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Quotes of the Day:
"A society that mocks virtue prepares its own collapse."
– Plato
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
― Carl Sagan, 1995
"Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who remember freedom: poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality."
Ursula K. Le Guin
1. Wars of deception are coming for America. It isn’t ready.
2. Scoop: Republicans plan bill to consolidate government-funded broadcasters
3. Why is TikTok dangerous? Consider this scenario.
4. America Loves Cocaine Again—Mexico’s New Drug King Cashes In
5. Pam Bondi Needs a Free Speech Tutorial
6. ‘Not the first instance,’ Pentagon says about DOD duo’s surprising presence at Belarus drill
7. The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains
8. So far, Trump’s ‘War Department’ name change is all talk
9. Can the West Really Stop Russia’s War in Ukraine? A View from the Frontlines.
10. Europe Prepares for War
11. 'Already at war': Palau's president brings China-US competition for Pacific Islands to forefront
12. How Washington’s drone policy is catching up to reality
13. SOTF – Helping SOF Veterans Transition
14. Rethinking Counterinsurgency: A Police-Centered Approach
15. The Robot Medics of Ukraine’s Frontline
16. Book Review | Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare
17. Iran's Perilous Path Back to Power18.
18. Rising Political Violence and the Security Readiness Gap in the U.S.
19. This is who we are: America's 250-year history of political violence
20. No New World Order: Xi’s Alliance Of Autocrats Can’t Rival The West
21. China: Xi seeks to fill America’s void
22. Geopolitical Fracture And The Rewiring Of Global Trade – OpEd
1. Wars of deception are coming for America. It isn’t ready.
All warfare is based on deception. (Sun Tzu).
Conclusion:
It is often said that the most powerful form of deception is self-deception. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that what happened to Russia and Iran couldn’t happen to us.
Wars of deception are coming for America. It isn’t ready.
Costly, outdated weapons are no match for cheap drones and high-tech misdirection.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/16/drones-ai-war-military-weapons/
September 16, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. EDTYesterday at 7:00 a.m. EDT
A drone carries shells during Russia-Belarus military drills on Monday.
By Mick Ryan and Peter W. Singer
Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian army and author of “White Sun War.” Peter W. Singer is a senior fellow at New America Foundation and managing partner of Useful Fiction LLC.
If 2025 has taught us one thing about war, it is that surprise is alive and well.
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For the past several years, many assumed that technology was lifting the proverbial fog of war. In theory, satellites, drones, cellphones and artificial intelligence would track every move and reveal military plans before a country had a chance to put them into action.
And yet, this year, militaries have repeatedly proven able to trick their foes. For instance, in Operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainians used small drones hidden in tractor-trailers to blow up a dozen of Russia’s most valuable aircraft at bases thousands of miles away. A few weeks later, Israel’s Operation Rising Lion took Iran’s leadership by surprise, decimating much of its military and nuclear capability. That enabled Operation Midnight Hammer, a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack by the United States against Iranian nuclear sites.
These operations employed tried-and-true tactics of misdirection and manipulation, only now they use drones and AI algorithms to evade enemy countermeasures. As celebrated as these operations are in American military circles, they also highlight an area where the U.S. risks falling behind, with potentially the same disastrous consequences experienced by Moscow and Tehran.
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Technology has made daring raids such as these affordable. Ukraine used inexpensive drones costing under $1,000 each to damage multimillion-dollar strategic aircraft, inflicting economic damage orders of magnitude greater than the cost of the attack. Russia, lacking the manufacturing capacity to replace these bombers, has lost a critical component of its long-range strike and nuclear capabilities for years to come. Similarly, small, cheap Israeli drones took out multimillion-dollar surface-to-air missiles and radars, paving the way for the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian command and nuclear facilities.
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The U.S. still overwhelmingly relies on sophisticated but costly technological overmatch to deliver battlefield success. The cost of bombs and flights for the U.S. Air Force in its strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was an estimated $196 million. This does not include the $2.1 billion cost for each of the seven bombers that dropped them, which make up nearly half of the U.S.’s strategic bomber force. The old way can still deliver spectacular results, but with an eye-watering bill attached.
This came into focus last week when a wave of 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace. The drones were reportedly of the Gerbera type, which cost as little as $10,000 each and thus are often used as decoys to misdirect and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. To face them, NATO needed a response force of two Dutch F-35 and two Polish F-16 fighter jets, backed by a Polish Saab 340, an Italian AWACS early-warning jet and a mix of helicopters, costing over half a billion dollars in total. They then shot down just four of the nineteen drones with AMRAAM missiles, each costing over $1.6 million.
The U.S. homeland remains profoundly vulnerable to similar surprises. The looming wave of smarter drones, advanced AI and sophisticated 3D printing promises to redefine both the battlefield and how trickery is conducted upon it. And our main adversary, China, is investing heavily in these technologies while studying the lessons of Iran and Russia.
Our militaries must internalize the fact that our adversaries potentially have unprecedented reach into our countries. Future wars will involve actively defending the homeland. A potential conflict with China would demand a military capable not only of projecting power across the Pacific or guarding the Rio Grande, but also of protecting critical infrastructure across America from the same kind of weapons and tactics that we employ abroad.
Military procurement strategies also need to be updated. Low-cost systems still make up a minuscule percentage of our acquisitions. This year, Ukraine is on track to build, buy and use over 4 million drones, while the U.S. will produce only tens of thousands annually. Furthermore, any plans for building a “Golden Dome” over the United States had better be able to counter these new threats, not just Cold War-era ballistic missiles.
It is often said that the most powerful form of deception is self-deception. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that what happened to Russia and Iran couldn’t happen to us.
2. Scoop: Republicans plan bill to consolidate government-funded broadcasters
Preserve the firewall. I am not sure this will meet the real need unless the firewall is protected and it remains an exemplar of freedom of speech. If it is "controlled" by the USG then it will lose its value.
I give credit to Congresswomen Kim for doing her best to preserve VOA and RFA, et al., and especially my beloved Korean Service.
Excerpts:
Between the lines: The bill, titled "The Information Warfare Modernization Act of 2025," has a few Republican co-signers, including Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, and Reps. James Moylan and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, delegates from Guam and American Samoa.
Zoom out: The proposal would essentially kill USAGM and transfer more power and control over U.S. government-funded broadcasters to the administration.
- Such an effort is likely to face legal scrutiny, as it would challenge the existing firewall meant to protect independent broadcasters, like the VOA, from government influence.
-
There have been several lawsuits waged against the administration by government-funded broadcasters and their employees alleging the executive branch has overreached in its efforts to dismantle USAGM, a congressionally appropriated agency.
-
The administration has looked to continue firing USAGM employees, despite legal setbacks. Most recently, a U.S. district judge ruled in August that USAGM special advisor Kari Lake's effort to remove VOA Director Michael Abramowitz was unlawful.
Scoop: Republicans plan bill to consolidate government-funded broadcasters
The U.S. Agency for Global Media website is displayed on a phone with Voice of America branding in the background. Photo: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Axios · Sara Fischer · September 15, 2025
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/15/republicans-bill-media-usagm-radio-free-europe-funding
Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) on Monday is set to introduce a new bill to consolidate government-funded broadcasters overseen by the embattled U.S. Agency for Global Media and give the State Department more control as a way to preserve their funding and continue their efforts to counter foreign disinformation.
Why it matters: The bill aims to salvage decades-long efforts by government-funded broadcasters to provide news reports to countries with little or no access to independent reporting, while appeasing conservatives who think USAGM should be abolished.
Zoom in: The bill aims to consolidate three USAGM broadcasters — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks — into one unified broadcaster that receives government funding through a State Department-distributed contract, according to draft text reviewed by Axios.
- It doesn't provide a name for the proposed unified broadcast entity, but calls for the assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department to become the issuer of its funding contract.
- The unified broadcasting unit would be governed by a single board, essentially eliminating the independent boards at each broadcaster, but the individual agencies would still be able to preserve their individual branding.
- Oversight of Voice of America, the largest government-funded broadcaster within USAGM, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, would be transferred to the State Department's Office of Global Media within the Bureau of Global Public Affairs.
- The bill calls for all broadcasters to receive the same amount of funding as they are currently appropriated by Congress.
Between the lines: The bill, titled "The Information Warfare Modernization Act of 2025," has a few Republican co-signers, including Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, and Reps. James Moylan and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, delegates from Guam and American Samoa.
Zoom out: The proposal would essentially kill USAGM and transfer more power and control over U.S. government-funded broadcasters to the administration.
- Such an effort is likely to face legal scrutiny, as it would challenge the existing firewall meant to protect independent broadcasters, like the VOA, from government influence.
-
There have been several lawsuits waged against the administration by government-funded broadcasters and their employees alleging the executive branch has overreached in its efforts to dismantle USAGM, a congressionally appropriated agency.
-
The administration has looked to continue firing USAGM employees, despite legal setbacks. Most recently, a U.S. district judge ruled in August that USAGM special advisor Kari Lake's effort to remove VOA Director Michael Abramowitz was unlawful.
Yes, but: While Kim's bill would certainly challenge some of the independence of government-funded broadcasters, it does aim to preserve their funding as adversaries overseas try to fill an information gap left by the gutting of those news agencies.
- "Every time we fail to speak the truth, our adversaries fill the void. We cannot hand the microphone over to China, Russia, Iran and North Korea," Kim said in a statement.
- "This bill allows our trusted broadcasting partners to continue critical coverage of human rights abuses and repression in countries where it is suppressed, while ensuring that every taxpayer dollar effectively advances U.S. national security interests. If we don't preserve this critical channel of influence, we risk losing hearts and minds around the world."
The big picture: VOA was created more than 80 years ago to combat Nazi propaganda during WWII. Its mission, to promote democracy and American interests abroad through fact-driven journalism, has been supported for many years by both Republicans and Democrats.
-
President Trump looked to defund USAGM in his first term, but his efforts were stymied by legal challenges.
- In recent years, Republicans have taken aim at USAGM, formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors, arguing those agencies were mismanaged.
- Kim hopes her new bill will address the "logistical, operational, and editorial issues that limited VOA's effectiveness under USAGM by bringing it under the State Department in support of U.S. public diplomacy," her office said in a statement.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect the proposal would make a State Department official the issuer (not grantee) of the funding contract.
Axios · Sara Fischer · September 15, 2025
3. Why is TikTok dangerous? Consider this scenario.
Excerpts:
These concerns are why Congress passed legislation giving ByteDance a deadline to either sell TikTok to an American company or shut down the app’s U.S. operations. The legislation, whose constitutionality was confirmed by a 9-0 vote in the Supreme Court, allowed for a single 90-day extension to secure a deal. Not only has Trump extended this four times while trying to broker a deal to save TikTok, but Attorney General Pam Bondi has also shielded tech companies from legal liability as they continue to service TikTok in defiance of the law.
Unfortunately, these policies, as well as the White House’s decision to open an official TikTok account, trade national security for political expediency. They provide tacit approval for American participation in a system that has the potential to undermine the very things the Trump administration has argued we should be promoting: national pride; strong, resilient families; and American security. Indeed, TikTok is perfectly positioned to undermine each of the purposes in the U.S. Constitution: It threatens our union, subverts justice, promotes domestic turmoil, weakens our national defense, and threatens the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Building up our capability is central to American security, but so too is building up our will. That takes small steps, every day, by all of us. But the first small step is in the hands of the president. If we truly want to honor the American legacy — to say nothing of our future — we must ensure that TikTok is immediately sold or banned.
Opinion
Why is TikTok dangerous? Consider this scenario.
The White House has granted another reprieve. Every day the app continues operating is a threat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/15/tiktok-ban-china-trump-deterrence/
Updated yesterday at 6:07 p.m. EDT
(Washington Post illustration, iStock; Anna Kurth/AFP/Getty Images)
By Carrie Filipetti
Carrie Filipetti is executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition.
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that TikTok’s shutdown would be extended until Dec. 16, giving Washington and Beijing time to hammer out an agreement over the app’s U.S. operations. The previous deadline, Sept. 17, coincided with Constitution Day. While the Constitution plays an indispensable role in weaving together e pluribus unum — “out of many, one” — it now faces the possible threat of the Chinese Communist Party deliberately weaponizing TikTok to tear that unity apart.
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Enforcing the law on TikTok is critical to heading off a military confrontation and, if necessary, winning one. As Henry Kissinger wrote, “Deterrence requires a combination of power, the will to use it and the assessment of these by the potential aggressor.” Our political conversations tend to focus on our capability to project power while too often sidestepping the question of our will to do so.
This is because capabilities are significantly more tangible; they’re also easier to quantify and, at least theoretically, to adjust. In the context of China, there’s serious work to be done — from building up our military to reducing China’s dominance over key defense and energy technologies. But central to the Communist Party’s operations against the United States is not merely weaponization of supply chains or outpacing the United States in military capabilities. The Chinese Communist Party recognizes that even if we were to match the Chinese in capability, it would mean nothing if we could not match them in will.
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Enter: TikTok.
Imagine the following scenario. China decides to attack Taiwan and, fearing the United States will come to Taiwan’s aid, launches preemptive strikes against American targets overseas. In the United States, Chinese operators launch drone attacks from secret bases located on more than 380,000 acres of farmland China has purchased. As the government considers its options, the 170 million American TikTok users open their feeds to thousands of bots disguised as people, rattling off anti-American propaganda; encouraging young students desperate for meaning to fight their own government; and spreading disinformation at such a rapid rate that it is impossible to discern fact from fiction.
This scenario seemed plausible enough to Congress when it weighed TikTok’s future. Lawmakers were alarmed when Osama bin Laden’s terrorist screed “Letter to America” spread on the app following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack against Israel. TikTok denies it actively pushes political content, but the company only worsened Congress’s concerns about influence operations when its app successfully urged thousands of young Americans to lobby against counter-TikTok legislation. Lawmakers reported children and teenagers flooding their phone lines, often without knowing whom they were calling or why.
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Other threats can be more subtle, though no less nefarious. Internal documents and communications cited by state attorneys general in a lawsuit against TikTok allegedly show that the company’s own research found young users’ feeds were filled with suggestions of suicidal ideation, sexually explicit material, drug use and violence. ByteDance has admitted to spying on journalists — after being caught, the company blamed rogue staffers — and its employee ranks are filled with veterans of Chinese state media, where advancing anti-American propaganda is part of the job. What is to stop them from further weaponizing TikTok against us — turning child against parent, neighbor against neighbor and citizen against country?
These concerns are why Congress passed legislation giving ByteDance a deadline to either sell TikTok to an American company or shut down the app’s U.S. operations. The legislation, whose constitutionality was confirmed by a 9-0 vote in the Supreme Court, allowed for a single 90-day extension to secure a deal. Not only has Trump extended this four times while trying to broker a deal to save TikTok, but Attorney General Pam Bondi has also shielded tech companies from legal liability as they continue to service TikTok in defiance of the law.
Unfortunately, these policies, as well as the White House’s decision to open an official TikTok account, trade national security for political expediency. They provide tacit approval for American participation in a system that has the potential to undermine the very things the Trump administration has argued we should be promoting: national pride; strong, resilient families; and American security. Indeed, TikTok is perfectly positioned to undermine each of the purposes in the U.S. Constitution: It threatens our union, subverts justice, promotes domestic turmoil, weakens our national defense, and threatens the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Building up our capability is central to American security, but so too is building up our will. That takes small steps, every day, by all of us. But the first small step is in the hands of the president. If we truly want to honor the American legacy — to say nothing of our future — we must ensure that TikTok is immediately sold or banned.
4. America Loves Cocaine Again—Mexico’s New Drug King Cashes In
The old demand drives supply problem. Or is it that we will demand whatever is in supply - e.g., no fentanyl so we go back to cocaine?
Are we our own worst enemy?
Please go to the link to view the web page in the proper format with graphics.
America Loves Cocaine Again—Mexico’s New Drug King Cashes In
The Trump administration’s war on fentanyl created an opening for ‘El Señor Mencho’ to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. by the ton
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/mexico-drugs-cartel-oseguera-trump-586f0cec?st=eE6ys7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
By Steve Fisher, José de Córdoba
Follow and Santiago Pérez
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Sept. 16, 2025 9:00 pm ET
From a heavily guarded mountain hideout in the heart of the Sierra Madre, 59-year-old Nemesio “Mencho” Oseguera reigns as the new drug king of Mexico, aided in his ascendance by America’s resurging love of cocaine and the Trump administration’s escalating war on fentanyl.
Oseguera spent decades building his Jalisco New Generation Cartel into a transnational criminal organization fierce enough to forge a new underworld order in Mexico, displacing the Sinaloa cartel, torn by warring factions, as the world’s biggest drug pusher.
The Sinaloans, Mexico’s top fentanyl traffickers, got caught in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which promised to eradicate the synthetic opioid. The crackdown has left an open field for Jalisco and its lucrative cocaine trade, elevating Oseguera to No. 1.
“‘Mencho’ is the most powerful drug trafficker operating in the world,” said Derek Maltz, who served this year as interim chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “What is happening now is a pivot to much more cocaine distribution in America.”
Nemesio ‘Mencho’ Oseguera. Photo: DEA
Cocaine sold in the U.S. is cheaper and as pure as ever for retail buyers. Consumption in the western U.S. has increased 154% since 2019 and is up 19% during the same period in the eastern part of the country, according to the drug-testing company Millennium Health. In contrast, Fentanyl use in the U.S. began to drop in mid-2023 and has been declining since, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For new users, cocaine doesn’t carry the stigma of fentanyl addiction. Middle-class addicts and the tragic spectacle of homeless crack-cocaine users in the 1990s helped put a lid on America’s last cocaine epidemic.
Oseguera, who grew up poor selling avocados, is making a killing from cocaine buyers in the U.S. His cartel transports the addictive powder by the ton from Colombia to Ecuador and then north to Mexico’s Pacific coast via speedboats and so-called narco subs.
U.S. forces in the Caribbean recently blew up two speedboats, including one this week, that President Trump alleged were ferrying cocaine and fentanyl from Venezuela to the U.S. Fentanyl is largely produced in Mexico, and most cocaine ships through the Pacific. All those aboard the two vessels were killed.
The president also has threatened military action against Mexican drug cartels.
The U.S. has a $15 million bounty on Oseguera, but he rarely leaves his mountain compound, according to authorities. Few photos of him circulate. The cadre of men protecting Oseguera, known as the Special Force of the High Command, carry RPG 7 heat-seeking, shoulder-fired rocket launchers capable of piercing a tank, people familiar with cartel operations said.
Visitors to the drug lord’s stronghold are hooded before they embark on the six-hour car trip through terrain sown with land mines, those people said. Locations of the pressure-activated explosives are known only by members of Oseguera’s inner circle.
Oseguera’s fortunes rose after the U.S. pressured Mexico to crack down on the Sinaloa cartel, where Oseguera got his start in the trade. The Sinaloans pioneered the manufacturing and smuggling of fentanyl, an industry breakthrough that sent cartel revenue soaring and drove up the number of fatal overdoses in the U.S.
For the Sinaloans, landing in the administration’s spotlight couldn’t come at a worse time.
The capture of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in January 2016 and his extradition to the U.S. a year later, set in motion a precipitous decline. Guzmán’s four sons inherited their father’s empire, highly valued for its network of smuggling tunnels beneath the U.S.-Mexico border, used for moving cocaine, fentanyl and other contraband.
The sons, known collectively as the little Chapos, or “Chapitos,” shifted production resources to fentanyl, which compared with the heroin their father had brought into the U.S. by the ton is easier to smuggle and costs just a fraction to produce.
Federal officers escorting Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman into U.S. custody after his extradition in January 2017. Photo: Reuters
The Chapitos triggered an internecine war last year as a result of a plot against Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the 70-something co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel. Zambada was forced aboard a private plane bound for the U.S. by Joaquin Guzmán, one of El Chapo’s sons, who hoped for leniency from U.S. prosecutors.
Both men were taken into U.S. custody when they landed outside of El Paso, Texas. Zambada pleaded guilty to drug-trafficking charges last month and faces a possible life sentence. Guzmán, still in custody, pleaded not guilty to trafficking charges.
Zambada’s capture led to a violent split between men loyal to Zambada’s son, Ismael “Mayito Flaco” Zambada, and those allied with the Chapitos. An estimated 5,000 people from both camps have been killed or gone missing in the conflict, along with bystanders caught in the crossfire. Mexico has sent 10,000 federal troops in the past year to the state of Sinaloa, where the federal government has been largely helpless to end the fighting.
Hemmed in by U.S. and Mexican authorities on one front, and Zambada’s men on the other, the Chapitos swallowed their pride and sought the help of Oseguera, once a sworn enemy.
Each side had something the other wanted. Oseguera agreed to meet, looking to a future where he and his Jalisco cartel would rule as Mexico’s dominant criminal enterprise.
A chemist for the Sinaloa cartel preparing the synthetic opioid fentanyl in Culiacan, Sinaloa state, Mexico, in 2022; Mexican soldiers guarding the scene where six men were killed in an alleged confrontation with army forces in Sinaloa state last year.
PAUL RATJE FOR WSJ, FRED RAMOS FOR WSJ
Landmark drug deal
In December, Oseguera sat down with a top lieutenant of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, who leads Sinaloa’s Chapito faction. At the meeting in Mexico’s western state of Nayarit, Oseguera, who was operating from a position of strength, agreed to supply the Chapitos with weapons, cash and fighters.
In exchange, the Sinaloans opened their smuggling routes and border tunnels into the U.S., said people familiar with the meeting. The Jalisco cartel previously paid hefty fees to use the tunnels to move drugs beneath the U.S.-Mexico border, people familiar with its operations said.
A photo from U.S. authorities of a smuggling tunnel between Tijuana, Mexico, and Otay Mesa, Calif., in 2022. Photo: Homeland Security Investigations /Afp/Getty Images
The agreement also divvied up the U.S. trafficking trade, these people said: The Chapitos would keep their focus on serving American fentanyl addicts. Oseguera would concentrate on cocaine and its down-market cousin, methamphetamine. The Jalisco cartel now ferries tons of cocaine and record amounts of methamphetamine into the U.S. through Sinaloan-built tunnels, as well as fentanyl, the people familiar with cartel operations said.
The Sinaloa-Jalisco agreement was “an unprecedented event in the balance of organized crime,” Mexico’s attorney general’s office said in a July report. The Jalisco cartel compares with the Sinaloa cartel at the height of its power before El Chapo’s arrest, according to the DEA’s latest drug-threat assessment.
Oseguera caught another break from the Trump administration. The president’s campaign to deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally has taken federal agents away from drug-traffic interdiction. In Arizona, two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants. A senior administration official said the U.S. border is more secure than it has ever been.
Colombia is producing records amounts of cocaine, and the volume of the drug arriving in the U.S. is driving down prices, the people familiar with cartel operations said.
Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago, said Morgan Godvin, a researcher with the community organization Drug Checking Los Angeles. “The price of pure cocaine has plummeted,” Godvin said.
The Jalisco cartel also draws steady revenue from diverse sources outside narcotics.
The cartel acts as a parallel government in the southwestern state of Jalisco and other parts of Mexico, taxing such goods as tortillas, chicken, cigarettes and beer, security experts said. It controls construction companies that build roads, schools and sewers for the municipal governments under cartel control.
A booming black market for fuel is another cash cow. Gasoline and diesel stolen from Mexican refineries and pipelines—or smuggled into Mexico from the U.S. without paying taxes—is sold at below market prices to small and large businesses. U.S. officials estimate as much as a third of the fuel sold in Mexico is illicit. The head of the Jalisco cartel’s fuel division is nicknamed “Tank” for his prowess at stealing and storing millions of gallons of fuel.
The cartel profited from the passage of migrants bound for the U.S., charging them thousands of dollars each to pass through territory it controls. And in recent years, the cartel has operated more than two dozen call centers to scam senior citizens out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a vacation-timeshare fraud, according to the Treasury Department.
Family ties
Oseguera, celebrated as “El Señor Mencho” in narco-ballads, is viewed as an altruistic patriarch by some poor Mexicans living in areas controlled by the cartel, which organizes town fiestas and hands out food, medicine and toys.
In 1994, Oseguera was convicted of dealing heroin and served nearly three years in a California prison. He was deported to Mexico, where he married the daughter of the boss of a Sinaloa-affiliated gang. By 2011, he was leading his own organization based in Jalisco state.
Jalisco gunmen stormed a Puerto Vallarta restaurant in 2016 and kidnapped two Chapitos—Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo—who were celebrating Iván’s birthday. Oseguera released them after an intervention by “El Mayo” Zambada, who later became a target of the Chapitos.
Like many of Mexico’s cartels, Jalisco is largely a family business. One of Oseguera’s brothers, Antonio, known as Tony Montana after the Al Pacino character in the movie “Scarface,” was in charge of acquiring heavy weapons, the attorney general’s report said. The brother was arrested in 2022, and in February he was among 29 drug bosses Mexico expelled to the U.S., hoping to address Trump’s demands.
Oseguera’s son, who served as a top leader in the cartel, was sentenced in Washington, D.C., this year to life in prison for drug trafficking.
Hundreds of gunmen trained by former Colombian special forces work for Oseguera, according to Mexican officials. He travels through his territory in a small convoy of armored vehicles with a team equipped to fight off aggressors until reinforcements arrive. He had a specialized medical unit built near his mountain hideout to care for his advanced kidney disease, according to people familiar with the matter.
Photos from the Mexican navy showing packaged cocaine, in a 3.5-ton seizure from a semi-submersible vessel, a so-called narco sub, caught off the Pacific coast and brought to port in Acapulco, Mexico, in June.
Mexican Navy (2)
Two cartel accountants arrested by Mexican authorities said they were required to leave behind smartphones, Apple Watches and any device with GPS signal before traveling to meet with Oseguera, a precaution against electronic surveillance or tracking, according to the people familiar with the cartel’s operations.
Oseguera has a team that manages more than 50 phones of top cartel lieutenants, people familiar with the operations said. Every week, cartel operatives gather and review phone call logs to ensure the men haven’t been speaking with enemies, security experts said. Afterward, the men get new phones.
In 2020, more than two dozen gunmen fired more than 400 rounds at the armored car ferrying Omar García Harfuch, then Mexico City’s security chief, on the capital’s Paseo de la Reforma. García Harfuch was hit three times but survived. Two of his bodyguards and a woman headed to work were killed.
García Harfuch now serves as security minister for Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum. He is overseeing the law-enforcement offensive, backed by U.S. intelligence, that has crippled the Chapitos.
Oseguera’s subsequent rise to Mexico’s top drug trafficker puts him in a very dangerous spot, according to a senior Trump administration official.
Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com and Santiago Pérez at santiago.perez@wsj.com
5. Pam Bondi Needs a Free Speech Tutorial
It is difficult for me (and I guess the WSJ Editorial Board) to understand our lack of understanding of American values and the oath all military and government officials take to support and defend our Constitution.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Please keep in mind the words of the late 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.)
Every US service member in effect signs up to Voltaire's principle when they take the oath. We need to stay true to first principles and American values.
Pam Bondi Needs a Free Speech Tutorial
The Attorney General seems to think ‘hate speech’ is illegal. Charlie Kirk knew better.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/pam-bondi-free-speech-hate-speech-charlie-kirk-first-amendment-a4f09203
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Sept. 16, 2025 5:36 pm ET
Attorney General Pam Bondi Photo: evelyn hockstein/Reuters
Is a basic understanding of the First Amendment too much to expect from the nation’s Attorney General? Progressives have spent years trying to create and define a category called “hate speech.” This misunderstanding of the First Amendment seems to have infiltrated the D.C. water supply because AG Pam Bondi repeated it Monday in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Discussing Kirk’s work on college campuses, Ms. Bondi mentioned the “disgusting” antisemitism on display at many universities, and so far so good. But wait. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” the country’s top law enforcer told a podcast. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
Kirk would want a word. “My position is that even hate speech should be completely and totally allowed in our country. The most disgusting speech should absolutely be protected,” he once told a crowd. “The ACLU used to hold this viewpoint. The American Civil Liberties Union, they sued so that legitimate Nazis could march through downtown Skokie.”
Why? “As soon as you use the word ‘hate,’ that is a very subjective term,” Kirk said, in a video posted by his group in 2020. “Then all of a sudden it is in the eyes, or it is in the implementation, of whomever has the power.”
He was right, as governments around the world are proving almost daily. Armed British police recently arrested Graham Linehan, a TV sitcom writer, and reportedly questioned him about his posts on the internet, including one that read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” He says it was a joke, and it’s stupid, but criminal?
Mark Rowley, London’s police commissioner, said there was “reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed,” since British law “dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence.”
Yet he went on to criticize the government for giving police “no choice but to record such incidents as crimes when they’re reported,” adding: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position.”
In an appearance this year at the Oxford Union, Kirk told British listeners: “Free speech is a birthright that you gave us, and you guys decided not to codify it, and now it’s—poof—it’s basically gone.” In other words, thank goodness for the First Amendment.
Free speech isn’t absolute in the U.S., but the exceptions are narrow, and “hate speech” isn’t one of them. The Supreme Court held in a famous 1969 case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, that the government can punish speech as incitement only if it’s directed toward, and likely to produce, “imminent lawless action.” General expressions of hate on the internet are despicable, but they aren’t cause for prosecution.
Ms. Bondi tried Tuesday morning to clean up her mess, writing on social media: “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” But then she incoherently mixed in everything from “violent rhetoric,” to doxxing, to calling a SWAT team to the home of a Member of Congress. The AG also didn’t recant her statement on Monday that the Justice Department might “prosecute” Office Depot or its ex-employee who refused to print a Kirk vigil poster.
Ms. Bondi hasn’t had a distinguished tenure as AG, as she too often seems to follow the latest social-media, cable-TV mood swing. But she is a law enforcer, not a social-media anger management coach, and she’s sworn to uphold the Constitution.
Maybe Ms. Bondi should quit appearing on podcasts about Charlie Kirk until she listens to some Charlie Kirk podcasts.
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Paul Gigot interviews longtime Wall Street Journal Columnist Dan Henninger
Appeared in the September 17, 2025, print edition as 'Pam Bondi Needs a Free Speech Tutorial'.
6. ‘Not the first instance,’ Pentagon says about DOD duo’s surprising presence at Belarus drill
I was surprised.
‘Not the first instance,’ Pentagon says about DOD duo’s surprising presence at Belarus drill
Stars and Stripes · John Vandiver · September 16, 2025
A screenshot from a Belarusian defense ministry Telegram video shows two unidentified U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonels attending the distinguished visitor day on Sept. 15, 2025, at Zapad 2025, a military exercise involving thousands of Belarusian and Russian troops. The officers are the incoming and outgoing U.S. Embassy defense attaches, according to the Pentagon. (Belarus defense ministry via Telegram)
U.S. military officers were in Belarus this week to observe a portion of the country’s joint war games with Russia, an invitation that the top Pentagon spokesman said resulted from a thaw in relations with the Kremlin ally.
The U.S. Embassy in Minsk was invited to the Zapad exercise as part of a distinguished visitor day, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Tuesday.
The Pentagon accepted “in light of recent productive bilateral engagements between our countries,” Parnell said, adding that this was “not the first instance” of U.S. attendance at the major exercise.
Still, the appearance of U.S. military defense attaches took some observers by surprise and gained international attention given the tense relations between the U.S.-led NATO alliance and Belarus, which is aligned with Russia.
Zapad 2025, which involves thousands of Belarusian and Russian troops, got underway Friday and was expected to end by Tuesday.
The Belarusian defense ministry released a Telegram video showing the unidentified U.S. officers, both Air Force lieutenant colonels, attending the training event on Monday.
“We’ll show you whatever you’re interested in, whatever you want,” Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin told the American officers, Reuters and other news outlets reported. “You can go and see for yourself, talk to people.”
NATO member countries, especially those on the alliance’s eastern flank, have expressed anxiety about the joint war games, which are carried out roughly every four years.
However, this year’s Zapad exercise involved an estimated 13,000 troops, significantly smaller than past versions, which have included as many as 200,000 troops.
John Vandiver
John Vandiver
John covers U.S. military activities across Europe and Africa. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, he previously worked for newspapers in New Jersey, North Carolina and Maryland. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.
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Stars and Stripes · John Vandiver · September 16, 2025
7. The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains
Our defense (or War Department) is only as strong as our economic foundation.
Please go to the link to view the graphics:
https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-economy-analysis-wealthy-low-income-8ba80ccc?st=PVFg8q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Excerpts:
Young people are experiencing a particular fall in fortune. While the overall unemployment rate rose to 4.3% in August, the rate is much higher for recent college graduates—6.5% over the 12 months ending in August. That is about the highest level in a decade, excluding the pandemic unemployment spike.
That rate, based on data from the Labor Department, applies to people ages 20 to 24 looking for work who have at least a bachelor’s degree. Economists say AI is to blame in some cases, because tools such as ChatGPT can now automate work previously done by relatively inexperienced workers.
Bleak employment prospects have helped tank young Americans’ views on the economy, to levels hardly seen since a prominent monthly survey began in the 1970s. Typically, young Americans ages 18 to 34 are the most optimistic about the future of the economy in the University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumer sentiment. But since the start of the year, they are expressing more pessimism than people 55 and older.
“This is extremely rare,” said Kuhnen, the UNC professor. “They don’t have a home, they don’t have a large investment in their 401(k) and they are the most concerned about losing their job should we hit a downturn.”
The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains
High-earners and older Americans are faring better than ever, while fortunes are sliding again for low-wage and young workers
By Jeanne Whalen
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Sept. 16, 2025 9:00 pm ET
Illustration: Rachel Mendelson/WSJ
There are two economies in the U.S. right now, and they are moving in different directions.
For high earners and many older Americans, the economy looks robust. They are still spending like gangbusters, and their 401(k) accounts and homes have soared in value. They nabbed 3% mortgages when rates were low. Some might worry about AI eventually coming for their jobs, but for now their positions look relatively secure.
For many others, momentum has stalled or reversed. The big wage growth experienced by low-income workers during the pandemic has petered out. Those workers are curbing their spending and in some cases are struggling to find jobs. Unemployment for Black Americans and many young people has jumped. Home prices and rents have risen sharply, making housing increasingly unaffordable.
The divided fortunes of rich and poor in the U.S. may sound like an old story. Yet in recent years, workers on the low end of the spectrum began modestly narrowing the gap, as acute labor shortages enabled them to switch jobs and bargain hard for better wages.
Now the gulf is widening again. For much of the past few years, wages for the bottom third of U.S. earners grew at a faster rate than for the top third, Bank of America data show. But since the start of the year, top earners have pulled far ahead.
“As the unemployment rate has slowly crept up, and job growth has fallen more sharply, wage growth has moderated, but particularly for low-wage workers,” said Arin Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “This is disappointing news for those who were hoping the reversal in wage inequality would be a more permanent feature of the American landscape.”
In August, annual wage and salary growth fell to 0.9% for the bottom third, the smallest gain since 2016, the Bank of America data show. The top third saw growth of 3.6% year over year, the most since November 2021. That divergence was echoed in year-over-year spending growth in August, with household spending rising just 0.3% for the low-income group and 2.2% for higher-income households.
The cooling labor market is probably fueling much of that divergence, said David Tinsley, senior economist at the Bank of America Institute. Federal job data and Bank of America’s internal figures suggest that the softening job market is affecting lower-income households more than other groups, Tinsley said.
The booming stock portfolios of higher-income households are probably also playing a role, providing higher-earners the confidence to spend more, Tinsley added.
The top 10% of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—account for more of the nation’s total spending than ever, reaching 49.2% in the second quarter, compared with 45.7% a decade ago, according to Moody’s Analytics.
Wealthy Americans’ spending power is continuing to buoy luxury segments of some industries, including airlines and high-end sneakers. Flights to international destinations and in premium classes are still selling out, while domestic and main-cabin sales have softened across airlines. United Airlines said premium cabin revenue in the most recent quarter increased 5.6% “while the economy cabin was negative.”
For Camelia Kuhnen, a finance professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, much of today’s divide relates to homeownership. Older and more prosperous households that owned homes before the pandemic are sitting on real estate that is now 50% more valuable, she said, citing the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.
“I think the U.S. population is split into these two types—the lucky ones, the asset owners, and the unlucky ones,” Kuhnen said. The latter “are now stuck because there’s no way they can come up with that down payment to buy a home.”
The median age of first-time home buyers increased to 38 last year from 35 in 2023, a record high, according to the National Association of Realtors.
At the same time, a booming stock market and robust economies in tech and finance are generating expansive wealth and minting new millionaires and billionaires. The divide is creating parallel realities of American life.
The split screen is on view in the Chicago area, where wealthy residents so far this year have already bought more homes at or above $4 million than they did in all of 2024, according to an annual tally by Crain’s Chicago Business. Much of the action is on the North Shore, a wealthy suburban enclave stretching along Lake Michigan.
“We thought Covid was crazy, this is Covid times 10—it just continues to take off,” said Jena Radnay, a real-estate agent in the area who recently sold a $31 million French Revival mansion with a private beach. “When [buyers] look at their portfolio, I think they feel more confident they can take more risk. If you see your portfolio going up 25%, you are feeling better about making that purchase.”
A mansion in Winnetka, Ill., recently sold for $31 million. Photo: MILLER + MILLER Architectural Photography
Alfred Baah, a Chicago cabdriver who immigrated from Ghana two decades ago, shows the other side of the coin. He rents an apartment with his wife and two children on the city’s north side. The 40-year-old would like to buy a home, but prices are too high, and he hasn’t been able to save money lately. His income has dropped significantly this year amid a slowdown in his customer traffic.
When the economy recovered after Covid, Baah could usually count on picking up a ride at the airport without a long wait, he said. In recent months he has been waiting longer—often more than an hour.
In a good year he might make $80,000, but this year he is on track to earn about half that, he said. Meanwhile his grocery bill and other expenses have ballooned. “Whatever I make is just to pay the bills, and that’s it. I can’t save any this year,” Baah said.
Young people are experiencing a particular fall in fortune. While the overall unemployment rate rose to 4.3% in August, the rate is much higher for recent college graduates—6.5% over the 12 months ending in August. That is about the highest level in a decade, excluding the pandemic unemployment spike.
That rate, based on data from the Labor Department, applies to people ages 20 to 24 looking for work who have at least a bachelor’s degree. Economists say AI is to blame in some cases, because tools such as ChatGPT can now automate work previously done by relatively inexperienced workers.
Bleak employment prospects have helped tank young Americans’ views on the economy, to levels hardly seen since a prominent monthly survey began in the 1970s. Typically, young Americans ages 18 to 34 are the most optimistic about the future of the economy in the University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumer sentiment. But since the start of the year, they are expressing more pessimism than people 55 and older.
“This is extremely rare,” said Kuhnen, the UNC professor. “They don’t have a home, they don’t have a large investment in their 401(k) and they are the most concerned about losing their job should we hit a downturn.”
Not all data points to bleak times for groups who tend to earn lower incomes.
Hispanic unemployment in August, at 5.3%, was a little lower than a year ago, though it ticked up from July levels.
The trends are more worrying for Black workers, whose unemployment leapt to 7.5% in August, from 6.1% a year earlier. Historically, Black workers have been more likely to hold low-skill and junior-level jobs than their white counterparts, making them more vulnerable to layoffs. They have long faced discrimination in the labor market that can become more pronounced when overall hiring slows.
Federal job cuts may also be playing a role in a recent increase in unemployment among Black college graduates. The federal workforce has a disproportionate share of Black workers.
Write to Jeanne Whalen at Jeanne.Whalen@wsj.com
8. So far, Trump’s ‘War Department’ name change is all talk
Joe Bosco pulls no punches. But in defense of the War Department, I think we need a little more time to see changes. It is easy to change the name on the battleship but it takes much longer to change its course (of course I think that is partly Joe's point - substantive changes versus cosmetic).
Excerpts:
If Donald Trump is changing not only the name but the fundamentals of U.S. national security policy to make it more coherent and assertive, it would be a positive development. Unfortunately, his actions on Ukraine — and, increasingly ominously, Taiwan — bely those policy changes.
Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin and obvious sympathy for Russia’s aggression, to the point that he echoes Putin’s absurd claim that Ukraine started the war, makes it highly unlikely that his administration will correct the “forever war” syndrome that undermined Western interests in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. His brilliant attack on Iran’s nuclear program does not change that reality.
The War Department may be back, but the semi-accommodationist policies of the subsequent 72 years remain in place.
So far, Trump’s ‘War Department’ name change is all talk
by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor - 09/16/25 10:00 AM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5504305-trump-war-department-change/?utm
“So we won the First World War,” said President Trump. “We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defense.”
Trump spoke those words last week in announcing that, henceforth, the Defense Department would be called the War Department, its name from 1789 until the National Security Act changed it in 1949. The Korean War — America’s first “forever war” — broke out within months of the establishment of the “Department of Defense.”
But coincidence is not causation. The trigger for the outbreak of the Korean War was not the department’s name change, but rather another verbal formulation from the Truman administration during that same period — this one affecting policy.
In January 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a National Press Club speech laying out America’s vital security interests in Asia. He outlined a strategic perimeter that aggressive communist powers — the Soviet Union, China, North Korea — were not to cross. Unfortunately, he left South Korea and Taiwan outside the perimeter. Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung saw not a red line but a green light for their expansionist ambitions. They immediately conferred with Joseph Stalin to decide which of his two junior partners would move first against its targeted partner of the United States. Kim beat Mao to the punch in June 1950 and “the Korean conflict” was on.
Harry Truman quickly mobilized a United Nations coalition to oppose North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. He also reversed an earlier post-war decision and sent the Seventh Fleet back into the Taiwan Strait to prevent a widening Asian war. Its purpose was not only to deter Mao from following Kim’s example and invading Taiwan, but also to discourage Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s military dictator at the time, from attacking Mainland China.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the War Department name change means the U.S. will return to an offensive mindset in wartime situations, “not just on defense.” Here again, Korea offers a useful template.
The Korean conflict was the first “limited war” after World War II, in which the U.S. goal was no longer the enemy’s unconditional surrender and regime change. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for publicly advocating that advancing U.N. forces push north to the Yalu River, the Chinese-North Korean border, fearing the move could ignite a third world war. Instead, after three years of fruitless negotiations in which the communist adversary perfected the strategy of “fighting while talking,” an armistice was signed and North Korea’s invaders returned home, with the same leaders who had sent them into war still in power.
The only international punishment Pyongyang suffered for igniting a war that killed or wounded 1.5 million combatants and an untold number of civilians was a U.N. condemnation for aggression, along with its Chinese ally. The limited objective of this new, limited war was achieved: the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of the South Korean state was preserved. But, for the past 72 years, North Korea, now nuclear-armed, has continued to threaten the peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula, Northeast Asia and the world.
Communist powers learned valuable lessons from the Korean War experience. The first was not to rely entirely on the West’s statements about whether it would or would not intervene militarily. Following from that, it was understood that any aggressive move must not be so overt and unambiguous that the moral and strategic consequences for failing to respond would be evident and demand a response. (As Deng Xiaoping later cautioned China’s strategic planners, “Hide your capabilities, bide your time.”)
After World War II, the U.N. Charter was created to prohibit any unilateral use of force to change borders or governments. The West feels bound to honor these international law principles, even if its members are not always willing to pay the price to enforce them.
Korea’s lessons were then applied to the communists’ expansionist designs in Southeast Asia. After France’s colonial rule in Indochina ended, America was challenged by the need to prevent another Asian “domino” from falling.
North Vietnam’s legendary leader Ho Chi Minh, who had helped found France’s Communist Party, wanted the South. He knew the U.S. opposed substituting communist domination for French colonial rule, so he avoided sending North Vietnam’s army en masse across the 17th Parallel, as the North Koreans had done in openly violating the 38th Parallel. Instead, he organized, funded and directed the Viet Cong in South Vietnam to conduct an armed insurgency against the anti-communist government of Ngo Dinh Diem.
U.S. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon sent an increasing number of U.S. forces and increased bombing of selective targets in the North but refused to hit the most strategic targets, such as the dikes. Nor did they retaliate against Russia and China, which were sending vast amounts of weapons and supplies to support North Vietnam, with China also deploying forces to fight the Americans and South Vietnamese.
After more than 15 years of sabotage and terrorism, and after the U.S. had cut off its support in 1975 and Henry Kissinger had been awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. forces, Hanoi finally tore off the mask. It sent in its massive tank divisions, ending with the calamitous U.S. withdrawal, presaging the abandonment of Afghanistan.
If Donald Trump is changing not only the name but the fundamentals of U.S. national security policy to make it more coherent and assertive, it would be a positive development. Unfortunately, his actions on Ukraine — and, increasingly ominously, Taiwan — bely those policy changes.
Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin and obvious sympathy for Russia’s aggression, to the point that he echoes Putin’s absurd claim that Ukraine started the war, makes it highly unlikely that his administration will correct the “forever war” syndrome that undermined Western interests in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. His brilliant attack on Iran’s nuclear program does not change that reality.
The War Department may be back, but the semi-accommodationist policies of the subsequent 72 years remain in place.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute and member of the advisory board of The Vandenberg Coalition.
9. Can the West Really Stop Russia’s War in Ukraine? A View from the Frontlines.
There is still so much we can learn from the Cold War. We ignore its lessons, strategy, and tactics at our peril. See the last paragraph.
