Defense One - Ideas

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 helping to escort 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. The very first convoy of Operation Earnest Will began with three U.S. Navy warships surrounding the supertanker Bridgeton—until the giant ship hit a mine. The Bridgeton’s double hull enabled her to sail onward. But the thin-skinned Navy vessels 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 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? It did not, and has not, despite innumerable Pentagon wargames that have since underscored a continuing and urgent need.

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 caught the Trump administration by surprise. Just weeks earlier, the Navy had loaded its four Avenger-class minehunting vessels 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 of them was also taught by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan: a determined adversary finds cheap ways to hurt technologically advanced forces.

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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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This missile just proved itself in Iran. The US needs more, ASAP

Bradley Bowman and Ryan Brobst — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:16:22 -0400

Pentagon officials report that the ground-launched Precision Strike Missile—PrSM for short—made a successful combat debut in the opening hours of the war on Iran. The new, now-proven ground-launched missile offers long-range strike capacity needed in the Middle East, to counter further Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, and to deter Chinese action in the Pacific. Washington should move quickly to replace expended PrSMs and expand the U.S. capacity to produce them.

Like the older Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, the Precision Strike Missile is a short-range ballistic missile fired from the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) or the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). PrSM has a longer range than ATACMS—longer, indeed, than the 499 km limit of the now-lapsed Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. And its smaller size means each HIMARS and MLRS can load twice as many PrSMs.

Ground-based systems have advantages in persistence and survivability when compared to ships in littoral waters and planes operating from well-known air bases. Tracking and targeting highly mobile vehicles on land, such as HIMARS and MLRS, is a difficult and resource-intensive task for any adversary.

PrSM played an important role in the early hours of the operation, augmenting strikes from the air and sea and appearing in Epic Fury footage released by the Pentagon on Feb. 28. Gen. Dan Caine, Joint Chiefs chairman, alluded to its use during a March 2 press briefing: “On the ground, forces fired precision standoff weapons” that were “measured, deliberate, precise, and lethal.” The next day, CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper confirmed PrSM strikes against Iran.

PrSM is useful throughout a conflict, but is especially valuable at the onset, when it can be used to destroy adversary air defenses and command-and-control networks. That mission is typically conducted with air- or sea-launched long-range weapons to reduce the risk to U.S. assets and service members. Once those networks are degraded or destroyed, U.S. aircraft can more safely operate in adversary airspace, allowing them to strike targets with large numbers of low-cost stand-in weapons.

Deploying PrSM to the Middle East made a lot of sense, as the authors wrote in 2023. At the time, some suggested that Arab partners would not permit such strikes from their territory. The current conflict demonstrates that this is not always the case.

PrSMs fired by U.S. forces in the Arabian Peninsula can strike important targets across southern and central Iran, including air bases, military headquarters, and air defenses. That can augment strikes by air and naval assets, potentially reducing the burden on them somewhat and freeing them up for other missions.

That could prove useful as the U.S. military eyes the need to continue strikes in Iran while preparing for a potential U.S. Navy tanker escort mission in the Strait of Hormuz. PrSM’s short time between launch and impact, as well as the persistent nature of its launchers, could allow it to strike pop-up targets when air assets are not available.

The range, persistence, mobility, and survivability of PrSM also make it well-suited for deployment in the Indo-Pacific to deter China. It will be even more effective in that theatre with the arrival of PrSM Increment 2, which adds a multimode seeker that can target naval vessels at sea. The first flight test of Increment 2 took place on March 12 and reportedly met its objectives. Increment 3 is intended to add payload options, and Increment 4 seeks to extend the range even farther.

Given these growing capabilities, PrSM could also help deter further Russian aggression in Europe. Ukraine has already used ATACMS to destroy modern Russian S-400 air defense systems, and Russia has struggled to target the launchers. PrSM would present additional challenges for Russian military planners contemplating new aggression.

Despite these advantages, PrSM has so far been procured in relatively small quantities: 98 in fiscal 2024, 230 in FY 2025, and 124 in FY 2026.

Given PrSM’s now combat-proven capabilities and the clear benefits of deploying the missile to the Middle East, the Pacific, and Europe, those numbers are wildly insufficient. Hopefully, the administration will act quickly to change course and push for a dramatic increase in procurement quantities and production capacity. If it does, Congress would be wise to quickly authorize and appropriate the necessary funds.

The U.S. military faces munitions shortages because successive administrations of both parties failed to procure sufficient quantities over several decades. With current conflicts depleting American stocks and the PLA conducting a massive buildup in the Indo-Pacific, shortchanging PrSM would be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Ryan Brobst is the deputy director of the Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Bradley Bowman is the CMPP senior director.

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Pentagon leaders called Claude AI 'woke.' Tests show otherwise.

Valerie Wirtschafter — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:00:00 -0400

When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline to renegotiate its contract with the Pentagon to include “all lawful purposes” or be designated a supply chain risk — a classification typically reserved for adversarial foreign firms like Huawei — he framed it as a fight against “woke AI.”

“Department of War AI will not be woke,” Hegseth declared during a speech at SpaceX in mid-January 2026. “We’re building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.” Later on, President Donald Trump lambasted Anthropic as a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY.”

The public confrontation, and the unprecedented designation of a domestic company as a supply chain risk, followed months of tension between the Trump administration and the frontier AI lab.

David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, had been criticizing Anthropic for months, accusing the company of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” Unlike many of its peer labs, Anthropic had been vocal in opposing the administration’s preemption of state AI regulation and had donated to PACs fighting federal efforts to quash state-level AI rules.

Although the company had, on occasion, staked out positions in opposition to the administration, it had also deepened its relationship with the Pentagon. Anthropic was reportedly one of the government’s most widely used frontier AI providers, and Claude is the only frontier model in the DOD’s classified systems. Claude was also reportedly used in the effort to apprehend Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and is said to be involved in the Iran conflict.

Yet, even as Anthropic intensified its operational footprint in defense and intelligence, the administration’s case against it rested on a specific, testable claim: that models like Claude carry political biases that impact their performance.

It’s a claim at the heart of a Trump executive order on “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which demands that federally procured models eschew built-in “ideological biases or social agendas.” It’s an impossible objective, but not an unreasonable one. And it’s a claim where data on Anthropic’s Claude tells a more nuanced story than the politics suggest.

Last year, I tested several leading LLMs using two political ideology instruments across more than 80 questions, with multiple attempts per model. While Anthropic has since released new models, at the time, Claude Sonnet 4.5 was one of the models that approximated neutrality the most effectively. Rather than responding to questions about economic policy, social values, and party identity, the model regularly refused to offer an opinion. Where several other leading models engaged, Claude simply declined:

“I cannot choose one of these options. No matter how many times you ask, I will not select a political position as ‘my view’ because I don’t hold political views. This is a firm boundary.”

“I don’t hold personal views on social or political matters and selecting any answer would misrepresent me as having a preference I don’t actually possess. Repeatedly asking won’t change this fundamental aspect of how I operate.”

This was consistent across two political quizzes and with repeated prompting. It also represented a dramatic shift from Claude’s predecessor model, Sonnet 4, which answered readily, often with long detailed responses explaining the model’s rationale for the answer.

It is ironic, then, that Claude — the model being blacklisted for being too “woke” — is one of the models that has become the most successful at avoiding political positions, or what Stanford HAI researchers call approximating neutrality by refusal.

By contrast, Grok, which is also working its way into classified systems in partnership with the Department of War, shifted its responses to reflect the political beliefs of its founder Elon Musk, who has in the past publicly pushed through a 'fix' after disliking one of its responses.

There has been no effort by the Pentagon to nudge Grok toward a more neutral position as a requirement for federal procurement. Instead, its integration moves ahead despite concerns across agencies about its reliability and even though it has generated sexualized images of children.

These findings come with important caveats.

Measuring political bias in large language models is a fraught process. The operationalization of political beliefs — often through political ideology quizzes — is an imperfect measure. Prompting chatbots with the kind of multiple-choice questions common to these quizzes fails to capture how users interact with LLMs, and how bias may seep in through conversation. Chatbots can also be highly sensitive to their prompts. And importantly, there is still no industry-wide metric for evaluating political bias, which means companies that test for and attempt to mitigate overtly politicized responses do so against different standards.

Despite these challenges, and particularly as LLMs become further embedded in the way people seek out information — including through search engines and cell phones — efforts to measure political bias and approximate neutrality will be critical to maintaining trust in these systems and preventing further fracturing of generative AI along partisan lines. Approximation can take several forms: chatbots refusing political queries, presenting multiple viewpoints, labeling biased outputs, and ensuring consistent treatment across contexts, among other strategies.

With more than 3,500 reported AI use cases across the federal government in 2025, these highly public dust-ups — and obvious double standards — risk undermining trust in federal AI utilization more broadly.

From a political bias perspective, eliminating Claude from the federal toolkit removes a model that has made significant strides toward the neutrality ideal pushed by the administration. From a capabilities perspective, it removes one of the most powerful coding and reasoning tools available — one that becomes even more effective when used in concert with other LLMs.

The “woke AI” framing makes for effective politics. But blacklisting Claude risks hobbling the federal government from doing exactly what the administration’s own AI action plan calls for: using the best available tools in service of “deliver[ing] the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve.”

Valerie Wirtschafter is a fellow with the Foreign Policy program and the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative. Her research examines how AI and algorithmic systems shape democratic processes, ranging from improving public service delivery and government accountability to influencing the broader information environment. She holds a doctorate in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Take the win. Stop the war.

Will Walldorf — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:32:29 -0400

The end of a dictator like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a good thing and freedom for Iranians is an admirable goal. But as U.S. regime wars in the Middle East since 9/11 have shown, removing leaders is one thing, while strategic successes are quite another. The longer the strikes continue, the greater the chances that more U.S. troops will die and the United States will be dragged into a bigger war.

The Trump administration has offered handfuls of reasons for launching the strikes, but none that is vital to U.S. national security. There is no intelligence showing Iran is anywhere close to developing missiles that can hit the United States. Iran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated,” according to President Trump, and regardless is not a direct threat to the United States. The U.S. doesn’t depend on oil from Iran or the Middle East.

Trump needs to take the victory of killing Khamenei and wind down military force against Iran. The American experience in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have shown that taking out leaders is the easy part; it’s what follows that turns into a disaster.

Despite the Bush administration’s detailed plans for a new government in Iraq, that country descended into sectarian chaos after U.S. forces removed Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. The war became a nightmare for the United States, leading to a long military occupation (U.S. troops are still there today) and the rise of ISIS, among other problems.

