Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty."

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

– Henry David Thoreau

"We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us."

– Quintilian

1. U.S. Sells $1 Billion in Arms to Europe for Ukraine, Sealing Shift in Weapons Pipeline

2. India Defies Trump on Russian Oil Despite Tariff Threats

3. USINDOPACOM launches new manufacturing facility

4. New commission to examine how to create an independent Cyber Force

5. The Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook

6. When a Nation’s Response Follows Its Gross Failure to Protect: Rethinking Proportionality of Civilian Harm in Gaza and Beyond

7. Could Putin Take the Baltics?

8. After Xi – The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

9. Israel Is Fighting a War It Cannot Win

10. America’s Defense Hinges on Making It Here

11. Technology, not geography, will grant global power in the 21st century

12. Lessons from this year’s unfunded priority lists

13. Opinion | How to shut down Putin’s war machine

14. As drones proliferate, the Army wants AI to help with air operations

15. Learn or Lose: Lessons from Ukrainian Training in Germany

16. Is Warfare Becoming More Performative?

17. Ukrainian Unit Used Heavy Drone to Drop E-Bike to Encircled Soldier Behind Enemy Lines

18. Russia’s Shadow Fleet: The Dangerous Tanker Network Threatening Global Waters

1. U.S. Sells $1 Billion in Arms to Europe for Ukraine, Sealing Shift in Weapons Pipeline

Transactional national security.

Excerpts:

“By selling American-made weapons to NATO countries, President Trump is generating billions of dollars for U.S. industries while getting Europe to take responsibility for its own defense,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

The European purchases, in two separate transactions coordinated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are expected to be the first of many funded by European governments and Canada following an agreement in principle earlier this summer.

U.S. Sells $1 Billion in Arms to Europe for Ukraine, Sealing Shift in Weapons Pipeline

Trump has stopped sending U.S. weapons to Kyiv, but is willing to let allies buy them for transfer to Ukraine

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-sells-1-billion-in-arms-to-europe-for-ukraine-sealing-shift-in-approach-73dea030

By Daniel Michaels

and Lara Seligman

Updated Aug. 5, 2025 1:15 pm ET

The U.S. and a NATO flags fluttered ahead of a NATO summit in The Hague in June. Photo: iris van den broek/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Key Points

What's This?

Four European countries are buying roughly $1 billion of U.S. military equipment for Ukraine, in a NATO-coordinated effort.
Trump has signaled openness to selling American arms to Ukraine, while also stating Europe should shoulder more of the burden.
NATO and Ukraine have established a list of Kyiv’s requirements, and NATO will coordinate delivery of arms from U.S. stockpiles.

In one of the clearest demonstrations to date of how the West’s approach to arming Ukraine against Russia is shifting under President Trump, four European countries are buying U.S. military equipment valued at roughly $1 billion for delivery to Kyiv’s forces.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after a phone call with Trump about the war, said Tuesday on X that he had discussed the European purchases and “our bilateral defense cooperation with America.”

“By selling American-made weapons to NATO countries, President Trump is generating billions of dollars for U.S. industries while getting Europe to take responsibility for its own defense,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.

The European purchases, in two separate transactions coordinated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are expected to be the first of many funded by European governments and Canada following an agreement in principle earlier this summer.

Trump has balked at providing U.S. weapons directly to Ukraine, as the Biden administration did, but he has signaled openness to selling the embattled country American arms. Trump and his senior officials have also said that Europe should shoulder more of the burden of supporting Ukraine because it is closer to them, and the U.S. is focused on China and the Pacific.

India Defies Trump on Russian Oil Despite Tariff Threats

Indian experts believe that Trump will back down once India and U.S. sign a trade deal

https://www.wsj.com/world/india/india-defies-trump-on-russian-oil-despite-tariff-threats-0298d751

By Shan Li

Updated Aug. 5, 2025 11:49 am ET

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladimir Putin last year. Photo: maxim shemetov/Reuters

Key Points

What's This?

President Trump threatened tariffs on India for purchasing Russian oil, but India has refused to back down from the purchases.
India defends its autonomy in foreign policy and its right to prioritize its own economic wellbeing amid global uncertainty.
The U.S. is trying to open India’s agricultural and dairy markets, but India could agree to investments in the U.S. instead.

NEW DELHI—India is digging in its heels and resisting pressure from the U.S. to curb purchases of Russian oil, despite threats by President Trump to retaliate by imposing higher tariffs on India.

Last week, Trump said he would place a 25% tariff on Indian imports to the U.S. in retaliation for India’s large-scale purchases of cheap Russian oil. Then, on Monday, the president said he would be “substantially raising” tariffs on Indian goods—on top of the 25% duty—because of the “massive amounts” of Russian oil that India buys.

India has nonetheless refused to back down and has suggested that it intends to continue to buy Russian oil. Political experts said that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is calculating that Trump will decide that ties between the two countries are ultimately too critical to jeopardize in a trade spat. Many Indian experts believe that Trump is spotlighting the issue to gain short-term leverage in ongoing trade negotiations with New Delhi—and that he will drop it once a deal is signed.

In recent years, the U.S. has grudgingly accepted India’s close ties with Russia, despite occasional protests, because New Delhi is considered a crucial partner in countering China’s growing power.

“The view is that this is not going to affect the overall relationship, and that we don’t have to kowtow,” said Sreeram Chaulia, dean at O.P. Jindal Global University’s School of International Affairs in Sonipat, India.

An oil refinery in Mumbai. Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg News

India has taken advantage of discounted oil prices from Russia following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. By late 2024, India accounted for over one-third of Russia’s oil exports, second only to China at nearly 50%, according to the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank. Before the war, India bought most of its oil from Gulf countries.

Besides China and India, Russia continues to export significant volumes of energy—especially crude oil, oil products and liquefied natural gas—to major buyers such Turkey, Japan and some European Union states, which has helped it to stabilize its budget.

New Delhi has repeatedly defended its purchases of Russian oil as necessary to support its economy and keep energy prices steady for its huge population. In a Monday statement, India’s Foreign Ministry said that its imports of Russian oil ramped up only after its traditional supplies were diverted to European countries during the Ukraine war.

The ministry also accused the U.S. and the EU of operating a double standard—continuing to trade with Russia while penalizing others for doing the same. “The targeting of India is unjustified and unreasonable,” it added.

When facing pressure from bigger powers, India has also historically defended its autonomy in foreign policy, Chaulia said. That independent streak surprised many when New Delhi remained neutral on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite a volley of criticism.

USINDOPACOM launches new manufacturing facility

The Forge will use 3D printing, casting and forging, rapid prototyping and precision machining manufacturing technologies.

army-technology.com · by Jangoulun Singsit · August 4, 2025

The Forge advanced manufacturing facility at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. Credit: USINDOPACOM.

The US Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) has marked the initial opening of “The Forge,” an advanced manufacturing facility at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii.

The soft opening held on 28 July 2025, was attended by USINDOPACOM commander admiral Samuel Paparo, marking a significant milestone in the partnership between USINDOPACOM and the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Innovation Capability and Modernization (ICAM) Office.

The new installation is designed to support innovative production methods within the military infrastructure.

Funded through the DoD’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program, The Forge is equipped with advanced technologies such as 3D printing, casting and forging, rapid prototyping and precision machining.

These capabilities aim to secure the military’s technological edge and support the Joint Force’s sustainability efforts.

“Advanced manufacturing gives Hawaii a strategic advantage as this technology will revolutionise our defence capabilities and operational readiness in unprecedented ways. As the tip of the spear, we must move faster to harness the full potential this manufacturing revolution offers our readiness capabilities, yet we cannot adapt fast enough,” Paparo said.

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The Forge is poised to manufacture a wide array of components, ranging from replacement parts to advanced prototypes and uncrewed systems, for the US Navy and Joint Forces.

This development is expected to mitigate reliance on traditional supply chains and facilitate rapid prototyping in collaboration with partners and allies.

The facility also aims to create a ‘Collaborative Environment’ for the Joint Force, focusing on fabricating components that typically have long lead times or are critical to missions.

This initiative is expected to not only accelerate innovation but also strengthen expeditionary military capabilities and contribute to Hawaii’s economic development.

The opening of The Forge highlights the DoD’s commitment to reinforcing Hawaii’s role in the defence industrial base.

army-technology.com · by Jangoulun Singsit · August 4, 2025

4. New commission to examine how to create an independent Cyber Force

New commission to examine how to create an independent Cyber Force

The new commission was established by CSIS in partnership with the Cyber Solarium Commission 2.0 project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Mark Pomerleau

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · August 4, 2025

A new commission has been established to chart a path toward developing an independent Cyber Force for the U.S. military.

The commission was started by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in partnership with the Cyber Solarium Commission 2.0 project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

While there have been calls historically to create a new dedicated, standalone cyber service, the effort has gained steam in recent years.

Congress has sought to address these shortfalls, mostly through studies, previously.

The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act initially mandated a study for alternate organizational models for military cyber elements, to include a Cyber Force, which was considered a watered-down version from previous drafts.

The new commission won’t be examining the efficacy of a Cyber Force — something congressional studies have already been tasked with doing — but rather, looking at the foundational issues of establishing that type of entity such as the organizational structure, core functions, roles and responsibilities, and necessary authorities, according to a press release.

Currently, the services are responsible for providing a set number of cyber mission force teams to U.S. Cyber Command, know as force generation, which employs those forces in operations.

Within the military, the services are responsible for providing the right number of trained personnel with weapons — known as “man, train and equip” — to the combatant commands that conduct the warfighting.

Outside voices have expressed concern that the services aren’t living up to this arrangement in cyber, due in part to the fact it’s not always a priority and those forces belong to Cybercom, not the services.

This has led to persistent readiness issues across the cyber mission force for years.

Moreover, each service has its own culture, rotation system and pay scale leading to incongruencies in how the joint digital warriors are treated within their respective roles.

“Given the well-documented shortcomings in current force generation and readiness models to organize, train, and equip for military cyber operations, momentum is building for a dedicated Cyber Force,” a press release from the commission states.

The commission is made up of people with a variety of backgrounds to include former military cyber commanders, former service chiefs — charged with the task of manning, training and equipping forces for Cybercom — academics, former congressional staff and civilian cyber leaders.

It is led by co-chairs Josh Stiefel, former professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee, and Ed Cardon, former commander of Army Cyber Command.

Other notable members include Michael Sulmeyer, the inaugural assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy; Ryan Heritage, the most recent director of operations at Cybercom and commander of Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command; Mike Gilday, former chief of naval operations and commander of Fleet Cyber Command; and George Barnes, former deputy director of the National Security Agency, among others.

The commission attempts to get ahead of a potential decision to create a Cyber Force to put in the necessary planning.

“Having supported multiple organizational transformations within the Department of Defense, the most consequential phase begins after a decision is made — implementation. When this phase is neglected or rushed, the result is enduring organizational friction with inefficiencies, confusion that can persist for years, and degraded mission effectiveness,” Cardon said. “This project takes a different approach: it invests in implementation planning up front to generate momentum, reduce downstream risk, and accelerate outcomes if and when there is a decision to create a Cyber Force.”

Cybercom has been in the process of several modernization efforts.

Congress in fiscal 2024 provided Cybercom with service-like authorities called enhanced budget control that now afford the command oversight of the offensive and defensive budgets for the cyber mission force, acquisition authority, capability integration authority and training, among others, which were fully realized with the passage of the budget in March 2024. Critics of proposals for a Cyber Force have said the command hasn’t had enough time to realize these authorities yet and needs time to mature them.

The command has also charted down what officials dubbed Cybercom 2.0. That effort is an ambitious plan first unveiled by former commander Gen. Paul Nakasone and other top DOD officials, spurred largely by a report requested by Congress in the fiscal 2023 annual defense policy bill to evaluate how Cybercom generates its forces.

The initiative was meant to provide a holistic examination of the command and its forces to better posture them for the future, serving as the first major update since Cybercom was formed over 10 years ago when many of today’s sophisticated threats and challenges in cyberspace did not exist.

Proponents of a Cyber Force argue that these efforts aren’t enough to fix the shortfalls, and only a new service is the right solution.

The commission will aim to provide recommendations to policymakers in government. It will formally launch Sept. 16.

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a senior reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare, cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, intelligence, influence, battlefield networks and data.

In This Story

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · August 4, 2025

5. The Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook

The Marines now have an official drone-fighting handbook

marinecorpstimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · August 4, 2025

On the heels of fielding the military’s first attack drone team, the U.S. Marine Corps added another weapon to their drone-fighting arsenal: a 90-page handbook all about employing small, unmanned aerial systems against the enemy and integrating them into formations.

The 1st Marine Division Schools’ Small UAS/Counter-small UAS Integration Handbook was published in June and approved for public release. It’s intended to support the 10-day sUAS/C-sUAS Integration Course recently launched at Camp Pendleton, which expects to see a throughput of about 400 students by the end of the year, according to a report from USNI News.

A foreword to the handbook is signed by Lt. Col. Nick Freeman, director of 1st Marine Division Schools, and co-signed by two first lieutenants leading the drone integration and signature management courses. It emphasizes that the handbook will be updated and rewritten often to keep up with evolving capabilities and practices.

The book “is not a general reference on broader aspects of sUAS-related equipping, organization, and training. Instead, it synthesizes lessons learned and best practices from across 1st Marine Division and elsewhere to provide basic considerations and ‘how to’ instructions that are missing or underdeveloped in other references,” the officers write.

“In doing so, this guide also develops and seeks to standardize common sUAS procedures for the infantry, fires, reconnaissance, and aviation units that will operate together with this capability.”

The manual’s publication comes amid a clear shift in defense priorities to favor drone warfare and emphasize, in particular, proficiency with “first-person view” or “one-way attack” small drones designed to pack a lethal punch.

In addition to the fielding of the Marine Corps’ Attack Drone Team, a small group of troops who will develop ways to employ these kinds of drones and integrate them into formations, the Pentagon in July announced a slate of changes to drone acquisition designed to “establish UAS dominance” by 2027.

Marine training chief wants to ‘let NCOs loose’ with more drone access

The Marines’ new Attack Drone Team is tackling the challenge of turning drones into weapons. And they want to get more personnel in on the action.

By Hope Hodge Seck

It’s a marked pivot from previous years, in which the services largely emphasized surveillance and logistics as the role of friendly, small drones in warfare and lacked a definitive approach to defending against hostile attack drones.

In 2020, a small group of infantry Marines crowdsourced an unofficial standard operating procedure for camouflaging small units from drone surveillance, underscoring the ad-hoc nature of efforts to account for this threat.

By contrast, the new 1st Marine Division handbook standardizes employment of various drones down to a common vocabulary.

Drone holding areas “are named after women and [battle positions] are named after animals (beginning with snakes), [loitering areas] are given the names of cigarettes and [task positions] are named after insects,” the manual states.

In addition, “hot walls” and “pizza slices” describe drone operating areas for hasty airspace deconfliction.

Charts and schematics show sample drone strikes in various personnel and equipment configurations. Tables break down specifications of the Corps’ most widely fielded small UAS. A sample strike brief provides a precise template for communications around drone operations. And a multi-page section on camouflage and evasion provides formal guidance on everything from hiding heat signatures to using vegetation to blend visually with the environment.

Drone employment as a team effort is emphasized throughout the book.

“In all cases, the operator of any one aerial system is unlikely to accomplish the unit’s mission by him/herself; instead, the operator performs tasks as part of a sUAS-equipped team whose other members may variously perform roles related to communications, targeting, mobility, protection, fires, maneuver/exploitation, and others,” the guide reads.

“For this reason, this handbook refers to sUAS teams as the basic unit of employment for these systems, even when the unit operating them (for example, a rifle squad or an artillery battery headquarters) may not have sUAS employment as its primary purpose.”

The handbook concludes with a list of chapters and sections the book is still missing, including weaponeering considerations for employing drones carrying munitions and a full chapter on tactics, techniques and procedures for one-way attack drones.

“Make no mistake, we are in a very tight race with our adversaries to master the possibilities of small aerial drones,” the authors write. “Consider this handbook a baton—now take it, and run with it!”

Marines with Advanced Infantry Training Battalion, School of Infantry – East load a Mjolnir munitions system on a SkyRaider. (Cpl. Zachariah Ferraro/Marine Corps)

While 1st Marine Division did not make anyone available to talk about the handbook by press time, Samuel Bendett, an adviser focusing on Russian military technology and capabilities including drones, called the book’s publication evidence of a “psychological shift” about the realities of the drone threat and the need to employ small UAS skillfully.

The handbook itself acknowledges lessons in drone use absorbed from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, where both sides have employed UAS to great effect.

While Bendett acknowledged that the next U.S. fight might not resemble the conflict in Ukraine, he maintained that the echoes of that war “will be heard in every conflict going forward,” adding that China was paying close attention and already training its military in drone warfare.

“It’s not just an abstract notion that there are adversary drones somewhere and we have to defend against them,” Bendett said. “It’s the fact that it’s right there, just around the bend, just just beyond the next building, just beyond the next tree. It’s there just two or three klicks away, and it’s observing and flying at you, and you won’t be able to react in time if you’re not prepared for it.”

