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TechFreedom: Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank, issued the following news release:
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Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit
September 16, 2026
Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors do ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank, issued the following news release: * * * Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit September 16, 2026 Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors donot justify the law.
"The research does not establish that social media causes mental-health problems or addiction in minors," the amici told the court. "Every few decades, a new mode of communications stands accused of harming the young. Novels, films, comic books, television, video games, and more--all have had their turn being accused of corrupting young people. Each time, the evidence fails to sustain the alarm. Social media in general and personalized feeds specifically are the latest entries in this tradition--and the pattern holds."
"Fortunately, the First Amendment--and the absence of evidence behind California's supposed compelling interest--stand in the way of such misguided policy," the amici continued. "The most rigorous research in this area--including the largest meta-analyses and cohort studies--finds either no clinically meaningful association between social-media use and adolescent mental health or correlations so small as to lack practical significance. Claims about social media's supposed 'addictiveness' are equally weak. Evidence of an association between personalized feeds and youth mental-health is even thinner: There are zero peer-reviewed studies finding a causal link between personalization and harm to the mental health of minors."
"Minors report a generally positive relationship with social media," the amici concluded. "None of this is to deny that some adolescents struggle. The evidence, however, strongly suggests that social media itself is not the cause, and scientific research on personalized feeds is nonexistent. In fact, the best available survey data shows that the overwhelming majority of teenagers describe their experience with social media as positive or neutral."
The case is Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Bonta, No. 26-5120 (9th Cir.).
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Find this brief on our website, and share it on Twitter and Bluesky. We can be reached for comment at media@techfreedom.org. Read our related work, including:
* Amicus brief urging Fifth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Texas's App Store Accountability Act (June 24, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Fourth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Virginia's screen-time law (May 22, 2025)
* Congressional Republicans Push Bills That Would Block Kids Access To Content For Ideological Reasons, Techdirt (Mar. 9, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Eighth Circuit to block Arkansas's social-media age-verification law (Jan. 27, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging SCOTUS to vacate a Mississippi law containing broad age-verification and parental-consent mandates (July 24, 2025)
* Statement on the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton ruling (June 27, 2025)
* No, Internet Age Verification Has Not Been "Solved", Tech Policy Podcast (Apr. 30, 2025)
* Letter expressing concerns about the Kids Off Social Media Act (Feb. 5, 2025)
* Age-Verification Laws are a Verified Mistake, Law & Liberty (Jan. 9, 2025)
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About TechFreedom:
TechFreedom is a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.
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Original text here: https://techfreedom.org/social-media-panic-unsupported-by-evidence-researchers-tell-ninth-circuit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
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Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit
September 16, 2026
Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors do ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- TechFreedom, a technology policy think tank, issued the following news release: * * * Social Media Panic Unsupported by Evidence, Researchers Tell Ninth Circuit September 16, 2026 Yesterday, TechFreedom was joined by twenty-one scholars of youth mental health and technology in an amici brief urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the district court's ruling and hold that California's SB 976, the "Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act," violates the First Amendment. Our brief explains why speculative claims of harm to minors donot justify the law.
"The research does not establish that social media causes mental-health problems or addiction in minors," the amici told the court. "Every few decades, a new mode of communications stands accused of harming the young. Novels, films, comic books, television, video games, and more--all have had their turn being accused of corrupting young people. Each time, the evidence fails to sustain the alarm. Social media in general and personalized feeds specifically are the latest entries in this tradition--and the pattern holds."
"Fortunately, the First Amendment--and the absence of evidence behind California's supposed compelling interest--stand in the way of such misguided policy," the amici continued. "The most rigorous research in this area--including the largest meta-analyses and cohort studies--finds either no clinically meaningful association between social-media use and adolescent mental health or correlations so small as to lack practical significance. Claims about social media's supposed 'addictiveness' are equally weak. Evidence of an association between personalized feeds and youth mental-health is even thinner: There are zero peer-reviewed studies finding a causal link between personalization and harm to the mental health of minors."
"Minors report a generally positive relationship with social media," the amici concluded. "None of this is to deny that some adolescents struggle. The evidence, however, strongly suggests that social media itself is not the cause, and scientific research on personalized feeds is nonexistent. In fact, the best available survey data shows that the overwhelming majority of teenagers describe their experience with social media as positive or neutral."
The case is Meta Platforms, Inc. v. Bonta, No. 26-5120 (9th Cir.).
###
Find this brief on our website, and share it on Twitter and Bluesky. We can be reached for comment at media@techfreedom.org. Read our related work, including:
* Amicus brief urging Fifth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Texas's App Store Accountability Act (June 24, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Fourth Circuit to affirm a district court order blocking Virginia's screen-time law (May 22, 2025)
* Congressional Republicans Push Bills That Would Block Kids Access To Content For Ideological Reasons, Techdirt (Mar. 9, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging the Eighth Circuit to block Arkansas's social-media age-verification law (Jan. 27, 2026)
* Amicus brief urging SCOTUS to vacate a Mississippi law containing broad age-verification and parental-consent mandates (July 24, 2025)
* Statement on the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton ruling (June 27, 2025)
* No, Internet Age Verification Has Not Been "Solved", Tech Policy Podcast (Apr. 30, 2025)
* Letter expressing concerns about the Kids Off Social Media Act (Feb. 5, 2025)
* Age-Verification Laws are a Verified Mistake, Law & Liberty (Jan. 9, 2025)
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About TechFreedom:
TechFreedom is a nonprofit, nonpartisan technology policy think tank. We work to chart a path forward for policymakers towards a bright future where technology enhances freedom, and freedom enhances technology.
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Original text here: https://techfreedom.org/social-media-panic-unsupported-by-evidence-researchers-tell-ninth-circuit/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Jamestown Foundation Issues Commentary: Ukraine's Drone Campaign Reaches the Russian Arctic
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Sept. 17, 2026, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor:
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Ukraine's Drone Campaign Reaches the Russian Arctic
Joe Sailor
Executive Summary:
* Ukrainian strikes that damage Russian energy facilities in the Arctic could disrupt Moscow's growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and eliminate one of Russia's last safe harbors for energy export.
* After Kyiv's strike campaign against Russian oil and gas facilities in the country's west and against major export facilities ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Sept. 17, 2026, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor: * * * Ukraine's Drone Campaign Reaches the Russian Arctic Joe Sailor Executive Summary: * Ukrainian strikes that damage Russian energy facilities in the Arctic could disrupt Moscow's growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and eliminate one of Russia's last safe harbors for energy export. * After Kyiv's strike campaign against Russian oil and gas facilities in the country's west and against major export facilitieson the Baltic and Black Seas, Russia's nascent network of valuable LNG and oil production sites on the Gydan, Taymyr, and Yamal peninsulas may be next in line for Ukrainian strikes.
* Ukraine's drone strike campaign has expanded to the Russian Arctic, with long-range one-way attack drones striking the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug for the first time, almost 2,000 miles from Ukrainian borders.
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On September 9, Ukraine conducted its longest-distance drone strike yet inside Russian territory, hitting the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the country's Arctic north. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), reportedly a group of ten long-range FP-1 attack drones, were allegedly launched from Ukrainian territory in Kharkiv before traveling almost 2,000 miles and striking an energy production facility in the city of Novy Urengoy (Meduza; Ukrainian National News, September 9; Gazeta.ru; Lenta.ru, September 10).
The expansion of Ukraine's drone strike campaign to Yamalo-Nenets is likely to alarm Kremlin decision makers. North of Novy Urengoy, the Gydan, Yamal, and Taymyr peninsulas host a constellation of valuable oil and natural gas projects and affiliated production facilities. These facilities, thus far directly unaffected by Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russia, represent both Moscow's most important hub for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and the future of Russia's energy sector as older projects in Siberia steadily diminish in value.
Most prominent among these projects is Novatek's Yamal LNG, which produces about 17.4 million tons of LNG annually and accounts for almost two-thirds of the country's lucrative LNG exports (Yamal LNG, September 10, 2024; Kyiv School of Economics, May 6). Novatek's Arctic LNG-2, intended to become Russia's largest LNG project, has more than doubled output despite sanctions, shipping some 3.1 million tons so far in 2026 against 1.4 million tons in 2025 (The Moscow Times, September 16).
Rounding out the major projects is Rosneft's Vostok Oil project, some 300 miles to the east on the Taymyr peninsula. The newest of the three projects and, like Arctic LNG-2, frustrated by sanctions, Vostok Oil has so far fallen well short of the lofty production estimates Rosneft made in the years leading up to Russia's war against Ukraine (Carnegie Politika, July 25, 2025). In September, however, the project loaded its first crude oil for export, and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin has estimated that the project will produce some 30 million tons by 2027 (Kommersant, September 9). Supporting these projects are the port facilities of Sabetta and Bukhta Sever and a network of ice-class LNG and crude oil tankers to ply the oft-frozen Northern Sea Route.
The importance of these projects has only heightened for Moscow as Russian air defenses prove incapable of defending energy export facilities in the country's west. As critical Baltic and Black sea port facilities at Novorossiysk and Ust-Luga face an ever-increasing number of Ukrainian drone attacks, the Arctic projects and ports have become central to Russia's energy trade (Vot-tak.tv, August 14). Trade along Russia's Northern Sea Route is estimated to hit a record high in 2026, with growing LNG exports to the People's Republic of China (PRC) driving a substantial portion of the growth (High North News, August 18). Despite pushing to end LNG imports from Russia by January 2027, the European Union continues to purchase supplies from the country, providing Moscow another outlet for revenue (High North News, September 14).
The Arctic projects remain undefended against potential Ukrainian attacks. Russian Arctic air defenses are overwhelmingly concentrated hundreds of miles to the west near Russia's Northern Fleet on the Barents Sea, and these have been thinned out to reinforce Moscow's forces fighting against Ukraine (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 14). Should Kyiv continue to develop its long-range drone strike capability to the point where Russia's facilities on the Gydan, Yamal, and Taymyr peninsulas come under threat, they are likely to face the same fate as Russian oil and gas facilities in the country's metropolitan core, paralyzed by continuous Ukrainian attacks. Their remote Arctic location would also make repairs far costlier and more time-consuming.
Western leaders have urged caution on the Ukrainian energy strike campaign, with U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly brokering a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire on energy infrastructure strikes (Truth Social/@realDonaldTrump, September 14). Such an agreement is unlikely to hold. Similar attempts to broker an energy ceasefire in March-April 2025 quickly broke down and led Moscow and Kyiv to resume full-scale attacks on energy production facilities (BBC Russian Service, April 8, 2025).
With Western pressure unlikely to sustain a long-term Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire on strikes against energy production facilities, the opportunity to cripple Moscow's Arctic energy hub is one Ukraine would likely seize. To date, Ukraine's most notable strike against Russian Arctic energy was the naval drone attack off the coast of Libya on the Arctic Metagaz LNG carrier, which was carrying Arctic LNG-2 cargo to the PRC's port of Beihai (Kommersant; Telegram/@Minstras_Russia, March 4). Some observers inside Ukraine have begun to advocate taking the drone campaign directly to LNG facilities on Yamal, and as Kyiv's drone capabilities increase, such strikes are likely to become reality (24 Kanal, September 6).
A Ukrainian drone strike campaign against Russia's Arctic energy hub holds promise for Kyiv and peril for Moscow. An effective series of strikes could undercut the Kremlin's nascent efforts to foster the Northern Sea Route as a transportation corridor tying the PRC to Russia via the LNG trade, while also angering European states that continue to buy Russian gas. The risk of environmental catastrophe also looms, as a lack of Russian investment and disaster-response capability in the High North leaves the region vulnerable to large-scale oil and gas leaks (Bellona, May 16, 2025). Should Russia's Arctic energy facilities emerge as the newest front in Ukraine's drone strike campaign, the geopolitical ramifications are likely to be significant, with major downstream impacts on the global energy market.
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Joe Sailor is a Washington, D.C.-based analyst and researcher, specializing on political and security issues in Russia and the Arctic.
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Original text here: https://jamestown.org/ukraines-drone-campaign-reaches-the-russian-arctic/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Ukraine's Drone Campaign Reaches the Russian Arctic
Joe Sailor
Executive Summary:
* Ukrainian strikes that damage Russian energy facilities in the Arctic could disrupt Moscow's growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and eliminate one of Russia's last safe harbors for energy export.
* After Kyiv's strike campaign against Russian oil and gas facilities in the country's west and against major export facilities ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Jamestown Foundation issued the following commentary on Sept. 17, 2026, in the foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor: * * * Ukraine's Drone Campaign Reaches the Russian Arctic Joe Sailor Executive Summary: * Ukrainian strikes that damage Russian energy facilities in the Arctic could disrupt Moscow's growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade with the People's Republic of China (PRC) and eliminate one of Russia's last safe harbors for energy export. * After Kyiv's strike campaign against Russian oil and gas facilities in the country's west and against major export facilitieson the Baltic and Black Seas, Russia's nascent network of valuable LNG and oil production sites on the Gydan, Taymyr, and Yamal peninsulas may be next in line for Ukrainian strikes.
* Ukraine's drone strike campaign has expanded to the Russian Arctic, with long-range one-way attack drones striking the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug for the first time, almost 2,000 miles from Ukrainian borders.
-
On September 9, Ukraine conducted its longest-distance drone strike yet inside Russian territory, hitting the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the country's Arctic north. The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), reportedly a group of ten long-range FP-1 attack drones, were allegedly launched from Ukrainian territory in Kharkiv before traveling almost 2,000 miles and striking an energy production facility in the city of Novy Urengoy (Meduza; Ukrainian National News, September 9; Gazeta.ru; Lenta.ru, September 10).
