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Rand Issues Commentary: Tomorrow's Victory and the Army of the Future - Forecasting the Next Steps in Ukraine's Military Evolution
SANTA MONICA, California, Sept. 5 -- Rand issued the following commentary:
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Tomorrow's Victory and the Army of the Future: Forecasting the Next Steps in Ukraine's Military Evolution
Commentary
By Jacob Parakilas and Oliver Gill
Amidst a changing strategic context which has seen Russian fortunes recede from their high water mark, Ukraine's armed forces are facing another inflection point. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) of 2026 bear little resemblance to the army which faced Russia's initial seizure of Crimea, the force which fought Russian-backed separatists in Donbas from 2014-2022, ... Show Full Article SANTA MONICA, California, Sept. 5 -- Rand issued the following commentary: * * * Tomorrow's Victory and the Army of the Future: Forecasting the Next Steps in Ukraine's Military Evolution Commentary By Jacob Parakilas and Oliver Gill Amidst a changing strategic context which has seen Russian fortunes recede from their high water mark, Ukraine's armed forces are facing another inflection point. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) of 2026 bear little resemblance to the army which faced Russia's initial seizure of Crimea, the force which fought Russian-backed separatists in Donbas from 2014-2022,and even the force that turned back Russia's attempt to decapitate Ukraine in February 2022. That army, which just over a decade ago was still defined by its Soviet legacy, has emerged today as something new: a hybrid force, in which legacy organizational structures and Soviet-era kit work alongside imported doctrines, arms from Western partners, and increasingly domestically produced equipment and experimental methods.
But like the war itself, that force has not reached a static final form. It remains a work in progress, adapting to circumstance as Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. The question we ask here is: if Ukraine's armed forces are a substantial evolution relative to the beginning of the war, what form will they take on next?
The choice facing Ukraine's forces is far from a binary between East and West. As the full-scale war enters its fifth year, with its character still changing, the AFU continues to be tasked with building, deploying, and improving its existing capabilities while simultaneously developing innovative organizational structures, tactics, and doctrine to use them most effectively.
Two camps have emerged into view this last month, each associated with a senior official whose disputes became highly public and controversial. A traditionalist camp, personified by recently relieved Chief of the General Staff Oleksandr Syrskyi, highlights the way in which Ukraine's forces succeeded in holding the frontline against a materially and numerically superior adversary with an often-overlooked reliance on traditional tactics and weapons (https://static.rusi.org/tactical-developments-third-year-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2205.pdf). A reformist camp, symbolized by equally recently dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, champions technological superiority and suggests more fundamental restructuring to better leverage novel weapons, unconventional tactics, and reformed procurement practices favoring decentralization, SMEs, and increased transparency. Put simply, this reflects a struggle of the old guard against the next generation.
One could interpret the dismissal of the senior figures in both camps as a sign that Ukraine's leadership is trying to find a middle path, but the fundamental questions of how to continue the AFU's evolution in the face of ongoing Russian assaults is unlikely to disappear. And as General Syrskyi's successor Mykhailo Drapatyi assumes the role of Chief of the General Staff of the AFU, it is worth first questioning the validity of this framing. The distinction between Old and New, static and maneuverable, traditional and novel, is perhaps an oversimplification. The public rivalry between General Syrskyi and Fedorov cannot be viewed simply as a difference of opinion on military management, divorced from the political and cultural context from which both men have emerged. For the future of the AFU, it is far more useful to view these two sides as a contest between theories of victory and governance -- and about what kind of force posture and approach to military management best achieves that end goal.
The Unmanned Systems Forces: The Command of the Future?
Within the AFU, the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) stand out as a source of pride for their technological and technical mastery of asymmetric warfare with attritable, adaptable tools (https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/Assets/Documents/2025-04-05-DRONES-MatlackSchwartzGill-FINAL-WEB-03.pdf). The USF make up just two percent of the military's personnel strength yet are responsible for roughly 30 percent of Russian losses, having irrevocably changed the character of the battlefield. Converting the AFU into a vehicle for a massively expanded USF is one possibility. That said, the remaining 98 percent of personnel (what might be termed the "traditional army") are just as essential, still accounting for the remaining 70 percent of Russian losses. To achieve full effect, hold the line, and sustain Ukraine's valiant defense over the past four years, both the "traditional" and "novel" camps have had to work together, regardless of friction, every step of the way. This is not as outlandish as it might seem at first blush. After all, it was under General Syrskyi's tenure that the world's first Unmanned Systems Force was codified as a branch of the armed forces.
But what would be the implications of either camp--the Traditionalists or the Technologists--taking the lead on the AFU's future? To structure this discussion, we consider four areas of potential change: unit structure, training, recruitment, and procurement. And for the purposes of this thought exercise, our assumption is a relatively steady state over the next two years, with no ceasefire and a constant level of ongoing hostilities with Russia.
Scenario One: Traditionalist Retrenchment
In this scenario, the General Staff fend off radical transformation while continuing an approach of large-scale but selective integration of emerging technologies. Doing so has preserved interoperability with NATO, avoiding the unknown vulnerabilities that radical restructuring might introduce, and leaned into a narrative of battlefield success and national effort to keep the ranks filled with volunteers.
Unit Structure
Over the course of the full-scale war, traditionalists have consistently favored fielding the maximum number of brigades. As fresh recruits complete basic training, they continue to be more or less evenly distributed across all active units, rather than being preferentially assigned to higher-performing or more combat-effective formations.
Despite efforts to centralize command and control into a Corps structure, the AFU has continued to centralize decision-making at the General Staff level. As in previous years, brigades subordinated to this new corps structure remain non-contiguous across the frontline -- a complicating factor that has continued to require constant intervention from the General Staff.
Training Structures
Under General Syrskyi's tenure, General Basic Military Training was extended from 30 to 51 days for standard entry into the Ground Forces. Under this regime, all soldiers are first trained as infantrymen, only later being potentially trained as Uncrewed Systems (UxS) operators. Given the prevalence of Russian infiltration tactics, and the subsequent risk of finding themselves in direct small-arms engagements, this approach persists. Moreover, despite Technologist aspirations toward full battlefield automation, human spotters and ground troops have remained essential for taking and holding positions. Centralized training ensures all personnel master foundational soldiering skills, enabling tactical movement and combined-arms discipline. In this scenario, technical expertise has remained a specialist force enhancer rather than the central organizing principle of individual training.
Recruitment
In a war of attrition, with frontline ground forces bearing the cost of holding the line, waves of mobilization have continued to be key to maintaining a viable force. As training structures continue to emphasize infantry skillsets, voluntary recruitment, which was already struggling to meet demand, has become increasingly inadequate. Despite public protest and frustration, more coercive forms of mobilization and conscription have become necessary to fill the ranks.
Procurement
Legacy systems, alongside a staggering scale of unmanned systems production, have remained the potent toolkit that has frozen the frontline against the Russian invaders. Innovation has been rewarded where it guarantees immediate return on investment. Contracts for procurement, refurbishment and upgrading of legacy systems have continued to scale consistent with trends from previous years, and large scale contracts continue to be awarded at the discretion of the General Staff, with more decentralized procurement and production of unmanned systems remaining the exception rather than the rule.
Assessment
The Traditionalist theory of victory emphasizes the need to preserve traditional offensive capability--the weapons and tactics which allowed Ukrainian forces to retake territory around Kharkiv and the city of Kherson in 2022 and punch into Kursk in 2024. In this now dominant view, over-reliance on unmanned systems, and the temptation of autonomous kill-chains that seek to separate weapon operators from danger, risks only prolonging the war. Only by eventually driving the invaders from occupied territory by maneuver can the war be ended justly. Offensive action by assault units, with uncrewed systems in a crucial but supporting function, remains indispensable.
This model has minimized structural risk by reinforcing combined-arms fundamentals and adapting new technology and tactics wholesale once they are proven, not before. While UxS and medium-range strike platforms offer unprecedented operational agility, they cannot independently solve every tactical problem. Heavy artillery, armored breachers, and conventional strike assets have remained indispensable for reducing hardened, protected infrastructure. By treating UxS as a preparatory enabler used to clear logistics, destroy enemy electronic warfare and soft targets, or degrade enemy air defenses ahead of ground maneuver, this approach has maintained operational balance while avoiding command duplication.
Scenario Two: Technologist Transformation
In this scenario, the Technologist camp is ascendant and leans fully into an emerging model--operationally, technologically, and organizationally. At the front line, human soldiers do less of the fighting directly; increasingly, the role of traditional frontline specialists (riflemen, machine gunners, etc.) shifts toward guarding strongpoints and securing rear areas to protect logistics and communications functions. ISR, defensive fires, short-range strike, and even ground assault are increasingly handled by remote and autonomous systems, with humans serving as a backup force rather than leading the charge. This has reduced AFU personnel's exposure to enemy direct fire and allows volunteers who might otherwise be unfit for frontline duty to continue contributing to combat operations. However, it has also destabilized existing structures, increased turnover at higher ranks, and opened opportunities for Russian forces to exploit seams in Ukrainian defenses--both physically and informationally. The AFU's rapid transformation also risks outpacing NATO's own force-transformation efforts, creating new obstacles to interoperability.
