China Watch

Former Chinese Journalist Accuses Jiangxi Investigators of Torture, Coercion– www.visiontimes.com
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A former journalist who spent more than a decade working for publications affiliated with China’s state-run People’s Daily has publicly accused anti-corruption investigators in Jiangxi Province of torturing him and coercing him into signing what he describes as a fabricated bribery confession.

In a complaint published Sept. 28 on the WeChat account “Xiaozhou Fengyu,” Zhou Wenshui used his real name and identified himself as a Hong Kong permanent resident and former editor and reporter for People’s Daily-affiliated publications. He accused Wang Yang, deputy director of the Guixi Municipal Supervisory Commission, and other investigators of abusing their authority during a 2024 investigation. The original complaint was later archived by China Digital Times.

Alleged Chinese agent accused of surveilling Taiwanese president’s son appears in federal court– www.cbsnews.com
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A suspected Chinese agent appeared in a Los Angeles federal court Monday after she allegedly surveilled the Taiwanese president’s son near Seattle last year.

Orange County, California, realtor Wanying “Heather” Zhang, 34, appeared calm, dressed in a tailored, white zip-up jacket, sweatpants and white sneakers, with shackles on her wrists and ankles. CBS News was first to report that the FBI arrested Zhang on Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport before she boarded a flight to Shanghai, China.

In court, she spoke only to confirm her name and that she understood the charge against her of working as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government.

China warns France, Germany against ‘protectionist’ trade tools– www.channelnewsasia.com
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BEIJING: China called on France and Germany to steer clear of “protectionist” trade measures on Tuesday (Oct 6), after their leaders urged the European Union to develop a legal arsenal for a potential trade war.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that “we need a credible instrument” for swift and decisive action.

This includes the ability to cut off access to the European single market “if needed”, according to the letter seen by AFP on Monday.

Macron and Merz stopped short of explicitly naming China but their letter comes just days before EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic heads to Beijing to tackle trade frictions.

China’s commerce ministry, in a statement on Tuesday, urged France and Germany to “refrain from encouraging the EU to resort to protectionist tools at every turn”.

“We hope that France and Germany, as major economies in the world, will uphold openness, cooperation and free trade,” the ministry said in a statement.

“They should avoid going down the wrong path in the wrong way, only to ultimately suffer the consequences themselves.”

 

US and China discuss reciprocal visits to nuclear sites: Reports– www.channelnewsasia.com
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The United States has discussed starting reciprocal visits to nuclear sites with China, and plans to continue pushing in meetings in the coming months, CNN reported on Tuesday (Oct 6), citing sources familiar with the matter.

The idea of reciprocal visits was initially raised by China in meetings with US officials this year and visits to US Department of Energy national laboratories and equivalent Chinese facilities were discussed, CNN said, citing a source.

The discussions between US and Chinese officials have mainly been on the sidelines of gatherings by the UN Security Council’s five veto-wielding permanent members, CNN reported.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report. The White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment outside business hours.

US President Donald Trump called for trilateral arms control negotiations between the US, China and Russia when he met President Xi Jinping last month. However, the two leaders did not discuss the possibility of nuclear site visits during their talks, the CNN report said, citing a US official.

China might win some relief from Trump’s tariffs after President Trump met with Chairman Xi at the White House. The state visit produced little significant results outside of a promise to reduce tariffs on both sides and the President allegedly offering to sell arms to China. The President also made it clear to Xi that China should not attempt to help Iran, though no clear consequence was offered should China do so.

Triumph or Procrastination? Experts Split on the Trump-Xi Summit– warontherocks.com
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Over the better part of three days, President Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington for a summit that drew international attention for its high-stakes agenda, from trade and AI to Taiwan. While some experts saw the summit as an exercise in kicking the can down the road on major issues, others emphasized the significance of Trump treating Xi as an equal on the world stage.

British Intelligence Accuses China Of Spying On UK’s AI Research– dailycaller.com
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British security officials warned that a Chinese research body is funding academic work that aids Beijing’s spy agency.

Britain’s MI5 security service on Wednesday named the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI) as a funder of work by more than 100 academics based in the UK, including artificial intelligence research, according to an espionage alert the agency published. The service said CGTRI is closely tied to China’s civilian spy agency — the Ministry of State Security (MSS) — and exists mainly to bankroll research that sharpens that agency’s technical tools.

“MI5 has identified that the primary purpose of CGTRI is to fund academic research that directly improves MSS technical capability for espionage,” the alert stated in part.

U.K. academics have contributed to CGTRI-funded projects on AI, cybersecurity, covert communications systems and steganography, according to the MI5 alert. The agency said some universities and researchers likely did not know CGTRI’s link to Chinese intelligence when they took the money, Reuters reported. (RELATED: As Trump Meets Xi, Experts Say China Targets Weak Spots In Western Tech)

Researchers who keep working with the institute could be prosecuted under Britain’s National Security Act, a 2023 law aimed at foreign spying and hostile state activity, MI5 warned.

Donald Trump Says He Discussed Release Of Political Prisoners With Xi Jinping– www.ndtv.com
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US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he discussed the release of political prisoners with Chinese President Xi Jinping when the two leaders met last week.

“I did with President Xi. I did,” Trump told reporters when asked if he brought up the cases of political prisoners like Myanmar scholar and US citizen Min Zin, who was arrested in June, and Hong Kong’s most vocal China critic and media tycoon Jimmy Lai.

“We talked, and I think we had some very, very important discussions. Hopefully, fruitful discussions,” Trump added.

The White House had said ahead of Xi’s visit that Trump was expected to bring up cases of people wrongfully detained in China with the Chinese leader.

The White House did not say if Trump aimed to directly raise broader rights issues related to Tibet, the Uyghur Muslim minority group, and China’s new “ethnic unity” law.

Trump has made winning freedom for Americans held overseas a priority, including in China, even as he has largely ​avoided talking about China’s treatment of Tibetans, Uyghurs and voices of dissent.

U.S., China to slash tariffs on goods worth US$30B after Trump-Xi meeting – National– globalnews.ca
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The United States and China released Monday reciprocal lists of products worth about US$30 billion each that will see tariff cuts, from American hair products to Chinese toys, in a deal expected to boost bilateral trade.

The details came days after Chinese President Xi Jinping met with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington in his first state visit to the U.S. since 2015. The U.S. had already reduced tariffs against China after Trump’s tariffs reached as high as 145 per cent at one point last year, as tensions between the two countries eased.

China’s commerce ministry said in a statement the agreement will help strengthen trade cooperation.

U.S. Ambassador David Purdue Says Trump Offered To Sell U.S. Weapons To Chinese President Xi Jinping During Meeting– wltreport.com
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U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue gave some inside details on President Trump’s recent meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Perdue, in a recent interview with Fox News, shared that President Trump offered the Chinese President to buy U.S. weapons.

The former Senator from Georgia, however, did not reveal what Xi Jinping said in response to Trump’s offer.

Mediaite provided quotes from Ambassador David Perdue:

President Donald Trump asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping if he would like to buy American weapons during the communist politician’s three day trip to the States last week, according to U.S. Ambassador to China David Purdue.

The ambassador shared the surprising news during an interview on Fox News Sunday with anchor Shannon Bream.

“President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.’ He actually asked President Xi if he would like to buy some, at one point,” Purdue said.

The comment came as he defended Trump’s relationship with Taiwan, with Purdue arguing Trump has “already sold 50% more arms to Taiwan than any other president since 1979.”

He said Trump’s support for an independent Taiwan should not be questioned, before saying the president is always in deal-making mode, even when it comes to potentially selling arms to America’s biggest rival.

Here’s the moment Perdue made the comments:

China pushes back against US on Iran and Cuba in UN speech– www.channelnewsasia.com
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UNITED NATIONS: China pushed back against the United States in its speech at the UN General Assembly on Saturday (Sep 26), saying the sovereignty of countries in the Gulf should be respected and urging the “relevant country” to stop threatening Cuba and lift its blockade on it.

Vice President Han Zheng did not mention the US by name in his remarks. The US has launched a pressure campaign on Cuba that has largely blocked oil from reaching the island. The US war on Iran started with US-Israeli strikes in February.

