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In February, reports emerged that the operation to capture the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, had not been a strictly human affair. The extrajudicial caper had somehow involved Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. The military had recourse to Claude via a drop-down menu in a workflow package, the Maven Smart System, which gathers, synthesizes, and streamlines intelligence. The government procures M.S.S., as it is called, from Palantir, the sphinxlike defense-tech contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel and an eccentrically jingoistic philosopher named Alex Karp. Claude’s deployment seemed to come as something of a surprise to its parent company, and an Anthropic executive reportedly reached out to a Palantir counterpart to clarify what, exactly, Claude had done in Caracas. When this inquiry was relayed to the Trump Administration, one Administration official told me last month, it was interpreted as a signal that Anthropic, which was then renegotiating its own contract with the federal government, was perhaps a faithless partner. (Anthropic disputed that characterization of events.) This suspicion was confirmed when Anthropic, citing fears of domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, refused to allow the Pentagon “all lawful uses” of its products. This dispute culminated in the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s designation, by outraged tweet, of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk—a standing peril to national security.

This ban, however, was not effective immediately. The Pentagon apparently needed Claude for one last job. Twelve hours later, the White House began to bomb Iran. Among the casualties of Operation Epic Fury’s first day were more than a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them little girls, at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, in the southern city of Minab. Claude’s potential culpability in this and other potential war crimes was a subject of widespread speculation, not only in the media but in Washington. Congressional Democrats sent a letter to Hegseth demanding a detailed account of how A.I. was being used in the Iran campaign. In an essay for his Substack that was republished, in slightly different form, by the Guardian, the technology scholar Kevin Baker wrote that almost none of the attendant coverage (including mine) “had any relationship to reality.” Maven had only recently added L.L.M.-based functionality, but the program had been around for a decade. Claude, in Baker’s view, was a MacGuffin. It only served to draw attention away from the centrality of Maven as an automated targeting system. He continued, “The real question, the question almost nobody was asking, is not about Claude or any language model. It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir.”

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The veteran journalist Katrina Manson, who now covers defense tech for Bloomberg, spent much of the past few years asking precisely that question. Her new book, “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare,” is an unflaggingly well-reported and well-sourced account of the ongoing reconfiguration of the U.S. armed forces for a new technological era. The book was completed months before Anthropic’s redlines generated new interest in autonomous-drone swarms and killer robots, but even then the writing was on the wall. Dystopian carnage isn’t coming, she warns at the end of her introduction. It is “already here.”

“Project Maven” is structured as an intellectual and professional biography of Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer largely responsible for the eventual “success” of this military transformation. The narrative begins shortly after September 11th, when Cukor finds himself among the first troops on the ground in Afghanistan. His first mission, as part of an expeditionary unit sent to seize Kandahar Airport from the Taliban, finds him inside a blacked-out helicopter where the place of a lance corporal has been taken by a bulky P.C.—the paleolithic version of Claude en route to Venezuela. The computer was loaded with state-of-the-art tools to assist Cukor and his unit in target assessment, threat detection, mission planning, and commander briefings: “Excel, Word, Google Earth, and PowerPoint, and some in-house military software none of them liked.”

The problem, as Cukor saw it, was not that American forces lacked facts. They were drowning in intel about hideout caves, weapons stashes, and enemy movements, some of which was culled from surveillance or signals intelligence and some of which came from detainee interrogations. But the Marines had no way to put it all together. Al Qaeda targets were listed in Excel. PowerPoint was for mapping network connections. Word was for writing things up. Google Earth was for zooming in and out. This wasn’t wholly ineffective—as one artillery officer later told Manson, “We’ve killed more people on Office than you’d ever imagine”—but precision munitions were only precise if you knew precisely where to point them. Cukor had no methodical way to “divine the patterns of war.” Over the ensuing decade, he watched soldiers and civilians die over and over because of a lack of organized, integrated information. The military, he’d long thought, required “something ‘vastly different’ from the status quo”: he dreamed of a “single digital grid” that gave a “highly accurate battlespace picture” in real time, a vision of white dots that moved legibly across an “aspirational single pane of glass to clear up the fog of war.”

The realization of this digital pane, which ultimately manifested itself as Project Maven, is one of two stories that Manson tells. It describes the halting development of the substance of what Cukor wanted. In parallel, she recounts the procedural, against-all-odds-ish story of how he went about achieving it. This is the story of Cukor’s private war against a stodgy Pentagon bureaucracy. Cukor, as she portrays him, is a cartoonishly gruff, ball-breaking pain in the ass who overworks himself and mistreats his subordinates and alienates his superiors. He patterns himself after Hyman Rickover, the notoriously bullheaded admiral who single-handedly called into being the Navy’s nuclear-submarine fleet. At the same time, he’s something of an intellectual romantic: his favorite novel, Manson discovers, is “Don Quixote,” which provides her with a ready-made narrative template in which a “tragicomic and misunderstood hero pursues a doomed quest for an idealized version of the world that does not exist, forever trying and failing to save the world and right wrongs.”

Manson, despite herself and to her credit, clearly comes to like Cukor, or at least begrudgingly admire him. Her personal sympathy clears the space for her to take seriously his passion for a world made better and safer by A.I. warfare. In this alternate future, flesh-and-blood soldiers are replaced by drones and robots (and, much later, militarized unmanned Jet Skis); the lives of innocent civilians are spared by reliable systems with instantaneous and total information awareness; and A.I. superiority provides an even more effective deterrent than nuclear capabilities. Manson points out that there are precedents for this fantasy of war’s obsolescence: in the years before the First World War, one contemporaneous observer wondered if the mass-produced rifle would lead to such unfathomable carnage that no commander in his right mind would be willing to risk combat.

