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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Thanks to Arwa Damon and her team on the ground in Iraq and as the 'Fog Of War' begins to lift in 🇮🇶 Iraq, we are beginning to see the real danger our U.S. 🇺🇸 troops and our Iraqi partners were truly in. PRAISE BE TO GOD none were injured, maimed, or killed. Trump and his minions need to realize that their decisions have real life effects and going to war with Iran 🇮🇷 is a losing proposition for all sides. DIPLOMACY IS THE ONLY ANSWER TO SOLVING THE SITUATION WITH THE LEADERSHIP OF IRAN.

US troops sheltered in Saddam-era bunkers during Iran missile attack (VIDEO)

By Tamara Qiblawi, Arwa Damon and Brice Laine | Updated 4 hours ago Jan 13, 2020 | CNN | Posted Jan 13, 2020 |

Al-Asad air base, Iraq (CNN) - Akeem Ferguson was in a bunker when his team received the bone-chilling radio transmission: Six Iranian ballistic missiles were headed in their direction.

The concrete slab they had taken cover under offered little protection from projectiles that US troops in Iraq were being attacked with.

"I held on to my gun and put my head down and I tried to find a happy place, so I started singing to my daughters in my head," said the six-foot tall US Staff Sergeant. "And I just waited. I hoped that whatever happened, that it was quick."

"I was 100% ready to die," he added.

Ferguson survived unscathed along with other US troops and civilian contractors on Iraq's al-Assad base, after a barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles on the morning of January 8.

The strike was the widest scale attack on a base housing US troops in decades. Troops said the absence of casualties was nothing short of a "miracle."

American troops stationed at the base are helping to counter ISIS and train Iraqi security forces. No Iraqi troops were hurt in the attack.

A closer look at the site reveals a base vulnerable to this type of assault.

Personnel received advance warning of the strike several hours before it took place, enabling them to take cover. Still they lacked the surface-to-air defenses to fend off a ballistic missile assault -- US military did not build structures on the base, one of the oldest and largest in Iraq, to protect against an attack of this kind. They were at the mercy of the downpour of missiles.

Near the airfield, shards of metal crack underfoot as two military personnel take measurements of the gaping crater left behind by one of the missiles. It is around 2 meters deep and roughly 3 meters in diameter -- a burned copy of "Beauty and the Beast" teeters on the edge of the hole. A flip-flop, an Uno card, and a military jacket stick out from the charred wreckage left in the wake of the missile.

This was a housing unit for drone pilots and operators on the base. They evacuated the unit before the strike. Incidentally, the they had nicknamed the living quarters "chaos."

Like most of the US section of the base, they had already been on lockdown at bunkers for over two hours when the first missiles landed.

The strike was an Iranian response to the US drone attack, ordered by US President Donald Trump, that killed Iran's most powerful general, Qasem Soleimani, less than a week before.

After days of anticipation, Tehran's zero-casualty retaliation came as a relief to many. At al-Asad camp, troops could rest easy after days of heightened alert. For countries across the region, it marked a welcome climbdown after the killing of Soleimani raised the specter of region-wide war.

Ten of the 11 missiles struck US positions at the sprawling desert Iraqi airbase. One struck a remote location on the Iraqi military's side.

Roughly one-third of the base is controlled by the US. The Iranian missiles, which used on-board guidance systems, managed to shred sensitive US military sites, damaging a special forces compound, and two hangars, in addition to the US drone operators' housing unit.

CNN journalists were the first to be granted access to the base after the Iranian attack.

ADVANCE WARNING

The first warning came from secret intelligence signals in the evening before the attack. By 11 p.m. on January 7, most of the US troops at al-Asad were sent to bunkers, and a few had been flown out, according to commanders at the base.

Only essential personnel, such as tower guards and drone pilots, would remain unsheltered. They were protecting against a ground assault which base commanders expected would follow the missile attack.

Ground forces never came, and troops would only re-emerge from their shelters at the break of dawn. The strike had ended just before 4 a.m.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi has said he was told by Iran, at around midnight, to expect airstrikes inside his country. An Arab diplomat who CNN spoke to said that the Iraqis passed on information about the strikes to the US.

But the US had already received reporting about a ballistic missile attack by the time the Iraqis could notify them, according to al-Asad's Lieutenant Colonel Tim Garland.

