U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II attached to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 122, 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, conduct deck landing qualifications on the flight deck of Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4) in the Pacific Ocean, March 21 and 22, 2026.
The 11th MEU is currently underway aboard the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations.
U.S. Marine Corps video by Sgt. Joseph Helms.
By Robbin Laird
The United States was not born as a centralized nation-state. It was improvised as a federation, then repeatedly re-engineered in crisis.
From the loose league of the Articles of Confederation to the stronger architecture of the 1787 Constitution, from the Union victory in the Civil War to the centralizing wave of the New Deal and World War II, the balance between Washington and the states has never been static.
What we call American federalism is, in practice, a living arrangement—always contested, always evolving, and always shaped as much by political economy as by constitutional text.
Today the next federal reset is unfolding without a single constitutional amendment or a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
It is happening instead through millions of individual decisions about where to live, where to invest, and where to build businesses.
The internal migration of people, jobs, and capital away from high-tax, high-cost coastal states toward faster-growing Sun Belt and Mountain West states is quietly rewriting the map of American power—and with it, the working profile of the union itself.
The first American experiment in union was deliberately weak. Under the Articles of Confederation, the states retained almost all meaningful sovereignty; the central government could not even tax directly. The 1787 Constitution was a reaction to that failure. It created a stronger national core, vesting taxing, spending, and defense powers in Congress and the executive but still left police powers, education, and most economic regulation to the states. Madison’s “compound republic” was designed as a balance of jealous sovereignties, not as a blueprint for a consolidated state.
The Civil War and Reconstruction forced the first great reset of that design. The Union victory decisively settled the question of secession and began the slow nationalization of civil rights through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The federal government was now not merely a referee among sovereign equals but the ultimate guarantor of individual liberties against them.
It took another generation, and the catastrophe of the Great Depression, for the second reset to take shape. The New Deal and World War II transformed Washington into the dominant fiscal and administrative actor in American life, concentrating resources and decision-making in the capital in ways that the founders would scarcely have recognized.
By mid-century, scholars spoke of “cooperative federalism” to capture the dense web of grants-in-aid, shared programs, and regulatory preemptions that now linked federal and state governments. States remained constitutionally significant, but in practice they depended on federal dollars and operated within federal frameworks across domains ranging from highways to health care.
The story from the 1960s through the early 2000s is largely one of incremental nationalization: civil rights enforcement, environmental regulation, education standards, and financial rules all moved toward Washington, even as political rhetoric oscillated between calls for “New Federalism” and demands for stronger national solutions.
If this were the whole story, one might conclude that the centripetal forces of the twentieth century had settled the question.
They have not.
A new centrifugal dynamic has emerged not through formal devolution, but through the shifting geography of growth and decline inside the union.
The 2020s have become, almost despite themselves, a migration decade. The pandemic, the remote-work revolution, and the brutal arithmetic of housing costs and state tax burdens have combined to accelerate trends already visible before 2020. Census state-to-state migration tables show sustained net outflows from large, high-tax coastal states, California and New York, and net inflows into lower-tax, faster-growing states across the South and Mountain West.
The July 2024–July 2025 period place California and New York at the top of the net domestic out-migration list, while North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona rank among the leading net-inflow states.
These flows are not driven primarily by retirees or ideologues. They involve working-age households and firms responding rationally to cost structures and regulatory environments. Moving-industry data for 2025 show a pronounced tilt toward more affordable, mid-sized metros in the South and Mountain West, with California and New Jersey featuring prominently as outbound origins. Venture-capital investment still concentrates in coastal hubs, the Bay Area, New York, Boston, but recent assessments note a diversification of capital expenditures, particularly in AI-related infrastructure, toward a broader range of states and metropolitan areas. Macroeconomic forecasts for 2026–2030 anticipate comparatively stronger growth in several Southern and interior states, driven by both domestic migration and business investment.
Census demographers have also highlighted a revealing interaction between domestic and international migration. A January 2026 release on population change finds that net international migration remains heavily concentrated in a handful of large states, Florida, Texas, California, New York, New Jersey, but that domestic flows are simultaneously redirecting Americans away from high-cost coastal states toward lower-cost destinations. County-level analysis for 2011–2025 reinforces the pattern: many of the counties with the strongest positive domestic migration balances are in the South and interior West, while large coastal counties increasingly record net domestic losses.
The details can be debated; the direction of travel cannot. The postwar pattern, growth clustered in a few coastal blue megastates, with the rest of the union orbiting around them, is being replaced by something more polycentric and more competitive. Federalism, in other words, is being reshaped not by constitutional argument but by the accumulated relocation decisions of millions of households and thousands of firms.
This migration-driven reshuffling of population and output is already altering the distribution of fiscal power inside the union. Nothing illustrates the shift more vividly than a simple budget comparison. In June 2025, the New York City Council adopted a budget of $115.9 billion for Fiscal Year 2026, a figure confirmed by both the Council and the Comptroller’s Office. Roughly a quarter of that total, some $31.2 billion, is allocated to education, with another $19.3 billion going to social service agencies.
Days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantis had signed Florida’s Fiscal Year 2025–2026 budget into law at $117.4 billion, following $567 million in line-item vetoes. Florida’s budget maintains $15.7 billion in reserves, triples the state’s Budget Stabilization Fund relative to pre-2019 levels, and allocates $830 million to accelerated debt repayment.
In other words, the entire state government of Florida, governing roughly 23 million people across 67,000 square miles, spends only about $1.5 billion more per year than a single municipality housing roughly one-third that population.
The precise ranking matters less than the scale. A single municipal government nestled within a blue coastal state now operates at roughly the same fiscal magnitude as one of the largest and fastest-growing states in the union.
That contrast crystallizes two structural realities. First, American federalism has evolved into a multi-level system in which large cities and counties, not just states, wield enormous fiscal and regulatory power. Second, the divergence in governance models between older blue urban cores and rising red-state Sun Belt jurisdictions is not a matter of political rhetoric alone; it is embedded in the actual size and footprint of their public sectors.
It is easy to over-interpret any single comparison. California’s budget remains far larger than Texas’s, and both dwarf those of smaller states. Yet when budget size, population, and migration direction are overlaid, a pattern emerges.
States and cities that have built expansive, high-cost public sectors are losing residents to states that while hardly minimalist in their ambitions offer a lower tax and regulatory burden alongside growing public-sector capacity. Florida’s net domestic inflows have fallen from more than 300,000 at the height of the pandemic boom to just over 20,000 in 2025, but they remain positive; California and New York continue to record large net domestic losses.
What does this mean for national politics? The most straightforward implication is demographic. Population flows translate, with a lag, into reapportioned House seats and Electoral College votes. Census state-to-state migration tables, constructed from the American Community Survey, already show which states are accumulating or losing residents through domestic mobility.
Over time, those shifts are reflected in the reapportionment math governing the allocation of House seats after each decennial census. States that gain population, Florida, Texas, and others across the South and Wes, gain clout in Congress and the Electoral College; states that lose population, such as New York, Illinois, and California, lose it.