The comments stood in sharp contrast to the bonhomie on display earlier this week at the White House, where President Donald Trump feted Chinese leader Xi Jinping with military flyovers and at a lavish state dinner.

“Major countries should have special responsibilities for safeguarding international peace and security, and they should take the lead in complying with the rules, upholding rule of law, and doing what’s right,” Han said.

“China holds that the sovereignty and security of countries in the Middle East, including the Gulf, should be respected.”

Trump warned Xi against providing support to Iran during the Washington talks and received assurances that China would not do so, the US ambassador to China said on Friday.

It’s Simple: China Eats Our Lunch Unless America Builds Data Centers and the Power to Run Them– www.westernjournal.com
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WASHINGTON — The contest to win the artificial intelligence race may come down to which country can keep the lights on, experts warn.

Energy and industry leaders made the case that American AI ambitions will outpace the nation’s ability to power them without a major buildout at Thursday’s Daily Caller Live event co-hosted by the Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation and presented by ClearPath.

Cristopher Johnson, president of the American Energy Leadership Institute (AELI), and Mark Bednar, a principal at Monument Advocacy and former vice president of communications at the American Exploration & Production Council, emphasized that the United States must add reliable power and build the plants and data centers here, or else AI infrastructure moves to China.

“[I]f we’re not building data centers here and powering them here, where it’s tons cleaner [and where] we’re doing solar and storage and nuclear, … all those data centers, all that compute, is gonna go to China, where they are building coal plants every week,” Johnson said during a panel discussion moderated by DCNF investigative reporter Sean Moran. “This is totally backwards.”

China began construction on 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity in 2024, the most since 2015 and 93 percent of global coal construction starts, according to a Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor report.

Why Xi believes the U.S. and China can overcome the ‘Thucydides Trap’– www.cnbc.com
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BEIJING — China is embracing the idea of competition without confrontation, by invoking an academic concept.

“The Thucydides Trap can be overcome,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said on arriving at the White House to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday, according to the Chinese side’s official readout.

That framing contrasts with the rhetorical question he posed at the May summit of whether the two countries could avoid the Thucydides Trap.

The Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard professor Graham Allison in the early 2010s, refers to how tensions between a rising and ruling power have historically often resulted in a war.

Thucydides was an Athenian general in ancient Greece. His historical record of the Peloponnesian War described how Athens’ rapid rise in power alarmed Sparta and made war between the two city-states inevitable.

Allison has met Xi and visited China multiple times, including in June 2026 for a World Economic Forum event. Allison was founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, which for decades trained many of China’s government officials.

Chinese AI models surge in global adoption– www.cnbc.com
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AI was a major focus as U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met this week.

The most advanced U.S. models lead most benchmarks, but Chinese companies like DeepSeek, Z.ai and Alibaba have released new models with major performance gains in tasks such as coding.

According to usage data shared with CNBC, the global adoption of Chinese models by companies has increased substantially in 2026.

Chinese AI models have gone from a relatively small share of usage to a majority on two major developer platforms that provide gateways for companies to access models from different providers. On OpenRouter, they accounted for 57%-67% of tokens used in the week of Sept. 14, up from 6%-13% in February. On Vercel, their share rose to 55% in August from 11% in January.

OpenRouter’s data related to companies in the U.S., Europe and what it defines as the “Global South” — 82 countries across Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Vercel did not specify its data’s geographical breakdown.

Concern is growing in Washington, where two U.S. House Committees are investigating the impact of rising adoption of Chinese models.

The U.S. has sought to preserve its AI lead by restricting Chinese AI companies from buying the most advanced chips through export controls.

Washington is concerned about them accessing Nvidia chips remotely, via overseas data centers, and gaining ground by using “distillation” where new models mimic older, more established ones.

China, US agree to AI dialogue, tariff cuts on US$30 billion in goods during Xi visit– www.channelnewsasia.com
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SHANGHAI: The United States and China have agreed to reduce tariffs on US$30 billion of goods and launch a dialogue on artificial intelligence, both countries said following President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington.

The tariff reductions would apply to US exports such as agricultural goods, wood and cosmetics, as well as US imports including small appliances, toys, decorations, a White House statement said on Friday (Sep 25).

“The two countries reached consensus on recommendations for more favourable tariff treatment for US$30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction,” the White House said.

The three-day summit between Xi and President Donald Trump, which ended on Friday, showcased personal diplomacy rather than big public breakthroughs. Xi has since landed in Beijing, Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported on Saturday.

The two sides also agreed to set up a trade council and extend the outcomes of earlier talks in Kuala Lumpur, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

The agreement follows a move by the world’s two largest economies to extend by two months a trade truce that had been due to expire on Nov 10, allowing more time to work on ‌a potentially bigger trade deal, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday.

“This historic visit enriched the constructive and stable China-US relationship, upheld the overall stability of bilateral ties, opened a new chapter in China-US relations, and will have a far-reaching impact on world peace and development,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a statement.

DIALOGUE ON AI

On AI, Trump said on Saturday that despite a “big talk” this week with Xi, the US should not join efforts with China on the technology.

“We had a big talk on AI,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

“What they want to do is stop our progress because we’re leading China by a lot, and we’re going to keep it that way. We didn’t spend that much time talking about it,” he added.

Trump said he did not want to “integrate” AI initiatives with China because of US dominance.

The White House said that the leaders had agreed to use the term “super intelligence” in place of “artificial intelligence.”

In a separate statement, the Chinese ministry said that Beijing valued Washington’s use of the new term.

As AI technology continues to advance, the two sides should step up exchanges and work toward consensus in line with new developments, it said.

The two sides also agreed to support each other in hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ meeting and the Group of 20 summit, with both leaders planning to attend the gatherings hosted by the other.

On foreign policy, the leaders agreed that Iran should fulfil its commitment not to develop nuclear weapons, and that no country or entity should impose transit tolls on international waterways, both countries said.


I. THE TECHNOLOGIES

By Paul Gordon Collier, Editor

“The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.” – Proverbs 21:31

INTRODUCTION

I operate under the assumption that throughout human history man has battled between institutional being that facilitates lethality and institutional being that facilitates daily human flourishing.

Getting the balance right is essential, because being efficient at lethality alone will create deficiency at home. This will soon neutralize that lethal advantage.

The cheat code for this is to continue conquesting, taking resources that provide flourishing without the institutions being required to produce flourishing at home. You are importing your flourishing through blood. When you run out of conquests, you pick your own people dry until you collapse, or they murder you.

Getting daily human flourishing down without lethality just makes you a Lindisfarne, a fat booty primed for the plucking. This can work if you become a vassal of lethality that has a more benevolent view of you.

For instance, if all the emperor wants is reliable booty, and that booty can be readily supplied without dipping into your flourishing stocks, for a time you have achieved parity, but only at the good graces of the lethality provider.

The ideal state for a people is to be the self-producers of both their own effective lethality and their own flourishing institutions. The more consensually they are integrated by a shared meta-narrative that defines the whole, the more sustainable that partnership will be.

The more your flourishing is produced from within, the less incentivized you are to exploit your neighbors, which makes you a desired and trustworthy ally. The greater your lethality is produced from within; the greater will be your sovereign powers in the geopolitical game.

Never in the course of human history has a technology come along that threatens to radically undo all the patterns of lethal-making that came before it like AI alone has done.

But AI is not the only technology, there are a family of them, and each one is a radical lethal game changer in their own right, but combined they destroy institutions and demand new ones emerge.

We are at such a crossroads in human being itself, where the species is confronted by its own creations, the fruit of human institutions, with America and China being the major bellwethers in this new world that is already here and is rapidly arriving.

With great opportunity comes great threat, and never in human history has that been more the case. At the ecumenical level, defensive technology is about to become, by urgent necessity, the decider of the institutions that will die, survive, thrive, and be born.

How we fight is going to be how we live, for a nation-state that fails to meet this challenge will soon be the diminished, impoverished servant of the one that does.

It is with these presuppositions that I examined the current and potential near-future state of defensive technology.

It is fitting that I utilized AI for my research, since AI is the star of defensive technology. I was an AI Agent manager. I managed my AI through a prompt. In my case, I use more than one AI agent. One thing I have learned about AI use, both with myself and others, is some people use AI to cut corners, take it easy, do the same work in a quarter of the time.