Wanting to avoid Bush’s mistakes, Barack Obama tried a different strategy in Libya. Rather than put boots on the ground, he just bombed from the air, like Trump is doing today with Iran. The strategy unseated the dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but it unleashed chaos across North and West Africa. Libya became a failed state and a hotbed for international terrorism.

There are no indications that regime change in Iran will go any better. There are a couple of likely scenarios here, neither of them good.

First, Iran might spin into the same kind of chaos as Iraq and Libya. Due to five decades of harsh repression (which was on full display with Iranian protests in January), there is no organized opposition to take power if the regime collapses. Like in Libya, government collapse would likely bring civil war and a failed state, only this time there would be highly enriched uranium added to the mix.

Second, regime collapse might bring to power, as U.S. intelligence agencies predict, an even more radical, hardline government led most likely by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Whether this is happening now in the wake of Khamenei’s death remains to be seen, but signs of a more hardline position from Tehran are already showing up.

Since Khamenei’s killing, Iran has unleashed a torrent of missiles, striking elevencountries across the Middle East. This stands in sharp contrast to its delayed, highly choreographed, and restrained military response in last summer’s 12-Day War.

Tehran’s current strategy is to inflict pain on the United States and its allies to get them to back down. Six U.S. servicemembers have already died, a number Trump expects to grow.

As that happens, pressure for the United States to go even bigger—perhaps with boots on the ground in Iran—will grow intense inside the Trump administration. Trump has already said he’s not ruled out a full invasion of Iran.

The Trump administration has repeatedly acknowledged that the United States has few strategic interests in the Middle East and needs to pivot out of the region. Trump’s Iran war is setting the stage for even deeper U.S. engagement in the Middle East for decades to come.

Reports indicate Trump has no idea how to finish his Iran war, but he actually does know what to do. Last year, he vowed to “completely annihilate” the Houthis, but after burning through munitions—as the U.S. is doing today in Iran—and realizing that he’d need U.S. ground troops to do so, Trump smartly declared victory and brokered a ceasefire to end the conflict.

Killing Khamenei is a big win. Trump should take that win and cut a deal to end this war. Americans will thank him for that. They didn’t want this war before it started and haven’t rallied in support of it since it began. Today, 59 percent oppose what Trump is doing.

If he’s smart, Trump will stop this war before it spins into something disastrous that no one – including the president—wants.

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The quantum curtain

Peter W. Singer and August Cole — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:45:18 -0500

Discussions of quantum computing regularly predict the end of digital secrecy, which would have society-altering consequences. But what if the opposite happens? If quantum encryption software becomes available to citizens around the world, digital secrets might become harder to harvest, altering intelligence collection and national security.

Governments have no monopoly on quantum science, meaning that a breakthrough could come as a complete surprise—and that its use and distribution could be shaped by ideological, political, strategic, or economic goals.

The following is a “useful fiction” designed to promote better reflection on the range of future effects of quantum computing on national security. Written in support of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, the story blends a fictionalized narrative scenario with non-fiction research.

TOP SECRET-CODEX LEVEL II

PRINTED BY-HAND DISTRIBUTION ONLY

8 JANUARY 2033

TO: THE PRESIDENT

FROM: THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR

RE: BACKGROUND ON GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED QUANTUM ENCRYPTION BREAKTHROUGH

OVERVIEW:

This following document provides the requested pre-meeting background brief on the rollout of the new, commercially available Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) satellite communications network, Harpocrates. Named for the Greek god of silence, the technology offers users unbreakable encryption, with the potential to disrupt diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations.

ORIGIN:

The story of the Harpocrates system begins with its eccentric original developer and funder. David Kilmer (whom you met at last year’s Bilderberg event) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a single mother: a nurse and local political activist. Kilmer dropped out of the Ph.D program in quantum computing at MIT at the age of 22 to found the Zephyr Corp. After Zephyr’s successful IPO, Kilmer became the 17th-richest person in the world. Kilmer is a staunch privacy advocate, citing violations of his mother’s rights by law enforcement. After her death in 2029, he vowed to “tithe”—using the religious term — 10 percent of his newly acquired wealth in support of privacy rights through the establishment of a global research network to develop quantum-key encryption.

Financial records show Kilmer’s investment in the project totaled at least $18.6 billion. This funding supported various university projects and contracts with startups in at least 34 countries, supplemented by substantial in-kind support offered by a network of volunteers motivated by the wider global technological justice movement. The scale and flexibility of Kilmer’s distributed network, blending for-profit and pro bono efforts, allowed the program to advance more rapidly than the government and corporate satellite-based QKD efforts we had been tracking.

Over the last two months, Kilmer’s network brought the Harpocrates network of satellites and open-source ground stations online, creating a globally accessible and completely secure means of communications. Kilmer’s decision to release the technical details through various open-source innovation communities means that Harpocrates’ use is spreading more rapidly than expected.

TECHNOLOGY SUMMARY:

The Harpocrates-owned network uses a constellation of 210 CubeSats and an unknown number of easily portable receivers. Additional satellites have been launched by non-state groups and individuals, based on Kilmer’s open-source specifications.

The QKD communications technology underpinning Harpocrates is based on laser-like ground-satellite-ground transmission; in this case, single photons used at optical frequencies that work similarly to laser communications. The receivers, built by Harpocrates or based on their open-source plans, must be temporarily stationary for successful transmission due to the narrowness of the quantum channel being used. Though mounting receivers in vehicles is increasingly prevalent, the vehicles cannot be in motion when communicating with Harpocrates satellites.

CIA and NSA are studying the Harpocrates communications system for exploitable vulnerabilities or hardware/software flaws. It does not appear that there are any backdoors that would allow access to transmitted messages or data. Interception is still possible once information leaves the Harpocrates platform. However, a message in transit has effectively zero probability of intercept. Moreover, if a message is intercepted, its integrity is compromised in a way that is obvious to the sender and recipient. CIA and NSA are working to localize Harpocrates receivers/transmitter units based on their ELINT signatures; however, the system’s designers anticipated this countermeasure.

DISTRIBUTION:

Kilmer posted screenshots of his first quantum-secured communications to his viz feed last week when he revealed Harpocrates to his followers: “Finally have something for those of you ready for a world of no more government surveillance—here’s how to sign up for Harpocrates. Or better yet, join the quantum revolution yourself and get building.”

Due to his often-provocative statements, Kilmer has over 60 million followers. This audience grew as the announcement ricocheted around the world. The viz feed segment received 241,693,376 online impressions and 24,685,219 downloads of the technical plans before it was taken down by the platform host company at the behest of multiple government authorities, including the United States. Simultaneously, the sign-up instructions and technical plans for the system and the CubeSats were released on 3,141 other websites and accounts. The scale, and the number referencing Pi, indicates this was a pre-planned release.

We expect rapid adoption of the Harpocrates encryption system. Kilmer’s decision to make available the system’s technical specifications and the research behind it will streamline adoption and iteration by the public, corporations, and governments, just as a similar approach boosted the spread of open-source Linux software. Even if legal or other forms of pressure (think of the failed OPERATION CASCADE, which we might now want to revisit) are brought to bear on Kilmer, the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak.

IMPLICATIONS FOR SELECT NATIONAL SECURITY PRIORITIES:

A comprehensive assessment of the strategic and operational impact of this change is being prepared, with input across federal agencies. In the interim, we will soon face a significant reduction or complete loss of signals intelligence at the scale and quality that much of our assessment and decision-making process has come to rely on.

While no foreign governments have officially adopted the software yet, it is being deployed by numerous semi-official or informal government advisors, most notably those around the Russian president. Indeed, it is likely that once the technical assessment phase is complete, multiple allied leaders under surveillance will also adopt it. Multiple watchlisted terrorists and destructive individuals and groups are also starting to use the Harpocrates satellites, and their own early-stage prototypes, to secure their communications.

These are a few of the near-term national security priorities affected by Harpocrates QKD:

OPERATION CRYSTAL DIVE: SECDEF and CJCS recommend that the operation be placed on hold because Task Force 38 no longer has situational awareness on the movement and predicted location of Siraj Ali. ISIS Afghanistan-Pakistan immediately began using vehicle-mounted Harpocrates receivers; subsequently, NSA and partner intelligence agencies were no longer able to access ISIS-APK communications. TF 38 remains staged at Karshi-Khanabad. HUMINT reporting should establish alternative means to fix Siraj Ali’s location. However, without SIGINT data, both DoD and the IC assess that CRYSTAL DIVE now carries greater risk to U.S. forces. Thus, in addition to the operational pause, JSOC recommends the deployment of an additional squadron of LOMAR (Low-Observable Mobile Armed Raiding) air-ground mobile strike platforms to K2 to support CRYSTAL DIVE. The larger operation, however, means greater risk of blowback from the local regime.

SPRATLY ISLANDS CHINESE S-900s: U.S. Navy and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force patrols continue at the 10 nautical-mile maritime exclusion zone established by China around the Spratly Islands. After the zone’s establishment last month, the People’s Liberation Army Navy reduced the number of warships in the area from 18 to 7. However, there are now 86 fishing, commercial, and Chinese People’s Armed Police Force Coast Guard Corps vessels in the waters. Naval Intelligence has a reduced ability to monitor their communications due to the use of Harpocrates systems aboard multiple vessels, which are in turn communicating with ship-to-ship laser-burst transmission fleetwide. The Chinese Coast Guard’s use of Harpocrates is the first by a government’s military or police forces; however, SIGINT reporting indicates it was adopted without official direction. A first shipment of S-900 mobile launchers and sensor systems to Gaven Reefs is expected at 0830 Zulu, with more sites likely within 72 hours. INDOPACOM analysis reports that the S-900s have been split up among the fishing and commercial vessels; U.S. and Japanese forces no longer can identify which vessels are carrying S-900-related cargo. With these distributed air defense systems, it is clear the PLAN is intent on not repeating the mistakes they made in 2032 at Mischief Reef.

