On Aug. 1, 1943, Lt. Ernie Poulson co-piloted the Consolidated B-24 Liberator on a low-level bombing run of an oil refinery in Campina — part of the deadly American aerial raid of the Ploesti oil fields, codenamed Operation Tidal Wave. His aircraft was one of 53 lost that day. Paulson and his crew crash-landed on a river bank and were taken captive by the Romanian home guard.

As they awaited their fate in that dank, dark pit, the young American airmen could hear a commotion above them. Suddenly, a trap door opened and a head appeared. A woman’s voice spoke to them in heavily accented English:

“Hello, boys. There are only friends here. Now come up and let us help you.”

Poulson and the others didn’t know it at the time but they had just been saved by a guardian angel. Princess Catherine Caradja, a member of Romanian royalty, was now responsible for their lives as the hell of World War II raged around them in Europe.

That scene is a pivotal moment in Adam Makos’ new book Tidal Wave: The Pilots, the Princess, and the Enemy Ace – A True Story of Courage and Survival in WWII. The bestselling author of World War II books A Higher Call and Spearhead details an amazing account of a little-known side story of the ill-fated mission to destroy “Hitler’s gas station.”

“That’s what the brass thought in 1943 when they sent those bombers into Romania at low level: wipe out Hitler’s refineries in one great raid,” Makos told Military Times.

“They said it would shorten the war by six months. The truth was, Operation Tidal Wave was the opening salvo in a campaign that took an entire year to knock Romania out of the war and deny Hitler its oil. It took more than 67 American missions — and 237 bombers lost — to batter Romania enough to cause regime change,” he added.

At the time, Romania was a reluctant ally of Germany. Ruled by a despotic fascist, the country had joined the Axis powers to fight its archnemesis, the Soviet Union. However, many in Romania were wary of the Nazis and favored the Allies.

One of those who believed the country was on the wrong side of the war was Princess Catherine. When the Chattanooga Choo Choo crashed on her estate, she took an active interest in the welfare of its crew, rescuing them from internment in a Luftwaffe POW camp.

Instead, Poulson and his men went to a safer Romanian prison camp where Princess Catherine could protect them. She even managed to have the camp commander replaced when he became too severe in his handling of the Americans.

Makos was tipped off to the story by Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx, who died in 2025. Smith told the author about Poulson and how his crew was aided by the Romanian princess. As the author investigated, he learned the B-24 copilot was still alive

“We found one of the last survivors of the 1,700 men that flew that mission in 1943. I was overjoyed,” says Makos, adding, “Ernie had a sharp mind and was physically fit. At 97, as he was telling me this story, you could tell he was still a tough guy.”

As the war progressed, more and more Romanians were killed in the senseless slaughter of the Eastern Front in Russia. Support for the Nazis weakened and in 1944, the country’s monarch — Michael I, who was king in name only — led a coup against the country’s dictator and flipped sides to join the Allies.

This enabled Romania’s leading fighter ace — Prince Constantin “Buzz” Cantacuzino, who hated the Nazis — to assist Allied airmen held prisoner in his country, including Lt. Col. James Alexander Gunn, the highest-ranking U.S. officer shot down in the Ploesti Raid.

In a Messerschmitt Bf 109 painted with two large American flags on its sides, Cantacuzino flew Gunn to safety in Italy. From there, the colonel helped plan the Operation Reunion rescue of more than 1,000 captured Allied airmen, including Poulson and his crew, in Boeing B-17 bombers converted into troop transports.

Buzz flew escort for the Flying Fortresses in a North American P-51 Mustang.

Like most of Makos’ books, the narrative doesn’t end with the guns falling silent. The author writes about how Princess Catherine and Poulson meet again years later in Europe, where the American learned just how much was at stake for his benefactor if she had been caught.

After the Communists seized control in Romania, Catherine escaped to America, where she lived in Texas with one of the airmen on Poulson’s plane: Richard Britt. Following the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the princess returned to her homeland, where she died at 100 in 1993.

“This is such an amazing story,” Makos says. “We were so lucky that many of the people involved wrote memoirs, so we were able to piece it together and triangulate all the incredible events for accuracy. I interviewed Ernie Poulson in 2018 to get his side of it. He played such a movie-like role in this story.”

Poulson later headed the Atlas missile program for the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a colonel in 1961. He then became a professor of business at the University of Utah. He died in 2020.