Unit Structure
Technologists have pursued corps structure reforms more thoroughly and centralizing command and control into coordinated hubs. High-performing brigades and corps have been further rewarded with recruits and materiel, while underperforming commands are gradually dissolved, with personnel redistributed to units under more effective leadership. Under this model, newer formations like the USF have been formalized as primary drivers of combat power. Tactical tasking has shifted away from traditional combined-arms brigades toward specialized autonomous units, with more offensive roles almost entirely delegated to autonomous platforms. Greater effort is directed toward strategic asymmetry--targeting enemy logistics at mid-range, and industry, supply chains, and military and energy infrastructure at long range and strategic depth. Where predominantly human formations undertake offensive operations, they do so in discrete, carefully bounded circumstances, helped by close collaboration with robotic systems and only in areas where systematic preparation has maximized their odds of success and survival.
Training Structures
Taking the Unmanned Systems Force's approach as indicative of the broader Technologist model, Ukrainian soldiers have continued to train first and foremost as infantry. Drone operators emerge from a unified fighting culture of frontline soldiers, not the reverse. That said, experimentation with and adoption of UxS has been more deliberately integrated into standard Basic Training, preparing soldiers to support unmanned systems-led operations. Defensive tactics, rather than the perceived costliness of offensive training, become the predominant skillset.
Recruitment
Under the Technologist approach, greater effort has gone into reforming recruitment along more practical lines. Conscription has been reimagined as an invitation to serve during defined, limited service periods, paired with a narrative emphasis on survivability as a core institutional value. Such a structure has built significant goodwill among the general population, but has not produced the raw numbers that mass mobilization would, further driving reliance on UxS and novel tactics and reducing the AFU's ability to surge forces to shore up weak points in the line or to contain enemy breakthroughs.
Procurement
Market forces have increasingly squeezed out manufacturers previously protected by unregulated contracts. Innovation has surged as small- and medium-sized enterprises seize smaller contracts on the periphery, while the Ukrainian and European drone-primes of tomorrow have consolidated market share and continue scaling up. Ukrainian firms have become increasingly viable players on the global defense market, but demand for their products has created some tension as the government tries to balance sustainable export success with continuing to feed the needs of the AFU.
Assessment
The Technologist theory of victory runs in a markedly different direction to the Traditionalist approach. Under this approach, unmanned systems offer asymmetric advantage and create distance between operators and the enemy. Offensive operations, rather than serving as the key to victory, become momentary and opportunistic--such as the recent pushes in the south following the whitelisting of Ukraine-based Starlink terminals, which triggered connection and communication failures on the Russian side. This camp instead pursues a theory of victory built on unrestricted technological dominance in the operational domain, particularly through medium- and deep-strike capabilities against Russian logistics and industrial infrastructure, gradually degrading the enemy's ability to wage war. Preserving human life, even at the cost of static defense, allows attritable forces to absorb the brunt of punishment. Victory, in this view, comes through economic and logistical collapse rather than decisive battlefield action.
Conclusion
A senior officer in the USF advised the authors not to reduce the question of the AFU's future to a simple dichotomy between old and new ways of doing things, especially regarding force structure. Unmanned systems, he explained, are a single tool in the commander's toolbox. Increasingly essential, but still just one capability among many that must be used together and selected carefully to achieve full operational success. Unmanned systems alone cannot take a heavily fortified position; yet in the Ukrainian battlefield of 2026, it is not possible to accomplish that task without them. Those systems are essential for harassing enemy infantry, armor, and logistics at short-to-medium range, and for destroying other soft targets--but heavy artillery and armor are still needed to destroy hardened targets, and infantry is still needed to move in and hold a position once cleared. This, indeed, is the purpose of Ukraine's domestic C2 system, DELTA: to link the full range of military capabilities together via live feed and to put the most appropriate tool to any given battlefield task. Whichever theory of victory Ukraine ultimately pursues, unmanned systems and traditional military hardware will need to be used in tandem to achieve it.
The distinction between traditional and novel approaches may be more clearly evidenced not in force structure itself, but in approaches to military culture and command (USF brigades, for instance, are largely staffed by recently recruited civilians at the command level), in approaches to recruitment, training, and procurement, and in differing theories of victory: combined maneuver and large-scale breakthrough versus attritional, asymmetric harassment of strategic and economic objectives.
Indeed, the distinction between the Unmanned Systems Forces (13 out of over 100 total AFU brigades) on one hand, and the land forces, National Guard, and territorial defense forces on the other, is again not as clear-cut as it may seem. While the Unmanned Systems Forces pioneer new technologies, procurement practices, and force structures, all of Ukraine's forces--land, territorial defense, and National Guard alike--use unmanned systems to varying degrees and in different ways.
The question is whether this robotic integration ends up proving that the fundamentals of war have changed and that revolutionary rather than evolutionary approaches are necessary for victory--or that war changes slowly and victory comes from paying heed to fundamentals. At this stage, the question is not yet answered, but the ultimate shape and fate of the AFU will be our strongest evidence one way or the other.
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More About This Commentary
Jacob Parakilas is a research leader at RAND Europe. Oliver Gill is Associate of the Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War Program at LSE IDEAS and managing director of 0I0 Consulting.
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Original text here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2026/09/tomorrows-victory-and-the-army-of-the-future.html
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Tomorrow's Victory and the Army of the Future: Forecasting the Next Steps in Ukraine's Military Evolution
Commentary
By Jacob Parakilas and Oliver Gill
Amidst a changing strategic context which has seen Russian fortunes recede from their high water mark, Ukraine's armed forces are facing another inflection point. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) of 2026 bear little resemblance to the army which faced Russia's initial seizure of Crimea, the force which fought Russian-backed separatists in Donbas from 2014-2022, ... Show Full Article SANTA MONICA, California, Sept. 5 -- Rand issued the following commentary: * * * Tomorrow's Victory and the Army of the Future: Forecasting the Next Steps in Ukraine's Military Evolution Commentary By Jacob Parakilas and Oliver Gill Amidst a changing strategic context which has seen Russian fortunes recede from their high water mark, Ukraine's armed forces are facing another inflection point. The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) of 2026 bear little resemblance to the army which faced Russia's initial seizure of Crimea, the force which fought Russian-backed separatists in Donbas from 2014-2022,and even the force that turned back Russia's attempt to decapitate Ukraine in February 2022. That army, which just over a decade ago was still defined by its Soviet legacy, has emerged today as something new: a hybrid force, in which legacy organizational structures and Soviet-era kit work alongside imported doctrines, arms from Western partners, and increasingly domestically produced equipment and experimental methods.
But like the war itself, that force has not reached a static final form. It remains a work in progress, adapting to circumstance as Ukraine continues to defend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. The question we ask here is: if Ukraine's armed forces are a substantial evolution relative to the beginning of the war, what form will they take on next?
The choice facing Ukraine's forces is far from a binary between East and West. As the full-scale war enters its fifth year, with its character still changing, the AFU continues to be tasked with building, deploying, and improving its existing capabilities while simultaneously developing innovative organizational structures, tactics, and doctrine to use them most effectively.
Two camps have emerged into view this last month, each associated with a senior official whose disputes became highly public and controversial. A traditionalist camp, personified by recently relieved Chief of the General Staff Oleksandr Syrskyi, highlights the way in which Ukraine's forces succeeded in holding the frontline against a materially and numerically superior adversary with an often-overlooked reliance on traditional tactics and weapons (https://static.rusi.org/tactical-developments-third-year-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2205.pdf). A reformist camp, symbolized by equally recently dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, champions technological superiority and suggests more fundamental restructuring to better leverage novel weapons, unconventional tactics, and reformed procurement practices favoring decentralization, SMEs, and increased transparency. Put simply, this reflects a struggle of the old guard against the next generation.
One could interpret the dismissal of the senior figures in both camps as a sign that Ukraine's leadership is trying to find a middle path, but the fundamental questions of how to continue the AFU's evolution in the face of ongoing Russian assaults is unlikely to disappear. And as General Syrskyi's successor Mykhailo Drapatyi assumes the role of Chief of the General Staff of the AFU, it is worth first questioning the validity of this framing. The distinction between Old and New, static and maneuverable, traditional and novel, is perhaps an oversimplification. The public rivalry between General Syrskyi and Fedorov cannot be viewed simply as a difference of opinion on military management, divorced from the political and cultural context from which both men have emerged. For the future of the AFU, it is far more useful to view these two sides as a contest between theories of victory and governance -- and about what kind of force posture and approach to military management best achieves that end goal.
The Unmanned Systems Forces: The Command of the Future?
Within the AFU, the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) stand out as a source of pride for their technological and technical mastery of asymmetric warfare with attritable, adaptable tools (https://www.lse.ac.uk/ideas/Assets/Documents/2025-04-05-DRONES-MatlackSchwartzGill-FINAL-WEB-03.pdf). The USF make up just two percent of the military's personnel strength yet are responsible for roughly 30 percent of Russian losses, having irrevocably changed the character of the battlefield. Converting the AFU into a vehicle for a massively expanded USF is one possibility. That said, the remaining 98 percent of personnel (what might be termed the "traditional army") are just as essential, still accounting for the remaining 70 percent of Russian losses. To achieve full effect, hold the line, and sustain Ukraine's valiant defense over the past four years, both the "traditional" and "novel" camps have had to work together, regardless of friction, every step of the way. This is not as outlandish as it might seem at first blush. After all, it was under General Syrskyi's tenure that the world's first Unmanned Systems Force was codified as a branch of the armed forces.
But what would be the implications of either camp--the Traditionalists or the Technologists--taking the lead on the AFU's future? To structure this discussion, we consider four areas of potential change: unit structure, training, recruitment, and procurement. And for the purposes of this thought exercise, our assumption is a relatively steady state over the next two years, with no ceasefire and a constant level of ongoing hostilities with Russia.
