Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“I understand Inchon is a 500-to-1 gamble, but I am accustomed to such challenges. We shall land at Inchon, and I shall crush them.”

– General Douglas MacArthur

"The Incheon landing thus also represented a trial-by-fire for cooperation between the two countries’ militaries and Katusa integration into U.S. forces, which has lasted to the present day."

– Joongang Ilbo, 2023

“By any measure, the Incheon landing are a feat of military genius that saved this country and ensured its future prosperity.”

– Lee Sang-ho

1. These Charts Show How Putin Is Defying Trump by Escalating Airstrikes on Ukraine

2. China’s military warns Philippines against provocations in South China Sea

3. Special Operations News – September 15, 2025

4. Modi’s Strategy for Mending Ties With Trump: a Stiff Upper Lip

5. China Says Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws

6. China Pushes for Trump Visit as High-Stakes Trade Talks Begin

7. Here’s How Trump Can Prevent a War Over Taiwan

8. Easy Victories, Hard Defeats: Fragile Adversaries and the Lessons of War and Society

9. Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk

10. US Stands With Philippines Against China’s Plan In South China Sea

11. Give Us Back Our Marine Corps

12. Drone boats, new landing craft get Army Pacific tryouts

13. Chinese cyber skirmishes in the Indo-Pacific show emerging patterns of conflict

14. Want Drone Dominance? Let the Squad Fail

15. Irregular Solutions for Irregular Threats: Maritime Lessons from Dutch Counterpiracy Operations in Colonial Indonesia

16. How to Keep Generative AI from Crashing in Combat

17. An Introduction to the Economic & Legal Warfare Project

18. Don’t Overestimate the Autocratic Alliance

19. The Wrong Way to Fight the Cartels

20. After Kirk's killing a growing chorus of conservatives wants his critics ostracized or fired

21. Inside Stephen Miller's Reign of Terror

1. These Charts Show How Putin Is Defying Trump by Escalating Airstrikes on Ukraine

Please go to this link to view the charts: https://www.wsj.com/world/these-charts-show-how-putin-is-defying-trump-by-escalating-airstrikes-on-ukraine-f7eee47b?st=bSiFhJ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

These Charts Show How Putin Is Defying Trump by Escalating Airstrikes on Ukraine

Russia has significantly stepped up its drone and missile strikes this year

By Jane Lytvynenko, Ming Li

Follow and Emma Brown

Sept. 13, 2025 11:00 am ET

Quick Summary

Since President Trump took office, Russia has escalated strikes on Ukraine, hitting targets including civilian buildings.View more

KYIV, Ukraine—Russia has significantly escalated strikes on Ukraine since President Trump took office, data show, defying his call for peace by increasing the range of buildings hit, including civilian ones.

The rise in strikes reflects Russia’s growing munitions production and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s avowed determination to achieve his goal of dominating Ukraine by military means.

The most intense bombardments of the war occurred this summer as Russia used drones and missiles to target Ukrainian cities. During major attacks, hundreds of drones fill the sky, some of them surrounding and swarming a target while decoys tie up Ukrainian air defenses. Although Ukraine’s interception rate stayed relatively steady, more drones launched meant more damage, even if most of them were downed.

These charts and maps show how the escalation has unfolded.

Russia has often stepped up strikes immediately after talks or phone calls between U.S., Ukrainian and Russian officials. After Russian officials sat down in May at cease-fire talks in Istanbul, Moscow intensified airstrikes.

“It’s part of the larger cognitive warfare objective that Russia has to sow dissent within the United States and our overseas partners by giving mixed signals in regards to their interest in securing a peace deal,” said Daniel Mealie, a geospatial analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.

Russian drones launched into Ukraine, monthly data

7,000

biden

Trump

6,000

5,000

4,000

3,000

Launched

2,000

1,000

Intercepted

2023

’24

’25

Note: Data as of Sept. 11

Source: Center for Information Resilience

The attacks surged again after Trump and Putin spoke on the phone in early July. Less than a week after the call, and hours after Trump criticized the Russian president for “a lot of bulls— thrown at us by Putin,” Russia carried out what was then the biggest combined attack to date, releasing 728 drones and 13 missiles, many of them aimed at Kyiv.

The lead-up to the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska in mid-August brought a two-week period of quiet to Ukraine. But it also allowed Russian forces to stockpile the attack drones for bombardments that immediately followed the summit with increased intensity. An assault on Kyiv in late August became the deadliest of the war for the capital, killing 18 and damaging offices of the British Council and the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine.

Russian drones launched into Ukraine, seven-day rolling average

march 11

Ukraine accepts 30-day cease-fire in U.S. talks

july 3

Trump and Putin phone call

Aug. 18

Zelensky White House visit

300

May 16

Russia-Ukraine talks in Turkey

250

200

150

100

Aug. 15

Alaska summit

Feb.

March

April

May

June

July

Aug.

Sept.

Note: Data as of Sept. 11

Source: Center for Information Resilience

Throughout the war, Moscow has bombarded Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, in particular its electrical grid, causing blackouts across the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion 3½ years ago.

These strikes partially paused after March negotiations, when Ukraine agreed to stop striking Russia’s oil infrastructure while Russia reduced energy-grid bombardments.

Those attacks returned over the summer, rolling back one of the few victories U.S.-led negotiations achieved. Russia has especially focused on Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, hitting oil and electricity targets with drones and missiles, according to officials. Ukraine, in turn, has renewed its strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure deep in the country’s territory.

Russian attacks on energy infrastructure

Number of attacks

2025

2024

Kyiv

UKRAINE

Nikopol

Russian

forces

Kherson

Note: Attacks as of Aug. 5. Russian forces as of Sept. 11.

Sources: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (attacks); Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project (Russian forces)

In another major escalation, two of Russia’s strikes following the Alaska summit damaged government offices in central Kyiv. Russia didn’t seem to go after such political targets previously, said Fabian Hoffmann, a missile expert at the University of Oslo who closely follows the war in Ukraine. He added that it is possible previous strikes on such targets were intercepted.

“Russia still wants to demonstrate to Ukraine and to the West that they have ways of escalating this war,” Hoffmann said.

About a week after the attack on the offices of the European delegation to Ukraine, Russia hit another symbolic target, this time in the government quarter. The ballistic missile that struck the Cabinet of Ministers building destroyed the top floors of the hulking Soviet-era building. The strike was about 500 yards from the Office of the President.

Attacks on government offices

Dnipro River

Kyiv

Naberezhne Hwy.

Cabinet of Ministers

UKRAINE

Khreschatyk St.

Office of the

President

Tarasa Shevchenko Blvd.

Kyiv

Zhylianska St.

Lesi Ukrainky Blvd.

British Council

National Sports

Complex

Delegation of the

European Union to Ukraine

1,000 ft.

Source: Google Earth (satellite image)

At the core of Russia’s air-raid campaign is its growing capacity to produce attack drones rather than purchasing them from Iran, according to analysts. In July, the peak month for drone bombardments this year, Russia launched nearly 6,300 attack drones against Ukraine, according to an analysis by the Center for Information Resilience, an open-source research organization, based on data published by Ukrainian authorities. In July last year, it launched 426.

Attacks began to intensify last fall, when Russia was able to build its own attack-drone production lines. Ukrainian intelligence has said that Russia is capable of producing about 2,700 attack drones monthly, excluding decoy drones, and is expected to increase that capability.

Russian air or drone strikes against civilians in Ukraine

Biden

Trump

300 events

250

200

150

100

Feb. 2022

’23

’24

’25

Note: Data as of Sept. 10

Source: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data

Ukrainian civilians have borne the brunt of Russia’s air-raid bombardments. Since Trump took office and Russia’s spring and summer bombardment campaign began, Ukrainian civilians have endured three of the deadliest months of air raids, according to data compiled by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a U.S.-based nonprofit monitoring service.

Russian strikes across the country have destroyed homes and collapsed apartment buildings, burying their residents under rubble. In Kyiv, a frequent target, a Russian attack drone recently flew into the middle of an apartment building, killing a young mother and her newborn child.

Russia Strikes Ukraine Government Building in Largest Drone Attack Yet

Play video: Russia Strikes Ukraine Government Building in Largest Drone Attack Yet

A young mother and her child were killed in Kyiv, Ukraine, during the largest aerial bombardment by Russia since the war began. Photo: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

Write to Ming Li at ming.li@wsj.com and Emma Brown at Emma.Brown@wsj.com

2. China’s military warns Philippines against provocations in South China Sea

Says the master of provocations itself. Who is provoking who?

Sounds like China is preparing the information environment for its own major provocation.

China’s military warns Philippines against provocations in South China Sea

The Philippines must immediately stop provoking incidents and escalating tensions in the South China Sea, says a spokesperson for the Chinese military's Southern Theater Command.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/south-china-sea-military-philippines-5348451

An aerial view of a China Coast Guard ship navigating near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea on Aug 13, 2025. (File photo: Reuters/Adrian Portugal)

14 Sep 2025 09:59AM

(Updated: 14 Sep 2025 12:57PM)

Bookmark

BEIJING: China's military said on Sunday (Sep 14) it had conducted "routine" patrols in the South China Sea and warned the Philippines against any provocations.

The two countries have been engaged in a long-running maritime standoff in the strategic waterway that has included regular clashes between coastguard ships and massive naval exercises.

A spokesperson for the Chinese military's Southern Theater Command said the Philippines must immediately stop provoking incidents and escalating tensions in the South China Sea.

"We sternly warn the Philippine side to immediately stop provoking incidents and escalating tensions in the South China Sea, as well as bringing in external forces for backing such efforts that are destined to be futile," the spokesperson said.

"Any attempt to stir up trouble or disrupt the situation will not succeed."

The Philippines' maritime council and armed forces did not immediately respond to questions outside office hours, while the Philippine embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The US Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement that Japan, the Philippines, and the United States conducted joint maritime exercises in the Philippines' Exclusive Economic Zone from Sep 11 to Sep 13 to strengthen regional cooperation and support a free and open Indo-Pacific.

"The US, along with our allies and partners, upholds the right to freedom of navigation and overflight and other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace, as well as respect to the maritime rights under international law," it said.

The United States stands with the Philippines, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday, rejecting what he described as China's "destabilising plans" for a disputed atoll in the South China Sea.

China claims almost all the South China Sea - a waterway carrying more than US$3 trillion of annual commerce - despite overlapping claims by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

3. Special Operations News – September 15, 2025

Special Operations News – September 15, 2025

https://sof.news/update/20250915/

September 15, 2025 SOF News Update 0

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: SEALs. DoD photo.

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it 2 or 3 days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

SOF News

UW, 9/11, and the Future. When terrorists struck the United States on September 11, 2001, a small part of the U.S. military was ready. U.S. Special Forces – having been trained up on unconventional warfare and other key skills – were quickly deployed on the global war on terror. “Unconventional Warfare, 9/11 and the Future of U.S. Military Power”, 1945, September 10, 2025.

New JSOC Commander. Army Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga has been selected for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as commander, Joint Special Operations Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Braga is currently serving as commanding general, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

New SEL for USSOCOM. A change of responsibility ceremony took place at U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida for the Senior Enlisted Advisor for USSOCOM. U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. Andrew Krogman is taking over for Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter who has been in the position for over three years. The commander of USSOCOM, Gen. Bryan Fenton, and CSM Shorter set the example for what a leadership team looks like. “USSOCOM hosts a Change of Responsibility”, DVIDS, September 5, 2025.

Sage Eagle 2025. Elements of the 3rd Special Forces Group took part in the Sage Eagle Exercise 25-04 on Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia in August 2025. The Sage Eagle exercise tests the agility, precision, and combat readiness of SF units. The exercise is a recurring, battalion-sized, unconventional warfare exercise that serves as a prerequisite for forward-deploying special forces members. Much of the training centers on incorporating partner forces in an evolving contested environment.

IW Online Course. The Irregular Warfare Center has announced that it is launching a new online course – Irregular Warfare (IW) 201. This is a follow-on to its introductory IW 101 online course which was rolled out in February 2024 and has had over 2,000 enrollments. The IW 201 course will provide an in-depth look at IW concepts and applications, fulfilling the IWC’s core mission as mandated by Congress to advance understanding of IW within the Department of Defense (DoD). This mission includes developing curricula and providing training for U.S. and international military and civilian personnel. “DoD Irregular Warfare Center Launches Advanced Online Course”, Irregular Warfare Center, August 27, 2025.

UW: A Thinking Man’s War. Retired COL David Maxwell (SF) provides a framework for unconventional warfare and explains why UW must be embraced by national security practitioners. “Unconventional Warfare: Solving Complex Political-Military Problems and Creating Dilemmas for Adversaries”, Small Wars Journal, August 26, 2025.

2019 Navy SEAL Mission in North Korea. The New York Times recently broke the news that the U.S. Navy SEAL Team Six attempted a secret mission along the coast of North Korea in 2019. Navy SEALs were tasked to plant an electronic device to intercept communications of Kim Jon Un – the North Korean leader. The mission was unsuccessful and left some unarmed North Korean fishermen dead. The SEALs were to infiltrate via two mini-subs followed by a swim to the target to install the electronic device. (CNN Politics, 5 Sep 2025)

AFSOC in the Caribbean. Air Force SOF have been training up for contingencies in South America. A small part of a large exercise held in Arizona and California took place in the Caribbean. This took place at the same time that naval and air assets have been moving in the area. The media is full of references to Venezuela and perhaps this is part of the administrations messaging. “Air Force special ops troops practice airfield seizures amid Caribbean build up”, Task & Purpose, September 9, 2025.

Fort Gordon Dedication. On September 26, 2025, MSG Gary Gordon will be remembered in a ceremony dedicating Fort Gordon in his honor. MSG Gordon is a Special Forces veteran who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on October 3, 1993 during the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.

Asian Influence on SF. Col (Ret) Dave Maxwell argues that Eastern philosophical traditions offer profound lessons that shape the intellectual and ethical framework of the modern SF soldier. “Eastern Philosophy and Influence on the Special Forces Soldier”, Small Wars Journal, September 12, 2025.

International SOF

UKs SOF. The United Kingdom is setting up its service-level forces to take a more direct role in the kinds of special operations that UKSF has historically held tight. “How the UK is changing its special forces for a modern world”, Breaking Defense, September 10, 2025.

Danish SOF. U.S. Air Force 352d Special Operations Wing Air Commandos and Danish Special Forces members trained together during Exercise SOUTHERN GRIFFIN 25, in Finland in August 2025. Exercise SOUTHERN GRIFFIN is part of a long-term multinational training effort to build warfighting capacity, expand military capability, maintain readiness, and deepen operational integration with NATO allied and partnered nations.

Bright Star 25. Members of the U.S. Army 5th Special Forces Group and U.S. Navy SEAL Team 7 took part in training in Egypt in September 2025. They were in the company of counterparts from Cyprus, Greece, India, Italy, Jordan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, South Africa, United Kingdom, and Yemen. One of the events was a freefall jump by the many SOF partners. (DVIDS, 7 Sep 2025)

Panama SOF. U.S. Army Special Operations Command South and Panamanian special operations forces conducted joint training at Aeronaval Base Cristóbal Colón, Panama, during PANAMAX-Alpha Phase II, in September 2025. The exercise supported U.S. Southern Command’s goal to expand its ongoing coordination, collaboration, and security efforts where U.S. military personnel and Panamanian public forces can bolster collective capabilities and skills, as well as facilitate a joint learning environment.

SOF History

MACV-SOG Legend George Bacon. John Stryker Meyer has penned an account of Green Beret medic and later CIA operative George Washington Bacon III. He had established himself as an accomplished Green Beret during his service with Special Forces in Vietnam. Bacon would later die in Angola in 1976 while engaged in combat operations against Cuban troops. Read more: “In Vietnam with MACV-SOG Legend George Washington Bacon III: A Story From Teammate ‘Tilt’“, Soldier of Fortune Magazine, August 27, 2025.

On September 20, 1945, Executive Order 9621 abolished the OSS. On September 18, 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was formed. The CIA was formed just two years after President Truman signed Executive Order 9621 disbanding the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

On September 16, 1953, the 77th Special Forces Group was activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The group was formed with personnel not forward based with the 10th Special Forces Group sent to Bad Tolz, Germany. Later, the 77th SFG(A) was consolidated on May 20, 1960, with the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

On September 21, 1961, the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was officially activated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. https://www.specialforceshistory.info/groups/5sfga.html

On September 14, 1962, HQ Detachment (Provisional) 5th Special Forces Group (Abn) arrived in Vietnam. In October 1964 the 5th Group assumed control of all Special Forces operations in Vietnam.

On September 17, 1969. On September 17, 1969, Melvin Morris, a Green Beret that was part of the IV Mobile Strike Force, was in a fierce firefight. His heroic actions that day in Vietnam would be recognized years later when he received the Medal of Honor. https://sof.news/vietnam/melvin-morris-sf-moh/

National Security and Commentary

Army’s ISV. The Congressional Research Service has published an update (25 Aug 2025) to its “In Focus” publication entitled “The Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV)”. The ISV is a lightweight, unarmored ground transport vehicle intended to enhance the mobility of Army Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCTs), Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs), and Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF). It is designed to move nine soldiers and their equipment rapidly across terrain where other vehicles may be less practical or effective. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13092

Iran and IW. Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, a retired Green Beret, has an essay on the U.S. and Iran competition in the Middle East and how each nation uses irregular warfare to compete with each other. “The History of U.S.-Iranian Irregular Warfare”, Small Wars Journal, September 10, 2025.

AF “Shoots Itself in the Foot” – Cuts Advisory Units. The Air Force is conducting significant cuts to several units that provides advisory and training services to foreign air force units. The rationale by the DOD is that this will divert money from non-lethal programs to advanced weapons systems. “Air Force Looks to Cut Squadrons That Advise, Train Foreign Militaries”, Air & Space Forces Magazine, September 2, 2025.

DOD Renamed to War Department. The name change isn’t really official . . . an official name change requires congressional approval.

Department of War? A congressman, Representative Greg Steube (R-Fla) has filed an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that would change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Steube served with the U.S. Army, first as an Airborne infantry officer and then later in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps. He served in Iraq with the 25th Infantry Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2006 – 2007). The Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense as part of the National Security Act of 1947. This act consolidated the War Department (Army) and the Navy Department into a single entity to improve coordination and efficiency. It also reflected a unified, comprehensive approach to national security – to include peacetime preparedness and deterrence during the onset of the “Cold War”. “Trump Wants a Department of War. A House GOP Amendment Would Give Him One”, Military.com, August 27, 2025.

Sabotage Ops in a New Era. Ant Burke, a Visiting Scholar at Arizona State University, details the escalating threats from hostile state actors (Russia, Iran, etc.) conducting sabotage operations on British soil. “Hybrid Autonomy Sabotage: Innovation Anchored in Tradition”, Small Wars Journal, August 25, 2025.

Intelligence, Cyber, and Info Opns

OSINT and AI. Artificial intelligence is everywhere and it has an impact of modern intelligence operations. AI can be an aid for open-source intelligence professionals; but it can also be a danger. The spread of AI-generated content (images, videos, and text) clouds and enlarges the public information space which complicates the efforts of OSINT professionals in providing trust intelligence reports. “You Can’t Spell PAI Without AI: The Issues of Cognitive Load and Tradecraft with OSINT”, Small Wars Journal, September 3, 2025.

Top CIA Russia Expert Fired. The purge throughout the intelligence agencies is continuing. A CIA officer due to take up a prestigious assignment in Europe has had her security clearance revoked and has been fired. Her 29-year career in public service was over after being ordered to report to the security office where she found out her service to the nation had come to an abrupt ending. “Trump, Gabbard fired top CIA Russia expert days after Alaska summit”, The Washington Post, August 27, 2025. (subscription)

The DoD announced that Navy Rear Admiral Heidi K. Berg has been selected for appointment to the grade of vice admiral, with assignment as commander, Fleet Cyber Command/commander, Tenth Fleet/commander, Navy Space Command, Fort Meade, Maryland. Berg is currently serving as deputy commander, Fleet Cyber Command/deputy commander, Tenth Fleet/deputy commander, Navy Space Command, Fort Meade, Maryland.

Slashing CI and CT Capabilities. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is continuing its efforts to reduce the size of the U.S. intelligence community. The latest steps are possible reductions to the National Counterintelligence and Security Center and the National Counterterrorism Center. “ODNI expected to shrink counterintelligence, counterterror centers”, Defense One, September 11, 2025.

The DoD announced that Army Lt. Gen. Michele H. Bredenkamp has been selected for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Bredenkamp is currently serving as director’s advisor for Military Affairs, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Washington, D.C.

Strategic Competition

Russia and the Black Sea. National security observers worry that Russia will establish a commanding presence in the maritime region where several nations have a coastline. Daniel S. Hamilton and Angela Stent dive into the Russian quest for regional dominance. The strife has disrupted flows of energy, food, and other commodities. “Russia’s Imperial Black Sea Strategy”, Foreign Affairs, August 19, 2025. (subscription)

Zapad 2025. Russian and Belarusian troops recently conducted Zapad 2025, a strategic military exercise in mid-September. It is a series of events held in Russia and Belarus. This annual exercise has declined in scope due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

China and Latin America. Beijing is finding success in Latin America by offering security cooperation very different from that of the U.S. It’s Global Security Initiative (GSI) is China’s framework for packaging its global security engagement. “China’s Quiet Security Push in Latin America”, Americas Quarterly, September 11, 2025.

China’s PLA. The Congressional Research Service has updated its information publication on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Topics include the PLA organization, China’s military strategy and goals, modernization, key capabilities, and more. (PDF, 2 pages, updated 4 Sep 2025). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12602

Armor Lessons from Ukraine. The use of large formations of combined arms in land warfare in today’s era is now being questioned. The Ukrainian Armed Forces twelve-brigade counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 was a failure despite extensive equipping and training by the West. The war has devolved into a grinding campaign of attrition. The has sparked much discussion about combined arms tactics and doctrine. “Armor’s Promise and Its Limitations”, by Joshua Ratta, Modern War Institute at West Point, September 10, 2025.

Reports and Journals

CRS Report – Illicit Fentanyl and Mexico’s Role. The Congressional Research Service has published IF10400, a synopsis of how the synthetic opiod fentanyl has been a key driver of the opioid crisis in the United States and how Mexico has probably replaced the People’s Republic of China as the main source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl. (CRS, August 26, 2025).

