Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

– Martin Luther King Jr.

“He tried to make her understand. 'This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event -- years after it.’”

– George Orwell, 1984.

“If you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can help assist suffering people then suddenly we become very cost conscious.”

– Andrew J. Bacevich, American historian.

1. Beijing-Backed Accounts Hint at U.S. Outreach on Trade as China Keeps Door Open

2. The U.S. Has a Deal for Ukraine’s Minerals. Accessing Them Won’t Be Easy.

3. Trump Wants a New Air Force One So Badly He’s Refurbishing a Qatari Plane

4. Judge Releases Columbia Student, Comparing Detention Threats to Red Scare

5. MARSOC is fusing traditionally rugged Marines with tech-curious ones

6. The OSS Society - OSS DEAR Team and Vietnam

7. LEARNING ABOUT THE PACING CHALLENGE: THE CHINA INTEGRATED COURSE

8. Modernizing the Unconventional Warfare Enterprise: The Case for Nonviolent Resistance

9. Pentagon warns it’s not prepared for homeland drone attack

10. Experts see rise of powerful non-state groups as US retreats from global stage

11. Hegseth’s Pentagon Is a Mess. Here’s How to Fix It.

12. America’s response to measles is eroding its ability to deter biological attacks

13. Ospreys won’t return to full flight operations until 2026

14. Taiwan's Frustrating Defense Spending Limits

15. Vietnam celebrates 50th anniversary of national unification, capture of Saigon

16. This Is the Way a World Order Ends

17. An Insider’s Guide to Cyber Readiness

18. A Cobalt Quagmire? The Risks of a Security-for-Minerals Deal in the DRC

19. China Is Still Winning the Battle for 5G—and 6G

20. Letters to the Editor: ‘The Elites Were a Disaster’

21. How Trump erased diversity in 100 days

22. Trump expected to FIRE his top national security adviser Michael Waltz

23. Trump to Oust National Security Adviser Mike Waltz

1. Beijing-Backed Accounts Hint at U.S. Outreach on Trade as China Keeps Door Open

Diplomatic communication, trade negotiation, and intelligence collection and analysis via social media.

Communication in President's Trump's medium of choice?

Beijing-Backed Accounts Hint at U.S. Outreach on Trade as China Keeps Door Open

China is open to discussions to better understand U.S. intentions, a social media post said

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/beijing-backed-accounts-hint-at-u-s-outreach-on-trade-as-china-keeps-door-open-f165993d

By Jiahui Huang

May 1, 2025 3:22 am ET

Social media posts from three widely followed state-backed accounts in China hinted at Washington’s outreach to Beijing. Photo: tingshu wang/Reuters

Beijing-backed social media accounts say U.S. officials have reached out to Chinese counterparts through multiple channels to discuss trade, as the world watches for any sign of tariff talks between the two sides.

Posts from three widely followed state-backed social media accounts in China made similar statements early Thursday, citing unnamed sources hinting at U.S. outreach.

“The U.S. is seeking contact with China ahead of formal negotiations–something China sees little downside in exploring at this stage,” state media-affiliated account Yuyuan Tantian posted on Weibo.

China is open to discussions to better understand U.S. intentions, the post said.

The messaging echoed previous comments from Chinese officials that the door to talks are open, though Washington must make the first move.

Thursday’s posts could mark a slight thaw in tensions that have worsened after the Trump administration raised tariffs on China, prompting Beijing to respond with its own measures.

Senior China strategist Zhaopeng Xing at ANZ Research said Beijing may be signaling a softer stance. He noted that a recent video posted by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs earlier this week–saying China would “never kneel down” to the U.S.–drew some negative comments from the public.

However, Dong Chen, chief Asia strategist at Pictet Wealth Management, said the posts merely reiterated China’s position that it is open to talks, but not under duress.

“China never said that it won’t negotiate, but there are conditions it wants to be met before the negotiation,” he said.

Beijing has repeatedly said the U.S. should cancel unilateral tariffs and offer equal treatment if it wants serious discussions.

Neither economist expects formal negotiations to begin any time soon.

Although China faces pressure from the tariffs, it has a stronger “pain threshold” than Washington, said Chen at Pictet Wealth.

2. The U.S. Has a Deal for Ukraine’s Minerals. Accessing Them Won’t Be Easy.

But does this provide the foundation and rationale for some kind of security guarantee because the US will want to protect its "investment?"

The U.S. Has a Deal for Ukraine’s Minerals. Accessing Them Won’t Be Easy.

The resources could be plentiful but will be difficult and expensive to extract—even without a war

https://www.wsj.com/world/a-look-at-the-ukrainian-minerals-that-trump-wants-54edb78a

By Ian Lovett

Updated May 1, 2025 3:52 am ET

The front-line town of Pokrovsk in Ukraine in January. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Key Points

What's This?

Ukraine possesses vast mineral resources, including lithium, graphite, titanium, uranium and rare earths, with an estimated value in the trillions of dollars.
Developing Ukraine's mineral resources requires significant investment and faces challenges due to Russian occupation of some deposit areas.
Trump's interest in Ukraine's rare-earth elements may be more geopolitical than a genuine attempt to secure supply outside of China.

The U.S. and Ukraine have signed a deal giving America access to Ukrainian minerals, an agreement that the Trump administration says will help compensate for assisting Kyiv in its fight against Russian invaders.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hailed the deal as a step toward a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine and a beginning of the country’s reconstruction. In tightly controlled negotiations, the Trump administration dropped its insistence that the agreement allow Washington to recoup billions of dollars of past military aid.

Developing Ukraine’s large resources will require huge investment, and many of the regions where they are found are in areas occupied by Russia.

What mineral resources does Ukraine have?

Ukraine is believed to have deposits of at least 20 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers critical. These include lithium, graphite, titanium, uranium and rare earths, a collection of 17 elements that are essential for everything from cellphones to the defense industry.

Their collective potential value is estimated to be trillions of dollars, according to industry analysts. Titanium and lithium are potentially of greatest commercial interest.

Before the full-scale war began in 2022, Ukraine produced 6% of the world’s titanium, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. The element is used in construction of missiles, airplanes and naval ships.

A titanium mine in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region. Photo: roman pilipey/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Ukraine is also home to around 3% of the world’s deposits of lithium, which is used in batteries and considered “critical to the U.S. economy and national security” by the U.S. Geological Survey, with demand expected to dramatically increase over the coming decade.

What are the obstacles to mining critical minerals in Ukraine?

The Ukrainian government has published maps showing the locations of various mineral deposits, but most of those are based on studies conducted during the Soviet era, said Roman Opimakh, former director general of the Ukrainian Geological Survey, the national resources regulator.

Many of the deposits have never been mined.

To make new mines commercially viable, the owners must conduct a series of new studies, said Denys Aloshyn, chief strategy officer for UkrLithiumMining, which is developing Ukraine’s first lithium mine, in the central Kirovohrad region.

“There’s an illusion that it’s someone taking a shovel and starting to dig money out of the ground,” Aloshyn said.

Since 2017, Aloshyn said, his company had spent more than $20 million acquiring a license and conducting studies. Still, before any mining can begin, he said, a further investment of at least $350 million would be required to conduct a final study and build facilities for mining and processing the rock, of which lithium makes up only a small part.

But the potential for profit has been established, he said, because ore from the site has been successfully made into battery-grade lithium carbonate.

“I don’t have many illusions that it’ll happen before the war is over, or before very strong security guarantees are in place,” he said.

Does the fighting impede access to mineral deposits?

Somewhere between 20% and 40% of Ukraine’s deposits are critical minerals located in areas of the country currently under Russian occupation, according to George Ingall, a price analyst at Benchmark Minerals Intelligence.

“If the war ended tomorrow, lithium would be the priority,” Ingall said, noting that two early-stage lithium projects were already under way—one of them in territory occupied by Russia. Two of the country’s four known lithium deposits are in areas under Russian control.

Russian officials have indicated that their desire to seize control of critical minerals may be strategic, as they try to position themselves for peace talks.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has cited the mineral deposits in asserting that Russia wouldn’t withdraw from occupied parts of Ukraine. “Should we just leave the rare-earth metals there and go?” he said.

What does Ukraine get out of the deal?

Central to the agreement is an investment fund that both Ukraine and the U.S. will contribute to and oversee: the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The signing of the deal insures that the U.S. and its allies will take the lead in any reconstruction. “To be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine,” Bessent said.

The Trump administration also regards the deal as a means of offering security to Ukraine against future Russian aggression if a cease-fire is reached. Trump officials argue that U.S. business presence in Ukraine will deter Moscow from attacking the country again.

What about rare-earth elements?

Trump has specifically expressed interest in Ukraine’s rare-earth elements, as he seeks to shore up the U.S.’s supply of elements from sources outside of China, which currently dominates that market. Greenland, which Trump has said the U.S. could try to seize by force, has some of the world’s largest deposits of rare earths.

Ukraine does have several deposits of rare earths, such as gallium. However, these deposits appear to be relatively small, Ingall said, and none have been mined or even significantly explored.

In addition, roughly half of the rare-earths deposits are now in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, with the largest one spanning the front line in the Donetsk region.

“Rare-earth mines require an incredible amount of capital expenditure to get them off the ground,” Ingall said. “There are a lot of mines in the U.S. struggling to get investment to even start mining. This seems more like a geopolitical plan than an actual play to have more control over rare-earth supplies.”

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

3. Trump Wants a New Air Force One So Badly He’s Refurbishing a Qatari Plane

Be careful because when you want it bad you may get it bad.

I wonder how this will affect Boeing contracts in the future because it cannot provide an Air Force One on time.

Trump Wants a New Air Force One So Badly He’s Refurbishing a Qatari Plane

The luxury plane is being outfitted in Texas for Trump’s use as his frustration mounts with Boeing

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/air-force-one-trump-qatari-jet-l3harris-fc903838

By Andrew Tangel

, Josh Dawsey

and Sharon Terlep

May 1, 2025 5:00 am ET

President Trump boarding Air Force One this week in Michigan. The jets currently in use date to the George H.W. Bush administration. Photo: jim watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Key Points

What's This?

Trump, frustrated with Boeing’s Air Force One delays, commissions L3Harris to ready an interim presidential plane by year’s end.
L3Harris has been tapped to overhaul a Boeing 747, formerly used by Qatar, retrofitting it with specialized systems to transform it into a presidential jet.
Boeing’s Air Force One replacement jets are years behind schedule and billions over budget due to supplier, engineering, and manufacturing setbacks.

President Trump is done waiting for Boeing BA 0.68%increase; green up pointing triangle.

Frustrated by delays on Boeing’s work to deliver a new Air Force One, Trump has commissioned a smaller defense contractor to ready an interim presidential plane by year’s end.

Boeing will continue plugging away on a pair of Air Force One replacement jets, which have fallen so far behind that Trump might not get to fly on them while in office.

The U.S. government has commissioned L3Harris LHX -0.55%decrease; red down pointing triangle to overhaul a Boeing 747 formerly used by the Qatari government. The Melbourne, Fla.-based company is tasked with retrofitting the plane with certain specialized systems to transform the luxury aircraft into a presidential jet, some of the people said.

Trump wants to have the plane available for use as early as the fall, some of the people said. He has regularly asked for updates. On April 18, the CEO of Boeing came to the Oval Office to meet with Trump, people familiar with the meeting said.

The White House, Boeing and L3Harris declined to comment.

In his first term, Trump commissioned two new presidential planes to replace a pair of aging jets, which are among the world’s most complex aircraft with communications and defensive systems that serve as a command and control platform for the commander in chief. Boeing won the $3.9 billion contract and at one point was expected to have the planes ready by last year. But it is now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, after a series of supplier, engineering and manufacturing setbacks.

L3Harris has been commissioned by the government to overhaul a Boeing 747, formerly used by Qatar’s government, as an interim presidential plane. Photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News

L3Harris has been a contractor to Boeing working on communications systems for the pair of replacement Air Force Ones. The company, a product of the 2019 tie-up between L3 Technologies and Harris Corp., aims to become an alternative to the Pentagon’s biggest suppliers and has been growing quickly. It generates roughly one-third the annual revenue of Boeing.

The interim jet would complement the current pair of aging, heavily modified Boeing 747 jets that are known by the military as VC-25A aircraft and referred to as Air Force One when the president is on board.

Before Trump’s inauguration, White House Military Office and senior Air Force officials considered canceling Boeing’s contract for the new planes, according to people familiar with the matter. White House officials under Trump have also discussed whether they can sue the plane manufacturer, some of the people said.

The U.S. Air Force has long wanted a third jet to serve as a backup when one of the current pair is undergoing maintenance, according to people familiar with the matter.

The VC-25As date to the George H.W. Bush administration and increasingly require heavy maintenance, potentially limiting the president’s transportation options on overseas missions when one of the planes is in the shop.

Trump inside Air Force One on a recent flight to Rome. Photo: nathan howard/Reuters

Around the November elections, Boeing representatives signaled to federal officials that the plane maker wouldn’t be able to deliver the new planes for about another decade—until around 2035, according to people familiar with the discussion. Boeing has, in particular, recently struggled with the planes’ complicated wiring and structural issues, including some related to holes for doors cut into the lower lobes of the aircraft, some of these people said.

During the Biden administration, Frank Kendall, the U. S. Air Force secretary at the time, considered canceling Boeing’s contract for the project. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week, Kendall said he had been open to weighing whether the Air Force might have to work with European plane maker Airbus, or go with a two-engine jet, rather than the four-engine 747s it has been using.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What could be the ripple effects of Trump’s frustrations with Boeing on Air Force One? Join the conversation below.

Building out an interim airplane by the end of this year poses its own challenges. The plane might not be a true VC-25A that is as capable as the current jets. A quick turnaround would likely limit modifications, said Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s acquisition chief during the Biden administration, who wasn’t familiar with the new plans. “You could do some paint, you could do some communications upgrades, and I suspect it would be hard to do too much beyond that on that timeline,” he said.

Military officials privately discussed whether they could paint the current Air Force One jets in Trump’s favored color scheme for the incoming president, people familiar with the discussions said. The Biden White House had rejected that paint job for the future president jets, whose dark blue paint might increase the heat signature on the plane and require costly and time-consuming modifications to avoid interfering with key electronic systems.

Boeing even produced a slide deck with potential other paint schemes, including variations of Trump’s that had blue and red stripes but a gray or white underbelly, according to a Nov. 18 Boeing presentation viewed by the Journal.

The president in February toured a Qatari-owned 747 in West Palm Beach, Fla. Photo: roberto schmidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Soon after his election victory, Trump initiated a series of conversations with Boeing executives and enlisted Elon Musk to help speed up the Air Force One replacement jets with the hopes of being able to fly on the plane whose price he personally negotiated, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Musk demanded detailed information about the project even before Trump was in office, according to a person familiar with the request, which made some executives at Boeing uncomfortable. Musk then regularly called Boeing officials and visited the future Air Force One jets at the company’s San Antonio facility.

In February, Trump teased publicly he might go in a different direction.

He spent more than an hour touring a Qatari-owned 747 in West Palm Beach, Fla., and said afterward that he might buy a new plane. “I’m not happy with Boeing,” he said.

Boeing didn’t comment at the time, but CEO Kelly Ortberg told investors Musk was helping to speed Boeing’s work on the replacement planes by reducing onerous requirements set by the Air Force and White House.

Musk is “able to pretty quickly ascertain the difference between technical requirements and things that we can move out of the way,” Ortberg said at a February investor conference.

Boeing has struggled with certain Federal Aviation Administration certification requirements, as well as maintaining security credentials for workers involved with the highly classified project.

“If we’re going to get this thing delivered and get it at a reasonable time and a reasonable cost, I think you have to go in and be somewhat ruthless about the requirements,” said Kendall, the former Air Force secretary.

Write to Andrew Tangel at andrew.tangel@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Sharon Terlep at sharon.terlep@wsj.com

4. Judge Releases Columbia Student, Comparing Detention Threats to Red Scare

He has said he places his faith in the courts and the American people for justice.

Excerpts:

Mahdawi, 34, was born and raised in the West Bank, according to court records. He entered the U.S. legally in 2014 and was married to an American. He owns a cabin he built in Vermont and has lived in the state for a decade.

He is set to graduate from Columbia next month with a degree in philosophy and then start a master’s program.

Columbia said Wednesday, “Every individual in this country, citizen and non-citizen alike, deserves the due process rights afforded them by law.”

He was a member of a Unitarian Universalist society and studied Buddhism. The government reported that he expressed interest in buying a rifle from a Vermont gun shop in 2015 and allegedly said he built guns “to kill Jews while he was in Palestine.” He denied making those comments in an interview with an FBI agent. The agency declined to file charges against Mahdawi.

Mahdawi must remain in Vermont while the case proceeds, but is permitted to travel to New York to meet with his lawyers or attend school.

Judge Releases Columbia Student, Comparing Detention Threats to Red Scare

A federal judge in Vermont ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi while his case proceeds

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/judge-release-mohsen-mahdawi-columbia-student-e5401f2a

By Alyssa Lukpat

Updated April 30, 2025 2:47 pm ET

MARSOC is fusing traditionally rugged Marines with tech-curious ones

Defense News · by Riley Ceder · April 30, 2025

The Marine Corps’ stand-in forces need to possess physical toughness and a natural inquisitiveness in order to succeed, Marine Corps Special Operations Command leaders said Tuesday at an annual defense conference.

Maj. Gen. Peter Huntley, commander of Marine Corps Special Operations Command, spoke at a Modern Day Marine panel in Washington about how a changing military landscape requires multifaceted Marine Corps Raiders who possess both a grittiness synonymous with the Marine Corps and an eagerness to learn and adapt to evolving information systems.

“It’s gonna be nasty, it’s gonna be brutish, it’s still gonna take tough, rugged people,” Huntley said of what the global military landscape requires of the Marine Corps Raider.

But he said that environment would also drive the need for MARSOC personnel with the cognitive ability to adapt to new technologies and the desire to adapt.

Marine Corps stand-in forces, outlined in the Marine Corps’ plan to prepare for future conflicts, dubbed Force Design, are defined as small but lethal forces designed to operate within a contested area and disrupt the plans of an adversary.

MARSOC fits the definition.

The proliferation of unmanned defense systems and adversarial technological advancements, as observed in the Russia-Ukraine war, has served as a driving factor for MARSOC’s modernization efforts, which have included acquiring leading defense technologies and recruiting physically tough, naturally curious Marines, leaders said at Tuesday’s panel.

Col. Shane Edwards of MARSOC G-8, who also spoke at the panel, said MARSOC’s current fleet of technologies includes unmanned surface and underwater vessels and more than 45 aerial drones.

He said artificial intelligence and small robotics, especially first-person view drones, are the biggest game changers for MARSOC.

These systems are pivotal for contested environments in which adversaries are ramping up their own modernization efforts and eclipsing the sophistication of their previous systems.

“We’re going up against enemies that have way better tech,” Edwards said.

Panelists reiterated that a military landscape evolving at breakneck speed doesn’t alter the basic necessity for exemplary Marines.

Marines want to add counter-drone weapon to amphibious vehicle

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has propelled counter-UAS weaponry onto a priority list of add-ons for the vehicle, officials said.

By Hope Hodge Seck

What makes MARSOC unique, Huntley said, is that their personnel are constantly deployed forward, providing Raiders the opportunity to consistently set the theater for partner forces and be a key solver of problem sites.

“It allows us to do the things that are uniquely soft,” Huntley said. “Whether it’s to help our partners fend off aggression by adversaries or to set conditions.”

That way, he said, if conflict does potentially arise, the Raiders will be prepared. They wouldn’t be starting on game day, because they will have done their homework.

Panelists said MARSOC aims to support joint forces by providing information to help them achieve their objectives. In order to do that, the component is leveraging new technologies to provide Marine Corps Raiders with as much valuable information as possible.

MARSOC is experimenting with unmanned systems — autonomous and semi-autonomous — that possess an increased range of movement that would allow MARSOC to navigate larger geographical swaths, Huntley said.

Those might include surface maritime types of platforms that could travel long distances from shore to sea, or airborne ones as well, he said.

About Riley Ceder

Riley Ceder is a reporter at Military Times, where he covers breaking news, criminal justice, investigations, and cyber. He previously worked as an investigative practicum student at The Washington Post, where he contributed to the Abused by the Badge investigation.

6. The OSS Society - OSS DEAR Team and Vietnam

An interesting part of OSS history is at the link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z3stn0glk1o4q28it9klh/OSS__2011_BeurtSerVass.pdf?rlkey=hmcbzwxfv13x0urwnfnlwo8js&e=2&st=hvz5gluv&dl=0

The Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh excerpt is below the photo.

