Donald Trump’s Price Tag on the US-India Relationship

Muhib Rahman, and Nazmus Sakib

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​​Donald Trump’s tariffs on India signal that Washington, far from abandoning New Delhi, wants to see more effort and less hedging.

When the State Department finally placed the “Foreign Terrorist Organization” label on the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and its suicide outfit, the Majeed Brigade, on August 11, most observers filed it under routine counterterrorism. BLA militants have spent years in violent struggle with the Pakistani state. Their actions have included the murder of Chinese teachers in Karachi, hijacking Pakistan’s Jaffar Express, and turning Gwadar—the centerpiece of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor—into a terror zone. The US move thus can be seen as a long-overdue legal housekeeping.

However, the terror tag was rolled out the same week the White House doubled tariffs on Indian exports and tied any relief to New Delhi’s procurement of cheap Russian oil. This is hardly a coincidence, especially because Pakistani Authorities have long been claiming India’s backing of BLA terrorist activities in Pakistan.

The FTO designation, therefore, marks the opening chord of a new American play in South Asia. The United States is no longer treating India as a privileged partner exempt from cost, nor Pakistan as a mere appendage to Afghan policy. Instead, it is introducing conditionality as the organizing principle of its regional strategy.

Pakistan’s Narrow Window of Opportunity

The FTO designation establishes a more transparent, pragmatic channel for US-Pakistan cooperation, including force protection near foreign projects and intelligence sharing on insurgent financing. It also comes as US officials and businesses eye Balochistan’s buried riches—copper, lithium, and the rare-earth elements that power green tech and precision missiles.

India-Pakistan missile race heats up, but China in crosshairs, too

Abid Hussain

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Islamabad, Pakistan – India on August 20 announced that it had successfully test-fired Agni-V, its intermediate-range ballistic missile, from a test range in Odisha on its eastern Bay of Bengal coast.

The Agni-V, meaning “fire” in Sanskrit, is 17.5 metres long, weighs 50,000kg, and can carry more than 1,000kg of nuclear or conventional payload. Capable of travelling more than 5,000km at hypersonic speeds of nearly 30,000km per hour, it is among the fastest ballistic missiles in the world.

The Agni test came exactly a week after Pakistan announced the formation of a new Army Rocket Force Command (ARFC), aimed, say experts, at plugging holes in its defensive posture exposed by India during the four-day conflict between the nuclear-armed neighbours in May.

But experts say the latest Indian test might be a message less for Pakistan and more for another neighbour that New Delhi is cautiously warming up to again: China.

The Agni’s range puts most of Asia, including China’s northern regions, and parts of Europe within reach. This was the missile’s 10th test since 2012 and its first since March last year, but its timing, say analysts, was significant.

It came just ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, amid a thaw in ties – after years of tension over their disputed border – that has been accelerated by United States President Donald Trump’s tariff war against India. On Wednesday, the US tariffs on Indian goods doubled to 50 percent amid tensions over New Delhi’s oil purchases from Russia.

Yet despite that shift in ties with Beijing, India continues to view China as its primary threat in the neighbourhood, say experts, underscoring the complex relationship between the world’s two most populous nations. And it’s at China that India’s development of medium and long-range missiles is primarily aimed, they say.

Can India and the U.S. Repair Their Relationship?

Rudra Chaudhuri

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On July 30, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a baseline tariff of 25 percent on Indian exports, along with “a penalty” for buying oil and military equipment from Russia. On Aug. 6, he signed an executive order (EO) placing “an additional ad valorem rate of duty of 25 percent” on India. It made clear that any retaliation against this order “may” lead to a modification of the order and would go into effect in 21 days. Furthermore, it said that if Russia or any foreign country impacted by the order were to “align sufficiently” with the United States on matters related to national security, foreign policy, and the economy, then the tariff rate could change again.

Essentially, if India continues to purchase Russian oil, the tariff stays and may be increased. If it starts to diversify away from buying Russian oil, then it could be reduced or removed. The EO has moved the goalpost beyond trade negotiations. Even if the first tranche of a trade agreement were to be reached, which is looking unlikely, India will still have to deal with the issue of its Russian oil purchases. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro has argued that “India’s oil lobby is funding Putin’s war machine.” Yet an attempt to force India to diversify away from Russia—effectively dictating its foreign policy—is a nonstarter. In fact, it only makes it more difficult to do what Indian firms may have already wanted to do, which is find alternative vendors in the global oil market.

As Trump’s Higher India Tariffs Go Into Effect, Oil Markets Shrug

Keith Johnson

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday followed through on so-called secondary tariffs of 25 percent on India to punish the country for buying large volumes of Russian crude oil. This is despite the fact that the United States previously encouraged New Delhi to buy Russian crude to stabilize global markets and meet India’s energy and economic objectives.

