The Overmatch Brief.

Unrealistic expectations. SpaceX mobile.

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1. The New York Times Editorial Board:

The Overmatch brief is a comprehensive review of U.S. military power prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials in the last year. It catalogs China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the U.S. military’s supply chain choke points. Its details have not been previously reported.

The picture it paints is consistent and disturbing. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said last November that in the Pentagon’s war games against China, “we lose every time.” When a senior Biden national security official received the Overmatch brief in 2021, he turned pale as he realized that “every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy,” according to one official who was present.

The assessment shows something more worrying than the potential outcome of a war over Taiwan. It shows the Pentagon’s over-reliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones. And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.

War games can be wrong; analysts sometimes overstate adversaries’ abilities. Yet this larger point should not be ignored. Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the U.S. military is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies. Read the rest. (Source: nytimes.com. Richard Haass and I discussed this subject at some length in last week’s episode of ‘Alternate Shots.)

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2. National Security Strategy (November 2025):

The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis. (Source: whitehouse.gov)

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3. Eurointelligence:

The talk about freedom of speech is the insult. The injury is that the US is moving further away from the European position on Ukraine. We ourselves have been questioning since the spring of 2023 whether the West’s approach can possibly succeed. Trump’s election victory was the decisive moment.

There is no way the Europeans can do this on their own. The European Commission officially acknowledged that Europeans governments are not in a position to find the money for Ukraine. Since EU member states also define the support for Ukraine as in their vital national security interest, their lack of funding meets the definition of insolvency. It does not matter whether you can’t pay because you don’t have the money, or won’t pay because you have it and want to spend it on something else. Europe’s insolvency is clearly of the latter variety. Without the US on our team, and without a willingness to spend our own money, there is no chance whatsoever for Europe to win a war against Russia – even if they end up sequestering the Russia money. All it will do is keep prolonging the war. (Source: eurointelligence.com)

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4. Ukraine will not surrender territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Monday, rejecting a central Russian demand that President Donald Trump had incorporated into his latest proposal to end the Kremlin’s war. “Under our laws, under international law — and under moral law — we have no right to give anything away,” Zelensky said, after meeting with top European leaders to discuss Trump’s plan Monday. “That is what we are fighting for.” The unequivocal declaration that Ukraine will not surrender land could mark the collapse of Trump’s plan, which critics condemned as fulfilling a wish list of Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

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5. A deal to release up to £100 billion of frozen Russian assets in Europe to aid Ukraine is just days away, Sir Keir Starmer believes, as he said negotiations to end the war had reached a “critical stage”. The prime minister held talks with President Zelensky on Monday, along with his French and German counterparts, to discuss the latest US peace proposals. The four men also discussed European efforts to free up the funds, which are frozen in European bank accounts — either to fund Ukraine’s continuing war effort or to pay for the reconstruction of the country in the event of a peace deal. Afterwards, senior government sources expressed optimism that the deal was close and would be announced either this week or next. (Source: thetimes.com)