Another helpful shift evidenced in the document, he said, was in viewing UAS not as small aircraft, but as weapons.

“These are not aircraft,” he said. “These are cheaper, attritable tactical systems that should be available to every military formation, based on what they’re doing and based on how they’re fighting.”

6. When a Nation’s Response Follows Its Gross Failure to Protect: Rethinking Proportionality of Civilian Harm in Gaza and Beyond

Conclusion:

Self-defense should not serve as a legal shield that erases prior responsibility. Proportionality must recognize that when a state has committed a gross failure of duty in failing to prevent an attack, its military response must reflect that culpability — limiting its objectives to those that would have been justified had it fulfilled its duty to protect in the first place.

When a Nation’s Response Follows Its Gross Failure to Protect: Rethinking Proportionality of Civilian Harm in Gaza and Beyond

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/05/rethinking-proportionality-gaza-response/

by Michael Greif

08.05.2025 at 06:00am

Abstract

This article proposes a doctrinal refinement to international humanitarian law: when a state suffers an attack in part due to its own gross failure of duty — conduct that rises above negligence but falls short of intent — that culpability should constrain the permissible scope of its military response when substantial civilian harm to the aggressor is foreseeable. Using the October 7th Hamas attacks as a case study, the piece outlines a framework for integrating prior state culpability into proportionality analysis, aiming to better balance military necessity, civilian protection, and sovereign accountability in an era of asymmetric conflict.

Introduction

Imagine a scenario in which the United States recklessly disregards multiple credible intelligence warnings about an imminent drone attack by a hostile foreign government. Within days, a drone penetrates U.S. airspace and strikes a key government facility in Washington, D.C., with deadly results.

The public demands swift and decisive retaliation — perhaps even a strike on the enemy’s capital. But such an action would cause massive civilian casualties, harming people who played no role in the attack.

The President asks her senior legal advisors whether international law would permit such a massive, non-targeted response.

The answer would be no if international law required a state to account for its own role in allowing the attack, and if no ongoing threat of another drone attack remained. But under the prevailing interpretation of proportionality — the principle that military force must be balanced against legitimate objectives — a nation’s role in allowing an attack to occur is legally irrelevant.

Without some form of accountability, proportionality risks becoming a shield for retaliatory excess. This issue is especially salient considering Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza following the October 7th unlawful and heinous terrorist attacks by Hamas.

This essay doesn’t question a nation’s right to dismantle a terrorist organization that continues to pose a threat. Instead, it asks whether a state’s failure beyond mere negligence to prevent such an attack should help shape the legal limits of its military response — especially when that response is expected to cause widespread civilian harm.

Without such accountability, international law creates a dangerous moral hazard: a state may ignore serious warning signs, fail to exercise its duty of care, and then invoke its own failure to justify overwhelming military responses under the guise of lawful self-defense. Proportionality, if left untethered from prior state conduct, risks becoming a doctrine that shields retribution rather than restrains it.

For purposes of this discussion, I use the term “gross failure of duty” to describe circumstances where a state’s disregard of known risks or failure to act upon credible warnings rises above mere negligence but does not amount to intentional wrongdoing.

So why focus on Israel rather than, for example, Russia’s targeting of civilians in Ukraine? Because proportionality applies to lawful self-defense after suffering an attack. It does not apply to an aggressor who unlawfully initiates war in the first instance. Nor does it purport to offer a general theory of self-defense, preemption, or anticipatory strikes.

Israel’s Apparent Intelligence Failures

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched its assault on Israel, killing approximately 1,200 Israelis and capturing over 200 hostages. As extensive reporting has since revealed, Israeli intelligence failures were apparently central to Hamas’s ability to execute the attack.

According to Haaretz and the New York Times, Israel’s domestic security service Shin Bet had obtained Hamas’s detailed battle plan, codenamed “Jericho Wall,” a full year in advance. However, senior officials dismissed the document as speculative and aspirational rather than actionable.

Further warnings from junior intelligence officers, field analysts, and border surveillance units were repeatedly disregarded in the months and days before the attack.)

No Israeli commission has yet formally adjudicated whether this conduct constitutes a gross failure of duty. But if a fact-finding tribunal were to reach that conclusion, this culpability should bear on how proportionality is assessed.

Proportionality Must Evolve

International humanitarian law, primarily through the Geneva Conventions, prohibits military operations likely to cause civilian harm that would be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete military advantage.

While current proportionality doctrine analyzes civilian harm in relation to military advantage from the moment force is used, it does not account for a state’s gross failure of duty that enabled the threat in the first place.

This proposal does not replace proportionality with an aggressor’s responsibility or reparations but rather argues that where a defending state has committed a gross failure of duty, that culpability should help shape the permissible scope of military objectives in response — narrowing what can be legitimately pursued while still honoring the core balance proportionality requires.

A defending state that committed a gross failure of duty should not be entitled to pursue maximalist war aims — especially once the immediate threat has been contained. Its military response should be limited to objectives it could have lawfully pursued had it not committed that failure — including repelling the incursion, rescuing hostages, and targeting those directly responsible for the attack.

But if Israel had committed a gross failure of duty, it should not be able to lawfully justify pursuing Hamas’s wholesale eradication through sustained, indiscriminate bombing that foreseeably devastates Gaza’s civilian population. That path should veer away from lawful self-defense and toward retribution untethered from legal accountability.

Absent such constraints, any government could invoke its own failure to justify disproportionate devastation under the banner of lawful self-defense — the very moral hazard international law should seek to avoid.

The Complexity of Urban Warfare

Israel argues that Hamas embeds its operations inside densely populated civilian areas, making precision targeting nearly impossible. Hamas’s deliberate use of human shields is indeed a violation of international law.

But even under the current legal standards for considering proportionality, this does not relieve Israel of its own legal and ethical obligations. Even when confronting an enemy that exploits civilians, proportionality demands that Israel minimize civilian harm as much as feasible.

Moreover, if it was Israel’s gross failure of duty that enabled the October 7th incursions, that culpability should matter because the operational necessity for many of the most destructive strikes might never have arisen — especially if no hostages had been taken and citizens not brutally slaughtered inside of Israel.

Israel’s Apparent Role in Hamas’ Rise

Complicating matters further is Israel’s policy in the years preceding October 7th, during which it quietly approved significant Qatari funding into Gaza. The goal was to keep Hamas in power as a weak, divided counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — a strategy designed to prevent Palestinian political unity.

While expedient in the short term, this policy may have ultimately empowered the enemy that Israel now seeks to eliminate. This does not absolve Hamas’s criminality. But it should be considered in a proportional response analysis. A state should not both enable a known adversary and later invoke that adversary’s existence to justify maximum-force campaigns enveloping civilian populations.

A Historical Parallel

Some defenders of Israel’s Gaza campaign may cite historical precedents where massive civilian destruction was used to force surrender — notably Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden during World War II.

In August 1945, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100,000 civilians to compel Japan’s unconditional surrender. Earlier that year, U.S. and British forces firebombed Dresden, incinerating tens of thousands more. Both acts were justified at the time as necessary to avoid costly ground invasions.

Yet under modern proportionality standards those actions would be indefensible. Japan and Germany no longer posed imminent threats when civilian population centers were targeted. These were not strikes to stop active aggression, but to induce total capitulation through maximum devastation.

The relevance today is not abstract. As scrutiny intensifies over Israel’s Gaza operations, defenders may invoke these precedents as justification. But if those actions should have been legally and morally wrong then, they cannot be made right now.

Conclusion

Self-defense should not serve as a legal shield that erases prior responsibility. Proportionality must recognize that when a state has committed a gross failure of duty in failing to prevent an attack, its military response must reflect that culpability — limiting its objectives to those that would have been justified had it fulfilled its duty to protect in the first place.

Tags: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israel-Hamas Conflict

About The Author

Michael Greif
Michael T. Greif is an attorney with over 45 years of experience in law, business, and governance. He brings disciplined legal reasoning to public policy issues, drawing on a career focused on complex corporate structures and institutional frameworks in both domestic and international contexts.

7. Could Putin Take the Baltics?

Conclusion:

While the threat of a Russian military invasion of one or more of the Baltic States cannot be discounted, it has been reduced by the number of casualties and amount of equipment lost in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The more likely scenario appears to be something similar to Russia’s taking of Crimea based on infiltration, isolation, and information, rather than raw mass and firepower. That type of action was far more successful than the 2014 proxy conflict, or the 2022 invasion of eastern Ukraine. Given the Baltics’ similarity to Crimea in size and population, as well as the opportunity to isolate them by operating from Russian bases in Kaliningrad, a repeat of the Crimea model seems more likely. The USA and NATO need to figure out how to support the Baltic States to prevent that from succeeding.

Could Putin Take the Baltics?

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/05/could-putin-take-the-baltics/

by Ted Vician

08.05.2025 at 06:00am

If I wanted, in two days I could have Russian troops not only in Kiev, but also in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Bucharest.

-Russian President Vladimir Putin, September 2014

Introduction

Lawrence Freedman quotes this statement from Putin, taken from an article in the Daily Telegraph, in his 2014 Survival article. This assessment was confirmed for Riga, Vilnius, and Tallinn (the capitals of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, respectively, collectively known as the Baltic States) by wargames conducted by RAND in 2014 and 2015. The Wargame estimated it would take no more than 60 hours to reach one or more of the Baltic States’ capitals with a large combined-arms mechanized invasion force. However, that should be re-evaluated given the Russian Army’s poor performance in Ukraine since 2022. Russia’s full-scale combined arms invasion has spent three years mostly bogged down in eastern Ukraine.

Even so, the Russians did successfully seize Crimea in 2014 and continue to hold it (as of 2025), though they have not been able to take most of Ukraine, including Kyiv. The major difference is that Crimea is small and easily isolated, and Ukraine is large (more than 20 times larger in both land area and population) and connected to the rest of Europe. The seizure of Crimea was done by Russian special forces and proxies through a combination of infiltration, isolation, and information, not by a large military invasion. This is a threat that the Baltic States need to be concerned with, perhaps more so than an invasion (though Shlapak and Johnson’s RAND study indicates the importance of that threat and makes recommendations to reduce it). Since those nations are NATO allies, it should be a concern for the United States of America (USA) as well.

Analysis

The three Baltic States are small nations that border Russia – Latvia and Lithuania also border on Belarus, Russia’s ally. They are NATO members, so a military invasion could trigger NATO’s Article V defense clause. But what about an internal uprising? How would NATO allies react to protests from Russian-speaking citizens within those countries, possibly including violent ones? This would parallel the Russian efforts in Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine.

Table 1. Comparison of Baltic States with Ukraine, Crimea, and Poland.

Country or Territory NameEstoniaLatviaLithuaniaUkraineCrimeaPolandCapitalTallinnRigaVilniusKyivN/AWarsawSize (km2)45,22864,58965,300603,550

(including Crimea)

27,000312,685Population1,202,7621,821,7502,655,75543,306,477

(including Crimea)

1,965,17737,991,766Russian Speakers (%)29.633.86.817.3Majority0 but Russian is recognized as a minority languageOrthodox Christians (%)16.219.13.7Approx 67%, some of whom are “Moscow Partriarchate”Not known1.3

(Data above about the five nations are from the CIA World Factbook. Regional data about Crimea are from the World Atlas and Britannica.com)

Based on the data, each Baltic state is closer in size and population to Crimea than to Ukraine as a whole or Poland (presented for comparison due to its proximity to the Baltics and similarity in size and population with Ukraine). In particular, Estonia and Latvia have large Russian speaking minorities while Lithuania’s is smaller but sizable. Protecting such groups is a pretense that the Russian government has used in Ukraine, Georgia in 2008, and elsewhere; there is no reason to think they would not do so again. Russian special forces or private military contractors (PMC) could infiltrate and disguise themselves as Russian-speaking citizens, as was done in eastern Ukraine. If some of the locals have pro-Russian sympathies, they might be recruited by the Russian government as proxy forces as well.

The map in Figure 1 below is centered on the Baltic Sea, showing each of the Baltic States and neighboring nations. Note the small part of Russian territory that includes Kaliningrad in the southeastern corner of the sea. This is the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet. It is described as Russia’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” by Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham (UK) in an article from 2022. The military equipment deployed there includes subsonic and supersonic anti-ship missiles. The Russian military could use this location to isolate the Baltic Sea from most NATO navies or at least make it very expensive to attempt an entry. This would be similar to the isolation of Crimea from the rest of Ukraine by Cossacks acting as a Russian proxy in 2014.

The Russians could also learn from the Iranians and their Yemeni Houthi rebel proxies (described by the BBC) and supply masked or proxy forces with uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and small boats to harass ships in the Baltic Sea. The Russian government could even go so far as to claim such actions were a threat to Russian shipping and bases in the area and use their naval resources to patrol the Baltic based on that premise, while reserving escalation to large-scale military power for a later phase. This would provide Russia deniability and delay the entry of NATO navies into the Baltic Sea without having to directly confront those ships.

Figure1. Political Map of Northeastern Europe, surrounding the Baltic Sea.

(Map excerpted from europe_pol-1.pdf (cia.gov))

Another major aspect of the Crimean seizure was cyber or information warfare. This was done officially, when the Russian government described positioning of personnel and equipment near Ukraine as a military exercise. An earlier generation of this sort of effort was performed in Georgia, attacking Georgian and sympathetic Western governments’ websites. In Ukraine, unofficial actions were also executed by proxy groups like the Kharkov News Agency (known as NAH for its Russian acronym), which was connected to the Internet Research Agency and Yevgeny Prigozhin, formerly a leader of the Wagner Group. If anything, this activity would increase given the decade’s worth of technological improvements including generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create more dis- and misinformation faster.

Response

Therefore, the threat to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania could be similar to the successful seizure of Crimea, rather than the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military. The question then becomes; how does the United States of America respond to such threats to our NATO allies?

The three aspects that facilitated the seizure of Crimea were infiltration, isolation, and information. The USA should be prepared to assist the Baltic States in combatting all three of those.

First, infiltration requires moving people, materiel, and money into the target area. The USA has intelligence capabilities from space to undersea. We need to share those data in a timely fashion with our NATO allies. We should also be offering our resources to process and collate the intelligence collected by nations in the region. This should lead to a sort of Baltic Sea “Ten Eyes” group that includes the eight NATO countries with Baltic coastlines as well as Norway and the USA, much like the “Five Eyes” group that includes the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This information-sharing group could monitor internal and external threats and look for links to Russia or its proxies.

Isolation of the Baltic States will involve the Russians or proxies taking the initiative in the Baltic Sea to cut off the larger NATO nations’ navies and prevent resupply. This could be Russian proxy forces imitating the Houthi rebels by disrupting shipping at a below-warfare level. Such disruption could even be used as an excuse by the Russian Navy to step up its own actions in the Baltic, or to move ships from the Northern Fleet in. It could also involve the Russians announcing a blockade to, for example, “prevent support of the illegitimate fascist government in [target country], in defense of Russian people there.” Or it could just be a threat to defend Russian sovereignty in Kaliningrad and the Baltic. One approach to overcoming this isolation is to pre-position materiel in the Baltic States, with more stored in Finland and Poland. Finland is separated from Estonia by a narrow waterway (the Gulf of Finland) that NATO would need to keep clear from Russian naval assets including those based at Leningrad Naval Base near St. Petersburg at the tip of the Gulf of Finland. One way to do this might be using long-range missiles as a threat (borrowing the Russians’ own area denial tactic). Poland is connected to Lithuania by a short land border between Kaliningrad (Russia) and Belarus. NATO forces would have to hold this area open to connect the Baltic States to central and western Europe. Prepositioning sufficient forces and transportation assets in Poland would facilitate retaining this corridor to Lithuania.

The previously mentioned fictional quote is an example of the information space: the Russians or proxies claiming a target government is illegitimate and fascist. This was the main thrust of the NAH attacks on the Ukrainian government in 2014 and later. The USA could provide key assistance in this area. The US President has a much larger media footprint than the Estonian President or Prime Minister (for example). We should champion our allies’ causes loudly, accurately, and often. This could be done in a variety of formats, from a formal Presidential address to official statements released by the White House Press Office, as well as more informally via the @POTUS account on X (formerly Twitter).

Another information tactic available is for US diplomatic and military personnel in the Baltics to provide known good reporting and intelligence to NATO Headquarters in Brussels and to Washington DC, via encrypted satellite communications. There are only a few US military units in the Baltics, but ensuring they can get information out would be key to US military planners and policy makers. This should be coordinated with the host government, including a means for them to use the communications channel should their own methods be compromised.

Conclusion

While the threat of a Russian military invasion of one or more of the Baltic States cannot be discounted, it has been reduced by the number of casualties and amount of equipment lost in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The more likely scenario appears to be something similar to Russia’s taking of Crimea based on infiltration, isolation, and information, rather than raw mass and firepower. That type of action was far more successful than the 2014 proxy conflict, or the 2022 invasion of eastern Ukraine. Given the Baltics’ similarity to Crimea in size and population, as well as the opportunity to isolate them by operating from Russian bases in Kaliningrad, a repeat of the Crimea model seems more likely. The USA and NATO need to figure out how to support the Baltic States to prevent that from succeeding.

