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THE KREMLIN FILES / COLUMN — (Note: This is the first in a two-part series on Russian gray zone, or hybrid warfare. In a future article, the author will address the continued evolution of Russian hybrid warfare and its practice in the years immediately leading up to and through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.)

Russian hybrid warfare, often referred to in the West as “gray zone” conflict, has transitioned from theoretical concept to prominent headlines, particularly following the invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin’s campaigns of sabotage, disinformation, and targeted intelligence actions across Europe and the U.S. What defines Russian-style gray warfare, or hybrid war? What are its doctrinal roots, and how well do these foundations align with assumptions in Western security discussions? To explore these questions, this article analyzes the writings of Russian military thinkers and the views of Russian military and intelligence agencies—covering their terminology, doctrines, and their evolving grasp of non-kinetic conflict.

Gray zone operations in the West are generally seen as actions that influence the course of a conflict or harm an adversary without crossing into direct kinetic attacks. For Russia, at the core of the gray zone is the concept of “non-contact war” (bezkontaktnaya voina), which is part of a larger doctrinal framework under which gray warfare, also called “new generation warfare” by the Russians, falls. This is not a new concept in Russian military thinking, but it has developed over decades. By examining its evolution over the past thirty years through Russian sources and military thinkers, we can better understand how Moscow uses these concepts today—and how they influence the conflicts we may face now and in the future, enabling the U.S. and our allies to respond more effectively.

There are two main components of Russian gray warfare. Russians rarely use the term hybrid war, which exists in Russian only as a borrowed term from English. The first concept is non-contact warfare—the concept of preparing and softening the battlefield, then minimizing ground engagements for their troops whenever possible. The second concept is Russian intelligence active measures, also known as measures of support. This is also an old idea in Russian intelligence circles, but one that has been expanded and intensified in recent decades, incorporating new elements such as cyber operations and cognitive warfare.

We will briefly discuss each of these concepts below, along with Russia’s gray-zone developments up to its deployments into Ukraine in 2014. In the second part of this series, we will analyze Russia’s doctrine as it was applied in the years immediately leading up to and through the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while also considering another key factor for Russia—their ability to evolve and adapt.

Non-Contact Warfare: Origins and Russian Military Necessities

Non-contact warfare developed from what the Russian General Staff and other military thinkers called sixth-generation warfare. The concept grew from the “reconnaissance strike complex” theory and the so-called “revolution in military affairs” at the end of the Cold War. As the Soviet Union disintegrated and the U.S. demonstrated overwhelming air power with NATO and other allies during the Persian Gulf war, former Soviet and Russian generals were not fools. They understood they could not keep pace with the new advancements in air warfare and the technological edge of NATO weapons systems.

Russian General Staff thinkers recognized that the Russian Air Force could not match TTPs (techniques, tactics, and procedures), the number of pilot training hours, or the advanced systems that the U.S. and NATO could field, especially given their significantly reduced military budget following the Soviet Union's collapse. This operational shortfall was further emphasized by the targeted bombing campaigns and overwhelming force deployed by U.S./NATO forces in the Balkan campaigns of the mid-1990s.

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In short, Russian military planners recognized they could not keep pace. NATO airpower and the reach of the alliance into all sorts of regions and conflict zones posed a significant challenge for the Russian military and its intelligence services. One of the lessons they understood was that massed tank formations alone would not win wars in the 21st century. Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, several important writings were produced by prominent Russian general staff figures, such as Generals Slipchenko and Gareev, as well as the future Chief of Staff of the Russian military and currently the commander of the Russian forces in the Ukraine war, Valeriy Gerasimov.

Slipchenko is credited in Russia with coining the phrase “sixth generation warfare” more than twenty years ago. According to Slipchenko, this new form of warfare signified a shift from nuclear-based conflict (which he called “fifth generation”) toward information-enabled, precision-strike, so-called non-contact wars (he authored a book with that same title). These wars would be fought at a distance, relying on airpower, command, control, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR), and long-range precision strikes, rather than large ground forces. He and Gareev published a book in Russia in 2004 titled On Future Wars, which became influential in many Russian military circles. In this work, Slipchenko and Gareev emphasized the importance of studying non-contact warfare and firmly stated that Russia must adapt to it, or else “Russia would not survive.”

During that same period, Russia’s Air Force struggled significantly in the 1990s and 2000s to adopt precision-guided munitions (PGMs). Russia never fully integrated them or appropriately trained them on their use, which was evident in its prolonged conflicts with Chechen separatists. Most ground-attack operations during that period, from the mid to late 1990s, relied on “dumb bombs” and massed artillery on the battlefield. This resulted in the Russian air force’s poor performance in the 2008 Georgian conflict, when an outmanned Georgian military embarrassingly shot down several Russian fighter-bombers.

In the summer of 2008, responding to Georgia launching an incursion to retake South Ossetia, Russia responded with overwhelming force, sending an entire army to occupy swaths of Abkhazia, Ossetia, and also northern Georgia from Poti to Gori and the edges of Tbilisi. But while their force ratios led to quick success on the ground, the Russian air force did not perform as well in the air. In addition to air losses to ground-based air defense and friendly fire, Russian precision strikes did not go off as planned. Russia’s performance could be summed up as ineffective from the air. They were not able to project over-the-horizon warfare in the ways that Russian military planners had envisioned for non-contact war.

The first widespread and successful use of Russian PGMs would come still later, mostly during Russia’s involvement in Syria, where Russian squadrons were rotated for training and gained exposure to actual combat. Before that, many pilots had not experienced any combat outside of Chechnya.

Russia’s Air Force underwent a series of reforms due to these failures. It was reorganized and renamed the Russian Aerospace Forces (the VKS) in 2015 as a result of many of these reforms, or what were claimed to be reforms. When the full-scale invasion happened in 2022, Russia’s VKS, like much of its military, was still trying to evolve from its targeted reforms and these earlier developmental challenges. They attempted a limited shock-and-awe offensive but failed miserably in areas such as battle damage assessment and other key aspects of a true air campaign (the second article in this series will touch on these issues in more detail).

However, military reforms and adaptations in the Russian Air Force were not meant to stand alone. Russian kinetic actions were intended to be supported by other elements in non-contact warfare, aimed at softening the battlefield and undermining an adversary’s ability to fight. Prominent among these were active measures focused on information operations.

Active Measures, Measures of Support, and Non-state Actors

Returning to Russian arms doctrine, Slipchenko and other figures on the General Staff argued that, in the post–Cold War world, especially after observing the 1991 Gulf War and the dominance of US airpower, massing military forces was no longer effective. The world saw how Saddam’s large army, with thousands of tanks and armored vehicles, was destroyed from the air. Slipchenko claimed that future wars will focus on disrupting enemy systems, including military, economic, social, and other so-called “information means.”

This was not a new concept for Russia and its intelligence agencies—the FSB, GRU, and SVR (collectively the Russian intelligence services or RIS). The RIS would play a key role by using a well-known Russian technique—active measures, or as the RIS calls them today, measures of support. These tactics aim to weaken the enemy's ability to fight through malign influence, political interference, and disinformation. The Russians use state agencies and means, like their intelligence services, but also so-called non-state actors, like organized crime, private mercenaries, hacker groups, and many others, to carry out these and other hybrid actions as proxies.

The doctrinal approach of gray war, or new generation warfare, was gaining attention in Russia just as Putin's reign started. His rule coincided with the growing influence of the RIS within the government. It was natural for the RIS to take on roles the military was not equipped to perform, and Putin was quick to authorize them. One of the first tests for their active measures and gray war was Russia’s brief war with Georgia in 2008. As noted above, and while their military’s performance was mixed, their intelligence services were very active in the information arena. Russia flooded international media with its version of events. Their still-growing “RTV” news network promoted stories of atrocities they claimed were committed by the Georgian military. Europe and the U.S. were caught off guard and unprepared by the conflict; there was little to no meaningful response to Russia’s military actions, and no high costs or reprisals. It was a lesson Russia would remember.

After Georgia in 2008, while reforms were introduced in the air force in particular, the doctrinal debates continued. Building on Slipchenko’s ideas, writers from the General Staff, such as General Chekinov and General Bogdanov, further developed the doctrine they called “new-generation warfare.” Their work emphasized scripted roles in conflict for the information-psychological struggle, subversion, and cyber operations, while traditional large-scale combat operations became, by comparison, less prominent.

In 2013, the current Russian Chief of Staff, Valeriy Gerasimov, gave a speech in which he also advocated for a constant “second front” of information operations against Russia’s enemies to weaken their ability to wage war. This speech and a later article became known in some circles in the West as the “Gerasimov doctrine,” although it was never officially called that in Russia.

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Gerasimov’s speech and article focused on shifting Russia's attention to countering the so-called “color revolutions” that occurred in the first decade of this century in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. They were, and still are, viewed as a direct threat to Russia’s national security and to Putin’s dictatorship. Russia cannot tolerate functioning democracies and freedom on its borders.

By combining Gerasimov’s contributions with those of Slipchenko, Gareev, and others, the Russian military developed a concept of non-contact warfare that planned for long-range strikes executed after weakening the enemy through non-kinetic means. They de-emphasized large ground formations because, according to the theory, they should not be necessary. Russian measures of support are designed to weaken an adversary through disinformation, misinformation, malign influence on politics, and other methods. This would become the battle plan the Russians would attempt to implement in Ukraine in 2014 (and again, with adjustments, in 2022).

As cyber has taken a greater role in society and the mass media, the Russian grey zone approach has also increasingly included RIS cyber operations and online media manipulation to support “reflexive control,” an old Russian intelligence concept from the 1960s. The term reflects the notion of influencing an adversary to act in a desired way without the enemy’s awareness. Gerasimov and the military, along with leaders of the RIS, knew from Russia’s poor performance in Georgia that they were not ready for war with NATO or any strong peer-level adversary. They needed help to weaken any adversary with a capable armed force before actual war.

Syria and Ukraine would be the new testing grounds for this concept in practice, with a heavy reliance on the intelligence services to help prepare the battlefield before and through the military’s engagement. Their perceived successes in both theaters would, over time, convince the Russian intelligence services, its military, and most importantly, President Putin that Russia was ready for a much larger task— an attack on and seizure of the entire territory of Ukraine.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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The Long Arc Of American Power

OPINION — “We [the U.S.] began as a sliver of a country and next thing you know we're a continental power, and we did not do that primarily through our great diplomacy and our good looks and our charm. We did that primarily by taking the land from other people.”

That was Michael O’Hanlon, the Brookings Institution’s Director of Research in the Foreign Policy program, speaking January 12, about his new book, To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution, on a panel with retired-Gen. David Petraeus and Historian Robert Kagan.

O’Hanlon continued, “Now, this is not a revisionist history that's meant to beat up on the United States for having become a world power, because if we hadn't done that, if we hadn't become this continental power, then we could never have prevailed in the World Wars…The world would have been a much worse place and we could never have played the role we did in the Cold War and at least up until recent times, the post-Cold-War world. So generally speaking, I'm glad for this American assertiveness, but to me, it's striking just how little we understand that about ourselves.”

Listening to that event eight days ago at Brookings, and looking around at what the Trump administration is doing at home and abroad today, I thought elements of what I heard from these three were worth repeating and reviewing.

For example, O’Hanlon pointed out a great amount of U.S. grand strategy and national security thinking took place during historic periods considered times of American isolationism and retrenchment.

O’Hanlon said, “A lot of the institutional machinery, a lot of the intellectual and leadership development capability of the United States began in this period starting in the late 19th century and accelerating into the inner [World] War years [1918-to-1941]. And without that, we would not have had the great leaders like [Gen. Dwight D.] Eisenhower, and [Gen. George C.] Marshall, trained in the way they were. I think that made them ready for World War II.”

He added, “We would not have had many of the innovations that occurred in this period of time -- so whether it's [Rear Admiral William A.] Moffett and [Navy] air power and [aircraft] carrier power, [Army Brig. Gen.] Billy Mitchell and the development of the Army Air Corps, [Marine Maj. Gen. John A.] Lejeune and the thinking about amphibious warfare. A lot of these great military leaders and innovators were doing their thing in the early decades of the 20th century and including in the inner war years in ways that prepared us for all these new innovations, all these new kinds of operations that would prove so crucial in World War II.”

“To me it's sort of striking,” O’Hanlon said, “how quickly we got momentum in World War II, given how underprepared we were in terms of standing armies and navies and capabilities. And by early 1943 at the latest, I think we're basically starting to win that war, which is faster than we've often turned things around in many of our conflicts in our history.”

Kagan, a Brookings senior fellow and author of the 2012 book The World America Made, picked up on American assertiveness. “Ideologically, the United States was expansive,” Kagan said, “We had a universalist ideology. We got upset when we saw liberalism being attacked, even back in the 1820s. You know, a lot of Americans wanted to help the Greek rebellion [against the Ottoman Empire]. The world was very ideological in the 19th century and we saw ourselves as being on the side of liberalism and freedom versus genuine autocracies like Russia and Austria and Prussia. And so we always had these sympathies. Now everybody would say wait a second it's none of our business blah blah blah blah, but nevertheless the general trend was we cared.”

Kagan went on, “People keep doing things out there that we're finding offensive in one way or another. And so we're like wanting to do something about it. So then we get dragged into, [or] we drag ourselves into these conflicts and then we say, ‘Wait a second, we're perfectly safe here [protected east and west by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans]. Why are we involved in all this stuff?’ And then we want to come back. And so this tension between our essential security on the one hand and…our kind of busy bodyness in the world has just been has been a constant -- and I think explains why we have vacillated in terms of our military capability.”

Petraeus, began by saying, “I'm a soldier not a historian here,” and then defended some past U.S. interventions as “basically when we've been attacked,” citing Pearl Harbor and ships being sunk in the Atlantic. He added, “Sometimes it's and/or when we fear hostile powers especially, if they're aligned as it was during the Cold War with the communists, or now arguably with China and/or Russia or both taking control of again Eurasia, Southeast Asia, East Asia.”

Petraeus admitted, “We have sometimes misread that. You can certainly argue that Vietnam was arguably more nationalist [North Vietnamese seeking independence from France] maybe than it was communist. But that I think still applies. I think one of the motivations with respect to [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro is that they [the Maduro Venezuelan leadership] were more closely than ever aligning with China, Iran to a degree, Russia and so forth. And we've seen that play out on a number of occasions as well.”

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Petraeus, who played several roles in Iraq, said the U.S. had “to be very measured in what your objectives are if you're going to use force, and…try to avoid boots-on-the-ground. If they're going to be on the ground, then employ advise, assist, and enable operations where it's the host nation forces or partner forces that are on the front lines rather than Americans.”

Looking back, Petraeus said, “I think we were unprepared definitely intellectually for these operations after toppling regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and not just [in] the catastrophically bad post-conflict as phase,” citing “horrific decisions to fire the entire Iraqi military without telling them what their future was. And then firing the Baath Party down to the level of bureaucrats. That meant that tens of thousands [of Iraqis] without an agreed reconciliation process are literally cast out. And by the way, they're the bureaucrats that we needed to actually help us run a country [Iraq] we didn't sufficiently understand.”

Describing another lesson learned, Petraeus said, “In looking back on Afghanistan, trying to distill what happened, what we did wrong, what we did right, I really concluded that we were never truly committed to Afghanistan nation building. Rather, we were repeatedly committed to exiting. And that was a huge challenge [for the 20 years the U.S. was there], because if you tell the enemy that you're going to draw down on a given date, during the speech in which you announce a buildup, really undermines the enemy's sense of your will in what is a contest of wills at the end of the day. Not saying that we didn't want to draw down, but to do it according to the right conditions. And of course then the other challenge was that the draw-down became much more based on conditions in Washington than it did on conditions in Afghanistan, which is again another pretty fatal flaw.”

Kagan gave his view on past American interventions with U.S. troops in foreign countries, and tied them sharply to today’s situation, not only in Caracas, but also in Washington. “You know, the United States did not go to war in Iraq to promote democracy despite the vast mythology that has grown up about that,” Kagan began.

He then continued, “It was primarily fear of security. Saddam was a serial aggressor. He certainly was working on weapons of mass destruction. Rightly or wrongly that was the primary motive [of the George W. Bush administration]. But then Americans, as always the case, and you know, all you have to do is look at what we did in Germany after World War II, what we did in Japan after World War II. Americans never felt very comfortable about moving into some country, taking it over for whatever reason and then turning it over to some dictator. We wanted to be able to say that we left something like democratic governance behind. Until now that has been such a key element of our self-perception and our character.”

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Kagan said the Bush administration then sent U.S. troops into Iraq “was not because we were dying to send troops into Iraq, but because we had concluded you cannot control countries from the air. And so we're now [with Venezuela] we’re back in that mode.”

But here, Kagan gave his view of an important change from the past. He said, “So here's what's different. We did not want to leave in Iraq Saddam's number two. Go ahead, take over. In Venezuela, we've gone after a regime head…[but] this isn't regime change. This is decapitation and now we've turned it over to the next, you know, part of the Maduro regime and said you take care of it. We'll run it, but you take care of it. That is a departure from American history and I think it is directly a consequence of the fact that for the first time I can say without any doubt we do not have a president who believes in the American principles of liberalism, but is actively hostile to them here in the United States as well as internationally. He is on the side of anti-liberalism. He is on the side of authoritarianism, both here and abroad. That, to my mind, it's not do we intervene in Latin America, Yes, we do, but for what purpose? And I think that is the huge break [from the past] that we're witnessing right now.”

To my mind and others, Kagan has it right. President Trump, facing political problems at home – affordability, the Epstein files, the upcoming November House and Senate elections – has tried to show expanding power abroad. Based on past success in Iran bombing nuclear sites and removing Maduro from Venezuela, Trump wants to absorb Greenland, send U.S. forces into Mexico after drug cartels, and threaten attacking the faltering regime in Iran.

Let me add a final element to Trump’s current eagerness to show power abroad. The one thing he doesn’t want is the death of any U.S. military personnel he sends into harm’s way. Trump and his top aides have repeatedly pointed out, whether it was in blowing up narco-trafficking boats or the Iran bombing or the Maduro snatch, no American lives were lost.

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New Reports Reveal Years of Unaddressed Osprey Safety Risks

DEEP DIVE — It is one of the most lauded defense developments in recent decades, providing preeminent capability to U.S. military personnel worldwide, but that prowess evidently comes with a steep cost that military leadership allowed to grow for years.

Critics have long asserted that the military failed to adequately address a mounting series of safety issues with the V-22 Osprey aircraft, even as service members died in preventable crashes. The Naval Air Systems Command review and Government Accountability Office report paint a scathing portrait of systemic failures by the Joint Program Office overseeing V-22 variants for the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy.

The Marine Corps operates approximately 348 MV-22s, the Air Force 52 CV-22s, and the Navy 29 CMV-22s, with the program of record at around 464 total across services. Japan operates 17 MV-22s, with deliveries complete or near-complete.

The Deadly Track Record

Some 30 U.S. Marines lost their lives in three separate crashes during the testing and development phase throughout the 1990s, giving the Osprey the nickname “The Widow Maker.” Since its introduction in 2007, at least 35 servicemembers have died in 10 fatal crashes.

“Initially, the V-22 suffered from Vortex Ring State, which produced crashes during development. The problem was diagnosed and remediated, and the loss rate went down dramatically,” John Pike, a leading defense, space and intelligence policy expert and Director of GlobalSecurity.org, tells The Cipher Brief. “Subsequent losses have been ‘normal accidents’ due to the usual mechanical and human failings.”

The GAO found that serious Osprey mishaps in 2023 and 2024 exceeded the previous eight years and generally surpassed accident rates of other Navy and Air Force aircraft. In August 2023, three Marines died in Australia. In 2022, four U.S. soldiers were killed in a NATO training mission, and five Marines were killed in California.

Unresolved Problems

The NAVAIR report revealed that “the cumulative risk posture of the V-22 platform has been growing since initial fielding,” and the program office “has not promptly implemented fixes.” Of 12 Class A mishaps in the past four years, seven involved parts failures already identified as major problems but not addressed.

Issues with hard-clutch engagement (HCE) caused the July 2022 California crash that killed five. The problem occurs when the clutch connecting the engine to the propeller gearbox slips and reengages abruptly, causing a power spike that can throw the aircraft into an uncontrolled roll.

There were eight Air Force servicemembers killed in the November 2023 crash off Yakushima Island when a catastrophic propeller gearbox failed due to cracks in the metal pinion gear, and the pilot continued flying despite multiple warnings, contributing to the crash.

This manufacturing issue dates to 2006, but the Joint Program Office didn’t formally assess the risk until March 2024 – nearly two decades later. A NAVAIR logbook review found that over 40 safety-critical components were operating beyond their airworthiness limits, and that 81 percent of ground accidents were due to human error.

A Broken System: Poor Communication Between Services

The GAO also found that the three services don’t routinely share critical safety information. Aircrews haven’t met regularly to review aircraft knowledge and emergency procedures. The services operate with significantly different maintenance standards, with three parallel review processes and no common source of material.

The GAO identified 34 unresolved safety risks, including eight potentially catastrophic risks that have remained open for a median of 10 years. The V-22 has the oldest average age of unresolved catastrophic safety risks across the Navy’s aircraft inventory.

Fixes May Take a Decade

The Navy report indicated fixes won’t be complete until 2033-2034. Officials now say the fleet won’t return to unrestricted operations until 2026 – a year later than planned. The V-22 program plans to upgrade gearboxes with triple-melted steel, reducing inclusions by 90 percent.

Under current restrictions, overwater flights are prohibited unless within 30 minutes of a safe landing spot, severely limiting their use by the Navy and Marine Corps.

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Osprey's Unmatched Capabilities

The Osprey still offers a game-changing advantage for U.S. troops, despite its troubled past, according to its supporters.

As it currently stands, the entire fleet operates under restrictions that prevent overwater flights unless within 30 minutes of a safe landing spot, significantly limiting its utility for Navy and Marine Corps missions.

In 1979 to 1980, American hostages were taken in Iran during Operation Eagle Claw, which gave rise to the Osprey. As five of the eight Navy helicopters that arrived at Desert One were inoperable, it was clear that rapid troop movement in harsh environmental conditions was urgently needed.

After development began in 1985, the Osprey entered service in 2007, replacing the Vietnam-era CH-46 Sea Knight.

Compared to fixed-wing transports, the Osprey can land troops just where they are needed. Airdrops with parachutes tend to scatter paratroops all over the place; see ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Pike explained. “And compared with other rotary wing aircraft, the Osprey is much faster and has a much longer range.”

The Osprey shifts from helicopter to airplane mode in under 12 seconds, reaches speeds of 315 mph, has an operational range of 580 miles, and carries 10,000 pounds – or 24 troops. It’s used for missions ranging from combat operations to the occasional transport of White House staff. During a dust storm in Afghanistan in 2010, two CV-22 helicopters rescued 32 soldiers in under four hours from a distance of 800 miles.

Chronic Readiness Problems

Yet these performance advantages have been undercut by persistent readiness shortfalls.

The NAVAIR report noted that mission-capable rates between 2020 and 2024 averaged just 50 percent for the Navy and Air Force, and 60 percent for Marines. The Osprey requires 100 percent more unscheduled maintenance than the Navy averages and 22 maintenance man-hours per flight hour versus 12 for other aircraft.

In addition, Boeing settled a whistleblower lawsuit in 2023 for $8.1 million after employees accused the company of falsifying records for composite part testing. Boeing, in its defense, claimed that the parts were “non-critical” and did not impact flight safety.

Conflicting Views on Safety

“The Osprey does not have a troubled safety record. Per a recent press release, the V-22 mishap rate per 100,000 flight hours is 3.28, which is in line with helicopters with similar missions.” a government source who works closely with the Osprey fleet but is not authorized to speak on the record contended to The Cipher Brief. “Like anything measured statistically, there are periods above and below the mean. Just because humans tend to conclude because of apparent clusters doesn’t necessarily mean there is a pattern or connection – think of how some people say that ‘celebrities die in threes.’”

The source vowed that “the design issues, such as certain electrical wiring rubbing against hydraulic and oil lines, were fixed before fleet introduction.”

“The problems with the test plan were a product of pressure applied to accelerate a delayed and overbudget program and were not repeated when the aircraft was reintroduced,” the insider pointed out. “Those mishaps, combined with the distinctive nature of the V-22, mean that any subsequent incident, major or minor, is always viewed as part of the ‘dangerous V-22’ narrative. A U.S. Army Blackhawk crash in November killed five but barely made the news. A Japanese Blackhawk crash killed ten soldiers in April, but the Japanese didn’t ground their Blackhawks.”

That perception, however, has done little to quiet families who argue that known risks went unaddressed.

Amber Sax’s husband, Marine Corps Capt. John J. Sax died in the 2022 California crash caused by hard clutch engagement, a problem the Marine Corps had known about for over a decade. “Their findings confirm what we already know: More needs to be done, and more needs to be done,” Sax said. “It’s clear in the report that these risks were not properly assessed, and that failure cost my husband his life.”

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An Uncertain Future

As the military confronts those findings, the future of the Osprey fleet is not completely clear. In 2018, the Marine Corps Aviation proposal outlined a sustainability plan for the Osprey to at least 2060.

“The quality of maintenance training curricula, maturation, and standardization has not kept pace with readiness requirements,” the report stated. “Current maintenance manning levels are unable to support demands for labor. The current V-22 sustainment system cannot realize improved and sustained aircraft readiness and availability without significant change. Depot-level maintenance cannot keep up with demand.”

Despite extensive recommendations – NAVAIR underscored 32 actions to improve safety – Vice Adm. John Dougherty reaffirmed commitment to the aircraft. Pike believes it’s a matter of when, not if, the Osprey returns to full operations.

“Once the issues are fixed, everyone will resume their regular programming,” he asserted.

Officials and insiders alike expect that process to translate into tangible fixes.

“I would expect that to lead to some type of corrective action, whether it’s a new procedure or replacing a defective part,” the insider added. “After that, I would expect a long career for the aircraft in the Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, as it’s an irreplaceable part of all three services now and gives a unique capability to the American military.”

Whether that optimism proves warranted depends on whether military leadership finally addresses the systemic failures the latest reports have laid bare – failures that cost 20 service members their lives in just the past five years.

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The Coast Guard's Mission in the Gray Zone

OPINION — U.S. defense planning rests on the assumption that wars are fought abroad, by expeditionary forces, against defined adversaries. For decades, those assumptions held. But today, many of the most consequential security challenges facing the United States violate all three. They occur closer to home, below the threshold of armed conflict, and in domains where sovereignty is enforced incrementally.

The shift has exposed a chronic mismatch between how the United States defines its defense priorities and how it allocates resources and respect. While defense discourse continues to stubbornly emphasize power projection and high-end conflict, many of today’s challenges revolve around the more modest and rote enforcement of U.S. territorial integrity and national sovereignty - functions that are vital to U.S. strategic objectives yet lack the optical prestige of winning wars abroad.

Sitting at the center of this gap between prestige and need is the U.S. Coast Guard, whose mission profile aligns directly with America’s most important strategic objectives - the enforcement of sovereignty and homeland defense - yet remains strategically undervalued because its work rarely resembles the celebrated and well-funded styles of conventional warfighting. In an era of increased gray-zone competition and persistent coercion, the failure to properly appreciate the Coast Guard threatens real strategic fallout.

In the third decade of the 21st century, U.S. defense planning remains heavily oriented toward expeditionary warfighting and high-end kinetic conflict. Budget conversations still revolve around Ford-class supercarriers, F-35 fighters, and A2/AD penetration. This orientation shapes not only force design and budget allocations, but also institutional prestige and political capital. The services associated with visible combat power, with the Ford-class and the F-35, continue to dominate strategic discourse—even as many of the most persistent security challenges confronting the United States unfold close to home, in the gray-zone, without the need for fifth-generation air power or heavy armor.

At the most basic level, any nation’s military exists primarily to defend territorial integrity, enforce sovereignty, and protect the homeland. Power projection, forward presence, and deterrence abroad are important—but they are secondary functions derived from the primary purpose of homeland defense. Yet U.S. defense discourse often treats homeland defense as a background condition when it should be revered as the first priority. The result is a blind spot in how security resources are evaluated and allocated.

