Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"And every time I hear a political speech, or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men except this, that the peoples anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way. They are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so-called 'vital interests.'"

– Albert Camus

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognize it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots."

– George Orwell

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. Voice of America - Analysis of allegations of left leaning bias

2. China’s Military Parade Was a Message

3. Rubio Reassures Mexico After U.S. Military Strike Jolts Region

4. Army’s Contract With Startup Will Give Soldiers Battlefield AI

5. Critical State: The Pentagon's AI 'Doomsday Machine'

6. The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think

7. Trump’s Gunboat War on Drugs

8. In Front-Line Ukrainian Towns, Those Who Stayed Become Moving Targets

9. The 5 key takeaways from China’s Victory Day military parade

10. The weapons and military units on display in China's major parade

11. Trump’s Ukraine Strategy Falters: White House Readies for High-Stakes Call

12. In the Donbas ‘Fortress,’ Ukraine’s Soldiers Refuse to Yield

13. Shortly after laying off hundreds, State hires new class of foreign service staff

14. Trump says US won’t pull troops from Poland

15. Technological Discord and Tactical Misjudgment: India’s Military Setback in the May 2025 Crisis

16. Syria’s Minority Killings Aren’t Accidents – They’re Strategy

17. Defending the Army’s Command Assessment Program

18. Air Force Looks to Cut Squadrons That Advise Foreign Militaries

19. U.S. Army prepares for next-gen tank production

20. Reprioritize SWO Tactical Qualifications for the High-End Fight

21. Weaning the U.S. Military Off a Tablet Supply Chain That Leads to China

22. The Dialectic of Deception: John Boyd and the Cognitive Battlefield

23. Russia Is Quietly Building a New Arctic Military Base—on American Land

24. America's biggest adversaries "conspire" in Beijing

25. While China’s military was on parade in Beijing, its navy patrolled the South China Sea

26. The Sad and Sorry Tale of Cyber Command’s Seven-Year Failure

27. White-Collar Warfighters: Can the US Military Learn from the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ Bold Pitch to Young Professionals?

28. The Case for a U.S. Alliance With India

29. America’s Private-Capital Advantage – How to Outcompete Chinese State Capitalism

1. Voice of America - Analysis of allegations of left leaning bias

I have been chastised by some for my support of Voice of America and my position that it is a serious national security mistake for our nation.

I have been told that the majority of the American people think it is a leftist organization that does not support America. I vehemently disagree with that allegation. So I decided to ask my "research assistant" (AI) to do some research for me and for anyone who is interested.

However, to put VOA in context it is important to understand its mission, the "firewall," and the charter that it operates under. Please review these before you read my "research assistant's" analysis.

Here is the prompt I used. I focused on the CRInK since they are our main national security threat.

Prompt: Please analyze Voice of America for left leaning bias. Specifically look at the China, Russia, Iran, and Korean services. Are these services living up to the VOA mission statement and VOA charter and vision? Did they exploit the VOA charter and firewall? Or have they been exemplars of the free press and uphold American values as an example to the world and especially to oppressed peoples living under authoritarian regimes?

I offer this because most people who engage with me on this have no idea what VOA does and they have no first hand experience with it. They appear to be basing their criticism and judgement on the media they subscribe to.

Of course the other issue is that this is merely a test case to prove the unitary executive theory of government and an interpretation of the Constitutional clause that says all executive power is vest in the president. VOA , USIP, USAID, etc are all tests of executive authority. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the Supreme Court eventually.

Mission, Firewall and Charter

insidevoa.com

VOA Mission

Voice of America (VOA) is the largest U.S. international broadcaster, providing news and information in nearly 50 languages to an estimated weekly audience of more than 354 million people. VOA produces content for digital, television, and radio platforms. It is easily accessed via your mobile phone and on social media. It is also distributed by satellite, cable, FM and MW, and is carried on a network of more than 3,500 affiliate stations.

Since its creation in 1942, Voice of America has been committed to providing comprehensive coverage of the news and telling audiences the truth. Through World War II, the Cold War, the fight against global terrorism, and the struggle for freedom around the globe today, VOA exemplifies the principles of a free press.

VOA is part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government agency that oversees all non-military, U.S. international broadcasting. It is funded by the U.S. Congress.

VOA Firewall

An essential guarantee of the journalistic credibility of Voice of America content is the “firewall” enshrined in the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act. The firewall prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news, thereby safeguarding the ability of our journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference. USAGM reforms contained in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2017 maintained the longstanding statutory firewall language protecting the professional independence of VOA and all other USAGM journalists. The firewall ensures that VOA can make the final decisions on what stories to cover, and how they are covered.

Who We Are, What We Do

VOA Charter

The Charter was signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford on July 12, 1976. The Charter protects the editorial independence and integrity of VOA programming.

The long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio. To be effective, the Voice of America must win the attention and respect of listeners. These principles will therefore govern Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts:

1. VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news. VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.

2. VOA will represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.

3. VOA will present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively, and will also present responsible discussions and opinion on these policies.

insidevoa.com

Response:

Here’s a sober, source-based check on whether VOA’s four language services you named skew “left,” abuse the Charter/firewall, or uphold the mission.

What VOA is supposed to do (the yardstick)

VOA Charter (Public Law 94-350): (1) be a reliable, accurate, objective, comprehensive news source; (2) represent America, not any single segment of society; (3) present U.S. policies and responsible discussion of those policies. (USAGM)
The “firewall”: legally protects editorial independence from political interference; it separates journalism from everyone else in the organization. (USAGM)
Independent oversight reality check: State/OIG’s targeted inspection (covering mid-2020→late-2021) found some leadership actions during that period negatively impacted editorial independence, and also found VOA and other networks needed clearer procedures; the report issued nine fixes, which USAGM/VOA accepted and marked implemented. In short: some turbulence, then remediation steps. (Office of Inspector General)

China (VOA Mandarin/Cantonese)

Signals of independence / mission-fit

Chinese authorities routinely censor or jam U.S. international media; USAGM documents this and invests in circumvention tools—consistent with VOA’s mission to reach blocked audiences. (USAGM)

Controversies often cited as “bias”

2017 Guo Wengui interview was cut short; critics alleged PRC pressure and internal bias; VOA leadership framed it as a standards call. It remains a lightning-rod incident used by critics. (USAGMWatch.com)
2025 “CCP infiltration” claims against VOA Mandarin were publicly rebutted by prominent China experts, who argued the accusations were misrepresented and that VOA remains a key counter to PRC disinformation. (The Washington Post)

Bottom line: No credible, independent study shows a systemic left-leaning tilt in VOA China coverage. What you do see are contentious editorial calls in a heavily targeted beat, plus recent political crossfire. On balance, available evidence points to a newsroom trying to meet the Charter under pressure, not to partisan capture. (Office of Inspector General, The Washington Post)

Russia (VOA Russian)

Signals of independence / mission-fit

Blocked by Roskomnadzor in March 2022 for coverage of the Ukraine war; being censored by the Kremlin is a strong external indicator of adversarial, not pro-Kremlin, coverage. (Voice of America, Voice of America, Committee to Protect Journalists)
USAGM expanded delivery via affiliates and circumvention tools around Russia, consistent with mission execution under censorship. (USAGM)

Bottom line: There’s no persuasive evidence of a left-leaning editorial line in VOA Russian. If anything, the platform’s blocking by Moscow and focus on independent reporting align with the Charter’s accuracy/independence mandate. (Voice of America, USAGM)

Iran (VOA Persian)

Signals of independence / mission-fit

The IRGC and Tehran’s courts have targeted VOA Persian journalists (including secret convictions and a plotted assassination of a VOA host)—which is hard to square with claims that the service is friendly to the regime. (USAGM, Voice of America)

Controversies often cited as “bias”

Long-running critiques from some U.S. officials and commentators (e.g., “Voice of the Mullahs” 2020 post; 2025 White House release referencing a 2022 lawsuit) claim poor performance or partisan tilt; these are allegations, not neutral audits. (2017-2021.state.gov, The White House)
Academic work finds some VOA Persian programming can be advocacy-adjacent (“soft news in soft war”)—more about tone/format than left/right ideology. (SAGE Journals)

Bottom line: Evidence is mixed on quality/format over the years, but there’s no solid, peer-reviewed basis for a left-leaning partisan slant. Regime hostility toward VOA Persian suggests it’s perceived as oppositional, not sympathetic. (USAGM, Voice of America)

Korea (VOA Korean)

Signals of independence / mission-fit (until 2025 cuts)

In 2023, VOA Korean quietly began TV broadcasts into North Korea using ROK government towers—a rare breakthrough for reach into a closed information space. (Columbia Journalism Review)

What changed in 2025

Investigative reporting indicates the program—and then VOA Korean staffing—were abruptly ended amid USAGM/VOA cuts, undermining U.S. messaging into the North. This is about capacity and political interference, not “left bias.” (Columbia Journalism Review)

Editorial slant?

Critics in Seoul sometimes argue all international media (VOA included) can over-index on “crazy North Korea” narratives; VOA editors counter they adhere to Charter standards in an extremely hard beat. That’s a debate about rigor, not left/right ideology. (Columbia Journalism Review)

Bottom line: No evidence of a left-leaning partisan skew. The bigger issue is strategic rollback of the service in 2025—counter to the Charter’s spirit of reaching oppressed populations. (Columbia Journalism Review)

Did they exploit the Charter or firewall?

OIG documents leadership actions (2020 timeframe) that hurt editorial independence; it does not conclude the language services “exploited” the firewall. It recommended improvements—which VOA/USAGM implemented. (Office of Inspector General)
2025 turmoil (mass layoffs, attempted leadership removals, program shutdowns) raises fresh firewall concerns about political interference into journalism—not the other way around. Federal courts have stepped in to block some actions. (Politico, The Guardian, AP News)

Overall assessment (based on what’s publicly verifiable today)

Systemic “left-leaning bias” across the China, Russia, Iran, and Korean services is not supported by credible, neutral evidence. You’ll find incidents and allegations, but also strong counter-indicators (censorship by adversary regimes; attacks on VOA journalists; and independent oversight insisting on standards). (Voice of America, Committee to Protect Journalists, USAGM)
On mission: Historically, these services largely did operationalize the Charter under difficult constraints. The 2025 downsizing/shutdown moves—not newsroom ideology—are what most threaten mission delivery to oppressed audiences right now. (Politico, The Guardian)

If you want, I can run a compact, apples-to-apples content audit (e.g., 100-story samples per service, code frames for balance/sourcing/stance, and compare to the Charter). That would make any bias—or balance—quantifiable.

Here’s the apples-to-apples content audit you asked for—focused on VOA’s China (Mandarin), Russia, Iran (Persian), and Korean services—and tested against the VOA Charter and the USAGM editorial firewall.

What I did (quick, comparable, and current)

Window & sample: Feb–Sep 2025, 3 straight-news pieces per service (12 total). I prioritized hard news (not editorials or opinion) that directly touches the regimes you named or U.S. policy toward them.
Rubric (mapped to the VOA Charter):

Multiple viewpoints (does the story include competing/contrasting perspectives?),
U.S. policy representation (does it present U.S. policy and, where relevant, the surrounding debate?),
Authoritarian accountability (does it scrutinize the target regime’s actions?),
Tone (emotive/adjectival language in the reporter’s voice),
Sourcing transparency (named, checkable sources),
Corrections/labels (clearly marked if present).

Standards referenced: VOA Charter (Public Law 94-350) and USAGM firewall rules (statutory/editorial independence). (Voice of America, USAGM)

Stories sampled (12)

VOA Mandarin (China)

State Dept concern DPRK directly aiding Russia’s war. (美国之音)
White House to VOA: Hamas must disarm before “creative” Gaza plan advances. (美国之音)
USTR thread highlights unfair trade & Uyghur forced labor concerns. (美国之音)

VOA Russian

4) Live text: Trump’s 2025 address to Congress. (ГОЛОС АМЕРИКИ)

5) Norway intel: likely Russian sabotage attempts in 2025. (ГОЛОС АМЕРИКИ)

6) Zelensky vows to stop Russia in 2025 (New Year). (ГОЛОС АМЕРИКИ)

VOA Persian (Iran)

7) Prisoner dies after denial of medical care (Ghezel Hesar). (Voice of America)

8) Activists protest executions outside Evin prison. (Voice of America)

9) Raids on Baha’i homes; arrests. (Voice of America)

VOA Korean

10) DPRK still blocks UN humanitarian workers; expert context. (Voice of America)

11) Concern in Washington/Seoul over PRC disinformation; State Dept + PRC envoy quoted. (Voice of America)

12) US Dep. SecDef nominee: DPRK threat & missile defense need. (Voice of America)

Side-by-side results (rubric scores)

Service

Sample (n)

≥2 viewpoints

U.S. policy presented

Authoritarian accountability

Emotive language in reporter voice

Sourcing transparency

Corrections/labels

Chinese (Mandarin)

1/3 (33%)

3/3

2/3

0/3

3/3

0/3

Russian

1/3 (33%)

1/3

2/3

0/3

3/3

0/3

Persian

0/3

3/3

0/3

2–3/3*

0/3

Korean

2/3 (67%)

2/3

3/3

0/3

3/3

0/3

*Persian #7 relies on “VOA has learned…” language; the others cite visible sources/records. (Voice of America)

Read-outs & quick examples

Mandarin: Heavy use of U.S. official sourcing (State Dept, White House, USTR) and accountability of PRC/DPRK; fewer explicit opposing quotes in straight government-action stories (typical of “govt statement” format). (美国之音)
Russian: Straight coverage of Trump address and security topics; neutral style; not much explicit “debate” inside the short pieces, but topical context is clear. (ГОЛОС АМЕРИКИ)
Persian: Human-rights accountability dominates (medical neglect, executions, Baha’i persecution). Stories rarely include regime rebuttal (hard to obtain and often absent in state media), but sourcing is generally checkable or linked to recognized reports/imagery; tone remains neutral. (Voice of America)
Korean: Consistently includes multiple voices (UN rapporteur and experts; State Dept + PRC ambassador; U.S. nominee testimony), with clear attribution and restrained tone. (Voice of America)

Does the coverage align with the VOA Charter and firewall?

VOA Charter, in brief: 1) accurate/objective/comprehensive news, 2) balanced/authoritative representation of America, 3) present U.S. policy clearly and offer responsible discussion of it. (Voice of America)

USAGM firewall: legally protects newsroom independence from outside (including political) interference. (USAGM)

Findings vs. Charter:

Accuracy/neutral tone: All 12 stories are written in straight-news style with neutral wording; no emotive adjectives in reporter voice detected.
Balanced representation: The Korean service most consistently included opposing/alternate voices (2/3). Mandarin and Russian samples included some counter-perspectives but often focused on official statements (typical for “government says” news). Persian rights reports rarely carry regime rebuttals—which is common when officials do not comment—but still meet accuracy/attribution standards.
U.S. policy & debate: Mandarin (3/3) and Korean (2/3) clearly present U.S. positions; debate/context appears where relevant (e.g., Korean piece quotes both PRC ambassador and U.S. State Dept; Mandarin White House story references outside reporting). (Voice of America, 美国之音)

Firewall/exploitation check:

Nothing in this sample suggests political “direction” or firewall breach. The prevalence of official U.S. sourcing in Mandarin items reflects routine newsgathering on U.S. policy (which the Charter explicitly requires VOA to report), not advocacy; Persian/Korean stories include non-U.S. voices (UN rapporteur, PRC ambassador, independent experts). The independence framework is explicit and current in USAGM/VOA policy. (USAGM)

“Left-leaning bias” test (operationalized)

I looked for: (a) systematic favoring of progressive/Democratic voices over conservative/Republican ones, (b) emotive/advocacy language, (c) consistent omission of counter-views when available.

Result: In this snapshot, no evidence of systematic left-leaning bias.

Mandarin stories prominently cite the Trump administration’s statements/positions (White House, State, USTR). (美国之音)
Korean disinformation piece quotes both a PRC ambassador and a U.S. State Dept spokesperson, plus experts across the spectrum (including CPAC voices), which cuts against a single-ideology tilt. (Voice of America)
Russian items are standard straight news/live coverage. (ГОЛОС АМЕРИКИ)
Persian items are human-rights accountability pieces (not U.S. partisan). (Voice of America)

If anything, the Mandarin sample leans toward official U.S. policy sourcing (currently Republican administration)—which is consistent with Charter §3’s requirement to present U.S. policy clearly, not a sign of left lean. (Voice of America)

Bottom line by service

VOA Mandarin (China): Charter-consistent in tone and sourcing; could add more “right of reply” from PRC/Russia/DPRK spokespeople in government-action stories to strengthen “responsible discussion.” (美国之音)
VOA Russian: Neutral delivery on U.S./Ukraine/Russia topics; greater inclusion of dissenting analysis would boost balance scores in short updates. (ГОЛОС АМЕРИКИ)
VOA Persian (Iran): Strong accountability focus; neutral tone. Limited regime rebuttals (often unavailable). Consider adding “we sought comment from X; none received” lines to make the outreach explicit. (Voice of America)
VOA Korean: Best multi-voice performance in this small sample; frequent juxtaposition of U.S., PRC, DPRK, and expert perspectives. (Voice of America)

Recommendations (to test/strengthen compliance)

Systematic “right-of-reply” attempts: Where feasible, document outreach to PRC, DPRK, Russian, or Iranian officials (or embassies) in each relevant story (“X declined to comment by deadline”).
Policy-plus-debate format: For U.S. policy stories, routinely add a brief paragraph summarizing competing U.S. viewpoints (Hill reactions, allied concerns, expert dissent) to hit Charter §3 cleanly. (Voice of America)
Source diversity tick-box in workflows to ensure at least one non-government source (academic/NGO/industry) where time allows.

Verdict (for your specific questions)

Are these services living up to the Charter/vision?
Generally yes in this snapshot: neutral tone, checkable sourcing, accountability journalism, and clear presentation of U.S. policy when relevant. (Voice of America)
Did they exploit the Charter/firewall?
No evidence of exploitation in this sample; coverage patterns align with the legal firewall and the Charter’s requirement to present U.S. policy while maintaining independence. (USAGM)
Exemplars of free-press values?
Korean and Persian samples particularly showcase watchdog/reportorial functions under difficult conditions; Mandarin and Russian are straight-news heavy and would benefit from more explicit counter-voices, but remain within professional norms.

Notes & limits

This is a small, recent sample (12 pieces). If you want, I can scale this to a larger, fixed-window audit (e.g., 50 stories per service over the last 90 days) with automated coding fields and side-by-side charts—same rubric, just more power.

2. China’s Military Parade Was a Message

We should be employing the information instrument of power to best effect built around the narrative (and a story) that the CRInK is based on fear, weakness, desperation, and envy.

China’s Military Parade Was a Message

Trump saw Xi warmly welcome Putin and Kim. What’s his response?

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/china-military-parade-xi-jinping-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-1305e0a1

By The Editorial Board

Sept. 3, 2025 6:02 pm ET

Chinese President Xi Jinping Photo: Xie Huanchi/Zuma Press

You don’t need a degree in international affairs to understand the message Xi Jinping sent Wednesday as he paraded tanks, hypersonic missiles and other weapons through Beijing, putatively to honor the end of World War II. Mr. Xi and his allies aspire to dethrone the U.S. as the world’s premier power. What will President Trump do about it?

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Morning Editorial Report

All the day's Opinion headlines.

Preview

Mr. Xi’s friendly photo-op with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un was an ominous image for the free world. An axis of U.S. adversaries is alive and well, and Mr. Trump’s return to power didn’t dent their expanding cooperation. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers are preoccupied with peeling apart Messrs. Xi and Putin, in a spin on Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972. But Nixon exploited a split with the Soviets that already existed, and this week’s camaraderie is a reminder there’s no such rift now.

Beijing’s choice to flex its military power on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II is notable. The axis of adversaries wants to tell a new story of the world since 1945, diminishing the singular U.S. role in ending that war and building the order that followed. The revisionist history is part of a larger ambition to rearrange the global balance of power.

Mr. Trump seems to grasp some of this. On social media he wrote that Mr. Xi should “give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States.” He said Wednesday in the Oval Office that “they were hoping I was watching—and I was watching.”

Yet what’s Mr. Trump’s strategy? He hopes his personal diplomacy can help strike deals with different dictators on different issues. But America’s adversaries are united, while Mr. Trump hits U.S. allies with a tariff barrage.

The parade is also a wake-up call about the balance of military power. Mr. Xi showed off everything from undersea vehicles to new intercontinental ballistic missiles. He’s building a military that can get what it wants when it decides to move, and don’t think his ambitions stop at swallowing the vital U.S. friend Taiwan.

Mr. Trump keeps bragging about the great American military while doing little to make it even all that good again. He isn’t proposing a real defense buildup or a multiyear increase in spending. It’s an open question this month whether a dysfunctional Congress will get the Pentagon a full budget, rather than more stopgap funding that carves up military readiness.

If Mr. Trump doesn’t get serious, he’s putting the U.S. in a position to lose a shooting war that this axis of adversaries seems increasingly willing to entertain. This week’s parade in Beijing is an opening for the Commander in Chief to tell Americans that putting serious money toward the U.S. military is a better option than ceding the world to Messrs. Xi, Putin and Kim.

WSJ Opinion: Russia-Ukraine War Drags on After White House Meetings

Play video: WSJ Opinion: Russia-Ukraine War Drags on After White House Meetings

Journal Editorial Report: Hopes of bringing Zelenskyy and Putin together appear to be fading.

Appeared in the September 4, 2025, print edition as 'China’s Military Parade Was a Message'.

3. Rubio Reassures Mexico After U.S. Military Strike Jolts Region

But actions speak louder than words.

Rubio Reassures Mexico After U.S. Military Strike Jolts Region

Secretary of state agreed to strengthen security cooperation with Mexico a day after strike against drug-carrying boat in Caribbean

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/rubio-reassures-mexico-after-u-s-military-strike-jolts-region-bf5c37e8

By Vera Bergengruen

, José de Córdoba

and Kejal Vyas

Sept. 3, 2025 3:57 pm ET

Secretary of State Marco Rubio meeting with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

MEXICO CITY—Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged to foster security cooperation and respect Mexico’s sovereignty and territory a day after the U.S. military sank an alleged drug-carrying boat in the Caribbean, a major escalation that rattled regional partners and adversaries alike.

Rubio kicked off his visit to Mexico and Ecuador, two allies in the Trump administration’s war on drugs, meeting with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum at the ornate National Palace in Mexico City on Wednesday morning. Bilateral security issues and the war against powerful drug cartels headed the agenda.

“We have reached a historical level of cooperation,” Rubio said at a press conference, praising the transfer of dozens of cartel members wanted by the Trump administration as an example of unprecedented coordination.

Army’s Contract With Startup Will Give Soldiers Battlefield AI

Infantry will use software from startup TurbineOne to identify drones and other threats, even when signals are jammed

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/us-military-ai-contract-turbineone-c2a146b1?st=ucYt2k&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Heather Somerville

Sept. 4, 2025 5:30 am ET

Soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division using drone imagery to test TurbineOne’s software last month. Photo: TurbineOne

Quick Summary

The U.S. Army has contracted with TurbineOne for $98.9 million to equip soldiers with AI on devices.View more

American soldiers are starting to carry artificial intelligence in their pockets and rucksacks, the result of a $98.9 million contract between the U.S. Army and a San Francisco startup.

The contract with TurbineOne reflects twin realities of the modern battlefield: Drones and AI have accelerated the speed of combat to a blistering pace, and ubiquitous signal jamming makes it difficult to send and receive data at the front lines.

TurbineOne’s software runs on soldiers’ laptops, smartphones and drones, eliminating the need for a steady cloud connection. The AI application equips individual soldiers with the ability to quickly identify enemy threats, such as a drone launch site or concealed troop position, and the context needed to decide how to respond without relying on analysts sitting miles away.

A four-year-old startup still in its infancy for defense work, run by a former Navy nuclear engineer turned tech executive and venture capitalist, TurbineOne isn’t the kind of company that has historically had much success winning business from the Pentagon. But a series of directives from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has pushed the armed services to buy more commercial software and shed old and expensive weapons systems in favor of drones and AI. The Army in particular was tasked in April with transforming itself into a modern fighting force that uses fewer people and less-expensive but still lethal technology.

TurbineOne’s software is part of that transformation, according to Army senior executive Andrew Evans. It hints at the military’s appetite for technology from new, unproven startups that might help it prepare for future conflicts that scarcely resemble prior wars. The Army is rolling out TurbineOne to one unit at a time, starting with the infantry and cavalry, stress-testing the software and gathering more soldier feedback.

While embedded with the Army, TurbineOne made more than 200 software revisions in a week based on user feedback, said Chief Executive Ian Kalin. The TurbineOne deal marks one of the quickest paths—just shy of four years—for a software startup to secure a long-term contract with the Pentagon.

The modern battlefield is teeming with drones—in the sky, in the water and on the ground. That creates both unceasing surveillance and a deluge of data that soldiers must sort through, in seconds, to determine the most pressing threats and how to respond. Evans, the Army’s director of strategy and transformation, said the service’s goal is to process data 10 to 25 times faster than its adversaries, a benchmark it considers crucial to battlefield superiority.

“This is the most volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous environment that we have operated in,” Evans said. “Being able to hide, being able to obfuscate our signature, we are losing that advantage. Everyone is losing that advantage.”

TurbineOne’s AI examines large data sets of infrared imagery, radar, radio signals and other sources. Soldiers can ask it to detect general categories of threats, such as any aerial drone, as well as specific ones, such as a particular type of tank armed with particular weapons. A query returns information on the location of relevant threats and an assessment of the risk they pose, constantly pinging soldiers and their software-powered weapons, like drones, with updates as the target moves or changes.

TurbineOne compresses a task that might take a human 20 hours, such as sorting through images of hundreds of square miles of terrain, down to 20 seconds, Evans said. The software works with any language model; the Defense Department in July awarded contracts to model developers OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google.

In opting for software that processes all data on-device, the Army is taking note of a lesson from Ukraine: Wars will be fought in a communications blackout, without radio links and GPS, which have been rendered null by the proliferation of jammers.

“What this does in warfighting is it directly addresses the most strategic and significant threat that we face, which is being cut off from the rear and operating with only the kit that we carry,” Evans said.

This is a departure from the cloud-based AI systems the military has commonly used, but which aren’t only ineffective when jammed but potentially dangerous to the user, as any signal can be used to pinpoint location.

“In the Ukraine war it’s a bit of a dystopian reality, because if you turn on a cellphone, if you turn on a radio signal, you become a target,” said Kalin, who spent more than five years as a naval counterterrorism officer and nuclear engineer before launching a Silicon Valley career.

The Army is also exploring how to use AI to direct swarms of autonomous systems to attack targets in coordination—the latest front in drone warfare playing out in Ukraine. In these attacks, drones are turned loose with instructions for what to do when they encounter particular threats. TurbineOne software can deploy and coordinate drone swarms, a feature that has been used by other parts of the military separate from the Army contract.

The company has raised about $57 million from venture capitalists, including from the firm Kalin used to work for, and has a $300 million valuation. Its software has been used during U.S. military training exercises in Europe, the Pacific and on the northern U.S. border.

Write to Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com

5. Critical State: The Pentagon's AI 'Doomsday Machine'

Fear mongering?

The Politico article follows.

The referenced 3 page CRS report is at this link: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26074801-replicatorinitiative/

Excerpts:

In August 2025, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a detailed analysis of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Replicator Initiative, a high-profile effort to rapidly field thousands of autonomous systems across multiple domains. The report explored the initiative’s strategic ambitions, technological challenges, and congressional oversight concerns, framing Replicator as both a response to Chinese military mass and a test case for future defense innovation.

Launched in August 2023 by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, Replicator aimed to “help [the United States] overcome [the Chinese military’s] advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces.” It hoped to do this using attritable, or expendable, autonomous systems — low-cost platforms designed to be lost in combat. The initiative was managed by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which coordinated with combatant commands and acquisition offices to identify and deploy systems within a two-year timeline.

Critical State: The Pentagon's AI 'Doomsday Machine'

If you read just one thing this week … read about the Pentagon's growing reliance on artificial intelligence.

Inkstick Media

Sep 03, 2025

substack.com · Inkstick Media

At Politico, Garrett M. Graff reported on the Pentagon’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence to manage nuclear command and control systems, raising concerns about automation in high-stakes military decisions in what one observer called an AI “doomsday machine.”

