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sitrep: aspen security Forum By Evan Anderson ________ Why Read: Last week's annual Aspen Security Forum featured top leaders from the US government, but no current Defense officials. Read more to find out why, and what the highlights and low points were from on the ground. ________ At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards. - Hunter S. Thompson
Each summer in Aspen, Colorado, global leaders in government and private industry meet on the campus of the Aspen Institute to discuss top security challenges. For decades, the Aspen Security Forum has offered a public / private interface with top leadership in policy and defense that promotes honest conversations about what must be done to properly address such challenges. Regular SNS readers will recall that when we stood up INVNT/IP, one of our earliest moves was to produce a description of the scope and scale of Chinese government IP theft programs and bring that material to Aspen to deliver it to intelligence and government professionals working to stop the bleeding. It worked. For this reason, the Forum has long been a must-attend for anyone working on issues relating to national defense from the private sector. For those in the US government, it provides a bipartisan respite from the halls of DC wherein semi-honest perspectives can be shared publicly and truly honest ones shared off the record. The thing about being relatively honest and open when it comes to security is that it is an activity reserved for nations with effective militaries. In authoritarian, fear-based systems, the military is as political a tool as anything else. To please political leadership and protect themselves, military brass in such systems sweep problems under the rug. The result of trading professionalism for politics in a nation's military, unsurprisingly, is unmitigated incompetence. This is currently on full display by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps across the Middle East and the ongoing failure of the Russian military to produce anything beyond blood-soaked chaos and unsustainable losses in Eastern Ukraine. The US and its key allies have long led the world in effective military force projection. NATO and other allies are regularly in attendance at Aspen, offering unique and often frontline perspectives that help to reduce the distance between the broader world and the mountaintop retreat in which attendees find themselves. Critically, the event has made a pointed effort throughout its history to be apolitical. This year's Forum was defined by three key themes: the emergence of a completely novel combat technology and geopolitical paradigm; the difficulties that the traditional DC policy set has in understanding and addressing that shift; and the politicization by the current US administration of the American defense world. So, la Lewis Carroll, let's begin at the beginning, and go on till we come to the end.
The PLA Air Force [...], with respect to its modernization and indigenization of its unmanned aerial systems, is quickly approaching US standards. - "Senior Defense Official Briefs on 2024 China Military Power Report"
The world has changed. In the era of the Cold War, the dominant paradigms were defined by large powers with powerful militaries and conflicting ideologies facing off in a series of proxy wars and frozen defensive lines. These were shaped mostly by the USA and its allies, working to prevent the USSR and the People's Republic of China from extending their influence and systems around the world. In an endless series of moves, from the intelligent and successful to the disastrous, the defining moments of the Cold War era were arced with US policy wins and losses in an environment of technical dominance. On the bright side, most of Eastern Europe was freed from bleak Soviet rule, and South Korea was prevented from falling to what has proven out to be a regime nothing short of bizarre. On the other hand, a prolonged, bloody, and protracted war in Vietnam did immense harm to the American people and the country's reputation, while its support or instating of brutal regimes served to erode confidence in American judgment. Now? An era of unnecessary Middle Eastern involvement has left the US population exhausted, while the CRINK alliance seeks to split up much of the globe for plunder. A revanchist Putin yearns to retake control of Eastern Europe, and China's Xi Jinping contemplates seizing Taiwan and dominating the APAC region. Iran, ruled by zealots and mullahs, destabilizes half of the Middle East, and North Korea hacks bank accounts and builds nuclear weapons with which to extort grain and cash from the free world. All of this is taking place amid the rapid advancement of new AI and communications, drone, missile, and space technologies that continue to disrupt the balance of global military power on a day-to-day basis. This dynamic, then, is our beginning. Whether we will meet these challenges depends on who is going to fill in the gaps. Featured (and a major highlight) at this year's Forum were some of the country's more staid technologists working on dealing with these issues, including: Anduril, which continues to appear poised to meet the drone and missile needs of the US military; Hawkeye 360, which operates an LEO satellite constellation with impressive capabilities; Strider, using open-source intelligence (OSINT) to track nation-state threat actors; and Pryon, which builds AI tools trained on trusted information. This is in sharp contrast to OpenAI and Anthropic, whose panel appearance mostly read as a complaint