coalition of the willing, have said they could deploy troops in a postwar Ukraine. Mr. Trump has promised U.S. involvement, though he offered few details and said no American troops would be on the ground.
Russia wants the United Nations Security Council to provide security guarantees, Mr. Lavrov said in the NBC interview. That statement follows one last week in which he said that Moscow would insist on being a part of any guarantees, an idea considered anathema in Kyiv.
Ukraine has also demanded that Moscow return around 20,000 children abducted and deported to Russia during the war. In 2023, the International Criminal Court accused Mr. Putin of war crimes and issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of responsibility for the abductions.
Editors’ Picks
Matthew Mpoke Bigg is a London-based reporter on the Live team at The Times, which covers breaking and developing news.
4. Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader
The article would not cut and past in the message but you can access it here: https://hbr.org/2025/08/lessons-from-u-s-army-special-ops-on-becoming-a-leader
The author wrote the book Primal Intelligence so this is not some "Hooah" special operations story.
Business education
Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader
by Angus Fletcher
August 19, 2025
AF
Angus Fletcher is a professor and the director of the Fisher College of Business Leadership Initiative at Ohio State University. His newest book is Primal Intelligence (2025).
5. Special Operations News – August 25, 2025
Special Operations News – August 25, 2025
https://sof.news/update/20250825/
August 25, 2025 SOF News Update 0
Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.
Photo / Image: A competitor from Guatemala zeroes his weapon before the start of Fuerzas Comando 2025at Ilopango, El Salvador, Aug. 18, 2025. Fuerzas Comando 2025 brings together 16 special operations teams from across Central, South America and the Caribbean to Ilopango, El Salvador, 18-29 Aug. to test skills through a 10-day special operations forces competition alongside a senior leadership seminar to collectively refine skills and foster military-to-military relationships. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Felix Ortiz Rivera)
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SOF News
NSW Cdr Fired. Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands III, the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, has been fired as part of a string of dismissals of high level defense officials by the Department of Defense in August 2025. Sands was in the job for just one year. He entered the Navy in 1992. As a Navy SEAL, he has deployed to Afghanistan and has been in special operations units for most of his career. “Navy Reserve, Naval Special Warfare Leaders Removed from Command”, U.S. Naval Institute, August 22, 2025.
https://news.usni.org/2025/08/22/navy-reserve-naval-special-warfare-leaders-removed-from-command
SF: The Enlightened Warrior. David Maxwell, retired SF Colonel, argues that enlightenment values of reaason and critical thinking are essential for Special Forces operators to effectively analyze complex situations and make sound decisions in the field. “The Enlightened Warrior: Applying Reason and Critical Thinking in Special Forces”, Small Wars Journal, August 18, 2025.
OSS “Donovan Award”. The OSS Society will present this years recipient of the “William J. Donovan Award” on October 18, 2025. The Office of the Strategic Services (OSS) Society is a chariable organization that honors the historic accomplishments of the OSS during World War II. Past recipients are a “Who’s Who” taken from the history books of the special operations and intelligence world. https://osssociety.org/pdfs/2025_Save_The_Date.pdf
Green Berets and “Conventional Combat Operations”. Michael Peck explains how the new U.S. Army special operations forces manual (FM 3–05, Army Special Operations, June 2025, PDF, 102 pgs) shifts the focus of U.S. Special Forces from conducting small-unit COIN and CT missions to supporting big-unit mechanized warfare. “Why Green Berets want to join conventional combat discussion”, Army Times, August 22, 2025.
Help Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel with spine injuries receive the healthcare options, education, and care they need.
Survivability Drift Theory – Protecting the SOF Force. A concept developed to surveil and flag early warning signs in special operations forces under cumulative “exposure conditions” that degrade the individual operator and the SOF force in general. These exposure conditions may include blast-overpressure, institutional tension, hazardous materials, role erosion, and more. “Survivability Drift Theory and Attrition Mitigation in Special Operations Forces”, Small Wars Journal, August 21, 2025.
Becoming a Leader – Lessons from SOF. There is an organization that has developed a “rich curriculum for cultivating initiative, strategic vision” and other skills need to lead during volatile times. The U.S. Army Special Forces has taught tens of thousands of soldier who excel at managerial tasks to successfully take on leadership positions. The soldiers learn these skills through experience in diverse and challenging assignments as well as in specialized courses at the JFK Special Warfare Center. “Lessons from U.S. Army Special Ops on Becoming a Leader”, Harvard Business Review, August 19, 2025.
CDF Winter Cruise 2025. The Combat Diver Foundation will host it annual Winter Cruise on November 21, 2025. It is by invitation only – conducted by the Sunset Sail at Key West. Sailing on board General George Patton’s yacht, this year’s event will feature Ric Prado – a former CIA clandestine services officer and now book author. The Combat Diver Foundation was founded to preserve the history and legacy of combat divers from all the services.
SOF History
On August 25, 1961, the first Finnish conscript paratrooper course graduated with a parachute jump in Utti, Finland. Since then, first the Finnish Defence Force Paratrooper School and now the Special Jaeger Battalion (Erikoisjaakaripataljoona) have celebrated this day as their anniversary / tradition day.
On August 28, 2013, SSG Earl D. Plumlee while serving as a weapons sergeant assigned to C Co, 4th Bn, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), at Forward Operating Base Ghazni, distinguished himself by acts of gallantry above and beyond the call of duty while engaging with the enemy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. For his heroic actions he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Congressional Medal of Honor Society. https://lnkd.in/emQVxaBr See also an article by Military Review published September 2023.
On August 26, 2021, thirteen U.S. service members and almost 200 Afghans died in a terrorist bombing at Abbey Gate of the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul, Afghanistan. The Kabul airlift (NEO) was in the final days of execution. https://afghan-report.com/news/abbey-gate-bombing/
National Security and Commentary
CRS Report – Counterproliferation in U.S. Policy. The Congressional Research Service has published a short report by Mary Beth D. Nikitin on the definition of counterproliferation policy, how it is used to degrade adversaries capabilities in developing weapons of mass destruction, the use of of force in counterproliferation (past events), and a short summary of the June 2025 strikes (Iran).
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12597
DIA Director Fired. Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been dismissed. Since January 2025 an unusual number of senior general officers have been fired or have announced an early retirement. Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin has announced his retirement (forced departure). The Trump administration has dismissed several high-profile speical operations and intelligence officials since January 2025. These include:
- General Timothy Haugh, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA)
- Wendy Noble, civilian deputy at the National Security Agency (NSA)
- Mike Collins, acting chair at the National Intelligence Council (NIC)
- Maria Langan-Riekhof, deputy acting chair at the National Intelligence Council (NIC)
- Brian Driscoll, former acting FBI Director
Army Chopper Units Cut. The U.S. Army is drastically reducing the number of rotary wing aviation units in the reserve forces. The cuts are part of a larger reorganization of the Army that reduces manpower, streamlines the force, modernizes the Army, and incorporates artificial intelligence and drone capabilities throughout the Army structure. “Why is the Army Chopping Away at Its Chopper Fleet?”, by David Roza, The Warhorse, August 22, 2025.
Maritime Security and Chokepoints. Some of the decisive struggles for global order may unfold in the oceans and across sea lanes. There are some areas of the ocean that are more “strategic” than others – straits being the most apparent. “The New Battle for the Straits”, by Isiah Wilson III, Compound Security, Unlocked, August 22, 2025.
ODNI Staff Cuts. Hundreds of roles are being phased away by the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. She has already eliminated 500 staff and reduced the office’s size by 30 percent since February. Now her plan is to cut even more. “Gabbard to cut ODNI staff by nearly 50 percent”, Politico, August 20, 2025.
Information Operations and Sabotage
Russia’s Fake News. A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation – and they’re spoofing reputable news outlets to do it. “Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US News”, by Dana Nickel, Politico, August 17, 2025.
Agents of Influence. Narrative warfare takes place in many forms. It doesn’t always appear in the form of lies or deception. Sometimes it is just how a story, incident, or event is framed. Narrative framing presents factually accurate details – “but does so in a way that guides readers toward a morally charged, emotionally resonant interpretation.” Douglas Wilbur examines this topic in detail in “Agents of Influence Weaponizing Credibilty: How to Win a Wartime Narrative From Within”, Inter Populum, August 24, 2025.
Russia Sabotage Ops in Europe. Read a new report on how Russia is conducting covert operations against critical targets of NATO countries. The Scale of Russian Sabotage Operations Against Europe’s Critical Infrastructure, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), August 2025, PDF, 18 pages.
https://www.iiss.org/research-paper/2025/08/the-scale-of-russian–sabotage-operations–against-europes-critical–infrastructure/
Ukraine Conflict
Russia’s Irregular Forces. Mariya Y. Omelicheva, a professor of strategy at the National Defense University, describes in detail the irregular forces of the Russian military and intelligence agencies. Some are fighting in Ukraine while others can be found in Africa in various countries. “Inside Russia’s Shadow Military Sustaining the War”, War on the Rocks, August 22, 2025.
Sabotage Behind the Lines. Members of the Ukrainian underground resistance movement – Atesh – have carried out sabotage against the Russian army. The leader of a group of agents provides a ‘behind the scenes’ look. “Ukrainian sabotage groups operating behind Russian lines“, Counteroffensive News, August 20, 2025.
Peace Talks – All About Donbas. The Russians, although they don’t occupy all of Donbas and have failed to capture the entire Donbas region, are demanding that Ukraine give it up. This is where the conflict began over ten years ago. “Peace Talks in Ukraine All Lead to the Donbas”, The New York Times, August 24, 2025. (subscription)
SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.
Asia
CRS Report – The U.S. “One-China” Policy and Taiwan. The Congressional Research Service has publised a two page report by Susan V. Lawrence that covers the historical context, diplomatic agreements, and related Congressional legislation related to China and Taiwan relationships. (18 August 2025)
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12503
North Korea and Taiwan: A Duel Contigency. Dr. Ju Hyung Kim, President of the Security Management Institute (South Korea), argues that strategic planners across the Indo-Pacific must reckon with the scenario of a full-scale war on the Korean peninsular at the same time China launches an attack against Taiwan. But one overlooked dimension of this type conflict is the North Korean irregular warfare capability against U.S., South Korean, and Japanese rear-area targets. “Preparing for the Silent Surge: Countering North Korea’s Gambit in a Dual Contingency”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, August 21, 2025.
Taiwan and Post-Invasion Resistance. Tyler Rodriguez provides an essay that explores how a Taiwan-based insurgency could emerge in a post-occupation environment. “The Inevitable Invasion is Over, Now What? Resistance in a Post-Invasion Taiwan”, Small Wars Journal, August 18, 2025. See also Taiwan Resistance for more articles on this topic.
And . . . Around the World
“Enduring Welcome Act of 2025”. With the beginning of the new administration in January 2025 the relocation of Afghans from Afghanistan to the United States with approved Special Immigration Visas (SIVs) was drastically curtailed. The U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) lost funding, staff, and the ability to coordinate and support the relocation of Afghans who supported the U.S. military as interpreters and in other roles as well. This bipartisan act will strengthen the role of CARE and allow it to resume the operations it had been conducting the past few years. Read more about the act on the website of the #AfghanEvac coalition.
Report – Four Years of the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan: A Stocktaking. Observer Research Foundation (ORF), August 2025, PDF, 53 pages. https://www.orfonline.org/public/uploads/posts/pdf/20250819092118.pdf
CT, Al-Qaeda, and Saudi Arabia (2002-2006). Julian McBride details the rise of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s and how the country’s security services cracked down on the suspected extremists mosques and imams sympathetic to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. This counterterrorism campaign took place from 2003 to 2006. “Lessons in Counterterrorism in Saudi Arabia’s Expulsion of Al-Qaeda in the Kingdom and Challenges Going Forward”, Small Wars Journal, August 19, 2025.
Venezuela Update. President Nicolas Maduro is mobilizing his country in preparation for perceived threats from the United States. News of an uptick in naval and other military operations by the U.S. in the Caribbean has causes some consternation for Maduro. He has reportedly declared a mobilization of militia units to deter a U.S. intervention in Venezuela.
Russian Mercenaries in Africa. Raphael Parens provides an analysis of what Russia’s mercenary forces in Africa would look like after the war in Ukraine comes to an end. “Moscow’s Mercenary Makeover in Africa”, War on the Rocks, August 20, 2025. (subscription)
Books, Podcasts, Videos, and Movies
Book – SAGE. Chapter 17 of the Special Forces Association has re-published the book SAGE, which is the memoir of COL Jerry “Robin” Sage. He was an OSS officer who was captured by the Germans during WWII. During his three years of captivity in a German POW camp, he helped work on the three-tunnel escape project that helped form the plot for the movie The Great Escape. After WWII, he commanded a Regimental Combat Team in the Korean War. He subsequentially was the commander of 10th SFGA in Europe during the Cold War. The book is available in Kindle version at Amazon.com.
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6. How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City
A form of unrestricted warfare and the PRC's three warfares?
How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City
The Chinese consulate in Manhattan has mobilized community groups to defeat candidates who don’t fall in line with the authoritarian state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/nyregion/china-consulate-new-york-elections.html
American and Chinese flags outside the Fukien Benevolent Association, a community group in Chinatown, Manhattan.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
By Michael ForsytheJay RootBianca Pallaro and David A. Fahrenthold
The reporters are investigating China’s covert influence campaigns in America. They welcome tips at nytimes.com/tips.
Aug. 25, 2025,
5:00 a.m. ET
阅读简体中文版
In New York City, social clubs backed by China undermined a congressional candidate who once challenged the regime on Chinese television.
They helped unseat a state senator for attending a banquet with the president of Taiwan.
And they condemned a City Council candidate on social media for supporting Hong Kong democracy.
In the past few years, these organizations have quietly foiled the careers of politicians who opposed China’s authoritarian government while backing others who supported policies of the country’s ruling Communist Party. The groups, many of them tax-exempt nonprofits, have allowed America’s most formidable adversary to influence elections in the country’s largest city, The New York Times found.
The groups are mostly “hometown associations” of people hailing from the same town or province in China. Some have been around for more than a century, while dozens of others have sprung up over the past decade. Like other heritage clubs in a city of immigrants, they welcome newcomers, organize parades and foster social connections.
But many hometown associations have become useful tools of China’s consulate in Midtown Manhattan, according to dozens of group members, politicians and former prosecutors. Some group leaders have family or business in China and fear the consequences of bucking its authority. Consulate officials have enlisted them to intimidate politicians who support Taiwan or cross Beijing’s other red lines. In one case, a Chinese intelligence agent and several hometown leaders targeted the same candidate.
This meddling may seem modest, involving politicians who are unlikely to affect international policy. But China is determined to quash dissent in its diaspora before it spreads back home, said Audrye Wong, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies Chinese influence.
Beijing is also making a longer bet, she said: “You never know which politician might eventually run for Congress at the national level, or become a presidential candidate.”
Editors’ Picks
Image
Flags outside the Chinese Consulate General in Midtown.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
Many countries, including the United States, have interfered in politics abroad. In New York City, federal prosecutors said that a Turkish government official gave Mayor Eric Adams luxury travel benefits in order to expedite the opening of a new consulate building. (Mr. Adams denied the charges, which were later dropped by the Trump administration.) And groups tied to India’s ruling party have attacked Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim of Indian heritage running for mayor, claiming he is anti-Hindu.
China’s influence machine is one of the world’s most expansive and effective. Over decades, it has harassed exiles in France, bribed academics in Britain and targeted politicians in Canada. It has even built clandestine police stations in dozens of countries to threaten dissidents. Its efforts have been especially potent in New York City, home to 600,000 ethnic Chinese people.
In 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested leaders of one group, the America Changle Association, for operating a police station in its clubhouse. Last year, a federal indictment accused a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of conspiring with the heads of two Chinese associations, saying their political activities “were supervised, directed, and controlled” by Chinese officials. And this summer, F.B.I. agents interviewed group leaders in Chinatown about consulate pressure, two leaders said.
Image
Mayor Eric Adams at a July campaign rally in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
The Times uncovered new evidence of how the consulate wields its influence. Videos uploaded to YouTube show festive ceremonies where consulate officials led hometown groups in pledges to love the motherland and defend her interests. Sometimes they vowed to promote “reunification” with Taiwan, a self-governed island democracy that China aims to absorb into the mainland.
More than 50 organizations with ties to Beijing have mobilized members to fund-raise or endorse political candidates over the past five years, The Times found. Many were nonprofit charities, which are prohibited by law from electioneering.
A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate General said it had always followed international law and had not influenced U.S. elections. “China has no interest in and has never interfered in any way,” the spokesman said in a brief statement. The consulate’s interactions with American society, he said, “are open and transparent, and we strongly reject any malicious accusations and smears.”
In a city where victories can be determined by ethnic voting blocs, relationships between China-aligned groups and elected leaders are mutually beneficial. Politicians often court these groups and, once in office, sometimes send government money back their way.
Mr. Adams — whose former aide resigned amid an investigation into China’s possible intrusion in the last mayoral race — has secured endorsements from the leaders of at least nine hometown groups in his tough campaign for re-election. That aide and another Adams supporter also caused a stir after reports last week that they had given red envelopes of cash to some journalists at his events this summer.
Pledges to the Motherland
The Times searched social media and Chinese news outlets for evidence of Chinese American groups endorsing or raising money for New York candidates. At least 53 such organizations had ties to China, defined as openly promoting Beijing’s political agenda, meeting in China with party members or extensively interacting with the Chinese consulate.
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The consulate has presided over dozens of hometown ceremonies that push China’s political interests. Here is a YouTube video showing one ceremony from last year:
American Fujian Houyu Association’s 40th Anniversary
Flushing, Queens, April 28, 2024
Entrance
Passing the seal
Yin Minjun
Xing Yulin
Yin Minjun
Promote peaceful reunification.
others including Xing Yulin
Promote peaceful reunification.
Yin Minjun
Advance China-U.S. relations.
others including Xing Yulin
Advance China-U.S. relations.
Yin Minjun
For the great rejuvenation of the motherland.
others including Xing Yulin
For the great rejuvenation of the motherland.
Yin Minjun
Contribute our greatest strength.
others including Xing Yulin
Contribute our greatest strength.
Taking pledges
My heart feels the same affection
Even if born in a foreign land, it cannot change
My Chinese heart
“My Chinese Heart”
Good evening
I’m Congresswoman Grace Meng,
and it’s such an honor
to be here with all of you
Representative Grace Meng
Honorees and dignitaries entered the hall to the tune of a live marching band, carrying American and Chinese flags.
Representatives of the Chinese consulate, Yin Minjun and Xing Yulin, presided over a ceremony in which the association’s old president passed the official seal to the new one.
Reading from pink pieces of paper, group leaders pledged to uphold core Chinese policies, including “reunification” with Taiwan.
Holding a Chinese flag, the group sang “My Chinese Heart,” a popular patriotic ballad in China.
Later, Representative Grace Meng, a congresswoman from New York, made a short and unremarkable speech after remarks by a consulate official and an association leader. Local politicians often make appearances at these events to reach constituents.
How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City - The New York Times
The American Fujian Houyu Association did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesman for Ms. Meng said the congresswoman had gone to events for many ethnic groups in her constituency, often with consulate members in attendance. As for Chinese events, “she has nothing to do with the guest list and does not control the program,” said Jordan Goldes, the spokesman. “But ideally, those administering the oaths should be from our country.”
The Times found videos of 35 ceremonies overseen by consulate officials since 2016. Diplomats led group leaders through many types of oaths, such as affirming China’s Taiwan policy and promising “to safeguard the development interests of the motherland.”
Some pledged to dedicate their utmost efforts to the “great rejuvenation” of the motherland, a phrase that President Xi Jinping used in his first public speech as the Chinese Communist Party leader in 2012 and has invoked many times since.
American Jin Feng Federation
Host
For Sino-U.S. friendship.
Oath taker
For Sino-U.S. friendship.
Host
Motherland’s reunification.
Host
Make positive contributions.
Oath taker
Motherland’s reunification.
Oath taker
Make positive contributions.
Fujian Foundation in USA
Oath taker
To safeguard motherland’s
Oath taker
development interests.
Host
To promote motherland’s
Host
peaceful reunification.
Oath taker
To promote motherland’s
Oath taker
peaceful reunification.
Wenshang Association
Oath taker
To safeguard motherland’s
Oath taker
development interests.
Chinese Consul Xing Yulin
To support motherland’s
Chinese Consul Xing Yulin
peaceful reunification.
Oath taker
To support motherland’s
Oath taker
peaceful reunification.
American Lianjiang Association
Host
To enhance
Host
community development.
Oath taker
To enhance
Oath taker
community development.
Host
To promote
Host
peaceful reunification.
Oath taker
To promote
Oath taker
peaceful reunification.