The Coast Guard operates at a unique point where law enforcement, military authority, and sovereign enforcement all converge. On any given day, the Coast Guard may board foreign-flagged vessels suspected of sanctions violations, police maritime borders against illicit trafficking, secure ports that underpin global supply chains, and maintain a persistent presence in contested spaces, like the Arctic, without inviting escalation. The Coast Guard is equipped to intercept illegal fishing fleets, escort commercial shipping through sensitive waterways, and assert jurisdiction in legally ambiguous areas. These activities rarely resemble traditional warfighting, they rarely result in a Hollywood blockbuster, and they can be accomplished without nuclear-powered submarines or intercontinental ballistic missiles. But these are not peripheral activities—they are arguably amongst the most important daily functions the U.S. military undertakes.

Distinct among the military branches, the Coast Guard operates under a legal framework that is uniquely suited to today’s security environment. Under Title 14 status, the Coast Guard falls within the Department of Homeland Security, conducting law enforcement and regulatory missions on a daily basis. Yet, when needed, the service can transition to Title 10 status, under the Department of Defense, and operate as an armed service when required. This agility allows the Coast Guard to remain continuously engaged across the spectrum of competition, whether enforcing U.S. law in peacetime, managing escalation in gray-zone encounters, or integrating seamlessly into military operations. Few other elements of U.S. power can move so fluidly between legal regimes.

Still, despite such strategic relevance, the Coast Guard suffers from a persistent optical problem. U.S. defense culture has long privileged services and missions associated with visible, kinetic combat—those that lend themselves to clear narratives of victory, sacrifice, and heroism. The Coast Guard’s work rarely fits that cinematic mold. Its success is measured not in territory seized or targets destroyed, but in disruptions prevented, borders enforced, and crises that never materialize. Inherently quiet work with outcomes that reflect a force operating exactly as designed, although without generating institutional prestige or political support. In a system that rewards the loudest and the brightest, the Coast Guard’s quiet enforcement of sovereignty is easy to overlook.

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Continuing to overlook the value of the Coast Guard carries strategic consequences. Specifically, persistent underinvestment in the Coast Guard weakens maritime domain awareness, reduces sustained presence in key waterways, and narrows the set of tools available to manage gray-zone competition. As adversaries increasingly rely on legal ambiguity, deniable actors, and incremental pressure to test U.S. resolve, gaps in enforcement become opportunities. In this environment, the absence of credible, continuous sovereignty enforcement invites probing behavior that becomes harder to deter over time.

Advocacy for the Coast Guard does not require reassigning prestige, or elevating one service at the expense of others. It is merely an argument for strategic alignment. If territorial integrity, sovereignty enforcement, and homeland defense are truly core national-security priorities, then the institutions most directly responsible for those missions should be treated accordingly. As competition increasingly unfolds in the gray-zone between peace and war, the United States will need forces designed not only to win conflicts—but to prevent them from starting in the first place.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief, because national security is everyone’s business.

The Country’s First ‘Cognitive Advantage’ Chief: Influence Is the New Battlefield

WEEKEND INTERVIEW — In an era when foreign adversaries can shape public sentiment with a well-timed meme and a handful of AI-driven accounts, the U.S. government is racing to redefine what national power looks like in the information age.

At the center of that effort is Shawn Chenoweth, the country’s first Director of Cognitive Advantage - a role designed to help the United States compete in the domain where modern influence, persuasion, and political outcomes are increasingly decided.

What, exactly, does a Director of Cognitive Advantage do? It’s not a title most Americans encounter, and it sits far outside the familiar contours of diplomacy, military force, or economic leverage. But as Chenoweth explains, the contest for influence no longer stays neatly within those lanes either.

His focus is often on the gray space - where information, perception, culture, and behavior collide, and where adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are operating with staggering resources and strategic focus.

In this Cipher Brief conversation, Chenoweth breaks down how cognitive operations actually work, why the U.S. has struggled to keep pace, and what it means to give the President an “information option” that’s not simply kinetic or economic.

He offers rare, candid insight into how technology, AI, and social platforms—from TikTok to algorithmically driven personas—are reshaping the battlespace faster than policymakers can write doctrine.

Our conversation is a deep dive into one of the least understood - but perhaps most consequential - fronts of modern national security. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Shawn Chenoweth

Shawn Chenoweth is the Director of Cognitive Advantage at the US National Security Council.

The Cipher Brief: How do you explain the role of the director of Cognitive Advantage?

Chenoweth: When you look at traditional elements of military power, you probably think of the DIME construct. It's not a perfect construct, but it's pretty good. DIME, is broken down into Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic, and it's very clear who owns the Diplomatic, Military, and Economic components. But there hasn't been, at least in several decades, a good example of where people have really come to the president and the administration with an "I" option, for Information. And it's a shame because when you actually look at the DIME construct, you don't want to break it into stove pipes. We should think of it as a cell. Each of those elements acts as part of a functioning cell, and removing any of those elements means you have an imperfect or failing cell.

So, I was asked to help put the "I" back in DIME so that we can provide additional options and advantages across the other elements of DIME to national power and provide the president with opportunities to accomplish the Administration’s objectives that aren't just warheads on foreheads or threatening economics or expending political leverage. We can enhance those things, but we can also gain advantages by using cognitive effects through the information environment.

Kelly: Let’s set the stage a bit further. If you were to explain to the average American what is happening in terms of cognitive warfare in the gray zone – the area where conflict occurs below the level of warfare - how would you describe it?

Chenoweth: I think if you look through your military histories, philosophers, politicians, political science, it's all pretty clear. You can pick out the elements. They all have one underlying thread, which is that political victory is the one that matters at its core. That's really what we're talking about. Nothing's changed. How human beings are connected, how technology is affected has certainly changed. But what we really care about is what people do in the real world and the geophysical world, the world we live in.

So, the point of a cognitive advantage is to leverage that so that human beings are taking behaviors favorable to outcomes, to national objectives, which most of the time are also - in the case of the United States - favorable in their own right. So it's core. And that is what we're driving to get: those advantages in what people do in the real world through their sensing, to make decisions that come back to the real world and have the effects that you want.

Kelly: Can you give an example of what that would look like?

Chenoweth: Let's say you're negotiating for a piece of land or a base that you need for overflight intel collection. You're going to conduct a trade-off in negotiations. Maybe it's going to look like, - if you pay more, you'll get more - based off what the value proposition is. But very rarely is it that blatant and simple. So, what you want to be able to do is understand, what advantage would we need in the negotiation? What's actually driving this other party other than maybe just cost or just danger? What’s the risk calculus?

There are cultural nuances that affect things: their understanding of influence, political implications. So, the point would be to understand why they would be interested in this in the first place? What advantage does it give them? What are the cultural nuances? Why wouldn't they do this in the first place? Why aren't they taking this action and what can we do to make sure that the outcome is what we want?

There are other areas where that applies across the spectrum.

Let's say we're conducting counter-terrorism operations, and we know an objective tends to use a particular cafe. Well, what if they were using a different one that day? What can we do to influence them to go to a place that's more favorable for options to decrease our own risk calculus, either because we want to conduct a kinetic strike or make an arrest? Maybe we can't find them. So, what if we use that for our intel collection and our methods to basically make them come up on comms and change their behavior so it's easier to find them, collect on them, and build the data so that we can conduct physical actions to stop or disrupt them? And you can kind of see how that applies across the board.

If you know more than the person you're dealing with, chances are that you're going to be better at accomplishing your outcome. It’s very similar with the werewolf theory. It's a game where two people are chosen to be the werewolf of the village and everyone else in the group doesn't know who the werewolf is. Most of the time the people who are the werewolves win the game because they have an information advantage over everyone else playing the game. So, it's a human norm.

And again, I point out that nothing's new under the sun. It's just that we haven't really thought through the implications of what it means in the information age that we live in - where everyone is connected through software defined radios. We're a long way away from direct sensing where it's communication and things happening in the real world. Now we have sort of indirect sensing where you're fed data feeds and everything else. We can affect cognitive behavior in ways we never imagined, and we really haven't thought through just as we can reach people and sell items. And if I want to find a person whose favorite color is red, who's a military age male who's really into Magnum PI, I can find that person thanks to their radio, and I can craft messages specifically for someone who fits that demographic and move them in a particular direction. That's the first time in history that that's been the case.

Kelly: You have a background that combines both government and private sector experience. Given that technology is being rapidly developed in the private sector, how do you think that background gives you an advantage in this role?

Chenoweth: There are a lot of people who've served in the military and have been contractors but just by happenstance, I happen to have been in a lot of critical locations at critical times. I think one of the advantages that has brought me is that I saw the frustration within the military when the contracting apparatus didn't work. I was also empowered by industry to go and fix a lot of those structures and enable the government to do it, and now I'm getting afforded the opportunity to work on policy to make the system really hum.

I think the advantage with that is that when it comes to the information space, there's no control. And I try to emphasize this to any policy maker or power broker or decision maker that I can find. You can put an armored brigade in an intersection - fully equipped, fully supported – and a U.S. Armored Brigade could own that intersection. There are things you can control. But when it comes to the information space, there is no control. It is constantly shifting, constantly changing. You have a binary decision. You are either going to participate, preferably at a level that matters, or not, and whatever's going to happen is going to happen.

So, you could find yourself in an advantageous information space in the morning, lose it by the late morning, get a stalemate in the afternoon, and win it back in the afternoon – just to lose it again at the end of the day. And when you wake up the next morning, you're going to have to do it all over again. There is no, "We have information dominance and we're done and we can crack our beers and go on with other things."

That's not how this works because every day new information is being injected into the system. People are changing and developing new opinions. Things are occurring and people are going to react to those things, change their opinions, adapt, age out, age in, so those cultural references may change. It's a constant flux. One of the things that from the U.S. government side we're getting our head around is that we need an information carrier group constantly operating afloat in the information environment, effectively. One that’s engaged 24/7 to affect these changes.

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Kelly: It's not just the United States that has gotten pretty good at understanding the impact of cognitive advantage. We see these tactics from China and Russia being used with stunning success. In this role, how focused are you on their activities when it comes to doing the exact same thing that you're tasked with doing?

Chenoweth: They absolutely practice these activities. I call them the ‘CRINKETT’. Every challenge we're generally dealing with falls in the CRINKETTS. It's China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Terrorists and Trans[national] criminals. And particularly for the nation states, this is exactly how they want to compete.

From their perspective, there are two ways to deal with the United States: asymmetrically and stupidly, largely because of our economic and military power. They get that. They're not interested in a kinetic fight; that is an awful prospect. So the way they want to do this is in gray zone activities, in the information space, in the cognitive domain.

And they outspend us. I'm not going to say necessarily outperform, but I'll say if you want to compete at a level that matters, they outspend us, period. Iran probably spends around $1.8 billion plus-minus a year, maybe more with their proxies and everything else they do in this particular space. Russia - post Ukraine invasion, spends about $2.6 billion, something like that. China - 48 plus billion dollars a year. The U.S., if I take all of the activities from the DoD, the State Department and everything else, and you put those together, you might approach $1.2 billion.

It doesn't mean we're executing those funds either. It just means that that's what we've allocated. When you think about how we outspend to have an advantage on the other parts of DIME, we're hideously underperforming here. And again, all props to the administration. They're acutely aware of this and the support I've had at the National Security Council and across the elements of government - the departments and agencies - has been stellar. And we're going to continue to work on this and get it right because we have three and a half more years of President Trump's administration to get this right, do the reps and sets, and make this a durable policy so that the American people can start enjoying those benefits that come when we're really focused on this space.

Kelly: What does success look like for you in this role and how do you measure it?

Chenoweth: Measurement has always been a funny thing. People will constantly tell me how hard it is to measure these activities. And what I’ve found time and time again is that we're actually pretty good at these activities. The issues with the measurements are, again, participating at a scale that matters. We need to measure behavior change, and in order to do that, we need to have clear objectives. What are we after?

The big part of that is who is the target audience that has the agency to do the thing we want? We spend a lot of time making plans and CONOPS [Concept of Operations] on sub-target audiences that don't actually have the agency – in hopes that they affect agency - and that's perfectly fine. But why are we doing assessments against this? We spend a lot of time and money generating assessments to target audiences that don't have the agency you want. So, let's focus on the target audience that has the agency and let's do this at scale.

For example; I'm in the DC area and I can go down to the Potomac River, drop a bucket of water in the river, and I have objectively molecularly increased the amount of water in the Potomac. There isn't a sensor on this planet that is going to detect that molecular change.

The fact is that you might be having an effect, but you don't have a sensor that is going to pick that up. So, you need to increase your scale or customize your sensing system to the effect you're having. That tends to be where the assessments fall apart.

I’ve heard all the time for decades now that assessments are so hard. I don't find that to be true. What I find is that you've sacrificed assessments for effect, which is fine. It's risk calculus. If I had a low amount of resources and I decided to put as much into the effect I've wanted, that's fine. But at the end of the day, you're looking for the real behavior change in the targeted audience that matters. What are the sensors you have on that and what are you doing to collect that data: public opinion, research surveys, building the networks. We're going to see this exacerbate further as the AI revolution continues at pace.

Kelly: How is technology impacting what you're trying to do, your mission, and then how are you also working with the private sector because the private sector is controlling so much of the technology and the innovation that the government needs to work with. So how are you doing that?

Chenoweth: One of the challenges I see emerging from AI is that there's sort of an assumption that AI will fix all your woes. I've seen the best tools out there do one thing: they model the data they have, and that's the core issue. We don't have the data. So again, I'm back to there's not a whole lot of new things under the sun. And the AI models are really good, and it can allow you to find new insights from the data that you have, but new data needs to be created. So, sacrificing collection methodologies and new approaches to gather the data at the foot of a model is terrible.

The AI snake oil salesman I would deal with in industry all the time would come in and say, ‘Oh, you're interested in that? I could absolutely model you the thing.’ Cool. How does that work? ‘Well, all you have to do is provide me the data and we'll put all this together and give you the insights.’ I'm like, whoa. We don't have the data either. No one has the data. That's kind of the problem. So, let's be honest about what we're doing.

AI is going to be a great boon for industry and for the government and everyone else under the sun. It's going to obviously have impact, but I think as that moves forward, we need to start looking at how we actually employ it. Building an agent or a token for every worker so that they're augmented by an AI that does the thing that they themselves may not be good at or saving them time is going to be amazing, but it needs to be undergirded by being able to detect what's actually happening out in the real world. And those two things are not necessarily - not interrelated. As I said, most things are kind of a whole cell that operate in one unit, and we can't necessarily bifurcate these things and then expect good outcomes.

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Kelly: So you have a mission that is difficult to measure, is hugely impactful, adversaries are using it as well against American citizens effectively, and in some cases, those adversaires are dedicating a lot more resources to this. If you could explaine to the average U.S. citizen how they might be targeted by cognitive operations that are conducted by U.S. adversaries, what would you tell them to look for?

Chenoweth: You need to be mindful of sources obviously. When I look at the construct of how we approach cognitive warfare, I think one of the biggest problems I've had for at least the last 10 years has been the construct of dis- and misinformation. My issue isn't the dis- and misinformation construct. It's the overuse of it.

Disinformation and misinformation are things. They have meaning. But they mean something that is true and people use it for things that are not true. For example, disinformation are lies. The person projecting the information knows it's a lie. They're doing it to accomplish an objective. The bigger problem of disinformation is misinformation. Those are people who are sharing those lies, not knowing they are lies, or taking things out of context like satire, et cetera, and propagating as if it were truth. Those are what those are.

But not everything we have to deal with falls into that construct. There are two other portions to this that we have to be mindful of.

One is missing information, which used to mean that the target audience wasn't informed enough to make a correct decision, favorable to them or anyone else. ‘It's a tragedy that your family member died and you should mourn their loss, but stop touching the body. That's how you're spreading Ebola’, right? Pretty straightforward, pretty simple.

Now that we're dealing with nation states with deep pockets, that's been flipped up on its head and they're practicing active missing information, where they will provide wire services into a country saying, ‘Congratulations, you can use our wire service for free and we'll provide you all the stuff, and that's your biggest cost except for labor. Isn't that wonderful? The catch is that you just have to use our wire service’.

If you think [contextual] stories are going to get into the press through those channels, good luck. This isn't happening in the third world. These are happening in major countries and places that would shock you.

Imagine something like, ‘If you run this story, all our connected businesses that are connected through us or other means are going to pull their advertising budget from you.’ So again, good luck talking about the story in your environment. No one's going to touch it. No influencer wants a piece of it because they're going to lose their incentive structure and their revenue stream. It's things like that.

On the other side of the coin, and the bigger problem, is the rhetoric information. These are the things that aren't necessarily true or false. They are framed by your value system, how you view things, what you think truth actually is.

There are people out there who will say, I think a communist socialist form of government that is highly authoritarian is more stable and therefore better than a liberal democracy. There are people who believe that, and just by saying, well, history would prove you otherwise, it's not a good enough argument. You need to engage with those people at a scale that matters and be prepared to win the argument.

We've seen this time again on the counter-terrorism front where we would shut down the comms of a nobody, and suddenly that person would come back with the reputation that was so valuable, and now they're a terrorist thought leader because the Western world thought that they were so dangerous they needed to be shut down instead of just accepting the fact, that maybe we should just engage with this guy because no one's ever heard of him and maybe we should just point out that he's a moron.

There are ways to deal with this, and just because we don't like something doesn't mean it's a lie to the person that's spreading it. They might believe it. Before we just title something disinformation and say, well, it's a lie and we can ignore it — that is not adequate in the modern era where everyone is connected because, again, this person has connective tissue to the internet. They have web platforms. They can be just as connected as a government if they should choose to be and if they have the popularity, because at its core, regardless of whether or not you're a government or a celebrity or anything else, you are fighting for attention.

Kelly: It’s sometimes difficult for busy Americans to navigate the information space today and know what to believe without inviting some serious time into the source. Do you look at part of your mission in this role as helping people understand more of the context they need in order to make good decisions?

Chenoweth: I've been more on the side dealing with foreign audiences. But even in that regard, I think that it really matters to ask what are the things that we know to be what we feel are objective truths and things that matter? Things that we want target audiences to know because we know it would be better for them and better for our objectives?

And then what are the things where we just want to make sure that if a debate needs to be had, we facilitate the debate so that the target audience, particularly with an American target audience - which again, it's not my forte, we don't do that in government or shouldn't — that needs to be facilitated by Americans pointing out to each other that we do need to have these debates and come to kind of consensus, understanding that there will be disagreements.

Kelly: Do you think your job is going to be even more important in the future or maybe less?

Chenoweth: I've never thought the job wasn't important. I think the thing I'm enjoying right now is that everyone's kind of getting their head around what this means. The overused expression that ‘We need to do some things on Facebook,’ when you would have policymakers say, ‘Well, I'm concerned that that would destroy Amazon and internet commerce’ and your head would explode as you're trying to explain, ‘That's just not how the internet works, man.’

We can be comfortable operating on these platforms and doing things that we need to do without destroying internet commerce or the internet. And now I think a lot of policy makers and industry are all connected. They're a lot more comfortable doing these things. Now is the time when we need to get to where the resources and the permissions really match the ability to get us where we need to be.

I've generally not found too many authority problems. I generally find permissions problems. I find that when it comes to authorities, you almost always find that every organization actually has a framework that allows them to do things. It's just that someone somewhere in the chain can say no and is all too comfortable saying no, because, particularly in the past administration, they were very comfortable at avoiding risk and not as comfortable at managing risk. And that is a dynamic that we have to change. The world is a risky place, and we need to be out there participating in it, throwing our elbows around and managing the risk, not avoiding it.

Kelly: How hard of a job is it to give the U.S. the cognitive advantage in today’s world?

Chenoweth: It's hard, tremendously hard because you're talking about changing culture. I don't think the activity itself and the policy and the things that can be done are hard. I think the hard part will be changing the culture and changing people's mindsets.

We've talked about the fact that there used to be three domains: physical domain, information domain and cognitive domain. We have to explore the information domain and actually call it what it is. There is the physical domain, the geophysical domain. But I like the ‘kill web’ approach. A good kill web will constitute a kill chain that is disrupted, and we have to get out of just a kill chain. We need to get into a kill web mentality when it comes to cognitive effects.

Kelly: Explain what you mean by a “kill web”?

Chenoweth: You have your geophysical world where things exist in the real world, the place where we all live. When it comes to the information domain, though, it used to consolidate a bunch of things.

The reality is that when we break that down into a kill web, you're looking from your physical domain up to your logic layer. The internet is not some amorphous cloud that wanders around. It's composed of a system of systems that live in the real world. It's data centers, servers, modems, et cetera. Where does that infrastructure actually exist? Sometimes the files are in the computer. So, we need to be mindful of where does that work? How does the internet, how do these structures work, the mobile networks, et cetera.

From there, it then creates the digital layer, where all the trons are that exist. You can have effects, that's where your real cyberspace comes into play. That's how the mobile devices work, but that is just data.

Then it goes up to the persona entity level. These are the real human beings, sometimes fake human beings, they're personas, organizations but entities that potentially could be targeted or addressed or engaged, et cetera.

And then there's the cognitive space. The trick in the cognitive space is what happens in the mind. And that mind is influenced by the sensing that goes up through that chain when they process it. You're able to interdict on its way up or influence, and you're able to influence on the way down when a decision is made.

For example, when something happens in the real world, it's communicated to a decision maker, but it's going to go through the logic layer transmitted through sensors, computers, emails, phones, et cetera, to people and entities who are going to process it themselves, communicate it to a decision maker who's going to make a decision based off that information, or an individual or a bunch of individuals.

They're all going to make decisions on how to react to that or not react to that. And that's going to go back down to the physical world when they say, ‘I don't really like what is happening’, or maybe ‘I do like what's happening. Let's do the thing’. They're going to communicate that down to ‘Yes, launch the missiles’, or ‘Let's have a protest’. So, you can affect the chain up. You can affect the chain down, but that's how it works.

We as the United States have a pipe that exists inside that kill web structure - so does everyone else. And it doesn't matter if you're a nation state or a family or an individual. You have your sensing sources.

As I mentioned earlier, the direct conversations between people in the real world - even now, you and I are communicating completely over that entire structure - and that structure could be affected on the way up as we're communicating to when this is finally produced and goes back out to the real world where suddenly I have AI effects on me and I'm saying things I never meant to say, but the rest of the world's now interpreting that.

I didn't say that, that wasn't my cognitive decision, but you intercepted on the way down and now you would inadvertently affect everyone else's cognitive approach to what I'm communicating.

Kelly: What does the future from a technology and AI standpoint really look like?

Chenoweth: It's having fundamental changes. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the entertainment industry as AI takes over and suddenly people can have more access. We've seen how the music industry went through huge change just on streaming music. We're about to witness what this is going to look like from our more traditional platforms. We've seen how things move from streaming. I think there is a level of adaptation that's going to go with that.

One of the things that needs to be addressed is how exactly we're going to engage. There is a point where we need to be comfortable with giving sort of guidance to the AIs - human in the loop - but if you think that you're going to be able to review every single message that needs to go out in an AI-driven world, you're out of your mind.

So, you need to be able to be comfortable generating for your target audience profiles and give sort of thematic guidance and let the AI do some level of engagements against foreign audiences to steer conversations in a particular direction, or at least identify where a conversation might be going so you can intervene when it looks like decisions are being made in a bad way, and then find out if that is an open and honest cultural nuance thing where it is about engagement or if it's being steered by your opponent.

I think that we are not far, and we're probably already in a game, where there are AIs versus AIs as we speak in the information environment.

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What U.S. – China Cooperation Means for the World

OPINION -- China was very critical of the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro last week. The spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the U.S. action was “blatant interference” in Venezuela and a violation of international law.

Mr. Maduro was accused of working with Columbian guerrilla groups to traffic cocaine into the U.S. as part of a “narco-terrorism” conspiracy. Of all countries, China should appreciate the need to stop Mr. Maduro from smuggling these illicit drugs into the U.S., killing tens of thousands of Americans. China experienced this in the Opium War of 1839-1842, when Great Britain forced opium on China, despite government protestations, resulting in the humiliating Treaty of Nanjing, ceding Hong Kong to Great Britain. Mr. Maduro was violating U.S. laws, in a conspiracy to aid enemies and kill innocent Americans. Fortunately, the U.S. had the political will, and military might, to quickly and effectively put an end to this assault. China should understand this and withhold criticism, despite their close relationship with Mr. Maduro and Venezuela.

The scheduled April meeting of presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will hopefully ease tension related to the South China Sea and Taiwan. The meeting will also offer an opportunity of the two presidents to elaborate on those transnational issues that the U.S. and China can work together on, for the common good.

The National Security Strategy of 2025 states that deterring a conflict over Taiwan is a priority and does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. It also states that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea and its implications for the U.S. economy are obvious.

The April meeting will permit Messrs. Trump and Xi to candidly discuss the South China Sea and Taiwan and ensure that there are guardrails to prevent conflict. Quiet and effective diplomacy is needed to address these issues, and the Trump – Xi meeting could establish the working groups and processes necessary to ensure the U.S. and China do not stumble into conflict.

Also important are the transnational issues that require the attention of the U.S. and China. This shouldn’t be too difficult, given the history of cooperation between the U.S. and China, primarily in the 1980s and 1990s.

Indeed, it was China’s Chairman Deng Xiaoping who approved cooperation with the U.S. on the collection and sharing of intelligence on the Soviet Union.

China opposed the December 1979 Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan and worked with the U.S. to provide weapons and supplies to the resistance forces in Afghanistan – who eventually prevailed, with the Soviet Union admitting defeat and pulling out of Afghanistan in 1989. The war in Afghanistan cost the Soviet Union immense resources, lives and prestige, weakening the Soviet Union and contributing to its later dissolution.

After the 1979 normalization of relations, the U.S. and China cooperated on a few transnational issues: nuclear nonproliferation; counternarcotics, focusing on Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and the heroin from Burma going into China and the U.S.; counterterrorism and the sharing of intelligence on extremist networks.

In 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell asked China to assist with the denuclearization of North Korea. The following year, China hosted the Six-Party Talks on North Korea’s nuclear program and actively assisted convincing North Korea, in the Joint Statement of September 19, 2005, to commit to complete and verifiable dismantlement of all nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons programs.

China also cooperated with the U.S. on public health issues, like SARS and the avian flu.

Cooperation on these transnational issues was issue-specific, pragmatic, and often insulated from political tensions. Indeed, even during periods of rivalry, functional cooperation persisted when interests overlapped.

Opportunities to Further Enhance Bilateral Cooperation for the Common Good

Although U.S. – China cooperation on counternarcotics is ongoing, specifically regarding the fentanyl crisis, trafficking in cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines also requires close attention. More can be done to enhance bilateral efforts on nuclear nonproliferation, starting with China agreeing to have a dialogue with the U.S. on China’s ambitious nuclear program. Extremist militant groups like ISIS continue to be active, thus requiring better cooperation on counterterrorism. Covid-19 was a wakeup call: there needs to be meaningful cooperation on pandemics. And ensuring that the space domain is used only for peaceful purposes must be a priority, while also ensuring that there are acceptable guidelines for the lawful and moral use of Artificial Intelligence.

U.S. – China cooperation today is more about preventing a catastrophe. The Belgrade Embassy bombing in 1999, when the U.S. accidentally bombed China’s embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese officials and the EP-3 incident of 2001, when a Chinese jet crashed into a U.S. reconnaissance plane, killing the Chinese pilot, and China detaining the U.S. crew in Hainan Island are two examples of incidents that could have spiraled out of control. Chinas initially refused to take the telephone calls from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both hoping to deescalate these tense developments.

Thus, crisis management and military de-confliction should be high on the list of subjects to be discussed, with a robust discussion of nuclear risk reduction. Stability in Northeast Asia and a nuclear North Korea, aligned with Russia and viewing the U.S. and South Korea as the enemies, should also be discussed, as well as nuclear nonproliferation.

The April summit between Messrs. Trump and Xi will be an opportunity to candidly discuss Taiwan and the South China Sea, to ensure we do not stumble into conflict.

The summit is also an opportunity to message to the world that the U.S. and China are working on a myriad of transnational issues for the common good of all countries.

The author is the former associate director of national intelligence. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication or information or endorsement of the author’s views.

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Remembering Aldrich Ames and the Lives He Destroyed

“I would never wish death upon anyone, but I have read some obituaries with great satisfaction.” - Winston Churchill

OPINION -- I associate myself with at least the latter part of that quote from Winston Churchill with regard to Aldrich Ames. To my knowledge, I met Ames on only one occasion. It was during a cocktail party in 1989 or 1990 when he oversaw the CIA operations group responsible for what was then Czechoslovakia. I have no clear recollection of that event, but I was later told that fellow traitor Robert Hanssen was also in attendance. If so, to paraphrase Shakespeare: ‘Hell was empty and the devils were there’.