The first missiles fell at 1:34 a.m. They were followed by three more volleys, spaced out by more than 15 minutes each. The attack lasted over two hours. Troops on the base described it as a time fraught with suspense, fear and feelings of defenselessness.

"You can defend against (paramilitary forces), but you can't defend against this," said Captain Patrick Livingstone, US Air Force Security Forces Commander on the base, referring to previous rocket attacks by armed groups. "Right now, this base is not designed to defend against missiles."

Ill-equipped to defend against ballistic missiles

As the expected attacks drew nearer, most troops filed into dusty, pyramid-like structures peppered throughout the base. These bunkers were built during the rule of deposed President Saddam Hussein.

The thick, slanting walls were constructed decades previous to deflect blasts from Iran. Baghdad had a bloody eight-year war with Tehran (1980-1988) which ended with a stalemate. It was a time when the new Islamic Republic was beginning to demonstrate its military prowess.

US troops said that they were unsure whether the Saddam-era shelters would withstand the ballistic missiles. But they were more sturdy than US bunkers, made to protect against rockets and mortars.

Relatively light-weight rockets and mortars are typically used by ISIS, jihadi extremists and Shia paramilitary in Iraq, who for years have had US troops in their crosshairs. But Iranian ballistic missiles have a far longer range and carry a far bigger payload of explosives -- estimated to be at least half a ton each.

Footsteps echo in a narrow passageway leading into the Saddam-era bunker. The walls are double-layered -- large holes in the interior reveal the coppery outer wall embedded with fans. Two spacious living areas are filled with folding beds, mattresses, stretchers and lockers. On the night of the attack, one of the rooms doubled as a makeshift bathroom, with cut up plastic water bottles serving as urinals.

Lieutenant Colonel Staci Coleman was one of the US team leaders who corralled troops into such a bunker. After about an hour and a half of being in the shelter, she had doubts.

"I was sitting in a bunker and I was like man, maybe I made the wrong decision [to come down here]," said Coleman.

"About 10 minutes, after I said that to myself, it went boom boom boom boom boom and I said well there's my answer."

"The whole ground shook. It was very loud," she said. "You could feel the blast wave in here. We knew they were close."

She said the doors appeared to bend like waves with every hit that reverberated through the shelter. None of the bunkers on the base were impacted.

Meanwhile, Staff Sergeant Ferguson was in a US-made bunker -- a crammed space held together by slabs of five-inch concrete fortified by sandbags. He watched the attack unfold through cracks between the adjacent walls.

"There's a little hole on the side of the shelter and we saw a flash of orange light," said Ferguson. "After that we figured that every time we see a flash it's just a couple of seconds before it's going to hit.

"It was Flash. Boom. Flash. Boom. We didn't know when it was going to stop. We sat there and waited for it to end."

After the first volley, several went out to look for casualties. When the second volley hit nearly 15 minutes later, some were caught in the open.

Staff Sergeant Ferguson said he was worried about comrades who were trapped outside. "After the second volley was over, I was worried about them being at the gate. So I left and went and grabbed them, brought them back to the shelter with us, and then we waited..." he said.

At the time of the expected ground assault, Ferguson had emerged from his bunker to face off with whatever came next. He described peering into the darkness over their gunsights, worn out by the shock of the missiles. But the attack never came.

"We were so tired. It was the worst adrenaline rush ever," said Ferguson.

When troops had all emerged from the bunkers, many went to work, repairing the damage. They described feeling a mixture of relief and shell-shocked. "It was 'normalish' afterwards," said Coleman. "But we were all looking each other in the eye as if to say 'are you ok?'"

Several troops CNN spoke to said the event had shifted their view of warcraft: the US military is rarely on the receiving end of sophisticated weaponry, despite launching the most advanced attacks in the world.

"You looked around at each other and you think: Where are we going to run? How are you going to get away from that?" said Ferguson.

"I don't wish anyone to have that level of fear," he said. "No one in the world should ever have to feel something like that."

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Who Signs Up to Fight? Makeup of U.S. Recruits Shows Glaring Disparity

More and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits.

By Dave Philipps and Tim ARANGO |Published Jan. 10, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 13, 2020 |

COLORADO SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. Now two of his four children say they want to serve, too. And he will not be surprised if the other two make the same decision once they are a little older.

