War on the Rocks

Cogs of War Turns One

Jonathan Panter — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:00:15 +0000

A mentor of mine, a superb scholar, once told me that good defense analysis starts with a trade-off. The classic example is combined arms doctrine, which is the foundation of modern warfare. Infantry, armor, artillery, and aviation work together to offset each other’s weaknesses. Each brings a combination of mobility, firepower, or protection, though none individually has all three. Infantry has a lot of mobility, but little protection. Tanks have mobility and a lot of protection, but limited magazines. Artillery in the rear has nearly limitless firepower, but no protection. Aviation brings speed, reach, and firepower, but little staying power,

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Good Medicine Is Combat Power: Clinical Innovation and the Lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War

John Quinn — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:30:55 +0000

War is a brutal driver of medical innovation. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has forced clinicians and commanders alike to confront a hard truth: Survival depends not only on tactics and technology, but on the ability to deliver advanced care under fire, evacuate and resuscitate the wounded, and preserve fighting strength despite repeated attacks on healthcare systems.Ukraine’s experience has reshaped combat medicine through necessity, resilience, and improvisation. The central question is no longer whether NATO can observe these lessons, but whether it can build a system bold enough to capture, test, scale, and field them at wartime speed. The NATO

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Macron’s Nuclear Gamble: Building a European Deterrent Faster Than French Politics Can Tear Down

Amélie Jaques-Apke — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:30:35 +0000

In early March, French President Emmanuel Macron stood at a windswept submarine base on the Breton coast and quietly buried four decades of French nuclear orthodoxy. The arsenal would grow. The numbers would be hidden. And for the first time, nuclear weapons that France built to defend Paris might one day be deployed to protect Berlin.Three simultaneous shifts — an increase of nuclear warheads; an end to transparency over the size of the force de frappe; and the launch of “advanced deterrence,” a framework offering European partners strategic dialogues, invitations to French nuclear exercises, and the potential forward basing of

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Three Short Tales on War Brad Carson Wants You to Read

Brad Carson — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:15:51 +0000

Editor’s Note: This is a new occasional series brought to you by War on the Rocks. If you would like to pitch your own version, please refer to the contact information and guidance on our submissions page.Every war, it seems, produces its famous novel, a book that captures not merely the tactics and the terrain but the moral weather of its time. The American Civil War gave us The Red Badge of Courage. World War I gave us All Quiet on the Western Front. World War II offered more competitors, as if the scale of the catastrophe demanded more witnesses;

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The Fall of Fortress Singapore: Three Lessons from the Collapse of Britain’s Great Asian Bastion

Iskander Rehman — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:30:44 +0000

Editor’s note: This is part of a running series of essays by Iskander Rehman, entitled “Applied History,” which seeks, through the study of the history of strategy and military operations, to better illuminate contemporary defense challenges.The fall of Singapore on February 15 stupefied the Prime Minister. How came 100,000 men … to hold up their hands to inferior numbers of Japanese? Though his mind had been gradually prepared for its fall, the surrender of the fortress stunned him. He felt it was a disgrace. It left a scar on his mind. One evening, months later, when he was sitting in

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Can Bankova Muster Political Will to Make Institutional Reforms During War?

WOTR Staff — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:15:47 +0000

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war. The perspectives gathered here are varied, candid, and often surprising, together forming a more complete picture of Ukraine as it really is.Frontline and StrategyОбозреватель —

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How Japan Could Co-Produce the Navy’s Future Fleet

Jeff Kucik — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:00:39 +0000

America’s defense industrial base cannot build the Navy out of the threat it faces. Decades of industry consolidation, persistent resource shortages, and inconsistent demand signals have delayed the production of critical vessels and munitions. With production bottlenecks stacking up, the Navy may have no choice but to let its allies do some of the building.Both the National Defense Strategy and Navy Warfighting Instructions highlight how mobilizing allies can field more forces to the mutual benefit of the United States and its strategic partners. Likewise, the latest U.S. Navy Shipbuilding Plan stresses the importance of allied investment and production.The Trump administration

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South Korea Could Build Nuclear Submarines, But It Shouldn’t

Wilson Grossman-Trawick — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:30:50 +0000

In late May 2026, South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back unveiled a roadmap to achieving one of Seoul’s top military acquisition goals: nuclear-powered submarines. This roadmap is heading in the wrong direction.During last month’s inaugural meeting of the Future Defense Strategy Committee, South Korea published its Basic Plan for the Development of Nuclear-Powered Submarines. Chaired by President Lee Jae Myung, the committee was formed to help South Korea build robust, self-reliant defense capabilities. During the event, Lee’s opening remarks underscored the symbolic significance of the nuclear submarine capability and stressed the program’s role in “strengthening the Republic of Korea’s defense

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The Gulf Arab States Need a Shield Built for Limited Trust

Mohammed Alotaibi — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:30:38 +0000

Missiles, drones, and maritime disruptions do not stop at national borders. Gulf defense architecture still too often waits for national permission to act. The Gulf Cooperation Council has spent decades building defense institutions, diplomatic forums, and a language of indivisible Gulf security. Recent crises in the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the airspace above the Gulf have exposed a harder test: whether those institutions can move at crisis speed when a missile salvo, drone attack, or maritime disruption gives the region minutes or hours, not days, to respond.The Gulf has no shortage of capability. The region has advanced

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Strike, Counterstrike, Repeat

WOTR Staff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:20:17 +0000

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***Iran Hostilities have increased notably in the last few days, effectively ending the U.S.-Iranian truce that had somewhat held since April. At the start of June, fighting further intensified between Israel and Hizballah in Lebanon, complicating U.S.-Iranian negotiations, as Iran has insisted on linking U.S.-Iranian talks with an end to Israeli actions against Hizballah. The fighting in Lebanon led to Israel and Iran trading direct strikes on June 7. Then, on June 8, Iran reportedly

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The Evolution of Ukraine’s Asymmetrical Combat Tactics

Scott Sweetow — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:00:43 +0000

In 2022, Scott Sweetow wrote, “Of Roadside Bombs and Drones: Putin’s Looming Insurgency Problem,” where he argued Ukraine’s fight against Russia would rely on a combination of conventional and asymmetrical insurgent tactics. Four years of combat later, we asked Scott to revisit his arguments.Image: National Information Warfare Center PacificIn your 2022 article, you argued that Ukraine’s tech-driven resistance could rapidly evolve into an insurgency-style force. Four years in, how have those assessments held up? Could one argue that Ukraine today operates more like an insurgency in some respects than a conventional state military? Classic insurgencies pit asymmetric or guerrilla forces against organized,

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Wargaming for Improved Acquisition: What Does It Take?

C. Travis Reese — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:00:33 +0000

A few months ago, I attended a panel discussion for a wargame simulating rapid industrial mobilization for armed conflict. Conducted by a leading university, with teams composed of former senior defense officials, the game probed how government and industry collaboration would play out given minimal coordination before the onset of a crisis. On the panel, the defense leaders confessed how infrequently they engaged with industry in real life to plan for a national emergency. This declared lack of public-private planning for large-scale conflict matches what I’ve experienced as a defense planner and wargame developer: Outside of rhetorical claims at annual

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The Chain of Peace: Do Supply Chain Chokepoints Deter War?

