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Quotes of the Day:
"It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win."
– John Paul Jones
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
– William Arthur Ward
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
– Henry David Thoreau
Greetings from Korea.
1. How to Ensure America Is Ready for the Next War
2. U.S. Navy Ships Are Languishing in Repair Yards
3. AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’
4. Trump’s AI Strategy Against China Gets Its First Big Test
5. Hamas Releases Video of Hostage Digging His Own Grave in a Tunnel
6. Athens seeks expanded US presence
7. The road map to making America a crypto superpower
8. Why Understanding Irregular Warfare Matters More Than Defining It
9. A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump
10. China state media reveals new nuclear-armed submarine
11. Close the Icebreaker Gap with ICE Pact
12. How the US needs to prepare for a higher-level war, according to an American special ops trainer in Ukraine
13. Hiroshima and the End We Refuse to Imagine
14. China and Russia start joint drills in Sea of Japan
15. Israel's Netanyahu urges Red Cross to help hostages, while more Palestinians die from hunger in Gaza
16. Beyond the Second Island Chain: It’s Time to Mitigate Strategic Risk in Oceania
17. "This is the Voice of America, Washington, D.C., signing off."
1. How to Ensure America Is Ready for the Next War
Real bipartisanship. Our nation is better off with it.
Conclusion:
Just after the start of World War II in Europe, the chief of naval operations, Adm. Harold Stark, was instrumental in delivering what became known as the Two-Ocean Navy Act, an overdue break from years of stagnant military investment. Stark observed then that “dollars cannot buy yesterday.” If our colleagues and the administration are serious about defeating tomorrow’s threats, then we must start investing in our common defense today.
Washington Post
How to Ensure America Is Ready for the Next War
Investment in the U.S. military is lacking. Our bipartisan defense spending bill can help.
https://wapo.st/45vnXam
August 1, 2025
By Mitch McConnell and Chris Coons
Mitch McConnell, a Republican, is a senator from Kentucky. Chris Coons, Democrat, is a senator from Delaware.
On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved our bill that would invest $852 billion in national defense over the next fiscal year by a decisive 26-3 vote. It would restore aid to Ukraine, boost assistance to our European and Pacific allies, and go beyond the president’s budget request (and the funding approved by our counterparts in the House) to modernize the U.S. military and defense industrial base to meet tomorrow’s threats. This bill is an urgently needed step in the right direction.
America’s adversaries — principally China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are investing heavily to blunt our military advantages, threaten our interests and undermine our influence. They’re collaborating on military technology, providing each other with diplomatic cover, and otherwise facilitating one another’s aggression and hegemonic aspirations. Countering this growing alignment requires strengthening our own alliances and partnerships with smart soft-power investments in global health and humanitarian aid that deny China opportunities to supplant U.S. influence.
First, however, it means healthy investments in American hard power. On this front, we have our work cut out for us.
This year, the Pentagon has had to meet payrolls, train forces, procure weapons and sustain operations with funds based on estimates made more than a year ago. That’s because, for the first time ever, Congress and the administration funded our military through a continuing resolution at spending levels set in 2023 instead of passing an updated budget. This was a tremendous missed opportunity to make serious, full-year investments in readiness, modernization and industrial capacity, and it has already had enormous consequences.
For example, even after the one-time influx of spending Congress passed last month, the Defense Department has come to us to acknowledge significant shortfalls in critical areas such as shipbuilding and high-demand munitions. The lesson here is obvious: There is no substitute for consistent, full-year appropriations that adequately address the growing requirements of our military.
Our effort this year won’t be enough to close the gaps with our adversaries’ sustained investments. Expanding shipyard and munitions capacity, deepening stocks of critical weapons, adopting new technologies, and recruiting and retaining service members and a skilled civilian workforce will all require increased funding. Meeting the urgent needs of a military adapting to renewed major-power competition will take growing annual commitments.
For now, however, we must focus on expanding production capacity for critical munitions — from the most basic artillery rounds to cutting-edge air defense interceptors. Recent high-tempo operations, such as the U.S. Navy’s work to defend freedom of navigation against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, have made it clear just how quickly modern warfare can deplete stockpiles of important (and expensive) weapons. We know the Pentagon’s top leaders share our commitment to deepening America’s magazines, but the president’s initial budget request was insufficient for the scale of the challenge he intends to address. The Senate’s higher allocation of $7.3 billion to fully fund and expand munitions production capacity would show we’re serious about tackling this multiyear project.
China’s naval buildup, at astonishing speed and scale, puts America’s dwindling capacity to build tomorrow’s Navy — or even maintain the fleet we have — in stark relief. The Senate’s bill would address shipbuilding misalignments and funding shortfalls that reconciliation left behind by increasing investment in critical projects such as Columbia- and Virginia-class submarines, DDG-51 destroyers, shipyard infrastructure, and workforce development by $8.7 billion.
Our bill also makes significant investments in quality of life for men and women in uniform, such as major renovations of Marine Corps barracks across many bases and a pay raise of nearly 4 percent, including funding the raise for junior enlisted members in last year’s defense authorization bill. It also fully funds child care fee assistance programs for military families for the first time.
Finally, we recognize the enormous dividends of investing in allies and partners. Our measure will help our friends — from the Baltic states to the Global South, the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East — build more capable forces, buy U.S.-made weapons and technologies, increase collective deterrence, and keep more U.S. service members out of harm’s way. Prevailing in any future fight will also draw on the lessons we continue to learn from Ukraine, a place the Army secretary rightly calls “the Silicon Valley of warfare.” Abandoning partners at the cutting edge of modern warfare would be strategic self-harm. That’s why our bill would restore funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative as well as programs like it that make America safer.
Just after the start of World War II in Europe, the chief of naval operations, Adm. Harold Stark, was instrumental in delivering what became known as the Two-Ocean Navy Act, an overdue break from years of stagnant military investment. Stark observed then that “dollars cannot buy yesterday.” If our colleagues and the administration are serious about defeating tomorrow’s threats, then we must start investing in our common defense today.
2. U.S. Navy Ships Are Languishing in Repair Yards
Hard to be a global power, or only an Asia-indo-Pacific power, or even to focus only on the "pacing threat" of China with a Navy that we cannot maintain.
What is POTUS, DOD, and Congress going to do about this?
U.S. Navy Ships Are Languishing in Repair Yards
A young submariner’s death has highlighted the Navy’s struggles to maintain its fleet
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/u-s-navy-ships-are-languishing-in-repair-yards-e6358adf
By Alistair MacDonald
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Aug. 3, 2025 8:00 am ET
USS Helena has spent more time in dock than out at sea in recent years. Photo: Paul Farley/U.S. Navy
Key Points
What's This?
- A sailor’s death on the USS Helena, amid substandard repairs, highlights the Navy’s struggle to maintain its existing fleet.
- The Navy faces challenges including aging infrastructure, staffing shortages, and limited dry dock capacity, causing maintenance delays.
- Maintenance delays can impact naval readiness, potentially affecting deployments and straining resources due to a shrinking fleet.
The USS Helena was preparing to leave dock after more than six years of stop-start repairs when a young sailor was electrocuted and died. His death further delayed the return to action of a submarine that epitomizes the Navy’s struggles to maintain its fleet.
Sonar technician Timothy Sanders had told his mother several times that he was concerned substandard repair work on the submarine would get someone hurt. A Navy report concluded that he died last May after inadvertently touching an electrical source left uncovered by repair workers, his mother said.
President Trump has called attention to U.S. shortcomings in building new naval vessels. The Helena’s history of costly, sometimes chaotic repairs highlights another problem: America is also struggling to fix the ships and submarines it already has.
While Sanders’ death is an extreme example of what can go wrong in U.S. shipyards, the shipbuilding and repair industries have long complained that a lack of experienced staff has led to mistakes and delays. Limited dry dock capacity and aging equipment are also challenges.
Timothy Sanders was a sonar technician who had expressed worries about substandard work on Navy vessels, his mother said. Photo: Nicole Sanders
The problems reflect a lack of investment in public yards after the Cold War-era and a broader decline in the American maritime industry. Those issues are now coming into sharp relief amid a greater focus on naval preparedness.
Naval experts are concerned that tardy or substandard work in repair yards will keep ships and submarines out of action during a potential war in Asia—a conflict expected to be fought in large part at sea.
Maintenance delays are already causing disruptions. The Marine Corps, for instance, has been prevented from deploying and training on schedule because of the poor upkeep of amphibious warships.
The importance of naval readiness was underscored Friday when Trump ordered two submarines to be “positioned in the appropriate regions,” in response to comments by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Repairing naval vessels often takes longer than scheduled. Roughly a third of surface ship maintenance wasn’t completed on time last year, Navy officials have said. In recent years as much as two-thirds has been late, and officials have said improvement is needed to hit the Navy’s combat-readiness target.
One submarine, the USS Boise, will have been out of action for 14 years before it is scheduled to head back to sea in 2029 after more than $1.2 billion worth of maintenance work.
Repairing ships on time has become a persistent challenge, Admiral Daryl Caudle, Trump’s pick as chief of naval operations, told a Senate confirmation hearing in July.
“We need a better approach to how we’re doing maintenance,” Caudle said. The Navy could learn from cruise lines, he added, which typically have better ship availability.
Getting vessels back to sea quickly matters more than ever because the U.S. fleet has shrunk. In the late 1980s, the Navy had some 600 vessels. Today it has about 295.
U.S. submarine fleet
U.S. destroyer fleet
400
350
WWII ends
250
300
200
250
150
200
150
100
100
50
50
0
0
1950
’75
2000
’25
1950
’75
2000
’25
Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command (1945-2015); International Institute for Strategic Studies (2020, 2025)
Fewer vessels coupled with longer maintenance times creates a vicious circle. Available ships spend longer at sea, suffer more wear and tear, and then require greater attention back at dock.
A Navy official said maintenance times were improving, and that there were 49 construction projects under way—worth about $6 billion—that would bolster repair infrastructure.
The Navy is committed to addressing the findings of the probe into Sanders’ death, and preventing future incidents, the official added.
Persistent delays
The Navy’s difficulties with ship repair increased in the 1990s, when the U.S. halved the number of public shipyards mandated to maintain nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines.
The four remaining government-owned yards were set up over a century ago, designed to build wind- and steam-powered ships. They suffer from aging infrastructure, with more than half their equipment past its expected service life, according to the Government Accountability Office.
A shortage of experienced workers is a major problem. With some shipyard welders earning roughly the same as fast-food workers, many have left the profession, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office. Inexperience reduces productivity and increases accidents, adding to delays, the CBO said.
To tackle the resulting backlogs, the U.S. needs to invest in more dry docks, naval experts say.
Delays in maintaining and fixing ships means the Navy has fewer vessels to deploy at times of increased activity, said Bryan Clark, a naval expert at the Hudson Institute think tank.
At one point in 2019, all but one of the Navy’s six East Coast stationed aircraft carriers were stuck in docks. The USS Abraham Lincoln had to endure an extended, 295-day trip to the Middle East—the longest carrier deployment in the post-Cold War era—partly because its replacement suffered electrical issues that took longer than anticipated to fix.
Delays persist. U.S. destroyers took a combined 2,633 extra days to repair than planned last year, according to a Navy official. The figure was an improvement, they said, without giving comparable data.
The Navy has struggled to maintain its ships and submarines, such as the USS Helena, on schedule. Photo: Shayne Hensley/U.S. Navy
‘A waste of time and money’
The USS Helena, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine first launched in 1986, has become a poster child for the Navy’s maintenance problems. In recent years, the vessel has spent more time in dock than out at sea.
Submarines have a particularly strict cycle of inspections and maintenance, typically going into dry dock every two years for up to six months.
But the Navy has been behind on submarine repairs since the 2010s, when it decided to give priority to other tasks including overhauling aircraft carriers, Clark said.
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What should be done to speed up repairs to U.S. ships and submarines? Join the conversation below.
To ease the backlog, the Navy in 2016 decided to send the Helena to shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries’ yard in Newport News, Va. The move was supposed to herald the return of private yards to repairing nuclear-powered vessels. However, HII hadn’t done repair work in nine years and its skills base had atrophied.
Work on Helena, which started in late 2017, was initially slated to take months but the vessel ended up staying at the company’s yard for several years.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on everything from painting and cleaning to fitting new hull tiles that help avoid detection and adding underwater microphones, contract data shows.
Delays on the Helena were cascading, deferring work on other vessels, including the Boise.
The Navy said the Helena was the oldest submarine of its type in the fleet and the maintenance required was more complex than initially envisaged. HII declined to comment.
