The effort to implement the Warfighting Acquisition System — transforming the acquisition system around speed, accountability and mission relevance — is both necessary and overdue.

However, if this reform is to deliver its full promise, it must extend beyond headquarters processes, portfolio structures and contracting authorities. Acquisition reform needs to migrate to the last tactical mile — where warfighters confront real-world friction, adapt in real time and generate operational lessons that should shape requirements, accelerate integration and compress acquisition timelines.

The true test of these reforms will not be how quickly decisions move through the system, but how effectively the system learns from the edge, where combat effectiveness is ultimately determined. The avenue to more certain victory leads to and from the warfighter, embracing analysis at the last tactical mile.

America’s warfighters operate at the edge, just as good operations analysts — like those in my own organization — must do in a fast-moving acquisition ecosystem. Successful acquisition reform will need insights from the edge, empowered by empirically trained analysts (uniformed and civilian) who understand systems, tactics, strategy and operations as seen from the perspective of the sailor, soldier, airman, guardian or Marine.

Speed in acquisition will not be achieved by process reform alone. Analysis at the tactical edge is often overlooked but in need of energy and capital to capture insights that drive decisions. Rapid acquisition to field systems that provide military utility demands a continuous learning loop between those who build capability and those who employ it under actual operating conditions — and the ability to measure results quickly.

In this loop, field-level insights should not be treated as downstream feedback after system deployment; they must become upstream drivers of requirements refinement, system integration and prioritization.

By institutionalizing this feedback loop, the department can reduce costly redesign cycles, shorten decision timelines and field capabilities that are not only delivered faster but have greater military value. This is consistent with the department’s own shift toward “speed of relevance,” operational outcomes, and fulfilling the promise to the warfighter.

The department does not need to build this learning architecture from scratch. Proven models already exist in pockets within the force. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, for example, works closely with warfighters to test and analyze new systems. The operator perspective gets fused early into the technical development process, which then allows fielding at speed. This approach to development can outpace program-of-record development, even when going after the same warfighting gaps.

But this warfighter-centric approach should not be confined to formal military innovation organizations alone. Operator-informed analysis must extend across the defense ecosystem, accelerating integration, reducing acquisition timelines and scaling trusted results.

This is not mere assertion. When acquisition works, whether rapid or otherwise, it does so in part because analysts got in the foxhole, in the aircraft, or inside the combat information center to assess, validate and inform acquisition efforts from the point of view of the warfighter.

I know, because my analysts have led that kind of impactful work. We have designed and executed tests of prototypes in the real world, providing independent technical analysis of performance. Analysis at the tactical edge has uncovered critical problems that have to be addressed before warfighters can safely use systems. It has also revealed new tactical use cases for systems — ones that weren’t anticipated by the manufacturer.

The complexity of the counter-IED fight in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom offers a clear case where warfighter feedback alone was not enough to assess a technology’s utility. So many counter-IED systems were being pushed to the warfighters that it became important to understand which systems worked under which conditions.

Yet one of the most challenging problems in analysis is proving a negative. In other words, if an IED did not go off, was that because of the counter-IED system or not? Our analysts deployed alongside Marine Corps units to collect data and employed complex statistical methods to make that determination. Lives were at stake, and our analyses made a difference.

The department’s shift to the Warfighting Acquisition System is both necessary and timely. Victory on future battlefields belongs to the nation that can create military advantage through rapid acquisition and wartime adaptation. That much is clear. But enduring speed does not come from process redesign alone. It comes from building an acquisition enterprise that learns from the warfighter — where data is analog and results require deep insight to interpret.

If the department fully integrates such a learning loop, it will do more than shorten timelines. It will create a force that adapts faster, integrates better and delivers combat-relevant capability at the pace warfare demands. This is how acquisition reform becomes warfighting advantage.

Dr. Katherine A. McGrady is the president and chief executive officer of CNA, which operates the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research and development center that pioneered the field of operations analysis in support of the U.S. Navy during World War II.

President Trump’s February 2025 executive order, “The Iron Dome for America” (later rebranded as Golden Dome), directed the Department of Defense to protect U.S. citizens and infrastructure from all forms of aerial attack. The department took a first step toward assigning responsibility for a U.S. air and missile defense architecture by standing up the Golden Dome office. But critical elements of any near-term defensive shield remain outside its control: namely, the U.S. air and missile defense systems that have proven their worth on Ukrainian and Middle Eastern battlefields.

The Aegis system, for example, is a U.S. Navy program—though its ballistic missile defense component is funded by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). Patriot interceptors, in turn, belong to the Army. Theater High Altitude Aerial Defense (THAAD) batteries and the Ground Based Midcourse Defense System (GMDS) are developed by the MDA but operated and maintained by the Army. U.S. Northern Command is responsible for U.S. air surveillance but relies heavily on radars belonging to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — and so on.

Iran war has cost $38 billion, depleted two-thirds of US missile interceptors, CBO says

The Golden Dome director’s position in the Defense Department hierarchy — reporting directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense — reflects the urgency of the task. But it does not convey any actual authority to direct the decisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Transportation secretaries.

Diffusion of responsibility is a recipe for failure.

For Golden Dome to work, the Defense Department must draw on lessons from some of its most successful Cold War innovations — specifically, the organizational innovations that made its game-changing technologies and operational concepts possible. Admiral Hyman Rickover, perhaps the leading exemplar of Cold War innovation, took nuclear propulsion from the blackboard to the fleet in just five years.

To quote Rickover: “Unless you can point your finger at the one person who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.” Golden Dome fails this test, precisely because — according to the Defense Department itself — it is a “team effort” in which “we’re going to need all the services and agencies that do this kind of work to step up.”

Rickover took the opposite approach. If something was critical to the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program, he established de facto (and often de jure) control over it. For example, he successfully co-opted the Cabinet-level Atomic Energy Commission. Established in 1947 to oversee all U.S. nuclear matters, the AEC was a potential bureaucratic roadblock. At Rickover’s prompting, therefore, the Navy issued him orders to “report for duty with the Division of Reactor Development” in the AEC (and to the Navy for “additional duty”).

With one foot in the Navy and the other in the AEC, Rickover became the central U.S. authority for nuclear propulsion. This allowed him to coordinate the activities of two separate executive departments, often by proposing an action from one department and then convincing the other to approve it. His dual office, Naval Reactors, remains part of both the Navy and the Department of Energy (successor to the AEC) to this day.

The Rickover approach is not how the Pentagon normally does business. “I can assure you,” Rickover told Congress in 1979, “that having one individual responsible for a total program is a unique concept within the Department of Defense.” But Rickover made it his business to acquire unchallenged authority over all areas that concerned “his” reactors.

The Secretary of Defense must likewise assign total responsibility for Golden Dome, with autonomy and authority to match. This will entail taking the requisite authorities from their normal stewards and re-delegating them to the Golden Dome director.

For example, ballistic missile defense responsibility is currently bifurcated between Golden Dome and the Missile Defense Agency. MDA should be moved under Golden Dome. Similarly, airspace surveillance operations and modernization are divided between DoD and the FAA, with the latter contributing the lion’s share. The Golden Dome director must have a Rickover-like dual assignment in the FAA. And if homeland defense is indeed an urgent priority, DoD should take a hard look at whether the Aegis and Patriot programs should be moved under Golden Dome as well.

This process will be challenging, but far from impossible. And while Rickover’s nuclear power program is one of the most remarkable Cold War innovations, other success stories such as General Bernard Schriever’s Atlas ICBM and Undersecretary of Defense William Perry’s F-117 stealth fighter applied the same core insight: comprehensive organizational authority is just as important as any technological or industrial-base factor. DoD must heed this lesson if Golden Dome is to succeed.

Thane Clare is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Among these ideas, none have been more controversial than the proposed Trump-class battleship.

Proponents argue that this new capital ship would bring concentrated fighting power with new high-tech weapons and large magazines that could fight independently and also withstand substantial punishment in battle. With its currently planned nuclear propulsion, moreover these behemoths could patrol for extended periods without the need to refuel.

Critics have taken aim at the project’s enormous expense, as well as the feasibility of the proposed design that is characterized as over-ambitious.

Into this roiling debate, it is instructive to survey a rather different perspective: What do the Chinese make of this project? An Aug. 21 article in China National Defense News [中国国防报] provides some initial insights into how America’s chief global rival is assessing this potentially major change in direction for the U.S. Navy surface fleet.

This article, published in an official paper of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) does note that the ship could have the advantages that “large vessels can continue to execute certain combat missions even when communications are jammed, and their hulls offer superior damage resistance compared to small or medium-sized ships.” It notes that smaller, distributed platforms could overly “rely on stable data links.” In addition, it’s worth observing that this rendering does note that the planned U.S. battleship would have nuclear propulsion, and would possibly also carry nuclear-armed missiles.

Nevertheless, the Chinese analysis, mirroring many Western evaluations, is suffused with ample skepticism.

For 15 Trump-class battleships built between 2028 and 2056, the costs would amount to $275 billion, with the lead class carrying the price tag of $23.4 billion. The report says that cost is 55% higher due to the change from conventional to nuclear propulsion and terms this price as “exorbitant.” Illustrating some familiarity with nuclear power issues, the analysis adds that “nuclear waste disposal and vessel dismantling following retirement are not included” in the $275 billion estimate.

“Unfinalized designs and insufficient technological maturity” are also flagged as potential major problem that may cause delays and cost overruns. Potentially carrying rail guns, hypersonic weapons, as well as lasers, this critique seems quite valid. As the PLA assessment states: “This ‘build the platform first, install equipment later’ approach could increase the risks.” The piece cites the examples of the both the Zumwalt-class destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) as relevant examples of recent problematic programs.

Notably, the Chinese article is also particularly attuned to potential shifts in the basic U.S. Navy warfighting doctrinal paradigm.

The article observes: “This design differs from the Distributed Maritime Operations concept that the U.S. Navy has been advancing in recent years. The theory of distributed maritime operations emphasizes the dispersal of detection, command, and strike capabilities across multiple nodes … to mitigate the impact that damage to a few large vessels would have on the entire formation.”

In a closely related point, the PLA article also broaches the question of whether large surface combatants are simply too vulnerable to quiet submarines, hypersonic missiles, and “drone swarms.”

Apparently quite aware of major difficulties in U.S. shipbuilding, the Chinese military assessment adds that leading American shipyards “are currently facing average delays of five years, with the delivery cycle for a single ship extending from approximately five years in the early 2000’s to about eleven years today.”

Noting that the new battleship program could have cascading results for other high priority U.S. Navy programs, the article concludes: “Assembly of nuclear-powered battleships … could further slow the construction of aircraft carriers and submarines.” These Chinese strategists are no doubt aware such a delay would further impact the Asia-Pacific naval balance.

China itself has indicated interest in nuclear-powered surface vessels. Thus, they have thoroughly investigated the newly renovated Russian battle cruiser Admiral Nakihimov.

Yet it is would be foolhardy to invest in such ambitious platforms for the U.S. Navy at a time when the service confronts so many shipbuilding challenges and when the nation also faces an inevitable process of belt-tightening. Perhaps some of America’s allies can experiment with the new battleship concept. But the U.S. Navy will be well advised to go toward its time-tested strengths, especially in undersea warfare, but also in the emergent domain of drones.

Overall, America’s sea service must bring its force structure into alignment with a new strategy appropriate to the multipolar world that involves reducing expensive “presence” missions and embracing more cost-effective hedging.

That will most likely mean a less high-profile role for surface combatants and thus recognizing the reality that the Trump-class battleship will most likely never get built.

Certainly, this Chinese military article implies that at least some Chinese strategists are eager for the U.S. to pursue that extravagant project, knowing that it is folly and would thus weaken Beijing’s chief rival.

Lyle Goldstein is director of the China Initiative at Brown University’s Watson School and concurrently serves as director of the Asia Program at the think-tank Defense Priorities.

Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby said that the review was meant to ensure that NATO allies are “moving fast and irreversibly” to “take primary responsibility for the defense of Europe” in a speech to the North Atlantic Council on Aug. 27.

Germany, for its part, has taken notice – and acted.

Berlin’s role in NATO has been defined for decades more by its restraint than by its contribution, a nation constitutionally cautious about military power and chronically underspending on defense.

That era is over. Spurred by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression in Ukraine and increasingly sharp demands from the Trump administration, Germany has undergone a strategic transformation so rapid and consequential that it has become the most important European nation in the alliance, not just by virtue of its economic clout, political power, and geographic position, but by the choices it has made about how to use them.

Germany unveils strategy for becoming Europe’s strongest military by 2039

The foundation of Berlin’s power is economic. Germany boasts a GDP of approximately $5 trillion, the largest in Europe and the third largest in the world.

