Redefining Fighter Pilot Training for the Age of Chaos Management

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/10/2026

By Robbin Laird

For generations, military aviation followed a familiar rhythm. Crises escalated in predictable sequences. Training focused on perfecting physical flying skills. Pilots mastered their aircraft through countless hours of stick-and-rudder practice, building muscle memory that would serve them throughout their careers. That era, according to defense experts examining the future of air combat, is definitively over.

We have entered the age of “chaos management”, a reality defined not by sequential, manageable crises but by simultaneous, overlapping conflicts across multiple domains. Air, land, sea, space, and cyber operations now converge in what experts describe as “total networked ambiguity.” This fundamental shift demands an equally fundamental transformation in how we prepare fighter pilots for combat. The question is no longer whether pilots can master their aircraft, but whether they can command the information battlespace while their aircraft does the flying.

At the center of this training revolution sits an unlikely location: a facility in Decimomannu, Sardinia, where Italy’s International Flight Training School (IFTS) is pioneering solutions to challenges that have plagued military aviation for decades. Through an innovative combination of technology, partnership models, and radically different training philosophy, IFTS represents not just an incremental improvement but a complete reimagining of how to create the fighter pilots that modern warfare demands. I visited IFTS in October 2025 and my visit underscored the reality of the dynamics of change in pilot training.

The Hidden Crisis in Traditional Training

To understand why IFTS matters, we must first confront an uncomfortable truth about conventional pilot training: for decades, it was actively causing damage. The problem, which experts call “negative transfer,” was insidious precisely because it seemed benign. Consider a pilot spending hundreds of hours in a legacy trainer like the T-38, a design now over sixty years old. During that time, the pilot physically embeds specific instincts, motor skills, formation techniques, and procedures deep into muscle memory. These habits become automatic, reflexive, unquestioned.

Then that same pilot transitions to a fifth-generation fighter like the F-35 or Eurofighter Typhoon, and those deeply ingrained habits actively work against them. The old skills don’t just fail to help—they actively interfere with the cognitive patterns needed for modern operations. It’s the equivalent of learning to type on a manual typewriter and then being asked to write complex software code. The fundamental interface has changed so completely that the old expertise becomes an obstacle rather than a foundation.

The story of Lieutenant Colonel “Chip” Burke, an experienced F/A-18 Hornet pilot transitioning to the F-22 Raptor, crystallizes this paradox. Despite his extensive combat experience and thousands of flight hours, Burke found himself consistently outperformed by pilots with far less total experience. The problem wasn’t his flying ability—he remained a master aviator. The issue was what he termed his “Hornet brain,” which kept making fourth-generation tactical choices in an information-rich fifth-generation environment. Those choices, honed over years of operational experience, proved instantly and consistently wrong in the new context.

This paradox reflects a deeper transformation in what modern fighters actually are. The phrase “easier to fly, harder to employ” captures the essential challenge. Fifth-generation platforms use sophisticated flight control computers to handle basic stability and maneuvering, deliberately freeing the pilot’s cognitive bandwidth for other tasks. The pilot’s job has shifted from worrying about keeping the aircraft stable to commanding a vast sensor fusion ecosystem, managing terabytes of data, and employing incredibly complex weapons systems.

An F-35, in this context, functions less like a traditional fighter and more like what one expert described as “a flying iPhone for the whole operation.” It can simultaneously push tailored, relevant tactical data to a general in the Combined

Air Operations Center and to a wingman ten miles away. The pilot doesn’t just fly the jet—they orchestrate this entire information ecosystem. The mission has transformed from being a competent flyer to becoming what strategists now call a “node of command” in the distributed kill web.

The LVC Revolution: Building Training That Matches Reality

If traditional training methods were creating negative transfer, and if modern pilots need fundamentally different cognitive skills, then incremental improvements wouldn’t suffice. The solution had to be revolutionary, which brings us to the core innovation at IFTS: Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) training integration.

LVC training blends three distinct elements into a seamless whole. The “live” component consists of actual aircraft flying real sorties. The “virtual” component encompasses high-fidelity ground-based simulators. The “constructive” element adds computer-generated forces, threats, and environmental conditions. While other air forces have experimented with these concepts, IFTS has achieved something distinctive through what they call the “one simulation” principle.