But the deeper effect concerns the nature of federalism itself. We are entering an era of more overtly competitive federalism, in which states function as rival political economies offering distinct blends of taxation, regulation, and public services. Americans are responding accordingly. In the postwar “cooperative” model, the federal government set broad programmatic terms and states adapted within those constraints.
In the emerging model, states are increasingly setting the terms of competition on everything from environmental regulation and labor law to education and cultural policy—and Washington is being forced to adapt to a more fragmented, regionally differentiated political economy.
This shift is already visible in how the parties behave. Republicans have oriented their growth strategy toward consolidating and expanding their hold on the Sun Belt and Mountain West, where migration and investment trends are favorable and fiscal models, Florida’s most prominently, emphasize low taxes, robust reserves, and debt repayment. Democrats face the structural challenge of governing large, complex blue metros whose residents and firms can increasingly exit to red or purple jurisdictions when costs and constraints become too onerous.
Ideological debates about “red” and “blue” models of governance are no longer abstractions; they are embedded in the infrastructure, budgets, and legal codes of jurisdictions competing for the same citizens and companies. Seen in that light, the migration and budget data are not curiosities. They are leading indicators of a deeper recalibration of the American union.
When a city of eight million can match the spending of a state of twenty-three million; when that city’s state is losing people even as the state next door gains them; when Electoral College votes and House seats follow those flows, it is reasonable to speak of a genuinely new profile of American federalism emerging from below.
Unlike 1865 or 1937, this reset has not produced a constitutional crisis or a great national debate about first principles. There is no secession crisis, no court-packing plan, no sweeping constitutional amendment campaign. What we have instead is a slow, data-driven rebalancing of where Americans live, work, and pay taxes and with it, of which jurisdictions possess the fiscal, demographic, and political weight to shape national policy in the years ahead.
The challenge for analysts and policymakers is to recognize that this too is a federal moment. The architecture of American federalism has always been defined as much by practice as by text: by who commands resources, who delivers services, and who can credibly threaten exit. In the 2020s, those practical realities are changing. If the dominant story of the last century was centralization in Washington, the emerging story is one of a more dispersed, competitive, and regionally differentiated union in which the real action often lies in the budgets and zoning codes of states and cities rather than in national rhetoric alone.
This does not mean that national power is ebbing in any simple sense. The federal government remains the decisive actor in defense, monetary policy, and social insurance.
But it does mean that any serious account of American power, domestic and international, must now reckon with a map in motion. The union is being renegotiated from below, household by household and quarter by quarter. Federalism is on the move again, and this time the moving vans, not the Supreme Court, are leading the way,
Note: With this article, I am returning to my roots as a political and historical analyst of the United States and Europe. As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I engaged deeply with historical and contemporary questions in American and European political development, questions that have never ceased to preoccupy me, even as my career carried me in directions I had not originally anticipated.
At Columbia, I had the great fortune of studying with Wallace Stanley Sayre, the Eaton Professor of Public Administration and one of the foremost authorities on New York City government of his era. Sayre was a figure of remarkable intellectual range and practical engagement. He co-authored the landmark 815-page study Governing New York City with Herbert Kaufman, a work that dissected the stakeholders and power dynamics of municipal government with an analytic rigor that set the standard for the field. He was also the namesake of Sayre’s Law, the wry observation, later attributed to him in the Wall Street Journal, that academic politics is the most vicious form of politics precisely because the stakes are so low. Sayre had convinced me that urban analysis was the most consequential arena for applied political science, and I had set my course accordingly.
But fate intervened in the most dramatic of circumstances. On May 18, 1972, while meeting privately with Mayor John Lindsay at City Hall, Sayre suffered a sudden and fatal heart attack. He was just weeks short of his sixty-seventh birthday. The loss was shocking, he died, as it were, in the very arena he had spent a lifetime studying and it closed, almost overnight, the intellectual path he had opened for me.
What followed was an odyssey I could not have foreseen.
Atlas Van Lines / North American Van Lines. Annual Migration Pattern Studies, 2020–2025. Inbound/outbound summaries by state, noting outbound concentrations in California, New York, and New Jersey and inbound concentrations in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona.
U.S. Government Publishing Office. “Federalism: An Overview.” https://www.govinfo.gov. Background surveys on cooperative federalism, federal grants-in-aid, and state–federal regulatory frameworks from the New Deal through the early twenty-first century.
U.S. Census Bureau. “State-to-State Migration Flows.” American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, 2020–2025. https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/state-to-state-migration-flows.html.
ResiClub Analytics. Net Domestic Migration by State, July 2024–July 2025. Private synthesis of Census “components of change” data, placing California and New York at the top of net domestic out-migration and North Carolina, Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona among the leading net-inflow states. Tracking data 2021–2025 showing Florida’s net domestic inflows declining from over 300,000 at peak to approximately 20,000 in 2025.
SSTI (State Science and Technology Institute). Venture Capital and Innovation Investment Report, 2026. Analysis of capital-expenditure diversification toward AI-related infrastructure and broader geographic distribution beyond Bay Area, New York, and Boston hubs.
Moody’s Analytics / Oxford Economics. U.S. and State Economic Outlook, 2026–2030. Projections of comparatively stronger growth in Southern and interior states, driven by domestic migration and business investment.
U.S. Census Bureau. “Net International Migration,” January 2026 release. Population growth components showing net international migration concentrated in Florida, Texas, California, New York, and New Jersey, alongside redirected domestic flows toward lower-cost states.
U.S. Census Bureau. County-Level Domestic Migration Analysis, 2011–2025. Positive domestic migration concentrated in South and interior West counties; net domestic losses recorded in many large coastal counties.
New York City Council. “City Council Adopts $115.9 Billion Budget for Fiscal Year 2026.” Press release, June 2025. https://council.nyc.gov.
New York City Comptroller’s Office. FY 2026 Budget Adoption Statement, June 2025. Confirmation of $115.9 billion total, $31.2 billion for education, $19.3 billion for social services.
Office of Governor Ron DeSantis. “Governor DeSantis Signs Florida’s $117.4 Billion Budget for Fiscal Year 2025–2026.” Press release, June 2025. Budget includes $567 million in line-item vetoes, $15.7 billion in reserves, and $830 million in accelerated debt repayment.
Florida Office of Policy and Budget. Fiscal Year 2025–2026 Budget Summary. Tripling of Budget Stabilization Fund relative to pre-2019 baseline; low-tax, low-debt fiscal strategy supporting reserve accumulation.
By Robbin Laird
The war with Iran has forced a clarity that years of diplomatic hedging obscured. So long as Tehran retains a robust power-projection toolkit and structural leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, it can hold the region and global energy markets at risk, regardless of the outcome of any single campaign. The central question is not how to punish Iran, nor how to stage another round of coercive diplomacy. The question is how to engineer an end state in which Iran is structurally constrained from projecting military power beyond its borders.
Three interlocking lines of effort define that end state.
First, the demilitarization of Iran’s regional power-projection toolkit, missiles, drones, naval harassment forces, and proxy networks, down to a level consistent with territorial defense rather than expeditionary coercion.