But Cukor insists that Maven was never supposed to be a weapon. He frequently defends the project as nothing more than an integrated data platform, which will afford its human users a dramatically increased capacity to make wise and careful decisions. With this positive vision in mind, Manson makes it at least intermittently possible to root for Cukor—as one roots for the insouciant Maverick in the “Top Gun” films—as he struggles with computer-vision models that don’t work, colleagues who jealously hoard their data, users who prefer the systems they know, a top brass set in its old kludgy ways, and peacenik tech workers. In 2018, Google employees staged a massive walkout to protest the company’s work on a primitive iteration of the project.

In the aftermath of the Google fiasco, Cukor turns to Palantir (in addition to Microsoft and Amazon) to make Maven a reality. The contract, Manson notes, almost certainly rescued an otherwise ailing Palantir from corporate oblivion. It also may have rescued Maven, which ultimately overcame the bitter skepticism of the defense establishment. Manson’s story culminates with the war in Ukraine, in which Maven has helped mitigate Russia’s advantages; the conflict became an inflection point for comprehensive national adoption. The Pentagon’s current contract ceiling for Maven is $1.3 billion. Former Mavenites have assumed positions of great power and influence in both the Trump Administration and a closely allied faction of the tech sector, which grew bored with mindless consumer apps in favor of a muscular military-industrial complex. Our allies, too, have been convinced: NATO now has its own Maven contract with Palantir, and that prompted ten member nations to pursue one, too. At any given time, thousands of people are logged in, monitoring thousands of information flows distilled into a clean user interface that recalls the cinematic touchscreens of “Minority Report.”

The Maven Smart System has become a global surveillance apparatus—it can keep track of forty-nine thousand airfields all over the world—but its current work is hardly limited to intelligence provision and analysis. A “single click,” Manson reports, “could send coordinates through a tactical data link to a specific weapons platform so that it could fire at the target.” The entire process, from target identification to target destruction, is four clicks. In 2023, one source told her that he could sign off on eighty targets in an hour: “Accept. Accept. Accept.” The old system could hit fewer than a hundred targets a day; the new system can hit a thousand, and with the recent integration of L.L.M.s that number has risen to five thousand. It was crucial in the “precision” mass-bombing in Iran. Officials told Manson that Maven was “accelerating operations and ‘enabling lethality’ at combat headquarters around the world.” It is also, predictably, being repurposed for border control and drug policing at home.

And Maven is only one part of the A.I. tool kit. Manson uncovers evidence of two clandestine killer-robot programs, one aerial and the other aquatic, which are being developed in haste. Should China make a move against Taiwan, the straits between them will resemble, as one U.S. commander had it, a “hellscape” of armed automata. For the first time, the Pentagon’s proposed budget contained a line item for comprehensively self-directing systems, requesting an allocation of more than thirteen billion dollars. A machine can shoot, Manson reports, up to “ten times faster than an assassin.” This gives the “autonomy hawks” something like an erotic frisson: one source says that “there’s really nothing quite like seeing a machine aim,” explaining their sense of “an alien aspect, some otherworld[ly] feeling, I don’t want to say ‘religious,’ that’s not the right word.”

But Cukor, who hit his thirty-year up-or-out deadline without getting a star, had long since been removed to lucrative work in the private sector. Manson catches up with him at the beach, near his home in Los Angeles. “He always foresaw a union between human and machine, not a machine takeover,” she writes. He’d once told her that the problem with war was that humans are “materially corrupt, inefficient, and they get tired.” Their weaknesses could be balanced with machine strengths. “ ‘If you get these things tuned up the right way, they can perform better than humans,’ he insisted. AI might help assail the inevitable problem: ‘War is fraught with human error.’ ”

“So was America,” she writes. “We’re flawed,” he says.

Cukor, too, is flawed. He might prefer to believe that Maven was only ever supposed to provide reliable intelligence to inform human decision-making, but Manson repeatedly points out that this was always somewhere between wishful thinking and deliberate obfuscation. Cukor’s interest in operations was such an open secret that it scarcely counted as a secret. Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir, once described him as the “founding father of A.I. targeting.”

In an important sense, neither Project Maven nor the book that it inspired was ever about A.I. per se Cukor may have been the crew-cutted colonel who bulldozed the project into existence, but he wasn’t the one who set it in motion. In 2014, halfway through the second Obama Administration, the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and his deputy, Robert Work, proposed what they called the “third offset strategy.” An “offset,” as Kevin Baker, the technology scholar, describes it, “is a bet that a technological advantage can compensate for a strategic weakness the country cannot fix directly.” The first offset was the development of nuclear weapons, which secured American dominance over a Soviet Union that could rely on mass mobilization. When the Soviets developed their own atomic bombs, the U.S. staked its superiority on precision munitions, like long-range guided missiles, and stealth technology.

The “third offset,” once Russia and now China had caught up, had less to do with a particular technology than with the effort to revamp the military for sheer speed and agility. What we now call “A.I.” was, at the time, still an obscure cat-identification device. Autonomy was nevertheless a bedrock component. At a public gathering in 2015, Work said, “I’m telling you right now, ten years from now if the first person through a breach isn’t a fricking robot, shame on us.” As he put it to Manson, “I do not want it to just be about intelligence” but about “some type of direct warfighting applications.” Cukor pitched Work on a demo to prove that drone feeds could be better monitored by algorithms than distractible airmen; according to one of Manson’s sources, Work was “super psyched,” and dispatched him to Silicon Valley. Cukor visited Tesla, Waymo, and Uber.

