This is the second article in a planned eight-part strategic series by the Gold Institute examining how global conflict is reshaping security, defense, industry, technology, alliances, diplomacy, and strategic decision-making.

Europe is the clearest case study in the new race for security.

For more than three decades after the end of the Cold War, much of Europe operated under a strategic belief that large-scale war on the continent had become unlikely, if not unthinkable. Defense spending declined. Industrial capacity was reduced. Military readiness was often treated as a long-term planning issue rather than an urgent political requirement. Armies became smaller. Stockpiles shrank. Procurement cycles slowed. Many governments worked under the understanding that the United States would remain the ultimate guarantor of European security, while Europe could focus on prosperity, regulation, trade, welfare, and diplomacy.

Russia’s war against Ukraine shattered that belief.

The war did not simply return military conflict to Europe. It exposed a deeper structural problem: Europe had underinvested not only in defense, but also in readiness, production, resilience, mobility, and decision speed.

That is why Europe now sits at the center of the new race for security.

But this race is not only about spending more money. It is about whether Europe can turn political alarm into usable power. It is about whether European countries can convert budgets into ammunition, platforms, logistics, air and missile defense, drones and unmanned aerial systems, electronic warfare, command-and-control systems, cyber resilience, industrial depth, and deployable military capability.

In other words, Europe’s challenge is not rearmament alone. It is integrated readiness.

This distinction matters.

Rearmament can be measured in budgets, contracts, procurement announcements, and political declarations. Integrated readiness is harder. It requires trained forces, functioning supply chains, secure infrastructure, industrial capacity capable of sustaining wartime production, interoperable systems, rapid repair, operational logistics, political and social will, and the ability to coordinate across national borders under pressure.

Europe now confronts both tasks at once.

The first Europe is institutional Europe: NATO, the European Union, and a growing set of smaller regional and mini-lateral cooperation frameworks. NATO remains the core military framework for collective defense. The EU is increasingly focused on the defense industry, joint procurement, military mobility, critical infrastructure, financing tools, industrial resilience, and reducing bureaucratic barriers. Smaller formats among Nordic, Baltic, Central European, and bilateral partners are becoming more important because they can sometimes move faster than large institutions.

The second Europe is national Europe: Germany, France, Poland, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Nordic countries, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Romania, the Netherlands, Spain, and others. Each has different threat perceptions, political cultures, defense industries, budget constraints, procurement systems, and strategic instincts.

These two Europes overlap, but they are not the same.

Institutional Europe can set targets, create funding mechanisms, define priorities, reduce bureaucratic barriers, and coordinate strategic direction. But national governments still control most of the money, forces, industries, planning processes, regulations, and political decisions that determine whether Europe can actually defend itself.

That is the central tension in European security today.

Europe can agree at the institutional level that it must become more capable. But readiness is built nationally, industrially, and operationally. It is built through factories, training areas, ports, railways, ammunition lines, shipyards, cyber defenses, drone production, air bases, command systems, and political decisions made inside individual capitals.

This makes Europe’s transformation uneven.

For Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, and other countries close to Russia, the threat is immediate and concrete. Their strategic culture has changed more quickly because geography makes delay dangerous. For parts of Western and Southern Europe, the Russian threat is serious but competes with other priorities: migration, terrorism, fiscal pressure, energy, domestic politics, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and industrial competitiveness.

For Germany, the challenge is different. Germany has the economic scale to become the central defense power in Europe, but money alone does not automatically create strategic leadership. Germany’s rearmament reflects a historic shift, but the harder question is whether Berlin can convert financial capacity into doctrine, deployable forces, political confidence, industrial mobilization, and operational leadership.

Germany is the perfect example of Europe’s broader dilemma: the gap between resources and capability.

A country may have fiscal strength, advanced industry, and political influence, but it will still struggle to move fast if its procurement systems are slow, its military culture is cautious, its political consensus is fragile, and its strategic doctrine remains underdeveloped. In Europe, this is not only a German problem. It is a continental problem.

France brings a different model: strategic culture, expeditionary experience, nuclear status, and a long-standing commitment to European strategic autonomy. But any serious European defense model also depends on German financial scale, industrial depth, and political willingness. France can help shape the strategic vision, but France alone cannot carry the industrial, financial, and operational burden of European defense.

The United Kingdom remains central to NATO and retains important military, intelligence, nuclear, and expeditionary capabilities. But it also faces constraints in readiness, capacity, and modernization, while Brexit complicates its relationship with EU defense mechanisms. Poland is moving quickly and ambitiously, but scale, sustainment, and integration remain major challenges. The Nordic and Baltic countries bring urgency, resilience, and geographic clarity, but require deeper integration with larger allies.

Europe is therefore not moving as one. It is moving through a combination of institutional pressure, national fear, industrial opportunity, fiscal constraint, old national rivalries, and geopolitical necessity.

The numbers show the scale of the shift.

