Donald Trump appointed incompetent Pete Hegseth who puts American military at risk for serious short-term and long-term harm

 Pete Hegseth Is a Wrecking Ball

New York Times echo opinion by David French

It is difficult to fathom the damage Donald Trump is doing to America’s national security. He is making our nation more vulnerable than it has been at any time since the cloudiest days of the Cold War.

Trump administration scandals come with such speed and frequency that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. 

One minute you’re reading about potential war crimes in the Caribbean. The next moment there’s a news alert about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ongoing purge of generals. Then you click over and read a story about depleted stocks of some of America’s most important munitions.

That’s a fraction of the havoc the administration has wrought. In a strange way, the very frequency of the scandals works to the administration’s advantage. Each new story distracts us from the last one, and we don’t have a minute to pause, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture.

Let’s take that deep breath now.

Before I do, I want to be careful not to be too alarmist. Our military is still highly capable, and we have watched it successfully execute some extraordinarily difficult missions during Trump’s second term. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and the rescue of two downed American airmen from the heart of Iran were remarkable feats of skill and courage.

There are also signs that the Navy has been slowly, painstakingly making progress toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz — traffic through the strait is well below prewar averages, but some ships are getting through.

Just as the Trump administration grossly miscalculated when it launched its war on Iran, the Iranian regime may have miscalculated when it refused to cease hostilities after winning what would have been a decisive victory through the memorandum of understanding it negotiated with the United States.

It’s comforting — I guess — to know that Hegseth can’t undo the effects of a generations-long commitment to excellence in just 20 months.

That’s the end of the good news. From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security.

At the same time, to maintain the stalemate against Iran, the United States is drawing resources from other, more dangerous theaters of potential conflict. There are now no active carrier battle groups in the Pacific region, for example, exactly when China has ramped up its military activities around Taiwan.

The short-term damage is serious enough. Even just to achieve what is at best a stalemate in the Persian Gulf, the administration has created a critical shortage in interceptors that can shoot down missiles and drones and in other precision munitions, including some of our most advanced offensive weapons.

The lack of interceptors is escalating the crisis in Ukraine. Russia is able to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles virtually at will, creating a critical vulnerability for the Ukrainian war effort. Last week, for example, Kyiv endured the longest sustained bombing campaign on the Ukrainian capital since the opening days of the war.

The Economist also reported that Putin is planning to throw hundreds of thousands of additional troops into the fight, and he’s provoking NATO with a series of incursions so severe (including, according to the German government, an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany) that it prompted John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, to visit Russia to reportedly warn Putin against any further aggression.

As long as Iran — a longstanding ally of Russia that’s closely linked to its neighbor through the Caspian Sea — remains in the fight, it can continue to deplete our interceptors to the point where it might take years to bring our stocks back to acceptable levels, even if we ramp up production at immense cost.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of terrible self-imposed wounds to America’s alliances. There are obvious immediate risks, for example, to withdrawing troops from allied nations or shortening military exercises with South Korea, but the damage done by engaging in trade wars with allies and threatening aggression against Greenland (remember that❓) can’t be repaired by just one administration.

Our allies learned an important lesson from Trump’s second election. It’s not just that Trump is mercurial and unreliable, it’s that the American electorate is mercurial and unreliable.

More than 77 million Americans compared Trump’s first term with Joe Biden’s only term and said, “More Trump, please.”

Even if the next Democratic president tries to reconcile with our allies, every allied government will be asking itself, “How long will this last❓” Every prudent allied government will hedge its geopolitical bets, and that can harm the United States in incalculable ways.

Our allies fear not just that they’ve lost Trump, but even worse, they fear that they’ve lost a substantial portion of the American people.

We’ve already seen the consequences of American faithlessness. The Trump administration has pitched a fit demanding allied aid in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, only to be greeted with stony silence. Why should our allies expend blood and treasure standing with an American government that didn’t even have the decency to consult them before launching its costly, poorly planned Middle Eastern adventure❓

Why should they expend blood and treasure standing with America when America is also threatening the independence and sovereignty of NATO member states❓ They are getting enough of that from Putin.

The end result might be a period of extended Western vulnerability as Europe bears the considerable costs (and takes several years to increase its defense capabilities) to deter Russia even while it can’t count on the United States to fulfill its treaty obligations.

The long-term threat is to the character and competence of the armed forces. They are becoming politicized, and the politicization of a military can both destroy its combat effectiveness and turn it into an instrument of domestic oppression.

If you are under the delusion that Hegseth’s purges are about competence more than loyalty — a welcome corrective to the excesses of D.E.I. programs — well then, as we say in the South, bless your heart.

The sycophancy that pervades Trump’s second term is creating perverse incentives. I was struck by a recent piece in The Dispatch (where I used to write and still contribute to podcasts) by Mike Nelson, a former special forces officer who is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

Nelson focused on Chris LaNeve, a lieutenant general and the commander of the 8th Army in Korea. LaNeve video-conferenced in to Trump’s inaugural ball to praise Trump, and Trump praised him right back. “Is this man central casting or what❓,” Trump said, “If I’m doing a movie, I’d pick him to play my lead.”

Trump did exactly that. “In February 2025,” as Nelson writes, “Hegseth fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short as his senior military adviser and named LaNeve as her replacement.” Months later, Hegseth fired Gen. James Mingus, the Army’s vice chief of staff. And who did the White House name to replace him? You guessed it — General LaNeve.

Army Chief of Staff asked to 'retire immediately' by Donald Trump’s defence sec Pete Hegseth, reported in The Mirror

That’s not the end of LaNeve’s meteoric rise. Again, here’s Nelson, “Six months after that, Hegseth fired the occupant of the Army’s top job, General Randy George,😡💢” who was serving as chief of staff, “and — to quote Gomer Pyle — surprise, surprise, surprise, LaNeve has been serving as the acting chief of staff since and is Hegseth’s pick to permanently fill the job, although he seems to face some pushback from G.O.P. senators.”