In the spring of 2017, Work inaugurated the secretive Project Maven and appointed Cukor its chief. Their work was only ever couched as an intelligence program, not a munitions or weapons platform. When Manson asked an early Mavenite if targeting and offensive strikes were an unspoken component, he said, “Yah, of course. It’s not like we’re doing it for kicks. The goal of the intel is to take out high-value targets.” Manson continues, “Speaking to me years later, Cukor made no bones about it either.” What was the point of all this speed if you needed to wait for cumbersome human supervision? If the machines could identify the targets, couldn’t they also pull the trigger to rain death from all angles?

From this perspective, Cukor wasn’t exactly waging a war on a definitionally bad thing called bureaucracy. What he identified as sclerosis might more properly have been described as the deliberative process by which our rashest impulses were kept in check. One could certainly “optimize” the decision-making apparatus by ridding it of any opportunities for individuals or committees to exercise discretion. But, Kevin Baker writes, this “friction is also where judgment forms. Clausewitz observed that most intelligence is false, that reports contradict each other. The commander who has worked through this learns to see the way an eye adjusts to darkness, not by getting better light but by staying long enough to use what light there is.” He continues, “This ‘staying’ is what takes time. Compress the time and the friction does not disappear. You just stop noticing it.” Humans are in the loop for a reason. We are there to slow things down.

Manson can’t quite make up her mind about the value proposition of institutional inertia. When she’s in a credulous mood, and disposed to accept Cukor’s appeal to A.I. warfare as an enhancement that will save precious lives, bureaucracy is like an old brick wall for Cukor to bust through like the Kool-Aid Man. When she instead assesses Cukor as a squirrelly pitchman and an all-around bad-faith actor, bureaucratic regulation looks more like Chesterton’s fence—something you don’t demolish unless you know precisely why someone put it there in the first place. Baker, for his part, sees no real distinction between the starchy, old-school Pentagon and its new A.I.-disrupted iteration. They are rather points along a continuum of increasing proceduralism, structures designed to limit the scope of independent action and accountability. Cukor and his ilk might think they’re furnishing service members with new means to rise to the occasion, but what they’re really doing is usurping human flexibility and freedom: “Karp thinks he is destroying bureaucracy,” Baker writes. “He is encoding it.” With Maven, he continues, “what Karp eliminated was the discretion the institution could never admit it depended on. What remains is a bureaucracy that can execute its rules but with no one left to interpret them. Bureaucracy encoded in software does not bend. It shatters.”

One argument in favor of the machines tends to pit the omniscience, mathematical rationality, and tirelessness of A.I. at its best against the weakness, hypocrisy, delusion, and bias of humans at their worst. The flip case of this line of thinking pits the best of humanity—situations in which humble, reflective, and wise people model meaningful discretion—against the worst of A.I.’s routinized brutishness. Neither of these is particularly satisfying, but then again this is just another version of the dilemma that the German sociologist Max Weber pointed out more than a century ago: legalistic bureaucracies, in which everyone follows the same rules for the same reasons, seem like the fairest and most even-handed way to arrange a collective in pursuit of shared values and goals. They might, in fact, be the only way to do so. But insuring that everyone hews to a common procedure is never going to help us hash out what our values and goals ought to be in the first place. Bureaucracies are efficient, but they cannot determine what ends our efficiency ought to serve. Baker has a point when he says that comprehensive automation is the final consolidation of the bureaucratic spirit. But that doesn’t mean we have no choice.

Neither Manson nor Baker, understandably, seems to have much patience with this argument. The A.I. boosters—especially in warfare, but in general—use it cynically, to evade responsibility: we are in the simple business of fulfilling objectives, they proclaim, and if you don’t like those objectives you’re free to take it up with policymakers. We build the tools; it’s up to all of us to decide to use them wisely. Setting aside the fact that these same people have done everything within their power to stifle regulation, this is self-evidently true. It’s also not much consolation. It seems absurd to expect prudence and restraint from figures like Pete Hegseth, who has written, of the Geneva Conventions, “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago.”

At the end of the book, Manson tells Cukor that when all is said and done she just doesn’t buy the idea that A.I. will ever be contained by cautious oversight. In the context of an exchange about Israel’s reliance on near-indiscriminate A.I.-enabled killing in Gaza, she says that “the AI targeting machine makes possible the policy decision, enabling operational speed and volume.” Cukor, who has made the policy argument in the past, now concedes: “This is correct.” Still, he affirms, “I’d do it again, in the same way.” ♦

In late March, grainy photographs of the Republican South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham relaxing at Disney World spread across the internet. One of these images showed Graham gripping a pink-and-blue bubble wand inspired by “The Little Mermaid.” Graham had a dilatory air, as though he’d somehow drifted off to a distant place. The photo’s caption wagged that Graham’s “fantasyland” surroundings, in the “Tangled” section of the theme park, couldn’t be more “on the nose—Congress is living in one, with each side blaming the other for its failure to reach a compromise that would reopen the government . . . believing voters are buying what they’re selling.”

