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The world is sliding into a long political war. It moves without ceremony across the seas and archipelagos of the Asia-Indo-Pacific. Its front lines run through villages, ports, digital networks, and the minds of men and women who live under pressure from four authoritarian powers that now operate with shared purpose. China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea have fused their ambitions into an informal alignment that has become known as the Dark Quad or CRInK. Their collaboration links the Eurasian landmass and the Asia-Indo-Pacific into one contested system. They do not see separate theaters. They see one struggle, connected across geography and ideology.
As Russia continues a long-running campaign of irregular warfare against the United States and its European allies, it has increasingly turned to criminal elements to carry out kinetic sabotage operations and attacks on people. Thus far, the U.S. government has failed to adequately counter this tactic, which Moscow uses as part of a broader strategy to impose costs on its adversaries and shape policymakers’ strategic perceptions while staying below the threshold of armed conflict. While significant attention has been paid to other gray zone tactics, including cyberattacks and electronic warfare, the evolving nature of this kinetic sabotage campaign requires closer examination.
AI is an emerging technology that will impact every sector and field across the globe. Militaries have a particularly hard challenge ahead, as mistakes in AI implementation cost lives. More importantly, there will be dramatic implications for the world order if Western adversaries can outmaneuver the U.S. and its allies. For the U.S military, the key to implementing AI will be Special Operations Forces (SOF). SOF has a unique skill set and ability to implement AI quickly and effectively and provide tangible real-world feedback on its performance. In this paper, I assess how AI will impact SOF operators and change Western conceptions of war. My research is informed by interviews with three retired SOF veterans: David Cook, who served in the 4th Psychological Operations Group of 1st Special Forces Command; Pete Chenko, a retired Marine Raider who remains active on the reserve force; and David Maxwell, a retired U.S Army Special Forces Colonel. Through my interviews, I gained an understanding of how AI will be used and how it will impact SOF operations. I focus on training, intelligence gathering/analysis, the role of SOF in the next generation of conflict, proposed uses for AI in combat, and the impact of AI on the levels of war. Ultimately, AI is the fulcrum of a seesaw; the East on one side, and the West the other. How America implements and operationalizes AI will determine which side of the seesaw goes up, and which side goes down.
“Evolution is driven by chance and necessity.”
This was the mantra of Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod. While Monod was primarily known for his work as a French biologist and philosopher, he also served as Chief of Staff for Operations for the French resistance organization, the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur, during the Second World War. A true Renaissance man, he was equally adept at both exploring the field of enzymology and conducting railroad bombings. Monod’s evolutionary principle applies seamlessly to both protein enzymes and irregular warfare, as it offers a useful analytical lens for understanding the adaptation of military organizations to the evolving character of warfare.
Abstract: The competition between terror movements and counterterrorism forces is an interactive and iterative game, as the actions taken by one side are designed to defeat, circumvent, or shape the activity taken by the opposing players. To better understand these interactive dynamics, it is important to evaluate how terrorism and counterterrorism have been evolving. This article first takes high-level stock of how the spread, structure, scale, and speed of terrorism have been changing in recent years and highlights key challenges and implications for counterterrorism. It then evaluates the United States’ ongoing effort to find a sustainable counterterrorism path, a journey that has been filled with challenges, benefits, dilemmas, and opportunities, and discusses how key factors have been shaping the direction, reach, and pace of change. An important takeaway from these reviews is that while the threat of international terrorism is not what it used to be, there is a lot of change occurring across the terrorism landscape. U.S. counterterrorism has also been undergoing some important shifts, and there are open questions about whether U.S. CT forces and assets will be spread further. If not managed carefully, change taking place across these two ‘systems’ could interact in ways that may disrupt CT progress.
Admiral Frank M. Bradley has been the Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) since October 2025. Originally from Eldorado, Texas, ADM Bradley is a 1991 graduate of the United States Naval Academy. He has commanded at all levels of special operations, including Joint Special Operations Command, Special Operations Command Central, and Naval Special Warfare Development Group. He has multiple tours in command of joint task forces and was among the first to deploy into Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
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