Defense One - Ideas

Time, not capital, is the constraint on the defense industrial base

James DeMuth — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:43:53 -0400

The Pentagon's industrial-base problem is no longer a shortage of capital. It is the time required to turn that capital into qualified suppliers, suppliers into parts, and parts into weapons in warfighters’ hands.

Three changes would shorten that timeline more than the next hundred billion dollars in appropriations. First, let defense suppliers that have earned a qualification for one program—that is, proven through testing and quality review that they meet its requirements—keep that qualification when seeking work in another program with similar requirements. Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. And third, increase multiyear acquisition to create the kind of demand that lower-tier suppliers can use to secure financing. None of these require new authority. None lowers a standard.

The Department began fiscal 2026 holding $382.4 billion in unexpired, unobligated appropriations, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added $152.3 billion more, and in June the administration asked for another $67.1 billion. Unfortunately, appropriations don’t shorten lead time. Boeing builds the active radar seeker for every PAC-3 MSE interceptor in Huntsville, and in April the Pentagon signed a seven-year framework to triple that output. A finished interceptor takes about two years to build, but qualifying a new component supplier takes even longer. Consequently, rounds bought this year are unlikely to reach the field before 2028.

Capacity that cannot produce a qualified part for two or three years is not yet military capacity. It is potential capacity. The gap between the two is mobilization latency, and qualification has become one of its largest hidden components. Double demand for a critical munition tomorrow and Congress can appropriate the money within weeks, industry can buy equipment within months, but every new supplier then enters an 18- to 36-month qualification cycle. Appropriated capacity and combat capacity are not the same thing.

I should say plainly where I sit. Seurat makes metal parts under contract using our own high-speed additive process, dubbed Area Printing, and we sell the parts rather than the printers. We are one of 25 awardees under JAQS-SQ, a $10.5-million Pentagon-funded America Makes project call. We would benefit directly if the government spent more on supplier qualification. My industry spent two decades promising more than it delivered. Additive manufacturing was going to replace machining, then reinvent the supply chain, and mostly it printed prototypes and low-volume parts. A program office skeptical of claims from the additive industry is applying a lesson we taught it.

Program offices are where the first change happens. A supplier that passed an audit for one program generally starts from zero for the next. A program office is accountable for its own program, so accepting another office's audit means taking on a risk judgment it did not make. Every program manager is behaving rationally, and the result is a system optimized to minimize program-level risk rather than mobilization time and qualification costs. The fix is a doctrine of qualify once, use many. Part qualification stays program-specific; what becomes portable is the evidence about the factory, so no office re-proves the shop before it begins proving the part. JAQS-SQ is building that framework now. What is missing is a decision by acquisition leaders to accept each others’ results.

Second, fund qualification as its own budget line. Inside industrial-base accounts, qualification competes against tooling and usually loses, because a machine tool can be bought and installed inside one budget cycle and a qualification package cannot. That line would cost about one percent of industrial base appropriations, or roughly $82 million against the $8.2 billion the Reconciliation Act routed through the Industrial Base Fund.

Third, give the supplier layer—that is, the companies that supply prime contractors—demand it can borrow against. The Department estimates it has lost more than 40 percent of its small-business suppliers over the past decade, and survivors are running at capacity. That sounds like health but is not, because a shop with no idle capacity must pull engineering hours from paying work to qualify a part that may never be ordered. The government does not need to finance every expansion; private capital will fund defense capacity when it can see durable demand. Multiyear procurement is one of the few instruments that turns stated intent into a contract a small shop can take to a lender. The ask is not more grants but enough contractual certainty that banks and investors do the financing.

The strongest argument against all of this is that qualification is rigorous for a reason. A motor case that fails in flight kills people, and additive processes deserve more scrutiny than conventional ones because a part's microstructure depends on parameters that vary by machine. That argument is correct, and I am not advocating faster approvals or looser standards. Instead, the infrastructure for running that standard rigorously, meaning trained auditors, shared process control documents, and material databases, is funded like an afterthought.

There is a fourth change worth making, and it would cost us—that is, my company and others like it. There should be no additive-specific set-asides. Fund qualified production rather than technologies: define the outcome and the standard and let manufacturers compete to meet it. If a conventional manufacturer can hold the spec at the rate and schedule, it should win the work, and on many high-volume part numbers today, it will.

None of this addresses what happens to a qualified supplier that waits two years without an order, a harder problem deserving its own argument. In a protracted conflict, the decisive industrial question will be how quickly the United States can turn manufacturing capacity into qualified production because deterrence rests on an adversary believing the United States can replace what it expends. The next phase of rebuilding the arsenal should be measured not in dollars obligated or factories expanded, but in something much harder to game: how many additional qualified suppliers can produce critical parts, and how quickly they can begin delivering them.

James DeMuth is CEO and co-founder of Seurat Technologies, a metal-parts contract manufacturer in Wilmington, Massachusetts

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Pete Hegseth is rebuilding the military's ‘brass ceiling’

Jeremiah Favara, The Conversation — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:48:16 -0400

Dan Driscoll resigned as secretary of the Army on Aug. 31, 2026. His departure leaves the Army without a Senate-confirmed civilian leader six months into the war with Iran, its busiest period since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Driscoll’s resignation was reportedly motivated, at least in part, by his frustration with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Earlier in August, Hegseth had blocked the promotions of four Army officers.

Since his appointment in January 2025, Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 admirals and generals. Often, Hegseth has referenced “woke” diversity efforts in his reasoning. One officer who was blocked had written a paper while in graduate school about the impact of political polarization on recruiting. Another officer had his name pulled from the promotion list after officials incorrectly believed that he had allowed a mentorship group for female paratroopers to exist in his unit.

More than half of the officers removed have been women or Black in an officer corps that is 79% male and 74% white.

Hegseth’s blocking of promotions and apparent targeting of women and Black people appear to violate military rules meant to protect against the politicization of the military’s officer corps and have undermined faith in the military’s promotion system, which is supposed to be merit-based.

I’ve spent years studying the U.S. military and have written a book on diversity and military recruiting. In my assessment, Hegseth is building a military that fits a narrow ideological view at the cost of its service members’ safety and well-being.

Recruiting isn’t ideological

The Army exceeded its recruiting goal of 60,500 new enlistees in fiscal year 2025 and has already hit its targets for the 2026 fiscal year.

In fact, 2026 marks the third straight year that every active duty military service has met its recruiting goals. That the Army and other branches have been able to do this – despite the fact that they rely on women and people of color – would, at first glance, seem to indicate that the politicization of the military has not hurt recruiting.