Second, the construction of a GCC–Israel kill web that can see, decide, and engage cross-domain threats at speed, transforming the region from a fragmented target set into a coherent defensive ecosystem.
Third, a geoeconomic redesign of energy routes that reduces systemic dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, a twenty-first-century reprise of Calouste Gulbenkian’s early twentieth-century effort to route Middle Eastern oil away from single points of failure.
This is not regime change by another name. It is an argument that a durable end state must be built around enforceable constraints on Iranian power projection, not around illusions about who governs in Tehran.
Western debate about Iran has oscillated between two failed poles for decades. On one side: transactional arms-control arrangements that leave Tehran’s expeditionary toolkit untouched. On the other: maximalist regime-change fantasies that are long on rhetoric and short on executable strategy. Both have proven strategically barren. The nuclear agreements left ballistic and cruise missiles, UAV arsenals, and a lattice of proxy militias entirely in place. Regime-change discourse generated no operational plan that any regional actor would endorse.
The more productive frame defines the end state in terms of capabilities, geography, and networks, not personalities in Tehran. What matters is function, not form. The core logic is straightforward:
Iran must be denied reliable means to project coercive power into the Levant, the Gulf, and the Red Sea. Regional states, foremost the GCC members and Israel, must be able to detect, absorb, and defeat residual Iranian and proxy attacks through an integrated kill web rather than fragmented national responses. The structural leverage Iran derives from sitting astride the Strait of Hormuz must be diluted by developing alternative energy-export routes across the Arabian landmass and into the Eastern Mediterranean.
This end state does not require a benign Iran or demand internal transformation in Tehran as a precondition. It imposes a new correlation of forces—military, technological, and geoeconomic—that narrows the scope for Iranian adventurism and raises the costs of reverting to the status quo ante.
To demilitarize Iranian power projection, we need to disaggregate it into operational components rather than treat it as a monolithic abstraction. Four pillars define the system.
Iran has built an arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and increasingly capable UAVs and loitering munitions. These systems serve three operational functions: holding regional capitals, energy infrastructure, and ports at risk; compensating for Iran’s conventional air-power deficits; and providing deniable attack options through proxy launchers. Collectively they constitute a form of strategic artillery, stand-off coercion that does not require a functioning air force to be effective.
Any demilitarization framework must therefore address missile ranges, payloads, and deployment patterns with explicit restrictions, backed by intrusive verification focused on production facilities, storage sites, and test ranges. Critically, these constraints must be enforceable by regional actors, not dependent on intermittent attention from distant capitals.
At sea, Iran has specialized in disruption rather than sea control: swarming fast-attack craft, mine threats, and anti-ship missiles positioned to menace commercial shipping at and near the Strait of Hormuz. Even when not activated, these capabilities function as a standing risk premium on global energy flows, a form of permanent fiscal coercion.
Neutralizing this pillar does not mean dismantling the Iranian Navy. It means eliminating or tightly circumscribing those elements specifically optimized for harassment of international commerce, offensive mine stocks, coastal anti-ship batteries within defined ranges of key shipping lanes, and the command-and-control nodes that orchestrate operations against tankers and foreign warships.
The most insidious dimension of Iran’s power-projection model is its proxy architecture: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, armed factions in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. These forces provide Tehran with deniable launch platforms, political leverage over fragile states, and human-terrain complexity that complicates retaliation.
A credible demilitarization end state must include sustained rollback of these networks through financial pressure, systematic targeting of expeditionary capabilities, and political strategies that offer host societies genuine alternatives to Iranian-sponsored militancy. It also requires a conceptual shift: proxy territory—southern Lebanon, western Iraq, northern Yemen must be understood not as separate crises but as the forward operating bases of a single Iranian system. Design the defense architecture accordingly.
Iran’s regional influence is not purely kinetic. It rests on a narrative that its military instruments represent “resistance” against external aggression, and that its proxies protect vulnerable populations. As long as rockets keep flying and tankers are harassed, that narrative finds receptive audiences.
Demilitarization is therefore not purely a targeting problem. It requires a counter-narrative grounded in fact: that Iranian militarization has brought ruin, not protection, to Arab societies. The alternative security architectures anchored in Arab sovereignty and regional partnerships offers better protection for Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, and Yemenis than conscription into Iran’s wars.
If demilitarizing Iran’s power-projection complex is one side of the equation, the other is constructing a regional defensive ecosystem that both deters and absorbs Iranian and proxy attacks. The kill web concept is the right frame here. It shifts focus from platform acquisition to networks, data integration, and decision cycles from the kill chain model of sequential, platform-centric engagement to a distributed, multi-domain web that can engage threats wherever they appear.
For years, Western planners urged GCC states toward integrated air and missile defense. Progress was uneven. National systems improved, but genuine integration shared early warning, cross-border fire control, common operating pictures remained constrained by political hesitations and technical seams. The war with Iran and its proxies has accomplished what years of seminars could not: it has demonstrated, in operational reality, the cost of fragmented defense. Missiles and drones do not respect national airspace boundaries. They arc across multiple theaters, exploit radar coverage gaps, and search for the weakest link in national intercept inventories.
Fragmented defense turns each capital into an isolated target. A kill web turns the region into a set of mutually reinforcing nodes. A GCC–Israel kill web would rest on several operational pillars:
Sensor fusion across borders: national radar, passive sensors, space-based assets, and maritime surveillance systems feeding into federated data pools that generate a near-real-time, theater-wide air and maritime picture. Distributed command and control: battle management systems that allocate shooters, ground-based interceptors, fighters, naval platforms, electronic warfare assets, based on geometry and magazine depth rather than nationality. Layered and cross-domain fires: high-altitude interceptors, lower-tier surface-to-air systems, point-defense, directed energy where available, and jamming/spoofing capabilities cued by shared tracks rather than siloed feeds. Maritime extension of the web: integration of Aegis-like capabilities, coastal batteries, and maritime patrol aviation into the same decision loop, so that a missile transiting from the Gulf to the Arabian Sea is tracked and engaged as a single problem, not three separate national problems.
In this architecture, the political map does not disappear but it stops dictating the physics of defense. A ballistic missile launched from western Iran toward a Gulf capital may be first tracked by an Israeli sensor, cued to an Emirati battery, and engaged by a Saudi fighter. The kill is achieved by the web.
The kill web is not merely a shield. It is also the enforcement mechanism for any demilitarization settlement. If Iran attempts to regenerate prohibited capabilities, testing a longer-range missile, surging UAV launches from proxy territory, regional states will not wait for deliberations in distant capitals. They will have the situational awareness to detect violations quickly, the means to intercept hostile systems before they reach targets, and the precision to undertake proportional, rapidly executed strikes against launchers, depots, or command nodes.
This changes the enforcement dynamic from episodic Western intervention to sustained regional guardianship. The United States and allied partners remain important enablers, high-end ISR, certain interceptors, diplomatic weight, but they are no longer the sole first responders. Regional actors carry the watch.
