The Cipher Brief

Do Oil Sanctions Still Work?

DEEP DIVE — On October 22, 2025, in his boldest move yet to force Vladimir Putin back to the negotiating table, President Trump unleashed sweeping U.S. blocking sanctions on Russia’s energy giants — state-controlled Rosneft and privately held Lukoil, the two companies that pump nearly half of Moscow’s crude exports and bankroll the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.

These aren’t slap-on-the-wrist measures. The designations freeze every asset these firms have in the U.S., ban American companies and citizens from any dealings with them, and put the world’s banks, refiners, and traders on notice: keep helping Rosneft or Lukoil, and you could be next under secondary sanctions.

Putin fired back quickly, branding the move an “unfriendly act” and vowing Russia “won’t bend,” but even he admitted “some losses are expected” as the Kremlin scrambles to shield its oil cash cow.

Markets didn’t wait for the dust to settle: Brent crude rocketed nearly 6 percent in a single day, hitting around $66 a barrel, as traders priced in the chaos. All eyes instantly shifted to the mega-buyers, India and China: would they defy Washington and keep discounted Russian oil flowing?

A month later, the squeeze is tightening: Russian Urals crude now trades at a painful $20 discount to Brent, Indian and some Chinese buyers have hit pause, and Moscow is desperately rerouting through shadowy intermediaries. With the U.S. wind-down window slamming shut on November 21, the big question looms larger than ever.

The sanctions hammer has landed hard — but will it finally cripple Putin’s war machine, or force Russia to get sneakier? And under what conditions do these measures actually bite?

“If you really work on sanctions and make them effective and implement them with rigor and offer a path out, they can be pretty effective. See Iran, South Africa, Libya,” Richard Nephew, a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former U.S. sanctions official who served as the lead sanctions expert in the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear negotiations, tells The Cipher Brief. “If you do them as a way of just getting the press or activists to leave you alone, then they don’t work.”

The Theory of Oil Sanctions: Coercion via Crude

At its core, the rationale for oil sanctions is compelling and straightforward: many authoritarian regimes depend heavily on oil exports for a large share of their state revenue. By targeting the oil sector — blocking key companies, choking off trade, and denying access to Western finance — the goal is to slash those export earnings, intensify economic pain, erode the regime’s ability to fund wars or strategic ambitions, and ultimately force a behavioral change.

This logic has long been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy toward oil-rich adversaries like Iran, Venezuela, and now Russia, precisely because petroleum is both a strategic lifeline and a uniquely vulnerable pressure point. Over the past two decades, the overall use of economic sanctions has exploded, with energy sanctions standing out for their rare ability to deliver simultaneous economic and military leverage.

Yet experts caution that Washington often conflates pain with success.

“The U.S. often thinks about sanctions effectiveness the wrong way,” Rosemary Kelanic, Director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, tells The Cipher Brief. “Effectiveness should be measured in terms of whether sanctions could achieve the desired policy outcomes, not just whether they impose costs.”

For Moscow, she stresses, the stakes are existential.

“Historically speaking, sanctions sometimes convince countries to give in on issues of minor importance, but they practically never compel countries to abandon vital national interests,” Kelanic continued. “For Russia, Ukraine is important enough to fight a long, slogging war over.”

In theory, when tightly enforced and backed by genuine international coordination, these measures can severely restrict foreign-exchange inflows, impose steep costs on rerouting exports, strain domestic budgets, curb military spending, and shift a regime’s calculus. In practice, however, the historical record reveals that outright success is elusive — evasion, adaptation, and incomplete coalitions often blunt the blow.

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Why the Record Is Mixed

Even the toughest oil sanctions can falter without ironclad enforcement. Announcing penalties is easy; making them bite requires global banks, refiners, shippers, and buyers to comply. If Rosneft or Lukoil can still sell through opaque brokers, shadow tankers, or non-dollar deals, much of the intended pain evaporates. Treasury recognized this by explicitly threatening secondary sanctions against any foreign entity that continues to deal with the two giants.

Nephew says that the early signs of real pressure will be visible on shipping patterns.