While I can recall little about meeting Ames at that party, my colleagues and I lived – and still live – with the consequences of his betrayal. The loss of an agent is a very personal thing for those responsible for securely handling him or her. I saw that impact up close early on in my career.

Toward the end of my training as an operations officer in late 1982, I was summoned to the office of the then-chief of Soviet Division (SE). In that era, a summons to a meeting with any Division Chief - much less the head of what was then the most secretive operational component – could be unnerving for any junior officer. The initial moments of my appointment with then-C/SE, Dave Forden, were appropriately unsettling. He began by asking me whether I had stolen anything lately. Having never purloined anything ever, I was taken aback. After I answered no, he asked if I could pass a polygraph exam. Again surprised, I responded that I could the last time I took one. ‘Good’, Forden said, ‘you are coming to SE to replace Ed Howard in Moscow’. Howard, whom I had met during training, had been fired from CIA for a variety of offenses. He later defected to the USSR, betraying his knowledge of CIA operations and personnel to the KGB.

After completing training, I reported to SE Division. Shortly thereafter, I was told I would not be going to Moscow after all. Instead, I was informed, I would be going to Prague. Initially, I was a bit disappointed not to have a chance to test my skills against our principal adversary. In hindsight, however, that change in plan was fortuitous. While I could not know it at the time, my SE colleagues who went to Moscow would be there during the grim mid-1980’s period in which our agents were being rolled-up by the KGB. Many CIA officers involved with those cases would have to live for years thereafter wondering what had happened to their agents and whether anything they had done had contributed to their arrests and executions. My colleagues’ ordeals would only end with the revelation that one of our own was a spy.

But Ames was more than a spy. He was a killer. His career floundering and burdened by growing debt, Ames decided to solve his money problems by selling the identities of several low-level CIA agents to the KGB. Consequently, on April 16, 1985 he walked into the Soviet Embassy and passed on the following note: "I am Aldrich H. Ames and my job is branch chief of Soviet (CI) at the CIA. […] I need $50,000 and in exchange for the money, here is information about three agents we are developing in the Soviet Union right now.” He attached a page from SE Division's phone list, with his name underlined, to prove he was genuine. Within weeks, fearful that Soviet spy John Walker had been fingered by a CIA agent within the KGB, and worried that he might likewise be exposed, Ames decided to comprise all of the CIA and FBI Soviet sources he knew of. “My scam,” he later said, “was supposed to be a one-time hit. I was just going to get the fifty thousand dollars and be done with it, but now I started to panic.”

Accordingly, on June 13, 1985, Ames passed the Soviets what he called “the Big Dump.” That tranche of documents contained the identities of at least 11 CIA agents. Brave men who had risked all in deciding to serve freedom’s cause, many of them would be arrested, interrogated and ultimately executed.

Ames’s rationalization of this act says everything about the kind of man he was. “All of the people whose names were on my list knew the risks they were taking when they began spying for the CIA and FBI,” he said, before adding that, "They knew they were risking prison or death.”

He would repeatedly seek to justify his actions by claiming that his espionage for the USSR was morally equivalent to what Western services had long done against their adversaries. Oleg Gordievsky, a British spy within the KGB and one of the few agents betrayed by Ames who escaped, rightly rejected any such equivalency. "I knew,” he said, that “the people I identified would be arrested and put in prison. Ames knew the people he identified would be arrested and shot. That is one of the differences between us.”

Sentenced to prison, Ames would spend almost 32 years of his life behind bars. I like to think that punishment was worse than death. One hopes he whiled away hours in his cell thinking of what he’d done and the lives he took. He expressed contrition during the plea bargain and sentencing process to ensure leniency for his wife, Rosario, saying, for example, that, "No punishment by this court can balance or ease the profound shame and guilt I bear."

But I very much doubt the sincerity of such statements because he showed no signs of having a troubled conscience thereafter. Instead, in statements while incarcerated, Ames was at pains to give his actions a veneer of ideological justification. "I had,” he said, “come to believe that the espionage business, as carried out by the CIA and a few other American agencies, was and is a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policy makers and the public about both the necessity and the value of their work.”

“There is an actuarial certainty that there are other spies in U.S. national security agencies and there always will be.” That statement by former CIA Chief of Counterintelligence Paul Redmond in the wake of the Ames and Hanssen cases reflects a grim reality of the intelligence profession.

Nonetheless, when I joined CIA, it was accepted wisdom that the Agency had never had, and could never have, a spy in its ranks. With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to understand how such a naïve conviction could have taken hold given the repeated penetration of our predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and our British counterparts by Soviet intelligence. “There will,” as CIA Chief of CI James J. Angleton said, “always be penetrations…it is a way of life. It should never be thought of as an aberration. Anyone who gets flustered is in the wrong business.”

Perhaps the downplaying of such a possibility was a natural reaction to the overreach of Angleton himself with his ‘HONETOL’ spy hunts which hindered the Agency’s ability to mount operations against the Soviets for years at the height of the Cold War. It was certainly a reflection of institutional arrogance.

Whatever the reason, the idea that a foreign intelligence service could recruit a serving CIA officer as a spy was inconceivable to many. That mindset makes the accomplishment of Redmond and the Agency team led by Jeanne Vertefeuille, concluding that reporting from a Soviet mole – ultimately determined to be CIA officer Aldrich Ames – was the cause of the losses, all the more remarkable.

The years-long hunt for the agent the KGB called “KOLOKOL” (‘Bell’) ended on February 21, 1994 with the arrest of Ames by the FBI. The assessment of the damage that Ames had inflicted on U.S. national security in exchange for some $2.5 million from Moscow was, not surprisingly, extensive. Even in the analogue era, he was able to pass along voluminous documentary and oral reporting to Moscow. This included reporting on his own debriefing of Vitaliy Yurchenko, who defected briefly to U.S. before returning to the USSR.

But it was the review of Ames’s role in compromising our courageous agents that struck home with us. Their sacrifice is commemorated by the CIA ‘Fallen Agent Memorial’ and other memorials within Agency spaces. And one hopes that someday the Russian people, too, will come to realize that Military/Technical researcher Adolf G. Tolkachev (GTVANQUISH); KGB Line PR officer Vladimir M. Piguzov (GTJOGGER); KGB Line PR officer Leonid G. Poleschuk (GTWEIGH); GRU officer Vladimir M. Vasilyev (GTACCORD); GRU officer Gennadiy A. Smetanin (GTMILLION); KGB Line X officer Valeriy F. Martynov (GTGENTILE); KGB Active Measures specialist Sergey M. Motorin (GTGAUZE); KGB Illegals Support officer Gennadiy G. Varenik (GTFITNESS); KGB Second Chief Directorate officer Sergey Vorontsov (GTCOWL); and the highest-ranking spy run by the U.S. against the USSR; GRU General Dmitry F. Polyakov (TOPHAT, BOURBON and ROAM); sacrificed everything for them and for their country.

“The life of the dead,” Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote, “is placed in the memory of the living.” For my part, I will remember Ames as the base traitor he was and the men he killed as the heroes they were.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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Ruling Venezuela with a 2,000 Mile Hammer is Not Likely to End Well

EXPERT OPINION — Rule by proxy just isn’t as simple as the Trump Administration wants to make it sound. While the long-term goals of the Administration in Venezuela are unclear, the tools they appear to want to use are not.

First, the Administration seems to want to dictate policy to the Delcy Rodriguez government through threats of force, which President Trump recently highlighted by suggesting that he had called off a second strike on Venezuela because the regime was cooperating.

Second, the Trump Administration has stated that it will control the oil sales “indefinitely” to, in the words of the Secretary of Energy, “drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela.”

Leaving aside the legality and morality of using threats of armed force to seize another country’s natural resources and dictate an unspecified set of “changes”, this sort of rule from a distance is unlikely to work out as intended.

First, attempting to work through the Venezuelan regime will drive a number of choices that the Administration does not appear to have thought through. Propping up an authoritarian regime that is deeply corrupt, violent, and wildly unpopular will over time increasingly alienate the majority of the Venezuelan people and undermine international legitimacy.

Regime leaders, and the upper echelons of their subordinates, are themselves unlikely to quietly depart power or Venezuela itself without substantial guarantees of immunity and probably wealth somewhere else. Absent that, they will have every incentive to throw sand in the works of any sort of process of political transition. Yet facilitating their escape from punishment for their crimes with some amount of their ill-gotten gains is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Venezuelan people.

Elements of the regime have already taken steps to crack down on opposition in the streets. The Trump Administration is going to decide how much of this sort of repression is acceptable. Too much tolerance of repression will harm the already-thin legitimacy of this policy, particularly among the Venezuelan people, the rest of the hemisphere, and those allies the Administration hasn’t managed to alienate. Too little tolerance will encourage street protests and potentially anti-regime violence and threaten regime stability.

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has announced that she plans to return to Venezuela in the near future, which could highlight the choices the Administration faces. Some parts of the Rodriguez government will want to crack down on her supporters and make their lives as difficult as possible. The Trump Administration is going to have to think hard about how to react to that.

The tools of violence from a distance, or even abductions by Delta Force from over the horizon, are not well calibrated to deal with these dilemmas.

The Venezuelan regime appears to be heavily factionalized and punishing Delcy Rodriguez, which President Trump has threatened, could benefit other factions, for example, the Minister of the Interior or the Minister of Defense, both allegedly her rivals for power.

Unless the Administration can count on perfect intelligence about what faction is responsible for each disfavored action and precisely and directly respond, we are likely to see different factions, and even elements of the opposition, undertake “false flag” activity intended to cause the U.S. to strike their rivals.

Actions to punish or compel the regime also run the risk of collateral damage, in particular civilian casualties which will undermine support for U.S. policy both in Venezuela and abroad and potentially bolster support for the regime. And intelligence on the ground is not going to be perfect and airstrikes or raids will almost certainly cause collateral damage despite the incredible capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military.

Secondly, assuming that the Administration doesn’t intend to use the proceeds of sales of Venezuelan oil to build the White House ballroom, it’s unclear what mechanisms they plan to use to ensure that those proceeds benefit the Venezuelan people.

The Venezuelan regime is deeply corrupt. Utilizing the Venezuelan government to distribute proceeds from oil sales is just a way of ensuring that regime elites continue to siphon off cash or use that money to reward their followers, punish their opponents, or coopt potential rivals by buying them off.

Assuming that the U.S. could, in fact, somehow track the vast majority of the funds from oil sales and ensure that they are not misused, this would again undermine the unity and inner workings of a regime built on buying off factions and elites. That would likely encourage those factions to find other ways of extracting funds—for example, increased facilitation of drug shipments or shakedowns of local firms supporting the reconstruction of the oil sector.

Yet the U.S. is not at all likely to have a granular view of what happens to that money. The U.S. intelligence community, while capable of a great many things, cannot track where most of these funds go or who is raking off how much.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. had tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, advisors, and bureaucrats and was directly funding large parts of those governments, staggering levels of corruption existed and at times, helped fund warlords and faction leaders who undermined stability. We even managed to fund our adversaries at times.

In Venezuela, by contrast, we might have an embassy.

Unless the problem of how to monitor where the money goes can be solved, the U.S. will be supporting and funding a corrupt regime that feathers its own nest and undermines the transition to democracy.

Ruling from a distance, or even trying to force a political transition from a distance, drives a number of choices that the Administration clearly hasn’t thought through. And the tools the Administration is choosing to use; force from over the horizon and the control over the flow of some funds, aren’t matched well enough or sufficiently nuanced to accomplish the ends they claim to want to achieve.

Given that, it’s unlikely this will end well.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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Russia Signals Minimal Desire for Peace

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — As Russia continues it's brutal bombardment of Ukrainian cities, talks between Moscow and the U.S. to end the war appear on very different trajectories. White House envoy Steve Witkoff is reportedly planning another trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin as Moscow's winter attacks continue unabated.

This week, Russia launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles on cities across Ukraine, killing at least four people and striking critical energy and heat infrastructure. In the capital, Kyiv, residents are facing temperatures as low as 10 degrees farenheit without electricity or water.

On December 30, 2025, Moscow claimed a Ukrainian drone attack targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin's residence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov threatened his country's military would launch "retaliatory strikes" and said Moscow's "negotiating position will be revised” in ongoing talks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the claimed drone attack as “a complete fabrication”, and sources say the CIA assessed that Ukraine was not targeting the Russian leader's residence in the attack.

President Trump said in December that the U.S. was “very close” to a deal. So, what's happening?

Throughout the latest push for peace, Russia seems to conveniently reset the clock, demanding further talks as it continues its bombardments and assaults across Ukraine.

“This Russian strike sends an extremely clear signal about Russia’s priorities,” Zelensky said in a post on X referring to a strike on December 23 that killed three people and injured 12. Zeleneky condemned the attack “ahead of Christmas, when people simply want to be with their families, at home, and safe.”

That strike came just days after Putin told Russian defense ministry officials that Moscow will persist in its mission to “liberate its historic lands” and achieve its war goals “unconditionally” — by negotiations for an agreement in Moscow’s favor, or through continued war.

The continued Russian attacks and Putin’s bellicose language underscore a pattern that has defined Russia’s position on “peace” throughout its full-scale invasion of Ukraine: not budging from maximalist demands, blaming Kyiv for the lack of progress, and leveraging Western fears of escalation to World War Three.

The hardline from Putin comes as Ukraine has offered significant concessions, including Ukraine dropping NATO membership ambitions, for at least the time being, as well as a potential withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the east and the creation of a demilitarized “free economic zone.” The latest reports say Russia still wants more, including more stringent restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s military.

“The Ukrainians have been saying for over a year that they are ready to come to an agreement. They are ready to be realistic and compromise,” Glenn Corn, a former senior CIA Officer told The Cipher Brief. “It’s the Russians that are not doing that. It’s the Russians that continue to push maximalist demands and that continue to scuttle the peace process — not the Ukrainians.”

Through the eyes of seasoned intelligence professionals who have studied Putin's actions for decades, the continued attacks despite peace talks are hardly surprising. “Putin has never been sincere about a negotiated solution to his ‘Special Military Operation,’” said Rob Dannenberg, former Chief of CIA’s Central Eurasia Division.

Russia is also continuing offensive pushes on multiple fronts, including in the regions it claimed to annex - Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk, where the embattled strategic city of Pokrovsk is - as well as in the northern Kharkiv region. Experts warn Putin’s ambitions go far beyond.

“We've got Putin on the other side of it and the reality is he has not taken one single step towards a temporary ceasefire or a peace deal whatsoever,” General Jack Keane (Ret.), who served as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and is a trusted advisor to President Donald Trump, told Fox News. “Where he is, he still believes that eventually he's going to break the will and resolve of the United States and the Europeans and the Zelensky government and he will eventually have his way here,” Keane said, adding that Putin’s ultimate war goal is to “topple the government of Ukraine and expand into Eastern Europe.”

A Tested Playbook

Russia has long used the pretense of openness to negotiations as a tool to deceive, delay, and fracture Western support for those Moscow is targeting. The pattern was visible in Georgia in 2008 and again in Crimea in 2014, when Moscow signaled willingness to talk even as it consolidated military gains on the ground, buying time and weakening Western responses.

“I always use the example of Syria during the Civil War when they [Russian forces] were killing members of the Syrian opposition while they were drinking wine and coffee with American and European interlocutors in Europe, claiming that they were trying to find an agreement,” Corn told The Cipher Brief.

Indeed, behind any Russian statement of openness to engagement and dialogue, Putin has continued to assert that Ukraine is part of Russia, that the government of Zelensky is illegitimate, and that Russian forces can achieve victory on the battlefield to justify his stonewalling — despite mounting costs for Russia and limited territorial gains.

“Putin’s strategy has been consistent: advance false narratives; adopt a non-negotiable maximalist position and make ever-increasing demands for concessions; take deliberate actions to erode U.S., Ukrainian, and NATO resolve and perceived options; employ implicit and explicit threats and intimidation; and offer false choices,” former CIA Senior Executive Dave Pitts told The Cipher Brief.

“Taken together, these represent Russian ‘reflexive control’—a subset of cognitive warfare and a strategy designed to persuade adversaries to voluntarily adopt outcomes favorable to Russia,” Pitts told us. “In the face of unreasonable sovereignty and territorial demands placed on Ukraine and none placed on Russia, an emboldened and confident Putin will now likely demand even more.”

A Hesitant West

How did we get here? Some experts say a long-running pattern of Western hesitation in keeping Russia in check has emboldened Moscow. It’s not hard to remember that at the start of the full-scale invasion, Western countries were slow to provide full military support to Ukraine, concerned about a possible wider escalation.

Retired General Philip Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told The Cipher Brief, “We have taken precious little action to stop the fight in Ukraine and we still find ourselves saying, ‘We're not going to do that because we've got to give peace a chance and we don't want to escalate the problem.’ And that formula is not working now and has not worked for 11 years.”

“We have virtually enabled the Russian war on Ukraine by our lack of action in a more severe way. Many of us from military backgrounds say that we have built sanctuary for Russia. From that sanctuary, we allow them to attack Ukraine.”

Experts warn that while the goal should be, as President Donald Trump has said, “to stop the killing,” awarding concessions to a Kremlin that has yet to drop its maximalist war aims is not the solution.

“The Trump Administration’s desire to end the violence in Ukraine is commendable, but not at the price of setting the stage for the next war by giving victory to the aggressor,” Dannenberg told The Cipher Brief.

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The Road Ahead

With peace talks ongoing, it is proving difficult to come up with a deal that does not force Ukraine to give too much while ensuring the proposal does not push Russia to reject the deal outright.

But beyond the negotiating table, experts say there are ways to pressure Putin to peace.

Ukraine is not waiting, continuing strikes on Russian energy infrastructure to curb energy export revenues that fund Moscow’s war machine, and bringing the cost of the war back to ordinary Russians.

For the U.S. and Europe, major sanctions on Russia - including new measures against Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil - are already in place and reportedly starting to take their toll, but experts say stronger enforcement is needed to make them truly bite.

Maintaining military aid to Ukraine is also essential. In mid-December, Congress passed a defense bill that authorizes $800 million for Ukraine - $400 million in each of the next two years - as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays U.S. companies to produce weapons for Ukraine's military. President Trump signed the measure into law on December 18. Meanwhile, while Europeans failed to agree to use frozen Russian assets to back a loan for Ukraine, the EU agreed to a 90 billion euro loan over the next two years, backed by the bloc’s budget.

"The Trump Administration should demonstrate its displeasure at Russia’s clear disregard for any so-called peace process by fully enforcing all existing sanctions, providing Ukraine with long-range weapons, and declaring that peace negotiations are suspended until Russia demonstrates it is serious about these negotiations," General Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, told The Cipher Brief. "Otherwise, the President’s efforts and those of his negotiators are clearly a waste of time and headed nowhere."

European countries have also fortified post-war pledges to Ukraine. Britain and France have committed to sending troops to a peacekeeping mission -- if a peace deal is reached. Experts U.S. intelligence, command and control, and logistics support is needed to give any European effort credibility.

The impact will be felt far beyond Ukraine, and long after the guns there go silent.

“For the United States, the best outcome will come from taking the longer, harder road that denies any reward for Russia’s illegal invasion, forces Putin to make reasonable concessions, and sustains the long-term sovereignty and independence of Ukraine,” Pitts said. “That longer, harder road also leads to stronger U.S. national security.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.

Why Labeling Muslim Brotherhood “Chapters” as Terrorist Groups Is Problematic

OPINION — The White House this past November issued a Presidential action statement designating certain Muslim Brotherhood “chapters” as terrorist organizations. On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department and U.S. Treasury Department announced the designations of the Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. The Egyptian and Jordanian chapters received a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) designation. The Lebanese chapter received both the SDGT designation and a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation.

In the spring of 2019, Washington, responding to mounting pressure by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, decided to brand the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) a terrorist organization. There was no mention of “chapters” outside Egypt.

Having followed the MB and interviewed many of its members for years during my government service, I published an article in 2019 questioning the underlying assumptions of the plan. This article is a revised version of my 2019 piece.

I argued in the 2019 piece that the administration’s decision at the time did not reflect a deep knowledge of the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood and its connection to Muslim societies and political Islam.

In the fall of 2025, the leaders of the United Arab Republic, Jordan, Bahrain, and Lebanon pressured the administration to label the MB a terrorist group.

Context

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was founded by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928 in response to two fundamental realities: First, Egypt was under the influence of British colonialism embodied in the massive British military presence near the Suez Canal. Second, under the influence of the pro-Western corrupt monarchy lead first by King Fuad and later by his son King Faruk, the MB’s founder believed that Muslim Egypt was drifting away from Islam. Egypt of course is the home of Al-Azhar University, the oldest Muslim academic center of learning in the world.

In addition, Al-Azhar University represents the philosophical and theological thought of the three major Schools of Jurisprudence in Sunni Islam—the Hanafi, the Maliki, and the Shafi’i Schools. The fourth and smallest School of Jurisprudence—the Hanbali—is embodied in the Wahhabi-Salafi doctrine and is prevalent in Saudi Arabia.

Al-Banna’s two founding principles were: a) Islam is the solution to society’s ills (“Islam hua al-Hal”), and b) Islam is a combination of Faith (Din), Society (Dunya) and State (Dawla). He believed, correctly for the most part, that these principles, especially the three Arabic Ds, underpin all Sunni Muslim societies, other than perhaps the adherents of the Hanbali School.

In the past 98 years, the Muslim Brotherhood has undergone different reiterations from eschewing politics to accepting the authority of Muslim rulers to declaring war against some of them to participating in the political process through elections.

Certain MB thinkers and leaders over the past nine decades, including the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the Syrian Muhammad Surur, and the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, adopted a radical violent view of Islamic jihad and either allied themselves with some Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia or joined al-Qa’ida. The organization itself generally stayed away from violent jihad. Consequently, it would make sense to label certain leaders or certain actions as terrorist but not the entire group or the different Islamic political parties in several countries.

In the early 1990s, the Egyptian MB rejected political violence and declared its support for peaceful gradual political change through elections, and in fact participated in several national elections. While Islamic Sunni parties in different countries adopted the basic theological organizing principles of the MB on the role of Islam in society, they were not “chapters” of the MB.

They are free standing Islamic political groups and movements, legally registered in their countries, which often focus on economic, health, and social issues of concern to their communities. They are not tied to the MB in command, control, or operations.

Examples of these Sunni Islamic political parties include the AKP in Turkey, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, Justice and Development in Morocco, al-Nahda in Tunisia, the Islamic Constitutional Movement in Kuwait, the Islamic Movement (RA’AM) in Israel, PAS in Malaysia, PKS in Indonesia, the Islamic Party in Kenya, and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

During my government career, my analysts and I spent years in conversations with representatives of these parties with an eye toward helping them moderate their political positions and encouraging them to enter the mainstream political process through elections. In fact, most of them did just that. They won some elections and lost others, and in the process, they were able to recruit thousands of young members.

Based on these conversations, we concluded that these groups were pragmatic, mainstream, and committed to the dictum that electoral politics was a process, and not “one man, one vote, one time.” Because they believed in the efficacy and value of gradual peaceful political change, they were able to convince their fellow Muslims that a winning strategy at the polls was to focus on bread-and-butter issues, including health, education, and welfare, that were of concern to their own societies. They projected to their members a moderate vision of Islam.

Labeling the Muslim Brotherhood and other mainstream Sunni Islamic political parties as terrorist organizations could radicalize some of the youth in these parties and opt out of electoral politics. Some of the party leaders would become reticent to engage with American diplomats, intelligence officers, and other officials at U.S. embassies.

Washington inadvertently would be sending a message to Muslim youth that the democratic process and peaceful participation in electoral politics are a sham, which could damage American national security and credibility in many Muslim countries.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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Uber Krysha: How Russia Turns Crime into Power—and Poison

OPINION — Current discussion of Russian "hybrid warfare" tends to revolve around concepts like disinformation, proxy militias, cyber operations, sabotage, and psychological manipulation designed to fragment, confuse, and demoralize Russia's opponents—and the respective roles these play in Russian military and national security doctrine. Yet one essential dimension remains underdeveloped in the broader debate: the organic integration of criminal structures and methods into Russia's strategic toolkit. Russia's system does more than merely operate in a "gray zone." It has become a gray state, sustained by an "Uber Krysha," a super-protection racket in which the Kremlin fuses its security apparatus with organized crime to project influence and intimidation both at home and abroad.

The enabling mentality behind this fusion can be directly tied to Russia's pre-revolutionary period. Although no longer ideologically communist, Russia's current ruling elite, led by President Vladimir Putin, has very much inherited the Bolsheviks' comfort with adopting criminal methods in the pursuit of regime objectives. Before 1917, Lenin's Bolshevik Party financed its operations partly through armed robberies justified as the expropriation of bourgeois wealth for the sake of the proletarian struggle. The Bolsheviks were revolutionary in ideology but gangster in practice, rationalizing robbery and violence not as moral lapses, but as necessary transgressions—crime rebranded as virtue in the service of power.

Furthermore, during the early years of the USSR, the communist regime was defiantly, even boastfully, dismissive in its rejection of “bourgeois” legal norms. Its November 1918 decree On Red Terror (yes, it was called that) is a good case in point. It formally authorized the secret police, the Cheka, to summarily arrest and execute perceived opponents of the revolution without trial, which it proceeded to do in the tens of thousands. In doing so, the new revolutionary state openly and unapologetically signaled to its people and to the world that it would not be bound by the ordinary moral limits of civilized life. Terror was not a regrettable excess, but a management tool. This was not moral confusion, it was moral disregard elevated to state policy, with a legacy that has left a deep imprint on the political DNA of contemporary Russia.

Even as the Soviet state engaged in its bloody ideological experiment, common criminality thrived in the workers' paradise. The inefficient Soviet economic system brought chronic scarcity, which, as it does everywhere, spawned smuggling and black-market behaviors. The state imposed tight controls, but the security services did not shy away from making expedient use of criminal gangs as instruments of control to help impose a brutal order among inmates in its sprawling GULAG camp system, or using petty thieves and prostitutes to report on dissidents and foreigners.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, these controls dissolved, and the roles suddenly reversed. In 1991 the Soviet security apparatus imploded, and many KGB and GRU officers migrated to the emerging oligarchic and criminal economy left in its wake. There they became security chiefs, "political technologists," oil traders, and gangsters, using their skills and muscle to help these entities provide a "krysha" (roof)—similar in meaning to "protection" in Western mafia parlance—by combining inside connections, intelligence tradecraft, violence, and financial engineering. When Putin—himself a KGB veteran whose purview over foreign trade and city assets as St. Petersburg’s Deputy Mayor brought him into contact with port rackets, fuel schemes, and the Tambov crime syndicate—rose to the presidency in 1999, he re-asserted state primacy not by dismantling this nexus, but by mastering it. Putin's Kremlin in effect became the Uber Krysha, the ultimate protection roof above the oligarchs, security chiefs, and crime bosses. The bargain was clear: enjoy your wealth and impunity, but serve the state—effectively Putin—when called. Loyalty was enforced not by law or shared purpose, but by leverage, fear, and mutual criminal exposure.

What took place after 1991, however, was more than merely a case of inverted and re-inverted primacy. The unprecedented circulation of cadres that occurred during this period fostered a profound organizational and behavioral cross-pollination between intelligence, oligarchic, and criminal elements resulting in a qualitatively new and insidious mutation that is today’s Russia—Putin's Russia. The 1990s saw an outflow of KGB and GRU officers who "pollenated" the criminal/oligarchic economy with their tradecraft, tools, and government connections. Putin’s reconsolidation of state power in the 2000s then saw a return flow creating a "reverse-pollination" as ex-intelligence officers brought their new underworld relationships, financial channels, and expanded operational flexibility back to the security services.

Among contemporary scholars, the historian and journalist Mark Galeotti stands out as the leading theorist and interpreter of this phenomenon, pointing out how modern Russia's power projection depends on cultivating deniability through criminal intermediaries. Galeotti's concept of the Kremlin as a "political-criminal nexus" and his description of its global "crimintern" offers a crucial corrective to more conventional security studies frameworks. Where others see diffusion of state control as a weakness, Galeotti sees design—a pragmatic outsourcing of coercion and corruption to actors who maintain loyalty through mutual dependence. In this arrangement, the lines between mafia, mercenaries, business, and ministries are blurred.