Zhang Yun, president of the American Lianjiang Association, said that it was “tradition” to invite Chinese consulate officials to these events, which are aimed at boosting ties between the two countries. “You all think that whatever Chinese people do is bad,” he said. “It’s discrimination.”
Among the 53 groups, The Times found at least 19 registered charities that had ignored the ban on election activities. Under federal tax law, these nonprofits — which do not pay most taxes — can take positions on policy issues but cannot endorse candidates for office. And yet, in case after case, the hometown groups made endorsements or hosted fund-raisers despite answering “no” to questions from the Internal Revenue Service about political involvement.
“That’s totally out of bounds,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a professor at Notre Dame who studies nonprofit law. “That’s a clear violation of the limits that Congress has put on their tax-exempt status.”
The I.R.S. declined to comment. A spokesman for New York’s tax agency, which is responsible for enforcing a similar state law, said it did not have the resources to look for such violations.
Some nonprofit charities with ties to China have endorsed the re-election of Mr. Adams. Dixon Mai, a leader of the Chong Lou USA Association Headquarters — which formally endorsed a meeting with top consulate officials last year focused on opposing Taiwan’s president — said he was mobilizing the group’s 2,000 members to re-elect Mr. Adams. “We are all united in voting for him,” he said.
Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, said that the mayor attended heritage events to listen to residents’ concerns, and that the campaign had tried “to safeguard against any improper influence.”
“If any group is prohibited from making endorsements or engaging in campaign activities, those rules apply to them, and we expect them to follow the law,” Mr. Shapiro added.
Image
Mr. Adams at a Sunset Park rally in July.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
Sometimes politicians steer government funding back to the groups that supported them.
In December 2021, the Asian American Community Empowerment nonprofit co-hosted a fund-raiser for New York’s governor, Ms. Hochul. The event took place at a restaurant owned by the group’s leader, John Chan, a businessman aligned with the Chinese government who was once convicted of trafficking heroin and smuggling Chinese citizens into the United States.
Two months later, Ms. Hochul announced that $10 million in pandemic aid would be distributed to dozens of Asian groups. Mr. Chan’s nonprofit received $45,000.
Anthony Hogrebe, a spokesman for Ms. Hochul, said that campaign donations “have no impact on policy decisions.”
‘Violence Would Be Fine, Too’
In at least one case, agents of the Chinese government have directly targeted politicians perceived as threats.
Updated Aug. 25, 2025, 2:07 a.m. ET5 hours ago
In 2021, Yan Xiong, a U.S. citizen and retired Army chaplain, decided to run as a Democrat for Congress in a district that includes heavily Chinese areas in Chinatown, Manhattan, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Mr. Xiong figured his background would help him win. As a student in Beijing in 1989, he had helped lead the uprising for democratic reforms in Tiananmen Square, prompting a bloody government crackdown. After criticizing the leadership on live television, Mr. Xiong landed on China’s list of 21 “most wanted” dissidents. He spent almost two years in Beijing’s notorious Qincheng Prison.
More than three decades later, and across an ocean, he remained a prime target.
After Mr. Xiong announced his campaign, an intelligence agent with China’s Ministry of State Security hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on him, according to criminal charges later filed by federal prosecutors. Unfortunately for the Chinese spy, the investigator was secretly cooperating with the F.B.I.
Image
Yan Xiong, a retired U.S. Army chaplain who helped lead the Tiananmen Square uprising when he was a student, at his home in St. Johns, Fla.Credit...Agnes Lopez for The New York Times
On a phone call, the two discussed hiring a woman who might lure Mr. Xiong into a compromising situation. The spy, Qiming Lin, who lived in China, promised to pay handsomely, indicating that $40,000 was a fair price for a prostitute.
“Violence would be fine, too,” the spy told the investigator, according to a recording of the call described in court filings. “Beat him until he cannot run for election,” Mr. Lin added, laughing.
Beijing also recruited a former pro-democracy activist in Queens to keep tabs on Mr. Xiong, according to charges later brought by federal prosecutors.
And the Chinese consulate directed hometown association leaders to oppose him, Mr. Xiong and several of his allies told The Times.
In March 2022, he opened his campaign headquarters in Chinatown and held a weakly attended fund-raiser. He said that Chen Xueduan, a former head of the Fukien Benevolent Association of America, later told him on a phone call that the consulate had issued a threat: If Mr. Chen supported the campaign, he would risk repercussions for his business interests in China.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Mr. Chen told The Times.
Another community leader, Jimmy Cheng, also offered to assist his campaign, Mr. Xiong recalled. Mr. Cheng told him he hated Communists and that, as a top leader of the United Fujianese of America Association, he could help deliver some 3,000 votes.
But Mr. Cheng was a saboteur, Mr. Xiong said: An F.B.I. agent had warned the candidate that Mr. Cheng had ties to China and should not be trusted.
Image
The Fukien Benevolent Association of AmericaCredit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
At an event weeks after their initial meeting, Mr. Xiong said Mr. Cheng duped him into being photographed in front of a backdrop claiming he opposed the creation of a museum honoring Tiananmen Square victims.
“In five minutes, that photo was all over the world,” Mr. Xiong said, referring to coverage in Chinese-language media. It was a “dirty trick,” he said.
Mr. Cheng did not respond to phone calls or a note left at his door by The Times.
Mr. Xiong lost his primary handily and moved to Florida. He plans to return to New York and has filed paperwork to run in the Democratic primary next year against Ms. Meng.
He was surprised that his biography didn’t move voters, he said. But “the Chinese government corrupts the Chinese people here.”
A Cafe Confrontation
China has gone to great lengths to stamp out global support of Taiwan.
After State Senator John C. Liu, who was born there, attended a meeting in New York with the Taiwanese president in 2019, “intermediaries” for the Chinese consulate contacted his office, he told The Times. They “made it clear that they felt it was inappropriate for me to attend that event.” Hometown associations rescinded his invitations to their banquets, Mr. Liu said.
In 2021, a top F.B.I. agent warned state lawmakers that consulate officers used both threats and sweeteners to influence politicians, including those who support Taiwan. “You and your staff, among others, are the targets of these efforts,” the agent wrote in a letter to an incoming assemblywoman.
When Taiwan’s president held another reception in New York City two years later, the head of the consulate warned the mayor, Mr. Adams, to avoid contact, National Review reported. He did not go.
But Iwen Chu, a Taiwan native in the State Senate, attended the reception — and paid a hefty price.
In the days after the event, Chinese diplomats invited members of hometown associations to the consulate, two attendees told The Times. There, officials asked about Ms. Chu’s position on Taiwanese independence.
“I said I didn’t know anything about that,” Zhen Jinrong, one of the attendees and a longtime leader of the Taishan Friendship Association, recalled in Cantonese.
Soon Ms. Chu herself heard from the consulate. A diplomat asked for a meeting between the senator and a consulate deputy “to talk with her on cooperation between New York and China,” according to a copy of the email reviewed by The Times.
Image
Iwen Chu, then a state senator, and Li Shipeng, a deputy consul general, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Ms. Chu met with the deputy in April 2023 at Boca del Cielo, a cafe in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. After some small talk, the diplomat got to the point: People were upset about the banquet, he said, describing the situation as “explosive.”
“They were giving me pressure,” Ms. Chu recalled.
The senator told the diplomat that she was focused on New York, not global affairs. But it was too late.
By February 2024, John Chan, the onetime smuggler and Beijing’s top power broker in New York, as well as the founder of a group representing people from the city of Fuzhou, was vetting a Republican to run against Ms. Chu, a Democrat.
In his Sunset Park office, Mr. Chan grilled the would-be candidate — Steve Chan, a former Marine and police sergeant, according to three people present. Lester Chang, a Republican state assemblyman, was there, too.
John Chan, who had once called the Taiwanese president “a sinner for all eternity,” asked the sergeant how he felt about Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Steve Chan replied that he supported Hong Kong democracy and that China should leave Taiwan alone, according to a person familiar with the meeting. The candidate was then asked if he wanted to revise his answer, the person said, and Steve Chan softened his response, suggesting a continuation of the status quo.
Steve Chan told The Times he did not change his stance in that meeting. Whatever he said, it convinced John Chan, who later endorsed the candidate at a hometown association event, with two members of the consulate in attendance.
One by one, leaders of groups that had once backed Ms. Chu flipped to Steve Chan. He easily defeated her in November, costing Democrats their supermajority.
Image
John Chan, Beijing’s top power broker in New York, at an event in Flushing, Queens, in April.Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times
Several community leaders told The Times that Ms. Chu was quite popular before the scandal over the Taiwanese dinner.
“If Iwen hadn’t attended that event, 100 percent she would have won,” said Mr. Zhen of the Taishan Friendship Association. Justin Yu, a former president of the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association, which includes more than 60 groups, said he believed that the consulate “mobilized some of the organizations in Brooklyn to boycott Iwen Chu.”
Earlier this year, The Times asked Steve Chan why he had accepted the endorsement of someone with prominent ties to China.
“Whether you like him or not, whether he’s a Communist or not,” the state senator said of John Chan, “he is very influential in his community.”
The Fortune Palace
This January, more than a dozen hometown associations, all with ties to the consulate and six of them tax-exempt nonprofits, put on a lively fund-raising dinner for Susan Zhuang, a Chinese immigrant running for re-election to City Council after biting a police officer at a homeless shelter protest.
Image
Councilwoman Susan Zhuang at an event hosted by the Brooklyn Democratic Party last year.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Ms. Zhuang had won her seat in 2023 after old photos surfaced of her opponent in the Democratic primary, Wai-Yee Chan, at a Manhattan rally for Hong Kong democracy. At the time of the rally, Ms. Zhuang shared a post on Facebook accusing Ms. Chan of “supporting violent Hong Kong independence.”
When the two women later ran against each other for City Council, prominent members of several community groups recirculated the rally photos on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media network, and said Ms. Chan held extreme positions, according to screenshots reviewed by The Times.
Some community leaders urged Ms. Chan to take out newspaper advertisements holding the Chinese flag, “to show what side she’s on,” recalled Grace Safarik, her campaign manager. “It was bananas.” The candidate did not run any such ads. Hometown associations soon dumped Ms. Chan and threw their support behind Ms. Zhuang.
Since then, Ms. Zhuang has appeared alongside consulate officials on at least 30 occasions, according to a Times review of dozens of videos and Chinese-language articles. As a City Council member, Ms. Zhuang has distributed more than $300,000 in city funds to tax-exempt Chinese American nonprofits that backed her, according to a Times review of government records. The majority of the funds went to organizations with close ties to Beijing.
At the January fund-raiser, some of the same group leaders showed up to the Fortune Palace restaurant in Brooklyn to support her again. Atop lavender tablecloths were signs denoting the names of various hometown organizations. That day, Mr. Zhuang’s campaign raised more than $20,000 in donations.
One donor, Huang Yirong of the Zhanjiang Association of America — a nonprofit that shares a house with the councilwoman’s campaign office — had helped organize opposition to the visiting president of Taiwan in 2023. Mr. Huang said his group did not endorse or donate to Ms. Zhuang’s campaign. “I support her, and some of our members support her,” he said. “We give and support individually.”
The emcee of the event, Joseph Luo, president of the American Association of Cantonese, had met in China in 2023 with leaders of groups belonging to the United Front, a division of the Chinese Communist Party aimed at expanding China’s influence.
Image
The Zhanjiang Association of America is a nonprofit that shares a house with Ms. Zhuang’s campaign office.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
“We want her to be re-elected. Re-elected!” shouted John Yu of the Guangdong Association of America, a tax-exempt nonprofit that has hosted many events with the consulate.
Benny Lau, the president of the Guangdong Association, said that while individual members supported the candidate, the group had not crossed the line into direct political advocacy.
Ms. Zhuang told The Times that questions about her ties to the Chinese groups were biased.
“Campaign contributions do not influence my decisions as a legislator,” Ms. Zhuang wrote in a statement. “I find it insulting that Asian American elected officials constantly have to defend our heritage because of these guilty-by-association rumors.”
She is expected to win her second term; no one is running against her.
Mable Chan and Yi Liu contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy, Kirsten Noyes and Tina Wang contributed research. Produced by Nico Chilla and Rumsey Taylor.
Michael Forsythe a reporter on the investigations team at The Times, based in New York. He has written extensively about, and from, China.
Jay Root is an investigative reporter for The Times based in Albany, N.Y., covering the people and events influencing — and influenced by — state and local government.
Bianca Pallaro is a Times reporter who combines traditional reporting with data analysis skills to investigate wrongdoing and explain complex issues by turning numbers into insightful information.
David A. Fahrenthold is a Times investigative reporter writing about nonprofit organizations. He has been a reporter for two decades.
7. Hybrid Autonomy Sabotage: Innovation Anchored in Tradition
Charts and graphics at the link.
Excerpts:
Conclusions
Contemporary sabotage operations represent a marked shift toward hybrid autonomy sabotage. They are high-caliber evolutions of longstanding operational concepts, resting on the enduring imperatives of secrecy, intelligence, deception, and human networks.
As these capabilities proliferate, defenders must balance targeted technological adaptations with strengthened counterintelligence and physical security, recognizing that future threats are likely to involve autonomous, cross-domain weaponized systems deployed in unconventional ways.
In assessing what has changed – and what has not – this analysis confirms that effective counter-sabotage strategies require sustained investment in traditional protective security and intelligence operations, alongside enhanced wide-area surveillance, supply chain integrity, and operational resilience.
Hybrid Autonomy Sabotage: Innovation Anchored in Tradition
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/25/hybrid-autonomy-sabotage-innovation-anchored-in-tradition/
by Ant Burke
|
08.25.2025 at 06:00am
Photo by Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash
Introduction
Strategic Context: Sabotage as a Renewed Threat
Recent public statements by the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service and Security Service have highlighted escalating threats from hostile state actors conducting sabotage operations on British soil. The 2025 UK Strategic Defense Review and NATO plans for enhanced defensive measures against drone, cyber, and sabotage threats underscore the renewed strategic priority of protecting critical infrastructure, personnel, and supply chains from evolving asymmetric threats.
Against this backdrop of heightened alarm over Russian and Iranian sabotage threats to the UK, the world has watched as Ukraine and Israel have conducted significant, spectacular sabotage operations. These developments demand a reevaluation of the concept of sabotage in the modern era, likely threat evolution and enduring characteristics to inform security policy, planning and operations.
Purpose and Scope
This analysis provides a systematic comparison of contemporary sabotage operations with historical precedents to identify enduring operational characteristics versus novel tactical innovations, assess the disruptive impact of emerging technologies on traditional security paradigms, and inform defensive strategies and capability development priorities. The analysis excludes cyber-enabled sabotage operations and Cold War-era contingency planning, focusing on physical operations.
Methodology
Definitional Framework
Given the contested nature of terminology in this domain, this analysis employs the following operational definitions:
Sabotage: defined here as covert operations conducted by state actors behind enemy lines or within adversary territory to destroy political, military, or economic targets—whether personnel, facilities, materiel, or critical enablers. This definition draws from the WWII era Office of Strategic Services (OSS) sabotage field manual, which emphasizes the deliberate destruction of enemy capabilities through clandestine means. While sabotage operations may employ proxies, agents, or sympathizers, this analysis focuses on operations with direct state control.
Terrorism: in light of significant definitional analysis in the field, this analysis adopts a narrow operational definition focused on tactics and targets rather than ideological motivations. We examine attacks by non-state actors whose tactics, modus operandi, operating environment, and targets parallel those defined as sabotage above. Mass civilian casualty attacks characteristic of contemporary Islamic extremist terrorism fall outside our analytical scope. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) campaign provides relevant case studies due to its focus on military, political, and infrastructure targets employing methods analogous to state sabotage operations.
This definitional approach enables comparison across state and non-state actors while maintaining focus on operational characteristics rather than political legitimacy or motivational factors. The distinction between sabotage and terrorism in this analysis is primarily one of actor type (state vs. non-state) rather than tactical methodology.
Analytical Framework
The comparative analysis employs the following eight operational factors assessed on a three-tier ordinal scale (low, medium, high):
- Logistics: Requirements for personnel, materiel, transportation, and communications support
- Range: Operational distances from staging areas to targets
- Coordination: Complexity of multi-element synchronization
- Resources: Human and material requirements, including specialized capabilities
- Intelligence: Information requirements for planning and execution
- Secrecy & Surprise: Operational security and tactical deception for the attack to remain hidden, and the extent to which the attack is characterized as ‘unthinkable’ or ‘unimaginable’ in post-attack coverage.
- Precision: Accurate, bounded, intentional, and discriminate targeting.
- Exposure: Time spent operating within a hostile environment, particularly in the attack execution and post-attack recovery phases of an operation.
Target-Based Categorization
To ensure systematic comparison across temporal and technological contexts, operations are organized into four target-based categories: Aviation Assets (attacks on airfields, aircraft, and aviation facilities), Naval Assets (operations against warships, naval bases, and maritime infrastructure), Leadership (assassination operations against high-value individuals), and Infrastructure (attacks on power generation, communications, and industrial facilities).
This categorization enables like-for-like comparison between contemporary and historical operations, controlling for target-specific operational requirements and constraints—a case study from each context (present day, WWII, PIRA) for each of our target categories is selected for detailed analysis using the eight-factor framework detailed above.
Case Study Selection
This section details the case studies selected for analysis, and the associated rationale for inclusion, as well as notable exclusions. Figure 1 summarizes our case studies:
Figure 1: Overview of case study comparison
While this analysis excludes Cold War-era Soviet, US, and NATO sabotage case studies, the following insightful analyses were examined: a 2024 study by Richterova et al analyses Russia’s new ‘gig economy’ sabotage, another 2024 from Richertova article explores the historic context of Soviet sabotage and the 2020 study by Sinai examines Cold War ‘stay behind force’ concepts.
Present Day Cases:
The 2024 Israeli pager operation against Hezbollah was excluded due to the unprecedented scale of the operation, which lacks historical parallels despite the UK Special Operations Executive (SOE) efforts to create novel, disguised explosives and weapons.
The 2025 Ukrainian integrated sea-air drone platform attacks were omitted in favor of the sea-drone operation, as they primarily targeted energy infrastructure, not military maritime assets.
World War II Cases:
We selected the first Chariot manned torpedo attack against the German Tirpitz battleship (despite operational failure) over the subsequent X-Class mini-submarine operation (Operation Source) to match the Ukrainian use of sea surface drones (and the fact that we have not examined Ukrainian sub-surface drone attacks, such as the June 2025 attack against the Kursk Bridge).
PIRA Cases:
We opted to consider the PIRA 10 Downing Street attack over the PIRA Brighton bombing attack targeting PM Thatcher or the bombing assassination of Lord Mountbatten in County Sligo, Republic of Ireland, as the 10 Downing Street attack occurred in London (UK capital city) and is the more recent attack.
We opted to exclude the September 2000 Real IRA rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on SIS headquarters as it was conducted by RIRA, despite being a relevant tactical case study in terms of considering the potential to replace a manned craft with a weapons-bearing sea surface autonomous drone, akin to the Ukraine attacks against Russian naval assets.
Comparative Analysis
Aviation Asset Target Comparison: Analysis of the Ukrainian Operation Spider’s Web against Russian strategic aviation assets reveals significant tactical advantages from drone employment: Range Extension (operational reach increased from tens to hundreds of kilometers, reliant on the ability to covertly transport and pre-position, and remotely activate coordinated launch), exposure reduction (elimination of human presence in hostile territory during execution), and enhanced precision (real-time guidance of increased number of strike assets versus on the ground, ad-hoc limited strikes from human on-target attack force). Historical comparison demonstrates continuity in deception requirements and logistical complexity, while highlighting the transformative impact of remote/autonomous platforms.
Naval Asset Target Comparison: The Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet headquarters attack exemplifies the convergence of surface and aerial drone capabilities, creating multi-domain challenges for maritime security. Key innovations include: platform integration (coordinated sea-air drone operations represents a significant tactical evolution, impacting operating range cross-domain defense planning), distributed launch (increased freedom of operation, ability to launch from wide coastal areas rather than dedication facilities or specialized warships), and cost-capability ratio (cost and scale benefits as a result of commercial technology adaptation).
Infrastructure Target Comparison: Israeli Operation Rising Lion demonstrates sophisticated integration of human intelligence, cyber capabilities, and kinetic effects. The operation’s success relied on Extended Secret Preparation (multi-year infiltration and pre-positioning), Sophisticated, timely intelligence and planning fusion (AI-enhanced target selection and operational planning), and Tactical Surprise (despite heightened security environments). Here, too, the essential role of secrecy, covert supply chains, transportation, and storage within a hostile operating environment is clear.
Leadership Targeting Target Comparison: The assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran reveals minimal technological disruption in close-access operations, emphasizing the enduring centrality of human intelligence and operational tradecraft. The ability to gain covert close physical access/proximity to targets (locations, facilities, or the target in transit) remains vital. However, recent attacks employing standoff weapons and the potential for long-range aerial drones change what counts as close physical proximity.