This is the SOF legacy. Since 1945 SOF, in the OSS image, has done this: "their personnel are constantly deployed forward, providing [them] the opportunity to consistently set the theater for partner forces and be a key solver of problem sites." (From the MARSOC article HERE )

The OSS Society

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. OSS DEER Team provided support to the Viet Minh and saved Ho Chi Minh’s life. At the Japanese surrender, Ho approached an OSS officer and asked him to ask the United States government to support Vietnamese independence, which the Truman administration rejected. Here’s a link to the article written by the OSS officer Ho approached: https://www.dropbox.com/.../OSS__2011_BeurtSerVass.pdf... is

Mission to Hanoi

I was in Kunming just as Chiang Kai-shek sent one of his commanders, General Wu Han, to take the surrender of the Japanese in Indo-China. I was assigned to go with him.

Wu Han had an army of 10,000 Chinese troops and he was not trusted by Chiang. We were only a few miles out of Kunming when the column was mortared—from behind. No one was hurt, but there was no question that the mor-tars were aimed at us. One of Wu Han’s aides told me it was simply a parting message from Chiang Kai-Shek: “Be gone—and stay gone!”

Hanoi was a beautiful city then. As we marched in, peo- ple were hanging out of the windows of the big government buildings, cheering our arrival. Wu Han met with the rank- ing Vietnamese in a large hall. The leader of the Vietnamese was a small man—he seemed about five feet tall. I would learn that this was Ho Chi Minh.

I was just one in the crowd, a junior officer. There were other Westerners, but not many, and they had probably lived out the war there. I was dressed in my Navy uniform, and perhaps that was why Ho Chi Minh noticed me. I saw him point, and Wu Han motioned me over. He introduced me to Ho.

Ho Chi Minh did not speak English well, but he wanted to communicate with me. He knew some English from his time in New York, Boston, and London. Basically, he wanted to know who I was and what was I doing there. Was I there as an American official? It seemed that he wanted something from me.

One of Wu Han’s intelligence officers took me over to Ho’s aide-de-camp. The ADC asked if I was in contact with my headquarters. I told him I had a small radio I could use. He asked if I could contact the U.S. commander re- sponsible for this region. I said that I could, although very indirectly. I could use my radio to contact Kunming, and Kunming in turn would contact our headquarters in Chun- gking. Any response from Chungking would also come via Kunming. The whole involved process could take a week.

The ADC asked that I contact the U.S. headquarters and query if a “committee” of American officials could be sent to Hanoi to meet with the Vietnamese, to discuss the future relationship between Vietnam and the United States. I said I would be pleased to do that, but added that I was just a junior naval officer, and I could not guarantee that I could get the message to the right people.

In the end it took a week to get a response to my message. Essentially it said: What are you doing there? You are on French territory. The Vietnamese are a French concern. Get out!

That was it. The Vietnamese initiative ended there. I have always thought that it was an opportunity that we missed—one that might have changed the course of America’s relationship with Vietnam.

7. LEARNING ABOUT THE PACING CHALLENGE: THE CHINA INTEGRATED COURSE

Good on the Army War College and Zenel Garcia and John Nagl. We need intellectual efforts such as this. We are closing down our military and government research arms such as the Office of Net Assessment, and the US institute of Peace. I understand that the National Defense University's research arm of the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) may also be on the chopping block. I know the Army has reimagined the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) to the Security Force Assistance and Stability Integration Directorate (SFASID) (HERE) but even this could be under threat as a "soft power element" as those who only focus on lethality may view it as a distraction from the priority on lethality.

Lethality, without the intellectual foundation that comes from rigorous research and academic programs such as this one, will not win wars.

Excerpts:

China Integrated Course (CIC). As Zenel Garcia and John Nagl explain, this isn't your typical lecture series; the CIC emphasizes practical, real-world knowledge through innovative teaching methods.

...

The CIC equips USAWC graduates with the strategic insight, operational acumen, and warfighting proficiency needed to address the pacing challenge posed by the PRC. By combining foundational knowledge, experiential learning, and interdisciplinary expertise, the course ensures students can think critically, lead strategically, and operate effectively in competition, crisis, and conflict. As the global security environment evolves, the Army War College will continue to refine the CIC guided by Joint Staff directives, Army priorities, and student feedback to ensure its graduates are ready to deter aggression, defend US interests, and, if necessary, fight and win in a contested theater.

LEARNING ABOUT THE PACING CHALLENGE: THE CHINA INTEGRATED COURSE

Zenel Garcia , John Nagl May 1, 2025

warroom.armywarcollege.edu · by Zenel Garcia · May 1, 2025

The USAWC has an established history of implementing various pedagogical approaches across its core curriculum and elective courses.

The U.S. Army War College (USAWC) has answered the Joint Staff’s call to prioritize understanding China by creating the China Integrated Course (CIC). As Zenel Garcia and John Nagl explain, this isn't your typical lecture series; the CIC emphasizes practical, real-world knowledge through innovative teaching methods. Students engage in expert lectures, participate in in-depth seminar discussions, and immerse themselves in wargames like "Pacific Posture 2032" and "Pacific Overmatch." These exercises simulate scenarios ranging from geopolitical maneuvering to armed conflict, pushing students to apply strategic thinking and warfighting skills. By combining academic rigor with practitioner expertise, the USAWC is equipping its graduates to effectively address the challenges posed by China.

The USAWC has an established history of implementing various pedagogical approaches across its core curriculum and elective courses.

In 2023, the U.S. Joint Staff directed the war colleges to increase the portion of their curricula devoted to understanding China, to include its “national interests, strategic objectives, and domestic constraints, and grand strategy.” The purpose of this deeper understanding of the Department of Defense’s pacing challenge is to enable students “to develop policies, strategies, forces, and military plans that counter PRC aggression against the United States, its allies, partners, and interests.” The implications of this guidance were clear, the U.S. Army War College (USAWC) had to not just raise general awareness but provide practical—preferably experiential—knowledge that will allow graduates to act in the real world.

The School of Strategic Landpower chose to implement this in phases, beginning with the resident course in the 2023-2024 academic year. The main vehicle for this was a new 10-lesson China Integrated Course (CIC). This year we tested an alternative experiential learning option. Next year, the distance education course will deliver its version of the course. All of these are just the most recent examples of how the USAWC centers warfighting with innovative pedagogies and leveraging academic and practitioner expertise.

Innovative Pedagogies

The USAWC has an established history of implementing various pedagogical approaches across its core curriculum and elective courses. As an integrated course, the CIC leverages several of these approaches to ensure that students are not only building foundational knowledge about China, but are also able to apply what they have learned. Half of the lessons in the course begin with a plenary lecture delivered by a subject matter expert, followed by a question-and-answer session. The class then breaks into their seminars of typically sixteen students for in-depth discussions, in which students can delve deeper into the readings and plenary presentation, test their assumptions, and apply what they have learned to a relevant strategic issue.

For example, in one lesson the students learn about China’s fragmented policy making and implementation process and its effects on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Having learned these aspects of China’s foreign policy through the readings and plenary lecture, students then explore in seminar discussions how strategic leaders can develop and implement strategies of engagement, cooption, or competition vis-a-vis the BRI and the implications of any of those courses of actions. This encourages students to critically assess real-world policy challenges and apply theoretical frameworks to dynamic geopolitical contexts, deepening their strategic thinking skills.

The other lesson type uses experiential learning pedagogies, including class exercises and wargames. Having learned, and engaged in discussions about the history of China and the Chinese Communist Party, its political and strategic culture, and the force structure and modernization process of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the students conduct the Pacific Posture 2032 wargame. In this exercise, the seminar splits into two teams: Blue (the United States) and Red (China), that compete using the military, diplomatic, informational, and economic instruments of national power. The objective is to influence other countries in the region, gain strategic access, deny access to opponents, and secure geopolitical advantage. The game unfolds over four turns, each representing two years. During each turn, teams invest resources in select countries to “set the theater,” guided by their strategic objectives and future force posture needs. Students must also allocate defense management resources to modernization, readiness, and force structure. Faculty adjudicate outcomes, determining which team gains technological and geographic advantages as the situation progresses toward armed conflict between China and the United States and its allies. With strategic conditions set, the course then shifts to how China conceptualizes and conducts warfighting.

Following a lesson on Chinese Warfighting that introduces students to PLA strategic and doctrinal concepts, the students apply their understanding to a three-day wargame called Pacific Overmatch. In this exercise, the same two teams that competed in Pacific Posture develop a campaign approach that advances and achieves US or Chinese national security interests and objectives within the construct of the scenario. They are tasked to apply relevant aspects of operational art, operational design, and the joint planning process to understand American and Chinese strategic and operational environments, frame military objectives, and communicate the sequence of actions and activities required to execute an armed conflict campaign. They apply American or Chinese warfighting concepts across all domains in the development, communication, and execution of an armed conflict campaign in the Western Pacific.

The game simulates U.S.–China competition, crisis, and conflict, prompting students to apply foundational knowledge from the core curriculum and the initial lessons if the CIC.

This year’s pilot offered lessons that will help improve subsequent iterations of the CIC and the broader curriculum as well. Five seminars tested Pacific Strategy, a matrix game developed by the USAWC wargaming experts in the Center for Strategic Leadership. The game simulates U.S.–China competition, crisis, and conflict, prompting students to apply foundational knowledge from the core curriculum and the initial lessons if the CIC. This fosters their ability to use a wider range of national power instruments across all three phases of the competition continuum. Pacific Strategy will be revised next year, incorporating student and faculty feedback and academic expertise ahead of its broader implementation across the remaining CIC seminars.

Academic and Practitioner Expertise

Developing and implementing the CIC requires a broad pool of expertise. The course is purposefully designed to draw on the talents of the civilian and military academics and practitioners from all three resident-course departments: the Department of Command Leadership and Management (DCLM), which educates senior leaders in leading organizational change and managing the enterprise aspects of national defense; the Department of National Security and Strategy (DNSS), which prepares leaders to understand and navigate strategic competition, conflict, national policy, and global dynamics; and the Department of Military Strategy Planning and Operations (DMSPO), which focuses on planning and executing military operations and leading joint forces. The CIC also leverages the expertise of the China Landpower Studies Center in the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) for plenary lectures.

Lessons in Warfighting

The CIC is designed to produce strategic leaders who know how to deter China, and, if deterrence fails, lead military operations. At its core, the course emphasizes the development and application of warfighting skills grounded in strategic thought and operational planning. Students learn how to generate landpower options within a joint and combined context, apply strategic thinking to assess evolving threats, and design coherent approaches across the competition continuum. The CIC also trains students to integrate military and non-military instruments of national power to pursue US interests and respond decisively to national security challenges. Critically, the course prepares students to anticipate and shape future operational environments by identifying emerging military requirements and force design implications. It also reinforces the principles of strategic leadership necessary to build, lead, and sustain combat-ready units capable of fighting and winning in a high-end conflict.

Conclusion

The CIC equips USAWC graduates with the strategic insight, operational acumen, and warfighting proficiency needed to address the pacing challenge posed by the PRC. By combining foundational knowledge, experiential learning, and interdisciplinary expertise, the course ensures students can think critically, lead strategically, and operate effectively in competition, crisis, and conflict. As the global security environment evolves, the Army War College will continue to refine the CIC guided by Joint Staff directives, Army priorities, and student feedback to ensure its graduates are ready to deter aggression, defend US interests, and, if necessary, fight and win in a contested theater.

Zenel Garcia is an Associate Professor of National Security Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy and co-director of the Resident Course China Integrated Course at the U.S. Army War College. His research focuses on the intersection of international relations theory, security, and geopolitics. Specifically, how interpretations of security and the geopolitical environment shape the discursive and empirical processes of regional formation and transformation in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia.

John Nagl is Professor of Warfighting Studies and co-director of the Resident Course China Integrated Course at the U.S. Army War College. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.

The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense.

Photo Credit: Digi-Shot via flickr Creative Commons 2.0

warroom.armywarcollege.edu · by Zenel Garcia · May 1, 2025

8. Modernizing the Unconventional Warfare Enterprise: The Case for Nonviolent Resistance

The author overlooked Colonel Robert Helvey who is a protege of Gene Sharp (he was a consultant at Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution (AEI)) and for some years used to lecture at the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in the unconventional warfare underground development course. The US of "non-violent" resistance techniques should not be new to Special Forces soldiers. If Robert Helvey and people like him (e.g., Brian Petit) are not contributing at SWCS and JSOU I am not sure what we are doing in the realm of unconventional warfare and resistance.

"One prominent AEI consultant was Colonel Robert Helvey, former dean of the National Defense Intelligence College. AEI’s regular funders included U.S. government pass-throughs like the U.S. Institute for Peace, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy."

https://nonsite.org/change-agent-gene-sharps-neoliberal-nonviolence-part-one/

See these articles:

Col. Robert Helvey On Strategic Nonviolence

Training Pro-Democracy Movements: A Conversation with Colonel Robert Helvey

https://peacemagazine.org/archive/v24n1p12.htm

Gene Sharp's work is outlined in detail in the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies project (ARIS) (https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html). See specifically chapter 10 of the Human Factors Of Undergrounds in Insurgencies, table 10-1 and the 198 methods of nonviolent action. https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/HumanFactorsS.pdf

Lastly, we should not be negatively influenced by the fact that these are "non-violent" techniques. I fear too many associate these techniques with a pacifist philosophy and are not applicable to unconventional warfare where violence is employed. All of these techniques can be adapted for employment across the spectrum of conflict. While the actions themselves as acts of subversion (a fundamental tenet of UW) and non-violent, they can result in violent action and reaction and support other acts of necessary violence to support resistance.

Needless to say, I agree with the author that we need to learn, understand, and employ these techniques as part of unconventional warfare strategies (and irregular and political warfare)

Excertps:

Contemporary research into resistance movements from scholars such as David Ucko and Dr. Erica Chenoweth emphasizes the preeminence of nonviolent resistance in the 21st century. Even though Army Special Forces are the Department of Defense’s only organization specifically manned, trained, and equipped to conduct UW, the UW enterprise has not kept pace with contemporary trends illustrating the criticality of nonviolent resistance. USASOC should support nonviolence resistance education and training as a key element of its curriculum, not as an outlier, beginning with the SQFC and expanding into more advanced training like at SOF-TEC.

Like all conflict, resistance is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, and political. Engaging in support to nonviolent resistance is not a decision to be made lightly, nor is it a panacea to great power competition. However, enhancing SF’s ability to combine nonviolent resistance effects with other military and interagency efforts offers a valuable asymmetric option to compete with authoritarian adversaries that the United States would be remiss to neglect.

Essay| The Latest

Modernizing the Unconventional Warfare Enterprise: The Case for Nonviolent Resistance

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/01/modernizing-the-unconventional-warfare/

by Mark Thomas

05.01.2025 at 06:00am

“When one man is enslaved, all are not free” – John F. Kennedy

Abstract:

This paper argues that U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) should modernize its unconventional warfare (UW) training and education to improve its ability to support nonviolent resistance. Resistance scholars such as David Ucko and Dr. Erica Chenoweth argue that resistance movements in the 21st century have increased in frequency and are more likely to be nonviolent, but paradoxically are also less successful than ever. This modern resistance dilemma offers an opportunity for the US to gain an asymmetric advantage over its authoritarian adversaries through nonviolent, unconventional warfare. Despite this opportunity, most, if not all, UW training focuses on violent resistance, such as raids and ambushes. To prepare Army Special Forces (SF) to support nonviolent resistance, USASOC should augment the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) and Special Operations Forces Training and Experimentation Center (SOF-TEC) with specially trained cadre and role players that possess appropriate knowledge of nonviolent resistance. This paper also addresses potential arguments against SF more directly supporting nonviolent resistance by reviewing the conditions to support any UW campaign, such as political feasibility.

The Age of the Dictator?

Will the 21st century belong to the dictator? The United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are competing to decide this existential question. The U.S.-led liberal world order is built on democracy, free trade, and universal human rights, while the PRC’s vision is based on survival of the Chinese Communist Party, civil obedience, and preeminent global influence. For the US to prevail in this struggle, it must be able to support those who seek to resist the authoritarian rule modeled and exported by the PRC. Consistent with integrated campaigning, a critical Department of Defense (DoD) role in great power competition is to conduct unconventional warfare (UW). Joint doctrine defines UW as activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area. U.S. Army Special Forces are the only Department of Defense element authorized to conduct UW. To cite a well-known example, U.S. Special Forces conducted a UW campaign in Afghanistan supporting the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban in 2001. Although this campaign was successful, the Taliban exerted only tenuous control over their country.

More modern authoritarian states wield sophisticated internal security apparatuses that cannot be easily defeated by the likes of the SF “horse soldiers” in Afghanistan. While resistance movements have increased in the past decade, their success has greatly decreased (see Figure 1). This resistance paradox presents both a problem for aspiring democracies and an opportunity for the US to gain strategic initiative over authoritarian states. Research by Harvard professor Dr. Chenoweth shows that most successful modern resistance movements are largely nonviolent (see Figure 2). While current U.S. military resistance doctrine acknowledges the growing importance of nonviolence, UW education and training still emphasize a protracted, violent struggle – reminiscent of a Maoist insurgency campaign of the early 20th century. However, the character of modern 21st-century resistance demands an evolution of the UW enterprise to account for these new trends toward nonviolence.

Figure 1. The Rise of Resistance Movements

Source: Chenoweth et al., Major Episodes of Contention Dataset (Harvard Kennedy School, 2019)

Figure 2. Resistance Movement Success Rates

Source: Chenoweth et al., Major Episodes of Contention Dataset (Harvard Kennedy School, 2019)

Resistance in the 21st Century

In 2011, Time Magazine named “The Protester” as the Person of the Year. Across the world, massive demonstrations raged from Wall Street to the Middle East, Europe, and Russia. All of these resistance movements relied on social media to quickly communicate and organize. These groups also used social media to share lessons learned and elicit foreign support. For a moment, the future seemed bright for the common people to take back control of their governments. Then dictators caught up. That same year, regimes quickly clamped down on the protest movements by exerting control over social media companies and internet infrastructure to conduct mass surveillance and arrests. For all the initial optimism, the 2011 protests achieved very little and often exacerbated issues for the participants. The recent failures of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests further illustrate Dr. Chenoweth’s findings that states still have the upper hand through digital repression. Now, resistance movements face an additional virtual layer to the enduring paradox of how to confront state oppression while avoiding a severe backlash.

David Ucko illustrates how resistance movements of all types are adapting this century in The Insurgent’s Dilemma. Through extensive case studies, Ucko argues that modern resistance movements can no longer win by slowly transforming into rival states as Mao’s Red Army did. Any resistance movement that tries to beat the state at its own game sacrifices the inherent strengths of a resistance: camouflage, dispersion, and fluidity. While resistance movements have always faced this paradox, authoritarian states increasingly gain significant control over their populations through more sophisticated mass surveillance and individualized repression. Ucko goes on to argue that modern resistance movements must adopt one of the following three strategies to succeed: a localized insurgency, an infiltrative insurgency, or an ideational insurgency.

In a localized insurgency, the resistance movement aims to control its own portion of territory within an existing state. Resistance movements conducting infiltrative insurgency seek to gain power through legal and illegal actions to co-opt institutions against the government. For the newest emerging strategy, the ideational insurgency, resistance movements exist primarily online centered around a common ideology without a clear structure or leader. Of note, the infiltrative and ideational insurgencies rely on more indirect nonviolent methods to overthrow the state than purely violent means. While the localized insurgency does directly employ violence, it is more defensive and never threatens to directly topple its opposing state. Ucko offers a well-researched basic taxonomy of modern resistance that emphasizes the importance of nonviolence in the 21st Century.

The most useful research on the topic of resistance efficacy comes from Harvard’s Professor Erica Chenoweth. Chenoweth and her colleagues have analyzed an extensive amount of information on resistance movements from 1945 to 2017. Her Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data project examines over 250 resistance movements broken down into 1,726 campaign years to account for changing strategies. The NAVCO dataset includes over 50 independent variables such as the size of the resistance movement, its overall goals, diversity, amount of international support, and how it uses social media. NAVCO also includes information on the state responses such as discriminate or indiscriminate repression, degree of international support, and number of casualties inflicted. All these independent variables correlate to the resistance campaign’s progress and overall success. This research does have to make certain subjective judgments, such as what constitutes progress, but it is well-researched, cited, and fully transparent. Chenoweth concludes that successful resistance movements rely on primarily nonviolent tactics, recruit diverse membership, and indirectly recruit state elites.

