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Organizations are getting better at some aspects of risk management but remain underprepared for the threats reshaping the business landscape, according to a new Riskonnect report. The findings show a growing gap between awareness and action as technol…
Ukraine
Trump backs out of peace talks with Putin. The much-anticipated Budapest meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was put on hold, the New York Times reported Tuesday, after Russian officials said they don&rs…
51% of European IT and cybersecurity professionals said they expect AI-driven cyber threats and deepfakes to keep them up at night in 2026, according to ISACA. AI takes centre stage in threat outlook The main reason for this concern is that most organi…
Trump denies Tomahawks to Ukraine. Instead of providing the long-range missiles he had dangled before a two-hour Friday meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump pushed off a decision and urged both sides to “st…
The NATO meeting this week highlighted tensions within the alliance—and a recognition that such tensions are exactly what Putin wants.
SOUTHCOM commander abruptly steps down two years early. Navy Adm. Alvin Holsey is departing his job as the military’s top officer over U.S. Southern Command, which oversees operations in and around Latin and South America, the New York Times reported Thursday.
Context: The Trump administration has sent thousands of troops to the region, along with at least eight warships and a submarine—ostensibly to fight fentanyl trafficking off the coast of Venezuela, including military strikes on at least a half-dozen alleged small boats, which have killed more than two dozen people without due process, according to the White House and Defense Department.
Why leave early? “It was unclear why Admiral Holsey is suddenly departing, less than a year into what is typically a three-year job, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career,” but he had reportedly “raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats,” the Times reported Thursday.
Read over Holsey’s fairly ordinary public statement announcing his departure, delivered via social media on SOUTHCOM’s account Thursday, here.
Panning out: “Admiral Holsey, who is Black, becomes the latest in a line of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women, who have left their jobs this year,” the Times notes. “It was not clear on Thursday who would replace Admiral Holsey, who just this week visited the island countries Antigua and Barbuda, and Grenada.”
“[T]his unexpected resignation is troubling,” observed Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. “At a moment when U.S. forces are building up across the Caribbean and tensions with Venezuela are at a boiling point, the departure of our top military commander in the region sends an alarming signal of instability within the chain of command,” he said in a statement Thursday.
“Any operation to intervene militarily in Venezuela—especially without congressional authorization—would be unwise and dangerous. Admiral Holsey’s resignation only deepens my concern that this administration is ignoring the hard-earned lessons of previous U.S. military campaigns and the advice of our most experienced warfighters,” said Reed.
New: The U.S. military attacked another alleged drug boat in Latin America, but this time it left survivors, a U.S. official told Reuters on Thursday.
“[I]t was not clear that the strike had been designed to leave survivors,” the official said, which Reuters reports “raises new questions, including whether the U.S. military rendered aid to the survivors and whether they are now in U.S. military custody, possibly as prisoners of war.”
Developing: The U.S. Army’s “elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment appears to have flown within 90 miles of Venezuela,” the Washington Post reported Thursday as the White House signals a newly-aggressive approach toward Venezuela, including reportedly authorizing CIA operations inside the country.
Commentary: How to foster a warrior ethos in the workforce: expand the Defense Civilian Training Corps, a scholarship-for-service program that helps undergraduate students learn the skills that will help them succeed as acquisition professionals. Two fellows of the Acquisition Innovation Research Center make that argument, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2017, the U.S.-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured the last ISIS stronghold in Raqqa, Syria. Just this week, those same SDF troops agreed on a plan to merge their forces with Syria’s newly-formed military—less than a year after dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the country as Islamic fighters with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham marched into the capital Damascus and took over.
A federal appeals court has again paused Trump’s deployment of National Guard forces to Chicago, maintaining a hold put in place by District Judge April Perry over the White House’s objections on October 9.
Rewind: “The Trump administration has argued that the bolstered military presence is needed to protect federal property and employees,” ABC7 Chicago reports. “But the judge said the government’s claims about an out-of-control public on the brink of rebellion were not credible.”
“The facts do not justify the President’s actions in Illinois,” the panel of judges wrote in their Thursday decision (PDF). “Even applying great deference to the administration’s view of the facts, under the facts as found by the district court, there is insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws.”
“Political opposition is not rebellion,” the panel declared. Next up, a hearing is scheduled for Wednesday to consider an extension to the temporary restraining order currently in place. Reuters has a tiny bit more.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker held a meeting of retired generals, rear admirals, and veterans Thursday to discuss the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics in Chicago.