Helena was delivered back to the Navy in January 2022, HII said at the time. The vessel, however, soon needed further work done at a Navy yard.
The grave of Timothy Sanders. The sailor with mother Nicole and father Bill.
Nicole Sanders, Samantha Sanders
On May 24 last year, Nicole Sanders was at home when she answered the door to see uniformed naval officers.
Her son had been killed by a 440-volt shock, almost four times the voltage that feeds a standard U.S. lightbulb, she said the Navy report found. The report hasn’t been made public.
“It’s akin to having an electrician come into your house and leave wires exposed,” Sanders said.
After weeks of NCIS inquiries and grief counseling for the crew, Helena sailed to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The visit coincided with the arrival in the area of a new Russian submarine.
Shortly after, the Helena left for Puget Sound on what would be her final voyage. Last month, the submarine was decommissioned.
“That long period of repair and maintenance ended up being a waste of time and money,” said the Hudson Institute’s Clark.
Write to Alistair MacDonald at Alistair.Macdonald@wsj.com
3. AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’
Because all that information, data crunching and slick powerpoint slide decks require the human element. The time saved by using AI to conduct those activities should allow more time for human interaction, analysis, judgment, analysis that should produce better outcomes from consultants. Then again, those same capabilities would also improve the functions and capabilities of primary staff personnel thus reducing the need for outside consultants. But if used correctly outside consultants can provide objective analysis that identifies the blind spots of those who are too close to the problems. I think we just need to use AI effectively but I believe AI can enhance human capabilities but not totally replace them (imagine those not having to waste time on making slide decks.)
Per the previous article on Navy ship maintenance - how is AI going to help solve that problem? Hopefully it can make a valuable contribution. But it won't be made without the human element.
We need to embrace AI and not be afraid of it and figure out how to best exploit it but we also cannot allow it to take over functions that require real human judgment.
AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’
If AI can analyze information, crunch data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck within seconds, how does the biggest name in consulting stay relevant?
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mckinsey-consulting-firms-ai-strategy-89fbf1be?st=u1UbFm&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
By Chip Cutter
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Aug. 2, 2025 11:00 am ET
Advising on AI and technology accounts for 40% of McKinsey’s revenue. Photo: Lanna Apisukh for WSJ
Companies pay dearly for McKinsey’s human expertise, and for nearly a century they have had good reason: The elite firm’s armies of consultants have helped generations of CEOs navigate the thorniest of challenges, synthesizing complex information and mapping out what to do next.
Now McKinsey is trying to steer through its own existential transformation. Artificial intelligence can increasingly do the work done by the firm’s highly paid consultants, often within minutes.
That reality is pushing the firm to rewire its business. AI is now a topic of conversation at every meeting of McKinsey’s board, said Bob Sternfels, the firm’s global managing partner. The technology is changing the ways McKinsey works with clients, how it hires and even what projects it takes on.
And McKinsey is rapidly deploying thousands of AI agents. Those bots now assist consultants in building PowerPoint decks, taking notes and summing up interviews and research documents for clients. The most-used bot is one that helps employees write in a classic “McKinsey tone of voice”—language the firm describes as sharp, concise and clear. Another popular agent checks the logic of a consultant’s arguments, verifying the flow of reasoning makes sense.
Sternfels said he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when McKinsey has one AI agent for every human it employs.
“We’re going to continue to hire, but we’re also going to continue to build agents,” he said.
Already, the shape of the company is shifting. The firm has reduced its head count from about 45,000 people in 2023 to 40,000 through layoffs and attrition, in part to correct for an aggressive pandemic hiring spree. It has since also rolled out roughly 12,000 AI agents.
“Do I think that this is existential for our profession? Yes, I do,” said Kate Smaje, a senior partner Sternfels tapped to lead the firm’s AI efforts earlier this year. But, “I think it’s an existential good for us.”
Consulting is emerging as an early and high-profile test case for how dramatically an industry must shift to stay relevant in the AI era. McKinsey, like its rivals, grew by hiring professionals from top universities, throwing them at projects for clients—then billing companies based, in part, on the scope and duration of the project.
AI not only speeds up projects, but it means many can be done with far fewer people, said Pat Petitti, CEO of Catalant, a freelance marketplace for consultants. Junior employees will likely be affected most immediately, since fewer of them will be needed to do rote tasks on big projects. Yet slimmer staffing is expected to ripple through the entire consulting food chain, he said.
“You have to change the business model,” Petitti said. “You have to make a dramatic change.”
Avoiding a ‘suit with PowerPoint’
One immediate change is that fewer clients want to hire consulting firms for strategy advice alone. Instead, big companies are increasingly looking for a consultant to help them put new systems in place, manage change or learn new skills, industry veterans say.
“The age of arrogance of the management consultant is over now,” said Nick Studer, CEO of consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
Companies, Studer added, “don’t want a suit with PowerPoint. They want someone who is willing to get in the trenches and help them align their team and cocreate with their team.”
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At McKinsey, Sternfels is trying to cement the notion that the firm is a partner, not adviser, to clients. About a quarter of the company’s work today is in outcomes-based arrangements: McKinsey is paid partly on whether a project achieves certain results.
Advising on AI and related technology now makes up 40% of the firm’s revenue, one reason Sternfels is pushing McKinsey to evolve alongside its clients. “You don’t want somebody who is helping you to not be experimenting just as fast as you are,” he said.
The firm’s leaders are adamant that McKinsey isn’t looking to reduce the size of its workforce because of AI. Sternfels said the firm still plans to hire “aggressively” in the coming years.
But the size of teams is changing. Traditionally, a strategy project with a client might require an engagement manager—essentially, a project leader—plus 14 consultants. Today, it might need an engagement manager plus two or three consultants, alongside a few AI agents and access to “deep research” capabilities, Smaje said. Partners with decades of experience might prove more indispensable to projects, in part, because they have seen problems before.
“You can get to a pretty good, average answer using the technology now. So the kind of basic layer of mediocre expertise goes away,” Smaje said. “But the distinctive expertise becomes even more valuable.”
The fastest learners
How McKinsey changes is a topic of much interest inside the firm. In October, roughly 2,500 McKinsey partners will descend on Chicago, where the company was founded in 1926, when a University of Chicago professor named James O. McKinsey began advising businesses.
The meeting will open a year of centenary celebrations inside the firm. In between the dinners, speeches and historical reflections, AI is expected to be a topic coursing through the multiday gathering.
AI-proofing McKinsey means taking on new work, too. The firm is targeting projects once the realm of boutique firms, such as helping companies to identify and groom future executives. McKinsey has long had its own reputation as a “leadership factory,” training CEOs and bosses, and Sternfels said the firm can apply its internal expertise to others.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Do you think consulting firms will become obsolete in the age of AI? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
“That is something I don’t think will be disrupted by AI,” he said.
As McKinsey recruits, it is looking for people who can demonstrate they are fast learners. “Increasingly, you’re going to have to learn over a career at a rate you and I have never seen,” he said.
It also wants something else: People who can work well with others.
“It may sound pretty obvious, but it’s an increasingly important skill if you want to drive change in an organization,” Sternfels said.
Write to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com
4. Trump’s AI Strategy Against China Gets Its First Big Test
Trump’s AI Strategy Against China Gets Its First Big Test
Administration to make its pitch for U.S. chips and software at APEC meeting in South Korea
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-china-ai-race-strategy-apec-64487dcc
By Amrith Ramkumar
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Aug. 2, 2025 9:00 am ET
Michael Kratsios of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a light-red tie, helped develop executive orders President Trump signed at a recent AI forum. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Key Points
What's This?
- The U.S. and China are set to present competing AI strategies to Asian countries at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in South Korea.
- The U.S. aims to promote its AI technology, particularly chips and software, for sectors like healthcare.
- China is pushing its AI products and open-source models.
The U.S. and China just released competing plans to win the artificial-intelligence race. They will get their first test this coming week when the superpowers pitch Asian countries that are picking sides.
The Trump administration is expected to tout its strategy for exporting American AI for a 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in South Korea focused on technology, which begins Monday, U.S. officials said. The goal is to explain why U.S. chips and software are best for deploying AI in sectors such as healthcare and make inroads against China.
Chinese officials will be at the event pitching their AI products, which they say will improve thanks to the government’s deep pockets and its vision for a global community of open models.
“Our message is pretty simple: that American AI is open for business,” Michael Kratsios, head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an interview. He is expected to speak at the event, as are Chinese officials.
Kratsios helped lead development of the AI strategy and executive orders President Trump signed recently at a forum attended by industry leaders. One of the orders is focused on sending U.S. technology abroad and using funding agencies such as the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. to help get the deals done. The agencies are normally used to buy physical goods such as planes and will need to be adapted for AI software.
An Nvidia booth at an international supply chain exposition in Beijing last month. Photo: Andy Wong/AP
The new program could be a boon for the U.S. companies that are chosen for the exports. Top contenders are expected to include the chip designer Nvidia and the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI.
U.S. officials are concerned that Chinese companies like Huawei Technologies will gain popularity in other countries if American competitors aren’t present, which occurred with telecom infrastructure in much of the world over the past 20 years. The risk is sharing U.S. chips and software with nations where they can end up in the hands of adversaries.
Trump earlier this year got rid of a Biden-era rule limiting the number of chips much of the world could buy. The administration recently said it would let China have access to an Nvidia AI chip whose sale had been restricted, marking a turnaround and fueling criticism from national-security hawks.
Kratsios is to be joined in South Korea by Jeffrey Kessler, head of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, who oversees export controls. The goal is to show other nations that the U.S. wants to make it as easy as possible to do AI deals, Kratsios said.
The U.S. and China have pulled back on many export restrictions while the two sides negotiate a trade deal. Trump has recently announced tariff agreements with a host of nations including South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Indonesia.
The Chinese upstart DeepSeek rattled many lawmakers early this year when it released an impressive model using efficiency gains that cut costs. Many countries now use DeepSeek’s product and models from other Chinese companies such as Alibaba Group Holding. China is putting a priority on open-source models that the rest of the world can use, a strategy that could undercut the U.S., whose best models are private.
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Who do you think will win the AI race, the U.S. or China? Join the conversation below.
Kratsios said he is confident U.S. open-source models from companies such as OpenAI can be competitive globally.
A protégé of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, he spent much of the first Trump administration traveling the world unsuccessfully trying to persuade other countries to stop using telecom equipment from Huawei that had already gained popularity.
“The decision of which tech stack to go with had already been made,” Kratsios said. “This time around the field is wide open.”
Write to Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com
5. Hamas Releases Video of Hostage Digging His Own Grave in a Tunnel
We must neve forget the brutality of Hamas.
Hamas Releases Video of Hostage Digging His Own Grave in a Tunnel
U.S.-designated terror group releases clips amid faltering cease-fire and hostage-release talks
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-releases-video-of-hostage-digging-his-own-grave-in-a-tunnel-28f012d5
By Dov Lieber
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Aug. 3, 2025 10:55 am ET
Demonstrators in Tel Aviv demanding the immediate release of hostages held in Gaza, underneath a video released by Hamas showing hostage Evyatar David. Photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters
Key Points
What's This?
- Hamas released videos of emaciated Israeli hostages Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, who pleaded to be freed and criticized Netanyahu.
- The videos have sparked outrage in Israel, intensifying calls for a deal with Hamas to release the remaining hostages.
- Israel is considering a comprehensive deal to end the war, disarm Hamas, demilitarize Gaza, and free all hostages.
TEL AVIV—Emaciated and pale, Evyatar David, a 24-year-old Israeli hostage, was filmed by his Hamas captors digging his own grave in a cramped underground tunnel, one of a series of videos that Palestinian militants have released in recent days of Israeli hostages.
David and another hostage, 21-year-old Rom Braslavski, also shown emaciated and weak, beg to be freed in the videos, warning that their deaths are near. They criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for ignoring their plight.
The U.S.-designated terrorist group released the videos as talks with Israel for a temporary cease-fire broke down last week, and as international pressure rises on Israel to end the war. Gaza has been gripped by a hunger crisis that has spurred several Western allies, including the U.K. and France, to pledge to recognize a Palestinian state.
The videos have shocked and enraged Israelis. Stills from the video of David ran on every front page and are fueling calls for the government to strike a deal with Hamas for the release of all the remaining hostages.
Ofir Braslavski, father of Rom Braslavski, speaking Saturday night at a rally in Tel Aviv for the hostages, asked Netanyahu to “end the war and bring everyone here.”
“Two days ago, I saw my son—and I didn’t recognize him. My Rom is hungry for bread, thirsty for water, sick, physically broken and mentally shattered,” Braslavski said. “I address you, Mr. Prime Minister: Enough!”