Global defense spending is rising, but the more important change is the growth in investment: procurement, research, development, modernization, and long-term force building. Europe is part of that global trend, but it is also one of its main drivers. European defense budgets have increased sharply since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. NATO has moved from the old two-percent debate toward a much more demanding defense-and-security benchmark. The EU has launched new tools intended to mobilize large-scale defense investment, accelerate joint procurement, and strengthen Europe’s industrial base.

Arms-transfer trends tell the same story. Europe is not only spending more; it has also become a central destination for major weapons imports. European NATO members have sharply increased their arms imports, and much of that immediate capability still comes from the United States. This creates Europe’s rearmament paradox: the continent is moving toward greater strategic autonomy, but its near-term effort to rebuild military power still depends heavily on external suppliers, American platforms, and transatlantic industrial capacity.

This paradox should not be ignored. It is the reality of the transition.

Europe needs to move quickly, but it also wants to reduce dependency. It needs urgent capability, but it also wants a stronger European industrial base. It needs the United States, but it also knows that Washington’s attention, resources, and political will may be increasingly divided among Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and domestic priorities.

The question is not only how much Europe spends. The question is what Europe can actually do.

Can European forces deploy quickly? Can they sustain high-intensity operations? Can ammunition be produced and replenished according to wartime needs? Can air defenses protect critical infrastructure? Can drones be built at scale? Can governments share intelligence quickly enough? Can industry increase production fast enough? Can ports, railways, roads, and bridges support military mobility? Can Europe operate if U.S. support is delayed, limited, redirected, or politically contested?

These are the questions that matter.

Ukraine has become the forcing mechanism.

The war has shown that modern conflict is not only high-tech. It is also industrial, attritional, adaptive, and brutally material. Artillery shells, air defense interceptors, drones, armored vehicles, repair capacity, electronic warfare, logistics, manpower, and resilient infrastructure all matter. So do software, sensors, data, artificial intelligence, and commercial technologies, which have been adapted quickly to military use.

The lesson is not that Europe must choose between old warfare and new warfare. The lesson is that Europe needs both mass and innovation.

It needs ammunition and autonomy. It needs tanks and drones. It needs air defense and cyber defense. It needs military mobility and data fusion. It needs long-range fires and secure supply chains. It needs national resilience and coalition interoperability.

Ukraine has also shown that the speed of adaptation matters. The side that can identify a battlefield problem, develop a solution, produce it at scale, deploy it quickly, learn from its use, and improve it continuously has the advantage. This favors countries and coalitions that can connect soldiers, engineers, companies, intelligence analysts, procurement officials, and political leaders into a faster learning system.

Europe is not yet organized for that speed.

Its defense ecosystem remains fragmented. National procurement systems usually protect local industries. Requirements differ by country. Certification procedures are slow. Industrial planning is uneven. Ammunition production takes time. Defense companies need long-term contracts and certainty before they invest in new capacity. Smaller companies struggle to move from innovation to scale. Governments often announce ambition before they create the mechanisms needed to implement it.

This is why Europe’s defense challenge cannot be solved by budgets alone.

Money can buy platforms, but it cannot automatically create strategic coherence. It cannot automatically produce ammunition quickly, rebuild supply chains, train personnel, repair infrastructure, integrate software, or align political priorities across more than two dozen states.

The real question is whether Europe can convert spending into power.

This question becomes even more urgent when Europe considers what it would take to defend itself with less American support.

The U.S. contribution to European security is not limited to troops and platforms, or even the much-discussed nuclear umbrella. It includes the connective tissue of modern defense: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; space-based capabilities; command and control; airlift; logistics; senior command structures; operational planning; strategic communications; and the ability to move and sustain forces at scale.

These enablers are not always visible in public debates about burden sharing, but they are central to how NATO functions. Without them, Europe would not simply need to buy more tanks, aircraft, ships, and missiles. It would need to build much of the architecture that allows modern forces to see, move, coordinate, strike, defend, and sustain themselves.

That is the real cost of strategic autonomy.

It is not only financial. It is industrial, operational, political, and organizational. It requires Europe to develop capabilities that the United States has provided for decades, while also maintaining domestic political support, managing fiscal constraints, and avoiding duplication among national defense systems.

Independent assessments suggest that directly replacing key parts of the U.S. contribution would require a vast, long-term investment. But even the largest price estimates understate the challenge. The issue is not only the money. It is the time required to build capacity, train personnel, expand production, integrate systems, and create the public consensus needed to sustain the effort.

Europe’s immediate priorities are therefore clear: air and missile defense, long-range precision strike, area-denial systems, and the connective tissue of modern warfare — space, intelligence, electronic warfare, command and control, cyber resilience, and logistics.

These capabilities matter because they determine whether Europe can deny an adversary freedom of action, protect critical infrastructure, support maneuvering forces, strike at operational depth, and coordinate multinational operations under pressure.

The problem is that many of these capabilities take years to build.

Europe can close some gaps quickly through off-the-shelf purchases, joint procurement, and cooperation with non-European suppliers. But that creates a tension. If Europe buys quickly from outside the continent, it may reduce immediate vulnerability while sustaining external dependence. If it insists on European-only solutions, it may strengthen long-term autonomy but leave dangerous capability gaps open for too long.