Scenario One: Traditionalist Retrenchment
In this scenario, the General Staff fend off radical transformation while continuing an approach of large-scale but selective integration of emerging technologies. Doing so has preserved interoperability with NATO, avoiding the unknown vulnerabilities that radical restructuring might introduce, and leaned into a narrative of battlefield success and national effort to keep the ranks filled with volunteers.
Unit Structure
Over the course of the full-scale war, traditionalists have consistently favored fielding the maximum number of brigades. As fresh recruits complete basic training, they continue to be more or less evenly distributed across all active units, rather than being preferentially assigned to higher-performing or more combat-effective formations.
Despite efforts to centralize command and control into a Corps structure, the AFU has continued to centralize decision-making at the General Staff level. As in previous years, brigades subordinated to this new corps structure remain non-contiguous across the frontline -- a complicating factor that has continued to require constant intervention from the General Staff.
Training Structures
Under General Syrskyi's tenure, General Basic Military Training was extended from 30 to 51 days for standard entry into the Ground Forces. Under this regime, all soldiers are first trained as infantrymen, only later being potentially trained as Uncrewed Systems (UxS) operators. Given the prevalence of Russian infiltration tactics, and the subsequent risk of finding themselves in direct small-arms engagements, this approach persists. Moreover, despite Technologist aspirations toward full battlefield automation, human spotters and ground troops have remained essential for taking and holding positions. Centralized training ensures all personnel master foundational soldiering skills, enabling tactical movement and combined-arms discipline. In this scenario, technical expertise has remained a specialist force enhancer rather than the central organizing principle of individual training.
Recruitment
In a war of attrition, with frontline ground forces bearing the cost of holding the line, waves of mobilization have continued to be key to maintaining a viable force. As training structures continue to emphasize infantry skillsets, voluntary recruitment, which was already struggling to meet demand, has become increasingly inadequate. Despite public protest and frustration, more coercive forms of mobilization and conscription have become necessary to fill the ranks.
Procurement
Legacy systems, alongside a staggering scale of unmanned systems production, have remained the potent toolkit that has frozen the frontline against the Russian invaders. Innovation has been rewarded where it guarantees immediate return on investment. Contracts for procurement, refurbishment and upgrading of legacy systems have continued to scale consistent with trends from previous years, and large scale contracts continue to be awarded at the discretion of the General Staff, with more decentralized procurement and production of unmanned systems remaining the exception rather than the rule.
Assessment
The Traditionalist theory of victory emphasizes the need to preserve traditional offensive capability--the weapons and tactics which allowed Ukrainian forces to retake territory around Kharkiv and the city of Kherson in 2022 and punch into Kursk in 2024. In this now dominant view, over-reliance on unmanned systems, and the temptation of autonomous kill-chains that seek to separate weapon operators from danger, risks only prolonging the war. Only by eventually driving the invaders from occupied territory by maneuver can the war be ended justly. Offensive action by assault units, with uncrewed systems in a crucial but supporting function, remains indispensable.
This model has minimized structural risk by reinforcing combined-arms fundamentals and adapting new technology and tactics wholesale once they are proven, not before. While UxS and medium-range strike platforms offer unprecedented operational agility, they cannot independently solve every tactical problem. Heavy artillery, armored breachers, and conventional strike assets have remained indispensable for reducing hardened, protected infrastructure. By treating UxS as a preparatory enabler used to clear logistics, destroy enemy electronic warfare and soft targets, or degrade enemy air defenses ahead of ground maneuver, this approach has maintained operational balance while avoiding command duplication.
Scenario Two: Technologist Transformation
In this scenario, the Technologist camp is ascendant and leans fully into an emerging model--operationally, technologically, and organizationally. At the front line, human soldiers do less of the fighting directly; increasingly, the role of traditional frontline specialists (riflemen, machine gunners, etc.) shifts toward guarding strongpoints and securing rear areas to protect logistics and communications functions. ISR, defensive fires, short-range strike, and even ground assault are increasingly handled by remote and autonomous systems, with humans serving as a backup force rather than leading the charge. This has reduced AFU personnel's exposure to enemy direct fire and allows volunteers who might otherwise be unfit for frontline duty to continue contributing to combat operations. However, it has also destabilized existing structures, increased turnover at higher ranks, and opened opportunities for Russian forces to exploit seams in Ukrainian defenses--both physically and informationally. The AFU's rapid transformation also risks outpacing NATO's own force-transformation efforts, creating new obstacles to interoperability.
Unit Structure
Technologists have pursued corps structure reforms more thoroughly and centralizing command and control into coordinated hubs. High-performing brigades and corps have been further rewarded with recruits and materiel, while underperforming commands are gradually dissolved, with personnel redistributed to units under more effective leadership. Under this model, newer formations like the USF have been formalized as primary drivers of combat power. Tactical tasking has shifted away from traditional combined-arms brigades toward specialized autonomous units, with more offensive roles almost entirely delegated to autonomous platforms. Greater effort is directed toward strategic asymmetry--targeting enemy logistics at mid-range, and industry, supply chains, and military and energy infrastructure at long range and strategic depth. Where predominantly human formations undertake offensive operations, they do so in discrete, carefully bounded circumstances, helped by close collaboration with robotic systems and only in areas where systematic preparation has maximized their odds of success and survival.
Training Structures
Taking the Unmanned Systems Force's approach as indicative of the broader Technologist model, Ukrainian soldiers have continued to train first and foremost as infantry. Drone operators emerge from a unified fighting culture of frontline soldiers, not the reverse. That said, experimentation with and adoption of UxS has been more deliberately integrated into standard Basic Training, preparing soldiers to support unmanned systems-led operations. Defensive tactics, rather than the perceived costliness of offensive training, become the predominant skillset.
Recruitment
Under the Technologist approach, greater effort has gone into reforming recruitment along more practical lines. Conscription has been reimagined as an invitation to serve during defined, limited service periods, paired with a narrative emphasis on survivability as a core institutional value. Such a structure has built significant goodwill among the general population, but has not produced the raw numbers that mass mobilization would, further driving reliance on UxS and novel tactics and reducing the AFU's ability to surge forces to shore up weak points in the line or to contain enemy breakthroughs.
Procurement
Market forces have increasingly squeezed out manufacturers previously protected by unregulated contracts. Innovation has surged as small- and medium-sized enterprises seize smaller contracts on the periphery, while the Ukrainian and European drone-primes of tomorrow have consolidated market share and continue scaling up. Ukrainian firms have become increasingly viable players on the global defense market, but demand for their products has created some tension as the government tries to balance sustainable export success with continuing to feed the needs of the AFU.
Assessment
The Technologist theory of victory runs in a markedly different direction to the Traditionalist approach. Under this approach, unmanned systems offer asymmetric advantage and create distance between operators and the enemy. Offensive operations, rather than serving as the key to victory, become momentary and opportunistic--such as the recent pushes in the south following the whitelisting of Ukraine-based Starlink terminals, which triggered connection and communication failures on the Russian side. This camp instead pursues a theory of victory built on unrestricted technological dominance in the operational domain, particularly through medium- and deep-strike capabilities against Russian logistics and industrial infrastructure, gradually degrading the enemy's ability to wage war. Preserving human life, even at the cost of static defense, allows attritable forces to absorb the brunt of punishment. Victory, in this view, comes through economic and logistical collapse rather than decisive battlefield action.
Conclusion
A senior officer in the USF advised the authors not to reduce the question of the AFU's future to a simple dichotomy between old and new ways of doing things, especially regarding force structure. Unmanned systems, he explained, are a single tool in the commander's toolbox. Increasingly essential, but still just one capability among many that must be used together and selected carefully to achieve full operational success. Unmanned systems alone cannot take a heavily fortified position; yet in the Ukrainian battlefield of 2026, it is not possible to accomplish that task without them. Those systems are essential for harassing enemy infantry, armor, and logistics at short-to-medium range, and for destroying other soft targets--but heavy artillery and armor are still needed to destroy hardened targets, and infantry is still needed to move in and hold a position once cleared. This, indeed, is the purpose of Ukraine's domestic C2 system, DELTA: to link the full range of military capabilities together via live feed and to put the most appropriate tool to any given battlefield task. Whichever theory of victory Ukraine ultimately pursues, unmanned systems and traditional military hardware will need to be used in tandem to achieve it.
The distinction between traditional and novel approaches may be more clearly evidenced not in force structure itself, but in approaches to military culture and command (USF brigades, for instance, are largely staffed by recently recruited civilians at the command level), in approaches to recruitment, training, and procurement, and in differing theories of victory: combined maneuver and large-scale breakthrough versus attritional, asymmetric harassment of strategic and economic objectives.
Indeed, the distinction between the Unmanned Systems Forces (13 out of over 100 total AFU brigades) on one hand, and the land forces, National Guard, and territorial defense forces on the other, is again not as clear-cut as it may seem. While the Unmanned Systems Forces pioneer new technologies, procurement practices, and force structures, all of Ukraine's forces--land, territorial defense, and National Guard alike--use unmanned systems to varying degrees and in different ways.
The question is whether this robotic integration ends up proving that the fundamentals of war have changed and that revolutionary rather than evolutionary approaches are necessary for victory--or that war changes slowly and victory comes from paying heed to fundamentals. At this stage, the question is not yet answered, but the ultimate shape and fate of the AFU will be our strongest evidence one way or the other.