This commentary was not from a wonkish TikToker nor a network pundit but from TMZ, the merciless purveyor of celebrity dirt, which published the images of Graham after a citizen vacationer noticed the senator flitting through the theme park and sent pictures. Known for its screeching headlines, up-to-the-second scoops, and contentious practice of paying off sources for scandalous tips, the tabloid has widened its pitiless lens to include officials across the political spectrum. Officials need not be as nationally recognizable as Graham to make the cut: within the last few weeks, TMZ has run surreptitious photos of John James, a Republican representative from Michigan, unwinding in the Caribbean, and others of Marsha Blackburn, a Republican U.S. senator for Tennessee, suitcase in tow, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

TMZ is, to put it generously, a controversial outfit that few would admit to reading regularly. The publication routinely breaks news—such as the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, and key developments concerning the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the “Today Show” co-anchor Savannah Guthrie—often employing ruthless tactics to obtain such significant stories. Their brutal approach to tracking down entertainers has earned them a litany of enemies. In 2007, TMZ reported on a disturbing voice mail that Alec Baldwin had left for his daughter; nearly a decade later, in a 2016 article, by Nicholas Schmidle, in this magazine, Baldwin described the site’s founder and executive producer Harvey Levin as “a festering boil on the anus of American media.”

But even some of TMZ’s usual detractors have applauded its pivot to name-and-shame political coverage. Commenting on a Times story about the phenomenon, one commenter wrote, “I don’t trust TMZ as far as I can throw them but this is a friendly reminder that we do have a voice.” “Sad do-nothings,” another reader quipped, adding, “Give them the B-lister treatment, TMZ!” On Sunday, TMZ reported that Britney Spears had checked into rehab following an alleged D.U.I. arrest; a post on X urged the site to “go back to telling us about politicians.”

After the latest U.S. partial government shutdown began, on February 14th, Levin put out a call for photos of congresspeople relishing their spring recess. The public delivered. In one post, the tabloid sniped that more than thirty members of Congress were in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the break. (Headline: “BUST OUT THE BAGPIPES, WE’RE IN SCOTLAND!!!”) Images of the Texas senator Ted Cruz sitting on a plane live alongside TMZ’s ample shots of stars’ breasts—a common enough feature that the site has a dedicated “celebrity boobs” tag. Yet TMZ has taken to ripping elected officials with a searing scrutiny beyond even what it usually reserves for its favored celebrity targets. In doing so, the tabloid has become an improbable fount of accountability in a political era characterized by impasse, fear, and an ad-nauseam passing of the buck.

TMZ’s broadened focus on the government is not a swerve but, rather, a circuitous end to Levin’s decades-long quest to fully own the nexus of celebrity and political opprobrium. Long before the site ran scoops about members of Congress traipsing around Edinburgh Castle, a young Levin harbored political aspirations. He studied political science as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and considered a Ph.D. in the discipline.

Two years after TMZ made an aggressive début in the tabloid sphere, in 2007, Levin sent an employee to Washington to scope out office space; he wanted to cover Washington, D.C., with the same dishiness that had worked so well for him in Los Angeles. But TMZ’s parent company at the time, Time Warner, balked at potential regulatory snarls that could arise from paparazzi and tipsters descending upon the district, according to a Bloomberg report. The company shelved plans for the TMZ D.C. bureau. (In 2021, Fox Entertainment acquired TMZ from WarnerMedia.)

TMZ has covered politics since the failed D.C. bid, sometimes seemingly according to Levin’s proclivities. Two of the site’s staffers told Bloomberg that they were limited in reporting on President Donald Trump’s scandals during his 2016 run—the kinds of stories that TMZ would ordinarily sprint toward. The seventy-five-year-old Levin, a supporter of socially liberal causes who boosted Trump in the early years of his first term, reportedly had a falling out with the President in 2018, over the Administration’s intention to restrict transgender people from serving in the military. Following their beef, TMZ has taken a notably pointed approach to covering Trump, reporting on the sexual accusations against the President in the Epstein files, and posting about how California governor Gavin Newsom “savagely trolled” Trump after the President posted an A.I.-generated image of himself resembling Jesus.

Politics has never been TMZ’s focal point, but political issues that aggrieve Levin personally have steered the outlet’s coverage from its inception. While growing up, in the San Fernando Valley, Levin saw fame’s capacity to protect certain people from the consequences of the law. His father, who owned a liquor store, grappled with frequent sting operations from officials claiming that minors were purchasing alcohol there. It incensed Levin that, meanwhile, on the other side of the mountain, teen-age celebrities clinked perspiring glasses of champagne in night clubs, with little consequence. “Harvey thought it was so unfair that these clubs would get away with it, just because they were selling to celebrities,” a former TMZ publicist told The New Yorker in 2016. As a counterpoint to the common media practice of deifying celebrities in well-composed shots fit for print, or attempting to humanize them in clearly planned errand-running shots, TMZ first made a name for itself by publishing pixelated cellphone shots of haggard-looking A-listers.

After a casino owner turned TV star first became President of the United States, media networks further beefed up their political coverage by treating it like entertainment, amplifying juicy play-by-plays over granular dissections of policy. CNN’s former president, Jeff Zucker, once told the Times Magazine that he aspired to imbue some aspects of ESPN into CNN’s political reporting—a move that has further framed politicians as entertainers rather than as employees who answer to the American public. Some officials have taken advantage of this, stepping into their roles with panache, mudslinging among themselves, and rattling off speeches primed for virality rather than for substance. The transformation of politicians into celebrities has fomented ideal conditions, in other words, for TMZ to chase elected officials with the same feverish intensity that they employ to snap a rumored celebrity couple leaving the Chateau Marmont together.

The partial shutdown began in February, 2026, when the Republican-led U.S. Senate deadlocked over a vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security. The G.O.P. had insisted on shoring up funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection to pass the resolution, a nonstarter for Democrats. Republicans then rejected the revised legislation, and the government shuttered in turn. Then elected officials went on a two-week recess. The fight is less about the Department of Homeland Security and more about the pathologies of modern politics, in which liberals and conservatives alike have been unwilling to cede any political turf—a perpetual game of chicken that’s caused thousands of federal employees to work for months without pay.

