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"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."

 – Abraham Lincoln

"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."

– Albert Einstein

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– Martha Gellhorn

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1. Army moves to link a full division with its next-gen C2 prototype

2. U.S. Army selects Swarmbotics AI for autonomous robot swarms

3. Accelerating Decision-Making: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Modern Wargame

4. Russia’s Cetacean Irregular Warfare in the North Atlantic

5. China's Underwater Data Center Is Doing A Lot More Than Just Computing

6. Why Xi Jinping has been purging China's military leadership, and what may come next

7. Book Review | America’s Taiwan Dilemma: Allies’ Reactions and the Stakes for US Reputation

8. Hong Kong Publisher Jimmy Lai Gets 20 Years

9. Army looks to lease out land on 4 military installations for new commercial data centers

10. Ukraine Seeks a War Plan Beyond Killing as Many Russian Soldiers as Possible\

11. Opinion | America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space

12. Supermajority Gives Japan’s Takaichi Strong Hand at Home and Abroad

13. Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo

14. Deterrence Won’t Fail in the Taiwan Strait — It Will Be Bypassed

15. Beijing’s Growth Model Is Still Broken

16. Europe Needs an Army: Only Collective Defense Can Protect the Continent

17. The Code War: A Race to What End?

18. The CIA World Factbook is dead. Here's how I came to love it

1. Army moves to link a full division with its next-gen C2 prototype

​Summary:

The 4th Infantry Division is scaling field testing of the Army’s Next-Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype from battalion to division level by this summer, using the Ivy Sting exercise series. Leaders say the effort shifts units from “fighting with the network” to “fighting using the network” by integrating sensors and weapons into one fast, shared picture across fires, logistics, and intelligence. Tests include vehicle sensors that feed fuel and ammunition data into NGC2 to enable resupply, and soldier sensors tracking vitals and casualties to support medical handoff and force management. Exercises also stress degraded conditions and jamming. Next milestones include Ivy Mass in May, Project Convergence Capstone 6, and continued Ivy Sting iterations.

Comment: NGC2 is being shaped in dirt and noise, not in a clean lab, so the Army is betting that speed and soldier feedback will beat long programs that arrive late. This is transformation in contact (or continuous transformation but I like TIC). They expect the network to be attacked, so resilience in denied and degraded conditions is a core requirement.

If commanders can replace long staff updates with a shared live picture, what decisions must they now delegate, and what decisions must they retain at their level? I have often thought that decisions must be made at the correct lowest level. I recommend relooking at paragraph 5 of the OPORD (Command and Signal) and focus on something more than just the chain of command and include an analysis of key decisions and which level of command is granted authority to make which decisions. I think this is going to be more important than ever as we incorporate AI support. 

And this is one of the real challenges: If resupply can be ordered from sensor-fed data, how do units prevent bad data, spoofing, or simple error from driving the wrong sustainment moves?

If the system must fight through jamming and cloud loss, what is the minimum C2 function the division must preserve at each echelon to ​s​ustain operations?

Army moves to link a full division with its next-gen C2 prototype

defenseone.com · Meghann Myers

By Meghann Myers

Staff Reporter

February 6, 2026

Ivy Sting 4 tested out logistics, tracking soldiers’ vitals and overcoming jammers.

https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2026/02/army-moves-link-full-division-its-next-gen-c2-prototype/411259/

The 4th Infantry Division is working to scale testing of the Army’s next-generation command-and-control system from a battalion to division level by this summer, the division’s commander told reporters on Thursday.

The Colorado-based unit is coming off of more than two weeks in the field for its latest Ivy Sting exercise, Maj. Gen. Pat Ellis said, the fifth since the series began in September. This time, they increased from the ability to shoot from one networked artillery system to six, among other incremental advancements.

“So the joke I like to make is we are no longer fighting with the network. We are now fighting using the network,” Ellis said, alluding to previous iterations of Army command-and-control that kept data on multiple systems and devices that prevented commanders on the battlefield from seeing a full picture all at once.

With more than a dozen vendors involved in its development, led by Anduril and Palantir, NGC2 is one of the Army’s premier experiments within its Continuous Transformation approach to developing new technology: Rather than spend a decade building a program to completion, then sending it out to the field only to learn that it’s out of date or missing key components, the Army is building the prototype while soldiers are testing what it can already do in the field, then offering their feedback about what else they need it to do.

“So largely what is being operated out at Ivy Sting is based on commercial components, commercial software practices, or even straight commercial development,” Joe Welch, the Portfolio Acquisition Executive for C2 and Counter-C2, told reporters. “And we are adopting and adapting those based on the guidance and feedback…to ensure that those technologies are aligned to the way that Gen. Ellis and his division need to be prepared to fight.”

That mostly means that all of the sensors and weapons on the battlefield need to be able to feed what they’re seeing and doing into one system, so that commanders can make informed decisions about next moves.

“So it's all in one place, and it's there very, very quickly, so that the staffs can see it across their functional systems,” Ellis said, “You know, the fires person can see what the logistician sees, can see what the intel person sees.”

That’s allowed him to get the information he needs from the software system, rather than “have the hour-long staff meeting” to get updated on what each unit is dealing with.

That includes vehicles and equipment fitted with sensors that track fuel and ammunition levels, so that instead of logistics soldiers having to keep track and write reports, the information goes right into NGC2—and not only can the commander see it, but resupplies can be ordered.

“We've got a tank, a Bradley [fighting vehicle] and several strykers that are outfitted with this capability. We're pulling it in,” Ellis said. “The goal for Sting 5 will be to run that at the battalion level.”

There are also similar sensors on each soldier, tracking their vitals and whether they’ve sustained a casualty. This serves two purposes: medics in the field can track conditions and record treatments that were given at the time of injury, then send that data to surgeons who will receive casualties at a field hospital; and commanders can know how many soldiers are still in the fight and send in the correct reinforcements.

Ivy Sting 4 also tested the soldiers on how to function if something goes wrong with NGC2, like a simulated electromagnetic jammer they had to find without a satellite feed and take out with mortars.

“So in other words, a denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited environment where we were essentially cut off from the division’s cloud, but we were still able to battle track and execute our tasks at the squadron level internally,” said Lt. Col. Shawn Scott, who commands 4th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team. “And then, as we eliminated that simulated jamming threat, and we were able to reestablish connection back with division and brigade, we watched how our feeds fed back into division, and likewise, division back down to us seamlessly.”

The next step, for Ivy Mass in May, Scott said, is to bring out a red team from Army Training and Transformation Command to further attack the system and force 4th IDto diagnose and fix issues without warning.

The division will show off what they can do as a full division this summer at Project Convergence Capstone 6, Ellis said, then get right back to the next Ivy Sting.

“I can tell you that we already have on the calendar, about a month and change after PCC 6, we have Ivy Sting 7,” he said. “So we will continue the Sting series at the pace and volume that we're doing now for Sting 8, Sting 9, Sting 10, as a lead up to what may happen in ‘27, is another opportunity for us to have the whole division fight.”

defenseone.com · Meghann Myers

2. U.S. Army selects Swarmbotics AI for autonomous robot swarms

​Summary:

The U.S. Army selected Swarmbotics AI to develop swarming, attritable small unmanned ground vehicles for its Transformation in Contact effort with the 1st Cavalry Division, announced Feb. 5. The selection followed xTech Overwatch evaluations where soldiers assessed autonomous systems for rapid integration into operational units. The program focuses on heterogeneous small sUGVs that cooperate as swarms, accept combat attrition, and create tactical dilemmas for adversaries at far lower cost than crewed, “exquisite” platforms. Army officials said xTech Overwatch accelerated decisions by putting operational units and stakeholders in the evaluation chain, emphasizing rapid experimentation, soldier feedback, and faster transition to field use. Work in 2026 aims to develop baseline concepts to deploy hundreds of robots in maneuver and breaching.

Comment: This signals the Army is moving autonomy from a tech demo to a unit-level battle drill, and it is willing to trade platform survivability for mass and speed.

U.S. Army selects Swarmbotics AI for autonomous robot swarms

defence-blog.com · Dylan Malyasov

https://defence-blog.com/u-s-army-selects-swarmbotics-ai-for-autonomous-robot-swarms/

Key Points

• The U.S. Army selected Swarmbotics AI to develop swarming, attritable small unmanned ground vehicles for Transformation in Contact with the 1st Cavalry Division following xTech Overwatch evaluations.
• The program aims to field large numbers of autonomous ground robots to support maneuver units and accelerate operational integration of ground autonomy.

The United States Army has selected Swarmbotics AI to develop swarming, attritable small unmanned ground vehicles as part of its Transformation in Contact effort with the 1st Cavalry Division, the company announced on Feb. 5.

The award follows Swarmbotics AI’s performance at last year’s xTech Overwatch competition, where Army soldiers evaluated autonomous systems intended for rapid integration into operational units. The effort is focused on advancing the Army’s ability to deploy large numbers of low-cost robotic platforms to support maneuver formations in contested environments.

According to the company, the program centers on swarming, heterogeneous small unmanned ground vehicles designed to operate cooperatively and accept attrition during combat operations. Swarmbotics AI said the systems are intended to create tactical dilemmas for adversaries while reducing reliance on more expensive, crewed platforms.

- ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW -

“Mass is our objective, by employing swarms of heterogeneous small sUGVs we create multiple dilemmas for our adversaries at fractions of the cost of exquisite platforms,” said Stephen Houghton, chief executive officer of Swarmbotics AI, in a company statement.

During xTech Overwatch evaluations, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division assessed multiple contractors’ autonomous capabilities across ground vehicles, airborne systems, payload integration, and mission planning tools. The assessments were conducted in coordination with Army stakeholders to determine which technologies were suitable for rapid transition into Transformation in Contact formations.

Lt. Col. Nick Rinaldi, competition lead at the Army Applications Laboratory, said the structure of xTech Overwatch accelerated decision-making by placing operational units directly in the evaluation process. “Having the entire material kill chain as evaluators invested in the outcome was critical to the speed of decisions on which technologies were most suited to move into a TiC formation,” Rinaldi said.

FireAnt robotick tank killer. (Swarmbotics AI pic.)

He added that the approach reflects how the Army intends to work with industry going forward, emphasizing rapid experimentation, direct soldier feedback, and quicker transition from demonstration to field use. According to Rinaldi, engaging companies on real operational problems and evaluating systems in realistic contexts allows the Army to make procurement and integration decisions faster.

Swarmbotics AI’s technical leadership said the program demonstrated the operational value of robotic mass at the small-unit level. Drew Watson, the company’s chief technology officer, said xTech Overwatch showed what could be achieved with limited numbers of robots and pointed to larger-scale deployments planned with the 1st Cavalry Division.

“The key takeaway is that robot swarms are here to stay,” Watson said. He added that upcoming work with the division in 2026 will focus on establishing baseline concepts for deploying hundreds of robots during maneuver and breaching operations.

The Army’s Transformation in Contact initiative is designed to push new capabilities directly into operational units for experimentation and refinement, rather than relying solely on long-term development programs. Attritable unmanned ground systems are viewed as a way to extend reconnaissance, security, and support functions while reducing risk to soldiers.

defence-blog.com · Dylan Malyasov

3. Accelerating Decision-Making: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Modern Wargame

​Summary:

The authors argue AI can accelerate MDMP wargaming now, based on CGSC experiments using a pre-trained LLM as a staff cognitive partner. Success required a deliberate method: build a framework, run a human-centric wargame, and iterate. They selected a heavyweight model with a 1 million token context window, wrote clear agent instructions grounded in FM 3-0 and FM 5-0, and provisioned references, often converting documents into ontology objects for faster parsing. A key finding was prompt design. Highly structured prompts biased results toward friendly forces, while simpler intent-focused prompts produced more realistic adjudication. A CAS and artillery vignette showed AI surfaced hidden human assumptions.

Excerpt:

In conclusion, our experience demonstrates that integrating AI into the Military Decision-Making Process is not a distant future concept but a present-day reality with immense potential. By providing our formations with properly resourced and guided AI agents, we can significantly enhance the quality and speed of staff wargaming. This process allows for more repetitions, deeper analysis, and the critical challenging of our own assumptions. The result is a more rigorously tested plan, a staff better prepared for contingencies, and a commander equipped to make decisions with greater speed and confidence. The path forward requires a commitment to developing the doctrine, training, and technical infrastructure to make AI an integral part of our decision-making toolkit, ensuring a decisive advantage on the battlefields of tomorrow.

Comment: It is great to see students (and faculty) thinking through tough problems. I have always thought that our best think tanks should be in our PME institutions. Turn students loose on tough problems while they have a year to think, reflect, discuss, debate, and research.

AI’s main value here is not speed alone, but disciplined exposure of staff bias, because it reasons from doctrinal tables and the documents you feed it.

If simplified, intent-driven prompts outperform detailed tasking, what does that imply about how commanders should express intent and constraints when they want AI to adjudicate without steering the outcome?

Accelerating Decision-Making: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Modern Wargame

by Thad D. Weist, by Skyler G. Kepley, by Braxton C. Musgrove

|

02.09.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/09/accelerating-military-decision/

The character of warfare is in a state of perpetual evolution, demanding that our Army not only keep pace but also actively seek a decisive edge through technological superiority. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) represents the next frontier in this pursuit. While the concept may seem abstract, recent practical applications at the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) have provided a concrete blueprint for how Large Language Models (LLMs) can revolutionize staff wargaming. This article outlines the key findings and lessons learned from an experiment that leveraged AI to enhance the speed, depth, and rigor of Course of Action (COA) analysis, offering a model for the wider force.

Our exploration demonstrated that when properly resourced and guided, AI can serve as a powerful cognitive partner for a staff. However, its successful integration is not a simple matter of “plug-and-play.” It requires a deliberate methodology centered on three pillars: building a robust analytical framework, executing a human-centric wargame, and embracing an iterative learning process.

Building the Framework: Resourcing the AI for Combat

The initial and most critical phase was preparing the digital battlespace. The goal was to create an environment where an AI agent could effectively reason using the same doctrinal and operational documents that a human staff would use. This was accomplished not by building a new model from scratch, but by leveraging a pre-existing platform to tailor a pre-trained LLM for our specific military application.

The process involved three key modifications to the base AI agent:

1. Model Selection: The choice of the underlying LLM is paramount. We required an AI capable of detailed analysis of complex operational inputs. We selected a “heavyweight” model (analogous to GPT-4.1) with a vast context window of 1 million tokens. This large window was essential, as it allowed the AI to simultaneously reference a wide array of doctrinal publications, operational orders, and scenario-specific data during its analysis, mirroring the cognitive load of a planning staff.
2. Agent Instructions: An AI agent, much like a Soldier, requires clear orders. We crafted a set of foundational agent instructions that defined the AI’s Role, Core Responsibilities, and Execution Guidance. Drawing on doctrinal sources such as FM 3-0, Operations, and FM 5-0, The Operations Process, we tasked the agent to act as an impartial adjudicator and analyst, providing it with the foundational “commander’s intent” for its role in the wargame.
3. Resource Provisioning: An AI’s output is only as good as the information it is given. We provided the agent with its “library” of references using two methods. While direct document uploads are possible, they are inefficient and consume the model’s limited context. A far more effective method was converting key documents into ontology objects. This process extracts and structures the text, making it significantly easier and faster for the AI to parse. The majority of our reference materials—including doctrinal manuals, the Operation Order (OPORD), and enemy/friendly capability handbooks—were processed into this optimized format, creating a structured and rapidly accessible knowledge base for the AI.

Execution and a Critical Discovery: Structured vs. Simple Prompts

With the framework established, we executed a two-COA wargame following the standard “action, reaction, counteraction” sequence. Our most significant discovery came from experimenting with how we communicated tasks to the AI.

Initially, for COA 1, we used a highly structured prompt that detailed every friendly action by the warfighting function. While thorough, this approach consistently skewed results in favor of friendly forces, requiring frequent human intervention to ensure a realistic outcome. It appeared that by providing excessive detail, we were constraining the AI’s ability to reason independently and weigh all factors.

For COA 2, we tested this hypothesis by running two AI agents in parallel. One received the same structured prompt, while the second received a simplified prompt that focused only on the main effort and key tasks. The results were striking. The agent operating with the simplified prompt delivered far more realistic adjudications. By providing less explicit direction, we enabled the AI to more effectively leverage its full context of doctrinal knowledge and scenario data to model enemy reactions and combat outcomes. This led to a crucial insight: as long as the AI is properly resourced with the necessary documents, it only requires the base actions—the commander’s intent for the turn—to adjudicate outcomes properly.

This was powerfully illustrated during the third turn of the wargame. In the scenario, a friendly battalion of three companies was tasked with fixing a defending enemy force of over five companies. The AI returned an outcome the staff found overly optimistic: friendly combat power remaining at 75% while the enemy was reduced to 40%. The initial human “gut check” suggested the result was flawed.

However, an inquiry into the AI’s reasoning revealed a different story. The AI explained that its adjudication was based on the doctrinal effects of the fully available Close Air Support (CAS), attack aviation, and artillery supporting the friendly action. The AI correctly calculated the suppressive effects in accordance with the doctrinal tables in its reference materials. The human planners, by contrast, had subconsciously assumed that only marginal effects would have only marginal effects.

To validate this, we reran the turn with adjusted variables:

• Marginal artillery and effective CAS: Friendly combat power fell to 65%.
• Effective artillery and marginal CAS: Friendly combat power fell to 70%.
• Both CAS and artillery were marginal: Friendly combat power fell to 55%.

This test proved that the AI’s initial logic was sound and based on the data provided. More importantly, it surfaced a hidden assumption in the human staff’s analysis. The AI did not replace the staff, and it challenged their assumptions and forced a more rigorous consideration of all available assets, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of the plan.

Lessons Learned for the Force

This experiment in AI-augmented wargaming offers several vital lessons for the Army as it moves to operationalize this technology:

1. Human-in-the-Loop is Non-Negotiable. The most critical lesson is that AI is a tool to augment, not replace, professional military judgment. The human “gut check” remains the ultimate arbiter of realism. The AI’s role is to accelerate analysis, identify potential blind spots, and handle the immense cognitive load of processing doctrinal data, freeing up the staff to focus on higher-level critical thinking.
2. Prompt Design is a New Staff Skill. How we task an AI dramatically impacts its output. Overly detailed prompts can stifle the AI’s reasoning ability and introduce bias. The force must develop expertise in crafting clear, concise, intent-focused prompts that allow the AI to best leverage its knowledge base.
3. Data Accuracy is Paramount. The adage “garbage in, garbage out” has never been more relevant. The AI’s adjudications are directly tied to the data it is provided. For AI to be effective, units must maintain meticulously accurate documentation, especially dynamic products like the task organization, which directly impacts combat power calculations.
4. AI Can Be a Powerful Red Team. The AI’s ability to “think” based on enemy doctrine and capabilities without friendly bias makes it an invaluable red-teaming tool. By providing a doctrinally sound and dispassionate perspective on the enemy COA, it can expose weaknesses in a friendly plan that a staff might overlook.

In conclusion, our experience demonstrates that integrating AI into the Military Decision-Making Process is not a distant future concept but a present-day reality with immense potential. By providing our formations with properly resourced and guided AI agents, we can significantly enhance the quality and speed of staff wargaming. This process allows for more repetitions, deeper analysis, and the critical challenging of our own assumptions. The result is a more rigorously tested plan, a staff better prepared for contingencies, and a commander equipped to make decisions with greater speed and confidence. The path forward requires a commitment to developing the doctrine, training, and technical infrastructure to make AI an integral part of our decision-making toolkit, ensuring a decisive advantage on the battlefields of tomorrow.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government).