Even a demilitarized Iranian power-projection complex leaves a geographic reality intact: Iran sits on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a substantial fraction of globally traded oil moves. So long as the international system depends predominantly on that artery, Tehran retains residual leverage, the ability to threaten closure, drive risk premiums, and command international attention whenever it feels cornered.
To reduce that leverage, we need to think like Calouste Gulbenkian. Operating in the early decades of the twentieth century, Gulbenkian understood that pipelines and routes were instruments of power as decisive as concessions and drilling rights. He spent years constructing arrangements that would allow oil from Mesopotamian fields to reach European markets through multiple outlets, driving pipelines from Kirkuk through Syria to ports at Tripoli and Haifa. By routing production through multiple corridors, he diluted any single chokepoint’s power and embedded oil flows in a broader strategic geography.
The contemporary analogue is the Arabian Peninsula. Several Gulf states already operate or plan pipelines that can move crude from Gulf coast fields to Red Sea terminals. These systems remain underdeveloped relative to the strategic need, treated as redundancy rather than as the backbone of a new energy geography. A serious end-state strategy requires more:
Expanded cross-peninsula capacity: increase the volume of oil and gas that can flow from Gulf fields to Red Sea ports and beyond, reducing the share of exports that must transit Hormuz. Integration of Iraqi and Eastern Mediterranean potential: build corridors linking Iraqi production south and west, connecting into Saudi and Jordanian networks and providing multiple outlets to the Mediterranean, Gulbenkian’s logic applied to contemporary infrastructure. Hardened and defended routes: place pipelines, pumping stations, and terminals under the same regional defensive umbrella as cities and military bases. Attacks on them—whether by Iran directly or through proxies—constitute collective security violations that trigger the kill web’s response.
The region would thereby translate a century-old insight into twenty-first-century practice: control of the routes can be as decisive as control of the wells.
It is tempting to treat military demilitarization and energy-route diversification as separate files, one for generals, one for energy ministers and project financiers. That would be a mistake. The two are mutually reinforcing and must be synchronized.
If Iran understands that alternative export routes exist and are politically and militarily defended by a coalition that includes both Arab states and Israel, its leverage diminishes even before the last missile is dismantled. The temptation to stage spectacular maritime disruptions wanes when those actions no longer threaten to choke global energy flows but instead reinforce an international consensus that Tehran is a spoiler in a system that works around it.
Conversely, if regional states invest heavily in alternative routes but neglect the kill web defending them, they simply paint new targets for Iranian coercion. Pipelines and Red Sea terminals become attractive objects of pressure. Only when those assets are integrated into a responsive defensive and retaliatory system. shared ISR, rapid attribution, pre-authorized response options, does the strategic balance actually shift.
A well-designed end state must therefore synchronize three lines of effort: the negotiated and enforced drawdown of Iranian power-projection assets; the buildup of a GCC–Israel defense web capable of both shielding and imposing costs; and the phased expansion of non-Hormuz export routes, hardened against disruption.
Any strategy aimed at demilitarizing Iranian power projection and diluting Hormuz leverage must account for how Tehran will respond. A leadership that perceives itself being systematically squeezed out of its traditional levers will be tempted to escalate in three directions: intensified proxy warfare, unconventional tools (cyber, sabotage, terrorism), and nuclear brinkmanship.
Mitigating those risks requires several parallel efforts. Clear signaling about limits and off-ramps: Tehran must understand that specific behaviors, missile proliferation beyond agreed parameters, attacks on new energy corridors, major proxy offensives, will trigger unified and tangible responses. It must also see that compliance opens access to economic integration and reduced isolation. Resilience in partner states: cyber defenses, counter-terrorism cooperation, and societal resilience programs across the GCC and Israel must be strengthened to absorb non-kinetic blows without political overreaction that hands Tehran propaganda victories. A narrow but real diplomatic track: demilitarization cannot rest solely on force. Structured dialogue—likely through intermediaries—must keep channels open, clarify intentions, and allow incremental adjustment as the regional balance evolves.
The objective is not security guarantees for Iran in the classic sense. It is to outline a future in which Iran can exist as a strong but constrained state within a resilient regional order, rather than oscillating between revolutionary adventurism and strategic isolation. Those are the only available options. The kill web and the Gulbenkian routes make the latter less sustainable.
The war with Iran and its proxy network has stripped away much of the comfortable ambiguity that Western and regional policymakers had lived with for three decades. Incremental sanctions, rhetorical red lines, and episodic strikes cannot substitute for structural change in the military and geoeconomic architecture of the Gulf and the broader Middle East. Regional states are no longer content to function as passive clients waiting on Washington or European capitals to manage their security environment.
The end state worth working toward is concrete. Iran’s military posture anchored in territorial defense, not expeditionary coercion. GCC states and Israel operating as a de facto defensive community, linked by a kill web that converts geographic vulnerability into shared strength. Energy routes that reflect Gulbenkian’s logic of diversification and redundancy, reducing the decisiveness of any single chokepoint. External powers supporting and underwriting the system, but no longer constituting its sole axis.
This is not a utopian vision. It accepts that Iran will remain hostile across multiple domains if the regime remains in power but militarily significantly diminished, that proxy embers will continue to smolder, and that crises will still erupt.
But it shifts the default condition from constant vulnerability to managed, constrained competition. It offers a way to end the present war not with another fragile pause but with a re-engineered regional order in which Iran can no longer so easily hold the rest of the region and the global economy hostage.
That is the lesson the current war is teaching.
The question is whether policymakers are prepared to act on it.
For the. historical background, see the following:
U.S. Marines assigned to Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS-1) conduct mock Forward Arming and Refueling Point briefs as part of Weapons and Tactics Instructor course 2-26, at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, March 18, 2026. WTI is a seven-week training event hosted by MAWTS 1 which emphasizes operational integration of the seven functions of Marine aviation in support of the Marine Air Ground Task Force, Joint and Coalition Forces.
(U.S. Marine Corps video by Lance Cpl. Gabriel Doherty).
By Robbin Laird
The week Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi arrived in Washington, the news cycle was fixated elsewhere. Missile trails over the Gulf, images from the Iran war, and oil price charts spiking on every financial screen dominated the coverage.
Yet in that same window, the Japanese leader walked into the White House carrying a portfolio of long-term energy and industrial commitments. She left with a set of agreements that barely registered in the Western press and in so doing, quietly reshaped the strategic geometry of the Indo-Pacific. Amid the noise of conflict, Japan used a Gulf crisis to advance a China strategy.
The visit had originally been framed as a milestone alliance moment: a chance to showcase Japanese investment, technology cooperation, and a tightening bilateral front in the Indo-Pacific. Instead, it unfolded under the shadow of Hormuz. Tehran’s operations and the resulting disruptions in oil and gas flows forced energy security to the top of every agenda. For Tokyo, this was not an abstraction. Japan remains heavily dependent on Middle Eastern crude and LNG, much of it transiting precisely the chokepoints now under threat. What appeared from Washington as another distant regional flare-up arrived in Tokyo as a direct threat to macroeconomic stability and domestic political confidence.
