Author: Michael

In recent years, as AI has begun to enter military planning and operational design, a persistent unease has surfaced among practitioners. Even with improved tools, increased tempo, and unprecedented access to data, plans continue to falter on integration, coherence, and a shared sense of direction. Marco Lyons’ recent War on the Rocks article on the perceived decline of operational art gives voice to this unease in a way that is both timely and important.We do not know enough about the specific wargame, its constraints, or its internal dynamics to adjudicate these conclusions directly.

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When leaders fire their top generals, they may be clearing the path to war or quietly sabotaging their own military.On Jan. 24, 2026, China’s defense ministry announced that the nation’s highest-ranking general, Zhang Youxia, a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was under investigation for unspecified violations of laws and political discipline. Since 2022, General Secretary Xi Jinping has removed five of the six generals serving on the Central Military Commission, including Zhang. In less than three years, dozens of other senior military officials have also been removed.

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Why would the West underwrite the very system it has spent four years trying to contain? Yet that’s exactly what Russia has proposed, and what some leaders in Washington might be willing to entertain.In February 2026, Russia proposed an economic reintegration plan (the “Dmitriev package”) that it claims would be worth $14 trillion. The package includes sanctions relief, aeronautics contracts and restoration of access to dollar-based financial systems for Russia, preferential treatment for Western firms in the Russian market, and joint ventures in energy and mining.

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The U.S. long-range, high-altitude (HALE) unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft, unofficially known as the RQ-180, is reported to have made an emergency landing at Larissa National Airport in Greece during operations against Iran. “Those who were in the area near the 110th Fighter Wing [110th Combat Wing] in Larissa at the end of last week were left speechless when they saw an impressive plane in the sky, completely different in shape and appearance from everything we see daily in politics and the military air force,” according to a local source.

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In August 1988, with his country bled white by eight years of war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a million dead, the economy in ruins, the revolutionary generation exhausted, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N. ceasefire. He called it “more deadly than taking poison.” He was drinking from the bitter chalice of defeat.And then what happened? The Islamic Republic survived. It did not moderate, liberalize, or reckon with its failures.

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