Restoring Grounded Discourse in an Anxious America: The Focus of the Invisible Threads Lab

03/29/2025

By Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake

Journalist Kate Woodsome has been laser-focused on a key challenge facing democracy in the United States and, frankly, within liberal democracies more generally: the growing inability of social and political tribes to talk with one another. In fact, the impacts of the pandemic on younger generations have generated difficulties for individuals to be part of a broader healthy – literally physically and mentally – democratic society. But the political sectarianism and mental health and addiction issues plaguing America existed even before covid-19 hit, and their corrosive challenge to social cohesion affect young and old alike.

Woodsome has been a journalist throughout her professional life, working for the Voice of America, Al Jazeera English, and The Washington Post in societies with complex information environments and fading or failed democracies. These include Cuba, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and the United States. Everywhere she’s lived and worked in, starting in her home state of Maine, Kate says she’s witnessed a common human experience: People are in pain, and they want to feel better. While so much political reporting focuses on tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said point-scoring, Kate delves deeper to examine the underlying forces of our division and alienation.

The root of much pain, Kate has found, is trauma, a biopsychosocial wound caused by an experience or condition so distressing that it overwhelms or short-circuits a person’s normal stress response systems. Even when a person returns to “safety,” their body and mind can carry the impacts of adversity, whether it is from a challenging childhood or fighting in war. A person’s nervous, endocrine, immune, cardiovascular, and cognitive systems can all be affected by the toxic stress, creating a complex web of long-term and even intergenerational consequences. Without care, resources and support, Kate told us, people can become shutdown or hypervigilant, scanning for threats or danger, or dissociating from even the highest levels of stress. She told us that trauma can rupture connections within ourselves and with others, and that social disorder, political polarization, and violence are all manifestations of collective trauma.

Kate had this experience in her home growing up. She witnessed it reporting in post-genocide Cambodia in the early 2000s. And she covered and lived it reporting on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 as part of The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team.

Now an independent journalist and emerging entrepreneur, Kate is focused on bringing together her experience in the journalistic world with her research on trauma to take a new approach to the challenge of fragmentation. As she told us, “We have to heal our nervous systems to heal our social and political systems.”

Kate took a buyout from The Post in Dec. 2023, and began a multimedia newsletter on Substack called Invisible Threads, where she uncovers the ties between mental health and democracy. Her writing and conversations are compassionate and authentic, weaving personal experiences with larger systemic happenings to make complex challenges more relatable and, therefore, less overwhelming to address.

A year later, with thousands of subscribers, it has grown into something bigger: a living laboratory for media, education and resources to nourish what she calls “an economy of well-being.”

Now a visiting scholar with Georgetown University’s Psychology Department and a senior fellow with the school’s Red House research and design unit, Kate is pioneering a nervous-system-informed approach to journalism, education, and public engagement. She’s building The Invisible Threads Lab to empower people with “tools to stay regulated, relational, and responsive in a world of constant input.”

We had a chance to talk with Kate recently about her mission and how she’s approaching the work.

The key question we posed during the discussion was raised by Ed Timperlake: “Using an engineering term in times of stress, pressure builds, and we need for folks to have a constructive pressure relief valve in order to take the pressure down and allow the society or the system to function so it doesn’t blow up into a set of angry confrontations. Is your vision to pull people together by shaping a common ground?”

One might add that one of the objectives of democratic discourse is in fact to shape common grounds rather than simply to shape isolated social tribes fighting with one another, and unable to find, or even to see the necessity of, finding common ground.

Kate Woodsome provided a thoughtful response that gets at the heart of her work:

The goal is to have media and resources for an economy of well-being. An economy fo well-being is what would result if our social and political and economic systems — and our relationships — were built with human dignity and respect and care in mind.

Right now, the media information ecosystem that I am a product of, that I spent 23 years in newsrooms participating in, and that I consume, is built on adrenaline. It’s built on speed. It is built on generating clicks to bolster ad revenue, to rev you up, to make you scared to you keep checking the news. It keeps us all scanning for danger, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing except when it becomes overwhelming and unhealthy, which I’d argue a lot of people are feeling right now. The information ecosystem reflects the larger fear-driven, hyper-capitalist system that has people ordering stuff they don’t need from Amazon to temporarily make them feel better. People either want quick fixes to complex problems, something to make us feel better now, or they want to know that their angst is valid, and they seek out information that confirms their fears.

And so essentially, what is happening when people are engaging in the information ecosystem, be it mainstream media or social media, or even conversations across the dinner table that are a product of the hyper partisan media, the result is to keep people in a state of fight, flight or freeze.

