Defense One - Ideas

New US security entities hint at more Latin American operations

Thomas Dolzall, Forecast International — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:26:27 -0400

The recent establishment of a organized-crime task force by U.S. Southern Command is the latest expression of the Donroe Doctrine, the administration's interventionist—some say imperialist—approach to Latin America. But it may also signal a increased desire to work with regional partners—or just to operate inside their countries.

Last year's launch of Operation Southern Spear marked a return to a more hands-on U.S foreign policy in Latin America. Beginning with U.S Navy strikes against alleged drug-trafficking vessels, it has expanded to encompass the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro earlier this year and the subsequent re-intensification of U.S economic and military pressure on Cuba.

But SOUTHCOM has also worked to integrate U.S. forces into local security operations and to bring partner states’ security forces under its operational umbrella. In March, the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition was created as a U.S-led body to coordinate regional actions against transnational organized crime. That same month, SOUTHCOM dispatched forces to help Ecuadorian security forces to take action against an alleged criminal hub inside Ecuador. Now the Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, stood up on Aug. 4, is meant to facilitate and coordinate action against organized criminal threats by the U.S. military and regional partner states.

The JTF-WHEM and the A3C suggest SOUTHCOM senses a need for multilateral cooperation. Though several Latin American governments are adopting tougher policies towards organized crime and were broadly sympathetic to Maduro's removal, Southern Spear’s controversial boat strikes and the Maduro operation provoked unease in a region with a long history of U.S. interventionism.

The task force and the coalition are forums through which U.S. and SOUTHCOM leaders can build and enforce strategic consensus, guide operational planning, mediate disputes among members, and influence non-members. U.S. officials have sought to attract participation through political and material incentives. Diplomats and senior SOUTHCOM personnel have sought to attain regional buy-in, or at least acquiescence, for the United States' larger role in the region—including, perhaps, formal deployments of U.S. troops inside regional partner states. And officials are is increasingly tying security and economic assistance to commitments of cooperation in areas of U.S. interest.

The JTF-WHEM, at least, appears likely to be put to imminent use. On Aug. 12, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia, Honduras, and Guatemala had approved U.S. participation in combined operations against criminal entities.

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Shock wave

Peter W. Singer and August Cole — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Imagine an alternate near-future in which the U.S. military had more vigorously pursued the development of hypersonic weapons. When a major U.S. Air Force exercise deploys such weapons to Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, it surprises Chinese military leaders who believed that U.S. hypersonic missile development had been stymied by underfunded research, technological gaps, and a lack of prioritization.

This month’s Fictional Intelligence is a “what if” thought experiment that takes the form of a memo on this stunning turn of events, written by a colonel in the PLA Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff of the Central Military Commission. In this imagined universe where the U.S. leads China in hypersonic warfare, not lags behind, the People’s Liberation Army is forced to revisit its strategic assumptions and plans.

This fictional document uses PLA writing conventions, for example, to detail specific aircraft and offer general systems capability observations.

FICTIONAL PLA MEMO TEXT:

DATE: 203X July 2

REF: 33/CMC/24-8

DIST: PLA Joint Operational Systems Design Expert Group • Central Military Commission Political Work Department • Central Military Commission Joint Staff Department • Central Military Commission Equipment Development Department • Eastern Theater Command Political Work Department • People’s Liberation Army Air Force Political Work Department

SUBJECT: Selected Observations on the Strategic and Mechanization Implications of the Performance of U.S. Air Force Hypersonic Weapons Systems

Comrade,

Reflecting the urgency communicated by the Communist Party of China’s Politburo Standing Committee and the Communist Party of China’s Central Military Commission, I respectfully offer this analysis in response to the CMC’s inquiry into the strategic blackmail posed by the U.S. Air Force PACIFIC ARCHER exercise inside the Second Island Chain and the mechanization aspects of the enemy’s combat power.

Summary: As a reflection of adversary defense industrial strength and military research, the PACIFIC ARCHER exercise signifies a qualitative shift for the enemy and necessitates a subjective rectification of our previous assumptions about American hypersonic weapons integration and its operational implications to the PLA.

Guided by dialectic principles, this analysis divides into three parts:

1) PACIFIC ARCHER Systemic Overview

2) Rectifications of Understanding: Cognitive Lag and U.S. Hypersonic Capabilities

3) Operational Logic for Confrontational Thresholds and Active Defense

PART 1: PACIFIC ARCHER Systemic Overview

On 17 June 0430 local time, the U.S. Air Force commenced exercise PACIFIC ARCHER to simulate the rapid deployment of hypersonic-missile equipped fighter and bomber aircraft. During the next 36 hours, the Americans deployed multiple squadrons of systemic nodes (five squadrons of fighter aircraft and four bomber squadrons) to Guam, along with additional support aircraft. Notably, both types of combat aircraft were armed with hypersonic missiles. Within 12 hours of arriving on Guam, 67 percent of the aircraft dispersed to other locations inside the Second Island Chain, including Saipan and Tinian.

The operationalization of this system-centric rapid response capability, integrating an aviation network entirely equipped with hypersonic air-to-ground effectors, is significant in multiple ways. It turned legacy aircraft and AI-guided Collaborative Combat Aircraft into an intelligentized force. The exercise of this system-centric rapid response capability marked the first time the adversary deployed aircraft that were all equipped with hypersonic air-to-ground missiles. Additional support and logistics C-17 and C-130 aircraft transported additional simulated missiles to Guam and other dispersed U.S. Air Force Agile Combat Employment (ACE) bases to demonstrate contested resupply. These systemic strike nodes achieved a qualitative leap ahead in lethality to achieve the potential systemic neutralization of our high-value targets.

Previous U.S. military exercises such as REFORPAC, BAMBOO EAGLE, and TALISMAN SABRE integrated hypersonic weapons capabilities, with a focus on U.S. Army and Marine Corps ground-launch capabilities, such as Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) and Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW or Dark Eagle) missiles. PACIFIC ARCHER is the first exercise centered on an intelligentized air-launched weapons framework of multiple aircraft types and their employment from dispersed locations that can match or exceed ground-launched hypersonic weapon ranges. The enemy demonstrated its capability to strike deep into our strategic depth.

The enemy aircraft involved in the exercise included F-15EX, F-22, F-35, F-47, B-21, B-1, and B-52, as well as at least two types of known Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Notably, the B-52 can carry more than 20 HACM weapons and the B-1 can carry 36 HACM weapons. Imagery and signals reporting indicate the aircraft carried the hypersonic missiles internally and externally. Known missile types tested during PACIFIC ARCHER were AGM-183A ARRW, Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM), and Mako weapons; presently unknown hypersonic air-to-air missile systems were also deployed.

By 29 June, all U.S. Air Force aircraft involved in PACIFIC ARCHER departed Guam, Saipan, and Tinian after completing multiple simulated long-range strike missions.

PART 2: Rectifications of Understanding U.S. Hypersonic Capabilities

The PLA possesses the most advanced and comprehensive hypersonic air-, sea-, and ground-launched missiles of any military. They are the logical product of the Party’s dedication to defending China’s core interests and years of investment to generate asymmetric advantages for the PLA in the New Era.

We must now admit a cognitive gap in our technical modeling and principal assessments that believed the enemy would continue to lag behind China’s hypersonics march to world-class status in the future. This necessitates seizing this opportunity for self-reflection on how the U.S. achieved this capability and for developing renewed understanding of the integrated elements involved. This reexamination is a moment to study the U.S. example and use that new understanding to surpass them in this technical area.

For one, PLA intelligence analysis considered the American harnessing of civil-military fusion with a sole focus on AI and software to have shut the door on military research and technology programs developing medium- and long-term capabilities in non-profit civilian economy centers, including hypersonics. Also, analysts believed U.S. military and political leaders to have timid voices regarding a sense of urgency in reforming the culture of procuring and deploying hypersonics as a matter of time sensitivity.

The U.S. Air Force’s fielding of these air-launched decapitation tools during PACIFIC ARCHER reveals much greater success in overcoming the technological and developmental challenges of air-launched hypersonic missiles than was previously assessed by PLAAF.

Most significantly, the enemy’s deployment of so many aircraft equipped with hypersonic missiles to the Guam bastion attests to the successful scaled production of such weapons. It is now evident that the U.S. has built a bridge between hypersonic research and testing and its revitalized defense industrial base’s production facilities. Past analysis of renewed enemy military-industrial-financial complex capabilities during the last decade indicated a policy focus on intelligentized command and control, autonomous drones, conventional munitions, and profit-seeking innovation –– rather than research-intensive aerodynamic pressure sensors, dual-flow scramjet propulsion, and composite aerostructures needed for scaled production of hypersonic air-launched missiles. In seeing what was visible on the water’s surface, such hypersonic technologies appeared to have been cut off from the flow of vital budget support and dedicated Air Force research and testing organization personnel focused on scaled manufacturing challenges. We assessed there to be little likelihood of production breakthroughs in these areas. PACIFIC ARCHER revealed a gap in our understanding.

As an example of the adversary’s progress, the successful miniaturization of medium-range hypersonic air-to-ground missiles allows them to be carried on internal weapons racks in aircraft such as F-35 and F-22 fighters. Produced at multiple manufacturing facilities, the supply chain for these miniaturized missiles is nonetheless vertically integrated and must reflect harmonious cooperation among the U.S. Air Force and defense industry. Subsequent research reveals successful high-volume manufacturing of miniaturized scramjet propulsion units. Not only does this design reduce the radar signature on these aircraft equipped with internally carried missiles, but it also makes it difficult to determine if an aircraft is equipped with hypersonic weapons during testing or deployment. Other technological advances linked to the capabilities demonstrated in PACIFIC ARCHER exceeded expectations. These include hypersonic flight control software systems, materials thermal management, and precision navigation and timing.

Shared military-civil fusion goals between U.S. universities and the U.S. Air Force are now known to have led to the development of additional hypersonic test infrastructure, such as multiple Mach 10 wind tunnels. Expanded flight test campaigns conducted to improve air-launched capabilities were integrated into other ground-launched missile development programs, resulting in cost efficiencies and obscuring the nature of these air-launched experiments.

Determining a precise picture was now evidently made more difficult by comprehensive adversary counterintelligence activities focused on securing defense-industrial research and development. We must also acknowledge their potential use of deception and cognitive warfare operations, capabilities that they demonstrated in past generations, but we assumed had been devalued. It is highly possible the gap in our understanding of U.S. Air Force hypersonic capabilities is attributable to a deception operation on the part of the American military to create a cognitive trap.

Your announcement of the replacement of the leadership cadre of the PLA Intelligence Bureau and a CMC Discipline Inspection Commission focused on all who failed in their duty will surely bring more information on how this cognitive gap proved possible.

What is known at this time is that by shining a bright light on emergent adversary civil-military fusion market forces revitalizing their defense industry, we created a shadow elsewhere. MSS and PLA analysis and cyber activities focused on emerging defense companies, especially those centered in “Silicon Valley” and their venture capital industry, both of which had been compromised by our human and SIGINT assets for over a generation. However, this created a failure to appreciate that many important defense breakthroughs like hypersonics advances, which often require long lead time and don’t always produce profits, could still be fueled by government research and development centers like DARPA and the Air Force Research Lab.

While more time is needed to understand how this was achieved, it is now clear that a shared vision of urgent innovation and scientific fighting spirit was present within the U.S. Air Force, as evidenced by reexaminations of obscure public writing and speeches by officials. While a budget is like oxygen for the body, without a facile mind there is no way that a program will thrive. By harvesting its human capital and innovation from all ranks and organizations, the U.S. Air Force has created a talent forest that is a resource for future development work in this technical area, as well as others. This may be the backbone of the breakthrough in air-launched hypersonic weapons displayed at PACIFIC ARCHER, and we must strongly search out other cognitive gaps in multiple other technology areas where we had assumed superiority for the PLA.

PART 3: Operational Logic for Confrontational Thresholds

The hegemonic behavior of enemy military forces inside the Second Island Chain is not surprising, but the U.S. Air Force hypersonic capabilities displayed at PACIFIC ARCHER reflect a necessary opportunity to consider the reexamination of operational logic for confrontational thresholds. It was believed that the enemy would be subdued without fighting, yet this aggressive demonstration shows they have now embraced our own approach to asymmetric engagement. If Chairman Mao advised, "You fight your way, and I’ll fight my way," the systematized employment of hypersonic weapons is more “our way.” A primary area of inquiry relates to operational planning during the critical window of the next 18 months.

While all-domain sensing of systemic threat nodes allows the identification of U.S. Air Force fighters and bombers dispersed to fixed nodes of high value inside the Second Island Chain from Guam to Tinian, Saipan, and other locations, PLAAF forces will be blind to whether these aircraft carry a spear or a stick. With its dispersed bomber and fighter aircraft armed with air-launched hypersonic weapons, the enemy has demonstrated a qualitative leap in lethality at a distance, while expanding the strike radius to apply persistent asymmetric pressure to the PLA’s own high-value systemic nodes.

When U.S. Air Force aircraft operate from a distributed operational system within the Second Island Chain, enemy air-launched hypersonic missiles can attack fixed PLA targets from multiple vectors and beyond air-intercept ranges. It is assessed now that enemy air-launched hypersonic missiles can simultaneously reach targets inside the First Island Chain, such as PLAN Carrier Strike Groups in port, PLA frontier bastions on Fiery Cross Reef, and the nerves of our space-ground nodes at Sanya Ground Station and Jiamusi Ground Station. This target coverage within our strategic barriers at scale was not believed to be possible until PACIFIC ARCHER presented the operationalization of these capabilities.

The demonstration of such enemy hypersonic capabilities introduces additional dilemmas for large-scale PLA expeditionary operations, which rely on surprise, mass, and speed. The enemy can deploy such aircraft and missiles in a superior position before a battle, such that they are able to predetermine the outcome in their favor.

Dispersed U.S. Air Force fighters and bombers inside the Second Island Chain will be able to pursue mobile targets at ever greater distances, as was demonstrated during PACIFIC ARCHER. In one instance observed by a PLAN surveillance vessel, a B-1 bomber operating from Tinian International Airport launched a HACM that destroyed a maneuvering maritime target decoy south of Wake Island. At a range of approximately 1,600 kilometers and guided by sensor-fusion data, this capability exceeds the speed and range of conventional air-launched antiship missiles previously used by the enemy. Our modeling and simulations of enemy airpower capabilities must therefore shift if relatively fewer enemy aircraft can target far more fixed and mobile PLA targets than had been expected. Additional testing during the exercise of an unknown hypersonic air-launched missile fired from B-21 bombers revealed the U.S. Air Force has fielded an internally carried Mach-10 weapon. This new enemy capability further destabilizes the balance between defense and offense.

The PLA’s planned asymmetric advantage targeting the enemy’s logistics in depth during a war of consumption is now also an assumption that must be reexamined.

The new enemy capabilities pose complications and dilemmas for PLA and CMC air, sea and expeditionary operations in INDOPACOM –– particularly the time-to-target compression from Mach 6/Mach 7+ hypersonic weapons deployed around the enemy force at scale. U.S. Air Force distributed nodes inside the Second Island Chain are beyond PLARF non-ballistic engagement zones, which compounds the PLA’s dilemmas as each dispersed enemy Air Task Force now has a much greater effective targeting range. With these new hypersonic weapons, the enemy systemic strike node operating concept emerges from its desperate position of timidity and defensiveness to one that is proactive and highly disruptive. By targeting PLAN vessels and air-defense systems, the enemy can disrupt the PLA’s counter-intervention capabilities necessary for far seas protection.

In light of this, specific operational areas necessary for strategic leadership require careful consideration based on the enemy capabilities demonstrated at PACIFIC ARCHER.

First, any operation to fulfill our national destiny to reunify with Taiwan must recognize the seeding of enemy archers and arrows throughout our near seas that can sever supply lines by targeting supply vessels in the Taiwan Strait with hypersonic air-launched missiles. The enemy can also apply a stranglehold on lines of communication and supply to our bases in the East and South China Seas.

Transregional operations to establish common strategic interests in the Indian Ocean, East Africa, South America, the Middle East, and the Arctic, must also be reassessed. U.S. Air Force aircraft equipped with hypersonic missiles provide a similar gain in range and speed, threatening PLA forces, our interests, and our logistics support facilities worldwide. Specifically, a harmonious and historic reunification with Taiwan could be prevented by enemy hypersonic weapons deployed to global strategic nodes proximate to our Belt and Road lines of communication. Even a few enemy aircraft could sever the maritime flow of oil, critical minerals, and other materiel flowing from the beating heart of our logistics networks in those far regions.

Conclusion:

The PACIFIC ARCHER exercise signifies a qualitative shift for the enemy’s systemic strike nodes in the Second Island Chain and reflects a renewed strength in their civil-military fusion focused on intelligentized warfare. The U.S. Air Force fielded unprecedented numbers of air-launched hypersonic weapons while demonstrating an improved joint operational strike system. In doing so, they revealed an unexpected sense of urgency in their fusion of research and development, production, and doctrine to achieve new levels of lethality at a distance against the PLA’s high-value systemic nodes. The adversary’s previously identified system dependencies, identified through systems confrontation analysis, are no longer valid. The Communist Party and CMC must reexamine all strategic planning during the next 18 months as we seize this opportunity for self-reflection on how the adversary achieved this capability and for developing a renewed understanding of our own PLA capabilities.

PREPARED BY: Commanding Officer Senior Colonel Li Feng, PLAAF

REVIEWED BY: Political Commissar Senior Colonel Bao Hu, PLAAF

Image: Modified from an original DVIDS U.S. Air Force photo.

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The antifa terrorism threat the Trump administration describes does not exist

Jason M. Blazakis, The Conversation — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:35:29 -0400

The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to believe: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement called antifa threatens the democratic world. At the event, allies were asked to mobilize against that enemy despite nations like the Netherlands and Germany politely noting to their host that they cannot find evidence of any such group.

Some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa at interagency meetings because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.

As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.

Antifa is not a group

As I and others have written before, antifa is not a group. It is a movement and an ideology, a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it amounts to scattered local collectives like Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.

There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy, and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.

Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.

As such, the Trump administration created one.

The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.

Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.

Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.

Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious-activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.

That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.

The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.

The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.

State Department targets groups overseas

The foreign component of the campaign arrived in November 2025. That’s when the State Department designated four European groups – one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The State Department-designated groups are real. And some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings.

