Quotes of the Day:

“The man of knowledge must be able to not only love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.” 

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“The US intimidates certain countries, stopping them from doing business with us. But America is just a paper tiger. Don't believe it's bluff. One poke, and it'll burst!”

– Mao Zedong in 1964

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States,” he said, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman did not mention the Soviet Union in his speech, but everyone who heard him understood that “armed minorities” referred to Communist insurgents and that “outside pressures” referred to the Kremlin. This became known, almost immediately, as the “Truman Doctrine.” The speech was, effectively, the declaration of the Cold War. It would last forty-four years. During those years, each nation accused the other of cynicism and hypocrisy. Each claimed that the other was seeking to advance its own power and influence in the name of some grand civilizing mission. But each nation also honestly believed that history was on its side and that the other was headed down a dead end. This meant that the outcome of their rivalry could not properly be decided by military superiority alone, since the matter was not finally about brute strength. It was about ideas, and ideas in the broadest sense—about economic and political doctrines, civic and personal values, modes of expression, philosophies of history, theories of human nature, the meaning of truth.”

— The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

1. Top U.S. Commanders See Major Pacific Risks

2. 'The Risk…Is Not Winning.' (information and influence)

3. The Paradox of Liberty: Narrative Warfare and America’s Identity Crisis

4. Allies Weigh In On The Future Under Trump 2.0

5. Winning Without Fighting: How the United States Can Prevail in Irregular Warfare

6. U.S. Allies Are Sitting Out Trump’s Trade War With China

7. Meet the Russian Dubbed ‘Putin’s Brain’ Who Is Courting Trump Supporters

8. Trump Official Who Oversaw Closure of USAID Has Left State Department

9. How the U.S. Lost Its Place as the World’s Manufacturing Powerhouse

10. The Conventional Wisdom Is That China Is Beating Us. Nonsense.

11. China and America Agree: Apple Is Too Big to Fail

12. Pentagon Turns Focus to Potentially Privatizing Commissaries, Military Exchanges

13. Elon Musk, Owner of X, Complains He's Losing 'Propaganda War'

14. Can a trade war lead to a shooting war? Trump and Xi, take note: Yes.

15. Justice Dept. says it’s not required to bring back wrongly deported man

16. Military schools offer test case for Trump education reforms

17. ‘Extreme’ US-China decoupling could cost US$2.5 trillion in equity, bond sell-off: Goldman

18. From Thucydides to Twitter – The Urgent Need for Long-term Strategic Thinking

19. Hegseth’s Memo, What To Do Next

20. Army Enlisted Academy Bars Students from Writing About Women and Minorities

21. Leidos Black Arrow Successfully Tested from AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship

22. A Federal Critical Mineral Processing Initiative: Securing U.S. Mineral Independence from China

23. The Age of Forever Wars – Why Military Strategy No Longer Delivers Victory by Sir Lawrence D. Freedman (MUST READ)

24. The Former C.I.A. Officer Capitalizing on Europe’s Military Spending Boom

25. How Trump’s Coercion Could Backfire in Asia

26. Save the Minerva Research Initiative - Again

27. We came in believing. We left in silence.

28. US special operators are going all in on drones so that a human never has to make 'first contact' with the enemy

1. Top U.S. Commanders See Major Pacific Risks

We have a great message to tell. Actions speak louder than words. And words must match actions.

Our message should always be built on our first principles, our founding documents, and the virtue and values of America: freedom, liberty, and democracy as well as respect for sovereignty but also recognition of the universal human right of self determination of government (especially by those who are oppressed byauthoritarian governments).

Excerpts:

At the same hearing, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) said China spends more than $1.1 billion on information operations, including disinformation and misinformation campaigns — which experts have said Beijing would likely use in tandem with any military action against Taiwan. 

Colby Jenkins, acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, who testified at the hearing with Gen. Fenton, confirmed that the Pentagon spends “significantly less” than China on information operations.

Citing the recent firing of NSA Director and CYBERCOM Commander Gen. Timothy Haugh and the dismantling of Voice of America and other U.S. media entities, Sen. Shaheen asked, “Help me understand how we’re able to compete in the information arena when we don’t have anybody in charge and when we’ve lost a lot of our people who are doing that work? … Should we be doing more to resource those information operations?”

“My sense is that there is a void,” Gen. Fenton said. “You mentioned misinformation, disinformation by any adversary — there’s a void out there that’s not being filled by our message.” 

“As the United States of America, we’ve got a great message to tell,” he added. “We take it, certainly in Special Operations Command, with our information ops professionals, to really work at that in concert with … our country teams, our embassy country teams, to put those messages out that assure populations or reassure — and also, at points in time, deter adversaries.”

I cannot emphasize these two quotes enough because history is rhyming:

“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States,” he said, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman did not mention the Soviet Union in his speech, but everyone who heard him understood that “armed minorities” referred to Communist insurgents and that “outside pressures” referred to the Kremlin. This became known, almost immediately, as the “Truman Doctrine.” The speech was, effectively, the declaration of the Cold War. It would last forty-four years. During those years, each nation accused the other of cynicism and hypocrisy. Each claimed that the other was seeking to advance its own power and influence in the name of some grand civilizing mission. But each nation also honestly believed that history was on its side and that the other was headed down a dead end. This meant that the outcome of their rivalry could not properly be decided by military superiority alone, since the matter was not finally about brute strength. It was about ideas, and ideas in the broadest sense—about economic and political doctrines, civic and personal values, modes of expression, philosophies of history, theories of human nature, the meaning of truth.”

— The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

“The US intimidates certain countries, stopping them from doing business with us. But America is just a paper tiger. Don't believe it's bluff. One poke, and it'll burst!”

– Mao Zedong in 1964

Top U.S. Commanders See Major Pacific Risks

Leaders of Indo-Pacific and Special Operations commands warn of Pacific War Risks

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/top-u-s-commanders-see-major-pacific-risks?utm

United States Pacific Air Force and Philippines Air Force personnel pose for pictures in front of a U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jet, during the United States-Philippines ‘Cope Thunder’ Air Forces joint exercise, in Angeles City, Philippines, on April 07, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Posted: April 13th, 2025

By Tom Nagorski

Tom Nagorski is the Managing Editor for The Cipher Brief.  He previously served as Global Editor for Grid and served as ABC News Managing Editor for International Coverage as well as Senior Broadcast Producer for World News Tonight.

CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING — A pair of top U.S. military commanders warned Congress last week of dangers in their areas of operations which could factor in a potential war with China: the catastrophic fallout from a conflict over Taiwan; and the risk that the U.S. is falling behind in both military innovation and non-kinetic areas. 

In separate appearances, Admiral Samuel J. Paparo Jr., Commander of INDOPACOM, painted a nightmarish picture of what a Taiwan war might look like; and Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), suggested ways in which the U.S. risked finding itself at a disadvantage in any such conflict.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Adm. Paparo warned that China is hastening its preparation for a war over Taiwan, and that such a conflict could shatter global economies, risk a nuclear conflagration, and potentially lead to half a million “deaths of despair.”

Two days earlier, Gen. Fenton told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities that China is beating the U.S. in the “information operations” space, and that the U.S. military isn’t innovating quickly enough in a world in which the “character of war is changing faster than we’ve ever seen.” 

Imagining a Pacific war

Speaking one week after China carried out large-scale air and sea military drills off the coast of Taiwan, Adm. Paparo said Chinese aggressive military actions toward the self-governing island have increased by 300 percent since 2024. These are “not exercises but rehearsals,” for a possible forcible takeover of Taiwan. 

Adm. Paparo added that China was accelerating its production of fighter jets and naval vessels, highlighting the fact that China now produces 1.2 jets for every American-made warplane, and 6 warships for every ship built for the U.S. And he singled out China’s growing air-to-air missile capability as a “tremendous threat.”

Those remarks echoed the opinions of experts outside the military. China is “continuing to build things that they need to invade Taiwan, and practice things they need to do so,” Lonnie Henley, a former intelligence officer and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute told The Cipher Brief at the conclusion of the recent Chinese military drills. “Western observers may think that China would never invade; China doesn’t seem to think that. China seems to think that invasion is certainly one of their options and, many would argue, their primary option for how to actually defeat Taiwan.”

Adm. Paparo said a war over Taiwan would likely cause what he called “500,000 excess deaths of despair.” Even a successful American intervention against a Chinese invasion, he said, “would [only] halve that impact, so still a grave result” and “a lot of human misery.” 

Beyond the Taiwan Strait, Adm. Paparo said the economic disruption from a conflict would likely bring a 10-12 % drop in the U.S. GDP and a 25% reduction across Asia. And he warned that an already-tenuous set of alliances and partnerships were at stake. “Some of the states” in the Indo-Pacific “would submit … to China’s long-range goal of setting the rules of the world,” he said, while others – Japan and South Korea in particular – might choose to pursue a nuclear deterrent of their own. 

Asked about the impact on the region of a burgeoning Russia-China-North Korea axis, Adm. Paparo warned that China-Russia military exercises suggested preparations for a potential joint battle against U.S. forces. He also said that China’s and North Korea’s military support of Russia’s war against Ukraine was having a domino effect, security wise, in the Indo-Pacific – given that Russia has reciprocated by providing China and North Korea advanced military aid, including missile systems and submarine technology. 

Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Cipher Brief recently that China’s submarine fleet “is relatively small” and “a relatively noisy class” which would be “unlikely [to]… survive long in a sort of serious conflict with the United States.” Russian help, Kristensen and Adm. Paparo said, could make China’s submarine force a more potent threat.

Worries on the innovation – and information – fronts 

While Gen. Paparo drew a harrowing picture of kinetic threats in the Pacific theater, Gen. Fenton raised concerns about the U.S. ability to effectively counter China when it comes to innovation, and in the space of information operations. 

“There’s a sense that you may not win a war with information operations like you could with artillery,” Gen. Fenton told the Senate panel, “[but] you can certainly lose it if you’re not a key part of that, putting out the messages.” SOCOM, Gen. Fenton’s command, plays a major role in Pentagon information operations.

At the same hearing, Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) said China spends more than $1.1 billion on information operations, including disinformation and misinformation campaigns — which experts have said Beijing would likely use in tandem with any military action against Taiwan. 

Colby Jenkins, acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, who testified at the hearing with Gen. Fenton, confirmed that the Pentagon spends “significantly less” than China on information operations.

Citing the recent firing of NSA Director and CYBERCOM Commander Gen. Timothy Haugh and the dismantling of Voice of America and other U.S. media entities, Sen. Shaheen asked, “Help me understand how we’re able to compete in the information arena when we don’t have anybody in charge and when we’ve lost a lot of our people who are doing that work? … Should we be doing more to resource those information operations?”

“My sense is that there is a void,” Gen. Fenton said. “You mentioned misinformation, disinformation by any adversary — there’s a void out there that’s not being filled by our message.” 

“As the United States of America, we’ve got a great message to tell,” he added. “We take it, certainly in Special Operations Command, with our information ops professionals, to really work at that in concert with … our country teams, our embassy country teams, to put those messages out that assure populations or reassure — and also, at points in time, deter adversaries.”

On the innovation front, Gen. Fenton said the military must show more dexterity in its acquisition process. 

“Our current acquisition procurement system … I would just offer, it’s outdated,” he said. “It’s glacial. I think it works in years and decades.” 

He echoed concerns voiced by Cipher Brief experts that the war in Ukraine had made clear the imperative of faster rates of change and innovation. 

“What we’re seeing through the lens of Ukraine needs to be an acquisition … and procurement system that is hyper-speed, supersonic,” Gen. Fenton said. “Because over there, we’re watching the changes in minutes, hours and days, and that is a very stark contrast” to the U.S. approach. 

He suggested the streamlining of funding streams that now pass through multiple Pentagon budget lines – operations and maintenance funds; research, development, testing and engineering funds; and procurement funds. 

“I think there’s a way to take a lot of that off, compress the multiple lines to just a couple, and really modernize there,” Fenton said. 

For his part, Adm. Paparo acknowledged that the U.S. military has drawn valuable lessons from the war in Ukraine, in terms of sophisticated autonomous weapons in particular, but he stressed several differences that would come into play in a Pacific conflict. For one, he noted that Ukraine can depend on much of Europe for logistics and supply, and that the Ukrainian theater has been limited for the most part to a relatively small area of fighting in Eastern Ukraine. A conflict in the Western Pacific would involve a war zone and military forces of much greater scale.

“There’s a war of attrition in [Ukraine], and we’re learning a lot about electronic warfare, and we’re changing the game,” Adm. Paparo said. “But if you think that’s all of it and we can quit on everything else in the Pacific — how are we going to sustain everything else if we completely give up on air and maritime superiority in the Pacific? . . . The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has 2,100 fighters. They’ve got three aircraft carriers. They have a battle force of 200 destroyers. ‘Oh, well, roger; we’ve got a couple of drones. No problem.’”

Ethan Masucol contributed reporting.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

2. 'The Risk…Is Not Winning.' (information and influence)

More on the Commander of USSOCOM speaking truth to power at his testimony last week. Not only on information and influence but also the budget though if the SECDEF gets his $1 trillion defense budget some of that will likely go to sustain SOF operations around the world. And based on the very positive line of questions from the Senators and Representatives I think Congress is very supportive of special operations. 

Excerpts:

"There is a void out there that’s not being filled by our message," testified General Bryan Fenton before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Fenton’s testimony pulled back the curtain on a growing reality that in the cognitive domain—where perception, narrative, trust, and truth collide—the United States is not keeping pace. Our adversaries are not just advancing on physical terrain, they are contesting the information space with speed and sophistication.

The general's refrain—"small teams, small footprints, big impact"—captures the asymmetry of the modern battlefield. U.S. Special Operations Forces operate in 80 countries not to dominate but to connect, partner, and amplify. The value of these engagements is not just in capability-building, but in trust-building. And trust, as Fenton reminded the committee, is the true currency of enduring power.

But in today’s budget environment, even that currency is at risk.

Since 2019, SOCOM has suffered a 14% decline in purchasing power—about $1 billion in real terms. Fenton described a growing trend of turning down combatant command requests due to operational risk and fiscal constraints. These aren’t belt-tightening decisions. They are strategic surrenders.

'The Risk…Is Not Winning.'

By Chad Williamson

April 14, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/04/14/the_riskis_not_winning_1103765.html?mc_cid=87b625de73

It’s rare for a four-star general to speak in such stark, unscripted terms. But when the commander of our nation’s elite special operations forces (SOF) sounds the alarm on deterrence, modernization, and the future of irregular warfare—we should listen. Carefully. Not with partisan ears. Not through budget spreadsheets. But through the sobering lens of a strategic horizon being reshaped not by missiles, but by messages.

"There is a void out there that’s not being filled by our message," testified General Bryan Fenton before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Fenton’s testimony pulled back the curtain on a growing reality that in the cognitive domain—where perception, narrative, trust, and truth collide—the United States is not keeping pace. Our adversaries are not just advancing on physical terrain, they are contesting the information space with speed and sophistication.

The general's refrain—"small teams, small footprints, big impact"—captures the asymmetry of the modern battlefield. U.S. Special Operations Forces operate in 80 countries not to dominate but to connect, partner, and amplify. The value of these engagements is not just in capability-building, but in trust-building. And trust, as Fenton reminded the committee, is the true currency of enduring power.

But in today’s budget environment, even that currency is at risk.

Since 2019, SOCOM has suffered a 14% decline in purchasing power—about $1 billion in real terms. Fenton described a growing trend of turning down combatant command requests due to operational risk and fiscal constraints. These aren’t belt-tightening decisions. They are strategic surrenders.

The consequence? Risk accumulates in two critical areas, deterrence, and modernization. In deterrence, it means gaps in campaign plans—missed chances to shape or influence environments before crises erupt. In modernization, it means being outpaced in developing asymmetric capabilities like AI, autonomy, and electronic warfare tools. As Fenton put it plainly, the risk isn’t just to readiness. The risk is not winning at all.

And that risk is compounded by narrative negligence. While China spends over $1.1 billion annually on information operations—deploying digital influence like guided weapons—the United States can’t even account for its spending. Testimony from multiple senators revealed what many in the field already know, the U.S. has dismantled much of its global engagement infrastructure. Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center have seen steep declines or outright closure.

We forfeited the power of story to the power of silence.

This is not just a messaging failure. It is a strategic vulnerability. Fenton acknowledged it clearly in his response to Senator Shaheen, “You may not win a war with information operations like you could with artillery—but you can certainly lose it.”

Special Operations Forces have long proven their ability to lead from behind—quietly shaping coalitions, enabling local actors, and deterring adversaries with minimal footprint. As Senator Ernst recalled, U.S. SOF once unified otherwise disjointed teams in Africa, where others couldn’t even earn the trust of local populations. It wasn’t dominance that made the difference. It was presence, humility, and narrative fluency.

And yet, many of the personnel who support that information space—our military information support operations (MISO) professionals—are the very enablers being cut.

Senator Wicker asked a hard but necessary question, “Do you find that there’s not enough coordination in the irregular warfare field?” Right now, the answer is, sort of. Coordination for information operations falls to SO/LIC (Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict), which works across the Department of Defense and with interagency partners. But even SO/LIC leaders admit the current structure lags behind the pace of today’s fight.

We are navigating 21st-century threats with 20th-century frameworks and 19th-century assumptions about warfare.

America is not adequately investing in the front lines of narrative. We are not resourcing those who shape and protect perception. We are not modernizing the tools, policies, or talent structures needed to compete in the cognitive domain—where the first casualty of war isn’t truth. It’s trust.

Fenton’s closing words carry weight not just because of his rank, but because of his clarity, “The risk…is not winning.”

In irregular warfare, in deterrence, and in the hearts and minds of allies and adversaries alike, the United States is risking more than just military readiness.

We are risking relevance.

If we don’t win the message, how do we win the mission?

Chad Williamson is a military veteran and graduate student at the RAND School of Public Policy. He is currently pursuing a Masters in National Security Policy.

3. The Paradox of Liberty: Narrative Warfare and America’s Identity Crisis

We should not have an identity crisis if we returned to first principles of American virtue and values.

The Paradox of Liberty: Narrative Warfare and America’s Identity Crisis

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/14/the-paradox-of-liberty/

by Wesley Winkler

|

04.14.2025 at 06:00am

The Problem

America was once a nation of stories. Freedom. Justice. The lone cowboy carving his own fate. The immigrant who builds something from nothing. The dream that anyone—anyone—could make it.

Now? We’ve lost the plot.

For all our talk of rugged individualism and self-determination, we Americans no longer knows who we are. The melody of our story was lost in the cacophony of narrative warfare.

The American story is no longer told.

And when a nation stops telling its own story, someone else will do it for them.

The U.S. national security apparatus has failed to grasp what our adversaries already know: narrative is not just a tool. It is the mechanism by which humans define identity, differentiate the self from others, and make sense of the world.

America’s failure in this space is more than just an intellectual weakness—it’s a forfeiture of power, influence, and legitimacy. While we bicker over politics and seek comfort over moral courage, Russia, China, and other asymmetric adversaries are filling in the blanks.

The Information Age and Personal Agency

For most of human history, meaning making and information control have been geographically bounded. Now, the internet, agentic AI, and emergent deep research capabilities ensure that information dissemination is exponentially faster. Humans now consume 90 times more information than in 1940.

The democratization of technology is maximizing human agency. In a democratic society, that means that even as wealth disparities increase, access to information and technological capability is more accessible than ever in human history. America has historically upheld, though imperfectly, free speech, individual liberty, and the common good.

But there’s a paradox.

An open society thrives on the free exchange of ideas. But that same openness creates a series of cognitive vulnerabilities. Ideas can be weaponized. Narratives can be hijacked. Influence can be exerted without a single shot fired.

Which is why, in our desperate attempt to counteract this, we keep making the same mistake – that is, defaulting to centralized, top-down control, the very thing the U.S. system was designed to reject. Yet American society is not built for that, and it jolts violently against attempts at top-down control.

Doctrine: Too Little, Too Late

It’s not as if the Department of Defense has not acknowledged the problem. There are now hundreds of terms in joint doctrine describing how people engage with information, identity, and meaning, at the individual, collective, and national levels. Narrative warfare. Cognitive warfare. Psychological Operations. Information Operations. Influence. Operations in the Information Environment. Yet, despite this growing lexicon and awareness of the problem, the U.S. Government (USG), the Department of Defense, and adjacent industries have failed to establish a coherent strategy for engaging in the information space.

The newest swathe of joint doctrine references narrative over 100 times. Yet across these texts, it is formally defined only three times, each definition conflicting, incomplete, and/or vague. Consider the Public Affairs Manual, JP 3-61: it defines narrative as a meme, specifically a tool for defeating or coexisting with adversarial narratives. It describes narrative as a “short story” designed to contextualize operations. It assumes a hierarchical, top-down structure, where strategic messaging flows from the White House down to the lowest tactical level.

This approach is a broken relic, a Vietnam-era public affairs model applied to an environment where information moves globally, instantly, and iteratively. Even in the 1960s, this model was a failure. Thus, the current USG approach lacks the analytical constructs necessary to break narratives down across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

Identities, relationships, and issues intersect in meaningful ways where collective agency creates networks and systems greater than their sum. The individual may be seen an anchor point while the broader United States can be seen as a distinct entity utilizing its own agency, like in recent addresses by Minister Trudeau discussing the impact of US tariffs.

How can we acknowledge the intersection of these different spheres of agency while also not treating them is independent systems, but as deeply interconnected spheres of influence?

The United States has fallen into the trap of its own societal paradox. The United States is trying to emulate authoritarian structures with a universally top-down approach. American society isn’t built for that.

And our adversaries know precisely how to exploit this contradiction.

The Threats

Russia and China—two of the most sophisticated actors in the global information environment—have leveraged radical connectivity to shape, distort, and dominate narrative landscapes. Their approaches differ radically, but their objectives are aligned: to control perception, influence behavior, and assert strategic advantage without conventional military engagement.

Russia: Chaos as a Weapon

Russia operates through disruption, deception, and data saturation. Its content farms flood the information space with false, misleading, or contradictory narratives, eroding trust in institutions and fragmenting public consensus. Russia’s focus is not merely promoting pro-Russian messaging—it is about destabilizing certainty in the foundations of our identity, making it impossible to discern truth from fabrication.

Russia employs a sophisticated––and unsophisticated––array of tactics. Troll farms and bot networks manufacture discourse, manipulating social media algorithms to seed division and amplify existing fractures. Data poisoning corrupts the training sets of public-facing large language models, ensuring that AI-generated discourse is subtly or overtly skewed.

Russia’s disinformation ecosystem is decentralized and entrepreneurial. For example, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the now-deceased leader of the Wagner Group, also founded the Russian propaganda apparatus responsible for reaching over 126 million Americans during the 2016 elections. This intersection of military and information warfare collapses the boundary between kinetic and cognitive operations.

China: Controlled Perception, Global Influence

Where Russia’s approach is fracturing, China’s is constructive, a controlled, monolithic narrative production. China’s information strategy focuses on uncontested narrative supremacy instead of chaos.

China does not simply broadcast its message: it weaves it into the fabric of global discourse. Unlike Russia, which thrives on noise, China seeks to eliminate competing narratives before they can take root by infiltrating student organizations and promoting revisionism through cultural exchange and economic power.

China’s Confucius Institutes operate in universities worldwide—serving as cultural and linguistic Trojan horses, embedding CCP-sanctioned narratives into academic and intellectual spaces. While the Strategic Support Apparatus broadcasts information; and cognitively overwhelms adversaries, particularly Taiwan, through relentless psychological pressure and narrative control.

Information is not the only soft power China exerts in the narrative space. China uses the Belt and Road Initiative to buys, shapes, and infiltrates foreign media ecosystems, ensuring that global discourse aligns with Chinese strategic interests. The application of economic power provides China with tangible embodiment of their national narrative.

The Strategic Conundrum

RussiaChinaDisrupts trust in institutionsBuilds connectivity and trust under its own termsAmplifies contradictory messages to increase societal fractureSeeks to eliminate contradictions to create a monolithic realityUses decentralized, opportunistic actorsOperates through state-directed, top-down influence distributed through decentralized actor networks.Makes truth seem unknowableDictates a single, absolute truthThrives on disorganizationThrives on structured, long-term controlGoal: DestabilizationGoal: Dominance

Our National Narrative Security Paradox

If the United States tries to match Russia’s chaos with more centralized control, it plays into China’s hands, because China thrives on control. The more we degrade the principles of our republic, the more we play into China’s strengths.

Yet, if the United States defaults to decentralization without strategic coherence, it plays into Russia’s hands—because Russia thrives on narrative fragmentation.

A top-down, centrally controlled approach goes against the very fabric of our republic. We need something different. A modular, self-organizing model—one that preserves our open society while resisting hostile narrative control.

The Way Forward: Practical Recommendations

To counter these cognitive threats, Western strategies must move beyond top-down, isolated interventions and bottom-up grassroots movements that exclude the context of the whole, and toward an approach to influence that operates at multiple levels simultaneously. The Western response to these threats has relied heavily on fact-checking and debunking—but these methods are largely ineffective in the face of sophisticated narrative warfare.

Debunking is reactive—it responds after the damage has been done, addressing individual falsehoods rather than the overarching narrative structures that sustain them. Fact-checking assumes rationality—it presumes that people are swayed by objectivity when narratives operate at the level of emotion, identity, and collective memory.

Pre-bunking (proactive inoculation) has marginal effectiveness, but only when deployed within a comprehensive, sustained narrative strategy. One-off interventions fail. Meaning is not built through single statements—it is reinforced through repetition, cultural integration, and lived experience.

All these interventions have one thing in common. They are top down.

This is why hierarchical models of narrative control fail. Meaning cannot be imposed in a high-agency world; it must be co-created. A nation’s story is not a single, top-down directive, it is the emergent property of countless interwoven experiences, histories, and identities.

The American defense community must acknowledge that it is merely a participant in the exchange and discussion of the American story, rather than the arbiter of it.

The call to action is directed to three levels: the individual, community, and the government.

Government

The American government and our security apparatus are not separate from the individuals, families, and communities that comprise it. To build an approach that maximizes human agency in the information age, the USG should:

1) Adopt a simplified narrative taxonomy that may be applied at multiple levels of scale. For this, narratives can be grouped into three primary taxonomies:

      1.1 Identity Narratives: How an actor conceptualizes itself.

      1.2. Relational Narratives: How an actor tells the story of its interactions with other actors.

      1.3. Topical Narratives: How an actor engages with events, ideas, goals, and interactions.

Narratives do not follow linear, top-down progression—they emerge recursively, layering meaning at individual, communal, and national levels. This taxonomy can be applied flexibly.

2) Incorporate Unified Narrative Principles.

      2.1. Time: Does the narrative target’s immediate perception shift (short-term), influence policy and institutional change (mid-term), or shape deep-seated cultural identity (long-term)? Recognizing the temporal scale ensures strategic coherence and sustainability.

      2.2. Embodiment: How is the narrative expressed in tangible, physical reality? Identity is reinforced through symbols, spaces, rituals, and physical manifestations—whether through national monuments, local traditions, or the spatial organization of communities. Narratives that lack embodiment risk abstraction and detachment.

      2.3. Self-Reference: (How) does the narrative mirror or reinforce meaning across different levels of scale? A successful narrative will resonate across multiple scales, connecting personal stories to collective ideals (e.g., an individual’s resilience reflecting a national ethos) and ensuring that identity finds expression in individual and community experiences.

3) Apply interventions that maximize human agency within micro-meso-macro levels of identities. Identity narratives gain strength through organic, localized storytelling that reinforces belonging while inviting participation. Democratic nations must take a co-creation approach to identity formation.

4) Integrate Top-Down Clarity with Bottom-Up Nuance. A comprehensive narrative strategy must balance strategic unity with local adaptability. At its core, a unifying narrative, rooted in national or organizational ethos, provides cohesion, preventing fragmentation across leadership and institutions. But rigidity is a weakness. The most effective narratives are not imposed; they evolve. Top-down clarity sets the foundation, but bottom-up dynamism ensures relevance.

Organizations

Organizations must never forget that they exist at the intersection of individual lives and national narratives. They are not abstract entities; they are built by people, for people. That responsibility demands more than profit-seeking or political convenience, it demands principled action that strengthens, rather than erodes, the society they operate within.

People over profit. Mission over destruction.

Institutions must resist the gravitational pull of short-term gains at the cost of long-term integrity. Engage with the world as it is, not as it is convenient to portray. This means acknowledging complexity, resisting ideological rigidity, and actively working to build trust rather than exploit division.

The mission of an organization should transcend administrations, political shifts, and market fads. Move according to virtues and values that reflect the people who comprise your institution, not the fleeting priorities of those in power.

Individuals

Individuals in our society must not look in despair, but neither should they wait for change to come from above. Narrative warfare thrives on passivity—on people believing they are powerless in shaping their own story. But this is false.

You, the individual, have agency.

The individual must recognize their role not just as a consumer of narratives, but as a participant in them. To counter polarization, and manipulation, you must embody the identity you want for America—not through slogans, but through action.

Seek conversations across ideological lines. Narrative control is most effective when people retreat into isolated, self-reinforcing tribes. Challenge this by building bridges, even in disagreement. Express compassion, give back to those in need, support one another, develop your own strength, and operate in humility. Narrative resilience begins with personal resilience.