A screenshot from a video released by Hamas shows Evyatar David, looking weak and malnourished, writing on a sheet of paper on a tunnel wall. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Over the past 22 months, Gazan militant groups have often published videos of Israeli hostages demanding an end to the war. Israeli officials have called it psychological terrorism.
By releasing videos of starving hostages, Hamas is capitalizing on the current international furor over Israel’s role in creating the humanitarian crisis inside Gaza, while also playing on growing anger inside Israel over the continued suffering of the Israeli hostages, said Michael Milshtein, a former head of Palestinian affairs for Israeli military intelligence.
“It’s part of a very calculated policy,” said Milshtein.
Hamas and other Gazan militants took around 250 people hostage in their Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that left 1,200 people dead and sparked the current war in Gaza. Both David and Braslavski were taken captive from the Nova music festival, where hundreds were killed by Palestinian militants in one of the deadliest scenes of the attacks. Israeli officials believe that about 20 male hostages are still alive and that an additional 30 bodies are being held by militant groups.
Following a meeting between Netanyahu and U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Thursday, Israeli officials said they are now considering negotiating a single comprehensive deal to end the war in Gaza, disarm Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and free all hostages, according to an Israeli official. This would represent a turnaround from Israel’s previous negotiating stance that insisted on only temporary deals because it wasn’t ready to end the war.
Hamas on Saturday said that it would reject Israel’s demand to disarm until the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“We will never relinquish this right until all our national rights are restored, foremost among them the establishment of an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” the group said.
Israeli hostage Rom Braslavski , 21, looking emaciated and weak, shown in a video issued by Palestinian militants. Photo: Hostages and Missing Families Forum
The first video came on Thursday, released by Hamas ally Islamic Jihad, showing a bony Braslavski whimpering as he said he would die of hunger soon if not released. He said he was unable to stand on his own, and the video included footage of him writhing in pain on a mattress on the floor.
On Friday, Hamas released a teaser of the full video of David, showing his wasting frame in a narrow tunnel interspersed with videos of emaciated children that the group said were in Gaza. “They eat what we eat and drink what we drink,” the video states, comparing the hostages with hungry Gazans.
On Saturday, Hamas released the full video of David. It shows him writing on a calendar pinned to the cement tunnel wall on which he records what he eats daily. Most days are either beans, lentils, or no food at all. The video also shows David struggling to hold a shovel as he digs a hole into the sandy tunnel.
“This is the grave I may be buried in,” he says as he continues digging. “Time is running out.”
The video ends with a graphic of clocks ticking and the words in Hebrew, Arabic and English: “Only a cease-fire can bring them back alive. Time is running out.”
Hamas has pinned the starvation of its captives on Israel.
Israelis say despite the food shortage gripping Gaza, Hamas operatives have enough food for themselves and are intentionally starving the hostages. Two former hostages who were held in the same tunnel as David said that they could often smell their captors eating food through an iron door behind where the video was shot.
“Hamas is using Evyatar in one of the most horrific and calculated campaigns of cruelty imaginable—a live hunger experiment,” said his brother Ilay David at the hostage rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. “They are starving him deliberately, systematically, using his agonizing suffering as a twisted tool for their depraved propaganda.”
Write to Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com
6. Athens seeks expanded US presence
Excerpts:
The Pentagon’s 2021-26 budget allocates approximately $42 million for investments in Greek facilities. Americans are replacing existing infrastructure for maintaining smaller vessels used in special operations with modern capabilities. These craft often sail from Souda to Cyprus, requiring substantial maritime range.
Souda is also developing facilities for operations management, including a Joint Tactical Operations Center (JTOC). Upgrades include new hangars for American aircraft at the 115th Combat Wing and replacing sections of the air base perimeter.
Technical discussions involve working groups from both sides addressing legal issues. Given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcements about reducing unnecessary expenses to strengthen the US Armed Forces, America may seek to reduce its European footprint.
However, Greece appears excluded from such reductions. Recent utilization of Souda by forces operating in the Middle East and Iran demonstrates that the Marathi facilities on Crete remain operationally crucial for the Pentagon.
Athens seeks expanded US presence |
Defense cooperation talks include new facilities along with island deployment requests
Vassilis Nedos
02.08.2025 • 19:10
ekathimerini.com · August 2, 2025
Greece and the United States are negotiating modifications to their Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA) that would establish new American military facilities while removing others, as Athens pushes for an expanded US presence across Greek territory, including strategic islands.
The Greek-American negotiations include Athens’ requests for a permanent American presence on islands like Skyros, though the US Armed Forces consistently reject such demands despite pressure, according to discussions between the two capitals.
The talks have gained urgency following the effective destruction of the 1st Army Air Brigade base at Stefanovikio, necessitating adjustments to existing arrangements. At the neighboring Larissa Air Base (110th Combat Wing), three additional facilities will be constructed to accommodate American forces, particularly helicopters stationed there.
Stefanovikio’s removal creates opportunities to formally add two bases to the MDCA. The Petrochori firing range in Xanthi, already used by American forces in recent years, may see an increased US presence. Americans are also discussing hosting arrangements at Camp Dalipi in Thessaloniki, where a command staff presence is expected.
US forces remain in Alexandroupoli, strategically significant in the current phase, while extensive discussions continue regarding Souda Bay’s modernization, covering both naval facilities at Marathi and the adjacent air base (115th Combat Wing).
The Pentagon’s 2021-26 budget allocates approximately $42 million for investments in Greek facilities. Americans are replacing existing infrastructure for maintaining smaller vessels used in special operations with modern capabilities. These craft often sail from Souda to Cyprus, requiring substantial maritime range.
Souda is also developing facilities for operations management, including a Joint Tactical Operations Center (JTOC). Upgrades include new hangars for American aircraft at the 115th Combat Wing and replacing sections of the air base perimeter.
Technical discussions involve working groups from both sides addressing legal issues. Given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcements about reducing unnecessary expenses to strengthen the US Armed Forces, America may seek to reduce its European footprint.
However, Greece appears excluded from such reductions. Recent utilization of Souda by forces operating in the Middle East and Iran demonstrates that the Marathi facilities on Crete remain operationally crucial for the Pentagon.
US Defense Diplomacy
ekathimerini.com · August 2, 2025
7. The road map to making America a crypto superpower
I am afraid of crypto. I don't understand it and I don't know how I could personally operate in that realm or even if I should try to learn how at this late stage of my life.
Isn't this just another form of fiat currency? What gives it value? Or am I demonstrating my ignorance?
But our Secretary of the Treasury says the US is all in on it.
Opinion
The road map to making America a crypto superpower
The Trump administration is making America the “crypto capital of the world.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/29/bessent-crypto-superpower/
July 29, 2025
4 min
1,101
President Donald Trump signs the GENIUS Act at the White House in Washington, D.C., on July 18. (Allison Robbert/For The Washington Post)
By Scott Bessent
Scott Bessent is the U.S. treasury secretary.
Innovation defines the American spirit. But it requires balanced, forward-looking regulation to thrive. No one understands this better than President Donald Trump, whose leadership on digital asset policy has led to a revolution in payments technology that will buttress the dollar and onshore innovation and secure the United States’ position as a crypto superpower.
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The president’s future-focused approach to blockchain technology stands in stark contrast to the hostility of his predecessor. The Biden administration leveraged the power of federal banking regulators to restrict banks from engaging in crypto- and blockchain-related activity, suffocating the digital asset industry. The Biden White House even weighed proposals to “limit or eliminate” bitcoin mining in the United States. And it embraced a “regulation-by-enforcement” ethos under former SEC chair Gary Gensler that made prosecution a potent threat to any crypto entrepreneur who dared to innovate.
To the relief of the United States’ tens of millions of digital asset holders, Trump has brought the Biden administration’s war on crypto to a decisive end. We stood at an inflection point in November, and Trump’s victory was a clear message to the world that Americans rejected managed decline and the suppression of innovation. It was — in blockchain terms — America’s hard fork.
🎤
Following Opinions on the news
Following
Guided by the president’s vision, the administration is now delivering on Trump’s promise to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.” During his first week in office, the president directed his administration to implement a whole-of-government effort to strengthen American leadership in digital financial technology. Federal regulators quickly moved to rescind regulatory guidance that sought to undermine the crypto industry. The administration also put an end to enforcement actions that targeted crypto companies simply for existing, instead refocusing enforcement on proper analysis of individual conduct.
The administration is moving rapidly to establish clear regulations for the digital asset industry. The president recently signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act into law. The act establishes a regulatory framework for dollar-backed stablecoins, embracing them as a force multiplier for the U.S. dollar system.
Stablecoins represent a paradigm shift in digital finance. The U.S. dollar now has an internet-native payment rail that is fast, frictionless and cost-efficient for users worldwide. This groundbreaking technology could expand access to the dollar economy for billions across the globe and lead to a surge in demand for U.S. Treasury bills, which back stablecoins. This could, in turn, lower government borrowing costs and help steer the nation toward fiscal sustainability, all while reinforcing the U.S. dollar’s status as the global reserve currency.
Now that Congress has established clear rules of the road for stablecoins, the next step is to expand the promise of digital assets beyond the payments system. Blockchain technologies have the potential to fundamentally transform how financial markets operate. Tokenization, through which assets in the “real world” are represented on blockchains, can introduce efficiencies into a broad array of financial services and support capital formation. A thriving market for digital assets can also incentivize business formation and create new employment opportunities for Americans nationwide.
The House of Representatives’ Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 is an excellent first step to bring regulatory certainty to digital asset markets. It would bring price transparency into these markets and establish clear lines between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, borrowing from the model in traditional financial markets of structuring rules and guidelines around regulated products and activities. As the Senate deliberates the details of this bill, it should keep the bigger picture in mind: The industry needs regulatory clarity to thrive in the United States. Without market structure legislation, the implementation of the president’s vision will be incomplete.
Trump will soon deliver yet another milestone with a new report from the Presidential Working Group on Digital Assets Markets. The Trump administration will work tirelessly to implement these proposals, and Congress needs to do its part to enact market structure legislation. Under Trump’s leadership, the United States is giving entrepreneurs, investors and innovators the long-needed regulatory certainty they deserve, ensuring that America becomes and remains the crypto capital of the world.
8. Why Understanding Irregular Warfare Matters More Than Defining It
I concur, though I recognize the importance of a definition for doctrine and the full range of DOTMLPF-P (Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel, Facilities, and Policy).
My thoughts here: https://warontherocks.com/2013/11/threats-and-the-words-we-use-a-thought-experiment/
Also I am a supporter of Frank Hoffman's ideas on "understanding." My paraphrase of him follows: Frank Hoffman's "Principle of Understanding" I am a supporter of Dr. Frank Hoffman’s idea that we need a new principle of war called understanding. Although that seems like a no-brainer – as far back as Sun Tzu we have been told that we must know our enemies and know ourselves to be victorious. We all know we need to understand war and warfare, the conditions that give rise to conflict, and the politics that lead to and end conflict. Yet even though the need for understanding is so obvious that we think we do not need to even mention it, it is surprising how so many of our failures can be traced to our lack of understanding. And as an aside, SOF, through its various assessment capabilities and engagement with indigenous populations can make a key contribution to understanding.
Why Understanding Irregular Warfare Matters More Than Defining It
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-understanding-irregular-warfare-matters-more-than-sal-artiaga-1abwc/?trackingId=eEJ63zz6cD0zdVw5BmF5EA%3D%3D
Irregular Warfare & National Security Strategist | Intelligence & Latin America Professional | Opinions = my own. Sharing ≠ endorsement.
August 2, 2025
The definition of Irregular Warfare (IW) has been a subject of debate for many years, with each definition being linked to the doctrinal requirements of the time. However, as strategic competition escalates and IW becomes the conflict space of the 21st century, a crucial realization emerges: the importance of understanding IW, its principles, dynamics, and historical manifestations far exceeds the need for a definition. Although a common definition is necessary for bureaucratic purposes, operational planning, and budgetary alignment, actual effectiveness depends on a deeper institutional and strategic understanding of what IW is, how it operates, and how the U.S. Government (USG) can function within its uncertain parameters. The search for a perfect definition, although essential for institutional clarity, often turns into a futile exercise that confines our strategic thinking to rigid conceptual frameworks. True mastery of IW requires a comprehensive understanding of its historical development, its complete range of operations, and its special requirements on national power.
