Realism and Restraint
I’ve taken a close interest in civil‐military relations for decades. I was taught the importance of civilian control over the U.S. military as a young NROTC midshipman....
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Wars rarely win elections. George H.W. Bush ended the Cold War, won the most decisive American military victory in modern history, and lost in...
American doctrine promises that any North Korean nuclear attack will end the Kim regime. The Iran war has just tested that assumption. The United...
Read the last three months as a divorce and you will get Canada wrong. Ottawa is cutting its dependence on American defense manufacturers and...
The Seawolf-class submarine was the quietest, fastest and most heavily armed attack boat anyone had built. The Navy stopped at three anyway. The 1993...
German Foreign Minister Wadephul's fourth Kyiv visit — two days before Ukraine's Independence Day — capped an accelerating shift: Berlin is becoming Ukraine's principal...
The Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative emerged from US Army Europe and Africa and NATO's Allied Land Command as a concept for restoring deterrence by...
For all the talk of spending targets, the Ankara NATO summit's real work happened elsewhere. Europe is being handed responsibility for NATO's conventional defense...
Western analysts fixate on North Korea's missiles. The real danger is speed — a mass artillery-and-missile salvo in the war's first hours, backed by...
The People's Liberation Army Air Force operates around 300 J-20 stealth fighters, is accelerating the J-35, and has two sixth-generation designs in development that...
A Ford-class carrier costs about $13 billion and takes years to build. The threats being aimed at it are cheap: drones, cyber intrusion, space-based...
It took two or three seconds. Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird test pilot Bill Weaver was at Mach 3.18 and 79,000 feet, in a 35-degree bank,...
The lesson Beijing took (and surely Iran, as well) from the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis was not diplomatic. It was that American aircraft carriers...
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has unveiled Operation Economic Outcast: secondary sanctions across five sectors and more than sixty targets, with no relief attached. Iran's...
Rezaei's threat goes beyond the strait: no oil leaving the Gulf by any route if neighbors cooperate. In practice that would mean strikes on...
Of the 1.5 billion barrels in emergency stocks, the IEA cannot order the commercial half released, leaving governments under a billion. The American reserve...
The Houthis have no warships. It doesn't need any. A blockade holds if shipowners and insurers decide the passage is not worth the risk,...
Speaking in Baghdad on August 20, Iran's parliament speaker warned that military power counts for nothing if the people are hungry. Four days later...
American forces struck Iranian positions preparing to fire mine-carrying missiles into the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran answered with a handful of missiles that reportedly...
Analysts dismissed American control of the Strait of Hormuz as a near-impossible task. The US government now says it has been helping tankers move...
Drones reached Moscow on three of the last five nights. A ballistic missile would not extend Ukraine's reach so much as compress Russia's warning...
Trump ordered Ulchi Freedom Shield cut from eleven days to five before Kim Jong-un had agreed to anything in return. Kim Yo-jong dismissed the...
As President Trump downsizes the Ulchi Freedom Shield war games after South Korea declined to help with Iran, one uncomfortable fact goes almost completely...
Russia has used North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine since late 2023. The early shots missed by kilometers. Later ones did not. That combat...
Iran's Shahab-1 came from the Scud-B and reached 300km. The Khorramshahr, derived from North Korea's Musudan, reaches 2,000km — a 6.7-fold increase in reach.
I’ve taken a close interest in civil‐military relations for decades. I was taught the importance of civilian control over the U.S. military as a young NROTC midshipman....
The hospital at which I work offered antibody serology tests to all medical staff last Wednesday. The test detects IgG, the immunoglobulin that appears in...
In a post last month, we raised concerns about the unforeseen and underappreciated costs of expanding export controls on U.S. technology. Either those concerns fell on...
