The U.S. and India Are Quietly Patching Things Up

Ian Bremmer

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U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meet in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 13, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Andrew Harnik—Getty Images

In Donald Trump’s first term and at the opening of his second, the U.S. President and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked to have a special relationship. Similar views on the value of strongman domestic politics and a common aim to check China’s global ambitions made them well-aligned partners. Things have changed. Common interests remain the bedrock of relations between the U.S. and Modi’s India, but the personal trust that helped build their relationship has now cooled significantly.

You might think the biggest source of tension between the two leaders is Trump’s search for leverage over Russia’s Vladimir Putin—in particular, his bid to halt India’s import of sanctioned Russian oil to force Putin to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. But it’s another armed conflict that’s at the heart of the friction.

When fighting began in May between India and Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir, Trump leaped at the chance to play peacemaker, and he tasked Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with de-escalating tensions. Despite India’s plans for a joint announcement of a deal to end the fighting, Trump claimed personal credit, and Pakistan compounded Modi’s anger by suggesting Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Trump then responded to a Pakistani diplomatic charm offensive with lucrative investment deals on energy, cryptocurrencies, and critical minerals. His request that Modi add his support to the U.S. President’s long-standing Nobel ambitions even further alienated the Indian Prime Minister, who began to express his frustrations.

That’s the background for Trump’s decision in August to impose 50% tariffs on India, ostensibly for its continuing purchases of Russian oil. Modi’s response? He accepted an invitation from China’s Xi Jinping to join a number of world leaders, notably including Putin, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin meant to highlight China’s growing diplomatic clout. It was Modi’s first trip to China in seven years. A ride and hour-long chat with Putin in the Russian President’s limousine sent a clear message of defiance that India and its leader would not be pushed around by the White House.

Evolution, Expansion and Diversification: Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s Umar Media

Abdul Basit

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Since 2021, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has reformed its organisational structure every year – imitating the Taliban’s insurgency model – to recruit, radicalise, and incite violence. TTP has paid particular close attention to managing its information warfare. The terror group meticulously disseminates ideological narratives to defend its militant campaign in Pakistan and rebut the Pakistani state’s efforts to undermine its legitimacy by labelling it as Fitna Al-Khawarij (the menace of Islamist seceders).

At the same time, by carefully infusing jihadist rhetoric with Pashtun nationalism, TTP seeks to position itself as the self-appointed defender of tribal rights along the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland. This attempt to appropriate ethnic identity for militant legitimacy, however, is widely rejected by most Pashtuns.

To sustain its narrative in the face of such rejection, TTP relies heavily on its propaganda arm, Umar Media. It plays a strategic role in influencing public opinion on politically charged issues such as Pakistan’s Afghan policy, the treatment of Afghan refugees, and US-Pakistan relations. By presenting itself as a political and ideological voice for disaffected communities, TTP seeks to obscure its violent tactics behind a façade of resistance and representation.

Against this backdrop, this Insight will discuss Umar Media’s evolution, content, and expansion. It will then examine the latest propaganda campaigns the group has conducted on social media and encrypted messaging platforms. The last section will discuss the implications of TTP’s propaganda warfare and outline some policy measures to counter it.

Evolution and Main Contents of Umar Media

In 2006, Umar Studio, named after the Taliban’s founder, Mullah Muhammad Umar, began as a patchwork of propaganda channels recording and publishing videos of TTP’s militant campaigns. Until 2010, Umar Media’s propaganda material was distributed through CDs, DVDs and pamphlets.

The rise of the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) in 2015, challenging the Taliban’s ideological legitimacy, was a turning point for Umar Media. TTP responded with a 66-page Urdu rebuttal contesting ISKP’s claim to a global Sunni Caliphate (see Figure 1) and launched an Urdu-language magazine in 2016, publishing eight issues through 2020.

Umar Media’s latest reincarnation came in 2021 following the Afghan Taliban’s re-takeover. Since then, it has regularly published its monthly magazine with notable improvements in design and content. Two additional magazines in Pashto and Urdu, including one focusing on women, have also been introduced. The women’s periodical features interviews with commanders’ wives to attract female sympathisers.

New documentary scrutinizes the lies that fueled the war in Afghanistan

Sophia Nguyen

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“Bodyguard of Lies,” a documentary examining the deceit that drove the longest war in American history, takes its title from a Winston Churchill line: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

It’s difficult to say whether truth was considered precious, during the decades that the United States was mired in military conflict in Afghanistan. As the film demonstrates, it was certainly in short supply.

The film adapts a 2019 investigation in The Washington Post, “The Afghanistan Papers,” which uncovered hundreds of firsthand accounts from generals, diplomats and other government officials about what went wrong in the conflict. In their reporting, The Post’s Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh found that those unvarnished remarks often directly contradicted statements made by those same leaders to the American public — adding up to decades of deliberate deception. (Whitlock was also executive producer on the film and appears in it.)