The Historical Foundations and Evolution of Irregular Warfare
Irregular Warfare has existed longer than the term itself. Its development is an ongoing historical process rather than a series of unrelated events. Throughout history, weaker actors have consistently used asymmetric methods to succeed and outlast conventional powers. Partisan militias used hit-and-run tactics against British forces during the American Revolution. The British imperial forces struggled against Boer guerrillas because of their mobility and deep knowledge of the terrain. Through understanding and influence, T.E. Lawrence leveraged Arab tribal dynamics to oppose Ottoman rule instead of relying on command authority. The core elements of IW remain the same because they rely on exploiting weaknesses and achieving political goals with local support or a tolerant environment. Historical patterns show these fundamental truths to students who examine them.
At the start of its history, IW mainly existed as guerrilla warfare, where small mobile groups leveraged local knowledge and terrain along with support from the population. The Napoleonic Wars provide an essential historical example for analysis. Napoleon’s conventional forces ultimately failed to dominate Europe because the “little war” in Spain, combined with guerrilla warfare operations, served as a counterforce. Spanish partisans, along with British special forces and political elements, formed a premodern, whole-of-nation approach that demonstrated IW as a complex system involving local fighters, special forces, and political operations.
During the Cold War, Unconventional Warfare (UW) emerged as a new form of IW by supporting resistance movements and insurgencies operating behind enemy lines, as U.S. Special Forces conducted operations in Europe and Asia. The twentieth century saw further developments in IW through the addition of counterinsurgency (COIN), counterterrorism (CT), and foreign internal defense (FID). The communist insurgencies in China and Vietnam pushed strategic and academic institutions to develop a deeper understanding. The 20th century saw IW evolve into a sophisticated political-military campaign for legitimacy, a concept powerfully articulated by Mao Zedong in “On Guerrilla Warfare.” This was demonstrated in the prolonged conflict in Vietnam, where American forces ultimately failed because they did not grasp this political dimension. The lesson from this and other historical conflicts is clear: Irregular Warfare is fundamentally a struggle for legitimacy, not a contest for territory.
From Activities to the Spectrum.
The U.S. Department of Defense began defining IW as a separate concept from conventional warfare in the early 2000s. The 2007 Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept characterized IW as “a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over relevant populations.” The definition of IW evolved from its previous classification of activities like COIN, CT, UW, FID, and Stability Operations to become a warfare logic rooted in political legitimacy and societal influence. The scope of IW activities continues to grow and become more complex, now including counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, foreign internal defense (FID), stability operations, as well as countering threat networks, civil-military operations, counter-threat finance, and information operations.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan showed how complex modern IW operations are. The U.S. military and its allies carried out counterterrorism efforts using advanced technology in one day, while the next day they focused on local stability efforts like building schools, training police, and meeting with tribal elders. The “whole-of-government approach” in military roles came directly from lessons learned in Vietnam and other post-colonial conflicts. The complicated link between kinetic actions, civil-military cooperation, and political involvement goes beyond what a simple definition of IW can explain. Skilled practitioners need to understand both the historical background and current factors that connect these activities, along with the methods to synchronize them effectively. IW now includes psychological operations, cyber campaigns, economic coercion, information manipulation, proxy warfare, and non-attributable influence operations carried out by Russia, China, and Iran. These efforts are part of organized campaigns operating in the gray zone below open warfare.
Despite this evolution, U.S. agencies and services remain mired in definitional debates. Different definitions exist across the DoD, Joint Staff, and other parts of the national security enterprise. Some emphasize violence. Others emphasize legitimacy. Some view IW as strictly military, others as inherently whole-of-government. The result is organizational confusion. This obsession with definitions often obscures the more critical need: comprehension. Understanding IW means recognizing its core dynamics: it is about people, perception, and power, not simply battlefield success. IW practitioners must grasp context, history, culture, political legitimacy, and ideology. These are not learned through doctrinal memorization but through sustained education, experience, and institutional learning. Take, for instance, the war in Afghanistan. Though defined in U.S. doctrine as a counterinsurgency campaign, many decision-makers lacked a deep understanding of Afghan tribal dynamics, local power structures, or Pashtunwali. The failure wasn’t in defining the mission; it was in failing to understand the human terrain and irregular dynamics.
The Necessity of Definition and the Challenge of Institutional Divide
That said, the need for a working definition of IW cannot be dismissed. For operational, policy, and fiscal reasons, institutions like the U.S. government (USG) require a common lexicon. Without a definition, it becomes impossible to allocate resources, write doctrine, or train personnel. These definitions serve bureaucratic functions: they guide doctrine, resource allocation, capability development, and interagency planning. But they are not enough. No definition, no matter how precise, can substitute for understanding how IW operates in real environments. The absence of a shared understanding of what constitutes IW creates internal “camps” within the USG. The Special Operations community, for example, has historically embraced IW as its core mission, while the conventional military, with its focus on state-on-state conflict, has often viewed it as a secondary, specialized task. Do not get me started on the current enamored between the Army and large-scale combat operations. These conceptual divides extend beyond the Department of Defense (DoD) and into the broader National Security Enterprise, including the intelligence community and the State Department. This internal friction, often born from differing definitions and understandings of IW, hampers the development of a cohesive national strategy.
Institutionalizing Understanding via Education Over Semantics
To truly succeed in the irregular domain, the U.S. Government must prioritize institutional education over semantic clarity. The challenge is not to abandon definitions but to use them as a starting point for deeper education. The goal should be to create a USG team, united not by a single, rigid definition, but by a shared, historical understanding of what IW is, how it has evolved, and why it is a critical component of modern statecraft. A shared curriculum, grounded in historical case studies from the Napoleonic Wars to the contemporary conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, is essential. This education would transcend bureaucratic silos, allowing diplomats to understand the military's role in political warfare and soldiers to appreciate the importance of economic development and governance in a COIN environment. This requires sustained, interagency professional development, where military schools, intelligence training programs, State Department academies, and law enforcement units integrate a shared IW educational framework.
Define to Coordinate, Understand to Win
The persistent debates around defining Irregular Warfare reveal more about institutional priorities than about warfare itself. While a shared definition is necessary for coordination, it is not sufficient. Victory in the irregular space is not achieved by the best definition, but by the best understanding. Irregular Warfare is not just a doctrine; it is a way that adversaries engage us politically, culturally, economically, and informationally. From cyber-attacks to narco-insurgencies, from misinformation to proxy militias, these are the realities of modern conflict. And unless the U.S. develops leaders, strategists, and policymakers who understand the irregular domain, its history, its logic, and its human dimension, no definition will save us. To succeed in the 21st century, the U.S. must stop asking, “What is IW?” and start asking, “Do we understand it?” That shift, from definition to comprehension, will determine the future of American national security.
9. A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump
Can anyone make a case for why this person should be influencing personnel decisions in our national security community? Why does this person have so much influence? What are this person's qualifications? (all rhetorical questions but I would not mind seeing if anyone can make the case).
A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump
Jen Easterly, who had served in Republican and Democratic administrations, was headed to the academy. Then a right-wing activist stepped in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/us/politics/west-point-easterly-trump-loomer.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bU8.-Z_T.O1UehQY7tZdV&smid=url-share
Listen to this article · 7:39 min Learn more
The Army secretary announced that Ms. Easterly would no longer serve as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the department of social sciences at West Point.Credit...Ben Curtis/Associated Press
By Greg Jaffe
Reporting from Washington
Aug. 3, 2025
Updated 8:10 a.m. ET
Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country.
“This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”
Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now she was blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”
The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.
“Wow @PeteHegseth! Looks like some of your underlings are trying to screw you,” Ms. Loomer wrote on X on July 29. She accused Ms. Easterly of using her position leading a cybersecurity agency in the Biden administration to “silence Trump supporters” who questioned the integrity of U.S. elections.
The next day, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, an Iraq war veteran and Yale Law School classmate of Vice President JD Vance, announced that Ms. Easterly would no longer serve as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the department of social sciences at West Point.
Ms. Easterly’s rise in elite policy circles over three decades and her sudden fall at the hands of Ms. Loomer, 32, tell the story of how Washington is changing during Mr. Trump’s second term and why it might never be the same.
And it raises big questions about the ways power and influence are currently wielded in Washington; what it means to be a patriot; and whether loyalty to Mr. Trump or any sitting president should be a prerequisite for government service.
Editors’ Picks
Image
Laura Loomer accused Ms. Easterly of using her position leading a cybersecurity agency in the Biden administration to “silence Trump supporters” who questioned the integrity of U.S. elections.Credit...Greg Kahn for The New York Times
In December 1989, with the Soviet Union crumbling, Ms. Easterly joined four other soon-to-be college graduates on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to discuss the decade that was ending and her hopes for the future. Her parents had both served in senior positions in the Reagan administration. She was finishing her final year at West Point and had been selected for a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University.
Ms. Easterly talked about the importance of public service and the spread of democracy and pluralism worldwide. Asked about her goals, she said, “I want to be the first woman chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Then she quickly amended her answer. “By that time,” she said, “I probably won’t be the first woman.”
Nearly 32 years later, just days after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Ms. Easterly sent a message to her staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In it, she described her husband’s struggles with PTSD upon his return from the war in 2009 and her decision to leave the Army at the end of her third combat deployment because she feared that her continued absences were hurting her young son.
“I’ve found the events of the past week more than heartbreaking — heart-rending, really,” she wrote.
She found solace in the belief that American soldiers had fought for something bigger than themselves, bigger than even the Afghan people. They were fighting in defense of “the most profound idea in human history,” she told her team. “The idea that men and women are born free and by their birth alone entitled to liberty and justice.”
Ms. Easterly did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Ms. Loomer, a podcaster and persistent social media presence, has run for Congress, but never served in government. Senior White House officials, who view her as unmanageable and often toxic, have blocked her from serving in the Trump administration.
But her unwavering loyalty to Mr. Trump and deep, often conspiratorial, doubts about the federal government have vaulted her to a position of influence in Mr. Trump’s orbit. “On a daily basis, I communicate with the most powerful and wealthiest people in the world,” she recently told The New York Times.
Her rise was also fueled by the post-9/11 wars, which cost trillions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of American, Iraqi and Afghan lives. Their failure, over the course of more than 20 years, highlighted the massive blind spots of the country’s political and foreign policy elite.
Ms. Loomer’s view of the country and its future reflects that legacy of long and costly failure. “I feel like Western civilization is in a death spiral,” she told The Times.
She often describes Mr. Trump as the country’s only real hope of redemption and casts herself as his fiercest advocate.
At least a half-dozen White House officials have been pushed out after Ms. Loomer pressed for their dismissal. A senior administration official said the departures were not necessarily Ms. Loomer’s work, but Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised her as a “true patriot” and ideological enforcer.
“I play to an audience of one,” Ms. Loomer said.
To some, Ms Loomer’s role in bringing down Ms. Easterly stands as an object lesson for the U.S. military and others in who survives in today’s Washington. Ms. Easterly had been appointed to her position by Brig. Gen. Shane Reeves, West Point’s dean.
“A Homecoming Worth Celebrating,” he announced on social media on July 29. On July 30, Ms. Easterly’s appointment was rescinded.
“Now some TV commentator keen to score political points can humiliate even very senior officers,” said Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, Vietnam veteran and emeritus professor in history and international relations at Boston University. “And, of course, those officers allow themselves to be humiliated with the secretary of defense as either bystander or co-conspirator. It is an extraordinary moment.”
Ms. Easterly expressed similar concerns in her recent social media post. “When outrage is weaponized and truth discarded, it tears at the fabric of unity and undermines the very ethos that draws brave young men and women to serve and sacrifice,” she warned.
She closed with a message to West Point’s cadets that echoed the hope she had expressed decades earlier as a 21-year-old cadet on NewsHour.
“The world needs your strength, your courage, your warrior spirit, your will to win,” she wrote. “But it also needs your empathy, your intellect, your humility, your integrity.”
Ms. Loomer often speaks of an America that is corrupt and crumbling, despoiled by an arrogant and out-of-touch elite. “There is a CIA Coup of the Trump admin taking place right now,” she wrote in a Saturday post on X.
In her message to West Point’s cadets, Ms. Easterly described the country in more optimistic terms. “I believe in our great nation, our great experiment to continually form a more perfect union,” she wrote.
Both she and Ms. Loomer were sharing their visions of America. For the moment, Ms. Easterly was the outsider.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military.
10. China state media reveals new nuclear-armed submarine
China state media reveals new nuclear-armed submarine
Newsweek · by Ryan Chan · August 1, 2025
A Chinese sailor deployed aboard a nuclear-armed submarine vowed that his unit would fire missiles "without hesitation" upon receiving an order, according to a report by state media.