This principle ensures that the operational flight program software running on the actual M-346 advanced trainer aircraft is identical to the software running in ground-based simulators. This isn’t merely similar or comparable—it’s the exact same code base. This eliminates the disconnect that has plagued training for generations, where habits learned in simulators required adjustment when transitioning to actual aircraft. At IFTS, what students practice on the ground transfers directly to flight operations because the simulation is identical to the reality.

The economic implications are substantial. Because the M-346 was designed specifically for LVC integration through its embedded tactical training system (ETTS), students can practice extremely complex scenarios—simulating laser-guided bomb employment, beyond-visual-range active radar missile tactics, advanced electronic warfare—at roughly one-third the cost per flying hour of an operational Eurofighter. This cost difference isn’t marginal; it’s transformational. It means students can practice high-end scenarios repeatedly until they achieve genuine mastery, rather than being limited to one or two expensive training sorties in frontline aircraft.

The system is also designed for evolution. The planned Block 20 upgrade for the M-346 will introduce large touchscreen displays similar to the F-35 and advanced helmet-mounted display integration. This means students will train on the actual human-machine interface they’ll encounter in fifth-generation cockpits, building familiarity with complex digital systems before they even reach operational squadrons.

Through the ETTS system, instructors on the ground can inject an entire synthetic battle package around that aircraft: hostile fighter formations, sophisticated surface-to-air missile systems, threats emerging from maritime environments, dense electronic warfare conditions.

Crucially, these aren’t abstract symbols on a planning map. They appear on the pilot’s actual cockpit displays, trigger their radar warning receiver, and interact with the aircraft’s sensors exactly as real threats would. The aircraft’s own systems perceive these synthetic entities as genuine threats. The pilot experiences authentic tactical pressure, must manage realistic information overload, and faces consequences for poor decisions, all while actually flying through real airspace with real weather and real aircraft performance characteristics.

This capability enables training scenarios that would be impossible, prohibitively expensive, or dangerously risky using only live assets. Instructors can saturate pilots with simultaneous threats, introduce unexpected complications, and replicate the kind of dense, chaotic environment that defines modern warfare. Rather than training pilots to follow predetermined scripts, they’re conditioning them to make rapid decisions amid authentic confusion and ambiguity.

The Sistema Paese

The technology alone doesn’t explain IFTS’s success. Equally important is the organizational structure supporting it—what Italians call “sistema paese,” or country system approach. This represents a sophisticated public-private partnership that maintains clear boundaries while enabling remarkable efficiency.

The Italian Air Force owns the training syllabus and sets operational standards, maintaining complete control over what gets taught and why. Industry partners—principally Leonardo and CAE—provide the how: the aircraft, simulators, maintenance infrastructure, and support systems needed to sustain high-tempo operations. This division of responsibility delivers measurable results: aircraft availability rates averaging around seventy percent and, more impressively, approximately ninety-five percent of all scheduled training sorties actually completed.

This reliability matters enormously for training effectiveness. Canceled sorties don’t just waste time—they disrupt learning progression, create training gaps, and reduce the number of repetitions students need to build genuine expertise. The IFTS system’s consistency ensures students can progress through their training pipeline predictably and efficiently.

The Living Curriculum: Adapting at the Speed of Relevance

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of IFTS isn’t any single piece of technology but rather the speed at which the entire system can adapt. The curriculum isn’t a static document approved years in advance. It’s a living system that can be updated within weeks of identifying new operational requirements.

This responsiveness comes from an engineered feedback loop. Instructors from operational F-35 and Eurofighter squadrons, the Phase Five instructors actually flying combat missions, regularly sit down with Phase Four IFTS instructors. They review procedures, discuss tactics, identify what’s working and what isn’t. When something changes in the operational world, perhaps a NATO air policing mission encounters new adversary radar behavior, or a deployment reveals gaps in coalition procedures, that information flows directly back to IFTS.

Instructors can immediately update simulation parameters, adjust scenario complexity, and modify training emphasis. Within weeks, students are training against the latest intelligence, facing current threats rather than historical assumptions. The result is measurable: graduates from IFTS Phase Four now require approximately twenty to thirty percent less training time when they reach their Eurofighter Operational Conversion Units. They arrive with what instructors call “the right mental furniture already in place”—the cognitive patterns, information management skills, and decision-making frameworks that fifth-generation operations demand.

Building Coalition Competence From Day One

The benefits of this system extend well beyond Italy’s borders. IFTS deliberately operates as an international facility, training pilots from the United States, Canada, Japan, Qatar, the United Kingdom, Germany, and over a dozen other nations. This isn’t merely a business model: it’s a strategic choice to build coalition competence from the earliest stages of pilots’ careers.