Maybe General LaNeve is genuinely gifted enough to merit those promotions — I can’t say — but the chain of events has set a terrible example for future commanders.

Trump’s critics aren’t the only ones alarmed, I’d refer you to the recent resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. As Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan and Michael Scherer reported for The Atlantic, in a recent White House meeting, “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump.”

Driscoll was reportedly worried that Hegseth’s purges were hampering the ability of the Army to transform itself. And this is just as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are demonstrating that the world is in the midst of another revolution in military affairs, and we are not prepared.

“Hegseth’s purge of the military has been so dramatic,” they wrote, “that with Driscoll gone, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe.”

If you pay close attention to the news, you know that my list of negative developments is woefully incomplete (for example, granting the Pentagon an ownership stake in a Venezuelan oil venture is more reminiscent of the way that the Chinese or Iranian militaries work than the way the United States military is supposed to), but it should suffice to paint a clear picture.

The combination of corruption, stupidity and sycophancy — the Pentagon was recently caught surreptitiously employing conservative media influencers who reliably defend Hegseth online — that pervades the Trump administration is now infecting the Pentagon at the moment that our most powerful enemies are becoming more aggressive.

I loved my time serving my country. It was one of the great honors of my life. If anything, I’m biased toward viewing the military in general and the Army in particular through rose-colored glasses. But my view is getting darker. Terrible leadership of even the most virtuous institutions can have terrible consequences.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that the battlefield is the most unforgiving place on earth.

Donald Trump continues to obsess about old election news while American military are being killed in his illegal war of choice with Iran

RECKLESS❗ It is insane and outrageous that — once again — the keepers of our election system have to issue statements responding to preposterous claims by Donald Trump and other Republican maga U.S. leaders that the system has been somehow compromised and co-opted by threats here and abroad.

Rather than tell Americans about his plan to end the illegal Iran war he declared and is now shackled with, he went on and on about old news and fake claims about election fraud.  #ImpeachTrumpNOW

Where is Senator Susan Collins❓

Echo editorial board opinion published in the Rutland Herald, a Vermont newspaper:

In Vermont, Attorney General Charity Clark and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas released a joint statement responding to the claims made by Trump during a national address on July 16, Thursday night concerning the integrity of the nation’s elections.
(Two national networks NBC and ABC did not carry Trump's address live and CBS cut away to regular programming after only a few minutes.)

In the speech, (for those with the intestinal fortitude to endure it) Donald Trump repeated false claims about the 2020, election that have been investigated and disproven. 

Going into the Midterm elections, Trump continues to raise doubts and conspiracies to negate Republican losses and carry on with his drumbeat that elections are “rigged” when they don’t go his way.

However, there is no evidence that China actually used that information in any way. It has long been established that China collects immense volumes of data on Americans unrelated to any efforts to manipulate votes or alter election outcomes. And public versions of voter files are widely available, including online, and can be bought and sold by campaigns and political parties so they know which doors to knock on and where to send mail.

An Associated Press reports that China’s efforts to influence the 2020, campaign were already well-documented, and there was no assessment of any direct election interference. The records released Thursday do not refute that conclusion but reveal an internal intelligence community debate about how to characterize Beijing’s efforts and motives.

In addition, Trump touted the release of a new Department of Homeland Security investigation, based on state voter rolls and public records, that he said had identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections.

According to published reports, the agency uncovered more than a quarter of a million noncitizens illegally registered to vote in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada, based on public records, which are often erroneous or incomplete. Another 28,000 noncitizens, it claimed, were found on voter rolls in 25 states using the new Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

Nevertheless, there is no allegation that any of those people actually voted, which would be a crime. That data has also not been verified. Reports have found that the SAVE database is plagued with errors, including outdated information that has often classified naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Indeed, a federal judge has barred the database from being used over fears that voters will be wrongly purged from voter rolls, the AP reports. Studies have found noncitizen voting to be extremely rare. Noncitizens are also allowed to vote in some local elections and could be on the rolls for that reason.

Trump also cited Russia, as well as issues domestically in Michigan concerning canvassing voters.

Notably, Trump told the nation the intelligence included “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” that leave it vulnerable “to hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.” 

One report in the files included a list of recent breaches — mostly by Russia — and called on state and local election officials to step up their defenses to prevent information from being used to obtain absentee ballots or alter voter rolls.

According to the AP, election officials acknowledge that voting machines also carry risk — which is why they don’t rely on them alone to ensure the accuracy of the vote. Safeguards like physical security, equipment testing, paper ballot backups and post-election audits help to catch machine errors or threats.

But it is unclear what the administration is doing to facilitate their efforts. Earlier this month, Trump ousted members of a bipartisan federal election commission that distributes federal grants to states, oversees the testing of voting systems, and maintains the national voter registration form after the group resisted his efforts to require potential voters to document their U.S. citizenship before registering.

Trump’s address had the intended effect, with renewed claims of old news about fraud and conspiracies. So much so that election officials across the nation are having to tamp down the fires yet again. It is irresponsible and reckless to stoke these fears.

We in Vermont commend Clark and Copeland Hanzas for working diligently with our town and city clerks to ensure secure and fair elections here in Vermont. There definitely is a lack of integrity in play here, but it’s all on Trump — not within the states❗

Donald Trump"s incoherent speech to the nation on July 16 gave no evidence to support his dangerous false claims about the six year old 2020 election!

Trump’s Election Denial Has Never Been More Dangerous

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jim Hines the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Donald Trump gave a rare (buy typically incoherent) prime-time address to the nation- but two TV stations refused to carry it and the third cut him off and returned to the regular programming. 

Is Republican Susan Collins of Maine listening❓ 

So, for those who managed to endure listening, Trump revived the debunked claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidential election of 2020, the same claim that led to the lethal but unsuccessful attack on my workplace, the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021. But this time there will be a difference.