Global oil markets were nonplussed at the prospect of secondary tariffs on India, and greeted their actual arrival with a yawn. Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose by less than 50 cents a barrel. That indicates that traders do not expect Trump’s tariffs to change India’s oil-consumption habits in a big way, or take serious volumes of Russian oil off the market.

Why India Should Not Walk Into the China-Russia Trap

James Crabtree

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You know a relationship is on the skids when one party refuses to answer the phone. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did just that recently, according to reports in the German media, when he declined to take a number of calls from U.S. President Donald Trump. This week, Trump turned the simmering tensions into a full crisis by hitting India—notionally a vital U.S. partner in its long-term competition with China—with 50 percent punitive tariffs. Suddenly being treated this way has caused understandable anger and shock in New Delhi, prompting a hunt for new foreign-policy options.

Modi will demonstrate his independence from Washington when he heads to Beijing this week for a summit of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a loose bloc promoting economic and security ties. It will be Modi’s first visit to China since 2018 and heralds an anticipated thaw in India-China ties, following a period of intense competition prompted by deadly clashes on their Himalayan border in 2020. Both China and Russia, which is also an SCO member, will now court India, seeking to capitalize on Modi’s rift with Trump. But New Delhi will rightly be wary of this. India’s recent foreign-affairs strategy has aimed for balanced engagement with multiple powers, with a particular focus on building ties with technologically advanced democracies. From India’s vantage point, this remains a sensible long-term approach, even if ties with the United States are tense. Throwing its lot in with China and Russia is to walk into a trap that could quickly backfire.

Trump’s Coercion Is Not the Way to Deal With India

Syed Akbaruddin

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened penal tariffs on Indian goods have now become a reality. As of Wednesday, Aug. 27, an additional 25 percent tariff—on top of the existing 25 percent levy—has gone into effect because, the White House says, India is purchasing Russian crude oil.

The reverberations from Trump’s tariffs are already shaking what was long celebrated as one of the world’s most consequential partnerships, as I have previously written in Foreign Policy. For many Indians, this is not simply a matter of trade arithmetic. It is a sharp signal that the very foundation of the trust painstakingly built with Washington over two decades is at stake.

Pakistan vs the TTP: Bajaur’s Déjà Vu

Natasha Matloob

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There is no denying that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other extremist outfits remain among the gravest threats to Pakistan’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political stability. Emboldened by transnational jihadist networks such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida, the TTP in particular continues to challenge the writ of the state via its brand of militant Deobandi radicalism. Pakistan’s response, as always, is to wage yet another military campaign, this time Operation Sarbakaf in Bajaur, formerly part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) but now a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province.

Why is the political and military leadership of the country repeating the same policies that have failed to defeat militancy for the last two decades?

Launched in July 2025, Operation Sarbakaf is being billed as a “precise, intelligence-based” campaign aimed at militants affiliated not only with the TTP but with the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghanistan-centered affiliate of the transnational terrorist group. The offensive followed a sharp escalation in militant violence, including targeted assassinations of political figures such as Awami National Party leader Maulana Khan Zeb and former senator Hidayatullah Khan, as well as a series of deadly ambushes and IED attacks on government officials.

While the ongoing operation’s potential to actually eradicate militancy remains dim, it is succeeding in racking up a devastating human cost. Over 100,000 people in Bajaur have been displaced, forced to live in overcrowded schools and sports complexes that were converted into makeshift shelters. Civilian deaths, such as the recent killing of a mother and her two children in Mamund Tehsil by mortar fire, have fueled anger and despair. The angry response from locals is a stark reminder that military victories mean little when public trust is shattered.

China Unveils New-Gen Tank With Anti-Drone System, Unmanned Turret & Hybrid Propulsion As ‘Old’ MBTs Sink In Ukraine War

Sumit Ahlawat

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The Ukraine War has proved to be a “graveyard” for tanks. From Soviet-era vintage tanks, such as the T-72 and T-80, to West-supplied modern tanks like the Leopard 2 and Challenger 2, and even US-supplied Abrams, all have proven equally vulnerable to cheap drones.

To such an extent that many defense commentators have already begun writing obituaries for tanks, suggesting that the era of tank dominance in modern wars is coming to an end.

Paul Scharre, a former US Army Ranger and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, has suggested that the role of tanks is diminishing due to lessons from the Ukraine war: “Tanks are going to move, over time, into more of a mopping-up role.”

In the Ukraine War, cheap drones armed with explosives, each costing less than US$500 apiece, have been able to take out a US$10 million Abrams tank.