Russia's asymmetric tactics abroad leveraging smuggling networks, compromising criminal entanglement (kompromat), cyber hacking, illicit financing, and global shadow operations by semi-private mercenary groups, like the Wagner Group and the Africa Corps, extend this logic internationally. Liaisons between the Russian intelligence and crime groups across Europe also give Moscow access to local networks for espionage, intimidation, and assassinations that can act faster, at lower cost, and with more deniability than professional intelligence officers. But while most analysts tend to focus on this as a blending of tools—military, intelligence, cyber, informational— Galeotti’s insight is sharper: the blend itself is criminal in nature, structurally fusing coercion, corruption, and deceit into a governing logic—not as a breakdown of state power, but as its deliberate expression. Yet you will never find this asymmetric dimension acknowledged in Russian doctrinal writings despite its widespread exploitation in Russian actions.

Policymakers in the Western democracies struggle mightily to wrap their minds around this phenomenon. Their siloed agencies—CIA for HUMINT, NSA for SIGINT/cyber, DOD for military, and FBI for crime, etc.—operate under strict legal separations between these domains to protect civil liberties. Effective in their respective arenas, they are vulnerable when adversaries operate across boundaries. Russia’s mafia-state collapses these distinctions and thrives in the weeds, exploiting moral disregard and legal ambiguity to create jurisdictional confusion and cognitive overload that stymie efforts at response.

And yet for all its advantages, the inherent pathologies of this criminal-state fusion contain the seeds of its own decay. Its reliance on criminal intermediaries corrodes institutional coherence. Loyalty is transactional, not ideological, and emptied of moral meaning. The fates of figures like Yevgeniy Prigozhin and various siloviki-linked oligarchs demonstrate how rapidly beneficiaries can become threats once their ambitions outgrow the tolerance of the Center. Moreover, by incentivizing enrichment over competence, criminal methods undermine professionalism within the military, intelligence services, government bureaucracy, and the private sector. Corruption pervades procurement, logistics, and governance, eroding capacity even as it funds loyalty. This was clearly evident in the shocking underperformance of Russia's military and intelligence operations in Ukraine.

Internationally, what appears cunning in the short term produces isolation in the long term. Russia's growing reputation as a mafia state alienates legitimate partners, of which it now has few, and hollows out whatever moral legitimacy it once had. Putin's Uber Krysha model is unsustainable in the long run because it requires continuous motion. It cannot stand on genuine law or trust, only perpetual leverage and fear, with tools that must be continuously re-coerced. The Russian people and others who are caught in its reach exist in an environment of moral blackmail that breeds cynicism rather than solidarity. Galeotti's moral edge, implicit in his scholarship, lies in showing that the criminal state is not merely a threat to others, it is a tragedy for Russia itself.

To fully understand Russian asymmetric warfare today, we must appreciate its blending of the state and criminal domains and recognize that Moscow hasn't simply rewritten the rules of war for the gray zone, it has blurred the lines between law and criminality and has itself become a gray state. It is the malignant ethos of this new Russian Uber Krysha state—the normalization of moral disregard—that, more than any cyber weapon or troll farm, has become its most dangerous export.

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Iran’s Crumbling Revolutionary Facade: How Today’s Protests Could Reshape the Region in 2026

EXPERT OPINION — I am closely watching the growing size and momentum of protesters across Iran’s cities, rural areas, and pious communities who are bravely and vocally rejecting the Supreme Leader’s broken policies. They have shined a light on Khamenei’s gross mismanagement of the economy and the severe multi-year drought; his constant agitation and hostile relations with neighbors; Iran’s loss of prestige and influence with coreligionist communities in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; his failures against foreign attacks; and his misguided alliance with Russia against Ukraine. Even regime loyalists have begun murmuring such complaints.

Regime instability indicators and warnings are blinking. I believe Iran’s revolutionary facade is crumbling, but into an uncertain future.

As more protesters demand a better future, I am watching for evidence of leniency from their fathers, brothers, uncles, and schoolmates who work in the IRGC, the police, and even in the Basij. If such cracks appear, new non-revolutionary leaders could emerge as quickly as al-Sharaa rose to power in Syria.

Protesters, however, most likely lack experience running cities, provinces, and the federal government. New non-revolutionary leaders therefore probably would look to the U.S. for assurance and support – and right away.

If the protests produce a new Supreme Leader under a revolutionary Velāyat-e Faqih theocracy model, however, the future looks quite dark. Crackdowns would probably be quite harsh and swift, the nuclear program would most likely march on, and Tehran undoubtedly would keep funneling money and arms to trusted proxies that threaten the U.S. and Israel.

I’ve been working on Iranian issues since 1979 as an academic, diplomat, intelligence officer, and now as a professor of practice. Nothing, in my view, would stabilize the region between the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf faster than a peaceful, non-nuclear and wealthy Iran that recognizes the state of Israel and distances itself from Russia.

Most pendulums eventually swing, and I am watching for this one to swing in support of the Iranian people finally having a chance to rejoin a community of free nations that value peace, prosperity, and democracy. If non-revolutionary leaders were to emerge, the West could finally and quickly work towards restoring a genuinely peaceful future that ends Tehran's nuclear weapons program; breaks its deadly alliance with Russia; terminates its costly support to Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis; and welcomes Iran into the community of nations as a responsible, wealth-producing global energy partner. May the pendulum swing decisively in these directions in 2026.

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Trump’s Power Doctrine: A $1.5 Trillion Military, Greenland Ambitions, and a World Ruled by Force

OPINION — “After long and difficult negotiations with Senators, Congressmen, Secretaries, and other Political Representatives, I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe.”

That was part of a Truth Social message from President Trump posted last Wednesday afternoon and illustrates the emphasis on increasing U.S. military power by him and top administration officials since the successful U.S. January 3, raid in Venezuela that captured its former-President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

As it should, public attention has been focused on Trump’s apparent desire to project force as he publicly savors the plaudits arising from not only the Venezuela operation, but also the June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities.

Most focus this past week has been paid to remarks Trump made to New York Times reporters during their more than two hour interview last Thursday.

At that time, when asked if there are any limits on his global powers, Trump said, "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump added, “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.” Asked about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Trump said, “I do,” but added, “it depends what your definition of international law is.”

Attention is also correctly being paid to remarks Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made last Tuesday during an interview with CNN.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

It is against that Trump open-stress-on-power background that I will discuss below a few other incidents last week that could indicate future events. But first I want to explore Trump’s obsession with taking over Greenland, which was also illustrated during the Times interview.

In 1945, at the end of World War II fighting in Europe, the United States had 17 bases and military installations in Greenland with thousands of soldiers. Today, there is only one American base – U.S. Pituffik Space Base in northwest Greenland, formerly known as Thule Air Base.

From this base today some 200 U.S. Air Force and Space Force personnel, plus many more contractors, carry out ballistic missile early warnings, missile defense, and space surveillance missions supported by what the Space Force described as an “Upgraded Early Warning Radar weapon system.” That system includes “a phased-array radar that detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of [a worldwide U.S.] strategic missile warning and missile defense [system],” according to a Space Force press release.

The same radar also supports what Space Force said is “Space Domain Awareness by tracking and characterizing objects in orbit around the earth.”

Under the 1951 U.S.-Denmark defense agreement, the U.S., with Denmark’s assent, can create new “defense areas” in Greenland “necessary for the development of the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area, and which the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark is unable to establish and operate singlehanded.”

The agreement says further: “the Government of the United States of America, without compensation to the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark, shall be entitled within such defense area and the air spaces and waters adjacent thereto to improve and generally to fit the area for military use.”

That apparently is not enough freedom for President Trump, still a real estate man. As he explained last week to the Times reporters, “Ownership is very important, because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

This long-held Trump view that he must have Greenland was explored back in 2021. After his first term as President, Trump was interviewed by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker for the book they were writing, and they asked Trump at that time why he wanted Greenland.

Four years ago, Trump explained, “You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a [street] corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this [Greenland], it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”

For all Trump’s repeated threats to seize Greenland militarily, it’s doubtful that will happen. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to meet with Danish and Greenland counterparts this week, and afterwards the situation should become clearer.

Context is another test for analyzing Trump statements, and that seems to be the case when looking at his call for a $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 defense budget.

Last Wednesday, hours before Trump made his Truth Social FY 2027 budget statement, the White House released an Executive Order (EO) entitled, Prioritizing The Warfighter In Defense Contracting. The EO called for holding defense contractors accountable and targeted those who engaged in stock buybacks or issued dividends while “underperforming” on government contracts. According to one Washington firm, the Trump EO represented “one of the most aggressive federal interventions into corporate financial decisions in recent memory.”

The EO caused shares of defense stocks to fall. Lockheed Martin fell 4.8%, Northrop Grumman 5.5%, and General Dynamics 3.6% during that afternoon’s stock exchange trading in New York. After the stock market closed, Trump released his Truth Social message calling for the $1.5 trillion FY 2027 defense budget and the next day, January 8, defense stocks experienced a sharp rebound. Lockheed Martin rebounded with gains of around 7%; Northrop Grumman rose over 8%; and General Dynamics gained around 4%.

Trump has not spoken publicly about the $1.5 trillion for FY 2027, but in his first message, he said the added funds would come from tariffs. He wrote, “Because of tariffs and the tremendous income that they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past, we are able to easily hit the $1.5 trillion dollar number.”

If that were not enough, Trump added that the new funding would produce “an unparalleled military force, and having the ability to, at the same time, pay down debt, and likewise, pay a substantial dividend to moderate income patriots within our country!”

What can be believed?

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) said the $500 billion annual increase in defense spending would be nearly twice as much as the expected yearly tariff revenue, and the spending increase would push the national debt $5.8 trillion higher over the next decade. CRFB added, “Given the $175 billion appropriated to the defense budget under the [2025] One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), there is little case for a near-term increase in military spending.”

I should point out that the FY 2026 $901 billion defense appropriations bill has yet to pass the Congress.

One more event from last week needing attention involves Venezuela.

Last Tuesday January 6, 2026, as Delcy Rodriguez, former Vice President, was sworn in as Venezuela's interim president, General Javier Marcano Tabata. the military officer closest to Maduro as his head of the presidential honor guard and director of the DGCIM, the Venezuelan military counterintelligence agency, was arrested and jailed, according to El Pais Caracas.

Marcano Tabata was labeled a traitor and accused of facilitating the kidnapping of Maduro by providing the U.S. with exactly where Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores were sleeping, and identifying blind spots in the Cuban-Venezuelan security ring protecting them, according to El Pais Caracas.

What’s the U.S. responsibility toward Marcano Tabata if the El Pais Caracas facts are correct ?

I want to end this column with another Trump statement last week that stuck in my mind because of its implications.

It came up last Friday after Trump, in the White House East Room, started welcoming more than 20 oil and gas executives invited to discuss the situation in Venezuela.

“We have many others that were not able to get in…If we had a ballroom, we'd have over a thousand people. Everybody wanted. I never knew your industry was that big. I never knew you had that many people in your industry. But, here we are.”

Trump then paused, got up and turned to look through the glass door behind him that showed the excavation for the new ballroom saying, “I got to look at this myself. Wow. What a view…Take a look, you can see a very big foundation that's moving. We're ahead of schedule in the ballroom and under budget. It's going to be I don't think there'll be anything like it in the world, actually. I think it will be the best.”

He then said the remark I want to highlight, “The ballroom will seat many and it'll also take care of the inauguration with bulletproof glass-drone proof ceilings and everything else unfortunately that today you need.”

Who, other than Trump, would think that the next President of the United States would need to hold his inauguration indoors, inside the White House ballroom, with bullet-proof windows and a roof that protects from a drone attack?

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Now Comes the Hard Part in Venezuela

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Now comes the hard part in Venezuela. Dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife are gone but the regime is still in power. Most Venezuelans, particularly in the diaspora, are pleased and relieved. Many are also apprehensive.

The Trump administration has decided to compel the cooperation of Maduro’s Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, now interim president. It is not at all assured that she will be a reliable partner. The U.S. decision to work with those still in control was logical even if disappointing to some in the democratic opposition which, after all, won the presidential election overwhelmingly in late July of 2024. The opposition’s base of support dwarfs that of the regime but the military, intelligence services and police are all still loyal to the regime - at least for the time being. The Trump administration believes the cooperation of these elements of the regime will be necessary for the Trump administration to implement its plans for the country without further U.S. police and military actions on the ground.

The Trump administration has said we will be taking over the oil sector and President Trump himself has announced his intention to persuade the U.S. private sector to return to Venezuela to rebuild the sector. Oil production in Venezuela has declined by two thirds since Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, was elected in 1998. This unprecedented decline was due to incompetent management, undercapitalization and corruption. Had Chevron not opted to stay in the country under difficult circumstances, the production numbers would look even worse. Resurrecting the oil sector will take time, money and expertise. The return of the U.S. oil companies and the infusions of cash that will be required will only happen if an appropriate level of security can be established — and that will require the cooperation of the Venezuelan armed forces and police. Many senior leaders in those sectors are believed to have been deeply complicit in both the abuses and corruption of a government the United Nations said was plausibly responsible for “crimes against humanity.” Two of the regime figures most widely believed to have been, along with Maduro himself, the architects of the Bolivarian regime’s repressive governance are still in power, Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello and Minister of Defense General Vladimir Portino Lopez. They will need to be watched and not permitted to undermine U.S. efforts to rehabilitate the oil sector and orchestrate a return to legitimate, popularly supported and democratic government.

There are several considerations that the U.S. will need to keep in mind going forward. First, more than 80 percent of Venezuelans now live below the poverty line. Their needs must be addressed . Even the shrinking number of Venezuelans who aligned with the regime are hoping to see their lives improve. Between 2013 and 2023, the country’s GDP contracted by around 70 percent, some believe it may have been as much as 75 percent. As most of Venezuela’s licit economy is essentially moribund and the U.S. will be controlling oil exports, the poor will naturally look to the United States for help. Heretofore, the regime employed food transfers to keep the populace in line. That role should move to the NGO community, the church or even elements of the democratic opposition.

Indeed, it will be important to secure the cooperation of the opposition, notwithstanding the Trump administrations to work with Delcy Rodriguez and company as the opposition represents the majority of Venezuelans inside the country as well as out. It will also be necessary to pay the military and it is not at all clear that the regime elements still in place will have the money to do so once oil receipts are being handled by the United States. If the U.S. is to avoid the mistakes that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein, attending to the needs of the populace and paying the rank and file of the military should be priorities.

The Trump administration should also move as quickly as the security situation permits to reopen the U.S. embassy in Caracas. There is reporting out of Colombia that the U.S. Charge in Bogota has already made a trip to Caracas to evaluate the situation. This is a good thing. There is no substitute for on-the-ground engagement and observation.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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Maduro and Noriega: Assessing the Analogies

Asked if there were any restraints on his global powers, [President Trump] answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law."

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Nicholas Maduro’s fate seems sealed: he will stand trial for numerous violations of federal criminal long-arm statutes and very likely spend decades as an inmate in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

How this U.S. military operation that resulted in his apprehension is legally characterized has and will continue to be a topic of debate and controversy. Central to this debate have been two critically significant international law issues. First, was the operation conducted to apprehend him a violation of the Charter of the United Nations? Second, did that operation trigger applicability of the law of armed conflict?

The Trump administration has invoked the memory of General Manuel Noriega’s apprehension following the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, in support of its assertion that the raid into Venezuela must be understood as nothing more than a law enforcement operation. But this reflects an invalid conflation between a law enforcement objective with a law enforcement operation.

Suggesting Operation Just Cause supports the assertion that this raid was anything other than an international armed conflict reflects a patently false analogy. Nonetheless, if - contrary to the President’s dismissal of international law quoted above – international law still means something for the United States - what happened in Panama and to General Noriega after his capture does have precedential value, so long as it is properly understood.

Parallels with the Noriega case?

Maduro was taken into U.S. custody 36 years to the day after General Manuel Noriega was taken into U.S. custody in Panama. Like Maduro, Noriega was the de facto leader of his nation. Like Maduro, the U.S. did not consider him the legitimate leader of his country due to his actions that led to nullifying a resounding election defeat of his hand-picked presidential candidate by an opposition candidate (in Panama’s case, Guillermo Endara).

Like Maduro, Noriega was under federal criminal indictment for narco-trafficking offenses. Like Maduro, that indictment had been pending several years. Like Maduro, Noriega was the commander of his nation’s military forces (in his case, the Panamanian Defense Forces, or PDF).

Like Maduro, his apprehension was the outcome of a U.S. military attack. Like Maduro, once he was captured, he was immediately transferred to the custody of U.S. law enforcement personnel and transported to the United States for his first appearance as a criminal defendant. And now we know that Maduro, like Noriega, immediately demanded prisoner of war status and immediate repatriation.

It is therefore unsurprising that commentators – and government officials – immediately began to offer analogies between the two to help understand both the legal basis for the raid into Venezuela and how Maduro was captured will impact his criminal case. Like how the Panama Canal itself cut that country into two, it is almost as if these two categories of analogy can be cut into valid and invalid.

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False Analogy to Operation Just Cause

Almost immediately following the news of the raid, critics – including me – began to question how the U.S. action could be credibly justified under international law?

As two of the most respected experts on use of force law – Michael Schmitt and Ryan Goodman - explained, there did not seem to be any valid legal justification for this U.S. military attack against another sovereign nation, even conceding the ends were arguably laudable.

My expectation was that the Trump administration would extend its ‘drug boat campaign’ rationale to justify its projection of military force into Venezuela proper; that self-defense justified U.S. military action to apprehend the leader of an alleged drug cartel that the Secretary of State had designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization. While I shared the view of almost all experts who have condemned this theory of legality, it seemed to be the only plausible rationale the government might offer.

It appears I may have been wrong. While no official legal opinion is yet available, statements by the Secretary of State and other officials seem to point to a different rationale: that this was not an armed attack but was instead a law enforcement apprehension operation.

And, as could be expected, Operation Just Cause – the military assault on Panama that led to General Noriega’s apprehension – is cited as precedent in support of this assertion. This effort to justify the raid is, in my view, even more implausible than even the drug boat self-defense theory.

At its core, it conflates a law enforcement objective with a law enforcement operation. Yes, it does appear that the objective of the raid was to apprehend an indicted fugitive. But the objective – or motive – for an operation does not dictate its legal characterization.

In this case, a military attack was launched to achieve that objective. Indeed, when General Caine took the podium in Mara Lago to brief the world on the operation, he emphasized how U.S. ‘targeting’ complied with principles of the law of armed conflict. Targeting, diversionary attacks, and engagement of enemy personnel leading to substantial casualties are not aspects of a law enforcement operation even if there is a law enforcement objective.

Nor does the example of Panama support this effort at slight of hand. The United States never pretended that the invasion of Panama was anything other than an armed conflict. Nor was apprehension of General Noriega an asserted legal justification for the invasion. Instead, as noted in this Government Accounting Office report,

The Department of State provided essentially three legal bases for the US. military action in Panama: the United States had exercised its legitimate right of self-defense as defined in the UN and CM charters, the United States had the right to protect and defend the Panama Canal under the Panama Canal Treaty, and U.S. actions were taken with the consent of the legitimate government of Panama

The more complicated issue in Panama was the nature of the armed conflict, with the U.S. asserting that it was ‘non-international’ due to the invitation from Guillermo Endara who the U.S. arranged to be sworn in as President on a U.S. base in Panama immediately prior to the attack. But while apprehending Noriega was almost certainly an operational objective for Just Cause, that in no way influenced the legal characterization of the operation.

International law

The assertion that a law enforcement objective provided the international legal justification for the invasion is, as noted above, contradicted by post-invasion analysis. It is also contradicted by the fact that the United States had ample opportunity to conduct a military operation to capture General Noriega during the nearly two years between the unsealing of his indictment and the invasion. This included the opportunity to provide modest military support to two coup attempts that would have certainly sealed Noriega’s fate.

With approximately 15,000 U.S. forces stationed within a few miles of his Commandancia, and his other office located on Fort Amador – a base shared with U.S. forces – had arrest been the primary U.S. objective it would have almost certainly happened much sooner and without a full scale invasion.

That invasion was justified to protect the approximate 30,000 U.S. nationals living in Panama. The interpretation of the international legal justification of self-defense to protect nationals from imminent deadly threats was consistent with longstanding U.S. practice.

Normally this would be effectuated by conducting a non-combatant evacuation operation. But evacuating such a substantial population of U.S. nationals was never a feasible option and assembling so many people in evacuation points – assuming they could get there safely – would have just facilitated PDF violence against them.

No analogous justification supported the raid into Venezuela. Criminal drug traffickers deserve no sympathy, and the harmful impact of illegal narcotics should not be diminished.

But President Bush confronted incidents of violence against U.S. nationals that appeared to be escalating rapidly and deviated from the norm of relatively non-violent harassment that had been ongoing for almost two years (I was one of the victims of that harassment, spending a long boring day in a Panamanian jail cell for the offense of wearing my uniform on my drive from Panama City to work).

With PDF infantry barracks literally a golf fairway across from U.S. family housing, it was reasonable to conclude the PDF needed to be neutered. Yet even this asserted legal basis for the invasion was widely condemned as invalid.

Noriega was ultimately apprehended and brought to justice. But that objective was never asserted as the principal legal basis for the invasion. Nor did it need to be. Operation Just Cause was, in my opinion (which concededly is influenced from my experience living in Panama for 3.5 years leading up to the invasion) a valid exercise of the inherent right of self-defense (also bolstered by the Canal Treaty right to defend the function of the Canal).

Nor was the peripheral law enforcement objective conflated with the nature of the operation. Operation Just Cause, like the raid into Venezuela, was an armed conflict. And, like the capture of Maduro, that leads to a valid aspect of analogy: Maduro’s status.

Like Noriega, at his initial appearance in federal court Maduro asserted his is a prisoner of war. And for good reason: the U.S. raid was an international armed conflict bringing into force the Third Geneva Convention, and Maduro by Venezuelan law was the military commander of their armed forces.

The U.S. government’s position on this assertion has not been fully revealed (or perhaps even formulated). But the persistent emphasis that the raid was a law enforcement operation that was merely facilitated by military action seems to be pointing towards a rejection. As in the case of General Noriega, this is both invalid and unnecessary: what matters is not what the government calls the operation, but the objective facts related to the raid.

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Existence of an armed conflict

Almost immediately following news of the raid, the Trump administration asserted it was not a military operation, but instead a law enforcement operation supported by military action. This was the central premise of the statement made at the Security Council by Mike Waltz, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Notably, Ambassador Waltz stated that, “As Secretary Rubio has said, there is no war against Venezuela or its people. We are not occupying a country. This was a law enforcement operation in furtherance of lawful indictments that have existed for decades.”

This characterization appears to be intended to disavow any assertion the operation qualified as an armed conflict within the meaning of common Article 2 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. That article indicates that the Conventions (and by extension the law of armed conflict generally) comes into force whenever there is an armed conflict between High Contracting Parties – which today means between any two sovereign states as these treaties have been universally adopted. It is beyond dispute that this article was intended to ensure application of the law of armed conflict would be dictated by the de facto existence of armed conflict, and not limited to de jure situations of war.

This pragmatic fact-based trigger for the law’s applicability was perhaps the most significant development of the law when the Conventions were revised between 1947 and 1949. It was intended to prevent states from disavowing applicability of the law through rhetorical ‘law-avoidance’ characterizations of such armed conflicts. While originally only impacting applicability of the four Conventions, this ‘law trigger’ evolved into a bedrock principle of international law: the law of armed conflict applies to any international armed conflict, meaning any dispute between states resulting in hostilities between armed forces, irrespective of how a state characterizes the situation.

By any objective assessment, the hostilities that occurred between U.S. and Venezuelan armed forces earlier this week qualified as an international armed conflict. Unfortunately, the U.S. position appears to be conflating a law enforcement objective with the assessment of armed conflict. And, ironically, this conflation appears to be premised on a prior armed conflict that doesn’t support the law enforcement operation assertion, but actually contradicts it: Operation Just Cause.

Judge Advocates have been taught for decades that the existence of an armed conflict is based on an objective assessment of facts; that the term was deliberately adopted to ensure the de facto situation dictated applicability of the law of armed conflict and to prevent what might best be understood as ‘creative obligation avoidance’ by using characterizations that are inconsistent with objective facts.

And when those objective facts indicate hostilities between the armed forces of two states, the armed conflict in international in nature, no matter how brief the engagement. This is all summarized in paragraph 3.4.2 of The Department of Defense Law of War Manual, which provides:

Act-Based Test for Applying Jus in Bello Rules. Jus in bello rules apply when parties are actually conducting hostilities, even if the war is not declared or if the state of war is not recognized by them. The de facto existence of an armed conflict is sufficient to trigger obligations for the conduct of hostilities. The United States has interpreted “armed conflict” in Common Article 2 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions to include “any situation in which there is hostile action between the armed forces of two parties, regardless of the duration, intensity or scope of the fighting.”

No matter what the objective of the Venezuelan raid may have been, there undeniable indication that the situation involved, “hostile action between” U.S. and Venezuelan armed forces.

This was an international armed conflict within the meaning of Common Article 2 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 – the definitive test for assessing when the law of armed conflict comes into force. To paraphrase Judge Hoeveler, ‘[H]owever the government wishes to label it, what occurred in [Venezuela] was clearly an "armed conflict" within the meaning of Article 2. Armed troops intervened in a conflict between two parties to the treaty.’ Labels are not controlling, facts are. We can say the sun is the moon, but it doesn’t make it so.

Prisoner of war status

So, like General Noriega, Maduro seems to have a valid claim to prisoner of war status (Venezuelan law designated him as the military commander of their armed forces authorizing him to wear the rank of a five-star general). And like the court that presided over Noriega’s case, the court presiding over Maduro’s case qualifies as a ‘competent tribunal’ within the meaning of Article 5 of the Third Convention to make that determination.

But will it really matter? The answer will be the same as it was for Noriega: not that much. Most notably, it will have no impact on the two most significant issues related to his apprehension: first, whether he is entitled to immediate repatriation because hostilities between the U.S. and Venezuela have apparently ended, and 2. Whether he is immune from prosecution for his pre-conflict alleged criminal misconduct.

Article 118 of the Third Convention indicates that, “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” However, this repatriation obligation is qualified. Article 85 specifically acknowledges that, “[P]risoners of war prosecuted under the laws of the Detaining Power for acts committed prior to capture . . .”

Article 119 provides, “Prisoners of war against whom criminal proceedings for an indictable offence are pending may be detained until the end of such proceedings, and, if necessary, until the completion of the punishment. The same shall apply to prisoners of war already convicted for an indictable offence.”

This means that like General Noriega, extending prisoner of war status to Maduro will in no way impede the authority of the United States to prosecute him for his pre-conflict indicted offenses. Nor would it invalidate the jurisdiction of a federal civilian court, as Article 84 also provides that,

A prisoner of war shall be tried only by a military court, unless the existing laws of the Detaining Power expressly permit the civil courts to try a member of the armed forces of the Detaining Power in respect of the particular offence alleged to have been committed by the prisoner of war.” As in General Noriega’s case, because U.S. service-members would be subject to federal civilian jurisdiction for the same offenses, Maduro is also subject to that jurisdiction.

This would obviously be different if he were charged with offenses arising out of the brief hostilities the night of the raid, in which case his status would justify a claim of combatant immunity, a customary international law concept that protects privileged belligerents from being subjected to criminal prosecution by a detaining power for lawful conduct related to the armed conflict (and implicitly implemented by Article 87 of the Third Convention). But there is no such relationship between the indicted offenses and the hostilities that resulted in Maduro’s capture.

Prisoner of war status will require extending certain rights and privileges to Maduro during his trial and, assuming his is convicted, during his incarceration. Notice to a Protecting Power, ensuring certain procedural rights, access to the International Committee of the Red Cross during incarceration, access to care packages, access to communications, and perhaps most notably segregation from the general inmate population.

Perhaps he will end up in the same facility where the government incarcerated Noriega, something I saw first-hand when I visited him in 2004. A separate building in the federal prison outside Miami was converted as his private prison; his uniform – from an Army no longer in existence – hung on the wall; the logbook showed family and ICRC visits.

Concluding thoughts

The government should learn a lesson from Noriega’s experience: concede the existence of an international armed conflict resulted in Maduro’s capture and no resist a claim of prisoner of war status. There is little reason to resist this seemingly obvious consequence of the operation.