But for too long Berlin did not translate its economic clout into necessary levels of defense spending. That is now changing.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on July 3 that “Germany is doubling its defense budget within four years.” Berlin’s defense spending as a percent of GDP has grown from 1.43% in 2021 to an estimated 2.69% for 2026.

The government promised last year to increase the budget to €162 billion ($189 billion) by 2029. That would put Berlin above 3% of GDP and on a path to achieve the minimum 3.5% of GDP on core defense requirements by 2035, a commitment codified by alliance members in the 2025 NATO Hague Summit Declaration.

Germany established a €100 billion (approximately $113 billion) special defense fund in 2022, the most significant single defense investment decisions by any European government in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That accelerated procurement across every combat domain, from air defense and armored vehicles to maritime and cyber capabilities.

These investments are strengthening the already robust defense industrial base in Germany, anchored by companies such as Rheinmetall, TKMS, Hensoldt, Diehl Defense, MBDA Deutschland and KNDS Deutschland.

Many of these companies are creating industrial partnerships with American companies, deepening the transatlantic defense production relationship.

Rheinmetall, for example, a preeminent land warfare systems producer in Europe, has established joint ventures with American partners in Ukraine and is in active discussions about co-production arrangements with U.S. defense companies for a 155 mm artillery munition and ATACMS, what is known as the Army Tactical Missile System.

Once-reluctant Germany goes big on one-way attack drones

Those partnerships will strengthen the American defense industrial base and will help Germany carry more of the security burden in Europe and better support Ukraine, while increasing the alliance’s capacity to sustain high-intensity, long-duration conflict.

The most visible and important expression of Germany’s strategic transformation is its decision to permanently station a combat brigade in Lithuania, the first time Germany has permanently forward-deployed combat forces outside its borders in Europe since the end of the Second World War. The 45th Armored Brigade in Lithuania represents a fundamental shift in German strategic culture: from a nation that once exported pacifism to one that accepts forward deterrence as a national responsibility.

For the Baltic states and Poland, which have long been skeptical of German commitment, this is what matters most: not defense budget percentages or procurement contracts, but German soldiers standing guard on NATO’s eastern flank.

That is a message that Putin understands.

Europe’s most powerful economy, its most capable defense industrial base, and now its most consequential forward military commitment are all moving in the same direction at the same time. That convergence of economic weight, industrial capacity, and forward strategic commitment is what makes Germany indispensable to the alliance’s future.

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have formed what we describe as a new Axis of Aggressors. They are “pursuing unprecedented levels of cooperation,” according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine. That cooperation is making each of these adversaries more formidable.

At this moment of growing risk, Americans should not take its allies and partners for granted. The United States is powerful, but Americans need help given growing threats and finite resources.

Disagreements will arise between Washington and Berlin, but those disagreements must not be allowed to derail Berlin’s growing defense investments and transatlantic unity and cooperation.

Americans need friends that match words with deeds and help carry the shared security burden.That is exactly what Berlin is finally doing — and Germans, Americans, and the NATO alliance will be more secure as a result.

Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery and Bradley Bowman are senior directors at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Bowman and Montgomery are co-authors, with Elaine K. Dezenski, of the new book “Axis of Aggressors: Countering the Cooperation of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”

Extensive damage to one of our most significant forward bases in the Middle East is likely to have profound tactical and strategic repercussions that are only now coming into focus.

The idea that this broad functioning hub, built over decades, was significantly degraded in the space of a few days by a regional player is unimaginable.

I have fond memories of Bahrain both from past port visits, where it provided much-needed rest and relaxation, decent shopping and fitness options, and from my time as a government trainer when I flew over for shipboard training once every six months. I always felt safe there.

That NSA Bahrain is now virtually uninhabitable, with families left in limbo, as described in recent reporting, is difficult to grasp.

The damage is estimated to be close to $400 million. Buildings reportedly harmed include the Fifth Fleet headquarters, a barracks, several warehouses, communications towers and a potable water station.

Ships, including several U.S. Coast Guard vessels, appear to have been relocated, along with a large portion of the staff and their facilities. Thankfully, no one was killed or severely injured at the base, according to U.S. military sources.

It’s important to understand that NSA Bahrain is more than just a headquarters. Among its many functions, the installation provides a regional naval operating base for U.S. Navy forces in the Middle East. NSA Bahrain is home to NAVCENT and U.S. Fifth Fleet, along with numerous tenant commands.

Whenever ships, aircraft, personnel or cargo are moving throughout the region, chances are they have been supported by NSA Bahrain.

The installation provides the physical infrastructure that keeps American military power continuously available in a strategically vital region. It is foundational to America’s ability to project maritime power in this critical theater.

The idea that the U.S. could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on a Fleet Headquarters — and our sailors stationed there — is quite startling. It likely is just as alarming to our allies.

The depth of NSA Bahrain’s impact became clear as the stories of scarcities of parts, food, mail and supplies to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln hit the news. Before long, pieces of the puzzle began falling into place as to the connection between ship supplies and the lack of a familiar resupply source.

Stretching supply lines that were once hundreds of miles away out to thousands of miles has far-reaching implications for forward-deployed ships and is likely to become a significant constraint in maritime operations.

Having deployed to the area multiple times, I can attest to such impacts. The fact that the U.S. did not preemptively — or at least expeditiously — evacuate families and dependents is truly mind-boggling. Even now, six months later, well over a thousand evacuated troops and their families are still in limbo, with many separated from pets and belongings due to the devastation.

The potential loss of NSA Bahrain is effectively the equivalent of losing an aircraft carrier. It could not have come as a surprise that Iran would attack it in retaliation, yet it — and those living and working there — were left exposed and the facilities inadequately protected from Tehran’s ballistic missiles.

The U.S. has superb air defense capabilities that could potentially have formed a near-impenetrable “dome” over our citizens, as they have over Israel and parts of Ukraine in recent history. Ballistic missile defense destroyers boast incredible defensive capabilities and could have been stationed effectively at sea to protect the Fifth Fleet Headquarters.

Instead, there is now talk of “reducing the footprint” of U.S. forces in the region, a “strategic retreat” that will have a significant impact on logistic support for our ships and troops in the region, making them even more vulnerable.

I commend Vice Adm. Curt Renshaw, the commander of Naval Forces Central Command, 5^th Fleet, and Combined Maritime Forces, for his honesty and candor when he told Bahrain evacuees at a town hall, “When we started this journey, there were some pretty clear rules. As we’ve moved on, we’re really in uncharted territory right now.”

Adm. Renshaw’s frustration is understandable. What is striking is not simply the physical damage, but the continuing uncertainty six months later surrounding the operational status and future of one of America’s most important naval headquarters — and importantly, the status of the personnel and their families.

What, precisely, is the current operational status of NSA Bahrain and the Fifth Fleet headquarters, and what capability did the U.S. lose when Iran demonstrated that it could strike this critical naval hub?

Fifth Fleet is still functioning, but the infrastructure from which it operated has been badly degraded. While there is certainly a need for operational security, it is important for the American people to understand how this situation happened, the magnitude of the impact and how repeating it can be avoided.

If NSA Bahrain is not reconstituted to something near its pre-attack capabilities, it will fundamentally change how the U.S. Navy operates, supplies and maintains its ships. It will also upend how we support regional coalition partners in the Gulf region.

It is my hope that it is resurrected with sufficient support and security to make it safe and viable again.

John Cordle is a retired Navy captain who commanded the destroyer USS Oscar Austin and the cruiser USS San Jacinto during his 30-year military career. He is a recipient of the U.S. Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership.

Sometimes it changes the outcome of a battle. Sometimes it means the difference between life and death. Eisenhower credited his meteorologists as one reason the Allied invasion of Normandy succeeded. They gave him the information he needed to make a decision at a moment when weather meant the difference between victory and defeat.

This underpins a simple reality: Weather does not accommodate the mission. The mission accommodates the weather.

That is why the Pentagon should be paying attention to the El Nino forecast now. Whatever one’s views on long-term climate trends, the military still has to operate in the weather it actually experiences. And the weather forecast for the second half of 2026 is giving the Department of Defense something commanders rarely get before disruption arrives: months of notice.

On June 12, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared that El Nino had formed, and current forecasts suggest it may become a very strong event by fall or winter, one of the strongest in the modern record.

That means significant warming of the Pacific Ocean will influence the broad weather patterns we experience through the rest of the year. It cannot tell us when and where extreme weather will hit, but it is a significant threat indicator.

NOAA is forecasting a below-normal Atlantic hurricane season. At the same time, El Nino conditions tend to shift typhoon activity eastward in the Pacific, toward Guam and the Marianas.

The region’s exposure is not hypothetical. This year, Guam and the Northern Marianas have already been hit by two major typhoons. Typhoon Sinlaku brought widespread blackouts, flooding, and infrastructure damage in April. Super Typhoon Bavi followed in July, its eye passing over Rota, leaving severe outages and flooded roads on Guam and Saipan while thousands were still recovering from the first storm.

Whatever the forecast holds, these storms are a reminder of what installations in the region face. The El Nino outlook says: Be ready for more.

The Pacific is not the only concern. El Nino is also expected to reshape weather across the United States as the year progresses, especially this winter.

NOAA’s historical outlooks associate El Nino with a stronger southern storm track: wetter conditions across the southern tier of the country; a greater risk of heavy rain and flooding in parts of California, the Gulf Coast and the Southeast; and a generally warmer northern tier.

For the military, that is not an academic forecast. It means installations across the South and Southwest may have to contend with more flooding, more drainage and access problems and more interruptions to training and maintenance, just as they are already operating through a punishing summer.

Heat stress remains part of the story as well.

Training bases in the South already face more days above safe thresholds for strenuous outdoor activity. El Nino will not create that problem, but it arrives on top of it, extending a year in which commanders may have to manage both the immediate effects of extreme heat and the prospect of a wetter, stormier winter ahead.

Years ago, after Hurricane Michael devastated Tyndall Air Force Base in 2018, I asked the base commander what he would have done if he had six months’ warning that the storm was coming. His answer was revealing. He did not begin with a five-year military construction plan or a new regulatory framework. He talked about operations. He would have done more hurricane drills. He would have made sure his people knew what to do. He would have prepared the force to absorb the shock.

That is the right way to think about this El Nino forecast. Six months of warning is not enough time to redesign a vulnerable installation. It is enough time to prepare to operate through disruption.

For commanders and installation leaders, that preparation is not mysterious. It means testing continuity plans and making sure the mission-essential functions of a base can continue if normal operations are interrupted. It means checking backup power, fuel, water, communications, drainage and access routes before a storm or heat emergency exposes the weakness for you. It means revisiting training calendars and work-rest cycles in places where extreme heat is increasingly likely to interfere with readiness. And it means asking the basic operational question: If a storm takes this installation offline for a week, what absolutely has to keep functioning?

The larger lesson is not limited to this one forecast.

El Nino will pass, but the baseline it returns to is not the baseline of thirty years ago. Each of these events now arrives atop a warmer ocean atmosphere, which means the same seasonal pattern delivers more water, more heat and stronger storms than its predecessors did. That is not a policy argument; it is an input to planning.

Another seasonal forecast will take this one’s place. Another storm season will come. Another heat wave will test the assumptions built into training schedules and installation operations. The military does not have the luxury of ignoring those warnings because they arrive under the label of “weather” rather than “war.” The weather is part of the operating environment. It always has been.

The Pentagon cannot control the weather, but it can use the intelligence it has been given. El Nino is a threat warning. The military should treat it like one.

John Conger served as the U.S. principal deputy under secretary of defense (comptroller) from December 2015 to January 2017.

The hard truth is this: America cannot dominate the modern battlefield if the Department of War does not know where its critical materials, components and software come from.

A fighter jet, missile battery, naval vessel, radar system, drone or armored vehicle does not begin on the factory floor of a prime contractor. It begins with minerals, metals, magnets, chips, chemicals, software, castings and forgings — thousands of components moving through supply chains that stretch across the world. In a major defense program, those chains may run five or six tiers deep, while government visibility often stops at the first or second.

That gap is the danger. America’s vulnerabilities are buried in the lower tiers — the subcontractors and vendors supplying specialty metals, electronics, chemicals, software and raw materials that Washington is not watching.

And that is exactly where President Trump’s new executive order, “Securing America’s Defense Supply Chains and Ensuring Domestic Acquisition of Critical Materials,” strikes.

For too long, Washington has pretended a weapons system is “American” if final assembly happens in America — even when critical inputs come from foreign adversaries or suppliers vulnerable to foreign ownership, control or influence. That fiction may satisfy a lobbyist. It will not survive a war.