Trump now has at his disposal the full backing of his incompetent cabinet and much of the Republican Party, including key leaders of the American intelligence community. And, he reportedly intends to use newly declassified American intelligence in an attempt to lend credence to these lies.

It is critical that the American people understand what foreign intelligence tells us about the security of our elections, past and future.

After Russia interfered in the 2016, election, our intelligence agencies made detecting foreign interference in our democratic process a priority. In past elections, members of Congress have regularly received briefings on how nations such as Russia and China monitor our elections, and what, if anything, they’re doing to interfere in or influence them.

Those updates are generally classified, but after elections, a declassified summary is typically released to the public.

In fact, you can read these assessments yourself, and you will find them broadly reassuring. They show that foreign nations do indeed attempt to influence our elections and democratic processes, but we have no credible evidence that they attempt to change the actual vote count or disrupt the casting of ballots, let alone that they have succeeded. We have been and remain very good at spotting and countering their activities.

After the 2020, election, our intelligence community found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process.” That assessment reflected a rigorous look at all available information and expert judgments by nonpartisan professionals. In fact, there’s been no evidence of successful interference in the tabulation of votes in any federal election since I have been on the intelligence committee, and I have seen no credible intelligence that the upcoming midterms will be different.

First, he misrepresented what classified intelligence actually says. Last year, his administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to defend deporting undocumented Venezuelan immigrants without due process. To justify the use of this centuries-old authority, Trump claimed that classified intelligence showed that the Venezuelan government was directing the actions of the Tren de Aragua gang. A now declassified assessment has revealed that most of America’s intelligence agencies believed such classified intelligence was “not credible.”

Another tactic Trump was to present a scrap of raw, unverified reporting as if it were proven truth. He or his acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, could, say, declassify an unsubstantiated report that includes an explosive allegation from a human source about rigged elections. The reality is that raw intelligence collection is full of things that aren’t true. Sources are sometimes unreliable — we learned that in spades after the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Reliable intelligence analysis fuses hundreds of different sources of information with expertise to produce something we can validate and trust.

Finally, if Trump declassifies intelligence about the 2020, election, it is nearly certain he will be cherry-picking bits and pieces that make his falsehoods look true. The findings of the 2020, assessment by the U.S. intelligence community have been declassified, but the basis for its findings has not.

I have read the most detailed version of that assessment, and the declassified findings are fully consistent with the classified material, which was based on exceptionally sensitive, high-value, high-confidence intelligence. The government has a legal obligation to share critical information with the House intelligence committee, and in nearly six years it has provided nothing that would call these findings into question.

Trump attempted other tricks to mislead the public about their democracy on Thursday. The American people should know that our elections are strong and secure because of the quiet and dignified work of thousands of patriotic Americans in the intelligence community, in state and local election offices and in polling places themselves. We all can be confident that they will continue to speak truth to power and perform their duties without fear or favor.

Those are the facts.

But ahead of this year’s midterms, Trump is setting the stage to undermine the confidence of the American people in our elections. He has packed his administration with election deniers and hired an acting director of national intelligence with zero national security experience and a history of abusing his position to target political opponents. The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has made his career chasing the president’s conspiracy theories, most recently with the devotion of massive resources to a sham investigation in Georgia.

Under this corrupt Trump administration, their agencies have gutted elements intended to identify, assess and counter foreign threats to U.S. elections, including the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Foreign Influence Task Force at the F.B.I. Last week, Trump fired the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, which was created to help states fairly administer elections. Without these institutions, and without principled leadership to fight for the integrity of their agencies and for the truth, our intelligence community stands precariously exposed to the president’s whims.

As a result, there are a number of ways he can muddy the waters by abusing the powers of the presidency. He’s done it before.

And from the many comments on this opinion: Many towns and cities could use election workers. I've been doing it for years. I think when people actually work an election they'll find that whatever they hear from this administration or conservative media is quite different from the reality. 

I've also come away with a sincere respect for our democratic system of choosing our leaders and deciding issues. Sure, I may not like the outcome, but the process itself is better than other places where things are decided by the gun or it's preordained by the government. Don't fall for the lies. Democracy needs informed citizens.

(Maine Writer P.S.......I hope the optimism can overcome Donald Trump's ruthless corruption.)

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are losing the Iran World War because of cheap drones.

(Meanwhile, the cost of oil keeps going up because Donald Trump declared an illegal war without any plan about how to win or exit.)

Drones are blowing up old assumptions about US foreign policy.

#ImpeachTrumpNOW attention Senator Susan Collins

Echo essay published in the Boston Globe by Stephen Kinzer

America will find it harder to win arguments with military might alone. 

Waging war is one of humanity’s oldest pursuits. That is unlikely to end. Leaders seeking power or glory will always want to prove themselves on battlefields. The way wars are fought, however, changes over time. Today those changes are especially dramatic. Wars used to be won by the side that fielded the biggest, meanest, and best-equipped army. America’s misadventure in Iran is the latest proof that those days are over.

War is becoming democratized. Weaker powers can now resist
stronger ones in new ways. Revolutionaries, like those in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, have often shown that smaller and more agile forces can triumph over larger ones.
Now governments are learning the same lesson. America’s failure to crush Iran, and Russia’s failure to impose its will in Ukraine, show that superior force is no longer enough to guarantee victory. In the new age of cheap drones, the value of expensive missiles, bombs, and fighter jets is suddenly limited. Today’s conflicts in Iran and Ukraine are opening a new era of warfare.

This is more than just an evolution in weapons technology. It is a paradigm shift that threatens the long-term power of countries that rely on military force to deter or resist enemies. The United States is the most prominent of those countries. 