Tapping into unreleased family archives, diaries, letters and firsthand accounts, Makos crafts a fast-paced, action-packed narrative that ties together many important individuals and historic events into a personal story about World War II. By presenting this aspect of the Ploesti Raid, he says he is focusing on the brave men who sacrificed so much to stop the Nazi war machine.

“Some 310 of them gave their lives, and they did help bring about an earlier end to the most terrible war in human history. Are we a country that remembers our heroes, those audacious young men who flew into the jaws of hell? Or will they be just a footnote in history?

“That’s why I wrote Tidal Wave: to make sure their names and their story are known.”

Earlier this year, the Defense Department awarded a nearly $41 million development contract to Singapore-based iX Biopharma to develop Wafermine, a small, ketamine-packed wafer that dissolves under the tongue.

Recently, the drug’s manufacturer announced that it is pursuing an emergency authorization that could make the medication available to troops before it receives full Food and Drug Administration approval, citing a September U.S. declaration of a military emergency that justifies the emergency use of drugs deemed necessary by the Pentagon.

A federal emergency use approval declaration by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Sept. 3 opened the possibility of early official authorization, giving the FDA a route to use unapproved medications to treat war wounds.

According to the notice, on July 15, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth determined “a military emergency, or significant potential for a military emergency, involving a heightened risk to U.S. military forces of an attack with a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agent or agents,” or an attack with agents that would cause life-threatening injuries.

The declaration continues: “Injuries arising from these attacks may cause those forces to experience moderate to severe acute pain and place them at risk of developing life-threatening hemodynamic instability, including shock or respiratory distress.”

Because of Hegseth’s determination, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. declared that “circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of drugs” identified by the Pentagon.

The notice did not elaborate on the emergency circumstances or state which drugs would be identified for emergency authorization.

A Politico investigation published Tuesday found that iX Biofarma’s domestic manufacturing partner lacks the Nevada license required to operate.

iX Biofarma called the non-opioid medication the “world’s first sublingual ketamine for acute moderate to severe pain,” and said the wafer enables a different delivery mechanism, letting patients absorb the ketamine through the mucous membrane into the bloodstream.

Typically administered via injection, ketamine can alleviate pain, increase euphoria and cause dissociation and amnesia.

A 2023 study found that opioid use to alleviate battlefield injuries decreased between January 2010 and December 2019, while ketamine use increased.

The researchers found that “ketamine is generally used first for more severely injured patients and has increasingly been employed by the U.S. military as the primary analgesic for combat casualties.”

The company said it received a “sole-source” award for Wafermine development, meaning it did not solicit other vendors.

In the complaint filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, Marine veteran Tristyn Edwards and active-duty Marine Morgan Stampfli allege that they experienced fraudulent charges on their financial accounts and an increase in spam messages because of the breach.

In September, the DMDC said it had discovered a vulnerability on July 16 in a file-sharing system that allowed unauthorized users to access unencrypted files containing personal information, including full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and military occupations.

According to the lawsuit, the vulnerability exposed millions of files containing information on service members and people affiliated with the military for approximately nine months before it was discovered.

The lawsuit also alleges that the DMDC failed to “promptly notify” affected individuals, some of whom were informed two or three months after the breach was found.

“The exposure of Plaintiff and Class members’ PII will cause various types of misuse in the coming months and years, including but not limited to, unauthorized credit card charges, unauthorized access to email accounts, identity theft, and other fraudulent use of their Private Information,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit argues that the Pentagon violated federal privacy laws by failing to protect personal records and maintain compliant cybersecurity systems, despite internal warnings about issues in its systems.

The complaint cites multiple reports from the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General describing failures by both the department and the DMDC to implement adequate cybersecurity controls.

In a report published days after the breach, the OIG said that “officials have not taken the necessary actions to demonstrate that they were operating at an effective level for 14 of the 20 [Inspector General Federal Information Security Modernization Act] core metrics.”

News of the Defense Department breach emerged alongside reports of a cyberattack targeting FBI personnel files. However, the group responsible for the FBI incident has not been linked to the Pentagon breach. The department offered affected individuals 12 months of credit monitoring and identity-restoration services.

“Had [the Defense Department] properly implemented standard cybersecurity controls — such as regular review of accounts, scanning for vulnerabilities, field encryption or tokenization of sensitive PII like SSNs, and routine monitoring of system logs for suspicious activity — the Data Breach could have been avoided,” the lawsuit says.