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In the movie, director Dan Krauss draws on the revelations from that cache of documents, interviewing a number of people involved in the conflict, including John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction; Gen. David McKiernan, the four-star general fired during the Obama administration; and Maj. Gen. Edward M. Reeder, who commanded the U.S. Army Special Forces for much of the war.

Chinese hackers breach US software and law firms amid trade fight, experts sa

Sean Lyngaas

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A team of suspected Chinese hackers has infiltrated US software developers and law firms in a sophisticated campaign to collect intelligence that could help Beijing in its ongoing trade fight with Washington, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Wednesday.

The hackers have been rampant in recent weeks, hitting the cloud-computing firms that numerous American companies rely on to store key data, Mandiant, which is owned by Google, said. In a sign of how important China’s hacking army is in the race for tech supremacy, the hackers have also stolen US tech firms’ proprietary software and used it to find new vulnerabilities to burrow deeper into networks, according to Mandiant.

The FBI is investigating the intrusions and US officials are still trying to understand the full scope of the hacks, sources told CNN.

It’s a fresh five-alarm fire for the FBI’s cyber experts, who at any given time are investigating multiple sophisticated Chinese cyber-espionage campaigns aimed at US government and corporate secrets.

In some cases, the hackers have lurked undetected in the US corporate networks for over a year, quietly collecting intelligence, Mandiant said.

The disclosure comes after the Trump administration escalated America’s trade war with China this spring by slapping unprecedented tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. The tit-for-tat tariffs set off a scramble in both governments to understand each other’s positions.

“The FBI is aware of this matter and we continue to work with our law enforcement and private sector partners,” a bureau spokesperson told CNN. “We encourage the public to contact their local field office or tips.fbi.gov, if they believe to be a victim.”

Mandiant analysts said the fallout from the breaches — the task of kicking out the hackers and assessing the damage — could last many months. They described it as a milestone hack, comparable in severity and sophistication to Russia’s use of SolarWinds software to infiltrate US government agencies in 2020.

China Maritime Report #50: Foggy With a Chance of Surprise Attack: PLA Amphibious Deception in a Taiwan Scenario

Ian Easton

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Main FindingsThe People’s Liberation Army (PLA) views deception as a force multiplier and war-winning weapon. The PLA leadership reserves a special place of veneration for wartime commanders who can employ deception to obtain surprise, something Xi Jinping refers to as “excelling at stratagem.”

In January 1955, the PLA launched a surprise attack on the Yijiangshan islands, then controlled by the Republic of China (ROC) government in Taipei. This campaign remains a case study in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for how to conduct amphibious operations and catch defenders off guard.

Empirical historical research shows that amphibious operations, while complex and difficult to conduct, almost always achieve their objectives. The critical factor is the shock they cause, and that is often enhanced by deception.

PLA textbooks and field manuals explicitly link the difficulty of a future Taiwan invasion with the need to embrace unconventional approaches. They exhort officers at all levels of command to use deception.

Advanced intelligence and surveillance technologies do not make a surprise attack on Taiwan unachievable. A zero-warning invasion remains virtually impossible, but it is also unnecessary from the PLA’s perspective.

Chinese military researchers envision employing robots, containerized missiles, and unmanned amphibious vehicles to confuse and unbalance Taiwan’s defenders in a future war.

American and Taiwanese strategists should account for unique ways the PLA may attempt to achieve the element of surprise and plan against those courses of action.

War games, simulations, and field exercises that account for a surprise attack on Taiwan could generate insights and help senior leaders rethink the levels of risk associated with current and possible future defense postures.

Immediate steps should be taken to cope with deception and minimize reaction times so that any sudden amphibious landings on Taiwan, while dramatic, will not be decisive.

Taming the Hegemon: Chinese Thinking on Countering U.S. Military Intervention in Asia

Joel Wuthnow 

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This report assesses recent Chinese thinking on countering U.S. intervention in Asia, specifically in a Taiwan contingency. Key findings include:

■ People’s Liberation Army (PLA) analysts assume U.S. forces will intervene in a Taiwan contingency, up to and including mainland strikes. This assumption, based on prudent military planning, has persisted for decades even as Chinese observers increasingly viewed U.S. power in a state of relative decline. It drives the PLA to advocate for careful preparation of counter-intervention options.

■ States in China’s position have historically relied on four options to counter third-party intervention in offensive campaigns: direct assault against intervening forces; deterrence actions against the third party’s political leadership; a fait accompli against the main target before the intervener can mobilize; and creation of strategic buffers between the attacker and the intervener.

■ PLA sources emphasize the options that require direct confrontation—direct assault and strategic deterrence of the United States—because they are the most decisive. The first relies on asymmetric warfare against key targets in the U.S. military system. The second leverages nuclear, conventional, and informational (space, cyber, and cognitive warfare) tools to pressure U.S. leaders to reject a recommendation to intervene. Both options are part of an effort to “deter and check” the “powerful enemy," which is a frequent euphemism for the United States.