Congress recognized the danger in 10 U.S.C. 4872, which restricts acquiring covered materials from covered nations. But laws are only as strong as their enforcement — and waiver culture, contractor convenience, and bureaucratic inertia have hollowed out those rules.

That era is over. The Trump policy is simple and tough: end the loose waiver process, expose hidden supply chains, vet the lower tiers, qualify trusted sources and hold contractors accountable.

Beginning January 1, 2027, waivers under 10 U.S.C. 4872(c)(1) and (e) will no longer be business as usual. A contractor seeking relief must identify the noncompliant source, document exhaustive efforts to find compliant material or prove none was available, lay out the steps to remove it from the supply chain and commit to a strict timeline.

Failure to qualify a domestic source will not count as “non-availability” unless the contractor shows active, adequately funded and ongoing efforts to qualify one. In plain English: No more, “We tried nothing, and we’re out of options.”

To expose hidden supply chains, the order directs the Secretary of War to begin rulemaking requiring contractors to map critical supply chains for national-security acquisitions identified by the department — from raw materials to the end products delivered to the military — through a tier-by-tier bill of materials tracing components, parts, software and materials back to their origins.

This is not paperwork. It is battlefield preparation. If a missile system depends on a foreign-controlled supplier, the Department of War needs to know before the shooting starts. If a naval platform relies on a sole-source supplier vulnerable to bankruptcy, takeover, cyber disruption or production bottlenecks, that risk must be surfaced and mitigated. If a supply chain runs through an adversary-controlled chokepoint, that is a strategic exposure, not an accounting detail.

To vet the lower tiers, contractors must screen suppliers and subcontractors supporting critical supply chains for financial risk; foreign ownership, control or influence; and manufacturing and supply risk. They must report significant risks and fix them on a strict, tracked timeline.

On trusted sources, the message is blunt: qualify or replace. For decades, contractors have hidden behind slow qualification processes while adversary-linked suppliers stayed embedded in America’s defense industrial base. No more.

Contractors relying on supply chains that include materials or components supplied by unreliable foreign suppliers must promptly qualify and use alternatives, consistent with law, safety, mission requirements and contract terms. The Department of War will speed the testing and qualification of new sources and materials. And when outdated regulations block rapid qualification for defense production, those roadblocks must come down.

On the accountability front, national security contracting is not a game of hide-the-ball. Contractors that fail to qualify required alternatives can lose task orders, contract options or the contract itself. And contractors who commit fraud, deliberately mislead the government, or knowingly or willfully fail to implement approved mitigation plans face every lawful action and contractual remedy the secretary deems appropriate, with possible referral to the Attorney General.

The broader message of this new Trump administration EO should be clear. America’s arsenal of democracy begins in the mine, the refinery, the forge, the foundry, the chemical plant, the semiconductor fab and the machine shop.

Peace through strength requires strength through secure supply chains: American weapons built with domestic, allied, and trusted materials; sunlight, enforcement, qualification and accountability.

And one overriding rule for every defense contractor: Never put an American warfighter at risk because an adversary-linked supplier was buried five tiers down.

Peter Navarro is the White House Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing.

That calculus has changed. Adversaries have invested in the capabilities needed to interdict supply lines — long-range fires, drones, electronic warfare, anti-ship weapons, proxy networks that can reach ports, rail corridors, and staging areas far from any front. The vulnerability of the logistics infrastructure that sustains combat power is no longer an abstract concern, it is the operational problem of this moment, and it is not unique to the Middle East. The supply chain as battlespace is the defining characteristic of modern conflict.

These same adversary investments are driving sustained, high-tempo combat operations that can burn through critical munitions inventories — precision strike missiles, air defense interceptors, long-range fires — at rates that take years to replenish. What once looked like an abstract readiness concern is now headline news. In this environment, knowing precisely where every asset is, protecting it with optimized precision, and integrating that picture into combat planning isn’t a modernization initiative, it’s a necessity. We have the technology for that comprehensive, near real-time common operating picture (COP), we just need to link it.

The technology is here

Episodic tracking — the military’s primary in-transit visibility approach for 30 years — was built for a different operational environment. It tells you when cargo passes a fixed reader but, in a contested environment that’s not visibility, it’s a guess.

Mesh networking changes the equation entirely. Battery-powered tags form ad hoc networks, relaying location and condition data through mobile gateways to satellite uplinks, delivering near real-time asset visibility across any mode of transportation without fixed infrastructure. The architecture is hardened for contested environments: tags can suppress their own emissions when the threat environment demands it and come back online automatically based on location; communications are encrypted; the network uses frequency hopping to resist targeting. It works in the field, across truck, rail, and sea, at scale.

Once materiel is deployed, AI-enabled platforms can now fuse asset locations, threat data, terrain, unit capabilities, and route status into a single real-time operating picture — and model the consequences of protection decisions before forces are committed. Optimization engines evaluate and analyze the full picture to recommend courses of action. Auto-tasking allocates units as conditions change. What once required significant, manual staff effort across disconnected systems can now be accomplished in a unified interface, fast enough to match the pace of combat. This capability, too, is proven and operational.

A COP across the lifecycle

Taken separately, each capability is valuable. Taken together, they represent something the joint force has never had: a COP that ties where a resource is to what the force can do with it. A COP that follows every resource — equipment, ammunition, fuel, sustainment — from depot to forward position, continuously informing protection requirements and enabling smarter combat decisions as the picture evolves.

Consider what that means in practice. A commander knows not just that a critical shipment departed a depot — but precisely where it is, in near real time, as it moves through rail yards, ports, and contested sea lanes. When the threat picture shifts, the protection platform immediately recalculates coverage, recommends reallocation and flags gaps. When assets reach a forward position, the same data that tracked them in transit feeds directly into combat planning. Inventory is not an estimate, it is a fact, integrated into every decision downstream.

That integration matters most when inventories are under pressure. Modern conflicts are consuming critical munitions inventories faster than they can be replenished, eliminating the margin for waste — misrouted shipments, unprotected convoys, planning based on stale inventory data — disappears. A COP does more than improve efficiency. It prevents the compounding losses that turn a supply shortfall into a capability gap.

This is a different theory of how logistics and operations relate to each other. The traditional model treats supply chain management and combat planning as sequential — logistics delivers, operations consume. The integrated model treats them as continuous and interdependent. The COP does not end at the depot gate or the port of embarkation. It persists through the entire lifecycle of a resource, from production to employment, updating in real time and driving decisions at every echelon.

Commanders who can continuously see their assets can redirect them before disruptions become crises. Protection cells who can see the full logistics picture — not just unit positions but the routes, schedules, and vulnerabilities of the supply chain itself — can defend it proactively rather than reactively. And planners who can query actual inventory rather than projected inventory can design operations around ground truth, not assumptions that dissolve on contact.

We get to choose

The threat environment that made this architecture necessary is no longer theoretical. From the Strait of Hormuz to the U.S. Pacific Command, adversaries are investing in the precise capabilities designed to disrupt sustainment, fracture visibility, and exploit delay between detection and decision.

The technology to close those gaps already exists, and the operational need is visible. What remains is the decision to connect these systems deliberately, under a unified architecture with the processes and authorities to move at the speed the threat demands.

Robert Yon is LMI’s vice president, Sensor Mesh. Yon leverages his experience as a former USMC officer to identify technology solutions for the military’s greatest challenges, with an emphasis on addressing logistics. As VP, Sensor Mesh, he leads the implementation of LMI’s SPECTR asset visibility tool, and oversaw its recent successful deployment during USTRANSCOM’s Turbo Fusion exercise.

This is not a temporary surge. It is a structural shift to taking care of our own backyard. It will take time, to be sure, but the tracks are laid and the train has left the station. We invite our American friends to judge us not by old assumptions, but by the record we are building together.

When I last wrote in these pages, in 2025, we had a plan – Readiness 2030, a nearly one trillion-dollar roadmap to buy new weapons and technological equipment. It signaled a fundamental rethink of the EU’s role in European defense spending, and big opportunities for American defense firms.

Today, we’re making that plan happen. Let’s look at what’s already advancing - Europe collectively spent 2.1% of GDP on defense in 2025, above NATO’s benchmark. Frontline allies like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are moving toward spending 5% of GDP. Eighteen member states have already taken the next step under the EU’s new $200 billion defense financing program. And the first $6 billion-plus is already being deployed to help countries procure faster, strengthen defense production and deliver the capabilities Europe and NATO need.

Bigger budgets are only part of the story. Europe has fundamentally changed how it thinks about defense. The era when Europe outsourced too much of its security is over. New factories are opening, existing production lines are expanding, and private investment is flowing into next-generation drones, armored vehicles, artificial intelligence and electronic warfare. That investment is already translating into new industrial partnerships. At the NATO Summit, Lockheed Martin and Rheinmetall announced plans to produce ATACMS missiles in a newly opened production plant in Germany, the first time the system will be manufactured outside the United States.

We’re also changing how Europe buys defense. For too long, 27 national defense markets operated under 27 different sets of rules, creating duplication, delays and unnecessary costs. The European Union is helping bring those markets together, making it easier for countries to procure jointly, invest together and give industry the predictable demand it needs to expand production and deliver capabilities faster. These initiatives and more are helping Europe move from fragmentation towards integration.

None of this comes at America’s expense. Quite the opposite. As Europe invests more in its own defense, the alliance as a whole becomes more resilient and better prepared for the threats we face together. Europeans remain the largest customers of the U.S. defense industry, accounting for nearly 40% of U.S. arms exports (worth $130 billion) – and supporting American manufacturing, innovation and high-skilled jobs. At the same time, more than half of European defense procurement continues to come from U.S. suppliers. Europe’s defense investment is creating a larger market, and as that market grows, so do the opportunities for American defense companies.

Let me be clear - this buildup is not about replacing the United States. It’s about becoming a stronger, more capable ally and balanced partner in a security relationship that benefits both sides of the Atlantic and keeps deterrence credible.

One year ago, we promised action. Today, Europe is delivering – and learning valuable lessons in what works and what doesn’t. A powerful example of this is Putin’s war in Ukraine. Together, the EU and its member countries have mobilized more than $300 billion in support for Ukraine, making Europe the largest provider of overall assistance. Importantly, a significant share of military support is being spent with U.S. defense companies through joint procurement and European-funded purchases, reinforcing both Ukraine’s defense and the transatlantic industrial base.

The lesson from Ukraine is clear: modern warfare rewards speed, adaptability and scale.

Europe has become very good, our defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius recently argued, at producing “haute couture missiles” – highly sophisticated and expensive systems. The next challenge is to combine that excellence and attention to detail with the ability to produce “good enough” capabilities at scale, including drones and other rapidly deployable systems. In other words, I am reminded of the English idiom “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

Later this year, the EU will formulate its vision for securing the region in our new European Security Strategy. It will help shape the next chapter of Europe’s defense transformation.

Stay tuned – we are just getting started.

Jovita Neliupšienė is the ambassador of the European Union to the United States.

We have soldiers for land, sailors for sea, airmen for air, and guardians for space. But in cyberspace, a borderless domain where American forces are engaged with adversaries every day, we still do not have a military service whose central purpose is to build a quality, expert force, equipped with the most cutting-edge capabilities, for war-fighting in the cyber domain.

For more than a decade, Washington has tried to patch this problem instead of fixing it. Congress has granted U.S. Cyber Command new authorities. The Pentagon has adjusted organizations, budgets and training pipelines. Senior leaders have made the current structure work better than it should. But those reforms have not changed the basic fact that there is no military service that sees organizing, training and equipping forces for the cyber domain as its first and primary priority.

Cyber Command’s job is to employ cyber capabilities in military operations. But it still depends on the existing services to recruit, train, retain, and develop the people who carry out those missions and equip them with the capabilities to do so. In the rest of the military, that division of labor is clear: services build forces, and combatant commands employ them.

Cyber remains the exception. The Navy must build fleets, the Army must build land power, the Air Force must attain air superiority, and so on. Each service has cyber responsibilities, but each also has core missions that naturally, and appropriately, come first. Cyber matters to all of the services, but it is not the central organizing mission of any of them.

The result is a weaker cyber force than the country needs. The military’s cyber enterprise still struggles with inconsistent recruiting and retention problems. A young American who can write code, spot weaknesses in software or understand how digital systems break may be exactly who the country needs, even if that person does not fit the standard mold the existing services were built to recruit, promote and retain.

Cyber talent does not grow by accident. It must be recruited deliberately, trained continuously and retained through a career model that rewards technical mastery, instead of forcing top operators to move into command or management roles just to advance. The country needs people who can spend years becoming experts in offensive and defensive cyberspace operations, not personnel forced through systems that were never built for the mission.