When pilots from different nations train together, they develop more than just shared technical procedures. They build a common tactical language, learn to anticipate each other’s responses, and forge the personal relationships that become crucial during complex multinational operations. They learn to think and communicate as coalition forces before they ever face actual combat together.

Italy is positioning itself as a central hub for advanced NATO training through this approach. The plan to establish the first F-35 pilot training center outside the United States, at Trapani-Birgi in Sicily, reinforces this strategic positioning. Combined with the major F-35 assembly and final checkout facility at Cameri, Italy is making a substantial commitment to becoming Europe’s center of gravity for fifth-generation training and sustainment.

The Next Frontier: Training Humans to Command Machines

Which brings us to perhaps the most provocative question raised by IFTS’s capabilities. The LVC system can already realistically simulate wingmen operating ten miles apart, all connected through data links in a distributed fight. It creates authentic training pressure for managing separated formations, coordinating actions across distances, and maintaining situational awareness of dispersed forces.

But if this training environment can realistically simulate human wingmen at such distances, how quickly must it adapt to integrate simulated autonomous wingmen?

The collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs) that every major air force is developing will fundamentally change the pilot’s role once again. Instead of commanding only human wingmen, pilots will potentially direct and control semi-autonomous or fully autonomous platforms flying in formation, executing complex missions with varying degrees of independence.

This represents the next evolution in the pilot’s transformation from stick-and-rudder aviator to information system manager to, ultimately, commander of a hybrid human-machine formation. The challenge for systems like IFTS is preparing pilots not just for today’s technologies but for capabilities that don’t yet fully exist. The training infrastructure itself must evolve perhaps even faster than the threats it’s designed to counter.

Conclusion: Adaptation as Doctrine

The revolution in fighter pilot training that IFTS represents isn’t fundamentally about new hardware, though the technology matters. It’s about recognizing that the cognitive demands of modern air combat have diverged so completely from traditional flying skills that incremental training improvements are insufficient. Success requires fundamentally reimagining what pilots need to know, how they need to think, and what kinds of decisions they must make at machine speed.

The IFTS model works because its entire philosophy is built around continuous adaptation. It doesn’t just train pilots for current aircraft or present threats. It creates a system designed to evolve alongside warfare itself. When the operational environment changes, the training changes with it, sometimes within weeks. When new technologies emerge, the system incorporates them rather than resisting them.

This approach acknowledges an essential truth about modern military aviation: in an era of chaos management, where simultaneous crises across multiple domains create unprecedented complexity, the most valuable skill isn’t mastering a specific platform or procedure. It’s the ability to adapt, learn, and make sound decisions under conditions of radical uncertainty.

That capability can’t be implanted through rote repetition of outdated skills. It must be cultivated through training that itself embraces complexity, accepts ambiguity, and prepares pilots not for the last war but for conflicts we can’t yet fully imagine.

In that sense, what happens in Sardinia isn’t just about pilot training. It’s a case study in how military institutions can overcome institutional inertia, overcome the negative transfer of outdated methods, and build systems that are genuinely prepared for an uncertain future. That might be the deepest lesson of all: that adaptation must be more than a buzzword: it must become doctrine itself.

Training for the High-End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training

For a video discussing the book, see the following:

The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training

 

For a podcast discussing the book, see the following:

Training Combat Pilots for the Kill Web Era: A Strategic Evolution

Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC)

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/09/2026

In July of 2025, the Air Force launched its Department-Level Exercise (DLE) series in multiple locations across the United States and Indo-Pacific areas of responsibility. This DLE features 12,000 U.S. Air and Space Force personnel, and more than 350 bomber, fighter, cargo and refueling aircraft. The exercises also highlight both space-based and space-enabled capabilities. The DLE series incorporates multiple command exercises into one overall threat deterrence scenario, to include Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC), Resolute Space, Mobility Guardian, Emerald Warrior and Bamboo Eagle.

07.14.2025

Video by Tech. Sgt. William OBrien 

Air Force Television Pentagon (SAF/PAI)

A Look Back at 18th Century Globalization of Revolutionary Ideals

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/08/2026

Ken Maxwell’s book on 18th Century Globalization argues that the American Revolution did far more than create a new nation; it ignited an eighteenth‑century globalization of political ideas that linked Philadelphia, Paris, Lisbon, and the mining towns of Minas Gerais in Brazil into a single, contested revolutionary space.