The report by China Central Television also claimed this was the "first disclosure" of a new Chinese submarine conducting a long-distance mission in an undisclosed maritime location.
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Why It Matters
China possesses more than 370 naval vessels, making it the world's largest combat fleet by hull count, including six Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, each armed with 12 nuclear ballistic missiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
All Type 094 submarines are homeported at Longpo Naval Base on Hainan Island in southern China, which borders the South China Sea, and represent China's "first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent," the Pentagon assessed in its report on Chinese military power.
Ballistic missile submarines are the most survivable leg of China's nuclear triad, alongside land-based ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable bombers, because they are extremely difficult to detect while conducting patrols that maintain a constant at-sea deterrent presence.
What To Know
A Chinese submarine, unidentified in the report, was seen departing a naval base at an undisclosed location, according to footage aired by China Central Television on Thursday.
Australia-based naval analyst Alex Luck told Newsweek the submarine is one of six Type 094 boats in service, suggesting the footage was likely taken at Longpo Naval Base. It remains unclear whether the submarine carried out its mission in the South China Sea.
A Chinese Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine docks at an undisclosed location on July 31, 2025. A Chinese Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine docks at an undisclosed location on July 31, 2025. China Central Television
While the footage offered a rare glimpse inside the submarine and how sailors operate it, certain interior sections were blurred, likely for operational security reasons. It was not immediately clear whether the interior scenes were filmed while the submarine was at sea.
"Today is a peaceful era, but tomorrow may mark the start of war. On the day real war begins, we will wait only for the order—and then launch this missile without hesitation," said Ma Xiaohui, a sailor assigned to an unidentified submarine unit.
The Type 094 submarine can be armed with either JL-2 or JL-3 ballistic missiles, which have ranges of 4,488 miles and 6,214 miles, respectively. The JL-3 missile is capable of targeting portions of the U.S. mainland when launched from China's littoral waters.
As part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's accelerated development of nuclear forces, China's next-generation nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine, the Type 096, is expected to enter service in the late 2020s or early 2030s, according to the Pentagon's assessment report.
A Chinese Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine transits an undisclosed maritime location on July 31, 2025. A Chinese Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine transits an undisclosed maritime location on July 31, 2025. China Central Television
In comparison, the United States currently operates a fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, each armed with up to 20 Trident II D5LE nuclear missiles. According to the Federation of American Scientists, this missile has an estimated range of 7,456 miles.
What People Are Saying
The Pentagon, in its report on Chinese military power: "The [People's Republic of China]'s next-generation Type 096 [nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines] will reportedly be armed with follow-on longer range [submarine-launched ballistic missiles]."
The Federation of American Scientists, in its report on Chinese nuclear weapons: "Whenever they are in the South China Sea, China's [nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines] typically appear to be accompanied by a protection detail, including surface warships and aircraft (and possibly attack submarines) capable of tracking adversarial submarines."
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen whether the Chinese military will disclose details of other nuclear forces in the coming days as it celebrates the 98th anniversary of its founding on Friday.
About the writer
Ryan Chan is a Newsweek reporter based in Hong Kong, where he previously had over a decade of experience at a local newspaper, covering China and current events around the world. His focus is on security and defense issues in the Western Pacific region. He is a graduate of Hong Kong Baptist University. You can get in touch with Ryan by emailing r.chan@newsweek.com.
Newsweek · by Ryan Chan · August 1, 2025
11. Close the Icebreaker Gap with ICE Pact
Close the Icebreaker Gap with ICE Pact
Coast Guard Essay Contest—First Prize
Sponsored by Susan Curtin and the Naval Institute
A foreign approach could be the answer to acquiring the Coast Guard’s next icebreakers.
By Lieutenant Isaac LaLonde, U.S. Coast Guard
August 2025 Proceedings Vol. 151/8/1,470
usni.org · August 1, 2025
The Coast Guard has an icebreaker acquisition problem. The Polar Security Cutter (PSC) program is six years behind schedule and $1 billion over budget. The first PSC now is not expected until at least 2030, and the medium icebreaker Arctic security cutters are a mere speck on the horizon. The recent signing of the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact between the United States, Canada, and Finland is an opportunity to plot a new course. The Coast Guard should use ICE Pact to outsource the design and production of icebreakers to a partner nation such as Finland, which could result in well-designed, cost-efficient, and quickly produced icebreakers to protect the nation’s polar interests for decades to come.
The Current Situation
The Coast Guard recently purchased and modified the commercial icebreaker Aiviq, renamed Storis (WAGB-21), to supplement its icebreaking fleet, but not everyone believes the ship will meet the Coast Guard’s operational requirements. Courtesy Edison Chouest Offshore
The United States is at a serious disadvantage in the maritime Arctic and Antarctic. Russia has 41 icebreakers, and China has been investing heavily in icebreakers in its bid to gain influence as a “near-Arctic” nation. In contrast, the United States has three polar icebreakers: the heavy icebreaker USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10), commissioned in 1976 and 19 years past its expected service life; the medium icebreaker Healy (WAGB-20), which experienced two serious shipboard fires in 2020 and 2024; and the recently purchased commercial icebreaker Aiviq, renamed Storis (WAGB-21), which some believe is a questionable match to Coast Guard requirements.1
The Polar Security Cutter program is intended to recapitalize the Coast Guard’s aging fleet of icebreakers, but it has experienced both schedule and budget overruns. Only two years after its original 2019 estimate of $2.3 billion for three PSCs, the Coast Guard’s cost estimate had increased to $3.2 billion. An August 2024 Congressional Budget Office report put the cost at more than $5 billion, which looks to be more accurate.2 In March 2025, the Coast Guard awarded a $951.6 million contract modification for the first PSC, bringing the lead ship’s cost to just under $1.7 billion, not including government -furnished equipment, Navy-type/Navy-owned equipment, post-delivery, and other program costs.3
The original timeline set delivery of the first PSC for 2024. Instead, the cutter did not begin construction until 2024, and delivery now is estimated for 2030. Even if 2030 is accurate, the nation cannot wait five more years. Were a casualty to sideline the Polar Star or Healy, it would have serious consequences for Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica and the United States’ ability to conduct research and project presence in the Arctic Ocean.4
The Coast Guard’s icebreaker fleet is on thin ice, and the nation’s ability to operate in the Arctic and Antarctic is at risk of falling through.
ICE Pact: A New Opportunity
The Coast Guard could make a fresh start with the polar security cutters that are not yet under contract and the Arctic security cutters. On 13 November 2024, the United States, Canada, and Finland signed the ICE Pact trilateral memorandum of understanding to “enhance their collective capacity to design, produce, and maintain arctic and polar icebreakers.”5 With the help of Finland in particular, the United States could construct a new icebreaker fleet and have foreign-built heavy or medium icebreakers operational in less than five years.
Is this an action the United States could take? The Jones Act restricts shipping between U.S. ports to U.S.-built, -owned, and -crewed ships, but according to a Congressional Research Service report, it does not apply to icebreakers because they are not engaged in “coastwise trade.”6 However, the report does note two laws that do prohibit the Coast Guard from owning foreign-built ships: 14 U.S.C. §1151 states, “No Coast Guard vessel, and no major component of the hull or superstructure of a Coast Guard vessel, may be constructed in a foreign shipyard,” and 10 U.S.C. §8679 states the same for any vessel constructed for the armed forces.6 Nonetheless, both sections allow the President to waive these rules in the interest of national security. Lack of icebreakers is certainly a risk to national security, and the current President has appeared willing to grant a waiver.
Following a meeting on 29 March with Finnish President Alexander Stubb, President Donald Trump stated on social media, “President Stubb and I look forward to strengthening the partnership between the United States and Finland, and that includes the purchase and development of a large number of badly needed Icebreakers for the U.S.”7 This seems to signal the President’s willingness to sign a waiver, but the Coast Guard still needs to be brought on board. There are signs that may be happening. On 11 April, the Coast Guard released a request for information for the Arctic Security Cutter program asking for global shipyards’ capability to produce an icebreaker in 36 months from the contract date.8 For now, this is only a call for information, but it is a step in the right direction.
In September 2024, the Finnish-designed icebreaking expedition cruise ship Le Commandant Charcot crossed the geographic and magnetic North Poles and became the first surface vessel to reach the North Pole of Inaccessibility—the point in the Arctic Ocean farthest from any landmass. U.S. Coast Guard (Krystyn Pecora)
The Icebreaking Capital of the World
While the United States has built one icebreaker in the past 50 years, Finland is widely considered to be the nation most experienced in designing and building icebreakers. Business Finland states the nation has designed 80 percent of the world’s icebreakers, and 60 percent have been constructed in Finnish shipyards.9 It has designed and built these ships for countries including Canada, Sweden, Russia, France, and Argentina. The website of Aker Arctic, one of Finland’s leading icebreaker design companies, shows more than 30 vessel designs, ranging from state-of-the-art icebreakers such as the Polaris, which can break ice ridges 10 feet thicker than the Polar Star can with half the horsepower, to the luxury cruise ship Le Commandant Charcot, which has an impressive IACS Polar Class 2 rating and is capable of breaking multiyear ice up to 8-feet-thick.10 Canada recently announced one of its Polar Class 2 icebreakers will be designed and partially constructed in Finland.
Finland’s shipyards also are known for building icebreakers quickly and cost-effectively. According to the Wilson Center, “It is estimated that, compared to U.S. icebreaker production underway, the average Finnish icebreaker would cost about a fifth of the price and be completed in about 24 months after a contract is signed.”11
A Path Forward
As many of Finland’s icebreakers are built to commercial standards, some might question its expertise building vessels to military specifications. Rauma Marine Constructions in Rauma, Finland, currently is building the Finnish Navy’s new multipurpose, ice-capable Pohjanmaa-class corvettes. Rauma Shipyard
Just as an ice pilot must carefully pick a channel through the ice, the Coast Guard must carefully weigh its options if it decides to use a foreign shipbuilder. There are two potential paths forward, and at least one must be taken if the nation wants new icebreakers in this decade.
The first is to end domestic heavy icebreaker acquisition at two ships and build the final two or three PSCs abroad. Heavy icebreakers are desperately needed, as the Polar Star is approaching a half-century in age. A two-pronged approach—international and domestic construction—would double the chances a heavy icebreaker would be operational by 2030, and the potential savings from the Finnish-built icebreakers could be funneled to other important acquisitions.
The second route is to take advantage of the opportunity ICE Pact offers to immediately begin acquisition of Arctic security cutters. With so much of the focus on the PSC program, replacements for the Healy have been largely ignored. An Arctic Security Cutter program building medium icebreakers in a foreign port could run parallel with domestic production of heavy PSCs. Turning out both icebreaker classes simultaneously would be a significant boost to the nation’s ability to protect its polar resources and project presence in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Addressing Critics
There are concerns in choosing foreign procurement of an icebreaker, but many can be addressed. One of the foremost concerns is the lost opportunity for domestic shipyards to gain icebreaking experience. The simple answer is that the United States does not have time for its shipyards to catch up. It needed new icebreakers years ago, and waiting until the 2030s for one PSC puts the nation’s polar security in jeopardy. The two PSCs already under contract will give U.S. shipyards signifi-cant experience. In addition, in June, the Canadian shipbuilder Davie stated its intent to acquire Gulf Copper’s shipyards in Texas. Davie already owns Helsinki Shipyard, which opens an opportunity for the Coast Guard to have the company quickly begin building icebreakers in Finland, where infrastructure and specialists are located, with a plan to eventually transition to U.S. production in Texas.12
Another concern is whether Finland has the expertise to build military-specification vessels. Although many of Finland’s icebreakers are built to commercial standards, companies such as Rauma Marine Constructions have experience with military vessels, and Rauma currently is building the Finnish Navy’s new ice-capable Pohjanmaa–class corvettes.13 Aker Arctic, which specializes in design, engineering, and testing for ice-going vessels and icebreakers, was involved in the design process for the USCGC Mackinaw (WAGB-83) and Healy, demonstrating past work with the United States and with the specifications that will be required for the next icebreakers.14
Another issue is Finland’s historical ties to Russia, including Russian firms’ part ownership of some shipyards. Although Finland previously made icebreakers for Russia, the 2022 war with Ukraine and Finland’s subsequent acceptance into NATO marked a fundamental break in an already deteriorating relationship. No further icebreakers are being built for Russia, and Finland replaced Russian ownership of its shipbuilding companies to avoid sanctions and remain attractive to its Western allies. The United States could and should still take steps to protect its intellectual property and classified technology by installing those systems in the United States after the icebreaker has been built. This would limit potential leaks and still allow the Coast Guard to take advantage of Finland’s icebreaking expertise.