The threat is evolving too quickly to justify continuing marginal fixes to the current system. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and criminal actors are targeting U.S. networks, critical infrastructure and military systems. Artificial intelligence will only increase the speed and scale of cyber operations. The United States cannot keep relying on a cyber force stitched together across multiple services, each with different priorities, incentives and personnel rules.

A new report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows how to build a Cyber Force with a clearly defined mission, not a sprawling bureaucracy. Its job should be to organize, train and equip forces for offensive and defensive cyberspace operations. It should not take over every military information technology network or absorb every technology function inside the Department of Defense. The existing services should continue to operate and secure the networks and systems tied to their own missions.

A Cyber Force would also strengthen Cyber Command. Too much of this debate treats a new service as a judgment on Cyber Command’s performance. It is not. Cyber Command houses some of our nation’s most talented cyber warriors. What they need is a better force-generation system behind them.

The U.S. military has adapted before when new domains became central to warfare. The Air Force was created because airpower became too important to remain secondary to another service’s priorities. The Space Force was created because space needed its own culture and focus. Cyberspace has reached the same point: American forces are already in daily contact with adversaries online, cyberattacks can disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure alike, and artificial intelligence is making the domain faster and more dangerous.

For too long, cyber has been treated as everyone’s responsibility, and therefore no one’s first priority. Our adversaries are not waiting for us to get organized. They are building capabilities, probing our defenses, and preparing for the next conflict. The United States should not enter that fight with cyber forces generated as a side mission by services built for other domains.

If cyberspace is truly a domain of warfare, it deserves its own service built to fight in it.

Dr. Erica Lonergan is an assistant professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and previously held several positions at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy and is now the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

They both served on the CSIS-FDD Commission on U.S. Cyber Force Generation.

Europe does not have an idea problem. Its challenge is turning ideas into mass-produced capability, and the joint ventures (JVs) meant to do that too often stall before they deliver.

The logic of a JV is sound: pair a fast-moving innovator with an incumbent that has factories, program relationships, and government credibility, and you can field capability faster than either could alone. A JV is often the right structure precisely where a full acquisition is not, whether because of national-security rules, foreign-ownership scrutiny, or a desire to prove the partnership works before committing permanent capital. A JV is not a compromise; it is a deliberate way to solve problems no other structure handles as well.

The deals that are progressing show what good looks like: Rheinmetall and ICEYE set up a satellite-manufacturing venture in 2025, and more recently, Helsing and OHB have teamed up to fuse battlefield AI with satellite-building in their KIRK venture. Both are promising because each side brings something the other cannot easily replicate. KIRK itself grew out of an earlier alliance, a reminder that the strongest partnerships tend to deepen over time rather than arrive fully formed.

So why do others lose momentum? Two reasons are well understood, and two are easy to miss.

Familiar challenges

First, speed. For an innovator, time is the most valuable asset. Approval cycles that are routine for a large organization can consume an innovator’s cash runway and slow the rapid iteration that modern, software-defined warfare rewards. A venture that moves only at the larger partner’s tempo loses much of its purpose.

Second, control. Software is improved through constant, rapid iteration. If the venture is set up so that routine technical decisions must clear the incumbent’s approval processes, speed is the first casualty. The structure looks balanced on paper, but development slows, decisions stall, and the partnership can lose momentum before anything reaches the field.

Overlooked challenges

The third is a difference in how the two sides measure value. A large defense group naturally values what it can see on a balance sheet: factories, order books, and assets depreciated over decades. But much of an innovator’s worth sits elsewhere, in software, algorithms and the ability to rewrite a product in weeks.

Helsing, for example, has been valued above €12 billion, and ICEYE above €10 billion, with almost none of it attributable to tangible assets. Applying a hardware-centric, revenue-based framework to a software-defined business understates the innovator’s contribution and misaligns incentives. The more useful approach treats an innovator’s commercial traction and demonstrated demand as real evidence of value, not something to discount until a defense contract is signed.

The fourth tends to surface only years later: who owns the technology, and the data it generates. If core intellectual property is not clearly ring-fenced at the outset, an innovator can become tied to a single partner and constrained from selling elsewhere, which limits its own value and can strain the relationship as circumstances change. This is why valuation is not a closing formality. Left unmanaged, a misalignment that seems minor at signing compounds quietly and can destabilize a partnership long after formation. Ownership, licensing, and exit terms are far easier to resolve at the start, when incentives are aligned, than once commercial pressures have set in.

None of this calls for financial engineering. It asks both sides to be clear about what each brings and what each receives: the innovator quantifying the value of reaching a certified production line and skipping years of procurement friction; the incumbent quantifying the capability it would otherwise have to build in-house; and both agreeing in advance how the economics adjust if the technology proves decisive in winning a program.

One pattern is worth watching. Partnership activity is not spreading evenly across the market; it is coalescing around a handful of industrial platforms, with groups such as Rheinmetall recurring as serial JV partners across multiple capability areas. As these alliances mature from loose market-access arrangements into named ventures with real equity at stake, valuation discipline stops being optional. Europe’s procurement ambitions will be met by partnerships built to last, where ownership, control, value, and exit are settled before the ink dries rather than after the friction starts.

Milko Pavlov is a managing director and Anita Bucanac is a director in Houlihan Lokey’s Financial and Valuation Advisory business.

Cutting U.S. troops in Europe places transatlantic trade and investment ties in jeopardy, but additionally, the decision represents a potential missed opportunity – Washington risks giving away something for nothing. Russia wants U.S. troop reductions in Europe, and it’s not too late for the United States to get something in return from Moscow.

Cutting U.S. troops in Europe now carries great risk, but if troops must leave, bargaining with Russia makes far more sense than cutting unilaterally. Doing so could reduce the threat posed by Russian forces to NATO, it could facilitate an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and it could lower the risk posed to the transatlantic trade and investment relationship.

Earlier this month, the United States notified its NATO allies that it would reduce the number of forces it makes available to NATO for the implementation of the alliance’s operations plans. These plans – approved by all allies – were developed by NATO’s American-led military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, and they are largely focused on the defense of allied territory against Russia. The alliance uses the plans to build a list of the required military forces, and then those requirements are apportioned among the individual allies, building a country-by-country capability target list.

The reduced commitments unveiled by the United States earlier this month were, in many ways, expected. They’ve been signaled by American leaders for at least a year, most notably in February 2025 when Secretary of Defense Hegseth announced that Europeans would need to take the lead in conventional defense of Europe.

But keen observers of NATO understand that this trend has been unfolding for years. Between 2017 and 2025, the proportion of all capability targets assigned to the United States dropped from 46 percent to 38 percent. At the same time, the number of high-end, “exquisite” capabilities provided by the United States, such as advanced air defense, were reduced from 13 (out of 26 total) to 5.

In other words, America has long been on the path of reduced commitments in European defense planning, in the name of fair burden-sharing as well as the shifting of U.S. resources to the Indo-Pacific. The latest changes are the result of dialogue between American and European defense planners as well as between U.S. military officials based in Europe and those based in the Indo-Pacific.

These latter discussions, and the analyses that informed them, were necessary to truly assess what was needed by American military leaders based in the Pacific. It should come as no surprise therefore to see that naval and air forces are reportedly on the list of what the United States will no longer make available to fulfill the NATO operations plans.

Coincidentally and largely unrelated to American capability targets and NATO plans, the United States also announced in early May that it would withdraw 5,000 troops from Europe. This decision, in contrast to the one described above, reportedly came as a surprise.

Initially, American military leaders decided that the largest portion of those 5,000 troops would come in the form of a 4,200-person tank brigade deployed to Poland on a rotational basis. However, that decision was quickly reversed following conversations between top American and Polish leaders. Now American military officials in the Pentagon and in Europe are wrestling with how to implement the cut, perhaps considering drawing down U.S. forces that are permanently stationed (usually with families) in places like Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, Turkey or the U.K.

Reducing American troops stationed in or rotationally deployed to Europe makes little sense for several reasons. First, most of those troops are ground forces, which are unlikely to be as important for a conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Second, basing U.S. troops in Europe can be cheaper than stationing them in the United States, especially when European allies like Poland or Lithuania pick up the costs. And third, U.S. reductions while Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on sends the wrong message to allies and enemies alike.

Even if none of these things were true and it made great sense operationally, fiscally, and strategically to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe, doing so in exchange for nothing amounts to a very bad deal.

Moscow has made clear it doesn’t want U.S. forces based in Europe, so why not bargain with Russia and get something in exchange?

This is precisely what U.S. officials did a generation ago as the Cold War came to an end – they negotiated simultaneous reductions in conventional and nuclear arms with Moscow.

It’s not too late – if Washington is intent on reducing troop levels in Europe, it can still wield this bargaining chip. In exchange for a 5,000 troop cut in U.S. forces based in Europe, Washington could demand Russia end its war in Ukraine, eliminate the military bases it’s been building up near NATO borders, or cease its hybrid war against U.S. and European interests across Europe and North America.

Something – really, anything – is better than nothing.

John R. Deni is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a nonresident senior fellow at the NATO Defense College. The views expressed are his own.

Today, that question resurfaces regarding Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The prospect of NATO safeguarding freedom of navigation prompts predictable objections: Hormuz is not NATO territory, and Iran is not attacking an ally.

Therefore, the argument goes, NATO should stay out. At first glance, this position appears prudent. In reality, it reflects a surprisingly short institutional memory.

For much of the last three decades, NATO has operated on the assumption that allied security cannot be defined solely by geography. For a generation, the alliance spent more time conducting operations beyond its borders than preparing for territorial defense within them.

From Bosnia and Kosovo to Afghanistan, and from Operation Active Endeavour to Operation Ocean Shield off the Horn of Africa, NATO repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to protect allied interests beyond the Washington Treaty area. These were not exceptional departures from NATO’s mission; they became an integral part of it.

The alliance formally codified this evolution. The 1999 Strategic Concept introduced crisis-response operations beyond Allied territory. The 2010 Strategic Concept went further, establishing collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security as NATO’s three core tasks.

Significantly, that same document identified the proliferation of ballistic missiles as a direct threat, explicitly highlighting Iran’s missile activities and nuclear ambitions. This was not an American talking point — it was agreed NATO policy, adopted unanimously.

How far is there to go until the US and Iran end the war?

The suggestion that developments in the Gulf fall entirely outside NATO’s sphere of concern requires a degree of historical selectivity—or, perhaps more accurately, strategic amnesia.

The geopolitical logic behind those earlier assessments has only strengthened. The world has become more interconnected.

Economic security, critical infrastructure, supply chains, energy resilience, and maritime access have moved from the periphery of security debates to their very center. Yet when one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints enters the discussion, many suddenly revert to a narrow geographical definition of security.

The Strait of Hormuz may be geographically distant from Europe, but strategically and economically, it is anything but. A significant share of global energy trade passes through it.

Disruption affects energy prices, industrial output, defense production, and ultimately military readiness across the Euro-Atlantic area.

None of this means NATO should return to the expeditionary ambitions of the early post-9/11 era. Collective defense must remain the alliance’s primary task, and Russia remains the most immediate military threat to allied territory.

The defense of Europe is NATO’s center of gravity. But there is a significant difference between maintaining priorities and embracing what psychologists might call a strategic tunnel vision.

France moves carrier into Red Sea ahead of potential Hormuz mission

The increasingly popular “not our war” argument promises discipline but often produces paralysis. Applied consistently, it becomes difficult to distinguish between strategic restraint and outright disengagement.

If the alliance divides the world into exclusive regional compartments, it gradually loses its ability to address security challenges whose consequences do not respect borders.

NATO has confronted this dilemma before. The famous phrase “out of area or out of business” emerged precisely because the alliance recognized that relevance required more than territorial defense alone. Security challenges rarely ask permission before crossing regional boundaries.

What makes today’s debate particularly peculiar is that allied practice has already moved ahead of rhetoric.

European navies — even under EU command — operate routinely close to, in, and around the Gulf. NATO maintains partnerships across the region, and individual allies regularly contribute to maritime security efforts beyond Europe. The practical question was largely settled years ago; what remains unsettled is the narrative.

A future mission supporting freedom of navigation in Hormuz — whether NATO-led, NATO-enabled, or conducted by a coalition of allies with NATO political backing—would represent continuity rather than a revolutionary expansion of the alliance’s role. It would reflect patterns of behavior and political commitments that NATO has developed over decades.

The real issue is not whether NATO can operate beyond its borders—it has done so repeatedly. The real issue is whether the alliance is prepared to acknowledge openly what its own history demonstrates: that defending Allied security sometimes requires action beyond Allied territory.