At the center of the narrative is the Recueil des Loix Constitutives des Colonies Angloises, a French collection of American constitutional texts that began life as Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic propaganda tool at Versailles but was later transformed through pirated editions, mistranslation, and creative reading into a revolutionary handbook for Brazilian conspirators in 1789.

Treating the Minas Conspiracy as a serious republican project rather than a provincial footnote, the book shows how Brazilian elites used the Recueil to imagine a Pennsylvania‑style constitutional republic in the heart of the Portuguese empire.​

Drawing on the annotated copy of the Recueil preserved at Ouro Preto and on the massive judicial records of the secret devassas, the author reconstructs the intellectual and social world of Minas Gerais as a “society of thought,” where magistrates, priests, poets, militia officers, and students debated North American constitutions alongside Raynal, industrial techniques from Birmingham, and news from Saint‑Domingue. Figures such as Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, José Joaquim Maia, José Álvares Maciel, and Tiradentes appear as mediators in complex transatlantic networks that moved books, people, and rumors faster than imperial authorities could control.

The story reveals how ideas of liberty and self‑government were always translated into French, into Portuguese, into local political idioms and how productive misreadings of American constitutionalism made new futures imaginable at the periphery.​

Yet the book insists that this globalization of revolutionary ideals unfolded within, and was ultimately constrained by, slave societies in both the United States and Brazil. By juxtaposing Jefferson’s white republicanism with José Bonifácio’s vision of a racially mixed Brazilian nation, and by detailing the slave‑owning realities of the Minas conspirators, it exposes the profound contradictions between universalist rhetoric and the economic centrality of slavery from Virginia to Minas to the coffee and cotton booms of the nineteenth century.

The suppression and long afterlife of the Minas Conspiracy—its attempted erasure, later archival recovery, and eventual canonization through Tiradentes Day—allow the book to recast the Age of Revolutions as genuinely Atlantic: an uneven, conflict‑ridden globalization in which constitutional blueprints, racial hierarchies, and anti‑colonial dreams moved together across an oceanic world.

18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil

HMH-461 Aviation Expo

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/06/2026

U.S. Marines with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 461, Marine Aircraft Group 29, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, showcase a CH-53K King Stallion as part of Fleet Week New York 2025, at Perth Amboy High School, Perth Amboy, New Jersey, May 21, 2025.

America’s warfighting Navy and Marine Corps celebrate 250 years of protecting American prosperity and freedom. Fleet Week New York 2025 honors the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard’s enduring role on, under, and above the seas.

05.21.2025

Video by Lance Cpl. Matthew McDonnell 

Communication Directorate

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22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) Composite Training Unit Exercise

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/04/2026

A U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey with Marine Helicopter Squadron 1 performs deck landing drills aboard the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7), during 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) Composite Training Unit Exercise while underway in the Atlantic Ocean, June 28, 2025. During COMPTUEX, the IWO ARG and 22nd MEU(SOC), refine tactics, techniques, and procedures to execute warfighting functions that enhance operational readiness and lethality as a unified IWOARG/22 MEU(SOC) team.

06.28.2025

Video by Sgt. Tanner Bernat 

22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit

Clearing Strategic Space: But the Venezuela Intervention Needs a Comprehensive Follow-on Strategy

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/03/2026

By Robbin Laird

The Trump Administration decision to intervene in Venzuela was certainly a decisive act. But acts are not strategies. My own sense is that the intervention opened up new strategic possibilities.

To explore this idea, I had the chance on January 21, 2026 to talk with one of the most articulate analysts of the issue, Gilbert Guerra. Gil (Gilbert) Guerra, an Immigration Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center whose work focuses on immigration and U.S. foreign policy, demographic trends in irregular migration, and assimilation; previously a senior associate at the American Enterprise Institute’s academic programs department and a 2024 Latin America Fellow with Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.

The Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela has created what immigration policy analyst Gilbert Guerra characterizes as a critical opening: strategic space for fundamental change in U.S.-Latin American relations. Yet as Guerra emphasizes throughout a recent discussion, creating space is not the same as having a strategy. The intervention has disrupted decades of drift, but without a coherent framework for transformation, that disruption risks becoming merely another episode in a long history of American inconsistency in the hemisphere.

Guerra frames the Venezuela crisis as one deteriorating for years while successive administrations avoided meaningful action. Relations became increasingly fraught following Hugo Chavez’s election and democracy’s gradual erosion in the early 2000s, reaching a critical inflection after Chavez’s death and Maduro’s ascension.