Key Findings
Technological Disruption
The emergence of ‘hybrid autonomy sabotage’, where covert human operations leverage autonomous or semi-autonomous unmanned systems, has created significant operational advantages for attackers:
- Extended Operational Range: Removal of human limitations enables continental-scale operations, as the speed and range of unmanned platforms extend the area of operations of attackers
- Reduced Tactical Exposure: Remote/autonomous platforms minimize personnel risk on targets, and therefore may change attacker cost-benefit calculus, lowering the barrier to execution
- Enhanced Precision: Real-time guidance and AI-enabled targeting increase the precision, but also the stealth and resilience of attacks
- Cost Accessibility: Commercial technology adaptation democratizes capabilities, shaping attacker cost-benefit calculus towards a lower barrier to execution
Enduring Characteristics
Despite the disruptive impact of technological advances, fundamental requirements persist:
- Covert Networks & Operational Security: The ability for attackers to operate in secret to organize, plan, transport, store, and move remains critical.
- Border Security: Physical access control remains foundational to counter-sabotage, as porous borders undermine the most sophisticated access and security controls, and large expanses of open habitat are readily exploited by attackers to prepare, train, and organize
- Intelligence Primacy: Target development and operational planning require sophisticated collection, though the radical expansion of open source intelligence capabilities offers attackers significant benefit in comparison to historic operations.
- Deception: Camouflage, disguise, and concealment are enduring essential components for both covert planning and tactical surprise.
Security Implications
Several recent analyses have analyzed the Ukraine war to identify insights for modern warfare, including lessons for modern warfare, how Ukrainian Special Operations experience can inform future US military warfighting, and special forces operations.
This analysis focused on implications primarily from a ‘defender’ perspective – that is, what it means to secure and protect vital personnel, assets, and facilities in the context of hybrid autonomous sabotage.
The impact of technological disruption has a direct impact on the planning, resource allocation, and intelligence efforts of the security community, including:
- Perimeter Redefinition: Security zones must account for long-range aerial and maritime drone threats, with direct consideration for wide area surveillance, early warning intelligence systems, and a reinterpretation of proximity
- Multi-Domain Integration: Air, sea, and ground defenses require unified command structures, supported by integrated intelligence and information, and cross-domain physical protection systems
- Supply Chain Security: Enhanced screening for dual-use technologies and components, suppliers, logistics operations, and shipments to identify weaknesses, enhanced surveillance, and proactive assurance
- Intelligence-led Disruption: Identification and disruption of attackers and their people networks must remain a priority for intelligence and security organizations, including the private sector
- Counter-Intelligence Enhancement: Proactive vigilance for the detection and disruption of insider threats and adversary espionage operations remains essential, including enhanced operational security awareness and behaviors within defender organizations
Future Considerations
Emerging Threats
Considering the radical rate of tactical and technological innovation over the past two years, and the trends of continued technological advancements—and AI-enabled autonomy in particular—hold the prospect for continued threat evolution. Here we present key focus areas identified in our analysis.
Continued advances in drone range and payload, coupled with increased autonomous navigation, targeting, mission planning, and deception technologies, will further elevate sabotage threats. The ability to easily integrate non-kinetic effectors (such as electronic warfare payloads) onto drone platforms, as part of synchronized coordinated attacks, can further expand tactical effectiveness and sophistication.
Potential for long-range, large-scale, cross-domain autonomous swarm attacks would create a class of threat that can overwhelm even the best-prepared point defenses. The long-hypothesized ‘Micro-Drone Assassination’ concept, in which miniaturized platforms are able to navigate to, access, and navigate through previously secure ‘hard target’ spaces to locate, identify, and strike high-value personnel, is a clear evolution of current technology and tactics.
While much of the technology for weaponized drones is retained in state entities, the prospect of the proliferation of existing weaponized drones (or the means to easily adapt civilian drones with homemade explosives/weapons) into criminal, terrorist, and other non-state threat actors represents an ongoing national security concern.
Defensive Evolution
Our analysis has identified the following concepts for further consideration by defense and security stakeholders:
- Extended Security Perimeters: Surveillance and interdiction capabilities must expand from traditional facility boundaries to account for drone launch sites potentially hundreds of kilometers distant, including mobile coastal launch points for maritime targets
- Supply Chain Infiltration Detection: Enhanced tracking of the export and sales of weaponized drones, together with monitoring of dual-use technology purchases, with particular focus on commercial drone components, communications equipment, and explosive precursors that enable “commercial-off-the-shelf lethality” of weaponized drones employed in recent operations
- Human Network Disruption: Renewed emphasis on counter-intelligence operations targeting pre-positioning activities, safe house networks, and logistics chains that remain essential despite technological advances
- Multi-Domain Sensor Integration: Unified detection systems spanning air, sea, and ground approaches with automated correlation capabilities to identify coordinated attack preparations across domains
Follow-On Research
This study was a short, limited comparative analysis that provides initial analytical conclusions. There remains much research to characterize the evolving threat, security implications, and to develop effective responses.
We propose three strands of follow-on research:
- Enhanced Analysis: While our rapid, limited analysis has highlighted key insights, further in-depth analysis will develop a stronger evidence base for decision-making and planning. We recommend an expanded study to include the Cold War era and expanded comparative analysis, and a more sophisticated, structured futures analysis.
- Technological Threat Tracking & Prototyping: Our analysis is based on reported operations and technology from Ukraine and Israel, and is therefore reactive in nature. The potential to be proactive – to actively imagine, research, and prototype ‘the next evolution’ based on operational insights and target vulnerabilities would provide a greater chance for planners to stay ahead of the threat landscape. We recommend the formation of a controlled, secure prototyping effort with trusted stakeholders to develop and test sabotage threat concepts.
- Enduring rapid iteration, integrated red teaming capability: Our limited analysis was a static, point-in-time comparison. The ability for attackers and defenders to learn from each other, to dynamically calibrate decision-making and actions, is absent. We recommend the formation of an enduring group of trusted stakeholders to conduct realistic (with input from the threat prototyping effort described above, plus threat and operations experts).
Conclusions
Contemporary sabotage operations represent a marked shift toward hybrid autonomy sabotage. They are high-caliber evolutions of longstanding operational concepts, resting on the enduring imperatives of secrecy, intelligence, deception, and human networks.
As these capabilities proliferate, defenders must balance targeted technological adaptations with strengthened counterintelligence and physical security, recognizing that future threats are likely to involve autonomous, cross-domain weaponized systems deployed in unconventional ways.
In assessing what has changed – and what has not – this analysis confirms that effective counter-sabotage strategies require sustained investment in traditional protective security and intelligence operations, alongside enhanced wide-area surveillance, supply chain integrity, and operational resilience.
ANNEX A: Comparative Analysis Data
This section contains the case study comparison analysis data for each of our four cases, color-coded to guide the reader to positive and negative judgments.
Airfield Case Study Analysis
Table A1: Comparative analysis of airfield attacks
Naval Asset Case Study Analysis
Table A2: Comparative analysis of naval asset attacks
Infrastructure Case Study Analysis
Table A3: Comparative analysis of infrastructure attacks
Leadership Assassination Case Study Analysis
Table A4: Comparative analysis of leadership assassination attacks
Tags: AI, counterintelligence, drone warfare, irregular warfare, Russia-Ukraine War, Sabotage Operations, Special Operations
About The Author
- Ant Burke
- Ant Burke is a Visiting Scholar at the School for Future of Innovations in Society, Arizona State University (ASU), Visiting Fellow at the UK’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS), and the founder of Camulos, a specialist firm focused on strategic analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) for national security.
8. U.S., Philippine Forces to Hold 500 Military Exercises in 2026
That seems like an incredible number.
U.S., Philippine Forces to Hold 500 Military Exercises in 2026 - USNI News
news.usni.org · Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · August 22, 2025
U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, Marine Rotational Force – Darwin 25.3, I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward, and Philippine Marines with 3rd Brigade set security during KAMANDAG 9 at Oyster Bay, Palawan, Philippines, June 11, 2025. US Marine Corps photo
U.S. and Philippine forces are set to hold more than 500 military-to-military activities throughout the coming year – a move the two countries claim will bolster deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
American and Philippine defense officials agreed on exercises, joint patrols and other activities slated for 2026 during the Mutual Defense Board-Security Engagement Board earlier this month in Hawaii. The series of annual meetings guide the course of U.S.-Philippine defense cooperation and have been held since 1958.
This year’s meeting comes on the heels of an enhanced relationship between Washington and Manila. It also coincides with the latter’s tensions in the South China Sea and concerns of a potential Taiwan conflict spillover into the Luzon Strait.
Military activities between the U.S. and the Philippines began to spike following Chinese maritime incidents in the western Philippine exclusive economic zone in 2022, prompting President Bongbong Marcos to reinvigorate Manila’s previously shaky relationship with Washington.
Since 2023, American and Filipino forces have expanded the scale of their military drills across the Southeast Asian archipelago. These moves, which include the deployment of missile systems that can reach mainland China and sink vessels in the Luzon Strait, drew ire from Beijing.
The two countries also resumed, and ramped up, joint patrols in the South China Sea in the face of escalating spats between Philippine and Chinese forces over contested maritime features.
Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, signs the 8-star memo alongside Gen. Romeo Brawner, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines at Camp Smith, HI on August 7, 2025. US Army photo
“The U.S.-Philippine military partnership continues to grow while addressing national defense capabilities and demonstrating a joint initiative for regional security and disaster response. Bilateral and multilateral Maritime Cooperative Activities (MCAs) proved a key success this year. These events are essential in ensuring freedom of navigation and improving interoperability,” reads a release on the meetings.
While the agreed number of activities remains similar to the amount planned for 2024, the focus of U.S.-Philippine defense cooperation has shifted from internal to external defense amid regional concerns. Exercises such as Balikatan, Salaknib and Kamandag have prioritized activities focusing on coastal defense, anti-ship tactics, area denial and air defense in recent years in-line with Manila’s shift.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of National Defense Gilbert Teodoro reflected this shift during their meeting in March. The two defense secretaries agreed to prioritize defense industrial base cooperation, unmanned surface vessel deployments, special forces drills and forward-deployed Marine Corps anti-ship missiles to the Luzon Strait.
Washington has also expanded its presence in the Southeast Asian nation, setting up a new Marine Corps prepositioning program and eyeing Subic Bay as a location for a regional munitions plant.
Beijing has viewed the American deployments and investments as destabilizing to regional stability, prompting demarches from officials and counter drills in the South China Sea.
Related
news.usni.org · Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · August 22, 2025
9. Restructuring Our Military for a Multi-Front War
Excerpts:
In my 2021 book, The Ever Shrinking Fighting Force, I argued that the goal of deterring our adversaries from starting a war is only achievable if we actually have the capabilities to take them on. Compared to the past, we are spending way more for a smaller force. We need to get a bigger bang for our buck while reconfiguring our military to deal with an increasingly tangled threat environment. That means we need to prepare and equip our forces for something similar to a two-theater war construct - ready to fight multiple conflicts simultaneously.
Will this require a larger budget allocation for defense? Absolutely. Will it mean a bigger force? Unquestionably. Some of it can be offset through force re-configuration, an expanded reliance on emerging technology, and a vigorous reduction of the Pentagon’s increasingly large overhead. But in order to be truly prepared, we will need a larger Navy for the Pacific, a more capable Army for Europe, an Air Force with longer legs and greater strategic airlift to support and go on the offensive, and a Marine Corps that is a combined-arms force ready for any contingency.
Simply put, if we don’t rework and reconfigure our military to handle multiple conflicts, we'll be perennially playing catch-up, putting our war fighters into unwinnable situations, and our nation’s security will suffer.
Restructuring Our Military for a Multi-Front War
By Arnold Punaro
August 25, 2025
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/08/25/restructuring_our_military_for_a_multi-front_war_1130636.html
rgent Action Is Necessary to Rework and Restructure Our Military for a Multi-Front War
Over the course of our nation’s relatively brief history, Americans have risen to the occasion to defeat our enemies and protect our freedoms. Whether it was those brave souls parachuting into Normandy on D-Day or those in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, American sacrifice serves as a powerful example of what can be accomplished when we dedicate the best of ourselves to the greatest good.
Global strategic conditions are rapidly evolving, and so too is the necessity of preparing for wars that we neither want nor seek. Conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza serve as a reminder of this challenge, as well as a stark warning that the American military must restructure in order to grapple with the realities of the world today.
In recent history, the United States has attempted to build a force and strategy capable of addressing conflicts on multiple fronts, learning critical lessons along the way. Vietnam proved that even what is perceived to be a “small war” requires a significant force, dispelling the Johnson administration’s belief that the military of the time could fight two wars simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific, as well as a smaller conflict in the third world. Under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, we reduced our force structure by thirty percent from its 1990 levels.
A Bottom Up Review from the Clinton administration read, in part, that “one of the central factors in our analysis was the judgment that the United States must field forces capable, in concert with its allies, of fighting and winning two major regional conflicts that occur nearly simultaneously.” Although the report does acknowledge that strategic force reductions could be made and still maintain this capability, then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin qualified it by adding that a series of “critical force enhancements to improve our strategic mobility and strengthen our early-arriving antiarmor capability” should be made.
Developing a national defense structure capable of a multi-front war continued to morph under George W. Bush’s administration, which aimed to build a force which was capable of deterring hostilities in four key regions at any given time. Of those four regions, the goal was to have a force prepared to win swiftly in two of those regions, and of those two, to win decisively in one region.
Since the Obama administration, the national security community consensus has been that China has become the new “pacing threat,” one whose military has rapidly expanded in both size and quality. Accordingly, both the Trump and Biden administrations moved to refocus and reinforce our military preparedness to be effective in a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine reinforced the theory that the military threat out of Russia had not disappeared. Events in the Middle East, including a resurgent terrorist threat, the possibility of broader regional conflict stemming from the war in Gaza, and escalating tensions with Iran, continue to attract both our strategic interests and our military capabilities. Iran’s recent provocations, including direct strikes on Israel and maritime disruptions, underscore its growing regional assertiveness, and highlight the necessity of recent U.S. military action to prevent its continued progress toward nuclear weapons capability and destabilizing global security.
While the doctrine and the types of adversaries we face have slowly evolved over time, the underlying logic has remained consistent: we must have the capability to deter and defeat multiple threats simultaneously. Still, we continue to ask our military to achieve this increasingly complex goal with an ever diminishing set of resources telling leadership to do more with less.
In my 2021 book, The Ever Shrinking Fighting Force, I argued that the goal of deterring our adversaries from starting a war is only achievable if we actually have the capabilities to take them on. Compared to the past, we are spending way more for a smaller force. We need to get a bigger bang for our buck while reconfiguring our military to deal with an increasingly tangled threat environment. That means we need to prepare and equip our forces for something similar to a two-theater war construct - ready to fight multiple conflicts simultaneously.
Will this require a larger budget allocation for defense? Absolutely. Will it mean a bigger force? Unquestionably. Some of it can be offset through force re-configuration, an expanded reliance on emerging technology, and a vigorous reduction of the Pentagon’s increasingly large overhead. But in order to be truly prepared, we will need a larger Navy for the Pacific, a more capable Army for Europe, an Air Force with longer legs and greater strategic airlift to support and go on the offensive, and a Marine Corps that is a combined-arms force ready for any contingency.
Simply put, if we don’t rework and reconfigure our military to handle multiple conflicts, we'll be perennially playing catch-up, putting our war fighters into unwinnable situations, and our nation’s security will suffer.
Major General Arnold L. Punaro (USMC, ret.) is the Chief Executive Officer of The Punaro Group and a nationally recognized expert in defense, national security, and government reform. He served for 24 years in the U.S. Senate, including as Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. His most recent book is entitled, “IF CONFIRMED: An Insider’s View of the National Security Confirmation Process”.
10. Steel and Silicon: The Case for Teaming Armored Formations with UAVs
Excerpt:
Armor remains the cornerstone of decisive land combat. But because the future belongs to those who can see first, strike first, and decide first, only those armored formations with fully integrated UAVs will be best positioned to maintain their role as the combat arm of decision. Not only will this enable armored units to act with greater speed, precision, and survivability, but it will teaming them with UAVs at echelon will also integrate them seamlessly into the joint force and its kill web. We should not wait for the next war to learn this lesson. The time to team steel and silicon is now.
Steel and Silicon: The Case for Teaming Armored Formations with UAVs - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · Charlie Phelps · August 23, 2025
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Dawn broke over the rolling hills of Eastern Europe as Task Force Loki, a combined arms battalion, prepared to breach a fortified enemy defensive belt. Intelligence reports confirmed that an enemy motorized rifle regiment had emplaced antitank ditches, minefields, and dismounted infantry armed with antitank guided missiles and supported by artillery. Instead of pushing scouts blindly into the kill zone, the battalion launched a swarm of rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from the turrets of the lead tanks and fixed-wing drones from the battalion’s organic multidomain reconnaissance element. Within minutes, overhead feeds revealed camouflaged fighting positions, artillery hides, and an unseen second belt of defense two kilometers to the rear.
One drone, a loitering munition linked to the battalion’s AI-enabled targeting system, locked onto a thermal signature of personnel in a tree line confirming the presence of a fighting position. A second drone armed with advanced imagining systems and pattern recognition software queued and confirmed the presence of a wire-guided antitank weapon system. Seconds later, the enemy antitank team was gone. This process was rapidly repeated over a dozen times in a matter of minutes as surveillance UAVs communicated targeting information in real time to additional loitering munitions. Another UAV dropped decoy electronic emitters mimicking armored formations maneuvering to a breach point, drawing enemy artillery onto empty ground. As enemy sensors fixated on the deception point, the true breach force moved up under cover of smoke and UAV overwatch. Thermobaric munitions impacted enemy bunkers and pillboxes just prior to direct fire suppression from Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Combat engineers, guided by real-time drone feeds, cleared a safe lane through the obstacle belt. An M1A2 platoon surged forward, supported by dismounted infantry and Apache attack helicopters conducting synchronized fires on vehicle positions identified by UAVs. The vulnerability of the attack helicopters was reduced through the employment of cheap, small UAVs whose purpose was to serve as targets for enemy air defense systems.
As enemy positions collapsed, the battalion’s UAVs pushed deeper to the next phase line, feeding targets for follow-on exploitation forces and long-range precision artillery. Transparent to the tankers and infantrymen in the fight, signals intelligence scrapes from battalion reconnaissance drones operating near their release points helped illuminate enemy brigade and division headquarters nodes. Seamlessly, the information about the command-and-control locations was fed to joint targeting working group and serviced by a combination of air- and sea-based long-range precision strike munitions. In less than an hour, Task Force Loki had shattered a layered defense without a single vehicle crossing the line of departure blind. UAVs did not just support the breach; they shaped it, cleared it, and protected it.
In the wake of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some observers questioned tanks’ continued battlefield utility. Three and a half years later, though, tanks have stubbornly held on as a feature of the war, even as their modes of employment have changed. The battlefields in Eastern Ukraine are an excellent case study of the economics of modern war. The Ukrainian military is gladly trading UAVs that cost in the thousands for multimillion-dollar armored systems. Rather than being made redundant by antitank weapons and proliferating drones, therefore, armored formations today face the imperative to adapt to overcome these new challenges. Reports of tanks’ demise, it turns out, have been greatly exaggerated—but this will only remain true for armies able to solve the riddle of teaming them with cutting-edge technologies.
The fictional scenario above helps illuminate how this teaming can play out. Undoubtedly, tanks and armored fighting vehicles still provide unmatched survivability, mobility, and firepower on the modern battlefield. However, as the fog of war grows thicker in environments saturated with antiarmor threats, loitering munitions, and long-range fires, even the mightiest armored column risks becoming a vulnerable target. To survive and dominate, armored formations must evolve. Not by replacing tanks with cheaper, more expendable systems, but by fusing the two through manned-unmanned teaming. This imperative is about survivability, lethality, and increasing the tempo capable of armored formations to ensure that tank commanders are informed decision-makers who can see, shoot, and maneuver faster than the enemy. Teaming UAVs with armored formations is no longer a luxury or a science project. It is a necessity for prevailing in twenty-first-century conflict.
One of the enduring challenges armored units face is terrain masking their line of sight. The decision-making of a platoon leader cresting a ridge is informed only by his or her optics and line of sight. A UAV, even a quadcopter launched from a turret rack, can provide over-the-hill reconnaissance without exposing combat vehicles to enemy fires. Larger UAVs operating at tactical and operational levels can extend that reach further by identifying enemy positions and mobility corridors long before first contact. This vertical situational awareness is not abstract. In Ukraine, commercial drones have been used with stunning tactical effect for targeting and immediate poststrike battle damage assessments. Imagine what a combined arms battalion could do with dedicated UAVs designed to plug into its battle management systems.