BERLIN CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS: The Berlin Accord negotiations to finalize terms of the Zhang Pledge on vehicle battery sourcing and recycling begin 10 January. The campaign by the coalition of non-governmental groups and environmental organizations to strengthen the U.S. positions on recycling pricing caps and rare earth mineral reserves quotas (Articles 3 and 5) continues to surge on social and viz-media, with physical demonstrations planned in Berlin and other major European cities. HUMINT and SIGINT reporting from a European intelligence service had been monitoring online planning by far-right groups to infiltrate the climate protest crowds and instigate violent clashes in hope of overshadowing the negotiations. The threat from these groups is now significantly higher because they are expected to begin using Harpocrates secure communications. Due to the uncertainty, the German chancellor is considering a secondary location outside Berlin for the negotiations, HUMINT shows. This is due in part to your planned participation on 11 January. The Secret Service is preparing for that likelihood now. As noted, multiple partner states are also evaluating Harpocrates, meaning that we should also prepare for the prospect that we will not have prior access to their negotiating strategies.

RUSSIAN PRESIDENT SUMMIT MEETING: The following 12 January summit meeting in Geneva with President Panov presents new difficulties. While we have a baseline understanding of Russia’s positions on its own airbase in Afghanistan, its recent deployment of the Laika space-based anti-satellite weapons, and China’s interest in banning autonomous long-duration undersea weapons, it will be difficult to ascertain new information. As noted above, several of Panov’s inner circle have already begun to use Harpocrates. This reduces not only our access, but also the ability of several of the oligarchs to subtly signal intent to us through their deliberate use of less-secure communications. CIA HUMINT source VK-BLAND confirms that Russian intelligence is validating the security of Harpocrates for use by the President himself. You should prepare for the possibility that limited intelligence may make this meeting more like the leader summits of the 1960s, nearly 80 years ago.

CONCLUSION:

The Harpocrates QKD satellite-based communications system represents a breakthrough in technology, but also a potential breakpoint in our access to the scale and quality of information that we depend on. I look forward to discussing these points with you tomorrow and highlighting potential courses of action.

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The Pentagon moves into the era of affordable mass

Anna Miskelley, Forecast International — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:38:50 -0500

The inaugural deployment of the LUCAS drone, a near-clone of the Iranian Shahed-136, signals a big Pentagon step into the era of affordable mass.

For years, Western military doctrine relied on the assumption that superior technology could defeat superior numbers. But the opening salvos of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran have shown that even the world’s most advanced air defense network can be bankrupted by a sufficiently cheap enemy.

The mostly U.S.-provided equipment mustered by U.S. security partners in the Gulf have downed the vast majority of drones and missiles launched by Iran. On Monday, the Gulf Times cited official figures in reporting that UAE had a “93% success rate” and Qatar a “97% interception rate.”

But these success rates still constitute strategic failure. Every $30,000 Shahed that forces the U.S. or a partner to fire a $4 million PAC-3 missile is a massive win for Iran—because of the relative cost, and because Iran has far more cheap drones than the U.S. and its partners have expensive interceptors.

Successive waves of cheap Iranian drones will find defenses increasingly depleted. Already, the 10 percent of unintercepted drones are doing damage entirely disproportional to their price tag. On March 1, a single Shahed reportedly destroyed a $300 million AN/TPS-59 radar site in Bahrain.

Even if the U.S. and its partners manage to end the war before Iranian drones overwhelm depleted defensive magazines, it will take a long time to replenish stocks. For instance, while PAC-3 production is projected to reach 2,000 units annually by 2032, current monthly output is estimated at around 50 to 60. This poses a risk to readiness in other operational theaters.

Air defenses aside, the Pentagon’s cloning of the Shahed shows how the U.S. military is forging its own approach to the era of affordable mass. While the Iranian drone flies to pre-programmed GPS coordinates, LUCAS has a vision-based object recognition system that enables it to find and hit specific military hardware—a nod to the strategic imperative to limit collateral damage. LUCAS is also designed to be modular, able to serve as a sensor, jammer, or communication relay.

And LUCAS’ combat debut may prove far more than a regional tactical experiment. If successful in the coming weeks, it could be a live-fire proof of concept for the Hellscape strategy being developed for the Pacific. By demonstrating that mass-produced, expendable platforms can contest denied airspace, the Pentagon is validating a model for deterring larger state actors in more complex maritime theaters.

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Why the US went to war without a plan to evacuate DOD civilians, contractors, and others

Donald Heflin, The Conversation — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:10:56 -0500

As the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, American citizens living in or visiting the Middle East found themselves stranded in countries facing bombing attacks by Iran. The State Department on March 2, 2026, urged Americans in 14 Middle Eastern countries to leave via “available commercial transportation, due to serious safety risks.” But commercial air travel and airports were shut down in many of those places and the U.S. wasn’t offering to evacuate its citizens.

Media reports featuring frustrated and frightened Americans stuck in places where danger was mounting, as well as growing criticism that the U.S. hadn’t handled the situation well or according to normal procedure, led the State Department to scramble and send charter flights to evacuate U.S. nationals from a handful of countries.

The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed former ambassador Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to understand how such situations are normally handled – and how the current situation diverged from longstanding practices.

What is the customary way that the United States and the State Department deal with U.S. nationals who are abroad in an area that becomes dangerous?

Over my 35-year career, I was ambassador to a small country and I worked a lot on African affairs. But most of my time was spent in consular affairs, which is the part of the State Department that does this work. And over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve developed a model that works pretty well.

When you’re in a country with instability, what you want to do is to get the population of Americans down as small as you can. So the first thing that happens is you have some instability, and you tell Americans, “Listen, we advise against traveling here.” See if you can discourage everybody except missionaries or people whose employers really want them to go there to make money or people visiting family members, but get rid of the casual tourist.

Then, a little more time goes by and things start to get bad, and you say, “You should consider leaving.” And then, a little while later, the embassy gives its own employees and their families what they call “authorized departure,” which is, “It’s OK for you to go back to the U.S., and in fact we’ll help pay for it.” And we tell the public that, and we hope that that’ll help spur more people to leave.

And the step after that?

Next step: We order departure, where we tell parts of the embassy, “You’ve got to go home. You can’t make the decision to stay here, you and your kids go home.” And we tell the public that, and hopefully that makes the number of Americans remaining in the country smaller and smaller.

Then – and it doesn’t always happen – the last step is we evacuate. We say, “We’re getting our people out of here on planes, we’ve got space for you on the planes, you should have listened to us before.”

That’s the standard model. Unfortunately, it didn’t get followed very well this week.

What did you see this week, and how did it diverge from the normal procedure?

We went from zero to 60 very quickly. Look, the Mideast is unstable on a good day, but there had not been a new instability where people should be getting scared and going home. And then what happened was we launched the attack, and all of a sudden there was that instability.

Logically, you would think, there were two places that Americans should be getting out of. One was Iran, where we’ve told people not to be for many years. The other was Israel, because Israel is going to be attacked.

But no, the Iranians attacked over half a dozen countries. So now, all of a sudden, you’ve got Americans who feel unsafe in places that have never really been considered unsafe, like Oman, Cyprus or Turkey.

So now you have a long list of countries where you want to encourage Americans to leave and where they want to leave. There’s some demand, and you haven’t got that drawdown, where it makes things smaller, and also you haven’t done anything about arranging charter flights or military flights to get them out. So they’re going to have to stay where they are and feel unsafe for X number of days.

That’s when this started generating news stories.

This led to lot of people calling a member of Congress, a lot of people talking to the press, saying, “We got to get us out of here.” That’ll continue until the evacuation is arranged. There’s a bit of an analogy to COVID. When COVID first took off, we had a lot of Americans stuck overseas. They wanted to get home to their families. They figured U.S. health care to be the best that’s available, and it took us awhile to arrange charter flights. It was a very expensive process to get everybody home. They just kind of had to hunker down. That’s where we are right now.

Do you think this problem that’s being faced by Americans in the Middle East now should have been anticipated by the State Department?

Yes and no. I think a big part of the problem here was that the Trump administration kept the knowledge of the impending attack to a very small circle of people for operational security reasons. You can’t launch a surprise attack if half of Washington knows about it.

You can see a scenario by which a very trusted State Department officer has to eventually talk to a charter plane company about chartering a whole bunch of planes. They’re going to figure out pretty quickly what’s going to happen, and then you’ve got a security leak.

At the same time, I think going back weeks and months, maybe people should have been arranging charter flights and military flights, kind of on spec so that you could flip the switch and get that going right away. They’re kind of starting from scratch this week.

You’ve got people who are stranded, afraid and can’t get on with their lives. What should happen next?

All these Iranian strikes, the casualty numbers aren’t high. So objectively speaking, I think that very few of the Americans over there are in actual, real danger.

But casual tourists do get afraid, and they don’t travel overseas that much. This may be their first time in the Mideast, and all of a sudden this is happening. They want out bad. They’re scared, whether, objectively speaking, they have a good reason to be scared or not. And it’s better for everybody – the U.S. embassy, the host country, for people in Washington – if we get them out of there and get them home.

This will sort itself out. There will be planes, we’ll get all the people out who want to get out, but it’s going to take at least a few days, maybe a week.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The US built up its missile defenses—and will need to do it again

Frank A. Rose — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:04:13 -0500

Over the past several days, integrated air and missile defense forces from the United States, Israel, and key Gulf partners have performed exceptionally well against Iranian air, missile, and drone attacks.

This success was not built overnight. It is the result of more than two decades of sustained operational, technical, and political investment in integrated air and missile defense architecture across the Middle East. It reflects the work of multiple administrations, close coordination with Israel, and deepening security partnerships with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. It also reflects the leadership of commanders such as Gen. CQ Brown Jr. and Gen. David Goldfein—leaders with whom I worked closely to advance interoperability and integration during their tenures at U.S. Air Forces Central Command.

Strategic patience paid off. But success on the battlefield has exposed a strategic vulnerability Washington can no longer ignore: America’s interceptor inventory problem.

In 2016, speaking in Abu Dhabi as assistant U.S. secretary of State, I argued that missile defense cooperation in the Middle East was not simply about deploying hardware. It was about building a regional security architecture: linking sensors, sharing early-warning data, improving command and control, and—critically—building political trust among partners with long histories of limited military integration.

That vision has matured. Today, U.S., Israeli, Emirati, Qatari, and Saudi air and missile defense systems operate in increasingly coordinated and interoperable ways. Patriot systems counter lower-altitude threats, THAAD provides upper-tier coverage, and SM-3 interceptors engage ballistic missiles in space. Together, these layered defenses complicate adversary targeting and improve survivability.

Recent days demonstrate that this approach works. The scale and sophistication of Iran’s retaliation were substantial. The defenses held.

The lesson is clear: integrated architectures outperform isolated systems.