Known as first-person view drones, or FPVs, they are equipped with a camera that streams real-time images back to their controller, who can direct them to hit tanks in their most vulnerable spots.

To be sure, drones are not the only challenge facing modern tanks. They are also becoming increasingly vulnerable to shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles. And not just the sophisticated Javelins, but also anti-tank missiles such as Stugna-P, a rudimentary anti-tank warhead made by Ukraine.

Edward Luttwak, a renowned military strategist, highlighted the vulnerability of tanks against empowered infantry in the context of Ukraine: “An infantry that is determined to fight is now super-empowered by having things like a huge number of point-and-shoot disposable anti-tank rockets.”Destroyed Leopard Tanks in Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine has also shown how cheap and disposable weapons, better known as next-generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAW), are highly effective in taking tanks out of action. NLAWs are proving their flexibility in attacking from almost any position, “from up high in a building to behind a tree or in a ditch.”

Reportedly, the Ukrainian army has attacked Russian tanks on motorcycles, buggies, and golf carts or unarmored Ural trucks encased in anti-drone cages.

China’s ‘Unforced Error’ in the South China Sea Could Spark a War

Joe Varner

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Key Points and Summary – A recent collision between a Chinese Navy destroyer and its own Coast Guard vessel near Scarborough Shoal has publicly punctured Beijing’s narrative of seamless maritime dominance.

-This embarrassing “unforced error,” which occurred while intimidating a Philippine ship, has triggered a predictable and dangerous response from China.

-Beijing is now escalating its aggression with unsafe aerial intercepts and is expected to swarm the disputed shoal with its naval and militia forces.

-This desperate attempt to “save face” is dangerously raising the stakes in a region where the U.S. has firm security commitments with the Philippines.

When Saving Face Risks Losing the Sea: China’s Dangerous Scarborough Escalation

When a People’s Liberation Army (PLAN) Navy destroyer rammed and crushed the bow of its own China Coast Guard (CCG) earlier this month China’s bid to project seamless maritime dominance instead exposed its own seamanship as a liability.

In the contested waters near Scarborough Shoal, the Chinese navy managed to deliver a humiliation to itself that no rival could have engineered. In a dangerous manoeuvre intended to intimidate a smaller Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship, a Chinese Type 052D destroyer collided with and crushed the bow of a CCG vessel that had been closing in on the same target. The intended show of seamless naval–coast guard coordination became, instead, a public display of confusion, miscommunication, and poor seamanship.

For Beijing, this was not simply a tactical mishap. In Chinese political and military culture, such incidents eroded the perception of competence and control—two pillars of the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy in the South China Sea. The Party has spent over a decade building the image of an unstoppable maritime presence in these disputed waters. That image cracked when the PLA Navy and CCG vessels collided.

Rising risk to China’s covert Iran oil lifeline

Amirreza Etasi

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What would happen if Iranian oil – a heavily sanctioned but vital supply for China – suddenly stopped flowing?

US pressure and the possible “snapback” of UN sanctions could choke off Iran’s clandestine crude exports, testing Beijing’s energy security, raising costs for its industry and dealing a financial blow to Tehran in a high-stakes geopolitical showdown.

Iran’s oil exports have rebounded sharply in recent years despite US sanctions over its nuclear program. After plunging to a 40-year low of about 0.4 million barrels per day (mbpd) in 2020, exports recovered to roughly 1.4 mbpd in 2023 and peaked near 1.5 mbpd in 2024.

However, this has since seen a reduction in 2025 following regional crises, with sales decreasing again. Despite this volatility, China’s dominance as a buyer remains absolute, purchasing roughly 90% of Iran’s total exports.

To entice buyers, Iran sells its oil at steep discounts on market rates. In late 2023, its flagship crude traded at about $13 per barrel below the Brent benchmark, according to Reuters, a staggering 15% discount that saved Chinese buyers an estimated $10 billion in 2023 on their total sanctioned oil imports.

This trade is facilitated by a “dark fleet” of tankers that disguise their origin, often relabeling Iranian crude as Malaysian. As a result, while China’s official customs data shows no imports from Iran, its imports from “Malaysia” have surged far beyond that country’s actual production capacity, revealing the scale of this clandestine trade.

China Is Building a Brain-Computer Interface Industry

Emily Mullin

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A new policy document outlines China’s plan to create an internationally competitive BCI industry within five years, and proposes developing devices for both health and consumer uses.

In a policy document released this month, China has signaled its ambition to become a world leader in brain-computer interfaces, the same technology that Elon Musk’s Neuralink and other US startups are developing.

Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, read and decode neural activity to translate it into commands. Because they provide a direct link between the brain and an external device, such as a computer or robotic arm, BCIs have tremendous potential as assistive devices for people with severe physical disabilities.