Tags: Baltics, Crimea, information warfare, irregular warfare, NATO, Russia, Ukraine

About The Author

Ted Vician
Ted Vician is a currently a student in Arizona State University’s (ASU) Master of Arts in Global Security (MAGS) program and is employed by a major US defense contractor. This is the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions of ASU, the MAGS program, or any other agency. This article is based on a paper written for Professor Candace Rondeaux’s Proxy Warfare class at ASU. Thanks are offered for the professor’s advice in writing and revising it and to Professor Ken Gleiman for advice in preparing it for publication.

8. After Xi – The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

Excerpts:

American policymakers should appreciate the risks inherent in China’s coming succession challenge, but they must also avoid the temptation to exploit it for geopolitical gain. Attempting to intervene in the succession process would violate principles of sovereignty and could elevate domestic political tensions in ways that outside actors cannot anticipate. Internal speeches show that the leadership, including Xi himself, still views the 1989 student-led protest movement as a plot by “hostile Western forces” to bring down the party, and this mistrust continues to color the U.S.-Chinese relationship.

Instead of meddling, the United States should let the process unfold while watching it closely. Although the party’s geopolitical assessments and ideological convictions are bigger than Xi, it is not unreasonable to expect a course correction from the post-Xi years, in which a more moderate and temperate leader emerges—someone who is not stridently nationalist and who can break down the walls that the current leadership has built around the country.

Indeed, in the past, the CCP has corrected course through the succession process. There is a hopeful lesson for the coming years in the transition from Mao’s radical socialism to Deng’s more pragmatic policy of reform and opening. “If we don’t reform, the party is at a dead end,” Deng famously said. Xi’s successor might come to the same conclusion.

After Xi

Tyler Jost and Daniel C. Mattingly

September/October 2025

Published on August 4, 2025

Foreign Affairs · by More by Tyler Jost · August 4, 2025

The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

September/October 2025 Published on August 4, 2025

Edward Kinsella

TYLER JOST is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is the author of Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation.

DANIEL C. MATTINGLY is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of The Art of Political Control in China.

More by Daniel C. Mattingly

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For more than a decade, Chinese politics has been defined by one man: Xi Jinping. Since Xi assumed leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has made himself into a strongman ruler. He has remade the CCP elite through a wide-ranging purge and corruption crackdown. He has curbed civil society and suppressed dissent. He has reorganized and modernized the military. And he has reinvigorated the role of the state in the economy.

Xi’s rise has also redefined China’s relationship with the rest of the world. He has pursued a more muscular foreign policy, including by increasing the tempo of military drills in the Taiwan Strait and overseeing a growing military presence in the South China Sea. He has encouraged (and then later reined in) a battalion of “wolf warrior” diplomats who engaged in a harsh war of words with foreign critics. And he has pushed China closer to Russia, even after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war in Ukraine. In short, it has been a new era for China. It has been Xi’s era.

Soon, however, everything will start to change. As the CCP elite begins the search for a leader to replace the 72-year-old Xi, China is transitioning from a phase defined by power consolidation to one defined by the question of succession. For any authoritarian regime, political succession is a moment of peril, and for all its strengths, the CCP is no exception. The last time the party dealt with the problem of political succession—when Xi took over from Hu Jintao—rumors swirled in Beijing of coup attempts, failed assassinations, and tanks on the streets. The rumors may have been unfounded, but the political drama at the top was real.

Xi probably has years, perhaps even more than a decade, before he steps down. But the reality is that succession shapes political choices well before leaders finally relinquish control. Chinese rulers, sensitive to their legacies, jostle to install people who will carry on their political agendas. Mao Zedong’s fixation with maintaining China’s revolutionary spirit after his death led to the Cultural Revolution, a mass political campaign that reshuffled the CCP leadership repeatedly during the last decade of Mao’s life.

Xi’s succession is unlikely to be as catastrophic, but the prelude, execution, and aftermath of transitioning power will shape China’s foreign and domestic politics in the coming years. The United States and its allies may be tempted to exploit this internal disruption, but meddling in the process would probably backfire. Instead, they should be mindful of the fact that, in the past, fights over succession have contributed to disastrous Chinese foreign policy choices. The vacuum left by a strongman such as Xi will make succession especially challenging, potentially triggering a scramble for power and a fight over the direction of the country. Such instability in the world’s second-largest economy could ripple beyond China’s borders—particularly as China navigates its tense relationship with Taiwan.

THE MAO MODEL

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, only one of Xi’s five predecessors stepped aside fully and willingly. Mao, the strongman founder of communist China, wielded overwhelming power and authority within the party-state apparatus and ruled the country until the day he died. Hua Guofeng, Mao’s heir, was able to hold on to power for only a few years before being pushed aside. Deng Xiaoping, the famous architect of China’s economic reforms, maintained his grip over the CCP’s most important decisions even after relinquishing his formal titles and positions. Until his health declined in the mid-1990s, Deng was said to be the most powerful man in China, even though his only formal title was honorary president of an association of bridge players. The man who succeeded Deng as paramount leader, Jiang Zemin, clung to the important post of military chief despite giving up his position as party leader, undercutting his successor, Hu Jintao. Only Hu gave up power all at once in a relatively orderly succession, to Xi, but that process was tainted by the dramatic downfall of a Xi rival and powerful Politburo member, Bo Xilai.

Xi’s return to strongman politics means his succession is likely to follow the pattern set by Mao and Deng, both of whom tried to select a successor who would rule as they would. Xi may see the challenge as discerning who among the thousands of cadres in the senior ranks of the CCP holds political beliefs similar to his own. But history also suggests that finding a political doppelganger will be insufficient. Whoever Xi taps will need to survive the cutthroat machinations of those he passes over. A new political game will begin the moment that Xi begins to step aside: Will those who remain inside the halls of political power support the new leader? Or will they resist the agenda that the new leader champions, undermine his authority, or conspire to remove him?

Here, Hua Guofeng’s story is revealing. Mao selected Hua in 1976, when Mao’s health was failing. The problem for Hua was that he was a cadre of middling status and influence within the CCP: someone whom Mao and his allies could control, and not a figure who could survive a political knife fight. Mao had written Hua a note that read, “With you in charge, I am at ease.” But even Mao’s word was not enough to keep Hua in power. In the end, he needed the military’s backing.

A struggle over succession is unlikely to stay inside China’s borders.

On the night of September 8, 1976, as Mao hovered near death, senior members of the Politburo gathered in a sickroom in the leadership compound in Beijing to pay their final respects. The chairman was no longer able to speak. Instead, he raised a frail hand and reached out to one visitor—Marshal Ye Jianying, one of the country’s most venerated military figures. Clasping Ye’s hand, Mao’s lips moved faintly, and Ye later told his colleagues that Mao instructed him to back Hua as his designated heir.

Mao’s choice to single out Ye, as opposed to the other civilian elites who would survive him, was intentional. Hua had little experience in national politics or with the military brass. When Hua’s enemies came for him, Ye and those with similar military credentials would have to decide whether to stand by him or abandon him. The head of the Chinese military was, as the sociologist Ezra Vogel has observed, the CCP’s de facto “kingmaker.”

Ye initially stood by Hua during the first assault on his leadership, which was launched immediately after Mao’s death by Mao’s wife and three radical compatriots known as the Gang of Four. With the support of Ye and other top military leaders, People’s Liberation Army troops arrested the gang. This ensured that Hua would hold on to power, but only as long as the PLA supported him. Just two years later, when Deng orchestrated a second challenge to Hua’s leadership, Ye and other military commanders sided with Deng, who had extensive social connections and personal rapport with senior military officers.

Delegates arriving for the closing session of the National People’s Congress, Beijing, March 2025 Tingshu Wang / Reuters

Xi will have multiple ways to credential his successor, but as the story of Mao’s troubled succession suggests, no facet of his successor’s dossier will be more important than his ties to and rapport with the military. Outside observers tend to downplay the role of the PLA in Chinese politics. After all, the Chinese military has never seized political control, as have armed forces in autocracies such as Argentina and Pakistan. To many, this suggests that modern China has cultivated strong norms of civilian control—such that the party unquestionably “commands the gun,” as Mao famously put it.

But the absence of direct military rule belies the quiet power that the PLA wields in China. The reality is that the Chinese military exercises a form of coercive control, shaping interactions among decision-makers. The reason is simple: even though Chinese leaders don’t fear a direct challenge from the military, they constantly face that risk from civilian rivals. And in such struggles, the PLA acts as an implicit kingmaker as civilian leaders try to manipulate the levers of control over the military to ensure that they, and not their opponents, have the upper hand. When Deng needed to bolster the standing of his chosen successors, for instance, he appointed his close ally Admiral Liu Huaqing, the father of the Chinese navy, to the Politburo Standing Committee—an unusually high promotion for a military officer that has not since been replicated.

It is tempting to think that China is so fundamentally different today that the military’s latent role in succession is the artifact of a bygone era. In reality, the military remains pivotal in China’s elite politics, and control over it will remain a key asset for future political leaders. The military does not pick leaders on its own—Xi was reportedly chosen because he beat Li Keqiang in a straw poll of current and retired civilian and military leaders—but military backing can make a leader immune to civilian challenges. Hu Jintao, for example, was considered politically weak in part because his career trajectory offered comparatively few opportunities to build personal connections to the military. When Hu entered office, he had no ties to the members inside China’s apex military organization, the Central Military Commission. In contrast, through what was likely a combination of fortuitous assignments and savvy politicking, Xi started with ties to four out of ten CMC members—a leg up that gave him the latitude to start a wide-ranging purge of rival elites and reorder the military brass. For personalist leaders such as Xi and Mao, continuous purges ensure that no rival power centers emerge and that the military stays loyal. Xi’s recent reshuffling of the CMC and the PLA shows that Xi is continuing to play this old game.

THE SUCCESSOR SHUFFLE

A fundamental dilemma of succession is that strong and competent successors can pose a threat to the leader himself. Being the next in line in China during periods of personalist rule is thus politically dangerous. Historically, Chinese strongmen have cycled through multiple successors before making their final selection. Mao, for instance, picked Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao as his potential heirs before casting them aside. He selected Hua only when his health was unmistakably failing. Once secure in his position, Deng followed a similar path, removing two presumed successors, CCP General Secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, before settling on Jiang Zemin.

All this suggests that Xi may have trouble settling on a successor. On the one hand, he needs to ensure that the successor learns how to operate the levers of power throughout the party and military bureaucracy. On the other hand, Xi will probably want to make sure his successor does not gain enough power to become an independent player too early. Moreover, if Xi is indecisive, shuffling through multiple candidates as Mao and Deng did, it could destabilize the CCP’s hold on power by creating opportunities for splits within the party elite.

The 1989 student-led protest movement, for instance, which led to violent repression at Tiananmen Square, began as a response to the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, the liberal leader who had been Deng’s most likely successor until Deng and other party elders removed him from his post as party secretary for being too lenient in response to an earlier wave of student protests. Hu’s death—a heart attack during a meeting of the Politburo—galvanized protesters partly because students saw a more liberal future for China slipping from their grasp. Student protesters pushing Chinese political leaders to adopt liberal reforms found tacit support from Deng’s second heir apparent, Zhao Ziyang, until Deng pushed him aside and placed him under house arrest. Jiang Zemin quietly arrived in Beijing in the middle of the protests to succeed Zhao, in part because party elites saw Jiang as someone who was ideologically palatable to all sides but a hard-liner on repressing protest.

PATH TO WAR?

The drama created by a struggle over succession is unlikely to stay inside China’s borders: it will affect China’s foreign policy and its relations with the rest of the world, as well. Xi is mindful of his legacy, and a sense that his time is limited may influence his decision-making and increase his appetite for risk—especially when it comes to Taiwan. He has instructed the military to be ready to carry out a campaign against the island by 2027. Although public reporting offers little evidence to definitively identify the conditions under which Xi would greenlight those moves, and there is no 2027 deadline for “reunification” with Taiwan, he clearly sees it as part of his program of national rejuvenation. If he hears the succession clock ticking, he could become more willing to gamble on war.

On the other hand, no legacy would be worse than being the leader who tried to unify with Taiwan—and failed. And despite the advances the Chinese military has made over the past decades, a successful blockade or invasion is far from guaranteed. And even if Xi succeeded on the battlefield, the cost might be high: China could become an international pariah, its economy sapped by sanctions, and its security forces saddled with a new, taxing mission of maintaining control of a restive Taiwan.

Once again, the PLA’s role might prove decisive. As Xi begins to hand over power, he will be constantly looking over his shoulder to ensure the military brass features the right mix of people with ties to the next in line and that the military is showing no signs of political disloyalty to Xi’s preferred successor. These conditions are ripe for the politicization of intelligence assessments and military judgments. It may be more difficult for subordinates to speak candidly about the costs associated with invasion, for instance, and China’s intelligence assessment processes could become tainted as analysts craft vague reports that can be interpreted as aligned with the leader’s thinking—no matter what it turns out to be.

Rumors of Xi’s ousting are indications of trouble down the road.

By now, Xi may be adept at mentally correcting for such analytical pathologies when he consumes intelligence reporting and military campaign projections. The challenge of extracting truthful reporting from the bureaucratic apparatus is not new for China; Mao famously commented that he shared U.S. President Richard Nixon’s distrust of diplomats, and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger cracked jokes together about the woes of the bureaucratic state. But it is an open question whether Xi will be able to keep one step ahead of his advisers’ assessments as he reaches his twilight years. Xi’s unwillingness to adjust course on his unpopular “zero COVID” policies, which led to protests in 2022, hints that he may not be getting crucial information. And whoever takes Xi’s place will likely lack the foreign policy experience necessary to know whom and what to trust.

More ominously, because of the military’s hidden hand in Chinese politics, war has served a useful political purpose during past successions. War provides an opportunity to showcase a new leader’s command over the PLA; seeing the senior military leadership obeying the new leader’s orders might then serve to deter a potential political challenger.

China’s short-lived invasion of Vietnam, in February 1979—the last time the PLA engaged in a full-scale conflict—offers a chilling reminder of how succession intrigue and miscalculation can work in tandem to push Chinese leaders to take up arms. The planning for the war coincided with Deng’s gambit to oust Hua. One of the reasons the invasion may have been attractive to Deng is that it offered an opportunity to send a not-so-subtle reminder of his deep military roots. In this way, the war’s battlefield outcome may have mattered less to Deng than its political upside in domestic politics.

At the same time, the assessment process before the war ranks among the worst in China’s history. Senior officers struggled to understand Deng’s strategic objectives and questioned whether the beleaguered PLA would be able to push Hanoi to the negotiating table. But because many knew that Deng favored military action, they kept quiet. The invasion failed in its primary strategic goal: to compel an immediate change in Vietnam’s policy toward the Soviet Union and Cambodia. Moreover, in the eyes of Vietnamese decision-makers, China’s lackluster battlefield performance highlighted how much of a toll the Cultural Revolution had taken on its military effectiveness—the exact opposite outcome that Chinese leaders were hoping to achieve.

HEIR UNAPPARENT

In China, the game of political succession plays out behind the high red walls of CCP headquarters at Zhongnanhai, making it difficult for outside observers to know what to look for and what to expect. The lack of public information about CCP politics also means that while Xi is in power, he will be subjected to regular rumors that he is in political trouble. This summer, for example, word circulated that Xi is on the verge of being pushed out of office, allegedly elbowed aside by his predecessor, Hu Jintao, and his military chief, Zhang Youxia. Such rumors about Xi’s premature political demise can usually be safely discounted. The odds that China’s top leader will be removed from office are not zero, but they are exceedingly small. Yet even if these rumors are not true, they are telling; indeed, they are products of a system of government in which the dynamics of leadership succession will play an increasingly urgent role.

As long as Xi is in good health, he will probably serve at least one more term, which would mean staying in power until 2032 or later, and he alone will likely decide who succeeds him. Previously, retired leaders have played important roles in the succession process, serving, for instance, on a ceremonial body called the party presidium. This time around, however, the party’s elders may sit the process out. At 82 years old, former General Secretary Hu Jintao is thought to be in poor health; in his most recent public appearance during the 2022 party conclave, he seemed to be confused as he was led off stage in a humiliating scene. Other surviving party elders are also unlikely to intervene; some, such as former premier Wen Jiabao, may lack the stature, and others, such as the retired premier, Zhu Rongji, are well past 90 years old.

If Xi dies without having picked a successor, there will be a scramble. According to the CCP constitution, the leader should be elected in a plenary session of the entire Central Committee, which has more than 200 members. Yet before this group convenes, a subset of party higher-ups, perhaps in consultation with retired leaders and military generals, would meet and essentially predetermine the outcome. A natural choice, should Xi die unexpectedly, might be Premier Li Qiang, who is 66. But there are no guarantees: a civilian with the backing of the military, security services, and enough of the Politburo could push him aside.