■ The PLA has a different attitude toward escalation in these two options. A direct assault emphasizes military expediency. PLA scholars focus on precision strikes but also highcasualty attacks if necessary for the campaign plan. Deterrence relies on brinkmanship. The two Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s are touted as examples of successful deterrence while managing risks.

■ The PLA appears less interested in the two indirect options because they cannot guarantee success. A fait accompli would be difficult due to strategic warning and a U.S. ability to respond quickly. Beijing will try to create strategic buffers by pressuring U.S. allies and partners to deny access, but those efforts could fail—and the U.S. military has options to intervene that do not rely on host nation support.

How Qatar Is Responding to Israel’s Sept. 9 Attack

Ravi Agrawal

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On Sept. 9, Israel’s air force bombed a residential neighborhood in Doha, Qatar, to take out Hamas’s senior political leadership. According to Hamas, five members were killed, but not its primary leaders. Doha, a key U.S. ally, strongly condemned the attack. Even U.S. President Donald Trump lamented the strike on Truth Social: “I view Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the U.S., and feel very badly about the location of the attack.”

Will Doha continue to play a role mediating between Hamas and Israel? And does Qatar still believe its interests lie in its broader role in peace negotiations around the world? I spoke with Majed al-Ansari at the Concordia summit on Monday, Sept. 22, on the sidelines of the 80th annual United Nations General Assembly. Ansari is an advisor to the prime minister of Qatar and the spokesperson of its ministry of foreign affairs.

The Coming Collision of Commercial and Military Space

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One of the conscious efforts of the military spacefaring community is to contract commercial space-based services to support military missions. In many ways, their aims are being realized with Starlink, Planet, Maxar, and other commercial communications and imagery providers.

These commercial systems, however, are vulnerable to military attack. Detailing these vulnerabilities and how hostile actors might hijack these systems is a key focus of NPEC’s latest volume of commissioned research (see below)—The Coming Collision of Commercial and Military Space.

The volume’s opening chapter, by Crystal Tu, examines the questionable resiliency of Taiwan’s communications systems—including their space-based assets—and how China might disrupt or disable them. This research supported a war game in which China countered Taiwan’s communications systems. The game’s after-action report can be found in the volume’s appendix.

The next four chapters include an examination of space safety zones by Melissa de Zwart, a brief on how best to defend U.S. commercial space systems by Marc Berkowitz, a review of space liability law by Christopher Johnson, and an analysis of how space conflict could draw in major powers by Brent Ziarnick.

These and the volume’s final chapters helped guide the design of another war game, which focused on proxy wars in the Middle East and the possible hijacking of commercial systems by hostile actors. The first, by Makena Burns, reviews the latest commercial space developments in the region. The second, by John Krzyzaniak, examines the future of Iran’s military and space programs. Again, the details of this game can be found in the volume’s appendix.

In addition to clarifying the space headaches ahead, the volume’s research is suggestive of several reforms the United States and its allies should pursue.

As always, I’m curious to get your take.

Britain may already be at war with Russia, former head of MI5 says

Dan Sabbagh

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Britain may already be at war with Russia because of the depth and intensity of cyber-attacks, sabotage and other hostile activity orchestrated by Moscow against the UK, according to a former head of MI5.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, who led the domestic spy agency two decades ago, said she agreed with comments made by the Russia expert Fiona Hill, who argued in a Guardian interview earlier this year that Moscow was at war with the west.

Lady Manningham-Buller argued that the situation had changed “since the invasion of Ukraine and the various things I read about that the Russians have been doing here – sabotage, intelligence collection, attacking people and so on”.

Speaking on a podcast in which she was interviewed by the lord speaker, John McFall, she then referenced Hill, who advised Donald Trump during his first term as US president and co-authored the UK’s strategic defence review.

“I think she may be right in saying we’re already at war with Russia. It’s a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyber-attacks, the physical attacks, the intelligence work is extensive,” she said.

Six Bulgarians living in the UK were jailed this year for their role in a spy ring conducting hostile surveillance around Europe, and five men were convicted for their involvement in an arson attack ordered by Moscow on a warehouse containing supplies destined for Ukraine.

Pat McFadden, then the Cabinet Office minister, said last year that Russia had stepped up its cyber-attacks against the UK. Hackers have targeted a string of British businesses. While the source of the attacks can take time to detect, many are suspected to have originated in Russia.

Several of the UK’s Nato allies in eastern Europe have been affected by recent drone incidents, most notably Poland where 19 unarmed Russian drones crossed into its airspace this month.

During the early part of Manningham-Buller’s period as MI5 chief between 2002 and 2007, there were hopes that Russia under Vladimir Putin would not revert to its Soviet ways and instead become a potential partner for the west.

