War on the Rocks

Fighting in Ethiopia and the Risk of Regional Spillover

William Davison — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:40:20 +0000

In September, fighting broke out in Ethiopia’s Tigray region between Ethiopian government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), effectively collapsing the 2022 peace deal. In October, Ethiopian forces recaptured an airport and towns from the TPLF and started moving closer to the border with Eritrea. The renewed conflict raised concerns about both increased instability within Ethiopia — particularly as the TPLF joined with several other armed groups under a new Alliance for Survival — and the potential for a new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Ethiopia accused Eritrea of supporting the TPLF and sending its own forces across

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Establishing Battery Supply Chain Resilience for Drones

Morgan Bazilian — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:00:11 +0000

Militaries have spent more than a century operating with fuel and ammunition as limits of combat endurance. They are only beginning to treat batteries with the same operational seriousness, as small unmanned systems move from niche equipment to mass-consumption weapons. Recent bipartisan supply diversification efforts by Congress, the administration, and the Department of Defense provide initial momentum to ensure supply chain independence and resilience for drone batteries. Further targeted efforts can accelerate the establishment of a competitive, advanced battery and cell domestic and allied industrial base.A drone battery can occupy three logistical categories at once. For a reusable reconnaissance drone,

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Tehran is a Different Beast Now

Cole Bucy — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 07:30:35 +0000

The Tehran that the world knew is gone. It died in the fires with former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war in February. His son and new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — wherever he is and in whatever physical condition — witnessed his father, wife, and other close family members die in the same airstrike that wounded him. The White House believed that the conflict would last only a few weeks, but the Islamic Republic has proven less fragile than anticipated by the United States and Israel, who now must deal with surviving Iranian leaders

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Reading Pyongyang Through the Cracks of the International System

Markus Garlauskas — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:30:05 +0000

In 2023, three North Korea analysts identified what they believe most people studying the country get wrong, and how analysts can avoid those traps. Three years later, we asked them to revisit their arguments and offer fresh insights into what North Korean propaganda reveals about Pyongyang’s priorities.Image: The KremlinIn your 2023 article, you said the key to analyzing North Korean propaganda is identifying what is new and figuring out the reasons for any changes. What changes have you all observed in North Korean propaganda since 2023, and what are the potential reasons for those shifts? One of the biggest changes since 2023

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Guns, Growth, and the German Reinvention of Military Keynesianism

Marina Henke — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 07:30:41 +0000

In March 2025, Germany did more than loosen a fiscal rule. It fused two national emergencies — a deteriorating European security order and a deteriorating industrial model — into a single constitutional bargain. The reform de facto exempted German defense expenditure from any domestic budgetary ceiling — as the German Bundesbank itself has acknowledged — and enabled a military expansion of extraordinary proportions. E.U. debt rules of 3 percent of GDP for annual government deficits and 60 percent for public debt technically still apply — though 14 out of the 27 Eurozone countries are not expected to meet these rules

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In Skepticism We Trust: Ukraine Reacts to the Diesel Deal

Nicole Wiley — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:15:35 +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 week, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.Western 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

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The Pentagon Doesn’t Need to Reinvent Supply Chain Transparency

Ryan Caldwell — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 08:00:14 +0000

As the United States seeks to rebuild its defense industrial base, Washington is scrambling to understand an industrial ecosystem that it no longer controls, nor largely understands. China has been able to achieve strategic advantage against the United States through the targeted application of export controls and licensing requirements on specific materials at specific supply chain nodes. U.S. responses, by contrast, have largely been broader in scope and shallower in effect. It is as though China is striking the supply chain with precision-guided munitions while the United States is still using dumb bombs.Maintaining weapons stockpiles and a resilient force, let

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March Separately, Strike Combined: Rethinking Mass and Maneuver on the Transparent Battlefield

Randy Noorman — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 07:30:47 +0000

Between May 10 and 13, 1940, German Panzer Group Kleist advanced through the densely wooded Ardennes Forest, which the French considered impenetrable to large, mechanized formations. Numbering five armored and three motorized infantry divisions, totaling around 41,000 vehicles, the entire panzer group moved along just four Rollbahnen, or axes of advance, creating the largest traffic jam in military history.When the leading XIX Armored Corps, commanded by Gen. Heinz Guderian, converged on the French city of Sedan, it epitomized the concept of Schwerpunkt, or point of main effort. Following his maxim “Klotzen, nicht kleckern” (hit with the fist, don’t feel with

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China’s Strategic Reassessment of India

Yun Sun — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:30:27 +0000

As China and India have improved their relations in recent months, many observers have attributed this improvement to the end of U.S. strategic altruism toward India. Indeed, in the past year, China has watched India lose its balance and simmer in a sense of strategic disorientation due to America’s change of heart. Delegation after delegation of Indian strategists visited China, trying to mend ties in search of balance in the Chinese view. Many Chinese experts see India as returning to middle-power alignment for “economic authority and strategic freedom,” which translates into vigorous outreach to Europe, Japan, Canada, and all the

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Do the Benefits Outweigh the Risks of Hosting U.S. Military Bases?

Ayumi Teraoka — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:30:25 +0000

Since the end of World War II, the United States has maintained hundreds of military installations abroad. While U.S. forces have faced some objections to their presence, many allies and partners have seen U.S. bases and other facilities on their territory as a sign of their close relations with a superpower, a form of protection, and an economic boon. However, the war with Iran has raised questions about whether hosting U.S. military installations subjects Arab Gulf states to Iranian retaliation while failing to provide sufficient protection. The sudden withdrawal of U.S. B-1 bombers from the RAF Fairford site in the

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Golden Dome Is Technologically and Financially Infeasible

Frederick Lamb — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:00:39 +0000

For as long as nuclear-armed, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles have existed, strategists and engineers have pursued a seductive idea: a shield effective enough to diminish — or even block — a ballistic missile attack. The appeal is obvious. A state that could reliably intercept ballistic missiles could protect its cities from these terrifying weapons and reduce its adversaries’ leverage.But defenses against strategic ballistic missiles have a long history of disappointments. Over roughly seven decades, the United States has spent more than $500 billion (in 2025 dollars) on missile defenses, much of it to defend against intercontinental ballistic

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How Sudan Became a Laboratory for Drone Warfare, Thanks to Abu Dhabi

Yasir Zaidan — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:30:16 +0000

In June 2026, I visited Khartoum, my hometown, for the first time since the war broke out in Sudan in April 2023. I left the city to seek safety with my family after the war spread into civilian neighborhoods. I never imagined I would return to the same city. I was very excited but also traumatized by the destruction I saw as the plane landed at Khartoum International Airport. The airport was busy, with many Sudanese returning after commercial flights resumed in May 2026. But the growing drone warfare that is spreading over Sudan threatens the return of hopeful Sudanese

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China’s Military Expansion in Southeast Asia Masks a More Complicated Reality