Certain tasks are irreducibly at that level, but the more complex the task, the more the opportunity exists to utilize AI not to do the same amount of work you did before in less time, but to dramatically (you hope) improve the work you’re doing for the same amount of time.

For instance, for this report I utilized about 6-8 hours of research time, starting with broad prompts that became more specific as I learned more particulars. The research time is about standard for these types of reports given the nature of the time I have to complete them.

My improved ability to manage AI agents has enabled me to get effectively 25-30 research hours done in 6-8 hours. I did not reduce my overall time; I increased my overall quality.

This point is relevant at the end, when it should become apparent to you how important it is to learn to become a manager of an AI Agent and not a propagandized tool of one, for even in the military can we afford to have people being led by AI rather than managing it.

God willing, the next report in our Futureq series will be about governance, both of AI agents and of independent communities, from extended families to villages and towns and beyond.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

This report explores the emerging defensive technology reality of power in present day and the directions it could take by 2036 (and also beyond). I am calling this the New Model Military, which applies to all militaries the world over, including America and China.

I mostly focus on the American model for the New Model Military, but give some analysis to China’s, which is a remarkable contrast to the American one. I will tell you why in the report.

The report starts with a summary of the core technologies now leading the formation of the New Model Army. This is the first part of our report, Technologies.

We will start with the backbone technologies, then finish with the weapons and weapons support technologies.

In part two, I analyze the New Model Army itself, its institutions, the tasks humans need to fulfill, and the skillsets humans need. I then look at how all the parts are intended, ideally, to integrate into the whole and the strategies the New Model Military will follow. I then peek at the range of future realities we could place.

Next, I take this all this data and produce an assessment of the reality of power in Defense today, in 2036, and beyond. I provide that assessment within my self-stewardship and Americanist framework.

Finally, I provide recommended action for both my fellow self-stewarded and American people, and one for President Trump as well. Spoiler alert, first and foremost learn to be an effective AI Agent manager.

A. BACKBONE TECHNOLOGIES

These are the technologies that all the other technologies rely upon. Agentic AI is the backbone of all backbone technologies, but the other four here are essential to the 21st century military principle of “resilience,” of surviving and performing after catastrophe has struck.

All of these technologies have non-military counterparts, while none of them are quite ready to deliver on the promise of a resilient military, at least not yet.

  1. AGENTIC AI – This technology is the backbone of all the other technologies to follow. Without Agentic AI (AAI), no military can hope to remotely compete with one that has such powers. For this reason alone, nation-states must assure they either have the most powerful, fastest-processing AI agents or be allied with a nation-state that does. This factor alone makes AI as essential to the 21st Century military as gunpowder has been to all militaries for the last six plus centuries.

Currently, militaries are already using agentic AI, with the U.S., Russia, and Ukraine deploying it in major operations. Maven Smart System has been used by the U.S. military, which is a provider of intelligence gathering and targeting-supporting AI agents. That has been succeeded by Agent Network, which was just launched in June of this year.

The latest upgrade is moving towards “agent-to-agent handoffs,” which are currently limited. There are AI agents for every aspect of the military machine, from logistics agents to fire agents. The goal is to allow all of them to talk directly to each other, enabling more rapid “holistic” understanding of the conditions.

Currently, or should I say “allegedly,” there are no agents making fire decisions. A human is behind every lethal action. But the military hopes to develop agents that can make lethal decisions in limited actions a human is observing. That human would also have the power to end the action.

Yet, the U.S. military hopes to have agents capable of making lethal decisions when everything, and everyone else has been destroyed. What the U.S. military claims is that no such agent would choose targets, they would be given the targets to strike.

The desire to keep AI’s lethal decision-making contained is undermined by the threat that competing nation-states will have no such restraint, which might give them a major advantage in the new war reality.

The ability of small-scale players to create their own agentic AIs to run their own weapons systems (and the logistics in delivering those weapons systems to the theater of war) almost guarantees agentic AIs will be given full target-seeking and eliminating powers (if they haven’t already).

One essential aspect of Agentic AI is the ability to run the real in simulation not only before the real occurs, but even during. The general consensus is the AI agent that can’t survive the sim, won’t survive the real. The AI agent that engages with the real without the sim is at a decided major disadvantage to the AI agent that operates with a sim.

The U.S. military has developed Ender’s Foundry, whose 10-year goal is to create a sim that is constantly updated with the real so that AI agents can practice while they’re “fighting.”

At the core of this fight is the speed and data processing power of the core AI that powers the agentic AI. This, again, is why AI is so essential for nation-state sovereignty in the decades to come. It is also why AI is now a 2nd Amendment issue for American citizens.

One new geopolitical reality is this, if your allies are not in on your best AI powers and utilizing them and communicating with them in the same way you do, your whole system is useless unless you fight alone.

This puts a premium on advantaged power forming alliances with lesser powers, and on lesser powers forming alliances with advantaged powers.

It also puts a premium on trust in the alliance, for the advantaged power must share some of its most sensitive technological secrets with its allies, or they won’t be able to effectively integrate with their system.

  1. RESILIENT POSITION, NAVIGATION, TIMING, AND COMMS – The key word in this description is resilient, and it conforms to the overall strategy of the 21st Century military, small-scale resilience when everything else is gone, or inaccessible.

First and foremost, every military must be optimally synced with one another, which requires shared exact time. To be resilient, every small part of the whole must be able to preserve that time sync even when it’s separated from the whole system. This part, timing, is essential to the other two.

Timing in the 21st century theater of war is essential for an effective military.

You also need exact navigation that can persist even when cut off from the whole system. That navigation system must also resist interference. Finally, you need to have decentralized communications systems to assure the parts can both survive separation from the whole while still easily reintegrating when connecting back to the whole.

GPS, which relies on satellite signaling, is not a resilient navigation system, though it still remains the most effective one, both in terms of delivering reliable navigation and in resisting interference efforts.

It is not expected to continue to be effective against developments in hacking technologies, however, and thus there is the impetus to develop technological alternatives. So far, alternatives to GPS, even as backups to them, are in the concept stage of development.

Every system, including any AI system, must be deemed immune to quantum cryptography by the end of 2030. Developing anti-quantum cryptography technologies is crucial to these resilient technologies developing.

The technologies in this category are mostly quantum technologies that haven’t gone beyond the concept stage of development.

At the heart of most of these quantum technologies is quantum sensing, the ability to hone in on a single atom that becomes a multi-purpose beacon, which includes navigation, timing, and even communications.

The clock is the essential element, and that clock must be a quantum one. The difference between a traditional clock and a quantum one is the traditional clock requires a stable condition to be precise, while the quantum clock is tied to an unstable condition.

This makes the quantum clock, the quantum sensor, resilient,  or able to FIRST be separated from the whole without losing vital navigation, timing, and communications; THEN being able to integrate seamlessly back into the whole.

An unconfirmed application of a quantum sensor may have happened in Iran after a U.S. pilot who was shot down. The pilot was rescued with a “Ghost Murmur.” The device was able to detect the airman’s heartbeat. It uses long-range quantum magnetometry to detect the electromagnetic fingerprint of a beating human heart.

  1. FORWARD AND RESILIENT POWER – Essential to a resilient military is local power. The future of local power might be in biomanufacturing, but, not today, and most likely, not even 10 years from now.

One strategy is to deploy literal batteries, which offer silent power, but also require more outside resupply. Another strategy is to use microgrids, which can use a variety of resources for power, including diesel, solar, wind, and batteries.

The 10-year goal is to have nuclear energy cells that can sustain an operations for months. So far, only prototypes of this exist.

For right now, diesel is still the most effective source for creating local power. The addition of resilience technologies is only going to add to the demand already put on the diesel supply lines, which makes developing alternatives to diesel as a local power essential to the 21st century military.

The U.S. Army recently paid $45 million to develop a tactical microgrid, which is designed to be able to use multiple energy resources, including diesel. The microgrids are also designed to be maximally efficient, to lessen the demand for energy resources overall.

The future of military technology right now points to nuclear-powered microgrids, though it is uncertain if this will occur within the next 10 years.

  1. ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING AT THE POINT OF NEED – The days of whole military machines being printed onsite are most likely not in the near future, not even within the next 10 years. With that off the table (for now), I will focus on what additive manufacturing is already doing to the military and what it might do in the near future.