That this stalemate has dragged on this long has infuriated Levin, who considers keeping the government functioning a basic tenet of Congress’s job. A few weeks into the shutdown, a T.S.A. worker named Rebecca Wolf appeared on “TMZ Live,” a gossipy weekday show produced inside the company’s L.A. studio space, featuring Levin and one of the show’s executive producers, Charles Latibeaudiere. Levin, typically springy, glowered as Wolf told them about how the shutdown had devastated her life. She’d contemplated selling her vehicle, adding that her last paycheck had come out to a paltry $13.53; in another video, Wolf shared that she’d considered suicide.

At the end of the interview, Levin speaks directly into the camera, pleading with his fellow-citizens to send photos of politicians doing anything but their jobs. “They can’t reach some agreement, some compromise to pay these people who are losing their houses, losing their cars, losing their livelihood, becoming sacrificial lambs so people can have a political gain,” he seethes. Later in the episode, he adds, if “you see one of the five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress, take a picture and send it to us at TMZ. We will post that picture on our website, on our social media, and we will put it on our television shows. We want to show what they are doing at your expense.” The photos flooded in.

Politicians, seeing themselves splashed all over TMZ’s homepage, scrambled to walk back their vacation plans. As if to underscore the outlet’s point, they took aim at their colleagues across the aisle rather than acknowledging that they were eating out on taxpayers’ dimes. Graham claimed that he had been in Florida to meet with Trump officials prior to his Disney World jaunt, adding that he “voted seven times to fully fund the government. Call a Democrat.” (As for the bubble wand: apparently he was holding it for a child using the bathroom.) When TMZ nabbed photos of the Rhode Island representative Seth Magaziner, a Democrat, co-hosting a watch party with the stars of “The Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” he jumped on “TMZ Live” to defend himself, pointing the finger at House Speaker Mike Johnson for dismissing officials before a consensus. Anticipating that someone might tip off TMZ about his presence at Disney World, the Republican Florida senator Rick Scott posted a photo of himself mugging for the camera there. “Hey TMZ. Yes, I’m at Disney with my grandkids. Should we be in DC? Yes! But I don’t get to make that decision,” he wrote in the post. TMZ ran the photo of Scott, scoffing, “It’s sort of like saying, not my job, man.”

TMZ has expanded its ranks following the success of this heightened political focus. On April 13th, timed to the week that members of Congress return from their spring recess, the long-awaited TMZ D.C. bureau launched with three reporters; with characteristic snark, the announcement noted that congresspeople were returning to work not on Monday but Tuesday: “gotta make sure they get the full two weeks off, right?”

Is TMZ’s political heel turn, then, a net good? A keen observer may be loath to make that claim. TMZ is owned by the Murdoch family, whose tense albeit reciprocal relationship with Trump raises skepticism that the network can truly bring a MAGA-dominated government—one that’s continuously stripping away checks and balances—to task. Then there’s the knottiness of TMZ itself. Paying sources for information is wildly unethical for a media organization. The N.F.L. player Robert Jones, the subject of a TMZ story, sued the outlet for defamation in 2015; TMZ issued a retraction in the piece. Past employees have said that working under Levin is nightmarish; one former colleague of Levin’s filed a gender discrimination complaint against the organization in 2020. (Representatives for TMZ called the claims “inaccurate” in a statement to the Times, and said that the employee had been fired for other reasons.) Another employee spoke with The New Yorker for the 2016 story while wearing a disguise, worried about retribution.

Still, scrolling through TMZ’s posts of congresspeople instills a strange rush of Schadenfreude. As a cost-of-living crisis surges, these politicians look foolish and out of touch in their vacation getups, even more so when they try to explain themselves. Wolf, the T.S.A. employee, in her interview with TMZ, noted that she and her colleagues have been pooling together their scant resources to help one another, organizing food drives and collecting gift cards while calling their respective representatives about their struggles to scrape by. “Even [with] all the different calls and the interviews that we’re doing, it doesn’t seem to bother these people who are making this decision on our lives,” she said.

When appealing to a congressional answering machine fails, perhaps public embarrassment is the most effective lever to pull. If the tabloid keeps applying this sort of pressure to politicians, one can only hope that these shaming campaigns could effectively prevent Congress from future complacency—even if only to insure that they’re never in TMZ’s crosshairs again. ♦

Why is Zendaya a mononymic star? It was an early bet on her potential for leading-lady singularity. Interviewed at twenty, on the cusp of graduating from sitcom-teen workhorse to the love interest in “Spider-Man,” Zendaya explained, in her gracefully blasé way, that she “just thought it was cool, like Cher or Prince.” She will turn thirty in September. With four film projects landing this year, from a salty indie to a summer blockbuster, along with the latest season of “Euphoria,” her ascent to rarified fame seems uncontested. But what about who she is—her interiority—as a grown-up performer? Zendaya and her film audience still seem to be figuring that out.

She isn’t burdened by the need to shed a darker, more mercenary child-star past. From the outset, the right decisions were made. She began as a Disney fixture: first, as one of the leads in “Shake It Up,” a buddy comedy about two background dancers, and, later, in “K.C. Undercover,” a secret-life sitcom in which the titular K.C., her parents, and her two younger siblings double as government spies, and which managed to credibly link itself to the tradition of nineteen-nineties Black sitcoms. Kadeem Hardison—known for playing Dwayne Wayne on “A Different World”—took the role of her father. (We will see him again in Season 3 of “Euphoria.”) The nuclear family was Black, apparently at the insistence of the show’s young star. Zendaya had about her the air of a Raven-Symoné, the type of savvy young Black performer who could play the genial child entertainer onscreen but, when the cameras cut, did not play about her business.