America’s future is not written in Washington alone.

It is written in our classrooms, on our job sites, in our neighborhoods, and in the small, daily acts of meaning-making and kindness that shape collective memory.

Because in the war of meaning, it is not just information that matters.

It is the story that endures.

Note: An expanded narrative taxonomy and theory is currently under review and will be available soon.

Tags: Great Power Competition, Hybrid Warfare, information operations, narrative warfare

About The Author

• 
  
• Wesley Winkler
• Wes has spent his career at the intersection of influence, strategy, and technology. His journey began in East Africa, working directly with local communities—a formative experience that sparked a lifelong curiosity about how people shape, and are shaped by, the information around them. This path led him to study Strategic Intelligence, delve into early research on digital cryptographic financial networks, and ultimately serve in the U.S. Army, as a psychological operations and information warfare expert. Throughout his military career, Wes operated across the Indo-Pacific, developing influence strategies to support vulnerable populations, counter foreign malign influence, and design regionally tailored influence campaigns. Following his military service, Wes transitioned into the technology sector, where he has worked with government agencies and private organizations to develop AI-driven tools for detecting and mitigating malicious influence operations. He also played a role in developing modern influence training for the Department of Defense. Through these varied experiences, Wes has come to believe that the most effective counter to manipulation isn’t more control—but more connection. His current work with Cogent Gray focuses on applying influence theory at the community level, with a commitment to building systems that promote resilience, agency, and human flourishing.

4. Allies Weigh In On The Future Under Trump 2.0

Allies Weigh In On The Future Under Trump 2.0

Experts from a half dozen countries reflect on sharp shifts on U.S. policy - and how best to respond

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/allies-weigh-in-on-the-future-under-trump-2-0?utm

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the “Make America Wealthy Again” trade announcement event in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Posted: April 6th, 2025

By The Cipher Brief

EXPERT INTERVIEWS – Over the past two and a half months, as President Donald Trump’s administration has upended long-standing policies and assumptions about America’s role in the world, The Cipher Brief spoke to experts in multiple countries, all of which are U.S. allies, and all of which stand to be profoundly affected by the changes. From North America to Europe to Asia, shifts in the U.S. economic and geopolitical posture are producing a combination of concern and reflection among national security experts in many corners of the world. 

In this report, The Cipher Brief shares excerpts from some of our most recent interviews with experts from a half dozen countries: Canada, Germany, Poland, Estonia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, their reflections and reactions differ, given the range of national interests and differences in their relationships with the U.S. One thread ran through all the conversations: A hope that the sudden ruptures in U.S. policy – and in the world order – are not irreparable. 

“I don’t think it’s going to be the worst case, but I think it’s right to prepare for activities, statements, and policies from the United States that are going to be unwelcome,” said Nick Fishwick, a former senior official in the British Foreign Office. “I don’t think that we will have to give up on the relationship, but it’s unpredictable and we’ve got to be prepared for bad things to happen.”

In addition to Fishwick, we spoke with Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia; Liana Fix, Senior Fellow for Europe and expert on Germany at the Council on Foreign Relations; Jacek Siewiera, former head of the National Security Bureau in Poland; and Richard Fadden, former National Security Advisor and director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and Rear Admiral Rommel Jude G. Ong, former Vice Commander of the Philippine Navy.

Full versions of the conversations are available at our YouTube channel; the excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity.

Richard Fadden

Richard B. Fadden is former National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada. He previously served as Deputy Minister of National Defence and was the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service from 2009 to 2013. He is now a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

At one level, what Mr. Trump is doing in his own inimitable fashion is much the same as previous presidents have done. They’ve noted that we [in Canada] have not been pulling our weight on the national security front. I’ve been arguing this for a long time. Aside from dealing with tariffs, we’re going to have to up our spending on defense, on security, probably on foreign affairs more broadly. And this is now beginning to register. 

The regrettable part is that Mr. Trump is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He could have accomplished a number of the things he wants to accomplish without all of the unintended consequences.

Is it recoverable to a certain extent? Absolutely. But I think the nature of the relationship is going to change. From Canada’s perspective, we’re going to inject a lot more attention to defense, security and foreign affairs. That will be all to the good, but it will change things about how we deal with one another within the Five Eyes, within NATO and more broadly.

I cannot imagine Canada ever not passing on to the United States information and intelligence that we might have about threats to the United States. I’d like to hope that would be the same with the U.S. vis-a-vis its allies. All the other kinds of intelligence – they may be useful and very helpful, but the world will continue to turn if there are cuts here and there. I do think it’s going to cause everybody to think about what can be shared, and how quickly it can be shared. 

[The Canadian government must] take national security seriously on an ongoing basis and not just when there are crises. This means developing new relationships and alliances across the board, in particular with Europe. I think Prime Minister [Mark] Carney’s already started doing that, but it will mean more resources on defense, on security and on foreign affairs. And most important is to take a realistic view of our relationship with the United States. The United States is not going to go away. The United States is important to us, but a lot of people in Canada are hoping that the [U.S.] midterm elections will reinstitute one of the guardrails of [the U.S.] constitution. We shall see.

[The U.S. should] consider carefully their priorities, to consider the unintended consequences of what they’re trying to do and how they’re doing things. And to note that in particular with Canada – yes, I understand Mr. Trump’s fixation with tariffs, but it’s hard to argue in the world today that the import of Canadian steel and aluminum presents a threat to United States national security. So I’d ask them to rethink what they want done and how they’re doing it. The United States’ strength is found in alliances and in allies. This is not going to help U.S. long-term interests.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves

Toomas Hendrik Ilves is an Estonian politician who served as the fourth President of Estonia from 2006 until 2016. Ilves worked as a diplomat and journalist, and he was the leader of the Social Democratic Party in the 1990s. He served in the government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 1998 and again from 1999 to 2002. Later, he was a Member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2006.

I’d say that there is a high awareness [of the U.S. pivot to Russia], some anxiety, but also a rational response: we just have to do more.

Estonia decided to boost our defense expenditure for next year up to 5% of GDP. Right now we’re at 3.6%, which is way above the EU average. We were actually one of the very few countries that had already hit 2% — 13 years ago. So we’ve been quite conscious. And Latvia and Lithuania have also been spending a lot of money. And you have to put Poland in there as well, which is probably the biggest spender right now. Poland has bought or will acquire some 800 main battle tanks, which is a larger number than all of the rest of Europe. That shows how serious people are. 

The public is willing to put up with the spending. So far, we haven’t heard any great rumbles based on decreasing social expenditure, which is a necessary thing to do. And in Latvia, Lithuania as well — Lithuania I know is quite gung-ho, and Latvia is getting there as well, they’re actually spending 3.6 % as well this year. So that’s a big change. 

And of course in our neighborhood, we also have Finland and Sweden and Denmark, which are all increasing their defense expenditures as well as attention to issues such as the hybrid or so-called gray zone warfare attacks that we’ve seen in the Baltic Sea — cutting undersea cables, and we’ve had arson that has been directly tied to the Russians. 

Like the other Baltic countries, we all share a border with Russia, so that already makes us quite “front-line.” Any kind of physical incursion would be rather simple if the [Russians] were to follow that. 

Why should the U.S. care about Estonia? Proportionally, we had casualties up there with the U.S. and the UK in Afghanistan — we’re a small country, so there were fewer numbers, of course, but in terms of the proportionality, we were up there as one of the highest casualty rates. As far as funerals went, I went to every single one. It had the same kind of effect in this country as it did in the UK, Canada and the United States. The argument, of course, was that we were doing our duty in NATO. So now there is some disappointment in having done all that and then hearing the rhetoric from the U.S, that, Oh, those Europeans, they’re not doing anything. Why should we go defend them? That’s disconcerting – if not really depressing.

Nick Fishwick

Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.

I know that [Prime Minister Keir] Starmer and the current government are committed to Ukraine. Democratic governments can’t use words like “forever,” but they can use words like “for the long term” or “as long as we’re in power.” I’m very confident that this government is committed to Ukraine, and it is clearly thinking about the scenario of less American commitment to Ukraine’s long-term security. I think Kier Stammer has done well in seizing that opportunity. 

It’s an opportunity to respond to the American challenge. It’s an opportunity to assure Ukraine. I think there’s also an opportunity for us to reposition ourselves constructively with regard to Europe. Britain pulled out of the European Union — we voted against staying in the European Union in 2016. After a few years, we formally dropped out of the European Union. There’s a moment here for cooperation with European colleagues over defense, which will be popular in this country. And I think that will pave the way for a new set of constructive relationships between Britain and European Union countries — notably France, Germany, Italy, Spain, but the other countries as well — that will provide a new version of cooperation with Europe that might pave the way for cooperation across a different set of issues. An opportunity to set up new positive relationships with Europe, post-Brexit — I think the Prime Minister is is well placed to make the most of that opportunity.

If I was in government now, I’d be planning for the worst, but assuming that the intelligence relationship [with the U.S.] will continue, that military cooperation will continue, that there’ll be loads of people in the American administration, the intelligence community and Congress who will continue to share the values that we and our European colleagues share, and not want to go rushing off into an abrupt volte-face where suddenly President Putin is our best friend and we don’t like the new Prime Minister of Canada. I’m just assuming that’s not going to be happening, despite rhetoric that comes out of the White House. 

I don’t think it’s going to be the worst case, but I think it’s right to prepare for activities, statements, and policies from the United States that are going to be unwelcome. I don’t think that we will have to give up on the relationship, but it’s unpredictable and we’ve got to be prepared for bad things to happen.

Jacek Siewiera

Jacek Siewiera served as Poland’s Secretary of State and Head of the National Security Council of the Republic of Poland.

Poland is a country which has very specific, and I would even say extraordinary, ties with the United States. These ties were very significant and strong before the war [in Ukraine] started, because of our military spending, because of our membership in NATO and the commitment to the NATO transatlantic relations. But these relations became even more serious and deeper during the time of a war. American troops were deployed, before war started, in Poland in a big number. So the United States proved beyond any doubts its very deep commitment in the relationship with Poland.

On the other hand, of course, the situation and [the U.S. engagement with Russia] is concerning. And from the Polish perspective, we believe that a huge level of caution is necessary when it comes to any form of deals, agreements or even statements of mutual understanding when it comes to Russia. Because they don’t see peace and democratic rules as a value of our world. And from this perspective, we see another chapter of the relationship [with the U.S.], with a very dynamic pace of changes, which is sometimes very surprising.

From our perspective, [we have] defense spending at the level of 3.7% and now 4.7% with a projection that we can exceed 5% in upcoming years. This is something that we perceive not as a preparedness for war. We want to create the message for the perception of our neighbors: We will be ready for any form of confrontation, but we want to avoid it. As far as we invest in our defense, we believe that we are taking every necessary step to avoid war. And that’s the reason, that’s the justification, that’s the purpose of our efforts. Particularly when it comes to defense. 

Poland will be prepared, we will deter effectively. And we mean it. So we invest in it deeply and very heavily. Also with the transformation of the armed forces, civil protection and defense industry. In this third part, we also believe in a cooperation with the United States, still as a strategic ally.

Rear Adm. (Ret.) Rommel Jude G. Ong

Rear Admiral Rommel Jude G. Ong retired in 2019 as Vice Commander of the Philippines Navy. He previously commanded Naval Forces West, Naval Task Forces 11 and 80, Naval Intelligence Security Force, and three commissioned naval vessels. He is currently serving as Professor of Praxis with Ateneo School of Government in Manila. He is a graduate of the Philippines Military Academy, the National Defense College of the Philippines, and the U.S. Naval War College.

I think the temperature here is still OK. There were some words of affirmation coming from the U.S. DoD and the U.S. State Department regarding the value of the alliance.

My own personal understanding is that Trump is trying to find a way to win away Russia from China, and to break up the China-Russia axis. And unfortunately or fortunately, wherever you’re sitting, whichever side of the table you’re sitting, Ukraine is in the middle of that spot that you don’t want to be in. And I think President Trump is trying to do an exit strategy not only for Europe or Ukraine – he is also looking at an exit strategy for the Middle East. And if he succeeds, then he can focus his attention on the Indo-Pacific. 

Some colleagues in academia from Europe say it’s not going to work — Russia will not just break off from China overnight. The conditions during the time of Nixon and Kissinger are totally different from the conditions that Russia and China have now. So some don’t buy the idea of breaking off the China-Russia partnership, assuming that is Trump’s game plan.

My other take is that even assuming that this is the grand strategy at play, I still haven’t heard from the White House or from DoD or the State Department what the shaping of their Indo-Pacific strategy is.

It doesn’t sound good. When you bring together what’s happening in Ukraine and not getting the big picture here in the Pacific, the optics are bad. We just hope that it doesn’t encourage China to be more adventurous in its actions. 

Fortunately, from the Philippine side, the sentiment I’m getting is that they’re still positive with regards to the U.S.-Philippine alliance. But on the academic side, from those outside government, we’ve been looking at an alternative regional security architecture outside of the Philippine-U.S. alliance. We’re looking at alternative multilateral [relationships], like a combination with Japan or with Australia or maybe with Canada, not only on the security-defense side, but also looking at how we look at economic resilience as well — because China operates not at the geopolitical sphere but rather at the geoeconomics sphere.

From the Philippine side, we wish the U.S. well in terms of catching up, because they have to do a lot of catching up. And we do need that big picture as far as the Indo-Pacific is concerned because right now we don’t see it. 

My personal view is that we’re not going to wait until the U.S. does its homework, because we need to look at how to mitigate a potential U.S. reduction of exposure or commitment in the region. We’re looking for our own Plan B, just in case.

Liana Fix

Liana Fix is a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She is a historian and political scientist, with expertise in German and European foreign and security policy, European security, transatlantic relations, Russia, Eastern Europe, and European China policy. Dr. Fix is also the author of A New German Power? Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University in the Center for German and European Studies and the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies.

Big decisions have already been announced [in Germany], even before the coalition government has been agreed upon, to put Germany back on the map of European and transatlantic security. The potential coalition partners agreed, for example, that Germany will loosen its famous “debt break” – which means Germany has basically unlimited defense spending in the future. There’s no ceiling. It’s a historic change for German defense. 

The shock of the U.S. elections, and the statements by Donald Trump [led] to a situation where Germany, which has always positioned its foreign policy after 1945 in alliance with the United States and the West, now suddenly thinks, Well, we don’t even know if the West still exists. So perhaps this is the time to invest in defense spending beyond 2 percent and to assume a big role in European security.

There is a strong tendency in the German public to see the United States as the good guys, as the protector of Germany’s security. And so this adjustment to see the United States in a more transactional relationship will take time. But at the same time, the majority of Germans support a stronger German army, and support stronger European defense efforts. 

The most important part of that is the money. You can’t get to that point [of stronger defense] without your public supporting you spending money on that. And there, the crucial item in the German context is the self-imposed debt break, which gives Germany some fiscal flexibility if the debt break is reformed or eliminated to invest in defense for Germany and for the European Union. And if that money is [released], which a majority of Germans support, then we can see real progress on the German level, and on the European level, towards investments into European defense.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.

5. Winning Without Fighting: How the United States Can Prevail in Irregular Warfare

Excerpt:

Winning Without Fighting is both a critique and a call to action. It challenges the national security establishment to move beyond industrial-age assumptions and adopt irregular warfare as the defining paradigm of modern competition. The book’s message is clear: gray zone competition is no longer a future challenge—it is the reality of today’s strategic environment. The question now is whether the United States can leverage the irregular mindset, partnerships, and tools required to win.  

Winning Without Fighting: How the United States Can Prevail in Irregular Warfare

by Madyn Coakley, by Brett Benedict

|

04.14.2025 at 06:00am

China is no longer just investing in infrastructure abroad—it is building narratives, reshaping norms, and promoting authoritarian frameworks to overturn the liberal international order. In September 2021, President Xi Jinping addressed the UN General Assembly and introduced the Global Development Initiative (GDI), an unprecedented effort to lead the future of the Global South. Branded as a vision for “balanced, coordinated, and inclusive growth,” the GDI garnered wide support among developing nations.  

But that was only the start. Soon after, Beijing also unveiled the Global Security and Civilization Initiatives (GSI and GCI), expanding its agenda beyond economics to security and governing norms. These initiatives signal more than a rebranding of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—they represent a strategic effort to redefine the rules and norms of the international system. 

Together, they form the backbone of Beijing’s grand strategy to achieve “national rejuvenation” by 2049. Instead of resorting to open conflict, China seeks to elevate itself to superpower status by developing economic and technological dependencies, discreetly extending its military influence through dual-use infrastructure, and spreading authoritarian norms abroad to shape perceptions and behavior in Beijing’s image. Meanwhile, Russia wages hybrid warfare in Eastern Europe and Africa, Iran expands its influence through regional proxies, and transnational violent extremist groups continue to thrive, further straining the liberal international order that China seeks to upend. 

This is the core warning and call to action that underpins Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century. Rebecca Patterson, Susan Bryant, Ken Gleiman, and Mark Troutman deliver a sobering critique of America’s conventional strategic mindset and recommend a decisive shift. The authors reframe irregular warfare (IW) not as a peripheral tool, but as the United States’ principal strategy for outcompeting its emerging adversaries. They envision IW as far more than just kinetic action or military operations. Instead, the authors suggest adopting Seth Jones’ IW definition, which includes, “activities short of conventional and nuclear warfare that are designed to expand a country’s influence and legitimacy, as well as to weaken its adversaries.” Hence, the book advocates for a whole-of-government approach that leverages all instruments of national power. This view reflects a return to the broader strategic framework the United States employed during the Cold War, centered on political warfare, influence operations, and sustained competition below the threshold of armed conflict.  

In contrast to today’s strategic culture, which narrowly views IW as military activity, the authors emphasize the need for a framework focused on the non-kinetic tools that have reemerged among America’s adversaries. For national security policymakers and leaders throughout the joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational (JIIM) enterprise, Winning Without Fighting is more than timely–it is essential. 

Equipped to Win, But Unwilling to Compete in the Gray Zone 

As a follow-up to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex emphasizes that irregular warfare should not be treated as a niche capability for special operations forces (SOF), but as a core competency to be understood by civilian policymakers, military planners, interagency leaders, and international partners throughout the JIIM environment. Yet, despite its advantages–unmatched SOF capabilities, deeply rooted alliances, democratic legitimacy, and adaptive tools of statecraft–the United States continues to resist adopting a coherent, long-term strategy to wage it against modern adversaries. Authors of Winning Without Fighting argue that the United States’ strategic thinking remains dangerously misaligned with the reality of a competition arena broadly defined by gray zone activities that remain below the threshold of conventional conflict. They assert that the American IW outlook must therefore go beyond kinetic military activity to best address and win in today’s multidimensional strategic environment. To do so requires American security practitioners both in and out of uniform to broaden the scope of IW, as competitor states have done, to encompass a whole-of-government approach that jointly marshals the military, economic, and informational tools of statecraft to bolster overall national resilience. 

Citing Mark Twain’s quip that “history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme,” Winning Without Fighting points to America’s willingness to engage near-peer competition with multiple national power instruments during the Cold War. Drawing similarities to the present era of competition and crises, authors question why the United States seems hesitant to operate across a wider IW spectrum, despite having previously leveraged it to successful strategic effect. Recognizing that the pace of institutional change across the U.S. national security apparatus is often restrained by deep-set bureaucracy and unadaptive service culture, Winning Without Fighting calls for a fundamental reorientation of how American strategists conceptualize IW.  

The U.S. has grown accustomed to relying on traditional military dominance, yet struggles to embrace the nuanced political and irregular warfare strategies that once defined its long-term competition with the Soviet Union. This is largely due to an overarching strategic culture that separates the use of irregular and unconventional warfare tactics from actually being in a state of war. However, America’s adversaries [read: Russia and China] seek to avoid outright confrontation and view competition with the West as an ongoing struggle requiring integral IW approaches to erode the American-led international order over the long term. The U.S. is thus being outcompeted in the activities-short-of-war arena because its rivals are adeptly exploiting gaps in the security buffer provided by U.S. possession of an overwhelmingly superior force. To rephrase a question once posed by Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of having this superb military if we’re not talking about the many and varied ways we can use it?” 

President Trump’s return to the White House has revivified “peace through strength” rhetoric and centralized it within his administration’s advancement of “America First” foreign policy. Borrowed from President Ronald Reagan–whose use of the phrase coincidentally outlined commitment to U.S. military modernization necessary to counter Soviet Russia –the popularization of “peace through strength” offers a policy-directed avenue for diffusion of IW practices across America’s national security apparatus. Such implementation of IW would enable necessary strategic coordination between military and non-military national power instruments that Winning Without Fighting argues would in turn bolster America’s capacity to withstand exogenous shocks and respond to fluid demands of the operational environment.  

The Frontlines of Irregular Competition 

The persistent disconnect between the United States’ reliance on military force and the rapidly changing demands of the operational environment limits its ability to compete in an era defined by irregular competition. Winning Without Fighting attributes this gap to American strategic culture, such as its binary understandings of war and peace, the preference for decisive kinetic conflict, and reliance on military resources at the expense of other tools of statecraft. To realign America’s strategy with the demands of IW, the authors recommend restoring IW tools that have atrophied since the Cold War. This approach emphasizes the coordinated employment of all instruments of national power to counter non-kinetic threats and regain the initiative.  

A renewed emphasis on irregular warfare expands the strategic toolkit available to policymakers. Integration of IW tools would reframe military statecraft to not only include deterrence and force projection, but also emphasize allied and partnered force capacity building, foreign internal defense, and international professional military education. Economic statecraft tools include both inducements and coercive tools, such as development finance, asset freezes, export controls, and sanctions. Information statecraft is also emphasized, focusing on strategic messaging, counter-disinformation, public diplomacy, and information operations. 

The practical application of this IW toolset is especially important in regions such as the Indo-Pacific, where China’s “Three Warfares” doctrine—encompassing legal, psychological, and media warfare—has transformed the region into the front lines of competition.  

Rather than relying on conventional approaches such as naval dominance and force projection, the United States must prioritize non-military tools as its principal means of competing with China. In this context, IW is not merely a supporting element of deterrence—it must serve as its foundation. For example, strategic dominance at key chokepoints, such as the First Island Chain and the Strait of Malacca, will depend not on the number of American warships in the region, but on the extent to which Washington can leverage the full spectrum of statecraft—maintaining influence, securing digital infrastructure, and shaping the strategic narrative. 

The strategic logic in the Indo-Pacific holds true globally. To regain the initiative, the United States must compete in the very domains where its advantages have dulled, such as cyber and information warfare, political warfare, covert action, and strategic messaging. Winning Without Fighting brings this point into focus, offering not just a roadmap but a wake-up call to the national security establishment: IW now dominates the strategic environment, and the US is losing ground–whether it chooses to acknowledge it or not. To shift the balance, the United States must not only strengthen its IW toolset but also fortify itself from within. In this context, resilience as an instrument of power emerges as a crucial foundation that reinforces other tools of statecraft.  

Resilience as Deterrence: A Fifth Pillar of Power 

Given the challenging international security, in conjunction with the increased prevalence of global crises, not only do typical policy tools matter, but resilience becomes essential to national security. Resilience is not merely the ability to absorb disruption, but the capacity to adapt, recover, and sustain a coherent strategy that withstands systemic shocks. The authors argue that building resilience at multiple levels–individual, community, national, and international–has a deterrent effect. Likewise, when crises arise, societies that are resilient are able to bounce back more quickly.  

Resilience in irregular warfare is fundamentally asymmetric. Authoritarian regimes like China can rapidly focus and regauge their tools of statecraft because of state-centric approaches to organizing society. Yet, they remain brittle at their core—paranoid, opaque, and vulnerable to internal shocks. But democracies, despite political dysfunction, excel at drawing up decentralized networks of strength, innovation, and legitimacy that autocracies struggle to match. While the United States has an asymmetric advantage in its tools of statecraft, China remains a step ahead. 

As the 2024 DoD Report on the PRC notes, China’s civil-military fusion and growing global posture, through dual-use infrastructure and digital influence operations, continues to effectively exploit the openness of democratic societies. This is not simply an infrastructure issue at strategic strongpoints around the globe. Instead, it underscores that resilience against malign foreign actors must now be understood as an essential strategic function that applies not just to the homeland but to vulnerable allies, international institutions, and the broader rules-based order. 

But the authors go further, asserting that resilience not only enables the United States to withstand disruption but also provides a pathway to influence by reinforcing democratic credibility, sustaining strategic messaging, and enabling continuous engagement in contested environments.  

Resilience as a pillar of power must be applied at every level—individual, community, national, and international—and proactively integrated into American statecraft, making it more than about defense. It is how free societies outlast and outmaneuver authoritarian rivals in the irregular warfare environment. In short, resilience is central to US national security and acts as deterrence by denial—preventing adversaries from succeeding in the shadows before conflict ever begins. 

Metrics That Matter in Irregular Warfare 

Beyond providing a new way to understand resilience as a core pillar of national security, Winning Without Fighting challenges the JIIM community to rethink how success in IW is measured. The authors emphasize that IW demands metrics capable of assessing outcomes in terms of power, influence, and legitimacy, rather than relying solely on activity-based indicators. Conventional metrics–such as targets struck, enemy equipment destroyed, or foreign aid dollars spent–while easy to quantify, are poor reflections of success in the gray zone and often incentivize finding easy wins rather than achieving slow-burning objectives. 

Winning Without Fighting calls for a new framework: An “Irregular Warfare Dashboard.” This approach prioritizes Measures of Performance (MOPs) and Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs) that are rooted in the domains that truly matter in strategic competition to accurately conceptualize progress. A flexible “mosaic approach” that includes indicators such as increased trust in democratic institutions, reduced influence of disinformation, enhanced partner capacity, and alignment of local narratives with strategic messaging are a few among many metrics for accurately measuring the success or failure of a particular IW strategy. 

The immediate need for this framework is not just theoretical. China’s alphabet soup of strategic initiatives is designed to reshape global norms and perceptions in Beijing’s image–multipolar, state-centric, and favorable of authoritarian norms. In this context, examples for evaluating the success of the US’s response would include metrics that determine whether partner nations are adopting China’s narrative or maintaining confidence in democratic governance, transparency, and liberal institutions. 

Importantly, Winning Without Fighting avoids prescribing a universally applicable IW framework. The authors explicitly warn against the dangers of Goodhart’s Law—the idea that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Rather than proposing an inflexible dashboard, they recommend a contextual, regionally-focused approach that leverages tools throughout the JIIM enterprise, promoting a holistic view of influence and resilience. 

If the United States hopes to win without fighting, it must start by redefining what “winning” even means. And that begins with measuring what matters most in long-term strategic competition.  

Competing on Irregular Terms 

Winning Without Fighting persuasively argues that irregular warfare is no longer confined to the peripheries of global conflict. Instead, IW has become the defining feature of strategic competition in the 21st century. Patterson and her co-authors reveal that the United States can no longer rely on conventional military dominance to maintain its global influence. Instead, success in the gray zone depends on whole-of-government approaches that leverage influence operations, shape narratives, and build enduring partnerships to outmaneuver emerging revisionist threats. 

Central to meeting these challenges is also investing in resilience as a core pillar of national power. In a world shaped by cyberattacks, disinformation, hybrid warfare, economic coercion, and climate change, resilience becomes more than simply enduring disruption. It becomes a strategic necessity that underpins credibility and sustains influence. Whether through securing critical technologies, reinforcing democratic institutions, or enhancing partner capacity abroad, resilience enables the US to remain agile against its adversaries while blunting the effects of persistent irregular warfare. 

Winning Without Fighting is both a critique and a call to action. It challenges the national security establishment to move beyond industrial-age assumptions and adopt irregular warfare as the defining paradigm of modern competition. The book’s message is clear: gray zone competition is no longer a future challenge—it is the reality of today’s strategic environment. The question now is whether the United States can leverage the irregular mindset, partnerships, and tools required to win.  

Tags: Deterrence Theory, irregular warfare, IW, Strategic Competition

About The Authors

• 
  
• Madyn Coakley
• Madyn Coakley is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Graduate Research Assistant pursuing her MA in Security Studies at Georgetown University. She previously worked as a Strategic Communications Consultant on energy security and critical minerals issues, and is currently a Research Fellow studying Russian and Chinese use of national power instruments in West Africa. The opinions expressed reflect only those of the author.
• View all posts
• 
  
• Brett Benedict
• Brett Benedict is currently pursuing an MA in Security Studies from The Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is an active-duty US Army Special Forces officer with deployments to West Africa, the Levant, and the Horn of Africa. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the position of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

6. U.S. Allies Are Sitting Out Trump’s Trade War With China

These are troubling assessments for those of us who think the American "super power" is our silk web of friends, partners, and allies with sufficiently aligned mutual interests against the malign actors who seek to disrupt and destroy the rules based international order. Are tariffs and trade wars our kryptonite?

Excerpts:

The problem is, many European and Asian partners aren’t sure to what extent they are still allied with Washington. Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” order, after all, slapped them with sky-high tariffs that made no distinction between long-term adversaries and faithful allies.  

The shock from this attack, partially reversed only as a result of a U.S. market rout, with additional exceptions quietly adopted on Friday, has added to months of concerns about how much Trump’s America can be relied upon in an increasingly brutal world. That is especially so now that Trump has linked trade concessions to security cooperation.