The TikTok Deal Is America’s White Flag in the Tech War With China

Steven Feldstein

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On Sept. 25, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that he says will allow TikTok to continue operating in the country while complying with national security concerns. After a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Sept. 19, Trump said he had reached an agreement for a U.S. investor group led by Oracle to take control of 80 percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. But as details have come to light, serious questions are surfacing.

For one, the national security concerns that led Congress to pass a law banning TikTok in the first place are left unresolved. TikTok’s algorithm—its “secret sauce” governing what users see on the app and possibly serving as a key weapon for Chinese influence operations—will remain in ByteDance’s hands. Under the deal, a copy of will be licensed to the U.S. investor group, which will then retrain it using data from users based in the United States.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B Visa Miscalculation

Vivek Wadhwa

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Critics have long argued that some companies abuse the program by using it to replace U.S. workers with cheaper foreign labor. These concerns have merit. Studies have documented consulting and other firms paying foreign H-1B workers less than their U.S. peers in similar roles and even engaging in wage theft.

NATO needs accelerated counter-drone tech to fend off Russian incursions: Official

Tim Martin 

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BELFAST — NATO’s fielding of counter-drone systems must be expediated so the threat of Russian drones violating alliance airspace can be better dealt with, according to a senior NATO official.

Counter-drone technology is “something we really have to field now, not in years,” Gen. Ingo Gerhartz, commander of NATO Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum, told the Warsaw Security Forum today. “It has to be fielded in months, in a multi-domain approach.”

He said NATO, the European Union and individual nations need to be a “bit faster” at acquiring counter drone systems.

Shooting down cheap drones that cost $2,000 to $3,000 with million-dollar missiles is neither effective nor sustainable, shared Gerhartz.

In the wake of Russia’s drone incursion into Poland, NATO launched Eastern Sentry to boost its air defenses across the Eastern Flank, chiefly through the deployment of British, Danish, French and German weapon systems.

“Putting more assets in there [Eastern flank] more fighters [combat jets] … gives us a good feeling,” said Gerhartz. “It signals that NATO and the countries can react. But we need other equipment, even more. We need low cost sensors. We need low cost effectors.”

In addition to flying drones over Poland, Moscow has done the same over Romania and has flown fighter jets over Estonia, moves that European officials have widely condemned.

In a joint statement today, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland called the Russian actions “reckless, hostile acts.”

Signaling increased efforts on the continent to respond to drone threats, France, Germany and Sweden are among a number of countries that have agreed to supply Denmark with counter drone systems in order to enhance security for a European Council (EC) meeting in Copenhagen on Wednesday, the Danish Ministry of Defense announced today.

The battle to save Intel: How a great American company ended up in the fight of its life

Geoff Colvin

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It certainly wasn’t the savior’s welcome Lip-Bu Tan may have expected. It was March 2025, and he had just been named Intel’s CEO, lured back after resigning from the company’s board of directors seven months earlier. Intel was drifting, overseen temporarily by two executives after the previous CEO abruptly retired. Now, for the first time, Tan was addressing online all Intel employees globally. They were looking for straight talk—and if they felt they weren’t getting it, the Intel culture would let them say so.

“You’re allowed to ask whatever you want in our company and not feel any ramifications from that,” a recently retired 30-year employee tells Fortune. Tan “was immediately asked, ‘Why did you quit [when he resigned from the board]—and now you think you’re going to come back and save us?’” Tan’s answer that he was dealing with personal things did not assuage the crowd. The veteran employee says side chats immediately lit up with criticism. “They were very frustrated with his answer.”

If Tan was sweating then, the heat cranked up considerably in August, when Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton alleged that Tan controlled Chinese companies and had a stake in hundreds of Chinese technology firms, some of which reportedly had ties to the Chinese army. President Trump quickly posted on Truth Social that Tan “is highly CONFLICTED and must resign.”

Yet after Tan met with Trump four days later, the winds started to shift for Intel. The two seemed to hit it off, and not long thereafter they struck a nearly unprecedented deal: Intel would send 9.9% of its stock to the federal government, and the U.S. would convey $8.9 billion to Intel. Then, in late September, the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, agreed to invest $5 billion in the chipmaker. Under their agreement, Intel will produce a broad range of new chips combining technology from both companies, with Nvidia buying some of the chips.