This is one of the central dilemmas of European defense policy today.

Speed and autonomy do not always point in the same direction.

The answer cannot be ideological. Europe will need a mixed approach: urgent external procurement where the gap is immediate, European industrial expansion where the capability is strategic, joint production where scale is needed, and deeper partnerships where no single country can move alone.

This is also where the defense-industrial question becomes political.

European leaders can announce higher targets, but industry cannot expand without predictable demand. Companies will not build new factories, hire specialized workers, expand supply chains, and invest in production lines if governments send only short-term signals. Industrial mobilization requires multi-year commitments, clear priorities, faster contracting, common standards, and procurement mechanisms that reward speed, scale, and interoperability.

That is difficult in Europe because defense remains both national and collective. Governments want efficiency, but they also want domestic jobs. They want joint procurement, but they also want national control. They want European autonomy, but they often disagree over what should count as European. They want to increase production, but they face fiscal constraints, labor shortages, regulations, and political resistance.

The result is a familiar European problem: strategic ambition ahead of implementation capacity.

The Czech Republic offers one important example.

It is not one of Europe’s largest countries, but its defense industry has become more important because it is connected to real demand, practical production, ammunition supply, and battlefield urgency. The Czech case shows that smaller and mid-sized countries can become significant players in the new security race when they control useful parts of the supply chain, specialize in areas of urgent demand, and move faster than larger bureaucratic systems.

But it also shows the limits of opportunity. Smaller countries often depend heavily on exports, foreign demand, political access, and larger alliance frameworks. They can become important nodes in a security network, but they may struggle to sustain that role without stronger research and development, government-backed export mechanisms, industrial depth, and institutional influence.

That is a broader lesson for Europe.

The future European defense ecosystem will not be built only by the largest powers. It will depend on networks of countries, companies, suppliers, research centers, and military users. Some of the most important contributions may come from states that are not traditional strategic leaders but are agile, specialized, and industrially relevant.

This is where the civil and military worlds converge.

European security can no longer be understood only through defense ministries and armed forces. It now depends on transportation networks, energy systems, ports, rail corridors, digital infrastructure, space assets, cyber resilience, telecommunications, financial systems, private industry, and dual-use technology.

Military mobility is a good example. A tank, missile battery, or air defense system is only useful if it can move where it is needed, when it is needed. That requires roads, bridges, railways, ports, permissions, logistics planning, and coordination between civilian and military authorities. The same is true for ammunition production, energy resilience, drone manufacturing, data centers, and cyber defense.

The battlefield and the home front are no longer separate.

Europe must therefore rethink security as a whole-of-society and whole-of-alliance challenge. This does not mean militarizing society. It means recognizing that deterrence depends on the ability of civilian systems to support military resilience under pressure.

The war in Ukraine has also changed the meaning of strategic autonomy.

For years, European strategic autonomy was often debated as a political slogan, sometimes interpreted as distance from the United States. That framing is too narrow. The real issue is not whether Europe should separate from the United States. It should not. The transatlantic alliance remains central to European security.

The real question is whether Europe can become a more capable partner.

A Europe that cannot produce enough ammunition, defend its airspace, move forces across its own territory, secure its critical infrastructure, or sustain a long conflict will remain dependent in ways that weaken both Europe and the United States. A stronger Europe would not replace NATO. It would strengthen NATO.

Strategic autonomy, properly understood, is not strategic isolation. It is a strategic responsibility.

It means the ability to act, sustain, produce, decide, and contribute at scale. It means reducing dangerous dependencies without abandoning alliances. It means building enough European capacity so that transatlantic cooperation becomes more balanced and more credible.

This is especially important as the United States faces competing demands in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and at home. Even when Washington remains committed to Europe, American attention, forces, industrial capacity, and political capital are not unlimited. Europe must prepare for a world in which U.S. support remains essential but cannot be taken for granted to cover every gap.

That requires a new European bargain.

European governments must spend more, but they must also spend differently. They must buy together where possible, standardize more, reduce fragmentation, support industrial expansion, integrate emerging technologies, and create faster pathways from innovation to procurement. They must build stockpiles not only for symbolic readiness, but for sustained operations. They must connect military planning with infrastructure, energy, cyber, transportation, and industrial policy.

They must also accept that deterrence is not a peacetime abstraction. It is a daily discipline.

The next European security model must be measured by practical questions: Can forces deploy quickly? Can ammunition be produced and replenished to match wartime needs? Can air defenses protect critical infrastructure? Can drones be built at scale? Can cyber systems survive sustained pressure? Can ports and railways move forces eastward? Can governments share intelligence fast enough? Can industry increase production fast enough? Can allies coordinate decisions before the crisis becomes unmanageable? Can governments bring civil society on board for a sustained security effort?

These are the questions that define integrated readiness.

Europe’s transformation is real. But it is incomplete.