Regarding ICE agents wearing combat fatigues and boots, “I think the modern term is cosplaying,” said William Enyart, a retired major general with the Illinois National Guard. “They’re not soldiers. And it is, it is a smirch on the National Guard’s reputation for them to be wearing the same uniform as we are,” he said.
“When we blur that line, we risk turning our own streets into battlefields and our citizens into potential enemies,” said Randy Manner, a retired U.S. Army two-star.
“One thing is evident: this effort to deploy troops in American cities is not normal,” Pritzker said afterward. “There is no justification for such a deployment, and it echoes the rise of authoritarian regimes throughout world history.”
“Illinois is not a place you can conquer. And our people are not your subjects. Period,” the governor said. ABC7 Chicago has a bit more.
For your radar: Trump said this week he wants more National Guard forces occupying more U.S. cities, he told reporters Wednesday at the White House. “This is an amazing thing, and we’re just at the start. We’re going to go into other cities that we’re not talking about purposely. We’re getting ready to go in. We’re going to have a surge of strong, good people, patriots, and they get to go in. They straighten it all out,” said Trump.
And don’t miss a new on-the-ground dispatch from the windy city: “The Conquest of Chicago,” by veteran immigration reporter Nick Miroff, reporting Thursday for The Atlantic.
Shutdown update: Even though it is against the law, the White House says it’s going to pay furloughed troops with money Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation for the current fiscal year.
The law that would violate is the Antideficiency Act, which “prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose,” historian Heather Cox Richardson explained in her column Thursday.
“There is more at stake here than a broken law,” she writes, and says “Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes. That principle was at the heart of the American Revolution.”
Report: “Accelerating authoritarianism” in America. More than 340 former U.S. intelligence officers from the CIA, NSA, State Department and elsewhere warned Thursday “the nation [is] on a trajectory toward competitive authoritarianism: a system in which elections, courts, and other democratic institutions persist in form but are systematically manipulated to entrench executive control.”
Topline read: “U.S. drift towards authoritarianism has accelerated this year, a trend characterized not by an abrupt seizure of power but by an erosion of democratic norms and institutional checks and balances,” the authors write in their 29-page report. “The erosion of public trust, attacks on academic freedom and the free press, and a growing public tolerance for authoritarian tactics contribute to this slide…Recognizing this multifaceted attack and actively resisting the erosion of these foundational principles is crucial to defending and restoring liberal democracy in the US.” Read over the report in full, here.
As Ukraine’s president travels to the White House today to talk about Tomahawk missiles, Trump is already looking forward to his next meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The president announced Thursday that Hungary has agreed to host the next Trump-Putin meeting following talks next week “led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with various other people, to be designated,” Trump wrote on social media. “President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end,” he said.
About those Tomahawks: Rumors began circulating that the U.S. could send Ukraine these 1,500-mile range cruise missiles at least a month ago, prompting Russian officials to warn the U.S. over the risks of escalation—as Russian officials have done repeatedly regarding possible U.S. weapons deliveries (like F-16s, Abrams tanks, and ATACMS, e.g.) over the course of Putin’s stalled invasion, which is now in its 44th consecutive month.
A week after Russia’s protests over the Tomahawks, Trump told reporters, “I want to find out what they’re doing with them,” referring to Ukraine. “Where are they sending them? I guess I’d have to ask that question. I would ask some questions. I’m not looking to escalate that war.”
Expert reax: “It does seem that Putin’s outreach is perhaps designed to thwart the potential transfer of Tomahawks to Ukraine, so Putin is wanting to put that back in the box. It strikes me as sort of a stalling tactic,” Max Bergmann, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters this week.
Related reading:
Houthis signal wary acceptance of Israel-Hamas ceasefire. In a Thursday speech, leader Abdulmalik al Houthi said the group will watch closely to see whether the ceasefire “actually stops Israel’s assault and allows aid into Gaza” which “is what we hope for.” If it doesn’t hold, they will “continue on our path of support and backing, always ensuring it escalates… and work relentlessly…to develop our military capabilities.” (Text of al Houthi’s speech from Saba, with translation by Google).
Al Houthi also announced the death of the group’s military chief of staff, which Israeli officials said was caused by their August 28 strikes that killed 12 Houthi officials.