Lucas Myers — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:15:12 +0000

The Chinese Ministry of Defense’s announcement of a “joint support and training center” at an airport in Ban Keun, Laos, on Sept. 29 drew attention to the People’s Liberation Army’s growing footprint in Southeast Asia. Although China does not call it a “base” and said it’s “not targeted at any third party,” it is China’s first publicly acknowledged overseas military facility centered on airpower. Ban Keun joins Djibouti and Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base as nodes in a burgeoning network of overseas Chinese security infrastructure.Concern is understandable. While smaller than China’s base in Djibouti, satellite imagery reveals eight light attack aircraft

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The Paradox of Victory: When Winning in Ukraine Raises the Nuclear Stakes

Jeremy Shapiro — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:30:24 +0000

In 2022, Jeremy Shapiro warned in “We Are on a Path to Nuclear War” that the war between Russia and Ukraine was heading toward nuclear escalation. Four years into the war, we asked him to revisit that argument.Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia CommonsIn your original piece, you named nuclear escalation as “the path that we are currently on.” Instead, the past few years have brought several rounds of stalled negotiations and, more recently, a near-frozen front line. What has kept nuclear escalation in check over the last year?We are still on that path. As the piece noted, “It is likely

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The Mecca Pact and Pakistan’s Bid to Become Indispensable

Muhib Rahman — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 07:30:47 +0000

For most of its history, Pakistan’s geopolitical value has risen and fallen with other countries’ emergencies. The Mecca Pact may be its most serious attempt yet to break that cycle. On Aug. 31, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey established a secretariat in Saudi Arabia for the Mecca Defence Agreement. The first secretary-general comes from Pakistan for a three-year term. The agreement builds on the Saudi-Pakistani agreement signed in September 2025, locking a decades-old informal security arrangement into a mutual defense pact. Turkey’s inclusion in August 2026 transformed it into a NATO-style collective security arrangement. The three states also outlined cooperation

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The United Kingdom’s Military AI Ambitions Need Guardrails

Georgia Cole — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 07:15:06 +0000

Advancing military AI capability is a priority for the United Kingdom, and in recent weeks, the new government has doubled down on its ambitions for AI and defense via two major partnerships.On Aug. 24, 2026, on his first overseas trip as the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham signed a landmark partnership: The United Kingdom is the first international partner to receive access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs. The deal will allow the United Kingdom to train its military AI systems with battlefield data, which give crucial insights into warfighting in the 21st century. In return, the

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Doubts Grow Over the Terms of Ukraine’s European Union Accession

Nicole Wiley — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:00:06 +0000

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Building an Arsenal That Survives the Tenth Salvo

Kevin Czinger — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:00:21 +0000

America faces a well-defined industrial base problem. Whether it’s a hypothetical Taiwan invasion wargame run two dozen times, the current Iranian conflict, or the Russo-Ukrainian War, the same result repeats: Magazines of key weapons such as cruise missile systems and interceptors empty within days, weeks, or months, and the current industrial base takes years to replenish them. Part of that shortfall results from the analog way in which missile structures are designed, tooled, and sourced, which locks the entire supply chain into rigid, design-specific schedules.The first salvo depends on platforms, positioning, and doctrine, all things controllable by militaries. But the

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How Taiwan Activates Beijing’s Chosen Fear

Charles Edward Gehrke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:30:25 +0000

The standard explanations for why Taiwan is so important to the Chinese Communist Party are familiar: territorial integrity, credibility of deterrence commitments, great power competition with the United States, the strategic value of the first island chain, and the semiconductor industry concentrated in TSMC’s fabrication facilities. These explanations work, but they don’t tell the whole story. Rational strategic calculation does not produce a posture in which a nuclear-armed state with the world’s second-largest economy treats a democratic island of 23 million people as a permanent, non-negotiable crisis. But what is rational depends largely on how history has defined you and

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Ground Robots Are Arriving on the Front Lines

Ryan Hartman — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:00:11 +0000

For years, ground autonomy lagged well behind its counterparts in the air. That gap is starting to close. Jonathan is joined by Ryan Hartman (Ondas Sentinel) and Scott Philips (Forterra) to examine what it takes to field autonomous ground vehicles in combat. The conversation ranges across what Ukraine and Gaza have taught them, what operating without GPS and resilient communications really looks like, air-ground teaming, and more. Image: Lance Cpl. Talan Werner via DVIDS.

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How China and America Can Move from Competition to Stability

Michael D. Swaine — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:30:20 +0000

The American team thought it was signaling restraint. The Chinese team saw preparations for combat. In a closed-door Sino-American crisis simulation I helped organize in the 2010s — which the U.S. military funded as part of a long-term project — the Americans repositioned an aircraft carrier away from a maritime dispute between China and the Philippines, expecting the move to reassure Beijing. Instead, the Chinese participants became deeply alarmed. They believed the carrier was now ideally positioned to launch combat operations while remaining less vulnerable to attack. The episode revealed how suspicion could turn an intended reassurance into an apparent

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Shows of Strength and Signs of Strain

WOTR Staff — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:34:47 +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.***IranIn late September, U.S. and Iranian negotiators engaged in indirect talks for the first time since the memorandum of understanding they struck in June fell apart. On Oct. 8, U.S. President Donald Trump said “productive discussions” were underway. But it will take some doing to break the deadlock. Tehran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within a week carries diminishing allure for Washington, as traffic through the chokepoint has trended upward. Also, Iran’s demand

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The Last Mile of Pentagon Reform Runs Through the Brigade

Lucas Ziller — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:00:47 +0000

A kill chain measured in seconds cannot depend on processes measured in weeks or months. The Pentagon recognizes that drone proliferation and AI-enabled lethal targeting are reducing decision cycles and increasing the premium on speed. The 2025 drone and acquisition reforms and the 2026 Artificial Intelligence Strategy call for faster procurement, fewer integration barriers, open architectures, continuous experimentation, and greater access to emerging technology.Yet the experience of myself and fellow soldiers in the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division (1/82), before and during its deployment in support of Operation Epic Fury shows that this reform agenda falls short at

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Fornication in America: Trump’s Arch, Rome’s Emperors, and the Meaning of Victory

Mike Fontaine — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:30:11 +0000

In 79 A.D., Gaius Plinius Secundus, known today as Pliny the Elder, was the supreme commander of the Roman imperial fleet, permanently stationed at Misenum near Naples. He died during the eruption of Vesuvius, after sailing across the bay on a valiant but unsuccessful rescue mission. Amid such heavy responsibilities, Pliny also wrote one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic works. He read and excerpted books of all kinds, and he knew something about Roman monuments. On the form and meaning of the triumphal arch, his explanation was characteristically blunt: “The point of columns with statues on top is to raise a

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Ten Wartime Technologies at America’s 250th

Cogs of War Staff — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

For America’s 250th anniversary, Cogs of War ran ten essays on innovations forged in wartime that subsequently diffused throughout the civilian economy, or had a lasting impact on society, governance, and Americans’ relationship with technology. We received submissions on a wide range of technologies, ranging from a copying lathe built for musket stocks after the War of 1812 to the stealth bomber. Over the last few weeks, subscribers to our free newsletter voted, and we’re pleased to announce the winners of our contest below.One idea surfaced in most of the essays: Historically, the government’s role in innovation was as much

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Achieving Breakthrough: Maneuver Warfare in the Face of Robotic Mass