Hegseth has attributed the success to “the belief [recruits] have in civilian leadership and military leadership.” According to a Pentagon spokesperson, “Americans everywhere are prouder than ever to serve.”

What Hegseth and others fail to acknowledge, however, is that recruitment is driven not by ideology but by market factors and need.

Since the end of the draft in 1973, according to my research, the success of military recruiting has largely hinged on young people’s perceptions of their chances for upward mobility. Many young people join the military because they are in need of the opportunities military service provides. This past year’s recruitment numbers are likely more a result of young Americans seeking steady pay, job training and educational benefits than agreement with Hegseth’s vision of the military.

Market research studies conducted in the past year have found that making money, paying for education, travel, work experience and medical benefits are the top motivators guiding young people toward military service. Recruits are guided by what military sociologist Charles C. Moskos called occupational appeals that frame enlisting as a smart economic decision rather than by patriotism or nationalism. These kinds of appeals have historically been successful in attracting the diverse recruits – women and people of color – who have been critical to the military’s ability to meet its personnel needs.

Recruiting data shows that Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration have little control over the composition of the enlisted ranks. However, Hegseth’s anti-woke campaign is changing what the military is like for those who serve.

The ‘brass ceiling’

Historically, women, Black service members and service members of color have faced discrimination and violence within the ranks.

Recent firings and blocked promotions have further shaped a military leadership that has historically been almost exclusively white and male. All five service chiefs and 9 in 10 combatant commanders are white men. This year the lowest percentage of women in 25 years have been nominated to the rank of general and admiral.

This targeting of women and people of color has solidified the “brass ceiling” – a term used to describe the limited opportunities for promotion for women and Black service members – and is creating a military leadership that doesn’t reflect the service members they command or the nation they represent. The overwhelmingly white and male leadership commands an enlisted force in which 34% identify with a racial minority group and 17% are women.

By purging military leadership of women, Black service members and those who have supported opportunities for service members other than white men, Hegseth is creating a culture ripe for racial, sexual and gender discrimination and harassment.

Hegseth has also sought to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers and has attacked military diversity. These actions further erase and invalidate the contributions of women, Black service members and other service members of color.

Lessons from Vietnam

The military’s need for more equitable representation was born of the demands and costs of combat.

During the Vietnam War, disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino service members served in combat and were killed while under the command of a largely white officer corps.

The Defense Race Relations Institute – now known as the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute – was formed in 1971 to provide race relations education to every member of the armed forces to quell rampant racial unrest, including racial violence and fragging incidents. Fragging incidents – the killing of a fellow service member, often using fragmentation grenades – were rampant in Vietnam.

Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs were instituted at historically Black colleges and universities to increase the numbers of Black officers. The Department of Defense pushed for increased ROTC programs at HBCUs during the Vietnam war as a way to increase the size of the officer corps.

While HBCUs provided large numbers of Black officers during Vietnam, the success of diversifying the officer corps has been limited. Scholars have attributed this limited success, despite consistent efforts to recruit Black Americans, to educational inequalities and the conservative culture of the officer corps.

These efforts were based on the military adopting the idea that an efficient and lethal military should look like the nation it serves and that its leaders should look like the soldiers they command.

Hegseth’s purging of the officer ranks means the Americans who serve in the military won’t see themselves reflected in leadership or see a path to the top ranks. But they will continue to bear the costs of war: About half of the 18 service members killed in the Iran war between February and August were women and people of color.

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How a MAGA influencer with ties to Russia became Trump’s Arctic adviser

Heather Vogell , ProPublica — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:51:27 -0400

For more than 40 years, the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has advised Congress and the president on what to study in the frigid and dynamic far north, from the environment to military security. It’s typically done so without making waves, led by people well-versed in science and public policy.

That was until December, when President Donald Trump appointed a Texas venture capitalist and MAGA influencer with no formal background in science as the commission’s chair. Since then, Thomas Dans has traveled the globe generating headlines. Serving as the administration’s main voice on the Arctic, he’s advanced some of the president’s wildest ambitions, like a takeover of Greenland, and rankled NATO allies in the process.

Yet as Dans holds forth in the U.S. and abroad, it’s not always clear where the administration’s agenda ends and his own begins.

He has repeatedly said, for example, that the U.S. needs more icebreakers, ships that Trump has long viewed as critical to dominating the Arctic. In doing so, Dans has championed one shipbuilder in particular — Damen Shipyards, a Dutch company with which he had a business relationship.

“They’re the largest builder of icebreakers and ice-class vessels in the world,” Dans said at an event in Anchorage, Alaska, in April. At the time, his consultancy was working to help Damen land an icebreaker contract with the federal government.

As he’s spoken to audiences of government officials, diplomats, academics and journalists, Dans — who wears his Arctic commission lapel pin and exudes a professorial air — has also waded into foreign policy.

In the media and at public events, he’s backed Trump’s push to take over Greenland. And he’s advocated enthusiastically for closer U.S. relations with Russia — even as a bipartisan group of lawmakers calls for tougher sanctions on the country and more aid to Ukraine. Dans and Damen have long done business in Russia, and Dans has regularly shared social media posts that reflect a pro-Kremlin viewpoint.

“We want a peaceful Arctic, we want a peaceful world,” he said at an event a few days after he announced plans to travel to Moscow. “Russia and the United States gotta get along for that to happen.”

Opining so broadly on foreign policy is “far beyond” the Arctic Research Commission’s scientific mandate, said Fran Ulmer, who served as commission chair for more than nine years before being replaced by Trump in 2020. “And certainly outside the bounds of what the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has done in the past.”

Dans, whose consultancy Almiranta Strategies “advises investors and businesses working in the Arctic,” according to his profile on the Arctic commission’s website, is far from the first in the Trump administration to mingle public and personal interests. The finances of many senior officials and the industries they regulatehave drawn scrutiny as Trump has disarmed government safeguards against conflicts.

“It’s become standard for people to pursue their personal financial interest,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit watchdog Public Citizen.

Under the law, Dans’ position gives him access to government information from other federal agencies — an arrangement that could benefit his private interests. Such potential conflicts are typically governed by federal ethics rules. But the nature of Dans’ role affords him more leeway than other appointees. Commission members are not considered government employees and thus not required to file an ethics form disclosing conflicts.

Indeed, a White House official told ProPublica that Dans’ consulting work did not constitute a conflict of interest for that very reason.

“Tom Dans is doing a great job leading the Arctic Research Commission, and his shipbuilding expertise has helped him succeed in this role,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The President appreciates all he is doing to advance American interests in the Arctic.”