Under Chavez, Venezuela’s economy could still sustain most Venezuelans, preventing mass exodus. But as the economy collapsed under Maduro, Venezuela transformed from a regional problem into what Guerra describes as “a playground for China, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Iran.”

The fundamental strategic error was assuming slowly accumulating costs were acceptable. “Because the costs that the Maduro regime was imposing were happening very slowly, and were happening over time, and were happening in a way that responsibility was in some way diffuse, made it so that we thought that those costs were acceptable,” Guerra explains.

During the 2019 crisis, when the first Trump administration considered military intervention, the dominant logic was the “you break it, you buy it” framework inherited from Iraq. This reasoning, Guerra suggests, fundamentally misunderstood the dynamics at play.

Guerra credits Maduro with considerable tactical skill in forestalling American action. The Venezuelan leader created the appearance of openness to negotiation while never intending to follow through. With the Biden administration, Maduro signaled willingness to hold elections in 2024 and claimed he would abide by democratic principles, “obviously knowing that Biden was going to be in a position where he couldn’t actually enforce the outcome of the election.”

What this maneuvering obscured was the broader strategic damage Venezuela was inflicting: massive refugee flows, regional organized crime, and providing China, Russia, and Iran with a hemispheric foothold. Yet because no single action constituted a direct attack on the United States, conventional strategic thinking struggled to formulate a response.

Guerra challenges treating Venezuela primarily as a regional issue, arguing it must be understood within major power competition. American strategic discourse has largely failed to grasp these connections, continuing to treat hemispheric issues as separate from major power dynamics.

My friend and colleague, Dr. Kenneth Maxwell has argued that China has been building an economic position resembling something akin to the UK’s 19th-century informal empire, while Russia has used Venezuela as part of its shadow fleet operations and energy export infrastructure. The intervention therefore disrupted more than Venezuelan internal politics. It challenged Chinese economic positioning throughout Latin America and undermined Russian ability to sustain its war in Ukraine through energy exports.

Guerra identifies two particularly significant aspects of the intervention itself. Tactically, reports suggest the United States may have employed new sonic weapons to incapacitate Maduro’s bodyguards. “If those reports are true, it’s interesting to me that this was sort of the first use case for it,” Guerra notes. “It might have been actually a way to just test out its actual capabilities.” Even if the reports prove false, Guerra suggests they function as effective psychological operations, forcing adversaries to reassess what capabilities the United States possesses.

The political dimension revolves around the presence of a Chinese diplomatic delegation in Caracas at the time of the operation. While the administration maintains the timing was coincidental, driven by weather conditions and Maduro’s location, Guerra emphasizes that “the Chinese don’t seem to believe in coincidences.” They continue to believe the United States deliberately bombed their embassy in Belgrade as a signal, and they are unlikely to interpret the Venezuela operation differently.

Critically, Guerra notes that the Russians apparently learned of the operation but did not warn the Chinese. “Regardless of whether or not it was a coincidence, the Chinese are certainly not going to interpret the operation happening while the Chinese diplomatic delegation was there in Caracas, the fact that we didn’t give them any warning, for example, the fact that the Russians are reported to have learned of the operation and also not give the Chinese any warning, apparently, about this, all those things are things that, to me, are very interesting about the actual operation itself.”

The significance extends beyond the immediate tactical success. The fact that 32 of approximately 100 people killed in the operation were Cuban bodyguards protecting Maduro raises fundamental questions about sovereignty and influence. “What were Cuban bodyguards doing in Venezuela in the first place?” Guerra asks. “Why wasn’t Maduro being protected by Venezuelan bodyguards?”

Guerra challenges what he sees as a fundamental intellectual dishonesty in how American foreign policy debates treat hemispheric intervention. “The United States is so ashamed and has been so cowed over the years by its history of what it sees as unjust interventions in Latin America, some of which were genuinely shameful, some of which I think were defensible, that we no focus on the fact that the Venezuelans are not in a position to determine the future of Venezuela.”

This shame, Guerra argues, prevents clear-eyed analysis of alternatives. If the United States does not act as the primary player determining outcomes in Venezuela, the alternatives are Chinese autocracy or Russian kleptocracy. “At least having the United States be the primary player who’s actually determining outcomes in Venezuela means that at some point in the future, there’s going to be a democratic election in Venezuela, and we’re actually going to give the future of Venezuela back in the hands of Venezuelans.”