Craig Barrett, a former Intel CEO, told Fortune recently that this model—customers putting new capital into the company—could save Intel, which desperately needs cash. “The only place the cash can come from is the customers,” he says. “They are all cash-rich, and if eight of them were willing to invest $5 billion each, then Intel would have a chance.” In addition to Nvidia, those companies would likely include Apple, Broadcom, Google, Qualcomm

Who is paying for Trump's tariffs? So far, it's US businesses.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer (PIIE) and Ye Zhang (PIIE)

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President Donald Trump promised during his recent campaign to impose steep tariffs on other countries, assuring voters that the cost would be paid by foreign sellers, not Americans. In September 2024, for example, Trump told supporters:

“We’re going to be a tariff nation. It’s not going to be a cost to you. It’s going to be a cost to another country…. I heard Kamala the other day, Comrade Kamala. She said, 'Oh, if you do that, he’s raising your taxes.' No. No. No. I’m not raising your taxes. I’m raising China and all of these countries in Asia and all over the world, including the European Union by the way, which is one of the most egregious.” 

Following his inauguration in January, Trump made similar claims as he issued multiple executive orders slapping tariffs on merchandise imports from countries near and far.

But the data suggest that US businesses have absorbed most of the tariff costs through July 2025, not foreign sellers.

This blog post explores the effects of Trump’s tariffs on import prices for these five broad product categories to identify who has borne the costs so far. After all, the tariffs paid by the importers of record have to show up in one of three places: lower prices paid to foreign sellers, smaller spreads earned by US firms between the cost of imported goods and their selling prices, or higher prices paid by US households.

The US government has collected growing revenue from the tariffs paid by US importers, but the prices paid to foreign sellers for many imported consumer goods have changed very little. Meanwhile, American consumers have not yet seen much change in retail prices for most imported goods.

As depicted in figure 1, revenue from US tariffs on five broad categories of imported products, expressed as a percentage of import value, have progressively increased this year through July. The categories are automotive vehicles, parts, and engines; consumer goods; non-auto capital goods; foods, feeds, and beverages; and industrial supplies and materials.

Tracking the Short-Run Price Impact of U.S. Tariffs∗

Alberto Cavallo Harvard University Paola Llamas Northwestern University Franco Vazquez Universidad de San Andr´es

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Tariffs have significant economic impacts that directly affect businesses, consumers, and policymakers. Understanding how tariffs influence retail prices is crucial, as price changes determine consumers’ purchasing power, shape business decisions, and inform government trade policy. Despite their importance, measuring the price effects of tariffs at the retail level remains a challenge. Official price statistics and traditional surveys typically provide data with low frequency and with significant delays, limiting their usefulness for timely policy analysis. Furthermore, such aggregate measures lack sufficient granularity, obscuring which specific product categories are most affected or how goods from particular countries respond differently to tariff adjustments. A more detailed and timely analysis is therefore essential to provide clarity and actionable insights into the short-run price effects of tariff changes. 

To address these challenges, we conduct an empirical analysis that combines micro-level retail price data with detailed information on product origin and tariff classifications. We link daily prices from major U.S. retailers to country-of-origin data, obtained either by searching UPC codes online or by using GenAI models to find the product’s origin. We match these products to their corresponding tariff lines using publicly available data from the U.S. International Trade Commission, which reports effective tariff rates and their revisions by HS10 code and country. Using this integrated dataset, we construct custom price indices by product category, country of origin, and tariff exposure, and analyze their movements around the tariff implementation dates. This high-frequency, granular view reveals which goods were affected, how quickly prices adjusted, and whether the impact varied by country—insights not captured in conventional price statistics.

NATO Needs a Realistic Path to 5 Percent Defense Spending by 2035

Brian Chow

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With a politically realistic path, NATO can preserve President Trump’s 5 percent commitment by 2035—and raise an additional $6.3 trillion over the next decade to counter collective adversaries.

At their summit in the Hague, Netherlands, in June, the 32 members of NATO—after years of prodding from President Donald Trump—finally agreed to raise their defense spending target to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. This replaces the vague “2 percent” benchmark set at the 2014 Wales summit with a clear, uniform, and fair 5 percent. Yet that pledge alone is insufficient. NATO must adopt a politically realistic path that steadily raises annual defense spending in order to achieve two essential goals: avoiding an abrupt, politically unacceptable jump from 2034 to 2035, and raising $6.3 trillion over the next decade so that allies can strengthen collective defense immediately rather than waiting a decade.

In the past three and a half years, Russia has seized an additional 12 percent of Ukraine’s territory, bringing total control to about one-fifth of the country (including Crimea, which it occupied in 2014). Even with a best-case peace settlement, Moscow will likely retain control of many of these territories, and will remain an ongoing threat to Moldova, Georgia, Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of Europe. On August 11, David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic noted that China has enabled Russia’s war and is using it to prepare for a showdown with the United States, particularly over Taiwan. On August 26, Xi Jinping declared China and Russia should jointly safeguard their security and development interests.

On September 3, CNN reported Xi, Putin, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had appeared publicly together for the first time at a military parade in Beijing. At the time, Trump accused the trio of conspiring against the United States. The president’s claims have merit: North Korea has supplied missiles, and Iran drones, to Russia for use in Ukraine. The joint actions of America’s adversaries heighten the urgency of strengthening NATO’s defenses.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reshaped NATO’s priorities. The United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states have boosted defense spending, but this must spread quickly to all allies—not only to hit 5 percent of GDP by 2035, but to build strength steadily in the coming decade.