Modern antitank guided missiles, artillery, and loitering munitions make it perilous for armored units to mass or advance blindly. The summer offensives by Western-equipped Ukrainian brigades in 2023 serve as a powerful case study. UAVs enable standoff in both sensing and striking. By pushing unmanned systems into contested zones first, armored units can preserve their combat power and choose when and where to fight. This is particularly critical in the deep area, where reconnaissance by traditional cavalry formations becomes increasingly dangerous. By using UAVs to probe these areas, armored units can map threat envelopes, detect enemy concentrations, and shape the battlefield before committing forces. This creates opportunities for precision fires and synchronized maneuver, which are core tenets of multidomain operations.
Teaming UAVs with armored formations also enhances precision. Target acquisition no longer depends solely on ground observers or forward scouts. UAVs equipped with advanced sensors, laser designators, and AI-enabled target recognition can identify and nominate targets faster than human scouts ever could. When linked to long-range precision fires or loitering munitions, UAVs become force multipliers. They allow armored units to act as spotters and finishers. Imagine an M1A2 commander using a small drone to detect a mechanized column, immediately calling for fires from HIMARS, and maneuvering around the debris before the enemy forces even understand what hit them. This kind of kill chain is no longer hypothetical. Experiments like the Army’s Project Convergence and the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program are proving that integrated sensors, AI, and fires can reduce decision timelines from minutes to seconds. UAVs are central to that equation.
UAVs do not replace the judgment of a seasoned tank commander or the adaptability of a scout platoon. They augment it. The future is not about robots replacing humans. It is about robots extending human reach, reducing risk, and accelerating decisions. Teaming requires more than colocation. It demands integrated networks, interoperable control systems, and shared training. Vehicle crews must train to fly, fight, and interpret data from UAVs as second nature. UAV control consoles must be built into future armored vehicles, not bolted on as afterthoughts. Units must integrate UAV operations into their battle drills. A breach or attack should automatically include UAV overwatch. A deliberate defense should assume constant aerial reconnaissance. Leaders must get comfortable making decisions based on drone feeds, trusting their sensors as they trust their scouts. When will UAVs be integrated into expert soldier or infantry badge testing? Which armored brigade combat team will be the first feature UAVs in its spur ride? For all the promise of UAV-armored teaming, there are operational and institutional challenges that must be overcome. These obstacles are not insurmountable, but they require deliberate design choices, leadership buy-in, and sustained investment across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy.
In a peer fight, UAVs will not operate in permissive conditions. Russian jamming in Ukraine has shown that even commercial drones can be rendered useless by aggressive electronic warfare. To mitigate this, the Army must field UAVs with secure, low-probability-of-intercept communications, onboard autonomy for lost-link scenarios, and electromagnetic resilience built into their design. Airspace deconfliction presents another challenge. In fast-moving fights, especially near artillery and rotary-wing aircraft, UAVs risk fratricide or disruption of fires. This demands tighter integration into digital fires networks and standardized tactical airspace control measures. Breaking from the practices of command supply discipline, UAVs must be viewed as expendable and consumable in training and combat. They will crash, get jammed, and require frequent replacement. Armored formations must treat drones like ammunition, which is an essential and replenishable asset. Sustainment systems must include spare parts, batteries, and trained UAV technicians within the maintenance footprint.
Perhaps the most important opportunity lies in connecting armored UAV operations to the broader joint kill chain. UAVs must not only share what they see with company and battalion commanders but also feed data to air, naval, cyber, and space assets. Likewise, they must be taskable from joint fires cells and theater-level intelligence fusion centers. This demands joint interoperability standards, shared data protocols, and joint training. Army UAV operators should routinely train with Air Force JTACs, Navy surface fire controllers, and cyber support teams—because multidomain synergy cannot wait until wartime. Finally, institutional inertia may be the hardest challenge. Armored leaders must embrace UAVs not as external enablers but as integral parts of their formation. Doctrine, field manuals, and leader development courses must evolve to reflect a future where every armored vehicle is part of a sensor network and every maneuver decision is informed by persistent aerial data.
Armor remains the cornerstone of decisive land combat. But because the future belongs to those who can see first, strike first, and decide first, only those armored formations with fully integrated UAVs will be best positioned to maintain their role as the combat arm of decision. Not only will this enable armored units to act with greater speed, precision, and survivability, but it will teaming them with UAVs at echelon will also integrate them seamlessly into the joint force and its kill web. We should not wait for the next war to learn this lesson. The time to team steel and silicon is now.
Major Charlie Phelps is a Special Forces officer and currently serves as a Company Commander in 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Master Sgt. Erick Ritterby, US Army
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mwi.westpoint.edu · Charlie Phelps · August 23, 2025
11. What is Key Terrain? Rethinking a Fundamental Military Concept in the Age of Economic Warfare
Excerpt:
For military planners and thinkers ranging from irregular warfare professionals to joint logisticians, the message is clear: Global economic networks are not neutral. They are contested terrain. Theories of weaponized interdependence must inform campaign design, wargaming, and red-teaming. When planning, military professionals need to consider how economic coercion, resource denial, and economic sabotage would impact domestic resolve of partners and military readiness. We continue to see the traditional military battlefields be influenced by these new forms of economic key terrain around the world.
Strategic competition today rewards those who can map and manipulate interdependence faster than their adversaries. It is no longer enough to protect convoys and airfields; military planners must also consider rare earth material stockpiles, shipping lanes, microchip intellectual property, and the resilience of subsea communications nodes. The future of warfare may be decided as much in data centers and supply contracts as in the battlespaces of warfighting domains.
What is Key Terrain? Rethinking a Fundamental Military Concept in the Age of Economic Warfare - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · Benjamin Backsmeier · August 25, 2025
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In an era where economic linkages are global and dense, strategic competition increasingly unfolds in the networks of supply chains, finance, and data rather than purely on physical battlefields. US military doctrine has long emphasized key terrain—ranging from hilltops or river crossings at the tactical level to major features whose control carries operational or even strategic implications such as the Bashi Channel, Fulda Gap, or Strait of Hormuz. But today’s most consequential terrain may be nonphysical: manufacturing dominance in key sectors like semiconductors, assured access to minerals like rare earth elements, control over natural gas infrastructure, or the security of undersea cables. These systems, once considered logistical backdrops, are now central instruments of national power.
As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman have described with their theory of “weaponized interdependence,” states can increasingly use control over nodes in global networks to extract coercive leverage, shape rival behavior, and compromise operational readiness. For military professionals, recognizing these dependencies as strategic terrain beyond the traditional DIME (diplomacy, information, military, economics) framework is critical to effective planning.
China’s Rare Earth Elements: Strategic Denial in Practice
China’s dominance in the rare earth market offers a textbook example of weaponized interdependence. By controlling more than 85 percent of heavy rare earth processing and nearly 70 percent of global mining output as of 2024, China occupies a central node in the defense-industrial value chain. Rare earths are indispensable in night vision goggles, precision-guided munitions, missile guidance systems, and electric propulsion, placing downstream US defense manufacturers at risk.
In 2010, Beijing restricted exports of rare earths to Japan amid a diplomatic dispute, signaling that access to these inputs was contingent on political compliance. More recently, in 2023 and 2024, China imposed licensing controls on gallium and germanium, key materials for semiconductors and defense applications, raising alarms about strategic vulnerability. The effect is a form of strategic denial: Rather than fight kinetically, Beijing forces rivals into costly diversification efforts, reshaping global investment flows and complicating defense production timelines.
Taiwan’s Silicon Shield: Resource Entrenchment
Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductor manufacturing, especially via Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, has made it an economic linchpin in the global value chain. Producing more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips, Taiwan’s position not only supports modern electronics but underwrites US military technological superiority in artificial intelligence, computing and military hardware, weapons systems, and supply chain autonomy.
This has created what analysts call a “silicon shield”: Taiwan’s integration into global production systems raises the strategic cost of Chinese aggression, functioning as a deterrent rooted in economic interdependence. Simultaneously, US export controls on advanced chip equipment have sought to blunt China’s access to cutting-edge AI capabilities, reinforcing the logic of network exclusion as a tool of economic statecraft. The battle over semiconductor dominance is no longer just about market share; it is about denying rivals access to the computational terrain on which future conflicts will be fought. And the continued dominance of Taiwanese semiconductor development adds new planning consideration for downstream impacts by military planners.
Russia’s Weaponization of Energy Dominance: Shaping the Fight
Unlike the first two examples of economic key terrain, Russia has leveraged key terrain militarily, wielding economic nodes to provide strategic depth and maintain momentum in Ukraine. Russia’s manipulation of natural gas flows into Europe demonstrates how infrastructure that has been central to peaceful economic activities for years or decades—like gas pipelines— can quickly be exploited to achieve contemporary strategic objectives. Leading up to the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia used its pipeline dominance to pressure European governments, drive up energy costs, and sow division within NATO. This was not just economic blackmail; it was terrain shaping at the operational and political level through Nord Stream 1 and 2.
Europe’s reliance on Russian gas created a vulnerability that Moscow exploited to weaken European resolve and delay deterrent postures. Unlike traditional warfare, this form of coercion operates through price volatility, domestic protest, and elite fragmentation. Military leaders must therefore recognize how access to fuel and heating during crises affects the broader political landscape in which warfighting occurs. Military planners need to consider economic weaponization coupled with the role of domestic support on military operations beyond the traditional confines of a military battlefield.
The Subsea Frontier: Vulnerable Nodes in the Information Domain
Undersea fiber-optic cables carry more than 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental data, including financial transactions, government communications, and military orders. These cables are publicly mapped, minimally protected, and increasingly at risk. In 2024 and 2025, two separate cable disruptions in the Baltic Sea, one linked to a Chinese vessel and another to a Russian-owned ship, highlighted the ease with which malicious actors can impose costs on adversaries through gray-zone operations.
In 2023, Chinese-flagged ships severed digital connections to Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, effectively cutting off internet service and demonstrating how cable sabotage can achieve effects akin to cyber warfare without attribution. These systems function as operational terrain in hybrid conflict: They are cheap to attack, difficult to repair, and decisive in shaping tempo and morale. For US forces and allied planners, subsea infrastructure must be treated with the same vigilance as strategic ports or airfields. This planning consideration and impact on domestic affairs has raised its importance following the development of seaborne drones and devices that can quickly target or disrupt these undersea data lifelines in a globalized world.
Strategic Implications
For military planners and thinkers ranging from irregular warfare professionals to joint logisticians, the message is clear: Global economic networks are not neutral. They are contested terrain. Theories of weaponized interdependence must inform campaign design, wargaming, and red-teaming. When planning, military professionals need to consider how economic coercion, resource denial, and economic sabotage would impact domestic resolve of partners and military readiness. We continue to see the traditional military battlefields be influenced by these new forms of economic key terrain around the world.
Strategic competition today rewards those who can map and manipulate interdependence faster than their adversaries. It is no longer enough to protect convoys and airfields; military planners must also consider rare earth material stockpiles, shipping lanes, microchip intellectual property, and the resilience of subsea communications nodes. The future of warfare may be decided as much in data centers and supply contracts as in the battlespaces of warfighting domains.
Major Benjamin Backsmeier is an infantry officer currently serving as the noncombatant evacuation operations planner for the INDOPACOM Army Reserve Element. He previously served on active duty at US Army Japan and in the 82nd Airborne Division and has deployed or served overseas in eleven countries. He holds a BS from West Point, a master of international security studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Close-up of chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (credit: FritzchensFritz)
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mwi.westpoint.edu · Benjamin Backsmeier · August 25, 2025
12. How to Keep Generative AI from Crashing in Combat
Excerpts:
The Future
In summer 2019, my business was monitoring Chinese social media chatter. We started collecting conversations about a “new SARS” — the respiratory disease that gave the 21st century its first pandemic.
As autumn arrived, and the Chinese netizens started absorbing the enormity of what was happening, colloquialisms and slang references to the new illness appeared. This new lingo was meant to outflank the Chinese Communist Party’s online censorship. Importantly, our company’s version of a quality assurance sentinel was able to capture and align output from the conversations that the models missed or misinterpreted. Without our own quality assurance sentinel, our business would not have been able to swiftly pivot based on new data demands. My company was then able to deliver information to our customers, who gained a better situational awareness. This was critical for maintaining an advantage on the ground during the start of COVID-19, and it’s going to be much more important for dynamic and data-rich operational environments like space.
Importantly, generative AI has more immediate use cases for the military within the enterprise environment. For mission environments, those systems rely on other types of AI, such as computer vision, sensor fusion, robotics, and unmanned vehicles. But generative AI is quickly becoming the user interface into these other areas of AI, and so drawing upon the learnings from the prompt engineering and processes of the quality assurance sentinels, the evaluation ecosystem grows into these other areas.
Robust benchmarking from the quality assurance sentinel hones the operational tempo by providing operators with high-confidence outputs, enabling faster decision-making and more decisive action. It’s an important part of the commercial AI toolkit, and should be the same for the military’s materiel. The quality assurance sentinel role will eventually be deprecated and, non-ironically, AI will replace it. At that point, AI will be assuredly monitoring its own progress with hardly any human intervention or oversight. It will be another cog in the algorithmic warfare envisioned for the future.
But until that happens, humans ought to be in the loop for smaller teams working on critical mission systems influenced by generative AI output.
How to Keep Generative AI from Crashing in Combat - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · August 25, 2025
Failure to constantly evaluate generative AI output is like driving a car, in a thunderstorm, at midnight, with no headlights. Good luck getting to your destination!
But there is good news with a newly released executive order on AI from the White House that calls for an evaluation ecosystem for AI. This can help set the baseline for scaling generative AI across the military, including in the Space Force.
The implementation of this ecosystem may not happen fast enough to outpace rivals like China, which has researched and proposed evaluation benchmarks of its own. As a technology startup founder and leader of multiple companies operating at the cross-section of national security and AI for most of the past 25 years, including in China, I want to deploy open-source benchmarking and evaluation that works well in the commercial sector and that can be freely transferred over to the Department of Defense. And that can be done now.
The Department of Defense should constantly evaluate the intelligence derived from generative AI. When I buy a car, I expect the factory assembly line to have quality control baked into the automotive manufacturing process, so my final product is drivable and safe. But even if the car passes all its safety inspections, it is only as safe as the driver controlling it. A car cruising down the road has two main assurance processes: one for the vehicle, and one to ensure the driver is properly licensed.
Warfighters need to expect generative AI to operate similarly to how drivers control automobiles. Large language model providers in the commercial arena are now working hard to craft safety and quality controls, as the Department of Defense has been expecting: over a year ago it announced a deal with ScaleAI to bring AI benchmarking to the military.
But operators require access now at the tactical level. They cannot wait. And while they hang fire, in the hands of an “unlicensed” team of Space Force guardians who are not maintaining control of the quality of the large language model’s results, generative AI will drift and crash. Just like a poorly maintained car.
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Avoiding “Oops” in Space Data Operations
Unreliable AI outputs from models lacking quality control at the tactical level could produce flawed intelligence assessments, leading to strategic miscalculations and unintended escalation in a contested environment. Imagine going to war off of flawed intelligence!
I’ve worked in AI for over 20 years, beginning in the late 1990s as head of internet operations in Beijing for a non-Chinese firm using early natural language processing to deliver intelligence to the United States, its allies, and multinational corporations. I later founded and sold several software companies in Asia, then returned to the United States as chief executive of a real-time people disambiguation startup and later as engineering chief at an AI firm.
I wanted to serve my country in uniform and was honored to accept a direct commission into the Space Force last year. I want to be sure that the Space Force continues to rely on new tools to generate critical and lethal capabilities of the type the commercial sector has been using for decades. Warfighters can avoid making future mistakes by utilizing some of the practices that AI scrums in both commercial and academic arenas have been using to safeguard the future. But while the military’s gears churn through requirements and authorization to operate, there are sufficient ways to operationalize benchmarking and evaluation.
Why is evaluation and benchmarking essential when using generative AI? Unreliable AI jeopardizes mission success and endangers personnel. Evaluation and benchmarking aren’t just crucial — they are non-negotiable for the operational integrity and reliability of generative AI systems. Without ongoing testing and rigorous comparison against established standards, the outputs of these models are untrustworthy — until they are verified — for missions where precision is paramount. Failure to continually assess their performance will inevitably lead to degradation. This transforms powerful tools into liabilities that can introduce catastrophic errors into critical military operations. This comprehensive, unyielding scrutiny isn’t merely best practice — it’s a fundamental requirement to seize and maintain the decisive advantage that prevents the kind of strategic vulnerabilities that can cost us everything.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that the United States should use tax dollars to evaluate and benchmark at the strategic level the overall safety and bias of new large language models. The White House already ordered this. Instead, because no holistic evaluation system can ever capture all ever-evolving tactical mission use cases, quality assurance needs to be baked into the processes of operators planning and executing close-in maneuvers. Prompt engineering is currently the best tool to do this. When used wisely at the small-unit action level by subject-matter experts, it can overcome large language model problems within the evaluation ecosystem.
The Department of Defense is already relying on generative AI and large language models. But what happens when the large language models are updated? How does an operator evaluate if using a new model will still provide the same precision and accuracy as in the results from the older version of the model? How does an operator know if they are maintaining quality responses over a period of time?
A robust evaluation ecosystem solves these challenges. But benchmarks of natural language processing and AI work are largely missing at the tactical level when guardians operationalize their generative AI work. And when I talk to guardians about this, they either are ignorant of the need for benchmarks and continuous evaluation at the tactical level, or they are uncertain how to begin operating within the machine learning operations lifecycle.
There is a way to create workable, efficient, and inexpensive solutions to evaluate and maintain consistency of results when utilizing large language models. Sure, eventually the military can implement expensive, bloated solutions that mimic the inexpensive ones that get the same job done. That is the way of the Department of Defense of yore. But until then, this is something nearly any small team in the Department of Defense can manage. In fact, because of the variety and nature of military vertical data, it is really something that is challenging to outsource to third parties: It works best when cradled close to the team of subject-matter experts gathering the intelligence. These are skills the military can develop and use in-house across the Department of Defense as it is both tightening its belt and maximizing lethality.
Following Industry Best Practice
For the past two decades, as I’ve grown and run natural language processing teams around the world, I had daily and weekly cadences to get the latest benchmarks from my teams on the quality of our enrichment services. Natural language processing is the way machines understand, interpret, and generate human language, a field whose tactical origins trace back to the 1950s with pioneering efforts in machine translation. Natural language processing provides the foundational intelligence layer, allowing computer systems to dissect and comprehend raw linguistic data from the field, irrespective of its origin or complexity. The latest generative AI rides on the back of Graphics Processing Units and is a force multiplier that leverages decades of natural language processing advancements and utilizes these capabilities to create new, human-like content, enabling everything from rapid intelligence summaries to dynamic operational planning based on interpreted commands.
When evaluating natural language processing results, the startup teams I led would use globally recognized benchmarks like Bilingual Evaluation Understudy or Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering to evaluate if the model’s Chinese-to-English or Russian-to-English translations were continuing to deliver great results or if we saw their quality drift. Think of these like a quality control checklist for translations, ensuring that the machine’s translation is not only understandable but also grammatically and contextually correct when compared to a professional human’s version. I would weekly view my teams’ Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation scores to make sure we were correctly summarizing large groups of documents into readable, actionable intelligence. This is like a student being graded on how well they summarized a long book chapter, checking to see if all the important points were included in their succinct summary.
Or I would track sentiment analysis quality of our Open Source Intelligence news and financial data using a combination of precision, recall, and accuracy with our financial phrasebank. This is like teaching a computer to be a stock market analyst, training it to read a news article and correctly identify if the tone is positive, negative, or neutral about a company, for instance, by seeing if it correctly classifies an article about “record profits” as positive and one about “unexpected losses” as negative. I could deliver actionable risk and threat intelligence of what was happening on social media using a variety of datasets for comparative evaluation. And there are many other benchmarks I could use to monitor ethics, toxicity, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation quality.
If our benchmark scores kept getting better, we would document what we were doing so we could double-down on the good changes we were making to our algorithms and prompts. If we instead saw our scores declining, we would dive into why they might have regressed and look for corrections to set us up for success.
Guardians want to get to the same type of results, but without the financial and manpower overhead of operating the type of AI-focused commercial organizations I ran. So here is a basic plan for executing the type of oversight within a team that has many of the controls much larger organizations rely on. It’s the method by which commercial AI companies bootstrap, and it reduces the need for using Bilingual Evaluation Understudy or Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation plugged into a complicated test harness. Instead, it focuses on doing more with less through good prompt engineering and logging.
Why is this important? If a guardian’s job is to synthesize open-source orbital data and then formulate actionable space intelligence, they may want to concoct a generative AI pipeline that uses a few engineered prompts. As a starter, they may write a prompt that generates a known result. By doing so, they can be sure, in that instance, that the prompt is well-written. It’s like testing if a calculator correctly adds two numbers together. Then they can re-run that prompt on other data and verify if they are still acquiring accurate results. Does the calculator still give the same result? Once they’re satisfied with the ongoing results, they can start scaling up that pipeline and prompt with larger amounts of data.