When you talk about the nervous system and responses to a traumatic incident, you can get ready to fight, you can get ready to run away, or you can freeze and shut down. Another response is appeasement. For a lot of people, reading the news or even visiting family or old friends over the holidays can raise their stress levels so much that they don’t want to engage anymore. Or they’ll say something that fractures the relationship, or they’ll bite their tongue to make the problem go away, which often generates more resentment or grief. This is the tip of the iceberg of the deeper dysregulation of our society.

What I’m trying to do with Invisible Threads is help people understand the underlying, interrelated factors of our mental health and political crises — what I call our crisis of misunderstanding — and develop the skills to start looking at these overwhelming things through different lenses. If we examine complex problems by asking different questions, we can identify different tools and pathways to solve them.

In the writing, interviews and field reporting I publish with the Invisible Threads newsletter, I’m integrating references to the human nervous system and how trauma affects the world around us so that we are better equipped to notice how social, political, and economic systems affect our well-being, and how our well-being affects the communities and systems we build. The goal is to ground people in a shared sense of humanity, so even if you disagree on political points, at least you’re more aware that maybe someone is experiencing spikes of cortisol or adrenaline that might be affecting how they — or we — are listening, communicating, relating, for better or worse.

The current information ecosystems promote polarization. And political polarization is a manifestation of collective trauma. Trauma ruptures relationships and makes you look at someone as the enemy — “us versus them.” That is polarization.

If we have a baseline understanding of how our nervous systems are working, and how trauma and resilience affect society, people can come to Invisible Threads and engage with these conversations and these ideas in a more complex, almost slower way, to begin to reassess how we exist in the world, so that we can see how the systems were built around us.

That’s the media arm of Invisible Threads. This coming year, I’ll be releasing more videos with high-profile trauma experts including Bessel Van Der Kolk, the author of The Body Keeps the Score, as well as a younger generation of resilience teachers such as Nkem Ndefo. I’m also teeing up conversations with people affected by the massive shifts in government, those who support it and those who don’t. We need to model dialogue across differences but, more than that, we need the tools to navigate this on an embodied level.

This is where The Invisible Threads Lab comes in. I’m building a non-profit where nervous system literacy meets media literacy, social intelligence, and collective care. People need opportunities to develop deeper skills and practice what they’re learning, so I’m building curriculum and workshops to empower people to notice, navigate, and transform the systems inside and around them. Social media, misinformation, and fearmongering are not going away. We need different skills to stay healthy and grounded in this environment.

This builds on work I’ve been doing for the past year with my partners at Georgetown’s Red House, including its director, Dr. Randall Bass, and Dr. Mays Imad, a neuroscience professor at my alma mater, Connecticut College, as well as with Dr. Jennifer Woolard, a Georgetown vice dean and psychology and law professor who heads the Community Research Group, It’s exciting to blend journalism, psychology, and systems change with an eye on healing rather than fear and division.

You can subscribe to the Invisible Threads newsletter here: https://katewoodsome.substack.com. To help build The Invisible Threads Lab or to learn more about talks, workshops and tools, email ka**@**********me.com.

Editor’s Note: We called our defense website Second Line of Defense and I have had defense types ask why this title?

Our idea from the beginning is that the defense mission of the nation is too narrowly focused on forward deployed forces and neglecting the entire domestic base which makes defense of the nation possible, including infrastructure, industry, a healthy information society and the willingness of the civilian population to defend their ideals and the nation. What Kate is focused on fits right in with our core concept.

II MIG Participates in Resolute Hunter 2-24

03/28/2025

U.S. Marines with II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, II Marine Expeditionary Force, participate in exercise Resolute Hunter 2-24 on Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, from June 17 to June 20, 2024. Resolute Hunter demonstrates the U.S. Marine Corps’ ability to work within the joint force and with foreign partners to validate & develop service, joint, and coalition doctrine and tactics within the realm of battle management, command and control and intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance.

06.21.2024

Video by Cpl. Maurion Moore 

II MEF Information Group

The U.S. Navy and the “Hybrid Fleet”

03/26/2025

By George Galdorisi

The U. S. Navy stands at the precipice of a new era of technology advancement. In an address at a military-industry conference, then-U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, revealed the Navy’s goal to grow to 500 ships, to include 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed maritime vessels. This plan has been dubbed the “hybrid fleet.” More recently, the former CNO, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, has stressed the importance of the hybrid fleet in her Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy.