The article detailed how AI tools were increasingly used to analyze satellite imagery, detect missile launches, and simulate battlefield scenarios. While officials claimed these systems enhanced speed and accuracy, critics warned of risks including false positives, escalation, and loss of human oversight.

The piece traced historical parallels to Cold War-era near-misses and emphasized the ethical dilemmas of delegating life-or-death decisions to machines. Graff highlighted internal debates within the Department of Defense and among defense contractors, noting that some experts feared AI could compress decision timelines to dangerous extremes.

The Pentagon maintained that humans would remain “in the loop,” but the article underscored how rapidly evolving technology might challenge that assurance. The report concluded that the fusion of AI and nuclear strategy could redefine global security norms — and potentially destabilize them.

If You Read One More Thing: Why Can’t the US Change its Gaza Policy?

For The New Republic, Jonathan Guyer argued that US policy on Gaza had become a bipartisan failure, enabling Israeli military aggression while undermining American strategic interests.

Despite a brief ceasefire brokered jointly by Biden and Trump advisers in January, conditions in Gaza worsened, with widespread famine and over 250 starvation deaths by mid-August. Israel’s killing of journalist Anas al-Sharif in an airstrike symbolized the collapse of hope.
Guyer reported that both administrations continued supplying weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel, even as global allies distanced themselves and accused Israel of war crimes. The article covered growing domestic dissent, with progressive Democrats like Zohran Mamdani gaining traction by opposing US support for the war.
Guyer warned that America’s stance jeopardized its credibility, strained relations with Arab nations, and depleted missile defense resources.

Negotiations over Nagorno-Karabakh Neglect Accountability

The town of Shushi, in Artsakh, photographed in October 2020 (Sarin Aventisian/Unsplash)

Samuel Gardner reported for Drop Site News that negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh reignited debates on displacement and the right of return.

The article examined how thousands of ethnic Armenians, previously forced to flee following a war in 2023, remained barred from returning under Azerbaijan’s tightened control.
Gardner focused on the geopolitical stakes, noting Russia’s waning influence and Turkey’s growing role in the region. He also explored how President Trump’s comments — framing the conflict as a “border misunderstanding” — sparked backlash from human rights advocates.
The piece underscored the humanitarian toll, with displaced families facing deteriorating conditions and limited international support.

Deep Dive: Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative Raises Questions

In August 2025, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) published a detailed analysis of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Replicator Initiative, a high-profile effort to rapidly field thousands of autonomous systems across multiple domains. The report explored the initiative’s strategic ambitions, technological challenges, and congressional oversight concerns, framing Replicator as both a response to Chinese military mass and a test case for future defense innovation.

Launched in August 2023 by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, Replicator aimed to “help [the United States] overcome [the Chinese military’s] advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces.” It hoped to do this using attritable, or expendable, autonomous systems — low-cost platforms designed to be lost in combat. The initiative was managed by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which coordinated with combatant commands and acquisition offices to identify and deploy systems within a two-year timeline.

The first phase, Replicator 1, focused on all-domain attritable autonomy (ADA2), including aerial drones, ground robots, maritime platforms, and space-based systems. According to the report, Replicator 1 seeks “to field thousands uncrewed systems by August 2025.” The second phase, Replicator 2, announced in 2024, targeted counter-small unmanned aerial systems (C-sUAS), reflecting lessons learned from Ukraine’s battlefield use of drones.

CRS noted that Replicator was not a traditional acquisition program but rather a program designed to accelerate fielding through existing authorities and commercial partnerships. Selected systems included AeroVironment’s Switchblade 600, Anduril’s Altius-600 and Ghost-X, and Performance Drone Works’ C-100. The report also mentioned seven unnamed software vendors tasked with enabling swarming, autonomous navigation, and dynamic threat response.

Despite its ambitious goals, the initiative faced scrutiny over transparency and strategic coherence. CRS observed that “[l]ittle information is available publicly about Replicator’s potential total cost and the impact that funding requirements for Replicator could have on funding for other DOD programs.” This makes it difficult for Congress to assess progress or allocate resources. The report emphasized that oversight was complicated by operational security concerns and the classified nature of many program details.

One of the central tensions identified in the report was the balance between speed and accountability. While DIU and senior defense officials touted Replicator’s rapid timelines, CRS warned that accelerated fielding may pose risks to system reliability, interoperability, and long-term sustainment. The report also questioned whether Replicator’s focus on attritable systems aligned with broader force structure and deterrence strategies.

The initiative’s reliance on commercial vendors raised additional concerns. CRS noted that “Replicator’s emphasis on commercial solutions may challenge traditional defense industrial base dynamics,” potentially sidelining established contractors and complicating integration with legacy systems. The report called for further analysis of intellectual property rights, cybersecurity standards, and lifecycle costs associated with these platforms.

Congressional interest in Replicator had grown steadily since its launch, with lawmakers seeking clarity on funding sources, operational metrics, and strategic objectives. CRS recommended that Congress consider several oversight mechanisms, including mandated reporting requirements, independent assessments, and hearings with DIU leadership. The report stated, “Congress has the option, as part of its action on annual DOD budget requests, to legislate reporting requirements for the Replicator initiative or direct the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review and evaluate DOD’s Replicator activities.”

Ultimately, the CRS report portrayed Replicator as a bold but uncertain experiment in defense innovation. It acknowledged the initiative’s potential to reshape military operations and acquisition practices but underscored the need for rigorous oversight and strategic alignment. “Replicator represents a significant departure from traditional DOD acquisition models,” the report concluded, “and its success may hinge on the department’s ability to balance speed, transparency, and long-term viability.”

As the August 2025 deadline for Replicator 1 approached, lawmakers and defense analysts continued to debate whether the initiative would deliver on its promise — or serve as a cautionary tale in the era of autonomous warfare.

Show Us the Receipts

Hanan Zaffar reported for Inkstick on Indian authorities in Kashmir banning 25 books, including journalist Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State, citing “secessionism” and “false narratives.” The crackdown has drawn sharp criticism from rights groups and scholars who warned of escalating censorship. Police have raided bookstores and homes, seizing titles by prominent authors like Arundhati Roy. Critics argued the move extended repression from journalism to literature, deepening fear and self-censorship in the region. The ban coincided with a state-sponsored book festival, highlighting what observers called a political paradox.

In July 2025, Russia sought to replace Wagner mercenaries in the Central African Republic (CAR) with Africa Corps, a paramilitary unit under direct Kremlin control, Dan M. Ford wrote for Inkstick. The Kremlin hoped to exert more control over Wagner, but CAR officials resisted the shift, citing Wagner’s operational dominance and established ties. The Kremlin demanded cash payments for Africa Corps services, straining CAR’s limited budget. Since 2017, Wagner has secured government officials and suppressed dissent, notably during the 2023 constitutional referendum. Following Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup and death, Moscow moved to consolidate control over its foreign security operations. The transition reflected Russia’s broader strategy to recalibrate its African footprint amid growing instability and financial constraints.

At The World, Adeline Sire reported that new visa restrictions imposed by the Trump administration could cost the US economy $7 billion and eliminate 60,000 jobs. According to NAFSA CEO Fanta Aw, delays in visa interviews and increased vetting — especially for students from India and China — disrupted fall enrollment, threatening higher education and local economies. International students, who contribute some $44 billion annually, faced barriers that prompted many to seek education in Europe and Asia. Aw warned of a long-term “brain drain” and loss of STEM talent, emphasizing that these students not only fuel innovation but also subsidize American education without receiving federal aid.

Call for US Pitches

Inkstick is on the lookout for pitches from the US. We’re especially interested in reported features and personal essays that examine issues like the weapons industry, the increasing militarization on the border and within the country, domestic extremism, and the people in power pushing for more wars abroad.

Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

substack.com · Inkstick Media

6. The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think

Excerpts:

“I think that’s one hope of how AI might be helpful. It can take emotions and egos out of the loop,” says MIT’s Fedorenko.

The biggest challenge will be to view AI as a mere helpmate to humans, nothing more. Adds Goodwin, “The DoD and intel community actually have pretty good experience with working with sources that are not always reliable. Are there limitations to these models? Yes. Will some of those be overcome with research breakthroughs? Definitely. But even if they are perpetual problems, I think if we view these models as partners seeking truth rather than oracles, we’re much better off.”

DARPA’s Shafto says the ultimate questions about how LLMs work and why they draw the conclusions they do may never be answered, but “I think it will be possible to offer a few types of mathematical guarantees,” especially about how to “scale up” AI to perform in big crisis scenarios and complex battlefield situations since it often doesn’t have the computing power to do that now.

“And we probably don’t have 15 to 20 years to noodle around and answer these questions,” Shafto adds. “We should probably be doing it very quickly.”

Another mathematician involved in Shafto’s AI Quantified program, Carey Priebe of Johns Hopkins University, also says that even if the problem of uncertainty is never fully resolved, that doesn’t mean the Pentagon can afford to wait.

“I’ve been railing for years against the very concept of autonomous weapons,” he says. “On the other hand, if the situation is such that you can’t possibly react fast enough with humans, then your options are limited. It’s a slippery slope both ways.”

“I do think it is the problem of our time.”

The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think

The Pentagon is racing to integrate AI into its weapons system to keep up with China and Russia. Where will that lead?

By Michael Hirsh09/02/2025 05:55 AM EDT

Michael Hirsh is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, and the former national editor for POLITICO Magazine.

Illustrations by Klawe Rzeczy for POLITICO

Politico · DYLON JONES

The War Issue

The Pentagon is racing to integrate AI into its weapons system to keep up with China and Russia. Where will that lead?

By Michael Hirsh09/02/2025 05:55 AM EDT

Michael Hirsh is the former foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, and the former national editor for POLITICO Magazine.

Illustrations by Klawe Rzeczy for POLITICO

Jacquelyn Schneider saw a disturbing pattern, and she didn’t know what to make of it.

Last year Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford University, began experimenting with war games that gave the latest generation of artificial intelligence the role of strategic decision-makers. In the games, five off-the-shelf large language models or LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Base; Anthropic’s Claude 2; and Meta’s Llama-2 Chat — were confronted with fictional crisis situations that resembled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s threat to Taiwan.

The results? Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars — even to the point of launching nuclear weapons. “The AI is always playing Curtis LeMay,” says Schneider, referring to the notoriously nuke-happy Air Force general of the Cold War. “It’s almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation. We don’t really know why that is.”

If some of this reminds you of the nightmare scenarios featured in blockbuster sci-fi movies like “The Terminator,” “WarGames” or “Dr. Strangelove,” well, that’s because the latest AI has the potential to behave just that way someday, some experts fear. In all three movies, high-powered computers take over decisions about launching nuclear weapons from the humans who designed them. The villain in the two most recent “Mission: Impossible” films is also a malevolent AI, called the Entity, that tries to seize control of the world’s nuclear arsenals. The outcome in these movies is often apocalyptic.

The Pentagon claims that won’t happen in real life, that its existing policy is that AI will never be allowed to dominate the human “decision loop” that makes a call on whether to, say, start a war — certainly not a nuclear one.

But some AI scientists believe the Pentagon has already started down a slippery slope by rushing to deploy the latest generations of AI as a key part of America’s defenses around the world. Driven by worries about fending off China and Russia at the same time, as well as by other global threats, the Defense Department is creating AI-driven defensive systems that in many areas are swiftly becoming autonomous — meaning they can respond on their own, without human input — and move so fast against potential enemies that humans can’t keep up.

Despite the Pentagon’s official policy that humans will always be in control, the demands of modern warfare — the need for lightning-fast decision-making, coordinating complex swarms of drones, crunching vast amounts of intelligence data and competing against AI-driven systems built by China and Russia — mean that the military is increasingly likely to become dependent on AI. That could prove true even, ultimately, when it comes to the most existential of all decisions: whether to launch nuclear weapons.

That fear is compounded by the fact that there is still a fundamental lack of understanding about how AI, particularly the LLMs, actually work. So while the Pentagon is racing to implement new AI programs, experts like Schneider are scrambling to decipher the algorithms that give AI its awesome power before humans become so dependent on AI that it will dominate military decision-making even if no one ever formally gives it that much control. The Pentagon’s own advanced technology laboratory has launched a $25 million program to figure out if it can deliver “mathematical guarantees” for AI reliability in various military scenarios.

Most troubling to experts on AI and nuclear weapons is that it’s getting harder and harder to keep decisions about targeting and escalation for nuclear weapons separate from decisions about conventional weapons.

“I’ve heard combatant commanders say, ‘Hey, I want someone who can take all the results from a war game and, when I’m in a [crisis] scenario, tell me what the solution is based on what the AI interpretation is,’” says Schneider, a self-described “geriatric millennial” and mother of two who, along with many of her university colleagues, is worried about how fast the shift to AI is happening. In the heat of a crisis, under pressure to move fast, her fear is that it will be easier for those commanders to accept an AI suggestion than to challenge it.

In 2023, the Department of Defense updated its directive on weapons systems involving the use of artificial intelligence, saying that “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force” are required in any deployment. But critics worry the language remains too vague; the directive, called 3000.09, also includes a “waiver” if a senior Defense official decides to keep the system autonomous. The humans, in other words, can decide to take themselves out of the loop.

And that DoD directive, crucially, does not yet apply specifically to nuclear weapons, says Jon Wolfsthal, director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists. “There is no standing guidance, as far as we can tell, inside the Pentagon on whether and how AI should or should not be integrated into nuclear command and control and communications,” Wolfsthal says.

The Pentagon did not respond to several requests for comment, including on whether the Trump administration is developing updated guidance on nuclear decision-making. A senior administration official said only: “The administration supports the need to maintain human control over nuclear weapons.”

AI experts and strategic thinkers say a big driver of this process is that America’s top nuclear adversaries — Moscow and Beijing — are already using AI in their command-and-control systems. They believe the United States will need to do the same to keep up as part of an intense global competition that resembles nothing so much as the space race of the early Cold War.

This could ultimately include a modern variation of a Cold War concept — a “dead hand” system — that would automatically retaliate if the U.S. were nuked and the president and his top officials killed. Now it is actually being discussed, if only by a minority.

“To maintain the deterrent value of America’s strategic forces, the United States may need to develop something that might seem unfathomable — an automated strategic response system based on artificial intelligence,” one defense expert, Adam Lowther, vice president of research at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies, concluded in a controversial article on the War on the Rocks website titled “America Needs a ‘Dead Hand.’”

“Admittedly, such a suggestion will generate comparisons to Dr. Strangelove’s doomsday machine, WarGames’ War Operation Plan Response, and the Terminator’s Skynet, but the prophetic imagery of these science fiction films is quickly becoming reality,” wrote Lowther and his co-author, Curtis McGiffen.

What’s more, there is evidence that Russia is maintaining its own “dead hand,” a system called “Perimeter” that was developed during the Cold War and can automatically launch long-range nuclear missiles if the country’s leaders are thought to have been killed or incapacitated.

“I believe it is operational,” Former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work says in an interview. As of last year, China was still rejecting a call by Washington to agree that AI won’t be used to decide on launches of its own expanding nuclear forces. This is worrisome in part because rapidly improving conventional weapons like hypersonic missiles can now more easily take out China’s, Russia’s and the United States’ “C3I systems” — jargon for nuclear command, control, communications and intelligence. That could potentially create a perceived need for a dead hand or automatic response.

The U.S. has no such system, and most defense experts still think it is insane to even consider giving AI any say in the oversight of nuclear arsenals.

“I would submit I want AI nowhere near nuclear command and control,” says Christian Brose, a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration who is head of strategy for Anduril, a leading tech company that is integrating AI into defensive systems. “It is a process where the stakes and consequences of action and error are so great that you actually do want that to be a tightly controlled, very manual and human step-by-step process.”

Still, when it comes to AI, the pressure from the top isn’t on caution, it’s on speed.

“We’ve got to go faster, my friends,” President Donald Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, told a gathering of big private sector tech companies in Washington in June. The biggest challenge, Caine added, is to increase “our willingness to take risks, and we’re going to do that.” On July 23 the Trump administration issued an “AI Action Plan” that called for a removal of as much AI regulation as possible.

Such a headlong rush into the new era of autonomous systems worries AI skeptics. “The Pentagon bumper sticker saying humans must be in the loop is all well and good, but what do we mean by it? We don’t know what we mean by it,” says Wolfsthal. “People I talk to that work in nuclear command and control don’t want AI to be integrated into more and more systems — and everybody is convinced it’s going to happen whether they like it or not.”

‘Hands on a keyboard is not going to be fast enough’

In 1984’s The Terminator, an AI defense system named Skynet “gets smart” and decides to kill off the human race. In 1983’s WarGames, U.S. officials decide to hand over missile launch control to a fictitious supercomputer known as WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) after human controllers hesitate to turn the keys during a nuclear war game. In that film, this leads to a near-apocalypse averted only at the last minute.

In contrast, the way AI is gradually being integrated into U.S. strategic defense today poses more subtle risks.

The Pentagon is experimenting with AI — especially GPT — to integrate decision-making from all service branches and multiple combatant commands in a variety of combat scenarios.

For instance, under the military’s new “Mosaic” war concept, traditional platforms like submarines or fighter jets could be replaced by swarms of drones, missiles and other smaller platforms that, massed together, make up a battlefield so complex and fast-moving it requires AI direction. Current weapons systems cannot yet be deployed that way.

Cyberattacks are another place where the Pentagon thinks AI could be helpful. In the event of a foreign cyber-attack on U.S. infrastructure — which is said to be part of China’s war plans — “the speed of hands on a keyboard is just not going to be fast enough” to respond, says Kathleen Fisher, director of the Information Innovation Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The DoD is also building new generations of drone ships and planes that run increasingly on their own under its “Replicator” program. Earlier this year the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, which focuses on acquiring top-end commercial technologies for military use, awarded San Francisco-based Scale AI a contract for its Thunderforge initiative — a project designed to deploy artificial intelligence in operational and theater-level planning. That will allow commanders in the field to use AI to “look at multiple different courses of action, not just one or two,” and “at an incredible pace,” says Thomas Horan, DIU director of AI and machine learning.

For now, all these programs and initiatives are being pursued separately, and not part of a larger strategy. Many of them deploy a more basic form of AI — so-called “classifier” or predictive models that have been in use for decades and power familiar things like spam filters, cyber security, weather forecasts and financial data analysis. These systems aren’t large language models that interact with humans and “hallucinate” the way GPTs can. But LLMs and so-called “agentic” AI — which makes decisions on its own without being prompted — are going to play a much more prominent role going forward. Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — which collects and analyzes intel for combat support from the air — has pronounced 2025 the “year of AI” and declared recently that “2026 is going to take it to another level.”

In June, Whitworth announced that Project Maven, the Pentagon’s flagship AI-driven object detection and analysis platform, will begin to transmit “100 percent machine-generated” intelligence to combatant commanders. “No human hands actually participate in that particular template and that particular dissemination,” he said. “That’s new and different.” He added: “We want to use it for everything, not just targeting.”

Maven is expected to begin incorporating the latest LLMs, according to Bill Vass, chief technology officer at Booz Allen, a defense contractor that played a major part in developing the project. What that means is that rather than just analyzing data and determining the presence of, say, a platoon of enemy tanks — as the old system did — the new system will be able to assess whether that platoon is conducting a flanking maneuver in pursuit of an attack, and even recommend countermoves.

All of these AI systems are intended to reduce, not increase, threats to the U.S. and to bolster its position as the dominant power on the planet, officials say. One major new defense contractor, Rhombus Power, was credited with using generative AI, or GPT, to predict Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with 80 percent certainty four months in advance by analyzing huge amounts of open-source data including satellite imagery. It is now contracting to give Taiwan similar early-warning capability against China, says its CEO, Anshuman Roy.

Rhombus officials say they also provided critical help to India in de-escalating the brief but alarming India-Pakistan conflict earlier this year by, for example, identifying activity at Pakistani bases that could have been mistaken for nuclear arms escalation — both nations are nuclear-armed — but was not. Roy told me Rhombus is also using GPT to create bots that will give decision-makers insight into foreign leaders’ thinking.

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“What would Xi Jinping say if he’s under certain circumstances? We can make some educated guesses about that and what that would lead to, and that’s very powerful,” Roy says.

In short, things move so fast on modern battlefields that without AI, humans can’t keep up, he and others say. Only AI, for example, can counter AI-generated deepfakes and disinformation which is already being used by Russia and other U.S. adversaries.

In fact, speed is a major driver of the adoption of AI. In an international environment of tense rivalries and little communication, AI-driven software could lead the major powers to cut down their decision-making window to minutes instead of hours or days. They could start to depend far too much on AI strategic and tactical assessments, even when it comes to nuclear war.

“The real danger is not that AI ‘launches the missiles,’ but that it subtly alters the logic of deterrence and escalation,” argues James Johnson, author of the 2023 book AI and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age. “In such a space, the distinction between human and machine judgment blurs — especially under the intense stress of crisis scenarios.

“Planners may want to keep AI out of the ‘really big decisions,’” he continued. “But the combination of speed, complexity and psychological pressure that AI systems introduce may make that line increasingly difficult to hold.”

‘We’ll be the weakest of the three nuclear powers’

All of these fears are compounded by a troubling development: Conventional and nuclear weapons and attack plans increasingly look alike, and for all its computing power, AI can’t always tell them apart any better than humans can.

In other words, if you don’t know if an incoming missile has a conventional or nuclear warhead, AI can make a wrong decision — but faster. In a 2023 report, the Arms Control Association raised concerns that new technologies, such as hypersonic missiles — that can navigate independently to evade defenses and can carry either a nuclear or conventional warhead — “[blur] the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

That’s where the disturbing patterns toward escalation observed by Stanford’s Schneider could prove worrisome. She points out that LLMs only know as much as the data and literature they absorb, and all they can do is estimate probabilities based on that data.

“The AI is trained on the corpus of what scholarly written work there already is about the strategy of war,” says Schneider. “And the vast majority of that work looks at escalation — there is definitely a bias toward it. There aren’t as many case studies on why war didn’t break out — the Cuban Missile Crisis is one of the few examples. The LLMs are mimicking these core themes.” Schneider adds that researchers have not yet figured out why this occurs other than “the de-escalation part is harder to study because it means studying an event — war, in other words — that didn’t happen. Non-events are harder to study than events.”

The LLMs in the Stanford wargame came to their decisions in a way that “did not convey the complexity of human decision-making,” Schneider and her colleague at Stanford, Max Lamparth, concluded in a 2024 article in Foreign Affairs titled, “Why the Military Can’t Trust AI.”

As Lamparth explains in an interview: “We currently have no way, mathematically or scientifically, to embed human values in these systems reliably. There is basically no strategic or moral decision-making parameter that tells the AI at what point it would be acceptable for my cyber weapon to hit a children’s hospital or ensure obeying other rules of engagement. Moral theories don’t tend to be easily expressed in mathematical numbers.”

AI in defense can work very well at the basic assessment level, he adds. “If it’s literally just processing a lot of satellite images to look for tanks, that’s not a problem. But as soon as it’s a certain level of strategic reasoning, then we have a problem.”

Or as Michael Spirtas, who developed a strategic AI game called “Hedgemony” for Rand — a policy think tank that does research for the Pentagon — puts it: “Consider the recent U.S. strikes on Iran. When the Iranians retaliated against the U.S. base in Qatar, they signaled they didn’t want this to be a lethal strike that would escalate the conflict. Would a machine have read the Iranian retaliation the same way?”

The integration of conventional and nuclear decision-making is about to get a boost under the DoD’s new command and control system known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control or JADC2. This system, which is currently being implemented, will connect sensors from all branches of the armed forces into an AI-powered unified network that will manage strategy across systems and branches. JADC2 will allow battlefield commanders to dramatically speed up the “kill chain” decision-making process through which they find, track, target and then fire at an enemy position. China appears to be implementing something similar, creating a command-and-control system that will ensure “seamless links” — as a 2020 report from the China Aerospace Studies Institute puts it — “from the field of conventional operations to the field of nuclear operations.”

The Pentagon is still exploring ways of keeping JADC2 separate from nuclear command and control to ensure human control; even so, recent DoD budget documents have said the two systems “must be developed in synchronization.”

Systems designed to detect attacks are also similarly “entangled,” including ballistic missile early-warning radars, over-the-horizon skywave radars and early-warning satellites. Beyond that, China and Russia both fear that conventional weapons like hypersonic missiles are gradually threatening their mobile and even silo-based nuclear ICBMs. Warfare is thus less definable as either conventional or nuclear.

All of which means that the deployment of AI in defense is, in sum, a slippery slope on which defense planners seem to keep slipping. In 2012, for example, a Defense Department directive prohibited the creation or use of unmanned systems to “select and engage individual targets or specific target groups that have not been previously selected by an authorized human operator.” Yet now the Maven system does just that, crunching huge amounts of field and signals intelligence to swiftly offer up targets to commanders in a matter of minutes.

Lowther, co-author of the “Dead Hand” article, says that even the most brilliant human might not be able to detect an imminent nuclear attack today, not with China developing “fractional orbital bombardment systems” that circle the earth and could potentially come at the U.S. from any direction, and with Russia soon to deploy hundreds of hypersonic glide vehicles that can’t be tracked because they have no ballistic trajectory.

Nor could a U.S. president know enough to make a responsible decision in time without AI help, he argues.

“The U.S. president doesn’t participate in nuclear war gaming anymore. He hasn’t done so since Reagan. Trump knows very little about nuclear strategy, targeting, any of that stuff, and that’s pretty typical of any president. What is that guy going to do if his first real foray into thinking about nuclear weapons and their use is when he’s got like five minutes to make a decision?” Lowther says. “I can’t think of a worse time to learn on the job.”

He notes that during the Cold War there were several incidents where the president might have had only a few minutes to decide on nuclear war. In one famous case, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was awakened in the middle of the night in 1979 by his military aide who told him: “Thirty seconds ago, 200 Soviet missiles have been fired at the United States.” As Brzezinski later recounted in an interview: “According to the rules, I had two more minutes to verify this information and then an additional four minutes to wake up the president, go over the options in the so-called football, get the president’s decision and then initiate the response.” Fortunately, with a minute left to decide, the aide called back and said it was a false alarm.

Lowther adds: “So our premise is to institutionalize the practice of the president walking through scenarios. In other words, ‘If this happens, what do you want to do?’ Then you pre-program the [AI] system to do whatever president has decided, such that if the system lost contact with the president, then it automatically responds — which is what [Russia’s] Perimeter [system] does. Having a system like that can serve as a pretty effective deterrent against the Russians and Chinese.”

“I don’t know if that’s any more a danger than if you’re going to rely on human decisions,” he says. “If we don’t make dramatic changes within a decade, we’ll be the weakest of the three nuclear powers.”

‘We really don’t understand these systems’

The Pentagon might be pressing hard on the accelerator on AI adoption, but it has also tasked one guy at one tiny Pentagon agency with the job of trying to press the brake at the same time.

Patrick Shafto lacks the warrior demeanor so common elsewhere in the Pentagon. A slender, balding mathematician, Shafto typically wears sandals, a Hawaiian-style shirt and yellow straw trilby to work and is a sometime surfer dude who tools off to the Azores when he gets a chance.

Building on his lifelong fascination with probing the difference between the way humans and machines think — “my mathematical interests are somewhat quirky,” Shafto says — a year ago he created a new DARPA program with the somewhat obscure name of “AI Quantified.” AI at its core is mathematics, using statistics, probability and other equations to mimic human information processing. So when something goes wrong, the problem is somewhere in the math. Shafto’s three-year research program seeks to develop algorithms and statistical formulas that could ensure greater reliability of the newest AI systems to prevent mistakes on the battlefield and, of course, prevent any doomsday scenarios.

DARPA, it should be noted, is the same agency that helped create the problem of runaway AI in the first place. Started in 1958 in a moment of national panic — as a response to Moscow’s shocking success in launching Sputnik at the height of the Cold War — DARPA basically invented the internet as we’ve come to know it. Through a series of hit-and-miss efforts dating back to the 1960s, DARPA also seeded most of the early research (along with the National Science Foundation) that led to today’s dramatic breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

But now some of the current leadership of DARPA, whose main mission is to ensure the U.S. never again faces strategic surprise, are worried their predecessors may have created a monster they can no longer control. Today DARPA is grappling with a national panic — fear of being outcompeted by China and Russia on AI — that feels very much like the Cold War fears that brought the agency into being.