That has profound implications for the course of American power.
The most immediate cause of this sudden reversal of fortune is the development of drones. They have become the poor man’s weapon of choice. That makes them the future of warfare.
Drones are cheap and easy to build. Depending on size and power, they can cost anywhere from 💲300 to 💲50,000. Compare that with the cost of American-made missiles that can shoot down drones: 💲3 million for each Patriot missile, at least 💲10 million for a THAAD interceptor. A drone factory can churn out hundreds in a week. Producing and delivering a Patriot battery takes a minimum of two years. Seeking to take advantage of this mismatch, Iranian leaders have sent swarms of drones to attack targets in Israel and the Persian Gulf. These are not intended to produce military victory. Iranians have realized that they can win simply by surviving. This is naturally unsettling to the United States, which is used to winning wars according to the old rules.
A similar dynamic shapes the war in Ukraine. Russia’s overwhelming military advantage should have allowed it to achieve its war goals in Ukraine just as easily as the Americans were supposed to achieve theirs in Iran. But as the Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke the Elder tartly observed more than a century ago, no war plan survives contact with the enemy. In the early stages of the Ukraine war, infantry charges and armored attacks were common. Now they are rare. The reason is simple: Any operation on open ground can be quickly spotted and attacked by drones.
One key difference between these two wars is the adaptability of the attacking power. Russia shifted its strategy just as Ukraine has. The two belligerents match each other drone for drone.
The United States has proved less willing or able to make such a sharp shift. Our lumbering and overfed defense industry is focused on making highly complex weapons systems that are also highly profitable. As Iran steadily churns out drones, the United States has scrambled to respond. Americans have even turned to their Ukrainian partners for advice on drone technology — a remarkable case of a student surpassing the teacher. 

In the future, if Iran and Ukraine are any indication, countries that adapt more quickly and imaginatively to strategic challenges will have an advantage over those that are slow-moving and tradition-bound.
This presents the United States with profound challenges. The most obvious is a challenge to our way of waging war. There was a time when a simple demand from Washington was enough to terrify a national leader into resigning. But obviously, that no longer works. If the United States wants to continue exercising military power over faraway lands, it will have to find new ways to do it.
The larger challenge for Americans is to decide whether exercising coercive power is what the United States should be doing in the 21st century. Our foreign policy is largely a matter of identifying enemies and finding ways to weaken or destroy them. The alternative would be to accept other countries as they are, and even seek to make them partners in a shared prosperity. Yet in Washington, it is an absolute taboo to suggest that compromising with Russia, China, or Iran could contribute more to our national security than any weapons system.
Raw power no longer brings either victory or stability. This is a gleeful moment for the underdogs. Superpowers do not seem so super anymore.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Donald Trump obsessed with power but he will fail because his failed leadership is unable to inspire loyalty

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe: 

Trump’s obsession with winning is a losing strategy. 

Raw power can only get a strongman leader so far. 

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it❗

Thank you for your service❗ 😞😰💘💙

By Stacie Nicole Smith, the managing director of the Consensus Building Institute and the director of the Workable Peace Project, a high school curriculum designed to teach conflict resolution.

For years, I watched ninth-graders learn a lesson that continues to elude some of the most powerful people in the world.

These students participate in a classroom role-play exercise based on one of history’s most famous diplomatic exchanges: the Melian Dialogue, recorded by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War. 

In 416 BC, Athenian envoys arrived at the small island of Melos with an ultimatum: submit or be destroyed. 

When the Melians protested, the Athenians cut them off. “The strong do what they can,” they said, “and the weak suffer what they must.”

The outcome: Athens “won” that conflict. Melos refused to submit and was conquered, its men killed, its women and children enslaved. In the very short term, it was a victory for Athens. 

Today, the logic of “the strong do what they can” seems to define how the world works. Great powers are ignoring the norms that once restrained them: Russia invaded Ukraine, and the United States arrested Venezuela’s leader and bombed Iran. The current administration’s approach to US foreign policy embodies the Athenian ethos, from a zero-sum approach to trade relationships to a willingness to take the country to war. 

In Canada, like the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently lamented at the World Economic Forum’s summit in Davos, “It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

Those who admire the Athenians’ vision of strength seem to miss the fact that Thucydides didn’t record that exchange to celebrate it. It’s a prelude to catastrophe. Because, within a few years, Athens’s enemies united against it. The empire Athens built by force dissolved precisely because it had been built by force. 

Loyalty from its conquered coalition proved only as durable as the armed force holding it together. I mediated environmental disputes, organizational conflicts, and complex multiparty negotiations, and I have seen how decisions dictated by the powerful are much less stable than agreements designed to meet the interests of all parties.

Students I observed almost always figured this out. In the role-play, some were Athenians, some , and they were prompted to think beyond what they “can” or “must” do. 

Instead, they had to consider what would meet their core needs, uphold their values, and endure the test of time. Students routinely found compromises Athens never even considered — like reduced payment by the Melians* or autonomy over some matters of governance. Those arrangements would have given Athens much of what it needed while giving Melos more reason to accept its rule. This is what mediation experts call the “mutual gains” approach to conflict resolution.

In other words, the students I work with learned the limits of coercion. By rejecting the moral case out of hand, Athens made its contempt for justice explicit and thereby handed every wavering city-state a common cause. Overtly illegitimate behavior reduces the cost of opposing the aggressor, makes coalition-building against it easier, and converts previously neutral parties into motivated adversaries. 

Legitimacy is not a constraint on power — it is a form of power. In their focus on demonstrating strength, the Athenians ignored the strategic importance of building legitimacy.

Mediators know that win-lose deals are almost always worse deals, especially in the long run. The pattern is consistent: One party’s interests are ignored and it is forced to comply with the aggressor’s demands, resentment accumulates, and the forced “agreement” holds only as long as the aggressor can maintain the pressure.

The mediators I work with share the conviction that achieving win-win deals on the world stage is possible. 

People practicing the dynamics of coercion and negotiation firsthand can learn to avoid the pitfalls of the raw, and usually short-lived, exercise of power.

The lesson from Thucydides, then, extends far beyond violent conflict. The ninth-graders in my classroom figured this out in an afternoon. The question is whether today’s strongmen will figure it out before the costs become irreversible.