But as I have noted, the designations are very peculiar. These groups have committed vandalism and harmed people, but not one of the four has carried out an attack that led to any fatalities.

German leaders have said the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.

As the former head of the State Department’s office that recommended to the secretary of state which groups to designate, I’ve been involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations. The bar was never this low. That’s because the Foreign Terrorist Organization list loses its meaning, and its deterrent power, when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.

That brings us back to the State Department’s ministerial. The sequence of events leading up to it matter:

Invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the story. Each step launders the previous one.

Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement. That is the point of the exercise, and U.S allies such as the Netherlands have explained how antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws.

Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses. I don’t believe that using them against an ideology, one defined by opposition to fascism, makes America safer. I believe it tells every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world’s leading counterterrorism power can no longer tell the difference between a threat and an opponent.

Implications of the ministerial meeting

This is not just an issue of semantics and rhetoric – each action by the Trump administration against a strawman enemy creates risks. And the push to internationalize the antifa threat could have dire consequences at home.

First, if the State Department leaves the July 16 meeting with pliable allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it will embolden the administration to point to a supposed global conspiracy of the far left.

That path leads to a State Department foreign terrorist designation. Such a designation means Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and quite possibly find themselves rounded up for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. This would be more dangerous than Trump’s earlier executive order.

Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government gains cover to shut down protests under the guise of exposing global left-wing plotting.

Third, it could justify the revival of projects like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, resurrecting the surveillance, infiltration and disruption of lawful political activity that the bureau was supposed to have abandoned after the abuses of the 1970s.

Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit lays bare a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration’s willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends.

That divergence is the real hazard, far more than any phantom left-wing terrorism group, because European counterterrorism leans so heavily on U.S. intelligence. As such, transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation could be in for turbulent times.

Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, there is no version that will make Americans safer.

I believe one result is certain: Genuine threats – from groups with leaders, actual funding and malicious intent – will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to take action against antifa.

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Canada’s GCAP decision is about relationships, not the F-35

Shaun McDougall, Forecast International — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:25:32 -0400

Canada's decision to become the first observer nation in the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, a multinational effort to build a sixth-generation fighter, is less about finding an alternative to its ongoing F-35 purchases and more about building non-U.S. defense relationships.

First, a look at Canada’s current fighter requirements. The Royal Canadian Air Force flies Boeing CF-18 Hornets that were originally expected to retire by 2020. Ottawa had planned since 2010 to replace them with 65 F-35s, but scuttled the plan as the cost of the Joint Strike Fighter continued to rise.

The government examined other options, including the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Saab Gripen, in a follow-on competition marked by a chaotic process and a trade dispute with Boeing about government commercial aircraft subsidies and negotiations over industrial benefits. Justin Trudeau’s government ultimately decided to buy 88 F-35s.

That changed when Donald Trump returned to the White House. Within a year, the American president's new tariffs and comments about annexing Canada deeply strained the once-ironclad relationship. The fallout reshaped Canada’s political future. Trudeau’s Liberal Party was facing abysmal approval ratings, leading to his ouster as prime minister prior to the 2025 federal election. His replacement, Mark Carney, promised to stand up to Trump in the trade war, which ultimately secured his Liberal party an election victory.

Carney has continued to push back against Trump, including outlining plans to distance Canada from its reliance on U.S. defense equipment. He put the F-35 procurement plans on hold to review the program and determine if a different aircraft would better serve Canada’s broader interests. Ottawa is already contractually committed to the first 16 F-35s, so at this point the government is deciding whether to continue with a pure fleet of F-35s or adopt a mixed fleet that would likely integrate the Saab Gripen. The Royal Canadian Air Force has long preferred the F-35, but the program remains a political negotiating tool.

Enter GCAP

Ottawa’s involvement in GCAP—a joint effort of Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—isn’t about replacing the CF-18, which will be retired sooner rather than later. Before putting the F-35 on hold, Ottawa anticipated receiving its final new aircraft in 2032. However, GCAP isn’t expected to enter service until 2035, and any theoretical Canadian aircraft wouldn’t arrive until well after that date, meaning it isn’t a viable platform to replace the CF-18. Canadian Defense Minister David McGuinty confirmed as much on Monday when he said any GCAP involvement is a separate issue from the ongoing F-35 review.

Rather, Canada’s move is about building relationships and realigning strategic partnerships at a time of deteriorating relations with the U.S. Canada is increasingly looking abroad to bolster defense and industrial ties with other nations. Joining GCAP, even if only as an observer, serves as way to learn more about sixth-generation fighter capabilities, increase industrial collaboration with allies overseas, and strengthen ongoing security arrangements. “Today is about more than a program, it’s about an enduring strength of partnership,” McGuinty said at a press conference announcing the GCAP news.

McGuinty also spoke of a world that is becoming more contested, with technology and conflict transforming at an unparalleled pace. “The nations that can innovate together, build together, and stand together will be best positioned to meet the challenges of tomorrow,” he said. These sentiments echo a speech Prime Minister Carney gave at the January 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. There, he called for increased cooperation among middle powers to hedge against uncertainty and the rise of “hard power.” While Carney didn’t mention the U.S. or Trump by name, the speech clearly served to highlight Canada’s displeasure with the new status quo in Washington.

Walking a fine line

Canada finds itself in a difficult position. It faces diminished trust in its closest ally and has outlined plans to reduce its reliance on American military equipment in the future. At the same time, U.S. and Canadian defense interests remain closely linked through shared security under the North American Aerospace Defense Command. U.S. and Canadian defense industrial bases are also deeply integrated, and Canada already operates many U.S. platforms. The tense relationship also hasn’t derailed other recent efforts to procure U.S. equipment, such as Boeing P-8A maritime patrol aircraft, General Atomics MQ-9B drones, and Lockheed Martin High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

As with other European nations that have expressed a desire to rely more heavily on domestic hardware, shifting away from reliance on U.S. equipment is something that would take years to achieve and is a goal that will be significantly impacted by future administrations. For now, GCAP observer status doesn’t change Canada’s fighter fleet or its F-35 review. What it does is give Ottawa a new seat at the table as it works to diversify its defense relationships beyond Washington.

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The Trump administration’s global campaign against ‘radical left terrorism’ is built on a national security memo

Melinda Haas, The Conversation — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:37:07 -0400

A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters.

That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism drew representatives from more than 65 countries to Washington. The gathering was informally called the “Antifa summit.”

Rubio described antifa-aligned networks as sharing infrastructure across borders and accused Iran and Cuba of helping bankroll the movement, without offering evidence. The White House declared the summit the start of an “unprecedented global offensive” against what it calls “radical left terrorism.”

This offensive is built on the same domestic legal architecture that has now sent American activists to prison for decades.

That architecture is National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, which for the first time appeared to authorize preemptive law-enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.

Nearly a year later, that blueprint has moved from paper into practice.

The Justice Department has built task forces staffed by counterterrorism prosecutors. The FBI has set up its own NSPM-7 mission center to oversee investigations into left-wing movements, including a joint effort with the IRS to investigate nonprofit groups.

The Justice Department has used this machinery to convict activists and send some of them to prison for decades.

NSPM-7 was not passed by Congress. It’s a lesser-known tool of executive power: a presidential memorandum.

As an international relations scholar who has studied U.S. foreign policy decision-making and national security legislation, I recognize that presidents can take several types of executive actions without legislative involvement: executive orders, memoranda and proclamations.

This structure allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight.

Presidential national security powers

Executive memorandums direct agencies to prepare reports, implement policies, or align programs with the administration’s priorities. Unlike executive orders, they aren’t required to be published. When they relate to national security, like NSPM-7, they’re called national security directives – many of which stay classified and may not be declassified for years or decades.

The stated purpose of NSPM-7 is to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence, focusing mainly on perceived threats from the political left. The memorandum identifies “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as potential indicators that a group or person will commit domestic terrorism.

The memorandum claims that political violence originates with “anti-fascist” groups that hold the following views: “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The strategy includes preemptive measures to disrupt groups before they engage in violent political acts, empowering multiagency task forces to investigate potential federal crimes related to radicalization and the groups’ funders. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 2025 implementation memo went further, ordering a five-year review of agency files on antifa. A task force staffed with counterterrorism and organized-crime prosecutors is carrying out these investigations.

‘Domestic terrorist organizations’

The memorandum directs the Department of Justice to focus FBI resources from approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on investigating “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.”

NSPM-7 also allows the attorney general to propose groups for designation as “domestic terrorist organizations.” That includes groups that engage in “organized doxxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”

Existing laws allow the secretary of state to designate groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” that are then subject to financial sanctions.

But these laws do not permit the president to label domestic groups this way.

That gap hasn’t stopped prosecutions. In Texas, eight defendants tied to a “North Texas Antifa Cell” were sentenced in June 2026 for a 2025 armed confrontation at the Prairieland immigration detention center. One man received 100 years, and others who never fired a weapon still drew decades in prison under terrorism sentencing guidelines.

In Minnesota, 15 members and associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota were indicted in June 2026 on conspiracy and assault charges. A 94-page indictment cited behavior such as wearing an “I’m Antifa!” sweatshirt, possessing a bullhorn or including a devil emoji in a Signal message.

NSPM-7 marks a major conceptual shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, departing from approaches that primarily targeted foreign threats.

Earlier directives, dating to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, treated terrorism as a global menace countered through military power and diplomacy. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration reframed it as a domestic challenge after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

After 9/11, the Bush administration fused counterterrorism with national defense through the global war on terrorism. The Obama administration later tried to narrow those powers, asking whether targeted individuals “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” — a standard focused on tactics and capture feasibility, not ideology.

The first Trump administration used a “travel ban” against several “terror-prone”countries, while President Joe Biden redirected focus toward weapons of mass destruction.

Notably, the “domestic terrorist” label itself has rarely produced actual charges. The State Department designated four antifa-aligned groups as foreign terrorist organizations. But antifa is a decentralized movement, not a formal group with a roster.

This designation lacks any real legal weight because U.S. law has no formal domestic terrorist organization category. Creating one risks infringing on First Amendment protected speech. Domestic terrorism itself is not a chargeable offense.

Prosecutors have instead leaned on older statutes such as material support for terrorism and conspiracy laws, tools originally built for cases like the ones above, not protest movements.

First Amendment rights at risk

There is no single official definition of terrorism in U.S. law; definitions vary by purpose – criminal law, intelligence collection, civil liability.

Definitions in all those areas typically focus on identifying violent or dangerous acts done with the intent to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy.

But more than redefining terrorism, NSPM-7 reorients the machinery of national security toward the policing of belief.

The First Amendment generally prevents the government from punishing people for unpopular opinions. It also protects the ability for people to associate to advance public and private ideas in pursuit of political, economic, religious or cultural goals.

The directive’s emphasis on ideological orientations – “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-American” views – as indicators of domestic terrorism potentially jeopardizes First Amendment rights.

Thirty-one members of Congress sent a letter to Trump in October 2025expressing “serious concerns” about NSPM-7, warning that it poses “serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest or ideological speech.”

As the ACLU warns, any definition of terrorism that includes ideological components risks criminalizing people or groups based on belief rather than based on violence or other criminal conduct.

Congress has declined to create a domestic complement to the foreign terrorist designation in large part because of the potential for impinging on First Amendment–protected association and speech.

But I fear that chilling speech may be the point.

Silencing dissent

NSPM-7 does not criminalize previously legal conduct.

Rather, it states that the Trump administration will focus investigations around the identity and ideology of supposed perpetrators. Prioritizing investigations into this broad swath of ideologies serves to instill fear, silencing anti-fascist and other messages in opposition to the Trump administration.

Law professor Steve Vladeck frames this chill as “obeying in advance,” in which organizations self-censor rather than risk investigation, prosecution or defending against the “domestic terrorist” label. Federal judges in the Prairieland case have shown little sympathy for that distinction: One judge described the protest itself as “an assault on democracy,” even for defendants who never touched a weapon.

Although left-wing violence has risen in the past decade, empirical evidenceshows it remains far below historical levels of right-wing or jihadist violence.

Most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, accounting for the vast majority of domestic terrorism fatalities.

Yet NSPM-7 focuses disproportionately on left-wing ideologies. NSPM-7 departs from prior U.S. counterterrorism frameworks by prioritizing the suppression of ideologically motivated dissent, even where, as in Minnesota, judges have already dismissed roughly half of similar federal cases for lack of evidence.

This is an updated version of a story originally published December 3, 2025.

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What is the Chinese military thinking about the Iran war?

Peter W. Singer — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Subj: Systemic Vulnerabilities and Strategic Overextension: Takeaways from the Recent Western Asian Conflict

Comrade, As requested urgently for your upcoming briefing to the Central Military Commission, I respectfully offer this preliminary strategic analysis regarding the ongoing military conflict involving the United States and Islamic Republic of Iran.

While the current leader of the American Hegemon, President Donald Trump, has publicly expressed a desire to place this war in the "rearview mirror," our nation and the People's Liberation Army cannot afford such comforting illusions. Neither, in truth, can the Americans themselves. Grounded in dialectic principles and systems-confrontation analysis, this report distills five primary analytical breakthroughs from the conflict.

Together they validate our present strategy, while demonstrating growing—and exploitable—weaknesses and mistakes of the United States.

1: Technical Masters, Strategic Amateurs

Any rigorous analysis of American combat employment confirms that they remain shackled by ideological blindness and a cognitive flaw: the United States remains a master of the tactical, but an amateur at the strategic.

Throughout the campaign, the U.S. military conducted complex operations of immense sophistication, scale, and diversity. These merit our respect and provide certain models for further study.

But as has been the case in multiple conflicts across multiple decades, the adversary conflates the kinetic with the realization of political objectives. U.S. leaders measure progress and now claim victory based on numeric localized indicators—the total number of sorties, or physical targets struck, or the death of specific high-value leaders. In reality, none of these tactical actions yielded an outcome in which the hegemon met their various stated political goals for initiating and then sustaining the conflict.

Moreover, this conflict has led to a net diminution of global American power, which is the only measure that truly matters. In each of the dimensions of our competition—political, economic, military, diplomatic, informational, and cultural power—the American leaders end the conflict with lesser freedom of decision, reduced resources, and new problems. Even the once-overwhelming personal influence of their leader is now openly challenged in new ways inside their political system—an asset to us in future diplomatic and trade negotiations.

In sum, American strategic culture continues to possess no coherent mechanism for translating explosive energy into strategic victory.

2: America’s Growing Strategic Isolation

The conflict showed the growing vulnerability within the enemy's coalition architecture, characterized by the hegemon’s disinterest in and inability to maintain genuine alliance harmony. The United States possesses allies, but its current leadership repeatedly and overtly demonstrates that it fundamentally does not value them.

This conflict extended a longstanding pattern of hegemonistic unilateralism. Washington failed to consult its regional client states before launching destabilizing actions, leaving those allies exposed to retaliatory strikes without adequate protective systems. This has led governments in the region, but also those beyond, to question the value of these client relationships. Furthermore, when many of the hegemon's most longstanding partners outside of the region exercised their sovereign judgment and declined to participate in what they correctly assessed as a strategic mistake, U.S. leaders repeatedly attacked them, politically and personally. Current American leadership seems more focused on manifesting itself as a security threat rather than friend and protector.

Each of these factors is now exploitable in our diplomacy and information operations, as further evidence of a broader trend of American unreliability and unpredictability. We no longer have to create disunity; they do so themselves.

The same failure to appreciate alliances was mirrored at the operational and even tactical military level.

Western military observers have rightly discussed the emergence of a “learning complex” that has been built between ourselves, Russia, Iran, and Democratic People's Republic of Korea, in which not just weapons, but intelligence, tactics, and doctrine lessons are exchanged.

The value of this approach was acutely demonstrated on the battlefield. Iranian forces operationalized the latest in Russian tactics and technology, imported from the Ukraine theater, and fused them with intelligence insights provided by our forces and deniable corporations. By using sophisticated, wave-saturated drone strikes paired with decoy systems, the Iranians on multiple occasions defeated or bypassed air-defense networks, causing massive damage to bases and critical infrastructure, each of which had strategic effect.

Many of these tactics and technologies had been exhibited in other conflicts for over a decade, most particularly in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. military demonstrated a profound lack of preparation for them, and their doctrinal rigidity and arrogance cost the lives of numerous American soldiers.

The Americans’ failure to adapt is all the more striking because they have an extensive presence in each of these conflicts: military, intelligence, and defense industrial connections to one and sometimes both sides. This illustrates not just the American institutional inertia in adaptation, but also their failure to appreciate and use their relationships with other experienced militaries. The Americans often seemed to operate in a vacuum, as if contemporary lessons of conflict and the experiences and insights of their partners did not even exist.

3: The New Math of War

The adversary fails to comprehend the changing objective laws of modern informationized and increasingly intelligentized warfare, and their connection to the realities of modern defense-industrial supply chains.

The U.S. political and military apparatus boasts of hitting an astounding 13,000 targets. Yet the cost to do so, measured in munitions alone, averaged $4 million apiece.

Their defensive posture suffered from a similar, and fatal, structural cost asymmetry. The Americans routinely engaged mass-produced, low-cost assets, such as $20,000 drones, using multi-million-dollar interceptors designed for high-end fighters and even ballistic missiles.

The American way of war is unsustainable in not just cost but capability. The conflict showed that the adversary’s interceptor inventory is dangerously shallow and exposed. The United States expended an estimated 150 of its THAAD rounds, of which it is believed to have had 190 to 290. At their purchasing rate of 12 new THAAD interceptors per fiscal year, replacing a single month of conflict consumption will require more than 12.5 years of uninterrupted industrial output. Even before the conflict, these numbers were insufficient compared to the capability of the PLARF.

This structural deficit is mirrored across their entire defensive apparatus. The Patriot system rests at a current inventory of 1,060 to 1,430 (against an objective of 2,330); each missile costs $3.9 million. The naval SM-6 is limited to 190 to 370 units (against an objective of 1,160); it costs $5.3 million apiece. The critical SM-3 theater interceptor is restricted to a mere 130 to 250 units (objective: 410), at a prohibitive unit price of $28.7 million.

U.S. leaders, who framed victory by offensive munitions fired, burned through their stockpiles of precision-guided munitions and advanced strike missiles. At current production rates, it will take them until 2030 to restore their pre-war inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The high expenditure rate is also another facet of their failure to appreciate their now-fraying alliance commitments. For instance, Japan's order of 400 Tomahawks will now be delayed, while Patriot missiles were moved away from defending allies and American bases in the Pacific.