Washington, for its part, saw both risk and opportunity. The United States still provides the naval power and forward presence that keep those sea lanes open. Against the backdrop of active conflict, President Trump leaned hard into his long-standing theme: allies must step up on burden-sharing. Japan’s dependence on Hormuz and on U.S. security guarantees became a rhetorical fulcrum. The message was plain enough: if Japan’s economy rests on oil and gas transiting an increasingly dangerous Gulf, then Japan must contribute more to securing that lifeline, whether through deployments, funding, or other tangible forms of support.
The problem for Prime Minister Takaichi is that the domestic politics of Middle Eastern entanglement are genuinely toxic. Legal constraints on collective self-defense, constitutional pacifism, and a population deeply wary of being pulled into another U.S.-led war all limit how far Tokyo can go in military terms. But Japanese policymakers understand equally well that simply pleading vulnerability in the face of Iran solves nothing. Doing nothing risks both energy insecurity and fraying trust in Washington at the precise moment Japan needs the United States most, in East Asia, not in the Gulf. Faced with that dilemma, Tokyo reached for a different instrument.
The core of that instrument is capital and capability rather than combat forces. Rather than paying primarily in deployments to a Gulf coalition, Japan is paying forward in long-term energy and industrial commitments inside the United States. The summit and its surrounding diplomacy produced pledges of large-scale Japanese investment into U.S. power generation, hydrocarbons, LNG infrastructure, and advanced nuclear projects. These are not routine or opportunistic commercial deals. Structured over years and tied to critical sectors, they begin to knit Japanese capital and technology into the physical backbone of American energy and industrial capacity.
This is what elevates the visit well beyond a footnote to another Middle East crisis. Tokyo and Washington are in effect building an energy-industrial compact. At one level, this compact diversifies Japan’s exposure away from the most brittle elements of Gulf supply, not by abandoning the Middle East, but by bolstering alternative sources and routes. At another level, it treats energy, critical minerals, and high-end industrial investment as genuine alliance currency. Bases, host-nation support, and interoperability remain essential, but Japan is now adding something broader: a long-term bet on the U.S. energy and industrial base itself as a load-bearing element of the alliance structure.
Framed this way, the Iran war becomes a catalyst rather than a distraction. Gulf shock provides the political justification in Tokyo for large-ticket diversification and in Washington for welcoming a deeper Japanese presence in strategic sectors that would once have been treated as purely domestic affairs. Both governments can sell this at home as a response to immediate vulnerability. In practice, it is laying down infrastructure, supply relationships, and financial ties whose significance will matter most not in the Strait of Hormuz, but in the Taiwan Strait and across the first island chain.
That is where the China dimension comes into full view. Over the past decade, Japan has undergone a profound strategic reorientation. Tokyo has moved from a cautious, often reactive posture toward China to something closer to a front-line role in great-power competition. Defense spending is rising sharply; long-range strike capabilities are being fielded; islands in the Ryukyus are being fortified and densified with sensors and fires. Japan’s official documents and serious strategic debates now treat a Taiwan contingency as a central planning scenario rather than a distant nightmare. Relations with Beijing have deteriorated correspondingly. China has already begun to experiment with multi-domain coercion against Japan, ranging from economic pressure to political signaling designed to raise the costs of alignment with Washington.
Against that background, the risk for Tokyo is that crises in other regions whether in the Gulf, in Europe, or elsewhere become excuses for U.S. distraction, or worse, for transactional deals that trade away Japanese interests. The timing of Takaichi’s visit was already linked to an anticipated Trump trip to Beijing, itself delayed by the Iran campaign. Japanese strategists carry vivid institutional memory of prior eras when Washington sought to stabilize relations with China over the heads of its allies. The question they brought quietly to Washington was fundamental: how does Japan ensure that the United States remains deeply and materially committed to East Asian security even when crises elsewhere are pulling hard on U.S. attention and resources?
The answer Tokyo is crafting relies on density rather than rhetoric. The deeper the integration of U.S. and Japanese energy, industrial, and technology ecosystems, the higher the political and economic cost to Washington of any retreat or deal with Beijing at Tokyo’s expense. Japanese investments in U.S. energy projects help anchor a resilient American industrial base capable of sustaining high-tempo competition and, if necessary, conflict with a peer adversary. In parallel, U.S. supplies and technology reduce Japan’s exposure to coercive leverage, whether from Gulf disruption or from China’s own position in critical supply chains.
This mutual reinforcement underwrites deterrence in Asia in at least three concrete ways.
First, it makes both societies less vulnerable to energy and commodity shocks, reducing the temptation for adversaries to calculate on war-by-strangulation through embargo or disruption.
Second, it strengthens the material foundation for sustained defense spending and military readiness by ensuring that shocks elsewhere do not immediately choke domestic economies at the moment they need to sustain forward posture.
Third, it embeds the alliance in a network of shared physical assets, ports, terminals, grids, reactors, factories, that create political constituencies and sunk costs on both sides of the Pacific. That is not a soft or theoretical form of alliance cohesion. It is structural.
From Beijing’s vantage point, this is an unwelcome development. Chinese leaders may have calculated that the Iran crisis would pull U.S. attention and resources away from Asia and reinforce the narrative of American overextension. What they are watching instead is a scenario in which Gulf turmoil pushes Washington and Tokyo closer together and accelerates the emergence of a more coherent economic-security bloc. Far from dividing the alliance, the crisis is being used by Japan to thicken it. Any Chinese strategy premised on peeling the United States away from Japan, or on separating economic from security ties, will find the ground shifting under its feet.
Other allies are taking notes. For European states grappling with their own exposure to Russian energy pressure and Middle Eastern instability, Japan’s approach offers a suggestive model. Rather than framing burden-sharing solely in terms of troop contributions or abstract spending percentages, Tokyo is redefining it as long-term, strategically targeted capital commitments into U.S. critical sectors. Those commitments yield both practical returns, infrastructure, diversification, resilience, and political leverage in Washington. They give allies something tangible to point to when arguing for sustained U.S. engagement in their own region. Indo-Pacific partners, South Korea, Australia, will similarly be studying how Tokyo converted energy vulnerability into a strategic bargaining asset.
None of this is without risk. Over-reliance on any single partner, even a close ally, carries its own dangers. Domestic politics on either side of the Pacific can shift unpredictably, converting today’s carefully structured compact into tomorrow’s political controversy. Protectionist reflexes in the United States and lingering economic anxieties in Japan both threaten to complicate the integration this strategy depends upon. And Beijing is unlikely to accept passively the consolidation of a U.S.-Japan energy-industrial bloc. Expect intensified coercive campaigns against Japanese firms, targeted efforts to fracture the coalition, and sharper use of economic leverage against any allied government that appears to be deepening the compact.
But these risks do not erase the underlying logic. In Washington, there is a persistent temptation to read Japanese investment announcements through a narrow commercial lens, another foreign partner pledging jobs and dollars under pressure, to be managed and filed. That misses the strategic content entirely. Tokyo is deliberately using the shock of the Iran campaign, and the visibility of Japan’s own energy vulnerability, to justify a deeper fusion of economic and security policy with the United States. The object is not simply to get through this crisis. It is to shape the material conditions of the next one.