Excerpts:
And I've been saying this for two plus years now, that we should be showing the Russians that - just like what Ronald Reagan did with his strategy during the Cold War - we are going to challenge them wherever they challenge us. And we're going to make them have to decide where they're going to spend their very, very limited — and I have to stress that — their limited funds.
They have economic problems. We can exasperate that. And it's unfortunate that we would have to do that, but we should do that, because the Russians are not only challenging the Ukrainians now, they're doing things like threatening the life of European officials when they're in the air.
Russian drones are violating Polish airspace. There's a whole list of things they're doing which is very aggressive, and there needs to be a strong response to those things. We need to make Russia understand that they will pay a price, there will be a significant consequence if they cross a line, and they seem to be crossing the line, so now it's time to show them the consequences.
And the last thing I'll say is what I wrote an article with you on: I think the president needs to start messaging the Russian people directly. We, the U.S. government, need to message them directly. The president has given their leader a chance for peace, and he's not taking it. He should be held accountable by the people of Russia for whatever economic pain they're feeling, and for whatever consequences come from policies that we're going to have to make to punish Moscow for its continued aggression against its neighbors, not just Ukraine, but others like Georgia and Moldova, too.
Can the West Really Stop Russia’s War in Ukraine? A View from the Frontlines.
16 September, 2025
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/ukraine-frontlines-west-stop-russia
By Glenn Corn
Former Senior CIA Operations Officer, Member of Senior Executive Service and Adjunct Professor of Russian/Soviet Studies
Glenn Corn is a former Senior Executive in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who worked for 34 years in the U.S. Intelligence, Defense, and Foreign Affairs communities. He spent over 17 years serving overseas and served as the U.S. President’s Senior Representative on Intelligence and Security issues. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics.
EXPERT Q&A — Russia has not slowed its assaults on Ukraine, ceaselessly raining missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities while pushing forward - albeit slowly - on the frontlines. Former Senior CIA Officer Glenn Corn got a firsthand account of how Ukraine is faring under fire, telling The Cipher Brief about the resilience of the Ukrainians, the sabre-rattling from Russia aimed at dissuading Western support, and what Kyiv is seeking from the U.S. and Europe.
Cipher Brief CEO and Publisher Suzanne Kelly spoke with Corn from Ukraine, for an on-the-ground picture of the challenges, opportunities and immediate actions needed to counter Russia’s invasion. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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The Cipher Brief: Russia’s attacks have really been intensifying against Ukrainian cities. You've witnessed that. What has this latest barrage been like from your perspective on the ground?
Corn: We were woken up in the morning about 6:00 AM by strikes inside of Kyiv by the Russians, including one strike which damaged the Council of Ministers building downtown. I think the Russians are claiming that was not deliberate, which is interesting. It tells me something when the Russians are very quick to say that they were not behind something, because that tells me they're worried about the response.
The Cipher Brief: We've seen heavy missile attacks in civilian areas before, so this is not entirely new. But it has been stepped up. It was a bit like this when we were there with you a few months ago. Is it wearing on people differently now?
Corn: The Ukrainians are incredibly resilient, and honestly, I'm not seeing that they're cowered by these attacks. I'm sure people are upset, and I think just days ago, the Russians hit a group of pensioners that were at a post office to get their pension checks and killed a group of civilians - 20-plus. People respond to that. They're angry about that. The main thing I'm hearing and seeing though is that they're waiting for the Western response. What is the West going to do? We've given Putin a chance to negotiate a ceasefire, a way out of this disastrous war, and he's not taking it. In fact, he's doubling down and people here are asking, "When is the West, including the United States, or maybe led by the United States, going to respond?" And I think many Americans are probably asking the same question.
The Cipher Brief: That's been a question for a long time. When the West steps up and for example, says it will provide more long-range missiles to Ukraine - the response from Moscow is threats and saber-rattling. This saber-rattling deterred the Biden administration from taking a more aggressive approach to supporting Ukraine. What do you think needs to happen now, for the West to provide effective deterrence against President Putin?
Corn: Let's just go back in history, to 2022. The Russians drew several red lines: Finland joining NATO was a red line, they said they were going to respond against the West. They didn't do that. If we gave the Ukrainians ATACMS, F-16s, Moscow said that could result in a nuclear response. They didn't do that.
I think there are a lot of threats that are coming from the Kremlin. It's easy for me to say, of course, because I'm not sitting in the White House, but I think that those threats are designed to deter us from making decisions or taking action..
If we talk about the deep strike capability, the Ukrainians are doing that on their own. My personal view, based on some of the things we've heard from the Ukrainians we've spoken with, is that they don't need that as much as they need a mid-strike capability, because the information that we heard is that the Russians are preparing for another large-scale offensive in the next couple of weeks, maybe even less than a week. And the Ukrainians are going to have to be able to strike the logistics points, the collection points for Russian troops if the Russians try and mass forces along the front to strike at any particular part of the front lines.
And we all know the Ukrainians are stretched personnel wise. So, having that capability would be very valuable. But obviously that's a strategic decision. My own view is that we should give the Ukrainians the weapons they need and they should be able to use them as they need to defend themselves and to stop this Russian onslaught. And if that means striking a Shahed factory deep inside of Russia, or a factory where they're producing these Kinzhal missiles, we should let them do it. And I don't think that Russia is going launch a nuclear war over that.
The Cipher Brief: Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently accused Finland of laying the groundwork for a NATO attack on Russia - right in the midst of a Russian drone incursion into Poland. Russia began a troop build up along its border with Ukraine in 2021, saying, "There's nothing to see here, there's nothing to see here." And then all of a sudden, Russia declared Ukraine a threat and invaded with ground troops and paratroopers dropping into Kyiv. Are you concerned about the Russian rhetoric now around Finland and Russian drone incursions into other neighboring countries?
Corn: If we go back to before the Second World War, Stalin used provocation to start a war with Finland, to invade Finland. They had Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the nineties through the mid-2000s, who was used to scare the West. Then they had Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was used, in my opinion, as an example of who could come to power if Putin were to lose power. Back in the nineties, people worried about who would follow if Boris Yeltsin lost power, you could have Zhirinovsky and that would have been a disaster for the West. So, I think Medvedev is being used to some degree for propaganda and deterrence purposes. I don't think what he says carries much weight.
I'm pretty positive that Finland is not preparing to invade, or NATO is not preparing to invade Russia across the Finnish border. I think that's all hyperbole. It's designed to make excuses for some of the things they're doing and maybe to rally support inside of Russia for a cause which, my guess is, doesn't have as much popular support as the Russian regime would like. Especially as Russia's economic situation continues to worsen, which it is doing.
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The Cipher Brief:You briefed President Trump on the threat from Russia during his first term in office. You were still working at the CIA at the time, but you've talked to him about Russia in the past. If you were briefing the president today after your latest trip to Ukraine, what would be in that brief?
Corn: That the Ukrainians are ready for a deal. It's not the Ukrainians that are the problem. Putin is the problem. Putin is pushing, as a bully would do. They're trying to bully their way to a settlement that they want, which is in favor of Moscow, and it's time for the United States to stand up to Russia. In my experience, if we do that, the Russians will be willing to negotiate in a more sincere manner, but they need to see force on the other side, and we should not let them deter us with their threats, their saber-rattling, Medvedev's comments. I think if you look at past action and response, that tells you a lot. And we should look at that and learn from that.
The Cipher Brief: Besides a more severe package of sanctions being prepared in the Senate right now, what other things could be included in a show of force to Putin that you feel like might actually make a difference?
Corn: Secondary sanctions, yes, I like what the president's saying to the Europeans. They need to take a step, too. They need to show that they have skin in the game. And enough with the excuses that they're relying on Russian oil and gas. They need to make changes. They've got to do that, because we're at the point now where we all need to do something and it's going to be painful for everybody.
The additional provision of weapons systems, including air defense systems, are critically needed. We talked about long-range weapon systems. We should give them the ability to use those systems the way that they need to be used, and let the commanders decide how they want to use them.
Some of the things we're doing elsewhere right now, make sense to me. For example, what we're doing in the Caribbean and the message we're sending to Venezuela, we shouldn't forget that is a Russian ally and a People’s Republic of China ally, and so we should be putting pressure on Maduro. We should be putting pressure on any Russian ally, in my opinion, around the world.
And I've been saying this for two plus years now, that we should be showing the Russians that - just like what Ronald Reagan did with his strategy during the Cold War - we are going to challenge them wherever they challenge us. And we're going to make them have to decide where they're going to spend their very, very limited — and I have to stress that — their limited funds.
They have economic problems. We can exasperate that. And it's unfortunate that we would have to do that, but we should do that, because the Russians are not only challenging the Ukrainians now, they're doing things like threatening the life of European officials when they're in the air.
Russian drones are violating Polish airspace. There's a whole list of things they're doing which is very aggressive, and there needs to be a strong response to those things. We need to make Russia understand that they will pay a price, there will be a significant consequence if they cross a line, and they seem to be crossing the line, so now it's time to show them the consequences.
And the last thing I'll say is what I wrote an article with you on: I think the president needs to start messaging the Russian people directly. We, the U.S. government, need to message them directly. The president has given their leader a chance for peace, and he's not taking it. He should be held accountable by the people of Russia for whatever economic pain they're feeling, and for whatever consequences come from policies that we're going to have to make to punish Moscow for its continued aggression against its neighbors, not just Ukraine, but others like Georgia and Moldova, too.
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10. Europe Prepares for War
Excerpts:
Lt. Gen. Hodges, who lives in Germany, said he was surprised this summer to see a mobile troop-recruiting site on the beaches of northern Germany, and plenty of people engaging with the recruiters.
“There was a big camouflage Bundeswehr truck with several NCOs, and there were people there all day long talking to them,” he said. “They were very positively received. Two or three years ago, I don't think that would've happened.”
Experts noted that while an act of raw military aggression beyond Ukraine may be years away, if it ever comes, the “gray-zone” war that can include cyberattacks and the cutting of undersea cables, is already well underway.
Europe’s leaders “need to recognize that Russia's at war with us, even if it doesn't look and feel like war in the traditional sense,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said, referring to those gray-zone actions. “And so, we should make that very clear to our populations and to the Russians that this is unacceptable.”
Nations far from Europe “should be concerned for the simple reason that only when it is united does Europe stand strong against Russia,” Fix said. She noted that it took two Russian invasions of Ukraine – 2014 and 2022 – and two elections of Donald Trump – for Europeans to finally and seriously reinvest in their own defense.
“Divided, each European country is too weak on its own,” Fix said. “If they think in terms of solidarity for the whole continent – what NATO Article 5 essentially says, an attack on one member is an attack on all members – then they cannot allow themselves to be foot-dragging.”
Europe Prepares for War
“War footing” looks different in East and West – but increasingly, the continent is focused on defense
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/europe-prepares-for-war
16 September, 2025
British Army Apache AH-64E attack helicopters are prepared for take off from Wattisham Flying Station in Suffolk alongside Wildcat reconnaissance helicopters (right) and RAF Chinook support helicopters, before heading to Estonia to train alongside Nato allies on Exercise Steadfast Defender 24. (Photo by Joe Giddens/PA Images via Getty Images)
By Tom Nagorski
Senior Contributing Editor, The Cipher Brief
Tom Nagorski is Senior Contributing Editor with The Cipher Brief. He previously served as Global Editor for Grid and as ABC News Managing Editor for International Coverage as well as Senior Broadcast Producer for World News Tonight.
DEEP DIVE – From large-scale military drills to increased defense spending to the continent’s easternmost nations fortifying their borders with Russia, Europe is preparing for war.
Under pressure from the U.S. and threats from Russia, most NATO member nations have pledged to spend 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense and individual nations and smaller regional blocs are taking measures of their own: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are building a network of physical barriers as part of a “Baltic Defense Line”; the Nordic nations are implementing a “total defense” strategy; and the European Union (EU) has launched a Black Sea strategy to bolster regional defense and infrastructure in Southern Europe.
It’s all part of a paradigm shift in European defense policy that Lt. Gen. Sean Clancy, head of the EU’s military committee, calls a “global reset” driven by the heightened threat from Russia, and a fear that Europe’s stalwart defender for eight decades – the United States – may pull away from the continent.
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Recent actions, including Russia’s drone incursion into Poland in the early hours of September 10 have only accelerated the urgency. Polish and NATO forces shot down several of the 19 drones that entered Polish airspace, marking the first time since the launch of Russia’s now three-and-a-half-year war on Ukraine, that any NATO member has engaged militarily with Russia.
“Europe today is moving towards a war footing,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, told The Cipher Brief. “Europe is not a single entity of course, but we're in a much different place than we were even a year ago, in terms of nations realizing the threat and realizing they have to do something about it.”
“The continent is on a rearmament footing,” Liana Fix, Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Cipher Brief. “It is not seeking or desiring war. But European leaders have recognized – especially with the fear of U.S. abandonment by [U.S. President] Donald Trump – that their core duty is to provide security to their citizens, and that they are currently unable to do so without the United States. That is a huge gap to fill, which is why defense efforts – new production lines, factories, and so on - are multiplying at such a rapid pace.”
That said, it’s a mixed picture, given European politics and geography. Spikes in defense spending and military preparedness are far more pronounced in countries that share a border with Russia, or have a history of enmity with Moscow.
“Let's face it, this is the region, and these are the countries – Norway, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland – they're the countries in Europe that one way or another directly face Russia,” Toomas Ilves, a former President of Estonia, told The Cipher Brief. “And we have a history (with Russia). That's the whole point.”
And while that urgency is felt less in Western Europe, where increased defense expenditures are less politically palpable, the signs across much of the continent are unmistakable: to an extent not seen since the height of the Cold War – and in some places not since World War II – Europeans are girding for war.
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Last month, famously pacifist postwar Germany announced the opening of Europe’s largest ammunition factory, built by the defense giant Rheinmetall, that will produce 350,000 artillery shells annually, a sizable chunk of the continent’s plans to manufacture 2 million shells a year.
“This is remarkable,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. “Number one, it's a new ammunition factory being built in Germany. Number two, even more remarkable, they just had the groundbreaking ceremony 15 months ago. That's lightning speed in Germany, to go from shovel to ready-to-produce ammunition.”
The “war footing” also means that Rheinmetall and other European defense companies now rank among the continent’s hottest investment properties. Seismic shifts have come to the Nordic countries as well. For years, Finland pushed for other nations to end their use of anti-personnel landmines, after it joined the Ottawa Treaty that banned their use or production. Now Finland is leading a group of countries – Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania – in the opposite direction; all five are withdrawing from the Ottawa treaty, citing the Russia threat. Finland and Lithuania have actually announced plans to begin producing landmines in 2026.
The small Norwegian town of Kongsberg – population 27,000 – hasn’t been on anything like a war footing since the 1940s, when resistance fighters in the town blew up a munitions factory run by occupying Nazi German forces. Now Kongsberg is home to a weapons manufacturer, local breweries have taken to making Molotov cocktails, and the town has been busy refurbishing Cold War-era bomb shelters. “The lesson we learned from Ukraine is that everybody pitched in,” Odd John Resser, Kongsberg’s Emergency Planning Officer, told the AP.
Norway, which shares a border with Russia in the Arctic north, published its first national security strategy in May, warning that “after decades of peace, a new era has begun for Norway and for Europe.” The country stopped building bomb shelters three decades ago and earlier this year it announced plans to install bomb shelters in all new buildings.
Russia’s aggression in Ukraine should be a “wake-up call for all,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told the AP. “We must strengthen our defense to prevent anything like that from happening to us.”
While Poland and the Baltic nations are no strangers to threats from Moscow — their history has been marked by Russian invasions and occupations in the Soviet and Tsarist periods — they are perhaps on more of a war footing than any nations in Europe, save of course for Ukraine itself.
On September 1, Poland launched Iron Defender-25, its largest military exercise of the year, involving 30,000 Polish and allied troops. Poland has vowed to sharply boost the size of its army to 500,000, increase the pace of training, strengthen its borders, and spend more on military equipment.
In June, Estonia broke ground on its part of the Baltic Defense Line, which aims to build six hundred bunkers along each country’s border with Russia, part of a network of defenses including land mines, anti-tank ditches and so-called dragon's teeth, to run as deep as 30 miles from Russian frontiers.
“Certainly, Estonia and Poland are two of the leaders in Europe who are taking the threat seriously, who literally can look across their borders and see Russia and feel the threat,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. “And Finland too, because of its geography and its very small population, has a tradition of comprehensive defense where the population is prepared and they have a pretty sober assessment of it, which is why they have more artillery than any other country in Europe. (These countries) are prepared.”
In the Netherlands, far from Russia, Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, is reserving space for NATO military shipments and planning amphibious exercises. The port’s CEO, Boudewijn Siemons, has said there will be designated periods for “military cargo handling,” including the safe transfer of ammunition. Siemons has also urged stockpiling critical materials at Rotterdam and other key ports — including copper, lithium, and pharmaceuticals — to help ensure resilient supply chains in the event of war.
And with eyes to the south, the EU’s new strategy for the Black Sea calls for bolstered regional defense and infrastructure, again citing growing threats from Russia. The plan includes upgrades in transport systems—ports, railways, and airports—for military mobility, particularly in Romania and Bulgaria, and a new “Black Sea Maritime Security Hub” with the twin missions of enhancing situational awareness and protecting critical infrastructure.
Experts stress that the threat assessments and preparations look very different in different parts of Europe. The “war footing” in Tallinn or Warsaw looks nothing like it does in Paris or Madrid.
“The most fundamental observation here is that geography still counts,” Doug Lute, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, told The Cipher Brief earlier this year. “The closer you are with a land border to Russia and now a newly aggressive, revanchist, neo-imperialist Putin's Russia, the more these hard defensive measures count.”
While Poland holds its military exercises, and the “Baltic Defense Line” takes shape, some countries in Western Europe appear far more relaxed about the threat. And their politicians face questions about why social welfare spending should drop in favor of defense and security.
Spain, which sits in southwest Europe, far from any Russian border, spent only 1.3 % on defense last year, and was the one NATO member that refused to sign on to the alliance’s 5% spending pledge earlier this year. Spain and other nations are facing a skeptical public, for whom the Russia threat, and thus the need to move to anything like a war footing, is a tough sell.
Ilves, the former Estonian President, said some of these countries are “a little recalcitrant.”
“Belgium really doesn't want to do this,” he said. “Spain is probably the least interested in doing anything. And then of course we have the usual slackers” – among whom he listed Slovakia, Hungary and Austria, which he says “have always been against anything that really might look bad to Russia.”
Ilves sees what he calls “a slow change” across Europe, “moving in the direction of taking defense far more seriously.” Fix believes that “the whole continent is changing, but some parts faster than others.”
“Now, Western European countries such as Germany are much closer to an Eastern European threat perception,” she said. “For example, Spain is now where Germany was in 2014, and Germany is now where Poland was in 2014. Europe is moving but starting from different positions.”
Ilves believes the differences have as much to do with history as with geography.
“The experiences that we have gone through, the brutality, the deportations – these are things that people know about,” Ilves said, speaking of the suffering of the Baltic nations during the Soviet period. “That makes a huge difference, as opposed to countries that have never had any experience with that. And this was all rekindled with (the Russian attacks against) Bucha in March of 2022, right after the war (against Ukraine) began, and the first pictures and the evidence started coming from there. My great-grandfather was shot with 140 other people in the courtyard of a medieval castle. The Russians still do this now.”
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War footing or not, there is a separate question: is the continent ready to counter the Russian threat? All the experts interviewed for this article – and others interviewed previously by The Cipher Brief — stressed the importance of a united European front, and the specific imperatives of air defense and military mobility. A “war footing” isn’t complete, they said, without the railways and bridges, airfields and ports ready to move troops and material.
“The major challenges that we have in Europe are air and missile defense,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. “There's not nearly enough. All you’ve got to do is watch what Russia does to Ukraine every night. Imagine that slamming into Riga and Vilnius and Tallinn and Gdansk, and then all the major ports that Europe depends on. It's not only about protecting civilian populations, it's about protecting critical infrastructure.”
Hodges also cited shortfalls in Europe’s ammunition stocks, which have been made plain during the war in Ukraine – and which explain why he and others were heartened by the opening of the Rheinmetall ammunition facility. “These are areas where I think effort is being made,” he said. “We just have a long way to go.”
Hanging over the European security questions is the future of the U.S. military presence. The U.S. currently has between 90,000 and 100,000 troops deployed to Europe – 34,000 in Germany – and all are being looked at as part of a Pentagon-led Global Force Posture Review. Multiple reports have suggested that a 30% reduction of U.S. forces is on the table – though President Trump said recently that the 8,000 American forces in Poland were there to stay. “We’ll put more there if they want,” Trump told reporters at a meeting with Polish President Karol Nawrocki.
“This force posture review, it could mean anything,” Ilves said. “It could mean that U.S. troops pull out of here, which would be a big blow. And that's one thing that Europe has to prepare for in case that happens.” But he also noted that President Trump has vacillated between abandoning Europe and offering robust support.
“If the United States withdraws from Europe today, Europeans would not be able to defend themselves against Russian aggression,” Fix said. “This is why Europe’s defense efforts are being ramped up – not only because of Putin, but because of the unreliability of Trump.”
The International Institute for Strategic Studies published a report earlier this year estimating that it would take Europe 25 years and nearly $1 trillion to replace U.S. military support were Washington to withdraw completely from the continent. The report found that key gaps for NATO members would involve aircraft, naval forces, and command infrastructure.
“Where America is absolutely the key is all of the enablers, all of the things that make an army potent – long-range precise fires, deep technical intelligence, developing kill chains and target folders in order to strike,” Gen. Phillip Breedlove, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told The Cipher Brief. While he doesn’t believe Russia poses an imminent threat to Europe, given the weakness of its military and economy, he said that the Europeans will ultimately need to manufacture or obtain a long list of high-end hardware on their own.
“There are a few things that really only America can do,” Gen. Breedlove said, listing rapid aerial transport, high-performing air defenses, and sophisticated intelligence systems. “They really don't have the kind of strategic lift that America brings.”
Lt. Gen. Hodges, who lives in Germany, said he was surprised this summer to see a mobile troop-recruiting site on the beaches of northern Germany, and plenty of people engaging with the recruiters.
“There was a big camouflage Bundeswehr truck with several NCOs, and there were people there all day long talking to them,” he said. “They were very positively received. Two or three years ago, I don't think that would've happened.”
Experts noted that while an act of raw military aggression beyond Ukraine may be years away, if it ever comes, the “gray-zone” war that can include cyberattacks and the cutting of undersea cables, is already well underway.
Europe’s leaders “need to recognize that Russia's at war with us, even if it doesn't look and feel like war in the traditional sense,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said, referring to those gray-zone actions. “And so, we should make that very clear to our populations and to the Russians that this is unacceptable.”