“Hey, if that’s what your calling is, I encourage it, absolutely,” said Sergeant Comes, who wore a dagger-shaped patch on his camouflage uniform, signifying that he had been in combat.

Enlisting, he said, enabled him to build a good life where, despite yearlong deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he felt proud of his work, got generous benefits, never worried about being laid off, and earned enough that his wife could stay home to raise their children.

“Show me a better deal for the common person,” he said.

Soldiers like him are increasingly making the United States military a family business. The men and women who sign up overwhelmingly come from counties in the South and a scattering of communities at the gates of military bases like Colorado Springs, which sits next to Fort Carson and several Air Force installations, and where the tradition of military service is deeply ingrained.

More and more, new recruits are the children of old recruits. In 2019, 79 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who served. For nearly 30 percent, it was a parent — a striking point in a nation where less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military.

For years, military leaders have been sounding the alarm over the growing gulf between communities that serve and those that do not, warning that relying on a small number of counties that reliably produce soldiers is unsustainable, particularly now amid escalating tensions with Iran.

“A widening military-civilian divide increasingly impacts our ability to effectively recruit and sustain the force,” Anthony M. Kurta, acting under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service last year. “This disconnect is characterized by misperceptions, a lack of knowledge and an inability to identify with those who serve. It threatens our ability to recruit the number of quality youth with the needed skill sets to maintain our advantage.”

To be sure, the idea of joining the military has lost much of its luster in nearly two decades of grinding war. The patriotic rush to enlist after the terrorist attacks of 2001 has faded. For a generation, enlisting has produced reliable hardship for troops and families, but nothing that resembles victory. But the military families who have borne nearly all of the burden, and are the most cleareyed about the risks of war, are still the Americans who are most likely to encourage their sons and daughters to join.

With the goal of recruiting about 68,000 soldiers in 2020, the Army is now trying to broaden its appeal beyond traditional recruitment pools. New marketing plays up future careers in medicine and tech, as well as generous tuition benefits for a generation crushed by student debt. The messaging often notes that most Army jobs are not in combat fields.

But for now, rates of military service remain far from equal in the United States, and the gap may continue to widen because a driving decision to enlist is whether a young person knows anyone who served in the military. In communities where veterans are plentiful, teachers, coaches, mothers, uncles and other mentors often steer youths toward military service. In communities where veterans are scarce, influential adults are more wary.

That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. The South, where the culture of military service runs deep and military installations are plentiful, produces 20 percent more recruits than would be expected, based on its youth population. The states in the Northeast, which have very few military bases and a lower percentage of veterans, produce 20 percent fewer.

Top Counties for Army Recruitment(SEE MAP ON WEBSITE)

Each map shows the 500 counties with the highest recruitment rates in a given year as a percentage of population, excluding counties with fewer than five recruits.

The main predictors are not based on class or race. Army data show service spread mostly evenly through middle-class and “downscale” groups. Youth unemployment turns out not to be the prime factor. And the racial makeup of the force is more or less in line with that of young Americans as a whole, though African-Americans are slightly more likely to serve. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.

“Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command.

That distinction has created glaring disparities across the country. In 2019, Fayetteville, N.C., which is home to Fort Bragg, provided more than twice as many military enlistment contracts as Manhattan, even though Manhattan has eight times as many people. Many of the new contracts in Fayetteville were soldiers signing up for second and third enlistments.

This was not always the case. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. But after the draft ended in 1973, enlistments shifted steadily south of the Mason-Dixon line. The military’s decision to close many bases in Northern states where long winters limited training only hastened the trend.

Today, students growing up in military communities are constantly exposed to the people who serve. Moms pick up their sons from day care in flight suits. Dads attend the fourth-grade holiday party in camouflage. High schools often have Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership and fitness through a military framework.

Many schools encourage students to take the military’s aptitude exam, the ASVAB, in the way students nationwide are pushed to take the SAT.

That exposure during school is one of the strongest predictors of enlistment rates, according to a 2018 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses.

In Colorado Springs, the high schools with the highest number of military families are also the biggest producers of recruits, Sergeant Comes said, adding that parents aware of the military’s camaraderie, stability and generous health, education and retirement benefits often march their children into his office and encourage them to join.