In the US, Neuralink, Synchron, Paradromics, and others have sprung up in recent years to commercialize BCIs. Now, China boasts several homegrown BCI companies, and its government is making the development of the technology a priority.

Jointly authored in July by seven departments within the Chinese government—including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Health Commission, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences—the new policy document lays out a road map for China to achieve breakthroughs in BCI technology by 2027 and build an internationally competitive industry by 2030.

“We know that China is strong at translating basic research into practical uses and commercialization. We’ve seen that in other industries, such as photovoltaics and electric cars. Now BCI is another area where that’s going to be critical,” says Max Riesenhuber, a professor of neuroscience and codirector of the Center for Neuroengineering at Georgetown University Medical Center, who has published research on China’s BCI developments.

The Front Line | China bets on military industrial might to outproduce and outlast rivals like the US

Amber Wang

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China is on a mission to turn its military into a modern fighting force. In the second of this four-part series, we look at how its massive defence industry can support China’s military goals, and during wartime could be further bolstered by the civilian manufacturing sector.

In the northeastern city of Shenyang, the future of China’s defence manufacturing capacity is rapidly taking shape – an enormous new aviation industrial complex that will eventually occupy an area about the size of 600 football fields.

Video of the site was aired on a provincial television news programme in early July, part of a feature about the provincial governor’s visit to the headquarters of the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation. The firm, which owns the collection of new complexes, makes China’s main carrier-based fighter, the J-15, as well as the country’s most advanced J-35 stealth fighter and prototypes for a sixth-generation jet.

In the report, Wang Xinwei, governor of Liaoning province, pledged to build a “world-class aerospace city”.

Details of what the production lines would eventually look like were not revealed, and Beijing has been tight-lipped on such military facilities. However, the scope of the complex has raised eyebrows.

While the development of the military weapons used by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has seen rapid progress, the country’s industrial capacity to mass produce such weapons in the event of possible protracted warfare has also gained attention amid the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Beijing has maintained a massive defence industry to support its military goals, which during wartime could be further bolstered by the civilian manufacturing sector, experts have said.

They have pointed out that these strengths could be key to winning conflicts, including one in the Taiwan Strait, as rivals such as the United States see their defence industries bogged down by budgets and red tape.

America’s Coming Crash

Kenneth S. Rogoff

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For much of the past quarter century, the rest of the world has looked in wonder at the United States’ ability to borrow its way out of trouble. Again and again, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the government has used debt more vigorously than almost any other country to fight wars, global recessions, pandemics, and financial crises. Even as U.S. public debt rapidly climbed from one plateau to the next—net debt is now nearing 100 percent of national income—creditors at home and abroad showed no signs of debt fatigue. For years after the 2008–9 global financial crisis, interest rates on Treasury debt were ultralow, and a great many economists came to believe that they would remain so into the distant future. Thus, running government deficits—fresh borrowing—seemed a veritable free lunch. Even though debt-to-income levels jumped radically after each crisis, there was no apparent need to save up for the next one. Given the dollar’s reputation as the world’s premier safe and liquid asset, global bond market investors would always be happy to digest another huge pile of dollar debt, especially in a crisis situation in which uncertainty was high and safe assets were in short supply.

The past few years have cast serious doubt on those assumptions. For starters, bond markets have become far less submissive, and long-term interest rates have risen sharply on ten- and 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds. For a big debtor like the United States—the gross U.S. debt is now nearly $37 trillion, roughly as large as that of all the other major advanced economies combined—these higher rates can really hurt. When the average rate paid rises by one percent, that translates to $370 billion more in annual interest payments the government must make. In fiscal year 2024, the United States spent $850 billion on defense—more than any other country—but it spent an even larger sum, $880 billion, on interest payments. As of May 2025, all the major credit-rating agencies had downgraded U.S. debt, and there is a growing perception among banks and foreign governments that hold trillions of dollars in U.S. debt that the country’s fiscal policy may be going off the rails. The increasing unlikelihood that the ultralow borrowing rates of the 2010s will come back any time soon has made the situation all the more dangerous.

Smart Weapons, Dumb Assumptions: Western Strategic Delusions Meet Industrial Reality in Ukraine

David Betz, M.L.R. Smith 

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For all the vast commentary in the Western media on the Russia-Ukraine war, a persistent fact remains: beyond the immediate theatre of conflict, few observers possess a clear or consistent grasp of events on the ground. The fog of war—historically the product of battlefield confusion—has thickened in the digital age, not merely through competing strategic narratives and decontextualised drone footage, but also through the prevailing mists of Western wishful thinking.