This pattern of overlooking the role that outside great powers have always played in Latin America distorts contemporary analysis. Critics question why the United States should determine what happens in Venezuela while ignoring the fact that Chinese and Russian involvement has already removed Venezuelan self-determination from the equation. The question is not whether outside powers will shape Venezuela’s future, but which outside power and to what end.

Guerra outlines contrasting possibilities for Venezuela’s future. The pessimistic case centers on the acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, whom the administration has empowered. Rodriguez “has historically been more tied to the Russians, has historically been seen more as an ally of the Cubans, has had more of an international intrigue and relationship, perhaps than other regime figures, has historically been seen as more of a hardliner.”

In this scenario, Guerra worries the administration may be “over learning the lessons of de-Baathification in Iraq.” The risk is creating a Venezuela that remains under control of “far left anti-American forces who are more or less buying their time until the Trump administration exits office.” Rodriguez could employ the same tactics Maduro used, stringing along negotiations about economic reorientation without ever delivering meaningful change.

The optimistic scenario aligns with what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has outlined: a transitional period focused on stabilization, preventing coups, followed by free and fair elections. Guerra notes that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has been sidelined, partly due to personal dynamics with Trump and partly because “she doesn’t actually control the weapons inside of Venezuela. She doesn’t actually control any kind of armed force in Venezuela.”

Nevertheless, Guerra remains hopeful for elections where Machado could run freely and win with majority support. This would require navigating complex questions about oil infrastructure reconstruction, Chinese debt, and the role of Venezuelan armed forces. Trump has “already undercut her somewhat by publicly disrespecting her and by publicly saying that she doesn’t have support in Venezuela,” which complicates this path.

Guerra sees the intervention’s impact extending far beyond Venezuela itself. Russia’s position across Latin America is weakening significantly. Cuba faces near-collapse as Venezuelan oil support dries up. Nicaragua has curtailed anti-American activities out of fear of being targeted next. Mexico has seen increased exposure of Russian spy rings and faces greater pressure for cooperation.

For China, the setbacks are equally significant. “The direction that politically the region is taking, you see the rise of a lot more Western alliance, more right-leaning politicians in the region,” Guerra observes. He points to recent electoral victories in Chile and Argentina, and particularly to Honduras, where the winner “has announced that he is going to switch recognition by Honduras from Beijing back to Taiwan.”

This would represent a major diplomatic reversal, “the first time that someone switches the recognition back their way from all the diplomatic effort that they’ve spent.” Combined with upcoming elections in Colombia and Peru, Guerra sees potential for region-wide rejection of Chinese influence. “If these trends hold, you see actually the region independently and willingly rejecting any kind of a Chinese alternative or a Chinese-led more Pacific order to actually align closely with the United States instead.”

We then turned to the critical drug issue and the role of the cartels in both deciminating the politics of several Latin American countries and killing Americans in large numbers. Guerra emphasizes that violence remains the only language many drug organizations understand. Root causes approaches and educational programs cannot compete with the incentives and social structures these organizations offer.

He challenges the default assumption made often in U.S. policy circles that drugs represent an inevitable problem for which the United States bears primary responsibility. This resonates particularly with Hispanic Americans. “People who come here, who have these backgrounds, actually hate that more than maybe sometimes Americans do. They’re sort of more anti-drug, or at least harder on drugs, because they’ve seen it firsthand.” Having witnessed how cartels devastated their countries of origin, Hispanic immigrants often support stronger action precisely because they chose America to escape that reality.

In short, Guerra’s central concern is that the intervention has created opportunity without strategy. “We can look at this intervention as triggering events that could craft a very different policy in the region, for the United States vis-a-vis China and Russia and others, but we really need that policy.”

The Trump administration’s personalistic approach to foreign policy creates more its own barriers to doing so. While Trump has correctly characterized problems that previous administrations ignored, characterization is not the same as strategy. The administration needs what only Secretary Rubio might provide: strategic thinking that moves beyond disruption toward coherent transformation.

It is clear that  we need desperately to craft a strategy, and that strategy needs engagement. And the Congress has to be engaged and the private sector has to be engaged.

This requires moving beyond partisan point-scoring to genuine debate about American interests and how to advance them. As Guerra frames the challenge to critics: “You can criticize it all you want, but if you want to criticize it, then next time you’re in power, go out there and do the same thing, but do it better. But don’t sit on the sidelines again and tell us that we have to accept endless drugs, endless unlimited migrations, endless proliferation of dictatorships in the hemisphere, unless you’re going to actually also do something about it.”