Why the 5 Percent Goal Might Fall Apart

U.S. Army Next Generation Armor Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief (2025)

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On March 12-13, 2025, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Board on Army Research and Development convened a workshop to explore barriers and opportunities for developing the U.S. Army's next generation of armor. At the workshop, experts from industry, academia, government, and national laboratories explored barriers that may exist to the introduction of a new generation of materials that could provide somewhat comparable kinetic weapons protection with significant weight savings. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

Irregular Warfare Center (IWC)

PRISM, September 2025, v. 11, no. 1 

What the Red Dragon Fears: Assessing Resistance in China

Decentralized Democratic State- Building: Evidence from the United Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands

Decentralized Stabilization Assistance

Strategizing Lawfare as a Key Irregular War Modality

Slovenian Independence and the Resistance Operating Concept: A Comparative Analysis

The Iatrogenic Paradox: When Information Operations Undermine Strategic Objectives

Why Is Russia Hiding the Armata Tank?

Maya Carlin

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The T-14 was dispatched to Ukraine temporarily in 2023, likely for propaganda purposes rather than real combat experience.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rages on, tank losses on both sides continue to amass. From World War II-era relics and Soviet-designed models to more modern successors, the main battle tank (MBT) has taken major hits throughout the last three-plus years of fighting. In fact, open-source intelligence trackers estimate that Moscow alone has conservatively lost at least 4,000 MBTs, although the accurate figure is likely much higher. Russian forces have been forced to turn to their storage of decades-old tank models to replenish their rapidly diminishing fleet on the frontlines. Despite these losses, however, it is noteworthy that the nation’s newest MBT platform has not played a role in its offensive efforts. The T-14 “Armata” is touted by the Kremlin as top-tier and unparalleled in capability, yet its absence in the war has caused many to wonder if these statements are in fact reality.

The T-14 was dispatched to Ukraine temporarily in 2023, likely for propaganda purposes rather than real combat experience. As one of the only fourth-generation MBTs in service across the globe, the Armata should certainly be serving as Moscow’s primary tank in the force. According to a UK assessment, the tank may not be as stellar as the Kremlin would like to purport. “Any T-14 deployment is likely to be a high-risk decision for Russia,” said the UK’s Defense Ministry. “Eleven years in development, the program has been dogged with delays, reduction in planned fleet size, and reports of manufacturing problems.” Russian officials have tried to paint the Armata’s absence in the war as a consequence of its value. Last year, the CEO of Russia’s state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec claimed that the T-14’s role in Ukraine has been limited since it is “too valuable.” Sergey Chemezov added that the latest Russian MBT is the most “revolutionary tank in a decade.”

What We Know About Russia’s T-14 Armata

As EW proliferates, Air Force Spectrum Warfare Wing speeds organic waveform development

Mark Pomerleau

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The patch of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing is displayed in front of the wing's holiday greeting card display at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Dec. 2, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by 1st Lt. Benjamin Aronson)

AFA 2025 — As it supports operations around the globe, the Air Force’s electromagnetic spectrum reprogramming wing has sped up the cycle for testing and deploying different waveforms to stay ahead in the cat-and-mouse game of electronic warfare, according to a key service official.

“What we have learned [as] they’re stressing the system is we have to be able to operate in multiple AORs [areas of operation] and be able to push the information that the warfighter is going to need in all of those AORs to make sure that the warfighter is dialed into what that electromagnetic operating environment is put in,” Col. Larry Fenner, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, told Breaking Defense in an interview. “We have contributed to multiple operations, whether it’s in the Middle East, [Indo-Pacific Command], in Europe, we and we continue to do so, even to this day. It’s nonstop for us.”

The 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing was born in 2021 as a direct result of a landmark study over six years ago known as the Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team that sought to dive deeper into electromagnetic spectrum issues and develop institutional changes. The wing is focused on three missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of Air Force electronic warfare capabilities.

In electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum operations — where adversaries seek to deny access to the spectrum for communications or navigation through jamming — agility and speed are paramount. Once a signal is detected, forces must work to reprogram systems to counter it. During the Cold War that could take weeks to months as the signal had to be sent back to a lab, a fix devised, and then sent back to the field. Today, it needs to happen in days or even hours.

Fenner, who spoke on the sidelines of the annual Air and Space Forces Association conference at National Harbor, Md., said that in the year he’s been in command of the wing, he pushed his airmen to “really move out aggressively on those waveforms and starting to introduce that extra capability into our treasure chest.” Early returns, he said, are promising, as the wing has halved the time for waveform reprogramming in some cases.