The continent has recognized the danger. It has begun to shift budgets. It has launched new financing tools. It has rediscovered the importance of the defense industry. It has learned from Ukraine. It now understands that resilience, mobility, and production capacity matter.

Still, recognition is not the same as readiness.

Europe will be judged not by the ambition of its declarations, but by the speed and depth of its implementation. It will be judged by its ability to move from fragmented rearmament to integrated readiness.

The new race for security is not only a race to spend. It is a race to organize, produce, adapt, integrate, and decide.

Europe is the clearest case study because it faces the challenge first and most visibly. But the lesson extends far beyond Europe: in the new security environment, power belongs not only to those who possess resources, but to those who can convert resources into coordinated action.

That is Europe’s test.

And it may become the test for every democracy in the decade ahead.

Omer Haim is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Ernie Audino and appeared on Frontlines of Freedom. Diplomacy Without Military Reality Is Fantasy — Our “MOU” With Iran)

Former CIA operative, Sam Faddis, published one of the first, accurate analyses of this crazy MOU we just signed with the patron of global Islamist terrorism. He discussed it with me on the show this week, and it’s another opportunity to hear hard truths based on relevant experience.

First, a little about Sam. He an Army vet, then later CIA operator and head of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Unit at the CIA Counter Terrorism Center. He infilled into the Kurdish north of Iraq in 2002 to prep the AO for our subsequent invasion (Opn Iraqi Freedom) in March, 2003. He’s got years of experience on the ground in the area, specifically along the Iranian border, but he also has years of direct experience with Iran’s nuclear program. He knows what he’s talking about.

But let me start with this – In the Real World of international relations, compliance with any document signed between nations is inherently voluntary. The international lawyers of the species will disagree, of course (because they make their living on this Fantasy), but unless one of those signatures was procured in the face of overwhelming combat power, noncompliance has no compelling sanction. This is why War exists.

As to Iran. We initiated combat. We ceased combat. We negotiated. Then we signed an MOU. Our entering into this MOU was a political decision. It wasn’t a result of a compelling military reality.

So, it’s worth asking why? Why agree to a set of conditions that we don’t control into the future? Let me re-state that…we don’t control the conditions agreed to in this MOU. And yet, the subject matter in the MOU is too important, and the stakes are too high, so why risk it all on a mere signature?

The only plausible answer is because the decision-maker must perceive other risks to be higher. That the President perceives some risk, somewhere, that is greater than the risk of a nuclear ayatollah. That some other risk somewhere exceeds the risk of an ayatollah in control of the Straits of Hormuz. That an ayatollah able to hold hostage 1/3rd of the world’s daily maritime transit of energy is acceptable, because some other risk, somewhere, is scarier. That the risk of the patron of global, Islamist terror, able to continue funding terror operations against Western Humanity is worth taking, because something is more important.

Okay, what is this thing that is more important?

Is it the potential political costs of mid-term elections that go the wrong way? Is that it? Is it because the isolationists advising the WH think Americans won’t accept a longer war? If that’s it, then these politicos better start acting like statesmen and not amateurs. If they want to “advise” on war, then they better start studying war. They can start with Clauzewitz, and specifically with his observation that “it’s the value of the objective that determines the magnitude and duration of any war any nation will wage in its pursuit.” If we understand that the stakes are extremely high, then we will do what’s necessary and endure what we must.

So, for those advising the president…look in the mirror, kids. If you guys advising the president think Americans won’t support a longer war on Iran….then you either think stopping a nuclear ayatollah ain’t that important….or you do, but you failed to help the rest of us understand how important it is.

As to the MOU. First, it’s largely an agreement to reach a final agreement…so consider everything in it locked in Jello. Second, it’s chock full of weasel words, ie vacuous statements that sound important, but mean nothing. They have no binding effect. Third, Iran and its proxies are going to ruin the deal anyway. In fact, they already have. As of today, Saturday, they’ve already announced they’ve closed the Straits again. Wait, but I thought they signed a paper saying they wouldn’t??!! WTF??

Of the MOU’s 14 terms, only 3 take effect immediately, but they are concerning. First, we agreed to IMMEDIATELY LIFT OUR BLOCKADE. Our doing that is irrational, as it is our only remaining leverage on the Regime. Second, we agreed to immediately ease the export restrictions on Iranian crude. Amazing. So, now the regime can start earning money again and replenishing its war chest (Yes, elements of regime leadership already said that is exactly what they’re going to do). Third, we agreed to the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon”! How is this possible, when neither Lebanon, Hezbollah, nor Israel are parties to this MOU??

There’s plenty more to analyze in the document, including a small matter of $300B, too much to get into here. Click on the link to hear Sam Faddis and I dig into them: https://frontlinesoffreedom.com/show-965/

Ernie Audino is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

This is the first article in a Gold Institute strategic series examining how global conflict is reshaping security, defense, industry, technology, alliances, diplomacy, and decision making.

The next decade will be shaped by a new race for security, not only a race for military power, but a race for industrial capacity, economic resilience, critical materials, trusted supply chains, technological integration, information resilience, cognitive security, and decision advantage.

