Lt. Gen. Scott Pleus, the Air Force’s acting vice chief of staff, told attendees at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies conference in Arlington, Virginia, that Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, the service’s chief of staff, have made improving readiness a top priority. That includes not just concentrating on flying airplanes, Pleus said, but fixing them so pilots and air crews can generate the sorties they need to project airpower. In recent years, Pleus said, the Air Force has shifted to a more “centralized” approach to managing readiness. But now, he said, “we are putting commanders in commander business,” and not having staff or headquarters take the lead on readiness. And if a surprise inspection shows a unit does not pass muster, Pleus said, it’s going to be on their commander. “This is commanders’ business, and we’re going to hold commanders responsible for that,” Pleus said. “Because that is 100% in their wheelhouse. If they fail an inspection, that is the commander’s fault, and we will hold them accountable as we move forward.” The Air Force has for years struggled with steadily declining aircraft readiness rates, but efforts to address the problem have yielded little success. Mission-capable rates across the fleet have continued to decline and hit 62% in fiscal 2024; the lowest in recent memory. Meanwhile, the service’s fleet is continually shrinking, and now has fewer than 5,000 aircraft.

Previous administrations emphasized modernizing the fleet, Pleus said, at the expense of readiness of the existing aircraft already on hand. Meink and Wilsbach are taking a different approach, he said, and “are explicitly clear readiness is our focus now.” “We’ve got to buy parts,” Pleus said. “We’ve got to have the parts available so that … maintenance folks that are out there, wrenching on the flight line each and every day, in the cold, in the rain, in the heat, have the parts they need so they can fix those airplane, and then we can get them airborne again.” Pleus said the Air Force is not abandoning its modernization drive, but will no longer do so at the cost of readiness. To do that, he said, the service is looking for better ways to use its funding and working with Congress and the Pentagon to ensure it has the maintenance skills and parts needed to ensure more planes are available to fly their missions. The service is also emphasizing speed in its drive to improve readiness, Pleus said, including swiftly moving on exercises, acquisitions and working with the defense industrial base. Meink has stressed the need to eliminate needless bureaucracy in the acquisition process, for example, Pleus said.

“When you have all the time in the world, you can spend as much time as you want, taking the risk out of everything you do,” Pleus said. “When you don’t have any time, then you have to move at speed, and that is exactly what our secretary has asked us, and the chief has mandated that we are going to start to do.” Pleus also said the service is emphasizing high standards. That includes everything from dress and appearance standards, which has been a priority of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to the way airmen execute flying tactics and procedures. “Everything in between is about setting a high standard, and then pushing your team to make sure that they are ready to do that high standard each and every day,” Pleus said.

Speaking at a Jan. 30 meeting of the Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation in Moscow, Putin said export contracts had been “reliably fulfilled” despite mounting pressure from Western nations attempting to block Russia’s defense partnerships. The revenue, he said, would help modernize defense enterprises, expand production capacity and fund research programs. The $15 billion figure represents a significant income stream for Russia’s defense industrial base as the country continues its war in Ukraine, now approaching its fourth year. The revenue may help offset some effects of Western economic sanctions, though the long-term sustainability of these export levels remains uncertain given Moscow’s increased own consumption of military goods and ongoing diplomatic isolation.​ If accurate, the new numbers would represent a remarkable rebound to near pre-war levels for Russia’s military exports. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which closely tracks the global major arms trade using transparent methodology, Russian large weapons exports fell 47% between 2022 and 2024, while the broader trend reveals a 64% decline comparing the 2015-19 period to 2020-24, though the descent began before the invasion of Ukraine.

Russia dropped to third place globally for arms exports, behind the U.S. and France, by 2024 due to its declining influence in the global military marketplace, SIPRI data shows. There may be credibility problems with the official Russian numbers. The government in Moscow claimed $13.75 billion in exports for 2024, while Western analysts estimated them to be billions of dollars lower.

ah, the classic "any big numbers posted by the enemy? um, they're fake!"

("'our' estimates (actually just handed to us by the Ukrainians since we apparently don't have any intel gathering capacity of our own anymore) of like the entire population of Russia having died in Ukraine several times over? totally truthful!")

Russian arms exports collapsed between 2021 and 2023 and may have dropped from $14.6 billion to approximately $3 billion, according to an analysis from the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank founded in 1984 to support Soviet defectors. While exact estimates differ, the trend holds true across methodologies and Western reports. Russia stopped publicly disclosing detailed data on arms export contracts following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including ceasing to provide information to relevant United Nations organizations. This has also made it harder for independent observers to accurately estimate the full picture of Russia’s arms trade, evidenced by divergent estimates by different Western organizations. SIPRI data shows Russia’s leading arms companies, Rostec and United Shipbuilding Corporation, increased their revenues by 23% in 2025, but this growth came from domestic military demand, which the researchers note “more than offset the revenues lost due to falling arms exports.”