The expansion of Ukraine's drone strike campaign to Yamalo-Nenets is likely to alarm Kremlin decision makers. North of Novy Urengoy, the Gydan, Yamal, and Taymyr peninsulas host a constellation of valuable oil and natural gas projects and affiliated production facilities. These facilities, thus far directly unaffected by Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russia, represent both Moscow's most important hub for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and the future of Russia's energy sector as older projects in Siberia steadily diminish in value.
Most prominent among these projects is Novatek's Yamal LNG, which produces about 17.4 million tons of LNG annually and accounts for almost two-thirds of the country's lucrative LNG exports (Yamal LNG, September 10, 2024; Kyiv School of Economics, May 6). Novatek's Arctic LNG-2, intended to become Russia's largest LNG project, has more than doubled output despite sanctions, shipping some 3.1 million tons so far in 2026 against 1.4 million tons in 2025 (The Moscow Times, September 16).
Rounding out the major projects is Rosneft's Vostok Oil project, some 300 miles to the east on the Taymyr peninsula. The newest of the three projects and, like Arctic LNG-2, frustrated by sanctions, Vostok Oil has so far fallen well short of the lofty production estimates Rosneft made in the years leading up to Russia's war against Ukraine (Carnegie Politika, July 25, 2025). In September, however, the project loaded its first crude oil for export, and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin has estimated that the project will produce some 30 million tons by 2027 (Kommersant, September 9). Supporting these projects are the port facilities of Sabetta and Bukhta Sever and a network of ice-class LNG and crude oil tankers to ply the oft-frozen Northern Sea Route.
The importance of these projects has only heightened for Moscow as Russian air defenses prove incapable of defending energy export facilities in the country's west. As critical Baltic and Black sea port facilities at Novorossiysk and Ust-Luga face an ever-increasing number of Ukrainian drone attacks, the Arctic projects and ports have become central to Russia's energy trade (Vot-tak.tv, August 14). Trade along Russia's Northern Sea Route is estimated to hit a record high in 2026, with growing LNG exports to the People's Republic of China (PRC) driving a substantial portion of the growth (High North News, August 18). Despite pushing to end LNG imports from Russia by January 2027, the European Union continues to purchase supplies from the country, providing Moscow another outlet for revenue (High North News, September 14).
The Arctic projects remain undefended against potential Ukrainian attacks. Russian Arctic air defenses are overwhelmingly concentrated hundreds of miles to the west near Russia's Northern Fleet on the Barents Sea, and these have been thinned out to reinforce Moscow's forces fighting against Ukraine (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 14). Should Kyiv continue to develop its long-range drone strike capability to the point where Russia's facilities on the Gydan, Yamal, and Taymyr peninsulas come under threat, they are likely to face the same fate as Russian oil and gas facilities in the country's metropolitan core, paralyzed by continuous Ukrainian attacks. Their remote Arctic location would also make repairs far costlier and more time-consuming.
Western leaders have urged caution on the Ukrainian energy strike campaign, with U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly brokering a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire on energy infrastructure strikes (Truth Social/@realDonaldTrump, September 14). Such an agreement is unlikely to hold. Similar attempts to broker an energy ceasefire in March-April 2025 quickly broke down and led Moscow and Kyiv to resume full-scale attacks on energy production facilities (BBC Russian Service, April 8, 2025).
With Western pressure unlikely to sustain a long-term Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire on strikes against energy production facilities, the opportunity to cripple Moscow's Arctic energy hub is one Ukraine would likely seize. To date, Ukraine's most notable strike against Russian Arctic energy was the naval drone attack off the coast of Libya on the Arctic Metagaz LNG carrier, which was carrying Arctic LNG-2 cargo to the PRC's port of Beihai (Kommersant; Telegram/@Minstras_Russia, March 4). Some observers inside Ukraine have begun to advocate taking the drone campaign directly to LNG facilities on Yamal, and as Kyiv's drone capabilities increase, such strikes are likely to become reality (24 Kanal, September 6).
A Ukrainian drone strike campaign against Russia's Arctic energy hub holds promise for Kyiv and peril for Moscow. An effective series of strikes could undercut the Kremlin's nascent efforts to foster the Northern Sea Route as a transportation corridor tying the PRC to Russia via the LNG trade, while also angering European states that continue to buy Russian gas. The risk of environmental catastrophe also looms, as a lack of Russian investment and disaster-response capability in the High North leaves the region vulnerable to large-scale oil and gas leaks (Bellona, May 16, 2025). Should Russia's Arctic energy facilities emerge as the newest front in Ukraine's drone strike campaign, the geopolitical ramifications are likely to be significant, with major downstream impacts on the global energy market.
* * *
Joe Sailor is a Washington, D.C.-based analyst and researcher, specializing on political and security issues in Russia and the Arctic.
* * *
Original text here: https://jamestown.org/ukraines-drone-campaign-reaches-the-russian-arctic/
[Category: ThinkTank]
Hudson Institute Issues Commentary Entitled 'America's Attrition Trap'
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary to Foreign Affairs:
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Sep 18, 2026
Foreign Affairs
America's Attrition Trap
The US Military Needs to Build Up Its Endurance
Nadia Schadlow
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Attrition is the defining feature of today's conflicts. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have become grinding contests over which side can exhaust the other's military capacity, economic resources, and political will. They all, of course, have unique characteristics, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary to Foreign Affairs: * * * Sep 18, 2026 Foreign Affairs America's Attrition Trap The US Military Needs to Build Up Its Endurance Nadia Schadlow - Attrition is the defining feature of today's conflicts. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have become grinding contests over which side can exhaust the other's military capacity, economic resources, and political will. They all, of course, have unique characteristics,but their similar trajectories reflect a deeper change in how wars now unfold. Throughout the war in Ukraine, artillery crews have repeatedly had guns and could locate their targets but have lacked the shells to fire. Ukrainian engineers have found that new kinds of drones are met with Russian countermeasures within weeks, undercutting any advantage they briefly had. And in Iran, the United States degraded its adversary's military and destroyed deeply buried nuclear facilities but failed to resolve the political problem that made the weapons a threat in the first place.
Each dynamic illustrates a different gap that helps explain why states increasingly choose strategies of attrition--or find themselves trapped in them. The first is between the military capacity that countries possess on paper and the power that they can actually deploy and sustain. The second is between traditional principles of warfare and a modern battlefield on which technology makes decisive breakthroughs increasingly difficult. The third is between military means and the political ends they are intended to achieve.
In combination, these mismatches push wars toward attrition. When countries cannot generate and regenerate enough military capacity to overwhelm an enemy, war becomes a test of endurance. When breakthroughs are elusive, pursuing incremental gains and the steady destruction of enemy capacity becomes attractive. And when the combatants' political end goals are too muddy or maximalist, imposing costs indefinitely can seem like the only alternative to capitulation.
For the United States, this poses a particular challenge. As American leaders increasingly seek short, decisive military operations, the United States may increasingly confront adversaries that see advantages in prolonging conflicts. The United States may not choose attrition, but it must be prepared to fight and win wars in which its adversaries do.
The Long and Grinding Road
Military power is traditionally measured by what countries possess--assets such as troops, weapons platforms, and munitions inventories. But recent wars have exposed the gap between nominal power and usable military capability. In his 2015 book, How the War Was Won, the historian Phillips O'Brien argued that even during World War II, winning the major battles that captured the popular imagination had actually become less important than dominating what he called the "super-battlefield," the vast expanse of factories and supply lines over which military power is produced and transported. Since that war, the ability to generate and sustain military power has only become more important. Modern militaries consume materiel at an incredible clip, and their adversaries have become increasingly capable of disrupting the production and supply networks needed to replace it.
When Russia invaded Ukraine again in early 2022, it appeared to possess overwhelming military superiority. Days before the invasion, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff told lawmakers that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a full-scale assault; speaking to The New York Times, Ukrainian commanders said that they believed that their forces had little chance against the more than 100,000 Russian troops that had massed on their border. Yet because it could not swiftly translate its vast resources into sustained combat power at the front, Russia failed to employ its capabilities effectively and take Kyiv.
But its material and manpower reserves allowed Russia to survive its early setbacks. Russia could mobilize more personnel, draw on large ammunition stocks, increase weapons production, and turn to partners such as North Korea to sustain its fight. Russia developed a theory of victory that proposed that it did not need to defeat Ukraine decisively if it could outlast it, wearing it down while waiting for Europe's and the United States' political commitment to weaken. Attrition gave Russia a military advantage. It also exposed a different problem among Ukraine's powerful NATO backers: aggregate power does not necessarily translate into the capacity to sustain a prolonged, high-consumption war.
The United States and NATO have far greater economic and military power than Russia does. Yet a war of attrition measures power differently. GDP cannot be fired from artillery tubes. Total defense spending cannot, itself, intercept missiles. The defense industries of Ukraine's partners were not built to replace ammunition rapidly; they were organized around peacetime production. They thus struggled to convert their latent potential quickly enough into shells, interceptors, and other usable military capabilities.
Russia and NATO thus encountered the capacity gap in almost opposite ways. Russia initially had capacity without commensurate effectiveness. Ukraine's backers had effectiveness without sufficient depth to sustain a prolonged war.
The conflict between U.S. and Israeli forces and Iran has presented a different iteration of this dynamic. Iran's conventional military power could not match that of Israel or the United States, but Tehran had spent decades building the ability to compensate for its conventional inferiority by creating military capacity outside its territory. Iran's network of proxies, sometimes called its "ring of fire," allowed Tehran to apply pressure across multiple fronts, forcing Israel and the United States to expend interceptors and sustain high operational tempos. Iran's use of inexpensive drones and missiles exposed the limitations of costly interceptors, expensive ships, and cutting-edge aircraft. In this strategy of attrition, Iran just needs to keep imposing costs and regenerating what is lost.
Adapt and Die
On the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, one U.S. general admired Moscow's "learning and adaptive force." Ukraine proved able to adapt even more quickly. But fast adaptation by both countries produced a paradox. Advantages that might have once enabled a breakthrough became temporary; neither side could sustain an advantage long enough to produce decisive results.
This is the second gap. As technology changes battlefields, traditional principles for creating a military advantage--such as maneuvering forces and massing combat power--are becoming harder to apply, driving wars toward attrition. In an era of drones, massed forces can make them easier to detect and destroy; the concentrations of forces and logistics required for large-scale maneuver can be detected and targeted before a breakthrough can be achieved. The element of surprise is harder to create when the battlefield is under constant observation. Technological advancement constantly creates new opportunities, but counter-adaptation erases the advantages quickly.
Quick adaptation during war is, of course, not new. But what is changing is the speed at which innovative tactics and operations can be rendered ineffective. In Ukraine, the feedback loop for learning runs directly from the battlefield to engineers and manufacturers and back again. QR codes allow troops on the ground to communicate problems such as drone malfunctions directly with support teams at the drone manufacturer, which can then alter production runs quickly. Ukrainian drone makers have described R & D cycles measured in weeks: as Russian jamming and faster drones defeat existing systems, manufacturers change frequencies, airframes, and propulsion and move the modified systems toward production. As the defense strategist Can Kasapoglu observed in July, "Unmanned systems, combat data, and human command have fused into kill chains that operate at unprecedented speed," meaning that the war in Ukraine "has evolved from a narrow contest of platforms to a battle fought at machine speed and dictated by algorithms."
Technology is also changing how traditional principles of war are applied in the Middle East. Consider mass. Israel and the United States have used intelligence, precision weapons, and long-range strikes to mass effects without having to mass literal forces. Iran has applied the same principle differently, using large salvos of missiles and drones to overwhelm sophisticated defenses. Because both sides can persistently generate concentrated effects without concentrating forces, destroying the enemy's ability to keep fighting becomes harder. The contest shifts toward repeated exchanges, replenishment, and endurance. In this sense, rapid adaptation can reinforce attrition.
Moving the Goalposts
The third and perhaps most difficult strategic gap is that the military means being deployed in the current wars are not producing the desired political outcomes. This is true in both Russia's war against Ukraine and in the broader Middle East confrontation involving the United States, Israel, Iran, and Iran's regional allies and proxies. In these wars, the combatants are not pursuing limited adjustments to territorial borders or modest changes in an adversary's behavior. The wars, instead, involve ambitious objectives that are nonnegotiable. Russia refuses to accept a Ukraine that is not in its sphere of control, and Ukraine is fighting for its right to exist as an independent state. Israel faces adversaries that reject its right to exist. The United States and Israel view an Iranian nuclear weapon as a fundamental threat to the regional security balance, while Iran sees its nuclear program and regional role as central to its security and power.
Such huge stakes leave little room for compromise, making the wars deeply intractable. Attrition is inflicting high costs in blood and treasure, apparently without narrowing those political differences As 2022 approached, Ukraine was already mired in the long-running conflict that had begun in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and had largely stagnated; NATO had never made a decision to push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders. Following Russia's invasion in 2022, Europe and the United States still did not make the expulsion of Russia from Ukrainian territory the explicit political objective, nor did they define an alternative political settlement. Instead, they often expressed their objectives as principles, such as supporting Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity for "as long as it takes" and refusing to reward Russian aggression. Military strategy, however, needs to be organized around a concrete, attainable political end state to be effective.
This ambiguity was understandable: defining a concrete objective and committing the military means to achieve that objective risked putting the United States and NATO on a direct collision course with Russia. But the result has been a military strategy detached from a political strategy--a determination merely to prevent Ukraine's defeat and impose costs on Russia indefinitely.
In the Middle East, a similar problem has emerged. Military force has imposed enormous costs on both Hamas and Iran, devastating their military facilities and killing their commanders. But it has not led either to capitulate. Early in Israel's war against Hamas, Graham Allison and Amos Yadlin argued in Foreign Affairs that Israel had defeated Hamas because it had killed most of its military leaders and more than half of its fighters. But destroying an enemy's military capacity is not the same as producing the political conditions required for a durable end to the conflict.