“The biggest macro indicator will be whether we see prices going up, the semi-glut of oil being tapped, and oil coming off of the water,” he observed. “On a more micro level, if we see that there are additional sanctions being imposed on Russian cut-outs, if we’re seeing ports continuing to deny ships with oil, if we’re seeing indications of pipelines no longer carrying this oil into China. Those are the sorts of things that will be indicative of exports drying up.”

Russia, for one, has proven adept at evasion. After earlier measures, it built a vast “shadow fleet” of aging, untraceable tankers and rerouted most exports to Asia. A recent European Council on Foreign Relations report warns that unless Europe fully aligns — closing asset-divestment loopholes and mirroring U.S. measures — the squeeze will remain partial.

Global oil markets themselves have grown more resilient. The dollar’s once-dominant role has eroded; China, India, and others now buy discounted crude and settle in yuan or rupees. Iran’s exports collapsed under “maximum pressure,” then recovered to over 1.5 million b/d through similar workarounds. Russia has followed the same playbook, shifting nearly all seaborne volumes eastward since 2022.

Nephew points out that none of this is new.

“Smuggling has been a feature of sanctions forever,” he said, highlighting that alternative payment networks may look innovative. Still, countries have long relied on hawala-style systems to dodge banking restrictions. “What makes a difference is the commitment of governments to enforce sanctions and to pay costs to do so.”

Sanctions can also backfire. Disrupting supply often spikes global prices, partially offsetting the loss of volumes for the sanctioned producer. Brent jumped 5 to 6 percent the day Rosneft and Lukoil were hit, temporarily boosting Russia’s per-barrel revenue even as discounts widened.

Finally, pain tolerance matters. Oil and gas still fund roughly 25 to 30 percent of Russia’s federal budget, a heavy blow but not a fatal one. With once-huge reserves still significant, domestic repression to shift burdens to citizens, and eager buyers in Asia, Moscow can endure far longer than many Western policymakers expect. History shows that oil sanctions rarely force rapid capitulation; they inflict damage slowly and decisively only when the target is already economically fragile and internationally isolated. Russia, so far, is neither.

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Making Oil Sanctions Work

Experts emphasize that oil sanctions can be far more effective if the U.S. and its allies act as a unified bloc rather than going it alone. The recent sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil explicitly call on Europe and others to join by banning imports, seizing Russian companies’ assets, and closing loopholes that still allow some countries to buy discounted oil. Without this coordination, Russia reroutes its crude to willing buyers. Experts warn that half-measures create safe havens and sharply reduce the pain—true pressure demands everyone play by the same rules.

A second big fix is plugging the leaks in global shipping and finance. The new U.S. measures take a tougher line by directly threatening secondary sanctions against any bank, refiner, or broker that continues to deal with Rosneft or Lukoil. Better satellite tracking of ships and aggressive follow-through on those threats could choke off the underground routes that have kept Russian oil flowing despite years of sanctions.

Nephew argues that enforcement, not the sanctions themselves, was what made the Iran campaign effective. The BNP Paribas case, which carried massive penalties, showed banks that Washington meant business.

“We imposed really stringent sanctions that threatened a lot of people with ruin if they moved Iranian money,” Nephew recalled. “So long as the U.S. has an important economy, we’ll have some measure of economic power that can be used for sanctions power. We just won’t have as much ability to dictate terms; we’ll have to think about who to target and how. But, as for energy sanctions in general, so long as the world needs energy, denying it is going to carry weight.”

Kelanic also pointed out that the global oil system is more shock-absorbent than many assume.

“There’s plenty of oil that can cushion the market if any supply disruptions occur,” she explained.

That flexibility allows it to sustain pressure for longer without triggering global price spikes.

Third, sanctions work best when the goals are realistic and the timing is right. Asking Moscow to end the war overnight is unlikely to succeed; more achievable aims — like making new weapons harder to buy or keeping revenues low long-term — have a better shot, especially when paired with incentives, such as easing some restrictions for good behavior, and help for ordinary people caught in the crossfire. The global oil market has also changed dramatically: trades now happen in yuan or rupees through non-Western networks, so sanctions must constantly evolve to target those new pathways.

Oil Sanctions in Action: Three Big Examples Compared

The impact of oil sanctions depends heavily on the target’s strength, isolation, and resilience. Three recent cases show how different those outcomes can be.