Putin’s announcement came alongside new remarks from Rosoboronexport’s CEO, Alexander Mikheyev, who told the Russian state news agency TASS that military-technical cooperation with African countries has reached levels last seen during the Soviet era and “surpassed it in some respects.” Rosoboronexport is also expanding its activities in Africa, Mikheyev said, following the presidential commission meeting.​ Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms export monopoly, oversees more than 85 percent of the country’s military exports. The company has concluded over 30,000 contracts with 122 countries since its establishment, with total exports exceeding $230 billion. In total, the company’s order book now exceeds $60 billion, Mikheyev said on Jan. 30. The Kremlin has prioritized arms sales to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which aren’t directly subject to the Western restrictions imposed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin said more than 340 joint defense projects with 14 countries were either underway or in development, and announced additional state support measures for military exports covering 2026 through 2028.​ If the reported numbers are accurate, Russia’s ability to maintain arms exports at these levels would raise questions about Western sanctions effectiveness. While the restrictions have targeted Russia’s banking, technology, and trade sectors, many countries in Africa and Asia continue to do business with Russia and purchase Russian military equipment due to lower costs and longstanding defense relationships. The continued sales also reflect Moscow’s use of its weapons exports to strengthen its geopolitical position in far-flung parts of the globe. However, Russia’s defense industry is already operating at wartime production levels to supply its own military. Defense spending had reached 7.3% of GDP as of December 2025, according to official numbers. Additionally, combat losses of Russian-made equipment in Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran may have raised questions among some potential buyers about the effectiveness of Moscow’s weapons systems in modern warfare.

The soft-pedal rollout of the National Defense Strategy—a Friday-night email to press as the Washington, D.C., area braced for a crippling snowstorm—has experts wondering whether there’s an implementation plan to go with it. “My real cynical take is the strategy isn't worth the paper it's written on because the president’s going to do whatever he wants and he's not going to even try to adhere to it, which might be why it was released with such little fanfare,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a CNAS senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, which hosted a Wednesday discussion on the strategy. And while there are always some tensions or contradictions in an NDS, because they’re written by a group of people, this latest document seems to go in several directions at the same time, said Becca Wasser, a CNAS adjunct senior fellow.

New world order

The thesis of the NDS is that the rules-based international order, an American-led framework that promoted liberal democratic values and diplomacy as a means to prevent another world war, was a far-fetched fantasy. It’s a favored worldview of Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief and key NDS author. The strategy proposes to replace that framework with what the Trump administration has coined the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: “American military dominance” in the Western Hemisphere that denies “adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities” there. “What is interesting about that, though, is that, of course, it doesn't say much about what this is,” said Dustin Walker, a non-resident CNAS fellow. “What is replacing that order, what are the sort of higher-order strategic objectives that we are pursuing here?” Experts have described the new NDS as a sharp departure from previous U.S. strategy, but the document itself is thin on details of how defense posture or priorities will shift to support it. “You don't really have much of a description of how the size and shape of our military is going to change pursuant to these strategic priorities,” Walker said. “You don't really hear much about sort of procurement priorities. I think Golden Dome is literally the only specific capability area mentioned in the document. So you don't have a lot of guidance for force design and development here. There's no description of the budget or sort of investment profile that's going to be required to do this.”

China

The NDS says the U.S aims not to “strangle” or “humiliate” China, but instead to forge a detente that halts the growth of Chinese economic inroads in the Western Hemisphere and uses “dominance” to keep China in line, including by increasing defenses along the First Island Chain. “And I think you see that a lot on the China front, which is sort of stripping away any of any discussion about, essentially any normative judgment about the competition between the United States and China, and simply saying that, on pure power terms, we will deny them their ability to assert interest in military force in the region,” Walker said. And at the same time, even more than the National Security Strategy does, he added, it proposes diplomacy to ensure a “decent peace, on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under,” in the NDS’s words. But, Wasser said, “that isn't necessarily how China might perceive it as well... And so when you have that, plus the aim of bolstering posture along the First Island Chain, there's a lot of incongruencies.”