Iran has used politics--in this case, international pressure--as a tool in its war of attrition. It has sought to degrade international support for Israel, creating a political ring of fire around its adversary. Avril Haines, the United States' director of national intelligence under President Joe Biden, disclosed in July 2024 that Iranian government-linked actors were posing as activists online, encouraging Gaza protests, and providing financial support to protesters in the United States. International institutions, many European governments, and public opinion around the world have increased pressure on Israel, and its isolation has deepened. This has had strategic consequences. Although Israel has demonstrated that it can dominate militarily, it has struggled to translate those victories into a more favorable regional political environment. Its relationships with European and other foreign governments have deteriorated, and those divisions now complicate the international discussions over postwar arrangements in Gaza.
Break the Mold
For the United States, wars of attrition create a particular strategic dilemma. The Pentagon has planned for short, decisive military operations, and political leaders in Washington often promise them. Yet adversaries today have the means and incentives to deny the United States that kind of war and prolong conflicts in the hope that they can regenerate capacity, impose costs, and outlast American political will.
At the same time, the United States has built a military that relies heavily on relatively small numbers of sophisticated and expensive weapons systems, an industrial base that cannot rapidly replace many of these systems, and strategies that too often leave the political conditions required for victory unresolved. U.S. defense planners are making some efforts to change this military posture, but it will take time. The danger is not that the United States cannot win a war of attrition. It is that it remains organized around the expectation that it will not have to fight one.
Nearly four decades ago, the military thinker Edward Luttwak proposed a strategy of "relational maneuver," which would focus on attacking the enemy's internal cohesion and functioning rather than simply grinding down its forces. Recently, the Trump administration has hinted that it may be trying to adopt such a strategy in Iran. The newly launched Operation Economic Outcast aims, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, to create an "economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe." This broader pressure may weaken the regime or eventually cause it to collapse--if the United States finds the political will to sustain such pressure. That it will, however, cannot be assumed: rising energy prices and other economic costs will test Washington's willingness to maintain pressure over time. The most realistic outcome in Iran may be an unresolved stalemate.
Breaking this pattern will require a change in thinking in Washington. U.S. military leaders must build forces and concepts around the assumption that future wars are unlikely to be resolved quickly, while political leaders must be more realistic about whether the objectives they set can be achieved by military force alone and in a short time frame. Such adjustments will not be easy. The more dangerous possibility is that the United States will continue to drift into attritional conflicts because their price initially appears manageable, even as the human and economic costs mount. Americans may reject the notion of "forever wars." But U.S. adversaries have every incentive to deny the United States the short, decisive conflicts it prefers. And even wars that prove relatively easy to sustain can be very difficult to end for good.
Read in Foreign Affairs (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-attrition-trap).
* * *
Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. She conducts research and analysis on a range of issues at the intersection of strategy, national security, and technology.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/americas-attrition-trap-nadia-schadlow
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Sep 18, 2026
Foreign Affairs
America's Attrition Trap
The US Military Needs to Build Up Its Endurance
Nadia Schadlow
-
Attrition is the defining feature of today's conflicts. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have become grinding contests over which side can exhaust the other's military capacity, economic resources, and political will. They all, of course, have unique characteristics, ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- Hudson Institute, a research organization that says it promotes leadership for a secure, free and prosperous future, issued the following commentary to Foreign Affairs: * * * Sep 18, 2026 Foreign Affairs America's Attrition Trap The US Military Needs to Build Up Its Endurance Nadia Schadlow - Attrition is the defining feature of today's conflicts. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have become grinding contests over which side can exhaust the other's military capacity, economic resources, and political will. They all, of course, have unique characteristics,but their similar trajectories reflect a deeper change in how wars now unfold. Throughout the war in Ukraine, artillery crews have repeatedly had guns and could locate their targets but have lacked the shells to fire. Ukrainian engineers have found that new kinds of drones are met with Russian countermeasures within weeks, undercutting any advantage they briefly had. And in Iran, the United States degraded its adversary's military and destroyed deeply buried nuclear facilities but failed to resolve the political problem that made the weapons a threat in the first place.
Each dynamic illustrates a different gap that helps explain why states increasingly choose strategies of attrition--or find themselves trapped in them. The first is between the military capacity that countries possess on paper and the power that they can actually deploy and sustain. The second is between traditional principles of warfare and a modern battlefield on which technology makes decisive breakthroughs increasingly difficult. The third is between military means and the political ends they are intended to achieve.
In combination, these mismatches push wars toward attrition. When countries cannot generate and regenerate enough military capacity to overwhelm an enemy, war becomes a test of endurance. When breakthroughs are elusive, pursuing incremental gains and the steady destruction of enemy capacity becomes attractive. And when the combatants' political end goals are too muddy or maximalist, imposing costs indefinitely can seem like the only alternative to capitulation.
For the United States, this poses a particular challenge. As American leaders increasingly seek short, decisive military operations, the United States may increasingly confront adversaries that see advantages in prolonging conflicts. The United States may not choose attrition, but it must be prepared to fight and win wars in which its adversaries do.
The Long and Grinding Road
Military power is traditionally measured by what countries possess--assets such as troops, weapons platforms, and munitions inventories. But recent wars have exposed the gap between nominal power and usable military capability. In his 2015 book, How the War Was Won, the historian Phillips O'Brien argued that even during World War II, winning the major battles that captured the popular imagination had actually become less important than dominating what he called the "super-battlefield," the vast expanse of factories and supply lines over which military power is produced and transported. Since that war, the ability to generate and sustain military power has only become more important. Modern militaries consume materiel at an incredible clip, and their adversaries have become increasingly capable of disrupting the production and supply networks needed to replace it.
When Russia invaded Ukraine again in early 2022, it appeared to possess overwhelming military superiority. Days before the invasion, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff told lawmakers that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a full-scale assault; speaking to The New York Times, Ukrainian commanders said that they believed that their forces had little chance against the more than 100,000 Russian troops that had massed on their border. Yet because it could not swiftly translate its vast resources into sustained combat power at the front, Russia failed to employ its capabilities effectively and take Kyiv.
But its material and manpower reserves allowed Russia to survive its early setbacks. Russia could mobilize more personnel, draw on large ammunition stocks, increase weapons production, and turn to partners such as North Korea to sustain its fight. Russia developed a theory of victory that proposed that it did not need to defeat Ukraine decisively if it could outlast it, wearing it down while waiting for Europe's and the United States' political commitment to weaken. Attrition gave Russia a military advantage. It also exposed a different problem among Ukraine's powerful NATO backers: aggregate power does not necessarily translate into the capacity to sustain a prolonged, high-consumption war.
The United States and NATO have far greater economic and military power than Russia does. Yet a war of attrition measures power differently. GDP cannot be fired from artillery tubes. Total defense spending cannot, itself, intercept missiles. The defense industries of Ukraine's partners were not built to replace ammunition rapidly; they were organized around peacetime production. They thus struggled to convert their latent potential quickly enough into shells, interceptors, and other usable military capabilities.
Russia and NATO thus encountered the capacity gap in almost opposite ways. Russia initially had capacity without commensurate effectiveness. Ukraine's backers had effectiveness without sufficient depth to sustain a prolonged war.
The conflict between U.S. and Israeli forces and Iran has presented a different iteration of this dynamic. Iran's conventional military power could not match that of Israel or the United States, but Tehran had spent decades building the ability to compensate for its conventional inferiority by creating military capacity outside its territory. Iran's network of proxies, sometimes called its "ring of fire," allowed Tehran to apply pressure across multiple fronts, forcing Israel and the United States to expend interceptors and sustain high operational tempos. Iran's use of inexpensive drones and missiles exposed the limitations of costly interceptors, expensive ships, and cutting-edge aircraft. In this strategy of attrition, Iran just needs to keep imposing costs and regenerating what is lost.
Adapt and Die
On the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, one U.S. general admired Moscow's "learning and adaptive force." Ukraine proved able to adapt even more quickly. But fast adaptation by both countries produced a paradox. Advantages that might have once enabled a breakthrough became temporary; neither side could sustain an advantage long enough to produce decisive results.
This is the second gap. As technology changes battlefields, traditional principles for creating a military advantage--such as maneuvering forces and massing combat power--are becoming harder to apply, driving wars toward attrition. In an era of drones, massed forces can make them easier to detect and destroy; the concentrations of forces and logistics required for large-scale maneuver can be detected and targeted before a breakthrough can be achieved. The element of surprise is harder to create when the battlefield is under constant observation. Technological advancement constantly creates new opportunities, but counter-adaptation erases the advantages quickly.
Quick adaptation during war is, of course, not new. But what is changing is the speed at which innovative tactics and operations can be rendered ineffective. In Ukraine, the feedback loop for learning runs directly from the battlefield to engineers and manufacturers and back again. QR codes allow troops on the ground to communicate problems such as drone malfunctions directly with support teams at the drone manufacturer, which can then alter production runs quickly. Ukrainian drone makers have described R & D cycles measured in weeks: as Russian jamming and faster drones defeat existing systems, manufacturers change frequencies, airframes, and propulsion and move the modified systems toward production. As the defense strategist Can Kasapoglu observed in July, "Unmanned systems, combat data, and human command have fused into kill chains that operate at unprecedented speed," meaning that the war in Ukraine "has evolved from a narrow contest of platforms to a battle fought at machine speed and dictated by algorithms."
Technology is also changing how traditional principles of war are applied in the Middle East. Consider mass. Israel and the United States have used intelligence, precision weapons, and long-range strikes to mass effects without having to mass literal forces. Iran has applied the same principle differently, using large salvos of missiles and drones to overwhelm sophisticated defenses. Because both sides can persistently generate concentrated effects without concentrating forces, destroying the enemy's ability to keep fighting becomes harder. The contest shifts toward repeated exchanges, replenishment, and endurance. In this sense, rapid adaptation can reinforce attrition.
Moving the Goalposts
The third and perhaps most difficult strategic gap is that the military means being deployed in the current wars are not producing the desired political outcomes. This is true in both Russia's war against Ukraine and in the broader Middle East confrontation involving the United States, Israel, Iran, and Iran's regional allies and proxies. In these wars, the combatants are not pursuing limited adjustments to territorial borders or modest changes in an adversary's behavior. The wars, instead, involve ambitious objectives that are nonnegotiable. Russia refuses to accept a Ukraine that is not in its sphere of control, and Ukraine is fighting for its right to exist as an independent state. Israel faces adversaries that reject its right to exist. The United States and Israel view an Iranian nuclear weapon as a fundamental threat to the regional security balance, while Iran sees its nuclear program and regional role as central to its security and power.
Such huge stakes leave little room for compromise, making the wars deeply intractable. Attrition is inflicting high costs in blood and treasure, apparently without narrowing those political differences As 2022 approached, Ukraine was already mired in the long-running conflict that had begun in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and had largely stagnated; NATO had never made a decision to push Russia back to its pre-2014 borders. Following Russia's invasion in 2022, Europe and the United States still did not make the expulsion of Russia from Ukrainian territory the explicit political objective, nor did they define an alternative political settlement. Instead, they often expressed their objectives as principles, such as supporting Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity for "as long as it takes" and refusing to reward Russian aggression. Military strategy, however, needs to be organized around a concrete, attainable political end state to be effective.
This ambiguity was understandable: defining a concrete objective and committing the military means to achieve that objective risked putting the United States and NATO on a direct collision course with Russia. But the result has been a military strategy detached from a political strategy--a determination merely to prevent Ukraine's defeat and impose costs on Russia indefinitely.
In the Middle East, a similar problem has emerged. Military force has imposed enormous costs on both Hamas and Iran, devastating their military facilities and killing their commanders. But it has not led either to capitulate. Early in Israel's war against Hamas, Graham Allison and Amos Yadlin argued in Foreign Affairs that Israel had defeated Hamas because it had killed most of its military leaders and more than half of its fighters. But destroying an enemy's military capacity is not the same as producing the political conditions required for a durable end to the conflict.
Iran has used politics--in this case, international pressure--as a tool in its war of attrition. It has sought to degrade international support for Israel, creating a political ring of fire around its adversary. Avril Haines, the United States' director of national intelligence under President Joe Biden, disclosed in July 2024 that Iranian government-linked actors were posing as activists online, encouraging Gaza protests, and providing financial support to protesters in the United States. International institutions, many European governments, and public opinion around the world have increased pressure on Israel, and its isolation has deepened. This has had strategic consequences. Although Israel has demonstrated that it can dominate militarily, it has struggled to translate those victories into a more favorable regional political environment. Its relationships with European and other foreign governments have deteriorated, and those divisions now complicate the international discussions over postwar arrangements in Gaza.
Break the Mold
For the United States, wars of attrition create a particular strategic dilemma. The Pentagon has planned for short, decisive military operations, and political leaders in Washington often promise them. Yet adversaries today have the means and incentives to deny the United States that kind of war and prolong conflicts in the hope that they can regenerate capacity, impose costs, and outlast American political will.
At the same time, the United States has built a military that relies heavily on relatively small numbers of sophisticated and expensive weapons systems, an industrial base that cannot rapidly replace many of these systems, and strategies that too often leave the political conditions required for victory unresolved. U.S. defense planners are making some efforts to change this military posture, but it will take time. The danger is not that the United States cannot win a war of attrition. It is that it remains organized around the expectation that it will not have to fight one.
Nearly four decades ago, the military thinker Edward Luttwak proposed a strategy of "relational maneuver," which would focus on attacking the enemy's internal cohesion and functioning rather than simply grinding down its forces. Recently, the Trump administration has hinted that it may be trying to adopt such a strategy in Iran. The newly launched Operation Economic Outcast aims, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it, to create an "economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe." This broader pressure may weaken the regime or eventually cause it to collapse--if the United States finds the political will to sustain such pressure. That it will, however, cannot be assumed: rising energy prices and other economic costs will test Washington's willingness to maintain pressure over time. The most realistic outcome in Iran may be an unresolved stalemate.