that people don't trust their products. Also noteworthy was Edward Fishman's excellent talk on economic warfare, sanctions, and tariffs. His storied history at the State Department working on sanctions packages offered a sharp, informed take on what works and what doesn't when it comes to fighting on the financial front. He noted that the United States and China appear to be at a standstill, with China's hold on rare-earth minerals butting up against the US-led global financial system. Refreshingly, Fishman said that US policy would have been better crafted had sanctions been applied to Russia ahead of the 2014 and 2022 invasions in Ukraine rather than after the fact. He went on to point out that the US can and should apply this learning to China. Fishman's new book, Chokepoints, promises to provide a fascinating description of modern conflict as it plays out in markets and supply chains. In the most personally interesting moment of the week, I found myself in a quiet corner with tech legend Craig Mundie after his talk about his recent book, Genesis. Co-authored with the late Henry Kissinger (it was to be his last) and Eric Schmidt (another tech titan with a much better handle on national security issues than some of his peers), Genesis seeks to navigate between the immense promise and identifiable threats of AI. I listened intently to the back-and-forth between experienced government personnel, including a former NSC staffer, and Mundie as they discussed the latter's suggestions for technical and policy solutions to address the threats posed by AI. They were, effectively, brainstorming how to develop layers in the tech and policy stack that can remediate the risks of international conflict and runaway AI. And while potential solutions are neither simple nor a given, it was gratifying to see the adults in the room working actively to make our future world a safer and better place. Mundie mentioned that before Kissinger's death he had promised him that he would work to safeguard humanity from the irresponsible development of unrestricted AI tools. This is a comforting notion, as more powerful kit enters an often-toxic business environment that regularly focuses on moving fast and breaking things more than ensuring that we keep those things we value most. The Old Guard We have got to treat the people who have served this country with respect. - Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan
Americans are not uncomfortable with the use of military force, they just don't want it dragged out. - Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
We frankly don't have the industrial capacity that we need. There wasn't a sense of urgency, and I frankly don't think there's still a sense of urgency within the executive branch and within congress to really address that problem [] we should be stacking munitions right now like cordwood." - Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
Also present high in the mountains this year were a number of companies and people representing what might be described as the "old guard." This amalgam of policymakers and manufacturers has long crafted US policy and weaponry, and to some degree is always worth listening to. But it is hard to escape the feeling that they are not ready to meet the moment, and that, in the main, their ideas and time may have passed. Intel, now run by Lip-Bu Tan, made a showing. But the company is in the middle of laying off employees left and right, as well as pulling out of key industries. (For those who missed it, you can read Berit Anderson's excellent SNS report "Is Intel's New CEO a National Security Risk?" here, on the concerns of having a person connected directly and financially to the PRC government running the firm.) Former GW Bush Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former Bush and Obama Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Former Trump Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Obama and Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan capped the event, discussing what has gone wrong (and right) with US policy over the past few decades. The panel strongly defended our system of alliances and their value, with Gates pointing out that NATO has actually been strengthening in the face of Russian aggression. A certain lack of accountability for the prolonged US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was noteworthy, with Rice herself stating that Korea is, technically speaking, our longest war. Gates pointed out that the American public wants to see military engagements operate in terms of hours or days, not years or decades. Sullivan defended the difficulty and time required to solve reshoring, supply-chain, and manufacturing issues and claimed that Iranian nuclear progress will only be solved with a diplomatic arrangement. Esper explained the challenge in ramping up munitions production. Gates added that we are "long on diagnosis and very short on prescription," and that advice to improve Pentagon bureaucracy is copious but rarely acted on. "People know what needs to be done," he concluded. "They just can't summon the frickin' will to do it." He made the case that it is lack of organization and clear budgeting from Congress that also contributes to holding up progress. From an analytical point of view, however, there are some very clear issues with the policies of Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump if deterrence of the CRINK alliance is to be achieved. It isn't hard to see that the following should have been, and should be, mandatory:
And yet, only the third point was covered with any real depth.