Expanding the UW Enterprise to Include Nonviolence

While research shows the importance of nonviolent resistance this century, current UW training still emphasizes protracted violent struggles. Special Forces candidates in Robin Sage culminating exercise spend more time planning ambushes and raids than any of Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of nonviolent action. More advanced SF training at the Sage Eagle exercise also focuses on violent resistance. Furthermore, no SF unit has support for nonviolent resistance as a mission-essential task. To prepare for a more realistic modern UW campaign, SF units should instead look to civilian organizations dedicated to nonviolent resistance.

A diverse collection of civilian organizations offers models for nonviolent resistance training that should inform more robust future SF resistance training. The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict offers scalable in-person training through customized workshops and more formal academic courses. The Leading Change Network offers classes on building organizations and developing narratives. Beautiful Trouble is an impressive digital collection of nonviolent resistance strategies and tactics. Effective training can also be indirect and virtual. For example, the computer games A Force More Powerful and People Power teach players how to organize a nonviolent resistance movement. These civilian nonviolent resistance organizations are the successors of the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The Civil Rights Movement conducted realistic training to successfully prepare their members for the harassment they’d face. While civilian organizations can provide nonviolent training models, direct military participation in such venues could jeopardize the integrity of these independent organizations supporting real-world campaigns against authoritarian regimes.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command should update the SFQC curriculum and advanced UW training such as Sage Eagle based on tactics proven by civilian nonviolent resistance organizations. In the same way that tabletop rehearsals cannot replace live fire iterations, nonviolent resistant training must be conducted in person. To make the training realistic, a professional cadre and range of specific role players are required to manage the training and represent the spectrum of resistance components: civilian leaders, resistance members, neutral civilians, and counter-resistance members—including military and civilian law enforcement. Modernizing the SF UW enterprise requires an important mental re-orientation and investment in nonviolence education and training—which does not have to be cost-prohibitive. If Army cadets at West Point could train on nonviolent resistance astride the Hudson River on a shoestring budget back in 2017, then seasoned Army SF teams and the USASOC schoolhouse can make it happen at scale today in 2025.

Counter Arguments—Why Not Nonviolent Resistance?

Some could argue that it is inappropriate for the military, even Special Forces, to engage in nonviolent resistance because it risks the integrity of these movements. After all, authoritarian states already falsely claim that local resistance organizations are merely pawns of Western powers. Maintaining resistance legitimacy should indeed be a top concern for UW practitioners and policymakers. Directly supporting a resistance movement with SF is not a decision to be made lightly. Current UW doctrine accounts for the political risks of supporting a resistance movement through a feasibility assessment. Before committing to a UW campaign, U.S. support to a resistance movement must analyze the stability of the opposing regime, the will and means of the resistance organization, its willingness to cooperate with the US, and perhaps most importantly, compatibility of objectives and ideology. If the US is willing to support violent resistance with military support such as the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, then why not support nonviolent resistance when similar conditions exist?

Preventing SF from interacting with nonviolent resistance movements removes a critical political-military option of exerting influence over these groups to advance U.S. national interests. Instead, SF should be able to provide senior decision-makers the option to support both violent and nonviolent resistance movements—independently, in parallel, or sequentially. In fact, many modern resistance movements use a combination of both violent and nonviolent strategies. Dr. Chenoweth warns that violent resistance often undermines nonviolent movement in the long run. However, the recent successes of violent resistance movements in Afghanistan and Syria cannot be ignored. As with any application of power, policymakers must consider the amount of violence necessary weighed against the second and third orders effects it may produce.

There is a wide variety of military capabilities that are thankfully rarely employed but present credible options to policymakers – nuclear weapons being a clear example. Support for nonviolent resistance is a unique and important implement for policymakers to wield carefully. However, due to the lack of current education and training, this capability does not exist. Dr. Chenoweth and her team have studied third-party intervention in resistance movements and concluded that the actions of the local resistance movements are of paramount importance, but third-party support to nonviolent resistance can prove decisive. Given these findings, USASOC should expand its UW enterprise for the 21st century to include education and training for support to nonviolent resistance.

Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century

Contemporary research into resistance movements from scholars such as David Ucko and Dr. Erica Chenoweth emphasizes the preeminence of nonviolent resistance in the 21st century. Even though Army Special Forces are the Department of Defense’s only organization specifically manned, trained, and equipped to conduct UW, the UW enterprise has not kept pace with contemporary trends illustrating the criticality of nonviolent resistance. USASOC should support nonviolence resistance education and training as a key element of its curriculum, not as an outlier, beginning with the SQFC and expanding into more advanced training like at SOF-TEC.

Like all conflict, resistance is inherently chaotic, unpredictable, and political. Engaging in support to nonviolent resistance is not a decision to be made lightly, nor is it a panacea to great power competition. However, enhancing SF’s ability to combine nonviolent resistance effects with other military and interagency efforts offers a valuable asymmetric option to compete with authoritarian adversaries that the United States would be remiss to neglect.

(Disclaimer: These views presented in this article represent the author and do not represent those of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Army, or any element of the United States Government.)

Tags: resistance, Special Operations, Unconventional Warfare

About The Author

Mark Thomas
Major Mark Thomas is a special forces officer with multiple combat deployments to the Middle East, currently assigned as a planner at I Corps, Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He is a graduate of the USMC School of Advanced Warfighting and has been published in the Marine Corps Gazette and Joint Special Operations University Press.

9. Pentagon warns it’s not prepared for homeland drone attack

So we will defend our bases. How is the rest of America defended against "drone attacks?" How are high value targets in the US defended against drone attacks? With what agencies do the responsibilities for defense reside outside of military bases?

I note that as I enter military installations a sign says the use of drones is prohibited. I always chuckle and say that it deters law abiding citizens like me, and probably helps family members to prevent their children from using drones on base, but what about malign actors? It reminds me of the argument about gun free zones - in such zones only the criminal will have guns. But I guess that is why Gen Guillot is providing a new SOP and has sought new authorities for drone defense of US bases. We need more than signs.

Pentagon warns it’s not prepared for homeland drone attack

NORAD commander Gen. Guillot has signed a new “standard operating procedure” for base commanders to deal with drones.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

Citing the hundreds of drones that flew around military sites last year, defense officials warn that the Pentagon is still unprepared to defend its installations—but say a new standard operating procedure, and expanded authorities, could help.

“Mass drone incursions over Joint Base Langley-Eustis in December 2023 reminded us that the homeland is no longer a sanctuary, and should our adversary choose to employ drones for surveillance or even attack, we would not be prepared to adequately defend our homeland and only marginally capable to defend our military installations,” Rear Adm. Paul Spedero, vice director for operations for the Joint Staff, said Tuesday during a House oversight subcommittee on military and foreign affairs hearing.

The mysterious drone swarms over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia in 2023 raised questions about when base commanders can legally take down drones, and how the military should coordinate with the various agencies that oversee U.S. airspace.

In addition to Langley, Spedero cited drone incursions at Plant 42 in California and Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey. The Pentagon reported 350 drone detected last year over 100 different military installations—a number that continues to rise, Spedero said.

Officials have been hesitant to confirm who is behind these flights, but some lawmakers have pointed to the work of foreign adversaries like China or Russia, while some defense officials have pointed to local hobbyists.

Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., the chairman of the subcommittee, called the drone incursions “a coordinated effort by our adversaries to collect valuable intelligence and surveillance of some of our most sensitive military equipment.”

While Spedero stopped short of naming specific instances of adversarial spying, he agreed that U.S. adversaries have “demonstrated that they will use this type of activity, for unauthorized surveillance, for espionage.”

Part of the Pentagon’s struggle to respond to these incidents lies in “challenges” with “our ability to implement a relatively untested interagency coordination process,” Mark Ditlevson, acting assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, said during the hearing.

In an effort to address some of the confusion, Spedero said that Gen. Gregory Guillot, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, published a “standard operating procedure” last month—essentially a guide for base commanders to request assistance from USNORTHCOM when there’s a drone incursion. The DOD last year announced that NORTHCOM will serve as the “synchronizer, integrator, and/or coordinator” of counter-drone efforts.

The Pentagon is also hoping Congress will approve a legislative proposal to revise counter-UAS authorities under a U.S. law called Section 130i, which governs current authorities for “protection of certain facilities and assets from unmanned aircraft.”

The new legislation would expand the authorities under 130i to cover all military installations. As the law currently stands, only some bases—“covered installations"—have permission to defend themselves against drones. In addition to covering all DOD installations, the new legislation will “facilitate data sharing” with interagency partners to improve coordination, Ditlevson said.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

10. Experts see rise of powerful non-state groups as US retreats from global stage

Excerpts:

“Historically, non-state actors had limited options,” said Jan Gleiman, a retired U.S. Army colonel at Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative and a senior fellow at New America. “You had to gather volunteers and donations. If you had territory, you could tax it. If you had the means, you could reach out to the diaspora for support, or, of course, you could take that big risk and go for an external sponsor where you might lose some of your autonomy.”

Gleiman said those limited options have expanded with the rise of cryptocurrencies, the ability to quickly create shell companies, and encrypted transactions. Many non-state actors have developed revenue streams ranging from black-market arms deals to taxation rackets in ungoverned spaces.

An intelligence analyst who tracks non-state actors across the Middle East said digital financial transactions had enabled the groups to expand into rigging and fixing government contracts, then laundering money through those contracts. Local-level corruption, especially in the Middle East, plays a huge role, they said in an interview: “Everybody is on the take.”

Some groups have routineized crime and sabotage for hire. Security experts and intelligence officials say the Wagner group has been using Telegram to find people to commit arson and other crimes.

It’s increasingly common not just in Europe but in New York City, said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner of New York City’s intelligence and counterterrorism bureau.

“We see this in our city, with transnational criminal groups and one signature is Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, where you have the same kind of contracted-out individual crimes that are being sought using technology as a labor for hire model,” Weiner said.

Then there’s the concept of sponsor state as angel investor. Iran is “smart about how they use money. Iran uses money as seed funding for proxies and then those proxies end up being money-making enterprises for them, not necessarily money- spending,” said retired U.S. Army colonel Gianni Koskinas, a retired U.S. Army colonel-turned-CEO chief executive officer of the Hoplite Group. “At a minimum, they are self-sufficient.”

Experts see rise of powerful non-state groups as US retreats from global stage

“Syria is an absolute case study in proxy warfare” and a possible window into the future.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

DOHA–Several trends are giving violent extremist groups a brighter, more profitable future, security officials and experts from around the world said this week at the Soufan Center Security Forum here.

Cryptocurrencies and sophisticated use of shell companies are helping them accumulate funds. AI is making recruitment and disinformation a snap. The reduction of social-media monitoring is enabling such campaigns to flourish. The U.S. retreat from multilateral diplomatic efforts is reducing the pressure that kept such groups in check.

All this is making such groups more powerful, independent, and useful as proxy tools for autocratic regimes.

State-backed militias are no longer operating on the margins—they're deploying increasingly sophisticated weapons and tactics, thanks in part to a surge in funding and arms transfers from autocratic sponsors. Russia, for example, has dispatched the Wagner Group across Ukraine, Africa, and the Middle East. But nowhere is this more evident than in Yemen, where Iran’s material and technical support has transformed the Houthis from a local insurgency into a regional threat. Houthis progressed from firing short-range rockets to launching cruise missiles and drones at targets hundreds of miles away—striking at Saudi oil facilities, Israeli airports, UAE territory, and shipping in international waters.

A new financial era

Extremist groups are finding it easier than ever to accumulate funding.

“Historically, non-state actors had limited options,” said Jan Gleiman, a retired U.S. Army colonel at Arizona State University’s Future Security Initiative and a senior fellow at New America. “You had to gather volunteers and donations. If you had territory, you could tax it. If you had the means, you could reach out to the diaspora for support, or, of course, you could take that big risk and go for an external sponsor where you might lose some of your autonomy.”

Gleiman said those limited options have expanded with the rise of cryptocurrencies, the ability to quickly create shell companies, and encrypted transactions. Many non-state actors have developed revenue streams ranging from black-market arms deals to taxation rackets in ungoverned spaces.

An intelligence analyst who tracks non-state actors across the Middle East said digital financial transactions had enabled the groups to expand into rigging and fixing government contracts, then laundering money through those contracts. Local-level corruption, especially in the Middle East, plays a huge role, they said in an interview: “Everybody is on the take.”

Some groups have routineized crime and sabotage for hire. Security experts and intelligence officials say the Wagner group has been using Telegram to find people to commit arson and other crimes.

It’s increasingly common not just in Europe but in New York City, said Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner of New York City’s intelligence and counterterrorism bureau.

“We see this in our city, with transnational criminal groups and one signature is Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, where you have the same kind of contracted-out individual crimes that are being sought using technology as a labor for hire model,” Weiner said.

Then there’s the concept of sponsor state as angel investor. Iran is “smart about how they use money. Iran uses money as seed funding for proxies and then those proxies end up being money-making enterprises for them, not necessarily money- spending,” said retired U.S. Army colonel Gianni Koskinas, a retired U.S. Army colonel-turned-CEO chief executive officer of the Hoplite Group. “At a minimum, they are self-sufficient.”

This new financial era is giving extremist groups more independence from their state backers. It also helps insulate them from international pressure in the form of sanctions. And, Gleiman said, at least some extremist groups may be shifting from the pursuit of ideology to profit.

“How groups mobilize resources can reshape their identity over time. Some begin as politically-motivated but evolve into revenue-driven entities.”

Winning the narrative

Extremists’ ability to recruit, raise funds, and spread disinformation is rising as platform companies reduce their efforts to stop them.

“The Houthis, for example, are selling weapons on X. It really is quite astonishing just how much there is online and just how little has been done about it,” said Adam Hadley, executive director of the U.K. group Tech Against Terrorism.

X owner Elon Musk is not just hostile to content moderation but a spreader of disinformation, said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar, who runs investigations into disinformation campaigns.

And extremists are turbocharging their efforts with AI tools as states dither, said Abdelkader Baggag, a senior scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute.

State actors “are way behind the non-state actors,” Baggag said. “That's because this [technology] democratization has happened, and the states are caught in a world where they don't really know what to do, whether it's a policy, whether it's law or whatever, the technical capabilities far outpace our ability to formulate policy and formulate regulation.”

The U.S. retreat

In the United States, the Trump administration has dismantled institutions built to counter extremist narratives, such as the Global Engagement Center and Voice for America.

That helps extremists, ASU’s Gleiman said.

“Legitimacy is contested in the narrative space long before it's contested in the battlefield. Countering violent non-state actors demands investment in local narratives, local messengers and political trusts, not just technical communication strategies and development projects,” he said.

The closure of USAID also deprives those projects of critical funds.

But what most worries Gleiman and other forum attendees is the broader U.S. retreat from international institutions that monitor things like corruption and financial transactions. Brute military force is a poor response to the threat of transnational criminal enterprises, something he said he teaches in his class on irregular warfare. His students. “expect to study guerrilla tactics. They expect to study counter-terrorist missions. But they end up learning about money laundering. They end up learning about the Financial Action Task Force. They end up learning about equity chain mapping and these important aspects.”

The United States is also cutting back on its efforts to monitor foreign interference in elections and monitor corruption. The pullback from those vital areas, both on the international stage and domestically, is the wrong response at the worst time.

“The criticality of being able to counter the resource mobilization of non-state actors—I mean, this requires cooperation around the world.”

What now?

While all of those trends are now accelerating, they are not new. CNN security analyst Peter Bergen pointed out that while President Joe Biden was a big fan of multilateral institutions, the broader U.S. retreat from the global stage, particularly in the form of troop withdrawals from the Middle East, was an established trend well before Trump came into power and that’s a factor as well in the rise of these groups.

“There is basically consensus on the left of the Democratic Party and, on the right, of the Republican Party that we shouldn't do anything overseas and we should withdraw. But we've already run this videotape before, where an absence of American troops produced a vacuum into which ISIS came. And we've already seen withdrawals from Syria under the second Trump administration … in the last week or so.”

What does a world increasingly destabilized by amped-up non-state actors look like? Koskinas said to look to Syria, where Russian, U.S., Iranian, Iraqi, and, victoriously, Turkish proxy groups all competed for power.

“In many regards, Syria is an absolute case study in proxy warfare.”

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

11. Hegseth’s Pentagon Is a Mess. Here’s How to Fix It.

Excerpts:

The secretary of defense lacks the most important thing for the toughest job in the world: experience.

...

Hegseth has filled this job with a newly promoted lieutenant general, Chris LaNeve, a former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division who, fortunately, has had several tours in DC. But choosing the right person isn’t enough: It is crucial for the senior military adviser and the chief of staff to be in constant coordination, with the former handling the military operations and the latter working the issues with the White House, Congress and other federal agencies. We have not seen that vital division of labor so far in Hegseth’s tenure, and now the absence of chief of staff compounds things.

One more idea to bring would be to consider a new position: a very senior individual set above both the chief of staff and military advisor. This might be a spot for a retired three- or four-star military officer. A few names that come to mind are General Jack Keene (former vice chief of the Army), Vice Admiral Joe Kernan (Navy SEAL and former senior military adviser to Secretary Robert Gates), and Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg (current envoy for Ukraine, former deputy national security adviser under Trump).

Hegseth needs to look for experienced, steady hands. Recruiting someone with enough experience may be challenging given the current turmoil. But maintaining efficiency and calm in the secretary’s inner office is crucial — not only to the functioning of the Department of Defense, but to America’s national security.

Hegseth’s Pentagon Is a Mess. Here’s How to Fix It.

The secretary of defense lacks the most important thing for the toughest job in the world: experience.

April 30, 2025 at 6:30 AM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-04-30/hegeth-s-pentagon-is-a-mess-after-100-days?

By James Stavridis

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired US Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group.

It’s one thing after another. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spent his first 100 days in office in an unending flood of controversy. His confirmation hearing, which required a tie-breaking vote by Vice President JD Vance, was an early indicator of just how bumpy his voyage would be.

Next came the so-called Signalgate controversy, in which he and other top Trump officials revealed sensitive information about forthcoming missile strikes to a group chat that included a reporter. That was followed by revelations of another Signal chat involving similarly confidential matters that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. Then came reports he used an unclassified and unprotected laptop on his desk in the secretary’s office.

Most recently, a handful of his hand-picked top aides were fired amid claims of media leaks. Several have openly criticized their dismissals as lacking due process or even specific allegations. His former spokesman, John Ullyot, penned a scathing article that essentially called on President Donald Trump to fire Hegseth. And finally, late last week, his chief of staff, Joe Kasper, departed abruptly.

The secretary of defense, in my view, has the hardest job in government. Not only are you overseeing by far the largest organization in the US, but every day you make decisions of life and death. Your hand is effectively on the country’s nuclear arsenal. And you need to work with foreign counterparts — both friend and foe — to improve deterrence and conduct combat operations when deterrence fails. On top of it all, you must operate within the most complex public affairs and interagency process on the planet. It is not a place for on-the-job training.

I know because I’ve been there. Two decades ago, as a very newly minted vice admiral, I undertook one of the hardest jobs of my career: several years as senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. As the secretary’s top uniformed aide, I saw how demanding and difficult his job was.

During that period, from 2004-2006, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both going badly. US casualties were rising, and it was becoming clearer by the day that they could turn into quagmires. Reports of abuse by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison were just unfolding as I checked into the office to take over from General John Craddock, who headed off to take over US Southern Command. “Good luck, Jim,” was about all he said as he departed.

Despite all the turmoil, Rumsfeld also had important wins during his time in office: the initially successful invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; creation of new Pentagon organizations in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including US Northern Command; smooth integration of the Defense Department with the nascent Department of Homeland Security; standing up US Africa Command; and a reorganization of intelligence for counterterrorism in conjunction with the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Again and again, I just shook my head at the immense complexities and challenges of the secretary’s job. It involves a span of control and scope of responsibility second only to the presidency itself. That’s why it was important that Rumsfeld, and the three defense secretaries I later served as a combatant commander, all came into the job with years of know-how about how the department — and Washington politics in general — worked.

What is needed in the secretary’s office is, in a word, experience. This is particularly true for any secretary who has never been a Washington insider and lacks significant prior interagency involvement. Hegseth, while a decorated veteran and accomplished public communicator, has none of that.

If he is to continue in the job — and Trump seems loath to fire him — he needs a strong and experienced bench around him. How should the most critical positions be filled?

There are two principal jobs in the secretary’s front office on the third deck of the Pentagon. The most important is the civilian chief of staff. During most of my time it was Robert Rangel, who had spent a decade leading the staff of the House Armed Services Committee. Modest and self-effacing, Robert was nonetheless a strong presence. He knew Congress, the Pentagon and the interagency process. In looking to replace Kasper, Hegseth would be wise to survey the list Pentagon chiefs of staff over the past decade and look either for one of them to return or find someone with a similar résumé.