* * *
More About This Commentary
Jacob Parakilas is a research leader at RAND Europe. Oliver Gill is Associate of the Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War Program at LSE IDEAS and managing director of 0I0 Consulting.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2026/09/tomorrows-victory-and-the-army-of-the-future.html
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary to City Journal Entitled 'West Faces Two Islams'
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on Sept. 4, 2026, by research fellow Zineb Riboua to City Journal:
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The West Faces Two Islams
A long-forecast civilizational struggle increasingly plays out not in the Middle East but in Western countries themselves.
-
Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center on the divide between Islamic and Western civilizations. Thirty ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on Sept. 4, 2026, by research fellow Zineb Riboua to City Journal: * * * The West Faces Two Islams A long-forecast civilizational struggle increasingly plays out not in the Middle East but in Western countries themselves. - Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center on the divide between Islamic and Western civilizations. Thirtyyears later, however, and a quarter-century after 9/11, the principal fault line runs through Islam itself, separating two ideological worlds.
Within Western diaspora communities, Islam has become intertwined with Third-Worldism and postcolonial theory, both of which see Western imperialism as the great evil of the modern era. Meantime, much of the Middle East and Asia has turned toward pragmatism, normalization, and acceptance of Western predominance as a geopolitical reality. The gap between these rival outlooks now exceeds the divide between Islam and the West that Huntington anticipated when his book first appeared.
After 9/11, American strategy focused on political Islam. Al-Qaeda and its eventual Islamic State offshoot, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran's Islamic Republic differed sharply in theology and tactics but shared a revolutionary ambition to overturn the Western led order. Today, that Islamist challenge has fragmented. Al-Qaeda has splintered, the Islamic State has lost its caliphate, Egypt has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Gulf monarchies increasingly treat Islamist movements as threats.
Iran remains the principal revolutionary holdout. The Islamic Republic defines itself through opposition to the United States and Israel while sustaining a regional network of armed proxies. Yet the foundations of that project have weakened. Hezbollah has suffered major battlefield losses, Iranian influence in Syria has contracted, nationwide protests in 2019 and 2022 exposed deep domestic disillusionment, and the ideals of the 1979 Iranian Revolution command little enthusiasm among younger generations. Tehran still exports its revolutionary ideology, but its influence across the broader Middle East continues to wane.
Much of the Middle East has chosen a different course. The Abraham Accords institutionalized security cooperation and trade with Israel. Morocco expanded ties with Jerusalem to strengthen diplomacy, defense, and economic growth. The United Arab Emirates built partnerships spanning artificial intelligence, aviation, finance, and defense. Saudi Arabia evaluates normalization through the lens of security guarantees, advanced technology, its Vision 2030 modernization program, and regional stability. Across the region, partnerships are judged less by ideology than by the capabilities they deliver.
This transformation reflects a broader shift in how Arab and Muslim states understand statecraft. Scientific discovery, industrialization, and institutional innovation have long rewarded societies that adopt the world's most advanced technologies, regardless of their origin. Middle Eastern governments have embraced the same logic after experiencing the costs of resisting Western innovations--most notably, the Ottoman Empire's centuries-long restriction on printing in Arabic script until 1727, which left the region lagging in the spread of knowledge long after Europe had surged ahead.
That historical stagnation gave rise to a century of Arab intellectual discourse centered on the crisis of modernity: the painful question of why Islamic societies had fallen behind the West. Thinkers such as Shakib Arslan, in works like Our Decline: Its Causes and Remedies, diagnosed cultural isolation and technological backwardness as the root of the problem and urged selective emulation of Western advances. Leading-edge technologies have become strategic assets because they determine military capability, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical influence. Leaders once legitimized through anti-Western resistance now measure success through modernization.
Western intellectual life has followed a different trajectory. Universities interpret the Middle East through postcolonial theory, with Edward Said's Orientalism becoming one of the field's canonical texts. Within that framework, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as the paradigmatic story of settler colonialism and resistance. After October 7, these ideas spread beyond academia into campus protests, divestment campaigns, professional associations, philanthropic organizations, and elections. Palestine became the organizing symbol for broader critiques of American influence, capitalism, and the liberal international order. Muslim identity merged with narratives of dispossession and resistance.
The consequences extend well beyond the campus. Anti-Israel activism once largely confined to Islamist organizations now operates comfortably within progressive politics. Zohran Mamdani's appointment of Ramzi Kassem--who represented Ahmed al-Darbi after his conviction for the al-Qaeda-linked MV Limburg bombing--as New York City's chief counsel illustrates that institutional migration. University encampments, municipal resolutions invoking "from the river to the sea," and coalitions organized around decolonization reflect the same evolution. Revolutionary Islam now finds expression through postcolonial theory rather than religious doctrine. Iranian-aligned clerical networks in places such as Dearborn, Michigan, frame public life around opposition to American influence and solidarity with Tehran.
The same rift has hardened in Europe, where diaspora activism contrasts with the pragmatism of Middle Eastern governments. Universities and progressive institutions have embraced postcolonialism, entrenching narratives of permanent resistance and contributing to a sharp rise in anti-Semitism, particularly on British campuses, where incidents increased more than fourfold after October 7. Gulf states view these environments as incubators of radicalization. The UAE, for example, removed British universities from its state scholarship program--even though nearly 9,000 Emirati students had studied in the U.K. in recent years--while still funding study in Israel.
These trajectories suggest sustained confrontation. The version of Islam that has emerged within Western universities, activist groups, and progressive politics clashes with both the Western societies in which it operates and the Middle Eastern governments now abandoning revolutionary politics.
Three forces drive this collision. First, the opposing sides draw political legitimacy from different sources. Much diaspora activism is rooted in historical grievance, anticolonial struggle, and opposition to Western influence, producing an anti-system worldview in which cooperation with the U.S.-led order can itself signify submission or betrayal. Pragmatic Middle Eastern governments increasingly see cooperation with the United States and Israel as a means to strengthen security, attract investment, acquire technology, and accelerate economic growth. This divide now plays out across Western democracies, where boycotts, campus protests, municipal resolutions, and electoral campaigns target both Arab governments pursuing these partnerships and the Western institutions that support them.
Second, priorities have diverged between governments in the Middle East and North Africa and some of their diasporas in the West. Regional governments increasingly prioritize investment, technology, military strength, and economic growth. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, are investing heavily in AI and data centers. Meantime, several pro-Palestinian movements in the West have expanded their campaigns from opposition to Israeli technology contracts to opposition to the data centers and cloud infrastructure supporting them. The divide increasingly places diaspora activism at odds with the economic and technological priorities of regional governments and complicates relations with the United States.
Third, Western institutions amplify the diaspora vision far beyond its demographic weight. Universities, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, media organizations, and segments of electoral politics have absorbed postcolonial ideas that recast Middle Eastern affairs through the lens of decolonization and racial justice. By contrast, Gulf restrictions on Islamist financing and expanding cooperation with Israel reflect a deliberate effort to contain the same ideological currents sweeping across Western public life. The United States and Europe thus face pressure from two directions: an ideological movement extending its institutional reach at home; and regional allies that regard that same movement as a direct threat.
Huntington was right that culture would matter after the Cold War, but he misidentified the principal fault line. Political evolution within civilizations matters more than the boundaries between them.
The United States will continue to confront Islamism in the twenty-first century. But the principal challenge will not come from Huntington's civilizational Islam, but instead from the version the West has itself helped cultivate: a diaspora Islam molded by Third-Worldism, postcolonial grievance, and a politics of permanent resistance.
Read in City Journal (https://www.city-journal.org/article/islam-middle-east-iran-israel-west).
* * *
Zineb Riboua is a research fellow with Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/west-faces-two-islams-zineb-riboua
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
The West Faces Two Islams
A long-forecast civilizational struggle increasingly plays out not in the Middle East but in Western countries themselves.
-
Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center on the divide between Islamic and Western civilizations. Thirty ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary on Sept. 4, 2026, by research fellow Zineb Riboua to City Journal: * * * The West Faces Two Islams A long-forecast civilizational struggle increasingly plays out not in the Middle East but in Western countries themselves. - Published in 1996, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, global conflict would center on the divide between Islamic and Western civilizations. Thirtyyears later, however, and a quarter-century after 9/11, the principal fault line runs through Islam itself, separating two ideological worlds.
Within Western diaspora communities, Islam has become intertwined with Third-Worldism and postcolonial theory, both of which see Western imperialism as the great evil of the modern era. Meantime, much of the Middle East and Asia has turned toward pragmatism, normalization, and acceptance of Western predominance as a geopolitical reality. The gap between these rival outlooks now exceeds the divide between Islam and the West that Huntington anticipated when his book first appeared.
After 9/11, American strategy focused on political Islam. Al-Qaeda and its eventual Islamic State offshoot, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran's Islamic Republic differed sharply in theology and tactics but shared a revolutionary ambition to overturn the Western led order. Today, that Islamist challenge has fragmented. Al-Qaeda has splintered, the Islamic State has lost its caliphate, Egypt has outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Gulf monarchies increasingly treat Islamist movements as threats.
Iran remains the principal revolutionary holdout. The Islamic Republic defines itself through opposition to the United States and Israel while sustaining a regional network of armed proxies. Yet the foundations of that project have weakened. Hezbollah has suffered major battlefield losses, Iranian influence in Syria has contracted, nationwide protests in 2019 and 2022 exposed deep domestic disillusionment, and the ideals of the 1979 Iranian Revolution command little enthusiasm among younger generations. Tehran still exports its revolutionary ideology, but its influence across the broader Middle East continues to wane.