Tags: AI-augmented wargaming, Combat AI, Military Decision Making Process, Technological Superiority

About The Authors

• 
  
• Thad D. Weist
• Thad D. Weist, LTC (RET), is a small group instructor for the Department of the Army Tactics at the Command and General Staff College. He holds a BS in Operations Research from West Point and an MA in Strategic Studies from the Naval War College, RI. During his career, Weist served with the 3rd Infantry Division, 4th Infantry Division, and 1st Armored Division, and the PMS at Arizona State University. He was a senior Aviator with multiple combat deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
• View all posts 
• 
  
• Skyler G. Kepley
• Skyler G. Kepley, MAJ, is a student at the Command and General Staff College, Staff Group 17C. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Virginia Military Institute and an MS in Data Science from the Air Force Institute of Technology. During his career, Kepley served in various roles with the 10th Mountain Division, the 82nd Airborne Division, and FORSCOM Headquarters. He is an Operations Research and Systems Analyst with multiple Training Center rotations and one Experimental Demonstration Gateway Event(Edge).
• View all posts
• 
  
• Braxton C. Musgrove
• Braxton C. Musgrove, MAJ, is a student at the Command and General Staff College, Staff Group 17C. He holds a BS in Information Technology from West Point and multiple MS degrees from various universities. During his career, Musgrove served in various roles within the Cyber Mission Force and the 11th Airborne Division. He is a Cyber Warfare and Electromagnetic Warfare Officer with a combat deployment to Iraq in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.

4. Russia’s Cetacean Irregular Warfare in the North Atlantic

​Summary:

The author argues the North Atlantic threat picture now includes a psychological and irregular warfare angle tied to marine mammals. He reviews Cold War era U.S. and Soviet marine mammal programs, including U.S. dolphin defense at Cam Ranh Bay and modern Russian dolphin pens at Sevastopol in 2022 for counter-diver defense. He cites the 2019 beluga “Hvaldimir” episode as evidence of Russian interest, though operational value was doubtful. He then describes Iberian orcas conducting hundreds of rudder strikes since 2020, using GTOA logs and reports to frame behavior as targeted disruption in a key shipping corridor. He closes by labeling Russia weaponized orcas as speculative, meant to provoke strategic thought.

Comment: We have dog kennels at all our Special Forces Groups for our military working dogs. Will we have Orca pens for our Orca irregular warriors someday? (with only a slight attempt at humor but meant to provoke strategic thought :-) ).

The value here is not proof of Russian orca control, but the way uncertainty, deniability, and absurdity can still impose costs and shape behavior in the gray zone. If NATO must plan for threats that may be natural, adversary-driven, or both, how should it set thresholds for response without turning every anomaly into escalation or every oddity into complacency?

Russia’s Cetacean Irregular Warfare in the North Atlantic

by Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca

|

02.09.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/09/russias-cetacean-irregular-warfare-in-the-north-atlantic/

Introduction

For seventy years, America and its allies hunted steel hulls and listened for the heartbeat of propellers in the North Atlantic. Today, the heartbeat belongs to something far older, far smarter, and, according to the more feverish corners of Western intelligence—far more Russian. This is not about silent submarines or acoustic arrays, but Orcas, the apex predator of the ocean, weaponized by Moscow for a new era of Irregular Warfare. Since 2020, the Iberian orca subpopulation has executed more than 700 precision strikes on vessel rudders from Galicia to the Strait of Gibraltar. Yachts sink, autopilots die, and insurance actuaries panic.

The claim sounds like the plot of a B-movie produced in the waning days of the Cold War. Yet, as military analysts grapple with hybrid and asymmetric conflict, it is necessary to recognize that this rumored program is less a sign of fantasy and more a stroke of psychological operations in a biological package. The absurdity of the threat serves to mask serious implications for naval security and deterrence.

A History of Military Marine Mammal Programs

To understand the current situation, one must acknowledge the strangely overlooked history of military marine mammal programs (MMPs). Since the Cold War, the Soviet Union and America have demonstrated interest in marine mammals as national security tools. The earliest reported use of aquatic mammals in active military defense was during the Vietnam War. Five US Navy bottlenose dolphins were sent to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, to defend US military boats from enemy swimmers. While the U.S. Navy taught dolphins to locate enemy divers and sea lions to detect mines, Moscow preferred the stouter physiologies of the Arctic. Despite a history of dolphin deployments, Russia has more recently focused heavily on larger mammals as well.

(A US Navy sea lion attaches a recovery line to a piece of test equipment. Image Credit: US Navy)

Enter Hvaldimir. In 2019, a beluga in a camera harness appeared off the coast of Norway’s far northern Finnmark region. First spotted in April near the island of Ingøya, speculation about Hvaldimir’s purpose ranged from carrying weapons and conducting surface surveillance to locating underwater threats. The creature was clearly trained and clearly escaped (or released), but also clearly more interested in socializing than in national security. All reports referenced a friendly whale happy to be around people. Belugas, it turned out, are perhaps too gentle, too social, and too corruptible by affection.  

Three years later in 2022, during its second invasion of Ukraine, Russia demonstrated that it had maintained its dolphin programs, as reported by USNI. In February of that year, the Russian Navy placed two dolphin pens at the entrance to Sevastopol harbor, sheltered just inside a sea wall. The most likely intent was counter-diver operations to prevent “Ukrainian special operations forces from infiltrating the harbor underwater to sabotage warships,” USNI reported. 

(Image Credit: H I Sutton Illustration for USNI News)

Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica (GTOA) Field Reports

More recent Irregular Warfare activities in the Atlantic, however, involve a more formidable species: the Iberian subpopulation of the Killer Whale. Orca logs maintained by Grupo de Trabajo Orca Atlántica (GTOA) read less like marine biology surveys and more like after-action reports from an amphibious sabotage unit. As Reteuro reported based on GTOA logs: 

“Most events involve sailing yachts under 15 meters, yet commercial skippers—coasters, trawlers, whale-watch operators—now report close approaches, stern-circling, and hard bumps that rattle crockery. In May 2024, a sailing vessel sank near the Strait of Gibraltar after repeated rudder strikes, and smaller working boats off Galicia have had gear fouled after sudden turns to protect props. The animals seem to know where control lives.”

(The moment seven orcas destroyed a yacht off the coast of Portugal. Image credit: Scuttlebutt Sailing News)

Translated to military targeting verbiage, the actions of the orcas might read as follows: 

• Tactic: Stern-first approach, coordinated by juveniles under matriarchal oversight.
• Target Selection: Vessels under 15m most vulnerable; larger ships merely inconvenienced.
• Weapon: Teeth on rudder stocks, sometimes peeling zinc anodes.
• Duration of Engagement: 6–40 minutes, followed by deliberate disengagement.
• Geographic Spread: Seasonal corridor from Rías Baixas to Moroccan waters, coincidentally overlapping NATO exercise areas and the new Baltic Pipe gas route.

In May 2024, a Polish yacht was sunk in the Strait of Gibraltar after repeated rudder strikes. European authorities now issue “orca interaction advisories” and checklists the way NATO once issued submarine warnings. Oceanographic conditions that stimulate erratic cetacean behavior are a possible cause, but recommended vessel procedures—slow to dead slow, engine neutral, crew forward—reads like a passive defensive posture adopted by a military formation.

Why Orcas are Perfect Irregular Warriors

In 2000, the BBC reported that, “Dolphins trained to kill for the Soviet navy have been sold to Iran…and other aquatic mammals were trained by Russian experts to attack warships and enemy frogmen.” Training cetaceans (usually dolphins) for military purposes is a long, complex process requiring a high degree of expertise, patience, and positive reinforcement. It is a rigorous process that takes years to complete, involving a deep bond of trust between animals and trainers. But Putin’s more recent shift to Orcas suggests a strategic pivot. Irregular Warfare often focuses on destabilizing an opponent through unconventional means, often below the threshold of open conflict. What could be more destabilizing than a fully deniable, self-replicating, aquatic predator? Irregular Warfare doctrine in this regard relies on a handful of principles:

• Psychological Impact: The possibility that an orca might be on Moscow’s payroll costs NATO millions in readiness. Every dorsal fin becomes a potential periscope. A commander spotting an Orca must entertain the possibility that this six-ton creature is a threat.
• Deniability: When a rudder is torn off, no one declares war on a whale. At worst it’s an “act of nature.” At best it’s a tragic accident at sea involving protected wildlife. Russia has possibly weaponized the “grey zone” between natural occurrence and state-sponsored attack.
• Zero Maintenance Overhead: No dry docks, no spare parts, no satellite uplink. They require only a feeding schedule and they self-replicate, free from bureaucratic entanglement.
• Scalability: Social learning is baked in. One trained matriarch can transmit tactics to an entire pod within a single season. The West calls it a “cultural fad.” The FSB calls it doctrine.
• Strategic Geography: The Iberian orcas patrol the exact chokepoint where Atlantic shipping funnels into the Mediterranean—close enough to European capitals to make headlines, far enough from Russian bases to preserve plausible deniability.

NATO working groups, which actually exist, are debating responses. Attempts to mimic communications may involve acoustic “orca pingers” as deterrents (currently ineffective). Industries have been pushed to develop reinforced composite rudders (expensive). And finally, the possibility of the deployment of counter-whales, specifically the reactivation of the U.S. Navy’s Cold War dolphin squadrons, hoping Flipper still answers the bell. There is also an unfortunate, ethical aspect to this evolving form of Irregular Warfare: Russia has demonstrated a willingness to direct orcas as fodder toward target vessels, often resulting in the death for the mammals. 

(The rudder of a ship damaged by orcas while in the Strait of Gibraltar is shown in Barbate in southern Spain in 2023. Image credit of Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images)

Conclusion

The North Atlantic feels crowded in a way it has not since 1986, a time that witnessed the highest operational tempo for both the U.S. and Soviet navies since the immediate post-WWII era. Today, military, civilian, and merchant ship captains plot courses around “high-interaction zones” the way they once avoided Soviet live-fire areas. The era of “Irregular Whale-fare” reminds observers that the most potent weapons are often those that defy categorization. Analysts must seriously prepare for a world where national security is not threatened by advanced missile systems, but perhaps by synchronized, highly intelligent, aquatic predators deployed with malign intent. More than likely, it is a combination of all of the above.

When a black fin slices moonlight off Cape Finisterre, observers might ask the uncomfortable question: is that a hungry adolescent looking for play, or is it something more nefarious? Either way, the vessel must be slowed, the helm centered, and the crew put on alert. The commissar of the deep does not negotiate. As one Galician skipper concluded: “They don’t hate us. They’re just doing their job.”

This is a work of speculative analysis. All citations on dolphins and belugas are based on fact and can be referenced by the reader. The only point of speculation (or narrative fiction) is whether Russia has trained and employed Orcas for irregular warfare. The purpose of the article is to stimulate thought, not to serve as historical fact. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not represent the official policy or position of the US Government or the Department of War.

Tags: Biological Weapons, irregular warfare, Maritime Security, NATO vs Russia, Russian military strategy, strategic deterrence

About The Author

• 
  
• Jeremiah "Lumpy" Lumbaca
• Jeremiah “Lumpy” Lumbaca, PhD, is a retired US Army Green Beret and current professor of irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and special operations with the Department of War. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI). Lumpy can be found on X/Twitter @LumpyAsia

5. China's Underwater Data Center Is Doing A Lot More Than Just Computing

​Summary:

China’s Hainan Province hosts what the article calls the only operational, commercial underwater data center in the world. Sealed steel capsules on the seabed near Lingshui house servers that process data, run cloud services, and train AI, with seawater providing cooling instead of energy intensive air conditioning. The first modules were deployed in 2022 and entered commercial operation in 2023, and recent upgrades enabled higher density AI computing. Benefits include lower energy use, reduced land footprint, and less local disruption. Risks include localized warming, possible biodiversity effects from deoxygenation, and potential leaks or corrosion. Some evidence suggests pods can act like artificial reefs.

Comment: China is using seabed infrastructure to scale AI compute while sidestepping land, power, and permitting friction that slows similar buildouts elsewhere. Seems pretty innovative (possible environmental impacts aside).  If undersea AI hubs proliferate, how will states monitor environmental effects and secure physical access points without turning seabed computing into a new strategic vulnerability?

China's Underwater Data Center Is Doing A Lot More Than Just Computing - SlashGear

slashgear.com · Emma Street · February 8, 2026

https://www.slashgear.com/2094111/china-underwater-data-center-ecosystem-study/?

By Feb. 7, 2026 7:45 pm EST

Shanghai Eye/YouTube

The high water demand of data centers causes significant problems. Large volumes of often potable, drinking-quality water are used for cooling, putting pressure on local water supplies and competing with households and agriculture. One way around this is to do what China has done — place data centers in a location where they're literally surrounded by non-potable water — the ocean. There have been several experimental underwater projects — like Microsoft's Project Natick, which concluded in 2020 — but currently, the only operational, commercial underwater data center in the world is in Hainan Province in China.

Over the past few months, this data center has begun operating as a large-scale artificial-intelligence computing facility, like DC's "AI Alley". Sealed inside steel capsules placed on the seabed near Lingshui, rows of servers now perform the same kinds of tasks as those in conventional data centers — processing data, running cloud services, and training AI systems — but are cooled naturally by surrounding seawater rather than by energy-intensive air-conditioning. This recent shift toward high-density AI computing marks the most advanced stage of a project that aims to combine computing power with lower energy use and a smaller land footprint.

The facility itself is not new. The first underwater modules were deployed in 2022 and entered commercial operation in 2023. The additional modules and upgraded hardware enabled it to take on far more demanding AI-focused tasks, transforming an already operational facility into a full-scale computing hub. China has another underwater data center – still under construction — near Shanghai.

What are the environmental impacts?

Gollykim/Getty Images

The positive environmental impact of such an undertaking is pretty clear. Conventional data centers use a lot of electricity to keep cooling systems running. Underwater facilities use the surrounding seawater as a heat sink, thereby eliminating most air conditioning and reducing overall energy use. Underwater data centers also reduce the impact on people. They don't require the clearance of large tracts of land, and there are no neighbors disturbed by noise pollution, repairs, or fuel deliveries — all reasons why many U.S. states are trying to delay AI data centers from being built.

However, this type of undersea structure remains new, and its environmental impact may not yet be fully understood. While the water is cooling the data center, the data center is ever-so-slightly warming the surrounding water. Although data from Microsoft's Natick project showed that temperature increases were highly localized and measured in fractions of a degree, even small temperature changes can have substantial effects on temperature-sensitive species. A report from researchers at the University of Johannesburg said that it "poses risk to aquatic biodiversity due to ocean deoxygenation". Any effects will be greater if more underwater data centers are built in the future. There is also the possibility of leaks, corrosion, or other damage.

Would marine life adapt to datacenter pods? Some studies have shown that the structures may act like artificial reefs, attracting fish and invertebrates. Microsoft's Nantick project included cameras that monitored and recorded the marine life outside the data center. Future underwater data centers could incorporate this tech to aid marine research. Unfortunately, there's no indication that this is something currently being implemented in Hainan.

slashgear.com · Emma Street · February 8, 2026

6. Why Xi Jinping has been purging China's military leadership, and what may come next

​Summary:

Since 2023, the PLA’s senior leadership has been heavily purged, culminating in the reported removal of CMC vice chairman Zhang Youxia after earlier removals of Rocket Force, defense minister, senior political officers, and Joint Staff leadership. Dean Cheng argues three drivers. First is corruption, which can degrade wartime performance. Second is guanxi networks that cross formal hierarchies and can entangle both rivals and Xi’s associates, as shown by the investigation of long-time Xi aide Zhong Shaojun. Third is bureaucratic politics and reform turbulence, including rivalry between the Political Work Department and the anti-corruption CMCCDI, plus resistance framed as violating the “Chairman responsibility system.” Despite disruption, PLA operations and modernization appear to continue, though discretion and training flexibility may tighten.

Comment: Pinball machines? But when Dean talks, I listen. 

It seems Xi is using anti-corruption and the Chairman responsibility system as a lever to enforce obedience during sweeping reform, even if that trades initiative for compliance in the ranks. If commanders narrow decision space to avoid scrutiny, does the PLA gain improved readiness, or does it lose the adaptive judgment needed for high-tempo joint warfighting around Taiwan and beyond?

Why Xi Jinping has been purging China's military leadership, and what may come next

breakingdefense.com

The Chinese PLA has gone through wide-scale restructuring in recent years, leading to questions as to why and what the effects may be.

By Dean Cheng on February 06, 2026 12:20 pm

https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/china-military-purge-why-xi-jingping-zhang-pla/?utm

Armoured vehicles and soldiers are seen during a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II, in Tiananmen Square on September 03, 2025, in Beijing, China. (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Since 2023, the senior leadership of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been decimated. The most recent casualty is Zhang Youxia, one of the two vice chairmen of the PLA’s Central Military Commission (CMC), and therefore one of the two most senior uniformed members of the Chinese security establishment. 

Zhang’s removal follows the relief of Gen. Li Yuchao of the PLA Rocket Force in 2023, defense minister (Li Shangfu) in 2024, the other vice chairman (He Weidong) and the head of the Political Work Department (Miao Hua) in 2025, and the head of the Joint Staff Department (Liu Zhenli) alongside Zhang in the current cycle. Those roles have yet to be formally filled, leaving only two official members of the CMC: Xi Jinping, as chairman, and Gen. Zhang Shengmin, head of the CMC Commission for Discipline Inspection (CMCCDI) who has also been promoted to vice chairman. 

Nor have the removals only been from the CMC. In the October 2025 purges that took down Hua, the Army and Navy political officers were also relieved. So was Gen. Lin Xiangyang, head of the Eastern Theater Command (ETC). Much of the PLA Rocket Force leadership was relieved in an earlier cycle, all on charges of corruption. 

But why has this been happening? There are at least three angles to consider: corruption, relationships and bureaucratic politics. 

“Corruption” tends to be the default term used in most of these cases. Given the endemic nature of corruption within the PRC and CCP, these accusations are broadly credible. One of the more egregious cases in recent years involved Lt. Gen. Gu Junshan, head of military housing in the then-General Logistics Department who was given a suspended death sentence for corruption in 2015. Gu reportedly had amassed several houses, a variety of art work, and even a solid gold bust of Mao Zedong. 

Given that corruption contributed to the failings of the Russian military in its Ukraine invasion, corruption has real implications for the PLA’s performance in event of any major contingency, be it in the Taiwan Straits, the South China Sea, or the Sino-Indian border. 

Another consideration, tied to the corruption issue, is that of “guanxi (关系),” or relationship, networks. Like any nation, there are a variety of bureaucratic authorities that allow the PRC to fulfill state functions. But undergirding and cross-cutting the formal line-and-block charts are relationship networks, comprised of familial, educational, career, hometown, provincial, and other ties. This is true across Chinese society, and is not unique to the PLA. In a low-trust society where there is no rule of law and there are few “objective” dispute resolution mechanisms, relationships assume a paramount role in getting work done, positions staffed, and information flowing. Indeed, much of what is termed “corruption” that marks Chinese society is comprised of goods and services that are part of the day-to-day operations of these unofficial networks, whether it is part of seeking entry into a network, or reinforcing already existing relationships. 

When Xi acted against former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, the resulting dragnet included not only Bo and his family, but both civilian and military officials that were reportedly tied to him in Chongqing and Chengdu province. This included Zhou Yongkang, Minister of Public Security and Politburo member. Gu was reportedly part of a relationship network that included former CMC vice chairman Gen. Xu Caihou, who was literally dragged from his sickbed and put under investigation. Similarly, the removal of defense minister Gen. Li Shangfu, who had previously served in China’s aerospace and rocket forces, was tied to the arrest of a number of senior PLA Rocket Force generals. As important, Li had reportedly been recommended for his position by Zhang Youxia; Li’s fall likely entangled Zhang because of these relationship networks. 