*Melians were the inhabitants of the Aegean island of Melos, famously involved in a 416 BC, incident during the Peloponnesian War. They maintained neutral, friendly ties with Sparta but were forced into a confrontation by Athens, which demanded their submission. Following their refusal to surrender, Athens conquered Melos, executing all men and enslaving women and children

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must be reminded about how January 6th 2020 was treason

Echo essay reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg

Donald Trump's Indecency: At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Donald Trump—disturbed, humiliated, livid—posted the following message on Twitter: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

In California, David Nicholas Dempsey, a 33-year-old man-child with multiple felony convictions and a profound affection for the president, answered the call. On January 6, wearing a tactical vest and an American-flag gaiter, Dempsey came to the Capitol. Shortly before he assaulted several police officers, he shared his perspectives in an interview given while standing near a gallows. 

The gallows was erected as a reminder to Vice President Mike Pence to do, in Trump’s words, “the right thing.”

Them worthless fucking shitholes like fucking Jerry Nadler, fucking Pelosi, Clapper, Comey, fucking all those pieces of garbage, you know, Obama, all these dudes, Clinton, fuck all these pieces of shit,” Dempsey said. “They don’t need a jail cell. They need to hang from these motherfuckers while everybody videotapes it and fucking spreads it on YouTube.”

Dempsey was not an organizer of the siege, but he was one of its most energetic participants. He assaulted Metropolitan Police Detective Phuson Nguyen with pepper spray. Nguyen was certain in that moment that he was “going to die,” he later testified. Dempsey assaulted another police officer with a metal crutch, cracking his protective shield and cutting his head. Dempsey, who was heard yelling “Fuck you, bitch-ass cops!,” assaulted other officers with broken pieces of furniture, crutches, and a flagpole. Prosecutors would later argue that “Dempsey’s violence reached such extremes that, at one point, he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him.” 

All told, more than 140 police officers were injured in the riot, many seriously.

I attended the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, at which Trump told his supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then I walked with the crowd to the Capitol. One woman, a QAnon adherent dressed in a cat costume, told me, “We’re going to stop the steal. If Pence isn’t going to stop it, we have to.”

What I remember very well about that day was my own failure of imagination. I did not, to my knowledge, see Dempsey—he had positioned himself at the vanguard of the assault, and I had stayed near the White House, to listen to Trump—but I did come across at least a dozen or more protesters dressed in similar tactical gear or wearing body armor, many of them carrying flex-cuffs. I particularly remember those plastic cuffs, but I understood them only as a performance of zealous commitment. 

Later we would learn that these men—some of whom were Proud Boys —believed that they would actually be arresting members of Congress in defense of the Constitution. I interviewed one of them. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible.” Grifters could not exist, of course, without a population primed to be grifted.

After the riot, Dempsey returned to California, where he was eventually arrested. In early 2024, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Six months later, in the summer of 2024, Trump, who would come to describe the January 6 insurrection as a “day of love,” said that, if reelected, he would pardon rioters, but only “if they’re innocent.” Dempsey was not innocent, but on January 20, 2025, shortly after being inaugurated, Trump pardoned him and roughly 1,500 others charged with or convicted of offenses related to the Capitol insurrection. (Fourteen people, mainly senior figures in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys🤢 movements, saw their sentences commuted but did not receive pardons.)

Of the 1,500 or so offenders who received pardons, roughly 600 had been charged with assaulting or obstructing police officers, and 170 had been accused of using deadly weapons in the siege. Among those pardoned were Peter Schwartz, who had received a 14-year sentence for throwing a chair at police officers and repeatedly attacking them with pepper spray; Daniel Joseph Rodriguez, who was sentenced to 12.5 years for conspiracy and assaulting an officer with a stun gun (he sent a text message to a friend, “Tazzzzed the fuck out of the blue”); and Andrew Taake, who received a six-year sentence for attacking officers with bear spray and a metal whip.

A day after the pardons were announced, Trump said in a press conference, “I am a friend of police, more than any president who’s been in office.” He went on to describe the rioters. “These were people that actually love our country, so we thought a pardon would be appropriate.”

Trump had something else to say during that first press conference of his new term: “I think we’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” This would turn out to be true, but unfortunately, shock does not last. Here is the emblematic inner struggle of our age: to preserve the ability to be shocked. “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” Dostoyevsky wrote. A blessing that is also a curse.

I understand that a review—even a short and partial review—of the past year might seem dismally repetitive (Oh no, no is not at all repetitive, it is first person reporting from the scene and must be told again). But repetition ensures that we remember, and perhaps even experience shock anew. 😢

So, in brief: Trump dismantled America’s foreign-aid infrastructure and gutted a program, built by an earlier Republican president, that saved the lives of Africans infected with HIV; he encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes; he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines; he has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration; he has destroyed the independence of the Justice Department; he has waged pitiless war on prosecutors, FBI agents, and others who previously investigated him, his family, and his friends; he has cast near-fatal doubt on America’s willingness to fulfill its treaty obligations to its democratic allies; he has applauded Vladimir Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide; he has led racist attacks on various groups of immigrants; he has employed unusually cruel tactics in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, most of whom have committed only one crime—illegally seeking refuge in a country that they believed represented the dream of a better life. Those are some of the actions Trump has taken. Here are a few of the things he has said since returning to office: He has referred to immigrants as “garbage”; he has called a female reporter “piggy” and other reporters “ugly,” “stupid,” “terrible,” and “nasty”; he has suggested that the murder of a Saudi journalist by his country’s government was justified; he has labeled a sitting governor “seriously retarded”; he has blamed the murder of Rob Reiner on the director’s anti-Trump politics; he has called the Democrats the party of “evil.”

Yet, even when weighed against this stunning record of degeneracy, the pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was an act not only of naked despotism but also of outlandish hypocrisy. 

By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantor of law and order. The truth is the opposite.