Much of the Middle East has chosen a different course. The Abraham Accords institutionalized security cooperation and trade with Israel. Morocco expanded ties with Jerusalem to strengthen diplomacy, defense, and economic growth. The United Arab Emirates built partnerships spanning artificial intelligence, aviation, finance, and defense. Saudi Arabia evaluates normalization through the lens of security guarantees, advanced technology, its Vision 2030 modernization program, and regional stability. Across the region, partnerships are judged less by ideology than by the capabilities they deliver.
This transformation reflects a broader shift in how Arab and Muslim states understand statecraft. Scientific discovery, industrialization, and institutional innovation have long rewarded societies that adopt the world's most advanced technologies, regardless of their origin. Middle Eastern governments have embraced the same logic after experiencing the costs of resisting Western innovations--most notably, the Ottoman Empire's centuries-long restriction on printing in Arabic script until 1727, which left the region lagging in the spread of knowledge long after Europe had surged ahead.
That historical stagnation gave rise to a century of Arab intellectual discourse centered on the crisis of modernity: the painful question of why Islamic societies had fallen behind the West. Thinkers such as Shakib Arslan, in works like Our Decline: Its Causes and Remedies, diagnosed cultural isolation and technological backwardness as the root of the problem and urged selective emulation of Western advances. Leading-edge technologies have become strategic assets because they determine military capability, economic competitiveness, and geopolitical influence. Leaders once legitimized through anti-Western resistance now measure success through modernization.
Western intellectual life has followed a different trajectory. Universities interpret the Middle East through postcolonial theory, with Edward Said's Orientalism becoming one of the field's canonical texts. Within that framework, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict serves as the paradigmatic story of settler colonialism and resistance. After October 7, these ideas spread beyond academia into campus protests, divestment campaigns, professional associations, philanthropic organizations, and elections. Palestine became the organizing symbol for broader critiques of American influence, capitalism, and the liberal international order. Muslim identity merged with narratives of dispossession and resistance.
The consequences extend well beyond the campus. Anti-Israel activism once largely confined to Islamist organizations now operates comfortably within progressive politics. Zohran Mamdani's appointment of Ramzi Kassem--who represented Ahmed al-Darbi after his conviction for the al-Qaeda-linked MV Limburg bombing--as New York City's chief counsel illustrates that institutional migration. University encampments, municipal resolutions invoking "from the river to the sea," and coalitions organized around decolonization reflect the same evolution. Revolutionary Islam now finds expression through postcolonial theory rather than religious doctrine. Iranian-aligned clerical networks in places such as Dearborn, Michigan, frame public life around opposition to American influence and solidarity with Tehran.
The same rift has hardened in Europe, where diaspora activism contrasts with the pragmatism of Middle Eastern governments. Universities and progressive institutions have embraced postcolonialism, entrenching narratives of permanent resistance and contributing to a sharp rise in anti-Semitism, particularly on British campuses, where incidents increased more than fourfold after October 7. Gulf states view these environments as incubators of radicalization. The UAE, for example, removed British universities from its state scholarship program--even though nearly 9,000 Emirati students had studied in the U.K. in recent years--while still funding study in Israel.
These trajectories suggest sustained confrontation. The version of Islam that has emerged within Western universities, activist groups, and progressive politics clashes with both the Western societies in which it operates and the Middle Eastern governments now abandoning revolutionary politics.
Three forces drive this collision. First, the opposing sides draw political legitimacy from different sources. Much diaspora activism is rooted in historical grievance, anticolonial struggle, and opposition to Western influence, producing an anti-system worldview in which cooperation with the U.S.-led order can itself signify submission or betrayal. Pragmatic Middle Eastern governments increasingly see cooperation with the United States and Israel as a means to strengthen security, attract investment, acquire technology, and accelerate economic growth. This divide now plays out across Western democracies, where boycotts, campus protests, municipal resolutions, and electoral campaigns target both Arab governments pursuing these partnerships and the Western institutions that support them.
Second, priorities have diverged between governments in the Middle East and North Africa and some of their diasporas in the West. Regional governments increasingly prioritize investment, technology, military strength, and economic growth. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, are investing heavily in AI and data centers. Meantime, several pro-Palestinian movements in the West have expanded their campaigns from opposition to Israeli technology contracts to opposition to the data centers and cloud infrastructure supporting them. The divide increasingly places diaspora activism at odds with the economic and technological priorities of regional governments and complicates relations with the United States.
Third, Western institutions amplify the diaspora vision far beyond its demographic weight. Universities, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, media organizations, and segments of electoral politics have absorbed postcolonial ideas that recast Middle Eastern affairs through the lens of decolonization and racial justice. By contrast, Gulf restrictions on Islamist financing and expanding cooperation with Israel reflect a deliberate effort to contain the same ideological currents sweeping across Western public life. The United States and Europe thus face pressure from two directions: an ideological movement extending its institutional reach at home; and regional allies that regard that same movement as a direct threat.
Huntington was right that culture would matter after the Cold War, but he misidentified the principal fault line. Political evolution within civilizations matters more than the boundaries between them.
The United States will continue to confront Islamism in the twenty-first century. But the principal challenge will not come from Huntington's civilizational Islam, but instead from the version the West has itself helped cultivate: a diaspora Islam molded by Third-Worldism, postcolonial grievance, and a politics of permanent resistance.
Read in City Journal (https://www.city-journal.org/article/islam-middle-east-iran-israel-west).
* * *
Zineb Riboua is a research fellow with Hudson Institute's Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East. She specializes in Chinese and Russian involvement in the Middle East, the Sahel, and North Africa, great power competition in the region, and Israeli-Arab relations.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/west-faces-two-islams-zineb-riboua
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: To Save Medicare, Congress Must Cut Fraud
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Sept. 5 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
* * *
To save Medicare, Congress must cut fraud
Written by Matt Dean
From Rochester to the communities around Red Lake Reservation, Minnesotans depend on reliable, local care options. Our state has earned a reputation as one of the healthiest in the nation, with strong health outcomes and lower costs compared to similar states.
But that success is at risk. Minnesota is facing a growing physician shortage, ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Sept. 5 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * To save Medicare, Congress must cut fraud Written by Matt Dean From Rochester to the communities around Red Lake Reservation, Minnesotans depend on reliable, local care options. Our state has earned a reputation as one of the healthiest in the nation, with strong health outcomes and lower costs compared to similar states. But that success is at risk. Minnesota is facing a growing physician shortage,with an estimated 19% of Minnesota's medical workforce planning to retire or switch careers in the next few years. For Minnesota families, that will mean longer wait times and farther drives for essential medical care.
What's worse is that federal policies hammered out in Washington risk adding fuel to the fire of our statewide doctor shortage. One in five Minnesotans rely on Medicare to cover their doctor visits, but payment to physicians through this vital program has been cut year after year, compounding the financial pressure on local practices.
As Biden-era inflation ran rampant since 2021, physicians have faced repeated reimbursement cuts from Medicare. President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill offered a welcome one-year reprieve for physicians, but this year, doctors are once again staring down another cut. It's time Congress addresses this chronic issue, which seriously threatens competition in healthcare, disrupts patient choice, and harms our rural communities.
Unlike other healthcare providers, independent physicians do not receive automatic, annual inflationary updates like hospitals do. As costs rise, physicians are being forced to do more with less. As a result, many practices must choose between operating at a loss, reducing the number of Medicare patients they see, merging with a health system, or closing altogether.
Minnesota is expected to see population growth in several rural counties by 2055, with adults older than 65 outnumbering younger populations. This drastic increase, coupled with an increasing number of older adults, requires better accessibility to local doctors, especially primary care. If Medicare can't cover the cost of providing care, there will be fewer doctors to serve Minnesota's growing rural population, furthering medical deserts and the death of rural health access.
Minnesota's patients and physicians deserve better. We can no longer tolerate a system that imposes government price caps on care. By failing to meet the cost of maintaining a practice, the current system ignores the free market and discourages doctors from staying in private practice, leading to unwarranted mergers with large health systems. Worse, it could force doctors out of the field altogether or forego expanding into rural Minnesota.
This type of payment system consistently undercuts physician practices, discourages entrepreneurship, and accelerates healthcare consolidation. Worst of all, it leaves patients with fewer local options when they need it most.
States should urge Congress to build a system that adequately and efficiently reimburses physicians under Medicare. Lawmakers could really help patients by moving beyond annual short-term "fixes" to Medicare cuts and advance legislation to cut fraud, the most preventable form of medical cost inflation. When asked how to best combat the affordability crisis, Minnesotans selected "cutting fraud" as their top priority. Ultimately, this will help stabilize physician practices, address the shortage of doctors across the country, and protect Americans' access to care.
Minnesota's physicians are counting on Congress. Achieving long-term Medicare payment reform gives physicians the support they need and the help Minnesota patients deserve.
* * *
Matt Dean is a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.
matt.dean@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/to-save-medicare-congress-must-cut-fraud/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
To save Medicare, Congress must cut fraud
Written by Matt Dean
From Rochester to the communities around Red Lake Reservation, Minnesotans depend on reliable, local care options. Our state has earned a reputation as one of the healthiest in the nation, with strong health outcomes and lower costs compared to similar states.
But that success is at risk. Minnesota is facing a growing physician shortage, ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Sept. 5 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * To save Medicare, Congress must cut fraud Written by Matt Dean From Rochester to the communities around Red Lake Reservation, Minnesotans depend on reliable, local care options. Our state has earned a reputation as one of the healthiest in the nation, with strong health outcomes and lower costs compared to similar states. But that success is at risk. Minnesota is facing a growing physician shortage,with an estimated 19% of Minnesota's medical workforce planning to retire or switch careers in the next few years. For Minnesota families, that will mean longer wait times and farther drives for essential medical care.