Phuong Pham — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:30:57 +0000

The next war over Taiwan may be deterred not by aircraft carriers or nuclear arsenals, but by a Dutch lithography machine. ASML, headquartered in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, is the sole manufacturer of the extreme ultraviolet lithography systems required to produce the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Without its machines, the most sophisticated foundries on earth — including those of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) — cannot operate. This fact should be at the center of how the United States thinks about deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. Currently, it is not.The conventional wisdom holds that Taiwan’s semiconductor industry acts as a “silicon

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The Maritime Action Plan Needs a Yardstick: Enter the Mahan Ratio

Ander Heiles — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:15:39 +0000

Washington is littered with the corpses of grand plans to restore the Merchant Marine. The Trump administration’s Maritime Action Plan is the latest attempt, and to its credit, the most comprehensive since World War II.The plan is the government’s blueprint to resurrect America’s commercial shipping and domestic shipbuilding industry. The goal is straightforward: build enough merchant ships and train enough civilian mariners to sustain the military through war, while cutting reliance on foreign supply chains in peace. With a $1.5 billion Maritime Security Trust Fund, Maritime Prosperity Zones, and fees on foreign-built vessels, it treats over a half-century of decline

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Dusting a Dirt Road: How The United States Can Break the Cycle of Failing Military Infrastructure

Jason McMahon — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:00:20 +0000

Winter Storm Uri ripped through Texas in January 2021. The frigid temperatures froze pipes, which then burst and caused flooding in aging barracks at Fort Hood, many of which were overdue for renovations and had vulnerable mechanical and utility systems. The burst pipes, damaged sprinkler systems, and frozen heating, ventilation, and air conditioning coils affected over 30 barracks, forcing soldiers to relocate and causing nearly $50 million in damage.According to the Department of Defense’s reporting, the United States owns and operates more than 700,000 facilities across nearly 5,000 sites at home and abroad. Much of this infrastructure is aging. Nearly

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Cascading Failure: The Spanish Navy’s Reserve Squadron and the Tragedy of Unpreparedness

Ned Breen — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:30:23 +0000

It is in long periods of peace that victories and defeats are prepared. Peace is the period for men of government, just as war is for men of action. Without the calm preparation carried out by the former, the courage and energy of the latter are of no use. — Captain First Class Ramón Auñón y Villalón, 1885.The Spanish-American War is widely remembered as a moment of triumph for the United States and a disaster for Spain. The war began in 1898 after Spain’s brutal effort to suppress Cuba’s independence revolt, American outrage over conditions on the island and the

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How Can Lebanon’s Partners Help Strengthen the Lebanese Armed Forces?

Faysal Itani — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:30:46 +0000

The Lebanese state’s lack of effective sovereignty is a crucial problem in efforts to negotiate with Israel and disarm Hizballah. In response to intensified fighting between Israel and Hizballah, the United States began hosting talks between Israel and the Lebanese government in April. However, fighting has continued, and Hizballah recently rejected a proposed ceasefire deal.In 2025, in a historic move, the Lebanese government made plans for the Lebanese Armed Forces to disarm Hizballah. However, the military made slow progress, partly due to fears that more aggressive moves might splinter the Lebanese forces. Meanwhile, Israeli attacks have killed dozens of members

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From Pyongyang to Primorsk: When Sanctions Evasion Becomes System Design

Olivia Vassalotti — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:30:36 +0000

Rarely a week passes without a new story about Russia’s shadow fleet. Tankers catch fire in the Mediterranean, are added to sanctions lists, or are boarded while passing through European waters. But the bigger story is not the vessels that are caught, but those that aren’t — ships moving between registries, ports, shell companies, and service providers that obscure their ties to Russia while keeping a sanctioned state afloat. The vessels that do get sanctioned are the visible tip of a larger scheme that North Korea spent years running, and Russia has refined at scale.Shadow fleets are typically studied in

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Is Skepticism Ukraine’s Foreign Policy Playbook?

WOTR Staff — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:43:42 +0000

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The Lawmakers Fighting to Modernize the Pentagon

Rep. Pat Ryan — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:00:34 +0000

Congress rarely moves fast, but Reps. Rob Wittman and Pat Ryan are trying to change that. The two lawmakers founded the bipartisan House Defense Modernization Caucus in 2024 and have driven reforms through two consecutive defense authorization acts, targeting acquisitions and other bottlenecks. Jonathan sits down with both congressmen to discuss their initiatives, how a caucus without markup power actually moves legislation, and whether bipartisan cooperation on defense can last.Image: Sgt. 1st Class Rakeem Carter via DVIDS.

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What Beirut’s Port Scanners Miss About Militant Supply Chains

Karim Chebaklo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:30:27 +0000

At the Port of Beirut, the new scanners did exactly what they were built to do. They saw the lithium batteries. They saw the drone propellers. They saw the fiber optic cable. They matched the scans against the paperwork, found no obvious deception, and cleared the cargo.That was the problem.The threat was not hidden in any single container. It was spread across many of them, arriving over weeks, through different vessels, different companies, and different bills of lading. The AI could identify what each shipment contained, but couldn’t figure out what those shipments, taken together, might be building toward.As a

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The Pentagon’s AI Edge Is Being Distilled Away

Sebastian Elbaum — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:00:18 +0000

Adversaries do not need to breach the Pentagon’s systems: They only need to harvest the logic of the publicly released frontier AI models that underpin them. This is a defining risk as the Department of Defense pivots to an “AI-first” warfighting machine. In this new context, military predominance is a derivative of AI model supremacy. From Project Maven’s intelligence fusion to the high-velocity sensor-to-shooter loops of Anduril’s Lattice, the Defense Department’s most advanced systems are tethered to the frontier models forged by tech heavyweights like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. As long as these firms hold the high ground in the

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After the Invasion: China Considers the Problem of Ruling Taiwan

Jude Blanchette — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:30:48 +0000

In August 2024, scholars at a Xiamen-based think tank published a paper urging Beijing to immediately establish a shadow Taiwan government on the Chinese mainland in preparation for a full takeover of the island. “It is imperative to prepare a plan for the comprehensive takeover of Taiwan after unification,” they said. The scholars were writing at a fraught moment for Beijing.Only months earlier, the anti-China Democratic Progressive Party had taken office after a third consecutive presidential election win. Unusually for a Chinese publication on such a sensitive topic, the paper made several frank admissions: that opposition to unification within Taiwan

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Is Time on China’s Side? Beijing’s Taiwan Calculus and the Balance of Power

Dean Cheng — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:00:20 +0000

When is the risk of war the highest? And what should the United States be doing about it? One of the most important but underappreciated questions in international politics is how states think about the future balance of power. Countries that believe their position is improving often choose patience. Those who fear their position is deteriorating may feel pressure to act before their advantages disappear. In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Amanda Hsiao to explore how Chinese leaders may be thinking about time, power, and Taiwan. This episode is sponsored by Kibu, which ensures you always know

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Forged in a Knife Fight: China’s Brutal Domestic AI Competition

David Lin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:00:49 +0000

China’s plan to become a world leader in AI by 2030 is a fixture of practically every Congressional briefing and expert commentary on Beijing’s AI ambitions. The plan’s logic — introduced in 2017 — was simple and alarming: Beijing would direct capital, mobilize its firms, recruit talent, and execute with the strategic patience of a state-led innovation ecosystem. Nearly a decade later, that frame has only hardened. Beijing’s recently issued 15th Five-Year Plan directs Party organs to take “extraordinary measures” to strengthen technological self-reliance and launch a new “AI+” initiative to integrate AI across the nation’s strategic sectors. Beijing has

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Revisiting The Importance of the Battle of Midway

BJ Armstrong — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:30:09 +0000

The Battle of Midway has assumed a place in American naval lore that has put it on par with other great battles in world naval history. What Salamis was for the Greeks, Trafalgar for the British Royal Navy, and Tsushima for the Japanese, the clash northwest of Midway Island on June 4, 1942, represents for the U.S. Navy. It was a moment of heroism, professional skill, and victory, which came to define how the Navy viewed itself for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.Unlike those other great battles, however, Midway was a decidedly modern naval operation. It involved

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Wrong Audience, Wrong Ask: Why Trump’s Abraham Accords Gambit Falls on Deaf Ears

H. A. Hellyer — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:15:24 +0000

When President Donald Trump repeatedly pressed regional leaders on Abraham Accords expansion late last month — framing Arab-Israeli normalization as a debt owed and a condition for a settlement to end the Iran war — he apparently commented there had been silence on the other end of the line.Arab and Muslim states are not silent because they lack a position on normalization. Indeed, collectively they have already articulated one through the Arab Peace Initiative — the 2002 proposal that offered normalized relations between Israel and over 50 countries. In exchange, it required Israel to fully withdraw from occupied territories, agree

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Will China and the United States Pursue Strategic Stability?

Michael D. Swaine — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:30:42 +0000

In 2024, Michael Swaine wrote, “How to Stop the United States and China from Sliding into War,” where he identified areas that could increase the possibility of an armed conflict between the United States and China. Two years later, after recent talks between President Trump and President Xi, we asked Michael to revisit his arguments.Image: U.S. Department of StateIn your 2024 article, you flagged a rising possibility of major armed conflict between China and the United States. That was before American forces became militarily involved in Iran. Does that involvement change your calculus? And critically — does it deter Beijing,

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The Rain in Spain Falls Harder on Ukraine: Rethinking the Spanish Civil War Analogy

Andrew Mitchell — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:30:21 +0000

In 2023, the NATO Baltic Defense College in Tartu, Estonia devoted its entire annual conference to the Interwar Period (1919 to 1939), a theme repeated at subsequent conferences sponsored by national militaries and academic societies throughout the United States and Europe. Western scholars and foreign policy analysts, provoked by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, seem persuaded that we are living at the close of another interwar era — one in which an egotistical European power shatters a decades-long continental truce, established and upheld by an international rules-based order, by invading a smaller neighbor ostensibly to defend threatened national minorities. A

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Does the Quad Still Matter?

Lisa Curtis — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:00:12 +0000

On May 26, India hosted a formal meeting of the foreign ministers of the Quad — comprising the United States, Australia, India, and Japan. Since its initial creation in 2007 and revival in 2017, foreign policy analysts have debated the usefulness of the organization, which was designed as a group of democratic states that could work together to counter growing Chinese power and influence. Under the second Trump administration, some analysts have expressed growing pessimism about the group’s effectiveness, given the president’s apparent lack of interest in attending a meeting with heads of state. Nonetheless, U.S. Secretary of State Marco

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Between Beijing and the Budget: The Domestic Realities of Taiwan’s Defense Spending Drama

Jessica C. Liao — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:30:03 +0000

On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages. The optics grew even more fraught as Cheng Li-wun, the newly elected chairwoman of the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s largest opposition party, embarked on a controversial “peace”

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The Toll Booth at the Throat of World Trade

Sujit Raman — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:15:59 +0000

In late February 2026, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to foreign shipping. What began as a chaotic wartime closure has, in the past few days, hardened into something more consequential: an official sovereign toll regime, codified in Iranian law, and priced in cryptocurrency.On May 18, Iran operationally launched the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, a formal state bureaucracy with its own internet domain (pgsa.ir), account on X, and contact email. Since then, Tehran has delineated a “management supervision area” across the strait and announced a transit-permit scheme that converts Hormuz from an international waterway into a vetted toll plaza.Under the

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Building a Better Ukraine Requires Accessibility Reforms

WOTR Staff — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:15:35 +0000

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Fences Not F-35s: Drone Attacks and the Illogic of Gulf Procurement

David B. Roberts — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:30:07 +0000

One of the most effective counter-drone systems in the largest drone war in history between Ukraine and Russia is a German anti-aircraft gun designed during the Cold War. The Gepard — a self-propelled 35 mm cannon that first entered service in 1976 — has earned recognition from Ukrainian military experts as the most effective weapon against Shahed-type drones, at a cost of a few thousand dollars per engagement. Meanwhile, one of the more novel counter-drone technologies amounts to a sharpened prong mounted on another drone that lances its target mid-flight — a 12th-century solution to a 21st-century problem.Then there is

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Deterring Russia Beneath the Waves: Securing NATO’s Critical Undersea Infrastructure

Samu Paukkunen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:15:28 +0000

What would happen if you woke up one morning and the internet was gone — not from a software glitch, but because someone had simply cut the wire?Threats to critical undersea infrastructure are rapidly escalating. In 2023, the Balticonnector pipeline and several Baltic data cables were damaged. A year later, four Red Sea cables were cut, disrupting a quarter of data traffic between Asia and Europe, with further incidents across the Baltic. In total, between January 2024 and July 2025, roughly 44 incidents of cable damage were recorded. Not all were deliberate, but Russia’s activity has grown brazen. In 2025,

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How America Lost Its Most Important Defense Tech Habit

Jack Barry — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:00:59 +0000

On April 15, technology podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a two-hour interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. For roughly forty minutes, Patel asked one question six different ways. The question was this: If American-made compute trains AI models with the serious cyber-offensive capabilities Anthropic’s Mythos Preview demonstrated — and that compute is sold to a strategic adversary — what responsibility does the seller bear?Huang’s answers hovered a safe distance away from the question. AI is a “five-layer cake,” he told Patel, and ceding any layer to China would be industrial suicide. The Chinese, he argued, already have enough compute to do

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Contriving Imaginary Gaps in Nuclear Deterrence

Jay Tilden — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:30:11 +0000

Among some nuclear strategists, military officers, and lawmakers, a belief bordering on the canonical has taken root that the United States is on the short end of a “deterrence gap” with Russia and China. Both countries, and especially Russia, possess theater-range nuclear weapons, whose comparatively small yield is thought to lower the threshold for their use. The relative dearth of these capabilities on the American side, so the thinking goes, denies Washington the ability to answer a limited regional nuclear strike with a comparable response and thus deter such an attack in the first place. Adversaries may therefore see an

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Glass Jaw? The New Economic Fragility Recasting American Power

Andy Polk — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:15:07 +0000

A pair of children’s shoes is an odd place to look for the changing dynamics of American power. But stick with me because, after the past year, it is one of the clearest places to see them.Long before those shoes reach a store shelf, tariffs have raised the cost of materials, components, and importation. Oil touches nearly everything else: synthetic fabrics, foam, adhesives, packaging, and freight. When both shocks arrive together, companies cut margins, cut orders, cheapen materials, delay investment, and eventually pass the pain on to consumers. Now, multiply that across the economy, and you start to see the

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Hollow Deals, Tricky Negotiations, and State Visits

WOTR Staff — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:30:51 +0000

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***IranThere has been increasing chatter that Washington and Tehran are nearing an agreement that might wind down the war launched by the United States and Israel on Feb. 28. The truce that took effect seven weeks ago has been a prickly affair, with occasional fire at Gulf states and tit-for-tats at sea — including in recent days, which have seen U.S. forces strike missile sites and vessels in southern Iran as well as shooting down

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What Would Relations with Post-War Russia Look Like?

Rose Gottemoeller — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:00:28 +0000

Rose Gottemoeller joined Ryan in Washington. They discussed how the West might think about relations with Russia once the war with Ukraine ends, as well as nuclear diplomacy and other critical issues. Gottemoeller was the deputy secretary general of NATO and, before that, served as a senior State Department official. She is currently at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and has a new book out called Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations after the Cold War (Stanford University Press).Image: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons Image: Kremlin.ru via Wikimedia Commons

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Control Without Ownership: How China’s Party-Business Networks Dominate Indonesia’s Mineral Supply Chains

Ahmad Syarif — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:00:38 +0000

In 2024, when Jiangsu Delong, the world’s second-largest stainless-steel producer, filed for bankruptcy, several Chinese firms and state-owned enterprises quietly absorbed its Indonesian assets. Among them was China First Heavy Industries, a state-owned enterprise founded in 1954 as one of China’s early Soviet-backed industrial projects. Today, China First Heavy Industries supplies military-grade metals to China’s military, including reactor vessels for nuclear submarines. For a manufacturer embedded deeply in China’s naval industrial base, securing nickel feedstock for specialty steels is crucial.The episode reveals China’s strategy for critical minerals: Incentivizing access to upstream assets for Chinese firms reduces the risk of supply

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A Sea Control Revolution?

Richard Dunley — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:30:16 +0000

Sea control has changed. In recent years, there has been a quiet revolution in maritime strategy that has seen navies increasingly expected to exert greater levels of control over more of the world’s oceans, more of the time. Whether it is NATO forces protecting critical maritime infrastructure in the Baltic, Pacific Island nations requiring maritime domain awareness to protect against illegal fishing, or Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels occupying features in the South China Sea, navies across the globe are confronting major challenges and are being forced to operate in new and novel ways. Behind all of this

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What Everyone is Missing About North Korea’s Reunification Strategy

Hyunseung Lee — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:15:46 +0000

When news broke that North Korea had revised its constitution, analysts in the West and across the Korean Peninsula rushed to declare it the formal death of Korean reunification as a policy objective. The changes were hard to ignore. Pyongyang stripped all references to a unified Korean nation, codified a territorial clause treating the Republic of Korea as a separate foreign state, vested direct nuclear weapons authority in Kim Jong-un personally, and concentrated near-absolute executive power in the supreme leader alone. On the surface, it looked like the official burial of seven decades of unification ideology.That reading is seductive. It’s

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What Did the NPT Review Conference Achieve?

Ankit Panda — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:15:56 +0000

The 11th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) concluded on May 22. Held every five years, the conference offers an opportunity to evaluate the treaty’s implementation, respond to technological and geopolitical developments, and reinforce states’ commitment to the treaty. For the third time in a row, the conference failed to reach consensus on a final document.We asked five experts for their perspectives on what the conference achieved — or failed to achieve.Read more below.Ankit Panda Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Host of War on the Rocks’ Thinking the Unthinkable PodcastWhile the

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Washington Shouldn’t Fly Solo on Building Space Superiority

Nazmelis Zengin — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:00:11 +0000

In 2025, Nazmelis Zengin wrote, “The Fragility of U.S. Space Power in a Multipolar World,” where she argued Washington’s space superiority could be challenged if the United States doesn’t rethink its course, taking lessons from mid-tier space powers. A year later, we asked Nazmelis to revisit her arguments.Image: NASA Kennedy Space Center/NASA/Chris Swanson via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that American space dominance could be challenged if the United States doesn’t alter how it systematically thinks about adaptability, resilience, and co-development, taking lessons from mid-tier space powers. In late 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,”

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Synthetic Biology, Drones, and AI: The Risks of Dual-Use Technologies

Lennart Heim — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:00:09 +0000

Is it too late to stop criminals and American adversaries from exploiting AI to conduct cyberattacks or design novel pathogens? Has regulation kept pace with the threat civilian drones pose to critical infrastructure? AI researcher Lennart Heim, Army drone strategist Paul Lushenko, and CEO of Sentinel Bio Claire Qureshi join Jonathan to discuss the trade-offs between protecting the public and letting the private sector forge ahead. The conversation gets into synthetic DNA, the risk of drones at the FIFA World Cup, and whether the U.S. government should get early access to Silicon Valley’s newest large language models.Image: T. T. Paris

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The Road to Space Runs through the Poles

Rebecca Pincus — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:30:17 +0000

Why are there more antennas on Svalbard than anywhere else on Earth? Svalbard of all places, where cats and childbirth are banned and there are more polar bears than people? This cluster of islands in the Arctic, one thousand kilometers from Norway, is key to everything from your weather forecast to your car’s navigation. At 78 degrees north, Svalbard is the highest-latitude satellite ground station on Earth and is a crucial point in humanity’s growing dependence on space. In fact, the polar regions — the Arctic and Antarctic — are both crucial to space access.The polar regions are the only

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Leading in the Dark: How Submarine Commanders Think Under Uncertainty

Paulo Frade — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:15:57 +0000

We had been tracking the contact for six hours.The acoustic signature was ambiguous. The geometry was incomplete. The tactical picture had shifted twice in the preceding hour.I ordered battle stations anyway. Not because I was certain, I was not. I ordered it because the decision window was closing. Waiting for certainty was no longer a strategy, it was a risk. That moment — the space between incomplete knowledge and irreversible action — is where submarine command lives. It is where I spent 14 years.Modern militaries have spent decades trying to eliminate that space. Networked sensors, satellite surveillance, and instantaneous communications

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Understanding the Value of Ukrainian Railways

WOTR Staff — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:30:21 +0000

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An Inconvenient Reality: Climate-Preparedness Cuts Are Lethality Cuts

Caitlin Irby — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:30:05 +0000

In 2019, the Missouri River flooded at historically high levels and damaged 137 facilities, destroyed 1.2 million square feet of workspace, and flooded 3,000 feet of runway at Offutt Air Force Base. Repairing the installation cost $1.2 billion. The Trump administration and Department of Defense justified $1.2 billion in budget reductions to the U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Defense Department climate programs as cuts to “woke” climate or environmental initiatives, but a singular event caused sufficient damage to erase those savings.The lethality of American presence in the Pacific depends upon the resilience of bases, ports, and

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The U.S. Military Lacks an Ethics Doctrine. Combat Effectiveness Suffers

Dennis W. Katolin — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:15:57 +0000

In 2004, I was a boot (translation: brand new) first lieutenant in 1st Battalion, 7th Marines at a retransmission site in the middle of nowhere, al-Qa’im, Iraq. I heard a sudden explosion and small-arms fire two kilometers away. The battalion radio net burst with chatter, with someone saying there were three casualties: two urgent surgicals (send help quickly!) and one routine (no rush to provide aid). Someone in the operating center asked about the status of the routine casualty, and the radio crackled with the kind of transmission that changes everything. “It’s Whiskey Six, he’s KIA [killed in action].” I

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Rebuilding American Manufacturing: A Keystone for Economic Statecraft

Mark Rosenblatt — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:00:37 +0000

Editor’s note: This is the ninth article in an 11-part series examining how the United States should organize, lead, and integrate economic statecraft into strategy, defense practice, and the broader national security ecosystem. The special series is brought to you by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and War on the Rocks. Prior installments can be found at the War by Other Ledgers page.In September 2010, after a Chinese fishing trawler captain was detained near the Senkaku Islands, Beijing halted rare-earth exports to Japan. The embargo lasted weeks. China showed, on a U.S. treaty ally, how a supply chain could be

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The Lessons of Sacrifice

Adam A. Scher — Mon, 25 May 2026 07:30:19 +0000

On this Memorial Day, American servicemembers remain deployed across the world. Many are in harm’s way. This simple fact makes the day less abstract, more real. Memorial Day is not only about wars filed away in history, but also about lives lost in service to the nation and the obligations those losses place on the living.For those who served in combat, the day is intensely personal. It is a day of names, missions, and memories that never fade away entirely. Three of the fallen return to me every year: Cpl. Andrew J. Kemple, 2nd Lt. Tracy Lynn Alger, and Sgt.

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Inside Ukraine’s Battlefield Innovation Loop

Catarina Buchatskiy — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:00:24 +0000

This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Catarina Buchatskiy, the co-founder and director of analytics at the Snake Island Institute, a Kyiv-based defense analytics center, and Viktoriia Honcharuk, the institute’s director of defense technologies. We asked them to share their views on how Ukraine’s military and defense firms turn battlefield feedback into rapid innovation, what Western investors and defense tech companies can learn from Ukraine, and what a future Ukraine-West defense industrial partnership might look like. Sign Up for Our Newsletter American and allied defense companies often speak about testing their products in Ukraine, but few have consistently done so. Why

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The Pentagon Still Cannot Manage Cyber Talent at Scale. Here’s the Fix.

Henry Phillips — Fri, 22 May 2026 07:30:14 +0000

The Department of Defense does not primarily have a cyber recruiting problem — it has a cyber talent management problem. The military already possesses serious qualification frameworks, scholarship programs, credentialing systems, and selection tools. What it still lacks is a system tying assessment, training, assignment, performance, and retention together across an entire cyber career.In March 2026, the department announced at its Cyber Workforce Summit 2.0 an effort to reinvent the cyber workforce. Called Cyber Command 2.0, this effort’s principal goal is improvement in talent management by focusing on identifying, recruiting, hiring, and retaining the right people. The effort also emphasizes

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The Kid Rock Flyby Controversy and the Erosion of Military Professionalism

Jason Dempsey — Fri, 22 May 2026 07:15:10 +0000

During Congressional testimony from Department of Defense leadership last week, Representative George Whitesides asked Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “How does canceling a command-initiated review support a culture of accountability?” But before the secretary could answer, Whitesides instead decided to direct the question to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, Caine replied, “What you are alluding to … is a partisan question.” The exchange occupied only a few minutes amid days of acrimonious testimony focused primarily on the war with Iran, but reflected how partisan considerations have now extended to

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China’s AI Governance Offensive Threatens U.S. Tech Leadership

Audrye Wong — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:00:37 +0000

China’s diplomats are on an “AI governance” offensive. At a May 5 United Nations meeting, China’s vice minister of science and technology championed China’s role in shaping U.N.-led frameworks that determine how the technology should be built and used. Just a week earlier, two top Chinese AI experts actively involved in Beijing’s governance efforts appeared by video on a Capitol Hill panel discussion hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders, touting China’s contributions to AI safety and cooperation.Norms and standards on AI development and applications are still being defined. Being a standards-setter rather than a standards-follower can simultaneously solidify a country’s technological

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The Operational Case Against Israel’s Gaza Campaign

Andy Milburn — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:30:53 +0000

Gaza did not have to look the way it looks. That is not a moral claim. It is an operational one.Claims of necessity are invoked to explain the scale of civilian harm, but they founder in the face of operational logic. Supporters of Israeli methods argue that Gaza’s urban battlefield — tunnels, rocket fire, extreme population density, hostages held underground — left no viable alternative to large-scale destruction. That argument rests on a false assumption: that large-scale fires were inevitable rather than chosen, and that the only tradeoff was between more fires and mission failure. That is a false choice,

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Europe’s Dangerous Hunger Games for American Troops

Vytautas Leškevičius — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:15:40 +0000

Every time reports emerge about a potential reduction of U.S. forces or capabilities in Europe, the old continent falls into the same cycle of anxiety and panic. The same applies to announcements about delayed or suspended deployments, planned rotations, or broader force posture reviews.A brief historical reminder here is necessary. The 2014 Wales Defense Investment Pledge is still often misunderstood in Europe as little more than an American demand for higher defense spending. In reality, it reflected something broader already taking shape in Washington: the expectation that Europe would gradually assume far greater responsibility for conventional defense on its own continent.

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A Check-In On North Korea and Russia’s Wartime Partnership

Choong-Koo Lee — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:30:26 +0000

In 2025, Choong-Koo Lee wrote, “Putting the Screws on the Partnership Between North Korea and Russia,” where he argued that the United States and South Korea should work together to weaken Pyongyang and Moscow’s military relationship. A year later, we asked him to revisit his arguments.Image: The Kremlin via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that the United States and South Korea should work together to limit the deepening military relationship between Russia and North Korea. How has the U.S.-South Korean relationship evolved over the past year, and what does that mean for the prospects of any joint effort? Separately,

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The Navy Needs Precise Mass and Here Is How to Get There

Michael C. Horowitz — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:30:39 +0000

Maintaining deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and around the world requires the U.S. Navy to change what it builds and how it fights. Sen. Roger Wicker observed in 2024 that the United States’ approach to fleet design and ship construction is “too small and too old.” The current model of naval power cannot scale at the speed modern war demands. The war with Iran is already exposing the limits. High-end ships are being consumed in sustained operations, munitions inventories are thinning, and replacement timelines for exquisite weapons stretch into years. Against a more capable adversary, such as China, those constraints would

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Machine Overmatch: What Salt Typhoon Reveals About China’s Data-Centric Intelligence Strategy

Ashley Ruiz — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:15:33 +0000

What if the next decisive intelligence advantage isn’t a recruited insider but a nation’s ability to model entire societies from its digital exhaust? Salt Typhoon’s multi-year cyber campaigns against U.S. telecommunications networks and critical infrastructure demonstrate China’s unparalleled focus on data-centric espionage: collect widely, analyze fast, and operationalize at scale — alongside continued investments in traditional intelligence disciplines. This approach reshapes how the United States has conventionally thought about intelligence advantage. From Exquisite to ExhaustFor decades, the U.S. intelligence community has prized what analysts call “exquisite” intelligence: narrowly sourced, high-confidence insight into adversary intent. That model depends on scarcity — secrets

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Asian Reactions to Trump’s Summit with Xi

William Chou — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:30:37 +0000

From May 14 to 15, U.S. President Donald Trump held a summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In addition to pageantry, the summit featured discussions about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, and bilateral trade. Both Washington and Beijing emphasized a relationship based on “constructive strategic stability.”Many countries, particularly those in Asia, were watching closely to see how the two leaders got along, what they agreed on, and what divided them. We asked four experts to tell us about the reactions in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines.Read more below.William Chou Senior Fellow and Deputy Director

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When Refusal Doesn’t Matter: Operation Epic Fury and the Erosion of Host Nation Consent

Bo Ram Kwon — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:30:35 +0000

When the U.S. military launched its war against Iran in Feb. 2026, it did not just dismantle Iranian military capabilities. It shattered the illusion that the United States would consult with its closest allies and that an ally’s refusal to grant base access can stop an American war in motion. Rather than the much discussed “outward flows” of military assets from the Korean Peninsula to the Middle East, it is the anticipated “inward flows” of U.S. military assets that could be more consequential in times of crisis.Focusing on the early days of the fallout of this intervention, I argue that

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The Recognition Question: Somaliland, Israeli Security Geometry, and the Red Sea Power Struggle

Iqra Salah — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:15:13 +0000

Since its proclamation of independence from Somalia in May 1991, Somaliland has sought international recognition for the territories under its control. Despite functioning as a de facto independent state for years, it lacked any formal recognition on the international stage until recently, when Israel became the first state to officially recognize Somaliland as an independent state. On Dec. 26, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel and Somaliland had signed a joint declaration establishing full diplomatic relations, describing it as being in the spirit of the Abraham Accords.Despite the enthusiastic reception in Somaliland, Israel’s move did not receive

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Ukrainian Agriculture as Strategy, Diplomacy, and Legacy

WOTR Staff — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:53:13 +0000

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Regulatory Friendly Fire: How ITAR Undermines the Alliance It Was Built to Protect

Gregory Kausner — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:00:49 +0000

For nearly a century, America’s defense industrial strength yielded a subtle benefit: influence as the world’s security guarantor of choice. But the system that once anchored partner access to U.S. weaponry is now an obstacle. Modern statecraft — the interplay of industry, diplomacy, and defense — requires a fresh approach to regulating defense trade.While the American arsenal accounts for more than 40 percent of global arms transfers, that share largely comprises exquisite systems for which the United States is unable to meet its own demand, let alone the needs of other nations. Arab partners expended hundreds of high-end interceptors to

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Army Aviation’s Wasted Decade: Lessons for the Next Generation of Drone Integration

Jake Steckler — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:30:12 +0000

In 2006, the U.S. Army’s 25th Combat Aviation Brigade deployed to Iraq, where it paired Task Force ODIN (Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize) with an Apache battalion from the 82nd Airborne Division — a first-of-its-kind teaming of attack helicopters with drones. These units combined manned and unmanned sensors to identify and destroy improvised explosive devices and high-value targets, leveraging drones to fill gaps in traditional rotary wing aviation. Col. Jamie LaValley, at the time a captain with the 82nd, told me he felt he was witnessing “the future of warfare.” “Man, Army Aviation is on to something,” he recalls thinking.

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Missiles Aren’t Strategy: Lessons From Iran for a Pacific Air War

David Deptula — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:15:51 +0000

Western airpower debates are increasingly driven by grim math. Analysts tally missile inventories, strike ranges, and sortie-generation capacity against a small number of critical runways, fuel systems, and aerial refueling aircraft. The prevailing conclusion is that U.S. and allied airpower could be severely disrupted early in a conflict with China. While China’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities place U.S. and allied air operations in the Indo-Pacific under sustained, lethal, and consequential threat, the belief that this numbers game guarantees victory is a fallacy — something Russia is learning the hard way in Ukraine. The 2026 Iran War showed why: Real combat is interactive,

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Restrain and Hedge: A New U.S. Nuclear Strategy for a Two-Peer World

Tyler Bowen — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:30:45 +0000

What if fielding more nuclear weapons makes the United States less secure, not more? That question is now at the center of a growing debate as the United States confronts a nuclear landscape shaped by two major nuclear rivals.China is rapidly expanding and modernizing its nuclear arsenal, while the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the last remaining nuclear arms control deal between the United States and Russia, has expired. In what appears as the beginning of a new, more dangerous nuclear age, some analysts believe the United States should increase the size of its deployed nuclear arsenal. Others believe

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South Korea’s 500,000 Drone Warriors Will Be a Hollow Force

Min-Cheol Jung — Fri, 15 May 2026 07:15:26 +0000

Ukraine has reshaped the battlefield with cheap, expendable drones. South Korea reads the signals and wants to match the scale. North Korea has been reading the same signals through a more direct channel. Since late 2024, North Korea has rotated thousands of troops through Russia’s war in Ukraine, alongside what is currently the world’s most combat tested drone force — tied with Ukraine’s, of course. Ukrainian defense intelligence reports that some of those troops have begun returning home and moving into instructor roles within the North Korean military.What exactly they are bringing back is harder to pin down from the

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In Talks with Israel, Lebanon is Walking a Thin Line

Faysal Itani — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:40:45 +0000

This week, Israel and Lebanon are holding their third round of unprecedented direct talks on crucial issues, including borders, the disarmament of Hizballah, and ongoing Israeli military action. The United States, which is clearly driving these talks, views them expansively as seeking a “comprehensive peace and security agreement,” although one that is contingent on Lebanese action against Hizballah. Ironically, as the most injured party, the Lebanese government is the one that can least afford a comprehensive agreement that would isolate it at home. This twist represents the single greatest obstacle to a settlement that would satisfy the United States or

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Maximalist Demands, Victory Day, and a Summit

WOTR Staff — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:00:58 +0000

Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.***IranA month after negotiators met for historic high-level talks in Pakistan, Washington and Tehran seem closer to a breakdown of the ceasefire that U.S. President Donald Trump announced on April 7 than a breakthrough. In addition to its blockade of Iranian shipping, the United States has been stepping up sanctions against Iran as part of “Economic Fury,” announcing several tranches of designations in recent days targeting its oil trade and banking networks. The toll on

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The New Era of Air and Missile Defense

Matthew Isler — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:00:05 +0000

Modern air and missile defense is approaching a structural limit. The model that protected forces over the past two decades remains effective, but only within a narrower envelope than current threats demand. A new approach is required, built on fire-control-level integration, disaggregated survivable architectures, affordable magazine depth, and the integration of offensive action as the central element of defense.I am a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and now lead international business development and strategy for Northrop Grumman in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I previously served as chief operating officer of DEFCON AI. As a defense industry

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Cyber Operations Aren’t Slow — Our Thinking Is

Timothy N. Neslony — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:30:51 +0000

The phone rang at 3:45 pm on a Friday afternoon. We were winding down for the weekend when the caller ID lit up — it was the counterterrorism analyst in our office we affectionately called “CT Brian.” When he called, it was never good news. An al-Qaeda-affiliated group seized an American aid worker. Her captors were preparing to move her within the hour and special operations forces needed cyber to pinpoint her location in 30 minutes or less. An assault team stood by, ready to launch — if we could tell them where to go. Weekend plans evaporated. Screens brightened.

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Meet the New Host of Cogs of War

Ryan Evans — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:30:25 +0000

Ryan sits down at the Cogs of War mic for the last time to introduce Jonathan Panter, the new host and executive editor of Cogs of War. Jonathan shares his background, from naval officer to scholar. They discuss major defense tech issues, and Jonathan shares what he hopes to accomplish at the helm of Cogs of War. Image: Cpl. Jacquilyn Davis via DVIDS.

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While the War Continues in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s Real Battlefield is at Home

Anna Varfolomeeva — Thu, 14 May 2026 07:15:07 +0000

On April 1, 2026, Russian officials announced the liberation of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic — for the third time. The first announcement came under then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in July 2022. The second one, in July 2025, came from the “republic’s” own head. By that point, Shoigu had already been reshuffled to the Security Council of the Russian Federation, but not for lying about Luhansk. The neat reports about Russia’s successes kept coming.In the fifth year of what the Kremlin calls a special military operation, that pattern raises a question worth taking seriously: is winning still Russia’s objective?Russia entered

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Analyzing Trump’s Foreign Policy and Its International Implications

Benjamin Friedman — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:30:42 +0000

In 2016, Ben Friedman wrote, “The Trump Administration Will be Hawkish,” where he argued that despite Trump’s non-interventionist campaign rhetoric, structural forces, hawkish appointees, and an entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy would push him closer toward conventional military interventionism. Ten years later, we asked Ben to revisit his arguments.Image: Max Goldberg via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2016 article, you argued the Trump administration would adopt a hawkish foreign policy, namely towards Russia, China, and Iran. What can we gather about his foreign policy objectives towards those countries from his first term and the first year of his second term? What factors have

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The Missing Navies: The Hormuz Crisis and the Limits of America’s Indo-Pacific Partnerships

Jean-Loup Samaan — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:30:28 +0000

On May 4, 2026, a South Korean vessel came under fire in the Strait of Hormuz, leading President Donald Trump to urge the government in Seoul to join the U.S.-led operation to secure the waterway. The South Korean government politely replied it would “review” the American proposal. The event crystallized a major paradox of the ongoing conflict: The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the worst maritime crisis in decades, is fundamentally an Asian problem, yet Asia is almost entirely absent from the debate over how to resolve it.In fact, not only are Asian countries greatly suffering from the Hormuz

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Dazed and Confused: How Marine Corps Promotion Boards Keep Getting It Wrong

Stephen McNeil — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:30:25 +0000

An old adage claims a marine’s career came down to the “two or three minutes of a promotions brief.” Turns out that was a little optimistic. In practice, the Marine Corps promotion system decides the institutional worth of a 20‑year career in about 12 minutes of board attention.Imagine the National Football League compressing the seven primary drills of the Scouting Combine — the 40‑yard dash, bench press, vertical and broad jumps, three‑cone drill, 20‑yard shuttle, and 60‑yard shuttle — into a single 12‑minute window. No game file, no multi-day interviews, no medical deep dives. In 12 minutes, it would be

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Pakistan’s New Logic of Limited War May Not Keep War Limited

Muhammad Faisal — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:15:11 +0000

In May 2025, as Indian BrahMos missile strikes hit Pakistani air bases — targeting runways, parked aircraft, and critical infrastructure — Islamabad faced a choice. It had the capability to respond with its own long-range systems, but it chose not to. Pakistan deliberately withheld the Babur cruise missile, not because it lacked options, but because using a dual-capable system risked signaling nuclear escalation.That moment captures the changing logic of conflict in South Asia. The four-day crisis was intense but contained, defined less by what was used than by what was held back. Yet, almost a year later, the sustained air

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Does OPEC Still Matter?

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:45:38 +0000

On April 28, the United Arab Emirates announced that it would leave OPEC, effective May 1 — ending nearly six decades as an OPEC member. In terms of oil production, it is the most significant country to leave the group. While multiple factors drove the decision to leave, the timing is notable — as the war with Iran has led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and focused global attention on oil prices. We asked four experts to consider the impact on OPEC’s future.Read more below. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute

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What Does SOUTHCOM’s New Autonomous Warfare Command Herald?

Gen. Frank Donovan — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:40:20 +0000

Gen. Frank Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, sat down with Ryan to discuss the vision behind the command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command and what it signals for the future of military operations in the Western Hemisphere. Donovan explains how SOUTHCOM aims to move drones and autonomous systems beyond tactical experimentation and connect them to strategic effect: disrupting cartel networks designated as terrorist organizations, strengthening cooperation with allies and partners, and giving the command new ways to see, decide, and act across a complex region. This episode was brought to you by NODA. Find out more about our friends at

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The Other Border Problem: How Russia and China’s Lawfare Threaten the Arctic

Jill Goldenziel — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:30:20 +0000

What happens when the Arctic starts to look like the South China Sea?Historically, a neutral region where cooperation prevailed, the Arctic is quickly becoming a contested space. This is no more evident than in the increasing scope and volume of Russian and Chinese lawfare affecting the region. Through excessive maritime regulations, coordinated challenges to Western continental shelf claims, and the use of shadow fleets to avoid accountability, Russia and China are increasingly coordinating their efforts to exert influence and challenge Western claims to Arctic resources and freedom of navigation. As these tactics continue to converge, the United States and its

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Closing the Gap? Italy Sets New Rules for Its First National Security Strategy Amidst Old Obstacles

Lorenzo Termine — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:15:35 +0000

Italy may finally be about to publish its first-ever national security strategy, a striking development for the only G7 country that has never had one.For decades, a mix of government instability, competition between institutions, a relatively permissive international environment, and the perceived reliability of U.S. security guarantees in Europe and the Mediterranean reduced incentives to produce a strategy. Recently, however, domestic political consolidation and external pressures have appeared to align in a way not seen before. Until recently, limited news articles and confidential interviews with policymakers, diplomats, and military officials pointed to a forthcoming publication that could address what military

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Sensationalism Doesn’t Serve Society

WOTR Staff — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:35:25 +0000

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Ankara’s Crossroads: Rearmament, Risk, and the Prospect of War with Israel

Ryan Gingeras — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:30:56 +0000

Talk of war in the Middle East abounds on social media, but not just about the one with Iran. A small, but significant, portion of this chatter relates to a conflict that has not begun. For more than a year now, pundits and politicians have warned of a potential clash between Israel and Turkey. Driving this hypothetical confrontation are a series of issues related to Syria, the Palestinian territories, and regional security as a whole. In December 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indirectly charged Ankara with wanting to reestablish Ottoman imperial rule over the Levant. To that, he declared,

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Conflict, CASEVAC, and the Golden Hour in the Age of Persistent Surveillance

Kai Gilmour Gath — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:15:54 +0000

Editor’s Note: This article contains frank descriptions of battlefield conditions, including accounts of soldiers dying by suicide following injury. Western battlefield casualty evacuation doctrine is built on assumptions forged during the “Global War on Terror.” Central among these is the belief that the wounded can be rapidly moved from the point of injury to progressively higher levels of medical care within a defined timeframe, commonly referred to as the “golden hour.” The concept itself originated in civilian trauma medicine decades prior, generally attributed to Dr. R. Adams Cowley of Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Institute in 1975. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert

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As Adversaries Integrate, U.S. Partners Bypass Washington

Ariane Tabatabai — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:30:53 +0000

The drones hitting Gulf Arab states daily since the United States and Israel launched large-scale military operations against Iran in February are not merely Iranian. They are originally Iranian, yes. But these designs and production processes were improved and refined by Russia through years of battlefield testing against Ukrainian defenses. So, they were returned to Tehran from Moscow. Confronted with a threat that Ukraine has spent four years learning to counter, the United States found itself in unfamiliar territory. It was one of 11 countries requesting Ukrainian counter-drone assistance to defend against Iran’s attacks, despite the American president’s assertion that

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Could Russia Follow the “Hormuz Playbook” in the Baltic and Black Seas?

Miro Sedlák — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:15:22 +0000

On the eve of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, 56 tankers sailed through the Strait of Hormuz. Two days later, Lloyd’s List, the maritime industry’s journal of record, counted just seven tankers and a single gas carrier — all small and three of them shadow-fleet vessels — with hundreds more drifting in the Gulf of Oman. One of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints had not been mined, blockaded, or seized by a navy. Rather, it had been priced shut by a handful of drone strikes and the insurance market.Within two days of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28,

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The Pentagon Needs a Playbook for Munitions Surge Production

Bryce Loidolt — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:13 +0000

The Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles the U.S. military fired during Operation Epic Fury take months to put on contract and years to produce.Whether driven by U.S. military operations or support to partners, the challenge of quickly replenishing U.S. munitions is not new. Exquisite munitions often take an exquisite amount of time to manufacture and deliver. Defense officials, in turn, frequently want to compress that time as much as possible, seeking to restock fast and mitigate future risks.The Russo-Ukrainian War has illuminated the challenge of accomplishing this feat. It also offers lessons for how the U.S can accelerate munitions production timelines

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What 300 Emails Say About Americans and the Army’s Direct Commission Program

Ted Delicath — Thu, 07 May 2026 07:30:52 +0000

For nine months in 2024 and 2025, I had an additional duty — monitoring an inbox that connected potential direct commission candidates with the Army’s individual branches. I served on the Army Reserve’s senior leadership team, helping to stand up a brokerage between mid-career professionals and the decentralized branch pipelines that controlled direct commission slots.During that time, I personally reviewed over 300 inquiries from accomplished professionals — data scientists, logistics engineers, cyber specialists, and strategic communicators — all of whom wanted to serve their country in uniform. The experience taught me two main lessons. First, people either regret not serving

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The Army Needs to Build Better Command Posts

Justin Lynch — Thu, 07 May 2026 07:15:09 +0000

It would be odd to see a TOC Mahal in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Often spotted at U.S. Army Combat Training Center rotations or large home-station exercises, TOC Mahals are sprawling tactical operation centers (TOCs) made from a series of connected tents, vehicles, and generators. They typically have maps posted at entrances to help people find their way through a labyrinth of desks, chairs, television screens, and cables. Most division command posts, many brigade command posts, and truly exceptional battalion command posts meet the criteria of a TOC Mahal. At their best, these behemoths foster collaborative planning by co-locating command teams

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How Much Longer Can Russia Last in the War?

Collin Meisel — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:30:18 +0000

In 2025, Collin Meisel and Mathew Burrows wrote, “Russia Can Afford to Take a Beating in Ukraine,” where they argued Russia was able to absorb the blows Ukraine was delivering and could continue fighting for a while. A year later, we asked Collin and Mathew to revisit their assessments.Image: The Kremlin via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that due to its sheer size — in service-capable population, economy, and munitions production capacity — Russia can absorb more of a hit throughout this war than Ukraine can. After another year of combat, Ukrainian defense innovation, and even more Russian

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The Cop on the Corner Is Our First Line of Defense: Local Police and the Surveillance Detection Gap

Matt White — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:30:15 +0000

Just before midnight on Nov. 24, 2025, New Castle County police officers conducting a routine property check in Wilmington’s Canby Park spotted a white Toyota Tacoma parked after hours. What initially appeared to be a standard traffic stop uncovered a detailed terror plot. The suspect — a University of Delaware student — was found in possession of a converted machine gun, more than 100 rounds of ammunition, body armor, and a handwritten notebook mapping out a planned attack on the campus police department, including entry points, escape routes, and the name of a specific officer. When FBI agents interviewed him,

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Between Intent and Capability: Assessing the Lack of Iranian Attacks on the U.S. Homeland

Matthew Levitt — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:15:19 +0000

Three days into the Iran war, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the quiet part out loud: The Revolutionary Guard’s Qods Force has long carried out plots around the world and now intended to deploy those capabilities against the U.S. homeland. The United States, a Qods Force statement carried on Iranian television warned, “will no longer be safe” as the Qods Force targets Americans within the homeland and abroad. “The enemy should know that their happy days are over and they will no longer be safe anywhere in the world, not even in their own homes.” U.S. authorities went on a nationwide high alert

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How the War with Iran Is Shaping U.S.-Chinese Competition

Zack Cooper — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:45:52 +0000

The war with Iran has once again raised questions about Washington’s ability to prioritize its interests in East Asia and particularly to manage intensifying competition with Beijing. Furthermore, the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have presented American and Chinese leaders with new challenges and potential opportunities, as they respond to the war’s global impacts. We asked five experts to address how the war is shaping competition between Washington and Beijing.Read more below.Zack CooperSenior Fellow at the American Enterprise InstituteBoth sides may be taking different lessons from the Iran War. Beijing appears to see it as another

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Acquisition Reform Needs Its Own Wargame

Stephen Bittner — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:00:52 +0000

One number buried in the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request reveals a decade of acquisition decisions in a data point: The U.S. Navy is requesting 785 Tomahawk cruise missiles. In 2025, Congress funded 55. That 1,200 percent jump is the cost of choices never stress-tested against the scenario unfolding today — a sustained air campaign against Iran while China watches the magazine drain.As a legislative fellow on the Hill, I watch acquisition reform proposals grind through the legislative machinery every day. A proposal usually arrives with a clean rationale: streamline this contracting mechanism, expand multi-year purchasing authority for this

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Practice Makes Deterrence: India’s Next Nuclear Challenge at Sea

Kunal Singh — Tue, 05 May 2026 07:30:16 +0000

When India’s third ballistic missile-carrying, nuclear-powered submarine — the INS Aridhaman — entered service on April 3, 2026, it marked a milestone decades in the making.With three boomers, India can now reliably always maintain at least one on deterrent patrol, thus completing the sea leg of its nuclear deterrent. Earlier, India successfully tested the capability to deploy multiple independently targetable warheads from a single missile. If it integrates multiple warheads into its sea-launched ballistic missiles, India further ensures it can cause unacceptable damage to an aggressor in response to an initial nuclear strike. With these capabilities, India now has the

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Abandoned and Ungoverned: Lebanon’s Palestinian and Syrian Populations and the Emerging Radicalization Landscape

Jack Schwartz — Tue, 05 May 2026 07:15:15 +0000

Inside Lebanon, the conditions for the next extremist uprising are quietly taking root.In the summer of 2007, the Lebanese Armed Forces fought Fatah al-Islam for three months inside Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Fatah al-Islam was a Salafi-jihadist group that exploited the camp’s power vacuum to establish a strong recruitment base, drawing recruits from Palestinian, Syrian, and broader Arab networks. Once the dust settled, more than 400 people were dead, and the 30,000 residents of Nahr-Bared were displaced for a second time. The very same conditions that led to the Nahr al-Bared clash are reassembling now,

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