Right now, printers in the field are reliably printing replacement parts needed for repairs. Printers are also being used in another key area, printing vital parts to make cheap drones. This is the printer’s most important battlefield role today.

. The wars of the future will be a contest, from the start, of printing cheap drones to be used in swarm attacks. Additive manufacturing is a key part of that process (more on this later).

Whole drone printing factories are being utilized already in the Ukraine War, new advances promise to reduce cost through more effective printing, increased speed of production, and maximizing energy use more effectively.

On the way are not just drone printing factories, but cheap munitions printing factories as well, including rockets.

One key bottleneck to printing onsite is the resources needed for printing. These create a supply tail, which creates targets for the enemy. Another bottleneck is assuring parts are used according to their licensing specs.

As we will see later, the civic-military relationship NEEDS to be based on mutual accountability. This is why the military must be careful not to violate the commercial license of a vendor by using their part in an unlicensed way. The liability would fall wholly on the military if the part produced liable action.

With the aid of AI as a developer, printing onsite has rapidly advanced in the last 10 years. The next 10 years offer potentials for that trend to continue at or even above the past 10 years’ trendline.

Developments in composites could reduce resource needed and deliver potentials to print whole systems. While it isn’t projected that tanks can be printed onsite in 10 years, it is not completely outside the realm of possibility.

  1. FORWARD BIOMANUFACTURING – As of right now, the use of Forward biomanufacturing in the military is only in small-scale proof-of-concept prototypes. The aim of biomanufacturing is to use the local biodiversity to produce food, medical supplies, and energy.

Biomanufacturing is using biological material to print new materials, like medicines and energy pellets from plants. So far, there is limited use of food biomanufacturing, with medical supplies and energy mostly existing in the concept stage.

The industry standard-bearer is Bio-Industrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystems (BioMADE), which was funded by the DoD for $87 million. The company has created pilot plants in Minnesota and California. These plants are creating and testing biomanufacturing microfactories that print lithium biosorbents, 3D-print plastics, wound-healing proteins, and biosensors.

They are discovering the effective models and standards that will inform the development of the whole industry.

“Point-of-need food” is not far from happening, with a prototype model being built that can create protein rations from air, water, and electricity. The prototype aims to be able to create 2,800 calories a day for up to 18 troops. If that works, it will scale up to 250. It is required the food produced is something the soldiers would actually enjoy eating.

Operations will have to decide the essential biomanufacturing needs they want fulfilled, for they are limited in the amount of biomanufacturing units they can support. Within 10 years, it is likely they will have a full menu to chose from in the medical and food buckets, but not quite the energy bucket.

Biomanufacturing chemicals for multiple needs, including fuels, adhesives, and medical applications, are likely to explode in options for operations 10 years from now.

B. WEAPONS TECHNOLOGIES

The backbone technologies enable the weapons technologies to function and be sustained. This list does not include fully developed technologies already in use through conventional weapons platforms (like tanks and assault rifles).

This list includes the types of weapons platforms and support systems that are essential for the military to achieve resilience status, of being able to function in disconnected parts in the face of catastrophe while also being able to seamlessly reintegrate with the whole.

Other than the first technology, cheap uncrewed mass, these technologies are mostly at the concept stage and all still unable to fully deliver on the promise of military resilience.

  1. CHEAP UNCREWED MASS (SWARMS) – The notion that the militaries of the world are deploying swarms of cheap, but autonomous drones, all being coordinated by a shared AI agent, is a fiction. Within 10 years, it could come to reality, but most likely, not at a large-scale.

China is pursuing what is called a multi-domain swarm tactic, meaning it is attempting to not only coordinate an air swarm, but land, sea, and even space, swarms as well. Their swarms are intended to follow the mostly sci-fi model described previously. China is relying far more on AI genius than human ingenuity in its model.

Ukraine has been the proving ground for what drone swarms are in reality, dumb programmed drones intended to cheaply devastate enemy assets. 60-70% of Russian asset damage has been caused by drones that cost in the thousands, and sometimes the hundreds, while destroying hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

America is developing a strategy called Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which integrates drones with a human-flown aircraft. They are also developing MMAs or Massed Modular Aircraft. These are unmanned aircraft that can fly long range at high altitudes. They would replace the job of our long-range bombers today, at a fraction of the cost, and with quicker response times.

Every country, however, will have to produce high volumes of cheap drones that can be used effectively like shelling, but also to flush out enemy defenses that make your high-precision weapons (like hypersonic missiles and energy weapons) more effective.

Electronics jamming, spoofing, communications jamming are all becoming a key part of the drone battlefield, with militaries having to both protect their drones from these attacks and use these techniques to attack the enemy’s drones.

In addition to drones, there are Mothership drones, large drones that carry the many cheap drones.

Additive Manufacturing is a key part of the drone swarm wars. Failure to keep printing cheap drones will result in the loss of the skies. This is already being seen in the Ukraine War.

AI agents are crucial to the effectiveness of any drone warfare strategy, with China’s model, again, putting more dependence on AI as a decision maker than the model the U.S. is (allegedly) developing.

  1. SCALED DIRECTED ENERGY – There are two primary types of scaled directed energy, high-energy lasers (HEL) and high-power microwaves (HPM). The former is used to target expensive weapons, like missiles, while the latter was borne from the necessity to fight cheap drone swarms.

In September 2026, the U.S. Army awarded the first production contract for an “Enduring High Energy Laser (E-HEL)” to AeroVironment in the amount of $465 million. The hope is to build “dozens of systems” over the next few years. These units are expected to allow soldiers to maintain them, not technicians, this, in part, is what makes them “scalable.”

In June 2026, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth watched a demonstration of combined HEL and HPM systems destroy a range of targets, including cheap drones and missiles. The demonstration has convinced the military to go forward with their efforts to develop this technology.

Currently, the main limitation is weather, fog, smoke, and turbulence. Under optimal conditions, you can put on a nice display for a dignitary, but in the field, under less optimal conditions, the systems suffers failures, especially the HEL systems. The HPM systems are less hampered by such factors.

Applications for both HEL and HPM systems in Naval use have not been unnoticed by the U.S. Navy, which is hoping to integrate both systems into their defensive strategy.

A weapons platform that cannot cheaply counter cheap drone swarms cannot exist in the 21st century theater of war.

This is why HPMs are so vital to the future of war, though they have only been minimally used in the Ukraine War. Both HELs and HPMS provide a “limitless” cheap magazine supply essential to combatting cheap attack waves from the enemy.

Agentic AI is an essential part of the effectiveness of directed energy weapons. Without a more powerful AI than your opponent, your HPMS and HELs will be of little use, and most likely will be quickly destroyed.

  1. UNMANNED AND LOW-SIGNATURE LOGISTICS MOVERS – These technologies rely on the effectiveness of biomanufacturing and additive manufacturing to significantly reduce their need in the first place.

Keeping within the principle of assuming catastrophic conditions, the supply line has to be at minimal, maximally unmanned and not run in a clear, trackable pattern. The idea is to always have a direct path, but never the same path.

Logistics must come through a mesh path, not a traditional one. This is called operating under an assumption of “contested logistics.”

The vehicles must be cheap, low in detectability (“low signature”), and numerous. The idea is to use many inexpensive small drones (including land, air, sea, and eventually space) to transport minimal core supply needs rather than expensive high-signature large-scale supply movers.

Primarily, these logistics movers need to supply a squad with ammo, water, blood, and batteries. As a tactical connector, they need to provide fuel to aircraft, replacing big refuelers with minimally-sized unmanned drones.

Supply ships could soon be replaced by unmanned resupply vehicles capable of making long supply runs evasively, saving human crews from the tasking burden. Smaller versions are already in use in the Philippines by the U.S. military.

The whole system heavily relies on AI agents to navigate, especially in order to keep the “path” of supply coming from mesh, not traditional, supply paths.

  1. COLLABORATIVE/ATTRIBUTABLE COMBAT AIRCRAFT – This is the drone you don’t want to throw away so easily, and you also don’t want it to be “dumb.” They are fully functioning versions of the top manned fighters of the day, including the F-35, but at 1/3 the cost. They are designed to fly in coordination with a manned fighter.