The Government Accountability Office discovered that 29 of 64 efforts outlined in the Defense Department’s Responsible AI Strategy and Implementation Pathway remained incomplete as of April 2026.

According to a report published Oct. 14, the GAO also found that staffing shortages had hindered the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer’s ability to take additional steps to implement responsible AI, which the department uses to help accelerate AI adoption.

GAO recommended that the department address staffing needs in its Responsible AI Division, which falls under the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, and issue a formal charter for the working council.

“Responsible AI should be considered the same as operationally effective AI,” said Owen Daniels, associate director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Effective testing, evaluation, verification and validation practices can help the military manage risks while ensuring systems operate as intended and operators understand their strengths and limitations, Daniels said.

Council ‘at risk of lapsing’

The GAO found that the Responsible AI Working Council did not meet from late 2024 until August 2025.

Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, or CDAO, officials told the watchdog agency that other priorities, including developing guidance for generative AI and contributing to government-wide AI risk-management resources, had prevented the Responsible AI Division from organizing meetings.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., raised a related concern about accountability during a May 2025 hearing regarding the Pentagon’s AI posture.

“It’s my observation that the Defense Department doesn’t lack in the number of principals, but rather, it often struggles with too little clarity in who is responsible for what.”

Officials from four DoD components told the GAO they faced implementation challenges during the hiatus that could have benefited from greater collaboration.

Six of the 10 DoD components surveyed said sharing responsible AI resources and best practices would increase their ability to incorporate the department’s six Responsible AI tenets into their AI use cases.

The council resumed meetings in August 2025, but the GAO found it still lacked a formal charter defining its responsibilities and specifying how frequently it should meet.

“Without a charter that defines roles and responsibilities for the council … and that specifies the frequency of council meetings, the council is at risk of lapsing again,” the GAO report reads. “Such a lapse could increase the risk of DOD facing Responsible AI implementation issues that it would not have the collaborative capacity to swiftly and effectively resolve.”

Slow staffing

CDAO officials told the GAO they were unlikely to fill vacant positions or increase staffing while the office underwent restructuring, following its realignment to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

In response, the GAO argued that “by … taking action to ensure it has staff in place to meet those needs,” CDAO could make better progress toward its goal of accelerating AI across the department.

Daniels said the staffing shortfall could make it more difficult to build AI literacy throughout the force.

“Operationally, the force needs to become AI literate, as warfighters will be responsible for determining when to deploy AI-enabled systems,” he said.

Service members need to understand AI systems’ limitations and recognize when delegating decisions to machines may be inappropriate, rather than defaulting to a machine’s judgment, Daniels said.

“Exercising meaningful human control — or to use the department’s term, appropriate levels of human judgment — over a military AI system requires robustly understanding a system’s operating boundaries through development, rigorous testing and evaluation, and training,” he said.

Congress’ role

The DoD agreed with the GAO’s two recommendations to issue a charter for the Responsible AI Working Council and address the Responsible AI Division’s workforce needs, according to the watchdog.

The GAO also urged Congress to order the department to implement earlier recommendations, including defining the responsibilities of organizations involved in AI activities and assigning responsibility and a timeline for identifying and managing the department’s AI workforce.

In a Sept. 21 letter, Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Mark Warner, D-Va., and Chris Coons, D-Del., expressed concern that the Pentagon’s AI push could be outpacing its governance efforts.

“Recent events have given us growing concern about the extent to which agencies under your oversight have prioritized acceleration of AI capability adoption and ‘experimentation’ over effective governance,” the letter reads.

Reed has also called for Congress to establish clearer guardrails for military AI.

“Congress must do its job and provide balanced oversight, standards, and rules of the road,” he said.

“This enterprise licensing provides all assigned and attached personnel at any echelon within the specified commands the ability to gain MSS accounts within those domains they have authorized access,” the service said in last week’s announcement.

Maven is an AI-enabled software platform owned by the government but developed by the company Palantir. The system aggregates and analyzes data from several feeds like intelligence reports, drone video, satellite imagery, maps and more in support of real-time decision-making by commanders and analysts across services and allies.

For example, Defense Department officials say they used Maven to identify and bomb more than 2,000 distinct targets in Iran within the first 96 hours of Operation Epic Fury. Officials add that the system is used to process about 6 million pages of text per day for intelligence and operational workflows.