There are two larger takeaways for our strategy from the American inability to keep pace with the appetite of their self-created demands.

First, while they trumpet a revitalized defense industrial base, now driven by social-media-technology oligarchs, their defense industrial complex still remains fundamentally beholden to the forces of short-term market profit rather than comprehensive national power and state resilience. They simply lack the surge production capacity to sustain the high-intensity consumption their way of war requires.

But even more, by forcing their system into an early war of attrition against a secondary power, the Americans have severely compromised their strategic depth and readiness for any future high-intensity confrontation elsewhere, for at least a half decade.

Both points validate the correctness of our Rocket Force’s doctrine of saturated strike capabilities designed to comprehensively paralyze the Americans’ and their client states’ defensive architectures.

4: Self-Inflicted Cognitive Warfare

The conflict reinforced other areas of our theory of victory in any confrontation with America. Most notably, it revealed that the U.S. is uniquely vulnerable to cognitive warfare. In fact, America now appears to specialize in conducting these psychological and information operations against itself.

The rationale behind the Iran conflict remains in great dispute across the American political system and society, with equal confusion and debate about its starting goals and even its termination point. For-profit social-media companies and the American political media apparatus have constructed insulated information bubbles that feed their audiences whatever outcome they most want to be validated by. To different audiences, the conflict is simultaneously a historic triumph and a glaring disaster.

Exacerbating these internal contradictions is a growing preoccupation with domestic culture wars at the expense of coherent strategic execution of real wars. Nor has this phenomenon been mitigated by various attempts at providing a circus of public entertainments that do not seem to be providing either unity or distraction.

In a parallel to the dynamics of U.S alliances, we no longer need to create disunity. While U.S. actions validate our investments in cognitive warfare, they may render them less necessary than when first envisioned, as none of the above was achieved through Iranian or our own cognitive-warfare operations during the recent conflict. The American’s own internal information and ideological fracturing severely degrades their strategic willpower and opens them to further exploitation.

5: Strategic Pressure Points

Nothing highlights this more than what the American political-military-media-entertainment complex chose to celebrate as the war’s greatest triumph: not battles won or geopolitical repositioning, but the rescue of a single pilot.

To review the operational facts, a mythologized, vanguard American asset was easily ambushed and neutralized by Iranian air defenses, which had supposedly already been defeated, in part due to our learning complex. The downed American pilot was then extracted via a massive, exorbitantly expensive rescue operation. A force of 155 aircraft, including 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and four nuclear-capable strategic bombers, as well over 100 of the most elite of US special operators were put at risk. Multiple helicopters and drones were then damaged or lost. The fiasco concluded with American forces being compelled to abandon and destroy two of their exorbitantly expensive, rare special-operations aircraft. In a striking display of strategic hubris meeting reality, these $130 million symbols of imperialist intervention ended up hopelessly mired in the mud of Iran.

Unimaginable in our system, the fate of this lone pilot personally occupied the attention of every single member of the American national senior leadership for an entire day. In a world where leader time is the most finite of resources, perhaps this is an even more condemnable use of resources amid a war. This stems from their anxiety that the fate of a single nameless individual would entirely shatter their domestic illusion of absolute military supremacy and determine their nation’s perceptions of overall victory or defeat. Based on their behavior and how their political system operates, they were correct in this judgement.

The recovery of the pilot subsequently extolled by their national media and claimed as a both great and personal victory by President Trump. He claimed the chain of tactical losses, operational waste, and strategic misattention showed the U.S. to have “the best, most professional, and lethal Military in the History of the World.” Extending their cognitive campaign into the long term, it was then announced a few days later that it will be made into a Hollywood movie. It is no coincidence that it will have the same director as the movies Pearl Harbor and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, both of which similarly sought to rewrite embarrassing American defeats as stories of heroic success and moral superiority.

The episode is instructive, and not just in how Americans reframed what any other nation would view as a tactical defeat into a strategic and “historic” victory. It illustrates a critical dialectic in American political and military culture. While callous about a conflict that saw thousands killed across the region, they care about their own people to the point of desperation, treating the survival of individual personnel as a metric of absolute strategic value.

To CCP leadership, the situation reveals clear strategic pressure points for future crisis behavior, treatment of allied populations, and likelihood of accepting high-intensity conflict. For PLA operational planning, the adversary's extreme aversion to casualties and their obsession with personnel recovery can be easily weaponized, so as to paralyze their tactical, theater-level, and national command decision-making. It can also be a means to deter or draw out and destroy high-value enemy assets.

CONCLUSION

The results of the American conflict against Iran do not mean that we would inevitably win a war against them. But they do demonstrate that we are winning the war for the future itself.

==============

Addendum: After this memo was reprinted in the American media, Pentagon leadership issued a response:

"This memo supposedly from Beijing is exactly the kind of over-intellectualized, administrative trash we are actively scrubbing out of the Department of War. Some armchair theorist wants to lecture us on 'the dialectic' and 'cognitive traps' while his own state-controlled echo chamber ignores reality. Let me make one thing crystal clear to the communists in Beijing: we do not measure the success of an American combat operation by spreadsheet metrics or the profit margins of globalist supply chains. We decimated 13,000 threats, neutralized their command nodes, and we did it with the most lethal, unapologetic display of raw power the world has seen in a generation.

"The bean-counters trying to use inventory arithmetic as an excuse for strategic timidity are fundamentally miscalculating how a superpower fights and wins. We did this from a position of absolute strength, leading with unmatched military might. Any suggestion that our defense industrial base is too fragile to sustain high-intensity operations is unhelpful, foolishly overstated, and fails to appreciate the sheer, adaptive scale of American manufacturing when it is fully unleashed.

"If anyone thinks he found a 'strategic pressure point' because we executed a massive, high-risk mission to rescue our downed pilots, he is a fool. He calls it a weakness that we blew up our own gear to protect our people. That isn’t a flaw—that is the sacred bond of the American warrior ethos, and it’s something a communist bureaucrat who views his own soldiers as expendable state property will never understand. We will spend whatever it takes, fire whatever interceptor is required, and push forward with absolutely no quarter and no mercy to bring our boys home.

"As for his pathetic attempt to lecture us on internal 'culture wars,' he's late to the punch. The days of a woke, risk-averse Pentagon distracted by bureaucratic summits and diversity seminars are over; under this administration, we have systematically re-centered our entire military apparatus around a singular, deadly purpose: winning wars. While China and its buddies in Russia try to build an 'authoritarian learning bloc' out of cheap, attritable drones, they are fundamentally miscalculating the sleeping giant they are poking. We are rebuilding our defense industrial stockpiles with pure, unadulterated American manufacturing scale. Beijing can keep writing its comfortable memos and analyzing our internal politics all they want, but the moment they try to step into the breach, they will find out exactly what happens when the full, unfiltered power of the American war machine, led by our greatest President, is unleashed on them."

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Don't abandon the US-UK nuclear relationship

Jamie Kwong — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:41:16 -0400

The United Kingdom will have a new prime minister by the end of summer. While sure to inherit a host of challenges at home, Downing Street’s newest occupant will also have to contend with a troubling reality across the Atlantic: Britain’s special relationship with the United States is on shaky ground. These brewing tensions raise the question of whether London should—and if it could—reduce its reliance on Washington. And perhaps nowhere is this reliance heavier than nuclear deterrence, as Britain depends on American Trident missiles to equip its nuclear-armed submarines.

An underexamined—and underappreciated—aspect of this nuclear relationship, however, is how the United States benefits, too. For over 65 years, Washington has made technical, operational, and strategic gains for its own deterrent through cooperation with London. America, too, would lose out from a rupture.

Preserving and protecting the nuclear relationship therefore remains firmly in the interest of both countries.

The benefits of the nuclear relationship to Britain are clear. The UK nuclear force is often characterized as technically dependent on the United States, even while the British prime minister maintains operational independence over its use. London’s nuclear collaboration with Washington has proven an efficient way for the UK to remain a nuclear weapons power. Without it, London would have been forced to bear significantly greater, and plausibly unsustainable, costs to stay in the nuclear business. Moreover, the linkages that this nuclear collaboration has created across the states’ nuclear enterprises have kept Washington engaged in the most crucial aspects of British security for decades.

Less understood are the benefits that the United States accrues. Although Washington does not rely on nuclear collaboration with London to the same extent that London does with Washington, research and interviews with current and former officials and experts in both countries highlight Washington’s gains. Those benefits are only likely to become more important as the United States contends with a rapidly evolving strategic landscape and the growing technical challenges faced by its own nuclear weapons modernization programs.

To start, Britain pays a hefty cost for its access to U.S. technologies. Take Trident, for which the U.K. government paid initial procurement fees, makes annual maintenance contributions, and contributes to life extension costs. These expenses total well into the many billions of dollars.

Yet the benefits to the United States are not purely—or even primarily—financial. The UK maintains top-notch scientific and technical nuclear expertise. Through regular exchanges, British experts work closely with their American counterparts, providing peer review, red-teaming, and other input that improves the work taking place at U.S. nuclear laboratories. London’s technical contributions to the U.S. nuclear navy also now have room to grow following a 2024 amendment to the Mutual Defense Agreement that allows for two-way exchanges on naval nuclear propulsion, including the enriched uranium needed to fuel seagoing reactors.

Of course, the British nuclear weapons enterprise is not without its problems. There are concerns, for example, about the UK’s capacity to deliver its new warhead program. But such challenges are hardly unique to Britain. The United States also confronts aging systems and atrophied infrastructure, and as noted by John Foster, the former head of a U.S. nuclear weapons lab, it has historically benefited from Britain’s “clever ways to get the job done more efficiently.”

Beyond these programmatic considerations, Washington benefits from London’s nuclear role in Europe. The UK provides an additional deterrent capability committed to defending the Euro-Atlantic. In fact, the original U.S.-UK missile sales agreement was negotiated on the premise that Britain assigns these weapons to the defense of NATO. Washington assessed then, as it should now, that these forces “strengthen the nuclear defense of the Western Alliance.”

A core tenant of NATO nuclear policy holds that since the UK deterrent is operationally independent, London acts as a second center of decision-making, complicating Moscow’s threat calculus and thus contributing to the deterrence of Russia. Moscow must weigh the possibility that, even without a collective NATO or U.S. decision to use nuclear weapons, the UK could independently decide to employ its nuclear force. There are some doubts about whether Russia actually believes London would carry out a nuclear strike without Washington’s involvement or even explicit approval. But Russia does seem to perceive the UK deterrent as credible, suggesting that it affects Moscow’s threat calculus regardless.

Washington has also found it politically and strategically valuable to have a European nuclear ally in lockstep on deterrence and broader nuclear issues and who can facilitate consensus-building within the alliance. This role will likely only be more important as U.S. defense priorities increasingly shift away from Europe but while effective deterrence on the continent remains in U.S. interests. Washington will need to rely more on London to help shoulder the European deterrence burden, both to help meet allied assurance demands and ensure that any reconfiguration of U.S. assets, even if only conventional, does not degrade regional deterrence.

London has a way to go in developing the necessary capabilities besides its strategic deterrent. But it is working on them, while promoting an approach to make Europe a stronger security partner for, rather than strategically autonomous from, Washington.

Finally, the nuclear relationship, as well as the two countries’ intelligence ties, has fostered a deep closeness on defense issues far beyond the European theater. Washington has benefited from such cooperation for decades. Were there a rupture in the relationship, it is probable that Britain would limit or entirely cut off its defense support—including access to bases such as Fairford or Diego Garcia, which have played important roles in the Iran conflict—and reduce its altogether high degree of support for U.S. foreign policy.

British dependencies on an, at minimum, increasingly unpredictable and, at worst, increasingly unreliable United States are a genuine concern. They raise serious and difficult questions about whether London should remain technically dependent on Washington for nuclear deterrence or whether it needs to explore alternative, or at least supplementary, arrangements. The new prime minister will have to tackle these questions head on.

Yet cooperation is not zero-sum. While the UK may benefit more, the United States also benefits in significant ways. As officials and experts in Washington chart the course ahead for the transatlantic partnership, they would do well to remember this.

Jamie Kwong is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This piece reflects preliminary findings from a project on the implications of the changing security environment for UK-U.S. nuclear deterrence collaboration.

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The director of national intelligence needs more than political loyalty to do the job

Gregory F. Treverton, The Conversation — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:42:58 -0400

President Donald Trump’s choice for acting intelligence director, Bill Pulte, has proved controversial. Pulte’s thin background has sparked resistance from Democrats on Capitol Hill, which is not surprising. But some Republicans too have expressed dismay at the president’s choice, a Trump loyalist who currently runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

“No qualifications,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas.

The current director, Tulsi Gabbard, is leaving the job at the end of June 2026.

Here’s why it matters who holds the job of director of national intelligence.

Principal national security adviser

To speak of telling truth to power seems terribly old-fashioned these days, but as a veteran of White House intelligence operations, I know that is the essence of the job.

The director of national intelligence is the president’s principal adviser on intelligence, though the CIA director has remained somewhat co-equal in that role. In past administrations, the director of national intelligence has been responsible for both the President’s Daily Brief, where the most crucial and sophisticated intelligence is presented, and for the work of the National Intelligence Council.

Most of the President’s Daily Brief items are still done by the CIA, but the DNI or a deputy briefed the president, daily in most administrations but one or two times a week in the first Trump administration. Now, it is not clear the briefings take place.

The issues in those briefings lean toward the immediate and tactical: What is the situation on the ground in the wars in Iran and Ukraine? If the United States does X, how will the Iranian regime or Russian President Vladimir Putin respond?

But intelligence strives to push presidents and their colleagues to think more strategically: What are the implications of hypersonic missiles? What is the trajectory of the relationship between Russia and China? What are China’s geostrategic objectives, and what is the role of the Belt and Road in that vision? What if, far from toppling it, U.S. and Israeli attacks push the Iranian regime to become more hard line, or even produce some “rally ’round the flag” effect among previous opponents of the regime.

I was chair of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, providing day-to-day intelligence support to the National Security Council and its committees, as well as trying to find time to do more strategic intelligence, looking at trends and connections across issues, producing what are called National Intelligence Estimates.

The director of national intelligence, known as the DNI, sits atop the 17 agencies that make up what is called the intelligence community. The director neither runs those agencies nor has full control of their budgets.

Rather, the director of national intelligence coordinates them, which sometimes seems like the proverbial herding of cats. They assemble a combined budget for intelligence, but many of the big agencies, such as the National Security Agency, which intercepts signals, belong to the Pentagon.

The creation of the director of national intelligence position was a direct result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The 9/11 Commission report was vividly damning about failures between agencies in the run-up to 9/11. In meetings in New York that summer, CIA and FBI officers were literally unsure what they could tell each other: The former wondered whether the FBI people were really cleared to hear this, while the latter feared that talking might blow a case they were working on. That lack of coordination played a role in letting the plotters slip through intelligence, often in plain sight.

The result of the commission’s work was the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, which created the director of national intelligence position.

Before that, the director of central intelligence wore two hats, as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and loose coordinator of the broader intelligence community. Hardly surprisingly, directors of central intelligence spent most of their time running the CIA, for that was the source of their troops – and their troubles when they arose.

A score of panels over 50 years had recommended breaking the director of central intelligence’s conflict of interest – coordinating agencies and their budgets while running one of them – and creating a director of national intelligence position.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence for whom I worked as chair of the National Intelligence Council, constantly emphasized “integration.” Across agencies, integration mostly means talking to each other and sharing information. This works against the natural tendency to scoop your colleagues.

Across disciplines, integration means better aligning what information intelligence agencies collect with what analysts need.

How integration works

If presidents want to know what the CIA thinks about a particular issue, they can simply ask. Usually, though, the question is what does the intelligence community think, and then the question goes to the National Intelligence Council, the director of national intelligence’s interagency group for intelligence analysis.

The National Intelligence Council is organized like the State Department, with officers for regions and functions. Once a question has been presented, the relevant national intelligence officer will convene his or her colleagues from the other agencies. They will argue about the answer to the question, a process sweetly called “coordination,” then agree on the answer. If need be, the process can be done in a few hours.

Major strategic analyses – national intelligence estimates – like one done in 2022 on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic out to 2026, may take months. In all cases, though, the analysis carefully records where there are differences of view in the intelligence community.

In my last year chairing the National Intelligence Council, of the 700 or so analyses we did, about 400 were responses to questions – called “taskings” in governmentese – from the national security adviser or one of the deputies.

National intelligence officers are national experts from inside or outside federal government, and their deputies – the heart and soul of the NIC – are all assigned from intelligence agencies. The largest number come from the CIA, but I worked with a cyber analyst from the Secret Service and a wonderful analyst from the New York Police Department.

Resolutely nonpolitical stance

What was striking then and has struck me both times I’ve had the privilege of running a U.S. intelligence agency is the dedication of the officers.

They work for the nation, not for a political party or ideology. As chair of the NIC, I had no idea of the politics of my people, save for the several closest to me. For them, telling truth to power is not a slogan. It is what they do. They are always worried about “politicizing” – producing an assessment to suit a policymaker’s preference or, worse, being pressured to do so.

Daily briefers, for instance, give up a year of their lives to come to work at 4 a.m., learn their briefs and then fan out across Washington to brief senior officials. They like being “on the team” of the person they brief, but they become uncomfortable if the conversation turns political.

The director of national intelligence sets the tone for that resolutely nonpolitical stance and enforces it through principles articulated in the agency’s analytic standards. As chair of the NIC, for instance, I’d receive regular assessments of both the quality of our analyses and whether we risked becoming “politicized.”

For their part, do politicians and agency leaders like it when their pet projects are assessed by intelligence as unwise or infeasible? Of course not. I’ve been on that side of the intelligence-policy divide as well. But the United States is much the better for it.

This story, originally published on Dec. 4, 2024, has been updated to reflect that Bill Pulte has been chosen by President Trump to be the acting director of national intelligence.

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The Pentagon’s $54 billion bet on autonomous warfare

Anna Miskelley — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:59:41 -0400

The Pentagon announced the Replicator Initiative with fanfare in 2023, aiming to field vast numbers of affordable, expendable drones as a strategic counter to China. However, by 2025, the program was limping along due to congressional criticism over stalled progress and the absence of a permanent institutional home or consistent funding.

