A Power-Hungry Southeast Asia Wants China’s Energy

Joseph Rachman,

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Geopolitical power has long been linked with literal power. Britain’s status as the world’s leading coal producer fueled not just the Industrial Revolution domestically but gave it enormous global influence.

For the United States, the key was oil and gas. Its oil giants proved formidable geoeconomic players, whether working with U.S. friendly regimes during the Cold War or providing liquefied natural gas to Europe as it struggles with Russia today. In turn, they have shaped U.S. policy, including the country’s decades-long entanglement in the Middle East.

Resistance is Victory: Taiwan’s 2025 National Defense Report and Resisting Cognitive Coercion

Brian Kerg 

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In October 2025, Taiwan published its latest National Defense Report. This document, released every two years by the Ministry of National Defense (MND), periodically informs the people of Taiwan, “what it has done, what it is doing, [and] what it prepares to do” in their defense. It is an expansive paper that describes myriad areas of national security, including strategy, military organizations, force structure, acquisition and finances, domestic resilience, and international cooperation, among other topics.

Taiwan’s 2025 National Defense Report reframes deterrence as national resistance, integrating cognitive resilience, societal mobilizations, and maritime defense into a coherent strategy of irregular deterrence.

It is notable how much of this year’s report features an overarching emphasis on resistance. Specifically, it describes how the MND is preparing Taiwan as a nation and the Taiwanese as a people to resist gray zone harassment, cognitive warfare, and narrative warfare by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These activities all support the most significant strategic threat identified by the report: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. While such an invasion would necessarily be characterized by naval and amphibious operations, the report flags the ongoing and continuing irregular means by which the PRC is attempting to undermine Taiwanese sovereignty and legitimacy on the world stage and within the minds of the Taiwanese people.

China solves Japanese spy cases, vows counter-intelligence crackdown

Yuanyue Dang

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China’s top anti-espionage agency said it had solved several infiltration and espionage cases involving Japanese spy agencies in recent years and vowed to step up counter-intelligence work amid serious diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Tokyo.

On Wednesday, the Ministry of State Security said in a social media article that it had “cracked a series of espionage cases involving Japanese intelligence agencies infiltrating and stealing secrets from China”.

It added that this had “effectively safeguarded the security of the nation’s core secrets”.

The ministry vowed that China’s state security officers would “resolutely crush any insidious plots to split the nation on the secret service front” and “firmly oppose any despicable acts by foreign countries trying to disrupt regional peace and stability”.

Wednesday’s article did not detail any specific cases of espionage, and such cases have rarely been disclosed to the public.

In May, China confirmed a Japanese citizen had been sentenced for espionage. Japanese media previously reported that a Japanese man in his fifties had been detained in Shanghai in December 2021 and was prosecuted in August 2023.

In another case, Beijing municipal state security authorities arrested a staff member of the Japanese pharmaceutical company Astellas Pharma. China’s foreign ministry confirmed in August last year that the employee had been prosecuted for espionage.

Making Sense of the World Energy Outlook

Jason Bordoff

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World leaders gathered in Belém, Brazil this week for the annual United Nations climate summit to confront a sobering reality: Global emissions from fossil fuels are set to reach a new high in 2025, the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is out of reach, and the United States did not even bother to show up. Against this backdrop, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its flagship World Energy Outlook, making headlines for including a scenario in which oil demand continues to climb through 2050.

The report contains multiple, diverging scenarios, with ambiguity around the assumptions behind each one. As a result, advocates on all sides are predictably declaring the report either a welcome reality check on overconfidence in the clean energy transition or proof that the transition is unstoppable. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. Perpetually rising oil and gas demand should not be seen as the status quo, but neither should a faster transition be seen as inevitable. Much will depe

How China Became a Solar Power

Christina Lu,

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U.S. President Donald Trump may have spurned solar power, but that has done little to slow the solar revolution that is sweeping nearly every other corner of the world, from Pakistan to Chile.

That momentum has been largely fueled by one country: China. Today, China commands more than 80 percent of the world’s solar supply chains, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)—and even that figure only begins to capture the sheer speed and scale of the country’s solar sprint.

Italy’s Defense Minister warns: hybrid warfare is already here

Jacopo Marzano

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Italy is under attack, and not in the conventional sense. Defense Minister Guido Crosetto’s newly released “non-paper lays” out a stark reality: the country is already engaged in a daily, multidomain hybrid conflict. The threat isn’t about bombs or tanks, it’s about perception. “In hybrid warfare,” Crosetto writes, “perception outweighs certainty.” The battlefield is cognitive, the weapons are ambiguity and doubt.

What’s happening?. Hybrid threats are no longer episodic—they’re structural.The document defines hybrid warfare as the coordinated use of diplomatic, informational, economic, military, and cyber tools by state and non-state actors to destabilise a country without triggering open war.

Who’s behind it?. Four hostile actors dominate the landscape: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea – the so-called “CRINK.”Russia deploys sabotage, influence ops, energy pressure, migration manipulation, and cyberattacks via affiliated groups.