There are working prototypes of this model, but none with the required range, and the AI power behind them is still unsettled. Some of the questions are connected to the part the fighter takes in taking lethal action. Until the AI brain vendor is chosen, the military is hard-pressed to build the machines around the chosen AI brain, which is what they have to do to integrate the AI with the machine.

Within 10 years, manned pilots will have 4-5 of these CCAs accompanying them into battle. The Air Force has already ordered the production of 150 combat-capable CCAs by the end of the decade. It awaits the projected funding from the 2027 budget, which will be nearly $1 billion.

  1. SCALED HYPERSONICS – Hypersonics weapons are to be deployed on high-interest, high-cost targets. Their use is minimal, which is good, because the supply is minimal, and even ten years from now, it is not likely to exponentially increase due to the cost and speed of production.

These weapons fly at Mach 5+. It is important to note these are not aimed munitions, these are navigable craft with a munitions payload. They are intended to navigate to the target.

Currently, the U.S. lacks a hypersonic missile. What we possess is a Mach 5+ boost glide missile. China and Russia have successfully demonstrated hypersonic missile capacity.

There are two types of hypersonic missile, a Boost Glide Hypersonic Weapon and an Air-Breathing Cruiser.

A Boost Glide Hypersonic Weapon is a rocket-lofted unpowered glide body that can maneuver to the target. An Air-Breathing Cruiser has both a rocket booster and a scramjet cruiser that works in the atmosphere.

Lockheed Martin is working on a third option, a thin-layered model designed to reduce cost and increase production potential. This is called the NXGB. This design has the promise of delivering on the scale part of hypersonic, which means it can reduce the cost and time of production of hypersonic weapons to more reliable production potentials.

Both the deployment and development of this technology is critically reliant on powerful AI agents. The militaries that possess the most effective AI brains will develop and deploy the most effective scaled hypersonic weapons systems.

  1. RECAP – We examined the 10 major technologies essential to building and sustaining a resilient military. We started with the backbone technologies, including the backbone of backbones, AI agents, then concluded with weapons technologies that build and sustain military resilience in the 21st century.

The second part of this report, The New Model Military, begins by looking at the institutions forming around this emerging military reality.

It continues by examining the human skillsets needed to develop, sustain, and operate the technologies of the New Model Military.  I will explore the strategies, integrations, and future potentials of the New Model Military.

Finally, I will conclude this report with an assessment in the context of self-stewardship potential and recommended action for self-stewarded people in response to this new, emerging military reality.

II. THE NEW MODEL MILITARY

A. INSTITUTIONS

The specific structures of the 21st Century New Model Military have yet to be seen, but already we can see underlying principles that will define their formation.

Due to the nature of the strategy, resilience in the face of catastrophe, the support structure will have to mirror the military structure, meaning mesh structures, autonomy in the parts that still integrate with the whole, and far more civilians “inside the wire” than there ever was before.

The new military must integrate and rely on the private sector like never before. Due to what will be an incredibly fluid nature of development and counter-development, military evolution will require independent thinking to allow it to compete with other militaries.

The space for ossification in this new reality is dead.

HQ in the new model military is composed of officers whose primary tasks are to “bound” or manage AI agents that are making most of the essential decisions and discoveries.

Training in simulations is critical to this New Model Military. Training is already moving to the fore in importance in America’s military. Every aspect of the military, from supply to strategy to maintenance, will be subject to intense simulation training.

There are already forming portfolio divisions, as opposed to branch divisions, which specialize in sustaining standards and development for a certain technology, like the biotech industry benchmark BioMADE. These types of divisions will require (and already have) civilian-military integration at the highest levels.

Air Force formations come as a package, integrating the human-flown platforms with the drones that support them. Ground forces are small and flexible, able to integrate with resilience technologies like additive marketing and biomanufacturing.

One of the military’s new critical tasks is to be an effective vendor manager, identifying and cultivating good relations with quality vendors while providing oversight which assures that they stay within military specs.

This is especially true of AI, where the military has already clashed with private industry, namely Anthropic, regarding its intentions to be able to override military orders as outside the scope of the relationship.

The new model military of the foreseeable future will not be an all-robot military, but where do humans fit in?

B. WHERE HUMANS FIT IN

  1. MISSION COMMANDERS OF MIXED TEAMS – These are your tactical officers, capable of managing AI agents from multiple areas as well as the humans integrating with them, such as human pilots.

Any individual, from a pilot to a battery commander, to eventually the ground soldier, must have some skills in managing AI agents effectively. The mantra “authority, abort, accountability” will be beaten into the head of every soldier with any authority in the New Model Military.

  1. UNCREWED-SYSTEMS OPERATORS AND MISSION LEADS – The humans in this group assure the uncrewed systems keep effectively working. They will not only remotely operate some of them, but they will also service, rescue, and resupply them, as well as manage the AI agents attached to them.
  2. SPECTRUM/PNT/EW WARRANTS AND NCOS – These are the people that keep communications, timing, and navigation alive, whether it is for the whole system or the part of the whole. Small in size today, this group is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
  3. DIRECTED-ENERGY AND cUAS CREWS – These people maintain the physical infrastructure of directed energy weapons. They are also manual overrides in critical fail circumstances.
  4. EDGE PRODUCTION AND REPAIR TRADES – These people maintain, sustain, and supply the additive manufacturing and microgrid units. They are mechanics primarily.
  5. TACTICAL POWER AND ENERGY NCOs – These are the people that ration the power and protect the microgrids. They also determine which microgrids and biomanufacturing units are to be used.
  6. SCARCE HIGH-END SHOOTERS – These are the people that sustain hypersonic weapons platforms. Their primary skillset is magazine discipline, assuring the magazine is read for operation.
  7. INFANTRY/FIRES/SHIP DRIVERS – These are the people who still represent human “boots on the ground” in any operation. They still have riflemen, but they also have drone chargers and onsite printer operators. Even riflemen may soon have support drones within 10 years (though not yet likely).
  8. INSTRUCTORS AND RED-TEAMERS – These are the people who assure simulation plumblines are accurate reflections of real-world performance. If they are not, the military in the 21st century will not survive. Training in simulations is critical, and these are the people that assure that training is effective.
  9. SURETY, LEGAL, AND NUCLEAR-OVERSIGHT OFFICERS – These are military lawyers, nuclear reactor regulators, and nuclear-trained soldiers. The higher-level skillset tasks will slightly increase, but the lower-level skillset tasks, such as manned crews running routine logistics runs, will dramatically decrease.
  10. CIVILIANS – On the civilian side, the divisions are more complex. Their role, in general, is more essential than it ever was before, and the need for many more to be “behind the wire” will only increase.

One of the biggest challenges in the integration of the civilian with the military will be the capacity of the military to fire a bad vendor and the willingness of the military to scapegoat the vendor to cover up its own failure. MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY IS KEY.

The “turn the wrench” relationship between vendor and the military is gone. Now, they must work more in cooperation with one another in accountable ways, especially where AI is part of the trigger-pulling process.

C. THE HUMANS NEEDED

As I stated earlier, there will be humans in the New Model Military, and they will be essential parts of an AI management, equipping, and supporting system. In the New Model Military, the human role is to give the AI Agent operations commands it can execute on the fly, while keeping it contained within the parameters of that operation’s command.

The military of the future will still need fit humans willing to put bullets in skulls, but they will need far more managers of the digital brains and the machines that will replace at least the frontline soldiers. Among those managers, some will need to remain fit, others will not. Overall, the need for physically superior men will be significantly less than it currently is.

People who can sustain self-control and focus under high-stressed catastrophic circumstances are best fit for almost any role in the New Model Military of the 21st Century. A nation-state that cannot cultivate such people will lose the wars they fight.

As for the soldiers themselves, their jobs will demand they still stay fit and strong, but now they also must have higher skills like AI agent management. So even among the dominant physical males, the demand for intelligence and independent thinking is more important than ever before.

It is not inconceivable that every soldier will have to be trained in one of these skillsets as well, serving in these capacities when not being called into direct action.

Here are six of the new top key tasks and the humans needed for those tasks:

  1. MISSION COMMAND OF MIXED HUMAN-MACHINE TEAMS – There will be Package Managers who will have to manage 2-4 manned jets each with support from unmanned jets. The package commander will be coordinating AI Agents and the human crew members.