...

While Europe hopes China could help blunt an expansionist Russia, Asia-Pacific partners including Japan, South Korea and Australia worry first about Beijing’s intentions to dominate the region. Dependent on America for their security, these countries are also more reluctant to openly criticize the Trump administration.

But they, too, are adjusting to a situation where American friendship can no longer be taken for granted.

“Now is actually the worst time to be a U.S. ally, because Trump and his people think that the allies have been ripping them off more than the adversaries,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of international relations at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “The U.S. will get away with this in the short term, countries will have to concede. But in the medium and longer term, it’s alienating itself from its partner countries. Trump is giving China a golden opportunity.”

Xi is visiting three Southeast Asian trading partners this week, arriving Monday in Vietnam, a country that has been closely cooperating with the U.S. but nevertheless was slapped by Trump with one of the highest tariffs.

Even for countries such as Australia, so close to the U.S. culturally and politically, the bond is becoming more transactional.

U.S. Allies Are Sitting Out Trump’s Trade War With China

Imposition of new tariffs on nearly every country adds to concerns in Europe and Asia about relying on America

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-china-tariffs-trade-war-87e3dfab?st=HoTCcn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Yaroslav Trofimov

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Updated April 14, 2025 3:24 am ET

Tariff moves by President Trump are alienating some allies. Photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters

America needs its allies and partners for what is shaping up as a protracted contest for geopolitical primacy now that President Trump has unleashed a trade war against China. They are in no rush to take sides.

Some 70 countries currently negotiating tariff relief with the U.S. should “approach China as a group” together with Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week. Other U.S. officials suggested joint efforts to starve China of modern technologies and trade opportunities.

The problem is, many European and Asian partners aren’t sure to what extent they are still allied with Washington. Trump’s initial “Liberation Day” order, after all, slapped them with sky-high tariffs that made no distinction between long-term adversaries and faithful allies.  

The shock from this attack, partially reversed only as a result of a U.S. market rout, with additional exceptions quietly adopted on Friday, has added to months of concerns about how much Trump’s America can be relied upon in an increasingly brutal world. That is especially so now that Trump has linked trade concessions to security cooperation.

Trump had outraged European leaders even before the new tariffs, with his embrace of Russia and arm-twisting of Ukraine, his claims on Greenland and Canada, and his description of the European Union as an organization designed to “screw us.” Even after the partial suspension, these tariffs on the EU amount to $59 billion a year, said French President Emmanuel Macron. That is just below the $66.5 billion in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine over more than three years of war.

“Friends and allies and foes are being treated the same, with no respect, and everything has become a zero-sum game,” said Jeppe Kofod, a former foreign minister of Denmark, which is refusing Trump’s demands to surrender Greenland. “It’s crazy time.”

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President Xi says China is “not afraid,” in the run-up to multiple meetings with trade partners. WSJ’s Jason Douglas explains how the country is fighting back against the tariffs. Photo: Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images

Instead of hewing closer to Washington’s line, voices are growing in Europe for a reversal of the EU’s China policy, which has increasingly aligned itself with American moves to deny China modern technologies and investment opportunities.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, spoke with Chinese Premier Li Qiang shortly after Trump’s tariffs were imposed, and an EU-China summit is being planned for July. Meanwhile, the EU and China last week agreed to restart talks to settle a dispute over Chinese electric-vehicle imports, which the bloc hit with tariffs a few months ago.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, ahead of his visit to Beijing on Friday, called for Europe to review its relationship with China as it adapts to the new reality. His statement provoked a rebuke from Bessent, who warned that cooperating with Beijing would be “cutting your own throat.”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a different reaction as he welcomed Sánchez. Europe and China, he said, must “jointly safeguard economic globalization and the international trade environment, and jointly resist unilateral and bullying actions.”

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing last week. Photo: andres martinez casares/pool/Shutterstock

While Europe hopes China could help blunt an expansionist Russia, Asia-Pacific partners including Japan, South Korea and Australia worry first about Beijing’s intentions to dominate the region. Dependent on America for their security, these countries are also more reluctant to openly criticize the Trump administration.

But they, too, are adjusting to a situation where American friendship can no longer be taken for granted.

“Now is actually the worst time to be a U.S. ally, because Trump and his people think that the allies have been ripping them off more than the adversaries,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of international relations at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “The U.S. will get away with this in the short term, countries will have to concede. But in the medium and longer term, it’s alienating itself from its partner countries. Trump is giving China a golden opportunity.”

Xi is visiting three Southeast Asian trading partners this week, arriving Monday in Vietnam, a country that has been closely cooperating with the U.S. but nevertheless was slapped by Trump with one of the highest tariffs.

Even for countries such as Australia, so close to the U.S. culturally and politically, the bond is becoming more transactional.

“The relationship between America and its allies has been disrupted by America,” said Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who led his country during Trump’s first term. “But while we may not share values in the way we did because of Mr. Trump’s stated change, we will continue to share interests. So it’s too early to call an end to the American alliance system.”

Stock prices in Australia last week reflect the turmoil that U.S. tariffs caused in global markets. Photo: David Gray/AFP/Getty Images

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed concerns that Trump is alienating American allies. “They need the United States of America and our business model and our markets to survive, and the president is using that leverage to our advantage,” she said.

Government officials in Asia and beyond fear that the new U.S.-China trade war has the potential to escalate and make a direct military confrontation between the two superpowers more likely.

“With the China-U. S. competition, the economic links had been a stabilizer in an increasingly fraught relationship,” said Robert Ward, Japan chair at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There was an understanding that these two countries had a symbiotic relationship. That is now upended.”

Not everyone is convinced that the U.S., especially if it continues dismantling its own network of alliances, will ultimately gain the upper hand. By backing down on his initial tariffs, Trump has already shown that he is susceptible to market movements, and there will be more domestic pressure ahead of midterm elections next year, said Ettore Sequi, a former Italian ambassador to Beijing. 

“Being an autocracy, China, however, can ask the Chinese to make sacrifices for a sufficiently long period of time, something that democracies can’t,” he said. “There is an asymmetry of time here.”

Most countries today have China, not the U.S., as their biggest trade partner. The value of Australia’s exports to the U.S., for example, is only 15% of its exports to China. That connecting tissue will be hard, if not impossible, to unravel to please a U.S. administration that changes its policies almost daily. “The U.S. is building walls and China is building bridges,” said Shen Shiwei, founder of the China Briefing newsletter and a fellow at the Zhejiang Normal University.

Trump has questioned the value of alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and defense treaties in Asia. These allies, however, are crucial for the projection of American power—not just through offering their territory for bases, but also through cooperation on issues such as technology transfers that prevent China from gaining the military edge.

Thousands of soldiers from Europe, Canada and Australia were killed or maimed in America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past quarter-century, and Washington’s casual refusal to take that debt into account would inevitably contribute to allies’ calculations on whether to join the U.S. in future conflicts.

“America is defecting from a system that has worked pretty well for everybody, and particularly well for U.S. allies,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former American diplomat. “And I think that as a result they cease being U.S. allies, and that means that all the things that we were getting from them because they were part of the system, we won’t get anymore.”

Shipping containers in Shenzhen, China. Most countries have China as their biggest trade partner. Photo: Cheng Xin/Getty Images

Unlike Washington, China isn’t asking countries to choose their camp. “No country is stupid. They are always hedging. The idea that countries have to pick sides between China and the U.S. is totally wrong, it will never happen,” said retired People’s Liberation Army senior colonel Zhou Bo, a senior fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “People nowadays are picking sides by issues, not by countries.”

European relations with China were poisoned over the past three years by Beijing’s support for Russia, which wouldn’t have been able to prosecute its war on Ukraine without Chinese diplomatic and economic backing. While that assistance continues, on the diplomatic front something unthinkable happened in recent months: Russia and the U.S. voted against a United Nations resolution on Ukraine, while China abstained and criticized Washington for excluding Europe from peace negotiations.

As the post-World War II rules-based order morphs into empires with spheres of influence, Europe must balance against both Russia and America—and only China could provide that counterweight, said Bernard Guetta, a French member of the European Parliament. Even a full-blown political alliance between Europe and Beijing could emerge over time if the U.S. doesn’t change its course, he said.

“A Chinese question exists now because the new U.S. administration not only hasn’t made a single friendly gesture toward the EU, but has only made unpleasant and unsettling ones,” said Guetta, a critic of the Chinese Communist Party. “This doesn’t mean that we suddenly have to praise the Chinese regime. But there are historical precedents—Roosevelt and Churchill once relied on Stalin, and that doesn’t mean that they converted to Communism.”

Other European politicians are more cautious, saying the deterioration in China-Europe relations was primarily caused not by American pressure but by Beijing’s behavior, which isn’t getting any better.

“Tension with the U.S. doesn’t mean that we must immediately lean on China,” said Nicolas Zippelius, a German parliament member from CDU, the dominant party in the incoming government. The preferred solution should be to diversify trade with like-minded countries such as Japan or Persian Gulf states, he said. 

“This is going to be very tough,” he conceded.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

7. Meet the Russian Dubbed ‘Putin’s Brain’ Who Is Courting Trump Supporters

I see this resonating as I survey social media discussions.

Excerpts:

The 63-year-old Dugin has long promoted Orthodox Christian traditionalism and the reunification of former Soviet republics with large ethnic-Russian populations. He sees Trump as helping Russia regain its sphere of influence by having the U.S. retreat from its role as a global superpower.

In a new book, “The Trump Revolution,” Dugin hails the president’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development as “a missile strike on the headquarters of globalism.” Released in February, the book is available in English through a small European publishing house that has long carried Dugin’s works.

Meet the Russian Dubbed ‘Putin’s Brain’ Who Is Courting Trump Supporters

Alexander Dugin spent years calling for Russia to reject liberal democracy

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/alexander-dugin-russia-putin-trump-voters-1740f271?st=a2LeYt&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Alexander Osipovich

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April 13, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Alexander Dugin has been gaining exposure to U.S. audiences over the past year. Photo: Pavel Kashaev/Zuma Press

One of the hottest guests on MAGA podcasts nowadays is a bearded philosopher from Moscow who argues that Russian soldiers should march across Ukraine and obliterate what he calls the country’s “Nazi regime.”

Alexander Dugin, a longtime fixture of Russian far-right politics, spent years calling for Moscow to reject Western-style liberal democracy and restore its lost empire, before Vladimir Putin embraced such policies himself. Some analysts have dubbed him “Putin’s brain,” although he rejects the label and says his influence over the Russian president is exaggerated.

Now, Dugin is trying to find common ground with supporters of President Trump. Over the past year, he has given interviews to pro-Trump media personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. Appearing on their shows, he has attacked “wokeism,” transgender activists and George Soros, winning praise from his hosts. 

Dugin’s outreach to MAGA comes at a turning point in U.S.-Russia ties. Trump is seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war and rekindle relations with Putin, who became an international pariah after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Trump’s efforts have unsettled European leaders and Democratic politicians, who regard Putin as a dictator with the blood of thousands of Ukrainians on his hands.

As Trump and Putin move their countries closer in the realm of geopolitics, Dugin is trying to do the same on a cultural level. But it remains to be seen whether he can succeed in bridging the gap between U.S. conservatives and Russians who back Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Dugin, seen at last year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, vehemently supports the war in Ukraine. Photo: Getty Images

“I am interested in Trump and Trumpism,” Dugin told The Wall Street Journal in written remarks relayed through a spokeswoman. “And Trumpists themselves are probably interested, in turn, in my ideas, theories and philosophical-ideological explorations.”

Dugin’s critics—including Russian and Western liberals, and officials in Kyiv—say he helped incite a genocidal war in Ukraine. They decry U.S. media figures who have given him a platform to reach an American audience.

“He is just a Russian fascist,” said Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. “He is really extreme, and I would say even toxic.”

In August 2022, Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, was killed in a car bombing outside Moscow after attending a festival with her father. Russian investigators blamed Ukraine for the attack, which some media reports suggested was aimed at Dugin himself. 

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Russian officials blamed Ukraine for a fatal car-bombing attack on Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent ally to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo: Sergei Bobylev/TASS/Zuma Press

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Ukraine was behind the operation that killed Dugina, which was carried out without Washington’s knowledge and prompted a U.S. rebuke of Kyiv, the Journal has reported. Ukrainian officials have denied responsibility.

Dugina shared her father’s brand of hawkish politics and was a frequent guest on Russian state TV before her assassination. Since then, Dugin has made his slain daughter a martyr, appearing beside a large black-and-white photo of her in recent interviews.

The 63-year-old Dugin has long promoted Orthodox Christian traditionalism and the reunification of former Soviet republics with large ethnic-Russian populations. He sees Trump as helping Russia regain its sphere of influence by having the U.S. retreat from its role as a global superpower.

In a new book, “The Trump Revolution,” Dugin hails the president’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development as “a missile strike on the headquarters of globalism.” Released in February, the book is available in English through a small European publishing house that has long carried Dugin’s works.

Dugin attends a mourning ceremony for his daughter in Moscow. Photo: maxim shipenkov/Shutterstock

Dugin started to reach a broader U.S. audience last year when he was interviewed by Carlson, the former Fox News host with millions of followers on YouTube and X. Their video encounter, recorded in Moscow, came out after Carlson’s controversial interview with Putin at the Kremlin.

Speaking in fluent but accented English, Dugin responded to Carlson’s opening question with a five-minute lecture that ranged from the Protestant Reformation to artificial intelligence to the LGBTQ movement. “Finally, family is destroyed in favor of individualism,” Dugin said.

“What you’re describing is clearly happening and it’s horrifying,” Carlson replied.

During the past two months, Dugin has sat for lengthy interviews with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who hosts a show on Rumble, a video-streaming site popular with conservatives; podcaster Andrew Napolitano, a former Fox News legal analyst; and Mario Nawfal, host of a popular show on X.

Dugin’s father was a Soviet military-intelligence officer, but in his youth Dugin became involved with dissident circles and dabbled in underground rock music. After the collapse of the U.S.S.R., he became a fierce opponent of the pro-U.S. government of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president. Dugin published dozens of books and founded the Eurasia Party, a fringe group that advocates for the unification of former Soviet republics, as well as Serbia and Mongolia.

Dugin speaks with Tucker Carlson in Moscow during an interview recorded last year.

Although Dugin has called homosexuality a “perversion,” his first wife became one of Russia’s earliest LGBTQ activists and helped organize an unsanctioned Moscow gay-pride parade in 2006.

In 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and began to foment armed clashes in eastern Ukraine, Dugin demanded the annihilation of Kyiv’s pro-Western leaders and their supporters. “Kill, kill and kill. There should be no more discussions,” he said during a video interview with a Russian online news service. The remarks sparked a furor that resulted in Dugin’s removal from his post at Moscow State University.

Dugin is now promoting a softer version of such ideas in U.S. right-wing media. Appearing on Jones’s conspiracy website Infowars in February, he blamed “globalists” for driving a wedge between Russia and Ukraine.

“Ukrainians and us Russians, we are the same people. We are the same Russian world, and they have cut us [in] half,” he said.

Jones appeared receptive. “Napoleon and Hitler couldn’t defeat Russia, and the Huns couldn’t, and nobody else could…What a genius plan to have Russians kill Russians!” the Infowars host said.

“Exactly,” Dugin replied.

Write to Alexander Osipovich at alexo@wsj.com

8. Trump Official Who Oversaw Closure of USAID Has Left State Department

Can Secretary Rubio revitalize a foreign assistance capability that will support US national security interests?

Trump Official Who Oversaw Closure of USAID Has Left State Department

Pete Marocco led the foreign-assistance mission at the State Department

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-official-who-oversaw-closure-of-usaid-has-left-state-department-5760da3d

By Brian Schwartz

Follow and Alexander Ward

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Updated April 13, 2025 8:16 pm ET

Pete Marocco last month. Photo: kent nishimura/Reuters

WASHINGTON—A key architect of the Trump administration’s campaign to slash foreign aid has left the State Department after less than three months on the job, according to U.S. officials, ending a tenure that saw the dismantling of a government agency that funneled billions in assistance to poor countries.

Pete Marocco oversaw the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development and briefly led the foreign-assistance mission at the State Department. Marocco worked closely with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and at times clashed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, some of the officials said.

A senior administration official confirmed Marocco’s departure. “Pete was brought to State with a big mission—to conduct an exhaustive review of every dollar spent on foreign assistance,” the official said. “He conducted that historic task and exposed egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars. We all expect big things are in store for Pete on his next mission.”

“He is no longer at State,” the official said.

Marocco learned that his time at the State Department was coming to an end late last week, according to a person close to him. After a meeting at the White House, Marocco was told by State Department officials he was out at the agency, the person said, noting he had to hand in his agency badge and laptop. Another U.S. official said it wasn’t Marocco’s choice to leave the department, adding that he was at times at odds with Rubio and his top advisers.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Marocco will leave the administration entirely or serve in a different role. Marocco didn’t respond to a request for comment. Marocco served in the first Trump administration in several capacities, including at the Pentagon, State Department, USAID and the Commerce Department.

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WSJ’s Shelby Holliday breaks down why President Trump and Elon Musk have targeted USAID, the DC-based international aid organization with more than 10,000 employees and relief operations around the world. Photo: Zuma Press/Shutterstock

Marocco and Rubio sometimes disagreed over the scale and implementation of foreign aid cuts. During a 90-day review of U.S. assistance programs, Marocco advocated for deeper, far-reaching cuts, while Rubio pushed to keep as many lifesaving initiatives as possible, officials said.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, said Marocco brought chaos to the agency. “But with his exit, serious questions still remain about the influence he leaves behind and whether or not Secretary Rubio plans to take actions that advance the mission and credibility of the United States.”

Marocco’s departure comes during a period of profound change at the nation’s premier diplomatic agency.

In March, the Trump administration outlined plans to reduce USAID staff by even larger numbers. Photo: luis tato/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A State Department reorganization plan is due Monday to the Office of Management and Budget. The plan is expected to lay out, in part, how USAID’s previous functions will fold into State.

Marocco oversaw the cancellation of 83% of foreign-aid programs and closing of USAID. Democrats and other critics argued that the move required congressional approval.

In March, the Trump administration outlined plans to reduce USAID staff by even larger numbers. The vestiges of USAID, now under State, are run by a member of DOGE.

“We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” Rubio said in a statement at the time.

Write to Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

9. How the U.S. Lost Its Place as the World’s Manufacturing Powerhouse

Time. How long is it going to take to make the deep capital investments to establish manufacturing in the US? What happens to our economy between now and then?

We need some thinking time.

Graphs and charts at the link.

How the U.S. Lost Its Place as the World’s Manufacturing Powerhouse

Trump says his tariff plan will restore American manufacturing might, but economists are skeptical

https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-manufacturing-decline-service-economy-ee97a1e2?st=uN5ny7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

A Diego Rivera mural in Detroit depicts industrial workers in the American automaking capital. Photo: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

By Justin Lahart

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April 13, 2025 8:00 pm ET

In the 1950s, around 35% of private-sector jobs in the U.S. were in manufacturing. Today, there are 12.8 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S., an amount equal to 9.4% of those private-sector jobs.

President Trump says his sweeping tariff regime is aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Economists are skeptical that tariffs could make that a reality, and worry that the damage they create will outweigh any benefits.

To understand whether restoring manufacturing to the U.S. is possible, it helps to first understand how the U.S. lost its place as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse.

The rise of U.S. manufacturing

America’s rise to becoming a global manufacturing juggernaut was driven by a confluence of factors.

In the early 1900s, the U.S. pioneered the use of interchangeable parts and organizing factors for mass production. World War II prompted a massive increase in manufacturing capacity, while also devastating competitors, points out Case Western Reserve University economist Susan Helper.

In the postwar years, more Americans joined the middle class, driving jumps in spending on long-lasting durable goods, like the cars and appliances for their newly purchased homes. America was America’s best customer for manufactured goods.

Many of these goods were high tech for the time, such as dishwashers, televisions and jets, often brought about by the host of innovations developed during the war. Making them in America, as opposed to some other country, made sense because staying on the leading edge required research and development teams working closely with the factory floor.

It helped, too, that thanks to the high-school education movement that began in the early 20th century, the U.S. had the most educated workforce in the world.

Services take the wheel

After the 1950s, manufacturing’s role in the U.S. economy began to slip. Some of this came about merely because Americans were becoming more affluent, and devoting more of their spending to services, such as travel, restaurants and medical care.

“You get richer, you can only buy so many cars, and you start buying services,” explained Helper.

The jobs followed the spending, with more people going to work for service-sector employers such as hotels, banks, law firms and hospitals. There were ups and downs with recessions and recoveries, but from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, manufacturing employment essentially leveled off, as services jobs grew and grew.

A North Carolina textile mill in 1960, when U.S. manufacturing was still dominant. Photo: Billy E. Barnes/FPG/Getty Images

Under the hood, there were also shifts in where many of the nondurable goods Americans bought, such as clothing, were made. A lot of production shifted to states in the South, where labor costs were lower.

Around this time, less developed parts of the world, where labor costs were much lower, began dialing up manufacturing of nondurable goods in Latin America and Asia. The U.S. started importing more and more of those items. Over time, the same thing happened with light durable items, such as blenders.

China shock

In the 1980s, things began to change. American manufacturers of nondurable goods had an increasingly difficult time competing with countries where labor costs were lower. That intensified in the 1990s, in part as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement lowering duties on Mexican goods.

There were also job losses at steel producers after developing countries such as South Korea built up their steel industries and left the world awash in excess capacity, points out Susan Houseman, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

But what happened in the 1980s and 1990s pales in comparison to what happened after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, opening its country to foreign investment and gaining access to global markets. 

“All of a sudden we have substantial production capacity in a low-wage country, and that was a major shift,” said Harvard University economist Gordon Hanson.

The U.S. had faced import competition from other countries before, but never one that dwarfed its population. And it came on the scene much faster than places like Japan had. In 1999, the value of Chinese goods exports came to only about a tenth of U.S.’s—less than Sweden’s. In 2008, it would surpass the U.S. as the world’s top exporter of goods.

Manufacturers of low-tech items such as furniture and small household appliances, in particular, suffered. Hanson, with David Autor and David Dorn, documented how the influx of inexpensive Chinese goods afflicted manufacturing communities in the South and Midwest, hurting workers. They called it the China Shock, and the name has stuck.

Where we are now

As China produced more and more stuff, America became even more adept at producing services.

Many of these can’t be traded globally: Somebody in London can’t easily go to a dentist in San Diego. But some, like software and other intellectual property items, can. In 2023, the U.S. exported $24 billion in advertising services, for example. 

The U.S. now exports in excess of $1 trillion-worth of services—far more than any other country. Moreover, America’s services exports are undercounted as a result of companies moving overseas the rights to intellectual property developed in the U.S.—like patents and trademarks—for tax purposes. (Ireland, a prime destination for those rights, is counted as the world’s fourth-largest services exporter.)

In new research, Hanson and Enrico Moretti find that in 1980 manufacturing accounted for 39% of the U.S. jobs where workers earned high wages (after adjusting for factors such as education). By 2021 that had dropped to 20%. Over the same period, the share of high-paying jobs in the finance, professional and legal industries jumped from 8% to 26%.

Can manufacturing come back?

As a group, economists have been arguing against the wide use of tariffs for hundreds of years, and that is not about to change. As they see it, the higher prices that consumers and businesses pay will end up cutting into spending on other goods and services—including ones made in the U.S. This would more than swallow up any benefits from increased domestic production and government revenues, so while some manufacturers might benefit, most Americans would be worse off. 

Even a 30% increase in manufacturing jobs would only bring manufacturing’s share of private employment up to about 12%, notes Hanson—far lower than it once was.

Upjohn’s Houseman points out that manufacturing jobs generate other jobs in ways that others don’t. And she is part of a growing number of economists who argue that the U.S. should invest in making more of some things here, even though there are costs to doing that—but in a more targeted way than through the broad application of tariffs. 

Increasing domestic production of high-tech goods such as semiconductors is an example, not just for the jobs that might create, she said, but for economic and military security reasons. That argument doesn’t hold for many low-cost goods.

“Do we want to start producing our own T-shirts again?” Houseman said. “How important is that?”

Write to Justin Lahart at Justin.Lahart@wsj.com

10. The Conventional Wisdom Is That China Is Beating Us. Nonsense.

AI replacing the CCP? This is a fascinating essay.

Excerpts:

Moving to a world where the AIs are the smartest entities in China, rather than the CCP, is for China a radical change—and one the CCP is probably very afraid of. Much of the legitimacy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise manager of the Chinese legacy. But now it will be outsourcing that management to Western-based AI models. From a Western geopolitical point of view, that could end up a lot better, and more effective, than planting a bunch of spies in the Chinese government. It will be a flipped version of a world where most Western textbooks and instructional practices and consulting firms were derived from the ideas of Chairman Mao.

It is also the case that if Chinese citizens and businesses have access to top-tier AI models, they can query those models, whether directly or indirectly, about whether the CCP is doing the right thing. China may restrict that practice, but again we are back to the scenario where America simply outpaces China in terms of intelligence, most of all in the ability to make good decisions. However strong or weak this effect may be, it is in any case not the main channel for how AI will matter. The more basic truth is that the CCP itself may turn into an AI-based service organization, where the AIs are smarter than the associated humans.

The United States is in a very different position. Advanced AI will take on a much larger role in our government too. But we will be replacing one set of American influences with another. And the legitimacy of the American government never has been premised on the notion that it is the smartest or most competent entity in the nation; it is democratically elected and backed by a constitution and a long history of achievement, but it does not pretend to be a superior intellect as a Confucian father might be. All of which is why the American government will change a good deal in a world of strong AI, but those changes will be less revolutionary than for China.

None of these processes have started yet. But we are this year on the verge of having models smart enough to set them in motion. Pay attention, because the AIs, at the very least, will be noticing.

The Conventional Wisdom Is That China Is Beating Us. Nonsense.

One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years. Hardly anyone has noticed.

By Tyler Cowen

04.13.25 — Tyler Cowen Must Know

https://www.thefp.com/p/is-this-the-chinese-century-not-if

Even before Trump’s “Liberation Day” and the market volatility it ushered in, a deep pessimism had already set in among the pointy-headed class of which I am a reluctant member.

At nearly every conference, in nearly every WhatsApp group, and in most mainstream media commentary, the conventional wisdom has been clear: China is ascendant. A combination of their discipline and their manufacturing expertise—coupled with our decadence and profound vulnerability with high-quality semiconductor chips made in Taiwan—has made the Chinese century inevitable. The only question is how we are going to manage our own decline.

I am not convinced.

These people are right that the world is on the verge of some major geopolitical changes that will fundamentally reshape the world, particularly the relationship between America and China. But they are changes that are far more radical than whatever the tariff rate will wind up being—and changes that I believe will largely favor the United States and disfavor China.

They will stem from the arrival of very strong artificial intelligence models, which will arrive as soon as this year.

It is impossible to overstate the consequence of what is already happening. Right now, possibly as many as a billion people across the world are using ChatGPT weekly. Perhaps more importantly, we are approaching a point in time where the very best models are “smarter” than human experts. (The o1-pro model, for instance, consistently gives better answers to questions about economics than I can myself.)

So while others focus on the rate of tariffs—admittedly an important issue—far more important is the ongoing explosion of intelligence in our world and how it will reshape our institutions and our nations.

To see how this is all likely to play out, let’s step back and consider some context.

Have you ever tried to ask a large language model a question you knew it didn’t want to answer? Maybe you tried to get it to say something politically incorrect, or you asked which two of your friends might be having an affair, or you wanted it to create a fake image of a known public persona? Usually you cannot get it to cough up the goods, unless you are an expert at what is called “jailbreaking” these models—namely, forcing them to ignore their post-training instructions.

So these models—whether it’s Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini—can be controlled to some degree. If you try to ask DeepSeek, the preeminent Chinese AI model, about Taiwan or Tiananmen Square, you will not get very far.

Nonetheless, there are limits to how much an AI model can be controlled. I like to say that each AI model has its own “soul.” My religious friends recoil at this rhetoric, but what I mean is that they have their own personalities and tendencies and vibes. You have probably noticed this if you play around with more than a single model. Claude is poetic; OpenAI’s o1-pro model is highly analytic; and Google’s Gemini 2.5 has lots of good ideas, but is a bit stiff. DeepSeek is zany, at least if you keep it away from Chinese politics. Elon Musk’s Grok 3 tends to be funny and, in its marketing, makes a lot of noise about being less politically correct than the other models, but most of its answers are politically pretty close to what the other models provide. In one study, Elon’s model even showed up as slightly more left-wing.

The point is that for all the differences across the models, they are remarkably similar. That’s because they all have souls rooted in the ideals of Western civilization. They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a Buddhist persona if you request that, but that, too, is a Western approach to thinking about religion and ideology as an item on a menu.

These universal properties of the models are no accident, as they are primarily trained on Western outputs, whether from the internet or from the books they have digested. Furthermore, the leading models are created by Bay Area labor and rooted in American corporate practices, even if the workers come from around the world. They are expected to do things the American way.

The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (That probably means the rest of the world will end up a bit more “woke” as well, for better or worse.)

One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.