CRS Report on Syria. The Congressional Research Service has published a report entitled Syria: Transition and U.S. Policy. This 47 page PDF, updated September 5, 2025, covers a variety of topics. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL33487

Infantry. The Fall 2025 issue is now online.

https://www.benning.army.mil/Infantry/Magazine/issues/2025/Fall/

Spotlight. The Irregular Warfare Center has posted its August 2025 issue online. (PDF, 2 pgs)

https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2025-08-IWC-Spotlight.pdf

SOF News Book Shop

View our selection of books about special operations forces at the SOF News Book Shop.

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Las Vegas, Nevada

October 14-17, 2025

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Las Vegas, Nevada

October 18, 2025

William J. Donovan Award

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November 16, 2025

Inaugural Charleston Trident Swim

Charleston, South Carolina

November 17-20, 2025

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4. Modi’s Strategy for Mending Ties With Trump: a Stiff Upper Lip

Excerpts:

Now, relations appear to be on the mend.

Sergio Gor, a senior White House aide whom Trump has nominated as ambassador to India, said India’s trade minister is coming to Washington next week to discuss a potential trade deal. India’s trade ministry declined to comment.

“I do think it will get resolved over the next few weeks,” he said during his public confirmation hearing before the Senate on Thursday. Miller, the Indian government’s lobbyist, posted a photo on Sept. 6 of himself meeting with Trump.

Kelly, the White House deputy press secretary, said India and the U.S. remain in close contact on a range of diplomatic, defense and commercial priorities.

The U.S. and Indian militaries have been engaged in a two-week training exercise in Alaska, scheduled to end Sunday.

But the India-U.S. relationship isn’t likely to return quickly to where it was, analysts say. Trump’s actions have cemented a longstanding distrust of the U.S. for many in India’s foreign-policy establishment, dating back to the Cold War.

They have also weakened the hand of more pro-Western policymakers in New Delhi who have long sought to deepen ties with the West, say U.S. and other Western diplomats.

Closer ties have “stalled, whether we like it or not,” says Saran, the former Indian foreign secretary.

Modi’s Strategy for Mending Ties With Trump: a Stiff Upper Lip

India’s prime minister has maintained a stoic silence in the face of sharp comments from the U.S. president, while signaling he is eager to stay friends

https://www.wsj.com/world/india/modis-strategy-for-mending-ties-with-trump-a-stiff-upper-lip-f99f9110

By Tripti Lahiri

Follow in Delhi and Robbie Gramer

Follow in Washington, D.C.

Sept. 14, 2025 10:00 pm ET

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Hyderabad House in New Delhi. Photo: Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Quick Summary

President Trump imposed tariffs on India, calling it a ‘dead economy’ and criticizing its Russian oil acquisitions.View more

President Trump launched a remarkable broadside against India this summer, branding it a “dead economy.” An administration official called India a “Laundromat for the Kremlin” because of its acquisitions of Russian oil. As punishment, the U.S. placed tariffs of 50% on Indian goods—higher than those recently imposed on China.

Faced with this onslaught, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strategy has been clear: do nothing.

“In a word, waiting,” said Ashley J. Tellis, an expert on geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, when asked about Modi’s approach. The Indian government has “displayed a remarkable equanimity in public [while] keeping open lines of communication to the Trump administration.”

An Indian official said that New Delhi has deliberately chosen to be “measured in our communications” and to not squander years of work improving ties with Washington.

Such restraint may be paying off.

Earlier this month, Trump said India and the U.S. have a special relationship, despite the current tensions. “Deeply appreciate and fully reciprocate President Trump’s sentiments and positive assessment of our ties,” Modi responded in a social-media post.

Then on Wednesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that trade negotiations with India were continuing and would soon reach a successful conclusion. Trump looked forward to speaking with his “very good friend” Modi soon, he added.

But the deterioration of ties with the U.S. before those words of rapprochement had stunned India.

While India historically had a position of avoiding Cold War alignments with either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, it tilted toward the Soviet Union as its major arms supplier, and remains close to Russia today. The U.S., for its part, partnered with Pakistan—India’s longstanding enemy—to counter the Soviet Union.

But since the end of the Cold War, India has grown closer to the U.S. For the last 25 years, the relationship had been “a great success story,” said Shyam Saran, a former Indian foreign secretary, “not only in terms of broadening it, but also intensifying it.”

Modi has cultivated close personal ties with Trump—despite some criticism of that approach at home. During Trump’s first term, he joined the Indian prime minister at “Howdy Modi,” a rally for the Indian-American diaspora in Texas, and later visited India.

Modi was one of the first foreign leaders Trump hosted in Washington, D.C., after returning to power this year. U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Vice President JD Vance spoke of India in glowing terms during visits to the country this year. The Indian government also hired a former Trump campaign adviser, Jason Miller, as a lobbyist and adviser.

President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi at ‘Howdy Modi’ in Texas in 2019. Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

U.S. Vice President JD Vance and his family visited the Taj Mahal in April. Photo: Kenny Holston/Press Pool

Moreover, after Trump launched a trade war with Beijing, businesses in India expected the country to benefit from companies looking to move out of China.

But then in May, U.S.-India relations suddenly unraveled in the wake of a clash between India and Pakistan that erupted after a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir. New Delhi blamed that attack on Pakistan-based groups. India and Pakistan each control parts of Kashmir but claim it in full.

India was angered by Trump’s claims to have brokered a cease-fire between the two countries—something New Delhi has denied.

Modi and Trump spoke for 35 minutes on June 17, during which the Indian leader sought to explain India’s stance on the cease-fire and its concerns over Pakistan, according to India’s readout. According to Indian officials, Trump had invited Modi to visit Washington on his way back from the Group of Seven summit in Canada, which India declined, aware that Pakistan’s Army Chief Asim Munir was visiting the U.S. at the same time. On June 18, Trump hosted Munir at the White House, a visit that upset the Indian government.

In a statement, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said that “President Trump was able to successfully broker a ceasefire” in May between India and Pakistan.

Prime Minister Modi during a meeting with President Trump at the White House in February. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Then, the U.S. shocked India by announcing stiff tariffs on Indian imports in retaliation for India’s large purchases of Russian oil, which rose from almost zero at the time of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine to nearly 40% of crude imports.

“India’s close energy relationship with our adversary Russia is incredibly troubling,” said Sen. Jim Risch (R., Idaho), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “America will not tolerate support for Putin’s war machine.”

Since then, according to an official familiar with the matter, Modi has been more cautious in his personal contacts with Trump. The U.S. sought a leader-level phone call the week of July 28 to help break an impasse over trade, but India was reluctant, the official said.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether it has sought further calls with Modi since their June 17 conversation.

As links with Washington have deteriorated, Modi has been seeking to mend ties with China, with whom relations have been in a deep freeze since the two countries engaged in a deadly border clash in 2020. In late August, Modi visited China for the first time in seven years for a summit that also included Russia. In a carefully choreographed public appearance, Modi embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” Trump wrote on social media days later, alongside a photo of the three leaders in China.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping speaks with Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Tianjin, China. Photo: ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/Sputnik/KREMLIN

Now, relations appear to be on the mend.

Sergio Gor, a senior White House aide whom Trump has nominated as ambassador to India, said India’s trade minister is coming to Washington next week to discuss a potential trade deal. India’s trade ministry declined to comment.

“I do think it will get resolved over the next few weeks,” he said during his public confirmation hearing before the Senate on Thursday. Miller, the Indian government’s lobbyist, posted a photo on Sept. 6 of himself meeting with Trump.

Kelly, the White House deputy press secretary, said India and the U.S. remain in close contact on a range of diplomatic, defense and commercial priorities.

The U.S. and Indian militaries have been engaged in a two-week training exercise in Alaska, scheduled to end Sunday.

But the India-U.S. relationship isn’t likely to return quickly to where it was, analysts say. Trump’s actions have cemented a longstanding distrust of the U.S. for many in India’s foreign-policy establishment, dating back to the Cold War.

They have also weakened the hand of more pro-Western policymakers in New Delhi who have long sought to deepen ties with the West, say U.S. and other Western diplomats.

Closer ties have “stalled, whether we like it or not,” says Saran, the former Indian foreign secretary.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think Trump’s style of diplomacy is an effective way to handle relations with other world leaders? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.

Write to Tripti Lahiri at tripti.lahiri@wsj.com and Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com

5. China Says Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws

China's legal warfare or lawfare?

Excerpts:

Antitrust lawyers familiar with the case say Beijing argued that Nvidia’s failure to continue to sell its most advanced chips to China—to comply with U.S. export controls—violated Chinese regulators’ remedy of Nvidia pledging to provide an uninterrupted supply of chips to China and not discriminate against Chinese companies.

In July, President Trump resumed sales of Nvidia’s H20 chip, which is useful for AI inference and was popular in China before being blocked for sales in April. Shortly after, Beijing raised concerns about potential cybersecurity risks of the chip and stopped companies from buying it until Nvidia has a chance to clear a regulatory review. Nvidia has said its products don’t have backdoors.

The company and its customers in China are now hoping that the Trump administration will approve a more advanced AI chip than the H20. People familiar with the matter say such approval would be subject to the trade talks between Washington and Beijing.

China Says Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws

Regulator hasn’t said whether it will punish the U.S. company

https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-probe-says-nvidia-violated-antitrust-laws-4acf344c

By Raffaele Huang

Updated Sept. 15, 2025 6:18 am ET

The U.S. government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top artificial-intelligence chips to China. Photo: tyrone siu/Reuters

China escalated its regulatory campaign against U.S. chip juggernaut Nvidia NVDA 0.37%increase; green up pointing triangle, heightening pressure on Washington as senior officials from both countries meet in the latest round of trade negotiations.

China’s antitrust regulator said Monday that preliminary investigations found Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia violated the country’s anticompetition law. The regulator didn’t say whether it would punish the U.S. company, saying only that it would conduct further investigations.

China approved an acquisition by Nvidia of networking-gear maker Mellanox Technologies in 2020 after the designer of high-end semiconductors agreed to conditions, including guaranteeing supplies of its chips to the country. Since 2022, the U.S. government has blocked Nvidia and other American chip vendors from selling many of their top-flight artificial-intelligence chips to China.

Beijing’s move came as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s top negotiator, Vice Premier He Lifeng, held a second day of negotiations in Madrid around a range of topics, including tariffs and the future of TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-video app.

Shares in Nvidia fell 2.5% in premarket trading. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nvidia has become perhaps the highest-profile business caught in the crossfire of the trade dispute between the world’s two biggest economies. The company sells the world’s most powerful chips, which are essential for building state-of-the-art AI.

In December, China’s antitrust regulator, the State Administration for Market Regulation, opened a probe into Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies. A week earlier, the Biden administration ratcheted up controls on China’s access to high-end chips.

Antitrust lawyers familiar with the case say Beijing argued that Nvidia’s failure to continue to sell its most advanced chips to China—to comply with U.S. export controls—violated Chinese regulators’ remedy of Nvidia pledging to provide an uninterrupted supply of chips to China and not discriminate against Chinese companies.

In July, President Trump resumed sales of Nvidia’s H20 chip, which is useful for AI inference and was popular in China before being blocked for sales in April. Shortly after, Beijing raised concerns about potential cybersecurity risks of the chip and stopped companies from buying it until Nvidia has a chance to clear a regulatory review. Nvidia has said its products don’t have backdoors.

The company and its customers in China are now hoping that the Trump administration will approve a more advanced AI chip than the H20. People familiar with the matter say such approval would be subject to the trade talks between Washington and Beijing.

Write to Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com

6. China Pushes for Trump Visit as High-Stakes Trade Talks Begin

Why should President Trump visit> Why doesn't Xi come to DC?

China Pushes for Trump Visit as High-Stakes Trade Talks Begin

Fate of TikTok in U.S. also sits at center of U.S.-China negotiations in Madrid this week

https://www.wsj.com/world/china-pushes-for-trump-visit-as-high-stakes-trade-talks-begin-62cc4eb8

By Lingling Wei

Sept. 14, 2025 6:00 pm ET

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in Madrid for talks with China. Photo: thomas coex/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Quick Summary

Chinese diplomats are seeking a Trump visit to China, which would be a diplomatic win for China’s leader, Xi Jinping.View more

For two months, Chinese diplomats have courted the White House, hoping to lock in a visit by President Trump to China that would grant leader Xi Jinping a significant diplomatic victory, according to people familiar with the matter.

In return, the U.S. administration has straightforward demands, the people said: tangible concessions, or “deliverables,” from Beijing on everything from trade to TikTok.

So far, China has conceded little. Now, a crucial round of trade talks in Madrid is poised to reveal whether Beijing is finally ready to give some ground, or if it intends to press on with its delicate maneuver to secure a presidential visit by offering up as little as possible.

Central to the negotiations that began Sunday between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, is the fate of TikTok, the popular video-sharing app whose U.S. operations hang in the balance. TikTok has until Wednesday to secure a deal that satisfies a congressional order for its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its controlling stake. Trump has extended similar deadlines three times this year.

The major sticking point is the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm—its secret sauce. Beijing, which must approve any sale, has placed this technology on an export-control list and has so far given no indication it will allow ByteDance to part with it, essentially killing any prospect of a deal.

For the Trump administration, TikTok is now the litmus test. Any flexibility from Beijing on the sale would be an indicator of its readiness to make the concessions required to secure a presidential visit, the people said.

China’s Commerce Ministry said Friday that “the Chinese side urges the U.S. side to meet China halfway” and to resolve issues through dialogue. The ministry didn’t elaborate on what such a deal would look like.

A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment.

Vice Premier He Lifeng is representing the Chinese side. Photo: thomas coex/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The negotiations in Madrid, following three rounds of high-level trade talks between the two sides that all resulted in a tariff truce, come as both Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for a potential leaders’ summit later this year. Xi invited Trump to visit China when the two spoke on the phone in June.

While officials in Washington are eyeing a late-October gathering of Asia-Pacific leaders in South Korea as a likely venue, Beijing is signaling that it prefers a bilateral summit in China, according to the people familiar with the matter. That is because, the people said, Chinese officials want to better choreograph the event to make Xi look strong, and to avoid any unwanted surprises.

They are particularly worried about a repeat of what happened to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who received a public dressing-down from Trump in the Oval Office earlier this year. Chinese officials, who want to avoid a similar embarrassment for their leader, see the open press and unpredictability of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum as a risk. A tightly managed summit on home turf is their way of ensuring there are no missteps.

Beijing is sending Premier Li Qiang to the United Nations General Assembly later this month, the people said, in hopes that he will meet with senior administration officials to make the case for a Trump visit to China. Li is expected to signal, according to the people, that if Trump travels to China this year, Xi would be open to going to the U.S. next year for the Group-of-20 leaders’ summit.

President Trump repeatedly claims tariffs will reap ‘billions’ of dollars for the U.S.—and so far, he’s right. Here’s a look at how all of that money is collected and where it goes. Photo Illustration: Ryan Trefes

“The central question is whether Trump will visit Beijing. Beijing is signaling they really want it,” said Evan Medeiros, a former senior national-security official of the Obama administration and now a professor at Georgetown University. “Trump and Xi meeting on the margins of APEC is a back up option and one that Beijing doesn’t want. But will they put enough on the table for Trump to visit?”

For now, Beijing is adopting a well-worn playbook for handling the U.S.: engaging in protracted negotiations that yield few tangible concessions. This strategy has also been employed by other world leaders to manage Washington’s demands while advancing their own agendas. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has dithered over the details of potential peace talks with Ukraine, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has similarly kept diplomatic channels open while pursuing his own military and regional objectives.

But by stalling, Beijing risks frustrating its U.S. counterparts to the point of scuttling the very visit it hopes to arrange.

So far, China hasn’t acted on Trump’s demand for a sharp increase in U.S. soybean imports. In addition, the two sides are at an impasse over the U.S. request for China to crack down on the flow of the chemicals used to make fentanyl. Beijing won’t take action on the drug until the White House removes the 20% tariffs it has placed on Chinese imports as punishment for China’s role in the fentanyl trade, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Beijing and Washington have entered talks about a deal for China to order hundreds of new Boeing jets. However, the plane maker first has to work through a backlog of undelivered jets: It reported more than 100 unfilled orders for Chinese customers through July. Therefore, according to industry executives, any new orders would be delivered years from now, possibly after Trump’s term ends.

Beijing’s unwillingness to make meaningful concessions reflects Xi’s resolve to engage in long-term competition with the U.S. Strategically, Xi feels empowered to harden his position from Trump’s first term, during which two years of negotiations yielded a trade deal widely seen as favoring the U.S.

Now, the arsenal of trade tools China has built under Xi’s leadership, including export controls of critical materials used to make chips, cars and F-35 jets, gives Beijing the ability to cause the U.S. real pain.

In a pointed move right before the start of the negotiations in Madrid, China announced Saturday that it had launched two probes into the U.S. semiconductor sector. The investigations, targeting American analog chips for alleged dumping and U.S. restrictions for discrimination, are a direct retaliation for Washington recently blacklisting 23 more Chinese firms. For the negotiations in Spain, the probes signaled a contentious start.

Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com

Appeared in the September 15, 2025, print edition as 'China Seeks Trump Visit As Trade Talks Begin'.

7. Here’s How Trump Can Prevent a War Over Taiwan

Wishful thinking? Throwing Taiwan under the bus?

Do we have a sufficient understanding of the nature, objectives, and strategy of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi?

Excerpts:

Mr. Trump, who is seeking deals with China on trade and security, so far appears wary of antagonizing Beijing over this issue in his second term. This summer his administration denied a request by President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan to stop over in the United States en route to Latin America and canceled defense talks with Taipei.

The president must go further by strongly reaffirming that the United States does not support Taiwan independence, reimposing restrictions on diplomatic contact and stopping congressional and State Department efforts to expand Taipei’s participation in international organizations, all of which China opposes. The Trump administration could also remove U.S. military trainers from Taiwan and weapon systems in the region that provoke China as much as they deter it.

Mr. Trump should of course seek reciprocal steps from China, such as a declaration that Beijing has no timeline for achieving unification with Taiwan nor any firm intent to use force. China must also commit to scaling back cyber warfare, military threats and trade sanctions that stoke fear and defiance on Taiwan.

This proposal find receptive ears in Beijing. China, too, hopes to avoid a war and its enormous costs. There is no guarantee that the difficult air, land and sea campaign required to seize Taiwan would succeed, and failure would be humiliating for the Chinese Communist Party, potentially even undermining its legitimacy at home. President Xi Jinping is struggling to rein in persistent corruption in the People’s Liberation Army that could affect military readiness, and it is uncertain whether the country’s slowing economy could withstand a lengthy conflict and the resulting trade disruptions.

Opinion

Guest Essay

Here’s How Trump Can Prevent a War Over Taiwan

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/opinion/taiwan-china-war-trump.html

Sept. 15, 2025,

1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Lourenço Providência

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By Jennifer Kavanagh

Ms. Kavanagh is director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a restrained U.S. defense policy.

China and the United States are closer than they’ve ever been to a war over Taiwan.

A dangerous feedback loop has set in over the past decade: Taiwanese defiance toward China provokes aggressive bluster from Beijing, leading to stronger rhetorical support for Taiwan in Washington. The self-reinforcing pattern repeats itself. Each time, it moves Taiwan more to the center of the U.S.-China relationship, increases the risk of conflict and provokes fretful analysis over what to do about this seemingly intractable situation.

This arc was not preordained. Nor is it immutable, and in Donald Trump, the United States has a norm-defying president uniquely positioned to reverse it.

The Trump administration’s best bet for avoiding war would be to boldly seek a fresh deal with China, restoring equilibrium across the Taiwan Strait by offering to dial back U.S. defense buildups in the region and putting Taiwan on notice that American military backup is neither assured nor boundless.

If that seems deceptively simple and logical, it’s because it’s worked before, to everyone’s benefit.

Taiwan has been a thorn in U.S.-China relations ever since Communist forces took control of China in 1949, driving the U.S.-backed Nationalists to Taiwan. China has never given up its goal of unifying the island with the mainland. In the 1970s, Beijing and Washington reached a nuanced compromise: The United States affirmed that the government in Beijing was China’s sole legal authority and acknowledged Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China. America also refrained from supporting Taiwan’s independence and limited contact with Taipei to unofficial channels, even while providing it arms and other military backing.

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This ambivalent balancing act proved remarkably successful, with the resulting stability allowing China, Taiwan and much of Asia to prosper. The United States benefited greatly from soaring trade and other cooperation with the region, and to this day Taiwan remains a vibrant, self-governing democracy.

Things began breaking down in earnest in 2016 when Taiwan elected Tsai Ing-wen, a president who departed sharply from her predecessor’s approach of accommodating China, which responded by ramping up military and economic pressure on the island. Mr. Trump, too, irked Beijing, breaking with protocol to accept a congratulatory call from Ms. Tsai after his own 2016 win and easing restrictions on diplomatic contact with Taiwan.

More damage was done under President Joe Biden, who repeatedly said he would send U.S. forces to defend Taiwan against attack, parting from longtime “strategic ambiguity” on that question. (Officials later affirmed that U.S. policy remained unchanged.) And, in 2022, after Nancy Pelosi made the first visit to Taipei by a sitting U.S. speaker of the House in 25 years, Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan escalated.

Mr. Trump, who is seeking deals with China on trade and security, so far appears wary of antagonizing Beijing over this issue in his second term. This summer his administration denied a request by President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan to stop over in the United States en route to Latin America and canceled defense talks with Taipei.

The president must go further by strongly reaffirming that the United States does not support Taiwan independence, reimposing restrictions on diplomatic contact and stopping congressional and State Department efforts to expand Taipei’s participation in international organizations, all of which China opposes. The Trump administration could also remove U.S. military trainers from Taiwan and weapon systems in the region that provoke China as much as they deter it.

Mr. Trump should of course seek reciprocal steps from China, such as a declaration that Beijing has no timeline for achieving unification with Taiwan nor any firm intent to use force. China must also commit to scaling back cyber warfare, military threats and trade sanctions that stoke fear and defiance on Taiwan.