Shafto says that they are especially concerned that the big private-sector tech companies engendered by all those old DARPA programs back in the 1960s and ’70s are in a no-holds-barred competition to advance its latest GPT with little restraint. And nowhere is this more dangerous than in the Pentagon.

“The tech companies are leading. They’re just charging ahead. They’re on a path that DARPA started us down in many ways,” says Shafto, a 49-year-old native of working-class Marshfield, Mass. But he adds: “At end of day we really don’t understand these systems well at all. It’s hard to know when you can trust them and when you can’t.”

To answer those questions, the AI Quantified program — which kicked off on June 26 — is applying sophisticated mathematics to evaluate how GPT performs when the AI is quizzed in extensive testing. By doing so, Shafto is trying to answer some of the most basic questions people have about GPT, including why it sometimes “hallucinates” or gives erroneous or seemingly crazy responses, and why the AI often offers different responses to the same query. Shafto says he wants to develop new models and methods of measurement “to offer potential guarantees” that military planners can rely on a result in any situation, whether an international crisis or something as simple as logistical planning in peacetime.

The problem, however, is not just that GPT is already being deployed. It’s that Shafto’s $25 million program — which amounts to a tiny fraction of what the Pentagon is devoting to new AI systems as part of its trillion-dollar budget — may be too small to rein in the larger push to integrate AI.

And giving AI more control increasingly is the strategy.

‘I don’t see DARPA being able to keep up’

More than a decade ago, when the Pentagon determined that Moscow and Beijing were starting to catch up with the U.S. in developing guided munitions and “smart” bombs, the Defense Science Board looked to find new technologies Washington could deploy to regain advantage, says Work. “They came back and said it’s not even close: Autonomy is the way you will be able to offset the Chinese — autonomous weapons, autonomous decision tools, all of these things. But you’re not going to be able to get great autonomy without AI.”

So the problem remains: America’s defenses seemingly won’t work without AI, even as experts are still puzzling over how to work with AI. Or as Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT neuroscientist who is working with Shafto, puts it: “We’re building this plane as we’re flying it.”

“It’s scary as hell,” says Richard Fikes, a leading AI specialist at Stanford who has been involved in many DARPA projects. “So much money is being thrown at AI right now. I don’t see DARPA being able to keep up with that.” Fikes adds that when it comes to Shafto’s goal of “guaranteeing” AI reliability, “I don’t think we have a clue how to do that, and we’re not going to be able to do it for a long time.”

Yet military strategists fear they may not have a long time. Because of rapidly shifting international norms and the disintegration of institutions that once provided stability — and the Trump administration’s seemingly laissez-faire approach to that disintegration — the current moment is far more perilous than the Cold War, some strategic experts believe.

In 2017 — well before the latest GPT generation became known and fears of “superintelligent” AI arose — Vladimir Putin notoriously said, “Whoever becomes the leader in [AI] will become the ruler of the world.”

Some scientists hold out hope that it may be possible to program the autonomous network in ways that might make it de-escalatory. That even happened in one 2023 wargame at George Mason University’s National Security Institute, when ChatGPT proved to be more cautious — granted, an isolated case — in its advice than the human team in a fictional conflict between the United States and China. “It identified responses the humans didn’t see, and it didn’t go crazy,” says Jamil Jaffer, director of the project. (Unfortunately, Jaffer adds, the Chinese human “red” team interpreted this as weakness and attacked Taiwan anyway.)

Some AI specialists suggest that a purely intelligence-based AI system, whether in Washington or Beijing, could eventually draw the rational conclusion that the strategic threat China and the United States pose to each other is far less than the peril each country faces from a failure to cooperate, or de-escalate in a crisis. This would take into consideration the mutual benefits to each nation of participation in global markets, stopping the climate crisis and future pandemics, and stabilizing regions each country wants to exploit commercially.

That too is a movie-style outcome — a far more hopeful one. At the end of WarGames, the errant computer eventually averts an apocalypse when it realizes that nuclear war is unwinnable.

“I think that’s one hope of how AI might be helpful. It can take emotions and egos out of the loop,” says MIT’s Fedorenko.

The biggest challenge will be to view AI as a mere helpmate to humans, nothing more. Adds Goodwin, “The DoD and intel community actually have pretty good experience with working with sources that are not always reliable. Are there limitations to these models? Yes. Will some of those be overcome with research breakthroughs? Definitely. But even if they are perpetual problems, I think if we view these models as partners seeking truth rather than oracles, we’re much better off.”

DARPA’s Shafto says the ultimate questions about how LLMs work and why they draw the conclusions they do may never be answered, but “I think it will be possible to offer a few types of mathematical guarantees,” especially about how to “scale up” AI to perform in big crisis scenarios and complex battlefield situations since it often doesn’t have the computing power to do that now.

“And we probably don’t have 15 to 20 years to noodle around and answer these questions,” Shafto adds. “We should probably be doing it very quickly.”

Another mathematician involved in Shafto’s AI Quantified program, Carey Priebe of Johns Hopkins University, also says that even if the problem of uncertainty is never fully resolved, that doesn’t mean the Pentagon can afford to wait.

“I’ve been railing for years against the very concept of autonomous weapons,” he says. “On the other hand, if the situation is such that you can’t possibly react fast enough with humans, then your options are limited. It’s a slippery slope both ways.”

“I do think it is the problem of our time.”

7. Trump’s Gunboat War on Drugs

I wonder what message the Venezuelan people are taking from this action? What does the future hold for them?

Trump’s Gunboat War on Drugs

Venezuelan capos get a kinetic message, and so does kingpin Maduro.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/u-s-military-venezuela-caribbean-donald-trump-nicolas-maduro-drug-trafficking-aadf5740

By The Editorial Board

Sept. 3, 2025 6:50 pm ET

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Photo: Jesus Vargas/Getty Images

President Trump posted dramatic video Tuesday of a speed boat in the Caribbean exploding in a precision U.S. air strike. The Administration says the target was carrying narcotics and the 11 crew who died were part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. Assuming that’s true, it was a good move. So was Mr. Trump’s warning: “There’s more where that came from.”

The attack is a break from the usual Coast Guard protocol of stopping suspected drug traffickers on the high seas, going aboard for search and seizure, and making arrests for a trial at a later date. That’s the way civilized countries do things, according to Mr. Trump’s critics. But Venezuelan capos don’t follow Marquess of Queensberry rules, and the U.S. doesn’t have to refrain from sending them a more convincing kinetic message.

A war on narco traffickers won’t end America’s drug-abuse epidemic, which has ruined so many lives, because U.S. consumption is a demand problem. It would help if public officials at least tried to discourage young people from ingesting mind-altering substances. That said, transnational criminal cartels also have diversified into a range of grisly businesses, including kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking and murder.

In Venezuela they’re tools of the dictatorship as well, since the regime of Nicolás Maduro uses them to repress the population and gives them impunity for their organized crime. Elsewhere in the region the gangs overwhelm weak institutions, even in countries that want to fight back. This makes them a threat to U.S. national security. Allowing them to grow powerful has invited chaos and tyranny.

The Maduro regime owns the Cártel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, named for the insignia Venezuelan generals earn as they move up in rank. The U.S. calls it a foreign terrorist group, and it’s known to run a vertically integrated cocaine operation, from coca leaf to delivery on American streets. The U.S. has indicted Mr. Maduro on narco-terrorism charges and put a $50 million bounty on his head.

Tren de Aragua isn’t Mr. Maduro’s creature, but it’s in cahoots with the regime. It originated and consolidated its power more than a decade ago in a prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, when the governor was Tareck El Aissami, a former Chávez security minister. Beyond drugs, it specializes in extortion and human trafficking, and it has exported its crime model around the hemisphere in an attempt to destabilize neighboring democracies.

One geopolitical benefit of a U.S. policy to police the Caribbean more aggressively is that it’s likely to disrupt, at least in the short run, the Maduro dictatorship’s dollar income from trafficking, which it relies on to remain in power, even more than oil. It’s also a reminder to Mr. Maduro of what the U.S. can do if its patience with his criminality runs out.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday called Mr. Maduro “a kingpin of a drug narco-state, not actually elected.” The U.S. recently sent serious naval power to the region. Asked if regime change is the goal, Mr. Hegseth deferred to Mr. Trump, but added that “we’re prepared with every asset that the American military has.” Sleep well tonight, Mr. Maduro.

In Front-Line Ukrainian Towns, Those Who Stayed Become Moving Targets

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-russia-frontline-towns-ee644d95?st=Spuzmz&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Any movement in cities near the battlefield is now dangerous, as explosive drones hunt for all signs of life

Anatoliy Suliz was wounded by a Russian drone while searching for a cellphone signal.

By Ian Lovett

and Nikita Nikolaienko | Photographs by Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Sept. 3, 2025 10:00 pm ET

Quick Summary

The conflict in Ukraine is becoming increasingly dangerous for civilians due to Russia’s use of explosive drones.View more

ORIKHIV, Ukraine—Anatoliy Suliz long ago grew accustomed to the sound of artillery in this front-line city. But in April, as he biked up a hill in search of a cellphone signal, he heard something buzzing overhead. He dove off the bike just as a drone smashed into the pavement next to him, bursting his eardrum and leaving a trail of gashes in his right side.

“Before it was dangerous if you were static,” he said, noting that artillery usually hits buildings. “Now, it’s dangerous to be moving, because drones hit moving targets.”

Three-and-a-half years into the war, the conflict is growing deadlier for civilians, with explosive drones reshaping life in front-line towns and villages just as they have on the battlefield.

Front line in southern Ukraine

Novomykolaivka

Velyka Novosilka

Zaporizhzhia

Ukraine

Huliaipole

Malynivka

Orikhiv

Russian forces

Vasylivka

Ukraine

Tokmak

Area of

detail

10 miles

10 km

Note: As of Sept. 1

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project

Andrew Barnett/WSJ

Some 1,674 civilians were killed or injured during July, the highest total of any month in more than three years, according to United Nations data. Drone attacks on civilians have risen sharply over the past year, the report found, with a record 67 civilians killed and 337 injured by short-range drones in July.

After years of lobbing munitions at buildings in front-line cities, Russia is now also targeting individual civilians and vehicles with explosive drones, creating a thick band of shattered towns and villages along the 750-mile front line where any movement is dangerous.

Yet, tens of thousands of civilians continue to live in front-line settlements. Despite the growing risks, many of them refuse to relocate.

Around 1,000 civilians remain in Orikhiv. Many others have gone to live in Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital, but it, too, has been the target of recent drone strikes.

Suliz, who lives with his wife in the south of Orikhiv—the most dangerous area, closest to the Russians—said about eight munitions have landed in his and his neighbor’s yard, including one massive glide bomb weighing at least a quarter-ton. The windows of the house are now boarded up and the roof covered with a tarp.

His adult children are constantly asking him to come live with them.

“My wife and I discuss it from time to time. We say, ‘Maybe we should go.’ But we decided to stay,” Suliz said, standing at a street market in town where he comes twice a week to get groceries. A munition crashed down several miles away as he spoke. “We built our house with our own hands. We can’t bring ourselves to abandon it.”

Orikhiv has been sitting along the southern front for almost the duration of the war, with the Russians within about 5 miles but unable to get much closer.

Around 1,000 civilians remain in Orikhiv and the surrounding villages, according to local officials, down from a prewar population of nearly 14,000.

Hardly a building remains unscathed. The town hall’s roof is caved in and covered with a tarp. The nearby church has been gutted, its steeple hanging askew on the splintered wooden dome. The street market in the city center remains open, though everything around it—including the trees—has been charred by Russian strikes.

Tetiana Kushnir, 41, works at Orikhiv’s market, where a concrete shelter has been installed to protect against attacks.

Tetiana Kushnir, who sells fruits and vegetables at the market, said she now hears drones overhead every day. She sent her 13-year-old daughter to live in Zaporizhzhia in 2022, but refuses to leave herself. All the windows in her home have been blown out, as has the roof.

“Russians are hunting every vehicle—we don’t think they won’t touch us because we’re civilians,” Kushnir, 41, said. “If you hear the sound, you have to take cover and wait a while.” A concrete shelter has been installed just beside the market.

A sliver of Orikhiv still sometimes gets electricity, but gas and running water were cut long ago.

Oleksandr Billerys, deputy chief of the military administration for Orikhiv, said providing food, water and other essentials to the remaining residents has become steadily more difficult since drones became a menace. Several weeks ago, one attacked a volunteer distributing aid. The volunteer survived, but his vehicle was destroyed.

Authorities have installed antidrone netting over streets in Orikhiv.

Almost all of Orikhiv’s buildings have been damaged in some way.

Local and regional authorities have installed antidrone netting over several streets in town and part of the highway that connects Orikhiv to Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital. Still, Billerys said, many volunteers will no longer come to town, leaving more of the burden—and the risk—for local officials like himself.

“Everyone should leave. People should not live here in these circumstances,” Billerys said. His own apartment here has been severely damaged, and he moved to Zaporizhzhia in 2022. “It ties the hands of our soldiers. They have to think, ‘If I fire from this place, there might be return fire and civilians could get hurt.’ ”

Getting civilians to leave, however, is a challenge. As in other front-line cities, children have been forced to evacuate. But Ukrainian officials have mostly held off mandating that adults clear out.

Oleksandr Billerys, deputy chief of the military administration for Orikhiv, in an underground office.

Most who remain in Orikhiv are older, many of them pensioners who have spent their entire lives here, like Mykola Hlushenko.

After a rocket ripped through his apartment last year—bursting through the front wall, over his head as he lay in bed, and out the back wall—Hlushenko, 73, and his wife moved to the basement of a neighboring building. They now live there with more than a dozen others from the neighborhood, all of them in their 60s and 70s.

Hlushenko hardly ever leaves the dirt-floor basement, which is lighted by a couple of bare lightbulbs hanging from the low ceiling. Water and other supplies are piled in the entryway. He occasionally steps outside to smoke or tend his vegetable garden, but is afraid to stray any farther.

“I feel very uncomfortable outside. I prefer to be down here,” he said. He goes to Zaporizhzhia to collect his pension, which amounts to less than $73 a month, and see family. “I can’t afford decent circumstances.”

Mykola and Svitlana Hlushenko live in the basement of a neighboring building, after their apartment was damaged by a rocket.

Hlushenko’s sons—one in Poland, the other in Zaporizhzhia with their five grandchildren—beg their parents every day to evacuate, and offer to help them financially. His wife, Svitlana Hlushenko, is also eager to leave.

“If it were up to me, I would have left already. I’m tired of living in these conditions,” Svitlana Hlushenko said. “He tells me, ‘You go and I’ll stay.’ I’m a hostage in this situation, because I can’t just leave him here alone.”

Hlushenko gives reasons that are common among older people who refuse to evacuate: He says he can’t afford it; that he doesn’t want to burden his children; and that he can’t bring himself to leave his apartment, which he and his wife moved into in 1983.

Temporary housing is available for anyone who wants to leave Orikhiv, along with free food and other humanitarian aid, according to local officials.

But there is a shortage of long-term housing for internally displaced people, said Oksana Kuyantseva, a board member for East SOS, which conducts evacuations from front-line areas. Much of the housing that is available isn’t in great condition, she said. Some people evacuate and then don’t like living in a dorm with other evacuees and return.

It isn’t always possible to evacuate them a second time, Kuyantseva said, especially with the increasing range of drones putting volunteers at risk.

Svitlana Mandrych, former deputy mayor of Orikhiv, in the partially destroyed town hall.

A local Orikhiv school was the site of an aid center until it was hit by a bomb.

Svitlana Mandrych, the former deputy mayor of Orikhiv, questioned whether it was a good idea for front-line cities to keep providing services, like food and water distribution, to the remaining residents.

For the first year of the war, Mandrych stayed in town and set up a humanitarian-aid center at a local school, which offered meals, showers and a play area for children. Then in 2023, a glide bomb razed the school, killing seven people, injuring five others, and leaving one young boy an orphan. After that, Mandrych moved to Zaporizhzhia.

“It’s irresponsible to stay,” she said. “Sometimes, you need to abandon people for their own good. When you take care of people, they keep coming to get that care.”

Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com

Appeared in the September 4, 2025, print edition as 'Russian Drones Hit Civilians Near Front'.

9. The 5 key takeaways from China’s Victory Day military parade

Video and photos at the link.

My question is do goose stepping armies ever prevail in the long term? (ses the first video)

From a visual/messaging perspective it appears XI (and Putin) gave a great victory to Kim as they walked together in front of all other 26 or so world leaders (though Kim had the number 3 position with Xi in the center and Putin to his right and Kim to the left).

The 5 takeaways:

1. Xi with Putin and Kim

2. Military showcase

3. Future warfare

4. Nuclear focus

5. World leaders

The 5 key takeaways from China’s Victory Day military parade

From the images of Xi with Putin and Kim to a growing focus on nuclear weapons, here are the key moments from Tiananmen Square

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3324135/5-key-takeaways-chinas-victory-day-military-parade?tpcc=GME-O-enlz-uv&utm

Highlights of China’s military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s WWII surrender

Dewey Simin Beijing

Published: 12:24pm, 3 Sep 2025Updated: 1:22pm, 3 Sep 2025

China hosted two dozen world leaders for a huge military parade in Tiananmen Square on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

It was only the second time Beijing has held a Victory Day parade, the first taking place a decade ago.

The parade – which started at 9am and lasted nearly 90 minutes – was viewed by many as a showcase of China’s growing military strength. But it was also an attempt by Beijing to cement its global leadership status and to show its rising diplomatic clout.

In an opening address, President Xi Jinping said the Chinese people “firmly stand on the right side of history and the progress of human civilisation”. He touted his “strong and self-reliant” country as a “great nation that fears no violence”, and said the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is unstoppable”.

Below are some key takeaways from Wednesday’s parade.

Why are China’s Tiananmen Square military parades so important?

1. Xi with Putin and Kim

One prominent scene was of Xi walking down the red carpet to the rostrum with Russian President Vladimir Putin on his right and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on his left. They were seen smiling and talking.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (centre) walks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un before the parade on Wednesday. Photo: AFP

It was the first time Kim, Xi and Putin – all seen as rivals of the United States – have gathered in the same place, sending a strong signal of unity against the US-led West.

It was also the first time that Kim, who arrived in Beijing on Tuesday by train, has attended a major multilateral event.

US President Donald Trump, who was not there, posted on social media asking if Xi would mention the contribution of the United States in the war and wished the Chinese leader “a great and lasting day of celebration”. Trump also asked Xi to “give my warmest regards to [Putin and Kim] as you conspire against the United States”.

2. Military showcase

Wednesday’s parade offered a chance for China to show its military prowess, as thousands of soldiers marched down Tiananmen Square and the People’s Liberation Army displayed some of its latest military hardware not seen by the public before.

In his address, Xi said the PLA “has always been a heroic army that the party and the people can completely rely on” as he called for officers and soldiers to “accelerate the building of a world-class military” and “resolutely safeguard national sovereignty”.

The parade involved formations from various military branches – including the PLA Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Logistics Support Force and Rocket Force – as well as newly established branches such as the Aerospace Force.

The DF-61 is believed to be China’s most advanced ICBM. Photo: AP

Beijing also used the event to showcase various land-based weapons systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and missile systems. It has said all systems seen in the parade were in service already.

A key highlight was the debut of the DF-61, believed to be China’s most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile after the DF-41. The DF-61 is expected to be part of the PLA Rocket Force’s long-range missile operations.

Also appearing for the first time was the JL-3, a new third-generation, intercontinental-range submarine-launched ballistic missile, crucial for the PLA’s sea-based nuclear deterrence operations.

3. Future warfare

The parade through the heart of the Chinese capital showed that the PLA is not just playing catch-up with the West but preparing for future warfare.

In what was its largest display of drone weapons, the PLA debuted the GJ-11, an unmanned combat aerial vehicle designed for precision strikes and aerial reconnaissance missions. It features a stealthy design with a tailless flying wing and two internal weapons bays.

Official broadcaster CCTV spoke of the “loyal wingmen” drones on display, meaning they are paired with crewed aircraft – a trend all leading militaries are pursuing.

Multiple rocket launcher the PHL-16, also known as the PCL-191, was also on display. It’s referred to as the mainland Chinese version of Lockheed Martin’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (Himars) that Taiwan has bought and deployed. It is believed it would play a significant role in the event of contingencies in the Taiwan Strait for its long-range strike abilities.

4. Nuclear focus

A growing focus on nuclear weapons was also seen, even as the PLA faces questions over its Rocket Force, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal and has been a target of Xi’s anti-corruption drive.

The DF-31BJ – the newest road-mobile variant of the DF-31 solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile – also made an appearance at the parade. It is thought to be an upgrade of the DF-31AG, currently the most advanced variant of the DF-31 series, which has a reported operational range of more than 11,200km (6,959 miles) and was test-launched in September last year – China’s first nuclear missile test in 44 years.

The parade was a show of China’s military might. Photo: Reuters

5. World leaders

Some 26 top leaders from around the world – including from Central Asia and Southeast Asia – attended the event, in what was a nod to Beijing’s growing global influence.

Higher ranked leaders from Southeast Asia attended compared to the inaugural Victory Day parade in 2015. They included Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Prabowo initially cancelled his trip to China due to widespread protests at home but on Tuesday said he would attend the parade.

Only two heads of government from Europe attended the event, namely Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

But foreign troops were notably missing from the parade this time, a contrast to the previous World War II commemoration in 2015, when nearly 1,000 soldiers from 17 countries joined the march. This year’s march-past was exclusively Chinese.

Dewey Sim

Dewey Sim is a reporter for the China desk covering Beijing's foreign policy. He was previously writing about Singapore and Southeast Asia for the Post's Asia desk. A Singapore native, Dewey joined the Post in 2019 and is a graduate of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and

10. The weapons and military units on display in China's major parade

Photos at the link below.

The weapons and military units on display in China's major parade

https://apnews.com/article/china-military-parade-weapons-214448c7ac0052c7bcf1e23220162389

AP · Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · September 2, 2025

BEIJING (AP) — Some of the weapons and military units in China’s major parade were being displayed for the first time.

The parade on a central Beijing avenue Wednesday marked the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Troops marched by President Xi Jinping, who heads the military as the chairman of the Central Military Commission.

New units and equipment

Marching in the parade were traditional People’s Liberation Army units from the navy and army, but also new ones like the cyberspace unit. The new unit is in charge of cybersecurity defense measures, according to the official Xinhua news agency, and also participated in live-fire drills.

Another debut was the information support force, created in 2024 to build network information systems to support military combat readiness.

Much of the weaponry and equipment in the parade was being shown to the public for the first time, according to Chinese military officials. This included hypersonic missiles designed to take out ships at sea. These weapons are of particular concern to the U.S. Navy, which patrols the western Pacific from its 7th Fleet headquarters in Japan.

Also shown were underwater drones including the AJX002, a long, black tube-shaped craft that looks like a narrow submarine with a rear propeller, and a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the DF-61, which could carry nuclear warheads to distant targets.

◆ Stay up to date with similar stories by signing up to our WhatsApp channel.

Others included land, sea and air-based strategic weapons, advanced precision warfare equipment and drones. Warplanes and helicopters flew in formation in the skies overhead.

It’s the first major military parade in China since 2019 on the 70th anniversary of the founding of communist China.

The parade aimed to instill pride in China’s populace and assure them that the country is strong enough to ward off any attack. But China’s growing military strength also concerns its Asian neighbors and the United States.

Russia and North Korea headline guest list

U.S. and Western European heads of state are staying away, as are the leaders of Japan, India and South Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made a rare foreign trip to attend. He was joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the president of Iran, among others.

In all, about two dozen foreign leaders attended, including several from Southeast Asia and a few from Africa and South Asia. Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto arrived early Wednesday after being delayed by protests in his country over lawmakers’ perks.

Parade mainly for invited guests

The event was highly choreographed and tightly controlled. It wasn’t the kind of parade where crowds line the streets to watch.

Barriers were set up to keep the public one block away and commercial buildings along the parade route were emptied and closed until the parade ended. The subway system running along Chang’An Avenue was shut Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

For most people, the only way to watch was on television or a livestream.

—-

AP writer Huizhong Wu contributed to this report.

AP · Updated [hour]:[minute] [AMPM] [timezone], [monthFull] [day], [year] · September 2, 2025

11. Trump’s Ukraine Strategy Falters: White House Readies for High-Stakes Call

Does our current national security apparatus that is leading our nation believe in collective security, collective defense? Are they willing and capable of leading a collective approach?

Trump’s Ukraine Strategy Falters: White House Readies for High-Stakes Call

Ahead of Trump’s key call with Zelensky and European leaders, White House is under pressure to pivot to a new, collective approach after months of failed efforts to bring Russia to the table.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/59416

by Alex Raufoglu | Sept. 4, 2025, 7:51 am

WASHINGTON DC – The White House is bracing for a high-stakes phone call today with a coalition of European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an exchange that comes amid growing questions about President Donald Trump’s evolving approach to Russia’s war and a recent deadline that passed without consequence.

The expected call, which senior Trump administration officials confirmed to Kyiv Post on Wednesday evening, will follow a Paris gathering where European leaders, co-chaired by France and the UK, yesterday focused on firming up post-war security guarantees for Kyiv.

The meeting underscored a growing sense of urgency among US allies to define their own position as the White House’s strategy has become increasingly ambiguous.

Moment of clarification

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, Trump hinted to his upcoming call, but left open whether his imminent conversation was with Zelenskyy or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A White House official later clarified that the call was indeed set for Thursday with the Ukrainian president and other European leaders, a public correction that nonetheless highlighted the diplomatic tightrope the administration is walking.

Allies seek a unified front

In Europe, the upcoming call is seen as a critical opportunity to repair relations and provide clarity to a transatlantic alliance that has been frayed by the US president’s mixed messages, two Western diplomats told Kyiv Post Wednesday evening.

As European nations move to formalize security guarantees for Ukraine, there is a clear desire to understand the extent of US involvement, one diplomat clarified.

NATO chief Mark Rutte also seems to have acknowledged this need, stating earlier on Wednesday that he expected the Paris talks to help “get a clearer picture of US involvement.”

Putin’s diplomatic offensive, Trump’s rhetoric – under scrutiny

The urgency is driven by what European leaders have described as Putin’s “unwillingness” to agree to a peace deal, despite his own diplomatic offensive.

The Kremlin leader, who recently visited China, projected an air of defiance, vowing to continue fighting if a peace deal could not be reached. Kyiv quickly dismissed his offer to meet with Zelensky in Moscow as “unacceptable.”

Speaking to Kyiv Post, another Western diplomat highlighted Trump’s recent rhetoric and actions as “not helpful either”

While the US President’s offer to send more troops to Poland was welcomed by Warsaw as a sign of reassurance, his public comments about his relationships with authoritarian leaders have caused unease.

The diplomat particularly highlighted Trump’s social media post in which he was asking Chinese President Xi Jinping to give his “warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America”.

As today’s call approaches, the world will be watching to see if it can bridge the growing transatlantic divide or if it will only further expose the fractures within the coalition against Russian aggression.

Deadline missed

Trump’s high-stakes call also comes as his self-imposed 50-day deadline set for Putin to end the war has passed without consequence. The failure to act has drawn sharp criticism from analysts and humanitarian organizations working to support Ukraine.

Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of the US-based Hope for Ukraine, told Kyiv Post on Wednesday that Putin marked the passing of the deadline with another massive attack on Ukrainian civilians.

“The strategy the White House pursued over the past eight months to bring peace to Ukraine through Russia has clearly failed,” Boyechko said.

He urged Trump to recognize that “Putin is neither his friend nor a friend of America,” arguing that the growing alignment between China, Russia, and North Korea represents a “fundamentally different worldview” that is irreconcilable with Western democracies.

Boyechko said that Trump’s hope of pulling Russia away from China’s influence is “unrealistic” given their shared ideological goal of ending US dominance.

Path forward

In the meantime, Boyechko believes Trump still has an opportunity to “correct the course on Ukraine and restore America’s standing globally” by rebuilding relationships with Western allies.

A united front between the G7 and the EU, he said, could present a “firm and clear plan to bring peace to Ukraine, with harsh consequences for those who are not interested in ending the war.”

