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“Economic security is national security.” This core principle, long echoed across the U.S. interagency—from the White House’s National Security Strategy to Treasury and Commerce policy directives—has gained renewed urgency as strategic competition intensifies in the Western Hemisphere. In no place is this more evident than in Latin America and the Caribbean, where economic statecraft has become the terrain of contestation.
Wielding drones in combat missions and being able to repair them on the spot could soon become a new standard among the skills fielded by the operators of U.S. Special Operations Command, per a solicitation released Wednesday.
SOCOM wants a contractor to develop a 10-day course for six operators twice a year to train them in all aspects of building and flying first-person view drones, according to the performance work statement from Naval Special Warfare Command, which oversees the training and formation of Navy SEALs.
Most Marines had never seen combat when Peter Ortiz joined the Corps in June 1942. However, he had already survived five years in the French Foreign Legion and fought in Africa, faced the Nazis in France, spent 15 months as a prisoner of war, and escaped occupied Europe to get back into the fight.
Before the war ended, the New York-born Legionnaire would become the most decorated member of the Office of Strategic Services and one of the most decorated Marines of World War II.
WASHINGTON — Special Operations Command Pacific is running its first ever artificial intelligence boot camp this week, in an effort to familiarize officials with how it can be useful everyday, according to the organization’s commander.
“The reasons why AI adoption has been difficult for us is because we’re creatures of habit, one. A lot of us have been at this for 20 or 30 years, you’ve developed workflows and processes, and we fear change,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey VanAntwerp said Tuesday at AFCEA’s TechNet Indo-Pacific conference in Hawaii. “We don’t want to do something differently. It seems inefficient at first. At first, potentially, we don’t even trust it. We don’t trust the results. The second one, I think is equally as big, if not bigger, is that we don’t know how. We don’t know how to do the new thing.”
f Special Forces has an “identity crisis,” it is because we misunderstood and mislabeled the problems we were sent to resolve, and applied solutions rooted in how the problems were labeled and defined, rather than for what they were. The world had changed, and revisionist actors of every ilk had stolen a march on those overly wedded to an obsolete playbook. For true change, we, as a Regiment, must first reframe the problem and then set out to reimagine more durable solutions.
In southern Lebanon, amid escalating tensions since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent “Northern Arrow” military operation, Hezbollah has urgently reshaped its information warfare doctrine. Formerly a dominant political actor in Lebanon, the Shiite organization has seen its digital capabilities crippled and its propaganda networks disrupted as its political influence and combat power have waned. Now facing pressure on multiple fronts, including an intensive psychological and cyber campaign from Israel, Hezbollah’s cyber-combatants are pursuing a determined effort to modernize: leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), foreign alliances, and digital influence campaigns to regain control of the narrative in a war that is increasingly fought online as much as on the battlefield.
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