For nearly three years, a steady stream of commentary—often by writers whose proximity to the conflict is more editorial than operational—has peddled forecasts heavy on conviction but light on corroboration. A familiar rota of Atlanticist voices,[i] supplemented by the op-ed pages of most of the major newspapers, have repeatedly assured their audiences that victory is within Ukraine’s grasp,[ii] or that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime is tottering on the brink of collapse.[iii] These declarations, rarely anchored in battlefield realities, have served less as strategic analysis and more as psychological reassurance: therapy disguised as insight.

This genre of morale-management has dovetailed neatly with the illusions that defined post-Cold War Western military orthodoxy. Political leaders and defence planners confidently envisioned a new era of warfare—rapid and surgical—executed by streamlined expeditionary forces deploying precision munitions and networked command systems. War, in this vision, would be not only decisive but decorous: fought at arm’s length and, metaphorically speaking, finished before lunch.

Instead, they got Bakhmut.

This essay seeks to dissect the collision between digital-age delusions and industrial-age realities. The war in Ukraine has exposed the fragility of Western military assumptions over the past three decades, not through a deliberate strategic reinvention but through war’s primordial nature reasserting itself—dragging Western theory back from its digital abstractions to the hard logic of force, friction and sustained political will.

The End of History did not arrive. The Return of Artillery did.

The Enduring Strategic and Moral Debates Over Dropping the Atomic Bombs

Phillip Dolitsky 

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Phillip Dolitsky is a Strategic Advisor at The Philos Project and an independent national security and foreign policy analyst. He is working towards becoming a strategic theorist, focusing on the intersection between strategy, military ethics, and classical realism. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Chesterfield Strategy, Parameters, Providence Magazine, Military Strategy Magazine and more.

It has been 80 years since the atomic age ushered in a new chapter of world history. 80 years after President Truman’s fateful decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby forcing Imperial Japan to surrender and saving countless American, Japanese and Chinese lives, we still debate the morality of that world altering decision. I believe that that is a good thing. We all intuitively recognize just how monumental a decision it was to drop the bombs, and I would not want to be a writer on military strategy and ethics in a world where we stopped grappling with arguably the most agonizing decision ever made by a single man in world history.

Much has been written on the 80th anniversary of dropping the atomic bombs. I write this humble contribution to the fray to note just how relevant the enduring moral debate over the atomic bombs continues to be, and how they interact with the tragic world of military strategy. In particular, I would like to focus on the moral imperative to consider alternative choices of action, as well as a brief rethinking and reframing of noncombatant immunity.

Before beginning this analysis, I want to clarify what this essay does and does not aim to do. It will not propose a new system of ethics for strategists, nor claim to offer a better framework than existing traditions. My point is simpler: strategy is never free of ethics, because it is carried out by human beings who cannot act in a moral vacuum.[1] Yet ethical traditions—especially Just War theory[2]—are too often “not well enough designed or employed to offer helpfully practicable navigational guidance on behavior.”[3]

‘No substitute for victory’: Israel fights on in Gaza

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There are two burning questions about the war in Gaza and its consequences. The first is why it has taken the Israelis until now to assault directly what they’ve known all along to be the centre of Hamas terrorist operations, and the second is the extent to which the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations and violence throughout most of the Western world is a complaint, however orchestrated and unspontaneous, against Israeli conduct in Gaza, and the extent to which it is a profound vein of anti-Semitism, unsuspected and inexplicable, in much of the world.

On the first point, the Israeli explanation for why it fights on in Gaza is essentially unanswerable: Israel was subjected to a barbarous act of war on October 7, 2023 and has acted entirely within its rights to respond as nations normally do to acts of war, by enacting General Douglas MacArthur’s famous aphorism that “In war, there is no substitute for victory.” That being the case why did Israel not follow the other half of that same aphorism of MacArthur’s: ”Once war has been forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring that war to the swiftest possible victorious conclusion at the minimum possible cost in (Israeli in this case) and allied lives?”

Such a policy would have required the earliest possible attack on the most dense complex of Hamas tunnels and installations, in Gaza City. Given the morally commendable Israeli tendency to trade inordinately large numbers of terrorist prisoners to secure the liberty of captured Israelis, it is understandable that Hamas thought that the hostages that it retained could be used as the ultimate free pass out of hostilities while preserving their organisation, however sheared and diminished in combat, as a going concern in the governance of Gaza, while retaining their authority over the population by their harsh and stingy control of the distribution of food, with the collusion of their minions in the United Nations.

Smashing Russia's Oil Industry: Ten Strategic Strike Lessons from Ukraine

Mick Ryan

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Russia’s economy is fast approaching a fiscal crunch that will encumber its war effort. Though that may not be enough to compel Putin to seek peace, it does suggest that the walls are closing in on him. 