Europe is the clearest example of this change, but it is not alone. Across the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, and in the broader allied world, governments are reaching the same conclusion: the assumptions that shaped the post-Cold War security order are no longer sufficient.

For decades, many democratic nations operated under a familiar set of assumptions. Large-scale war in Europe was considered unlikely. Globalization was expected to reduce the incentives for major-power conflict. Defense industrial capacity could be reduced because future wars were assumed to be shorter, more precise, and technologically managed. Supply chains could be optimized for efficiency rather than resilience. The United States would remain the central security guarantor in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East.

Those assumptions have weakened.

Russia’s war against Ukraine, China’s pressure across the Indo-Pacific, instability in the Middle East, the proliferation of drones and missiles, cyber threats, fragile supply chains, and uncertainty over the ability of the United States to support multiple theaters simultaneously are forcing governments to rethink defense.

The result is not simply higher defense spending. It is a broader strategic awakening.

NATO’s shift toward a much higher defense-investment benchmark reflects the scale of the change. The old two-percent debate is no longer enough. Allied governments are now being pushed to think about defense requirements, infrastructure, industry, resilience, and long-term readiness in a more integrated way.

Global military spending is moving in the same direction. But money alone will not solve the problem. The central question is not only whether governments can spend more. The real question is whether they can build the readiness, production capacity, technological integration, economic durability, and decision speed required to deter, survive, and prevail in a more dangerous world.

Modern warfare is no longer simply a contest between militaries. It has become a competition between entire national systems.

Military power still matters. Firepower still matters. Air superiority, missile defense, intelligence, logistics, and industrial capacity still matter. But no single element is decisive on its own. The decisive advantage increasingly belongs to countries and coalitions that integrate these elements faster and operate more effectively as a system.

Current conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East show that national security now depends on the interaction of military forces, intelligence networks, defense industries, technology ecosystems, civilian infrastructure, energy systems, information environments, and political leadership.

A country’s ability to fight and endure is shaped not only by what happens at the front line, but by the strength and integration of the entire national security ecosystem behind it.

This changes how governments should think about alliances.

In the twentieth century, alliances were often built around geography, formal commitments, and shared political interests. In the twenty-first century, alliances will increasingly be measured by operational coordination: shared planning, shared intelligence, compatible systems, industrial cooperation, trusted supply chains, technology partnerships, and the ability to coordinate under pressure.

Political alignment is important, but it is not enough.

When a crisis begins, it is too late to build trust, integrate systems, establish intelligence-sharing mechanisms, or create emergency industrial capacity. Successful coalitions prepare before the crisis. They integrate planning, operations, intelligence, technology, logistics, industry, and decision making in advance.

Russia’s war in Ukraine shows why these matters.

The war exposed the return of industrial warfare on European soil. It showed that artillery, ammunition, drones, electronic warfare, air defense, logistics, manpower, and repair capacity remain decisive. It also showed that the side that adapts faster — technologically, industrially, and organizationally, can offset traditional military disadvantages.

The war has also demonstrated how rapidly the character of conflict can change. What began primarily as a war of ground maneuver, armor, artillery, and territorial defense has increasingly become a laboratory for drone warfare, long-range strike, electronic warfare, and rapid battlefield adaptation. Ukraine’s use of drones has not only shaped the front line; it has also allowed Kyiv to extend pressure into Russian territory, striking military infrastructure, energy facilities, logistics networks, and other strategic assets. This is one of the clearest examples of how relatively low-cost technologies, when combined with intelligence, innovation, and operational adaptation, can change the balance of pressure in a prolonged war.

Europe’s current defense transformation reveals this new reality. Air and missile defense, artillery, ammunition, drones, cyber, electronic warfare, AI, military mobility, space, and critical infrastructure protection are no longer narrow military issues. They are becoming core elements of European statecraft.

Yet Europe’s challenge is not simply financial.

Money is necessary, but not sufficient.

The deeper problem is fragmentation. European defense remains divided by national procurement systems, divergent industrial interests, uneven military readiness, incompatible platforms, slow acquisition cycles, workforce shortages, and political constraints. Europe has world-class defense companies and advanced technologies, but it commonly lacks the scale, speed, and integration needed for sustained high-intensity conflict.

Europe’s defense gap is therefore not simply a shortage of equipment. There is a shortage of integrated readiness.

The same lesson applies beyond Europe.

In the Indo-Pacific, China’s military modernization, maritime pressure, missile forces, cyber capabilities, and economic leverage are driving Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and other partners to rethink deterrence, supply chains, defense production, and alliance integration.

In the Middle East, missile and drone warfare, proxy networks, cyber operations, maritime disruption, energy pressure, and information operations show how regional conflicts can quickly become multi-domain stress tests. The conflicts involving Iran demonstrated that range changes the structure of war, not only its distance. Long-range missiles, drones, and strike capabilities expand the battlespace, compress decision timelines, and turn what may appear to be a bilateral confrontation into a regional systems challenge.