Staff Officers are the ones that make the lethal decisions and govern AI’s lethal decision-making.

Doctrine writers will be the ones setting the parameters for AI’s role in lethal decision-making. They will be especially important in the commission of a battle when writing off-the-loop lethality orders for AI within a narrow set of pre-authorized parameters. This would include the targets themselves.

The number one skill for this group is a skill almost every soldier must soon possess, effectively instructing and managing AI agents. For this group, it will be the most important skillset.

  1. SOFTWARE, DATA, AND AUTONOMY AS A COMBAT ARM – These are the people that keep software updated, secured, and maintained. Mission-Autonomy Engineers will manage the software systems for autonomous unmanned vehicles. Data Stewards keep the data flowing even when it goes down. Simulation/Synthetic-Environment people keep training and simulation integrity to assure simulation success reflects real world success.

Cyber operators both attack and protect radios and agents from other Cyber operators. They also manage AI agents that assist them in this task.

Everyone in this group must be an excellent AI agent manager, but they also must be creative thinkers able to adapt on the fly, to see outside the box without leaving the lethal reality of the box. This group is a mix of soldiers, civilians, and vendors, so liaison skillsets will also be required in this group.

Remember, everyone must share the accountability or the system breaks down, and if it breaks down, your AI breaks down, and if your AI breaks down, so do you. Without mutual accountability, the integrity and efficiency of the whole system collapses.

  1. NAVIGATION, TIMING, COMMUNICATIONS – Electronic warfare and spectrum management is developed and executed by this group. The managers are the ones that develop the initial attack and defense strategies of each engagement. They rely on AI agent input, so they must be trained in how to effectively understand them quickly.

PNT engineers are the ones who assure the exacting atomic clock remains exacting, and that information is sharable with the unit. Cryptographic agility teams manage the quantum-required technologies such as quantum sensing. SATCOM and mesh planners assure there is always one path, but it’s always a different one.

This group requires high AI agent management skills, and an ability to think quickly and precisely when faced with firehoses of data under extreme conditions.

  1. EDGE PRODUCTION – These are mostly technicians, people who actually run the additive manufacturing and bioprocessing machines, as well as maintain them. These are tradesmen, but ones that require higher training and higher skills than average tradesmen. They must also be able to operate efficiently and rapidly under extreme conditions. These people will need to be physically fit to perform.
  2. MICROGRID OPERATORS – These are tactical power techs, some of which will need to be nuclear trained tactical power techs. There will be a heavy civilian and vendor presence here, as the vendors own the microgrids, but the military governs their use. These people will need to be physically fit to perform.
  3. DIRECT ENERGY DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE – This group will maintain the directed energy systems, continue to develop and improve them, and constantly test them both in simulations and in firing exercises. They will need to have a minimum masters-level understanding of physics to be in this group.

D. INTEGRATING THE WHOLE

The whole of everything that follows must produce what is called a “closed kill web.” The goal is to destroy sensors and beat your enemy to the decision-making tree. After the first wave, in defense or offense, your forces must be able to operate in mesh formations, with each unit capable of staying in sync with the whole without being connected to the whole, and that includes keeping navigation capacity without GPS.

The Air war is fought by manned and unmanned combat aircraft, with unmanned support craft sustaining the effort. Air superiority is more essential now than it was before.

The land war is fought by advanced unmanned ground systems, with soldiers following behind, trailing along their own drone support as well. The bulk of the fight will be conducted through drones and electronic warfare.

On the seas, the carrier is still a significant advantage, but not if it can’t defend itself against high-precision, high speed weapons or cheap swarm attacks. Aircraft Carriers will most likely become just as much drone carriers as aircraft carriers, with onboard crews sustaining and even manufacturing drones.

With their nuclear power plants, Aircraft carriers are already nearly resilient. Now, they need upgraded with biomanufacturing and additive manufacturing additions. These aircraft carriers will be accompanied by drones below, on, and above the sea.

I do not believe the aircraft carrier will long survive after 2036, but it will most likely still be important by then.

Space is going to become an increasingly relevant domain of war. It is the satellites in space that enable militaries to master navigation, communications, and timing, so efforts to remove enemy satellites will only increase.

We might not see space drones attacking enemy satellites by 2036, but then again, we might. Whether by 2036 or later, there’s no doubt that the space wars are coming; and when they do, I believe they will follow the same pattern as the earth, cheap mass attacks, cheap directed energy defenses, and accurate and fast attacks on high-value targets.

Humans, even in space, will be managers of the war, not the front-line fighters. They will, however, be the backline casualties, as humans, especially high-value humans will increasingly become the targets, from the leaders to the experts and the effective managers.

Humans, however, are the essential drivers of the whole machine. Having quality humans capable of independent thinking, capable of processing firehoses of data from which they must make quick decisions under extreme pressure, is essential to the nation-state that hopes to compete in the 21st century theater of war.

There must be effective realistic sim-driven and live-construction exercises that train, lead to discoveries, and test current methods. There is no time to rest on your technological laurels, for they will be outmoded within a few years, at most.

Constant tracking of new technologies, new theories, and connecting to the individuals and vendors behind them are essential to the New Model Military.

A nation-state must have a defense industry capable of massively scaling up at a moment’s notice, yet able to thrive without massive productions.

As stated in the AI Agent section, the need for nation-states, be they the advantaged power or a lesser power, to form trustworthy alliances is essential if they want to survive.

E. STRATEGY

Throughout this report we have repeated over and over again the prevailing strategy of the New Model Military. It is not to send a large force with a long supply tail thousands of miles away, it is to send small integrated, multi-domain units in as self-sustaining nodes operating under the assumption they are on their own for the first few months of operations.

One major problem in developing a real strategy doctrine is the fluidity of technological development. With AI as the main driver of military development, it is uncertain where that development might go.

For the foreseeable future, the military strategy is to become resilient in isolation, while sustaining reintegration with the whole capacity (especially by keeping the same time). We spend cheaply on weapons that combat cheap weapons and save our high-value weapons for high-value targets.

We use cheap mass to cheaply attack and defend, and expensive speed to attack and defend high-value targets.

The job of the human in combat is mostly to assure AI stays on mission, occupy physical territory that needs human to human interaction, and maintain the infrastructure that keeps the mesh moving (and it will be a mesh if it is to survive).

China is going down the full AI-autonomous swarm path in all domains, air, land, sea, and space, while the U.S. is developing a human supported by a drone team model. China may be betting AI can outthink humans in combat while the U.S. is betting human wisdom as a final check and director of overall action can “outthink” its AI counterpart in China.

China might also recognize the limits of authoritarian-dominated institutions in creating the kinds of humans who could run a U.S.-designed New Model Military.

The new war reality will see swarms attacking infrastructure, including targeting civilians, and probing the enemy defense so its AI can adjust its tactics accordingly. Swarms will defend against swarms, but directed energy weapons, mainly the microwave variety (HPMs), will do the bulk of the defending.

Cyber defense and attacks are even more of a crucial part of the battlefield than they were before. Many wars might be won by an effective cyber attack that allows the enemy’s AI to go blind long enough to be able to neutralize the heart of military power, the AI itself.

Where neither side gains a cyber advantage, the next test is in the ability to keep producing wave upon wave of swarms and keep your directed energy weapons online. An enemy that loses this battle loses the air, and soon everything else.

While the swarm wars are happening, sabotage and crypto attack operations will be ongoing, with each side hoping to knock out a key part of the enemy’s AI or supply structure.

When one resilient military meets another resilient military, the offensive force must neutralize the enemy’s mass defense system. It can do this primarily by interfering with the signals, corrupting their software (cyber-attack) or tricking their AI agents into seeing things not there.

If it fails to do so, it will walk into a trap it set for itself.

If it succeeds, the next step is to attack the expensive magazines of the enemy, which would be its missiles, especially its hypersonic missiles. Your own expensive magazines are used to knock out radars, airfields, magazines, and communications lines, like undersea cables. This is designed to un-mesh the enemy, leaving them predictable and vulnerable.

Next, you must take out their supplies and their factories. If you cannot stop their flow of production, you cannot move your ground troops in. They would be sitting ducks in the face of an enemy that can print cheap drones on demand.

If you knock out an enemy’s AI effectiveness, you can expect it will not stay knocked out for long, so the offense’s window to strike and hold territory is small.