The second major job is the one I held, now called senior military adviser. Some of the generals and admirals to hold it include former Secretary of State Colin Powell; James L. Jones, who was later commandant of the Marine Corps and supreme allied commander at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and John Kelly, later commander of Southern Command and chief of staff in the White House during Trump’s first presidency.

Hegseth has filled this job with a newly promoted lieutenant general, Chris LaNeve, a former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division who, fortunately, has had several tours in DC. But choosing the right person isn’t enough: It is crucial for the senior military adviser and the chief of staff to be in constant coordination, with the former handling the military operations and the latter working the issues with the White House, Congress and other federal agencies. We have not seen that vital division of labor so far in Hegseth’s tenure, and now the absence of chief of staff compounds things.

One more idea to bring would be to consider a new position: a very senior individual set above both the chief of staff and military advisor. This might be a spot for a retired three- or four-star military officer. A few names that come to mind are General Jack Keene (former vice chief of the Army), Vice Admiral Joe Kernan (Navy SEAL and former senior military adviser to Secretary Robert Gates), and Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg (current envoy for Ukraine, former deputy national security adviser under Trump).

Hegseth needs to look for experienced, steady hands. Recruiting someone with enough experience may be challenging given the current turmoil. But maintaining efficiency and calm in the secretary’s inner office is crucial — not only to the functioning of the Department of Defense, but to America’s national security.

Stavridis is dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University . He is on the boards of Aon, Fortinet and Ankura Consulting Group, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.

America’s response to measles is eroding its ability to deter biological attacks

The rising death toll for a preventable disease reveals just how ill-prepared the country is to handle a malicious bioweapon.

By Steph Batalis

Research Fellow, Center for Security and Emerging Technology

April 30, 2025 02:53 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Steph Batalis

When Texas health officials announced the third measles death in early April, the message also raised a sobering reality: the outbreak has now claimed as many U.S. lives in 11 weeks as in the previous 24 years. It has shown no signs of slowing down since beginning in late January, and has now spread to 25 states with nearly 900 confirmed cases as of April 25.

Public health experts have already begun sounding the alarm on extensive and troubling failures in the United States’ response to the measles threat. Some warn that this sluggish response could allow the outbreak to escalate into a full-blown epidemic, with health consequences lasting for decades to come. But while media coverage has rightly focused on the implications for public health today, this outbreak also exposes a deeper national vulnerability: the erosion of the United States’ ability to deter biological attacks.

Deterrence is a central pillar of biodefense strategy. It rests on the idea that the most efficient way to deal with a biological attack is to prevent one from happening in the first place. One way to put this into practice is through “deterrence by denial”—projecting an image of strong defenses that can dissuade an attack before it causes mass damage, lessening the attractiveness of a biological attack as a viable option for bad actors. For biodefense, this would mean showing the world that the United States can quickly detect, identify, contain, and treat dangerous outbreaks. And the U.S. Defense Department happens to strongly agree, noting in its Biodefense Posture Review that such capabilities can deter the development and proliferation of bioweapons but only if “properly messaged and demonstrated.”

But the measles outbreak has made the opposite message clear. Rather than demonstrating a swift and coordinated national response, the United States has revealed just how ill-prepared it is to handle a biological challenge. The fact that this is a measles outbreak––not a new or untested problem––makes this all the worse. The country already has the playbook to eliminate measles, given that it did so in 2000. Stopping it again should be routine, given that it doesn’t require us to develop, scale up, or manufacture new vaccines. That we are now struggling so publicly against a well-known threat might only embolden those who see our public health vulnerabilities as an opportunity. If we can't defend against a disease we've already defeated once, what kind of message does that send about how we’d respond to a deliberate biological attack?

Instances of unforced errors and self-inflicted damage in the measles response greatly risk weakening U.S. deterrence, and international perceptions of it, in the long term. Take, for example, funding cuts for local health responders in Lubbock, Texas, as they worked to quell the outbreak. Perhaps even the shuttering of over 50 measles clinics in Dallas due to retracted federal funding. Or the major downsizing and “restructuring” of the federal agency responsible for preventing, preparing for, and responding to public health emergencies. Consider as well, the fact that federal officials blocked the publication of expert measles guidance. Or even the elimination of thousands of employees from the Department of Health and Human Services, including infectious disease experts across key agencies from the FDA’s vaccine advisory group to the CDC’s outbreak forecasting center.

Compounding these structural failures is a chaotic—and often conflicting—communications strategy. During critical early weeks of the outbreak, a department-wide ban on external communications prevented the CDC from issuing updates on the evolving public health threat. In fact, the CDC did not hold any public briefings in the first months of the new administration.

Meanwhile, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. initially downplayed the efficacy of the measles vaccine publicly and even floated the unfounded idea that getting measles might be good for children—only to later acknowledge that the MMR vaccine is the most effective way to prevent measles. This mixed messaging sowed confusion, forcing local public health officials to divert precious time and resources to correcting misinformation. In some cases, these statements worsened the situation by causing a brand-new type of harm. Take Secretary Kennedy’s suggestion to use Vitamin A supplements to treat measles, for example. Measles outbreaks in other countries are sometimes accompanied by Vitamin A treatments, in populations that suffer from Vitamin A deficiencies. Since that deficiency is uncommon in the U.S., hospitals in Texas are now treating children for Vitamin A toxicity, a dangerous type of poisoning that can lead to liver failure, alongside their severe measles cases.

These aren’t isolated missteps. They point to a broader pattern of disinvestment and dysfunction in America’s biodefense posture. Recently cancelled funding is halting the implementation and modernization of data systems that track outbreaks. Long-term research into antiviral drugs to fight future “priority pathogens” is being scaled back. And the demonstrated success of medical misinformation could entice adversaries to launch a disinformation campaign—casting doubt on vaccines or treatments, or minimizing the severity of a disease—to exacerbate the effects of a biological weapon. In fact, disinformation could itself be the weapon by giving adversaries the tool to intensify a natural outbreak with less cost and risk and without violating international weapons treaties. All of these examples make it clear that the United States is not following a carefully laid-out deterrence strategy—and, what’s more, that one may not even exist.

To be sure, some experts debate whether deterrence by denial is the most effective option for biodefense. But even if the strategy isn’t perfect, publicly dismantling our own defenses is clearly worse. The public health system is our first line of response in any biological event. It’s how we detect early warning signs—like spikes in emergency room visits—and how we raise the alarm. If that system is underfunded, understaffed, and silenced, we may not even realize we’re under attack until it’s too late.

Right now, the United States’ biodefenses are failing a basic stress test. The response to the measles outbreak is more than a domestic public health failure—it is a glaring breach in our overarching biodefense strategy. Congress and federal agencies must treat this for what it is: not just a public health challenge, but a critical biodefense failure that demands immediate correction. Measles is a known enemy, yet our response on the world stage has been chaotic, underfunded, and dangerously politicized. Dismantling critical preparedness offices, cutting infrastructure and funding, and allowing misinformation to derail the response are not just bad for healthcare—they’re dangerous national security signals. They send a clear message to the world, and one that emboldens adversaries: America is not prepared.

Steph Batalis is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), and holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine.

defenseone.com · by Steph Batalis

13. Ospreys won’t return to full flight operations until 2026

This must surely impact readiness around the world for the Marines and for SOF.

Ospreys won’t return to full flight operations until 2026

The program office expects upgraded gearboxes to begin arriving in January.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

The U.S. military’s fleet of V-22 Ospreys won’t be able to fly without restrictions until 2026—about a year later than originally planned—as officials work to upgrade flawed gearboxes that have caused several mishaps.

The military put limitations on Osprey flights after a crash killed eight airmen off the coast of Japan in December 2023. An investigation into the crash found that the aircraft's prop-rotor gearbox, which allows the aircraft to shift between helicopter and airplane mode, failed due to metal weakness.

The V-22 program office plans to start upgrading gearbox components with a stronger, triple-melted steel, a process that “bakes out impurities,” Col. Robert Hurst, V-22 program manager, said Wednesday during the Modern Day Marine conference. The triple-melt steel will reduce inclusions—an impurity that weakens the steel—by about 90%, Hurst said.

Deliveries of the new gearboxes will begin around January, and the service will start resuming full flights operations in the spring, with a goal of fully returning to unrestricted flights for operational aircraft by end of next year, Hurst said.

Last year, officials said the service would get back to unrestricted flights by mid-2025, but that timeline moved after officials opted to upgrade gearboxes across the entire fleet rather than fixing only certain gears, Hurst said.

In addition to stronger steel, the program is pursuing two other improvements for its gearboxes: a redesigned input quill assembly—a part of the gearbox that houses the clutch—and new sensors to monitor failures and give maintainers more information.

The redesigned input quill assembly should mitigate hard clutch engagements, a long-documented problem that caused a fatal June 2022 Osprey crash. And since the program put a flight-hour limit on the current IQAs, Hurst said, there have not been any such clutch incidents.

The new sensors, called Osprey Drive System Safety & Health Instrumentation, or ODSSHI, will report post-flight data to maintainers on the health of the gearbox so they can remove parts before they fail.

Both fixes are currently in development and the service will implement them into the fleet “as soon as it's ready,” Hurst said.

As the program office works on gearbox improvements, officials maintain that the aircraft is doing "absolutely great” and there’s no aircraft better suited for the Marines’ role as the crisis response force, said Lt. Gen. Bradford Gering, deputy commandant for aviation.

The program has also started thinking about what comes after the V-22. Officials said they plan to make a decision in the mid-2030s on whether the program completely overhauls its existing Ospreys or buys an entirely new next-generation assault support platform.

“At some point, the V-22 will have to be replaced. Now, I don't know if that's 2040, I don't know if it's 2050. There's probably some decision space out there for us. There could be a scenario where we upgrade it and keep it relevant, and then go after something different, whatever the next generation technology is. This is first generation tiltrotor, so maybe there's something else that comes along down the road, or maybe we keep part of the aircraft and then we look to what we did in my world as a Harrier pilot, remanufacture the next generation Harrier,” Gering said.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

14. Taiwan's Frustrating Defense Spending Limits

Excerpts:

“In fact, faced with the growing threat from China, Taiwan has consistently raised its defense budget year after year — rising from NT$381.5 billion in 2019 to NT$580.3 billion in 2023, representing a cumulative increase of 52.11 percent,” Hung said.

“Moreover, Taiwan’s defense spending as a share of the government budget has steadily grown. In 2024, when including special budgets, defense-related expenditures account for approximately 21 percent of total government spending — meaning that over one-fifth of the government’s budget is dedicated to strengthening defense capabilities. This demonstrates Taiwan’s strong commitment to enhancing its self-defense.”

Similarly, another observer said it is necessary to look closer at the regional context.

“The defense share of GDP affects how much more spending each country can afford, with both Japan and the Philippines having spent very little on defense, at just over 1 percent, meaning they have more room to increase spending,” said Timothy R. Heath, Senior International Defense Researcher at RAND Corporation.

“Taiwan, by contrast, already spends about 2.5 percent of GDP on defense, thus, Taipei is likely to face more challenges in raising defense spending. Moreover, Taiwan faces a more difficult political situation than either Japan or the Philippines in that there is gridlock and a lack of consensus among the major parties on matters of how much to increase defense spending.”

Asia Sentinel

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Defense/Security

Taiwan's Frustrating Defense Spending Limits

Opinions differ whether policymakers are in denial as security situation deteriorates

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/taiwan-frustrating-defense-spending-limits?utm=

May 01, 2025

∙ Paid

By: Jens Kastner

Amid deep concerns in the west, particularly in the United States vis-à-vis a long-threatened invasion of Taiwan, military planners in Taipei appear remarkably blasé. The island’s military spending inched up by a meager 1.8 percent year-on-year in 2024, far outpaced by the rest of East Asia’s average 7.8 percent – China at 7 percent, Japan 21 percent and the Philippines’ 19 percent, according to the latest report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Taiwan’s perceived lack of alarm about its giant, belligerent neighbor actually is due to a complex interplay of factors, including delayed shipments by external arms suppliers, primarily the United States, political squabbling, and other issues, analysts say. In addition, defense strategy focuses at least in part on non-confrontational tactics, according to a recent report from the US Naval War College.

Whatever the reason, the absence of expenditure to defend the island comes in the face of repeated threats since 2022 including simulated blockades, joint precision strikes and cyber warfare against the island by the Chinese military, frequently in response to political events that counter Beijing’s interests, such as visits to Taipei by high-profile US officials or the defiant May 20, 2024 presidential inauguration speech by Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te.

China spent about US$15 billion, or 7 percent of its defense budget, on exercises in the Western Pacific in 2023, which demonstrates that investment in military activities in and around Taiwan is a priority in its military spending. In 2024, China’s official defense spending stood at about US$231.36 billion, which is about 14 times more than Taiwan’s US$16.5 billion. What’s more, analysts say the US$231 billion figure is misleading because significant military spending actually falls under other budget sections. They put the actual 2024 figure for China at the equivalent of roughly US$475 billion on defense.

Inauspiciously for the future balance, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled Legislature has cut or frozen some items of the government’s defense spending plan for this year, including inserting a 50 percent freeze on spending for a submarine program and a drone industry park. Without these cuts or freezes, the spending plan would amount to NT$647 billion, equal to 2.45 percent of GDP.

“The relatively slow growth in 2024 follows a period of sharp increases of 9.7 percent in 2023 and 13 percent in 2022,” Xiao Liang, Researcher in the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme, told Asia Sentinel. “Over the last decade, spending still grew by 48 percent, but we might see a reversal of the trend from 2025 as the opposition-controlled legislature, which is more pro-China, is cutting defense budget and pausing major procurement plans.”

Other analysts differ in their assessment as to whether Taiwan’s 1.8 percent growth rate was adequate in view of the situation. On the one side stands Rick Fisher, a Senior Fellow at the US-based International Assessment and Strategy Center, who said the figure is sure to alarm both supporters and critics in Washington. Fisher calls for a 10 percent of GDP defense spending commitment, in line with recent demands of Elbridge Colby, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy.

“Since 2017, the PLA has been practicing in earnest to invade Taiwan, kill its democracy and then very likely, to massacre millions of Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang members who support freedom for Taiwan,” Fisher said.

“As such, a 10 percent of GDP defense spending commitment was justified many years ago, but Taiwan's leaders somehow are not able to convey loudly and effectively this simple message: we have no choice but to defend ourselves because the Chinese Communist Party will kill us.”

By contrast, Hung Tzu-Chieh, an associate research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a public think tank in Taipei, believes that looking at a single year's figure may not fully capture the broader trend of Taiwan’s defense spending increases in recent years. He said that due to differences in calculation methods and adjustments for inflation, the reported annual growth rate appears to differ from general perceptions.

“In fact, faced with the growing threat from China, Taiwan has consistently raised its defense budget year after year — rising from NT$381.5 billion in 2019 to NT$580.3 billion in 2023, representing a cumulative increase of 52.11 percent,” Hung said.

“Moreover, Taiwan’s defense spending as a share of the government budget has steadily grown. In 2024, when including special budgets, defense-related expenditures account for approximately 21 percent of total government spending — meaning that over one-fifth of the government’s budget is dedicated to strengthening defense capabilities. This demonstrates Taiwan’s strong commitment to enhancing its self-defense.”

Similarly, another observer said it is necessary to look closer at the regional context.

“The defense share of GDP affects how much more spending each country can afford, with both Japan and the Philippines having spent very little on defense, at just over 1 percent, meaning they have more room to increase spending,” said Timothy R. Heath, Senior International Defense Researcher at RAND Corporation.

“Taiwan, by contrast, already spends about 2.5 percent of GDP on defense, thus, Taipei is likely to face more challenges in raising defense spending. Moreover, Taiwan faces a more difficult political situation than either Japan or the Philippines in that there is gridlock and a lack of consensus among the major parties on matters of how much to increase defense spending.”

15. Vietnam celebrates 50th anniversary of national unification, capture of Saigon

Here was my entire response to the journalist's query about the short and long term legacies of the Vietnam War for the US military. (And I am not complaining because journalists can only use limited quotes).

I think the short term results of the Vietnam War led to the All Volunteer Force, a return to preparation for large scale combat operations, the development of Airland Battle doctrine and a renewed emphasis on realistic, tough, and sophisticated training (e.g., the National Training Centers). Desert Storm proved the value of this approach. The ironic parallel for today is that most of the military except for Special Forces and the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School purged most of the doctrine in counterinsurgency (and what we would call irregular warfare today) because the military believed it would never conduct such a war as Vietnam again. Although we have not had such extreme purge today the majority of the military seeks to return to large scale combat operations as the desired role for the military, though it is true that there are some in the conventional military who do recognize the importance of irregular warfare and the Army and all the services are paying more attention to IW than they did in the post-Vietnam era.

Vietnam celebrates 50th anniversary of national unification, capture of Saigon

Legacies of Vietnam War linger

washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, April 30, 2025

SEOUL, South Korea — Vietnam marked the 50th anniversary of national unification Wednesday with fireworks, a flyover of jets and a parade featuring a portrait of independence leader Ho Chi Minh on a giant lotus leaf through the city named after him.

Thousands lining the parade route waved red flags and sang patriotic songs as they celebrated the capture of South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, by North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975. The outcome was the unified communist state of Vietnam, with its capital in Hanoi. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

One informed visitor was struck by the profusion of flags of the National Liberation Front — the Viet Cong, or southern communist guerrillas — given that Saigon fell to North Vietnamese troops.

“That tells me Hanoi has a message of unity. They are trying to keep the south from feeling left out or restive,” said Don Kirk, an 86-year-old American reporter who covered the war from 1966 to 1973 and was an invited guest of Vietnam’s Press Bureau. “In the south, they don’t feel terribly dominated and they can make money, but they can’t speak out against the regime.”

The victory of the communist North over the democratic South was a profound disaster for 1.2 million refugees who fled Vietnam and for U.S. prestige.

A war America couldn’t win

U.S. troops had fought Asian communist forces with fair success a decade earlier, and South Korea survived as a state.

GIs fought for South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. With 58,000 dead, it was America’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

Despite building massive bases and deploying colossal firepower, Washington failed to break the will of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Instead, the will on the U.S. homefront cracked as television media beamed the war into living rooms.

Some footage was glamorous: jungle patrols, helicopter assaults and airstrikes scored by rock’n’roll.

Still, much imagery was disturbing: flaming villages, children scorched by napalm, South Vietnamese executing prisoners.

“I think U.S. media did contribute to feeling against the war by acting as if we were screwing up all the time and reporting the futility of what we were doing,” Mr. Kirk said by telephone from Vietnam, which he covered for the Chicago Tribune and other outlets. “Big media were basically anti-war: They were interested in showing how stupid we were.”

That factor, combined with Saigon’s corruption, a surprise communist offensive in 1968 and revelations of a massacre in My Lai by U.S. troops, turned many Americans against the war.

Some portrayed Washington’s stance as imperialist. Protests rocked campuses, and veterans were abused.

“For the first time in history, the Yanks were definitely the bad boys,” said Gastone Breccia, a military historian at the University of Pavia. “They were incapable of conquering a small, defiant people.”

Some point to U.S. leadership failures.

“In Vietnam, if [Army Gen. Dwight D.] Eisenhower had been president, the war would have lasted about a year,” former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich said during a recent trip to the region. “He understood winning.”

Though U.S. forces were largely undefeated, they were outmaneuvered as North Vietnamese troops massed in neighboring Laos and Cambodia.

GIs withdrew in 1973, the year the draft ended.

By 1975, as North Vietnam advanced, Washington had no appetite for intervention. While the U.S. Navy rescued evacuees, Saigon’s forces fought their final battles alone.

Multiple legacies for multiple players

Since Vietnam, professionalized U.S. forces have prevailed in short conflicts such as Grenada, Panama and the Persian Gulf War, but not in sustained battle zones, including Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Vietnam, the end of the fighting did not mean the end of war. In 1978, it invaded Cambodia, ejected the murderous Khmer Rouge and occupied the country until 1989.

In 1979, China, which had aided North Vietnam and supported the Khmer Rouge, invaded Vietnam, sparking a two-month border war. Chinese troops, lacking Vietnamese combat expertise, were bloodied.

China and Vietnam last exchanged fire in 1988 in the South China Sea, where territorial disputes over reefs and shoals still simmer.

One of Hanoi’s key communist backers ignored a core lesson of Vietnam: that a technologically advanced army may fail against determined peasant adversaries.