The Basic Plan
To maintain operational integrity and ensure actionable insights from large-scale large language model-driven data ingestion, a small team should assign a single operator as the quality assurance sentinel. You can name the role anything you’d like, and I think the three words “quality assurance sentinel” correctly identify the role of being vigilant about quality and assuring it is maintained. At companies I’ve run in the past, the quality assurance sentinel would be called a search analyst or an insights analyst. Regardless of the name, this individual acts as the central authority on prompt performance, model reliability, and output fidelity at the tactical level. The quality assurance sentinel owns the end-to-end oversight of generative AI outputs and ensures drift, degradation, or hallucination do not compromise mission-critical intelligence products.
The quality assurance sentinel does not need to be savvy about algorithms, but they should have an excellent grasp of their own job domain. If they are focused on spectrometry data, they should understand if data they are looking at is ionospheric data or gravimetry data. If they are responsible for navigational work, then let’s hope they can spot a two-line element set. Their new task as quality assurance sentinel is to second-guess and oversee the model, so they need to be an expert in their domain. This is a big reason why outsourcing this type of niche — but mission-critical — task to third parties may not be a good idea. Don’t trust commercial products that promise to deliver this subject-matter expertise to the warfighter!
The quality assurance sentinel’s first responsibility is to establish a baseline operational framework for generative AI use cases. Whether document summarization, signal extraction, intelligence fusion, or sentiment triage, all missions ought to be clearly scoped with defined success criteria. This process may take a few weeks as the quality assurance sentinel talks with supervisors and members of the team about defining the successful mission. This includes hard metrics such as factual accuracy, latency, and hallucination rate, as well as soft metrics such as relevance, clarity, and tone.
The quality assurance sentinel maintains a master Evaluation Control Sheet that tracks all model interactions, inputs, outputs, and scores, that is version-controlled and accessible to the entire team. The Evaluation Control Sheet could be a simple spreadsheet. And the scoring can be created for the time, by the team. There’s no need to spend big bucks if the aim is to do more with less.
The quality assurance sentinel then builds a static test set representing key mission scenarios (approximately 20–50 samples per use case). This test set is run periodically or on any update to models or prompts. The quality assurance sentinel executes A/B testing between model variants (e.g., GPT-4o vs Claude 3) and scores responses across predefined metrics. All changes in model behavior, prompt structure, or performance degradation should be logged and acted on. The quality assurance sentinel should be constantly asking themselves, “What is different than before? Is the quality of the output better or worse?”
To prevent prompt drift and maintain configuration control, the quality assurance sentinel maintains a centralized prompt repository under version control (Git or equivalent). Every prompt edit, model parameter change, and output deviation should be documented. The quality assurance sentinel flags anomalies and enforces rollback if output quality degrades. In the commercial world, this repository is valuable intellectual property that quickly becomes the secret formula for making sense from seemingly disparate data.
Drift and anomalies are tracked with simple red/amber/green status indicators per use case. The quality assurance sentinel chairs weekly Quality Assurance Standups, delivering situation reports on large language model performance. These briefings to both members of the team and to leadership ensure the rest of the team stays aligned on what is operationally viable and what needs recalibration.
The quality assurance sentinel also builds and maintains a lessons learned repository to capture model behavior quirks, effective prompt strategies, and prior failures. This can be a simple spreadsheet or ongoing written document. Importantly, this becomes institutional knowledge and ensures long-term survivability and repeatability, even under personnel turnover or high operational tempo. SharePoint or Confluence are good locations for this repository if a spreadsheet is too lowbrow and if subscriptions for these higher-end platforms are readily available.
And the quality assurance sentinel should also try pushing the boundaries of each model, especially if it’s an off-the-shelf commercial model. As Benjamin Jensen, Yasir Atalan, and Ian Reynolds wrote in these pages, “commercial guardrails are unwarranted or even dangerous” in some military scenarios, so the quality assurance sentinel should understand how to blow the metaphorical tachometer off the large language model. Imagine a scenario where the team engages in information warfare and needs the model to output data that would otherwise be considered unsafe, or where a cyber squadron wants to input malware code to help find patterns or artifacts quickly. The quality assurance sentinel should red-team the limits to understand how to exceed them.
The rest of the team then focuses on ingestion, annotation, and exploratory analysis, while the quality assurance sentinel acts as the final gatekeeper before intelligence is disseminated or used in decision loops. All outputs used in briefings, products, or dissemination will need to pass quality assurance sentinel validation. Guardians can think of it as a pre-mission loadout check before go-time.
Bottom line: In a small generative AI cell, the quality assurance sentinel becomes the standard-bearer for model performance, prompt discipline, and quality control. This decentralized yet controlled structure empowers the team to operate at speed without sacrificing trust in the output. The team moves fast, but the quality assurance sentinel ensures they don’t move blindly.
This person fills the critical role of making sure they are driving a well-maintained car, staying on the road, and avoiding obstacles. The use of a quality assurance sentinel within any team helps to maintain quality results. As funding and organizational demands grow in the Space Force, the introduction of third-party platforms that do some of the quality tracking can be implemented. But in the absence of those tools, a quality assurance sentinel can be a great, inexpensive role addition.
The Future
In summer 2019, my business was monitoring Chinese social media chatter. We started collecting conversations about a “new SARS” — the respiratory disease that gave the 21st century its first pandemic.
As autumn arrived, and the Chinese netizens started absorbing the enormity of what was happening, colloquialisms and slang references to the new illness appeared. This new lingo was meant to outflank the Chinese Communist Party’s online censorship. Importantly, our company’s version of a quality assurance sentinel was able to capture and align output from the conversations that the models missed or misinterpreted. Without our own quality assurance sentinel, our business would not have been able to swiftly pivot based on new data demands. My company was then able to deliver information to our customers, who gained a better situational awareness. This was critical for maintaining an advantage on the ground during the start of COVID-19, and it’s going to be much more important for dynamic and data-rich operational environments like space.
Importantly, generative AI has more immediate use cases for the military within the enterprise environment. For mission environments, those systems rely on other types of AI, such as computer vision, sensor fusion, robotics, and unmanned vehicles. But generative AI is quickly becoming the user interface into these other areas of AI, and so drawing upon the learnings from the prompt engineering and processes of the quality assurance sentinels, the evaluation ecosystem grows into these other areas.
Robust benchmarking from the quality assurance sentinel hones the operational tempo by providing operators with high-confidence outputs, enabling faster decision-making and more decisive action. It’s an important part of the commercial AI toolkit, and should be the same for the military’s materiel. The quality assurance sentinel role will eventually be deprecated and, non-ironically, AI will replace it. At that point, AI will be assuredly monitoring its own progress with hardly any human intervention or oversight. It will be another cog in the algorithmic warfare envisioned for the future.
But until that happens, humans ought to be in the loop for smaller teams working on critical mission systems influenced by generative AI output.
BECOME A MEMBER
Daniel Levinson is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Air War College and is currently pursuing multiple graduate certifications at National Defense University. He has a Masters in Cybersecurity from Georgia Tech and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong. He earned his Bachelors in English from William and Mary. For more than 25 years he has been a tech entrepreneur, company chief executive, and investor around the globe, and has multiple million-dollar exits from his businesses. He direct commissioned as an active-duty lieutenant colonel into the Space Force in 2024. Before commissioning, he divested all commercial holdings that have any defense business interests.
The arguments in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the U.S. Space Force or Department of Defense. Appearance of, or reference to, any content, companies, outlets, views, or opinions does not constitute Department of Defense endorsement.
Image: Midjourney
warontherocks.com · August 25, 2025
13. America’s Coming Crash
Conclusion:
It is impossible to predict how and when a U.S. debt problem may erupt and what the consequences will be: unpalatable austerity, high inflation, financial repression, partial default, or a mix of these. There are strong reasons to assume that inflation will have a pronounced part, as it did during the 1970s. Regardless, a debt crisis will be destabilizing for the United States, the global economy, and the dollar’s reserve status. Left unchecked, it could erode the country’s position in the world.
America’s Coming Crash
Foreign Affairs · More by Kenneth S. Rogoff · August 19, 2025
Will Washington’s Debt Addiction Spark the Next Global Crisis?
September/October 2025 Published on August 19, 2025
Daniel Downey
KENNETH S. ROGOFF is Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead.
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For much of the past quarter century, the rest of the world has looked in wonder at the United States’ ability to borrow its way out of trouble. Again and again, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the government has used debt more vigorously than almost any other country to fight wars, global recessions, pandemics, and financial crises. Even as U.S. public debt rapidly climbed from one plateau to the next—net debt is now nearing 100 percent of national income—creditors at home and abroad showed no signs of debt fatigue. For years after the 2008–9 global financial crisis, interest rates on Treasury debt were ultralow, and a great many economists came to believe that they would remain so into the distant future. Thus, running government deficits—fresh borrowing—seemed a veritable free lunch. Even though debt-to-income levels jumped radically after each crisis, there was no apparent need to save up for the next one. Given the dollar’s reputation as the world’s premier safe and liquid asset, global bond market investors would always be happy to digest another huge pile of dollar debt, especially in a crisis situation in which uncertainty was high and safe assets were in short supply.
The past few years have cast serious doubt on those assumptions. For starters, bond markets have become far less submissive, and long-term interest rates have risen sharply on ten- and 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds. For a big debtor like the United States—the gross U.S. debt is now nearly $37 trillion, roughly as large as that of all the other major advanced economies combined—these higher rates can really hurt. When the average rate paid rises by one percent, that translates to $370 billion more in annual interest payments the government must make. In fiscal year 2024, the United States spent $850 billion on defense—more than any other country—but it spent an even larger sum, $880 billion, on interest payments. As of May 2025, all the major credit-rating agencies had downgraded U.S. debt, and there is a growing perception among banks and foreign governments that hold trillions of dollars in U.S. debt that the country’s fiscal policy may be going off the rails. The increasing unlikelihood that the ultralow borrowing rates of the 2010s will come back any time soon has made the situation all the more dangerous.
There is no magic fix. U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to place the blame for high rates on the Federal Reserve Board are deeply misleading. The Federal Reserve controls the overnight borrowing rate, but longer-term rates are set by vast global markets. If the Fed sets the overnight rate too low and markets expect inflation to rise, long-term rates will also rise. After all, unexpectedly high inflation is effectively a form of partial default, since investors get repaid in dollars whose purchasing power has been debased; if they come to expect high inflation, they will naturally require a higher return to compensate. One of the main reasons governments have an independent central bank is precisely to reassure investors that inflation will remain tame and thereby keep long-term interest rates low. If the Trump administration (or any other administration) moves to undermine the Fed’s independence, that would ultimately raise government borrowing costs, not lower them.
Skepticism about the safety of holding Treasury debt has led to related doubts about the U.S. dollar. For decades, the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency has conferred lower interest rates on U.S. borrowing, reducing them by perhaps one-half to one percent. But with the United States taking on such extraordinary levels of debt, the dollar no longer looks unassailable, particularly amid other uncertainty about U.S. policy. In the near term, global central banks and foreign investors may decide to limit their total holdings of U.S. dollars. Over the medium and longer term, the dollar could lose market share to the Chinese yuan, the euro, and even cryptocurrency. Either way, foreign demand for U.S. debt will shrink, putting further upward pressure on U.S. interest rates and making the math of digging out of the debt hole still more daunting.
Already, the Trump administration has hinted at more drastic actions to deal with mounting debt payments, should gaining control of the Fed not be enough. The so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, a strategy put forward in November 2024 by Stephen Miran, now head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, suggests that the United States could selectively default on its payments to the foreign central banks and treasuries that hold trillions of U.S. dollars. Whether or not the proposal was ever taken seriously, its very existence has rattled global investors, and it is not likely to be forgotten. A clause proposed for the huge tax and spending bill that was passed by the U.S. Congress in July would have given the president discretion to impose a 20 percent tax on select foreign investors. Although that provision was removed from the final bill, it stands as a warning of what might come if the U.S. government finds itself under budget duress.
With long-term interest rates up sharply, public debt nearing its post–World War II peak, foreign investors becoming more skittish, and politicians showing little appetite for reining in fresh borrowing, the possibility of a once-in-a-century U.S. debt crisis no longer seems far-fetched. Debt and financial crisis tend to occur precisely when a country’s fiscal situation is already precarious, its interest rates are high, its political situation is paralyzed, and a shock catches policymakers on the back foot. The United States already checks the first three boxes; all that is missing is the shock. Even if the country avoids an outright debt crisis, a sharp erosion of confidence in its creditworthiness would have profound consequences. It is urgent for policymakers to recognize how and why these scenarios could unfold and what tools the government has to respond to them. In the long term, a severe debt or, more likely, an inflationary spiral could send the economy into a lost decade, drastically weakening the dollar’s position as the dominant global currency and undermining American power.
THEIR MONEY, OUR GAIN
It is crucial to understand that the Trump administration’s economic policies are an accelerant, rather than the fundamental cause, of the United States’ debt problem. The story really begins with President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, an era of deficit spending in which the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio was about a third of what it is today. As Vice President Dick Cheney said during the first George W. Bush administration, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” It is an assumption that both parties appear to have taken to heart in the twenty-first century, despite far more worrying debt burdens. In fiscal year 2024, for example, the Biden administration ran a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion, or 6.4 percent of GDP. Except for the global financial crisis and the first year of the pandemic, that was a peacetime record, slightly exceeding the 6.1 percent of the previous year. President Joe Biden’s deficits would have been larger still but for determined resistance from two centrist Democratic senators who bid down some of the administration’s most expansive spending bills.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pilloried Biden for his administration’s massive deficit spending. Yet in his second term in office, Trump has embraced similarly large deficits—six to seven percent of GDP for the rest of the decade, according to independent forecasts produced by the Congressional Budget Office and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The latter has projected that, by 2054, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio will reach 172 percent—or an even higher 190 percent if the bill’s provisions become permanent. Trump and his economic advisers claim that such forecasts are overly pessimistic—that the projections for growth are far too low and those for interest rates far too high. Higher growth will bring in larger future tax receipts; lower interest rates mean the debt will be less costly to service. If Team Trump is right, both factors will actually lower deficits and tilt the trajectory of debt to income downward. Whereas in January 2025, the CBO projected an annual growth rate of 1.8 percent over the next decade, the administration has put the figure at 2.8 percent. The difference is significant: if the U.S. economy is growing at 1.8 percent annually, it will double in size (and presumably tax revenues) every 39 years. At 2.8 percent, it would double every 25 years. For Trump, assuming that kind of rapid growth has made it easier to finance a lot of budget giveaways.
There is a substantive basis for the Trump administration’s growth projections, although it has little to do with the claimed benefits of the “big, beautiful bill” passed in July. Many prominent technology experts firmly believe that as long as the government stays out of the way, artificial intelligence companies will achieve Artificial General Intelligence, meaning AI models that can equal or outperform human experts at a wide variety of complex cognitive tasks, within ten years, leading to explosive productivity growth. Indeed, the progress of AI research has been breathtaking, and there are strong reasons for assuming that AI’s effect on the economy will be profound. But in the medium term, widespread adoption of AI could be hindered by multiple bottlenecks, including outsize energy requirements, data regulations, and legal liabilities. Moreover, as AI allows companies in some sectors to lay off scores of workers, public discontent could encourage populist politicians to push through policies that—along with aggressive limits on legal immigration, cuts in funding for scientific research, and the chaotic tariff war that are already underway—could dramatically slow the effects of AI on growth.
Regardless of when and how the AI revolution unfolds, it’s possible that another major economic shock may not be far off. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a short-lived recession and the large-scale government response to it added debt roughly equivalent to 15 percent of GDP; in the case of the global financial crisis, the debt added was closer to 30 percent of GDP. It seems reasonable to assume that another shock approaching this magnitude—a cyberwar or even a full-blown military conflict, a climate catastrophe, or another financial crisis or pandemic—will come in the next five to seven years. One might view the more modest CBO growth projections as realistically balancing the odds that the economy could see fantastic growth, most likely driven by AI, with the odds of a new shock.
How fast the U.S. debt level grows will also depend on the interest rate. The CBO has estimated that the government will have to pay an average interest rate of 3.6 percent through 2055. (This average takes into account that the government borrows at both short- and long-term maturities.) Here, too, the Trump administration views the CBO as far too pessimistic. The president seems to believe that the economy can go back to the extremely low interest rates of his first term, when they averaged less than half the current rates and there was only very modest inflation. It is hard otherwise to understand why he would be pressing for the Fed to cut its short-term policy interest rates by as much as three percentage points.
Trump’s view should not be dismissed out of hand. Several members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which periodically reports where it believes the Fed’s short-term policy rate will land in a couple of years, see much lower rates as the central scenario. Yet with the 30-year Treasury bill rate near five percent as of late July, market indicators do not signal that a sharp drop in long-term rates is coming. If they remain at or near this level, there are real risks to continuing to push up the debt, especially when the biggest crisis in the U.S. economy for now is a political one.
MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Washington’s failure to deal with its runaway debt problem is in part the result of misguided (or at least oversold) economic theories that took hold over the last two decades. Throughout most of modern history, it was thought that prudent government debt management involved bringing down the ratio of debt to GDP during quiescent periods of growth in order to store fiscal ammunition for the next crisis. In the 1800s, the United Kingdom used debt to fight one war after another, taking advantage of the time in between to repair its finances. Likewise, although the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio was very high during World War II, it quickly declined in the years that followed; since the United States had just fought two world wars, policymakers feared there might be yet another. To pay for the Korean War, the Eisenhower administration famously raised taxes instead of relying mainly on debt. But in the years following the global financial crisis, the persistent very low interest rates that took hold caused a number of leading economists to question this orthodoxy.
In his influential theory of secular stagnation, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers posited that real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates would stay low indefinitely because of factors such as adverse demographics, low productivity growth, and chronically weak global demand. Others, such as the economist Paul Krugman and Olivier Blanchard, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, suggested that the secular stagnation cloud had a silver lining in that reliably low rates allow the government to use fiscal policy aggressively without worrying too much about the cost. Normal economic growth would continually swell tax revenues by more than enough to cover glacially rising interest bills on the national debt, the thinking went, at least on average over time. Indeed, so rosy was the interest-rate picture in the 2010s that some economists, including proponents of modern monetary theory, argued that there would be little risk to running larger deficits even when the economy was growing briskly. In this view, which was embraced by progressive politicians such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, deficit spending was a low-cost means of paying for social investment, including ambitious climate protections and policies to reduce inequality.
A once-in-a-century U.S. debt crisis no longer seems far-fetched.
To be fair, Democrats were hardly in universal agreement about any debt-driven approach. Even as he ran outsize deficits to pay for progressive priorities, Biden made clear that over the long run, he hoped to meet the cost by raising taxes, and he might have done so with a larger Democratic majority in the Senate. By contrast, Republican administrations continued to espouse the idea that budget deficits did not matter if they were used to pay for tax cuts, since higher growth would turn the deficits into surpluses over time. Although this claim was widely understood to be overstated, the general view, including on Wall Street, was that ultralow interest rates would save the day even if the extra growth from tax cuts proved insufficient.
As debt debates became highly politicized, economists who questioned the lower-rates-forever orthodoxy were shunned or ignored. Yet anyone looking at the long history of interest-rate fluctuations would have recognized that a return to higher rates was a distinct, indeed likely, possibility. Consider the interest rate on ten-year inflation-indexed U.S. Treasury bonds, which are often used as a measure of the real interest rate in the economy. The rate fell by roughly three percentage points between September 2007 and September 2012, a collapse that can hardly be explained by slow-moving trends such as demographic decline and falling productivity. A far more plausible explanation was the prolonged effects of the global financial crisis and its aftermath. As with other past financial crises, these effects would eventually end, and one might reasonably have guessed that the era of ultralow interest rates would end as well.
True, some of the factors that contributed to very low interest rates are still present today, including aging populations in most advanced countries. But there are plenty of reasons to think that long-term interest rates will remain higher well into the future. Foremost, government debt is exploding globally, putting upward pressure on U.S. rates in a world of integrated capital markets. For example, the average net debt-to-GDP ratio for the G-7 countries has grown from 55 percent in 2006 to 95 percent today. In fact, the United States is not even the worst offender: Japan’s net debt-to-GDP ratio is 134 percent (its gross public debt is a staggering 235 percent of GDP). For Italy, the ratio is 127 percent; France, 108 percent; and the United States, 98 percent. Other upward pressures on interest rates include the rise in many countries of populist parties, which are pushing for more domestic spending; AI’s voracious appetite for electricity, which generates a huge demand for investment that has to be financed; tariff wars and the fracturing of global trade, which are forcing companies to invest in reshoring, with massive borrowing; and the ever-growing cost of adapting to climate change and responding to climate disasters. Although some economists, taking note of these trends, have begun to reconsider the seductive assumptions of the 2010s, there is little sign that Washington has. And with high interest rates, already vertiginous levels of debt, political upheaval, and challenges to Fed independence, there is now a real risk that a fresh economic shock could precipitate a broader collapse.