Act Now to Close the Gap
The Coast Guard’s icebreaking fleet is far behind those of U.S. competitors. Senior Coast Guard leaders must take action, championing the power of ICE Pact and seeking an executive waiver to procure foreign-built icebreakers. As adversaries seek to capitalize on polar shipping routes and resources, the Coast Guard urgently needs top-of-the-line icebreakers that can protect the nation and the crews that serve on board, regardless of where those ships are built.
1. Richard Read, “Meet the Neglected 43-Year-Old Stepchild of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex,” Los Angeles Times, 2 August 2019; and McKenzie Funk, “How a Troubled Icebreaker Became America’s Newest Military Vessel,” ProPublica, 23 January 2025.
2. Congressional Budget Office, The Cost of the Coast Guard’s Polar Security Cutter (Washington, DC: 21 August 2024).
3. Ronald O’Rourke, Coast Guard Polar Security Cutter (Polar Icebreaker) Program: Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 18 June 2025).
4. The National Science Foundation had to contract the services of the Russian icebreaker Krasin to support Operation Deep Freeze in 2004–6, the Swedish icebreaker Oden from 2008 to 2011, and the Russian icebreaker Vladimir Ignatyuk in 2012–13.
5. “MOU among the Government of Canada, the Government of the Republic of Finland, and the Government of the United States of America Regarding a Trilateral Framework for the Production of Arctic and Polar Icebreakers and Other Capabilities: Homeland Security,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 13 November 2024.
6. O’Rourke, Coast Guard Polar Security Cutter (Polar Icebreaker) Program.
7. Andrea Shalal and Anne Kauranen, “Finnish President Boosts Ties with Trump in Surprise Florida Visit,” Reuters, 30 March 2025.
8. U.S. Coast Guard Contract Operations Office, “Request for Information—Arctic Security Cutter (ASC): Icebreaking Capable Vessels or Vessel Designs that Are Ready for Construction,” Sam.Gov, 11 April 2025.
9. “Finnish Solutions for the Entire Icebreaking Value Chain,” news release, Business Finland, 3 August 2024.
10. Peter Rybski, “Finland’s Icebreakers,” Sixty Degrees North, 3 April 2024. The International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) established polar classes 1–7. Polar Class 1 is the highest and is capable of year-round operation in all polar waters. The U.S. definition of a “heavy” icebreaker generally aligns with a Polar Class 2 vessel and a “medium” icebreaker generally aligns with a Polar Class 3 vessel.
11. Jason Moyer and Rickard Lindholm, “Icebreaking Explained—Finland: Europe’s Icebreaker Superpower,” Wilson Center, 12 November 2024.
12. Sam LaGrone, “Canadian Shipbuilder Davie Set to Buy Texas Shipyard for Potential U.S. Icebreaker Work,” USNI News, 12 June 2025.
13. Ice-capable ships are able to operate in ice-covered waters but are not designed primarily for icebreaking and normally are not capable of breaking thicker ice.
14. Aker Arctic, “A Finnish Solution in North American Waters,” AkerArctic.fi, 30 May 2025; and “An Extraordinary Icebreaker for the United States Coast Guard,” AkerArctic.fi, September 2016.
usni.org · August 1, 2025
12. How the US needs to prepare for a higher-level war, according to an American special ops trainer in Ukraine
Excerpts:
"The first lesson I would recommend to NATO and the United States is to forget the last lesson they learned," the American said during a video chat from an undisclosed location in central Ukraine. A counterinsurgency, like the ones American forces fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is "nothing like a conventional war" in terms of the intensity of combat and the types of threats.
Scooter, a former US Navy sailor who fought Russia for two years alongside other foreign volunteers in Ukraine's International Legion before eventually joining the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces, said threats that soldiers face in this war — rocket fire from helicopters, fighter jet strikes, accurate artillery shelling — are vastly different from the scenes in the Middle East.
How the US needs to prepare for a higher-level war, according to an American special ops trainer in Ukraine
- The US military is taking lessons from the Ukraine war to inform its training for future wars.
- An American veteran serving in Ukraine said the US needs to prepare in a few broad ways.
- He told BI the US needs to forget about the Middle East wars and focus efforts on air superiority.
Business Insider · by Jake Epstein
To prepare for the next major conflict, the US military needs to forget nearly everything it has learned from two decades of fighting wars in the Middle East, an American veteran in Ukraine told Business Insider.
Scooter, who serves as an instructor with the 4th Ranger Regiment of Ukraine's Special Operations Forces, said Russia's invasion offers lessons for the West about how it can prepare for future combat. The American could only be identified by his call sign for security reasons.
"The first lesson I would recommend to NATO and the United States is to forget the last lesson they learned," the American said during a video chat from an undisclosed location in central Ukraine. A counterinsurgency, like the ones American forces fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, is "nothing like a conventional war" in terms of the intensity of combat and the types of threats.
Scooter, a former US Navy sailor who fought Russia for two years alongside other foreign volunteers in Ukraine's International Legion before eventually joining the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces, said threats that soldiers face in this war — rocket fire from helicopters, fighter jet strikes, accurate artillery shelling — are vastly different from the scenes in the Middle East.
"Commanders need to be training their people to deal with a threat, very similar to what we were expecting during the Cold War, with whoever we end up in a war with next," he explained. "They need to be training them for much of the same threat that we would've faced in the 1980s."
'Airpower wins wars'
In a modern war, achieving air superiority through the suppression or destruction of enemy surface-to-air missile systems is critical. In the Middle East campaigns of the past couple of decades, this mission was much less of an issue for US forces, which could operate relatively uncontested in the skies.
Russia failed to achieve air superiority during the early stages of its invasion despite fielding a force of fighter jets and bombers vastly superior to that of Ukraine. This would come back to haunt Moscow, which is locked in a grinding, attritional fight, unable to make significant battlefield gains.
Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Advanced air defenses on both sides prevent Russia and Ukraine from operating their aircraft too close to the front line, providing the kind of close-air support needed to facilitate maneuvering. Most strikes are carried out from standoff ranges.
For US and NATO military planners, the ability to suppress enemy air defenses and establish air superiority — the ability to control the airspace without restrictive interference — will be key in a conventional war against a peer adversary like Russia.
And they know that.
US Air Force Gen. James Hecker, who served as the commander of NATO's air command before he retired this year, said previously that "if we can't get air superiority, we're going to be doing the fight that's going on in Russia and Ukraine right now."
"And we know how many casualties that are coming out of that fight," he said.
Given the dangers of failing to achieve air superiority, Scooter said he "would suggest to our leadership to make the quality of our pilots, maintainers, and logistics core a huge priority — if not number one."
"In this type of conflict, airpower wins wars," he continued. "Infantry take and hold ground. It's really hard to take and hold ground when you have to contend with enemy artillery and aircraft. The party holding air superiority and the ability to suppress enemy air defense is typically the party doing the bombing of ground troops."
Scooter stressed that ensuring squadrons are well-maintained and at solid readiness levels is a significant capability to chase.
Even then, there's no guarantee that air superiority can be achieved. Some military leaders have said that there may only be windows of opportunity rather than persistent dominance in the air, but those bursts can be exploited for potential breakthroughs on the battlefield.
'Throw the book away'
US Army/Markus Rauchenberger
Lessons learned from Ukraine extend beyond the leadership level and run down to the unit level, down to the soldier.
For individual soldiers, it's important to be quick, stay mobile, and avoid drawing unnecessary attention. This means concealing weapons or anything that can make someone a target. Others in the war have told BI that appearing important on the battlefield is definitely something to avoid. Sitting around in a spot can also be a bad decision.
"Speed saves. The faster you go, the longer you live," Scooter explained.
He said that it's good practice for special operations forces in the US to think outside the box. This might mean working against the training manual or standard operating procedures in situations that might call for it, like evacuating wounded soldiers from the battlefield.
"Throw the book away, throw the manual away. Get rid of it, and pay attention to how things are actually done here," Scooter said. "So much of what we train in the United States is completely not applicable to reality."
Scooter isn't the first US vet in Ukraine to arrive at that conclusion. One told BI last year that "we've gotten so used to the idea of just fighting guerrilla wars and fucking fighting terrorists and everything else that we kind of forgot what it means to actually fight a war."
A critical area of focus for the US will need to be keeping pace with drone warfare, which is rapidly evolving in Ukraine, as Kyiv and Moscow routinely adapt their tactics and unveil new innovations to one-up the enemy.
Officials and analysts have said that the US is unprepared for the type of conflict that Ukraine and Russia are locked in — specifically, the drone conflict — and that dramatic steps will need to be taken to step up readiness for that kind of fight.
Business Insider · by Jake Epstein
13. Hiroshima and the End We Refuse to Imagine
As we get closer to the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, something to refresh our memories:
Read the properly formatted article at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/03/arts/hiroshima-anniversary.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bU8.KN9p.gmNqY0hrRo4J&smid=url-share
Hiroshima and the End We Refuse to Imagine
NY Times · by Jason Farago · August 1, 2025
なにもかもなくした手に四まいの爆死証明
なにもかもなくした手に
四まいの爆死証明
I have lost everything;
in my hand,
four atomic bomb death certificates
— Atsuyuki Matsuo, 1945
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Eighty years after the city’s destruction, we seem to be blundering into a new age of nuclear perils. It is time for culture to rediscover “the courage to be afraid.”
By Photographs by Kikuji Kawada 川田 喜久治
Poetry by Atsuyuki Matsuo 松尾 あつゆき
Aug. 1, 2025
HIROSHIMA, Japan — For a few years, now, I’ve been turning over in my head one brief scene in a beautiful movie.
It comes two hours into “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning 2021 masterpiece of bereavement and artistic inspiration, when a troupe of actors steps outside the theater to rehearse in the fresh air. It is autumn. Leaves crunch beneath the feet of two actresses as they play one of the tenderest scenes of “Uncle Vanya.” They’d been struggling, up to now, as they recited Chekhov’s lines about sorrow and stagnation: lives not lived, dreams squelched and dreams maintained. But here in the park something clicks. We must live. The show must go on.
It’s never made explicit why this outdoor rehearsal unlocks the core of Chekhov — how this park, for these actors, opens a whole universe of grief and endurance. For a Japanese audience, at least, there was no need.
Beginning in 1958, Kikuji Kawada photographed Hiroshima, capturing images of its A-Bomb Dome and objects reflecting the American postwar occupation.
The park is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, designed in 1954 by the great modernist architect Kenzo Tange. On Aug. 6, 1945 — 80 years ago this week — a new kind of bomb detonated, almost silently, some 1,900 feet overhead. The scene from “Drive My Car” came back to me when I stood, in a pouring rain, on the spot where it was filmed. Anyone standing there in 1945 was killed immediately; then came the fires, and the fallout. It started raining in the first days after Aug. 6 as well: viscous black drops, heavy with soot and debris. The survivors drank it desperately in the ruins of Hiroshima. The raindrops were radioactive.
“A scientific event,” wrote the painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1913, “removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world.” At the start of the last century, after Ernest Rutherford, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein began to unravel the mysteries of nuclear physics, a periodic table of artists, authors and philosophers grew fixated on this new science’s cultural repercussions. Suddenly, the permanence of matter (the permanence of history, perhaps) appeared like an industrial relic. Objects that seemed stable actually vibrated with energy. Nuclear physics was confirming a suspicion, one at the core of modern art and literature, that the things we see are less solid than they look.
“Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial,” Kandinsky had said.
I had come to Hiroshima to try to see, and to feel, where that argument led. The Peace Memorial Museum, crowded but quiet, showed the side of atomic power Kandinsky could not have envisioned. Metal fused with debris in ungodly heat. Singed student uniforms; singed children’s dresses. There is a six-panel folding screen, donated just recently by a Hiroshima family, whose gold expanses are streaked by black rain: the most terrifying abstract painting I have ever seen.
Modern art’s atomic optimism vanished outside a bank building in this city, about 850 feet from the hypocenter — its steps darkened by the permanent shadow of someone who died there, instantly, in heat that reached 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more. When the painter Yves Klein saw those steps in a documentary, he was moved to create one of his ghostly impressions of bodies in his signature blue. In a panorama called “Hiroshima” (circa 1961), the bodies of his models have receded from bright blue to ashy white. Flesh became negative space. “Everything physical and material could disappear from one day to another,” said Klein, “to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.”
かぜ、子らに火をつけてたばこ一本
かぜ、子らに火をつけて
たばこ一本
The wind.
I light my children’s funeral pyre,
and then a cigarette
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The ultimate abstraction: It is closer than you think.
