Commentary

Five years ago, we warned that a snap decision to depart Syria — abandoning the U.S. Kurdish-led partner force that has fought the Islamic State in Syria for the last 10 years while thousands of suspected fighters remained in detention —…

“In the United States people are singularly oblivious of the close relation between peace and preparation.”–Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1912 Only 34 percent of Americans can find Taiwan on a map and they are even less aware of U.S. strategic…

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…

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…

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…

In a press conference on Jan. 7, President-elect Donald Trump declined to rule out using military force to acquire Greenland. Previously, he proclaimed that American “ownership and control” of the semi-autonomous island, which is part of…

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Should a war erupt with China over Taiwan, many observers seem to think that Europe would be largely irrelevant as far as the actual fighting is concerned. Those who share this opinion typically point to Europe’s reluctance to confront…