Some thoughts from Bridget Toomey, FDD research analyst focused on Middle East militant groups:
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The 15-mile fence is meant to prevent border crossings that shut down aviation training rotations.
Air Force cancels plans to create a command focused on competing with China. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly: “Ending the creation of a permanent Integrated Capabilities Command—a major command slated to be led by a three-star general focused on modernizing and prioritizing the service’s future acquisitions—reverses a key initiative by former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.”
A provisional ICC was established in November to help lift acquisition responsibility from major commands to help them focus on other priorities. But the effort was paused by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in February. On Wednesday, service officials said the ICC’s responsibilities will by April 1 be folded into the existing Air Force Futures organization. Known as A5/7, it will gain a “Chief Modernization Officer” focused on strategy and force design, mission integration, capability development, and modernizing the service’s platforms.
Defense budget experts weren’t surprised by the decision to end the ICC, saying it followed a trend of the Air Force casting aside parts of the Biden-era reorganization plan. “This is really a course correction on the whole reorganization that Frank Kendall put in place,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Novelly has more, here.
The Army’s new tank will roll out a decade early, its manufacturer said Wednesday. Last year, service acquisition leaders shifted course when they awarded the contract for the M1E3 tank. “Rather than pick out every single communications system and sensor that would go into the next Abrams for the rest of its service life, the Army is opting for an open system that will allow new software to be plugged in as needed,” Defense One’s Meghann Myers reported off comments by Danny Deep, General Dynamics’ executive vice president for global operations. That means soldiers are expected to be riding in the M1E3 next year, well ahead of the tank’s planned 2030s arrival. Read on, here.
Additional reading:
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis began.
Developing: President Trump now seems to want to go to war to implement regime change in Venezuela. U.S. officials told the New York Times that the White House “has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela…stepping up a campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader.”
“We are certainly looking at [airstrikes on Venezuelan] land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump told reporters after confirming the Times reporting Wednesday.
To be clear, “The Trump administration’s strategy on Venezuela, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, aims to oust Mr. Maduro from power,” U.S. officials told the Times.
By the way: American B-52 bombers were spotted in the air near Venezuela on Wednesday, according to public flight-tracking sites, the UK Defence Journal reported. On the one hand, “The flight profile is somewhat consistent with long-range training and deterrence patrols routinely conducted by B-52s from Barksdale Air Force Base across the Caribbean.” However, “The flight path brought the bombers close to La Orchila and Gran Roque, both Venezuelan islands with military facilities,” which along with their “visibility on open tracking platforms suggested a deliberate signalling exercise.”Trump also said he’s ordered the military to attack those small boats without due process—killing more than two dozen people in at least six watercraft to date—because prior U.S. Coast Guard interdictions of alleged drug traffickers “never worked when you did it in a very politically correct manner.”
Reminder: Neither the White House nor the Defense Department has yet offered proof that any of the six boats it has destroyed were in fact trafficking drugs, insisting instead that unreleased “intelligence” confirms their allegations.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee: “I support cracking down on the cartels and traffickers. But the Trump Administration’s authorization of covert C.I.A. action, conducting lethal strikes on boats and hinting at land operations in Venezuela slides the United States closer to outright conflict with no transparency, oversight or apparent guardrails. The American people deserve to know if the Administration is leading the U.S. into another conflict, putting servicemembers at risk or pursuing a regime-change operation.”
For what it’s worth, Trump promised during last year’s presidential campaign that he was “not going to start a war.” He also promised to end Russia’s Ukraine invasion in a single day, to end inflation, and lower grocery prices for Americans. But nine months into his second term, none of those three promises have materialized. He and Republicans in Washington have, however, initiated what Trump promises will be the largest mass deportation operation in history, and those operations—as predicted here, here, here, and here, e.g.—have worsened the economic outlook for everyday Americans and slowed the global economy, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest forecast.
As Ukraine’s president heads to the White House Friday, Spain is facing a new threat from its chief NATO ally in Washington. “Spain was the only member of the 32-nation alliance not to commit to increasing military spending to 5% of GDP,” Reuters reported Tuesday. The western European nation is currently spending 1.3% on defense, with a promise to raise that number to 2% by the end of the year.
“I’m not happy with Spain…I was thinking of giving them trade punishment through tariffs because of what they did, and I think I may do that,” Trump suggested to reporters on Tuesday. Another possible response from Trump “would be moving the naval and air bases the US has in southern Spain to Morocco—an idea floated by former Trump official Robert Greenway—which would damage the local economies through the loss of thousands of indirect jobs,” al-Jazeera reports.