When historians look back on this period, the missiles over the Gulf and the debates in Congress will rightly occupy much of the frame. But they may also note that in the same week, behind the headlines, Japan and the United States were quietly rearranging the foundations of their alliance. If deterrence holds in the Taiwan Strait later in this decade and holding it is the central task of alliance management in the Indo-Pacific, it will owe something not only to new missiles positioned on Japanese islands and strike-capable ships at sea, but also to pipelines, LNG terminals, advanced reactors, and factories whose construction was accelerated by a war half a world away.
Amid the noise of Gulf shock, the Japanese Prime Minister’s Washington visit was already looking past Iran to China.
By Kenneth Maxwell
Brazilian foreign policy has long prided itself on a distinct grammar: sovereignty, non‑intervention, dialogue with adversaries, and strategic autonomy rather than bloc alignment. Layered on top of that diplomatic tradition, especially within the Brazilian left, sits a powerful anti‑imperialist political culture that reads world politics primarily through the lens of resistance to hegemonic power, above all that of the United States.
When these two traditions converge, they generate a recurring pattern: Western states are judged directly in moral and legal terms, while non‑Western challengers to the Western order are buffered by the language of sovereignty, anti‑hegemony, and multipolarity. The result is a structured asymmetry that has become increasingly visible in Brazilian debates over Iran, Russia, and Brazil’s role within BRICS and the wider “Global South.”
This article explores that asymmetry and its consequences. It begins by reconstructing the dual inheritance, anti‑imperialist political culture and sovereignty‑centric diplomacy, and then traces how it shapes Brazilian responses to Iran’s theocratic repression and Russia’s war in Ukraine. It then connects these cases to Brazil’s self‑presentation in BRICS as a bridge between North and South and assesses the strategic risks and internal tensions this stance creates. Finally, it considers how Brazilian diplomats defend this posture, and what is at stake for Brazil’s long‑term credibility as a “normative” middle power.
The first pillar of the pattern is an anti‑imperialist political culture that organizes international conflict around opposition to hegemony. In this worldview, the core divide in global politics is not between democracies and autocracies, or between liberal and illiberal regimes, but between dominant and subordinate states. The United States, NATO, and the broader “West” figure as the principal carriers of a hierarchical international order, actors who resist or complicate this order are often read, at least partially, as part of a camp of resistance. It is a lens shaped by the history of the Cold War, U.S.. interventions in Latin America, and enduring inequalities in global economic governance.
The second pillar is a Brazilian diplomatic tradition that prizes sovereignty, non‑intervention, and engagement with adversarial regimes. Brazilian diplomacy has historically resisted sanctions, regime‑change projects, and ideological crusades. It emphasizes multilateralism, dialogue, and legal equality of states. This tradition is rooted in Brazil’s own experience as a large but historically peripheral power, which gained autonomy not through military alliances but through careful, law‑infused diplomacy and niche leadership in multilateral forums.
Individually, each tradition is intelligible. Anti‑imperialist suspicion of Western power reflects real historical grievances. Sovereignty‑heavy diplomacy captures the constraints and opportunities of a non‑nuclear middle power in a system long dominated by others. The issue arises in the way they combine: together, they produce a framework in which the central question about a foreign state is often less “what is this regime at home?” than “where does this state sit in relation to U.S. and Western power?”
States opposed to Washington or Israel can thereby gain a presumption of indulgence, or at least a more forgiving interpretive frame, while Western actors face more direct ethical and legal scrutiny.
The recent Brazilian debate over Iran illustrates the dynamic in a relatively pure form. When sectors of the Brazilian left respond to Iran’s repression or regional adventurism, the first move is often to reframe the issue away from regime type and domestic coercion and toward geopolitics: Iran as a target of U.S. sanctions, as an adversary of Israel, and as a pole within a contested regional order. Support for Palestine which is broad and intelligible across much of Latin America can gradually slide into a more accommodating posture toward Tehran. What begins as solidarity with a dispossessed people can, without much explicit argument, become rhetorical protection for a state that presents itself as part of the anti‑Western front.
At the radical end of the spectrum, some groups openly minimize the nature of the Iranian regime. They question whether Iran should even be described as a genuine theocracy, present its repressive practices as an almost natural by‑product of external pressure or internal disorder, or simply deflect discussions of domestic repression onto U.S. or Israeli behavior. In these circles, regime character is relativized: whatever one thinks of Iran’s internal order, the “main enemy” is Western hegemony, and it is that hierarchy which must structure analysis and priority of critique.
Elsewhere on the left, the mechanism is more indirect but no less consequential. Sectors of the Workers’ Party (PT), the Communist Party, and the landless movement (MST) do not openly defend the Iranian regime. Instead, they shift the frame. Rather than address Iran’s domestic order, its limited pluralism, its religious hierarchy, its coercive apparatus, they emphasize sovereignty, non‑intervention, and the right of Iranians alone to decide their future. They talk about sanctions, selective outrage, and Western double standards. They highlight imperialism, Zionism, and the broader regional confrontation, leaving the internal character of the Iranian state largely unexamined.
The upshot is a marked asymmetry. U.S. and Israeli actions are judged in direct moral, legal, and strategic terms. Iranian conduct, by contrast, is more often contextualized and relativized. Even where criticism of Tehran exists, it is typically qualified or treated as secondary to the larger story of Western aggression and hypocrisy. The more weight that anti‑imperialist and sovereignist frames carry, the less space there is for clear, unbuffered judgment of Iran’s domestic regime and its external behavior on their own terms.
With Russia, the dual tradition expresses itself differently, because the structure of the crisis is different and the domestic regime question is harder to ignore. Yet the same asymmetry is visible. Brazil has formally condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in multilateral forums, reaffirmed Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and defended the UN Charter. It has not sided with Moscow’s narrative of the war as a justifiable “special military operation.” On paper, this is a clear stand.
In practice, however, both the Brazilian state and much of the Brazilian left quickly reframe the conflict in terms of NATO expansion, U.S. hegemony, and the imperative of multipolarity. Instead of a war of imperial conquest by a stronger neighbor against a weaker one, the conflict is narrated as a proxy war, a manifestation of Western refusal to accommodate Russia’s security concerns, or a symptom of the dangers of a unipolar order. Russia becomes, in this telling, not so much an imperial aggressor as a problematic but necessary pole in a more balanced, multipolar system. Critique of Moscow’s actions exists, but the strongest language is often reserved for Western policy: enlargement, sanctions, and what is portrayed as an effort to sustain Western dominance under the guise of defending rules and norms.
The sovereigntist diplomatic tradition then supplies the operational posture. Brazil refuses to join Western economic sanctions. It opposes military aid frameworks that would place it firmly in the Western camp. It insists on “neutrality,” on dialogue with all parties, and on its potential role as mediator. Fertilizer dependence and BRICS ties are invoked as practical constraints. The language is that of autonomy, non‑alignment, and peace‑brokering. Yet the effect is that Russia faces limited practical consequences in its relations with Brazil, despite Brazil’s formal condemnation.