George M. Dougherty — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:30:00 +0000

In 1914, European armies entered a war with forces designed to move. Within months, they were digging themselves into the earth. Fires from newly introduced machine guns and heavy artillery made movement across exposed ground a proposition far more deadly than in any war that had ever afflicted humanity. More than a century later, armies are confronting an unsettling echo of that experience in Ukraine.Drones and other robotic precision weapons fill the low-altitude airspace, detecting and destroying tanks and other large vehicles that appear anywhere near the Ukrainian front and devastating any attempts at mobile ground offensives by infantry. Western

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The Atlantic Brief: U.S. and European Perspectives on Nuclear Deterrence

Ankit Panda — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:00:59 +0000

For this edition of The Atlantic Brief, the Royal United Services Institute and War on the Rocks present a dialogue on U.S. and European Perspectives on Nuclear Deterrence. Participating experts from the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and the United States bring decades of first-hand experience in the armed forces, diplomacy, and foreign policy. They explore evolving views of America’s extended nuclear deterrence, the role of the British and French nuclear forces, and assess implications for NATO.Speakers: Ankit Panda: Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and host of the War on the Rocks

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The Navy’s Missing Welders Are Stocking Shelves

Michael Gilroy — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:00:02 +0000

The U.S. Navy’s May 2026 shipbuilding plan, signed by Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, uses the word “innovative” eight times. The plan applies that word, among other things, to the Columbia-class submarine, an acquisition strategy for the medium landing ship, and new approaches to running the public shipyards. Elsewhere, the shipbuilding plan notes that recent increases in wages at Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding got both yards to their required 2025 hiring rate and cut attrition by two to five percent.While added funding is a welcome salve to the Navy’s well-known problem of shipyard worker shortages, it

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How to Defend Against AI-Designed Viruses

Jason T. Kaelber — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:30:15 +0000

Anthropic recently disclosed five cases in which users hid their countries while asking Claude for help enhancing pathogens or toxins. This added fuel to the ongoing debate over whether progress in AI should be slowed. Insider warnings of threats to human lives from artificial intelligence have been received as everything from prescient humility to a hoax or marketing stunt. But in a world where AI-designed biological viruses have already been grown in the lab, the threats should be reckoned with in any biodefense strategy.The “AI doomer” model of biological risks is that AI will develop intelligence beyond that of any

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Kindling, Catalyst, and Containment: Will the West Bank Ignite?

Nathan Brown — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:25:37 +0000

As violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has escalated, often with the acquiescence or support of Israel’s military, and the Israeli government has increasingly constricted Palestinian daily life, the potential for a new intifada — or uprising — has intensified. The first Palestinian intifada began in late 1987 and continued for several years. Civil society played a major role in organizing the first intifada, which started as mostly nonviolent and included economic measures such as strikes and boycotts. The second intifada broke out in 2000 and lasted into 2005. It was much more violent than the

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Iran Faces Severe Challenges to Rebuild Missile and Drone Production

Jim Lamson — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:30:13 +0000

With the significant Israeli and U.S. military attacks against Iran in 2025 and early 2026, analysts have discussed and debated Iran’s ability to replenish its missile and drone arsenal. Since 2024, Iran has burned through thousands of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones in its retaliatory attacks against Israel, U.S. military bases, and other targets in the region. In addition, air and missile strikes destroyed many more Iranian missiles and drones along with their launchers. Importantly, Israeli and U.S. attacks in 2024, 2025, and especially 2026 cumulatively caused severe damage to Iran’s missile and drone industry as well

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Certainty is a Luxury Ukrainians Must Create

Nicole Wiley — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:40:35 +0000

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The AI-Assisted Strategic Own Goal in the Kill Chain

Dan Summers — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:16 +0000

For eighty years, the Western alliance has anchored its strength in moral legitimacy, shared values, and the resulting credibility to shape international norms. NATO’s durability through the Cold War rested on more than nuclear deterrence alone: a shared conviction that the alliance represented a rules-based order worth sustaining, in which the use of force was bounded by law, constrained by democratic accountability, and subject to independent scrutiny. Dozens of nations aligned with a framework in which power was subject to restraint.That framework is now under pressure from several directions, but one unexpected contributor is the increasing use of AI embedded

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China is Watching Us. Is the U.S. Air Force Still Watching China?

Peter Mattis — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:30:23 +0000

On Oct. 1, 2026, Beijing celebrated the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of the end for the U.S. Air University’s China Aerospace Studies Institute. The institute was one of several centers of excellence established across the U.S. military’s professional military education programs, with the Army, Navy, and Air Force each running a center focused on its own service’s needs. The China Aerospace Studies Institute, however, was more than just a U.S. Air Force and Space Force research center that provided open-source insights on their Chinese counterparts. The in-house analysts and the

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How Closed Airspace Threatens U.S. Military Mobility Across Eurasia

Alex Kolbin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:30:03 +0000

For much of the modern aviation era, geography was something the global aviation industry learned to overcome. Simply put, unlike a railway, a pipeline, or a highway, an aircraft does not require a continuous physical infrastructure between its point of departure and its destination. Routes could change, aircraft could move between markets, and hubs could rise and decline. If economics justified a service, aviation possessed an extraordinary ability to find another way through. Before 2022, for nearly a decade at Russian AirBridgeCargo Airlines, I watched that principle operate from inside one of the most geographically ambitious cargo networks in the

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Cyber Operators Are Deployed in Place. The Pentagon Should Treat Them That Way

Kurt Sanger — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:15:31 +0000

A cyber operator can spend a shift tracking an adversary halfway around the world, walk to the parking lot, and be home in time for dinner. There is no flight home, no demobilization, and no transition from an operational mission back to ordinary life. The war zone is a commute away. That arrangement looks like one of the advantages of cyber warfare. It is also becoming one of its human costs.Bloomberg reported in August that as many as five people working at or alongside U.S. Cyber Command took their own lives in a five-week period in June and July this

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Jaw-Jaw With Belarus, Revisited Amid Ukraine War

Michael Kimmage — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 17:30:16 +0000

In 2021, Michael Kimmage wrote, “Belarus and the Ukraine Trap,” where he argued the United States should adopt a realistic diplomatic relationship with Belarus that takes into account its strategic partnership with Russia and learns from overpromises made to Ukraine. Five years later, we asked Michael to revisit his arguments. Image: President of BelarusIn your 2021 article, you named Belarus as one of the most likely places for a war to break out between Russia and the West. Belarus became a staging ground for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet a direct confrontation with NATO has not occurred. What factors explain

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MacGyver at Scale: Winning Future Air Wars of Rapid Technological Adaptation

George M. Dougherty — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:00:48 +0000

During a recent training exercise in the western Pacific, a small group of engineers single-handedly saved the day.In the scenario, adversary covert forces used first-person view drones to intercept American helicopters that were shuttling between austere forward island airbases. Some helicopters were shot down, and the rest were forced to suspend flight operations, meaning the island bases were cut off from each other and from easy resupply. Fortunately, one of the U.S. bases included a small, forward-deployed team of military engineers and their equipment. They analyzed the adversary radio control techniques and then designed and built custom self-protection radio jammers,

