Cogs of War

Lessons from Ukraine for Defending Gulf Airspace from Shaheds In early March 2026, U.S. Central Command confirmed the first U.S. fatalities of the Iran conflict. A drone strike at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait killed six

Years of mass drone attacks have stress-tested Ukraine’s air defenses, resulting in a system that has held up under relentless pressure. The United States and its allies should be paying attention.
warontherocks.com/2026/03/less...

AI-Ready Biodata Is America’s Next Strategic Infrastructure There is little doubt in Washington that AI is a powerful technology that will help determine which country rules the 21st century. Policymakers from the

America has world-class scientific data. What it lacks is the infrastructure to turn it into strategic power.
warontherocks.com/2026/03/ai-r...

Why a $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Request Might Slow the Pentagon’s Reform Efforts On Jan. 7, 2026, President Donald Trump announced: I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous

History shows Congress rarely funds defense requests in full. What happens when the shortfall runs into the hundreds of billions?
warontherocks.com/2026/03/why-...

Why Satellites Fail — and How to Protect Them This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Jean-François Morizur, the CEO and founder of Cailabs, a French company focused on ground-to-satellite laser

Threats to commercial space systems are expanding in scale and variety. Some of the most serious never leave Earth.
warontherocks.com/2026/03/why-...

Washington Built the AI Infrastructure AUKUS Needs — Then Locked Allies Out The Manhattan Project brought allied scientists to Los Alamos because winning required pooling allied scientific capacity. Today, as Australia

The Genesis Mission unifies America’s exascale infrastructure for AI development. It did not unify the allies who are supposed to build those systems together.
warontherocks.com/2026/03/wash...

All Too Quiet on the Western Neuroenhancement Front “A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard.” The characters in Philip K.

Consumer neurotechnology is advancing quickly. The military has long tested its potential. What is holding it back?
warontherocks.com/2026/02/all-...

AI Is Being Misunderstood as a Breakthrough in Planning. It’s Not. In the age of AI, the scarcest resource in headquarters is no longer time. It is, rather, the willingness to say no. Artificial intelligence is moving

AI now produces balanced lines of effort, evenly weighted objectives, and fully populated task lists on demand. What it cannot produce is judgment.
warontherocks.com/2026/02/ai-i...

Agentic AI is beginning to move from Pentagon pilots into operational environments. That means confronting degraded networks, legacy workflows, and acquisition timelines that lag the technology.

Listen here: pod.link/1818133762/e...

When GPS Goes Dark: Building a Force That Navigates from Orbit to Seabed GPS denial is no longer a theoretical future threat. It is the environment in which modern forces increasingly operate. China has invested heavily in

Precision warfare depends on position, navigation, and timing. All now operate inside a highly contested electromagnetic spectrum that is cheap to disrupt and hard to defend.
warontherocks.com/2026/02/when...

The Greatest Threat to Acquisition Transformation Is Fear The Department of Defense’s acquisition and sustainment culture is pathologically risk-averse. The greatest threat to acquisition transformation is not

For thirty years, fielding timelines have only stretched longer while the Defense Department has pursued acquisition reform. Why does reform fail to translate into speed?
warontherocks.com/2026/02/the-...

Will These Four Defense Innovation Reforms Improve Industry’s Lot? When everyone is accountable, who is actually responsible? I can’t help but think of this question as I consider the flurry of new top-down activity on

The Pentagon wants speed, AI dominance, and industrial discipline. Without clear benchmarks and ownership, reform could mean more uncertainty for the firms it depends on.
warontherocks.com/2026/02/will...

Biodefense Blind Spot: Why Washington Confuses Pandemics with Bioweapons The next great biological threat may not begin in a wet market, a jungle, or a laboratory accident. It may begin on a laptop with a commercially available

The current U.S. biodefense model assumes threats shaped by biology’s constraints. AI-driven tools allow those constraints to be engineered away.
warontherocks.com/2026/02/biod...

Beyond the Missile: A Cost-Per-Effect Blueprint for the Future Force Should the United States buy more destroyers, or would the money be better spent developing bases, munitions, or software? These are the kinds of

Each budget cycle raises the same underlying question about how the force should judge its investments. Force design demands judging weapons by value in war, and the Pentagon isn’t there yet.
warontherocks.com/2026/02/beyo...