Otherwise, NATO risks repeating a familiar mistake — not mission creep, but strategic amnesia. And history suggests that forgetting past lessons is often more dangerous than applying them.

Vytautas Leškevičius, previously Lithuania’s ambassador to NATO, is chief policy advisor at GSSC, a Vilnius-based think tank.

The same censorship apparatus the Party built to control its people is now corrupting the AI systems its leaders depend on. The United States, by leaning into an open marketplace of information and ideas, will gain advantage as it takes a different path.

AI is increasingly training newer, faster AI models. This typically involves scraping the internet for content and then loading it into datasets for new programs. The problem: online content used for training is increasingly generated by AI. As a result, each generation of technology drifts from reality.

AI researchers refer to this as “model collapse,” a phenomenon in which models trained on their own synthetic outputs degrade over successive generations. The only defense is a constant influx of fresh, honest, human-generated information. Without it, the system folds in on itself.

China’s Great Firewall cuts off that influx, expediting the impact of model collapse within its borders. The first generation of large language models worldwide was trained on massive datasets of publicly available human-generated text. These human-derived pieces of information built an algorithmic approximation of how people think, argue, explain, and communicate.

Now, the internet is filling with AI-generated content at a rate inconceivable five years ago. Marketing copy, product descriptions, social media captions and news summaries are increasingly produced by AI systems and published online. They’ve all become generic and detached from human signals.

Outpaced by the US, China’s military places selective bets on artificial intelligence

With each cycle of new AI, the models drift further from their human origins. The newer systems amplify the patterns AI systems favor while losing nuance and amplifying existing biases. Each successive AI generation is one step further removed from the humans these programs were originally built to serve.

In China, the Great Firewall accelerates this problem. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security built the Great Firewall of China in the late 1990s to censor the Chinese people. It is now the most sophisticated information control infrastructure in human history. The Great Firewall does not just restrict what Chinese users can see. It shapes the data used to train Chinese AI systems. By design, it strips out politically sensitive events, dissenting viewpoints, and independent reporting. Left behind is a curated record of reality aligned with the Party’s narrative. That filtered record of information becomes the raw material for LLMs.

The training data fed into LLMs in China does not contain any criticism of the government, fair reportage of controversial topics, or accurate information about Chinese history. Events such as the the Uyghur detention camps exist inside the Firewall only as the state chose to describe them.

Now add model collapse on top of this. Chinese AI companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance and dozens of others aggressively deploy AI-generated content across their platforms. This material becomes training data for the next generation of Chinese AI models. With independent reporting locked out, model collapse expedites inside the Great Firewall with no escape valve. The practical consequences of this divergence are already visible and will accelerate.

Chinese LLMs struggle with tasks that require new observation, original synthesis or human complexity that the training data was designed to suppress. If asked about repression in Chinese history or controversial current events such as the Uyghur detentions, these LLMs either do not answer or produce a response indistinguishable from a Party press release. A Chinese trade official relying on domestic AI to model the economic impact of Western sanctions is working from a system incapable of providing an honest account of how those sanctions functioned or failed in comparable historical cases.

The West has a milder version of this problem.

Western AI models are trained on increasingly synthetic content, but human reporters regularly push new information into the ecosystem. Free and open societies have structural advantages to retain the capacity to reason about what is happening in the world rather than what previous AI systems described. When asked about Tiananmen Square, Western accounts typically focus on the 1989 protests and the crackdown. By contrast, Chinese models either refuse to answer or return state-aligned language. This information gap becomes part of the training data for the next generation.

To maintain a competitive AI advantage over China, Washington should treat human-generated data as a strategic asset and invest in journalism, open web archives, and synthetic-content labeling. Preserving the integrity of American training data is a defense imperative, not a tech problem.

Chinese leaders deploying AI products to make decisions about economics, geopolitics, and public health will make those decisions based on systems trained on what China’s information control apparatus wants people to believe. That is not an intelligence system. It is a mirror. And the tragedy of model collapse is that a mirror that has been looking at itself long enough no longer reflects anything.

Joe Buccino is a retired U.S. Army colonel and the author of “When Every Word Counts: How to Earn Trust, Command Attention, and Communicate Clearly in Any Situation.”

Why didn’t the president’s maximalist threats work? Indeed, his bombastic form of diplomacy appears to have undermined the prospects for peace between the United States and Iran. To understand why Trump has failed to change Iran’s behavior, it is necessary to examine his approach to diplomacy.

Trump relies on a version of the “madman theory” in many of his disputes. His approach resembles a distorted, MAGA version of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous maxim – that is, scream loudly and swing a big golf club.

In practice, it often amounts to boisterous threats without a clear or credible strategy behind them.

Baltic nations brace for impact of Iran war delaying US weapons shipments

And despite the president’s rather novel use of the theory, it does have a sketchy if unsuccessful history.

While President Nixon’s political aide, H. R. Haldeman, popularized the term “madman theory,” it was developed more fully by economist and deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The madman theory is a deterrent technique, to be used in limited circumstances: it signals to an adversary, “Do not take this action, or the consequences will be severe.”

To succeed, however, the adversary must believe the threat will be carried out. The more frequent or outlandish the threats, the more the madman’s credibility deteriorates. Success stories of the madman theory are few and far between. Richard Nixon signaled that he would use nuclear weapons against North Vietnam in 1969 to bring it and the Soviet Union to the negotiating table. It failed. Nikita Khrushchev’s nuclear blackmail were unconvincing for NATO forces to withdraw from West Berlin. Saddam Hussein cultivated ambiguity about weapons of mass destruction to deter Iran and the United States from invading. And that story did not end well for him.

Given its lackluster record, it is unclear why policymakers continue to rely on this approach.

Besides the madman theory being flawed, the U.S. lacks the will and capabilities to back up President Trump’s threats. Iran’s leadership is likely aware of the American people’s unwillingness to fight another ground war in the Middle East.

Trump’s threat to destroy Iran produced massive backlash from the American public, including his base. Such public disapproval of madman behavior undermines its credibility and effectiveness. What’s more, American munitions are in short supply and rapidly depleting.

Take Tomahawk cruise missiles. In just slightly over four weeks, the United States launched about 850 of these missiles against Iran out of the total 3,100 missiles in its inventory, and only produces around 90 missiles per year. These two facts already rendered Trump’s threats kaput.

Trump’s frequent use of bombastic rhetoric further erodes that credibility. He has issued sweeping threats across multiple contexts—from “fire and fury” toward North Korea to threatening to withdraw from NATO, as well as to “take” Greenland. Over time, this creates a “boy who cried wolf” dynamic, making it difficult to take his most worrisome threats seriously.

Compounding the problem is Trump’s misapplication of the madman theory itself.

Trump continues to tell Iran, “Do this, or I’ll blow up everyone.” This rhetoric reflects what Schelling described as “compellence”—an effort to force an adversary to change its behavior—rather than deterrence, which seeks to prevent an action in the first place. But compellence is typically more difficult to achieve, as it requires the target to abandon the status quo, of which humans are psychologically inclined to prefer. Deterrence, by contrast, reinforces it. This distinction helps explain why threats that might prevent an action often fail to reverse one already underway.

President Trump’s overuse and misapplication of the madman theory has placed the United States in a difficult position. The risk of deeper involvement in the Middle East is rising at a time when the margin for error in U.S. foreign policy is limited. Yet the current approach offers few clear pathways to either de-escalation or success.

The United States is stuck with an inept form of coercion in its war with Iran—one that generates heat but no leverage. Trump’s use of the madman theory has failed to produce security or stability. It has only revealed the madness of America’s current policy towards Iran.

Benjamin Giltner is a Policy Analyst in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, where he works on issues related to U.S. military strategy and foreign policy, great-power competition, nuclear weapons and deterrence.

That is why the German government, and particularly the newly created National Security Council, started early in assessing options for a credible European nuclear deterrence mechanism in addition to the U.S. nuclear umbrella, as long as it holds.

As Berlin weighs next steps, here is an overview of the various channels through which the conversation about nuclear weapons — namely those of France and the United Kingdom — is progressing.

Firstly, the U.K.-France nuclear talks, which have been ongoing since 2010, were taken to a new level with the “Northwood Declaration” of July 2025. The communiqué put a “coordination” of both nations’ nuclear forces on the table for the first time.

Secondly, in October 2024, the defense ministers of Germany and the U.K. agreed on a German-British defense cooperation framework, the “Trinity House Agreement,” which was also intended to cover nuclear issues. However, this dialogue is still at a rudimentary stage.

Thirdly, Chancellor Merz and President Macron have agreed on a Franco-German nuclear dialogue. A high-level Steering Group is to conduct regular exchanges on all nuclear-related issues and develop opportunities for cooperation.

The fourth dialogue to start soon is based on the proposal of Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron to extend the bilateral dialogue to other European NATO member states. Poland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Greece have already expressed interest. Should the U.K., Europe’s second nuclear power, join this initiative, it would result in an all-encompassing European nuclear dialogue modeled on the NATO Nuclear Planning Group.

These processes are only just beginning, and the initial focus is on developing a common understanding and formulating shared objectives within the various formats. In this regard, the British-French dialogue differs from the other formats because here two nuclear powers can discuss their respective nuclear doctrines on an equal footing, exchange nuclear-related data, or coordinate their operational principles and targeting.

The German-British, German-French and multinational dialogues, meanwhile, put their initial focus on the exchange of information and the building of trust between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Such trust is essential when it comes to matters such as the sharing of sensitive data or documents.

The conversations aren’t merely a dialogue for dialogue’s sake, but rather the development of a credible European deterrent based on the capabilities of France and the U.K. and – for as long as the U.S. so wishes – remaining linked to the American nuclear umbrella.

German considerations in that direction envision the following steps:

To begin with, the German-British and German-French dialogues can only be a starting point. Both formats must be expanded to include other European states as soon as possible. Only in this way can potential political reservations be overcome regarding the predominance of a Paris-London-Berlin connection as well as France’s history of a strictly national nuclear policy. Furthermore, representatives from the U.S. and Canada should always be invited to this expanded dialogue to underpin the transatlantic link.

Moreover, the dialogue should initially focus on political issues – such as the willingness of nuclear states to make a nuclear security pledge to their non-nuclear allies. The U.K. has already done so within the framework of NATO’s “extended deterrence,” while France has consistently opposed this concept and intended its nuclear weapons solely for the protection of its own territory.

Most recently, however, President Emmanuel Macron has proposed an idea of “advanced deterrence” (dissuasion avancée), thereby cautiously moving toward extended deterrence, albeit without explicitly saying so.

Furthermore, political guidelines could be drawn up for consultations between nuclear powers and their non-nuclear allies in the event of an imminent nuclear strike, as has been the case within NATO since 1962 — the so called “Athens Guidelines.” This does not restrict the nuclear states’ sole right to decide, but gives the allies the assurance that, in the event of a strike, they will at least be heard.

Non-nuclear states can provide various forms of compensation in return for the nuclear protection afforded to them. These could, for example, take the form of direct financial contributions. In the case of Germany, the Research Service of the German Parliament had already recognized in May 2017 that such nuclear co-financing is legally possible.

Nevertheless, a European nuclear deterrent, however it is structured, also requires adequate conventional defense. Here, Germany, as Europe’s largest economic power, bears a special responsibility. France and the U.K. are equally called upon, as a division of labor between the nuclear-armed states, which are left to focus on strategic forces while the other allies ensure sufficient conventional forces, is not realistic.

This will require painful steps in London and Paris to establish new financial priorities.

Karl-Heinz Kamp was a special advisor in the German Ministry of Defense and is an associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Tehran’s goal is to impose persistent economic and political costs until Washington concludes that continuing the war is not worth it. To achieve that, Iran is exploiting a gap in U.S. Air Force doctrine — the distinction between air superiority and air denial, and between the blue skies and the air littoral. So far, it is working.

Air superiority — the control that permits operations at a “given time and place without prohibitive interference from air and missile threats” — is what the United States has achieved over southern and western Iran and is now working to extend eastward. That control allows large-scale strikes and freedom of maneuver at medium and high altitudes. As Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted on Tuesday, “Given the increase in air superiority, we’ve successfully started to conduct the first overland B-52 missions.”

By that measure, the campaign has been a success. But the strait is still closed.

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Air superiority is meant to assure freedom of action not just in the air, but across all domains for the entire joint force.

Air Force Doctrine Publication 3-0 is explicit on this point: air superiority “prevents enemy air and missile threats from effectively interfering with operations of friendly air, land, maritime, space, cyberspace, and special operations forces.” That includes the Navy’s ability to escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.

By that measure, the United States does not have air superiority where it counts.

