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President Trump’s 30 September 2025 call to “deploy the military to American cities to fight the enemy within,” together with the Department of War’s institutional steps to teach irregular-warfare methods for homeland application, hands a strategic and symbolic, victory to our authoritarian adversaries. The rising public tolerance for political violence, captured in a new PBS NewsHour / NPR / Marist poll, demonstrates a dangerous domestic trajectory: if Americans convince themselves that violence may be necessary to “set the country on track,” they may be producing the very “enemy within” that political leaders claim to fear. By normalizing domestic militarization and securitization of political conflict, the United States risks validating the “Dark Quad’s” playbook and accelerating the inward turn adversaries hope to cause. This paper offers an alternative path that defends the republic without surrendering democratic and American norms.
In 1943, a body washed up on a beach in Huelva, Spain. It was the body of a Royal Marine officer, Major William Martin. Martin was carrying papers, cuffed to his wrist in a briefcase, suggesting that the Allies would invade Greece and Sardinia, not Sicily. Spain was officially neutral, but a few Spanish officials sympathetic to the Nazis allowed German agents to discreetly photograph the documents before Spain quietly passed the documents to the British. Those British officials appeared to be in a state of panic over the lost briefcase.
While units like the Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets are widely recognized for their guerrilla operations, advisory roles, and direct combat during the Vietnam War, one critical team often remains in the shadows: MACV-SOG. The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group was a top-secret, elite organization that fused the capabilities of special forces soldiers with CIA operatives, creating a unit trained for some of the conflict’s most dangerous and consequential missions.
IW is a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities. b. IW provides an important complement to other joint force activities, operations, and investments in both competition and conflict. (1) IW strategies and tactics can involve the threat or use of force, including the use of non-lethal weapons, for purposes other than physical domination over an adversary. (2) States and non-state actors can conduct IW when they cannot achieve their strategic objectives by non-warfare activities or conventional warfare. c. Within the DoD, IW is a joint force activity conducted by conventional forces and special operations forces (SOF).
The evolving threat of terrorism and political violence in the United States cannot be understood without observing technological change, institutional memory, and societal resilience. Recent discussions underscore five urgent considerations: (1) sustaining lessons from two decades of counterterrorism, (2) preparing for AI and drone-enabled battlefields, (3) confronting the misuse of commercial technologies, (4) maximizing open-source intelligence collaboration, and (5) analyzing the connection between counternarcotics and counterterrorism. Across all five lies a central truth: adversaries exploit division, while unity across government, private sector, and civil society is America’s most credible form of deterrence.
Almost in tandem, Russia and China have expanded their hostilities with Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively, to allies of each.
Russia sent fighter aircraft into the territory of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is supplying weapons and intelligence to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion.
At sea and in the sky, China is moving to tighten its grip in areas around Taiwan, the self-governing island China claims as its own, with low-intensity intimidation.
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