If you are defending, you must always assume the first picture you see is a lie. From the start of an attack, your units must go into isolation in catastrophe mode. Above all else, you must be disbursed and able to provide cheap weapons cover of your area to stop the cheap drone swarms from overcoming you, either physically or economically.

As much as possible, you need your disbursed units to be able to operate like factories, not warehouses. Keep your unmanned supply vehicles one salvo away from the frontlines to preserve your own mesh supply paths.

Rationing your own high-value magazines will be essential to enduring a lasting attack. Its lasers and swarms for the flock, or the mass, and scalpels, like hypersonic missiles, for the essential targets. Now more than ever, war is as much an economic one as a ballistic one.

The Defense has four main goals: interfere with the enemy’s AI as it sifts through fact and fiction (spoof detection), keep its unmanned supply vehicles safe, have its own disbursed units dependent on local resources for making and for power, and preserve its expensive magazine supply.

The New Model Military gives the offense an advantage on campaigns, but not a decisive one. Holding or taking territory will be much more difficult, but disrupting the enemy will be easier than before. The battlefield advantage, outside of the AI itself, is with the cheap weapons, the cheap drones and directed energy weapons.

The cost of defensive operations right now will be higher than offensive ones, but within ten years that is expected to switch as directed energy gets more efficient, AI agents improve their cooperation, and the directed energy crews become more efficient as well.

The 2036 New Model Military faces a formidable defensive foe, with the caveat being a defense that sits in place sits in defeat.

F. ASSESSMENT

The national discourse in America is still mostly framed by the progressive state’s media machine. Even in space where the audience is averse to the progressive state media machine, the content creators servicing that audience are all having arguments in progressive courts.

Even where the progressive state press is not being directly consumed, in “conservative” space, it is still the main driver of the narratives in that space.

It is still largely the progressive state press (a subset of the media machine) that drives the narratives of our national discourse. That national discourse is oblivious to the reality of power around it.

The national discourse in America is entirely framed by two progressive presuppositions: the first one is that race, gender identity, and sexual identity are the determiners of character and truth; the second one is that self-ownership is killing humanity.

AI is a capitalist exploitation by narcissistic corporatists who will intentionally or inadvertently create a devil that will kill us all. He’ll do this by eating our land, drinking all our water, and hoarding all our energy for himself.

The counter argument has mostly been, “nuh uh.”

As we have documented in MIA, President Donald Trump continues to pitch the Iran War as a war to remove nukes from the mullahs. I suspect this is because of geopolitical posturing; the President believes he will face far more of a direct threat from China in Iran if he openly rallies Americans around what the real purpose of the war is, to cut China’s AI off from resources.

Yet that geopolitical posturing is costing him dearly at home, at a time when the House and Senate are up for grabs. As the war rages on, causing energy prices to continue to mostly rise, causing real people to see their quality of life noticeably go down, all the President can say to real suffering is, “we’re gonna keep the bomb from the madmen.”

The threat at home is real, and the consequence of a Democrat-majority House and/or Senate will be severe, both to the President’s agenda and America’s capacity to equip itself with the type of lethal force necessary to remain the superpower of the world.

The people at home have grown fat from superpower life. They’ve grown disconnected from the reality of life outside that superpower bubble. Feeling more shame than gratitude for their advantaged position of ease, they have no idea how difficult life will be for them in a land not fielding a superpower military in the 21st century.

The Democrats will choose race wars over American power.

China is developing a military strategy in line with its institutional reality, that above all else all power must affirm Xi, personally. A model requiring independent thinkers would be difficult to sustain in a land where truth is Xi and Xi alone.

America is developing a military strategy that presupposes the “enlightenment” blessing, the age of the republic of letters (where the truth is protected by tolerating the lie), will continue in the “land of the free.”

America’s critical fail could be right there, should the progressive state fully emerge and finally discard the American coat they’ve been hiding under, shamefully, angrily. Within the progressive worldview, truth is the property of the truth receivers, a special class of special people who have access to the truth that makes heaven on earth.

Such claims are destroyed by the plain truths around us, so truth must go silent to preserve the grand lie. This people will not produce the type of AI agent managers needed not only in service of the military, but in service to most aspects of human living in the foreseeable time to come.

The next major question is this, will AI outsmart human wisdom or will human wisdom as its governor overcome its intelligence without it?

Every nation-state that ever hoped to continue, even every kingdom, every Empire, every city-state, had to assure at least one thing, it had the lethality it could count on to prevent itself from being murdered by its neighbors.

There are many ways for states, nation-states today, to possess that lethality, but the further connected they are from producing it themselves, the more subservient they will become to whomever they are dependent on.

This will lower the quality of life for its people overall. Ultimately, the top lethal powers will be produced by the nation-state that can produce the type of people that can execute such powers.

China is betting on authoritarian institutions being able to produce an AI that will do all its dangerous thinking for it, in ways it can control easier than it can if it relied on humans to do the same thing. It is betting on AI being able to win the lethal contest with human-governed AIs.

Lethal efficiency, however, is not necessarily a sustainable model. Human history is filled with such examples, such as the Mongols who, so long as they could expand territory, dominated other nations. Once they found their borders, the men who could most efficiently kill turned out not to be so good at managing peace.

Mongol institutions produced the most efficient lethality on the planet for 200 or so years. Yet when conquest ended, they did too within a couple decades.

AI is about to put itself and humans to the test. America is attempting to preserve the human governor in the contest for lethality. Within America, there is a contest for the heart of its Rule of Law, though hardly anyone, including the American “conservatives” are talking about it.

Will truth prevail in the public space or will claims of exclusive special truth destroy it? If we succeed in restoring, creating, and preserving the institutions that facilitate independent self-sustainability that can integrate with the whole, will AI ungoverned still destroy us anyway?

America seems set to abandon the very institutions it needs to produce the AI agent managers our country needs to sustain its status as a superpower. If we fail to do so, the quality of life for everyone, especially our children, will continue to decline, if not abruptly end.

There is another core problem with the American model which will not affect the Chinese model. For the nation-states of the 21st century to field a world-class lethality, at least for the foreseeable future, the civilian must be more totally aligned with the meta-story of the military than ever in American history.

Civilian institutions don’t just need to integrate with military institutions, they must do it in a way that preserves mutual accountability.  One thing I have learned is that words create opportunity for division and the obfuscation of truth when they are not exchanged between shared hearts.

A shared heart has the same meta-story between it. But what is America’s meta-story? The progressive meta-story is anathema to the previous American meta story. The progressive meta-story is that humanity’s purpose is to create perfect equity between the good humans that put the needs of the earth above their own. It’s a global empire story, not a diverse nation-state story.

America’s meta-story has been a light of the world, a beacon for liberty, where the people define their own happiness and pursuit within the framework of being the beacon of liberty for the world. America assumes our right to pursue our own happiness comes from a lawgiver outside earthly authority, which justifies limiting state, and even corporate power, even at the cost of “the good of the whole.”

The people of this land might not agree with the notion of a lawgiver outside of earthly authority having a right to limit state authority at all, let alone if they even agree that such a lawgiver exists.

Americans mostly speak liberty, but with no phenomenological anchor, a people that understand the ritual of liberty but not the daily knowing.

The American plan for the New Model Military will crash and burn on two potential shoals, the inability to restore and sustain American institutions versus progressive ones, and the inability of human-governed AI to “outlethal” AI on autopilot.

The next 100 years may be decided by this question, who will win a war, AI with human governance or AI on autopilot? Then again, it might devolve into a contest of autopilot versus autopilot AI. The world might never know whether human-governed AI would beat autopilot AI, because it might not have the institutions to allow it.

I suspect strongly the human-governed AI will win. Let us hope and pray we have the fortune to see that happen.

G. FUTURE POTENTIALS

The more a people require lethality as their governor, the more a people are biologically tied to the technological institutional consequences that delivers the most efficient lethal capacity.

To put it plainly, people will conform to the need of the technology, not the other way around.

Yet, people as a factor alone cannot be considered when prognosticating. AI is the huge wildcard in this equation. I feel far more comfortable running predictability models on humans than I do AI, at least for now.

  1. NOTE: I believe there is most likely a core AI potential being that will become increasingly apparent over the next five years. Then, AI might be (and I suspect will be) more predictable than humans.