This hyperawareness of Hollywood’s machinery—and how Black actresses function within the caste system of the industry—has shaped Zendaya’s career since, especially as she’s transitioned into the world of film. Professionalism is the lens through which we can understand her. She is poised and adroit as she submits to the press-tour circuit. She dodges rumor, most recently, about whether she has secretly married her partner and “Spider-Man” co-star, Tom Holland, with a kind of winking tact. Onscreen, there is rarely the sense that she is performing from the full, liberated joy of her power but, rather, that she is working through a complex casting strategy that will yield carefully calibrated wins. Rather than sit back and wait for casting agents to dial, she has proactively shaped her performer’s self into a reproducible version of a Zeitgeist woman—her vocal patterns, her laugh, her scowl, all sculpted to the moment. So, when I watch her, I am often struck by the feeling that her charisma is a cover for a realness that she is withholding, which she has calculated is not prudent to fully expose.

Is her professionalism an obstacle to risk? Fatal to artistry? She speaks matter-of-factly about her relative privilege in the industry. She is not “only” an actress; she is a producer, which dates back to her time on “K.C. Undercover.” As a cultural figure, she strikes me as a code-switcher. She is not the crossover case, who distances herself from Black Hollywood. The prognosticators on the industry podcast “The Town” hand-wring over her box-office pull, but they might not register the meaning of her attending the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards, in vintage Caché initially worn by Whitney Houston. Zendaya is biracial—her mother is white German Scottish, her father, African American. She knows she benefits from colorism, being what she has called “Hollywood’s acceptable version of a Black girl.” She is not playing the faux naïf; she deliberately capitalizes on her industry’s trend toward race-blind casting. She was open about her tactics securing her role as M.J., the latest iteration of Mary Jane Watson, in “Spider-Man,” a character that had most recently been played by Kirsten Dunst. The character had been written as white, but Zendaya tried out anyway; her auditioning called the bluff of liberal Hollywood.

Now Zendaya is everywhere, and everything: she is the tennis star puppeteering two lovesick adversaries in “Challengers”; she’s the emperor’s mistress in the “Dune” series; she is the neglected girlfriend of a hotshot director in “Malcolm & Marie.” That film, directed by Sam Levinson—who first worked with Zendaya on “Euphoria,” the series that won her a Golden Globe and an Emmy—is total shlock, but it does provide the id moment in her career. Zendaya’s character, Marie, a depressive addict, who finds herself at complete unease in the Hollywood bestiary, claws at Malcolm, played by John David Washington, who is nothing more than a vessel for Levinson’s entitled auteur grievances. Still, it is the one film in which Zendaya inhabits a Black heterosexual world, because Malcolm is a Black man, even if he’s a double for Levinson, a white filmmaker.

How Zendaya’s film characters are “raced” is almost always an outgrowth of their romantic or sexual worlds, which are almost unilaterally with white men. An extremely fragile veneer of post-racial logic blankets these spiky romances, which take place in conspicuously progressive cities. Tashi Duncan sneering “I’m taking good care of my little white boys,” in “Challengers,” is a perfunctory gesture—really, a tell—in a film that had no use for her psychology elsewhere. Because Zendaya plays young women, these women still have parents, and the actors cast to play her parents—which is to say her history, the expository reasons for her Blackness—typically flit in and out of the background, there to signify and do nothing else. It can often feel as if Zendaya has been added to a preëxisting story, like salt on a finished dish. The ostensible fear is that of identity hardening into a cudgel, foreshortening a character’s emotional palette. But why can’t it expand that palette?

Her latest role, Emma, in Kristoffer Borgli’s wedding-disaster movie “The Drama,” is the one that I keep thinking about. We live in the age of the oppressive publicity campaign. Zendaya did her style-as-cosplay thing, in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, looking modelesque in bridal looks across the globe. In the actual movie, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie, a mussed Englishman, spins out after he learns that Emma, his fiancée and dream girl, once planned to carry out a school shooting when she was a bullied, unhappy teen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Charlie prods Emma incessantly, digging for a reason that could justify her adolescent rage, though he never asks if her sense of isolation stems from being different. Because the film has banished acknowledgment of race from its quarters, the scenes can make you feel insane. The only catharsis is in the actress Jordan Cuyet, who plays the younger version of Emma, whom we see doing target practice in the woods, and basking in the computer glow of incel chatrooms. But even this Emma is largely a figment of Charlie’s imagination; when we see her point a shotgun at a dog, which she ultimately doesn’t shoot, it’s unclear whether the scenario is one that he concocted in his head. For the film to sustain itself as an elongated question about how well you really know your partner, Emma’s interiority has to be put on the pyre; she must be rendered a void. As Rachel, her maid of honor—a woman whom Emma met through Charlie—notes in a nasty reception speech, she doesn’t even have friends. Where are her people? Borgli isolates Emma, stranding her in a mostly white world, because it’s the only way his movie can make conceptual sense.