The reason for this commitment to uncrewed maritime vessels is clear. During the height of the Reagan Defense Buildup in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Navy evolved a strategy to build a “600-ship Navy.” That effort resulted in a total number of Navy ships that reached 594 in 1987. That number has declined steadily during the past three-and-one-half decades, and today the Navy has less than half the number of commissioned ships. However, the rapid growth of the technologies that make uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) increasingly capable and affordable has provided the Navy with a way to put more hulls in the water.

Juxtaposed against this aspiration is the fact that the U.S. Congress has been reluctant to authorize the Navy’s planned investment of billions of dollars in USVs until the Service can come up with a concept of operations (CONOPS) for using them. Congress has a point. The Navy has announced plans to procure large numbers of uncrewed systems—especially large and medium uncrewed surface vessels—but a CONOPS has not yet emerged.

That said, the Navy has taken several actions to define what uncrewed maritime vessels will do and thus accelerate its journey to have autonomous platforms populate the fleet. These include publishing an UNCREWED Campaign Framework; establishing Surface Development Squadron One in San Diego and Uncrewed Surface Vessel Division One in Port Hueneme, California; and conducting many exercises, experiments and demonstrations where operators have had the opportunity to evaluate these maritime vessels.

These initiatives will serve the Navy well in evolving a CONOPS to describe how these innovative platforms can be leveraged. Fleshing out how this is to be done will require that the Navy describe how these platforms will get to the operating area where they are needed as well as what missions they will perform once they arrive there.

An evolving concept of operations is to marry various size uncrewed surface, subsurface and aerial uncrewed vehicles to perform missions that the U.S. Navy has—and will continue to have—as the Navy-After-Next evolves. The Navy can use a large uncrewed surface vessel as a “truck” to move smaller USVs, uncrewed underwater systems, and uncrewed air systems into the battle space to perform important Navy missions such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and mine-countermeasures (MCM). Further, the Navy does not have to wait for a lengthy acquisition process to field capable medium-sized USVs (MUSVs). Rather, it can use commercial-off-the-self (COTS) USVs and field them in the near future.

How would this CONOPS for a hybrid fleet evolve? Consider the case of an Expeditionary Strike Group comprised of several amphibious ships underway in the Western Pacific. This strike group includes three large USVs (LUSVs). Depending on the size that is ultimately procured, the LUSV can carry a number of MUSVs and deliver them to a point near the intended area of operations.

These vessels can then be sent independently to perform the ISR mission, or alternatively, can launch one or more smaller USVs to perform this task. Building on work conducted by the Navy laboratory community and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, MUSVs will have the ability to launch uncrewed aerial vehicles to conduct overhead ISR.

For the MCM mission, the LUSV can deliver several MUSVs equipped with mine-hunting and mine-clearing systems (all of which are COTS platforms such as the MCM-USV, Devil Ray T38, Shadow Fox, GARC and others) that have already been tested extensively in Navy exercises. These vessels can then undertake the “dull, dirty and dangerous” work previously conducted by Sailors who had to operate in the minefield.

While the full details of how this CONOPS plays out is beyond the scope of this article, this innovative approach accomplishes an important goal. If the U.S. Navy wants to keep its multi-billion-dollar capital ships out of harm’s way, it will need to surge uncrewed maritime vessels into the contested battlespace while its crewed ships stay out of range of adversary anti-access/area denial systems, sensors and weapons.

To be clear, this is not a platform-specific solution, but rather a concept. When fleet operators see a capability with different size uncrewed COTS platforms in the water working together and successfully performing the missions presented in this article, they will likely press industry to produce even more-capable platforms to perform these missions, thereby accelerating the fielding of a hybrid fleet.

While evolutionary in nature, this disruptive capability delivered using emerging technologies can provide the U.S. Navy with near-term solutions to vexing operational challenges, while demonstrating to a Congress that the Navy does have a concept-of-operations to employ the uncrewed systems it wants to procure as an important part of the emerging hybrid fleet.

Editor’s Note: I am publishing a new book later this year which is entitled: The Paradigm Shift in Maritime Operations:The Impact of Autonomous Systems which discussed many of the issues raised in this article. 

 

 

 

Eric Béranger Provides an Update on MBDA and European Defence: March 2025

03/24/2025

By Pierre Tran

Paris – MBDA was beating its own targets in building missiles in larger numbers and greater speed, at a time when the ties between Western allies were shifting, the chief executive of the European missile company said March 17.