‘Marauder force’

The NDS also has a novel approach to simultaneity, the idea that the U.S. military might have to manage conflicts in multiple regions at once. Rather than talk about the capabilities needed to respond to, say, a Russian incursion into NATO territory while China invades Taiwan, the strategy downplays the possibility by suggesting that the U.S. will stay mostly in its own hemisphere, except when it wants to quickly put down conflicts in other regions. “The strategy seems to be saying that they want to maintain the capacity for the United States to conduct these sort of sudden, short-notice, large, sharp strikes all over the world, essentially while erecting the First Island Chain-denial defense…to have a marauder capability, where, if the president has a problem with a particular country, a particular leader, a crisis emerges, whatever the case may be, we want to suddenly be able to shift a lot of forces to conduct high-tempo, short-duration operations,” Walker said. It would be interesting to see how they work out the math on that, he added, without a significant change in force design or posture, just based on the Defense Department’s shuffling of forces to simultaneously home in on Venezuela while putting pressure on Iran to end its violent clashes with protestors. “It's interesting. This document came as we were waiting for a carrier to depart the South China Sea, to get to the Persian Gulf, because we had taken one and moved it to the Caribbean,” Walker added. And it will only get more difficult if, as the strategy seems to suggest, the “you’re on your own” message to allies means a withdrawal of permanently stationed U.S. troops around the globe, which will mean fewer access points from which to launch these strikes. “We're going to lose basing access, probably because less people are going to be willing to work with us when we're using force wantonly and at the president's discretion for these marauding raids, right?” Pettyjohn said. “And we're not consulting, necessarily, in the same way and treating alliances as enduring partnership. It's a much more transactional thing, which means we're going to need more access-insensitive forces, which means long-range bombers and tankers, or you need the Navy—the surface fleet is one of the most stressed forces right now in terms of readiness.”

‘$1.5-trillion budget’

While the NDS suggests that the U.S. wants to reduce its involvement around the world, it doesn’t intend to save any money while doing it. Earlier this month, Trump announced in a social media post that he’d like to see the defense budget increase by half, to $1.5 trillion. Much of that will go to paying for Golden Dome, experts said, as that effort alone is estimated to cost around $1.1 trillion. But it may also fund this self-sustaining precision strike force that the document hints at. “Essentially, what this strategy almost sets up for me are two parallel force structures, right? Wasser said. “There's the force structure that we have, that's already budgeted for, that's already bought, that's already baked into the system, and that's optimized for the Indo-Pacific, and then there's this more flexible surge force…that sometimes is going to require a different set of capabilities.” Economic-pressure campaigns like the one underway in Venezuela are going to require different assets than the ones the U.S. has been developing for combat against China. Those might be a tough sell to Congress, she added, based on how much recent defense authorizations and appropriations have focused on competition with China. “But I thought that there wasn't really the linking of the ways and means, other than making allies do more,” Pettyjohn said. “There was no sort of context or specificity about what the U.S. is going to do…and what our force looks like as a result of this.”

Budget committee of German parliament rejected purchase of up to 90 MAUS mobile EW systems for Bundeswehr for 600 million euros due to irrelevance. And although such a decision may seem strange in the drone era, actually Ukraine's experience precisely pushed toward this decision. As Defence Network writes, we're talking about replacing old HUMMEL with similar means from Rohde & Schwarz company, which specializes in solutions in this direction and was considered by Germany's defense department the only one capable of implementing the project on time. Initially 40 serial and 2 prototype systems were planned for 596 million euros. However, parliamentarians stated that the project presented to them doesn't correspond to modern battlefield realities and Ukraine's received experience. So, weak protection of new vehicle and lack of trust in Rohde & Schwarz are noted, whose products recently supposedly arrived of poor quality. Overall, Bundestag budget committee determined that a larger and well-armored platform is needed with greater range. Moreover, the defense ministry won't be able to adjust the proposal, but will have to start the procurement process from scratch under updated requirements.

Defense Express notes exact MAUS configuration is not reported; one can try to estimate it by analogy to HUMMEL. The latter was created based on Fuchs APC on which equipment for suppressing various enemy signals was installed. Most likely MAUS was to be on Finnish Patria 6x6, which is being purchased within CAVS, or Piranha V on basis of which Luchs 2 reconnaissance vehicle is being created. Both variants have small basic armor, so the protection claim can be understood. Also appeared criticism overall of such EW vehicle, which will be vulnerable to enemy drone strikes if operating near front line. There's sense in this; at the same time, similar platform makes sense for covering rear objects and filling role of larger EW means, which has greater range. Perhaps German parliamentarians asked to adjust for the latter.

And interesting is that before us is the first recent refusal by Bundestag budget committee on defense procurement, which is currently happening on huge scales. Parliamentarians argue this by the fact that defense ministry still must use its funds efficiently, so not every its project should automatically be pushed through further.