The White House official said Dans is one of two commission members the law designates as representatives of “the interests of industry.”

Even so, Dans’ lack of research experience stands out. The other industry rep is a Ph.D. and former director of the United States Geological Survey.

Dans declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to written questions from ProPublica, but he told The New York Timesthis year that his post did not preclude him from working in private business.

The Arctic commission has arguably never been more important. The region is warming at unprecedented rates, accelerating sea-level rise and causing severe weather in the U.S. and elsewhere. The melting ice also has geopolitical consequences. Russia and China are conducting joint military exercises in the far north. New shipping lanes have opened there. And mineral deposits are becoming potentially more accessible.

At a public appearance in July, Dans cited the commission’s four priorities: military and national security, energy security, economic development in the Arctic and “what we’ll call ‘community security.’” He did not define the term.

From Russia, With Love

Dans has long been taken with Russia, the country that has by far the most Arctic coastline.

His fondness dates back at least to seventh grade, when he says he was recruited to learn Russian in his Maryland public school. He later visited Moscow as an exchange student, then returned to work in finance in the mid-1990s.

He worked at a private equity fund financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which aimed to grow the private sector after the Soviet Union’s breakup. In a LinkedIn post last year, he reminisced about how he and Kirill Dmitriev, a Harvard-educated banker who now serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intermediary with Trump officials, traveled in the same circles early in their finance careers.

Decades later, in Trump’s first term as president, Dans landed a job in the Treasury Department as a senior policy adviser for international affairs. There, he served on a secret National Security Council task force on U.S. control of Greenland, a role first reported by The New Yorker. A former Trump administration official told ProPublica the group’s purpose was to strengthen the United States’ strategic position in Greenland and devise policies to bring the two closer.

Perhaps because of that work, Trump named Dans to the Arctic Research Commission for the first time in late 2020. His tenure was short-lived. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, the new administration fired Dans and three other Trump appointees.

Dans was angry.

“We were fired without notice and anonymously slandered by the White House for ‘lacking relevant expertise,’” he wrote in The Hill. “At the time, I was the first commissioner in the agency’s 37-year history to speak fluent Russian, the language of the world’s largest Arctic nation.”

Dans launched an investment firm with two other former Trump Treasury officials, but it was short-lived, closing in late 2023. That year, Dans said on Substack that he was the “first American” to launch an effort to buy the Helsinki Shipyard in Finland, where about half the global icebreaker fleet was built. One of its Russian owners at the time was a business partner of a former Putin deputy minister. The effort failed.

He traveled the world, talking with officials in places like Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Romania. He lobbied on behalf of the Kazakhstan Embassy and that country’s state-owned national oil and gas company, records show. He devised policy recommendations “for Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction” as a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, his LinkedIn profile says. He also contributed to Heritage’s federal workforce-slashing Project 2025, of which his twin brother Paul was director.

Then in May 2024, he launched a nonprofit called American Daybreak. Its goal was to foster ties between the U.S. and Greenland.

After Trump’s victory, Dans promised in comments on Substack that “the next Trump Admin is going to Make America a Great Arctic (MAGA) nation!” In early January 2025, Dans and American Daybreak helped arrange a visit by Donald Trump Jr. and late conservative activist Charlie Kirk to the Arctic island. He then sought to bring Vice President JD Vance’s wife, Usha, to watch a popular dog sled race (the trip was scaled back after protests). Dans also enlisted Greenland’s most outspoken MAGA enthusiast, a bricklayer named Jørgen Boassen, whom Dans has called a “good friend,” to generate support for U.S. control of Greenland.

“The Best Icebreakers in the World”

Dans was not named to a new full-time post in the second Trump administration. But he remained in the Trump orbit.

He was a frequent guest on conservative activist and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. He spoke for one episode from Romania, plugging far-right Romanian presidential candidate George Simion (who was later seen with Republicans at the Kennedy Center cutting up a cake shaped like Greenlandwith American flag frosting). “There’s a phenomenon here that’s the silent George Simion voter, kind of like your silent Trump voter,” Dans told Bannon. “And that’s significant.” (Simion lost and afterward unsuccessfully sought to have the election annulled.)

By August of last year, Dans found another opportunity in the private sector. He posted on LinkedIn that he was “very excited to announce that I am working with Damen Shipyards Group, one of the world’s leading shipbuilders.”

At the time, Dutch prosecutors were investigating the company for supplying Russia with equipment that they said could be used for military purposes, in violation of European sanctions. In his post, Dans shared a photo of himself arm-in-arm with three high-ranking company executives, including Rutger Dolk, who was later detained by Dutch authorities as part of the probe. The case is ongoing. (Dolk did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions, Damen shared a press release that said it “has always acted in accordance with the applicable sanctions packages and that full transparency has been exercised about its activities.”)

Dans said he was working with the shipbuilder “to bring some of the best icebreakers in the world to the United States” and noted that the U.S. Navy had recently chosen Damen “to help it fast-track a new fleet” of a different type of vessel: up to 35 medium-sized ships to move troops and supplies to shorelines. According to records, the Navy bought the designs for the ship from Damen for $3.3 million without going through the typical bidding process, saying it would save time and money to go with a “proven” design. (The Navy did not respond to requests for comment.)

In December, Trump appointed Dans to head the Arctic Research Commission. The announcement said Dans’ primary focus as a businessman was “shipbuilding and transportation where, among other projects, he is leading an effort to develop icebreakers and ice-class vessels for the United States while helping restore America’s Maritime Base.”

Since then, Dans has championed Damen in conversations and at a public appearance. In April, he said that “outside of the commission, I wear a hat working for one of the world’s largest shipbuilders, which is a group called Damen.”

While ProPublica was reporting this story, Damen terminated its agreement with Dans, which would have paid him if the company got a contract to build an icebreaker.

If Dans was seeking to advance Damen’s interests, he may have been required under the law to register either as a lobbyist or a foreign agent, said Josh Rosenstein, an attorney who is an expert on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Documents show he’d done neither.

“It certainly would raise questions, you know, in my mind about what sort of interactions he, on behalf of Damen, had with the U.S. government,” Rosenstein said. “And with whom.”

The White House pushed back. “These so-called ‘experts’ have no idea what they are talking about,” said Kelly, the spokesperson.

Whether Dans has other business ties that could impact his government job is unclear. When at the Treasury, he reported holding a stake in Global Restaurant Management LLC, the parent company of a firm that operated multiple Papa Johns restaurants in Russia at the time. The status of that investment — which Dans reported had a value of between $250,000 and $500,000 — isn’t publicly known today because he’s no longer required to disclose his financial interests.