Nations far from Europe “should be concerned for the simple reason that only when it is united does Europe stand strong against Russia,” Fix said. She noted that it took two Russian invasions of Ukraine – 2014 and 2022 – and two elections of Donald Trump – for Europeans to finally and seriously reinvest in their own defense.
“Divided, each European country is too weak on its own,” Fix said. “If they think in terms of solidarity for the whole continent – what NATO Article 5 essentially says, an attack on one member is an attack on all members – then they cannot allow themselves to be foot-dragging.”
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11. 'Already at war': Palau's president brings China-US competition for Pacific Islands to forefront
Excerpts:
PNG, as the country is often called, has agreed to “totally integrated forces” with Australia, PNG’s Defence Minister Billy Joseph told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday.
Allen agreed the treaty is a hopeful sign, but she balanced that against the fact that Vanuatu declined to sign a $500 AUD million ($300 million USD) agreement with Australia last week that was designed to help cement their strategic relationship.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to Vanuatu for the signing and, reports said, Chinese interference led to the failure to secure the agreement. China has supplied large amounts of infrastructure funding to Vanuatu in the past. But Albanese has said he believes Vanuatu will sign.
Sora, agreed, writing that he believes negotiations will continue, noting that “Vanuatu’s last-minute wobble on signing the Nakamal agreement with Australia is par for the course. Vanuatu’s security partnerships have always been highly contentious within that country’s dynamic political system. But the security imperatives for Vanuatu are still there – the country needs more support from trusted partners – and the strategic imperative for Australia to shore up a stable regional balance of power is still there.”
'Already at war': Palau's president brings China-US competition for Pacific Islands to forefront - Breaking Defense
Separately, Papua New Guinea and Australia are set to sign a new security agreement.
breakingdefense.com · Colin Clark · September 16, 2025
SYDNEY — The president of Palau, the tiny Pacific Islands state that is a key section of the Second Island Chain, raised eyebrows last week with the comment that his island is “already at war with China“ and under “constant threat” from Beijing — with analysts saying Washington would be wise to seize on his comments and offer aid.
Speaking in Hawaii before the beginning of the Pacific Island Forum, President Surangel Whipps Jr. added that “the best way to combat this is through partnership with like-minded nations who believe peace comes through strength and presence is deterrence.”
It’s a notable statement at a time when China is making inroads with other Pacific Island leaders, including in the Solomon Islands, host of this year’s Pacific Island Forum. Beijing successfully leaned on the Solomons to exclude Taiwan, as well as the US and Japan, from this year’s meeting. However, Palau — one of the three Pacific Islands to still have relations with Taiwan — is next year’s host, and the PIF members declared before the end of the conference that Taiwan and the other development partners should be included at the next annual meeting.
Mihai Sora, a regional analyst with the Lowy Institute here, noted Palau has been “on the front line of China’s coercive tactics in the Pacific for years now. President Whipps has outlined on numerous occasions how China has pressured him individually as a Pacific leader to switch Palau’s recognition away from Taiwan.”
China, he said, “has weaponized Palau’s dependence on Chinese tourists – a dependence specifically manufactured by China itself – to put economic pressure on the country. Chinese-linked transnational criminal syndicates are increasingly active in Palau. Chinese developers are buying land next to US sites of strategic value. The list goes on,” he said in an email to Breaking Defense.
“It’s not surprising that President Whipps is visibly frustrated by the Chinese government, and that he has quite rationally come to the conclusion that a greater US military presence in Palau is critical to Palau’s own national security.”
Bethany Allen, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Chinese analysis noted this White House “has floated a travel ban on Tonga, Vanuatu and Tuvalu, and is considering closing consulates in the region. These moves undermine trust in the region just as China is presenting greater challenges than ever before.”
“Now is the time for Australia, the US and other like-minded countries to respond to Palau’s call for closer engagement and show that they are reliable partners who will respect the needs of Pacific Island states,” she added.
To reinforce the islands’ ability to resist China, Allen said, “The Trump administration should return to the policies of the president’s first term, when the White House National Security Council positioned its first-ever Pacific Islands’ envoy to better represent the US and respond to the needs of partners in the region.”
Australia, PNG To Sign Treaty
In another sign of what could be a stiffening of the Pacific Islands willingness to resist the importuning of the Chinese, Papua New Guinea and Australia plan to sign a defense treaty during this week’s celebration of the island’s 50 years of independence from its former colonial ruler.
Papua New Guinea is rapidly becoming Australia’s closest security partner in the Pacific Islands region, aside from New Zealand. The new treaty “appears to have some groundbreaking provisions with respect to mutual security obligations, and a new level of defense force integration between Australia and PNG,” Sora wrote, adding that “without question the treaty marks a new chapter for Papua New Guinea’s foreign and defense policy.”
PNG, as the country is often called, has agreed to “totally integrated forces” with Australia, PNG’s Defence Minister Billy Joseph told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday.
Allen agreed the treaty is a hopeful sign, but she balanced that against the fact that Vanuatu declined to sign a $500 AUD million ($300 million USD) agreement with Australia last week that was designed to help cement their strategic relationship.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to Vanuatu for the signing and, reports said, Chinese interference led to the failure to secure the agreement. China has supplied large amounts of infrastructure funding to Vanuatu in the past. But Albanese has said he believes Vanuatu will sign.
Sora, agreed, writing that he believes negotiations will continue, noting that “Vanuatu’s last-minute wobble on signing the Nakamal agreement with Australia is par for the course. Vanuatu’s security partnerships have always been highly contentious within that country’s dynamic political system. But the security imperatives for Vanuatu are still there – the country needs more support from trusted partners – and the strategic imperative for Australia to shore up a stable regional balance of power is still there.”
breakingdefense.com · Colin Clark · September 16, 2025
12. How Washington’s drone policy is catching up to reality
Excerpts:
Revising the U.S. approach to the MTCR is long overdue. As competition with China seeps into other arenas, maintaining a constellation of interoperable allies and partners is crucial for the U.S. Doing so requires meeting market demand, and the demand worldwide — after witnessing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East — is for UAVs. Crucial for the U.S., however, is finding a way to balance meeting this demand with protecting its proprietary information. Beyond the historically strict interpretation of the MTCR, American officials have been reticent to export advanced UAVs for fear that their technologies and capabilities would be vulnerable to adversary collection. This concern is warranted, and U.S. officials should couple the roll-out of this reinterpretation alongside the establishment of strict nonproliferation parameters with partner countries and a robust oversight mechanism to ensure American technologies are not in jeopardy and countries or non-state actors do not take advantage of more lax policy.
Ultimately, for the United States to remain the partner of choice, not just in the Middle East but worldwide, it must continue to balance between meeting market demand and protecting its proprietary technologies. But the balance must also reckon with the original purpose of the MTCR: Preventing the proliferation of missile technologies that could destabilize regions or fuel arms races. Providing the U.S. the ability to simply compete with China in UAV sales is not, in itself, a strategy. The reinterpretation should be coupled with updated nonproliferation standards and robust safeguards to balance both competition and global responsibility. Balancing both can lead to deeper, more sustained defense collaborations in the Middle East and around the world.
How Washington’s drone policy is catching up to reality
By Elizabeth Dent and Grant Rumley
Defense News · Elizabeth Dent · September 16, 2025
Drones are swiftly changing the nature of warfare, but for years, the United States has tied its hands behind its back when it comes to selling cutting-edge drone technology. Washington has long held fast to a strict interpretation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) — an informal political agreement formed in 1987 to limit the proliferation of missiles and missile technologies — which the U.S. applied to certain uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) as well, thereby preventing itself from selling its most advanced drones to many key partners. But China, Turkey and others have had no such scruples, which has let them fill the gap and expand their defense sales and influence across the Middle East, Africa and beyond.
The Trump administration has a rare chance to change all that. Last night, the administration announced that it would make widespread changes to its interpretation of the MTCR as part of a broader effort to reform the way the U.S. sells and transfers weapons abroad. This step would face up to today’s realities and help Washington compete far better in today’s increasingly crowded arms market, though, as of yet, there is no clarity on whether the reinterpretation of the MTCR would be matched with clear principles on which UAVs will be acceptable to export and to whom.
Efforts to revise the U.S. approach to the MTCR date back to the first Trump administration, which in 2020 announced that it would reinterpret the regime to treat certain UAVs as Category II technologies instead of the more restrictive Category I, which historically carried a presumption of export denial for UAVs. This effort endured in the Biden administration, which in 2025 announced a revised interpretation of the MTCR to allow more flexible interpretations of Category I, but explicitly excluded the potential for transfers of production facilities and technologies. The second Trump term has picked up right where it left off: The White House issued an executive order in April to streamline defense exports, which was quickly followed by Congressional action, including H.R. 3068 and the Streamlining Foreign Military Sales Act of 2025.
Taken together, the coordinated action between the executive and legislative branches represents a concerted effort to make some of the most comprehensive changes to arms sales and transfers in decades. Nested under this effort is an understanding — shared across party lines — that the competition with China is increasingly expanding to the international arms market. China is a top-five global arms exporter, and has its sights set on expanding its position. Beijing recently displayed new armaments to dozens of foreign heads of state at its military parade, and Chinese officials have been seeking to capitalize elsewhere on the performance of their weaponry in the Pakistan-India crisis earlier this year. Increasing the speed and efficiency of U.S. arms transfers is one way to preclude China from making inroads in new export markets.
UAV sales are increasingly at the forefront of this competition. Sales of armed drones have ticked up dramatically in recent years as countries have witnessed the benefits of utilizing uncrewed, relatively cheap technologies in combat. A new MTCR interpretation opens up the aperture of American UAVs available to countries around the world. U.S. UAVs like the MQ-9 Reaper are likely to be in top demand, as Washington has historically limited the amount of external operators of this advanced platform to select NATO allies and Major Non-NATO Allies (MNNAs). For the United States, expanding sales of MQ-9s would have the dual effect of increasing interoperability with more partners while also blocking out China and others from exploiting a gap in the market.
Nowhere does this competition play out more acutely than in the Middle East. Years of asymmetric warfare and swarm tactics have only increased the demand for large, cheap, uncrewed capabilities. Faced with repeated rejections from Washington, many have turned to outside suppliers, like China. Chinese drones have already been sold to traditional U.S. partners in the region including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Iraq. Some have even coordinated with Beijing on manufacturing UAVs. With a new MTCR interpretation in place, the Trump administration seems poised to reverse course and begin exporting UAVs to the region. The U.S. approved the sale of 8 MQ-9Bs to Qatar in March, and Saudi Arabia is reportedly seeking up to 100 MQ-9s as part of a massive arms deal negotiated during Trump’s visit in May.
Revising the U.S. approach to the MTCR is long overdue. As competition with China seeps into other arenas, maintaining a constellation of interoperable allies and partners is crucial for the U.S. Doing so requires meeting market demand, and the demand worldwide — after witnessing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East — is for UAVs. Crucial for the U.S., however, is finding a way to balance meeting this demand with protecting its proprietary information. Beyond the historically strict interpretation of the MTCR, American officials have been reticent to export advanced UAVs for fear that their technologies and capabilities would be vulnerable to adversary collection. This concern is warranted, and U.S. officials should couple the roll-out of this reinterpretation alongside the establishment of strict nonproliferation parameters with partner countries and a robust oversight mechanism to ensure American technologies are not in jeopardy and countries or non-state actors do not take advantage of more lax policy.
Ultimately, for the United States to remain the partner of choice, not just in the Middle East but worldwide, it must continue to balance between meeting market demand and protecting its proprietary technologies. But the balance must also reckon with the original purpose of the MTCR: Preventing the proliferation of missile technologies that could destabilize regions or fuel arms races. Providing the U.S. the ability to simply compete with China in UAV sales is not, in itself, a strategy. The reinterpretation should be coupled with updated nonproliferation standards and robust safeguards to balance both competition and global responsibility. Balancing both can lead to deeper, more sustained defense collaborations in the Middle East and around the world.
Elizabeth Dent is the Nathan and Esther K. Wagner Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute, where Grant Rumley is the Meisel-Goldberger Senior Fellow. Both previously served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
13. SOTF – Helping SOF Veterans Transition
SOTF – Helping SOF Veterans Transition
https://sof.news/veterans/sotf-helping-sof-veterans-transition/
September 17, 2025 Lindsey Schmidt Veterans 0
By Lindsey Schmidt.
When special operators leave the military, they don’t just walk away from a career. They walk away from an identity, a brotherhood, a mission. The Special Operators Transition Foundation (SOTF) exists to help them find the next one. Founded in 2013, SOTF focuses on the top 3% of all US military forces. They include Green Berets, the 75th Ranger Regiment, Special Operations Aviation, Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders, Air Force Special Operations and more. Because they come from such diverse backgrounds with varied skill sets, SOTF understands that their goals will also be different and unique. So, they tailor the program to the individual rather than a set, defined schedule for all. They’ve found that 12 months is the sweet spot, but can extend or abbreviate that timeline based on the needs and timeline of the individual.
14. Rethinking Counterinsurgency: A Police-Centered Approach
I think the author might agree with his provocative statement that I stand by: The only counterinsurgency the US should conduct is against an insurgency directed at the US. We should never conduct counterinsurgency operations on foreign soil. If we try to conduct counterinsurgency on foreign soil what we are actually doing is conducting pacification as an occupying power (and we all know what happens to occupying powers). That said, we need to be the absolute experts in counterinsurgency to be able to advise and assist friends, partners, or allies in their defense and development programs to help them to defend themselves against subversion, lawlessness, terrrorism, insurgency, and civil war. We need a change in our philosophical approach which must start with understanding the indigenous way of war and adapt to it and not forcing the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.
And in the case of this essay, it is the host nation police forces that have to get the job done.
And lastly I will add that it is not about "winning hearts and minds." As Matt Armstrong teaches us it is about influencing "minds and will."
Excerpts:
Conclusion: A Smarter, Sustainable COIN Strategy
To succeed in modern counterinsurgency, the U.S. Government must pivot from build of fragile armies to placing much more emphasis on and empowering trusted local community actors. That means investing in local police—not as regime enforcers but as community servants capable of providing everyday security and earning public trust. When combined with embedded SOF or military police advisors, aligned civilian support, and genuine political buy-in, this approach offers a scalable, adaptable, and locally legitimate path to stabilization.
It won’t work everywhere. In environments without governance structures, cohesive communities, or credible local partners, this model may not gain traction. But where conditions allow, police-centered COIN can bridge the gap between foreign assistance and local ownership. In such places, it may mark the difference between perpetual conflict and the first real steps toward sustainable peace.
Rethinking Counterinsurgency: A Police-Centered Approach
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/17/rethinking-counterinsurgency-a-police-centered-approach/
by Matt Rowe
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09.17.2025 at 06:00am
Introduction: The Problem with Conventional COIN
U.S. COIN doctrine, with its detailed field manuals and interagency frameworks, remains caught up in its reliance on building national armies—often exacerbated by misalignment between military and civilian efforts and the neglect of law enforcement resources. U.S. civilian agencies like the Department of State, Department of Justice, and others are often poorly structured or insufficiently resourced to sustain long-term stabilization operations. As a result, military-led nation-building frequently proceeds without the cultural insight or political sensitivity required for lasting success.
The “Green Zone” in Baghdad is emblematic of this failure. It was a fortified sanctuary for international personnel that reinforced physical and psychological separation from the Iraqi people.
As Rep Dennis Kucinich pointed out during a House sub-committee meeting on winning the hearts and minds in Iraq, “The perceived dissonance between American rhetoric and actions breeds mistrust at home and in Iraq about why we are there and how long we will stay…when we forget why we are there, when we forget it is their revolution not ours, we allow ourselves to be portrayed as arrogant agents of empire rather than as trustees of noble ideals.”
Rather than fostering legitimacy, the Green Zone signaled occupation and reinforced insurgent narratives of Western weakness and decadence. It implied that U.S. and staff hid safely behind the “wall” enjoying their typical decadent luxuries regularly shipped in from the West. Meanwhile, their military lackeys and highly paid mercenary contractors persecuted the God-fearing Iraqi people over access to oil.
At the more local level, while working in Iraq, my colleague was approached by a tribal elder who needed a village irrigation canal repaired. The elder pointed out that a new power plant was being built nearby and that the bulldozer required for the repair work sat idle most of the time. Recognizing an opportunity to build goodwill and strengthen local relationships, my colleague attempted to secure permission and funds to use the equipment—but was ultimately unsuccessful. Contractors and untrained Department of State personnel failed to grasp the significance of the canal to the village’s survival and the strategic value of responding to the elder’s request. This reflects a broader, longstanding weakness in U.S. COIN strategy: a lack of local context and the inability to recognize small, practical projects as valuable counterinsurgency opportunities.
This is precisely where empowered, community-focused police forces could make a difference. Local police—who interact daily with the population and are more attuned to immediate community needs—could serve as a critical interface in identifying and prioritizing such projects. In this case, a village police commander could have flagged the irrigation repair as a stabilization priority, framed it as a public safety concern, and worked through civic liaison officers to escalate the request. In a properly structured police-centered COIN framework, police forces linked to stabilization advisors and aid programs would be positioned to recognize and act on small-scale, high-impact projects like this, turning missed opportunities into tangible trust-building wins. This paper does not propose that a police-centered COIN model should replace all others, nor does it attempt to address every operational detail involved in counterinsurgency. Rather, it advocates for more civilian-led and politically informed management, while prioritizing development of local police and government actors as key pillars of long-term success. In places like Afghanistan, where tribal structures, remote terrain, and minimal contact with the central government present significant challenges, police-heavy frameworks may be unworkable.
Equally important is the realization that in some environments, such as parts of Afghanistan or Somalia, no practicable COIN strategy may exist at all. Therefore, the government leaders must do a better job of assessing whether the outcome is strategically achievable. David Kilcullen, a leading COIN strategist, has explicitly noted that in environments deeply fractured by ethnic divisions and lacking any viable governance structures—such as parts of Somalia or Syria—deploying U.S. forces “boots-in-country” seldom achieves the desired shift in local allegiances. He emphasizes that without pre‑existing political will, durable institutions, and sufficient troop levels sustained over a long campaign, conventional COIN interventions are unlikely to create meaningful stabilizing effects. Knowing when not to fight is just as essential as knowing how to fight.
Why Local Police Matter More Than Armies
As the primary interface between the government and the population, police play a critical role in COIN. Unlike armies, which are designed for external threats, police operate within communities—enforcing the rule of law in ways that directly influence legitimacy and everyday security. Professor Hy Rothstein, COL, U.S. Special Forces (Ret.), of the Naval Postgraduate School has pointed out that the law enforcement community is skilled in handling criminal elements and organized narcotics. These elements use the same tools and techniques—if on a more limited scale—as insurgent forces. Local and national law enforcement know how to deter, disrupt and dismantle these gangs and to bring them to prosecution. This “law enforcement function” should be a core COIN function—not an afterthought. Conversely, conscripting teenagers into the army, transporting them across the country, and expecting them to be effective at interacting with the local population is asking a lot. This may be low cost and serve to protect the soldiers and their families from retaliation, but they may not speak the local language or climate, have no real stake in the community, and significantly reduces their effectiveness.
Visibility and Trust: Local police patrols can stop to talk with shopkeepers in a neighborhood market, asking about security concerns and listening to complaints about recent thefts or militia harassment. Rather than conducting aggressive searches, the officers focus on casual conversations, showing respect, and offering advice. Over time, this regular, low-pressure engagement builds relationships and trust, signaling to the community that security forces are present to serve and protect rather than intimidate.
Police run can sports tournaments, after-school clubs, or simple soccer matches for neighborhood children, creating a visible, positive association between state security forces and the next generation. Over time, families see the police as protectors of the community rather than distant enforcers.
Intelligence Gathering: Community-based policing yields more actionable human intelligence than transitory military patrols. Each interaction is an opportunity to reinforce the government’s legitimacy and fairness, countering insurgent narratives and gathering valuable human intelligence in the process. Trust-based relationships allow local police to gather human intelligence passively and routinely—information that would be impossible for foreign military units to collect without creating resentment.
Sustainability: Police forces can sustain localized security with less long-term cost and foreign dependency. Unlike military units, police are inherently community-based and are viewed as domestic authorities rather than foreign occupiers. Local police are familiar with community norms and languages, can enforce laws and resolve disputes in ways that are culturally appropriate—something foreign forces and even other host nation forces often struggle to do. This makes them more effective for long-term COIN efforts aimed at restoring and maintaining legitimacy.
Legitimacy: Locally accountable police undermine insurgent narratives by being present and responsive. Insurgents often frame the government as distant, corrupt, or illegitimate, exploiting gaps in local security to position themselves as alternative authorities. When community-based police are consistently visible—walking patrols, responding quickly to incidents, and addressing everyday concerns like theft, harassment, or disputes—they directly challenge these narratives.
Their physical presence signals that the government cares about local security, while their responsiveness shows that civilians can seek justice and protection through official channels, not insurgent courts or militias. For example, when a shopkeeper’s complaint about extortion results in a prompt police investigation—or when officers assist in resolving a land dispute rather than ignoring it—residents see the state as engaged and relevant.
Over time, these small, repeated acts of service erode the insurgents’ claims to legitimacy and demonstrate that the government’s presence is not limited to distant military bases or political elites but woven into the fabric of everyday life.
Rapid Reinforcement: National militaries still play a vital role as a reaction force when crises outpace police capacity. While police are essential for sustaining everyday security, there are moments when localized forces are overwhelmed—such as large-scale attacks, coordinated insurgent offensives, or natural disasters exploited by hostile elements. In these situations, police units may lack the manpower, firepower, or mobility to respond effectively.
National military units provide the strategic depth to fill this gap. Rapidly deployable QRF elements—whether infantry battalions, air assault units, or armored columns—can respond to unfolding crises with speed and force that local police cannot match. For example, if insurgents stage a coordinated attack across multiple districts, military units can be airlifted to stabilize key areas, secure infrastructure, and reinforce threatened police outposts.
Importantly, militaries should not displace police but act as a supportive surge capability, designed to intervene temporarily when the situation exceeds normal policing thresholds. This allows police to maintain their role as the primary face of government security while military forces operate as a backstop during exceptional events—ensuring both resilience and legitimacy in the broader counterinsurgency effort.
The Failure of the Current Model
The current COIN model prioritizes building national armies over developing local policing and sound governance. This approach often creates top-heavy, regime-focused security forces while neglecting the community-level trust, accountability, and continuity that are essential for lasting stability. Effective COIN forces historically balance kinetic action and action to reduce insurgents’ ability to exploit various strategic gaps, which include:
Army-Centric Training: Failures in our foreign military exploits stem from policymakers who default to the conventional force-on-force strategies they understand, while missing the complexities of modern irregular warfare. That’s the oversimplified answer we keep getting wrong. Special Operations Forces (SOF)—especially the Army’s Green Berets—are built for these nuanced challenges, yet few policymakers truly grasp how to craft policies that support unconventional warfare effectively politically and with the conventional forces at their disposal.