In the decades after Aug. 6, 1945 — and the second bomb, dropped three days later on Nagasaki — the domains of painting, cinema and literature committed to envisioning the doomsday scenarios of mutually assured destruction.
“On the Beach,” following the last survivors of a third world war waiting for the radiation to reach Australia, turned melodrama into a radioactive genre. “Dr. Strangelove,” literalizing the paranoia and psychosis of nuclear confrontation, confirmed our daily survival as nothing but a black comedy. George Orwell, Philip K. Dick and Kim Stanley Robinson imagined life, or what was left of it, after atomic Armageddon. They were nuclear Cassandras. They found our institutions, our leaders, as unstable as plutonium.
Now, 80 years after Hiroshima, we have blundered into a new age of nuclear perils. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that the planet faced the greatest risk of nuclear confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier this year President Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, warned that we stand “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” drawing a rebuke from the president. The U.S. and Israel bombarded Iran’s nuclear development sites in June. North Korea continues to modernize its nuclear-capable forces, while China is expanding its own arsenal so swiftly that students of deterrence must now account for three, not two, nuclear superpowers. The last arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is set to expire in just six months. The very principle of arms control may die with it.
All this with remarkably little outcry: little in our politics, less still in our culture. There were no “Daisy Girl” or “3 a.m. phone call” ads during last year’s presidential campaign. The bookshops and streaming studios fob off the burden for our own extinction onto outside antagonists: zombie invasions and errant asteroids and, most recently, killer A.I. There remain an estimated 12,000 nuclear warheads on earth today, per the Federation of American Scientists, and yet we have let the bomb be absorbed back into World War II dad history. An endless river of Manhattan Project dramatizations has conveyed some morally serious works, like John Adams’s opera “Doctor Atomic”; more often, from the TV series “Manhattan” to the self-satisfied “Oppenheimer,” I struggle to distinguish Hollywood offerings from Department of Energy propaganda.
I needed to come here, to Peace Memorial Park, to learn again how artists envisioned what we have been refusing to face — how they put into words, and images, our intertwined capacities for self-destruction and self-delusion. This is a city whose very name once authoritatively established a “nuclear taboo,” which was the political scientist Nina Tannenwald’s term for the implicit norm in all nuclear states not to launch a weapon. But the name “Hiroshima” has grown fainter, its impact weaker, and last month the Japanese health ministry reported that the number of survivors of the attacks here and in Nagasaki dropped below 100,000 for the first time.
To survive this second nuclear age we are going to need models from the first one: artists who faced up to what the bomb did, and what the bomb made of us.
あわれ七ヶ月の命の花びらのような骨かな
あわれ七ヶ月の命の
花びらのような骨かな
She was just
seven months old. Bones
like flower petals
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Immediately after V-J Day, Americans looked to Hiroshima more in awe than in anguish or anger. The fundamental form of Aug. 6 was the mushroom cloud: an abstract amazement seen from miles above, miles away. Artists and scientists alike had misgivings about the Truman administration’s justifications for the destruction of Hiroshima, to say nothing of Nagasaki. But the bomb itself was a thing of wonder.
Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, would argue that Hiroshima was a moral summons with an aesthetic corollary: to boil art down to its tragic essence. The bomb, wrote Newman in 1948, “has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us.”
Detail would dissolve. The picture would become speechless. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning, Reinhardt: American postwar painting took on techniques of amorphousness and disintegration, laden with humanistic and universalist rhetoric, in part as a mirror of the bomb. Asked to justify his canvas-covering drips, Jackson Pollock told an interviewer in 1950, “The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”
With the exception of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” a work of reportage published as a special issue of The New Yorker in 1946, nuclear destruction was initially seen at a bird’s-eye view. Which was hardly just a matter of squeamishness. From 1945 to 1952, American occupying forces strictly censored images of the two destroyed cities. U.S. Army photographs of Hiroshima were clinical, depopulated documents. What civilians endured could not be seen; the photographer Yosuke Yamahata, who rushed to Nagasaki in the first hours after the attack, did not publish his records of blackened corpses and shellshocked children for seven years.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained invisible, in those first years, not only because of what the bomb did but what the bomb announced: a new stage of history, in which technology had removed human survival from human will.
Atsuyuki Matsuo was a high school teacher in Nagasaki, and in his leisure time he wrote haiku in a modern style that did not conform to the typical structure of five, seven, five syllables. On Aug. 9, 1945, he was exposed to the second bomb while working at a food distribution site by the port. He made it home, through the fires, at midnight. Two of his children had already died. A third succumbed the next day. His wife died within the week. Yet when he tried to publish his poetry about the blast in a Nagasaki journal in 1946, the editors told him no.
The occupation’s press codes were only the half of it. In the “dark era” of the first postwar decade, hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) received no official recognition, and no medical relief. Survivors faced social discrimination for decades. To read Matsuo’s haiku, then, with its autumn clouds, its meager rice rations, its dragonflies buzzing above his dead sons and daughter, was to fear that the Japanese language itself had been irradiated — as if the poet’s invocations of the moonlight or the changing seasons divulged a larger contamination of literature and history.
So what Matsuo was doing, in his “A-Bomb Haiku,” was less public testimony than private grief work. He took the distanced gaze of the verse form, which poets since Basho had used to transcend the passions, and turned it in 1945 into a strategy for survival. Matsuo was keeping faith, in the privation of the postwar landscape, with the rigor and precision of language. He was wrenching uncontainable anguish into the strictures of Japanese poetry, in the hope that, through art, a ruined life might be still livable.
For almost a decade, Matsuo and Japan’s other artist-survivors worked in shadow. What made their grief politically palpable was another nuclear explosion, conducted once again by the Americans, a thousand times more powerful than the two they had survived. That was Castle Bravo, the disastrous U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, which spewed radioactive fallout — “ashes of death,” as the Japanese said — across 7,000 square miles. Twenty-three crew members of a Japanese fishing vessel succumbed to acute radiation sickness. In Japan, just two years after the end of American occupation, the outrage of Castle Bravo spurred a nationwide movement to ban nuclear weapons, and led to the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, in Hiroshima in 1955.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in other words, re-emerged in Japanese art in the shadow of a third mushroom cloud. Matsuo’s “A-Bomb Haiku” finally went into print in 1955. The painters Iri and Toshi Maruki, in the same year, added a folding screen of anti-nuclear demonstrators to their series of “Hiroshima Panels.” “Still, It’s Good to Live,” directed by Fumio Kamei in 1956, was the first documentary of life in postwar Hiroshima, intercutting orphanage rehabilitation programs with rallies against nuclear proliferation.
Three years later, the French director Alain Resnais would borrow footage from Kamei’s documentary for the opening sequences of his first feature, “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” The movie lingers over the scorched girders in the new Peace Memorial Museum as its French and Japanese lovers embrace and argue. It pauses before the bank steps with the shadow of the vanished man. It was the film that launched the French New Wave. The cinema was reborn, in 1959, from radiation.
降伏のみことのり、妻をやく火いまぞ熾りつ
降伏のみことのり、
妻をやく火いまぞ熾りつ
The imperial edict of surrender.
The fire that burns my wife
now flares
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Across the river from the Peace Memorial Park, I stood in the rain in front of the most recognizable monument in Hiroshima: the steel-ribbed A-Bomb Dome, or what remains of the only building that remained standing this close to the hypocenter. You see it in the last moments of “Drive My Car,” a symbol for living on through the void, sheathed in scaffolding as the sun sets over the river. For 80 years now it has stood alone by the riverside, its denuded dome appearing like the canopy of an umbrella.
These days, you can’t go inside. But the young photographer Kikuji Kawada walked into the dome in July 1958, while on assignment here for a newsmagazine. He saw a collection of anomalous stains burned into its exposed walls — the stains of its carbonized occupants, turned now into swirling, roiling whirlpools on the stone. Unsettled, spellbound, gripped by a duty to witness, Kawada would return for years afterward to the A-Bomb Dome, photographing the stains in the raw, high-contrast black-and-white that would come to characterize Japanese photography.
The stains form the core of Kawada’s “Chizu (The Map)”: a book of photos first published in 1965, and to my eye one of most monumental achievements in 20th-century art. The images ripple and puddle, full of fear and formlessness, but they’re interwoven with mementos of Japanese families and records of the American occupation. (A crushed box of cigarettes in Hiroshima reads “Lucky Strike,” a brand name with a dreadful double meaning.)
His photographs, which illustrate this essay, took on the impossible task of mourning inconceivable death, but there was a more universal topography in Kawada’s “Map,” a vision of extinctions still to come. The stains bled outward, onward, into what Kawada, now 92, called “one big world I found in Hiroshima.”
In America, by contrast, the bombs that gripped artists in the 1960s and 1970s were not the ones the nation had dropped but the ones aimed its way. “Seven Days in May,” a 1962 novel and 1964 movie, proposed a too-plausible American coup d’état by generals opposed to U.S.-Soviet disarmament. “Fail Safe,” Sidney Lumet’s 1964 thriller of an accidental nuclear war, begins with a miscommunication and ends with the incineration of New York City. Like “On the Beach” and “Dr. Strangelove,” these were prospective nightmares, in which popular entertainment took on the moral responsibility that government seemed to have abdicated.
Later on, in the Reagan era, American artists and writers who had spent their school days hiding underneath desks came to the forefront of campaigns against nuclear weapons. Jessye Norman and Itzhak Perlman performed against nukes on the stage of Avery Fisher Hall. A genre-spanning coalition of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament — Trisha Brown and Meryl Streep and Harry Belafonte — staged rallies and plays for arms abolition. The animated films of Hayao Miyazaki, now classics in both Japan and the United States, brimmed with antinuclear sentiment. Even cheesy popcorn movies seemed like acts of deterrence, whether “WarGames” (1983), with the young Matthew Broderick as a hacker who nearly triggers World War III, or “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” in which Christopher Reeve faced off with Nuclear Man.
Much of that ended when the (first) Cold War came to a close, and practically disappeared after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, downsized the nation’s anxieties from 25-megaton yields to 3 ounces of liquids. But nuclear weapons do not permit easy divisions into us and them; if destruction is mutually assured, then we must all live together or die together. I suppose that was what I was looking for, as I trundled through the rain from the cenotaph to Hiroshima Bay: the universal vulnerability that painters and writers and filmmakers discovered in this city, and turned from an incapacitation into a driving purpose. You begin from the past deaths you cannot represent. You confront the present absurdity you cannot even understand. You discover a future life still worth fighting for.
蕎麦の花ポツリと建てて生きのこっている
蕎麦の花ポツリと建てて
生きのこっている
The buckwheat is in flower.
A single stalk for a grave.
We have survived
debug view
You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. On the bullet train down from Tokyo, I started reading the work of Günther Anders, the foremost philosopher of humanity after Hiroshima. Too little known in the English-speaking world (you may know him as Hannah Arendt’s first husband), Anders was one of many German Jewish intellectuals who found refuge in the United States — and he was in New York on Aug. 6, 1945, when he heard the news on the radio with total incomprehension.
For years after he could not write. On one day, with one act, the core inquiry of philosophy for 2,500 years, the matter of how to live a good or righteous life, had been invalidated. “The basic moral question of former times must be radically reformulated” after Hiroshima, Anders would argue. “Instead of asking ‘How should we live?’, we now must ask ‘Will we live?’”
Anders came to conclude, in books such as “Hiroshima Is Everywhere,” that modern man had fallen into “a Promethean gap”: a chasm, grown wider by the year, between what our technologies can do and what we think they can do. Before Hiroshima, a Leonardo or a Voltaire could close his eyes and imagine futures far beyond contemporary capacities. The novelist, the opera composer, or the filmmaker could picture the end of the world as a low-risk cleansing fire presaging some purer rebirth. But as our destructive abilities have multiplied and Big Science got bigger, our cultural faculties failed to keep pace. “We are psychically unequal to the danger confronting us,” Anders wrote as early as 1956. And our principal moral failing, after Hiroshima, has been to neglect the development of our imagination — in the face of, or out of fear of, our final end.
The development of the imagination: This is one of art’s only functions. Generations of Americans were raised to fear fear itself. The writers and photographers and filmmakers who came to Hiroshima saw fear instead as a muse: saw how fear can draw universal dictates from a haiku’s specific adversities, how fear elevates a movie romance from a sob story into a call for action. As we slip into this second nuclear age, we have to put that fear in the service of something — to have “the courage to be afraid,” as Anders had it, and broaden our imagination to the scale of our arsenal. The alternative is to reduce our survival over the last 80 years to just dumb luck, and to tell the last remaining hibakusha, as some already are, that what they have endured and we still might is too much to imagine.