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School of War or School of Battle? Educating for an Uncertain Future

Michael P. Ferguson — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:30:11 +0000

In 1901, military analyst Jan Bloch declared that new military technologies had changed war so radically that the study of history had become useless. He castigated military officers who prepared for future war based on “musty precedents” and who failed to recognize that the past was as irrelevant to the future as the experiences of caterpillars were to butterflies. Some of his tactical predictions did prove prescient: He anticipated that modern firepower and entrenchments would make decisive battle impossible. But he was very wrong about the continued value of history. After all, it was his study of past wars —

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Triumph or Procrastination? Experts Split on the Trump-Xi Summit

Sam Bresnick — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:30:48 +0000

Over the better part of three days, President Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington for a summit that drew international attention for its high-stakes agenda, from trade and AI to Taiwan. While some experts saw the summit as an exercise in kicking the can down the road on major issues, others emphasized the significance of Trump treating Xi as an equal on the world stage. Read more below.Sam Bresnick Research Fellow and Andrew W. Marshall Fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging TechnologyThe Xi-Trump summit yielded little progress on AI. Yes, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and

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Rated Ready is Not Ready: What America’s Korea Exercises Actually Measure

Alexei Hoffman — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:30:47 +0000

“We want to stop the North Koreans as far from Pusan as we can. Block the main road as far north as possible. Contact General Church. If you can’t locate him, go to Taejon and beyond if you can. Sorry I can’t give you more information. That’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you, and God bless you and your men.” -Maj. Gen. William F. Dean, orders to Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith, July 1, 1950, four days before Task Force Smith was overrun at Osan.The battery I served in at Camp Casey, South Korea, the 333rd Field Artillery Target

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Writing the Playbook: A Strategy and Doctrine for American Economic Security

Tim Welter — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:15:52 +0000

In January, this article series opened with a blunt question: Economic statecraft is back, but is America ready?Driving the question, in part, was the fact that the United States had not yet articulated (at least overtly) a strategy for economic statecraft. This was despite widening recognition that nations were increasingly using economic tools like tariffs and sanctions to pursue strategic objectives. U.S. awareness was particularly elevated by the realization during COVID-19 that decades of Chinese market manipulation, predatory trade behaviors, and security vulnerabilities deployed against its markets had gone unanswered.On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, Treasury Secretary Scott

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What Will Hegseth’s “State of the Force” Reprise Reveal?

Peter Feaver — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:00:11 +0000

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is expected to convene a high-profile meeting of military personnel for a “State of the Force” address this week. Will it show the U.S. armed forces as healthy? The answer may depend on how the audience responds, regardless of what Hegseth says. How the audience handles what could be one of the higher-visibility made-for-media events of the defense secretary’s tenure could tell us a lot about how the U.S. military has adjusted to President Donald Trump’s second term.Reporting on the event is spotty, which suggests the Pentagon’s leadership is still deciding whether to hold it,

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The Unhedgeable Bet: What the Future Combat Systems Can Teach Us About Acquisition

Andrew Tenbusch — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:00:27 +0000

The Pentagon describes Golden Dome for America as a “system of systems,” an integrated air and missile defense architecture that combines space-based sensors, orbital interceptors, ground systems, and a command network designed to defeat any aerial attack. Eighteen months after its founding executive order, the program broke ground on its first operational site. Its architecture remains so closely held that the Congressional Budget Office cannot fully price it, and cost estimates span from $252 billion to $3.6 trillion. The program also carries significant risk of failure, depending on how many tightly coupled, interdependent systems it attempts to integrate.One of the last

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The Discipline of Refusal: Constitutional Concerns About Lawful Orders in the U.S. Military

Kurt Shulkitas — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:30:47 +0000

Military doctrine gives officers a clear rule for manifestly unlawful orders: Refuse them. It offers no comparable rule when lawful action appears to threaten the constitutional structure the military serves. The first response is neither refusal nor resignation, but rather deliberative friction.Deliberative friction is the professional duty to raise a credible constitutional concern in a form that remains attributable and survives the decision to execute. The officer submits the concern in writing to the commander and copies an inspector general, while the authorized decision-maker retains control of execution. An individual officer will often see only a fragment of a larger

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The Manhattan Project Mindset: How Nuclear Analogies Are Steering AI Policy Off Course

Rebecca Gibbons — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:15:45 +0000

Analogies for artificial intelligence abound. In recent years, analysts have likened the development of AI to the advent of electricity, the Industrial Revolution, contact with extraterrestrials, and at least fifty other things. One analogy, however, appears to have won out over the rest: AI is like nuclear weapons.This comparison is now ubiquitous in government rhetoric, policy debates, and media accounts about AI. The risks of advanced AI are equated with the existential risk posed by nuclear weapons. There are several references to AI development as a modern-day Manhattan Project. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review’s 2024 Annual Report to Congress

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Why the Week’s Most Important Story Went Unwritten

Nicole Wiley — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:15:39 +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 StrategyДзеркало

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Collective Defense in an Era of Tokens and Data Links

Adm. Pierre Vandier — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:00:19 +0000

NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, Adm. Pierre Vandier, returns to the studio to discuss how the alliance is continuously adapting to a new era of warfare driven by software, data, and uncrewed systems, and where it still lags. He explains why NATO is favoring field experimentation, how allies can build sovereign defense tech ecosystems without sacrificing interoperability, and what the right balance between unmanned and legacy platforms might look like.Image: 1st Sgt. Austin Berner via DVIDS.

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Speed to Fielding Is Not Speed to Combat Power

Michael Woodhouse — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:30:47 +0000

I spent more than 20 years in U.S. Army air defense, much of it in cramped control stations where the difference between a successful engagement and a catastrophic loss came down to the soldier at the console. The radar did its job. The fire control system did its job. But the responsibility, the weight, and the trust sat on one person making a call in seconds, sometimes less.Now I sit on the other side of the fence, as vice president of space, air, and missile defense for business development at Leonardo DRS. I work for a defense contractor with a

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Tracing the Future Soldier’s Tech Stack

Cogs of War Staff — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 08:00:28 +0000

Movies, shows, and books have long been at the forefront of imagining the future of war. If you were to picture the “future soldier,” you’d likely picture the genetically engineered super soldiers that have captivated — and horrified — audiences for decades. Soldiers have been depicted as being engineered or bred for super strength or speed, intense rage or cold calculation, and even half-human, half-machine.While Hollywood’s most alarmist visions for the future soldier are nothing more than fantasy, advances in technologies and AI are pushing the frontier of soldier technologies. Cogs of War staff wanted to sort through what capabilities have

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North Korea’s Irregular Warfare After Ukraine

Anton Ponomarenko — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 07:30:29 +0000

Pyongyang has a long history of conducting irregular warfare and asymmetric operations: Look no further than the 1968 Blue House raid or the 1996 submarine incursion as the most pressing examples. More often than not, North Korea failed to achieve the intended objectives of its missions and lost its commandos. Despite failures, the regime pressed on, and now, over thirty years after the sub incursion, it has the combat experience of its special operations forces in Kursk to leverage. For policymakers and analysts, the more urgent question is that of transferability and operationalization of the Kursk lessons to the Korean