Iran’s drone and missile campaign has already forced American forces back. In 2003, the bulk of U.S. combat and support aircraft operated from forward positions in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia while carriers patrolled the Persian Gulf. Today, carriers increasingly operate from the Red and Arabian Seas while land-based airpower has shifted toward bases farther from the strait, leaving U.S. forces positioned for the high-altitude fight over Iran, not the persistent-close-in coverage the strait requires to keep shipping lanes open under continuous drone and missile threat.

Iran’s strategy of air denial is why.

Air denial is a strategy of contesting control of the air without achieving air superiority outright. It leverages the advantages of large numbers of low-cost and mobile systems employed in a distributed way to keep the air domain too dangerous, too costly and too uncertain for joint forces to operate. Critically, the barriers to achieving air denial are considerably lower than those required to gain and sustain air superiority, yet it can impose disproportionate costs.

In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is putting this strategy into practice. Tehran is exploiting the air littoral above the strait, employing drones and missiles capable of reaching oil tankers and naval vessels in minutes. Iran has struck more than 20 commercial vessels in and around the strait since the war began, killing at least seven sailors. This action has effectively halted traffic through the strait, except for a handful of ships that Iran has let pass — in many cases, for a hefty fee. The U.S. Navy has reportedly declined requests from the shipping industry for military escorts, citing the ongoing threat.

Iran’s strategy appears to be working. Gas prices have risen a dollar a gallon in a month, U.S. stock markets have entered correction territory, and the White House is under growing pressure to wind down the conflict. Iran planned for exactly this.

Tehran built this playbook, funded it, and watched it succeed. The lessons come straight from the Red Sea, where Houthi proxies used cheap, distributed drones and missiles to impose costs that more than 800 U.S. airstrikes between 2024 and 2025 could not eliminate. Now, Iran is running the same playbook over the Strait of Hormuz.

The United States has no ready answer. Achieving and maintaining air superiority in the air littoral above the strait demands the very layered defense capabilities in which the Pentagon has systematically underinvested: large numbers of low-cost, attritable systems to continuously attack launch locations and dispersed manufacturing; mobile air defenses rapidly and persistently deployable near threatened waterways; low cost persistent airborne platforms capable of detecting and destroying waves of drones; and interceptors capable of sustaining high engagement rates without exhausting inventories.

These are precisely the capabilities decades of procurement choices never built at scale, in favor of the small number of exquisite platforms that have performed so well in the blue skies above Tehran. The gap is not an accident. It is the result of choices. The Strait of Hormuz is one of their consequences.

Addressing this gap requires building low-cost, attritable systems at scale to contest and control the air littoral — not in small numbers as an afterthought, after the high-end aircraft are bought and paid for, but as a core mission — which inevitably means scaling back legacy platforms. The window to absorb that lesson is open now, while the cost is measured in closed shipping lanes and rising gas prices.

Maximilian K. Bremer is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.

It is an early glimpse of a broader problem that many organizations would prefer not to acknowledge: As AI is rushed into critical systems, it is introducing new failure modes faster than they can understand or control them.

For defense organizations increasingly integrating AI into mission-critical systems, the implications are far more consequential.

When organizations pause to consider these risks at all, they often reach for a familiar reassurance: there will be a “human in the loop.” The idea is that even if the system is complex or unreliable, a person will catch mistakes before they matter.

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This reassurance is dangerously misleading. A “human in the loop” whose sole function is to approve a machine’s actions is not a safeguard but a design failure. Attention wanes because nobody can concentrate on a job that is mostly doing nothing, and over time the operator’s skills atrophy to the point that they cannot meaningfully supervise the system. What remains is the appearance of oversight rather than the reality.

In military contexts, this kind of degraded human involvement is not just inefficient but operationally dangerous.

This pattern is not new. Engineers have seen it before, most famously in the Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine introduced in 1982. It combined the functions of two predecessor systems in a smaller, more convenient package, and its improved automation made it faster and easier to operate. Safety was “guaranteed” by the presence of a human operator who had to confirm actions – in effect, a “human in the loop.”

The system failed anyway. Patients began developing severe radiation burns. Hospitals dismissed the possibility of machine error, and the manufacturer insisted overdoses were impossible. Only after sustained investigation was it discovered that the machine contained multiple safety-critical software flaws. By then, six overdose accidents had occurred, three of them fatal.

The deeper problem was not just faulty code but faulty design. The machine frequently halted with poorly explained error messages, requiring operators to “press P to proceed” to continue treatment. Because these errors were common and rarely meaningful, operators became habituated to restarting the system dozens or hundreds of times a day. When real malfunctions occurred, the act of “operator confirmation” had already lost its meaning. In one case, an operator restarted the machine multiple times, unknowingly delivering repeated overdoses. The presence of a human operator did not prevent the failure; it normalized it.

Today, we are repeating this mistake. Computer scientists are rushing to incorporate poorly understood AI systems into safety-critical environments, and when concerns are raised they are often waved away with the same phrase: there will be a human in the loop. This assumption is now appearing in discussions of defense systems, from decision support to autonomous operations.

People will argue that AI is fundamentally different, and in one sense they are right. We have never before deployed systems whose behavior is explicitly probabilistic and nondeterministic in high-stakes environments. In defense contexts, where uncertainty compounds quickly and errors can cascade across systems, this is especially concerning. But AI is also not different in the ways that matter most. It is still software, embedded in larger systems composed of people, processes, and machines. It cannot act in the real world without that surrounding system, and those systems fail in ways that are already well understood. Engineers and operators have spent decades studying how complex, tightly coupled systems behave under pressure.

What we are seeing now is not a new class of failure but a familiar one, accelerated. The software industry is once again demonstrating an inability to learn from its own history. That would be unfortunate if we were only talking about Spotify recommendation algorithms. It becomes dangerous when these same patterns are introduced into the systems that organizations — and nations — depend on.

Recent Pentagon leaks suggest that AI systems may already be influencing where bombs land. In such environments, the illusion of human oversight is worse than no oversight at all. It creates confidence without control.

If we spend the next decade hiding unsafe systems behind the fig leaf of the “human in the loop,” the consequences will not be theoretical.

Mikey Dickerson was the founding administrator of the U.S. Digital Service and is a crisis engineer at Layer Aleph. He is a co-author of the forthcoming book Crisis Engineering.

The global price of oil continues to skyrocket as Iran’s missiles and drones hit vital infrastructure in Arab Gulf states. Billion-dollar American radar systems have also been targeted and destroyed across the Middle East by Iran, seemingly degrading U.S. defenses.

U.S. military presence near Iran includes dozens of locations and tens of thousands of troops in harm’s way. This raises the question: If a missile is launched from Iran toward a U.S. military base in the region, how do service members know in time to stay safe?

The United States and its allies have built a layered system to watch the skies day and night. This system uses satellites in space, radar on the ground, ships at sea and aircraft in the air. It also depends on well-trained military members from U.S. Space Command who make quick decisions with the data. As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now aerospace and national security law professor at the University of Mississippi, I’ve studied the vast network of alliances and systems that make this happen.

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Together, these tools form a missile defense network that can spot danger early and give warnings. The fastest way to spot a missile is from space. U.S. satellites, like the U.S. Space Force’s Space-Based Infrared System, circle high above Earth. These billion-dollar satellites, the crown jewels of missile defense, can spot the bright heat from a missile launch almost instantly.

When a missile is fired, it creates a strong enough heat signal to be seen in space. The satellites detect this heat using sensitive, infrared sensors and send an alert within seconds. This early warning is critical. It gives the military on the ground or at sea time to get defense systems ready.

The warning signal from space is then received on the ground by systems known as the U.S. Space Force’s Joint Tactical Ground Stations. The signal is sent from space using secure satellite communications, received by these ground stations and then quickly distributed to other parts of the missile defense network.

Radar to detect and track missiles

But satellites cannot do everything to detect and track missiles. They need help from systems on Earth. After a missile is launched, ground-based radars take over from the initial satellite signal. Radars work by sending out radio waves. When those waves hit an object, like a missile, they bounce back. The radar then uses that information to track where the object is and where it is going throughout its flight.

The U.S. uses both short and long-range radars together. One powerful, long-range radar is the AN/FPS-132 Upgraded Early Warning Radar. It can see missiles from over 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away and track them as they travel. Another key system is the U.S. Army’s AN/TPY-2 Surveillance Transportable Radar. This radar has a range of almost 2,000 miles (3,219 kilometers) and looks more closely at the missile to provide more information about the threat. TPY-2 systems typically sit right next to weapons systems that will destroy the missile to ensure the timely relay of tracking data.

In sum, satellites spot the launch and radars follow the missile through the sky until defense systems destroy it.

However, Iranian forces recently struck both a TPY-2 in Jordan and a FPS-132 in Qatar. These systems are expensive and difficult to quickly replace. This has required the U.S. to move an additional TPY-2 from Korea to place it in the Middle East.

U.S. missile defense tracking was certainly degraded by losing these resources, but other radars are still part of the network. For example, the U.S. Space Force operates another FPS-132 in the U.K., which could potentially provide radar support to the Middle East.

In addition to ground and space-based sensors, U.S. Navy ships carry powerful radar systems as part of their Aegis Combat System, known as the AN/SPY-1, which can provide up to 200 miles (322 kilometers) of coverage. Ships can sail closer to areas where threats may come from and help fill gaps that land-based radars cannot cover.

U.S. Air Force aircraft also play a big role. Planes like the E-3 Sentry can watch large areas using radar from the sky. Drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper can stay in the air for long periods and track activity below with radar and sensors. These moving sensors help the system stay flexible. If one area needs more coverage or is degraded, ships and aircraft can move there to fill in.

Why drones are harder to catch

Drones require a different set of tracking tools and have proven more difficult to destroy than missiles from Iran. The legacy systems are simply better suited to missiles than new drone technology. To detect drones, the U.S. typically uses several tools: radar; radio signal tracking, which can pick up control signals; and cameras and other sensors, which can see drones directly.

Missiles are fast and hot, which makes them easier to detect with the current systems. Iranian drones, such as the Shahed system, are different. Their heat signature is often minimal due to using gas-powered engines not easily detected by infrared sensors. Without this heat signature, that initial warning cue is delayed, making it difficult for radar to know what to track.

Drones are usually smaller and fly low to the ground, making them hard to see on radar. They can be hidden by buildings or tough to distinguish from birds and other objects. Some are made of materials that do not show up well on radar, such as fiberglass and plastic. Others move slowly, which can make them harder to notice or stand out.

Many of Iran’s drones do not show up on radio signal detection systems because they cannot be remotely controlled. These drones are programmed with GPS coordinates and navigate themselves to a target.

Multiple methods

No single method works all the time to defend against drone attacks. Instead, these tools work together to find and track drones. The U.S. and its allies continue to improve their systems to catch both missiles and drones. For example, the U.S. is in discussions to buy acoustics sensors from Ukraine, which can hear drones coming when they cannot be seen using other methods.

New sensors, better software and faster communication will all help strengthen defenses. The goal is simple: Detect threats earlier, respond faster and hit the target faster.

Aaron Brynildson is a law instructor at the University of Mississippi.

The fires gap

The Army’s current self-propelled workhorse, the M109A7 Paladin, requires the crew to halt, emplace, fire and displace on a timeline measured in minutes — time that modern counter-battery systems are designed to exploit. Stryker Brigade Combat Teams face an even more acute problem: Their organic M777A2 towed howitzer cannot match the Stryker’s 60-mph road speed, and its displacement time after firing — up to 7.5 minutes with an 11-man crew — is a death sentence in a counter-battery environment. HIMARS sidesteps this problem by firing precision munitions from brief, mobile engagements, but at $150,000 per GMLRS rocket, sustained suppressive fire is prohibitively expensive. The Army needs a survivable howitzer that fills the gap between Paladin’s emplaced methodology and HIMARS’ precision strikes.

What makes the RCH 155 different

The RCH 155 is the world’s only turreted howitzer capable of firing accurately while in motion. Its unmanned Artillery Gun Module — derived from Germany’s PzH 2000 and mounted on a Boxer 8x8 chassis — uses a high-precision inertial navigation system to continuously track vehicle position and barrel orientation, firing at the computed moment of alignment. A gun crew can receive a digital fire mission, drive to a release point, fire and continue moving without ever presenting a stationary target.

Even from a static position, the numbers are stark. The RCH 155 can receive a mission, lay the gun and fire its first round in under 20 seconds. It can be back in motion in under 10 seconds after firing. KNDS comparison data tells the operational story directly: A battery of 24 M109 Paladins with 144 soldiers takes over 180 seconds to complete a 216-round fire-for-effect mission. A battery of 12 RCH 155s with 24 soldiers completes the same mission in 140 seconds — with half the systems and 83% fewer soldiers at the gun line. The RCH 155 also achieves a burst rate of nine rounds per minute versus the M109’s six, with a fully automated loading system that eliminates the need for a manual loader handling 95-pound projectiles.