The Pentagon officially dissolved Replicator in late 2025, absorbing it into the newly minted Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG. Originally allocated a modest $225.9 million in the fiscal year 2026 budget, DAWG was widely expected to be just another iterative defense working group.

But the Trump administration’s FY27 budget request has shattered those expectations. The White House is requesting a staggering $54.6 billion for DAWG—a near 24,000 percent increase in a single fiscal year. Reflecting on the scale of the surge, retired general and former CIA Director David Petraeus noted that DAWG represents the “largest single commitment to autonomous warfare in history.”

This is no longer a pilot program. The Pentagon has stopped treating autonomous warfare like a startup project and is now funding it like a permanent branch of the American military apparatus.

Why did Replicator fail?

The unprecedented scale of DAWG’s budget is a direct response to the limitations that stalled its predecessor.

The Replicator Initiative rushed to procure specific, ready-built drone platforms. However, Replicator’s chosen drones suffered from persistent technical issues, struggled to integrate with existing military command-and-control systems, and were far too expensive and slow to manufacture in the quantity needed.

Furthermore, the Pentagon was paralyzed by its own procurement process. It struggled with up-front vetting, finding that many systems were entirely unfinished or purely conceptual. Perhaps most critically, Replicator failed to procure software able to orchestrate and command massive swarms of different drones.

Compounding these technological hurdles was an institutional homelessness. Because Replicator never possessed its own dedicated line-item budget, defense officials were forced to constantly reprogram. Frustrated by the lack of transparency regarding long-term lifecycle costs, Congress increasingly pushed back.

Managing the $54 billion operational whiplash

DAWG is designed to rectify the past mistakes of the Replicator Initiative, but its sudden financial windfall has only introduced more questions. How does an office that managed $225 million last year suddenly oversee $54.6 billion?

Pushing this massive sum through traditional Pentagon procurement pipelines risks a bottleneck. DAWG simply does not possess the infrastructure (contracting officers, lawyers, program managers etc.) to obligate that volume of capital in a twelve-month cycle. To prevent this, the Pentagon divided DAWG’s funds.

Of the $54.6 billion request, only $1 billion sits in the standard, highly restricted base budget. The remaining $53 billion has been tucked away into a flexible future reconciliation pot. This gives DAWG up to five years to obligate the funds. Instead of being forced to frantically dump billions into obsolete hardware before the fiscal clock runs out, DAWG can instead dole out cash incrementally as autonomous technology matures. To ensure long-term viability, DAWG will emphasize procurement, operations, maintenance, training, and sustainment over the first few years before scaling back to ensure active manufacturing lines while avoiding the risk of overproduction.

Will DAWG be different?

There are some early signs that the institutional shift to DAWG will be different from the Replicator experience. Unlike Replicator, which sat precariously under the Defense Innovation Unit as a pilot program, DAWG is getting more permanent institutional teeth. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced the impending creation of a dedicated Sub-Unified Command for Autonomous Warfare. Simultaneously, U.S. Southern Command has established its own autonomous warfare command, which will work closely with DAWG to identify available expertise and capabilities required for operations.

Architecturally, the focus has shifted from hardware to software. Acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst describes DAWG as a “pathfinder,” embedded with private tech firms, live-testing “orchestration tools for autonomy” and providing real-time combat feedback. This software-focused mentality is demonstrated by the recent announcement that Shield AI has been tapped to integrate its Hivemind AI pilot software into the military’s new Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, or LUCAS. Unlike Replicator, DAWG has introduced a new divergent priority to develop sophisticated software that can be flashed onto any cheap drone frame.

Yet, lawmakers are starting to raise major red flags. There is a growing anxiety in Congress that the Pentagon’s foundational policy on AI weapons, DoD Directive 3000.09, is completely unequipped for this scale of deployment. The directive mandates “appropriate levels of human judgement,” but when orchestrating thousands of autonomous systems simultaneously, human-in-the-loop oversight becomes a mathematical impossibility. An uncomfortable reality is beginning to emerge: the Pentagon is throwing a military-branch-sized budget at autonomous swarms before deciding on the rules of engagement.

Ultimately, the creation of DAWG represents a structural shift rather than a guaranteed technological revolution. By shifting the ad-hoc, hardware-first approach of the Replicator Initiative to a permanent, software-focused funding line, the Pentagon is attempting to fix a broken acquisition pipeline that has historically been unable to move at the speed of commercial technology.

However, funding and execution are different. DAWG’s ambitious plans still heavily rely on a congressional reconciliation process that faces a complicated and uncertain political path. Even if the $54.6 billion request is approved, the Pentagon must still solve the immense logistical challenge of integrating thousands of autonomous systems into a joint force that lacks established doctrine for swarm warfare.

The Pentagon has clearly signaled where it believes the future of warfare lies. But as DAWG moves from a budget proposal to an operational reality, its success will not be measured by the size of its funding pot, but by whether the military can safely and effectively integrate these algorithmic tools into the reality of modern combat.

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Why the Iran war is breaking the US‑European strategic alliance

Farah N. Jan, The Conversation — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:45:55 -0400

Days after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28, 2026, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denied American forces the use of the Naval Station Rota and the Morón Air Base – installations that had hosted U.S. troops for more than 70 years.

“We are a sovereign country that does not wish to take part in illegal wars,” Sánchez said. U.S. President Donald Trump responded by threatening a full trade embargo against Spain.

Weeks later, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – Trump’s closest European ally and the only EU head of government invited to his second inauguration – broke publicly with Washington.

“When we don’t agree, we must say it,” she said. “And this time, we do not agree.” Rome then refused to refuel U.S. bombers at a base in southern Italy.

These are not minor diplomatic frictions. As a scholar of alliance politics and nuclear security, I see something much larger than a tactical disagreement. The Iran war’s most consequential casualty may not be in Tehran. It may be American credibility as an ally, and with it, the trans-Atlantic alliance itself.

The Iraq comparison misleads

The initial U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran were launched with virtually no advance consultation with European allies. The Trump administration treated NATO partners not as participants in strategic decision-making but as logistical infrastructure to be commandeered or punished for refusing assistance.

European governments, even those most invested with the U.S., declined to join the campaign. The Trump administration has responded with the embargo threat against Spain and the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany.

“The U.S.A. will REMEMBER!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social on March 31, 2026.

The reflex in Washington has been to read this as a rerun of 2003, when France and Germany opposed the Iraq War. In January 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed France and Germany as “old Europe” while courting the postcommunist “new Europe,” including Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

On the surface, the parallel is tempting: a unilateral American war in the Middle East, European refusal to participate, trans-Atlantic recriminations.

But the comparison conceals more than it reveals. In 2003, the United States wanted Europe in its coalition. The George W. Bush administration sought United Nations authorization, courted allies and treated European refusal as a problem to be managed.

In 2026, the Trump administration explicitly does not want European input. It views allies as freeloaders and threatens them with economic coercion. It treats their hesitation as cause for retribution rather than negotiation.

The deeper difference is structural. In 2003, the trans-Atlantic alliance still rested on shared commitments to collective defense, open trade and an international, rules-based order.

Today, the Trump administration does not share the commitments that traditionally bound the United States to its European partners, whether on NATO, the Russia-Ukraine war, or the rules governing trade and migration.

The shared values that papered over the Iraq disagreement in 2003, and that allowed President Nicolas Sarkozy to reintegrate France into NATO’s command by 2009, are no longer there to do the work of repair.

The April 2026 collapse of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary left Trump without a serious political ally among major European governments.

The real precedent is Suez

A more illuminating precedent lies further back. In 1956, Britain and France went to war with Egypt over the Suez Canal, in coordination with Israel, concealing their plans from the Eisenhower administration. Washington responded by threatening to crash the British pound, forcing London and Paris into humiliating retreat.

The crisis is remembered as the moment Britain accepted that it was no longer an independent great power.

But its more important legacy was strategic. Suez exposed the depth of Europe’s dependence on the United States. That humiliation drove Charles de Gaulle’s pursuit of an independent French nuclear deterrent. It also accelerated European integration and planted the recognition that genuine strategic autonomy would be a generational project.

The Iran war inverts the conditions of that lesson. In 1956, Europeans learned that they could not act independently of Washington. In 2026, they are learning that they cannot rely on Washington’s consent being available, and that the U.S. will act without them, against their stated interests and at their economic expense.

The pattern is the same: Dependence on the U.S. is unsustainable, and autonomous capacity is no longer optional. What has changed is that Europe is now willing to use the financial, economic and military tools it has long possessed in ways it would not have considered before.

The EU’s €90 billion joint-debt loan to Ukraine signals an autonomous European strategic stance. So do discussions of activating the bloc’s anti-coercion trade instrument against U.S. tariffs, France’s nuclear arsenal expansion and offers to “Europeanize” deterrence.

The strategic postures were debated for decades. The Iran war is making them operational.

This is not yet European strategic independence. Europe remains militarily reliant on U.S. air defense, satellite capacity and intelligence.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for example, has forced an uncomfortable energy reckoning with American liquefied natural gas, Russian pipelines, Middle Eastern hydrocarbons and Chinese-dominated renewable supply chains. None of the available paths to energy security run through trusted partners.

France and Germany still disagree on nearly every detail of how integration should proceed. But the political condition for autonomy, a shared European belief that Washington can no longer be trusted to share strategic decision-making, has crystallized in a way that no previous crisis produced.

The post-1945 trans-Atlantic bargain traded U.S. security guarantees for European deference on global strategy. Iraq 2003 strained that bargain. Trump’s first term cracked it, and the Iran war has broken it.

What replaces it will not be a renewed partnership. It will be a parallel relationship between two powers with sometimes overlapping interests and, increasingly, separate strategic horizons.

In 1956, Europe learned how dependent it was on Washington. In 2026, it is learning that dependence is no longer sustainable.

Eleni Lomtatidze, a student in the International Relations Program at the University of Pennsylvania and at SciencesPo Paris, contributed to this story.

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Taiwan is a ‘model ally,’ not trade bait

Mark Montgomery — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:55:54 -0400

Taiwan is everything Donald Trump says he wants in an ally. It is investing unprecedented sums in its own defense, including billions spent on American-made weapons. It manufactures the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips, which power U.S. commercial products and cutting-edge weapons, such as the F-35 stealth fighter.

As Trump heads to Beijing this week for a summit with Xi Jinping, the question is whether the U.S. president recognizes that Taiwan is a “model ally”—a term his administration has applied to Israel, South Korea, and other countries—and will resist the temptation to trade its security for Xi’s hollow promises to import more U.S. goods and allow American firms to purchase more of the critical minerals whose supply China nearly monopolizes.

Taiwan demonstrates the success American partnership can bring to a hungry country. It is a vibrant democracy of 23 million that holds free and fair elections, has peaceful transfers of power, an independent judiciary, free press. It also has a vigorous civil society that has consistently chosen self-government over absorption into a Chinese system whose autocratic rule over Hong Kong shows what unification looks like. The contrast with the People's Republic of China could not be more stark or more relevant. Amid a global competition between free nations and aggressive dictatorships, Taiwan stands firm. It reflects the world the United States is trying to build and sustain.

Likewise, Taiwan’s contributions to American prosperity are so fundamental that their loss would reverberate through every sector of the U.S. economy. Two Taiwanese companies, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and United Microelectronics Corporation together account for nearly three-quarters of the semiconductor chips produced world-wide. TSMC alone produces about 90 percent of the world's most advanced logic chips. These components run every smartphone, every data center, every AI application, and every advanced weapon that gives the United States military its battlefield advantage. The algorithms that power American intelligence analysis also run on Taiwanese chips. Last year, Taiwan exported about $200 billion of goods to the United States of which $150 billion was advanced computing components. These components, in turn, were used to manufacture trillions of dollars of U.S.-made products. This is what a secure supply chain looks like.

Taiwan has doubled down on this economic commitment by pledging more than $500 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States, $250 billion of which will be in advanced computing, artificial intelligence, and other innovation efforts. This is a far greater per capita investment than any other Asian or European partner. It is not the behavior of a free-rider, but of a partner investing its capital in an enduring alliance.

The Chinese Communist Party is desperate to subjugate Taiwan, whose very existence is a visible reminder that Chinese people can have both freedom and prosperity. The People’s Liberation Army threatens and challenges Taiwan’s military and coast guard on a daily basis. Taiwan responds professionally and does not flinch. It does not ask American forces to fight every skirmish on its behalf.

Taiwan's defense spending has increased every year this decade and currently stands at over 3 percent of GDP. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, has committed to reaching 5 percent of GDP by 2030, a target that would make Taiwan one of the highest defense-spending democracies relative to the size of its economy.

Critically, Taiwan is spending this money on American weapons designed specifically for the threat it faces. Harpoon coastal defense missiles. HIMARS rocket artillery. Javelin anti-tank missiles. These are not platforms purchased for parades. They are the ones that American military planners have identified as most relevant to deterring a PLA amphibious assault.

China’s diplomats have been explicit in the run-up to this week’s summit that they want Trump to bend on Taiwan. They say it is “at the core of China’s core interests” and Washington’s adherence to the One China principle is a “prerequisite” for stable relations. Xi is likely to offer trade deals and rare earth cooperation, if Trump will constrain arms sales or acknowledge that the United States opposes Taiwan’s independence. Xi will calibrate his appeal to a president who thinks transactionally.

President Trump should recognize that Taiwan is offering the far better deal. It has already done what Washington would want from an ally.” It is a democracy. It is spending over 3 percent of GDP on defense and committed to 5 percent. It is buying American weapons specifically designed for its threat environment. It is standing daily against a U.S. peer adversary. And it is the source of the semiconductor chips that energize American economic and military power in the twenty-first century.

Trading Taiwan’s security for rhetoric from Beijing would be a strategic blunder of historic proportions, one that every American ally watching the summit, from Tokyo and Seoul to Warsaw and Tallin would remember for a generation.

Mark Montgomery is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who is now a Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Why the War Powers Resolution deadline doesn’t actually constrain presidents

, The Conversation — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:02:04 -0400

May 1, 2026, marked the 60th day of Operation Epic Fury in Iran – a symbolically significant date designating when a president who has mounted unilateral military operations must receive Congressional approval or wind it down.

However, the complex history of the War Powers Resolution clock demonstrates it is a toothless milestone.

The Trump administration signaled on April 30, 2026, that it would ignore that deadline, set by the War Powers Resolution. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we are in a cease-fire right now, which my understanding is that the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a cease-fire. That’s our understanding, so you know.”

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, responded that the 60-day threshold poses a “legal question” and “constitutional concerns.”

This is not the first time presidents and members of Congress have sparred on the meaning of the War Powers Resolution. What happens next will play out through regular politics, because the conflict is not a matter of simple legal interpretation.

In the U.S. Constitution, Congress and the president share war powers.

In the shadow of political struggles in the final years of the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 to “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.”

A crucial section of the resolution reasserts legislators’ role, and makes clear that the constitutional power of the president to make war is subject to, or exercised with, the following conditions: a Congressional declaration of war; specific statutory authorization; or a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions or its armed forces.

For new military campaigns that do not meet these criteria, the resolution included a 60-day clock that begins when a president reports the action to congressional leadership within 48 hours of the action beginning.

The clock can be expanded to up to 90 days upon presidential determination and certification of “unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of United States Armed Forces” related to removal of troops.

After 60 to 90 days, the resolution originally said this type of unilateral military action would be terminated automatically unless both chambers of Congress approved some form of legislative authorization.

Congress could also choose to terminate an unauthorized military operation any time before the 60 days with a concurrent resolution, which doesn’t require a president’s signature – essentially, a “legislative veto.”

And to make sure the president couldn’t stretch the definition of congressional approval, the resolution said neither existing treaties nor new budget appropriations could substitute for legislative authorization of a military action.

Since 1973, actions by all three branches across a variety of political and policy landscapes have undermined its intents and procedures.

Veto, vetoed

In 1983, the Supreme Court declared various kinds of legislative vetoes unconstitutional, which led Congress to reinterpret its War Powers Resolution procedures and powers and effectively amend its processes to expedite any joint resolution or bill that “requires the removal of U.S. armed forces from hostilities outside the United States.”

Now, if members want to stop a presidential military campaign already in progress, they must act affirmatively and pass a disapproval resolution, which a president could veto like any other bill. Congress has sent only one such disapproval – to President Donald Trump in his first term – which he vetoed. Congress did not have the two-thirds required in the Constitution to override.

Both chambers of Congress now have to vote twice, once to disapprove a military action and then again to overcome a likely veto, to stop something it never approved in the first place.

House Majority Leader Mike Johnson explains on March 4, 2026, why his party rejects a Democratic-led measure to assert Congress’ war powers and stop the Iran military action.

The 60-day mark for the current Iran operation has therefore loomed as more of a politically charged symbol of this longstanding imbalance on war powers than a real deadline for action by either branch.

Parallels to Kosovo and Libya

The House and Senate have tried to pass legislation to stop military operations against Iran six times since operations began. All attempts have failed, including the most recent vote on April 30. Democrats are considering filing suit against President Trump if operations go beyond 60 days without authorization.

Yet federal courts have long expressed disinterest in getting involved in constitutional questions related to the War Powers Resolution, especially if members of Congress are the plaintiffs.

Although most presidents from Richard Nixon onward have claimed that the War Powers Resolution is an unconstitutional check on their institutional powers, they usually filed the required reports on new military actions 48 hours after they began.

While the current Iran conflict is different in many ways, presidential unilateralism, inconclusive chamber actions and even member lawsuits all echo controversies over U.S. military action in Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011.

Where Trump administration may lean on Clinton

Operation Epic Fury against Iran began Feb. 28, 2026, and President Trump sent the required report to Congress on March 2, 2026.

After detailing the rationale for military action, Trump added “Although the United States desires a quick and enduring peace, it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary.”

He concluded the memo with his interpretation of constitutional power to act unilaterally.

“I directed this military action consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests,” the president wrote. He acted, he said, “pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.” He said he made the report “consistent with the War Powers Resolution. I appreciate the support of the Congress in these actions.”

Similarly, on March 26, 1999, President Bill Clinton sent a War Powers Resolution letter explaining his decision two days earlier to take part in a NATO-led operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, known as FRY.

Clinton wrote to Congress using mostly the same words and phrases Trump did in his 2026 letter. Clinton also said that he took the action “in response to the FRY government’s continued campaign of violence and repression against the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.”