The best-case scenario might be for Xi to anoint a successor who is permitted to quietly build a base of power in Xi’s final years. Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Deng handed Jiang Zemin the formal posts of military and party chief in 1989 while Deng was aging but still vigorous. Jiang was a newcomer to both Beijing and elite politics when Deng handed him the reins. Jiang’s position, particularly his weak ties to the military, offered Deng continued leverage, and Deng used his final years to shepherd Jiang through his first years in power, insulating the novice leader from rivals while also pushing him firmly toward economic liberalism. By contrast, if Xi anoints a successor but refuses, or is unable, to allow him to build a power base, the next in line will be vulnerable to potentially chaotic leadership challenges after Xi dies—similar to what befell Hua Guofeng.

To follow the Deng model, Xi would need to select someone relatively young who can carry his agenda forward for years. He could first appoint his chosen successor to the position of head of the party secretariat, an important job that would familiarize him with the internal workings of the Politburo. And eventually, Xi may even make this person a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission to give him some experience with military affairs and the power to rule. The goal is likely for the successor to be ready to assume the top job when he is in his late 50s or early 60s.

Washington must avoid the temptation to exploit the succession challenge.

Strikingly, none of the current members of the seven-man Politburo Standing Committee fit this profile. Li Qiang will be in his late 60s in 2027 and in his 70s in 2032, significantly older than recent party leaders when they took office. Cai Qi holds the critical position as head of the party secretariat, a steppingstone to the top job, but he is only a couple of years younger than Xi. Ding Xuexiang will be 65 in 2027, which makes him a more plausible choice, but he has never governed a province or municipality, a likely prerequisite to ensure the successor is a competent administrator. The remaining three men—Li Xi, Wang Huning, and Zhao Leji—are also too old to be likely contenders.

The larger Politburo offers some more candidates, but each comes with a big asterisk by his name. Chen Jining is the party secretary of Shanghai, a job that both Xi and Jiang held—and, at 61, one of the youngest members of the Politburo. But Chen is not a sitting member of the Standing Committee, and Xi would probably want to elevate him a few years before he took over so he could learn the ropes. (Xi was elevated to the Standing Committee five years before he became CCP general secretary.) By the time Chen was ready, he would be older than Jiang, Hu, and Xi were when they took office.

The outside world would most likely learn of potential successors during the next party congress, which is expected in 2027, and which is usually when the CCP announces reshufflings of the Politburo Standing Committee. But looking at the field of candidates, if Xi makes his selection with an eye toward a 2032 handover, he will need to designate an older heir than has been typical, or he will have to go with a surprise dark horse who lacks the typical pedigree.

An older heir would mean that Xi’s hand-picked successor would not be able to carry Xi’s vision forward for very long, which could create further uncertainty for the country. Xi will want to avoid the problem that the Soviets faced in their regime’s last decade. After Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, his two aging heirs both lasted only a year in office before dying themselves. The result was the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev, who oversaw the regime’s demise. Xi often speaks of the fall of the Soviet Union and wants to prevent China from suffering the same fate.

But a surprise pick would also be risky, because it would mean passing over all the current members of the 24-man Politburo. An entire generation of politicians, in other words, would lose the chance to lead—and their frustrated ambitions could shape Chinese politics for years to come. Such internal tension could create the opportunity for a politician to emerge from the wings, either with a reform agenda, as Deng did in 1978, or with an even more conservative and nationalist agenda than Xi holds.

COURSE CORRECTION?

All this points to a political atmosphere that will be increasingly tense as the problem of succession hovers over the party. Each year that Xi fails to identify and groom a successor will increase the possibility of more chaotic paths for the party and for China, such as the elevation of a weak successor who falls victim to a power struggle. In this way, the periodic rumors about Xi’s alleged political demise are urgent signals not because they are true but because they are indications of trouble down the road.

American policymakers should appreciate the risks inherent in China’s coming succession challenge, but they must also avoid the temptation to exploit it for geopolitical gain. Attempting to intervene in the succession process would violate principles of sovereignty and could elevate domestic political tensions in ways that outside actors cannot anticipate. Internal speeches show that the leadership, including Xi himself, still views the 1989 student-led protest movement as a plot by “hostile Western forces” to bring down the party, and this mistrust continues to color the U.S.-Chinese relationship.

Instead of meddling, the United States should let the process unfold while watching it closely. Although the party’s geopolitical assessments and ideological convictions are bigger than Xi, it is not unreasonable to expect a course correction from the post-Xi years, in which a more moderate and temperate leader emerges—someone who is not stridently nationalist and who can break down the walls that the current leadership has built around the country.

Indeed, in the past, the CCP has corrected course through the succession process. There is a hopeful lesson for the coming years in the transition from Mao’s radical socialism to Deng’s more pragmatic policy of reform and opening. “If we don’t reform, the party is at a dead end,” Deng famously said. Xi’s successor might come to the same conclusion.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Tyler Jost · August 4, 2025

9. Israel Is Fighting a War It Cannot Win

Excerpts:

In a 1997 interview, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, made a chilling prediction, envisioning that by 2027, a unified Islamic state would rise between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, governed by sharia law. When asked what could prevent that, he replied: “The only thing I fear is a reality in which Palestinians believe the Jews will allow a Palestinian state to exist alongside Israel.”

This admission revealed a core truth: Hamas’s power depends on hopelessness. It thrives on the absence of alternatives. But if a credible, internationally backed pathway to Palestinian statehood were offered, Hamas’s appeal would collapse.

Israel’s military deterrence has been restored. It has shown the capacity to defend itself and to deter its enemies. But force alone cannot dismantle Iran’s proxy network and deliver Israel lasting peace and security for its future generations. Only a regional agreement with strong international backing that ultimately yields a viable two-state solution can preserve Israel’s security and Jewish-democratic identity, end the cycle of violence, and transform the Middle East from a battlefield into a zone of cooperation. This is not utopian idealism. It is in the interest of regional and international actors. And for Israel, it has become a strategic necessity.

Israel Is Fighting a War It Cannot Win

Foreign Affairs · by More by Ami Ayalon · August 5, 2025

Only a Path to a Palestinian State Can Stop Calamity in Gaza—and the World Must Lead the Way

Ami Ayalon

August 5, 2025

Gaza as seen from behind a rally promoting Israeli resettlement of the strip, near the Israel-Gaza border, July 2025 Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

AMI AYALON is a former Commander of the Israeli navy, former Director of the Israeli Security Agency (known as Shin Bet), and the author of Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and Its Hope for the Future.

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The war that erupted after the Hamas-led massacre of October 7, 2023, has become the most transformative conflict in the Middle East since the Arab Spring. Yet more than 22 months after the Israel Defense Forces launched a campaign to destroy Hamas, Israel still has no defined political endgame. Negotiations over a cease-fire in Gaza have faltered, and Israel’s failure to envision the war’s “day after” has deepened a humanitarian catastrophe in the strip, which now includes worsening hunger. As the conflict increasingly becomes a deadly regional and international problem, actors outside Israel are stepping in to try to bring resolution: last Monday, France and Saudi Arabia launched a plan at the United Nations to force a more conclusive end to the fighting, encouraging other countries to recognize the state of Palestine and support the creation of states along borders delineated in 1967 on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions. Canada, France, and the United Kingdom have said that they will recognize the state of Palestine by September unless the war ends.

Israel’s current government appears unable to change its approach, even though its principal military objective—to dismantle Hamas’s terror infrastructure—has largely been achieved. The absence of any long-term Israeli vision has left Israel, Gaza, and the broader region in a protracted state of chaos. Wars without a clear political goal cannot be won. They cannot be ended. The longer the vacuum in Israel’s planning persists, the more international actors will have to come together to prevent an even worse catastrophe than the one currently unfolding. They must do so not only for the sake of Israelis and Palestinians but for the region’s stability and their own interests. The war that followed Hamas’s October 7 slaughter was just. Today it is becoming unjust, immoral, and counterproductive, shifting responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza from Hamas to Israel.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Two events have reshaped the strategic landscape of the Middle East in the twenty-first century: the Arab Spring and the October 7 attacks. The Arab Spring, which began in late 2010, radically altered the internal dynamics of many Middle Eastern regimes. It empowered street movements and weakened autocrats’ traditional legitimacy, forcing even the most authoritarian leaders to become more responsive to their publics’ sentiment. Israeli and U.S. leaders should have understood that, in the long run, the Arab Spring would influence how a variety of regional actors responded to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian cause has long served as a unifying banner for otherwise disparate actors—Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, Islamists and nationalists. It provided ideological glue for Iran’s “ring of fire”: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. These groups have often been at odds, but the cause of Palestine has served as a rallying point and a source of legitimacy in the wider Muslim world.

Ignoring this reality was a critical error by regional and global policymakers alike. The October 7 massacre was not merely an act of barbaric terrorism. It sent a deliberate political message, directly challenging the doctrine of “conflict management” that had defined Israel’s policy under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for over a decade. It was also a rebuke to U.S. assumptions that Arab states would proceed in normalizing their diplomatic ties with Israel without serious efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That illusion shattered in the fall of 2023, exposing the fragility of a region held together by diplomatic pragmatism but roiled by unresolved grievances. The 2020 Abraham Accords, brokered by the United States, were celebrated as a diplomatic triumph. They formalized peace between Israel and several Arab nations—most notably Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. But these accords rested on the dangerous, misguided belief that the Palestinian issue had become irrelevant in the region and that further normalization agreements could be reached while bypassing the Palestinian aspiration for self-determination. This strategic miscalculation emboldened Israel to deepen its control over the West Bank—through settlement expansion and the dispossession of Palestinian communities—and weaken the Palestinian Authority. It allowed Hamas to further fill the political vacuum in Gaza and sideline the hobbled PA, portraying itself as the sole defender of Palestinian rights.

In September 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled the India–Middle East Corridor, an ambitious economic plan to link India to Europe via routes through Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Intended as a strategic counterweight to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, this project similarly marginalized the Palestinians, offering them only symbolic gestures. To Hamas, and particularly to its leader, Yahya Sinwar, the proposed corridor represented a betrayal by Arab leaders and international actors. It is now understood that the U.S.- and Saudi-led plan was a central factor in Sinwar’s decision to launch the October 7 attack.

The massacre and Israel’s subsequent military campaign redefined the political calculus of other regional rulers, including those in the Gulf monarchies. As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman candidly put it in September 2024 to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do.” This statement highlighted a broader truth: public opinion, even in autocracies, has become a force leaders cannot afford to ignore.

HARD FORK

Following its unprecedented military successes, Israel now stands at a historic T-junction. One path—the one Israel is now on—will lead the country toward the erosion of its current peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the deepening of internal polarization, and international isolation. It will encourage further radicalization across the region, more religious-nationalist violence from global jihadist organizations that feed on chaos, a decline in support among U.S. policymakers and American citizens, and an increase in antisemitism worldwide. To choose the other path—one that enhances security for Israelis and Palestinians alike and fosters stability and prosperity across the Middle East—Israel must head toward a regional agreement that includes a viable two-state solution.

This war is part of a persistent, deep-rooted struggle over identity, history, and belonging. It is a conflict shaped by asymmetric power but symmetrical fear. Its resolution must allow each side to craft a narrative of victory. This, in turn, requires active international engagement and leadership. Any durable resolution must be not only political and territorial but also psychological and symbolic. Only a regional framework with cohesive international backing can provide the external legitimacy, broader incentives, and political cover necessary for both sides to compromise.

The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, introduced by Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the Arab League, remains the most comprehensive and underutilized framework for resolution. Unlike previous diplomatic efforts, it had two critical elements: a clear end goal—two states on the basis of the 1967 borders with agreed land swaps—and full regional participation in the negotiating process. It represented an inversion of the Arab League’s 1967 Khartoum declaration, transforming that statement’s infamous “three no’s”—no peace, no recognition, no negotiations—into a collective regional yes.

Successive Israeli governments ignored this proposal. But for Israelis, the initiative could now be understood as a strategic victory: the culmination of decades of diplomatic and military effort that resulted in broad Arab recognition of the Jewish state’s right to exist. Ze’ev Jabotinsky—one of the founders of Zionism and a key architect of Israel’s security doctrine—wrote in 1923 that true negotiations with the Arab world would be possible only once it recognized that the Jewish people were in the region to stay. For Palestinians, after more than 140 years of struggle, the nakba in 1948, civilian uprisings against occupation, and the heavy toll of successive wars, the framework proposed by the Arab Peace Initiative would offer a long-denied acknowledgment of national identity and statehood. Crucially, it addresses not only borders and sovereignty but also the regional security architecture necessary for lasting peace.

PREACH BEYOND THE CHOIR

Regrettably, the current Israeli government has demonstrated that it actively opposes a Palestinian state. So the time has come for international actors to move forward on a realistic, staged process inspired by the Arab Peace Initiative as well as the Egyptian and more recent French-Saudi proposals. The broadest possible group of countries, including United States, Saudi Arabia, and moderate Arab states, must issue a joint declaration: the goal is two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and mutual recognition. The clarity provided by such a statement can break through the fog of mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians and allow both to imagine a future worth striving for.

The first practical step is to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of all the remaining Israeli hostages. An interim, technocratic Palestinian government under U.S.-Saudi oversight could handle civil affairs in Gaza, while a regional Arab security force, potentially under an Arab League or multilateral mandate, could maintain order. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with major international organizations, could lead the large-scale reconstruction of Gaza. Hamas can gradually be disarmed by Palestinian Authority forces with regional support.

Within 18 to 24 months of a cease-fire, internationally supervised elections should be held in the West Bank and Gaza, with the aim of creating a legitimate, unified Palestinian government capable of representing its people in final-status negotiations. Anchored in the Arab Peace Initiative, guided by existing UN resolutions, and conducted with robust international mediation, a final agreement would set permanent borders, involving land swaps based on security, demography, and territorial continuity. It would also establish security arrangements, negotiate solutions for Israelis wishing to reside in Palestine and Palestinians seeking to live in Israel, decide the status of Palestinian refugees and of Jerusalem, and affirm mutual recognition.

In a parallel process, the military achievements of Israel and the United States must be leveraged to launch comprehensive negotiations with Iran to stop it from acquiring nuclear weapons. The EU, the UN, China, Israel, Saudi Arabia (representing the Arab League), and the United Nations must coordinate this process and establish robust international inspections.

FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

In a 1997 interview, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, made a chilling prediction, envisioning that by 2027, a unified Islamic state would rise between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, governed by sharia law. When asked what could prevent that, he replied: “The only thing I fear is a reality in which Palestinians believe the Jews will allow a Palestinian state to exist alongside Israel.”

This admission revealed a core truth: Hamas’s power depends on hopelessness. It thrives on the absence of alternatives. But if a credible, internationally backed pathway to Palestinian statehood were offered, Hamas’s appeal would collapse.

Israel’s military deterrence has been restored. It has shown the capacity to defend itself and to deter its enemies. But force alone cannot dismantle Iran’s proxy network and deliver Israel lasting peace and security for its future generations. Only a regional agreement with strong international backing that ultimately yields a viable two-state solution can preserve Israel’s security and Jewish-democratic identity, end the cycle of violence, and transform the Middle East from a battlefield into a zone of cooperation. This is not utopian idealism. It is in the interest of regional and international actors. And for Israel, it has become a strategic necessity.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Ami Ayalon · August 5, 2025

10. America’s Defense Hinges on Making It Here

Excerpts:

Critics will balk at the price tag. Sure, it’s not cheap to rebuild a manufacturing base. But what’s the cost of being caught short? Supply chain challenges have already grounded F-35s, though no fault of any suppliers but simply because we couldn’t get parts. Meanwhile, China’s pumping out warships and missiles at a clip we’re struggling to match. A CHIPS-style investment pays off—private companies will pour in billions more, factories will hire, and we’ll save cash long-term by cutting out middlemen. This isn’t just about security; it’s an economic shot in the arm. Some major defense manufacturers are heavily investing in domestic production, but it needs investments in materials and workforce to meet the demand.

Others might say global supply chains are here to stay. They’re not wrong—until they break. Remember COVID? Factories stalled, shelves emptied, and the new car you wanted wasn’t available—at least not with all the options you desired. The aftereffects of the pandemic are still being felt in both the commercial and defense aviation supply chains. Now picture that in wartime. Our “just-in-time” system, hopping from one foreign port to another, collapses under pressure. Domestic production isn’t optional; it’s the only way to ramp up when it counts.

The CHIPS Act didn’t mess around—it targeted key needs, funded solutions, and moved fast. We need that urgency for defense. Start with what’s running low: munitions, aircraft parts, ship components. Build the foundries and forges to make them. Train welders and machinists to replace the folks retiring out. Stockpile the raw stuff—steel, titanium, rare earths—so we’re not begging when push comes to shove. We can’t wait.

We need smart, focused action—bring back the small shops and big plants that keep our military humming. The CHIPS Act proved it can be done: take a problem, fund it, fix it.

Lawmakers, this is your cue—write and pass a CHIPS Act for military domestic manufacturing. Our adversaries aren’t pausing. We can’t either.