Christopher Wynne, who headed Global Restaurant Management, said he could not discuss another person’s investments.

Unlike most high-level presidential appointees, the Arctic commission chair — who is eligible only for a stipend of up to about $55,000 a year — is not a federal employee under the law. And while the commission has a policy seeking to prevent conflicts of interest, there are no penalties for violating it.

Dans’ outside commitments could be problematic if he used his access to the federal government to improperly benefit another employer or country, said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House and other agencies during Republican and Democratic presidencies.

“The fact that he has foreign entanglements and access to government-wide information,” she said, “it should raise national security concerns.”

ProPublica asked the White House about Canter’s comments but it did not respond.

A Chilly Reception in Greenland

Tensions over Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, have flared since Dans returned to the Arctic commission.

A month into Dans’ tenure as commission chair, Trump said he would take Greenland “one way or the other.” He initially refused to rule out military force. Dans echoed Trump, telling the BBC that month that “everything’s on the table.”

While Dans is a minor player in the federal government, “when he speaks, international audiences and officials see him as representing U.S. policy,” said Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In his first five months as chair, Dans spoke often to the foreign press and traveled to locales that included Denmark, Norway, Italy and Canada — as well as Mar-a-Lago in Florida and the Explorer’s Club in New York City, records show. The commission spent about $87,000 on his travel expenses.

He did not return to Greenland. But the administration’s rhetoric put Denmark on a war footing. The country sent soldiers to Greenland armed with explosives and plans to blow up airfields in the event of an American invasion. At one point, a Greenlandic politician told ProPublica, some schoolchildren were instructed to practice hiding under their desks in case of such an event.

Greenlanders have repeated a refrain: Open for business, not for sale. Dans’ remarks only seem to have further deepened divisions. In February, while at a conference in Norway, he was caught on a hot mic telling a Greenlandic politician that “the check’s in the mail.” A former chairman of the Arctic Research Commission, Michael Sfraga, was at the same conference and publicly told the politician to “rip the check up.”

Trump has continued to press the cause. In mid-July, he posted a picture on Truth Social of a map that included Greenland with the American flag superimposed on it.

The rhetoric has had consequences for Arctic research. Several Danish researchers said they will no longer participate in research with the U.S. One noted that her colleagues avoided Dans at a recent conference.

Dans’ current role in Greenland is unclear. He said at a recent conference he is not involved in talks among negotiators for the U.S., Greenland and Denmark that began earlier this year. In May, Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, and the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery, attended a business conference in the capital of Nuuk without Dans. Landry and Howery appeared for photo ops and opened a new, bigger consulate building, as protesters shouted outside.

A White House official told ProPublica that Greenland is “critical from the standpoint of U.S. national security” and “we are very optimistic that we’re on a good trajectory” in the diplomatic talks. The official did not address Dans’ role.

Reposting Russian Propaganda

Official visits to Russia have been exceedingly rare since the U.S. and its European allies froze ties with the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022, yet at his appearance in Anchorage in April Dans announced that he was planning to go to Moscow “probably in the next month” to discuss research cooperation. The trip never happened; the State Department’s official guidance on Russia is “Do Not Travel for Any Reason.”

Asked about Dans’ push for reestablishing ties and travel plans, a State Department spokesperson referred questions to Dans.

His social media feed on X is filled with foreign news accounts, sometimes from outlets sympathetic to the Kremlin.

He reposted a story last October from Kazakh media on Putin’s warning that the U.S. would fracture relations with Russia if it supplied Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.

In May, he wrote of his grandfather’s participation in the perilous Murmansk Run to supply the Soviet Union during World War II. “Happy Victory Day,” Dans wrote in Russian and English, reposting a video of Putin from Russian state media laying flowers at a soldiers’ memorial. The original poster of the video has been called a source of Russian propaganda by the Ukrainian government.

“Everyone obviously needs to be incredibly cautious when you’re reposting Russian information,” Conley said, because such posts could promote a narrative that is “against U.S. national interests.”

Posting “Happy Victory Day” in Russian may sound innocuous, but it is “a super-loaded thing to do right now,” she added. Putin has conjured Russia’s World War II victory when talking about Ukraine, even equating Ukrainians to Nazis in Germany.

The White House did not respond to questions about Dans’ Russia-related posts.

Under Putin, Russia has tied its future to the Arctic and the region’s natural resources, including liquefied natural gas. U.S. sanctions, which targeted the country’s energy sector, have set those efforts back — something that Russia has sought to reverse in ongoing talks with the Trump administration.

Dans has remarked on the developments on social meda, calling Dmitriev, the Russian who now serves as a key Putin negotiator with the Trump administration, “the Kremlin’s ace in the hole.”

“We’re older now and have some grey hair, but it’s neat to see who the Trump Administration is negotiating with,” Dans wrote of Dmitriev, who rose to head one of Russia’s sovereign wealth funds before being sanctioned by the Biden Treasury Department in 2022 for his ties to Putin and work raising funds from the U.S.

Asked about Dans’ calls for cooperation, Kelly, the White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump and his entire administration are willing to work with anyone in order to advance American interests, including peace in the Russia-Ukraine War. This approach has helped the United States bring both sides of the conflict together for historic peace talks.”

Dans seemed to downplay any differences with the Trump administration over Russia in one recent appearance, where he told an audience that included State Department officials, Russian Embassy personnel and Greenlandic diplomats that “getting Russia-Ukraine war ended, I think, is a priority. Stopping the killing.”

But the following month, in July, Dans opened and closed his remarks at a conference in Aspen by calling Russia a “neighbor.” He again urged that the U.S. repair its relationship.

“We need to be able to communicate with the Russians,” he said. “We’ve got some very important things to clear up with them with Ukraine, absolutely, but we have to work towards peace in the Arctic.”

Kelly said there was “nothing controversial about Mr. Dans’ remarks calling for an end to years of bloodshed and expanded dialogue.”

Doris Burke, Lynn Dombek and Alex Mierjeski contributed research. Joel Jacobs contributed data reporting.

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Cold comfort

Peter W. Singer and August Cole — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:50:17 -0400

The arrival of new weapons has often been followed closely by their use against civilian populations for strategic effects. Submarines, bombers, rockets; The Lusitania, Dresden, London. This 20th-century history portends that the emerging capabilities of the 21st century—cyber attacks, information warfare—will be similarly used against civilian targets. The challenge will be all the greater as extreme weather becomes more common. This month’s Fictional Intelligence narrative, set in the late 2030s, explores how adversaries could exploit the combination to raise existential questions about political, military, and societal resiliency.

An empty bar is a terrible thing to waste.

Tomec took in the Loui Bar at Steigenberger Icon Wiltcher’s grand hotel in Brussels and set himself in a plush leather club chair. The young sergeant in Poland’s JW FORMOZA naval commando unit was a large man, meaning he found most chairs uncomfortable. And he enjoyed his quiet, now more than ever. It was half an hour before a driver would pick him up, but he wanted to be sure not to miss them.

His military service had taken him to three continents, but he had never been to NATO’s headquarters, let alone imagined he would go for an awards ceremony, albeit a discreet one held after hours. He assumed it was a hushed matter due to the sensitivity of his wartime missions. The war had been officially over for four months, but a great deal of it remained clouded. With so much disinformation and outright damage to computer systems and cloud networks, people were still trying to piece together what had happened.

Tomec took a sip from his highball glass, careful not to get the cocktail’s muddled basil on his chin. He pulled out a paperback novel he had picked up at the airport, no longer trusting his old digital book reader after all the hacks. But as he tried to lose himself in the story, he found his solitude disturbed by a man and a woman entering the bar.

The woman was taller than Tomec’s nearly two meters; her black suit contrasted with her short platinum-and-purple-streaked hair. The man, shorter and bald, wore a loose-fitting gray suit, a white shirt, and a squadron tie in maroon polyester.

Tomac’s hearing wasn’t as good as it had been before the war, so it was hard to make out what they were saying on the other side of the room. But it was just loud enough to break the silence he had so welcomed. Then they collected their drinks, looked around at him, and walked over. The pair seemed entirely comfortable, which put him on edge. He put his book down, ran a hand through his thick brown hair, and started to stand.

The woman motioned for him to sit and did so herself, in a plush chair that faced his.

“You have good taste,” she said, in what Tomac took for a Dutch accent. “The bartender said we’re having what you’re having.”

“Gin Basil Smash,” Tomec said.

“Exactly. Less bevvy, more salad,” said the man, who spoke with a carefully neutral British accent. He was bald and significantly shorter than the woman. He wore a loose-fitting gray suit, a white shirt, and a polyester maroon squadron tie.

“I’m Aniek, and this is Wing Commander James Crick, 617 Squadron RAF,” the woman said. “You’re Sgt. Tomec Majka, Polish Navy special forces? We’re going with you to the awards ceremony.”

She pulled out her phone and showed Tomec a message from the staff officer who was coordinating the ceremony and reception.

“Bona fides,” said the man, offering a white-toothed grin. “Call me Jim.”

The bartender brought their drinks over and set them down on the low table between them, carefully placing a coaster with the hotel’s “W” logo oriented vertically in front of each.

“And this is Aniek Rasmussen of the Dutch Joint Sigint Cyber Unit, the real star of the show,” James said, toasting her with his glass.

“Not so much,” said Aniek. “I sat at my desk during the entire war.”

James and Aniek each took a sip. Tomec leaned back in his chair.

“Delicious,” James said. “How quickly we can take for granted something like a bunch of fresh basil and proper tonic water.” Tomec thought he sounded like a BBC announcer from the last world war.

“What kind of aircraft do you fly?” Tomec asked.

“F-35Bs,” James said. “Always thought when we went to war, I’d be doing close-air support or battling other 5th-gen fighters. Instead, they had us sucking up electronic emissions to track those sub-swarm motherships. That’s why I’m here. Led a few of those missions, made it back. Seemed to be enough.” He took a longer sip. “How about you?”

Tomec sighed. Sometimes what appeared simple was far more complicated to say. He was being decorated for defending the fiber-optic cable taps that ran through the Baltic Sea. A microsecond advantage in transmission time had produced a vital edge for NATO’s artificial intelligence-driven campaign. Some of the war’s most important battles had been fought hand-to-hand in the icy waters above glass threads carrying petabytes of data across the bottom of the sea. Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, he thought, the place where the devil says goodnight.

“Badly paid undersea fiber-optic cable technician,” Tomec said.

Aniek laughed softly and started fiddling with her phone.

“How about you, Major?” Tomec asked.

“Cyber defense,” said Aniek. “Civilian infrastructure, mostly.”

“You remember the heat disaster last summer?” said James.

“Of course. We joked that seafloor was only cool place,” said Tomec.

“Yes, we should have wargamed not just what climate change would do to our weather, but how an enemy would take advantage of it. A cyberattack taking advantage of a heat wave. Diabolical,” said James. “Not just the power grid, but the aircon systems for care homes and hospitals and schools, let alone our MoD and government facilities.”

Tomec thought back to a video call with his parents that August. It was 41 degrees Celsius in Krakow. They had been panting and red-faced like they were running for their lives, and yet they were just sitting in their small apartment’s living room, gasping out wishes that he would stay safe.

Aniek put her phone down and leaned forward. “It was more than just hacking, like all good operations,” she said. “We were subjected to an info-op campaign during the heat wave. They wanted to cause societal unrest, if not collapse.”

“People get angry at everyone when it’s too hot,” said James, fishing an ice cube from his glass.

“What did you do?” Tomec asked.

“We had lots of meetings,” said Aniek.

Tomec looked at her dubiously, as if she was also trying to keep her operation secret.

“Really, we did,” she said, with a smile. “We coordinated with private-sector companies and public institutions and allied intelligence agencies and hacker collectives. We shared data on everything. Absolutely everything, from incoming threats to best practices. We sent teams of experts to work on-site at targeted networks.

“That was our advantage in the end. The enemy had to keep their operations behind the veil, while we could pool all our information, ideas, and resources—as long as we broke down the bureaucratic and organizational culture barriers. And there is nothing like a good crisis to force that.”

“Well, however boring you want to paint what you did, if the attack had gone on a few more days, I’m pretty certain the alliance would have collapsed,” said James. “A toast, then, to the real hero of the war.”

Tomec nodded in agreement and lifted his glass in salute.

Aniek smiled in thanks, evidently embarrassed at the praise.

The Polish sergeant took a sip, rattling the ice in his glass, savoring the cool drink. It was true what James had said about how quickly we could take things for granted. Even something as simple as ice in a glass.

“Another round?” he said. “I think we have time.”

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The Pentagon is using polygraphs to hunt leakers, but the tests are more theater than fact

Brian O'Neill, The Conversation — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:41:12 -0400

In August, government investigators subjected roughly 50 military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff to polygraph tests as part of an inquiry into press leaks about the Iran war and depleted U.S. munitions, according to The New York Times. The newspaper described the scope of the investigation as unprecedented in the modern military.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has used polygraphs in this way; in 2025, it directed that a wave of tests be administered across the executive branch to expose minor leaks.

As someone who has taken roughly a dozen polygraphs during my 27-year career with the CIA, I am wary of how the process is understood – and of the certainty its use can appear to convey.

Polygraphs carry an ominous, almost mythological reputation among Americans. The more familiar and unofficial term – lie detector tests – likely fuels that perception. Television crime dramas have done their part, too, often portraying the device as an oracle for uncovering the truth when conventional methods fail.

In those portrayals, the polygraph is not merely a tool – it’s a window into the soul.

Among those entering government service, especially in national security, the greater anxiety is not the background check but passing the polygraph. My advice is always the same: Don’t lie. It’s the best – and perhaps only – guidance for a process that most assessments have concluded is a more subjective interpretation than empirical science.

Why the polygraph persists

Polygraphs are “pseudo-scientific” in that they measure physiological responses such as heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration. The assumption is that liars betray themselves through spikes in those signals. But this presumes a kind of psychological transparency that simply doesn’t hold up. A person might sweat and tremble simply from fear, anger or frustration – not deceit.

There also are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying. The National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and the American Psychological Association in a 2004 review, concluded that the polygraph rests more on theater than fact. A 2019 assessment reached the same conclusion.

Accordingly, polygraph results are not generally admissible in U.S. courts. Only a handful of states – such as Georgia, Arizona and California – permit their use even under limited conditions. And they typically require that both parties agree to admission and a judge to approve it. Unconditional admissibility remains the exception, not the rule.

And yet, inside many national security agencies, polygraphs remain central to the clearance process – a fact I observed firsthand during my time overseeing personnel vetting and analytic hiring within the intelligence community.

While not treated as conclusive, polygraph results often serve as a filter. A candidate’s visible discomfort – or the examiner’s subjective judgment that a response seems evasive – can stall or end the hiring process. For instance, I know that government agencies have halted clearances after an examiner flagged elevated reactions to questions about past drug use or foreign contacts, even when no disqualifying behavior was ultimately documented.

The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building in Washington in 2016. AP Photo/Cliff Owen

In some cases, an examiner’s suggestion that a chart shows an anomaly has led otherwise strong applicants to volunteer details they hadn’t planned to share – such as minor security infractions, undeclared relationships, or casual drug use from decades earlier – that, while not disqualifying on their own, reshape how their trustworthiness is perceived.

The polygraph’s power lies in creating the conditions under which deception is confessed.

A predictable pattern

No administration has been immune to the impulse to investigate leaks. The reflex is bipartisan and familiar: An embarrassing disclosure appears in the press – contradicting official statements or exposing internal dissent – and the White House vows to identify and punish the source. Polygraphs are often part of this ritual.

During his first term, Trump intensified efforts to expose internal dissent and media leaks. Department guidelines were revised to make it easier for agencies to obtain journalists’ phone and email records, and polygraphs were reportedly used to pressure officials suspected of talking to the press. That trend has continued – and, since 2025, escalated.

Policies at the Pentagon now restrict unescorted press access, revoke office space for major outlets and favor ideologically aligned networks. The line between legitimate leak prevention and the surveillance or sidelining of critical press coverage has grown increasingly blurred.

At agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, polygraphs reportedly have been used frequently – and more punitively – to identify internal dissenters. Even “cold cases,” such as the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion ahead of its overturning of Roe v. Wade, were reopened, despite prior investigations yielding no definitive source.

Government reaction varies

Not all leaks are treated the same. Disclosures that align with official narratives or offer strategic advantage may be quietly tolerated, even if unauthorized. Others, especially those that embarrass senior officials or reveal dysfunction, are more likely to prompt formal investigation.

In 2003, for example, the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity – widely seen as retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the Iraq War – triggered a federal investigation. The disclosure embarrassed senior officials, led to White House aide Scooter Libby’s conviction for perjury, later commuted, and drew intense political scrutiny.

Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, rides in the backseat of a limousine on Oct. 27, 2005, in McLean, Va. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Leaks involving classified material draw the sharpest response when they challenge presidential authority or expose internal disputes. That was the case in 2010 with Chelsea Manning, whose disclosure of diplomatic cables and battlefield reports embarrassed senior officials and sparked global backlash. Government reaction often depends less on what was disclosed than on who disclosed it – and to what effect.

A narrow set of disclosures, such as those involving espionage or operational compromise, elicit broad consensus as grounds for prosecution. But most leaks fall outside that category. Most investigations fade quietly. The public rarely learns what became of them. Occasionally, there is a vague resignation, but direct accountability is rare.

What the future holds

The Pentagon polygraph campaign is not likely to eliminate leaks to the press. But it may have a chilling effect that discourages internal candor while diverting investigative energy away from core security priorities.

Even if such campaigns succeed in reducing unauthorized disclosures, they may come at the cost of institutional resilience. Historically, aggressive internal enforcement has been associated with declining morale and reduced information flow – factors that can hinder adaptation to complex threats.

Some researchers have suggested that artificial intelligence may eventually offer reliable tools for detecting deception but caution that the technology is nowhere near operational readiness.

For now, institutions will have to contend with the tools they have – imperfect, imprecise and more performative than predictive.

This is an updated version of a story that was first published on July 9, 2025.

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We can buy more weapons. We can’t buy more time.

Todd Harrison — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:26:28 -0400

The munitions shortage caused by the Iran War is real and growing. While the precise magnitude of the shortfall is uncertain, the question now is how quickly the window of vulnerability can be closed. With no apparent path for passing a supplemental or regular appropriations bill by Oct. 1, the Pentagon will likely spend at least the first quarter of fiscal 2027 under a continuing resolution. The debate over what happens next will naturally focus on how much funding Congress ultimately provides, but for the munitions the military urgently needs, money is only one scarce resource. The other is time, and the two are fundamentally different. After the election, Congress can fund what it did not in FY 2026, but it cannot buy back the time lost.

The Pentagon’s own budget documents reveal the unforgiving timelines. The published procurement lead time—the time it takes from when an order is placed to when the first delivery arrives—is 31 months for the much-needed PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptor, 34 months for the most recent lot of THAAD interceptors, and 40 months for Tomahawk Block Va. If appropriations are enacted in December and new orders placed immediately, the MSE missiles would begin to arrive no earlier than roughly July 2029, THAAD interceptors in October 2029, and Tomahawks in April 2030.

Those dates presume that contracts are ready to be signed and everything downstream proceeds as planned. But if FY 2027 appropriations follow recent trends and slip to March or later, all else being equal, every date shifts three months or more to the right. A dollar appropriated in December and one appropriated in March may look identical in the final fiscal-year total, but to a production line waiting to expand, they are not the same at all.

That is why the details of a continuing resolution matter more this year than the topline suggests. CRs do not shut down existing production lines, but they typically restrict new starts and increases in production rates. The White House specifically asked Congress to exempt several munitions from some of these restrictions, including PAC-3 MSE and Tomahawk. Neither the House nor the Senate version includes that anomaly language. As written, the CR would prevent DoD from executing some of the planned FY 2027 quantity increases until Congress provides additional funding authority—potentially months of delay.

A second issue is that the administration made the timing problem harder by putting much of its munitions surge in a separate legislative vehicle. Of the original $350 billion FY 2027 reconciliation request, about $57 billion is allocated for procurement and research and development of munitions and interceptors. But the House-passed budget resolution provides only $60 billion in reconciliation for defense, far short of the request, and the Senate has yet to move it. If reconciliation stalls or is insufficient to carry munitions funding, the only remaining options are to squeeze it into an already full base budget or an FY 2027 supplemental—both of which are fraught with political challenges.

A third issue is the mismatch between the political calendar and the production calendar. This is not a buildup for the current administration or Congress. These weapons will not arrive until after President Trump leaves office—and too late for even the next Congress to see the first deliveries. Orders placed in FY 2027 for these munitions will not lead to deliveries until 2029 at the earliest. The 119th Congress is being asked to act today for the benefit of the next administration and the 121st Congress. That separation makes delay easy to discount politically, but it does not make delay less consequential strategically.

The military and industry can work to shorten these lead times. The military can buy new types of munitions designed for manufacturability at scale and speed. Both DoD and industry can invest in expanded production capacity, diversified supply chains, and pre-purchasing of long-lead-time parts. Much of this is already planned, although DoD has not been especially transparent about how the $92 billion of industrial-base funding it requested would support specific weapons programs. The framework agreements reached with industry set the stage for this surge, but each of these actions requires funding and takes time to yield results—and the procurement clock does not start until Congress acts.

The most certain way to speed things up is to stop delaying, and that responsibility rests with Congress. Every month that passes without funding and authority to ramp production of key munitions extends the window of vulnerability. Congress could get the process moving now in three ways: 1) add language to the final CR allowing critical munitions orders to proceed; 2) identify which reconciliation-funded munitions to move into regular appropriations or a supplemental; and 3) require DoD to publish a crosswalk connecting industrial-base investments to specific programs. Congress should debate how much money these programs deserve and which ones come first. But delay is the one choice it cannot reverse. The next Congress can make up for many of the things this Congress fails to deliver, but it cannot make up for time lost.

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The wrong way to review US force posture in Europe

Julianne Smith and Mara Karlin — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:00:00 -0400

Bloomberg recently reported that the Trump administration will consider European countries’ ideological positions and support for U.S. policies as part of the European posture review that is currently underway. Whether a country has supported the 2026 Iran War, placed recent restrictions on U.S. forces based in their country, or “publicly opposed” regulations that constrain U.S. business in Europe will all be factors in determining where and how many forces remain stationed in Europe. These loyalty tests depart from decades of established practices of evaluating and adjusting U.S. force posture, are likely to backfire, and above all, could leave America less safe.

The U.S. military’s ability to find, fix, and finish practically any target around the world is built on its global military posture. No other country has ever had such varied and dispersed capabilities, all enabled by an unparalleled network of allies and partners. The importance of our overseas posture leads many new administrations to look at whether troop levels, capabilities, and locations match the most recent threat assessments.

So when Secretary Hegseth announced a European posture review in June, neither of the authors was particularly surprised. When we served in the Obama and Biden administrations, both of us were involved in these types of major posture decisions from different perches, including inside the Pentagon, the White House, and at the U.S. Mission to NATO. We consider such reviews to be wise—but only when their purpose and scope are clearly defined and when the results are based not on politics but on the advice of our top civilian and military leaders.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be where the Trump administration is starting. By making a list of pass/fail questions about a country’s overarching loyalty to the United States—which has never been a condition of NATO membership—the Pentagon is conflating ideological fealty with costly and consequential questions about the future of U.S. defense policy.

In our experience, useful posture reviews start by evaluating what the U.S. needs to meet the contingencies it may face now and in the future. Instead of measuring allies’ loyalty, the administration should answer four key questions.

First, how might the Russia-Ukraine war end and what will follow? Despite a campaign promise to end it within 24 hours, the war shows no signs of stopping. Even more concerning, over the last year, Russia has increasingly tested NATO unity with airspace violations, cyber attacks, and sabotage operations. If the U.S. makes drastic posture changes, Russia might conclude that Washington is signaling disinterest in European security. An emboldened Moscow might choose to act against NATO territory.

Second, what types of global dependencies will exist in the coming three to five years? U.S. forces in Europe are often deployed to the Middle East and Africa, so this review must consider contingencies outside the Euro-Atlantic area. Recall that U.S. forces in Europe helped enable last summer’s 12-day war and Operation Midnight Hammer against Iranian nuclear facilities, and that they have been crucial for generating forces in the current 2026 war against Iran. AFRICOM’s headquarters has been located in Europe since the combatant command was created nearly two decades ago. The tyranny of distance across the African continent, coupled with the smaller U.S. posture there since the 2023 Niger coup, only further highlights the operational relevance of European posture for Africa.

Third, how do we expect European capabilities to evolve? Europeans are spending substantially more on defense than they have in decades, a shift that was turbocharged by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, it will be another five to ten years before they can provide for their own security. The United States must take Europe’s growing defense arsenal into consideration without leaving the continent exposed. At a minimum, and for the foreseeable future, the United States will likely need to leave in Europe strategic enablers such as lift, refueling, and long-range strike platforms; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities; and command-and-control infrastructure. Nuclear forces will need to be part of that mix as well.

Finally, beyond geopolitics, the Pentagon will face a series of age-old questions about basing that influence recruitment, retention, and the overall readiness of the force. Chief among them: is rotational or permanent stationing a better fit for today’s security environment and the health of the force? Rotational forces are often more costly and can be harder on troops since these tours are traditionally unaccompanied.

Posture reviews are extraordinarily complicated because they require predicting future requirements and weighing those requirements against the competing needs of multiple regional commanders. Such reviews can also damage our important, and increasingly fragile, relationships with allies if not handled with deft and delicate diplomacy. It’s rare to get it just right.

The worst thing the United States could do right now is to base this important posture review on which allies have backed U.S. foreign policy—especially as being an ally of the United States has never required blind loyalty. Allies are already reacting to the leaked questionnaire and pushing back.

Loyalty tests don’t build loyalty. They erode it.

Mara Karlin served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities and is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. Julianne Smith served as U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO from 2021 to 2024 and is a Distinguished Nonresident Fellow in Defense and Security at the Chicago Council for Global Affairs.

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CMMC Works. Now let’s sharpen it.

Katie Arrington — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:19:00 -0400

I built the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification because self-attestation was failing our war industrial base. Contractors could simply promise they were following basic cybersecurity practices, with no verification behind that promise. Our adversaries noticed that gap long before Washington did—and they have not eased up since. If anything, the opposite is true.

Nation-state actors and the ransomware crews they tolerate or direct are more aggressive, better funded, and faster than they were five years ago. This is not the moment to loosen the standard. The Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement requirements behind CMMC should not change, and I would not support it if they did.

But defending a program doesn't mean pretending it's perfectly aimed. Now that CMMC is a final rule moving into real contracts, it's the right time to ask: are we targeting it precisely enough? I don't think we are yet—and artificial intelligence, used correctly, can help fix that without touching the cybersecurity bar itself.

The problem is targeting, not the standard

CMMC's requirements hinge on controlled unclassified information. But CUI determinations across the war industrial base are inconsistent: Two subcontractors doing nearly identical work can end up with completely different assessments because the call still depends on manual judgment with incomplete visibility into how data actually flows down. Some small businesses get pushed into heavy assessment burdens for data that isn't really CUI. Others handling real, sensitive data slip through with a lighter requirement. Neither outcome helps national security; the first wastes compliance dollars, the second leaves real exposure unaddressed.

AI can do the first-pass sorting here—flagging likely CUI from contract language and statements of work and catching mismatches between what a prime contract designates and what actually flows down to subcontractors — far more consistently than today's patchwork of manual reviews. In this scenario, a human with contracting authority still makes the final call. But that human should be working from a much better starting point than we give them now.

Small business is the economy, not just the supply chain

Small businesses are 99.9% of American companies and employ nearly half the private workforce. And right now, they face threats most aren't equipped to handle: ransomware that can shut down operations overnight; AI-enabled fraud that's harder to spot every year, and a coming reckoning when quantum computing breaks today's standard encryption. The quantum threat is already real, since data harvested now can simply be decrypted later.

I'm glad the Small Business Administration is leaning into this. Its Cybersecurity for Small Business Pilot Program has done real work funding training through state partners. But training grants aren't capital, and no amount of counseling gets a small manufacturer through a ransomware recovery or a quantum-resistant encryption upgrade. Small businesses can't get favorable financing for cybersecurity the way they can for equipment because most lenders don't know how to underwrite it.

We need a dedicated SBA loan program for cybersecurity investment—open to every small business, not just those working with the Department of War—to fund things like multi-factor authentication rollouts, endpoint detection, incident response, and early migration toward quantum-resistant encryption, before it's an emergency instead of a plan.

Same mission, two fronts

Inside the war industrial base, use AI to make sure CUI calls and flow-down match reality. Outside it, give the broader small business economy the capital to defend itself against adversaries who are only getting more aggressive. I still believe unverified promises are not a security strategy. But precision and support aren't the enemies of security—they're what make it sustainable.

Sharpen how we target CMMC, and open the door for every small business to invest in its own war footing. That's not lowering the bar. That's making sure the bar is doing its job.

Katie Arrington is a former South Carolina state legislator and cybersecurity executive who served as DOD CISO for Acquisition and Sustainment starting in 2019, and later returned as DOD CISO/PTDO DOD CIO under the second Trump administration. She spearheaded the Pentagon’s initial efforts to create the CMMC program for defense contractors beginning in 2019, driven by a conviction that contractors needed to actually prove — not just self-attest to — their cybersecurity compliance in order to protect sensitive defense data from adversaries. Her commitment to the program has been described as stemming from a deeply personal mission to secure the Defense Industrial Base from cyber threats that jeopardize national security.

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New US security entities hint at more Latin American operations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shock wave

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

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

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

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

FICTIONAL PLA MEMO TEXT:

DATE: 203X July 2

REF: 33/CMC/24-8

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

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

Comrade,

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

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

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

1) PACIFIC ARCHER Systemic Overview

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

3) Operational Logic for Confrontational Thresholds and Active Defense

PART 1: PACIFIC ARCHER Systemic Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PART 3: Operational Logic for Confrontational Thresholds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion:

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

PREPARED BY: Commanding Officer Senior Colonel Li Feng, PLAAF

REVIEWED BY: Political Commissar Senior Colonel Bao Hu, PLAAF

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

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The antifa terrorism threat the Trump administration describes does not exist

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

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

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

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

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

Antifa is not a group

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

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

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

As such, the Trump administration created one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State Department targets groups overseas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implications of the ministerial meeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter GCAP

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

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

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

Walking a fine line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presidential national security powers

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

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

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

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

‘Domestic terrorist organizations’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Amendment rights at risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I fear that chilling speech may be the point.

Silencing dissent

NSPM-7 does not criminalize previously legal conduct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What is the Chinese military thinking about the Iran war?

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

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

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

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

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

1: Technical Masters, Strategic Amateurs

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

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

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

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

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

2: America’s Growing Strategic Isolation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3: The New Math of War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4: Self-Inflicted Cognitive Warfare

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

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

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

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

5: Strategic Pressure Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Don't abandon the US-UK nuclear relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Principal national security adviser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How integration works

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

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

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

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

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

Resolutely nonpolitical stance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Pentagon’s $54 billion bet on autonomous warfare

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

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

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

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

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

Why did Replicator fail?

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

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

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

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

Managing the $54 billion operational whiplash

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

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

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

Will DAWG be different?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Iraq comparison misleads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real precedent is Suez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Taiwan is a ‘model ally,’ not trade bait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veto, vetoed

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

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

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

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

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

Parallels to Kosovo and Libya

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

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

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

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

Where Trump administration may lean on Clinton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama did it, too

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

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

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

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

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

Unilateral action endures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to reopen the Strait of Hormuz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stop managing NATO. Start rebalancing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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