President Bill Clinton after his television address to the nation on the NATO bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo, March 24, 1999. Pool/Getty Images

Clinton explained his authority in virtually the same language as Trump and, like Trump, said it was hard to predict how long the operations would continue.

The House and Senate repeatedly failed to either approve or disapprove of Clinton’s actions through a series of votes across March and April 1999. But lawmakers did send him supplemental appropriations for the operations in May.

NATO suspended the operation after 78 days. Almost a year later, a federal appellate court upheld a district court’s decision rejecting a lawsuit led by Rep. Tom Campbell, a California Republican, alleging Clinton violated the War Powers Resolution. Rather than deciding on the merits, the decision rejected the lawmakers’ claims of injury as not reviewable by the court.

Obama did it, too

In a very different context, a similar rhythm played out during President Barack Obama’s presidency.

During the “Arab Spring” revolts of 2010-2011, the U.N. Security Council passed two resolutions condemning violence against Libyan civilians by security forces under the direction of Colonel Moammar Gadhafi.

On March 21, 2011, two days after NATO operations began against Gadhafi’s forces, which included American air support, Obama sent his War Powers Resolution letter to the Republican House and Democratic Senate. Obama had not received prior legislative authority from Congress.

Obama’s letter included language almost identical to Clinton’s earlier letter and Trump’s later one.

As with Kosovo, the House and Senate did not ultimately agree to either approve or disapprove of the president’s actions in support of the UN and NATO over the operation’s 222 days. In addition, Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio led a group of mostly Republican House members in a failed War Powers Resolution lawsuit to stop the president.

Unilateral action endures

The Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice has published legal opinions that explain and defend presidential war powers, including with Kosovoand Libya. In December 2025, that office published a memo defending the imminent January 2026 capture of Nicolás Maduro. On April 21, 2026, the State Department published a defense of ongoing U.S. actions in Iran.

Within the current dynamics of the War Powers Resolution, until Congress musters bipartisan supermajorities to connect its own institutional ambition with constitutional power, presidents from either party will decide alone if, and when, the country goes to war. Instead of Congress, presidents may heed public opinionand economic indicators, especially in election years.

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Navy EA-18Gs over Iran, Venezuela show rise in aerial electronic attack

Andrew Dardine, Forecast International — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:12:50 -0400

The Pentagon is using the Navy’s EA-18G Growlers more than ever, suggesting more development and a bigger role for aerial electronic attack are on the way.

Flying from the carriers Abraham Lincoln and Gerald R. Ford in recent months, the Growlers have used jammers and missiles to confuse, suppress, and destroy Iranian communications and radar systems and surface-to-air missile batteries.

They were also key to January's seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, when they suppressed and destroyed Russian and Chinese-derived air defenses and other infrastructure to allow the abduction team to reach their Caracas target with virtually no resistance. As usual in these types of operations, Venezuelan air defense operators learned of the attack only when their radar screens went dark.

Development of the electronic warfare variant of the F/A-18F began in earnest in late 2003, when Super Hornet maker Boeing received the system development and demonstration contract. The first Growler was delivered on schedule in 2006. The Navy, which originally planned to buy 90 Growlers, increased its buy to 114, then 135, then 160. The last of the aircraft was delivered in 2018.

Plans call for developing the heart of the aircraft’s electronic attack, the ALQ-249 Next-Generation Jammer pod, in three variants: Increment 1 (Mid-Band), Increment 2 (Low-Band), and Increment 3 (High-Band).

In 2023, Mid-Band prime contractor Raytheon received a $650.4 million contract to make Lot III NGJ-MBs, including a low-rate initial production order for 15 pairs of the pods—including four pairs for the Royal Australian Air Force, which operates a dozen Growlers. Two years later, Raytheon received a three-year, $580 million contract to continue production, including covering pods, spare parts, and support equipment, for the two operators.

Work on development of the Low-Band version is moving ahead. In 2020, L3Harris won a $495.5 million contract award to make and deliver 10 NGJ-LB pod simulators, eight operational prototype pods, four jettison mass model pods, two captive mass models, and other support systems. The company received a further $587.3 million for Low-Band development in 2024. Last year, L3Harris hired Honeywell for undisclosed help in developing the Low-Band variant.

Two months ago, the Navy awarded Boeing a four-year, $489.3 million order for jamming upgrades: four ALQ-264(V) Beowulf A-Kits, four Gunbay Pallet A-Kits, 12 Beowulf B-Kits, 15 sensor control unit B-Kits, and nine power control unit B-Kits, as well as various support equipment.

AI and machine-learning algorithms are said to be a growing element of the aircraft’s electronic attack, enabling faster analysis of hostile signals and production of tailored noise to degrade enemy air defenses. The aircraft’s active electronically scanned arrays, powered by gallium nitride transmitters, can shoot precise, high-powered beams of electronic noise at several targets at once.

The Navy has already spent more than $5 billion to develop the NGJ. The new budget proposal requests $428.6 million for fiscal 2027.

Australia is also working on upgrades for its Growlers. In February 2023, Project AIR 5349 Phase 6 – Advanced Growler awarded CEA Technologies, an Australian radar company, a $277 million contract to improve some fixed and portable emitters.

Andrew Dardine is lead analyst for Forecast International's Defense Electronic Systems group.

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The next president must reimagine, not just restore, the administrative state

Tom Shoop — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently addressed the issue of what happens after the Trump administration’s assault on America’s administrative state is over. The work needed to restore the country’s governing capacity, he argued, involves more than just putting the bureaucratic Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The next president can’t “go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say: ‘Here you go. I give you the world as it looked in 2023,’” Buttigieg said.

The Trump team is “destroying a lot of good, important things,” he added. “They’re destroying some useless things, too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.”

The list of “good, important things” destroyed by Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding attack on government is long:

More than 200,000 federal jobs were eliminated. That includes 7,000 employees at the Social Security Administration, another 7,000 at the IRS, 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration, 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health, and 1,300 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. No federal departments escaped the slashing, and some agencies saw virtually all of their positions eliminated.
The U.S. Agency for International Development was dismantled, bringing an abrupt halt to food aid and disease prevention efforts all over the world.
Employees at other agencies, such as the National Nuclear Security Administration, were fired without an understanding of exactly what they did, necessitating a panicked rehiring effort.
Contracts and grants were summarily canceled, sometimes after using rudimentary artificial intelligence programs to identify programs affiliated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

When DOGE burst onto the scene, chaos ensued. Yet the crusade failed to come close to Musk’s promise to cut up to $2 trillion from the federal budget. DOGE’s claim to have saved taxpayers more than $200 billion is suspect due to accounting errors. And even if that figure is accurate, it represents a small percentage of the federal budget. DOGE was a thoroughly haphazard operation, lacking any significant degree of planning or strategy. It operated according to the whims of Musk—then one of Trump’s strongest allies—and of Trump himself.

In that sense, DOGE was a key part of the president’s shift to what scholar Jonathan Rauch has argued is a form of government new to the United States: patrimonialism. This type of regime is based on personal loyalty to a country’s leader, driven by the leader’s ability to dole out rewards and punishments. This explains why Trump has moved so aggressively to expand his own power via executive orders and to politicize the career civil service, especially at the senior executive level.

The enemy of patrimonialism is bureaucracy, a well-functioning administrative state that is not driven by personal fealty to a ruler. A highly functioning country of the size and influence of the United States needs bureaucracy. It requires rules and regulations, not just norms, to provide guardrails against ill-advised policymaking and public administration—or worse, corruption and illegality. It needs a large cadre of nonpartisan experts to administer complex programs and provide support to policymakers.

It’s easy to take for granted what the federal government, and its attendant bureaucracy, have accomplished. In just the last two decades, federal agencies have:

Facilitated the development of a covid vaccine
Averted financial catastrophe in 2008
Expanded access to health insurance
Improved children’s health
Increased infrastructure investment
Significantly improved highway safety

That’s just a short list of achievements at the federal level. The first step toward ensuring government can take on these kinds of challenges again is restoration. That doesn’t mean trying to piece things together exactly as they were before, but it does involve reopening shuttered agencies like USAID and rehiring the workers necessary for agencies like the IRS to do their jobs.

In their popular and influential book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer a critique of bureaucracy from the left. Government at all levels, they argue, has prized procedure over results. Layer upon layer of regulations have made it too easy for opponents of initiatives to manipulate systems so that action is all but impossible.

It’s not just conservatives who feel this way. None other than Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., said last year, “If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy—absolutely correct. It is terrible.…That is common sense.”

The solution to that problem is not dramatically fewer bureaucrats and more constraints on their actions. It’s redesigning systems so they don’t overemphasize laudable goals such as fairness and diversity at the expense of efficient operations and real-world results.

For example, it has long been too hard to hire federal employees, and to fire those that aren’t measuring up. That’s a result of risk aversion baked into a system encrusted with restrictions on managers’ ability to manage. The solution is more trust in them to do their jobs and to help elected leaders implement their agendas while following the rule of law.

This kind of recalibration of government is essential. And it can’t be accomplished with a chainsaw.

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Trump’s assumptions are running his Iran policy aground—again

Daniel DePetris — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:30:51 -0400

President Trump’s April 21 decision on to extend his original two-week ceasefire with Iran, less than 12 hours after he expressed reluctance to do precisely that, is giving the U.S. and Iran more time to salvage a diplomatic process defined by misleading statements, rhetorical chest-thumping, and conflicting agendas.

While shooting has stopped for the time being, the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz remains. The good news is that neither the United States’ nor Iran’s best interests are served by a long-term conflict, which suggests both sides are at the very least keen to keep the diplomatic option open in order to determine whether a settlement to the nearly two-month long war is possible. The bad news is that Trump’s poor assumptions about how Iran would react to U.S. pressure tactics have led to poor decisions and a conflict in the Persian Gulf whose outcome remains in doubt. Far from squeezing Iranian leaders into concessions, the U.S. president has repeatedly ceded leverage in negotiation.

Trump is notoriously unpredictable on a lot of subjects, but he’s been quite consistent on Iran throughout his presidency. His objective is clear: to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all had a similar policy, even if they adopted different strategies for getting there. The difference is Trump’s unwillingness to adapt, his propensity to wield the stick without the carrot, and most of all, his unwarranted confidence in his assumptions.

Trump’s blunders have made the goal harder. The first occurred in 2018, when he withdrew the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. Trump, who said JCPOA offered too much relief from sanctions while imposing too few limits on Tehran’s nuclear activity, launched a “maximum-pressure” strategy on Iran’s leaders that sought to prevent Iranian oil from reaching the global market and to cut off Iranian-linked banks from the international financial system. The hope was that Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader at the time, would come back to the table on U.S. terms.

This calculation was mistaken. Instead of capitulating, Iran took advantage of the U.S. withdrawal by freeing itself from the deal's nuclear restrictions. More and faster centrifuges were manufactured, installed, and used. Iranian scientists began growing Tehran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. Enrichment, which was capped at 3.67 percent under the deal, moved closer to weapons-grade. And the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access became limited as the Iranians retaliated to U.S. sanctions and IAEA censure.

By November 2023, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was roughly 22 times larger than the deal had allowed. Today, despite last June’s U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and the thousands since Feb. 28, Iran still has roughly 1,000 pounds of 60-percent enriched uranium—leverage that Tehran wouldn’t have if Trump had chosen to stay in the agreement.

Some would call this ancient history. If so, it’s ancient history that has repeated itself. Trump’s war strategy against Iran leans on the same assumptions and theories at play during his first term: with enough coercion, the Iranian regime will be weakened to the point where the United States can run the table and dictate terms the Iranians will have no choice but to accept. Yet Trump’s war of choice in the Persian Gulf has merely afforded Iran more chips to play with.

Look no further than the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, the international waterway was open for business. About 120 tankers transited the narrow chokepoint into the Gulf of Oman on a daily basis, servicing approximately one-fifth of the world’s crude oil supply.

The U.S. and Israeli military campaign changed the status quo virtually overnight. Trump, inexplicably, believed Iran would give up before closing the strait. This proved to be a massive error of judgment. Perceiving the war as an existential one, Iran effectively closed the chokepoint, picking and choosing which vessels could enter and interdicting those that tried to bypass its rules.

Traffic through the waterway has since plunged by 95 percent, resulting in price hikes on everything from fuel to fertilizer. Meanwhile, the ongoing U.S. blockade of Iranian ports has merely incentivized Tehran to drag out its own closure. Tehran has since offered to re-open the waterway if Washington ends the war, lifts the blockade and guarantees not to bomb in the future. Once again, the Iranians successfully exploited Trump’s strategy, using it as an excuse to turn the strait into a de facto Iranian lake, which before the war was a non-issue.

Unplugging the strait is now at least as important to the Trump administration as accounting for Iran’s nuclear material, a reality Tehran no doubt understands as it continues deliberating internally about how to manage diplomacy with Washington. Whatever tactics the regime does use, it’s highly unlikely it will agree to Trump’s wishes without a whole host of U.S. concessions in return. Some of those concessions, such as an internationally guaranteed security commitment that the United States will refrain from going to war against Iran in the future, will be difficult for Trump to swallow. Either way, any settlement is bound to be more satisfying to the regime than it needed to be.

There is a fundamental lesson in all of this, one U.S. officials present and future should take heed of: if you’re unwilling to recognize your mistakes out of stubbornness or genuine belief, then they risk exacerbating the very problems you seek to solve. This is why a robust, operational inter-agency process is so important and why Trump himself would do well to expand an inner circle that has thus far been highly restricted. Different departments and agencies will have different opinions on how a particular problem should be managed, what the policy should be and how it should be enacted. Presidents in the past may view these conflicting viewpoints as hindrances to effective decision-making at best and obstructionism at worst. In reality, a full-fledged debate and the existence of a constant feedback loop over what is and isn’t working is precisely how the process should function.

The principals need to speak truth to power. And the president needs to be smart enough to listen.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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How to reopen the Strait of Hormuz

Luke Coffey — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:37:28 -0400

One of the biggest geopolitical consequences of the recent U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Though the exact status of the waterway remains unclear at the time of writing, the daily flow of oil and gas through it has been severely reduced. Even though the United States imports relatively little energy from the Persian Gulf, it is not insulated from global price shocks that follow any disruption in transit—as many Americans are feeling at the pump right now.

It is clear that President Trump did not anticipate Iran’s willingness to close the strait. His subsequent effort to pressure European allies into deploying a maritime force to the region appeared rushed and uncoordinated. With no prior consultation or planning, and with many European navies tied up in existing commitments or maintenance cycles, expecting an immediate deployment of high-value assets to one of the world’s most dangerous waterways was unrealistic.

Still, Trump is right about one thing: it is in everyone’s interest for shipping to move freely through the Strait of Hormuz. European frustration over how the United States entered into conflict with Iran does not change the strategic reality that this maritime chokepoint must remain open for the global economy to function. With a ceasefire in place, and with progress being made at the diplomatic level on fully reopening the waterway, there is now an opportunity to organize a coalition to ensure that Iran can never close the strait again.

First, the United States must lead diplomatically. Rebuilding trust with European allies will be essential through early consultation, shared planning, and giving partners a stake in the mission. This is also how to repair broader transatlantic relations and reestablish confidence in U.S. leadership. It also means shelving any notion of acquiring Greenland. While someone in Washington may not see how the issue connects to Gulf security, Europeans do. The consequences of Washington’s rhetoric have made it harder to build public support for deployments.

Second, any new effort should operate within existing frameworks. For more than two decades, the United States has led multinational Combined Maritime Forces based in Bahrain, including individual Combined Task Forces focused on maritime security in the Gulf and the Horn of Africa, among other places. These structures are well established and familiar to participating navies—both from the Gulf states and Asian partners. Leveraging them would allow for a faster and more coherent response.

Third, there needs to be a focus on the “three U’s”: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. Any credible maritime operation in the Strait of Hormuz will depend on this core group. The United Kingdom brings deep experience in the Gulf and highly specialized mine countermeasure capabilities essential for clearing the strait.

Ukraine, meanwhile, brings recent, hard-earned experience. Its operations in the Black Sea have made it one of the most practiced actors in mine countermeasures in the world. Ukraine has also pioneered the use of unmanned systems in naval warfare. Kyiv has also shown the political will to contribute any operation in the Strait of Hormuz. Of note, Ukraine currently has two British-built Sandown-class minehunters, with trained crews based in the United Kingdom (where they remain, as they cannot enter to the Black Sea), which could be deployed with U.S. and British support.

Finally, broader coalition contributions will require creative thinking. The Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—possess advanced mine countermeasure capabilities and have consistently supported U.S.-led operations. Even countries without naval platforms could contribute by deploying explosive ordnance disposal specialists aboard allied vessels, allowing them to play a direct role in mine clearance.

NATO itself maintains a standing maritime mine countermeasure group that could be considered. While the Gulf lies outside NATO’s traditional area, such a mission could be structured through frameworks like the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, which is the alliance’s main platform for cooperating with Gulf states.

With political will, flexibility, and clear American leadership, a coalition can be assembled to reopen and secure the Strait of Hormuz. The current ceasefire provides a narrow but critical window. Given the stakes for global energy markets and international trade, there is no better time to act.

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Stop managing NATO. Start rebalancing it.

Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Atlantic alliance can no longer be managed through reassurance, communiqués, or the fiction that its internal tensions are political noise. They are structural. Mark Rutte's recent visit to Washington made that clear. NATO requires rebalancing: a more credible distribution of responsibility, capability, and strategic weight across the alliance.

Beneath this lies a growing crisis of trust. Europeans no longer simply ask whether the United States will stay engaged; they worry that ambiguity or sudden shifts in Washington could hollow out deterrence and tempt adversaries to test what was once an ironclad commitment. Unequal burden‑sharing has shifted from a long‑running grievance to a hard instrument of leverage. The American message to Europe is blunt: step up or live with more conditional U.S. guarantees. Europeans, for their part, argue they are already carrying heavier financial and political costs. They also demand a seat at the table: they expect to be consulted, not simply informed, when decisions with direct consequences for European security are made.

The alliance cannot afford to remain trapped in this cycle of mutual recrimination—it must move decisively to embrace rebalancing as a strategic imperative that serves the long-term interests of both sides of the Atlantic.