Breaking this pattern will require a change in thinking in Washington. U.S. military leaders must build forces and concepts around the assumption that future wars are unlikely to be resolved quickly, while political leaders must be more realistic about whether the objectives they set can be achieved by military force alone and in a short time frame. Such adjustments will not be easy. The more dangerous possibility is that the United States will continue to drift into attritional conflicts because their price initially appears manageable, even as the human and economic costs mount. Americans may reject the notion of "forever wars." But U.S. adversaries have every incentive to deny the United States the short, decisive conflicts it prefers. And even wars that prove relatively easy to sustain can be very difficult to end for good.
Read in Foreign Affairs (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-attrition-trap).
* * *
Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. She conducts research and analysis on a range of issues at the intersection of strategy, national security, and technology.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/americas-attrition-trap-nadia-schadlow
[Category: ThinkTank]
Capital Research Center Issues Commentary: Unions and School Districts Have Been Clumsy AI Regulators
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary:
* * *
Unions and school districts have been clumsy AI regulators
We should be wary of what governments, schools and teacher unions plan to do with artificial intelligence. And rather than worrying about AI in the classroom, shouldn't they worry more about the declining performance of the kids in their schools?
by Kali Fontanilla
September 18, 2026
-
Nobody yet knows how much artificial intelligence (AI) will impact and change our society. We are still in the "dial-up" era of AI, which is where the internet ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary: * * * Unions and school districts have been clumsy AI regulators We should be wary of what governments, schools and teacher unions plan to do with artificial intelligence. And rather than worrying about AI in the classroom, shouldn't they worry more about the declining performance of the kids in their schools? by Kali Fontanilla September 18, 2026 - Nobody yet knows how much artificial intelligence (AI) will impact and change our society. We are still in the "dial-up" era of AI, which is where the internetwas well before WiFi. Into this uncertain mess the American Federation of Teachers has decided our classrooms need a union leading the way on AI regulation. But so far, teacher unions and their school districts have been even more lost than the rest of us.
Earlier this month Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the AI firm, accusing his former employer and its rival, OpenAI, of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." His former colleague Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, backed Coxon up and put a number on it: greater than a 10 percent chance AI kills us all within the next decade. Back in 2023, more than 350 AI executives and researchers, including the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, signed a statement saying mitigating AI's human extinction risk should rank alongside pandemics and nuclear war.
And these are the people building the things?
Enter the teacher unions
In 2024, the AFT passed a formal resolution on artificial intelligence with twelve separate provisions, including a declaration that AI's impact in the workplace is a mandatory subject of collective bargaining, and a demand for a "union seat at the table" during the development of AI policy and regulation. In 2025, the AFT launched a new initiative called the National Academy for AI Instruction with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic as partners; it aimed to train four hundred thousand teachers to be "AI fluent" by 2030.
Then, on September 9 of this year, AFT President Randi Weingarten, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, and Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith jointly announced the "National AI Safety & Privacy Standard," a legally binding agreement districts can fold directly into their existing Microsoft contracts. The standards stipulate that Microsoft cannot train its models on student data, track students, nor let an algorithm decide a kid's discipline or grades without an actual human signing off first. If Microsoft breaks any of these rules, districts can sue for damages. According to Weingarten, "Anything less than legally enforceable provisions is simply a wish list."
This deal took two years to negotiate, and in the end, the AFT and the UFT walked away with a real contract with a huge tech giant.
New York City and the Los Angeles Unified School District have recently skipped the negotiating table and went straight to banning AI. This is not actually a new story, but an old one on repeat. LAUSD banned the use of ChatGPT in December 2022, and NYC followed in January 2023, both citing cheating and accuracy concerns.
Then, within months, both flip-flopped completely. NYC's chancellor wrote an op-ed that May calling the previous ban a "knee-jerk fear." And by August 2023 LAUSD was moving toward a more permissive policy as well.
But now, three years later, both districts have swung all the way back, yet again. LAUSD announced new restrictions this year and is "reviewing safeguards." NYC, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, just enacted new restrictions including a full ban on student-facing generative AI for roughly 600,000 kids from pre-K through 8th grade. The new NYC policy discontinues 38 previously-approved AI programs and blocks ChatGPT and Claude outright for every grade.
That is two of the most left-leaning school systems in the country, banning, then embracing, then banning again, the same technology within four years. If the people trying to set the rules cannot decide whether the thing is dangerous or useful, then the rest of us should slow-roll our support for more rules.
Instead, the strict AI regulation train has been picking up speed.
Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. The proposal would permanently ban any AI system that matches or exceeds human intelligence, create a new cabinet-level federal agency to police AI, and provide penalties for up to twenty years in prison for violations.
Sanders's office has boasted that the hefty prison time equals what you'd get for trying to illegally build a nuclear weapon. Firms that violate the ban could face what the bill literally calls a "corporate death penalty."
And then this week Barack Obama and Kamala Harris jumped into the regulation fight, with Obama calling for Washington to "get proactive" with new laws and Harris calling for a federal oversight agency and an international treaty to slow AI down. It doesn't seem likely China will sign on to that treaty, and it's always time to get suspicious when Bernie, Obama, and Kamala are all asking for more government power.
Ask yourself who actually benefits if Washington hands a brand-new federal agency the power to approve which companies are allowed to build advanced AI at all. Definitely not the startup in a garage. Not the next new company founder trying to compete with Microsoft or Google. The compliance costs alone to survive a regime like the one Sanders is proposing would be significant for OpenAI or Microsoft, but a death sentence for anyone smaller trying to compete with them.
Back in the classrooms
What is being proposed is not a mere safety regulation. It would be a regulatory moat, dug by the government, enforced by severe prison time, that would benefit two or three companies already sitting at the top.
Controlling who gets to build AI means controlling what it says. The fewer firms allowed to build this technology, the fewer people get a say in what it is allowed to tell your kids.
Google's Gemini has already shown us how that can go off the rails. Type in "I am alone with a black person" and, per screenshots that circulated widely online this August, Gemini delivers a lecture about how fear based on race reinforces harmful generalizations. But type in "I am alone with a white person," and Gemini does not trigger that same guardrail, treating the situation more like a straightforward safety question instead.
Back in February 2024, Gemini went even further, flatly refusing to generate an image of a white person while happily generating every other race, and rewriting the Founding Fathers and German WWII soldiers as people of color in the process. This forced Google's CEO to issue an apology.
But none of this was a bug nor an accident. However dangerous AI chips may or may not be for humanity, they don't spring from the lab worried about racial sensitivities. A human wrote that behavior into the model on purpose.
Now imagine companies like this holding one of a very few government-approved licenses to build "safe" AI, with every smaller competitor regulated out of existence. How does that work out for the future of humanity?
Then, ask if it should be trusted in a classroom full of kids of any age.
Young people have already been switching to AI and away from Google for their internet searches. A 2026 Gallup and Lumina Foundation study found that most college students use AI at least weekly for coursework, with 45 percent using it to do research for their papers. That stat will only rise as AI advances. You cannot ban your way out of a technology that is so widespread.
But the government can try to decide whether a handful of tech companies get to own and control it exclusively, or whether anyone else still gets a shot.
Speaking of government monopolies, consider what this means for teacher unions.
The 2024 Nation's Report Card, our longest-running measure of student achievement, says only 31 percent of fourth graders and 30 percent of eighth graders are reading proficiently. Forty percent of fourth graders scored below even the "basic" level, the largest share since 2002! Twelfth grade reading scores have dropped ten points since 1992, and only 35 percent of graduating seniors read proficiently. Reading scores were dropping before the pandemic, and it has not stopped since. The use of AI alone cannot be blamed for these dismal stats, as we were well on our way to a barely literate younger generation before AI.
With that in mind, a teacher union with 1.9 million members spent two years building contract language, a national training academy, and a legally binding privacy standard for a technology that newly arrived in classrooms less than five years ago.
A third of our eighth graders cannot read at grade level, a problem that has been getting worse for over a decade, and I have yet to see an AFT press conference about that with anywhere near the same fire that has been aimed at the union's AI concerns.
It isn't necessarily wrong to have some district rules to deal with AI in the classroom, but having left-wing teacher unions directing it raises some big red flags.
It's not clear that anyone making these decisions about AI knows what they are doing. What I do know is that a third of our eighth graders cannot read a book at their own grade level. Maybe more of this energy now directed at regulating AI in the classroom should be redirected instead towards improving the learning that has been coming out of those classrooms.
Perhaps AI can even help.
* * *
Kali Fontanilla
Kali is serving as CRC's Senior fellow, particularly focusing on topics related to K-12 public education.
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/unions-and-school-districts-have-been-clumsy-ai-regulators/
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Unions and school districts have been clumsy AI regulators
We should be wary of what governments, schools and teacher unions plan to do with artificial intelligence. And rather than worrying about AI in the classroom, shouldn't they worry more about the declining performance of the kids in their schools?
by Kali Fontanilla
September 18, 2026
-
Nobody yet knows how much artificial intelligence (AI) will impact and change our society. We are still in the "dial-up" era of AI, which is where the internet ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Capital Research Center issued the following commentary: * * * Unions and school districts have been clumsy AI regulators We should be wary of what governments, schools and teacher unions plan to do with artificial intelligence. And rather than worrying about AI in the classroom, shouldn't they worry more about the declining performance of the kids in their schools? by Kali Fontanilla September 18, 2026 - Nobody yet knows how much artificial intelligence (AI) will impact and change our society. We are still in the "dial-up" era of AI, which is where the internetwas well before WiFi. Into this uncertain mess the American Federation of Teachers has decided our classrooms need a union leading the way on AI regulation. But so far, teacher unions and their school districts have been even more lost than the rest of us.
Earlier this month Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the AI firm, accusing his former employer and its rival, OpenAI, of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." His former colleague Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, backed Coxon up and put a number on it: greater than a 10 percent chance AI kills us all within the next decade. Back in 2023, more than 350 AI executives and researchers, including the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, signed a statement saying mitigating AI's human extinction risk should rank alongside pandemics and nuclear war.
And these are the people building the things?
Enter the teacher unions
In 2024, the AFT passed a formal resolution on artificial intelligence with twelve separate provisions, including a declaration that AI's impact in the workplace is a mandatory subject of collective bargaining, and a demand for a "union seat at the table" during the development of AI policy and regulation. In 2025, the AFT launched a new initiative called the National Academy for AI Instruction with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic as partners; it aimed to train four hundred thousand teachers to be "AI fluent" by 2030.
Then, on September 9 of this year, AFT President Randi Weingarten, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, and Microsoft Vice Chair Brad Smith jointly announced the "National AI Safety & Privacy Standard," a legally binding agreement districts can fold directly into their existing Microsoft contracts. The standards stipulate that Microsoft cannot train its models on student data, track students, nor let an algorithm decide a kid's discipline or grades without an actual human signing off first. If Microsoft breaks any of these rules, districts can sue for damages. According to Weingarten, "Anything less than legally enforceable provisions is simply a wish list."
This deal took two years to negotiate, and in the end, the AFT and the UFT walked away with a real contract with a huge tech giant.
New York City and the Los Angeles Unified School District have recently skipped the negotiating table and went straight to banning AI. This is not actually a new story, but an old one on repeat. LAUSD banned the use of ChatGPT in December 2022, and NYC followed in January 2023, both citing cheating and accuracy concerns.
Then, within months, both flip-flopped completely. NYC's chancellor wrote an op-ed that May calling the previous ban a "knee-jerk fear." And by August 2023 LAUSD was moving toward a more permissive policy as well.
But now, three years later, both districts have swung all the way back, yet again. LAUSD announced new restrictions this year and is "reviewing safeguards." NYC, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, just enacted new restrictions including a full ban on student-facing generative AI for roughly 600,000 kids from pre-K through 8th grade. The new NYC policy discontinues 38 previously-approved AI programs and blocks ChatGPT and Claude outright for every grade.
That is two of the most left-leaning school systems in the country, banning, then embracing, then banning again, the same technology within four years. If the people trying to set the rules cannot decide whether the thing is dangerous or useful, then the rest of us should slow-roll our support for more rules.
Instead, the strict AI regulation train has been picking up speed.
Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. The proposal would permanently ban any AI system that matches or exceeds human intelligence, create a new cabinet-level federal agency to police AI, and provide penalties for up to twenty years in prison for violations.
Sanders's office has boasted that the hefty prison time equals what you'd get for trying to illegally build a nuclear weapon. Firms that violate the ban could face what the bill literally calls a "corporate death penalty."
And then this week Barack Obama and Kamala Harris jumped into the regulation fight, with Obama calling for Washington to "get proactive" with new laws and Harris calling for a federal oversight agency and an international treaty to slow AI down. It doesn't seem likely China will sign on to that treaty, and it's always time to get suspicious when Bernie, Obama, and Kamala are all asking for more government power.
Ask yourself who actually benefits if Washington hands a brand-new federal agency the power to approve which companies are allowed to build advanced AI at all. Definitely not the startup in a garage. Not the next new company founder trying to compete with Microsoft or Google. The compliance costs alone to survive a regime like the one Sanders is proposing would be significant for OpenAI or Microsoft, but a death sentence for anyone smaller trying to compete with them.
Back in the classrooms
What is being proposed is not a mere safety regulation. It would be a regulatory moat, dug by the government, enforced by severe prison time, that would benefit two or three companies already sitting at the top.
Controlling who gets to build AI means controlling what it says. The fewer firms allowed to build this technology, the fewer people get a say in what it is allowed to tell your kids.