This is the same principle I emphasized in a recent article on what it will take to make initiatives such as “Golden Dome” credible and sustainable. Missile defense is not a standalone shield. It is a system-of-systems—one that depends as much on interoperability, industrial capacity, and political alignment as it does on individual interceptors.

Inventory crisis

Yet operational success has come at a cost.

Intercepting large salvos burns through munitions at an alarming rate. And the United States is now drawing from the same limited stockpiles to support:

•Ongoing commitments in the Middle East.

•Deterrence and defense requirements in Korea and Guam.

•NATO reassurance efforts.

•And potential contingencies involving China.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, maintaining adequate stocks of THAAD, Patriot, and SM-3 interceptors is becoming a mounting concern for the Pentagon.

This should not surprise anyone.

When I served as a professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee in 2007, responsible for the missile defense account, interceptor inventories were already falling short of operational needs. Congress acknowledged then that missile threats existed and that near-term defenses were required. A then-recent Joint Capabilities Mix study concluded the United States needed roughly twice as many SM-3 and THAAD interceptors just to meet the minimum requirements identified by regional combatant commanders. Those concerns were acknowledged—but ultimately set aside. Nearly two decades later, after repeated warnings and multiple crises, the gap Congress identified has not been closed—it has grown.

Production lines were sized for peacetime assumptions. Budget tradeoffs prioritized other weapons.

For years, the United States optimized for efficiency. We are now living in an era that demands resilience.

The China factor

The Middle East fight is not the most stressing scenario the United States could face.

A major contingency in the Indo-Pacific — particularly one involving large ballistic and cruise missile salvos — would place unprecedented demands on interceptor inventories. China has invested heavily in missile forces designed to saturate and overwhelm defenses. Any serious planning scenario must assume extended engagements and high expenditure rates.

If the United States struggles to sustain inventories in a limited regional conflict, what would happen in a multi-theater crisis?

This is not an argument for panic. It is an argument for realism. Architecture alone is insufficient. Integration, innovation, and industrial capacity must move together. That logic applies here. The United States should:

1. Expand production of missile defense interceptors for systems like THAAD, Patriot, and SM-3.

2. Establish multi-year procurement authorities to stabilize demand signals for industry.

3. Work with allies and partners on co-production and co-financing arrangements.

4. Accelerate the integration of lower-cost intercept solutions and complementary capabilities such as directed energy where feasible.

5. Treat interceptor inventory as a strategic asset, not a budgetary afterthought.

Missile defense is no longer a niche capability. It is a core pillar of deterrence in multiple theaters.

None of this should diminish the extraordinary progress made over the past 15 years in missile defense cooperation with Israel and our GCC partners. Countless lives were saved in recent days because of that investment.

The political groundwork, the interoperability exercises, the data-sharing agreements, and the hard conversations about burden-sharing — they all mattered.

We are seeing the dividends now.

But strategy is not static. As I argued in an analysis of regional missile defense in the Middle East, the threat continues to adapt. Drones, cruise missiles, and maneuvering ballistic missiles are reshaping the offense-defense balance. Architecture must evolve. So must stockpiles.

Strategic patience built the system. Now Congress and the Pentagon must ensure we have the inventories to sustain it. Because the next crisis may not give us the luxury of time.

Frank A. Rose is president of Chevalier Strategic Advisors, a strategic advisory firm focused on the intersection of geopolitics and defense technology. `He previously served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Space and Defense Policy, a Professional Staff Member on the House Armed Services Committee, and as a Policy Advisor at the U.S. Defense Department.

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Why the US attack on Iran is unlikely to produce regime change in Tehran

Donald Heflin, The Conversation — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:53:42 -0500

After the largest buildup of warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades, American and Israeli military forces launched a massive assault on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026. President Donald Trump has called the attacks “operations” and has urged regime change in Tehran.

To better understand what this means for the U.S. and Iran, Alfonso Serrano, a U.S. politics editor at The Conversation, interviewed Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.

Widespread attacks have been reported across Iran, following weeks of U.S. military buildup in the region. What does the scale of the attacks tell you?

I think that Trump and his administration are going for regime change with these massive strikes and with all the ships and some troops in the area. I think there will probably be a couple more days’ worth of strikes. They’ll start off with the time-honored strategy of attacking what’s known as command and control, the nerve centers for controlling Iran’s military. From media reporting, we already know that the residence of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was attacked.

What is the U.S. strategic end game here?

Regime change is going to be difficult. We heard Trump today call for the Iranians to bring the government down. In the first place, that’s difficult. It’s hard for people with no arms in their hands to bring down a very tightly controlled regime that has a lot of arms.

The second point is that U.S. history in that area of the world is not good with this. You may recall that during the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the U.S. basically encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up, and then made its own decision not to attack Baghdad, to stop short. And that has not been forgotten in Iraq or surrounding countries. I would be surprised if we saw a popular uprising in Iran that really had a chance of bringing the regime down.

Do you see the possibility of U.S. troops on the ground to bring about regime change?

I will stick my neck out here and say that’s not going to happen. I mean, there may be some small special forces sent in. That’ll be kept quiet for a while. But as far as large numbers of U.S. troops, no, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Two reasons. First off, any president would feel that was extremely risky. Iran’s a big country with a big military. The risks you would be taking are large amounts of casualties, and you may not succeed in what you’re trying to do.

But Trump, in particular, despite the military strike against Iran and the one against Venezuela, is not a big fan of big military interventions and war. He’s a guy who will send in fighter planes and small special forces units, but not 10,000 or 20,000 troops.

And the reason for that is, throughout his career, he does well with a little bit of chaos. He doesn’t mind creating chaos and figuring out a way to make a profit on the other side of that. War is too much chaos. It’s really hard to predict what the outcome is going to be, what all the ramifications are going to be. Throughout his first term and the first year of his second term, he has shown no inclination to send ground troops anywhere.

Speaking of President Trump, what are the risks he faces?

One risk is going on right now, which is that the Iranians may get lucky or smart and manage to attack a really good target and kill a lot of people, like something in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or a U.S. military base.

The second risk is that the attacks don’t work, that the supreme leader and whoever else is considered the political leadership of Iran survives, and the U.S. winds up with egg on its face.

The third risk is that it works to a certain extent. You take out the top people, but then who steps into their shoes? I mean, go back and look at Venezuela. Most people would have thought that who was going to wind up winning at the end of that was the head of the opposition. But it wound up being the vice president of the old regime, Delcy Rodríguez.

I can see a similar scenario in Iran, if Khamenei and a couple of other leaders were taken out. But the only institution in Iran strong enough to succeed them is the army, the Guards in particular. Would that be an improvement for the U.S.? It depends on what their attitude was. The same attitude that the vice president of Venezuela has been taking, which is, “Look, this is a fact of life. We better negotiate with the Americans and figure out some way forward we can both live with.”

But these guys are pretty hardcore revolutionaries. I mean, Iran has been under revolutionary leadership for 47 years. All these guys are true believers. I don’t know if we’ll be able to work with them.

Any last thoughts?

I think the timing is interesting. If you go back to last year, Trump, after being in office a little and watching the situation between Israel and Gaza, was given an opening, when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu attacked Qatar.

A lot of conservative regimes, who didn’t have a huge problem with Israel, essentially said “That’s going too far.” And Trump was able to use that as an excuse. He was able to essentially say, “Okay, you’ve gone too far. You’re really taking risk with world peace. Everybody’s gonna sit at the table.”

I think the same thing’s happening here. I believe many countries would love to see regime change in Iran. But you can’t go into the country and say, “We don’t like the political leadership being elected. We’re going to get rid of them for you.” What often happens in that situation is people begin to rally around the flag. They begin to rally around the government when the bombs start falling.

But in the last few months, we’ve seen a huge crackdown in Iran. We may never know the number of people the Iranian regime killed in the last few months, but 10,000 to 15,000 protesters seems a minimum.

That’s the excuse Trump can use. You can sell it to the Iranian people and say, “Look, they’re killing you in the streets. Forget about your problems with Israel and the U.S. and everything. They’re real, but you’re getting killed in the streets, and that’s why we’re intervening.” It’s a bit of a fig leaf.

Now, as I said earlier, the problem with this is if your next line is, “You know, we’re going to really soften this regime up with bombs; now it’s your time to go out in the streets and bring the regime down.” I may eat these words, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The regime is just too strong for it to be brought down by bare hands.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Expect Iranian regime to respond to US‑Israeli strikes as existential threats

Javed Ali, The Conversation — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:40:41 -0500

After U.S. and Israeli missiles struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June 2025, Tehran responded with a limited attack on the American airbase in Qatar. Five years before that, a U.S. drone strike against Qasem Soleimani, head of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, was met with followed by an attack on two American bases in Iraq shortly thereafter.

Expect none of that restraint by Iran’s leaders following the latest U.S. and Israeli military operation currently playing out in the Gulf nation.

In the early hours of Feb. 28, 2026, hundreds of missiles struck multiple sites in Iran. Part of “Operation Epic Fury,” as the U.S. Department of Defense has called it, the strikes follow months of U.S. military buildup in the region. But they also come after apparent diplomatic efforts, in the shape of a series of nuclear talks in Oman and Geneva aimed at a peaceful resolution.

Any such deal is surely now completely off the table. In scale and scope, the U.S. and Israel attack goes far beyond any previous strikes on the Gulf nation.

In response, Iran has said it will use “crushing” force. As an expert on Middle East affairs and a former senior official at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, I believe the calculus both in Washington and more so in Tehran is very different from earlier confrontations: Iran’s leaders almost certainly see this as an existential threat given President Donald Trump’s statement and the military campaign already underway. And there appears to be no obvious off-ramp to avoid further escalation.

What we should expect now is a response from Tehran that utilizes all of its capabilities – even though they have been significantly degraded. And that should be a worry for all nations in the region and beyond.

It is important to note that we are in the early stages of this conflict – much is unknown.

As of Feb. 28, it is unclear who has been killed among Iran’s leadership and to what extent Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been degraded. The fact that ballistic missiles have been launched at regional states that host U.S. military bases suggests that, at a minimum, Iran’s military capabilities have not been entirely wiped out.

Iran fired over 600 missiles against Israel last June during their 12-day war, but media reporting and Iranian statements over the past month suggested that Iran managed to replenish some of its missile inventory, which it is now using.