“Four-and-a-half years after the liberation, or fall, of Saigon, Moscow’s communists would have acquired their own Vietnam by invading Afghanistan,” Mr. Breccia said.

U.S. military leadership refocused on big war.

“That paid off in Desert Storm,” said retired Special Forces Col. David Maxwell, but in what he called an “ironic legacy,” it forgot Vietnam’s lessons when battling insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Most of the military, except Special Forces and the [U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School], purged most of the doctrine in counterinsurgency because the military believed it would never conduct such a war as Vietnam again,” Mr. Maxwell said.

Some combatants, such as Australia, suffered trauma similar to America’s. For South Korea, the U.S. ally that supplied the largest troop contingent in Vietnam, outcomes were nuanced.

Washington’s support for dictatorial Seoul regimes “postponed democracy for decades,” said Korean-American scholar Tae Yang Kwak, whose Harvard doctoral thesis explored the issue.

Still, there were economic upsides.

“Over 300,000 South Korean soldiers fought, and around 100,000 civilian contractors labored in South Vietnam over the course of the war,” leading to an “economic boom” for South Korea “and also for hundreds of thousands of families lifted into the middle class by salary remissions,” Mr. Kwak said.

A resilient people

Hanoi has rebuilt relations with Washington and Beijing. Though communist, Vietnam, like China, has unleashed controlled capitalism across its economy.

Integrated into global supply chains, it benefits from overspill from China’s huge manufacturing sector and investment from countries including South Korea.

Western warships frequently visit Vietnam, and Western arms firms view it as a promising market.

Tourists from around the world visit its attractions, including war sites Hoa Lo Prison, ironically dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by U.S. captives, and widened Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi, near Ho Chi Minh City.

For Mr. Kirk, who had just visited Cu Chi, Vietnam’s resilience stood out.

“There is no doubt that life’s a heck of a lot better now. It’s amazing how Vietnam has recovered,” he said. “How and why did we spend so much time here, and what could we have done differently to have ended mass suffering on all sides?”

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon

16. This Is the Way a World Order Ends

Another article to provoke some thought.

Are spheres of influence the way to go?

And the conclusion begs a question (among others) that we should all consider and answer: Has the US given up on the foundational principles of our federal democratic constitutional republic: "checks and balances, [separation of power], respect for the courts, reverence for democratic values and practices?" We should all objectively ask and answer this question. I am open to answers from both sides of this issue.

Conclusion:

As is often the case in history, what appears sudden isn’t really. Pressures build; small changes accrete—and then burst into view. The first months of 2025 have felt like a movie suddenly speeding up, images rushing by so fast that the dialogue is an almost incomprehensible gabble. What the world once took for granted in the U.S.—checks and balances, respect for the courts, reverence for democratic values and practices—is now in question. And because America was the crucial player in the international order, the tremors of its earthquake are felt everywhere. In Asia and Europe, U.S. allies prepare to face China and Russia alone. In the Americas, a president who sounds like a 19th-century imperialist crossed with a New York real-estate developer talks about taking over Greenland, Panama, and Canada. And all at once, spheres of influence have ceased to be just something historians and political scientists study, but the emerging reality of a volatile new world.

This Is the Way a World Order Ends

Americans once associated spheres of influence with a cynical, volatile European past. Now Washington is resurrecting them.

By Margaret MacMillan

April 30, 2025, 7 AM ET

The Atlantic · by Margaret MacMillan · April 30, 2025

In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942.

The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease.

As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today’s world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and “the weak suffer what they must.” Imperialism, which never really disappeared, is back. Governments and think tanks now speak of spheres of influence, something the U.S. long opposed. If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition.

The past holds many examples of great change: regimes ending, monarchies becoming republics, whole civilizations vanishing, ways of managing relations between peoples and states swept aside, to be replaced by new ones.

Change can come slowly or suddenly. The Roman empire and its successor in the East decayed gradually, with intervals of revival. The French Revolution of 1789, Russia’s in 1917, and, much more recently, the end of the Soviet regime and the Cold War happened within weeks or months.

Warnings beforehand can tell us, if we pay attention, that the old structures and rules are giving way. As with an apparently solid house, the foundations start to shift, the roof leaks, and greedy neighbors start to encroach on the grounds. When old regimes fall, the causes tend to be economic: France before 1789 was effectively bankrupt. Sometimes governments have ceased to function, and large sections of society, including elites, have become disaffected. By 1917 in Russia, housewives were marching in city streets to protest a lack of food, peasants were seizing land, and many Russians saw the czarist government as irrelevant, even treasonous. Soviet citizens in the 1980s could no longer ignore the glaring differences between the utopian promises of communism and the reality of an autocratic and incompetent regime. Even party members no longer believed.

George Packer: The Trump world order

International orders collapse in the same way. Pressures mount on the system from within and without. Support ebbs, even among those who have benefited most from the existing order, while those who would defy it grow bolder, and embolden one another. Before the First World War, the fading Ottoman empire promised rich pickings in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Nevertheless, the world’s powers shared a general understanding that they would leave it alone, for fear of setting off a major conflict among themselves. Then, in 1911, the relatively new state of Italy, using the flimsiest of excuses, invaded what later became Libya. The Balkan states watched with interest as the other great powers did very little. The next year, several of them banded together to launch their own attack on the Ottoman empire.

We should never underestimate the power of example in human affairs. In our own time, we are seeing one country and then another flouting what had been a basic rule since the end of World War II: that ownership by one country of territory seized by force from another would not be recognized. President Vladimir Putin of Russia took parts of Georgia in 2008, and in 2014 invaded Ukraine to seize Crimea and part of the Donbas region to further his mission of rebuilding the czarist empire. The peace negotiations under way between Ukraine, which is being abandoned by the United States, and Russia seem almost certain to allow Russia to keep that territory and very likely acquire even more. Israel seems to be maneuvering toward annexing parts of Gaza and maybe even southern Lebanon, while in Africa, Rwandan troops are pushing into neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. China can only be encouraged to think that the world will accept its bringing Taiwan under its rule.

A new world order with new rules is taking shape.

The alternative to an accepted international order, much like the alternative to government, is Thomas Hobbes’s dystopia: a grim, anarchic world with “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The way back to a sustainable and effective international order, once that order has been lost, is long and difficult.

Until recent centuries, international orders were not global but regional in scale. Those regional orders became the models for much bigger ones later on, but until the end of the 15th century, travel was slow and frequently dangerous, and one part of the world did not always know much, if anything, about the others.

The underpinnings of a global order can be traced to the age of discovery, when Europeans first learned to circumnavigate the globe, then established a presence at vast distances, and followed that with empires. The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century produced, among much else, railways, steamships, and telegraphs, which connected people in far-flung territories with one another. The international orders that followed these advances assumed many different shapes. Sometimes, as in 18th-century Europe, powers balanced against one another, forging alliances and leaving them in a jostling for advantage that could easily topple into war. Sometimes international relations fell under the sway of a powerful hegemon—or of outright imperialism, where a single state, such as Rome, or an outside invader, such as the Ottoman empire, dominated its neighbors and provided them with security. For centuries, the Chinese believed that their land was the center of the world and that their emperor held the mandate of heaven to govern it. The British empire was the world’s hegemon from the second half of the 19th century until, arguably, the start of the Second World War—just as the United States was from 1989 until now.

Michael Schuman: Trump hands the world to China

Under the Trump administration, the United States no longer demonstrates the will to dominate the globe, and China does not yet have the capacity. History offers yet another model for the present situation, and perhaps for the future: spheres of influence, in which great powers dominate their own neighborhoods or strategic points, such as the Suez Canal for the British empire or Panama for the U.S., while lesser powers within the sphere accept, not always willingly, their sway, and outside ones steer clear to preserve their own dominions. Western powers and Japan carved out such spheres of influence in the 19th century, when they took advantage of a declining China to establish exclusive zones of interest there. Britain and Russia did something similar in Iran in 1907.

Such an order is inherently unstable: The regions where the spheres meet become fields of conflict known as “shatter zones.” Austria-Hungary and Russia vied for dominance in the Balkans before the First World War, just as China and India do with the countries between them and along around their shared border today. One power can be tempted to intrude on another’s sphere when it thinks a rival’s grip is slackening. And the influence that powers have in their spheres can wax and wane depending on domestic factors, including political upheavals and economic downturns. Lesser powers that find themselves under the dominion of a great power against their wishes can be resentful and rebellious. By its words and actions, for example, the Trump administration has reignited anti-Americanism in much of Latin America and turned Canadians against their neighbor.

A once-dominant power that fears it is declining can be particularly reckless. In 1914, Austria-Hungary saw that Serbia, nominally within its sphere of influence, had fallen under Russia’s influence. Resentful and determined to destroy Serbia, Austria-Hungary instead precipitated a world war that destroyed the empire itself and much else.

Perhaps history can offer some hope as well as warning. The notion of an international order based on rules, norms, and broadly shared values has deep roots. Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch scholar of the 16th and 17th centuries, talked of an international society with laws and ways of settling disputes. A century later, Immanuel Kant proposed a League of Nations, which he imagined would prevent wars and eventually enfold all the countries of the world into one peaceful society.

For a time in the 19th century, what Kant called the “crooked timber of humanity” appeared to be straightening. Democracy spread globally, and with it, challenges to the received idea of the national interest as something determined by autocratic elites, or of military power as the only kind that mattered. Democratic leaders and thinkers began to envision a new and better international order—one with worldwide laws, institutions, and values. The First World War turned such musings into a plan of action.

The conflict’s outbreak came as a shock to many Europeans, but signs were visible before 1914. Jobs for Europe’s skilled workers were vanishing, or their wages were lowering, as production moved to areas of the world where labor was cheaper. Populist leaders stirred resentment against minorities—Jews, immigrants, elites. Revolutionaries condemned the whole system as unequal and unjust and called for the creation of a new order. At the same time, the willingness of the great powers to work with one another, as they had done in the first half of the century in the Concert of Europe, evaporated. New alliances emerged—one among Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy, and the other among France, Britain, and Russia. Crises and wars in the Balkans in the first years of the 20th century fueled resentments, desires for revenge, and an arms race. Europe had entered a danger zone where a sudden crisis could start a chain reaction. And that is what happened with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in June 1914.

Ryan Crow: I’ve seen how ‘America First’ ends

The war’s consequences were so devastating for Europe and the wider world that many feared humanity was doomed. But catastrophes have a way of focusing attention on solutions that might once have been dismissed as fanciful or impossible.

Woodrow Wilson, the president who took the United States into the war in 1917, made clear that he wanted nothing for his own country, and that his overriding aim was a new international order animated by ideals of fairness: Peoples are entitled to self-determination, and the nations of the world must come together to protect the defenseless and prevent future wars. Wilson told Congress in January 1918 that “reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail.” To that end, a new institution, the League of Nations, would provide collective security for its members, confront aggression (with military force if necessary), and endeavor to improve the lot of humanity. When Wilson traveled to Europe for the peace conference in Paris, adoring crowds greeted him as a savior.

Historians now describe the league as a failure, because in the 1930s, the revisionist powers—Germany, Japan, and Italy, which were members—defied it to wage unprovoked war: Germany on its neighbours, Japan on China, and Italy on Ethiopia. Other powers, including the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and the United States, expressed disapproval and imposed some ineffective sanctions, but shrank from anything more drastic. A second and even more destructive world war was the result. But the hope and the idea behind the league did not die. If anything, the scale of the Second World War and the advent of the atom bomb made the quest for a peaceable international order more urgent than ever.

Another American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been talking about an organization of the world’s nations even before the U.S. came into the war. He gained British support and brought the American people and Congress along with him, something Wilson had failed to do. He also managed to gain Joseph Stalin’s grudging assent that the Soviet Union would join the new order, which included not only the United Nations but also the Bretton Woods institutions, established to organize global economic relations.

After 1945, these instruments and the order they upheld allowed the world’s powers to manage many of their antagonisms without resorting to war. A strong web of international bodies, special agencies, treaties, laws, and NGOs bound the globe ever closer. The Cold War threatened at times to break that web apart, and shooting wars were always present somewhere in the world. But the order held, such that even the United States and the Soviet Union found ways to reach agreements and ease tensions. When the Cold War abruptly ended with the collapse of first the Soviet empire in Europe and then the Soviet Union itself, the world looked set for greater cooperation, and perhaps even the onward march of democracy.

History has a way of clarifying that what looks like the only possible future at one moment is actually just one possibility among others. Few in the 1990s anticipated the emergence of revisionist powers, for whom the existing order was a sham, a cover for the dominance of the United States and its allies. These actors saw the post–World War II order as an obstacle to their nations’ ambitions, whether to restore past glories, reclaim land they felt was rightfully theirs, or dominate their own people and regions. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has threatened to reconsider the Treaty of Trianon, which assigned much of Hungary’s territory to its neighbors after World War I. The greatest revisionist of all, so far, is Putin. But perhaps the most serious rebuke to the liberal international order has come from inside the democracies, where populist parties have hitched economic grievances, anti-immigrant sentiments, and the loss of faith in their own elites and institutions to an authoritarian domestic turn.

Resentments and goals may differ from country to country, but populism is fueled everywhere by the promise of undoing the mistakes of the past. Internationally, this translates into contempt for the liberal rules-based order and international organizations such as the United Nations. Far-right leaders prefer to work with like-minded counterparts to further their own interests, even at the expense of others.

Yair Rosenberg: Trump is remaking the world in his image

Nowhere is this shift more consequential than in the United States, which was the original visionary and anchor of the postwar order. The Trump administration has characterized that role as one for suckers, in which the United States restrained its hard power and allowed other countries to bleed its wealth. Donald Trump has proposed instead for the United States to use its economic and military predominance as tools of naked coercion, dispensing entirely with the niceties of international agreements and even domestic constitutional constraint.

We are witnessing the resurrection of spheres of influence. In the past, U.S. leaders decried these as characteristic of the cynical old Europe that Americans had escaped. But in truth, the Monroe Doctrine, which warned outside powers to stay away from the Western Hemisphere, asserted an American sphere of influence; during the Cold War, the United States implicitly accepted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and extended its own influence over the West. Yet, however imperfectly, the U.S. also stood for another, better order, which recognized the rights of small nations and spoke to much of humanity’s hope for a world run for the collective good, not just for the benefit of a few powerful states. Today’s American administration, however, seems openly wedded to the idea of dividing the globe among great powers, and oblivious to the potential for conflict where spheres interact and struggle against one another—for example, U.S. and China in the Pacific.

The recent leaked proposal to drastically reduce the State Department and the Foreign Service and reorganize what is left into four regional “corps”—Eurasia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Indo-Pacific—is a first step toward accepting such a division. The fact that Canada would come directly under the aegis of the secretary of state suggests that the Trump administration sees the whole of the Western Hemisphere as its own. In a recent Time interview, the president repeated his airy claims that Canada was a burden on the U.S. and went on: “We don’t need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.” In a new division of the world, Russia could presumably preside over Central Asia and most or all of Europe, dismissed so contemptuously by Vice President J. D. Vance and others. China may well claim hegemony in East Asia. The current drift toward authoritarian leaders in this fractured world will leave international relations at the mercy of their whims, dreams, and follies.

As is often the case in history, what appears sudden isn’t really. Pressures build; small changes accrete—and then burst into view. The first months of 2025 have felt like a movie suddenly speeding up, images rushing by so fast that the dialogue is an almost incomprehensible gabble. What the world once took for granted in the U.S.—checks and balances, respect for the courts, reverence for democratic values and practices—is now in question. And because America was the crucial player in the international order, the tremors of its earthquake are felt everywhere. In Asia and Europe, U.S. allies prepare to face China and Russia alone. In the Americas, a president who sounds like a 19th-century imperialist crossed with a New York real-estate developer talks about taking over Greenland, Panama, and Canada. And all at once, spheres of influence have ceased to be just something historians and political scientists study, but the emerging reality of a volatile new world.

The Atlantic · by Margaret MacMillan · April 30, 2025

17. An Insider’s Guide to Cyber Readiness

Excerpts:

My years of experience working with allied cyber forces and studying adversary cyber forces have taught me there are four key organizational and cultural attributes that distinguish successful cyber forces from unsuccessful cyber forces: They require significant tech education before people begin specialized cyber training, they recruit and promote personnel who demonstrate the technical aptitude to understand the cyber domain, they have cultures of listening to experts regardless of rank and of de-emphasizing strict enforcement of military protocol or uniform regulations, and they stress higher education (particularly science and engineering graduate degrees) as a key part of career progression. None of these consistently apply to the forces the current military services provide to Cyber Command, which does not bode well for America’s ability to win a future cyber fight against adversaries like China that have built successful cyber forces.

These problems are inherent to the current structure of the Cyber Mission Force. Minor tweaks to assignment policy or retention bonuses will not solve the core problems causing the Cyber Mission Force’s readiness failures. The current services’ cyber priorities and talent management practices are not producing tactical proficiency, operational expertise, or domain knowledge at the scale the mission requires. Continuing to make gradual reforms within the current force structure will not fix the fatal problems with talent management and career progression that stretch across all services. Even with Special Operations Command-like or service-like authorities, Cyber Command’s need for experienced cyber professionals will continue to be a hostage to Air Force network management priorities, Army staff requirements, and Navy at-sea expectations for promotion. Moreover, many of the Cyber Command staff officers tasked with managing these problems are themselves victims of the cycle of perpetual amateurism, as most have little or no cyber experience.

Solving the Cyber Mission Force’s readiness problem requires a different approach. Without major structural changes, the United States risks conceding the cyber domain to adversaries in a future high-end, multi-domain fight. A sustainable force of experienced cyber professionals is a critical component of winning future multi-domain fights. However, the current structure of the Cyber Mission Force will not produce that force. Fixing these training and talent management problems requires a dedicated Cyber Force (i.e., a new military service roughly 20,000 strong that provides all offensive and defensive military cyber forces to both Cyber Command and the intelligence community). Winning the cyber fight requires breaking the cycle of perpetual amateurism — reorganizing military cyber forces into an independent Cyber Force focused on the cyber domain, able to create and invest in dedicated professionals to man, train, and equip effective cyber forces.

An Insider’s Guide to Cyber Readiness - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by John Cobb · May 1, 2025

Despite the Department of Defense spending $14 billion a year on cyber forces and technology, U.S. military cyber forces have never met the department’s readiness standards. This decade-long failure has motivated Congress, the military cyber community, and a variety of national security thinkers to debate major structural changes to Cyber Command and its Cyber Mission Force (a joint force with teams provided by each service).

In late 2022, Cyber Command responded to these concerns by creating a readiness campaign to attack the structural problems keeping Department of Defense military cyber forces from meeting training and readiness standards, and I was selected to lead the first phase of the effort. That experience revealed that the problems with cyber readiness are deeper, more severe, and more structural than most of the leaders and thinkers discussing cyber readiness realize.

Fundamentally, Cyber Command has been unwilling to face the reality that the current structure of the Cyber Mission Force cannot generate mission-effective cyber forces at scale. Instead, Cyber Command and service readiness practices have tried to hide the problem from themselves and Congress by lowering cyber readiness standards far below actual mission requirements, double-counting mission-qualified personnel in readiness metrics, and obfuscating catastrophic levels of turnover. Protecting the status quo has been prioritized over revealing an honest picture of the failure to build a Cyber Mission Force able to keep pace with increasingly dangerous adversaries.

Why is cyber readiness so challenging? The core problem is that service mismanagement of career progression and assignments has led to high turnover and low retention in the Cyber Mission Force’s most critical roles and missions. Overcoming these challenges and building a ready Cyber Mission Force requires a dedicated cyber service focused on growing a sustainable, highly skilled force of military cyber professionals.

Become a Member

Cyber Readiness in Historical Context

Cyber Command measures two types of readiness: the readiness of its assigned cyber forces and the readiness of all Department of Defense networks (conducting network security inspections known as “Cyber Operational Readiness Assessments”). Military networks generally meet these readiness standards and military cyber forces do not.

Cyber security inspections are important in managing risks to military networks, but they are not directly related to the readiness of offensive and defensive cyber forces to execute missions. Well-configured firewalls and sophisticated threat-detection tools can slow down cyber intrusions, but skillful adversaries will find ways to evade them and must be hunted down across military networks by cyber protection teams. Without highly skilled cyber personnel, even the networks with perfect inspection scores will fall to adversary attacks.