The simultaneous wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have revealed just how critical transatlantic rebalancing is. Russia's war against Ukraine has been the alliance's most clarifying test in decades. Without Washington's intelligence, industrial capacity, and political resolve, Ukraine's resistance would have looked very different. European dependency is a structural condition, built over thirty years of unbalanced burden-sharing, that now constitutes a strategic liability for the Alliance as a whole. In the Strait of Hormuz, the calculus ran in the other way: the United States recognized that it needed European military bases, naval presence, and diplomatic cover to manage escalation in a region where allies are deeply exposed. Taken together, these two theaters make the case that neither side can afford to act alone.

This is an inflection point—one that requires the terms of the transatlantic relationship to be reset and clarified. Against this backdrop, GMF’s new Europe Defense Roadmap lays out three structural reforms that allies urgently need to operationalize.

First, Europe must transform defense spending into integrated strategic capability. The structural shift from a U.S.-led security order in Europe to a European-led framework—supported but no longer directed by the United States—is no longer hypothetical. It is accelerating. Spending announcements are not capabilities. The historic shifts in German defense investment, Poland's military buildup, and Nordic-Baltic rearmament are real and significant—but fragmented national procurement will not produce the interoperable architecture a rebalanced Alliance requires. The issue is no longer whether Europe spends more. It is whether Europe can pool procurement, expand industrial depth, and generate interoperable force at the scale required on NATO’s eastern flank. Without that, burden-shifting will remain a slogan.

Second, NATO must replace its outdated burden-sharing metrics with a framework that actually measures strategic value. The 2 percent, and now 5 percent, benchmark is a political signal, but it is not, by itself, a serious measure of alliance contribution. Both NATO and the EU already use more granular mechanisms to track defense efforts, covering force readiness, deployable units, intelligence sharing, logistical capacity and resilience to hybrid threats. Taken seriously, these tools offer a more accurate picture of who delivers what to collective defense than headline spending alone. They would also recast the transatlantic argument: from an annual quarrel over percentages to a more rigorous and measurable assessment of strategic partnership.

Third, the Alliance must settle the European strategic autonomy debate—permanently—and embrace strategic complementarity instead. The decade-long argument that European defense capacity somehow threatens Alliance unity has served no one. The choice is not between a Europe that duplicates American power and a Europe that remains permanently dependent on it. The choice is between a Europe that can act and fill operational gaps when the U.S. is stretched across theatres and one that cannot. Ukraine and Iran, taken together, make the case. Rutte effectively hinted at this shift in Washington when he argued that Europe must move from “unhealthy co-dependence” to “true partnership”. That is the right formula. A stronger European pillar does not weaken deterrence and defense. It makes it more credible.

The transatlantic relationship will be preserved and strengthened only by being transformed. The task is to build a version of the alliance suited for the strategic conditions of the next decade: one in which American commitment is sustained by European capability, and European ambition is anchored in a strategic contribution framework that reframes the conversation in terms Washington can act on and Brussels can deliver: not just how much Europe spends, but what Europe can do—reliably and at scale, within EU, NATO and/or coalition frameworks. Europe will need clear planning, coordinated investments, and a shared pathway for collective defense and crisis management. That is the real message: Stop managing NATO. Start rebalancing it.

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Unheeded lessons from the US warship nearly sunk by an Iranian mine

Bradley Peniston — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:48:16 -0400

Thirty-eight years ago today, an Iranian mine tore a hole in the hull of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a guided missile frigate that had been escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. The blast broke the frigate's keel, flooded its engineroom, and lit fires on several decks. Only its well-trained crew saved the Roberts from sinking.

The story has become a touchstone of Navy schoolhouses, where instructors exhort officers and enlisted sailors alike to take seriously the grueling business of damage control. But a strangely amnesiac effect seems to surround the threat of mines.

The attack on the Roberts came nearly a year after Iranian minelayers had first taken U.S. planners by surprise. In early 1987, Washington agreed to shepherd Kuwaiti tankers through the Persian Gulf, where Iran and Iraq were striking at each other's economic jugulars. Operation Earnest Will began with a four-ship convoy: three U.S. Navy warships surrounding the supertanker Bridgeton. Within hours, the giant ship hit a mine. The Bridgeton’s double hull enabled her to sail onward. But the thin-skinned warships followed in her wake, huddling behind the damaged tanker for safety.

"The assumption that the Iranians 'wouldn’t dare' was shattered,” an official Navy history recounts. “The incident also revealed that despite all the preparation for the convoy, the United States had virtually no mine-warfare assets in the Arabian Gulf. Further convoys were postponed during the scramble to deploy eight MH-53 Sea Stallion mine-warfare helicopters and eventually eight ocean-going minesweepers (MSOs) and six coastal minesweepers (MSCs)."

This was a puzzling oversight. No weapon had sunk more ships since World War II. But once shocked into action, the Pentagon responded forcefully. Besides the overt dispatch of the minesweeping vessels and aircraft, the Pentagon also launched a covert operation: Prime Chance, the first big mission of the new U.S. Special Operations Command.

Navy SEALs ran patrol boats from a pair of leased oil barges in the Gulf, while elite Army aviators flew Little Bird helicopters from U.S. warships. Together, they sank and captured enough Iranian boats to bring mine attacks to a halt as the year drew to a close.

But even the newly joint special operators couldn’t stop Iranian boats from sneaking into the Gulf. On April 14, 1988, the Roberts ran into a string of newly laid mines. They were traced to Iran, which led to Operation Praying Mantis, a one-day war of retribution. On April 18, U.S. naval forces shelled Iranian operating bases in the Gulf, sank two Iranian warships, and did yet more damage before President Reagan called the shooting to a halt.

Repairing the damage to the Roberts required 18 months and $90 million—nearly a quarter-billion dollars in today's money. The mine that did the damage cost far less. Based on a 1908 design for the Russian empire, it likely cost around a thousand bucks.

Did the Navy emerge from the incident determined to bulk up its perennially underfunded minehunting forces into capabilities somewhat equal to their tasks? By and large, no. Though it completed the 14-ship Avenger class of minehunters in 1990, it took two decades for the Navy to produce its next countermine vessel: the disappointing littoral combat ship, which even now "will struggle to replace the Avengers as a viable, full detect-to-engage capability."

Now once again, Iran is disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Despite its advancements in missiles and drones, the humble naval mine remains a potent part of Tehran’s arsenal. Within weeks of the U.S. attack, Iranian boats began slipping mines into the strait.

The move, somehow, caught the Trump administration by surprise. Just weeks earlier, the Navy had loaded its four remaining Avengers onto an even larger ship, and sent them thousands of miles away. “The Pentagon and National Security Council significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. military strikes while planning the ongoing operation,” CNN reported.

Painfully, history is repeating itself.

I wrote a book about the Roberts, its mining, and the enduring lessons we can learn from the incident. One is the cost-effective potency of the naval mine, whose mere rumor can stop ships from moving through waterways. A broader formulation of the lesson was also taught by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently by Iranian Shahed drones: a determined adversary can always find cheap ways to hurt technologically advanced forces. It is a lesson the U.S. military can ill afford to forget.

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4 ways the war in Iran has weakened the US in the great power game

Jeffrey Taliaferro, The Conversation — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”—Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim—may well have been in the minds of policymakers in Moscow and Beijing these past weeks, as the U.S. war in Iran dragged on. And now that a 14-day ceasefire between Tehran and Washington is in effect, with both sides claiming “victory,” Russian and Chinese leaders still have an opportunity to profit from what many see as America’s latest folly in the Middle East.

Throughout the weeks-long conflict, China and Russia struck a delicate balance. Both declined to give Iran – seen to a varying degree as an ally of both nations – their full-throated support or sink any real costs into the conflict.

Instead, they opted for limited assistance in the form of small-scale intelligenceand diplomatic support.

As a scholar of international security and great power politics, I believe that is for good reason. Beijing and Moscow were fully aware that Iran could not “win” against the combined military might of the United States and Israel. Rather, Iran just needed to survive to serve the interests of Washington’s main geopolitical rivals.

Below are four ways in which the U.S. war in Iran has damaged Washington’s position in the great power rivalries of the 21st century.

1. Losing the influence war in the Middle East

As I explore in my book “Defending Frenemies,” the U.S. has long struggled to balance competing objectives in the Middle East. During the Cold War, this meant limiting the Soviet Union’s influence in the region, while contending with the development of nuclear weapons by two troublesome allies, Israel and Pakistan.

By the 2020s, the priorities in Washington were aimed at restricting the influence of the U.S.’s great power rivals– China and to a lesser degree Russia – in the Middle East.

Yet under Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, China and Russia have sought to increase their footprint in the region through a variety of formal alliances and informal measures.

For Russia, this took the form of aligning with Iran, while also partnering with Tehran to prop up the now-ousted regime of President Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, China increased its diplomatic profile in the Middle East, notably by acting as a mediator as Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic ties in 2023.

The irony of the latest Iran war is that it follows a period in which circumstances were unfavorable to Russian and Chinese aims of increasing their influence in the Middle East.

The fall of Assad in December 2024 deprived Russia of its one reliable ally in the region. And Trump’s May 2025 tour of the Gulf states, in which he secured major technology and economic deals with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, was aimed at countering China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence in those countries.

With Washington perceived as an increasingly unreliable protector, the Gulf states may seek greater security and economic cooperation elsewhere.

2. Taking US eyes off other strategic goals

In expanding military, diplomatic and economic ties in the Middle East, Russia and China over the past two decades were exploiting a desire by Washington to move its assets and attention away from the region following two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran directly contradicts the national security strategy his administration released in November 2025. According to the strategy, the administration would prioritize the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, while the Middle East’s importance “will recede.”

In co-launching a war in Tehran with Israel, without any prior consultation with Washington’s other allies, Trump has shown a complete disregard for their strategic and economic concerns. NATO, already riven by Trump’s repeated threats to the alliance and designs on Greenland, has now shown further signs of internal divisions.

That offers benefits for China and Russia, which have long sought to capitalize on cracks between America and its allies.

The irony, again, is that the war in Iran came as Trump’s vision of the U.S. as the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere was making advances. International law and legitimacy concerns aside, Washington had ousted a thorn in its side with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and replaced him with a more compliant leader.

3. Disproportionate economic fallout

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where some 20% of the world’s oil passes, was as predictable as it was destructive for U.S. interests.

But for Russia, this meant higher oil prices that boosted its war economy. It also led to the temporary but ongoing easing of U.S. sanctions, which has provided Moscow an indispensable lifeline after years of economic pressure over the war in Ukraine.

While a prolonged closure and extensive damage to oil and natural gas infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf states no doubt hurts China’s energy security and economy, these were risks Xi appears willing to accept, at least for a time.

And by building up a domestic oil reserve and diversifying energy sources to include solar, electric batteries and coal, China is far better positioned to weather a prolonged global energy crisis than the U.S. Indeed, Beijing has made strides in recent year to encourage domestic consumption as a source of economic growth, rather than be so reliant on global trade. That may have given China some protection during the global economic shock caused by the Iran war, as well as push the economy further down its own track.

The more the U.S. loses control over events in the strait, the more it loses influence in the region – especially as Iran appears to be placing restrictions on ships from unfriendly nations.

4. Loss of global leadership

Trump’s willingness, to abandon talks to go to war, and the contradictory rhetoric he has employed throughout the Iran conflict, has weakened the perception of the U.S. as an honest broker.

That provides a massive soft-power boost for Beijing. It was China that pressed Iran to accept the 14-day ceasefire proposal brokered by Pakistan. Indeed, China has slowly chipped away at America’s longtime status as global mediator of first resort.

Beijing has successfully mediated in the past between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and it attempted to do the same with Russia and Ukraine and Israel and the Palestinians.

In general, the Iran war adds weight to Beijing’s worldview that the U.S.-led liberal international order is over. Even if China benefited at some level from the war continuing, its decision to help broker the ceasefire shows that China is increasingly taking on the mantle of global leadership that the U.S. used to own.

And for Russia, the Iran war and the rupture between Trump and America’s NATO allies over their lack of support for it, shift world attention and U.S. involvement from the war in Ukraine.

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How would the US Navy counter Iran's mines?

David Hutchins, Forecast International — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:59:28 -0400

It's not clear whether Iran has put naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, but its longstanding ability to do so is part of the reason ships have all but stopped moving through the critical global chokepoint. The time may come for the U.S. Navy's littoral combat ships to demonstrate their long-touted ability to hunt mines.

According to a March 2026 congressional report, Iran is believed to possess roughly 6,000 naval mines. Although CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper has said that Iran’s conventional navy has been rendered combat-ineffective, some reports indicate that Iran has deployed mines in the strait. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has hundreds of speedboats with which to rapidly deploy mines across the narrow waterway.

Last fall, the Navy decommissioned the backbone of its minehunting capabilities: the four Avenger-class minesweepers stationed in Bahrain; four more remain elsewhere in the fleet. Purpose-built for mine warfare, the Avengers have wooden hulls wrapped in fiberglass to reduce magnetic signatures that trigger mines. But the Avengers are slow, outdated, lack any meaningful self-defense systems, and can’t launch helicopters or unmanned systems.

The Avengers were replaced in the Persian Gulf by the long-controversial littoral combat ships: high-speed, agile surface combatants designed for near-shore surface warfare, anti-submarine operations, and mine countermeasures. The Gulf LCSs—all Independence-class vessels—are equipped with minesweeping and mine-hunting capabilities: the LCS Mine Countermeasures Mission Package. The MCM MP supports mine warfare operations using aviation assets and unmanned systems equipped with an array of sensors to detect, localize, and neutralize surface, near-surface, moored, and bottom mines in the littorals. To date, the USS Canberra (LCS 30), USS Santa Barbara (LCS 32), and USS Tulsa (LCS 16) are known to have received the MCM MP. A fourth LCS, the USS Kansas City (LCS 22), is equipped with MCM MP for crew training and relief support.

With aluminum hulls, Independence-class LCSs must stay outside minefields, sending in MH-60S Seahawks, unmanned surface vessels (USVs), and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to hunt the underwater weapons.

USVs can tow the AN/AQS-20 mine-hunting sonar system, which uses sensors to find bottom and moored mines. The USVs can also deploy the unmanned influence sweep system (UISS), which mimics the magnetic and acoustic signature of a ship to detonate mines safely. LCSs can also deploy the Knifefish UUV, which can find buried and proud mines using low-frequency broadband sonar.

Crewed MH-60S Seahawks can be equipped with the AN/AES-1 Airborne Laser Mine Detection System (ALMDS), which detects floating and near-surface moored mines, as well as the AN/ASQ-235 Airborne Mine-Neutralization System (AMNS), whose expendable Archerfish UUV can destroy mines.

How might the U.S. Navy conduct counter-mine operations in the Persian Gulf? As of March, the four remaining Avengers were in Japan. The USS Tulsa and USS Santa Barbara were spotted at port in Malaysia on March 15, reportedly conducting brief logistical stops. The USS Canberra was reportedly in the Indian Ocean around the same time. The absence of these vessels in the Persian Gulf is surely no accident. Moving U.S. warships, particularly the three LCSs, out of port in Bahrain ahead of the conflict was likely a calculated decision to keep these vessels well out of the range of Iranian drones and missiles. Moreover, the U.S. military’s strikes on Iranian vessels in port have demonstrated the vulnerability of ships docked in the Gulf.

Yet, even if the LCSs are sent to the Persian Gulf, there are concerns around the capability of the LCS MCM MP. The unmanned assets require hours of pre-mission calibration. They cannot operate beyond line of sight ot the LCS. The AN/AQS-20 has struggled to identify g mines, even when tested in the relatively benign waters of Southern California. Perhaps most concerning, the Pentagon’s testing office said in March 2026 that it could not determine the operational effectiveness of the LCS equipped with the MCM MP.

Finally, mine-clearing is a slow, deliberate process made even more arduous when occurring in an environment contested by Iranian missiles and drones. Neither the purpose-built Avenger-class nor the LCS equipped with a relatively unproven MCM mission package would likely prove effective without a robust military escort.

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Going hunting

Peter W. Singer and August Cole — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Even the simplest naval mines can strike fear into mariners or throttle traffic through a choke point, for no weapon has sunk more warships in the past 75 years. Yet the mines of the future will be far more capable and dangerous.

The integration of AI and robotic technologies will produce hybrid UUV-mines: versatile, intelligent,able to adapt to and overcome countermeasures. They will strike from the depths at targets on land, sea, and in the air.

To counter them, militaries will need an equally new set of tactics and technologies: autonomous platforms, heterogeneous swarms, advanced sensor arrays, and modular architectures.

The following is a “useful fiction” written in support of the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation. The story blends non-fiction research on current and future trends and technologies with a fictionalized narrative scenario designed to promote reflection about the future of mine and countermine operations and autonomy in a maritime environment.

NATO Suspects Russians in Sinking of 4th Black Sea Grain Ship

BRUSSELS—The Turkish-flagged cargo ship MV Golden Horizon ran aground in Romanian waters on Thursday, less than two hours after the 110-meter vessel was damaged by an underwater explosion. It was the latest of four vessels, all carrying Ukrainian agricultural products, to suffer similar damage in the Black Sea.

NATO officials here say the pattern of attacks indicate a suspected Russian operation intended to set back a Ukraine still recovering from years of war. They could not, however, specify what sort of weapon might have caused the explosions. MV Golden Horizon, which had been bound for an undisclosed West African nation, ran aground in shallow coastal waters in full view of the Romanian Black Sea resort town of Mamaia.

“Moscow wants to cut us off at the knees just as we are getting back on our feet,” said a Ukrainian military spokesman in Kyiv. “The Black Sea is a lifeline not just for our nation, but the world. Our agriculture exports feed people of all faiths and colors, and now we are all under attack again.”

A Russian spokesman denied that the Kremlin or its affiliated forces had any role in the incident. The spokesman said it was “a false-flag attack designed to besmirch Russia’s good name.”

Endangering this route poses profound challenges for Ukraine, which exports foodstuffs worth roughly $30 billion a year. Growing uncertainty around this supply line has also begun to reverberate across the global economy. Ukraine remains the world's seventh-largest exporter of wheat, fourth-largest exporter of barley, and the biggest exporter of sunflower seeds, which are used for sunflower oil and animal feed. Its products are shipped to more than 40 countries where food prices have surged.

After Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, foreign-flagged cargo ships carrying Ukraine’s grain harvest began to use the protected corridor that hugs the western coastline of the Black Sea. The route, too shallow for submarines, passes through the territorial waters of Romania and Bulgaria, both of which are NATO countries. That this vital export lifeline is now a zone of renewed conflict raises immense questions for the NATO alliance and Ukraine, which have led alliance leaders to agree to deploy a Maritime Task Force to protect the shipping and NATO-member territorial waters.

