Modern Combat Requires Warrior Medics Modeled After Machaon

The war with Iran has once again raised questions about Washington’s ability to prioritize its interests in East Asia and particularly to manage intensifying competition with Beijing. Furthermore, the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have presented American and Chinese leaders with new challenges and potential opportunities, as they respond to the war’s global impacts. We asked five experts to address how the war is shaping competition between Washington and Beijing.Read more below.Zack CooperSenior Fellow at the American Enterprise InstituteBoth sides may be taking different lessons from the Iran War. Beijing appears to see it as another

Adversaries do not need to breach the Pentagon’s systems: They only need to harvest the logic of the publicly released frontier AI models that underpin them. This is a defining risk as the Department of Defense pivots to an “AI-first” warfighting machine. In this new context, military predominance is a derivative of AI model supremacy. From Project Maven’s intelligence fusion to the high-velocity sensor-to-shooter loops of Anduril’s Lattice, the Defense Department’s most advanced systems are tethered to the frontier models forged by tech heavyweights like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. As long as these firms hold the high ground in the

On this Memorial Day, American servicemembers remain deployed across the world. Many are in harm’s way. This simple fact makes the day less abstract, more real. Memorial Day is not only about wars filed away in history, but also about lives lost in service to the nation and the obligations those losses place on the living.For those who served in combat, the day is intensely personal. It is a day of names, missions, and memories that never fade away entirely. Three of the fallen return to me every year: Cpl. Andrew J. Kemple, 2nd Lt. Tracy Lynn Alger, and Sgt.

In 2016, Ben Friedman wrote, “The Trump Administration Will be Hawkish,” where he argued that despite Trump’s non-interventionist campaign rhetoric, structural forces, hawkish appointees, and an entrenched foreign policy bureaucracy would push him closer toward conventional military interventionism. Ten years later, we asked Ben to revisit his arguments.Image: Max Goldberg via Wikimedia CommonsIn your 2016 article, you argued the Trump administration would adopt a hawkish foreign policy, namely towards Russia, China, and Iran. What can we gather about his foreign policy objectives towards those countries from his first term and the first year of his second term? What factors have

When is the risk of war the highest? And what should the United States be doing about it? One of the most important but underappreciated questions in international politics is how states think about the future balance of power. Countries that believe their position is improving often choose patience. Those who fear their position is deteriorating may feel pressure to act before their advantages disappear. In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dean Cheng, Mira Rapp-Hooper, and Amanda Hsiao to explore how Chinese leaders may be thinking about time, power, and Taiwan. This episode is sponsored by Kibu, which ensures you always know

A century later, the meaning of Abd el-Karim and the Rif Rebellion is still up for grabs.