Iran (2012–today): U.S.-led sanctions crushed Iran’s oil exports from 2.5 million barrels a day down to under 500,000 at their peak. It was excruciating and forced Tehran to the negotiating table for the 2016 nuclear deal. Yet once the pressure eased a bit, Iran bounced back; today it quietly ships 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day, mainly to China, using ghost tankers and creative payment tricks. Analysts underscore that sanctions can deliver massive short-term pain, but determined countries learn to live with them.

Venezuela (2019–today): Sanctions hammered the state oil company, PDVSA, and slashed exports, but Venezuela was already falling apart due to corruption, mismanagement, and hyperinflation. The regime lost a lot of cash yet made almost no real concessions — it just tightened its grip and kept surviving. Experts point out that if a country is already in free fall, additional pressure from sanctions doesn’t force significant political change.

Russia (2022–now, sharpened October 2025): Russia is different. It started with substantial cash reserves, a modern economy, and eager customers in China and India. The new direct sanctions on giants Rosneft and Lukoil are the toughest yet. Still, Russia has spent years building shadow tankers and Asian trade routes. Oil prices are down, and the discount on Russian crude is painful, but Moscow keeps exporting almost as much as before. Thus, when the target is big, rich, and has willing buyers outside the West, sanctions hurt but don’t quickly break the Kremlin.

A Tool Under Strain but Not Broken

Oil sanctions can hurt but they rarely force quick political surrender. Iran showed that sustained pressure can shift behavior, yet Russia and Venezuela demonstrate how resilient or already-collapsing regimes can absorb the pain and adapt. The new U.S. measures against Rosneft and Lukoil are the most challenging test yet of whether this tool can still bite in a more multipolar world.

Their impact ultimately hinges on strict enforcement, coordinated allies, closed loopholes, and whether the target is structurally vulnerable. Yet, if buyers keep finding workarounds and Russia keeps rerouting crude through shadow networks, the sanctions may sting without delivering major strategic change. The coming months will indicate whether oil sanctions remain a credible tool or drift into symbolism.

As Nephew puts it, “No tool works if it is applied halfheartedly, mildly or inconsistently.”

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The Human Algorithm: Why Disinformation Outruns Truth and What It Means for Our Future

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — In recent years, the national conversation about disinformation has often focused on bot networks, foreign operatives, and algorithmic manipulation at industrial scale. Those concerns are valid, and I spent years inside CIA studying them with a level of urgency that matched the stakes. But an equally important story is playing out at the human level. It’s a story that requires us to look more closely at how our own instincts, emotions, and digital habits shape the spread of information.

This story reveals something both sobering and empowering: falsehood moves faster than truth not merely because of the technologies that transmit it, but because of the psychology that receives it. That insight is no longer just the intuition of intelligence officers or behavioral scientists. It is backed by hard data.

In 2018, MIT researchers Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral published a groundbreaking study in Science titled The Spread of True and False News Online. It remains one of the most comprehensive analyses ever conducted on how information travels across social platforms.

The team examined more than 126,000 stories shared by 3 million people over a ten-year period. Their findings were striking. False news traveled farther, faster, and more deeply than true news. In many cases, falsehood reached its first 1,500 viewers six times faster than factual reporting. The most viral false stories routinely reached between 1,000 and 100,000 people, whereas true stories rarely exceeded a thousand.

One of the most important revelations was that humans, not bots, drove the difference. People were more likely to share false news because the content felt fresh, surprising, emotionally charged, or identity-affirming in ways that factual news often does not. That human tendency is becoming a national security concern.

For years, psychologists have studied how novelty, emotion, and identity shape what we pay attention to and what we choose to share. The MIT researchers echoed this in their work, but a broader body of research across behavioral science reinforces the point.

People gravitate toward what feels unexpected. Novel information captures our attention more effectively than familiar facts, which means sensational or fabricated claims often win the first click.

Emotion adds a powerful accelerant. A 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that messages evoking strong moral outrage travel through social networks more rapidly than neutral content. Fear, disgust, anger, and shock create a sense of urgency and a feeling that something must be shared quickly.