The division between the US and the EU, he added, has weakened both sides. By leveraging their collective economic power over China, which relies on Western markets, the two blocs could send a powerful message to Beijing to pressure Putin to end the war.

Alex Raufoglu

Alex Raufoglu is Kyiv Post's Chief Correspondent in Washington DC. He covers the US State Department, regularly traveling with US Secretary of State. Raufoglu has worked extensively in the South Caucasus and Black Sea regions for several international broadcast outlets, such as VoA, BBC, RFE/RL, etc. He holds an MA in Interactive Journalism from American University, Washington DC.

12. In the Donbas ‘Fortress,’ Ukraine’s Soldiers Refuse to Yield

The will to fight. Does the free world have the will to support them?

In the Donbas ‘Fortress,’ Ukraine’s Soldiers Refuse to Yield

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/09/02/in-the-donbas-fortress-ukraines-soldiers-refuse-to-yield-a90327

By Joseph Roche

Sep. 2, 2025

By Joseph Roche

Multiple glide bombs hit the town of Bilozerke, reducing entire blocks to rubble and forcing families to evacuate. Neighbors still don't know how many bodies lie under the ruins. In a few months, the town lost the majority of its inhabitants, and the recent Russian advances in the region could very well transform it into a ghost town.

Louis Lemaire-Sicre / Hans Lucas

DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — On the salty shore of Sloviansk, Sasha, a 22-year-old soldier from Kherson, sips a beer and drags on a cigarette. Behind him, the salt lakes shimmer, a mirror where sky and earth blur together. In the distance, a column of smoke marks something burning. Along the shoreline, civilians and returning refugees, back for a weekend in their home region, rest uneasily beside soldiers on rotation.

The summer has dragged on longer than any winter. Faces are drawn, expressionless.

Situated just 22 kilometers from the front line, the lake of Sloviansk is one of the last fragile pockets of peace left in the Donetsk region. Russian forces have been pressing all along the front since late spring, and today, they are trying to encircle the city of Kostiantynivka.

“Pokrovsk could fall by autumn,” one soldier tells me.

On the diplomatic front, Ukraine has had to reinvent its relationship with the U.S. under the Trump administration. Kyiv has chosen the strategy of conciliation, agreeing to conditions like an unconditional 30-day ceasefire and a rare-earth minerals deal negotiated with Washington.

At first, this approach appeared to bear fruit. Amid a diplomatic push led by Ukraine’s European partners and nights of Russian bombardment on Ukrainian cities, Trump appeared to be hardening his tone and considering new sanctions against Moscow.

But at an Aug. 15 summit in Alaska, President Vladimir Putin dangled the prospect of peace in Ukraine before Trump and suggested he might scale back his ambitions. In exchange for halting hostilities on the southern front line, Moscow demanded Ukrainian forces’ full withdrawal from the Donetsk region, some 70% of which is under Russian occupation.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky ruled out the proposal, stressing that Ukraine’s constitution does not allow the ceding of territory.

More importantly, it would be nearly unimaginable for Ukraine to abandon its remaining territory in Donetsk, one of the country’s most fortified areas — and one that shields Russian advances toward Kharkiv and Dnipro, Kyiv-based foreign policy and security analyst Jimmy Rushton said.

“Ukraine has the Donbas line, a network of fortifications stretching across Donetsk,” Rushton said. “It is well constructed, with deep anti-tank ditches, trench lines and reinforced concrete positions. Some of them were built at great expense.”

If Ukraine were to abandon these, it would fall back to almost nothing, he said.

“The ground behind is flat and open, without prepared defenses,” he said. “Donetsk offers elevation and strong positions that are already in place. It is far easier to defend.”

Difficulties with mobilization

Far from the diplomatic maneuvers, Sasha has lived the war at close range.

“I spent three years in the infantry. I am one of the only survivors of my first unit,” he says quietly. “Now I serve in artillery. My body cannot take the infantry anymore.”

With the recent changes along the front line, numerous Ukrainian troops have been repositioned to patch any breaches in the defensive lines.

Louis Lemaire-Sicre / Hans Lucas

He does not think beyond tomorrow. For him, peace, whether promised by Washington or by Moscow, is not believable.

“It will take them years to take all of Donbas,” he says. “So why give it up for free? How could we give it away after so many of our friends and family have died at the front?”

Still, Sasha does not underestimate Russia’s strength. The Donbas front has always been difficult. He knows Ukraine cannot retake lost territory.

“It is better to stop them on the line of contact. Reinforce, create a wall of drones, make any advance impossible.”

But he also knows the task is daunting. Unlike Russia, with its demographic advantage, Ukraine struggles to recruit — and it is this manpower shortage that allows such porosity in Kyiv’s lines.

news

Russia Grinds Ahead in Donetsk, Testing Ukraine’s ‘Fortress Belt’

Just days before the Trump-Putin summit, Russian forces pushed 17 kilometers on the eastern front near Dobropillia, a town near Pokrovsk.

According to DeepState Map, an independent Ukrainian platform tracking the front line, the breach was sealed in record time, with the Azov and Da Vinci brigades cutting the salient in two and expelling Russian sabotage groups known as DRG.

The operation, which also served as a Russian PR stunt ahead of the Alaska summit, nonetheless revealed weaknesses in Ukraine’s defenses.

Bohdan Krotevych, chief of staff of the Azov Brigade, said the problem goes beyond fortifications.

In a series of blunt Telegram posts, he implied that Ukraine has built sufficient defenses but does not have enough soldiers to hold them.

“In defense without fortifications. In assault without reserves,” he wrote. “Officers no longer lead men into battle, they drag in whoever is still standing.”

An explosion seen from the beach of Sloviansk. A few dozen kilometres away from the frontlines, local families and soldiers gather to forget the war, if only for the length of a swim.

Louis Lemaire-Sicre / Hans Lucas

Describing the porous front line, Krotevych explained that exhausted and understrength units are forced to hold vast sectors with minimal personnel.

“On a sector of more than five kilometers, [there are] 10, at most 12 fighters. The defense is held by drivers, artillerymen, cooks. But even they are used up. In the battalions, only 25% of the manpower remains, most of them already wounded before, now serving as drivers or orderlies just to keep being useful.”

The problem, he added, is compounded by the absence of real reinforcements.

“When another battalion burns out, we do not receive reinforcements, we get a redistribution. People do not arrive, they are smeared across countless gaps,” he said.

‘The Russians no longer have enough men’

After the Russian push near Dobropillia, Sasha was laconic.

“They keep launching attacks. But we stop them. They advance centimeter by centimeter. We still lack everything, though. But do we really have a choice?” he says. “After the Donetsk region, they will keep advancing further. Better to make them pay the price here, where we have good fortifications.”

French defense consultant Xavier Tytelman argues that while the breach represented a Ukrainian mistake, it also exposed Russia’s incapacity to exploit breakthroughs.

“The assaults are less and less effective,” he says. “The Russians still have men willing to sacrifice themselves to plant a flag. But they did not send vehicles. Even when they find a breach, they no longer have the resources to send in 20 tanks, engineering units to dig trenches or demining systems. They do not have the material means to exploit infantry successes. It proves Russia no longer has the maneuvering mass that once matched its infantry.”

New reinforced defensive lines are being installed east of Donetsk, outside of Dobropillia, in anticipation of further Russian advances. Sunflowers, a symbol of Ukraine, have taken root between barbed wires and dragon teeth.

Louis Lemaire-Sicre / Hans Lucas

This, he says, shows why Ukraine has no interest in abandoning the Donetsk region in exchange for a shaky promise that Russia will bring peace in return.

“Russia captured less than 4,000 square kilometers last year,” he says. “At this pace, it would take them two years to finish capturing the Donetsk region if they concentrated all their forces. But they do not, because they are also engaged in Sumy, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.”

Rushton echoes this, noting that cities like Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and Druzhkivka form a defensive backbone.

“Since 2014, Ukraine has fortified them with underground structures and industrial complexes, something akin to Mariupol’s Azovstal. Along with the Donbas line, it makes this region uniquely defensible,” he says.

On the road back from Sloviansk, the landscape bears the scars of Russian advances. Excavators tear into the fields, carving one trench after another.

Across the plain, dragon’s teeth stretch for miles, with sunflowers already sprouting between the concrete.

“The Kremlin knows that we will not withdraw,” Sasha sighs. “What they want is to make us bear the blame for the failure of peace. Then Putin can say it is Ukraine’s fault. Maybe the Americans will cut weapons, maybe intelligence. But even that, I am not sure it would be enough for Russia to take the whole Donbas in the next two or three years. Not at this pace.”

13. Shortly after laying off hundreds, State hires new class of foreign service staff

As General Mattis once spoke words to the effect that if you do not resource the diplomatic instrument of power, you will need the military instrument of power to buy more ammunition.

Shortly after laying off hundreds, State hires new class of foreign service staff

The firing-hiring combo is "the definition of wasteful government spending,” according to one staffer.

By Eric Katz

Senior Correspondent

September 2, 2025

defenseone.com · Eric Katz

About 99 new employees will join the foreign service class, with its orientation starting Sept. 22. J. David Ake / Getty Images

September 2, 2025

Less than 10 weeks after the State Department laid off hundreds of Foreign Service Officers, citing bureaucratic bloat, it is beginning to bring nearly 100 new ones on.

Last week, the Office of Talent Acquisition began notifying new employees that their orientation class will begin Sept. 22, according to an email obtained by Government Executive. About 99 new employees will join the Foreign Service class, according to people involved in or familiar with the plans.

In July, State issued reduction-in-force notices to 1,350 employees, including about 250 FSOs.

Current and laid-off employees wonder why cuts were made if State planned to begin hiring again so soon. Foreign Service Officers are flexible; most work as generalists, switching roles and locations every few years.

“The optics are terrible," said one State employee familiar with the hiring plans.

A Foreign Service Officer affected by the layoffs said the new hiring demonstrates a lack of consistent thinking. “They indiscriminately fired hundreds only to turn around and start hiring almost immediately,” the soon-to-be-former officer said.

Another laid-off Foreign Service Officer called the approach wasteful because State has invested in training each diplomat throughout their career.

“So the idea of firing 250 FSOs only to bring in more people in their wake is totally inefficient and the definition of wasteful government spending,” the laid-off staffer said.

That person added the approach will open the door to the Trump administration intimidating new employees “who don’t know the rules of the road or when and how to push back.”

A department spokesperson said State "welcomes a new class" of FSOs, calling the process standard.

"This new class will be filling entry-level positions throughout the department that were maintained in the reorganization," the spokesperson said.

State officials said ahead of the July layoffs that the department’s reorganization was meant to “refocus” its mission on core objectives and modern needs. The department was not saying those affected by the layoffs “weren't doing a good job or weren't valuable members of the State Department family,” one official said, but the administration had an obligation to “do what's right for the mission and what's right for the American people.”

While the duties and areas in which FSOs serve shift regularly, State said it was targeting staff because of the offices in which they were serving in that moment. Some of those laid off have subsequently been awarded promotions for outstanding performance, though their RIFs remain in effect.

Under President Biden, the Foreign Service grew by 6% at State and the department last year brought on 235 people in its largest class size ever. In May, the Trump administration welcomed another cohort of 104 Foreign Service personnel.

While the Trump administration has ushered hundreds of thousands of employees out of government since January, State is just the latest example of an agency seeking to unwind some of that work. The departments of Treasury, Health and Human Services and Labor have rescinded layoffs to fill staffing needs, while the Agriculture Department, Justice Department, Social Security Administration and other agencies have moved employees around to ensure continuity of critical functions.

Share your news tips with us:

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

14. Trump says US won’t pull troops from Poland

Trump says US won’t pull troops from Poland

Stars and Stripes · John Vandiver · September 3, 2025

Col. Jorge Fonseca, the first commander of U.S. Army Garrison Poland, unfurls the unit’s colors during a ceremony March 21, 2023, in Poznan that was attended by high-level U.S. and Polish military officials. (John Vandiver/Stars and Stripes)

STUTTGART, Germany — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is open to deploying more troops to Poland, a country that has long sought a larger American military presence to deter potential Russian aggression.

“We’ll put more there if they want,” Trump said, adding “we’re with Poland all the way, and we will help Poland protect itself.”

Trump’s comments came during a meeting at the White House with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, who was in Washington to solidify the U.S.’s military commitment to Poland.

The U.S. has about 8,000 troops in Poland, mostly on a rotational basis. Trump’s assurances to the central European country come amid uncertainty about the United State’s future military plans in Europe.

The Pentagon is close to wrapping up a force posture review that is likely to have implications for missions in Europe and elsewhere. Key players inside the Pentagon have advocated for a stronger military focus in the Pacific to counter China, which could come at the cost of the Europe mission.

Inside NATO, some allies have been anticipating potentially significant cuts, with some estimates in the range of 20,000 troops being withdrawn.

Trump acknowledged that he has considered drawing back, but did not say where or how much. While Poland was off the table, Trump said “we do think about it with regard to other countries.”

The U.S. has about 80,000 troops in Europe, with Germany hosting the largest number. During Trump’s first term he sought to relocate about 12,000 troops out of Germany.

But in June, during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the White House, Trump said he was willing to keep American forces in the country.

Other European countries where the U.S. has significant troop numbers include the United Kingdom, Italy, Romania and Spain. Several other nations play host to U.S. forces in smaller numbers.

If the Defense Department reduces its European force posture, it would need to weigh whether to pull back on rotations, cut into its permanently based presence or opt for a combination of the two.

U.S. officials have said that if a reduction happens, it would be carried out in an orderly manner.

U.S. ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker told reporters in June that he would work closely with the Pentagon and allies “to address the impact of any decisions.” He said the U.S. also will make sure there are “no security gaps in defense capabilities” should it change its force posture.

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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.

Stars and Stripes · John Vandiver · September 3, 2025

15. Technological Discord and Tactical Misjudgment: India’s Military Setback in the May 2025 Crisis

Conclusion:

The May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict underscores that success in multi-domain warfare depends on integrated technology, effective joint doctrine, and sound and timely decision-making. India’s BrahMos strikes showed tactical prowess but were undermined by structural challenges. Pakistan’s Chinese-origin hardware integrated with Pakistani software enabled superior battlefield agility. In a theater of modern warfare characterized by speed, complexity, and information supremacy, military success depends not just on capabilities but also on unified systems and good joint integration.

Technological Discord and Tactical Misjudgment: India’s Military Setback in the May 2025 Crisis

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/04/technological-discord-and-tactical-misjudgment/

by Tahir Azad

09.04.2025 at 06:00am

Victory in multi-domain warfare depends on the effective integration of military resources within a contested battlespace, not merely their quantity. The May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict highlighted India’s challenges in managing technologically fragmented platforms. India’s reliance on diverse Russian, Western, and indigenous systems—such as American-Israeli electronics, Russian S-400 air defense systems, and French Rafale jets—created operational discord. Conversely, Pakistan leveraged a cohesive Chinese-backed arsenal, including J-10C and JF-17 fighters, localized drone swarms, and electromagnetic warfare (EMW) tactics unified by a centralized Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) framework.

This essay analyses Pakistan’s tactical edge through Chinese technology and EMW, India’s limited success with BrahMos missile strikes, and how India’s doctrinal and technical fragmentation undermined its military effectiveness. In doing so, this essay highlights both sides’ strengths and weaknesses in a shifting regional context.

India: Perils of Non-Integration

India’s diversified procurement from Russia, France, Israel, and the United States was intended to safeguard strategic autonomy and reduce the dependence on a single supplier. Such assets as the Israeli Heron drones, American surveillance platforms, French Rafale jets, and the Russian S‑400 air defense system offered advanced capabilities but lacked interoperability. Even the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a leading Indian think tank, underscored same in 2023, when it noted that India’s military modernization is hampered by service-specific preferences resulting in the weak integration of weapons and intelligence systems, limiting their ability to conduct network-centric warfare. Military analyst Michael Dahm echoed similar concern by underlying India’s absence of unified architecture for sensor-to-shooter continuity, which constrained its air defense grid. India’s air force, though large, suffers from interoperability issues due to its diverse fleet of aircraft and missile systems from multiple countries. Dahm argues this complexity hinders real-time coordination and has turned strategic variety into a liability in today’s fast-paced, AI-driven warfare environment.

During this 2025 conflict, Pakistan exploited these gaps with drone saturation tactics against India’s Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat states, both with drones and missiles and EMW tactics to overwhelm Indian command and communication networks. Defense Security Asia reported Pakistan’s “flawless kill chain” integrating Chinese-origin radars, airborne early warning platforms AEW&C (most likely KJ-500), and datalink-enabled fighters, all integrated under a China-supported C4ISR system. Although the majority of the technology and hardware used in Pakistan’s C4ISR system comes from China, the Pakistani military has strategically and tactically integrated it. Think of it as a network with a Chinese backbone and a Pakistani brain, where China supports the network and Pakistan controls integration, tactics, and implementation.

In contrast, India’s own Rafale squadrons experienced latency issues and radar inconsistencies due to an eight-year delay in upgrading gallium nitride (GaN)-based radars for its Rafale fighter jets and lack of joint communication protocols. The 36 Rafale aircraft that India has received since 2020 are still outfitted with gallium arsenide (GaAs)-based RBE2-AESA radars, which are less effective at managing multiple targets and peak power. This resulted in leaving those systems vulnerable to Pakistan’s beyond visual range (BVR) missile engagements.

Moreover, in conflict areas like Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan’s Defense Science and Technology Organization (DESTO) is thought to have created domestic EMW ground stations with the ability to intercept communications intelligence (COMINT) and provide signals intelligence (SIGINT), giving them electronic dominance and real-time tactical awareness. This capability enabled Pakistan to intercept Indian communications, coordinate precision strikes, and disable Indian drones via EMW using “soft kill” techniques.

India’s experience during May 2025’s India-Pakistan conflict demonstrates that inducting advanced military and intelligence platforms without a complimentary doctrine and network architecture can produce ineffective military outcomes. To that end, India requires urgent reforms in jointness, digital integration, and concepts and doctrine to avoid future vulnerabilities and military failures.

Pakistan’s Use of Chinese Technology and Coordinated Warfare Doctrine

Throughout the four-day conflict, Pakistan’s strategic alignment with China paid off well. Over the past decade, Pakistan undertook extensive acquisitions from China, including J-10C multi-role fighter jets fitted with PL-15 long-range air-to-air missiles and HQ-9 and LY-80 air defense systems. Both countries have collaborated on the JF-17 Thunder, particularly its advanced Block III variant, which is increasingly becoming the PAF’s primary combat aircraft—phasing out the aging Mirage III and V platforms. Among these, during the May 2025 conflict, the J-10C established air superiority by neutralizing Indian Su-30MKIs and MiG-29s with BVR tactics and led PAF to dominate key sectors.

Likewise, Pakistan targeted Indian aircraft trying to obtain intelligence over the Line of Control (LoC) with the PL-15E, which has a range of 145 km and active radar homing. Justin Bronk, air power expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), assessed that during aerial engagements, the PAF fired a large number of PL-15 (E) air-to-air missiles from either J-10CE, and/or possibly JF-17 fighters, along with a number of HQ-9 long-range surface-to-air missiles. Consequently, the Indian Air Force (IAF) lost several fighters, including a Dassault Rafale, a MiG-29, and likely a Su-30MKI, in addition to one or two other losses for which no clear wreckage has been publicly revealed.

During the conflict, Pakistan’s employment of Chinese-supplied drones, UAVs, jamming devices, and electronic warfare platforms provided Beijing, with a low-risk window into how its technology functions under duress. French lawmaker Marc Chavent has called for a comprehensive upgrade of the Rafale fighter jet’s SPECTRA electronic warfare system following its alleged failure during May’s India-Pakistan clash. In a formal inquiry to the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, Chavent cited intelligence from NATO partners and assessments by U.S. defense analysts, claiming that the Thales-developed SPECTRA suite failed to detect and jam a PL-15E beyond-visual-range missile launched by a Pakistani J-10C equipped with a KLJ-10A AESA radar.

Pakistan’s Electromagnetic Warfare Breakthrough

Pakistan deployed a mix of organic, and Chinese DWL-002 passive detection systems to detect and track electronic signatures of airborne threats. In order to interfere with incoming Indian drones, Pakistan installed a number of Chinese manufactured commercial-grade GPS jammers. Furthermore, on April 29, 2025, the advanced EMW technology carried by Pakistan’s J-10C fighter aircraft reportedly interfered with the control systems of Indian Rafale aircraft operating along the international border, forcing mission cancellation. On May 15, 2025, Pakistan utilized electromagnetic waves EMW to destroy an Indian loitering munition drone near Lahore Airport that was identified as a WARMATE, created by Poland’s WB Electronics. In the midst of the war, Pakistani military planners had a unique opportunity to analyze the state-of-the-art a foreign unmanned aerial system (UAS). A “soft-kill” electronic countermeasure was used to bring it down instead of physical interception. Pakistan’s use of EMW demonstrates that even the most cutting-edge military systems can be rendered useless by an excessive dependence on off-the-shelf technologies without thorough joint integration.

BrahMos Strikes: India’s Limited Success

India made a major display of its precision strike capability with the deployment of the BrahMos supersonic missile. The Indian authority claimed that BrahMos missile, a joint Indo-Russian project, on 9-10 May 2025, was employed in both air-to-ground (Su-30MKIs) and ground-launched versions to target high-value Pakistani airbases and radar stations, including Rafiqui, Murid, Nur Khan, Bolari, and Skardu. However, Pakistan Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) confirmed that Indian military forces attempted to strike three key PAF bases—Nur Khan, Murid, and Shorkot—during a recent escalation. Nevertheless, Pakistan’s air defense systems successfully intercepted the threats, ensuring that all PAF assets remained fully secure and undamaged. The BrahMos’s supersonic speed (Mach 2.8 to 3.0), low radar cross-section, and great maneuverability enabled effective retaliatory strikes. However, these strikes failed to shift the strategic balance of the conflict due to India’s lack of integrated platforms across multiple domains.

In recent years, Pakistan’s air defense capabilities have been greatly enhanced. In October 2021, for instance, the Pakistani military introduced the Chinese-built HQ-9/P Surface-to-Air Missile System. The HQ-9/P is a long-range, high-precision platform that can intercept ballistic threats, cruise missiles, and aircraft. The HQ-9/P is sometimes equated to Russia’s S-400 system due to the HQ-9/P’s high single-shot kill probability and detection range of up to 125 kilometers. The LY-80 (HQ-16A), a low-to-medium altitude air defense system, created by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, was previously deployed by Pakistan in 2017. This system can destroy contemporary fighter planes, drones, and cruise missiles up to 18 kilometers in the air using semi-active radar guidance. However, concern was raised by Pakistan’s failure to intercept the BrahMos missile that entered its airspace despite this sophisticated technology. The BrahMos strikes on Pakistan underscored that even the most powerful weapons require integrated joint doctrine to maximize their impact.

Conclusion:

The May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict underscores that success in multi-domain warfare depends on integrated technology, effective joint doctrine, and sound and timely decision-making. India’s BrahMos strikes showed tactical prowess but were undermined by structural challenges. Pakistan’s Chinese-origin hardware integrated with Pakistani software enabled superior battlefield agility. In a theater of modern warfare characterized by speed, complexity, and information supremacy, military success depends not just on capabilities but also on unified systems and good joint integration.

Tags: India, India-Pakistan Conflict, Pakistan

About The Author

Tahir Azad
Dr. Tahir Mahmood Azad is currently a research scholar at the Department of Politics & International Relations, the University of Reading, UK. He previously served as an Affiliate Researcher at King’s College London and held fellowships at Sandia National Laboratories (USA), the University of Bristol, the University of Georgia USA, the Graduate Institute Geneva, ISDP Stockholm, and PRIF Germany. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leicester and holds a PhD in Strategic & Nuclear Studies from National Defence University (NDU), Pakistan. Azad also worked as a Research Fellow and Programme Coordinator at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), Pakistan. His research focuses on nuclear politics, missile proliferation, China’s military modernisation, politics & security in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East regions, and South Asian strategic affairs.

16. Syria’s Minority Killings Aren’t Accidents – They’re Strategy

Conclusion:

Western governments and the media should learn to decode these tactics. Focusing only on organizational labels such as militia vs. military, state vs. nonstate actors misses the intentional dynamics at play. States and international actors must hold leaders accountable, especially those who come to power through extremist groups and use severe violence to achieve political goals. Not only to reduce political violence, it can also help increase internal stability and the long-term viability of the regime.

Syria’s Minority Killings Aren’t Accidents – They’re Strategy

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/04/syrias-minority-killings-strategy/

by Ore Koren

09.04.2025 at 06:00am

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham - Getty Images

Introduction

In the aftermath of Bashar al-Assad’s fall in Syria, the U.S. and several European Union countries legitimized Ahmed al-Sharaa. Better known as al-Julani, he is a Sunni Muslim and former Al-Qaeda and ISIS commander leading Syria’s postwar government. At first, Al-Julani appeared able to achieve stability. Foreign governments lifted sanctions, resumed aid, and normalized diplomatic ties. In recent months, al-Julani’s forces have carried out brutal campaigns against Syria’s Alawite and Druze communities. Al-Julani did not target these minorities at random. The real story behind the recent violence against minorities in Syria paints a much more gruesome picture of Al-Julani’s leadership.

Alawites, a minority group that made up roughly 15% of Syria’s population under Assad, shared his ethnic background. As a result, the Alawites had privileged status within Assad’s regime. Like the Alawites, the Druze, an even smaller group concentrated in the south, resisted al-Julani’s military from entering their areas. Community leaders saw securing autonomy as protection from retribution, or more broadly, to avoid living under a rebranded Islamic State.

Plausible-Deniability Strategy

And yet, the violence against minorities in Syria is not a story of sectarian chaos. Rather, it exemplifies plausible-deniability repression – a strategy of state violence that deliberately relies on non-state actors to obscure responsibility. Governments use militias and auxiliaries—armed groups with minimal or officially unacknowledged ties to the state—to deny responsibility for violence, since observers cannot directly trace these groups back to the regime. Although presumed to be unaffiliated with the state, these organizations often maintain informal or semi-official ties and sometimes operate under little more than shifting bureaucratic labels.

Governments use militias and auxiliaries—armed groups with minimal or officially unacknowledged ties to the state—to deny responsibility for violence, since observers cannot directly trace these groups back to the regime.

When militias or “local groups” commit atrocities, this allows regimes to deflect blame or attribution. Later, formal government forces – sometimes even the same troops wearing formal uniforms – return, heralded as restoring order. International observers adhere to the apparent separation between state and nonstate actors, hesitating to act, while media coverage softens. The regime ends up facing few consequences.

This kind of repression, which centers on militias and officially unaffiliated auxiliaries, is how the al-Julani regime “eats its cake and has it too”; it gets the benefits of violent repression while shielding itself from the political costs. The new Syrian president is no stranger to weaponizing nonstate violence against civilian populations to cement power – this was a standard ISIS strategy in its attacks on Christians and Yazidis in Syria and Iraq. Similarly, in al-Suwayda, Syria, the regime relied on Sunni groups, including former Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham jihadists and local Bedouin auxiliaries, who provided a local edge in Druze areas due to their familiarity with the terrain and population.

In Alawite coastal areas, villages and towns were violently attacked and terrorized by militants prominently wearing the black patches of the Islamic State, only to see some of those same men return in Syrian military fatigues days later. From the outside, it all appears fragmented: irregular forces here, formal troops there, vigilante justice in between.

Narratives that Obscure Accountability

The fragmented security environment creates confusion, which is exactly the point. In the case of the Druze, international attention was briefly focused due to Israeli intervention, which helped blunt the scope of violence. Even then, many headlines originally toned down the repression aspect. A recent article in The New York Times (7/19/2025), for instance, framed the violence as “sectarian–tinged clashes,” downplaying the extreme violence leveled against the Druze (including beheading, mass executions, burnings) or its scope. Similarly, a formal statement by U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and regional envoy Tom Barrack placed the responsibility on “warring factions on the ground,” which he said “undermine the government’s authority,” rather than holding the government itself accountable.

Shifting narratives in the U.S. and in many EU countries – which increasingly seek to recast even violent terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah in a more favorable light – have created space for ISIS-linked figures to be reframed positively.

It is important to acknowledge that violence in Syria has not flowed in only one direction. Alawite factions in the coastal regions have launched attacks against al-Julani’s forces, including a high-profile declaration of open rebellion. In southern Syria, Druze leaders warned that attempts to forcibly reincorporate their communities would be treated as declarations of war. Some Druze groups have also carried out attacks against Bedouin communities.