A major drone bill from Capitol Hill aims to build the capacity to manufacture drones at scale. Rep. Pat Harrigan joins the show to discuss how it will work and how it squares with the way America fights.

Listen here: pod.link/1818133762?v...

Defending Against the Next Bioweapon: the mRNA Imperative Modern synthetic biology and AI represent both medicine’s greatest breakthrough and warfare’s most terrifying evolution. In this new landscape, where

As biological threats get faster and cheaper, the United States is dismantling its fastest countermeasure.
warontherocks.com/2026/01/defe...

The defense industrial base is typically defined by its prime contractors, but its real vulnerabilities lie below the surface.
warontherocks.com/2026/01/at-a...

The Primes Aren’t the Real Bottleneck in U.S. Weapons Production In 2021, a single explosion in Minden, Louisiana, sent shockwaves across the U.S. defense industrial base. For nearly two years, the nation’s only

When lower-tier suppliers lack money or spare capacity, pushing the primes won’t make weapons arrive faster.
warontherocks.com/2026/01/the-...

The Organic Industrial Base and the Risks of Competing Against Ourselves When I was in middle school, I ate lunch every day with the same group of boys. Most of us brought the same brown-bagged peanut butter and jelly

The U.S. military still owns the depots that sustain its force. Increasingly, it is designing a system that sidelines them.
warontherocks.com/2026/01/the-...

Ships or Munitions? Clarifying the Discussion on Unmanned Surface Vessels Many strategists, myself included, believe that unmanned surface vessels could be part of an approach to help the U.S. Navy maintain an edge over its

When strategists argue about unmanned surface vessels, the most important question often goes unasked. Are these ships, or are they munitions?
warontherocks.com/2026/01/ship...

No one owns the full journey from problem definition to procurement in commercial space engagement — and startups pay the price.
https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/the-front-door-problem-in-national-security-space/

The Triage Trap: When AI Speed Replaces Command Judgment A targeting screen fills with structures, heat signatures, and a rapidly closing window. Aircraft have only minutes of fuel left when an AI highlights a

In future conflicts, a human will likely still approve a military action. But if an AI system decides which options appear, what remains of command judgment?
warontherocks.com/2026/01/the-...

What Thucydides Really Thought About Technology and War This exclusive Cogs of War interview is with Bret C. Devereaux, an ancient military historian and Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of World

For generations, historians have framed the Peloponnesian War as a story of battlefield innovation. Thucydides emphasized something else.
warontherocks.com/2026/01/what...

The politics were complicated, and the costs and tradeoffs were real. Roosevelt opened the new year in 1941 on familiar terrain.
https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/fdrs-message-on-the-defense-industry-for-the-new-year/

Defense innovation and industry sparked no shortage of ideas this year. These were the arguments readers returned to most.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/most-read-cogs-of-war-articles-of-2025/

The Case for Caution: Why the U.S. Military Shouldn't Organize Around AI… Yet Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series exploring key AI policy choices faced by the Department of Defense and Congress. Please also read the first,

The AI debate inside the Pentagon is often framed as evolution or revolution. Is the military focused on being ready, or just on being early?
warontherocks.com/2025/12/the-...

In space competition with China and Russia, how much the United States can lift and where it can put it still shapes power on Earth.
warontherocks.com/2025/12/at-a...

The Genesis Mission and Quantum Technologies Editor’s Note: This is the fourth article in a four-part series exploring quantum technologies and industrial policy. Please also read the first,

Manhattan and Apollo worked because America chose to build, not just discover. Quantum will fail if it is treated differently.
warontherocks.com/2025/12/the-...

Hybrid Manufacturing: The Case for Agile Factories Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series exploring the modernization of defense manufacturing. Please also read the first: “The Additive

The defense sector has tested the limits of additive manufacturing. Now it has to confront what actually drives production at scale.
warontherocks.com/2025/12/hybr...

The Additive Manufacturing Mirage in Defense Editor's note: This is the first article in a two-part series exploring additive manufacturing. The Pentagon has poured unprecedented funds into additive

Defense's vision for additive manufacturing is bold. Does reality match the hype?
warontherocks.com/2025/12/the-...

America’s edge depends on talent, ideas, and long bets, many of which originate in the university system. What does that ecosystem look like today?

Listen here: pod.link/1818133762/e...