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War on the Rocks

War on the Rocks

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Latest coverage from War on the Rocks

Total War on Taipei: China Explores Elevating Cognitive Effects into Its Vision of Warfare

In March 2025, China’s military researchers published a concept describing how to rapidly capture and subdue the city of Taipei. Distributed in restricted military channels, this approach argues Beijing can achieve victory “by blocking the city’s ability to receive external assistance, restricting its ability to enable operations, breaking its operational system, collapsing cognitive cohesion, and eliminating its ability to recover.” Its objective is to break the Taiwan people’s will to fight.While this concept is not yet doctrine, it is an important and rarely seen example of how China’s military strategy and research inform the way it plans to fight a The post Total War on Taipei: China Explores Elevating Cognitive Effects into Its Vision of Warfare appeared first on War on the Rocks.

9 hours ago•
1

How Ukraine Put Russia on the Backfoot

Ukraine’s expanding use of drones at all ranges has changed the war’s momentum. This episode examines how Kyiv is reaching deeper into Russian territory, disrupting operations and logistics as well as energy infrastructure. How is Russia adapting (or not)? Can these strikes produce lasting advantages on the battlefield? Will this force Russia to escalate? Mike Kofman and Dara Massicot join Ryan to discuss.This episode is brought to you by Booz Allen. Learn more at warontherocks.com/boozallen.Image: ArmyInform The post How Ukraine Put Russia on the Backfoot appeared first on War on the Rocks.

22 hours ago•
1

How the War with Iran is Shaping Key U.S. Relations Beyond the Middle East

The U.S. war with Iran has had political, economic, and military implications that spread far beyond the Middle East. We asked five experts to assess how the war with Iran has affected U.S. bilateral relations with key countries that illustrate some of the global ramifications: South Korea, India, Ukraine, France, and the United Kingdom.Read more below. Jenny Town Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center and the Director of 38 NorthSouth Korea has resisted aiding U.S. military operations to forcefully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, pledging other forms of political and logistical support instead. This has, at times, drawn harsh criticism from President Donald Trump. It has also The post How the War with Iran is Shaping Key U.S. Relations Beyond the Middle East appeared first on War on the Rocks.

23 hours ago

Publishing Activity

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Rebuilding America’s Critical Minerals Base

There’s a clear consensus that America hollowed out its critical minerals base. How to rebuild it is less settled. Alex Grant of Magrathea Metals and Wes Spurlock of Principal Mineral join Jonathan to discuss the processing technology, labor force, and how government can catalyze private capital investment in the sector rather than replace it.Image: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission via Wikimedia Commons. The post Rebuilding America’s Critical Minerals Base appeared first on War on the Rocks.

1 day ago

Learning from the ‘Voyage of the Damned’: The Making of a Russian Naval Disaster

Editorial Note: The dates cited in Eugene Politovsky’s account are from the old Russian Orthodox calendar, which is 13 days behind that of the (Gregorian) calendar system used in this article.A recent War on the Rocks article on the failure of the Spanish Reserve Fleet to prepare for war with the United States in 1898 offers a useful point of entry into what may be the most significant issue of poor fleet readiness ahead of a major battle. Fought on May 27, 1905, the Battle of Tsushima ended in the destruction or capture of nearly the entire Russian Baltic Fleet, The post Learning from the ‘Voyage of the Damned’: The Making of a Russian Naval Disaster appeared first on War on the Rocks.

1 day ago

Corruption Takes Center Stage in Ukraine’s National Conversation

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war. The perspectives gathered here are varied, candid, and often surprising, together forming a more complete picture of Ukraine as it really is.Frontline and StrategyУкраїнська правда The post Corruption Takes Center Stage in Ukraine’s National Conversation appeared first on War on the Rocks.

1 day ago•
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Before Q-Day: The Race to Quantum First

Somewhere, a hard drive is filling up with secrets no one can read yet, and its owner is waiting for the machine that opens them all at once. On March 30, 2026, that wait got shorter.Two independent research teams lowered the public estimates for breaking the encryption that secures banking, communications, and classified traffic. One showed that Shor’s algorithm, the quantum method for factoring the large numbers behind public-key encryption, could run at cryptographically relevant scale with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits. Google Quantum AI, with the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford, put the threshold for breaking elliptic-curve encryption The post Before Q-Day: The Race to Quantum First appeared first on War on the Rocks.

2 days ago•
1

The Make-or-Buy Line has Moved

The secretary of defense’s November announcement on acquisition reform laid out an unprecedented vision across the entire acquisition spectrum to improve the delivery speed of critical capabilities to our warfighters. One foundational pillar is the implementation of a commercial first policy, which laid out several initiatives: leveraging existing but less often used acquisition authorities, maximizing non-traditional contract vehicles, and increasing the use of more flexible solicitations. Most critically, it drives a commercial solution-first paradigm. If the immediate commercial solution isn’t sufficient, acquisition officers then find ways to modify it. If that approach does not work, then and only then do The post The Make-or-Buy Line has Moved appeared first on War on the Rocks.

2 days ago

The Fedorov Dismissal: On Trust, Technology, and Turnover

Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary from across the political spectrum.Every Monday, War on the Rocks members get a curated selection of op-eds and editorials from Ukrainian-language media to understand how Ukrainians themselves debate the biggest issues shaping their country. Western coverage of Ukraine often narrows to the battlefield; these pieces widen the view to daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war.A typical edition provides roughly a dozen pieces sorted into five categories: Frontline and Strategy, Allies and Diplomacy, Domestic Politics, Economy, and Society and Culture — closing with detailed Editor’s The post The Fedorov Dismissal: On Trust, Technology, and Turnover appeared first on War on the Rocks.

5 days ago•
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The Blood Bank and the Logistics of Wartime Medicine

Before the twentieth century gave armies antibiotics, the leading killer of American soldiers in wartime was neither enemy fire nor shrapnel. Two-thirds of the roughly 620,000 deaths in the U.S. Civil War came from diseases like typhoid and dysentery. Spread through contaminated water and crowded camps, they were eventually controlled through inoculation and field sanitation rather than the antibiotics that would not arrive until the following generation. Later in World War I, American forces lost more men to disease than to combat: 63,000 to 51,000.By 1940, military medicine had largely closed that gap. Vaccines, sterile surgical technique, sulfa drugs, and The post The Blood Bank and the Logistics of Wartime Medicine appeared first on War on the Rocks.

5 days ago•
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