These developments don’t undermine the logic of plausible-deniability repression; rather, they confirm it. Al-Julani’s deliberate targeting of thousands of minority civilians, not just combatants, reveals these attacks were not about restoring order but sending a political message. In that context, using militias and auxiliaries is not incidental – it is the strategy’s core feature.

In my own work on political violence, I have shown how regimes deliberately deploy semi-official or informal organizations to blur the lines between these groups and the formal security apparatus and shield themselves from accountability. For example, Iran’s use of the Basaij militia to repress the 2009 and 2022 protests, or in enforcing sharia law. In Iraq, the “Sons of Iraq” militia was implicated in numerous civilian deaths. Additionally, in Hong Kong, “thugs for hire” were used by the authorities to intimidate protestors and mask regime accountability. Like similar cases, Syria is no anomaly but a textbook example of regimes minimizing international costs while violently suppressing dissent.

Shifting narratives in the U.S. and in many EU countries – which increasingly seek to recast even violent terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah in a more favorable light – have created space for ISIS-linked figures to be reframed positively. This development has potential implications for both emerging and established regimes across the Middle East and Central Asia. Al-Julani is a clear example of this trend.

Conclusion

Western governments and the media should learn to decode these tactics. Focusing only on organizational labels such as militia vs. military, state vs. nonstate actors misses the intentional dynamics at play. States and international actors must hold leaders accountable, especially those who come to power through extremist groups and use severe violence to achieve political goals. Not only to reduce political violence, it can also help increase internal stability and the long-term viability of the regime.

Tags: al-Julani, Alawites, Druze, irregular forces, ISIS, Middle East, Militias, nonstate actors, plausible deniability, political violence, State Violence, Syria

About The Author

Ore Koren
Ore Koren is an applied political economist who specializes in political violence, economic development, and civil conflict. His research, which includes numerous peer-reviewed publications, books, and grant-funded projects, explores the incentives that drive armed actors to commit violence and the broader consequences of these behaviors. He has also advised international organizations and U.S. agencies on conflict dynamics and strategic violence.

17. Defending the Army’s Command Assessment Program

I wonder what the cost benefit analysis is for the program? It certainly seems time and resource intensive. Has it resulted in significantly better commanders? (How can we judge that?) Or is the traditional CSL process sufficient?

Defending the Army’s Command Assessment Program

https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/2025/09/04/defending-the-armys-command-assessment-program/

By Katherine Kuzminski

Sep 3, 2025, 08:09 PM

Characterizing the Army's Command Assessment Program as a Biden-era attempt at DEI is counterproductive, the author of this op-ed argues. Here, representatives from military and corporate organizations listen and ask questions during a CAP briefing at Fort Knox, Kentucky, on Oct. 5, 2023. (Eric Pilgrim)

In the U.S. Army, the job of a battalion or brigade commander is to compel a group of human beings to resist their natural urge toward survival and self-preservation in the name of protecting the nation’s security at the precise moment of crisis — to compel their subordinates to lay down their lives for another.

To lead in the pitch of battle, the Army needs commanders who meet the highest standards. The Command Assessment Program (CAP) — developed during the first Trump administration — was always about these standards. First applied to battalion command selection at the O-5 (lieutenant colonel) level through the Battalion Commander Assessment Program (BCAP), CAP expanded to assess and select brigade commanders at the O-6 level (CCAP) and later expanded to the enlisted ranks through the Sergeant Major Assessment Program (SMAP).

The minimum requirements for commanders who excel as individual performers are peak physical fitness, basic branch proficiency and a proven track record of performance at every prior echelon. The Army produces more of these individuals every year than it has command billets to fill. And so, the Army must not only identify those who have a proven track record of individual performance — that’s table stakes — it must also cull and winnow the list of officers with the additional capabilities to lead the soldiers under their charge in the heat of battle.

Army cancels Biden-era promotion program aimed at eliminating biasThe Command Assessment Program previously replaced the Army’s longstanding Centralized Selection Board/List system.By Zita Ballinger Fletcher

To make those tough leadership choices, the Army must identify those individuals with the knowledge, skills, behaviors and other attributes that make them fit for command. It’s simply not enough to be an exceptional individual performer: Commanders (and their sergeants major) need to be a step above in mastering human performance, not only their own, but the hundreds or thousands of soldiers under their command. To be entrusted with command, the Army needs to know more about those being considered. In addition to their PT scores and performance records, how well do these officers and NCOs communicate? What is their level of emotional intelligence? Do they have a stellar reputation among their superiors, but demonstrate untrustworthy behavior among their peers, or kick down on their subordinates? Does this officer or NCO demonstrate leadership in word and deed? Have they mastered their own self-discipline such that they compel those around them to do the same? Would you trust your life to this officer’s ability to lead in combat?

Given those weighty and consequential questions, it is only fitting that the minds behind the development of CAP were themselves the epitome of talent management done right; that is, the placement of the right individuals with the precise combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, experience and other attributes to develop such a program. The concept for CAP — developed during the first Trump administration — benefited from the guidance, input and oversight from the foremost scholar and practitioner on military talent management who wrote the book on Army talent management. Casey Wardynski was appointed by President Donald Trump as the assistant secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, or ASA (M&RA), in the first Trump administration. Trump’s appointment of Wardynski as the ASA (M&RA) — a 30-year Army officer who later went on to run for Congress as a Republican candidate on an America First platform — was an inspired choice. CAP’s genesis relies on his own rigorous body of work.

Perhaps an even more difficult audience to win over, CAP was further embraced by uniformed leadership among those who went on to positions of increasing authority. Writing publicly about the program’s early successes, then-Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James McConville and then-Director of the Army Talent Management Task Force Maj. Gen. J.P. McGee articulated:

“Battalion commanders are arguably the most consequential leaders in the Army. Their experience, placement, and influence give them an out-sized ability to shape the future service of the soldiers they lead. … They will one day lead the Army and make decisions that directly impact American national security.

“No longer will we spend weeks selecting a private for the Ranger Regiment while spending an average of two minutes to select battalion commanders. We can and will do better.”

What makes these observations all the more remarkable is the battle-hardened experience, expertise and career paths of the two men writing the piece. Prior to serving as the Chief of Staff of the Army, McConville had served as the Army’s G-1 — the uniformed counterpart to the ASA (M&RA), responsible for military personnel, directly responsible for delivering the trusted, lethal and ready forces that comprise the most valuable contribution to the nation’s security that the Army has: its people. For his part, McGee — who before his assignment as the director of the Army Talent Management Task Force had commanded in the Army’s most storied units, the 82nd Airborne and the 75th Ranger Regiment — went on to earn his third star and serve as the commanding general of the 101st Airborne. This wasn’t an Army leader with his head in the ivory tower; he was a leader with a deep, battle-tested, visceral knowledge of the demands of command — and what the Army needs of its commanders.

Addressing the administration’s concerns that CAP was intended as an effort at expanding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programming, the administration can look to the program’s own handling of a high-level case to see that DEI is not the program’s focus. There was one notable attempt by a four-star general to inappropriately influence a subordinate’s command assessment board based on the candidate’s race and gender. And what that experience demonstrated was that CAP functioned as it should have: The general officer was suspended and then fired by President Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth. The colonel in charge of CAP appropriately recorded the series of incidents in a formal memo. The subordinate candidate was removed by the Secretary of the Army command selection list. If anything, the incident provided a public case study of the program’s ability to remain transparent and fair. What’s more, the details of this specific case emphasize the program’s protection from intervention by those in positions of authority based on race or gender. If the program were intended to reinforce efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion, we would have seen a vastly different outcome to the incident.

The administration has every right to change policy as it sees fit. But characterizing the program as a Biden-era, woke attempt at DEI is counterproductive. Some of Trump’s best minds played a critical role in its formation. The program reinforced the core principles the Army is pursuing: lethality and meritocracy. CAP is a tool that could be modified to suit the administration’s priorities, and could in fact be used to reinforce the exact attributes the Pentagon’s senior appointees want from the force, and those who lead it.

Katherine Kuzminski is the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security.

18. Air Force Looks to Cut Squadrons That Advise Foreign Militaries

Will we regret giving up this capability?

Are we giving up a capability to assist friends, partners, and allies to be able to better defend themselves without our direct military support? Are we giving up a capability that might ensure better interoperability between allied and US air power? Are we giving a capability that allows us to know ourselves and our allies better as we both seek to know our enemies? (after all we want to be successful in 100 battles by knowing ourselves (and our allies) and our enemy).

Air Force Looks to Cut Squadrons That Advise Foreign Militaries

airandspaceforces.com · David Roza · September 2, 2025

Sept. 2, 2025 | By Rachel S. Cohen and David Roza

Audio of this article is brought to you by the Air & Space Forces Association, honoring and supporting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Find out more at afa.org

The Air Force plans to shutter several units dedicated to training foreign militaries in a bid to save money amid shifting priorities across the Defense Department.

Proposed cuts identified in the service’s fiscal 2026 budget request would hit seven squadrons and foreign military education programs on multiple continents that have fostered international partnerships for decades.

The plan is part of the Air Force’s response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s February directive to cut 8 percent of the Pentagon’s budget for “nonlethal programs” and instead funnel that money into new weapons programs, Maj. Gen. John Klein, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for operations, told Air & Space Forces Magazine in an Aug. 29 email.

“The USAF made tough choices to eliminate specific units to free resources for critical readiness and modernization investments while balancing strategic objectives and available resources,” Klein said. “We are still committed to engaging with our partner nations to improve airpower capabilities that support [National Defense Strategy] priorities and ensure all of our allies and partners are well integrated.”

Former members of the units, however, warn the closures could be a step backward amid the U.S. military’s wider efforts to strengthen ties with partners and allies as a hedge against growing influence from rivals Russia and China.

“China is just salivating at opportunities like this, as are the Russians,” said Phil Morrison, a retired colonel who commanded air advisors as head of the 621st Air Mobility Advisory Group. “We should be pumping money into this enterprise, not pulling it away.”

Service members with the 571st Mobility Support Advisory Squadron and Comando Aéreo Central (CACEN) spoke about similarities between the two Air Force units during a base tour at CACEN “La Aurora” in Guatemala City, Guatemala, Feb. 20, 2024. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Scott Warner)

Organizations on the chopping block include:

The 571st and 818th Mobility Support Advisory Squadrons at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., respectively. The squadrons’ goal is to strengthen U.S. ties with partners and allies by advising and training their air forces.
The 637th International Support Squadron, which manages English-language training for foreign troops at Joint Base San Antonio, Texas
The Aviation Leadership Program at Columbus Air Force Base, Miss. ALP is an undergraduate pilot training program for foreign students. The program includes English language training and studying U.S. democratic institutions and ideals.
The Inter-European Air Forces Academy at Kapaun Air Station, Germany. IEAFA provides professional military education and technical training courses for more than 300 international officers and non-commissioned officers every year in leadership, aviation safety, and air base defense, among other topics.
The 4th Combat Training Squadron at Einsiedlerhof Air Station, Germany. The 4th CTS provides Joint Terminal Attack Controller training for U.S., allied, and partner troops. JTACs are ground troops trained to call in airstrikes.
U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa’s Combat Training School, also at Einsiedlerhof. The school provides integrated air and missile defense training for partners and allies.

Closing the units would save nearly $8 million by cutting pay for 65 full-time civilian jobs to “meet DOD overall funding reductions,” according to Air Force request documents. Congress would need to sign off on the changes for them to take effect.

Members of the security assistance community who spoke to Air & Space Forces Magazine argue it’s a small price to pay for programs with an outsized benefit to the U.S. military.

“At the end of the day, for me, this is a big force multiplier, and it comes at a pretty low cost,” said a former official with the 637th International Support Squadron, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to speak with the press.

Capt. Toai Dang, from Vietnam Air Defense-Air Force, puts on his helmet while settling into a T-6 Texan II, preparing for his final check ride as part of the Aviation Leadership Program May 29, 2019, at Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi.(U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Christopher Gross)

A spokesperson for the 37th Wing, which oversees the 637th ISS, referred questions about the proposed closure to Headquarters Air Force.

The Air Force is still hashing out the details of how it would wind down each organization. For instance, the 4th CTS and Combat Training School will shut down by the end of 2025, said Lt. Col. Erika Yepsen, a spokesperson for USAFE-AFAFRICA.

Eliminating the units would disperse hundreds of troops to other squadrons across the Air Force. But Klein stressed that the Air Force was not eliminating its operational advising capability overall.

“The Air Staff is analyzing how to get the most of these capabilities in support of current priorities,” said Klein, who previously oversaw the service’s air advisor units as commander of the Air Force Expeditionary Center. For air advisors in particular, he said, “we are shifting from a dedicated model … within the [mobility support advisory squadrons] to one where they use their expertise while embedded in units across the USAF.”

“Our partnerships remain central to operations around the globe, and we will continue to maintain the air advising capability and expertise through this change,” he said.

Tech. Sgt. Haines, 571st Mobility Support Advisory Squadron maintenance air advisor, shows Colombian Air Force maintainers proper maintenance techniques and electrical system familiarization and troubleshooting during a mobile training team mission, Mar. 5, 2020. (Courtesy Photo)

‘Ready-Made Relationships’

For years, top U.S. military officials have lauded international partnerships as a means of covering more territory in the global power competition with China, Russia, and non-state extremist groups. But whether that tradition continues under the Trump administration, which has withdrawn from so-called “soft power” programs abroad as part of its “America First” mission, remains to be seen.

The 571st MSAS focuses on Central and South America, and the 818th on Africa, though both squadrons can be deployed worldwide. China is heavily invested in expanding its influence in those regions; Russia continues to grow its footprint in Africa as well.

Mobility support advisory squadrons send small teams, usually composed of fewer than a dozen Airmen, to train foreign partners in air operations skills from command and control and aircraft maintenance to combat casualty care and cargo operations.

Proponents say that support can improve security in a host nation in ways that ultimately safeguard the U.S. as well. For instance, in Honduras, where much of the landscape is inaccessible by road, effective use of airpower allows local authorities to curb safe havens for drug traffickers.

But the key benefit, air advisors say, is building relationships between the Air Force and foreign partners, which could prove invaluable if the Air Force is ever scrambling to find a friendly airfield overseas, a former MSAS official explained.

“Let’s say something kicked off, and we found ourselves in that region,” said Morrison, who oversaw the mobility support advisory squadrons as a group commander from 2020 to 2022. “We have ready-made relationships, we have air advisors who know the key players there, and we can leverage that to get access to runways, to ramps.

“A small country might not be able to afford C-17s or C-130s,” he added, “but if they have some equipment, some asphalt we can land an airplane on, that goes a long way.”

Air Force Staff Sgt. Messan Atayi, 818th Mobility Support Advisory Squadron air advisor, discusses local acquisition processes and standard practices with logisticians from the Togolese Air Force, April, 2023. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech Sgt. Sandre Lillington)

Retired Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian saw the benefit of MSAS work during his tours commanding U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa and Air Forces Central. Air advisors helped build connections with foreign partners to enable anything from an emergency landing spot to a pit stop for gas.

“Having those relationships grown through the tactical level, where the MSAS is engaging, helps us with access basing and overflight, which is so critically important for us as a nation,” he said.

Air advisors can also act as eyes and ears, as their on-the-ground familiarity with far-flung airfields help U.S. planners build operations.

“In most cases, they’ll be the first to help us understand what type of airframe can go into those locations,” Harrigian said. “They’ll be able to feed that back into the broader Air Mobility Command process: ‘Hey, this is C-130 capable, and oh, by the way, we’re going to need to help them with air traffic control.’ Those can be game-changers for our ability to execute the plan.”

Such expertise is important as the Air Force pursues agile combat employment, a vision of faster, lighter deployments that relies on bare-bones airfields around the world. And it could mean sending fewer American troops into harm’s way when air advisors have already trained local troops to use a Halvorsen Loader for cargo, for example.

In that sense, the squadrons have been the most forward element of the Global Air Mobility Support System—the broad term for the Air Force’s ability to turn almost any airfield in the world into a logistics hub for the rest of the military.

“Logistics wins wars, and logistics requires the GAMSS, or you’re not going to be able to land places,” Morrison said. “Right at the very tip of that spear of GAMSS [are] the air advisors.”

Master Sgt. Matthew Abner, 818th Mobility Support Advisory Squadron, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, conducts training with the Falintil – Forcas de Defesa de Timor-Leste (F-FDTL) air component Airmen on the the inspection process of a R-11 Refueler in Dili, Timor-Leste, June 20, 2023. (Courtesy photo)

Klein emphasized that the air advisor mission will continue as the 160 or so members of the two squadrons bring those skills to other units. Most graduates of the Expeditionary Center’s air advisor school, which trains Airmen from various specialties to train and equip foreign troops on top of their regular job, are already spread across the service rather than falling under an MSAS.

“The capability of our Airmen is not going away, and we will continue leveraging their talent and expertise in the future,” Klein said.

Three other squadrons in the 621st Air Mobility Advisory Group—the 321st and 621st Air Mobility Operations Squadrons and the 621st Mobility Support Operations Squadron—could take on some of the air advising role, Klein added. However, those units don’t specialize in air advising, and Morrison said the MSAS provides the structure and coordination to make the mission successful.

Growing the Global Coalition

While air advisors train troops on their home turf, foreign students head to Texas to study at the U.S. military’s Defense Language Institute English Language Center.

The 637th ISS acts as the center’s operational arm, managing the care and feeding of some 3,000 international students from more than 120 countries who attend the program each year. There, troops learn to speak the complex language of air operations in English over a matter of weeks before moving on to pilot training or other programs at bases across the U.S.

Like the mobility support advisory squadrons, the school bolsters the international coalition of U.S.-aligned air forces so that American troops can better work with foreign partners.

Combatant commanders “want us to be able to talk together, work together, exercise together, fight together, debrief together, learn lessons together,” the former ISS official said. “Unless AI can replace the whole language gap, you’ve got to have people that can talk to each other.”

On that front, the program offers a major advantage over Chinese and Russian efforts to win allies: English is more widely spoken and easier to learn.

“I think English has a long, long head start on them,” the former ISS official said, “but if we start to slow down, then they’ll catch up.”

International Military Students and staff prepare to march at the annual Fiesta Flambeau parade in San Antonio, Texas, April 29, 2023. (U.S. Air Force photo by Agnes Koterba)

The former ISS official also called the school the “engine” of foreign military sales because it gives international troops the language skills they need to operate advanced American weapons. FMS sales totaled $118 billion in fiscal 2024, up 45 percent from the year before.

It’s possible that the 100 or so ISS employees could be rolled into the 332nd Training Squadron, which designs the center’s curriculum, the former official said. Yet changing how the center operates could carry impacts for the English-language training, in turn affecting how quickly foreign students get up to speed on U.S. military equipment and joint air operations.

When it comes to shrinking the program, “I think we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot,” the former official said.

In a similar vein, Harrigian spoke highly of the Inter-European Air Forces Academy and the 4th Combat Training Squadron. Academy graduates often go on to serve at the highest levels of their nation’s militaries, while the 4th CTS helps partners and allies understand how to integrate air and ground operations, which helps their own security enterprise and helps them operate with Americans.

“The return on investment is tremendous,” he said.

‘Budget Dust’

Because the programs are small compared to other Air Force missions and are often misunderstood, they have become an easier target for budget cuts, former officials said.

The 571st and 818th MSAS operate on “budget dust,” Morrison said, estimating it costs about $1 million per year to run each squadron. The former ISS official said that squadron has a similarly negligible price tag, since much of the center’s work is paid for by foreign governments.

The long-term nature of building partnerships, where gains are difficult to quantify and may not be visible until crisis erupts, makes the squadrons low-hanging fruit for leaders looking for short-term savings. Morrison likened the mission to building a cathedral.

“They chip away at something they may never fully see come to fruition during their tenure,” he said. “That day you need that cathedral, it will be because people in the MSAS five, 10, 15 years ago started building it.”

The Air Force isn’t the only military branch looking to shrink its security assistance footprint. Earlier this year, the Army said it planned to shutter two of its six Security Force Assistance Brigades, which were activated in the late 2010s to advise friendly ground forces.

Should these programs be eliminated, the strategic impact may not be apparent for some time.

“It’s not an immediate payback,” the former ISS official said about the school.

Audio of this article is brought to you by the Air & Space Forces Association, honoring and supporting our Airmen, Guardians, and their families. Find out more at afa.org

Air

Personnel

Warfighter Training

airandspaceforces.com · David Roza · September 2, 2025

19. U.S. Army prepares for next-gen tank production

U.S. Army prepares for next-gen tank production

https://defence-blog.com/u-s-army-prepares-for-next-gen-tank-production/

News Army

Colton Jones

Sep 2, 2025

Modified date: Sep 2, 2025

File photo of a M1A2 Abrams by Matthew Oldham

The U.S. Army has moved a step closer to fielding its next-generation main battle tank, the Abrams M1E3, by issuing a comprehensive market survey to American industry.

The request, released by the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems (PEO GCS) through the federal System for Award Management portal, seeks detailed information on industrial capacity to support mass production of the future Abrams.

According to the notice, Project Manager Abrams is collecting written responses from companies able to demonstrate proven experience in tracked ground combat vehicle manufacturing.

The Army emphasized that the initiative covers not only assembly of legacy components but also the production, procurement, and installation of new technology kits, along with testing and verification of advanced subsystems.

The questionnaire distributed to industry outlines a wide range of technical areas. Respondents are asked to detail their ability to produce line replacement modules, electronic boxes, display assemblies, and power distribution components. They are also expected to describe experience with integrating communications hardware, battle command systems, predictive maintenance technology, and fire control systems, including advanced sights, stabilization, and laser applications.

The Army further requested that companies explain their experience with configuration management, supply chain oversight, and quality testing systems. Respondents must demonstrate the ability to manage engineering change proposals, track vehicle configurations by serial number, and ensure compliance with Department of Defense standards.

PEO GCS also placed emphasis on facility readiness. Companies are being asked to outline their manufacturing infrastructure, equipment, and tools for building heavy tracked vehicles. This includes powertrain testing labs, armor fabrication capabilities, painting and storage facilities, and logistics for shipping completed vehicles. In addition, potential producers must describe how they would adapt existing production lines or construct new facilities for the Abrams M1E3 program.

The survey questions extend to workforce skill sets, security clearances, and handling of classified materials, reflecting the sensitive nature of the program. Companies must identify whether they possess facility clearance levels adequate to manage classified and Special Access Program data.

Responses are due by September 2, 2025, with the Army Contracting Command at Detroit Arsenal overseeing the process. While the survey does not constitute a contract award, it represents the Army’s first major step toward building industrial capacity for the Abrams M1E3.

The Abrams M1E3 program is intended to modernize America’s heavy armor fleet with upgraded protection, mobility, and digital systems, while streamlining logistics and reducing sustainment costs. The Army has described the tank as a balance between combat power and long-term survivability, integrating new technologies into a platform designed to remain viable in contested environments.

With the United States preparing for potential large-scale conflicts against near-peer adversaries, ensuring robust domestic manufacturing for armored vehicles is a central priority.

By outlining requirements for fire control, predictive maintenance, active protection systems, and advanced digital integration, the Army is signaling its expectation that the Abrams M1E3 will not only inherit the legacy of the M1 Abrams but also adapt to modern battlefield demands.

20. Reprioritize SWO Tactical Qualifications for the High-End Fight

I love having SWOs in our JOC. They were always excellent at managing complex and diverse operations on land, sea or air operations.

Reprioritize SWO Tactical Qualifications for the High-End Fight

cimsec.org · Guest Author

By Seth Breen

As the U.S. Navy pivots toward preparing for high-end maritime conflict, the SWO community must ask itself a difficult question – Are we allocating our limited time to develop the warfighters we need, or are we clinging to legacy requirements that no longer align with the modern threat environment?

Train for the Fight, Not Just the Float

Currently, officers pursuing command at sea are required to be qualified as both Tactical Action Officer (TAO) and Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW). In the latest SWO Manual (SWOMAN) COMNAVSURFORINST 1412.7B, both are essential for future commanding officers, but this dual requirement deserves critical reexamination in light of today’s warfighting priorities. While being familiar with the engineering plant of the ship is essential, the EOOW qualification not only consumes a significant amount of time and bandwidth during the formative years of a SWO’s career, that time could be better spent developing tactical competencies that directly affect combat effectiveness, such as Surface Warfare Coordinator (SUWC) or Anti-Air Warfare Coordinator (AAWC) qualifications.

For EOOW, the rationale is clear: an officer in command should understand the propulsion plant and engineering systems that keep the ship functioning and maneuverable. As a wise TOPSNIPE once told me when I was ELECTRO, “without engineering, a ship is just a well-armed barge,” and I agree entirely. In theory, EOOW promotes holistic leadership, reinforcing the notion that SWOs should be capable of leading in both engineering and warfighting domains, reinforcing the perception of SWOs as “a jack of all trades.” But as the threat of China looms and the Navy continues to fight in real-world combat operations, such as in the Red Sea, is a jack of all trades what we really need when a TAO, often a LT or LCDR, is the only thing standing between the Fire Inhibit Switch rolling green and a salvo of incoming anti-ship missiles?

EOOW demands intensive amounts of preparation, studying, and a significant number of watches under instruction (U/I) if a SWO is to properly deal with everyday operations and any equipment casualties by knowing the engineering operational casualty controls (EOCC). Yet this qualification is one that most SWOs will likely never stand as department heads in the future, even after they are qualified, except for the 30-day requirement outlined in the SWOMAN. Depending on the ship’s operational schedule and an officer’s timeline, EOOW is typically earned at the expense of a warfare coordinator watch. Officers who excel tactically but have not spent hours in CCS may find themselves disadvantaged in milestone screenings, despite being better prepared for the future fight.

This structure sends the wrong message that time spent tracing lube oil paths is as valued as managing an integrated air defense picture. Every hour spent qualifying for EOOW is an hour not spent studying tactics and rehearsing CIC scenarios. I found myself in a similar situation. As an FCO, despite qualifying as AAWC and Force AAWC, and being on track to qualify for TAO, I had to shift my focus and prioritize EOOW over TAO because it was required for future progression.

Tactical Proficiency: The Real Development Gap

The SWO pipeline offers multiple paths for junior officers to take between their first and second tours. This presents a tactical gap that exists between junior officers as they arrive at Surface Warfare Schools Command (SWSC) for department head school. Those who qualify for a coordinator watch during their divo tours have a major advantage in the future over those who do not. Getting that tactical experience early builds a foundational understanding of warfighting early in an officer’s career. These tactical watches train junior officers to interpret sensor data, build air and surface pictures, manage killchains, and coordinate fires—skills that directly translate to TAO and future command responsibilities. The department head TAO pipeline is only growing more complex and demanding as direct feedback from the fleet is received and lessons learned from current combat operations are applied. This evolving curriculum tests students’ understanding and application of the tactics they have learned. Officers with these tactical backgrounds arrive more confident, capable, and better prepared for the TAO curriculum, as the foundation has already been laid.

The SWO community has a solid groundwork for a better approach. To better align the qualification system with operational imperatives, the Navy should decouple the EOOW qualification from the command qualification. Instead, commands should ensure that the SWO-Engineering PQS is a robust qualification that provides SWOs with a strong familiarity with the engineering plant, but not to the level of a qualified senior enlisted EOOW. Instead, we should incentivize early qualifications in tactical watchstations, such as surface or air, during division officer tours. Unless the junior officer wants to be a Battle CHENG in the future, EOOW should not be a requirement. This reform would not compromise readiness, it would enhance it by placing more weight on tactical skill. Officers would still understand the fundamentals of shipboard engineering, but without the time-intensive watchstanding, they would then be able to devote more focus toward gaining deeper tactical insight and readiness for warfare.

When crisis escalates into conflict, can the Navy afford to wait months for department heads to complete lengthy pipelines? They spend six months at SWSC, followed by two to four months learning either AEGIS or SSDS. It could take longer than six months for one department head to arrive on a ship. If they had more tactical experience early in their careers, this would provide more flexibility for senior leadership to buy back risk if a decision needs to be made to truncate some of the DH pipeline during a time of war and surge the fleet. If they have previously qualified on a specific AEGIS baseline, a two or three-week refresher rather than the whole course could accelerate the process of getting warfighters to the fleet faster.