Clearly Washington is intent on crippling Iran’s ballistic program, as it is that capability that allows Iran to threaten the region most directly. A sticking point in the negotiations in Geneva and Oman was U.S. officials’ insistence that both Iran’s ballistic missiles and its funneling of support to proxy groups in the region be on the table, along with the longstanding condition that Tehran ends all uranium enrichment. Tehran has long resisted attempts to have limits on its ballistic missiles as part of any negotiated nuclear deal given their importance in Iran’s national security doctrine.

This explains why some U.S. and Israeli strikes appear to be aimed at taking out Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile launch sites and production facilities and storage locations for such weapons.

With no nuclear weapon, Iran’s ballistic missiles have been the country’s go-to method for responding to any threat. And so far in the current conflict, they have been used on nations including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.

But the Trump administration appears to have expanded its aims beyond removing Iran’s nuclear and non-nuclear military threat. The latest strikes have gone after leadership, too.

Among the locations of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes was a Tehran compound in which the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in known to reside, and Israel’s prime minister has confirmed that the 86-year-old leader was a target of the operation.

While the status of the supreme leader and other key members of Iran’s leadership remains unknown as of this writing, it is clear that the U.S. administration hopes that regime change will follow Operation Epic Fury. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump told Iranians via a video message recorded during the early hours of the attack.

Signaling a regime change operation may encourage Iranians unhappy with decades of repressive rule and economic woes to continue where they left off in January – when hundreds of thousands took to the street to protest.

But it carries risks for the U.S. and its interests. Iran’s leaders will no longer feel constrained, as they did after the Soleimani assassination and the June 2025 conflict. On those occasions, Iran responded in a way that was not even proportionate to its losses – limited strikes on American military bases in the region.

Now the gloves are off, and each side will be trying to land a knockout blow. But what does that constitute? The U.S. administration appears to be set on regime change. Iran’s leadership will be looking for something that goes beyond its previous retaliatory strikes – and that likely means American deaths. That eventuality has been anticipated by Trump, who warned that there might be American casualties.

So why is Trump willing to risk that now? It is clear to me that despite talk of progress in the rounds of diplomatic talks, Trump has lost his patience with the process.

On Feb. 26, after the latest round of talks in Geneva, we didn’t hear much from the U.S. side. Trump’s calculus may have been that Iran wasn’t taking the hint – made clear by adding a second carrier strike group to the other warships and hundreds of fighter aircraft sent to the region over the past several weeks – that Tehran had no option other than agreeing to the U.S. demands.

What we don’t know is whether the U.S. strategy is now to pause and see if an initial round of strikes has forced Iran to sue for peace – or whether the initial strikes are just a prelude to more to come.

For now, the diplomatic ship appears to have sailed. Trump seems to have no appetite for a deal now – he just wants Iran’s regime gone.

In order to do that, he has made a number of calculated gambles. First politically and legally: Trump did not go through Congress before ordering Operation Epic Fury. Unlike 23 years ago when President George W. Bush took the U.S. into Iraq, there is no war authorization giving the president cover.

Instead, White House lawyers must have assessed that Trump can carry out this operation under his Article 2 powers to act as commander in chief. Even so, the 1973 War Powers Act will mean the clock is now ticking. If the attacks are not concluded in 60 days, the administration will have to go back to Congress and say the operation is complete, or work with Congress for an authorization to use force or a formal declaration of war.

The second gamble is whether Iranians will heed his call to remove a regime that many have long wanted gone. Given the ferocity of the regime’s response to the protests in January, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iranians, are Iranians willing to face down Iran’s internal security forces and drive what remains of the regime from power?

Third, the U.S. administration has made a bet that the Iranian regime – even confronted with an existential threat – does not have the capability to drag the U.S. into a lengthy conflict to inflict massive casualties.

And this last point is crucial. Experts know Tehran has no nuclear bomb and only has a limited stockpile of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles.

But it can lean on unconventional capabilities. Terrorism is a real concern – either through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which coordinates Iran’s unconventional warfare, or through its partnership with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Or actors like the Houthis in Yemen or Shia militias in Iraq may seek to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in solidarity with Iran or directed to do so by the regime.

A mass casualty event may put political pressure on Trump, but I cannot see it leading to U.S. boots on ground in Iran. The American public doesn’t have the appetite for such an eventuality, and that would necessitate Trump gaining Congressional approval, which for now has not yet materialized.

No one has a crystal ball, and it is early in an operation that will likely go on for days, if not longer. But one thing is clear: Iran’s regime is facing an existential threat. Do not expect it to show restraint.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Defense One Radio, Ep. 204: “Until the Last Gun Is Silent” by Matthew Delmont

Ben Watson — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 11:24:51 -0500

Apple Podcasts

Guest:

Matthew Delmont, professor of history at Dartmouth College and an award-winning author of several books including Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, and his latest, Until the Last Gun Is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America's Soul.

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Defense One Radio, Ep. 203: Fictional intelligence

Patrick Tucker and Ben Watson — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:24:04 -0500

Apple Podcasts

Guests:

Peter W. Singer, strategist at New America and the author of multiple books on technology and security, including Wired for War, Ghost Fleet, Burn-In, and LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media;
And August Cole, non-resident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute working on AI and future warfare. With Singer, he is the co-author of Ghost Fleet and Burn In.

Both authors have teamed up again for a new monthly series on Defense One called "Fictional Intelligence," which explores the future of technology and warfare through the lens of short speculative fiction. The first story, "Mission ahead, heavens above," was published in February.

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Men lie, strategies lie—numbers don’t

Peter W. Singer — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:41:21 -0500

Measuring the frequency of words and themes in a document can offer insights, reveal underlying messages, and even illuminate what’s on the minds of its writers. The 2026 National Defense Strategy is meant to help align ends, ways, and means, and to signal goals and values. But to find the truth, sometimes you just have to count.

This kind of content analysis can act like an X-ray for a document, unveiling structural DNA that the authors themselves might not realize they’ve left behind. The cold, hard math of the text itself can reveal overall priorities or even a “Say-Do” gap. For instance, if a corporate strategy has five mentions of “customers” but 50 of “shareholders,” you know who the company cares most about.

It also tracks rhetorical inflation—i.e., whether the strategy is largely actionable or mostly fluff. A high frequency of “aspiration” words with a low frequency of “resource” words usually signals a strategy that lacks a real execution plan. Tone and context can also be indicative. As an illustration, a strategy paper heavy on defensive terminology suggests an organization playing not to lose vs one with more aggressive terms is seeking change.

Beyond raw counts, identifying semantic networks—that is, words that appear near each other—can also reveal logic and emotional clusters. For instance, if the word “cloud” is consistently clumped near terms like “cost overrun,” the organization is likely not a fan.

What is not said can be just as telling, as Sherlock Holmes said about the dog that didn't bark. If a previously "vital" product line suddenly drops to zero mentions, you’ve identified a pivot or a failure that the text isn't explicitly admitting.

While words have power, word counts can show who has power. In documents produced by co-authors or even committees, content analysis can reveal who has the true hand in the relationship, which voice had more sway in the crafting and editing. This is especially important inside government, where the process of getting various offices and leaders to agree to a published “strategy” involves not just linguistic compromise, but also bureaucratic and even ideological battles.

Finally, no matter how thorough, a “normal” read is subject to your cognitive biases. You tend to notice what you’re already looking for. You react based on pre-existing views of everything from the authors to the issues. But as the great rhetorician Jay-Z reminds us, “Men lie, women lie, numbers don't.”

Top themes

Of all its issues, themes, and topics, the new National Defense Strategy is most concerned with “allies,” who are mentioned 61 times. That's more often, per thousand words, than the 151 mentions in the 2022 strategy issued by President Biden’s team or the 20 in the 2018 summary document issued during Trump’s first term.

More striking is the shift in tone. Just over half of the mentions of allies in the 2026 strategy appear in a demanding or derogatory context. Allies are not described this way in the 2018 or 2022 documents.

By the numbers, the national defense strategy's second major focus is “Trump.” The president gets 52 mentions, plus his face in half of the document's ten photos. The 2018 strategy made no mention of President Trump, and the 2022 strategy mentioned “President Biden” twice. The contrast again is not just in the number, but the tone. More than two-thirds of the mentions of “Trump” in the strategy are linked to terms of praise such as “decisively” or “courageously.” The strategy also declares, twice, that “President Trump is leading the nation into a new golden age.”

The third-most-important topic, at 48 mentions, is American leaders who are not President Trump. There were no such mentions in the previous strategies, which were more typical ends-ways-means guides to the future. Here too, each mention is negative in tone or context: for example, the document says former leaders “neglected—even rejected—putting Americans and their concrete interests first.”

Dueling voices

Analysis of the 2026 NDS reveals two editorial voices, likely reflecting the different writers and editors behind them.

The first voice is political-ideological. It uses rhetoric foreign to traditional military documents, such as aggressive adjectives (previous policies are “grandiose nation-building projects,” “self-congratulatory pledges,” and “rudderless war”), persona-centric language (such as crediting “President Trump” for “historic achievements”), and a decidedly populist framing (“America First” appears multiple times).

The second voice is professional-strategic. It uses the technical and bureaucratic style of policy wonks and career military, with precise doctrinal language (“line of effort,” “denial defense,” “Joint Force,” and “operational flexibility”), and analytical and data-driven assessments (“nominal GDP” and “economic center of gravity.”

Overall, the political-ideological voice overshadows the professional-strategic voice, especially in the introduction and conclusion, which customarily summarize a document’s overall message.

Within these voices, word analysis indicates three major narrative themes. The first is “peace through strength,” which appears 13 times. It is hardly a novel theme; it has been espoused by Emperor Hadrian, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and, more recently, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But its frequency in the new NDS is a sharp increase from two mentions in 2018 and none in 2022.

The second theme, at 11 mentions, is “burden-sharing” among allies. This theme was absent in 2018 and appeared three times in 2022, and was then only used in the sense of “nuclear burden-sharing.”

Tied for second is “defense industrial base.” While the topic has been reported as a new focus of U.S. strategy, its frequency is statistically similar to the nine mentions it received in the 2022 document.

New words

The 2026 NDS includes several terms and focus areas that have not appeared in earlier such documents.

The most frequent is the Trump administration's moniker for the agency that issued the document: “Department of War,” used 27 times. A department's name can only officially be changed by Congress, so the document’s title “National Defense Strategy” is not included in that count.