The Department of Defense’s traditional measures of readiness include assessments of units’ personnel strength, equipment status, supply, and training, but the Cyber Mission Force’s readiness shortfalls are nearly all training issues. Training has continuously been at failing levels since Cyber Command first established training standards. As Mark Montgomery and Erica Lonergan discuss in their recent work advocating an independent cyber force, when Cyber Command has claimed to have reached milestones like initial operating capacity, the training numbers have been artificially inflated. Some services rapidly rotated their two to four teams’ worth of qualified personnel across 10 to 12 teams. Some local units issued unauthorized training waivers, and some simply quadruple-billeted all qualified personnel. My experience with Cyber Command readiness has been that claims about readiness milestones were based on deeply misleading contortions and pervasive double-counting.

Readiness Challenges

A core factor in the challenge of creating a ready cyber force is the unavoidable fact that new personnel need multiple years of training and experience to gain the skills needed to be effective operators or cyber analysts against hard targets. Reaching full proficiency usually takes about 10 years.

Fighter pilots and special operators require similar timelines for training and proficiency. However, the services generally do not leave personnel in critical cyber roles (cyber operator, cyber analysts, and capability developer) long enough to create a high-skill force capable of executing the Cyber Mission Force’s assigned missions. Instead, service promotion and career progression requirements typically pull operators out of tactical missions after six to nine years and usually pull cyber analysts out within four to six years. This high turnover creates a cycle of perpetual amateurism in the Cyber Mission Force. With most personnel on their way out the door by the time they become fully mission-effective, the pool of fully trained and skilled personnel is always a small fraction of the force. This limits operational capacity, creates severe burnout and retention problems, and puts the Cyber Mission Force at a significant disadvantage when competing with adversaries who manage their cyber talent with a focus on building cyber lethality rather than meeting traditional Army or Navy promotion requirements.

The end result of these practices is the problematic state of readiness that Montgomery and Lonergan describe in their recent report. A typical cyber mission team is roughly equivalent to a dysfunctional fighter squadron where one pilot is an elite TOPGUN graduate, four pilots are fully trained and mission-effective, six pilots are listed as fully trained but are only qualified to fly in a threat-free environment, and eight pilots are still in initial pilot training and have never flown a real fighter jet.

Readiness Metrics

While Cyber Command’s detailed readiness numbers are classified, both Congress and Cyber Command commanders have repeatedly voiced alarm at the Cyber Mission Force’s readiness rating. However, most leaders seeing Cyber Command readiness reports do not realize that the readiness numbers causing disquiet are based on standards that list two “fully trained and qualified” personnel for every single truly mission-capable member. Personnel in the most critical work roles on Cyber Mission Force teams are counted as “fully trained and qualified” more than a year before their training is complete and they are actually qualified to perform their teams’ primary missions.

Cyber operations require extremely high skill levels for teams to succeed against critical military and intelligence targets reliably and effectively. Low-skill cyber personnel can opportunistically attack soft targets and sometimes break something. On the defensive side, they can update firewalls and follow cyber security checklists. But if the need is for forces that can bring down specific targets at specific times to support operations in other domains, attack hard targets, or effectively react to adversary intrusions, then higher training standards are required. Consequently, the Cyber Mission Force’s standards required for executing real missions are mostly based on equivalent National Security Agency standards.

Many defenders of the status quo argue that Cyber Mission Force personnel should be trained to lower standards. However, the justification is nearly always based on the current military services’ difficulty meeting current operational standards, not operational requirements. With the complexity of tools and targets, the skills that better trained adversaries bring to the fight, and the fact that many missions require the ability to work with partners, a cyber operator or analyst who is at the minimum “fully trained and qualified” readiness standard is usually dead weight for their team’s wartime mission.

This issue is distinct from the historical issues discussed above — not only did past readiness assessments double-count each “fully trained and qualified” member, but many of those being double-counted were only halfway through the training required to perform routine missions. Today, Cyber Command has built new readiness reporting systems allowing both Cyber Command and subordinate commands to see individual training across the Cyber Mission Force. This prevents some previous forms of cooking the books in readiness reports, but the improved visibility only confirms that the force’s training numbers remain more deeply troubling than most cyber thinkers and commentators realize. To give one example, an elite unit recently requested that all of its cyber operators be fully mission-qualified operators on their second operational assignment. Cyber Command responded that all of those people across the Cyber Mission Force would fill less than half of the unit’s billets.

Structural Failure

This is ultimately a structural problem — the current military services are extremely reluctant to change their promotion and talent management processes to accommodate the long timelines required for mission effectiveness in the cyber domain. Even when formal rules are changed, informal cultural expectations often deter junior and mid-career personnel from applying for the assignments and training that would make them elite cyber operators, analysts, or developers.

This structural bias against tactical proficiency and mission effectiveness does not just reduce the supply of trained and ready personnel by prematurely forcing operators and analysts out of tactical roles. It dramatically reduces the supply of qualified trainers for new operators and analysts — creating bottlenecks at critical points in the training pipeline and preventing troops with multiple years of training from completing mission qualification.

Worse, it creates a toxic combination of poor talent management and poor leadership in many parts of the Cyber Mission Force. With promotion largely restricted to those willing to choose service promotion requirements over becoming mission-effective cyber professionals, the quality of cyber leaders suffers. There are a few exceptions, including Air Force officer operators, Army warrant officer operators and analysts, and Navy officer developers. But in the majority of the services’ cyber career fields filling the Cyber Mission Force, this dynamic creates significant morale and retention problems among cyber officers and non-commissioned officers. Congress sought to address these issues when it required Cyber Command to monitor promotions across cyber career fields (Title X, s. 167b (2)(a)(x)), but for half a decade, Cyber Command has failed to fulfill this legal obligation.

Both Congress and the Department of Defense have sought to address the Cyber Mission Force’s retention issues in recent years, but these efforts have mostly focused on the financial side of the problem. Those problems are real — mission-qualified cyber non-commissioned officers are often paid significantly less than the market rate for their skills while assigned to high-cost-of-living areas. But in my experience, financial issues are secondary. The primary drivers of low retention have been poor talent management and poor leadership, as service policies that punish or prevent building cyber expertise push many out of the military.

Conclusion

Despite rarely claiming its forces meet Department of Defense readiness standards, Cyber Command has a long history of significantly overstating the skill and readiness of its forces. An honest appraisal of the percentage of the Cyber Mission Force actually qualified to conduct operations is deeply sobering and suggests that it would have severe difficulty executing wartime plans or supporting national strategy at scale in a crisis.

My years of experience working with allied cyber forces and studying adversary cyber forces have taught me there are four key organizational and cultural attributes that distinguish successful cyber forces from unsuccessful cyber forces: They require significant tech education before people begin specialized cyber training, they recruit and promote personnel who demonstrate the technical aptitude to understand the cyber domain, they have cultures of listening to experts regardless of rank and of de-emphasizing strict enforcement of military protocol or uniform regulations, and they stress higher education (particularly science and engineering graduate degrees) as a key part of career progression. None of these consistently apply to the forces the current military services provide to Cyber Command, which does not bode well for America’s ability to win a future cyber fight against adversaries like China that have built successful cyber forces.

These problems are inherent to the current structure of the Cyber Mission Force. Minor tweaks to assignment policy or retention bonuses will not solve the core problems causing the Cyber Mission Force’s readiness failures. The current services’ cyber priorities and talent management practices are not producing tactical proficiency, operational expertise, or domain knowledge at the scale the mission requires. Continuing to make gradual reforms within the current force structure will not fix the fatal problems with talent management and career progression that stretch across all services. Even with Special Operations Command-like or service-like authorities, Cyber Command’s need for experienced cyber professionals will continue to be a hostage to Air Force network management priorities, Army staff requirements, and Navy at-sea expectations for promotion. Moreover, many of the Cyber Command staff officers tasked with managing these problems are themselves victims of the cycle of perpetual amateurism, as most have little or no cyber experience.

Solving the Cyber Mission Force’s readiness problem requires a different approach. Without major structural changes, the United States risks conceding the cyber domain to adversaries in a future high-end, multi-domain fight. A sustainable force of experienced cyber professionals is a critical component of winning future multi-domain fights. However, the current structure of the Cyber Mission Force will not produce that force. Fixing these training and talent management problems requires a dedicated Cyber Force (i.e., a new military service roughly 20,000 strong that provides all offensive and defensive military cyber forces to both Cyber Command and the intelligence community). Winning the cyber fight requires breaking the cycle of perpetual amateurism — reorganizing military cyber forces into an independent Cyber Force focused on the cyber domain, able to create and invest in dedicated professionals to man, train, and equip effective cyber forces.

Become a Member

John “Strider” Cobb is an Air Force offensive cyber officer with over a decade of experience in military and intelligence community cyber operations. His experiences have ranged from laboratory researcher to deployed special operations planner. The views expressed are personal and may contradict the official positions of U.S. Cyber Command, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, other agencies of the U.S. government, or NATO.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by John Cobb · May 1, 2025

18. A Cobalt Quagmire? The Risks of a Security-for-Minerals Deal in the DRC

Excerpts:

Working in the DRC would be tricky even if there wasn’t an ongoing conflict. Factors that make it an attractive node in a critical mineral supply strategy, such as resource abundance and a transactional head of state, also make it a risky place to do business. Corruption is endemic, regulatory enforcement is weak, executive authority is limited, and many of the key actors in the mineral economy have ties to regional militias or foreign powers. While US companies are apparently safe from legal restrictions on bribery for the time being given Washington’s pause on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, malfeasance does not form a stable basis for an economic partnership.

Moreover, China is unlikely to leave quietly. Chinese firms have embedded themselves deeply into the mining industry and offer a wider range of services, from infrastructure to arms sales. And nothing about Tshisekedi’s offer solves the core problem of insecurity in eastern DRC. It merely shifts the burden to Americans.

Ensuring that US companies have the resources they need to continue their work is important, but so is avoiding costly entanglements. This means being clear-eyed about what a US security commitment to the DRC actually entails. If history is any guide, external powers that overestimate their leverage, or misestimate the complexities of insecurity in the country rarely exit unscathed. As the new administration finds its footing in Africa, it should tread lightly in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern bloodlands.

A Cobalt Quagmire? The Risks of a Security-for-Minerals Deal in the DRC - Modern War Institute

Christopher M. Faulkner, Raphael Parens and Marcel Plichta | 04.30.25

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Christopher M. Faulkner · April 30, 2025

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While most Americans are aware of the debate over a security-for-resources deal with Ukraine, far fewer know of a similar proposal that has quietly emerged in the heart of Africa.

Under pressure from the administration of President Donald Trump, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and its longtime adversary, Rwanda, signed a declaration of principles on April 25, which includes expectations of significant US public and private sector investment in the region. This move comes amid a rapidly deteriorating security situation that prompted the president of the DRC, Félix Tshisekedi, to send a letter to President Trump soliciting a formal security pact in exchange for access to critical mineral reserves.

On paper, a deal with the DRC may look desirable, even logical: access to resources, dislodging Chinese influence, and an opportunity to create stability to enhance investment. In reality, this deal looks more like a trap. Washington risks marching straight into a proxy war in some of Africa’s deadliest terrain.

The DRC is no stranger to conflict. From 1998 to 2003, the country was rocked by the bloodiest war since World War II, the Second Congolese War, a conflict most Americans have never heard of and that never really ended. Today’s conflict is witnessing surging violence; it is a tinderbox that has already drawn in nations like Rwanda and South Africa, with the former country being responsible for much of this uptick.

In recent months, M23, a Rwandan-backed rebel group, has surged through the country’s eastern provinces, capturing the city of Goma in January and triggering a spiraling humanitarian crisis. The DRC’s east is both its most volatile region and its most valuable. Much of the country’s critical mineral reserves can be found here—approximately 60 percent of global coltan reserves and 70 percent of cobalt worldwide.

Critical Minerals

Cobalt, coltan, and other rare earth metals and magnets are critical components in semiconductors and lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles, smartphones, and advanced weapons systems. Today, China controls about 70 percent of global cobalt refining capacity and dominates much of the supply chain through long-term contracts and embedded mining operations in Africa, particularly pursuing such resources in the DRC.

With a US-China trade war brewing, the Chinese government has blocked international exports of critical minerals and magnets, and the United States is seeking direct access to Africa’s raw material sources.

Tshisekedi’s offer is as much about pivoting away from economic overdependence on China as they are about security. Beijing’s deep involvement in the DRC’s mineral marketplace drove up extraction to a point that the government tried to restrict exports to stabilize prices. Tshisekedi has consistently attempted to renegotiate mining contracts with China since taking office, viewing previous deals as unfair to his country’s interests. Beyond economics, China’s brand of resource extraction includes child labor, human rights violations and abuse, and widespread environmental destruction—yet, it’s unclear whether humanitarian concerns play into the DRC’s calculus. In this context, Kinshasa’s outreach to Washington may be as much about economic leverage as security cooperation.

A Risky Engagement

While the precise shape of any US security commitment—specifically whether military personnel would play a role—is not determined, it’s worth noting that US forces have deployed to the DRC before, but at a much different level. In August 2021, Tshisekedi authorized the deployment of US special operations forces to assist the DRC army in combating the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a group with links to the Islamic State that is designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. That mission reportedly aimed to bolster efforts in the Virunga and Garamba national parks that had “become a sanctuary for terrorist forces.”

The 2021 mission was limited to a few dozen personnel for a few weeks. The scope of US involvement in the transactional proposal on the table today is less clear, but it is likely that the United States would need a substantial commitment to capitalize on the terms of the deal. The dense jungle, limited infrastructure, shifting allegiances, and decades of conflict experience among armed groups like M23 offer poor odds for a quick or clean deployment. Like previous conflicts, US officials could find themselves the victims of mission creep, convinced that just one more escalation will achieve the desired results.

There is also the risk of significant political blowback should an American military assistance mission fail. The domestic reaction to American personnel captured or killed in a conflict over critical minerals in the DRC would be swift and vitriolic. In 2017, four Green Berets were killed in Niger during an ambush—an event that shocked the public and Congress, and exposed how little Americans knew about their military’s footprint in Africa. A deployment to the DRC risks a similar dynamic, but on a far larger scale. Deployed personnel would be stepping into a web of insurgency, foreign interference, and unresolved regional rivalries. And with Chinese mining operations and security guards still active in cobalt-rich areas, the prospect of a diplomatic or kinetic confrontation is real.

There are alternative calls to avoid these risks by leaving the actual fighting to mercenaries. Reports note that Erik Prince, founder of the controversial private military company Blackwater, has been in contact with DRC officials to offer private security solutions. In late April The Africa Report claimed that he made a deal with the DRC government to work on logistics and tax collection, although his history with Blackwater would suggest that he has bigger plans for the region.

Mercenary deployments might be more palatable to the American public, but private solutions have failed before. From 2022 to 2025, European private security firms provided training and military assistance to the DRC army in Goma. Several hundred Romanian contractors led by Horatiu Potra, a former French legionnaire and well-traveled mercenary, deployed across eastern DRC to conduct tasks like airport security. However, M23 surrounded and captured nearly 300 of these troops when Goma was taken in January. The mercenaries were paraded in front of the media before being led away first to Rwanda and then back to Romania. The case provides a very real warning to American interventionists seeking to outsource conflicts abroad.

A Complicated Partner?

Working in the DRC would be tricky even if there wasn’t an ongoing conflict. Factors that make it an attractive node in a critical mineral supply strategy, such as resource abundance and a transactional head of state, also make it a risky place to do business. Corruption is endemic, regulatory enforcement is weak, executive authority is limited, and many of the key actors in the mineral economy have ties to regional militias or foreign powers. While US companies are apparently safe from legal restrictions on bribery for the time being given Washington’s pause on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, malfeasance does not form a stable basis for an economic partnership.

Moreover, China is unlikely to leave quietly. Chinese firms have embedded themselves deeply into the mining industry and offer a wider range of services, from infrastructure to arms sales. And nothing about Tshisekedi’s offer solves the core problem of insecurity in eastern DRC. It merely shifts the burden to Americans.

Ensuring that US companies have the resources they need to continue their work is important, but so is avoiding costly entanglements. This means being clear-eyed about what a US security commitment to the DRC actually entails. If history is any guide, external powers that overestimate their leverage, or misestimate the complexities of insecurity in the country rarely exit unscathed. As the new administration finds its footing in Africa, it should tread lightly in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern bloodlands.

Dr. Christopher M. Faulkner is an assistant professor at the US Naval War College and nonresident senior fellow with the Eurasia program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His research focuses on militant recruitment, private military companies, and national/international security. X: @C_Faulkner_UCF

Raphael Parens is an international security researcher focused on Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He is a Templeton Fellow in the Eurasia and Africa programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He specializes in African security, paramilitary groups, and Eurasian security. He received his MA in international security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and he is currently based in London. X: @MoreSecurityInt

Marcel Plichta is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews, a former analyst at the US Department of Defense, and an intelligence instructor for Grey Dynamics. His research focuses on the use of force by small states and drones in modern warfare. X: @Plichta_Marcel

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the US Naval War College.

Image credit: Al Jazeera English

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Christopher M. Faulkner · April 30, 2025

19. China Is Still Winning the Battle for 5G—and 6G

Is this not one of the major battlefields of strategic competition? Why aren't we winning?

Excerpts:

Thus far, much of the digital infrastructure that has undergirded the modern world was invented, developed, and deployed in the United States. If the United States were to lose this advantage for good, the consequences would be immense. A China that dominates global digital networks would be able to surveil them at will. It would also be positioned to lead in AI, training AI models on data that traverses Chinese companies’ networks and controlling AI applications that rely on high-speed networking. Successive U.S. administrations have recognized the magnitude of the problem. But the steps they have taken to address it have not resolved the core issue: the absence of alternative technologies that can compete with China’s on price.

U.S. national security depends on the United States regaining its lead. It cannot do so alone. Although the competition with China will be fierce, particularly because of Beijing’s willingness to wield its economic clout to give its companies a crushing competitive advantage, Washington must engage. Technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, virtualization, and artificial intelligence will only become more important. The country that leads the transition to 6G, moreover, will be at the forefront of advancements in a variety of applications, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. If the United States, in cooperation with its allies and partners, adopts and implements the right policies, it can regain the technological initiative and protect its intelligence operations and military communications around the world. But to do so, it must ensure that advanced, trusted, and secure digital infrastructure, designed and produced outside of China, remains available—and becomes the technology of choice—both at home and abroad.

China Is Still Winning the Battle for 5G—and 6G

Foreign Affairs · by More by Anne Neuberger · May 1, 2025

America Must Do More to Compete With Huawei

Anne Neuberger

May 1, 2025

Walking past a Huawei store in Beijing, September 2024 Florence Lo / Reuters

ANNE NEUBERGER is Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology on the U.S. National Security Council in the Biden administration.

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When Ren Zhengfei founded Huawei in 1987, the Chinese telecommunications company had a few thousand dollars in the bank and an eye on reverse-engineering advanced foreign technology. By 1994, Huawei was producing switching equipment, the hardware and software that form the basis of modern telecommunications, and Ren was taking a meeting with Chinese Communist Party Secretary General Jiang Zemin. The Huawei chief executive observed that his company’s product was a matter of “national security,” and that a country “that did not have its own switching equipment was like one that lacked its own military.” “Well said,” Jiang replied. From that moment on, business and government have been partners in the mission to keep China’s telecommunications secure.

Meanwhile, in the late 1990s and throughout the first decade of this century, the United States did not think much about its telecommunications dominance. Its leadership in the sector was unrivaled, and U.S. innovations—including 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies—were widely adopted and securely used around the world. But as the United States sat complacently in the top position, trusting that the strength of the free market would keep it there, China was carefully setting itself up as a challenger. Beijing poured resources into Huawei and other Chinese companies, positioning them to outcompete foreign firms. So successful was this effort that by 2012, Huawei telecom gear had been deployed across rural America, covering the bases that house U.S. nuclear weapons. This effectively provided the Chinese government with constant surveillance of the United States’ most sensitive capabilities and military operations. Huawei may not have been raking in profits from this venture, but for Beijing it was an intelligence coup.

Although the United States began to push back on these efforts and eventually banned Huawei from U.S. networks in 2016, Huawei’s successes have continued to mount. The company is now the world’s largest provider of 5G networks and a dominant player in telecom equipment. It is also poised to lead the next generation of networking—6G. The company’s competitors accuse it, with some justification, of achieving this dominance through intellectual property theft, helped along by aggressive Chinese subsidies and a closed Chinese market. Meanwhile, Huawei has demolished many of its rivals. Over the last 15 years, some, such as the U.S. companies Cisco and Motorola, have been driven out of the equipment market; others, such as the U.S. company Lucent, the French Alcatel, and the German Siemens, have been forced to sell or merge with larger firms in order to compete. The Canadian company Nortel declared bankruptcy in 2009. Today, only two non-Chinese firms remain capable of competing with Huawei on a global level: the Swedish firm Ericsson and the Finnish Nokia. The United States is their largest market, and U.S. telecommunications rely on the services of both.

This is not simply about Western firms’ lost market share. Huawei’s networks carry valuable data, which the company is obliged under Chinese intelligence laws to provide at the government’s request. That access would be valuable to Beijing at any time. But now, in the era of artificial intelligence, the data sets that Huawei transports also have another function: training AI models. Huawei has deployed its Smart City services—which can include street camera imaging; electricity, gas, and water meter data; and social media analysis—in more than 200 cities in 40 countries, from Singapore to Spain. The data sets this produces could be fed straight into Chinese AI models and made available to China’s military and intelligence agencies, making Beijing not just a leader in telecommunications but the dominant player in the use of AI for public safety and national security. The recently exposed Salt Typhoon hacking operation, which targeted major U.S. telecommunications firms, also demonstrated China’s determination to gain access to U.S. networks by any means necessary.

U.S. President Donald Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden after him took steps to slow China’s ascent to this commanding height. Both administrations tried, in particular, to address Huawei and other Chinese firms’ cost advantage over their Western counterparts. Yet Huawei continues to extend its global reach. Beijing will gain an even greater edge in telecommunications if international tensions and trade wars undermine cooperation among Western countries. In his second term, Trump must redouble U.S. efforts to compete, enhancing programs that are working, making hard choices about how to allocate the range of invisible waves that carry wireless signals such as radio, television, and phone data through the air, known as spectrum, and working with allies to finance research and development and technology deployments abroad. Otherwise, China will extend its lead in 5G into the transition to 6G, cementing the country’s authority over worldwide telecommunications—and putting it in a position to compromise the security of the U.S. and allied military and intelligence operations that rely on these global networks.

EARLY STUMBLES

In the twentieth century, U.S. government investments resulted in the creation of the Internet, high-speed networking, and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Innovations in cellular technology by American firms also shaped global communications: 2G brought text, 3G brought mobile broadband, and 4G brought mobile video and app stores. Apart from its support for research and development, Washington largely left the free market alone. In China, by contrast, the government and military treated leading telecommunications firms as national champions, powering their rise because their success bolstered Beijing’s strategic aims. Huawei alone reportedly received $75 billion in government support between 2008 and 2018, which enabled it to gain market share by pricing products well below cost. In the late 1990s, Western vendors owned nearly 90 percent of the market for telecom gear. By 2025, Ericsson and Nokia, even after acquiring their failing peers, were down to a combined 40 percent market share. Chinese firms account for an additional 40 percent of the global market.

Today, the United States and Europe—home of both Ericsson and Nokia—are sitting on a shrinking base, as China continues to undercut their sales pitches by subsidizing Huawei deployments around the world. Although Huawei’s global dominance in 5G has been slowed by U.S.-led sanctions and export controls, neither U.S. innovations nor those of its partners have threatened the competitiveness of its products. Given that Huawei’s research and development budget is more than twice the size of its two next-largest Western competitors, the company is unlikely to lose its innovation advantage.

The first Trump administration, recognizing the need for secure telecommunications, banned Huawei and other Chinese products from U.S. networks and took steps to replace the gear that was already present. The United States also began to encourage its allies, most notably the United Kingdom, to remove Huawei gear and work with trusted firms instead. The Biden administration continued this strategy. But both parties have known for years that banning Chinese technology would not be enough. The United States and its partners would need to develop a cost-effective alternative that could compete with China’s aggressively subsidized products. To that end, the Biden administration brought in two critical government agencies, the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, to, among other projects, directly finance Costa Rica’s move from a Huawei 4G network to a trusted 5G network and to team up with Finland’s investment bank to finance a major deployment of Nokia’s 5G technology in India.

CUTTING COSTS

Washington’s objectives have not changed. It needs to compete with China at scale, narrow the price gap between U.S. and Chinese technologies, and encourage wider adoption of trusted systems. The way to accomplish this is with incentives for technology innovation and joint financing for countries choosing between Chinese and non-Chinese technologies.

The Trump administration should begin by making better useof the ten-year, $1.5 billion grant program established by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. Initial grants focused on funding large-scale interoperability testing of technologies that integrate hardware and software from different vendors. Over $140 million was awarded to U.S. and foreign firms and universities through this initiative, with a further $420 million in grants made available in May 2024. This was a good start, but future funding rounds must move much faster and focus on projects that commercialize new technologies, giving U.S. software companies greater incentives to enter the market. In particular, directing capital to the “cloudification” of network infrastructure—that is, subsidizing technology that creates virtual versions of specialized equipment, will pay dividends for U.S. industry, which excels at software development.

Banning Chinese technology is not enough.

AI applications rely on high-speed networking. The United States, however, trails far behind China when it comes to setting up the required infrastructure. Today, 45 percent of U.S. mobile users are covered by 5G, compared with 88 percent of Chinese mobile users. When 5G technology was first introduced, China built 600,000 5G base stations in three months. It took the United States two years to build 100,000. But where Washington cannot compete with Beijing on deployment at scale, it can compete on efficiency. By integrating artificial intelligence into telecommunications operations, companies could rapidly increase transmission speeds and network capacity, improving overall efficiency. The next round of CHIPS grants should be used to drive research and development and pilot projects in this area.

Another important way to lower costs for U.S. firms is through tax policy. For example, Washington can encourage investment in digital infrastructure by allowing accelerated depreciation, a financial tool that enables companies to quickly lower the value of new assets and thus reduce their tax burden and free up investment funds. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act included such a provision, but it was set up to last for only a limited time and the mechanism is already being phased out. Congress should now extend these types of tax incentives to a broad category of digital infrastructure equipment to maximize private-sector investment.

KNITTING TOGETHER

Even after the United States implements these reforms, the cost of non-Chinese technologies will still undermine U.S. efforts to persuade other countries to avoid Chinese vendors. The alternative on offer must be technologically advanced and competitively priced. The United States therefore needs to cooperate with its partners on digital infrastructure financing. This model has worked before: under the East Micronesia Cable project, launched in 2022, Australia, Japan, and the United States have jointly contributed over $90 million to support secure, sustainable, and resilient telecommunications infrastructure in and between Pacific Islands countries.

Potential partners that could bring expertise and commercial capabilities to a U.S.-led 5G financing campaign include the EU, Japan, and South Korea. The two European heavyweights in the field, Ericsson and Nokia, are already well established in U.S. markets but need additional research and development support to be able to compete globally with Huawei. Japan and South Korea have smaller companies that could also compete if provided enough backing. A deal with Washington that covers R & D and financing for technology adaptation in third countries could help any or all of these partners lessen their companies’ disadvantages relative to Chinese firms.

A China that dominates digital networks would be able to surveil them at will.

China is ramping up its funding for these projects, and the United States and its partners must do the same. The obvious institution for Washington to turn to is the Export-Import Bank, the U.S. government’s credit agency. The bank still needs more flexibility to take on risk and offer competitive financing for 5G projects, but its recent efforts show promise. In 2023, the bank’s board authorized 5G-related transactions in which less than 51 percent of the goods and services involved originate in the United States, provided the exporter could present a plan for job expansion in the United States. Already, $313 million has been approved to support 5G construction in India under a cofinancing agreement with Finland’s export credit agency. With more collaboration of this kind, Washington can show the world that the United States and its partners are determined to offer compelling alternatives to China’s subsidized vendors.

The private sector has a role to play, too. Earlier this year, Google and the government of Chile announced the launch of Humboldt Cable, a subsea cable route connecting Chile to Australia via French Polynesia. A concerted effort by the United States and its allies to include private firms in their strategy can incentivize similar investments to keep far-flung parts of the world connected to Western technology, rather than reliant on companies that may be controlled by Beijing.

GOING WIRELESS

Finally, Washington should reform its spectrum policy. Spectrum, which refers to the range of invisible energy waves used to carry information (such as television and WiFi) through the air, is a limited resource. The Department of Defense is the largest owner of spectrum in the United States and it is not transparent about how much spectrum it requires and when it is used. Spectrum is vital for all kinds of data transfers, whether streaming movies or using drones to monitor infrastructure—in other words, it is not only the government that needs it. But in the United States, unlike in China, the public and private sectors do not cooperate on shared goals. Instead, the government and private firms compete for access. This holds back U.S. technologies relative to their Chinese rivals. China’s advantages in this area underpin its ambitions to control global networks and to reap military and strategic benefits from that control. Washington will now need to make hard choices to make portions of the Pentagon’s spectrum available for commercial use, while ensuring that it preserves critical military and intelligence capabilities.

The benefits would be significant. U.S. companies would be better positioned to develop next-generation mobile technologies, initiating a virtuous cycle of innovation. As they build and test equipment, products, and technologies for the new spectrum, companies in other countries will follow suit. A hardware and software ecosystem generated by the United States and its allies would then filter across the globe.

In a few situations, the Defense Department will be unable to free up more spectrum for the private sector. But even here there are solutions. The Pentagon should work with commercial firms to scale up the use of new spectrum-sharing technologies, licensing regimes, and AI-supported software to make networks smarter and more agile. This would enable government and commercial users to share spectrum more effectively than is possible today, which means the Defense Department could access spectrum when needed for infrequent but important missions, training, and testing. A pilot project initiated by the Biden administration has aimed to test these technologies at scale and in partnership with private firms. The Trump administration should quickly wrap up this pilot and accelerate the next steps of figuring out how spectrum sharing will be governed and putting rapid dispute-resolution processes in place. This will assure the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that spectrum would be available to them during crises and conflicts. It will also give the private sector confidence that on-demand spectrum would be sufficiently reliable for commercial purposes. That confidence is key to making private-sector investment in digital infrastructure worthwhile.

CATCHING UP

Thus far, much of the digital infrastructure that has undergirded the modern world was invented, developed, and deployed in the United States. If the United States were to lose this advantage for good, the consequences would be immense. A China that dominates global digital networks would be able to surveil them at will. It would also be positioned to lead in AI, training AI models on data that traverses Chinese companies’ networks and controlling AI applications that rely on high-speed networking. Successive U.S. administrations have recognized the magnitude of the problem. But the steps they have taken to address it have not resolved the core issue: the absence of alternative technologies that can compete with China’s on price.

U.S. national security depends on the United States regaining its lead. It cannot do so alone. Although the competition with China will be fierce, particularly because of Beijing’s willingness to wield its economic clout to give its companies a crushing competitive advantage, Washington must engage. Technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, virtualization, and artificial intelligence will only become more important. The country that leads the transition to 6G, moreover, will be at the forefront of advancements in a variety of applications, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. If the United States, in cooperation with its allies and partners, adopts and implements the right policies, it can regain the technological initiative and protect its intelligence operations and military communications around the world. But to do so, it must ensure that advanced, trusted, and secure digital infrastructure, designed and produced outside of China, remains available—and becomes the technology of choice—both at home and abroad.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Anne Neuberger · May 1, 2025

20. Letters to the Editor: ‘The Elites Were a Disaster’

This may be the root of the political divisions in America today; The actions of the elite versus the views of the elite by the American people.

Excertps:

Elites like to portray their views as aligned with expert analysis, but this is often a mirage. Elite opinion is shaped more by prestige than by technical knowledge. And when moral righteousness enters the mix, it often supplants reasoned, evidence-based guidance.

This disconnect—between what the experts recommended and what the elites declared—helps explain why trust eroded. Many Americans weren’t rejecting science. They were rejecting what looked like elite political manipulation dressed up as science.

—Rob Henderson

...

Moreover, the elites revealed that they are not driven by “science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking,” but by a pernicious form of left-wing racialism. During the lockdowns, virtually all of the elite institutions submitted to Black Lives Matter ideologies and encouraged mass protests while simultaneously shutting down churches and small businesses. Some states even considered distributing vaccines according to a racial hierarchy, with “oppressors” at the bottom of the list.

Whatever their technological virtues, American elites caused—and deserved—the collapse in institutional trust. You can’t punish, censor, lie, scold, ideologize, and lock down Americans, a freedom-loving people, without creating a reaction. And this loss of trust cannot be rebuilt by concluding, after the disasters of the past five years, that elites did a pretty good job after all.

—Chris Rufo

Letters to the Editor: ‘The Elites Were a Disaster’

Plus: How Carney got a Trump bump in Canada, and more.

By The Free Press

04.30.25 — Culture and Ideas

https://www.thefp.com/p/letters-to-the-editor-experts-and-elites

“Elite opinion is shaped more by prestige than by technical knowledge,” writes Rob Henderson. (Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive via Getty Images)

Readers of The Free Press are smart, opinionated, and ideologically diverse. That means we get a lot of really fascinating letters. We can’t publish all of them, but every month we print a handful that have us talking in the office.

First up this month, Rob Henderson responds to Tyler Cowen’s recent column defending intellectual elitism. “Too many who despise ‘the elites’ do not look closely enough at the dissidents—or assess what they get right and wrong, and how they got there,” Cowen wrote. Henderson, on the other hand, says that mistrust in elites arises more out of a disconnect between “experts” and elites:

In reflecting on the collapse of institutional trust during the pandemic, one moment stands out: The summer of 2020, when many officials and media figures who had urged strict lockdowns pivoted to endorsing mass gatherings for Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

This sudden shift created widespread confusion and suspicion. If Covid was so dangerous that funerals and family visits had to be canceled, why were mass protests permitted? It seemed as though the rules weren’t grounded in science but in politics. Many interpreted this double standard not just as hypocrisy but as a revelation: If the cause was fashionable, restrictions were negotiable. Some people refused the Covid vaccine not out of ignorance, but as a way to object to what they saw as a double standard. If mass gatherings were permissible for political causes, then perhaps the threat wasn’t as grave as claimed.

Tyler Cowen recently argued that the “real elites”—the expert scientists—remained closer to the truth and that critics of elites aren’t looking far enough up the hierarchy with regard to Covid transmission and vaccinations. But this misses a crucial point. People too often conflate experts and elites. They are not interchangeable. When elites don’t care about a topic, the experts rule. But once elites turn their attention to an issue—especially when it carries strong moral overtones—elite opinion usually overrides expert consensus.

Elites like to portray their views as aligned with expert analysis, but this is often a mirage. Elite opinion is shaped more by prestige than by technical knowledge. And when moral righteousness enters the mix, it often supplants reasoned, evidence-based guidance.

This disconnect—between what the experts recommended and what the elites declared—helps explain why trust eroded. Many Americans weren’t rejecting science. They were rejecting what looked like elite political manipulation dressed up as science.

—Rob Henderson

Similarly, Christopher Rufo makes a distinction between technological and political issues. America’s elites did well with the former but utterly failed at the latter, he says:

I admire Tyler Cowen, but his recent column on elites in the Covid era has a major blind spot: the failure to separate the technological from the political. On technological questions, America’s educated class performed ably, developing a novel vaccine, maintaining medical systems, and keeping essential goods flowing through the supply chain. But on the political questions, the elites were a disaster.

There still has not been an accounting for some of the most egregious policies of the era. During the pandemic, elites continued the lockdowns beyond the evidence, used heavy-handed censorship of dissent, forced vaccinations on populations that did not need them, and published a steady stream of lies about lockdown duration, post-vaccination transmission, and the origins of the coronavirus.

We all remember the slogans: “Two weeks to stop the spread,” “You can’t transmit the virus after vaccination,” and “the lab leak theory is a racist conspiracy.”

“You can’t punish, censor, lie, scold, ideologize, and lock down Americans, a freedom-loving people, without creating a reaction,” writes Christopher Rufo. (Hollie Adams via Getty Images)

Moreover, the elites revealed that they are not driven by “science, open-ended inquiry, and truth-seeking,” but by a pernicious form of left-wing racialism. During the lockdowns, virtually all of the elite institutions submitted to Black Lives Matter ideologies and encouraged mass protests while simultaneously shutting down churches and small businesses. Some states even considered distributing vaccines according to a racial hierarchy, with “oppressors” at the bottom of the list.

Whatever their technological virtues, American elites caused—and deserved—the collapse in institutional trust. You can’t punish, censor, lie, scold, ideologize, and lock down Americans, a freedom-loving people, without creating a reaction. And this loss of trust cannot be rebuilt by concluding, after the disasters of the past five years, that elites did a pretty good job after all.

—Chris Rufo

Two weeks ago, we launched “This Week in Canada,” a weekly newsletter from Rupa Subramanya dedicated to covering the most important reporting from our northern neighbor.

“All of my stories,” Rupa wrote, “share the same DNA: They speak to the steady growth of the state’s role in daily life, and the slow erosion of our individual liberties in the West.” Some topics mentioned in her first installment reflect that theme, such as the 2022 truckers protest and the rise of assisted suicide in Canada.

Mardi Burton, a reader from Canada, wrote in to remind us that Canadians vary widely in their beliefs on these issues. She also argues that Mark Carney, the Liberal prime minister, won the election because Canadians believe he has the expertise to handle the nation’s economy amid Trump’s tariffs:

I am a Canadian living in Canada who listens regularly to Honestly with Bari Weiss and reads The Free Press. I appreciate the diverse points of view, the straightforward discussion, and the respect for challenging dialogue. I caution The Free Press and Rupa in particular to avoid presenting her perception of events in Canada as the predominant perception of Canadians. For example, the self-identified Freedom Convoy folks were experienced by many of us as detrimental to our freedom to get to work, get our kids to school, and make autonomous choices about healthcare and vaccines.

In some provinces, medical officers of health did acknowledge the mistakes that were made during Covid, most significantly closing schools for too long. Disagreements and discussions occurred in my province at various levels, and I was able to make my own decisions about the Covid vaccine and the associated consequences.

I totally support the right of the Freedom Convoy folks to protest, but please do not present them as effective representatives of the concerns most Canadians experienced during the pandemic. I don’t think it was our finest hour.

“I totally support the right of the Freedom Convoy folks to protest, but please do not present them as effective representatives of the concerns most Canadians experienced during the pandemic,” writes Mardi Burton. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Rupa also uses the phrase “alarming normalization of euthanasia.” This debate is ongoing and very important. Many Canadians of good moral conscience want the freedom to end their own lives in the case of untenable suffering that cannot be managed by the health and social services that people in Canada expect. We must be vigilant against the use of euthanasia to hasten the deaths of people who should get better health and social care. This value is not in conflict with the freedom many of us want to have at the end of our lives.

As for our election, I submit that Rupa’s message is a bit misrepresentative of the situation. Yes, many of us, as Canadians, support the Conservatives and the policies they proposed. However, writing that Carney “saw an opening” in Donald Trump “and exploited it” is odd. She could have as easily said, “saw an opening and stepped up.”

The biggest factor in the election outcome likely was Trudeau’s resignation and replacement by someone, Carney, who is perceived to have commitment and expertise in strengthening the Canadian economy. The Trump factor is key, but primarily in the context of who would best manage the Canadian economy.

—Mardi Burton

Every so often, we publish reader suggestions for Things Worth Remembering. Douglas Murray, the column’s original author, wrote about the work of British American poet W.H. Auden on several occasions. We received a submission from Anneliese Renck—a former college professor who now lives with her husband, her kids, and their chickens in Montana—about another Auden poem, his 1938 “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

The morning of 9/11, my high school English teacher read W.H. Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts.” We sat in a semicircle at her feet, the desks at our backs closed in around us like spiders in a dark forest. At the time, I was struck by how perfectly the poem interweaves art and myth with simple language and imagery.

Auden wrote his poem after a visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Auden presents us with his interpretation of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and reading the poem in tandem with an examination of the painting proves helpful.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. (DeAgostini via Getty Images)

What strikes Bruegel’s viewer first is the same thing that struck Auden in his description of it: For a poem whose title implies it will be about Icarus—the Greek figure who built wings of wax and fell after flying too close to the sun, now a fairly universal Western metonym for hubris—the painting’s central figure is strikingly absent from all emphasis. While Icarus does appear in the work’s bottom right-hand corner, as a barely perceptible pair of legs disappearing into the sea, Bruegel chooses as his dual focal points a farmer plowing a field in the foreground and a ship under sail further back to the right. Bruegel paints tranquility and industry, not tragedy.

Auden’s word for this scene is leisurely. His images are those of the plowman, the ship, and the sun. Indeed, he is right: The painting may gesture at Icarus’s death, the myth’s denouement, but Bruegel has chosen to depict this tragedy as part of a larger whole, on a sunny afternoon, in a society whose wheels continue to turn—not even in spite of Icarus’s fate, but likely completely oblivious of it.

