It’s a key subplot of this week’s NATO summit in Ankara: The Turkish government aims to turn the forum into a showcase for its rapidly growing weapons industry. And it expects to find plenty of buyers.

Threat Status Correspondent Jacob Wirtschafter has a fascinating deep dive from Turkey, examining how the gathering, in addition to bringing together all of NATO’s top political figures, is doubling as the largest defense industrial event in the alliance’s history. Tens of billions of dollars in defense deals are expected to be announced over the next two days. The first wave of deals was announced Tuesday morning.

Turkey has plenty of its own defense merchandise to display. Steel Dome is its home-built network for shooting down missiles and drones. 

Turkey’s Baykar drones have burnished their credentials in Libya, Syria and Ukraine. And the KAAN is Turkey’s new fighter jet — Ankara has lined up Indonesia as its first foreign buyer for 48 of them.

It’s one of the highest-profile trials the nation has ever seen. And the verdict could shape the future of presidential politics in the Philippines.

Asia Editor Andrew Salmon examines the impeachment trial of Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte that began Monday in Manila. Significant animosity exists between Ms. Duterte, 48, and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., 68, who is serving his final term in office. Ms. Duterte announced her intention to run in the 2028 presidential race, but if her trial results in impeachment, she would be barred from politics.

This matters to the U.S. for many reasons. Under Mr. Marcos, the Philippines has proven to be a good ally of the Pentagon. Bilateral agreements between the two nations have enabled more U.S. troops to rotate through the Philippines.

And the Philippines is a key part of the “first island chain” that blocks Chinese naval access to the blue-water Pacific. All of that means Washington will watch closely to see how Ms. Duterte’s trial unfolds.

Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward goes inside the rapidly accelerating race to build mobile data centers for U.S. troops on the front lines of combat around the world. 

Throughout its war with the U.S., Iran has targeted regional data centers across the Middle East, threatening access to the traditional cloud servers that the American military relies on. Those attacks have added urgency to the push to develop portable mass digital storage that can be distributed across modern-day battlefields, rather than concentrated in one relatively easy-to-target location.

Mr. Seward breaks down the Menace-I, a mobile data center that has emerged from the partnership between rising defense industry power Anduril and Amazon Web Services. He also highlights a competitor, the Galleon deployable data center, from artificial-intelligence hardware company Armada.

The Trump administration ripped into China’s latest military provocation and accused Beijing of a “rapid and opaque nuclear weapons buildup” that should concern the U.S. and its allies around the world. It was the administration’s first public comment since China tested a submarine-launched, nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific early Monday.

National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has more on the test and the State Department’s reaction. Some national security insiders say the test is another clear signal that China is prepared to abandon its decades-long policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons in a conflict.

Specifically, military experts told Mr. Gertz the weapon appeared to be an advanced JL-2 missile or new JL-3 multiwarhead submarine-launched ballistic missile.

In the 21st century, America’s leadership rests heavily on access to technology — especially the world’s most advanced computer chips — and the strategic resources that undergird them. And that’s one of the keys to why the island democracy of Taiwan is so vital to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

In a new piece for The Times, entrepreneur and educator Orina Chang argues that Taiwan, as a central hub for semiconductors, is a main component of any Western attempt to offset China’s sizable advantage in processing rare earth elements. Taiwan holds roughly 92% of the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

“If Taiwan fell into Beijing’s hands, the CCP would monopolize both ends of the world supply of computing hardware: the minerals that go into advanced systems and the chips that make them intelligent,” she writes, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

The op-ed is part of “Why Taiwan Matters, Now More Than Ever,” a special advertising supplement to The Times from the Taiwan Freedom Project. 

• July 7 — Sixteenth Annual South China Sea Conference, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• July 7 — Was the Iran War Worth It? Assessing Costs, Benefits and U.S. Interests, Stimson Center

• July 8 — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Proposers Day: Lightweight Universal Codec Program, DARPA

• July 8-9 — Military Robotics and Autonomous Systems USA Conference, SAE Media Group

• July 10 — Taiwan’s Institutional Defense: Countering CCP Infiltration and Transnational Repression, Hudson Institute

• July 14 — Strategic Landpower Dialogue: A Conversation with Lt. Gen. Frank Lozano, Center for Strategic and International Studies 

• July 14-17 — Aspen Security Forum, Aspen Strategy Group

• July 14-15 — Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, Sen. Dave McCormick, Pennsylvania Republican, U.S. Army War College

• July 15 — The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East with Rep. Mike Lawler, New York Republican, Hudson Institute 

• Aug. 4-5 — Air and Space Force Procurement Conference, American Defense Alliance