And identity plays a subtle, but significant role. Sharing something provocative can signal that we are well informed, particularly vigilant, or aligned with our community’s worldview. This makes falsehoods that flatter identity or affirm preexisting fears particularly powerful.

Taken together, these forces form what some have called the “human algorithm,” meaning a set of cognitive patterns that adversaries have learned to exploit with increasing sophistication.

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During my years leading digital innovation at CIA, we saw adversaries expand their strategy beyond penetrating networks to manipulating the people on those networks. They studied our attention patterns as closely as they once studied our perimeter defenses.

Foreign intelligence services and digital influence operators learned to seed narratives that evoke outrage, stoke division, or create the perception of insider knowledge. They understood that emotion could outpace verification, and that speed alone could make a falsehood feel believable through sheer familiarity.

In the current landscape, AI makes all of this easier and faster. Deepfake video, synthetic personas, and automated content generation allow small teams to produce large volumes of emotionally charged material at unprecedented scale. Recent assessments from Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report document how adversarial state actors (including China, Russia, and Iran) now rely heavily on AI-assisted influence operations designed to deepen polarization, erode trust, and destabilize public confidence in the U.S.

This tactic does not require the audience to believe a false story. Often, it simply aims to leave them unsure of what truth looks like. And that uncertainty itself is a strategic vulnerability.

If misguided emotions can accelerate falsehood, then a thoughtful and well-organized response can help ensure factual information arrives with greater clarity and speed.

One approach involves increasing what communication researchers sometimes call truth velocity, the act of getting accurate information into public circulation quickly, through trusted voices, and with language that resonates rather than lectures. This does not mean replicating the manipulative emotional triggers that fuel disinformation. It means delivering truth in ways that feel human, timely, and relevant.

Another approach involves small, practical interventions that reduce the impulse to share dubious content without thinking. Research by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand has shown that brief accuracy prompts (small moments that ask users to consider whether a headline seems true) meaningfully reduce the spread of false content. Similarly, cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky has demonstrated the value of clear context, careful labeling, and straightforward corrections to counter the powerful pull of emotionally charged misinformation.

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Organizations can also help their teams understand how cognitive blind spots influence their perceptions. When people know how novelty, emotion, and identity shape their reactions, they become less susceptible to stories crafted to exploit those instincts. And when leaders encourage a culture of thoughtful engagement where colleagues pause before sharing, investigate the source, and notice when a story seems designed to provoke, it creates a ripple effect of more sound judgment.

In an environment where information moves at speed, even a brief moment of reflection can slow the spread of a damaging narrative.

A core part of this challenge involves reclaiming the mental space where discernment happens, what I refer to as Mind Sovereignty™. This concept is rooted in a simple practice: notice when a piece of information is trying to provoke an emotional reaction, and give yourself a moment to evaluate it instead.

Mind Sovereignty™ is not about retreating from the world or becoming disengaged. It is about navigating a noisy information ecosystem with clarity and steadiness, even when that ecosystem is designed to pull us off balance. It is about protecting our ability to think clearly before emotion rushes ahead of evidence.

This inner steadiness, in some ways, becomes a public good. It strengthens not just individuals, but the communities, organizations, and democratic systems they inhabit.

In the intelligence world, I always thought that truth was resilient, but it cannot defend itself. It relies on leaders, communicators, technologists, and more broadly, all of us, who choose to treat information with care and intention. Falsehood may enjoy the advantage of speed, but truth gains power through the quality of the minds that carry it.

As we develop new technologies and confront new threats, one question matters more than ever: how do we strengthen the human algorithm so that truth has a fighting chance?

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.

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Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

EXPERT OPINION – The recently leaked 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine is nothing short of an appeasement that satisfies the maximalist demands of the aggressor in the conflict, Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is nothing short of the side on the verge of victory (eg, the free world) conceding to the side on the verge of defeat (Putin, the leader of the anti-west coalition). Sadly, it comes at a time when the situation on the battlefield is more or less a draw, both sides are effectively attacking energy infrastructure, and Russia’s economy is moving toward recession.