In the latest attacks, Russian oil refineries in Samara and Krasnodar Krai have been hit just in the past day. Last Sunday, Ukraine also attacked a major condensate gas processing site near the Russian Baltic Sea port city St. Petersburg. As journalist Stefan Korshak described the attack in an article published by the Kyiv Post:

Flying wing drones tipped with explosive warheads swooped down on the Ust-Luga facility, Russia’s main processing site for natural gas piped from the Arctic and West Siberia, during the morning work shift. Eyewitnesses reported at least two massive fires following the daylight attack.

In the past 48 hours, the Ukrainians have also struck an oil pipeline supplying Moscow.

This fits the Ukrainian modus operandi. First, it is hitting Russia’s oil industry and hurting the Russian economy. Second, by cutting off oil supplies, it is making the war felt at home by Russian people – without targeting civilians directly like Russia does.

This extensive strike campaign by Ukraine is becoming an increasingly critical vulnerability for the Russian government. The earnings from their energy exports helps to fund Putin’s war, and reducing oil refining capacity impacts on this. Domestically, fuel rationing and shortages also indicate to Russian citizens that all is not well with their war against Ukraine and with how Putin is running their country.

In my previous exploration of Ukraine’s ongoing development and adaptation of a strategic, long-range strike capability, I wrote that:

How to Arm Ukraine for Negotiations

Michael McFaul

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The Trump administration’s week of Russian-Ukrainian diplomacy yielded mixed results. At his Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump treated an imperial dictator and indicted war criminal like a revered dignitary. His main goal for the summit—a cease-fire—was rejected outright by Putin, and his most modest objective for the meeting—a commitment by Putin to meet directly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with Trump in attendance—has thus far been rebuffed by Moscow, as well. A subsequent summit in Washington, attended by Zelensky and other European leaders, was more productive, as the group discussed potential U.S. and European security guarantees for Kyiv. Before that meeting, the American commitment to security guarantees was ambiguous.

Trump’s intuition that a deal will require land swaps and security guarantees is correct; Putin will agree to end the war only if he feels that he has won Ukrainian territory, and Zelensky will never agree to cede territory without the promise of protection from a future Russian invasion. But Trump’s improvisational attempt to negotiate over both subjects at the same time, with the same groups of leaders, is wrong-headed. Rather than discussing these two issues with everyone all at once, Trump needs to organize two sets of separate negotiations. The order in which these negotiations occur will be key to their success. Trump and his team must first reach an agreement on security guarantees among Ukraine, other European countries, and the United States. Only then should Washington encourage a conversation between Zelensky and Putin about de facto territorial concessions that could bring an end to the war.

Such a diplomatic two-step will not be easy. Indeed, the United States and Europe may have to present a security guarantee convincing enough to get Ukraine to agree to an unpopular compromise: the continuation of Russian occupation of Ukrainian land. But if Trump and European leaders can hold successful negotiations with Zelensky before the Ukrainian president sits down with Putin, they have a chance to craft a lasting peace.

TAKING THE LEAP

An agreement to bring an end to the war hinges on the ability of Putin and Zelensky alone to reach an agreement on borders and land swaps. Neither European leaders nor Trump should be involved in these discussions; neither has the authority to give away Ukrainian land.

The US Is Unprepared for the Next War

Daniel L. Davis

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The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.

Earlier this year, speaking at a press conference in Qatar, President Donald Trump categorically declared that “nobody can beat us.” He continued, “We have the strongest military in the world, by far. Not China, not Russia, not anybody!”

We do have a strong military, but we are woefully unprepared to fight a modern war. That’s because, despite all of the major technological advances in warfighting in recent years, manpower is still absolutely critical, and understanding how those boots on the ground interact with emerging drone warfare is still in its infancy in the U.S. military.

Ground warfare has evolved over the past three and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine. I've spent considerable time studying this conflict from strategic, operational and tactical angles, and I’ve conducted multiple interviews with combatants on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. The picture that emerges explains not only why Russia’s progress is slow and Ukraine is gradually losing ground, but also why the U.S. would face serious challenges if forced into a similar fight today.

Salt Typhoon hackers targeted over 80 countries, FBI say

DAVID DIMOLFETTA

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A major Chinese espionage group targeted some 80 nations—and likely more than just telecommunications companies—in a sweeping hack discovered last year, U.S. investigators said Wednesday.

At least 600 organizations were notified by the FBI that the group — known as Salt Typhoon — had interest in their systems, the FBI's cybersecurity division director Brett Leatherman said in media interviews Wednesday that dovetailed with a release of a technical advisory about the hacking activity. Nextgov/FCW previously reported that hundreds of entities — telecom providers and others — were notified of potential compromise.