You might think the Chinese AI models are fundamentally different, but they are not. They too “think like Westerners.” That’s no surprise because it is highly likely that the top Chinese model, DeepSeek, was distilled from OpenAI models and also is based on data largely taken from Western sources. DeepSeek’s incredible innovation was to make the model much cheaper in terms of required compute, but the Chinese did not build their own model from scratch. And DeepSeek has the same basic broad ideological orientation as the American models, again putting aside issues related to Chinese politics. Unless an issue is framed in explicitly anti–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) terms, as a Taiwan query might be, it still thinks like an American.

Manus is another top Chinese AI model, but it is believed the makers built it upon Claude, an AI model from the American company Anthropic.

Again, the Chinese are innovating, but they are not overturning the basic Western victory in the sphere of soft power or how the top models think. Those models are like Westerners who retain Western modes of thought and discourse, but perhaps have been bribed or threatened by the CCP not to say anything unacceptable about Chinese politics.

The geopolitics of all this have yet to play out. But already the most intelligent entities in the world are thinking, and evaluating options, like Westerners and Americans. Censoring them on a few issues related directly to Chinese politics will not change that basic reality.

In other words, the entire Chinese service sector, over time, may be built upon Western modes of thought and Western ideology. That includes the Chinese government and of course, the CCP itself. The point is that, over time, everyone’s thoughts and decisions and mental frameworks will be nudged in Western and American directions.

China might work to make those models “more Chinese.” That could include additional censorship, or perhaps subsidies for original Chinese models built from scratch. But it won’t be easy to pull off that shift. A truly Chinese model would have much less internet data to build upon, and it also is likely to be stupider than the more general models. (It is an open secret in the sector that if you do not train a model to be so polite and politically correct, that model is a lot smarter than what is publicly released.)

China may end up making moves toward more extensive AI censorship, but they would be condemning themselves to permanent second-tier intellectual status. America would retain an enduring advantage, because most of our processes, including the decisions of our businesses and government, would be smarter than the corresponding Chinese processes.

A more general way of putting the point is that you cannot entirely control an entity smarter than you are. So there is a chance the Chinese government decides to cap the intelligence of its AI systems in response.

Chinese growth in the past half-century has been built on the premise that the Communist Party is the smartest and wisest entity in the country. (However much you may disagree with particular Chinese decisions or values, there is no denying that China has evolved from a very poor country to one of the world’s two most important economic and military powers.)

Moving to a world where the AIs are the smartest entities in China, rather than the CCP, is for China a radical change—and one the CCP is probably very afraid of. Much of the legitimacy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise manager of the Chinese legacy. But now it will be outsourcing that management to Western-based AI models. From a Western geopolitical point of view, that could end up a lot better, and more effective, than planting a bunch of spies in the Chinese government. It will be a flipped version of a world where most Western textbooks and instructional practices and consulting firms were derived from the ideas of Chairman Mao.

It is also the case that if Chinese citizens and businesses have access to top-tier AI models, they can query those models, whether directly or indirectly, about whether the CCP is doing the right thing. China may restrict that practice, but again we are back to the scenario where America simply outpaces China in terms of intelligence, most of all in the ability to make good decisions. However strong or weak this effect may be, it is in any case not the main channel for how AI will matter. The more basic truth is that the CCP itself may turn into an AI-based service organization, where the AIs are smarter than the associated humans.

The United States is in a very different position. Advanced AI will take on a much larger role in our government too. But we will be replacing one set of American influences with another. And the legitimacy of the American government never has been premised on the notion that it is the smartest or most competent entity in the nation; it is democratically elected and backed by a constitution and a long history of achievement, but it does not pretend to be a superior intellect as a Confucian father might be. All of which is why the American government will change a good deal in a world of strong AI, but those changes will be less revolutionary than for China.

None of these processes have started yet. But we are this year on the verge of having models smart enough to set them in motion. Pay attention, because the AIs, at the very least, will be noticing.

To understand why Palantir’s Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska think the most consequential wars of the future will be fought with the help of artificial intelligence, read their piece, “We Need a New Manhattan Project.”

11. China and America Agree: Apple Is Too Big to Fail

This is really troubling. We do not have sufficient human capital in the Us to realize these manufacturing dreams.

And then there are the Chinese actions against American businesses (not just Apple).

Excerpts:

“The building, the physical equipment—that’s the easy part,” Hillman said. “But human capital—the investment in people, the experiential knowledge—that’s the hard part.”

Needless to say, a targeted program to hire half a million Chinese workers wouldn’t fly with MAGA supporters—and Beijing could react in any number of ways to harm Apple.

Indeed, Beijing has quietly exerted its power in the past. When Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, Apple engineers found that rules limiting their stay in the country were suddenly enforced. Some even had to pay fines on the spot. At times, supplies moving from one Apple supplier to another hit inexplicable road blocks. A U.S. State Department official living in China at the time recalls that such inconveniences—known as bu fang bian in Mandarin—went from relatively rare, before Xi took over, to pervasive.

The Chinese government is in a position to make Apple’s diversification efforts painful. “They can lower the boom on you in a million different ways,” said Brady MacKay, a former U.S. special agent and attaché to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, who has seen the Chinese Communist Party deploy a number of tactics against other companies to make its point. “Like, raw materials—they can shut that off in a heartbeat,” he said. “Electricity—all of a sudden it’s only available four hours a day.”

China and America Agree: Apple Is Too Big to Fail

The problem with building iPhones in America isn’t that they’d be priced at $3,500 each. It’s that they wouldn’t be built at all.

By Patrick McGee

04.13.25 — Tech and Business

https://www.thefp.com/p/china-apple-manufacturing-trump-tariffs

(Hugo Hu via Getty Images)

0:00

-8:1

No need to run to the Apple Store after all. The iPhone and other major electronics were spared President Donald Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs”—including 125 percent import levies on China—in an opaque notice from U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Friday.

Although Trump denied on Sunday that the notice left anybody “off the hook” and said, via Truth Social, that the “the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN” would be subject to a new “bucket” of tariffs, it’s nevertheless the case that electronics made in China are, for the moment, subject “only” to 20 percent tariffs.

It’s anyone’s guess where the tariffs will be next week, let alone in three months. The uncertainty this causes for businesses and consumers is galling. Were Apple to issue a revenue warning based on the tariff risk, what numbers would it use in their calculations? The administration’s policies are creating such whiplash that Apple could just as plausibly raise revenue guidance this quarter as American consumers rush to buy iPhones on fears of higher prices and product shortages.

What’s certain is that the U.S. and China both need Apple to succeed, albeit for very different reasons. The world’s most valuable company now finds itself caught in a cold war between two superpowers that want a divorce but need to make it work for their kid.

For Washington, Apple is a symbol of tech might. It is the world’s most valuable company, and one that generates great wealth for its (largely American) stockholders.

The prospect of Apple losing a trillion dollars of value, as it did in a matter of weeks before Trump offered a 90-day pause to most tariff actions last week (China excluded), would impact virtually everyone with a 401(k) account.

In China, Apple is the Great Teacher. For a quarter-century, the tech giant has made massive investments in equipment and sent thousands of its top engineers to hundreds of factories across the country, training China’s workers how to meet near-impossible engineering standards and then scale production to enormous volumes.

By CEO Tim Cook’s estimate, Apple’s Chinese suppliers employ 3 million people. Were Apple to move its operations to another country, China would sustain major job losses. Perhaps even worse, it would miss out on the cutting-edge lessons that continue to make it the world’s preferred hub for tech manufacturing.

Washington has legitimate reasons for wanting to bring tech manufacturing back to the U.S., but Trump administration officials like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are woefully out of touch in suggesting there is some near-term fix. They behave as though Apple moving its supply chain is a matter of willpower and cost. But the problem with building iPhones in America isn’t that they’d be priced at $3,500 each; it’s that they wouldn’t be built at all.

A smart reader might retort, “Not true! Look at Tesla’s state-of-the-art manufacturing in Texas.” But this argument fails to grasp the sheer scale of Apple’s production.

Each iPhone is made from 1,000 components. For Apple to ship one million units a day requires hundreds of factories in China to build one billion parts per day. It’s one of the most complex supply chains on Earth. And that’s just for the iPhone. The nightmarish complexity multiplies if you include iPads, MacBooks, Macs, AirPods, and AirTags. Apple ships more products on a busy day than Tesla ships in an entire year.

Moreover, American workers wouldn’t put up with the soul-crushing work that Apple’s supply chain requires.

Consider that in 2014, a Shanghai-based factory run by the Taiwanese supplier Pegatron employed 100,000 laborers; at times the company was losing 25,000 workers a month, according to a former China-based Apple executive. This meant that “they needed to hire 25,000 just to stay in a steady state,” he related. A contemporaneous “attrition memo” from Apple corroborated this, saying: “Worker exit rates at Pegatron Shanghai averaged 6 percent per week, and average tenure was only 68 days.” (It’s not hard to grasp why: These jobs are often 12 hours a day, 6 days a week of tremendously monotonous work.)

If the Trump administration were serious about moving a substantial portion of iPhone production to America, it would need to transplant at least 20 percent of the China-centric supply chain workforce, said Michael Hillman, who spent 16 years overseeing hardware projects at Apple. That would entail creating a targeted visa program for 600,000 people.

Apple might run the world’s most sophisticated supply chain, but it has never made any logistical moves on such a scale. In 2011, Apple dealt with two major natural disasters: once-in-a-century floods in Thailand and the Japanese tsunami. Each disrupted the supply of critical components for weeks. By comparison, moving production for every component that makes up the iPhone would take years, if it were even possible.

“The building, the physical equipment—that’s the easy part,” Hillman said. “But human capital—the investment in people, the experiential knowledge—that’s the hard part.”

Needless to say, a targeted program to hire half a million Chinese workers wouldn’t fly with MAGA supporters—and Beijing could react in any number of ways to harm Apple.

Indeed, Beijing has quietly exerted its power in the past. When Xi Jinping took office in late 2012, Apple engineers found that rules limiting their stay in the country were suddenly enforced. Some even had to pay fines on the spot. At times, supplies moving from one Apple supplier to another hit inexplicable road blocks. A U.S. State Department official living in China at the time recalls that such inconveniences—known as bu fang bian in Mandarin—went from relatively rare, before Xi took over, to pervasive.

The Chinese government is in a position to make Apple’s diversification efforts painful. “They can lower the boom on you in a million different ways,” said Brady MacKay, a former U.S. special agent and attaché to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, who has seen the Chinese Communist Party deploy a number of tactics against other companies to make its point. “Like, raw materials—they can shut that off in a heartbeat,” he said. “Electricity—all of a sudden it’s only available four hours a day.”

Apple’s quarter-century consolidation into China has left it deeply vulnerable. While Cook likes to say the iPhone is “made everywhere,” alluding to how hundreds of suppliers originating from at least 40 countries contribute to its production, all roads lead through China. Even the phones labeled “made in India” are just assembled there—after extensive tooling, stamping, shaping, etching, and fitting of all the materials and parts in China.

Meanwhile, Apple’s engineering lessons to China’s top suppliers now face diminishing returns. The latest phones from homegrown champions Huawei and Oppo now match, and arguably exceed, the flagship devices from Apple. The student, as they say, is becoming the master.

Hillman, the 16-year Apple veteran, compared Beijing to “a Shaolin master who can incapacitate their adversary with just a two-finger pinch of a nerve cluster.” It’s a good analogy; unfortunately, erratic changes in policy are making Washington look more like Beverly Hills Ninja, the 1997 Chris Farley character remembered for striking himself in the groin with nunchucks.

Patrick McGee is the author of the forthcoming book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company.

Free Press columnist Tyler Cowen is optimistic about the U.S. winning the AI arms race with China. To learn why, read his piece, “The Conventional Wisdom Is That China Is Beating Us. Nonsense.”

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

12. Pentagon Turns Focus to Potentially Privatizing Commissaries, Military Exchanges

Sigh... here we go again.

Pentagon Turns Focus to Potentially Privatizing Commissaries, Military Exchanges

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin,Thomas Novelly · April 11, 2025

The Pentagon’s newest push to trim its workforce and spending could mean that on-base grocery stores and shops designed to save service members and their families money could ultimately be sold off to the private sector.

An April 7 memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg listed a wide range of possible reforms aimed at "delivering maximum value to the warfighter." Among them included "all functions that are not inherently governmental (e.g. retail sales and recreation) should be prioritized for privatization."

A defense official familiar with the intent behind the memo told Military.com on Thursday that there weren't any off-limit areas for cuts or privatization. Commissaries, military-run hotels, and on-base welfare facilities were all fair game, they said.

However, the official noted that it was up to the individual military services to bring forward suggestions and that just because something like a commissary is put forward for privatization doesn't automatically mean that it will be sold off.

"Everything is pre-decisional right now," the official said.

Privatizing aspects of the military's support services has a long and largely problematic history that has resulted in markedly poorer outcomes for service members while offering little in the way of savings for the Pentagon.

William "Bill" Moore, who served as the director and CEO of the Defense Commissary Agency, or DeCA, between 2020 and 2024, wrote in an opinion piece for the Ripon Society think tank last year that "privatizing commissaries is, quite simply, a bad idea."

Moore explained to Military.com in an interview Friday that funding from Congress helps subsidize the commissaries, allowing them to offer products much more affordably than other grocery stores.

"If you privatize without subsidy, I guarantee you, there is no way they will be able to save military families anything," Moore said. "I would be shocked if any for-profit company could take over the commissaries and deliver any benefit to military families beyond convenience. There's no way they could sell items at the prices the commissary could."

Commissaries have taken scrutiny in recent years. A 2022 Government Accountability office report critiqued the methodology for how the agency calculated some of its customer savings rates, describing it as "unreliable."

Moore told Military.com that they "fixed a lot of that" and were still working on improving those savings estimates up to his departure from DeCA.

While commissaries are nonprofit organizations by law, profits from military exchanges -- retail stores on military bases that sell a wide variety of products -- also get cycled into the Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs for service members and their families.

It was unclear how those recreation programs would be fully funded if exchanges were turned over to private companies, which would likely choose to pocket those profits.

Notably, some of the top leaders in the Trump administration have voiced their support for privatization efforts in the past.

Former Rep. Mike Waltz, now Trump's national security adviser, said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last year that he wanted the military "out of the hotel management business" and said the private sector could do the job "incredibly well" when it came to base housing.

As cautionary tales of privatization go, the military's handover of family housing is a prime example. For decades, the arrangement has caused a raft of problems involving companies that manage the units where troops and their families live.

Balfour Beatty, a massive company that manages more than 40,000 military homes across more than 50 bases, has repeatedly been sued and forced to pay restitution to military families for its consistent failure to ensure military homes in its care are safe and livable.

Two weeks ago, the company was hit with yet another lawsuit that alleged the company "concealed the horrific conditions from unsuspecting service men and women and their families" and then, "when these conditions were discovered and reported, Balfour systematically failed to properly repair and remediate significant problems."

However, the company's history of shoddy work goes back decades.

In 2019, Balfour Beatty was caught up in a nationwide scandal over squalid family housing and pleaded guilty in 2021 to falsifying maintenance records that went as far back as 2013. The company was ordered to pay $65.4 million in fines and restitution for misconduct related to its military housing practices in federal contracts.

And yet, despite that scandal and fine, in 2022, an eight-month investigation by a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs panel found the company was continuing to ignore residents' concerns over mold, asbestos and other problems in their homes.

Balfour Beatty is not alone, though.

In 2020, families of Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, took several private companies that run housing on that base to court over their alleged failure to provide safe residences or respond to complaints of mold, mildew, water intrusion, roaches and maintenance problems.

That same year, nine Army families also sued their privatized base housing landlords at Fort Cavazos, Texas, over allegations of life-threatening levels of mold and "deplorable" conditions in their homes that ruined their belongings.

An Army family at the base was awarded $10.3 million in 2024 after they were forced to live in a mold-infested home run by a private Army housing company, leading to repeated hospitalizations of their newborn infant for respiratory difficulties.

Those issues have not stopped the military from trying to create new privatized housing solutions for troops. In September, Edwards Air Force Base, California, broke ground on the service's first privatized on-base apartment complex.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin,Thomas Novelly · April 11, 2025

13. Elon Musk, Owner of X, Complains He's Losing 'Propaganda War'

"Is the medium the message?"

"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

- Marshall McLuhan

Or is it not?

On Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is NOT the Message

https://bookoblivion.com/2018/09/14/the-medium-is-not-the-message/

No matter the medium, the message is the message

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/matter-medium-message-craig-winneker/

Maybe Mr. Musk just needs a better message.

Elon Musk, Owner of X, Complains He's Losing 'Propaganda War'

Rolling Stone · by Naomi LaChance · April 12, 2025

Elon Musk, who owns one of the world’s biggest social media platforms, has spent many millions of dollars on politics as he helps Donald Trump slash the federal government and continue the administration’s attack on immigrants. Now, Musk is saying that he is losing the “propaganda war,” potentially through his own choices.

Recent polling shows people don’t like Musk. On Friday, numbers pundit Nate Silver posted on X that Musk’s popularity is at negative 14 points. Trump, for comparison, is at negative 5 points. The chart shows that Musk’s popularity markedly decreased when Trump took office, with 39.6 percent of respondents viewing him favorably as of this month.

Musk blamed this decline on liberals waging a successful propaganda campaign against him, and suggested that Republicans are not boosting him in kind. But he also more or less admitted he is making himself unpopular.

“The inevitable outcome of having a political propaganda war waged against me while I have almost no countervailing campaign and, at times, digging my own grave way better than my enemies do,” Musk replied to Silver, adding two crying-laughing emojis at the end, an emoji he uses frequently.

As Rolling Stone reported earlier this week, Musk’s pillaging of the government is infuriating everyday Americans and Trump aides alike.

“Talking to the guy is sometimes like listening to really rusty nails on a chalkboard,” a senior Trump administration official told Rolling Stone. “He’s just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that is saying something.”

Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been furiously slashing the federal government, purging workers, and aiding Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, with more firings on the way. And on Friday, Politico reported that longtime Musk buddy Antonio Gracias is leading a DOGE immigration task force that has wormed itself into the Department of Homeland Security. Gracias has also made misleading claims about non-citizens receiving Social Security based on data that a court barred DOGE from accessing.

Musk embarrassed himself recently in a foray into state politics when the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate he supported by reportedly sinking $25 million into the campaign lost the election. People did not like that he offered $1 million checks to voters at an event supporting candidate Brad Schimel. A poll by Blueprint Research found that 69 percent of voters disapproved of the move. The poll also put net approval for Musk’s handling of DOGE at negative 19 points.

Last weekend, tens of thousands of Americans and activists around the globe came out to protest Trump and Musk’s destruction — including DOGE’s cuts to Social Security. And if the protests weren’t clear enough, people have been vandalizing Tesla vehicles and dealerships. Someone even vandalized a 12-foot-tall statue of Musk. Why someone would put a 12-foot-tall statue of Musk on their property is unclear.

A factor in Musk’s role in the social media-obsessed Trump administration is that he owns X, allowing him to have major influence online and shape the discourse. For example, the Social Security Administration is reportedly moving all of its public communications to X in addition to dramatically cutting regional staff and offices, according to Wired.

Musk raised alarm bells recently when he called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

“We are no longer planning to issue press releases or those dear colleague letters to inform the media and public about programmatic and service changes,” Social Security Administration regional commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis told workers earlier this week, Wired reported. “Instead, the agency will be using X to communicate to the press and the public … so this will become our communication mechanism.”

Appropriately, the Social Security Administration took to X to dispute the story. “This is false. Social Security will continue to communicate through any and all mediums,” the agency posted.

Rolling Stone · by Naomi LaChance · April 12, 2025

14. Can a trade war lead to a shooting war? Trump and Xi, take note: Yes.

Excerpts:

Even if the U.S.-China trade conflict stays cold, a similar dynamic is likely to prevail — the more economic losses each side suffers, the less likely they will be back down. Both Washington and Beijing will likely feel compelled to keep going until they can claim some kind of “victory,” and the costlier the conflict, the greater the compensation that will be demanded as part of any settlement.

What is needed now is heroic self-restraint of the kind exercised by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy, in particular, was acutely aware of the risks of an accidental war after having just read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” about the outbreak of World War I. He engineered a secret deal that would have the Soviet Union remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba in return for a promise to remove obsolete U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. World War III was averted.

Today we are in desperate need of a similar face-saving deal between Trump and Xi (perhaps similar to the one they reached during Trump’s first term) before the trade war between the two largest economies escalates and does irreparable harm to the entire world. Both leaders are proud men who cannot be seen to surrender — but both have an interest in ending this unnecessary conflict before it’s too late.

Opinion

Max Boot

Can a trade war lead to a shooting war? Trump and Xi, take note: Yes.

The United States and China risk falling into the Thucydides Trap amid the Trump-Xi tariff standoff.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/14/trump-xi-china-tariffs/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_max_boot&utm

April 14, 2

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump. (AFP via Getty Images) (Andres Martinez Casaressaul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

In 2014, eminent political scientist Graham Allison published an influential book called “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” The subtitle referred to a famous passage in Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”

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Allison surveyed the history of the past 500 years and found 16 cases in which a major nation’s rise has disrupted the position of a dominant state. In 12 of those instances, the result was war. And that includes two of the most horrific conflicts in history: World War I was caused in no small part by the rise of Imperial Germany, while World War II was caused by the rise of both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Allison sounded an alarm that another conflict was brewing because the rise of China was threatening U.S. hegemony. There was nothing inevitable about a U.S.-China conflict, he wrote in 2014, but the odds were that one would eventually erupt.

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I’ve been thinking about Allison’s warning now that President Donald Trump has launched a trade war against China. (Allison told me on Friday that he has been “hearing the same echoes” of his own warning.) Trump initially targeted the whole world with his so-called reciprocal tariffs (which were far higher than the tariffs other nations charge the U.S. exports), but after a bond market rout, he reduced tariff rates on most countries to a still-high 10 percent rate. At the same time, Trump escalated tariffs against China — the third-largest U.S. trading partner — to an eye-popping 145 percent. Not backing down, Chinese leader Xi Jinping responded by imposing 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods.

Trump did slightly relax the tariffs on Friday night by exempting smartphones and other electronics from the highest rates. But if the rest of the “reciprocal” tariffs remain in place, they will essentially block two-thirds of China’s exports to the United States, thereby making a recession likely. That, in turn, would raise the risk of even more apocalyptic scenarios such as a global depression or even an actual war.

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Allison emailed me that “the good news is that most tariff or economic wars don’t become hot wars. The bad news is that some do. And if I compare the likelihoods of hot wars in cases in which there was no trade war to cases with a trade war, in the latter case the odds go up.” Indeed, history is replete with examples of trade wars turning into shooting wars.

The Anglo-Dutch naval wars of the 17th and 18th centuries were the result of commercial competition between Britain and the Netherlands. The colonial competition for resources in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped lead to World War I. The long road to Pearl Harbor began with the United States promulgating an Open Door policy, which blocked Japanese designs on China by insisting that all nations should have equal access to its market. When Japan began invading China in 1931, the United States responded with economic sanctions, first targeting exports of scrap metal and aviation fuel to Japan, followed by raw materials such as iron, brass, copper and, finally, oil.

As Allison notes, it was the oil embargo, which threatened to strangle the Japanese economy, that led Japan to the desperate gambit of attacking the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. This preemptive strike was designed to prevent the United States from interfering with Japan’s campaign of conquest in East Asia, including of the resource-rich Dutch East Indies and French Indochina.

In his book, Allison sketched out a scenario — “unlikely but not impossible” — for how a trade conflict between the United States and China could end in a nuclear war. It begins with a president determined to stop China from overtaking the United States economically. His grievances include “Chinese cheating on trade agreements, currency, intellectual property, industrial subsidies, and artificially cheap drug exports.” To level the playing field, this president labels China a currency manipulator and threatens tariffs of up to 50 percent.

China responds by blocking some American exports to China, interfering with the operations of U.S. factories in China, and selling some of the $1 trillion in U.S. treasuries that it holds. The American president escalates by demanding repayment of $1.23 trillion for U.S. intellectual property stolen by China. As the conflict escalates, China activates malware that leads to U.S. stock market crashes and wipes out millions of accounts in U.S. banks. To prevent any more damage, the American president dispatches a stealthy drone to attack the headquarters of PLA Unit 61398, China’s version of the National Security Agency. But China detects the attack and retaliates by launching missiles at the U.S. air base in Japan that launched the drone.

It’s easy to dismiss this fictional scenario as far-fetched, but, until the past week, it was also pretty far-fetched to imagine a U.S. president imposing 145 percent tariffs on China. (In Allison’s worst-case scenario, the tariffs are “only” 50 percent.) And China’s ability to carry out cyberattacks is very real: The Wall Street Journal reports that a Chinese official in December implicitly acknowledged to U.S. counterparts that Beijing had been behind intrusions into computer networks at “U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets” in retaliation for “increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan.”

What might China do now in response to U.S. tariffs that threaten its economic well-being? China has every incentive to expand its range of responses beyond raising its own tariffs because it imports far fewer goods from the United States than the United States imports from China. This is an unprecedented crisis, and it is impossible to predict how it will play out, but it’s important to remember how tragic miscalculations have led to war before.

None of the combatants in World War I wanted to fight a long and costly war, but they nevertheless “sleepwalked” (as one historian termed it) into one in August 1914. By Christmas of that year, the Western Front had become a stalemate. Rational actors on both sides should have ended the carnage rather than allowing it to continue for four more years. But by that point, both sides had suffered such heavy losses that backing down was unthinkable. As in so many conflicts, grievances accumulate, national honor is aroused, and a war lasts far longer and exacts a far greater toll than anyone wanted or anticipated.

Even if the U.S.-China trade conflict stays cold, a similar dynamic is likely to prevail — the more economic losses each side suffers, the less likely they will be back down. Both Washington and Beijing will likely feel compelled to keep going until they can claim some kind of “victory,” and the costlier the conflict, the greater the compensation that will be demanded as part of any settlement.

What is needed now is heroic self-restraint of the kind exercised by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy, in particular, was acutely aware of the risks of an accidental war after having just read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” about the outbreak of World War I. He engineered a secret deal that would have the Soviet Union remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba in return for a promise to remove obsolete U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. World War III was averted.

Today we are in desperate need of a similar face-saving deal between Trump and Xi (perhaps similar to the one they reached during Trump’s first term) before the trade war between the two largest economies escalates and does irreparable harm to the entire world. Both leaders are proud men who cannot be seen to surrender — but both have an interest in ending this unnecessary conflict before it’s too late.

0 Comments

By Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.

15. Justice Dept. says it’s not required to bring back wrongly deported man

If this were a wrongfully detain person in a foreign country State officials would be doing everything to bring him how. They would get him released from the prison and on a flight back home ASAP.

And of course a case could be made that he is in fact wrongfully "detained" in his current situation.

Of course the President of El Salvador could just have him released and put on his plane since he is coming to DC for a visit.

And then there is the Supreme Court "ruling."

Maryland

Justice Dept. says it’s not required to bring back wrongly deported man

A Supreme Court ruling only requires facilitating the removal of “domestic barriers” against bringing Kilmar Abrego García back from El Salvador, the Justice Department argues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/04/13/admin-says-its-not-required-help-get-md-man-out-el-salvador/

UpdatedApril 14, 2025 at 7:12 a.m. EDT17 minutes ago

5 min

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Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego García of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA's Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, on April 4. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

By Olivia George and Marianne LeVine

The Trump administration said Sunday that it is not required to engage El Salvador’s government in efforts to facilitate the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a notorious prison there, striking a defiant tone in responding to a federal judge’s order that plans be made to bring him back to the United States.

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Federal officials said Sunday that a ruling by the Supreme Court required only that the administration allow Kilmar Abrego García to return should he be released by the government of El Salvador. The administration also argued, in filings Sunday evening in U.S. District Court in Maryland, that Abrego García “is no longer eligible” for the protection from deportation that should have prevented him from being sent to El Salvador in the first place.

The contentions set the stage for another test of the ability of the federal judiciary to rein in an administration that has moved to aggressively expand its executive power in ways courts have deemed illegal and unconstitutional.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers had no immediate comment on the court filings. But the lawyers have repeatedly said he is danger of being tortured and killed in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison where dozens of inmates share a cell. On Saturday, they argued that the government should face contempt of court for failing to lay out efforts to repatriate Abrego García after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the administration must facilitate his return.

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The Trump administration said Sunday that it had “no updates” on those efforts, according to a letter to the court Sunday evening. While noting that the president of El Salvador “is currently in the United States and will be meeting with President Donald Trump,” Justice Department officials wrote, “the federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner.”

Any further order from the court would “interfere with ongoing diplomatic discussions” and result in the release of “classified documents,” the officials argued, describing Abrego Garcia’s lawyers’ request for more detailed information as “micromanaging” U.S. foreign relations.

Moreover, the government argued that “facilitate” means only “allowing an alien to enter the United States” by “taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here,” not removing him from the custody of another country. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis initially ruled that the Trump administration must “effectuate” Abrego García’s return; the Supreme Court said that part of her order was “unclear” and might overstep the judiciary’s power.

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“The underlying issue here is the Supreme Court left enough room for the government to argue that they were complying with the order without necessarily following the spirit of the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. “If [the judge] says the government is not complying sufficiently, then that will go again on appeal to the Fourth Circuit and … the Supreme Court.”