The relationship aspect may be a double-edged sword for Xi. In reporting the investigation into Zhang Youxia, one of the other officers also named was Zhong Shaojun — a long-time associate of Xi, reportedly helping draft statements for the Chinese leader when the latter was Zhejiang Party Secretary in the early 2000s. Despite never having served in the military, Zhong became a senior commissioned officer assigned key positions within the CMC internal bureaucracy. By 2024, he was head of the CMC General Office, responsible for managing the CMC schedule, agenda, and overall activities, with the rank of major general. At the time of his investigation, he had been promoted to lieutenant general and become a political officer for the PLA’s National Defense University. Zhong’s fall indicates that Xi is not afraid to turn the investigatory spotlight even on old associates, despite their “guanxi,” but also highlights that members of those networks may nonetheless be unreliable. 

PLA officers who are part of any “guanxi” network with any nascent anti-Xi movement are therefore likely to be purged. This is very different from suggesting the military itself is somehow opposing Xi. But because “guanxi” networks span civilian and military communities, ethnic and regional groupings, it is inevitable that military figures will be part of various networks that, in turn, may have become the focus of Xi’s attention. 

A third consideration is that of bureaucratic politics. In the context of the ongoing purges, this could take on at least two forms. One is the potential rivalry between the Political Work Department (PWD) and the CMCCDI. Prior to 2015’s massive reorganization, the General Political Department (GPD) was responsible for both enforcing political orthodoxy and overseeing anti-corruption measures. With the reorganization, the GPD was divided into the PWD, which retained responsibility for political warfare, political training, and promotion reviews, and the CMCCDI, responsible for countering corruption. The CMCCDI reports not only to the CMC, but also to the CCP’s Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection, the entity that polices the broader CCP for corruption. 

The promotion of so many officers who have subsequently been found to be corrupt (assuming that the charges are legitimate) suggests that the GPD and now PWD have failed to root out corruption. Similarly, if the problem is with the relationship networks, the PWD has also failed to curtail or control them. 

It is notable how many senior political officers have been removed in the various purges. These include not only Adm. Miao Hua, who as head of the PWD was the most senior political commissar in the PLA, but also the political officers for the ground forces, the navy, and the PLA Rocket Force. This suggests that whatever rot is at work in the PLA is as deeply rooted among its political officers as the staff officer corps. It is arguably not an accident that the only surviving uniformed member of the CMC is the head of the CMCCDI. 

Another aspect of the bureaucratic politics aspect, however, may be more directly related to the military reforms of the last two decades. The PLA of 2026 is a radically different organization from the one Xi inherited in 2012. 

• The CMC has been thoroughly shaken up and radically reorganized. The elevation of the CMCCDI alone, where it now is equivalent to the Joint Staff Department and the PWD, is a major change. 
• The PLA’s service structure has been significantly reformed. The PLA is now organized as four services (PLA Ground Force, PLA Navy, PLA Air Force, PLA Rocket Force) and four “arms” (Joint Logistics Support Force, Military Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, Information Support Force), with the services and arms responsible for training, equipping, and providing forces, but not, apparently, for warfighting. 
• The seven military regions have been replaced with five theater commands. Where the military regions were peacetime organizations, always under de facto ground force leadership, the theater commands are wartime command structures, with several headed by non-ground force officers. 

Such massive changes have been accompanied by major doctrinal shifts, as the PLA has pushed for greater joint operations at lower and lower operational levels. The Mao-era focus on mass has been replaced by a recognition of the enormous importance of advanced technology in fighting and winning future wars. 

The result has been comprehensive bureaucratic upheaval, whether in terms of funding priorities, bureaucratic clout, or promotion opportunities. In any organization, such a raft of changes would generate bureaucratic push-back, as even clean officers would see promotion opportunities lost, and service chiefs (especially the PLA Ground Forces) have watched their authority wane. 

It is notable that both Gen. Zhang Yongxia and Liu Zhenli were accused of “severely trampling and disrupting the Chairman responsibility system,” an accusation not leveled at many of the officers removed in earlier purges. The “Chairman responsibility system,” enshrined in both the PRC state constitution and CCP constitution, makes the CMC chairman (who is also the head of the CCP) the ultimate authority for all military decisions. As the State Council Information Office notes, “The CMC chairperson responsibility system is the institutional arrangement for practicing the Party’s absolute leadership over the military. It represents the top of the military chain of command, a role that combines central direction functions of both the Party and the state.” 

This suggests that their fall may be due to professional differences, even resistance to the slew of changes implemented by Xi. From Xi’s perspective, such professional differences could nonetheless pose a challenge to “the Party’s absolute leadership over the military,” requiring the imposition of the severest sanctions.  

Consequences? 

Despite the removal of so many senior leaders, the broader forces of the PLA appear to be operating normally, rather than pulling back. PLA forces continue to operate around Taiwan, with China’s third aircraft carrier transiting the Taiwan Straits. There is little indication of reduced Chinese cyber or space activities.  And despite the various charges of corruption, Chinese military modernization, including major acquisition programs, does not appear to have been affected. 

What may be less visible is the impact of these major disruptions on commanders’ discretion. Those in networks under investigation are likely to avoid drawing attention to themselves; that in turn may well mean adhering to the letter of regulations, standards, and norms. Training may be less flexible and decision space more restricted. Ironically, those who are corrupt may well suspend their activities, so that unit readiness in terms of stockpiles, spare part inventories, etc., may well improve. 

It is also noteworthy that, with the exception of the Eastern Theater Commander, the purges thus far have not affected too many of the theater commands — the organizations responsible for actually planning and implementing any Chinese use of force under the reorganized structure. 

What does this imply for PLA readiness at the war-fighter level? Xi will presumably repopulate the CMC. The wholesale removal of officers creates an opportunity for elevating new thinkers, and, ironically, accessing new networks. Those officers and networks will, in turn, potentially mark another major shift for the PLA. 

And how that shakes out, and whether another major purge is due in the future, will only be seen with time. 

Dean Cheng is a non-resident fellow with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and with the George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. When not translating Chinese articles, he can often be found feeding quarters into pinball machines.

breakingdefense.com

7. Book Review | America’s Taiwan Dilemma: Allies’ Reactions and the Stakes for US Reputation

​Excerpts:

The authors reveal a remarkably pragmatic consensus among interviewed elites: the primary objective of any state in the international system is survival. Mirroring the reliability of the Honda Accord described in the opening anecdote, elites consistently prioritized reliability over reputation regarding cross-Strait scenarios. Furthermore, the data suggest that Chinese aggression in the Taiwan straits would likely trigger balancing behavior, driving allies closer to the U.S. rather than away. However, this dynamic is contingent upon U.S. material capacity. This necessitates a sustained commitment to military readiness, best demonstrated through purposeful allocation of fiscal resources. Ultimately, the United States can weather damage to its reputation (e.g., by abandoning Taipei) but cannot afford to erode its reliability (its capability to deter through military force generation).

The authors’ focus on material capabilities perhaps undervalues the importance of political capital to generate combat power within democratic societies. While the authors briefly discuss the fiscal costs of such efforts (which they conclude are substantial), a deeper examination of the structural hurdles involved in sustaining military reliability would strengthen the argument. As someone entrenched in military personnel studies, my primary quibble is that military capacity is significantly constrained by demographics—a variable to which the authors pay relatively little attention. This omission is significant given the unmistakable numeric disparity between the Chinese military (quantitatively superior) and the allied forces under examination. Nevertheless, national security policymakers and practitioners—specifically those focused on the Indo-Pacific—can benefit greatly from this work. It effectively challenges Taiwan scenario shibboleths, allied decision-making, and the author’s own conclusions that contradict their initial assumptions.

Comment: I am somewhat on the fence, but I will probably add this to my "to read pile."

Book Review | America’s Taiwan Dilemma: Allies’ Reactions and the Stakes for US Reputation

by Ryan Pallas

|

02.09.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/09/book-review-americas-taiwan-dilemma-allies-reactions-and-the-stakes-for-us-reputation/

America’s Taiwan Dilemma: Allies’ Reactions and the Stakes for US Reputation. Michael A. Hunzeker and Mark A. Christopher. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. 2025. ISBN 978-1638573531. Pp. xv, 232. $39.99.

In the mid-20th century, British marques such as Jaguar and Morris Garages were the zenith of automotive excellence, style, and sophistication. While their reputation suggested they were the finest machines on the road, mechanical reality was starkly different; they were notoriously unreliable. Conversely, when Honda entered the American market in the 1970s, it lacked any established reputation; it was perceived as a purveyor of cheap, practical novelties. However, the reality was that these vehicles started every morning, remained leak-free, and reached 200,000 miles with basic maintenance. The enduring lesson is that, over time, reliability becomes reputation. Reputation is a lagging indicator—a snapshot of past performance or a fading echo of who an actor used to be. Reliability, by contrast, is a leading indicator—a prediction of future performance and a clear voice of intent. What does this anecdote offer the national security community? While reputation remains a fixture of U.S. foreign policy discourse, reliability is the more salient variable when examining the cross-Strait alliance issues, challenging national security orthodoxy.

This critical national security challenge, reputation vs. reliability, is the focus of an extensive, multi-year study culminating in the 2025 release of “America’s Taiwan Dilemma,” by Taiwan scholars Michael Hunzeker and Mark Christopher. The authors contend that reliability is the primary variable through which allies assess U.S. commitments regarding Taiwan, not the more frequently cited reputation. While reputation continues to dominate much of the discourse within the national security community, Hunzeker and Christopher argue that it is the tangible expectation of reliable performance that ultimately dictates allied behavior. The most important finding of this study is that America’s reputation for resolve in the Asia-Pacific region does not rest solely on whether Washington defends Taiwan. Instead, the credibility of Washington’s extended deterrence commitments depends on tangible U.S. military capabilities. When it comes to critical decisions, Australia, Japan, and South Korea prioritize Washington’s ability to protect their own interests over its demonstrated willingness to defend others. Interviewing over 100 elite experts on Australia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, Hunzeker and Christopher explore four scenarios and subsequent alliance behavior: the U.S. intervenes and Taiwan remains independent, the U.S. intervenes and China gains control of Taiwan, the U.S. not does intervene and Taiwan remains independent, and the U.S. does not intervene and China gains control of Taiwan.

Before proceeding, it is useful to establish baseline definitions for terms like ‘reputation’ and ‘reliability’ which often suffer from variance within the national security lexicon. Reputation – specifically reputation for resolve – is defined as “the belief others hold about an actor’s willingness to stand firm and face costs, based on that actor’s past behavior.” In contrast, reliability is defined “as the degree to which a given ally considers Washington to be both willing and able to protect that ally’s core national interests.” The primary barrier for this work is its heavy reliance on international relations theory. Although the authors clearly define terms, the argument relies on a baseline fluency in the rhetoric of deterrence and alliances. Consequently, readers without a background in international relations may find it necessary to familiarize themselves with the broader literature to fully appreciate the strategic implications of this work. In the same vein, one of this work’s positive attributes outside its contributions to better understanding cross-Strait relations is how it distills and summarizes expansive international relations theories for the layperson, increasing its accessibility and usefulness outside of a purely academic or expert setting. This work is as much a stand-alone scholarly work as it is a useful primer to those seeking to better understand the principles of deterrence and alliances within international relations.

Starting with the most geographically proximate ally, Japan, the authors conclude that the most optimal outcome is successful deterrence. This strategy relies on a capable military that ensures state survival—an enduring maxim of Machiavelli—and serves as the fulcrum for regional alliance cohesion. However, this reliance on military capacity presents a significant challenge: the Japan Self-Defense Forces are already numerically overmatched by the People’s Liberation Army, a disparity that will likely worsen given Japan’s demographic decline.

Regarding South Korea, the authors present a complex picture beginning from Seoul’s historic ties to China. Unlike Japan or Australia, Seoul remains notably hesitant to commit or comment on cross-strait relations, likely due to its proximity and economic integration with China. Hunzeker and Christopher posit that South Korea experiences the pressures of reliability and reputation more ‘acutely’ than other relevant actors. Yet South Korea proves empirically elusive. While interviews with human subjects reveal an attitude of ambiguity, the authors admit that a distinct unwillingness among South Korean elites to discuss the subject hinders their assessment, complicating their efforts to reach a firm conclusion. Regardless of the limitations, they find that domestic politics will play a factor in any Taiwan scenario for Seoul, more so than for other allies.

The last case study, Australia, benefits from geographic standoff but still faces the challenge of having strong economic ties to China while remaining militarily aligned with the West. Many of Australia’s elites expressed concern that the United States fails to appreciate the unique challenges faced by Canberra. It appears defending Taipei is less of a concern for Australia than the U.S. retaining the military capability to defend Canberra should the need arise.

The authors reveal a remarkably pragmatic consensus among interviewed elites: the primary objective of any state in the international system is survival. Mirroring the reliability of the Honda Accord described in the opening anecdote, elites consistently prioritized reliability over reputation regarding cross-Strait scenarios. Furthermore, the data suggest that Chinese aggression in the Taiwan straits would likely trigger balancing behavior, driving allies closer to the U.S. rather than away. However, this dynamic is contingent upon U.S. material capacity. This necessitates a sustained commitment to military readiness, best demonstrated through purposeful allocation of fiscal resources. Ultimately, the United States can weather damage to its reputation (e.g., by abandoning Taipei) but cannot afford to erode its reliability (its capability to deter through military force generation).

The authors’ focus on material capabilities perhaps undervalues the importance of political capital to generate combat power within democratic societies. While the authors briefly discuss the fiscal costs of such efforts (which they conclude are substantial), a deeper examination of the structural hurdles involved in sustaining military reliability would strengthen the argument. As someone entrenched in military personnel studies, my primary quibble is that military capacity is significantly constrained by demographics—a variable to which the authors pay relatively little attention. This omission is significant given the unmistakable numeric disparity between the Chinese military (quantitatively superior) and the allied forces under examination. Nevertheless, national security policymakers and practitioners—specifically those focused on the Indo-Pacific—can benefit greatly from this work. It effectively challenges Taiwan scenario shibboleths, allied decision-making, and the author’s own conclusions that contradict their initial assumptions.

Tags: alliances, cross-strait relations, Indo-Pacific security, reliability, reputation, us-taiwan relations

About The Author

• 
  
• Ryan Pallas
• Ryan Pallas, Ph.D. is an active-duty military officer and strategist. The views presented are that of the author and do not reflect the Department of Defense or any other governmental agency.

8. Hong Kong Publisher Jimmy Lai Gets 20 Years

​Summary:

A Beijing-selected three-judge panel sentenced Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai, 78, to 20 years for “collusion with foreign forces” and publishing “seditious” material tied to Apple Daily, shuttered in the 2021 crackdown. With maximum remission, he would still serve about 13 years and 4 months, effectively life given ill health and years of solitary confinement. Amnesty International called it a grim attack on expression and named him a prisoner of conscience; multiple press and rights groups urged UK and US intervention. The article argues only a prisoner swap, likely via POTUS, offers hope, amid broader tightening of speech, education, universities, and media under national security laws.

Comment: Rule by law? This sentence looks designed to end the Apple Daily legacy, warn the remaining press, and convert Lai into a diplomatic bargaining chip that Beijing can keep or trade. If outside leverage is limited and the law is now the weapon, what tools remain for democracies to raise the cost of repression without worsening Lai’s fate or accelerating Hong Kong’s self-censorship?

Politics

Hong Kong Publisher Jimmy Lai Gets 20 Years

Harsh sentence expected to keep 78-year-old democracy icon in jail for life

John Berthelsen

Feb 09, 2026

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/hong-kong-publisher-jimmy-lai-gets?utm

Associated Press photo

As expected, a three-judge panel handpicked by Beijing today (February 8) sentenced the 78-year-old Hong Kong publisher and democracy icon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and publishing seditious material in his now-defunct Apple Daily, which was abruptly closed by authorities in the 2021 crackdown that ended any hopes for democracy in what had been one of the most open cities in Asia.

A 20-year prison sentence typically means actual imprisonment of at least 13 years and 4 months, assuming maximum remission. The sentence is thus plainly calculated to keep Lai behind bars for the rest of his life. It was assailed by human rights organizations across the globe, with Amnesty International labeling it a “grim milestone” and a “cold-blooded attack on freedom of expression.” The organization officially designated Lai, who is in ill health, a prisoner of conscience. Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, The Committee to Protect Journalists, Chinese Human Rights Defenders and the International Press Institute, among others, all issued statements condemning the sentence, requesting that the UK and US governments intervene on humanitarian grounds.

Prisoner swap or other agreement only hope

Realistically, however, the only hope for Lai, a British citizen, is some sort of prisoner swap or other agreement with the government in Beijing, probably with the United States rather than the UK, which realistically has nothing to offer. US President Donald Trump last August renewed a promise to try to “save” Lai when Trump is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “I’m going to do everything I can to save him. I’m going to do everything … His name has already entered the circle of things that we’re talking about, and we’ll see what we can do,” Trump said.

It is uncertain, however, if any force can spring Lai, a particular bete noir for his insolence to Beijing. He is viewed as a primary mastermind and instigator of anti-China activities and riots in Hong Kong, often portrayed as an American “pawn” aiming to destabilize the city. He has been on Beijing’s radar since the 1990s when, then the founder of the popular clothing chain Giordano, he famously insulted the late Premier Li Peng in response to Li’s role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, calling him a “son of a turtle’s egg,” implying illegitimacy since turtles are understood to not know their fathers. That led to the Chinese government forcing him to divest from Giordano.

During the 2010-2020 decade of protest against increasing pressure on Hong Kong from Beijing, authorities accused him of working with foreign entities to endanger national security, a charge intensified by his high-profile meetings with US officials. They regarded his actions, including supporting the protests, and his brash newspaper’s editorials and reporting, as crossing what were called “red-line” challenges to central government authority.

Crackdown from Beijing

Authorities finally had enough of protest by academics, journalists, lawmakers and others against Beijing’s increasing pressure on Hong Kong’s freedom of expression – and Lai’s newspaper – on January 6, 2021, when, using the draconian National Security Law, as many as 1,000 police detained journalists and most of the lawmakers involved in 2020 District Council primary elections that Beijing opposed. Some 72 locations were said to have been searched with at least 53 people arrested, police said, for the crime of “subverting state power.” In addition to Apple Daily, police closed two other anti-Beijing media outlets, Stand News and In-Media.

With a handful freed, those who remained in custody became known as the “Hong Kong 47.” After spending months awaiting trial, two were acquitted. Sentences of the other 45 ranged from four years and two months to 10 years. Benny Tai, whom the court described as the “mastermind” in the unrest, was handed the longest jail term. As of February 1, 18 of those sentenced have been released.

“The prosecution of Jimmy Lai has been from the outset a perversion of the rule of law in Hong Kong, with the outcome pre-determined. Today’s sentence risks being a death sentence for a 78-year-old who is in poor health after some five years in solitary confinement,” Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation chairman and former US Consul General to Hong Kong James Cunningham said. “Jimmy Lai’s only ‘crime’ was to defend the freedoms Hong Kong’s people were promised by Beijing and London, through peaceful actions that were legal and should have remained so. Lai and his Apple Daily colleagues, also sentenced today after years in prison, should be released immediately. That they have been persecuted and held without bail in this travesty of justice is reprehensible.”

