Are drones or manned aircraft the future of the Air Force? Lt. Gen. David Harris, deputy chief of staff of Air Force Futures, says the answer is both — and each can play a crucial role in ensuring the U.S. retains air superiority in the 21st century.

Gen. Harris sat down with National Security Editor Guy Taylor for the latest edition of the Threat Status Influencers video series. Their wide-ranging conversation comes at a crucial moment for the Air Force, which is tasked with maintaining long-term aerospace dominance in a world where U.S. adversaries are accelerating their own development of high-tech weaponry, from next-generation fighter jet prototypes to advanced satellites and futuristic drone swarms.

Gen. Harris explains that, even as the Pentagon races ahead with the deployment of huge numbers of drones and autonomous craft, the flesh-and-blood service members of the Air Force remain the most critical component.

“I don’t think part of that calculus and long-term strategy is removing a manned person or a manned asset from the fleet,” he said. “The way that we see collaborative combat aircraft, these autonomous things that fly with a manned platform, they’re collaborative … but they also talk to the human that’s in the loop.

“So he becomes the quarterback, for lack of a better term, on how these capabilities come together in time and place. And that’s a powerful combination,” Gen. Harris said.

The reactions to Mr. Trump’s deployment of U.S. forces to American cities are breaking down along political lines, with Republican-led states welcoming the troops and Democrat-led states quickly taking legal action to block the moves.

Washington Times reporter Matt Delaney breaks down the wildly different receptions across the country. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe authorized National Guard troops to fulfill administrative duties amid ICE operations.
Other GOP governors in Tennessee and Louisiana are also looking for the National Guard to support overworked and understaffed police departments in urban areas.

But Oregon, led by Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek, took legal action almost immediately after 200 National Guard troops arrived in Portland under orders from Mr. Trump. Democratic officials in Illinois said they’ll also file lawsuits when troops arrive in Chicago, as expected.

Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn is on the ground in India this week and has a fascinating deep dive from Mumbai, the world’s seventh-largest city and a metropolis that the Indian government hopes to transform into a global center for financial technology.

The big problem standing in the way of that dream: The region’s crowded slums, where 5.5 million people live in poverty throughout the state of Maharashtra, including the state’s capital of Mumbai.

The government is in the midst of a controversial and wide-ranging plan to shuttle slum residents to other areas while continuing economic development projects such as luxury apartments, malls and high-rise office buildings. Mr. Glenn has more details, including an interview with Aseem Kumar Gupta, the head of urban development for the state of Maharashtra.

It was a dramatic scene at last week’s U.N. General Assembly: Dozens of representatives from a host of nations walking out when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage, all in an effort to express their disapproval of Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

And those countries should face dramatic consequences. That’s the argument made by Gerard Leval, a partner in the Washington office of a major national law firm, who writes in a new op-ed in The Times that the walkouts should lead to nations giving up the right to participate in deliberations of the General Assembly and all other U.N. bodies throughout the forthcoming year.

“A failure to take remedial action to prevent displays such as the recent rude grandstanding by a group of human rights violators, autocracies and warmongers seeking to ostracize the only democracy in the Middle East can only help doom the United Nations to the fate of the League of Nations, its long-disappeared, impotent and unlamented predecessor,” he writes. 

It’s up to the CIA to give Mr. Trump a brutally honest assessment of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his motivations. And only then can the U.S. find a path to ending the Russia-Ukraine war that doesn’t reward the Kremlin.

Threat Status contributor and Times columnist Daniel N. Hoffman explains in detail in a new column the policy options and intelligence assessments that CIA Director John Ratcliffe should present to the president. They include an honest look at how secondary economic sanctions on Russia could be enforced effectively and how long it would take for them to affect Mr. Putin’s calculus about the war.

“These policy options could be executed alone or in concert, but only after agreeing on the facts, not what some might think or hope is true, but rather what can be verified through reliable sources,” writes Mr. Hoffman, a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the CIA.

• Oct. 6 — Big Deal, Small Deal or No Deal? Possible Outcomes of a Trump-Xi Summit, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• Oct. 8 — Investing in the North Korean People: Broadening Access to Information in North Korea, Stimson Center

• Oct. 8 — Relearning Great Power Diplomacy: A Conversation with Wess Mitchell, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 9 — Countering the Axis of Aggressors with Retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Retired Gen. Laura Richardson, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Oct. 13-15 — AUSA 2025 Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA)

• Oct. 21-22 — Missile Defense Agency Small Business Conference, Tennessee Valley Chapter of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).

• Oct. 22 — Europe’s Energy Transition: From Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine to Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda, Brookings Institution