America’s Defense Hinges on Making It Here

By Scott Gureck

August 05, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/08/05/americas_defense_hinges_on_making_it_here_1126934.html

When the U.S. unleashed 14 of its massive 30,000-pound Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) bombs on Iran, I couldn’t help but think: we could use them all up before they can be replaced. Having spent 27 years in the Navy to include during two major wars, I’ve seen this story before—military operations often chew through hardware faster than we can keep up. The fix isn’t just more money; it’s a CHIPS Act-style plan to build what we need, here and now.

The CHIPS and Science Act—signed into law on August 9, 2022—has been called “the largest technology and industrial policy program in modern history, investing hundreds of billions of dollars into research, manufacturing, and American competitiveness.”

In Iraq and Afghanistan, endless deployments ground down our tanks, jets, and munitions. Parts wore out faster than we could replace them, and the strain showed. Fast forward to today: we’ve provided Ukraine with massive amounts of military equipment—artillery, drones, missiles—leaving our own reserves leaner than ever. Then there’s Israel, counting on us for arms that they’ve depleted. We’re juggling too many fires, and our current supply chain business model cannot keep pace indefinitely.

“The U.S. may be the first country to deliberately outsource its military supply chain to an adversary in exchange for cost savings,” said a recent writer. “The scale of the U.S. military’s dependence on China is staggering. Carriers, missiles, aircraft, missile defenses and tanks all rely on components or materials sourced from the People’s Republic of China,” he added.

The Iran strike drove it home. Those MOP bombs need precision components—guidance kits, casings, electronics—and we don’t make enough of them domestically. Too often, we’re stuck waiting on foreign suppliers, some in places that might not stay friendly. That’s not a strategy; it’s a gamble. Recent conflicts prove we’re burning through gear at a rate we can’t sustain without a stronger homegrown base.

Here’s where the CHIPS Act shines as a model. In 2022, it tackled our reliance on foreign semiconductors with over $30 billion, kickstarting American factories and slashing our vulnerability. It’s working—new plants are humming, jobs are growing, and we’re less beholden to overseas risks. We need that same playbook for defense manufacturing. A CHIPS Act for the military would fund factories, train workers, and secure materials to churn out everything from bombs to jet engines, fast. It’s not about nostalgia for “Made in America”—it’s about being ready when the next fight comes.

We need smart, focused action—bring back the small shops and big plants that keep our military humming. The CHIPS Act proved it can be done: take a problem, fund it, fix it.

Lawmakers, this is your cue—write and pass a CHIPS Act for military domestic manufacturing. Our adversaries aren’t pausing. We can’t either.

Scott Gureck, a retired U.S. Navy captain, most recently served as an Executive Vice President at the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis, Md and president, Naval Academy Class of 1986. Military assignments include spokesman for Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, U.S. Seventh Fleet in Japan, and USS Independence (CV 62) during the China-Taiwan crisis of 1996. The opinions expressed here are his own.

11. Technology, not geography, will grant global power in the 21st century

Actually I would argue that it is a trinity that will ggant global power: Technology sure, photogprahpy always, but most important remains the human. Human capital. Human influence, Human politics. Humans making war. Why do we neglect the human domain?

"Humans, geography and technology, in the order" to paraphrase the late John Boyd:

"People, Ideas, things, in that order."

Technology, not geography, will grant global power in the 21st century

Defense News · by Frank A. Rose · August 4, 2025

In 1904, the British geographer and strategist Sir Halford Mackinder delivered a paper to the Royal Geographical Society in London titled, “The Geographic Pivot of History.” In it, he argued that control over the Eurasian heartland—what he called the “pivot area”—would determine the future of world power. His theory became foundational to modern geopolitical thought, influencing everything from British imperial strategy to Cold War containment doctrine.

Mackinder’s central premise was simple but profound: geography shapes destiny. Railroads, industrialization, and continental-scale military logistics were transforming the old maritime balance of power, and Mackinder believed that the vast landmass of Eurasia—with its resources, manpower, and central position—would become the key to global dominance.

More than a century later, the world looks radically different. Great power competition is no longer solely a contest over territory or physical access to critical chokepoints. Today, while geography still matters and will continue to shape strategic realities, technology is playing an increasingly central role in defining geopolitical competition in the 21st century. Rather than fully replacing geography, technology is becoming the critical complement to it—transforming the way states project power, protect their interests, and influence global affairs.

In the 21st century, the new “pivot of history” is not a place—but a set of technologies.

I was recently reminded of Mackinder’s relevance by an excellent article from my colleague Hal Brands at Johns Hopkins SAIS. In revisiting Mackinder’s insights, Brands shows how deeply geography shaped 20th-century grand strategy—and how much of that thinking still permeates defense and foreign policy today.

Pentagon unit seeks Ukraine-like conditions for drone testing

Most commercial firms can't access test space where they can refine their products under conditions they might face in the field. DIU wants to change that.

Yet as I read it, I found myself thinking: What would Mackinder say if he were alive now? Would he still see the Eurasian heartland as the strategic center of gravity—or would he look instead to the frontiers of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors, outer space, undersea cables, and biotechnology?

In my view, these technologies—rather than any patch of terrain—will likely define who leads and who follows in the 21st century. They are the modern equivalents of the railroads and battleships that reshaped the balance of power in Mackinder’s day. And unlike a landmass, technological advantage is not fixed. It must be cultivated, protected, and renewed constantly.

Consider artificial intelligence. AI is already transforming warfare, intelligence collection, logistics, and decision-making. The country that best harnesses AI will be able to dominate in everything from autonomous systems and electronic warfare to cyber defense and space operations. As Russian President Vladimir Putin has stated, “whoever dominates the development of AI, will rule the world.”

Likewise, quantum computing promises to render today’s encryption obsolete while creating new frontiers in simulation and data analysis. Biotechnology will reshape medicine, agriculture, and human performance. Semiconductors remain the irreplaceable backbone of all these domains.

It is no coincidence that these sectors are at the heart of the current strategic competition between the United States and China. Beijing has made technological supremacy a national priority. Through its “Made in China 2025” strategy and other initiatives, China is pouring resources into scientific research, tightening control over supply chains, and investing heavily in its universities and tech sectors. According to the most recent Annual Threat Assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, China is pursuing a whole-of-government strategy to become the world’s leading science and technology power.

This should concern every American policymaker. For decades, the United States maintained its global leadership in part because of a unique ecosystem that combined government R&D, leading research universities, and a dynamic private sector. This federal-university-industry partnership—first forged during World War II with programs like the Manhattan Project and refined during the Cold War—produced many of the technological breakthroughs that powered U.S. military and economic dominance.

But that ecosystem is now under strain. Funding for basic scientific research has stagnated in relative terms. As I have written elsewhere, political attacks on universities—most recently the Trump administration’s proposal to cut federal research funding over campus responses to antisemitism—threaten to undermine the long-term scientific base that sustains American innovation.

Let me be clear: antisemitism, like all forms of bigotry, must be condemned and confronted. But we must find ways to address these cultural and political issues without destroying one of the crown jewels of our national security architecture.

Meanwhile, our adversaries are not waiting. China is racing ahead with aggressive investments in STEM education, advanced manufacturing, and dual-use technologies. It is also working to dominate critical infrastructure like undersea cables, satellite networks, and 5G systems—digital equivalents of Mackinder’s railroads and ports. Control over these domains translates directly into geopolitical influence, economic leverage, and military advantage.

This is why I believe we must update Mackinder’s thesis for the modern era. Instead of just asking who controls the Eurasian heartland, we must also ask: who controls the semiconductor supply chain? Who leads in quantum research? Who sets the global standards for AI ethics and cybersecurity? These are the questions that will determine global power in the coming decades.

To compete effectively in this new strategic environment, the United States must take several key steps:

Reinvest in Basic Scientific Research: We need a significant and sustained increase in federal research and development funding, particularly in foundational science and engineering fields. This must include long-term support for university-based basic research, which is often the seedbed of breakthrough innovation.
Revitalize the Federal-University Partnership: There is no doubt that American universities have made significant political mistakes over the past decade that they must address. That said, Washington must rebuild trust with academia, not wage culture wars against it. On the other hand, universities must do their part by reaffirming commitments to free inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and national service. In return, they deserve stable support and meaningful engagement from policymakers.
Strengthen Public-Private Collaboration: The government should act as a catalyst and customer for emerging technologies. Programs and organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, In-Q-Tel, and the CHIPS and Science Act point in the right direction—but they must be scaled and institutionalized. Additionally, Congress and the administration should take the opportunity to fundamentally overhaul the federal acquisition process in ways that ensures capabilities can be quickly deployed.
Safeguard Critical Supply Chains: The U.S. and its allies must reduce dependence on adversarial nations for key technologies, especially rare earth minerals and semiconductors. Friend-shoring and secure innovation networks will be essential.
Lead in Setting Global Norms: In AI, biotech, and cyber, the U.S. must work with democratic allies to shape the rules of the road. These technologies are not neutral—they reflect values. If we do not lead, others with very different worldviews will.
Promote Legal Immigration Pathways. The U.S. military has long benefited from the talent and innovation of immigrants. During the Cold War, immigrant physicists and mathematicians played a foundational role in advancing missile defense, satellite reconnaissance, and nuclear deterrence. In more recent decades, immigrants have driven breakthroughs in cybersecurity, autonomous systems, and AI-enabled defense technologies. To sustain its competitive edge in emerging technologies, the United States must maintain—and strengthen—legal immigration pathways that attract top scientific and technical talent from around the world. An open and strategic immigration system is not just a domestic policy choice; it is a national security imperative.

In many ways, our future depends not on reclaiming lost terrain but on winning the race for ideas. The new “pivot area” is likely not a continent—it is a constellation of labs, startups, and academic institutions. And like Mackinder’s heartland, these domains are where early advances can confer long-lasting dominance.

Mackinder helped his contemporaries understand the world they were entering. We must do the same. Today’s policymakers need a new geopolitical framework—one that recognizes that the strategic high ground of the 21st century is no longer just land or sea, but technology.

The nations that lead in innovation will shape the rules, win the wars, and dominate the future.

The only question that remains is this: Will the United States seize this moment—or surrender it?

Frank A. Rose is President of Chevalier Strategic Advisors, a strategic advisory firm focused on the intersection of geopolitics and defense technology. He previously served as Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (2021-2024), U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control (2014-2017), a Professional Staff Member on the House Armed Services Committee (2007-2009), and as a Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Defense (1999-2006).

12. Lessons from this year’s unfunded priority lists

Lessons from this year’s unfunded priority lists

Just 15% of the value would go toward near-term readiness.

defenseone.com · by Elaine McCusker

Exceeding $50 billion and arriving amid a unique federal budget cycle, this year’s unfunded priority lists from uniformed military leaders offer a lot to consider.

Let us summarize the environment in which they were submitted. In a historic first, Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill for the Defense Department for the current fiscal year. Lawmakers then passed a reconciliation bill, which gives DOD more than $150 billion in FY 2025 funding, spendable over several years. (Interestingly, the White House Office of Management and Budget characterizes most of the reconciliation funding as part of the President’s budget request for FY 2026.) While President Trump talks about nearly $1 trillion in 2026 defense funding, the actual proposed budget contains about $850 billion—less than President Biden had proposed. Finally, the likelihood of a series of continuing resolutions leading to a potential second straight year where no appropriation is passed, along with a government shutdown or two, grows with each passing day.

Against that background, four insights leap from this year’s funding-gap lists. First, the military’s leaders took a mostly unconstrained approach, listing $22 billion more in unfunded priorities than last year, thereby, in our view, fully exposing the insufficiency of the White House defense topline.

Second, the Air Force and Navy were the most aggressive of the services, listing gaps totaling $10 billion and $9 billion respectively, implying that they may not have taken reconciliation funding into account, or if they did, they see it for what it is, a one-time supplemental to fill long-existing gaps. One must also wonder why other forces are perennial laggards: this year, the Army’s list totals $4.3 billion; the Marine Corps’, $2.8 billion.

Third, INDOPACOM once again produced the biggest list: $11.9 billion, up from $11 billion last year. Whether or not they considered the $12.7 billion-plus in budget-reconciliation funding when developing this list, the number is clearly without constraints, as it was last year.

Finally, only about 15 percent of the total would serve near-term readiness needs, suggesting that military leaders are more satisfied with the priority on these needs in the budget which prioritized near-term readiness and relied, perhaps incorrectly, on the budget reconciliation bill to make up the investment shortfalls, which remain a high unfunded concern.

More can be deduced from year-over-year shifts in the lists. Three components added more than $4 billion apiece, led by the Air Force, which more than doubled its 2024 total. The service’s list is dominated by munitions and military construction items, but also includes $1.5 billion for spare parts and $1.4 billion in facilities, sustainment, restoration and modernization. The cumulative shortfall signals an overall troubling state of Air Force infrastructure and readiness.

The Navy list, which is about one-third larger than last year’s edition, is dominated by procurement, including $3.5 billion for munitions, reserve aircraft, a ship-to-shore connector, and items to boost production capacity. The service also listed nearly $3 billion in research and development, almost half of which would go toward the Air Wing of the Future. Like the Air Force, the Navy identified a large shortfall in military construction: $1.7 billion for a wide variety of facilities.

In fact, six of the 14 components list military construction shortfalls. With 93 projects ranging from a $319 million parking apron on Wake Island to a $4 million apron expansion in West Virginia, there is pretty much something for everyone from a political perspective. The list also signals that despite the reported excess in defense infrastructure across the enterprise, there are still plenty of needs for new, improved or expanded brick and mortar facilities.

The Space Force gap list also rose this year, with MILNET Block II accounting for about two-thirds of the $6 billion total.

Though the INDOPACOM request for military construction is down from last year, possibly in part due to the $1.6 billion in the 2025 reconciliation bill, the command’s reported investment gap totals $9.6 billion and includes many capabilities needed by the entire enterprise, such as all domain unmanned systems, critical munitions, space control, cyber security and defense and find, fix, track and target systems.

Taken as a whole, the need to buy things is the largest of the declared shortfalls and covers the full range of modernization and capacity challenges resident in the force. This is interesting given the $38 billion in 2025 procurement-related reconciliation funding.

Thematic priorities in the longer-term investment accounts include electronic warfare systems, addressing munition production backlogs and identifying alternative supplier options, and unmanned capabilities.

The readiness shortfall story is mostly about the Air Force, followed by INDOPACOM and the Navy with facilities, sustainment restoration and modernization, training, prepositioning, cyber defense, mission network, installation base support, and the ever-nebulous INDOPACOM “campaigning” effort topping the list.

These unfunded-priority lists really only matter in one of two ways. First, the appropriators would actually have to pass and get the President to sign an 2026 appropriation that includes them. With sixty votes needed in the Senate to make this happen and with failure to do this in 2025, the odds are not good.

The other way it matters is if there is some grand deal to have another modified full-year continuing resolution to keep the government open. One could see an end-game budget bargain that adds this unfunded-list-driven $50 billion to the White House request for defense, while garnering the sixty votes needed in the Senate with a politically driven deal that adds, dollar-for-dollar, about $50 billion for domestic programs above the request.

Either way, the lists provide valuable insight into how budget decisions were made and the resulting potential shortfalls that help Congress fulfill its constitutional mandate to raise and maintain our military forces.

Elaine McCusker is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). She previously served as the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary of defense (comptroller). Retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. He previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.

defenseone.com · by Elaine McCusker

13. Opinion | How to shut down Putin’s war machine

Excerpt:

Russia’s war against Ukraine poses broader dangers for the world. When a fire rages this ferociously, one must act before its flames consume everything. Trump’s latest statements suggest he has seen through the smoke and understands the stakes. The ultimatum he has given to Putin expires later this week. Thousands of lives depend on the success of what follows. The tools to stop Russia exist. What is needed is the political will to use them with precision and force.

Opinion | How to shut down Putin’s war machine

President Trump’s warnings to Russia are welcome. But pressure must follow for peace to be possible.

August 4, 2025 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Washington Post · by Andriy Yermak

Andriy Yermak is head of the presidential office of Ukraine.

Later this week, the world might be presented with an opportunity to end the war Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waging against Ukraine.

President Donald Trump has made it clear that Russia will soon face serious consequences if it doesn’t immediately come to the negotiating table. By cutting back the previous 50-day window to just 10 days last week, the U.S. president sent an unmistakable signal to Putin. These signals need to be followed up with decisive action for the war to end.

“We thought we had that settled numerous times, and then President Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in a nursing home or whatever,” Trump said. “And I say that’s not the way to do it.”

Kyiv welcomes this clarity. We thank Trump for his firm and unmistakable commitment to peace through strength. It is a commitment we share. President Volodymyr Zelensky has made it the foundation of Ukraine’s resistance, and it is Ukrainian strength that has kept our nation alive. This strength is the only language Putin understands.

To truly shift the war’s trajectory, however, the existing sanctions regime must be sharpened. We have concrete ideas on how to do so.