Eric Béranger said last year he had forecast there would be a 50 percent increase in production of the Aster surface-to-air missile in 2026 compared to 2022, the year seen as baseline, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“In fact we are very much ahead of this,” he said. The company would deliver this year five more Aster than the company had forecast.

“What I can tell you is we are ahead of time on each of the targets mentioned last year,” he said, and that was true for its range of weapons, including Acheron, common anti-air modular missile (CAMM), and Enforcer.

Béranger was speaking at a news conference on MBDA 2024 financial results, which showed new highs in sales and orders. The company withholds profit figures.

MBDA is a joint venture held by Airbus (37.5 pct), BAE Systems (37.5 pct), and Leonardo (25 pct), with British, French, and Italian procurement offices holding key roles.

The missile company has been responding, along with other European arms manufacturers,  to calls from national procurement and client nations for faster and larger delivery of weaponry in response to the war in Ukraine.

A sign of the times could be seen with President Emmanuel Macron visiting March 18 the Luxeuil air base, eastern France, where the commander in chief said France will order a further batch of the Rafale, and that air base will be home of a future version of the fighter jet armed with a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile from 2035.

That will be part of “the modernization of our nuclear deterrent,” he said.

Two squadrons of the planned Rafale F5 will be based at Luxeuil, with almost €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) earmarked to upgrade the base 2026-2032. Some 2,000 civilian and military staff will work on the base by 2030, up from the present 1,200 personnel.

MBDA is developing the ASN4G, a fourth-generation missile which will replace the ASMP-A nuclear-tipped cruise missile carried by the Rafale F4.

The then defense minister, Florence Parly, said in June 2019 Luxeuil would be a base for the Rafale, with the first squadron to be stationed there from 2032.

With recent public debate of Paris offering European allies an independent nuclear umbrella, Macron’s visit to Luxeuil had the significance of “strategic signaling,” afternoon daily Le Monde reported.

That air base is home of the Mirage 2000-5, which Paris is sending to Kyiv. Macron raised the prospect of dispatching further Mirages, some from allies flying the French-built fighters.

On the combat side, Ukrainian forces hit a Russian Sukhoi fighter last week with an Aster missile fired from the Franco-Italian SAMP/T surface-to-air system, Béranger said, citing Ukrainian authorities.

The unit price of an Aster missile is understood to be around €1 million.

Uncertain Behavior

An urgent restocking of European military stores and despatch of weapons to Kyiv have taken a new dimension with the Trump administration, which appears to hold the European allies in low esteem.

“We are today really living through historical moments,” Béranger said. “We are living through a moment where the alliances…are being challenged. We are living the moment where the behavior of historical allies is uncertain.”

MBDA was adapting to “those consequences” by streamlining production, he said.

The company last year built and delivered a third more missiles than in 2023, he said. That ramp up meant production of missiles in 2025 would be double that of 2023. That was “the magnitude” of what was going on in the company.

On the Mistral man-portable missile, the company had hit a forecast four times increase in monthly production in 2024, and there would be a greater increase this year, he said.

The company expected to beat a forecast halving of production time, he said.

MBDA had taken a new approach, he said, with building up stocks of parts in anticipation of orders from client nations, for which “time is absolutely of the essence.”

That meant “increasing risk for MBDA,” he said.

That risk appeared to have delivered financial reward.

MBDA reported 2024 sales of €4.9 billion, up from €4.5 billion a year ago, with orders of €13.8 billion, up from €9.9 billion. The order book rose to €37 billion from €28 billion.

The company booked profit of €640 million, financial website La Tribune reported. MBDA reported 2023 operating profit of €498 million, as reported by website Airitage.

The company was investing €2.4 billion in new plant and equipment over five years to boost production, Béranger said, with that amount appearing to creep up to €2.5 billion.

The company was recruiting 2,600 staff this year, the same number as last year.

There have been several European summits since the remarks by the U.S. vice president at the Munich security conference, he said.

“This is a very specific moment, where Europe is…actively discussing how it wants to take its destiny in its own hands,” he said. “It is a little bit of a moment of truth for Europe.”

Strained relations with the Trump administration has raised pressure for Europe to rearm, with the European Commission calling March 19 for member states and allies to buy arms built in the European Union.

Part of that Buy European policy was a plan to offer access to easy credit with a €150 billion fund, dubbed Security Action for Europe (SAFE), which the E.U. would raise in the capital markets. The U.K. was not – for now – on the list of allies which could tap that E.U. loan.

Design Authority

There has been debate on whether to buy European, Béranger said, whether to depend on suppliers outside the Continent or develop an “internal European capability.”