Civilian Gaps: Agencies like the State Department, USAID, and Department of Justice lack the personnel models needed for long-term, embedded deployments capable of working with and influencing local civilian leadership. While these agencies are critical to rebuilding governance, justice systems, and civil society in post-conflict environments, they are not structured for the sustained, on-the-ground presence that successful counterinsurgency demands.
Unlike the military, which has rotation models, pre-deployment training, and logistics pipelines to support personnel in austere environments for months or years, civilian agencies often rely on short-term assignments, contractors, or ad hoc deployments. This leads to constant turnover, institutional memory loss, and inconsistent relationships with local leaders and other stakeholders. In many cases, diplomats or advisors rotate out just as they’re beginning to build trust.
Without a dedicated, trained cadre of civilians prepared for long-duration assignments at the provincial or district level, U.S. efforts to develop legitimate local governance and rule of law are undermined. Insurgents, who often exploit weak or absent local government, benefit from this inconsistency. Until agencies like State, USAID, and DOJ develop true expeditionary personnel models—including incentives for long-term service, appropriate training, and robust field support—their ability to shape and sustain local political progress in contested areas will remain limited.
Short Tour Lengths: High turnover disrupts relationships, erodes institutional memory, and weakens progress in any operational environment—but in counterinsurgency, these effects can be particularly damaging. In One Size Does Not Fit All: A Critique Of Comprehensive Coin Doctrine, Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel Cody Sherman, outlines that the challenge of rapid turnover “…is incompatible with the acquisition of cultural expertise,” noting that rapid rotations prevent the retention of deep local understanding, which is vital for effective long-term operations.
Building trust with local leaders, community members, and partner forces requires time and consistency. When advisors, diplomats, or military personnel rotate out every six to twelve months, hard-won relationships are lost, and incoming personnel must start from zero. Each handoff resets the relationship-building process, signaling instability and disinterest to local partners.
Institutional knowledge—like cultural nuances, local power dynamics, and lessons learned from prior engagements—is often lost during these transitions. Without mechanisms to retain and pass forward this understanding, the same mistakes are repeated, and long-term goals are delayed or derailed.
Worse, insurgents exploit this churn. They recognize that U.S. and coalition efforts often lack continuity and capitalize on the confusion and gaps that follow leadership or advisor transitions. Progress stalls, credibility fades, and the local population’s confidence in government institutions declines when they perceive foreign support as inconsistent and short-lived. In this way, high turnover doesn’t just slow progress—it actively weakens the legitimacy of the entire counterinsurgency effort.
Corruption & Politics: Police reform is inherently political. It’s not just about restructuring departments or retraining officers—it’s about shifting power, authority, and public trust within a society, often in fragile or contested environments. Local leaders, tribal elders, political factions, and even criminal networks all have stakes in how police operate. Attempting to “reform” such forces without understanding these local power dynamics risks failure or backlash.
Because of this, successful police reform requires embedded advisors who can build relationships, understand the informal power structures, and work alongside—not above—local leadership. These advisors must be patient, culturally aware, and politically savvy enough to guide reforms without being seen as imposing them. If foreign advisors dominate or dictate the process, they reinforce perceptions of occupation and delegitimize the very forces they’re trying to strengthen.
Instead, advisors should act as mentors and partners, helping local leaders shape reforms in ways that fit the local context, while still advancing principles like accountability, rule of law, and public service. This quiet, steady influence—rather than heavy-handed direction—is what ultimately builds sustainable, credible police institutions capable of supporting long-term counterinsurgency goals.
A New Approach: Embedded Community Security Teams (ECSTs)
Core Concept:
By deploying modular Embedded Civil Security Teams (ECSTs)—comprised of Special Forces elements, law enforcement advisors, civilian stabilization experts, and local interpreters—the U.S. can work directly alongside host nation police and government leaders, building trust and legitimacy from the ground up. Rather than positioning U.S. forces as occupiers or commanders, this model treats them as long-term partners focused on enabling local solutions to local problems. Properly structured and resourced, ECSTs provide a scalable, sustainable method to shift the center of gravity in COIN operations from military force to community security—linking policing priorities to tangible improvements, supporting local leadership, and fostering the relationships critical to undermining insurgent influence and achieving durable stability.
Deploy modular teams—composed of Special Forces, law enforcement advisors, and civilian experts—to embed directly with local government and police units. These teams act as long-term partners, not occupiers.
While U.S. Special Forces (SF) are highly effective at partnering with indigenous forces, assigning them as team leads within ECSTs may unintentionally reinforce a military-centric posture. An alternate approach would position SF in a supporting role—particularly during early-phase deployments or in high-threat environments—while civilian and law enforcement advisors lead the mission’s policing and stabilization focus.
Note: In some regions, ECSTs may even be led by military police units or select officers from Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) trained in police engagement—making the model scalable even where SOF is unavailable.
Composition:
In the initial phase, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alphas (SF ODAs) with language skills and cultural fluency should take the lead. Their ability to communicate effectively and understand local customs allows them to build relationships and establish trust critical to early counterinsurgency efforts. At the same time, they possess the requisite military skills for both defensive and offensive training and operations in the unconventional warfare environment.
A USAID stabilization expert should be embedded to coordinate police development with broader stabilization initiatives. This advisor ensures that police efforts are linked to visible, community-level improvements such as street lighting, infrastructure repairs, and public complaint systems—reinforcing both security and public trust.
A local interpreter and civic liaison should be part of the team to bridge language and cultural gaps while facilitating communication with community leaders. Ideally, this interpreter would come from the same region in which they operate, providing deeper local knowledge and helping to build trust with the population. Their role is essential for gathering local insights, managing perceptions, and ensuring that security efforts align with community priorities.
The Mission:
ECSTs should focus on training and mentoring local police in community policing principles, basic patrol procedures, and effective investigative techniques. Community policing emphasizes regular, non-confrontational interactions with civilians to build trust and legitimacy. Patrol procedures should prioritize visibility, approachability, and proactive engagement rather than reactive enforcement. Training in investigative techniques helps shift police behavior from reliance on confessions or intimidation to evidence-based approaches, enhancing professionalism and public confidence. Together, these skills create a police force that serves as a stabilizing, community-focused institution rather than an instrument of state control.
ECSTs should work with local police and civic leaders to build public trust and formal engagement mechanisms. This can include setting up community forums, complaint and feedback systems, and public safety committees that allow citizens to voice concerns and participate in shaping local security priorities. By creating consistent channels for dialogue and problem-solving, these mechanisms help foster transparency, improve police responsiveness, and reinforce the idea that law enforcement serves the community rather than ruling over it. Over time, these efforts strengthen the relationship between civilians and police, reducing the influence of insurgent groups and enhancing overall stability.
Local policing priorities should be directly linked to tangible U.S. aid projects such as street lighting, infrastructure improvements, and public complaint hotlines. This connection ensures that as police address community concerns, visible improvements reinforce their efforts and build public confidence. For example, when police identify poorly lit areas as crime hotspots, U.S. aid can fund lighting installations to address the problem, visibly demonstrating responsiveness. Similarly, police-supported complaint hotlines or neighborhood repairs signal to the community that security improvements are tied to concrete benefits, strengthening the legitimacy of both local authorities and the broader stabilization effort.
Deployment Duration:
To ensure continuity and effectiveness, key advisory roles—such as police mentors, stabilization experts, and civic liaisons—should be structured around minimum three-year deployments, rather than the typical six or twelve-month rotations common in military and civilian assignments. Longer deployments allow advisors to build genuine relationships, develop local knowledge, and follow through on reforms that require time and trust to implement.
Additionally, overlapping rotations should be built into the deployment model. Rather than replacing entire teams at once, staggered handovers ensure that incoming personnel are trained and integrated by those already in place, preserving institutional memory and reducing the operational disruption that typically accompanies turnover. This continuity is essential in counterinsurgency environments where progress is often slow and depends on sustained personal relationships and trust. Without this long-term presence, advisors risk repeatedly restarting efforts and undermining local confidence in the stability and commitment of U.S. support.
Scalability Strategy
ECSTs act as a train-the-trainer platform to develop local police mentors, with U.S. involvement tapering over time.
One of the most significant challenges to implementing multi-year ECST deployments is the potential disruption to career progression, professional education, and personal stability for both military and civilian personnel. Extended tours may prevent individuals from attending required promotion or specialized training courses, and prolonged time overseas can strain families and increase the likelihood of personal issues requiring command involvement.
To offset these risks, the U.S. should establish a dedicated stabilization career track that formally recognizes ECST service as career-enhancing, with credit toward time in grade, leadership development, and follow-on assignments. Modular deployments—such as overlapping 12- to 18-month rotations within the same team—can preserve continuity while reducing individual burden. Additional incentives, including special pay, guaranteed school slots, priority reassignments, and optional family accompaniment where feasible, can further offset the operational and personal costs of long-term service. By institutionalizing ECST participation as strategically vital and professionally rewarding, the U.S. can attract and retain high-quality personnel without compromising force readiness or career viability.
Host Nation Integration
Embedded Civil Security Teams (ECSTs) operate side-by-side with host nation leaders and police, not as commanders but as trusted partners focused on long-term stability. Their approach is built around daily joint patrols and collaborative planning with local officials, ensuring that operations are shaped by local realities. Training is tailored to the specific capacities and challenges of the host nation’s police and government structures, rather than imposed as a one-size-fits-all solution. Civilian and military liaisons at the U.S. embassy help secure political backing and ensure that field-level initiatives align with broader diplomatic objectives. Importantly, ECST progress is measured not by kinetic activity, but by benchmarks of trust, public perception, and local legitimacy—placing community confidence at the heart of their mission.
Strategic Enablers for Success
Effective COIN-focused police reform requires structural changes at the strategic level. A dedicated funding mechanism, administered under USAID, the National Security Council (NSC), or SOCOM, should provide fast-disbursing stabilization funds tied directly to local policing milestones, allowing flexible, on-the-ground response to emerging needs.
Metrics must also be revised—shifting focus from traditional military measures like body counts to outcomes that reflect genuine stability, such as crime clearance rates, public perceptions of safety, and levels of citizen engagement with local police. Existing doctrine should be rewritten to prioritize policing, transitioning from the conventional “clear-hold-build” model to a more sustainable “clear-hold-police” framework that centers on local law enforcement.
ECSTs should track the metrics like the percentage of contacts initiated by local community members versus those initiated by ESCTs and other COIN units; longevity of friendly local leaders in positions of authority; the number and quality of tip‑offs on insurgent activity that originate spontaneously from the population; and even economic activity at markets and shops.
Finally, establishing a deployable civilian cadre through long-term contracts and incentive programs would allow recruitment of experienced retired police officers, governance experts, and surge-capable USAID advisors who can embed for extended periods, providing continuity and expertise essential for long-term success. These civilians can regularly train alongside Special Forces units as appropriate to build working relationships, improve knowledge and skills, and foster better working relationships.
Scaling Through Military Police and SFABs
To avoid overburdening Special Operations Forces, select US Army Military Police units can be restructured to support Embedded Civil Security Team (ECST) missions. These units should be equipped with community policing training, cultural literacy, and advisory skills focused on supporting internal defense and local governance.
Rather than short-term deployments, these military police units should operate on regional rotations with longer assignments, allowing them to build local relationships and apply specialized knowledge over time. By expanding the role of military police in this way, the U.S. can create a scalable, sustainable support force for local policing efforts without exhausting SOF resources.
Certain elements of Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) can be cross-trained in police development to provide additional advisory capacity in COIN environments. For example, SFAB personnel could receive specialized instruction in community policing methods, civil-military engagement, and basic investigative procedures, preparing them to support local police forces in areas where civilian advisors are limited or require augmentation. However, to maintain the focus on building trust and public legitimacy, these SFAB elements must operate under the direction of Embedded Civil Security Teams (ECSTs) and civilian leadership, rather than pursuing independent or military-centric objectives. This ensures that their support enhances the community-oriented mission rather than defaulting to traditional military approaches.
An SFAB team might assist local police with patrol planning or evidence collection techniques, but their efforts should always reinforce the guidance and priorities set by ECST advisors and civilian governance specialists, preserving the civilian face of security and reinforcing police, not military, primacy in the eyes of the population.
Civilian Leadership and the State Department’s Role
The U.S. State Department, particularly through its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), must serve as the interagency anchor for police development and stabilization efforts in counterinsurgency environments. INL is uniquely positioned to coordinate the disparate efforts of the Department of Justice (DOJ), USAID, and the Department of Defense (DOD), ensuring that policing, governance, and development initiatives are synchronized rather than working at cross-purposes. Beyond interagency coordination, State should manage multi-year stabilization contracts, establishing long-term partnerships with local security forces, governance bodies, and civil society organizations. By overseeing funding streams and program accountability, State can provide the continuity and structure necessary for sustainable reform.
To support these efforts, State should advocate for and institutionalize long-term advisory assignments of at least three to five years for civilian personnel, including police mentors, governance experts, and development specialists. Building trust with local leaders and communities takes time—rotating personnel every 12 months undermines relationship-building and interrupts progress. Historically, British colonial administrators often spent decades embedded in the same regions, gaining deep local knowledge and influence. While the U.S. need not replicate that model, establishing career incentives for American diplomats, advisors, and development professionals to specialize in regional stabilization roles is critical. A professional, long-term civilian presence is essential for achieving legitimacy-focused reforms that can outlast insurgencies and strengthen local institutions.
Lessons from other Conflicts
Several lower-profile U.S. engagements offer valuable lessons in alternative approaches to counterinsurgency. Notably, U.S. support for civilian-led security initiatives in Colombia, the Philippines, and El Salvador demonstrates the potential of police-centered strategies to stabilize fragile environments without overreliance on conventional military force. In each of these cases, advisory efforts focused on community policing, targeted reforms, and relationship-building rather than large-scale kinetic operations. These experiences highlight how empowering local police forces and embedding tailored advisory teams can disrupt insurgent and criminal networks in a more sustainable and politically acceptable way.
In Colombia, U.S. advisors embedded with the Colombian National Police to help stabilize rural zones previously dominated by FARC insurgents. By improving police presence and legitimacy in remote areas, the program limited FARC’s ability to recruit and maintain local control. The author was embedded with the Colombian Anti-Narcotics police providing combat military police training and guidance to improve the effectiveness of the police forces against violent narco-traffickers and FARC guerrillas. Just as importantly, during this and other deployments to Latin America, we instructed host nation police and military forces in both the respect for Human Rights and the Rights of the Accused.
In the Philippines, U.S. advisors supported barangay-level community patrols that helped suppress insurgent activity with minimal military confrontation, illustrating the power of decentralized, community-focused security initiatives. In El Salvador, despite significant challenges, U.S.-supported police reform contributed to counter-gang operations, though endemic corruption remains a long-term obstacle. Taken together, these cases underscore that police-centered approaches—when properly resourced, embedded, and politically supported—offer a viable path to stabilization that avoids the pitfalls of militarized occupation.
Risks and Mitigations
As with any strategy, a police-centered COIN approach carries both traditional and unique risks that must be carefully managed. One of the most critical challenges is reducing corruption within local police forces. To address this, robust parallel vetting systems should be established to screen recruits and existing officers for criminal ties or insurgent sympathies. Public reporting mechanisms, such as anonymous tip lines or oversight boards, should be implemented to give civilians a way to report misconduct without fear of retaliation. Additionally, international aid must be tied directly to integrity benchmarks, ensuring that funding supports accountable institutions rather than fueling corrupt patronage networks.
Another key risk is insurgent penetration of local police forces. Estimates are that about half of the green‑on‑blue attacks in Afghanistan were carried out by Taliban infiltrators, and about 25 percent were a result of Taliban infiltration and/or coercion of Afghan forces. To counter this, a multi-layered human intelligence (HUMINT) network should be developed, incorporating both police and civilian sources. Civic-military intelligence loops—where information from community policing efforts feeds into broader military and diplomatic analysis—can help detect and neutralize infiltration attempts early.
Political resistance in Washington also poses a potential obstacle, particularly from policymakers accustomed to funding large-scale military operations. To overcome this, Congress should be educated on the cost-effectiveness of police-centered stabilization, using small-scale pilot programs to demonstrate real-world impact and build political support for expanding these efforts.
There is also the risk of unintentionally fragmenting local police forces by focusing on specific vetted units. Analysis from the U.S. Institute of Peace highlights how supporting specific vetted units—like the Afghan Local Police (ALP)—can inadvertently foster elite capture, powerful subnational factions, and even insurgent influence, thus fragmenting broader security institutions rather than strengthening them. To prevent this, coordination with national governments is essential. Vetted subunits should be framed as models of successful reform, not as independent entities, reinforcing the legitimacy of national structures while building localized capacity.
Finally, to avoid fostering long-term dependency on U.S. support, every program should include a clearly defined exit plan from the outset. Contrary to popular belief, exit plans from military conflicts do not require secrecy because transparency fosters public trust, strengthens strategic credibility, enables allied coordination, and prevents adversaries from exploiting uncertainty. While operational details may require classification, the broader plan—including goals, conditions for withdrawal, and timelines—should be openly communicated. This plan should establish transition milestones and conditions for withdrawing advisors and financial support, ensuring that local institutions are positioned to sustain progress independently over time. By addressing these risks early and systematically, a police-centered COIN strategy can remain both sustainable and effective.
Conclusion: A Smarter, Sustainable COIN Strategy
To succeed in modern counterinsurgency, the U.S. Government must pivot from build of fragile armies to placing much more emphasis on and empowering trusted local community actors. That means investing in local police—not as regime enforcers but as community servants capable of providing everyday security and earning public trust. When combined with embedded SOF or military police advisors, aligned civilian support, and genuine political buy-in, this approach offers a scalable, adaptable, and locally legitimate path to stabilization.
It won’t work everywhere. In environments without governance structures, cohesive communities, or credible local partners, this model may not gain traction. But where conditions allow, police-centered COIN can bridge the gap between foreign assistance and local ownership. In such places, it may mark the difference between perpetual conflict and the first real steps toward sustainable peace.
Tags: aid, asymmetric, COIN, community, conflict, control, coordination, counterinsurgency, defense, deployment, Development, Diplomacy, doctrine, enforcement, engagement, force, foreign, governance, hearts, Infrastructure, insurgency, integration, intelligence, interagency, justice, law, Legitimacy, local, military, minds, occupation, operations, patrol, patrols, police, Policing, population, Reconstruction, reform, resistance, security, Sovereignty, stability, stabilization, strategy, terrain, training, trust, unconventional
About The Author
- Matt Rowe
- Matt Rowe is a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier with operational experience in Latin America, where he specialized in counterinsurgency, unconventional warfare, and partner force development. He has published feature articles in Crisis Magazine, Quality Progress, and numerous online journals. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MBA program and a practitioner of Lean Six Sigma, Rowe combines field-based expertise with strategic process improvement. His perspective is informed by firsthand experience bridging tactical missions with long-term institutional outcomes, making him a vocal advocate for pragmatic, locally driven COIN models.
15. The Robot Medics of Ukraine’s Frontline
Excerpts:
But the effectiveness of these missions also improves when combined with other efforts to distract the enemy. “During evacuation missions, especially when we’re evacuating wounded soldiers, we need distraction maneuvers, artillery support, and drones to ensure the soldier is evacuated as safely as possible,” said Shipovich.
“In our last 60 missions, we lost two UGVs, one due to operator error, one to an FPV drone,” said Eugene, callsign “Kharkiv,” a UGV company commander in the 92nd Assault Brigade. One member of the unit, a former software engineer in his late twenties, has built custom software to enhance the UGVs’ functionality. This is part of a trend in which engineers in workshops across the front are tinkering and testing to improve their UGVs.
These ground robots are only beginning to transform frontline medicine, carrying out more and more evacuations. They are also taking on an increasing share of logistical work. In time, Ukraine’s frontline commanders expect to deploy many more robots across the front, continuing to wage asymmetrical warfare against Russia.
Ukrainian electronic warfare expert Serhii (“Flash”) Beskrestnov believes that, in the future, infantry will stay underground, with only robots operating on the surface and taking the greatest risks.
Even if Western military planners believe they can establish air dominance in future conflicts, Ukraine shows how modern battlefields can still turn into battles of grinding attrition. Preparing for that possibility is no less essential than working to prevent it.
The Robot Medics of Ukraine’s Frontline
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/17/the-robot-medics-of-ukraines-frontline/
by David Kirichenko
|
09.17.2025 at 06:00am
The Russia-Ukraine war has evolved into a technological arms race, with uncrewed machines playing a central role across every domain of combat. The skies are now filled with aerial drones, and their kill zone continues to expand in all directions. Drones have revolutionized warfare on land and at sea as well. The latest development is the use of ground robots and their incipient transformation of frontline medicine.
For Ukraine, unmanned systems have become a necessity in fighting a larger and better‑resourced enemy. With no sign of the war ending anytime soon, and with Russia willing to expend seemingly endless numbers of people, Kyiv is turning to technology to help ease the pressure on its mobilization effort and to preserve the lives of its soldiers.
Ukrainian soldiers often have to stay on the frontlines for weeks at a time. In one recent case, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) rescued three wounded Ukrainian soldiers who had been stranded near the front for more than a month—that is, stranded with their wounds for more than a month.
Colonel Kostiantyn Humeniuk, the chief surgeon of the Medical Forces of Ukraine, said, “As of today, the war has fundamentally changed because our enemy uses modern unmanned aerial vehicles.” He added, “On the battlefield, armored vehicles are almost absent…So we are faced with a modern war where drones are the main type of weapon. Today, in the theatre of war, almost all the injuries we see among our service members are drone-related injuries.”
According to Humeniuk, the biggest challenge is that they’ve lost the “golden hour”—the period in which medical attention has a higher chance of saving someone suffering traumatic injury. The army can no longer evacuate wounded from combat zones quickly. “That’s the most serious problem. Evacuating a wounded soldier from the battlefield using any kind of armored vehicle, medical or otherwise, is practically impossible,” Humeniuk said. “Drones have shown that they are low-visibility. They don’t make much noise and are almost unnoticeable on the battlefield.”
Douglas Davis, an Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a frequent medical volunteer in Ukraine, commented on how battlefield injuries are changing, “Tourniquet Syndrome from delayed evacuation was the main reason many lost limbs. This is very different than what we saw in the first two years.”
“Ukraine is one of the first countries to implement drones for medical evacuation, on land, by air, and even by water. They’re low-visibility and almost silent,” Humeniuk added. “They can carry the wounded one to three kilometers from the front.”