Ahead of a Maven training summit in August, the Marine Corps also explained that its demand for Maven has grown, noting that some 5,500 Marines used the system in the month prior. Additionally, the Marines replaced its manual process for filing Situational Reports with a Maven application.

Before the Oct. 1 agreement, the service’s license only allowed specific commands and organizations to use the AI-enabled battle management system and only through a Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. In that August 2025 rollout, the service provided dozens of units with access and training to the system.

The Marine Corps is encouraging commands to designate an MSS implementation lead for their respective organization. The service said that training materials are available on the secure website Intelink. It added that further guidance such as an MSS Implementation Plan will be published separately.

At the commission’s second meeting, members reviewed two service-level efforts: an Air Force and Space Force pilot in which the commission reported a 60% increase in military spouse placements over three weeks.

Members also called for measuring actual hires, promotions and retention rather than relying on participation figures alone.

The pilot matches spouses with hiring managers before they arrive at their next duty station.

Spouses can use the Air Force Civilian Careers website to identify where they expect to move, even before receiving formal permanent change of station, or PCS, orders. The program then facilitates introductions to hiring managers at the gaining installation.

The pilot entered its second phase in September, expanding to additional installations in the United States and overseas, according to the commission.

The military spouse commission also reported a 70% year-over-year increase in completed job profiles through SpouseWorks, a career and education resource for military spouses. Officials said they are working to make the platform easier to use and improve its ability to connect spouses with employment opportunities. The commission also announced that SpouseWorks is now available to spouses of all ranks.

Jennifer Hegseth, commission chair and wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said the increase in completed job profiles suggested that spouses were ready to pursue employment but needed a better way to connect with opportunities.

“So that just shows that spouses are wanting to work, they’re ready to apply, and they just needed the right outlet,” she noted in the meeting.

The Army’s Department of the Army Voluntary Reassignment Program, or DAVRAP, takes that approach a step further by helping eligible civilian employees maintain career continuity when a permanent change of station requires them to relocate.

Launched in May 2025, the voluntary program allows eligible Army civilian employees to seek noncompetitive reassignment to positions at their gaining installations.

The commission reported that more than 11,000 candidates had created profiles since the program launched, with more than 12,000 hiring managers participating across Army installations in the United States and overseas. Members in attendance did not discuss in detail the number of completed reassignments nor specify how many candidates were military spouses.

Linda Lelande, a Coast Guard representative, asked that the Coast Guard be kept in mind along with the other services, and said spouses can face similar employment disruptions when moving between Coast Guard installations.

“They often experience this very same problem where they have a job, maybe in childcare and then they go to another Coast Guard base and have to start over,” Lelande said.

She asked whether the service could adopt elements of the Army’s reassignment model. Commission members said they wanted to identify existing programs that work and expand them rather than create new initiatives without first examining what the services already offer.

Navy representative Angela Perryman urged the commission to measure whether employer partnerships lead to actual hires.

“It’s one thing to say you’re hiring military spouses, but I want to see numbers,” Perryman said. “I want to see how many military spouses have actually been hired into these positions.”

Members also discussed tracking employment outcomes by region and in relation to PCS moves.

The commission did not announce a finalized department-wide expansion plan or implementation deadline. Member discussions underscored the need to assess whether existing programs deliver measurable employment results before determining how they might be adopted more broadly.

Meyer will now serve as Hegseth’s senior advisor to the task force, which is tasked with addressing the military’s “unacceptable” living conditions, the defense secretary announced Monday in a video on social media.

“Our warfighters should be focused on training, readiness and defending this great nation,” Meyer said during the video. “They shouldn’t have to fight for basic living conditions when they come home at night.”

As senior advisor, Meyer will travel to installations across the country, looking at their barracks, meeting with service members and identifying how to curtail any issues blocking the resolutions.

The first group of installations Meyer is expected to visit are all located in California, with Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton on Tuesday and Wednesday, followed by Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms on Thursday and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar on Friday.

If sticking to schedule, Meyer will have visited 21 bases across the country, with most along the East Coast, by the end of December, according to a map displayed during the social media video.

“I want you to ask this question for the next couple of months: Where’s Dakota?” Hegseth posed during the video. “Could he be coming to my base, to my installation, to my camp, my fort? Because he might be.”

“He’ll be traversing the country on behalf of the Barracks Task Force, on behalf of me personally inspecting, holding town halls, getting real input, and then providing real solutions,” Hegseth continued. “Be on the lookout for him.”