NY Times · by Jason Farago · August 1, 2025
14. China and Russia start joint drills in Sea of Japan
China and Russia start joint drills in Sea of Japan
China's defence ministry has said this year's exercises are aimed at "further deepening the comprehensive strategic partnership" between the two countries.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-russia-joint-military-drills-sea-japan-5274291
In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese and Russian warships take part in joint naval drills in the East China Sea, Dec 27, 2022. (File photo: Xinhua via AP/Xu Wei)
03 Aug 2025 01:47PM
BEIJING: China and Russia began joint naval drills in the Sea of Japan on Sunday (Aug 3) as they seek to reinforce their partnership and counterbalance what they see as a United States-led global order.
Alongside economic and political ties, Moscow and Beijing have strengthened their military cooperation in recent years, and their relations have deepened since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The "Joint Sea-2025" exercises kicked off in waters near the Russian port of Vladivostok and would last for three days, China's defence ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
The two sides will hold "submarine rescue, joint anti-submarine, air defence and anti-missile operations, and maritime combat".
Four Chinese vessels, including guided-missile destroyers Shaoxing and Urumqi, are participating in the exercises alongside Russian ships, the ministry said. After the drills, the two countries will conduct naval patrols in "relevant waters of the Pacific".
China and Russia have carried out annual drills for several years, with the "Joint Sea" exercises beginning in 2012. Last year's drills were held along China's southern coast.
The Chinese defence ministry said Friday that this year's exercises were aimed at "further deepening the comprehensive strategic partnership" of the two countries.
China has never denounced Russia's more than three-year war nor called for it to withdraw its troops, and many of Ukraine's allies, including the US, believe that Beijing has provided support to Moscow.
China insists it is a neutral party, regularly calling for an end to the fighting while also accusing Western countries of prolonging the conflict by arming Ukraine.
Source: AFP/ws
15. Israel's Netanyahu urges Red Cross to help hostages, while more Palestinians die from hunger in Gaza
Israel's Netanyahu urges Red Cross to help hostages, while more Palestinians die from hunger in Gaza
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/israels-netanyahu-urges-red-cross-aid-hostages-more-palestinians-die-hunger-in-gaza-5274586
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a ‘Christian Conference’ in Jerusalem, July 27, 2025 (Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)
04 Aug 2025 01:45AM
(Updated: 04 Aug 2025 04:04AM)
CAIRO, JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday (Aug 3) he spoke with the International Red Cross's regional head, Julien Lerisson, and requested his involvement in providing food and medical care to hostages held in Gaza.
According to Israeli officials, 50 hostages now remain in Gaza, only 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
On Saturday, Hamas released its second video in two days of Israeli hostage Evyatar David. In it, David, skeletally thin, is shown digging a hole that, he says in the video, is for his own grave.
That as six more people living in Gaza died of starvation or malnutrition in the past 24 hours, its health ministry said on Sunday.
The new deaths raised the toll of those dying from what international humanitarian agencies say may be an unfolding famine to 175, including 93 children, since the war began, the ministry said.
Israel said over the weekend it allowed a delivery of fuel to the enclave, in the throes of a humanitarian disaster after almost two years of war.
Egypt's state-affiliated Al Qahera News TV said two trucks carrying 107 tons of diesel were set to enter Gaza, months after Israel severely restricted aid access to the enclave before easing it somewhat as starvation began to spread.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates aid, said later in the day that four tankers of UN fuel had entered to help in the operations of hospitals, bakeries, public kitchens and other essential services.
There was no immediate confirmation whether the two diesel fuel trucks had entered Gaza from Egypt.
Gaza's health ministry has said fuel shortages have severely impaired hospital services, forcing doctors to focus on treating only critically ill or injured patients.
FEW FUEL SHIPMENTS ALLOWED IN TO GAZA SINCE MARCH
Fuel shipments have been rare since March, when Israel restricted the flow of aid into the enclave in what it said was pressure on Hamas militants to free the remaining hostages they took in their October 2023 attack on Israel.
Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza, but, in response to a rising international uproar, it announced steps last week to let more aid reach the population, including pausing fighting for part of the day in some areas, approving air drops and announcing protected routes for aid convoys.
UN agencies say airdrops are insufficient and that Israel must let in far more aid by land and open up access to the territory to prevent starvation among its 2.2 million people, most of whom are displaced amidst vast swathes of rubble.
COGAT said that during the past week, over 23,000 tons of humanitarian aid in 1,200 trucks had entered Gaza but that hundreds of the trucks had yet to be driven to aid distribution hubs by UN and other international organisations.
Meanwhile, Belgium's air force dropped the first in a series of its aid packages into Gaza on Sunday in a joint operation with Jordan, the Belgian defence ministry said. France, on Friday, started to air-drop 40 tons of aid.
AID TRUCKS NOT YET REACHING PEOPLE DESPERATELY IN NEED
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office said nearly 1,600 aid trucks had arrived since Israel eased restrictions late in July. However, witnesses and Hamas sources said many of those trucks have been looted by desperate displaced people and armed gangs.
Palestinian local health authorities said at least 40 people had been killed by Israeli gunfire and airstrikes across the coastal enclave on Sunday. Deaths included persons trying to make their way to aid distribution points in southern and central areas of Gaza, Palestinian medics said.
Among those killed was a staff member of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which said an Israeli strike at their headquarters in Khan Younis in southern Gaza ignited a fire on the first floor of the building.
The recent Gaza war began when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and took 251 hostage in a cross-border attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, according to Israeli figures. Israel's air and ground war in densely populated Gaza has since killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to the enclave's health officials.
Source: Reuters
16. Beyond the Second Island Chain: It’s Time to Mitigate Strategic Risk in Oceania
Excerpts:
Across all these dimensions, the United States must lead with a strategy of competitive engagement, backed by credible alternatives and sustained presence. A whole-of-government approach is essential, but it must also be integrated with regional mechanisms like the Pacific Islands Forum, Melanesian Spearhead Group, and initiatives that support scenario planning, local resilience, and food and medical strategic reserves. Civil society, youth networks, and indigenous leaders should be included as primary stakeholders, not afterthoughts.
For too long, the United States ceded ground in Oceania. China filled the vacuum with little resistance, achieving influence on the cheap while focusing its resources on military modernization. But that uncontested environment is changing. It’s time to impose costs. By forcing China to defend its holdings across Oceania, the United States can compel leaders in Beijing to expend resources they previously didn’t need to spend. The more they have to hold, the less they can reach.
Now is the time to act—not just to compete, but to offer a better vision. China’s coercive diplomacy, ethnonationalist rhetoric, and unequal deals offer a preview of what long-term alignment with Beijing entails. The United States, with its allies and partners, can and should offer another path—one rooted in respect, transparency, and long-term partnership.
Oceania is not a peripheral concern. It is the southern flank of the Indo-Pacific. And the window to mitigate strategic risk is closing fast.
Beyond the Second Island Chain: It’s Time to Mitigate Strategic Risk in Oceania - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by George Fust · August 1, 2025
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The lens of US-China strategic competition is most typically focused on geographic areas of friction like the South China Sea and potential flashpoints like Taiwan, locations inside the first island chain. Occasionally, it zooms out to the second island chain. Too rarely, however, does the aperture widen even further to the Pacific Islands. But these islands are not a backwater. They are the front line.
Oceania spans more than three hundred thousand square miles and sits astride some of the world’s most important sea lanes and beneath vital air corridors. From the second through the third island chains, the region plays a pivotal role in Indo-Pacific security and would certainly do so in any future military contingency involving China. Though these island nations are often small and remote, their strategic value is undeniable. Geography remains destiny, and in the case of Oceania, whoever controls access to the region holds a powerful advantage. China understands this. The United States must act accordingly and urgently.
China has spent the last two decades executing a comprehensive strategy of influence across Oceania. This campaign reflects a model of unrestricted warfare: economic enticement, diplomatic charm offensives, elite capture, media manipulation, and the deployment of state-owned enterprises that serve both commercial and military functions. Beijing-backed companies now operate critical infrastructure including ports, airports, undersea cables, and telecommunications networks across the region. In many cases, these services are monopolistic by necessity; most Pacific island countries are too small to support multiple competitors. This creates single points of failure and vulnerability.
Chinese infrastructure is not just dual-use in theory. In a future conflict, these assets will support early warning operations or integrate into a kill chain for the People’s Liberation Army targeting US and allied forces. Even in peacetime, their presence enables surveillance, coercion, and disinformation, all of which align with Beijing’s larger effort to reshape the regional order and cast the United States as an unreliable or even malign actor.
Mitigating strategic risk in Oceania requires a nuanced understanding of several interlocking dynamics. First and foremost is the intensifying geopolitical competition between China, the United States, and regional partners like Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. These islands offer critical nodes for access, basing, and overflight. Political recognition of Taiwan remains a flashpoint, and China’s ability to pressure island nations into switching allegiance reveals the transactional nature of Beijing’s diplomacy.
Environmental vulnerability adds a second layer of complexity. Climate change, including rising sea levels and more intense cyclones and droughts, disproportionately affects these nations. Disaster diplomacy is a vector of influence. Beijing has repeatedly capitalized on natural disasters to strengthen its image and deepen dependency. US and allied efforts should prioritize building climate-resilient infrastructure, modular housing, and drought-proof agriculture while offering rapid, pre-positioned disaster relief capabilities.
Economic fragility is another risk China has exploited. Many island economies depend on a few sectors—usually tourism, fisheries, or remittances. Chinese development assistance often undercuts local sovereignty through debt traps or corrupt deals. The United States and its allies can provide fair and transparent alternatives. This includes supporting trade integration, diversifying exports, and creating reliable digital and renewable energy industries. Washington should also compete directly with Beijing’s influence in education by expanding Fulbright, Young Pacific Leaders, and other talent development initiatives.
Governance challenges compound these vulnerabilities. In countries like Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, weak institutions and political instability open the door to Chinese interference. The United States can provide targeted support through electoral assistance, anticorruption programming, and civil society strengthening. Security sector reform, particularly police and military training, offers another long-term advantage. Whoever trains and equips these forces also shapes their norms and allegiances.
Digital infrastructure must not be overlooked. As Pacific island countries digitize rapidly, their cybersecurity postures remain underdeveloped. China has already laid digital foundations through telecom deals and cloud services that raise major national security concerns. The United States and its allies should push for national cybersecurity frameworks, regional incident response cooperation, and independent audits of critical infrastructure. Collaboration with trusted technology providers offers the only viable path forward.
Across all these dimensions, the United States must lead with a strategy of competitive engagement, backed by credible alternatives and sustained presence. A whole-of-government approach is essential, but it must also be integrated with regional mechanisms like the Pacific Islands Forum, Melanesian Spearhead Group, and initiatives that support scenario planning, local resilience, and food and medical strategic reserves. Civil society, youth networks, and indigenous leaders should be included as primary stakeholders, not afterthoughts.
For too long, the United States ceded ground in Oceania. China filled the vacuum with little resistance, achieving influence on the cheap while focusing its resources on military modernization. But that uncontested environment is changing. It’s time to impose costs. By forcing China to defend its holdings across Oceania, the United States can compel leaders in Beijing to expend resources they previously didn’t need to spend. The more they have to hold, the less they can reach.
Now is the time to act—not just to compete, but to offer a better vision. China’s coercive diplomacy, ethnonationalist rhetoric, and unequal deals offer a preview of what long-term alignment with Beijing entails. The United States, with its allies and partners, can and should offer another path—one rooted in respect, transparency, and long-term partnership.
Oceania is not a peripheral concern. It is the southern flank of the Indo-Pacific. And the window to mitigate strategic risk is closing fast.
Lieutenant Colonel George J. Fust is an Army officer in the US Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility, where he is the G2 director of targeting and collection and advisor to senior leaders within US Army Pacific. He is a graduate of Duke University and an adjunct professor. He previously taught in the Department of Social Sciences at the US Military Academy and served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. He has multiple deployments and experience in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: A member of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force and a Solomon Islands local lead service members from the US Army, Australian Defence Force, and Canadian Armed Forces to an unexploded ordnance location during Operation Render Safe in Ringgi Cove, Kolombangara, Solomon Islands, Sept. 9, 2024. (Credit: Gunnery Sgt. Kassie McDole, US Marine Corps)
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by George Fust · August 1, 2025
17. "This is the Voice of America, Washington, D.C., signing off."
A 30 second video that breaks my heart.
"This is the Voice of America, Washington, D.C., signing off."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qBF9dMDF7_TxtTAzYgFMug1HIxsID-j1/view
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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