In prepared testimony for a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio says the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela and that its interim leaders are cooperating, but he notes that the Trump administration would not rule out using additional force if needed following a raid to capture then-President Nicolás Maduro early this month. “We are prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation if other methods fail,” Rubio will say, according to his prepared opening statement released Tuesday by the State Department. ”It is our hope that this will not prove necessary, but we will never shy away from our duty to the American people and our mission in this hemisphere.” As he often is called to do, Rubio, a former Florida senator, will aim to sell one of President Donald Trump’s more contentious priorities to former colleagues in Congress. With the Republican administration’s foreign policy gyrating among the Western Hemisphere, Europe and the Middle East, Rubio also may be called to smooth alarm that has emerged in his own party lately about efforts like Trump’s demand to annex Greenland. In the hearing focused on Venezuela, Rubio will defend Trump’s decisions to remove Maduro to face drug trafficking charges in the U.S., continue deadly military strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs and seize sanctioned tankers carrying Venezuelan oil, according to the prepared remarks. He will again reject allegations that Trump is violating the Constitution by taking such actions. “There is no war against Venezuela, and we did not occupy a country,” he will say, according to the prepared remarks. “There are no U.S. troops on the ground. This was an operation to aid law enforcement.”

Maduro, who has pleaded not guilty to federal drug trafficking charges in a U.S. court, has defiantly declared himself “the president of my country” and protested his capture.

Congress has not curtailed Trump on Venezuela

Congressional Democrats have condemned Trump’s moves as exceeding the authority of the executive branch, while most Republicans have supported them as a legitimate exercise of presidential power. Idaho Republican Sen. Jim Risch, the chairman of the committee, planned to open the hearing by lauding Trump and Rubio for making Americans safer with the military actions in and around Venezuela and saying they were legal. “These actions were limited in scope, short in duration, and done to protect U.S. interests and citizens,” Risch will say, according to his prepared remarks released by the committee. “What President Trump has done in Venezuela is the definition of the president’s Article II constitutional authorities as commander-in-chief.” New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the committee, was taking the opposite tack, questioning whether the operation to remove Maduro was worth it considering most of his former top aides and lieutenants are still running the country. “The U.S. naval blockade around Venezuela and the raid have already cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars … and yet the Maduro regime is still in power,” she plans to say, according to her prepared opening statement. The House narrowly defeated a war powers act resolution that would have directed Trump to remove U.S. troops from Venezuela. As Rubio will argue, the administration says there are no U.S. troops on the ground in the South American nation despite a large military buildup in the region. Democrats had argued that the resolution was necessary after the U.S. raid to capture Maduro and because Trump has stated plans to control the country’s oil industry for years to come. The pushback has begun in the courts, too, as the families of two Trinidadian nationals killed in a Trump administration boat strike filed what is thought to be the first wrongful-death case arising from the campaign. Three dozen strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean have killed at least 126 people since September.

The US takes steps to normalize ties while still issuing warnings

While keeping pressure on those the Trump administration dubs “narcotraffickers” without providing evidence, U.S. officials also are working to normalize ties with Venezuelan acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Nonetheless, Rubio will make clear in his testimony that she has little choice but to comply with Trump’s demands. “Rodríguez is well aware of the fate of Maduro; it is our belief that her own self-interest aligns with advancing our key objectives,” Rubio will say, noting that they include opening Venezuela’s energy sector to U.S. companies, providing preferential access to production, using oil revenue to purchase American goods, and ending subsidized oil exports to Cuba. Rodríguez, who previously served as Maduro’s vice president, on Tuesday said her government and the Trump administration “have established respectful and courteous channels of communication.” During televised remarks, Rodríguez said she is working with Trump and Rubio to set “a working agenda.” So far, she has appeared to acquiesce to Trump’s demands and to release prisoners jailed by the government under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. On Monday, the head of a Venezuelan human rights group said 266 political prisoners had been freed since Jan. 8. Trump had praised the releases, saying on social media that he would “like to thank the leadership of Venezuela for agreeing to this powerful humanitarian gesture!”

In a key step to the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the State Department notified Congress just this week that it intends to begin sending additional diplomatic and support personnel to Caracas to prepare for the possible reopening of the U.S. Embassy there. It was the first formal notice of the administration’s intent to reopen the embassy, which shuttered in 2019. Fully normalizing ties, however, would require the U.S. to revoke its decision recognizing the Venezuelan parliament elected in 2015 as the country’s legitimate government. Rubio also planned to meet Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado later Wednesday at the State Department. Machado went into hiding after Maduro was declared the winner of the 2024 presidential election despite ample credible evidence to the contrary. She reemerged in December to pick up her Nobel Peace Prize in Norway. After Maduro was ousted, she traveled to Washington. In a meeting with Trump, she presented him with her Peace Prize medal, an extraordinary gesture given that Trump has effectively sidelined her.