Hegseth first formed the task force in October 2025 to be led by the assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment. The group is meant to identify investment opportunities and create department-wide policies for barracks standards.

The One Bill Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law in July 2025, gave the Defense Department $1.2 billion for barracks improvement, with $230 million allotted for the Marine Corps Barracks 2030 initiative and $425 million for enlisted boot camp barracks and other related facilities, as well as $1 billion for Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force restoration and modernization of military housing.

A Government Accountability Office report from August found that the Defense Department does not request enough funding to meet its installation maintenance and improvement needs, resulting in an estimated $285 billion of maintenance backlogs in fiscal 2025.

Previous GAO reports found that some barracks were “chronically neglected,” resulting in poor conditions that impacted enlisted service members’ quality of life. Thousands of service members lived in subpar barracks, with some having potentially serious health and safety risks, according to a 2023 report.

Recently, the Barracks Task Force funded various projects at installations across the nation, including modernized housing at Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia, and a housing installation at Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton, Washington.

“From this point forward, there’s no confusion about who’s accountable,” Meyer posted on social media. “If we don’t get this fixed, there’s only one person to blame. Me.”

Former President Barack Obama awarded Meyer his Medal of Honor in 2011 for his service during the Battle of Ganjgal in Afghanistan in 2009 when he repeatedly entered an enemy ambush zone to rescue wounded comrades and recover the bodies of fallen service members. His actions were credited with saving 13 Americans and 23 Afghan personnel.

Meyer left the Marine Corps in 2010 and reenlisted in the reserves in April 2025, with his oath of enlistment administered at the Pentagon by Hegseth.

Doron Spielman, a spokesperson for the prime minister, later confirmed to Reuters that Netanyahu had met with Hegseth at the Uvda Air Force Base in Israel’s southern Negev desert region.

Netanyahu and Hegseth discussed “the threats in the region” and the U.S.-Israel partnership in dealing both offensively and defensively with those threats, he said in a brief phone call.

Hegseth also thanked Israel for hosting U.S. forces, which Spielman said numbered in the thousands, and discussed President Donald Trump’s support for the prime minister.

“There’s a deep personal relationship here that was at the core of this discussion,” Spielman said.

On Sunday, Trump endorsed Netanyahu in next week’s parliamentary election in Israel, the country’s first ballot since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel.

The Pentagon has not publicly commented on Hegseth’s visit.

Hegseth earlier posted on X that he had visited U.S. service members in the Central Command area of responsibility, which covers the Middle East, northeast Africa and parts of Asia.

He did not specify where he had met with the forces.

Hegseth’s visit comes as tensions flare between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and as Yemen’s Iran-allied Houthis intensify their attacks on Saudi Arabia.

U.S. and Israeli forces launched joint strikes against Iran in late February, setting off the wider Middle East war. Netanyahu told Israeli media this month that he’s not seeking to attack Iran before the Oct. 27 Israeli election. Trump has said he will not attack Iran before U.S. midterm elections in November.

Israel has hosted additional U.S. forces, including military aircraft, since at least February as part of the war with Iran.

The 1st Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, will be equipped with the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, as part of the ongoing Marine Corps Force Design 2030 modernization plan, according to a recent release.

Lt. Col. Joseph Mozzi, the battalion’s commanding officer, called making the service NMESIS-capable “a crucial step to facilitate the maritime component commanders to fight for sea control.”

“[The NMESIS] is the Marine Corps’ emerging ground-based anti-ship missile capability, and it will also be a ground-based long-range precision fires platform,” he said in the announcement.

The NMESIS consists of an unmanned Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV, with two Naval Strike Missiles mounted atop the chassis, according to the service.

The service added that during a 2021 exercise, Marines successfully tested the weapon system off the coast of Hawaii, where it had an effective range of 130 nautical miles. Later, it introduced the system to the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment in 2024 and to the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment in 2025.

Earlier this month, the Marine Corps deployed NMESIS along with the Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or MADIS, to Japan’s southwesternmost island — some 69 miles from Taiwan — for exercise Keen Sword.

Although the 1st Battalion is now a medium missile battalion, the 10th Marines aren’t done with artillery.

Col. William Soucie, commanding officer of 10th Regiment, 2nd Marines Division, explained that the regiment will retain its lightweight Howitzer capabilities, with NMESIS as a complement to it.

“While the transition of the weapons platform is interesting, what makes the story compelling is that the Marines and Sailors in that formation are not changing,” he said. “They are just as good as they have always been, and they will make the platform successful and whatever mission they are assigned successful because they are phenomenal.”

