Trajectory Daily Brief: 09 January 2026

Indo-Pacific | Defence | China’s Taiwan exercises compress warning time to six minutes while purges undermine PLA readiness

Situation

China’s Joint Sword-2024B exercise demonstrated the PLA’s ability to encircle Taiwan within a single day after 70 days of planning. The operation began at 5:01 AM on October 14, 2024, and concluded by nightfall, practicing strikes and port blockades.

Taiwan’s PAVE PAWS radar system provides only six minutes of warning for incoming ballistic missiles—enough time to sound alarms but insufficient for meaningful decision-making or evacuation. The PLA has systematically erased the Taiwan Strait median line through repeated crossings, contaminating the baseline for threat assessment.

Xi Jinping has simultaneously purged military leadership, including Eastern Theater Commander He Weidong in October 2025, prioritizing factional loyalty over operational competence.

Context

The PLA has inverted traditional military doctrine where major operations require visible mobilization. Their “cold start military posture” enables shifts from peacetime to combat readiness without obvious indicators. Each exercise that doesn’t escalate trains analysts to classify encirclement as routine, creating “ontological paralysis” where defenders cannot distinguish genuine threats from drills.

China has solved amphibious lift shortfalls through civilian infrastructure. RO-RO ferries on profitable domestic routes function as pre-positioned assault transports requiring no visible reconfiguration. This “shadow navy” creates detection nightmares as commercial vessels oscillate between economic and military identities.

The contradiction between increasing PLA sophistication and leadership purges creates systemic vulnerability where tighter joint integration paradoxically lowers failure thresholds.

Trajectory

Warning time has become a series of nested decisions rather than a simple detection problem. Sleep inertia reduces effective six-minute missile warnings to three minutes for awakened decision-makers, while legal procedures assume response times that no longer exist.

The informal economy inadvertently functions as an early warning network through logistics workers who notice unusual military orders. However, this intelligence advantage may erode as the PLA refines operational security.

Xi’s purges create a readiness paradox where the supreme leader has made himself the single point of failure in an increasingly sophisticated military system designed for rapid escalation.

Africa | Security | Western counterterrorism withdrawal from Sahel creates Russian mercenary expansion and increased violence

Situation

France’s eight-year Operation Barkhane officially failed to suppress jihadism in the Sahel, with French forces withdrawing from Mali by August 2022 and UN peacekeepers exiting by December 2023. Violence increased 38% in 2023 following Western departure, with Burkina Faso suffering the world’s worst terrorism impact and 68% more deaths.

Russian mercenaries filled the vacuum through Wagner Group and later Africa Corps, offering security assistance without democratic conditions. The Alliance of Sahel States—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—formalized mutual defense commitments in 2023 after expelling Western partners.

Context

Western counterterrorism assumed that eliminating insurgents would allow state authority to expand, but kinetic operations destroyed the registry offices and courts that constituted actual state presence. This created a temporal mismatch where compressed Western project cycles competed against jihadist systems offering permanent structures.

The cultural dimension proved equally damaging. In honor-shame frameworks prevalent across the Sahel, accepting foreign military protection created legitimacy deficits where each successful Western operation demonstrated local government incapacity. Military officers trained by Western forces ultimately led the coups that expelled their former partners.

Russia’s proposition differed fundamentally—regime survival assistance rather than capacity building, paid through mining concessions and creating mutual liability through shared atrocities that bound partners more durably than treaties.

Trajectory

The Sahel now accounts for over half of global terrorism deaths, suggesting that neither Western capacity-building nor Russian regime-protection models effectively address underlying insurgency drivers. The kompromat bonds between juntas and Russian mercenaries create relationship architecture resistant to diplomatic pressure.

This pattern may expand as other African governments observe that Russian partnerships offer protection from both external threats and domestic opposition without governance conditions. Western counterterrorism’s structural contradictions—protection that creates dependency—remain unresolved across similar partnerships continent-wide.

