Daily Brief: 22 December 2025

Pacific | Defence | China’s missile arsenal transforms US forward bases from deterrent shields into strategic hostages

Situation

China now fields over 1,250 ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles capable of striking every major US installation in the Western Pacific simultaneously. The DF-26 “Guam Killer” reaches 4,000-5,000km while hypersonic systems like the DF-17 compress warning times to minutes.

Pentagon assessments confirm Chinese missiles could “close runways and taxiways at US forward air bases in Japan, Guam, and other Pacific locations in the first critical days—and even weeks—of a war.” America maintains 66 significant defence sites across the Pacific, including 14 bases in Japan and 8 in South Korea.

The military’s response—Agile Combat Employment doctrine—envisions dispersing forces across dozens of smaller airfields to complicate Chinese targeting.

Context

For seven decades, forward-deployed US forces served as political “tripwires”—their vulnerability guaranteed American involvement in any conflict. This logic assumed those forces could survive long enough to matter.

China has systematically inverted this calculus. Concentrated bases that once demonstrated resolve now present lucrative targets. The very allies these bases were meant to reassure increasingly recognise that hosting US forces makes them primary targets in any conflict.

Dispersal strategies face brutal mathematics: spreading aircraft across 30 locations instead of 3 multiplies logistics requirements by ten while eliminating economies of scale. A single F-35 requires 50 maintenance personnel and constant supply flows—costs that compound exponentially across distributed operations.

Trajectory

The fundamental assumption underlying Pacific deterrence—that forward presence signals credible commitment—no longer holds when that presence can be neutralised before responding.

Dispersal doctrine sounds elegant but requires commandeering civilian infrastructure across allied nations during crises, disrupting the economic systems that maintain those facilities. The coordination costs and entropy of distributed operations may exceed any defensive benefits.

America faces a strategic paradox: maintaining forward presence that invites preemption, or withdrawing forces that allies depend on for reassurance. Neither option preserves the deterrent effect that justified seven decades of Pacific deployment.

Africa | Conflict | Sudan’s gold-hawala war economy operates below Western intelligence thresholds despite Red Sea strategic position

Situation

Sudan’s civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces has killed tens of thousands and displaced over ten million since April 2023, creating what the UN calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Despite controlling 853 kilometers of Red Sea coastline and producing 64.4 tonnes of gold in 2024, Sudan receives minimal Western strategic attention.

The RSF controls artisanal mining areas in Darfur and Kordofan, moving gold through informal hawala networks to UAE-connected traders in exchange for weapons. This circuit operates entirely outside digital financial infrastructure that Western signals intelligence is designed to monitor.

Context

Western intelligence architecture relies on passive collection of electronic communications and financial transactions through state-controlled infrastructure. Sudan’s war economy deliberately bypasses these systems—gold extraction requires no state capacity and hawala transfers leave no digital traces.

The UAE’s backing of RSF while maintaining US ties, combined with Russian Wagner presence at mining sites and Chinese infrastructure investments, creates overlapping proxy relationships that constrain Western action without providing leverage points. Unlike the Kimberley Process for diamonds, gold can be melted and recast to erase provenance entirely.

Port Sudan’s position near Bab el-Mandeb Strait, through which 14 percent of global maritime trade transits, should trigger strategic interest. However, observation itself reveals existing Russian, Chinese, and UAE positioning, destroying the strategic ambiguity that makes assessment valuable.

Trajectory

Sudan represents a new category of strategic invisibility where conventional triggers for Western engagement—clear state actors, digital financial flows, sanctions leverage—simply do not exist. This creates a template for other conflicts to operate below Western detection thresholds.

The gold-for-weapons circuit demonstrates how commodity-based war economies can achieve sanctions resistance through deliberate infrastructure avoidance. As Red Sea shipping disruptions continue, Western powers may find critical chokepoints controlled by actors they cannot effectively monitor or influence.

Yesterday’s Assessments

• What Breaks First as the Sahel’s Security Collapse Spreads to Coastal West Africa?
• When the Clocks Stop: The Hidden Fragility of Global Timing Infrastructure
• The Wires Beneath the Waves: How Submarine Cables Became the Pacific’s Contested Terrain
• The War Nobody Watches: Why Sudan’s Genocide Remains Invisible to Western Powers

Until tomorrow.