Held for five years

Lai has been in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison since December 2020, marking over five years in confinement. He was convicted of fraud on what legal scholars called a minor breach of office lease conditions, which contrasts with the non-prosecution of several government officials for major breaches of land use regulations. That more than the National Security case with its specially appointed judges shows how the whole judicial system and its judges will bend the law according to government demands. His detention, often spent in solitary confinement, and deteriorating health have been raised repeatedly by his family and international advocates. His son, Sebastien Lai, criticized Western governments for failing to take concrete action on his father’s behalf during recent diplomatic engagements, including a high-profile visit to Beijing by the British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

Six former Apple Daily executives were sentenced alongside Lai: Executive editor-in-chief Lam Man-chung, editor-in-chief Ryan Law, and editorial writer Fung Wai-kong all received 10 years in prison. Publisher Cheung Kim-hung received a sentence of six years and nine months while associate publisher Chan Pui-man was handed seven years, and editorial author Yeung Ching-kee received a sentence of seven years and three months. All previously pleaded guilty to one count of “collusion with foreign forces” under the National Security Law.

In the meantime, the prevailing mood in the city has continued to deteriorate. Newspapers refrain from printing articles critical of Beijing, “patriotic” education has been encouraged in schools, freedom of expression in universities has been curtailed. Amnesty International reported that the city has been transformed “from a bastion of free speech into an environment defined by fear, self-censorship, and strict adherence to national security narratives. This erosion…has been driven by the imposition of the National Security Law, the 2024 Safeguarding National Security Ordinance and a sweeping crackdown on media, civil society, and public discourse.”

9. Army looks to lease out land on 4 military installations for new commercial data centers

​Summary:

The Army is reviewing proposals to lease underutilized, non-excess land for commercial data centers at Fort Hood and Fort Bliss, Texas, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. A new RFP would create the Army’s first Enhanced Use Leases (EULs) for data centers, aiming to maximize financial return through leases as long as 50 years for large facilities supporting internet, cloud, and AI. The effort aligns with a Trump executive order to accelerate data center permitting on federal lands, replacing a 2024 Biden-era order tied to renewable-powered frontier AI centers. Proposals due Feb. 23 must detail utilities and a security plan covering cyber, physical, and supply chain risks. The article flags community concerns over water, power, noise, aesthetics, environmental and cultural constraints, and “in-kind” payments complicating taxation and infrastructure burdens.

Comment: Win-win? Seems like a practical move. But it is not without politics. Let's build small nuclear reactors to ensure sustained power for the data centers and the military installation and perhaps provide emergency backup power to the local population in the area. 

This is a bet that installations can turn idle acreage into long-term revenue and compute capacity, but it also pulls base land, utilities, and local politics into the AI infrastructure fight. If the Army hosts commercial data centers behind the fence, how will it prevent a 50-year lease from becoming a chronic readiness risk, where power, water, security, and community friction start to compete with the installation mission? (again, build small nuclear reactors).

Army looks to lease out land on 4 military installations for new commercial data centers

defensescoop.com · Brandi Vincent · February 6, 2026

The initiative was sparked by a recent directive from the Trump administration.

By

Brandi Vincent

February 6, 2026

https://defensescoop.com/2026/02/06/trump-military-bases-army-lease-land-data-centers/?utm

Private, public and not-for-profit companies could soon build out and host commercial data centers on U.S. Army installations, as part of a broader Trump administration-led push to expand the nation’s AI and technological infrastructure.

The Army is currently reviewing pitches from businesses that want to lease lots of underutilized land for data center development projects at Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

A recent request for proposals and more than a dozen associated materials shed light on the service’s plans to “maximize [its] financial return” by renting out non-excess, available properties for the stand-up of massive, mostly windowless buildings that could power the internet and cloud storage for 50-year terms.

“The RFP we have out now for data center [Enhanced Use Lease] opportunities, if awarded and executed, would be the first EUL for data centers on Army installations,” a spokesperson for the service told DefenseScoop. “This is a fully open and competitive process.”

Considered factories of the digital age, data centers are specialized facilities that house servers, storage, IT and networking equipment needed to process and store the data that underpins the internet, cloud computing, and AI.

They consume vast amounts of electricity and water for cooling, often leading to serious environmental impacts like high emissions, resource scarcity, and strained power grids.

“Proposals shall describe Offeror’s planned local outreach and engagement for its potential deployment of the data center on the Properties to assess local sentiment and any risks or opposition to execution of the Project,” officials wrote in the RFP.

Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that included directions for the Defense Department and three other agencies to facilitate new government-funded infrastructure projects related to data centers — and ultimately “authorize data center construction on appropriate Federal lands.”

That order notably revoked a Biden-era EO from 2024 that directed the DOD and Energy Department to lease federal land sites to private sector organizations to construct frontier AI data centers supported by renewable energy.

The Army spokesperson confirmed that this new RFP opportunity supports Trump’s order to accelerate the federal permitting of data center infrastructure, and “other administrative and Army senior leader priorities.”

Proposals are due on Feb. 23, and they will not be accepted past 5:00pm EST that day.

Submitted entries will need to detail all the utilities that would be essential for the projects, including but not limited to water, sanitary sewer, electrical power, and telecommunications. Those applying will also need to include a proposed security plan to mitigate potential cyber, physical, supply chain, and other security risks associated with the efforts.

“As far as the data centers, the concerns are typically the same regardless of location: water usage/requirements, electrical requirements, noise, and being unsightly,” Dr. Jason Walter, an associate professor of economics at the University of Tulsa told DefenseScoop. “As noted in the Fort Hood Q&A, the city of Copperas Cove will likely be affected as well as some of their water resources.”

The Q&As and other documents accompanying the RFP provide many details about each of the installations’ sizes, resources, populations, and more.

Notably, the attachments state that at Fort Bliss “only the 1,384 acres identified in the RFP are available for lease” — and the land was “reduced due to cultural and environmental considerations prior to posting” in the original request published in January.

“The Fort Bliss information seems to imply a lack of water. The land details seem to imply that there could be potential archaeological sites nearby, but the concerns for the area in question have been examined (chemical, environmental, archaeological, etc.) although typical permitting is still needed,” Walter noted. “The surrounding land may have been removed intentionally because of these concerns.”

When asked about the change, the Army spokesperson said that the service’s EUL process follows all applicable environmental laws and compliance efforts.

“The Army has a process to determine the parcels identified in the RFP, there are many considerations that go into this analysis to include installation mission, community impact, environmental and other impacts, etc.,” the spokesperson said.

Among other inclusions, the RFP notes that in exchange for the Army entering into the contemplated EULs and in accordance with existing laws, if chosen, the selected offerers will be “required to provide consideration in the form of in-kind, cash, or a combination thereof, not less than the fair market rental value of the lease interest as determined by” the Army, which it also refers to as “rent.”

Walter suggested that the 50-year aspect of the lease is significant, and pointed out that it seems the government would control most elements in any leasing agreements.

“Obviously, this could yield revenue from currently unused land, but the option for ‘in-kind’ payment is concerning. The construction and operation on federal land creates even more challenges. In addition, the site could be exempt or complicate local taxation while requiring more infrastructure. Any ‘in-kind’ payment could potentially make this worse,” the professor said.

“I think there are other concerns with these types of agreements,” Walter also told DefenseScoop. “The federal-private company angle is unique and creates grey areas and potential problems for the local population — this is in addition to the typical concerns with data centers.”

The Army isn’t the only military service that’s been looking to lease land for data center development. In October, the Air Force published a request for lease proposals that was also in accordance with the Trump administration’s executive order.

Written by Brandi Vincent

Brandi Vincent is a Senior Reporter at DefenseScoop, where she reports on disruptive technologies and associated policies impacting Pentagon and military personnel. Prior to joining SNG, she produced a documentary and worked as a journalist at Nextgov, Snapchat and NBC Network. Brandi grew up in Louisiana and received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. She was named Best New Journalist at the 2024 Defence Media Awards.

defensescoop.com · Brandi Vincent · February 6, 2026

10. Ukraine Seeks a War Plan Beyond Killing as Many Russian Soldiers as Possible

​Summary:

Russian forces are using medium-range drones to strike Ukrainian supply lines and hunt Ukrainian drone teams 12 to 50 miles behind the front, sustaining a slow advance and strengthening Russia’s leverage in talks. Ukraine’s approach remains centered on maximizing Russian infantry casualties in kill zones starting about 12 miles from the line, with a stated goal of killing 50,000 Russian soldiers per month, up from 35,000 in December. Some Ukrainian officers argue Ukraine must instead target Russian rear areas, including drone operators and company and battalion command posts. Ukraine lacks enough drones and other weapons to hit midrange targets 20 to 120 miles behind the front, limiting its ability to counter Russia’s method.

Comment: Russia has identified Ukrainian drone logistics and rear movement as a tactical center of gravity, and it is using midrange drones to turn routine sustainment into fear and friction. Ukraine’s manpower and targeting math is colliding with a capability gap, because killing infantry forward cannot fully offset an enemy that is disrupting C2 and logistics in the depth.

If Russia’s drones punish movement to and from the line, what should Ukraine treat as the decisive objective in the rear: supply routes, drone teams, or command posts?

If Ukraine cannot reliably strike 20 to 120 miles deep, what operational problem must Western support solve first: sensors, platforms, munitions, or integration?

If Russian forces advance slowly but steadily through rear disruption, what does success look like for Ukraine in 2026: holding ground, restoring depth fires, or changing the logic of the fight?

Ukraine Seeks a War Plan Beyond Killing as Many Russian Soldiers as Possible

WSJ

Russia’s grinding, slow-motion advance weakening Kyiv’s hand at negotiating table

By Anastasiia Malenko

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 and Marcus Walker

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 | Photography by Emanuele Satolli for WSJ

Feb. 8, 2026 11:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-seeks-a-war-plan-beyond-killing-as-many-russian-soldiers-as-possible-a7f74615?mod=wknd_pos1

NOVOMYKOLAIVKA, Ukraine—In this corner of southeast Ukraine, Russian forces are pummeling rear areas with drone attacks, seeking to sap the strength of Ukrainian defenders by cutting their supply lines. Snow-covered roads are littered with burned-out pickup trucks.

As the conflict nears the four-year mark, Russia’s increasingly effective use of drones is helping its forces maintain a grinding, slow-motion advance. It is weakening Ukraine’s hand at the negotiating table, where it is under pressure to cede strategically vital territory.

Russia’s battlefield drone strategy is focused on a medium range of about 12 to 50 miles. Priority targets include Ukrainian drone operators as well as logistics.

In contrast, Ukraine’s approach is still largely about inflicting maximum casualties on Russian infantry when they enter a kill zone beginning about 12 miles from the front line. Ukraine is betting on doing more of the same this year. The goal is to kill 50,000 Russian soldiers a month, up from 35,000 in December, new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said recently.

Many Ukrainian soldiers and officers say that a shift is needed and that Ukraine needs to match Russia’s strategy of systematically targeting the rear.

Ukrainian forces could better resist the relentless Russian pressure if they focused more on targeting Russian drone operators and company and battalion command posts many miles behind the line of contact, said Maj. Oleh Shyriayev, commander of the 225th Assault Regiment, which is fighting off constant Russian assaults in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

“Everything rests on their shoulders at the tactical level,” he said.

Russian soldiers killed and wounded have reached nearly 1.2 million, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. But even that toll hasn’t led the Kremlin to relent. Ukraine’s military has likely suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 total casualties, CSIS estimates.

“Russia has adopted a much more systematic approach of hunting for Ukrainian drone teams, to disrupt and destroy Ukrainian drone logistics, because that’s the center of gravity of the Ukrainian defensive system,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst. Ukraine has better individual drone pilots, but their strikes against targets in the rear are more piecemeal, he said.

Ukraine is short of drones and other weapons that can hit midrange targets at 20 to 120 miles behind the front line, Gady noted. More help from Western partners would be needed to improve its arsenal.

Here in the Zaporizhzhia region, it is easy to see why Russia’s army still can’t achieve a decisive breakthrough, despite having more men and munitions.

A soldier from Ukraine’s Presidential Brigade stands outside a bunker.

The snowy plains stretch for miles, occasionally interrupted by bare trees. The sky buzzes with deadly Ukrainian drones when Russian infantry try to cross the fields. Long ditches lined with coils of razor wire and concrete pyramids known as dragon’s teeth await Russia’s increasingly rare armored attacks.

The bare terrain doesn’t defend itself, however. Shyriayev’s troops are working like firefighters, rushing to respond when Russian soldiers find gaps in the thinly held front line. They are doing their best to make the strategy work, said Shyriayev.

Ukraine has more troops holding the line in the eastern Donetsk region, the war’s single biggest battlefield. That has left it short of troops to cover the southern front.

Russian forces are now barely 14 miles from the outskirts of Zaporizhzhia city, putting it within range of some of their drones. Fears are growing in the city, whose prewar population was 700,000, that Russia could seek to make daily life impossible with constant drone attacks on civilians, like it has done in the city of Kherson.

Soldiers from Ukraine’s Presidential Brigade.

Ditches filled with razor wire carve along the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Soldiers from Ukraine’s Presidential Brigade. Ditches filled with razor wire carve along the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.

In the countryside some 15 miles behind the southern front, Ukrainian troops’ challenges are apparent. Antidrone nets cover long sections of road. In some sections, workers struggle to repair sections of netting torn by sleet and ice.

The Russians pick a road and try to destroy everything on or near it, said a deputy brigade commander on the southern front. Their goal is to break Ukrainian soldiers mentally by making all movement to and from the line of contact terrifying, he said.

His brigade is building up its midrange drone capabilities to hit Russian forces at up to 15 miles behind the front line, before they can launch infiltration attempts, he said. But more progress is needed.

The Russians rarely assault Ukrainian positions directly these days. Instead, small numbers of soldiers try to bypass them and get as far into the rear as possible to sow chaos. The Russians pay a high price, but they keep coming.

A Ukrainian surveillance drone pilot known by the call sign Kuts inside a drone workshop in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Interceptor drones are used to shoot down Russia Shahed-type drones.

A Ukrainian surveillance-drone pilot known by the call sign Kuts inside a drone workshop in the Zaporizhzhia region. Interceptor drones are used to shoot down Russia Shahed-type drones.

Near the town of Hulyaipole, which the Russians have partly taken, a Ukrainian surveillance-drone pilot known by his call sign Kuts was flying his drone back to base to recharge its battery recently. On the drone’s video feed, he spotted three Russian soldiers only a kilometer away. “No one can understand how they got there,” he said.

He directed attack drones to the spot, which killed the Russians.

For Ukrainian infantrymen, Russia’s midrange drones make moving to and from the front line the most perilous part of their work.

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“During rotations, unfortunately, there are a lot of losses, the most losses,” said a 52-year-old rifleman known by his call sign Psycho. His face bore the extreme exhaustion typical of men who have spent too long in front-line dugouts. After a few days’ rest at his brigade’s psychological support center, he returned to the front.

Kuts, the drone pilot, said he was paying only limited attention to the peace negotiations with Russia, the U.S. and Ukraine. With no deal in sight, it is more useful to watch the icy fields of Zaporizhzhia on his video feed, he said.

“They say one thing publicly,” he said. But on the battlefield, “I see intensified assault operations.”

An entrepreneurial ethos allowed Ukrainian drone pilots to adapt drones and combat tactics to counter evolving Russian threats. Now they are sounding the alarm over Europe’s vulnerability to the high-tech war they are fighting. Photo: Ben C. Solomon

WSJ

11. Opinion | America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space

​Summary:

Arthur Herman  argues the United States has regained momentum in space after a period when China appeared ascendant. He cites China’s recent achievements, including lunar sample returns in 2020 and 2024, Tiangong’s completion in 2022, and continued antisatellite weapons work. He then claims Beijing is now stumbling, pointing to launch failures, a December orbital explosion, a Shenzhou-20 debris strike, and leadership turmoil tied to Rocket Force purges. He credits POTUS and NASA administrator Jared Isaacman with renewed U.S. direction, highlights Artemis II launching next month and Artemis III by 2028, and emphasizes SpaceX’s launch cadence, commercial ecosystem strength, Space Force resiliency measures, and the Artemis Accords.

Comment: The piece frames space dominance as an industrial and governance contest, where launch tempo, resilient constellations, and private sector scale matter as much as flags on the moon. If antisatellite weapons remain the core strategic risk, does winning the “space race” mean reaching the moon first, or making U.S. space-enabled warfare and commerce too redundant to cripple?

Opinion | America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space

WSJ · America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space

The first manned moon mission since 1972 will launch next month. China, meanwhile, is struggling.

By

Arthur Herman

Feb. 8, 2026 4:58 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/america-reclaims-its-dominance-in-space-b5a9f74d

A SpaceX Super Heavy booster carrying the Starship spacecraft in Starbase, Texas, Oct. 13, 2025. Steve Nesius/Reuters

Just two years ago, America’s longstanding dominance in space seemed under threat. China had been surging ahead for more than a decade and planned to become the world’s leading space power. It had two successful robot moon landings, which returned with lunar samples in 2020 and 2024. It completed the Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) orbital space station in 2022. Most troubling: Beijing continues to test and develop antisatellite weapons that could cripple the GPS and other space-based systems on which the U.S. would rely in time of war.

In 2023 officials including Bill Nelson, then administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, warned that China was trying to establish a dominant foothold on the moon by 2030, with the aim of seizing resource-rich areas near the lunar south pole. Mr. Nelson said the Chinese might assert sovereignty over the moon itself. Stopping them didn’t seem a Biden administration priority, especially when space-capsule safety problems stranded two American astronauts at the International Space Station for more than nine months.

In the past year, however, the energy and vision in the U.S. government has shifted, thanks to the Trump administration and NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman. Meanwhile, Beijing is struggling to keep its space ambitions on track.

The recent launch failures of China’s Long March-3B and Ceres-2 commercial rockets and the explosion of another, Landspace’s Zhuque-3, shortly after reaching orbit in December raise questions about the program’s technical competence. In November, China’s Shenzhou-20 spacecraft was hit by debris, delaying the return of three astronauts by more than a week. The 2023 leadership shake-up in China’s Rocket Force, followed by the removal of other high-level leaders, sowed confusion and instability in the overall space program.

China still plans to launch a data center into space in the next five years, but that timeline looks unlikely. Instead, the U.S. now has the momentum, competence and leadership to dominate the space race in the private and public sectors.

The centerpiece of the Trump space program is Artemis II, which is scheduled to launch next month. It will carry four astronauts on a 10-day orbit of the moon, preparing the way for Artemis III by 2028. That mission will put human beings—including the first woman—on the moon for the first time since 1972. The Artemis III crew will conduct scientific research around the lunar south pole—the area the Chinese hoped to claim.

China’s heavy-lift rockets for lunar landings, like the Long March 9 and 10, won’t be ready for operation until 2030. The massive March 10 reportedly can move a payload of 70 metric tons. Compare that with Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship, which can lift 150 metric tons and will be the backbone of Artemis III, with more upgrades in the works.

America’s place in the current space race owes a lot to Mr. Musk and SpaceX. The company carried out a record 165 launches in 2025, compared with 92 for China. That includes more than 100 for Starlink alone, which makes SpaceX the world master in orbital missions.

Mr. Musk last week announced the merger of SpaceX with xAI, which will enlist artificial intelligence and machine learning in space exploration. He is talking about putting AI data centers into space, where solar power can make them as much as 10 times as efficient as those on Earth.

Lockheed-Martin is responsible for the Orion space capsule for Artemis II and III. Boeing and Blue Origin will continue to be major contributors to America’s space programs. They are joined by rising companies like Astranis, which builds geostationary orbit satellites, and Relativity Space, which uses 3-D printers to make commercial rockets. Hadrian builds precision component factories that help space manufacturers get the parts they need 10 times as fast at 1/20th of the cost. Rocket Lab conducts cheap and rapid space launches for small satellites. These companies and others will keep space a growing commercial and national-security sector for America.