Arctic | Strategy | Trump’s Greenland pursuit exposes structural contradictions in US Arctic policy that create openings for adversaries

Situation

Trump has escalated his Greenland acquisition campaign from aspiration to ultimatum, refusing to rule out military force against NATO ally Denmark. His approach directly contradicts existing US Arctic strategies that emphasize multilateral cooperation and rules-based order.

The US operates with two heavy icebreakers versus Russia’s forty-plus fleet. American Arctic planning cycles in budget terms while Russia thinks generationally and China plans in decades through its Polar Silk Road initiative.

Danish military intelligence has elevated the US to threat assessment status for the first time, even as diplomatic channels maintain public normalcy.

Context

US Arctic strategy since 2013 has emphasized that the region would not be a source of territorial conflict under international law. Trump’s approach legitimizes the revisionism Washington claims to oppose by treating Arctic sovereignty as negotiable.

The temporal mismatch is structural: Russia’s Arctic ambitions span centuries, China’s infrastructure investments span decades, while US planning cycles through budget periods. This creates predictable capability gaps.

Trump’s rhetoric inadvertently elevates Greenlandic actors, creating diplomatic arbitrage opportunities. An independent Greenland—increasingly likely after March 2025 elections—would not automatically remain in NATO’s legal perimeter.

Trajectory

The Greenland paradox reveals that aggressive American pursuit undermines the conditions that make control valuable. Alliance credibility suffers when the guarantor threatens allies, creating legal absurdities within NATO’s Article 5 framework.

Strategic incoherence creates exploitable openings. Patient adversaries benefit not from American weakness but from American unpredictability that fractures alliance structures.

The real risk is not territorial loss but strategic isolation—where America’s Arctic objectives become achievable only through unilateral action, precisely the scenario that empowers revisionist powers.

Pacific | Defence | US rebuilds WWII airfields but dispersal strategy may not survive China’s precision strike capabilities

Situation

The US Air Force is spending $409 million to restore Tinian’s North Field and dozens of other Pacific airstrips under its Agile Combat Employment doctrine. The strategy aims to complicate Chinese targeting by dispersing aircraft across multiple locations rather than concentrating them at vulnerable mega-bases like Kadena and Andersen.

China’s PLA Rocket Force operates over 1,200 missiles capable of reaching US Pacific bases, including DF-17 hypersonic weapons designed to defeat defenses. Meanwhile, China’s 510-satellite ISR constellation provides persistent Pacific coverage with car-sized object detection capability.

The Pacific Deterrence Initiative has allocated $40 billion through 2024, with $2.38 billion specifically for infrastructure improvements across the theater.

Context

US Pacific basing has shrunk 65% since WWII—from 93 bases to 33 permanent installations—creating concentrated targets that China can saturate with missile strikes. The geometric logic of dispersal sounds compelling: forcing China to expend 10 missiles per airfield across 100 locations would require 1,000 missiles.

However, this assumes an adversary operating blind. China’s satellite constellation provides near-real-time tracking of aircraft movements, fuel deliveries, and construction activity. The shell game becomes transparent when the opponent can see all the shells continuously.

Moreover, each dispersed location multiplies logistical requirements. F-35s need 25 maintenance personnel per aircraft plus fuel, munitions, and spare parts at every operating site—constraints that training “Multi-Capable Airmen” cannot eliminate.

Trajectory

The fundamental paradox is that rebuilding creates the intelligence enabling destruction. Environmental impact statements and defense cooperation agreements provide targeting data in public documents, while coral foundation variability makes blast protection unpredictable.

China can manufacture missiles faster than the US trains repair crews, and has expanded missile production 60% since 2020. The asymmetry favors the attacker despite repair doctrine claiming 120 craters fixed in 6.5 hours.

The strategy may be rebuilding targets rather than deterrence, multiplying vulnerabilities across a wider geographic area without meaningfully complicating Chinese strike planning.

Yesterday’s Assessments

• The Protectors Who Couldn’t Protect
• The Six-Minute Warning: What China’s Taiwan Exercises Reveal About the Vanishing Window for Defense

Until tomorrow.