Current medical training is often outdated, like the application of tourniquets, said Rima, a medic in Ukraine’s International Legion. “It doesn’t prepare you for the kind of catastrophic injuries we’re seeing from drone-dropped munitions. Close-quarters combat is rare now; it’s almost all shrapnel and blast trauma,” she said.
“Medics out here are forced to learn on the fly because we have no other choice. And nine times out of 10, it’s not just one or two wounded, it’s a full-blown mass casualty situation.”
Volodymyr Rovenskyi, an officer in the ground force’s Department for the Development of Ground Control Systems for Unmanned Systems, said in a briefing that 47 percent of Ukrainian UGV missions involved delivering supplies or evacuating soldiers.
The work is still far from safe. Units avoid operating UGVs during daylight hours, as movement of the machines is easy to spot and they are highly vulnerable to strikes from first-person view drones (FPVs). Third Assault Brigade soldier Kostas, known as El Greco, said FPVs were “the number-one threat to UGVs.”
UGVs’ primary roles were “logistics and evacuation, followed by engineering tasks, and finally kamikaze strikes or fire support,” he said.
Lyuba Shipovich, chief executive of Dignitas—a non-profit that supports the military—and head of the Victory Robots project for deploying UGVs, said “returning both the wounded and the dead” was now one of the main functions of ground robots.
But it’s not as simple as it seems. Connectivity remains one of the biggest challenges. Soldiers cannot risk being evacuated on a ground robot that loses its radio-control signal or satellite navigation or suffers a technical failure, leaving it stranded and the casualty exposed to drone strikes. To counter this, frontline units are experimenting with multiple, parallel channels for connectivity—such as wi‑fi mesh networks, Starlink satellite links, and LTE terrestrial networks—to keep the robots online.
Analogue radio systems make ground robots highly susceptible to enemy jamming, so most units are trying to move to multi‑node networks with data relaying combined with satellite control links. This greatly improves resilience. However, these upgrades significantly raise costs, which are already a barrier to widespread adoption.
“In practice, solutions that simply attach fiber optics to UGVs may prove more effective and solve the immediate challenges,” said Vitaliy Goncharuk, CEO of A19Lab and former Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence Committee of Ukraine.
But the effectiveness of these missions also improves when combined with other efforts to distract the enemy. “During evacuation missions, especially when we’re evacuating wounded soldiers, we need distraction maneuvers, artillery support, and drones to ensure the soldier is evacuated as safely as possible,” said Shipovich.
“In our last 60 missions, we lost two UGVs, one due to operator error, one to an FPV drone,” said Eugene, callsign “Kharkiv,” a UGV company commander in the 92nd Assault Brigade. One member of the unit, a former software engineer in his late twenties, has built custom software to enhance the UGVs’ functionality. This is part of a trend in which engineers in workshops across the front are tinkering and testing to improve their UGVs.
These ground robots are only beginning to transform frontline medicine, carrying out more and more evacuations. They are also taking on an increasing share of logistical work. In time, Ukraine’s frontline commanders expect to deploy many more robots across the front, continuing to wage asymmetrical warfare against Russia.
Ukrainian electronic warfare expert Serhii (“Flash”) Beskrestnov believes that, in the future, infantry will stay underground, with only robots operating on the surface and taking the greatest risks.
Even if Western military planners believe they can establish air dominance in future conflicts, Ukraine shows how modern battlefields can still turn into battles of grinding attrition. Preparing for that possibility is no less essential than working to prevent it.
(Editor’s note: The comments in this article were sourced from interviews by the author in Ukraine between July and August 2025).
Tags: drone medics, drones, Russia-Ukraine War, war casualties
About The Author
- David Kirichenko
- David Kirichenko is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. His work on warfare has been featured in the Atlantic Council, Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Modern Warfare Institute, among many others. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
16. Book Review | Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare
Book Review | Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/16/book-review-bitskrieg-the-new-challenge-of-cyberwarfare/
by Ciprian Clipa
|
09.16.2025 at 06:00am
Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare. By John Arquilla. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-5095-4363-6. Pp. viii, 220. $19.95.
John Arquilla’s Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare is a timely and provocative analysis of how information and digital networks are reshaping the nature of conflict. Best-known for coining the term “netwar” and for being the first scholar writing on swarming and information-age war, Arquilla extends those thoughts further in Bitskrieg, arguing that cyberwarfare is the twenty-first-century version of Blitzkrieg. As the 1930s and 1940s were transformed by the mechanization of warfighting, he contends that cyber weapons, joined by flexible organization and strategic vision, have come to dictate both peacetime competition and wartime combat. Central to his argument is that information flow is the key to success in the information-age war of the twenty-first century: it must flow quickly to underpin decision and coordinated action but must be highly protected as well. Speed without security invites catastrophe, which is why Arquilla advocates universal encryption and the migration of data into resilient cloud architectures. Only when information flows are both swift and shielded can they provide the decisive edge in modern conflict. As a wake-up call to those policymakers, military leaders, and scholars dealing with cyber strategy, Arquilla’s book sends a stern message: offense leads, defense lags, and nothing short of a massive rethinking of how we fight and the policies by which we operate will prevent catastrophic vulnerability.
Arquilla—professor emeritus and one of the founders of the Defense Analysis department at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a longtime advisor on information warfare—structures the book thematically rather than chronologically. The opening chapter on the rise of the “Cool War” frames cyber conflict not as spectacular destruction but as persistent disruption, which ranges from Russian operations in Georgia and Ukraine to the Stuxnet and Shamoon attacks. He follows this with a critical assessment of “Pathways to Peril,” in which he faults overreliance on brittle firewalls and antivirals as “Maginot Lines,” urging instead a shift to strong encryption, resilient cloud architectures, and deterrence by denial. Later chapters turn to the future of battle, highlighting the “Afghan Model” of small, networked SOF teams supported by precision strike, and speculating on how swarming, robotics, and artificial intelligence (“AI Jane”) will shape combat. Arquilla also examines the prospects for cyber arms control, arguing that, like chemical and biological weapons, it should be built on a “behavioral basis,” with international norms constraining specific actions rather than the tools themselves. He concludes with a call for doctrinal transformation: militaries must shed their industrial-age hierarchies and adopt Bitskrieg’s logic of many small, fast, and flexible units empowered by information networks.
The book’s greatest strength is its ability to blend theory, history, and recommendations. Arquilla illustrates his arguments with vivid cases, from NATO’s Kosovo campaign to Russia’s hybrid operations, alternating citations of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and his own earlier writings. His insistence that “offense rules” in cyberspace is sobering, as is his critique that the United States, despite formidable offensive capabilities, suffers from “the very worst defenses.” Particularly compelling is his warning that organizations must transform, because big, slow bureaucracies cannot survive against small, agile, networked adversaries who exploit information faster.
Nonetheless, the book does have its shortcomings. As Arquilla compellingly identifies the weaknesses of contemporary cyber defense, his solutions, such as ubiquitous encryption and cloud dependency, may be reinforced with additional empirical instances and case studies. Furthermore, even though his argument about cyber arms control is morally justified, it may fall on deaf ears among skeptics in an international environment where suspicion is the order of the day and verification a challenge. A comparative examination of the manner in which China, Iran, or smaller nations are developing their doctrines would have enhanced the international angle of his research.
Even with these reservations, Bitskrieg is an essential addition to the literature on cyber war and contemporary strategy. Military leaders and SOF commanders will find it both a warning and an encouragement about the possibilities of adapting force structure and doctrine to the information age. Policymakers will take from it the lesson that defensive hubris brings disaster into the world where offense prevails. And scholars and students of the study of security will take from it a synthesis of Arquilla’s decades-long intellectual journey, joining theory to practice with a sense of necessity. Chief among its many virtues is the way it compels readers to reevaluate the very nature of war itself in an age where bits rather than bullets may be the decisive factor.
Tags: Book review, Cyber warfare, netwar
About The Author
- Ciprian Clipa
- LCDR Ciprian Clipa is a Romanian Special Operations Forces officer with over a decade of distinguished SOF service and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Defense Analysis, majoring in Irregular Warfare, at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His research focuses on the role of SOF in countering Russian hybrid threats in the Black Sea region, with particular emphasis on Romania.
17. Iran's Perilous Path Back to Power
Depend on Beijing?
Excerpts:
In the short run, neither better air defenses or an improved fleet of fighter jets can drastically change Iran’s relative disadvantage with respect to Israel and the United States. But in the medium term, these improvements could make further strikes on Iran harder and costlier for adversaries to pursue and discourage episodic escalations. At the very least, they could buy Iran some time to replenish and refine its domestically produced missile stockpile and better prepare for another conflict. The more temporally distant the threat of war becomes for Iran, the more immediate risk it can shoulder.
Regardless of how China responds to its predicament, Iran is in a crunch. Its leaders may yet choose to muddle along in a state of insecurity, hoping simply to survive this period of crisis without further compromise. Or they may opt for the even more dangerous path of nuclear weaponization. But the scaffolding that had preserved Iran’s security for the last two decades has collapsed, and the country will remain fundamentally vulnerable and insecure until its conventional military shortcomings are addressed.
Iran's Perilous Path Back to Power
Foreign Affairs · More by Afshon Ostovar · September 17, 2025
Iran’s Perilous Path Back to Power
Tehran Has Few Options, but the Best One Depends on Beijing
September 17, 2025
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, September 2025 Iran's Presidential website / West Asia News Agency / Reuters
AFSHON OSTOVAR is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the author of Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East.
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A year of sustained losses has left Iran’s grand strategy in ruins. The near-destruction of Hamas in Gaza, the evisceration of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria deprived Iran of the proxies it had long relied on to threaten Israel. As a result, in June, Israel was able to conduct its 12-day war against Iran unencumbered by worries about regional escalation. That war demolished a long-held assumption about Iranian deterrence—the belief that Tehran could retaliate effectively against overt, direct attacks on its territory. More practically, it destroyed the country’s main air defenses, degraded its ballistic missile capabilities, and set back its nuclear ambitions.
Iran’s regime will certainly attempt to claw back its lost power. But regional developments since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s persistently assertive military footing have made it much harder for Tehran to take steps that could shore up its influence, such as rearming Hezbollah. Until Iran can defend its own territory, it may be impossible for it to rebuild its proxies or sprint for a nuclear bomb in a way that does not put the theocratic regime at further risk of collapse.
In the near term, Iran is likeliest to try to rebuild its military defenses by expanding its partnership with China. Until recently, Beijing has resisted backing one faction over another in the Middle East. But China’s calculus could be changing, too. It may well see fresh opportunities in assisting Iran to regain some of its diminished strength, given the rising tensions between Israel and Arab states—especially following Israel’s early September strikes on Hamas’s leadership in Qatar.
OBSTACLE COURSE
The Assad regime’s ouster last December—and the anti-Iranian stance adopted by Damascus’s new rulers—constitutes an underappreciated obstacle to Tehran’s ability to reconstruct its regional proxy strategy. For decades, Syria directly provided rockets and missiles to Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network; Assad also allowed Iran to smuggle weapons to Lebanon through Syrian territory. Although that effort met resistance after the outbreak of Syria’s civil war as Israel began to regularly conduct strikes on weapons storehouses in Syria and on convoys facilitated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran still managed to keep Hezbollah armed.
Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s new president, has made it clear that Iranian influence is no longer welcome in his country. He has sought partnerships with Iran’s rivals, particularly Turkey, and blamed Iranian-backed militias for fueling instability in Syria, arguing in a February 2025 interview on state television that Iranian proxies posed a threat to the Syrian people and “the entire region.” Yet despite some early successes, Shara’s government has struggled to unify the country. Iran could exploit the latent sociopolitical divisions in Syria by clandestinely aiding factions dissatisfied with the new regime or open to financial inducements, just as it has leveraged divisions in Iraq and Yemen.
Iran could have even greater opportunities to interfere in Syrian politics if the U.S. military completes its withdrawal. Iran already boasts relationships with some Syrian Sunni tribal networks, having worked with them to move weapons into the West Bank through Jordan. It could try to incentivize those networks to move arms to the Lebanese border if Damascus’s authority over southern Syria dwindles.
Without access to Syrian transit networks, however, Iran will be left with only two ways to send significant weapons shipments to Lebanon: by air or by sea. Both of these methods are vulnerable to Israeli interception, and the degree to which Israeli intelligence has penetrated Iran’s military establishment makes it even less likely that Iranian weapons could successfully reach Lebanon. After Israel’s 2024 attacks on Hezbollah, the group’s leadership structure is in shambles, and it faces extraordinary pressure to disarm. It may have no choice but to pull back or even abandon its military efforts.
ON THE DEFENSIVE
Iran may eventually find a way to reconstitute its supply lines to Hezbollah, but the conditions under which it could do so don’t yet exist. This means that Iran has lost—perhaps permanently—the one proxy militia whose power had discouraged Israeli attacks on Iranian territory. The Houthis in Yemen have successfully used Iranian weaponry to target shipping in the Red Sea, but they have not helped shield Iran against Israeli aggression. Hezbollah’s rockets posed a direct threat to Israeli cities, but the Houthis’ arsenal—as well as that of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq—constitutes a lesser and more distant threat.
Iran could, of course, pivot from its proxy strategy and try to restore its deterrence by racing for a nuclear weapon. Despite the Israeli and U.S. assaults on its nuclear facilities in June, Iran already possesses enough highly enriched uranium to construct several nuclear weapons and is believed to have the know-how to build them. If Iran could repair or rebuild adequate enrichment facilities (or if it already has such secret facilities), it could refine that uranium to a weapons-grade level relatively quickly, perhaps in a matter of weeks.
But even if Iran’s leaders want to pursue nuclear weaponization, taking the necessary steps to do so would be extremely dangerous for the ruling regime. Given Israel’s steep intelligence advantage, any moves to further enrich uranium would risk alerting Iran’s adversaries and triggering a new, and more destructive round of strikes led by Israel, the United States, or both. And even if Iran succeeded in testing a nuclear device and developing a small weapons arsenal uninterrupted, its current inability to defend its skies would render that arsenal tremendously vulnerable. Developing a nuclear weapon, on its own, therefore cannot restore Iranian deterrence. Without strong conventional defenses or proxies to deter foreign aggression, nuclear weapons could simply create a new liability.
Iran has a pressing need to bolster its air defenses.
Before Iran can even begin to restore deterrence, much less recoup some of its regional power, it must address the shortcomings in its conventional military capabilities. Iran did find ways to impose costs on Israel during the 12-day war, particularly by targeting Israeli population centers. But Israel’s air defense systems’ high intercept rate rendered Iran’s missiles an insufficient deterrent; they could not destroy or even reliably hit serious strategic and military targets. And after it eliminated Iran’s air defense systems, Israel was able to strike Iranian missile launchers, which further eroded Iran’s ability to launch effective counterstrikes.
How Iran chooses to rebuild its arsenal will depend on the lessons its military took from the 12-day war. Much remains unknown about how effective different Iranian missiles systems were in the conflict, but Iranian commanders will have undoubtedly acquired a greater understanding of which systems performed best and which operational tactics were most effective, even if Israel’s attacks on Iran were always more potent. Those lessons will guide how Iran’s military focuses its energies. It may, for instance, invest even more in domestically produced hypersonic or other advanced weapons (such as the Fattah and the Khorramshahr-4 missiles), as well as longer-range systems that could be fired from eastern Iran, a harder target for Israel to hit.
Iran’s need to bolster its air defenses is even more pressing. In June, Israel destroyed the bulk of Iran’s air defenses in the central and western parts of the country, including all of its Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, which had been the most advanced systems that Iran possessed. Israel also destroyed a number of Iranian military aircraft. Even before the war, Iran could not field an air force that could defend its skies against a stronger adversary, and it is weaker now.
Iran lacks the industrial capacity to produce the platforms it needs to bolster its air defense and will have to seek outside assistance. Moscow has long been Tehran’s closest defense partner, but Russia’s complicated relationship with Israel limits the defense assistance it has been willing to provide; its war on Ukraine has also diminished its ability to sell weaponry to outside buyers. In 2023, for instance, Iran announced a deal to purchase Sukhoi Su-35 fighter planes from Russia. To date, however, Russia has only delivered two of the reported 50 aircraft that Tehran has ordered. Moscow may yet make good on the deal, but given the delay and the constraints on Russia’s defense industry, Iran may choose to look elsewhere.
LAST RESORT
That leaves China as Iran’s best source of additional military equipment. China has traditionally sought to balance its relationships in the Middle East. It has helped Iran evade oil sanctions and offered limited military assistance, such as by aiding Iran’s development of antiship ballistic missiles. But Beijing has not assisted Tehran enough to give it a clear advantage over its Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, its traditional regional rival. China has reaped some benefits from Iran’s relative isolation—most importantly, by exploiting Western sanctions to purchase Iranian oil at a steep discount.
But China’s balancing act may no longer be necessary. In March 2023, Iran began normalizing diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia—a move brokered by China that fundamentally changed a prior driver of Beijing’s Midde East policy. And as tensions grow between Beijing and Washington, so does Tehran’s potential strategic utility for Beijing. Linking Iran more closely to Chinese interests and support could prove advantageous in, for example, a crisis scenario involving Taiwan, during which Beijing could split the focus of the U.S. Navy and its allies by incentivizing Tehran and its proxies to target civilian shipping in the Red Sea or the Gulf of Oman.
Air defense is a crucial gap that China could help Iran fill. China’s HQ-9 mobile air defense system is similar to Russia’s more advanced S-400 platform. If Beijing sold this system to Tehran, that could help Iran restore some protection of its skies. Iran could also pursue a deal with China to modernize its air force, such as by purchasing Chinese Chengdu J-10 aircraft, which performed well for Pakistan in its brief military escalation with India in May.
In the short run, neither better air defenses or an improved fleet of fighter jets can drastically change Iran’s relative disadvantage with respect to Israel and the United States. But in the medium term, these improvements could make further strikes on Iran harder and costlier for adversaries to pursue and discourage episodic escalations. At the very least, they could buy Iran some time to replenish and refine its domestically produced missile stockpile and better prepare for another conflict. The more temporally distant the threat of war becomes for Iran, the more immediate risk it can shoulder.
Regardless of how China responds to its predicament, Iran is in a crunch. Its leaders may yet choose to muddle along in a state of insecurity, hoping simply to survive this period of crisis without further compromise. Or they may opt for the even more dangerous path of nuclear weaponization. But the scaffolding that had preserved Iran’s security for the last two decades has collapsed, and the country will remain fundamentally vulnerable and insecure until its conventional military shortcomings are addressed.
Foreign Affairs · More by Afshon Ostovar · September 17, 2025
18. Rising Political Violence and the Security Readiness Gap in the U.S.
Excerpt:
In this case study, we will investigate the rise of political violence and assassination attempts in the United States, expose why traditional security approaches are failing, and illustrate how proactive measures such as assessments, policy development, and training can save lives and assets.
Conclusion:
The rise in political violence and targeted attacks in the U.S. is a wake-up call for corporate leaders, security professionals, law enforcement, and concerned citizens alike. We no longer have the luxury of viewing assassination attempts or workplace shootings as isolated aberrations – they are part of a pattern indicating serious deficiencies in our security readiness. Complacency, misinformation, and misallocated trust (in unvetted people or shiny products) have put the wrong people in charge and left critical vulnerabilities unaddressed. But this situation is not hopeless. By acknowledging the threats and learning from past failures, organizations can chart a new course – one grounded in proactive defense, rigorous training, and expert insight.
As someone who has spent a career on the offensive side of security (only to help make defenses stronger), I assure you that thinking like an attacker is the best way to stop one. The solutions are within reach: empower your security teams with knowledge and authority, educate your workforce, invest in measures that actually work, and hold everyone – including leadership – accountable to a high standard. In an era when violence can erupt at a school, a boardroom, or a campaign rally, preparation is not paranoia; it is a professional obligation and a moral one.
Ultimately, security is about protecting people, principles, and peace of mind. By closing the insight gap and eradicating complacency, we can prevent the next potential assassination or violent tragedy. It’s time to act decisively. In the words of a veteran protection executive, “We win 100% of the fights we avoid” – meaning the surest victory is to deter the fight from ever starting. Through diligent effort and the right partnerships, we can make our organizations and communities harder targets and ensure that would-be attackers are stopped before they pull the trigger. The cost of doing nothing – or doing the wrong things – is simply too high. Together, let’s build a culture of security excellence that meets this challenge head-on, and keeps our leaders, colleagues, and loved ones safe.
Rising Political Violence and the Security Readiness Gap in the U.S.
https://mwgroup.io/case-studies/rising-political-violence/
Table of Contents
- Escalating Political Violence and Assassination Attempts
- Complacency and Failures in Protective Security
- Security Gaps in Organizations and Institutions
- Surveillance Posture: From Passive Recording to Proactive Control
- Bridging the Gap: Proactive Security Measures That Work
- Surveillance Posture & Live Monitoring Enhancements
- Conclusion
- References
Author Credentials:
Over the past decade, since stepping out of military service, Travis Weathers has led and performed hundreds of covert facility breaches against Fortune 100 companies across sectors like healthcare, finance, retail, insurance, broadcast media, and banking, as well as critical infrastructure sites such as power distribution centers and educational institutions. These operations often carried objectives such as positioning to cause physical harm to on-air talent during prime-time news broadcasts or gaining access to physically and digitally sabotage critical infrastructure across some of America’s largest metropolitan areas. He has trained hundreds of professionals on these tactics, ranging from corporate security leaders to U.S. Special Operators. He has written security policies for organizations across multiple industries and has coached executives and their families on securing both their residences and their digital hygiene.
This real-world red team experience, essentially attacking organizations to test their defenses, has revealed a stark truth: complacency kills in security. Too often, the wrong people occupy critical protective roles, and organizations remain ill-prepared to detect or prevent determined attackers.
In this case study, we will investigate the rise of political violence and assassination attempts in the United States, expose why traditional security approaches are failing, and illustrate how proactive measures such as assessments, policy development, and training can save lives and assets.
Escalating Political Violence and Assassination Attempts
Political violence in America is surging to levels not seen in decades. High-profile attacks once thought to be relics of the 1960s and 1970s have re-emerged, creating an alarming trend of attempted and successful assassinations. Recent data shows a “dramatic rise” in attacks and plots motivated by partisan political views since 2016, with nearly three times as many incidents in the past five years as in the previous quarter-century. Experts say U.S. political violence is at its worst point since the turbulent 1970s. This spike includes violent threats, assassination attempts, and fatal attacks against public figures across the political spectrum.
