OUR PICKSRussia’s Helium Card in the AI Arms Race | Risks of Autonomous Weapons | Dangers of Hegseth’s “Warfighter” Ethos, and more

Hegseth’s Boastful Claims About Iran War Contradict Reality, Officials Say  (John Hudson, Ellen Nakashima and Tara Copp, Washington Post)
The defense secretary’s portrayal of U.S. success in the conflict risks misinforming the public and the president, observers worry.

The Dangers of Hegseth’s “Warfighter” Ethos  (Allison McManus, Just Security)
Hegseth may present his version of a warfighter as the paragon of U.S. military power, but for all his talk, he fails to recognize the true strengths of the armed forces.

What Spending Probes at DHS Reveal About Kristi Noem’s Time in Office  (Brianna Sacks, Maria Sacchetti and Marianne LeVine, Washington Post)
Kara Voorhies, a little-known contractor, worked closely with top aide Corey Lewandowski and had wide influence over contracts under Noem’s leadership.

Russia’s Helium Card in the AI Arms Race  (Fyodor Dmitrenko, National Interest)
The Iran War knocked out a third of global helium. China barely flinched. What does that tell us about who’s actually winning the industrial contest behind artificial intelligence?

Outdated Language Obscures the Risks of Autonomous Weapons  (Arthur Holland Michel, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
For the last dozen years, international efforts to establish regulations for autonomous weapons have traced a series of widening circles.
Within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), the main arena for multilateral negotiations on the matter, states generally agree that giving weapons the capacity to select and engage targets on their own could lead to unintended consequences, including serious harms for which no human would be held accountable. But after more than a dozen years of talks, the odds are slim to none that states will adopt common measures anytime soon to foreclose upon those risks. The technology, meanwhile, only keeps getting more advanced and more prolific.

Revenge of Rumsfeld’s Fourth Quadrant—Closing the Strait of Hormuz  (Herb Lin, Lawfare)
Iran’s closure of the strait reveals a lack of U.S. operational planning in a foreseeable contingency.
In my 2021 Lawfare article, “The Fourth Quadrant—the Unknown Knowns,” I argued for expanding Donald Rumsfeld’s famous knowledge matrix to include a category he conspicuously overlooked. Recall that in a 2002 press briefing about Iraq, Rumsfeld organized knowledge into three useful bins: known knowns (known answers to questions we know are relevant), known unknowns (questions that we know are relevant but for which we do not yet have answers), and unknown unknowns (the true blind spots that we have no reasonable way of anticipating and appear as a total surprise).
My article pointed out that he omitted the fourth quadrant—unknown knowns—things known in some institutional, analytic, or experiential sense that nonetheless fail to inform decision-making when they should. Unknown knowns are not gaps in data; somewhere in the system, their informational content exists. Rather, they arise from human psychological and organizational frailties: wishful thinking, organizational silos, desensitization to repeated warnings, hierarchical filtering, and the seductive comfort of narratives that tell us what we want to hear. 
The Trump administration’s operational surprise at Iran’s recent closure of the Strait of Hormuz offers a stark and deeply instructive illustration of this phenomenon unfolding before our eyes in real time. The crisis reveals a core pathology of unknown knowns: treating a low assessed probability as license to skip preparation. How that pathology operated—and what it cost—is the subject of this article.

Three Hundred Habeas Cases in Which the Government Has Defied Court Orders  (Katherine Pompilio and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare)
A database of non-compliance with court orders around the country.