Key capability advantages

Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact (MRSI): The RCH 155 can fire up to five rounds at different charges and elevation angles, with all projectiles arriving on target within a two-second window — replicating the concentrated effect of a HIMARS salvo at a fraction of the cost per mission.

Ammunition efficiency: By operating closer to the forward edge of the battle area without survivability risk, the RCH 155 dramatically improves accuracy. Against a 200x200m target at 7 kilometers, a conventional howitzer requires 516 rounds; the RCH 155 needs 216. At 11 kilometers, the gap is 727 rounds versus 353 — a saving of roughly 235 rounds per mission that cascades through the entire logistics chain.

Extended range: Firing V-LAP munitions, the RCH 155 reaches 54 kilometers versus the M109A7’s 40 kilometers with Excalibur. With the Vulcano guided round, range extends to 70 kilometers, approaching HIMARS GMLRS range.

Crew survivability: The Boxer chassis protects the two-man crew against 14.5mm rounds and 10-kilogram anti-tank mines. Because the Artillery Gun Module is unmanned and remotely operated, soldiers are separated from the ammunition and firing mechanism by armored vehicle structure — a survivability multiplier no current Western self-propelled howitzer offers.

A howitzer battery that fights like HIMARS

Six RCH 155s, each operating from its own hide site and receiving digitally transmitted fire missions, can coordinate MRSI timings so that all rounds arrive simultaneously. From the target’s perspective, the effect is indistinguishable from a HIMARS salvo. From the counter-battery perspective, six independently moving guns each presenting a fleeting radar return are nearly impossible to suppress — precisely how HIMARS batteries fight. Unlike HIMARS, however, the howitzer battery can sustain fires over time without exhausting an expensive rocket pod in a single volley.

Current status and US interest

The RCH 155 is not developmental — it is proven, fielded and combat-tested. Ukraine is operating 54 systems against one of the world’s most sophisticated counter-battery environments. Britain selected it as its Mobile Fires Platform in April 2024. Germany has structured its procurement framework for up to 500 vehicles, with approximately 360 slots available for allied nations at German contract pricing through a government-to-government arrangement.

The bottom line

The RCH 155 does not replace HIMARS — it complements it. HIMARS engages high-value targets at standoff with precision munitions. The RCH 155 takes over the intermediate-range fires fight: sustained suppression, preparation fires and counter-battery harassment that would drain HIMARS ammunition at ruinous cost. Together, they form a fires system that is survivable, flexible and cost-effective across the full range of brigade-level missions. The era of the emplaced howitzer battery is ending. The Army should procure the RCH 155 in sufficient numbers for the SBCT formation and evaluate for the remainder of the Army.

Bill Koziar is a retired field artillery officer who served as the military analyst for the I Corps Stryker Warfighters’ Forum. In that capacity, he developed the initial Operational Needs Statement for Stryker-borne fires capabilities, which was approved by the chief of staff of the Army. He subsequently participated in the competitive shoot-off at Yuma Proving Ground that evaluated candidate systems against that requirement. His analysis draws on direct experience shaping Army fires modernization from the ground up — from operational requirements development through live-fire evaluation.

Armored vehicles are quickly spotted and destroyed with either drones or artillery. Soldiers on foot seldom fare any better. Negating the other side’s drone capabilities would be a tremendous advantage, but conventional air defense isn’t good enough.

Fortunately, the U.S. has developed a solution: 30mm chain guns — traditionally mounted on Apache attack helicopters — bolted to civilian pickup trucks and connected to a portable sensor called Mobile–Acquisition, Cueing and Effector, or M-ACE.

After detecting drones, the Northrop Grumman-made system calibrates programmable shells to detonate mid-air, meaning the system, which is cost-friendly compared to other solutions, can destroy quadcopters and dismantle swarms without hitting them directly.

Such an answer to some of the evolving drone challenges seems too good to be true, but its viability has been vetted in recent years.

Ukraine has already deployed M-ACE on the battlefield in small quantities, along with Australian “Slinger” systems, which use the same chain gun. Taiwan has also expressed interest in the system, iterations of which have recently been fielded by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.

A key shortcoming with these systems, however, is driving nonmilitary vehicles in war zones. While the mounted gun may be able to stop drones, the vehicle’s crew would have effectively no protection from landmines, artillery or gunfire.

To make these counter-drone platforms truly effective, systems should be mounted on remotely operated vehicles. Enter the Tesla Cybertruck.

The Cybertruck’s usefulness for Ukraine cannot be unpacked without acknowledging its failure on the civilian market. Elon Musk promised hundreds of thousands of sales each year; Tesla fell short by 92% in 2025, barely selling 20,000 of the widely mocked pickups.

Consumers have a slew of reasons to avoid Cybertrucks. In addition to political controversy surrounding Tesla’s CEO, the truck’s design has been slammed for poor visibility, accelerator pedals that get stuck, warranties voided by car washes, dysfunctional windshield wipers and trunk doors that have gone viral for safety concerns.

Such issues, however, would be mostly irrelevant should the vehicle be used to aid the Ukrainian military.

Low demand, meanwhile, has left over 10,000 Cybertrucks sitting unsold in dealership lots. With Tesla modifying its “Gigafactory” in Austin to build a quarter-million units each year, Cybertrucks could, in theory, be delivered quickly to Ukraine — and in large quantities.

Availability isn’t the only factor that makes Tesla’s pickup a good choice. With systems like M-ACE limited by the vulnerability of crew members, Tesla could bypass the supervision requirement of the vehicle’s self-driving capability.

With remote operation, Cybertrucks on the battlefield would add a layer of safety other M-ACE-equipped pickups can’t provide. These vehicles are also easier to mass produce than any purpose-built unmanned ground vehicle rated to handle 30mm autocannons.

Today, two UGVs fit this role — the Estonian-made THeMIS and the U.S.-made Textron Ripsaw M5. Per-unit prices are not publicly available, but it’s safe to assume that these systems cost hundreds of thousands: THeMIS has sold for several million dollars, and the Ripsaw M5’s civilian variant has a starting price of $295,000.

If the Cybertruck is a viable substitute for these UGVs, an $80,000 price tag seems like a bargain. Beyond its availability and self-driving mode, the Cybertruck also offers the benefit of electrical power.

EVs have several logistical and functional advantages over fuel-powered trucks. The lack of moving parts and fuel requirements make them easier to maintain and cheaper to operate. They also create less noise and less heat, key for avoiding attention from Russian forces — especially those with thermal cameras.

A fleet of Cybertrucks equipped with chain guns and sensors to clear the skies of small drones could significantly affect the war and tilt certain battlefields in Ukraine’s favor.

Defanging enemy drones would, at worst, make the war effort more sustainable by reducing casualties and buying time for Europe to supplement Ukraine’s efforts.

More optimistically, these systems could give Ukraine’s ground forces more flexibility to move on drone-saturated front lines.

There’s no sign that an end to the war, or an improvement in Cybertruck sales, will come any time soon. Ukraine could be the best backup plan for Tesla’s misplaced investment.

Alex Lee is a recent graduate from Washington University in St. Louis, where he majored in political science and minored in writing.

Unlike in most oceans, the U.S. does not have territory in the Indian Ocean. Therefore, it relies on the U.K. to provide access to Diego Garcia, a centrally located base for military operations both westward to the Middle East and eastward to the Pacific. Mauritius, a small-state former British colony, has waged a longstanding diplomatic and legal campaign contesting the U.K.’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, which include Diego Garcia.

Some analyses have framed the debate in partisan terms, with former Trump adviser John Bolton criticizing the Biden administration’s position on the issue as “international law theology overriding legitimate U.S.-U.K. national security interests.”

However, this argument neglects to mention the bipartisan reality: Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration in 2021 backed the U.K.’s sovereignty over the islands, rather than Mauritius’ claim, due to the importance of Diego Garcia. Importantly, no allied boots on the ground moved despite Mauritius’ successful legal campaign for the islands.

Fast forward to 2024, when the Biden administration announced support for the U.K.’s agreement with Mauritius which permits the use of Diego Garcia, and to 2025 and 2026 when the Trump administration twice endorsed it.

What, then, accounts for the change in the U.S. position? Real-world developments in international law changed the U.K.’s calculus. In a separate case, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea resolved the maritime border dispute between Mauritius and Maldives in 2023, while its 2021 Special Chamber judgment recognized the “legal effect” of a non-binding 2019 advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that the U.K. should vacate Chagos.

Simply put, the U.K. could ignore an advisory opinion, but not binding legal judgments. This was clear motivation for former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss who kickstarted discussions with Mauritius in 2022 when it became apparent the winds were changing for the U.K.’s position. Labour Prime Minister Starmer pointed to negative consequences for the U.K. at UN agencies such as electromagnetic spectrum management, while other examples concern overflight rights.

The China card has also been invoked by critics. The assumption that Mauritius could be cajoled by China’s influence indicates little understanding of the multidimensional ties between Mauritius and India, which holds deep threat perceptions of China — seen in border crises this decade resulting in fatalities. Not only are Indian officials involved in Mauritius’ national security establishment, the Indian Navy also conducts operations in Mauritius’ exclusive economic zone. While Mauritius will continue to have economic relations with China, as do most countries, India will ensure that its strategic place for Mauritius remains paramount.

For its part, India is designated as a Major Defense Partner by the United States, and both renewed their 10-year defense framework agreement in October 2025. Furthermore, the U.S. has excellent relations with Mauritius, which had even offered a 99-year lease directly to the U.S. for Diego Garcia.

Certainly, there are legitimate arguments against the Chagos agreement such as its cost and insufficient involvement by displaced Chagossians. There is also criticism that the U.K. should not worry about potential international legal consequences. Is it worth accepting them? If the treaty is not ratified, then such scenarios will be tested and critiques should be evaluated.

Regardless of what happens with the current agreement, Trump reinforced his support of it by stating he’ll secure Diego Garcia in the event of threats to the base. As articulated, his statement will have weight beyond his presidency, similar to the Carter Doctrine prohibiting external interference in accessing the Persian Gulf as a vital U.S. interest. However, misunderstanding legal issues and exaggerating Chinese influence in Mauritius obfuscate what is a clear national security priority — maintaining U.S. access to Diego Garcia for the next century.

The Starmer government’s information-sharing about the U.K.’s calculus has been poor, while misinformation abounds.

There have been many twists and turns over the years in this dispute, including a recent claim by Maldives to the Chagos, and President Trump’s differences with Prime Minister Starmer over Greenland and Iran.

Yet for current transparency and future accountability, what’s required is a better understanding of what will follow after finalizing the treaty — compared with inaction on the issue — and how it preserves U.S. national interests in Diego Garcia and more broadly, the dynamic Indian Ocean region.

Nilanthi Samaranayake is an Adjunct Fellow at the East-West Center in Washington. The views expressed are solely those of the author and not of any organization with which she is affiliated.

A January 2026 report by researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies indicates that this war has now claimed 325,000 Russian lives and 875,000 wounded (or missing). For context, roughly 15,000 Soviet military personnel were killed in the ten-year Afghan war.

How do economists place a value on fatalities and wounded people? We typically do so by using the value of a statistical life (VSL). Economists derive VSL estimates by analyzing everyday tradeoffs people make between income and small changes in their probability of death. For example, numerous studies have analyzed how much people are willing to pay in the product safety market (air bags and seat belts) for reductions in fatality risk. In other studies, researchers have analyzed the connection between labor market fatality rates and wages.

Decades of research by economists have found that Americans, on average, are willing to pay about $140 for every one per 100,000 reduction in fatality risk. This equates to a $14 million (in 2026 dollars) VSL. But that’s for Americans. What are the values for Russians?

VSL estimates across countries track directly with per capita income. For example, a 10% rise in income adjusts the VSL upward by 10%, with the opposite being the case for decreases. Russia’s per capita income is 18.3% that of the United States. This suggests that Russian lives should be valued at approximately $2.6 million. Therefore, the total loss from Russian military fatalities is: 325,000 x $2.6 million = $845 billion.

As for valuing the losses to 875,000 wounded Russians, economists apply similar methods to estimate injury valuations. The Department of Transportation recommends using a value of 10.5% of the VSL for “serious” injuries. That would translate to about $270,000 per wounded Russian. Therefore, the total loss from Russian wounded soldiers is: 875,000 x $270,000 = $236 billion.