China uses a “multi-vector” strategy—economic, technological, and informational—to penetrate critical sectors and exploit Europe’s dependence on rare earths, gallium, and germanium.

Iran leverages regional proxies and controls maritime choke points.

North Korea runs a cyber apparatus focused on ransomware, crypto theft, and digital espionage to sustain its regime.

US military team visits Kyiv as EU warns about Russian plans

Jaroslav Lukiv, Laura Gozzi

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US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll held talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and was to see President Volodymyr Zelensky later.

Reports had surfaced on Wednesday that the US and Russia had prepared a new proposed framework to end the war, requiring major concessions from Ukraine including giving up territory and dramatically shrinking its military.

The White House said President Donald Trump had grown "frustrated" with both Russia and Ukraine "for their refusal to commit to a peace agreement" and his team had been working on a "detailed and acceptable" peace plan.

A senior US official confirmed to the BBC that special envoy Steve Witkoff had been "quietly working" on a plan and that he had received input from both the Ukrainians and the Russians "on what terms are acceptable to them to end the war".

"Both sides will have to make concessions, not just Ukraine," the official said.

Details of the draft 28-point plan emerged more than three weeks after Witkoff and his Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev are said to have spent three days in meetings in Miami, Florida.

Awake But Groggy: Europe’s Shadow Warfare Guardians

Marija Golubeva

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The purpose of shadow warfare attacks on European countries by Russia and its proxies is multifaceted: to test the vulnerability of critical infrastructure, to destabilize societies and governments, and to provoke reactions that undermine national and European unity and institutions, including the free press and open public debate.

The scale of disruption caused by attacks ranges from small to very significant, and now spans all of Europe — from the hacktivist attack on the Millenium Bank in Portugal (2022) to the disruption of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea (2023-2024), and — possibly as a result of state action — the huge £1.9bn ($2.5bn) September’s cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover, said to be Britain’s worst-ever.

So, how is the European Union (EU) responding to the threat?

As Mark Leonard of the European Council of Foreign Relations has aptly put it, the world has entered the Age of Unpeace. Peacetime assumptions no longer hold, especially for the systems that support everyday life, such as electric grids and water supply systems. For Europe, the illusion of security crumbled the day Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Europe is no longer living in denial of this new reality, it is still figuring out its response to it.

Force Design for the Twenty-First Century Fight: U.S. Cyber Force Lessons from China’s Strategic Support Forces

Lauryn Williams

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In 2018, Vice President and National Space Council Chair Mike Pence heralded a new era of “American dominance in space,” which would be led by a new U.S. Space Force. The service, eventually established in late 2019, would be a manifestation of the U.S. government’s heightened awareness that space was a domain of “national security significance,” as opposed to simply scientific exploration. This development acknowledged that the old, decentralized way of doing things—dispersing space professionals across the existing services—was no longer sufficient. Advocates argued that consolidating forces within a single service, led by empowered Pentagon leadership, was necessary to effectively recruit and organize, train, and equip personnel to meet the adversary space threats of a new day.

Enter 2025, and discussions are actively underway among U.S. experts about the need for a U.S. Cyber Force to own force generation for offensive, defensive, and cyber intelligence personnel. Advocates argue that a standalone Cyber Force, like the Space Force, would address acute challenges today in “recruiting, training, and retaining personnel for key cyber work roles and missions.” Skeptics question whether a new bureaucratic structure will resolve them. They argue that cyberspace operations are unique to each service and existing forces should remain integrated.

The US Needs an Open Source AI Intervention to Beat China

Will Knight

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Since 2022, America has had a solid lead in artificial intelligence thanks to advanced models from high-flying companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI. A growing number of experts, however, worry that the US is starting to fall behind when it comes to minting open-weight AI models that can be downloaded, adapted, and run locally.

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Open source is absolutely not the correct move here. Open source is great for technologies that don't have the potential for Dangerous outcomes. If we are worried that China is innovating ahead of us, the answer will never be to outdo them and share that information with them. The world of AI today is like an errand where we needed to go to the grocery store to pick up some food and then go to the birthday party afterwards. We started on a bicycle with a basket towards store, but then we added a motor and started traveling faster. After that we added a shell around the bicycle, we added more wheels, we added a better seat and space for passengers. In fact people watching us and what we did with our bicycle continued to be amazed. The only problem was, we never made it to that grocery store and we never made it to the birthday party. In a world where every engineer says what they've created is unique and special it becomes very difficult to understand what actually is. My most recent granted patent is the example of what the AI looks like when we allowed the bicycle to be upgraded but actually went to the grocery store. As a result, I have a large language model evolved to the next level, it does not hallucinate, scheme, it allows input chunks and those are separate and reference chunks. The limitations in prompt size, context window, response size have all been overcome, and the entire vectorized embeddings representing text from prompts and chunks had to be completely ripped out and rewritten.

Transition Period Warfare: How the US Army Should Organize to Fight in a Time of Rapid Change

Joshua Suthoff

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Military leaders and analysts consistently highlight the importance of predicting what the future formation should look like to win the next war. Current conflict areas and the rise of drones highlight the need for professional militaries to adapt to remain relevant against evolving threats. The Army Transformation Initiative and its transformation in contact efforts continue to expedite changes in organization and equipping. However, key to the US Army maintaining relevancy is how it adapts the division, as the unit of action, along with its subordinate brigades. Although the division formation has seen some recent organizational changes with artillery, engineers, and sustainment, key and most critical is the lethality of the division headquarters and assigned combat brigades. The speed of drone evolution, supported by AI, is uncomfortable for professional armies. This discomfort is exacerbated when considering procurement times and reliance on traditional combat-tested formations or tactics. This fear is reinforced by the idea that professional Western armies, like that of the United States, will successfully execute maneuver warfare in the new drone-infested operating environment. The sheer size and mass of US Army divisions and brigades is considerable, making them inviting targets for an enemy commander’s kill web. One combat principle remains true: Making contact with the smallest element possible limits vulnerability, and this applies from the squad to the division level. Today, a corollary to that imperative has emerged: That smallest element must be a drone-enhanced unit.

Assuming divisions will be able to rapidly transition from movement to maneuver under contact for the first time in decades without significant friction and casualties is unrealistic. Division-level maneuver is never rehearsed outside of a combined arms rehearsal or digital warfighter exercise. Current exercise design and training environments do not adequately recreate the enemy kill web possible on the modern battlefield. Attempts at innovation at the division level are capability focused, without deep thought on the organizational structures that most effectively employ new capabilities. Despite these shortcomings, there is an opportunity to experiment and learn across formations now.

The New Soft-Power Imbalance

Maria Repnikova

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Since the start of his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has been dismantling the traditional channels of American soft power. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is no longer operational, and Voice of America is tied up in legislative and court battles. The State Department has significantly reduced its staff and programming. Restrictive new visa and immigration policies have made the United States less accessible and less attractive to potential visitors, and Washington’s coercive and transactional dealings with U.S. allies have damaged trust abroad. In The New York Times, Jamie Shea, a former NATO official, referred to these sweeping changes as the United States’ “soft power suicide.”

Many experts and commentators have interpreted the United States’ loss as China’s gain. The late political scientist Joseph Nye, who developed the concept of soft power, cautioned earlier this year that China “stands ready to fill the vacuum that Trump is creating.” Yanzhong Huang, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, similarly contended that the Trump administration’s actions have “boosted China’s charm offensive.”

But as I argued in 2022 in Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-Chinese soft-power competition is not a zero-sum quest for influence. The two countries take distinct approaches to building soft power: China has tended to rely on drawing in other countries with pragmatic benefits, whereas the United States has placed ideals and values at the center of its outreach. Recipient countries, especially those in the so-called global South, have perceived Chinese and U.S. offerings as complementary, accepting both rather than seeing a need to choose one over the other.

What 3 former SOUTHCOM commanders say troops should know about Venezuela

Jeff Schogol, Drew F. Lawrence

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The U.S. military could be poised to launch the largest combat operations in Latin America since the invasion of Panama nearly 36 years ago.

Since September, the U.S. has launched 21 strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing a total of 82 people, a Pentagon official told Task & Purpose.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly considering expanding U.S. military operations in Latin America to possibly include strikes against targets inside Venezuela, claiming that the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, is in charge of a criminal organization that smuggles drugs into the United States.

Task & Purpose spoke with three former four-star generals who each led U.S. Southern Command, which has purview over Latin America and the Caribbean, along with a retired senior military commander with deep knowledge of the region for this story. Their concerns included whether U.S. troops would have a clear military objective for any operation against Venezuela and the chances of ground combat devolving into an insurgency. The former commanders also believed the U.S. military holds clear advantages in air power over Venezuelan defenses and conventional forces.

How a Nazi trial ended the just-following-orders defense for US troops

Richard Sisk 

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They started calling it the “Nuremberg defense” when lawyers for Lt. William Calley at his court martial argued that he was only following orders in the March 1968 slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese in what became known as the My Lai Massacre.

George Latimer, Calley’s main lawyer, cited Nuremberg in his summation, telling the court, “I could hardly stand here and tell you in good conscience that people, like at Nuremberg, could be excused or justified” in mass murder by claiming they were acting on the orders of a superior, according to court documents.

“But I think when you put untrained troops out in areas and they are told to do certain things, they have a right to rely on the judgment and the expertise [of their leaders],” Latimer said. “Then you are bound to give credence in effect to orders from their company commander.”

The argument for Calley, in what was the most high-profile court martial to come out of the Vietnam War, did not hold up. It also didn’t work at the end of World War II for the defendants at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who cheated the hangman by taking cyanide on the night he was to be executed.

Calley had taken the stand in his own defense to state that Capt. Ernest Medina, his company commander, had told him to kill everybody in the village. They were all Viet Cong or sympathizers, Calley said he was told, and Medina’s order was to “waste them.” Medina was later tried at court martial and acquitted.

Army leaders ordered to check in daily with soldiers over the holidays

Eve Sampson 

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Soldiers in the Army will receive a check-in from their leadership each day during the holiday season to combat suicide and self-harm, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll announced in a memo that was disseminated across the force Tuesday.

Now through Jan. 15, 2026, an officer or noncommissioned officer “will check in on every soldier daily to see if they need help,” Driscoll said in the memo, with a plea for those struggling to “pick up your phone” and accept help during a season he said could leave people especially at risk.

In the memo, which has since been posted — and widely shared — on social media, Driscoll, who served in the Army, recounted his own struggles during Ranger School.

“Ranger School’s Winter Mountain Phase nearly broke me. I slipped and fell, couldn’t get up, and the cold crushed me. I was done in that moment. But my Ranger buddies picked me up and helped me start moving again,” he said, adding “that was the inflection point for me: I realized no one can go through life alone, we all break eventually, and we need each other.”

Driscoll called on the force to prioritize supporting each other during the holiday season and noted grim statistics.

“Last year, we lost 260 soldiers to suicide,” he said, adding that “signing those letters of condolence — and knowing we could have helped — is heart-breaking. I wish we never had to write another one.”

Can a tabletop game explain why America lost the Vietnam War?

Michael Peck 

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How could America lose the Vietnam War?

Even now, 50 years after the last American helicopters left Saigon, the answer is elusive. Despite pouring immense resources into Vietnam — including nearly 3 million military personnel, and suffering 58,000 dead — the world’s most powerful nation was unable to defeat an enemy that seemed hopelessly inferior in military power.

Accusations still fly at a long list of alleged culprits: “pinkos,” war hawks, hippies, the China Lobby, Jane Fonda, John Wayne, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But can a tabletop wargame — that began life as a college student’s project — offer insight?

“Vietnam 1965-1975” was conceived in the early 1980s when Nick Karp, a Princeton University student, needed to complete his senior thesis. So Karp designed a board game that was published as a hobby game in 1984, and is still available today from GMT Games.

A game of firepower

As befitting such a massive struggle, “Vietnam 1965-1975” is a massive game. The GMT edition includes a 44-page manual, a 5-foot-by-3-foot map and 1,328 small cardboard pieces that depict combat battalions and regiments, as well as various informational markers.

The order of battle alone illustrates the polyglot nature of the conflict. On the Allied side are more than a dozen U.S. Army and Marine divisions and brigades that fought in Vietnam, or could have been sent, plus numerous independent artillery and mechanized battalions. Alongside them is the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, plus contingents of Australian, South Korean, Thai and Philippines troops. Opposing this coalition is the National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese Army divisions — mostly infantry, backed by some artillery and mechanized units — and a plethora of Viet Cong battalions.

Vertical integration of rare Earth elements for US autonomous dominion

Kevin Chen 

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America’s national security is imperiled by its dependence on China for the rare earth elements (REEs) essential to artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous systems, and precision-guided weapons. Without secure access to refined REEs, even the most sophisticated algorithms and defense platforms become inoperable.

China’s dominance across the REE supply chain­ — from supply to mining to refining — creates a single point of failure for US military readiness. In a crisis, Beijing could weaponize these choke points, halting production of the AI-enabled drones, electronic warfare systems, and missiles that underpin US deterrence in theaters from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific.

Rebuilding A Domestic Supply Chain

Washington should treat REEs not as commercial commodities but as strategic national assets. A bipartisan path forward lies in the vertical integration within US borders of domestic mining, separation, refining, and magnet alloying capacity. MP Materials’ operations in California offer a prototype for such an effort.

Based in Las Vegas, MP Materials owns and operates the Mountain Pass mine in California, the only active rare earth mine and processing site in North America. According to company analysts, MP is working to expand its capacity downstream to domestically produce separated oxides and permanent magnets. It recently struck a major public–private partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD) to accelerate the construction of a completely domestic US rare earth magnet supply chain. This 10X Facility will help ensure domestic magnet manufacturing, expand heavy rare earth separation, and establish long-term price floor guarantees that reinforce US independence in the REE chain.

Why Australia’s terrorism definition still works

John Coyne, Chris Taylor, Susan Thomson 

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The definition of a ‘terrorist act’ included in Australia’s Criminal Code since 2002 has been important in protecting Australia’s national security and reinforcing the resilience of our democratic institutions. That definition, currently the subject of an inquiry by the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM), continues to be relevant and effective. It should be retained with minimal revision.

We welcomed an opportunity to engage with the INSLM to discuss the definition of a ‘terrorist act’ as outlined in section 100.1 of the Criminal Code Act 1995. Our subsequent submission to his inquiry reflects a policy and operational perspective grounded in the realities of operational and strategic counterterrorism, rather than a legalistic or academic critique.

Since its introduction, the terrorism definition has been reviewed seven times by different institutions and jurisdictions, yet no substantive amendments have been adopted. One interpretation might be that the number of reviews and recommendations reflects some kind of failing. We suggest that it instead reflects the reality that recommended revisions have simply not had public nor political support.

We reject the premise that absence of change implies deficiency. The burden of proof lies with those advocating for revision to demonstrate that an alternative definition would better serve Australia’s interests by being more effective, more proportionate, more protective of rights and more consistent with international obligations. To date, no such case has been convincingly made.

Japan's no longer ambiguous stance on Taiwan

Julian McBride

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On November 7, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi stated that any use of military force by China against Taiwan would be considered a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, prompting Tokyo to consider deploying its defense apparatus.

Tokyo’s 2025 position is broader than that of other regional actors regarding the defense and sovereignty of Taipei, a shift that will likely affect Beijing’s strategies of coercion and aggressive maritime maneuvers.

Japan’s stance, once ambiguous, is now explicit: an attack on Taiwan will be regarde as an attack on Japanese maritime, economic and security interests.

During the Lower House Budget Committee, Takaichi clarified that her remarks were part of a broader strategy aligned with prior Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) PMs, such as the now-deceased Shinzo Abe, who introduced collective self-defense in 2015.

However, according to the Asahi publication, Takaichi’s stance differs from Abe’s, as the late prime minister never stated that an invasion or blockade of Taiwan would have warranted a Japanese military response.

Previously, Japan was unclear about whether it would intervene if Taiwan came under military pressure from China. In the specific case of a Chinese navy (PLAN) military blockade, Japan considers the wartime scenario existential, meaning the JSDF would have to respond with various measures.

Commercial innovation, not government production, will win the drone war - Breaking Defense

Nadia Schadlow

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The central theme of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s recent speech on acquisition reform was that commercial companies and technologies are at the foundation of a strong defense industrial base and military innovation. As he put it, the department wants to harness more of America’s cutting-edge companies to focus their talent and technologies on our toughest national-security problems. New results won’t appear overnight, but the direction launched by Hegseth is the right one.

That’s why defense policymakers should be cautious about a provision now under consideration in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that could undercut the dynamism we need in one of our most critical emerging defense sectors: unmanned autonomous systems.

Tucked into the bill is a proposal based on the SkyFoundry Act of 2025, to establish a government-owned innovation hub and production facility that would produce up to one million small unmanned aircraft systems under the oversight of the US Army Materiel Command. The Army recently reiterated this plan to build one million drones over the next 2-3 years.

The Remaking of U.S. Foreign Aid Programs

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The former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) building is seen at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on July 8, 2025.(Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

When civil war erupted in South Sudan in 2013, Jeremy Konyndyk, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, rolled out the U.S. government’s humanitarian aid playbook. As the conflict between two opposing government factions quickly spiraled into multi-sided infighting and mass atrocities, U.S. officials funneled money to distribute food aid, nutritional interventions like peanut paste, and clean drinking water among civilians fleeing the fighting.

But, as Konyndyk, now the president of Refugees International, told TMD, disaster response requires far more than emergency food and water supplies. He designated medical teams to deploy to areas of the country at risk of famine, as malnutrition-related disease usually causes more deaths than outright starvation. Social workers and doctors attempted to provide basic health care, especially for women, who were at greater risk of violence and often in need of pregnancy care. And tens of thousands of households were provided with fishing and agricultural kits to blunt the long-term need for emergency aid.

AI Hacks AI: Cybercriminals Unleash An AI-Powered, Self-Replicating Botnet

Thomas Brewster,

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Hackers have started using large language models to code up attacks on AI systems, researchers have warned. They’re then using those hacked AI systems to target other AI machines.

Marking another milestone on the road to a cyber world where AI constantly fights AI, Israel-based Oligo Security found evidence of mass exploitation of software designed to help developers manage and assign power to AI projects, called Ray.

The Oligo researchers were able to find over 230,000 Ray servers that were online despite the company's warning, potentially leaving them open to cyberattacks, according to Oligo’s AI security researcher Avi Lumelsky. Lumelsky said he was “very certain” large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, were used to generate code to order the hacked servers to mine crypto, though he couldn’t specify which models. He said there were identifiable “hallmarks” when LLMs had been used to produce malicious code, including needless repetition of certain comments and strings in the code.

The Ray servers were also used to autonomously scout out further targets, turning their operation into a self-propagating botnet, showing “AI infrastructure can be hijacked to attack itself,” said Gal Elbaz, CTO and cofounder of Oligo. Oligo has dubbed the attack ShadowRay 2.0, an update to hacks it detected last year.

With the Rise of AI, Cisco Sounds an Urgent Alarm About the Risks of Aging Tech

Lily Hay Newman

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Aging digital infrastructure equipment like routers, network switches, and network-attached storage—has long posed a silent risk to organizations. In the short term, it's cheaper and easier to just leave those boxes running in a forgotten closet. But this infrastructure may have old, insecure configurations, and legacy tech is often no longer supported by vendors for software patches and other protections. As generative AI platforms make it easier for attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in targets' systems, the network tech company Cisco is launching an effort to raise awareness about the issue and promote improvements—both for ancient Cisco devices and products from other companies that are still in use.

Dubbed “Resilient Infrastructure,” the initiative includes research and industry outreach as well as technical shifts in how Cisco manages its own legacy products. The company says that it is launching new warnings for its products that are approaching end of life, so if customers are running known insecure configurations or attempt to add them, they will receive a clear and explicit prompt when they update a device. Eventually, Cisco will go a step further to completely remove historic settings and interoperability options that are no longer considered safe.

SOCOM to evaluate industry hardware solutions for powering AI workloads

Jon Harper

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Officials from U.S. Special Operations Command are gearing up to assess and downselect industry hardware offerings that can support SOCOM’s growing use of AI and large language models.

The organization is looking to enter into procurement contracts or other agreements with vendors whose solutions are favorably evaluated by subject matter experts from SOCOM’s J24 Intelligence Data Science Team, according to a special notice about the effort.

The initiative comes as Defense Department components are keen on acquiring generative artificial intelligence tools — including large language models — to aid enterprise and warfighting tasks.

“The U.S. Government’s data science portfolio is rapidly expanding its reliance on large-scale AI workloads, especially LLMs and high-speed inference pipelines. To sustain this growth and to maintain a strategic edge, the program requires cutting-edge GPU acceleration, capable of delivering the throughput and memory bandwidth needed for state-of-the-art training, finetuning, and deployment. Advanced GPUs will provide a high-performance, energy-efficient, and future-ready foundation for advanced AI workloads, while ensuring low response times, reliability, and room for future growth,” officials wrote in the special notice about plans for hardware-enabled AI acceleration.

How to Topple Maduro

Elliott Abrams 

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ELLIOTT ABRAMS is a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as Special Representative for Venezuela in the first Trump administration and as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America in the Reagan administration.

On the last day of October, CBS’s 60 Minutes asked U.S. President Donald Trump about his policy on Venezuela and his thoughts about that country’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro. “Are Maduro’s days as president numbered?” asked Norah O’Donnell. “I would say yeah,” Trump replied. “I think so, yeah.”

This phlegmatic response was a good summary of current U.S. policy: Washington favors Maduro’s downfall, but its position lacks clarity and is not backed by the actions—including military strikes inside Venezuela—that would bring about the outcome U.S. officials appear to want. And therein lies the danger for Trump and his administration: that after a great deal of chest-thumping and a show of naval force aimed at Maduro, they will leave him in place. In that scenario, Maduro would emerge as the survivor who bested Trump and showed that American influence in the Western Hemisphere is limited at best.

Removing Maduro, on the other hand, would advance Washington’s interests, protect U.S. national security, and benefit Venezuelans and their neighbors. Regime change would result in reduced migration to the United States, less drug trafficking, more freedom and prosperity in Venezuela, and an end to the country’s cooperation with China, Cuba, Iran, and Russia, which gives countries hostile to U.S. interests a base of operations on the South American mainland.

China’s Demographics Problem Grows

Philip Bowring

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China’s leaders have known for some time that they have a demographics problem, with their concern growing at the threat to future prosperity and dynamism. The population decline is set to accelerate, with China’s male-female imbalance presenting limiting factors not faced by the rest of Asia.

The median age is already 40.2, nearly the same as older developed countries such as the UK (40.8) and higher than the United States at 38.5. China’s fertility rate appears to be about 1.1, or half the population replacement level.

Various programs in China, as in other countries such as South Korea with similar challenges, are focused on issues such as financial support for children, greater equality in the workplace, provision of nursery facilities, etc. Such incentives make sense but so far have had limited success in other countries. They may yet have an impact in China – though it is rather more difficult to force couples to have more children than it was to limit them to one child, as was the case with the One Child policy introduced in 1979 and only formally abandoned in 2015.

But compared with other countries facing the same birth collapse, China’s prospects for raising the fertility rate face a major additional obstacle, the imbalance between numbers of men and women of the childbearing age bracket. This is the indirect consequence of One Child – a deep-rooted patriarchal bias towards male children which led to widespread abortion of female foetuses. This is not just a product of the past. Although the imbalance of sexes at birth has narrowed, there is still a significant gap.

This year, according to UN World Population Prospects 2024, there are 44.4 million men in the 25-29 age group, which should be on the cusp of procreation, but only 38.4 million women. The gap in absolute terms diminishes with the subsequent cohorts but remains in double-digit percentages.

Congressional study urges countering the global spread of Chinese communist system

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The Chinese Communist Party and its military forces are preparing the entire country for a future war with the United States over Taiwan, the hot spots in the South China Sea or disputed territory near Japan, according to a new report by a congressional China commission.

The 728-page annual report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission also warns that the U.S. and allied effort to counter Chinese communist expansion and replacement of the U.S.-led democratic system is an urgent problem.

“Countering China’s aggression is now a truly global challenge,” the report said.

China’s large-scale military modernization advanced significantly and was not affected by extensive purges of key military leaders, the report said.

Over the past year, increases took place in nuclear warhead stockpiles, new amphibious warships, deployment of more advanced stealth fighter jets and greater fielding of drone weapons, the report said.

The military modernization has strengthened the People’s Liberation Army’s capabilities for launching an attack on Taiwan, the report states.

“China has continued to rapidly advance its capabilities to launch a successful invasion of Taiwan,” said the report, noting intensified PLA operations near Taiwan and deployment of new forces for an amphibious attack.

The Enduring Dangers of Anti-Satellite Weapons and Space Debris

Kathleen Curlee , and Lauren Kahn

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On November 4, 2025, a piece of space debris collided with China’s Shenzhou-20 spacecraft. This forced China to delay the return of its three astronauts while engineers and authorities assess the damage to the craft. Although the exact nature of the strike and the extent of the damage are unknown, it is possible that the offending piece of space junk was no bigger than a few millimeters. But at orbital speeds, debris can collide with objects in space nearly ten times faster than the speed of a bullet.

What is more concerning is that there are tens of thousands of pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters, each capable of crippling satellites or endangering crews, and there is currently no reliable way to remove them. More concerning still, many of these hazards were not the result of accidents. They were generated through deliberate anti-satellite (ASAT) tests.

On January 11, 2007, China used an ASAT weapon to destroy its aging Fengyun (FY-1C) polar-orbit weather satellite, creating a cloud of debris that persists to this day. ASAT weapons involve the deliberate destruction of satellites in orbit, often using kinetic interceptors launched from Earth. The strike was hardly unprecedented: both the United States and the Soviet Union tested ASAT systems during the Cold War. However, those strikes rarely created significant debris because they were conducted at lower altitudes.

China Built the Solar Century; The Fusion Century Can Still Be Ours

Jackie Siebens

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It’s producing nearly a terawatt of new clean energy capacity every year — the equivalent of more than 300 large power plants worth of generation, according to The Economist. That pace has made it a new kind of energy superpower: one that manufactures, builds, and exports clean electricity on a planetary scale. And because that scale has driven prices so low, the rest of the world is now buying from Beijing. Even if the current US government is less supportive of renewables or decarbonization, global demand is undeniable: emerging markets are hungry for cheap renewables, with countries from Pakistan to Brazil rapidly importing Chinese solar and wind equipment to meet rising electricity needs.

There’s no catching up to that. We’re not going to out-subsidize, out-manufacture, or out-coordinate China on solar panels, inverters, or transmission wire. The truth is we didn’t really try to compete until we had already lost—the United States innovated and invented but failed to build the environment needed to rapidly manufacture and scale its own technologies, ceding the market to China.

Explaining The Lack of Proficiency in Arab Armies with Solutions to Modernize

Julian McBride

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Arab armies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region) currently do not perform as proficiently as Western militaries in North America, Europe, or even East Asian militaries. Because of stagnation, corruption, and a lack of a constitution, Arab militaries are plagued by human rights abuses and a lack of unit cohesion.

Numerous wars and conflicts in the region have seen Arab armies suffer unnecessary casualties, minimal unit cohesion, and failed reconstructions of their wartime doctrines. Whereas other regional militaries, such as Israel and Turkey, excel, the rest struggle to adapt with proficiency and modernization.

Despite numerous challenges, militaries in the Arab world remain in a state of perpetual limbo. Some are currently adopting new doctrines and tactics to revitalize their armed forces and restore the readiness level the region lacks. Reviewing several key points, we can examine why MENA armies were constituted to avoid becoming competent and proficient.

Lack of Cohesion in Different Sects

In the ancient and medieval eras, the Arab world was united under the umbrella of various empires, forming caliphates and sultanates. Under the allegiance of ruling authorities, Arabs under united armies conquered the Romans, Crusaders, and even the Mongol Ilkhanate, as the latter three suffered major problems of infighting and usurpations.

Saudi Arabia wants to buy nearly 300 U.S. tanks, White House says

Colin Demarest

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An Abrams tank with the 1st Cavalry Division at the National Training Center in November. Photo: Tyler Williams/DVIDS

Saudi Arabia committed to buying hundreds of U.S.-made tanks, part of a larger spending-and-security conversation between the two countries, the White House said.

Why it matters: It's a massive, long-term commitment — and one that appears to shrug off doubts regarding the tank's role on the battlefield of the future.

Driving the news: The Trump administration on Tuesday announced a slew of deals with Riyadh following consultations with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.The arrangement for "nearly" 300 tanks, in particular, will enable "Saudi Arabia to build up its own defense capabilities" while "safeguarding hundreds of American jobs," it said.

Zoom in: General Dynamics Land Systems makes the Abrams main battle tank. It's used by the U.S. Army and has been adopted overseas, including by Ukraine.A company spokesperson referred questions about the plan to the State Department.

Zoom out: MBS earlier in the day told President Trump that Saudi Arabia would raise its stateside investments to $1 trillion, up from $600 billion.