What's worse is that federal policies hammered out in Washington risk adding fuel to the fire of our statewide doctor shortage. One in five Minnesotans rely on Medicare to cover their doctor visits, but payment to physicians through this vital program has been cut year after year, compounding the financial pressure on local practices.
As Biden-era inflation ran rampant since 2021, physicians have faced repeated reimbursement cuts from Medicare. President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill offered a welcome one-year reprieve for physicians, but this year, doctors are once again staring down another cut. It's time Congress addresses this chronic issue, which seriously threatens competition in healthcare, disrupts patient choice, and harms our rural communities.
Unlike other healthcare providers, independent physicians do not receive automatic, annual inflationary updates like hospitals do. As costs rise, physicians are being forced to do more with less. As a result, many practices must choose between operating at a loss, reducing the number of Medicare patients they see, merging with a health system, or closing altogether.
Minnesota is expected to see population growth in several rural counties by 2055, with adults older than 65 outnumbering younger populations. This drastic increase, coupled with an increasing number of older adults, requires better accessibility to local doctors, especially primary care. If Medicare can't cover the cost of providing care, there will be fewer doctors to serve Minnesota's growing rural population, furthering medical deserts and the death of rural health access.
Minnesota's patients and physicians deserve better. We can no longer tolerate a system that imposes government price caps on care. By failing to meet the cost of maintaining a practice, the current system ignores the free market and discourages doctors from staying in private practice, leading to unwarranted mergers with large health systems. Worse, it could force doctors out of the field altogether or forego expanding into rural Minnesota.
This type of payment system consistently undercuts physician practices, discourages entrepreneurship, and accelerates healthcare consolidation. Worst of all, it leaves patients with fewer local options when they need it most.
States should urge Congress to build a system that adequately and efficiently reimburses physicians under Medicare. Lawmakers could really help patients by moving beyond annual short-term "fixes" to Medicare cuts and advance legislation to cut fraud, the most preventable form of medical cost inflation. When asked how to best combat the affordability crisis, Minnesotans selected "cutting fraud" as their top priority. Ultimately, this will help stabilize physician practices, address the shortage of doctors across the country, and protect Americans' access to care.
Minnesota's physicians are counting on Congress. Achieving long-term Medicare payment reform gives physicians the support they need and the help Minnesota patients deserve.
* * *
Matt Dean is a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.
matt.dean@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/to-save-medicare-congress-must-cut-fraud/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center of the American Experiment Issues Commentary: Nukes and Natural Gas - End Two Bans, for the Price of One
MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Sept. 5 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary:
* * *
Nukes and natural gas: End two bans, for the price of one
Written by Darren Nelson
Electricity prices started to become more-and-more unaffordable in Minnesota from 2002 onwards. This was driven by the state's: 2001 Renewable Energy Objective (REO); 2007 Renewable Energy Standard (RES); 2022 Climate Action Framework (CAF); and 2023 Clean Electricity Standard (CES).
Electricity unaffordability is made ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Sept. 5 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * Nukes and natural gas: End two bans, for the price of one Written by Darren Nelson Electricity prices started to become more-and-more unaffordable in Minnesota from 2002 onwards. This was driven by the state's: 2001 Renewable Energy Objective (REO); 2007 Renewable Energy Standard (RES); 2022 Climate Action Framework (CAF); and 2023 Clean Electricity Standard (CES). Electricity unaffordability is madefar worse by two bans. One is the current ban on any new nuclear electricity generation since 1994. The other is the planned ban, under the 2021 Natural Gas Innovation Act (NGIA), on natural gas use in most homes and workplaces, by 2050, perhaps 2040 or even 2030.
The lack of additional nuclear generation has already contributed to electricity inflation since 2002. This has been mitigated by the addition of natural gas generation. However, the latter is 3 times more expensive than the former, and is usually better suited to peak-load than base-load. Although, wind and solar are 8x and 13x more expensive respectively than nuclear.
Prices
Electricity prices have been inflating in a sustainable way since 2002, as renewables increased, coal decreased and nuclear stayed the same, through to 2025. Natural gas prices, on the other hand, have slightly deflated over this same period of time.
* Chart 1 below shows that electricity prices, in dollars per one million British thermal units ($/MMBtu), rose by +118% from $16.99 in 2002 to $37.12 in 2025.
* Chart 1 also shows that natural gas prices ($/MMBtu) fell by -9% from $5.33 in 2002 to $4.86 in 2025.
* Chart 2 below plots the ratio (%) of electricity to natural gas prices, demonstrating that it skyrocketed by 3.5x from 216% in 2005 to 763% in 2025.
Uses
Electricity usage grew from 1978 to 2008, then has declined since, until 2025. Natural gas usage grew from 1978 to 1996, then took off in 1997 and 1998, as it started being used for electricity generation, in addition to residential, commercial and industrial uses.
* Chart 3 below shows electricity use (MMBtu) growing by +120% from 107 Million in 1978 to 235 Million in 2008 but then shrinking by -5% to 224 Million in 2025.
* Chart 3 also shows natural gas use (MMBtu) nicely grew by 28% from 195 Million in 1978 to 250 Million in 1996 but then took off by 100% to 501 Million in 2025.
* Chart 4 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas uses halved from a high of 88% in 1987 to a low of 43% in 2019 then flattened out since.
Revenues
Revenues, which are prices times uses, started to noticeably pile up for electricity public utilities in the renewables era, from 2002 onwards, and for natural gas companies in the electricity generation era, from 1997 onwards. The former has since reinforced the latter.
* Chart 5 below shows that electricity revenues increased by 131% from $3.6 Billion in 2002 to 8.3 Billion in 2025.
* Chart 5 also shows that natural gas revenues grew by 145% from $979 Million in 1995 to 2.4 Billion in 2025.
* Chart 6 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas revenues plummeted from 334% in 1987 to 129% in 2008 then exploded up to 341% by 2025.
Customers
Total electricity customers include residential, commercial, industrial and electricity generation. Total natural gas customers include the first three classes, but not the fourth.
* Chart 7 below shows that electricity customers went from 1.9 Million in 1987 to 2.6 Million in 2008, an increase of 37%, and grew a slower 12% to 2.9 Million by 2025.
* Chart 7 also shows that natural gas customers went from 936 Thousand in 1987 to 1.5 Million in 2006, an increase of 56%, and grew a further 20% to 1.8 Million by 2024.
* Chart 8 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas customers dropped from 197% in 1987 to 164% in 2006, then continued on to 160% by 2024.
Chart 7
Chart 8
Bills
Bills, which are revenues divided by customers, have been on a serious and sustained rise for electricity customers since 2004, overtaking natural gas bills from 2009 onwards. The latter, however, did spike up close to the former in both 2014 and 2002.
* Chart 9 below shows that electricity bills rose by 36% from $1,175 in 1987 to $1,601 in 2004 and then ramped up another 77% to $2,834 by 2025.
* Chart 9 also shows that natural gas bills went up by +19% from $694 in 1987 to $825 in 1995 before skyrocketing by +226% to $2,688 in 2008, and then has been up-and-down since, although has sunk to -41% lower at $1,574 in 2024.
* Chart 10 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas bills fell from 169% in 1987 to 78% in 2008, then reversed course up to 175% in 2012, and roller coastered along to be at 175% again in 2024.
Uses
Natural gas use for electricity generation took off from 1997 onwards. Also from 1997, industrial customers use began to be tracked, along side residential and commercial.
* Charts 11 and 12 below show natural gas use for electricity generation expanding exponentially from 1997 to 2025 by 1,507%, with overall use ratio rising from 2% to 20%.
* Charts 11 and 12 also show, for 1997 to 2025, residential growth of 9%, with overall use ratio falling from 38% to 29%;
* Charts 11 and 12 in addition show, for 1997 to 2025, commercial growth of 19%, with overall use ratio falling from 28% to 23%.
* Charts 11 and 12 show as well, for 1997 to 2025, industrial growth of 26%, with overall use ratio rising from 32% to 28%.
Conclusion
Dear fellow Minnesotans, rise up and have your say on nuclear power by September 14, as well as on natural gas by October 14 and October 21. There is a rare opportunity to both: lift the current ban on new nuclear generation; and stop the planned ban on natural gas use.
Further details are provided below on where to go to have your voice heard, to strongly say "Hands Off My Gas!" as well as "Nuke the Mandate, free the Nukes!" Also contact your state level DFL and GOP officials and candidates, before and after Tuesday November 3.
Nuke the Mandate, Free the Nukes! Minnesota's time is nigh
- Great Plains Institute (GPI) has a website devoted to a Request for Information (RFI) for the Minnesota Nuclear Energy Study. One can either upload a response document or enter responses by topic area in the online form. GPI also has a different website with further information on the study. Responses must be submitted by 11:59 pm on September 14, 2026. In the meantime, questions about this RFI may be submitted by email to GPI at mnnuclearstudy@gpisd.net.
Yet another Minnesota fraud? Natural Gas Innovation Act
- Public comments are due by 4:30pm on October 14 to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), regarding CenterPoint Energy's annual report, under the NGIA, on their natural gas replacement plans and spending as well as related rate increases.
- Public comments are due by 4:30pm on October 21 to the PUC, regarding Xcel Energy's annual report, under the NGIA, on their natural gas replacement plans and spending as well as related rate increases. Email: consumer.puc@state.mn.us.
