War On The Rocks

Over the past couple weeks, everyone in Washington and the world has published their geopolitical forecast for 2025. The beauty of these predictions is that you can simultaneously make fun of the vague ones for being vague and the clear…

Iran’s inability to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime and prevent its collapse, coupled with recent significant blows to Hizballah and Israeli strikes within Iranian borders, underscores Tehran’s unprecedented regional weakness. With…

<!-- category --> January 15, 2025 In this special episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Rick Landgraf talks with Jane Vaynman and Tristan Volpe, co-authors of “Dual Use Deception: How Technology Shapes Cooperation in International…

In 2022, Kathleen J. McInnis, Benjamin Jensen, and Jaron Wharton wrote, “Why Dictators are Afraid of Girls: Rethinking Gender and National Security,” where they analyzed how gender can break or bolster authoritarian regimes. We asked…

For decades, the United States has relied on airpower and the qualitative superiority of its aircraft to gain an advantage over its adversaries. But that advantage is rapidly eroding. The Chinese military is fielding sophisticated air…

Peace seems to have broken out between India and China. On Oct. 23, 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese leader Xi Jinping had their first bilateral meeting since 2019. Statements from the foreign ministries of both…

At a roundtable with industry and academia at the Defense Innovation Unit, I met a CEO whose company had developed a language translation app that was providing critical support across the Department of Defense. He shared that the…

On December 18, 1944, Moe Berg — a Princeton graduate, Major League baseball star, and Office of Strategic Services operative — discreetly took his seat in a cramped conference room in Zurich. Masquerading as a studious physics graduate,…

<!-- category --> January 10, 2025 Welcome to The Adversarial. Every other week, we’ll provide you with expert analysis on America’s greatest challengers: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and jihadists. Read more below.…

A 1953 advertisement for the U.S. Air Force’s civilian Ground Observer Corps described America’s air defenses as a “10 mile high fence full of holes.” Seventy years later, the United States again finds itself unable to reliably detect and…