The power to pardon is a vestige of America’s pre-independence past. It is an unchecked monarchical power, an awesome power, and therefore it should be bestowed only on leaders blessed with self-restraint, civic-mindedness, and, most important, basic decency.

We have been watching indecency triumph in the public sphere on and off for more than 10 years now, since the moment Trump insulted John McCain’s war record. For reasons that are quite possibly too unbearable to contemplate, a large group of American voters was not repulsed by such slander—they were actually aroused by it—and our politics have not been the same. Much has been said, including by me, about Trump’s narcissism, his autocratic inclinations, his disconnection from reality, but not nearly enough has been said about his fundamental indecency, the characteristic that undergirds everything he says and does.

In an important essay, Andrew Sullivan noted this past fall that Trump’s indecency is comprehensive in style and substance. “It is one thing to be a realist in foreign policy, to accept the morally ambiguous in an immoral world; it is simply indecent to treat a country, Ukraine, invaded by another, Russia, as the actual aggressor and force it to accept a settlement on the invader’s terms,” Sullivan wrote. “It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws; it is another to use masked, anonymous men to do it. It is one thing to cut foreign aid; it is simply indecent to do so abruptly and irrationally so that tens of thousands of children will needlessly die. We have slowly adjusted to this entirely new culture from the top, perhaps in the hope that it will somehow be sated soon—but then new indecencies happen.”

The subject of Trump’s indecency came up in a conversation I had with Barack Obama in 2017. I asked him to name the most norm-defying act of his successor to date. Somewhat to my surprise, Obama mentioned Trump’s speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree earlier that year. This appearance has been largely forgotten, but it was a festival of indecency. At one point, Trump told the scouts about a wealthy friend of his who, he suggested, did unmentionable things on his yacht.

President Barack Obama, a model of dignified presidential behavior (just like nearly all of his predecessors, Democratic and Republican), understood viscerally the importance of self-restraint and adherence to long-established norms. Which is why he was so troubled by Trump’s decadent performance. “You can stand in front of tens of thousands of teenage boys and encourage them to be good citizens and be helpful to their mothers,” Obama said, “or you can go Lord of the Flies. He went Lord of the Flies.”

We are in a long Lord of the Flies moment, led by a man who, to borrow from Psalm 10, possesses a mouth “full of cursing and deceit and fraud.” For many people—government scientists seeking cures for diseases; FBI agents investigating corruption and terrorism; military leaders trying to preserve respect for the rules of warfare; and, in particular, police officers who were brutalized by Trump’s army of deluded followers—these days can seem infernal. 

Trump’s term is one-quarter over; a piece of advice often attributed to Churchill has it best: When you’re going through hell, keep going❗

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must prevent any money allocated for purchase or invasion of Greenland

Editorial published in The New York Times: 

The World Will Remember Trump’s Greenland Outburst💢

The free world exhaled on Wednesday when Donald Trump retreated from his administration’s threat to invade Greenland. 

But, that relief, however, masks the damage that Donald Trump has done to America this week. Donald Trump’s apologists once dismissed his bullying of Greenland as an attempt at humor. Instead, it has been something far darker. His immoral threats against a loyal NATO ally have escalated a crisis in U.S.-European relations, weakened one of history’s most successful alliances and hurt American interests in tangible ways.

NATO is an important force for global stability and for the democratic values that our nation champions. It has made the world safer, more prosperous and better able to work together for a common purpose. The alliance amplifies American military might, deterring Russia and adversaries around the world through the original promise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. NATO also serves nonmilitary purposes, helping present a unified front that limits the rising technological and economic influence of China and its autocratic allies.

Mr. Trump is undermining these interests with his push to take control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, despite vociferous resistance from Denmark and Greenlanders themselves. He is attacking the shared values to which democracies have aspired for decades: the rule of law, recognition of national sovereignty and respect for self-determination. 

Donald Trump is causing what Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada this week called “a rupture, not a transition” in the world order.

In normal times, the president deserves great deference in the exercise of foreign affairs, but that deference is never absolute, especially not when the president has shown himself unbound by legal and ethical constraints. When the president endangers the country or breaks its laws, other branches of government have a responsibility to intervene. Donald Trump’s repeated moves to undercut our most valuable alliance require other Americans to reaffirm our commitment to our international partners. The Republicans who control Congress cannot sit on their hands as they have done so many times in the past year. Many of them know the value of NATO. Congress should pass a bill that bars spending on any military action against Greenland or Western Europe. It should also hold up all of Mr. Trump’s nominees to national security positions until he commits to halting his attacks on the alliance.




The Supreme Court has a role to play as well. Mr. Trump’s attempt to use tariffs to coerce allies, including in the fight over Greenland, is unconstitutional. He has justified using them by declaring a national emergency on false pretenses. We are encouraged that most justices expressed skepticism of his use of tariffs during oral arguments in November. We are disappointed that the justices are about to embark on a midwinter break that will last until late February, apparently without acting on the case. They should issue an expedited ruling, given the policy’s illegality and the damage it is causing.

Donald Trump has always been an undisciplined and unprincipled politician, but the shambolic and sometimes illegal nature of his foreign policy moves of the past few weeks has been unusually harmful.

After months of blowing up boats in the Caribbean, without giving the victims any chance to defend themselves, he ordered a military operation to capture Venezuela’s dictator — and has since allowed the dictator’s corrupt deputies to continue ruling the country. Mr. Trump encouraged Iranians to rise up against their brutal government, saying “help is on the way,” and abandoned the protesters to a crackdown that reportedly killed thousands of them and imprisoned thousands more. 

And his confrontation with NATO crossed a new line: threatening the territory of a longtime ally. The notion that the United States might invade Greenland would sound like satire under any other modern-day president.