* * *
Darren Nelson is a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.
darren.nelson@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text and charts here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/nukes-and-natural-gas-end-two-bans-for-the-price-of-one/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Nukes and natural gas: End two bans, for the price of one
Written by Darren Nelson
Electricity prices started to become more-and-more unaffordable in Minnesota from 2002 onwards. This was driven by the state's: 2001 Renewable Energy Objective (REO); 2007 Renewable Energy Standard (RES); 2022 Climate Action Framework (CAF); and 2023 Clean Electricity Standard (CES).
Electricity unaffordability is made ... Show Full Article MINNETONKA, Minnesota, Sept. 5 -- The Center of the American Experiment, a civic and educational organization that says it creates and advocates policies, issued the following commentary: * * * Nukes and natural gas: End two bans, for the price of one Written by Darren Nelson Electricity prices started to become more-and-more unaffordable in Minnesota from 2002 onwards. This was driven by the state's: 2001 Renewable Energy Objective (REO); 2007 Renewable Energy Standard (RES); 2022 Climate Action Framework (CAF); and 2023 Clean Electricity Standard (CES). Electricity unaffordability is madefar worse by two bans. One is the current ban on any new nuclear electricity generation since 1994. The other is the planned ban, under the 2021 Natural Gas Innovation Act (NGIA), on natural gas use in most homes and workplaces, by 2050, perhaps 2040 or even 2030.
The lack of additional nuclear generation has already contributed to electricity inflation since 2002. This has been mitigated by the addition of natural gas generation. However, the latter is 3 times more expensive than the former, and is usually better suited to peak-load than base-load. Although, wind and solar are 8x and 13x more expensive respectively than nuclear.
Prices
Electricity prices have been inflating in a sustainable way since 2002, as renewables increased, coal decreased and nuclear stayed the same, through to 2025. Natural gas prices, on the other hand, have slightly deflated over this same period of time.
* Chart 1 below shows that electricity prices, in dollars per one million British thermal units ($/MMBtu), rose by +118% from $16.99 in 2002 to $37.12 in 2025.
* Chart 1 also shows that natural gas prices ($/MMBtu) fell by -9% from $5.33 in 2002 to $4.86 in 2025.
* Chart 2 below plots the ratio (%) of electricity to natural gas prices, demonstrating that it skyrocketed by 3.5x from 216% in 2005 to 763% in 2025.
Uses
Electricity usage grew from 1978 to 2008, then has declined since, until 2025. Natural gas usage grew from 1978 to 1996, then took off in 1997 and 1998, as it started being used for electricity generation, in addition to residential, commercial and industrial uses.
* Chart 3 below shows electricity use (MMBtu) growing by +120% from 107 Million in 1978 to 235 Million in 2008 but then shrinking by -5% to 224 Million in 2025.
* Chart 3 also shows natural gas use (MMBtu) nicely grew by 28% from 195 Million in 1978 to 250 Million in 1996 but then took off by 100% to 501 Million in 2025.
* Chart 4 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas uses halved from a high of 88% in 1987 to a low of 43% in 2019 then flattened out since.
Revenues
Revenues, which are prices times uses, started to noticeably pile up for electricity public utilities in the renewables era, from 2002 onwards, and for natural gas companies in the electricity generation era, from 1997 onwards. The former has since reinforced the latter.
* Chart 5 below shows that electricity revenues increased by 131% from $3.6 Billion in 2002 to 8.3 Billion in 2025.
* Chart 5 also shows that natural gas revenues grew by 145% from $979 Million in 1995 to 2.4 Billion in 2025.
* Chart 6 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas revenues plummeted from 334% in 1987 to 129% in 2008 then exploded up to 341% by 2025.
Customers
Total electricity customers include residential, commercial, industrial and electricity generation. Total natural gas customers include the first three classes, but not the fourth.
* Chart 7 below shows that electricity customers went from 1.9 Million in 1987 to 2.6 Million in 2008, an increase of 37%, and grew a slower 12% to 2.9 Million by 2025.
* Chart 7 also shows that natural gas customers went from 936 Thousand in 1987 to 1.5 Million in 2006, an increase of 56%, and grew a further 20% to 1.8 Million by 2024.
* Chart 8 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas customers dropped from 197% in 1987 to 164% in 2006, then continued on to 160% by 2024.
Chart 7
Chart 8
Bills
Bills, which are revenues divided by customers, have been on a serious and sustained rise for electricity customers since 2004, overtaking natural gas bills from 2009 onwards. The latter, however, did spike up close to the former in both 2014 and 2002.
* Chart 9 below shows that electricity bills rose by 36% from $1,175 in 1987 to $1,601 in 2004 and then ramped up another 77% to $2,834 by 2025.
* Chart 9 also shows that natural gas bills went up by +19% from $694 in 1987 to $825 in 1995 before skyrocketing by +226% to $2,688 in 2008, and then has been up-and-down since, although has sunk to -41% lower at $1,574 in 2024.
* Chart 10 demonstrates below that the ratio of electricity to natural gas bills fell from 169% in 1987 to 78% in 2008, then reversed course up to 175% in 2012, and roller coastered along to be at 175% again in 2024.
Uses
Natural gas use for electricity generation took off from 1997 onwards. Also from 1997, industrial customers use began to be tracked, along side residential and commercial.
* Charts 11 and 12 below show natural gas use for electricity generation expanding exponentially from 1997 to 2025 by 1,507%, with overall use ratio rising from 2% to 20%.
* Charts 11 and 12 also show, for 1997 to 2025, residential growth of 9%, with overall use ratio falling from 38% to 29%;
* Charts 11 and 12 in addition show, for 1997 to 2025, commercial growth of 19%, with overall use ratio falling from 28% to 23%.
* Charts 11 and 12 show as well, for 1997 to 2025, industrial growth of 26%, with overall use ratio rising from 32% to 28%.
Conclusion
Dear fellow Minnesotans, rise up and have your say on nuclear power by September 14, as well as on natural gas by October 14 and October 21. There is a rare opportunity to both: lift the current ban on new nuclear generation; and stop the planned ban on natural gas use.
Further details are provided below on where to go to have your voice heard, to strongly say "Hands Off My Gas!" as well as "Nuke the Mandate, free the Nukes!" Also contact your state level DFL and GOP officials and candidates, before and after Tuesday November 3.
Nuke the Mandate, Free the Nukes! Minnesota's time is nigh
- Great Plains Institute (GPI) has a website devoted to a Request for Information (RFI) for the Minnesota Nuclear Energy Study. One can either upload a response document or enter responses by topic area in the online form. GPI also has a different website with further information on the study. Responses must be submitted by 11:59 pm on September 14, 2026. In the meantime, questions about this RFI may be submitted by email to GPI at mnnuclearstudy@gpisd.net.
Yet another Minnesota fraud? Natural Gas Innovation Act
- Public comments are due by 4:30pm on October 14 to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), regarding CenterPoint Energy's annual report, under the NGIA, on their natural gas replacement plans and spending as well as related rate increases.
- Public comments are due by 4:30pm on October 21 to the PUC, regarding Xcel Energy's annual report, under the NGIA, on their natural gas replacement plans and spending as well as related rate increases. Email: consumer.puc@state.mn.us.
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Darren Nelson is a Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.
darren.nelson@americanexperiment.org
* * *
Original text and charts here: https://www.americanexperiment.org/nukes-and-natural-gas-end-two-bans-for-the-price-of-one/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Center for American Progress: U.S. Economy Needs About 97,000 Jobs a Month To Keep the Share of People Working From Declining Further
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (TNSbrep) -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release on Sept. 4, 2026:
* * *
U.S. Economy Needs About 97,000 Jobs a Month To Keep the Share of People Working From Declining Further
The U.S. economy needs to add about 97,000 jobs every month just to keep employment levels from deteriorating further, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy added 162,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate remained at 4.1 percent. The increase in jobs exceeded ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (TNSbrep) -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release on Sept. 4, 2026: * * * U.S. Economy Needs About 97,000 Jobs a Month To Keep the Share of People Working From Declining Further The U.S. economy needs to add about 97,000 jobs every month just to keep employment levels from deteriorating further, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy added 162,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate remained at 4.1 percent. The increase in jobs exceededeconomists' expectations. Even with the strong end-of-summer job growth, the economy added an average of only 31,000 jobs a month over the past year, well below what CAP research finds is the level needed to keep the share of the population employed steady.
"The United States has a long way to go to return to a pre-pandemic labor market," said Cristina Tello-Trillo, chief economist at CAP and co-author of the analysis. "The economy needs to add roughly 97,000 jobs every month just to keep the share of people working from declining further. Job growth consistently below that level means fewer opportunities for workers amid uncertain economic conditions."
CAP's analysis finds:
* About 97,000 jobs per month are needed to stop further deterioration of the job market. CAP estimates that the economy must add 97,000 jobs each month over the next two years to keep the employment-to-population ratio within each age group steady at its July 2026 level.
* About 297,000 jobs per month are needed to return to the pre-pandemic labor market within two years. Restoring the employment-to-population ratio to its February 2020 level within two years would require approximately 297,000 jobs per month.
* The labor market is failing to keep pace with population growth. The economy added just 31,000 jobs per month, on average, from August 2025 to July 2026, while the employment-to-population ratio fell to 58.9 percent in July 2026, its lowest level since May 2014--outside the COVID-19 recession.
* BLS' long-term projections fall short. BLS projects employment will grow by 5.9 million jobs from 2025 to 2035, equivalent to roughly 49,000 jobs per month if growth were constant. That pace would still fall well below the level CAP estimates is necessary to prevent employment rates from declining.
