The article argues that recent executive overreach and politicization have severely undermined established norms of U.S. civil-military relations. To restore professional standards, the incoming Congress must actively exercise its oversight powers, moving beyond mere criticism to demanding transparency in defense policy and personnel decisions. Key reforms include enforcing meritocratic promotion processes, requiring documented justification for senior officer removals, and preventing the partisan use of the military. These actions are crucial for bolstering public trust and ensuring the military remains a nonpartisan instrument of civilian control.
The Triumph of Tech-Fueled Propaganda
English Summary
Foreign influence operations have evolved into 'full-spectrum propaganda,' an integrated strategy that combines state media, fake accounts, paid influencers, and advanced AI to amplify narratives across all channels. Adversaries utilize this multi-pronged approach—which includes both digital and real-world 'cognitive strikes'—to confer legitimacy and make disinformation highly credible. Policy must therefore abandon the focus on isolated social media incidents and instead develop holistic, cross-platform strategies to assess and counter threats across the entire information ecosystem. Failure to build this comprehensive capacity, exacerbated by platform and government disinvestment, leaves the nation unprepared for this complex, technologically advanced challenge.
中文摘要
外國影響力操作已演變為「全光譜宣傳」（full-spectrum propaganda），這是一種整合性策略，結合了國家媒體、虛假帳號、有償網紅和先進AI技術，以跨所有管道放大敘事。敵對勢力利用這種多管齊下的方法——包括數位和現實世界的「認知打擊」（cognitive strikes）——來賦予不實資訊合法性，使其極具可信度。因此，政策制定必須放棄僅關注孤立的社群媒體事件，轉而發展整體性的、跨平台的策略，以評估和應對整個資訊生態系統中的威脅。若未能建立這種全面的能力，尤其是在平台和政府資源投入不足的情況下，國家將無法應對這種複雜、高科技的挑戰。
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