Within the Brazilian left, one finds the same gradation observed in the Iran debate. A radical fringe openly valorizes Vladimir Putin as a symbol of resistance to U.S. and NATO power. A broader left condemns the war in the abstract but devotes the bulk of its rhetorical energy to attacking Western hypocrisy and the alleged militarization of the conflict by the United States and Europe. The governing center‑left tries to maintain a middle line, balancing legal condemnation with strategic non‑alignment. As in the Iranian case, the central pattern is that Western actors are judged in direct ethical and strategic terms, while a non‑Western challenger is partly shielded by the registers of anti‑hegemony and sovereignty.
These case‑specific asymmetries feed directly into Brazil’s role in BRICS and its claims to speak for the Global South. Brasília presents BRICS as an instrument for democratizing global governance, not as an anti‑Western bloc. It frames its participation as part of a long lineage running from the Bandung Conference to the Non‑Aligned Movement: neither West nor East, but a coalition of states seeking a more plural, multipolar, and equitable order.
In this narrative, the softening of criticism toward partners such as Russia and Iran is not an embarrassment but a strategic necessity. Brazil must keep open channels with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran if it is to position itself as a bridge between North and South. Too sharp a public break over Ukraine, human rights, or regional interventions would, the argument goes, push these partners closer together under a more openly anti‑Western banner and deprive Brazil of influence. The language of sovereignty, dialogue, and anti‑hegemony thus functions as diplomatic glue, allowing Brazil to remain in good standing within BRICS while still claiming adherence to the UN Charter, human rights, and democratic values in its rhetoric toward Europe and the United States.
This balancing act underwrites Lula’s self‑image as mediator and spokesperson of the Global South. He portrays Brazil as uniquely placed to “talk to everyone”: to Washington, Brussels, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and the Arab world. BRICS is framed as a channel for dialogue in a polarized landscape, not as a revisionist alliance. Brazil’s insistence that it will not “take sides” in a new Cold War is meant to signal to the Global South that it will not simply relay Western threat perceptions or policy instruments, especially sanctions.
But the very asymmetry that makes this bridging role possible also generates strategic risks. One is credibility. If Brazil repeatedly invokes sovereignty and anti‑imperialism to soften critique of its non‑Western partners, while applying much more direct ethical language to Western actions, observers can reasonably question whether its normative commitments are substantive or selective. Another risk is reputational spillover. As Russia, Iran, or other BRICS members deepen domestic repression or external aggression, Brazil’s reluctance to draw sharper lines risks tying it to projects it claims not to endorse, complicating its aspiration to lead a “responsible” Global South rather than a merely anti‑Western one.
This foreign‑policy pattern is not just an external phenomenon. It is also a terrain of domestic political contestation. In recent years, as wars and regional crises involving Russia, Iran, and China have become more salient, the Brazilian right has sharpened its critiques. Parts of the right have moved toward a more openly pro‑Israel, Atlanticist orientation. For them, the left’s asymmetric stance is easily framed as moral relativism or complicity with authoritarianism dressed up as anti‑imperialism. They argue that Brazil’s credibility as a democracy is undermined when its leaders appear faster to condemn Western allies than autocratic partners.
These attacks tap into a broader polarization in Brazilian politics, where foreign policy has become another marker of identity and culture‑war alignment. The more the left leans into a rhetoric of anti‑hegemony and sovereignty to justify its partnerships, the more space it opens for the right to present itself as the defender of “Western civilization,” Israel, and liberal values, even if, in practice, many right‑wing leaders have little interest in multilateralism or human rights. In other words, the asymmetry that structures external relations also structures internal battles over Brazil’s geopolitical identity.
Looking ahead, much will depend on whether Brazilian elites across the spectrum can articulate a more consistent set of criteria for judging partners and adversaries.
One option is to double down on the existing pattern, accepting the charge of asymmetry as the inevitable price of being a middle power in a fractured world. On this view, Brazil cannot afford moral symmetry. It must prioritize autonomy, trade, and room for maneuver over principled consistency.
Another option is to recalibrate, for example by developing a clearer language of “minimum norms” that apply to all, while still resisting sanctions or regime‑change agendas. That would not erase asymmetry, but it might narrow its gap.
For now, Brazil sits in a structurally ambiguous position. Its foreign policy draws on a proud anti‑imperialist tradition and a deeply rooted commitment to sovereignty and dialogue. Those traditions have real virtues in an era of renewed great‑power confrontation.
Yet when combined in the way they are currently practiced, they also produce recurrent blind spots: indulgence toward non‑Western challengers, sharper moralizing toward Western actors, and a persistent difficulty in naming the domestic orders and external behaviors of partners like Iran and Russia for what they are.
Whether Brazil can refine this posture into something more normatively coherent without sacrificing the autonomy and bridge‑building role it rightly prizes will be one of the central tests of its diplomacy in the emerging multipolar order.
Note: This article was stimulated by Felipe Krause’s excellent post on Linkedin on March 15, 2026.
U.S. service members assigned to Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One (MAWTS1) participate in a Forward Arming and Refueling Point practical application as part of Weapons and Tactics Instructor course 2-26, at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, March 17, 2026.
WTI is a seven-week training event hosted by MAWTS-1 which emphasizes operational integration of the seven functions of Marine aviation in support of the Marine Air Ground Task Force, Joint and Coalition Forces.
U.S. Marine Corps video by Lance Cpl. Gabriel Doherty.
By Robbin Laird
The kill web concept, which Ed Timperlake and I have been developing and writing about for more than a decade, is fundamentally about replacing the linear kill chain with a distributed, interactive combat architecture. Rather than sequencing effects through a fixed hierarchy of platforms, the kill web operates through interlocking nodes, sensors, shooters, decision-makers, and enablers , that can reconstitute targeting solutions dynamically and faster than an adversary can adapt.
What has distinguished Admiral Brad Cooper’s career is that he has been building and operating kill webs before the term became fashionable. His trajectory from fifth-generation airpower operations to the creation of Task Force 59, and then to command of U.S. Central Command, is the story of a practitioner who has shaped the concept through operational use rather than theoretical advocacy.
The central shift that kill web thinking demands is deceptively simple to state but enormously difficult to execute: the value of any platform is not what it can do alone but what it contributes to the wider combat network. A fifth-generation aircraft is not primarily a strike asset. It is a sensing and decision node that happens to carry weapons. An unmanned surface vessel is not a replacement for a frigate. It is a persistent presence in the sensing grid that makes manned platforms more lethal by cueing them to where they need to go.
Admiral Cooper has operated inside this logic at every command level.
As Commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 7 in Japan, Cooper led a landmark moment in U.S. naval history overseeing the first operational deployment to integrate the F-35 into amphibious and maritime operations in the Western Pacific. This was not simply a technology introduction; it was a strategic inflection point, as fifth-generation capability was woven into the fabric of expeditionary strike operations for the first time. Cooper had to work through the operational, doctrinal, and interoperability challenges that come with fielding a genuinely new kind of combat aircraft in a live operational environment, translating the F-35’s sensing, networking, and strike potential into real mission execution across the strike group. That experience gave him a practitioner’s understanding of what fifth-generation integration actually demands, well before it became a settled concept across the joint force.