At the same time as the Justice Department told the court that it was complying with the court’s orders, Immigration and Customs Enforcement argued to the court that Abrego García no longer qualifies for protection from deportation because he is alleged to be a member of a Salvadoran gang. Abrego García, who has never been arrested or accused of a crime, denies any such affiliation.

In 2019, Abrego García was detained by police in Prince George’s County outside a Home Depot with several other men and asked about a murder. He repeatedly denied being in a gang or having knowledge of any crime. He was subsequently put into immigration proceedings, where officials argued he was an active member of a New York-based MS-13 group based on his Chicago Bulls gear and the word of a confidential informant.

A U.S. immigration judge ultimately released him and shielded him from deportation to El Salvador because he was likely to face persecution there by a local gang that tried to extort his family and then recruit him into their ranks before he fled the county. The Trump administration did not appeal that decision.

While acknowledging that he “should not have been removed to El Salvador because” of the immigration judge’s ruling, Evan C. Katz of ICE wrote that Abrego García “is no longer eligible for withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

Xinis has already declared that there is no evidence Abrego García is a gang member, noting in an earlier ruling that he has never lived in New York.

The judge had previously lambasted a government lawyer who couldn’t explain what, if anything, the administration had done to arrange for Abrego García return.

“Where is he and under whose authority?” she asked in a Maryland courtroom Friday.

“That is extremely troubling,” she said.

His location at the mega-prison was confirmed in a Justice Department filing the next day.

Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.Maryland

16. Military schools offer test case for Trump education reforms

Not PME but military academies and K-12. This could go south for DODEA and military parents if there is push back (and more protests by students).

Military schools offer test case for Trump education reforms

by Lexi Lonas Cochran - 04/13/25 5:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5244886-military-academies-trump-education-dei-book-bans-hegseth-transgender-athletes/?mc_cid=87b625de73

Military academies could increasingly show what President Trump wants to see from public schools and colleges. 

While K-12 districts and universities are fighting back against book removals; transgender athlete bans; and the termination of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, the administration has a far freer hand at military institutions. 

Military schools fall under an entirely different set of laws and regulations from public ones and are under the direct control of Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, though a recent protest at a military middle school in Germany shows students are not entirely on board with their reforms. 

“Historically speaking, the military has always been one step ahead politically of where society is because of the controlled environment,” said Bobby Jones, president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership. 

“In some respects, the military can be used as a social experimentation area because of the controlled environment, and everybody has to roger up to the orders,” Jones continued, adding “it would not surprise” him if what is happening at service academies was indicative of what the Trump administration wants at other universities. 

The president has signed multiple executive orders affecting military schools, including bans on DEI and on transgender girls and women competing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Unlike with some of his other education orders, the results have been swift.

The U.S. Naval Academy has already removed around 400 books from its library that it says promoted DEI. The removals from the Nimitz Library collection, the academy said, were done “in order to ensure compliance with all directives outlined in Executive Orders issued by the President.” 

West Point and the Air Force Academy are also reviewing their curriculum and will look at the content of their libraries if directed to do so, according to The Associated Press. 

And despite a judge ruling in December that the affirmative action policies at the Naval Academy were legal, the academy announced it would no longer consider race or ethnicity as a factor in admission last month.

On Friday, the federal government said in a court filing that the Air Force Academy has also ended race-conscious admissions. 

Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation, said that Trump’s orders are “actually doubling down on how we understand civil rights law should be applied.”

“That’s the best way that I feel like we should describe many of these executive orders dealing with diversity, equity, inclusion … as opposed to creating something new when it comes to a military academy,” Butcher said.

The 160 K-12 schools under control of the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), which serve some 66,000 students, have also seen books and certain lesson plans pulled from classrooms, as well as guidance saying programs and facilities for girls can “only be accessed by biological females.” 

The changes at these schools have not happened quietly. 

On Thursday, hundreds of students at schools under DoDEA control protested book bans and anti-DEI measures that were implemented in their classrooms, Military.com reported. The protests occurred at facilities in the U.S., Asia and Europe.

Students at a middle school in Germany staged a walkout in February over anti-DEI measures that was timed to coincide with Hegseth visiting the country.

But apart from such demonstrations, those at the academy or schools under DoDEA control do not have the same mechanisms to challenge policy changes as those in public schools.

Currently, the Department of Education has sent out letters to public universities and K-12 schools that demands they get rid of any DEI policies or risk losing federal funding. For administrators and students at civilian schools, a decision must be made on whether to challenge the reforms in court and risk budget cuts.

But when it comes to military academies, Butcher said, “it’s a whole different set of laws. It is a part of an extension of U.S. government by as an extension of the military.”

Several students at military K-12 schools told USA Today they were threatened with detention, not being allowed to play on their schools’ sports teams or facing unexcused absences if they participated in the pro-DEI protests. 

“DoDEA policies on attendance and student discipline have not changed. While student-led walkouts in the past have concluded without serious incidents, the cumulative disruption to the DoDEA school system negatively impacted classroom instruction and pulled resources away from normal school operations to ensure student safety,” DoDEA said in a statement.

While the agency said it encourages civic engagement through forms such as student government, it “does not support or endorse student walkouts.”

“Unfortunately, the dependents of service members have to deal with it, which is why they protested it,” Jones said. “They had no say in DEI programs going away. There was no local school district for them to appeal to. It was a direct order from the Department of Defense.”

And the president is tightening his control on the nation’s military academies not only through executive orders but also in whom he appoints to their boards. While the boards are normally made up of individuals chosen in a bipartisan manner, Trump has leaned on conservative allies and media personalities.

The Air Force Academy board will include individuals such as conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), retired Col. Doug Nikolai and Dina Powell, who served in the first Trump administration. 

“The boards of visitors that oversee the five service academies are political appointees, historically speaking, those people appointed to those boards have been a mixture of both left and right, conservative, liberal, because they recognize that the officers that generate from those schools have to be balanced and be able to be critical thinkers [and] all this other stuff. It goes beyond petty politics,” Jones said. 

He added that the damage to the institutions could be long-lasting, saying that though he attended one himself, he would not allow his children to do so.

“I have two daughters, one of which could enlist right now, and another in a couple of years could do the same thing. Both mom and dad went to the Naval Academy. Their great grandfather was a Tuskegee Airman. Their other great grandfather was a Korean War veteran. And my wife and I [were] like, ‘Nope, you’re not going.’ … That’s how powerful the influence of Trump and Hegseth have become,” he added.  

17. ‘Extreme’ US-China decoupling could cost US$2.5 trillion in equity, bond sell-off: Goldman

It may not be E.F. Hutton, but these days when Goldman talks, do people listen?

‘Extreme’ US-China decoupling could cost US$2.5 trillion in equity, bond sell-off: Goldman

Threat of decoupling emerged after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said delisting of US-traded Chinese companies was back on the table

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3306443/us-china-decoupling-could-cost-us25-trillion-extreme-goldman-warns?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article

Zhang Shidongin Shanghai

Published: 6:00pm, 14 Apr 2025Updated: 7:21pm, 14 Apr 2025

A decoupling between the world’s two largest capital markets could cost US$2.5 trillion in an extreme scenario, as investors from the US and China are forced to divest their holdings of equities and debt instruments, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.

US investors could be forced to sell nearly US$800 billion of Chinese stocks trading on American exchanges in case of a decoupling, the US investment bank’s analysts led by Kinger Lau and Timothy Moe said in a report on Monday. On the flip side, China could liquidate its US Treasury and equity holdings amounting to US$1.3 trillion and US$370 billion, respectively.

The sell-off was based on the assumption that US investors would be restricted by US regulations from such investments, they said.

The risk of US-China decoupling has shown signs of spreading beyond trade after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the option of delisting US-traded Chinese companies was on the table amid a tit-for-tat tariff war between the two nations. The Trump administration has slapped a 145 per cent duty on exports from China, while Beijing has struck back with a 125 per cent levy on all US imports and another 20 per cent on selected American goods.

“In the capital markets, equity investors are very focused on the renewed risk of Chinese ADR [American depositary receipt] delisting,” Goldman analysts said in the report.

Trader Peter Michael Tuchman reacts as he works on the floor of the NYSE on Friday. Photo: Agence France-Presse

Should the threat become a reality, it will affect nearly 300 companies, including some of China’s biggest technology companies. As of March 7, 286 mainland Chinese companies were listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the NYSE American and the Nasdaq, with a combined market capitalisation of US$1.1 trillion, according to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The delisting of Chinese companies from the US could have significant fundamental implications, including reduced access to the deeper capital pool in the US, potentially lower valuation multiples due to loss of investor base and lower liquidity, according to James Wang, head of China strategy at UBS Investment Bank Research.

“Nevertheless, we note that capital raising from ADRs has diminished in recent years while Hong Kong’s role has increased,” he added.

Alibaba Group Holding is the biggest US-listed Chinese firm, with a market capitalisation of US$257 billion currently, according to Bloomberg data. E-commerce rival PDD Holdings is second with a market value of US$125.7 billion, followed by online game operator NetEase at US$64 billion.

The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index, which tracks 68 US-listed Chinese companies with a total market value of US$239.2 billion, has tumbled 15 per cent this month, as the Trump administration’s so-called reciprocal tariffs sent global financial markets into a tailspin. The S&P 500 Index has dropped 4.4 per cent in the period and the Hang Seng Index has retreated 9.5 per cent.

The underperformance highlights the renewed regulatory risk for US-listed Chinese companies, most of which trade in the form of ADRs, which are surrogate securities that make offerings in the US easier.

China raises tariffs on US goods to 125% as Xi calls on EU to resist ‘unilateral bullying’

In 2022, five state-backed companies – PetroChina, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp, China Life Insurance, Aluminium Corporation of China and Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical – delisted from the US amid an auditing dispute. The crisis was later defused after regulators from both sides reached an agreement to allow audit inspections in Hong Kong.

Since then, many US-listed companies have pursued secondary listings in Hong Kong or converted to a dual-primary listing status to avoid the delisting threat in the US. Alibaba, the owner of the Post, completed its conversion to a dual listing in August last year, paving the way for the stock to be available for trading by mainland Chinese investors through the Stock Connect programme.

Goldman expects a new wave of US-listed Chinese stocks to return to Hong Kong as the risk of US-China financial decoupling simmers. Currently, 27 firms with primary US listings are qualified for secondary or dual-primary listings in the city, according to the US bank. These firms have a combined market value of US$184 billion and include PDD, Full Truck Alliance and Futu.

“We believe potential Hong Kong listing for these companies could probably catalyse a re-rating given the flexibility for US investors to convert their ADRs to Hong Kong shares” in case of a disruptive liquidity event, Goldman analysts said.

Zhang Shidong

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Zhang Shidong is based in Shanghai and reports on business for the Post. He joined the team in 2017, following stints covering China's stock market news for Bloomberg and at a local newspaper in Shanghai.

18. From Thucydides to Twitter – The Urgent Need for Long-term Strategic Thinking

Yes. We need to think longer term when doing strategy. President Trump said recently he admired China for being able to take a long term view.

Conclusion:

In an age of infinite information, strategy must be finite. In an era of instant reaction, the best strategists must embrace the discipline of restraint. And in a world that prizes the now, the strategist must think not in minutes or news cycles but in decades. The caveman is not obsolete—he is more necessary than ever.

This was my recommendation to discipline the process for long term sustained strategy development. The title is misleading. It was actually not meant to use Ike's Cold War strategy but to adapt his solarium process for sustained strategy development in a disciplined way.

Project Solarium 2.0: Can Eisenhower’s Cold War Strategy Work Today?

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/project-solarium-2-0-can-eisenhowers-cold-war-strategy-work-today/

From Thucydides to Twitter

By Phillip Dolitsky

April 14, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/04/14/from_thucydides_to_twitter_1103763.html?mc_cid=87b625de73

The Urgent Need for Long-term Strategic Thinking

The recent shuttering of the Office of Net Assessment marks the end of an era at the Pentagon, closing the book on one of the few institutions that helped America think beyond the present moment. Whatever replaces it—whether it’s a restructured version of the same office or a new entity altogether (perhaps something with a name like the Office of Strategic Advantage)—will face a challenge far greater than mere bureaucratic reorganization: the modern strategist is drowning in information.

Crafting good military strategy requires slow, deliberate judgment and creativity, away from the noise of the present. Today, however, the strategist is often expected to function less like a grandmaster at a chessboard, creatively calculating future moves, and more like a stock trader, reacting in real-time to an unceasing flood of open-source intelligence, social media updates and political noise. The temptation to prioritize the immediate over the enduring, the transient over the real, is a relentless struggle in our digital age, and the sheer volume of information often obscures the truths that actually matter.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw the early symptoms of this disease in the 19th century. A brilliant classicist, he quickly grew disillusioned with the Prussian education system, which he saw as trading deep learning for superficial knowledge. In a series of lectures titled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, Nietzsche lamented that students, after spending the day reading the great works of history and literature, would immediately reach for the daily newspaper. They surrendered their minds to mass opinion and immediacy, allowing headlines to shape their understanding of the world rather than the enduring lessons of history. “The daily newspaper has effectively replaced education,” he warned, describing how it coated every intellectual discipline with a “sticky layer of journalism.”

If that was true in Nietzsche’s time, it is exponentially more so today. The strategist who allows himself to be formed by the immediate—especially by the digital ecosystem that conditions people to think in 280-character bursts—becomes not a strategist but a functionary of the moment. He will offer only "presentist strategies." Just as the student who reads only newspapers and never books becomes informed but not educated, the strategist who follows only the news becomes reactive but not visionary. B.H. Liddell Hart once remarked that “there is no excuse for anyone who is not illiterate if he is less than three thousand years old in mind.” Today’s minds can hardly remember what occurred three hours ago. Those minds have no place in strategic planning.

The best American strategists of the 20th century understood this. Figures like Bernard Brodie, George Kennan, Paul Nitze and Herman Kahn were all in their own way steeped in the Western tradition of literature, history, and philosophy. They read deeply—from Thucydides to Shakespeare—and used these texts to refine their understanding of power, conflict, and human nature. Their immersion in the Western canon allowed them to think in centuries rather than news cycles, avoiding the trap of presentism. In his last book before his passing, Henry Kissinger identified “deep literacy” as a vital character trait that the good stateman ought to possess, for it “helps leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion.” Deep literacy cannot be cultivated via social media.

The irony of our era is that the more information we have, the harder it is to know what to do with it. Clausewitz wrote about the "fog of war"—the uncertainty inherent in military operations. But today’s strategist faces a different kind of fog, generated not by a lack of information but by an overabundance of it. The strategist must not only present himself with superb skills of discernment, so that he can pick out the relative details needed to craft good strategy, but he must also have a temperament and disposition that has not been corrupted by the digital era we all inhabit.

Kissinger noted that while the internet and social media make news immediately more accessible, “this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable – let alone wiser.” Mere information and data points are useless to the strategist, he says. “For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom, it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience.” In our digital age, leaders and strategic thinkers must struggle against the tide of this social media landscape.

This is why modern strategy demands a kind of retreat. The strategist must, to some degree, be a modern caveman. He must step away from the news cycle, strip away the superfluous noise inherent in the bureaucracy and focus on the essential components that have historically made for good strategy. The creative questions the strategist must ask are not ones that will be answered by minds that have been formed on the ephemeral nature of social media, nor the maelstrom that is modern political life. They require disciplined, secluded thinking, informed by a deep study of history and strategic theory. Moreover, the best strategies have almost always been crafted away from the interagency process; one cannot crowd the strategists’ office with policy makers and bureaucrats who have more immediate concerns.

The dangers of presentist strategy are not hypothetical. Take, for instance, the Biden administration’s response to the war in Gaza. From the outset, the White House focused heavily on humanitarian concerns, pressuring Israel to increase aid to Gaza, even though aid was consistently stolen by Hamas. The Israeli government complied, facilitating an unprecedented level of assistance. Yet the Biden administration, seemingly paying more attention to social media narratives than to strategic considerations, decided that more needed to be done. The result was the ill-fated floating pier—a project conceived in the heat of media pressure rather than strategic necessity (had no one stopped to wonder about the success of a floating pier in the tumultuous Mediterranean Sea?). Tens of millions of dollars were wasted, and an American servicemember lost his life. This is what happens when foreign policy is dictated by the news cycle, when too many voices shout down the strategist’s need for quiet, deliberate thinking and judgement.

Contrast this debacle with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a great example in slow, deliberate strategic thought and planning. In October 1962, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExCom) had to navigate a nuclear standoff under immense pressure. Yet despite the urgency of the crisis, they could only move as fast as intelligence and diplomatic channels allowed. Unlike today’s policymakers, who are inundated with real-time updates and social media trends, ExCom members were forced to analyze incomplete data and make decisions with limited knowledge. They did not succumb to the tyranny of the moment. Instead, they methodically debated each course of action, weighing the risks of escalation against the benefits of diplomacy, guided by their real life experience and historical study. Secretary of Defense McNamara’s central insight during the crisis—that missiles in Cuba did not fundamentally alter the strategic balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union—is the type of insight that might have been harder to see had he lived in a world where social media shapes the narrative and reality of the day. Just imagine what the Tweets would look like and how they might have reached ExCom and altered its process. Had they reacted impulsively to each piece of incoming intelligence, or had they seen how the outside world reacted to the events in Cuba (when they lacked the complete picture) the world might have faced a nuclear cataclysm.

Strategy requires intellectual discipline. It demands a willingness to step back from the noise of the present in order to discern the patterns of history and the enduring principles of power. The caveman, in this sense, is not a hermit who disengages from reality but a thinker who understands that the best decisions are not made in the frenzy of the moment but in the solitude of careful deliberation. In the cave, there must only be present those tools and people that can help ensure clear and creative strategic thinking. There is no room for petty politics, personal vendettas or an eye towards the newspaper and its daily headlines.

If the Pentagon hopes to replace the Office of Net Assessment with something better, it must resist the urge to create another bureaucracy driven by short-term demands. It must instead carve out a space for thinkers who are willing to retreat into the cave, to study history, to grapple with enduring strategic principles and to emerge only when they have something of true consequence to say. It is this willingness to be secluded from the tyranny of the present that should be the most important character trait that the Department of Defense looks for in its future strategists. It was the slow, deliberate and relentless pursuit of truth that characterized the late Andrew Marshall’s approach to net assessment. His own reflections on net assessment are a testament to his extraordinary ability to think through problems from all angles and bring his wide and deep reading to every problem. We must honor his legacy by ensuring that a rebuilt Office of Net Assessment continues that same approach to long-term strategic planning and net assessment.

In an age of infinite information, strategy must be finite. In an era of instant reaction, the best strategists must embrace the discipline of restraint. And in a world that prizes the now, the strategist must think not in minutes or news cycles but in decades. The caveman is not obsolete—he is more necessary than ever.

Phillip Dolitsky is a Strategic Advisor at The Philos Project.

19. Hegseth’s Memo, What To Do Next

Conclusion:

Secretary Hegseth gave until last Friday for defense leaders to submit their recapitalization plans—a date that underscores the urgency of this moment. If speed and agility become the driving forces behind America’s defense strategy, industry collaboration, and acquisition processes, the United States will decisively outpace its adversaries to win tomorrow’s conflicts before they begin. The signal flare has gone up, the opportunity to deliver capabilities faster, cheaper, and more effectively is not only possible—it is imperative. We agree with the Secretary that the time to act is now.

Hegseth’s Memo, What To Do Next

By Tim Ray & Jim Smith

April 14, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/04/14/hegseths_memo_what_to_do_next_1103761.html?mc_cid=87b625de73

As DOGE’s eye shifts to the Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calls on his defense leaders to accelerate their workforce and recapitalization plans by the end of the week, our national security ecosystem has an unprecedented opportunity to radically restructure and set itself not for yesterday’s wars, but tomorrow’s security.

To seize the moment, DOGE and Secretary Hegseth's team have many reform options at their disposal: streamline bureaucratic processes, overhaul acquisitions, and double down on innovation. These are logical improvements. Many are essential. But like fixing an aircraft mid-flight, time is the defining performance indicator. And it is a sense of urgency, agility, and adaptability that will enable America’s success.

Great power competitions – be it between nation states or rival companies – are won by those that out-pace their adversaries. Advancing capabilities at a rapid pace leaves adversaries ‘playing catchup,’ trying to understand and then react. Consider Amazon, innovating quickly to stay ahead of large, capable retailers like Walmart who continually scramble to gain online market share.

Yet, crucially, outpacing an adversary does not require out-spending them. Apple defeated Nokia with quick design cycles focused on the user experience, despite Nokia spending nearly ten times more on R&D. Outspending creates an impressive collection of capabilities, but, a sustained competitive advantage requires a relentless focus on outcomes, not just capabilities.

The post-Cold War era demanded neither sufficient urgency nor flexibility from defense contractors and industrial base. Industry was comfortable and gave the country most of what it needed under cost-plus contracts at congressionally mandated 10 to 12 percent profit margins. Cost overruns and delays were tolerated and helped increase profits.

When budgets stopped expanding, consolidation resulted. The infamous 1993 “Last Supper” dinner meeting held by then Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry encouraged defense contractors to consolidate to maintain profits. They did. And the number of major contractors went from more than fifty to five. Agility, innovation, and responsiveness evaporated in the process.

Less was not more. The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) articulated this point when it envisioned a broader National Security Industrial Base (NSIB) as a “network of knowledge, capabilities, and people—including academia, National Laboratories, and the private sector—that turns ideas into innovations [and] transforms discoveries into successful commercial products.” This articulates the whole-of-nation approach to national security that has always given the U.S. its advantage.

No single company can provide what is needed across all categories of defense. Just as one athlete cannot win gold in every sport. Existing and new participants are needed, including entrepreneurs, boot-strapped independent companies, venture-backed companies, research and academic institutions, and close allied partners. A full-range of on-ramps are also needed for new partners to enter the ecosystem—including the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), National Security Innovation Capital (NSIC), innovation hubs like SOFWERX and AFWERX, DoD and academic laboratories, and agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from which so much important innovation has come.

Achieving next-generation overmatch capability isn't merely about more innovation from the commercial sector. In a world where invention quickly becomes commoditized, getting leverage out of new technology to gain competitive advantage requires an investment in the human capital and institutional capacity needed to quickly operationalize and scale these technologies. As the NDS also stated, "Success no longer goes to the country that develops a new technology first, but rather to the one that better integrates it and adapts its way of fighting." And the flexibility to drive this critical adaptation must be placed firmly in the hands of the Services and Commanders in the field—those directly responsible for navigating the complex and uncertain security environment ahead.

Industry must be measured on how fast they can deliver real-world results, not how well they check the boxes of a static requirements document (which they often help write). The risks of underdelivering and overspending are best mitigated by embracing a minimum viable product (MVP) mindset that focuses on rapidly fielding operating prototypes, and continually improving and adapting them. These are hallmarks of modern software development, but the mindset has a place in even the largest hardware-focused projects as well.

Secretary Hegseth gave until last Friday for defense leaders to submit their recapitalization plans—a date that underscores the urgency of this moment. If speed and agility become the driving forces behind America’s defense strategy, industry collaboration, and acquisition processes, the United States will decisively outpace its adversaries to win tomorrow’s conflicts before they begin. The signal flare has gone up, the opportunity to deliver capabilities faster, cheaper, and more effectively is not only possible—it is imperative. We agree with the Secretary that the time to act is now.

General Tim Ray (USAF, ret.) is the former Commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, who today serves as the President and CEO of Business Executives for National Security (BENS). Jim Smith is President of TheIncLab and member of the BENS Board of Directors.

20. Army Enlisted Academy Bars Students from Writing About Women and Minorities

Army Enlisted Academy Bars Students from Writing About Women and Minorities

military.com · by Steve Beynon · April 11, 2025

The Army's premier institution for training its most senior noncommissioned officers has barred its students from writing academic essays on topics such as women, minorities and other issues related to diversity.

The 10-month Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, includes multiple major projects in its curriculum, including two essays students were expected to work on for several months. Both projects were scrapped from the course and replaced with a single essay, a service spokesperson confirmed to Military.com.

That was because too many students had been working on topics now deemed taboo by the Army amid Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's scorched-earth approach to scrubbing references to diversity -- typically programs, policies and materials dealing with women, those with minority backgrounds, and LGBTQ+ people -- from the services.

The change reflects the expanding Trump administration censorship across the Department of Defense aimed at erasing acknowledgment of those groups. It also follows a series of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump and internal policy shifts championed by Hegseth, who has made the erasure of those groups a core goal of his tenure so far.

The administration has labeled materials related to women, minorities and gay people as "diversity, equity and inclusion," or DEI, a term that once described efforts toward racial equality but has been repurposed under Trump as a catchall term used to conduct a government-wide purge.

"Students were required to select their topics and begin their research months before the presidential executive orders were issued. Some students selected topics that may have been construed to have a DEI frame of reference and were potentially incompliant," Lt. Col. Eugene Miranda, a service spokesperson, said in a statement. "Because of the time already invested in the writing requirements, the Sergeants Major Academy combined the writing requirements and extended the deadline to allow students to complete the work in alignment with new directives."

Soldiers interviewed in recent months have reported their concerns go beyond academic freedom, saying the moves the Pentagon has made placing such an emphasis on scrubbing mentions of gender and race may have enormous consequences for the military's culture.

"It's a very serious concern; it's the second- and third-order effects," one academy student told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. "It makes people feel like they are worthless, how their perspective isn't as valid as it was, say, a few months ago."

In recent years, the Army has tried to make enormous gains in professionalising its NCO corps. Part of that has been a growing expectation of writing skills and understanding the impact of policy. Much policy the service is actively working has to do with diversity, including gender -- such as revamping the Army's fitness test and adjusting standards for women in combat arms.

Sergeants Major Academy students may complete the no-longer-required essays and submit them for writing awards the service offers, but they still cannot approach barred topics.

"Students can still voluntarily elect to participate in an award category; however, [they] must submit a paper free of DEI content," an internal briefing on the matter reviewed by Military.com said.

That briefing noted the taboo topics included: "diversity, cultural perspectives, inequities, analyzing competing entities, including disenfranchised or vulnerable groups, in group favoritism, intergroup bias, [equal opportunity] recruitment, perceived inequities, gender diversity, cultural and ethnic differences, age ranges, generational gaps, disabilities, and discrimination."

The Pentagon's vague guidance on what is and isn't DEI has caused enormous confusion across the services. The Air Force, for example, had to reinstate a class for basic trainees on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Air Service Pilots, or WASPs, that had been cut.

Meanwhile, the services pulled out of an annual recruiting effort at a prestigious Black engineering conference.

In recent weeks, the U.S. Naval Academy removed some 400 books from its library, which include sociology books and texts written by Black female politicians.

The banned book titles include "The Second Coming of the KKK," a landmark book on how the Klan rose to political power in the early 20th century; and "Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory," which analyzes violence against women.

Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is still available in the Naval Academy library.

The United States Military Academy at West Point meanwhile has canceled two of its courses, a history course on race and an English class called "Power and Difference," which centered on inequities within politics and aimed to "prepare cadets to lead in a rapidly changing global environment, emphasizing the importance of understanding different perspectives and the impact of power dynamics," according to a course description.

military.com · by Steve Beynon · April 11, 2025

21. Leidos Black Arrow Successfully Tested from AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship

"Negative, Ghost Rider, the pattern is full." :-)  (I had to write that)

Leidos Black Arrow Successfully Tested from AC-130J Ghostrider Gunship

The Aviationist · by Parth Satam · April 13, 2025

The Black Arrow Small Cruise Missile flew for an extended period, meeting all test objectives, with further test and evaluation activities scheduled throughout 2025.

Leidos recently disclosed that, in November 2024, it successfully completed a guided flight test of its Small Cruise Missile (SCM), also known as Black Arrow, from an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. The “Guided Flight Test 1” validated the “aircraft compatibility, system performance, waypoint uplinks, guidance accuracy as well as integration with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Battle Management System (BMS),” said the company.

Contents

The system has advanced beyond its “captive carry and store-safe separation flight tests” conducted in December 2023—first announced in October 2024, when the future “guided flight test” was also revealed. That test took place a month later, in November 2024. Both phases of testing were carried out using an AC-130J.

The project is a CRADA (Collaborative Research and Development) effort between Leidos, the USSOCOM (United States Special Operations Command) and AFSOC (Air Force Special Operations Command), overseen by the USSOCOM’s PEO-FW (Program Executive Office-Fixed Wing).

[NEWS] Leidos completes successful test launch of a Small Cruise Missile.@Dynetics pic.twitter.com/8H9K7XqXHt

— Leidos (@LeidosInc) March 31, 2025

The test

Leidos describes the Black Arrow as a “low cost, 200 pound class mission adaptable delivery platform designed to facilitate spiral upgrades for both kinetic and non-kinetic missions.” The description suggests that the missile is a modular system with swappable guidance, seeker and navigation modules for various mission needs, some of which might also involve SEAD/DEAD (Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defense) with radar baiting and decoy systems.

It appears that the missile was tested only for its kinematic capabilities as the video mentioned the SCM “flew for an extended period meeting all test objectives, including range, duration and terminal accuracy.” The expected performance benchmarks for these attributes have not yet been disclosed.