Politicization Rears Its Ugly Head Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. - Abraham Lincoln
For more than a decade, the Aspen Security Forum has welcomed senior officials - Republican and Democrat, civilian and military - as well as senior foreign officials and experts, who bring experience and diverse perspectives on matters of national security. This year, we extended invitations to senior Trump administration officials, including several cabinet-level leaders. Today the Department of Defense gave their speakers guidance that they "will no longer be participating." We will miss the participation of the Pentagon, but our invitations remain open. We are honored to host dozens of top national security voices, experts, business leaders and innovators, from across the political spectrum - and from across the world - at this year's Forum. The Aspen Security Forum remains committed to providing a platform for informed, non-partisan debate about the most important security challenges facing the world. - Statement on Department of Defense participation at the 2025 Aspen Security Forum, Aspen Institute
It is always dangerous for soldiers, sailors or airmen to play at politics. They enter a sphere in which values are quite different from those to which they have hitherto been accustomed. - Winston Churchill
Finally, as described in the statement quoted above, the most noticeable feature of the Forum was the sudden banning of all current US Department of Defense officials from speaking, one day before the event began, by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The bizarre move seemed timed to attempt to sabotage the event, with Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson stating that the Forum "promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the President of the United States" and that the Department of Defense "has no interest in legitimizing an organization that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home." Let's begin with what is true in that statement. The Aspen Institute and Aspen Forum have indeed promoted what could be considered "globalist" policies - because a major part of the point of the organization is to engage with the world. There are regularly speakers who have made major errors in policy of various kinds, as we have covered above. But the point of the Forum is to generate open discussion of all these things. Pulling active-duty military personnel hurts the event, to be sure, but the real damage is to the Pentagon itself. The kinds of conversations and engagement regularly present at the Forum often serve to help and empower the US military and to share knowledge and lessons learned. Thus, the politicization of the event serves more to weaken US standing and military readiness than it does to critique fellow participants. Such hollow moves, in the name of defending the president, are exactly the kinds seen in the authoritarian dictatorships that we face. But, as mentioned earlier, those dictatorships are also regularly faced with military impotence, and often for the same reason. Using the military primarily as a political tool, and only secondarily as a professional fighting force, is becoming all too common. From involuntary domestic deployment of the National Guard to presidential birthday parades, these displays are not just financially expensive; a cost also comes in loss of respect for the US military at home and abroad. This is the kind of grandstanding that looks good to the types of leaders who cannot win wars. They are filled with the cheap optics of the projection of strength and security. In actuality, they scream of weakness and insecurity. And our enemies are surely watching.
Your comments are always welcome.
Sincerely, Evan Anderson
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Subject: Fwd: Skip Technology - 2025 Q2 Investor update letter Dear Andersons - Berit, Evan, Mark & Sally, We have told each of you at various points just how much FiRe has meant to us, and the difference being with you this June [at Future in Review] has made for our company. We have just sent out our Q2 update to all of our investors (see below), where FiRe was a major centerpiece of the news. We thought we would share it with you, so you can see the words and impact beyond just what we've privately shared [....] Best to you all, and we look forward to seeing you each soon, Ben Brown, PhD President & Co-Founder Joey Haber Executive VP, Business Development
Skip Technology Inc. ---------- Forwarded message --------- Dear Skip Technology, Inc. Investor Family and friends, It has been an exciting and busy time at your company and we are pleased to provide you with this update on our progress. Thank you for making all this progress possible with your investment and from some of you with all your other help. Along with this update, below we also respectfully request that you take a look at a potential additional investment into Skip Technology in the next few weeks. We go over the many reasons why you may consider this below. Please enjoy the attached letter with updates from all of Q2 2025 from your company. We look forward to you visiting us soon. Ben & team Ben Brown, PhD, President, Co-Founder
Ben et al., This is great, Ben! Thank you for such kind words. [...] I'm so glad things are going so swimmingly; awesome that DIU is proving fruitful. Can't wait to see what you guys can do, and looking forward to a lot more with you in the future. Save the world and make good money doing it :) Evan Anderson
Subject: Taiwan article Evan, There's an interesting article this morning in the Washington Post about China and Taiwan - don't know if you saw it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/23/taiwan-china-us-war-aspen-strategy-group/ A lot of big names in the foreign policy world ... Cheers, John Payne Ecologist | Data Scientist
John, Interesting; thanks for passing this along, John! I will read it over the weekend - just back from the Aspen Security Forum. Evan Anderson
Subject: Re: Latest on the hygiene hypothesis of allergies - the Amish and the microbiome Evan [et al.], https://www.yahoo.com/news/allergies-seem-nearly-impossible-avoid-183841687.html Ken Kreutz-Delgado Senior Technical Fellow
Ken, Rob Knight talked about this at FiRe 2019! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAtlMlAB68w&t=286s&ab_channel=FutureinReview Evan Anderson
* Mark will be speaking at and/or attending the following upcoming conferences and events: * September 3: Pattern Computer Investors' Event, Kirkland, WA. * September 24-25: 11th Founders World Summit, Stockholm. * October 21: AI Summit 2025, Hamburg. * October 30: ThinkEquity Conference, NYC. * May 31-June 3, 2026: Future in Review, Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego.
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