Yet, it fits with Donald Trump’s escalating and caustic attacks against NATO. During the 2016, presidential campaign, he called the alliance obsolete. In his first term, he reportedly considered withdrawing from it. During the 2024, campaign, he said he would encourage Russian leaders to “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies if the allies did not increase their military spending. The threat was chilling to Russia’s Baltic neighbors, like Latvia and Estonia, given Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of civilians in Ukraine.

As is often the case, Donald Trump has blended a reasonable policy critique with blatant falsehoods and extreme behavior. In this instance, the reasonable critique is that most European countries have long spent too little on their defense, relying on the United States to protect them. President Barack Obama understandably complained in 2016 that they were behaving as “free riders.” Donald Trump deserves some credit for pressuring Europe to increase military spending, in both his first and second terms.  Nevertheless, that success does not give him credibility or any valid reason to threaten invasion or annexation to promote American interests.

American Catholics support Pope Leo XIV and the world views him as an antidote to poisonous Donald Trump evilism

Since his election in May as the first American pope, Leo XIV has become a political and temperamental counterweight to an incendiary American president. Echo opinion published in The New York Times by David Gibson. 

Pope Leo draws extraordinary large crowds of the faithful

A face-off between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage was inevitable, if only for the contrast between Donald Trump’s blustery inconstancy and Pope Leo’s soft-spoken yet firm dignity. The Pope is “neither quiet nor shy — if he has something to say, he will say it,” in the words of his eldest brother, Louis Prevost. 

Indeed, after Trump sent forces to seize the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the pope declared that Venezuela’s “sovereignty” must be guaranteed along with “the rule of law enshrined in its Constitution.” Leo had already urged the United States not to follow through on threats against Venezuela and criticized the administration’s military buildup in the Caribbean. He also repeatedly lamented the treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities and called on American clergy members to be vocal and active on the issue, which they have been.

But rather than viewing Pope Leo’s statements as one half of a mano-a-mano between pope and president, they may be better seen as the articulation of a post-Trump global order, one informed by universal values and institutional norms rather than tribal and individual self-interest. Leo is not looking for a fight with Trump; he is looking past him. When he challenges the president’s policies, he does so as an American-born pope recalling the American-inspired system that Trump is dismantling — one that values statesmanship over gamesmanship, the common good over national conquest and common decency over jingoist (over the top patriotism❗💢) bullying.

In early December, Pope Leo met with President Volodymyr Zelensky

leader of the Ukraine and said he would like to visit the country, which has suffered a years long assault from Russia. 

Hours later, he criticized the Trump administration’s peace plan: “Trying to reach a peace agreement without including Europe in the discussions is not realistic,” he said. “The war is in Europe.”

Soon after, in remarks that could have been aimed at the MAGA movement, Pope Leo told European politicians on the center-right that “the mark of any civilized society is that differences are debated with courtesy and respect.” 

Later, the Pope told diplomats that honesty is the greatest virtue in “an international context plagued by prevarications and conflict” and he blasted the “war of words armed with lies, propaganda and hypocrisy.”

Throughout the Christmas season and into the new year, Pope Leo continued to call for a world based on old ideals, pushing for “the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization.” He lectured civic leaders on how to be responsible public servants. On Christmas he urged world leaders to pursue peace through dialogue — even as Trump was launching military strikes on Islamic militias in Nigeria, ostensibly to protect Christians.

In his state of the world address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on Friday, Leo delivered his most thoroughgoing defense of postwar multilateralism, calling the rule of law “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” the pope said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”

The Catholic Church, it is said, thinks in centuries, and Pope Leo is unlikely to worry about such pushback. He is a fit 70-year-old who could potentially set a papal record as the oldest pope to die in office, outlasting another Leo, his predecessor Leo XIII, who was 93 at his death in 1903. Donald Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, has three years left in his (terrible❗ chaotic 💥) second term and faces political headwinds that has conservatives talking about a post-MAGA vision for the Republican Party. 

Of course, even three more years of Trump could do incalculable damage not only to the United States but to the global commonwealth.

When Leo was elected, there were regular references to the first pope to take that name, Leo the Great, who served in the fifth century amid the declining Roman Empire. As barbarian armies swept across Europe, that first Pope Leo led a delegation to northern Italy to meet Attila the Hun and his invading forces. Leo’s holiness and diplomacy (perhaps aided by a menacing vision Attila was said to have had of SS. Peter and Paul brandishing swords) is credited with persuading Attila to turn back and spare the Italian peninsula.

But a more apt parallel for our current circumstances might be the legend of Leo’s meeting three years later, in 455, with Gaiseric the Vandal outside Rome. On that occasion, it is said, Leo was able to persuade the barbarian king only to spare several large churches so that thousands of Romans could find sanctuary from the ensuing devastation. In the aftermath, Pope Leo and his successors were able to rebuild city and society.

Catholicism has a knack for preserving the best of the past to help seed a better future. Today’s Pope Leo may be the surest guardian of a legacy that America, and the world, will desperately need.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stop illegal invasions and making threats against sovereign countries!

Echo opinion published in the Baltimore Sun:

Understandably, Americans are more concerned with their job security and the challenging ability to meet weekly expenses than they are about international issues. (Maine Writer opinion, although Trump will use our tax money like his own personal checkbook because the Supreme Court said he can do and get away with anything❗)

But, what Donald Trump is doing on the international stage is so crazy and so dangerous that it demands our attention (“Trump meets with oil executives at the White House on Friday, seeking investments in Venezuela,” Jan. 9).

Trump argues that the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was merely the arrest of an indicted criminal. Whether that authorizes him to bomb a foreign country and forcibly change that country’s leadership without authorization from Congress is highly questionable. In defending Trump’s action, Sen. Lindsey Graham compares the arrest of Maduro to the arrest of the leader of Panama, Manuel Noriega, in 1990. But, we did not thereafter intend to “run” Panama like Trump stated we intend to run Venezuela. That Maduro is a cruel dictator is clear; that Trump intends more than just his arrest (such as taking Venezuelan oil) is equally clear. That explains why the Senate, with the votes of five Republicans, just moved forward a bill to restrict the president from taking further military action against Venezuela.