“We just tell them our story: ‘This is where I was, one of six kids living in a trailer. This is where I am today.’ Good pay check. Great benefits,” he said, adding that even in good economic times, it is an easy sell. His recruiting station made its goals handily this month.

His biggest challenge is finding recruits before they are scooped up by recruiters from the Air Force, Navy and Marines, who work the same fertile neighborhoods.

The situation is markedly different in regions where few people traditionally join.

In Los Angeles, a region defined by liberal politics where many families are suspicious of the military, the Army has struggled to even gain access to high schools. By law, schools have to allow recruiters on campus once a semester, but administrators tightly control when and how recruiters can interact with students. Access is “very minimal,” said Lt. Col. Tameka Wilson, the commander of the Los Angeles Recruiting Battalion.

Predictably, enlistment rates are low.

In 2019 the Army made a push to increase recruiting efforts in 22 liberal-leaning cities like Los Angeles.

As part of that, Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy visited officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District in December to push for greater access.

“He was doing a sort of listening tour,” said Patricia Heideman, who is in charge of high school instruction for the school district and said there was a perception the military preys on disadvantaged students. “I told him from the educator perspective, we sometimes feel they are targeting our black and brown students and students of poverty,” she said. And therefore they are less likely to push enlistment.

Recognizing it cannot sustain recruitment numbers by relying only on the South and military communities, the Army has tried to broaden its appeal. Slick ads on social media offer less of the guns-and-grunts messaging of decades past. Instead they play up college benefits and career training in medical and tech fields.

Even within one state there are striking differences in how communities view military service. Colorado Springs produced 29 times as many enlistments in 2019 as nearby Boulder, a liberal university town.

“I grew up in Boulder, and the military appealed to me but it was just not in the culture, or my family,” said Brett Dollar, who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. “The conversation was not ‘What do you want to do after high school?’ but ‘Which college are you going to go to?’”

She attended Middlebury College in Vermont before becoming a police officer in Fort Collins and, eventually, a law enforcement dog handler.

This fall, at age 32, she decided to enlist in the Army, drawn by the chance to work with dogs in security, bomb-sniffing and rescue missions around the world. She ships to basic training in about a week.

“I’d always had an itch to serve in the military and be useful,” she said. “I think it took me being on my own for a while to realize it was a possibility.”

She said she was going into the work knowing she could soon end up deployed to a combat zone.

“The Army is ultimately a war-fighting organization — you go in knowing that,” she said. “I guess I really didn’t see that as a downside. It’s a core value of mine to try to be of service.”

______

Dave Philipps reported from Colorado Springs and Tim Arango from Los Angeles.

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A New Nuclear Era Is Coming

We’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to the brink of war between the U.S. and Iran.

By Uri Friedman | Published Jan 9, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted Jan 12, 2020 |

Iranian missile attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Deadly chaos in Iran. A sudden halt of the fight against the Islamic State. Utter confusion over whether U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, and even whether the United States still respects the laws of war. The fallout from the Trump administration’s killing of Qassem Soleimani has been swift and serious.

But one potential knock-on effect may not come into clear view for some time: the emergence of Iran as the next nuclear-weapons state, at the very moment when the world appears on the cusp of a more perilous nuclear age. It’s possible that the Reaper drone hovering over Baghdad’s airport last week destroyed not only an infamous Iranian general, but also the last hope of curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Before he’d even said “good morning” during an address to the nation yesterday, Donald Trump vowed that Iran would “never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon” as long as he’s president of the United States. Yet as he urged other world powers to abandon the nuclear deal that they and the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, and that Trump withdrew the U.S. from in 2018, he offered no details on his plan to obtain a better deal.

When the Iranian government announced that it would suspend more (though not yet all) of its commitments under the nuclear agreement, in a move made after Soleimani’s death but planned beforehand, I recalled something Richard Burt, the U.S. diplomat behind the largest nuclear-weapons reduction in history, told me back in 2018. He noted that in the ’80s, when he negotiated the START I treaty with the Soviet Union, people were acutely aware of the existential dangers of a nuclear conflict. That’s no longer the case, he warned.

“No one is focusing on the fact that the existing framework for nuclear control and constraints is unraveling” and giving way to “unrestrained nuclear competition,” Burt observed. What we’re witnessing, he argued, is not some sort of creative destruction, in which an outdated Cold War framework is being discarded in favor of a more modern one. It’s “just destruction.”