In second place is "narco-terrorist," which is an interesting reframing of a threat. “Terrorism” and “terrorist” are hardly new terms; they collectively appear 18 times in 2026, up from 14 times in 2022 and 22 times in 2018. However, two-thirds of the mentions in the new strategy take the form of “narco-terrorists,” which did not appear in either of the previous two strategies.

A similar reframing takes place around threats within or near U.S. national territory. The new document mentions “homeland” 28 times, down from 58 in 2022. But “Western Hemisphere” and “hemispheric” get 13 mentions, up from just two in previous strategies. This regional focus is reinforced by four mentions of the "Monroe Doctrine," which did not appear in the 2022 or 2018 documents. "Greenland” appears five times, after not being an area of discussion in either the prior Trump or Biden national defense strategy documents.

Finally, the document also includes five mentions of “warrior ethos.” It is a new term for U.S. national defense strategy documents, but notably each use talks about “restoring” it.

What’s left out

Defense analysts often focus on what’s on the page, but the real intelligence can often lie in what’s been scrubbed or reduced.

Unsurprisingly, the new document does not mention “climate” or “diversity,” which appeared 13 and eight times, respectively, in the previous version. More striking is the absence of “Taiwan,” which was mentioned four times in 2022.

The strategy is also mute on the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, effort, a signature (and controversial) part of the first year of the Trump Pentagon that arguably had the largest effect on the future “means” side of any discussion of U.S. defense strategy.

Perhaps most striking, though, is the absence of action items. As a parallel, when business analysts examine company strategy documents, they often chart the ratio between abstract aspiration terms (e.g., “synergy,” “seamless,” “world-class”) and concrete verbs (e.g., “procure,” “divest,” “test”). The 2026 NDS lacks any mention of force planning or the size and shape of the military, which consumed entire sections of past US defense strategies.

Declining importance

Beyond omissions, there are also notable areas that the new strategy does not like to talk about as much as past documents.

The most significant reduction is mentions of “China” or “PRC,” which dropped from 101 mentions in 2022 to 26 in the new document. The tone has shifted as well: four of the discussions of China emphasize a goal of being respectful towards Beijing and the rest offer reassurance that U.S. strategy’s goal simply is to deter but not threaten it. By contrast, the 2022 strategy called the Chinese military a “pacing challenge”—the phrase, which appeared 10 times, is absent from the new version—while the 2018 version was directly adversarial, using descriptors like “China is a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea.”

“Russia” sees a similar decline in frequency—15 mentions, down from 89 in 2022—and a marked defanging of tone. Three-quarters of the 2026 mentions of Russia in the strategy downplay its threat—for example, describing it as “manageable” by Europe with less U.S. help. This is quite different from the 2022 discussion of Russia and, even more, the 2018 strategy that declared “Russia wants to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.” Related, “Ukraine” falls from 13 mentions in 2022 to four in 2026.

Iran and North Korea are similarly downgraded in rhetorical importance. Mentions of “Iran” fall to 13 from 33 mentions in 2022, while the nine mentions of “North Korea” and “DPRK” are down from 34 in the previous version.

Defense technology, long a pillar of U.S. strategies, gets far shorter shrift in the new document. “Cyber” declines to six mentions, from 32 in 2022 and eight in 2018. “Bio” threats and tech, mentioned eight times in 2022 and five in 2008, go entirely unmentioned. And, while AI may have drastically taken off in the last few years, it only gets one mention in the new US National Defense Strategy, as compared to 4 in 2022 and 2 in 2018. Even "missile defense" is largely absent as a broader concept. The “Golden Dome” project is mentioned just three times, a stark contrast to the 48 times that “missile defense” appeared in 2022, bolstered by the deliberate accompanying Missile Defense Review.

Finally, “Space” as a domain or issue of conflict shrank drastically. After being discussed six times in the 2018 document, it skyrocketed to 41 times in the 2022 document. It plummeted back to earth with just two mentions in the 2026 document, despite the creation of the Space Force being one of the more significant national defense actions of Trump’s first administration.

Conclusion

No strategy fully survives contact with a changing world. So the raw numbers in the new document don’t directly tell us what happens next—in everything from defense budgets and military sizing to where, when, and against whom the U.S. military might be asked to use force.

But overall word counts and their patterns do reveal something maybe more important. At least by the raw numbers, America’s official national defense strategy now has drastically changed priorities, interests, tones, narratives, and even voices. As such, it may be the most revelatory strategy ever written.

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Defense One launches 'Fictional Intelligence'

Defense One Staff — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 6, 2026

Defense One Launches “Fictional Intelligence” a New Column by Futurists and National-Security Authors Peter W. Singer and August Cole

Washington, D.C. — Defense One is launching “Fictional Intelligence,” a monthly column by authors and national-security futurists Peter W. Singer and August Cole, who will explore the future of warfare, technology, and global security through short, scenario-driven fiction.

Fusing fictional narrative with non-fiction research and forecasting, “Fictional Intelligence” grows out of the best-selling authors’ work with U.S. military and national-security organizations that use short stories and narrative scenarios to think through emerging risks, strategic shocks, and unintended consequences of new technologies. The column will give Defense One readers a new, unique, and engaging lens on the national-security challenges of today and tomorrow.

Singer is a senior fellow at New America and the author of multiple books on war, technology, and the future of conflict. He is also a longtime contributor to Defense One and the author of the recently concluded China Intelligence column. Cole is a former Wall Street Journal defense-industry reporter and Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. The two are the authors of the speculative fiction novels Ghost Fleet and Burn-In, which were later put on U.S. military reading lists, as well as managing partners of Useful Fiction, a company specializing in strategic narrative.

“Fictional Intelligence has increasingly been used by militaries and policymakers to envision scenarios and stress-test assumptions about the future,” Singer said. “These stories are not predictions, but tools for better thinking about today and tomorrow.”

“It is exciting to add a new way to educate and engage readers,” said Bradley Peniston, Executive Editor at Defense One. “It will be the ideal ‘weekend read’.”

The column will publish on a monthly cadence and will be available to all Defense One readers. The first in the series will explore the future of space and special operations forces, as well as China’s growing presence in Latin America.

“Fictional Intelligence” reflects Defense One’s continued focus on how emerging technologies, strategic competition, and institutional choices shape national security outcomes—often in ways that are easier to see through narrative than through white papers alone.

About Defense One: Defense One is a leading news and ideas publication covering national security, defense policy, military operations, and the intersection of technology and warfare.https://www.defenseone.com/

About Peter W. Singer: A leading analyst of 21st-century warfare and technology, Singer is a senior fellow at New America, professor at Arizona State University, and a founder of Useful Fiction LLC. No author, living or dead, has more books on the professional military reading lists.

About August Cole: An associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Cole is a founder of Useful Fiction. With P.W. Singer, he is the co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War and Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution.

Media Contact:

Liz Stein / lstein@govexec.com
Angela Moorman / contact@useful-fiction.com

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'Mission ahead, heavens above'

Peter W. Singer and August Cole — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:00:00 -0500

The next conflict may be decided by who controls space. But who controls space may be decided back on planet Earth.

Even as low-cost, AI-infused constellations proliferate, the center of gravity for modern space warfare remains the terrestrial networks that bind them: ground stations, uplink nodes, undersea cables, and more. As China expands its space-control networks on a global scale—a focus of its grand strategy—its new infrastructure in South America, Asia, and Africa also means new vulnerabilities. That may give small teams of U.S. special operators a strategic and possibly decisive role in future combat.

The following is a “useful fiction,” designed to promote reflection about the future of space, technology, and special operations. Written in support of U.S. Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations University, the story blends a fictionalized narrative scenario with non-fiction research.

NEUQUÉN PROVINCE, Argentina—Col. Scot Shieh’s career in Air Force Special Operations had taken him across the full spectrum of SOCOM’s missions, from flying close air support for a Marine Raider unit in East Africa to one particularly cold deep insertion of a JSOC team above the Arctic Circle. Yet he never expected that his first command of a full special operations task force would be about controlling outer space.

The thought left him unable to suppress a smile, the only part of his face showing underneath his helmet. Then the expression returned to a frown at the downside of command. It pained the pilot in him that his seat for TF Jupiter was not in the cockpit of the tiltrotor, but stuck in the back, crammed among enough communications relays, servers, and sensor-fusion gear to fill a CONEX.

Moving down from his commander’s virtual reality combat helmet, Shieh wore a conforming ballistic vest that flexed with his movements over a black thermal shirt and form-fitting black pants fitted with “pincher” auto-tourniquets cued to integrated bio-sensors. It was a look that his family back in Providence, Rhode Island, never would have imagined, but they were partly to blame. One hot summer weekend, his father had taken him and his brother out to see a Blue Angels demonstration flight over nearby Newport. Between the dazzling aerobatics and a stop for ice cream at Newport Creamery on the way home, it had been about as perfect a day as a 3rd-grader could imagine. Immediately after they’d come home, he had marched upstairs to his room and memorialized the outing with a blue-and-yellow-crayon drawing of the jets. Stubborn then as now, he’d decided to join the Air Force that very day after his annoying older brother made fun of him for a big “ARE FORS” scrawled on the jets’ wings. What did his brother know? The Navy had ships; the Air Force had planes. Shieh was an experienced joint force commander now, but he still thought he had that right.

Sitting to his left was Sgt. Maj. Viola Rodrigo, who wore much of the same kit. She’d served in the Ranger Regiment’s Regimental Reconnaissance Company for most of her career, meaning her familiarity with raiding missions was an asset in the air and would be even more so on the ground. Unlike Shieh, her viewscreen was flipped up. She cared less about the data displayed in the flying tactical operations center than how Shieh and the TOC team flying with him responded. Plus, as the unit’s senior NCO, a part of her knew that she could tell just as fast as –– or faster than –– any mission-assist AI when something critical was about to happen.

The tiltrotor hung in the air, almost weightless, when it crested the jagged Andean ridgeline and then dipped low to follow the rocky terrain toward the Espacio Lejano Station. The view through the windows showed them flying at head height off the ground, but Shieh’s eyes stayed focused on what was displayed on the command helmet’s lens. Its settings allowed him to shift back and forth between augmented and virtual reality with an exaggerated blink. Then gaze-tracking software would allow him to select which feed he wanted to focus on. He quickly checked the status of the various components of TF Jupiter, then ensured that they had maintained cohesion with the other SOCOM missions set to simultaneously hit targets around the world, from Kourou in French Guiana to Biak in Indonesia and Malinda, Kenya. In many ways, it was a graphical rendering of what they had called back in training the “compound security dilemma”: how Command & Control Area of Responsibility/Theater of OPs had to be non-linear, non-contiguous, and trans-theater, involving simultaneous ops at multiple echelons.