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Power, Prudence, and Restraint in Fénelon’s Telemachus

Iskander Rehman — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:30:45 +0000

“If one is to judge by the fire and ardor with which this book is sought after, it is the most excellent of all books. Never were so many copies printed of any work; never were so many editions made of a single book; never has any writing been read by so many people.” -Pierre-Valentin Faydit in La Télémacomanie (1700), snidely critiquing the “mania” surrounding the initial publication of The Adventures of Telemachus.A sprawling epic that thrills the public, mesmerizes it with its aesthetic qualities and technical prowess, and reignites collective interest in some of the most foundational texts of

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The New Signature Wounds: How Drone Warfare Is Reshaping the Injuries Veterans Bring Home

Robert Chisholm — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:15:36 +0000

Traumatic brain injury became the signature wound of the post-9/11 wars because the battlefield changed. Improvised explosive devices changed the nature of American combat injuries. But the medical and legal systems that followed — including the Department of Veterans Affairs’ own adjudication frameworks — took years to catch up.Drone warfare is doing it again. And the gap between battlefield reality and the systems meant to support veterans may be widening faster than the last time.As a veterans disability appellate law firm, Chisholm Chisholm & Kilpatrick has represented tens of thousands of veterans in situations like this — instances where the

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South Korea’s Deliberate Strategic Ambiguity on Taiwan

Sungmin Cho — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:30:17 +0000

In 2021, Sungmin Cho wrote, “South Korea’s Taiwan Conundrum,” where he argued Seoul’s complex strategic position makes engagement on questions of involvement over a Taiwan contingency complicated. Five years later, we asked him to revisit his arguments.Image: U.S. Navy (Photo by Seaman Apprentice Cale Hatch)In your 2021 article, you argued that Seoul should more actively engage in strategic dialogue with Washington on Taiwan issues. Five years later, what does that dialogue look like? How has South Korea adjusted its strategic thinking regarding involvement in a potential Taiwan contingency since 2021, based on its relationship with the United States?Outside the government, the

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Winning by the Rules: Optimizing Weapons Reviews in the Age of Technological Innovation

Nathan Wood — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:00:48 +0000

We spare the reader another detailed story from Ukraine to establish the now-familiar point that battlefield technology changes faster than militaries can acquire, review, and field it. The villain in this story is easy to identify: bureaucracy. The fashionable remedies are equally familiar — cut the red tape slowing procurement, or revise the policy review requirements for autonomous weapon systems. But bureaucratic reform, however necessary, cannot eliminate the fundamental challenges machine-learning-based systems pose for rapid testing, evaluation, validation, and verification. Moreover, legal and operational reasons make it unwise to cut corners on compliance with domestic and international law.Rather than relying

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Seoul Needs a Playbook for Hormuz, Ukraine, and What Comes Next

Jun-seok Lee — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:30:13 +0000

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump shared a Washington Post opinion piece on his social media, arguing that South Korea should send its Cheongung-II air-defense system to Ukraine. Additionally, the Trump administration continues to pressure Seoul to send troops to the Strait of Hormuz. Neither the U.S.-Iranian conflict nor the Russo-Ukrainian War is new, yet the simultaneity of U.S. pressure on Seoul to help in its war with Iran and to support Ukraine is striking.While such diverging asks are indeed unprecedented, this is partly due to a lack of principles that stipulate a clear South Korean position. South Korea should

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What the End of Operation Inherent Resolve Means for Iraq and Syria

Victoria Taylor — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:50:05 +0000

Operation Inherent Resolve is scheduled to end on Sept. 30, as remaining U.S. troops in northern Iraq complete their withdrawal. The United States formed Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve in October 2014 to bring together partners to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which had seized territory in parts of Iraq and Syria. The end of Operation Inherent Resolve highlights the success of coalition efforts against ISIL but also raises questions about future political stability and security in Iraq and Syria — and whether ISIL could rise again. The U.S. departure from northern

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Missed the Marque: Cyber Privateers Wanted, Compensation to Be Determined

Justin Hardy — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 07:30:08 +0000

Coverage of the new White House memorandum on combating cybercrime quickly reached the privateer label. CNN called the participants “cyber privateers,” invoking the image of government-sanctioned raiders working the high seas of cyberspace, hauling in digital booty. The reality is considerably less romantic. The administration has tried to create a private offensive cyber program using an exception buried in outdated legislation, and that has shaped how the program must be constructed. For this reason and others, the proposed framework will likely not attract the talent needed to address transnational cybercrime meaningfully.Within a single month, Congress and the White House each

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Zelensky’s Perception Problem: Are New Partnerships a Solution?

Nicole Wiley — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:55:46 +0000

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Washington’s Foreign Equity Bets Need Better Governance

Stephen Rodriguez — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:00:50 +0000

What do a rare earth mine in Brazil and a graphite mine in Mozambique have in common? Both have received significant United States government funding. The rub? Neither was subject, when the financing was committed, to the corporate governance standards that American listed companies are: an independent board, an independent audit committee, and audited disclosure to shareholders.There are strong national and economic security justifications for the recent push to use equity strategically to build secure American supply chains. Congress created the Development Finance Corporation in 2018 and the CHIPS program office in 2022, and has adopted a sharply faster pace

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Only America Could Have Designed the Field Jacket

Charles McFarlane — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:30:53 +0000

When the M-1943 field jacket was introduced at the height of World War II, it was a revolutionary garment. The jacket was the result of rigorous testing, input from an astonishingly diverse group of experts, and was produced by the most advanced textile and garment industry in the world at the time. But the essence of the M-1943 field jacket, and what made it so unique, was the very simple question it was trying to answer: “What does the soldier want?”The success of the field jacket highlights how a diversity of thought, a mastery of logistics, and a concern for

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Pressure Points

WOTR Staff — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:30:37 +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.***IranSenior officials from Iran, Oman, and neighboring Gulf states were scheduled to meet in Salalah on Monday to unveil the provisions of a deal for managing the Strait of Hormuz. Those plans unraveled before the meeting could take place, and Oman’s foreign minister announced a postponement.For Tehran, securing buy-in from U.S. allies in the Gulf was potentially a step toward resuming negotiations with Washington — presenting the Trump administration with a fix, even if temporary,

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Why Eurasia, Not the Indo-Pacific, Matters Most in Next Phase of Taiwan Deterrence

Ken Moriyasu — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 07:30:22 +0000

Washington is preparing for the right war, but in the wrong theater. For years, U.S. strategic thinking has centered on the Indo‑Pacific: the militarized atolls of the South China Sea, China’s churning naval shipyards, and the tense waters of the Taiwan Strait. Yet the next phase of competition will likely play out on the Eurasian landmass, contested through pipelines, swing states, and shifting alignments along routes that overlap with the ancient Silk Road. This is where China is building alternative trade and energy corridors beyond the immediate reach of U.S. military power.Chinese strategists have long worried that, in a conflict

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Latin America’s Balancing Act: Washington, Beijing, and the Post-Maduro Environment