Google's Gemini has already shown us how that can go off the rails. Type in "I am alone with a black person" and, per screenshots that circulated widely online this August, Gemini delivers a lecture about how fear based on race reinforces harmful generalizations. But type in "I am alone with a white person," and Gemini does not trigger that same guardrail, treating the situation more like a straightforward safety question instead.
Back in February 2024, Gemini went even further, flatly refusing to generate an image of a white person while happily generating every other race, and rewriting the Founding Fathers and German WWII soldiers as people of color in the process. This forced Google's CEO to issue an apology.
But none of this was a bug nor an accident. However dangerous AI chips may or may not be for humanity, they don't spring from the lab worried about racial sensitivities. A human wrote that behavior into the model on purpose.
Now imagine companies like this holding one of a very few government-approved licenses to build "safe" AI, with every smaller competitor regulated out of existence. How does that work out for the future of humanity?
Then, ask if it should be trusted in a classroom full of kids of any age.
Young people have already been switching to AI and away from Google for their internet searches. A 2026 Gallup and Lumina Foundation study found that most college students use AI at least weekly for coursework, with 45 percent using it to do research for their papers. That stat will only rise as AI advances. You cannot ban your way out of a technology that is so widespread.
But the government can try to decide whether a handful of tech companies get to own and control it exclusively, or whether anyone else still gets a shot.
Speaking of government monopolies, consider what this means for teacher unions.
The 2024 Nation's Report Card, our longest-running measure of student achievement, says only 31 percent of fourth graders and 30 percent of eighth graders are reading proficiently. Forty percent of fourth graders scored below even the "basic" level, the largest share since 2002! Twelfth grade reading scores have dropped ten points since 1992, and only 35 percent of graduating seniors read proficiently. Reading scores were dropping before the pandemic, and it has not stopped since. The use of AI alone cannot be blamed for these dismal stats, as we were well on our way to a barely literate younger generation before AI.
With that in mind, a teacher union with 1.9 million members spent two years building contract language, a national training academy, and a legally binding privacy standard for a technology that newly arrived in classrooms less than five years ago.
A third of our eighth graders cannot read at grade level, a problem that has been getting worse for over a decade, and I have yet to see an AFT press conference about that with anywhere near the same fire that has been aimed at the union's AI concerns.
It isn't necessarily wrong to have some district rules to deal with AI in the classroom, but having left-wing teacher unions directing it raises some big red flags.
It's not clear that anyone making these decisions about AI knows what they are doing. What I do know is that a third of our eighth graders cannot read a book at their own grade level. Maybe more of this energy now directed at regulating AI in the classroom should be redirected instead towards improving the learning that has been coming out of those classrooms.
Perhaps AI can even help.
* * *
Kali Fontanilla
Kali is serving as CRC's Senior fellow, particularly focusing on topics related to K-12 public education.
* * *
Original text here: https://capitalresearch.org/article/unions-and-school-districts-have-been-clumsy-ai-regulators/
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: U.S.-China Summit - Too Big and Too Small to Fail
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
* * *
The U.S.-China Summit: Too Big and Too Small to Fail
Commentary by Scott Kennedy
September 18, 2026
Next week's summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be their second meeting of the year, with potentially two more engagements still to come. That the leaders of the world's two most powerful countries are meeting to talk about their bilateral relationship and international affairs is an achievement deserving appreciation. But the gap between their ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * The U.S.-China Summit: Too Big and Too Small to Fail Commentary by Scott Kennedy September 18, 2026 Next week's summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be their second meeting of the year, with potentially two more engagements still to come. That the leaders of the world's two most powerful countries are meeting to talk about their bilateral relationship and international affairs is an achievement deserving appreciation. But the gap between theirlimited ambitions in terms of likely topics and outcomes on the one hand and the challenges facing the world on the other points to a growing vacuum of global leadership.
Too Important to Permit Failure
Both the United States and China have a strong self-interest in keeping the relationship at least superficially calm. The American economy has substantial strengths, driven mainly by investments in AI, but also glaring weaknesses, among them persistent inflation, rising unemployment, and ballooning debt. The bond market is already wobbly, with yields continuing to rise, suggesting increasing anxieties about deep-seated risks in the economy's foundations. With the midterms approaching, it is not in the Trump administration's self-interest to generate a crisis in the bilateral relationship right now.
Beijing likely is computing a similar calculus. Despite--or perhaps because of--its technology gains, its macroeconomic forecast is equally if not more shaky. Xi is in the early months of planning for the 21st Party Congress, to be held in the fall of 2027, which likely will give him a fourth five-year term as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Like Trump, his political fortunes will be burnished by a stable international environment, which in large part comes down to keeping the peace with Washington.
Hence, observers can expect the current commercial ceasefire to be extended, with China permitting a greater flow of rare earths to the United States and others (Japan's access to rare earths is also a high priority for Washington) and the Trump administration not imposing cumulative tariffs on China higher than the rate in place as of the October 2025 Busan meeting. Beijing has reportedly sought to extend the current arrangement to the end of the Trump administration, whereas the United States prefers only a six-month extension. The obvious compromise would be one more year.
Too Small to Not Meet Expectations
The other reason the summit will not fail is because expectations have been whittled down to almost nothing. Beijing would likely prefer a long list of deliverables and Washington a shorter list, but neither has much ambition for path-breaking arrangements and compromises. Instead, expect limited deals, progress, and outcomes, such as both sides agreeing to reduce tariffs to standard levels for $30 billion of the other side's exports; more deals on Boeing planes, aircraft components, and agricultural goods; an initial discussion of AI safety issues; subtle adjustments in language about trying to end the conflicts in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf; and an emphasis on the importance of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and G20. Trump and Xi will likely meet in November in Shenzhen and in December in Miami for more of the same.
Not a G2
Although Trump and Xi will outwardly get along, this is not a G2. They are finding a way to manage the bilateral relationship, but they are not whatsoever working together as co-stewards of the international order. Nor is either interested in providing substantial public goods to provide conditions for a more enduring stability. This is a great power competition tempered by interdependence, a rough balance of power, and a need by both to handle challenges at home.
Given the widening global distribution of power, the decline of alliances, and the centrality of non-state actors, a G2 would never accurately reflect the significance of the U.S.-China relationship. That said, the meeting is a lost opportunity to tackle fundamental challenges, such as the international effects of macroeconomic imbalances, the growing risks from AI, the wars in Ukraine and Middle East, and climate change.
But the Trump administration is inherently constrained from doing more. It is pursuing an imperial foreign policy built primarily on a rigid emphasis on sovereignty, hard power, and bilateral interactions. Concerns about international legitimacy and multilateral norms that set guidelines for responsible behavior that constrain everyone, including the United States itself, are off the table. It also does not see a similar level of danger from climate change or AI safety as others do. Moreover, the breakdown of the interagency process means the Trump administration is typically bouncing from one problem to another and is insufficiently prepared to handle complex challenges over an extended period.
As a result, the administration's strategy is encountering obstacles on both the trade and security fronts, with problems in one area (e.g., an uneasy truce with Beijing) hindering success in others (e.g., gaining Beijing's help on Ukraine and Iran). Washington increasingly finds itself playing defense simultaneously on multiple fronts.
Conversely, Beijing could conceivably do much more, but it is content running out the clock on the Trump administration and keeping pressure from the European Union and others at bay, all while gradually advancing its own approach to global governance in the various fora it leads, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). Although Xi will likely bring an impressive group of corporate executives from some of China's leading high-tech firms, if past is prologue, they are unlikely to be given room to showcase their companies and expertise, meaning a lost opportunity for China to present a more nuanced picture of its society to an important audience.
A Lost Opportunity
Whenever the leaders of the planet's two most powerful countries--and some of their top companies--get together, there is a chance to do big things. But that would require sustained commitment from both parties, which does not currently seem possible in either capital. If nothing goes horribly wrong--and Xi expresses faux admiration at the White House's new helipad--the two sides will consider the gathering a success. But others should not.
* * *
Scott Kennedy is senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-china-summit-too-big-and-too-small-fail
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
The U.S.-China Summit: Too Big and Too Small to Fail
Commentary by Scott Kennedy
September 18, 2026
Next week's summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be their second meeting of the year, with potentially two more engagements still to come. That the leaders of the world's two most powerful countries are meeting to talk about their bilateral relationship and international affairs is an achievement deserving appreciation. But the gap between their ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * The U.S.-China Summit: Too Big and Too Small to Fail Commentary by Scott Kennedy September 18, 2026 Next week's summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be their second meeting of the year, with potentially two more engagements still to come. That the leaders of the world's two most powerful countries are meeting to talk about their bilateral relationship and international affairs is an achievement deserving appreciation. But the gap between theirlimited ambitions in terms of likely topics and outcomes on the one hand and the challenges facing the world on the other points to a growing vacuum of global leadership.
Too Important to Permit Failure
Both the United States and China have a strong self-interest in keeping the relationship at least superficially calm. The American economy has substantial strengths, driven mainly by investments in AI, but also glaring weaknesses, among them persistent inflation, rising unemployment, and ballooning debt. The bond market is already wobbly, with yields continuing to rise, suggesting increasing anxieties about deep-seated risks in the economy's foundations. With the midterms approaching, it is not in the Trump administration's self-interest to generate a crisis in the bilateral relationship right now.
Beijing likely is computing a similar calculus. Despite--or perhaps because of--its technology gains, its macroeconomic forecast is equally if not more shaky. Xi is in the early months of planning for the 21st Party Congress, to be held in the fall of 2027, which likely will give him a fourth five-year term as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Like Trump, his political fortunes will be burnished by a stable international environment, which in large part comes down to keeping the peace with Washington.
Hence, observers can expect the current commercial ceasefire to be extended, with China permitting a greater flow of rare earths to the United States and others (Japan's access to rare earths is also a high priority for Washington) and the Trump administration not imposing cumulative tariffs on China higher than the rate in place as of the October 2025 Busan meeting. Beijing has reportedly sought to extend the current arrangement to the end of the Trump administration, whereas the United States prefers only a six-month extension. The obvious compromise would be one more year.
Too Small to Not Meet Expectations
The other reason the summit will not fail is because expectations have been whittled down to almost nothing. Beijing would likely prefer a long list of deliverables and Washington a shorter list, but neither has much ambition for path-breaking arrangements and compromises. Instead, expect limited deals, progress, and outcomes, such as both sides agreeing to reduce tariffs to standard levels for $30 billion of the other side's exports; more deals on Boeing planes, aircraft components, and agricultural goods; an initial discussion of AI safety issues; subtle adjustments in language about trying to end the conflicts in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf; and an emphasis on the importance of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and G20. Trump and Xi will likely meet in November in Shenzhen and in December in Miami for more of the same.
Not a G2
Although Trump and Xi will outwardly get along, this is not a G2. They are finding a way to manage the bilateral relationship, but they are not whatsoever working together as co-stewards of the international order. Nor is either interested in providing substantial public goods to provide conditions for a more enduring stability. This is a great power competition tempered by interdependence, a rough balance of power, and a need by both to handle challenges at home.
Given the widening global distribution of power, the decline of alliances, and the centrality of non-state actors, a G2 would never accurately reflect the significance of the U.S.-China relationship. That said, the meeting is a lost opportunity to tackle fundamental challenges, such as the international effects of macroeconomic imbalances, the growing risks from AI, the wars in Ukraine and Middle East, and climate change.
But the Trump administration is inherently constrained from doing more. It is pursuing an imperial foreign policy built primarily on a rigid emphasis on sovereignty, hard power, and bilateral interactions. Concerns about international legitimacy and multilateral norms that set guidelines for responsible behavior that constrain everyone, including the United States itself, are off the table. It also does not see a similar level of danger from climate change or AI safety as others do. Moreover, the breakdown of the interagency process means the Trump administration is typically bouncing from one problem to another and is insufficiently prepared to handle complex challenges over an extended period.
As a result, the administration's strategy is encountering obstacles on both the trade and security fronts, with problems in one area (e.g., an uneasy truce with Beijing) hindering success in others (e.g., gaining Beijing's help on Ukraine and Iran). Washington increasingly finds itself playing defense simultaneously on multiple fronts.
Conversely, Beijing could conceivably do much more, but it is content running out the clock on the Trump administration and keeping pressure from the European Union and others at bay, all while gradually advancing its own approach to global governance in the various fora it leads, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). Although Xi will likely bring an impressive group of corporate executives from some of China's leading high-tech firms, if past is prologue, they are unlikely to be given room to showcase their companies and expertise, meaning a lost opportunity for China to present a more nuanced picture of its society to an important audience.
A Lost Opportunity
Whenever the leaders of the planet's two most powerful countries--and some of their top companies--get together, there is a chance to do big things. But that would require sustained commitment from both parties, which does not currently seem possible in either capital. If nothing goes horribly wrong--and Xi expresses faux admiration at the White House's new helipad--the two sides will consider the gathering a success. But others should not.
* * *
Scott Kennedy is senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-china-summit-too-big-and-too-small-fail
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Is the U.S. Banking System Ready for a Post-Quantum Future?
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
* * *
Is the U.S. Banking System Ready for a Post-Quantum Future?
Commentary by Sultan Meghji
September 17, 2026
Washington does not need another study of quantum risk in banking. It needs a supervisory deadline.
The reason is straightforward. Modern finance depends on public-key cryptography to authenticate transactions and protect sensitive data, but a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break much of that cryptography. Post-quantum cryptography--the new class of standards ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Is the U.S. Banking System Ready for a Post-Quantum Future? Commentary by Sultan Meghji September 17, 2026 Washington does not need another study of quantum risk in banking. It needs a supervisory deadline. The reason is straightforward. Modern finance depends on public-key cryptography to authenticate transactions and protect sensitive data, but a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break much of that cryptography. Post-quantum cryptography--the new class of standardsdesigned to remain secure against both classical and quantum computers--is the replacement. But migration is not a software patch. Finding where vulnerable cryptography resides, making systems capable of changing algorithms, and replacing protocols, certificates, hardware, and third-party connections is a multiyear engineering program.