Salt Typhoon breached major telecom carriers in a global, multi-year espionage operation that, in part, targeted the phone conversations of key American officials, including now-President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Additional discoveries about its scope and scale have trickled out over the past year.

The hackers are “targeting networks globally, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging and military infrastructure networks,” the advisory says. It lists Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and other allied nations’ cyberintelligence directorates as co-signers.

The document is among the most lengthy guidance to date designed to help known or potential victims of the hackers.

“It’s great to finally see such a useful, actionable hunt guide released on this threat. This document should start to level the playing-field for networks that have been struggling to evict these threat actors for a year or more,” said Marc Rogers, a seasoned telecommunications cybersecurity expert.

The intrusions have been happening since at least 2019, Leatherman said in a video statement, allowing the Chinese cyberspies to quietly burrow across telecom operators’ internet infrastructure and collect intelligence about prime targets.

Protecting Soldiers, Preventing Harmful Behaviors, and Boosting Combat Readiness—with Data

Jon Bate, Stephanie Hightower and Caleb Gage 

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Harmful behaviors such as violence, substance abuse, and suicidal ideations profoundly affect both individual soldier well-being and military unit cohesion, corroding the foundation of our combat readiness and pulling leaders away from their primary mission: preparing for combat. Too often, leaders have only reactive solutions available, such as ordering safety stand-downs after a harmful behavior has occurred. What if, instead of simply responding to such events, they could predict where it was most likely to occur and proactively intervene?

This question sparked a multiyear grassroots effort called Project Prevention. A brigade data analytics and innovation team in the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado developed a new data-centric method to proactively identify units at risk and enable timely, preventive interventions. The result was the Unit Risk Forecasting Tool (URFT), which applies predictive data analytics to give leaders an additional tool to keep their soldiers ready to train and fight.

Over the past year and a half, this tool identified the specific companies/batteries/troops within a brigade that were at increased risk of harmful behaviors in a given week, enabling dozens of opportunities for leaders to proactively step in to address the root causes fueling the risks. It was a low-cost investment in combat readiness with a documented empirical impact on the health and readiness of the force. It does not replace, but rather augments and focuses, human intuition—helping highlight otherwise unnoticed risk trends that busy leaders may have missed. By systematically analyzing existing data and applying rapid data modeling, the URFT functions as an advanced early-warning system, monitoring the subtle, almost invisible atmospheric changes within a unit that signal a coming storm.

The tool is currently scaling more widely across Army units, but we have only scratched the surface of its potential to both help soldiers and increase military readiness. Deepening the data architecture, refining the risk algorithm, and adapting the tool to specific unit needs can amplify its future impact.

Finding the Signal in the Noise: The Momentum Effect in Harmful Behaviors

The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning

Phillip Dolitsky 

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“Strategy is the future of present decisions”- Garry Kasparov

“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.”- Savielly Tartakower

Strategy and defense planning belong to the realm of the unknown. There is nothing as certain as the uncertainty of the future and yet all polities depend on their safety and survival by striving to meet the challenge of uncertainty. All nations must attempt, in the words of the late British strategist Colin Gray, “to get the biggest issues right enough” and to “seek good enough answers to the right questions.”[i] As such, strategy necessitates a rigorous and often uncomfortable examination of potential threats, no matter how improbable they may seem. It involves moving beyond the conventional wisdom and exploring scenarios that stretch the boundaries of our current understanding of, and hope for, the world. It requires navigating a delicate balance between caution and creativity, with deep roots in history, where planners must envision not just the likely developments but also the wild cards that could disrupt the status quo. In other words, it requires that strategists and defense planners think about the unthinkable. This particular aspect of the strategic flame is dwindling. The current war in Israel and the discussions surrounding the looming conflict with China over Taiwan should serve as warnings for what might occur if we completely extinguish the strategic imperative to think about the unthinkable. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to identify this unfortunate trend in strategic thinking, describe an approach to defense planning called “strategic prophylaxis” and offer a few potential remedies to the malady.