Indeed, we’ve gone from the first decade since the advent of the atomic age to not yield a new nuclear-weapons state to, in the first days of 2020, the brink of war between the world’s leading nuclear power and a nuclear aspirant. The Trump administration is now poised to face at least two simultaneous nuclear crises along with an escalating and unprecedented tripartite nuclear-arms race, all of which will threaten the miraculously perfect track record of nuclear deterrence since 1945. Even if there are no nuclear tests or exchanges in the year ahead, the systems, accords, and norms that have helped mitigate the risks of nuclear conflict are vanishing, ushering in a more hazardous era that the United States won’t be able to control.

Consider what has transpired in the past year alone:

A newly unconstrained Iranian nuclear program: Iran has gradually cast off the shackles of the 2015 nuclear agreement following Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the pact, though it is still cooperating with international inspectors and leaving itself space to return to compliance if the United States lifts sanctions against Tehran. Experts estimate that with the recent steps away from the deal, the time that Iran would need to generate enough fuel for a nuclear bomb could decrease from roughly a year to a matter of months.

An emerging North Korean nuclear-weapons power: The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed over New Year’s to further advance his nuclear-weapons program, which is already likely sophisticated enough to threaten the whole world, after nuclear talks with the United States fell apart. The targeted killing of a top Iranian official, just a few years after the Iranians struck the nuclear accord with the United States, will probably only reinforce Kim’s belief that the only way for his regime to avoid a similar fate is to cling to its nuclear weapons. The former North Korean diplomat Thae Yong Ho told me he’s concerned Kim could go well beyond that in the coming year, perhaps declaring that the U.S. economic blockade of his country has left his nation no choice but to survive by selling nuclear and missile technologies to other parties, including U.S. adversaries.

The specter of other countries going nuclear: Failing efforts to denuclearize North Korea and broker a better nuclear deal with Iran, coupled with concerns among U.S. allies about Trump’s commitment to providing for their security against these adversaries, have generated talk of Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Saudi Arabia exploring nuclear weapons of their own rather than relying on America’s nuclear deterrent. In a forecast of possible geopolitical risks in 2020, published a couple of weeks before Soleimani’s killing, two scholars at the Atlantic Council predicted that South Korea and Australia, “already pondering nukes, may move to the next stage of actively considering them in 2020, as may Japan. If the Iran nuclear crisis is not resolved, expect the Saudis to buy or rent a nuke from Pakistan.”

Emboldened nuclear states in South Asia: Clashes between India and Pakistan in February 2019, sparked by an attack on Indian security forces by Pakistani militants in the disputed territory of Kashmir, didn’t go nuclear. But they did escalate to an Indian air strike on a terrorist training camp in Pakistan—an act the nuclear experts Nicholas Miller and Vipin Narang have described as “the first ever attack by a nuclear power against the undisputed sovereign territory of another nuclear power.” These were nuclear powers with growing arsenals, no less.

The demise of U.S.-Russian arms control: Blaming Russian violations of the agreement and the unfairness of China not being a party to it, the United States officially withdrew in August from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned an entire class of ground-launched nuclear weapons. The Trump administration has also signaled that it may not renew New START, a 2010 successor to START I that’s due to expire next year and limits the number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. and Russia can deploy on longer-range missiles. The hope is that this will free up the United States to reach a more comprehensive deal that includes China, but so far that idea seems fantastical. A New START lapse would do away with the only remaining nuclear-arms-control treaty. It would also mark the first time since 1972 that America and Russia, which together account for more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, haven’t had any legally binding restrictions on their nuclear forces.

The outbreak of great-power competition: The collapse of the INF Treaty coincides with heightened rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia, threatening to accelerate their budding nuclear-arms race. They’re already investing heavily in modernizing their nuclear arsenals and in new technologies such as hypersonic glide vehicles, which evade missile defenses; cyberweapons against command-and-control systems; and artificial intelligence to incorporate into those systems. Meanwhile, the U.S.-China trade war hacks away at the economic interdependence that has helped deter conflict between the two nuclear-armed superpowers.