The risk does not begin when such a computer arrives. Adversaries can collect encrypted financial traffic today and hold it until they can decrypt it later. And the exposure is not only financial--payment traffic can reveal supply chains, defense relationships, sanctions activity, and ultimately the structure of the U.S. economy itself.
Washington already recognizes the problem. Executive Order 14412 and Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-26-15 put federal high-value systems on a 2030-2031 migration clock. Yet the banking system the federal government supervises has no equivalent deadline. In January, the G7 Cyber Expert Group, cochaired by the U.S. Treasury and the Bank of England, laid out a financial sector roadmap calling for critical systems to transition by 2030-2032 and full migration by 2035. The Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and other U.S. regulators have issued guidance. None has named a year.
The result is an unusual contradiction: The federal government has imposed a deadline on itself while leaving the financial system largely to an advisory timetable. More striking still, no U.S. supervisor has required institutions to report their post-quantum readiness consistently, so Washington does not know how prepared the system actually is.
What the Threat Is, and What Fixing It Takes
The security of public-key cryptography rests on complex factoring and discrete-logarithm problems that classical computers cannot solve in useful time. Shor's algorithm, run on a sufficiently capable quantum computer, solves these problems directly. Encryption does not become easier to guess; instead, the underlying math becomes tractable. Symmetric encryption degrades but survives. Public-key cryptography does not.
Mitigation begins with a cryptographic inventory, but most institutions do not know where their keys live, which protocols depend on them, or which vendor connections carry them. It proceeds to crypto-agility--changing algorithms without re-architecting the systems built around them. Only then does replacement begin, across protocols, certificates, hardware security modules, and every third-party interface. This is a multiyear engineering program. Waiting for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer to arrive means starting too late.
The program is expensive and invisible, which is why it needs advocates outside the banking agencies. Encrypted financial traffic is not only money. Payment flows are a map of the industrial base: which firms supply which primes, how defense contractors are financed, and where sanctioned entities move value. An adversary that decrypts a decade of intercepted financial messaging in 2032 does not read balances; it reads the structure of the U.S. economy, retroactively. That is an economic security and intelligence problem before it is a compliance problem. And it is already underway: Adversaries are collecting encrypted traffic now so they can decrypt it later. Anne Neuberger, formerly deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, wrote in Foreign Affairs this year that China and Russia are doing precisely this.
It is worth being honest about what can and cannot be recovered. Traffic already harvested is gone. No migration returns it and no future standard protects it. What migration to quantum-resistant systems does is stop the accrual: Every month of delay adds to a pile that will one day be read in full by someone who was patient. Any record that must remain confidential past 2030--a mortgage file, a trust account, the systems adjacent to them--is already exposed.
Is the United States Ready for Post-Quantum Migration?
The natural next question is how prepared U.S. financial institutions are to migrate before quantum computers can compromise the public-key cryptography they rely on. The honest answer is that nobody knows, because nobody has been required to say. The United States has about 8,500 federally insured depository institutions--roughly 4,280 banks and thrifts, and 4,250 credit unions. About 400 of these file annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Over the past year, according to a search of these filings, only about 1 in 10 of those mentions quantum at all, nearly always as a single line in a list of emerging technologies.
What institutions disclose bears no relationship to what they are doing. Wells Fargo is a named collaborator on the federal government's own post-quantum migration project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology; however, the word "quantum" does not appear in its annual report. Ally Financial describes a multiyear post-quantum readiness program, with a cryptographic inventory and board reporting--in its proxy statement, where no risk analyst looks. The clearest public language appears outside the U.S. subsidiary of Spanish bank Santander: Banco Santander's global 2025 annual report describes the group as playing a leadership role in post-quantum security, while Santander UK identifies quantum technology as an emerging risk and says it maintains an inventory of internal cryptography.
This incoherence is not negligence. It is the absence of a question anyone is required to answer the same way twice--and for most of the system, there is nowhere to answer it. The roughly 8,100 institutions outside SEC reporting have no narrative disclosure vehicle at all: The Call Report, submitted by banks to financial regulators, is a set of numeric schedules, with no field in which a bank could describe its cryptographic posture if it wanted to.
Other governments have measured quantum readiness. Hong Kong has announced a Quantum Preparedness Index as part of its 2026 banking-sector resilience agenda; Swiss supervisors surveyed 60 financial institutions and found that 72 percent had not yet planned or implemented measures relating to quantum-safe encryption. No U.S. supervisor has measured anything quantum-related, and the major 2026 surveys of U.S. bank and credit union executives do not ask. International infrastructure is already beginning to impose its own timetable: SWIFT, the secure messaging network used by the financial industry for international transactions, has put its community on an upgrade path toward post-quantum readiness, with mandatory Release 8.0 planned for the end of July 2027 and Release 7.9 reaching end of support 15 months later. A Belgian cooperative is therefore imposing an operational migration clock on U.S. institutions before any U.S. regulator has set a comparable date.
Y2K as a Case Study
Y2K is a useful precedent--while the technical problem is very different, the management problem is the same one that U.S. banking faces today. The financial system completed a forced, sector-wide migration on a calendar because three conditions held at once: (1) a date certain, (2) examination against that date, and (3) shared vendor infrastructure that could be fixed once and inherited many times. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) set December 31, 1998, as the milestone for substantially completing tests of internal mission-critical systems; by the end of the first quarter of 1999, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reported that 95 percent of national banks had completed that testing.
Post-quantum migration has the third condition, but it lacks the first two. That the work is genuinely hard is not speculation: When the BIS Innovation Hub, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, Deutsche Bundesbank, Nexi-Colt, and SWIFT replaced traditional digital signatures with post-quantum equivalents in an operational payment flow last December, post-quantum signature verification averaged 209.9 milliseconds versus 28.1 milliseconds for traditional cryptography, and the project identified larger key sizes and additional infrastructure demands. But ultimately, all test scenarios--and the overall experiment--succeeded. It also demonstrated that this is a problem of engineering, not configuration.
Shared infrastructure and the concentration of technology vendors create an opportunity. For most smaller institutions, the relevant cryptographic infrastructure is not designed and operated in-house; it is embedded in systems supplied by core processors and other technology vendors. FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry serve a large share of those institutions, yet none has publicly laid out a comprehensive post-quantum migration timetable--Jack Henry's own list of the top cybersecurity trends for 2026 does not mention quantum. What initially looks like 8,500 separate remediation programs is therefore, in significant part, a much smaller set of vendor migrations. That gives supervisors leverage. Examining the cryptographic inventories and migration plans of the major service providers can improve the posture of thousands of institutions at once.
Four Steps to Prepare U.S. Banking for the Post-Quantum Transition
1. Set the date. The Treasury and the FFIEC should align post-quantum examination expectations with the 2030-2031 gates the federal government has already accepted for itself. Closing a gap the Treasury helped create is the highest-leverage move available and requires no new authority.
2. Examine the vendors, not only the banks. The Bank Service Company Act already permits direct examination of third-party service providers. Make cryptographic inventory and migration status examination items at the core processors, and thousands of institutions inherit the answer without each solving the problem alone.
3. Measure the system. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) should name delayed post-quantum migration a systemic vulnerability in its annual report, and supervisors should publish a readiness measure. The United States cannot manage what it has never counted.
4. Congress should press for the date. Bipartisan support exists for post-quantum readiness and broader quantum policy; it does not yet exist for a banking-sector migration mandate. Oversight hearings, report language, and the National Quantum Initiative Act reauthorization are the instruments for pushing the Treasury, FSOC, and the banking agencies to set a deadline, and for funding shared migration tooling for institutions that cannot build it alone.
None of this requires a precise forecast of when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will arrive. It requires only recognizing the inconsistency Washington has already created: urgency and a timetable for its own systems, but neither for the banking system it supervises. Cryptographic migration is not the only clock running against the same defenders; it is the one Washington can set this year, using authorities it already has. But setting a deadline may be the most important step--a migration plan without a required completion date is not a plan.
* * *
Sultan Meghji is a senior technical expert (non-resident) in the Economic Security and Technology Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-banking-system-ready-post-quantum-future
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Is the U.S. Banking System Ready for a Post-Quantum Future?
Commentary by Sultan Meghji
September 17, 2026
Washington does not need another study of quantum risk in banking. It needs a supervisory deadline.
The reason is straightforward. Modern finance depends on public-key cryptography to authenticate transactions and protect sensitive data, but a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break much of that cryptography. Post-quantum cryptography--the new class of standards ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Is the U.S. Banking System Ready for a Post-Quantum Future? Commentary by Sultan Meghji September 17, 2026 Washington does not need another study of quantum risk in banking. It needs a supervisory deadline. The reason is straightforward. Modern finance depends on public-key cryptography to authenticate transactions and protect sensitive data, but a sufficiently capable quantum computer could break much of that cryptography. Post-quantum cryptography--the new class of standardsdesigned to remain secure against both classical and quantum computers--is the replacement. But migration is not a software patch. Finding where vulnerable cryptography resides, making systems capable of changing algorithms, and replacing protocols, certificates, hardware, and third-party connections is a multiyear engineering program.
The risk does not begin when such a computer arrives. Adversaries can collect encrypted financial traffic today and hold it until they can decrypt it later. And the exposure is not only financial--payment traffic can reveal supply chains, defense relationships, sanctions activity, and ultimately the structure of the U.S. economy itself.
Washington already recognizes the problem. Executive Order 14412 and Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-26-15 put federal high-value systems on a 2030-2031 migration clock. Yet the banking system the federal government supervises has no equivalent deadline. In January, the G7 Cyber Expert Group, cochaired by the U.S. Treasury and the Bank of England, laid out a financial sector roadmap calling for critical systems to transition by 2030-2032 and full migration by 2035. The Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and other U.S. regulators have issued guidance. None has named a year.
The result is an unusual contradiction: The federal government has imposed a deadline on itself while leaving the financial system largely to an advisory timetable. More striking still, no U.S. supervisor has required institutions to report their post-quantum readiness consistently, so Washington does not know how prepared the system actually is.
What the Threat Is, and What Fixing It Takes
The security of public-key cryptography rests on complex factoring and discrete-logarithm problems that classical computers cannot solve in useful time. Shor's algorithm, run on a sufficiently capable quantum computer, solves these problems directly. Encryption does not become easier to guess; instead, the underlying math becomes tractable. Symmetric encryption degrades but survives. Public-key cryptography does not.
Mitigation begins with a cryptographic inventory, but most institutions do not know where their keys live, which protocols depend on them, or which vendor connections carry them. It proceeds to crypto-agility--changing algorithms without re-architecting the systems built around them. Only then does replacement begin, across protocols, certificates, hardware security modules, and every third-party interface. This is a multiyear engineering program. Waiting for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer to arrive means starting too late.
The program is expensive and invisible, which is why it needs advocates outside the banking agencies. Encrypted financial traffic is not only money. Payment flows are a map of the industrial base: which firms supply which primes, how defense contractors are financed, and where sanctioned entities move value. An adversary that decrypts a decade of intercepted financial messaging in 2032 does not read balances; it reads the structure of the U.S. economy, retroactively. That is an economic security and intelligence problem before it is a compliance problem. And it is already underway: Adversaries are collecting encrypted traffic now so they can decrypt it later. Anne Neuberger, formerly deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, wrote in Foreign Affairs this year that China and Russia are doing precisely this.
It is worth being honest about what can and cannot be recovered. Traffic already harvested is gone. No migration returns it and no future standard protects it. What migration to quantum-resistant systems does is stop the accrual: Every month of delay adds to a pile that will one day be read in full by someone who was patient. Any record that must remain confidential past 2030--a mortgage file, a trust account, the systems adjacent to them--is already exposed.
Is the United States Ready for Post-Quantum Migration?
The natural next question is how prepared U.S. financial institutions are to migrate before quantum computers can compromise the public-key cryptography they rely on. The honest answer is that nobody knows, because nobody has been required to say. The United States has about 8,500 federally insured depository institutions--roughly 4,280 banks and thrifts, and 4,250 credit unions. About 400 of these file annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Over the past year, according to a search of these filings, only about 1 in 10 of those mentions quantum at all, nearly always as a single line in a list of emerging technologies.
What institutions disclose bears no relationship to what they are doing. Wells Fargo is a named collaborator on the federal government's own post-quantum migration project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology; however, the word "quantum" does not appear in its annual report. Ally Financial describes a multiyear post-quantum readiness program, with a cryptographic inventory and board reporting--in its proxy statement, where no risk analyst looks. The clearest public language appears outside the U.S. subsidiary of Spanish bank Santander: Banco Santander's global 2025 annual report describes the group as playing a leadership role in post-quantum security, while Santander UK identifies quantum technology as an emerging risk and says it maintains an inventory of internal cryptography.
This incoherence is not negligence. It is the absence of a question anyone is required to answer the same way twice--and for most of the system, there is nowhere to answer it. The roughly 8,100 institutions outside SEC reporting have no narrative disclosure vehicle at all: The Call Report, submitted by banks to financial regulators, is a set of numeric schedules, with no field in which a bank could describe its cryptographic posture if it wanted to.
Other governments have measured quantum readiness. Hong Kong has announced a Quantum Preparedness Index as part of its 2026 banking-sector resilience agenda; Swiss supervisors surveyed 60 financial institutions and found that 72 percent had not yet planned or implemented measures relating to quantum-safe encryption. No U.S. supervisor has measured anything quantum-related, and the major 2026 surveys of U.S. bank and credit union executives do not ask. International infrastructure is already beginning to impose its own timetable: SWIFT, the secure messaging network used by the financial industry for international transactions, has put its community on an upgrade path toward post-quantum readiness, with mandatory Release 8.0 planned for the end of July 2027 and Release 7.9 reaching end of support 15 months later. A Belgian cooperative is therefore imposing an operational migration clock on U.S. institutions before any U.S. regulator has set a comparable date.