“Commander, do not tell me this is the first time you’ve been to a spa?” Spanish Navy Capitán de Corbeta Carlos Echeverría spread his arms with a host’s sweeping welcome.

“My husband and I did an anniversary trip to one of Swansea’s finest last year. It was nice, but for some reason that one didn’t have the added option of a visit to a tactical operations center,” replied Cmdr. Heidi Bonner of the British Royal Navy.

Befitting a four-star resort, the Hotel Aqua’s two-story spa building was finished in mahogany and polished brass and overlooked the waters of the Black Sea. The luxurious setting was disturbed now by fiber cables, thick as an arm, snaking across the gravel paths. These cables linked to an Offset Antenna Farm hidden in the resort’s parking garage, providing connectivity back to Brussels, the capitals of the participant nations, and every ship and aerial asset deployed in nearby waters as part of the newly arrived NATO Maritime Task Force.

Bonner nodded complimentarily at her deputy, who stepped aside for her to enter first. “Very well done in getting this set up so quickly,” knowing how much work had gone into turning the off-season resort’s spa into a command center for their operation.

The hotel sat just outside Mamaia, a resort community on the Romanian seashore. It was a strange juxtaposition for the two officers, who were used to operating from crowded warships or cubicles at NATO’s Allied Maritime Command in Northwood, UK.

“To be honest, I would not have minded if they had assigned us to the casino,” Echeverría said.

“Our Task Force intel cell is already set up there on the top floor,” Bonner replied. “It fits. They all watch far too much James Bond.”

The two officers had an easy repartee, but both felt the tension of their mission. The NATO task force was charged with securing the nearby sea lanes, which meant identifying and neutralizing the undersea threat that had all but closed off Black Sea shipping. The operations also carried the risk that whatever Russia was doing could cross into an Article 5 violation if any of the member-states’ ships were disabled or sunk. On top of that, there was the risk of an accident or skirmish with the growing number of Russian aerial drones and fighters that pestered the NATO forces.

“Where did they put the crew from the MV Golden Horizon?” Echeverría asked.

“Also in the hotel wing linked to the casino,” Bonner said. “Wanted them near the intel folks.”

“Smart,” said Echeverría, tapping his temple. “We’re about to get the UUV live feed up from the Golden Horizon.”

“Let’s go,” she said, leaving him in her wake as they headed towards the spa’s dining area.

Floor-to-ceiling windows were covered with light-blocking ballistic blankets against the threat of drones. Echeverría motioned for a sailor to bring up footage of the MV Golden Horizon’s latest UUV-conducted hull inspection.

“Tell me what we know, Petty Officer Shanks,” Bonner said, arms crossed as she leaned forward to study the video.

“Commander, the blast pattern on the hull indicates an external explosion,” replied the sailor, a young Canadian Navy petty officer 2nd class wearing wire-frame glasses. “We’re still modeling the size or yield of the explosive involved and will have that in less than 30 minutes. In terms of the source or cause, it is still a mystery to us. The waters in the area are too shallow for a submarine. No minefields are in the area; we’ve reconfirmed that with space assets.”

“Could it be a limpet mine emplaced in port by a Russian diver or drone?” asked Bonner.

“Highly unlikely based on the hull damage,” Echeverría said. “Bring up the close-up.”

Shanks froze the feed and swiped back to earlier imagery. “The latest generation Russian limpet mines use a shaped charge and would punch a clean hole through the hull, targeting the fuel stores or something else that would set off secondary explosions. This rather large, jagged metal near the bow indicates something else. Notice also the size. It is much bigger than what a diver or small UUV could emplace.”

“Thank you to you both,” Bonner said.

She closed her eyes and nodded, as if conversing with herself. Shanks looked confused, while Echeverría raised his eyebrows in anticipation, knowing a decision was about to come. The two NATO officers had deployed together twice in the past five years, once as part of a three-month Baltic mission focused on undersea cable surveillance and defenses and before that in the Persian Gulf supporting a U.S. task force that monitored illicit shipments to Iran.

“Let’s not get overly focused on the Golden Horizon,” she said, gesturing through the blackout curtains at the unseen hulking ship looming off the coast. “I want to know everything about the waters she was in, instead. By that, I mean we want to pull in as much data as we can, from every sensor we can access. All-domain NATO assets. OSINT. Buy what you need. And please don’t forget that our Ukrainian friends have quite a bit they can offer. If you’re having any problems with access, come see me, and we’ll break down that wall. Let’s get to it. There have been four attacks so far. If we could bet at the casino on it, a fifth would get at least even odds.”*

“Es un misterio,” said Echeverría.

In the next few hours, the task force assembled as powerful a collection of data as Bonner had ever seen. In this AI-powered era of sensor fusion, she could bring together an array of NATO military surveillance sources –– from hyperspectral satellite sensors to surface and undersea sonar — and civilian sources like oceanographic data from environmental buoys, or the acoustic data picked up by fishing vessels hunting for their catch.

Yet Bonner and Echeverría frowned as they conferred in front of an oversized monitor that displayed a live tactical map of the Black Sea, with icons to mark current shipping and the four attack sites.

“There is no discernible pattern, " she said. "At all. No minefields that we detected. Moreover, the second and third explosions happened in specific lanes that had already been cleared or transited by multiple other ships.”

“And it cannot be a submarine, as there is no vessel that can deploy in such shallow waters, nor one that could be in so many places at once,” Echeverría replied, gesturing in frustration at the screen as if shaming it into revealing a conclusion the task force’s AI mission analysis systems had been holding back.

“It’s impressive work. Now, I need to get another look at the problem,” said Bonner, already on her way out of the operations center.

• • •

On her first deployment, aboard on HMS Somerset far too many years ago, Bonner had found that going on deck always helped clear her head. Breathing fresh sea air and feeling the wind on her face was the best tonic for a mind and body numbed by hours inside an ops center.

The resort was a far better setting to recharge than the heaving deck of a frigate, where a spray of icy North Sea water doused your face every few moments. Bonner walked along well-tended gravel pathways, taking in the view that had been the scene of many engagement proposals. The serenity of the mostly empty tourist beach and lapping waves, though, was broken by the sight of the disabled Ukrainian freighter ship only 200 meters away, its bow low in the water and the ship listing to port. She eyed the wrecked ship, wishing it would reveal the secret of what had struck it.

A hundred meters further, a small fishing boat puttered past. Even from afar, she could tell the two men on board were related by the way they moved so fluidly together. The fishermen ignored the Romanian Navy RHIB standing guard at the wreck. They cared little for the freighter or what had happened to it, only that it was in the way of their catch.

Life goes on, Bonner thought, even with war on their doorstep. This region’s history of conflict was something she had been thinking about a lot recently, and yet it was easy to lose sight of the simple fact that families like this had no choice but to live out their lives in the middle of that history. Sometimes, it was easier. Other times, it was more complicated. But time and life moved on as it did for everyone.

Horse mackerel, she thought. Common enough fish here and likely what they were going out for. She might eat some at a local cafe if they ever cracked whatever was going on in the waters. In the hands of an able chef, it could make half-decent sushi.

She found a recently painted bench and sat down. The fatigue of the rushed deployment and nonstop tempo nearly took her breath away. You had to face the fatigue head-on, acknowledge it, and know when it might be holding you back.

The small fishing boat set an anchor just beyond the RHIB, and the father and son unlimbered heavy-duty rods. They cast their jigs in increasingly wider arcs beyond their boat and out toward the Golden Horizon. By the way the light flashed off the silvery lures, Bonner suspected they were using feather rigs. The predatory mackerel devoured small fish and, in this wintery time of year, could be found closer to the coast hunting near the bottom.

As her mind drifted, almost relaxing for a moment as she watched the long casts, an idea burst out of the moment of calm.

Bait.

Bonner leapt up and ran across the cross-cut manicured lawn back to her operations center.

• • •

Less than 24 hours later, Bonner and Echeverría flew low above the now lake-flat Black Sea aboard a Romanian IAR 330 Puma Naval Helicopter. Out the port side, she could see the Romanian Type 22 frigate Regele Ferdinand and a pair of RHIBs setting out from its stern at high speed toward the horizon. She knew the vessel: it was the former Royal Navy HMS Coventry. Since becoming the Romanian flagship in 2004—a few years before she graduated from the Royal Naval Academy—it had regularly supported allied operations in the Mediterranean.

Bonner hunched over the ruggedized tablet in her lap, signaling to the crew chief that they were nearing the drop point for the pair of drones secured with stout tie-down straps.

The air suddenly shook around them and the Romanian helicopter banked left and down toward the ocean surface. Spray from the helicopter’s downdraft flew in every direction and created conditions that took Bonner back to a white-out she once experienced in the Barents Sea.

Amid the steep, lurching turn she dropped her tablet, and it went skittering across the floor of the helicopter before the crew chief stepped on it with his boot. The air around her vibrated and roared. It took a second to realize that the helicopter wasn’t disintegrating but rather being buffeted by the slipstream from a fighter jet’s high-speed pass.

“Russians,” one of the Romanian pilots called out over the radio, a declaration followed by what were a string of epithets recognizable even in a foreign language.

Bonner tightened her harness and cleared her throat. “Very well. Continue mission,” she said, extending a steady hand for her tablet.

A few minutes later, the crew chief nodded at Bonner, before opening the starboard door. Then he stepped back to make way for a pair of British sailors, who gingerly carried a 2-meter UUV towards the open door. Secured by safety lines, the sailors fought to stay on their feet as the helicopter slowed to hover a few meters above the sea's surface. The dart-like autonomous craft weighed not much more than a sonobuoy.

This was the second one they had deployed from the helicopter, but just one of dozens launched into the glassy waters from RHIBs, patrol vessels, and other aircraft.

“Delta Two is wet!” one of the sailors called over the helicopter’s internal communications net.

Bonner looked down as the drone slipped beneath the surface.

“Confirmed Delta Two underway,” said the other sailor.

“Well done. Now let’s let these robots dangle their lures.” Given the stakes of hundreds of sailors whose lives were on the line, it may have sounded like a flippant comment. Yet it was the most unambiguous expression of the tactics she wanted the wider NATO force to employ.

The crew chief moved to secure the helicopter’s door, but Bonner waved him off. She preferred to have a direct view of the hunt going on below.

The warships, RHIBs, autonomous aerial drones, space-based surveillance, and UUVs formed a web, controlled by a fusion of occasional human but mostly onboard AI guidance. In the helicopter, Bonner was in the center of their digital threads, nudging and tugging occasionally to orient them or assigning her team to reconcile technical setbacks, of which there were always a few. But far less with each deployment of the drones, she noted, because the mission-management software learned, as she did.

The composition of the UUV fleet beneath this 300-square-kilometer stretch of the Black Sea reflected the hard-won lessons of operations in the region during Russia’s war upon Ukraine and the hot peace that followed. It wasn’t just about numbers but the type. No one design could succeed at everything, and engineering was a discipline built around managing tradeoffs. One of the American 17-meter long-endurance surveillance drones carrying its own mini-UUVs looked everything like a miniature submarine ought to and outranged every other of its robotic peers. The lightweight British dart-shaped drones dropped from her helicopter were at the other end of the swarm, sprinting and drifting up and down thermoclines where they passively surveilled the area with acoustic sensors. By deploying undersea drones of different ranges, sonar and infrared sensor packages, and underlying operating systems –– as befitted the numerous platforms NATO member nations brought to the mission –– this heterogeneity became the swarm’s strength.

In the role of undersea hunters, this collection of UUVs could orient and pursue a larger goal as a pod or pack, coordinated semi-autonomously by Bonner and the onboard edge-AI mission computers that could receive limited guidance and reason the next steps they should take. Bonner thought of it like the way her own body and brain integrated her five senses – and the sixth of instinct or gut feeling that had proved her invaluable. This happened automatically, without focused thought in a manner that she had come to see as similar to how she conducted her missions today than when she first joined the Royal Navy. The basic laws of physics endured underwater: communications would remain a challenge until a quantum breakthrough arrived. Yet the creative application of AI and autonomy allowed undersea operations to work around it.

In this case, the swarm of UUVs were not just hunting, but acting as bait. They were alternatively blasting out the acoustic signature of the Golden Horizon—harvested from the data records of the ships it had passed during its many transits of the region—and listening for a response.

Unlike the normal experience of fishing, the hunt was short. A multicolor image arrived on Bonner’s tablet screen—shared with her at the same time the meshed network of NATO UUVs shared it among themselves, overcoming the difficulty of undersea data transmission by playing a machine-speed version of the classic game of telephone. That same image was also being shared across the entire NATO task force’s battle network.

The data attached to the image indicated that it was one of many being shared at low bandwidth among the underwater UUVs and the surface vessels. It was a mosaic tile that, when combined with thousands of other past and present data sets, began to reveal a striking picture of what had been threatening the Black Sea shipping.

The first sequence of data showed movement that had begun almost immediately after the sonic deception was initiated. Delta Three, a counterpart of the UUV deployed from their helicopter, was already closing in on the contact. It soon beamed back imagery of a cloudy swirl of dirt kicked up by something lifting from the seabed floor. A synthetic picture of the target began to fill in automatically by the visual models used by the battle management system to integrate all the other data being gathered by the UUV swarm’s varied sensors. It was like watching a digital sketch artist at work.

The display soon revealed a barrel-like shaped UUV, with a pair of ducted-propellor drive units on either side of its fuselage and a kind of tread on the bottom of its hull that apparently allowed it to creep along the seabed, much like those used by undersea pipeline inspection companies. A needle-like projection from its nose was clearly visible, and Bonner did not need the AI to tell her it was a contact-detonation device.

She opened a direct channel to Echeverría, who hunched over his tablet. “It’s a hybrid mine of sorts. Do you concur?”

“Yes. It seems that the Russians stole an idea from the Ukrainian maritime drone program and further blurred the lines between commercial gear, mines, and UUVs.”

Echeverría used his tablet pen to circle a part of the image and zoom in.

“Look at the growth on the drone’s fuselage; it has clearly been sitting on the seabed for some time.”

“Just waiting to deploy when the right freighter comes along,” Bonner said. “Or, at least, what sounds like a freighter.”

She closed her eyes and sought peace amid the helicopter's noise. She considered how this new form of robotic attack represented just the latest twist in the tit-for-tat contest between undersea attackers and defenders that had gone on for more than a century.

After less than a second, her eyes opened up with a decision.

“It is a good bet this isn’t the only one. Pass the initial profile of this weapons system around the task force. Between knowing what we are hunting for and the bait that will draw its ilk out, we should be able to find any of its friends. I’ll propose up the chain of command that once we locate the rest, we employ a coordinated layered depth charge attack at each location.”

“It looks like a full sweep may take up to eight hours, but I think we can mine the existing data from initial scans and halve that time by backcasting the target profile on that data,” said Echeverría, whose color had returned with the excitement of the hunt. “And using depth charges will generate a lot of noise.”

“It should, but I don’t think the Russians will complain. After all, that would be revealing they were the ones behind the attacks, wouldn’t it?” Bonner said as she tapped out updates to her real-time situation report.

She then let herself smile. NATO would soon bag a catch that would leave even those two fishermen jealous.

P.W. Singer is Strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security. August Cole is associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. They are co-founders of Useful Fiction.

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How Ukraine’s defense industry innovates at the speed of modern war

Göran Roos and Johan Roos — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:07:27 -0400

The Pentagon is negotiating to buy Ukrainian interceptor drones, having concluded that no American manufacturer can match the price, delivery times, and battlefield-tested reliability. A drone developed by UK firm Skycutter with Ukraine’s SkyFall recently scored 99.3 out of 100 in the Pentagon’s own Drone Dominance evaluation, beating every U.S. competitor by more than ten points. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine had about seven domestic drone manufacturers. It now has roughly 500. Last year, they produced a rough total of four million drones, exceeding by far the combined output of all NATO members; in 2026, they are aiming to make seven million.

The technology is not the story. The organizational model behind it is.

What Ukraine’s drone ecosystem has built is what U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd theorized in the 1970s and 1980s but almost no institution has managed to implement: a distributed observe-orient-decide-act architecture at industrial scale, where the feedback between battlefield observation and production action operates faster than any comparable system in history. Three principles from that model apply directly to how Western defense leaders think about acquisition reform.

Observation nodes belong at the point of use, not at the top of a reporting chain. In Western defense procurement, the distance between a battlefield observation and an engineering change is measured in years. After-action reports travel through chains of command, requirements committees draft specifications, and engineering change proposals enter configuration-management queues. Ukraine’s three-year-old Brave1 platform has created a national marketplace where frontline units order drones directly from certified manufacturers. (The platform has served orders totaling more than $235 million so far.) Real-time dashboards feed confirmed-hit data, strike distances, and failure modes back to producers continuously. The frontline operator is the primary sensor in the system, not a customer at the end of a supply chain. Put another way, the people who use the drones provide the design feedback that shapes the next production run.

Shared failure data is a strategic asset, not a competitive vulnerability. When Russia deployed stronger electronic warfare systems, Ukrainian engineers across the 500-company network responded simultaneously with fiber-optic guidance, encrypted multiband links, AI-assisted targeting, and hybrid systems that switch from fiber-optic to radio when the cable breaks. No single authority ordered these responses. Manufacturers share what breaks across competitors, and the shared orientation made the problem visible to everyone at once. Most solutions failed. The ones that survived combat testing propagated through the network within weeks. In most Western corporate and defense settings, failure data is hidden behind classification walls or treated as liability exposure. That is an orientation-impoverishment strategy, and it is one of the primary reasons centralized procurement systems cannot match the adaptation speed of a distributed network.

Decision authority belongs where the information is richest and most current. Ukrainian military units independently select which manufacturers to order from, switching suppliers based on what works under fire rather than waiting for committee approval. The soldier is the procurement officer. There is no requirements document, no multi-year contract cycle, no bureaucratic intermediary between battlefield judgement and resource allocation. Capital flows to demonstrated effectiveness, measured in confirmed hits, not to incumbency or contractual position. Boyd argued that decision authority must sit with the person closest to the most current information. Ukraine has institutionalized that principle in a manner that has no precedent in modern defense procurement.