Madrid’s reax: “We are committed to the defense, to the security of NATO and, at the same time, we are equally committed to the defense of our welfare state,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said after Trump’s tariff threat.
Semi-related new polling: “Far more Americans think the United States should mainly make important foreign policy decisions with major allies (60%) versus on its own (21%),” the Chicago Council announced in a new report published Tuesday.
Also notable: “The highest levels of Americans yet recorded in Chicago Council polling think US security alliances in Europe (68%), Asia (72%), and the Middle East (67%) benefit the United States alone or the United States along with its regional allies,” the Council’s pollsters write. Read more, here.
Additional reading:
Most of the reporters who cover the Pentagon turned in their access badges on Wednesday afternoon rather than agree to new reporting rules. Associated Press: “News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information—classified or otherwise—that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.” Hegseth has called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate what Trump has called a “very disruptive” press. More, here. (Defense One reporters were among those who declined to sign the Pentagon’s new agreement; the publication co-signed a statement with several other defense-oriented newsrooms, here.)
“[M]ake no mistake, today, Oct. 15, 2025 is a dark day for press freedom that raises concerns about a weakening U.S. commitment to transparency in governance, to public accountability at the Pentagon and to free speech for all,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement Wednesday. Trump’s Defense Department “did this because reporters would not sign onto a new media policy over its implicit threat of criminalizing national security reporting and exposing those who sign it to potential prosecution.” Nevertheless, the group added, “The Pentagon Press Association’s members are still committed to reporting on the U.S. military.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Army veteran and Democrat from Illinois: “The American people deserve transparency from their government—especially from an Administration that brags about being ‘the most transparent Administration in history’ and from a department with a nearly $1 trillion budget funded by taxpayer dollars.”
“You don’t hide and avoid accountability when you’re proud of what you’re doing,” Duckworth said. “You hide when you know what you’re doing is wrong. These sort of un-American restrictions on the free press could be expected from an authoritarian regime, but Pete Hegseth should know they simply have no place—and are not necessary—from the United States government.”
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The U.S. military destroyed another boat in the waters around Latin America, killing six people on board the vessel, President Trump announced Tuesday on social media. The episode marks the sixth known watercraft destroyed by U.S. forces in the region since Trump greenlit the first attack early last month.
As before, Trump alleges those on the boat were affiliated with “a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking…off the Coast of Venezuela,” he wrote online Tuesday. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known DTO route,” Trump said.
Reminder: It still appears Trump does not have the authority, under Article II of the Constitution, to order these killings, former State Department counsel Brian Finucane explained as part of a recent longer discussion with colleagues at Just Security. To date, more than two dozen people have been killed in these U.S. attacks.
National Guard soldiers are patrolling Beale Street as immigration enforcers have been conducting “mass pullovers” in Memphis while other Guard forces have been spotted “walking along the Mississippi River, and visiting the Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid,” the local Commercial Appeal reported Tuesday.
The Guard presence began on Friday, and the city’s mayor says it’s unclear how long the soldiers will patrol Memphis. The Guard’s domestic deployment is ostensibly part of the Trump administration’s alleged effort to crack down on crime, though some critics view it more as a means of accelerating immigration enforcement.
Five other states have timelines for their domestic Guard deployments to Washington, D.C. Eight states have sent a total of 2,300 soldiers to the nation’s capital at Trump’s request—which was based on false and exaggerated crime statistics. Those states include Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota. South Carolina expects to end their DC deployment by the end of the month, while Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, and West Virginia are targeting the end of November for a withdrawal of their forces from Washington, according to the Associated Press. (Alabama, Louisiana and South Dakota have not yet provided an end date.)
Mounting costs: The Guard “deployments could wind up costing Americans roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars,” Marc Novicoff Friday for the Atlantic. In addition to Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, “Tens of millions of dollars—perhaps hundreds of millions in total—will be spent on deployments to Chicago, Portland, and Memphis, if Trump’s plans for those cities proceed,” Novicoff writes, and puts it all together to note, “it is hard to think of a less efficient way of doing so than shifting funds away from violence prevention and local law enforcement and toward troops who stand in low-crime areas and don’t make arrests.”