Besides casualties, other direct Russian military costs include equipment losses and funding for military operations (such as fuel and munitions). MinFin, which reports official government statistics, documents the following Russian losses: 12,000 tanks, 24,000 armored fighting vehicles and 400 planes, among others. Total Russian equipment losses are estimated to be $125 billion.

In a December 2023 RAND report, researchers estimated Russian operational costs in Ukraine at $3.1 billion per month. Extrapolating this value over four years of war yields an estimate of $149 billion for Russian operating costs.

What is the war’s overall impact on Russia’s economy? Since the invasion, many economic headwinds have battered Russia. International sanctions and an exodus of 650,000 Russians moving abroad have exacerbated the economic difficulties. In addition, various international organizations have frozen $340 billion worth of financial assets. Furthermore, an October 2025 report from the World Bank documents serious pressures on the current Russian economy, including year-over-year inflation running at 9.5% and interest rates at 20%.

Given the amount of negative economic information, it is difficult for analysts to obtain a specific value on economic losses. To simplify matters, we focus on a July 2025 study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. That study uses pre- and post-invasion professional forecasts for GDP rates in the Russian Federation to approximate the economic impact of the war. Their estimates suggest post-invasion Russian GDP losses of $281 billion per year on average. Using these values yields a cumulative GDP loss of $1.124 trillion since the invasion.

Combining casualty figures, equipment and operational costs, and GDP losses indicates a total cost of approximately $2.5 trillion for the Russian Federation. To put that number in perspective, we note that it exceeds Russia’s $2.2 trillion GDP.

How do these costs compare to the benefits? We measure “benefits” as the land grab by Putin. Estimates based on data from the Institute for the Study of War show that Russia has gained approximately 28,000 square miles since the start of the war — a territory equivalent to about 10% of the size of Texas. Conquering a territory of this size has come at a cost of approximately $90 million per square mile in blood and treasure.

Of course, these costs, while borne by Russian society largely through conscription and lower living standards, are not borne in the same way by Putin himself. Napoleon, the inventor of modern conscription, was once told that a planned operation would cost too many men. He replied, “That is nothing. The women produce more of them than I can use.” Possibly Putin has a similar attitude.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Ryan Sullivan is an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, the U.S. government or any other institution with which the authors are affiliated.

Two carrier strike groups are converging on the region. Fighter squadrons are flowing into bases from Jordan to Qatar, bridged across the Atlantic by aerial refueling. Submarines and destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles patrol nearby waters. Patriot and THAAD batteries have been rushed forward. B-2 stealth bombers stand ready in Missouri.

Now consider how long it has taken to assemble.

The buildup began in late January. The full force will not be in place until mid-March. This is six to seven weeks to assemble a force capable of imposing meaningful costs on Iran. The reason is simple: aircraft fly, but mass sails. When commanders needed more airpower, they drew on the joint force — two carrier air wings, surface ships, Army interceptors, and sixty-plus land-based strike aircraft sent to Jordan — proving that airpower is bigger than the Air Force.

US military assets flock to Middle East amid Iran standoff

Some analysts will see this surge as proof the United States needs a larger Air Force. They misdiagnose the problem. Airpower is not the same as the Air Force, and the pursuit of ever more exquisite aircraft has left the service less relevant to the airpower mission it claims to own. Air denial increasingly falls to the Army, electronic warfare to the Navy, and persistent strike capacity to ships and submarines.

Consider each service’s contribution. Air control remains the Air Force’s core mission — but it is increasingly a joint effort. In the event of Iranian retaliation, air control means air denial, defeating the ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range drones Iran is most likely to fire. That mission runs primarily through Army Patriot and THAAD batteries, backed by Navy destroyers. Air Force fighters play a supporting role, intercepting drones and slower missiles first, reducing the volume that surface-based interceptors must engage. That is not the offense-first, air-superiority mission the Air Force prizes. It is a layered defensive fight in which the Air Force is one layer among several — and not necessarily the most important one.

Electronic warfare (EW) tells a similar story. The most capable tactical EW platform in the joint inventory is the Navy’s EA-18G Growler. Six of them operate from Jordan alongside Air Force Wild Weasel F-16CJs armed with high-speed anti-radiation (HARM) missiles and Angry Kitten jamming pods. The F-35 still lacks a fully integrated anti-radiation missile like the AGM-88 HARM or its successor. If Washington strikes Iran, destroying Iranian radar sites depends on a Navy platform. Electronic warfare was once an Air Force strength. The Navy now leads its most critical element.

Exquisite platforms buy exquisite capability for a narrow target set. They do not buy persistence — and persistence is what strategically effective airpower requires. Punishment, as Thomas Schelling argued, depends on the credible threat of continuing pain. What compels an adversary is not a single devastating blow, but the belief that costs will keep coming. Denial aims to degrade capabilities and foreclose retaliation. Both require sustained presence over time, which in turn demands mass.

Washington should have learned this lesson from the last strike on Iran. After a long planning and buildup period, the single night of B-2 strikes last June damaged facilities Iran had spent years building. Months later, however, the United States is assembling its largest regional military force since 2003 to re-engage. The parallel to the no-fly zone over Iraq in the 1990s is hard to ignore: Episodic airpower, while tactically impressive, is strategically inconclusive. Strategic effects require sustained pressure, persistent presence, and continuous operations that force an adversary to make acute choices rather than simply absorb a blow and wait.

The gaps this buildup exposes are not in Air Force strike capabilities. They are in the Army’s ability to sustain air denial at scale, in the munition inventories required for persistence, and in the tanker fleet that keeps U.S. warplanes airborne. More B-21s and F-47s address none of these shortfalls. No procurement strategy centered on $700 million bombers or $300 million fighters can generate sustained presence at scale.

The Air Force does need more airpower—but not the kind it is buying. Persistent presence requires large numbers of lower-cost drones that can absorb losses, deep stockpiles of low-cost munitions that can sustain fires over time, and uncrewed aerial refuelers that can keep fighters and bombers over target areas. These are the capabilities that generate sustained effects at affordable cost—and they are consistently deprioritized in favor of the next exquisite crewed platform.

The deeper problem runs beneath procurement. Washington has long treated “airpower” and “Air Force” as synonymous. They are not. Air control — the ability to deny an adversary the use of the domain while preserving one’s own — is increasingly accomplished by Army interceptors, Navy strike platforms, drones, and munitions fired from ships and submarines. The Air Force’s preferred model — manned fighters striving for air superiority so manned bombers can reach their targets — has yet to demonstrate the scale and stamina needed to bring a conflict to an end.

Until budget priorities reflect that reality, the United States will keep buying the Air Force it prizes and underinvesting in the airpower it needs.

Maximilian K. Bremer is a nonresident fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and head of Mission Engineering and Strategy for Atropos Group.

Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and adjunct professor in the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has accelerated the return of high-intensity competition to the High North, a region that was perceived as a peripheral corner of global geopolitics for much of the post–Cold War era. As the United States and NATO Arctic allies hold intense debate about security throughout the region and begin to integrate drones for collective defense and deterrence, they face an uncomfortable reality: Russia is moving faster.

A growing gap has emerged between the alliance’s ambition to defend the High North and its ability to field Arctic-capable uncrewed systems at scale. The future of Arctic security will hinge not only on submarines, missiles, fighter jets and icebreakers, but on the capacity to deploy, sustain and counter uncrewed systems in extreme conditions and unprecedented numbers.

In this specific competition, Russia can leverage a significant edge. It fields the world’s largest industrial-scale drone ecosystem outside China and is institutionalizing combat lessons from Ukraine. Like Kyiv, Moscow has established a dedicated branch for uncrewed systems, expanded mass-training of drone operators, and is forming new drone units across the joint force, including within the Northern Fleet. It is also investing in Arctic-adapted platforms and command centers for long-range maritime drones. Annual production now exceeds 1.5 million units, with Western intelligence services expecting sharp increases driven by Chinese industrial support and sanctions evasion.

In the Arctic, Russia is likely to use drones as integrated force multipliers: enabling persistent ISR along Arctic littorals and the Northern Sea Route, cueing Bastion coastal defense systems, supporting anti-submarine and anti-surface operations and conducting long-range strikes with one-way attack drones alongside traditional missiles. These activities will be tightly coupled with aggressive cyber and electronic warfare to degrade allied sensing, targeting and command-and-control capabilities.

For NATO, uncrewed systems may matter more in the Arctic than in any other theater. Vast distances, sparse infrastructure and extreme weather constrain human presence and amplify gaps in domain awareness and response times. Traditional crewed platforms such as maritime patrol aircraft, submarines and ice-capable vessels remain essential but are limited in number and costly to sustain. Even with renewed investments, they cannot alone provide the persistent surveillance, logistics, and targeting required by NATO’s regional defense plans.

Drones help fill this gap. They can offer unmatched persistence, scalability, and flexibility at lower operational cost and risk to personnel, conducting a wide array of tasks, from reconnaissance and surveillance to logistic and resupply, casualty evacuation, mine and countermine operations, strike and more. In short, uncrewed systems are no longer niche enablers but indispensable elements for strengthening deterrence and defense in the Arctic.

Technology does not work in a vacuum

Procuring advanced platforms, however, does not automatically translate into usable capability. NATO faces structural challenges that limit its ability to exploit drones in the High North.

First, most systems are not designed for Arctic conditions. Extreme cold degrades batteries, icing affects propulsion and sensors, communications become unreliable, and corrosion accelerates wear. As a result, NATO suffers from a shortage of uncrewed systems certified for sustained cold-weather operations.

Second, infrastructure is sparse, complicating logistical support. Airfields, ports, and repair facilities are limited, while satellite coverage above 75°N is degraded and less reliable. Therefore, any robotization strategy must include adequate sustainment across the board. These challenges make reliance on autonomous features and GNSS-denied navigation essential, though the latter raises system complexity and costs.

Third, NATO’s problems are not only technical but also institutional and organizational. Doctrine, training, and innovation pathways have not kept pace with the rapid evolution of uncrewed technology and its military use.

Doctrine, personnel and other “unsexy” things

Despite recent updates, NATO doctrine still treats drones largely as supplements rather than as core elements of deterrence and defense. Commanders lack mature concepts for integrating uncrewed systems into multidomain operations against a drone-enabled adversary like Russia. The Arctic environment magnifies these gaps and demands greater efforts to develop shared approaches to human–machine teaming, standardized tactics, deployable sustainment, and counter-uncrewed systems operations.

Recent initiatives to support concept development, standardized training and operational experimentation are promising but insufficient.

Personnel challenges compound the problem. With many NATO allies struggling to recruit and retain people, the skilled operators, software specialists and specialized maintainers required for Arctic drone operations are in high demand but few in numbers.

Russia, by contrast, is rapidly expanding its training pipelines and embedding uncrewed expertise across its force structure. Autonomy can mitigate but not fully resolve the personnel problem. The human element and doctrine remain decisive to leverage the technological edge that uncrewed systems provide.

Innovation pathways across the alliance also remain slow and fragmented. While NATO experimentation initiatives are growing, they struggle to scale results. At the same time, private capital is beginning to play a larger role, with venture capital firms and European public–private mechanisms such as the European Defence Bank and European Investment Fund (EIF) increasingly backing uncrewed systems and AI startups.

However, as we explain in a recent report, harnessing this momentum will also require procurement reforms that favor speed, scale, and interoperability over risk-averse procurement programs and industrial protectionism.

A strategic imperative

For NATO as well as Arctic allies, the central question is whether they can absorb the institutional, organizational, and operational change required by large-scale robotization. The priorities are clear: field Arctic-ready uncrewed systems that are modular and interoperable by design; connect the battlespace through resilient command and control structures and high-bandwidth data pipelines; devise robust personnel and sustainment strategies and develop doctrinal tenets and concepts to effectively integrate uncrewed systems into the force structure and multidomain joint operations in an austere environment; and procure collectively and at scale, including through a mix of national and multilateral initiatives.

Without a strong demand signal for key platform categories such as tactical ISR drones, loitering munitions and uncrewed logistics vehicles, allies will continue paying premium prices for bespoke systems while Russia floods the region with battle-proven, mass-produced platforms.

These steps demand resources and urgency but also a solid understanding of what drones can and cannot do. Decision-makers need to move beyond the misleading quantity versus quality debate and focus on both elements, for uncrewed systems are neither silver bullets nor replacements for traditional lethality. Instead, their value lies in complementarity.

Effective Arctic defense requires a balanced high–low mix in which uncrewed systems extend and multiply the effectiveness of traditional forces rather than substitute for them.

Federico Borsari is a fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He focuses on defense technology and military affairs.

Gordon B. “Skip” Davis Jr is a senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a retired U.S. Army major general, and former NATO deputy assistant secretary general for defense investment.