His engagement with F-35 operations in CENTCOM illustrates his kill web perspective. In describing recent high-end air operations over Iran, Cooper emphasized not individual platform performance but the orchestration of waves of advanced fighters, supported by tankers, legacy aircraft, ISR assets, and space-based enablers, cycling through contested airspace faster than the adversary could respond. The F-35’s contribution in this architecture is its ability to fuse multi-spectral data in a contested environment and pass that fused picture across the force in near-real time. That is kill web logic: the aircraft is a node, and the network is the weapon.
What is particularly notable in Cooper’s public articulations of these operations is his insistence on orchestration over heroics. His language is operational and architectural. He speaks of sequencing, repositioning, and re-targeting inside the adversary’s decision loop.
That is not the vocabulary of platform-centric warfare. It is the vocabulary of someone who has internalized the idea that speed of decision and continuity of effect matter more than the performance ceiling of any individual system.
If the F-35 operations illustrate Cooper’s comfort with kill web logic in the air domain, Task Force 59 shows him actively building one at sea. When Cooper established TF-59 in September 2021 under U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and U.S. Fifth Fleet, the stated mission was to rapidly integrate unmanned systems and artificial intelligence into fleet operations. What that meant in practice was constructing a persistent, AI-enabled sensing grid across some of the world’s most strategically demanding maritime terrain, the Strait of Hormuz, the Arabian Gulf, the Bab el-Mandeb, and doing it operationally, not in a laboratory.
The concept TF-59 pursued what Navy and industry participants described as a “digital ocean” is a direct maritime expression of kill web architecture. Large numbers of low-cost unmanned surface vessels, including Saildrone Explorers and MARTAC MANTAS T-12 craft, were deployed for extended periods carrying electro-optical, infrared, and other sensors. Their continuous data streams fed into AI-enabled command and control tools, creating an automated anomaly detection and cueing capability that extended maritime domain awareness across areas no manned force could cover at comparable cost. Manned ships and aircraft were then freed to do what manned platforms do best: intercept, board, deter, and strike cued by the unmanned grid rather than searching for targets themselves.
In fact, the MARTAC vessels MANTAS T-12 (12‑ft catamaran USV) integrated early with TF 59 as a “workhorse” ISR and test platform and the Devil Ray T-38 (38‑ft high‑speed USV) brought in later for higher‑end, longer‑range missions and as an armed platform. That is what a mesh fleet can do: mix different kinds of payloads to deliver various kill web effects.
Cooper drove a particular operational discipline inside TF-59 that is worth emphasizing because it reflects a core kill web design principle: the importance of a unified operational picture. He insisted on what he called a “single pane of glass” through which operators could see and task the entire distributed unmanned force through one interface, aided by AI flagging anomalies and potential threats in near-real time. That kind of interface is not just a convenience. It is what makes the web operable: the point where distributed sensing becomes actionable intelligence and actionable intelligence becomes directed force.
What also distinguished TF-59 under Cooper was the speed of its development cycle. During exercises like Digital Horizon, his team was iterating software in hours and hardware configurations in days. That compression of the traditional acquisition and experimentation timeline is itself a kill web principle: the force that learns and adapts faster inside its own network can sustain operational advantage over an adversary adapting more slowly. Cooper was not waiting for programmatic solutions: he was pulling capability forward through operational demand and feeding lessons back into the development cycle in real time.
The influence of Cooper’s work with TF-59 extended well beyond Fifth Fleet. The Chief of Naval Operations publicly credited what Cooper was doing with small unmanned systems in Fifth Fleet as having changed his own thinking about unmanned systems and their role in the future fleet. That is an unusual acknowledgment. Theater-level operational experimentation rarely drives that kind of strategic redesign from the top. What it tells us is that TF-59 was not simply a regional solution to a regional problem. It was a proof of concept for a different model of maritime warfare, and Cooper made it credible by making it operational.
The Navy’s evolving vision for distributed maritime operations, smaller, more numerous manned and unmanned platforms linked by resilient networks and AI-enabled C2, draws directly on TF-59’s lessons. In that sense, Cooper’s work in Bahrain is not just an operational success story. It is an input to force design. He has moved a kill web architecture from demonstration to enduring operational concept, and in doing so has helped the Navy understand what distributed maritime warfare actually requires at the tactical and operational levels.
Cooper’s elevation to Commander, U.S. Central Command moved a proven kill web practitioner from a maritime theater command to a joint warfighting command responsible for integrating air, land, maritime, cyber, and space operations across one of the world’s most consequential regions. The principles he applied in Fifth Fleet scale directly to this broader context. Distributed sensing, integrated C2, multi-axis strike, and the use of F-35s and other advanced platforms as connected nodes rather than isolated assets, all of these remain central to how CENTCOM has operated under his leadership.
Operation Epic Fury is the clearest current illustration. CENTCOM launched a large-scale, cross-domain operation combining advanced fighters, bombers, tankers, ISR aircraft, naval assets, and space support to neutralize Iranian capabilities and signal deterrent resolve. The operation relied on a tightly integrated air and missile defense network, cross-domain targeting, and rapid adaptation to adversary reactions. Fifth-generation aircraft operated within this architecture as both sensors and shooters, contributing to and drawing from a wider web that Cooper orchestrated at theater level. The operation was not a linear strike sequence. It was a kill web executing at operational depth.
The GCC-Israel kill web architecture that has emerged as a result of sustained CENTCOM engagement represents a further evolution of what Cooper has been building. The integration of Israeli F-35Is, Gulf partner air and missile defense systems, U.S. naval and air assets, and space-based enablers into a coherent regional network is precisely the kind of extended kill web that Timperlake and I have argued is the structural answer to the region’s security challenges. Cooper has been the operational architect at the joint and combined level making that integration real.
What has always distinguished the kill web from its critics’ caricatures is that it is not a technology argument. It is an operational logic.
The argument is not that unmanned systems or AI will replace judgment. It is that connecting sensors, shooters, and decision-makers through resilient networks, and then using that connectivity to out-cycle adversaries, produces military advantage that no single platform, however exquisite, can match. Cooper has lived that argument through two major commands and proven it operationally in both.
His contribution is not only to have commanded kill web operations but to have built the operational understanding within his own commands and across the Navy and joint force of what those operations require. The creation of TF-59, the drive for the “single pane of glass,” the insistence on compressing the learning cycle, and the integration of fifth-generation aircraft as network nodes rather than standalone strike assets all reflect a coherent and consistently applied operational philosophy. That philosophy is kill web thinking, applied by a practitioner who has shaped its development through practice rather than prescription.
As U.S. and allied forces move deeper into an era of major power competition and contested domains, the critical leadership question is not who understands the concept but who has proven they can execute it under operational conditions.
By that measure, Admiral Brad Cooper stands out as one of the most consequential kill web practitioners in the current U.S. military leadership.
The record is operational, not theoretical, and that is precisely what makes it significant.
The Admiral at the Helm: How Brad Cooper’s Years in Bahrain Are Shaping the Iran War