Persisting in the assertion that the conflation of a law enforcement objective with a law enforcement operation as a way of denying the obvious – that this was an international armed conflict – jeopardizes U.S. personnel who in the future might face the unfortunate reality of being captured in a raid like this.

Indeed, it is not hard to imagine how aggressively the U.S. would be insisting on prisoner of war status had any of the intrepid forces who executed this mission been captured by Venezuela.

There is just no credible reason why aversion to acknowledging this reality should increase the risk that some unfortunate day in the future it is one of our own who is subjected to a ‘perp walk’ as a criminal by a detaining power that is emboldened to deny the protection of the Third Convention.

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How China Built AI Dominance on Stolen American Silicon

DEEP DIVE — Federal prosecutors in Texas, in December, unsealed charges and related details exposing a sprawling scheme that quietly siphoned some of America’s most powerful artificial intelligence chips into China.

According to court filings, a Houston businessman and his company orchestrated a $160 million smuggling operation that moved thousands of NVIDIA’s top-tier processors overseas, evading U.S. export controls through falsified shipping records and shell transactions.

Hao Global and its founder, Alan Hao Hsu, pleaded guilty on October 10, 2025, to participating in smuggling and unlawful export activities, including knowingly exporting and attempting to export at least $160 million in Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs between October 2024 and May 2025. Investigators say the operation was funded by more than $50 million in wire transfers originating from China, and the U.S. has seized over $50 million in Nvidia hardware and cash as part of the broader investigation, with the seizures tied to the overall network, not solely this defendant’s operation.

The operation reveals a broader strategy: if you can’t build it, take it. With a blend of state-run espionage and corporate infiltration, China has turned technology acquisition into an art form. Their ‘all-of-the-above’ approach has allowed their AI sector to grow even as export bans tighten. By sourcing the hardware from elsewhere, Beijing has made the lack of domestic chip manufacture moot.

The Corporate Insider Pipeline

The same month that prosecutors announced the NVIDIA chip smuggling charges, the Department of Justice filed a superseding indictment against Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer accused of stealing over 1,000 confidential files containing trade secrets related to Google’s AI infrastructure. According to the indictment, Ding uploaded the files to his personal cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023 while secretly working for two China-based technology companies.

It is believed that the stolen materials included detailed specifications of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chips and Graphics Processing Unit systems, as well as the software platform that orchestrates thousands of chips into supercomputers used to train cutting-edge AI models.

Ding allegedly circulated presentations to employees of his Chinese startup, citing national policies encouraging domestic AI development, and applied to a Shanghai-based talent program, stating that his company’s product “will help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level.”

Within weeks of beginning the theft, Ding was offered a chief technology officer position at Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology with a monthly salary of approximately $14,800 plus bonuses and stock. He traveled to China to raise capital and was publicly announced as CTO. A year later, he founded his own AI startup, Zhisuan, focused on training large AI models. Ding never disclosed either affiliation to Google.

After Google detected unauthorized uploads in December 2023, Ding vowed to save the files as evidence of his work. Nonetheless, he resigned a week later after booking a one-way ticket to Beijing. Security footage revealed that another employee had been scanning Ding’s access badge to give the appearance that he was working there during extended trips to China. Ding faces up to 175 years in prison on 14 counts: economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.

Ding has pleaded not guilty to the charges on multiple occasions. He entered a not guilty plea in March 2024 to the original four counts of trade secret theft, and again pleaded not guilty through his attorney, Grant Fondo, in September 2025 to the expanded superseding charges — including seven counts each of economic espionage and trade secret theft. Fondo has actively represented Ding in court proceedings, including a successful June 2025 motion to suppress certain post-arrest statements due to alleged Miranda violations, though no extensive public explanatory statements from the attorney or Ding appear beyond these court actions and pleas.

The federal trial in San Francisco began in early January 2026, with jury selection reported around January 8, and Ding remains presumed innocent until proven guilty.

AI-Powered Cyber Espionage at Scale.

The threat escalated dramatically in September 2025 when Anthropic detected what it describes as the first fully automated cyberattack using artificial intelligence to breach corporate networks. Chinese state-sponsored hackers conducted the campaign, which Anthropic assessed with high confidence, targeted approximately 30 organizations, including technology firms, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.

The attackers manipulated Anthropic’s Claude Code tool into executing 80 to 90 percent of the operation autonomously. Claude’s safety guardrails were bypassed by jailbreaking the system, disguising malicious tasks as routine cybersecurity tests, and breaking attacks into small, seemingly innocent steps that conceal their broader objectives. Once compromised, the AI system independently conducted reconnaissance, identified valuable databases, wrote custom exploit code, harvested credentials, created backdoors, and exfiltrated data with minimal human supervision.

“The AI made thousands of requests per second—an attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match,” Anthropic stated in its analysis.

“This case is a huge concern for other companies that have almost fully adopted AI in their business operations,” JP Castellanos, Director of Threat Intelligence at Binary Defense, tells The Cipher Brief. “Instead of just using AI to draft phishing emails or assist human hackers, the perpetrators gave Claude direct instructions to carry out multi-stage operations on its own.”

The implications extend far beyond technical sophistication.

“An AI operator doesn’t have to sleep or take breaks moving at machine speed; the agent can do the work of dozens or more hackers, tirelessly and even without error, launching constant attacks that even human defenders would struggle to monitor, let alone counter,” Castellanos explained.

Chief Geopolitical Officer at Insight Forward, Treston Wheat, also noted the operational tempo represents a fundamental shift.

“AI-enabled operations can run reconnaissance, exploitation attempts, credential harvesting, lateral movement playbooks, and exfiltration workflows in parallel, iterating rapidly across targets,” he tells The Cipher Brief.

This shift not only changes how operations are conducted but also reveals the hidden supply chains that enable them.

DeepSeek’s Smuggled Silicon

In early 2025, it became impossible to ignore the connection between black-market chips and stolen IP. It was then that DeepSeek dropped the R1 model, claiming it could compete with OpenAI’s o1, but for significantly less. This, however, immediately set off alarm bells: How does a company hamstrung by U.S. sanctions move that fast without some serious ‘outside’ help?

Reports from The Information in December 2025 revealed that DeepSeek is training its next-generation model using thousands of NVIDIA’s advanced Blackwell chips — processors specifically banned from export to China. The smuggling operation reportedly involves purchasing servers for phantom data centers in Southeast Asia, where Blackwell sales remain legal. After inspection and certification, smugglers allegedly dismantle entire data centers rack by rack, shipping GPU servers in suitcases across borders into mainland China, where the chips are reassembled.

NVIDIA disputed the reports, stating it had seen “no substantiation or received tips of ‘phantom data centers’ constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners” while acknowledging the company pursues any tip it receives. The chipmaker is developing digital tracking features to verify chip locations, a tacit acknowledgement that there are enough smuggling concerns to warrant technological solutions.

Castellanos described China’s strategy as deliberately dual-track.

“China has been very open to being the lead in AI and semiconductors and the need for self-reliance in core technologies,” he said. “But also, externally, China relies on partnering with overseas institutions, building on top of Western open-source technologies, and acquiring advanced technologies through illegal means, such as through theft, smuggling, and forced transfers.”

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The FBI’s Losing Battle

Christopher Wray, the former FBI director, testified that the bureau oversees approximately 2,000 active investigations into Chinese espionage operations.

“Chinese hackers outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1,” Wray testified before the House Appropriations Committee in 2023. “They’ve got a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations—big or small—combined.”

That scale reflects a long-running strategy rather than a sudden surge.

“U.S. officials say China has long relied on a multi-pronged strategy to lie, to cheat and to steal their way to surpassing us as the global superpower in cyber,” he said. “It’s not just cyber intrusions, we are concerned about, but also human insiders stealing intellectual property. In the realm of AI, this can include insiders siphoning source code, research papers, or semiconductor designs for China.”

The Chinese approach exploits multiple vectors simultaneously, according to experts. The Ministry of State Security operates human intelligence networks. The People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force conducts offensive cyber operations.

The Thousand Talents Plan, for example, then offers Chinese researchers financial incentives to transfer proprietary information to American institutions. By investing in and partnering with ostensibly private companies, state-owned enterprises gain access to sensitive technologies.

Export Controls Lag Behind Reality

The export control regime designed to prevent China from accessing advanced chips has proven inadequate in the face of Beijing’s evasion tactics. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has repeatedly updated restrictions, most recently imposing sweeping controls in October 2023 on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

The recent Texas case shed light on how these smugglers operate. There was more to it than simply shipping; they used crypto payments and paper-only shell companies to conceal the money trail. To pass customs, they even removed the Nvidia labels from the chips. By the time those processors reached China, they had been bounced through so many different countries that the original paper trail was basically gone.

“Export controls are not a complete solution to IP theft or technology diffusion. They are best understood as a time-buying and friction-imposing tool,” Wheat observed. “If the objective is to prevent all leakage, that is unrealistic; if the objective is to slow adversary capability development, shape supply chains, and increase acquisition cost and risk, they can be effective when paired with enforcement and complementary measures.”

The chip industry, analysts caution, is facing a structural nightmare. We’re restricting technology that’s already been stolen and studied. The $160 million operation out of Texas proved just how easy it is to game the system — they lied on customs forms hundreds of times over several months, and it still took nearly a year for authorities to notice anything was wrong.

Defending at Machine Speed

Security experts are calling this the most significant tech transfer in history, and it isn’t happening by accident. By stacking insider theft, cyberattacks, recruitment programs, and smuggling on top of each other, China has found a way to leapfrog ahead in AI. They don’t have the domestic factories to build high-end chips yet, so they’ve bypassed the need for ‘original’ innovation by taking what they need. It’s a massive operation that’s making traditional defense strategies look obsolete.

“The realistic U.S. approach is not to match China operator-for-operator. It is to win by asymmetry, such as scaling defense through automation, hardening the most valuable targets, and using public-private coordination to reduce attacker dwell time and increase attacker cost,” Wray said in his testimony.

Castellanos emphasized that defending against AI-enabled attacks requires matching the adversary’s capabilities.

“To have any hope to defend against this, we have to multiply effectiveness through automation and AI, so basically fight fire with fire,” he underscored. “Doing this requires significant investment, new skills, and perhaps most challenging, trust in autonomous defensive AI at a time when many organizations are still learning basic cyber hygiene.”

To prevent adversaries from acquiring sensitive technologies, the U.S. Government has, in recent years, implemented targeted responses, such as the Disruptive Technology Strike Force in 2023. Yet, even as FBI investigations increase and new indictments are filed, the fundamental challenge persists. Chinese intelligence services use unlimited resources, legal compulsion over Chinese nationals, and long-term strategic patience to operate in an open society with porous institutional boundaries.

“It’s a challenge for policy makers; a multi-layered response and defense in depth is needed to protect the US AI technology base better,” Castellanos added. “Harden insider threat programs, accelerate public and private intelligence sharing, modernize export controls and enforcement, increase the costs or impose costs for the offenders of these attacks and lastly innovate faster to ensure even if China steals today’s tech, the breakthrough is already in the pipeline for tomorrow.”

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After Maduro’s Removal, the U.S. Faces Its Hardest Test Yet in Venezuela

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW — As Venezuela faces a moment of profound uncertainty following a dramatic U.S. operation that removed longtime strongman Nicolás Maduro from power, policymakers and intelligence professionals are grappling with what comes next for a country long plagued by authoritarian rule, with Washington signaling an unprecedented level of involvement in shaping Venezuela’s political future.

To help unpack what's ahead, Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly spoke with former CIA Senior Executive David Fitzgerald, a veteran intelligence officer whose career spans decades of operational, leadership, and policy roles across Latin America. Drawing on firsthand experience as a former Chief of Station and senior headquarters official overseeing the region, Fitzgerald offers a sobering assessment of Venezuela’s challenges, from rebuilding its institutions and oil sector to managing internal security threats while navigating the competing interests of China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

David Fitzgerald

A 37-yr. CIA veteran, David Fitgerald retired in 2021 as Chief of Station in a Middle Eastern country, which hosted CIA’s largest field station. As a seven-time Chief of Station, Fitzgerald served in numerous conflict zones to include Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia. He also held senior HQS positions that included Latin America Chief of Operations and Latin America Deputy Division Chief. He also served as the senior DCIA representative at U.S. Military’s Central Command from 2017-2020, where he participated in several tier 1 operations as the intelligence advisor to the commander.

The Cipher Brief: How are you looking at Venezuela at this moment through a national security lens? What do you see as the next real challenge the U.S. is likely to face there?

Fitzgerald: As President Trump has said, the U.S. intends to run Venezuela. I'm still waiting for how the U.S. government intends to define 'running Venezuela'. I'm going to assume, and I hate to assume, but I'll assume that the goal will be to work closely with the current Venezuelan government to transition to a democracy and allow elections, something like that. So that will just be my assumption in lieu of any comments or any guidelines coming out of the White House.

The Cipher Brief: You understand the history, the politics, the culture of Venezuela better than most Americans. Where do you think some of the bumps in the road will come as the U.S. tries to figure out and define, as you put it, what running Venezuela really means?

Fitzgerald: It's a very diverse country. It's an incredibly rich resource country. People talk about the oil and the petroleum, but it's not only that. It could be one of the largest gold producers in the world. It's amazing the amount of natural resources that Venezuela has, yet 25 years after President Chávez was elected as president, it's one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

I think one of the hurdles that they're going to have is the brain drain. You don't have a strong cadre. A great example is Pedevesa, [Petróleos de Venezuela], the state run oil company. Back in the 90's, Pedevesa was considered one of the most efficient and best run oil companies in the world. Compared to even the private companies, it was a machine because they owned everything from downstream to upstream. They owned the drilling, they owned the pipelines, they owned the refineries, they owned the oil tankers, they owned the refineries in the U.S., they owned the distribution through their Citco company here. It was just an amazing company, and it was always held up as a model for state run companies. Of course, with the election of President Hugo Chávez, and then in 2002, the general strike when he just fired all of the Pedevesa members - even today, if you look around at the Chevrons, Exxons, the BPs, you'll find a large amount of former Pedevesa employees because they all migrated to the private petroleum companies because they were that good.

So, one of the biggest challenges is that Venezuela's going to need the financial means to really rebuild itself. I was last in Venezuela in 2013, and I'd been there in the early '90s, and it looked exactly the same. The infrastructure was terrible. Nothing had been modernized or built. So instead, what the Maduro and the Chavez government had done, was basically used Pedevesa as their cash cow to really distribute that money to themselves, steal the money, or distribute it to their followers. There was no effort to modernize the infrastructure or to do the necessary maintenance in the oil fields. That's why I think they're producing maybe 10% to 15% of the amount of oil they were at their peak.

So for me, that's really the key. How do you get Pedevesa up and running so it becomes a profitable company again that can actually provide the necessary resources for the country to rebuild itself?

The Cipher Brief: If you were looking into your crystal ball, and you had to guess, will there be enough political stability with the U.S. involvement to be able to allow for this infrastructure to be rebuilt? How difficult is that political component going to be?

Fitzgerald: I think it's twofold. Not only the political component, but the security component. How do you transition from basically a dictatorship to some form of transparent democracy, which I think is the White House's goal. You do that via Delcy Rodríguez and the current Venezuelan government. As you know, the PSUV, which is the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which is Maduro's party, they control every apparatus of government, whether it's the Supreme Court, the judicial branch, the legislative branch, the executive branch, it's owned by them. There is no transparency right now. How do you get away from that? How do you rebuild these institutions so they become functional again and in some type of democratic transparent manner? That has to be a principal goal.

Number two, the security situation. You have maybe 20% to 25% of the population supporting Maduro and the PSUV. I would argue most of these people are supporting the party because they benefit from the party. They're either on the payrolls, they have some type of sweetheart deal, or they're able to conduct their illegal activities. The security forces are not hardcore ideologues. I think with the death of Chávez in 2013, he was the last ideologue you had as far as the Bolivarian revolution. My experience working with these people is that they're just in it for their own self-enrichment. Nobody really drank the Kool-Aid and said, "I want to be a Bolivarian revolutionary." I mean, this might have happened during the earlier stages when Chávez was first elected, but through the decades, it's become just an empty suit. Nobody really believes in any type of revolution.

On the security side, getting back to that, you have a disruptive element. You have this organization called the Colectivos, which is kind of a non-official goon squad that is supported by the government, basically comprised of criminals and local bullies. During demonstrations, they're the ones who go out there and start beating people and stuff like that. But you have the security services themselves as well. The rank and file. I think if you can do something like we did maybe in the Haiti occupation and in Panama where we actually formed an interim security force — I can't talk about the Haitian National Police nowadays as an effective force — but at the time in 1994, they became an effective enough security force, which provided security to the populace. That led the whole population to believe that there was hope.

I think that's going to be key along with the political transition. Can you provide security? Can you provide faith that people will adhere to the rules and regulations? How you do that? It's a good question.

Venezuela's a little different than most Latin countries. There is no national police force, other than the National Guard, which currently, if you talk to our DEA colleagues they'd probably say it's one of the largest drug cartels on the continent right now. Like the United States, Venezuela is divided into the state and municipal police forces.

For example, Caracas has two major police forces. You have the city of Caracas Police Force, and then you have the Miranda State Police Force, which is about maybe a third of Caracas, and then the rest is by the city of Caracas. Then you go out to the different states in Venezuela. They each have their own police force, and the large cities all have their police force. Years ago, they tried to form this Bolivarian national police agency. We're trying to incorporate this. It's never really worked because these police forces are all influenced and run by the local politicians.

So, that could work to our advantage as far as being able to work independently of the government and work with these local institutions to not only enhance their capability, but kind of vet them, cleanse them.

The Cipher Brief: How do you think Russia and China are assessing what''s next in Venezuela? What are the losses here and what are the opportunities here for each of them?

Fitzgerald: Let's talk about China first because that's probably going to be the most important for Venezuela. China must be extremely careful about how they handle this because they have literally billions and billions of dollars in loans that they provided the Bolivarian government. And one of their concerns, no doubt is that if you have a new democratic government, they could come in and say, "You know something? These loans that you signed with China, we don't consider them valid. We think they're illegal, and we're going to nullify all the loans." And right now, China's getting paid back in petroleum. So, China's got to be worried.

That means that if you're China, you're going to make nice with any new government because you don't want to be in a situation where they just say, "We consider these agreements you made with former government officials as illegal, and we will no longer honor them." So I don't see China being a spoiler. I see them willing to work with any new government coming into power because they have a lot of financial stake in what happens in Venezuela.

Russia, on the other hand, has very little commerce here. Russia's main trade with Venezuela is in arms. Venezuela's never even been able to pay back the loans or the purchases they made on some of the weapons systems they bought. Iran's another one. Iran's been there for decades now. It's entrenched. They've been allowed to work pretty much without limits in Venezuela, going back to, I think it was 2012, and the assassination attempt on the Saudi Ambassador in Washington. That was all being run out of, or being facilitated by, the Iranian embassy in Caracas.

So, it's going to affect all of their relationships. Iran's been more important than they realize for their oil industry as far as providing the parts and the 'know how' to maintain the oil fields and some of their refineries. A lot of that's coming from Iran. The big thing here that people don't realize is that there's one ingredient that's important for Venezuelan petroleum and if you don't have this, you really can't produce the amount of petroleum you need. Even at today's rate, you can't produce it. So Iran's been a major provider of this substance.

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The Cipher Brief: How are drug cartels likely looking at this? And what about Cuba?

Fitzgerald: I would love to be in Cuba right now and listen to what they're saying about this. I mean, this really must be a shocker for them. Number one, for their security service. They just had a major failure because it's very well known that all of President Maduro's inner security was being provided by the Cubans. They're the only people he trusted. To a greater extent, they're out of security. Plus all their security services were being managed by the Cuban CI officers. The Cubans don't do it for free. So Venezuela pays the tab for that, and no doubt it's a greatly enhanced bill that they were getting from the Cuban government for President Maduro's security.

On the other end, as you know, Suzanne, the petroleum is just as vital to the Cuban economy. It's not all of it, but it's a major percentage of the petroleum that Cuba uses to include refined products that are provided by Venezuela at incredibly reduced rates that Venezuela knows Cuba will never repay. So, they have billions of dollars in debts to Venezuela and although they're technically selling the petroleum to Cuba, there's pretty much an understanding that it's not going to be repaid. So that's going to be a big blow to Cuba right now.

The Cipher Brief: What are the indicators that you're going to be watching for next that give you some clue as to where things might be headed?

Fitzgerald: Well, my big indicator is what's the plan? I'm sure they're huddling together both in the IC and in the State Department and the White House trying to figure out, 'Okay, how can we transition the current government to some type of viable democratic government and allow for a free election?' And there's probably been a million plans thrown out there. They just haven't figured out which one they're going to use. So I think that's what I'm waiting for is what the administration intends to roll out as their plan and how they intend to run Venezuela.

I think one of the big things here as far as Venezuela goes, is how to actually rebuild the country. It's going to require the private sector. The U.S. government is not going to be some nation builder like we tried to do in Iraq. And the great thing is that Venezuela has the resources that are quite sought after in the world where I think you're going to get a lot of interest from the private sector.

For example, a friend of mine asked the other day about the construction that would be needed. You're going to see some of the major construction companies needed to go in there and just rebuild the cities and the streets and everything. It's just the infrastructure there that hasn't been really modernized or updated in decades. So I think there is going to be a lot of interest in that. I think that interest by the private sector will also encourage the government to become as transparent and as democratic as it can be. So look for that too. And it's just not all about oil — it's minerals, construction, and the electric grid - it's across the board.

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Agentic AI and the “Human-in-the-Loop” Luxury in Modern Defense

THE IRON TRIANGLE — Welcome to the inaugural edition of “The Iron Triangle”, my new Cipher Brief column that serves the three pillars of modern defense: Procurement Officers tasked with buying the future, Investors who fund the technology, and Policy Wonks who analyze the impact of technology on the global order.

My first column explores the shift from "Chatbots" to "Agents." In Washington, they call it Agentic AI. In the Valley, they call it Action-Oriented LLMs. In the field, it’s the difference between a system that tells you a storm is coming and one that autonomously moves your fleet to a safe harbor before the first raindrop falls.

The Technology: From "Prediction" to "Agency"

For years, AI in defense has been about Computer Vision, tasks such as labeling tanks in a photo. While Computer Vision has saved countless hours of labor, it doesn't address the challenges associated with overloading analysts with data.

Agentic AI (Agentic) is a generational leap. For clarity, Agentic refers to systems capable of:

Analyzing the commander’s intent.
Identifying and evaluating subordinate tasks.
Executing a sequence of actions across multiple platforms without human prompting.

Agentic processes vast amounts of data into knowledge, exponentially increasing each user’s effectiveness. With Agentic, teams of analysts will no longer pour through volumes of irrelevant information searching for a few key indicators. Agentic will distill torrents of data, a side effect of exponential increases in the number of sensors (drones), down to just the essential elements. In some cases, Agentic may even make decisions without user input.

Several questions come to mind. First, what will my analysts do with this windfall of time? That's a discussion for another article. Instead, let’s make this relevant.

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For the Procurement Officer

Procurement officers should be wary of "Black Box" Contracts. If a vendor claims their agent uses "proprietary reasoning" that’s difficult to audit, walk away. Consider commanders whose primary concern is managing risk. In the inevitable post-accident investigation, "the algorithm made a choice" will not serve as strong legal defense. The Pentagon must demand Chain of Preference Transparency. The software must log why it chose one course of action over another, and the decision tree must be continually refined.

The Pentagon should also move away from Firm-Fixed-Price contracts. Agentic requires Continuous Authority to Operate, not only to remain functional, but in a competitive context (war with a global power). If The Pentagon buys a "static" version, the system will be obsolete by the time the invoice is cleared, especially considering the Pentagon bureaucracy. Procurement Officers should buy the pipeline, not the package.

The Investment Thesis

The challenge for investors is distinguishing between a "thin wrapper" on AI and a foundational defense operating system. Investment firms often hire retired officers to evaluate defense technology. These officers retired years ago, and may not have had first-hand experience with technology while they were active. Now the investment firm expects them to provide advice on emerging technology that many 20-year-old practitioners are just learning about. It’s not a fair expectation, and will lead to investments in irrelevant technologies.

Proximity breeds opportunity. Investors should get involved with practitioners. I’m not suggesting that VCs attend National Training Center rotations, though I do enjoy that mental picture. There are other opportunities to interact with end users; small-scale exercises, trade shows and demonstrations are some.

Beware of the moat. The value isn't in the Large Language Model; it’s in the Action Layer. Investors should look for startups who are building "high-side" integrations—companies that have security credentials to plug into actual data. Only then will it become clear how the technology performs.

Look for the exit. Some "Big Primes" are hardware-heavy and software-poor. They are looking to acquire "Agentic Middleware" to make legacy systems more relevant in an autonomous age. The "Defense Unicorn" of 2026 will be a company that provides the universal brain for antiquated hardware. There are some promising companies focused on exactly this challenge. Whatever is created should be collaborative, to promote and not stifle innovation.

The Policy Wonk’s Warning

In the early days of AI, policy was concerned about AI’s potential effects on strategic stability. If both the U.S. and a peer competitor deploy Agentic to manage strategic command and control–or frontline skirmishes–we might enter a "Speed of Relevance" trap. When AI reacts to AI, the window for diplomatic de-escalation shrinks from hours to milliseconds, effectively disappearing and devolving into a machine on machine conflict where humans suffer the consequences.

To prevent this devolution, there should be a foreign policy shift, a move from Arms Control to Algorithm Control. The next great treaty should not focus on the number of warheads, but the verification of "Human-on-the-loop" safeguards and universal standards.

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My Take. This where I get to discuss what excites me about this new technology.

Military Planning. Agentic AI will fundamentally change “course of action development” during military planning. Military Officers, like everyone, suffer from functional fixedness. Their creativity can be limited by their experiences. Agentic will see thousands of potential pathways for conducting new missions. I like to think that this will lead to more creative solutions being applied to emerging challenges. Look out executive officers, AI is coming for your jobs!

The Risk. There is a chance that our government becomes reliant on Agentic. The Military plans for everything. I’ve seen Staff Officers plan for how and when to make plans. Reducing planning to a button click could diminish critical analysis, a fundamental skill for effective leaders, which will have a compounding negative effect on future generations.

Mission Rehearsals. Agentic will enable warfighters to rehearse missions based on real time intelligence. Imagine flying a drone simulator where the terrain, the targets, and the weather are all precisely the same as those in the target area of interest. What’s more, Agentic will enable simulated adversaries to react more realistically. Combat Training Centers may be the next casualty of Agentic. I don’t think any soldier will be sad to learn that their NTC rotation is cancelled…

The Risk. Agentic might get it wrong, leading to gross overestimations–or underestimations–of adversarial capabilities. And what happens when a commander decides to ignore their AI, then suffers a defeat? Punishing the commander in this situation would encourage future leaders to blindly follow Agentic guidance. The government must build rules which preserve and promote independent decision authority, ensuring that Agentic complements, but does not replace the commander’s judgment.

Agentic is the first technology that I can recall that doesn't just make our weapons better; it makes our decision-makers faster. For the Procurement Officer, it's a liability to manage; for the VC, it's the ultimate "sticky" SaaS play; and for the Wonk, it’s a terrifying new variable in the balance of power. Current international laws of war are based on human intent and accountability. But it remains legally unclear who is responsible—the developer, the operator, or the commander—when an autonomous agent makes an error. The most pressing requirement now is not for the best new technology, but for our legal and policy frameworks to keep pace.

Joey Gagnard is a Cipher Brief columnist who regularly shares his perspective on national security and technology via his Iron Triangle column.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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The Kremlin Files: Russia, the Modern Surveillance State

THE KREMLIN FILES / COLUMN — Ask any Russian intelligence officer about “naruzhka,” and you’ll see them nod knowingly. It’s the term for physical, trailing surveillance: watchers on the street who follow targets, track meetings, and report patterns. The Russians are experts at it, and they have been for centuries, dating back to the Tsarist Secret police, the Okhrana, and even further to Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, the brutal enforcers of his regime. Surveillance is a subject that dominates Russian society and Russian espionage, and it also dictates how Russian intelligence officers (RIOs) conduct counter-surveillance and surveillance detection. The Russian intelligence services (RIS) still lean heavily on surveillance as both a protective and offensive tool. Given such an all-compassing presence in Russian society, the term "surveillance" and its connotations in Russia are worth exploring to better understand Russia, its state, society, and our adversaries.