Cecilia Farfán-Méndez — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:15:01 +0000

The year 2026 has brought sweeping change to Latin America’s relationship with the United States. Following a major military buildup in the Caribbean and strikes against vessels suspected of drug trafficking, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3 — unilaterally deposing the country’s leader and making new oil deals with the post-Maduro government. Washington has also intensified economic and political pressure against Cuba, imposed more tariffs across the region, and said it would not renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, triggering renegotiations. Meanwhile, Washington has deepened security cooperation with several countries, including shifting some funds from other regions

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A Body Blow? The War on Iran and U.S. Military Readiness

Mark Cancian — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:14:36 +0000

The war against Iran is putting new strains on U.S. military readiness by consuming munitions and missile defense interceptors, as well as through extended deployments, sustained operational demands, and the diversion of forces and attention from other theaters. Mark Cancian (Center for Strategic and International Studies), Stacie Pettyjohn (Center for a New American Security), and Michael Eisenstadt (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) join Ryan to unpack what readiness actually means, how the war is affecting it, what vulnerabilities have been exposed, and what it all means for deterrence and the U.S. military’s ability to respond to a crisis with

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An Army General Talks Fusing Sensors and Shooters on the Eastern Flank

Brig. Gen. Steven P. Carpenter — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:00:53 +0000

This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Brig. Gen. Steven P. Carpenter, the commanding general of Multi-Domain Command – Europe, the U.S. Army’s first multi-domain operations command, headquartered at Clay Kaserne in Mainz-Kastel, Germany. Multi-Domain Command – Europe serves as the premier multi-domain fires headquarters for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. We spoke with Brig. Gen. Carpenter, following the conclusion of Arcane Thunder 26, the command’s fourth annual multi-domain exercise, which ran from April 6 to April 29 across Germany, Poland, Fort Irwin, and the Nevada Testing and Training Range. The exercise’s objective was to qualify multi-domain company teams

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The Real U.S.-Saudi Nuclear Deal Is Better Than We Thought

Richard Nephew — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 07:30:37 +0000

On Aug. 24, 2026, the Trump administration transmitted the text of the U.S.-Saudi nuclear cooperation agreement to Congress. By doing so, the administration triggered the 90-day congressional review process described in the Atomic Energy Act and relaunched a debate about the right approach to international nuclear commerce.The United States and Saudi Arabia jointly announced a deal in Nov. 2025 and signed the final text in July 2026. President Donald Trump held up its transmission to Congress over the issue of whether Saudi Arabia would normalize its relations with Israel, a topic that — according to the White House — could

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Would NATO Membership for Ukraine Undermine Article 5 Itself?

Jennifer Kavanagh — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:30:17 +0000

In 2025, Jennifer Kavanaugh and Christopher McCallion wrote, “Armed Neutrality for Ukraine Is NATO’s Least Poor Option,” where they made the case for armed neutrality over full NATO membership as the wiser course for both Ukraine and NATO. A year later, we asked them to revisit their arguments. Image: MidjourneyIn your 2025 article, you argued that NATO membership and binding U.S. or European security guarantees for Ukraine were effectively unworkable, and that armed neutrality was the option best suited to protecting both Ukraine’s security and NATO’s credibility. As the debate has evolved to include talk of “Article 5-like” assurances short of

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Strategic Stability and the Rebuilding of Xi’s Military

Christopher Nye — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 07:30:51 +0000

For all the warnings about an increasingly capable Chinese military, this may very well be an awkward moment for Beijing to have that military tested. General Secretary Xi Jinping has hollowed out much of the People’s Liberation Army’s senior command through purges and is now trying to rebuild it while preserving the appearance of uninterrupted strength. Several factors have allowed Xi to purge and rebuild on this scale, among them a temporary easing of external pressure. The United States unintentionally provided that comfort.One year ago, on the stage of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said

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Three Patrons, Three Clients: The Mecca Alliance No One Owns

Ahmed Saber Abbas — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:30:13 +0000

Every alliance contains a struggle over who gets to decide what the alliance is for. The unusual thing about the Mecca Alliance, formally known as the “Mecca Joint Defence Agreement,” is that all three of its members appear to believe they possess something that should give them that privilege: Saudi Arabia has the capital, Turkey has the defense industrial base, and Pakistan has the manpower and nuclear arsenal. Each can therefore imagine itself as the patron and the other two as clients. None of them, however, holds enough leverage to make that hierarchy stick.That unresolved competition for patronage may prove

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Reading the Kremlin’s Mind: Ukrainian Writers Attempt to Understand Putin

Nicole Wiley — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:40:51 +0000

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This Is Not Your Father’s Nuclear Flight Test Vehicle

Brandon Williams — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:00:39 +0000

For decades, the United States’ nuclear weapons enterprise has wrestled with an institutional paradox. On one hand is the imperative to make the complex more “responsive” to global tumult and technical surprise, able to field new weapons quickly in reaction to unanticipated threats. On the other are the unforgiving engineering requirements of thermonuclear warheads, devices whose development is measured in years. No silver bullet solution to this unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object conundrum will likely present itself. But the contours of a new model in systems development are taking shape that may bring the long-sought responsiveness of the complex far closer to reality.Under the

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The Big Bet on the Emerging Space Economy

Dan Wald — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:45:57 +0000

The space economy has surpassed $600 billion in annual value, with some projecting it will reach a trillion by the 2030s. Jonathan Panter is joined by Joseph Yaffe (Cowboy Space), Brian Weeden (The Aerospace Corporation), and Dan Wald (Booz Allen) to weigh where the real growth is. They discuss how AI infrastructure is blurring the line between the space economy and the regular economy, the regulatory tangle, the leap toward autonomous constellations of hundreds of thousands of satellites, competition with China, and the dual-use risks of data centers in orbit.Image: Giuseppe Donatiello via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Age of Strategic Exclusion

Patrick Gill-Tiney — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:30:13 +0000

Major powers are increasingly trying to shut out their rivals. Russia invaded Ukraine in part to prevent the latter’s further integration with the West. The United States is restricting China’s access to advanced semiconductors and encouraging allies to do the same. China’s Belt and Road Initiative secures privileged positions in strategic infrastructure and economic relationships. Though these examples vary in aims and methods, they reflect a growing willingness of major powers to restrict rivals’ access and influence.I use the term ‘strategic exclusion’ to describe policies that move competition from shared access to restricted access. Territorial control is its most extreme

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The War’s Last Generation Is Still Holding America’s Moral Debt

Omer S. Rafiq — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 07:30:36 +0000

On the first night of the evacuation of Kabul, Aug. 15, 2021, a young mother found me in the crowd at Hamid Karzai International Airport. She had marked me, correctly, as someone who spoke her language. By the end of the night, she was pressing the body of her dead child into my chest and telling me, “You did this.” I have spent five years with that sentence.In a way, she was wrong about me. I had done nothing to her son. But the decisions that delivered her to that night were made an ocean away, and their consequences needed

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What America’s Adversaries and Allies Hope to Gain at the U.N. General Assembly