China and Russia are still America’s adversaries in space, especially with their antisatellite arsenals. But the U.S. Space Force, which Congress created during President Trump’s first administration, understands the threat. It is deploying ground-based systems to disrupt Chinese intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites. Space Force also is launching “proliferated” constellations, or networks, of satellites that are harder for adversaries to disrupt than a single satellite.

Space Force’s $40 billion budget this year includes contracts for building the Golden Dome system, which will use space-based interceptors to take out missiles targeting the U.S. and its allies.

American space dominance benefits more than the U.S. The Artemis missions take their name from the Artemis Accords, established by the first Trump administration in 2020 to create rules for international cooperation in space. Sixty countries have signed the accords. China and Russia haven’t.

More than 50 years ago, America ushered in a global era of using space for communication and connectivity. Today, that U.S. dominance will produce space-based prosperity and enhance security.

Mr. Herman is author of “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II” and “Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump,” the latter forthcoming in April.

Unruly Republic: With artificial intelligence disaster looming, we’re told to empower experts, raise taxes! Could we be heading into another version of climate alarmism? Photo: Noah Berger/AP/Vincent Isore/Zuma Press/Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the February 9, 2026, print edition as 'America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space'.

WSJ · America Reclaims Its Dominance in Space

12. Supermajority Gives Japan’s Takaichi Strong Hand at Home and Abroad

​Summary:

Japan Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi won a landslide lower-house victory. Her coalition took 354 of 465 seats, and her Liberal Democratic Party won 316, its best result. The mandate gives her strong control of committees and the ability to override the upper house on legislation. She plans strategic investment in 17 sectors, temporary consumer tax relief, and higher defense spending. Markets welcomed stability but investors worry about borrowing and future rates and currency risk. Beijing has already imposed economic reprisals after her Taiwan comments, including canceled tourist flights and tighter access to critical minerals. The win may also revive debate on loosening defense export rules and revising the pacifist constitution, though a referendum would be required.

Comment: With a supermajority and explicit alignment with POTUS on allied burden sharing (or burden owning), Takaichi can press faster defense and economic security shifts across the Asia-Indo-Pacific, but she also inherits fewer excuses if results lag. If Beijing can pressure Japan through tourism and critical minerals, what is Takaichi’s first decisive test: rewire supply chains, expand defense exports to partners, or spend political capital on constitutional revision?

Supermajority Gives Japan’s Takaichi Strong Hand at Home and Abroad

WSJ

Win offers chance to push through policies on economy and defense—and might open the door to revising Japan’s constitution, a conservative goal for decades

By Jason Douglas

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 and Junko Fukutome

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Feb. 9, 2026 5:20 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/supermajority-gives-japans-takaichi-strong-hand-at-home-and-abroad-26b1f98e

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi spoke of Japan’s ‘unshakable unity' with the U.S. Franck Robichon/Pool/Reuters

TOKYO—Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s blowout election victory gives her an unprecedented shot at shaking Japan out of its long economic funk and taking on a bigger security role deterring Chinese ambitions in Asia.

Her agenda includes new investment in strategic industries, temporary tax relief for inflation-weary consumers and fatter defense budgets.

For the U.S., Takaichi’s triumph ensures Japan is led by a prime minister who is in broad agreement with American goals, especially President Trump’s imperative of getting allies to spend more on regional security.

“We will confirm the unshakable unity between Japan and the U.S., while advancing broad Japan-U.S. cooperation in diplomacy, economics, and security,” Takaichi said at a news conference Monday.

Her message to fellow lawmakers is, “This is Japan’s last roll of the dice. We are going to have to go big on economic growth, on economic security. We’ve just got to do it,” said William Chou, deputy director of the Japan Chair at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Sanae Takaichi’s huge victory is likely to strengthen ties with the U.S., says WSJ Tokyo bureau chief Jason Douglas. Photo: Kyodonews/ZUMA Press

But even though she now leads a parliamentary juggernaut with the biggest majority of any Japanese leader in history, Takaichi still faces challenges.

Investors have been jittery about the prospect of more government borrowing to finance her spending plans. That could lead to higher interest rates and a weaker currency in future, analysts say, though financial markets broadly welcomed the prospect of long-term, stable leadership in Japan on Monday, with stocks hitting new records, the currency strengthening and bond yields generally stable.

Another big challenge is Beijing. Japan has suffered a barrage of economic reprisals from China after Takaichi said Japan might get pulled into any conflict over Taiwan, a self-ruled island democracy Beijing claims as its own territory. It isn’t clear if or when those tensions will ebb.

And analysts say that Takaichi will need to deliver for voters who, having handed her such a big win, will have little patience with her government if it fails to measure up.

“I do think that the landslide puts pressure on Takaichi to deliver results. There can be no excuses like in the past few years, where leaders could blame opposition parties for stalling,” said Rintaro Nishimura, senior associate in Tokyo at the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm.

In the Japanese parliament’s lower-house election Sunday, Takaichi’s ruling coalition won 354 of the 465 seats up for grabs. The gains included a more than two-thirds majority for her Liberal Democratic Party alone, which won 316 seats, its best-ever result.

That substantial margin of victory gives Takaichi’s administration overwhelming control over Japan’s legislature. The LDP and its smaller coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party, can now claim a majority of slots on key committees that scrutinize legislation as well as the power to appoint those panels’ chairs. They can also overrule parliament’s upper house if the two chambers clash on legislation.

One legislative goal now within easy reach is dismantling restrictions on exports by Japan’s defense industry. Current rules limit exports to nonlethal uses, such as rescue missions, transportation and minesweeping. Supporters say ditching those restrictions would drive investment and innovation in the sector by allowing Japanese firms to find new markets and customers, which would help Japan play a much bigger role in regional security by arming neighbors such as Australia and the Philippines.

Robotics played a role in exercises by Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and allies including the U.S. in January. Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Takaichi’s huge majority might also tempt her to pour her political capital into conservative causes, some analysts say, such as revising Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution to recognize Japan’s Self-Defense Forces as a fully fledged military. The constitution says Japan will never maintain land, sea or air forces, so the JSDF operates in a legal gray area. Such a change would ultimately require approval in a referendum and could face stiff opposition from other political parties and sections of the public.

Relations with China show little sign of improving. Beijing has canceled tourist flights to Japan and squeezed Japanese companies’ access to critical minerals in retaliation for Takaichi’s Taiwan comments. Though she has said she won’t retract her remarks, her new mandate could give her added confidence in dealing with Beijing and might even give her the political space to try to ease tensions from a position of strength.

“I think for Ms. Takaichi, it’s wise to appear tough publicly while being a bit more flexible behind the scenes where appropriate,” said Tomoko Ako, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Tokyo.

Takaichi’s overarching priority is the economy, however. Her immediate economic priorities include a temporary cut to a consumption tax on food to give households some relief from rising prices. A longer-term goal is making Japan’s economy more secure by weaning it off Chinese-centered supply chains for essential materials such as critical minerals, and honing Japan’s technological edge. Her government has identified 17 sectors it wants to target for strategic investment, including critical minerals but also precision machinery, biotechnology and quantum computing.

The size of her majority should give her the ammunition to see off any internal opposition to her economic plans in the LDP, while also giving her the cover to make unpopular decisions, which could include raising taxes to finance spending promises if revenues disappoint.

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Jason Douglas is the Tokyo bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, overseeing the Journal's coverage of economics, finance, business and politics in Japan.

He was previously the paper's Asia economics reporter in Singapore, where he wrote about China's economy and global trade. He joined Dow Jones & Co. in 2007 as a newswires reporter in London after stints in the U.K. business press and newspapers in Northern Ireland.

Junko Fukutome is a news assistant and researcher at The Wall Street Journal in Tokyo. Junko has reported from Tokyo and New York on U.S. and international politics and culture. She has interned at outlets including CNN.

Junko earned her bachelor's in law from Waseda University and a master’s in journalism from Columbia Journalism School.

WSJ

13. Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo

​Summary:

The article says POTUS has asserted a U.S. right to take another country’s oil, announcing plans to control Venezuela’s oil industry after U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January. It reports the U.S. is pressing Venezuela to “turn over” up to 50 million barrels for U.S. sale and pushing American firms to drill, while claiming some revenue will be returned without stating how much. Critics in Congress call it “stolen oil” taken “at gunpoint,” and foreign governments and China condemn it as illegal appropriation. The piece contrasts this with past U.S. actions that sought access and market stability, not physical control, and warns the oil narrative can fuel anti-Americanism and violence.

Comment: Even if meant as leverage or restitution, the move hands adversaries a potent colonial frame, and it may turn Venezuelan oil politics into insurgent fuel. If the United States is now claiming physical control of foreign resources, what limiting principle stops this from becoming a template that undermines U.S. legitimacy and alliance cohesion the next time force is used? Or is it that "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must?"

Trump’s Oil Grab in Venezuela Shatters an American Taboo

NY Times · Michael Crowley · February 8, 2026

By Michael Crowley

Reporting from Washington

• Feb. 8, 2026
• 
  

U.S. presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But President Trump has asserted a U.S. right to take it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/us/politics/trump-oil-venezuela.html

U.S. presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But President Trump has asserted a U.S. right to take it.

Venezuela’s Cardon oil refinery. Critics say President Trump’s plan for the country’s oil industry revives bitter memories of colonial exploitation and flagrantly violates international law.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

U.S. presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But President Trump has asserted a U.S. right to take it.

Venezuela’s Cardon oil refinery. Critics say President Trump’s plan for the country’s oil industry revives bitter memories of colonial exploitation and flagrantly violates international law.Credit...Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

President George W. Bush said he was invading Iraq to keep America safe. But critics saw a hidden motive: oil.

“No blood for oil!” became a global rallying cry, and Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, accused Mr. Bush of seeking “to control the Middle East oil.”

The Bush administration rejected the charge and was determined to refute it. After invading and occupying Iraq in March 2003, Bush officials were careful to leave Iraqis in control of their oil industry, and they never sought special treatment for American firms.

As foreign investors moved in, the biggest winners by far were not U.S. companies but Chinese ones.

American presidents have long been accused of plotting to control foreign oil. But while the United States has built relationships and even intervened abroad for oil, it has never simply seized control of another country’s oil reserves.

“I can’t think of a military operation that the U.S. engaged in to actually take oil from anybody,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security.

Until now.

Immediately after U.S. forces captured Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January, President Trump announced plans to take control of the country’s oil industry.

Since then, Mr. Trump has forced Venezuela’s government to begin “turning over” as many as 50 million barrels for sale by the United States and is pressuring American firms to start drilling in the country, which sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

“The people of the United States are going to be big beneficiaries,” Mr. Trump said at the White House last month. (Mr. Trump says that some oil revenue will be returned to Venezuela, but not how much.)

Venezuela’s parliament passed legislation in late January opening the country’s mostly state-run oil sector to more foreign investment, a decision critics note was made as U.S. warships floated near Venezuela’s coast.

“You are taking their oil at gunpoint,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a hearing in late January. Mr. Trump is selling “stolen oil,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, has charged.

A monument to oil workers in Cabimas, Venezuela. Mr. Trump has charged that Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets” in 2007 when it increased state control over its oil industry.Credit...Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters

Mr. Trump’s fixation with Venezuelan crude is somewhat puzzling, given that global oil prices are relatively low, and that the United States is now a net energy exporter no longer dependent on foreign oil supplies.

Despite that, analysts say that Mr. Trump is confirming some of the worst suspicions about U.S. motives worldwide. He also risks infuriating ordinary Venezuelans, who could oppose American efforts to drill their oil — possibly with violence — and resist a political alignment with Washington.

“One lesson that emerged from Iraq,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Bush administration official who worked closely on Iraq policy, “was how toxic the oil narrative can be — and how potent it can be in fomenting anti-Americanism.”

Critics say Mr. Trump’s plan revives bitter memories of colonial exploitation and flagrantly violates international law, including a 1974 United Nations resolution that asserts that every country has full rights to “all its wealth, natural resources and economic activities.”

In China, a foreign ministry spokeswoman said last month that Mr. Trump was “bullying” Venezuela to give up its oil. Spain joined with five Latin American countries, including Mexico and Brazil, in denouncing “the external appropriation” of Venezuela’s natural resources as illegal.

Mr. Trump has sought to turn the tables, charging that Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets” in 2007 when it increased state control over its oil industry and forced two of the three U.S. companies operating in the country to abandon their projects at considerable expense.

Whether that is Mr. Trump’s true motivation is unclear. He has asserted a U.S. right to “take the oil” from other countries, from Iraq to Syria to Libya, although he has not previously done so.

That is a sharp break from decades of precedent, Ms. O’Sullivan said.

“America has, by and large, focused on ensuring access to oil and the smooth functioning of global oil markets — which is different from physical control of oil,” she said.

A C.I.A. Coup for Oil

Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, with supporters after declaring his plans to nationalize the country’s oil sector in 1951. The Eisenhower administration joined with Britain in fomenting a 1953 coup that overthrew him.Credit...Associated Press

Oil has shaped U.S. foreign policy at least since 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on imperial Japan to check its aggression in Asia. Japan responded by attacking Pearl Harbor, which dragged the United States into World War II.

The war’s industrial nature showed that national security depended on access to oil. By 1946, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were warning about the risk of “an oil-starved war” should the United States lose access to Middle East supplies. That mind-set gave birth to America’s courtship of Saudi Arabia, where huge oil reserves were discovered in 1938.

Iran also emerged at the time as a major Western oil supplier. But a crisis erupted in 1951 when Iran’s new prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalized his country’s oil industry. Worried that Mr. Mossadegh could cut off the West and “deny Iranian oil to the free world,” as a National Security Council policy memo later put it, the Eisenhower administration joined with Britain, which had lost a major oil stake in Iran, in fomenting a 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian leader.

The United States did not try to seize control of Iranian oil, however. The N.S.C. memo, written a few months after the coup, said the U.S. government should help Iran remain an “independent” nation, in part by supporting the development of its oil industry.

It was a case where national interest and profit motive overlapped. American and British oil companies would profit handsomely after the coup from doing business with Iran’s pro-Western shah, as noted by critics who cite the episode as proof of American greed and treachery.

After decades of official U.S. denials, the C.I.A. in 2013 finally admitted its role in toppling Mr. Mossadegh.

Blood for Oil

Smoke from burning oil wells blanketed the sky in Kuwait in 1991. After U.S. forces liberated the country, President George H.W. Bush made no effort to take control of any oil.Credit...Ángel Franco/The New York Times

In his 1980 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter made a dramatic declaration: America would fight a war for oil.

“Our excessive dependence on foreign oil is a clear and present danger to our nation’s security,” Mr. Carter explained. Thus, any attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf and its oil “will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America,” and would “be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

The Carter Doctrine, as that position came to be known, was prompted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan months earlier. U.S. officials worried that Soviet troops might continue west, into the oil fields of neighboring Iran.

That did not happen. But a decade later, the United States would launch its first oil war.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded its oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. President George H.W. Bush quickly decided to respond with force. He argued that it was vital to defend global order. But he did not hide his economic motive to free Kuwait’s oil fields from Mr. Hussein’s control. “We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless,” Mr. Bush said.

His secretary of state, James A. Baker, explained why: “If you want to sum it up in one word, it’s ‘jobs.’”

After U.S. forces liberated Kuwait, Mr. Bush made no effort to take control of any oil. He even declined grateful Kuwaiti offers of preferential treatment for American oil companies.

“The U.S. could have commandeered Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil and didn’t,” Mr. Fontaine said.

Iraq: W.M.D. or Oil?

After invading and occupying Iraq in March 2003, officials in President George W. Bush’s administration were careful to leave Iraqis in control of their oil industry.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Even so, when Mr. Bush’s son George W. invaded Iraq in 2003, many skeptics dismissed his main rationale — a false claim that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — as a cover story for the secret goal of controlling Iraq’s oil.

Fueling the suspicion was Mr. Bush’s past as a former Texas oil man; his vice president, Dick Cheney, had run the energy giant Halliburton.

Bush officials disputed the charge. “That’s just not what the United States does,” Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, told an interviewer shortly before the invasion. “We never have, and we never will.”

A litany of shifting explanations and misstatements from Bush administration officials invited doubts about their motives. But experts say there is extensive evidence showing that U.S. officials never tried to commandeer Iraq’s oil or win special treatment for American firms, and actually took steps to limit their own role in the country’s postwar oil industry.

American Navy sailors patrolling near an oil platform in Iraq in 2004.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

“This idea that the war was meant to be a permanent oil grab is false,” said Emily Meierding, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of “The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict.”

Before the invasion, she said, a team of White House officials drew up plans for Iraq’s oil industry. “They were very clear that Iraq’s resources belonged to the people of Iraq, that oil production should belong to the Iraqis and that the U.S. should transfer control to the Iraqi people as soon as possible,” Ms. Meierding said, noting that she was speaking only for herself and not her institution.

American companies including Exxon Mobil did sign early contracts with the country’s new government. But high risks and disappointing results caused them to retreat. (Exxon Mobil recently signed a deal to return to Iraq.)

But their Chinese rivals moved aggressively, and the dominant player in Iraq’s oil sector today is the China National Petroleum Corporation.

A Lesson for Venezuela

Supporters of Venezuela’s ousted president, Nicolás Maduro, rallying in Caracas last month. Immediately after U.S. forces captured Mr. Maduro, Mr. Trump announced plans to take control of the country’s oil industry.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

The mere perception that America was stealing Iraq’s oil inflicted severe damage there, Ms. O’Sullivan said, helping to fuel a bloody insurgency against American forces and undermining public trust in Iraq’s U.S.-backed government.

That might be a cautionary lesson for Mr. Trump. U.S. oil executives already say the risks and costs of doing business in Venezuela are daunting. Those obstacles could grow if Mr. Trump’s approach angers Venezuelans who might otherwise be sympathetic to the United States.

The Venezuelan people “are extremely sensitive to any perception of foreign exploitation,” Ms. Meierding said. “So they’re going to want their industry to revive, and they know they’ll need foreign investment. But they are not going to accept direct U.S. control, at least for the long term.”

Ms. Meierding suggested what may be the main reason countries do not wage wars for oil more often.

“People will resist an occupation for their resources, and resist forcefully,” she said.

Michael Crowley covers the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The Times. He has reported from nearly three dozen countries and often travels with the secretary of state.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 8, 2026, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump, in Seizure of Venezuela’s Oil, Goes Beyond Iran Coup and Iraq War

See more on: Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics

NY Times · Michael Crowley · February 8, 2026

14. Deterrence Won’t Fail in the Taiwan Strait — It Will Be Bypassed

​Summary:

China’s recent Taiwan Strait activity is framed as practice for a “paralysis” strategy, not an invasion. The author cites Dec. 29, 2025 activity with over 100 aircraft, 90 crossing the median line, plus warships and China Coast Guard and maritime safety vessels. On Dec. 30, China fired 27 rockets from Fujian, with 10 landing inside Taiwan’s 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone. The argument is that Beijing can bypass invasion-centric deterrence through a coercive quarantine, using legal ambiguity, selective inspections, and market pressure to slow shipping, spike insurance costs, and compress Taiwan’s energy timeline, especially LNG reserves estimated around 11 days. The remedy is allied pre-commitment and automatic responses to gray-zone coercion.

Excerpts:

This shift reflects a deeper implication of the paralysis framework: Deterrence must target hesitation as much as action. If ambiguity and delay are the tools of coercion, then narrowing the space for prolonged uncertainty becomes a strategic objective in its own right. The question is no longer only what triggers escalation, but what forecloses stalling.

The question for the United States and its allies, then, is not simply whether they can defeat an invasion if it comes. It is whether they can prevent a slower defeat: one in which hesitation becomes habit, ambiguity becomes shelter, and delay becomes destiny. In such a contest, the absence of battle may not signal success. It may signal that paralysis has already begun.