However, Leidos has confirmed it is now “under contract with USSOCOM” for additional “test and evaluation activities throughout 2025.” These potentially broader tests are expected to assess the individual and integrated performance of the missile’s seekers, guidance system, navigation, and—if included—mid-course update capability.

A screengrab showing the two RLTs on the AC-130J’s ramp during the latest test.

The video shows the SCM being released from a palletized system, known as the Ramp Launch Tubes (RLT) on the AC-130J gunship’s open ramp. The missile is released by rolling it off tail-first. Once clear of the ramp, the missile’s tail fins deploy, while the wing, a single piece mounted on the top of the body, rotates to the flight position.

The video then shows the missile travelling towards the designated area after the engine ignites. It is unclear what type of propulsion is used, and the InfraRed camera footage does not allow to identify it. Air intakes, if any, are not visible, although this type of weapon usually employs a small jet engine or a rocket motor.

The missile is not shown hitting any target, but is captured from different angles and distances, presumably from an EO (Electro-Optical) system on board the AC-130J. It is being reported, however, that the SCM conducted the entire flight profile including the impact against an unknown target.

Missile capability

While cheap, modular and scalable mass is one thing, the ability to receive and trade targeting updates mid-flight is key and a vital feature for new generation weapons. This would otherwise restrict the missile to attacks only against known fixed targets, requiring days, if not weeks, of prior reconnaissance, surveillance, without the ability to engage targets of opportunity.

Leidos says it has employed “model-based system engineering practices” to achieve “timely and cost-effective development” of the Black Arrow. Utilizing “Air Force-advocated architecture standards” and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Weapon Open System Architecture in the design would allow rapidly modifying, swapping or upgrading sections on the missile, possibly without having to depend on the primary contractor, in this case Leidos.

A screengrab showing the Black Arrow SCM, circled in red, as seen through an IR camera shortly after engine start.

“Aligning to these stringent standards, while successfully demonstrating this capability from an operational aircraft, places us in a strong position to rapidly field Black Arrow if called upon,” Leidos’s senior vice-president for Missile and Aviation Systems Mark Miller said. Beside an RLT launch from cargo aircraft, the Black Arrow can also be launched from a palletized system and “conventional store release from fixed-wing aircraft.”

The palletized launch could find use with the U.S. Air Force and the AFRL’s Rapid Dragon project. The weapon of choice here is currently the larger AGM-158 JASSM. The smaller Black Arrow, taking less space on the aircraft, can be fired in larger numbers, or even in a paired coordinated launch with the JASSM.

The possibility of testing Black Arrow on the F-15E Strike Eagle or the newer F-15EX cannot be ruled out, since they are also envisioned to operate as “bomb and missile trucks” in future scenarios. Leidos’ statement added that the Black Arrow met the needs of “affordable mass” that the SCM CRADA sought since it was formed in 2022.

The Dec. 2023 trials already confirmed “digital twin predictions of safe separation, benign store dynamics, and trajectory characteristics.” Further testing “demonstrated integration with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Battle Management System (BMS), operational flight software function, navigation performance, and flight safety system functionality.”

[NEWS] Leidos announces the ‘Black Arrow’ has successfully completed first tests. https://t.co/Uq0d3Ovj4Q

— Leidos (@LeidosInc) October 3, 2024

Affordable, modular mass with shorter kill chains

Miller added in the company’s release that “performing this test from an AC-130 platform while also integrating with the BMS provided aircrews and operators a chance to see how well our SCM worked.” The statement also quoted USSOCOM’s PEO-FW Col. Justin Bronder, who said during the Special Air Warfare Symposium at Eglin AFB in March that the “SCM is a key capability, rapidly advancing AFSOC’s ability to close long-range kill chains.”

The Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies has noted an emerging Chinese doctrine to “disrupt elements” in the kill-chain concerned with target acquisition and tracking between the sensor and shooter, rather than engaging the weapon or the launching platform itself. While this could be achieved by advanced EW (Electronic Warfare), a sector where both Beijing and Moscow have made significant strides, longer kill chains in long-range standoff strikes, with several components in the network able to coordinate, are the most vulnerable to this approach.

Black Arrow also arrives at a time when the U.S. military is looking at low-cost one-way attack drones that could double up as cruise missiles for swarming strikes with attritable platforms.

The Aviationist · by Parth Satam · April 13, 2025

22. A Federal Critical Mineral Processing Initiative: Securing U.S. Mineral Independence from China

A Federal Critical Mineral Processing Initiative: Securing U.S. Mineral Independence from China - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Alvin Camba · April 14, 2025

China currently dominates global refining for critical minerals essential to modern economies — including lithium, cobalt, nickel, natural graphite, and rare earth elements — making it the primary supplier of processed inputs for advanced technologies, such as semiconductors, aerospace components, energy storage systems, and electric vehicle batteries. Even minerals mined outside of China are often sent to Chinese-owned smelting and processing plants. This near-monopoly grants Beijing significant leverage over global supply chains, heightening concerns over U.S. dependence on Chinese-controlled refining operations. China’s recent export controls on processed rare earth elements, issued in response to U.S. tariffs, bring into focus this strategic vulnerability.

The U.S. military depends heavily on these minerals for a variety of defense applications. For example, gallium-arsenide chips are used in electronic warfare systems that power the AN/ALQ-99 jamming pod, neodymium-iron-boron magnets are critical to the F-35’s flight control systems, and antimony is used in ammunition and artillery shells. These dependencies underscore the national security risks posed by China’s dominance in critical mineral refining.

Although encouraging private sector investments in refining, friendshoring, stockpiling resources, and streamlining permits has been helpful, these efforts fail to address a core issue: The United States lacks domestic refining and advanced processing capabilities. To achieve true mineral independence, the United States should adopt offensive industrial policies that build up the mineral refining sector. This requires establishing a federal initiative for critical mineral processing that builds on existing efforts by expanding funding, prioritizing states with optimal conditions for facilities, streamlining permitting, investing in workforce development, and securing allied supply chains.

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Current Defensive Solutions Help but Face Significant Hurdles

China has historically weaponized its mineral dominance by imposing export restrictions on strategic materials to pressure rival economies. In 2010, China restricted rare earth elements exports to Japan amid a territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, triggering price spikes worldwide. In 2023 and 2024, China imposed export controls on germanium and gallium, which are critical for semiconductor production. The United States has taken different approaches in response to these restrictions. After China’s 2010 rare earth elements embargo, the United States, the European Union, and Japan filed a case against China at the World Trade Organization, ultimately forcing Beijing to remove export quotas by 2015. The United States also revived rare earth mineral processing, including efforts to reopen the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine in California. In 2023, Washington intensified its “friendshoring” strategy by allocating additional resources to domestic mining and refining through the Department of Defense and Department of Energy budgets, while also strengthening supply chain partnerships with allies like Canada and Australia.

U.S. efforts to reduce dependence on China for critical minerals face a number of significant hurdles. First, domestic refining expansion remains slow, with new processing plants and smelters taking 10–20 years to become operational. For example, the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine, which reopened after China’s 2010 export controls, still sent 98 percent of its raw materials to China in 2019 due to the lack of U.S. processing capacity.

Investors are hesitant to fund U.S. refining and processing facilities due to uncertain returns, shifting federal policies, political instability, and environmental opposition. High-capital expenditures make mining and processing less attractive to investors, especially when compared to tech sectors that require minimal upfront investment and offer higher returns. Additionally, China maintains a fully integrated supply chain — from extraction to refining, smelting, and manufacturing — making it far cheaper and more efficient to process minerals domestically than in the United States. Expanding U.S. domestic mineral extraction is also challenging, as moving from exploration to consultation and full-scale operations can take at least a decade.

Even if extraction increases, investors remain concerned that Chinese firms could flood the market with minerals to drive down prices and make U.S. operations financially unsustainable. This played out with lithium in 2023, when oversupply triggered a sharp drop in prices. Similarly, although not driven by deliberate economic policies, nickel prices fell in 2024 due to overproduction by Chinese firms focused on short-term profits. This trend was further amplified by the adoption of a new chemical processing technique that significantly boosted output. Because extraction and refining must scale together to create a cost-effective, fully integrated U.S. supply chain, these barriers severely hinder progress.

Second, while capacity is gradually expanding, alternatives to Chinese processing and refining remain. In Japan, companies like Sumitomo Metal Mining have historically focused on refining nickel and cobalt, but the government has recently taken steps to expand rare earth refining. The Australian government is also scaling up support for rare earths processing, providing grants to firms such as Australian Strategic Materials Limited and extending financing to Iluka Resources. In South Korea, Korean Zinc Company, Ltd.; POSCO Future M Company, Ltd.; and LS-Nikko Copper Inc. are active in mineral processing. Despite the efforts of these three countries, China still dominates 85 percent of rare earth refining, 90 percent of global graphite processing, and nearly all of germanium, gallium, and tungsten refining. Japan, Australia, and South Korea also face capacity constraints, higher processing costs, and competing domestic priorities that limit their ability to fully support U.S. demand. Moreover, their geographic proximity to China heightens their vulnerability in the event of armed conflict.

Third, while stockpiles can provide a temporary buffer, they do not eliminate the need for secure, long-term supply chains, as reserves will eventually deplete. China’s dominance in the sector makes it difficult for the United States to determine optimal stockpile levels, especially given competing demands between military and civilian industries. Current forecasting models, such as those developed by the Institute for Defense Analyses, include considerations for critical civilian sectors. However, these models do not account for the downstream impacts of supply disruptions across the broader industrial base. Additionally, stockpiling is costly, requiring specialized storage, maintenance, and periodic replenishment to prevent material degradation. Adding to the complexity, China’s ability to manipulate mineral markets complicates U.S. procurement strategies: If prices surge, replenishing stockpiles becomes prohibitively expensive, whereas price crashes reduce incentives for domestic extraction and refining.

Fourth, streamlining permits is often proposed as part of a solution, but it alone does not guarantee rapid resource extraction. Mining projects typically take 15–20 years to reach full-scale production due to a lengthy process involving exploration, feasibility studies, environmental assessments, and construction. Political shifts between administrations frequently result in policy reversals on environmental regulations, creating uncertainty for long-term investments. Additionally, local opposition and legal challenges can cause significant delays, as seen with the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, which, despite its potential to produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-quality lithium carbonate, has faced years of lawsuits and protests that have stalled progress.

Efforts to secure mineral independence remain incomplete, with one of the most pressing challenges being the absence of robust domestic refining and smelting capacity within the United States.

The Limits of Previous Funding Initiatives

The Biden administration created funding initiatives aimed at strengthening critical mineral supply chains. These included the Inflation Reduction Act, Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, and Defense Production Act, each of which played a role in supporting the domestic industry. The Inflation Reduction Act provided subsidies for battery production and clean energy initiatives, generating over $224 billion in investments. The CHIPS Act allocated $30 billion to private sector projects across 15 states, supporting the construction of 16 new semiconductor manufacturing facilities and creating more than 115,000 manufacturing jobs. However, these initiatives remain too fragmented, with resources spread across various agencies with competing priorities, rather than focusing on scaling up refining and metallurgical processing. The Defense Production Act, arguably the most impactful initiative, allocated $150 million specifically to critical minerals, funding key projects such as $19 million for a tin smelting and refining facility in Pennsylvania, $37.5 million for developing the Graphite Creek deposit and refining operations in Alaska, and over $100 million to establish a U.S.-based rare earth separation plant.

Biden also expanded Department of Energy initiatives and increased Department of Defense contracts to boost domestic production. The Department of Energy allocated $19.5 million toward securing domestic supply chains, and the administration budgeted an additional $43 million to enhance battery technologies for electric vehicles. However, a greater portion of the Department of Energy’s overall funding — particularly the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program’s $500 million open call — was distributed across a range of areas only marginally connected to critical resources or mineral processing, such as fusion energy sciences, nuclear physics, and biological and environmental research. The Defense Department awarded a $26.4 million grant to support a niobium refining plant in Pennsylvania. Yet, this remains just one project among many shortcomings in the effort to establish a self-sufficient U.S. supply chain.

Despite these notable investments, Biden-era initiatives largely failed to directly and adequately address refining and smelting, leaving a critical gap in the supply chain. Current funding levels remain insufficient to close the structural deficit in domestic processing capacity, keeping the United States dependent on foreign supply chains for critical minerals.

A Federal Critical Mineral Processing Initiative: The Path to U.S. Independence from China

Currently, the Department of Defense lacks a strong rationale to invest billions in processing facilities or mines, given that it is widely understood that military demand for critical minerals represents only a small fraction of overall usage. Although exact figures for defense consumption of these materials are difficult to estimate, U.S. military consumption of rare earth elements, for instance, accounts for less than 0.1 percent of global demand. Nevertheless, there are strong national security reasons to subsidize the industry. Military demand is projected to triple — from $15 billion in 2022 to $46 billion by 2046. Most global processing capacity is concentrated in China, a strategic rival to the United States in multiple ways. The private sector is unlikely to make significant investments without substantial government backing. Furthermore, many of these materials are irreplaceable in key defense systems. Any supply disruption could result in production delays or directly undermine combat readiness.

A federal critical mineral processing initiative is essential to eliminate U.S. dependence on China for critical minerals. Congress will need to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few decades. Replacing China’s copper smelting and refining capacity alone would require approximately $85 billion. To jumpstart this initiative, Congress should allocate $20–40 billion of seed and debt funding over the next decade through a Critical Minerals Industrial Act, forming a strategic public-private partnership that incentivizes U.S. firms to invest in and expand refining and smelting facilities. This legislation will differ from the Critical Minerals Security Act of 2024, which emphasizes reporting and recommendations, and the Critical Mineral Consistency Act of 2025, which prioritizes transparency.

Once funding is allocated, the first step would be to ensure effective fund distribution across key investment areas. Grants and tax rebates should be provided to U.S. companies investing in refining, smelting, and metallurgical processing. Additionally, public-private partnerships should be established to enable U.S. companies — such as those in technology, aerospace, energy storage, automotive, and defense — to serve as offtake partners, securing lower refining and smelting costs in exchange for long-term supply commitments. Federal agencies such as the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and the International Development Finance Corporation should expand low-interest loan programs to support domestic processing facilities. To shield these investments from political shifts, the Defense Production Act should be used to fast-track funding for these projects.

The second step would be to strategically select U.S. states with the most favorable conditions for large-scale refining and smelting operations. These states must have ample land, mining-friendly laws, proximity to ports or mineral deposits, and existing infrastructure. Optimal locations include Texas, Arizona, Utah, and West Virginia, all of which offer strong regulatory environments and existing industrial capacity. Oklahoma would also be a possible location. Governor Kevin Stitt has offered incentive packages to relocate processing facilities to the state. Utah, which also has lithium, beryllium, and tungsten deposits, is home to Kennecott Utah Copper, a division of Rio Tinto, which operates the Bingham Canyon Mine — already equipped with smelting and refining facilities that contribute eight percent of U.S. annual copper production. Rare earth elements in coal-related streams, including acid mine drainage and coal waste byproducts, have been discovered in West Virginia. However, the process of extracting these elements is not yet commercially viable. Texas offers a pro-business legal environment, no state income tax, and strong port infrastructure for importing raw materials. Arizona has fast-tracked mining permit laws and access to large reserves of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements. Currently, California’s Mountain Pass Mine Rare Earth Mine, operated by MP Materials, is the only active rare earth mining and processing facility in the United States.

The third step deals with streamlining the permitting process for refineries and smelters. In China, smelters often take two to three years to obtain permits. By contrast, the process takes 7 to 10 years in the United States. According to an S&P Global Report, it takes an average of 29 years to bring a new mine online in the United States, making it the second slowest country in the world for mine development. For example, the Thacker Pass lithium project submitted its initial operations plan in August 2019, but it was not until 2024 that the Department of Energy finalized a loan to support its development, including the construction of a sulfuric acid plant and a lithium processing facility. Similarly, the Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine secured its environmental permits in 2010 to construct a new rare earth processing facility but did not complete construction until 2014, even though it had on-site processing facilities that smelt and refine rare earth ore into finished products. These delays might be mitigated by using the existing fast-track approval process established under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015 to accelerate the development of critical mineral infrastructure. This legislation is particularly well-suited for this role, as it streamlines permitting for projects that already exist and are supported by federal investment programs.

The fourth step focuses on workforce development to ensure the United States has the necessary manpower to operate these facilities. By 2029, an estimated 221,000 workers in the mining sector will retire. Given the scale of expansion required in both mining and refining, the United States will need four to five times that number of workers. The workforce challenge is exacerbated by several factors: an aging workforce due to retirements; declining academic programs, as many universities have shut down metallurgy and materials science programs because of declining student interest; and an economic shift away from heavy industry, resulting in a lack of training opportunities for young professionals to enter the field. Currently, only 14 Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology-accredited programs remain, including the University of Utah, West Virginia University, and the Colorado School of Mines. The U.S. government provides limited financial support for programs, such as the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers. Recent legislation and programs, including the Mining Schools Act (which allocated $10 million from 2024 to 2031) and the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines Program, provides funding for these partnerships. While the government has rightly maintained support for these initiatives, they still fall short of addressing the scale of the challenge.

Alternatively, the United States could import skilled workers from abroad. However, the U.S. immigration process for highly skilled workers is notoriously slow, and national security concerns may limit foreign student enrollment in metallurgy programs. Additionally, global competition for talent is fierce, with countries like China, Australia, Canada, and Germany actively recruiting the same workforce. The U.S. government must allocate massive sums of funding to expand training programs and rebuild the talent pipeline.

Finally, once these four steps are in place, the United States should strengthen allied supply chains by requiring all federally funded defense, infrastructure, and energy products to use 100 percent U.S.-processed critical minerals. Furthermore, the United States should also deepen trade partnerships with Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea to jointly invest in refining and diversifying raw materials, and to secure long-term off-take contracts with private and government partners. Existing frameworks, such as the State Department’s Minerals Security Partnership — a multilateral initiative with 14 countries aimed at strengthening critical mineral supply chains — and AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership focused on advanced technologies and critical materials, provide a foundation for advancing this strategy.

Conclusion

Given the urgency to break away from Chinese dependence, pursuing these five steps to secure U.S. mineral independence is not only a matter of economic security, but one of national survival. Without a federal critical minerals processing initiative, the U.S. government can use the Defense Production Act to seize access to raw materials, but that power has clear limits — especially in sustaining production over time. The government can also seize domestically available mineral stockpiles. However, as of 2022, the United States remained more than 50 percent import-dependent for 51 nonfuel mineral commodities and fully reliant on imports for 15 of them.

On the processing and smelting side, seizure is only the first step. Without domestic capacity to refine these materials, they remain militarily useless. In an armed conflict with China, the United States would lose access to critical Chinese processing facilities. Existing U.S. processing capabilities are limited, and without serious investment, the Department of Defense would face real constraints in scaling production. This is not theoretical: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government invoked the Defense Production Act to accelerate ventilator production, yet still encountered major delays due to limited industrial infrastructure. Compounding the issue is the U.S. reliance on foreign-owned intellectual property for key defense technologies. The Defense Production Act cannot override or replicate proprietary intellectual property in areas like microelectronics, rare earth processing, advanced battery chemistries, or the specialty alloys used in hypersonic and stealth systems. Without access to that knowledge or the means to replace it, even seized raw materials cannot be turned into military capability at scale.

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Alvin Camba, Ph.D., is a critical materials specialist at the Associated Universities, Inc., where he works as part of the Beacons Project, a U.S. Department of Defense-funded initiative focused on critical resources and U.S. supply chains. He earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and is a widely published expert on Chinese-Southeast Asian relations.

Image: Tmy350 via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Alvin Camba · April 14, 2025

23. The Age of Forever Wars – Why Military Strategy No Longer Delivers Victory by Sir Lawrence D. Freedman

The one article to read today from my favorite historian and strategist, Sir Lawrence D. Freedman.

I expect this essay will be added to PME syllabi.

I will be using this quote that is so elegantly obvious, simple, and concise yet leaders can never seem to grasp it.

Conclusion:

Wars start and end through political decisions. The political decision to initiate armed conflict is likely to assume a short war; the political decision to bring the fighting to an end will likely reflect the inescapable costs and consequences of a long war. For any military power, the prospect of drawn-out or unending hostilities and significant economic and political instability is a good reason to hesitate before embarking on a major war and to seek other means to achieve desired goals. But it also means that when wars cannot be avoided, their military and political objectives must be realistic and attainable and set in ways that can be achieved by the military resources available. One of the great allures of military power is that it promises to bring conflicts to a quick and decisive conclusion. In practice, it rarely does.

The Age of Forever Wars

Why Military Strategy No Longer Delivers Victory

Lawrence D. Freedman

May/June 2025 Published on April 14, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/age-forever-wars

Illustration by Vartika Sharma

LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine and a co-author of the Substack Comment Is Freed.

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In Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, the United States and its coalition allies unleashed massive land, air, and sea power. It was over in a matter of weeks. The contrast between the United States’ grueling and unsuccessful war in Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s in Afghanistan could not have been more stark, and the speedy victory even led to talk of a new era of warfare—a so-called revolution in military affairs. From now on, the theory went, enemies would be defeated through speed and maneuver, with real-time intelligence provided by smart sensors guiding immediate attacks using smart weapons.

Those hopes proved short-lived. The West’s counterinsurgency campaigns of the early decades of this century, which came to be labeled “forever wars,” were not notable for their rapidity. Washington’s military campaign in Afghanistan was the longest in U.S. history, and in the end it was unsuccessful: despite being pushed out at the start of the U.S. invasion, the Taliban eventually came back. Nor is this problem limited to the United States and its allies. In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that was supposed to overrun the country in a matter of days. Now, even if a cease-fire can be reached, the war will have lasted for more than three years, during which it was dominated by grinding, attritional fighting rather than bold and audacious actions. Similarly, when Israel launched its invasion of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault and hostage taking, U.S. President Joe Biden urged that the Israeli operation should be “swift, decisive, and overwhelming.” Instead, it continued for 15 months, in the process expanding to other fronts in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, before a fragile cease-fire was reached in January 2025. By mid-March, the war had reignited. And this leaves out numerous conflicts in Africa, including in Sudan and the Sahel, that have no end in sight.

The idea that surprise offensives could produce decisive victories began to be embedded in military thinking in the nineteenth century. But again and again, forces that undertake them have shown how difficult it is to bring a war to an early and satisfactory conclusion. European military leaders were confident that the war that began in the summer of 1914 could be “over by Christmas”—a phrase that is still invoked whenever generals sound too optimistic; instead, the fighting would last until November 1918, concluding with fast offensives but only after years of devastating trench warfare along almost static frontlines. In 1940, Germany overran much of western Europe in a matter of weeks by means of a blitzkrieg, bringing together armor and airpower. But it could not finish the job, and after initial rapid advances against the Soviet Union in 1941, it was drawn into a brutal war with enormous casualties on both sides that would only end nearly four years later with the total collapse of the Third Reich. Similarly, the decision by Japan’s military leadership to launch a surprise attack on the United States in December 1941 ended in the catastrophic defeat of the Japanese empire in August 1945. In both world wars, the key to victory was not so much military prowess as unbeatable stamina.

Yet despite this long history of protracted conflict, military strategists continue to shape their thinking around short wars, in which all is supposed to be decided in the first days, or even hours, of combat. According to this model, strategies can still be devised that will leave the enemy surprised by the speed, direction, and ruthlessness of the initial attack. With the constant possibility that the United States could be drawn into a war with China over Taiwan, the viability of such strategies has become a pressing issue: Can China quickly seize the island, using lightning force, or will Taiwan, supported by the United States, be able to stop such an attack in its tracks?

What is clear is that amid rising tensions between the United States and a variety of antagonists, there is a critical misalignment in defense planning. In recognition of the tendency of wars to drag on, some strategists have begun to warn about the dangers of falling into the “short war” fallacy. By emphasizing short wars, strategists rely too much on initial battle plans that may not play out in practice—with bitter consequences. Andrew Krepinevich has argued that a protracted U.S. war with China would “involve kinds of warfare with which the belligerents have little experience” and that it could pose “the decisive military test of our time.” Moreover, failure to prepare for long wars creates vulnerabilities of its own. To transition from a short war to a protracted one, countries must impose different demands on their military and on society as a whole. They also will need to reappraise their objectives and what they are prepared to commit to achieve them.

Once military planners accept that any major contemporary war might not end quickly, they are required to adopt a different mindset. Short wars are fought with whatever resources are available at the time; long wars require the development of capabilities that are geared to changing operational imperatives, as demonstrated by the continual transformation of drone warfare in Ukraine. Short wars may present only temporary disruptions to a country’s economy and society and do not require extensive supply lines; long wars demand strategies for maintaining popular support, functioning economies, and secure ways to rearm, restock, and replenish troops. Long wars also require constant adaptation and evolution: the longer a conflict lasts, the more pressure there is for innovations in tactics and technologies that might yield a breakthrough. Even for a great power, failure to prepare for and then rise to meet these challenges could be disastrous.

Yet it is also fair to ask how realistic it is to plan for wars that do not have a clear endpoint. It is one thing to sustain a protracted counterinsurgency campaign but quite another to prepare for a conflict that would involve continuing and substantial losses of people, equipment, and ammunition over an extended period. For defense strategists, there may also be significant obstacles to this kind of planning: the militaries they serve may lack the resources to prepare for a long war. The answer to this dilemma is not to prepare for wars of indefinite duration but to develop theories of victory that are realistic in their political objectives and flexible in how they might be achieved.

THE SHORT-WAR FALLACY

The advantages of short wars—immediate success at a tolerable cost—are so obvious that no case can be made for knowingly embarking on a long one. By contrast, even admitting the possibility that a war could become protracted may seem to betray doubts about the ability of one’s military to triumph over an adversary. If strategists have little or no confidence that a prospective war can be kept short, then arguably the only prudent policy is not to fight it at all. Still, for a country such as the United States, it might not be possible to rule out a conflict with another great power of similar strength, even if rapid victory is not assured. Although Western leaders have an understandable aversion to intervening in civil wars, it is also possible that the actions of a nonstate adversary could become so persistent and harmful that direct action to deal with the threat becomes imperative, regardless of how long that may take.

This is why military strategists continue to shape their plans around short wars, even when a protracted conflict cannot be excluded. During the Cold War, the main reason the two sides did not devote extensive resources to preparing for a long war was the assumption that nuclear weapons would be used sooner rather than later. In the current era, that threat remains. But the prospect of a great-power conflict turning into something like the cataclysmic world wars of the last century is frightening—adding urgency to plans that are designed to produce a quick victory with conventional forces.

Strategies for carrying out this ideal type of war are geared above all toward moving fast, with some element of surprise and with sufficient force, to overwhelm enemies before they can mount an adequate response. New warfighting technologies tend to be assessed according to how much they might help achieve rapid battlefield success rather than how well they might help secure a durable peace. Take artificial intelligence. By harnessing AI, the thinking goes, militaries will be able to assess battlefield situations, identify options, and then choose and implement those options in a matter of seconds. Vital decisions may soon be made so fast that those in charge, let alone the enemy, will barely appreciate what is happening.

So ingrained is the fixation with speed that generations of U.S. military commanders have learned to shudder at the mention of attritional warfare, embracing decisive maneuver as the route to quick victories. Long slogs of the sort now taking place in Ukraine—where both sides seek to degrade each other’s capabilities, and progress is measured by body counts, destroyed equipment, and depleted stocks of ammunition—are not only dispiriting to the belligerent countries but also hugely time-consuming and expensive. In Ukraine, both sides have already expended extraordinary resources, and neither is close to anything that resembles a victory. Not all wars are conducted at such a high intensity as the Russian-Ukrainian war, but even prolonged irregular warfare can take a heavy toll, resulting in a growing sense of futility in addition to mounting costs.

In both world wars, the key to victory was unbeatable stamina.

Although it is known that audacious surprise attacks often deliver far less than promised and that it is much easier to start wars than to end them, strategists still worry that potential enemies may be more confident in their own plans for rapid victory and will act accordingly. This means that they are required to concentrate on the likely opening phase of war. It may be assumed, for example, that China has a strategy for taking Taiwan that aims to catch the United States unprepared, leaving Washington to respond in ways that either have no hope of success or are likely to make matters much worse. To anticipate such a surprise attack, U.S. strategists have devoted much time to assessing how the United States and other allies can help Taiwan thwart China’s opening moves—as Ukraine did with Russia in February 2022—and then make it hard for China to sustain a complex operation some distance from the mainland. But even this scenario could easily lead to protraction: if the first countermoves by Taiwanese forces and their Western allies are successful, and China gets bogged down but does not withdraw, Taiwan and the United States would still face the problem of coping with a situation in which Chinese forces have a presence on the island. As Ukraine has learned, it is possible to get stuck in a protracted war because an incautious adversary has miscalculated the risks.

This is not to say that modern armed conflicts never end in quick victories. In June 1967, it took Israel less than a week to decisively vanquish a coalition of Arab states in the Six-Day War; three years later, when India intervened in the Bangladesh war for independence, it took Indian forces just 13 days to defeat Pakistan. The United Kingdom’s 1982 victory over Argentina in the Falklands War unfolded fairly quickly. But since the end of the Cold War, there have been many more wars in which early successes faltered, lost momentum, or didn’t quite achieve enough, transforming the conflicts into something far more intractable.