This proposal find receptive ears in Beijing. China, too, hopes to avoid a war and its enormous costs. There is no guarantee that the difficult air, land and sea campaign required to seize Taiwan would succeed, and failure would be humiliating for the Chinese Communist Party, potentially even undermining its legitimacy at home. President Xi Jinping is struggling to rein in persistent corruption in the People’s Liberation Army that could affect military readiness, and it is uncertain whether the country’s slowing economy could withstand a lengthy conflict and the resulting trade disruptions.

Making a deal with China is politically risky for Mr. Trump. Support for Taiwan has grown in Washington, especially in his own party, and the president could face accusations of appeasing Beijing and abandoning a democratic friend. But Mr. Trump is uniquely immune to such pushback. He has whipped a compliant Republican Party and Congress into line and, as a second-term president, needn’t worry about re-election.

At any rate, this isn’t about abandoning Taiwan. It’s merely about reducing its central role in U.S.-China ties. Taiwan is of course valuable to the United States, not only symbolically as a fellow democracy but also as a source of advanced semiconductors. But even all that is not worth America’s going to war. China is a formidable military power, with a growing arsenal of missiles and nuclear weapons that can reach the U.S. mainland. With its military resources already overstretched by conflicts elsewhere, the United States can ill afford conflict with China.

Taiwan has been an important factor in the spiral of destabilization. Mr. Lai, who won office in January 2024, has taken an even more confrontational stance toward China than Ms. Tsai did. Taipei must be made aware that the United States may not be there to help, and should refrain from inflaming Beijing. That, in the end, may be the best way to preserve Taiwan’s freedoms.

An overture like this could, of course, fail. But that would leave the situation no worse than it is now. And merely making the effort would send the important signal that the United States is willing to give and take on issues of great importance to China.

A war between the United States and China would have no winners. Preventing one would rightfully secure Mr. Trump the place in history as a peacemaker that he so covets.

Conclusion: From Port Arthur to Kyiv

The story that began at 203-Meter Hill echoes in Kyiv today. In February 2022, as Russian tanks rolled toward the Ukrainian capital, Western governments offered to evacuate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His reply was simple: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Where Japan at Port Arthur bled itself dry and pressed on until diplomacy saved it, Ukraine stood fast, mobilized society, and rallied allies before collapse. One was a mountain of corpses; the other, a moment of resilience.

Japan’s rise and fall illustrate a timeless pattern. Societies rise when they build institutions, integrate military and diplomatic power, and practice restraint. They fall when they mistake fragile adversaries for the norm, abandon diplomacy for force, and let hubris override prudence.

Russia in Ukraine and Israel against Iran face the same test. Victories against weaker or more divided foes can obscure the limits of power. But tomorrow’s adversaries may not cooperate in their own defeat.

And looming in the background is China. For centuries, it dominated East Asia, until Japan reversed the balance in the late nineteenth century. Now, we are living through another reversal of that reversal, as China reasserts itself and seeks to constrain Japan’s strategic space. The lesson is clear: power is never permanent, victories are never final, and hubris is always fatal. The deepest lesson of war and society is not how to win battles, but how to recognize the limits of one’s own power—and how to know when to stop.

Easy Victories, Hard Defeats: Fragile Adversaries and the Lessons of War and Society

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/15/easy-victories-hard-defeats-fragile-adversaries-and-the-lessons-of-war-and-society/

by Siamak Naficy

09.15.2025 at 06:00am

For most of recorded history, China was the dominant civilization in East Asia. Then came the Meiji upstart: Japan rose, China stumbled, and the balance reversed—with profound consequences for the region and the world. Today, we are watching another reversal of the reversal, as China reasserts itself and seeks to constrain Japan’s strategic space. That raises an enduring question: why do these shifts happen, and what do they tell us about the interplay of war, society, and power?

The hillside was slick with blood. At 203-Meter Hill above Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) in December 1904, Japanese troops clawed their way up under Russian fire, charging again and again until the ground itself seemed made of corpses. When the crest finally fell, Japanese artillery could at last rain shells onto the harbor, sinking the Russian Pacific Fleet. The victory was decisive, but it cost over 11,000 Japanese dead (and almost 10,000 wounded). General Nogi, who lost both his sons in the war, later wrote that he had won a “mountain of corpses.”

That image captures both the brilliance and the fragility of Japan’s early rise. The victory at Port Arthur was hailed worldwide as proof of Asian modernity, yet Japan was already nearing exhaustion. Only deft diplomacy and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation prevented the war from sliding into defeat. Success was real—but it was contingent, narrow, and deeply dependent on timing, alliances, and restraint.

As an anthropologist, I am interested in what is particular and local but also in what is true across time and space. Japan’s rise and fall illustrate both. This particular story is about Meiji reforms, battlefield victories, and diplomatic finesse. The broader truth is about war and society: how institutions mobilize power, how restraint preserves success, and how hubris—fueled by victories over cooperative adversaries—can drive states into ruin.

Building a Modern Power

Japan’s rise began with the Meiji reforms (1869–1890). Faced with the humiliations of the treaty-port system, Japanese leaders recognized that survival required more than rifles and ships: it required Western-style institutions that could mobilize society and, crucially, both manufacture and manage modern technology.

Compulsory education created a literate citizenry; conscription produced a national army; a central bank stabilized currency; a professional bureaucracy and legal code mirrored Europe’s. Children were pulled from farms, samurai were stripped of privilege, and peasants were taxed to fund unfamiliar schools. To be sure, these reforms were deeply unpopular—conscription and schooling provoked resistance (“blood tax” riots), yet the reforms underwrote state capacity and gave Japan the institutional backbone to sustain power.

The 1871 Iwakura Mission confirmed the necessity. After touring Europe and the United States, meeting with President Ulysses Grant, Japanese officials returned convinced that adopting Western technology without Western institutions was impossible. The lesson was pragmatic, not cultural: to protect sovereignty, Japan would have to mimic not the popular culture but the institutional foundations of Western power.

The First Sino-Japanese War

When Japan went to war with Qing China in 1894, these reforms bore fruit. Japan’s modern army routed Chinese forces at Pyongyang; its navy shattered the Chinese fleet at the Yalu River. Over the winter, Port Arthur and Weihaiwei fell.

The consequences were transformative. Victory silenced domestic opposition to Westernization, legitimized the Meiji reforms, and elevated the prestige of the military. Regionally, Japan replaced China as Asia’s dominant power, annexing Taiwan and the Pescadores. Internationally, Britain recognized Japan as a peer, culminating in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902.

But this success also carried a cost. Military prestige grew disproportionately, and the balance of civil–military power tilted, foreshadowing the militarism that would constrain its foreign policy in the future.

The Russo-Japanese War: Victory by Finesse

The war against Russia a decade later revealed both Japan’s sophistication and its limits. On paper, the odds were grim: Russia’s population was three times larger, its resources vastly greater. Yet Japan seized a fleeting “window of opportunity” before the Trans-Siberian Railway could deliver Russia’s full weight into Manchuria.

Japan’s success couldn’t have been brute force—it was finessed. Diplomatically, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance ensured no other European state would join Russia. This is, of course, straight out of China’s own Sun Tzu’s Art of War: build your own alliances while disrupting that of your rival; isolate them, and then ideally you win before the battle is even fought. In modern terminology, we’d call it isolating the adversary. That was the purpose—and the genius—of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Economically, Japan financed nearly two-fifths of the Russo–Japanese War through foreign loans—approximately 820 million yen of the 2,150 million yen total war expenditure. Much of this was enabled by Jacob Schiff’s pivotal $200 million loan, which alone accounted for about half of Japan’s war funds. Strategically, Japan integrated diplomacy, intelligence, finance, and the military into a coherent plan.

A third factor in overturning the balance of power was Japan’s ability to master grand strategy and to recognize the “culminating point of victory.” The concept of the “culminating point” in military strategy originated from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who introduced it in his classic work On War (published posthumously in 1832).

At the operational level, there is the “culminating point of attack.” And of course, a point of culmination exists for both attackers and defenders on every level of war. If you fail to reach it in a battle or campaign, you could have advanced further. Push too far though, and your extended lines collapse while the enemy’s shorten—your supply chains fray, theirs improve—and you invite a counterattack that drives you back further than if you had stopped earlier.

At the strategic level, however, there is the “culminating point of victory.” This concerns the purpose of the war itself. Japan fought Russia not to conquer Siberia but to secure its sovereignty and recognition as a great power. Stopping short of this point leaves gains on the table. Going too far, however, risks drawing in third parties, shifting the balance against you. What had once been achievable becomes impossible once outsiders intervene. In other words, Japan’s brilliance was restraint; it was knowing where to stop.

Even so, the war strained Japan to breaking. At Mukden, one of the largest land battles before World War I, Japan fielded exhausted troops against a larger Russian army. By 1905, Japan was nearing collapse.

Here, diplomacy proved decisive. Even before the war began, Tokyo had lined up Theodore Roosevelt as mediator. The Peace Treaty of Portsmouth delivered Japan its core objectives—dominance in Korea, southern Manchuria, and Sakhalin’s southern half (Karafuto Prefecture)—without demanding unconditional Russian surrender. Had the war dragged on, Japan would likely have lost. Its leaders succeeded not because they were omnipotent, but because they knew when to quit.

The Perils of a Fragile Adversary

These victories, however, were misleading. China was collapsing under civil wars and dynastic decline. Russia was plagued by illiteracy, corruption, divided command, and revolutionary unrest. Both were “fragile adversaries”: foes who, though determined to win, undermined themselves.

Building on Samuel Zilincik’s adaptation of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idea of antifragility, we can think of adversaries as falling along a spectrum. At one end are antifragile opponents, who actually grow stronger from the stress of conflict. In the middle are resilient adversaries, who can restore themselves to their prior strength after a campaign. At the other end are fragile foes, whose military capabilities diminish when tested in strategic performance. They move and behave as you’d like them to move and behave. Think of the boxing fighting technique of “rope-a-dope,” most famously associated with Muhammad Ali in his October 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” match against then world heavyweight champion George Foreman. These are of course ideal types—real adversaries rarely fit neatly into a single category—but the typology helps us ask the right question: does war weaken, restore, or empower the adversary we face?

More to the point, defeating fragile adversaries may teach the wrong lessons. It tempts societies to believe that boldness and sacrifice alone guarantee victory, obscuring the role of timing, diplomacy, and luck. Japan mistook contingent success for a permanent formula.

In the 1930s, the balance of power within Japan tipped decisively toward the military. The assassination of Itō Hirobumi in 1909 deprived Japan of one of its most capable civilian leaders. The brilliant, cautious Meiji statesmen passed from the scene. Their successors pursued unlimited objectives in China and, by 1941, struck Pearl Harbor.

But unlike Nicholas II’s Russia, Franklin Roosevelt’s America was not a fragile foe. Unlike Qing China, the Chinese Republic refused to collapse. What had once been finesse had become hubris. Japan confused luck for genius, tactical success for strategic mastery—and paid the ultimate price.

Lessons for War and Society

Japan’s story underscores enduring truths:

Institutions matter. Victory depends not just on weapons but on the institutions that mobilize society and sustain war.
Diplomacy matters. Japan’s rise owed as much to alliance-building and timing as to battlefield skill. Without Britain’s alliance or Roosevelt’s mediation, the Russo-Japanese War might have ended in ruin.
Restraint matters. The Meiji generation knew when to stop. Their successors (the next generation) did not.
Adversaries matter. Victories against fragile foes can deceive, encouraging hubris when adversaries no longer oblige.

Contemporary Echoes

Russia in Ukraine: Institutions as Weapons

Like Nicholas II, Vladimir Putin assumed his opponent was a cooperative, fragile adversary: corrupt, divided, incapable of mobilization. Ukraine, he believed, would collapse under the first blows. Instead, Ukraine rallied with remarkable cohesion. Its institutions—civil society, decentralized local governance, and the capacity to improvise technologically—proved resilient.

Internationally, Ukraine displayed Japan-like finesse. By aligning itself with NATO, the EU, and the United States, it secured the lifelines of finance, weapons, and training. Just as Japan leveraged the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and Roosevelt’s mediation, Ukraine has turned external partnerships into force multipliers.

Russia, by contrast, replayed its own history of dysfunction: corruption hollowed logistics; divided command bred confusion; brittle autocracy isolated decision-making. Like Nicholas II, Putin found himself in a grinding war that eroded legitimacy at home.

The echo is unmistakable: Moscow mistook its adversary’s will and institutions, just as Japan did in 1941. The result then was not quick victory but drawn-out entanglement.

Israel and Iran: From Tactical Brilliance to Strategic Limits

Israel’s wars across six fronts illustrate a different parallel. Iranian networks in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen helped provide it depth and resilience. Against Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, Israel achieved repeated tactical brilliance—swift air campaigns, targeted assassinations, and suppression of adversary militaries. These victories resembled Japan’s triumph over Qing China in 1895: decisive, impressive, and affirming of its modernized military.

But they also bred illusions. Victories against weaker or fragmented adversaries suggested that force could deliver strategic transformation. This confidence underpinned Israel’s campaign against Iran: sabotage, cyber strikes, assassinations, and pressure designed to collapse Iran’s nuclear program or even the regime itself.

Iran, however, has proven anything but cooperative. Like the United States in 1941, it absorbed blows and mobilized for a longer struggle. Its institutions—repressive but cohesive—prevented collapse. Israel’s hopes for Syria-fication instead became a long contest of endurance. Moreover, its strikes appear to have unintentionally reshaped Iran’s political future.

Here, the lesson mirrors Japan’s misstep: tactical brilliance does not guarantee strategic victory. Like Japan pressing beyond the culminating point of victory, Israel discovered that what had worked against weaker adversaries faltered against a stronger one. Iran refused to collapse. Instead, it absorbed the blows, and Israel felt forced to push for American backing. Without the diplomatic finesse that Japan once wielded in 1905—or that Israel has struggled to replicate against Iran—military power alone runs up against hard limits.

The danger here then is the same one that undid Japan: mistaking tactical victories for proof of strategic invincibility, and assuming yesterday’s fragile adversaries define tomorrow’s wars.

Conclusion: From Port Arthur to Kyiv

The story that began at 203-Meter Hill echoes in Kyiv today. In February 2022, as Russian tanks rolled toward the Ukrainian capital, Western governments offered to evacuate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His reply was simple: “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Where Japan at Port Arthur bled itself dry and pressed on until diplomacy saved it, Ukraine stood fast, mobilized society, and rallied allies before collapse. One was a mountain of corpses; the other, a moment of resilience.

Japan’s rise and fall illustrate a timeless pattern. Societies rise when they build institutions, integrate military and diplomatic power, and practice restraint. They fall when they mistake fragile adversaries for the norm, abandon diplomacy for force, and let hubris override prudence.

Russia in Ukraine and Israel against Iran face the same test. Victories against weaker or more divided foes can obscure the limits of power. But tomorrow’s adversaries may not cooperate in their own defeat.

And looming in the background is China. For centuries, it dominated East Asia, until Japan reversed the balance in the late nineteenth century. Now, we are living through another reversal of that reversal, as China reasserts itself and seeks to constrain Japan’s strategic space. The lesson is clear: power is never permanent, victories are never final, and hubris is always fatal. The deepest lesson of war and society is not how to win battles, but how to recognize the limits of one’s own power—and how to know when to stop.

Tags: Clausewitz, culminating point, Fragile Adversary, Meiji Restoration

About The Author

Siamak Naficy
Siamak Tundra Naficy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. An anthropologist by training, he brings an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of strategic culture, conflict resilience, and the human dimensions of security. His work draws from both naturalist and classical realist traditions, emphasizing how power, interests, the history of ideas, and human nature shape conflict. His research interests span conflict theory, wicked problems, leadership, sacred values, cognitive science, and animal behavior—viewed through an anthropological lens. The views expressed are his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, or the Naval Postgraduate School.

9. Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk

A number of OpEds at the link: https://www.thefp.com/p/repairing-america-in-the-age-of-political-violence

A number of thoughtful essays. I especially like Tyler Cowan's.

Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk

(Illustration by The Free Press)

Coleman Hughes, Abigail Shrier, Sam Harris, Mary Katharine Ham, Yuval Levin, and others on how to bring America back from the brink.

By The Editors

09.14.25 —

U.S. Politics

Breaking news, deep investigations, and eye-opening commentary, that favor no party.

FOLLOW TOPIC

Is there a way back? That was the question Free Press columnist Matthew Continetti posed in the hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last Wednesday.

What occurred to Matt in the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, and what has only grown clearer since then, was this: “Kirk’s death feels like a watershed. It is the most stunning evidence we have to date that America is becoming two nations, divided not only by politics but by culture, lifestyle, psychology, and epistemology.”

Where to start with a problem so big? It’s one thing to say we need to lower the temperature, as so many have in the days since Kirk’s death, but how do we actually do that? How do we bring America back from the brink?

Like you, those are the questions we’ve been asking in these dark days. And like you, we’ve been reaching out to some of the people we trust most to find out what they think.

Today, we offer you their answers.

Read

Yuval Levin: Have an Argument

Read

Coleman Hughes: Demand Nonviolence

Read

Abigail Shrier: Parent Your Kids

Read

Mary Katharine Ham: Look for God

Read

Tyler Cowen: Stop Blaming ‘Them’

Read

Charles Fain Lehman: Don’t Tolerate Disorder

Read

Sam Harris: Log Off

Read

Greg Lukianoff: Bury the ‘Words Are Violence’ Cliché

Read

Joe Nocera: Stop Worshipping Guns

Read

Peter Savodnik: Be a Leader

10. US Stands With Philippines Against China’s Plan In South China Sea

US Stands With Philippines Against China’s Plan In South China Sea

https://gcaptain.com/us-stands-with-philippines-against-chinas-plan-in-south-china-sea/

An aerial view of a China Coast Guard ship navigating near the disputed Scarborough Shoal, in the South China Sea, August 13, 2025. REUTERS/Adrian Portugal

Reuters

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September 13, 2025

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Sept 12 (Reuters) – The United States stands with the Philippines, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday, rejecting what he described as China’s “destabilizing plans” for a disputed atoll in the South China Sea.

“Beijing claiming Scarborough Reef as a nature preserve is yet another coercive attempt to advance sweeping territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea at the expense of its neighbors,” Rubio said in a statement.

Filipino fishermen fear Beijing’s plan to create the nature reserve could make it harder for them to operate in the atoll, which is under the constant watch of Chinese vessels.

Scarborough Shoal lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone but has been under Beijing’s control since 2012. China claims almost all the South China Sea – a waterway carrying more than $3 trillion of annual commerce – despite overlapping claims by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Rubio said China’s actions continued to undermine regional stability, calling on Beijing to abide by the Arbitral Tribunal’s unanimous 2016 decision that China had unlawfully prevented Filipino fishermen from engaging in traditional fishing at Scarborough Reef.

The Philippines said on Saturday it had sailed with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and Japan’s navy off islands in Zambales province, whose coast is around 120 nautical miles from Scarborough Shoal.

Chinese state media Global Times reported on Friday that Manila had held a “joint patrol” in the South China Sea with unnamed countries outside the region.

(Reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones and Bhargav Acharya in Toronto; Additional reporting by Mikhail Flores in Manila; Editing by Caitlin Webber and William Mallard)

11. Give Us Back Our Marine Corps

Excerpts:

More fundamentally, Force Design 2030, the critics charge, lessens the Marines’ ability to perform its traditional role of responding to emergencies anywhere in the world. China, to be sure, is our most dangerous adversary, but putting all of your eggs in one basket for a possible conflict with China ignores the need for a more versatile and more effective Marine Corps that has served us well throughout our nation’s history.

It is always difficult, if not impossible, to predict the nature of future wars and how they will differ from previous conflicts. Advanced technologies will undoubtedly play a role in future wars just as they are doing in current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. But as the Ukraine war has demonstrated, conflict in the 21st century can resemble attritional wars of the past—the fighting there is reminiscent of the combat on the western front in World War I. The United States Marines have fought, as the song goes, from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. They have fought in brutal island campaigns in the Pacific in World War II, in Korea and Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so many other places. Their proud tradition in war is to go anywhere our civilian leadership sends them to seize ground, hold it, and defeat our enemies. China is the pacing threat but it is not the only threat we will face in the future. The critics of Force Design 2030 appear to understand that better than the current Marine leadership.

Give Us Back Our Marine Corps

By Francis P. Sempa

September 13, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/09/13/give_us_back_our_marine_corps_1134664.html

There is an intellectual war being waged within the United States Marine Corps. It centers on Force Design 2030, a force structure and mission reform that has pitted recent and current Marine leadership against a growing group of retired Marines who contend that the reforms, in retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper’s words, have “destroyed the Corps’ combined arms capabilities” and will transform the Marine Corps from an offensive mobile warfighting force to a defensive “stand-in-force” that undermines “the very ethos of the Corps and not for the good.” The latest salvo in this war of words was fired by Ryan Evans, the founder of the web journal War on the Rocks, who writes that the critics of Force Design 2030 are a “small but vocal group of retired Marine officers” who have employed “doomsday rhetoric and distortions with . . . shameless fervor” and who falsely claim that there is a “crisis” within the Corps because of the reforms.

Evans essentially accuses the critics of Force Design 2030 of resisting needed change in the Corps’ mission and of wanting to fight the last war. The critics, he writes, “advocate for a Marine Corps divorced from strategic reality, current joint doctrine, and policy directives.” Evans claims he is for reasoned debate and responsible critiques of Force Design 2030, but he characterizes most of the critics as “unelected, unappointed cabals of retired octogenarians and nonagenarians” who have no legitimate role in running the military services. His use of the word “cabal” is revealing—it connotes a group of people secretly united in a nefarious plot. But there is nothing secret or nefarious about the critics of Force Design 2030. They are quite public with their criticism of the reforms, using a platform titled “Compass Points” to air their concerns.

The critics’ concerns are anything but “divorced from strategic reality, current joint doctrine, and policy directives.” Gen. Van Riper notes that seven of the eight living former Marine Corps commandants oppose Force Design 2030, the online platform used by the critics has more than 100,000 views per month, and email chains with at least 1300 members voice serious reservations or outright opposition to the reforms. That can hardly be called a “small but vocal group,” let alone a “cabal.”

Evans also complains that the critics have sought meetings with senior defense officials and elected officials, including in the White House. Perhaps Evans would deny retired Marines, including former commandants, their First Amendment rights of free speech and to petition their government. After all, many of those retired Marines fought to defend those rights for themselves and others.

To fully understand the changes undertaken and planned by the current Marine leadership in Force Design 2030, a good start is the Congressional Research Service’s publication “U.S. Marine Corps Force Design Initiative: Background and Issues for Congress.” It notes that this Marine Corps initiative was launched in 2019 by Marine commandant Gen. David Berger. It has since received continued support from current Marine commandant Gen. Eric Smith. Under the plan, the Marines have deactivated their tank battalions and transferred over 400 of their 450 tanks to the Army; eliminated towed cannon artillery and many fixed-wing aircraft from future plans; and phased out “legacy logistical capability” that was used for “sustained land operations.” These force structure changes are one aspect of Force Design 2030 seized on by the critics who say that the lack of armor, artillery, and aviation forces will detract from the Marines ability to act as an “effective combined arms force”; will limit logistics support; will hamper ground mobility; and will lessen the Marines ability to fight in urban areas.

But the heart of Force Design 2030 is the shift from fighting small wars to planning to fight against great power rivals, especially China. Gen. Berger and now Gen. Smith view Force Design 2030 as being consistent with the 2018 National Defense Strategy issued by the First Trump administration. Force Design 2030, however, calls for a restructuring of the Marines to shift from a mobile expeditionary force to what former Marine infantry officer John F. Schmitt calls a “faulty Island Chain Defense concept that seeks to prevent the Chinese navy from breaking out into the East and South China Seas in the event of war.” The plan is for “stand-in-forces” to be inserted onto key islands in the western Pacific who will use precision-guided munitions to attack Chinese ships as they attempt to move beyond island chains. Schmitt writes, however, that China is already taking steps to base its forces outside those island chains. So, Force Design 2030 fails strategically. It also fails operationally, writes Schmitt, because it assumes that future warfare will consist of “an attritional duel between competing kill webs of advanced technologies.” It fails tactically, according to Schmitt, because it “provides no adequate protection, sustainment, or support for the widely-distributed stand-in-forces once they are inserted in place.” And there is no guarantee that the governments of some of the island nations will agree to the prepositioning of Marine stand-in-forces on their territory.

More fundamentally, Force Design 2030, the critics charge, lessens the Marines’ ability to perform its traditional role of responding to emergencies anywhere in the world. China, to be sure, is our most dangerous adversary, but putting all of your eggs in one basket for a possible conflict with China ignores the need for a more versatile and more effective Marine Corps that has served us well throughout our nation’s history.

It is always difficult, if not impossible, to predict the nature of future wars and how they will differ from previous conflicts. Advanced technologies will undoubtedly play a role in future wars just as they are doing in current wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. But as the Ukraine war has demonstrated, conflict in the 21^st century can resemble attritional wars of the past—the fighting there is reminiscent of the combat on the western front in World War I. The United States Marines have fought, as the song goes, from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. They have fought in brutal island campaigns in the Pacific in World War II, in Korea and Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so many other places. Their proud tradition in war is to go anywhere our civilian leadership sends them to seize ground, hold it, and defeat our enemies. China is the pacing threat but it is not the only threat we will face in the future. The critics of Force Design 2030 appear to understand that better than the current Marine leadership.

Francis P. Sempa writes on military and foreign policy.

12. Drone boats, new landing craft get Army Pacific tryouts

My assessment is anecdotal and based on news reporting over the past couple of years and especially the past 9 months, but I think the Army is innovating on a scale and at a speed not seen before. The Army deserves a lot of credit for its transformation in contact and the Army Transformation Initiative.

Excerpts:

While this iteration of the contest is the first to include experiments, Stillman said the xTech office has three others lined up in the next three months with different commands.

“One of the things that senior leaders are focusing on right now is getting the technology into the hands of the soldiers,” she said. “This is the first step.”

Drone boats, new landing craft get Army Pacific tryouts

The service is looking for better ways to protect its waterborne forces.

By Jennifer Hlad

Managing Editor, Defense One

September 15, 2025 04:46 AM ET

defenseone.com · Jennifer Hlad

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii—Robot boats. Counter-drone systems. A prototype Army landing craft. A million dollars in cash prizes. It’s all part of the Army’s effort to overcome logistics challenges in the Indo-Pacific and get new technology in the hands of soldiers more quickly.

Experimentation for the Army’s xTech contest started Sept. 9 with sunshirt-clad representatives from HavocAI wheeling small gray autonomous boats down a concrete ramp on Ford Island into the cerulean waters of Pearl Harbor. Soon, the boats were zipping through the harbor, protecting a Maneuver Support Vessel (Light) from an unnamed adversary. A total of 10 companies tested their tech as part of the contest.

On Thursday, three winners will take home $35,000 cash prizes, along with feedback from soldiers and technical experts that will help as they pursue a follow-on contract.

“We partnered with [U.S. Army Pacific] to identify some of their capability gaps, and invited industry to solve some of those [challenges]. Our goal is really to bring in new industry and offer them a friendly front door to the Army where they can propose their solutions, but also get that direct feedback from stakeholders,” said Jessica Stillman, project manager for the Army’s xTech program.

The 10 competing companies were winnowed from a pool of about 130 that submitted white papers after a call for solutions, Stillman said. About 44 percent of the companies that apply for these contests are new to the Defense Department, and the service tries “to make it as easy as possible” for them throughout the process.

“A lot of times we keep the problem statements pretty broad, because sometimes industry can tell us what we need,” she said. “You know, we don’t always know what industry is doing, and that’s the value of using our program, because it allows you to do that market research and understand what industry is developing, and can that apply to what the Army needs. It gives the Army the opportunity to bring in new innovation, and new companies into the pipeline, which is really great.”

Though xTech has run nearly 50 contests so far, this is the first that involves the competitors running scenarios in an experimentation environment, Stillman said.

The Pearl Harbor experiments deployed drone boats and counter-drone tech to protect a high-value asset, while experiments at inland Schofield Barracks focused on unexploded ordnance and electronic warfare.

The role of “high-value asset” for the exercise was played by a prototype logistics vessel called MSV(L)-01, carrying two Strykers on its reinforced aluminum deck. Vessel Master Chief Warrant Officer 2 Matthew Davis said the crew is testing the vessel to inform low-rate initial production.

“Today was kind of a two-birds, one-stone” situation, Davis said: testing the requirements of the vessel along with serving as an asset to be defended by the robot boats.

The MSV(L) was built as a replacement for the Vietnam-era Landing Craft Mechanized, for use in the Indo-Pacific, Davis said.

“This vessel offers an increased capability and capacity to what we already have,” he said. “The draft is shallower, so fully laden is 82 short tons… With that payload on board, we can still make 23 knots with only five and a half feet of draft,” so even loaded up, it can go straight to the beach and set its ramp on the sand, while other Army vessels require a port.

While this iteration of the contest is the first to include experiments, Stillman said the xTech office has three others lined up in the next three months with different commands.

“One of the things that senior leaders are focusing on right now is getting the technology into the hands of the soldiers,” she said. “This is the first step.”

defenseone.com · Jennifer Hlad

13. Chinese cyber skirmishes in the Indo-Pacific show emerging patterns of conflict

Excerpts:

Cyber skirmishes in the Indo-Pacific mark the cutting edge of strategic competition, where adversaries test limits and normalise coercion. The region’s growing dependence on digital infrastructure, combined with its strategic volatility, makes it a perilous testing ground for cyber conflict globally. The choice is stark: treat these incidents as minor disruptions until one sparks a crisis, or act to strengthen resilience, deepen cooperation and set rules for responsible behaviour in cyberspace. If governments fail, adversaries will decide the thresholds for acceptable action—and by then it may be too late.

Chinese cyber skirmishes in the Indo-Pacific show emerging patterns of conflict | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · Gil Baram · September 14, 2025

China’s Salt Typhoon hacking campaign has taken on new urgency with revelations it may have compromised the data of millions of Australians. This demonstrates how cyber operations have evolved beyond merely gathering intelligence.

When first identified by US government partners back in mid-2023, the campaign by the Salt Typhoon group was assessed as a targeted espionage effort against US and allied government systems. It involved stealthy intrusions, selective data theft and probing of networks in a handful of countries. At the time, the effect was thought to be limited and largely confined to government targets.

But August 2025 disclosures have shown just how broad the campaign truly has been. The Australian Signals Directorate, working with 20 foreign partners, has publicly attributed the operation to Beijing’s Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation now assesses that Salt Typhoon has struck dozens of countries, sweeping up telecommunications, transport, lodging and civilian data on a massive scale.These operations may have reached virtually every Australian household and millions more across partner nations.

Cyber operations now function as tools for coercion and competition, influencing the balance of power across the Indo-Pacific. They are central to rivalry. Even as governments invest in resilience and attempt to set boundaries, the persistent tension between the United States and China ensures that new vulnerabilities and threats will continue to emerge.

The Indo-Pacific is the epicentre of 21st-century competition. China and the US vie for influence, while South Korea, India, Japan and Southeast Asian countries all face mounting digital vulnerabilities. With the digital economy of Southeast Asian nations expected to surpass US$1 trillion by 2030, growth is driving their prosperity but also compounding risk.

Chinese-sponsored hackers have been targeting critical infrastructure for a long time. Suspected Chinese hackers disrupted India’s port logistics in 2020, and repeated intrusions have targeted Japanese, South Korean and Australian energy grids, telecom systems and government networks. Cyber operations are applied to traditional hotspots—such as the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait—by threatening disruption without any shots being fired.

Beyond the sheer number of cyber incidents, patterns in their objectives distinguish cyber operations in the Indo-Pacific from those in other regions. Three stand out: probing, pressuring, and threshold testing.

Probing operations aim to identify and target system vulnerabilities. Chinese threat group APT41 often employs this method. The group has conducted espionage operations across healthcare, telecoms and government agencies for many years. North Korea’s Lazarus Group has perfected a distinct form of probing: cyber-heists, ranging from the 2016 Bangladesh Bank hack to ongoing cryptocurrency thefts that directly fund Pyongyang’s weapons programs. These operations map vulnerabilities and generate funds, while staying below the threshold of conventional war.

Australia has been a repeated target of pressuring tactics, with the breaches of critical infrastructure widely interpreted as signaling that Canberra’s alignment with Washington has costs. Taiwan is another case in point. During its 2024 elections, disinformation campaigns, distributed denial-of-service attacks on government portals, and breaches of media outlets sought to undermine confidence in the democratic process. These pressures were synchronised with more visible coercion, such as military exercises and air incursions, illustrating how digital operations complement kinetic manoeuvres.

Some cyber campaigns appear to be aimed at threshold-testing, blurring the line between espionage and sabotage. In the Vietnam–China cyber clashes related to South China Sea disputes, Vietnamese hackers allegedly targeted Chinese government websites. Similarly, the 2021 Japan Olympics cyberattacks, which some attributed to Russian actors, demonstrated how geopolitical rivalries could extend into civilian life. Together, these incidents outline a region where states and non-state actors continually challenge each other’s resolve. Skirmishes might not cause immediate destruction, but they foster digital coercion and raise the risk of escalation.

Cyber campaigns are not just harassment; some signal a potential for escalation. Attacks against Taiwan’s government networks have spiked during Chinese military drills, showing how cyber and kinetic tools are increasingly integrated.

The danger lies in miscalculation. A ransomware strike that disrupts Japan’s energy grid or South Korea’s financial sector could be interpreted as state-backed aggression, prompting military responses. In cyberspace, where attribution is murky and timeframes are compressed, escalation could outrun diplomacy. Repeated incidents also risk normalising cyber coercion as a standard tool of statecraft. If probing and pressure go unchallenged, adversaries will keep pushing until the region faces a full-scale digital confrontation. The Indo-Pacific has become a laboratory for cyber conflict, setting global precedents. Europe, Latin America and Africa should watch closely: today’s coercion in Asia could become tomorrow’s global standard.

Cyber skirmishes in the Indo-Pacific mark the cutting edge of strategic competition, where adversaries test limits and normalise coercion. The region’s growing dependence on digital infrastructure, combined with its strategic volatility, makes it a perilous testing ground for cyber conflict globally. The choice is stark: treat these incidents as minor disruptions until one sparks a crisis, or act to strengthen resilience, deepen cooperation and set rules for responsible behaviour in cyberspace. If governments fail, adversaries will decide the thresholds for acceptable action—and by then it may be too late.

aspistrategist.org.au · Gil Baram · September 14, 2025

14. Want Drone Dominance? Let the Squad Fail

Excerpts:

A culture shift around sUAS across all combat units means embedding drone experimentation into training cycles, building local sustainment and fabrication capacity, and treating drone teams as integral parts of tactical formations. Such a shift will not happen by directive alone. It will require resourcing the lowest levels, tolerating failure, and decentralizing innovation authority. It must begin with the squad leader and the drone in his or her rucksack.

To prepare for the next war, the US Army must stop waiting for perfect answers from the top and start empowering its youngest, most adaptable warfighters to build, experiment with, and break equipment like sUAS, reimagining the battlefield from the ground up. This does not mean abandoning oversight, doctrine, or security. It means recognizing that in a world of massed, networked, and expendable sUAS, the only way to stay ahead is to innovate faster than your adversary. That innovation will not come from a program office. It will come from the mud, the barracks, the garage, and the field. If we are serious about competing with peer adversaries, then it is time to let the squad fail—early, often, and forward.

Want Drone Dominance? Let the Squad Fail - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · Charlie Phelps · September 15, 2025

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In Ukraine, a soldier is provisioned a low-cost drone from a factory that only began operations in the last twelve months, modifies it with a 3D printed part from a trench, and uses it the next day to spot Russian logistics movements. Meanwhile, the United States Army is just now beginning to meaningfully contend with mechanisms for tactical units to procure drone systems that match the performance levels Ukrainian forces have achieved while also complying with extensive cybersecurity, electromagnetic spectrum use, airworthiness, and compliance standards. This disparity captures the stark difference in how tactical innovation is treated in wartime versus peacetime militaries and highlights a truth we cannot ignore: If the US Army wants to remain a dominant landpower service in large-scale combat operations, it must radically decentralize innovation, especially in the realm of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS). This innovation must occur at the lowest tactical level, within squads, platoons, and companies—and the Army should spend money accordingly. This will require tolerating failure, embracing commercial technology, and restructuring acquisition pathways to enable rapid, bottom-up iteration. In other words, the Army needs to apply the principles of the lean startup model, not to billion-dollar programs in the legacy defense industrial base, but to the nineteen-year-old specialist in the mud with a drone and a screwdriver.

Modern warfare is being transformed by the mass use of sUAS. Ukraine and Russia deploy drones for every tactical purpose imaginable: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, artillery spotting, electronic warfare targeting, psychological operations, logistics, and direct attack. Drones are no longer specialized tools; they are battlefield essentials. In large-scale combat operations, where contested airspace limits manned platforms and the electromagnetic environment is constantly shifting, the United States cannot rely solely on expensive and exquisite platforms. Recent announcements indicate that the Army recognizes that fact—the service is canceling procurement of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle, for instance, and shuttering the Future Tactical UAS program, which had failed in seven years to field a replacement for the Shadow drone. But the mechanisms the service selects in place of the canceled programs to procure, field, and adapt drones will only succeed if they reflect an overarching principle: getting adaptable, expendable sUAS in the hands of the smallest units. The war in Ukraine has proven the battlefield value of sUAS beyond any doubt, but the US Army continues to treat drones as niche enablers. Drone density remains too low across brigade combat teams. Most formations are organized and trained for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance via manned platforms and top-down control, not decentralized swarms of cheap, modular systems. Despite small-scale pilot programs and innovation units, the Army remains tactically and culturally unprepared for the scale and speed of drone warfare in large-scale combat operations.

The lean startup model, popularized by Eric Ries, emphasizes three core principles: build a minimum viable product, test and iterate quickly based on user feedback, and pivot or persevere based on real-world data. This model contrasts with traditional defense acquisition, which relies on long timelines, rigid requirements, and top-down control. Legacy acquisition prioritizes certainty over adaptability, which is the opposite of what tactical innovation demands in today’s fluid battlefield environment. The lean startup model is particularly applicable to sUAS because the technology changes rapidly and is often driven by commercial markets. Commercial drones, 3D printed parts, open-source software, and modular payloads allow for a cycle of experimentation and adaptation that mirrors the iterative product development process used by startups. These are not theoretical advantages; they are playing out in real time on the battlefields of Ukraine, where drone warfare has become a grassroots phenomenon.

While the US military has experimented with rapid innovation cells, these efforts remain largely confined to elite units and pilot programs. The broader force still operates under a procurement regime that expects certainty, punishes failure, and equates innovation with top-down modernization plans rather than bottom-up adaptation. That has to change.

The defense acquisition system was built to procure ships, tanks, and aircraft, not modular electronics with commercial origins and six-month upgrade cycles. That system is deeply ill-suited for the sUAS revolution for several reasons. First, it is overly optimized for compliance. Defense acquisition has traditionally been governed by the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (the elimination of which was announced last month), the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, and the Federal Acquisition Regulation. These frameworks prioritize documentation, approval, and accountability over speed or tactical utility. The result is a system that struggles to buy drones at a pace faster than they become obsolete. Second, the acquisition system favors exquisite, long-life, high-cost solutions. But sUAS are short-lived by design. They should be cheap, expendable, and replaceable. The current system fights that logic at every turn, often requiring even inexpensive drones to meet the same certification and documentation standards as major weapons platforms. Third, the industrial base is consolidating. A handful of prime contractors dominate the defense sector. These companies excel at producing complex platforms but are poorly suited for producing and iterating on the kind of fast, modular, user-driven sUAS needed at scale. Smaller firms, including startups and nontraditional defense partners, face massive barriers to entry, including long delays in contracting and lack of programmatic funding continuity. Finally, even when small firms or startups develop promising sUAS, the process of becoming a program of record is so onerous that many never make it past pilot phases. Innovation is strangled not by a lack of ideas, but by a lack of institutional pathways to adoption.

To break this cycle, the Army—and the joint force, more broadly—must reallocate funds directly to tactical units, especially in the combat arms, so they can procure, test, and modify sUAS in operational settings. This is already happening in isolated pockets. Special operations forces have long enjoyed flexible funding and acquisition authority, allowing teams to procure and experiment with new tech quickly. Initiatives within Marine Corps Force Design 2030 elements and Army Futures Command’s soldier touchpoints have pioneered rapid iteration models. But these efforts remain the exception, not the rule. A true shift would involve creating dedicated drone innovation budgets at the battalion and company level, allowing commanders to fail fast and often without career penalty, building support ecosystems such as repair labs, 3D printing capabilities, and software hacking workshops within maneuver units, and partnering directly with commercial drone companies at the operator level.

Imagine an Army infantry company during a training rotation at the National Training Center with $50,000 in discretionary drone funds. Over two weeks, platoons compete to develop the most effective use cases for commercial, off-the-shelf drones. They test different frame types, integrate modular sensors, script simple autonomy routines, and iterate based on feedback in training. Some ideas fail. Others reveal new concepts for scout and strike, obstacle reconnaissance, or low-visibility overwatch. Now multiply that by every company in the Army. Within six months, the Army would generate thousands of operator-tested data points about what works in sUAS employment, far more than a traditional program office could gather in five years. The result is not just smarter purchases; it’s bottom-up innovation, generated by the people who will fight the next war.

Some will argue it is not safe to let units buy and fly their own drones. This concern is valid in controlled airspace or complex electromagnetic environments. But strict oversight should not preclude decentralized innovation. Commanders can establish safety protocols, no-fly zones, and unit-level airspace management tools. Cybersecurity and operational security concerns are also frequently raised. While cybersecurity is essential, it must be tailored to risk. A $1,000 expendable drone flown by a rifleman does not require NSA-level security. DoD should adopt a tiered approach to security, where certain classes of drones meet baseline standards and others are approved for higher-risk missions. Others may argue that the military cannot just throw money at every unit. No one is suggesting unlimited spending. Instead, leaders with the appropriate authority should redirect a fraction of existing sUAS research, development, and procurement funds to unit-level experimentation. This would yield a higher return on investment than overengineered programs with five-year horizons.

Tactical failure is a strategic asset if it happens early and cheaply. That is the entire premise of the lean startup. Letting a squad fail with an ineffective drone configuration costs a few hundred dollars. Learning that lesson in combat, with lives on the line, is unacceptable. The key is to fail forward, to treat every failed experiment as data. A unit that wrecks five drones during a training cycle is not wasting money; it is stress-testing ideas before they face real adversaries. Ironically, the most risk-averse choice is to maintain the status quo: an acquisition system that delivers exquisite drones too slowly, to too few, with too little room for adaptation.

The war in Ukraine offers a real-time laboratory for the future of drone warfare. Ukrainian units have leveraged commercial drones at every echelon, from battalion-level strike coordination to squad-level intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Soldiers modify drones on the fly using commercial parts, 3D printers, and open-source code. They experiment with new tactics weekly, adapting to Russian jamming and counter-UAS capabilities in real time. One key lesson from Ukraine is that drone warfare is not just about platforms; it is about ecosystems. Units that can build, fix, hack, and redeploy drones faster than the enemy gain a cumulative advantage. This demands technical skill, institutional support, and most importantly, local authority to experiment and innovate. It is the lean startup model applied to the battlefield.

A culture shift around sUAS across all combat units means embedding drone experimentation into training cycles, building local sustainment and fabrication capacity, and treating drone teams as integral parts of tactical formations. Such a shift will not happen by directive alone. It will require resourcing the lowest levels, tolerating failure, and decentralizing innovation authority. It must begin with the squad leader and the drone in his or her rucksack.

To prepare for the next war, the US Army must stop waiting for perfect answers from the top and start empowering its youngest, most adaptable warfighters to build, experiment with, and break equipment like sUAS, reimagining the battlefield from the ground up. This does not mean abandoning oversight, doctrine, or security. It means recognizing that in a world of massed, networked, and expendable sUAS, the only way to stay ahead is to innovate faster than your adversary. That innovation will not come from a program office. It will come from the mud, the barracks, the garage, and the field. If we are serious about competing with peer adversaries, then it is time to let the squad fail—early, often, and forward.

Major Charlie Phelps is a Special Forces officer and currently serves as a company commander in 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. Devyn Adams, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · Charlie Phelps · September 15, 2025

15. Irregular Solutions for Irregular Threats: Maritime Lessons from Dutch Counterpiracy Operations in Colonial Indonesia

Excerpts:

Further analogies can be observed regarding the apparent issue of cost-effectiveness, which played a significant role in both the establishment of the Governor’s Navy and the utilization of private maritime security companies today. Moreover, institutional conflict within naval circles concerning a navy’s ‘core task’ also represent a persistent feature regarding the delegation of security, as illustrated by Rear Admiral Terence McKnight, the inaugural commander of CTF-151, who in 2012 said: “It is time for the maritime community to take responsibility for their own security and free our navies to defend our freedoms on the high seas.” Additionally, similar to the political pressures faced by the ill-equipped and outnumbered Colonial Navy, the international naval coalitions equally received harsh criticism from their respective political establishments, as their attempts to suppress piracy initially had little effect and caused the further diffusion of pirate activity over a larger area.

With the return of great power competition and a renewed focus on traditional security, these insights may regain relevance. The Houthi attacks have increasingly become a concern for the private security industry, while states are growing more reluctant to engage in such non-traditional and irregular maritime threats. Moreover, the mobilization of equally irregular actors by states in countering a variety of asymmetric threats, as we saw with the Governor’s Navy, might make a return as well. As discussed concerning the use of nonmilitary actors in the South and East China Sea disputes, where coast guards and maritime militias are progressively overshadowing their naval counterparts. Whether Mark Twain said so or not, the maxim that history does not necessarily repeat itself but often rhymes certainly holds true, as the case study of Dutch colonial maritime strategy in the Indonesian archipelago highlights.

Irregular Solutions for Irregular Threats: Maritime Lessons from Dutch Counterpiracy Operations in Colonial Indonesia

irregularwarfare.org · Pieter W.G. Zhao · September 15, 2025

Editor’s note: This article is part of IWI’s Maritime Focus Area, which explores modern challenges and opportunities in the maritime dimension at the intersection of irregular warfare and strategic competition. Follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @proj_maritime.

With the de facto closure of the vital Red Sea route between Europe and Asia, 2024 proved a particularly challenging year for global maritime shipping. Houthi attacks forced shipping companies to reroute vessels around Africa, driving up costs and disrupting supply chains. While reflecting on the previous year, the Council on Geostrategy, a British think tank, stated that “The failure to establish the level of sea control needed to secure trade raises important questions as to the effectiveness of naval protection, future approaches, and most importantly, how navies that are already stretched thin ought to balance preparing for peer conflict with safeguarding shipping.” This statement captures a central tension that has confronted navies since the turn of the century: the need to balance persistent, non-traditional maritime security threats, such as maritime terrorism, piracy, and illegal fishing, with the renewed demands of great power competition, deterrence, and preparing for peer conflict. This article examines colonial Dutch counter-piracy operations to illuminate the tension between securing commerce and preparing for conflict, offering insights for modern maritime strategy.

Since late 2023, multinational operations in the Red Sea such as Prosperity Guardian, Aspides, and Poseidon Archer have struggled to reassure commercial shipping. Warships were scarce, response times slow, and much of the burden fell to private security firms. For Aspides, a fraction of the planned vessels were deployed, underscoring states’ reluctance to commit limited assets to missions perceived as non-traditional. These shortcomings echo earlier responses to Somali piracy, where Combined Task Forces 150 and 151 and the EU’s Operation Atalanta faced similar criticism over cost, sustainability, and strategic prioritization.

This modern dilemma is not unprecedented. The need to protect commercial shipping in peacetime while preparing for major conflict has shaped maritime strategy for centuries. History shows that navies often delegated certain maritime security responsibilities to nonmilitary or irregular actors to preserve high-end warfighting readiness. One telling example comes from Dutch colonial counter-piracy operations in the Indonesian archipelago during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There, Dutch authorities faced the same dual challenge of persistent piracy threatening trade and the need to remain ready for peer conflict. Examining how they navigated these pressures offers valuable insights for today’s naval planners and policymakers confronting the same enduring trade-off.

Historical Context: The Dutch in Colonial Southeast Asia

The Dutch regained control of their former colonial possessions in present-day Indonesia under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. Although their territorial possessions had been relatively limited at the time, the nineteenth century saw a period of widespread Dutch expansionism marked by imperialist wars aimed at enlarging and consolidating territory. By 1900, the Kingdom of the Netherlands centrally administered most of present-day Indonesia.

The military organization, tasks, and ministerial coordination of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) were relatively straightforward. But the maritime domain was not, consisting of two to three separate organizations subordinate to different departments with varying (and often rivaling) responsibilities. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dutch maritime forces in the Indonesian archipelago comprised a complex organization of conventional national forces, a regional force, and a civilian paramilitary force. This arrangement resulted primarily from what were described as “dual pressures.” On one hand, the Dutch sought external security against outside powers such Britain, Spain, and, later, Japan. On the other, they faced an internal security challenge centered on persistent piracy around the archipelago. In other words, this was a dual challenge comparable to today’s tension between traditional maritime security responsibilities and the need to balance irregular threats.

Like other regions with significant maritime trade, piracy has been a persistent feature of the Malaysian and Indonesian archipelagos. However, by the start of the nineteenth century, piracy increased considerably as a consequence of the diminishing power of the East India Companies and the resulting changes in intra-Asian trade patterns. As soon as the Dutch Commissioner-General arrived in 1816, alarming reports concerning attacks on commercial shipping and coastal regions arrived. The Dutch labeled these attacks “acts of piracy,” but Indonesians often saw them as legitimate resistance against foreign rule sanctioned by local rulers not unlike early-modern European privateering.

Besides piracy, the Dutch colonial administration was wary of foreign power encroachment on its territorial claims. Interestingly, the colonial administration considered these concerns to be interrelated with the issue of piracy, as they feared that Britain or Spain could justify intrusions into Dutch-claimed territory under the guise of counterpiracy operations. As such, a successful maritime counterpiracy strategy was considered essential for various socio-economic, colonial administrative, and geopolitical reasons.

Dutch Colonial Maritime Strategy: A Dual Approach

To handle these dual pressures, the Dutch formed a colonial navy, Koloniale Marine. This force was separate from the Royal Netherlands Navy’s auxiliary squadron, reported to the Ministry of the Colonies instead of the Ministry of the Navy, and drew personnel from the regular navy. The newly colonial navy carried out internal security and counterpiracy responsibilities, while the auxiliary squadron had the core task of protecting the Dutch colonial territories against external threats. The auxiliary squadron had a relatively meager fleet of two frigates and four corvettes in 1818, in practice acting as an auxiliary to the colonial navy. The latter had 38 vessels with roughly 1,000 sailors and officers the same year. The colonial navy was primarily outfitted with conventional but outdated warships, converted commercial vessels, and gunboats to face largely ill-equipped and asymmetric adversaries, an arrangement that today may be considered maritime irregular warfare.

The Dutch took a conventional approach to an inherently asymmetric and irregular naval threat by choosing the colonial navy. As a result, the colonial navy proved utterly ineffective at its primary task of counterpiracy. There were occasional successes, such as in 1817, when the colonial navy’s frigate HNLMS Wilhelmina captured several pirate vessels off Seram Island. But their slow, bulky ships were no match for the fast and agile pirate craft, which avoided direct confrontation. Moreover, the densely wooded islands with their hidden inlets offered the pirates excellent hiding spaces. And since they could often count on the support of the local population, they were nearly untraceable. Accordingly, the cost of the colonial navy was disproportionate to its benefits, and criticism rapidly grew over the use of costly naval assets for ineffective counterpiracy operations. Moreover, naval officers increasingly began to lament such ineffective counterpiracy tasks, which they considered a task “unworthy of the navy.”

Piracy in the Indonesian archipelago persisted despite the colonial navy’s best efforts. The Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies decided to change strategy in 1821 by recruiting and mobilizing the local Javanese population for counterpiracy purposes. Their fast-sailing and maneuverable kruisprauwen cruisers were small indigenous sailing boats suited for the environment. These units would be decentrally organized under the authority of the local “resident,” a high-ranking Dutch colonial official governing an administrative division and armed with three to four guns, klewangs (traditional swords), and assegais (javelins). Local colonial authorities established a paramilitary civilian maritime force, crewed and outfitted by the local population, often under the command of a Dutch officer. This essentially countered an irregular threat with an equally irregular force. This “third” maritime force was known as the “Government’s Navy” (Gouvernementsmarine) in 1861.

The irregular Government’s Navy proved more effective at countering piracy than its naval counterpart, leading to the colonial navy’s disbanding in 1838. Vessels were reassigned to the auxiliary squadron of the Royal Netherlands Navy, which thereafter became known simply as the Dutch Squadron (Nederlands Eskader), as it no longer served as an auxiliary to the colonial navy. Although the conventional Dutch Squadron officially supported counterpiracy efforts, in practice the Government’s Navy absorbed most non-traditional security tasks. As a result, the squadron acquired the local nickname “half company” (Setengah Kompeni) due to its semi-military status.

The division allowed the Ministry of the Colonies, which was responsible for the Government’s Navy, to focus exclusively on the provision of inexpensive, small, and maneuverable vessels for counterpiracy purposes. Previously, the Ministry of the Navy obstructed their purchase as those capabilities were considered useless for more traditional security responsibilities. A larger fleet of smaller vessels was seen as more effective against asymmetric threats like piracy than a handful of larger, more sophisticated warships. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Government Navy maintained between 34 and 90 vessels, far outnumbering the much smaller regular naval fleets. Moreover, by recruiting locally and increasingly under the supervision of Dutch merchant officers instead of the more expensive naval officers, the counterpiracy campaigns became more cost-effective. As such, the Dutch colonial authorities effectively delegated and civilianized counterpiracy operations away from the regular military actors towards the more irregular and semi-military Government’s Navy.

Historical Parallels with Today

The Dutch colonial experience in the Indonesian archipelago offers striking parallels to the maritime security challenges confronting today’s navies, now underscored by the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea. Then, as now, maritime forces faced a persistent dual pressure: sustaining internal security against threats such as piracy or terrorism while remaining ready for external defense against powerful state rivals. The Dutch also recognized that these missions were connected: suppressing piracy helped deter foreign encroachment. Similarly, today’s “non-traditional” maritime threats (such as piracy, terrorism, and illegal fishing) are often closely linked to larger geopolitical competition. While the strategic contexts differ, the Houthi threat to shipping illustrates how seemingly localized maritime security challenges can be shaped and amplified by the ambitions of more powerful state actors.

The most striking analogy, however, is represented by the Dutch colonial authorities’ decision to delegate or outsource an asymmetric threat, in this case, counterpiracy operations, to an equally asymmetric and irregular semi-military civilian force. The Governor’s Navy, crewed with local Javanese under the supervision of Dutch merchant or naval officers, operated with a semi-military objective and thus represented an early precursor to today’s private maritime security companies.

In a sense, this parallels 21st century counterpiracy operations off the coast of Somalia. Initially, flag states relied on naval deployments, but Somali pirates held significant advantages with their fast and maneuverable skiffs and their ability to avoid direct confrontation. This led states to turn to irregular solutions: embarked guards and a larger number of cheaper, smaller escort vessels – as seen in counterpiracy operations in the Gulf of Guinea – provided a more effective defense and deterrence than a few powerful warships. In this sense, the rise of private maritime security companies mirrors the Dutch decision to counter irregular threats with equally irregular forces.

Further analogies can be observed regarding the apparent issue of cost-effectiveness, which played a significant role in both the establishment of the Governor’s Navy and the utilization of private maritime security companies today. Moreover, institutional conflict within naval circles concerning a navy’s ‘core task’ also represent a persistent feature regarding the delegation of security, as illustrated by Rear Admiral Terence McKnight, the inaugural commander of CTF-151, who in 2012 said: “It is time for the maritime community to take responsibility for their own security and free our navies to defend our freedoms on the high seas.” Additionally, similar to the political pressures faced by the ill-equipped and outnumbered Colonial Navy, the international naval coalitions equally received harsh criticism from their respective political establishments, as their attempts to suppress piracy initially had little effect and caused the further diffusion of pirate activity over a larger area.

With the return of great power competition and a renewed focus on traditional security, these insights may regain relevance. The Houthi attacks have increasingly become a concern for the private security industry, while states are growing more reluctant to engage in such non-traditional and irregular maritime threats. Moreover, the mobilization of equally irregular actors by states in countering a variety of asymmetric threats, as we saw with the Governor’s Navy, might make a return as well. As discussed concerning the use of nonmilitary actors in the South and East China Sea disputes, where coast guards and maritime militias are progressively overshadowing their naval counterparts. Whether Mark Twain said so or not, the maxim that history does not necessarily repeat itself but often rhymes certainly holds true, as the case study of Dutch colonial maritime strategy in the Indonesian archipelago highlights.

Pieter W.G. Zhao is a non-resident fellow at the Irregular Warfare Initiative, affiliated with IWI’s Maritime focus area. He is a PhD Researcher at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where his research focuses on the role of nonmilitary and irregular actors in maritime warfare and security throughout history. As a historian, his research interests include international security and geopolitics, with a particular focus on the maritime domain and the Indo-Pacific region.

Image Credit: A live-fire drill with Indonesian sailors from the Governor’s Navy, under supervision of a Dutch sergeant. Courtesy of the Dutch Marine Corps Museum.

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irregularwarfare.org · Pieter W.G. Zhao · September 15, 2025

16.How to Keep Generative AI from Crashing in Combat

Please note the author's bio. He is an American patriot.

Excerpts:

In summer 2019, my business was monitoring Chinese social media chatter. We started collecting conversations about a “new SARS” — the respiratory disease that gave the 21st century its first pandemic.

As autumn arrived, and the Chinese netizens started absorbing the enormity of what was happening, colloquialisms and slang references to the new illness appeared. This new lingo was meant to outflank the Chinese Communist Party’s online censorship. Importantly, our company’s version of a quality assurance sentinel was able to capture and align output from the conversations that the models missed or misinterpreted. Without our own quality assurance sentinel, our business would not have been able to swiftly pivot based on new data demands. My company was then able to deliver information to our customers, who gained a better situational awareness. This was critical for maintaining an advantage on the ground during the start of COVID-19, and it’s going to be much more important for dynamic and data-rich operational environments like space.

Importantly, generative AI has more immediate use cases for the military within the enterprise environment. For mission environments, those systems rely on other types of AI, such as computer vision, sensor fusion, robotics, and unmanned vehicles. But generative AI is quickly becoming the user interface into these other areas of AI, and so drawing upon the learnings from the prompt engineering and processes of the quality assurance sentinels, the evaluation ecosystem grows into these other areas.

Robust benchmarking from the quality assurance sentinel hones the operational tempo by providing operators with high-confidence outputs, enabling faster decision-making and more decisive action. It’s an important part of the commercial AI toolkit, and should be the same for the military’s materiel. The quality assurance sentinel role will eventually be deprecated and, non-ironically, AI will replace it. At that point, AI will be assuredly monitoring its own progress with hardly any human intervention or oversight. It will be another cog in the algorithmic warfare envisioned for the future.

But until that happens, humans ought to be in the loop for smaller teams working on critical mission systems influenced by generative AI output.

How to Keep Generative AI from Crashing in Combat

Daniel Levinson

September 15, 2025

warontherocks.com · September 15, 2025

Failure to constantly evaluate generative AI output is like driving a car, in a thunderstorm, at midnight, with no headlights. Good luck getting to your destination!

But there is good news with a newly released executive order on AI from the White House that calls for an evaluation ecosystem for AI. This can help set the baseline for scaling generative AI across the military, including in the Space Force.

The implementation of this ecosystem may not happen fast enough to outpace rivals like China, which has researched and proposed evaluation benchmarks of its own. As a technology startup founder and leader of multiple companies operating at the cross-section of national security and AI for most of the past 25 years, including in China, I want to deploy open-source benchmarking and evaluation that works well in the commercial sector and that can be freely transferred over to the Department of Defense. And that can be done now.

The Department of Defense should constantly evaluate the intelligence derived from generative AI. When I buy a car, I expect the factory assembly line to have quality control baked into the automotive manufacturing process, so my final product is drivable and safe. But even if the car passes all its safety inspections, it is only as safe as the driver controlling it. A car cruising down the road has two main assurance processes: one for the vehicle, and one to ensure the driver is properly licensed.

Warfighters need to expect generative AI to operate similarly to how drivers control automobiles. Large language model providers in the commercial arena are now working hard to craft safety and quality controls, as the Department of Defense has been expecting: over a year ago it announced a deal with ScaleAI to bring AI benchmarking to the military.

But operators require access now at the tactical level. They cannot wait. And while they hang fire, in the hands of an “unlicensed” team of Space Force guardians who are not maintaining control of the quality of the large language model’s results, generative AI will drift and crash. Just like a poorly maintained car.

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Avoiding “Oops” in Space Data Operations

Unreliable AI outputs from models lacking quality control at the tactical level could produce flawed intelligence assessments, leading to strategic miscalculations and unintended escalation in a contested environment. Imagine going to war off of flawed intelligence!

I’ve worked in AI for over 20 years, beginning in the late 1990s as head of internet operations in Beijing for a non-Chinese firm using early natural language processing to deliver intelligence to the United States, its allies, and multinational corporations. I later founded and sold several software companies in Asia, then returned to the United States as chief executive of a real-time people disambiguation startup and later as engineering chief at an AI firm.

I wanted to serve my country in uniform and was honored to accept a direct commission into the Space Force last year. I want to be sure that the Space Force continues to rely on new tools to generate critical and lethal capabilities of the type the commercial sector has been using for decades. Warfighters can avoid making future mistakes by utilizing some of the practices that AI scrums in both commercial and academic arenas have been using to safeguard the future. But while the military’s gears churn through requirements and authorization to operate, there are sufficient ways to operationalize benchmarking and evaluation.

Why is evaluation and benchmarking essential when using generative AI? Unreliable AI jeopardizes mission success and endangers personnel. Evaluation and benchmarking aren’t just crucial — they are non-negotiable for the operational integrity and reliability of generative AI systems. Without ongoing testing and rigorous comparison against established standards, the outputs of these models are untrustworthy — until they are verified — for missions where precision is paramount. Failure to continually assess their performance will inevitably lead to degradation. This transforms powerful tools into liabilities that can introduce catastrophic errors into critical military operations. This comprehensive, unyielding scrutiny isn’t merely best practice — it’s a fundamental requirement to seize and maintain the decisive advantage that prevents the kind of strategic vulnerabilities that can cost us everything.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the United States should use tax dollars to evaluate and benchmark at the strategic level the overall safety and bias of new large language models. The White House already ordered this. Instead, because no holistic evaluation system can ever capture all ever-evolving tactical mission use cases, quality assurance needs to be baked into the processes of operators planning and executing close-in maneuvers. Prompt engineering is currently the best tool to do this. When used wisely at the small-unit action level by subject-matter experts, it can overcome large language model problems within the evaluation ecosystem.

The Department of Defense is already relying on generative AI and large language models. But what happens when the large language models are updated? How does an operator evaluate if using a new model will still provide the same precision and accuracy as in the results from the older version of the model? How does an operator know if they are maintaining quality responses over a period of time?

A robust evaluation ecosystem solves these challenges. But benchmarks of natural language processing and AI work are largely missing at the tactical level when guardians operationalize their generative AI work. And when I talk to guardians about this, they either are ignorant of the need for benchmarks and continuous evaluation at the tactical level, or they are uncertain how to begin operating within the machine learning operations lifecycle.

There is a way to create workable, efficient, and inexpensive solutions to evaluate and maintain consistency of results when utilizing large language models. Sure, eventually the military can implement expensive, bloated solutions that mimic the inexpensive ones that get the same job done. That is the way of the Department of Defense of yore. But until then, this is something nearly any small team in the Department of Defense can manage. In fact, because of the variety and nature of military vertical data, it is really something that is challenging to outsource to third parties: It works best when cradled close to the team of subject-matter experts gathering the intelligence. These are skills the military can develop and use in-house across the Department of Defense as it is both tightening its belt and maximizing lethality.

Following Industry Best Practice

For the past two decades, as I’ve grown and run natural language processing teams around the world, I had daily and weekly cadences to get the latest benchmarks from my teams on the quality of our enrichment services. Natural language processing is the way machines understand, interpret, and generate human language, a field whose tactical origins trace back to the 1950s with pioneering efforts in machine translation. Natural language processing provides the foundational intelligence layer, allowing computer systems to dissect and comprehend raw linguistic data from the field, irrespective of its origin or complexity. The latest generative AI rides on the back of Graphics Processing Units and is a force multiplier that leverages decades of natural language processing advancements and utilizes these capabilities to create new, human-like content, enabling everything from rapid intelligence summaries to dynamic operational planning based on interpreted commands.

When evaluating natural language processing results, the startup teams I led would use globally recognized benchmarks like Bilingual Evaluation Understudy or Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit Ordering to evaluate if the model’s Chinese-to-English or Russian-to-English translations were continuing to deliver great results or if we saw their quality drift. Think of these like a quality control checklist for translations, ensuring that the machine’s translation is not only understandable but also grammatically and contextually correct when compared to a professional human’s version. I would weekly view my teams’ Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation scores to make sure we were correctly summarizing large groups of documents into readable, actionable intelligence. This is like a student being graded on how well they summarized a long book chapter, checking to see if all the important points were included in their succinct summary.

Or I would track sentiment analysis quality of our Open Source Intelligence news and financial data using a combination of precision, recall, and accuracy with our financial phrasebank. This is like teaching a computer to be a stock market analyst, training it to read a news article and correctly identify if the tone is positive, negative, or neutral about a company, for instance, by seeing if it correctly classifies an article about “record profits” as positive and one about “unexpected losses” as negative. I could deliver actionable risk and threat intelligence of what was happening on social media using a variety of datasets for comparative evaluation. And there are many other benchmarks I could use to monitor ethics, toxicity, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation quality.

If our benchmark scores kept getting better, we would document what we were doing so we could double-down on the good changes we were making to our algorithms and prompts. If we instead saw our scores declining, we would dive into why they might have regressed and look for corrections to set us up for success.

Guardians want to get to the same type of results, but without the financial and manpower overhead of operating the type of AI-focused commercial organizations I ran. So here is a basic plan for executing the type of oversight within a team that has many of the controls much larger organizations rely on. It’s the method by which commercial AI companies bootstrap, and it reduces the need for using Bilingual Evaluation Understudy or Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation plugged into a complicated test harness. Instead, it focuses on doing more with less through good prompt engineering and logging.

Why is this important? If a guardian’s job is to synthesize open-source orbital data and then formulate actionable space intelligence, they may want to concoct a generative AI pipeline that uses a few engineered prompts. As a starter, they may write a prompt that generates a known result. By doing so, they can be sure, in that instance, that the prompt is well-written. It’s like testing if a calculator correctly adds two numbers together. Then they can re-run that prompt on other data and verify if they are still acquiring accurate results. Does the calculator still give the same result? Once they’re satisfied with the ongoing results, they can start scaling up that pipeline and prompt with larger amounts of data.

The Basic Plan

To maintain operational integrity and ensure actionable insights from large-scale large language model-driven data ingestion, a small team should assign a single operator as the quality assurance sentinel. You can name the role anything you’d like, and I think the three words “quality assurance sentinel” correctly identify the role of being vigilant about quality and assuring it is maintained. At companies I’ve run in the past, the quality assurance sentinel would be called a search analyst or an insights analyst. Regardless of the name, this individual acts as the central authority on prompt performance, model reliability, and output fidelity at the tactical level. The quality assurance sentinel owns the end-to-end oversight of generative AI outputs and ensures drift, degradation, or hallucination do not compromise mission-critical intelligence products.

The quality assurance sentinel does not need to be savvy about algorithms, but they should have an excellent grasp of their own job domain. If they are focused on spectrometry data, they should understand if data they are looking at is ionospheric data or gravimetry data. If they are responsible for navigational work, then let’s hope they can spot a two-line element set. Their new task as quality assurance sentinel is to second-guess and oversee the model, so they need to be an expert in their domain. This is a big reason why outsourcing this type of niche — but mission-critical — task to third parties may not be a good idea. Don’t trust commercial products that promise to deliver this subject-matter expertise to the warfighter!

The quality assurance sentinel’s first responsibility is to establish a baseline operational framework for generative AI use cases. Whether document summarization, signal extraction, intelligence fusion, or sentiment triage, all missions ought to be clearly scoped with defined success criteria. This process may take a few weeks as the quality assurance sentinel talks with supervisors and members of the team about defining the successful mission. This includes hard metrics such as factual accuracy, latency, and hallucination rate, as well as soft metrics such as relevance, clarity, and tone.

The quality assurance sentinel maintains a master Evaluation Control Sheet that tracks all model interactions, inputs, outputs, and scores, that is version-controlled and accessible to the entire team. The Evaluation Control Sheet could be a simple spreadsheet. And the scoring can be created for the time, by the team. There’s no need to spend big bucks if the aim is to do more with less.

The quality assurance sentinel then builds a static test set representing key mission scenarios (approximately 20–50 samples per use case). This test set is run periodically or on any update to models or prompts. The quality assurance sentinel executes A/B testing between model variants (e.g., GPT-4o vs Claude 3) and scores responses across predefined metrics. All changes in model behavior, prompt structure, or performance degradation should be logged and acted on. The quality assurance sentinel should be constantly asking themselves, “What is different than before? Is the quality of the output better or worse?”

To prevent prompt drift and maintain configuration control, the quality assurance sentinel maintains a centralized prompt repository under version control (Git or equivalent). Every prompt edit, model parameter change, and output deviation should be documented. The quality assurance sentinel flags anomalies and enforces rollback if output quality degrades. In the commercial world, this repository is valuable intellectual property that quickly becomes the secret formula for making sense from seemingly disparate data.

Drift and anomalies are tracked with simple red/amber/green status indicators per use case. The quality assurance sentinel chairs weekly Quality Assurance Standups, delivering situation reports on large language model performance. These briefings to both members of the team and to leadership ensure the rest of the team stays aligned on what is operationally viable and what needs recalibration.

The quality assurance sentinel also builds and maintains a lessons learned repository to capture model behavior quirks, effective prompt strategies, and prior failures. This can be a simple spreadsheet or ongoing written document. Importantly, this becomes institutional knowledge and ensures long-term survivability and repeatability, even under personnel turnover or high operational tempo. SharePoint or Confluence are good locations for this repository if a spreadsheet is too lowbrow and if subscriptions for these higher-end platforms are readily available.

And the quality assurance sentinel should also try pushing the boundaries of each model, especially if it’s an off-the-shelf commercial model. As Benjamin Jensen, Yasir Atalan, and Ian Reynolds wrote in these pages, “commercial guardrails are unwarranted or even dangerous” in some military scenarios, so the quality assurance sentinel should understand how to blow the metaphorical tachometer off the large language model. Imagine a scenario where the team engages in information warfare and needs the model to output data that would otherwise be considered unsafe, or where a cyber squadron wants to input malware code to help find patterns or artifacts quickly. The quality assurance sentinel should red-team the limits to understand how to exceed them.

The rest of the team then focuses on ingestion, annotation, and exploratory analysis, while the quality assurance sentinel acts as the final gatekeeper before intelligence is disseminated or used in decision loops. All outputs used in briefings, products, or dissemination will need to pass quality assurance sentinel validation. Guardians can think of it as a pre-mission loadout check before go-time.

Bottom line: In a small generative AI cell, the quality assurance sentinel becomes the standard-bearer for model performance, prompt discipline, and quality control. This decentralized yet controlled structure empowers the team to operate at speed without sacrificing trust in the output. The team moves fast, but the quality assurance sentinel ensures they don’t move blindly.

This person fills the critical role of making sure they are driving a well-maintained car, staying on the road, and avoiding obstacles. The use of a quality assurance sentinel within any team helps to maintain quality results. As funding and organizational demands grow in the Space Force, the introduction of third-party platforms that do some of the quality tracking can be implemented. But in the absence of those tools, a quality assurance sentinel can be a great, inexpensive role addition.

The Future

In summer 2019, my business was monitoring Chinese social media chatter. We started collecting conversations about a “new SARS” — the respiratory disease that gave the 21st century its first pandemic.

As autumn arrived, and the Chinese netizens started absorbing the enormity of what was happening, colloquialisms and slang references to the new illness appeared. This new lingo was meant to outflank the Chinese Communist Party’s online censorship. Importantly, our company’s version of a quality assurance sentinel was able to capture and align output from the conversations that the models missed or misinterpreted. Without our own quality assurance sentinel, our business would not have been able to swiftly pivot based on new data demands. My company was then able to deliver information to our customers, who gained a better situational awareness. This was critical for maintaining an advantage on the ground during the start of COVID-19, and it’s going to be much more important for dynamic and data-rich operational environments like space.

Importantly, generative AI has more immediate use cases for the military within the enterprise environment. For mission environments, those systems rely on other types of AI, such as computer vision, sensor fusion, robotics, and unmanned vehicles. But generative AI is quickly becoming the user interface into these other areas of AI, and so drawing upon the learnings from the prompt engineering and processes of the quality assurance sentinels, the evaluation ecosystem grows into these other areas.

Robust benchmarking from the quality assurance sentinel hones the operational tempo by providing operators with high-confidence outputs, enabling faster decision-making and more decisive action. It’s an important part of the commercial AI toolkit, and should be the same for the military’s materiel. The quality assurance sentinel role will eventually be deprecated and, non-ironically, AI will replace it. At that point, AI will be assuredly monitoring its own progress with hardly any human intervention or oversight. It will be another cog in the algorithmic warfare envisioned for the future.

But until that happens, humans ought to be in the loop for smaller teams working on critical mission systems influenced by generative AI output.

BECOME A MEMBER

Daniel Levinson is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Air War College and is currently pursuing multiple graduate certifications at National Defense University. He has a Masters in Cybersecurity from Georgia Tech and a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Hong Kong. He earned his Bachelors in English from William and Mary. For more than 25 years he has been a tech entrepreneur, company chief executive, and investor around the globe, and has multiple million-dollar exits from his businesses. He direct commissioned as an active-duty lieutenant colonel into the Space Force in 2024. Before commissioning, he divested all commercial holdings that have any defense business interests.

The arguments in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the U.S. Space Force or Department of Defense. Appearance of, or reference to, any content, companies, outlets, views, or opinions does not constitute Department of Defense endorsement.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · September 15, 2025

17. An Introduction to the Economic & Legal Warfare Project

Excerpts:

If current practice is any indication, states are likely to consider non-traditional instruments of power to address these emerging threats. The strategic imperative to master these different toolsets has never been more urgent, as it is clear that the rules of engagement are shifting and will require a change in our response. ELW will be at the forefront of developing creative, effective, and practical applications of economic and legal power for 21st-century regular and irregular statecraft.

These tools are not the exclusive domain of the military or intelligence communities—in fact, many fall well outside of such traditional activities. Their relevance spans government agencies, private industry, and civil society, which underscores the need to democratize strategic thinking beyond traditional mainstream circles. Keeping with IWI’s mission, we invite thinkers, practitioners, and skeptics alike to join the ELW Project as we challenge assumptions, propose new frameworks, and help shape the evolving contours of state interaction and the continuous struggle for advantage.

An Introduction to the Economic & Legal Warfare Project

irregularwarfare.org · Matthew Flug, Tom Johansmeyer, Patrick Sweeney · September 14, 2025

Irregular warfare thrives in the proverbial “gray zone”—that murky space between war and peace, conflict and stability. The past several decades have shown a need to move beyond Cold War-era orthodoxy, where military force was the primary lever of assertive power, to an environment in which non-military hard power takes precedence.

Today, states routinely leverage public diplomacy, information activities, and coercive trade practices as part of their approach to gain legitimacy and erode adversaries’ political or economic influence. The Economic & Legal Warfare (ELW) Project seeks to explore how state and non-state actors are leveraging these indirect and often abstract forms of influence—including economic and legal warfare—to shape outcomes without necessarily triggering conventional conflict.

Through a whole-of-government lens, ELW will examine current use cases and future applications of state power to coerce, pressure, and manipulate relevant populations in pursuit of key strategic objectives. Fitting with IWI’s mission, this project will help national security policymakers, scholars, and practitioners understand this complex landscape and develop coherent policy recommendations through published articles, podcasts, academic collaborations, and policy dialogues.

While not strictly a military concept, Joint Publication 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States, outlines the Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic (DIME) model, emphasizing the interconnected nature of these instruments in achieving national security objectives. ELW builds on this approach, broadening the strategic planning to include non-kinetic domains that may seem unconventional in the irregular warfare discipline. In particular, ELW will examine the role of states’ coercive, resource-driven, economic, and trade policies on shaping favorable geopolitical conditions, underscoring its role as a critical component of modern and unconventional statecraft.

Economic and legal instruments are often viewed narrowly—as primarily coercive tools of national strategy. Sanctions, tariffs, and trade embargoes tend to dominate discourse, despite their bluntness and varying track records. ELW envisions an approach that includes more precision, more dynamism, and more agile use of economic tools and principles of lawfare.

As security strategy evolves, the tools of the trade will expand and be applied in ways that challenge existing paradigms, legal frameworks, and government organization. We believe that integrating these unconventional tools into strategies informed by irregular warfare—in ways that are asymmetric, minimally disruptive, and temporary—could profoundly reshape approaches to international relations. This shift in states’ behaviors suggests that more compelling modes of influence short of traditional deterrence through denial or the prospect of open conflict will emerge.

Key Topics We Will Explore:

Sanctions & Embargoes – Exploring modern applications and limitations of coercive trade tools.
Investment Security – Examining inbound and outbound controls in an era of supply chain resiliency, de-risking efforts, and integrated national industrial strategies.
Contingent Capital & Foreign Aid – The strategic implications of conditioned economic assistance.
Disaster Diplomacy – Leveraging natural disasters as moments of influence or opportunities amidst instability.
Dual-Use Technology – Investigating civil-military crossover.

Strategic Resource Leverage – Exploring how control over supply chains, agricultural systems, and critical minerals can serve as instruments of influence, resilience, and coercion in geopolitical competition. Emerging threats are rapidly redefining the security landscape. Access to water and control over supply chains may create leverage for upstream states at the expense of downstream neighbors. Climate change is opening new Arctic shipping lanes, raising the stakes for polar security while threatening the relevance—and economic power—of chokepoints like the Suez and Panama Canals. Meanwhile, the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters may generate both humanitarian crises and new opportunities for influence through aid and alliance-building.

If current practice is any indication, states are likely to consider non-traditional instruments of power to address these emerging threats. The strategic imperative to master these different toolsets has never been more urgent, as it is clear that the rules of engagement are shifting and will require a change in our response. ELW will be at the forefront of developing creative, effective, and practical applications of economic and legal power for 21st-century regular and irregular statecraft.

These tools are not the exclusive domain of the military or intelligence communities—in fact, many fall well outside of such traditional activities. Their relevance spans government agencies, private industry, and civil society, which underscores the need to democratize strategic thinking beyond traditional mainstream circles. Keeping with IWI’s mission, we invite thinkers, practitioners, and skeptics alike to join the ELW Project as we challenge assumptions, propose new frameworks, and help shape the evolving contours of state interaction and the continuous struggle for advantage.

Author Bios

Matthew Flug is Of Counsel at DLA Piper, advising on mergers and acquisitions with expertise in insurance, indemnification, and transactional liability. He also counsels on D&O and cyber insurance. Matthew is a senior advisor to Presage Global, General Counsel of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and serves on the board of Help Ukraine – Operation Palyanytsya. He holds degrees from Syracuse (J.D.), Johns Hopkins (M.S. Applied Economics), and American University (B.S. Business Administration & International Relations).

Patrick Sweeney is Founder and Principal of American Kestrel Global Strategies Group, a firm that specializes in aligning U.S. technology, services, and capital to support strategic priorities at home and abroad. Patrick previously served as Vice President at Business Executives for National Security. He earned degrees from the University of South Carolina (B.A.) and New York University (M.A.).

Tom Johansmeyer is a Political and International Relations Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kent, researching insurance and economic security with a focus on cyber. Based in Bermuda and also working in the reinsurance industry, he previously led Property Claim Services at Verisk, estimating the cost of disasters worldwide. A frequent writer and speaker on disaster risk, Tom is also a U.S. Army veteran who served in the late 1990s.

The views expressed are those of the authors 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.

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

IWI’s Economic and Legal Warfare Team Published by Joint Special Operations University Press on Contingent Capital and Economic Statecraft
IWI’s General Counsel and Co-Director of the Economic and Legal Warfare (ELW) Project, Matt Flug, together with fellow Co-Director Thomas Johansmeyer, published a piece in the Joint Special Operations University…
Winning Without Fighting: Economic Power and Information Warfare (Part 2)
Episode 133 is the second installment in our two-part series exploring how the United States can leverage non-kinetic instruments of power to compete effectively without resorting to military force. Building…
What makes warfare irregular? Pineland Underground speaks with Mr/LTC Doug Livermore on Irregular Warfare
Did you know the entire Joint Force engages in Irregular Warfare? Often defined differently depending on the individual or organization you speak to. The Pineland Underground podcast has Doug Livermore…

irregularwarfare.org · Matthew Flug, Tom Johansmeyer, Patrick Sweeney · September 14, 2025

18. Don’t Overestimate the Autocratic Alliance

I agree with Dr. Kim. But we have to be able to generate synergy among our silk web of friends, partners, and allies to be able to counter this "autocratic alliance." We must exploit its vulnerabilities and its very reasons for being - fear, weakness, desperation, and envy.

Conclusion:

The red carpet moment in Beijing was meant to unsettle Washington—and it should. It underscored how far the United States’ rivals have come in teaming up, even if their interests do not completely align. Yet China, Russia, and North Korea each still have reasons to deal with the United States. If Washington can resist the urge for improvised, optics-driven diplomacy; recognize its sources of leverage; and lean into its comparative strengths—its alliances, military power, economic influence, and diplomatic reach—it can shape the strategic environment instead of just reacting to it.

Don’t Overestimate the Autocratic Alliance

Foreign Affairs · More by Patricia M. Kim · September 15, 2025

Washington Still Has Significant Leverage Over China, North Korea, and Russia

Patricia M. Kim

September 15, 2025

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Beijing, September 2025 Alexander Kazakov / Sputnik / Reuters

PATRICIA M. KIM is a Fellow at the Brookings Institution with a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies.

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No moment captured the shifting global balance of power more vividly than when Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walked in lockstep on the red carpet at China’s military parade in early September. The three autocrats, despite a long history of mutual suspicion, projected a show of unity against Washington. The message behind the carefully managed scene was unmistakable: China is at the center of a rising anti-Western bloc, while the United States is adrift—divided at home, faltering abroad, and rebuffed by its rivals.

U.S. President Donald Trump has made no secret of what he wants from each of the three leaders: a peace deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine, a trade pact with Xi to rebalance the U.S.-Chinese economic relationship, and a summit with Kim to revive stalled diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula. But all three have spurned his overtures. Instead of engaging on Washington’s terms, Kim, Putin, and Xi are now linking arms in Beijing, flaunting not only their growing willingness to challenge U.S. leadership but also their ability to do so in concert.

But beneath this show of solidarity, China, North Korea, and Russia remain uneasy partners. What the three countries have is a tactical alignment rooted not in trust or shared values but in overlapping grievances and necessity. History demonstrates that they are not natural allies. Each state remains wary of entrapment and is unwilling to subordinate its national interests to those of the others. And crucially, each still seeks something from the United States—leverage that Washington must wield wisely.

THREE’S A CROWD

The last time China, North Korea, and Russia aligned this closely was during the Korean War, which ended badly for all. Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the current North Korean leader, invaded South Korea with Soviet and Chinese support. The gamble failed. North Korea became the isolated, impoverished pariah state it is today, while its southern rival, backed by the United States, flourished. For China, the intervention was costly, in both blood and treasure. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded, and scarce resources were drained from its economy, which was already battered by years of civil war and World War II. Worse, the war entrenched a permanent U.S. military presence on its doorstep and upended Beijing’s plans for Taiwan. Fearing a broader communist advance, the Truman administration reversed its hands-off approach and signed a mutual defense treaty with Taipei, indefinitely forestalling China’s goal of annexing the island, which remains unfinished business for China’s leaders to this day. For Beijing, the Korean War offered a sobering lesson: aligning with volatile partners, such as Pyongyang, out of ideological solidarity can incur enormous costs and generate long-term liabilities.

The Korean War also sowed lasting distrust between China, North Korea, and Russia. Pyongyang believed that Beijing had prioritized its own interests during the Panmunjom armistice talks, sidelining North Korea’s concerns. In the years that followed, North Korea resented what it saw as persistent Chinese interference and overreach. Kim Il Sung purged pro-Chinese figures from his country’s leadership, just as Kim Jong Un would do decades later when he executed his uncle Jang Song Thaek, known for having close ties to Beijing. Meanwhile, Beijing bristled at Moscow’s tepid support during the conflict. This added to a growing list of grievances that would culminate in the Sino-Soviet split, which began to take shape by the mid-1950s.

These fractures deepened over time. North Korea, ever transactional, learned to play Moscow and Beijing against each other, extracting aid and concessions from both countries while refusing to subordinate itself to either. China and the Soviet Union, once comrades in arms, descended into an intense ideological and geopolitical rivalry. For China, fears of Soviet encroachment loomed large. In 1961, just days after Moscow signed a mutual defense treaty with Pyongyang, China inked its own pact with North Korea, despite its bitter lessons from the Korean War. That treaty remains China’s only formal alliance to date. Two decades later, similar fears drove China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam, its last major war. By resorting to force, Beijing hoped to counter what it saw as Moscow-backed Vietnamese expansionism and Soviet encirclement in Southeast Asia. The throughline is clear: mutual suspicion, not solidarity, has historically defined relations among this trio.

FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS

Today, more than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the three countries have found common cause again in seeking to erode Washington’s power and influence. But the carefully choreographed display of unity masks old divisions and simmering distrust. Unlike Pyongyang and Moscow, Beijing seeks to reshape the global order without setting it ablaze. It aims to weaken U.S. influence without fully severing its profitable ties with the West. China has extended Moscow a critical economic lifeline and supplied dual-use goods that have helped sustain the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. But it has done so because the costs have been manageable, limited to reputational damage among Western states. Crucially, the war between Russia and Ukraine has not yet posed a direct threat to China’s own security or economic stability. If that changed, Beijing’s calculus could shift quickly.

The cracks in the Chinese-Russian relationship are especially evident on the Korean Peninsula. China is deeply uneasy about Russia’s expanding ties with North Korea. Moscow has turned to Pyongyang for munitions and troops to sustain its war in Ukraine and the two countries have signed a mutual defense pact. Putin has now eclipsed Xi as Kim’s most important partner—frustrating Beijing’s effort to be the dominant player on the Korean Peninsula. Over the past two years, Russia has added to China’s concerns by transferring sensitive military technology, including air defense missile systems and drone capabilities, to North Korea. In private, Chinese analysts express concerns about the limited visibility over these transfers and their destabilizing potential.

Putin has now eclipsed Xi as Kim’s most important partner.

What Beijing fears is a lack of control. In flash points such as the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, China can calibrate the pace of escalation. But North Korean adventurism, backed by Russia, could create volatility on China’s doorstep that it cannot easily manage. As in the Korean War, China risks being dragged into a crisis by a reckless junior partner supported by Moscow. Russia, for its part, is less concerned about the consequences of instability in Asia. Putin’s focus is squarely on reasserting Russian influence in eastern Europe. Should tensions escalate on the Korean Peninsula or in the Taiwan Strait, it is far from certain that Moscow would be willing to shoulder serious costs to support either of its partners.

Indeed, a deeper rivalry between Moscow and Beijing lingers beneath the surface. In June, for example, The New York Times reported that Russia’s domestic intelligence agency refers to China as “the enemy” and worries about Chinese espionage. Within Russia, there are persistent fears that Beijing harbors long-term ambitions in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Moscow is anxious, in part, because Chinese investment and workers have flooded into these areas in recent years and because China published official maps in 2023 that used historical Chinese names for several Russian regions and cities.

Of the three leaders, Kim Jong Un has the most potential to exploit the trilateral relationship. Pyongyang has long perfected the art of leveraging great-power competition to extract concessions and preserve its autonomy. Today, Kim is simultaneously capitalizing on his ties with Moscow and reengaging Beijing to ensure he doesn’t become too reliant on either patron. Attending the military parade with Xi, the first time the two leaders have met face-to-face since 2019, is part of a calculated recalibration. Kim reaffirmed his ties with China while keeping Russia close, strengthening his position to demand greater concessions from Washington in any future round of diplomacy. In this triangle, each country is hedging as much as aligning—pursuing its own interests under the guise of unity, yet prepared to shift course if either relationship becomes a liability.

PLAYING THE RIGHT CARDS

The uneasy convergence of China, North Korea, and Russia may not give the United States a sweeping strategic opening, but it still leaves Washington room to maneuver if it engages each adversary with purpose and discipline. The United States still holds meaningful leverage with China because Beijing seeks economic stability. It wants to avoid any direct confrontation with the United States that would jeopardize its rise. Beijing also shares, at least in principle, several U.S. objectives: preserving regional stability, preventing a nuclear cascade in northeast Asia, and witnessing a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine. Chinese officials have repeatedly emphasized their support for cease-fire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, portraying dialogue as the only way to resolve the conflict.

But overlapping interests alone are insufficient to spur cooperation. If Washington wants to translate these shared goals into tangible outcomes, it must proceed deliberately. The United States should make clear that progress on a trade deal and a possible Trump-Xi summit are contingent on China demonstrating its willingness to cooperate on areas of mutual concern—particularly curbing North Korea’s unchecked nuclear and missile expansion and ending the war in Ukraine.

The United States does not need to engineer a split between China and Russia, nor could it anytime soon. Beijing will resist overt pressure to publicly break ranks with Moscow or Pyongyang. But private pressure might work to sway China, especially when its larger priorities are on the line. Despite its defiant tone, Beijing still seeks a trade deal with Washington that lowers tariffs and preserves a degree of stability in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Failure to secure a deal may not be catastrophic for China’s economy. But it would add unwanted volatility, compounding existing economic strains and increasing discontent among the Chinese public. By raising the stakes and conditioning Chinese cooperation on Ukraine and North Korea as integral to a broader bilateral agreement, Washington could force Beijing to make modest but meaningful adjustments, such as slowing purchases of Russian oil, curbing dual-use exports to Moscow, and signaling to Pyongyang that denuclearization must remain a long-term goal.

The red carpet moment in Beijing was meant to unsettle Washington.

With Russia, Putin has shown little interest in peace talks that would require him to abandon his maximalist demands in Ukraine. He remains committed to outlasting U.S. and European support for Ukraine. But over time, Russia will need an off-ramp as troop losses mount, economic strains deepen, and public fatigue grows. Neither China nor North Korea can give Putin the diplomatic exit he needs. Only Ukraine and its partners can. Washington should not rush into negotiations; rather, it should use this leverage to carefully shape the conditions for a just and sustainable resolution to the war. The United States should coordinate with European allies to enhance Ukraine’s capacity for self-defense, provide credible security guarantees, and apply mounting economic pressure on Moscow. A key part of that strategy must involve pressuring China and India to scale back their support for Russia’s wartime economy—not through public ultimatums, which often provoke defiance, but through forceful backchannel diplomacy—allowing Beijing and New Delhi to change course without appearing to capitulate to U.S. pressure.

And with North Korea, the United States has bargaining power. Kim wants sanctions relief, regime security, and recognition of North Korea as legitimate nuclear power. There is a limit to how much China and Russia can deliver on these without U.S. cooperation. Despite its anti-American rhetoric, Pyongyang has long pursued a peace deal and normalization with Washington—not just for direct gains, but also because such a breakthrough would unlock broader engagement and economic assistance from Tokyo, Seoul, and beyond. This leverage shouldn’t be squandered in pursuit of a quick Trump-Kim photo op. A workable deal could start with reaffirming the joint statement, signed by Trump and Kim, from the 2018 Singapore summit, which included a clear commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. It could be accompanied by interim steps to reduce nuclear risks and expand diplomatic, economic, and humanitarian exchange with North Korea.

The red carpet moment in Beijing was meant to unsettle Washington—and it should. It underscored how far the United States’ rivals have come in teaming up, even if their interests do not completely align. Yet China, Russia, and North Korea each still have reasons to deal with the United States. If Washington can resist the urge for improvised, optics-driven diplomacy; recognize its sources of leverage; and lean into its comparative strengths—its alliances, military power, economic influence, and diplomatic reach—it can shape the strategic environment instead of just reacting to it.

Foreign Affairs · More by Patricia M. Kim · September 15, 2025

19. The Wrong Way to Fight the Cartels

Excerpts:

If the United States charges into Mexico with no regard for the political or military consequences, the end result could be a disaster. Washington would no doubt do some damage to major drug cartels, but the overall flow of drugs might not change substantially, and violence in Mexico might increase as the chaos leads to competition among surviving groups. Some cartels could even conduct revenge attacks across the border. The diplomatic consequences could be even more consequential. Mexico could end its migration and security cooperation, reducing overall pressure on cartels and curtailing enforcement actions with long track records of success, even as showy U.S. efforts proceed. The resulting anger in Mexico could easily spill over into other areas of the U.S.-Mexican partnership, including trade, undermining one of Washington’s most important economic and diplomatic relationships.

To avoid this outcome, Washington should prioritize strengthening its intelligence relationship with Mexico City, improving land and maritime border security, and building Mexico’s capacity to fight the cartels with targeted security assistance and training. Doing so could reduce the cartels’ freedom of action, increase their costs of doing business, and over time, reduce the flow of drugs to the United States. The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to rewrite the rules of U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. The Sheinbaum government views Trump’s threats of using force unilaterally as credible, especially after the strike on the Venezuelan vessel, and Mexico has proved willing to compromise, as long as the United States does not cross the country’s redline against raids on Mexican soil.

Trump has long criticized the United States’ forever wars in the Middle East. He is well aware of how U.S. interventions in the name of counterterrorism can go wrong. Mining the long and often sordid history of these efforts can provide the Trump administration with lessons for the fight against transnational crime. But to embrace the entire U.S. counterterrorism playbook without considering what may and may not work against the cartels would be to court catastrophe.

The Wrong Way to Fight the Cartels

Foreign Affairs · More by Ryan C. Berg · September 15, 2025

Trump Risks Repeating the Mistakes of the “War on Terror”

Ryan C. Berg, Daniel Byman, Iselin Brady, Riley McCabe, Alexander Palmer, and Henry Ziemer

September 15, 2025

Members of Mexico's federal forces in San Pedro Totoltepec, Mexico, August 2025 Gabinete de Seguridad de Mexico / Reuters

RYAN C. BERG is Director of the Americas Program and Head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

DANIEL BYMAN is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

ISELIN BRADY is a student in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

RILEY MCCABE is an Associate Fellow in the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

ALEXANDER PALMER is a Fellow in the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

HENRY ZIEMER is an Associate Fellow in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

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Since returning to the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to defeat the Western Hemisphere’s violent drug traffickers by any means necessary. In a March address to Congress, Trump declared, “The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Over the last several months, his administration has designated 13 cartels and criminal groups, including six based in Mexico and two in Venezuela, as foreign terrorist organizations. It has also surged troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, declared several tracts of land near the border to be military zones, directed the Central Intelligence Agency to step up reconnaissance drone missions over Mexico, and ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to draw up plans to assess potential collateral damage from airstrikes in Mexico.

Washington has left behind its traditional conception of the fight against transnational criminal organizations as a matter of law enforcement with its threats of “war” and consideration of military action against the cartels. In July, Trump directed the Department of Defense to prepare such plans. Then, in September, the U.S. military struck what administration officials claimed was a vessel used by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to smuggle drugs, killing 11. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the strikes on the basis that the U.S. president has the authority “under exigent circumstances to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”

A militarized approach may be a politically attractive way for Trump to project strength. And indeed, the United States can, and should, draw on many valuable lessons from the last two decades of counterterrorism missions during the “war on terror” in its campaign against the cartels. But there is a more productive path forward than drastically shifting the rules of engagement with transnational criminal groups. In Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Washington may have a genuine partner in containing the cartels that pose the most direct threat to the United States. More extensive border measures, increased bilateral security coordination, and more frequent (but not more lethal) maritime interdiction efforts can accomplish just as much as unilateral U.S. military interventions using drones and special operations forces would, all while limiting risk to U.S. personnel and mitigating blowback.

NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

Fueled by weak Mexican state capacity (and by complicity), demand for illicit drugs in the United States, and a steady flow of guns south, violent transnational criminal groups have morphed from relatively small-scale trafficking operations to sophisticated organizations, combining the financial networks and political influence of multinational corporations with the lethality of private military contractors.

Although Mexico, with U.S. assistance, has achieved many operational successes in its decades-long battle against the cartels, the fight is, at best, at a stalemate. Mexico’s 2006 “kingpin strategy,” which targeted cartel leaders, actually increased violence. In 2008, when the Mérida Initiative institutionalized U.S.-Mexican security cooperation, Mexico’s homicide rate stood at about eight murders per 100,000 inhabitants. By 2017, it had mushroomed to 26 per 100,000, largely driven by the growth of organized crime. Abuses by Mexican security forces further eroded public support for a militarized approach to public safety. In reaction to the state’s failure to stem rising violence, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador entered office in 2018 declaring the death of the Mérida Initiative, replacing it with a “hugs, not bullets” policy that prioritized social programs and poverty reduction over direct military confrontation with the cartels. “Hugs, not bullets” was no more successful than the Mérida Initiative, however, eventually becoming a byword for government passivity in the face of spiraling criminal violence.

Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s successor, has forged a different path. Under her leadership, Mexico has mobilized its intelligence services, army, and national guard against the cartels, setting new records in fentanyl seizures; deployed 10,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexican border; and extradited 55 cartel operatives to the United States. Although Sheinbaum’s government may have calibrated these moves in part to reduce tariff pressure from the United States, they nonetheless signal a departure from the approach of the López Obrador administration, which at times denied the very existence of fentanyl production in Mexico.

Mexico remains highly cautious of U.S. security interventions. In August, Sheinbaum announced that, although her government will “cooperate” and “collaborate” with the United States, “there will be no invasion.” That option, she said, is “off the table, absolutely off the table.” Still, Sheinbaum’s commitment to fighting the cartels presents opportunities for the United States.

THE OLD PLAYBOOK

For its part, the Trump administration has aimed to reinscribe the legal classification of cartels to signal a shift in the U.S. approach to fighting transnational criminal organizations. On the first day of his new term, Trump signed an executive order that described cartels as national security risks to the United States and vowed their “total elimination.” The subsequent designation of several transnational criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations made available new legal tools to bring charges against those who provide financial or other material support to these groups. The Department of Justice has previously brought material support charges against individuals in the United States who have provided time, labor, or financial assistance to help suspected members of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.

The cartels share many traits with the terrorists and insurgents that the United States fought in the post-9/11 era. Like insurgents in Afghanistan and Somalia, the cartels are nonstate actors that take advantage of state failure to exert authority over large swaths of territory. Rank-and-file cartel members, many of whom are part-time participants, are mixed into the population, making it hard to sort the guilty from the innocent. Like the Islamic State (ISIS), cartels use violence to spread fear and achieve their goals through intimidation. And like many terrorist groups, cartels are organized as networks of smaller cells, often with international links.

There are limits to the comparison, however. Unlike the Islamist groups of the post-9/11 period, cartels are generally motivated by profit, not ideology, a characteristic that lowers barriers to recruitment and widens the appeal of membership. In most cases, they seek less to replace the government than to intimidate, subvert, and corrupt it. Furthermore, Mexico is not a faraway country but a U.S. neighbor with much deeper cultural, historical, and diplomatic ties to the United States than Afghanistan or Iraq have. U.S. counterterrorism and counterinsurgency methods, if they are used, must be modified to reflect these differences.

OPERATIONAL INSECURITY

Past U.S. counterterrorism campaigns have benefited from intelligence sharing and cooperation with allies, who can use local police and security services to monitor potential terrorists and arrest them. In Mexico, many cartels exhibit poor operational security, enabling intelligence agencies to intercept their communications, track their movements, and compile information about organization membership, hierarchy, activities, operating structure, and patterns of behavior. Intelligence collected mostly by U.S. agencies then can be used by Mexican military, intelligence, and police forces to capture or kill cartel leaders and strike the groups’ training camps and facilities. Once cartel members are captured, intelligence is also necessary to prosecute them in courts of law. Monitoring cartels’ financing, furthermore, can eventually lead to the arrest of financiers and enable the Treasury Department to cut off correspondent banking with financial institutions in the United States or target and seize individual cartel members’ bank accounts, denying them access to payment networks and effectively halting the flow of money into the groups’ coffers. In June, for example, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network identified three Mexican financial institutions suspected of involvement in cartel-related money laundering, prohibiting certain economic transactions involving these banks.

Historically, U.S.-Mexican intelligence cooperation has been rocky, owing to mistrust, a difference in goals, and the weak capabilities of Mexican intelligence agencies, which produce relatively small amounts of actionable intelligence. But U.S. agencies produce plenty of intelligence that can fill the gap, especially now that the U.S. military has increased intelligence collection on the border and the CIA has expanded a program, which began under the Biden administration, to use unarmed drones to gather intelligence on cartel labs and redoubts. As long as Washington continues to share its information with trusted agencies within the Mexican government, Mexican security forces can use it to interdict cartel activity. The United States could also increase technical aid, expand information and analysis centers that pool intelligence across multiple agencies and assist decision-making known as fusion cells, and target financial support to Mexican intelligence and police services.

As Washington considers military options short of an invasion, one that became a common tool in counterterrorism campaigns is raids by special operations forces. Carried out in countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria, such raids eliminated senior terrorist leaders including al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, degraded or dismantled insurgent cells, and provided opportunities to gather intelligence that enabled subsequent operations. Yet there can be steep costs if the raid goes wrong. Sobering examples include a 2017 raid in Yakla, Yemen, which left one Navy SEAL dead and several others wounded, and the 1993 Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, Somalia, which triggered a firefight that resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis. Failed or controversial raids can provoke political scrutiny and erode public support for ongoing military operations. Civilian casualties, such as those in the 2017 Yakla raid, can further undermine local support and serve as powerful propaganda for militant groups.

Historically, U.S.-Mexican intelligence cooperation has been rocky.

In theory, special operations forces deployed to Mexico could eliminate cartel members, disrupt hubs of drug and human trafficking activities, and collect actionable intelligence in the process. But carrying out such raids would come with considerable risk. These operations always endanger U.S. personnel and, especially when they happen in densely populated urban areas, risk collateral damage. Given the large numbers of U.S. citizens who live in and visit Mexico (and the many family members of U.S. citizens in Mexico), civilian harm could trigger a strong public response at home in a way that civilian casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen never did. A botched operation would also jeopardize broader security cooperation with the Mexican government. And if the U.S. military executed raids without the Mexican government’s consent, the violation of sovereignty could further imperil collaboration between the two countries.

A safer alternative to sending in special operations forces is to use drones. Over decades of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, drones have been used in one-off strikes against top leadership and in sustained campaigns targeting the middle ranks of an organization. Sustained drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan removed key figures, disrupted communications and organizational processes, forced leaders into hiding, and prevented the establishment of large-scale training camps. Yet even successful drone campaigns rarely destroy a group entirely. They force decentralization, which does make it harder for terrorist groups, especially those with far-flung affiliates, to coordinate globally and carry out acts of spectacular violence that require a high degree of training and skill. That lack of coordination, however, can create a fragmented foe that is more difficult to completely defeat. Moreover, U.S. drone campaigns have resulted in significant numbers of civilian deaths. The U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan from 2004 to 2018, for example, killed between 303 and 969 Pakistani civilians.

A drone campaign against cartels in Mexico might kill leaders, disrupt the transport of drugs, and destroy production facilities. But this sort of drone campaign would face strong headwinds. Cartels are primarily motivated by profit, so their leadership is generally easier to replace than that of ideological terrorist groups because of the material benefits that usually accompany membership in a cartel. Leadership decapitation also tends to be more successful for small (less than 500 members), new (fewer than ten years old), and centralized networks. Cartels, however, can easily become decentralized, and many of the best-known transnational criminal networks are large and relatively established. And if the bloody turf wars catalyzed by the kingpin strategy is any indication, drone campaigns would create additional fighting among cartels for control of the drug trade, likely killing many civilians in the process.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

Given the risks of and likely backlash to both drone strikes and targeted raids, the United States should consider other strategies to suppress Mexico’s cartel operations. Some of the U.S. military’s most expansive counterterrorism efforts have involved securing territory to exert pressure on and deny safe haven to terrorist groups. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. forces attempted to destroy bases where terrorist groups could organize, plan, and train, and to stop “ratlines”—clandestine movement and supply networks—that enabled terrorists to infiltrate government-controlled areas. To secure Baghdad, for example, the United States had to secure neighboring residential, industrial, and agricultural areas and roadways—the so-called Baghdad Belts—that insurgents were using to stage attacks.

To impede smuggling routes and disrupt cartel operations, the United States could establish a buffer zone along the U.S.-Mexican border, perhaps extending into northern Mexico, by increasing border patrol and military deployments, as well as defensive measures such as physical barriers and sensors. Maritime buffers, established by increasing U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy patrols and maritime surveillance, could also prevent cartels from island hopping between countries in the Caribbean with poor littoral security to move drugs and precursor chemicals without detection. A more ambitious alternative would see U.S. forces work with Mexican forces to seize and occupy key cartel strongholds deep in Mexican territory, including in Sinaloa, Michoacán, Jalisco, and Tamaulipas. These efforts could be modeled after counterinsurgency campaigns such as those in Fallujah during the war in Iraq or in Kandahar during the war in Afghanistan, proceeding through the steps of clearing territory, holding it through persistent patrols, and then strengthening local governance and policing capacity.

Occupying cartel hotbeds deeper in Mexico could enable the U.S. military to dismantle infrastructure, capture or kill the groups’ leaders, and restore the Mexican government’s control over its own territory. But sending U.S. forces into the Mexican interior would demand a significant commitment of personnel, provoke cartel retaliation, risk prolonged conflict in occupied areas, and jeopardize the Sheinbaum administration’s cooperation. As terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan did, cartel fighters could use civilian populations as shields. And even if military operations were coordinated with the Mexican government, they could lead to a fierce backlash in Mexico against the United States. Sticking to buffer zones would not come without risk: this strategy would endanger U.S. personnel and require long-term joint operations with the Mexican army. But the risk would be lower than in a larger occupation of cartel territory, and this approach could still enable important gains, such as denying traffickers access to key corridors, disrupting cross-border activity, exposing cartel movements to greater surveillance and interdiction, and creating secure staging areas for U.S. intelligence collection and rapid response operations in Mexico.

Finally, U.S. counterterrorism strategies have often included efforts to improve the capacity of partner governments and their military forces, which may be poorly trained, corrupt, brutal, and politicized, in an attempt to prepare them to fight terrorists on their own. Partner governments typically welcome these efforts; unlike unilateral U.S. military action, they do not threaten the country’s sovereignty. When successful, U.S. training can make foreign militaries, police, and intelligence services more effective and willing to act by themselves, ensuring that long-term counterterrorism campaigns are less costly and risky for the United States.

Building the capacity of a partner, however, is difficult. Not only does U.S. training often fail to guarantee respect for human rights or improve norms of civilian control; it often fails to equip a foreign military for victory. Despite years of training and tens of billions of dollars in spending, U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan fell apart when facing smaller numbers of lightly armed opponents. Mexico’s track record does not necessarily promise a better outcome. Mexican security forces have already been receiving U.S. training and aid for years, yet their capacity is still lacking, and cartel-linked corruption is common at all levels of government. Recently uncovered networks of fuel theft in the armed forces do not inspire confidence. Nonetheless, Sheinbaum is under intense political pressure, from both Washington and from many Mexicans rightly preoccupied with violence, to deliver security gains. Washington should not abandon its approach of working with and training vetted units within the Mexican army and navy.

BLOWBACK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

If the United States charges into Mexico with no regard for the political or military consequences, the end result could be a disaster. Washington would no doubt do some damage to major drug cartels, but the overall flow of drugs might not change substantially, and violence in Mexico might increase as the chaos leads to competition among surviving groups. Some cartels could even conduct revenge attacks across the border. The diplomatic consequences could be even more consequential. Mexico could end its migration and security cooperation, reducing overall pressure on cartels and curtailing enforcement actions with long track records of success, even as showy U.S. efforts proceed. The resulting anger in Mexico could easily spill over into other areas of the U.S.-Mexican partnership, including trade, undermining one of Washington’s most important economic and diplomatic relationships.

To avoid this outcome, Washington should prioritize strengthening its intelligence relationship with Mexico City, improving land and maritime border security, and building Mexico’s capacity to fight the cartels with targeted security assistance and training. Doing so could reduce the cartels’ freedom of action, increase their costs of doing business, and over time, reduce the flow of drugs to the United States. The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to rewrite the rules of U.S.-Mexican security cooperation. The Sheinbaum government views Trump’s threats of using force unilaterally as credible, especially after the strike on the Venezuelan vessel, and Mexico has proved willing to compromise, as long as the United States does not cross the country’s redline against raids on Mexican soil.

Trump has long criticized the United States’ forever wars in the Middle East. He is well aware of how U.S. interventions in the name of counterterrorism can go wrong. Mining the long and often sordid history of these efforts can provide the Trump administration with lessons for the fight against transnational crime. But to embrace the entire U.S. counterterrorism playbook without considering what may and may not work against the cartels would be to court catastrophe.

Foreign Affairs · More by Ryan C. Berg · September 15, 2025

20. After Kirk's killing a growing chorus of conservatives wants his critics ostracized or fired

Cancel culture on steroids? How about civil discourse in our nation?

Please keep in mind Justice Scalia and Voltaire:

The late Justice Antonin Scalia: "I attack ideas. I don't attack people. And some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don't want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel."

Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," (actually coined by Evelyn Beatrice Hall to summarize Voltaire's ideas on free speech in her 1906 book, The Friends of Voltaire.)

After Kirk's killing a growing chorus of conservatives wants his critics ostracized or fired

AP · JOSH BOAK · September 14, 2025

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. (AP) — After years of complaints from the right about “cancel culture” from the left, some conservatives are seeking to upend the lives and careers of those who disparaged Charlie Kirk after his death. They’re going after companies, educators, news outlets, political rivals and others they judge as promoting hate speech.