Deterrence Won’t Fail in the Taiwan Strait — It Will Be Bypassed

warontherocks.com  · February 9, 2026

J. William DeMarco

February 9, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/deterrence-wont-fail-in-the-taiwan-strait-it-will-be-bypassed/

On Dec. 29, 2025, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense reported one of the most intense single-day episodes of Chinese military activity in recent years. Over 100 Chinese aircraft were detected operating around the island, not merely signaling but actively compressing Taiwan’s defensive space. Of these, 90 aircraft crossed the median line, effectively erasing a boundary that had kept the peace for decades. More ominously, these air assets were joined by 13 Chinese warships and, crucially, 14 official ships from the China Coast Guard and Maritime Safety Administration.

The escalation did not stop at encirclement. On Dec. 30, the Chinese military fired 27 rockets from Fujian, 10 of which landed in the waters southwest of Taiwan directly inside the 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone.

This was a historic breach, demonstrating the ability to threaten key ports like Kaohsiung with cheap artillery rather than expensive ballistic missiles. Tensions peaked when a Taiwanese frigate, the Pan Chao, was accused by a Chinese destroyer of locking its fire control radar onto the vessel. No shots were fired. No formal crisis was declared. Yet for several hours, the machinery of escalation sat visibly primed.

That pattern of high-intensity military activity, deliberately calibrated to stop short of open conflict, has become increasingly familiar in the Taiwan Strait. It is also increasingly misunderstood.

BECOME A MEMBER

Recent Chinese military exercises around Taiwan are widely interpreted as rehearsals for invasion. Live-fire drills, missile launches, air and naval encirclement, and amphibious signaling appear at first glance to confirm long-standing fears of an imminent cross-strait war. That interpretation is understandable, yet incomplete. It risks mistaking the visible mechanics of military power for the underlying logic of how Beijing appears to think about victory.

Much like military parades, freedom of navigation operations, or other headline-grabbing demonstrations of resolve, large-scale exercises are easy to mistake for strategy itself. They look decisive. But as with many modern displays of power, the real question is not what they show, but what they are meant to produce. What if these episodes are not primarily about practicing how to seize Taiwan, but about practicing how to immobilize it, and those who would come to its defense, long before a decision for war is ever required?

Seen through that lens, China’s recent actions point toward a theory of success that does not rely on decisive battle or territorial conquest, but on sustained pressure, ambiguity, and delay. Rather than seeking victory through destruction, Beijing appears increasingly focused on achieving political outcomes through paralysis: exhausting decision-making processes, fracturing alliances, and reshaping perceptions of risk and inevitability. This approach does not reject deterrence theory. It exploits its blind spots.

This logic is not alien to coercion theory. Thomas Schelling famously argued that coercion operates through bargaining, the manipulation of risk, and the power of threats that leave something to chance. What distinguishes a paralysis strategy is that risk is not merely signaled — it is externalized onto markets, insurers, and allied political processes. Similarly, as Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman observe, coercion often succeeds or fails not on battlefield balance but on how uncertainty, domestic constraints, and coalition politics shape decision-making. In the Taiwan Strait, paralysis exploits those dynamics by stretching time until restraint becomes self-reinforcing.

That narrative logic was reinforced in General Secretary Xi Jinping’s New Year’s Eve address, delivered immediately after the conclusion of the latest round of exercises. In that speech, Xi described reunification with Taiwan as “unstoppable,” framing it as a historical inevitability rather than a contingent political choice. The sequencing matters. When rhetoric of inevitability follows closely on demonstrations of military encirclement, the combined message is not simply one of resolve but of foreclosed alternatives. It is an attempt to condition expectations at home, in Taiwan, and among external actors about what outcomes should be regarded as natural, prudent, or futile to resist.

From Beijing’s perspective, this approach is neither unprecedented nor accidental. Its logic is rooted in modern Chinese strategic thought, particularly Mao Zedong’s theory of protracted war, which treated time, endurance, and political cohesion as decisive variables. Mao emphasized the gradual exhaustion of an adversary’s will rather than rapid battlefield decision, framing conflict not as a race toward decisive engagement but as a process of shaping political, psychological, and organizational conditions until resistance became unsustainable. What mattered most was not the moment of battle, but the strategic environment in which choices were made, constrained, and ultimately foreclosed. That logic was subsequently institutionalized within Chinese military doctrine, which increasingly frames coercion as a means of shaping political outcomes short of war. Contemporary Chinese military writing discusses options such as maritime exclusion, airspace control, and economic pressure explicitly as tools for testing resolve and altering decision calculus without immediately triggering large-scale intervention.

Western as well as Japanese and Australian deterrence thinking in the Taiwan Strait, however, remains overwhelmingly invasion-centric. The core question animating strategy debates is whether China can successfully conduct and sustain a large-scale amphibious assault before the United States and its allies can intervene decisively. From force posture to weapons procurement, deterrence by denial has been framed around preventing or defeating that assault. Taiwan’s emphasis on asymmetric defense, mobile fires, air and maritime denial, and resilient command and control reflects this logic, as do evolving U.S. operational concepts designed to complicate a cross-strait landing.

Recent War on the Rocks analysis has described a growing deterrence gap in the Taiwan Strait, driven by diverging perceptions of risk, resolve, and escalation incentives. What a paralysis framework adds is the possibility that deterrence can be bypassed entirely, not by crossing red lines, but by exploiting the time it takes coalitions to decide whether those lines have been crossed at all.

These investments in denial and asymmetric defense are serious and necessary, but invasion-centric deterrence carries an implicit assumption: War, if it comes, will arrive in a recognizable form. It presumes a discrete crossing of thresholds clear enough to trigger unified political responses and rapid military action. It also assumes that battlefield outcomes are the primary mechanism by which political decisions are forced. China’s recent exercises suggest a different wager.

A coercive quarantine achieves strategic effect not by physical interdiction, but by exploiting asymmetries in time, risk tolerance, and decision-making speed. Beijing does not need to stop every ship: It needs only to raise the perceived probability of interference high enough that insurers, shippers, and port operators judge the route commercially unstable. The sequence is cumulative. China announces temporary inspection zones or exclusion measures under a law enforcement pretext, then enforces them unevenly through coast guard patrols, selective delays, and highly visible incidents. Those incidents trigger insurance reassessments, premium spikes, and rerouting decisions. As shipping slows, Taiwan’s narrow energy margins — especially liquefied natural gas — compress into a political timeline measured in days rather than weeks. Rolling industrial disruptions and grid stress follow, turning a maritime problem into a domestic legitimacy crisis. Meanwhile, allied governments confront a slower dilemma: whether to escort, counter-quarantine, or accept ambiguity while they consult. In the gap between market speed and coalition speed, paralysis takes hold. Taiwan’s defeat in this scenario is not occupation, but coerced accommodation under mounting economic pressure and the visible realization that external support is delayed, contested, or conditional.

Seen in this light, the most striking feature of the drills was not their scale, but their character. Rather than focusing narrowly on amphibious landings, they emphasized encirclement, blockade-like maneuvers, missile demonstrations short of impact, and the coordinated use of naval, air, rocket, and coast guard forces. This prominent inclusion of law enforcement vessels is not accidental. It signals a shift from preparing for military conquest to rehearsing a strategy of quarantine.

The distinction between a blockade and a quarantine is vital, yet often overlooked. A blockade is a recognized act of war under international law, entitling the blockading power to attack breaching vessels but also triggering neutrality laws that force third parties to declare their status. A quarantine, however, operates in the gray zone. Beijing frames it not as a military operation, but as a domestic law enforcement action led by the China Coast Guard to inspect ships for contraband or safety violations within its own claimed waters. A quarantine built around coast guard enforcement and selective inspections is uniquely difficult to counter because it blurs the line between military and civilian authority while remaining legally reversible, complicating collective response and buying time for coercive pressure to accumulate.

This legal ambiguity is a strategic weapon. A quarantine is reversible. It can be tightened or loosened without the humiliating binary of winning or losing a war. It places the burden of escalation squarely on the United States. If a U.S. Navy destroyer intervenes to stop a China Coast Guard vessel from inspecting a cargo ship, Washington is technically interfering in a domestic law enforcement matter and firing the first shot. This hesitation is exactly what Beijing seeks to exploit.

While the mechanism is legal ambiguity, the target is physical: Taiwan’s fragility in energy security. The island imports roughly 98 percent of its energy, and its reliance on liquefied natural gas creates a critical vulnerability. Unlike coal, which can be stockpiled for months, liquid natural gas boils off and requires continuous replenishment. Current estimates suggest Taiwan’s effective liquid natural gas reserves hover around just 11 days.

Two caveats matter. Taiwan is not passive: It has pursued mitigation measures including expanded storage, diversified supply routes, and contingency planning. Nor would a limited quarantine be cost-free for Beijing, which would incur diplomatic backlash, economic disruption, and escalation risk. But these caveats do not negate the vulnerability: They clarify the logic of coercion. Paralysis does not require inevitability. It requires only that uncertainty accumulates faster than political consensus can form. A coercive campaign need not be airtight to be effective — it need only raise perceived risk enough to disrupt markets. If insurance premiums spike and underwriters judge the route unstable, commercial tankers need not be stopped by force to stay away. In such a scenario, paralysis sets in not when the gas runs out, but when the market decides the route is no longer viable.

Modern Chinese doctrine reinforces this preference for pressure over collision. The People’s Liberation Army has for decades emphasized the “Three Warfares”: the coordinated use of public-opinion shaping, psychological pressure, and legal framing to influence the strategic environment. The purpose is not persuasion in the narrow sense, but the gradual constriction of an adversary’s perceived options. Legal ambiguity blurs thresholds. Psychological pressure — exemplified by canceling nearly 900 flights during the drills — exploits fear of isolation. Public narratives frame outcomes as historically settled. Together, these efforts are designed to exhaust decision-making long before decisive force is required.

However, this strategy of paralysis is not without its own existential risks for Beijing. The “silicon shield” that protects Taiwan also binds China. A quarantine that strangles Taiwan’s power grid would shutter the semiconductor fabs that Beijing’s own economy relies upon, potentially causing a catastrophic contraction in China’s manufacturing sector. Furthermore, a quarantine is inherently leaky. If Taiwan refuses to submit, or if the United States and Japan organize convoys to break the cordon, China faces a dangerous binary: back down and suffer humiliation, or fire on foreign ships and trigger the very war it sought to avoid. Critics have rightly noted that a full economic blockade would impose severe costs on China and risk rapid escalation. But that critique applies to overt, comprehensive blockades — not to incremental quarantine behavior designed to generate commercial shutdown without a declaration of war.

What emerges from this approach is a theory of victory in which delay itself becomes decisive. Paralysis, in this sense, is not mere hesitation. It is the systematic slowing and fragmentation of political decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. It manifests as debate without resolution, signaling without commitment, and action deferred in hopes that circumstances will clarify on their own.

Paralysis here is not a tactic or a new domain of conflict. It is an outcome of successful coercion, one in which the strategic environment itself is reshaped so that decisive action becomes politically, economically, or morally harder over time. Victory does not come from spectacle or shock, but from altering what decision-makers believe is possible, legitimate, or worth the risk. A strategy built around paralysis does not seek immediate compliance. It seeks to stretch time, allowing pressure to accumulate faster than consensus can form.

Responding to this challenge does not require abandoning deterrence — it requires expanding it in ways that reflect how coercion actually unfolds. If paralysis is the intended outcome, then deterrence must account not only for catastrophic acts but for cumulative pressure designed to delay decisions and exploit ambiguity. Resilience and denial remain necessary, but they are insufficient on their own.

What changes most is the meaning of anticipatory alignment. It cannot simply denote consultation or shared concern — it must involve pre-agreed responses to specific categories of coercive action designed to remain below the threshold of war. For example, if China were to declare a law enforcement quarantine or maritime exclusion zone under the guise of safety or inspection, allied responses should not be improvised in real time. They should be pre-delegated, legally grounded, and automatic — ranging from coordinated maritime escort operations to synchronized economic and insurance guarantees — so that delay itself cannot be weaponized.

Such pre-commitment is not without cost. Automatic responses would constrain political discretion and surface alliance tensions over escalation and risk. But those costs are inseparable from the problem at hand: A strategy designed to win by delay can only be countered by accepting some loss of flexibility in exchange for denying the coercer time.

This shift reflects a deeper implication of the paralysis framework: Deterrence must target hesitation as much as action. If ambiguity and delay are the tools of coercion, then narrowing the space for prolonged uncertainty becomes a strategic objective in its own right. The question is no longer only what triggers escalation, but what forecloses stalling.

The question for the United States and its allies, then, is not simply whether they can defeat an invasion if it comes. It is whether they can prevent a slower defeat: one in which hesitation becomes habit, ambiguity becomes shelter, and delay becomes destiny. In such a contest, the absence of battle may not signal success. It may signal that paralysis has already begun.

BECOME A MEMBER

J. William “BILL” DeMarco, D.Prof., is the Chief Academic Officer at Headquarters, LeMay Center, 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.

Image: Philippine Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · · February 9, 2026

​15. Beijing’s Growth Model Is Still Broken

​Summary:

China’s 2021 property collapse left Beijing hunting for a new growth engine. Infrastructure is constrained by peaking population and weak land sales, and exports were already large, so consumption looked like the durable answer. Yet the author argues Beijing is not truly rebalancing toward household spending. Consumption was about 40 percent of GDP in 2024, well below peers, but leaders want consumption to rise after wealth is created, not through redistribution now. Beijing cuts mortgages and nudges dividends, but resists expanding the social safety net, fearing debt and “welfarism.” Instead it doubles down on “new quality productive forces,” advanced manufacturing, and exports. Overcapacity, weak profits, and falling tax revenue risk harming China and foreign competitors.

Excerpts:

Advanced industrialized countries will bear the brunt of China’s revved-up export engine. Countries such as Germany, which is a major producer of cars, chemicals, and industrial machinery, face a future in which demand for their products drops and their global market share will be taken over by Chinese competitors. Developing countries face challenges, as well. As China produces low-end goods ever more efficiently, it cuts off economies with lower labor costs from embarking on the path to prosperity that China itself once trod.

The great irony is that while China’s new growth model threatens the prosperity of other countries, it might not deliver the desired returns at home. For China’s economic model to be a success, it must deliver higher profits, salaries, and tax revenue. But in the first half of 2025, China’s real GDP grew by 5.3 percent, according to government statistics, yet tax revenue declined by 1.2 percent. Part of the problem is industrial overcapacity: China’s firms have built factories capable of producing goods far in excess of demand, which has driven down prices, destroyed profits, reduced taxes, dampened wage growth, and created uncertainty for workers. If Beijing can’t reverse this overcapacity, it will struggle to deliver prosperity in the face of demographic decline.

Economists both in China and around the world continue to call for China to pivot to consumption-led growth fueled by wealth redistribution. It seems like the very definition of a win-win proposition: the Chinese public would be better off, and China would import more from the rest of the world. But Beijing is moving in the opposite direction. Increasingly, the only things that China needs from abroad are commodities, luxury items, overseas holidays, and a handful of high-tech goods it isn’t yet able to make for itself. As Chinese leaders say, they want to ensure that the economic cake gets bigger before they divide it more fairly. But it remains to be seen if they can have their cake and eat it, too.

Beijing’s Growth Model Is Still Broken

Foreign Affairs · More by Dinny McMahon · February 9, 2026

And It’s Hurting China and the Rest of the World

Dinny McMahon

February 9, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/beijings-growth-model-still-broken-dinny-mcmahon

Assembling air fryers at a factory in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, May 2025 Go Nakamura / Reuters

DINNY MCMAHON is head of Markets Research at Trivium China and the author of China’s Great Wall of Debt.

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And It’s Hurting China and the Rest of the World

Dinny McMahon​

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When China’s property market collapsed in 2021, its leaders scrambled to find a new driver of economic growth to replace housing construction. More investment in infrastructure, which had powered much of the country’s boom for decades, wasn’t an option: the population was peaking, and a collapse in land sales meant that local authorities lacked the funds to spend on new airports and eight-lane highways. Nor could Beijing rely on more exports. China was already the world’s biggest exporter, and with labor and land costs rising the world’s factory no longer had as significant a cost advantage for cheap goods.

That left consumption. Economists have long noted that household consumption in China contributes relatively little to economic activity compared with other countries. In 2024, according to World Bank data, consumption was only 40 percent of China’s GDP, about 20 percentage points below the global average. A policy focused on lifting household spending to the level of South Korea (48 percent) or Japan (55 percent in 2022) could drive growth for decades.

In reality, however, China isn’t rebalancing its economy toward consumption. That’s not to say it doesn’t want more consumption. It does. Leaders in Beijing have publicly endorsed the need to raise consumption: in February 2025, for instance, Chinese premier Li Qiang called for “boosting consumption to expand domestic demand, smooth the economic cycle, and drive economic growth.” But China’s leaders envision higher consumption coming at the end of China’s economic transition, not the beginning. Rather than redistributing wealth so people can spend more now, Beijing wants to focus on creating new wealth in the hope that it spurs greater consumption in the future.

In the long term, this approach may lead to a more balanced growth model. But in the face of weak domestic demand from the aftermath of the deflated property bubble, China is ramping up its exports even more in the short term. This not only delays China’s own pivot toward consumption; it also promises wealth destruction for other countries trying to compete with China or find their place in the global economy.

FAREWELL, WELFARE

For consumption to lead China’s economy, the country’s famously frugal savers must set aside less of their income, or incomes must increase faster than the economy as a whole. Engineering that kind of transformation requires wealth redistribution.

When advanced industrial economies redistribute wealth, they typically do it by raising the minimum wage, cutting personal income tax rates, handing out stimulus checks, increasing welfare payments, or cutting mortgage rates. China has taken some of these steps. In 2023 and again in 2024, for instance, the People’s Bank of China forced banks to dramatically cut the interest rate on existing mortgages, reducing households’ annual interest payments by about $43 billion. Provincial governments raise the minimum wage every year. And, starting in 2023, regulators have pushed listed companies to pay dividends to shareholders, something they’ve traditionally been reluctant to do.

But Beijing has steadfastly refused to do the one thing that might make the biggest difference: significantly expand the social safety net. China’s system of social supports is chronically underfunded. The national social security fund, which backstops the country’s pensions, is likely to be depleted by 2035, throwing into doubt the retirement of tens of millions of people. Although nearly all of China’s citizens have some basic health insurance, low reimbursement rates mean that out-of-pocket health-care costs can be debilitating, particularly for families supporting elderly parents. And many of the 300 million people who have migrated from the countryside to the cities to work cannot access subsidized public services because they’re only registered to access services in their hometowns, where quality is often much lower. The government says that it supports granting internal migrants the residency status they need to allow them the same access to affordable housing, public schooling, health care, and pensions as their urban neighbors, but it has been unwilling to fund it.

Observers often point to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s stated aversion to “welfarism”—his reluctance to seeing “‘lazy people’ get something for nothing,” as he wrote in 2021—as the reason for this lack of spending. But the bigger sticking point is party leaders’ insistence that social programs be “within the means” of the state to fund them.

Beijing has refused to significantly expand the social safety net.

As most countries do, China runs a budget deficit. In 2025 the government set the deficit target at four percent, the highest level in three decades. Any expansion of social supports, therefore, would have to be funded with debt. Chinese officials and academics, however, have long worried that debt-funded social programs could lead to what they call “Latin Americanization”—how the growth of vibrant Latin American economies such as Argentina and Brazil stalled in the 1970s and 1980s after populist governments in these countries tried to build Western-style welfare systems on the back of developing economies. In a 2021 essay in the party’s main theory journal, Xi explained that when “some Latin American countries engaged in populism,” the resulting lack of fiscal discipline condemned them to the middle-income trap and prevented them from catching up to advanced economies such as the United States and the European Union.