Real-world incidents underscore the trend. In just the last year, multiple U.S. elected officials and public figures have been targeted. A sitting Minnesota state lawmaker was shot and killed in her own home, and another survived an attempted murder alongside his spouse. There were two assassination attempts on a U.S. President during the 2024 campaign. The threat is not confined to politicians: in late 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group was brazenly shot and killed on a Manhattan sidewalk, a chilling reminder that corporate leaders can become targets as well. Most recently, Charlie Kirk, a prominent political commentator, was shot dead during a public speaking event, an act Utah’s governor bluntly labeled a “political assassination.” Each of these incidents took place on U.S. soil, shattering any illusion that modern America is immune to the kind of targeted violence that shakes governments and societies.
At the heart of this crisis is the preservation of human life and freedom of speech. These are not abstract values but foundational principles for the United States. When public servants, business leaders, or commentators risk their lives for speaking or encouraging open debate, the very essence of democratic society is under attack. As President Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to them to do the same.” That fight today includes defending human life and ensuring that freedom of speech remains a right exercised without fear of political assassination.
Armed attacks can strike even seemingly secure public spaces, as political extremism and grievance-fueled violence lead individuals to target public officials, business leaders, and other figures. Recent years have seen a worrisome increase in plots and attacks, calling into question the effectiveness of current protective measures.
The motives behind these attacks vary – some are clearly partisan or ideological, while others are personal vendettas – but the common thread is that individuals are acting on violent intent toward specific people. A criminology expert notes that today’s perpetrators increasingly target individuals they associate with an opposing faction, rather than just attacking government buildings or symbols as in past extremist eras. This means the threat landscape is highly personalized and unpredictable: a lone gunman with a twisted grievance can be just as dangerous as an organized terrorist. And fueling this volatility is the toxic brew of hyper-polarized rhetoric and online radicalization. The ease of finding echo chambers on social media, where extreme views are reinforced, has lowered the barrier for angry individuals to move from hateful words to violent deeds. It’s no surprise, then, that U.S. authorities are inundated with threats against legislators, judges, and officials – a volume of threat intel that is difficult to triage.
Despite the relative rarity of successful assassinations in raw numbers, the impact is profound. Each incident sends shockwaves through the public and prompts the question: How did no one see this coming or stop it in time? The unsettling reality is that even well-funded agencies and protective details are struggling to adapt. Next, we examine how security forces – from federal agents to corporate security teams – are often caught flat-footed, and why misplaced confidence and complacency within the security apparatus are putting lives at risk.
Complacency and Failures in Protective Security
High-profile protectees – whether political leaders or C-suite executives – often surround themselves with trained security personnel and law enforcement escorts. On paper, these Protective Security Details (PSDs) and agency teams are elite; in practice, recent incidents reveal dangerous gaps in prevention and early threat detection. A sobering example came from an assassination attempt on a former President in July 2024: A Senate review found “wide-ranging failings” in the U.S. Secret Service’s preparation, including a known rooftop sniper hazard that was left unsecured at the rally venue. The would-be assassin took advantage of this oversight, firing eight rounds from a perch that agents themselves had identified beforehand as a risk. In the aftermath, the Secret Service’s acting director admitted the agency showed “complacency” among some agents and lacked clear communication and guidance with local police. In his words, “we must…make sure that we do not have another failure like this again”. Thankfully, that day the protectee survived with a minor injury, but the incident could have ended in tragedy – a direct consequence of seasoned security professionals letting their guard down.
It is often said in security circles that “complacency kills.” This mantra is not hyperbole – it reflects the harsh reality that the moment guards, agents, or executives assume “it won’t happen here,” they invite disaster. An executive protection specialist put it plainly: always being on guard is rule number one, because complacency kills. Yet complacency can take many forms. Sometimes it’s physical lapses – like failing to secure a door or neglecting to post overwatch on a known blind spot. Other times it’s a mental complacency – dismissing a suspicious remark or social media post as idle talk, or assuming that an arrest last month means a threat is “handled.” We’ve seen law enforcement units and corporate security teams alike fall victim to a “routine” mindset, where cursory badge checks or cursory event sweeps replace true vigilance.
Consider that most attackers exploit exactly those assumptions. The unpredictable shooter who targeted a CEO on a public street counted on the element of surprise – and indeed no one expected a corporate chief to be attacked in broad daylight. Likewise, the assassin who struck a speaker on a university campus took advantage of an environment where campus security was present but likely not anticipating a sudden gunshot from the crowd. These scenarios highlight a painful truth: even highly trained officers and agents can miss warning signs or fail to imagine tactics outside their usual playbook. When protective teams rely solely on “standard” procedures, a clever adversary will find the seams.
Unfortunately, a post-incident blame game often follows such failures. Rather than address systemic issues, organizations search for a scapegoat. We’ve seen individual guards, junior staff, or vendors swiftly fired or blamed after breaches – a knee-jerk reaction that solves nothing. Industry analysts warn that this blame culture masks deeper problems: “When CEOs scapegoat interns and admins, they really announce issues with policy, process, and accountability.” In other words, pointing fingers at a single employee (or a single “faulty” camera, etc.) is usually an admission that leadership failed to institute proper policies and oversight. Complacency often starts at the top. If the C-suite and security directors treat physical security as a low priority checkbox, that attitude trickles down to front-line personnel. Without a culture of vigilance, even a highly skilled bodyguard force or police detail can be rendered ineffective.
Wrong people in the wrong roles is another silent contributor to protective failures. In my experience performing covert breach tests, I’ve encountered security managers who had impressive résumés but outdated skills, and others placed in charge of physical security simply because they were senior in a different field (like IT or facilities) – not because they had true expertise in threat detection or adversary tactics. The executive protection field itself acknowledges a skills gap: not every practitioner has the needed training, and a “gap in baseline knowledge surfaces far too often in a profession where lives depend on performance.” The Dunning–Kruger effect is alive and well in security – individuals or firms often overestimate their capabilities and sell themselves as experts when they are not. Social media is flooded with self-styled “protection specialists” showing off gear and tactics that may look cool but diverge sharply from industry best practices. This has real consequences: clients (be they a politician’s staff or a corporate HR team) might hire unqualified “experts”, not realizing the person lacks the soft skills, planning acumen, or experience to prevent an attack. As one security expert noted, in this line of work “your decisions can determine the safety of others…blind overconfidence…is potentially lethal.” Put plainly, if a security team doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, the protectee pays the price.
So we have a situation where political and corporate targets face higher threat levels than ever, yet the very people responsible for guarding them may be lulled by routine, hampered by outdated training, or miscast in roles beyond their competence. The next section will look beyond the protective detail and examine the broader organizational weaknesses that attackers routinely exploit – often with little resistance – in both public institutions and private enterprises.
Security Gaps in Organizations and Institutions
High-profile assassinations grab headlines, but the underlying security weaknesses that enable them are alarmingly common across organizations of all kinds. Whether it’s a government building, a corporate headquarters, or a school campus, many institutions share the same flaws: depreciated security systems, under-trained staff, and a false sense of security about their risk exposure.
Start with the physical security hardware and procedures. Despite spending billions on security technology in the past two decades, basic access control failures plague many facilities. In a recent survey of security professionals, 66% of organizations reported a physical security breach in the past two years. How are intruders getting in? Often by walking right through the door. 48% of organizations experienced unauthorized entry due to “tailgating,” where an attacker simply follows an employee through a secure door. And 54% found doors propped open or left unlocked by staff, effectively inviting intruders inside. These numbers indicate a pervasive complacency about entry points – either through negligence or a misguided attempt to make life “more convenient” for employees. Such lapses can be catastrophic. (For instance, IBM’s 2024 data breach study found nearly 1 in 10 data breaches stemmed from physical security compromises, meaning an intruder bypassing the door can lead directly to network and data loss.)
Common vulnerabilities go well beyond doors. Attackers often exploit the “human factor” to bypass what gadgets are in place. Social engineering tactics – impersonating a delivery person, a contractor, or even a new hire – frequently trick untrained personnel. Poor enforcement of ID badge rules, inadequate visitor screening, lack of multi-factor authentication on secure doors, insufficient camera or alarm coverage, and untrained personnel easily fooled by ruses are all listed among the top security gaps in facilities. In other words, you can have the best cameras and locks, but if policies are lax and people aren’t trained to follow them, determined intruders will find a way. My team’s penetration tests have repeatedly confirmed this. We’ve breached Fortune 100 offices by exploiting exactly these weaknesses – a friendly smile and a fluorescent vest can get one past a lobby guard who isn’t expecting deceit. Organizations often don’t know what their own security systems are truly capable of, or not, and how attackers might bypass them.
Surveillance Posture: From Passive Recording to Proactive Control
Organizations routinely assume that installing cameras equals having surveillance—but in practice, many high-risk venues and events operate with a reactive posture: cameras record, footage is reviewed after the fact, but crucial problems during the event are unseen or unmitigated. This posture fails to account for how attackers exploit line-of-sight vulnerabilities, elevated vantage points, and time gaps of detection—particularly in large public gatherings or high-profile events.
What Went Wrong: The Butler Rally Case
The DHS Independent Review Panel’s July 13, 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania rally case is a textbook example:
- AGR Building rooftop vulnerability: The AGR building, whose rooftop gave line-of-sight toward the stage, was not secured by the Secret Service or state/local law enforcement, even though it was within ~150 yards of the stage. The attacker climbed onto the roof and fired eight rounds before counter-sniper action.
- Failure to mitigate line-of-sight: Although advance planning identified the AGR building as a threat, mitigations (barriers, camera coverage, or physical posts) were either insufficient or mismanaged. Visibility issues (e.g. tree obstructions) and ambiguous perimeter responsibilities left the roof inadequately monitored.
- Lack of continuous, live monitoring / oversight: Multiple observers saw suspicious activity (including someone with a rangefinder) near or on the AGR roof well before shots were fired, but the flow of information was delayed, communications were siloed, and no dedicated visual or physical post was maintaining live oversight of that rooftop.
Common Surveillance Failures (Across Institutions)
- Cameras are often placed only at entrances, lobbies, or internal choke points; elevated external vantage points (rooftops, adjacent buildings with sight-lines) are neglected.
- Live monitoring is weak or missing. Many organizations rely solely on recording for after-the-fact review, not on live video operators tasked with scanning for emerging threats.
- Operator staffing, playbooks, and hierarchy are often undefined or too weak to force escalation. A guard seeing someone on a rooftop may not have had clear authorities to respond or raise alarm.
- Pre-event risk assessment often misses hazard mapping of elevated external surfaces.
- Reliance on visual deterrents (e.g., cameras alone) without physical posts or security personnel to cover external vantage points when camera coverage is insufficient.
What Proactive Monitoring Requires
- Hazard mapping & line-of-sight analysis - Identify all elevated vantage points (rooftops, adjacent buildings) and determine if they can see protectees or VIP movement paths. If so, mark them as critical areas.
- Live coverage of hazard areas - Either via cameras with sufficient resolution, angle, and coverage or via trained physical posts. If neither is feasible, modify the venue layout or event plan.
- Overhead / aerial surveillance layer - Temporary towers, drones (where lawful), elevated PTZs or roof-mounted cameras.
- Clear command & integrated communications - Operators must have lines of communication to decision-makers, with defined escalation protocols for suspicious behavior or observations.
- Training & auditable standards - Include scenario-based drills involving rooftop threats or aerial perches. Include after-action reviews and audits.
- “No-coverage, no-go” policy - The venue or organization must enforce a policy that known hazard areas must be under visual control or physically secured. If not, reconfigure or cancel/relocate.
A major contributor to this problem is the tendency for organizations to blindly trust security product vendors and chase the latest high-tech solutions, while neglecting fundamentals. There’s nothing wrong with modern security tech – advanced cameras, analytics, etc. – but buying fancy equipment does not automatically make you secure. In fact, over-reliance on technology can breed a false sense of security. As one analysis noted, “buying more tools” can actually create a false sense of security while adding complexity. We see this in many corporate settings: leadership invests in an expensive camera system or AI threat detector and assumes threats will be caught, yet they fail to invest in training the staff who operate those systems or to update the procedures for responding to an alert. The result is often camera footage of an incident that no one acted on in time. Technology is only as effective as the people and processes behind it.
Nowhere is the gap between perceived security and actual security more evident than in our education system. Many school districts, under pressure from school violence incidents, have put money into security officers or cameras – but often just the minimum necessary to “check the box”. According to a school security consultant, “many district leaders invest the minimum necessary to maintain compliance or keep up appearances when it comes to school security.” This compliance-focused approach means schools do things like run occasional lockdown drills or have one officer patrolling, but they may ignore true vulnerabilities (e.g., multiple open campus access points, unvetted visitors, lack of threat assessment programs for troubled students). The unintended consequence is higher risk in the long run. We have seen the tragic results when school security is under-resourced or under-trained – doors that should lock don’t, no one has a key when needed, or officers hesitate because they never received proper active shooter training. The human toll of these failures is immense, and it feeds into a broader climate of fear. (It’s telling that teacher burnout is exacerbated by lack of safety; many educators cite fear for their security as a reason for leaving the profession.)
Businesses, too, often under-train their security staff or outsource to low-cost contractors, then assume everything is handled. But an inexperienced or undertrained guard force can be a liability. Security officers who lack proper training may respond inappropriately to incidents – either overreacting (and causing harm or panic) or freezing up and failing to act. If a breach occurs and a guard’s mistake contributes to the damage, the company can be held liable for negligent security practices. Beyond legal risk, there’s reputational damage: a bungled security incident makes the public and your employees lose confidence in their safety. Simply put, entrusting your physical security to unqualified personnel is a recipe for disaster – yet many organizations do exactly that, whether to save costs or because they don’t recognize the difference between a highly-trained protection professional and an ordinary rent-a-cop.
To summarize, here are some common security shortcomings prevalent in many organizations today:
- Outdated or poorly maintained security systems: Relying on old cameras, door locks, clonable access control cards, or alarms/sensors that cover only part of the facility, with no regular audits to identify blind spots or malfunctions.
- Lax enforcement of security policies: Employees prop doors open, skip visitor sign-ins, or let strangers “tailgate” into secure areas, without correction. Management often isn’t even aware it’s happening.
- Undertrained or misassigned personnel: Security guards or staff lack training in threat detection, de-escalation, and emergency response. In worst cases, individuals with limited security knowledge are put in charge, leading to dangerous overconfidence.
- Overconfidence in vendor solutions: Blindly trusting that a new security gadget or software will solve all problems. This can lead to complacency (“the system will catch it, we don’t have to”) and a false sense of security.
- Lack of threat awareness and early warning mechanisms: No robust channels to gather intelligence on potential threats (e.g. monitoring concerning social media posts, employee behavioral red flags, or FBI/DHS threat alerts). As a result, warning signs get missed until it’s too late.
Each of these gaps is exploitable by attackers – and, indeed, attackers from disgruntled insiders to organized criminals have exploited them time and again. The silver lining is that because these weaknesses are well-known, they are also addressable. Next, we focus on how organizations can flip the script: moving from complacency to proactivity, and from misguided security spending to strategic risk mitigation. The goal is to empower corporate leaders, security professionals, law enforcement partners, and everyday employees to detect and deter violence before it strikes, rather than scrambling in the aftermath.
Bridging the Gap: Proactive Security Measures That Work
If the status quo of “business-as-usual” security isn’t working, what will? In a climate of rising political violence and adaptive adversaries, organizations must become as serious and cunning about security as the attackers are about offense. This means embracing a proactive, intelligence-driven approach to physical security – one that involves expert assessments, robust policies, continuous training, and layered defenses. As a Service-Disabled Veteran-owned security firm, our team at Mayweather Group has focused on exactly these solutions, helping clients strengthen their security posture before a tragedy occurs.
First and foremost, organizations should assess their true security posture through realistic testing and analysis. It’s not enough to have an internal review or check-the-box audit; you need to think like an attacker. This is where red team operations and physical security assessments come in. By conducting controlled facility breach tests (with proper approvals), professional security testers can reveal how an intruder might circumvent your controls – whether by lock-picking, social engineering, or finding an unseen gap. The findings often jolt leadership into action. Seeing a report that “An unauthorized person gained access to the CEO’s floor by tailgating through three doors and wasn’t stopped by anyone” is far more impactful than theoretical advice. As one security white paper noted, 79% of organizations believe that improvements in physical security – better training, better technology, etc. – would have prevented their last security incident. Identifying those needed improvements requires a frank assessment. Our experience breaching critical sites has been eye-opening for many clients, revealing that what they thought was secure, wasn’t. The lesson is clear: don’t wait for a real attacker to show you where your weaknesses are – have ethical attackers find them first.
Based on assessment results, the next step is strengthening policies and procedures to close those gaps. A strong policy framework establishes what must be done (and not done) to maintain security day-to-day. For example, if tailgating is a problem, implement a strict badge policy: “No tailgating, no exceptions.” Make it a fireable offense for employees to let someone piggyback through a secure door. That may sound tough, but it sends the message that everyone is responsible for security. Education and awareness training should accompany such policies: staff and even executives need to be taught to politely challenge unfamiliar persons (“Hello, can I help you? Who are you here to see?”) rather than assume someone else vetted the stranger. Likewise, if a door is found propped open, there should be an immediate corrective process. Organizations should also develop threat assessment teams and protocols so that any hint of violence (a disgruntled comment, a social media threat, etc.) is documented and evaluated, not ignored.
Continuous training and drills are critical. You can’t hand employees a manual on active shooter response or emergency lockdown and consider it done. Regular drills for scenarios like an armed intruder, executive evacuation, or bomb threat will condition both security staff and employees to react swiftly under stress. This includes training protective details and law enforcement partners together with the organization’s staff when possible – coordination is key for fast response. We also advocate for specialized training for those in security leadership positions (corporate security directors, school safety officers, etc.) to keep them updated on the latest threat tactics. Just as attackers evolve, so must defenders. For example, an emerging threat is the use of drones for surveillance or even delivery of harmful payloads – do you have a policy or countermeasure for that? Only experts who stay current can advise on such evolving risks.
From a technology and infrastructure standpoint, layered defenses yield the best protection. No single gadget will stop a determined attacker, but multiple layers can delay and deter them until they are detected. For instance, a perimeter fence or access gate is a first layer; secure doors with badge readers form a second layer; internal locks or man-traps a third; and so on. Even if an adversary gets past the fence (layer 1), a locked door with an alarm can stop them at layer 2, or at least alert security to respond. Importantly, each layer should be integrated with a response plan – an alarm is only useful if someone acts on it immediately. Redundancy is also vital: if one officer or camera misses something, another can catch it. We’ve found that organizations that invest in this “defense in depth” approach – while also promoting a culture of vigilance – significantly harden themselves against intrusion.
Surveillance Posture & Live Monitoring Enhancements
Recent U.S. events make painfully clear that installing cameras is not enough. At the July 13, 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, rally, a gunman fired from a rooftop (the AGR building) that was explicitly outside the declared security perimeter. That rooftop had no continuous visual monitoring or physical security post, despite its line-of-sight to the stage and prior warnings from law enforcement. Local officers later spotted the shooter on the rooftop just before the shots were fired — but there was no ready mechanism to escalate into active response.
To combat these kinds of failures, organizations must embed live video monitoring (human, AI-assisted, or hybrid) into their security operations. Live feeds are distinct from passive archiving: they allow detection of behavior in real time, escalation of threats, and intervention before violence starts. Industry data show that systems combining live monitoring with strong placement (e.g. covering rooftops, vantage points, perimeters) significantly outperform systems relying only on recording for after-the-fact review.
Finally, expert guidance is invaluable. In the same way companies hire cybersecurity firms to test their networks, engaging physical security experts (like our team at Mayweather Group) can provide an outside perspective that internal teams often lack. We support clients through end-to-end security programs: conducting thorough assessments, developing customized policies, and providing training workshops that resonate with employees and security staff alike. Our goal is to transfer knowledge and confidence, so that the boardroom, the guard booth, and the local police precinct are all on the same page about threats and responses. When an organization’s leadership understands security beyond buzzwords, they make smarter investment decisions – focusing on practical measures, not just vendor hype. They also stop treating security as an afterthought or a necessary cost center, and start treating it as a mission-critical function that can save lives and protect the business’s continuity.
To encapsulate the proactive approach, consider these key steps to improve physical security and prevent violence:
- Conduct Regular Assessments: Evaluate your facilities through simulated attacks and professional audits. Identify how someone might penetrate your defenses and what the impact would be.
- Enforce Strong Security Policies: Implement clear rules (visitor verification, badge use, emergency reporting protocols) and ensure executives down to interns know and follow them. Zero tolerance for complacency should be part of your culture.
- Train Continuously at All Levels: Provide initial and ongoing training for security staff and regular employees. Drills for active shooter, evacuation, etc., should be conducted at intervals. Teach awareness – e.g., how spot surveillance or recognize social engineering attempts.
- Invest Wisely in Layered Controls: Deploy multiple security measures that complement each other (perimeter barriers, electronic access control, surveillance, alarms, lighting, etc.). Ensure there are no single points of failure and that each layer is monitored. This includes covering roof-vantage points and external structures with live visuals or physical posts.
- Validate and Update Plans: Don’t shelf your emergency response plan – practice it and update it based on lessons learned and new threats. Incorporate input from local law enforcement and security consultants. Ensure your crisis communication and incident response teams are prepared to act quickly.
By taking these steps, organizations send a message both internally and externally: we are not a soft target. Would-be attackers often conduct surveillance and planning before striking. If they encounter robust security measures, alert personnel who challenge them, and visible signs that the organization takes security seriously, they may be deterred or decide the effort isn’t worth it. And if they are foolish enough to attempt the attack regardless, a well-prepared security team and workforce will react swiftly to mitigate harm and save lives.
A security control room operator monitors live surveillance feeds. Modern security technology provides powerful tools, but without well-trained humans and proper procedures behind them, these tools can instill a false sense of safety. True security comes from a blend of smart technology, strict policy enforcement, and attentive personnel who remain vigilant – never allowing complacency to creep in.
Conclusion
The rise in political violence and targeted attacks in the U.S. is a wake-up call for corporate leaders, security professionals, law enforcement, and concerned citizens alike. We no longer have the luxury of viewing assassination attempts or workplace shootings as isolated aberrations – they are part of a pattern indicating serious deficiencies in our security readiness. Complacency, misinformation, and misallocated trust (in unvetted people or shiny products) have put the wrong people in charge and left critical vulnerabilities unaddressed. But this situation is not hopeless. By acknowledging the threats and learning from past failures, organizations can chart a new course – one grounded in proactive defense, rigorous training, and expert insight.
As someone who has spent a career on the offensive side of security (only to help make defenses stronger), I assure you that thinking like an attacker is the best way to stop one. The solutions are within reach: empower your security teams with knowledge and authority, educate your workforce, invest in measures that actually work, and hold everyone – including leadership – accountable to a high standard. In an era when violence can erupt at a school, a boardroom, or a campaign rally, preparation is not paranoia; it is a professional obligation and a moral one.