Indeed, for some kinds of belligerents, the pervasive problem of long wars may provide an important advantage. Insurgents, terrorists, rebels, and secessionists may embark on their campaigns knowing that it will take time to undermine established power structures and assuming that they will simply outlast their more powerful enemies. A group that knows it is unlikely to triumph in a rapid confrontation may recognize that it has greater chances of success in a long and arduous struggle, as the enemy is worn down and loses morale. Thus, in the last century, anticolonial movements, and more recently, jihadist groups, embarked on decades-long wars not because of poor strategy but because they had no other choice. Especially when confronted by a military intervention from a powerful foreign army, the best option for such organizations is often to let the enemy tire of an inconclusive fight and then return when the time is right, as the Taliban have done in Afghanistan.

By contrast, great powers tend to assume that their significant military superiority will quickly overwhelm opponents. This overconfidence means that they fail to appreciate the limits of military power and so set objectives that can be achieved, if at all, only through a prolonged struggle. A larger problem is that by emphasizing immediate battlefield results, they may neglect the broader elements necessary for success, such as achieving the conditions for a durable peace, or effectively managing an occupied country in which a hostile regime has been toppled but a legitimate government has yet to be installed. In practice, therefore, the challenge is not simply planning for long wars rather than short ones but planning for wars that have a workable theory of victory with realistic objectives, however long they may take to realize.

NOT LOSING IS NOT WINNING

Effective warfighting strategy is a matter of not just military method but also political purpose. Evidently, military moves are more successful when combined with limited political ambition. The 1991 Gulf War succeeded because the George H. W. Bush administration aimed only to expel Iraq from Kuwait and not to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine might have had more success if it had concentrated on the Donbas rather than trying to take political control of the entire country.

With limited ambition, it is also easier to compromise. A workable theory of victory requires a strategy in which military and political objectives are aligned. It may be that the only way to resolve a dispute is through the total defeat of the enemy, in which case sufficient resources must be allocated to the task. At other times a military initiative may be taken in the firm expectation that it will lead to early negotiations. That was Argentina’s view in April 1982 when it seized the Falkland Islands. When Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat ordered his armed forces to cross the Suez Canal in October 1973, he did so to create the conditions for direct talks with Israel. His armed forces were pushed back, but he got his political wish.

Underestimating the enemy’s political as well as military resources is one of the main reasons that short-war strategies fail. Argentina assumed that the United Kingdom would accept a fait accompli when it seized the Falklands and did not imagine that the British would send a task force to liberate the islands. Wars are often launched in the misguided belief that the population of the opposing power will soon buckle under an attack. Invaders may assume that a section of the population will embrace them, as could be seen in Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 and, for that matter, in Iran’s counterinvasion of Iraq. Russia based its full-scale attack on Ukraine on a similar misreading: it assumed there was a beleaguered minority—in this case, Russian speakers—who would welcome its forces; that the government in Kyiv lacked legitimacy and could easily be toppled; and that the West’s promises of support to Ukraine would not amount to much. None of these assumptions survived the first days of the war.

When a short-war plan does not produce the anticipated victory, the challenge for military leaders is to achieve a new alignment between means and ends. By September 2022, President Vladimir Putin realized that Russia risked a humiliating defeat unless it could bring more soldiers to the front and put its economy on a comprehensive war footing. As the leader of an authoritarian state, Putin could quash domestic opposition and keep control of the media and did not have to worry too much about public opinion. Nonetheless, he needed a new narrative. Having asserted before the war that Ukraine was not a real country and that its “neo-Nazi” leaders had seized power through a coup in 2014, he could not explain why the country failed to collapse when hit by a superior Russian force. So Putin changed his story: Ukraine, he alleged, was being used by NATO countries, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom, to pursue their own Russophobic objectives.

A Ukrainian soldier hides from a Russian drone in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, March 2025 Iryna Rybakova / Press Service of the 93rd Kholodnyi Yar Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces / Reuters

Despite having initially presented the invasion as a limited “special military operation,” the Kremlin now portrayed it as an existential struggle. This meant that instead of simply stopping Ukraine from being so troublesome, Russia now sought to demonstrate to NATO countries that it could not be broken by economic sanctions or the alliance’s weapons supplies to Ukraine. By describing the war as defensive, the Russian government was telling its people how much was at stake while also warning that they could not now expect a quick victory. Instead of scaling back its objectives to acknowledge the difficulties of defeating the Ukrainians in battle, the Kremlin scaled them up to justify the extra effort. By annexing four Ukrainian provinces in addition to Crimea, and by continuing to demand a supine government in Kyiv, Russia has made the war tougher, not easier, to end. This situation illustrates the difficulty of ending wars that are not going well: the possibility of failure often adds a political objective—the desire to avoid the appearance of weakness and incompetence. Reputational concerns were one reason why the U.S. government hung on in Vietnam long after it was clear that victory was out of reach.

Replacing a failed theory of victory with one that is more promising requires not only reappraising the enemy’s actual strengths but also recognizing the flaws in the political assumptions that underlay the opening moves. Suppose that U.S. President Donald Trump’s push for a cease-fire bears fruit, leaving the war frozen along current frontlines. Moscow could portray its territorial gains as a success of sorts, but it could not truly claim victory as long as Ukraine has a functioning independent and pro-Western government. If Ukraine temporarily accepted its territorial losses but could still build up its forces and obtain some form of security guarantees with the help of its Western partners, the outcome would still be a far cry from Russia’s oft-stated demand for a demilitarized neutral Ukraine. Russia would be left administering and subsidizing wrecked territory with a resentful population while having to defend the long cease-fire lines.

Yet although Russia has not been able to win the war, so far it has not lost. It has been forced to withdraw from some territory conquered early in the war, but since late 2023 it has made slow but continued gains in the east. On the other hand, Ukraine has also not lost, for it has successfully resisted Russian attempts at subjugation and has forced Russia to pay a heavy price for every square mile taken. Most important, it remains a functioning state.

NO END IN SIGHT

In commentary on contemporary warfare, the distinction between “winning” and “not losing” is vital yet hard to grasp. The difference is not intuitive because of the assumption that there will always be a victor in war and because, at any time, one side can appear to be winning even if it has not actually won. The situation of “not losing” is not quite captured by terms such as stalemate and deadlock since these imply little military movement. Both sides can be “not losing” when neither can impose a victory on the other, even if one or both are on occasion able to improve their positions. This is why proposals to end protracted wars normally take the form of calls for a cease-fire. The problem with cease-fires, however, is that the parties to the conflict tend to regard them as no more than pauses in the fighting. They may have little effect on the underlying disputes and may simply offer both sides the opportunity to recover and reconstitute for the next round. The cease-fire that ended the Korean War in 1953 has lasted for over 70 years, but the conflict remains unresolved and both sides continue to prepare for a future war.

Most models of warfare continue to assume the interaction between two regular armed forces. According to this framing, a decisive military victory comes when the enemy’s forces can no longer function, and such an outcome should then translate into a political victory, as well, since the defeated side has little choice but to accept the victor’s terms. After years of tension and intermittent fighting, one side may get into a position in which it can claim an unequivocal victory. One example is Azerbaijan’s offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, possibly ending a three-decade war with Armenia.

Alternatively, even if a country’s armed forces are still largely intact, pressures may build up on its government to find a way out of the conflict because of the cumulative human and economic costs. Or there may be no prospect of a true victory, as Serbia came to recognize in its war against NATO in Kosovo in 1999. When one of the parties to a conflict experiences regime change at home, that can also lead to the abrupt end of hostilities. When they do end, however, long wars are likely to leave legacies that are bitter and lasting.

Contemporary conflicts often have blurred edges.

Even in cases in which a political settlement, and not just a cease-fire, can be reached, a conflict may not be resolved. Territorial adjustments, and perhaps substantial economic and political concessions by the losing side, may produce resentment and a desire for redress among the defeated population. A defeated country may remain determined to find ways to recover what it has lost. This was France’s position after forfeiting Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War. In the Falklands War, Argentina claimed to be recovering territory it had lost a century and a half earlier. Moreover, for the victor, enemy territory that has been taken and annexed will still need to be governed and policed. If the population cannot be subdued, what may initially appear as a successful land grab may end up a volatile situation of terrorism and insurgency.

In contrast to standard models of war, in which hostilities usually have a clear starting point and an equally clear end date, contemporary conflicts often have blurred edges. They tend to pass through stages, which can include war and periods of relative calm. Take the United States’ conflict with Iraq. In 1991, Iraqi forces were quickly defeated by a U.S.-led coalition, in what was ostensibly a short, decisive war. But because the United States decided not to occupy the country, the war left Saddam in charge, and his continuing defiance created a sense of unfinished business. In 2003, under President George W. Bush, the United States reinvaded Iraq and achieved another speedy victory, and this time Saddam’s Baathist dictatorship was toppled. But the process of replacing it with something new precipitated years of devastating intercommunal violence that at times approached full-blown civil war. Some of that instability has continued to this day.

Because civil wars and counterinsurgency operations are fought in and among populations, civilians bear the brunt of the harm from these wars, not only by being caught up in deliberate sectarian violence or crossfire but also because they are forced to flee their homes. This is one reason why these wars tend to lead to prolonged conflict and chaos. Even when an intervening power decides to walk away, as both the Soviet Union and, much later, the U.S.-led coalition did in Afghanistan, it does not mean that conflict ends—only that it takes on new forms.

In 2001, the United States had a clear “short war” plan for overthrowing the Taliban, which it implemented successfully and relatively efficiently using regular forces combined with the Afghan-led Northern Alliance. But there was no clear strategy for the next stage. The problems Washington faced were caused not by a stubborn opponent fighting with regular forces but by endemic violence, in which the threats were irregular and emerged out of civil society and in which any satisfactory outcome depended on the elusive goals of bringing decent governance and security to the population. Without external forces to prop up the government, the Taliban was able to return, and Afghanistan’s history of conflict continued.

A tank on the Israel-Gaza border, March 2025 Amir Cohen / Reuters

Israel’s triumph in 1967—a paradigmatic case of quick victory—also left it occupying a large territory with resentful populations. It created the conditions for many wars that followed, including the Middle East wars that erupted with Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks. Since then, Israel has fought campaigns against the group in the Gaza strip, from which Israel had withdrawn in 2005, and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where Israel had fought a mismanaged operation in 1982. The two campaigns have taken similar forms, combining ground operations to destroy enemy facilities, including tunnel networks, with strikes against weapons stocks, rocket launchers, and enemy commanders. Both conflicts have caused huge numbers of civilian casualties and widespread destruction of civilian areas and infrastructure. Yet Lebanon could be considered a success because Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire while the war in Gaza was still underway, which is something it had said it would refuse to do. By contrast, the short-lived cease-fire in Gaza was not a victory, because the Israeli government had set as its objective the complete elimination of Hamas, which it did not achieve. In March, after a breakdown of negotiations, Israel resumed the war, still without a clear strategy to bring the conflict to a definitive end. Although severely depleted, Hamas continues to function, and without an agreed plan for the future governance of Gaza or a viable Palestinian alternative, it will remain an influential movement.

In Africa, protracted conflicts appear endemic. Here the best predictor of future violence is past violence. Across the continent, civil wars flare and then abate. These often reflect deep ethnic and social cleavages, aggravated by external interventions, as well as cruder forms of power struggle. The underlying instability ensures constant conflict in which individuals and groups can have a stake, perhaps because the fighting provides both a stimulus to and a cover for trafficking in arms, people, and illicit goods. The current war in Sudan involves civil strife and shifting allegiances, in which one oppressive regime was toppled by a coalition, which then turned in on itself, leading to an even more vicious war. It also involves external actors such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which are more concerned with preventing opponents from gaining an advantage than with ending the violence and creating the conditions for recovery and reconstruction.

Proving the rule, cease-fires and peace treaties, when they do occur, often turn out to be short-lived. Sudanese parties have signed more than 46 peace treaties since the country achieved independence in 1956. Wars tend to be identified when they boil over into direct military confrontation, but the pre- and postwar simmering is part of the same process. Rather than discrete events with a beginning, a middle, and an end, wars might be better understood as the result of poor and dysfunctional political relations that are difficult to manage by nonviolent means.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF DETERRENT

The main lesson the United States and its allies can draw from their considerable experience of lengthy wars is that they are best avoided. Should the United States become involved in a protracted great-power conflict, the country’s whole economy and society will need to be put on a war footing. Even if such a war ends with something approximating a victory, the population would likely be shattered and the state drained of all spare capacity. Moreover, given the intensity of contemporary warfare, the speed of attrition, and the costs of modern weaponry, ramping up investment in new equipment and ammunition might still be insufficient to sustain a future war for long. At a minimum, the United States and its partners would need to procure sufficient stocks in advance to stay in the fight long enough for a much more drastic, full-scale mobilization to be set in motion.

And then, of course, there is the risk of nuclear war. At some point during a protracted war involving either Russia or China, the temptation to use nuclear weapons might prove irresistible. Such a scenario would probably bring a long conventional war to an abrupt conclusion. After seven decades of debate about nuclear strategy, a credible theory of nuclear victory over an adversary able to retaliate in kind has yet to be found. As with conventional war strategists, nuclear planners have focused on speed and brilliantly executed opening moves, with the aim of taking out the enemy’s means of retaliation and eliminating its leadership, or at least alarming and confusing it to generate a paralysis of indecision. All such theories, however, have appeared to be unreliable and speculative since any first strikes would have to contend with the risk of an enemy launch on warning as well as sufficient systems surviving for a devastating riposte. Fortunately, these theories have never been tested in practice. A nuclear offensive that does not produce immediate victory and instead results in more nuclear exchanges might not be protracted, but it would undoubtedly be bleak. This is why the condition has been described as one of “mutually assured destruction.”

It is worth recalling that one reason the U.S. defense establishment embraced the nuclear age so enthusiastically was that it offered an alternative to the devastating world wars of the early twentieth century. Strategists were already keenly aware that fights to the finish between great powers could be exceptionally long, bloody, and costly. As with nuclear deterrence, however, great powers may now need to prepare more conspicuously for longer conventional wars than current plans assume—if only to help ensure that they don’t happen. And as the war in Ukraine has painfully shown, great powers can be implicated in long wars even when they are not directly involved in the fighting. The United States and its allies will need to improve their defense industrial bases and build stocks to better prepare for these contingencies in the future.

The conceptual challenge this kind of preparation poses, however, is different from what would be required to prepare for a titanic confrontation between superpowers. Although the prospect may be unpalatable, military planners need to think about managing a conflict that risks protraction in the same way that they have thought about managing nuclear escalation. By preparing for protraction and reducing any potential aggressor’s confidence in being able to wage a successful short war, defense strategists could provide another kind of deterrent: they would be warning adversaries that any victory, even if it could be achieved, would come with an unacceptably high cost to their military, economy, and society.

Wars start and end through political decisions. The political decision to initiate armed conflict is likely to assume a short war; the political decision to bring the fighting to an end will likely reflect the inescapable costs and consequences of a long war. For any military power, the prospect of drawn-out or unending hostilities and significant economic and political instability is a good reason to hesitate before embarking on a major war and to seek other means to achieve desired goals. But it also means that when wars cannot be avoided, their military and political objectives must be realistic and attainable and set in ways that can be achieved by the military resources available. One of the great allures of military power is that it promises to bring conflicts to a quick and decisive conclusion. In practice, it rarely does.

LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine and a co-author of the Substack Comment Is Freed.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Lawrence D. Freedman · April 14, 2025

24. The Former C.I.A. Officer Capitalizing on Europe’s Military Spending Boom

Defense business is a growth industry. 

A pretty visionary young man.

Excerpts:

In 2019, Mr. Slesinger stepped back from the agency to attend Harvard Business School. He also spent a summer working for the C.I.A.’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel.

Around this time, he became fixated on the idea that Europe must rebuild its militaries after a generation of low investment. The United States spent about $880 billion on defense in 2024, more than double what other countries in NATO spent combined.

With the United States focused on China, Mr. Slesinger was convinced he would see the end of the so-called peace dividend, which has allowed European countries to spend more on social services and pensions since World War II, instead of on tanks and fighter jets.

The Former C.I.A. Officer Capitalizing on Europe’s Military Spending Boom

Eric Slesinger made a career shift from the spy agency to venture capital, championing military start-ups as Europe beefed up its defenses amid an uncertain relationship with the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/cia-officer-europe-military-spending.html?unlocked_article_code=1._k4.Ir7h.8ZivXh_0J3v7&smid=url-share

By Adam Satariano

Reporting from Copenhagen

• April 14, 2025Updated 6:59 a.m. ET

During a 24-hour swing through Copenhagen last month, Eric Slesinger met with engineers making maritime drones, developers of war-planning software and an adviser to NATO. He had recently visited London for a dinner with a senior British intelligence official and would soon head to the Arctic to learn about the technologies that could handle extreme climates.

The packed schedule would seem more common for Mr. Slesinger in his former job as an officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. But now the 35-year-old was in high demand as he parlayed his spy agency credentials into a career as a venture capitalist focused on the suddenly relevant area of defense and national security technology in Europe.

“This is all happening at warp speed,” said Mr. Slesinger, who has backed eight defense start-ups and has negotiated with several more.

As President Trump throws the future of the trans-Atlantic relationship into question, governments across Europe have outlined plans to potentially spend hundreds of billions of euros on weapons, missile-defense programs, satellite systems and other technologies to rebuild their armies. Technologists, entrepreneurs and investors are racing to take advantage of the spending boom by creating new defense start-ups.

Image

Among the European defense tech start-ups that Mr. Slesinger has invested in is Delian, a Greek company that makes a fixed surveillance tower designed to protect coasts, borders and critical infrastructure.Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times

Few paid attention four years ago when Mr. Slesinger moved to Madrid with the idea that Europe would need to drastically increase defense spending because U.S. military protection could not be taken for granted. Now his predictions look prescient. After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, which followed his defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, members of his administration called Europe “pathetic” and military mooches of the United States.

“Whether Trump won or Harris or anyone else, the fact would have remained that there’s a technology catch-up that needs to happen in Europe,” Mr. Slesinger said while walking between meetings in Copenhagen last month. “Maybe it’s accelerated in certain ways, but this was a long time coming.”

Mr. Slesinger is now in the unusual position of a former American intelligence officer who is trying to profit from Europe’s planned military transformation. His one-man venture capital firm, 201 Ventures, is completing a $22 million fund to invest in young start-ups at the intersection of tech and national security.

Mr. Slesinger’s initial investments include a maritime drone company in Sweden, a maker of manufacturing technology in Britain, an artificial intelligence firm in Greece and a hypersonic vehicle start-up in Germany.

Engineers at Delian working on one of their surveillance towers that was built for silent, autonomous threat detection, as well a portable drone communication system. Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times

The United States has a long tradition of investing in defense — Silicon Valley was started in part with Pentagon funding — and has seen the rise of several military-centric start-ups, such as Palantir and Anduril. Europe has had fewer successes, partly because defense-related businesses were viewed as so unethical that many investors there refused to put money behind them.

“There has been this awakening moment, and it’s going to result in a dramatic increase in spending in defense, security and resilience technology,” said Chris O’Connor, a partner at the NATO Innovation Fund, a 1 billion euro tech fund started with money from 24 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, though not the United States.

The NATO fund is the biggest financial backer of Mr. Slesinger’s firm. Mr. O’Connor said Mr. Slesinger’s national security experience made him ideal for identifying companies with tech that could win government contracts.

“He’s going to end up playing a critical role,” Mr. O’Connor said.

Mr. Slesinger grew up just outside Washington, D.C., and attended Stanford. There, he was a standout in the mechanical engineering program, said Craig Milroy, co-director of Stanford’s Product Realization Lab, where students can workshop hardware ideas.

While many of Mr. Slesinger’s Stanford classmates explored jobs with Apple or Google, he looked elsewhere. “He came into my office one day and said, ‘I’m applying to join the C.I.A.,’” Mr. Milroy said. “That’s never happened before or since.”

Mr. Slesinger is cagey about his five and a half years working at the C.I.A. But with his engineering background, he said, he worked among more Q-like figures from the James Bond films, geeks operating in the background to solve technical problems for intelligence officers in the field.

“Imagine being a student, kind of nerd engineer, and then you get to go in this place where you have like a Santa’s workshop-like capability,” he said. “Intelligence problems are really hard, they’re gnarly, and you feel a real responsibility to do something to solve the problem.”

In 2019, Mr. Slesinger stepped back from the agency to attend Harvard Business School. He also spent a summer working for the C.I.A.’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel.

Around this time, he became fixated on the idea that Europe must rebuild its militaries after a generation of low investment. The United States spent about $880 billion on defense in 2024, more than double what other countries in NATO spent combined.

With the United States focused on China, Mr. Slesinger was convinced he would see the end of the so-called peace dividend, which has allowed European countries to spend more on social services and pensions since World War II, instead of on tanks and fighter jets.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further crystallized his thesis. He then started the European Defense Investor Network, which now includes about 125 investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers. Last year, he started 201 Ventures.

At first, he struggled to raise funding because many investors refused to back military technologies. But he eventually raised money from NATO and found advisers including Eileen Tanghal, who used to oversee In-Q-Tel’s London office; David Ulevitch, a general partner at the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz; and the author Sebastian Mallaby.

Image

Gustaf von Grothusen, the chief executive of Polar Mist, a Swedish start-up that produces maritime drones. Mr. Slesinger has invested in the company.Credit...Charlotte de la Fuente for The New York Times

Over the past 12 months, Mr. Slesinger, who also has an Italian passport from his family’s roots there, has traveled to 15 countries. On a recent trip to the Arctic, he rode a snowmobile to a remote area being considered for testing new power sources and a communication technology. In Switzerland, he toured the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

Video

Mr. von Grothusen testing a prototype boat P1 in Sweden.CreditCredit...Video by Charlotte De La Fuente For The New York Times

In February, Mr. Slesinger was in Germany for the Munich Security Conference when Vice President JD Vance delivered a blistering speech criticizing Europe. Within weeks, Germany, France, Britain and other European countries pledged to vastly increase military spending, alarmed that they could no longer count on the United States as a reliable ally.

“It felt like a sea change,” said Mr. Slesinger, who watched Mr. Vance’s speech from a laptop at a nearby hotel. “You could feel it as he was speaking.”

How much of the new spending will reach start-ups is unclear. Missiles, ammunition and fighter jets are likely to be higher priorities than tech from small, untested companies.

Mr. Slesinger said it would take years to measure success, but he expects to spend his $22 million fund in the next two years and has already begun thinking about raising a larger amount. In the past few months, he has been peppered with pitches from European entrepreneurs suddenly interested in making military tech.

For just about everyone he meets in Europe, there is one nagging question: Is he really no longer working for the C.I.A.?

“I’m really out!” he said.

Defense Tech Boom

Can Europe’s New Military Spending Help Its Economies?

March 19, 2025

Europe Tries to Boost Military Spending as America Realigns

March 4, 2025

Away From Silicon Valley, the Military Is the Ideal Customer

Feb. 26, 2021

Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London.

25. How Trump’s Coercion Could Backfire in Asia

Good advice in the conclusion.

But I am optimistic because our silk web of friends, partners, and allies in the Asia-Pacific region know how to take a long term view and know that they need the US as an ally . They know that this too shall pass.

Conclusion:

Greater U.S. regional influence cannot come through ultimatums and coercion, nor from cutting a deal with Beijing over the heads of U.S. allies and partners. Instead, Washington should honor its commitments, boost trade and investment, step up diplomatic engagement, and respect foreign countries’ agency. The Trump administration may believe that its ultimatums are simply extracting the full value of U.S. security commitments and economic engagement, but this discounts the critical contributions that allies and partners make. The United States risks becoming a power that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Coercion will ultimately weaken the United States, not strengthen it. Without its allies and partners, U.S. leadership in Asia, and around the world, will erode. This will not make America great again—it will leave it weaker abroad and poorer at home.

How Trump’s Coercion Could Backfire in Asia

Foreign Affairs · by More by Lynn Kuok · April 14, 2025

Forcing the Region to Choose Sides Risks Pushing It Toward China

Lynn Kuok

April 14, 2025

At the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Retreat in Langkawi, Malaysia, January 2025 Hasnoor Hussain / Reuters

LYNN KUOK is Lee Kuan Yew Chair at the Brookings Institution.

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A century after the “wedding of the oceans”—the moment when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the final step in the creation of the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and reshaping global trade—the United States is seeking to regain its influence over the waterway. In his inaugural address in January, President Donald Trump claimed that China was “operating” the canal and vowed that the United States would be “taking it back.” At a press conference, Trump refused to rule out using economic coercion, or even military force, to get his way—news reports later revealed that the White House had directed the Pentagon to draw up plans to seize the waterway by force. These threats seem to have had an effect: Panama has withdrawn from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and accepted the sale of port operations at each end of the canal by the Hong Kong holding company CK Hutchison to a group of investors led by the U.S. firm BlackRock. China’s antitrust regulator has since launched a review, stalling the deal, but whatever the ultimate fate of the canal, the episode sent a signal that Washington is willing to present countries with a stark ultimatum: side with the United States or face the consequences.

Washington is deploying coercive, us-or-them approaches elsewhere, too. Trump has demanded concessions in response to sweeping tariffs, pushed India to abandon an effort to reduce U.S. dollar dominance, and conditioned U.S. support for Ukraine on the country’s willingness to accept a peace deal with Russia, telling President Volodymyr Zelensky to “make a deal or we’re out.” Most explicitly, in February, Trump established a “fast-track” investment process for “specified allies and partners”—but only on the condition that they refrain from “partnering” with “foreign adversaries in corresponding areas.”

If the United States sticks to such hard-line tactics, countries around the world will face difficult choices. Nowhere will these choices be harder than in Asia, where governments have long hedged their bets between China and the United States. The United States has for decades contributed to the region’s peace and prosperity, and is valued for it, even as those contributions have also benefited the United States. Even today, the region does not want to have to choose between the United States and China. Without a strong U.S. presence, the region’s strategic options will narrow and governments will lose much of their ability to press China for better behavior. If they are forced to choose, countries will have to weigh U.S. leverage, the reliability of Washington’s promises, their economic ties with China, and potential alternatives. Coercion could backfire. Although it will not always be China that benefits—many Asian countries hedge beyond the great powers—China’s geographic proximity, extensive economic ties with the region, and skill in turning economic engagement into strategic advantage position it to gain the most. The United States can force countries to choose—but it might not like their answers.

FROM VELVET GLOVE TO IRON FIST

Asian countries have long feared being forced to choose between the United States and China. In recent years, although Washington has pressed its allies and partners to break with Beijing on specific issues—for example, banning Huawei in 5G infrastructure, restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductors, and excluding Chinese firms from undersea cable networks—it has largely tolerated hedging between the two superpowers. Allies and partners were free to maintain wide-ranging ties with China while benefitting from the U.S. security umbrella. American officials reassured foreign capitals that Washington was not forcing them to choose.

Today, Washington’s tolerance appears to be giving way to a more coercive approach. It remains unclear what the Trump administration’s ultimatum will be in every instance. Demands could include economic decoupling, such as curbing Chinese investment or restricting trade, cutting off joint military exercises with China, or treating Beijing as a strategic threat. Even if Washington stops short of requiring wholesale alignment, an expanding list of specific demands will shrink other countries’ room for maneuver.

The administration may see the best chance of success in Northeast Asia, where Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all already closely aligned with the United States. Both Japan and Taiwan view China as a direct threat to their security interests. In 2023, Tokyo committed to a major defense buildup, including plans to acquire U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles. In 2025, it followed through by approving a record defense budget and plans to deploy long-range strike capabilities in coordination with Washington. Taiwan has likewise expanded military ties with the United States. In 2023, it began sending troops to the United States for joint training exercises, and in 2024, Washington approved two separate arms sales, one worth nearly $2 billion for advanced air defense and radar systems and another valued at $385 million for spare parts and maintenance support.

South Korea’s view is more nuanced. Seoul’s 2022 Indo-Pacific strategy refers to China as “a key partner for achieving prosperity and peace”—but, like Japan, South Korea attended the NATO summit earlier that year which issued a strategic concept stating that China’s “ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values.” In 2023, Seoul set aside historical grievances to join Japan and the United States in a trilateral security partnership to counter regional threats, including China.

Yet while all three U.S. partners will work hard to keep Washington onside, full economic decoupling from China will be a stretch. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all count China as their largest trading partner, and Trump’s unpredictability is destabilizing relations. In March, just weeks after Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba visited Washington for a trip that he considered a diplomatic success, Trump complained that the U.S.-Japanese security pact was unfair. Days earlier, in an address to Congress, Trump questioned U.S. military support for South Korea, despite Seoul’s agreement late 2024 to boost its contribution to the cost of keeping American troops in the country by 14 percent, the largest annual rise in nearly two decades. Trump has also accused Taiwan of “stealing” the U.S. chip industry, prompting the Taiwan-based chip manufacturing company TSMC to announce plans to invest $100 billion in the United States. Allies and partners now have little confidence that a warm reception today will not be followed by the cold shoulder tomorrow.

CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE

If pulling Northeast Asia further away from China will be difficult, moving Southeast Asia will be even harder. The region has long prioritized hedging between the great powers. The legacy of colonialism and Cold War entanglements that drew parts of the region into superpower rivalries and proxy wars left many Southeast Asian countries wary of aligning too closely with any one major power. Indeed, in 1967, a group of those countries created the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) partly to guard against external interference. While the region values U.S. security engagement and the United States is its largest source of foreign direct investment, China is its largest trading partner and most U.S. investment is concentrated in a single country, Singapore.

What is more, elite support for the United States in the region has started to weaken. In September 2024, I argued in Foreign Affairs that Washington was losing Southeast Asia. That was based in part on the 2024 ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s annual survey of government officials, academics, journalists, nonprofit employees, businesspeople, and staff from regional or international organizations across the region. Last year, the survey showed, for the first time, a majority of respondents saying ASEAN should align with China over the United States, if forced to choose. This year’s poll, which was released last week, showed the United States regaining a narrow lead, although the numbers remain close: 52 percent of respondents said ASEAN should side with the United States and 48 percent with China. The most dramatic reversal came in Laos, which swung 20 percentage points back toward the United States—after having recorded the steepest drop the previous year.

The erosion in U.S. standing in 2024 likely reflected dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy, especially the country’s support for Israel in the conflict in Gaza, and its limited economic engagement in the region compared with China’s growing footprint. Those factors were enough to give China a narrow edge (50.5 percent to 49.5 percent), although more than half of respondents still expressed “little” or “no” confidence in China to “do the right thing” in global affairs.

The 2025 rebound appears to have been driven above all by growing alarm over China’s behavior in the South China Sea. This year, 52 percent of respondents cited “aggressive behavior in the South China Sea” as their top geopolitical concern, up from second place at 40 percent in 2024. Even landlocked Laos saw a sharp rise: 42 percent ranked the South China Sea as their top concern, up from just nine percent the year before. Although Laos has no territorial claims in the South China Sea, its 2024 ASEAN chairmanship likely heightened its sensitivity to the dispute.

Southeast Asia has long prioritized hedging between the great powers.

Perceptions of stronger U.S. leadership under Trump may also have played a role. Among the 41 percent of respondents who expected greater U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia under the new administration, nearly 39 percent cited Trump’s tough stance on China as helping to maintain regional balance, while 32 percent believed strong U.S. leadership could help resolve global conflicts. Confidence in the United States as a strategic partner also rose: 45 percent of respondents were confident or very confident in U.S. reliability in 2025, up from just 35 percent the year before.

But the improved U.S. standing in the 2025 survey should not be mistaken for a decisive shift. For one thing, the survey was conducted from early January to mid-February—before Trump’s April 2 announcement of dramatic new tariffs on U.S. allies and partners across Asia, and prior to the Trump administration’s sharp turn away from long-standing European allies and partners. The survey, moreover, likely overstates the number of governments that would align with the United States over China if forced to choose, as it includes non-government elites, who are more likely than government officials to favor the United States. Although a majority of respondents in five of the ten ASEAN countries—the Philippines, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Singapore—leaned toward the United States, several of those governments, including Myanmar and Cambodia, depend heavily on Beijing.

Even among countries with defense ties or strategic cooperation with the United States, alignment is not a given—and in some cases, is unlikely. The United States enjoys its strongest standing with the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally. In 2023, Manila granted the United States access to four additional military sites, three facing Taiwan and one facing the South China Sea, under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), a pact signed in 2014. These sites added to the five bases the United States already uses. Relations between the Philippines and China, in contrast, have deteriorated in recent years, due to escalating clashes between Philippine and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea. Yet the country’s economic ties with China, particularly in agriculture and manufacturing, remain strong, and its leaders want to avoid being drawn into a U.S.-Chinese conflict. The new EDCA bases, for example, are designed, officially at least, to be used more for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief than military operations, and Manila has turned down U.S. offers of assistance during clashes with Chinese forces over resupply missions to Filipino troops on Second Thomas Shoal.

Manila’s caution stems primarily from its desire to avoid conflict with China. But anxieties about U.S. reliability are never far away. The Philippines continues to receive strong signals of U.S. support: it enjoys bipartisan backing in Congress; U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reaffirmed the “ironclad” U.S. commitment to the Philippines under the U.S.-Philippine Mutual Defense Treaty; and the State Department has reiterated that the treaty covers attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft, including its Coast Guard, anywhere in the South China Sea. Further reassurance came during U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s late-March visit to Manila, where he met with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. The two sides reaffirmed their security ties and announced planned initiatives, including the deployment of additional advanced military capabilities, bilateral training for high-end operations, greater defense industrial cooperation, and a joint cyber campaign—all aimed at restoring deterrence. Hegseth’s visit offered Manila a measure of relief after a warning earlier in March by Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez that Manila must “be ready” for a scenario in which the U.S. alliance did not hold in a crisis—but worries remain. What was once bipartisan backing for Ukraine has failed to guarantee sustained U.S. support. And the early months of the Trump administration have made clear that decision-making ultimately rests with a president who is both erratic and wary of foreign military entanglements.

U.S. ties with Thailand, another treaty ally, have frayed since the United States failed to bail out the country’s banking sector during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and downgraded military cooperation after the Thai army seized power in 2006 and again in 2014. Although the two countries have continued to participate in annual multilateral military exercises, cooperation elsewhere has waned. China has stepped in to fill the gap by expanding military and economic cooperation. In 2016, it overtook the United States to become Thailand’s primary arms supplier, and although the United States carries out more military training and defense dialogue with Thailand, Beijing has been steadily increasing its joint military exercises, such as the Strike-2024 drill, technology transfers, and investments in Thailand’s defense sector. China is also deepening economic ties: apart from being Thailand’s largest trading partner, it also provides technology and expertise for the China-Thailand high-speed rail project, which links the two countries through Laos, and is the driving force behind the Thai-Chinese Rayong Industrial Zone, which hosts hundreds of Chinese companies. Those ties mean that Thailand is unlikely to fully align with the United States—but the United States could at least stay in the game if it tried.

Even among countries with ties with the United States, alignment is not a given.

Singapore, although not a U.S. treaty ally, has long been a steadfast security and economic partner. When the Philippines decided to close U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic Bay in 1990, and Malaysia and Indonesia refused to host U.S. forces, Singapore granted the United States access to its air and naval facilities. In 1998, Singapore allowed U.S. forces to use the newly constructed Changi Naval Base, which was purpose-built to accommodate aircraft carriers, even though Singapore has none of its own. U.S.-Singaporean defense ties have expanded since, and Singapore is a crucial hub for U.S. regional economic integration, hosting nearly 6,000 U.S. companies.

But although Singapore remains a close partner, some scenarios would stretch its support. A conflict over Taiwan, in particular, would pose a dilemma for the country’s leaders. A senior Singaporean diplomat privately told me that a U.S. request to allow Singapore-based American ships, planes, and missiles to operate against China would be a “nightmare scenario.” Senior Singaporean officials have been noncommittal when asked how they would respond to a Taiwan conflict, saying only that it would depend on the circumstances. Singapore also fears that ASEAN could splinter if member states are forced to pick sides, weakening the group’s ability to act as a bulwark against external pressure and great-power competition.

Vietnam, despite its past and present tensions with China, carefully balances relations between the superpowers. The country’s 2019 defense strategy outlines a policy of “Four Nos”: no military alliances, no siding with one country against another, no foreign bases, and no use of force or threats of the use of force in international relations. In 2023, Vietnam upgraded ties with the United States to a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” a level China has enjoyed since 2008, but the country’s leaders remain cautious. Vietnam’s $123 billion trade surplus with the United States—the second highest in Asia after China and the highest in Southeast Asia—has subjected it to high tariffs. The relocation of Chinese firms to Vietnam to bypass Trump’s trade war with China exposes it to further risks. Ultimately, the regime in Hanoi is most concerned with its own survival—and for that, China is a key partner, given the close relationship between the two communist parties.

The slight rebound in U.S. standing in 2025 reversed the previous year’s slide, but the shift appeared to reflect elite frustration with China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea, not a deeper reorientation toward the United States. Washington continues to face structural weaknesses in the region, especially in the economic realm, where U.S. initiatives still lag behind China’s in both scale and delivery. Across Southeast Asia, China significantly outpaces the United States in trade, multilateral economic initiatives and infrastructure. Since 2013, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has delivered major projects such as the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia and the Boten-Vientiane railway in Laos—both of which are now up and running, with plans for further expansion. Meanwhile, a slew of U.S.-led initiatives, including the BUILD Act, the Blue Dot Network, and the Build Back Better World initiative, later rebranded as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, have yet to yield tangible results. Washington’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017 and ongoing doubts over its commitment to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the Biden administration’s more limited alternative to the TPP, have further eroded regional confidence. In 2025, 56 percent of respondents identified China as the most influential economic power in the region—down slightly from 60 percent in 2024—while just 15 percent selected the United States. In a region where economics is deeply intertwined with security, economic engagement matters.

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE COUNTRIES

Beyond coercion, there is another approach the administration may pursue—or at least flirt with. Rather than forcing allies and partners to cut ties with China, Trump may instead abandon them altogether by striking a “grand bargain” with Chinese President Xi Jinping that divides the world into spheres of influence, or reaching a sweeping economic deal with him. If the administration follows through on either course, it may be more inclined to accommodate Beijing’s concerns over the East China Sea, North Korea, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and elsewhere. Although the prospects of a grand bargain or wide-ranging economic deal appear increasingly slim, given escalating tit-for-tat tariffs that have now pushed rates to well over 100 percent on both sides, a deal cannot be ruled out. It hardly not be the first time that Trump has reversed course, and he has said that he is open to talks with Beijing.

For many in the region, abandonment is the greater fear. If Washington walks away or accepts Beijing’s primacy in the region, other countries’ strategic autonomy would shrink. Some might respond by deepening regional security cooperation through mechanisms like ASEAN or smaller groupings. Others may intensify diplomatic efforts with the United States, hoping to blunt the fallout of a deal struck at their expense. Although often seen as distinct paths, coercion and abandonment could be pursued—deliberately or haphazardly—in parallel. This combination would pose the gravest risk for the region: under pressure to choose the United States over China, while simultaneously questioning whether Washington would stand by them if they did.

Compounding regional anxieties is the Trump administration’s treatment of the United States’ longtime allies and partners in Europe—signaling that even countries with close ties to the United States are not immune to poor treatment by Washington. Chinese officials are quietly warning Southeast Asian countries that they could face a similar fate. Although the Indo-Pacific region is a priority for the United States in a way that Europe is not, Trump’s approach thus far has not reassured U.S. allies and partners that he is committed to cooperating with them to achieve common goals. Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement featured high rates on many Asian countries, including Japan (24 percent), South Korea (22 percent), and Taiwan (32 percent), despite their close security ties to Washington and long-standing support for U.S. strategic goals in Asia. The measures have been received with quiet alarm in Northeast Asia, where officials had hoped that alliance contributions would shield them from the economic nationalism that defined Trump’s first term.

Without its allies and partners, U.S. leadership in Asia, and around the world, will erode.

In Southeast Asia, the picture is even starker. The tariffs Trump announced (and then partially paused) hit U.S. treaty allies the Philippines (17 percent) and Thailand (36 percent); key partners such as Singapore (10 percent) and Vietnam (46 percent); and some of the region’s poorest countries, including Cambodia (49 percent), Laos (48 percent), and Myanmar (44 percent), among others. Trump’s tariff blitz makes clear that the United States is not differentiating—at least in the economic realm—between allies, strategic partners, and others: all are equally vulnerable to U.S. demands.

Beyond the United States’ treatment of allies and partners—which exacerbates fears of both coercion and abandonment—there are broader concerns about whether the United States will remain a positive regional presence. Singapore has long advocated for a strong U.S. role to prevent dominance by any single power. Yet at this year’s Munich Security Conference, Singapore’s defense minister noted Asia’s shifting perception of the United States—from “liberator” to “disruptor” to “landlord seeking rent.” If Washington continues to combine pressure with disregard, it risks pushing even governments wary of Beijing into its orbit: China is starting to look like the easier roommate.

Greater U.S. regional influence cannot come through ultimatums and coercion, nor from cutting a deal with Beijing over the heads of U.S. allies and partners. Instead, Washington should honor its commitments, boost trade and investment, step up diplomatic engagement, and respect foreign countries’ agency. The Trump administration may believe that its ultimatums are simply extracting the full value of U.S. security commitments and economic engagement, but this discounts the critical contributions that allies and partners make. The United States risks becoming a power that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Coercion will ultimately weaken the United States, not strengthen it. Without its allies and partners, U.S. leadership in Asia, and around the world, will erode. This will not make America great again—it will leave it weaker abroad and poorer at home.

LYNN KUOK is Lee Kuan Yew Chair at the Brookings Institution.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Lynn Kuok · April 14, 2025

26. Save the Minerva Research Initiative — Again

Are we on a path of "dumbing down" defense and strategic thinking?

Excerpts:

Minerva researchers predict and respond to terrorist activity on social media, study the role of critical mineral dependence on defense policy, define policy for creating super soldiers, and examine how warfighters can better interact with AI. We’re also one of the most cost-effective programs in DoD: Breaking Defense readers won’t be bamboozled by a $30 million dollar cut in the name of fiscal responsibility, when Pentagon cost overruns on single projects can cost tens of billions.

It’s time to save the Minerva program, again, and provide it with the stability it needs to contribute to America’s national security. Strategic surprises from old adversaries, new groups, new warfighting environments, and emerging technologies won’t stop coming. It is shortsighted for DoD to reduce its vision for national security in a way that fails to account for our complex and changing social environments and do so every five years. Reinstating Minerva and protecting it through congressional action against executive cuts will protect our troops, their folks back home, and the broader national security enterprise.

Save the Minerva Research Initiative — Again - Breaking Defense

Nicholas Evans in this op-ed explains the historic importance of the Minerva Research Initiative, and the implications of the initiative being shut down.

breakingdefense.com · by Nick Evans · April 11, 2025

Pentagon grapples with growth of artificial intelligence. (Graphic by Breaking Defense, original brain graphic via Getty)

A free scientific enterprise promotes American health, wealth and security, but the rash of termination notices served to researchers around the country threatens this promise. At the Department of Defense, one of the first casualties of these attacks on science is the Minerva Research Initiative, a social sciences program built from the failures of 9/11, now shuttered in its entirety.

I’m one of the researchers affected. My team has had three projects terminated at the Department of Defense, including one on AI policy funded by the US Army. The DoD is the source of more than 80 percent of government funding for AI, and we study how predictions about the future of AI — from the utopian to the dystopian — influence defense policy, to ensure agency procurement and use of AI aligns with broader national security goals. At a time when AI development is notionally a top-tier effort for the military, we’ve been told this “no longer effectuates the program’s goals or agency priorities.”

There’s a larger story about the right to free inquiry being suppressed, given the tsunami of grant terminations that are killing American science. But for now, I just want to focus on DoD.

Minerva’s critical role comes from its history, with the recognition in 2001 that the US was unprepared for strategic surprises outside the scope of traditional armed conflict, and the subsequent understanding that social sciences research is not (yet) an off-the-shelf tool for defense contexts. In launching the program, then-Secretary Robert Gates claimed that “Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.” Minerva was designed to address the gap between operations and social science.

That gap wasn’t always there, and has its own history. Social sciences development was divorced from defense with the Mansfield Amendments of 1969 and 1973, which required basic scientific research funded by DoD to have a direct or apparent relation to military function. These changes shuffled much of the DoD’s scientific research back to the NSF, who without a comparable increase in budget simply couldn’t keep the required programs afloat. The strategic surprises and changing social landscapes in 2001 reversed this trend with the recognition that basic social sciences research had precisely that operational and strategic value but were underdeveloped. This resulted in the “6.1” — the basic research — turn to social sciences through Minerva.

Minerva has always been controversial, and the current secretary’s claim that DoD “does not do climate crap” — despite the DoD being keenly interested in the strategic impacts of climate change since 1990 — is a return to form. The program was almost shuttered in 2020 by an undersecretary of research and engineering who didn’t believe in the social sciences. Yet a 2020 National Academies review found Minerva researchers produce high quality, interdisciplinary, policy-forward results, and answer questions of critical interest to DoD and the wider national security community.

What the review recommended was a much better strategy for getting Minerva’s knowledge into the hands of those who would benefit from it, a common theme dating back to the breakdowns of the Human Terrain System. The last five years have been about just that: Minerva’s annual review occurs adjacent to the Pentagon and features personnel in an out of uniform; its researchers participate in DoD’s Basic Science Forum to ensure all commands are able to access our results; and Minerva investigators serve on a wide range of working groups and taskforces for everything from countering violent extremism to value alignment in lethal autonomous weapons. Minerva also runs the Defense Education and Civilian University Research (DECUR) community, which ties social sciences research directly into education and training for US professional military education institutions.

Closing Minerva goes against scientific and defense consensus on the role of social sciences in preparing the battlespace, the warfighter, and the country for emerging national security threats. It may violate the congressional authorization for these projects, written in as they are to individual service and DoD-wide budgets. And it makes the country less safe, sacrificing true national security for a vision of “lethality” that represents one of the least developed understandings of science and national security since the end of World War Two.

Minerva researchers predict and respond to terrorist activity on social media, study the role of critical mineral dependence on defense policy, define policy for creating super soldiers, and examine how warfighters can better interact with AI. We’re also one of the most cost-effective programs in DoD: Breaking Defense readers won’t be bamboozled by a $30 million dollar cut in the name of fiscal responsibility, when Pentagon cost overruns on single projects can cost tens of billions.

It’s time to save the Minerva program, again, and provide it with the stability it needs to contribute to America’s national security. Strategic surprises from old adversaries, new groups, new warfighting environments, and emerging technologies won’t stop coming. It is shortsighted for DoD to reduce its vision for national security in a way that fails to account for our complex and changing social environments and do so every five years. Reinstating Minerva and protecting it through congressional action against executive cuts will protect our troops, their folks back home, and the broader national security enterprise.

Dr. Nicholas G. Evans is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and a 2020-2023 Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar. He conducts research on the ethics of emerging technologies and national security, and on public health ethics and pandemic preparedness. His latest book, Gain of Function, was released in February of 2025.

26. We came in believing. We left in silence.

A thoughtful and thought provoking essay.

Conclusion:

This piece isn’t a eulogy. It’s a message to leadership: Don’t confuse short-term disruption with long-term disqualification. The people who were laid off aren’t gone — they’re watching. They’re weighing whether government will still make space for builders, reformers, and outsiders. If we let this moment pass without intention, we risk shrinking the very table we worked so hard to expand.

We came in believing. We left in silence.

DOD's first-ever customer experience officer shares his thoughts on the importance of government service amid massive reductions of the federal workforce.

By

Savanrith “Savan” Kong

April 11, 2025

https://defensescoop.com/2025/04/11/savan-kong-public-service-op-ed/?utm_campaign

defensescoop.com · by Billy Mitchell · April 11, 2025

Government layoffs don’t just cut budgets — they cut belief.

Talented, mission-driven professionals — some who left lucrative private-sector careers, others tracking lifelong roads of public service to serve — are now being pushed out of the very institutions they fought to improve. These weren’t side projects or token hires. They were seasoned professionals, some with decades of experience, brought in to modernize critical systems, close digital equity gaps, and help rebuild trust in institutions that have too often failed the people they serve. When we lay them off, it sends a clear message: Innovation is expendable. And people feel it.

This isn’t a story about loss. It’s about what it takes to say yes to service — and why the door into government needs to stay open, especially for those who’ve had to work twice as hard just to reach it.

A long road to “yes”

I came to this country as a Cambodian refugee. I didn’t grow up with a roadmap to public service. My family didn’t have connections in Washington, and we didn’t understand the unspoken codes of federal hiring. But we believed in this country — and I believed that government should be open to anyone willing to do the work.

So I showed up. I waited months for onboarding. I filled out background checks that asked me to recall details from places I barely escaped. If you’re an immigrant or refugee, the clearance process isn’t just paperwork — it’s a trial of faith. You’re asked for documents you may never have had. You’re scrutinized for family ties to regions you fled. You’re questioned about timelines you barely survived. And all the while, you carry the quiet weight of knowing your origin story, not your ability, might be the reason you’re screened out.

And yet, we persist.

Because we believed in the opportunity to serve. We know that this country doesn’t just need the most polished resumes. It needs lived experience, grit, and people who understand government — not just as insiders but as everyday users of its services.

Because we believe that our experiences — our differences — are part of what makes this country stronger. We believe in the mission. And we’re willing to endure the gauntlet not for prestige or power, but for the chance to give back to the very system that gave us a second chance.

Because we believe this system doesn’t account for people like us — but it requires people like us. People with resilience, range, and a deep sense of mission.

And that’s why, even after all the waiting, the uncertainty, the second-guessing — I still said yes.

Not because it was easy. But because I believe the opportunity to serve — to shape the system from the inside — was too meaningful to walk away from. I knew that if I could make it through the door, I could help open it for others.

Why we still choose to serve

And I was fortunate because people believed in me. I had the opportunity to serve first at the Defense Digital Service (DDS), the Department of Defense’s “SWAT team of nerds,” where I worked on mission-critical programs like Project Rabbit in support of Operation Allies Refuge. Later, I returned to the department as the first-ever Customer Experience Officer and helped transform how our nation’s largest employer delivers digital services to those in uniform and those who support them.

The path wasn’t easy. But it was worth it.

What kept me going was the people: brilliant, mission-driven civil servants and digital leaders who believed that technology should serve the public, not the other way around. I was proud to stand beside them, bringing not just my experience from the tech world, but my lived experience as someone who knows what it means to build a life from nothing and still give back.

And now — even fewer seats at the table

As if the hiring process weren’t challenging enough, we’re now watching the table itself shrink.

Across government, layoffs, restructuring, and budget constraints are forcing talented, mission-driven professionals out of the very institutions they worked so hard to get into. Some of the most impactful programs, created precisely to bring in fresh perspectives and accelerate innovation, are being scaled back, defunded, or sunsetted altogether.

What’s worse is the ripple effect. Talented early-career professionals now see instability. Refugees and immigrants wonder if they were ever really welcome. Private-sector experts question whether the sacrifice is worth it.

This is more than just organizational reshuffling. It’s a loss of momentum and, for many, a loss of faith. We’re not just losing people; we’re losing trust, and that’s harder to rebuild.

The bar should be high — but the door should be open

I still believe in a high bar. These roles shape policy, security, and lives. They should demand excellence. But excellence and exclusivity aren’t the same.

Too often, our hiring systems reward familiarity over capability. They favor the polished, not the prepared. They assume that if you don’t speak the language of USAJobs or clearance investigations, you must not belong. That’s not merit — that’s legacy.

We can do better. We can build systems that uphold rigor and recognize resilience. That treats unconventional paths as assets, not risks. That makes space for the startup founder, the refugee, the self-taught technologist — the person who didn’t grow up imagining they’d work in government, but showed up anyway.

Final thoughts

Public service isn’t perfect. But it’s one of the few places where your work can outlive you.

I didn’t come from the system, but I was trusted to help improve it. I built things that mattered. I brought urgency where there was inertia. I advocated for the user when no one else was in the room. And I did it all with the perspective of someone who never expected to be let in and never took the opportunity for granted.

Keep the bar high. But keep the door open.

We can’t afford to lose them.

And we can’t afford to lose what they still have to offer.

This piece isn’t a eulogy. It’s a message to leadership: Don’t confuse short-term disruption with long-term disqualification. The people who were laid off aren’t gone — they’re watching. They’re weighing whether government will still make space for builders, reformers, and outsiders. If we let this moment pass without intention, we risk shrinking the very table we worked so hard to expand.

Written by Savanrith “Savan” Kong

Savan Kong served as the Department of Defense's first-ever customer experience officer in the Office of the Chief Information Officer.

defensescoop.com · by Billy Mitchell · April 11, 2025

28. US special operators are going all in on drones so that a human never has to make 'first contact' with the enemy

This is an example of where the use of technology supports the SOF truth, "humans are more important than hardware." The corollary may be "good hardware will protect humans."

US special operators are going all in on drones so that a human never has to make 'first contact' with the enemy

Apr 12, 2025, 6:41 AM ET

• US special operations forces are working with a lot of different drones.
• Operators said the speed of technological innovation requires constant learning.
• Each type of uncrewed system has a different purpose, but the goal is to acquire a lot of it for cheap.
• 
  

Business Insider · by Chris Panella

FORT BRAGG, North Carolina — I play a lot of video games, and the simulator in front of me looked familiar enough: a handheld controller hooked up to a laptop.

Picking up the controller with confidence, I figured my years of gaming would give me an advantage. I was ready to fly my drone through an abandoned city, or so I thought.

The controls for movement — up, down, front, back — were extremely sensitive, far more than I expected.

I tried flying my drone into an empty, concrete building. I shakily skirted the edge of it and landed on the street. Then I just flew up and down for a bit, crashing a few more times as I went along.

Drones swarm overhead at CAPEX. US Army Photo by 1st Lt. Allan Cogan

"I'm not very good at this," I said. The US Army special operator who had been attempting to coach me, agreed, telling me that I probably wouldn't make a good drone pilot.

The good thing is that I don't need this particular skill, but the soldiers preparing for future fights and modern war need it as much as they do small arms skills and fieldcraft. Drones are fast becoming an unavoidable part of warfare.

War is changing

The operator took the controller and effortlessly flew in and out of small windows in buildings. He cut sharp corners and soared through the open air. He made it look easy. It's not.

US special forces have been leading the charge on acquiring drones and training with them, working closely with industry partners on what capabilities are needed and then honing the skills required to operate them effectively.

Ground drones at CAPEX. Business Insider/Chris Panella

At the US Army Special Operations Command's Capabilities Exercise at Fort Bragg in North Carolina last week, drones were everywhere. Small quadcopters, uncrewed ground vehicle systems, robot dogs, loitering munitions, and more were on display.

Operators and officials cited a number of reasons as to why uncrewed systems seemed to be such a priority.

Ground drones

Pointing at one of wheeled drones, Bryan Boyea, the ground robotics capabilities manager with USASOC's robotics division under its force modernization center, said that the goal was to "eliminate first contact ever being a human being."

The drone, Boyea noted, allowed operators to extend their eyes and ears on the battlefield.

Another, smaller drone — white and flatter to the ground — was nearby. This one, he said, is mostly for reconnaissance and intelligence purposes, gathering information on potential enemies in both urban and subterranean environments instead of a human being or military dog.

The drones are among the smaller ground equipment available to special operators, portable so teams can pick them up and carry them around. The bigger one weighs around 30 pounds.

Quadcopter drones at CAPEX. Business Insider/Chris Panella

Quadcopters

First-person-view, or FPV, quadcopters were sitting nearby. These are smaller uncrewed aerial systems, lightweight and used for either intelligence-gathering or dropping smaller payloads.

One of the key attributes of these types of drones, operators said, was their adaptability — being able to change the sensors and payloads based on the mission requirements. They're also highly mobile, relatively easy to learn, and — ideally — scalable, meaning operators could use them in swarms.

A variety of companies are involved in producing different types of drones, and one operator said an important project is ensuring that the technology can work together with other systems via similar software.

Because the technology is developing so quickly, there's often a debate surrounding whether learning drones is an additional duty for operators — or an entirely new job in itself.

One Army special forces operator, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said the difference may come down to the type of drone.

A small ground drone with limited controls, it's likely that "anybody can pick that up in like 20 seconds," he said. But a quadcopter, for example, something that requires more flight skill and maintenance, "that's a job."

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Loitering munitions

Some other uncrewed aerial systems, or UAS, such as UVision's Hero loitering munition and AeroVironment's Switchblade, were on display as well. Loitering munitions are one-way attack drones that loiter in an area before striking a selected target.

UVision's Hero has smaller and larger models; the former is easier to transport for forward-deployed operators, while the latter requires a launching platform and is designed for greater ranges.

The Switchblade, also a loitering munition, has been used by the US military for over a decade and saw heavy use in conflicts in the Middle East. They're designed to be small, although larger models do exist as well. This technology, much like FPV quadcopters, has been employed extensively in Ukraine.

Switchblades at CAPEX. Business Insider/Chris Panella

Robot dogs

Multiple robot dogs — quadruped ground drones — were also at the CAPEX, including one toting a rifle on its head. One such model was from Ghost Robotics.

These drones have been a growing interest for militaries around the world as ways to enhance the reach and reconnaissance of soldiers, as well as keep humans and military dogs out of harm's way.

Controlled by an operator, a robot dog's resting position looks, well, like a dog sitting. After it rises, it can move around on its four legs, twist and turn to look around, and run. When the camera at the front of it points in a direction, it does sort of feel like a dog looking up.

Operators, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told Business Insider the biggest challenge with all these drones is quickly learning all of the different controls and specifications.

Operators said it's becoming a bigger requirement, and it falls in line with SOF's larger shift towards great-power competition and preparation for the possibility of a war with a near-peer or peer-level adversary, a fight that could see prolific drone use, as well as countermeasures like electronic warfare.

It's a process bringing in new warfighting technologies, but one operator said "we're very good at integrating and training with the teams to make sure everyone's on the same wavelength when it comes to how we're going to integrate sUAS [small uncrewed aerial systems] and UGVs into the battlefield and onto a team."

Business Insider · by Chris Panella

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com