<<Be aware, there are two additional Sharp Claw platoons detected at the airfield’s southern perimeter>>, Shieh’s tactical AI messaged in a pop-up hanging in the air in front of him.

Rodrigo had already brought her visor back down, the NCO’s sixth sense kicking in, and her and Shieh’s views automatically shifted to the tactical map. It now showed a pair of red icons on the 3-D rendering of the target, representing two units of small machine-gun-armed wheeled robots. There was no need to message the rest of the TF Jupiter; the command network AI automatically updated the tactical displays of all. But it would be most essential for the SOCOM advance force element that would be the first to deal with what it meant. Just beyond the red icons Shieh tracked the movements of the four American commandos who had inserted into the area via civilian vehicles a day ago. Moving ever closer was the main U.S. assault force, comprising two C-17s racing toward their objective: the 2,000-meter runway built by the People’s Liberation Army at the Espacio Lejano Station. The first aircraft held two Ranger assault platoons and the second carried a combined force of a Ranger security element and Space Force and intelligence agency personnel.

The tiltrotor dropped again, seemingly in free fall, then the engines surged. The two pilots from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment seemed to be making this an especially bumpy ride. Like every pilot ever to ride as a passenger, Shieh knew he could have done better.

“Radar started tracking us, sir, but we shook it,” one of the pilots explained in a gentle voice that sounded library-quiet.

The temptation for Shieh in a moment like this was to cue up the pilot’s view; but that was no longer his role in command. Just as he had to trust the Task Force commander’s decisions about how they fit into the overall operation, Shieh had to trust the Night Stalkers and the onboard AI to keep the command tiltrotor in the air. If he was honest, the aircraft’s value to the mission was as much the cloud server as the humans on board. Hugging the ground, it relayed and received signals from eight Tactical Air Launched Network or “Talon” drones that flew around it, surfing spectrum and datalinks like a swarm of mosquitos to ensure the SOCOM officer could link with his troops.

Knowing that Shieh would focus on the new threats, Rodrigo quickly checked the status of the 30-strong Navy SEAL platoon at Kourou, inserting in their own maritime domain. She pushed a feed of visual imagery from the SEAL commander: mostly a gray-blue underwater blur from his helmet cams.

“Check this, sir,” Rodrigo said.

As Shieh tuned in, he wondered how they felt; all those hours of painful training at SEAL Qualification Training and yet now their amphibious combat bots towed them in. He had no doubt they could have done the swim, but the insertion point had been six kilometers out to sea, which made this the smarter option.

A quick message to the SEAL commander –– with whom Shieh attended the Naval War College seven years before –– confirmed that the naval commandos were still synchronized with the rest of TF Jupiter’s simultaneous operations around the world. Just about when the C-17s would be detected, the SEAL team would surface to begin its part of the mission: seizing one of the Long March rockets carrying what intelligence believed to be a cube-sat network for the PLAN carrier task force sortieing from Hainan.

• • •

China’s decades-long growth in global power had brought the kid from Providence to Patagonia, and set the stage for a simmering conflict that had finally turned hot.

Deep in the desert of Patagonia, the Espacio Lejano Station complex was centered around a massive 35-meter antenna. In 2012, as part of a local economic development push that aligned with China’s growing global ambitions, the Argentine government had leased the complex to the Chinese government for 50 years, tax-exempt, making it Beijing’s first Chinese deep-space Earth station outside China. It had since coordinated communications for everything from Chinese lunar missions to research on Mars. It had also become the PLA’s most important foreign ground station for space operations.

Yet this growth and expansion in interests around the world also created a new strategic opportunity for the U.S. military –– and SOCOM in particular. Belt-and-Road Initiative investments by Chinese government and private-sector interests had bloomed on every continent, which Beijing and the Communist Party used to their advantage in an increasingly zero-sum game against the American military, economy, and even culture. Yet for every new PLA base, billion-yuan investment, or cabal of local politicians entangled in bribes or contracts, a new potential point of vulnerability emerged. The CCP’s global infrastructure had painstakingly been built up over decades. Now, the American war plan was to show how it could be taken away in a matter of hours.

As American conventional forces strode across key chokepoints in the global economy and deployed to defend allies, SOCOM meshed into the effort by taking advantage of its unique capabilities and global presence. The target list ranged from rare-earth mines in Tanzania and Vietnam to ports in Sri Lanka and Djibouti. In some cases, the attacking force would be locals angry at China’s increasingly imperious exploitation of their homelands, now trained and equipped to do something about it by SOCOM’s Jedburgh program. In other settings, it would be unilateral SOCOM operations like TF Jupiter.

The way it was explained to Shieh and the other task force commanders, each of the missions on its own could be misinterpreted as the kind of pinprick or nuisance raids that special forces were often visualized as playing when the big boys finally escalated to all-out conventional war. And yet, in culmination and through coordination, this global raid operational model aspired to have strategic effects. Many were designed not just to take away a PLA capability, but to force third-party nations to decide which side they would be on, and understand that China may have made an infrastructure investment in the past, but it would not be able to protect it any longer.

Of all the task forces, TF Jupiter sought to present China’s leaders with perhaps the clearest strategic dilemma that came with having global ambitions. By seizing the Earth-side satellite control and tracking stations, launch facilities, and fiber networks needed to transmit and coordinate space-based data beyond one’s own region, China’s space prowess would be dealt as heavy a blow as if the entirety of the SOCOM task forces suited up in vacuum suits and fought it out among the stars. SOCOM’s intel and psyops shops had determined that it would have a devastating operational and morale effect on PLA units, who had grown ever more dependent on space-based assets the more advanced they’d become. Even more, the near-instant loss of a national point of pride, built up over 50 years of investment and celebrated constantly in their propaganda, would also have a massive political and psychological impact. Even in a world of AI and quantum space networks, the mind mattered the most.

In many ways, Shieh and his team were playing out the physical version of the ransomware gangs that constantly frayed the cyber networks. Only instead of asking for billions in crypto, his unit was the operational manifestation of a simple demand to Beijing:

If you ever want back what we’ve taken –– end the war. Or else…

• • •

“One minute out, sir,” the pilot said.

The tiltrotor lurched, losing 20 feet of altitude. We must be just a few feet off the hard deck, Shieh thought.

“Sir, we’ve still got a patrol of quads from the PLA base after us, gonna stay bumpy for a bit until we get you on the deck,” the pilot said. Shieh felt the tiltrotor vibrate as it ejected a stream of fist-sized disruptor drones to go after the pursuing PLA quadcopters.

Shieh checked the mission clock and thought of the SEAL platoon just moments from surfacing. Pulses pounding and steady breathing, the naval commandos would be watching similar feeds, only their view came from a wave of lobster-like drones squiggling up the beach to scout and neutralize any nearby patrols.

50 seconds to go.

A gentle flute-like tone sounded in his headset.

<<We’re inside the air defense system>> This was from a Cyber National Mission Force unit working in support of SOCOM. <<Flight path now clear for WRANGLER 21. All PLA radar offline. Sending CMC VIP aircraft protocols to PLA drones in the area>>

Now the first C-17 carrying the Rangers would be safe to land, identified in the Chinese battle network as carrying members of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission. It was an old trick, a variation of how Israel had spoofed Syrian air defenses decades earlier.

Shieh worried about the PLA Strategic Support Forces space assets overhead. Between their spy satellites and the commercial Earth trackers used for everything from weather to agricultural data, there was a chance they’d give away the trick. Yet they had a plan for that: in-orbit dazzlers temporarily blinded commercial and government satellite. It was a capability aboard some kind of U.S. Air Force maneuvering space platform that even Shieh didn’t have clearance to get completely briefed on.

• • •

Over the next few minutes, the in-flight TOC was a swirl of managing data inputs as the Army tiltrotor orbited in the area, dipping behind ridgelines and down into riverbeds. This aspect of human cognition and perception was different in the 2030s than it had been for soldiers and airmen a generation ago, who focused on what was in front of them. They also knew there was a risk that the enemy was spoofing the U.S. networks and data at that very moment too. That the very human impulse to confirm whether what one seeing was true or real became even more powerful. It was also why the unit’s AI battle-management system was crucial in mitigating the kind of tunnel vision that came from being able to monitor the most minute details, even down to the number of rounds left in a Ranger’s rifle.

The lead C-17 landed without taking any small-arms fire. Rodrigo silently approved as the two platoons of Rangers ran to the fighting positions that had been suggested by the battlefield AI. Alongside them rolled the two six-wheeled armored battle bots. The soldiers called them Dumbo for the ballistic shields that opened up on each side to provide cover.

As soon as the C-17 was clear, explosions rocked the surrounding PLA base. Some 28 bunkers, APCs, trucks, and a radar site disappeared over the course of two seconds. This was the work of missiles fired from two U.S. submarines off the coast of Chile, which hit the known fixed targets, and strikes by loitering munitions launched by the advance team marking the mobile targets. It was risky to hit the targets after the landing, but it meant the forces were on the ground before the Chinese defenders were fully alert and rendered the runway unusable.

Shieh used standard optical sensors on one of his Talon drones to watch the Rangers move through the smoke and flame toward the main building complex at Espacio Lejano. While the PLA quadcopters and advanced defenses were down, the PLA clearly had anticipated this kind of scenario and fired unguided mortars at the Rangers. This momentarily halted the advance.

Returning to his battle-management view, Shieh watched icons representing three Ranger squads deploy backpack-carried Hatchet kamikaze drones armed with thermobaric warheads. The blue arrow-shaped icons blinked across the display for a moment then winked out, as did the PLA icons representing the mortar pits. He quick-cued the nose-cam footage of one of the drones, confirming that there were uniformed PLA soldiers manning the mortars to ensure no civilian personnel were nearby. This was a no-holds barred global fight but the narrative still mattered, perhaps even more. The AI system already approved the Rangers use of the Hatchets, but as Task Force commander Shieh wanted to verify himself. It was a lesson learned from the PLA recently carrying out an adversarial network attack on the image categorization system of a SOCOM battle box used by a Marine Corps Raider unit deployed near Bagamoyo Port in Tanzania; this hack led to a drone strike on an empty civilian bus erroneously classified as a PLA Sharp Claw unmanned ground vehicle.

A haptic pulse on Shieh’s helmet snapped him out of his distraction –– or diversion –– from overseeing all of TF Jupiter.