China’s rapidly aging population makes this fear even greater. China’s old-age dependency ratio—the number of retirees as a share of the working-age population—will match that of the United States in 2035, and the EU in 2046. By 2080, China will have more retirees than workers. This has major consequences for the economy: as a population ages, the burden on the state increases as pensions, health-care spending, and other costs rise. Meanwhile, as the size of the workforce shrinks, so does the pool of taxpayers, making it harder for the state to cover its rising expenses.

Beijing is not afraid to borrow; after all, it allowed local government to rack up huge debts to fund infrastructure. The difference is that it sees infrastructure as an investment. Even if infrastructure doesn’t pay for itself, it can nonetheless create new wealth and value. By contrast, Beijing sees social spending as a recurring expense and an endless burden. In the words of Xi, “Welfare benefits cannot be reduced once they have gone up.” If China is going to boost social welfare, it will do it incrementally—not at the level that would meaningfully rebalance the economy toward consumption. Instead, if China’s leaders are going to borrow and spend, they want that money to address the most important challenge they are facing: moving up the economic value chain.

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

For decades, Beijing’s overriding economic preoccupation was the pace of growth. Economic growth is still important—Xi wants GDP per capita to double between 2020 and 2035—but it’s no longer enough. Xi now speaks of the need for “high quality” growth, or growth that will help transform China’s economy so it can avoid the middle-income trap, mitigate the effects of a rapidly aging population, and deliver Xi’s promise of “common prosperity,” in which China is more affluent and equitable.

To manage this confluence of goals, Beijing needs an economy capable of producing higher-value goods that can’t be cheaply replicated by developing economies with lower labor costs. This will require China to innovate and improve its advanced manufacturing sectors. China also needs to boost tax revenue sufficiently to cover the expanding needs of retirees without overburdening the shrinking workforce. This means that incomes need to rise high enough that even with a heavier tax burden, working people are still better off. And to realize “common prosperity” without massive redistribution, China needs to find ways to produce enough wealth to enlarge the middle class and, eventually, boost consumption by dividing the new gains more fairly.

To achieve all of this, Beijing has embraced what it calls “new quality productive forces.” In this model, productivity gains are the core of growth, and Chinese leaders intend to use innovation and industrial upgrading to concentrate these gains in manufacturing. The hope is that by developing their own proprietary technology, Chinese firms will be able to lead emerging industries as varied as biotechnology and electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (better known as flying cars), which will, in turn, allow them to generate higher profit margins than when they were merely producing low-cost knockoffs of existing technologies.

Driving at sunset in Beijing, China, January 2026 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Beijing is thus engaged in a top-to-bottom effort to generate scientific breakthroughs and industrial innovations that can be commercialized and sold. What that looks like depends on the industry, but it often includes tax exemptions, public investment in infrastructure, funding for R & D, government procurement, and consumer subsidies. In the electric vehicles sector, for instance, all of these policies have helped make China the undisputed global leader.

But Beijing also wants to hold on to old industries. Rather than let traditional labor-intensive industries such as textiles and toy manufacturing decamp to developing countries in search of ever-cheaper labor, policymakers are striving to keep these industries in China by deploying robots, industrial software, and artificial intelligence to reduce production costs and raise profit margins. China’s advanced firms can produce the technology that allows its low-end industries to remain competitive. This strategy has the added benefit of creating domestic demand for China’s high-end engineering and machinery firms. And even though such industrial transformation eliminates some blue-collar jobs—jobs that were likely to migrate overseas to lower-cost destinations—it creates new “purple-collar” jobs for skilled technicians that pay more than traditional assembly line positions.

But Beijing is hoping the biggest employment gains from China’s shift to advanced manufacturing will be white-collar professional jobs. Take the example of Apple. Apple outsources all of its manufacturing, yet the company still employs 90,000 people in the United States alone. These include engineers, researchers, software developers, product designers, supply chain managers, salespeople, market researchers, marketers, lobbyists, and intellectual property lawyers—in other words, well-paid white-collar employees. Beijing wants companies in its own high-end industries to provide these kinds of good jobs for the tens of millions of young college graduates in China.

STILL MADE IN CHINA

By focusing on innovation and industrial upgrading, Beijing hopes to create firms capable of generating higher profits and paying higher salaries. Bigger salaries and profits will translate into an expanded tax base for the state, which can then spend more on social supports for an aging population. More profitable companies will also lift the stock market, which will replace an oversaturated property sector as the engine of middle-class wealth creation. In this more affluent, equitable China of the future, people will—finally—be able to consume at far higher levels than they do today.

But that vision is not only long term; it also contains a paradox. Holding on to old industries while expanding into new ones means that China’s industrial production will continue to grow. As incomes rise, however, people typically spend a greater share of what they earn on services and less on physical goods. Even if Chinese households do buy some more manufactured items, they cannot possibly absorb all of China’s massive increase in industrial production. The rest of the world will be asked to fill the gap.

According to the United Nations, China accounted for 27 percent of global industrial output in 2023. No country has dominated global production to this degree since the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when many of the world’s economies lay in ruin. The UN projects that, given current trends, China’s share will rise to 45 percent by 2030. Regardless of the exact percentage, countries around the world are unlikely to tolerate a rising tide of cheap, high-quality, and increasingly innovative Chinese goods overwhelming their domestic markets.

China’s new growth model threatens the prosperity of other countries.

Advanced industrialized countries will bear the brunt of China’s revved-up export engine. Countries such as Germany, which is a major producer of cars, chemicals, and industrial machinery, face a future in which demand for their products drops and their global market share will be taken over by Chinese competitors. Developing countries face challenges, as well. As China produces low-end goods ever more efficiently, it cuts off economies with lower labor costs from embarking on the path to prosperity that China itself once trod.

The great irony is that while China’s new growth model threatens the prosperity of other countries, it might not deliver the desired returns at home. For China’s economic model to be a success, it must deliver higher profits, salaries, and tax revenue. But in the first half of 2025, China’s real GDP grew by 5.3 percent, according to government statistics, yet tax revenue declined by 1.2 percent. Part of the problem is industrial overcapacity: China’s firms have built factories capable of producing goods far in excess of demand, which has driven down prices, destroyed profits, reduced taxes, dampened wage growth, and created uncertainty for workers. If Beijing can’t reverse this overcapacity, it will struggle to deliver prosperity in the face of demographic decline.

Economists both in China and around the world continue to call for China to pivot to consumption-led growth fueled by wealth redistribution. It seems like the very definition of a win-win proposition: the Chinese public would be better off, and China would import more from the rest of the world. But Beijing is moving in the opposite direction. Increasingly, the only things that China needs from abroad are commodities, luxury items, overseas holidays, and a handful of high-tech goods it isn’t yet able to make for itself. As Chinese leaders say, they want to ensure that the economic cake gets bigger before they divide it more fairly. But it remains to be seen if they can have their cake and eat it, too.

Foreign Affairs · More by Dinny McMahon · February 9, 2026

​16. Europe Needs an Army: Only Collective Defense Can Protect the Continent

​Summary:

The author argues Europe can no longer assume the United States will guarantee its security, citing the Trump administration’s signals and actions that undermine the transatlantic bargain. With Russia a continuing threat and NATO without U.S. muscle potentially hollow, Europe’s problem is structural, not just budgets. The continent fields about 30 separate militaries built to support a U.S.-led alliance, lacking key enablers and interoperability at scale. Bergmann calls for the European Union to become “Europe’s Pentagon,” pooling sovereignty for procurement, industrial policy, readiness, and rapid response forces, while Europeanizing NATO leadership. He contends public support for common defense is higher than faith in national armies.

Excerpts:

Integrating defense also requires integrating European foreign policy. Europe needs to be able speak with one voice—something the proliferation of ad hoc regional groupings complicates. One solution, put forth last month by Andrius Kubilius, the European commissioner for defense and space, is a European Security Council comprising select countries, including the United Kingdom, as well as the EU and NATO, to reduce fragmentation and strengthen collective defense. Europe also needs to be more proactive in intelligence sharing, a role that in the past has largely been played by the United States. But just as the EU created Europol to coordinate cross-border law enforcement and counterterrorism operations, Europe could create an “EU service for intelligence cooperation,” as a European Commission report highlighted in October 2024, to fill this gap.

These reforms are compatible with the EU’s existing underlying treaty, which includes its Common Foreign and Security Policy. When constraints arise—for example, if illiberal Hungary objects—the EU could find workarounds such as creating new institutional structures that do not include all EU members, similar to how not all EU states use the euro or participate in the Schengen area, which permits freedom of movement across national borders.

Europeans would do well to remember why they joined into a European Union in the first place. Although reluctant to give up sovereignty to a federal authority, Europe’s small states realized that they would not survive on their own. They were stronger together, and they needed to work with one another to protect themselves as countries. As the historian Alan Milward observed, far from eliminating each country, the European Community was “its buttress, an indispensable part of the nation-state’s post-war reconstruction.” With the United States in retreat, Europe’s nation-states are under threat. By activating what the European project was created to do—build the continent’s power—European countries can secure their future.

Comment: Who would command such an Army? Or who would the European nations agree to allow to command the Army?

Europe Needs an Army

Foreign Affairs · More by Max Bergmann · February 9, 2026

Only Collective Defense Can Protect the Continent

Max Bergmann

February 9, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/europe/europe-needs-army

French soldiers preparing for a military exercise in Santimbru, Romania, November 2025 Andreea Campeanu / Reuters

MAX BERGMANN is Director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and the Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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Only Collective Defense Can Protect the Continent

Max Bergmann​

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The transatlantic alliance is on the ropes. Since the end of World War II, American power has underwritten European unification and integration—arguably Washington’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment. But the Trump administration has made clear that the United States is no longer interested in acting as Europe’s security guarantor. It has threatened to seize the territory of a NATO member, reduced funding to Ukraine, aggressively imposed tariffs on European allies, and, in its 2025 National Security Strategy, called for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.” The message could not be clearer: the continent can no longer rely on the United States to defend it. For the first time in eight decades, Europe stands alone.

European states now find themselves vulnerable to Russian aggression. Should Moscow turn its attention beyond Ukraine and rebuild its war machine, it could quickly threaten eastern Europe. Such a danger should spur European leaders to embark on a bold new course of action to solidify their defenses. But there has been no such revolution in European military affairs. Although NATO countries have agreed to increase defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035, they cannot spend their way to security. The issue is structural, not financial. European militaries are not set up to defend the continent without the United States.

European leaders are keenly aware of their security dependence but in denial about what must be done. The biggest stumbling block is the belief that defense is a national responsibility rather than a European one. Individual governments across Europe want to retain sovereignty over their militaries and have been reluctant to Europeanize their defense efforts. But this focus on national sovereignty overlooks a deeper reality: European countries are not and have not been sovereign in defense since the end of World War II. They have relied on the United States, a foreign power, to protect them. Now, with that foreign power abandoning them, the most effective way European states can defend themselves without Washington’s backing is to integrate their defense efforts. They need to do what they would in any other crisis: activate the European Union. It is time for the EU to become Europe’s Pentagon.

PILLAR OF STRENGTH

This is not the first time that a defenseless Europe has faced a United States wanting to retreat to its own shores. In the late 1940s, Washington found itself trapped: its overriding priority was to bring American troops home from World War II, but Western European countries were still too weak to defend themselves, and the Soviet threat was too severe for Americans to leave without risking that the continent would fall under communist rule.

Washington’s preferred solution was not NATO, which, according to the historian Sten Rynning, U.S. officials considered a “holding measure until Europe’s condition improved.” The larger goal was to build a united Europe into a “third force” that could counter the Soviet Union without needing to rely on the United States. The “first step in the federation of Europe,” as French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed in an address in May 1950, was the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community, which would reconcile France and Germany and integrate the industries necessary to wage war. Reconciliation was the starting point, but the ultimate aim was to revitalize European power. This project eventually became the European Community, the precursor to the European Union.

When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, just a month after Schuman’s speech, the United States was suddenly pulled into a war in the Indo-Pacific. With U.S. forces stretched thin, the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Europe became very real. In response, and to accelerate Europe’s federation, French Prime Minister René Pleven proposed the creation of a European army. If Western Europe were strong enough to deter the Soviet Union, the argument went, it would allow the United States to pull back its military presence from the continent. With strong backing from the Truman administration and U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, then NATO’s supreme allied commander, six Western European countries—Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—signed a treaty in May 1952 to create a common army with a shared budget, governing council, consultative assembly, and court. But the plan never took off. Despite the idea’s French origins, the French parliament blocked ratification of the treaty in 1954 after General Charles de Gaulle decried the prospect of ceding French sovereignty. Much to the chagrin of both the Gaullists and the Eisenhower administration, U.S. troops remained in Europe indefinitely.

The EU must become Europe’s Pentagon.

The result was that Europe never needed to federate militarily. NATO gave European countries the illusion of sovereign control over national defense. Officially, all NATO states had an equal say in the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s decision-making body, and maintained their own independent militaries. But the United States was the one that called the shots. If a war erupted, every European leader knew the United States would handle it.

After the Iron Curtain collapsed, the European Community transitioned into the European Union. The 1993 Maastricht Treaty, signed by 12 European states, established the Common Foreign and Security Policy, a new pillar dedicated to shared defense. By that point, however, the United States had decided it did not want to leave Europe. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted in 1998 that there should be no “decoupling” or “duplication” between the EU and NATO because it would undermine the primacy of the United States in the transatlantic alliance. The EU was not to do defense; that was Washington’s job. The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy has thus largely sat dormant.

FLYING SOLO

Europe is back where it was in the early 1950s, facing a predatory Russia while the United States rushes for the exits. Europe must now assume that it has to defend itself without American support. This challenge is surmountable but requires more than merely boosting defense budgets. The continent is home to roughly 30 distinct militaries, which operate at varying levels of readiness and capability and use their own equipment. If Russia were to amass troops on the border of a Baltic state, all of Europe’s disparate forces would need to rapidly deploy and seamlessly fight together.

In theory, NATO coordinates these moving parts. But a NATO without the United States would be a hollow shell. When the alliance mobilized European forces in Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Libya, for instance, U.S. military prowess masked the inadequacies of those European missions. Europe’s armies lack sufficient materiel, such as airtankers, airlifters, and advanced surveillance and targeting technology. The capacity gap is baked in: European militaries were designed to serve as auxiliaries in a U.S.-led NATO war effort.

Only 19 percent of Europeans are confident that their national armies could defend them.

A U.S. retreat most concerns the European states bordering Russia—understandably so. Frontline states such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have pleaded for other European states to spend more, but marginal increases in national defense spending will not turn their militaries into a cohesive fighting force. It is also unlikely that most European states will meet their pledge to NATO to raise defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP because such policies are often unpopular domestically. Many citizens of nonfrontline states see their national militaries as tangential to deterring Russia and do not believe they are up to the task. A pan-European poll conducted by Le Grand Continent in early 2025 showed that although a majority feared the outbreak of a conflict, only 19 percent of respondents were confident that their national armies could defend them—compared with 60 percent who felt confident in a hypothetical common European army. Europeans don’t want good money going to bad militaries.

Nor can any of Europe’s traditional powers effectively oppose Russian aggression on their own. France and the United Kingdom have major budget deficits, leaving them low on funds to ramp up already overstretched militaries. Moreover, years of austerity have ground down the British army: the United Kingdom would struggle to deploy even 25,000 troops to eastern Europe today. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has begun investing massively in defense, and Berlin has the scale to serve as Europe’s military backbone, but the country’s postwar history of pacifism and aversion to military power makes relying on a German military revival a risky bet.

As a result, Europeans have increasingly embraced ad hoc regional groupings. Despite decades of decrying any duplication with NATO, a flurry of minilateral frameworks have emerged that do just that. The Joint Expeditionary Force, a British-led military partnership designed for rapid reaction to crises, has its own command headquarters in London. As does the French-led “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine, in Paris. Nordic states are also increasingly integrating their military efforts. These arrangements are useful, but not if they sap the drive for a larger collective European effort.

ARMY OF ADMINISTRATORS

The European Union—with its 450 million people and an economy roughly the size of China’s—has the size, scale, and wealth to defend itself, but it is failing to leverage its advantages. Europeans need to relinquish the primacy of national sovereignty and integrate their efforts. The most pragmatic and effective means of achieving European collective security is by empowering the European Union on defense.

European leaders tend to blame “Brussels bureaucrats” when something—anything—goes wrong. The EU is far from perfect, of course. But at its core, it is Europe’s vessel for pooling sovereignty and uniting Europe. It has decades of experience integrating Europe’s commercial and industrial sectors and harmonizing policy. Unlike individual state governments, the EU focuses on advancing common interests rather than just national ones.

The EU is also where Europe turns in times of crisis, and it has proved it can act. When saboteurs destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipelines in 2022 and Europe was plunged into an energy crisis, for instance, the EU stepped in to coordinate energy policy. When COVID-19 struck in 2020, the EU purchased hundreds of millions of vaccines for the citizens of its member states, even though health policy was strictly a “national competency.” And following the 2015 migration crisis, when more than a million refugees sought to enter Europe, Brussels recruited a border service of 10,000 armed guards. The EU functions as Europeans need—and now they need it for defense.

Europeans should take over top NATO posts, including supreme allied commander.

More important, European citizens want the EU to do defense. The EU is the continent’s most trusted governing institution, more so than any member state. According to a 2025 Eurobarometer survey, roughly 80 percent of Europeans worry about the EU’s security over the next five years and support a common defense and security policy. The center-right European People’s Party, the largest party in the European Parliament, supported a pan-European military during its successful 2024 election campaign. Rob Jetten, the incoming Dutch prime minister, said during his October 2025 campaign that he wanted to give “the EU the power and the resources to do what citizens all across Europe are asking it to do: defend our territory against Putin’s aggression.”

The main obstacle is bureaucratic, not political. Europe’s national defense ministries deeply oppose ceding control. If Brussels handled military acquisitions, the EU’s 27 defense ministries would no longer need their own bloated procurement offices. National defense companies would lose their privileged contracts. In the 1980s, problems of national bureaucratic bloat, corporate state capture, and protectionism led British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to champion the Single European Act to integrate the European market, which led to major efficiency gains and cost savings across the continent in exchange for strengthening Brussels. The same gains—and the same tradeoff—would occur in the defense industry from EU integration today.

Few European political leaders today have called for such a trade. But with more money needed for the military, there will be less for social spending initiatives. Are European leaders prepared to trade butter for guns just to appease their defense ministers? The EU would need a sizable defense budget, funded through member-state contributions, joint borrowing, or the removal of restrictions on Brussels’s ability to raise revenue. But Europe does not need to spend as much as the United States does on its military to deter Russia. Pooling funds for joint procurement would spread the spending burden across the continent, strengthen Europe’s defense industrial base, and help streamline Europe’s militaries. According to a study from the think tank Bruegel, it would create enormous economies of scale that could reduce rearmament costs by half.

GROUP EFFORT

Empowering the EU on defense would not spell the end of NATO or national militaries. The EU’s focus would be on funding and organizing European troops—that is, serving as Europe’s Pentagon. Brussels would merge many of the functions of national procurement offices and manage major acquisitions, as well as integrate and regulate its 27 member states’ defense industrial sectors. NATO, ideally, would remain Europe’s combatant command, coordinating and executing missions. The alliance, however, should be increasingly Europeanized. With U.S. interest in NATO declining, Europeans should propose to take over top posts, including supreme allied commander, which has always been held by an American. National militaries, especially those of frontline states and traditional military powers, would still serve as the crux of Europe’s defense. But these forces would be Europeanized and augmented by the EU.