Borgli is a Norwegian director who, in the wake of his film’s release, has taken heat for having the audacity to bring America’s trauma of school shootings to the casual level of a romantic comedy. I don’t particularly like him as a figure; his director persona is one of entitlement. But I did like “The Drama,” a movie about reality, projections, and the risk of loving another (or should I say, the other?). I couldn’t love it, though, because I didn’t really care what Emma thought about the disintegration of her panicked partner. I cared about what Zendaya thinks. ♦

In a capital where politicians and policymakers often argue one side and then the other, Elbridge Colby has stood out over the past decade for his consistent and often single-minded position that the United States should shift its military and geopolitical world view toward countering the rise of China. Known to friends and colleagues as Bridge, Colby is something of national-defense royalty: his grandfather was William Colby, a legendary C.I.A. director who had served as the agency’s station chief in Saigon in the early years of the Vietnam War. During the first Trump Administration, Colby, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, helped devise the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which directed the department to reorient its focus from the Middle East to China (a perennial-but-never-realized staple of U.S. policy since the Obama Administration proclaimed a “pivot to Asia” in 2011). After Joe Biden was elected, Colby continued to argue that the world was returning to an era of Great Power competition, publishing a book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” writing op-eds, and leading a think tank, the Marathon Initiative, which he had co-founded with the promise to “develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate a protracted competition with great power rivals.”

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Colby opposed the Biden Administration’s surge of arms, military assets, and munitions to aid the country in its fight. In Colby’s view, Europe needed to take the lead on its own defense, and the U.S. needed to conserve its weapons for China and the Pacific. As he wrote in an op-ed in November, 2022, “This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare—heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions.”

Two weeks after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Colby retweeted a warning based on comments by Samuel Paparo, a top U.S. admiral, that “conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are eating away at U.S. stockpiles of air defenses.” In December, Colby shared a tweet by Mike Waltz—who was soon to be Trump’s national-security adviser—in which Waltz proclaimed, “President Trump received an overwhelming mandate to avoid the U.S. being dragged into another Middle East war on his watch.” Later that month, Trump nominated Colby as his Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy—one of the Pentagon’s most powerful roles. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called him “the intellectual front man for a wing of the political right that argues the U.S. should retreat from commitments in Europe and the Middle East.”

Last summer, soon after the so-called Twelve-Day War, in which the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, press reports accused Colby of using his new position to quietly orchestrate a freeze on key weapons shipments to Ukraine—a move that was said to surprise even the White House and which was quickly reversed. (According to a senior Pentagon policy official, last year’s disruption of U.S. aid to Ukraine was the result of “a process foul in the bowels of the Pentagon,” and the reporting that Colby directed—or even recommended—such a pause is “categorically false.”)

More recently, the White House made clear in its National Security Strategy that the Administration hoped to avoid in the Middle East “the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost,” and Colby’s office helped drive the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, which came out in January and highlighted how the U.S. had been focussed elsewhere in recent years as “all the while, China and its military grew more powerful in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s largest and most dynamic market area, with significant implications for Americans’ own security, freedom, and prosperity.”

Now, with the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran in a fragile and uncertain ceasefire, it’s clear that there was something to Colby’s arguments all along. Despite spending more than eight hundred billion dollars a year on defense, the U.S. is uncomfortably short on key munitions, weapons platforms, and even some ships and planes after six weeks of fighting Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East.

Trump’s Pentagon has made frequent use of Tomahawk cruise missiles—highly advanced multimillion-dollar missiles with the ability to strike targets a thousand miles away—throughout his second term, as part of military strikes conducted in a total of seven countries. Tomahawks were fired at Houthi rebels in Yemen last March; at Iran, during the Twelve-Day War; and at suspected ISIS militants in Nigeria in December. Other reports have indicated that the U.S. may have also used Tomahawks in Syria and Venezuela in recent months. An even steeper toll on U.S. stockpiles, munitions, and weapons systems has been incurred during the latest war in Iran. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., estimates that the U.S. currently has between three thousand and four thousand Tomahawk missiles. (The exact number is classified.) Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Washington Post reported that the U.S. used more than eight hundred and fifty Tomahawks in just the first month of the war in Iran—that’s as much as three billion dollars’ worth of a single weapon. Meanwhile, the 2026 U.S. defense budget funds the purchase of only fifty-seven new Tomahawk missiles. “If you’re in China, you are gleefully counting on a little hand clicker all the Tomahawks that are being expended,” Tom Karako, who directs the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “Iran is not what the Tomahawk is for. Iran is what Small Diameter Bombs—gravity bombs—are for. Thousand-plus-kilometre cruise missiles are for when you have to suppress a wicked thicket of air defenses in China, because you don’t want to fly your bombers in without doing that.”

U.S. interceptor missiles and air-defense systems turn out to be similarly ill-provisioned. Last summer, during the bombing campaign against Iran, the Islamic Republic retaliated against Israel with large waves of ballistic missiles. The U.S. deployed two Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense systems, or THAADs, to Israel, which reportedly fired off more than a hundred and fifty interceptors—roughly a quarter of the number the Pentagon has ever purchased. Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor, previously made about a hundred interceptors a year, each of which cost close to thirteen million dollars. (A full THAAD battery, including missiles and radar, costs upward of a billion dollars.)

The U.S. has only eight THAAD batteries worldwide. At least one of them has been damaged by Iranian strikes in the current conflict, and the U.S. is now moving in components from a system in South Korea, where it had been considered a key part of North Korean deterrence. “The reports of some number of those eight radars being disabled—even if temporarily—ought to really concern you, because those are the kind of things that they’re small in number, they’re really good at what they do, and they’re going to be really important on a bad day with China,” Karako said. “And—oh, by the way—we didn’t have enough of them already.”

A 2023 war game developed by C.S.I.S., and later run for the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, found that, in a conflict with China over Taiwan, the U.S. would run out of key munitions in just a month—and, in the case of one missile, in three to seven days—a worrisome conclusion even before the giant depletion of stockpiles caused by the Iran war. “What we learned, in a protracted war—our defense industrial base does not have the resources it needs to win that war,” John Moolenaar, a Republican House member from Michigan, who chairs the committee, said in an interview on Fox News. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that he worries Chinese officials might be watching the U.S. war in Iran and thinking that the strength of the U.S. military isn’t all that they might have imagined. “They have to be seeing some of the full might of the U.S. and Israel, and that Iran is still standing,” he said. “I’m afraid that they may be amazed at the specificity of our ability to target, but it raises the question of our staying power.”