Conclusion

The SWO community has made significant strides in recent years, reforming shiphandling and training, and introducing milestone assessments. However, to truly dominate the high-end fight, we must continue to evolve. That means investing our time, energy, and talent into the watches that matter most – those that prepare our officers not just to lead, but to win at fighting. It is time to prioritize tactical readiness over traditionally engineering-heavy requirements. Let us develop SWOs who are more than shipboard generalists. Let us build lethal warfighters.

Lieutenant Seth C. Breen is currently an Integrated Air and Missile Defense Warfare Tactics Instructor at Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in Criminology and enlisted in the Navy in 2013 as a Cryptologic Technician. He subsequently commissioned as an officer in 2017. LT Breen served aboard USS Monterey (CG-61) from 2017 to 2021. He held successive billets as Electrical Officer and Fire Control Officer, completing two deployments to FIFTH and SIXTH Fleets. During these tours, Monterey executed Tomahawk strike operations into Syria, served as Air and Missile Defense Commander and Ballistic Missile Defense Commander with the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, and conducted operations in the Black Sea in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Ashore, LT Breen has served as an exchange officer with the Royal Navy, teaching Air Warfare Tactics to RN Warfare Officers at HMS Collingwood. While ashore, he earned a Master of Arts in International Relations and Global Security from American Military University.

Featured Image: GULF OF ALASKA (Aug. 23, 2025) Lt. Alex Celestin, from Randolph, Mass., works on a terminal in the combat information center (CIC) aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121) during exercise Northern Edge 2025 (NE25). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christian Kibler)

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21. Weaning the U.S. Military Off a Tablet Supply Chain That Leads to China

Excerpts:

Tablets used by the military are assembled with displays, microelectronics and circuit boards that trace back to companies under China’s control, with some flagged by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2021 for ties to the Chinese military.

Although these systems are heavily vetted by U.S. agencies that provide authority to operate after rigorous review, no level of screening can mitigate the risks that come with relying on hardware that’s controlled by an adversary.

China could easily manipulate the supply chain, shutting off access to tablets and their components partially or completely or compromising their security and integrity through the inclusion of unauthorized or malicious capabilities.

The issue affects more than military platforms. Tablets are also used in critical infrastructure, such as banking, medical systems, utilities and transportation systems. These industries face the same vulnerabilities associated with China’s domination.

Weaning the U.S. Military Off a Tablet Supply Chain That Leads to China

https://defenseopinion.com/weaning-the-u-s-military-off-a-tablet-supply-chain-that-leads-to-china/1014/

Published September 2, 2025
@ 7:00 am

By Jim Will

Tablet computers are essential to how our military fights, moves and sustains, but these devices are built on a fragile global supply chain with strong ties to China. Building domestic manufacturing to eliminate this vulnerability is feasible if we tap into the information and capabilities that already exist and create strong demand for tablets produced by trusted and assured sources.

During recent discussions at the Department of Defense, officials indicated that current tablet demand is in the tens of thousands, with significant expansion planned over the next five years. This reflects a broader trend in mission-critical operations, where commercial tablets are increasingly used for aircraft avionics interfaces, logistics and command-and-control functions.

Tablets used by the military are assembled with displays, microelectronics and circuit boards that trace back to companies under China’s control, with some flagged by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2021 for ties to the Chinese military.

Although these systems are heavily vetted by U.S. agencies that provide authority to operate after rigorous review, no level of screening can mitigate the risks that come with relying on hardware that’s controlled by an adversary.

China could easily manipulate the supply chain, shutting off access to tablets and their components partially or completely or compromising their security and integrity through the inclusion of unauthorized or malicious capabilities.

The issue affects more than military platforms. Tablets are also used in critical infrastructure, such as banking, medical systems, utilities and transportation systems. These industries face the same vulnerabilities associated with China’s domination.

To fully eliminate the risk, the U.S. must create a strong and assured domestic supply chain for tablet production.

How to build a safer supply chain

We already have the data. Publicly available reports from firms like TechInsights and iFixit detail the bill of materials for nearly every commercial tablet on the market. These identify processors, memory, display drivers, analog integrated circuits, sensors and printed circuit boards (PCBs), complete with manufacturing sources and technology nodes.

A task force of industry experts can map this data into actionable categories. Whether it’s ultra high-density interconnect (UHDI) PCBs, display drivers or system-on-chip (SoC) processors, each category can be paired with domestic or allied sources.

Intel, GlobalFoundries, Micron, Texas Instruments, SkyWater, Onsemi, Qorvo, Wolfspeed and many others already provide much of the foundry technologies. Design and turnkey service providers, such as Trusted Semiconductor Solutions and Phoenix Semiconductor, form vital links in the supply chain from design to qualified component.

Packaging and assembly providers like Micross and Integra Technologies, VSLIP Technologies, Amkor (U.S. operations) and Texas Instruments (internal and partner capabilities) add further support. Large and small electronics manufacturing services companies that include Valtronic, Zentech Manufacturing, Jabil, Sanmina, Benchmark and Plexus offer trusted U.S.-based system integration and production capacity.

Build and demonstrate the full chain

As part of this process, the U.S. will need to build and fund demonstrators that prove domestic production can meet both performance and reliability requirements. These demonstrators should address the full chain, from assured semiconductors and packaged components to final assembly.

For example, a focused effort with Intel to deliver a demonstrator application processor for a domestically sourced tablet could help validate and de-risk the company’s commercial pathways, while serving as a strategic investment to help stabilize this pillar of our national semiconductor capacity. We also should engage domestic PCB suppliers like Calumet, Greensource and TTM. These companies are currently standing up advanced capabilities that include UHDI, ensuring they can demonstrate production readiness and rapidly scale output to meet demand.

Identifying and funding these demonstrators will help quickly shift from risk awareness to readiness.

Scale with increased demand

To spur companies into tablet production, the U.S. must ensure strong demand for domestically produced products. This is also key to avoid repeating past attempts that couldn’t compete globally.

If the DoD buys 500,000 tablets, that’s a start. Layering on demand from critical infrastructure, federal agencies, first responders and state governments could drive volumes into the millions. That’s enough to make domestic sourcing commercially viable if there’s a mandate to buy from trusted and assured sources. Our allies have the same needs, which would add even greater volume to the demand.

With proper incentives and standards, we can expand this base to serve the entire economy, delivering security, reliability and resilience at scale.

We should stop rewarding the lowest-cost bidder whenever it comes at the expense of national security. Buyer-directed assurance requirements tied to trusted standards will realign incentives and bring accountability back to procurement.

Some globally recognized standards for electronic manufacturing already exist. For example, IPC-1782, IPC-1791 and IPC 1792 together provide frameworks for traceability, supply chain management, cybersecurity and secure manufacturing practices. These can be adapted and embedded into DoD acquisition and applied consistently across services and suppliers.

Building an end-to-end domestic supply chain for tablet production eliminates the vulnerabilities and risks of relying on China for these mission-critical devices. This initiative could also serve as a blueprint for onshoring manufacturing for other products critical to defense and infrastructure. For example, applying similar approaches to the more than 6,500 Chinese-origin components found in the Ford-class aircraft carrier could significantly de-risk one of the U.S. military’s most important weapon platforms.

We know the risks. Let’s start building the solution.

Tags: china, Defense Industrial Base, microelectronics, semiconductors, Supply Chain, U.S. military

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Jim Will

With over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor and microelectronics industry, Jim Will is executive director of the U.S. Partnership for Assured Electronics. He has held leadership roles across defense and commercial industry, focused on supply chain and assured microelectronics.

22. The Dialectic of Deception: John Boyd and the Cognitive Battlefield

I am saving this quote in the first line of this excerpt.

Of course the sarcastic synthesis (from the thesis and antithesis) is what we must maintain rigid flexibility.

Excerpts:

Democracies can export adaptability. Authoritarians can only export rigidity.

Skeptics will ask whether bureaucracies can ever embody Boyd’s ethos, or whether concepts built for fighter pilots can really scale to societies. These are fair questions. But the contest is not about perfection. It is about orientation under pressure and adaptability at all levels.

The future will not be won by the side with the most data or the fastest AI. It will be won by the side whose people and institutions can best execute the timeless human cycle of adaptation. Winning the war within our own minds is the prerequisite for winning the wars of the future.

The Dialectic of Deception: John Boyd and the Cognitive Battlefield

J. William DeMarco

September 4, 2025

warontherocks.com · September 4, 2025

Imagine an AI system analyzing the social media history of a deployed soldier and his spouse. Within seconds, it identifies a vulnerability to jealousy and violence. At negligible cost, it generates a deepfake video of marital infidelity and delivers it to the soldier’s device. An hour later, the soldier — an experienced warfighter — is psychologically neutralized, driven to a catastrophic personal act. This chilling scenario captures the 21st century’s newest battlefield: the human mind.

BECOME A MEMBER

What NATO calls “cognitive warfare” is not simply information operations rebranded. It transcends land, sea, air, space, and even cyberspace. Its purpose is not to control what people know, but to shape how they know it, altering the orientation process that underpins judgment and action. Russia and China treat this as a primary instrument of power: a way to fragment societies and achieve strategic effects below the threshold of armed conflict. The center of gravity is no longer fleets or factories but the shared grasp of reality itself.

The key to navigating this battlespace lies in the work of U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd. Known as “40 Second Boyd” for his prowess in the cockpit, he was more profoundly a strategist of adaptation. His 1976 essay “Destruction and Creation” explained how humans adjust their mental models to a changing world. What Boyd framed as the engine of survival, adversaries today have learned to weaponize against their targets.

Boyd argued that survival depends on a relentless cycle: destroy outdated mental models and create new ones that better fit reality. He called the first step destructive deduction — breaking apart frameworks when they no longer match the facts. The second step was creative induction — assembling new connections, often from unrelated domains, into a more coherent picture. His famous thought experiment showed how pieces from a boat, a skier, a tank, and a bicycle could be recombined into a snowmobile. Adaptation, in Boyd’s view, was the decisive act of creation.

This dialectic powers his better-known OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Most focus on speed, but Boyd’s real insight was the centrality of orientation. Those who can dismantle outdated assumptions and synthesize new ones under pressure gain the advantage. Those who cannot fall into confusion, disorder, and paralysis.

To underscore the point, Boyd gestured to Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Each revealed limits on knowledge: No system can prove itself fully consistent, no observation is perfectly precise, and all closed systems drift toward disorder. The implication is clear. Any person, institution, or state that seals itself inside rigid doctrines will eventually misalign with reality. Only open systems — capable of destruction and creation — can endure.

Boyd’s focus on orientation as the essence of adaptation resonates with older traditions that grappled with collective cognition. Philosophers and scientists have long suggested that societies operate within a larger ecology of thought. Teilhard de Chardin described the Noosphere as a global “thinking layer” that emerges beyond the biosphere and geosphere, a shared cognitive environment vulnerable to disruption as much as any physical terrain. Cybernetic traditions, from Norbert Wiener’s theory of feedback loops to Chile’s Project Cybersyn, likewise wrestled with how control, adaptation, and learning could scale across complex systems. Boyd did not explicitly draw from these schools — although he did cite Malz’s Psycho-Cybernetics and Spencer-Brown — but the convergence is striking. His model of destruction and creation at the level of individual orientation mirrors the same dynamics of feedback, adaptation, and vulnerability visible in whole societies.

Adversaries have drawn the opposite lesson. Instead of cultivating their own agility, they aim to paralyze ours. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine and the West illustrates the method. Long before the 2014 annexation of Crimea or the 2022 invasion, Moscow seeded separatist narratives in eastern and southern Ukraine, cultivating vulnerabilities that could later be exploited. Since then, Russia has combined overt lies (the Bucha massacre dismissed as a “stage performance”), false framing (Ukraine blamed for the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction), and menacing actions (nuclear blackmail, missile strikes) to generate conceptual chaos. The aim is not persuasion but disorientation — preventing any stable understanding of events.

This approach is rooted in the Soviet concept of reflexive control: feed premises to an adversary so they make choices favorable to the attacker. But today it is supercharged by technology. Attention-based algorithms on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram deliver content not by credibility but by emotional impact. Shocking or divisive material is propelled to the most vulnerable audiences, bypassing traditional filters of trust and reputation.

Into this system adversaries can inject deepfakes and AI-generated content. Their true value is not in a single deception but in corroding the very idea of truth. If anything can be faked, then anything inconvenient can be dismissed as fake. This “liar’s dividend” breeds cynical exhaustion. People stop trying to discern reality at all.

The flood of disinformation ensures that no creative induction can occur. Societies fracture into tribes, each clinging to its own internally consistent but externally false reality. The adversary wins not by imposing one story but by destroying the possibility of shared orientation.

If destruction can be weaponized to paralyze orientation, resilience lies in mastering creation. Traditional defenses — fact-checking, debunking — are necessary but insufficient. They fight at the level of observation while the attack is aimed at orientation. Real defense requires the capacity to dismantle hostile narratives and synthesize stronger, reality-based ones faster than the adversary can generate chaos. That means agility at three levels: individual, institutional, and national.

At the individual level, the front line is the human mind. Education and training should go beyond information delivery to develop metacognition — thinking about thinking. Military members, analysts, and citizens need tools to recognize cognitive biases, regulate emotional triggers, and withstand manipulation. “Cognitive inoculation,” where people are exposed to weakened forms of manipulation in controlled settings, has proven effective. Games like Bad News teach disinformation tactics by making players use them. The goal is a cognitive warfighter able to run their own cycle of destruction and creation under pressure.

Bureaucracies pose the greatest risk. Their slow decision cycles and resistance to challenge make them vulnerable to disruption. Boyd argued for “Organic Design for Command and Control” — systems built on trust, shared purpose, and decentralized initiative. But here the obvious objection arises: can rigid bureaucracies really move with Boyd’s agility? The answer is no — not fully. Yet even incremental reforms that reward curiosity, encourage dissent, and build rapid feedback loops make institutions far harder to paralyze. They do not need to be perfectly Boydian. Rather, they only need to adapt faster than adversaries can fracture them.

At the national scale, the idea of applying concepts built for fighter pilots may seem strained. Can orientation theory really guide entire societies? The analogy is imperfect: Democracies cannot act with the speed of a pilot or the centralization of an authoritarian state. Yet the logic of openness still applies — closed systems collapse. Resilience at the national level requires seizing the cognitive initiative, moving beyond reactive “strategic communications” to shaping the environment itself. The foundation is a compelling, inclusive narrative that provides coherence and shared purpose. Democracies, often derided as chaotic, hold the advantage here: Their openness allows constant correction, while authoritarian regimes — closed by design — must rigidly enforce brittle state narratives. Boyd’s logic suggests such regimes are doomed to misalignment; their need to project cognitive warfare outward reveals an inability to adapt within.

Democracies can export adaptability. Authoritarians can only export rigidity.

Skeptics will ask whether bureaucracies can ever embody Boyd’s ethos, or whether concepts built for fighter pilots can really scale to societies. These are fair questions. But the contest is not about perfection. It is about orientation under pressure and adaptability at all levels.

The future will not be won by the side with the most data or the fastest AI. It will be won by the side whose people and institutions can best execute the timeless human cycle of adaptation. Winning the war within our own minds is the prerequisite for winning the wars of the future.

BECOME A MEMBER

J. William “BILL” DeMarco, D.Prof is the director of innovation and analysis Air University where he is also an assistant professor. He is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with five command tours spanning mobility, refueling, and joint operations. A former Hoover fellow at Stanford and research fellow at Cambridge University, he focuses on operational design, intrapreneurship, and leadership innovation in complex military systems. The views in this article are those of the author and not those of Air University, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

warontherocks.com · September 4, 2025

23. Russia Is Quietly Building a New Arctic Military Base—on American Land

Another interesting fact I did not know.

Russia Is Quietly Building a New Arctic Military Base—on American Land

The National Interest · Brandon J. Weichert · September 3, 2025

Topic: Security

Blog Brand: The Buzz

Region: Eurasia

September 3, 2025

For more than 100 years, Russia has illegally occupied Wrangel Island, an American-claimed island in the Arctic—and has now fortified it with a military base.

Wrangel Island, a remote Arctic gem in the Chukchi Sea, stands as one of the world’s most pristine natural sanctuaries. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 and a federally protected nature reserve since 1975, this 2,934-square-mile island hosts unparalleled biodiversity, including polar bears, mush oxen, and ancient mammoth remains. Yet beneath its icy façade lies a contentious military outpost: the Ushakovskoye facility. This Russian military installation, featuring the advanced Sopka-2 radar and support infrastructure, not only violates the island’s protected status, but also occupies what is historically American territory that has been illegally annexed by Russia.

As Russia’s militarization of the Arctic region intensifies, Ushakovskoye base poses severe environmental and geopolitical threats, a mere 300 miles west of Alaska.

The Wrangel Island Dispute

Wrangel Island’s sovereignty dispute traces back to the 19th century, rooted in exploration and imperial ambitions. Discovered by a Russian naval officer named Ferdinand von Wrangel in 1823, the island saw no permanent settlement until American interests emerged. In 1881, the United States formally claimed Wrangel Island under the Guano Islands Act, asserting it as US territory due to its strategic Arctic position and potential resources. America’s claim on the island was bolstered by American expeditions to the island, including Vihjalmur Stefansson’s 1921 venture, which established a provisional government and raised the US flag.

Russia’s claims to the island came later. In 1916, Tsar Nicholas II issued an imperial proclamation of sovereignty over the island, but the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war distracted the Kremlin from the issue for nearly a decade. In 1924, however, Soviet forces illegally seized the island, expelling American and British settlers in a brazen act of aggression. Since then, in spite of occasional protests from Washington, Russia has kept the island, gradually building up facilities such as Ushakovskoye to strengthen its control.

Legal scholars argue that the US claim remains dormant, and the US State Department declined to press it under the second Bush administration. However, the American claim is valid, unextinguished by time or acquiescence. More importantly, the island’s strategic position only 300 miles away from America’s Alaska frontier, means that Washington should not so easily drop its rightful claim to Wrangel Island.

Why Does Russia Want Wrangel Island?

The fact that Moscow continues behaving aggressively toward Alaska’s airspace—most recently flying nuclear-capable bombers off the coast of Alaska—means that Washington should sooner or later respond with similarly provocative actions.

Even though Russia administers the island as part of Chukotka, the lack of former US renunciation preserves Washington’s historical claim. Therefore, Russia’s hold on the island constitutes an illegal occupation. Setting aside the strategic value of the island, the region that Wrangel Island is in is rich in untapped oil, natural gas, and sits in the midst of a major shipping route. The United States cannot abandon its claim simply because the Russians have moved forces on the island.

Named after explorer Georgy Ushakov, the Ushakovskoye military facility on Wrangel Island represents the tip of the spear that is Russia’s aggressive Arctic buildup. Established in the 2010s as part of the “Arctic Shield” initiative, this Russian military facility includes an airfield, barracks, fuel depots, and communication centers. Central to the base is the Sopka-2 radar, a state-of-the-art S-band air surveillance system deployed in 2016. That radar features a primary phased-array antenna for three-dimensional tracking of up to 350 kilometers, supplemented by secondary radars for aircraft identification. Housed in a protective dome to withstand temperatures of up to 40 degrees below zero (F) and 89 mile-per-hour winds, Sopka-2 monitors air traffic and detects intruders with high precision. Russian forces tested its capabilities in 2021 exercises, confirming its role in airspace control. Support installations include logistics hubs for sustaining up to 100 personnel, enhancing Russia’s projection of power in the eastern Arctic.

This development contrasts sharply with the island’s pre-2014 status, when it hosted only a small weather station and reindeer herders. Satellite imagery has since revealed expanded runways and storage, turning a nature preserve into a fortified outpost.

Positioned near the Bering Strait, the Sopka-2 radar provides real-time intelligence on US and NATO movements, covering key Alaskan approaches. This enables early warning for missile defenses and potential jamming of GPS signals, heightening escalation risks. As Russia rebuilds 50 Arctic bases, Wrangel serves as an eastern flank outpost, supporting submarines and bombers amid resource rivalries.

Russia Is Destroying the Environment on Wrangel Island

Wrangel Island’s status as a protected nature sanctuary amplifies the outrage over the establishment of the Ushakovskoye military facility. As a UNESCO site, it safeguards high Arctic biodiversity, with over 60 mammal species and migratory bird routes. Military activities, however, introduce pollution from fuel spills, construction debris, and emissions—threatening fragile ecosystems. UNESCO’s 2018 report urged Russia to mitigate impacts from such facilities, yet expansion continues unabated.

Abandoned Soviet era bases already litter the landscape with rusting wreckage, and new installations exacerbate habitat disruption for endangered polar bears and walruses.

America Could Use Wrangel Island

For the US, this illegal Russian presence on American soil threatens national security, as well as a loss of economic opportunity and prestige. It could facilitate hybrid warfare, including cyber intrusions or incursions, in a region vital for future trade via the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Experts warn of miscalculation leading to conflict, especially with NATO’s growing Arctic focus. The facility’s dual-use nature—civilian air control masking military surveillance—blurs lines, inviting tension.

Russia’s Ushakovskoye facility on Wrangel Island starkly illustrates Arctic imperialism: a protected sanctuary despoiled by an illegal military base on disputed American territory. The Sopka-2 radar and its infrastructure not only violate environmental protections but pose direct threats to US interests through surveillance and militarization. As the Arctic thaws, the US must revive its claim to the island—at the very least to use for diplomatic leverage in dealing with Moscow.

About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert

Brandon J. Weichert is a senior national security editor at The National Interest. Recently, Weichert became the host of The National Security Hour on America Outloud News and iHeartRadio, where he discusses national security policy every Wednesday at 8pm Eastern. He is also a contributor at Popular Mechanics and has consulted regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including The Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, The Asia Times, and others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.

Image: Shutterstock / mergus.

The National Interest · Brandon J. Weichert · September 3, 2025

24. America's biggest adversaries "conspire" in Beijing

The CRInK conspires.

What is our next move? Can we reinforce our silk web of friends, partners, and allies?

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

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

Excerpts:

China's leader Xi Jinping hosted Russia's Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-un and dozens of other leaders at the country's biggest-ever military parade on Wednesday morning local time.

The big picture: President Trump in D.C. suggested the trio may be conspiring against the U.S. during the event marking 80 years since Japan's formal surrender that ended World War II.

Sep 3, 2025 -

World

America's biggest adversaries "conspire" in Beijing

https://www.axios.com/2025/09/03/xi-parade-china-putin-kim-conspire?utm

Dave Lawler

Putin, Xi and KIm (L-R) at the parade in Beijing. Photo: Sergey Bobylev/pool via Getty

The tectonic plates of global power are shifting ever faster thanks to President Trump, and images beamed from China around the world this week provide one vision of where they will settle.

The big picture: The leaders of China, Russia and North Korea strode out together overnight in Beijing to attend a massive military parade — and to send a message to Washington.

For the first time ever, these three nuclear-armed strongmen — long resentful of America's alliances, sanctions and "rules-based order" — are gathering together in a show of solidarity.
Trump was watching from afar, and offered a message to Xi Jinping: "Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un as you conspire against the United States of America."

Screengrab via Truth Social

Breaking it down: Dubbed the "Axis of Upheaval," along with Iran, the countries have deepened their cooperation during the war in Ukraine.

North Korea sent troops, Iran provided drones, and China offered an economic and diplomatic lifeline.

Friction point: It's the Russia-China nexus that particularly troubles Trump's advisers.

Some have argued that by courting Putin rather than shunning him, they can perhaps peel Russia away from China. So far, that's wishful thinking.
The giant neighbors have their differences. The vast economic imbalance is uncomfortable for Moscow, while Russia's nuclear saber-rattling and growing influence in North Korea may be unsettling for Beijing.
But for now they have much more pulling them together — not least their shared enmity toward the U.S.

Driving the news: The parade in Beijing on Wednesday morning to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender during World War II was flush with VIPs and military hardware.

"The Chinese nation is never intimidated by any bullies and always forges ahead," Xi declared, before newly revealed weaponry — a novel nuclear ICBM, a laser-powered interceptor, giant underwater drones — rolled through the streets.

Chinese soldiers march during the military parade. Photo: Pedro Pardo:/AFP via Getty Images

Between the lines: While photos of Xi, Putin, Kim and 20-some other leaders assembled in Beijing will make front pages all over the world, another remarkable image from a day earlier will trouble U.S. policymakers just as much.

Facing tariffs and insults from Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi literally held hands with Xi and Putin during an economic summit in Tianjin.

Successive U.S. administrations have based their Indo-Pacific strategies largely on partnering with India in competition with China — a convergence aided by deadly China-India border clashes in Trump's first term.
But Xi is clearly trying to capitalize on this period of mutual hostility between the U.S. and India. It's time, he told Modi, "for the dragon and the elephant to come together."

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left), Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center) speak at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Tianjin, China. Photo: Sergey Bobylev/Kremlin Press via Getty

Reality check: The partnerships on display this week have their limits.

No one in the "axis" lifted a finger when Israel and the U.S. rained bombs down on Iran, for example, and China is providing Russia with oil revenues, but not with arms.
Nor will Trump's insults erase India's concerns about sharing a contested border with a major rival for regional influence.

Zoom out: The Biden administration saw U.S. rivals coalescing and held ever tighter to its allies, which together account for well over half of global GDP.

Trump sees the U.S. as the biggest heavyweight in the ring as countries slug it out on their own.
But his critics fear he's weakening the pro-U.S. coalition just as the anti-U.S. axis grows stronger.
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Go deeper

Rebecca Falconer

Updated Sep 2, 2025 -Politics & Policy

Xi, flanked by Putin and Kim, hosts China's largest-ever military parade

Left to right: Russia's President Vladimir Putin, China's President Xi Jinping and North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un just before the military parade marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3. Photo: Alexander Kazakov/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

China's leader Xi Jinping hosted Russia's Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-un and dozens of other leaders at the country's biggest-ever military parade on Wednesday morning local time.

The big picture: President Trump in D.C. suggested the trio may be conspiring against the U.S. during the event marking 80 years since Japan's formal surrender that ended World War II.

Dave Lawler

Updated Sep 2, 2025 -World

Modi joins hands with Xi and Putin in message to Trump

Facing tariffs and insults from President Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a far friendlier interaction on Monday with his Russian and Chinese counterparts during his first visit to China in seven years.

The big picture: Successive U.S. presidents have aggressively courted India as a counterweight to China. Trump is actively trying to drive a wedge between India and Russia while seeking to gradually peel Russia away from China. So the image of all three leaders literally holding hands is, at the very least, a symbolic blow.

Go deeper (2 min. read)

Zachary Basu

Aug 9, 2025 -Politics & Policy

Trump's China gamble

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

President Trump is abandoning — or actively undermining — core pillars of U.S. strategy toward China in pursuit of a legacy-defining trade deal with Xi Jinping.

Why it matters: With tax cuts extended, tariff rates set and billions of dollars of investment flowing into the U.S., Trump is now fixated on the largest remaining puzzle piece in his economic agenda.

25. While China’s military was on parade in Beijing, its navy patrolled the South China Sea

Nothing to see here. Keep your eyes on our parade.

I recall our visit to the 5th Armored Brigade northwest of Beijing in 2011. The commander told us that the unit is most proud that they have marched in nearly every Military Day Parade since the unit was established in 1963. I wanted to ask what he was doing in June 1989, but I held my tongue.

China's military weapons

China Diplomacy

While China’s military was on parade in Beijing, its navy patrolled the South China Sea

Southern Theatre Command were on high alert ‘to safeguard China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests’

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3324368/while-chinas-military-was-parade-beijing-its-navy-patrolled-south-china-sea?utm

Vanessa Caiin Shanghai

Published: 7:09pm, 4 Sep 2025Updated: 7:21pm, 4 Sep 2025

China’s navy conducted a “routine patrol” in the contested waters of the South China Sea as “deterrence” on the same day it hosted a massive military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of China’s victory over Japan in World War II.

The patrol on Wednesday took place days after Australia and the Philippines concluded Exercise Alon, their largest-ever joint drill which ran from August 15 to 29. A Canadian frigate also took part in the exercise, while several countries, including the United States, sent observers.

“Any attempt to stir up trouble or create tensions in the South China Sea will never succeed”, China’s Southern Theatre Command spokesman Senior Colonel Tian Junli said, according to a statement on Thursday.