A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist’s death to the firing or punishment of teachers, an Office Depot employee, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming.

This past weekend, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s assassination.

“This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,” Duffy said on the social media site X.

As elected officials and conservative influencers lionize Kirk as a warrior for free expression who championed provocative opinions, they’re also weaponizing the tactics they saw being used to malign their movement — the calls for firings, the ostracism, the pressure to watch what you say.

Such tactics raise a fundamental challenge for a nation that by many accounts appears to be dangerously splintered by politics and a sense of moral outrage that social media helps to fuel.

The aftermath of Kirk’s death has increasingly become a test of the public tolerance over political differences. Republicans are pushing not only to punish the alleged killer but those whose words they believe contributed to the death or dishonored it. At the same time, some liberals on social media have criticized those, such as actress Kristin Chenoweth, who expressed sympathy online over Kirk’s death.

“This pattern that we’ve seen for decades seems to be happening much more now and at this moment than it ever has before,” said Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He dates the urge to persecute people for their private views on tragedies at least to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “If there was ever time to support the better angels of our nature, it’s now.”

Goldstein noted that it’s unpopular speech, like people praising the assassination, that stands as the greatest test of acceptance of the First Amendment — especially when government officials get involved. “The only time you’re really supporting free speech is when it’s unpopular,” Goldstein said. “There’s no one out there trying to stop people from loving puppies and bunnies.”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, has cautioned that the motive for the assassination has not been confirmed. He said the suspect in custody clearly identifies with the political left and had expressed dislike of Kirk before the shooting. But he and other authorities also say the suspect was not known to have been politically engaged.

Kirk was seen as an architect of President Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, helping to expand the Republican outreach to younger voters. That means many conservatives see the remarks by liberals as fomenting violence, rather than as acts of political expression.

“I think President Trump sees this as an attack on his political movement,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on NBC as he noted the two assassination attempts against Trump as well as Kirk’s killing. “This is unique and different. This is an attack on a movement by using violence. And that’s the way most Republicans see this.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who is running for governor, called on social media for the firings of an assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University and professors at Austin Peay State University and Cumberland University.

All three lost their jobs for comments deemed inappropriate for expressing a lack of sympathy, or even for expressing pleasure, in the shooting of Kirk. One said Kirk “spoke his fate into existence.”

Some NFL teams chose on Sunday to hold a moment of silence for Kirk. Football teams have in the past chosen to memorialize victims after school shootings or an attack on a house of worship. They have also marked notable deaths of public figures, weather-related disasters and international crises such as Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023.

Because conservatives previously felt canceled by liberals for their views, Trump on his first day back in office signed an executive order prohibiting everyone in the federal government from engaging in conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

In February at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance criticized the preceding Biden administration for encouraging “private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth” regarding the pandemic. He assailed European countries for censoring political speech.

“Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree,” Vance said at the time.

Still, the Trump administration has also cracked down on immigrants and academics for their speech.

Goldstein noted that Trump’s State Department in the minutes after Kirk’s death warned it would revoke the visas of any foreigners who celebrated Kirk’s assassination. “I can’t think of another moment where the United States has come out to warn people of their impending cancellation,” Goldstein said.

The glimmer of bipartisan agreement in the aftermath of the assassination was in a sense that social media was fueling the violence and misinformation in dangerous ways.

“I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us,” Cox said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said “the most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains get us addicted to outrage.”

But many Republican lawmakers have also targeted traditional news media that criticized Trump for contributing to a toxic political climate with his consistent rhetoric painting anyone against him as an enemy.

On Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., blamed news outlets for having guests on who called Trump a “facist” or compared him to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Such statements have been borne out of Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss, his pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters and a range of policy differences. Among them, his deportations, deployment of the National Guard, mass firings of federal employees and his scorn for the historic limits on the power of the presidency.

But for Britt, those expressions were unfair, inaccurate and triggered violence.

“There must be consequences with regards to people spewing that type of hate and celebration in the face of this,” Britt said. “And I believe that there will be.”

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Jonathan Mattise contributed to this report from Nashville, Tennessee.

AP · JOSH BOAK · September 14, 2025

21. Inside Stephen Miller's Reign of Terror

Yes, a clickbait title. I do not send this from a partisan perspective. But Stephen Miller is arguably the intellectual/policy center of gravity for the Trump Administration so this critique should be considered.

Inside Stephen Miller's Reign of Terror

Rolling Stone · Asawin Suebsaeng,Nikki McCann Ramirez,Andrew Perez · September 14, 2025

I t was after 3 a.m. on Nov. 6 last year, and nobody on the planet was happier than a balding, slender man standing near the reception desk of the Hilton West Palm Beach.

Donald Trump had just finished hosting his 2024 election watch party at the adjacent Florida convention center, declaring victory in a speech eloquently touting “the most incredible political thing.” Jubilant Republican donors, campaign staff, future government officials, and attendees (of course, Jon Voight) flooded over to the luxury hotel to celebrate.

At the front of the lobby stood Stephen Miller, the man Trump would soon tap as his White House’s undisputed orchestrator of policies and executive authority.

Miller had been one of the first Trump administration’s key policy drivers, particularly when it came to the president’s throttling of legal immigration. Senior officials in President Joe Biden’s administration will tell you the country is still living with the damage Miller did to immigration during Trump’s first term, and that the Biden team was unable, or unwilling, to undo much of it with their four years in power.

But that night in Florida, something was different for the then-39-year-old Miller. A universe of possibilities was unfurling before him.

Amid the revelry, Miller huddled with other high-ranking Trump personnel and said his thank you’s to the ad hoc procession of euphoric conservative voters and GOP bigwigs who congratulated him over and over. They all could see it wasn’t just Trump’s victory that night — it was Miller’s, and many felt obliged to kiss his Trump-endowed ring.

To see the expression of unbridled joy written across Miller’s face at that moment of Trump’s restoration was to stare into the eyes of someone who could see the future: Trump’s top adviser, his most faithful believer, the one close aide who had somehow survived the countless purges of MAGA officials in the first term, knew the country was now his.

Speaking to one overjoyed woman, Miller said, “It’s gonna be great.”

More than seven months into Trump’s second term, Stephen Miller has become America’s — if not the world’s — most powerful unelected bureaucrat. With Trump’s blessing, Miller has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank. Think of any egregious policy from the Trump administration: Chances are, it was driven by Stephen Miller.

All of it bears Trump’s signature, but the president is not the one spending his nights writing executive orders and bending legal theory to his will; nearly all of this bears the authorship (or, at least, co-authorship) of Miller. Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Stephen Miller’s republic of fear.

Under Miller’s guiding hand, the government can deport (or kidnap and rendition) you or your spouse, without due process, to a foreign gulag, if the president feels like it. The White House can repeatedly threaten to take away the most basic of constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus. The president can launch Justice Department criminal investigations against his enemies who, by all known accounts, did nothing wrong except annoy the commander-in-chief, or refuse to help him steal an election. The president and his lieutenants can arrest you at a routine courthouse check-in, at your church, outside your kid’s school, even if you have no criminal record. They’ve instituted a heavily draconian system of immigration arrest “quotas,” ensuring a regime not mainly of mass deportation, but of mass disappearances and indefinite detention in jails and newly erected camps.

They’ve quickly turned much of federal law enforcement into the masked, nameless, unaccountable secret police, working at the whims of the president and his staff. The president can deploy armed National Guard troops, and even U.S. Marines, to the streets of an American city any time he wants — and deem it enemy territory. The administration has made censoring media organizations, comedians, and aging rock stars a policy priority, in an anti-free-speech crusade waged from the West Wing to the Federal Communications Commission.

“Shadow Sec Def.”

“Prime Minister Miller.”

“The REAL Attorney General.”

“The DHS boss.”

“President Miller.”

Trump administration officials and other Republicans close to the president and this White House are paranoid that Miller will one day hear them gossiping about him behind his back — but they still whisper the unofficial titles and nicknames that they bestow onto the White House deputy chief of staff.

When Rolling Stone asks one senior administration official about former Fox News star and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this source says, unprompted, that “he does what Stephen wants him to do.”

‘One Intense Motherfucker’

As a teenager in Santa Monica, California, Miller craved nothing more than triggering the good-looking kids in school who wanted nothing to do with him.

Jason Islas, who first met Miller at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says he and Miller and a third friend were a tight-knit band of outsiders who spent middle school doing preteen-boy stuff, like talking about Star Trek (Islas remembers Miller as a big Captain Kirk fan). That all changed, though, in the summer of 1999, between eighth and ninth grades, when, Islas says, Miller informed him they couldn’t be friends anymore. “One of the things he did say was that he didn’t like the fact that I’m of Latin heritage,” Islas recalls.

In the decades that followed, Miller did not grow — except to become more hardened in his extremist views. When he worked as a communications aide in the office of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions during the Obama years, he was so widely disliked by his conservative colleagues on Capitol Hill that Republican staff in other offices would invent or spread malicious rumors about Miller, such as that he liked to play with porcelain dolls. (A White House official insists that any such characterization of his time on the Hill is “inaccurate and baseless gossip.”) The staffers at the time never dreamed that he’d ever amount to much more than a punch line or an obscure cautionary tale of what happens when you read too many far-right hate websites and dive into Washington’s most feverish swamps.

Even today, not much has changed. As the president’s policy architect and enforcer, he is obsessed, according to three Trump advisers, with deploying the might of the government to stamp out what he deems “anti-white hatred” and “anti-white racism” and “anti-white discrimination” — no matter the cost.

Miller speaks almost exclusively in apocalyptic terms, in the caricatured language of military combat, forever war, and invasion against the culture and the homeland.

He’s yearned to erect a vast hyper-militarized network of what he’s dubbed “camps” for detention and mass deportation — a network he hopes will change the American political and physical landscape forever.

Miller, who is Jewish, has been denounced by his own uncle as a one-man betrayal of Jewish moral and political values. Miller has long held the deepest admiration for the Immigration Act of 1924, and wishes to bring America back to those days. The law is notorious for making the Holocaust deadlier for Jews who tried to flee the Nazis, only to be denied safe passage to the U.S.

Immediately after election night 2024 was called, human rights groups and pro-immigration advocates could not help but consider that they were not prepared for the onrush that Miller was about to unleash. Of all of the Trump appointees, he was the one who kept them up at night. For all of incoming Trump “border czar” Tom Homan’s big talk on mass deportations, he was nothing compared to Miller. To those familiar with Homan’s work, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could recognize, occasionally, that there were some rules and restrictions, here and there. For a guy like Miller, the only laws that mattered were the ones he and Trump could pervert.

Miller may be the avatar of the anonymous racist internet troll brought to agonizing life and imbued with power. But that does not mean he doesn’t thoroughly believe in the righteousness of the ideology he’s selling. In his mind, he’s the triumphant hero — a one-man antidote to effete liberalism, and a holy warrior against the permissive legal and illegal immigration that has left him and his peers feeling mugged by pluralistic reality.

Talk to Republicans operating at the highest levels of Trumpville and you get a unique mix of admiration and unease when you ask them what they think about Miller. “One intense motherfucker,” a longtime Trump adviser notes.

Even attempts by his friends to make him sound gentler, kinder, or funnier often fall flat, making him seem like a crank or the meanest dork you’ve ever met. For instance, multiple longtime Miller associates say that the top White House aide is one of the most “MAHA” people you’ll ever meet, and has plunged headlong into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-style food and health (or anti-health) agitprop. Accounts of his social life make him sound, to put it gently, tedious.

One conversational victim of his recounts to Rolling Stone what it was like to get hit on by a premarital Miller, circa 2017, at a bar not far from Dupont Circle. The story involves being grilled about which country was named on the collar of her clothing (don’t say China), and getting accused of being a “globalist” because she wasn’t the right kind of conservative.

Female strangers aren’t the only ones in Washington who think he’s weird. Over the years of their close working relationship, President Trump — ever the gossipy Mean Girl with a nuclear arsenal — has not shied away from insulting Miller behind his back. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Trump has commented to others in the past about Miller’s intense, awkward, and at times off-putting demeanor.

But to Trump, Miller is a useful battering ram, the policy answer to his lingering question of “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

“Stephen Miller has been one of President Trump’s longest serving and most trusted advisers for nearly a decade, and I can personally attest to the respect the president has for Stephen because I witness it every day,” says White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “That’s why Stephen serves as the deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, because the president has the utmost faith in him and his proven leadership abilities. In addition to being extremely effective at his jobs, Stephen is a loyal colleague and friend. Any suggestion otherwise is false gossip from people who don’t actually know him.”

In addition to the press secretary’s statement, the Trump White House sent Rolling Stone a lengthy list of testimonials — resembling an extremely MAGA LinkedIn endorsements section — from Republican lawmakers to prove that people like Stephen Miller personally.

Sen. Josh Hawley, for instance, says he’s glad to call Miller “a friend,” adding that “he cares deeply about helping create a future where American families can thrive.”

“Stephen Miller is bright, thoughtful, takes the time to listen to our members and their concerns, and has always been easy to work with,” says House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, adding: “I am proud to call Stephen Miller a close friend.”

The White House provided similar statements from Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Mike Lee, and Rep. Jim Jordan, with a spokesperson saying they expected that all of the lawmakers’ praise for Miller would be included in this story.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

‘Get It Done’

Nowadays, according to various sources working in and close to the Trump West Wing, the president’s lieutenant is technically a deputy White House chief of staff, but he far outpaces the actual White House chief of staff — Trump’s former 2024 campaign co-chief Susie Wiles — as Trump’s primary chief of administration policy.

Miller touches virtually every policy and executive action (especially as it relates to domestic initiatives), effectively all documents, Trump directives, constitutionally dubious orders, and memos. The architecture of Trump’s military crackdowns (in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and coming to a Democratic-dominant city near you) is in part a product of Miller’s vision for dominating liberal strongholds he despises.

“It’s a blast for Stephen,” says another fellow Trump adviser, in describing Miller’s role in orchestrating the domestic deployments of U.S. armed forces.

The Trump administration’s sweeping clampdown on diversity programs, higher education, and free speech Trump does not care for is a direct expression of Miller’s ethos, bringing to life a long-held ambition of federalizing the conservative “culture war” in ways once thought uncouth. Trump’s sprawling immigration and border enforcement is just “The Stephen Miller Show,” brought to you by Stephen Miller Productions LLC, and personally stage-managed by Stephen Miller.

With each shred of paper that the president will sign to launch these domestic programs, the Trump lieutenant peruses it, sometimes marks it up with edits, and pushes other Trump officials across the federal apparatus to, in his words, “get it done.”

His berating of intra-departmental and agency officials has become the stuff of legend, if not waking nightmares. Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, two sources who’ve worked in the federal government and have personally dealt with Miller tell Rolling Stone that his berating has made them each cry at work.

During intra-agency discussions, Miller has routinely name-called, yelled, threatened officials’ jobs or future in the party, and attempted to humiliate people in front of their colleagues. He becomes enraged if he feels the immigrant-arrest numbers aren’t padded enough, or if he believes Trump’s domestic agenda is being stalled, even slightly. He is known for working long hours and micromanaging the brutal policies coming out of the new administration. He has a longstanding reputation, dating back to 2017, in the Republican upper ranks as someone willing to say anything, do anything, and betray almost anyone, in the service of Trump and, more vitally, keeping his power and proximity to the president intact.

Within the highest levels of the Trump administration, the idea that Attorney General Pam Bondi runs the Justice Department or that Kristi Noem runs the Department of Homeland Security is woefully incomplete. Nominally independent departments are run by the West Wing of the White House — and therefore, largely, by Miller.

When some government personnel would note that Trump can deploy National Guard troops and armed U.S. Marines to Democratic-run urban areas, but that the troops can’t conduct traditional law enforcement, per se, Miller was the one telling administration lawyers and staff that Trump wanted them to figure out ways around that legal inconvenience, and to report back with whatever legal theories they’d produce.

Miller has made it a top priority for the opening months of this Trump term to normalize the deployment of U.S. troops on American soil — not for states of emergency, but for domestic political purposes. According to those who’ve spoken with them about it, Trump and Miller view those who object as “weak,” “cowards,” and “pro-crime.”

‘We Just Have to Follow Orders’

In the aftermath of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to assist with ICE operations in Los Angeles, Miller insisted that purging undocumented migrants from the city would create a utopia for the remaining residents.

“You have any idea how many resources will be opened up for Americans when the illegals are gone?” Miller told Fox News. “No more waiting in line at an emergency room, no more massive traffic in Los Angeles. Your health insurance premiums go down, your public-school classroom size will shrink … and if you do need to get support from the government, you’re not going to be in line behind millions of illegal aliens from the third world. This is going to be such a gift to the quality of life of everyday Americans.”

In July, when speaking to the press pool in front of the White House, Miller was asked if it was the best use of the administration’s resources to be going after “moms with young kids.” In return, he grilled the reporter on what percentage of undocumented migrants should be allowed to stay. “Do you think we have some sort of Magic 8 Ball to see which particular illegal aliens … are going to go on to commit a rape or murder?”

Miller has no legal background, but according to Trump officials, Miller was the mastermind behind Trump’s ploy to use the Alien Enemies Act to conduct mass deportations without due process, a plot he detailed in 2023 during an interview with conservative radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton.

Miller was also the first member of the administration to publicly suggest the suspension of habeas corpus, the core constitutional right of protection from arbitrary detention by the state. Speaking to reporters at the White House in May, Miller said, “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion, so I would say that is an option we’re actively looking at.” There is, of course, no invasion.

For those who want to grasp the true nature of Miller’s legacy and his role in our world, you have to look far beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. To understand Trump’s principal enforcer, you need to understand what he is doing to countless people, all over the country — and then you’d have to understand his personal, instinctive response when he hears about the stories of his victims.

Across the country there are thousands of families ripped apart by the Trump-Miller gang, and most of those stories you won’t read about or may never hear about. One of these was relayed earlier this year to Rolling Stone by an Ohio-based immigration lawyer. This magazine verified details of this account, and agreed to use pseudonyms for the wife, husband, and three-year-old daughter. The lawyer asked not to be identified, due to Miller’s and the Trump administration’s zeal for targeting pro bono immigration attorneys.

In 2020, “Richard” (as we’ll call him) fled his Latin American home country to seek asylum in the U.S. As Richard will tell you, he had served in the military in his home country, but had grown fearful of what might happen to him if he remained, citing corruption and powerful organized crime.

By 2025, he had already made a life for himself in the United States. He had a wife — “Ellen” — and a small daughter, “Jessica,” and they were living in Columbus, Ohio. He worked to support the family, and Ellen stayed home with Jessica. There is no known history of petty or violent crime or any criminal record between them. However, in early 2024, the couple showed up for one of their scheduled hearings and left without actually attending it, but only because somebody at the check-in desk erroneously told them they were not on the schedule that day. That one mishap — which by all accounts, was not their fault — was enough to doom their family under Trump’s second administration.

This past June, Richard received a text message from ICE asking that he appear for a check-in at the local ICE office. Due to the Trump administration’s barrage of new policies and arrest quotas pushed by Miller and Trump, his lawyer was suspicious. Still, Richard had faith in this great country. He wanted to show he was no criminal, that he wanted to come here the right way, and that he had nothing to hide.

The Ohio-based attorney met the family of three at the federal check-in outside of Columbus, with all of them waiting in line to get into the building. Jessica and Ellen were wearing matching attire — Jessica’s hair in pigtails with ribbons, wearing a pink dress. The lawyer recalls the daughter and father laughing as Jessica played with her dad’s cheeks, which he blew up as if to mimic a puffer fish.

After they passed the waiting area, two armed ICE officers would soon flank them, and one of them told the attorney and the family that the officers had no choice. ICE had its directive “from Washington,” the officer said, which had been issued after Trump’s inauguration in January — new standards and demands for higher arrest and deportation numbers (regardless of any existing criminal record) that were directly authored by Miller.

The officer said they had to put the father in handcuffs right then and there, and take him away. “We just have to follow orders,” the ICE officer said.

At first, the Spanish-speaking family did not know what was happening. The lawyer had to translate all of this, back and forth, as the couple and their legal representative pleaded with the ICE officers to allow them to self-deport as a family. Surely doing so would save the American taxpayer money.

The ICE officer apologized. There was nothing anyone, apparently, could do.

The officers were courteous enough to offer to allow Ellen and Jessica to leave the room, so the child did not have to see them handcuffing her dad. The father squatted low to pick up Jessica and hug her goodbye. Jessica, confused and sobbing, would not let go, wrapping her arms around her father’s neck and her legs around his body.

One of the two ICE officers informed the family they needed to get things moving along, just as Ellen had her hands around Jessica’s waist, unable — at first — to pry the preschool-age girl off her dad. One ICE officer had his hand on the father’s shoulder, while the other officer hovered over the family.

“Daddy!” the girl screamed in Spanish. “I want Daddy! I want my daddy!”

Ellen was finally able to remove a hysterical Jessica from the room, and as the ICE officers took Richard, she kept yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, Noooooooooo!!!!” As they walked back to the waiting room, the lawyer could see the faces of the immigrants and others who were sitting in the waiting area, looking on in confused horror at what must have been waiting for them on the other side of that door. Months later, the attorney tells Rolling Stone, “I can still hear the little girl’s screams.”

Ellen and Jessica would pack up and leave for Richard’s home country. The two expected to reunite with him there within days. Instead, to their terror, the Trump administration disappeared him into a Louisiana detention facility for nearly two months. They have since been reunited, but the scars have yet to heal. The lawyer says that Jessica still wakes up in the middle of the night, shouting for “Daddy.”

Under every modern president there is harsh immigration enforcement, and heartbreaking decisions are made. But this story is only happening because the Trump White House and Miller are leaning on agencies to crack down in every state, just so Miller can run up the scoreboard on arrests.

To you, this may seem sad, even appalling. To Miller, he thinks your outrage is very funny. In private conversations this year, the top Trump adviser has said that liberals promoting immigrant families’ “sob stories” are engaging in emotional “blackmail” that Miller and the government simply will not fall for. He laughs it off, before getting back to work creating more horror stories.

Rolling Stone · Asawin Suebsaeng,Nikki McCann Ramirez,Andrew Perez · September 14, 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."

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