Read: Inside the collapse of Trump’s Korea policy

These dismal circumstances follow substantial advances in halting the spread of nuclear weapons. In the ’60s, the decade in which the most new nuclear states emerged (France, China, and, unofficially, Israel), John F. Kennedy predicted that there would be “15 or 20” nuclear powers by 1975. Today there are nine, a rate of about one to two entrants into the nuclear club per decade, with the latest being North Korea in 2006. The nuclear-security scholar Jim Walsh has noted that three-fourths of countries that were once interested in developing nuclear weapons ultimately chose not to do so, and that since the ’90s, more states have given up nuclear weapons than acquired them.

The number of nuclear weapons in the world, moreover, has dropped from more than 70,000 in 1986 to fewer than 14,000 today because of arms-control efforts. (That’s still enough, of course, to kill billions of people and envelop the world in a nuclear winter. When it comes to nuclear nonproliferation, progress is only heartening when expressed in relative terms.)

Most of the reductions in these weapons, however, occurred in the ’90s, and the pace of cuts has slowed ever since. We now live in a period when the barriers to acquiring nuclear weapons, a 75-year-old technology, are much lower than they once were. It’s also a time when, as James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College once explained to me, there are more nuclear-weapons states “of different shapes and sizes … [and] different trajectories,” making the “geometry” of nuclear deterrence “far more complex and harder to manage” than during the comparatively symmetrical Cold War.

Add to that the fading memory of the Cold War and fiercer competition among the great powers, and it’s no surprise that the guardrails on the world’s most destructive weapons are disappearing.

The past year may be remembered “as the turning point from an era of relative calm” to “the dawn of a dangerous new nuclear age,” Miller and Narang wrote last month in Foreign Affairs. The consequences could be “catastrophic.”

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The Race for Big Ideas Is On

The United States faces genuinely new global challenges—but tries to understand them using outmoded theories from a bygone era.

By Amy Zegart, Contributing writer | Published January 13, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 13, 2020 |

In the past two weeks, escalating hostilities brought the United States to the brink of yet another conflict in the Middle East—this time with Iran. But such a conflict might not look much like the others that American forces have fought in the 21st century.

Tank-on-tank warfare this isn’t. While crises are inherently unpredictable, Iran’s decision on Tuesday to lob missiles at bases housing American troops in Iraq might well be the last of its conventional retaliation for the American air strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani. Future hostilities are more likely to occur in cyberspace, not in physical space.

The Soleimani strike is a harbinger in other ways. Historically, targeted killing has been rare as an instrument of war because it has been so difficult technically. The last time the United States killed a major military leader of a foreign power was in World War II, when American forces shot down an airplane carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. These killings are unlikely to be so rare in the future. Because drones allow constant surveillance and can strike precise targets, states may credibly threaten so-called decapitation attacks in ways that nobody imagined possible short of all-out nuclear war.

When battlegrounds are growing invisible and leaders can be killed by airplanes without pilots, it’s fair to say that conflict is not what it used to be. The rise of cyberaggression, information warfare, autonomous weapons, and other technologies all require a thorough reevaluation of the coming era, what geopolitics will look like, and the kinds of capabilities that will give nations a strategic advantage against their competitors. Yet the United States still lacks the sort of dominant explanatory framework that can guide American policy regardless of who the president is.

It’s not for lack of trying. Many people have been grappling with how to strengthen America’s national security in an uncertain era. The far-flung outposts of these efforts range from conference rooms on Capitol Hill and offices in suburban-Virginia strip malls to hotel ballrooms and slick boardrooms in Silicon Valley. There are new Pentagon units to harness technological innovation and bipartisan national commissions on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. (I am an expert adviser for the AI commission.) There are intelligence studies to identify baseline trends and megatrends driving the future of international-security challenges, and think-tank reports and academic workshops on the future of just about everything.

All of these initiatives are seeking to look beyond the anxieties of today to understand the threats of tomorrow. And nearly all of them start with two insights: The first is that we face a “hinge of history” moment. Emerging technologies are poised to transform societies, economies, and politics in dramatic and unprecedented ways. The second is that we need better ideas to make sense of this new world so that American interests and values can prevail.

When one of the big ideas involves calling for more big ideas, you know it’s tough out there. The technological race is challenging, but it is likely to be the easy part. It’s the ideas race—who best understands the levers and opportunities presented by technological disruption and shifts in the world’s political geography—that will determine geopolitical winners and losers. Some strategic insights provide competitive advantage; Russia recognized well before the United States did, for instance, that the rise of social media magnified the impact of information warfare.