Designing systems meant “you know them, designing…means you do not ask anybody on how it works, whether to adapt in one way or another,” he said. “You don’t ask anybody outside… for approval of use or adaptation.”

This design authority allowed MBDA to adapt in a few weeks the British Storm Shadow and French Scalp cruise missile to fit on the Ukraine air force Sukhoi fighter, he said.

The question was how much priority should be given to European capabilities, he said.

Asked about a reported row on an attempt to reorganize management, Béranger said MBDA  had to deal with the stakeholders, namely staff, shareholders, and clients.

There was no greater sovereignty issue for France than nuclear deterrence, he said.

That could be the perceived importance of the French manager working on the airborne nuclear-armed missile, with concern Paris stood to lose management weight if a previous planned reorganization went ahead.

The company was seeking to move from a “model which is balanced, which is satisfying everybody” to a new structure, he said. The question was between the three circles – staff, shareholders, and the domestic countries – was there an intersection?

“This is what we are exploring now,” he said.

The company has been working on a reorganization intended to speed up production, as requested by the client nations. There had been a plan for the Italian shareholder, Leonardo, to place two Italian executives in top management posts, but France and the U.K. had objected to the reshuffle, forcing a rethink.

More Aster

France, Italy, and the U.K., partner nations on the Aster missile program, placed an order for a further 218 of the surface-to-air missile, and also signed contract amendments for speeded up delivery of 134 Aster which had been ordered in 2024, the Direction Générale de l’Armement procurement office said in a March 14 statement.

A faster delivery of the 134 Aster meant the missile would be built between 2025 and 2026, the DGA said, reflecting faster production by MBDA and subcontractors.

The statement did not give details of how those orders would be shared out between the partner nations, nor the value of the orders.

The contract amendment with Eurosam covered production of Aster 30 B1 ground and naval missiles, and Aster 15 naval missiles, the joint venture between MBDA and Thales said in a March 11 statement.

The British Royal Navy operates the Aster on its Horizon air defense frigates.

France and Italy sent an SAMP/T missile launcher to Ukraine as part of their military aid, and that system will need restock of Aster weapons.

The armed forces minister, Sébastien Lecornu, told a news conference March 26 2024 there would be an order for 200 Aster missiles worth almost €2 billion, in addition to a previous 200-strong order for Aster. That previous order would have been a deal sealed in December 2022.

On the Rafale, the defense minister has recently spoken of the need for ordering a further 30 fighters, with 20 going to the French air force and 10 for the navy.

Featured image credit: ID 366007493 | European Defense © Ganna Zelinska | Dreamstime.com

Freedom Flag 24-1

With drop zone operations support provided by U.S. Air Force personnel from the 607th Air Support Operations Group, Republic of Korea military personnel assigned to the 13th Special Mission Brigade jump from a U.S. Air Force C-130J Super Hercules assigned to the 36th Airlift Squadron, Yokota Air Base, Japan, and landed in a drop zone near Seoul Air Base, ROK, Nov. 1, 2024.

The bilateral static-line Airborne training was part of Freedom Flag 24-1, a combined flying exercise designed to strengthen relationships and enhance interoperability between U.S. partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific region.

SOUTH KOREA

11.01.2024

Video by Maj. Kippun Sumner 

51st Fighter Wing

Phoenix Express 2024

03/21/2025

BIZERTE, Tunisia (Nov. 4 – 15, 2024) – U.S. Navy Divers assigned to Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2, and partner nations participate in Phoenix Express 2024 in Bizerte, Tunisia, Nov. 4 – 15, 2024. Phoenix Express 24 is one of three regional Express series exercises sponsored by U.S. Africa Command and executed by Commander, U.S. 6th Fleet as part of a comprehensive strategy to provide collaborative opportunities amongst African forces and international partners in order to address maritime security concerns.

BIZERTE, TUNISIA

11.08.2024

Video by Seaman Chance Hanson 

U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet

HSC-23 Conduct Air Power Demonstration During USS Boxer Tiger Cruise

03/19/2025

U.S. Marines assigned to Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron (VMM) 165 (Reinforced) and Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 225, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and Sailors assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 23 conduct an air power demonstration during a Tiger Cruise aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4) while underway in the Pacific Ocean Nov. 16, 2024. Elements of the 15th MEU are currently embarked aboard Boxer and are conducting routine operations in U.S. 3rd Fleet.

USS BOXER (LHD 4), PACIFIC OCEAN

11.16.2024

Video by Cpl. Joseph Helms   

15th Marine Expeditionary Unit