Why bring it up: “These expenses would seem to undermine an administration that has claimed to go after ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ wherever possible…if that’s the goal, the method the administration has settled on is highly inefficient,” Novicoff writes. And ICYMI, “While some types of crime—especially gun offenses—have become less frequent since Trump ordered troops into the city, overall violent crime hasn’t changed that much” since the troops arrived in Washington two months ago, Reuters reported 10 days ago.
We have a few new snapshots of Guard forces on the job in Washington thanks to some police-report sleuthing this week by Brad Heath of Reuters. For example, on October 5, “a 7-11 manager flagged down soldiers to report that a man who tried to pay $2 for $4.50 worth of pizza. He also threw pizza at the manager, then his friend stole two slices of pizza. Soldiers pursued and detained both accused pizza thieves.”
The next day, “police approached a man suspected of kicking the glass door of a McDonald’s until it broke. He tried to walk away from the officers, but stopped when National Guardsmen cut him off,” Heath writes. And the week before that, “soldiers from West Virginia patrolling D.C.’s Navy Yard area observed a man masturbating in public. The soldiers ‘advised [him] to stop.’ Police officers arrested him a little while later after they said they saw him peeing in front of a restaurant.” Read over two more episodes, here.
Related reading:
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1990, Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
China is ‘pacing threat,’ Army Secretary says—while backing Trump’s homeland defense push. “I think my understanding of the administration’s priorities and the Secretary of War is [that] China is the pacing threat,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said on the sidelines of the annual Association of the U.S. Army’s conference in Washington, D.C.
But Driscoll stopped short of calling China the top priority, adding that “we are also, at the same time, in parallel, executing on providing security and maintaining what the president has done at the border.” Strategic documents have detailed the shift in military focus from China to border enforcement, countering drug trafficking, and backing the Department of Homeland Security. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly has more from that sidelines conversation, here.
More Defense One reporting from AUSA:
Today’s the deadline for most Pentagon reporters to sign an agreement accepting unprecedented restrictions on covering the military or turn in their badges. Washington Post: “Fox News, along with ABC, CBS and NBC, did not sign the Defense Department’s press policy by Tuesday’s deadline, having earlier in the day denounced the new regulations in a joint statement that included CNN, which previously said it would not sign.
Fox: “Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues,” the news networks wrote. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.” The Post’s article includes a list of dozens of media outlets and their stances; only One America News has declared it will sign.
Defense One and seven other defense trade publications are declining to sign; they issued this joint statement on Wednesday morning. Trump, who last week seemed lukewarm on Hegseth’s new policy, seemed more supportive on Tuesday, and even suggested he could move the White House press corps “across the street.”
And Hegseth repeated a misleading statement about the current rules for reporters. “Maybe the policy should look like the White House, or other military installations where you have to wear a badge that identifies that you’re press, or you can’t just roam anywhere you want,” he said; in fact, reporters are required to wear badges in the Pentagon like anyone else, and may not enter restricted areas. Mediate has more, here.
Backgrounder: Read a bit more about Defense Secretary Pete “Hegseth’s legal fixer at the center of [the] Pentagon’s new media restrictions,” via Dan Lamothe’s Wednesday reporting at the Washington Post.
In solidarity with the Pentagon Press Corps, Clayton Weimers, the U.S.-based executive director of Reporters Without Borders, released a statement Tuesday writing, “On a daily basis, the US military is responsible for the lives of millions of Americans, combat operations around the world, and nearly a trillion dollars of US taxpayer money. The Pentagon cannot evade accountability or criticism by crushing the independence of the media in clear violation of the First Amendment.”
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee: “A free and fair press is essential to our nation, but Secretary Hegseth is attempting to shut down independent reporting with these coercive restrictions…Hegseth and his team have missed the mark legally and morally, and they should immediately abandon this policy and restore the Pentagon’s longstanding commitment to independent press access. The Secretary of Defense should lead by example with seriousness and integrity, not secrecy and suspicion.”
Big-picture analysis: “What Trump and Hegseth are doing…represents a threat to democracy—and a profound test for service members, who do not swear a personal loyalty oath to the president but to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States,’” says Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing Wednesday in Foreign Affairs “By trying to politicize the military, the Trump administration is breaking trust with the men and women in uniform and driving talented leaders out of the force. The dearth of military pushback, then, begs the question of how effectively Trump and Hegseth have cleaned house, rooting out those who might disagree with them.”
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The PLA is building a self-healing “kill web” to surpass today’s brittle kill chains.