Russians have a saying, “the walls have ears,” and sometimes follow it with “and the streets have eyes.” Studying in Russia in the early 1990s as an exchange student, I was repeatedly warned by my friends with this expression. It was their way of telling our group of American students that no matter how welcome we felt— and Russians have some of the best hospitality in the world when you are welcomed by them— the state was still suspicious. We came to understand very quickly that there were minders among us: Russian students and professors who reported on us back to the FSB, the successor of the KGB.

Some of our group of students were even “soft-pitched.” For example, in one case, a fellow student with a military background was asked whether he would like to meet with the FSB to discuss how interesting the Russian internal security service was (not exactly a soft approach, really). These blunt and clumsy attempts went unanswered, but the point was clear: the state was not just watching; they were operationally targeting our group of future soldiers, researchers, academics, and in at least one case, a future CIA officer.

Anyone who has studied or lived in Russia over the past three decades no doubt has had similar experiences. But the bar of intimidation has risen dramatically in recent years. With dissidents, journalists, and even athletes targeted for intimidation, beatings, arrest, and even murder, there is no safe haven in Russia any longer for foreign citizens. They are used as targets to be entrapped for hostage exchanges with the West. The goal is to swap civilians for RIOs for the latter to escape their failings when arrested and convicted abroad.

Russians live in a state of constant fear, especially with the war in Ukraine, since opposition to the war, in any form, is now threatened by jail time. Anyone who may be a threat to the regime is subjected to overwhelming surveillance of their person, electronic communications, and contacts. The FSB has many resources at its disposal, including access to all ISPs and phone companies by law. In the early 2000s, the Russian Duma quietly passed laws giving the FSB access to all communication companies in Russia without the need for any warrants. It was the first step in creating their modern surveillance state and an early sign under Putin that democracy was dying.

Inside Russia, surveillance teams from the FSB number in the many thousands. Their origins lie in the old KGB 7th directorate. Still, their mission remains the same: monitor diplomats, suspected foreign intelligence officers, journalists, NGO workers, businesspeople, and ordinary Russians who cross the regime’s lines. The teams are, unfortunately, among the very best in the world at surveillance, given their long history of practice.

Surveillance schools in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), in particular, were known as the best in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Young surveillance team members from the KGB, GRU, and other services of the Soviet Union were trained in the art of on-foot and vehicle surveillance, effective radio communications, and spotting intelligence tells of possible espionage operations. Today, it is no different. The FSB, in particular, devotes considerable resources to surveillance work in Moscow and across Russia in every major city of its vast surveillance apparatus. They are increasingly assisted by technology and a vast array of cameras across the country.

In Russia, all universities, think tanks, and defense contractors, have assigned security officers, what the Russians call an “OB,” who monitor the foreign contacts, make Russians report on their foreign friends, and even many of their Russian ones. The OB is usually an FSB officer, but if not, they are a cooptee of the service, reporting directly to a UFSB or a regional office across Russia. The OBs, in turn, enlist networks of agent-reporters who are only too eager to report on the travel, potential misdeeds, disloyalty to the regime, or other offenses of all those they monitor. Russia today has a network of informers to rival Stasi East Germany, Nazi Germany under the Gestapo, or any other despotic regime, including North Korea and China of today (both of whom, admittedly, may also contend for the gold and silver on despotic modern surveillance states, together with Russia).

The all-encompassing nature of the Russian surveillance state, which includes monitoring by city cameras (supplemented by drones now too), communications, and in-person surveillance, makes it clear that RIS surveillance is not confined to diplomats or foreigners suspected of intelligence affiliation. Academics, journalists, and corporate leaders can find themselves under observation or pressure when Moscow sees strategic value in them. Awareness of surveillance indicators—and how to respond—remains essential.

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Unfortunately, for decades, Westerners traveling to Russia as academics, athletes, NGO workers, and others have been naïve on this score. The refrain is frequently that “I am no one of interest, they’ll leave me alone.” The RIS never did and never will. The pressure for the Russian services, in particular the FSB, to prove worthy of their giant bureaucracy and corrupt budget means they will manufacture spy cases when they can’t find real ones.

They map the routines of foreign officials, political or business leaders. Their goal is to decide if those targets are viable recruits, potentially, or targets for other operations, like extortion, “direct action,” or even assassination attempts in Russia and abroad. This leads to another underappreciated aspect of Russian intelligence and espionage that permeates their society: setups, tricks, and double-agent operations, which the Russians call “operational games.” (That will be the topic of a future “Kremlin Files” column in The Cipher Brief.)

On Russian surveillance, the warning remains clear, and the potential risks are stark. Unfortunately, for all the beauty to be found in Russian history, its cultural sites and heritage, and with their people, traveling to the Russian surveillance state under this corrupt and authoritarian regime holds incredible risk for foreigners, and even for Russian citizens themselves. It will not change until the RIS no longer has the dominant role in society. Laws and checks on power don’t exist in the Russian services. Surveillance, in fact, guides the functioning of the Russian state, and the streets continue to have eyes- everywhere.

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Iran’s Supreme Leader Should Listen to the People

EXPERT OPINION — The Iranian people are saying they want new leadership. And it’s not too hard to understand why so many merchants, university students and young people in Iran are on the streets calling for political change and an end to the current Islamic Republic rule.

It was the merchants in Tehran’s Grand Bazar that initially closed their shops because they couldn’t make a living with soaring inflation and the collapse of the national currency, the rial. Merchants in over 32 cities quickly followed suit, with university students and the public joining in protests calling for change.

This is not new for Iran. In 2009, the government ensured that incumbent Mahmood Ahmadinejad was reelected president, despite the popular opposition leader, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, having widespread support from the public, promising hope and change. The government’s heavy hand in ensuring their man was reelected, regardless of what the public wanted and voted for, understandably angered the public, resulting in Iran’s “Green Movement.” Protesters, who adopted green as the symbol of hope and change, claimed the election was rigged. When they demanded greater democracy, the rule of law, and an end to authoritarian practices, the government responded violently. Peaceful protesters were beaten, with thousands arrested and dozens killed.

In September 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian was arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf (hijab). She died in police custody, with eyewitnesses saying she was beaten and died because of police brutality. The death of Amini resulted in nationwide protests, with Iran Human Rights reporting that at least 476 people were killed by security forces. Amnesty International reported that the Iranian police and security forces fired into groups with live ammunition and killed protesters by beating them with batons. Amini’s death gave rise to the global movement of: Women, Life, Liberty.

Since then, Iran has conducted a war against its own people, with widespread arrests of anyone protesting widespread government corruption and human rights abuses.

Today’s protests were sparked by Iran’s severe economic crisis and water shortages, but also by Iran’s humiliating defeat by Israel in its 12-day war of June 2025 and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. This was after the people were told that Israel would never dare to attack Iran. But they did, with impunity.

The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Iran’s nuclear program, building thousands of spinning sophisticated centrifuges, enriching uranium at 60% purity, concealed in deeply buried underground facilities -- and related scientific work— certainly contributed to Iran’s economic collapse. The resultant global sanctions imposed on Iran also contributed to the crumbling of Iran’s economy. Indeed, Iran’s long history of pursuing nuclear weapons and then claiming they ceased such a pursuit, although continuing to enrich uranium while denying IAEA access to suspect nuclear facilities ensured that the global community viewed Iran with deep suspicion and was supportive of the biting sanctions imposed on Iran. Iran’s nuclear pursuits and the resultant sanctions led to Iran’s failed economy. And it was the people who suffered when the rial lost its value.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian acknowledged the legitimacy of the protesters’ complaints, while announcing the appointment of a new central bank chief.

Reportedly, 36 people have been killed during the demonstrations, with hundreds arrested and thousands on the street saying they want change.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamnei, in an address on Saturday, blamed foreign interference and said that “rioters must be put in their place.”

President Donald Trump had warned Iran that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters” the U.S. “will come to their rescue.”

What these and previous demonstrations tell us is that the people have suffered enough. They’ve taken to the street because they want change, hope and a leadership that cares for the people. The protesters carry signs saying, “the mullahs must leave Iran.” It’s clear: the government has mismanaged Iran’s economy; has made Iran a pariah nation. The Iranian theocracy, led by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, apparently no longer has the support of the Iranian people.

Is a democratic secular Iran possible?

The author is a former associate director of national intelligence. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times

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The U.S. Says it Will “Run” Venezuela. What Will That Mean?

DEEP DIVE – As audacious and complex as it was for the U.S. to extract Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela – and to do so without a single U.S. casualty – the challenges ahead may be even harder. “We’re gonna run it,” President Donald Trump said Saturday, referring to a post-Maduro Venezuela. The president gave few details and no specific time frame, saying only that the U.S. would “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be arranged. U.S. oil companies would return to Venezuela, investing “billions and billions” of dollars to reboot the oil sector and the country’s economy. American “boots on the ground” might be deployed in the interim.

It was a remarkable series of statements from a president who has criticized past American nation-building projects, and it raised questions about how exactly the Trump Administration would “run” a country beset by profound challenges. Venezuela, a country twice the size of Iraq, has endured decades of authoritarian rule, corruption, drug-related violence, and economic pain. And for the moment at least, the country’s leader still pledges allegiance to Maduro.

Miguel Tinker Salas, a Venezuelan historian, Professor Emeritus at Pomona College and Fellow at the Quincy Institute, said that when Trump spoke those words – “we’re gonna run it” – he was stunned.

“Initially, my jaw dropped,” Salas told The Cipher Brief. “Even at the height of U.S. influence in Venezuela, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, they never said they wanted to run the country. And I don't think the Trump administration comprehends the complexity that they're dealing with for a country as diverse and as big as Venezuela.”

Even those who cheered the U.S. military operation warned of the difficulties that lie ahead. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who pronounced himself “delighted” by Maduro’s ouster, told NewsNation the mission was “maybe step one of a much longer process. Maduro is gone but the regime is still in place.”

“Maduro’s fall is good for Venezuela and the United States,” Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, posted on X. “It was a brilliant military operation and the world should be better off because of it. Whether it WILL in fact be better off depends on what happens next. One of the lessons of other regime-change operations is not to topple a government without a plan for what comes next. What comes next in Venezuela seems as vague as the plan for running postwar Gaza under a ‘Board of Peace’.”

The Venezuelans who might lead

At a news conference following Maduro’s capture, Trump said that Delcy Rodriguez, the regime’s vice president, would lead Venezuela as long as she “does what we want.” And he suggested the U.S. would enforce that arrangement at the barrel of a gun.

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” Trump said, adding that the U.S. might deploy “a second wave” of forces if Venezuelan officials or troops don’t go along with Washington’s wishes. The U.S. naval presence near Venezuela remains in place – the largest such deployment in the region since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

A day later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio painted a slightly different picture of the U.S. role. “It’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this,” he said.

But Rubio and Trump were clear about the overall approach: in essence, Do what we say, and things will be fine.

“We’re going to make decisions based on their actions and their deeds in the days and weeks to come,” Rubio told The New York Times. “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”

It’s not clear that Rodriguez, the former Vice President, will be a pliant ally. She was sworn in Monday as interim president, after almost immediately accusing the U.S. of invading her country on Saturday. She called the operation “a barbarity,” and in an address to the nation said that Maduro was still Venezuela’s head of state.

“There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” Rodriguez said, with other senior officials at her side. Venezuela, she said, would never agree to being a U.S. "colony."

A day later she struck a less defiant note, calling on the U.S. to work with her government on an “agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development.” She added that “we prioritize moving towards balanced and respectful international relations between the United States and Venezuela."

It’s not at all clear that’s what Trump has in mind; he insisted that Rodriguez would comply with his wishes – one way or another. "She had a long conversation with Marco [Rubio], and she said, 'We'll do whatever you need,'” Trump said. “I think she was quite gracious, but she really doesn't have a choice.” On Sunday he upped the ante, telling The Atlantic that if Rodriguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Experts said Rodriguez will have to navigate an almost impossible political tightrope.

“She claims to represent a socialist party opposed to U.S. intervention and to U.S. meddling in her internal affairs – so how does she rationalize this to her base?” Salas said. “This is a very difficult, challenging position for her to be in – to on the one hand promise social change reforms, a continuation of Maduro, and at the same time, now become compliant in providing oil to the United States.”

Beyond Rodriguez, who serves as both Vice President and minister for oil, other Maduro regime leaders remain in place, including the military chief General Vladimir Padrino Lopez and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. They have denounced Maduro’s abduction as well – Padrino vowed to resist “the most criminal military aggression” and ordered a mobilization of Venezuelan forces on land, sea, and air.

Experts have warned of splits within the army – between hardliners who may refuse to support anyone who bows to Trump’s demands, and others who will stand with Rodriguez no matter what. Such divides could lead to violence and – if Trump is true to his word – a deployment of U.S. “boots on the ground.”

Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, said that while Rodriguez might be able to deliver on Trump’s demands to open up the oil sector, other critical tasks will prove more challenging.

“It will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for her to tame the entrenched corruption and widespread criminality in the country while leaving the machinery of Chavista governance intact,” Shifter told The Cipher Brief, using a term for policies begun by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. “The risks that chaos, violence and instability will ensue are high, and under that scenario the U.S. would have no choice but to send in troops to stabilize the situation.”

“Control of the military is essential for control of Venezuela, particularly in this unstable moment,” Salas said. “And so far, the commanding general of the military, Padrino, has shown no disposition to break with the PSUV [Maduro’s party].”

Absent in the Trump plans for now is any role for the Venezuelan opposition. The main opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, issued a statement urging that her political ally, Edmundo Gonzalez, be recognized as Venezuela’s president. Gonzalez was widely seen as the rightful winner of the 2024 presidential vote. “Today we are prepared to enforce our mandate and take power,” Machado said.

But in his news conference after Maduro’s capture, Trump never mentioned Gonzalez, and threw cold water on the prospects of a role for Machado.

"I think it'd be very tough for her to be the leader," Trump said. "She doesn't have the support or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect."

Those remarks left Machado in the odd position of having won her goal of Maduro’s exit, while failing to win the backing of Washington. Salas said Venezuelans he had spoken with “were disillusioned about the fact that Trump essentially threw her under the bus.”

Asked Saturday which American officials would “run” Venezuela, Trump nodded to Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who flanked the president during his news conference. “The people that are standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it,” Trump said.

That drew a rebuke from Elliott Abrams, a Senior Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations and longtime hawk in terms of U.S. policy in Latin America.

“Venezuelans wanted Maduro out and voted against him,” Abrams wrote on the organization’s website. “They did not vote for U.S. rule, and pursuing that path will create instability—exactly what Trump does not want.”

The oil factor

In the months-long runup to Maduro’s capture, as the U.S. deployed naval forces to the Caribbean and attacked alleged drug traffickers from the air, the Trump administration justified its actions by invoking the drug trade and the illegitimacy of Maduro’s rule. Oil was rarely mentioned.

Now, as U.S. officials explain their post-Maduro plans, oil is front and center.

Over the weekend, Trump accused Venezuela of seizing U.S. oil assets in the country, and said U.S. companies would return to operate Venezuela’s state-controlled oil reserves, “spend billions of dollars” and “start making money for the country.”

U.S. oil companies have a long history in Venezuela, dating to the early 20th century, when they came at the government’s invitation to explore and develop oil reserves. Gulf, Shell, and Standard Oil were among the early arrivals, in what proved to be a symbiotic relationship: the companies earned billions of dollars, and Venezuela grew rich; by the mid-1970s, oil revenues had helped make it the wealthiest nation, per capita, in Latin America.

In 1976, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry, creating a state-owned company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), that continued to partner with foreign companies. More than two decades later, President Hugo Chavez renegotiated contracts with foreign oil companies to boost Venezuela’s share of the profits, a move that prompted ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to leave the country.

Ultimately, Venezuela’s oil sector and its broader economy suffered the consequences – a deteriorating oil infrastructure, and U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and the PDVSA. Today, Venezuela produces fewer than one million barrels of oil a day, down from roughly 3.5 million in 1997, and more than 90 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty.

“Venezuela has been a problem both for the United States and for the Venezuelan people for over 20 years,” Paul Kolbe, a former Director of The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, told The Cipher Brief. “For the Chavez years and then the Maduro years, they've driven a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the world, and certainly the wealthiest in South America…into the ground through corruption, poor leadership, poor decisions, and oppression of the people.”

Only one U.S. oil company – Chevron – has remained in Venezuela, operating under joint ventures with the PDVSA. Rubio’s and Trump’s remarks suggest that the U.S. intends to force Rodriguez, the interim leader, to offer favorable conditions to other American companies.

But experts aren’t sure the others will return.

Ali Moshiri, who oversaw Chevron’s operations in Venezuela until 2017, said the big oil firms won’t go back until they clear signs of change.

“Not many companies are going to rush to go into an environment where there’s not stability,” Moshiri told The New York Times. He also said that while Chevron and smaller operators could boost the country’s oil output slightly in the short term, a more robust expansion would take years, given the political situation, the state of the country’s oil infrastructure, and the time needed to reestablish operations in the country.

Salas echoed the point. “Exporting oil from Venezuela is a challenge,” he told The Cipher Brief. “The infrastructure has collapsed. The oil itself that has to be pumped out of the ground is heavy crude, which requires a lot of technology, and billions of dollars of investment. So I'm not convinced that American companies are going to be running in.”

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A long history of regime change

The Maduro mission came exactly 36 years after the surrender of another Latin American dictator – Panama’s Manuel Noriega – to face drug charges in the U.S. That operation had its detractors, but in the history of U.S. regime-change missions, it probably counts as a relative success story. The list of other cases is long – and while each episode had its own specific history, there have been few good outcomes.

To take three very different examples: The 2003 decapitation of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq – which involved a huge force of “boots on the ground” – was celebrated initially by President George W. Bush in a “Mission Accomplished” speech, only to unravel in a fierce domestic insurgency that lasted for years, cost more than 4,000 American lives, and led – indirectly – to the rise of the Islamic State. The Kennedy administration backed a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963; Diem was later murdered, unrest followed, and in his memoirs, President Lyndon Johnson blamed the coup for the escalation of the Vietnam War. In Iran, the nationalization of the oil industry was at the heart of a coup orchestrated by the U.S. and Britain in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. That led to the return to power of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – and ultimately to the revolution that brought an Islamic theocracy to power in Tehran in 1979.

“I immediately am reminded of Iraq, where the military operation was well done and we removed Saddam Hussein pretty quickly in 2003, but then what came after was not great,” Glenn Corn, a former CIA Senior Executive, told The Cipher Brief. “So I hope we've learned that lesson and we're not going to repeat the mistakes we made there.”

Salas noted that one lesson of the Iraq War involved the perils of driving out the remnants of an ousted regime. “The lesson learned in Iraq was when they attempted to expunge the Ba’ath Party, they realized that they had utter chaos because there was no one there to run the government, no one with experience,” he said. “You had the nation fracture into particular sections, regions, strongmen, military individuals, and others. If that happened in Venezuela, it would be chaotic. The country's very big, very diverse. It has oil regions, it has urban areas, it has an industrial base. So you could imagine that happening on a national scale.”

To some, the Maduro operation was reminiscent of an earlier era of American “gunboat diplomacy,” when the U.S. military was deployed regularly to seize territory and resources. The New York Times’ David Sanger noted that Trump installed a portrait of William McKinley in the White House – and it was President McKinley who presided over the U.S. seizures of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

“The U.S. operation, in seeking to assert control over a vast Latin American nation, has little precedent in recent decades,” Sanger wrote, “recalling the imperial U.S. military efforts of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.”

What comes next

Given the uncertainties of the moment, experts said the next phase in Venezuela will hinge on answers to several core questions:

Does the Trump administration have an arrangement with Rodriguez and other Maduro regime officials to do the White House’s bidding? If not, how will the U.S. respond if they fail to oblige? Does the U.S. have a plan to remove those leaders? What might trigger that “second wave” Trump referred to, and the deployment of U.S. forces to the country?

What milestones must be met for the end of the interim period? Would elections follow – and would the U.S. organize or oversee those? What will the major U.S. oil companies do?

“Uncertainties abound in Venezuela about what comes next,” Shifter said. “For now, a framework of coerced cooperation between the Venezuelan regime, now led by Delcy Rodriguez, and the Trump administration, seems to be in effect. But it is far from clear whether that model is viable, much less sustainable.”

Fontaine said that “the default could well be to work with a compliant President Delcy and most of the existing government. It would be a head of state change more than regime change.” But he added that such an arrangement would do little to satisfy the opposition – the same people who have cheered the news of Maduro’s capture. “Many would-be supporters of this move hoped for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela, not just a different approach on drugs and oil.”

He also noted that Trump was hardly the first president to decry nation-building projects, only to wind up taking them on.

“For 25 years, every U.S. president has opposed nation-building abroad and then gotten involved in it,” Fontaine said. “Trump, with the commitment to run Venezuela, appears to be the latest. The welcome fall of Maduro is not the end, or the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.”

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I've Tracked Terrorist Networks for Decades. I've Never Seen Anything Like 764.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — In 2021, a fifteen-year-old in a small Texas town started something from his bedroom. He’d dropped out of school. He spent his days online, deep into violence and gore. He found others like him and built a network. He named it after his ZIP code: 764.

Within two years, it had spread to every continent. Members – a lot of them teenagers – were finding kids as young as nine on Minecraft and Roblox. They’d befriend them, earn their trust, then trap them. They forced children to hurt themselves on camera. To hurt animals. To do things I’m not going to describe here. That kid from Texas is serving eighty years now. But 764 didn’t stop. It splintered and kept growing.

The FBI currently has over 300 active cases in the U.S. – investigations running in every single field office across the country. They’re looking at more than 350 people tied to the network. Worldwide, authorities believe there are thousands of victims. Arrests connected to groups like 764 jumped nearly 500% in 2025 compared to 2024.

The FBI ranks 764 as a “tier one” threat. That’s the same level as ISIS. Last year, Canada became the first country to officially call 764 a terrorist organization. Not a crime ring. Not predators. Terrorists.

I ran the State Department’s programs against violent extremism. I’ve studied how terrorist groups find and recruit people for most of my career. Canada got this one right.

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What Canada Did

Calling something a terrorist organization isn’t just a label. It changes what governments can do. In Canada, the designation means that anyone who helps 764 – with money, with recruitment, with anything – is now committing a crime. Banks have to freeze assets. Immigration can block people at the border. Law enforcement gets access to tools they can’t use for regular crimes. It also sends a message. When a country puts a group on the same list as Hezbollah and the Islamic State, it tells allies, tech companies, and the public: this is serious. Pay attention.

Canada’s intelligence service says nearly one in ten of their terrorism investigations now involves a minor. Think about that. We’re not talking about kids as victims – we’re talking about kids as suspects in terrorism cases.

How They Find Kids

764 doesn’t stumble onto victims. They go looking for specific kinds of kids. Depressed kids. Lonely ones. Kids who get picked on at school. Kids who cut themselves or post about wanting to disappear. They hunt for these signs in Discord servers, on Roblox, in Minecraft – places your kid probably hangs out.

When they find someone, they’re patient. They don’t ask for anything. They just show up. They say “I get it” and “you’re not crazy” and “I’ve been there.” If you’re a thirteen-year-old who feels invisible, having someone actually listen? That hits different.

Weeks go by. Maybe months. They share darker stuff. Normalize it. Then they ask for a photo – something the kid wouldn’t want anyone to see. Once they have that, everything changes.

“Send more or we show everyone.”

Most blackmail is about money. Not 764. They want content. They make kids film themselves getting hurt. Humiliated. Some get pushed toward suicide attempts—on camera, while the network watches.

One mother told investigators her daughter carved a screen name into her arm with a razor blade. When she finished, the guy on the other end told her he loved her.

Her daughter said it back.

Victims Become Recruiters

Here’s what turns 764 from a bunch of predators into an actual network. Members earn status by producing “content.” The worse the content, the higher they climb. They keep files on their victims – records of what they made them do—and trade them like trophies. Kids who started as victims become perpetrators because that’s how you move up.

In Connecticut, a former honor roll student got caught up in 764. She ended up making bomb threats against her own school – threats phoned in by someone overseas who she thought was her friend. When police searched her devices, they found abuse images, photos of self-harm, and pictures of her paying tribute to the network. Her mom told ABC News, that “It was very difficult to process, because we didn’t raise her to engage in that kind of activity.” That’s the thing. Nobody raises their kid for this. These children get found, groomed, trapped, and turned. One researcher put it simply, “The most horrendous part is it’s minors doing this to minors.”

This Is Terrorism

I know – it sounds like the worst kind of predator ring. So why call it terrorism? Because it works exactly like the terrorist networks I’ve tracked for years. Find someone in pain. Give them a worldview that makes sense of that pain. Then get them to act on it.

764 finds broken kids and tells them the world deserves to burn. That cruelty is honesty. That hurting people is power. The ideology underneath is simple: chaos for its own sake. No political demands. No territory. Just destruction as the point.

Then they turn victims into recruiters – kids climb the ranks by trapping other kids. The ones who got groomed become the groomers. And it doesn’t stay online.

Last July, a 764 member in Minnesota stabbed a woman twenty times. In Germany, authorities arrested someone connected to the network on over 120 charges — including murder. In Finland, police are investigating whether two teen suicides are linked to 764. The network shares guides on how to plan real-world attacks. This isn’t abuse that sometimes leads to terrorism. It’s a terrorism pipeline that uses child abuse as its on-ramp.

Why the U.S. Hasn’t Moved

So Canada calls this terrorism. Why haven’t we? Our laws weren’t built for this. We’ve got tools to go after foreign terrorist groups. We’ve got tools to prosecute child predators. But 764 started in Texas, spread everywhere, and mixes exploitation with extremism in ways that confuse the system.

Right now, we’re going after these guys one at a time for the abuse. That puts individuals in prison. But it treats 764 like random criminals instead of a network with a shared playbook and a body count that keeps growing. The FBI calls it “one of the most disturbing things we’re seeing.” The Attorney General calls it “one of the most heinous online child exploitation enterprises we have ever encountered.” Meanwhile, kids keep getting trapped. The network keeps growing. And we keep treating each case like it exists in a vacuum.

Canada made a call. We should make the same one.

Cipher Brief Expert Dexter Ingram also publishes on Substack Code Name: Citizen

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Venezuela’s Key Takeaways for the World

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT INTERVIEW – While the U.S. operation to detain Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro took just hours to execute, a full assessment of its global impact will take weeks or months to fully understand in part, because of the complicated dynamic connecting the country’s assets, allies and oil.

“Venezuela is what I would call one of those hyphenated accounts,” says Norm Roule, a global energy expert who also served as former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI. “Venezuela in and of itself is important, but it's also Venezuela/oil, Venezuela/Russia, Venezuela/China, Venezuela/Cuba. There are a lot of different accounts and issues that must be taken into consideration.”

Venezuela’s partners depend on it for various strategic reasons: Cuba for economic support, Iran for political alignment in Latin America, and China for a notable share of its oil imports. The United States, meanwhile, is signaling a major shift in how it intends to assert influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian talked with Roule, a leading global consultant on Middle East and Energy issues, about what is likely to happen next as the U.S. signals a major shift in how it intends to assert influence in the Western Hemisphere. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Norman T. Roule

Norman Roule is a geopolitical and energy consultant who served for 34 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, managing numerous programs relating to Iran and the Middle East. He also served as the National Intelligence Manager for Iran (NIM-I)\n at ODNI, where he was responsible for all aspects of national intelligence policy related to Iran.

THE INTERVIEW

The Cipher Brief: The Trump administration recently released an updated national security strategy that weighed heavily on the Western hemisphere. Are we seeing perhaps the first kind of inclination that this is going to actually be something to pay close attention to?

Roule: Absolutely. And I think the national security strategy is something that every one of the Cipher Brief's readers and listeners should pull out today. Look at it again, because I can assure you that policymakers around the world - in both our partner and adversary countries - are certainly doing so. If you look at events in Venezuela and read that national security strategy, a number of themes come forward.

The U.S. will be the dominant power in the Western hemisphere. In Venezuela, we saw a display of massive U.S. power and skill in the form of our military intelligence and technology. This is very similar to the display that the world witnessed in Iran last June. So, this is coming very, very close to two sets of actions. And I think this is meant to be seen also, as the president alluded to in his press conference, as a visible reset of what he described as a previous erosion of U.S. military power in his predecessor's administration.