The Middle East also shows a growing cost problem. Low-cost drones, rockets, and one-way attack systems can force defenders to use expensive interceptors or maintain high readiness levels for extended periods. Even a successful defense can become economically stressful if defenders must spend far more than attackers for every engagement.

This creates demand for cheaper interceptors, directed energy, electronic warfare, autonomous detection, passive defense, and AI-enabled prioritization.

Economic security is now part of national security.

A country may have advanced defense platforms, but without semiconductors, rare earth elements, energetics, batteries, fuel, microelectronics, steel, titanium, machine tools, software, and trained workers, those platforms cannot be produced, sustained, repaired, or replaced at scale.

Critical raw materials are especially important. Materials required for the green, digital, defense, and space sectors are strategic assets. Supply chains are no longer a background economic issue. They are part of the security equation.

Deterrence is not only built in military headquarters. It is built in factories, ports, mines, data centers, laboratories, shipyards, energy networks, and supply chains.

The information and cognitive domains are also becoming central to modern security.

Adversaries increasingly use disinformation, propaganda, cyber activity, fake personas, manipulated media, bot networks, social platforms, leaks, and influence operations to shape political environments before, during, and after military crises. Their goal is not always to convince the public of one alternative truth. Often, it is to create confusion, reduce trust, divide societies, slow decision-making, weaken alliances, and make democratic governments hesitate.

This means that defense modernization must include more than platforms, ammunition, cyber, AI, and industrial capacity. It must also include the ability to understand, protect, and operate in the information and cognitive domains.

The challenge is not only to collect more information. Modern governments already collect enormous amounts of data: intelligence reporting, open-source information, social media signals, cyber indicators, satellite imagery, diplomatic reporting, financial data, logistics data, and public sentiment indicators.

The real challenge is turning information into insight.

Information often sits in separate systems, agencies, formats, and classification environments. Decision-makers receive too much information, too late, and missing sufficient context. The future advantage will belong to governments that can collect, fuse, analyze, and present information in ways that support faster, better decisions.

This requires four capabilities.

First, collection: the ability to acquire relevant data from classified, commercial, open-source, cyber, social, economic, and operational environments.

Second, fusion: the ability to connect different types of information into one coherent picture.

Third, analysis: the ability to understand patterns and to identify anomalies, risks, opportunities, and adversary behavior.

Fourth, predictive insight: the ability to move from describing what happened to anticipating what may happen next.

AI can help, but only when connected to trusted data, human expertise, clear governance, and operational decision-making. AI should not be treated as a narrow software tool. It should be treated as part of the national security strategic infrastructure.

The future advantage in conflict will belong not only to the side with better weapons, but to the side with better prediction, faster fusion, and more effective decision support.

The next decade will therefore test whether democratic nations can move fast enough.

They must rebuild readiness, expand production, secure critical materials, protect supply chains, integrate AI and data, defend the information environment, strengthen alliances, and prepare societies for sustained strategic pressure.

The articles that follow will examine how this race is unfolding across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, smaller countries, economic and security systems, alliance networks, and the United States. Each arena is different, but the underlying strategic requirement is increasingly similar: the ability to integrate military power, industrial capacity, economic resilience, technology, intelligence, diplomacy, and decision-making processes into one coherent system.

The future will not be shaped only by those who spend more. It will be shaped by those who integrate better.

The decisive advantage will belong to countries and coalitions capable of connecting military power, economic resilience, industrial capacity, technology, intelligence, information awareness, and political will into one coherent system.

That is the new race for security.

Omer Haim is a Distinguished Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Brig.-Gen. Ernest “Ernie” Audino and appeared in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Defensible Borders Are an American Interest)

Strategic Depth, Hybrid Warfare, and the Logic of Forward Defense After October 7

Strategic depth is not a slogan. It is a function of time and distance that enhances a nation’s geographic defensibility, and it does so in two concrete ways. It provides adequate reaction time between sensing a threat and acting on it. And it provides sufficient land area to deploy and array friendly forces before committing them to combat. Every serious military planner understands this. Few American politicians do.

October 7, 2023, forced the question back into the open. Without the high ground of Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights, Israel is incredibly narrow—too narrow to permit the swift internal deployment of overwhelming combat power against any compelling external threat. This is not a recent insight or an Israeli talking point. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff reached exactly this conclusion in their own analysis in the late 1960s, when modern Israel was barely two decades old. Their judgment has only been reinforced by the technological developments of the intervening half-century. The terrestrial range of the weapons commonly employed today is far greater than it was 20 years ago, let alone 60. Once-adequate strategic depth is no longer adequate.

The Litani Lesson

Consider the area south of the Litani River since the IDF’s unilateral withdrawal in 2000. The river’s furthest point from the Israeli border is less than 30 kilometers. That is not a vast theater. It is a thin strip of land. Yet in the 23 years between withdrawal and the October 7 war, that strip became saturated with Hizbullah missiles, artillery, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, rockets, and drones. The terrain, combined with modern technology, enabled deeper, more accurate strikes into Israel proper than had been possible previously. Every weapon was emplaced for one purpose: to kill Israeli civilians.