Moreover, what this administration is saying about Greenland is even crazier. The White House made clear it does not reject the possibility of using military force to take over an autonomous territory belonging to our NATO ally Denmark. I don’t think even Trump would suggest that the prime minister of Denmark is a narco terrorist, a term he has used for Maduro. Take a step back for a moment and reflect on the fact that the president of the United States is not ruling out the use of force against a NATO ally for no apparent reason other than a claim that it would help American security to possess Greenland.

Aside from how just plain wrong this is, consider how China could use Trump’s rationale for the use of force and continued occupation of Venezuela and Greenland with regard to actions it might take against Taiwan or anywhere else where its national security could be enhanced by taking over parts of another country. Surely, we lose the moral authority to scold Russia for its brutal attack on Ukraine.

At this point, I don’t care about the hypocrisy and inconsistency Trump demonstrates daily (you’ll remember during his campaign how he warned against foreign interventions), but at some point, enough has to be enough.

From Steven P. Grossman, in Baltimore, Maryland

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must stand with European allies to support Ukraine

Thanks to the Philadelphia Inquirer for publishing this article. Main stream media (MSM) are neglecting this important story about the Ukranian resistance against Russian aggression. 

Echo report published in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Trudy Rubin and an appendix by David Remnick*: 

Elite units from Ukraine’s intelligence agencies hit key Russian sites

Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the military sites from which Russia launches its attacks.

EASTERN UKRAINE — Slava’s appearance had changed dramatically from a year ago when we last met in Kyiv. His eyes were weary, and his deep black beard was now grizzled with gray.

The Ukranian 43-year-old former commercial director and journalist had volunteered early in the war, and now commanded an elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s military intelligence service. His unit conducts some of the country’s most dangerous missions. And those missions never end.

Operating from the zero line, his men are called in to launch long-range drones that attack sites deep inside Russia. Their goal is to destroy Russian military logistics at the source.

Before an assignment, they return to home base, pack up every conceivable drone and piece of equipment they may need, and head for the front lines to reinforce or assault.

“We do R&D in the trenches when we find a problem we didn’t expect,” he tells me.

The United States never gave the green light for Kyiv to use its longest-range U.S.-made ATACMS missiles to target Russian aerodromes or military production sites, so the Ukrainians have had to innovate to strike back at the specific locations from which Russia launches bombs, missiles, and Shahed drones.

Drones can’t substitute for ATACMS, which can cover a huge area and pack a much more powerful explosive payload than unmanned aerial vehicles, as Slava told me while we bumped along over a dirt road to a HUR testing site, somewhere heading east. “You need 20 to 30 drones to cover the same area as one of the missile systems,” he continued, “but in terms of the economics of war, the drones are much cheaper than a missile.”

The most stunning drone success story was Operation Spiderweb, which destroyed or damaged around 40 Russian warplanes, including supersonic bombers, worth billions of dollars. It was conducted by Ukraine’s chief internal intelligence agency, and HUR’s friendly rival, the SBU.

Two days later, an SBU sea drone hit the base of the Kerch Bridge from Russia to Crimea, which can no longer handle heavy trucks or rail traffic because of a previous Ukrainian strike.

“The main task is to make Crimea a big burden so army logistics can’t work, because for the Russians as well as us, logistics is crucial,” said Slava. “They reconstruct quickly, but even spotty hits increase the difficulty for them.”

“Sea drones pushed out the whole Russian fleet from the Black Sea,” he recalled with relish. Sea drones (which look like large covered rowboats) with hidden missiles shot down two Russian helicopters and a warplane in a single day.

In new developments, drones are starting to hit the Iranian-designed Shaheds, he told me, and, of key importance, “anti-Shahed interceptors are almost ready.” In another breakthrough, hitting a swarm of 30 FPV drones is now “nothing at all,” when last year the technology for that was just emerging.

The June attack, at five different military airports, was done with 117 cheap FPV drones smuggled deep inside Russia within wooden containers on commercial flatbed trucks driven by unwitting Russians.

Less noticed in the West, however, on the very same day as Spiderweb, ❗HUR (aka Ukraine Intelligence) hit two trains and a newly built part of a railway in the occupied Donbas region that “blew up a whole Russian logistical supply chain.”

“But the Russians learning quickly,” he added. “We always have to create new technology. Every three months, technology becomes obsolete.”

Nevertheless, like every drone expert I met with, he believes U.S. war doctrine hasn’t caught up with the new era of drone warfare, which demands military decentralization and bottom-up initiative.

“The Russians are learning from us, but the U.S. is still based on old doctrines of war,” he said. “You should be more flexible. What America needs to understand is the need for decentralization. Not the generals’ world vision.”

In direct conflict with Russia today, the U.S. would be in trouble, Slava said. “If not speaking of deep strikes, but in direct contact, they could do nothing. Their tanks, armor, all would be hit by drones because their doctrine of war is obsolete. The reason we weren’t seized in first three days of the war is because Russian doctrine was still like in WWII.”

Europe, he said, grasps the shift because it sees Russian aggression up close.

“The Europeans are not just open, but ready to do whatever they can to learn from us. They are afraid, because they fear the future. The Poles have a fresh experience of war, transferred from generation to generation. They understand that if the Russians come, they will kill them just for the fact they aren’t Russians.

“The Europeans have plenty of training centers and invite our specialists to come there. War is constantly changing so they need to invite us to share our experience because we don’t have anything stable. Everything is constantly changing here.”

But Slava too bemoans the lack of resources that prevent Ukraine from pushing new technologies much further and faster. “Holding Russians back is a function of money for R&D. Either we get certain technology or someone sitting in the trenches.”

And either the Pentagon pays attention to Ukraine’s drone advances, or it falls behind Russia in hands-on knowledge of how to fight new wars to come.

*Appendix echo published in The New Yorker by David Remnick:

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. 

Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”

















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