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After doing a quick side by side of a handful of pages, the ChatGPT o1 translation, while not being the exact same as MND's, still captures the essential meaning of the piece and the writing is of generally better quality.

The PRC's Maritime Administration has posted a navigation warning for military activity south of Zhanjiang. The designated zone is near the area where exercises including the PLA’s new landing barges were conducted. Entry is prohibited from 14:00 to 20:00 on March 28th.

Rand Paul’s advice to President Trump on tariffs: "The more we trade … the less we fight" trib.al/2dZ1MoQ

This event is one you don't want to miss. Join myself, Negar Mortazavi نگار مرتضوی, Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش, and Gregory Brew to discuss Trump's options re Iran as calls for war grow in Washington. Free lunch, too.

One of the things I miss most about not being at Cato Foreign Policy anymore is working with Jon Hoffman who has just had an incredible run of writing and events on Middle East security issues. If you have any interest in these topics, head to this event!

This is baffling and nonsensical. If the PRC is considering dropping a nuclear weapon on Guam, there are going to be US theater weapons (W-72/2, air leg) in theater ready to respond.

Now would be a good moment for Congress to take back its absolute power over tariffs.

Arms sales notification thresholds are statutory, notification processes are both statutory and convention. Amending them has received way too much attention in past discourse on reform; they aren't a significant cause of delays in the process. 7/14

The AECA & FAA already identify many countries that receive preferential treatment in different situations, so will be interesting to see what they envision here. I suspect it relates to the jumping the FMS delivery queue, which is currently first come, first serve. 8/14

Defenses aren’t as good as people think but also conventional ballistic missiles aren’t accurate enough/large enough to do much damage at these ranges. This captures both dynamics, the Israelis missed the missile and the missile missed the airport.

Missile defenses are great for damage limitation on salvos attempting to destroy critical military equipment - if only 50% of the missiles in the salvo are going to hit something important, and you can intercept a large portion of those missiles, you've substantially decreased

Missile defense is increasingly used to defend countervalue targets, as we've been seeing in Israel and Ukraine. This demands 100 percent missile defense effectiveness, which is impossible.

So what's the solution here? I think Yemen is a good case study in why "lets just bomb them back" doesn't really work. I'd argue that framework extends to Ukraine-Russia.

NEW: The March 2025 Taiwan Arms Sales Backlog update is here! Read Eric Gomez's analysis about the recent announcement, fulfillment, and delivery of US arms sales to Taiwan on our website: tsm.schar.gmu.edu/taiwan-arms-sa…

Using this as the metric is kind of odd because I doubt the U.S./NATO/asian allies (besides the ROK) would lean super heavily on 155mm artillery in their war plans anyway

MND has literally said otherwise but OK. defenseone.com/business/2025/…

It is definitely worrying and not at all funny that KJU is blowing huge sums of money on ships that don't work and will be looked at by US submarines the same way a lioness looks at a tasty, unawares gazelle

This sounds good but something like two thirds of the backlog of US weapons for Taiwan by dollar value were those announced by the Trump admin that still haven’t arrived yet.