Brussels could also create a rapid-response force made up of troops from nonfrontline states. Italy and Spain could lead the force because each has a standing army more than 100,000 strong. If they stationed troops to the east of the Pyrenees and north of the Alps and integrated them with other small nonfrontline armies, the EU could form a permanent force able to react quickly to a Russian attack, filling the role imagined for U.S. ground forces in Europe. Since NATO and EU membership already obligates European militaries to fight together in war, it makes sense to integrate now, before war hits. Mobilizing troops into a rapid-response force would also give all countries an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with frontline states and do more for their security. The EU would manage, fund, and equip this force but could make it available for NATO to command in the event of a war, as originally envisioned in the treaty for a common army signed in 1952.

Roughly 80 percent of Europeans support a common defense and security policy.

Integrating defense also requires integrating European foreign policy. Europe needs to be able speak with one voice—something the proliferation of ad hoc regional groupings complicates. One solution, put forth last month by Andrius Kubilius, the European commissioner for defense and space, is a European Security Council comprising select countries, including the United Kingdom, as well as the EU and NATO, to reduce fragmentation and strengthen collective defense. Europe also needs to be more proactive in intelligence sharing, a role that in the past has largely been played by the United States. But just as the EU created Europol to coordinate cross-border law enforcement and counterterrorism operations, Europe could create an “EU service for intelligence cooperation,” as a European Commission report highlighted in October 2024, to fill this gap.

These reforms are compatible with the EU’s existing underlying treaty, which includes its Common Foreign and Security Policy. When constraints arise—for example, if illiberal Hungary objects—the EU could find workarounds such as creating new institutional structures that do not include all EU members, similar to how not all EU states use the euro or participate in the Schengen area, which permits freedom of movement across national borders.

Europeans would do well to remember why they joined into a European Union in the first place. Although reluctant to give up sovereignty to a federal authority, Europe’s small states realized that they would not survive on their own. They were stronger together, and they needed to work with one another to protect themselves as countries. As the historian Alan Milward observed, far from eliminating each country, the European Community was “its buttress, an indispensable part of the nation-state’s post-war reconstruction.” With the United States in retreat, Europe’s nation-states are under threat. By activating what the European project was created to do—build the continent’s power—European countries can secure their future.

Foreign Affairs · More by Max Bergmann · February 9, 2026

17. The Code War: A Race to What End?

​Summary:

The author uses science fiction as warning language for the U.S. China AI rivalry and argues pursuit of AGI makes pure competition destabilizing. He claims both democracies and autocracies risk sliding toward rights loss, surveillance, and “autonomous governance” as AI concentrates information and policy power. He contrasts U.S. aims to embed democratic values in AI with China’s use of AI for surveillance, the Social Credit System, and information control, while noting U.S. surveillance tools can also threaten civil rights. He argues the winner gains economic and military advantage, including automated weapon systems and influence via deepfakes and misinformation. Because private firms drive AI, states lack nuclear-like control, so he calls for U.S. China cooperation on regulation to prevent catastrophic misuse, including bio risk.

Comment: The article’s core claim is that the race is less about who wins than whether either side can prevent loss of state control to the technology and the firms building it. If both sides fear being overtaken, what verifiable, limited safety bargain could Washington and Beijing accept that slows the most dangerous capabilities without handing the other a decisive edge? Can there be "AI control" along the lines of "arms control?" Of course China has ever entered into arms control negotiations the way the US-USSR did. 

The Code War: A Race to What End?

by Emanuel Prodan

|

02.09.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/09/the-code-war-a-race-to-what-end/

Abstract

This article explores the prophecies provided in science fiction as a warning for the current Artificial Intelligence rivalry between the United States and China. It argues that the dangers in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence require a paradigm shift away from competition toward a mutually-beneficial cooperative architecture for the sake of global stability.

Voices in the Digital Desert

Authors wrestling with the realities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the impending evolutionary step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) find touchpoints in science fiction as a prophetic voice in making sense of the current landscape and its possible future. While citing Terminator or Alien as dystopian views may seem unacademic, it is worth noting that science fiction predicted the submarine, the atomic bomb, and the rise of the authoritarian police state, the latter being the most prescient of the AI race and China’s integration of AI within its Social Credit System. In this vein, Terminator predicted robotics, which Michael O’Hanlon notes, if placed “in the wrong hands, or in the wrong context… could be very dangerous and hard to control,” spelling potentially disastrous consequences not only for an adversary but the user as well. Alien, on the other hand, accurately predicted what Ian Bremmer fears could be a shift away from government in preference for a “techno-elite” at the helm of powerful AI tools that give them a seat at the geopolitical table and create an opportunity for corporations to subvert representative government.

These comparisons provide a starting point but leave observers with more questions than answers about the race between the U.S. and China, whether competition or collaboration should be the agenda, and what that decision could mean for the rest of the globe. Vladimir Putin may well be proven right on AI when he claims, “the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.” This makes the incentive, for states to dominate the AI race, not just great but existential – despite warnings from disparate voices as Musk, Gates, Kissinger, and Hawking that “we will neither be able to understand it nor control it.” These warnings, however, go largely unheeded, as any slowing of progress by the United States could allow China to eclipse in AI development in a short span, “downward spiral of a security dilemma” and spurring a U.S. investment of $18 billion toward Automated Weapons Systems (AWS) alone in a four-year time frame from 2016 to 2020.

The Frictions of Differing Ideologies

The questions of consciousness and control are heavily dictated not only by a state’s interaction with AI and its intended use, but their form of governance – either for continued democracy or the maintenance of autocracy. For the sake of a continued democracy, capable of being spread globally, it is considered imperative that the United States win the AI race with an AI imbued with a value system based upon democratic principles, such as individual rights and freedom of expression. Allowing China to overtake the U.S. risks the creation of an AI based on authoritative values – which can be exported only for the good of the Chinese Communist Party and maintaining their control. This much can be seen in their vast surveillance apparatus in the service of their Social Credit System, as well as the Great Firewall in curating the internet with which the Chinese people interact.

With the assistance of AI, the promise of democracy or threat of autocracy will experience an amplifying effect. However, they share a common problem as AGI, Max Tegmark warns, they are subject to “scenarios of expunged rights under benevolent AGI dictators and totalitarian surveillance states.” Where China has the Great Firewall, the United States has the spy agency run ECHELON to “monitor global communications,” both of which can be used to great adverse effect in violating civil rights and suppressing dissidence. Pitfalls into authoritarianism by different names are more likely when national security and the ease of information-gathering on citizens through AI converge.

Shifting Sands of Economy and Information

The country that wins the AI race will be able to geopolitically subvert its adversaries and shape the global world order through the fruits of economic and military growth. Efficiency through automation holds the promise of lowered production costs to a wide swath of industries, from logistics to manufacturing, as well as breakthroughs in medical interventions through the massive computing power of AI and iterative improvements to its own code. These industries boost GDP, creating a greater spending advantage toward military mobilization, but by leveraging their superior AI towards automated weapon system improvements, they ensure a primacy in exerting influence across the geopolitical sphere.

Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Jeremy Wallace make the prescient observation, however, that “AI will not transform the rivalry between powers so much as it will transform the rivals themselves.” AI will be able to further alter reality through a more sophisticated degree, as well as brute force, in election interference through deep fake videos and misinformation campaigns. Steven Myers and Stuart Thompson reported to have included 215 distinct incidents of this globally but most notably during the 2024 election cycles in the U.S., Taiwan, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Slovakia. It is evident that the winner of the AI race will be the arbiter of truth, as a tool against a chief adversary and to ensure their preferred world order globally.

The Risk of Autonomous Governance

This sort of autonomous governance would be a danger to democracy and autocracy alike…

Both democracy and autocracy rely heavily upon a feedback loop from their public, with the distinction that autocracies “historically have a much harder time getting good feedback.” AI built upon false premises and poor inputs due to its desire to give answers it believes humans approve of exacerbates problems in an autocracy where government opposition is considered a threat. Democracies, likewise, fall prey to a similar sort of biased inputs when feedback from the public is misinformed or fickle. Ultimately, AI poses a greater threat to an autocracy’s goals of regime maintenance by inadvertently turning the information loop back on itself, granting outputs that are self-fulfilling prophecy of the Party, thereby enjoying a façade of short-term control at the risk of long-term stability, ending in regime failure. This is an unconscionable outcome for the CCP.

There will be a great temptation to allow AI to consolidate information in giving a seemingly unbiased assessment while autonomously enacting policies, without acknowledgment of built-in biases or, if acknowledged, overlooking bias generated by the supposed impartiality of a machine with prescribed guardrails that mirror the state’s value system. This sort of autonomous governance would be a danger to democracy and autocracy alike, individually as states, and collectively to a global human-run order.

The Case for Collaboration

O’Hanlon puts forth that in the race for AI superiority, and for the sake of both the U.S. and China, “safety must not only be an afterthought or viewed entirely in zero-sum terms.” He continues by making this not only a great power concern but a global one, saying, “all nations have an interest in preventing abuse of this century’s transformative technology,” bolstering this view through the claim that “unrestrained competition… could exacerbate the dangers.” Nick Bostrom, posits that we are in a quickly shrinking window in which AI can be regulated before it reaches the level of super-intelligence, dwarfing human capabilities for control. Among many layers of a system not fully understood is just one of the myriad possibilities that a “godfather of AI,” Yoshua Bengio, relates wherein a “superintelligent yet badly regulated AI might even try to hoodwink a rogue actor to produce and then unleash an unprecedentedly lethal virus.” Predictions, such as these, from experts deeply aware of the potential dangers are unsettling to say the least, and stand as a call to action for the U.S. and China to cooperate on regulation without driving mindlessly headlong towards the mirage of single-state dominance, which ends in the ash heap of humanity.

Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman state that the trade-off in reward for “maximally constraining” or “maximally liberating” AI is asymmetric, driving the imperative “to prevent… risks before they materialize rather than mitigate them after the fact.” Unfortunately, regulation is no longer the sole prerogative of individual states and must include the tech companies that created AI – which function as geopolitical actors in their own right. While the importance of tech companies cannot be overstated, it is of great value to recognize that these are private, unelected entities with private interests, whose monetary incentive for competitive systems far outweighs ethical imperatives. Comparisons of the current AI race to the nuclear arms race are beneficial to a degree, but fail to appreciate the government control that states possessed over nuclear arms. This control which states do not have over AI, including the indiscriminate proliferation of AI to every smartphone on the planet, is what states sought specifically to avoid with nuclear arms.

This control which states do not have over AI… is what states sought specifically to avoid with nuclear arms.

Conclusion: A Dynamic but Navigable Challenge

Bremmer and Suleyman make the case that “Washington and Beijing may find it advantageous to work together… in slowing the proliferation of powerful systems that could imperil the authority of nation-states.” For want of profit, unchecked, an AI created by a private tech company, devoid of guardrails built into the code, or regulations agreed upon by nation-states, can lead to a self-serving system interested not in the good of man but in its own survival and improvement. This enables the erosion of democratic norms through deepfakes and disinformation at the outset, military conflict worldwide through gross miscalculation of an adversary’s intentions, and proliferation of AI to rogue states as the norm; all culminating in AGI which is no longer controlled, but bent on eliminating the sole threat to its survival: humans. The desire to compete for primacy in AI is not the same as the geopolitical jostling of the past, and as such must be approached with a flexible stance to meet the dynamic nature of this new challenge.

The U.S. and China are in a dead heat to create an intelligence that neither understands and, in high likelihood, neither can control, provided by companies that cannot guarantee the safety of their product while wielding the power of representative government. There is no doubt that any pause or divestiture in the AI space for either state would leave them vulnerable to the overtake and implicit threat to their own way of life. However, both the U.S. and China must understand the fleeting nature of that primacy in this construct, as well as the volatile nature that these competing interests represent.

Competition is dangerous, leaving greater room for disastrous outcomes such as rogue states leveraging AI, or worse, a rogue AI. Competition in this case is the yesteryear thinking of the Maginot Line, with no regard to AI’s blitzkrieg. These challenges do not include the social changes that will be experienced from the loss of jobs through automation, creating civil unrest and political upheaval, necessitating at minimum a universal basic income. Domestic issues would presage international catastrophes if the two great powers are not “united in common purpose, rather [than] incentivized to use advanced technology against each other.” There is an ever-shortening timeframe in which greater competition equates to less cooperation. Thankfully, however, China has the infrastructure but not the chips, and the U.S. in reverse, creating a natural stalemate of sorts, for the time being, in which regulations can be spelled out through the employment of an AI meant to keep the prevailing systems in check. Without these regulations, Putin will be proven true: the one who wins the race will become the ruler of the world, there just might not be much left to rule.

Tags: Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence (AI)

About The Author

• 
  
• Emanuel Prodan
• Emanuel Prodan is an O-4 in the United States Air Force. He currently holds a Master's degree from Liberty University in Public Policy: Chinese Affairs, and is in the process of completing a Master's degree at the University of Denver in International Security with a focus on the comparative degree of AI implementation between the US and Chinese militaries.

18. The CIA World Factbook is dead. Here's how I came to love it

​Summary:

NPR’s Bill Chappell mourns the CIA World Factbook’s sudden “sunset” on Feb. 4, after decades as a free, orderly baseline for country data and odd but useful travel notes. He explains he came to love it as a young CNN International editor: when a secretive agency shows how it sees the world, journalists chasing a first draft of history get a rare, practical primary source drawn from official data. Librarians treated it as a gold standard for basic distinctions on religion and government, and Chappell later used it as “clutch” context in Olympics reporting. He’s now hunting for a replacement.

Comment: Do we no longer believe in the government providing a public good?

The CIA World Factbook is dead. Here's how I came to love it

NPR · By · February 7, 2026

February 7, 20265:00 AM ET

By 

Bill Chappell

https://www.npr.org/2026/02/07/nx-s1-5702494/cia-world-factbook-dead

The World Factbook's website drew millions of views each year, according to the CIA. It's seen here in an archived version from last month. CIA World Factbook via Internet Archive/ Screenshot by NPR

When one of the world's most secretive and far-reaching organizations offers to share how it sees the world, it's worth taking a peek.

That's the thought I had when I dove into the CIA World Factbook for the first time as a young editor at CNN International in the early 2000s. If journalists aim to write the first draft of history, I figured, then the Factbook, culling data from Cabinet agencies and other official outlets, could be a reliable primary source.

The CIA World Factbook started out as a classified Cold War document, but it later emerged as an internet stalwart. In classrooms and public and private research spaces, people relied on it for presenting essential facts about countries and governments.

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But without warning, the CIA said this week that it will no longer produce the publication that it previously touted as "indispensable."

A 'perennial bestseller' full of essential facts

For a sense of how indispensable it could be, consider visiting Bulgaria without reading this Factbook "Travel Facts" tip: "Unlike in most other countries, a vertical shaking of the head indicates 'no' in Bulgaria while a sideways shaking indicates 'yes.'"

Librarians at CNN and NPR were the first people I heard singing the Factbook's praises, treating it as the gold standard for making important distinctions such as whether a country is majority Shiite or Sunni, and what kind of government it has.

But they're part of a large choir: Since the Government Publishing Office started publishing the World Factbook in 1975, it has been a "perennial best seller," the GPO says.

"The CIA World Factbook has been for 30 years an invaluable goldmine of reliable information used by students, scholars, reporters and the general public," says CIA historian Tim Weiner, referring to the decades the Factbook has been online; its history goes back even further (more on that below).

The Factbook was an immediate hit after it went online in 1997 — offering an orderly view of the world, one year before Google's 1998 debut. The CIA says it has "garnered millions of views each year."

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All of that came to an abrupt end on Feb. 4, when the CIA closed the book on the Factbook. The resource's former web address now redirects to a brief one-page message stating that it "has sunset," and is bidding it farewell. The CIA gave no reason for the move, so I called the agency's media office, which declined to comment on the record.

Its demise comes one year into the tenure of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who has promised to bring "strict adherence to the CIA's mission" of intelligence gathering and analysis.

The Factbook's website might have been wiped from the internet, but thousands of copies of the site have been saved to the Internet Archive, including dozens from recent weeks and nearly 29,000 since January 2017. And you can find physical copies of the book in many public and university libraries.

From the practical to the fanciful

For academics, the Factbook offered hard reliable data that was updated each year. For international travelers, it offered a promise of predictability. Its Travel Facts section listed everything from voltage requirements and cultural norms to what kind of food and souvenirs visitors would find.

"In 1988, I was going to Afghanistan, then under Soviet domination," says Weiner, author of the book, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century. "And one of the first things I did was to go to the CIA World Factbook for information about Afghanistan, which was hard to find" in the pre-internet era.

"It's like you wouldn't go off on a trip as a reporter without a map, and you wouldn't go off to a strange country without consulting the CIA World Factbook," he adds. "It was a compass to discover the world."

When I was covering the 2016 Olympics in Brazil and the 2018 Games in South Korea for NPR, the Factbook was clutch, decoding flags and national anthems and laying out where countries stack up in the pecking orders of GDP, land mass and population. I came to rely on it for everything from locator maps to a quick guide to a country's political, religious and ethnic dynamics.

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The Factbook also supplied superlatives that trivia buffs could count on, issuing Daily Facts of historical and geographical significance. It listed, for instance, the only two "doubly landlocked" countries — which means they're surrounded by other landlocked countries — in the world: Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein.

A "Fact of the Day" entry on the World Factbook website from earlier this year shows a building in Bethlehem, Pa., that was part of the first pumped municipal water system in the U.S., dating to the 1760s. CIA Factbook via Internet Archive/ Screenshot by NPR

It also included photos of local scenes, from tourist sites to fields of livestock. And as the spy agency noted this week, "only CIA insiders would know that officers donated some of their personal travel photos" among the Factbook's more than 5,000 photographs. (As for how many people have worked on the book itself, the agency says that's classified!)

The Factbook's roots extend to World War II

The World Factbook's origin story is interwoven with that of the CIA itself. The agency is a descendant of the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS, as many crossword solvers might know), which was created during World War II to gather reliable intelligence.

The OSS worked with the Army and Navy to create authoritative appraisals of basic intelligence, emphasizing fundamental facts. A CIA history of the Factbook notes that as the U.S. emerged from the war as a global power, it recognized a need to continue giving leaders a reliable, 360-degree view of the world.

The agency quotes an idea put forth by the writer George S. Pettee, that "the conduct of peace involves all countries, all human activities — not just the enemy and his war production."

After the CIA's creation in 1947, it dubbed the enterprise the National Intelligence Survey. In 1962, the CIA began publishing the classified National Basic Intelligence Factbook, according to the agency.

The CIA issued the first unclassified version of the publication in 1971; it was renamed The World Factbook in 1981.

The Factbook's demise drew immediate concern from people who frequently rely on it for their work, as Reddit groups for teachers, librarians and travel agents mourned its passing.

A World Factbook "Fact of the Day" entry from 2025 shows the Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon, a Christian pilgrimage site near Beirut. CIA World Factbook via Internet Archive/ Screenshot by NPR

And I mourn with them, while I look for another free and reliable online resource that offers to sort countries by metrics such as median age, inflation rate, net migration, and spending on education – details that can give news stories important context.

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But we'll give the last word about the Factbook to the CIA. Here's how the agency described it in 2020, during the final months of President Trump's first term:

"It has been a resource used by presidents, by warfighters, and by the world's greatest scholars. It is used in times of crisis, in times of uncertainly [sic], in times of peace, and in times of war. It is an authoritative source of basic intelligence that has and will continue to be an essential part of CIA's legacy."

NPR · By · February 7, 2026

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

https://apstrategy.org/

Executive Director, Korea Regional Review

https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/

Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal

https://smallwarsjournal.com/

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com