Air Force Grapples with Limitations of AI

Shaun Waterman

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Now that the Air Force is starting to deploy artificial intelligence operationally, service leaders are grappling with AI’s limitations—not just what it can and cannot do, but the extensive data and technical and human infrastructure it needs to work.

That was the takeaway from industry experts and senior officers at AFA’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept 23.

At a recent experiment staged by the Advanced Battle Management System Cross-Functional Team, for example, vendors and Air Force coders used AI to do the work of “match effectors”—deciding which platforms and weapons systems should be used against a particular target and generating Courses of Action, or COAs, to achieve a military objective.

An AI algorithm was able to generate a COA in 10 seconds, compared to 16 minutes for a human, but “they weren’t necessarily completely viable COAs,” said Maj. Gen. Robert Claude, Space Force representative to the ABMS Cross-Functional Team.

“While [the AI] was much more timely and there were more COAs generated,” some did not take all necessary factors into account; for instance, proposing the use of infrared-guided weapons when the weather was cloudy, Claude told reporters.

“We’re getting faster results and we’re getting more results, but there’s still going to have to be a human in the loop for the foreseeable future to make sure that, yes, it’s a viable COA or no, we need just a little bit more of this to make the COA viable,” he explained.

The tendency of generative AI to “hallucinate,” or invent answers, is well understood, but other forms of AI have problems too, explained David Ware, a partner at consulting firm McKinsey, who moderated a panel on data and AI for decision superiority.

“Generative AI uniquely has a hallucination problem, but all AI models have problems with accuracy and bias,” he told Air & Space Forces Magazine in a brief interview following the panel.

Mobilizing for the ‘invisible war’

Bryan Clark 

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EA-18G Growlers from the "Star Warriors" of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 209 simultaneously fire two AGM-88 High Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARM) during a training exercise near Guam. (U.S. Navy photo by Cmdr. Peter Scheu)

In his recent confirmation hearing, Gen. Chris Mahoney, the nominee for vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, set electronic warfare as one of his top priorities if he is approved by the Senate. This was welcome news after more than a decade of dire assessments regarding the US military’s eroding proficiency and capacity for fighting in the spectrum.

But to turn bold statements into operational impact, the Pentagon will need to update its approach for the information age. Electronic warfare is no longer just jammers and decoys. It is a battle for sensemaking itself.

For Mahoney to make good on this opportunity will require more than replacing or updating aging EW aircraft like the EC-130 Compass Call, EA-18G Growler, or RC-135 Rivet Joint. Those are tactical improvements that might help once combat begins. The more important investments will be those that set the battlefield before the first shot — or prevent any shooting at all.

In 2025, intelligence sources are highly distributed, span military and commercial systems, and are of widely varying quality. Enemy forces can use publicly available data to target US troops, ships, or aircraft and exploit social media to gather intelligence on US servicemembers and operations. Paradoxically, disrupting, overwhelming, or deceiving this flood of information may be getting easier. Today nearly all information at some point moves through the airwaves, including to and from space. Electronic warfare and cyber operations are merging as the fastest way to get into an opponent’s network becomes an antenna.

With military and commercial sensors ubiquitous, an opponent like China can build a comprehensive picture during peacetime of US forces’ positions, identity, and habits, building a “pattern of life” akin to the approach used during counterinsurgency operations. When combat begins, People’s Liberation Army targeteers can quickly implement fire plans against US bases, ships, and ground units.

AI will make drone threats a nightmare – it could also save us

Paul Lemmo - Lockheed Martin 

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Imagine you’re standing watch on a military base’s security forces team, monitoring for potential air threats. Your radar screen is cluttered with tracks – commercial aircraft, flocks of birds, and civilian and commercial drones. You see what looks like a small aircraft veering towards your fence line.

Is that a threat? A delivery drone flying off course? A hobbyist drone operator snapping a picture of a sunset? Or is it an AI-trained distraction while the real threat masks its approach from another direction?

Drones already present a formidable challenge for military and homeland security forces. AI-guided drones could be a nightmare, using advanced tactics to hide their movements or coordinate swarming attacks custom-designed to overwhelm defenses.

The good news? AI is uniquely suited to powering exceptional drone defenses. Here’s how:

Learning algorithms are excellent at spotting and tracking drones: In a noisy or cluttered radar environment, drones could slip through cracks in sensor detection. But AI can be trained specifically to separate signal from noise in a given environment.

An AI-powered system can become an expert in the area around a military base, for example, learning the local landscape, structures, and even weather patterns so it knows how to pick out and track drone anomalies with exceptional accuracy.

AI can match defensive weapons to drone targets much faster than humans: Once the drone is spotted, a counter-UAS system has to know how to best determine intent and to plan for mitigation. But that depends on many complex factors. Is the drone carrying explosives? Is it vulnerable to a cyber or electronic attack? Could a laser take it down safely?