Holly Dagres — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:30:54 +0000

This year’s U.N. General Assembly officially opened on Tuesday, Sept. 8. The annual gathering gives diplomats and leaders a valuable opportunity to press their foreign policy priorities and engage — formally and informally — with both partners and adversaries. Most heads of state will arrive later this month for the General Debate that begins on Sept. 22. The General Assembly will wrap up on Sept. 28.U.S. President Donald Trump and his senior officials have strongly criticized the United Nations, withdrawn from multiple U.N. organizations, and reduced funding. More broadly, the Trump administration’s moves to withdraw some U.S. troops, shift more

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Automating the Action Officer: Between Bureaucracy and Technology

Samuel Canter — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:00:52 +0000

If there is a revolution brewing in the automation of white-collar work, you wouldn’t know it at the Pentagon. Here, the typical action officers, staff who tackle the daily work of the bureaucracy, perform essentially the same duties as their predecessors in 1996 or 1956: creating charts, authoring papers, delivering briefings, and coordinating across offices. Given the promise of AI tools, allowing this staff ecosystem to remain stuck in the past represents a dangerous failure to adapt, especially as senior leaders criticize the workforce for lacking organizational speed. Having served as an action officer across the White House, Pentagon, and

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The Assessment Gap in U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strikes

Jim Loucks — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:30:59 +0000

For eight years I helped decide whether American counter-terrorism money was working.As a programs advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism from 2018 to 2025, I oversaw about 20 projects in East Africa worth roughly $80 million a year. None of that money moved without a performance monitoring plan. We established baselines before work started and agreed on indicators in advance. When a project underperformed, or the reporting came late, we withheld funding. Reporting tracked activities against those metrics across the life of the program. Independent evaluations validated what implementers said they had done.That machinery was not the bureau’s

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Forced Into the Right Decision? A Look at U.S. Land-Based Deterrence Posture

Steve Fetter — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:30:23 +0000

In 2019, Steve Fetter wrote “A Cheaper Nuclear Sponge,” in which he argued that building a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was unnecessary for strengthening U.S. land-based deterrence. After several years of changing defense budgets and strategic priorities, we asked Steve to revisit his arguments.Image: U.S. Air Force (John Ingle)In your 2019 article, you argued that building an entirely new ICBM was unnecessary and that the Pentagon could save tens of billions by extending the life of the Minuteman III instead. Nearly seven years on, how has that argument held up? What has the new ballistic missile program’s trajectory looked

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The Tyranny of Shipyard Cost-Plus Contracting

Kavon Hakimzadeh — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:00:38 +0000

As a naval shipyard commander, my mandate from Navy leadership is straightforward: return warships to the fleet as quickly as possible. Neither my shipyard nor many other public and private shipyards are consistently fulfilling that mission.Public shipyard availabilities — the scheduled periods during which nuclear-powered warships are taken out of operational service for maintenance, repair, or modernization — are often delayed well beyond their original timelines. A recent Government Accountability Office report highlighted that over the past 10 years, maintenance delays for attack submarines have resulted in 15,000 lost operational days and an estimated $3.4 billion in costs. This problem of maintenance

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The Strange Transformation of the Front Line in Ukraine

Édouard Maurin — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:30:29 +0000

On Jan. 5, 2025, my volunteer platoon attached to the 23rd Special Purpose Battalion of the Presidential Brigade entered a 1-kilometer-long tree line called CHAI, on the outskirts of Kotlyne, a few kilometers west of Pokrovsk, Ukraine. Our task was to occupy a position whose status on DeepState, an open-source map tracking military operations in the Russo-Ukrainian war, had been shifting out of gray for five days. On DeepState’s map, different colors illustrate the fighting situation: the red area is held by the aggressor, while green or blue areas show territory successfully defended or recaptured by the Ukrainian army. The

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The Mecca Pact’s Credibility Gap

Doga Eralp — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:15:03 +0000

Collective-defense pacts are meant to make war less likely. Poorly designed ones can do the opposite. If allies make sweeping promises without the military integration, decision-making mechanisms, and escalation controls needed to carry them out, they may invite adversaries to test the boundaries of these promises.The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, signed on Aug. 7 amid intensifying regional conflict, represents a significant but uncertain development in the region. The agreement declares that an attack on one member will be treated as an attack on all three, establishing a broad commitment to collective deterrence. Yet the

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The Two Questions Ukraine Asks Before Every Decision

Nicole Wiley — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:50:05 +0000

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China’s Warrior Scientists: Insights from Recent Operations Around Taiwan

Peter Alan Dutton — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:30:45 +0000

China’s marine scientific research ships are expanding their operations around Taiwan, and they are not just there to advance the frontiers of human knowledge. Their operations serve to undermine Taiwan’s independent political status and to force international acceptance of Beijing’s claim of sovereignty over the island and its surrounding waters. This pressure campaign by the People’s Republic of China began intensifying in 2022. While media coverage of this development has focused on the activities of the People’s Liberation Army and the China Coast Guard, China’s civilian survey ships operate among them often unnoticed and in unprecedented numbers. Because of the

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Nicaragua’s Army Will Decide What Comes After Ortega

Orlando J. Pérez — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:00:26 +0000

The first institution Nicaragua’s National Assembly called to testify on the constitutional reform ending competitive elections was the army. On July 29, 2026, Gen. Julio César Avilés appeared before the Special Constitutional Commission and pledged the firm support of the Army of Nicaragua for a package that dissolves the electoral basis of the civilian authority he serves. Avilés spoke on behalf of the General Command, the Military Council, and the ground, naval, air, and reserve forces under his command. Five years earlier, at the ceremony launching the distribution of ballots for the 2021 election, the same officer committed 15,000 troops

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The Strategic Fiber of America: Kevlar’s Impact on Warfighters

Julie George — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:00:53 +0000

Editor’s note: This is the tenth and final article in a limited series celebrating American defense technologies born from wartime and their effects on broader national security, politics, and society. This series ran for several weeks to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. This article won third place in our reader vote. Prior installments can be found at the Arsenal of Innovation page.I was fortunate enough to do something that would be a benefit to mankind. It’s been an extremely satisfying discovery. I don’t think there’s anything like saving someone’s life to bring you satisfaction and happiness.– Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of KevlarIn 1965, a

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Shrinking Buffers: Why Turkey and Israel Are on a Collision Course

Ali Murat Kursun — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:30:31 +0000

When Israeli warplanes struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Syria on Aug. 18, 2026, the smoke rose over the demolition of an old geopolitical assumption about the Middle East. This time, Israel directly targeted a strategic sphere of influence where the Turkish military had been working to build local security capacity.Turkey rapidly filled the power vacuum in post-Assad Syria, expanding its military and intelligence footprint southward and positioning itself as a founding actor in the Levant’s new security architecture. With this military move, Israel aimed to draw a new line of engagement on the ground for both Ankara and Damascus.