Terrifying internet vulnerability EXPOSED Cloudflare crash

HARRIET ALEXANDER, US SENIOR FEATURES WRITER

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To millions around the world who – perhaps, unwittingly – depend on Cloudflare's services, the blackout was unnerving.

The Silicon Valley firm that is the foundation of a fifth of all websites worldwide, was brought to its knees on Tuesday morning. The issue was first detected at 6:48am Eastern Time.

Internet users experienced the outage as maddening connectivity issues. Elon Musk's X, Sam Altman's ChatGPT, Spotify and Shopify were among the sites grinding to a halt. More essential organizations, such as the New Jersey transit system, New York City's emergency management offices and the French national railway company SNCF were also reportedly impacted.

By 9:42am the Cloudflare said a 'fix' had been 'implemented' and by 12:44pm the service was fully restored. Dane Knecht, Cloudflare's chief technology officer - whose X bio boasts: 'I help invent the future' - was grovelling in his apology.

'I won't mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet,' he said, adding that it 'caused real pain' and the 'issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable.' For a company that promises to 'build a better internet,' the drama was mortifying. To millions around the world who – perhaps, unwittingly – depend on Cloudflare's services, the blackout was unnerving

Trump Said to Authorize C.I.A. Plans for Covert Action in Venezuela

Tyler PagerJulian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt

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With the largest U.S. aircraft carrier now positioned in the Caribbean, President Trump has approved additional measures to pressure Venezuela and prepare for the possibility of a broader military campaign, according to multiple people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump has signed off on C.I.A. plans for covert measures inside Venezuela, operations that could be meant to prepare a battlefield for further action, these people said. At the same time, they said, he has authorized a new round of back-channel negotiations that at one point resulted in President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela offering to step down after a delay of a couple of years, a proposal the White House rejected.

It is not clear what the covert actions might be or when any of them might be carried out. Mr. Trump has not yet authorized combat forces on the ground in Venezuela, so the next phase of the administration’s escalating pressure campaign on the Maduro government could be sabotage or some sort of cyber, psychological or information operations.

The president has not made a decision about the broader course of action to pursue in Venezuela, nor publicly articulated his ultimate goal beyond stemming the flow of drugs from the region. And military and C.I.A. planners have prepared multiple options for different contingencies.

Military planners have prepared lists of potential drug facilities that could be struck. The Pentagon is also planning for strikes on military units close to Mr. Maduro. Mr. Trump held two meetings in the White House Situation Room last week to discuss Venezuela and review options with his senior advisers.

The surreal 45-day trek at the heart of Nato’s defence

Laura Pitel 

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US general Ben Hodges was overseeing a military exercise in Europe when an unexpected incident occurred at a Polish railway station.

As dozens of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles thundered through, some of them had their gun turrets ripped off by the platform roof. “Nobody got hurt,” said Hodges, who was at the time the commander of US forces in Europe and has since retired. “But that was thousands of dollars of damage. And 10 vehicles that weren’t going to be ready to fight for some time.”

A decade later, crumbling bridges, mismatched rail gauges and labyrinthine bureaucracy remain significant hurdles to moving military assets across Europe. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France was unable to send tanks to Romania on the shortest land route through Germany and instead had to ship them via the Mediterranean.

These examples serve as a stark reminder that Europe’s race to re-arm is not limited to procuring weapons or building up big armies. It must also be possible to swiftly transport troops, equipment and ammunition from the west — where the bulk of Nato’s forces are based — to the alliance’s eastern flank.

Nato vessel HNLMS Tromp at Rotterdam — a key port for military equipment arriving by sea from the UK © Frank de Roo/ANP/AFP/Getty Images

Currently it would take roughly 45 days to move an army from the strategic ports in the west to countries bordering Russia or Ukraine, EU officials estimated as they prepared to publish a new proposal on “military mobility” on Wednesday. The aim, they said, was to bring that down to five or even three days.

The Case for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Ensuring Information Access for Closed Societies

Olivia Enos 

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In March 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order aimed at closing the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).1 This decision affected Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), both of which are USAGM grantees, and may ultimately lead to their closure. Such a development would be a strategic loss for the United States and the world.

Despite their names, RFA and RFE/RL are so much more than radio. They do provide radio broadcasts to countries with strict information control. But they also offer critical on-the-ground reporting that informs the American public and provides a voice to those persecuted by authoritarian governments in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. Both serve strategic functions that advance US interests by conveying the truth about the value of freedom and human rights. The information they provide produces goodwill toward the United States in authoritarian countries that seek to sow discord with America and to deceive their populations about the importance of freedom.

Since the executive order went into effect, RFA has been forced to suspend news operations for the first time in its 29 years of existence and laid off nearly all of its staff in hopes of fully reopening once funding is restored.2 The closure of critical services, including the Mandarin, Uyghur, Tibetan, Cantonese, Korean, and Burmese services, has left citizens of authoritarian countries without an information lifeline. Policymakers and civil society actors who once relied on RFA’s groundbreaking reporting, especially through its English-language media, are now without a critical source of information to inform foreign policy decisions.