This is also showing that the U.S. is now capable of executing what was described by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as an extraordinarily large and complicated military and intelligence operation, without being leaked. This did not require foreign partners. And it also did not require the disruption of regional commercial air operations. If you listen to what the chairman talked about, this involved 150 aircraft from multiple locations descending upon another country. And other than closing the airspace for a short period of time, commercial air traffic was not disrupted. But you're seeing some other things that are also notable. The U.S. will undertake regime change when it perceives that the existing regime threatens core U.S. national security interests.

This also represents another U.S. blow against a Chinese partner in the Western hemisphere following the Trump administration's actions in Panama. The operation also took place on the anniversary of the killing of Iranian Quds Force leader General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 as well as the surrender of Manuel Noriega in 1990.

These are both examples of the long arm of the U.S. government. And certainly, the United States may have thought that the selection of this date would dampen any commemorations by the Iranian government for Soleimani's death in Tehran. Which would have been difficult enough given the ongoing demonstrations in Tehran. But the ripples from this Venezuela operation will be global. And I think the national security strategy puts some meat on the bone with this operation.

The Cipher Brief: Just looking at the intelligence that was needed to pull off an operations like this for a moment, what do you think this says about U.S. intelligence and what would have gone into that for this particular operation?

Roule: Well, it tells you a couple of things. It tells you that first, the intelligence was exquisite and up to date. But it also tells you that the intelligence was integrated into the military operation with an intimacy, with care, so that our military personnel were able to move with extraordinary speed to get to the location as quickly as humanly possible. We've seen this in the past with the operation against Osama bin Laden. This is just another example of the close integration between the U.S. intelligence communication and our amazing and extraordinary special forces personnel. I can't speak highly enough of those extraordinary and humble operators.

This also shows you the breadth of that intelligence community. The intelligence agencies that were cited included, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). So, you're getting a sense of some very broad intelligence capabilities which were brought to bear and then integrated.

The president, I believe, also mentioned that a house had been built in advance. I mean, you're just watching some incredible intelligence capability that was brought to bear by people on the ground over many months. It shows courage, it shows tenacity, it shows you the resources that were pulled together. And it also shows an ability to compartment this information and to prevent a leak. The U.S. government is doing what it's supposed to do. And in a world where we're often complaining about government, the American people and our partners should be gratified that our tax dollars are being well spent. And that the U.S. intelligence community and the military are performing superbly.

The Cipher Brief: There's a lot of connective tissue between Venezuela and the rest of the world when you consider the oil industry, including China. As an energy expert, can you share what’s top of mind for you on the broader impact on the oil and energy markets?

Roule: Maybe the best way to answer that is to just explain a little bit about the Venezuelan oil system. First, the operation did not occur near Venezuelan oil production. Upstream oil operations are not located near Caracas, although exports and storage are highly sensitive to obviously, as you correctly put it, a U.S. maritime enforcement of a U.S. embargo.

Most of Venezuela's oil production, about two thirds, is derived from what is known as the Orinoco belt. And oil production from this Orinoco belt had fallen to about 498,000 barrels by the end of December, which is about a 25% drop from just a couple of weeks earlier. And it's been shutting down because they're running out of storage space because Venezuela can't export oil because of the blockade. So, they're trying to put the oil anywhere they can. They've put it in their own storage, they've put it in ships that are docked. They're putting it in almost in teacups at this point because they are running out of space to store the oil that they're producing.

Let's talk about the oil that is produced in Venezuela. They produce it from tar sands. It's extra heavy. It's a heavy type of crude oil and there are relatively few refineries that can process this grade of oil. It's difficult to extract. It's expensive to extract. Chinese refineries in 2025 tended to get a majority of Venezuelan exports. That amount ranged from 75 to 90% depending upon the amount. But even here, the Chinese tended to put much of that oil in their own storage. And China and Russia tend to be the two big players in Venezuela. For China, it is transactional. Chinese buyers look at it as a way to purchase cheap oil that they again put in storage. It's about 4% of China's exports and China again, has used a shadow fleet of intermediaries to purchase this oil. If China were to lose access to this, it's a problem. But because much of this has gone into storage and there are other suppliers out there in Saudi Arabia and other places, they could make this up.

Russia's a different story. Russia is an enabler of the Venezuelan oil industry. Because Venezuela's oil is so tar heavy, in essence, they need to import naphtha from Russia and this dilutes the ore and eco output and makes it blendable and then shippable. So, Russia sends in naphtha, it blends the stuff down and then stuff can then be exported. What would happen if suddenly Venezuela is opened up? Well, a couple of things.

First, because the oil market is relatively well supplied, people would look at it and ask, ‘where are the investment opportunities?’ If you look at the places where the world has changed suddenly and investment opportunities occurred, production didn't dramatically change. Let's take Iraq and Libya for example.

In Iraq, it took about a dozen years to get back to the level of pre-Saddam. And at that point, China was a major player. The U.S. is now returning to Iraq. In Libya, we're now a number of years after the fall of Gaddafi, and they are still about 25% below production levels under Gaddafi.

And again, the U.S. is returning. Much of it does depend upon the security of the country and the stability of the country. So, the president's comments about running Venezuela the right way really does strike at the heart of what happens in the oil industry.

The Cipher Brief: Devil’s Advocate here: how does it compete with Texas’ output? What does the U.S. do with that oil? Is it going to be sold to China?

Roule: The president and the Secretary of State have talked about stolen oil. What does this refer to? Is there a U.S. case there? I'll leave it to others to talk about the amounts and so forth but when this is talked about, this refers to a 2007 Venezuela expropriation of what I believe was then Conoco Phillips or ExxonMobil investments. That Venezuela did indeed expropriate. So, there is indeed a legal case of Venezuela nationalization of U.S. assets for which the U.S. was not compensated. If Venezuela's government did change and if U.S. oil companies were to go in, could the oil industry be dramatically changed? Yes, but it would depend upon security.

Maybe my final comment would be that Chevron has been heavily invested there, and they have maintained a very mature and stable outlook for the country. If you hear Chevron’s CEO speak about Chevron's investments, they've been very levelheaded and unflappable about national security events. So, I think you're going to see them stay there as well. And I think when you listen to the president's comments about how the U.S. would run Venezuela, he seemed fairly confident that the U.S. oil industry would play a role there. Which makes one think that there have been some sort of discussions in this regard playing out in some way in the background.

The Cipher Brief: At the most recent Cipher Brief Threat Conference, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of global conflict and some people believe that we are at the precipice of World War III. Certainly everyone agrees that global disruption is at fairly unprecedented levels. What is your thinking on this?

Roule: We are in a different world, but we're in a world of permanent gray zone conflict. But gray zone is defined and very, very differently. Gray zone was once defined by Iranian militias and it was defined by drone attacks or cyberattacks that were non-attributed. But we now have drone attacks or drone flights in Europe that come from God knows where, but they're Russian. We have Chinese routine harassment for more than a decade in the South China Sea. We have routine theft of intellectual property by China and North Korea, which in and of itself is a type of attack against our economy. But it's not necessarily a traditional gray zone attack. Because the people who are often involved in gray zone operations only see a certain number of colors on the palate. But the theft of intellectual property is just another form of attack.

We're in that kind of a world and the people who are running the countries, they don't need to launch a war per se. They need to launch a series of short, sharp conflicts. Or short, sharp attacks. Now they said these could lead to a war if people believe we don't care about certain areas. And I do think there is the issue of what could happen in Taiwan in 2026. That should be a worry for everyone.

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High Risk in Venezuela—To What End?

OPINION — “I knew the possible danger. It was a very dangerous operation. It was amazing that we had a few injured, but all are in good shape right now, but I knew there was great danger. You got off a helicopter. The helicopters were being shot out. They got on the ground amazing talent and tremendous patriotism, bravery. The bravery was incredible…They got off the helicopter and the bullets were flying all over the place. As you know, one of the helicopters got hit pretty badly, but that we got everything back. Got everything back and nobody killed,” meaning Americans.

That was President Donald Trump speaking Sunday aboard Air Force One on the way back from Florida about what he observed watching the early Saturday morning U.S. raid in Caracas that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

While events in Venezuela are still unfolding and I will discuss some below, I use that quote because it illustrates that deaths of American service members is one thing I believe is high in Trump’s mind as he has in recent months undertaken a series of worldwide military actions.

Trump almost regularly points out that no Americans have been killed in the four months the U.S. has been blowing up alleged narco-trafficking boats. No Americans were lost in the bombing of Iran nuclear facilities.

And despite Trump’s threat that he could put U.S. boots-on-the-ground if needed to “run” Venezuela, there is no immediate indication he has plans to do that.

Instead, it appears Trump’s plan is to “run” Venezuela using what remains of the corrupt Maduro military/police hierarchy as long as they do what Trump wants. To me it recalls Trump as a builder working with questionable union leaders and construction firms to get jobs done.

Just why has President Trump spent time and money, first to negotiate with Maduro to get him to leave, and finally to dramatically oust the Venezuelan President from office?

I divert for a moment.

On Friday, the original beginning of this column was, “Most fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking into the U.S. occurs through official ports of entry along the southwest border, according to DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency).”

That was a quote from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled, “Illicit Synthetic Drugs: Trafficking Methods, Money Laundering Practices, and Coordination Efforts,” that was sent to Congress and released publicly December 18, 2025.

The GAO’s report, including the finding cited above, focuses attention on fentanyl primarily coming into the U.S. through land ports of entry while the Trump administration made its anti-fentanyl focus on attacking narco-trafficking swift-boats initially from Venezuela, claiming they were headed for the U.S.

More recently, the attacks, and killing of those aboard, have been those in the eastern Pacific.

The New York Times published a story by Carol Rosenberg that discussed what happens when U.S. Coast Guard cutters intercept narco-trafficking boats, seize drugs and capture those aboard – but not kill 115 on 35 speedboats as the U.S. military did last year.

Putting together the December GAO report and the Times story raised some serious questions about the rationality of the Trump administration’s so-called anti-drug program.

Up to that time, interception of drug-carrying boats and interrogation of the crews gave valuable information on drug routes.

However, as The Times noted, “Attorney General Pam Bondi directed [U.S.] prosecutors in February to mostly stop bringing charges against low-level offenders in favor of bigger investigations.” According to The Times, “For the most part, people captured by the Coast Guard in the same smuggling routes the U.S. military is bombing are being repatriated -- either directly, before reaching the United States, or through deportation after briefly being questioned near U.S. ports.”

The Times noted that many earlier captured crew members were “poor, undereducated farmers or fishermen [who] would reach cooperation agreements that offered details of their engagement at the bottom rung of the drug smuggling business in exchange for possible leniency.”

The Times quoted Tampa-lawyer Stephen M. Crawford, who in the past had been assigned to represent defendants captured by the Coast Guard, who said the killing of crew members without prosecution amounted to very dangerous “political theater.”

I could say the same today for what I consider today’s ill-thought-out Trump actions in Venezuela.

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As many others have pointed out, returning democracy to the Venezuelan people was not uppermost in Trump’s mind.

On Saturday, in announcing the raid, Trump told reporters he had not been in contact with Venezuelan Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. He then went on to say, "I think it'd be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman but she doesn't have the respect."

What I believe Trump meant was that the Maduro power structure – the Venezuelan Army, Bolivarian National Police and urban paramilitary networks known as colectivos -- remain active and it is they that don’t “respect” Machado.

They are also probably the reason there are no U.S. boots-on-the-ground.

Instead, Trump seems to believe that by keeping major U.S. military forces near Venezuela, he can threaten additional military attacks to keep the ex-Maduro crowd in line.

As Trump put it Sunday on Air Force One, “Venezuela thus far has been very nice, but it helps to have a force like we have. You know, we were ready for a second wave. We were all set to go, but we don't think we're going to need it.”

Apparently it is Venezuela’s oil which is primarily on Trump’s mind.

As with other matters, Trump seems to be living in the past as illustrated when he told reporters over the weekend, “We [the U.S.] had a lot of oil there [in Venezuela]. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

Nationalization was the culmination of a decades-long effort by Venezuelan administrations of both the right and the left to bring under government control an industry that an earlier leader had largely given away.

American oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil, which merged in 1999, and Gulf Oil, which became Chevron in 1984, were hit hardest. The Dutch giant Shell was also affected. The companies, which had accounted for more than 70 percent of crude oil production in Venezuela, lost roughly $5 billion in assets but were compensated just $1 billion each, according to news stories from that period.

On Sunday, Trump said, “The oil companies are ready to go. They're going to go in, they're going to rebuild the infrastructure. You know, we built it to start off with many years ago.

They took it away. You can't do that. They can't do that with me. They did it with other presidents.”

According to several sources, major oil companies are not eager to spend the years and money at the present time to revive the Venezuelan oil industry, but as with much about the Venezuelan situation, there’s little yet that is predictable.

One potentially dangerous outcome, looming already, is how Trump reads what he so far considers his military success.

On Sunday he made open threats to both Colombia and Cuba.

He called Colombian President Gustavo Petro “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he's not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you?”

And as for Cuba, Trump said, “Cuba always survived because of Venezuela. Now, they won't have that money coming in. They won't have the income coming in.”

He then went on to point out, “You know, a lot of Cubans were killed yesterday. You know that. A lot of Cubans were killed…There was a lot of death on the other side.”

But then Trump quickly added, as I have pointed out before, “No death on our side.”

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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Human Agency in a Technology-Mediated World

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Occasionally, a speech does more than mark a leadership transition or outline institutional priorities. It captures, with unusual clarity, the nature of the moment we are living through and the choices it demands.

Blaise Metreweli’s recent inaugural address as Chief (or more colloquially, C) of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service was one of those moments. Rather than offering a conventional tour of threats or capabilities, she chose a more demanding path. She spoke about human agency in a world increasingly shaped by machines. About trust, judgment, and integrity at a time when technology is accelerating every dimension of competition and conflict.

I had the pleasure of working with Metreweli while serving as Deputy Director of the CIA for Digital Innovation. I watched her navigate the intersection of operations and technology with a rare combination of rigor and imagination. Her speech reflects that same sensibility. It is operationally grounded, intellectually disciplined, and quietly ambitious in what it asks of an intelligence service. Just as it should be.

What struck me most, reading her remarks, was not simply their alignment with themes I have been working on for years, both inside government and since my departure in 2024. It was the way she wove those themes together into a coherent vision of intelligence suited to the world as it is, not the world we might wish it to be.

At the center of Metreweli’s speech is a proposition that may sound self-evident, yet is increasingly contested in practice: even in a technology-mediated world, human beings must still decide outcomes.

Artificial intelligence can surface patterns, illuminate possibilities, even accelerate analysis. It cannot decide what matters. It cannot weigh moral tradeoffs. It cannot assume responsibility for consequences. Intelligence, in her framing, remains a human endeavor, even as it becomes ever more technologically enabled.

This is a conclusion I reached years ago while leading digital transformation efforts inside the CIA. As our tools became more powerful, the temptation to treat output as authority grew stronger. We resisted that instinct deliberately. The most effective systems we built were those designed explicitly to support human judgment, not replace it. They forced users to ask better questions or to challenge assumptions, and to understand context before acting.

I have described this in multiple speeches and articles as human–machine partnering, and Metreweli’s speech reflects the same conviction. The future of intelligence is not technological supremacy alone. Nor is it the return to a romanticized vision of the intelligence mission before the digital revolution. It is the disciplined integration of technology into human decision-making, with clarity about where judgment must reside.

Metreweli is equally clear about the character of modern conflict. We are no longer operating in a world neatly divided between war and peace. Instead, we inhabit a persistent space between the two, where states seek advantage through pressure that is continuous, deniable, and often difficult to attribute.

Cyber operations, sabotage, influence campaigns, and coercive economic measures all live comfortably in this grey zone. They are designed to intimidate and to erode confidence without triggering a conventional response.

One aspect of this competition that deserves particular attention is the emergence of what I have called digital chokepoints. These are points of leverage embedded in digital infrastructure, data ecosystems, platforms, standards, and supply chains. They do not announce themselves boldly as instruments of power, yet they have increasingly come under attack in recent years as a tool of geopolitical competition. In 2024-2025 alone, there were numerous anomalous “incidents” that damaged or cut 13 undersea cables around Taiwan and the Baltic Sea.

Grey-zone conflict, viewed through this lens, is not episodic. It is cumulative. And we will see more of it. Intelligence services must therefore understand not just individual operations, but the architecture of pressure that builds quietly and persistently across domains.

The convergence of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing, and the way these advances are reshaping both opportunity and risk was featured prominently in Metreweli’s speech. She avoids the dual traps of easy optimism and easy alarmism alike.

I have often framed technology as both shield and sword. It accelerates intent, but it does not generally determine outcomes. Technology itself is neutral. What matters is how it is governed, deployed, and constrained by human choice, as well as which values are encoded into its digital foundations

This distinction is not academic. The same AI system that accelerates medical discovery can enable surveillance at scale. The same digital infrastructure that connects societies can be (and is) used to monitor and control them. Metreweli’s speech is careful to emphasize mastery of technology alongside responsibility for its effects.

That balance is essential. Technological determinism strips leaders of agency and excuses poor judgment. Metreweli’s approach does neither.

One of the most sobering elements of Metreweli’s address is her discussion of trust. Information, once a unifying force, is now routinely weaponized. Falsehood spreads faster than fact. Algorithms reward outrage and reinforce bias. Shared reality seems increasingly elusive.

I have spent significant time in recent years examining the implications of synthetic media, deepfakes, and AI-enabled influence operations. Today, identity itself has become contested space. Voice, image, and presence can be fabricated convincingly and at scale. Seeing is no longer believing.

This presents intelligence services with challenges that extend well beyond traditional counterintelligence or cyber defense. When trust collapses, when one can no longer discern truth from fiction, societies risk losing much more than confidence in institutions. They risk losing the ability to reason collectively about the world they inhabit.

Metreweli’s insistence that defending the space where truth can still stand as a core intelligence mission reflects a deep understanding of what is at stake.

Another strength of Metreweli’s speech is her refusal to treat today’s challenges as isolated problems. She describes an interlocking threat landscape that spans physical and digital domains, from seabed cables to space systems, from code to cognition.

This holistic view is critical. Too often, Western governments have approached cross-domain issues in separate policy lanes. Next-generation communications, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, cyber intrusions, disinformation campaigns. All treated as distinct, individual issues. Our principal strategic competitor, the People’s Republic of China, has not made that mistake. These domains are understood as mutually reinforcing components of a comprehensive national digital strategy tied directly to a grand geopolitical ambition.

I have argued for years that we must respond in kind, not by mirroring authoritarian models, but by approaching this competition in a more holistic fashion and by offering global partners a credible alternative. Countries around the world want to harness new technologies to accelerate development and improve lives. Many also want to protect sovereignty and human freedom. Meeting that demand requires seeing the digital contest as a whole, not as a collection of technical projects about which individual and disconnected policy decisions are made.

Though not stated in such terms, Metreweli’s framing reflects this reality.

As an operational commander who became a technical leader, Metreweli brings unusual authority to her discussion of technology within intelligence tradecraft. She envisions a service where officers are as comfortable using digital tools as they are recruiting and running human sources.

This is not about turning intelligence officers into engineers. It is about understanding technology as both a tool and a terrain. Digital literacy becomes foundational, not because everyone must code, but because everyone must grasp how technology shapes the operational environment and adversary behavior. In modern intelligence, ignorance of technology becomes a vulnerability.

Metreweli also speaks directly to the question of legitimacy. Intelligence services in democracies operate with extraordinary authorities. Their effectiveness ultimately depends on trust.

Her commitment to openness, where it can responsibly exist, is not about transparency for its own sake. It is about sustaining a relationship with the public rooted in shared values. Accountability, in her formulation, is a strength, not a constraint.

This is a principle I championed consistently inside the Agency and since my departure. In democratic societies, trust can never be taken for granted. It must be earned and maintained, especially as intelligence services operate in the shadows, out of view of the citizens they serve.

A particularly powerful portion of Metreweli’s speech focuses on audacity and “hustle,” reflecting a clear understanding of the environment intelligence services face today. In a world defined by exponential change, moving slowly does not preserve relevance. It accelerates decline.

I have spoken often about urgency, about the reality that institutions unwilling to adapt will become obsolete. That does not mean abandoning discipline or ethics. It means recognizing that delay carries its own significant risks. In today’s dynamic, high-threat landscape, inaction is perhaps the biggest risk.

Metreweli closes her speech where she began, with values. Courage. Creativity. Respect. Integrity. She recounts a conversation with a long-term foreign agent who worked with the UK precisely because of these values. This is not a sentimental anecdote. It is a strategic insight into how intelligence services in western democracies must navigate today’s complexity. Leveraging our core strength. Values.

We are living through the rise of digital authoritarianism, where technology is used to monitor, manipulate, and control populations at unprecedented scale. The most profound threat this poses is not technical. It is moral. It erodes human agency incrementally, often invisibly, until freedom becomes difficult to reclaim.

I have warned repeatedly that societies rarely lose freedom in dramatic moments. They lose it through systems that optimize for efficiency or security while stripping away consent, accountability, and choice.

Metreweli’s insistence that none of us have a future without values is therefore a statement of strategic reality, and it gets to the very heart of the issue.

Blaise Metreweli’s speech deserves close reading, not because it is eloquent (though it is), but because it is consequential. It articulates a vision of intelligence that is technologically fluent without being technologically captive, operationally aggressive without abandoning principle, and deeply human in a world that increasingly tempts us to forget what that means.

For intelligence professionals, policymakers, and citizens alike, it is a reminder that even as our tools evolve, the most important choices remain ours to make.

Read the full speech here.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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After Venezuela, What Is Next in 2026?

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT Q&A — President Donald Trump said the U.S. is "in charge" in Venezuela after U.S. forces detained President Nicolas Maduro on charges related to drug trafficking. President Trump is also demanding "total access" to Venezuela's oil infrastructure. Venezuela's de-facto leader Delcy Rodriguez said Caracas is seeking "balanced and respectful international relations" with Washington.

Intelligence professionals are reacting to this major development as it will have far-reaching consequences far beyond Venezuela, for the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere amid heightened tensions with adversaries such as Russia and China. Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian spoke with former CIA Senior Executive Paul Kolbe about what Maduro's capture signals for the national security landscape in 2026. The conversation has been lightly edited for length.

Paul Kolbe

Paul Kolbe is former director of The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Kolbe also led BP’s Global Intelligence and Analysis team supporting threat warning, risk mitigation, and crisis response. Kolbe served 25 years as an operations officer in the CIA, where he was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, serving in Russia, the Balkans, Indonesia, East Germany, Zimbabwe, and Austria.

Christian: How are thinking about what just happened in Venezuela? What's top of mind for you?

Kolbe: Venezuela has been a problem both for the United States and for the Venezuelan people for over 20 years. For the Chavez years and then the Maduro years, they've driven a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the world, and certainly wealthiest in South America, with unbelievable natural resources, particularly oil, and driven it into the ground through corruption, poor leadership, poor decisions, and oppression of the people. There's a reason eight million Venezuelans have fled the country. So, it's been a series of corrupt, horrible rulers. Not sorry to see Maduro go.

Venezuela has also been a foothold for Cuba. Very important for Cuba in terms of the oil that they get there, but also as a place to plant the flag and spread Cuban revolution throughout South America. It's been a base and source of money and money laundering for Hezbollah and Iran. Russia has had a long-standing relationship with Chavez and with Maduro, supporting them with weapons, with intelligence, with the Wagner Group. So, Venezuela has been both a thorn in the side of the U.S., and has been involved in so many different things that are against our interests — not sorry to see Maduro go.

Christian: Last year, President Trump had authorized covert activity in Venezuela. There had been talk even recently, just days ago, of the CIA being involved in a strike against a target in Venezuela. We don't often see a military operation of this complexity that goes this smoothly. What does that tell you about the intelligence that was at play here and the level of cooperation with the military?

Kolbe: Clearly it was highly professional and extraordinarily well-executed operation, both by the intelligence community and by the U.S. special operations forces that went in. Very pleased that there were no casualties, that we didn't suffer any losses. But the split that I would make is to ask if this is a very well-executed tactical operation that is without a larger strategy? And if there's a larger strategy, what is it? In particular, what's the follow-on? There's been a number of times where we've gone in and broken things and not done such a great job of fixing them or just leaving. You can look at Libya, at Iraq, and other places where that's not happened. Some folks will point to Panama and Grenada and try to use those as analogies for Venezuela, and they're very different cases. Venezuela's not Panama — much bigger, much different set of dynamics there — and it's certainly not Grenada.

So the follow-on of who's going to rule, what the transition is, how do you maintain stability? The narco-traffickers are still there, the narco-syndicates, the military is still there, the street gangs are still there. The paramilitaries, which have been supported by the military and have acted as the chief arm of oppression and brutality against the people, they're still there. There's a lot of generals that have an awful lot to lose. So, unless there's been a negotiated handover of power, I don't quite understand, yet, how we're going to run the country without boots on the ground or without a clear negotiated handover.

Christian: Russia's been described as a special type of enabler for Venezuela over the years. Russian officials have called the U.S. operation in Venezuela "unlawful'' and a violation of norms. There have been other Russia developments related to Venezuela recently. The ship, Bella 1, that the United States has been pursuing for the last couple of weeks was reported to have painted a Russian flag on it's hull on Dec 31, and Russia reportedly has asked the United States to stop pursuing it. What's your reaction to how Russia has publicly responded to these incidents?

Kolbe: I'll start with the irony of Russia's protestations against what they see as the invasion of sovereignty of another country and how awful that is put out there with no sense of irony. Russia is condemning something that is not analogous to what they've done in Ukraine, but also completely ignoring what they've done in Ukraine and the ongoing war that they continue to pursue against the Ukrainian people, against their infrastructure, against everything that stands there.

So, while Venezuela is going to capture a lot of attention over the next few days, I suspect that's also, perhaps, part of the purpose of it. It distracts from what I think is a far more strategic, far more important issue, i.e., What's going to happen in Ukraine in 2026? Will the U.S. abandon Ukraine? Will we stab them in the back, or will we be able to provide support that lets them fight Russia, preserve their sovereignty?

The story with the ship is a pretty interesting one. It feels like watching a sea-born version of OJ Simpson's escape in his Ford Bronco as this Coast Guard cutter trails this gigantic oil freighter, which is running away at the speed of 11 knots and is now in the North Atlantic and is claiming to have Russian protection. Russia has reportedly put out a diplomatic note dissuading the U.S. from taking any action on that. So it will be interesting to see what actually happens if the ship managed to make good on the escape or if we turn around and say, "Oh, nevermind."

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Christian: At the most recent Threat Conference back in October, there was a lot of talk of global conflict. And some people use the phrase, "World War III." Are we in it? Has it begun? There's been a lot of talk about gray zone, the level of gray zone activity, and the risk of major conflicts breaking out such as Taiwan or the situation in Europe growing beyond the borders of Ukraine. How are you thinking about the world as we start 2026 amid what is truly a dynamic national security backdrop?

Kolbe: I'm thinking about it as we're in a state of conflict without recognizing it. Just a couple of days ago over New Year’s, you saw China mount a blockade exercise, clearly practicing for a coming blockade of Taiwan. The signaling coming out of there is ever sharper and, it’s always been clear, but suggests a narrowing timeline for action on Taiwan. I don't believe anything's imminent, but clearly they're building the capability and then the intent, the decision, once they have the capability, can happen at any time.

Just a couple of days ago, we saw another communications cable cut between Estonia and Finland by a Russian ship that had left a Russian port that continues what is essentially low grade warfare on the European continent by Russia: sabotage, assassinations, misinformation, disinformation, and just a series of things which are clearly preparation of the battlefield, designed both to deter Europe and get Europe to self-deter, but also for the U.S., but also to put into place the capabilities that would be useful or used in conflict.

I think what is clear to me is that we, the US — as stated in the National Security Strategy that came out in December — are basically carving out Latin America as a U.S. area of influence and seeming to leave Europe and Central Asia to Russia and East Asia to China. And for me, that's very disturbing that America First looks to be coming to include South America First.

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Venezuela was a Surprise. What Could be Next?

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT Q&A -- Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is scheduled to appear in a U.S. courtroom on Monday for the first time since being brought to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. The brief hearing will formally begin what is expected to be a lengthy legal battle over whether he can be prosecuted in the United States.