Ultimately, security is about protecting people, principles, and peace of mind. By closing the insight gap and eradicating complacency, we can prevent the next potential assassination or violent tragedy. It’s time to act decisively. In the words of a veteran protection executive, “We win 100% of the fights we avoid” – meaning the surest victory is to deter the fight from ever starting. Through diligent effort and the right partnerships, we can make our organizations and communities harder targets and ensure that would-be attackers are stopped before they pull the trigger. The cost of doing nothing – or doing the wrong things – is simply too high. Together, let’s build a culture of security excellence that meets this challenge head-on, and keeps our leaders, colleagues, and loved ones safe.
References
[1] DHS Independent Review Panel – Independent Review Panel Final Report on the July 13, 2024 Butler Rally
[2] U.S. House Task Force – Final Report of Findings and Recommendations: Investigation of the Second Assassination Attempt, West Palm Beach & Related Events
[3] U.S. Secret Service – Mission Assurance Inquiry Summary: Butler Rally – Operational Failures and Lessons Learned
[4] Volt.ai – Live Video Monitoring: Taking Security from Reactive to Proactive
[5] Resolute Partners – Why Security Video Surveillance Is Not Just About Cameras
[6] LVT Security – Security Camera Monitoring 101: Active vs. Passive
[7] ABC News – ‘Without reform’ to the Secret Service ‘another Butler can and will happen again,’ DHS independent review finds
[8] Senate Judiciary Committee (Grassley) – Report: Secret Service Failure to Share Threat Information in Butler Attempt
19. This is who we are: America's 250-year history of political violence
Blaming political violence on guns?
Excerpts:
These more modern firearms became not only practical tools of war, crime or self-defense but symbolic objects in their own right. They embodied authority, carried cultural meaning and gave their holders the sense that legitimacy itself could be claimed at the barrel of a gun.
That's why the phrase "This isn't who we are" rings false. Political violence has always been part of America's story, not a passing anomaly and not an episode.
To deny it is to leave Americans defenseless against it. Only by facing this history head-on can Americans begin to imagine a politics not defined by the gun.
Voices Sept. 16, 2025 / 7:05 AM
This is who we are: America's 250-year history of political violence
https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/09/16/political-violence-America-recurring/3971758019685/
By Maurizio Valsania, Università di Torino
The Texas Book Depository (L), from which the fatal shots that killed President John F. Kennedy were fired, is seen here in this November 29, 1963, photo. File Photo/UPI | License Photo
The day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University, commentators repeated a familiar refrain: "This isn't who we are as Americans."
Others similarly weighed in. Whoopi Goldberg on The View declared that Americans solve political disagreements peacefully: "This is not the way we do it."
Yet, other awful episodes come immediately to mind: President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963. More recently, on June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortman, speaker emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives, was shot and killed at her home, along with her husband and their golden retriever.
As a historian of the early republic, I believe that seeing this violence in America as distinct "episodes" is wrong. Instead, they reflect a recurrent pattern.
American politics has long personalized its violence. Time and again, history's advance has been imagined to depend on silencing or destroying a single figure -- the rival who becomes the ultimate, despicable foe.
Hence, to claim that such shootings betray "who we are" is to forget that the United States was founded upon -- and has long been sustained by -- this very form of political violence.
Revolutionary violence as political theater
The years of the American Revolution were incubated in violence. One abominable practice used on political adversaries was tarring and feathering. It was a punishment imported from Europe and popularized by the Sons of Liberty in the late 1760s, Colonial activists who resisted British rule.
In seaport towns such as Boston and New York, mobs stripped political enemies, usually suspected loyalists -- supporters of British rule -- or officials representing the king, smeared them with hot tar, rolled them in feathers and paraded them through the streets.
The effects on bodies were devastating. As the tar was peeled away, flesh came off in strips. People would survive the punishment, but they would carry the scars for the rest of their life.
By the late 1770s, the Revolution in what is known as the Middle Colonies had become a brutal civil war. In New York and New Jersey, patriot militias, loyalist partisans and British regulars raided across county lines, targeting farms and neighbors. When patriot forces captured loyalist irregulars -- often called "Tories" or "refugees" -- they frequently treated them not as prisoners of war, but as traitors, executing them swiftly, usually by hanging.
In September 1779, six loyalists were caught near Hackensack, N.J. They were hanged without trial by patriot militia. Similarly, in October 1779, two suspected Tory spies captured in the Hudson Highlands were shot on the spot, their execution justified as punishment for treason.
To patriots, these killings were deterrence; to loyalists, they were murder. Either way, they were unmistakably political, eliminating enemies whose "crime" was allegiance to the wrong side.
Dueling as politics
Even after independence, the workings of American politics remained grounded in a logic of violence toward adversaries.
For national leaders, the pistol duel was not just about honor. It normalized a political culture in which gunfire itself was treated as part of the debate.
The most famous duel, of course, was Aaron Burr's killing of Alexander Hamilton in 1804. But scores of lesser-known confrontations dotted the decade before it.
In 1798, Henry Brockholst Livingston -- later a U.S. Supreme Court justice -- killed James Jones in a duel. Far from discredited, he was deemed to have acted honorably. In the early republic, even homicide could be absorbed into politics when cloaked in ritual. Ironically, Livingston had survived an assassination attempt in 1785.
In 1802, another shameful spectacle unfolded: New York Democratic-Republicans DeWitt Clinton and John Swartwout faced off in Weehawken, N.J. They fired at least five rounds before their seconds intervened, leaving both men wounded. In this case, the clash had nothing to do with political principle; Clinton and Swartwout were Republicans. It was a patronage squabble that still erupted into gunfire, showing how normalized armed violence was in settling disputes.
Gun culture and its expansion
It is tempting to dismiss political violence as a leftover from some "primitive" or "frontier" stage of American history, when politicians and their supporters supposedly lacked restraint or higher moral standards. But that is not the case.
From before the Revolution onward, physical punishment or even killing were ways to enforce belonging, to mark the boundary between insiders and outsiders, and to decide who had the right to govern.
Violence has never been a distortion in American politics. It has been one of its recurring features, not an aberration but a persistent force, destructive and yet oddly creative, producing new boundaries and new regimes.
The dynamic only deepened as gun ownership expanded. In the 19th century, industrial arms production and aggressive federal contracts put more weapons into circulation. The rituals of punishing those with the wrong allegiance now found expression in the mass-produced revolver and later in the automatic rifle.
These more modern firearms became not only practical tools of war, crime or self-defense but symbolic objects in their own right. They embodied authority, carried cultural meaning and gave their holders the sense that legitimacy itself could be claimed at the barrel of a gun.
That's why the phrase "This isn't who we are" rings false. Political violence has always been part of America's story, not a passing anomaly and not an episode.
To deny it is to leave Americans defenseless against it. Only by facing this history head-on can Americans begin to imagine a politics not defined by the gun.
Maurizio Valsania is a professor of American history at the Università di Torino. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions in this commentary are solely those of the author.
20. No New World Order: Xi’s Alliance Of Autocrats Can’t Rival The West
We should remember why the CRInK exists: fear, weakness, desperation, and envy.
They fear the "silk web" of alliances of free and democratic countries.
They have inherent internal weaknesses that threaten their authoritarian/totalitarian dictators' power and control.
They are desperate for support of their various malign endeavors.
They envy the "silk web" of alliances of free and democratic countries.
No New World Order: Xi’s Alliance Of Autocrats Can’t Rival The West
Xi Jinping’s military show in Beijing and his alliance of autocrats may look like the dawn of a new world order, yet the economic, scientific, and military balance still tilts toward the democracies of the West.
by Matthias Naß
September 16, 2025
worldcrunch.com · Gabriele MAGRO · September 16, 2025
-Analysis-
BERLIN — Soldiers goose-stepping, with a viewing platform above them crowded with stern-looking heads of state: newspapers love to splash such images across their front pages. China’s leadership provided them in abundance last week.
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The intended message of the Beijing military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Asia, just as it had been two days earlier at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, was clear: the future belongs to us, China and its allies.
Indeed, amid the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump, party and state leader Xi Jinping managed to cast himself as the guardian of international “stability.”
At Beijing’s thunderous display of weaponry, Xi spoke from the Gate of Heavenly Peace like a leader touched by destiny. “The Chinese people,” he declared, “stand firmly on the right side of history.”
“Davos of Despots”
But there is every reason to doubt that. After all, who did Xi Jinping assemble beside him at the entrance to the Forbidden City? From Russia came warlord Vladimir Putin, from North Korea his arms supplier Kim Jong Un, from Iran Massoud Peseschkian, from Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, from Serbia Aleksandar Vucic, and from Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing.
A “Davos of despots,” as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung scoffed.
And with this crowd, Xi believes he stands on the “right side of history”?
In truth, what was on parade was the past. It is hard to see why so many Western media voices immediately began to fret about the birth of a new world order and the waning strength of the West.
Such continuity with the Cold War, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is remarkable.
The order represented by China, Russia, and North Korea is hardly new. On October 1, 1959, at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Mao Zedong, Nikita Khrushchev, and Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, stood together with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh to review the parade marking the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
Such continuity with the Cold War, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is remarkable. True, it was not the old Communist International that gathered last week. That is long gone. But those one-time sister nations remain dictatorships, all of them nationalist, and Russia openly imperialist.
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte after his call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the Oval Office. — Photo: Daniel Torok/White House/ZUMA
Weakened by Trump
One crucial difference from 66 years ago is that China has achieved a breathtaking economic ascent, and in many industrial sectors it has already overtaken its great rival, the United States. The People’s Republic now produces more than 70% of American economic output, and is on its way to cementing its place as the world’s second superpower.
But if one looks at the West as a whole – North America, Europe, and the democracies of Asia and the Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – it still represents a force that far surpasses China and its dreary company of dictators in every respect: economically, scientifically, technologically, and even militarily.
Here, of course, comes the objection: but what about Western political cohesion? Is Donald Trump not doing everything in his power to tear it apart? When U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance snubbed the Europeans with an outrageous speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, there was much talk of “the end of the West as we knew it.”
American democracy is resilient
There is no doubt: the unity and credibility of the West are being weakened by Trump’s destructive behavior, and he himself would prefer to rule like a dictator. But American democracy is resilient. Contrary to dire predictions, Trump has not pulled the United States out of NATO. In fact, through his pressure and threats, he has pushed Europeans to take on much more for their own defense. And despite Trump’s diplomatic blunders, solidarity with Ukraine has so far held firm, as last week’s meeting of the Coalition of the Willing in Paris showed.
China and India both see themselves as leaders of the Global South.
Perhaps Trump will one day come to understand what America gains from its allies and partners, rather than constantly driving them away, as he recently did with India. His punitive tariffs pushed Prime Minister Narendra Modi into the wide-open arms of China.
Still, this will not produce a new world order co-shaped by China and India. Both countries see themselves as leaders of the Global South. Their geopolitical ambitions will keep them apart, as will deep-seated historical hostilities.
Let us wait and see who truly stands on the “right side of history.” The Western-led world order is riddled with flaws and injustices; it badly needs reform. But surely Xi, Putin and Kim offer none of the answers.
worldcrunch.com · Gabriele MAGRO · September 16, 2025
21. China: Xi seeks to fill America’s void
A brutal critique here:
Asia’s foreign leaders do agree on one thing, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic—that the president of the United States is an incompetent “light-weight.” Western European allies also view Trump as a petulant, insecure child: Their leaders mostly toggle between “soothing his ego and working around him.” Trump has made it clear he’s a president with “little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him.” Don’t underestimate the enormous damage he’s doing “to American power and prestige.” China certainly isn’t.
I will restate my assessment of China – it seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan).
China: Xi seeks to fill America’s void
- Trump’s tariffs are pushing nations eastward as Xi Jinping focuses on strengthening ties with global leaders
-
The Week · The Week US · September 16, 2025
Trump has made it clear he’s a president with “little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him.”
(Image credit: Alexander Kazakov / Getty Images)
By
published 16 September 2025
As “the U.S. isolates itself” economically and politically, said Katherine Kim in Politico, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is taking a “big victory lap.” Xi recently met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in China for the first time since 2018, then gathered with Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and two dozen other foreign leaders in Beijing for a parade in which China showed off its massive military buildup. With President Trump’s tariffs and “America First” policies alienating India and other nations, China has started to “present itself as a trustworthy alternative” to lead a post-American world order. A furious Trump took Xi’s “performative” gathering of fellow autocrats as “a personal affront,” said Stephen Collinson in CNN.com, accusing him, Putin, and Kim of meeting to “conspire against the United States of America.” But Trump has only himself to blame. His punishing tariffs and cutoff of foreign aid are “accelerating a shift of global power to the East.”
Trump’s recent treatment of Modi and India “has been despicable,” said Bobby Ghosh in Time. For years, the U.S. had been courting India as a regional counterweight to China, but Trump hit the massive country with a 50% tariff, apparently out of spite. Trump falsely claimed he brokered peace in a brief flare-up of hostilities between India and Pakistan in May, and was infuriated when Modi declined to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Still, Modi has long viewed China as a dangerously aggressive neighbor, and he “can’t afford to cut ties with the U.S.,” which remains by far India’s largest trading partner. Despite the show of unity, there’s little chance of a “China-Russia-North Korea NATO-type military alliance,” said Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner. Kremlin officials remain “deeply fearful” of Chinese domination, and these three autocratic countries have too many “mutually exclusive agendas” to form a solid bloc.
Asia’s foreign leaders do agree on one thing, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic—that the president of the United States is an incompetent “light-weight.” Western European allies also view Trump as a petulant, insecure child: Their leaders mostly toggle between “soothing his ego and working around him.” Trump has made it clear he’s a president with “little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him.” Don’t underestimate the enormous damage he’s doing “to American power and prestige.” China certainly isn’t.
22. Geopolitical Fracture And The Rewiring Of Global Trade – OpEd
A view from India.
Excerpts:
The fracture of global trade has left many nations scrambling. China is bleeding market share in the US, its shipments plunging even as it reroutes through Southeast Asia. The US is struggling with higher consumer prices and uncertain supply chains. India, by contrast, has emerged as a net gainer. For the first time since independence, it is not merely a waypoint but a commanding node in the global network. The Ministry of Commerce’s ledgers, the Ministry of Finance’s surveys, and reports from McKinsey, PwC, and NITI Aayog all agree: India has turned adversity into advantage.
This is the self-reliance dividend. The world is redrawing its map of trade. India, at long last, holds the pen.
When America tried to bully India with tariffs, New Delhi charted its own course. Data from the Ministry of Commerce and Finance, reinforced by PwC, McKinsey, and NITI Aayog, show that India not only withstood the shock but converted it into a dividend of self-reliance. The fracture of global trade has become the foundation of India’s rise as a commanding node in a multipolar world.
This trajectory also finds resonance in comparative data: while China’s share of global exports has begun to decline from its 2020 peak of nearly 15 percent to around 13 percent by 2024, India’s share has inched upward. The WTO’s 2025 monitoring report observed that India now accounts for close to 2.4 percent of world merchandise exports, up from barely 1.6 percent a decade earlier. This incremental rise is not cosmetic; it reflects the cumulative effect of diversified markets, improved logistics, and tariff-defying resilience. In essence, India is beginning to do what China did in the early 2000s: translate political will and demographic scale into lasting commercial heft.
Geopolitical Fracture And The Rewiring Of Global Trade – OpEd
https://www.eurasiareview.com/16092025-geopolitical-fracture-and-the-rewiring-of-global-trade-oped/
September 16, 2025 0 Comments
By Manoranjana Gupta
When Washington tried to strong-arm New Delhi with punitive tariffs, India did not bend. Instead, it doubled down on self-reliance, diversified its markets beyond the United States, and emerged as a far larger export power than its critics had imagined. Today, the Ministry of Commerce’s export tables, the Ministry of Finance’s fiscal surveys, and global assessments from consultancies and think tanks converge on a single story: the fracture of global trade is not India’s loss, but India’s opportunity.
In fact, I had argued in my own Eurasia Review column a few months ago that America’s attempt to squeeze India with tariffs would end up creating the opposite effect. By trying to bully New Delhi, Washington would push India toward a harder embrace of self-reliance. That defiance, I wrote then, would not be a setback but a springboard: an opportunity for India to diversify markets, scale exports, and claim a firmer place in the world’s trading system. Today, the data pouring in from the Commerce and Finance Ministries bears that prediction out.
The rupture in trade flows that defines this decade did not begin in Delhi or Hanoi, but in Washington. As the United States widened its tariff arsenal — first against China, and then against India’s steel, aluminium, and technology services — it expected compliance. Instead, the Modi government drew a line. There would be no capitulation. The Ministry of Commerce’s 2024 report showed how India responded: by expanding bilateral exports with ASEAN, Africa, the Gulf, and Europe. Far from wilting, India’s export base reached an unprecedented $820 billion in goods and services in FY 2024–25, according to the Ministry of Finance. This was muscular diversification, not fragile growth. McKinsey, PwC, and NITI Aayog now note that India’s breadth of export partners has expanded faster than any other G20 nation.
When I spoke recently with a senior official in the Ministry of Finance, he underlined that the $820 billion export figure was not just a number on paper. It represented new shipping lanes to Africa, contracts inked in Gulf ports, and hundreds of smaller exporters filing returns for the first time. The Commerce Ministry’s own resources show that between 2019 and 2025, the number of active exporters has risen by nearly 40 percent — a statistic rarely highlighted in headlines.
The context is crucial: China’s share of US imports has plunged from about 18 percent in 2017 to barely 9 percent by mid-2025, according to China’s customs data. In the same period, Chinese shipments to the US in August 2025 collapsed by 33 percent year-on-year. The vacuum has not remained empty. Mexico, Vietnam, and India have absorbed the trade. Reuters reports that despite a tariff-induced dip in August shipments, India’s US exports over April–August 2025 still rose to about $40.39 billion, underscoring resilience. NITI Aayog further argues that the very tariff gaps created by Washington have made Indian products more competitive vis-à-vis China, Mexico, and Canada.
Diversification has now become doctrine. Five years ago, nearly a fifth of India’s merchandise exports were America-bound. That proportion has narrowed deliberately. The Gulf and ASEAN absorb India’s energy and engineering goods; Africa has emerged as the fastest-growing frontier for pharmaceuticals and two-wheelers; and Europe has been tied into long-term compacts such as the India–EFTA TEPA. The agreement promises $100 billion in pledged investment over 15 years — an unprecedented bundling of tariff relief with capital inflows. Meanwhile, the UAE CEPA has lifted gems and jewellery exports by more than 30 percent within three years. This is not accidental, but a design born from India’s refusal to remain tethered to any one power centre.
The smartphone story symbolises the new arc. Barely visible a decade ago, India exported over ₹2 lakh crore worth of smartphones in FY 2024–25. Apple alone assembled $22 billion worth of iPhones locally. Deloitte and PwC concur that India’s electronics value-addition has risen from about 12 percent to nearly 20 percent in three years, with official targets set at 35–40 percent by 2028. The ecosystem of printed circuit boards, camera modules, and precision enclosures has begun rooting itself. What began as tariff defiance has become industrial depth.
I recall a Commerce Ministry source telling me that this was the first time in memory that auto-components had swung into surplus — “a psychological turning point” was how he phrased it. The Finance Ministry’s quarterly bulletin quietly carried the same data: India now sells more parts to Detroit and Stuttgart than it imports from Shanghai.
Other sectors are quietly showing the same pattern. India’s auto components industry logged a trade surplus in FY25, with exports rising to about $23 billion, overtaking imports for the first time. The Ministry of Commerce’s annual report confirms that the overall trade deficit has improved from $121.6 billion in 2022–23 to $75.5 billion in 2023–24 — a 38 percent correction. These are not marginal numbers but structural shifts.
Even as America’s share of Indian exports narrows, India has gained in Africa and the Gulf. From Nairobi to Lagos, Indian engineering goods, solar technology, and affordable medicines are carving space. The Ministry of Finance calls Africa India’s ‘next frontier’ in its 2025 mid-year economic review. This is echoed by PricewaterhouseCoopers’ outlook, which forecasts that India’s exports to Africa could double within the decade. In parallel, Southeast Asia has become both a market and a partner: Vietnam and Indonesia are not merely conduits for Chinese rerouting, but active collaborators with India in electronics and energy.
Services, though less glamorous than goods, remain India’s silent surplus. IT, fintech compliance, design, and clinical data services consistently cushion trade volatility. The Ministry of Finance estimates an additional $50 billion in surplus by 2028. PwC calls India’s services trade ‘the invisible ballast’ that stabilises the ship even in stormy seas.
History rhymes here. Colonial India was shackled to monocultures; the IMF’s diktats in the 1990s bound liberalisation to external whims. Today’s India has seized autonomy: it is neither autarky nor subservience, but strategic self-reliance. By refusing to bow to tariff bullying, India has asserted sovereignty. By diversifying exports, it has widened opportunity. By leveraging services, it has built stability.
As someone who has tracked India’s trade story for three decades, from the shock of liberalisation to the new swagger of self-reliance, I sense a distinct change in tone within North Block. The Finance Ministry no longer explains away deficits; it talks about strategy. That change of vocabulary is itself a measure of India’s arrival in this rewired world.
The fracture of global trade has left many nations scrambling. China is bleeding market share in the US, its shipments plunging even as it reroutes through Southeast Asia. The US is struggling with higher consumer prices and uncertain supply chains. India, by contrast, has emerged as a net gainer. For the first time since independence, it is not merely a waypoint but a commanding node in the global network. The Ministry of Commerce’s ledgers, the Ministry of Finance’s surveys, and reports from McKinsey, PwC, and NITI Aayog all agree: India has turned adversity into advantage.
This is the self-reliance dividend. The world is redrawing its map of trade. India, at long last, holds the pen.
When America tried to bully India with tariffs, New Delhi charted its own course. Data from the Ministry of Commerce and Finance, reinforced by PwC, McKinsey, and NITI Aayog, show that India not only withstood the shock but converted it into a dividend of self-reliance. The fracture of global trade has become the foundation of India’s rise as a commanding node in a multipolar world.
This trajectory also finds resonance in comparative data: while China’s share of global exports has begun to decline from its 2020 peak of nearly 15 percent to around 13 percent by 2024, India’s share has inched upward. The WTO’s 2025 monitoring report observed that India now accounts for close to 2.4 percent of world merchandise exports, up from barely 1.6 percent a decade earlier. This incremental rise is not cosmetic; it reflects the cumulative effect of diversified markets, improved logistics, and tariff-defying resilience. In essence, India is beginning to do what China did in the early 2000s: translate political will and demographic scale into lasting commercial heft.
Manoranjana Gupta
Manoranjana Gupta is a Journalist, TV opinion leader, and a Special Advisor for GDKP in India, at the Center for Digital Future, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism under the University of Southern California.
23.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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