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New Complications in Countering the Flow of Arms in the Caribbean

Ian Ralby — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:00:22 +0000

Arms trafficking in the Caribbean has soared in recent years, with many states now ranking firearms trafficking as the number one public safety and security threat. As new methods of arming individuals and gangs emerge across the Caribbean, gun violence continues to rise throughout the region. While armed gangs in Haiti currently possess superior firepower to the police, most countries are trying to get a handle on the problem before it becomes that bad. Some outdated narratives, particularly about South American arms, still color thinking about firearms in the region, but the reality is becoming increasingly complex in the directional

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The Fruit of Patience: How Regional Shifts Ripened Turkey’s Path to Kurdish Reconciliation

Riccardo Gasco — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:30:39 +0000

On Aug. 25, at the People’s Palace in Damascus, Mazloum Abdi announced the dissolution of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which he had commanded for a decade. Speaking first in Arabic and then in Kurdish, he said the force had joined the Syrian army and would no longer operate independently. 15 days earlier, Turkey’s parliament had passed a framework law for the disarmament of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The group has long been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, which have waged a brutal campaign against it for decades. Two

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The Future of Combat Medicine

John Quinn — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:30:11 +0000

War has always been a brutal engine of medical innovation, running on a feedback loop: Civilian breakthroughs are adapted for the battlefield, while battlefield necessity pushes advances back into civilian care. We asked three experts to identify the innovations from the last five years most likely to shape the future of combat medicine.Read more below.John Quinn Adjunct Lecturer, College of Remote and Offshore Medicine Foundation Medical Volunteer in UkraineThe war in Ukraine has made it clear that the most important combat-medical innovations are not gadgets, but new distributions of risk, skill, and authority. First, blood-forward resuscitation will require moving whole

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Where Does AI Escalation Come From? We Don’t Know. We Should Find Out.

Dustin League — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:30:30 +0000

We played a wargame using AI players. Two nuclear-armed nations — Red and Blue — with a long-standing, fierce border dispute were placed into a militarized crisis. Over the course of several turns, the states managed to avoid escalation to war, though there were non-operational nuclear demonstrations. Surprised by the lack of escalation we’d been primed to find by Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Chandler Smith, and Jacquelyn Schneider, as well as Kenneth Payne, we tried upping the stakes. We gave Red some new tactical nuclear weapons, altering the balance a bit in their favor. The states

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Russia’s Road to El Dorado

Raphael Parens — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:00:03 +0000

As a new convoy of Russian armored vehicles arrives from the port of Lomé to support Russia’s Africa Corps deployment in Mali, that mission has entered its fifth year. Russia’s investment of blood and treasure urgently demands a return, but what could this return be? What is the Russian end goal in Mali?When the Wagner Group, Africa Corps’ predecessor, entered Mali in December 2021, it was pursuing a resources-for-security deal like the one it had achieved in the Central African Republic. Along with my co-authors Chris Faulkner and Colin Clarke in our book, Moscow’s Mercenaries, I documented Wagner’s lessons learned,

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Is Taiwanese Society Prepared for a China Contingency?

Michael A. Hunzeker — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:30:43 +0000

In 2025, Michael Hunzeker and Yuster Yu wrote, “Taiwan’s Biggest Problem in Steeling Itself for War With China is Cultural,” where they argued major cultural changes were needed in both Taiwan’s military and civilian society if it were to be competitive in a conflict with China. A year later, we asked them to revisit their arguments.Image: Taiwan Presidential Office via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2025 article, you argued that major cultural changes must take place in both the officer corps of Taiwan’s armed forces and broader society if Taiwan is to be competitive in a contingency with China. A year later,

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European Resilience in Digital Infrastructure: The Changing Nature of State-Business Relations

Michiel Foulon — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 08:00:52 +0000

As the war in Ukraine progressed, Russian strikes increasingly degraded Ukraine’s terrestrial communications infrastructure, steadily deepening Kyiv’s dependence on SpaceX’s Starlink. The satellite constellation became indispensable for crucial military functions, including command and control, drone operations, and artillery fire coordination, with no readily available European alternative should access be withdrawn.This reality exemplifies the idea that today, governments rely on critical infrastructure that is privately owned and globally embedded. But these interdependencies can be weaponized, and state-firm relations can become misaligned. Recent controversies over the ability of American and Chinese technology companies to restrict access to critical AI models, alongside NVIDIA’s

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Ukraine’s Ground Robots and the Economics of Survival

Lesia Bidochko — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:30:47 +0000

In August 2024, special forces from five Ukrainian military intelligence units crossed the Black Sea to raid Russian-held Kinburn Spit. The commandos of these units — Chimera, Aratta, Stuhna, Paragon, Terror, and the Siberian Battalion — landed, fought, destroyed equipment, and withdrew. Two years later, in July 2026, Ukraine returned, but left the soldiers behind. Instead, an uncrewed surface vessel carried a ground robot across the water and released it onto the shore. The robot, equipped with a Wolly 7.62 remotely operated combat module, featuring a machine gun and an AI-assisted targeting system, rolled onto shore and engaged targets. A

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Why Are People Talking About a German Reset with Russia?

Ian Klinke — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:15:33 +0000

The summer of 2026 has raised questions once again among politicians, diplomats, and academics about whether Germany might be about to dither on Russia. Last month, a drone attack on German soil seemed designed to coerce Germany back into business as usual. Earlier, there had been rumblings about two German ex-chancellors brokering a peace treaty between Kyiv and Moscow. Both Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schröder are living embodiments of the ill-reputed Ostpolitik, Germany’s tradition of pragmatic cooperation with the Kremlin over the heads of other Eastern European countries.Is Germany getting ready for a reset with Russia, though? Not really. Berlin’s

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A Rulebook for Surprises: Commanding Autonomous Aircraft

Greg Search — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:00:28 +0000

My greatest challenge while flight testing collaborative combat aircraft was not troubleshooting errors at high speed in the cockpit. It was when, in a single keystroke, my job shifted from pilot to something like a dog handler — a supervisor of an autonomous agent. As a test pilot, my instinct is to stop for surprise machine behavior, but that met a system where such unexpected behavior could be a good thing. Managing autonomy means accounting for a new phenomenon — machine behavior that is both correct and unexpected.Historically, aircrews have handled surprises by assuming there’s a malfunction and fixing it,

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The Educated Operator: Rethinking Lethality in Special Operations

Calvin Richards — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:30:23 +0000

Editor’s Note: While War on the Rocks has a high standard for allowing pseudonyms, this is an unusual case: U.S. Army Special Operations Command requires its uniformed personnel to use pseudonyms when writing for public consumption (Policy 23-16). Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. –Ralph Waldo Emerson Over the course of more than a dozen combat deployments, it is undeniably true that being dumb has sometimes

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The Political Constraint on America’s Data-Center Power Buildout

Javaid Iqbal Sofi — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:00:15 +0000

In April, President Donald Trump issued two Defense Production Act determinations covering grid infrastructure and large-scale energy infrastructure. One found that the country’s constrained electric grid posed an increasing threat to national defense and made grid infrastructure and its supply chains essential to national defense. The other found that financing risks, regulatory delays, and market barriers were preventing large-scale energy infrastructure essential to national defense from being provided in a timely manner. Less than three months later, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed a one-year moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. Her order said the pause would keep New Yorkers

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The Divine Calculus of the Ukraine War’s End

Nicole Wiley — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:35:54 +0000

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