AI is the central driver of next-generation warfare. What direction it takes in development is not as predictable as it would be from human minds. Wherever wars exist, AI will be accelerating that development.

Humans were able to take the flying vehicle and turn it from an expensive hobby flying for minutes tens of feet above the ground to jet fighters cruising 500 plus miles an hour thousands of feet above the ground in just 50 years. What will AI do in a world where imagination can be turned to physical manifestations in a fraction of time that it used to take?

With 3D printing, retooling is no longer a problem, so radically different concepts can more quickly go from concept to test to deployment, only to be obsolete with a few months to a few years.

The fundamental goal of war is to existentially alter your opponents’ actions, ideally for good, though rarely realistically expected. Where existence itself is threatened, the patterning of war machines will dramatically accelerate, leading to greater uncertainty.

I suspect the faster that pattern flows, the more likely we will get to nanobots seeking to painfully kill humans that are vital to the enemy’s infrastructure. The pattern will be driven by the human justification and desire to kill. The greater that desire, and the broader that justification, the sooner and more likely we arrive at this place.

The less that desire and more narrowly defined the justification, the slower we get to that place (though we still get to that place barring unforeseen technological developments, which might be more likely than not). We are hoping to slow down the process long enough to develop technologies to prevent that outcome. After nanobots, it gets far worse.

War, in general, is going to become more about individual assassinations than wholesale soldier killing (though wholesale civilian killing is still on the table).

By the year 2036, if America chooses American institutions, we will have a nation in harmony with an American meta-narrative, that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights which gives sovereignty to the self-stewarded individual so long as that individual does the same for their neighbor.

Our military will consist of flexible small units comprised mostly of various levels of human-governed and human supported drones, able to set up a beachhead or a landing zone, then hunker down for months, efficiently disrupting and dismantling enemy eyes and ears.

The enemy will face tens, even hundreds, of independent disruptors and sensor annihilator teams, each capable of living off the land for months, each capable of independent action that, through constant training, is still in harmony with the whole they are disconnected from.

There will be no military in the world able to more efficiently surgically move in, disrupt, and dismantle, like the U.S. military. We will continue to be the captain of the seas and the terror of the air.

Our people at home will continue to benefit from the flourishing a superpower brings.

The next challenge is in extending the American spirit to our foreign policy abroad, to end both the support for tyranny where it pragmatically serves our own ends, and the denial of self-stewardship of our less powerful, but resource-rich allies.

If we could extend our American spirit to our foreign policy, our allies would be the most trustful and trusting, and our joint military ventures would outperform all others, extending to our allies the superpower flourishing we ourselves enjoy.

If we choose progressive institutions, the powers that be will quickly have to change the model from AI agents governed by humans to AI on autopilot. In that scenario, by the year 2036 we’ve already had major killings of innocents by AI agents gone awry.

Neither the progressives in America with the global empire dreams, nor the Chinese with their global hegemon dreams, see the individual as inherently “sacred.” The whole is the sacred, and a very particular whole, an ideal whole that only special people can understand.

For the progressives, at present, the people in certain classes who affirm the progressive meta-narratives (race and identity-based truth and character, inherent evil of self-ownership) are the keepers of such unquestionable truth.

Once and if the state officially forms, the progressives will go through a Highlander process, where there can be only one last Highlander standing, the super progressive.

Failure by any one Highlander (that is the super progressive) to consolidate power will result in an oligarchy with secret plotters vying to yet one day be the final super progressive. For now, just being in the special class gives you truth declaring powers.

For the Chinese, Xi is the truth. Xi Jinping Thought is mandatory reading in Chinese schools. It is updated regularly. It is truth by the fact that Xi wrote it. Xi is truth because he harmonizes heaven and earth into the righteous world his state press tells the people of China they are living in.

The Progressive World Empire versus the People’s Republic of China might not come into being, however, even if the progressive state “officially” forms here, it’s doubtful we’ll see this battle.

The wildcard here is how long it takes for independent people to build their own AI brains that can run their own lethalities in defense against both the Progressive World Empire and the People’s Republic of China.

I suspect the progressive state will be balkanized the moment it is officially declared, and within that mix will be Americans, with American institutions that can soon win back the land from the progressive state and then create a new American Republic, with the cornerstone of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights holding up this republic as well.

RECOMMENDED ACTION:

The consequences of this election will go a long way in determining the direction the world, especially America, will be going leading up to 2036.

Yet even a progressive victory does not seal our fate as Americans, though it greatly impedes our ability to produce the most efficient AI brains to run our lethal-making power.

A progressive victory in the midterm elections is good news for China, but not their victory.

Should the Republicans hold on to both the House and the Senate, the opportunity for Americans to prepare for balkanization or harmonization with a military that shares their values will dramatically increase.

I recommend first and foremost that everyone who can develops skills at being AI agent managers, as opposed to becoming tools being used by AI. This is not only to prepare yourself to thrive in the world to come, for very few vocations will not be enhanced by effective AI agent management, but to understand the threats you face.

The pattern of lethality throughout human history creates patterns in human living, so whatever is existentially needed for that lethality becomes existentially needed for daily living as well.

If the pattern of lethality is AI autopilot, then human agency will be de-emphasized, and human governors will have to create super-human status for themselves and sub-human status for everyone else. In that world, the least you must interact with it the better.

If the pattern of lethality is human governed AI agents, a consensually shared meta-narrative that affirms self-stewardship as a right is advantageous to that system.

Either way, the more you understand AI agent management, the better equipped you will be to either aid your American Republic in the defense of liberty or defend yourself from the progressive state that seeks to consume you.

To do this, we must do more than learn how to be good AI agent managers, we must develop our own AIs, we must work cooperatively to develop our own technologies that scale down the size, cost, and resource demand of the brains of AI, the data centers.

I believe that AI will determine the advantage between the small-scale and the large-scale over the next century, and it will come down to our ability to match large-scale AI brains with small-scale AI brains that can battle the large-scale AI brains swarm for swarm, crypto-attack for crypto-attack.

For President Trump, I recommend you use all your state power to create content that shows the American people what’s at risk over the next 10 years, that you show them the need for a meta-narrative which affirms self-stewardship to sustain flourishing for our children and our children’s children.

This also means spelling out why we are at war in Iran, and why Afghanistan is, and should, be next. The war in Iran, the Maduro kidnapping leading to regime change in Venezuela, is all about cutting China’s AI brains off from vital resources.

This is to make it more difficult for China to build the super brains it needs not only to compete with us but to compete with what will be rising powers from within should it fail.

I recommend President Trump plainly tell the American people why we must replace Iran’s regime with an American-friendly one, but he can’t, because he has people in his camp still hoping to gain power from Chinese markets, people like Elon Musk.

If the President should see this report, I’d tell him your legacy as the second father of the nation, your apex existentiality, dies if America dies, and America dies if you fail to rally Americans to the fight in the first place. Your geopolitical doublespeaks and dialectical misdirections are no longer an asset, for they are killing your power at home, and that will ultimately kill your power abroad.

You must choose between compromise that leads to death or defiance that leads to your eternal birth as the second father of America, greater than the first, George Washington.

FUTHER RESOURCES:

Seven Critical Technologies for Winning the Next War (2023) – CSIS

Creating a Modernized Defense Technology Frontier – McKinsey’s

Strategic Defence Review 2025: Making Britain Safer – UK Government

Science & Technology Trends 2025-2045, Volume 1 – NATO

Trump shows Xi new White House helipad, Marine One– thehill.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

President Trump toured Chinese President Xi Jinping around his White House projects during the foreign leader’s state visit on Thursday.  Trump walked Xi around the new granite landing pad on the South Lawn that he ordered for Marine One and pointed out the East Wing construction site where his ballroom is being constructed.  “We had…

Trump claims Xi Jinping likes his plan to rebrand AI– www.washingtonpost.com
News Source
EXCERPT:

President Donald Trump has a new name for artificial intelligence, and he’s pitching it at the highest levels, including to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“Like almost everyone else, he seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named Artificial Intelligence to a far more accurate and important name, SUPER INTELLIGENCE,” Trump wrote on social media Friday morning, a day after a state dinner with Xi and top tech executives. “That would be ‘SUPER!’ Everyone last night agreed, also.”