U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told an audience in the Philippines on Monday that Washington is constantly weighing export controls to stop China from acquiring advanced computer chips and manufacturing equipment that could be used to boost its military.

“We look at this every single day,” Ms. Raimondo said, adding that the U.S. could continue to sell semiconductors worth billions of dollars to Beijing, but “cannot allow China to have access, for their military advancement, to our more sophisticated technology.”

Her comments come amid a U.S. national security community debate over the possibility of turning the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security — the entity charged with regulating export restrictions on the most sensitive technologies from American private industry — into an intelligence agency. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who has oversight of the bureau, offered insight on the debate recently during an exclusive video interview with Threat Status.

U.S. military forces shot down at least 28 attack drones launched by Houthi militants in Yemen over the weekend. The Pentagon’s Central Command said the drones were an “imminent threat” to commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

Central Command said the action unfolded over a frantic four-hour period Saturday. The assault came just days after the Yemeni rebel group struck a commercial ship, killing three sailors — the first known fatalities of the campaign the Houthis have been carrying out in the region in solidarity with the Iran-backed Hamas militants who attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

The U.S. and Britain have routinely struck Houthi-controlled positions in Yemen. But the strikes have clearly not eliminated the rebel group’s ability to disrupt maritime traffic with drones and anti-ship missiles in the vital and heavily trafficked waterway.

North Korea responded to joint U.S.-South Korea military drills last week with a mass firing by mobile howitzers and tactical rocket batteries into the Yellow Sea between the Korean Peninsula and China. The move was visually impressive if militarily questionable, according to Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon, who reports that North Korean propaganda showed a line of self-propelled 175mm armored howitzers firing a barrage out to sea, and a line of multiple-launch rocket systems doing the same.

The firepower demonstration gave North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a chance to enhance his warlord persona. State media images showed him in a black leather jacket and smoking a cigarette as he aimed a Kalashnikov during a visit to an army unit while overseeing the artillery. In both images, Mr. Kim is surrounded by tough-looking officers in modern digital camouflage uniforms rather than the old-school brown serge uniforms commonly worn by the North Korean army.

In a separate development tied to the region, the Pentagon has announced U.S. tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey helicopters can return to full flight status following a complete stand-down after several crashes over the past two years in which 20 U.S. service members were killed. Naval Air Systems Command had grounded the entire fleet of Ospreys following the fatal Nov. 29 crash of an Air Force CV-22 off the coast of Japan.

There is no evidence to support claims that shadowy elements inside the U.S. government have made contact with alien life forms, have reverse-engineered extraterrestrial spaceships or have systematically kept that information hidden from the American public for decades, according to a new Pentagon report.

National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang has a deep dive on the Defense Department’s “All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office” report that addresses far-reaching claims by some former military personnel about undisclosed government contacts with aliens. The 60-page study rejects charges that former U.S. officials leveled during stunning public testimony to Congress in July that the Pentagon has known about UFOs of extraterrestrial origin for years and has engaged in a highly secretive program to reverse-engineer their spaceships.

It’s notable that the issue came up in an exclusive interview Mr. Wolfgang conducted in August with then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, who offered similar conclusions.

Regular columnist Jed Babbin takes aim at Francis Fukuyama, asserting that the American political philosopher’s proclamation in 1992 that the end of the Cold War was akin to the “end of history” was wrong. Mr. Babbin argues that Mr. Fukuyama was wrong again in a recent Financial Times op-ed that claimed America is the worst example of political decay — and that the way forward for America is to embrace President Biden’s agenda and reject Donald Trump.

At issue specifically are comments Mr. Trump made on the campaign trail about NATO and Russia: “Mr. Fukuyama bashes Mr. Trump for his comments that he wouldn’t defend NATO nations that don’t spend enough on defense. That brings to mind the comment that Mr. Trump’s supporters take him seriously but not literally, while his critics take him literally but not seriously,” Mr. Babbin writes. “Mr. Trump won’t renege on the NATO Treaty’s mutual defense obligation. At some level, he must understand that — no matter how much we dislike the NATO deadbeat nations — their freedom is crucial to ours.”