Y2K as a Case Study
Y2K is a useful precedent--while the technical problem is very different, the management problem is the same one that U.S. banking faces today. The financial system completed a forced, sector-wide migration on a calendar because three conditions held at once: (1) a date certain, (2) examination against that date, and (3) shared vendor infrastructure that could be fixed once and inherited many times. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) set December 31, 1998, as the milestone for substantially completing tests of internal mission-critical systems; by the end of the first quarter of 1999, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reported that 95 percent of national banks had completed that testing.
Post-quantum migration has the third condition, but it lacks the first two. That the work is genuinely hard is not speculation: When the BIS Innovation Hub, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, Deutsche Bundesbank, Nexi-Colt, and SWIFT replaced traditional digital signatures with post-quantum equivalents in an operational payment flow last December, post-quantum signature verification averaged 209.9 milliseconds versus 28.1 milliseconds for traditional cryptography, and the project identified larger key sizes and additional infrastructure demands. But ultimately, all test scenarios--and the overall experiment--succeeded. It also demonstrated that this is a problem of engineering, not configuration.
Shared infrastructure and the concentration of technology vendors create an opportunity. For most smaller institutions, the relevant cryptographic infrastructure is not designed and operated in-house; it is embedded in systems supplied by core processors and other technology vendors. FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry serve a large share of those institutions, yet none has publicly laid out a comprehensive post-quantum migration timetable--Jack Henry's own list of the top cybersecurity trends for 2026 does not mention quantum. What initially looks like 8,500 separate remediation programs is therefore, in significant part, a much smaller set of vendor migrations. That gives supervisors leverage. Examining the cryptographic inventories and migration plans of the major service providers can improve the posture of thousands of institutions at once.
Four Steps to Prepare U.S. Banking for the Post-Quantum Transition
1. Set the date. The Treasury and the FFIEC should align post-quantum examination expectations with the 2030-2031 gates the federal government has already accepted for itself. Closing a gap the Treasury helped create is the highest-leverage move available and requires no new authority.
2. Examine the vendors, not only the banks. The Bank Service Company Act already permits direct examination of third-party service providers. Make cryptographic inventory and migration status examination items at the core processors, and thousands of institutions inherit the answer without each solving the problem alone.
3. Measure the system. The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) should name delayed post-quantum migration a systemic vulnerability in its annual report, and supervisors should publish a readiness measure. The United States cannot manage what it has never counted.
4. Congress should press for the date. Bipartisan support exists for post-quantum readiness and broader quantum policy; it does not yet exist for a banking-sector migration mandate. Oversight hearings, report language, and the National Quantum Initiative Act reauthorization are the instruments for pushing the Treasury, FSOC, and the banking agencies to set a deadline, and for funding shared migration tooling for institutions that cannot build it alone.
None of this requires a precise forecast of when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will arrive. It requires only recognizing the inconsistency Washington has already created: urgency and a timetable for its own systems, but neither for the banking system it supervises. Cryptographic migration is not the only clock running against the same defenders; it is the one Washington can set this year, using authorities it already has. But setting a deadline may be the most important step--a migration plan without a required completion date is not a plan.
* * *
Sultan Meghji is a senior technical expert (non-resident) in the Economic Security and Technology Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
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Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-banking-system-ready-post-quantum-future
[Category: ThinkTank]
CSIS Issues Commentary: Building and Using a U.S. Polar Defense Industrial Base
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary:
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Building and Using a U.S. Polar Defense Industrial Base
Commentary by William "Bill" Muntean III and Alexander B. Gray
September 17, 2026
The significant differences between the Arctic and Antarctic have traditionally made it challenging for U.S. policymakers to form a coherent strategy covering both polar regions. The Arctic is dominated by an ocean with rapidly declining ice cover and is surrounded by countries with clear sovereignty over Arctic land and dependent seas, allowing ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Building and Using a U.S. Polar Defense Industrial Base Commentary by William "Bill" Muntean III and Alexander B. Gray September 17, 2026 The significant differences between the Arctic and Antarctic have traditionally made it challenging for U.S. policymakers to form a coherent strategy covering both polar regions. The Arctic is dominated by an ocean with rapidly declining ice cover and is surrounded by countries with clear sovereignty over Arctic land and dependent seas, allowingcitizens to take unimpeded a full range of political, economic, and military activities. On the opposite side of the globe, Antarctica is a continent covered by miles-thick ice sheets and surrounded by an ocean with huge annual fluctuations in its sea ice, all of which is governed under an international treaty system championed by the United States that limits participant countries' political, economic, and military activities.
By virtue of Alaska, the United States is an Arctic country with American citizens living in the region. As Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said when releasing the 2024 Arctic Strategy, "The Arctic region of the United States is critical to the defense of our homeland, the protection of U.S. national sovereignty and the preservation of our defense treaty commitments. Our Arctic strategy will guide the [Defense] Department's efforts to ensure that the Arctic remains a secure and stable region." Similarly, it is in the national interests of the United States for Antarctica to not be a source of international strife and instead to be used only for peaceful purpose, even if the United States has never made a claim to sovereignty in the region. Its 2024 Antarctic Policy states that "the United States will continue to lead cooperative international efforts through the Antarctic Treaty System to maintain the Antarctic Region for peaceful purposes, protect its relatively pristine environment and ecosystems, and conduct scientific research."
At the same time, the polar regions are experiencing an increase in activity by great power competitors such as China and Russia. In the Arctic, Beijing and Moscow have deepened their cooperation by conducting multiple joint military and scientific missions as well as pioneering a commercial shipping route. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, both powers are coordinating activities to strengthen and expand their presence. Their actions in the two polar regions highlights the need for the United States to ensure that its policies are backed by capabilities.
Unfortunately, sustained neglect of the U.S. polar defense industrial base has given potential competitors the false impression that the United States has forgotten the two regions. The increasing age and declining numbers of key operating equipment are insufficient to achieve the goals the United States has established for itself. To reverse this capabilities neglect, the United States should establish and maintain a powerful U.S. polar defense industrial base as the nucleus of a unified polar strategy and an adjunct to larger efforts to revitalize the broader U.S. defense industrial base. Modernizing U.S. polar defense capabilities, particularly icebreakers and cargo airplanes with ski-landing equipment, would advance U.S. policy goals by building the equipment needed to protect U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic and keep both regions peaceful, respond to the expanding presence of China and Russia in those regions, and create thousands of jobs in the United States.
U.S. Polar Operational Assets and Capabilities
The United States currently does not have sufficient modern icebreakers to meet current and future needs in the two polar regions. The only two icebreakers the United States regularly operates in the Arctic region are the medium-strength USCGC Healy, which recently suffered a significant mechanical failure, and the USCGC Storis, which was purchased in 2024 after a 12-year history of private sector polar operations when it was known as the M/V Aviq. As China and Russia increasingly send their own purpose-built vessels into eastern and western Arctic waters, the United States requires more than a vessel getting repairs and a rebranded commercial vessel to safeguard its domestic and international Arctic interests.
In the Antarctic, the sole U.S. heavy icebreaker, the 50-year-old USCGC Polar Star, is needed to break thick ice to resupply the research stations essential to maintaining an active and influential U.S. presence in a region. The ship also contributes significantly to other U.S. national security missions in the region, such as unannounced arms control inspections of other nation's research stations as provided for by the Antarctic Treaty. However, it is risky to rely on one vessel to achieve such vital missions when that one vessel is well beyond its service replacement date.
The Trump administration has made notable efforts in recognizing and acting on the need for a domestic icebreaker industrial base. In June 2020, the Trump administration issued a Presidential Memorandum to catalyze government and industry action on the need to domestically produce icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard to protect the country's interests in the Arctic and Antarctic. During the second Trump administration, those efforts have been expanded while adopting different approaches to spur domestic construction of icebreakers for the two polar regions..
For the Arctic, the United States is working with Canada and Finland via the ICE Pact created under the Biden administration to design and build medium-strength icebreakers called Arctic Security Cutters (ASCs). The United States has not built an icebreaker on its own since 1976, and has demonstrated--via its failed efforts in recent years--that it can no longer can so. The ASCs would supplement and eventually replace the Healy and Storis. In May 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard finalized a $3.5 billion contract to build five ASCs. Two of the vessels will be built in the Helsinki Shipyard in Finland, with the first expected to be delivered in 2028, and three will be built at Davie Defense's Gulf Copper facilities in Galveston and Port Arthur, Texas. Davie and Texas state officials have announced that more than 2,400 jobs will be created through this contract. In July 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard finalized a second contract valued at $3.3 billion for six more ASCs, which would have slightly greater capabilities. Four would be built at Bollinger Shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and two at Rauma Marine Constructions in Finland, with the first being delivered in 2028. Officials estimate that Bollinger will hire an additional 300 workers for this contract. The U.S. Coast Guard has already determined that the first two ASCs built will be based out of Kodiak and the third out of Seward, Alaska. This is consistent with their expected area of operation in western Arctic. The homeport location for the other ASCs remains to be determined, although Maine has requested it be selected as the base for U.S. eastern Arctic capabilities.
To meet its operational needs for the Antarctic, the United States will continue to rely on existing domestic capabilities to build heavy-strength ice breakers called Polar Security Cutters (PSCs). These PSCs would replace the Polar Star. Recognizing that two PSCs have been in the pipeline since 2019 but have made little progress, the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, Section 7117, requires the U.S. Coast Guard and chief of naval operations to regularly report on the status of the PSC acquisitions until the three vessels are operational. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that became law in July 2025 provides an additional $4.3 billion to complete those two PSCs and begin construction of a third. The first PSC, which will be called the USCGC Polar Sentinel, is currently estimated to arrive in 2030, six years after the initial arrival date, and will be homeported in Seattle, Washington, along with the other new PSCs once built, continuing that city's strong polar connection that has existed since 1976.
For FY 2027, the Trump administration included in its budget request for the National Science Foundation $900 million for the construction of an Antarctic Icebreaking Research Vessel (ARV) to replace the two research vessels it abruptly halted using. The requested U.S.-built ARV would provide vital knowledge of the changing polar seas by being the platform for year-round oceanography, geology and geophysics, biology, and atmospheric research, much of which would be useful to maintain basic operational knowledge in rapidly changing environments. Unless it builds the platforms and funds polar research, the United States will operate at a disadvantage by relying on other countries--including its potential competitors--for information, or being ignorant of the current ground truth in the two polar regions.
For air capabilities, the United States relies on the LC-130 Skibird and the C-17 Globemaster III to supply remote stations and bases in the two polar regions. Similar to icebreakers, the U.S. defense industrial base for these aircraft types has stagnated: Boeing no longer produces Globemaster IIIs and there is no replacement plane planned. However, the potential exists to replace the existing fleet of Skibirds, which is long overdue since some of the aircraft were built in the 1970s and use 1950s-era technology.
These two airplanes give the United States much greater operational flexibility than other countries in the two polar regions. The LC-130H Skibird is the world's largest tactical aircraft able to operate in extreme polar climates, most notably being able to land on snow or ice without a paved or gravel runway. This unique capability to move large quantities of equipment and people with little prepared infrastructure gives the United States the ability to operate the second-largest station in all of Antarctica at the continent's most prestigious and geopolitically important real estate, the geographic South Pole. The Skibird also gives the United States significant operational flexibility in the infrastructure-poor North American Arctic, including Greenland. The Skibirds are operated by the New York Air National Guard (NYANG) 109th Airlift Wing; however, only 4 of the 10 were deployed last season due to their advanced age and lack of spare parts. The result is that the United States does not have as significant an operational advantage over its competitors in real life as it should on paper, which could give competitors false impression of U.S. capabilities and commitment to the polar regions.
Fortunately, the replacement for the antiquated Skibird, the LC-130J, can be made by Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Georgia. It has been producing C-130J since 1994 and can add specialized equipment, including the crucial skis that create the nickname, after producing one of the base units. The FY 2025 Department of Defense Appropriations Act signed into law in December 2024 provided $29 million for engineering and $200 million for two LC-130J aircraft and their components. The FY 2026 Department of Defense Appropriations Act signed into law in February 2026 provided an additional $29 million for engineering and $165 million for the initial LC-130J aircraft and its components. It also requires the U.S. Air Force to report to Congress on this program. The NYANG estimates three years to build the first replacement plus another year to modify it for polar operations.
The C-17 Globemaster IIIs, part of the U.S. Air Force's 62nd Airlift Wing, cannot land on the South Pole station skiway. Instead, they operate to transport personnel and equipment between New Zealand and the U.S. McMurdo station, where they land on a compacted snow runway. On the other side of the world, Globemasters regularly participate in Arctic exercises such as the 2024 Exercise Arctic Shock, and resupply Canadian and NATO forces via the northernmost airfield located in Canada. Production of the C-17s halted in 2015 when the last plane was completed. Although long expected, the closing resulted in over 5,000 jobs being lost. Similar to revitalizing U.S. icebreaker building capacity, restarting production of the C-17, which has significant non-polar utility, would strengthen U.S. defense industrial base. Currently, there is no successor plane in the works, although the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2027includes a provision that would require the Air Force to report on plans to develop a next-generation strategic airlifter to augment or replace the C-17. Additionally, Boeing is reportedly pursuing opportunities that could result in the production line restarting, although the estimated $8 billion cost to rebuild and restart the line will be a factor.