Russia’s military-industrial complex needs to be better targeted. Entities such as Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, and Roscosmos, its space agency, are not neutral civilian institutions, but strategic enablers of Putin’s war. Rosatom underpins nuclear weapons development and facilitates the occupation of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Roscosmos provides satellite imagery and communications that guide Russian missile strikes. Both agencies must be sanctioned in full and banned from cooperating with Western scientific and academic institutions.

More must also be done to cut off Russia’s access to international finance. Disconnecting some Russian banks from SWIFT, the backbone of global financial communications, in 2022 was a milestone. But one major financial institution, Gazprombank, remains connected, serving as a major conduit for sanctioned trade, particularly in energy and defense-related goods. Gazprombank must be disconnected alongside any smaller financial institutions trying to fill the gap.

A full economic blockade is needed. Russia imports billions worth of microchips and electronics used in its drones and missiles through China and other smaller countries across Central Asia. These components often originate in the West but reach Russia via circuitous trade routes and financial loopholes. We are greatly encouraged by recent U.S. actions to crack down on sanctions evasion. The bipartisan Graham-Blumenthal bill marks a strong step toward imposing secondary sanctions on entities in third countries that help fund Russia’s war machine.

In addition, Trump’s decision last week to raise tariffs on India for purchasing Russian oil above the price cap surely rattled the Kremlin. It’s a great first step, but more pressure is needed. The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions, which I’m honored to co-chair, has developed a set of targeted proposals that can do just that. Those include imposing sanctions on Russian ports used for exporting oil; designating operators of the shadow fleets of oil tankers, including vessels that disable tracking systems and use ship-to-ship transfers to obscure origin; and targeting intermediaries in the defense supply chain, including crypto infrastructure such as exchanges and wallets used for illicit payments and sanctions evasion.

Russia’s war against Ukraine poses broader dangers for the world. When a fire rages this ferociously, one must act before its flames consume everything. Trump’s latest statements suggest he has seen through the smoke and understands the stakes. The ultimatum he has given to Putin expires later this week. Thousands of lives depend on the success of what follows. The tools to stop Russia exist. What is needed is the political will to use them with precision and force.

Washington Post · by Andriy Yermak

14. As drones proliferate, the Army wants AI to help with air operations

"Fight tonight"

As drones proliferate, the Army wants AI to help with air operations

A request for information seeks "fight tonight" tools plus longer-term ideas to ease the burden on commanders.

By Nick Wakeman

Editor-in-Chief, Washington Technology

August 5, 2025 02:45 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Nick Wakeman

Gettyimages.com/Anton Petrus|

August 5, 2025 02:45 PM ET

As drones spread out into crowded skies, the Army hopes artificial intelligence and machine learning can help humans keep up.

A request for information posted on Wednesday seeks ways to ease "the cognitive burden faced by commanders in managing complex airspace operations and maintaining situational awareness in a rapidly evolving battlefield environment."

The Army wants two types of responses: near-term “fight tonight” gear, and longer-term ideas to integrate AI and ML into next-generation command-and-control systems.

All should take note of Army challenges in:

Multi-domain operations
The proliferation of unmanned aerial systems and other emerging platforms
Contested and congested environments
Dynamics mission requirements
Integration of fires and effects
Data-driven decision making

“AI-enabled airspace management solutions have the potential to address these challenges by leveraging machine learning, predictive analytics, and automation to enhance situational awareness, optimize airspace allocation, and enable rapid decision-making,” the RFI states.

The Army wants to analyze data from multiple sources in real-time, predict airspace usage patterns and recommend proactive steps to improve safety, efficiency, and mission effectiveness.

Some of the goals include real-time conflict detection and resolution, integration of UAS, loitering munitions and autonomous platforms in the Army’s airspace. The service branch also wants greater coordination among fires, effects and airspace users.

Other objectives include resilience against countermeasures, including electronic warfare and jamming.

Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 29.

The Army is also looking for companies with solutions that can be demonstrated in November at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center.

15. Learn or Lose: Lessons from Ukrainian Training in Germany

Excerpts:

Ukraine’s war exposes NATO’s challenge, an echo of the problem that plagued the redcoats during the Revolutionary War: a reliance on outdated doctrine ill-suited for modern, drone-saturated warfare. From Bakhmut’s chaos to Robotyne’s trenches, Ukraine proves that tactical agility—not just technology—defines victory. As Zaluzhnyi warned, rigid command models falter in today’s fights. NATO must transform advising into a two-way street. Reverse advising must be codified to capture frontline lessons, ensuring that NATO doctrine and TTPs remain relevant and flexible.

The next war—whether in the Baltics, Black Sea, or the Indo-Pacific—will likely resemble Ukraine’s current fight more than NATO’s past ones. As Zaluzhnyi argued, “Political leadership in the conducting of war is the most critical factor . . . defining the objectives of the war, providing the material conditions for defense, and strengthening cohesion.”

If NATO continues to export Cold War–style training, it risks irrelevance. NATO can no longer treat advising as a static export function. It must become a feedback loop—driven by humility and urgency—that captures frontline innovation and institutionalizes it across the alliance. Reverse advising is a strategic necessity, and NATO must not rely on what it teaches, but on what it learns. Otherwise, the United States and its allies will train for the last war and march confidently (and blindly) into the next: disciplined, doctrinal, and defeated.

Learn or Lose: Lessons from Ukrainian Training in Germany - Modern War Institute

Joshua Hood, Jahara Matisek and Anthony Tingle | 08.05.25

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Joshua Hood · August 5, 2025

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In the American Revolutionary War, British soldiers employed orderly, neat formations that they had perfected in European battlefields, but that were worthless against colonial rebels. More than two centuries later, NATO faces its own version of the redcoats’ problem. Like the British Army two and a half centuries ago, NATO risks irrelevance by training Ukrainians for idealized battles, not their chaotic, drone-heavy, attritional war.

Ukrainian units are not facing conventional battles of the form NATO plans and prepares for. They contend with artillery barrages, drone swarms, chemical munitions dropped from the air, and trench warfare, a sort of cyberpunk warfare resembling parts of both World War I and World War II, mixed heavily with modern technology. While the Ukrainians have adapted to these conditions with creativity, resilience, and speed, Western training programs remain mostly rooted in prewar doctrine, ignoring the radical evolution of battlefield dynamics.

Based on fieldwork in Ukraine and our observations at German bases under the European Union Military Assistance Mission–Ukraine (EUMAM UA) and US-led Joint Military Training Group–Ukraine (JMTG-U) at Grafenwoehr, along with internal documents from the Security Assistance Group–Ukraine (SAG-U), we argue NATO must lose outdated training models, and learn from Ukraine’s frontline innovations to prepare for future wars.

The Battlefield Reality: What Ukrainians Actually Need

Three years of grinding attrition have rewritten the rules of modern combat in Ukraine. According to a SAG-U report, Ukrainian troops endure harsh “zero line” conditions—long foot movements under constant threat from first-person-view drones and precision-guided munitions. Movement itself is a hazard, demanding pattern avoidance, camouflage, and terrain adaptation—skills often absent from Western infantry training. Effective training must prepare Ukrainians to counter drones enabled by fiber-optic cable, build deeper bunkers, and counter tunneling threats. Moreover, Ukrainians tell us they need battlefield medicine adapted for high-casualty environments, where evacuation may take up to a week via a motorbike.

Ukrainian soldiers also operate under relentless surveillance from drones, to include drones dropping chemical munitions. Yet Western training rarely includes battlefield stress inoculation, preparation for maneuvering at night, or how to dismount during a mechanized assault. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and former top general, has emphasized decentralization and mental resilience as vital for survival, a cultural shift NATO must study. Still, Ukrainian requests for drone countermeasures and trench fortification training are sidelined in curricula built for conventional or peacekeeping operations, despite their proven effectiveness.

JMTG-U instructors from the Pennsylvania National Guard (2024–2025 rotation) brought experience and passion, but often struggled against institutional limits: outdated software, poor doctrinal translation, limited resources, and unrealistic rehearsal timelines. As their commander noted to us, planning cycles were difficult to schedule because they were dependent on borrowing equipment from other US units to improve training quality for the Ukrainians.

In interviews, Ukrainian soldiers voiced frustration that NATO instructors often push textbook solutions, like deliberate planning cycles, to nontextbook problems such as surviving drone swarms and coordinating maneuvers in an environment characterized by a highly contested electromagnetic spectrum. Russian and Ukrainian soldiers adapt new tactics on the front line faster than NATO can update its courses, a challenge compounded by restrictive safety regulations on Western training grounds. Unfortunately, Ukrainian training derived from NATO doctrine does not fully prepare them for battlefield changes and adaptations, which occurs every two to six weeks.

The urgent priority is to reverse the flow of lessons—taking the field experience of Ukrainian units and using them to transform how NATO trains its own forces for the wars of tomorrow. To continue training Ukrainians as if they will fight NATO’s next conventional war rather than their current existential one risks more than irrelevance—it risks building paper battalions while Ukraine bleeds, and it threatens NATO’s credibility.

Training Gaps and Cultural Mismatches

Western training programs, while professional, falter on cultural and doctrinal mismatches. Language barriers persist: JMTG-U uses Ukrainian interpreters to build trust, but EUMAM UA sites rely on Russian-speaking interpreters, risking friction given Ukraine’s desire to promote the Ukrainian language and encourage English proficiency in its security forces. Cultural disconnects also erode cohesion. For example, Ukrainian soldiers refused to use a command post known as Building 200 due to Ukrainian forces’ use of the number 200 to indicate a fatality (300 is also a loaded term because it’s used to refer to wounded personnel). German instructors dismissed their concerns, ignoring this symbolism, which would be much like overlooking an American aversion to a thirteenth floor. Cultural respect isn’t a nicety—it’s a requirement for effective training and cohesion.

Doctrinally, NATO’s rigid planning models assume resources and time Ukrainian units lack. As Zaluzhnyi noted, success demands rapid adaptation, not bureaucratic templates. These gaps hinder not just training but NATO’s ability to learn from Ukraine’s front lines. Unfortunately, many trainers from NATO countries insist on rigid adherence to doctrinal templates, even when they do not align with battlefield realities. The German-led brigade staff training standard operating procedure developed under EUMAM UA draws from NATO APP-28 and emphasizes formal planning steps such as mission analysis, course-of-action development, and decision-making, along with supporting activities like wargaming and synchronization. While sound in theory, this approach often struggles under wartime constraints where Ukrainian have minimal time with degraded communications and incomplete staff structures. A senior German colonel we interviewed, who helped design this standard operating procedure, explained that although it incorporates battle rhythm discipline and standardized staff roles, it assumes organizational capacity that Ukrainian brigades often lack.

Photos taken at a EUMAM UA training site in Germany depicting how German trainers explain the planning process to Ukrainian forces (shared with permission).

By contrast, the US Army’s MDMP, outlined in ATP 5-0.2, emphasizes iterative commander-driven planning, tailored for formations with extensive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and support infrastructure. The German-Ukrainian standard operating procedure, while more NATO-aligned, attempts to account for partner nation constraints—adding emphasis on electronic warfare, resilience training, and rapid course-of-action formulation. Yet even with these adaptations, it remains too rigid for the tempo and improvisation demanded on the Ukrainian front lines. This reflects a deeper issue: training focused more on making Ukrainians look like NATO units than on equipping them to win their current war. In fact, the German colonel running the staff training program for Ukrainian staff officers used a wargame scenario straight out of the Cold War, refusing to add drones and other modern weaponry.

Ukrainian commanders face a dilemma: aspire to NATO’s professional, interoperable standards or embrace the improvisation needed to survive. Western trainers, particularly under EUMAM UA, push structured planning doctrines ill-suited for Ukraine’s chaotic battlefield, where plans must be formed rapidly. NATO’s templates, requiring extensive documentation and rehearsals, create bureaucratic fatigue for units of mobilized citizens with limited training time. As Zaluzhnyi emphasized, Ukraine is forging its own way, blending professionalism with adaptability. Without a feedback loop to capture these realities, NATO risks training a Ukrainian Army in its own image, not the military Ukraine needs.

Until training missions internalize the reality of Ukrainian battlefield conditions, they will keep training for theoretical wars. Without cultural attunement and doctrinal humility, even the best-intentioned Western assistance generates friction, misunderstanding, and missed opportunities.

The Army NATO is Creating or the Army Ukraine Needs?

Ukrainian commanders today straddle a complex divide. On one side is the aspiration to become a NATO-style military: professional, hierarchical, and interoperable. On the other is the urgent need to wage a brutal, cyberpunk war of survival. Western advisors often focus on building the former, but battlefield necessity demands the latter. This disconnect is especially clear in brigade and battalion staff training.

Under EUMAM UA, Western trainers introduce Ukrainian officers to advanced planning doctrines focused on synchronization and full-spectrum staff processes. But Ukraine’s battlefield reality rewards improvisation, rapid decisions, and decentralized execution. As one brigade commander noted about his unit receiving staff training in a SAG-U report: “We appreciate the instruction, but we plan our fights in three hours, not three days.” This has been a primary point of contention over the last three years, where the Ukrainians are caught between surviving in the moment and building a resilient and coherent force for the long-term.

At JMTG-U, the commanding officer cited delays driven by incompatible software, incomplete annex templates, and unrealistic rehearsal requirements. Staff were buried in documentation—producing operations order annexes and matrices often irrelevant once the battle began. The result: bureaucratic fatigue and rote planning that failed to shape actual operations.

European instructors often emphasize deliberate battalion-level planning and combined arms integration. Yet most Ukrainian units are composed of mobilized civilians with little time to train. Officers rise through battlefield merit, not staff college credentials. Doctrine must be translated—not just linguistically, but operationally—to reflect the force Ukraine has. As Zaluzhnyi himself emphasized, “Changes will be required in the doctrine that promotes and facilitates the adaptability of the armed forces.”

This is the golden middle dilemma, between professionalization and improvisation. As Zaluzhnyi recently stressed, “We are no longer copying others—we are learning to fight in our own way.” NATO must train for that future, not its own past.

NATO’s training lacks a critical component: a feedback loop linking battlefield outcomes to classroom instruction. Trainers assess success through classroom performance, not combat effectiveness, leaving them blind to whether skills translate. A Ukrainian officer noted that some NATO tactics were impractical due to terrain or equipment shortages. Structural barriers—outdated simulations, mistranslated doctrines, and limited polling tools—compound the issue. Senior US officials, per a SAG-U report, worry that reduced Ukrainian feedback undermines assistance efforts. When JMTG-U’s drone course was redesigned after Ukrainian critiques, it proved the value of frontline insights. NATO needs a battlefield-to-classroom pipeline to capture these lessons, setting the stage for reverse advising.

The Problem of Training Feedback Loops

Despite years of instruction and assessment, trainers often lack visibility into whether their lessons are used—or useful—on the battlefield due to a lack of feedback loops. This creates a blind spot where validation is anecdotal, delayed, or entirely absent. Or in many cases, improving the quality of training is dependent on a proactive instructor staying in touch with Ukrainians they’ve trained, usually via a Signal chat room.

A SAG-U report described this disconnect as “training in a vacuum,” where trainers assess success based on classroom performance and doctrinal adherence, but rarely see how those skills perform under fire. One Ukrainian officer noted that some NATO tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) were theoretically sound, but unusable due to terrain, tempo, or equipment constraints.

The lack of battlefield feedback has strategic consequences. According to a SAG-U officer, some Washington policymakers have lamented how Ukrainian officials were sharing less feedback on battlefield development, prompting them to question whether security assistance was worth it if the Ukrainians weren’t sharing tactics and lessons. Without clear messages reaching the Pentagon, it becomes harder to advocate for needed support and to adapt programs to the evolving fight.

The commanding officer at JMTG-U also identified multiple structural obstacles: insufficient data collection infrastructure, broken simulation platforms, lack of resources, and missing or mistranslated doctrinal documents. Even basic tools like wargaming support and course-of-action comparison tables were sometimes incomplete or delivered too late to matter. In his final evaluation, the JMTG-U commander recommended integrating Ukrainian officers into the curriculum development process to improve realism and close the loop between instruction and implementation. In one case, when JMTG-U instructors developed a drone course, Ukrainian trainees “ripped up” most of the training program because it did not match their battlefield experience, a common complaint of many Ukrainians we interview. Ukrainian inputs led to a complete redesign—producing a far more realistic training module based on frontline drone TTPs, which was finally demonstrated in June 2025 by the new Tennessee National Guard rotation at JMTG-U.

Finally, some digital polling tools for improving tracking are being beta tested, which is a step in the right direction. Such platforms allow Ukrainian soldiers to rate training modules and provide post-training feedback. However, they remain limited in scale and primarily measure satisfaction rather than tactical efficacy. To go further, NATO needs a battlefield-to-classroom pipeline—a formal structure for gathering after-action reviews, combat observations, and tactical innovations from Ukrainian units and pushing them into training course development. Scholarship has described the US military’s historical reluctance to absorb operational lessons in real time. NATO now has a chance to prove it can evolve faster, not just smarter. We can no longer risk allowing after-action reports of Ukrainian training to be uploaded into a blackhole SharePoint website, never to be read again.