Two Western cases demonstrate that these principles can work outside a wartime ecosystem. In early 2025, Saab, the Swedish Air Force, and the FMV developed and evaluated the Loke counter-UAS system in 84 days, not by circumventing regulation but by repurposing proven components and explicitly authorizing departure from standard process. From April through September, Loke was operational at Malbork Air Base, a NATO base in Poland.

And when U.S. engineers recovered a downed Iranian Shahed-136, they did not commission a requirements study. They disassembled it, rebuilt it with American guidance and satellite datalink systems, and fielded the LUCAS drone in about five months at $35,000 per unit. The Tomahawk it partially replaces costs north of $2 million. In both cases, the bottleneck was organizational, not technical.

There are, of course, real objections. What works under wartime emergency may not translate into the institutional architecture that sustained great-power competition demands. Fragmentation, corruption risk, and the absence of standardization are genuine constraints. These principles apply where the product is modular and the iteration cycle can be measured in weeks: drones, electronic countermeasures, software-defined systems. They do not apply to submarines or next-generation fighters. The argument concerns the growing category of defense capabilities where speed of adaptation determines effectiveness.

Consider the cycle time in your own organization between a signal from the front line and a change in what you produce. Consider who has authority to act on that signal without waiting for approval from someone further from the information. If the answers are months or years, and someone in a committee, Ukraine’s drone entrepreneurs have built the organizational proof that a faster, more adaptive model is not theory. It is operational, at scale, under fire.

The rest of us have the luxury of learning it before the pressure arrives.

Göran Roos is a retired Swedish Army Reserve major and a Visiting Professor in Business Performance and Intangible Asset Management at the Centre for Business Performance, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University.

Johan Roos is a retired Swedish Army Reserve captain and a professor in Strategy and Executive Advisor at Hult International Business School.

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Don't bottleneck defense-personnel vetting with a small-business set-aside

Lindy Kyzer — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:25:52 -0400

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) sits at the center of one of government’s most sensitive and consequential missions: determining who is trusted to access classified information and facilities. At the heart of that mission is the Case Processing Operations Center (CPOC), a function that powers the intake, processing, and quality control of federal background investigations.

As DCSA moves forward with its next-generation CPOC 2.0 procurement, recently released as a draft solicitation on SAM.gov, the agency deserves credit for continuing to modernize a mission that has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Of particular note is DCSA’s incorporation of the critical continuous vetting analytical-services mission, a key component of Trusted Workforce 2.0, into the CPOC 2.0 draft solicitation along with the original CPOC clerical work covered by the Service Contracting Act.

But the acquisition strategy now taking shape — a total small-business set-aside — raises important questions: how does DCSA balance the government’s commitment to small-business participation with the need to deliver at scale for a mission that underpins national security? And how do we respond to the push for more realistic and equitable contract awards and fewer set-asides when some of the nation’s most important contracts still seem to be following acquisition business as usual?

A mission growing in complexity

CPOC has customarily been procured as a small-business set-aside, but it has never been a small undertaking. It helps process background investigations for more than a million federal and contractor personnel each year. This requires millions of investigative actions, enough to keep more than 800 full-time equivalents busy.

And it’s only getting bigger. Adding continuous vetting means expanding from periodic reinvestigations to near real-time monitoring of cleared personnel and analyzing an evolving series of threat alerts against the entire cleared population. That transformation is central to Trusted Workforce 2.0 and demands not just steady-state processing, but adaptability, technology integration, and surge capacity.

The small business question

DCSA’s decision to pursue a total small business set-aside is consistent with longstanding federal priorities to expand opportunities for small and disadvantaged firms. That objective is both important and necessary, particularly in a market where consolidation and incumbent advantage can limit new entrants.

But not all requirements are created equally and suitable for small businesses. Large contracts like CPOC need established management discipline and systems, available funding to front payroll and capital expenditures and the ability to compete with large companies to recruit and retain top talent. Due to the inherent risk, most would not consider a contract of this size, complexity and criticality a viable small business set-aside opportunity.

Policy alignment and oversight

There is also a broader policy context to consider.

Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Jan. 16 memorandum, “Contract Review of All Small Business Sole Source and Set-Aside Awards Above $20 Million in Contract Value,” mandates a comprehensive review of such procurements. There is a fundamental question as to whether this acquisition strategy has undergone the appropriate level of scrutiny. Has the CPOC 2.0 procurement been evaluated in accordance with established oversight protocols to ensure alignment with mission priorities, adherence to small business eligibility intent and avoidance of de facto pass-through or structurally constrained competition?

This scrutiny is well-placed. Large, complex procurements introduce risks that must be carefully managed. But scrutiny on the backend only delays critical acquisitions. The government should be carefully considering its contract requirements and how some small business set-asides both slow progress and virtually guarantee litigation.

For a requirement like CPOC, the stakes are unusually high. Delays or performance issues don’t just affect contract metrics, they ripple across the entire personnel vetting enterprise, impacting hiring, readiness and national security. The ability to grow and scale the national security workforce is an imperative to a nation in conflict as the U.S. is today. The current policy and security reality argues for an acquisition strategy that maximizes competition among all capable providers, regardless of size classification.

Another concern raised by industry is the unusually compressed response timeline associated with the CPOC 2.0 acquisition. Requests for information and subsequent requests for purchase have been released with response timelines of just a few days, leaving little time for thoughtful industry input. While short suspense timelines are not uncommon in federal procurement, they can undermine one of the core purposes of draft solicitations: to gather meaningful feedback that improves the final acquisition.

There’s a lot of talk about acquisition reform today. But when basic business as usual, such as short suspense requests like this, is the norm, the only companies who can compete are those who already know the requirement. If the goal is to maximize competition and refine requirements, allowing sufficient time for industry to respond is not just a courtesy, it’s a strategic necessity.

Why this matters

None of this is to suggest that DCSA’s objectives are misplaced. Supporting small businesses, advancing socioeconomic goals and fostering a diverse industrial base remain essential priorities.

But acquisition strategy should be tailored to mission needs.

The size and scale of DCSA’s mission today demands a robust and wide pool of available resources, not a single, consolidated contract, newly bucketed with additional, more complex requirements and then set aside as a small business acquisition.

DCSA has made significant progress in modernizing the personnel vetting enterprise, and the transition to continuous vetting represents a generational shift in how the government manages risk.

The CPOC recompete is a pivotal moment in that journey.

Getting the acquisition strategy right isn’t just about compliance with policy or alignment with small business goals, it’s about ensuring the resilience, scalability and effectiveness of the system that determines who can be trusted with the nation’s most sensitive information.

That’s a mission worth competing for — fully, openly and with the best capabilities available.

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The National Security Council is missing in action

Gregory F. Treverton, The Conversation — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:26:20 -0400

Three weeks into the U.S. war with Iran, it seems increasingly evident that President Donald Trump and his administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to attacks.

Besides appearing unprepared by the escalation of war, the president has offered contradictory statements on the U.S. rationale for bombing Iran, including that Iranian missiles could “soon” rain down on American cities.

The administration’s inconsistent rationale for waging war was laid bare on March 18, 2026, when Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee and declined to say whether her agency had made an estimate of if and when Iran would threaten the U.S. mainland.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” Gabbard said.

The statement was especially odd given that the briefing’s subject was the U.S. intelligence community’s latest global threat assessment. It’s clear to me that neither Gabbard nor other members of the intelligence community were part of Trump’s decision-making about going to war.

Besides serving as chair of the National Intelligence Council in the Barack Obama administration, I was a staff member of the National Security Council in the Jimmy Carter administration. I know that this apparent lack of a coordinated policy on Iran is a far cry from the war preparation and planning done during previous presidential administrations.

National Security Council

Typically, the National Security Council, which consists of the Cabinet secretaries of the national security agencies, does its work through its committees, including the Deputies Committee, which is made up of the top deputies in those departments. The Deputies Committee reviews plans and assesses options, usually presenting a recommendation to the principals, including the president.

In that sense, the National Security Council is seen within an administration as the honest broker, especially in balancing the roles of the two main foreign affairs departments: the State Department and the Defense Department.

To be sure, different administrations have used the National Security Council in different ways.

President Dwight Eisenhower created the modern National Security Council. His was an elaborate structure, with groups for both assessing options and overseeing implementation. It reflected his wartime experience, with careful staffing from a general staff whose responsibilities ranged from operations and logistics to intelligence and plans.

Other administrations have favored less formal arrangements. John F. Kennedy, for instance, kept discussions with the National Security Council secret during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But all the National Security Council stakeholders were represented, and Kennedy reached out to consult outside expertise on the Soviet Union.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden walk away from the lectern after Obama announced a nuclear deal with Iran on July 14, 2015. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool

Lyndon Johnson made Tuesday lunches his forum for debating decisions about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Beginning with just his secretaries of state and defense, the lunches became a National Security Council meeting but in less formal circumstances. The CIA director, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the press secretary were later added to the group.

In other administrations at war, including the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations in Iraq, the Deputies Committees would meet daily to assess progress and review options for what came next.

In the Obama administration, the National Intelligence Council I chaired supplied the intelligence support to the Deputies Committee. We provided a steady stream of intelligence assessments across various subjects. Those included pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring in the 2010s to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

The intelligence assessments provided the information – about where wars stood and what may come next – used for discussion among the deputies. They were discussions informed by experts on the Deputies Committee and from staff on the National Security Council who specialized in the region or military affairs.

This was nowhere better illustrated than in negotiating the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The deal required bringing together experts on Iran and regional dynamics in the Middle East with experts on nuclear fuel cycles and the making of nuclear weapons.

Hardly seen

The Trump administration cut the National Security Council staff in half in May 2025, to around 150. The plan was to streamline and restructure national intelligence under Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Since White Houses always want to pretend they are cheaper than they are, most staff with the National Security Council are seconded – or loaned for free – from one of the agencies. The process saves the White House money. But it also provides it with invaluable in-house expertise and exposes those seconded officials to presidential policymaking.

A friend and colleague who served as under secretary of defense quipped that every time he saw a State Department counterpart coming to a Deputies Committee meeting, he knew what was coming in substance: a request for a military solution to a geopolitical problem.

His stock answer: “Yes, we can do that, but it’ll require 100,000 soldiers and cost US$10 billion.” That answer was his quip, but the Deputies Committee provided a forum for arguing about the merits of the case.

The Trump administration in January 2025 outlined the National Security Council structure in familiar terms. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and director of national intelligence, both a regular presence in debates in previous administrations, were made situational rather than regular members. They would attend as needed, not automatically.

This photo provided by the White House shows President Donald Trump talking with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles as Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens at Mar-a-Lago during Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, 2026. Daniel Torok/The White House via AP

But the National Security Council has hardly been seen since, unlike Trump’s Cabinet, which gathers occasionally at meetings that often begin with Cabinet members lavishing praise on the president.

Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio asked Trump on March 13, 2026, about that inner circle.

“In your Cabinet with the vice president, secretary of state, what is it like, what are the dynamics when you have a big decision like Iran or Venezuela?” Kilmeade asked. “Are people speaking up and speaking their minds?”

Trump’s answer spoke volumes.

“They do,” the president said. “I let them speak their mind, and they do. And we have some differences, but they, they never end up being much. I convince them all to, let’s do it my way.”

Perhaps this casual approach to national security from the Trump administration should not surprise Americans after “Signalgate” – when administration officials in 2025 used the messaging app Signal rather than secure government modes to discuss U.S. military strikes on Yemen and inadvertently included a journalist in the communications.

But when lives are at stake, not to mention Americans’ pocketbooks and the global economy, I think the nation deserves better. Conducting a war requires a hard-headed process for assessing progress and evaluating next steps. In other administrations, the National Security Council would have provided that.

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Iran war shows the strategic limits of tactical strikes

Shaun McDougall — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:16:55 -0400

The war in Iran is testing the strategic limits of tactical military success. Even as U.S. and Israeli airstrikes degrade Iranian capabilities, a complex web of global economic and strategic consequences are keeping victory out of reach.

On Monday, U.S. Central Command said that more than 9,000 targets had been struck, including more than 140 Iranian vessels damaged or destroyed in the war. Among them were mid-March strikes on Kharg Island, which produces most of Iran’s oil exports. CENTCOM said only military assets, including missile and mine storage facilities, were hit on the island. However, other strikes hit Iranian oil and energy infrastructure. Tehran retaliated by attacking oil facilities in Gulf countries, placing continued pressure on oil prices. Iran has also launched several cyberattacks, warning that major U.S. tech firms could be targeted, which could disrupt government networks, defense contractors and other civilian companies, and utilities.

U.S. and Israel continue to target senior members of the Iranian regime, which “appears to be intact but largely degraded,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told senators on Wednesday. Last week, Israel’s defense minister announced the deaths of Iran’s top security official, Ali Larijani, and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Basij militia, Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani. Larijani is a particularly significant loss for Iran, as he was believed to be spearheading military operations since the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran’s intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, was also killed on Wednesday, according to Israel.

A contingent of Marines is also on the way to the region—reportedly, aboard USS Tripoli, an America-class amphibious assault ship. Tripoli can carry F-35B fighters, MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, MH-60S helicopters, and around 2,200 Marines. The administration hasn’t signaled how it plans to deploy the Marines. Seizing Kharg Island is one plausible mission for the Marines, albeit a risky one.

As of Monday, the Pentagon said that about 200 U.S. service members have been wounded in the war, and 13 have been killed, including the crew of a KC-135 tanker that crashed over western Iraq.

Hormuz standoff

One of the biggest strategic challenges is the Strait of Hormuz, whose closure has bottled up roughly one-fifth of the world’s crude oil. Iranian anti-ship missiles are the biggest threat. Iran can also employ small fast attack craft and unmanned surface vessels; the venerable A-10 Warthog has been pressed into service against them. And mines remain a concern even thought much of Iran’s minelaying capacity has been wiped out.

President Trump reportedly expected Iran to capitulate rather than block it, and his reactions to the closure have varied wildly. He initially suggested that U.S. Navy ships could escort commercial ships. Then he asked allies for help, but was rebuffed. “This is not our war; we did not start it,” said Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, who favored a diplomatic solution. Trump turned to threats, saying that NATO would face a “very bad” future if it didn't help. Then he said in a Truth Social post that “we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID!” Then he amplified an opinion piece arguing that U.S. allies should help open the strait.

Still, a group of seven U.S. allies issued a joint statement Thursday indicating a willingness to contribute to reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom condemned Iran’s closure of the strait and highlighted the need for freedom of navigation. “We express our readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait,” the statement said. “We welcome the commitment of nations who are engaging in preparatory planning.” The joint statement left the specifics of “appropriate efforts” deliberately vague.

Escorting ships through the strait is a dangerous endeavor. Any ship transiting the strait is a potential target for Iranian missiles, airborne and maritime drones, and mines, meaning both civilian vessels and warships run the risk of being damaged or suffering casualties. Escort missions also carry a financial burden. In addition to the costs of an increased operational tempo, warships could end up further depleting interceptor inventories, as the U.S. Navy experienced while defending ships in the Red Sea from Houthi rebels.

Regarding the mine threat, the U.S. recently retired its Bahrain-based Avenger class mine countermeasures ships, which featured wood and fiberglass hulls to facilitate demining operations. That job now falls to the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship, which is outfitted with mine countermeasures equipment, including towed sonar, unmanned surface and underwater vehicles, and an airborne mine neutralization system carried by an MH-60S helicopter. However, two of the Navy’s three LCS outfitted with minesweeping gear were spotted in Malaysia earlier this week, far from the war in Iran. Even if the ships return to the Middle East soon, conducting demining operations in the contested strait carries its own set of risks.

Markets under pressure

Ongoing strikes against Iranian and regional oil infrastructure, combined with the lack of free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, continue to disrupt energy markets. My colleague, Derek Bisaccio, recently addressed how rising energy prices are impacting Washington’s strategic approach to the war. He cited possible options like the U.S. releasing oil from the strategic reserves and even easing sanctions on Russian oil to help lower prices, even though doing so would give Moscow fresh resources to pour into its war in Ukraine. Both of those scenarios came to pass over the past week. Washington released 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which will increase supply but puts pressure on dwindling reserves that were also utilized following the start of the war in Ukraine. It will take years to replenish these withdrawals, making this a longer-term security concern.

The U.S. also followed through on temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil, but Washington didn’t stop there. The U.S. has also temporarily eased sanctions on Venezuelan oil, and on Thursday the administration announced it planned to remove sanctions even on Iranian oil, highlighting the tug-of-war between increasing economic pressure on Iran and concern about rising gas prices at home. Notably, the recent joint statement released by the group of seven U.S. allies applauded Washington’s release of oil from the strategic reserves and said the allies would “take other steps to stabilize energy markets.”

Additional resources

We are now in the fourth week of a war that the White House originally said would last up to four to five weeks. The U.S. maintains there are still thousands of targets to hit, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that the “largest strike package yet” is in the works. Every level of Iranian leadership also remains a target. Tehran has shown no signs of conceding, despite the level of destruction, making the timeline of the war unclear. If the regime survives, it could still rebuild its missile and drone stockpiles and pose a continued threat. At the start of the war, Trump called on Iranians to revolt against the regime, which is a difficult task for an unarmed populace that has already faced deadly government crackdowns against dissent. The president later conceded that point, saying an Iranian revolution is “a very big hurdle.” The Trump administration has said it has no plans to send ground troops into Iran, while also refusing to rule out the possibility. A major ground incursion to topple the regime would take a significant amount of time and resources to stage and carry out, and it appears unlikely at this time. However, a narrower operation, such as trying to take Kharg Island, could be on the table. While speculative, this type of move would be intended to increase pressure on the regime, but it could have untold consequences on Iran’s oil infrastructure, its civilian population, and global energy prices.

The financial cost is another issue for Washington, as well as Israel and Gulf nations. The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the White House would seek a $200 billion supplemental to help pay for the Iran war, an amount that far exceeds earlier rumors of a $50 billion war request. Hegseth indicated the $200 billion number isn’t final and could be adjusted. It’s possible the supplemental could include items beyond the immediate cost of the war, but passage through Congress is far from guaranteed. The supplemental comes at a time when Trump has promised a $1.5 trillion defense budget, which would represent an increase of more than 50 percent above FY26 spending levels.

Taken together, the past week’s developments highlight a conflict that is tactically successful in degrading Iranian capabilities but strategically uncertain, with no clear off-ramp and mounting risks for both regional stability and U.S. interests.

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