The close attention that Beijing is paying to the new USMC strategy became clear about a year ago when the Global Times [环球时报] published an unusual editorial decrying Washington’s new determination to deploy anti-ship missiles proximate to China. Arguing that the new American strategy aims to correct a U.S. Navy prioritization for “open ocean control” rather than “close-quarters engagement in confined waters,” this article concludes that Washington’s effort to “control maritime chokepoints [aims to] curtail the freedom of rivals to operate at sea … [and] introduces new risks … .”

A much more detailed study of the new USMC strategy appeared in early 2025 in the naval magazine Modern Ships [现代舰船]. This Chinese assessment noted with considerable alarm that the USMC was experimenting with unmanned surface vessels capable of firing the stealthy LRASM anti-ship cruise missile and that these units could alternatively serve as forward scouts, fixing targets for long-range U.S. military fires. Still, this analysis underlines some weaknesses of the USMC strategy, including the range limitations of related sensors and drones, and even characterized the air-defense capabilities of the USMC as “precarious.” Another study in this same magazine had earlier drawn attention to the logistics quandaries raised by the new strategy.

A 2026 Chinese analysis in another Chinese navy-affiliated magazine, Shipborne Weapons [舰载武器], offers a sharper critique of the Marines’ new approach, noting that the creation of the Marine Littoral Regiments (MLR) “actually represents campaign preparation by the USMC to militarily intervene in China’s unification.” At the outset, this study notes that many American think tanks raised doubts about the strategy, suggesting that forward bases without sea and air control could prove “untenable.”

There is a recognition in this analysis that the new mobile missile launchers that are being deployed by the USMC are small, light, and thus “not easily discovered by … surveillance.” In the end, this study concludes that the USMC strategy is vulnerable because the “U.S has no way to quickly establish air superiority. This could take weeks or months and would entail massive losses.”

Among the most remarkable pieces written by Chinese experts on the new USMC direction is one that was published in translation recently by the China institute at U.S. Naval War College (NWC). That translation deserves extra attention due to the fact that it was written by senior active-duty Chinese Navy officers and also because it was published originally in a sensitive internal circulation Chinese military journal too.

Though this piece does not touch directly on the sensitive Taiwan issue, and it also explicitly notes the USMC strategy aims at deterrence of Beijing, it nevertheless explains that the new USMC deployments amount to “continuous penetration and encroachment into our near seas” and argues that China must “establish effective countermeasures.” Notably, this high-level rendering links the USMC strategy to China’s improving submarine force in significant detail, observing that forward deployed Marine forces could deploy “hydro-acoustic arrays and other assets to establish barrier zones and monitoring areas to track Chinese submarine operations.” Similar arguments are made that U.S. deployments could degrade Chinese air defenses by employing drone swarms “to overwhelm our radar tracking capacity.”

The Chinese Navy authors caution against applying resource-intensive assets to defeat such American asymmetric tactics. However, the conclusion of the article is rather disturbing since it argues that China must counter this posture by deploying a Chinese “proactive offensive posture, aggressively expand[ing] our operational reach, [and] project[ing] forces forward.” Elaborating, they counsel: “We must maintain and normalize forward-deployed forces, extend[ing] undersea combat capabilities as far forward as feasible.”

This conclusion and other aspects of these Chinese-language analyses raise some rather uncomfortable questions for U.S. defense planners. The final translation done by NWC strongly hints that the Chinese Navy may be adopting a more aggressive approach as a direct reaction to the forward lean in American strategy. This seems to be a very clear manifestation of the so-called ‘security dilemma,’ wherein two powers’ defensive measures develop into a dangerous escalatory spiral. Moreover, there is a clear recognition by Chinese strategists that forward USMC elements could be vulnerable due to logistics challenges and lack of proper air and missile defenses. It would not be the first time that the USMC was deployed haphazardly in East Asia at the cost of many American lives.

Understanding these dynamics, American leaders should recalibrate and opt to rely less on forward defense. Alternatively, the USMC should aim to embrace the strategic depth of the Pacific and its myriad island archipelagos (e.g. the Philippines) in a less costly, less risky, more sustainable, and clearly defensive strategy.

Lyle Goldstein is director of the China Initiative at Brown University’s Watson School and concurrently serves as director of the Asia Program at the think-tank Defense Priorities.