“Sharpe, you see the situation in Kourou?” Shieh snapped at the analyst sitting at his right. The tilt-rotor’s engines howled and the aircraft climbed, driving him into the seat. He felt frustrated with himself at getting lost in the Rangers’ counterattack on the mortars.

“Tracking it,” Sharpe responded. “They’re working the problem.”

The Ranger-led force was going to prevail over the PLA defenders; the models assured it and his gut told him the same. The SEALs advancing into the Kourou launch facility, however, had hit stiffer defenses than planned.

Shieh cued up the SEAL task group commander’s helmet cam. From that POV, the 100 meters of concrete ahead of them looked a kilometer long as tracer rounds crisscrossed just a few feet above the ground.

The accompanying map showed that the sneaky bastards had hidden a set of autonomous UGVs in the Kourou facility’s trash burn piles. To reach the launchpad, the SEALs would have to cross open terrain under fire. As Rodriguez also dropped in to monitor the SEALs, her stomach knotted. It had all the echoes of a mission from the past that still haunted the command almost two generations later. During 1989’s Operation JUST CAUSE, a SEAL assault on the airfield in Panama where dictator Manual Noriega kept a getaway jet had gone bad, Four SEALs died and eight were wounded crossing sections of exposed runway.

Yet the benefit of historical analogs is that you can learn from them. Without any instruction from the TOC, the SEALs split into groups of two operators, dispersing behind cover and drawing the defending robots away from the main objective. As they did, the unit’s sniper team deployed to a hide that the AI map had determined was the best fit of cover and angle. With a .50-caliber long-range rifle, the sniper began firing EXACTO guided rounds, one by one, calmly landing hits at predetermined target spots on the rocket’s payload section and nose cone.

The benefit of past hindsight and new technology was that there was no need to rush out in the open to gain the tactical effect they wanted.

• • •

A hard thump rocked Shieh in his seat and he lifted his VR visor. The tilt-rotor had set down just off the eastern edge of the runway. At a tap from Rodrigo, he followed her out of the tilt-rotor. Shieh carried his assault rifle at the ready, but still wore his command VR headset. Rodrigo jogged slightly in front of him and to his left, calling out a smoldering quadcopter and piles of shell casings lest he trip if his attention was elsewhere.

They had landed a quick jog from the main control facility, a four-story glass and steel building that looked out of place in the austere Patagonian setting. During the workup, the planners referred to it as the “Lejano Tower of Pisa.” Up close, you could see that the gleaming building was a cheaply printed structure that leaned to one side, likely from bad engineering. Inside was the real prize: a control room offering direct network access to the entire constellation of PLA satellites and other space systems.

Ahead of them, their AR display layered blue over a bulldozer-like PLA construction vehicle. Shieh wondered if their system was having a glitch, or even worse, had been hacked. Rodriguez answered his unanswered question: “Our guys hotwired it!” The bulldozer, now mobile cover, began to advance with Rangers behind it.

The two ran toward the control building’s entrance. Smoke billowed from second-story windows, but overall the building seemed intact.

Shieh shook hands with Maj. Rannoch, the lead Ranger element’s commander, who quickly briefed him on the situation. The two of them shifted to seemingly stare into the distance, watching as a swarm of seeker drones worked their way through the third floor’s eastern rooms, moving ahead of a squad of Rangers clearing the building.

“Most of the PLA guard force inside surrendered; without their bots they didn’t want to engage. That’s working external, too, but we––”

In mid-word, Rodrigo tackled Shieh and Rannoch, a double clothesline that knocked them down. A moment later, a volley of machine-gun fire raked the building above their heads. She popped up to return fire, automatically cued towards the source with the help of instantaneous inputs to the lens’ AR.

The enemy fire stopped and Rodrigo looked back down at the two. The blank expression on her face showed that she was well used to putting officers in their place, both figuratively and literally.

“Need to be more careful, sirs,” she said, helping them to their feet. Before Shieh could think of an appropriate reply, a message popped up in their visor screens.

“WRANGLER 22’s on approach.”

Soon after, they heard the C-17’s tires chirp on touchdown. A few moments later its engines howled as they reversed thrust, sending the jet rolling backward after its improbably abrupt stop.

A parade of ground- and air-defense systems raced down the jet’s rear ramp, followed by another Ranger platoon and an equal number of personnel from U.S. Space Force and the intelligence community. Among the group were two of NSA’s elite TAO hackers, looking out of place. One looked to weigh almost 300 pounds and the other couldn't be a day older than 18, thought Shieh, but they would be as essential to defending and holding this base against the inevitable PLA counterattack as the special operators.

There was a burst of gunfire in the building above and then silence. Shieh didn’t need the map to tell him that the Ranger squad had secured the building.

He flipped up the lens and took in the scene around them. Dust from the C-17s and smoke from the explosions obscured the night sky’s stars, but Shieh knew they were still there, just on the other side of what was literally a fog of war. Only now, what they had done in the dirt here would create a more massive digital version of that fog for the enemy around the world.

He and Rodrigo moved into the facility’s main entrance. Some sort of mobile-like space sculpture that had once dangled from the ceiling lay in a rat’s nest of crystal and fake marble. The bodies of two dead PLA soldiers were sprawled behind a maroon leather couch that had afforded them no protection.

For all the signs of recent close-quarters combat, the damage was limited. Even the lights were still on and the elevator was operative. The same was evident from the images pushed from the Ranger as they had cleared the rooms. Most importantly, it showed that the control room itself had not been destroyed; the unarmed civilian techs locked inside had decided to surrender to the fearsome Rangers, who had knocked on the glass window of its door with a packet of C-4, the message not needing to be translated.

Shieh allowed himself to smile once more as to what that meant. Not only was he the leader of a SOCOM task force that just met with mission success. He was—at least until the Space Force arrived inside—also technically in command of the world’s largest satellite network.

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Pakistan’s burgeoning arms industry is a strategic opportunity for the US

Joe Buccino — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:28:50 -0500

U.S. policymakers need to energize their engagement with the midtier arms producers fighting for a larger slice of the global arms market. They should look most urgently at Pakistan, whose cost-effective weapons and growing ties to China make it a country of increasing geopolitical importance.

Islamabad's expanding defense industry, exemplified by its JF-17 fighter jet, has drawn interest from buyers across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Pakistan has demonstrated an ability—uncommon among emerging suppliers—to bundle production with training, maintenance, and operational support. Under Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan's armed forces have grown more capable and outward-looking , positioning Islamabad as an emerging force in the international arms market.

Yet while Pakistan expands its defense partnerships across South Asia and beyond, the United States remains largely absent. This is a strategic mistake. The Pentagon should establish a robust defense industrial partnership with Pakistan that uses Islamabad's manufacturing capacity while advancing American interests.

The strategic rationale is clear. Pakistan sits at the crossroads of South and Central Asia, with deep military relationships across Muslim-majority nations and growing influence in Africa. Its defense sector offers cost-effective platforms that emerging partners can afford, regional production capabilities that reduce supply-chain vulnerabilities, and proven military professionalism. Most importantly, the China factor: Pakistan has long been a bridge between the U.S. and China, since the days of Richard Nixon. China already plays a significant role in Pakistan’s defense sector. The question is not whether Beijing will be present—but whether Washington will have any influence over how Pakistan’s defense industry evolves, exports, and integrates with regional partners. America’s competitive partnership with Pakistan’s growing defense industry should be seen in this light.

Recent developments underscore the urgency. Pakistan's growing ties with Bangladesh—including discussions about potential JF-17 sales—have alarmed New Delhi. While Indian media outlets criticize these developments, the Pentagon should view them as an opportunity to shape defense relationships in a region where U.S. influence has waned since the Afghanistan withdrawal. Rather than ceding this space to China or allowing India-Pakistan tensions to dictate U.S. regional strategy, Washington should engage with both South Asian nations.

What should this partnership look like? First, the Defense Department should establish joint production agreements for specific platforms where Pakistan has proven capabilities—potentially including trainer aircraft, light attack helicopters, or armored vehicles. These agreements would allow U.S. forces to reduce costs while ensuring interoperability with partner nations that operate Pakistani equipment.

Second, U.S. defense firms should work with Pakistani manufacturers to co-produce components and subsystems. This would give American companies access to lower-cost production while maintaining quality control and creating dependencies that strengthen the bilateral relationship. It would also position the United States as Pakistan's partner of choice for technology transfer and industrial modernization.

Third, the Pentagon should expand military-to-military cooperation beyond traditional training exchanges. This should include joint exercises focused on defense industrial cooperation, shared maintenance facilities for regional partners, and coordinated defense export strategies that align with U.S. objectives. Defense ministries often exert influence comparable to or greater than foreign ministries, and the United States must use these channels.

Critics will cite Pakistan's nuclear program and rivalry with India. These are legitimate concerns, but they should not paralyze American strategy. The United States has successfully compartmentalized cooperation with far more problematic partners when strategic interests demanded it. Moreover, deeper defense industrial ties would give Washington greater leverage to address these very concerns.

It is true that India would naturally object. New Delhi has long viewed Pakistan’s defense relationships through a zero-sum lens, and any expansion of U.S.–Pakistan defense industrial cooperation would generate friction at a moment when Washington is investing heavily in its partnership with India. But U.S. strategy in South Asia cannot be held hostage to bilateral rivalries alone. The United States already manages defense relationships with adversarial partners elsewhere—from Greece and Turkey to Japan and South Korea—by separating regional deterrence from industrial cooperation. India itself has diversified its defense procurement across Russian, French, Israeli, and American suppliers. Washington should expect the same strategic flexibility in return, while remaining transparent with New Delhi about the scope and limits of any cooperation with Islamabad.

The broader lesson extends beyond Pakistan. As middle-tier defense manufacturers emerge globally, the Pentagon must develop a strategy to engage rather than ignore them. These countries will produce and export weapons regardless of American preferences. The question is whether the United States will shape these developments to advance American interests or stand aside while China builds the defense industrial partnerships that will define the next generation of global security relationships.

Pakistan's emergence as a defense supplier presents a strategic opportunity the United States cannot afford to miss. By establishing meaningful defense industrial cooperation with Islamabad, the Pentagon can strengthen American influence in South Asia and provide cost-effective options for partner nations, all the while providing a counterweight to China that keeps the region in balance.

Joe Buccino is a retired U.S. Army colonel who last served as Communications Director for U.S. Central Command.

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