Reverse Advising as the Strategic Imperative

Security force assistance has traditionally been a one-way street: Western advisors arrive, impart doctrine and TTPs, and leave. Ukraine challenges this model: Ukrainian troops create new drone tactics, develop underground command bunkers, and decentralize reconnaissance-fire networks that are survivable in a sensor-rich and electronic warfare–intensive battlespace. Such battlefield adaptations are not just wartime improvisations—they are sources of institutional knowledge.

This is why NATO must embrace reverse advising—not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a structural transformation. Ukraine is a laboratory for modern warfare; adaptation, as much as technological supremacy, defines the current fight. Zaluzhnyi has noted that Ukraine’s early battlefield experiences with AI-enabled systems represent “a profound and relevant change in the characteristics of warfare.” War-winning capability lies not just in hardware, but in the agility to employ it creatively under pressure. For instance, the French Army appears the most poised to learn and innovate from the Ukrainians. Interviews with French trainers indicated that they were developing a new infantry-drone manual based on feedback from Ukrainians they had trained. This development suggests why the French recently designed and developed 3D printing labs, which are highly mobile and allow their soldiers to produce ten drones every three hours.

To systematize reverse advising, institutions such as NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and the new NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training And Education Centre must be empowered to capture frontline innovations and rapidly integrate them into allied doctrine and training. Battlefield TTPs from Bakhmut and Robotyne should be analyzed and integrated within weeks—not studied abstractly years later. NATO should adopt mechanisms used by the Ukrainians themselves: crowdsourced battlefield intelligence, iterative TTP updates, rapid-turnover rehearsal drills, and integration of open-source intelligence like Telegram posts and chats.

As the JMTG-U commander recommended, future training cycles must be codesigned with “Ukrainian veterans and leverage Ukrainian planning software like Kropyva and Delta as standard instructional tools.” This level of interoperability is not a luxury, as it’s the only way to ensure Western support actually enhances battlefield survivability.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has revealed an uncomfortable truth: Ukraine may be advising NATO more than the reverse. Recognizing this—and institutionalizing the flow of frontline lessons—will determine whether NATO remains doctrinally relevant. Achieving this shift also depends on building strong advisor relationships with Ukrainian units. By institutionalizing reverse advising, NATO can evolve from advisor to student, ensuring its relevance in future conflicts.

Ukraine’s war exposes NATO’s challenge, an echo of the problem that plagued the redcoats during the Revolutionary War: a reliance on outdated doctrine ill-suited for modern, drone-saturated warfare. From Bakhmut’s chaos to Robotyne’s trenches, Ukraine proves that tactical agility—not just technology—defines victory. As Zaluzhnyi warned, rigid command models falter in today’s fights. NATO must transform advising into a two-way street. Reverse advising must be codified to capture frontline lessons, ensuring that NATO doctrine and TTPs remain relevant and flexible.

The next war—whether in the Baltics, Black Sea, or the Indo-Pacific—will likely resemble Ukraine’s current fight more than NATO’s past ones. As Zaluzhnyi argued, “Political leadership in the conducting of war is the most critical factor . . . defining the objectives of the war, providing the material conditions for defense, and strengthening cohesion.”

If NATO continues to export Cold War–style training, it risks irrelevance. NATO can no longer treat advising as a static export function. It must become a feedback loop—driven by humility and urgency—that captures frontline innovation and institutionalizes it across the alliance. Reverse advising is a strategic necessity, and NATO must not rely on what it teaches, but on what it learns. Otherwise, the United States and its allies will train for the last war and march confidently (and blindly) into the next: disciplined, doctrinal, and defeated.

Major Joshua Hood is a PhD student at Northwestern University and is an intelligence officer in the US Air Force.

Lieutenant Colonel Jahara “Franky” Matisek, PhD, (@JaharaMatisek) is a senior pilot and nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College, Resilience Initiative Center, Payne Institute for Public Policy, and Defense Analyses and Research Corporation. He has published two books and over one hundred articles on strategy, warfare, and security assistance.

Dr. Anthony Tingle is an independent researcher and author who has been studying and writing on Ukraine since the beginning of the war. He has been to Ukraine multiple times, including in May 2023 in the Donbas near Bakhmut the weekend the Russians officially took the city, and in October 2023 near a town called Robotyne, where he accompanied a Ukrainian special forces unit into combat. Most recently in 2024, he was in the Kursk Oblast with Ukrainian forces. He is a West Point graduate and retired Army officer with a PhD from George Mason University. He can be followed at www.WarVector.com and on his Flash Traffic Podcast.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or those of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the US Air Force and US Naval War College. This fieldwork was sponsored by a DOD Minerva project to improve U.S. foreign military training (Air Force Office of Scientific Research: FA9550-20-1-0277) until it was DOGE’d in March 2025.

Image credit: Capt. Leanne Demboski, US Army National Guard

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Joshua Hood · August 5, 2025

16. Is Warfare Becoming More Performative?

Excerpts:

Performative Warfare and American Strengths

These operations represent perhaps the more extreme end of a performative warfare spectrum, but their true strategic value lies in demonstrating principles applicable to other high level operations. The United States conducts more strategically significant operations than any competitor, creating frequent opportunities for performative warfare applications without requiring the global scale of Operation Midnight Hammer.

American operational tempo at the strategic level provides unique advantages. While adversaries conduct impressive one-off spectacles, America regularly executes operations that could qualify for performative treatment with proper disclosure strategies and authoritative endorsement. The infrastructure exists. The high level operations occur. Only the systematic integration of disclosure planning needs development. This means integrating disclosure strategy into operational planning from inception, not as an afterthought.

Critics have called for corrections to American information operations capabilities for years — issues which continue today. Institutional solutions are still developing but will take time to implement, even under optimistic outcomes. Performative warfare offers a different path, one that leans into America’s strength — leveraging existing operational excellence with more singular and integrated influence focus. Strategic disclosure integrated with America’s sustained high level, globe-spanning operations represents an influence advantage that competitors will be hard pressed to match.

Warfare is becoming more performative, or at the very least countries are recognizing the value of performative opportunities. The June operations demonstrate this and further suggest other countries will follow their example. The task for the United States is to more intentionally develop this warfare tool, rather than allow competitors to define its parameters.

Is Warfare Becoming More Performative? - War on the Rocks

Jordan Spector

August 5, 2025

warontherocks.com · August 5, 2025

In the span of three weeks this June, the world witnessed three extraordinary military operations: Ukraine’s decimation of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Israel’s sweeping overnight key leader and air defense neutralization in Iran, and America’s ultra long-range bunker busting at Fordo and other Iranian nuclear sites. Each operation shared commonality in audacity, scale, and something surprising: detailed and immediate operational disclosure. These weren’t the limited scope press briefings or carefully circumscribed military reports seen in other high profile missions, like the raid that killed Osama bin Laden or the drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani. Instead, presidential statements were quickly augmented by comprehensive overviews from that nation’s senior defense officials, complete with easily distributed media: drone footage, confirmational imagery, and mission graphics.

Warfare has always been performative — the means of actions carry significance beyond their explicit destructive effects. What distinguishes the June operations is not their performative nature, but their post-operation communications methodology. Like the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq War or CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War, the June operations captured global attention using novel tools — social media, real-time distribution, and comprehensive disclosure.

This pattern extends beyond just these three operations. Russia’s increasingly significant drone operations against Ukraine may not have captured the same sense of global fascination, but they have featured heavy drone footage dissemination. These have come to (at least temporarily) displace the nuclear saber rattling that Russia was previously using to deter more direct or effective Western intervention. Iran’s own reaction to the American strike seem to have been more symbolic than serious, allowing the nation to show strength domestically without any actual escalation.

All of these raise the question: is warfare becoming more performative?

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The Divide Between Signaling and Direct Effect

In the 21st century, major powers have generally separated their high profile operational agenda from their strategic signaling activities. While this separation isn’t absolute, real world operations naturally prioritize a specific and explicit mission end state. Signaling and geopolitically significant messaging operate through their own distinct channels.

This separation serves a logic of limitation and control. Military operations require disclosure constraints to preserve capabilities and maintain those advantages for subsequent missions. Strategic signaling, conversely, needs more controlled messaging to communicate precise intentions without provoking unintended escalation.

Examples of the latter include nuclear signaling — like what Russia has largely used to deter the West from taking a more active interceding role in Ukraine. Military exercises like Freedom of Navigation Operations, China’s massive joint exercises around Taiwan, or NATO’s own combined maneuvers also demonstrate capability and intent. Meanwhile, capability revelations — technology demonstrations or major platform announcements — capture the interest and attention of both the public and policy makers. The end state of each of these is influence.

Distinctly, actual military operations — whether singular clandestine missions or broader warfare campaigns — focus on military objectives and compellence. When countries conduct limited high level operations — e.g., eliminating adversary leaders or destroying critical infrastructure — they heavily prioritize mission success. The signaling — if there is an intentional effect — is in the action itself. War and extended conflict, made up of countless smaller operations, follow similar paths. Operational details are limited and messaging is meant to control, not amplify.

The June operations — deliberately, incidentally, or opportunistically — collapsed this distinction by using operational channels as primary strategic signaling mechanisms. That this may have been an after-the-fact addition does not diminish the effect. While precedents like Desert Storm showed conflict in real time, they did not bring the viewer into the metaphorical planning room. The June operations showed both conflict and the means and methods used to wage it. Details disclosed were not guessed at by talking heads or pundits, but were officially relayed by the highest levels of national authority. Rather than achieving tactical objectives through one channel and strategic communication through established signaling formats, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States integrated tactical execution with strategic messaging into single operational frameworks.

Present and Future Costs

Three major operations from three different countries in succession providing this same unprecedented release of detail indicates this is more than an isolated pattern. The trend is an evolving approach to strategic information operations — specifically, how countries conceptualize the relationship between means, effect, and message. Rather than treating them as competing priorities, the June operations demonstrated a more fundamental merger. Ukraine, Israel, and the United States all sacrificed valuable military information — details that might limit similar methods, capabilities, and flexibility in future missions — in exchange for immediate strategic communication gains.

This calculation involves complex trade-offs that can justify disclosure even when concealment would normally be valuable. Ukraine’s drone technology evolves every few months, making specific methods quickly obsolete. The U.S. strike aimed for comprehensive destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities, reducing the need to preserve methods for future similar operations. In these contexts, immediate strategic communication value may have been thought to outweigh traditional operational security concerns. Yet in both examples, the opposite case can also be made.

Consider just a few of the details provided: Ukraine revealed its months-long infiltration methodology using commercial trucks as mobile drone platforms — intelligence that will likely force future operations to develop new concealment and delivery methods. Israel disclosed its capacity to pre-position autonomous systems and the extent of deep infiltration it held inside Iran months before activation — a revelation that will certainly prompt enhanced counterintelligence efforts by both Iran and other countries that are observing closely. The United States detailed some of its deception tactics, including sending B-2 bombers towards the Pacific as decoys while the actual strike package approached from a different vector — a method now potentially unusable against sophisticated adversaries who will be wary of similar indicators in the future.

However, the strategic communication gains likely justify the costs in information. While it is challenging to fully understand the perceptions internal to the Kremlin or the highest rungs of the Chinese Communist Party, the adjacent impacts demonstrate a magnitude that would make the meaning hard to ignore. Ukraine’s revelation of coordinating 117 drones across five time zones and 4,300 kilometers of Russian territory sent an unmistakable message about Russian vulnerabilities, while simultaneously boosting Ukrainian morale and international credibility. The extent of Mossad’s infiltration into Iran likely serves to reinforce regional deterrence, rather than limit future operations. For the United States, the complexity and distance of Operation Midnight Hammer — involving over 125 aircraft, seven B-2 stealth bombers, submarine-launched Tomahawks, and true global coordination — served to reinforce a message of unambiguous American technological superiority and global reach, with a more consequential target audience in the Indo-Pacific rather than exclusively in the Middle East.

Influence as Necessity

In many ways, the evolution of performative warfare is predictable within modern information operations. Even highly successful influence campaigns face the challenge of retaining attention in today’s saturated information environments, and the natural method of recapturing audience focus is through increasingly dramatic and credible demonstrations. Traditional information operations campaigns struggle to increase scale and intensity against the rapid decay of attention spans and counter narratives by adversaries.

Ukraine exemplifies this strategic necessity. Following the disastrous Oval Office meeting, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive into Kursk, and stalled peace negotiations, international observers assessed that Ukraine’s strategic position had deteriorated significantly. European support remained strong but faced growing pressure for a negotiated settlement. Operation Spider’s Web fundamentally altered these dynamics. The demonstration of credible deep strike capability against Russian strategic assets shifted military assessments and rebuilt external perception needed to continue the flow of aid.

Israel faced similar geopolitical imperatives. Declining international support for Gaza operations, coupled with Iranian nuclear advancement and regional power uncertainties, created a narrow window requiring decisive action. Israel needed to seize the strategic initiative while avoiding both wider conflict escalation and alienating the support of allies. Operation Rising Lion’s disclosure strategy served this delicate balance. By revealing the surgical precision of intelligence penetration and targeting capabilities, Israel shifted attention away from Gaza and showed its allies that its actions were precise, calculated, and based on extensive intelligence, not aggression.

The United States confronted different but equally pressing challenges. Perceived deficiencies in gray zone competition with China has built narratives critical of American strategic power, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. While gray zone operations represent an important competitive arena, they are not America’s core strength. Operation Midnight Hammer provided a demonstration of American global operational reach and coordination capabilities at a moment when political tensions are at a high point. While the strikes were not against a Chinese-equivalent target, they did showcase a logistical complexity, multi-domain coordination, and global scope to assert American conventional military strength. For audiences questioning the inertia of strategic competition, the details of the operation demonstrated that U.S. core military capabilities remain dominant.

The Limitations of Repetition

Historical precedent demonstrates that extraordinary military methods lose effectiveness when repeated. For example, in World War I, Q-ships — armed merchant vessels disguised as defenseless traders — initially succeeded by luring German U-boats into close-range attacks, but lost effectiveness once U-boat commanders adapted by striking from a distance. Their use also escalated the conflict at sea, contributing to Germany’s shift to unrestricted submarine warfare and the abandonment of surface engagement norms.

Precision drone strikes carried significant psychological impact and sustained media attention in the early years of the “Global War on Terror,” but by the 2010s they had become routine events that only registered in news cycles during the highest profile operations and in professional policy debate circles. Ukraine’s drone warfare revolution reintroduced the topic, but media fatigue is likely to place it on a similar trajectory.

Despite these constraints, the June operations demonstrate that more detailed disclosure strategies may serve multiple strategic functions across different power levels — force multiplication for constrained actors like Ukraine and dominance assertion for powerful ones like the United States and Israel. This versatility suggests the approach represents a flexible strategic tool rather than a niche capability for specific circumstances. It is likely that the June operations were military successes first, with performative messaging layered in after, but that doesn’t change the ultimate effectiveness.

Performative Warfare and American Strengths

These operations represent perhaps the more extreme end of a performative warfare spectrum, but their true strategic value lies in demonstrating principles applicable to other high level operations. The United States conducts more strategically significant operations than any competitor, creating frequent opportunities for performative warfare applications without requiring the global scale of Operation Midnight Hammer.

American operational tempo at the strategic level provides unique advantages. While adversaries conduct impressive one-off spectacles, America regularly executes operations that could qualify for performative treatment with proper disclosure strategies and authoritative endorsement. The infrastructure exists. The high level operations occur. Only the systematic integration of disclosure planning needs development. This means integrating disclosure strategy into operational planning from inception, not as an afterthought.

Critics have called for corrections to American information operations capabilities for years — issues which continue today. Institutional solutions are still developing but will take time to implement, even under optimistic outcomes. Performative warfare offers a different path, one that leans into America’s strength — leveraging existing operational excellence with more singular and integrated influence focus. Strategic disclosure integrated with America’s sustained high level, globe-spanning operations represents an influence advantage that competitors will be hard pressed to match.

Warfare is becoming more performative, or at the very least countries are recognizing the value of performative opportunities. The June operations demonstrate this and further suggest other countries will follow their example. The task for the United States is to more intentionally develop this warfare tool, rather than allow competitors to define its parameters.

BECOME A MEMBER

Jordan Spector is a U.S. Navy officer and a politico-military fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He has also written in Proceedings. The opinions in this article are his own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Navy, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.

Image: Joshua Hastings via U.S. Air Force

warontherocks.com · August 5, 2025

17. Ukrainian Unit Used Heavy Drone to Drop E-Bike to Encircled Soldier Behind Enemy Lines

A 16 minute video at the link. Unfortunately it is all in the Ukrainian language (I believe).

Can we learn from our Ukrainian friends?

https://www.sofx.com/ukrainian-unit-used-heavy-drone-to-drop-e-bike-to-encircled-soldier-behind-enemy-lines/

Ukrainian Unit Used Heavy Drone to Drop E-Bike to Encircled Soldier Behind Enemy Lines

sofx.com · by Editor Staff · August 1, 2025

A Ukrainian soldier wounded and surrounded for five days behind Russian lines was rescued using an electric bicycle dropped by drone, in an operation documented in a 16-minute video published by Ukraine’s National Guard brigade Rubizh.