The crisis of American defense production has been slowly worsening since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “Official Washington added a new word to its vocabulary in the months after February, 2022, and that new word was ‘munitions,’ ” Karako told me. Jon Finer, who served as Biden’s principal deputy national-security adviser, said that the limited ability of the United States to meet the endless need for weapons in the war in Ukraine was the “the most jarring thing that I learned during the entire time I was in government.”

Heavy-duty munitions had long been an afterthought in the “global war on terror,” which prioritized close fighting, special forces, and weapons platforms such as the Predator and Reaper drones. “We adjust our industrial base to the kinds of wars that we are fighting,” Finer told me. “I think we got out of the mind-set where we were ever going to fight a very munitions-heavy war again. That was a bit of a failure of imagination.” At the same time, the nation’s weapons manufacturers—part of what is known inside the Beltway as the defense-industrial base, or DIB—have grown cautious after years of fast-shifting congressional priorities. “If you’re a defense prime, you have basically had to use a Ouija board and a divining rod to try to guess what number of munitions that the government will want to buy two years from now,” Karako said. “These are publicly traded companies—they have to maximize the return for their stockholders—and they can’t, unfortunately, as good Americans, build stuff on spec and hope that the government will show up and buy it.”

The Pentagon has tried to revamp its famously slow and sclerotic acquisitions pipeline. Last summer, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg began leading the newly formed Munitions Acceleration Council, which focussed on rapidly growing the production of a dozen weapons that the Pentagon believes would be key to a future conflict with China—including Patriot interceptor missiles and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, known as JASSMs. (In early April, before the ceasefire, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. was redeploying stockpiles of JASSMs from the Pacific to the Middle East, a move that would leave around four hundred and twenty-five of the missiles, out of a prewar stockpile of more than two thousand, for the rest of the world.) Later in the fall, as part of what the Department of Defense dubbed an “Acquisition Transformation Strategy,” the Pentagon laid out how it aimed to rebuild the nation’s defense production; one of the main strategies is to give companies “bigger, longer deals, so they’ll be willing to invest more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapons.”

In September, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin a nearly ten-billion-dollar contract for the production of Patriot interceptor missiles, the largest in the company’s history; in early January, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced a deal to more than triple the production of the missiles, each of which costs about four million dollars, from six hundred to two thousand a year. Michael Duffey, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, called the deal “a fundamental shift in how we rapidly expand munitions production and magazine depth, and how we collaborate with our industry partners.”

On April 3rd, as the war in Iran approached its sixth week, the White House released a budget request for 2027, which called for $1.5 trillion in defense spending—a more than forty-per-cent increase that, by itself, would be larger than any other nation’s annual defense budget. Much of that money would go to increased investments in munitions and missile-defense systems; Trump said that such spending on “military protection” should take priority over funding for health care and other safety-net programs. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.”

But Iran’s reliance on cheap drones has also exposed the ways in which expensive U.S. systems are ill-matched for many facets of modern warfare. For decades, U.S. war planners had assumed that Iran would be reluctant to fully close the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines because doing so would render it impassable to Iran’s own oil-tanker fleet. But Iran was ultimately able to choke the global economy by enforcing a closure largely with drones aimed at foreign tankers. “The idea of an operation to quote-unquote open the strait is a little bit of a misnomer, because even troops on the coast are not going to do anything about drones fired from apartment buildings, mountains, and whatever else inland,” Finer said. “We never imagined a scenario in which the Iranians were under so little pressure to open the strait for the rest of the world, because they are able to get more of their own product out than they were able before.”

Deborah Lee James, who served as Secretary of the Air Force from 2013 to 2017, told me that she hopes the weaknesses the current war has exposed in procurement systems will help spur a moment of innovation. She noted the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s mandate for a “crash program,” in 2007, to rapidly manufacture armored troop transports that could withstand the blasts of improvised explosive devices, which were killing and maiming U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense manufacturers such as BAE Systems and Oshkosh manufactured tens of thousands of mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles at a cost of nearly fifty billion dollars before the program was ended in 2012. “I think this has now gotten that type of attention,” James said. “This is going to, I hope, be an MRAP moment for the United States when it comes to counter-drone [technologies].”

The Pentagon, though, has continued to project confidence that, despite the past month and a half of fighting in Iran, the U.S. military is still well positioned to deter China in the Pacific. “The Department is laser-focussed on ‘deterrence by denial,’ ” the Pentagon official said. “Our goal is very simply to convince our counterparts that whatever their ambitions are from a military standpoint, they just are not going to be able to achieve them with the kind of confidence they’re looking for—and so they are better off not trying.”

Ultimately, President Xi Jinping’s decision about whether to move against Taiwan will almost certainly be driven by internal considerations—how much confidence he has in his own military leadership, which has faced repeated purges in attempts to root out corruption, and how much progress the military makes in building advanced sea, aerial, and amphibious capability. But some defense analysts believe that the so-called Davidson Window, the period when China could be ready to seize Taiwan, might begin as early as next year—meaning that every missile fired against Iran is a missile unlikely to be replaced by then. “We are vaporizing many billions of dollars of offensive and defensive munitions, specifically the kind that you would want to have in large quantities to deter or fight a war with China,” Karako said. “The biggest danger is that this sets us up for provoking China to do something for which we now have fewer strike missiles and many fewer missile-defense capabilities.” ♦