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Luke M.

Kevin R. James, RealClearDefense
The U.S.

Bruce Stubbs, Breaking Defense
ADM Daryl Caudle’s Fighting Instructions aims to guide the Navy’s future, but it does not make the tradeoffs or force-design decisions a true strategy…

In late 2024, Chinese models accounted for one percent of global AI workloads. By the end of 2025, that figure had surged to 30 percent. Alibaba’s Qwen family now boasts over 700 million downloads, making it the world’s largest provider of “open-source” AI systems that are publicly released and capable of being downloaded and run locally.

What if the next war is decided not by drone swarms, hypersonic missiles, or AI — but by good, old-fashioned human creativity? We have undervalued the mindset dimension that is critical to innovation yet it is the cornerstone of defense organizations’ adaptability and very difficult to scale. We cannot buy (military) innovators.One of the most important shifts happening inside NATO today is not a drone platform, a software suite, or a breakthrough in AI — it is the growing recognition that innovation is a transferable skill between people.

America’s war against Iran has sparked heated debates over U.S. strategic priorities, military objectives, and defense industrial capacity. It has also fueled speculation about how a hypothetical clash between the United States and the People’s Republic of China might unfold. Tehran’s ability to launch salvo after salvo of simple attack drones reflects current thinking about how the proliferation of cheap, easily producible precision weapons is changing the character of war, and previews some of the challenges that Washington might confront in a fight with Beijing.

Following growing concerns in the Western world that the U.S. Air Force F-47 sixth generation fighter could enter service close to a decade or more behind rival Chinese programs, the first two of which brought fighters to flight prototype stages in December 2024, the possibility of the American aircraft entering service as late as the 2040s has increasingly been raised by analysts. These assessments have been based on the record of prior post-Cold War U.S.

ignoring the known knowns

It has long been a dirty little secret that we made a decision to “accept risk” in defending our bases from attack. That momentary bet became a habit…and then part of the environment.
The Army, especially during GWOT, didn’t just underfund air defense in general and treat it as a secondary career field—it never even considered what was needed to defend bases. The USAF? No better…and they relied on the Army for air defense. It was only 18 months or so ago they started to experiment with base defense.

About Face for the Afghanistan (& Iraq) Veteran

Lieutenant Colonel (Lt Col) Asad “Genghis” Khan USMC’s book, Betrayal of Command, is the modern day About Face for the Post 9/11 Afghanistan (and Iraq) war veteran. Colonel David Hackworth US Army wrote About Face: The Odessey of an American Warrior in 1989 almost two decades after he walked away from a distinguished 30-year military career. Hackworth, one of the most decorated US soldiers of the post WWII era, wrote a brutally honest critique of US military leadership, bureaucratic ineptitude, and strategic failures in Vietnam.

During the Cold War, there weren’t a lot of things the U.S. military wasn’t willing to nuke in the name of science.
The Air Force once considered a nuclear-powered bomber that would drop nukes on the Soviet Union forever. NASA once tested the effects of a nuclear blast on beer. Before we sent men to the moon, we actually considered nuking it first.
Related: This is America’s latest nuclear bomb
The Atomic Age was essentially a kid with a new toy, the U.S. military just playing around to see what its new toys could do.