Human Geography: The Strategic Edge in a Complex World

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. government was the unrivaled patron of American science. It funded nearly two-thirds of the nation’s research and development — much of it for defense — defining the early Cold War. In a phenomenon that’s been widely explored in our Arsenal of Innovation series, for several decades federal dollars pushed the technological frontier, and the private sector followed.Today, that arrangement has been inverted. Industry now funds roughly three-quarters of U.S. research and development, while Washington’s share is less than a fifth. Because the cutting edge increasingly emerges from commercial labs, the

The drones hitting Gulf Arab states daily since the United States and Israel launched large-scale military operations against Iran in February are not merely Iranian. They are originally Iranian, yes. But these designs and production processes were improved and refined by Russia through years of battlefield testing against Ukrainian defenses. So, they were returned to Tehran from Moscow. Confronted with a threat that Ukraine has spent four years learning to counter, the United States found itself in unfamiliar territory. It was one of 11 countries requesting Ukrainian counter-drone assistance to defend against Iran’s attacks, despite the American president’s assertion that

After disputes culminated in fighting last week, the country’s political system is in doubt.

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

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.

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