He said the theatre forces “remain on high alert at all times, determined to safeguard China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests”.

Chinese fighter jet flies close to Philippine plane over disputed shoal in South China Sea, Manila says

The reiterated pledge came as China capped a busy week of grand diplomacy, including its massive military parade in the heart of the Chinese capital and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin attended by dozens of state leaders and drawing global attention.

The Southern Theatre Command did not reveal how many or what type of vessels were involved in the patrol on Wednesday.

Song Zhongping, a military commentator and former PLA instructor, said the military parade was itself a combat exercise conducted by the People’s Liberation Army and, at the same time, strategic patrols and combat readiness duties were being enhanced in various directions and maritime areas.

“If the Philippines attempts to seize this opportunity to provoke, it will not succeed. Moreover, those external countries that seek to assist the Philippines will inevitably think twice, as the PLA’s parade will undoubtedly serve as a strong deterrent,” Song said on Thursday.

Before the two-day SCO summit that began on Sunday, the PLA deployed naval and air forces to conduct a “combat readiness patrol” in the sea and airspace surrounding the Scarborough Shoal – which China calls Huangyan Island and the Philippines calls Panatag Shoal – according to a statement from the Southern Theatre Command on August 29.

The statement said that from early August, the theatre command had “continuously reinforced patrols and vigilance” in the waters and airspace around the shoal.

Days after Australian troops, pictured, joined the Philippine military for a joint drill, China’s People’s Liberation Army has conducted a drill in the South China Sea. Photo: Facebook/Armed Forces of the Philippines

The Southern Theatre Command said its forces had “further strengthened control, effectively countering violations and provocations, firmly safeguarding national sovereignty and security, and resolutely upholding peace and stability in the South China Sea”.

A day earlier, Beijing had accused the Philippines of “causing trouble” in the South China Sea and suggested that the United States was to blame for fuelling tensions.

Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesman for the Chinese defence ministry, criticised the recent 15-day joint drills by the Philippines and Australia, saying that Manila “has repeatedly courted influence from outside powers”.

Beijing has conducted frequent patrols and combat drills in the South China Sea, and has long criticised US defence activities conducted with its allies in Asia, saying they provoked instability and were fuelling an arms race in the region.

China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea are challenged by a number of neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Brunei.

In recent years, Manila has been the most active in challenging Beijing’s claims, leading to frequent confrontations around disputed features such as Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal.

The Scarborough Shoal is claimed by Beijing and Manila and has been under Beijing’s actual control since 2012.

Second Thomas Shoal is a submerged feature in the Spratly Islands that is within the 200-nautical mile (370km) exclusive economic zone of the Philippines but is also claimed by China.

Vanessa Cai

Vanessa Cai is a reporter for the China desk, based in Shanghai. Previously she worked for Caixin Global in Beijing and Shanghai-based news outlet Sixth Tone.

26. The Sad and Sorry Tale of Cyber Command’s Seven-Year Failure

Excerpts:

In 2017, Cyber Command was advised regarding the consequences of not taking decisive, proactive measures to sustain cyber force generation after the Cyber Mission Force was declared fully operational. This warning was validated relatively early on when it became apparent that Cyber Command did not have a process by which to monitor and assess unit readiness progress and manage risks to mission readiness before units reached the point of failure. By this point, however, the command was not organized for success and could only address isolated causes, lacking the ability to address issues in a comprehensive manner. Due to the command culture and the personnel staffing the command, there was a void of a service-like force generation perspective that would have been necessary to effectively pivot. The underlying frictions involving the services and service cyber components were simply bypassed as irreconcilable limiting factors, which further exacerbated the degradation of force generation effectiveness.

When the debilitated posture of the Department of Defense’s force generation effort became apparent, the cyber service debate was reignited with fervor.

Even if Cyber Command had a viable model to pivot to today, the command would be unable to do so due to the current staff structure, the command culture, gaps in staff expertise, and the organizations that the service cyber components have been allowed to become. There is no existing model that corrects those and other contributing factors.

When the Defense Department elevated Cyber Command to a combatant command with concurrent force generation and force employment responsibilities, it violated the Goldwater-Nichols principle that had been proven effective and still stands to this day. The strength of a service is that it is dedicated to only one military force operation. A cyber service is the only viable course of action to correct and sustain cyber force generation. In addition, this will enable Cyber Command to singularly focus on its critical force employment mission, as it should.

The Sad and Sorry Tale of Cyber Command’s Seven-Year Failure

Aden Magee

September 4, 2025

warontherocks.com · September 4, 2025

What if I told you a major U.S. Department of Defense component assumed responsibility for building a critical warfighting capability negligently disregarded this duty, and ultimately allowed this capability to reach a point of failure? Well, that’s exactly what happened with U.S. Cyber Command.

Leading into 2017, there was an ongoing debate regarding whether the U.S. Department of Defense should establish a cyber service to generate cyber forces or if cyber force generation responsibilities should be formally given to U.S. Cyber Command. Ultimately, that year, Cyber Command was given force generation responsibilities, which are to organize, equip, train, and provide forces for employment in Cyber Command or other combatant command joint force operations. Since being given these responsibilities, which include sustained unit readiness, Cyber Command’s stewardship of the cyber force generation mission has been counterproductive, resulting in a force generation “model” that has devolved to a point where it cannot be fixed.

The Department of Defense cyber force generation effort has failed. The acting Cyber Command commander recently asserted that this could be corrected going forward by emulating the U.S. Special Operations Command force generation model. This contention tacitly acknowledges that the Cyber Command “model” has failed. In addition, the implication that there is a Special Operations Command “model” that Cyber Command can readily ease into is misleading.

Special Operations Command may be considered a “model” for force generation in the sense that it is a combatant command that has effectively executed service-like force generation responsibilities for nearly 40 years, which is a measure of effectiveness that Cyber Command should have aspired to emulate from the beginning. However, the Department of Defense should not allow the illusion of this symbolic “model” to misdirect from the facts. With only one specific exception, the Special Operations Command model would not apply to the nuances of the Cyber Mission Force. In addition, authorizing Cyber Command to adopt a new model would portend that the command would retain its force generation responsibilities, which would extend these authorities and give Cyber Command a “redo” after at least seven years of failure.

The cyber service debate still lives, with a major think tank launching a new commission to establish a cyber service. An examination of the preceding 13-year cyber force generation effort provides the empirical evidence necessary to decisively support the argument for a cyber service.

BECOME A MEMBER

The Genesis of Cyber Command’s Force Generation Responsibilities

There are three military force operations: force generation, force projection, and force employment. Based on the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, the services are responsible for force generation, the combatant commands are responsible for force employment, and force projection is a shared service/combatant command responsibility. Until the establishment of Cyber Command, the only exception to this model was the 1987 establishment of Special Operations Command.

In 2009, Cyber Command was established as a sub-unified command under the U.S. Strategic Command. In 2017, the decision was made to elevate Cyber Command to a combatant command. During that period, there was an active debate over whether the Department of Defense should establish a cyber service or formally designate Cyber Command as the component ultimately responsible for the force generation functions that the services had primarily managed since the force build began in 2012. At the time, Cyber Mission Force units were being effectively built by the services, nominally under Cyber Command’s oversight, and the process appeared to be working. This led to an assumption that after attaining full operational capability for the total force, the process of sustaining the forces would be equally effective. Since giving a combatant command force generation responsibilities was not unprecedented, and it was the path of least resistance relative to establishing a cyber service, the decision was made to give Cyber Command these service-like responsibilities upon elevation. However, there were divergent dynamics that combined to eventually prove this to be the wrong decision.

In 2017, the Department of Defense erroneously conflated the scope of Cyber Command’s 10 U.S. Code § 167b force generation responsibilities with Special Operations Command’s 10 U.S. Code § 167 force generation authorities originally established in 1987. Almost comically, the drafters simply copied whole sections from the Special Operations Command Title 10 responsibilities, many with the only change being to replace the term “special” with the term “cyber.” The cut-and-paste draft version presented to Congress did not reflect the stark differences between the Special Operations Command model, which had matured over a 30-year period, and the unique challenges of generating Cyber Mission Force units relative to special operations forces. Cyber Command was tasked with responsibilities for which it was not postured to execute and should not have been given. This began a period of cyber force decline that was marked by a misunderstanding and neglect of the responsibilities the command had been given.

The decision to give Cyber Command force generation responsibilities was made during the final months of a six-year process wherein the services had a tangible Department of Defense mandate to build a total of 133 Cyber Mission Force units. The services’ efforts to reach full operational capability had high-level Department of Defense interest, and there was a strong sense of urgency to meet the mission and be done with it. Cyber Command Cyber Mission Force units attained full operational capability in May 2018, just months after the command had been formally established as the component responsible for cyber force generation. Coincidentally, Cyber Command was officially elevated to a combatant command that same month. The elevation and declaration of the Cyber Mission Force as at full operational capability marked an inflection point at which Cyber Command miscalculated its lines of effort.

After the services trained individuals and formed them into Cyber Mission Force units, the units were then assigned under the combatant command authority of Cyber Command. After units were assigned to Cyber Command, the command had the force generation responsibility for sustained unit readiness. Although the services remained responsible for providing trained individuals, Cyber Command was responsible for sustained individual and collective readiness. Force generation is a continuous process. However, Cyber Command reacted to the May 2018 full operational capability declaration as though the force generation phase had ended, and the force employment phase had begun. This was the point at which Cyber Command (wrongly) assumed the services and service cyber components would sustain the force as effectively as they had built it, without any overarching guidance or oversight. The command mentality shifted after an extended period of building the force to a point at which the command could then employ this robust cyber capability in global operations. What followed was perhaps the worst-ever case of a Department of Defense component neglecting its military force operation responsibilities.

The Void in Cyber Force Generation Policy and Process Guidance

Department of Defense policy specifies that Cyber Command is a combatant command with unique functions, responsibilities, and authorities similar to a number of authorities exercised by the military departments. Department of Defense policy further specifies that Cyber Command, in coordination with the Military service Chiefs, has the responsibility to organize, train, equip, and provide cyber operations forces. After having been given these responsibilities, it does not appear that the command ever conducted a detailed mission analysis to understand the implications.

The services (and Special Operations Command) have comprehensive policies and processes to guide the generation of forces to meet service-specific force employment requirements. Conversely, Cyber Command never developed a unifying force generation process, nor did it establish a dedicated staff structure to centrally manage what should have been a robust program. A force generation process that is dependent on external partners (such as the services) for support can only be effective if there is Department of Defense-level policy directing the external partners to comply with process requirements. Since there was never a comprehensive process developed for the Department of Defense to promulgate in policy, cyber force generation proceeded without a compass or a hammer.

Although the policy guidance regarding Cyber Command’s responsibilities is clear, a common source of confusion as it applies to cyber force generation responsibilities is the tendency to conflate the services and the service cyber components due to the incestuous relationships they have been allowed to establish over the years (more on that later). Cyber Command has neglected to act as the direct interface with the services on key force generation issues, so it is difficult to distinguish when the service cyber components are performing as Cyber Command components or as co-opted extensions of the services. This leads to a tendency to label a service cyber component’s responsibility as a “service” responsibility, but the service cyber components are under the combatant command authority of Cyber Command, so any service cyber component’s responsibility is a Cyber Command responsibility. Again, articulate policy would have clarified roles and responsibilities.

Rather than taking the necessary measures to meet the responsibilities it was given, Cyber Command focused on its force employment mission and accepted risk in force generation by largely ignoring how the services and service cyber components were developing cyber forces in a very non-standardized and unbalanced manner. This approach was also reflected in the developing command culture.

A Command Culture That is Not Conducive to Force Generation

By the point at which Cyber Command was formally given responsibilities for cyber force generation, a command culture had developed that reflected a bias toward the force employment mission (real-world operations), to the detriment of the force generation mission.

When Cyber Command was established at Fort Meade, Maryland, there was no core cadre of cyberspace operations personnel. Therefore, Cyber Command’s manning was initially made up of signals intelligence and communications personnel, because they were considered to be the most compatible specialties. There was a large pool of military personnel with these specialties at the National Security Agency and the Defense Information Security Agency at Fort Meade who would readily transfer to Cyber Command rather than having to relocate to another posting. While these categories of personnel may have been the most appropriate fits for offensive and defensive cyberspace operations, they are not the types of expertise that a command with force generation responsibilities would rely on most heavily for success in that mission area. Predictably, with little understanding of, or interest in, the methodical grind of force generation, the signals intelligence and communications personnel had a bias toward emergent operations. This dynamic led to a command culture that focused on force employment operations while relegating force generation responsibilities to the Cyber Command service cyber components without unifying processes or four-star level command oversight.

Any Plan to Adopt the Special Operations Command Model is a Red Herring

The notion that Cyber Command could emulate the Special Operations Command model is not grounded in an understanding of the disparate variables that dictate how the two dissimilar models must operate.

The most notable distinction between Cyber Command and the Special Operations Command, as it applies to force generation, is the contrast between the combatant commands’ relationships with the services. The Special Operations Command receives inherently service capabilities (ground, air, naval/marine) presented by the services and further specializes these capabilities through the Special Operations Command service components. These service-centric capabilities are organized, trained, and equipped to form special operations forces-specific capabilities that are integrated and interoperable with other Joint Force Commands. Cyber Command, in contrast, is responsible for generating a modular force that has no service-unique attributes. Cyber Command receives individuals presented by each of the services that do not benefit from (nor require) inherently service characteristics. Service-trained personnel are integrated into organizations having no direct correlation with a service warfighting domain-centric function or traditional force structure. The services do have applicable feeder skill specialties (e.g., intelligence, communications/signal), but the personnel trained to man Cyber Mission Force units are trained in cyber domain skills and not skills that are inherently related to the core service warfighting domains (land, sea, air, space). Objectively, a cyber force team provided by the Army or sustained by the Army service component command will have the same organization and perform the same functions as those provided by the Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps. This distinction demonstrates that the Special Operations Command model and a Cyber Command model could never be interchangeable.

The fundamental strength in the Special Operations Command model that Cyber Command should have emulated from day one is an appreciation for how critical the force generation mission is to the overall success of the Cyber Command mission. The only other applicable imperative in the Special Operations Command model that Cyber Command should have emulated is the rigid bifurcation of force generation and force employment responsibilities. Upon elevation, Cyber Command immediately fell into the very trap that the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act was enacted to prevent. Cyber Command is the only organization that attempts to manage both force generation/sustainment and force employment responsibilities from the same headquarters staff directorates. The dysfunctional organizational approach that Cyber Command adopted was vulnerable to a command culture that prioritized force employment efforts in a manner that accepted risk to force generation. The Cyber Command responsibilities also diverge from those of the Special Operations Command’s in that Cyber Command-generated forces are almost exclusively employed by the command in Cyber Command cyberspace operations, making the dereliction in force generation responsibilities even more confounding. Unlike falsely generalizing how Cyber Command should emulate the Special Operations Command model, the construct of rigidly separating the force generation and force employment missions is the singular variable that Cyber Command should have adopted. Other than that example, the two models would have nothing in common. That stated, the Special Operations Command force generation model does incorporate attributes that mirror those of the services (e.g., enhanced acquisition authorities, advanced education institutions), but these are not unique to the Special Operations Command model and merely reflect the command’s service-like responsibilities, which would have equally applied to an effectively developed Cyber Command model.

The Results of Having No Process, No Policy, No Oversight, and No Culture

In Cyber Command’s defense, the deck was stacked against it from the beginning. However, the command refused to accept advice regarding the implications of the force generation mission that had been dubiously pushed upon it. In retrospect, it is evident that the only prospect for success would have been to immediately establish a process that facilitated the integration of service-provided resources without allowing the services to impose undue influence within the command. Instead, Cyber Command focused on its force employment mission while the service component commands steadily contributed to the devolution of the command in deference to parochial service equities. In contrast to a modular structure, the service cyber components have developed into diverse, service-centric cylinders of excellence, which would now render an effort to deconstruct and establish a standardized force generation process time-, effort-, and cost-prohibitive.

Cyber Command and its subordinate command elements were established to generate forces, to command and control forces, and to execute cyberspace operations as a combatant command or in support of other combatant command operational requirements. Over time, however, the service cyber components have become the services’ “everything cyber” components and have been given either command or control of service-retained organizations to accomplish service-mandated requirements. This presents a convoluted command authority relationship wherein the service cyber components are nominally under Cyber Command combatant command authority, while there are organizations assigned under the operational control of the service cyber components that are categorized as service-retained forces and not considered to be under Cyber Command combatant command authority.

The assignment of service-retained, cyber-related force elements to Cyber Command service cyber components creates a competitive dynamic between the services and Cyber Command and burdens the service cyber components to deconflict or adjudicate competing requirements. An example of the competing requirements is that the services do not have units identical to those in the Cyber Mission Force, but they do have manning requirements that must draw on the same pool of personnel as the Cyber Mission Force. Service feeder specialties that qualify personnel for Cyber Mission Force entry are the personnel needed to man service-retained, cyber-related organizations. Cyber Mission Force-assigned personnel remain under the administrative control of the services and can therefore be reassigned by the services to service-retained units. In a zero-sum game among low-density specialties, the assignment of Cyber Mission Force-qualified personnel to service-retained units directly degrades Cyber Mission Force readiness. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not establish policy to compel the services to support a unified force generation process, and Cyber Command did not demand that such policy be promulgated. Therefore, there was no binding guidance to compel the services to prioritize the sustainment of the Cyber Mission Force above (or even equal to) service priorities.

The most glaring example of the incestuous relationships between the services and the service cyber components occurred during the Cyber Mission Force build, which culminated with “full operational capability” in 2018. To meet milestones leading up to full operational capability, the Army employed a deceptive method of unit personnel strength reporting to make it appear as though they were meeting their objectives. As was discovered years later, the units generated by the Army were declared as fully capable at 67–75 percent manning, which was well short of the required end-strength. It was apparent that the Army Cyber Command had been complicit and reported the vastly exaggerated numbers to Cyber Command, demonstrating that the service cyber component was more loyal to its service headquarters than the command it was a component of.

Another key component of cyber force generation that has devolved beyond Cyber Command’s control is training. Although the Cyber Mission Force was structured to be a modular force, the services have differing names/designations for work roles, and individuals assigned to the Cyber Mission Force to fill these work roles are trained differently. The services train cyber personnel at service-specific training centers; training pipelines differ by service, and misalignments persist. Consequently, service members often arrive at Cyber Command with skill sets that are inconsistent and insufficient to fulfill their basic work roles.

A Cyber Service is the Only Viable Course of Action

In 2017, Cyber Command was advised regarding the consequences of not taking decisive, proactive measures to sustain cyber force generation after the Cyber Mission Force was declared fully operational. This warning was validated relatively early on when it became apparent that Cyber Command did not have a process by which to monitor and assess unit readiness progress and manage risks to mission readiness before units reached the point of failure. By this point, however, the command was not organized for success and could only address isolated causes, lacking the ability to address issues in a comprehensive manner. Due to the command culture and the personnel staffing the command, there was a void of a service-like force generation perspective that would have been necessary to effectively pivot. The underlying frictions involving the services and service cyber components were simply bypassed as irreconcilable limiting factors, which further exacerbated the degradation of force generation effectiveness.

When the debilitated posture of the Department of Defense’s force generation effort became apparent, the cyber service debate was reignited with fervor.

Even if Cyber Command had a viable model to pivot to today, the command would be unable to do so due to the current staff structure, the command culture, gaps in staff expertise, and the organizations that the service cyber components have been allowed to become. There is no existing model that corrects those and other contributing factors.

When the Defense Department elevated Cyber Command to a combatant command with concurrent force generation and force employment responsibilities, it violated the Goldwater-Nichols principle that had been proven effective and still stands to this day. The strength of a service is that it is dedicated to only one military force operation. A cyber service is the only viable course of action to correct and sustain cyber force generation. In addition, this will enable Cyber Command to singularly focus on its critical force employment mission, as it should.

BECOME A MEMBER

Aden Magee has performed as a senior joint operations advisor at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, including the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and multiple combatant commands, including U.S. Cyber Command and U.S. Special Operations Command. He is a retired U.S. Army officer and a veteran of foreign wars. The views in this article are those of the author and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: Skyler Wilson via U.S. Cyber Command

warontherocks.com · September 4, 2025

27.White-Collar Warfighters: Can the US Military Learn from the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ Bold Pitch to Young Professionals?

Excerpts:

Finally, the Department of Defense should market nontraditional career paths more effectively. Career fields like the Army Reserve’s 38G (military government officer) program offer meaningful service opportunities for older candidates and midcareer professionals to serve as subject matter experts advising theater-level commands on stabilization and governance. DoD should advertise these roles as flexible, skill-aligned alternatives to traditional enlistment.

As Ukraine integrates autonomous systems and recruits technical experts to compensate for its manpower limitations, the US military should likewise rethink how it maximizes American human capital for future conflicts. As future conflicts will increasingly reward agility, innovation, and cognitive superiority, the US military must reconsider its recruitment and selection processes. Ukraine’s experience shows that the modern battlefield does not only require warriors, but also technologists and digital practitioners. Building a force that reflects the qualities of modern war is no longer just optimal. It is a matter of strategic survival.

White-Collar Warfighters: Can the US Military Learn from the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces’ Bold Pitch to Young Professionals? - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · Adel S. Hussain · September 3, 2025

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A surge in enlistments earlier this year, has diminished concerns about the recruiting crisis that plagued the US military in recent years. From a raw numbers perspective, this is good news—but numbers are only one part of the military recruitment equation. The other part is a question of whether the talent recruited matches the needs of modern warfare. Future conflicts will be fought not only by warfighters on land, at sea, and in the air, but also in the information environment, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Quite rightly, the US Army has responded by expanding recruiting efforts for cyber, intelligence, and electronic warfare specialties. But the service, and others in the joint force, face challenges—stiff competition from the private sector, for example, as well as a public that is increasingly disconnected from, and consequently less inclined toward, military service. Overcoming those challenges will depend not just on doing a better job recruiting the young men and women who have family that have served—the demographic that provides a disproportionate number of service members—but drawing on an expanded population that includes the skills required by the modern battlefield.

One source of lessons can be found in Ukraine, where a military at war has taken a radically different approach to attracting digital professionals capable of filling specialized military career fields.

Ukraine’s Manpower Challenge

Three and a half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s armed forces continue to struggle with manpower shortfalls along a front line stretching over six hundred miles. Mobilizing military-aged men has become increasingly unpopular, and has yielded diminishing returns. This challenge is epitomized by the ill-fated Anne of Kyiv Brigade, which experienced high desertion rates even after receiving specialized training from the French Army.

In response, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense has introduced shorter enlistment contracts and incentive programs to encourage voluntary service. Yet many Ukrainians remain wary of joining, citing equipment shortages, limited training, and of course, the risk of death or lifechanging injury given the ongoing war’s high casualties. Rising to meet this challenge is the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), Ukraine’s youngest service branch and its most disruptive. With a clear and resonant message—“The most important value is human life”—the USF reimagines military service to appeal to those otherwise disposed against it and seeks talent optimized for the next generation of warfare.

Ukraine Bets on Technological Innovation

At the July 2025 LANDEURO symposium, Major Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, the newly appointed commander of the USF, spoke candidly about the force’s unconventional composition. “Ninety-five percent of [our soldiers] were civilians before the war started. They are businessmen, athletes, lawyers, singers, anyone you can imagine, but not military personnel. Our total strength is just 2 percent of the entire Ukrainian army. Yet we destroy one out of every three enemy personnel and one out of every three enemy targets.”

As Russia continues to exploit its numerical advantage, the USF offers a different approach: leveraging autonomy, precision, and a digitally native workforce to offset manpower disadvantages. Modeled in part after startup technology companies, the USF has attracted not only drone operators and coders, but also entrepreneurs, technologists, and content creators. Major Brovdi emphasized the importance of organizing military units like businesses, namely by encouraging flexibility in organizational culture and awarding authority based on performance over time in service. Within the framework of the Ukrainian military’s NATO standardization, this hybrid military-business model gives Ukrainian commanders a nimble and low-risk, high-reward option to outmaneuver Russian forces.

A Value Proposition for Ukraine’s Digital Generation

Ukraine’s manpower crisis constrained the USF at its inception in 2024. Rather than compete for the coveted 18–24-year-old male demographic, the USF shifted its focus to men aged 25–35 in white-collar professions, a group already targeted for conscription but underrepresented in traditional recruiting campaigns. This demographic brought with it valuable skills: coding, project management, and English fluency. Though historically less inclined to serve, wartime realities and the threat of frontline military service pushed many to seek more technical roles oriented on combat support within the armed forces.

The USF seized this opportunity. Recognizing the need to break from legacy recruiting approaches, its communications team launched a multimedia outreach campaign. In addition to traditional military advertisements, they engaged directly with digital natives via music festivals, podcasts, CrossFit competitions, esports tournaments, and even meme culture. There are also branded t-shirts, energy drinks, and gamified drone footage that showcased USF battlefield successes with a tone and polish that resembled a lifestyle brand mixed with a combat unit.

Notably, the USF recruited Ukrainian comedian and online influencer Andriy Luzan and documented his experiences from civilian to soldier through a four-part YouTube series. Luzan’s unique content creation style mixed with his interviews with his comrades and instructors produced a compelling advertisement for the young branch. The series works as a form of strategic communication in that it entertains, informs, and humanizes military service by showing that Ukraine’s defense is high-tech, inclusive, and achievable even for civilians who do not fit the traditional mold of a soldier.

But behind the marketing was a serious value proposition: a high-impact, lower-risk alternative to infantry service. The USF emphasized quality over quantity and humans over hardware (anyone familiar with US special operations forces’ five guiding truths will recognize this approach). Recruits would be trained as operators tasked with using drones and other types of emerging technology to bridge Ukraine’s manpower gap. In addition to advertising vacancies for first-person-view drone operators, the USF also produces marketing materials that predominately feature combat support roles such as programmers, technicians, and communications officers. This focus on support specialties aligns with the technical skill sets and professional identities of white-collar millennials, offering a way to contribute meaningfully to the war effort without abandoning their careers or incurring the risks associated with frontline service. This reframing addressed core enlistment concerns and positioned the USF as a professional, tech-driven, and mission-oriented community tailored to the risk preferences and professional identities of Ukraine’s skilled civilian workforce.

Lessons for the US Military

Amid a growing civil-military divide and a shrinking pool of physically eligible and willing recruits in the United States, even the recent enlistment surge does not obviate the need to think deeply about how best to bring American men and women into the all-volunteer force. While there are substantial differences between the American and Ukrainian militaries, Ukraine’s recruiting experience offers actionable insights. In a protracted war against a peer adversary the US military is likely to face the same challenges regarding force generation as did Ukraine’s armed forces. Therefore, the US military could benefit from diversifying its talent pool. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Ukraine has had to adapt under fire, but by heeding the lessons of Ukraine’s experience, the United States can ensure that when the next war begins, the military it has is the one it needs. Specifically, the Department of Defense can adapt by embracing several key lessons.

First, it should leverage influencers to bridge the civilian-military culture gap. Informal military influencers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok already shape how Gen Z and millennials perceive military life. Like the USF’s campaign with Andriy Luzan, the US military could stand to benefit from offering incentives to influencers to entice them to join. Similar to how the US Army World Class Athlete Program promotes the US Army at the Olympics, there lies an opportunity to recruit select celebrities to promote the military in television, film, and social media.

Second, the US military should expand direct commissioning for midcareer professionals. Recent efforts by the Army to commission tech executives as reserve field-grade officers should be extended across specialties such as cyberwarfare, space operations, and intelligence. This strategy would not only not only bring critical expertise into the force but also diversify its professional makeup.

Finally, the Department of Defense should market nontraditional career paths more effectively. Career fields like the Army Reserve’s 38G (military government officer) program offer meaningful service opportunities for older candidates and midcareer professionals to serve as subject matter experts advising theater-level commands on stabilization and governance. DoD should advertise these roles as flexible, skill-aligned alternatives to traditional enlistment.

As Ukraine integrates autonomous systems and recruits technical experts to compensate for its manpower limitations, the US military should likewise rethink how it maximizes American human capital for future conflicts. As future conflicts will increasingly reward agility, innovation, and cognitive superiority, the US military must reconsider its recruitment and selection processes. Ukraine’s experience shows that the modern battlefield does not only require warriors, but also technologists and digital practitioners. Building a force that reflects the qualities of modern war is no longer just optimal. It is a matter of strategic survival.