Read the analysis: "2026 U.S. Job Growth Has Lagged Far Behind Optimal Levels" by Cristina Tello-Trillo and Christian E. Weller
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, please contact Christian Unkenholz at cunkenholz@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-u-s-economy-needs-about-97000-jobs-a-month-to-keep-the-share-of-people-working-from-declining-further/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
U.S. Economy Needs About 97,000 Jobs a Month To Keep the Share of People Working From Declining Further
The U.S. economy needs to add about 97,000 jobs every month just to keep employment levels from deteriorating further, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress.
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy added 162,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate remained at 4.1 percent. The increase in jobs exceeded ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 (TNSbrep) -- The Center for American Progress issued the following news release on Sept. 4, 2026: * * * U.S. Economy Needs About 97,000 Jobs a Month To Keep the Share of People Working From Declining Further The U.S. economy needs to add about 97,000 jobs every month just to keep employment levels from deteriorating further, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy added 162,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate remained at 4.1 percent. The increase in jobs exceededeconomists' expectations. Even with the strong end-of-summer job growth, the economy added an average of only 31,000 jobs a month over the past year, well below what CAP research finds is the level needed to keep the share of the population employed steady.
"The United States has a long way to go to return to a pre-pandemic labor market," said Cristina Tello-Trillo, chief economist at CAP and co-author of the analysis. "The economy needs to add roughly 97,000 jobs every month just to keep the share of people working from declining further. Job growth consistently below that level means fewer opportunities for workers amid uncertain economic conditions."
CAP's analysis finds:
* About 97,000 jobs per month are needed to stop further deterioration of the job market. CAP estimates that the economy must add 97,000 jobs each month over the next two years to keep the employment-to-population ratio within each age group steady at its July 2026 level.
* About 297,000 jobs per month are needed to return to the pre-pandemic labor market within two years. Restoring the employment-to-population ratio to its February 2020 level within two years would require approximately 297,000 jobs per month.
* The labor market is failing to keep pace with population growth. The economy added just 31,000 jobs per month, on average, from August 2025 to July 2026, while the employment-to-population ratio fell to 58.9 percent in July 2026, its lowest level since May 2014--outside the COVID-19 recession.
* BLS' long-term projections fall short. BLS projects employment will grow by 5.9 million jobs from 2025 to 2035, equivalent to roughly 49,000 jobs per month if growth were constant. That pace would still fall well below the level CAP estimates is necessary to prevent employment rates from declining.
Read the analysis: "2026 U.S. Job Growth Has Lagged Far Behind Optimal Levels" by Cristina Tello-Trillo and Christian E. Weller
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, please contact Christian Unkenholz at cunkenholz@americanprogress.org.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-u-s-economy-needs-about-97000-jobs-a-month-to-keep-the-share-of-people-working-from-declining-further/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues InfluenceWatch Wrapup on Sept. 4, 2026
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following InfluenceWatch wrapup on Sept. 4, 2026:
* * *
InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers' funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.
The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties research ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following InfluenceWatch wrapup on Sept. 4, 2026: * * * InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers' funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups. The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties researchto use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.
CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:
* Whitman-Walker Institute is a research organization based in Washington D.C. that provides health policy recommendations and conducts clinical trials and investigations. The Institute is listed as a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a left-of-center network of over 240 organizations that advocates and lobbies on civil rights legislation and presidential appointments. The Institute has previously received grants from George Washington University, the Ford Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the Greater Washington Community Foundation.
* Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation is a private grantmaking foundation whose grantees include left-of-center organizations promoting environmentalist and abortion access policies. As of 2025, the Foundation was listed as a signatory of "Meet the Moment," a pledge for increased grantmaking in response to federal government cuts organized by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The Foundation's grant recipients have included the Hopewell Fund, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Clean Energy Fund of Texas.
* Allstate Foundation is a private foundation affiliated with the insurance company Allstate whose grantees include left-of-center activist organizations. In 2024, the Foundation's "Racial Equity" grant program provided funding to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Prosperity Now, the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, and the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. Additional funding that year went to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, PolicyLink, the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development, and UnidosUS.
* Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is a research and advocacy organization that focuses on state policy issues such as child welfare, race, the economy, and immigration. Its 2024 funders included the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Arkansas Community Foundation, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its donors have also included Community Catalyst, the Economic Policy Institute, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
* Community Organizing and Family Issues is a Chicago-based organization that provides training to low-income residents on influencing public policy. In 2022, the organization received a $2 million grant from MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, which was reportedly the largest single donation it had received in its history at the time. It has also received funding from the Chicago Community Trust, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the K. Kellogg Foundation, the New Venture Fund, and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/influencewatch-friday-09-04-2026/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers' funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.
The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties research ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following InfluenceWatch wrapup on Sept. 4, 2026: * * * InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers' funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups. The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties researchto use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.
CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:
* Whitman-Walker Institute is a research organization based in Washington D.C. that provides health policy recommendations and conducts clinical trials and investigations. The Institute is listed as a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a left-of-center network of over 240 organizations that advocates and lobbies on civil rights legislation and presidential appointments. The Institute has previously received grants from George Washington University, the Ford Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the Greater Washington Community Foundation.
* Jacob and Terese Hershey Foundation is a private grantmaking foundation whose grantees include left-of-center organizations promoting environmentalist and abortion access policies. As of 2025, the Foundation was listed as a signatory of "Meet the Moment," a pledge for increased grantmaking in response to federal government cuts organized by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations. The Foundation's grant recipients have included the Hopewell Fund, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the Clean Energy Fund of Texas.
* Allstate Foundation is a private foundation affiliated with the insurance company Allstate whose grantees include left-of-center activist organizations. In 2024, the Foundation's "Racial Equity" grant program provided funding to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Prosperity Now, the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, and the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. Additional funding that year went to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, PolicyLink, the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development, and UnidosUS.
* Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families is a research and advocacy organization that focuses on state policy issues such as child welfare, race, the economy, and immigration. Its 2024 funders included the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Arkansas Community Foundation, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its donors have also included Community Catalyst, the Economic Policy Institute, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and the Marguerite Casey Foundation.
* Community Organizing and Family Issues is a Chicago-based organization that provides training to low-income residents on influencing public policy. In 2022, the organization received a $2 million grant from MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos, which was reportedly the largest single donation it had received in its history at the time. It has also received funding from the Chicago Community Trust, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the K. Kellogg Foundation, the New Venture Fund, and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/influencewatch-friday-09-04-2026/
[Category: ThinkTank]
America First Policy Institute Issues Commentary to The Hill: Europe's Digital Agenda is a Gift to China
WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Sept. 4, 2026, by Juan Andres Caro, senior fellow for American Justice Policy, to The Hill:
* * *
Europe's digital agenda is a gift to China
Powerful AI chips are moving into China again. As Beijing does everything it can to close the gap with American AI companies, the U.S. and its European allies should pursue a trade and technology agenda designed to keep that gap open.
Instead, Brussels is spending its energy dismantling the American companies that are doing the heavy lifting.
The ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Sept. 4, 2026, by Juan Andres Caro, senior fellow for American Justice Policy, to The Hill: * * * Europe's digital agenda is a gift to China Powerful AI chips are moving into China again. As Beijing does everything it can to close the gap with American AI companies, the U.S. and its European allies should pursue a trade and technology agenda designed to keep that gap open. Instead, Brussels is spending its energy dismantling the American companies that are doing the heavy lifting. TheDigital Markets Act is sold in Brussels as a competition and consumer measure. It is neither. It imposes costs, mandates, and compliance burdens triggered by arbitrary thresholds: market capitalization instead of proven dominance, user counts instead of demonstrated harm.
To read the full article, click here (https://thehill.com/opinion/international/6070296-eu-regulation-hurts-us-ai-leadership/).
* * *
Juan Andres Caro serves as a senior fellow for American Justice Policy at AFPI. Caro most recently served as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for international and space affairs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he served as the agency's chief international representative, directing U.S. engagement across fisheries governance, space commerce, satellite policy, deep-sea mining, and polar affairs.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/europes-digital-agenda-is-a-gift-to-china
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Europe's digital agenda is a gift to China
Powerful AI chips are moving into China again. As Beijing does everything it can to close the gap with American AI companies, the U.S. and its European allies should pursue a trade and technology agenda designed to keep that gap open.
Instead, Brussels is spending its energy dismantling the American companies that are doing the heavy lifting.
The ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 -- The America First Policy Institute issued the following excerpts of a commentary on Sept. 4, 2026, by Juan Andres Caro, senior fellow for American Justice Policy, to The Hill: * * * Europe's digital agenda is a gift to China Powerful AI chips are moving into China again. As Beijing does everything it can to close the gap with American AI companies, the U.S. and its European allies should pursue a trade and technology agenda designed to keep that gap open. Instead, Brussels is spending its energy dismantling the American companies that are doing the heavy lifting. TheDigital Markets Act is sold in Brussels as a competition and consumer measure. It is neither. It imposes costs, mandates, and compliance burdens triggered by arbitrary thresholds: market capitalization instead of proven dominance, user counts instead of demonstrated harm.
To read the full article, click here (https://thehill.com/opinion/international/6070296-eu-regulation-hurts-us-ai-leadership/).
* * *
Juan Andres Caro serves as a senior fellow for American Justice Policy at AFPI. Caro most recently served as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for international and space affairs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he served as the agency's chief international representative, directing U.S. engagement across fisheries governance, space commerce, satellite policy, deep-sea mining, and polar affairs.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/europes-digital-agenda-is-a-gift-to-china
[Category: ThinkTank]