This, as intelligence professionals are considering what the seemingly flawless U.S. military operation to detain Maduro could mean for what’s next in the region. Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian spoke with former CIA Senior Executive Glenn Corn about the impact of the Venezuelan operation and what we still don’t know. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length.

Christian: Talk us through how you're reacting to the news of the last 72 hours.

Corn: If I had a hat, I'd take it off to our former partner colleagues in the intelligence community and the special operations community. I mean, great operation. Well planned and executed. I'm sure that the intelligence had to be very good. Honestly, I'm proud because it's good to have a reminder that the U.S. can do this kind of thing. I don't want to go into the international law piece. I'm not a lawyer. But really a great operation and thanks to the people that put it together. You probably remember that we talked recently about the importance of the Western Hemisphere and reasserting some of our influence there and reminding people that, this is our backyard. This administration has made the Western Hemisphere a priority and I think it's a good thing. And here's an example of something that the president is willing to do. I give the president credit - this is a pretty bold move. And the timing was interesting. The other thing I'll say is no leaks, right? Which is also very, very good news because we have a problem in Washington with leaks, and the administration was able to keep this one under wraps. I was completely surprised.

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Christian: What do you think are going to be some of the things that you're going to be watching most closely? President Trump has said that the United States is going to be involved in administering Venezuela in the near term. There's been a lot of talk about reviving Venezuela's oil industry. Obviously, that's not surprising. There's been some reaction from American adversaries, but everyone's still in a watch and wait mode yet for how China and Russia is going to respond to this. What are you paying attention to in terms of signals for this week?

Corn: The president's comments about some type of U.S. administration, at least in some kind of transitory period were interesting. I immediately am reminded of Iraq where the military operation was well done and we removed Saddam Hussein pretty quickly in 2003, but then what came after was not great. So, I hope we've learned that lesson and we're not going to repeat the mistakes we made there. Hopefully there is a plan in place. The president indicated that some people in the administration are going to be giving roles also to help administer.

And it’s interesting that President Maduro and his wife were detained, but it looks like everybody else is still in their roles which may be an indication that they learned the lesson from Iraq and our experience there.

By the way, if you're the Iranian supreme leader, you probably have to be very nervous right now. I went to bed thinking about Iran and what's happening there. And the president's comments that the U.S. will support those people that are coming out to peacefully protest and if they're... I forget his exact words, but basically, "We will punish those who use force against them or who killed protestors."

Christian: The way I interpreted that was that the U.S. was prepared to intervene militarily to protect the protestors.

Corn: And we may still be. Last week, I was very focused on Iran, then all of a sudden over the weekend, this operation went down. Now, whether that's the intent or not, I don't know, but it’s really interesting timing. What comes next will be very important. I've been saying for a while that this administration has had some very good foreign policy successes in the last year, since coming to office. Generally, I think they're doing well on the foreign policy front. They've done some bold things. Syria, Azerbaijan, Armenia. Now what comes next is important, and then consistency is important. Do we have the ability to see it through? We’ll have to see.

Christian: Russia is considered an ally to Venezuela. How might this impact Moscow’s foreign policy in the Western hemisphere, to include their planning and their ongoing operations as it relates to Venezuela or perhaps other parts of the Western hemisphere?

Corn: I think Putin has backed himself into a corner when it comes to a lot of these countries that he's aligned with. We saw that with Syria where he was overspent, and he really didn't have anything to help former President Bashar al-Assad when Assad was in crisis. And one of his main allies in the Middle East is no longer there.

In Venezuela, the Russians have come out with some statements in support of Caracas, of Maduro, but they really haven't done much. There was some reporting last year, that Moscow was shipping more air defense systems and weapons to Maduro and the regime as we were ratcheting up our military activity in the Caribbean. But none of that seems to have made a real difference. Putin has to understand right now that he's been unable to come to Assad's assistance and with Maduro, his ally has just been removed and detained. So, he's got to be watching Iran very nervously because that's his other main ally in the Middle East and they've invested a lot in that relationship, and it seems like the Supreme Leader is in trouble right now. The regime is in trouble.

With the President of the United States making bold comments about what the U.S. will do if the regime goes after protestors in Iran, it’s clear that Putin's influence is waning all over the world and he's eventually going to be unable to stand.

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The Russians used to like to brag that they stand by their allies when the U.S. abandons them. Actually, it's looking now like the Russians are abandoning their allies. And I assess that's partly because of this quagmire that Putin got himself into in Ukraine.

Maybe some of the Venezuelans who are celebrating the removal of their dictator should think about Ukraine and what the Ukrainians have done for them by stopping the Russian military the way they've done so effectively.

It also seems at first blush, that the intelligence services of Russia failed because it looks like this operation went down without any real warning to Maduro. And one would assess that if Putin is an ally of Maduro, he'd have tipped him off about the operation, which the Russians have tried to do in other circumstances in the past.

By the way, the Cuban bodyguards, what happened to them? Someone was telling me last week, that Maduro's main security force was made up of Cubans.

I think Putin has painted himself into a corner because I think he's afraid to really upset Trump because he knows that if Trump comes down hard on him on the Ukraine issue, he's in big trouble.

He's already in trouble. And many of us have assessed for a while that if President Trump decides that it's time to really ratchet up the heat on Moscow and the Kremlin, that will probably be a serious, serious blow to Putin and his power.

Christian: Do you believe that President Putin thinks he's backed into a corner in the way that you describe? And is it likely that there are people around him who may be telling him that?

Corn:. I don't even want to try to put myself in his head space. I've said for a long time, going back 10 years, that he's put himself in an information vacuum or echo chamber. So, who knows what he's thinking. But my guess is that he feels like he's backed into a corner. If you saw when the U.S. announced sanctions on Gazprom and Lukoil, the first thing Putin did was send a delegate to the United States in a rush. That showed me panic and fear. And I'm sure that people around Putin are upset and worried.

Now, let's watch Iran. I think Iran's a big piece on the chess board, and we should see what happens there. I don't think that the Russians are going to be able to help much if the Iranian regime starts to collapse.

Christian: The critics of the operation in Venezuela are saying things like, "This is a bad precedent to set. Other leaders around the world may decide, 'Okay, well, if the U.S. can do something like this...'" And obviously the criticism of this operation is it violates Venezuela's sovereignty. Do you worry about the knock-on effect and the second and third order effects of an operation like this being conducted by the United States, regardless of who's president, and being used in ways that may cause further instability in the world or being used by autocratic leaders or America's adversaries?

Corn: No, I think that ship sailed a long time ago. This is not the first time the United States has done something like this. This is not the first time other countries have done something like this. Countries have made land grabs, have assassinated leaders or tried to remove leaders, overthrow governments. So, there's nothing new here. There's no new precedent here that I see. We've already started down this very ugly road. And to me, now, what's important is to make sure that our national security structure and our intelligence community and armed forces are fully armed and capable of dealing with any threat to U.S. interests and to our allies.

Christian: At our most recent Cipher Brief Threat Conference in October, there was a lot of talk about global conflict. Some people use the phrase World War III. Do you believe it’s started and how are you thinking about 2026 from a national security standpoint?

Corn: Deterrence is critical right now. The U.S. has been deterred too much in the past, and we've been unable to deter our adversaries. It's very important that the U.S. maintains and demonstrates an ability to deter adversaries when they threaten our interests. The president is talking about U.S. oil companies going into Venezuela, rebuilding the infrastructure, reviving the Venezuelan oil industry, energy industry. I think this goes along with the administration's approach with commercial diplomacy, getting the U.S. business community actively involved around the world to help promote U.S. interests, which I support but you have to make sure that happens because you don't want vacuums to be created. A year ago in Syria, everybody was very excited about the opportunities, but those opportunities have been very hard to develop because of the realities on the ground. So, you need sustainment. You need the ability to really sustain and be patient and invest in taking advantage of opportunities and bringing some kind of economic development to regions that have suffered for a long time and are in very bad shape that are producing either jihadists or narco traffickers - probably because a lot of those people have no other choice to survive.

You and I have both served in countries where that is the case, where the majority of people are not bad people, but they have no choice. There's really no option. We want to give them something better, right? But we have to do it. And that's going to be the big challenge.

Again, kudos to the administration. This is part of a bigger game. I go back to the Reagan administration and the kind of rollback approach to the Soviet Union when Russia was challenging us around the world and Reagan finally responded to that by challenging them and calling out the Soviets where they were trying to poke on our interests.

I would say that the Trump administration seems to be doing that, which is good, but we've got to be very, very cognizant of the fact that it's going to take a lot of investment and a lot of persistent attention to do it.

If the Iranian regime collapses tomorrow, that could create a great opportunity or a vacuum. There’s a great opportunity in Venezuela right now. Let's take advantage of it.

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Building U.S. Drone Dominance Brick by Brick

OPINION — One of the things I loved about LEGO as a child was the ability to mix and match an endless amount of parts to create unique builds. Children (and some adults) gather around a bin of parts to create something new. Imagine being asked: “Build 10 houses in 30 minutes.” Everyone would come up with unique designs using various parts. Now, imagine a constraint: “You may only use red, 2x4, 2x2, and 1x2 bricks, white windows and doors, and it all has to fit on a green 32x32 baseplate.” Quickly, the limited supply causes a frantic scramble.

This scenario mirrors the recent call by the Department of War to field 300,000 drones over two years. The conflict in Ukraine exposed the U.S.'s lack of preparedness to equip forces with Purpose Built Attritable Systems (PBAS) at the scale of its peer competitors. Further, manufacturers are restricted by the requirement for critical components to be NDAA / BlueUAS compliant and, as of December 22nd, even more restrictions which demand non-critical components be U.S.-manufactured. The defense industrial base is struggling to meet unprecedented demand.

While numerous startups and giants have stepped up, the U.S. supply chain cannot sustain the required pace. Existing suppliers’ manufacturing capabilities are quickly surpassed as companies scramble to design, build, and market the requested systems.

sUAS are fundamentally basic, consisting of a flight controller (FC), electronic speed controller (ESC), motors, propellers, camera, radio/video transmitters, receivers, and a frame. The main problem is the availability of parts and, more critically, sub-components needed to make them. Manufacturers are all reaching into the same scarce “bin,” forcing suppliers to seek materials with increased vigor.

Motors, for instance, require neodymium and copper. The majority of motor production occurs outside of the U.S., where technology is mature, labor costs are lower, and the supply chain exists. However, the sUAS industry accounts for less than 8% of neodymium consumption in the U.S. Returning to the LEGO analogy, if a child asks for more 1x1 red bricks to make houses, LEGO, which (in this scenario) makes over 90% of its money on other parts, has little incentive to retool for large-scale 1x1 brick production.

Similarly, most FC and ESC boards are produced in Taiwan. While this was permissible under the original NDAA and BlueUAS frameworks, the new requirement for U.S. production necessitates standing up domestic manufacturing, likely to ensure production continues in the event that trade with Taiwan is disrupted. However, standing up U.S. companies, sourcing materials, hiring labor, and developing technology all create significant costs that are passed to the consumer. Since PBAS systems must remain attritable (affordable enough to be lost in combat), a higher cost per unit will force warfighters to be more judicious.

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Given the intense demand and additional domestic constraints, how can the U.S. remain competitive? There are a few ways.

Incentivize existing global manufacturers to stand up U.S.-based manufacturing. Companies with existing technology, design, manufacturing, and supply chains should be incentivized to establish domestic production of like products.

Encourage raw material companies to invest upstream. Critical material mining companies (e.g., for lithium and neodymium) currently lack incentive to ensure stable, consistent supply to manufacturers. Encouraging investment upstream offers supply chain guarantees for domestic manufacturing and additional revenue for investors.

Establish a “strategic reserve” of raw materials. The U.S. maintains strategic oil and gas reserves. For future conflicts, a strategic reserve of critical sUAS materials is vital given the global stranglehold countries like China have on the market to enable rapid manufacturing scale-up even if trade is disrupted.

Increase throughput of BlueUAS and NDAA compliant components from outside the U.S. Maintaining U.S. connectivity to the global sUAS marketplace is important. While the restrictions are righteous, isolating U.S. production strains the raw material supply chain, causes allies to follow suit, and increases the overall cost per unit, reducing attritability. The U.S. should use the BlueUAS framework, with increased throughput, to identify compliant vendors across a wide section of allies and trade partners.

Expedite current NDAA compliant components manufactured overseas through BlueUAS processes. As manufacturing shifts to the U.S., the U.S. could provide ‘provisional’ BlueUAS certifications with limited durations to cover companies during the transition.

Without a temporary easement or an adequate transitional period, the U.S. drone market is likely to shift abruptly. Many companies cannot afford to stand up U.S. production, or the cost of compliance would render their price points untenable. This situation would likely result in defense giants acquiring the IP/technology from smaller companies at a steep discount, leveraging their supply networks, lobbying, and significant capital advantage to continue development and manufacturing under their umbrella, returning the U.S. defense ecosystem to its former exclusive state, prior to the recent tranche of reforms.

The U.S. is at a critical inflection point in its quest for American Drone Dominance. The foundation it establishes will define its final strength and resilience. Care must be taken to avoid supply chain degradation, continue providing affordable solutions for the warfighter, and remain flexible and responsive in future crises. Incentivizing domestic production without isolation will ensure the U.S. has all the pieces it needs to build successfully, brick by brick.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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A Trained Eye Sees Strategic Patterns in Venezuela

OPINION -- Venezuela presents a long-standing challenge tied to narcotics trafficking and transnational criminal networks. For years, the country has functioned as a major transit hub for illicit drug flows, money laundering, and organized crime, with direct consequences for U.S. domestic security and for stability across the Western Hemisphere. These realities alone justify sustained U.S. attention.

But criminal activity does not explain Venezuela’s full strategic significance. What distinguishes Venezuela today is not only the scale of illicit activity, but the conditions surrounding it: political isolation, economic dependence, weakened institutions, and contested legitimacy.

These conditions are familiar. These are precisely the environments external adversarial powers exploit in the gray zone to embed influence and preserve leverage without crossing the threshold of open conflict.

In such settings, influence is not imposed abruptly. It is embedded gradually, normalized through routine engagement, and retained for use when pressure mounts. That method, rather than any single triggering event - is what places Venezuela squarely within the scope of longer-term U.S. strategic concern.

Assessing Venezuela this way does not require assumptions about covert orchestration or crisis direction by outside states. It requires recognizing a recurring competitive approach that has played out repeatedly in fragile and isolated systems: establish access early, avoid responsibility for governance, and preserve optionality as conditions deteriorate.

A Pattern Observed Across Multiple Theaters

Recent Cipher Brief analysis has highlighted that strategic competition increasingly unfolds below the threshold of armed conflict. In states facing internal stress or external isolation, influence is rarely asserted through overt coercion. Instead, it is accumulated through sustained presence, access to institutions, and normalization of engagement — creating leverage that can be exercised selectively during moments of crisis.

This pattern is not theoretical. It is consistent across actors and regions, even where tactics differ.

China: Economic and Technical Presence as Strategic Infrastructure

China’s approach relies on economic and technical engagement as strategic infrastructure. Commercial projects, administrative systems, and digital platforms provide access long before crises emerge. Over time, this presence enables intelligence collection, political influence, and situational awareness without requiring overt security commitments or visible military footprints.

The value of this approach lies in patience. By embedding early and remaining engaged through periods of instability, China preserves optionality when political alignments shift or governance weakens. Influence accumulated quietly can later be activated to protect strategic equities, shape outcomes, or constrain competitors’ freedom of maneuver.

This model avoids ownership. It does not require Beijing to stabilize fragile states or assume responsibility for their internal failures. Access is sufficient. Optionality is the objective.

Russia: Security Engagement and Access Without Ownership

Russia applies a more security-centric variant of the same logic. Moscow’s engagement with sanctioned governments or non-recognized actors has repeatedly prioritized intelligence access, operational insight, and regional buffers rather than political alignment or long-term stabilization.

By maintaining relationships across formal and informal power structures, Russia ensures continued relevance during periods of transition or escalation. This posture allows Moscow to influence events without absorbing the costs associated with governance, reconstruction, or economic support.

Here again, the emphasis is not control but access. Engagement is calibrated to preserve leverage while avoiding entanglement — a model designed to expand or contract as circumstances dictate.

Iran: Network Persistence and Crisis Adaptability

Iran’s approach centers on the durability of networks rather than institutions. Elite cultivation, security penetration, and proxy relationships are established early and maintained quietly. When political systems weaken or collapse, these networks remain intact.

The advantage is resilience. Preexisting relationships allow rapid recalibration during crises without the need to rebuild influence under pressure. This approach is particularly effective in environments where authority is fragmented and legitimacy contested.

Across cases, Iran’s method demonstrates how influence survives regime change when it is rooted in people, systems, and incentives rather than formal state structures.

Key Analytic Distinction

Across these approaches, a central distinction applies: Presence and enablement do not equal operational control. But sustained presence creates optionality — the ability to act, influence, or constrain outcomes when conditions shift. That optionality, accumulated quietly over time, is what allows external powers to convert instability into strategic advantage without triggering direct confrontation.

Venezuela as a Permissive Strategic Environment

Venezuela now exhibits many of the conditions that have enabled this form of competition elsewhere. Politically, it remains isolated and internally polarized, with contested legitimacy and eroded institutions. Economically, it is dependent on external partners and vulnerable to leverage through finance, energy, and technology. Strategically, it occupies a sensitive position - proximate to the United States, central to regional migration flows, and endowed with significant energy resources.

Open-source reporting has documented sustained external engagement consistent with these vulnerabilities. Chinese firms maintain long-term financial and energy exposure, while Chinese technology has been linked to state administrative and digital systems. Russia has pursued military cooperation and security ties with the Maduro government over several years. Iran has expanded defense-related cooperation, including activities now cited in U.S. sanctions actions.

None of this establishes direct operational control over events in Venezuela. That distinction matters. Modern competition does not depend on command-and-control relationships. It depends on positioning — ensuring access, protecting equities, and shaping the environment so that options exist when pressure mounts.

From this perspective, Venezuela is not an abrupt escalation point. It is the maturation of a permissive environment.

U.S. National Interests at Stake

Viewed through this lens, the U.S. interests implicated extend beyond narcotics enforcement.

Security and Intelligence Access: Adversarial access or technical presence in the Western Hemisphere creates intelligence and counterintelligence risks. Proximity amplifies the strategic consequences, particularly during crises when early warning and situational awareness are decisive.

Regional Stability: Venezuela’s instability already fuels migration flows, strains neighboring states, and sustains criminal economies. External actors that selectively stabilize the regime — without addressing governance or legitimacy - risk prolonging instability while insulating it from internal pressure.

Energy and Economic Leverage: Venezuela’s energy sector remains strategically significant. External involvement that secures preferential access or shields operations from pressure can distort markets and complicate sanctions, reducing U.S. leverage over time.

Alliances and Credibility: Regional partners watch not only U.S. actions, but their durability. Episodic pressure without strategic continuity reinforces perceptions that U.S. engagement is temporary, a perception that competitors routinely exploit.

The Risk of Tactical Action Without Strategic Effect

Military or law-enforcement action can disrupt illicit networks and impose immediate costs. But disruption alone rarely dismantles the access structures external powers cultivate over years.

When political or economic stress intensifies, those structures often remain intact, allowing competitors to protect their equities and adapt quickly. Pressure that is not paired with a longer-term access-denial strategy risks plateauing or incentivizing deeper external involvement.

In Venezuela, criminal disruption addresses symptoms. It does not, by itself, degrade the political, economic, and intelligence ecosystems that enable adversarial positioning. Without sustained follow-through, tactical success can coexist with strategic stagnation.

Narrative, Legitimacy, and the Competitive Space

Competition below the threshold of war is also a contest over legitimacy. External powers rarely challenge U.S. actions on operational grounds alone. Instead, they exploit ambiguity, sovereignty narratives, and perceptions of disproportion.

These narratives gain traction when objectives appear narrow, temporary, or disconnected from a broader political strategy. Countering them does not require rhetorical escalation. It requires clarity, about purpose, duration, and the outcomes the United States seeks to prevent or enable.

Strategic Implications Going Forward

Venezuela should be assessed as part of a broader competitive environment in which external actors exploit fragility, isolation, and economic dependence to secure enduring access.

Experience from other regions points to several implications:

Denying durable access matters more than disrupting individual activities.

Time favors persistent presence over episodic pressure.

Clarity of purpose constrains adversarial narratives.

Regional confidence and allied coordination reduce competitive space.

In this environment, success is measured not only by disruption, but by whether competitors are prevented from converting instability into lasting advantage.

Venezuela reinforces a familiar reality: in an era of competition below the threshold of war, strategic outcomes are shaped less by single actions than by whether access, influence, and legitimacy are denied over time.

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Iran’s Protests Expose Deeper Fragility as Leaders Struggle to Contain Crisis

CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT INTERVIEW -- Economic grievances in Iran have sparked demonstrations for a fifth straight day, with protests surfacing in Tehran and multiple provincial cities as inflation, a collapsing currency, and worsening living conditions fuel public anger.

Reports from state-linked media, local officials, and rights groups confirm new clashes and at least one additional death, though accounts differ over whether the deceased was a member of a pro-government militia or a protester. Several other incidents of violence were reported in western and southern regions, but independent verification remains difficult.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, traveling in southwestern and eastern Iran, has acknowledged mounting public dissatisfaction and urged officials to address the population’s concerns, calling mismanagement - not foreign adversaries - the primary cause of the crisis. His remarks contrasted with harder-line figures who continue to blame unnamed “enemies” for the unrest.

The latest protests began after the Iranian rial plunged to record lows, prompting the resignation of Central Bank Governor Mohammad Reza Farzin.

The broader economic backdrop is bleak: inflation remains above 40 percent, food and household costs have surged, and nearly every major sector outside oil is contracting.

“The ongoing, still relatively small, economic protests now unfolding in several cities in Iran are the latest indicator of the Islamic Republic's fragility,” Middle East Expert and former National Security Manager for Iran at ODNI, Norm Roule tells The Cipher Brief.

Roule explains in this exclusive Cipher Brief analysis, why he believes the latest protests are likely a sign of what could be waiting for Tehran in the new year.

Norman T. Roule

ANALYSIS -- “Since 2017, Tehran’s domestic oppression, persistent inflation, declining standards of living, international isolation, and weak domestic policy credibility have produced periods of sharp and widespread unrest. Iran’s security forces have responded brutally. But the protests have shattered the Islamic Republic’s political self-confidence. Tehran’s response to the ongoing demonstrations reflects that mood.

A regime that once boasted that its high national election turnout reflected the support of its people is now unable to hide historic low voter turnout and accepts the threat of destabilizing national unrest as an inevitable consequence of life in modern-day Iran. Economic challenges are not the regime’s only concern. Iran’s historic drought and other environmental problems persist. Winter saw a sharp decline in air quality in large areas of Tehran, Khuzestan, and Isfahan provinces. In early December, Iran’s health minister announced that ongoing air pollution problems had sent more than 170,000 Iranians to emergency wards with heart and respiratory problems.

Whether the current unrest expands or dissipates - like prior waves of protest - remains uncertain. What is clearer is that the underlying drivers are durable, making future episodes virtually certain. The more consequential question is whether disillusionment will remain confined to civilians or will begin to test the cohesion and confidence of the security forces the Islamic Republic has relied upon for so many years to contain dissent.

The ongoing collapse of Iran’s currency, the rial, ignited the protests this week. After the currency fell as low as 1.42 million per dollar, Central Bank Governor Mohammad Reza Farzin resigned. The magnitude of the slide is best understood with some history: In 1979, the Iranian rial stood at 72 to the dollar. On July 14, 2015, the day the Iran nuclear deal was signed in Vienna, the Iranian rial was at 29,500 per dollar. When Farzin entered office in December 2022, the rial traded at about 430,000 to the dollar. Whatever the precise benchmarks, the trend is unmistakable: the rial’s weakness has become both a symbol of policy failure and a driver of unrest.

The currency’s decline has coincided with bleak economic signals. Except for anemic growth in the oil sector, every key sector of Iran’s economy is entering recession, foreshadowing higher unemployment. Industry and mining declined by 3.4%, construction by 12.9% and agriculture contracted by 2.9%. At the same time, inflation is growing. The Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) reported that Iran’s average annual inflation reached 42.2% in December. A close examination of this number indicates the significant impact of inflation on Iranian consumers. Food, tobacco, and beverages rose 72% year over year. This persistent high inflation erodes the purchasing power of Iranians and drives an increasing number into poverty.

Tehran’s options are few. Iran’s problems are deep and structural, and durable improvement would require political and ideological shifts beyond what the Pezeshkian administration is likely able to deliver. Even so, the government will be compelled to act on three fronts.

First, Farzin’s resignation provides the president with a convenient focal point for public anger, but it does nothing to address the issues that precipitated the crisis: fiscal mismanagement, sanctions pressure, and chronic credibility deficits. President Pezeshkian has reportedly selected 64-year-old former economy minister Abdolnaser Hemmati as Farzin’s successor.

Hemmati may at first seem a counterintuitive choice, given that the Iranian Parliament impeached him in March for failing in similar circumstances. However, he has a background that offers potential for stability. First, he is experienced. He led the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) from 2018 until late May 2021, during the Trump administration's earlier sanctions, and his work helped stabilize the foreign exchange market under similar difficult circumstances. He also qualifies as a regime insider with decades of experience with hardliners and more pragmatic conservatives. After beginning his career as an agricultural economist, he moved to Iran’s broadcasting organization, where he rose to become its political deputy and director general of news broadcasting. He then became the Director of Iran’s Central Insurance Corporation. Between 2006 and 2016, Hemmati led Sina Bank and Bank Mellat, banks with close ties to the Revolutionary Guard's Qods Force, to the extent that the U.S. and the European Union designated each. Hemmati attempted to enter the 2024 presidential election on a platform offering economic stabilization, but the Guardian Council rejected his candidacy. He instead became Pezeshkian’s economy minister, a position he held until his impeachment on 2 March 2024, following a spike in inflation and the rial's fall to 950,000 to the dollar. Ironically, that value would be seen as a significant improvement in its status today.

Hemmati will need to work quickly with Pezeshkian to propose measures to decelerate inflation, with an emphasis on protecting low-income and rural households. In the medium term, Hemmati will need to target Iran’s banking sector to strengthen balance sheets and prevent further failures. The downside of this last step is that it will inevitably involve some recognition of bad loans and credit tightening to prevent additional poor loan issuance.

Next, Pezeshkian will focus on budget reform. Details on his latest budget are limited, but we know that security and military entities remain well-resourced, which will constrain his options on the civilian side. He has proposed a 20% salary increase for public workers, but it will not keep up with inflation, and even here, he will struggle to find the funds. The budget debate will continue until 20 March 2026, and will likely remain contentious, given its emphasis on tax collection and subsidy cuts rather than oil revenues as a source of income.

Last, foreign policy will remain the most complicated aspect of Pezeshkian’s economic challenges. His government will do whatever it can to mitigate the impact of sanctions through engagement with Russia, China, and Africa, and will continue to seek talks with Washington. Initiating negotiations with the U.S., even without a prospect of an outcome, has in the past strengthened the rial. But if Pezeshkian would welcome talks with the West, the hardline actors within the regime responsible for Iran’s foreign policy remain focused on aggressive goals that remain one of the primary obstacles to peace in the region. The Quds Force shows every sign of seeking to rebuild its shattered proxies and establish new relationships with the Khartoum and other actors in Africa. The Trump administration’s approach to Tehran has been consistent. It will not waste time on talks that offer sanctions relief without seismic changes in the regime’s approach to nuclear, missiles, and regional issues. Gulf Arabs are willing to maintain a strategy of détente but will not consider rapprochement without an end to Qods Force activity in the region. Absent political rapprochement and a belief that capital invested in Iran will not be subject to terrorism or human rights sanctions, foreign investment for Iran will remain impossible.

Last, Iran’s leaders will inevitably recognize that this unrest is unfolding amid several hallmarks of a pre-revolutionary situation: institutional failure, fragmentation among the ruling elites, generational alienation, persistent fiscal crisis, widespread economic suffering, class antagonism, escalating and chronic protests, and the absence of a unifying state narrative. President Pezeshkian recently stated that his country was “in a full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe.” Such rhetoric will play to domestic hardline audiences while reinforcing Iran’s aggressive reputation abroad. During this sensitive period, Iran is unlikely to take actions that would further exacerbate its domestic fragility and instead seeks to gradually test Western red lines while navigating the Islamic Republic through what remains the regime's most sensitive and challenging economic and political period since the 1980s.”

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