The Decline in Thinking About the Unthinkable

During the Cold War, much of American strategic thought was dedicated to “thinking about the unthinkable” in the context of nuclear war. The famed “Wizards of Armageddon” did not merely postulate and stipulate on geopolitical threats and then shrug their shoulders at the magnitude of the problem; they attempted to articulate clear and actionable strategies as best as one can about events that had not happened and might never have happened. To name but a few examples: Colin Gray and Keith Payne argued that “Victory Is Possible” in a nuclear war, Bernard Brodie detailed the interplay between tactical nuclear weapons and conflict escalation, Herman Kahn, perhaps the most creative of the Wizards, delineated separate rungs on an “escalation ladder” that led to general nuclear war.[ii] Thank God, we can never know how well any of their theories would have worked in the advent of nuclear war. But if, as the Cold War nuclear theorists insisted, there is value in nonuse, there is also value in thinking about the unthinkable. Should general nuclear war have occurred, there would have been some thinking about how it could have been managed. The United States would not have stumbled into calamity totally blind. Following the Cold War, however, this type of creative strategic thinking, especially about “unthinkable” problems, significantly declined.

Army promises to deliver analysis on sweeping changes in 10 days

Jen Judson

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U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll promised Congress today the service would show its homework in 10 days on how it decided to consolidate commands, restructure formations and cancel or restructure a slew of weapons programs.

In a memo to the Army, the service secretary announced in early May that major change was underway and dubbed it the Army Transformation Initiative.

Yet many of the decisions laid out in the document lacked clear analysis behind them, such as a plan to consolidate Army Futures Command and Training and Doctrine Command into one entity and cancel programs just as they were crossing the finish line like the M10 Booker light tank and the Robotic Combat Vehicle

Driscoll tallied the amount of spending planned over the next five years for programs the service will cancel or reorient to roughly $48 billion. The service will reallocate funding into innovative efforts to transform the Army into a highly mobile and lethal force, service leaders are saying.

“I agree the Army must change and modernize how it fights and must take into account significant changes in technology,” Sen. Chris Coons, the highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee said in a June 18 hearing.

“But, bluntly, months after you’ve announced the Army Transformation Initiative, this committee hasn’t received detailed or substantive analysis as to why the Army is planning to cancel or reduce 12 programs of record, consolidate or reduce staffing at 21 commands or how the investments you’re proposing will significantly enhance battlefield lethality,” he said.

Coons pressed Driscoll for a timeline to deliver more answers to congressional committees.

“We’d be happy to come by any time, but I think very specifically, you will have that detail within 10 days,” Driscoll said.

Army transformation plan could undermine infantry brigades: Watchdog

Michael Peck

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The U.S. Army’s new plan to become a leaner, more modern force may actually undercut combat readiness, warns a congressional watchdog.

The Army Transformation Initiative, or ATI, could affect “the availability of Army forces to support Combatant Command requirements and the effectiveness of Army ground operations, as well as the effectiveness of ATI-proposed changes to existing headquarters units,” according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, which is Congress’ in-house think tank.

The specifics of ATI have yet to be finalized in the wake of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s April directive that called for transforming the Army “at an accelerated pace by divesting outdated, redundant, and inefficient programs, as well as restructuring headquarters and acquisition systems.”

Hegseth’s directive was quickly followed by a letter to the force from Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, which outlined a plan to convert Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, or IBCTs, to Mobile Brigade Combat Teams “to improve mobility and lethality in a leaner formation.”

The letter also vowed to cancel the procurement of “outdated crewed attack aircraft such as the AH-64D [helicopter], excess ground vehicles like the HMMWV [High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle] and JLTV [Joint Light Tactical Vehicle], and obsolete UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] like the Gray Eagle,” as well as canceling programs “that deliver dated, late-to-need, overpriced, or difficult-to-maintain capabilities.”

Clausewitz in theory and practice: Revisiting the politics of war

Harsh Thakor*

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Carl von Clausewitz remains one of history’s most original military thinkers. His writings extend beyond particular conflicts and elevate the study of warfare to a broader theoretical level. By examining the relationship between war and politics, the interaction between governments, military leadership, and society, and the dynamics that drive escalation, he created a body of work that has continued to shape discussions of strategy since the 19th century.

Interestingly, his ideas found their most attentive readers not only among professional military officers but also among those engaged in movements of popular resistance and unconventional warfare. While his influence on Lenin has been widely discussed, the connections to Engels, Mao, Giáp, and others are less well known. The first French edition of Clausewitz and the People’s War explored these links and examined revolutionary warfare through new perspectives.

The recent republication of Clausewitz and the People’s War and Other Politico-Military Essays by Foreign Languages Press, two decades after its original appearance, seeks to renew this discussion. This revised and expanded edition includes dedicated chapters on leaders such as Mao and Giáp, drawing on newly available sources such as Giáp’s memoirs and Mao’s reading notes.

The author, T. Derbent, has long studied the adaptation of Clausewitz’s ideas in modern contexts and has produced extensive research on how they intersected with various political and military traditions. His work traces both the intellectual relationship between Clausewitz and later theorists and the ways in which specific military doctrines drew on or diverged from Clausewitzian principles.