The soldier, identified by the call sign Tankist, belonged to the 4th Rapid Reaction Battalion Syla Svobody (Power of Freedom). According to the brigade, he was the only survivor of a four-man team operating near Siversk, a frontline town in Donetsk Oblast where fighting remains ongoing.

Published on the brigade’s YouTube channel on Wednesday, the video shows real-time coordination between drone operators and Tankist, surveillance footage of enemy-controlled terrain, and the three-stage attempt to deliver a 42-kilogram (about 88-pound) electric bike by heavy drone. The brigade said the mission was a last-resort effort to reach the wounded soldier, who was unable to leave his position on foot.

“The Siversk direction is known for incredibly difficult logistics. Almost none exists there. Guys have to walk six to seven kilometers on foot to reach a position,” said Junior Lt. Mykola Hrytsenko, the brigade’s chief of staff. “The enemy was in front, behind, and on both flanks. Completely surrounded.”

The first two drone drops failed. One drone carrying the bike was shot down. A second attempt ended when the drone’s motors overheated and crashed. On the third try, a modified drone using a winch system successfully lowered the bike to Tankist.

The video captures the moment as he receives the bike and begins his escape. Moments later, a surveillance drone records him striking a landmine only a few hundred meters from the drop site. Despite the blast, Tankist was able to continue on foot to a nearby shelter. The brigade then flew in a second e-bike to complete the evacuation.

“Everyone in HQ was shouting and crying like we’d just launched the first plane in the sky,” Hrytsenko said in the footage.

The rescue highlights a growing trend: the increasing use of robotic systems, including both aerial drones and uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs), for evacuating wounded soldiers. As battlefield mobility decreases due to the near-constant threat of FPV drones and loitering munitions, both Russian and Ukrainian forces have turned to automated solutions.

Though drones have been used for delivering supplies or surveillance, this mission marks one of the first documented instances of a drone delivering a full-sized vehicle—an electric bike—during live combat.

Hrytsenko noted that the bikes were funded through volunteer donations, with the entire operation costing approximately 100,000 hryvnias (about $2,340) in lost bikes and an additional $30,000 in lost Heavy Shot drones.

While the use of e-bikes in such operations remains rare and experimental, Hrytsenko suggested it may become more common. “If you see a strange fundraiser for an e-bike or a unicycle, don’t be surprised. Maybe it will save a life,” he said.

sofx.com · by Editor Staff · August 1, 2025

18. Russia’s Shadow Fleet: The Dangerous Tanker Network Threatening Global Waters

Excerpts;

Conclusion

The Shadow Fleet is no longer a workaround for sanctions but a durable instrument of coercion, leveraging fragile ships, legal gaps, and opaque networks to shift risk onto others while serving Moscow’s strategic aims. If left unchallenged, it will normalize a maritime order where environmental disasters and economic disruption are routine costs, undermining security and stability in critical waterways. Mitigating this threat requires coordinated measures that close enforcement gaps, target enabling actors, and apply pressure across the fleet’s entire support system—not just on the vessels at sea. The system will persist until each administrative and financial layer of its architecture is denied operational freedom.

Russia’s Shadow Fleet: The Dangerous Tanker Network Threatening Global Waters

irregularwarfare.org · by George Janjalia · August 5, 2025

Russia’s so‑called “Shadow Fleet” operates in plain sight, turning the world’s shipping lanes into a tool of economic and ecological risk. Hundreds of these shadow tankers carry crude through European waters each day, many beyond their service life and registered under opaque holding structures. The result is a maritime environment made increasingly hazardous; between 2022 and 2024 alone, Shadow Fleet vessels were involved in dozens of incidents at sea, many of which involved oil spills.

This operation persists because, despite Western-imposed sanctions intended to restrict Russia’s access to conventional shipping, China and India remain the primary buyers of the Shadow Fleet’s cargo. Both states operate outside the G7 price cap regime and avoid scrutiny via transshipment through hubs in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. These nodes obscure origin, prevent attribution, and facilitate reintegration into global markets.

It would be easy to assume that the Shadow Fleet is only a means to evade sanctions or introduce plausible deniability for oil transactions. However, the Shadow Fleet functions as an instrument of irregular warfare by transferring environmental liability, undermining maritime law enforcement, and normalizing sanctions evasion, allowing Russia to impose strategic and economic costs on adversaries without using force. The following analysis shows that the Shadow Fleet represents a deliberate, irregular warfare approach designed to impose environmental and economic risk on adversaries without accountability or kinetic engagement. This approach creates the persistent threat of environmental and economic crises, particularly in vulnerable regions like the Baltic and North Sea, without offering clear legal recourse or accountability. Addressing this threat requires targeting the fleet’s enabling infrastructure—registries, insurers, intermediaries, and legal loopholes—rather than focusing solely on individual vessels.

Why the Shadow Fleet is a Floating Hazard

The Shadow Fleet remains afloat by exploiting the seams in countries’ legal regimes and taking advantage of falsified or non-existent insurance to avoid any liabilities and operate with impunity. Much of the Shadow Fleet’s risk stems from the advanced age of its vessels. The average Shadow Fleet vessel is 18.1 years old, compared to mainstream commercial vessels, which are nearly a decade newer, averaging 10.4 years of age. Over 75 percent are past the 15-year threshold where technical failures increase sharply. In 2022 alone, Lloyd’s List recorded 16 incidents involving Shadow Fleet tankers, including hull breaches and power loss during transit.

Adding to the physical risk, the vessels are often poorly maintained and crewed by poorly qualified mariners. Shadow Fleet tankers also pose a direct threat to seabed infrastructure, whether through malice or negligence. In December 2024, Finnish authorities confirmed that a Russian-linked tanker dragged anchor across the seabed, damaging the Estlink-2 power cable and multiple telecommunications lines. Automatic Identification System (AIS) suppression and anchor positioning patterns suggest both negligence and potential coercive activity are to blame.

Environmental risk also plays a major role. The International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation reports costs associated with each spill ranging from almost $600 to nearly $4,000 per barrel, yet most affected states cannot recover damages through courts. The Shadow Fleet’s lack of verifiable insurers or owners blocks legal redress. Responsibility for environmental harm is decoupled from exposure and affected states lack any means to enforce compliance.

Compounding these risks, Russian sanctions-evading traffic operates in what are usually narrow, seasonal routes with limited mitigation capacity. The legal framework surrounding these routes was built for flag-state responsibility and commercial transparency. Neither legal structure functions in the case of Shadow Fleet tankers, however. When vessels well past their operational prime navigate confined, high-traffic waterways, the likelihood of catastrophic failure—and the inability to contain the fallout—rises exponentially, placing surrounding nations and industries at disproportionate risk.

The Mechanics of Liability Evasion

According to Lloyd’s List and maritime compliance audits, over 70 percent of the fleet lacks verifiable Protection and Indemnity (P&I) coverage, operating without the ability to cover third-party risks such as crew injury, cargo damage, pollution, and wreck removal. In the case of the Shadow Fleet, many vessels either carry falsified certificates or list insurers that no longer exist. Without P&I coverage, cleanup and compensation costs from spills or collisions fall entirely on the affected state or commercial entity, resulting in billions of dollars in compensation costs per incident and far exceeding legal caps in existing maritime compensation frameworks.

However, increased tracking will not solve the issue. These ships are monitored in real-time by a host of navies, coast guards, maritime regulators, and commercial actors. Fragmented designation regimes across the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), and European Union (EU) have produced jurisdictional seams and hindered enforcement. As of mid-2025, the EU has sanctioned 342 vessels, the UK 133, and the US several hundred. Overlap remains limited and enforcement mechanisms differ: the EU relies on access and service bans, the UK on hybrid compliance, and the US on financial prohibitions under the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). These differences allow Russian operators to reflag vessels, reroute cargo through non-aligned registries, and access financial and insurance systems not uniformly controlled.

The Risks in the Baltic

The Baltic and North Sea are most vulnerable to the Shadow Fleet, which hosts dense subsea infrastructure vulnerable to degraded vessels. Russia manages over 430 tankers, of which, according to KSE (Kyiv School of Economics) Institute data, 150 to 170 of these vessels transit through the Baltic Sea each month. Unlike Persian Gulf routes, the Baltic is narrow, shallow, and bordered by EU and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states. Traffic density increases the probability of collision, and icy conditions in the winter reduce response time.

Moreover, the concentration of biodiversity in shallow waters raises ecological costs. A single spill could erase entire wintering grounds for migratory species. Commercial fisheries and coastal tourism risk sustained economic losses. Ageing, uninsured tankers operating in narrow and ecologically sensitive corridors create unmanaged environmental and economic exposure for EU and NATO states due to Russia’s refusal to meet international safety and liability standards.

A System Designed to Leverage Failure

Although the Shadow Fleet system was assembled to keep exports moving after sanctions, largely to help finance Russia’s war in Ukraine, it has become a durable logistics model that shirks liability and avoids traceability. The Fleet is also easy to abandon at the first sign of failure, given the already-aged nature of the ships and low experience levels of the crews that man them, suggesting low risk of detection or loss.

As use of the Shadow Fleet has transitioned into routine practice, the Shadow Fleet has clearly ceased to be a sanctions workaround and is now a deliberate tool of statecraft. The Shadow Fleet applies a form of irregular pressure on the EU and NATO that exploits systemic gaps without using overt force. Exploiters of this new paradigm have learned that they can thrive in such a system in which they can wield harm without attribution and systemically exploit enforcement gaps for maximum strategic benefit.

Operational Expansion, Systemic Spillover, and Failed Mitigation Efforts

The Shadow Fleet has evolved into a multi-state, multi-domain system that now intersects with Iranian operations, threatens critical ecosystems, provokes military confrontations, and tests the limits of existing maritime regulation. For example, operational overlap has formed between Russian and Iranian fleets. Multiple vessels have transported crude for both states. The Panama-flagged Themis, sanctioned by the UK, conducted voyages for both oil networks. UAE and Seychelles-based firms manage tankers linked to both regimes. They manage to get away with this through a mix of AIS manipulation, layered corporate ownership, and ship-to-ship transfers in jurisdictional blind spots.

Beyond ties to Iran, the Shadow Fleet’s operations are causing spillover in the High North, where Shadow Fleet-generated environmental risk has expanded into Norwegian waters. Non-ice-strengthened tankers have begun Arctic transit, raising contamination risks to coastal ecosystems. Norwegian fisheries, including salmon farms and cod grounds, face increased vulnerability from older vessels with unverifiable P&I coverage. Tanker density near Norwegian waters has increased twofold since 2023.

In some cases, kinetic protection has replaced deniability. On 13 May 2025, Estonia attempted to inspect the unflagged Jaguar in the Gulf of Finland. A Russian Su-35 fighter violated Estonian airspace in response. NATO aircraft responded under Baltic Air Policing protocols. This marked the first overt use of military force to shield a Shadow Fleet vessel. Five days later, Russia detained a Greek-owned tanker transporting Estonian fuel. Warships have since begun escorting select tankers through contested waters.

Regulatory responses remain reactive. On December 16, 2024, Nordic-Baltic states initiated joint insurance verification in key chokepoints including the Danish Straits and Gulf of Finland. Germany and Sweden began enforcement in mid-2025. Port authorities may now demand proof of P&I coverage and board non-compliant vessels. Yet compliance remains inconsistent. Existing frameworks allow documentation requests but lack real-time verification of insurer solvency, and over 20 percent of vessels refused disclosure in 2024.

Recommendations and Actions

The Shadow Fleet constitutes a coercive logistics system built on deniability, fragmented oversight, and regulatory asymmetry. Traditional interdiction tools are structurally misaligned with this environment. Effective disruption requires targeting the system’s support architecture such as registries, insurers, and intermediaries. Legal, financial, and administrative tools can impose compliance friction, restrict continuity, and constrain operational access without relying on physical interdiction.

Flag-state permissiveness enables the fleet’s legal maneuverability. Expansion of the Registry Information Sharing Compact (RISC) is required to establish reciprocal deregistration protocols among major open registries. Exposure of non-compliant registry metrics should be published monthly, ranking flag states by their concentration of high-risk vessels and triggering response thresholds at defined intervals. Jurisdictional pressure limits legal reflagging and strips operators of registry cover, signaling that permissive registries now carry reputational and operational cost, including escalating costs for cumulative non-compliance.

Insurance coverage must be verifiable at point of entry. The Nordic-Baltic 8 model should be adopted at all critical chokepoints, with port authorities authorized to demand real-time confirmation of P&I coverage. Solvency testing mechanisms for non-recognized insurers should be integrated into vessel clearance systems, and refusal to cooperate should constitute grounds for access denial. Port entry, then, receives restriction via solvency thresholds and insurer verification, and operators may now more directly face immediate operational costs.

Maritime sanctions enforcement must extend to ship management firms, staffing agencies, brokers, and corporate service providers that facilitate reflagging and ownership obfuscation. These entities should be designated based on open-source tracking of sanctioned vessel activity. Registries should mandate full disclosure of beneficial ownership as a precondition for registration, with independent audit capacity embedded in the review process. Disabling intermediaries severs access to registries, insurance, and reflagging pathways. Administrative disruption dismantles the redundancy that enables evasion across registries and ownership layers.

AIS manipulation and transshipment blind zones must be closed through persistent surveillance and enforced reporting. Satellite-AI tools including Windward classification models, Bellingcat Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, and Planet Labs optical data should be deployed in corridors with elevated evasion risk. Jurisdictions should require automatic reporting of AIS suppression lasting more than six hours in regulated zones. Detection of manipulation or repeated transmission gaps should trigger blacklisting and port exclusion under existing maritime safety authorities. Detection should trigger a sequence of exclusion protocols: flag revocation, port denial, and registry downgrade, all of which can scale, if needed, due to repeated violations.

Legal immunities must be narrowed to restore consequences, starting with amending the 1976 Limitation Convention to exclude vessels operating without verified P&I coverage. Bilateral recovery agreements must be developed between affected coastal states to enable legal compensation for cross-jurisdictional environmental harm. The mandate of the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF) should be expanded to include coordination of cleanup and claims in cases involving stateless, abandoned, or unregistered vessels. Removing post-incident insulation makes liability enforceable at the structural level.

Conclusion

The Shadow Fleet is no longer a workaround for sanctions but a durable instrument of coercion, leveraging fragile ships, legal gaps, and opaque networks to shift risk onto others while serving Moscow’s strategic aims. If left unchallenged, it will normalize a maritime order where environmental disasters and economic disruption are routine costs, undermining security and stability in critical waterways. Mitigating this threat requires coordinated measures that close enforcement gaps, target enabling actors, and apply pressure across the fleet’s entire support system—not just on the vessels at sea. The system will persist until each administrative and financial layer of its architecture is denied operational freedom.

George Janjalia is a former Georgian Special Operations Forces and Military Intelligence officer with over a decade of experience in security and intelligence operations. He currently serves as Senior Country Security Manager for Healix International in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he oversees strategic risk management and operational security across a complex, high-threat environment. He is a graduate of The United States Military Academy.

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

Main Image: Image generated by ChatGPT using DALL·E, OpenAI (July 29, 2025).

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

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army-technology.com · by Jangoulun Singsit · August 4, 2025

New commission to examine how to create an independent Cyber Force

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When a Nation’s Response Follows Its Gross Failure to Protect: Rethinking Proportionality of Civilian Harm in Gaza and Beyond

Abstract

Introduction

Israel’s Apparent Intelligence Failures

Proportionality Must Evolve

The Complexity of Urban Warfare

Israel’s Apparent Role in Hamas’ Rise

A Historical Parallel

Conclusion

About The Author

​Conclusion:

Could Putin Take the Baltics?

Introduction

Analysis

Response

Conclusion

About The Author

After Xi

The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

THE MAO MODEL

THE SUCCESSOR SHUFFLE

PATH TO WAR?

HEIR UNAPPARENT

COURSE CORRECTION?

Israel Is Fighting a War It Cannot Win

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Ami Ayalon

CLIMATE CHANGE

HARD FORK

PREACH BEYOND THE CHOIR

FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

Technology, not geography, will grant global power in the 21st century

Lessons from this year’s unfunded priority lists

Just 15% of the value would go toward near-term readiness.

Opinion | How to shut down Putin’s war machine

As drones proliferate, the Army wants AI to help with air operations

A request for information seeks "fight tonight" tools plus longer-term ideas to ease the burden on commanders.

Learn or Lose: Lessons from Ukrainian Training in Germany - Modern War Institute

Is Warfare Becoming More Performative? - War on the Rocks

Ukrainian Unit Used Heavy Drone to Drop E-Bike to Encircled Soldier Behind Enemy Lines

Russia’s Shadow Fleet: The Dangerous Tanker Network Threatening Global Waters

Why the Shadow Fleet is a Floating Hazard

The Mechanics of Liability Evasion

The Risks in the Baltic

A System Designed to Leverage Failure

Operational Expansion, Systemic Spillover, and Failed Mitigation Efforts

Recommendations and Actions

Conclusion

Conclusion: