​Quotes of the Day:

"Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later."

– Benjamin Franklin

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has." 

– Margaret Mead

"As in many wars, Japan’s unstated goals were more important than its stated goals. Expelling China from Korea and reforming Korea were elements of an overarching agenda to overturn the East Asian balance of power, taking over parts of the disintegrating Qing empire before Russia could and containing Russia thereafter. Like Prussia, Japan was a rising power on the march – a nightmare for dominant powers like China which cleave to a status quo of their own creation. Japan, like Prussia, intended to overturn the regional balance and make itself pre-eminent. Moreover, Japan envisioned a new regional order, based not on the tributary system, but on imperialism.”

– S. C. M. Pain, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War

1. America Must Rediscover Political Warfare: The Pen Dictates the Sword

2. Russia’s Deadliest Attack on Kyiv Since Trump-Putin Summit Damages EU Building

3. Israeli Troops Raid Site Deep Inside Syria, Damascus Says

4. China's 'Unforced Error' in the South China Sea Could Spark a War

5. ​Dealing with Drones: Why Words Matter

6. Build–Broadcast–Bolster: A Strategic Framework for Middle Power Influence

7. Army bids adieu to ISR Task Force, stands up Strategy and Transformation Directorate

8. Spectacular Drone Strikes and the Future Sanctuary of the U.S. Homeland

9. Building a New Brain: Transforming Military Schoolhouses into AI Battle Labs

10. From Shield to Spear: How Golden Dome Points the Way toward Breaking China’s Kill Web

11. A Dozen Countries Drill in Indo-Pacific Exercises

12. The State Department laid them off, then it promoted them

13. Report spotlights tensions in Mali military over Wagner mercenaries

14. What to Do About “Mirror Life”?

15. Warnings From Weimar​: Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails

16. Are Japan, South Korea, and Poland on the Verge of Getting Nuclear Weapons?

17. How many drones does it take to replace a destroyer?

18. DOD Establishes Joint Interagency Task Force to Deliver Affordable C-sUAS Capabilities to America's Warfighters

19. Could Putin Be Overthrown?

1. America Must Rediscover Political Warfare: The Pen Dictates the Sword

Excerpt:

Political warfare is something U.S. policymakers must come to understand, respect, and commit to practice in the way our adversaries do, or we will perpetually be one step behind them, reacting tactically to strategic defeats. But by synchronizing and implementing all elements of national power, we can protect American interests globally and prevent conflicts before they turn kinetic.

America Must Rediscover Political Warfare: The Pen Dictates the Sword

https://soaa.org/political-warfare/

• Post published:August 28, 2025

Commentary by Jack Barry and Daniel Elkins.

The United States is overdependent on the Department of Defense (DoD) and Special Operations Forces (SOF) to counter threats that are political in nature.

In U.S. national security discussions, terms like “unconventional warfare” and “political warfare” are often used interchangeably to describe the murky space between peace and war where an increasing amount of global conflict is levied. The imprecision and conflation of these terms is symptomatic of a broader, more concerning trend of being slow and unilateral in reacting to adversaries who contest American interest and shape the battlefield without firing a bullet. The overall lack of understanding of political warfare causes strategic misalignment in how we should operate in and respond to an increasingly complex global order. If we do not make a deliberate shift toward a whole-of-government political warfare framework in which military operations support integrated diplomatic, informational, and economic efforts, we will continue to lose ground to nations who have mastered the art of full spectrum political warfare.

The distinction of political warfare and unconventional warfare is significant, and it would pay well to understand them completely. George Kennan, the architect of U.S. Cold War strategy, defined political warfare in 1948 as, “The employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives… from overt actions such as political alliances, economic measures, and ‘white’ propaganda to covert operations such as clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare, and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”

Unconventional warfare (UW), by contrast has a much narrower definition. According to the 2014 edition of Joint Publication 3-05, UW consists of activities that enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power, usually by operating through underground or guerrilla forces in denied areas.

In other words, political warfare describes the full spectrum of available means of influence; unconventional warfare is one option. Yet, in Washington, “unconventional warfare” has become a catch-all label for almost any irregular, non-kinetic activity, which convolutes the policy discussion and triggers military-first responses to problems that require an interagency campaign. In contrast to Washington’s current state, Russia and China understand political warfare and apply it effectively.

China’s “Three Warfares” Doctrine (adopted by the Central Military Commission in 2003) integrates psychological warfare, media warfare, and legal warfare into all levels of statecraft. In the South China Sea, China has used maritime militias, selective enforcement of domestic law, economic coercion, and a barrage of state-controlled media to establish de facto control over disputed waters without utilizing military force.

Russia’s New Generation Warfare places information dominance at the center. Before and during the 2014 seizure of Crimea, Russia deployed a full-spectrum campaign that included cyberattacks, disinformation operations targeting both local and global audiences, economic blackmail via energy supply, and covert military action using “little green men.” The result was a strategic victory achieved with minimal overt combat.

These states have mastered the art of aligning diplomatic, informational, military, and economic tools (DIME) toward a single strategic objective. One reason they’re so adept at synchronizing all of their instruments of power is their centralized political systems, which the U.S., by design, does not have. The United States’ values, constitutional structure, and commitment to transparency put it at a disadvantage to orchestrate full spectrum political warfare like that of our adversaries. These constraints are a feature of our democracy, not a flaw, but they create a disadvantage when competing against authoritarian states that face no such checks.

By statute, the National Security Council (NSC) is supposed to coordinate political warfare strategies across all DIME agencies. In practice, however, the U.S. response to gray-zone challenges is fragmented, and hasn’t made meaningful progress to improve, despite the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) recognizing the growing threat from “coercion below the level of armed conflict.” Operational responsibility often defaults to DoD because it has the most resources, the fastest decision-making processes, and the most mature operational infrastructure. This has led to what the Hudson Institute has called an “over-militarization of competition,” where the U.S. reflexively leans on SOF and kinetic capabilities to solve what are essentially political problems.

The closure of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in 2025, as reported by the The Washington Post, underscores this imbalance. That center was one of the few dedicated interagency hubs for countering disinformation, a critical tool in the political warfare toolbelt.

The real-world cost of our inability to mount a sustained, whole-of-government political warfare campaign is that adversaries can reshape the operational environment virtually unchecked. A few examples:

• Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, Russia has strengthened its hold through a combination of cultural outreach, propaganda, and economic leverage over Europe. While vital, western military aid to Ukraine addresses only the kinetic symptom, and leaves the preponderance of Russia’s strategy untouched.
• Beijing’s strategy in Taiwan is to precede an invasion with political isolation. They’re actively reshaping the information environment to degrade the island’s (and the world’s) will to resist, so that when a military operation begins, the fight is already half won.
• Iran’s influence in the middle east largely stemmed from its proxy networks, which, before being hollowed out by Iran, allowed it to shape outcomes beyond its borders without decisively committing its own forces, such as when the Houthis attacked Saudi oil infrastructure in 2019.

These examples demonstrate that when we fail to counter political warfare with political warfare, we lose strategic positioning and are perpetually forced to play catch-up on the battlefield.

This issue isn’t new, and it’s been highlighted by several think tanks and policy advocates. The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ “Return to Political Warfare” analysis makes the point clearly: adversaries wage integrated campaigns across all domains of their national power, but U.S. counter-strategies remain siloed and overly reliant on military options. We have no enduring mechanism to align economic statecraft, strategic communications, covert action, and military support toward a single political objective. The goal isn’t to pull SOF out of the fight, but to nest DoD operations smartly inside a broader political warfare strategy led by the NSC and executed across all agencies.

The Special Operations Association of America recommends starting with the following changes:

1. Be precise with our words. Washington should retire “unconventional warfare” as a catch-all term in policy discussions. Replace it with “SOF support to political warfare,” making clear that UW is a subset, not the whole campaign.
2. Resource the State Department, Treasury, and USAID for sustained competition. Build a robust interagency political warfare capacity. As the NDS notes, integrated deterrence requires influence, alliances, and economic leverage as much as it does ships and aircraft.
3. Update doctrine and clarify agency roles in political warfare, ensuring DoD is a supporting arm rather than the lead planner.
4. Institutionalize training and doctrine across the interagency so that senior leaders, not just SOF operators, understand how political warfare works.

Political warfare is something U.S. policymakers must come to understand, respect, and commit to practice in the way our adversaries do, or we will perpetually be one step behind them, reacting tactically to strategic defeats. But by synchronizing and implementing all elements of national power, we can protect American interests globally and prevent conflicts before they turn kinetic.

Tags: political warfare, politics, SOF, Unconventional Warfare

2. Russia’s Deadliest Attack on Kyiv Since Trump-Putin Summit Damages EU Building

​Excerpts:

The attack, which left at least 17 people dead, resulted in the highest death toll in the capital since Trump held talks in Alaska earlier this month with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who increasingly appears to be defying White House threats of sanctions and pressing on with his war on Ukraine. It comes a day before a Ukrainian delegation is set to meet Trump’s team in New York to discuss security guarantees for any peace deal.

Russia’s aerial strikes involved 598 attack drones and 31 missiles, including nine ballistic missiles, which can only be intercepted with the U.S.-made Patriot air-defense system. The Ukrainian Air Force said it downed 26 missiles and 563 drones in total. At least 13 locations were hit directly, the Air Force said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the barrage “a horrific and deliberate killing of civilians” that targeted residential buildings. At least four of the dead were children, and a further 38 people were injured, emergency services said.

“The Russians are not choosing to end the war, only new strikes,” Zelensky wrote on social media. “It is crucial now that the world responds firmly. Russia must stop this war it started and continues.”

Russia’s Deadliest Attack on Kyiv Since Trump-Putin Summit Damages EU Building

The large-scale strike on the Ukrainian capital damaged buildings of the EU delegation and British Council

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-launches-deadliest-attack-on-kyiv-since-trump-putin-summit-03bf0125

By Jane Lytvynenko, Thomas Grove

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 and Laurence Norman

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Updated Aug. 28, 2025 8:07 am ET

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Ukrainian officials said the strikes involved 598 attack drones and 31 missiles, including nine ballistic missiles. Photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

Quick Summary

• Russia launched its deadliest barrage against Kyiv since Trump talked with Putin in Alaska.View more

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia launched a deadly barrage across Ukraine on Thursday, punctuating a lull in attacks on Kyiv during President Trump’s peace efforts and damaging buildings across the capital, including those of the British Council and EU delegation, prompting angry responses from European leaders.

The attack, which left at least 17 people dead, resulted in the highest death toll in the capital since Trump held talks in Alaska earlier this month with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who increasingly appears to be defying White House threats of sanctions and pressing on with his war on Ukraine. It comes a day before a Ukrainian delegation is set to meet Trump’s team in New York to discuss security guarantees for any peace deal.

Russia’s aerial strikes involved 598 attack drones and 31 missiles, including nine ballistic missiles, which can only be intercepted with the U.S.-made Patriot air-defense system. The Ukrainian Air Force said it downed 26 missiles and 563 drones in total. At least 13 locations were hit directly, the Air Force said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the barrage “a horrific and deliberate killing of civilians” that targeted residential buildings. At least four of the dead were children, and a further 38 people were injured, emergency services said.

“The Russians are not choosing to end the war, only new strikes,” Zelensky wrote on social media. “It is crucial now that the world responds firmly. Russia must stop this war it started and continues.”

European Union officials said that the bloc’s delegation building in Kyiv had been damaged in the strikes, but that staff members there were safe. Photos taken by a member of the EU delegation in Kyiv showed ceiling panels strewn across the floor of the office building and shattered glass around the entrance. The EU said the building remains open and fully functional.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged to respond to the attacks by hastening a new package of sanctions that could tighten restrictions on foreign firms doing business with Russia and the shadow vessel fleet Moscow uses to export its oil. The sanctions package should be announced early September, a Commission spokesperson said.

Von der Leyen also said the EU would look at fresh measures to deploy the $300 billion in Russian central bank assets it froze at the start of the war.

“It shows that the Kremlin will stop at nothing to terrorize Ukraine, blindly killing civilians, men, women and children and even targeting the European Union,” von der Leyen said. “This is why we are keeping maximum pressure on Russia.”

The strikes damaged the offices of the European Union’s delegation to Ukraine. Photo: alina smutko/Reuters

A woman near the site of the Russian strike, which damaged apartment buildings and the British Council. Photo: stringer/Reuters

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the British Council building in Kyiv was also damaged in the attack.

“Putin is killing children and civilians, and sabotaging hopes of peace,” Starmer said in a statement posted to social media. “This bloodshed must end.”

The strike on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and damage to EU and British offices was the clearest sign of Putin’s desire to eschew Trump’s peace efforts and score another win on the battlefield with an attack that also struck a blow to the Western institutions supporting Kyiv. 

Less than two weeks ago, Trump sat down with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, to try to lay the foundation for a peace in Ukraine. Those efforts attempted to bridge the gap between Trump’s desire for an end to the conflict and Moscow’s ambition to build on its advances in eastern Ukraine, where it has grindingly gained ground this year in bloody assaults.

President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin following their meeting in Alaska. Photo: Kevin lamarque/Reuters

Russia has dealt repeated setbacks to the U.S. president’s endeavors, demurring on a meeting between Putin and Zelensky and rejecting Western plans for security guarantees for Ukraine to underpin a peace deal. European leaders are devising a plan to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to guarantee any peace agreement between Moscow and Kyiv, but they have met stiff resistance from the Kremlin. 

Since the Alaska summit, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly said Russia won’t sign up to a peace plan without having a veto over the details, leaving the future of those talks in question.

In the wake of Thursday’s barrage, which lasted 11 hours across Ukraine, the country’s president called for stronger sanctions on Russia to pressure the Kremlin to agree to a cease-fire. Trump last week gave a two-week deadline for the leaders of Russia and Ukraine to move forward with the peace process or face possible U.S. retaliation. The president said he could enact “massive sanctions” or “massive tariffs” or might do nothing and “say it’s your fight.” Trump added that he would determine his next steps depending on whom he believes is at fault for delaying the process.

People carry an injured woman following the strikes on a residential neighborhood in Kyiv. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

Emergency services at the site of an airstrike on an apartment building in Kyiv. Photo: Patryk Jaracz/ZUMA Press

Around 3 a.m. Thursday, missiles struck Kyiv, jolting residents from sleep and sending them scurrying for shelter. Explosions from missiles, drones and air defense could be heard into the morning. Thick columns of smoke rose above the city in the aftermath.

“Our job is to understand how the enemy plans the attack and to build a plan to counter it,” said Yuri Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s air force. “And this battle goes on continuously.”

Among the targets struck was a sorting facility for the courier company Nova Poshta, where three employees were wounded, and a train depot for Ukraine’s rail company Ukrzaliznitsya, with at least one intercity train damaged beyond repair, according to a statement the company posted on social media. 

“Not a single train will be canceled,” the company said. 

Ukraine, meanwhile, was also on the offensive. Its drones struck two oil refineries in Russia, according to Ukrainian authorities. Videos of the attack posted to social media show Russian residents looking on as one of the refineries is engulfed by a massive blaze.

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

3. Israeli Troops Raid Site Deep Inside Syria, Damascus Says

​Is Israel spreading itself too thin? Gaza (Hamas), Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iran, Yemen (Houthis), and Syria? Or is this out of necessity because of this wide range of threats?

You have to respect and admire Israel in that it seeks to gain the initiative even when it seems spread too thin. Other countries would go on the defensive.

Excerpts:

Syria and Israel have been bitter enemies for decades and fought three major wars against each other. After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was ousted in December, Israel and Syria have held U.S.-backed discussions about reaching a security arrangement, people briefed on the negotiations told The Wall Street Journal in June.

Israel is demanding Syria demilitarize the entire border area between Israel and the Syrian capital of Damascus. Israeli officials say they don’t yet trust Syria’s new leaders, whose roots are in Jihadi groups. The Trump administration, however, has embraced Syria’s new government and is taking steps to stabilize its rule.

Israeli Troops Raid Site Deep Inside Syria, Damascus Says

Hourslong operation overnight was backed by airstrikes, according to Syrian state media

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israeli-troops-raid-site-deep-inside-syria-damascus-says-6c86d2e8

By Dov Lieber

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Aug. 28, 2025 6:50 am ET

Israeli forces patrol the border fence with Syria. Photo: jalaa marey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Quick Summary

• Israeli troops executed a ground raid near Damascus, according to Syrian state media, marking a rare operation deep inside Syria.View more

TEL AVIV—Israeli troops carried out an overnight raid on a site near Damascus, Syrian state media said, a rare ground operation deep inside Syrian territory that comes amid U.S. efforts to end hostilities between the two countries following the Assad regime’s fall late last year.

The hourslong raid, which was backed by Israeli airstrikes, took place near the town of Kiswah, in the Damascus suburbs, the Syrian foreign ministry said. Syrian soldiers on Tuesday uncovered surveillance and eavesdropping devices near the site, state news agency SANA reported. After the discovery, Israel targeted the area with airstrikes, resulting in the deaths of at least six Syrian soldiers, state media said.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the operation. 

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said in an X post Thursday that his country’s forces are “operating in all of the theaters of battle day and night for the security of Israel.”

Syria and Israel have been bitter enemies for decades and fought three major wars against each other. After Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was ousted in December, Israel and Syria have held U.S.-backed discussions about reaching a security arrangement, people briefed on the negotiations told The Wall Street Journal in June.

Israel is demanding Syria demilitarize the entire border area between Israel and the Syrian capital of Damascus. Israeli officials say they don’t yet trust Syria’s new leaders, whose roots are in Jihadi groups. The Trump administration, however, has embraced Syria’s new government and is taking steps to stabilize its rule.

Israel appears to be aiming to boost its intelligence capabilities inside Syria before reaching a security agreement with Syria that would force the removal of Israel’s forces and limit its operations in the country, said Carmit Valensi, head of the Syria program at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. The Israeli strikes were likely intended to prevent Israeli intelligence-gathering devices from falling into Syrian hands, Valensi said.

The Syrian town of Kiswah was previously targeted by Israeli airstrikes in February. Photo: bakr alkasem/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

“Israel is starting to acknowledge its military presence there is temporary and will be over soon if there’s a security pact,” Valensi said. 

Israeli forces have carried out numerous operations inside Syria in recent months aimed at destroying the remnants of the Assad regime’s military and Iranian-backed forces that had built up in southern Syria over the past decade.

Syria’s new government has condemned and protested the Israeli operations at the United Nations but hasn’t publicly responded militarily.

Syria’s foreign ministry on Wednesday called the latest Israeli strikes “a grave violation of international law” and a “clear breach” of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Israel has launched 421 ground incursions and 954 airstrikes, according to data compiled by Charles Lister, a Syria analyst who runs the Syria Weekly newsletter. Many of those strikes and raids have been carried out near the border. Israel’s military has also occupied parts of southern Syria, expanding a security zone into Syrian territory.

Valensi said the overnight raid in Kiswah was the first publicly known Israeli ground operation that took place far from the Israeli occupied territory in southern Syria since the fall of the Assad regime. 

Last September, before the fall of the Assad regime, Israeli special forces were helicoptered into the western Syrian city of Masyaf where they raided and destroyed an Iranian missile factory.

Write to Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com

4. China's 'Unforced Error' in the South China Sea Could Spark a War

China's 'Unforced Error' in the South China Sea Could Spark a War

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Joe Varner · August 27, 2025

Key Points and Summary – A recent collision between a Chinese Navy destroyer and its own Coast Guard vessel near Scarborough Shoal has publicly punctured Beijing’s narrative of seamless maritime dominance.

-This embarrassing “unforced error,” which occurred while intimidating a Philippine ship, has triggered a predictable and dangerous response from China.

China J-20 Screenshot. CCTV Screenshot from State TV.

-Beijing is now escalating its aggression with unsafe aerial intercepts and is expected to swarm the disputed shoal with its naval and militia forces.

-This desperate attempt to “save face” is dangerously raising the stakes in a region where the U.S. has firm security commitments with the Philippines.

When Saving Face Risks Losing the Sea: China’s Dangerous Scarborough Escalation

When a People’s Liberation Army (PLAN) Navy destroyer rammed and crushed the bow of its own China Coast Guard (CCG) earlier this month China’s bid to project seamless maritime dominance instead exposed its own seamanship as a liability.

In the contested waters near Scarborough Shoal, the Chinese navy managed to deliver a humiliation to itself that no rival could have engineered. In a dangerous manoeuvre intended to intimidate a smaller Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship, a Chinese Type 052D destroyer collided with and crushed the bow of a CCG vessel that had been closing in on the same target. The intended show of seamless naval–coast guard coordination became, instead, a public display of confusion, miscommunication, and poor seamanship.

For Beijing, this was not simply a tactical mishap. In Chinese political and military culture, such incidents eroded the perception of competence and control—two pillars of the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy in the South China Sea. The Party has spent over a decade building the image of an unstoppable maritime presence in these disputed waters. That image cracked when the PLA Navy and CCG vessels collided.

China is attempting to reassert dominance. A PLA fighter jet dangerously buzzed a PCG patrol aircraft, passing at an unsafe distance in a deliberate show of force. The message was unmistakable: the People’s Republic would not allow an operational blunder to undermine its claim to mastery over the South China Sea.

China Type 076 from Chinese Weibo Screenshot.

The South China Sea has long been the arena where Beijing combined ‘grey zone’ coercion, illegal warfare, and military intimidation to bend smaller neighbours to its will. The Scarborough Shoal is both a strategic outpost and a political symbol. Located well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) as defined by the 2016 Hague Tribunal ruling—which China has ignored—it has been under de facto Chinese control since 2012. Manila’s renewed patrols under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. have been a direct challenge to that status quo, backed by the US explicit security guarantees.

In this context, the destroyer–coast guard collision was more than an operational embarrassment; it was a challenge to the narrative of Chinese inevitability. Adversaries now had a propaganda gift: proof that China’s “maritime machine” was capable of stumbling over itself. In a contested region like the South China Sea where perceptions shape deterrence, losing face could be as damaging as losing a battle.

Historically, Beijing’s response to such humiliations has followed a predictable pattern. First comes a show of strength—often through increased patrols, harassment of rival vessels, and assertive air manoeuvres. This is aimed at quickly re-establishing the image of control. Second comes a sustained campaign to alter the status quo in its favour, whether by deploying more assets, expanding artificial island facilities, or creating new “facts on the water” through construction and enforcement. Third, a parallel propaganda push reframes events so that China appears the victim of foreign provocation.

All three phases may now be in motion. The unsafe intercept of the Philippine patrol aircraft was almost certainly the opening act of a broader pressure campaign. We should expect to see Chinese warships and coast guard vessels swarm the Scarborough Shoal over the coming weeks, forcing Philippine vessels to either withdraw or risk repeated confrontations. Maritime militia craft—civilian in name only—will likely add to the numbers, making it harder for Manila to counter without appearing to escalate.

Economics may also be weaponised. Beijing has previously restricted agricultural imports, delayed customs clearances, and cut tourist flows to punish Manila. Such measures allow China to raise costs without firing a shot. And if these steps fail to erase the embarrassment, Beijing could resort to a high-profile seizure—a fishing boat detained, a reef blockaded, or a Philippine supply mission turned back—to produce the imagery of dominance that domestic audiences expect.

J-20. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The risk in this pattern is that the Philippines is no longer isolated. Under Marcos Jr., Manila has deepened defence cooperation with the US, Japan, and Australia, and opened more bases to US forces. Washington has repeatedly affirmed that any armed attack on Philippine public vessels or aircraft in the South China Sea would trigger mutual defence obligations. That raises the stakes for every “buzz,” every ramming, every blockade attempt.

China’s desire to save face could therefore become the spark for a wider confrontation. A single miscalculated manoeuvre could injure or kill Philippine personnel, prompting Manila to invoke the US treaty. In such a scenario, China would find itself facing not a solitary coast guard cutter but a coalition naval presence, with all the strategic costs that entails.

Beijing’s leaders must weigh the value of symbolic recovery against the danger of strategic overreach. The Scarborough Shoal is important, but it is not worth a direct clash with US treaty allies. Yet if history is any guide, the political imperative to demonstrate resolve—especially after a public embarrassment—will outweigh the caution urged by professional sailors and diplomats.

The ramming of its own vessel was an unforced error that punctured the image of Chinese maritime infallibility. The dangerous aerial intercept that followed signalled that Beijing intends to erase that memory quickly. But in the high-stakes environment of the South China Sea, regaining face is rarely a cost-free exercise.

In the South China Sea, the greatest threat to China’s ambitions may not be its rivals, but its own need to prove it never falters—no matter how close that urge sails to disaster.

About the Author: Joe Verner

Joe Varner is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security in Washington, D.C.

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Written By Joe Varner

Joe Varner is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security in Washington, D.C.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Joe Varner · August 27, 2025

5. ​Dealing with Drones: Why Words Matter

C​onclusion:

Dealing with drones, or UAS, or unmanned aircraft, requires more than just new technologies. It demands clearer thinking and the deliberate use of terminology. We should call a spade a spade and a drone a drone. ​UAS requires an air defense approach, albeit with needed improvements in cost and efficiency. Drones require an intelligence-forward urgency to not only stay ahead of innovations in technology, but in tactics, especially involving deception. Most importantly, once we can distinguish the threats of which we speak, counter-UAS or counter-drone efforts need to be understood in terms of the protection function. As unmanned aircraft continue to reshape the character of conflict, a steady, effects-based view of protection will shape how the DoD understands and counters them. By aligning our language with the layered reality of the threat, we lay the groundwork for more effective and efficient solutions. If we are to prevent surprise in a battlespace increasingly defined by innovation and adaptation, how we talk about unmanned aircraft may be just as important as how we stop them.  

​As an aside every time I hear "Drone" I am always reminded of Plato's Republic.

In Plato's Republic, a "drone" is a metaphorical term used to describe individuals who contribute nothing to society and are governed by their unnecessary, excessive desires. In Book 8, Socrates describes drones as the idle, spendthrift class in a democracy who are not producers, warriors, or rulers, and who are easily swayed by demagogues, leading to political instability and the eventual rise of tyranny.

These drones are likened to bees that consume honey without contributing to the hive, and they are divided into harmless (stingless) and dangerous (stinging) types, with the latter being particularly disruptive in democratic politics.

In Book 9, the concept is further developed psychologically, where the "drone" symbolizes the master passion within a person's soul that dominates their life, leading to a tyrannical nature when unchecked desires rule over reason.

 This internal drone is described as a "monstrous winged drone" that becomes the tyrant's master passion, controlling the individual's actions.

The term also refers to the wealthy money-makers who exploit the poor by lending money at high interest, thereby creating more drones and paupers, which fuels the societal decay leading to tyranny.

Opinion / Perspective| The Latest

​Dealing with Drones: Why Words Matter

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/28/dealing-with-drones-why-words-matter/

by Andrew Bogusky

|

08.28.2025 at 06:00am

An FPV drone's view of a drone-struck Tu-95 Bomber at Russia's Olenya airbase during Operation Spiderweb.

While the June 1, 2025 Ukrainian drone attack, “Operation Spiderweb,” against Russian air bases has been described as a “wake-up moment,” the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) either needs to stop feigning surprise ​(​or needs to prepare for constant surprise​)​ in the development and employment of “drones” in warfare. The unmanned aircraft phenomenon is not new. Only a decade after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the United States developed the ‘Kettering Bug,’ a track-launched, unmanned “aerial torpedo” capable of striking ground targets up to 75 miles away. During World War II, Germany employed the first cruise missile, the V-1, which is not unlike the so-called “kamikaze drones” that various actors employ today. Simply put, the threat from unmanned aircraft has been around for over a century. The major difference today, however, lies in the exponential proliferation and expansion ​of ​their capabilities and ​the ​tactics ​used ​to employ them. The increasing volume of attacks and the continued advancement of unmanned aircraft technologies and tactics are exposing gaps in existing air defense capabilities and approaches to protection. Because the problem is layered ​– ​involving cost, size, proliferation, doctrine, and technology​ – ​the solution will likewise require a layered, interconnected, and comprehensive approach. However, the fundamental first step must be to innovate the way we talk—and therefore think—about unmanned aircraft. By distinguishing between various systems—such as smaller drones and larger unmanned aircraft systems—and framing the challenge within the broader context of protection, the defense community can develop more appropriate, efficient, and intelligence-driven responses. 

In order to apply disciplined reasoning to the implications of this evolving threat, the defense community (which includes the DoD, but also the defense industry and the media which reports such stories) must employ disciplined language. Media (and even military) reporting typically use the singular term “drone” to mean any variety of unmanned aircraft, from larger sophisticated aircraft like the MQ-9 and one-way attack aircraft like the Iranian produced Shahed 136 to small hobbyist quadcopters. Conflating these various systems can oversimplify and obfuscate the discussion on countering the threats when in reality they reflect vast differences in size, cost, purpose, and capabilities. The word “drone” is vague and inconsistent with the variety of systems it attempts to describe, which leads to flawed assumptions, faulty logic, and misunderstanding. This is akin to saying “fighter jet” when you are referring to any aircraft, whether it is a Boeing 747 or two-seat Cessna. It can also lead to an oversimplification of counter-unmanned aircraft solutions. The solution for countering a quadcopter looks very different than thwarting a preprogrammed, one-way aircraft, not to mention neutralizing a large, satellite-controlled unmanned aircraft.  

While the lines can get blurry, UAS typically serve as an extension of airpower while drones expand ground combat. The distinction is not merely about semantics; it carries doctrinal implications and cues for solutions.  

Conversely, the DoD and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) categorize unmanned aircraft primarily by size in five groups and three classes, respectively. However, these distinctions are rarely referred to outside of technical and acquisition purposes and understandably so. ​​Therefore, for both clarity and simplicity, “unmanned aircraft” will be used in this piece as a generic and encompassing term. “Unmanned aircraft system” (UAS) will be used to describe larger, more complicated fixed-wing aircraft, while “drone” refers to smaller and widely proliferated systems such as quadcopters or other hand-held or hand-launched aircraft. While the lines can get blurry, UAS typically serve as an extension of airpower while drones expand ground combat. The distinction is not merely about semantics; it carries doctrinal implications and cues for solutions.  

Understandably, the fact that drones maneuver through the air muddies ​​the waters, so to speak. From spears and arrows to bullets, rocket-propelled grenades, artillery rounds, mortars, and rockets—to name a few—the modern military drone still represents an evolution of man’s quest to extend the reach of his fist while his feet are planted on the ground. The revolution of the drone and unmanned aircraft in general lies in the creativity of how they are employed and the capabilities they provide untethered to a human. Yet the temptation to treat all unmanned aircraft as an air and missile defense (AMD) problem results in inefficient and unintended consequences, such as exacerbating the cost-exchange dilemma whereby the defender is expending much more than the attacker. Consider the case of the $3 million Patriot missile used to shoot down a $200 quadcopter drone. Or when the United States used a $400,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder missile from an F-22 to shoot down a low-tech Chinese spy balloon. These instances represent the equivalent of using a shotgun to kill a fly instead of a fly swatter. The first example highlights employing an anti-air solution to a doctrinally ground-based threat. ​​The latter shows how intelligence, more than technology, factors more deeply into the unmanned aircraft dilemma. The unmanned aircraft race is not just about technology, but about staying ahead of your adversary’s plans and deceptions. 

In defending against unmanned aircraft, the language of the DoD also confuses the issue when it refers to countering small drones as “counter unmanned aerial systems” or CUAS. Because UAS also refers to the very large and sophisticated unmanned aircraft, the term CUAS, like “drone,” broad-brushes the issue. Rather than treating all unmanned aircraft as an AMD, CUAS, or drone problem—it would be more helpful to start speaking in terms of the joint function of protection, which Joint Publication 1 Joint Warfighting describes simply as “preserving the joint force’s fighting potential.” Because the threats are complex, this back-to-the-basics approach helps to simplify the solution by fighting effects-based weapons with an effects-based approach. 

U.S. Soldiers conduct Mobile Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Integrated Defense System (M-LIDS) training, Camp Buehring, Kuwait. The M-LIDS weapon system can be mounted on vehicles and is designed to target and disable, or destroy hostile drones or other unmanned aerial vehicles (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Damian Mioduszewski).

An actor no longer requires precision guided munitions dropped by stealth fighters to take out its adversary’s air force or air defense assets on the ground; drones have democratized the same effects. Similarly, a protection mindset does not group all unmanned aircraft as one singular threat, nor does it strictly separate each variety of UAS or drone into rigid stovepipes, but seeks a holistic, effects-based method of protecting the fighting potential of its forces. AMD certainly falls under protection when appropriate but so does physical security, which incorporates a blend of active and passive, simple and sophisticated, and above all else an intelligence-based approach to identifying critical vulnerabilities and meeting the threat. With this philosophy, threats from unmanned aircraft would be matched with appropriate and more efficient solutions. Key infrastructure and assets should be protected from larger UAS by AMD capabilities, but also from smaller drones by more ground-based-threat protection measures. Within AMD—traditionally geared toward shooting down fast airplanes and missiles—cost-parity solutions should be developed to see and shoot down slower and lower UAS. If AMD relies on a defensive “stiff arm” approach, then operational leaders should demand other proactive, offensive, and intelligence-forward forms of protection.  

Developing technology for counter-unmanned aircraft applications to jam, degrade, suppress, or kill is a necessary, but also fleeting aspect of the ​​solution as shown with the war of adaptation between Ukraine and Russia. Rather, in the race for innovation, an effects-based mindset focused on protection frames the problem partly in terms of intelligence, seeking to stay ahead of the adversary’s intent instead of chasing constantly changing tactics and technology. This is increasingly more apparent given Operation Spiderweb’s 18-month setup, and more recently, Israel’s June 12, 2025 attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, leadership, and air defenses which relied on the aid of smuggled drones and UAS. It is not enough to focus on defending just against drones, but rather against drones in combination with deception and surprise. These factors make staying ahead of the adversary through intelligence a crucial element of protection against drones and UAS. 

Dealing with drones, or UAS, or unmanned aircraft, requires more than just new technologies. It demands clearer thinking and the deliberate use of terminology. We should call a spade a spade and a drone a drone. ​UAS requires an air defense approach, albeit with needed improvements in cost and efficiency. Drones require an intelligence-forward urgency to not only stay ahead of innovations in technology, but in tactics, especially involving deception. Most importantly, once we can distinguish the threats of which we speak, counter-UAS or counter-drone efforts need to be understood in terms of the protection function. As unmanned aircraft continue to reshape the character of conflict, a steady, effects-based view of protection will shape how the DoD understands and counters them. By aligning our language with the layered reality of the threat, we lay the groundwork for more effective and efficient solutions. If we are to prevent surprise in a battlespace increasingly defined by innovation and adaptation, how we talk about unmanned aircraft may be just as important as how we stop them.  

Tags: C-UAS, doctrine, drones, UAS

About The Author

• 
  
• Andrew Bogusky
• A B-52 and MQ-9 pilot, Colonel Andrew "WALA" Bogusky is an active-duty Air Force officer and Faculty Instructor in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, & Operations at the U.S. Army War College. This article reflects his views and not those of the United States Army War College, the United States Army, or the United States Air Force. 

6. Build–Broadcast–Bolster: A Strategic Framework for Middle Power Influence

​We must wield the information instrument of national power more effectively.

"BBB" – Build Broadcast Bolster.

Excerpts:

The BBB framework illustrates that strategic influence is not a passive byproduct of circumstances but is actively constructed by nations through creative problem-framing, aligning national narratives with systemic leverage points, and forming enduring coalitions. These cases demonstrate how innovation, emerging technologies, and anticipatory governance enable smaller states to exert a greater impact than their size might suggest, creating a strategic paradox: great powers’ reliance on complex global systems exposes them to the influence of niche-specialized middle powers.

These dynamics present a complex mix of opportunities and challenges for both practitioners (military officers, analysts, and policy advisors) and academics studying international relations and strategic competition.

• Offensively, the United States and its allies should proactively cultivate specialized dependencies with middle powers to forge partnerships anchored in essential capabilities that transcend traditional military competition.
• Defensively, intelligence efforts must expand beyond tracking material capabilities to include governance innovations and reputational strategies that reveal emerging leverage points.
• Operationally, stability and partner-building missions should prioritize fostering world-class niche capabilities within smaller states over the broad conventional force development.
• Most critically, alliance structures must evolve from burden-sharing models to capability-specialization networks, where smaller partners exercise leadership in distinct domains of influence. This necessitates academics to move beyond the static inventories of material assets toward dynamic, systems-level analyses that trace how capabilities, narratives, and institutions co-evolve to generate lasting strategic advantages.

By illuminating these dynamics, the BBB framework equips practitioners and academics with a powerful tool to anticipate and shape the next era of competitive statecraft, where strategic skill in orchestrating capabilities, perceptions, and institutions through Building, Broadcasting, and Bolstering proves far more significant than the mere accumulation of raw power.

In an age where alliances are strained and the rules-based order is contested, influence will belong not to those with the most enormous arsenals, but to those who make themselves essential. The BBB framework helps explain how—and why—that is happening now.

Essay| The Latest

Build–Broadcast–Bolster: A Strategic Framework for Middle Power Influence

by Elizabeth Boyett

|

08.28.2025 at 06:00am

The Build–Broadcast–Bolster strategic framework for middle-power influence.

Military mass and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) size no longer define influence in today’s security environment. States without superpower arsenals shape coalition decisions, deter aggression, and extract alliance-wide concessions. They do this not by coercion, but by converting specialized strengths into strategic leverage. These middle powers lack coercive leverage to impose their preferences unilaterally, but possess the vision, credibility, and tactical acumen to turn narrow capabilities into tools of wide influence.

Lawrence Freedman notes that strategy is the art of converting resources into power, while Joseph Nye reminds us that credibility and narrative shape outcomes as much as raw force. The Build–Broadcast–Bolster (BBB) framework builds on these insights, showing how middle powers transform niche capacities into sustainable influence through three reinforcing mechanisms:

• Build: Developing niche capabilities or chokepoints, such as advanced manufacturing, control of critical minerals, strategic geography, or technological leadership, on which others depend.
• Broadcast: Framing and signaling capabilities as indispensable to allies and adversaries.
• Bolster: Locking in gains through institutions, governance, and durable credibility to ensure resilience and longevity.

Taken together, BBB mechanisms show how smaller states convert narrow strengths into an outsized influence. This is not an academic point for coalition planners and commanders; recognizing where partners bring leverage in contingency planning, wargaming, and alliance management can matter as much as counting battalions. Properly understood and integrated middle-power influence can shape operational outcomes well beyond traditional measures of force.

Conceptual Framework

A contemporary power analysis relies on two fundamental insights. Lawrence Freedman defines power as the capacity to produce effects more advantageous than would otherwise have been the case and argues that strategy is the art of creating power. Joseph Nye complements this by demonstrating that power derives from successfully converting resources into desired outcomes through effective strategies, rather than merely accumulating material assets.

While these frameworks clarify that power requires the strategic conversion of resources, they offer limited guidance on how states, particularly middle-and emerging powers, can systematically amplify their influence without matching the great power arsenals. The BBB framework addresses this gap. This translates Freedman’s concept of power as a generative process, and Nye’s idea of conversion into a three-part strategy for influence. By building chokepoints or capabilities, broadcasting indispensability, and bolstering these gains through institutional durability, middle powers can create effects beyond their apparent means. The BBB offers a systematic lens for tracing how states engineer lasting relevance in a competitive international environment.

Why These Three Cases?

The following three cases—Taiwan, Estonia, and Chile—each represent a distinct point of entry into the BBB model, illustrating how middle powers convert narrow advantages into durable influence: Taiwan as a case of Build through advanced semiconductor dominance, Estonia as Broadcast through digital credibility within NATO, and Chile as Bolster through the governance of critical lithium resources. Together, they demonstrate how middle powers can punch above their weight by deliberately converting narrow advantages into durable influences.

These cases were not selected to offer a representative sample of all the middle or emerging powers. Instead, they were chosen as clear illustrations of distinct BBB mechanisms while also showing how the three elements converge. The selection criteria emphasize strategic visibility (places where niche capacities visibly shape global or alliance decision making), institutional innovation (new governance or doctrinal structures that lock influence in place), and narrative coherence (the ability to communicate indispensability to partners and competitors alike).

Most importantly, they highlight agency: influence does not flow automatically from material endowments. Taiwan, Estonia, and Chile refined their advantages through deliberate choices that anticipated rivals, reinforced credibility, and embedded leverage in institutions. In doing so, they show that strategic relevance emerges less from static resources such as landmasses or critical minerals than from the continual orchestration of capabilities, narratives, and governance.

Case 1: Taiwan

Build as Deterrence: The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) dominates advanced-node chip production, with a market share increase of 67.6% in the first quarter of 2025. These microchips are critical not only for global technology ecosystems—powering smartphones and computers—but also for precision weapons systems vital for modern security. Taiwan’s strategic development of this semiconductor sector, often termed the “silicon shield,” deeply embedded its indispensability into the economic and military calculations of allies and adversaries. Protecting this chokepoint is a central element in Taiwan’s deterrence strategy. Taiwan’s semiconductor strength also creates a critical vulnerability due to the geographic concentration of its advanced foundries, which pose risks from potential geopolitical conflicts or natural disasters that disrupt the supply chain.

Broadcast: Taiwan brands itself as an essential democratic partner and a linchpin in the global economy and U.S. defense technology projects. Through export controls, strategic alliances, and co-investment in joint R&D centers with allied nations, Taiwan projects its indispensability, shaping the perception that any conflict would trigger widespread global economic disruption.

Bolster: Taiwan’s asymmetric defense doctrine integrates the security of semiconductor fabrication facilities into broader alliance commitments, making their protection a shared international interest. This doctrine institutionalizes the economic and strategic significance of the chip sector within U.S.-led Indo-Pacific defense planning, ensuring that operational and logistical support extends to safeguard upstream supply chains vital to military capabilities.

Implications:

• Strategic: The economic fallout from disrupting Taiwan’s semiconductor supply acts as a powerful deterrent against Chinese coercion or attacks.
• Operational: U.S. and allied Indo-Pacific command plans explicitly incorporate semiconductor facility protection as a defense priority, coordinating cyber, physical, and logistic assets accordingly.
• Tactical: Critical infrastructure supporting chip manufacturing—energy, water, and transportation—is prioritized for defense alongside more traditional urban missile defense systems.

Taiwan’s case illustrates Freedman’s insight that strategic advantage is inherently dynamic and must be continuously renewed. It also exemplifies Nye’s concept of smart power, in which the combination of coercive deterrence, economic indispensability, and reputational credibility reinforces Taiwan’s security through control over a critical global supply chain chokepoint.

Case 2: Estonia

Build: Following the 2007 cyberattacks that targeted critical infrastructure, Estonia rapidly invested in cutting-edge digital infrastructure and cyber-defense capabilities. This established Estonia as a NATO pioneer in cyber resilience and governance innovation, with flagship systems such as X-Road (a secure data exchange layer), i-Voting, and KSI blockchain for securing data integrity and forward-leaning assets such as data embassies that safeguard government data abroad. By creating interoperable cyber chokepoints and digital platforms, Estonia has built a unique niche capability on which both national and alliance security increasingly depend.

Broadcast as Force Multiplier: Estonia has successfully branded itself as NATO’s “first-mover laboratory” in cyber defense. Hosting NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) reinforces its standing as a key hub for research, training, and operational innovation in cyber warfare. This digital state brand conveys credibility and indispensability to its allies, amplifying Estonia’s influence in alliance decision-making and cyber policy shaping far beyond its size.

Bolster: Institutionalization transforms cyber vulnerability into strategic agility by systematically integrating civilian and military efforts. Its whole-of-nation approach prepares for rapid mobilization against cyberattacks, enabling effective coalition response readiness. This institutionalization transforms cyber vulnerability into strategic agility. NATO partners have increasingly adopted Estonia’s framework and cyber playbooks, influencing alliance posture and capability development. Maintaining Estonia’s technological edge will require continuous adaptation and investment to keep pace with evolving cyber threats and rapid technological advancement abroad.

Implications:

• Strategic: Estonia demonstrates how a small state can command outsized alliance influence by cultivating a strong reputational brand in its critical security domain.
• Operational: NATO’s growing adoption of Estonia’s cyber frameworks requires militaries worldwide to study and emulate Estonia’s civilian–military cyber integration model.
• Tactical: Lessons from Estonia’s experience directly inform the design and deployment of the U.S. National Guard cyber mission forces and allied cyber resilience units.

Estonia’s transformation illustrates the power of human agency to turn digital vulnerabilities into a core asset. It validates Freedman’s concept of power as a process requiring continuous adaptation and Nye’s view that strategic influence depends on credibility and narrative as much as material capability. Estonia’s cyber domain role is a model of how smaller states can synchronize capabilities, narratives, and institutions to gain lasting influence.

Case 3: Chile

Build: Chile controls the world’s largest lithium reserves and is a critical resource for batteries and defense technologies. Rather than allowing resource nationalism to cause fragmentation, Chile launched a transparent, multi-stakeholder, National Lithium Strategy in 2023. This framework governs Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) and balances state control with private partnerships, avoiding the classic “resource curse” where rich reserves fail to translate into economic or strategic gains. The strategy includes the creation of a state-led National Lithium Company, strong environmental safeguards, and active involvement of indigenous groups and local communities.

Broadcast: Chile positions itself as a leading Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) compliant supplier. Chile attracts premium global markets and partners committed to responsible sourcing by branding lithium as ethical, sustainable, and socially responsible. Chile’s reputation has enhanced its geopolitical leverage by making its lithium preferred in supply chains sensitive to ESG concerns.

Bolster as Strategic Sustainability: The National Lithium Strategy institutionalizes governance stability through revenue sharing, indigenous board participation, and environmental protection that builds domestic consensus and reduces risk. Political foresight in embedding these governance elements ahead of large-scale resource extraction strengthens contract durability and long-term partnerships, making Chile a reliable supplier critical to allies’ defense supply chains. Ongoing political debates and opposition could pose challenges to the sustainability of Chile’s governance model, potentially injecting uncertainty for strategic partners and investors.

Implications:

• Strategic: Chile’s governance stability secures its role as a dependable partner in the U.S. and allied defense supply chains reliant on lithium.
• Operational: Securing critical minerals, such as lithium, is fundamental to sustaining advanced munitions, batteries, drones, and mobility platforms; adversaries may seek to exploit these supply dependencies through economic coercion.
• Tactical: Innovations in extraction technology and recycling partnerships support the development of agile small-scale defense systems and supply resilience.

Chile’s authority rests on a broad social consensus supporting sustainable extraction and environmental stewardship. This legitimacy reinforces resource capacity and market reputation, creating a positive feedback loop involving strong governance, premium partnerships, and enduring strategic advantages.

How Build, Broadcast, and Bolster Interact Across Cases

Table 1 summarizes the interaction of each state’s Build, Broadcast, and Bolster elements to clarify the key strategic patterns across Taiwan, Estonia, and Chile. Strategic advantage arises not from isolated strengths, but from the deliberate integration of capabilities, narratives, and institutions. Capacity creates credibility, which in turn attracts partnerships, and governance is sustained through a recurring adaptive cycle.

Table 1. How Middle Powers Convert Strategic Advantage: BBB Framework in Action

Case / Primary

Driver

Build

Elements

Broadcast ElementsBolster

Elements

Synergistic

Interplay

Taiwan / BuildAdvanced-node chip manufacturing (TSMC); “silicon shield” conceptBranding as indispensable; export-control diplomacy; trusted-supplier alliances anchoring global chip flowAsymmetric defense doctrine that frames the protection of fabrication facilities as a shared international interestSemiconductor dominance creates economic leverage, broadcast globally, and institutionalized through alliance-integrated defense planningEstonia / BroadcastPost-attack digital infrastructure; X-Road, blockchain, and i-Voting systemsDigital-state brand; NATO first-mover lab status; competence legitimacyStrong cyber institutions enabling rapid NATO-integrated mobilizationTechnological credibility reinforces alliance influence; institutional agility turns brand into operational readinessChile / BolsterLithium reserves; DLE innovation; majority state stakes; R&D investmentESG-compliant supply; reputation for transparent and ethical extraction; strategic market accessAnticipatory governance; institutionalized revenue-sharing; indigenous board participation; environmental legitimacyGovernance foresight enables sustainable extraction, enhances international legitimacy, and generates enduring strategic leverage

As Table 1 illustrates, each case demonstrated a different entry point in the BBB. Sustainable influence emerges only when all three elements mutually reinforce each other cyclically. Power conversion is recursive, with states continuously aligning their unique capacities with credible narratives and institutional power.

Whether through Taiwan’s supply chain centrality, Estonia’s reputational agility, or Chile’s governance-led ESG strategy, these examples show how middle powers orchestrate influence beyond their material means. The Build–Broadcast–Bolster framework clarifies these mechanisms and offers a roadmap for how smaller states can navigate and shape a complex multipolar world.

Conclusion

In today’s increasingly interconnected global environment, influence is exerted more frequently by those who render themselves indispensable than by those deemed invincible. While traditional power models focused on military strength, GDP, and resource endowments remain valuable for understanding great power competition, they are insufficient for explaining how middle and emerging powers leverage human agency and smart power strategies to exert a disproportionate influence relative to their hard power.

The BBB framework illustrates that strategic influence is not a passive byproduct of circumstances but is actively constructed by nations through creative problem-framing, aligning national narratives with systemic leverage points, and forming enduring coalitions. These cases demonstrate how innovation, emerging technologies, and anticipatory governance enable smaller states to exert a greater impact than their size might suggest, creating a strategic paradox: great powers’ reliance on complex global systems exposes them to the influence of niche-specialized middle powers.

These dynamics present a complex mix of opportunities and challenges for both practitioners (military officers, analysts, and policy advisors) and academics studying international relations and strategic competition.

• Offensively, the United States and its allies should proactively cultivate specialized dependencies with middle powers to forge partnerships anchored in essential capabilities that transcend traditional military competition.
• Defensively, intelligence efforts must expand beyond tracking material capabilities to include governance innovations and reputational strategies that reveal emerging leverage points.
• Operationally, stability and partner-building missions should prioritize fostering world-class niche capabilities within smaller states over the broad conventional force development.
• Most critically, alliance structures must evolve from burden-sharing models to capability-specialization networks, where smaller partners exercise leadership in distinct domains of influence. This necessitates academics to move beyond the static inventories of material assets toward dynamic, systems-level analyses that trace how capabilities, narratives, and institutions co-evolve to generate lasting strategic advantages.

By illuminating these dynamics, the BBB framework equips practitioners and academics with a powerful tool to anticipate and shape the next era of competitive statecraft, where strategic skill in orchestrating capabilities, perceptions, and institutions through Building, Broadcasting, and Bolstering proves far more significant than the mere accumulation of raw power.

In an age where alliances are strained and the rules-based order is contested, influence will belong not to those with the most enormous arsenals, but to those who make themselves essential. The BBB framework helps explain how—and why—that is happening now.

Tags: Alliance Management, Build–Broadcast–Bolster Framework, Coalition Warfare, Critical Infrastructure, Deterrence, Great Power Competition, Middle Powers

About The Author

• 
  
• Elizabeth Boyett
• Elizabeth E. Boyett is a multidisciplinary graduate student-practitioner pursuing an MA in Global Security with a concentration in Irregular Warfare at Arizona State University. She also holds an MA by Research in Covert Action, HUMINT, and the Psychology of Intelligence Elicitation from the University of Buckingham, as well as an MA in Human Rights. Additionally, she completed graduate-level studies at Harvard focusing on public leadership, intelligence, and biotechnology ethics. Before transitioning to national security, she spent two decades in executive roles, leading strategic initiatives across the healthcare sector. Her research now centers on managing uncertainty and developing frameworks that enhance strategic advantages for intelligence and national security communities.
• 
  

7. Army bids adieu to ISR Task Force, stands up Strategy and Transformation Directorate

​Two words that may be mutually exclusive: institutionalize and transformation. 

My snarky comment aside, intelligence must transform and evolve to keep up with the changing character of war.

Army bids adieu to ISR Task Force, stands up Strategy and Transformation Directorate - Breaking Defense

“This institutionalizes this role of transformation that we've been doing in the ISR Task Force, makes it more permanent, and also combines it with the important role of strategy and strategy formulation for the Army Intel Corps,” said Director for the Strategy & Transformation Office Andrew Evans.

breakingdefense.com · Ashley Roque · August 27, 2025

WASHINGTON — The Army is standing up the Directorate for Strategy and Transformation inside its intelligence shop as part of a larger shake up that involves dissolving the ISR Task Force, according to a senior official helping lead the charge.

“This institutionalizes this role of transformation that we’ve been doing in the ISR Task Force, makes it more permanent, and also combines it with the important role of strategy and strategy formulation for the Army Intel Corps,” said Andrew Evans, who headed up the former task force before being tapped as the new director for the Strategy & Transformation Office inside the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence shop (G-2).

Stood up during the first Trump administration, the ISR Task Force was charged with modernizing the service’s airborne ISR fleet at a time when the larger department focus was pivoting from terrorism towards large-scale contingency planning in the Indo-Pacific. The task force’s work included shepherding in several high-profile, Greek mythology-themed development and acquisition programs like the Athena-Sensor, centered around two converted Global 6500s, another pair of converted Global 6500s dubbed the Athena-Radar initiative, and the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES).

“We [also] expanded beyond sensing, and looked at what it meant to modernize training in new ways and make it more accessible for soldiers,” Evans told Breaking Defense on Friday. “We did a lot with pilots … and a lot of coordination with units.

“What we discovered along the way is that transformation is not a one and done thing,” he added. “You don’t transform to achieve some end state and say, ‘I’m done transforming’ in the world where threats continuously change, you also must continuously transform.”

Evans has worked to sunset that office, but its work will now be carried out by a transformation division inside the G-2. And above that new division is now the Directorate for Strategy and Transformation, with Evans at the helm.

“I have executive oversight of that as one division, but also strategy engagements and the performance acceleration and business transformation,” he explained.

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“We haven’t fully settled on what this [S&T directorate] will look like,” Evans added. “It’ll be a combination of military, civilians and contracted workforce. And the exact numbers are still being discussed … but it will be a lean team.”

The goal, for that directorate, is to reach initial operating capability by mid-October before hitting full operational capability within a year. Ultimately, Evans explained, his directorate will focus on developing an assessment capability for programs, ensuring that investments are returning the right value for the Army’s intel community, and getting prototypes into soldiers’ hands at a fast clip.

breakingdefense.com · Ashley Roque · August 27, 2025

8. Spectacular Drone Strikes and the Future Sanctuary of the U.S. Homeland

​Could drones create a 9-11 like event? Certainly Ukraine showed us the possibilities.

Excerpts:

Learning the Right Lessons

What does all of this imply for U.S. strategy? First, while detecting and defeating incoming drones against high value targets at places like military bases is vital, the long lead times involved in the Ukrainian and Israeli operations suggest an opportunity to try to identify and thwart threats far left of launch.

...

Second, the United States should prioritize making its most exposed assets more resilient. Ships docked at naval bases or warplanes parked on runways, for example, are far more vulnerable than hardened missile silos.

...

Third, there is a pressing need for more research, analysis, and wargaming of this issue. Recent wargames run by the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office and RAND are an important start.

...

Additional investigations to better understand which bases and potential targets are most susceptible to these kinds of spectacular attacks in the first place would be welcome. In their article, for example, Hunzeker and Yu argue that Taiwan is especially vulnerable given its challenges with espionage and smuggling. While the United States may not face these same problems as acutely, it is still a big country with lots of commercial activity and points of entry. Moreover, the United States has bases in foreign countries with their own unique vulnerabilities and weak points. Mapping the landscape and allocating resources appropriately is important given the near-impossible task of defending everywhere at all times.

Fourth, the Pentagon should learn from these cases — not just defensively, but offensively. If conflict breaks out in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea, the ability to launch precision, deep penetration attacks using small, expendable systems would be impactful. Just as it is critical to map the previously discussed vulnerabilities, it is equally critical to understand where adversaries are most vulnerable to these sorts of attacks and develop strategies to exploit them should conflict break out. As Bego notes, Ukraine’s operation against Russia “threaten[ed] to undermine a long-standing strategy of relying on its vast size and strategic depth to shield key military and industrial assets from within striking distance of any front-line on its western border.” China, as a large country, may similarly be concerned about the implications of such attacks for its own security. The United States and its allies should take note and prepare accordingly.

Spectacular Drone Strikes and the Future Sanctuary of the U.S. Homeland - War on the Rocks

Michael Poznansky and Erik Sand

warontherocks.com · August 27, 2025

How vulnerable is the continental United States to drone attack? Could a wily adversary cause vast destruction of military assets on U.S. soil at a fraction of the cost it would take to replace them? Ukraine and Israel’s stunning drone attacks against high value targets deep within Russia and Iran, respectively, in June 2025 raise serious questions about whether the United States homeland will remain a sanctuary. America has long enjoyed the advantages of favorable geography. Aside from nuclear-armed missiles, the continental United States has largely remained out of reach of conventional kinetic attacks from major adversaries.

While fears about the revolutionary potential of these drone attacks — Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web and Israel’s Operation Rising Lion — are understandable, they are potentially overstated. On the one hand, they clearly show that even inexpensive, short-range drones can be used to cripple critical infrastructure deep inside enemy territory, a feat that would have previously required tools like long-range precision missiles or exquisite cyber capabilities. And yet, their spectacular nature is precisely what makes them so extraordinary. They are hard to pull off and hard to repeat.

The key lessons lie in what made them possible in the first place. These strikes were more than a matter of buying cheap drones and hitting hard-to-reach targets. They relied on detailed intelligence, elite special operations forces, and extensive logistical coordination, all hallmarks of state actors with impressive organizational capacity. In this sense, they resemble high-end cyber operations — and large intelligence operations more broadly. While cheaper, less impactful cyber tools are widely available, the most bespoke and consequential operations largely remain the purview of highly capable state actors. These drone attacks also resemble cyber operations in that they are burned once deployed. This makes them most useful for a first strike in the opening stages of a war or during protracted conflict. Drawing the right lessons from these operations is essential for right sizing the threat and mitigating damage should a highly capable adversary attempt to pull off such an attack against the United States.

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Growing Threats to Sanctuary

With massive oceans on each coast and friendly neighbors to the north and south, the continental United States has long had sanctuary from conventional attacks. The challenge of generating military effects across large distances meant nuclear-armed ballistic missiles were the primary way America’s rivals could threaten its homeland. Nuclear weapons compensated for conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles’ chief weakness — their lack of precision — but their practical military utility was limited for a variety of reasons.

This picture has changed in recent years. Emerging technologies are shrinking the globe and chipping away at sanctuary from non-nuclear attack by major adversaries. Many have warned that cyber tools make it possible for states to reach into the territory of rivals from thousands of miles away, wreaking havoc on cities, ports, and bases. The 2018 National Defense Strategy identified cyberspace, along with other non-conventional threats, as a major challenge to the sanctuary of the homeland.

With respect to kinetic weapons, the revolution in the precision of intercontinental ballistic missiles is perhaps the greatest threat to physical sanctuary on the horizon. As one of us argues in a forthcoming article, “Strategy in the New Missile Age,” technological improvement will soon enable great powers to build conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles that are both relatively cheap and precise enough to be militarily relevant – at least with good intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance and against unhardened fixed targets as well as, potentially, relocatable targets. Air-launched cruise missiles, including from long-range bombers, represent another potential threat to physical sanctuary.

What made the recent Ukrainian and Israeli operations so spectacular is that they used short-range drones in ways that approximated long-range strike capabilities. The result was consequential kinetic effects deep inside enemy territory. Ukraine’s gambit, known as Operation Spider’s Web, used over 100 cheap, pre-positioned drones to target multiple Russian airbases housing nuclear-capable bombers across five different time zones. The drones relied on commercial autopilot software known as ArduPilot and used AI for targeting. Ukraine estimated that they caused $7 billion in losses for Russia.

Less than two weeks after Ukraine’s operation, Israel carried out its own stunning attack against Iran. Operation Rising Lion entailed many moving parts, including the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Most germane here was Israel’s use of drones pre-positioned at key locations. When the military operation commenced, small drones disabled air defense and ballistic missile launchers in Iran, contributing to Israeli air superiority.

Commentary on these operations has rightly pointed to their spectacular nature, emphasizing the distance at which attacks occurred from their perpetrators’ bases as a major achievement. In Foreign Affairs, Michael Horowitz, Lauren Kahn, and Joshua Schwartz argue that these strikes showcase how vulnerable expensive systems are “to cheap, precise mass capabilities, no matter how deep into a country’s territory they are.” Writing in War on the Rocks, Michael Hunzeker and Yuster Yu observe that “Ukraine’s daring, multi-axis strike showed that drones can serve as a cheap and effective way to conduct highly precise ‘long range’ strikes (by virtue of having been covertly pre-positioned near Russian bases far from the front) with little to no warning.” Katja Bego of Chatham House notes that Ukraine’s attack in particular “offered a glimpse into the future of warfare, transformed by access to cheap, widely available technology such as small drones, in which anything, anywhere can become a target.”

Recentering Hidden Constraints

There is no question that Ukraine and Israel’s operations were breathtaking in scale and scope. They were also ingenious in design and execution. But that is precisely the point. Their sheer logistical complexity makes them less like increasingly precise intercontinental ballistic missiles and more akin to high-end cyber and intelligence operations. As with the use of drones on the frontlines in Ukraine, malicious cyber operations occur constantly. But the most destructive and costly attacks are exceedingly hard to pull off. They take months and sometimes years to plan. They require highly specialized intelligence including a detailed understanding of usually closed and hardened networks. An unexpected change in the environment — such as an inopportune software update or a password change — can jeopardize entire operations. In other words, they are complex, logistically taxing, and necessitate many things all going right in succession. These attributes aptly describe Ukraine and Israel’s operations.

According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Operation Spider’s Web unfolded over the course of a year and a half from start to finish. That puts the initial inception date around late 2023 or early 2024. The drones were smuggled into Russia and inserted into wooden cabins with detachable, remotely controllable roofs that were loaded onto trucks. The unsuspecting Russian drivers received phone calls telling them where to stop upon nearing their intended targets. The AI systems were reportedly trained on decommissioned Russian bombers housed in military aviation museums in Ukraine to aid in target recognition and the identification of weak points.

The Israeli operation was similarly complex. Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, started planning for the use of drones as part of a broader operation several years back. Israeli intelligence knew where Iranian missiles were located “but needed to be in a position to attack them given the country’s size and distance from Israel.” Israel smuggled the parts for quadcopters along with explosives into Iran over the course of months. They used “suitcases, trucks, and shipping containers” in conjunction with unwitting business partners as part of the effort. Once the materials were in country, “Agents on the ground would collect the munitions and distribute them to the teams. Israel trained the team leaders in third countries, and they in turn trained the teams.” In other words, in both cases there was a lot that had to go right to pull off these operations — and a lot that could have gone wrong.

None of this should be taken to mean that a similar attack on critical targets, including military bases inside the United States or abroad, is out of the realm of possibility. It is not. But emphasizing these operations’ revolutionary nature without accounting for their complexities and the organizational prowess on display paints a misleading picture. For its part, Israel’s Mossad is among the most capable intelligence services in the world, particularly in the Middle East. And while Ukraine is much weaker than Russia, certain cultural and linguistic similarities combined with years of hard-fought experience becoming a world-class leader in the use of drones likely contributed to the operation’s success. And yet, both countries still spent years preparing and there was a lot that could have ultimately gone awry.

Learning the Right Lessons

What does all of this imply for U.S. strategy? First, while detecting and defeating incoming drones against high value targets at places like military bases is vital, the long lead times involved in the Ukrainian and Israeli operations suggest an opportunity to try to identify and thwart threats far left of launch. What made these operations tactically different, and more difficult to defeat, than traditional sabotage efforts was that no human was needed to gain direct access to the target bases or the supply chains that support them to plant explosives. It is therefore critical to focus on detecting and disrupting plots before they materialize, a relatively traditional counterintelligence task.

Adapting to this change will require greater coordination between the military, intelligence community, and law enforcement to ensure that adversaries cannot exploit the seams that often exist between them. It will also require creative solutions that reduce the threat surface. The decision in recent years to give the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States greater ability to veto foreign land purchases near sensitive military sites is looking especially prescient as one such step.

Second, the United States should prioritize making its most exposed assets more resilient. Ships docked at naval bases or warplanes parked on runways, for example, are far more vulnerable than hardened missile silos. This was less problematic in an era where the U.S. homeland was effectively out of reach from conventional kinetic attacks. But that era is coming to a close. Because small drones can necessarily only carry relatively small explosive payloads, even minimal hardening or guidance problems may defeat such attacks.

The adoption of a layered defense is also necessary. U.S. Northern Command, which plays a key synchronizing role in counter-drone defense at home, has expressed interest in mobile flyaway kits, a “rapidly deployable, prepackaged counter-drone technology, along with personnel trained to employ that technology, that can be dispatched via commercial aircraft to get to the installation in need.” According to reports, these kits will ideally not only include detection capabilities but also the capacity to bring drones down. The Services should certainly take this interest seriously. The good news is that research suggests the public supports counter-drone operations. But flyaway kits will be more effective with good counterintelligence work to identify threats with enough lead time. Whatever the ultimate answer, reducing the vulnerability of high value assets to direct kinetic strikes from cheap, short-range drones is essential for maintaining a robust deterrent and generating forces in the event of conflict.

Third, there is a pressing need for more research, analysis, and wargaming of this issue. Recent wargames run by the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office and RAND are an important start. Their most recent game, held in March 2025, helped U.S. Northern Command refine its approach and identified the need for coordination from a wide range of entities. Working through relevant legal issues and establishing processes for interagency decisions, which will need to be made quickly, is critical.

Additional investigations to better understand which bases and potential targets are most susceptible to these kinds of spectacular attacks in the first place would be welcome. In their article, for example, Hunzeker and Yu argue that Taiwan is especially vulnerable given its challenges with espionage and smuggling. While the United States may not face these same problems as acutely, it is still a big country with lots of commercial activity and points of entry. Moreover, the United States has bases in foreign countries with their own unique vulnerabilities and weak points. Mapping the landscape and allocating resources appropriately is important given the near-impossible task of defending everywhere at all times.

Fourth, the Pentagon should learn from these cases — not just defensively, but offensively. If conflict breaks out in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea, the ability to launch precision, deep penetration attacks using small, expendable systems would be impactful. Just as it is critical to map the previously discussed vulnerabilities, it is equally critical to understand where adversaries are most vulnerable to these sorts of attacks and develop strategies to exploit them should conflict break out. As Bego notes, Ukraine’s operation against Russia “threaten[ed] to undermine a long-standing strategy of relying on its vast size and strategic depth to shield key military and industrial assets from within striking distance of any front-line on its western border.” China, as a large country, may similarly be concerned about the implications of such attacks for its own security. The United States and its allies should take note and prepare accordingly.

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Michael Poznansky is an associate professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core member of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025) and In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Erik Sand is an assistant professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core member of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. He is also a research affiliate with the Security Studies Program at MIT.

The views expressed here are the authors’ own and do not represent those of the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, or the Department of Defense.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · August 27, 2025

9. Building a New Brain: Transforming Military Schoolhouses into AI Battle Labs

​Will we need small nuclear reactors to generate the power necessary for AI? (attempt at humor).

War is always about fighting, but fighting goes better with thinking.

This is an important conclusion:

The best militaries historically are those capable of reflection and innovation. They don’t rest on their laurels. They create enlightened soldiers who embrace the moment. In the 21st century, that means combining the best of human judgment with AI agents to create new ways to plan and fight wars. That process should start in the schoolhouse.

Building a New Brain: Transforming Military Schoolhouses into AI Battle Labs - War on the Rocks

Benjamin Jensen

warontherocks.com · August 28, 2025

The military’s AI strategy is starting to resemble a bad dating app: lots of swipes, few lasting matches. The Trump administration’s new AI Action Plan offers potential to take things to the next level. It calls for deeper investments by the U.S. Department of Defense in algorithmic warfare. The plan calls for turning senior military colleges into hubs for AI research where students learn and apply core AI skills. This approach complements calls in the Army Transformation Initiative to integrate AI agents into next-generation command and control.

Realizing the Trump administration’s vision of algorithmic warfare will require radically rethinking what constitutes senior-level education in the profession of arms and embracing key ideas about creating data-driven learning organizations.

Indeed, senior military colleges should become centers for AI training, research, and application, with classrooms functioning more like battle labs than lecture halls. Professional military education should serve as an organic refinement ecosystem — a modern version of the general staff — where student and faculty problem-solving is captured and fed back into AI systems.

Teaching should focus less on general reflections on history and theory and more on solving pressing operational problems, with the best student solutions serving as an organic feedback loop that builds reinforcement learning with human feedback into the modern profession. These schools should become smaller but more elite, with fewer administrators and faculty who combine teaching with applied research on war, ensuring the classroom itself becomes a site where new knowledge is created and refined.

Done right, these schoolhouses could truly be the new brain of the military.

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The State of AI in the Department of Defense

The generative AI turn is still an open market yet to be consolidated in the U.S. military. Foundation models such as ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini, and Claude, along with applications like Palantir’s Maven, Scale AI’s Donovan, and others, present themselves as the path to the future of planning and decision-making. Next to real progress are products polished for show but empty in substance. Hackathons, experiments like Thunderforge, and endless “military GPTs” blur the line between innovation and illusion, leaving leaders and staff officers struggling to separate what is useful from what is hype.

The spectacle distracts from the harder task of building the intellectual foundations that AI will need. Everyone poses as an AI expert, but few grasp the underlying technology well enough to apply it in war. The probability of believing the hype increases with every bad claim by industry, teachers, and peers alike. Students leave with unrealistic expectations or become numb, preferring to tune out rather than lean into building their own AI agents and narrow use-case applications.

What is missing is a deliberate effort to organize history, theory, and doctrine into usable forms that machines can learn from. Without this curated foundation, models will continue to know more about celebrities than about Carl von Clausewitz or William Slim. The military professional becomes lost in the noise.

If the military is serious about AI, it should prioritize expertise over performance. The real challenge is curating domain-specific knowledge that allows algorithms to deal with fog, friction, and shifting aims in war, and to apply concepts like operational design, centers of gravity, and emerging ideas such as pulsed operations and mosaic warfare.

Building the Brain of the Officer Corps

In an era of agentic AI, the military will need a collective mind, with officers able to think critically and challenge what algorithms produce. Professional forums should be places where learning happens alongside the creation of new knowledge that feeds directly into the systems used for planning and operations. Building this brain cannot be outsourced, since it depends on capturing how the military’s best thinkers approach problems and apply those insights to refine foundational models.

This brain of an army is an extension of an old idea — the general staff — but adapted to modern information networks. In the late 19th century, Spencer Wilkinson published The Brain of an Army, describing the German general staff and its key role in planning successful military campaigns. The Prussian model, with its distinct ideas about education and how to unleash “enlightened soldiers,” became the standard for military organizations. This model holds a special place for a mix of campaign analysis through historical cases and decision games, captured in Clausewitz’s On War in the idea of critical analysis in Book 2, Chapter 5. The true professional uses history to accumulate insights into the complexity of warfare, but with an applied eye toward future campaigns. Studying war and planning become co-constituted and inseparable, creating a need for less lectures and meandering seminar discussions and more time spent designing and fighting campaigns. That means civilian faculty will need to spend more time learning about joint all-domain operations and how to plan rather than hiding in disciplinary comfort zones.

Done right, this process produces new knowledge. Students have to do more than show they can solve stale “schoolhouse” solutions. They should demonstrate they can be thinking agents — neurons in the brain of the military, capable of generating estimates, analyzing courses of action, and functional planning. This analytical process hones their judgment while producing options for solving key operational problems and identifying requirements for building the future force alongside key requirements of theater posture, access, basing, and overflight to execute plans.

To make the AI Action Plan work, this process of knowledge production ought to become the beating heart of modern professional military education and senior service colleges. Faculty should do research with students, not just disseminate glittering generalities and epiphanies. Students should be pushed hard, and some will fail, to demonstrate they have the foundational expertise and can apply it to the study of major campaigns.

Most importantly, analytical processes — from deliberate planning to campaign analysis and wargaming — should be based on doctrine and domain-specific datasets the military can use to refine AI models. Foundational models are generalists by design, so they need refinement. At the most basic level, this can mean asking better questions, shaping how algorithms search for answers, and setting rules that narrow their outputs. Modern warfare, however, requires more than these basics. It calls for reinforcement learning with human feedback, where the knowledge created in the classroom is used to sharpen the models that will underpin AI agents across the force.

That means the classroom becomes a data capture site. Professional military education becomes a new type of “brain of the army” where algorithms learn from top thinkers. This pivot isn’t hard or costly, but it does require structural and cultural change.

Structurally, the schoolhouses will likely become smaller but more elite. The money saved on large administrative support staff and faculty can be directed into buying AI licenses and building the type of data capture in the classroom needed to train algorithms. This will require changing the joint regulations that push schools to dilute their focus on modern war while better aligning graduate degrees and student learning outcomes.

Culturally, the faculty will need to reconceptualize their role. There are great professors in modern professional military education, and they will have a home, but it will be one in which they both educate and research alongside students and focus on war, not pet projects. It will be a world that focuses more on practicum than core courses and embraces cooperative education and connectivism as learning theories. Students will learn by doing, and in the process, create new knowledge that refines AI models and agents used in the operating forces. And it will be a world in which faculty, by definition, should be top researchers who work with student teams to solve key operational problems.

“If I Only Had a Brain”

Military education is an old art in need of new ideas and approaches that better align it with the reality of modern war. The classroom should become a battle lab where teams analyze problems, test hypotheses, and generate new solutions to operational problems. This entire process becomes central to training AI models, creating in effect a new “brain of the army” for an algorithmic era. It is a bold reform and one that will require substantial change, ranging from how faculty and students are evaluated to the role of technology in the classroom. These changes are less a function of money and more a function of deliberate choices and thinking about the opportunity costs at play in the current design and execution of professional military education. There will be fewer administrative faculty, like deans and academic support staff, and higher requirements for aligning teaching and practice in the classroom. There will need to be more deliberate mechanisms for identifying key operational problems, moving beyond lists and technical approaches to data capture and model refinement.

The best militaries historically are those capable of reflection and innovation. They don’t rest on their laurels. They create enlightened soldiers who embrace the moment. In the 21st century, that means combining the best of human judgment with AI agents to create new ways to plan and fight wars. That process should start in the schoolhouse.

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Benjamin Jensen is the Frank E. Petersen chair at the School of Advanced Warfighting, Marine Corps University and the director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The views in this article are those of the author and not those of Marine Corps University, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government.

warontherocks.com · August 28, 2025

10. From Shield to Spear: How Golden Dome Points the Way toward Breaking China’s Kill Web

​Excerpts:

Modern warfare favors those who sense fast, decide faster, and act fastest. Against a centralized and synchronized adversary, that advantage is magnified. By targeting operational coherence at its source, the United States could impose its own rhythm, turning the People’s Liberation Army’s strength into vulnerability. The shield that defends the homeland may instead sever command networks, blind sensors, scramble timing, and leave the kill web disjointed before it can act.

Golden Dome’s greatest power lies not in what it stops, but in signaling what space capabilities prevent. When space-based interceptors reach into the enemy’s system, they strike at the processes that coordinate China’s forces. They make the first strike less certain. They make the kill web less synchronized. They make the adversary less capable. In a Pacific conflict, the first move is the most lethal—and the weapon that can unravel the enemy’s coherence becomes the instrument of decisive advantage. The shield still defends.

The spear still strikes. Operational coherence is the linchpin—and space-based interceptors hold the key to severing it. If the system is fractured first, the war may never fully materialize. In modern war, the first strike is not only judged by what lands, but by also what never arrives.

From Shield to Spear: How Golden Dome Points the Way toward Breaking China’s Kill Web - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · Matthew Smokovitz · August 28, 2025

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If the United States fights China on China’s terms, it may risk collapse in the opening hours. Such a war would not begin with a slow exchange of fire—it would be a race between the two sides to sever the other’s ability to think and act as a single, coordinated force. Beijing has spent decades forging its warfighting system into a tightly integrated brain and nervous system. Theater commanders fuse data from satellites, over-the-horizon radars, airborne sensors, and undersea arrays into a shared real-time picture. From this picture, precisely timed orders flow to air, sea, and missile forces. That operational coherence—seeing, deciding, and striking as one—is what turns scattered operational assets into a lethal, synchronized kill web.

That coherence is China’s greatest strength and its most brittle hinge. When missile salvos arrive just as bombers spring in from their launch points, when submarines maneuver without orders because their neural network tells them the enemy’s retreat path—this is operational synchronization in action. But when data flows stall, when timing errors creep in, that neural network misfires. Missiles still launch, radars still receive—but the system fights as a collection of disjointed parts. Strikes fizzle. Orders lag. Reflexes fail.

Traditionally, the United States has attacked such integrated systems by methodically rolling them back—destroying radars, missile batteries, and command centers one by one. In Desert Storm, in the Balkans, that worked. But against China’s kill web? It is a slow, costly path to disaster. Mobile launchers reposition before they are struck. Redundant sensors light back up. Alternate comms routes reroute data. The brain and nervous system remain intact even as its limbs are wounded.

This is where Golden Dome enters the discussion. Conceived as a homeland missile shield, Golden Dome envisions a multilayered architecture—with one layer even space-based—using both sensors and interceptors in orbit. This space layer is vital for defense—it is a vantage point above the battlefield no terrestrial platform can match. But as the concept takes shape, it makes clear that such a layer will possibly be necessary to countering China’s kill web. Space-based interceptors are not just tools to strike incoming missiles targeting the US homeland and its interests; they can also hold the enemy’s neural infrastructure at risk.

From orbit, interceptors may project effects across the kill web in a single sweep. Directed-energy weapons could blind or degrade intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites, narrowing the commander’s field of vision. Cyber payloads could infiltrate fusion nodes, injecting phantom ships, ghost launchers, and false threats into their digital battlespace. Precision interference with navigation satellites could scramble missile salvo timing—delaying a strike by seconds or minutes, long enough to turn a coordinated hammer blow into scattered, ineffective fire.

These are not science-fiction fantasies. The United States already tests directed-energy weapons capable of sensor damage, interferes with navigation in civilian and military domains, and employs cyber effects to corrupt enemy command and control systems under its “persistent engagement” doctrine. While not fully mature or operationalized at scale, these technologies are progressing quickly. What is novel is envisioning them combined from orbit—simultaneously, preemptively, and across the entire network.

This strike is likely not gradual; it is instantaneous. Orbiting interceptors could plunge into the enemy kill web’s senses, scorching its eyesight. Then they scramble its synapses and timing. As the kill web stumbles, clandestinely placed unmanned systems move in. Autonomous surface vessels strike coastal radar sites. Air-launched drones swarm mobile missile batteries. Undersea drones cut seabed sensors and submarine comms—all while People’s Liberation Army detection struggles to keep time and space coherent.

The effects continue to snowball. Decision-makers are forced into fragmentary choices. A surface action group may move without air support. A missile battery may fire before the target enters range, or after it has passed. Aircraft may arrive only to find the windows of opportunity to strike have closed. The kill web, once a synchronized organism, becomes a lattice of failing parts. Openings spread. The advantage slides into United States hands.

This is a strategic shift from attrition to disruption, from destruction to paralysis. The goal is not to eliminate every node. The goal is to sever the neural connections that give the system its power. Operational coherence is the target. Weapons, sensors, and platforms may exist—but without coordination, they cannot fight as one. Space-based interceptors, with their speed and ability to exert simultaneous effects across the battlespace, appear the most effective instrument for doing this.

By accepting the premise that space-based assets seem critical to countering China’s kill web, the question then becomes: Which assets? One option, of course, is to plan and develop the capabilities separately from Golden Dome. A more cost-effective option, however, is simply to operationalize Golden Dome with such a use case in mind. Critics will argue using the Golden Dome offensively escalates conflict—that weaponizing a homeland defense asset is reckless. But escalation is not reversed by passivity. China’s doctrine emphasizes seizing the initiative; its kill web exists to do exactly that. Doing nothing cedes the opening salvo. Disrupting coherence is not reckless—it is precise, systemic, and deterrent. It targets the enemy’s central nervous system, not its cities. It renders the first strike less likely, not more. That is escalation control through denial.

Moreover, neither Golden Dome as a homeland defense system nor an implementation that enables offensive use during wartime violates the Outer Space Treaty, and the loudest critic of US plans to place systems like these in space is China—who is leaning ahead aggressively to enhance its own space-based military capabilities.

Regardless of whether the assets required to defeat China’s kill web are included in Golden Dome’s development or not, execution utilizing space-based effectors in wartime will demand resilient United States command and control—hardened against retaliation—and secure, redundant communications linking space effects to unmanned follow-on forces. Timing must be exact. Success is measured not simply by the destruction of individual nodes or munitions expended, but by the degree of operational coherence denied to the adversary.

In a Pacific war, victory won’t come from intercepting every missile or destroying every launch site. It will come from denying China the ability to fight as one coherent force. Space-based interceptors strike at the system’s brain and nervous system, disrupting information flow, timing precision, and unity of action—turning our conceptualization of space from that of a shield into one of a spear capable of ending the war before it begins.

Modern warfare favors those who sense fast, decide faster, and act fastest. Against a centralized and synchronized adversary, that advantage is magnified. By targeting operational coherence at its source, the United States could impose its own rhythm, turning the People’s Liberation Army’s strength into vulnerability. The shield that defends the homeland may instead sever command networks, blind sensors, scramble timing, and leave the kill web disjointed before it can act.

Golden Dome’s greatest power lies not in what it stops, but in signaling what space capabilities prevent. When space-based interceptors reach into the enemy’s system, they strike at the processes that coordinate China’s forces. They make the first strike less certain. They make the kill web less synchronized. They make the adversary less capable. In a Pacific conflict, the first move is the most lethal—and the weapon that can unravel the enemy’s coherence becomes the instrument of decisive advantage. The shield still defends.

The spear still strikes. Operational coherence is the linchpin—and space-based interceptors hold the key to severing it. If the system is fractured first, the war may never fully materialize. In modern war, the first strike is not only judged by what lands, but by also what never arrives.

Major Matthew “Niner” Smokovitz is a current fellow at the United States Air Force Academy, Institute of Future Conflict and a graduated instructor of the United States Air Force Weapons School.

The views expressed are those of the author, are based on personal open-source research, and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: NASA

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mwi.westpoint.edu · Matthew Smokovitz · August 28, 2025

11. A Dozen Countries Drill in Indo-Pacific Exercises

​Our silk web of allies, partners, and friends.

Silk Web of Alliances: Trump’s Legacy and the Indo-Pacific’s Future

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/silk-web-of-alliances-trumps-legacy-and-the-indo-pacifics-future/

A Dozen Countries Drill in Indo-Pacific Exercises - USNI News

news.usni.org · Dzirhan Mahadzir · August 27, 2025

U.S. Air Force Special Tactics operators with the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron, walk towards a CASA C-295 during Super Garuda Shield 2025 at Gatot Soebroto Airport, Lampung, Indonesia, August 24, 2025. US Army photo

The U.S.-Indonesia led Super Garuda Shield and Guam’s Pacific Vanguard kicked off this week, drawing thousands of military personnel from a dozen countries to the Indo-Pacific to participate in the two multilateral exercises.

The U.S. and Indonesia formally launched Super Garuda Shield 25 in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. The multidomain exercise is held annually in various parts of Indonesia. It runs until Sept. 4.

“This year is the largest Super Garuda Shield ever with over 6,500 participants and 13 nations, which represents a commitment to our partnership and to the sovereignty of each country through the prism of mutual respect,” Adm. Samuel Paparo Jr., commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said in a news release.

Along with the U.S. and Indonesia, countries participating in the drills include Australia, Canada, India, Japan, the Republic of Singapore, Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands.

“Designed to test interoperability, sharpen combat readiness and demonstrate combined resolve, Super Garuda Shield 2025 will challenge forces across air, land, sea, cyber, information and space domains, often simultaneously,” reads the release.

Forces will practice rapid High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) infiltration missions, integrate in urban warfare and small unit tactics, and conduct medical operations under simulated battlefield conditions. Units will also conduct joint staff planning and combined arms live-fire events, operate from austere airfields, execute airborne and amphibious assaults, and navigate complex jungle terrain, according to the release. Civic action is also embedded into this year’s exercise.

The Indonesian Navy welcomes destroyer USS John Finn (DDG-113) to Jakarta’s port of Tanjung Priok on Aug. 25, 2025. Indonesian Navy photo

Marine Rotational Force-Darwin (MRF-D) announced its participation in the drills with a video posted on its social media page, while an Indonesian Navy release on Monday stated destroyer USS John Finn (DDG-113) was supporting Super Garuda Shield 25. The U.S. destroyer arrived in Jakarta’s port of Tanjung Priok that day, the Indonesian Navy said.

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) tank landing ship JS Osumi (LST-4001) will participate along with embarked elements of the ground force’s Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade (ARDB). Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s 1st Airborne Brigade will conduct airborne operations. Osumi and its embarked ARDB element recently participated in the Australia-led Talisman Sabre exercise, held July 14-Aug. 4 in Australia and Papua New Guinea as part of an amphibious task group.

Also on Monday, Pacific Vanguard kicked off in Guam. Participating countries include maritime forces from the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), Japan’s maritime force, Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN), Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN), U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps. The exercise is geared to enhancing skills in maritime operations, anti-submarine warfare, air warfare and advanced maneuvering scenarios to improve overall interoperability between the forces.

“Exercises like Pacific Vanguard are when our ties to our allies and partners are best displayed,” Rear Adm. Eric Anduze, commander of Carrier Strike Group Five, said in a U.S. Navy news release., “The ability to come together seamlessly and demonstrate the capacity to integrate in all aspects of maritime operations is a testament to the abilities of every country involved. We all share a commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, and Pacific Vanguard is the latest example of that unwavering belief.”

The release stated that this year’s Pacific Vanguard features greater participation from other nations and joint forces compared to last year’s iteration. Royal Australian and New Zealand forces did not participate in Pacific Vanguard 2024. Last year’s iteration also saw the U.S. Navy, ROKN and JMSDF deploy a destroyer each and the Royal Canadian Navy deployed a frigate. The U.S. Navy also deployed P-8A Poseidon Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) and EA-18G Growlers electronic attack aircraft.

The RAAF is expected to deploy its P-8A Poseidon MPA while the JMSDF is deploying helicopter destroyer JS Ise (DDH 182), destroyer JS Suzunami (DD-114) and fleet oiler JS Omi (AOE-426). The ROKN is deploying destroyer ROKS Wang Geon (DDH 978). The U.S. Navy is deploying destroyer USS Higgins (DDG -76), dry cargo ship USNS Richard E. Byrd (T-AKE-4) and P-8A Poseidon aircraft, according to the release.

Higgins, Ise, Suzunami and Wang Geon all previously operated together as part of the amphibious task force in Talisman Sabre 2025 exercise.

“Pacific Vanguard is a valuable opportunity for us to demonstrate our high-end tactical capabilities,” said Rear Adm. Natsui Takashi, commander of JMSDF Escort Flotilla Four. “A free and open Indo-Pacific promotes the prosperous socio-economic activity that has benefited the region. Our deepening partnership with the Republic of Korea Navy, Royal Australian Navy and U.S. Navy in Guam symbolizes this stability and shared deterrence that upholds peace in the Indo-Pacific.”

Related

news.usni.org · Dzirhan Mahadzir · August 27, 2025

12. The State Department laid them off, then it promoted them

​Sigh...

We have met the enemy and he is us.

I think this excerpt shows that the cuts were based purely on numbers and not performance which seems like we are cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Excerpts:

“Headcount reductions have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions, duplicative or redundant offices, and offices where considerable efficiencies may be found from centralization or consolidation of functions and responsibilities,” the department said in a notice to staff on the day it sent the reduction-in-force notices.

...

Selection boards began their reviews before the layoffs and did not know who would be affected when making their recommendations. Cunningham and the State officials who signed off on those recommendations in recent weeks opted not to remove those who were laid off from the approved promotion list.

I don't think the people making these regulations understand that State Department professionals have always demonstrated great fidelity to support and defend the Constitution of the US. Sure there are anecdotes that support the mythical deep state theories but the Foreign Service officers I have worked with over the decades always execute US foreign policy "zealously" regardless of who is in the White House.  

Excerpt:

The Global Talent Management bureau, which oversees State’s promotion process, recently put out new guidance for determining whether employees should be promoted. It created a new section called “fidelity,” which will measure employees’ commitment to “zealously executing [U.S. government] policy” and “completely aligning oneself and one’s team to the most current [U.S. government] goals.” Employees expressed concern that the new standards would prohibit the tradition of constructive dissent and force selection boards to judge FSOs on their willingness to bend to political winds.

The State Department laid them off, then it promoted them

The message is "even excellence cannot protect your career," union says, as "fidelity" is added to promotion criteria.

defenseone.com · Eric Katz

Greg Mathieson / Mai / Getty Images

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The message is "even excellence cannot protect your career," union says, as "fidelity" is added to promotion criteria.

|

August 27, 2025 04:50 PM ET

By Eric Katz

Senior Correspondent

August 27, 2025 04:50 PM ET

Every year, the State Department completes a thorough, multi-layered process to determine who in the Foreign Service will get promoted. This year, news of impending promotion came as a surprise for some employees: just a month ago, State laid them off.

At least 10 people have been promoted since receiving layoff notices in July, according to the American Foreign Service Association, which represents the workers. They work in areas throughout the department: one was a deputy assistant secretary in the Energy Resources Bureau; others were in European and Eurasian Affairs, Economic and Business Affairs, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, and other areas.

The laid-off employees remain on the payroll; they are on paid administrative leave through Nov. 8. If their promotions go through before then, they will separate at a higher grade.

“That the department would simultaneously recognize individuals for exemplary service and eliminate their positions as no longer needed defies logic,” AFSA said in a statement. “Together, these actions send a chilling message: In today’s State Department, even excellence cannot protect your career.”

Under the Trump administration, State has laid off 1,350 employees, including 264 Foreign Service Officers, as part of plans to shed a total of 3,000 employees through reductions-in-force, attrition, and incentivized separations.

State officials said ahead of the layoffs that the department’s reorganization was meant to “refocus” its mission on core objectives and modern needs. One official said the layoffs did not mean that the employees “weren't doing a good job or weren't valuable members of the State Department family,” but rather reflected the administration's obligation to “do what's right for the mission and what's right for the American people.”

“Headcount reductions have been carefully tailored to affect non-core functions, duplicative or redundant offices, and offices where considerable efficiencies may be found from centralization or consolidation of functions and responsibilities,” the department said in a notice to staff on the day it sent the reduction-in-force notices.

State determines promotions of Foreign Service staff through selection boards that review each employee's qualifications every one to four years after their last advancement. The department promotes about 1,400 Foreign Service personnel per year, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. The undersecretary for management at State, a role currently filled by Jose Cunningham, must approve each promotion. Cunningham helped oversee the reorganization efforts and the resulting layoffs.

Selection boards began their reviews before the layoffs and did not know who would be affected when making their recommendations. Cunningham and the State officials who signed off on those recommendations in recent weeks opted not to remove those who were laid off from the approved promotion list.

AFSA reiterated its call for State to reverse the reductions in force, saying the cuts are causing chaos throughout the department.

Employees to be judged on 'fidelity'

The Global Talent Management bureau, which oversees State’s promotion process, recently put out new guidance for determining whether employees should be promoted. It created a new section called “fidelity,” which will measure employees’ commitment to “zealously executing [U.S. government] policy” and “completely aligning oneself and one’s team to the most current [U.S. government] goals.” Employees expressed concern that the new standards would prohibit the tradition of constructive dissent and force selection boards to judge FSOs on their willingness to bend to political winds.

The new standards will go into effect for the 2025-2026 review cycle.

Share your news tips with us:

Eric Katz: ekatz@govexec.com, Signal: erickatz.28

13. Report spotlights tensions in Mali military over Wagner mercenaries

​Wagner and "Africa Corps." You think they could have chosen a better name (well I guess they could have used a "K" in corps)

Report spotlights tensions in Mali military over Wagner mercenaries

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/report-spotlights-tensions-mali-military-over-wagner-mercenaries-2025-08-27/

By Portia Crowe​

​August 27, 202510:07 PM GMT+9Updated August 27, 2025

DAKAR, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Russian private mercenary operations in Mali have sowed resentment within the West African nation's army and military government, caused security lapses, and failed to yield any mining concessions, a new report has found.

The Wagner group began operating in Mali after the military, which seized power in two coups in 2020 and 2021, ejected French and United Nations forces that had been involved in fighting Islamist insurgents for a decade.

Wagner announced its departure in June, but Africa Corps, a Kremlin-controlled paramilitary force, said it would stay on. About 70-80% of the Africa Corps is made up of former Wagner mercenaries, according to several Telegram chats used by Russian mercenaries seen by Reuters.

Rights groups including New York-based Human Rights Watch have repeatedly, opens new tab accused, opens new tab Wagner, fighting alongside Mali's army, of committing atrocities, opens new tab against civilians.

But the report - based on interviews with officials from Mali's military, intelligence agency, finance and mines ministries, and published on Wednesday, opens new tab by investigative research group The Sentry - found that Wagner had also caused trouble for the military and government it was hired to support.

Citing interviews with Malian soldiers, it said Wagner fighters would "often operate outside the chain of command", using army equipment and even carrying out security operations without permission or prior notice.

These missions sometimes led to the loss of equipment, vehicles or personnel, the report said. At other times, they had left Malian soldiers unexpectedly without equipment to fight when insurgent attacks took place, it said.

According to the report, Malian soldiers resent Russian mercenaries who receive "preferential treatment", such as medical evacuations that are otherwise limited due to a scarcity of fuel.

The Russian Defence Ministry and Wagner did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

DESTABILISATION ATTEMPT

Earlier this month, Mali arrested more than 30 soldiers and military officers accused of trying to destabilise the military government.

Sentry investigators told Reuters that the arrests followed a meeting between two generals and several colonels to discuss grievances, including the fact that "Russians" still appeared to be in command in the military bases where they operated.

Any destabilisation attempt would likely be related at least in part to how Wagner and Africa Corps have treated Malian troops, The Sentry investigators said.

Defence Minister Sadio Camara is believed by U.S. officials to have secured the agreement for Wagner to operate in Mali; the U.S. Treasury Department in 2023 sanctioned him, opens new tab for doing so. But The Sentry report said President Assimi Goita himself blocked Wagner from obtaining mining licenses or concessions as payment.

Instead, it found that for Wagner and Africa Corps, "no viable business has been set up; relations with the military... have only worsened with time; and Wagner's fearsome reputation has been undercut by a series of military setbacks".

Reporting by Portia Crowe; editing by Mark Heinrich

14. What to Do About “Mirror Life”?

​Okay. This one made my head hurt. My mind goes to old Army PT - "I will go to my right and you will go to your left, thus creating the mirror effect."

Seriously, I was completely unaware of this before I read this article.

Is this a national security threat that we must address?

Excerpts:

Mirror life remains a distant prospect: it could take researchers ten to 30 years to create a mirror cell that would be able to perform the hallmark activities of life. But this technology could have many uses. It could help scientists explore the origins of life, as reconstructing biochemistry on the “other side” would provide insights into how life evolved on Earth and could occur on other planets in the solar system. Mirror life could also find many potential applications in medicine and biomanufacturing. Human bodies, for instance, are not yet equipped to degrade mirror molecules, so therapeutics based on such molecules could prove to be more stable and durable than current ones.

...

Strategies and guidelines don’t have much value if they are not executed and enforced. National governments backed by international monitoring organizations should establish binding legal frameworks with clear penalties for violations. States should follow the latest guidelines in, for example, choosing to block funding to projects that could lead to the dangerous development of mirror life. Countries could also use trade restrictions and export controls to limit access to specialized materials and equipment needed to develop mirror organisms. For example, although mirror amino acids could be essential components of mirror peptide-based therapeutics, governments could place controls on rare mirror nucleotides that are not needed for therapeutic applications but would be essential for creating mirror DNA and viable mirror organisms. Such targeted controls would allow beneficial research to continue while creating significant barriers to the most dangerous work, forcing potential violators to develop complex workarounds that international intelligence agencies could more easily detect and intercept.

Governments should also determine how best to respond to possible violations of the protocols around mirror life. To be effective, such responses must be implemented internationally and should therefore come under an international system of governance—either through an updated version of the BWC or a new legal framework that governments agree to. With hazards of this nature, nobody is safe unless everybody is safe.

A STITCH IN TIME

The quest to develop mirror life is very different from most bioengineering and biotechnological research. Societies have time now to proactively and collectively develop regulatory frameworks and international norms around technology before it becomes a real and immediate problem. Work around mitigating the future threat of mirror life, including updating the BWC and building new regulatory frameworks to align with technological advancements, could also make it easier for countries to better manage future global biological risks.

It would be an extraordinary outcome if governments and academic communities could collectively scan the horizon for biosecurity hazards and identify risks before they materialize. Such efforts offer a unique opportunity to chart the course of scientific progress, steering the allocation of resources away from possibly dangerous goals, improving countermeasures and preparedness for biological risks, and in the process, laying the foundations for a better, safer future.

What to Do About “Mirror Life”?

Foreign Affairs · More by Liyam Chitayat · August 28, 2025

The Promise and Peril of a Startling New Technology

August 28, 2025

A scientist examining COVID-19 infected cells, Saint Petersburg, May 2020 Anton Vaganov / Reuters

LIYAM CHITAYAT is a Hertz Fellow and MIT Ph.D. student in Computational Systems Biology. She has previously led biodefense and biosecurity programs in the Israeli Ministry of Defense and served as a Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks.

KATE ADAMALA is a McKnight Presidential Fellow Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Polymath Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and a leader of the international synthetic cell engineering community Build-a-Cell.

• More by Kate Adamala

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For many years, researchers have been pursuing the development of what scientists have called “mirror life.” This evocative term refers to a fundamental property of biological life. All biological molecules have what is called chirality, a feature more colloquially understood as “handedness.” Just as left and right hands cannot be superimposed on each other, so, too, does biological matter function in this way. Natural life exhibits a striking molecular uniformity: proteins are constructed almost exclusively from “left-handed” amino acids, while DNA employs “right-handed” sugars. The creation of mirror life would entail a deliberate inversion of this biological paradigm, through the development in laboratories of synthetic organisms built from the opposite-handed versions of these essential molecular components. Such organisms would constitute living systems that are functionally equivalent to natural life but composed of molecules that are the complete chiral inverse of every living entity on Earth. That would, in effect, allow scientists to look at life through a biological mirror.

Mirror life remains a distant prospect: it could take researchers ten to 30 years to create a mirror cell that would be able to perform the hallmark activities of life. But this technology could have many uses. It could help scientists explore the origins of life, as reconstructing biochemistry on the “other side” would provide insights into how life evolved on Earth and could occur on other planets in the solar system. Mirror life could also find many potential applications in medicine and biomanufacturing. Human bodies, for instance, are not yet equipped to degrade mirror molecules, so therapeutics based on such molecules could prove to be more stable and durable than current ones.

Yet the very characteristics that would make mirror life so valuable for research and therapeutic applications—its resistance to natural degradation, its invisibility to evolved systems of immunological response and biological controls, and its independence from existing ecological constraints—are precisely what make it a potentially existential threat. A study released in July, co-authored by one of us (Adamala), suggests that mirror bacteria might be able, for instance, to evade existing immunological responses to bacteria and other germs. This could lead to untreatable infections that spread through human, animal, and plant populations. Mirror organisms could also act like the ultimate invasive species, thriving without natural predators or competitors while potentially displacing beneficial microbes that ecosystems depend on. Even more concerning, conventional antibiotics and antiviral treatments would likely be ineffective against mirror pathogens since these drugs target specific molecular structures that would be reversed in mirror life. Whether released accidentally or intentionally, mirror organisms could simultaneously bypass human biological defenses, resist medical treatments, and disrupt the ecological balance.

Mirror life may seem like a futuristic fantasy, but the likelihood of its existence should encourage governments to act now to make sure the risks of the technology never materialize. Ideally, scientists should defer the creation of mirror life. But in the event that does not happen, countries must intervene proactively. Governments cannot rely solely on the self-regulation of scientific communities. Instead, they must establish robust international agreements, potentially using existing mechanisms and conventions, to ward off this impending danger.

THROUGH A LOOKING GLASS DARKLY

Every complex biological molecule can exist in two forms of opposite chirality—mirror images of each other. Researchers could invert the basic building blocks of a cell to produce a functioning living cell. Such an organism, a mirror cell, could behave similarly to a natural one and become a useful research subject and a platform for practical applications in bioengineering and medicine.

Unfortunately, the safety and security concerns that come with such mirror cells far outweigh their possible benefits. Consider the scenario of an accidental laboratory breach: a single mirror bacterium escapes through a microscopic crack in containment, perhaps carried on a researcher’s clothing or laboratory equipment. Within hours, it begins reproducing in the outside environment, feeding on the abundant nutrients—simple sugars and other organic compounds—that exist everywhere in nature. Because no natural organism has evolved to compete with or prey upon mirror life, the escaped bacterium multiplies exponentially without any biological constraints.

As it spreads through soil, water, and air, it begins outcompeting essential microbes that form the foundation of Earth’s food chains. Plants start dying; aquatic ecosystems collapse as phytoplankton vanish; and human populations face cascading crop failures alongside untreatable infections that bypass every immune defense developed through evolution. Unlike conventional pandemics that eventually burn out or succumb to medical intervention, this biological invasion would effectively start an alternative trajectory of evolution, with mirror life now adding to all existing living systems. The tools society has today would be entirely inadequate to reverse or stop the spread of such a novel organism.

THE ILLUSION OF CONTAINMENT

In 1975, scientists moved proactively to head off possible threats when they voluntarily imposed a worldwide moratorium on recombinant DNA research and convened the Asilomar Conference to establish safety guidelines regarding such research. Eventually, they lifted the ban. This unprecedented act of scientific self-regulation successfully preempted heavy-handed government intervention while allowing genetic engineering to proceed safely under agreed international standards. That example offers a precedent for the kind of work that is needed now when facing the prospect of the development of mirror life.

The risks of mirror life could far exceed those of any conventional pathogen. But this unprecedented danger also presents an extraordinary opportunity. Unlike nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or naturally occurring bioweapons, mirror life does not yet exist. That gives the international community a rare chance to prevent an existential threat before it materializes rather than trying to control it after the fact.

The best way to avoid a catastrophe would be to freeze the development of mirror life. But if that proves impossible, then the only recourse will be to make sure that any creation of mirror life is very closely guarded. Stringent physical containment strategies and biocontrol methods maintained by specialized laboratories and enforced through international regulatory agreements could make disasters unlikely. Such procedures, however, will not eliminate the risk completely.

Governments cannot rely solely on the self-regulation of scientific communities.

Current biosafety level protocols already mandate that dangerous pathogens must be handled with strict containment measures, such as the sealed, negative-pressure facilities fitted with filtered air systems where researchers can work with the Ebola and Marburg viruses. These protocols have contributed immensely to reducing the spread of infections from laboratories and preventing the release of pathogens, with incident rates declining significantly since the establishment of modern biosafety frameworks in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet even these rigorous standards have not prevented all accidents: SARS escaped from laboratories in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and elsewhere multiple times between 2003 and 2004, anthrax exposures occurred at CDC facilities in 2014, and in that same year, National Institutes of Health employees discovered live samples of smallpox in a storage room decades after the virus was supposedly eradicated from all but two authorized repositories. In other words, no measure of containment currently used is perfectly safe. An accident could lead to disaster, one of an enormous and unprecedented scale when it comes to the possible release of mirror organisms. And the deliberate and malicious misuse of mirror life organisms could be even more difficult to guard against.

Governments must prepare for this dire possibility by working together. Coordinated action and binding international agreements could create uniform safety standards and enable real-time information sharing about research activities with the larger goal of preventing the creation of mirror cells. And if all else fails, countries need to establish rapid response protocols that could help contain any accidental release before it spreads globally. In the past, countries have banded together to try to handle biosecurity threats. The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which came into force in 1975 and now has 189 members, prohibits countries from developing, producing, and acquiring biological agents or toxins that do not have justifiable purposes. The framers of this convention were clearly not thinking of mirror life forms, but mirror life could be considered a biological weapon and thereby fall under the convention’s remit.

Although flawed in many ways, the BWC has helped prevent the spread of biological weapons. For example, it allowed inspectors in the 1990s to discover and destroy Iraq’s stockpiles of agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin, which the Iraqi government had kept in violation of the treaty. But the real value of such a treaty is its deterrent effect, discouraging countries from developing such weapons. Designating mirror life as a biological weapon would immediately set up international governance structures to investigate suspected mirror life research, impose sanctions on violating countries, and potentially authorize international intervention. The BWC, however, was designed to regulate existing biological agents, not completely new categories of threats. And it is uniquely weak compared with other international treaties; unlike the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, it lacks the teeth of formal verification mechanisms, mandatory inspections, or enforcement procedures. All signatory state parties would have to agree to add a new pathogen (or new type of organism of concern) to the convention, an ungainly process of herding cats that could make this effort hard to achieve.

A COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

As a result, policymakers, scientists, and international regulatory bodies must work together to build a framework to handle mirror life, most likely distinct from (but perhaps modeled on) the BWC. They must first sketch a technological road map for the development of mirror life, plotting milestones that would signal real progress toward the technology’s realization, such as the engineering of large-scale mirror genome synthesis. This international network should also track the enabling technologies, such as mirror peptide and DNA synthesis, that would foster the development of mirror life. Such information can be used to establish guidelines regarding what research should and should not be permitted—not just by government-funded institutions but also by any actor within the borders of the countries that sign this new agreement.

Once that framework is established, international research consortia and national health agencies should develop countermeasures that could protect against accidental or intentional releases of mirror life. For instance, researchers have begun to devise “mirror antibiotics” that could target mirror organisms without affecting natural bacteria, providing a potential defense against mirror infections. But the possible impact of mirror life on the environment is currently unknown. In a worst-case scenario, escaped mirror organisms could displace essential microbes in soil and water ecosystems, triggering cascading collapses in food chains that support all complex life on Earth. Researchers must continuously evaluate the potential threats by studying how the immune systems of different organisms (including humans, plants, and bacteria) might respond to mirror life. Those findings should be used to update guidelines and shape policies.

Strategies and guidelines don’t have much value if they are not executed and enforced. National governments backed by international monitoring organizations should establish binding legal frameworks with clear penalties for violations. States should follow the latest guidelines in, for example, choosing to block funding to projects that could lead to the dangerous development of mirror life. Countries could also use trade restrictions and export controls to limit access to specialized materials and equipment needed to develop mirror organisms. For example, although mirror amino acids could be essential components of mirror peptide-based therapeutics, governments could place controls on rare mirror nucleotides that are not needed for therapeutic applications but would be essential for creating mirror DNA and viable mirror organisms. Such targeted controls would allow beneficial research to continue while creating significant barriers to the most dangerous work, forcing potential violators to develop complex workarounds that international intelligence agencies could more easily detect and intercept.

Governments should also determine how best to respond to possible violations of the protocols around mirror life. To be effective, such responses must be implemented internationally and should therefore come under an international system of governance—either through an updated version of the BWC or a new legal framework that governments agree to. With hazards of this nature, nobody is safe unless everybody is safe.

A STITCH IN TIME

The quest to develop mirror life is very different from most bioengineering and biotechnological research. Societies have time now to proactively and collectively develop regulatory frameworks and international norms around technology before it becomes a real and immediate problem. Work around mitigating the future threat of mirror life, including updating the BWC and building new regulatory frameworks to align with technological advancements, could also make it easier for countries to better manage future global biological risks.

It would be an extraordinary outcome if governments and academic communities could collectively scan the horizon for biosecurity hazards and identify risks before they materialize. Such efforts offer a unique opportunity to chart the course of scientific progress, steering the allocation of resources away from possibly dangerous goals, improving countermeasures and preparedness for biological risks, and in the process, laying the foundations for a better, safer future.

Foreign Affairs · More by Liyam Chitayat · August 28, 2025

​15. Warnings From Weimar​: Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails

​From the headline I was expecting to read about Robert Kaplan's recent book: Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis  https://www.amazon.com/Waste-Land-World-Permanent-Crisis/dp/0593730321. I suppose I need to write a review about his excellent book. His premise is that the world is experiencing conditions on a global scale that are similar to the Weimar Republic. But I digress.

Excerpts:

No democratic constitution is self-enforcing, not even ones much older than the Weimar Republic was in the early 1930s. Citizens and leaders must defend democratic institutions whenever they are threatened and whatever the scale of the threat.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections. Mainstream political leaders had many opportunities to push back. But Hugenberg believed he could use Hitler to revitalize his conservative movement. Von Papen believed he could control Hitler after making him chancellor. Kaas believed that capitulating to Hitler’s demands would protect his party and buy time for a more significant resistance. They were all wrong.

Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve.

Warnings From Weimar

Foreign Affairs · More by Daniel Ziblatt · August 28, 2025

Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails

Daniel Ziblatt

August 28, 2025

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler at the opening of the Olympic Games in Berlin, August 1936 Action Images / Reuters

DANIEL ZIBLATT is Professor of Government and Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy and a co-author of How Democracies Die.

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On March 23, 1933, inside a dimly lit chamber filled with the stale scent of cigar smoke, Ludwig Kaas tried to convince himself he was making the right decision. A Catholic priest and the leader of Germany’s establishment Center Party, he stood at a crossroads. For several years, his party had sought to block Adolf Hitler’s rise. But in 1932, Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis) became the largest force in parliament, and in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor. As he moved to consolidate power, the Center Party had become the last remaining obstacle to his bid for total control over Germany.

Hitler had introduced the Enabling Act, which would allow him and his cabinet sweeping powers to rule by decree, thereby dismantling democracy at its core. The act needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The Social Democrats—the only other significant group of parliamentarians that still fundamentally supported democracy—were too few to stop it alone. If the Center Party also resisted, it could block the act’s passage.

But Kaas hesitated. He feared what would happen if his party defied the Nazis. Would it survive? Could democracy endure if his party resisted? Hitler’s storm troopers had already begun arresting political opponents. Kaas convinced himself that his best option was to cooperate—to work within the new reality rather than be crushed by it. “We must preserve our soul,” he told his colleagues, “but a rejection of the Enabling Act will result in unpleasant consequences for our party.” The act passed, 444 to 94, opening the path to Hitler’s dictatorship.

This episode illustrates the dangerous logic of abdication: the belief that, faced with a rising threat to democracy, surrender is strategy, cooperating with an autocrat is survival, and sparing oneself or one’s party from immediate punishment is worth opening the door to long-term authoritarian rule. Kaas was not alone in this kind of thinking. In the years leading up to that moment, three catastrophic miscalculations—each rooted in short-term maneuvering and self-justification—paved the way for Hitler’s ascent.

Today, this chapter of the Weimar Republic’s history should be revisited. At a moment in which democracy is backsliding in places as varied as Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States, it is a reminder that democracy often erodes slowly at first, via the gradual surrender of those entrusted to defend it. But with each concession, autocrats become bolder, defenses grow weaker, and reversal becomes harder. Responses that, early on, can feel pragmatic—waiting it out, remaining silent, cutting a deal—only embolden autocrats, leading ultimately to the demise of democracy itself.

FATAL TRANSACTIONS

The fateful decisions that doomed the Weimar Republic were made in the aftermath of World War I, shortly after the birth of a new democracy in Germany. The Weimar constitution, drafted in 1919 under the influence of luminaries such as the legal scholar Hugo Preuss and the sociologist Max Weber, enshrined civil liberties, expanded rights for women, and established labor protections. Building on wins secured by an already robust civil society, a broad and confident coalition of progressive forces, liberals, Social Democrats, and the Catholic Center Party established Germany’s post–World War I republic.

Yet this republic was also fragile. It was roiled by rampant political violence, frequent political assassinations, and street fights between communists and fascists, both of whom rejected the new regime. Still, after three turbulent years of hyperinflation and political unrest, by 1924 the Weimar Republic had entered a period of relative stability.

Beginning in 1929, however, the crash of the U.S. stock market hit Germany, triggering a catastrophic economic downturn and mass unemployment. The Communist Party and the Nazis gained ground in elections. This made it difficult for the German parliamentary system to form governments, and country’s president had to resort to installing new chancellors at the head of parliament without parliamentary backing—an extraordinary measure. The resulting policy gridlock enhanced the Nazis’ appeal.

The German conservative establishment granted Hitler legitimacy.

But the Great Depression alone did not doom the Weimar Republic. Many other embattled republics in Europe and North America survived this era of economic and political turmoil, including two other new European republics, Czechoslovakia and Finland. What mattered most were not just the shocks themselves but German leaders’ responses to them—choices that shaped the republic’s fate.

The country’s conservative establishment made the first mistake. In the late 1920s, the mainstream right-wing party, the German National People’s Party, was struggling. Its leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a powerful businessman and media mogul, but he lacked charisma and mass appeal. As he watched Hitler’s Nazi movement gain popularity in state and national elections in the late 1920s, Hugenberg saw an opportunity—not to stop Hitler, but to use him.

Hugenberg recruited the Nazis into a campaign to undo Germany’s obligation to pay World War I reparations. He hoped that their fervor would help reinvigorate the conservative cause. A 1929 referendum attempting to rally the German public behind annulling the debt—and classifying politicians who agreed to pay it as traitors—failed, but the partnership changed everything. It elevated the Nazis from a band of fringe extremists to a political force that had been granted legitimacy by one of Germany’s most influential political figures.

Hugenberg’s miscalculations did not end there. In 1931, he hosted a major right-wing rally in the spa town of Bad Harzburg, inviting Hitler to stand alongside Germany’s nationalist elite. The idea was to present a united conservative front. Instead, Hitler stole the spotlight. His paramilitary forces marched through the streets in a show of discipline and power as Hugenberg faded into the background. By 1933, Hugenberg had realized the full scale of his mistake. He reportedly told a fellow conservative: “I have committed the greatest stupidity of my life; I have allied myself with the greatest demagogue in human history.” But by then it was far too late. At a pivotal moment, Hugenberg had given Hitler what he needed most: respectability.

A PREVENTABLE DEATH

The German political establishment’s next miscalculation was even graver: elevating Hitler to power outright. By 1932, Germany’s parliament remained paralyzed. No governing majority could be formed. Conservatives were desperate to establish a stable government that excluded the Social Democrats and Communists, but they lacked the numbers to govern alone. President Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero, continued to cycle through chancellors, unable to find anyone who could command the support of a majority of parliamentarians or contain Germany’s deepening economic crisis. Then former Chancellor Franz von Papen made a bold suggestion: offer the chancellorship to Hitler—but surround him with conservative ministers who could control him.

Von Papen was confident that Hitler could be kept on a leash. “Don’t worry,” he told his right-wing colleagues. “Within two months, we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner he’ll squeal.” In January 1933, Hindenburg signed on to the plan, believing that Hitler would remain a figurehead.

The opposite happened. Hitler immediately began consolidating power, sidelining his handlers and dismantling the opposition by arresting leading figures such as the former Prussian minister of the interior and other Social Democratic and Communist Party members of parliament. The Nazi Party was not the choice of a majority of Germans—about two-thirds of Germans had voted against it in the 1932 national elections—and Hitler’s violent moves to seize more influence caused a new atmosphere of intense fear to grip the country. The gamble that antidemocrats could be tamed if they were granted power had failed spectacularly.

German politicians believed they could bargain away democracy’s protections.

The February 1933 Reichstag fire, which did so much damage to the parliament building that it temporarily forced the body to hold sessions in the Kroll Opera House a few blocks away, provided the perfect pretext for repression. Hitler’s new government blamed communists for the blaze, also claiming to have proof that they were stockpiling explosives. The Nazi-led government launched mass arrests, and Hitler immediately promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree, a draconian measure restricting freedom of the press and assembly and allowing the police to detain suspects indefinitely without a trial.

It was this climate of emergency following the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to propose the Enabling Act. Kaas and his fellow Center Party leaders debated it for hours, torn between principle and self-preservation. Some urged resistance, warning that Hitler’s power must be checked. But most feared the consequences of defiance. Still others clung to the hope that by cooperating, they might influence Hitler from within—perhaps by helping weaken their Social Democrat rivals or by carving out protections for Center Party or Catholic leaders. In the final vote, all 73 Center Party parliamentarians capitulated, justifying their surrender as a necessary evil to save the party. As Kaas himself told his colleagues, “If a two-thirds majority [is] not achieved, the government will carry out its plans through other means.”

But there was nothing strategic about this vote. Along with all of Germany’s other opposition parties, the Center Party was dissolved within months. The Center Party’s support for the act did not moderate Hitler; it gave him total control. This was the final, fatal miscalculation—the belief that democracy’s protections could be bargained away but democracy itself could still somehow survive.

DON’T BET ON IT

No democratic constitution is self-enforcing, not even ones much older than the Weimar Republic was in the early 1930s. Citizens and leaders must defend democratic institutions whenever they are threatened and whatever the scale of the threat.

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections. Mainstream political leaders had many opportunities to push back. But Hugenberg believed he could use Hitler to revitalize his conservative movement. Von Papen believed he could control Hitler after making him chancellor. Kaas believed that capitulating to Hitler’s demands would protect his party and buy time for a more significant resistance. They were all wrong.

Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve.

Foreign Affairs · More by Daniel Ziblatt · August 28, 2025

16. Are Japan, South Korea, and Poland on the Verge of Getting Nuclear Weapons?

​interesting speculation.

Excerpts:

These are the countries that should be monitored with the greatest scrutiny if one wants to identify the next power to elbow its way into the global nuclear weapons club. The nonproliferation system has had a good run since the signing of the NPT in 1968. Indeed, it has had a longer run than anyone had the right to expect. However, the world is changing rapidly, and we likely must deal with a new international system that has a larger number of nuclear players.

That development will test the arguments embraced by respected realist international relations scholars, especially the late Kenneth Waltz and Professor Christopher Layne, currently the Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Waltz, Layne, and others have argued that nuclear proliferation might actually prove stabilizing rather than destabilizing by recreating the cold-war era’s global dynamic of mutual assured destruction in multiple regions.

Time will tell.

Are Japan, South Korea, and Poland on the Verge of Getting Nuclear Weapons?

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Ted Galen Carpenter · August 28, 2025

The Treaty

Published

8 hours ago

Fat Boy Nuclear Bomb At U.S. Air Force Museum. Photo Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal Original Photo.

In April and again last month, Kim Yo-Jong, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un’s sister and influential policy adviser, demanded that President Trump explicitly acknowledge and accept that her country possesses a nuclear arsenal. Her comment has increased speculation throughout the international community about which other nations might follow the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) into the once-exclusive club of nuclear weapons powers. It is an important question, and the probable consequences vary significantly from case to case.

The Nuclear Weapons Challenge

Some of the most likely candidates have been discussed for many years, but others are relatively recent entrants. The former category includes major powers such as Japan and Germany. Indeed, if the United States had not emphasized its emphatic commitment to extended deterrence to shield those countries, both Tokyo and Berlin might well have opted to follow London and Paris to build their own independent deterrents. A similar dynamic influenced the decisions of secondary, but quite technologically capable, U.S. allies such as South Korea and Taiwan to remain nonnuclear.

During the 1960s, it was widely assumed both among international affairs experts and general populations throughout the world that by the early twenty-first century as many as two dozen countries would possess nuclear arsenals. Washington’s passionate support for the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) helped slow the probable proliferation trends, especially among key U.S. allies. The incentives for all of those governments to continue relying on U.S. extended deterrence pledges, though, have gradually weakened for multiple reasons.

The emergence of additional nuclear-weapon powers, including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Israel, India, Pakistan, and most recently, North Korea, has created a less stable and unpredictable strategic environment.

The addition of the DPRK causes obvious worries for both Japan and South Korea, and it strengthens domestic sentiment in those countries for an independent nuclear deterrent. The long-standing animosity between India and Pakistan unsettles the entire surrounding region, as does the rivalry between India and China. Leaders in Japan and South Korea understandably wonder if Washington’s extended deterrence commitment can truly deter a volatile regime like that in Pyongyang—especially now that North Korean missiles can reach the U.S. homeland.

Why Do States Want Nukes Now? Ask America

Domestic political changes in the United States also foster doubts about the U.S. commitment to Washington’s allies in East Asia and Europe. Even during his first term as president, Donald Trump issued warnings that the U.S. defense commitment to allies was not unconditional.

His principal motive was to pressure those allies to assume more of the collective defense burden by increasing their own military spending. Abandoning the allies Trump viewed as a drastic alternative, not the preferable option, but his hectoring and criticisms created uneasiness.

Trump’s return to the White House following the 2024 presidential election squelched the brief sense of relief that officials and populations in allied countries had experienced after his defeat in 2020 and the elevation of Joe Biden with his utterly conventional views regarding the sanctity of Washington’s alliances. The confrontational rhetoric and harsh trade policies toward traditional U.S. allies and security dependents that Trump quickly adopted during the initial months of his second term have already revived uneasiness about the U.S. relationship among countries in both Europe and East Asia. That development is leading to a reassessment of nuclear weapons policy in Japan. Seoul, as well as Tokyo, still hopes to terminate Pyongyang’s nuclear buildup, but those hopes grow fainter and fainter even as the level of confidence in Washington’s security guarantees diminishes.

A more volatile security environment, combined with greater uncertainty about the reliability of Washington’s security commitments is sparking renewed interest in several countries about developing independent nuclear capabilities. It is a prominent topic of discussion again in both South Korea and Japan. New entrants are also making an appearance with respect to that issue. There appears to be significant and growing sentiment in Poland that the country must “have access to nuclear weapons” to adequately provide for its own defense against a looming Russia. It is not yet clear what the term “access to” means in operational terms.

Are Polish leaders talking about something akin to French President Emmanuel Macron’s comment earlier this year that he would consider extending the protection of his country’s nuclear deterrent to France’s nonnuclear NATO partners in Central and Eastern Europe? Do Polish leaders instead have in mind authorizing the United States (or Britain or France) to deploy nuclear weapons in Poland? Or does Warsaw want control over such weapons regardless of which nuclear NATO ally retains official ownership? At the moment, such details remain unclear. However, there is no longer any doubt that Poland wants a nuclear weapons capability in some form.

Another rising European power, Turkey, also is showing interest in developing that capacity, to the approval of public opinion. Such an attitude should create considerable uneasiness. Ankara is displaying aggressive ambitions on multiple fronts. It is working closely with the new Islamist government in Damascus to eradicate the last remaining Kurdish self-governing enclaves in northeast Syria along the Turkish-Syrian border. Ankara’s military assertiveness has spiked to the point of generating tense aerial confrontations with Israeli planes also operating in Syrian airspace.

Turkey’s ongoing effort to play an outsized diplomatic and economic role in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia also indicates surging great power ambitions. Although Ankara has yet to express explicit intentions to build a nuclear arsenal, it has indicated interest, and the country has the technological capabilities to do so. Crossing that line may be the final phase of Turkey fully joining the ranks of the world’s great powers.

What Happens Next?

These are the countries that should be monitored with the greatest scrutiny if one wants to identify the next power to elbow its way into the global nuclear weapons club. The nonproliferation system has had a good run since the signing of the NPT in 1968. Indeed, it has had a longer run than anyone had the right to expect. However, the world is changing rapidly, and we likely must deal with a new international system that has a larger number of nuclear players.

That development will test the arguments embraced by respected realist international relations scholars, especially the late Kenneth Waltz and Professor Christopher Layne, currently the Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Waltz, Layne, and others have argued that nuclear proliferation might actually prove stabilizing rather than destabilizing by recreating the cold-war era’s global dynamic of mutual assured destruction in multiple regions.

Time will tell.

About the Author: Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at The National Security Journal. He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

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Written By Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter was a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Carpenter served as Cato’s director of foreign policy studies from 1986 to 1995 and as vice president for defense and foreign policy studies from 1995 to 2011.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Ted Galen Carpenter · August 28, 2025

17. How many drones does it take to replace a destroyer?

​Excerpts:

An overall goal for Task Force 66 is to experiment with formations to determine what is needed to put a robotic flotilla on par with traditional manned platforms.

“We generally have multi-domain or multi-mission ships…But we don't necessarily have ships that can do [effects] everywhere, all the time, everything. So the idea, then, is, how do I take an exquisite capability like a destroyer, outsource maybe one mission set from that destroyer, maybe the maritime demand awareness, and then be able to characterize, how do I maintain the persistence and capabilities of that ship to do that mission with a flotilla of unmanned things—which may include unmanned aerial vehicles, may include unmanned underwater vehicles, they would be networked together working through the space and cyber arenas to kind of pull their data together and generate a similar effect to what that destroyer might be doing,” Mattis told reporters.

How many drones does it take to replace a destroyer?

Fresh off a summer of testing robotic boats, the Navy's Task Force 66 wants to turn lessons into metrics.

By Lauren C. Williams

Senior Editor

August 27, 2025 07:42 PM ET

defenseone.com · Lauren C. Williams

Could a flotilla of robot boats do the same job as a U.S. Navy destroyer? A task force commander has a theory.

“We have a thesis in TF66 we call the ‘deconstructed DDG,” said Rear Adm. Michael Mattis, who leads an effort to figure out how low-cost, commercially available uncrewed systems might fit into the Navy’s Sixth Fleet. “We think that with 20 USVs of different, heterogeneous types, we could deconstruct a mission that a DDG could do. And we think we could do it at a cost point of essentially 1/30 of what a DDG would cost.”

Now, Mattis needs to prove it to his leaders at U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Africa, he told an audience at the National Defense Industrial Association’s emerging tech conference on Wednesday.

“I need to be able to show the ROI on that. I need to be able to show the resilience of that system, being able to perform. And I need to be able to show that it's okay to attrit that capability and then be able to quickly regenerate another one, another one. And that comes back down to really understanding these numbers in this data and having confidence that these are real capabilities able to deliver real effects that we've rehearsed and proven.”

With a keen eye on the war in Ukraine, Mattis’ task force spent the summer testing uncrewed systems in joint and multinational exercises. The group joined the Army’s Second Multidomain Task Force in Arcane Thunder and NATO partners in the annual BALTOPS maritime exercise. The TF66 team is also working with NATO’s Task Force X on domain awareness.

“It turns out that the Baltic is a pretty caustic environment as well. Similar to the Eastern Med or the Black Sea, we saw a bit of jamming and spoofing going on…We were able to see sort of the challenges operating through that electromagnetic spectrum,” Mattis said.

During BALTOPS, which ended in June, the task force worked with the Royal Navy, commanding uncrewed systems from a patrol boat within line of sight for scouting tasks. They also tested USVs for contested logistics with the Polish Special Forces and the Army during BALTOPS and Arcane Thunder respectively.

“We used 10 of our USVs that have pretty good range—they're slower speed, but they have good ability to carry a couple hundred pounds of a payload. So, whether it be ammunition, food…we worked with both the Polish SOF and the U.S. Army to put those boats in the water and then essentially see what it would take to get him through a barrier and have him go to another beach where he might have an isolated force that's looking to be sustained,” Mattis said. “And then finally, we pivoted from BALTOPS to the Task Force X, true maritime demand awareness task…the data interoperability and passing them our video feeds, passing them our data locations, and then figuring out what we could do around identifying targets…and monitoring threats.”

An overall goal for Task Force 66 is to experiment with formations to determine what is needed to put a robotic flotilla on par with traditional manned platforms.

“We generally have multi-domain or multi-mission ships…But we don't necessarily have ships that can do [effects] everywhere, all the time, everything. So the idea, then, is, how do I take an exquisite capability like a destroyer, outsource maybe one mission set from that destroyer, maybe the maritime demand awareness, and then be able to characterize, how do I maintain the persistence and capabilities of that ship to do that mission with a flotilla of unmanned things—which may include unmanned aerial vehicles, may include unmanned underwater vehicles, they would be networked together working through the space and cyber arenas to kind of pull their data together and generate a similar effect to what that destroyer might be doing,” Mattis told reporters.

Robotic and autonomous systems would act as part of a “hedge force” that could be used to deter adversaries when there aren’t enough traditional capabilities to do it and deliver the same effects.

For example, for maritime domain awareness in the Gulf of Guinea, “I need some sort of persistent presence there. I'm not going to try and flood the zone with 1,000 drones,” Mattis said. “That flotilla has to be out there for an amount of time. And we have some USVs that can persist, for example, for six months straight. I could just leave them out there. But if I'm generating an effect somewhere else—a different effect—maybe I may need to cycle the boats back and forth. And so then I've got to figure out what is my rotation. If I have a destroyer out there, I have to refuel it, and I have to have it go do other mission sets and other things. So we don't have a framework to figure that out right now.”

Eventually, the lessons of TF66 could be combined with those of Task Force 59—the Navy's original drone task force, run by Naval Forces Central Command—and 4th Fleet’s own, more integrated efforts. But for now, Mattis is focused on proof in the data.

“I am trying to create more transparency to my leadership and to the leadership in the US Navy around the performance and capabilities of our systems to meet their expected concepts and operations every time I put my systems to sea,” he said. “I want to be able to take those telemetry feeds down to the component level and be and—based on outcomes, based metrics—be able to articulate whether I've met an outcome or not, and be able to isolate that to a failed component or a working system. And I want to be totally ruthlessly transparent with that, with my leadership all the way up to the chief of naval operations, who would love to have a dashboard that he would look at. He's a data driven leader, and that's where we need to go, where we've been challenged.”

defenseone.com · Lauren C. Williams

18. DOD Establishes Joint Interagency Task Force to Deliver Affordable C-sUAS Capabilities to America's Warfighters

​JIATF 401.

The 4 page memo can be accessed here: https://media.defense.gov/2025/Aug/28/2003790021/-1/-1/0/ESTABLISHMENT-OF-JOINT-INTERAGENCY-TASK-FORCE-401.PDF

Release

Immediate Release

DOD Establishes Joint Interagency Task Force to Deliver Affordable C-sUAS Capabilities to America's Warfighters

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4289621/dod-establishes-joint-interagency-task-force-to-deliver-affordable-c-suas-capab/

Aug. 28, 2025 |   

Secretary Hegseth announced today, actions the Department is taking to address the growing threat of hostile drones and to enhance its small unmanned systems to protect personnel, equipment, and facilities at home and abroad.

To ensure that American airspace remains secure, Secretary Hegseth directed Secretary of the Army to formally establish the Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF 401) — a new, unified team that will bring together our best talent from across all agencies to counter these threats and restore control of our skies. The Task Force will report to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, to better align authorities and resources to rapidly deliver Joint C-sUAS capabilities to America's warfighters, defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.

"We're moving fast — cutting through bureaucracy, consolidating resources, and empowering this task force with the utmost authority to outpace our adversaries," said Secretary Hegseth. "Make no mistake — under this administration and President Trump's leadership, we will innovate, we will lead, and we will win."

The Department of Defense is committed to enhancing its C-sUAS capabilities to protect personnel, equipment, and facilities at home and abroad.

The memo is posted here. 

19. Could Putin Be Overthrown?

​Enquiring minds want to know. But we also want to know what comes after.

Excerpts:

The Institute assessed the rumors as having “Medium credibility.”

“While unconfirmed, the logic behind the fear of repressions and coup contingency planning fits historical Russian behavior patterns. However, the lack of public-facing signals from top generals tempers the assessment.”

It may, however, be wishful thinking on behalf of Putin’s opponents, similar to the years of rumors about the Russian leader being sick or dying.

“The idea of a coup from within Russia’s General Staff is not implausible—but remains speculative and fragile in terms of execution. The most likely outcome, if any, would be internal destabilization or isolated defiance, not a full regime change.”

Could Putin Be Overthrown?

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Stephen Silver · August 26, 2025

Key Points and Summary – More than two years after the failed Wagner rebellion, the question of Vladimir Putin’s vulnerability to a coup remains a subject of intense debate.

-While the Wagner group has been absorbed into the state, the long, brutal war in Ukraine has created new discontents within the regular military.

-Unverified but persistent rumors suggest that some officers within Russia’s General Staff are considering a “coup-style operation” as a survival mechanism against potential purges.

-While many experts dismiss this as “wishful thinking,” the possibility of a challenge from within the military is still considered feasible in a system where all other paths to power have been blocked.

Is Putin Susceptible to a Coup?

Back in the summer of 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin faced an attempted rebellion from the Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who marched on Moscow. However, the rebellion was over after less than 24 hours.

“It is wrong to assume that the Russian military is toothless or that the Prigozhin saga is “the beginning of the end” for Putin,” Aslı Aydıntaşbaş wrote as part of a Brookings Institution roundtable after the Wagner coup.

“Putin was humiliated and, as Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin argues, the Russian military is corrupt and inefficient — but there is no indication that the regime is unraveling. We do not have a clear sense of what really happened. Was Prigozhin trying to stage a coup, as early reports suggested, or is this simply infighting among warlords in an opaque system?”

Indeed, it remains a question whether the Wagner Group rebellion was an attempt on the rule of Putin himself, or merely on the military leadership.

Prigozhin, the leader of the rebellion, isn’t around to answer questions about it; he died in a plane crash in August of 2023, just months after the rebellion, along with several of his lieutenants. And the BBC reported a year later that the remnants of the Wagner Group were by then under the control of the Kremlin.

Dr. Sorcha MacLeod, a member of the UN’s working group on mercenaries, told the BBC that the Wagner Group “may not exist in exactly the form it did previously, but a version – or even versions – of it continue to exist… There’s been this sort of dispersal amongst the Russian state, so there is no one overall controller.”

Is Putin in danger of suffering another rebellion, with Russia’s economy stagnant and the war in Ukraine continuing? And could it succeed?

Could It Happen Again?

A new book called Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos, by Candace Rondeaux, was published earlier this year and looks at the 2023 rebellion.

An article in May, in the Times, looks at the question of whether that could happen again.

“Could Vladimir Putin be overthrown by disgruntled soldiers? The Russian leader has blocked so many other paths to his removal that it is a question worth asking,” the article asks.

“Those who can mobilise young protesters on city streets are in exile or in the gulag (where Alexei Navalny met his death). Those who could form a credible anti-Putin axis within the establishment lack the nerve or the clout. It is a feature of the Putin system, shaped over a quarter of a century in power, that to be trusted by him or even brought into his presence you have to be politically castrated. Yet challenge from within the military is still feasible. A long war in Ukraine, clumsily steered by the Kremlin, has created its own discontents.”

New Rumblings

In late July, The Robert Lansing Institute wrote about rumblings about “alleged coup planning within Russia’s general staff.” Those rumors, however, are unverified.

“Recent unverified claims from Russian sources suggest that certain officers within Russia’s General Staff are allegedly considering a coup-style operation, fearing repression or purges if the war in Ukraine ends unfavorably,” the report says. “Inspired by the failed mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023, these actors reportedly view a limited, swift power seizure as a potential survival mechanism. This report evaluates the credibility of these claims, identifies plausible actors, and assesses the likelihood and possible outcomes of such a scenario.”

The Institute assessed the rumors as having “Medium credibility.”

“While unconfirmed, the logic behind the fear of repressions and coup contingency planning fits historical Russian behavior patterns. However, the lack of public-facing signals from top generals tempers the assessment.”

It may, however, be wishful thinking on behalf of Putin’s opponents, similar to the years of rumors about the Russian leader being sick or dying.

“The idea of a coup from within Russia’s General Staff is not implausible—but remains speculative and fragile in terms of execution. The most likely outcome, if any, would be internal destabilization or isolated defiance, not a full regime change.”

About the Author: Stephen Silver

Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, national security, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter.

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Written By Stephen Silver

Stephen Silver is a journalist, essayist, and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review, and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Stephen Silver · August 26, 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