Daily Brief: 24 December 2025

Russia | Africa | Sahel military alliance creates Russian dependency trap rather than regional security architecture

Situation

The Alliance of Sahel States—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—has launched a 5,000-strong unified military force while expelling French troops and quitting ECOWAS. The three military juntas signed the Liptako-Gourma Charter in September 2023, proclaiming collective defense against jihadist insurgencies that have killed tens of thousands.

Russia’s Africa Corps, rebranded from Wagner after Prigozhin’s death, provides military services across the region. Wagner-linked entities have extracted an estimated $2.5 billion in gold since 2021, with juntas paying in mining concessions rather than cash.

Context

The coups were indigenous responses to French counterinsurgency failure, not Russian operations. Operation Barkhane’s 5,100 troops failed to defeat the insurgency over eight years, while UN peacekeeping became the organization’s deadliest mission. Popular support for military takeovers reflected exhausted alternatives, not pro-Russian sentiment.

Russia’s business model creates structural perverse incentives. It needs perpetual instability—enough violence to justify its presence, not enough to collapse client states. Civilian casualties have increased in Wagner-operated areas, generating grievances that fuel jihadist recruitment.

The insurgency itself has evolved into proto-state governance, mapping operations onto pre-colonial ethnic territories rather than colonial boundaries.

Trajectory

The AES represents genuine sovereignty aspirations enforced by an actor with no interest in actual sovereignty. Russia wants the Sahel to need Russia, not succeed independently—incompatible objectives masquerading as partnership.

Each junta leader operates from different motivations: Traoré’s revolutionary ideology, Goïta’s pragmatic calculation, Tchiani’s wounded pride. This diversity suggests the alliance may fragment as Russian dependency deepens and security conditions fail to improve.

The arrangement locks the region into managed instability rather than building sustainable security architecture.

China | Defence | 100+ ICBMs deployed in border silos create two-peer nuclear targeting problem for US

Situation

China has loaded over 100 solid-fueled DF-31 ICBMs into 250 newly constructed silos across Xinjiang and Gansu provinces near the Mongolian border. The Pentagon projects Beijing will possess over 1,000 operational warheads by 2030, up from roughly 600 today.

The silos are spaced three kilometers apart across 800 square kilometers, requiring individual warheads to destroy with high confidence. This represents more nuclear missile silos built in three years than the US constructed in sixty years.

Context

The expansion fundamentally alters nuclear mathematics by forcing American planners to size forces against two near-peer powers simultaneously—a challenge Cold War strategists never faced. China’s silo geometry purchases survivability through multiplication, making comprehensive first strikes mathematically implausible while preserving second-strike capability.

The Congressional Budget Office projects US nuclear forces will cost $946 billion over the next decade, a 25% increase driven partly by this two-peer problem. China’s positioning near Mongolia externalizes nuclear risk, creating an involuntary buffer zone.

Recent purges in China’s Rocket Force revealed corruption so severe that some silos allegedly contained water instead of fuel, creating intelligence uncertainty that itself becomes a strategic asset.

Trajectory

America faces an industrial capacity mismatch—nuclear warhead production facilities haven’t operated at scale for decades while China expands faster than US forces can respond. The Sentinel ICBM program’s 81% cost overrun to $141 billion exemplifies this challenge.

China benefits regardless of actual silo functionality. If the US assumes they work, it drives costly force expansion. If planners assume dysfunction, they risk catastrophic miscalculation. The ambiguity forces American overinvestment while preserving Chinese strategic flexibility.

Yesterday’s Assessments

• The Architecture of Impunity: Why the World Cannot Stop Sudan’s Genocide
• China’s Silo Fields and the End of Nuclear Primacy
• Daily Brief: 23 December 2025
• The Highway Through Paradise: How Drug Trafficking Is Remaking the Pacific
• When the Taps Run Dry: The Cascading Consequences of Water Infrastructure Failure in Australia
• When the Signal Dies: Australia’s Telecommunications Fragility and the Cascading Consequences of Infrastructure Failure
• When the Grid Goes Dark: The Cascading Consequences of Australia’s Electricity Vulnerability

Until tomorrow.