For operators in a command center, making those decisions from a dozen or so football fields away can cost precious minutes. But an AI algorithm can be trained to recognize and evaluate different drone threats in an instant, evaluating its weaknesses and capabilities to quickly find and recommend the best way to maintain safety and sovereignty. It can also be trained on policy and rules of engagement to know which responses best align to regulations, assisting operators in a complex data rich environment.

PRC Consolidates Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Dominance

Daniel Burke

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The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) appears to be consolidating around a handful of national giants such as Sino Biopharm and Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine.

These companies occupy a large and growing presence in international supply chains and hold bottlenecks in at least three “essential medicines.”

The PRC government has released a policy initiative targeting the pharmaceutical industry almost every year since at least 2015.

Much of the PRC’s pharmaceutical manufacturing development is also linked to Western investment in Chinese capabilities, with leadership from companies such as AstraZeneca, Roche, and Sanofi contributing billions of dollars to research and development in the PRC and personally meeting with Xi Jinping.

In July, LaNova (礼新医药), a major international supplier of innovative biomedical technology, was acquired by the large Chinese pharmaceutical conglomerate Sino Biopharm (中国生物制药) (Sino Biopharm, July 15; BioSpace, July 16). This move comes amid substantial growth in the burgeoning pharmaceutical production and development sector within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and has the potential to further entrench the country in both international and U.S. supply chains.

LaNova saw major development in late 2024, when Merck, an American pharmaceutical giant, paid the company nearly $600 million to further develop, produce, and commercialize its flagship LM-299 anti-cancer treatment, along with a possible $2.7 billion for technology transfer, development, regulatory approval, and additional commercialization (Merck, November 14, 2024). This agreement followed an earlier deal between LaNova and AstraZeneca for treatment of a certain type of bone marrow cancer that neared $600 million (BioSpace, May 15, 2023). These partnerships and others marked a reversal of the previous dynamics of U.S. innovation and Chinese manufacturing and point to extensive Chinese advancements in the pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. The recent acquisition of LaNova by Sino Biopharm will likely further strengthen the conglomerate and increase its overall innovation potential through LaNova’s staff and patents.

Mapping Terrorist AI Use: Identifying Factors Behind a Relatively Slow Adoption Rate

David Wells

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Over the past three years, regional, national, and international governments have repeatedly raised concerns that the misuse of Generative AI (Gen AI) could have a significant impact on the capabilities of terrorists and violent extremists (TVEs). These warnings have not been without foundation. Multiple TVE groups and actors have experimented with Gen AI technologies, primarily to optimise or enhance existing activities and processes.

However, despite these warnings and extensive coverage of these TVE Gen AI experiments, its adoption to date has remained largely ad hoc and experimental. As a result, if Gen AI’s overall impact on the terrorist landscape to date remains hard to define, it is difficult to argue that it has been transformative.

This Insight will outline the slow, piecemeal adoption of Gen AI by TVE actors, and try to characterise the relatively limited impact of this adoption. It will then assess some of the factors behind the rate of adoption, including by contrasting this with the adoption of Gen AI by Serious and Organised criminals (SOC), and exploring factors that impact terrorist adoption of new technologies. In doing so, it aims to help chart a course towards a better understanding of any potential future expansion in TVE Gen AI use, before concluding with brief recommendations for government and private sector actors relating to this activity.

Cases of TVE Gen AI Use

There have been several clear-cut examples of Gen AI use by TVE actors. These include a wide range of propaganda-related activities, with the Islamic State Khorasan Province’s use of AI-generated news bulletins to claim high-profile attacks in March and May 2024 being particularly noteworthy. Other TVE actors have used Gen AI to create imagery and videos, including the re-packaging or translation of materials from ISIL’s weekly newspaper al-Naba. However, most of this activity has originated from ISIL supporters, not official ISIL accounts. Similarly, although pro-Al Qa’ida accounts have discussed or promoted the use of Gen AI, there have only been isolated examples of AI-generated Al Qa’ida activity.

In contrast, AI-generated propaganda has been more widespread among the far-right violent extremist milieu, with AI-generated imagery and videos being used to support anti-immigration narratives in Italy, Germany, France and Ireland. However, a recent analysis highlighting Grok’s use by the UK far-right showed that between January and May 2025, Gen AI content only featured in around 2% of posts on X by a range of UK far-right groups and personalities.

Finally, there are emerging examples of how Gen AI has been exploited to support offline violence. These include its role in the planning of a January 2025 incident in Las Vegas in which an individual died by suicide in an explosion; the use of Gen AI by the 16-year old responsible for a school stabbing in Pirkkala, Finland in May 2025 to draft his manifesto and to prepare for the attack; and a June 2025 incident in New York, where an individual arrested for throwing an IED onto subway tracks in New York claimed that he had “used AI” to assist in its creation.