Three conclusions follow, and they are not difficult. First, it is unacceptable that non-combatants should be targeted by these weapons. Second, it is unacceptable that the Lebanese government has been unable to disarm Hizbullah. Third, it is a fantasy to think Hizbullah will disarm itself. Given these realities, re-securing this area as a buffer is therefore imperative—not optional, not negotiable, and not subject to revision by a foreign chancellery whose own borders are not exposed to a single Hizbullah rocket. Similarly, the same logic applies on the Syrian side of the Golan, where the lessons of 2000 in Lebanon and 2005 in Gaza were paid for in Israeli lives and should not have to be paid again.

Why Washington Misses This

American opposition to Israel’s IDF presence in Lebanon and Syria is, at root, ideological, not experiential. Most U.S. politicians lack military experience and do not understand battlefield realities. They are politicians, not colonels. They first weigh every issue in terms of political coin, whether it will gain or cost a vote, and they are uniquely vulnerable to their preferred sources of information on warfighting, because they lack the relevant experience to critically assess what they are told. Lacking relevant experience, they’re vulnerable to their preferred sources, shaped by decades of orchestrated false narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian arena, Iran, and the broader Middle East. The result is that passions masquerade as reason—and they do not or cannot acknowledge it. Advocates of defensible borders face less an analytical challenge than an engagement challenge: figuring out how to reach politicians on the terrain of American interests, where their passions already lie.

Appeal to Self-Interest, Not Mercy

With this in mind, the most effective way to convey to U.S. lawmakers the necessity of military buffer zones and demilitarization on Israel’s exterior borders is not to appeal to American mercy. Instead, it appeals to American self-interest. President Trump’s “America First” framing may be labeled arrogant by his political rivals, but it is eminently rational. The essence of rational behavior is acting in one’s own interest. As unseemly as that may sound in polite company, it is how the world goes round, and it is how alliances are sustained when the rhetoric of shared values runs thin.

A related factor complicates the conversation: isolationist sentiment now occupies much of the Republican coalition and, in the Beltway, inhibits discussion of allies’ security needs. Even isolationists rarely admit they’d want as many strong friends as possible in a fight—not senior citizens, but buddies with the power and will to knock someone out. That is Israel. As General George Marshall said: You don’t want to fight unless you must, but if you do, you don’t want to fight alone or for long.

From an American viewpoint, Israel is on the front lines against global Islamist terror, providing a buffer. Israel’s need to counter threats daily has fostered valuable experience, technology, and intelligence networks. Their lessons benefit U.S. security as well.

The Same Enemy in Our Own Backyard

A similar dynamic plays out in the United States’ own backyard, making the case for defensible borders relevant beyond Israel. The United States faces the same enemy, albeit from a greater distance, conducting distributed operations on non-contiguous terrain in our own hemisphere. Venezuela is the clearest illustration. Until the recent capture of Nicolas Maduro, Iran’s presence there was pervasive and deliberate. Since at least 2010, Tehran has maintained a growing complement of Quds Force and Hizbullah assets on Venezuelan soil. In 2022, Tehran and Caracas began coordinating with Moscow and Beijing to establish an Iranian naval base on the Venezuelan coast. In 2023, the commander of the Iranian Navy publicly announced the regime’s intention to deploy and maintain assets at the Panama Canal. For several years, Iran supplied Venezuela with drone components and assembly lines, eventually opening a dedicated factory producing three variants of the Shahed loitering attack drone—the same family of drones supplied to Venezuelan forces and to other Latin American militant groups. Shortly before Maduro fell, the two regimes had agreed to deepen nuclear cooperation.

The threat in the Western Hemisphere is not isolated. The tri-border area where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet has become a narco-terror hub, and it should surprise no one that Quds Force and Hizbullah operatives are on the ground there to exploit those networks in service of Iranian interests. The same Quds personnel missioned to train, equip, and cadre terror forces in the Middle East are the same personnel missioned to do the same in Latin America, and, almost certainly, inside the United States itself. The enemy employs hybrid capabilities by design, operating in the gray zone between war and peace, between combat and crime. That ambiguity confuses lawmakers and warfighters alike and inhibits effective response. Because Tehran calculates each hybrid action to remain just below the threshold that might trigger a decisive American reply, the temptation in Washington is to deny that this is a new character of war at all.

President Trump is finally doing something about this. Re-invigorating the Monroe Doctrine and toppling Maduro were the first steps. Cuba is likely next. The second- and third-order effects for global adversaries, Iran above all, who have been quietly setting up shop near our southern border while American eyes were closed, will be considerable. Stay tuned.

Tehran Is the Center of Gravity

What happens in Tehran does not stay in Tehran. Modern, global Islamist terrorism was born there in 1979. Islamist terrorism existed before the Islamic Revolution, but the example set by Khomeini’s seizure of power, combined with the regime’s explicit doctrine of exporting jihad, inspired and underwrote campaigns of terror worldwide. Tehran is now the global patron and center of gravity for these movements. Their dependency on that patron is also their vulnerability.