Next Steps
Through decisive action across two presidential terms, the Trump administration has made significant strides in breaking the decades-long stagnation in U.S. icebreaker building capacity for the Arctic. However, it is currently unclear if it has had similar success with expanding domestic icebreaker building capacity to address its needs for the Antarctic. The administration should build upon its current efforts to ensure the United States can domestically produce both heavy- and medium-strength icebreakers, including research vessels, to advance its interests in both the Arctic and Antarctic. It should further strengthen the U.S. polar defense industrial base by procuring enough LC-130J ski-wheel cargo airplanes and expedite planning for the next generation C-17 to meet expanding operational needs in both polar regions.
Rebuilding the polar defense industrial base, along with developing a pipeline for training and promotion for individuals who specialize in the polar regions, will create jobs and position the United States as a polar leader for the coming decades rather than responding to the advances of great power competitors in the Arctic and Antarctic. Doing so will safeguard the U.S. homeland in Alaska as well as keep the region and the rest of the United States safe from potential threats via the north. It will also allow the United States to remain the country with the greatest capability of independent action in Antarctica, which it has used for decades to insulate that region of the world from international strife.
Domestic collaboration between the White House, Congress, and the elected officials of key states will facilitate sustaining such an effort, as will international collaboration with key allies and neighbors. The result of this investment in the U.S. polar defense industrial base, if done correctly, will be greater operational capabilities to advance U.S. interests in the Arctic and Antarctic and the flexibility to respond to future needs, all of which are in the interest of the United States and maintaining peace in these two regions.
* * *
William Muntean is a nonresident senior associate with the Americas Program at CSIS. Alexander B. Gray served as deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff of the White House National Security Council (2019-21), as special assistant to the president for the defense industrial base at the White House National Economic Council (2017-18), and as director for Oceania and Indo-Pacific security at the National Security Council (2018-19).
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/building-and-using-us-polar-defense-industrial-base
[Category: ThinkTank]
* * *
Building and Using a U.S. Polar Defense Industrial Base
Commentary by William "Bill" Muntean III and Alexander B. Gray
September 17, 2026
The significant differences between the Arctic and Antarctic have traditionally made it challenging for U.S. policymakers to form a coherent strategy covering both polar regions. The Arctic is dominated by an ocean with rapidly declining ice cover and is surrounded by countries with clear sovereignty over Arctic land and dependent seas, allowing ... Show Full Article WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 -- The Center for Strategic and International Studies issued the following commentary: * * * Building and Using a U.S. Polar Defense Industrial Base Commentary by William "Bill" Muntean III and Alexander B. Gray September 17, 2026 The significant differences between the Arctic and Antarctic have traditionally made it challenging for U.S. policymakers to form a coherent strategy covering both polar regions. The Arctic is dominated by an ocean with rapidly declining ice cover and is surrounded by countries with clear sovereignty over Arctic land and dependent seas, allowingcitizens to take unimpeded a full range of political, economic, and military activities. On the opposite side of the globe, Antarctica is a continent covered by miles-thick ice sheets and surrounded by an ocean with huge annual fluctuations in its sea ice, all of which is governed under an international treaty system championed by the United States that limits participant countries' political, economic, and military activities.
By virtue of Alaska, the United States is an Arctic country with American citizens living in the region. As Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said when releasing the 2024 Arctic Strategy, "The Arctic region of the United States is critical to the defense of our homeland, the protection of U.S. national sovereignty and the preservation of our defense treaty commitments. Our Arctic strategy will guide the [Defense] Department's efforts to ensure that the Arctic remains a secure and stable region." Similarly, it is in the national interests of the United States for Antarctica to not be a source of international strife and instead to be used only for peaceful purpose, even if the United States has never made a claim to sovereignty in the region. Its 2024 Antarctic Policy states that "the United States will continue to lead cooperative international efforts through the Antarctic Treaty System to maintain the Antarctic Region for peaceful purposes, protect its relatively pristine environment and ecosystems, and conduct scientific research."
At the same time, the polar regions are experiencing an increase in activity by great power competitors such as China and Russia. In the Arctic, Beijing and Moscow have deepened their cooperation by conducting multiple joint military and scientific missions as well as pioneering a commercial shipping route. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, both powers are coordinating activities to strengthen and expand their presence. Their actions in the two polar regions highlights the need for the United States to ensure that its policies are backed by capabilities.
Unfortunately, sustained neglect of the U.S. polar defense industrial base has given potential competitors the false impression that the United States has forgotten the two regions. The increasing age and declining numbers of key operating equipment are insufficient to achieve the goals the United States has established for itself. To reverse this capabilities neglect, the United States should establish and maintain a powerful U.S. polar defense industrial base as the nucleus of a unified polar strategy and an adjunct to larger efforts to revitalize the broader U.S. defense industrial base. Modernizing U.S. polar defense capabilities, particularly icebreakers and cargo airplanes with ski-landing equipment, would advance U.S. policy goals by building the equipment needed to protect U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic and keep both regions peaceful, respond to the expanding presence of China and Russia in those regions, and create thousands of jobs in the United States.
U.S. Polar Operational Assets and Capabilities
The United States currently does not have sufficient modern icebreakers to meet current and future needs in the two polar regions. The only two icebreakers the United States regularly operates in the Arctic region are the medium-strength USCGC Healy, which recently suffered a significant mechanical failure, and the USCGC Storis, which was purchased in 2024 after a 12-year history of private sector polar operations when it was known as the M/V Aviq. As China and Russia increasingly send their own purpose-built vessels into eastern and western Arctic waters, the United States requires more than a vessel getting repairs and a rebranded commercial vessel to safeguard its domestic and international Arctic interests.
In the Antarctic, the sole U.S. heavy icebreaker, the 50-year-old USCGC Polar Star, is needed to break thick ice to resupply the research stations essential to maintaining an active and influential U.S. presence in a region. The ship also contributes significantly to other U.S. national security missions in the region, such as unannounced arms control inspections of other nation's research stations as provided for by the Antarctic Treaty. However, it is risky to rely on one vessel to achieve such vital missions when that one vessel is well beyond its service replacement date.
The Trump administration has made notable efforts in recognizing and acting on the need for a domestic icebreaker industrial base. In June 2020, the Trump administration issued a Presidential Memorandum to catalyze government and industry action on the need to domestically produce icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard to protect the country's interests in the Arctic and Antarctic. During the second Trump administration, those efforts have been expanded while adopting different approaches to spur domestic construction of icebreakers for the two polar regions..
For the Arctic, the United States is working with Canada and Finland via the ICE Pact created under the Biden administration to design and build medium-strength icebreakers called Arctic Security Cutters (ASCs). The United States has not built an icebreaker on its own since 1976, and has demonstrated--via its failed efforts in recent years--that it can no longer can so. The ASCs would supplement and eventually replace the Healy and Storis. In May 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard finalized a $3.5 billion contract to build five ASCs. Two of the vessels will be built in the Helsinki Shipyard in Finland, with the first expected to be delivered in 2028, and three will be built at Davie Defense's Gulf Copper facilities in Galveston and Port Arthur, Texas. Davie and Texas state officials have announced that more than 2,400 jobs will be created through this contract. In July 2026, the U.S. Coast Guard finalized a second contract valued at $3.3 billion for six more ASCs, which would have slightly greater capabilities. Four would be built at Bollinger Shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and two at Rauma Marine Constructions in Finland, with the first being delivered in 2028. Officials estimate that Bollinger will hire an additional 300 workers for this contract. The U.S. Coast Guard has already determined that the first two ASCs built will be based out of Kodiak and the third out of Seward, Alaska. This is consistent with their expected area of operation in western Arctic. The homeport location for the other ASCs remains to be determined, although Maine has requested it be selected as the base for U.S. eastern Arctic capabilities.
To meet its operational needs for the Antarctic, the United States will continue to rely on existing domestic capabilities to build heavy-strength ice breakers called Polar Security Cutters (PSCs). These PSCs would replace the Polar Star. Recognizing that two PSCs have been in the pipeline since 2019 but have made little progress, the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, Section 7117, requires the U.S. Coast Guard and chief of naval operations to regularly report on the status of the PSC acquisitions until the three vessels are operational. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that became law in July 2025 provides an additional $4.3 billion to complete those two PSCs and begin construction of a third. The first PSC, which will be called the USCGC Polar Sentinel, is currently estimated to arrive in 2030, six years after the initial arrival date, and will be homeported in Seattle, Washington, along with the other new PSCs once built, continuing that city's strong polar connection that has existed since 1976.
For FY 2027, the Trump administration included in its budget request for the National Science Foundation $900 million for the construction of an Antarctic Icebreaking Research Vessel (ARV) to replace the two research vessels it abruptly halted using. The requested U.S.-built ARV would provide vital knowledge of the changing polar seas by being the platform for year-round oceanography, geology and geophysics, biology, and atmospheric research, much of which would be useful to maintain basic operational knowledge in rapidly changing environments. Unless it builds the platforms and funds polar research, the United States will operate at a disadvantage by relying on other countries--including its potential competitors--for information, or being ignorant of the current ground truth in the two polar regions.
For air capabilities, the United States relies on the LC-130 Skibird and the C-17 Globemaster III to supply remote stations and bases in the two polar regions. Similar to icebreakers, the U.S. defense industrial base for these aircraft types has stagnated: Boeing no longer produces Globemaster IIIs and there is no replacement plane planned. However, the potential exists to replace the existing fleet of Skibirds, which is long overdue since some of the aircraft were built in the 1970s and use 1950s-era technology.
These two airplanes give the United States much greater operational flexibility than other countries in the two polar regions. The LC-130H Skibird is the world's largest tactical aircraft able to operate in extreme polar climates, most notably being able to land on snow or ice without a paved or gravel runway. This unique capability to move large quantities of equipment and people with little prepared infrastructure gives the United States the ability to operate the second-largest station in all of Antarctica at the continent's most prestigious and geopolitically important real estate, the geographic South Pole. The Skibird also gives the United States significant operational flexibility in the infrastructure-poor North American Arctic, including Greenland. The Skibirds are operated by the New York Air National Guard (NYANG) 109th Airlift Wing; however, only 4 of the 10 were deployed last season due to their advanced age and lack of spare parts. The result is that the United States does not have as significant an operational advantage over its competitors in real life as it should on paper, which could give competitors false impression of U.S. capabilities and commitment to the polar regions.
Fortunately, the replacement for the antiquated Skibird, the LC-130J, can be made by Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Georgia. It has been producing C-130J since 1994 and can add specialized equipment, including the crucial skis that create the nickname, after producing one of the base units. The FY 2025 Department of Defense Appropriations Act signed into law in December 2024 provided $29 million for engineering and $200 million for two LC-130J aircraft and their components. The FY 2026 Department of Defense Appropriations Act signed into law in February 2026 provided an additional $29 million for engineering and $165 million for the initial LC-130J aircraft and its components. It also requires the U.S. Air Force to report to Congress on this program. The NYANG estimates three years to build the first replacement plus another year to modify it for polar operations.
The C-17 Globemaster IIIs, part of the U.S. Air Force's 62nd Airlift Wing, cannot land on the South Pole station skiway. Instead, they operate to transport personnel and equipment between New Zealand and the U.S. McMurdo station, where they land on a compacted snow runway. On the other side of the world, Globemasters regularly participate in Arctic exercises such as the 2024 Exercise Arctic Shock, and resupply Canadian and NATO forces via the northernmost airfield located in Canada. Production of the C-17s halted in 2015 when the last plane was completed. Although long expected, the closing resulted in over 5,000 jobs being lost. Similar to revitalizing U.S. icebreaker building capacity, restarting production of the C-17, which has significant non-polar utility, would strengthen U.S. defense industrial base. Currently, there is no successor plane in the works, although the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2027includes a provision that would require the Air Force to report on plans to develop a next-generation strategic airlifter to augment or replace the C-17. Additionally, Boeing is reportedly pursuing opportunities that could result in the production line restarting, although the estimated $8 billion cost to rebuild and restart the line will be a factor.
Next Steps
Through decisive action across two presidential terms, the Trump administration has made significant strides in breaking the decades-long stagnation in U.S. icebreaker building capacity for the Arctic. However, it is currently unclear if it has had similar success with expanding domestic icebreaker building capacity to address its needs for the Antarctic. The administration should build upon its current efforts to ensure the United States can domestically produce both heavy- and medium-strength icebreakers, including research vessels, to advance its interests in both the Arctic and Antarctic. It should further strengthen the U.S. polar defense industrial base by procuring enough LC-130J ski-wheel cargo airplanes and expedite planning for the next generation C-17 to meet expanding operational needs in both polar regions.
Rebuilding the polar defense industrial base, along with developing a pipeline for training and promotion for individuals who specialize in the polar regions, will create jobs and position the United States as a polar leader for the coming decades rather than responding to the advances of great power competitors in the Arctic and Antarctic. Doing so will safeguard the U.S. homeland in Alaska as well as keep the region and the rest of the United States safe from potential threats via the north. It will also allow the United States to remain the country with the greatest capability of independent action in Antarctica, which it has used for decades to insulate that region of the world from international strife.
Domestic collaboration between the White House, Congress, and the elected officials of key states will facilitate sustaining such an effort, as will international collaboration with key allies and neighbors. The result of this investment in the U.S. polar defense industrial base, if done correctly, will be greater operational capabilities to advance U.S. interests in the Arctic and Antarctic and the flexibility to respond to future needs, all of which are in the interest of the United States and maintaining peace in these two regions.
* * *
William Muntean is a nonresident senior associate with the Americas Program at CSIS. Alexander B. Gray served as deputy assistant to the president and chief of staff of the White House National Security Council (2019-21), as special assistant to the president for the defense industrial base at the White House National Economic Council (2017-18), and as director for Oceania and Indo-Pacific security at the National Security Council (2018-19).
* * *
Original text here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/building-and-using-us-polar-defense-industrial-base
[Category: ThinkTank]