THE GREAT REPRESSION
How and when a debt crisis in the United States could unfold is now the $37 trillion question. In one scenario, the trigger will be a collapse of confidence by investors in U.S. Treasuries—a “crack in the bond market,” as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, warned in May—meaning a sudden spike in interest rates that revealed a larger problem. This is not as hyperbolic as it may sound; debt crises often build up steam quietly for what seems like forever before erupting unexpectedly. Alternatively, investors’ growing fears about the safety of their money could cause a gradual rise in Treasury bond yields over many months or even years.
Rising interest rates do not in themselves constitute a crisis. But if driven by debt concerns, they will push down stock and housing prices, make business investment more challenging, and raise the cost of servicing government debt. If this process unfolded slowly, the government would have time to react. If it doesn’t do so forcefully—typically, by closing the current budget deficit and credibly committing to fiscal rectitude—markets would smell blood, interest rates would go up even more, and the government would need to make even bigger adjustments to steady the ship. As long as the country remained stuck in this high-interest debt purgatory, business and consumer confidence would be low and growth would stall. The usual U.S. solution of running a giant deficit would likely backfire and lead to even higher interest rates. To escape this situation without crushing austerity measures, the government would almost certainly reach for heterodox options that are today more usually associated with emerging markets.
For one, the United States could default outright (in the legal sense) on its debt. It has done so before. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt abrogated the so-called gold clause for U.S. Treasury debt, which guaranteed creditors that they could choose to be paid in gold, instead of dollars, at $20.67 per ounce. The next year, the conversion rate of dollars to gold was set at $35 per ounce, sharply devaluing the currency. In a highly controversial case, the Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that Roosevelt’s abrogation of the gold clause in public debt was indeed a default. But under enormous political pressure from the president, the court simultaneously ruled that creditors were not entitled to compensation because no harm had been done. Really? For foreign central banks across the world that had been holding U.S. Treasury bonds on the assumption that they were as good as gold, the 1933 default was quite painful.
The National Debt Clock in New York City, July 2025 Brendan McDermid / Reuters
Given that the United States can print dollars rather than refuse to honor its debt, a far simpler option is to use high inflation to achieve a partial default. Of course, the independence of the Fed poses a significant obstacle to this, but not an insurmountable one in a true crisis. The Fed’s independence is not mandated by the Constitution, and the president has many ways to induce it to lower interest rates. The first, clearly, is to appoint a chair who believes it will be in the national interest to radically cut interest rates, even if that creates inflation. This solution, however, has limits, starting with the fact that Fed chairs serve for four years, and the Supreme Court has indicated, in a May ruling, that the president cannot fire them over policy differences. Moreover, the Fed chair leads the Open Market Committee, which consists of the seven Fed governors in Washington, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and four rotating representatives of the 11 other regional Federal Reserve Banks. These positions typically rotate infrequently; a full term for a Fed governor is 14 years, and only one position is guaranteed to open up in 2026.
With the cooperation of Congress, however, the president can do much more. For example, Congress could empower the Treasury to dictate the Fed’s short-term interest rate target during a national emergency, including a debt crisis. This is more or less what happened in World War II and its immediate aftermath. It could also pack the Federal Reserve Board with new members, as Roosevelt threatened to do with the Supreme Court in the 1930s. A battle of that scale between the Fed and the president would take the country into uncharted territory. But even if the Fed submits and cuts rates sharply, inflation is not the get-out-of-jail-free card some believe it to be. Whereas a truly massive bout of hyperinflation, such as what happened in Germany after World War I, would effectively wipe government debt off the books, it would wipe out the rest of the economy, as well: ask the citizens of Venezuela and Zimbabwe, who have suffered epic hyperinflation in this century. More plausibly, a few years of 1970s-style inflation—in 1979 inflation reached more than 14 percent per year in the United States—would crater the value of long-term bonds but have less effect on short-term debt, which would have to be refinanced at higher interest rates. And such a prolonged spike would likely be very damaging to both the U.S. and the global economy.
One way to manage the effects of inflation is to use it in conjunction with financial repression. In this strategy, governments stuff public debt into the financial sector via banks, pension funds, and insurance companies, with the central bank typically buying massive quantities as well. By creating a vast captive market for public debt, the government can lower the interest rate it has to pay and significantly reduce the odds of any sudden flight from its bonds. Financial repression can be made more potent by restricting other assets people can hold or by imposing interest rate controls. This is not as exotic as it sounds: governments around the world have used financial repression for most of modern history. After World War II, governments leaned heavily on financial repression to help inflate their way out of massive public debts. Without financial repression, U.S. debt in relation to GDP would likely have continued to grow from 1945 to 1955; instead, it fell by more than 40 percent. In some countries, notably the United Kingdom, results were even more dramatic. Today, the strategy is especially widespread in emerging markets, but Europe used financial repression to hold the euro together during the European debt crisis, and Japan has used it on an even greater scale; the Bank of Japan alone holds Japanese government debt equal to nearly 100 percent of the country’s income.
Since the global financial crisis, the United States has also pursued some financial repression through financial regulations and Federal Reserve purchases of long-term Treasury bonds. In a pinch, it could do much more. Financial repression is particularly effective in a high-inflation environment, in which, ordinarily, markets would drive up interest rates on government debt. On the other hand, repression negatively affects long-term growth by absorbing bank financing that could be going to the innovative firms in the private sector. The use of financial repression to deal with high debt is hardly the only reason for Japan’s miserable growth record over the past few decades, but it is certainly a leading one.
An inflationary spiral could send the economy into a lost decade.
As the Japanese experience has shown, financial repression would offer no panacea to the United States. It really only works on domestic savers and financial institutions that cannot easily avoid the implicit tax on their savings and income. If Washington used it in a large-scale way, foreign investors, who now hold close to a third of the U.S. debt, would try to flee, and it would not be easy to stop them without engaging in outright default. Moreover, the United States is highly dependent on its financial sector to drive its exceptionally innovative economy. And just as the costs of inflation fall most heavily on lower-income individuals, so, too, do the effects of financial repression, since the wealthy have workarounds.
Alongside default, austerity, inflation, and financial repression, a prospective new option for dealing with high debt is emerging, whose costs and benefits are not yet fully understood. This involves a form of cryptocurrency called dollar stablecoins. Unlike conventional cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, whose dollar value fluctuates wildly, stablecoins are pegged to the dollar, typically at a value of one to one. New U.S. legislation passed by Congress in 2025 has attempted to provide a clear regulatory framework by requiring that U.S.-based dollar stablecoins hold a mix of Treasury debt and federally guaranteed bank deposits sufficient to (almost) pay off all coin holders in the event of a run. This requirement could potentially create a captive pool of stablecoins whose issuers hold large quantities of Treasury bills. To the extent that stablecoins compete for funds that might normally be allocated to banks, they provide a backdoor to routing bank deposits into Treasury debt. For now, it is unclear whether the new legislation will promote stability or undermine it, given a number of unresolved issues having to do with the risk of runs on stablecoins and how their circulation can be audited to prevent their use for criminal purposes or tax evasion.
In principle, the Federal Reserve can also issue its own stablecoin, or central bank digital currency. This, too, would compete with bank deposits and channel savings toward Treasury debt unless the funds were in turn used in lending to the private sector, a process that would create its own problems. A Fed digital currency would differ from stablecoins in other important ways. For one thing, it would, by design, be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government, and presumably tracking its use would pose less of a concern. On the other hand, competitive private stablecoins would likely be far more innovative. Although none of the available options for dealing with unsustainable debt are particularly attractive, it is nevertheless important that the government begin to contemplate them seriously. Not only does Washington need to be prepared for the next shock when it comes, but politicians and policymakers must also recognize what will happen if the government continues to assume that the United States can never have a debt crisis.
END OF AN EMPIRE
For too long, the status quo approach in Washington has been to ignore the massive debt problem and hope that a return to miraculous levels of growth and low interest rates will take care of it. But the United States is approaching the point at which the national debt could undermine not only the country’s economic stability but also the things that have sustained its global power for so many decades, including the military spending that it has leveraged in many ways to maintain the dollar’s formidable influence over the global financial system since World War II. Whether in the case of Spain in the sixteenth century, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, or the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, no country in modern history has been able to sustain a dominant currency without also being a superpower.
The United States may avoid a debt crisis, and Trumpian and progressive economists who count on growth dividends ultimately outweighing the interest costs of higher debt may turn out to be right. But the debt policy that both the Republican and the Democratic Parties have engaged in over the first quarter of the twenty-first century amounts to a huge wager on long odds, especially if the country wants to remain a dominant power for the rest of this century and beyond. Given the current trajectory of deficits, it has become much more difficult to sustain the belief that no matter how high U.S. debt gets, it will have no effect on the country’s capacity to fight financial crises, pandemics, climate events, and wars. And it will certainly be a drag on the country’s growth.
It is impossible to predict how and when a U.S. debt problem may erupt and what the consequences will be: unpalatable austerity, high inflation, financial repression, partial default, or a mix of these. There are strong reasons to assume that inflation will have a pronounced part, as it did during the 1970s. Regardless, a debt crisis will be destabilizing for the United States, the global economy, and the dollar’s reserve status. Left unchecked, it could erode the country’s position in the world.
Foreign Affairs · More by Kenneth S. Rogoff · August 19, 2025
14. Putin’s New Cyber Empire
Excerpts:
A RACE RUSSIA CAN WIN
The stakes in this quiet yet intense new cyberbattle are high. It is not only about which companies gain access to the national digital infrastructure of dozens of countries outside the West but also about the training of those responsible for protecting that infrastructure. For the Russian government, the influence of Russian firms around the world is clearly a strategic priority. For one thing, the experts who train the next generation of cyber-specialists around the world will play a crucial role in helping those specialists identify what constitutes perceived threats. The differences in the perception of such threats have been political since the early years of this century, when first Russia and then China began promoting a very broad definition of threats to national information security—one that in the Kremlin’s version includes, for instance, the activities of foreign media. As the earlier NSA leak shows, Russian technology could also potentially provide a backdoor to Russian intelligence.
Paradoxically, the moves by the United States and its European allies to sanction Russian cybersecurity companies and limit or bar their use in the West may only have accelerated the spread of Russian cybertechnology to other parts of the world. Russian intelligence has a long reach, and the country’s leading cyber-companies have been made well aware of it. But the United States and its allies seem far less so, and that neglect could in the long run provide a significant advantage to Putin’s Russia as it gains growing influence over the cyber-infrastructure of countries around the world.
Putin’s New Cyber Empire
Foreign Affairs · More by Andrei Soldatov · August 25, 2025
How the Kremlin Is Embedding Russian Technology Around the World
August 25, 2025
Attendees at an economic conference in Saint Petersburg, June 2025 Anton Vaganov / Reuters
ANDREI SOLDATOV is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
IRINA BOROGAN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Deputy Editor of Agentura.ru.
They are the authors of Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation.
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In late April 2024, Nikolai Patrushev, the longtime head of Russia’s Security Council, chaired a meeting in St. Petersburg of top security officials from countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The meeting was about information sovereignty and security—the Kremlin’s way of describing cybertechnologies that are designed to protect against Western surveillance, influence, and interference. But Patrushev also had a more specific message. Flanked by Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Kremlin’s SVR Foreign Intelligence Service, Patrushev informed the audience that Russia’s top cybersecurity companies could help their governments gain control of their national information space.
At the time, the event was little noted in the United States or Europe. Just days earlier, the U.S. Congress had approved a long-delayed $60 billion aid package to Ukraine, and Europe was preparing its 14th round of sanctions against Russia. Yet governments in many other parts of the world were paying attention. Although the full list was not released, participants in the meeting included national security advisers, the heads of national security councils, and the heads of security and intelligence agencies from a wide range of countries including Brazil, Sudan, Thailand, and Uganda; close Russian allies such as China and Iran; as well as the Arab League.
For many of these security officials, Patrushev’s pitch was welcome: Russia has long excelled at cybertechnologies, and they understood that its resources could be valuable to securing their national digital infrastructures. Some of them had witnessed the “Twitter revolutions” of the last two decades and tended to share Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view that such events—enabled by American-owned social media—reflected a U.S. tactic of fomenting mass protests that were often destabilizing. Moreover, many of their governments have maintained business relations with Moscow despite the war in Ukraine and are not particularly concerned about Russian influence in their countries.
As did its Soviet counterpart during the Cold War, Putin’s Kremlin views Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Latin America as primary battlefields of the global contest with the West. This campaign includes the expansion of Kremlin-affiliated military groups, such as the Wagner paramilitary company, in numerous African countries. It involves an expanded use of soft power, such as the opening of new “Russia Houses” in more than a dozen countries in Africa. These are cultural centers run by the foreign ministry that serve to promote the Kremlin’s narratives, including about its war in Ukraine; to work with Russian émigré communities in target countries; and to provide cover for Russian intelligence operatives—a time-honored practice for Russian cultural centers since the Cold War. The campaign also includes a push to expand Russian intelligence capabilities in regions caught between superpowers.
As the St. Petersburg meeting attests, the Kremlin sees Russia’s commercial cybertechnologies as an important part of this broader campaign and another way to further its interests around the world. According to past findings by European governments and the United States, several top Russian cybersecurity firms have links to the Kremlin’s military and security services. In April 2021, for example, the U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on the Russian cybersecurity firm Positive Technologies for supporting “Russian government clients, including the FSB” and alleged that the company “hosts large-scale conventions that are used as recruiting events for the FSB and GRU.”
And in June 2024, the United States put sanctions on Kaspersky Lab, another top Russian firm, for “cooperation with Russian military and intelligence authorities” that Treasury officials said is “contrary to U.S. national security.” Since 2022, the EU and some European countries have also taken steps to limit Russian cyber companies’ access to their markets. Positive Technologies is under EU sanctions; in the case of Kasperky Labs, several countries, including Germany, Italy, and Poland, have sought to ban or discourage the use of the company’s software. Both firms have dismissed the findings. In a public statement, Positive Technologies called the Treasury’s conclusions “groundless.” A Kaspersky spokesperson told Reuters that the U.S. decision was “unjustified and baseless.”
Despite this pressure from the West, Moscow is seeking to build on the 2024 security meeting and aggressively expand its cyber-influence around the world. With a series of new partnerships between Russian cyber-firms and foreign entities and governments, Russia has gained a growing technological foothold in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Although it remains unclear how Russia’s security services may be exploiting these deals, cybersecurity analysts say that such arrangements could give Moscow new ways to preempt Western intelligence activities.
In recent months, as the Trump administration has softened its stance on Russia and pulled back U.S. foreign and intelligence assets aimed at foreign cybersecurity threats, Moscow has pursued this expansion with relatively little scrutiny. Left unchecked, these new relationships could put Washington and its allies at a significant disadvantage in the developing world, even as they potentially give Russia more ways to conduct cyberwarfare against the United States and Europe.
CYBERINSECURITY
Russian cyber companies emerged as global players a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A strong technical education system across the country combined with the collapse of the military-industrial complex pushed hordes of talented engineers into the nascent cybersecurity market. They brought with them both expertise and determination. Some of them built successful international companies such as Kaspersky Lab, founded in 1997, which developed a range of highly advanced Internet security and cybersecurity tools and became known for exposing cybersecurity threats. In 2010, a team of Kaspersky researchers uncovered the Stuxnet virus, a highly sophisticated malware weapon that was used against Iran’s nuclear program and was jointly designed by Israel and the United States.
For nearly two decades, Russian cyber-companies were focused on building large markets for their products in Western countries, targeting both corporations and foreign government agencies. Some cyber-firms, such as Kaspersky Lab, which was incorporated in the United Kingdom, also established subsidiaries in the West. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, however, growing Western pressure on Moscow and concerns about cyberwarfare by Russian intelligence made it much harder for these companies to do business in the United States and Europe.
In March 2017, U.S. intelligence officials—including the heads of the FBI and the CIA—said they didn’t feel comfortable having Kaspersky’s powerful antivirus software on their computers. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security ordered all government agencies to remove Kaspersky software from their systems, citing unspecified “information security risks” presented by Kaspersky-branded products and noting that the company’s antivirus and other software “provide broad access to files” that could be exploited by malicious actors.
In October 2017, investigations by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that Russian hackers had stolen classified documents related to U.S. cyberdefenses from the National Security Agency, in part by using Kaspersky software on an NSA contractor’s computer. Kaspersky strongly denied any knowledge of or involvement in the use of its software to enable hacking. “Kaspersky Lab has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage efforts,” the company told The New York Times.
Moscow is seeking to aggressively expand its cyber-influence around the world.
In the years that followed, Russia’s cyber-companies began to focus more on markets outside the United States and Europe. The Russian government was keen to help. The turning point came with the April 2024 security meeting in St. Petersburg, where the Kremlin made a direct bid to offer Russian cybersecurity infrastructure—and specifically the services of seven top Russian cyber-companies—to dozens of security agencies around the world. The firms mentioned by Patrushev included Positive Technologies and its spinoff Cyberus Foundation, Kaspersky Lab, Angara Security, Kod Bezopasnosti, Security Vision, and Solar. By and large, these companies provide products that protect digital infrastructure against cyberattacks—whether from vigilante hackers or hostile foreign governments. Their products generally require deep access to the files and the systems they are protecting.
There are several strategic reasons behind the Kremlin’s push. In many cases, when a foreign government acquires cutting-edge surveillance and cybertechnologies from Russia, their local security and law enforcement agencies lack the expertise to operate them. As a result, they rely on the Russian suppliers not just for technical guidance but also for help integrating the technology into their domestic legal frameworks. That kind of relationship offers the Russian cyber-companies a rare level of access to systems and to local contacts within the client country.
Moreover, many of Russia’s leading cyber-companies were created by engineers and computer scientists from Russian elite technical universities, which were originally established to supply engineers for the Soviet military and the KGB. Going back to the Soviet era, these schools have produced generations of engineers who are trained to work in secrecy. Eugene Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, studied at the KGB Higher School .
According to Western security officials, Putin has sought to rebuild this tight relationship between the intelligence services and the country’s top technology developers. In its sanctions against Kaspersky Lab, the U.S. Treasury did not include personal sanctions against Kaspersky himself. But it did sanction 12 other Russian nationals who are senior executives at the company. Kaspersky Lab denied that the executives have any links to Russia’s security services. “It would be weird (and flat-out wrong) to assume these executives were introduced into the company’s top management to give Russian spies leverage in Kaspersky Lab’s actions,” the company said in a 2018 statement.
The Russian government has also applied more overt pressure on its cybersecurity companies. In 2016, for example, several top Russian cyber officials—including a top manager at Kaspersky Lab—were thrown into Moscow’s Lefortovo prison by the FSB on charges of high treason. Kaspersky told the BBC that Kaspersky Lab had not been informed of the investigation and that the arrest of its employee had nothing to do with the employee’s work for the company. To cybersecurity experts, the Kremlin appeared to be sending a message to its commercial firms: loyalty to the government was no longer optional.
MOSCOW’S NEW MARKETS
Under the Biden administration, the United States became increasingly concerned about the links it found between Russia’s top cyber-companies and the Russian government. The U.S. Treasury put Positive Technologies and Kaspersky Lab on the U.S. sanctions list, and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, other Western countries followed suit. In 2023, Positive Technologies was sanctioned by the European Union. Meanwhile, the use of Kaspersky’s software on government devices was banned or restricted in Canada and the United Kingdom; Germany and Italy issued warnings against using Kaspersky’s software in both the public and the private sectors. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Italy’s national cybersecurity agency also banned the use on government devices of various Russian-designed cybersecurity applications—including those of Kaspersky, Positive Technologies, and also Group-IB, another leading Russian company—citing national security concerns.
As in the case of the U.S. measures, the companies denied the findings. In a statement, Positive Technologies described the EU decision as “based on the fact that the company has a license from the Russian Federal Security Service.” The company also said that its business interests are “not related to EU countries and focus on regions ready to work with entities from the Russian Federation, in particular in markets of Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as India, South Africa, China and others.” Following the moves by Italy, Group-IB decided to completely sever its international business from its Russian-based business.
Since the April 2024 meeting in St. Petersburg, Positive Technologies has continued to expand its international reach. In December, the company signed a distribution agreement with Mideast Communication Systems in Cairo, gaining a strategic launch pad for its services in Africa and the Middle East—particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Positive Technologies has been particularly attractive to Riyadh because the company provides protection against so-called advanced persistent threat attacks—cyberattacks in which a malicious actor may remain hidden within a system for a long period of time to accomplish strategic objectives—which have been particularly prevalent in Saudi Arabia. In 2024, the company found that of the groups it could identify that had launched such attacks, 88 percent had targeted telecommunications and military industries in Saudi Arabia.
In June 2025, Cyberus Foundation, which describes itself as a “tool for consolidating business, the cyber defense industry, and the state to achieve common goals,” signed a strategic agreement with Al-Adid Business, owned by Sheikh Suhaim bin Ahmed bin Sultan bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of the ruling family of Qatar. The deal is designed to develop Qatar’s cybersecurity capabilities, including by establishing Cyberdom Qatar and Hackademy, institutions for training cyber experts in the country. There is no direct indication that Russian intelligence was involved in these deals. But they indisputably give Russian companies far-reaching access to these countries’ digital infrastructures.
In April 2025, Cyberus also signed a partnership agreement with the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Kremlin-led military alliance of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. The goal of the agreement, according to CSTO Secretary-General Imangali Tasmagambetov, is “to strengthen coordination between the CSTO member states in countering cyber threats and to increase the level of cyber resilience in the region.”
A Kaspersky stand at a trade show in Barcelona, March 2022 Albert Gea / Reuters
Russia’s cyber-expansion has been particularly active in Africa. Kaspersky Lab, for example, has signed an agreement with Smart Africa, a partnership among 40 African countries aimed at developing information and communications technologies. Kaspersky is also involved in the African Network of Cybersecurity Authorities, an initiative established in February 2025 to “tackle cross-border cybersecurity challenges across the Continent.” In making such arrangements, Kaspersky Lab has positioned itself to be the leading shaper of the emerging cyber-industry across Africa.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has continued to promote the companies on Patrushev’s list. For instance, in June, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum—the annual conference sponsored by Putin that has long served as a showcase for Russia’s economic and geopolitical power—featured Yury Maksimov, the co-founder of Positive Technologies and Cyberus, as one of its key speakers. Maksimov discussed the need for the countries that “don’t have complete technological independence”—meaning countries that are unable to create national online services that are capable of competing with Western platforms—to understand how to maintain digital sovereignty. In the Kremlin’s view, much of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East fits into this category.
At the St. Petersburg forum, Cyberus’s pitch to those countries was echoed and reinforced by Andrey Bezrukov, the president of the Russian Association for the Export of Technological Sovereignty. Bezrukov is better known in the United States as Donald Heathfield, the identity he used while serving in what the U.S. Department of Justice called the “Illegals Program”: a network of Russian sleeper operatives who attempted to infiltrate U.S. institutions by posing as ordinary Americans. U.S. authorities turned over Bezrukov and nine other operatives to Russia in a prisoner swap in 2010. After the swap, the Kremlin helped Bezrukov reinvent himself as a foreign policy expert specializing in the United States, and he became a constant presence on Russian TV shows.
Bezrukov’s current occupation—leading the “export of technological sovereignty”—reflects what the Kremlin, Russian intelligence agencies, and Russian cyber-companies aim to achieve: to provide target countries with cyber-services that would shield their information spaces from the perceived threat of Western influence, including in cybersecurity and social media control. Given that neither Bezrukov nor Naryshkin have hidden their affiliations with the SVR, it appears that Russia’s spy agencies think their colleagues in the client countries are little concerned about the possibility of Russian intelligence penetration in their digital infrastructure as long as they can obtain cyberprotection from the West.
A RACE RUSSIA CAN WIN
The stakes in this quiet yet intense new cyberbattle are high. It is not only about which companies gain access to the national digital infrastructure of dozens of countries outside the West but also about the training of those responsible for protecting that infrastructure. For the Russian government, the influence of Russian firms around the world is clearly a strategic priority. For one thing, the experts who train the next generation of cyber-specialists around the world will play a crucial role in helping those specialists identify what constitutes perceived threats. The differences in the perception of such threats have been political since the early years of this century, when first Russia and then China began promoting a very broad definition of threats to national information security—one that in the Kremlin’s version includes, for instance, the activities of foreign media. As the earlier NSA leak shows, Russian technology could also potentially provide a backdoor to Russian intelligence.
Paradoxically, the moves by the United States and its European allies to sanction Russian cybersecurity companies and limit or bar their use in the West may only have accelerated the spread of Russian cybertechnology to other parts of the world. Russian intelligence has a long reach, and the country’s leading cyber-companies have been made well aware of it. But the United States and its allies seem far less so, and that neglect could in the long run provide a significant advantage to Putin’s Russia as it gains growing influence over the cyber-infrastructure of countries around the world.
Foreign Affairs · More by Andrei Soldatov · August 25, 2025
15. Should Asia Make It Official? The Prospect of an “Asian NATO”
Excerpts:
Ratner is right to call attention to the growing sense of shared purpose among U.S. allies in Asia. But this commonality is better advanced by deepening existing mechanisms, not rushing toward formal alliance structures. The challenge in Asia is not a lack of cooperation, but a temptation to institutionalize cooperation faster than the region can support. It should be resisted.
...
Ken Jimbo rightly underscores recent progress in networking U.S. alliances. But although the resulting mechanisms are important and even unprecedented, they remain too informal to deliver true and lasting combat-credible deterrence. Deeper institutionalization, especially in areas such as force posture, operational planning, and command and control, will be necessary if U.S. allies are serious about working together to keep the peace in the Indo-Pacific. The preparedness made possible by a formal pact would give presidents and prime ministers real-time options for collective defense during crises. A lack of preparedness and coordination would greatly diminish the potential deterrent power that alliances could otherwise confer. It would instead invite greater instability and increase the risk of undeterred Chinese aggression.
Should Asia Make It Official?
Foreign Affairs · Ken Jimbo; Ely Ratner · August 19, 2025
Response
The Prospect of an “Asian NATO”
September/October 2025 Published on August 19, 2025
A joint military exercise between U.S. and Philippine troops, in Aparri, Philippines, May 2025 Lisa Marie David / Reuters
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Responses
If It Ain’t Broke . . .
Ken Jimbo
Ely Ratner’s article, “The Case for a Pacific Defense Pact” (July/August 2025), reflects an appropriate sense of urgency about deterring Chinese aggression among Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States. Yet his central argument—that these countries should codify mutual defense obligations—overlooks crucial realities that make what others have termed an “Asian NATO” counterproductive.
Relative political homogeneity and a degree of institutional trust have made NATO possible in Europe. No such consensus on the threat posed by China has emerged in the Indo-Pacific, even among Ratner’s “core four” countries. Japan’s security strategy prioritizes defense cooperation with like-minded neighbors but not mutual defense commitments. Australia’s geographic distance from potential conflict zones in East Asia and shifting defense posture—from expeditionary peacekeeping to deterrence by denial and regional force projection—set it apart from other countries in the region. The Philippines is not yet capable of meaningful joint military operations with treaty allies such as Japan or the United States.
Thanks in part to the policies Ratner himself helped put in place as a senior official in the Biden administration, the region’s security architecture is already evolving organically, through a flexible network of bilateral and trilateral agreements that makes the most of these diverse (and ambiguous) postures. Elevating these arrangements into a treaty-based mutual defense pact could disrupt an already effective system, create a commitment hazard that China would certainly test, and alienate partners not yet ready—or willing—to formalize security commitments, such as India and South Korea. Attempting to institutionalize collective defense without the support of these key actors could fracture the very trust and coordination Ratner seeks to enhance.
Ratner is right to call attention to the growing sense of shared purpose among U.S. allies in Asia. But this commonality is better advanced by deepening existing mechanisms, not rushing toward formal alliance structures. The challenge in Asia is not a lack of cooperation, but a temptation to institutionalize cooperation faster than the region can support. It should be resisted.
KEN JIMBO is Managing Director of Programs at the International House of Japan, Professor of International Relations at Keio University, and former Senior Adviser to Japan’s National Security Secretariat.
Ratner Replies
Ken Jimbo rightly underscores recent progress in networking U.S. alliances. But although the resulting mechanisms are important and even unprecedented, they remain too informal to deliver true and lasting combat-credible deterrence. Deeper institutionalization, especially in areas such as force posture, operational planning, and command and control, will be necessary if U.S. allies are serious about working together to keep the peace in the Indo-Pacific. The preparedness made possible by a formal pact would give presidents and prime ministers real-time options for collective defense during crises. A lack of preparedness and coordination would greatly diminish the potential deterrent power that alliances could otherwise confer. It would instead invite greater instability and increase the risk of undeterred Chinese aggression.
Foreign Affairs · Ken Jimbo; Ely Ratner · August 19, 2025
16. Chinese President Xi Jinping sends independence day greetings to Ukraine
China hedging in case there is no Russian victory?
Chinese President Xi Jinping sends independence day greetings to Ukraine
Message to Volodymyr Zelensky is first public congratulations sent to Kyiv since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022
Fan Chen
Published: 6:00pm, 25 Aug 2025Updated: 6:07pm, 25 Aug 2025
Chinese President Xi Jinping sent his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky a message to mark the country’s independence day on Sunday – the first public congratulations sent by Beijing since the Russian invasion of February 2022.
Xi’s message, which Zelensky posted on social media, said: “Over the past 33 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties, China-Ukraine relations have developed steadily, and cooperation in various fields has yielded remarkable results.
“I stand ready to work with you to guide our bilateral relations towards steady and long-term development and bring greater benefits to the peoples of both countries.”
China’s increasing closeness with Russia since the invasion has raised suspicions in Ukraine about its stance on the war, but Beijing insists it is neutral in the conflict.
In response to Xi’s message, Zelensky said he appreciated the congratulations, adding that both sides were interested in “developing long-term bilateral dialogue with mutual respect and for the sake of peace, stability, and prosperity”.
China has not published the latest message. Xi and Zelensky last exchanged congratulatory messages in January 2022, a month before Russia invaded, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1991 after the country declared independence following a referendum.
European leaders to join Zelensky, Trump for talks
Xi and Zelensky spoke on the phone in April 2023, in their only known conversation during the war, when Xi said “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity is the political basis of China-Ukrainian relations”.
On Monday, the foreign ministry denied a report in the German newspaper Die Welt, which quoted European Union diplomats as saying Beijing was ready to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire.
“The relevant report is not true. China’s position on the Ukraine crisis is consistent and clear,” foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said.
Security guarantees for Ukraine are likely to be central to any possible peace deal following recent visits by Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the United States.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the US network NBC that all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including China, along with several other states, should be the guarantors of Ukraine’s security.
Putin also mentioned China as a possible guarantor during his meeting with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, in Alaska last week.
But the following day, Zelensky ruled out a role for China, saying: “First, China did not help us stop this war from the beginning. Secondly, China helped Russia by opening the drone market.”
In response, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said China had maintained an “objective and impartial position”, which was “open and visible to all”.
“All parties concerned should work to find a political solution to the Ukraine crisis, guided by a vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative, and sustainable security. China is willing to play a constructive role in this effort,” Mao said on Friday.
Russia says peace talks on Ukraine should happen gradually
Ukraine’s consulate in Shanghai marked independence day by positing a fundraising appeal to buy equipment to “evacuate wounded personnel, resupply troops with essential goods and clear mines and traps”.
“Small donations made through the UNITED24 platform are also a part of our shared victory, a hope for the safe return of our soldiers, and a contribution to Ukraine’s peaceful future,” the embassy wrote on Chinese social media.
The campaign has already raised around US$1.8 billion worldwide.
Fan Chen
Fan Chen joined the Post in 2024. She has reported in Cambodia, Nepal, and the Czech Republic. Her work appears in Reuters, Newsweek, and Southern People Weekly. She holds two journalism degrees from Columbia Journalism School and New York University.
17. Will China’s ‘Great Green Wall’ expand to Mongolia in joint desertification fight?
ChinaScience
Will China’s ‘Great Green Wall’ expand to Mongolia in joint desertification fight?
Researchers from either side are discussing ‘joint construction’ of ecological security barrier as climate change worsens desertification
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3323055/will-chinas-great-green-wall-expand-mongolia-joint-desertification-fight?tpcc=enlz-china&UUID=b6aa9fa1-137f-48da-8e5d-b6a303526224&next_article_id=3323040&article_id_list=3323086,3323078&tc=9
Victoria Bela
Published: 4:18pm, 25 Aug 2025Updated: 5:42pm, 25 Aug 2025
China and Mongolia are joining forces to build an ecological security barrier to combat desertification and sandstorms, which may involve an expansion of the Chinese “Great Green Wall” across their shared border.
The project is the latest in joint efforts to help slow the spread of desertification in the Mongolian Plateau.
With nearly 80 per cent of Mongolian land degraded, the country’s battle with desertification has consequences that extend beyond its borders, posing challenges for the wider East Asian region.
The Gobi Desert, spanning a vast swathe of northern and northeastern China and parts of southern Mongolia, is a key source of sand and dust for sandstorms that have become increasingly severe in recent years, driven by stronger winds and growing desertification.
Inner Mongolia battles sandstorms and expanding desert by planting forest
In 2021, China had its worst sandstorm in a decade as yellow sand and dust blanketed a dozen northern provinces, leading to soaring pollution levels and several deaths.
In recent decades, Beijing has launched massive reforestation and sand-control efforts to halt the spread of the Gobi Desert, which is the largest in Asia.
The project, also known as China’s “Great Green Wall”, has reduced sandstorms originating within the country’s borders.
However, severe sandstorms influenced by conditions in Mongolia have revealed that the efforts may need to be taken across the border to prove more effective.
In June, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Mongolian Academy of Sciences (MAS) met in Ulaanbaatar to discuss the “joint construction of an ecological security barrier between China and Mongolia”.
“Dramatic climate change, coupled with increased disasters and ecological risks such as sandstorms, has not only had a significant ecological impact on Mongolia but also posed a serious ecological threat to [China] through cross-border transmission,” the CAS Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research said on its website.
As part of the trip, experts from both countries conducted field research “in key areas of ecological barrier construction” in Mongolia’s central Govisümber province, including visiting jointly designed experimental bases for desertification control.
The expedition and meetings helped to “facilitate cooperation between China and Mongolia in the joint construction of ecological security barriers, climate change response, desertification and sandstorm control, and green development”, according to the CAS institute.
The efforts will be led by the CAS institute along with MAS’ Institute of Geography and Geoecology.
The South China Morning Post has contacted the coordinators at both academies for comment.
About 77 per cent of Mongolia’s land is classified as degraded as a result of unsustainable pasture practices, overgrazing and climate change, according to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall across Mongolia have led to widespread droughts and desertification, and this trend is only expected to continue under the influence of climate change.
To tackle this, Mongolia has rolled out more than a dozen environmental protection plans and hundreds of projects over the past decade.
But these have had limited success in halting desertification, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Land in April last year.
The authors from the CAS Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography noted that while desertification in China had decreased between 2000 and 2020, it continued to expand in Mongolia during the same period.
Because of strong, cyclone-driven winds as well as dry sand and soil conditions, Mongolia has dozens of sandstorms every year, with the most severe occurring in the spring and early summer.
These wind patterns can form large, violent sandstorms that affect Mongolia and China and can even reach as far as the Korean peninsula.
In addition to the severe sandstorms across East Asia in 2021, those in 2023 affected 18 Chinese provinces and municipalities as far south as Hunan province.
China itself has long battled desertification and sandstorms in its northern regions.
In the 1970s, it launched the “Three North Shelterbelt Forest Programme” to stabilise parts of the Gobi Desert, including a network of thousands of kilometres of forests and shrubs. China’s “Green Great Wall” has helped to reduce sandstorms in the capital.
In addition, Beijing has launched several megaprojects as part of its wider initiative, including surrounding the country’s largest desert – the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region – with a 3,050km (1,900-mile) sand belt of trees, shrubs, straw grids and solar panels.
Earlier this year, a 1,856km sand control belt spanning three deserts in the westernmost part of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region was completed.
While these efforts have succeeded in holding back the expansion of dunes, they are a massive years-long undertaking.
Worst sandstorm in a decade hits Chinese capital, Beijing
China has also lent its anti-desertification expertise to the construction of Africa’s own Great Green Wall, which stretches 7,700km across the southern edge of the Sahara Desert.
Closer to home, a number of Chinese institutes have been involved in projects in Mongolia since 2017. This includes a 27-hectare dune stabilisation and vegetation recovery project in the country’s northern Bulgan province, according to state broadcaster CGTN.
Several other projects, including monitoring grassland, desertification control and tree and shrub planting, have been implemented in the years since.
In 2023, the China-Mongolia Desertification Prevention and Control Cooperation Centre was established in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.
CAS said the centre was launched to support the sharing of China’s “established afforestation, grass planting and sand control techniques and models in Mongolia”.
Victoria Bela
Prior to joining SCMP in 2023, Victoria received her Bachelor’s degrees in Environmental Health and Environmental Studies from the University of Rochester, where she also worked in a Biochemistry lab. She holds a Master's in Public Policy from Peking University.
18. China vows to stand maritime ground as Vietnam ‘expands’ Spratlys construction
ChinaDiplomacy
China vows to stand maritime ground as Vietnam ‘expands’ Spratlys construction
Hanoi has sped up island-building on multiple reefs in the contested South China Sea archipelago, US think tank says
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3323086/china-vows-maritime-rights-defence-amid-us-report-vietnams-accelerated-spratly-efforts?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article
Enoch Wong
Published: 6:59pm, 25 Aug 2025Updated: 7:17pm, 25 Aug 2025
Beijing has vowed to defend its maritime rights after a US report that Vietnam has sped up its island-building efforts in the contested Spratly Islands this year.
In a report on Friday, the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), part of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said Vietnam had ramped up construction on multiple reefs in 2025.
Responding to the report on Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said the islands “are China’s inherent territory”.
“We firmly oppose construction activities by the relevant country on illegally occupied reefs and will take necessary measures to safeguard our territorial sovereignty and maritime rights,” Guo added.
The Spratlys, known as the Nansha Islands in China, are claimed by various countries, including Vietnam and China, and are a flashpoint in the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest trade routes.
Play
According to the report, since the start of this year Vietnam has expanded its island-building to eight features previously untouched by its current reclamation programme, which began in 2021.
New dredging and landfill work has been recorded at Alison Reef, Collins Reef, East Reef, Landsdowne Reef and Petley Reef, transforming these from small outposts into expanded artificial islands.
With these additions, all 21 of Vietnam’s occupied rocks and low-tide elevations now include artificial land, compared with just 11 in 2021.
Vietnam has also resumed expansion at Amboyna Cay, Grierson Reef and West Reef, which had already hosted medium-sized islands from earlier dredging rounds.
As of March 2025, Vietnam had created about 70 per cent as much artificial land in the Spratly Islands as China had, AMTI said.
“Reclamation at these eight new features all but ensures that Vietnam will match – and likely surpass – the scale of Beijing’s island-building,” the report said.
It added that satellite imagery showed new infrastructure was emerging on reefs where dredging work neared completion, including Barque Canada Reef, Discovery Great Reef, Ladd Reef, Namyit Island, Pearson Reef, Sand Cay and Tennent Reef.
These developments include munitions storage depots and groups of six buildings laid out in a recurring pattern, possibly for barracks or administrative use.
AMTI said the placement of these facilities would make it difficult to build full-length runways on many reefs, with Barque Canada Reef likely hosting the only new airstrip under construction, alongside Vietnam’s existing runway on Spratly Island.
Another CSIS report in March stated there had been little public response to Vietnam’s island-building, including from China.
It said Beijing had offered only a brief restatement of its claims in February, while its coastguard and maritime militia had focused instead on confrontations with the Philippines and made no effort to interfere with Hanoi’s activities.
Vietnam is accelerating its island-building just as confrontation is rising between China and the Philippines.
On August 11, a Chinese navy destroyer collided with a coastguard vessel while pursuing a Philippine patrol boat near Scarborough Shoal.
The Philippines said China had deployed 25 vessels around Second Thomas Shoal by Thursday morning, including armed boats and ships conducting water cannon drills, according to military spokesperson Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad.
Meanwhile, Vietnam has continued to assert its sovereignty claims through diplomatic channels while avoiding direct confrontation with China.
In May, Vietnamese foreign ministry spokeswoman Pham Thu Hang said Hanoi had lodged protests against both Beijing and Manila over activities at Sandy Cay, demanding respect for Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Spratly archipelago.
Enoch Wong
Enoch Wong joined the Post in 2024 as a Senior Reporter on the China Desk after over a decade with institutions like Tsinghua University and UN-affiliated organisations across Asia, Africa and Europe. A Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University specialising in China-US relations and public policy, he also holds a BSc in Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics a
19. Why Ukraine Won’t Give Up Donetsk
Excerpts:
If Kyiv were to cede Donetsk, Ukrainian and European forces would be responsible for securing more than 2,000 miles of frontier, including the line of contact and the borders with Russia and Belarus. But a recent report from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies detailed several difficulties Europe would have deploying large forces to Ukraine. Europe wants a U.S. backstop, but there is no “indication that the U.S. is willing to supply a force that is that big and that decisive,” says Ukraine’s former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk. “And if it’s anything short, this will end with Russia concluding they can attack again and have it be successful.”