Guerra’s analysis reveals the Venezuela intervention as simultaneously necessary and insufficient. Necessary because accumulated costs across migration, drugs, great power competition, and regional stability had reached crisis levels. Insufficient because disruption alone does not constitute strategy.

The intervention has demonstrated that bold action can reshape regional dynamics, weakening both Chinese and Russian positions throughout Latin America while creating potential for democratic transitions. But potential requires strategy.

Guerra calls for serious strategic discourse about American policy in Latin America during great power competition. This means moving beyond both risk-averse incrementalism and personalistic disruption, recognizing that the Western Hemisphere is central to global power dynamics, not separate from them.

The intervention has opened strategic space for transformation. The harder work of defining that transformation remains.

Gil Guerra is an Immigration Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center, where he focuses on immigration and foreign policy, the demographics of irregular migration, and assimilation processes. He is also a contributing writer at The Dispatch.

Venezuela, Energy Warfare, and the Global War in Ukraine

The Marines at Atlantic Alliance 2025

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/02/2026

This video is a trailer for a longer form video of U.S. Marines with 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing participating in Atlantic Alliance 2025. Atlantic Alliance 2025 (AA25) is the premier East Coast naval integration exercise, featuring over 25 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps units alongside Dutch naval forces and British Royal Commandos. Spanning from North Carolina to Maine, AA25 showcased a range of dynamic events including force integration, air assault operations, bilateral reconnaissance, naval strait transits, and amphibious assault training.

MARINE CORPS AIR STATION CHERRY POINT, NORTH CAROLINA

07.15.2025

Video by Lance Cpl. Gavin Kulczewski 

2nd Marine Aircraft Wing

Rear Admiral Ed Gilbert and the Coast Guard’s Strategic Voice: Shaping the National Security Narrative

Posted on | by Robbin Laird

During the first Obama Administration, as American defense policy pivoted toward Asia and grappled with budget pressures following the financial crisis, a critical question emerged: Where did the United States Coast Guard fit in the nation’s strategic framework?

For decades, the Coast Guard had operated somewhat in the shadows of national security discussions, its contributions often underappreciated or misunderstood by policymakers focused on the Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps.

Into this gap stepped Rear Admiral Ed Gilbert, whose strategic communications efforts helped reshape how America understood the Coast Guard’s essential role in national defense.

My collaboration with Admiral Gilbert during this period proved transformative in understanding how military services articulate their value and secure their place in strategic planning. Together, we embarked on a systematic effort to visit Coast Guard districts across the nation and engage with the service’s two area commanders, documenting operational realities that rarely penetrated Washington’s policy discussions.

What emerged was not merely a public relations exercise but a fundamental reframing of how the Coast Guard’s unique capabilities contributed to American security in an era of complex, hybrid threats.

Admiral Gilbert understood something that many defense thinkers missed: the 21st-century security environment demanded capabilities that transcended traditional military paradigms. The Coast Guard, with its law enforcement authorities, regulatory responsibilities, and operational flexibility, represented a strategic asset uniquely positioned for an era when threats emerged from gray zones, piracy, drug trafficking, illegal fishing, maritime disputes short of armed conflict, and hybrid warfare that blurred distinctions between military and civilian operations.

Yet this value proposition remained poorly articulated in budget documents, National Security Council deliberations, and strategic guidance.

Our district visits revealed operational innovation that deserved far wider recognition. Coast Guard crews conducted complex operations requiring simultaneous application of law enforcement, search and rescue, environmental protection, and defense readiness, often within the same patrol. In the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, Coast Guard cutters pursued drug traffickers while simultaneously maintaining presence operations that reassured partner nations and deterred potential adversaries. In Alaska, Coast Guard units navigated the complexities of opening Arctic waters, balancing environmental monitoring, sovereignty assertion, search and rescue preparation, and engagement with both commercial interests and potential competitors like Russia and China.

The challenge Admiral Gilbert faced was translating these operational realities into strategic language that resonated in Washington. The Coast Guard suffered from what might be called a categorization problem.

Was it a military service or a law enforcement agency?

Did it belong to the Department of Defense or Homeland Security?

These bureaucratic questions, seemingly arcane, had profound implications for funding, authorities, and strategic integration. Admiral Gilbert’s genius lay in reframing the question: rather than forcing the Coast Guard into existing categories, he demonstrated how its hybrid nature represented strategic advantage, not administrative confusion.