Other strategic insights, if widely shared, become invaluable guides to democratic policy making and cooperation, enabling like-minded states to thwart repression and aggression of authoritarian regimes. How are military strategists and average American voters alike supposed to understand the world now confronting them—and decide which conflicts to undertake and how?

In unsettled moments like the current one, the cost of a conceptual mistake is high. At the end of World War II, the U.S. found itself locked in confrontation with the Soviet Union, a former ally that sought to export its own revolutionary ideology, communist economic system, and repressive governance around the world. American strategists built a foreign policy for the next half century around the strategy of containment developed by George Kennan in his famous 1947 “X” article. A career diplomat and Russia expert, Kennan believed that winning the superpower conflict required, above all, patience. The United States, he argued, should use every element of national power—including economics, diplomacy, and military force—to contain the spread of communism. Eventually, he predicted, the Soviet Union would collapse from its own weaknesses. Every president from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush pursued containment in various ways. Not every policy worked, and some, like the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War, failed disastrously. But Kennan was fundamentally right, and his ideas provided the North Star for Republican and Democratic presidents alike.

But when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, policy makers were suddenly left without a conceptual blueprint for navigating global politics. In the place of containment, a gauzy optimism took hold. Major threats were considered passé: The end of history had arrived, and democracy had won. Declaring a “peace dividend,” policy makers slashed defense spending and cut the CIA’s workforce by 25 percent, hollowing out a generation just as a terrorist threat was emerging. In the post–Cold War decade, the United States focused its foreign policy on nation building, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief. The Pentagon even created a new acronym for its operations: MOOTW, or “Military Operations Other Than War.” Nothing says strategic drift like focusing America’s warfighters on jobs other than the one they were hired and trained to do.

Today’s conceptual struggle is harder because the threats are more numerous, complex, varied, uncertain, and dynamic; because all of them are being supercharged by technological advances that will work in ways no one can fully fathom; and because two of the most widely discussed concepts so far have been force fits from a bygone era.

The notion of a new Cold War with China is all the rage. It’s a term that provides a strange sort of comfort—like seeing a long-ago friend at your college reunion—and yet no great insight. The U.S.-Soviet Cold War was driven primarily by ideology. The current competition with China is driven primarily by economics. And while the Cold War split the world into two opposing camps with almost no trade or meaningful contact between them, the key feature of today’s Sino-American rivalry isn’t division by an iron curtain but entanglement across global capital markets and supply chains.

Deterrence is another Cold War oldie-but-goodie. It sounds tough and smart, even though, in many circumstances, nobody is really sure how it could ever work. It has become a hazy, ill-formed shorthand policy that consists of “stopping bad guys from doing bad things without actually going to war, somehow.” Russian information warfare and election interference? Let’s get some deterrence for that. Iran? Maximum-pressure deterrence. Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people? Deterrence with clear red lines. China’s militarization of space? Cross-domain deterrence.

Deterrence isn’t a useless idea. But it’s not magic fairy dust, either. History shows that deterrence has only been useful under very specific conditions. In the Cold War, mutually assured destruction was very good at preventing one outcome: total nuclear war that could kill hundreds of millions of people. But nuclear deterrence did not prevent the Soviets’ other bad behavior, including invading Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. The key Cold War takeaway isn’t that policy makers should use deterrence more. It’s that some things are not deterrable, no matter how much we wish them to be.

For all the talk of deterring cyberattacks, for example, the reality is that successful deterrence requires three conditions that are rarely all met in cyberspace: knowing the identity of the adversary, making clear what behavior you will not tolerate, and showing the punishment you could inflict if a Rubicon is crossed. But cyberattacks are frequently anonymous. No one knows who the bad guys are, at least not easily, so miscreants of all types can act with little fear of punishment. And there’s a reason no country conducts public cyberweapons tests or showcases its algorithms in military parades: Once a cyberweapon is revealed, it’s much easier for an adversary to take steps that render it useless, turn it against you, or both.

Using familiar ideas like the Cold War to understand new challenges is always tempting and sometimes deadly. Analogies and familiar concepts say, “Hey, it’s not so bad. We’ve been here before. Let’s consult the winning playbook.” But in a genuinely new moment, the old playbook won’t win, and policy makers won’t know it until it’s too late.