Deterrence would be further weakened if Russia gained full control of Donetsk, given that the loss of a fortress belt would put Ukrainian and European forces in a less defensible position. Russia would gain a prime outpost to threaten the neighboring regions of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia. The Ukrainians and their Western partners would have to rush to erect new fortifications, including on terrain that’s more vulnerable. The next comparably advantageous defensive line would be the Dnipro River, much further west.
Mr. Putin pitches the surrender of Donetsk as a condition to end the war. Ukrainians know any such concession would enable Russian aggression, not end it.
Why Ukraine Won’t Give Up Donetsk
It is the site of a reinforced defensive line, the ‘fortress belt.’ Putin’s demand for it is a sign of weakness.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-ukraine-wont-give-up-donetsk-russia-putin-territory-9d47041b
By Jillian Kay Melchior
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Aug. 25, 2025 12:21 pm ET
A Ukrainian national guardsman trains near the front line in Donetsk, Aug. 8. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
Kyiv, Ukraine
Vladimir Putin’s demand that Ukraine cede territory the Russians haven’t even managed to conquer may seem audacious, but it’s actually a sign of weakness. Mr. Putin doesn’t have the power to take the land by force easily.
Russia wants the entire region of Donetsk, including the 25% that Ukraine still controls, an unoccupied swath larger than Delaware. A heavily reinforced defensive line, known as the fortress belt, has stopped the Russians from rolling deeper westward, and Ukraine has no plans to surrender the area.
Ukraine began strengthening the 31-mile belt more than a decade ago, and the Russians have lost men and weapons whenever they bashed themselves against it. Penetrating it by force would take years, according to the Institute for the Study of War—so Mr. Putin seeks to seize it through negotiations instead.
Ukraine knows the consequences of allowing itself to be stripped of its strength. Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Kyiv surrendered its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S., U.K. and Russia. Those promises failed to deter Mr. Putin’s 2014 and 2022 invasions. Mr. Putin has been ruthless in past dealings. In 2014, after he promised a “humanitarian corridor” to save surrounded Ukrainian soldiers in the eastern city of Ilovaisk, Ukrainian troops laid down their weapons—only to be ambushed and massacred.
The Kremlin justifies its aggression in part by claiming Moscow has an obligation to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population. But the prevalence of Russian language in Ukraine is itself a legacy of centuries of oppression, says Ostap Kryvdyk, chairman of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, a think tank. In the Soviet era, Moscow banned Ukrainians’ mother tongue in schools, workplaces and government, instead imposing Russian. An upshot is that Ukraine’s post-Soviet descendants can take Mr. Putin at his word when he talks about his objectives and intentions, and they’ve concluded that territorial concessions would whet his appetite, not satisfy it.
“No one actually believes the Russians will stop. Why should they?” says Lt. Col. Viktor Tregubov, spokesman for the Dnipro Operational Strategic Group of Forces, a joint command of several dozen brigades that oversees the eastern front of the war. “The only way to stop the Russians is physically.” Ukrainians refuse to be pressured into a quick but unstable peace. Seventy-eight percent of Ukrainians reject the idea of a deal that yields unoccupied territory to Russia, according to a poll published this summer by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
Another worry is that the U.S. might seek to coerce Ukraine into concessions. American intelligence plays a crucial role in Ukraine’s defense, among other things by providing early warnings of incoming long-range drones and missiles. American Patriots are the only way of countering Russian ballistic missiles. Without them, Russia can better target civilians and Ukraine’s fighter jets, defense industrial base, energy infrastructure and other high-priority targets.
Would a loss of key U.S. operational support force Kyiv to accept a bad peace predicated on Russian conditions? “Americans are really a huge help,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in July. Without U.S. support, “it would get tough, but this doesn’t mean that Ukraine will exit the war,” Mr. Podolyak says. “If we were to stop, this would not mean a peace agreement—this would mean a capitulation that would be followed by a mass genocidal extermination.” Other Ukrainians offered similar answers.
What if, in exchange for ceding unoccupied territory, the West commits to ensuring Russian aggression won’t resume in the future? Europe is now considering a deterrent force, known as a “coalition of the willing,” that would include troops in Ukraine. But Russia has repeatedly violated cease-fire agreements, and there’s no reason to believe it would honor the next one. Some Ukrainians question whether under fire such a coalition would remain willing. “If the West is going to go to war with Russia, why can the West not do it right now?” Col. Tregubov asks. “If the West has no political will to do so, why do we think it will have the political will after Russia will break the next promise?”
If Kyiv were to cede Donetsk, Ukrainian and European forces would be responsible for securing more than 2,000 miles of frontier, including the line of contact and the borders with Russia and Belarus. But a recent report from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies detailed several difficulties Europe would have deploying large forces to Ukraine. Europe wants a U.S. backstop, but there is no “indication that the U.S. is willing to supply a force that is that big and that decisive,” says Ukraine’s former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk. “And if it’s anything short, this will end with Russia concluding they can attack again and have it be successful.”
Deterrence would be further weakened if Russia gained full control of Donetsk, given that the loss of a fortress belt would put Ukrainian and European forces in a less defensible position. Russia would gain a prime outpost to threaten the neighboring regions of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia. The Ukrainians and their Western partners would have to rush to erect new fortifications, including on terrain that’s more vulnerable. The next comparably advantageous defensive line would be the Dnipro River, much further west.
Mr. Putin pitches the surrender of Donetsk as a condition to end the war. Ukrainians know any such concession would enable Russian aggression, not end it.
Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal’s editorial board.
20. Global Perspective: Comprehensive security is needed to counter Russia's hybrid war
A view from Japan.
Global Perspective: Comprehensive security is needed to counter Russia's hybrid war - The Mainichi
By Yoko Hirose, professor at Keio University
mainichi.jp
Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks during a news conference at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on Aug. 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
By Yoko Hirose, professor at Keio University
Japan's defense white paper this year strongly advocated for strengthening responses to "hybrid warfare," along with readiness for China's military coercion and gray zone situations. Hybrid warfare refers to modern warfare that combines regular warfare using military and irregular warfare that is not limited to military activities.
The irregular warfare is also called "invisible war," and it aims to collapse the society and institutions of the adversary from the inside, covering a wide range of tactics, including cyberattacks, information warfare, political threats, economic pressure, and the use of proxy forces. Especially in democratic countries, directly attacking weak foundations such as elections and speech space can cause considerable damage.
'Invisible War'
Russia is at the forefront of this hybrid warfare. During the war in Ukraine, especially since 2023, the number of Russian attacks in the West has increased, and their scope has expanded, and their quality has become extremely sophisticated and vicious. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a U.S. think tank, the most prominent hybrid methods are election interference and information campaigns, attacks on critical infrastructure, including cutting submarine cables and sabotaging global positioning systems (GPS) for flights, violent acts including sabotage and terrorism, and "weaponization of refugees and migrants," which intentionally flood refugees and migrants to other countries.
Let's pay attention to information warfare and election interference, which account for the largest proportion. Now, Russia has gone beyond simply spreading disinformation and is also using artificial intelligence (AI) to engage in "doppelganger campaigns" of information manipulation in many Western countries.
This is to create fake media sites and social networking sites (SNS) accounts that look exactly like the real thing and spread false information in highly credible forms. In the "operation overlord," websites imitating major European newspapers such as France's "Le Monde" and Germany's "Bild" spread fake articles about fatigue in supporting Ukraine or inciting distrust of the European Union (EU). The state-backed operation had a multilayered structure of fake think tanks behind fake media, making the true source of information unclear. Russia deliberately informed fact-checking agencies of the existence of such fake information to overwhelm them with overwork. Information verification thus became impossible, further damaging the credibility of information in general.
In addition, operations that combine cyberattacks and information manipulation are on the rise, such as "Storm 1679," which is deployed by the cyber unit under the Main Directorate of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU).
Fierce election interference
Russia has used these methods to intervene in many elections in the West in recent years. Among them, Moldova, which I visited in March this year, is one of the forefronts. In the presidential election and referendum on whether to join the EU in the fall of 2024, Russia actively interfered by spreading disinformation and scattering money.
In this information war, propaganda was developed linking European integration to the "loss of state". In addition to providing campaign funds to pro-Russian candidates, as much as 200 million Euro (about 34 billion yen) were distributed to citizens, mainly pensioners and the poor, using cash, electronic money, prepaid cards, etc., to influence voting behavior. Many poor voters, despite their support for the EU, had no choice but to receive the money because their lives are difficult, and there are also many who had the illusion that they would be able to live a better life if Moldova became a pro-Russian country.
Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have supported democracy on the ground are worried about continuing their activities due to the suspension of funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Democracy in Moldova is under attack by the trinity of money, information, and organization.
Such threats are not limited to Europe. Remember, in the United States, since the presidential election in 2016, disinformation has been spread on social media and stirred up division. In France, there was the "Macron Leaks" case caused by the hacking of President Macron files in 2017. In Germany, the personal information of hundreds of politicians from major political parties was leaked due to a cyberattack in 2019. Many traces of Russia's involvement in information leak cases have been confirmed in Europe and the United States.
Weakening the international order
In Western elections from last year to this year, many deepfake videos by Russia have been discovered. It is no exaggeration to say that hybrid warfare has become a war to protect elections and democracy for democratic countries.
Russia's goal is not necessarily to have pro-Russian candidates elected or targeted societies draw conclusions that are convenient for Russia. Rather, it is to erode trust in the electoral system itself and spread a sense of powerlessness toward elections and democracy. As a result, the legitimacy of targeted regimes are damaged, social divisions accelerate, and the solidarity among West countries Russia has confronted collapses, leading to the hollowing out of support for Ukraine, and ultimately weakening the international order.
The ultimate goal of Russia's information warfare is the loss of institutional trust in democratic countries and the collapse of solidarity among democratic countries. We should not forget that the rise of populist parties in European countries, distrust of elections and growing social divisions are exactly what Russia wants, and Russia has supported right-wing parties in Europe long before the war in Ukraine.
In Japan, suspicions of election interference by foreign countries were pointed out in the House of Councillors election in July. Although there is no clear evidence, it is crucial to take a multifaceted response with a strong sense of crisis.
One of the main goals of Russia's hybrid warfare is to cause the "implosion of democracy," so to speak. Rather than being blinded by military conflict, it is essential to embark on a long-term and strategic defense, or comprehensive security, of institutional, informational, and societal vulnerabilities. For Japan, it is urgent to reform the system to protect the transparency and fairness of elections, make information literacy an essential requirement of the educational curriculum, and develop a countermeasure system through international cooperation.
Once again, this year's defense white paper is significant in highlighting these crises in the non-military domain. Japan is already in the midst of an "invisible war," and we should recognize once again that the battle is evolving every day.
mainichi.jp
21.What Are the New US ERAM Missiles Ukraine Just Got That Threaten Every Russian Base 400 Km Away
What Are the New US ERAM Missiles Ukraine Just Got That Threaten Every Russian Base 400 Km Away
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/what-are-the-new-us-eram-missiles-ukraine-just-got-that-threaten-every-russian-base-400-km-away-11024
Aug 24, 2025 12:05
Updated Aug 25, 2025 12:12
3 min read
Authors
Illia Kabachynskyi
Author
With thousands of American long-range ERAM missiles on the way, Ukraine may soon strike depots, supply hubs, and the vital arteries of Russia’s war machine.
In recent months, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have intensified strikes on railways—the Russian military’s primary transport lifeline. A large supply of missiles could paralyze this channel for moving cargo and weapons to the front.
A conceptual rendering of the ERAM missile, as envisioned by the U.S. Air Force. (Source: Defense Express)
US President Donald Trump has approved the sale of 3,350 ERAMs—Extended Range Active Missiles—to Ukraine. This new weapon, originally slated for development in 2024, was designed to rival Russia’s KAB guided aerial bombs but with greater range and significantly lower cost. The final unit price per missile is not yet known, as they are part of an $850 million aid package that also includes other weapons.
What is ERAM?
ERAM is essentially a hybrid between a cruise missile and a bomb. It has a strike range of 240 to over 400 kilometers (150-250 miles). Ukraine has only a limited number of comparable long-range strike systems, notably the Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles and domestically produced drone missiles. The delivery of a large batch of additional missiles will further strengthen Ukraine’s defensive capabilities.
To reach distances of up to 400 kilometers, ERAM is equipped with an engine with a flight speed exceeding 700 km/h. Known technical specifications include:
- Approximate range: 463 km (288 miles)
- Flight speed: at least 763 km/h (475 mph)
- Accuracy: within 10 meters (33 feet)
- Weight: around 227 kg (500 pounds)
The weapon was designed as simply as possible to ensure it can be launched from Ukraine’s existing platforms—specifically, aircraft. It can also be equipped with additional systems, including the Quicksink guidance head.
The ERAM project was conceived in 2024 as a response to the war in Ukraine. US defense planners tasked manufacturers with producing a weapon capable of striking deep behind enemy lines, while keeping costs low and production timelines fast.
Read more
The US goal is to achieve a production rate of up to 1,000 units per year. The number of missiles Ukraine will receive in the first delivery remains unknown.
What are the targets?
With a range of 400 kilometers, ERAM dramatically expands the list of potential military targets for Ukrainian aviation, both inside Ukraine and on Russian territory. Within reach are all occupied territories and Crimea, allowing Ukraine to strike Russian military personnel concentrations, depots, railway infrastructure, supply routes, as well as air defenses and radar systems. Airfields and Shahed drone launch sites would also be vulnerable.
If Ukraine is granted permission to strike military targets inside Russia, those would include airfields, rail infrastructure, and large ammunition depots.
Most crucially, quantity matters. With a large supply of ERAMs, Ukrainian aircraft could launch massed strikes, overwhelming Russian air defenses. The result: slowing offensives and inflicting greater losses on Russia’s forces.
22. Hard rivalry for Buddhism's soft power
Excerpts:
Ultimately, religious diplomacy—whether through Buddhism or other faiths—should aim not only to enhance a nation’s image, but also to promote shared values of compassion, restraint, and understanding across the region.
Still, Buddhist diplomacy retains its appeal because it offers a vision of international relations grounded in compassion, peace, and mutual respect. It provides an alternative to zero-sum politics and coercive power. In an increasingly polarized world, that vision is both timely and necessary.
Hard rivalry for Buddhism's soft power - Asia Times
China and India locked in a not-so-holy geopolitical competition for Buddhism’s diplomatic high ground
asiatimes.com · Jack Meng-Tat Chia · August 25, 2025
In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, punctuated by trade wars, rising costs, and fractured alliances, diplomacy is increasingly being conducted not just in boardrooms and embassies but in temples and pilgrimage sites.
From May to June this year, India loaned sacred relics of the Buddha to Vietnam for a historic multi-city exposition. Drawing nearly 15 million devotees, the event underscored not only the enduring appeal of Buddhist piety but also religion’s growing role in diplomacy.
A year earlier, India had loaned similar relics to Thailand to mark Makha Bucha Day and King Vajiralongkorn’s birthday, reflecting a growing pattern of religious soft power.
China has also embraced Buddhist diplomacy to advance its foreign policy objectives and shape cultural narratives. In December last year, it sent the Buddha’s tooth relic from Beijing’s Lingguang Temple on a high-profile loan to Thailand, an event that was widely promoted and attended by Thai elites.
Beijing has also asserted its authority over Tibetan Buddhism by claiming the right to determine the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation. While religious in form, these actions reflect a deeper geopolitical strategy: the use of Buddhism in foreign policy.
Buddhist diplomacy is not a new phenomenon. Monarchs across Asia historically used Buddhist relics, texts and emissaries to assert legitimacy and affirm alliances. Today, this practice is experiencing a revival across the Asia-Pacific, which is home to nearly half a billion Buddhists.
Governments are rediscovering Buddhism as a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, narrative-building and strategic influence. While this opens new avenues for connection and cooperation, it also carries risks, especially when spiritual traditions are co-opted for political purposes or become entangled in geopolitical rivalries.
India, China and the contest for influence
India and China are the most prominent actors in this resurgence, both drawing on their Buddhist heritage to shape regional and global perceptions, often in subtle rivalry.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has positioned itself as the Buddha’s homeland and invested in initiatives such as the “Buddhist Circuit” and relic loans to strengthen ties with Buddhist-majority nations.
China, in turn, has woven Buddhist diplomacy into its Belt and Road Initiative. The Xi Jinping administration has organized international Buddhist conferences, revitalized pilgrimage sites, and nurtured ties with Theravada communities in countries like Thailand, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
It has also promoted the idea of “South China Sea Buddhism” as shared regional heritage to legitimize its maritime presence. Such efforts project a benevolent image of China abroad, particularly amid rising regional tensions.
Although China and India share a deep historical connection through Buddhism, most famously through the pilgrimages of Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing, their contemporary engagements are often shaped by competition more than solidarity.
Both Asian powers seek to position themselves as stewards of Buddhist heritage and as leaders of a pan-Asian spiritual renaissance.
But their efforts are complicated by unresolved border conflicts and diverging visions of regional order. The Dalai Lama’s presence in India adds a further layer of religious sensitivity and friction.
As each country turns to Buddhism as soft power, their parallel efforts often reflect competition rather than cooperation.
Singapore’s quiet bridge-building
While attention often focuses on major powers, smaller states also play pivotal roles. In Singapore, Buddhist diplomacy preceded the establishment of formal ties with the People’s Republic of China.
Between 1982 and 1990, Venerable Hong Choon, president of the Singapore Buddhist Federation, visited China eight times, meeting Vice President Ulanhu, Buddhist leader Zhao Puchu, and the Panchen Lama. In 1985, he led a landmark interfaith delegation from Singapore to China.
These exchanges occurred at a time when Singapore and China had no formal diplomatic relations. Both governments discreetly supported them.
When Zhao Puchu visited Singapore in 1988, he was received not only as a religious leader but also as a high-level envoy by then Deputy Prime Minister Ong Teng Cheong. Such engagements paved the way for stronger bilateral ties and demonstrated how religious actors can serve as intermediaries and trust-builders.
These early interactions laid the foundation for more formalized exchanges. In 2014, the Asian Civilizations Museum partnered with the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau to present “Secrets of the Fallen Pagoda: Treasures from Famen Temple and the Tang Court.”
Featuring Buddhist artefacts from the Famen Temple, renowned for its finger bone relic of the Buddha, the exhibition used Buddhism to illustrate Tang cosmopolitanism.
Though framed as a museum event, it highlighted how Buddhism can serve as a platform for diplomacy by connecting the shared cultural and religious heritage between China and Singapore.
When religious diplomacy cuts both ways
Elsewhere in Asia, Buddhist diplomacy manifests in diverse ways. In Japan, the late Nichidatsu Fujii played a significant role in building Peace Pagodas around the world to promote global peace in the aftermath of the Second World War.
In Bhutan, the principles of Gross National Happiness have shaped a distinctive model of diplomacy that emphasizes balance and compassion over economic gain.
These examples suggest that Buddhist diplomacy can foster a more ethical and culturally rooted model of engagement. In a region marked by colonial legacies, contested histories, and resurgent nationalism, appeals to shared religious heritage can open channels of communication and exchange.
However, the strategic use of religion also carries risks. When states instrumentalize Buddhism for soft power, sacred symbols may become politicized or lose spiritual depth.
Pilgrimages and relic displays, while powerful, can alienate local communities if perceived as propaganda or spectacle. The growing rivalry between China and India in this arena illustrates how easily cultural outreach can become a proxy for geopolitical tension.
To avoid these pitfalls, governments should engage local communities and religious institutions as partners rather than props, and ensure that Buddhist diplomacy is not reduced to a mere tool of foreign policy.
Cross-border collaboration between Buddhist organizations, scholarly exchanges, and interfaith dialogue can help preserve the integrity of the tradition while fostering genuine people-to-people ties.
Ultimately, religious diplomacy—whether through Buddhism or other faiths—should aim not only to enhance a nation’s image, but also to promote shared values of compassion, restraint, and understanding across the region.
Still, Buddhist diplomacy retains its appeal because it offers a vision of international relations grounded in compassion, peace, and mutual respect. It provides an alternative to zero-sum politics and coercive power. In an increasingly polarized world, that vision is both timely and necessary.
As the Buddha’s relics return to India, they conclude a significant chapter in Vietnam’s spiritual journey. Yet the broader diplomatic story is still unfolding. For Asia, the rediscovery of Buddhism as soft power suggests not only a strategy but a path where culture, faith and politics may find harmony.
Jack Meng-Tat Chia is the Foo Hai Fellow in Buddhist Studies and Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the editor of Figures of Buddhist Diplomacy in Modern Asia, supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship.
asiatimes.com · Jack Meng-Tat Chia · August 25, 2025
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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