Meeting with the area commanders provided crucial insights into how the Coast Guard conceived its strategic role. These flag officers thought in terms of global persistent presence, relationship building, and graduated response options, concepts that would later gain prominence in strategic discussions about competition short of armed conflict. They described operations where Coast Guard vessels served as floating embassies, where boarding teams enforced international law while simultaneously gathering intelligence, and where partnership building with foreign coast guards created access and influence that purely military engagements could never achieve.

What impressed me most about Admiral Gilbert was his intellectual rigor in building the narrative. He didn’t simply assert the Coast Guard’s importance; he documented it systematically. We examined how Coast Guard operations supported broader national security objectives, from counter-narcotics efforts that weakened adversarial networks, to fisheries enforcement that protected economic resources and maintained international order, to icebreaker operations that asserted American presence in strategic waters. Each operational activity connected to strategic ends, but those connections required articulation.

Yet Admiral Gilbert never oversold the Coast Guard’s capabilities. He acknowledged resource constraints, aging infrastructure, and capability gaps with admirable candor. This honesty enhanced credibility. Rather than claiming the Coast Guard could solve every maritime challenge, he articulated a realistic vision of how adequate resourcing would enable the service to fulfill its expanding responsibilities. The chronic underfunding that has plagued the Coast Guard for generations became not just a service-specific problem but a national security vulnerability. a gap in America’s strategic toolkit which still remains to this day.

Our work together reinforced lessons about military transformation that extend beyond the Coast Guard. Strategic narratives matter. Services that cannot articulate their value in terms policymakers understand risk marginalization, regardless of their operational effectiveness. The Coast Guard’s struggle for recognition stemmed partly from its own modesty and partly from Washington’s tendency to think about security in conventional military terms. Admiral Gilbert’s contribution lay in bridging this gap, translating operational excellence into strategic relevance.

The district visits also revealed something often missed in Pentagon discussions: military effectiveness cannot be measured solely in firepower or technological sophistication. The Coast Guard’s authority to board and inspect vessels under international law, its credibility as a humanitarian organization, its relationships with foreign counterparts, these represented force multipliers as significant as any weapons system. Admiral Gilbert helped defense planners understand that in many scenarios, a Coast Guard cutter achieved strategic effects a Navy destroyer could not, not despite its limited armament but because of its different authorities and operational profile.

Looking back on this collaboration, I recognize how much I learned from Admiral Gilbert about strategic communication, institutional advocacy, and the complex relationship between military services and civilian policymakers. His approach combined operational knowledge, strategic thinking, and political awareness in ways that served both the Coast Guard and broader national interests. He understood that effective advocacy required substance, not just salesmanship and that lasting influence came from demonstrating value rather than asserting it.

The narrative we helped shape during those years has endured and evolved. Today’s strategic discussions increasingly recognize the Coast Guard’s contributions, though resource challenges persist. The service’s role in Indo-Pacific strategy, Arctic operations, and countering Chinese maritime expansion reflects concepts Admiral Gilbert articulated years earlier. His work laid foundations that subsequent Coast Guard leaders built upon, creating institutional memory and strategic positioning that transcends individual tenures.

What made Admiral Gilbert particularly effective was his ability to balance service advocacy with broader strategic perspective. He recognized that the Coast Guard’s interests aligned with national security imperatives that strengthening the Coast Guard strengthened America’s strategic position. This alignment meant he could advocate forcefully without appearing parochial, connecting service capabilities to national needs in ways that resonated across the policy community.

My respect for Admiral Gilbert stems from both his professional excellence and personal integrity. In an environment where self-promotion often substitutes for substance, he let operational results and strategic logic speak for themselves. He built the Coast Guard’s narrative through patient documentation, systematic engagement, and intellectual honesty, an approach that created lasting impact rather than ephemeral attention.

The Coast Guard’s ongoing struggle for adequate resources and strategic recognition suggests that Admiral Gilbert’s work remains unfinished. Yet his contribution. demonstrating that the Coast Guard represents not a secondary service but an essential element of American strategic power, established foundations that continue supporting the service’s advocacy and operational effectiveness.

For those of us privileged to work alongside him. the experience provided masterclass instruction in how military and security institutions navigate political environments while maintaining operational focus and institutional integrity.

Note: I am publishing a book in April 2026 which draws together our work and carries it forward into the current period.