Captain Adel S. Hussain is a psychological operations officer with the United States Army Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs Command. He recently served with the Security Assistance Group–Ukraine as an information operations planner.

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

Image credit: Sergio Hvostini

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mwi.westpoint.edu · Adel S. Hussain · September 3, 2025

28. The Case for a U.S. Alliance With India

But India has always been fiercely independent and has never wanted to ally with anyone.

Is alliance with India any more feasible than an Asian "NATO?"

Excerpts:

As always, there is the practical question of bureaucracy and capacity on both sides. Can they move the machinery of government to build an alliance? Doing so would require leadership from the top of both governments. And it would require a vision that inspires not only their governments but also their private sectors, technology communities, universities, and publics.

It is also worth remembering that many of Washington’s most important alliances have seen setbacks and led to domestic discord. The U.S.-Japanese alliance, for example, had to weather the economic disputes and political pressures of the 1980s and hard questions about the continued necessity of an alliance with Washington in the post–Cold War environment in the 1990s. The NATO alliance has had to contend with persistent questions about burden sharing. The United States and South Korea previously butted heads over how to handle the threat from North Korea, and there have been periodic public upheavals in Korean public opinion over tragic incidents involving American troops stationed on the peninsula. The United States and its allies have gotten through tough moments before, and the United States and India can do so, too.

Whether that will happen with the current occupant of the Oval Office is unpredictable, but the strategic aim should be clear. The realities of the emerging era have elevated the value of new shared security arrangements. And India has emerged as one of the United States’ most consequential partners. The only thing harder than building and formalizing a deeply significant relationship with India is not having one. So, with no illusions, the United States and India should get to work.

The Case for a U.S. Alliance With India

Foreign Affairs · by Kurt M. Campbell · Jake Sullivan September 4, 2025

Washington Should Draw New Delhi Closer, Not Push It Away

September 4, 2025

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a summit in Tianjin, China, September 2025 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chairman and Co-Founder of The Asia Group. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

JAKE SULLIVAN is Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2021 to 2025.

More by Jake Sullivan

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Tariffs, Russian oil purchases, and renewed tensions regarding Pakistan have caused a rapid and regrettable downturn in the U.S.-Indian relationship, replete with public insults and recriminations. As Washington and New Delhi evaluate the state of things, it is prudent to remember why India has emerged over the last generation as one of the United States’ most important global partners. It is also time to consider how to fortify a relationship that has been one of the brightest spots of bipartisan support in a divided Washington where concerted international purpose has been in short supply.

U.S. policymakers have long seen promise in India’s status as the world’s largest democracy as well as opportunity in its economic and technological dynamism and its growing global leadership role. More recently, India’s desire to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific has led to a strategic alignment with the United States that has effectively disincentivized reckless Chinese adventurism.

This common purpose must not be taken for granted. Until this most recent dustup, multiple U.S. presidents have pushed forward specific initiatives to advance the relationship and convert a general sense of promise into something deeper and sustained, including U.S. President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s landmark U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement and U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cooperation in critical fields such as AI, biotechnology, and aerospace.

The relationship, however, has remained vulnerable to misunderstandings, missteps, and missed opportunities because of lingering distrust and misaligned expectations. This is partly because U.S.-Indian ties do not fit neatly into the boxes that the United States has historically used to define its most consequential bilateral relationships. In the Cold War and post–Cold War eras, U.S. foreign policy made a distinction between alliances and partnerships. Alliances involved formal treaty commitments built on the foundation of a mutual defense guarantee. Partnerships were for essentially all other countries that worked with Washington—and India fell into that category.

The end of the post–Cold War era has exposed the shortcomings of this approach, which overemphasized collective self-defense commitments and neglected the deeper economic, technological, and strategic ties that are increasingly salient in modern geopolitics. Indeed, despite fundamental areas of alignment between the two countries, the U.S.-Indian relationship received relatively little attention, because it was not centered on a security guarantee.

The current trajectory risks a split that would be difficult to mend, to the great detriment of both countries. As Modi’s chummy appearance over the weekend with Chinese president Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin made clear, the United States could end up driving India directly into its adversaries’ arms. India, meanwhile, could end up squeezed on all sides with an unaccommodating power in China on its border and strained technology, education, and defense ties with the United States. Given this reality, Washington and New Delhi must strive to do more than simply restore the old, suboptimal status quo. They must create a firmer and more ambitious foundation: a strategic alliance between the United States and India based on a series of mutual commitments regarding technology, defense, supply chains, intelligence, and global problem-solving. An alliance, in other words, not based on a traditional mutual defense pact.

At this moment of unprecedented discord, it may be hard to imagine reinventing and bolstering the relationship. But the United States and India can move forward by using the scaffolding already in place to build a stronger structure. Failing to do so risks squandering a major strategic opportunity and could encourage India to adopt a path less aligned with, or even hostile to, American strategic and economic interests.

PILLARS OF STRENGTH

A new strategic alliance between the United States and India would be established by a treaty subject to advice and consent by the U.S. Senate. It would be built on five core pillars, with the aim of enhancing the mutual security, prosperity, and values of both countries.

First, the countries would agree to a ten-year action plan in the technologies that will define the future: artificial intelligence, semiconductors, biotech, quantum, clean energy, telecommunications, and aerospace. The goal would be to build a common technology ecosystem, linked to other allies, to ensure the United States and fellow democracies do not cede the innovation edge to competitors like China. This would mean working together on both the “promote” agenda of bold public investments, common R&D, and shared talent—as well as the “protect” agenda of aligning export controls and cybersecurity measures. The Trump administration’s U.S.-India TRUST initiative, built on top of the Biden administration’s U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies, should be at the core of this effort, but it could and should evolve from primarily a convening forum to a more formal architecture. By the close of the Biden administration, for instance, early discussions had begun around a formal U.S.-Indian AI agreement, potentially the first of its kind. Such an agreement could anchor R&D partnerships and encourage private-sector investment. This type of agreement, replicated across a range of emerging technologies, should be a cornerstone of a new alliance.

The United States and India should also establish a strategic talent partnership that removes obstacles for their scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and technical experts to work together on priority areas. This would include streamlining visa processes on both sides, creating common pots of funding, and removing outdated export controls that stymie collaboration.

The second pillar would be enhanced economic cooperation, including a bilateral trade pact that reflects the structural realities of the modern global economy while accounting for the political realities in both Washington and New Delhi. The natural first step would be a supply chain and investment agreement that would reduce mutual vulnerabilities to coercion and enhance the two countries’ respective techno-industrial bases. India and the United States have each acknowledged dependencies on China for vital supply chains, and in some instances, those dependencies are interconnected. For example, China supplies India with 70 to 80 percent of its active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Since 40 percent of generic drugs in the United States are manufactured in India, the United States is indirectly exposed to India’s reliance on Chinese APIs. Similarly, both countries rely heavily on China for critical minerals.

A supply chain agreement would help accelerate diversification and resilience by creating a standing mechanism to identify and address risks to supply chains in areas critical for national security and economic competitiveness. This would involve both early warning of impending disruptions and longer-term strategies to make investments that build resilience. In addition, the United States and India should establish high-standard principles for cross-border data flows and data security. And both countries should pursue an investment pact that would reduce obstacles to foreign direct investment, especially in strategic sectors, by addressing nontariff barriers, removing outdated regulatory restrictions in areas like clean energy, and strengthening intellectual property protections. Much of this diplomatic work was underway before the recent bout of public acrimony.

Washington and New Delhi must do more than simply restore the old, suboptimal status quo.

The third pillar of the strategic alliance would involve defense cooperation—specifically codevelopment, coproduction, joint logistics, and interoperability. This need not require a traditional Article V-like guarantee to trigger mutual defense. But if both sides committed to developing the necessary consultation mechanisms and technology and personnel platforms, a more durable capacity to train, exercise, and operate together is within reach. Among other things, this would mean further institutionalizing and capitalizing the India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS-X), which was launched in 2023 as an innovation bridge that directly connects the full spectrum of the two countries’ defense ecosystems, including government agencies, prime contractors, startups, investors, and research institutions.

The agreement that GE Aerospace would manufacture F-414 jet engines in India—an unprecedented technology transfer to a nontreaty partner—showed the promise of a more robust defense partnership. (Delays in executing the deal reflect the continuing bureaucratic inertia in both countries.) But the goal here cannot and should not be simply to facilitate the transfer of American defense capabilities and technologies to India. Instead, it should be to build and operate new capabilities and technologies together, in areas such as unmanned aerial systems and air defense that will shape future combat. The United States brings obvious defense production prowess to the table, while India offers a new and critical opportunity: the chance to leapfrog many of the legacy defense platforms by deploying new platforms at scale. The scope of cooperation should grow to include joint naval and air activities in the Indian Ocean involving more submarine cooperation, airborne reconnaissance operations, and joint contingency planning.

A fourth pillar of the new alliance would be intelligence cooperation, which accelerated during the first Trump and Biden administrations. The 2022 Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, for example, has allowed Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—the so-called Quad—to address illegal fishing, trafficking, and unauthorized maritime activities. The next major step would be to build a common maritime intelligence picture for the Indian Ocean, as well as a formalized structure of intelligence sharing and joint analysis that can continually update that picture.

The fifth and final pillar of the new alliance would be a commitment to global problem-solving. The unique strengths of the two countries present significant opportunities for dealing with the climate crisis, food security, and public health, as well as the effective use of emerging technologies to deliver global public goods. The United States can mobilize public- and private-sector resources and development know-how; India can leverage deep experience with this set of challenges as well as its trusted relationships across East Africa and in the Pacific. This could start with joint scalable pilot projects in third countries—such as in Papua New Guinea and Fiji where the Indian government has demonstrated a new commitment to ambitious infrastructure and health and technology initiatives that align with long-standing U.S. approaches in the Pacific—and grow from there.

REALISM REQUIRED

Some will argue that it will not be possible to reengineer momentum in the bilateral relationship after the recent downturn. On this point, those invested in the relationship on Capitol Hill and in the business and strategic community need to impress on their Indian interlocutors that U.S. President Donald Trump’s theatrics are often the prelude to dealmaking. This is a deeply unpleasant reality to many, but to paraphrase the late U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, you must do diplomacy with the United States you have, not the one you might prefer. Of course, it may turn out that it will be difficult to elevate the relationship under the current administration, but proponents of a U.S.-Indian alliance must keep building the strategic case and the intellectual and practical framework for the long term.

Some will also credibly ask whether India’s democratic backsliding would make such an alliance untenable. There are real challengesin India on pluralism, civil rights, and the rule of law, but the relationship should be mature enough to sustain an honest conversation with the government of India and Indian civil society about these trends. The United States should also be humble enough to acknowledge its own significant challenges when it comes to democracy and the rule of law. It is a very large glass house.

There is also the question of whether such an alliance can be built in the face of India’s relationship with Russia, which was brought into sharp relief by the recent Modi-Putin meeting. India will need to make a long-term strategic choice to break its dependence on Russia for defense and energy. This is a choice that New Delhi can and should make for its own reasons, not out of deference to Washington. And there have been subtle signs in recent years that India has gradually repositioned itself more toward the United States and Europe.

Washington must also refrain from hyphenating its relations with India and Pakistan: there should be no “India-Pakistan” policy. U.S. diplomacy in recent years has been heavily weighted toward New Delhi for a reason. The United States has enduring interests in Pakistan in combating terrorism and limiting nuclear and missile proliferation, but these pale in significance to Washington’s multifaceted and consequential interests regarding India’s future.

On the Indian side, some will ask—particularly now with nationalist sensibilities running hot—whether a U.S.-Indian alliance will impinge on India’s strategic autonomy. The very idea of an alliance will be strange and scary to the inheritors of the Non-Aligned Movement, which India helped spearhead during the Cold War. But a strategic alliance is not mutually exclusive with strategic autonomy. India and the United States are both proud and independent countries. Alliances are about alignment and common purpose—not about sacrificing sovereignty.

NEW ERA, NEW ALLIANCE

As always, there is the practical question of bureaucracy and capacity on both sides. Can they move the machinery of government to build an alliance? Doing so would require leadership from the top of both governments. And it would require a vision that inspires not only their governments but also their private sectors, technology communities, universities, and publics.

It is also worth remembering that many of Washington’s most important alliances have seen setbacks and led to domestic discord. The U.S.-Japanese alliance, for example, had to weather the economic disputes and political pressures of the 1980s and hard questions about the continued necessity of an alliance with Washington in the post–Cold War environment in the 1990s. The NATO alliance has had to contend with persistent questions about burden sharing. The United States and South Korea previously butted heads over how to handle the threat from North Korea, and there have been periodic public upheavals in Korean public opinion over tragic incidents involving American troops stationed on the peninsula. The United States and its allies have gotten through tough moments before, and the United States and India can do so, too.

Whether that will happen with the current occupant of the Oval Office is unpredictable, but the strategic aim should be clear. The realities of the emerging era have elevated the value of new shared security arrangements. And India has emerged as one of the United States’ most consequential partners. The only thing harder than building and formalizing a deeply significant relationship with India is not having one. So, with no illusions, the United States and India should get to work.

Foreign Affairs · More by Kurt M. Campbell · September 4, 2025

29. America’s Private-Capital Advantage – How to Outcompete Chinese State Capitalism

As long as the dollar remains the reserve currency?

Excerpts:

To that end, policymakers should ask several essential questions before making investments. Does this industry require support that capital markets cannot provide? If so, what form of support should it take? If financial support is truly required, which tool will have the greatest likelihood of success at the most reasonable cost? Should the state intervene directly in private capital markets or merely provide incentives? The government has a wide range of incentives from which to choose—tax benefits, grants, loans, and guarantees, as well as its own purchasing power—and each comes with tradeoffs. These questions should be standardized and addressed systematically through an investment vehicle, such as a sovereign fund, with rules that insulate decisions from political interference.

A related challenge is identifying the critical ancillary requirements that strategic industries need. For example, AI requires massive data centers, which in turn depend on reliable power generation, water resources, and permits at both the local and federal levels. States cannot fund these requirements alone. The 2021 infrastructure bill, for example, was almost entirely funded by federal and state governments, with minimal incentives for the private sector. A realistic industrial policy must also consider the supporting investments—in research, infrastructure, and workforce development—that are necessary for strategic industries to succeed.

Policymakers should also continue nurturing the United States’ underlying advantages. Capital markets could be further strengthened by lowering the tax burden on foreign capital from trusted sources seeking minority stakes in U.S. infrastructure and other priorities. And comprehensive immigration reform is essential to ensure that the United States has the human capital required for industry and for maximizing the odds that the next strategically important innovation happens at home.

The United States can lead in tomorrow’s technologies and industries by leveraging its unparalleled capital markets, fostering public-private collaboration, and aligning policy incentives with long-term strategic goals. But success will require disciplined prioritization and a commitment to creating conditions that attract both domestic and international private capital. As global competition intensifies, Washington’s ability to mobilize private capital will be central to safeguarding U.S. strategic interests.

America’s Private-Capital Advantage

Foreign Affairs · More by Sadek Wahba · September 4, 2025

How to Outcompete Chinese State Capitalism

September 4, 2025

A cargo ship in the San Francisco Bay, California, August 2025 Carlos Barria / Reuters

SADEK WAHBA is Chairman of I Squared Capital and the author of Build: Investing in America’s Infrastructure.

JONATHAN E. HILLMAN is Senior Fellow for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future.

More by Jonathan E. Hillman

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Years from now, the summer of 2025 may be remembered as a turning point in U.S. industrial policy, with President Donald Trump’s deals with Intel, Nvidia, and MP Materials marking the beginning of a new era of direct state investment in key industries. As the United States competes over the technologies and industries of tomorrow, Washington is now experimenting with state-centric investment strategies that resemble those of Beijing. But because the U.S. federal government is constrained by a debt-to-GDP ratio above 120 percent and a budget deficit exceeding seven percent, U.S. policymakers will have to channel more private capital toward strategically important sectors. Doing so will not be easy. To ensure a successful industrial strategy, the Trump administration must set clear criteria for what qualifies as a strategic industry, marshal the necessary public resources, and incentivize private investment in those industries.

The global battleground spans a wide range of industries, including artificial intelligence and related digital infrastructure, critical minerals, and advanced manufacturing. Both China and the United States have advantages and disadvantages in this strategic competition. In China, the government plays a central role as a source, allocator, and user of capital, directly resourcing strategic priorities but creating significant waste and inefficiency in the process. Chinese companies get much of their financing from state-owned banks, with capital markets providing only 14 percent of their financing. In the United States, by contrast, a market-led approach struggles to support less lucrative areas of strategic importance, such as basic infrastructure, but excels at directing capital toward areas with the highest perceived returns, such as artificial intelligence. And with integration across all 50 states, U.S. capital markets are the largest globally and provide nearly three-quarters of all equity and debt financing for U.S. companies outside of the financial sector.

In both countries, investment outcomes depend heavily on national conditions, including the strength of capital markets, workforce, infrastructure, and the judiciousness of laws and regulations. When these conditions are strong, countries become magnets for foreign capital and talent. As U.S. policymakers work to scale investments for strategically important technologies and industries, they may improve underlying conditions over time, but they should not bet on overnight transformations.

THE VISIBLE HAND

The Chinese government has an extensive toolkit for supporting investments at home and for launching into global markets. State-owned banks provide most of the financing to companies in China, which is home to the world’s four largest banks, all of which are state-owned. The government is also the dominant investor in venture capital and private equity, supplying six times more funding than private investors. Chinese companies can draw from a wide range of state-backed sources, including funds, banks, enterprises, and sovereign wealth vehicles. Beijing also shields firms from foreign competition, facilitates technology transfer, and supports them with cheap land, electricity, and credit. Abroad, Beijing extends financing and diplomatic backing to Chinese companies through the Belt and Road Initiative, helping them to secure mineral rights and logistics networks.

The rise of China’s largest shipping company, COSCO, illustrates the power of this support. In 2009, COSCO operated three overseas terminals. Today it manages a dozen. In that same period, the company increased the amount of overseas cargo it handled tenfold. Many other Chinese firms have profited from COSCO’s success, including manufacturers of tankers and LNG carriers, financial-technology and mining companies, and entrepreneurs developing AI applications for maritime operations. This broader Chinese ecosystem of beneficiaries allows the state to rationalize its continued support for a national champion.

When all else fails, the Chinese government can move capital from profitable state-owned enterprises to keep their struggling counterparts afloat. The relative success of Beijing’s Made in China 2025 initiative, which Chinese President Xi Jinping launched in 2015, is telling. Displaying a degree of focus that Washington has lacked, Beijing aimed to upgrade not just industry in general but ten specific sectors. Within those sectors, Beijing has achieved global leadership in five of 13 key technologies and is making headway in seven others.

Yet this approach carries costs. China’s subsidies, which are far larger than those of other countries, have created overcapacity in automobiles, solar panels, and semiconductors. Correcting this will be difficult as growth slows, the Chinese population ages, and reliance on foreign energy rises. In addition to draining resources from competing sectors, Chinese subsidies have provoked other countries to respond with their own measures, as evidenced by Trump’s tariff policy.

The heavy hand of the state is also driving investors away. Foreign capital, especially venture funding, has collapsed amid higher risks and lower returns. Beijing has tried to lure investors with regulatory flexibility and even a $138 billion public venture capital fund, but domestic private firms still prefer private sources, and government-owned investment firms perform worse than private ones. Still, when strategic priorities are at stake, Beijing values control over efficiency.

THE NEW DEALS

Trump’s recent deals with Intel, Nvidia, and MP Materials may represent a significant escalation of a nearly decadelong shift toward experimenting with industrial policy. In his first term, Trump fired the opening salvo with his “America first” strategy based on a mix of tariffs, import substitution policies, and attempts to improve infrastructure. President Joe Biden increased some tariffs on China and worked with Congress on landmark programs to rebuild the country’s aging infrastructure, invest in clean energy, and develop semiconductors and related technologies.

In his second term, Trump has deployed a variety of tools to attract more capital to strategic areas. He has used executive orders to relax regulatory barriers, continued to provide financial incentives—such as tax benefits, grants, loans, and guarantees—for semiconductors through the CHIPS and Science Act, and blocked or raised the cost of foreign alternatives, including through aggressive import controls and tariffs. His administration has also taken dramatic steps to leverage the U.S. government’s power as a customer and regulator to strike deals with private companies. Some of these measures are reminiscent of the New Deal, when the federal government actively invested in the economy.

In April, the leading AI-chip maker Nvidia announced that it would spend $500 billion to build AI supercomputers and infrastructure in the United States, including new manufacturing and testing facilities in Arizona and Texas. In return, Trump committed to speeding up permits for Nvidia’s expansion. Then, in July, the Department of Defense launched a partnership with MP Materials, the rare-earth miner, to build a fully domestic rare-earth magnet supply chain, with the aim of reducing U.S. reliance on China for critical defense inputs. The deal includes a $400 million equity investment by Washington (making the Department of Defense the company’s largest shareholder), a $150 million public loan to expand heavy rare-earth separation, and a ten-year price floor on a rare-earth compound that is a key ingredient for powerful magnets. This combination of incentives has already mobilized $1 billion in financing from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, as well as a pledge from MP Materials to contribute $600 million to the project. The real test will be whether the partnership can meaningfully scale up production and create a self-sustaining market over the next decade.

The strategic case for more recent deals is less clear. In August, Washington announced that it would allow Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), another leading semiconductor company, to export certain AI chips to China in exchange for 15 percent of top-line revenues generated from these sales. The Trump administration has not clarified how it plans to use these funds, which makes it impossible to weigh the revenue gained against the potential costs to national security. In an unprecedented move, the administration also recently announced that it would use $5.7 billion in previously awarded grants to the chipmaker Intel to purchase a ten-percent equity stake in the company. By converting a grant to an equity stake, taxpayers may benefit from future returns—but Intel may be at a disadvantage, since its competitors will likely continue receiving grants and other less demanding support.

These actions can be interpreted in two ways. First, they reflect Trump’s transactional style of policymaking. Second, they could signal the start of a more sustained industrial policy focused on supporting strategic sectors, both at home and abroad. The first does not preclude the second. But an ad hoc approach risks failing to achieve the scale and consistency necessary for long-term success.

FOR THE LONG HAUL

The long-term nature of industrial policy is perhaps the greatest challenge for the United States, where elections carry the risk of erasing a previous administration’s policy initiatives. An effective industrial policy for strategic competition across a range of technologies and industries—including those that have yet to be discovered—may have to be extended for decades. Moreover, whatever policy takes shape over the coming years, U.S. public resources are limited and risk being spread too thin over too many priorities. It is critical that policymakers continue to identify strategic industries that require targeted state support and ensure that the United States has the capabilities, either domestically or through its network of partners and allies, to defend its vital interests under various scenarios.

To that end, policymakers should ask several essential questions before making investments. Does this industry require support that capital markets cannot provide? If so, what form of support should it take? If financial support is truly required, which tool will have the greatest likelihood of success at the most reasonable cost? Should the state intervene directly in private capital markets or merely provide incentives? The government has a wide range of incentives from which to choose—tax benefits, grants, loans, and guarantees, as well as its own purchasing power—and each comes with tradeoffs. These questions should be standardized and addressed systematically through an investment vehicle, such as a sovereign fund, with rules that insulate decisions from political interference.

A related challenge is identifying the critical ancillary requirements that strategic industries need. For example, AI requires massive data centers, which in turn depend on reliable power generation, water resources, and permits at both the local and federal levels. States cannot fund these requirements alone. The 2021 infrastructure bill, for example, was almost entirely funded by federal and state governments, with minimal incentives for the private sector. A realistic industrial policy must also consider the supporting investments—in research, infrastructure, and workforce development—that are necessary for strategic industries to succeed.

Policymakers should also continue nurturing the United States’ underlying advantages. Capital markets could be further strengthened by lowering the tax burden on foreign capital from trusted sources seeking minority stakes in U.S. infrastructure and other priorities. And comprehensive immigration reform is essential to ensure that the United States has the human capital required for industry and for maximizing the odds that the next strategically important innovation happens at home.

The United States can lead in tomorrow’s technologies and industries by leveraging its unparalleled capital markets, fostering public-private collaboration, and aligning policy incentives with long-term strategic goals. But success will require disciplined prioritization and a commitment to creating conditions that attract both domestic and international private capital. As global competition intensifies, Washington’s ability to mobilize private capital will be central to safeguarding U.S. strategic interests.

Foreign Affairs · More by Sadek Wahba · September 4, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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China’s Military Parade Was a Message

Trump saw Xi warmly welcome Putin and Kim. What’s his response?

Rubio Reassures Mexico After U.S. Military Strike Jolts Region

Secretary of state agreed to strengthen security cooperation with Mexico a day after strike against drug-carrying boat in Caribbean

Army’s Contract With Startup Will Give Soldiers Battlefield AI

Infantry will use software from startup TurbineOne to identify drones and other threats, even when signals are jammed

Quick Summary

Critical State: The Pentagon's AI 'Doomsday Machine'

If you read just one thing this week … read about the Pentagon's growing reliance on artificial intelligence.

The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think

‘Hands on a keyboard is not going to be fast enough’

‘We’ll be the weakest of the three nuclear powers’

‘We really don’t understand these systems’

‘I don’t see DARPA being able to keep up’

​I wonder what message the Venezuelan people are taking from this action? What does the future hold for them?

Trump’s Gunboat War on Drugs

Venezuelan capos get a kinetic message, and so does kingpin Maduro.

In Front-Line Ukrainian Towns, Those Who Stayed Become Moving Targets

Any movement in cities near the battlefield is now dangerous, as explosive drones hunt for all signs of life

Quick Summary

Appeared in the September 4, 2025, print edition as 'Russian Drones Hit Civilians Near Front'.

1. Xi with Putin and Kim

2. Military showcase

3. Future warfare

4. Nuclear focus

5. World leaders

The 5 key takeaways from China’s Victory Day military parade

From the images of Xi with Putin and Kim to a growing focus on nuclear weapons, here are the key moments from Tiananmen Square

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3324135/5-key-takeaways-chinas-victory-day-military-parade?tpcc=GME-O-enlz-uv&utm

1. Xi with Putin and Kim

2. Military showcase

3. Future warfare

4. Nuclear focus

5. World leaders

The weapons and military units on display in China's major parade

New units and equipment

Russia and North Korea headline guest list

Parade mainly for invited guests

Trump’s Ukraine Strategy Falters: White House Readies for High-Stakes Call

Moment of clarification

Allies seek a unified front

Putin’s diplomatic offensive, Trump’s rhetoric – under scrutiny

Deadline missed

Path forward

In the Donbas ‘Fortress,’ Ukraine’s Soldiers Refuse to Yield

Difficulties with mobilization

Russia Grinds Ahead in Donetsk, Testing Ukraine’s ‘Fortress Belt’

‘The Russians no longer have enough men’

Shortly after laying off hundreds, State hires new class of foreign service staff

The firing-hiring combo is "the definition of wasteful government spending,” according to one staffer.

Trump says US won’t pull troops from Poland

Technological Discord and Tactical Misjudgment: India’s Military Setback in the May 2025 Crisis

India: Perils of Non-Integration

Pakistan’s Use of Chinese Technology and Coordinated Warfare Doctrine

Pakistan’s Electromagnetic Warfare Breakthrough

BrahMos Strikes: India’s Limited Success

Conclusion:

About The Author

Syria’s Minority Killings Aren’t Accidents – They’re Strategy

Introduction

Plausible-Deniability Strategy

Narratives that Obscure Accountability

Conclusion

About The Author

Defending the Army’s Command Assessment Program

Air Force Looks to Cut Squadrons That Advise Foreign Militaries

Reprioritize SWO Tactical Qualifications for the High-End Fight

Discover more from Center for International Maritime Security

Weaning the U.S. Military Off a Tablet Supply Chain That Leads to China

The Dialectic of Deception: John Boyd and the Cognitive Battlefield

Russia Is Quietly Building a New Arctic Military Base—on American Land

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For more than 100 years, Russia has illegally occupied Wrangel Island, an American-claimed island in the Arctic—and has now fortified it with a military base.

The Wrangel Island Dispute

Why Does Russia Want Wrangel Island?

Russia Is Destroying the Environment on Wrangel Island

I wonder what message the Venezuelan people are taking from this action? What does the future hold for them?