Eliminating the center of gravity makes its operations—including those in Latin America—untenable. Israel’s proximity, will, and capability make it indispensable for any effort to destroy that center. Whenever Americans choose to target Iran’s regime, Israeli participation will be essential. The reverse is also true: a secure Israel within defensible borders is the platform from which this work continues.

The Floor of a Serious Strategy

Defensible borders, buffer zones, and demilitarization on Israel’s northern and southern frontiers are not maximalist demands. They are the minimum required for a small state to survive in a hostile neighborhood, and the precondition for any lasting peace. The military center of gravity in any democracy is almost always the support of its domestic population. If Americans want a willing and capable ally in Israel—and it is increasingly clear that many of our European allies are no longer willing or capable—if we want a partner who can go shoulder-to-shoulder with us and deliver a punch, we need to understand that sufficient strategic depth is necessary to secure the Israeli population. That is not charity. It is American interest, plainly stated.

Brig.-Gen. Ernest “Ernie” Audino, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Military Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Del crimen inicial al poder criminal)

Let us not get too distracted by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his jewels. Because it is true that his own abusive and criminal vocation became clear very soon after he arrived at La Moncloa riding on the dead and wounded of the Atocha attack in 2004. Just as it is true that it was he who laid all the political, amoral and criminal foundations — with his pacts with murderers and his deployment of perverse laws for revenge and civil-war agitation in Spain — so that, after those revealing years of total betrayal of the Spanish people by Mariano Rajoy and his gang of Montoro and assorted “kitchen” operatives, Pedro Sánchez could find the Spanish situation ripe for the taking: to seize every institution and literally put an end to any possibility of the State functioning with the slightest probity.

There is an abysmal lack of honesty in all those real or feigned expressions of surprise voiced these days at the latest revelations concerning José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Whether over those jewels used for money laundering and the efficient transport of great value. Whether over the accusations by former Venezuelan political prisoners about the blackmail this wretched little man exerted to win favors from the narco-murderer Nicolás Maduro. Whether over the dealings — more than murky, downright sinister — that will be revealed one after another.

That he has dragged his daughters into a scheme that entangles them for life in ties with some of the most abject figures of organized crime is almost logical. His participation — as enthusiastic as it is self-interested — in the plans of the drug-trafficking criminal gang of Delcy Rodríguez and company only reveals the abyss of vileness hidden behind that smiling little simpleton’s face and unhurried voice.

You will forgive me the petulance of recalling two books I wrote about the regime Zapatero was inaugurating, published by Imelda Navajo at La Esfera de los Libros, titled Libelo contra la secta (“Libel Against the Sect”) and Días de Ira (“Days of Wrath”). Of course, since both were published once I had already escaped the social-democratic paradise of El País and its realm of Babelia, both books were gaslighted in the media and — although treated with affection by some members of that tribe of analysts and columnists of the day — they did not, of course, provoke the debate I intended. A debate concentrated on denouncing the imminent danger of the destruction of every last remnant and glimmer of the rule of law and democracy in Spain, arising from Zapatero’s aims and methods. Today, some two decades later, these have finally crystallized into the aims, methods and attitudes not of a more or less corrupt group of people, but of an international criminal organization to whose interests every decision of government in Spain is subordinated.

Everyone is now rightly laughing at Luís Arroyo — that self-serving, demagogic, tacky and fraudulent figure of Zapaterism and Sanchism who now runs the Ateneo — over the appraisal he made of the jewels Zapatero kept in his office. He deserves it. But those jewels are mere chicken feed next to the sums being weighed by the DEA, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice and, I suppose, the UCO, in the dealings in which Zapatero’s direct or indirect starring role is under investigation. For everyone also knows that if those jewels serve to move, say, a million and a half euros from one place to another, the profits from the other smuggling operations under investigation run into the billions — and of course many of them are impossible to carry out without the collaboration of the Venezuelan government, of Sánchez’s Spanish government and of the PSOE.

If to all this you add that we now know the Attorney General’s Office in Spain not only persecutes members of the opposition but mounts operations against the judiciary itself, we are left with precisely the picture that those who read my books called catastrophist or apocalyptic. I congratulate myself that so much has come to pass and that so many Spaniards today — unlike when those books were published — are now conscious that we are governed not by the corrupt but by organized crime.

The only factor that makes today’s situation objectively better than that one is the existence of Vox, the origin of the lucidity in the face of the gravity of the crime of which Spain is the victim. “Under Zapatero we were terribly badly off, with every lane set for catastrophe, and we did not know it. Today things have worsened to an extreme degree, but we are better off because many of us Spaniards are conscious of what is happening to us.” We have been kidnapped. They are robbing us as if there were no tomorrow. And they are preparing an immense electoral fraud to try to make their power, their impunity and their unbridled criminal activity last forever.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.