Auden wrote his poem in the lead-up to World War II and published it in the spring issue of a magazine. All around him, the human world dealt in bleak grays and shadows, and yet daffodils and snowdrops were appearing all the same, pushing shoots out of the sun-warmed ground and unfurling green, white, and yellow. It is that juxtaposition of emotional depth with the mundane that makes the poem so successful.

I spent many years thinking that “Musée des Beaux Arts” was an odd choice for a poem on 9/11. Hadn’t the whole world, in fact, watched, and not at all “turn[ed] away” and “sailed calmly on”?

Now I think I understand what my English teacher was trying to tell us: that grief, like Icarus falling from the sky at his failure, or like the “dreadful martyrdom” that must “run its course / Anyhow in a corner,” is never as important to the onlooker as it is to those in the throes of it. The poem, I think, was not for me, but for a classmate whose uncle was in one of the towers, or for a friend whose husband in New York wasn’t returning her calls.

How to put a number or measure on loss? The fact is that these experiences are part of life, integral to its very fabric. That, ultimately, is what Auden is telling us in his poem.

I’ve heard some say that “Musée des Beaux Arts” is a callous poem, curmudgeonly at best, to point out that your suffering or mine means very little to others who blithely continue with their lives. On the contrary, I think Auden offers us a hopeful message as his entire world hovers on the edge of a knife blade. He is saying that the ordinary, everyday parts of life—cups of tea, daffodils in spring, children playing—can do nothing other than coexist with the zeniths and nadirs, and that even at our lowest, most desperate moments, life will continue, as it always has, for others. And for us.

Except, of course, for Icarus. Was Auden gesturing at the cost of peace, writing just after Chamberlain’s famous and fateful “peace in our time” that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the hands of Hitler? Or was he looking further into the future, as Churchill did even then, to the other side of a war where evil is beaten back, but at an immeasurable and immense cost, counted in but not truly measured by human lives? We’ll never know, and that is another thing offered by great writing and art: the chance to reflect on questions with no easy answers and, sometimes, to fill in the gaps left to us with experiences and interpretations that are entirely our own.

—Anneliese Renck

Do you have a unique perspective on a Free Press story? Can you bring your personal experience or expertise to bear on an issue we cover? We want to hear from you. Send us a letter to the editor: letters@TheFP.com.

21. How Trump erased diversity in 100 days

How Trump erased diversity in 100 days

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/100-days-trump-erased-diversity-ended-dei/

Memphis Barker

In the United States

30 April 2025 10:30am BST

There was no ceremony to mark the removal of the giant Black Lives Matter mural that had dominated the road leading to the White House.

But if Donald Trump had been watching from a top floor window the scene stretching out across two blocks of 16th Street Northwest, one can imagine his feelings.

He had called the stencil a “symbol of hate” when it was installed in 2020 as protests raged over police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

His promise to strip “diversity, equity and inclusion”, or DEI, from American life has whip-sawed through the first 100 days of his administration at a staggering pace and scale.

On Day 1, Mr Trump signed an executive order vowing to end “illegal and immoral” DEI policies. One week later, the president blamed diversity hiring for the fatal plane collision above the Potomac River.

By Day 100, the campaign has rippled through the military to law, education, popular culture, business, the political opposition and arguably across the world.

Where the president has run into trouble in other key priorities, such as ending the war in Ukraine or re-imagining the system of global trade, he retains the upper hand in his effort to kill off what he describes as the poisonous, "woke" strain in US culture.

Within hours of Mr Trump’s return, thousands of federal workers in DEI positions were put on administrative leave.

There was chaos in two agencies set up to avoid discrimination in the workplace and federal contracting, the Equal Employment Opportunities Council (EEOC) and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP).

In cabinet offices whose work was not directly threatened, such as the Department of Homeland Security or Department of Energy, bureaucrats frantically worked to scrub their websites of a new list of unwelcome phrases.

"Diversity" was struck out. "LatinX" deleted. "Unconscious bias" erased.

Alongside the tweaks were wholesale junkings of Democrat-era webpages. A guide produced for employees of the Department of Agriculture on how to correctly use gender pronouns swiftly vanished (“Avoid using Sir or Madam,” it had warned, “since the recipient may not identify with either gender”)

On January 31st, the White House went further. All federal employees must remove gender pronouns from their email signatures, an executive order demanded. “There should be only two options - MALE and FEMALE”. Contractors seeking government work would have to follow suit.

The battles over "he/him" and in obscure government agencies reflect a much larger war over American history. Broadly, the Left says the US must do more to heal the scars of slavery. The Right argues that there has been an over-correction that now unfairly favours black Americans and other minority groups.

In his flood of missives, the president casts DEI as contradictory to the American dream. It undermines “traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system”, a Day Two order reads.

Donald Trump has signed a wealth of executive orders aimed at getting rid of 'woke' culture in the US | Image credits: AP / Reuters

Post-2020, the Democratic Party embraced a radical vision of racial justice, driven by the Black Lives Matter protests. Figureheads such as Ibrahim X Kendi argued white people had to suffer discrimination to make up for historic racism. Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders took the knee in the Capitol wearing Ghanean-style Kente cloth, while state governors and mayors cut back police forces seen as inherently racist.

Having ordered racial equity reviews across all government departments upon taking office, Joe Biden also aligned with activists in the field of transgender rights, backing the participation of male-born pupils in girls’ sport. Dylan Mulvaney, a controversial influencer who charted her transition in daily posts, was invited to the White House to interview the president. “I feel I may have girlbossed too close to the sun," said Ms Mulvaney, wearing a bright pink neck-tie.

Those days are over. In the DC offices of the EEOC and OFCCP, suspended staff were only given a few hours to collect their belongings.

The new direction of the EEOC was prefigured in a spat between Andrea Lucas, Mr Trump’s choice for acting chairman, and billionaire Democrat Mark Cuban last year. “I have never hired anyone based exclusively on race or gender,” Mr Cuban said. “But race and gender can be part of the equation.”

Appearing on Fox News in a bright red blazer and pearl necklace, Ms Lucas fired back. Any hiring decision influenced by race or sex is a violation of the law, she said. “People seem to think that as long as it’s just a tipping point… or as long as it benefits certain protected racial groups” that's OK.

“There’s no good race discrimination,” she said firmly.

The point stands, argues Craig Leen, a former OFCCP chairman in Mr Trump’s first term. Civil rights laws are meant to ensure everyone is treated equally, avoiding discrimination rather than encouraging ‘positive’ forms. During his term, companies that conducted pay reviews and found disparities against men or white employees “wouldn’t fix it”. That was illegal then. But companies are now scrambling to ensure they no longer fall foul of the law.

Inside the EEOC and OFCCP, some old hands are aghast by the screeching about-turn. In 2024, the EEOC warned that misgendering staff or barring transgender employees from using the bathroom of their choice could constitute harassment. Under Ms Lucas, the guidance has been scrapped - and the EEOC has abandoned hearing cases of workplace discrimination against transgender staff. “Sex is binary,” Ms Lucas said in January, “and it is not harassment to acknowledge those truths.”

Specific advice for opportunities regarding disabled workers has been dropped from the US Department of Energy website

Source: www.energy.gov/work-us-department-energy | Changes accessed via Wayback Machine

The “viciousness” of the Trump administration’s new direction has “surprised” staff even though they knew a change was coming, says a former senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Ms Lucas appears to be investigating “very weak” charges of reverse discrimination, while “strong charges” from traditionally marginalised groups are being ignored. The promotion of meritocracy is simply a cover, the official said. The Trump administration is “engaging in discriminatory actions… removing people from leadership, calling them DEI hires simply because of their race or gender when they are highly qualified”.

In a speech to Pentagon staff on Feb 7, Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary, strode across the stage with his shirt-sleeves rolled up. “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength’," he said. Mr Trump has barred transgender troops from the military (although the move has been blocked by courts).

Pete Hegseth has criticised female combat deployments in the US military Credit: AP

In March, Mr Hegseth said the entry of women into combat positions in 2015 had led to a decline in standards of fitness. Reviews are ongoing.

Ahead of a visit by Mr Hegseth to the US Naval Library in Maryland on April 1, staff made sure to cleanse the shelves of unwelcome, DEI literature. How to be an Antiracist by Mr Kendi was removed. But so too was Maya Angelou’s 1970 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Government workers are having to make subjective decisions without much guidance, notes Katherine Kuzminski of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank. Some risk "over-compliance", such as the brief removal of the Tuskegee airmen, a pioneering group of black Second World War fighter pilots, from air force basic training. The Pentagon also flagged a picture of Enola Gay among 26,000 images to be deleted from its websites, suggesting the use of computer programmes to scythe through DEI material en masse. Dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima could hardly be described as "woke".

Pictures of the Enola Gay were automatically flagged for deletion | Credit: AP / US Air Force

By early March, Mr Trump’s crosshairs had shifted to the education sector. In the president’s eyes, much of the American school system has been captured by a Left-wing, unpatriotic ideology. The White House is attempting to force a recalibration with the threat of funding cuts, running from primary schools all the way to Harvard. Teaching pupils about "structural racism" could now see federal support for free-school meals removed. More than $2 billion of government funding for Harvard has been frozen, after the university refused to comply with a list of demands, including hiring staff with different viewpoints and scrapping all DEI-related courses.

On March 23rd, Alex Shieh, a student at Brown university in Providence, Rhode Island, rented a chainsaw from a Home Depot an hour’s walk off campus. A few days earlier, Mr Shieh had launched his own version of Elon Musk’s Doge department, aimed at administrative, DEI-focused “bloat” at Brown. He sent an email to all the college’s staff asking them to list five achievements in the past week. Only 20 replied, one simply saying: “F*** off”. The university is investigating Mr Shieh for causing emotional distress and improper access to email databases.

Alex Shieh launched his own version of Elon Musk’s Doge department Credit: Alex Shieh

They would be better off taking his concerns seriously, sighs the undergraduate. According to a July poll by Gallup, American citizens’ faith in higher education has collapsed, driven by the rising cost of tuition and concerns of political bias. “I think my [$93,000 per year] tuition shows that Brown has a greater loyalty to a sort of progressive ideology, DEI whatnot, than being able to offer tuition at an affordable price,” he says. Getting rid of "box-ticking" staff could bring costs down and help less privileged students than himself gain access.

Around campus, Mr Shieh now wears a cap to disguise his identity. Threats to beat him up were made on a university-wide messaging channel. Some students argue with him on sight, he says. “It seems to me sort of an indication of the echo chambers that, in the Ivy League, when people say ‘Your tuition is too high’, people attack you.” His campaign has at least one fan, however. “Wow,” Mr Musk posted on X in reply.

Unlike in the military and federal government, Mr Trump has no direct ability to hire-and-fire in the education sector. His attacks rely in part on accusations of anti-Semitism tied to the campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Also in his arsenal is a 2023 Supreme Court verdict, which ruled that Harvard and North Carolina University’s affirmative action policies unfairly discriminated against white and Asian applicants.

The Trump administration has sought to turn the verdict into “a magic wand it can wave and achieve whatever it wishes” throughout the entire school system, says Justin Driver, a Law professor at Yale University. Its approach has had some success: Columbia University agreed to a series of Trump demands, including reshaping its Middle East studies department. The university said it would also allow the arrest of students on campus, not long after graduate student Mohamed Khalil – accused of “supporting Hamas” – was seized for deportation by ICE agents.

But Harvard has refused to budge. It is now suing the White House, claiming the administration cannot link claims of anti-Semitism to federal funding for its studies into tuberculosis, ALS and radiation poisoning.

On April 24, a frustrated Mr Trump called the university an “Anti-Semitic, Far-Left institution” and a “threat to democracy”. The decision of such a world-famous institution to take a stand against Mr Trump could encourage other civil bodies to find their backbone, says Mr Driver, comparing the White House to a bully that had been “punched in the nose”.

If he wanted to cheer himself up about this obstacle to his 100-day purge, the president could do worse than putting on a screening of Peter Pan for his grandchildren. On Disney +, the cartoon used to come with a warning: “This programme includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.” But earlier this year the wording was quietly tweaked. Disney, a standard-bearer in the corporate field of DEI, has watered down or removed such language across its operations. Similar moves can be seen across the Fortune 500, from Meta to Amazon to Target. Media giants have been warned that mergers could be blocked if they keep on with “invidious” DEI policies.

Corporations should keep up their anti-discrimination policies, advises Mr Leen. But "if you want to do a barrier analysis, an adverse impact analysis, if you want to use statistics to make sure you don't have pay disparities, you should continue to - but what you can't do is exclude non minorities and men from the benefits of those programmes", he says. New programmes might consider disabled people, religious minorities and veterans more closely, he adds.

Disney have quietly dropped references to diversity from their website

The use of the word 'diversity' has been quietly dropped from many US corporate websites, including Disney | Source: www.inclusion.twdc.com changes accessed via Wayback Machine

In the summer, the Supreme Court will rule in the case of Marlene Ames, an employee of the Ohio Department of Youth Services who claims she was overlooked for promotion in favour of gay employees. The case was thrown out in lower courts. But the justices, who lean 6-3 to in favour of the conservatives, seem open to her arguments. A victory would likely see a flood of white workers suing for “reverse discrimination”.

At an anti-Trump protest in the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina on April 5, Donna McCaslin wore a placard bearing the slogan "Dump Trump". The former navy veteran abhorred the president’s agenda, fearing for her benefits. But she was less concerned with the attacks on DEI. “DEI, as far as I’m thinking, was for the executive caucasian man and the executive caucasian woman,” she said. Corporate programmes, she added, largely ended up hiring white women in HR departments, boosting their salaries so they might match male peers on $250,000.

Derrick Montogmery, the chairman of the Cumberland County Democratic party, disagreed. “Our white counterparts had a hell of a jump start versus us, who came here and were stuck in slavery,” he said. “Racism,” the 42-year-old simply replied, when asked what was motivating Mr Trump’s campaign against DEI.

Donna McCaslin wore the 'Dump Trump' placard at a protest in North Carolina Credit: Julian Simmonds for The Telegraph

Such splits can be seen in the wider Democratic party. Few leaders are willing to issue full-throated defences of the Biden administration’s DEI policies. Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay former presidential candidate, was an early dissenter. While protecting the vulnerable, the party had to avoid “making people sit through a [diversity] training that looks like something out of Portlandia [a TV series satirising Left-wing citizens]”, he said at a Feb 25 debate at the University of Chicago. “That’s how Trump Republicans are made.”

While black voters and women make up a large part of the Democratic base, both groups shifted towards the Republicans in the 2024 election. The only demographics in which Kamala Harris increased vote share were college-educated citizens and those earning more than $100,000.

In the plush Lansdowne resort in Virginia, a group of around 80 Democrat candidates, strategists and influencers met in February to discuss the way forward. The party had become too focused on America’s problems with racism and sexism, a summary document concluded. “Far-Left staffers exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” it read.

Lanae Erickson of Third Way, the centrist think tank that organised the summit, chaired several “robust” discussions during the retreat. What was undeniably clear, she said, was that the party needed to drop DEI from its platform. “I would not recommend any 2028 candidate for the Democrats talking about DEI,” she says. “I think that phrase has now been turned into an insult.”

Like the freshly repaved tarmac of 16th Street Northwest, Mr Trump could look on that as a symbolic victory for his new world order.

22. Trump expected to FIRE his top national security adviser Michael Waltz

Trump expected to FIRE his top national security adviser Michael Waltz

By CHARLIE SPIERING, SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER, WASHINGTON, DC

Published: 09:37 EDT, 1 May 2025 | Updated: 10:08 EDT, 1 May 2025

Daily Mail · by CHARLIE SPIERING, SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER, WASHINGTON, DC · May 1, 2025

President Donald Trump will replace Michael Waltz as his national security advisor according to journalist Mark Halperin, citing three sources familiar with the situation.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security council did not respond to a Daily Mail request for comment.

Halperin reported on his 2Way YouTube show that there was 'unhappiness throughout the national security establishment' with Waltz and his deputy national security Alex Wong.

'This has to do about competence, not ideology,' he said.

Halperin specified that the timing was uncertain, noting that the president had not settled on a replacement.

'I do believe he has made up his mind, but he could change his mind,' he said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to comment on the details of the report.

'We are not going to respond to reporting from anonymous sources,' she told the Daily Mail.

Waltz appeared in an interview on Fox and Friends Thursday morning, giving no indication that he had lost his job.

The center of 'Signalgate,' Waltz struggled mightily to keep his job despite being responsible for mistakenly adding Atlantic editor Jeffery Goldberg to a Signal chat with with 17 high raking officials about military strikes in Yemen.

US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz at the White House

National Security Advisor Michael Waltz looks at his phone as he prepares for a TV interview at the White House

Goldberg published the digital messages in full at The Atlantic, ginning up weeks of negative news coverage of the administration and calling into question Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's leadership.

Trump did not fire Waltz at the time, partially because he did not want to give Goldberg the satisfaction.

But Waltz's public humiliation from the scandal especially after his embarrassing Fox News interview where he tried to to explain the mistake damaged his reputation in the West Wing.

Waltz took responsibility for the mistake, but struggled to explain how Goldberg's number was in his phone to begin with, even as he stressed that he had never spoken to him before.

'Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then it, and then somehow it gets sucked in,' he said to Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

Trump gave Waltz as less than enthusiastic endorsement in an interview with The Atlantic last week.

'Waltz is fine. I mean, he's here. He just left this office,' Trump said. 'He's fine. He was beat up also.'

Daily Mail · by CHARLIE SPIERING, SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER, WASHINGTON, DC · May 1, 2025

23. Trump to Oust National Security Adviser Mike Waltz

A friend forwarded me this comment (I have pretty much stopped watching TV these days.)

FYI, Kimberly Strassel/WSJ was interviewed a few minutes ago on Fox Business. She was on to discuss budget reconciliation; but, they took the opportunity to ask her take on Mike Waltz stepping down. She said while the media will likely focus on SignalGate as the reason -- she fears that is an excuse; but, not the reason. She said there are two factions fighting it out in the West Wing/WH. There is a Ronald Reagan faction that believes in engagement and peace through strength -- to which she said Waltz belongs. The second faction wants the U.S. to mostly disengage and focus inward. Her take is that the Reagan faction lost this round.

This is really sad. If we cannot have a Reagan Peace Through Strength strategy to lead our national security policy and we are going to disengage and focus inward then we are on a path that I fear all will soon regret.

Trump to Oust National Security Adviser Mike Waltz

The decision came after Waltz placed a reporter on a sensitive Signal chat about bombing the Houthis in Yemen

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-to-oust-national-security-adviser-mike-waltz-766873b1?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Josh Dawsey

, Alexander Ward

and Meridith McGraw

Updated May 1, 2025 11:22 am ET

National security adviser Michael Waltz clashed with other White House officials. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Key Points

What's This?

Mike Waltz is being replaced as national security advisor after a series of missteps.
Waltz added a journalist to a chat discussing a sensitive military operation.
Waltz was already under scrutiny for staff hires and being out of step with Trump.

WASHINGTON—President Trump is replacing national security adviser Mike Waltz roughly a month after he put a journalist on a group text chat in which advisers discussed a sensitive military operation, according to people familiar with the matter, making him the first top official to lose his job in Trump’s second term.

Waltz lost favor with the president and his senior advisers after The Atlantic revealed that he added a journalist to a chat on the nongovernment messaging app Signal, a crisis that dominated headlines and became one of the first major embarrassments for the administration. Trump declined to fire Waltz immediately, but privately expressed his frustration with Waltz.

Trump and senior administration officials, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, had been frustrated with Waltz even before the Signal debacle. Waltz hired aides that his critics said didn’t appeal to Trump’s MAGA base and struggled to relay the president’s national security priorities on television—once seen as the former Florida congressman’s strength, according to administration officials. He also was sometimes ideologically out of step with Trump, pushing more traditionally hawkish views on Ukraine and Iran, and clashed with other White House officials, people close to Trump said.

Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong, is also being ousted, the people said. The former aide to Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and senior negotiator during Trump’s first-term nuclear diplomacy with North Korea was seen by the president’s allies as a Waltz loyalist. Wong had been attacked by outside Trump allies, who asserted without evidence that he was pro-China. Other National Security Council staffers Waltz hired are also likely to lose their jobs, the people said.

Waltz was planning to travel to Michigan on Tuesday for the president’s rally marking his first 100 days in office. But Trump told him not to attend, according to administration officials.

Senior U.S. officials said Waltz had been marginalized during debates on key decisions, namely starting talks with Iran over its nuclear work and brokering a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to both of those negotiations, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio proved more influential in those deliberations, the officials said, noting that Rubio had recently been spending much of his time at the White House.