In today’s genuinely new moment, the biggest conceptual challenge is the profundity of paradox: Seemingly opposite foreign-policy dynamics exist at the same time.

Today, for instance, geography has never been more important—and less important. Sure, geography has always mattered. The Portuguese built an empire by claiming colonial territories along the maritime route Vasco da Gama discovered to reach India. But questions of who controls the physical landscape, and who lives in it, are now shaping global events in unpredictable ways and on an unprecedented scale. According to the UN, more than 70 million people were forced from their homes last year, the highest number on record. Of those, 25 million had to flee their home country, driven by violence or persecution. Separatist movements are stirring from northern Spain to the South Pacific, part of a secessionist trend that has intensified over the past century.

Meanwhile, global climate change is transforming the landscape itself. Australia is on fire, with flames already ravaging an area the size of West Virginia and choking millions of residents miles away with extreme air pollution. Experts predict that global warming will make massive fires more frequent in more places. Scientists also estimate that rising seas could threaten up to 340 million people living in low-lying coastal areas worldwide. All of these trends, along with old-fashioned territorial aggression (Russia in Ukraine, China in the South China Sea), are searing reminders that physical spaces and borders drawn across them still matter as much as they ever have.

At the same time, the virtual world has never been more global and seamless, with individuals and groups able to connect, transact, cooperate, and even wage wars across immense distances online. The percentage of the global population that is online has more than tripled since 2000. There is now Wi-Fi on Mount Everest, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, promises to use balloons to bring the Internet to remote parts of Kenya. Facebook in 2019 drew 2.4 billion active monthly users—that’s a billion more people than the entire population of China. All of this connectivity makes it possible for Russian operatives to reach deep inside American communities and spread disinformation, influence what we believe, and tear us apart. Cyber capabilities also reportedly enabled Americans to sabotage North Korean rocket tests from thousands of miles away. Artificial intelligence is compressing time and distance—making it possible for information analysis and military decisions to move at machine speed. Even the borders between war and peace, combatant and civilian, are becoming increasingly blurred in cyberspace. In the old days, military mobilization took months and involved large logistics operations with heavy equipment that was hard to hide. In cyberspace, mobilization is literally at your fingertips.

In a related paradox, the United States is simultaneously the most powerful country in cyberspace and the most vulnerable country in cyberspace. This, too, is new. In the military’s traditional domains—air, land, and sea—countries with more capabilities were typically more powerful. Want to know who will “own the skies” in a conflict? The answer is easy: the side with better aircraft and air defenses. The Pentagon likes to talk about domain “dominance” because the term used to mean something. But it doesn’t in cyberspace. In the virtual world, power and vulnerability are inextricably linked.

As my Stanford cyber colleague Herb Lin has noted, connectivity is an important measure of strength and influence. From enterprise computing to industrial-control systems to the Fitbits on our wrists and video doorbells in our homes, information-technology-based systems are crucial for exploiting information to achieve greater efficiency, coordination, communication, and commerce.

But greater connectivity inescapably leads to greater vulnerability. The internet puts bad guys in distant locales just milliseconds away from the front door of a nation’s important information systems, such as those at power plants and major corporations. And as Lin notes, the more sophisticated our computer systems are, the more insecure they inevitably become. Increasing the functionality of any system increases the complexity of its design and implementation—and complexity is widely recognized as the enemy of security. “The reason is simple,” he told me. “A more complex system will inevitably have more security flaws that an adversary can exploit, and the adversary can take as long as is necessary to find them.”

Beyond recognizing the fact that seemingly paradoxical dynamics can exist at the same time—that digital technology multiplies America’s power and weaknesses; that physical geography is irrelevant and more laden with peril than ever—I don’t have a unified working theory for global affairs. That one has yet to develop is not surprising. But the effort is essential.

Containment and deterrence were bold and counterintuitive ideas when they were first formulated. Theorists of the mid-20th century, such as Kennan and Thomas Schelling, who articulated the theory of deterrence, started with one essential advantage: The atom bomb made it viscerally, horrifically clear just how much the coming world would be different from the past. It also drove home the point that the go-to ideas of yesteryear would not be up to the task of guiding American foreign policy in a new age. That point is no less urgent now.

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