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The Compute We Cannot Power

On September 9, Oracle reported a cloud backlog of $664 billion — up $209 billion from a year earlier, an order book the size of a mid-cap national [...] More

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The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

Last week, I argued in these pages that the United States is buying an army it cannot command — writing procurement checks at a scale its adversaries [...] More

Inside Trump’s Massive Venezuela Oil Deal

“A major oil agreement has been announced between the government of the United States and the [Venezuelan interim] regime of Delcy Rodriquez. I know [...] More

The New Economics of Warfare: David vs Goliath

The most important lesson emerging from the Iran conflict may not actually be about Iran. It is about the changing economics of warfare and what [...] More

The Nuclear Umbrella is Bent, Not Broken

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Still Matters Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press make a compelling argument in a recent article about the future [...] More

The Cost of Squandering America’s Reputation

Make no mistake: the United States is weaker today than it was yesterday, and the day before that.Many of our closest allies have moved from fear to [...] More

Blowing up Boats: The Numbing Effect of Repetitive Illegality

Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. campaign against alleged drug trafficking small boats off the coast of several South American nations, continues [...] More

America Is Buying an Army It Cannot Command

The U.S. Army has committed to a million small drones by 2028. The Department of Defense has not decided who will authorize how they fire.That is not [...] More

The Growing Cost of Keeping U.S. Submarines Idle

“Inactive idle time describes when a [U.S. Navy] attack submarine designated for decommissioning cannot be inducted into a dry dock in a shipyard. As [...] More

Modernizing the Aircraft Carrier—By Returning to 20th-Century Technology?

“During its 11-month deployment [mostly in the Middle East] which ended in May, and was the longest for an [aircraft] carrier since the Vietnam War, [...] More

It’s Time to Reengage North Korea

The U.S. and South Korea have their annual joint military drills (Ulchi Freedom Shield) from August 17-27, focusing on countering the threat from [...] More

China’s Research Espionage Threat Is Hiding in Plain Sight

Western universities and laboratories are on the frontlines of a battle over talent and technology. This assertion may seem like scaremongering, but [...] More

The Return of the Essential Art: Electronic Warfare and the Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War

A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer HoldsFor three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic [...] More