According to Russian data, third Quarter GDP growth in Russia was 0.6%. The expectation is that Q4 data will show the beginning of a recession. Sberbank has just decided to let 20% of their workforce go. Russia has for the first time, begun to sell gold reserves, presumably to make up for lost revenue from the recently imposed sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil. Russia’s wartime transition to a command economy is not sustainable with a declining workforce sapped by the loss of young men sacrificed in Ukraine and those who have voted with their feet by leaving Putin’s kleptocracy.

The key points of the 28-point plan amount to nothing less than surrender by Ukraine and make in vain the sacrifices made by their valiant soldiers and citizens in their three plus years of war of full-scale war since Russia’s deadly invasion.

The agreement will be remembered in history with the same ignominy of the Munich Agreement of 1938 and will have the same consequence of setting the stage for a larger war to come.

Perhaps most egregious in the terms of the draft agreement is the re-establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine and the establishment of Russian as the official language. This indignity on top of the kidnapping of hundreds - if not thousands - of Ukrainian children to Russia and the forced conscription into the Russian army of men from Russian occupied territory. Then, of course, there is the massacre of innocent citizens by Russian soldiers in places like Bucha, all of which will go unaccounted for under the draft agreement. No judgement at Nuremberg for Russian war criminals.

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The plan U.S. officials have negotiated is nothing more than cultural genocide against the people of Ukraine. That the U.S. would be part of an agreement that almost certainly would result in the arrest, deportation and incarceration of a generation of brave Ukrainians who have bravely resisted Putin’s aggression is simply unthinkable.

Mr. Trump, every member of your national security team should be required to watch episode nine of the brilliant HBO series Band of Brothers. The episode’s title is “Why We Fight” and the reasons for standing up to autocracy and evil portrayed in that episode are perfectly applicable to the situation today with the free world standing strong against the aggression of a malevolent dictator.

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. The men who reportedly negotiated the key points of the agreement have no experience dealing with Russia or Russians of the KGB ilk. The promises of “peace” offered by the Russian side are a chimera at best. Putin and the gang of thieves in his government know perfectly well how to manipulate representatives of the character of Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s real estate specialist now in charge of negotiating with Russia over Ukraine. Perhaps those negotiators are working with the idea of “Commander’s intent” that the President believes an agreement can be reached and counted upon with a counter-party like Putin. This is a serious misjudgment with serious consequences.

Those who have studied Putin for decades, understand clearly that he wants nothing but the destruction of the United States, our system of government and the set of ideals for which we stand. This is core to his beliefs. Putin and his security services will do everything they can to undermine the United States. One should not be surprised if the Russian services do not use every opportunity in the context of the Epstein revelations to attack every angle of the political spectrum in the U.S. that they can, including President Trump.

President Trump is now facing the most significant foreign and national security moment of his presidency. It appears the representatives he has chosen to negotiate with the Russian side have left him in a position to be remembered forever in history as the Chamberlain of the 21st century. Mr. Trump would do well to recognize that history does not remember Neville Chamberlain for any achievements in his political career in economic or domestic policy in Great Britain. He is remembered solely for Munich and "peace in our time". Mr. Trump is setting himself up to be remembered by history similarly. Sadly, it could also be the legacy of the country that was once the pillar of strength of the free world.

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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I Was Cheney's CIA Briefer: This is the Dick Cheney I Knew

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — About a week before being interviewed by Richard Bruce Cheney about whether I would be the right person to serve as his national security briefer, I broke a bone in my left foot. While bounding down the stairs at home in a rush not to be late to a meeting at the National Security Council, I missed a step. So, rather than spending the morning at The White House, I spent it at a doctor’s office getting a big, goofy, purple cast on my left leg. Fantastic. How better to exude to the Vice President of the United States that I would be competent as his President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer, than hobbling into the interview with a cast? Somehow, I got the job.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the President and Vice President’s PDB briefers met and traveled with them six days a week, sometimes seven. We would awaken every morning around 1:00am to prepare what is known as the “Book” and accompanying material. The Book was the President’s Daily Brief itself, a brutally concise, relatively short collection of intelligence analyses produced at that time, by just the CIA; it went to a short list of designated policymakers. All who received it also got morning briefers to accompany and expand on the content as needed and to take taskings, but only those for the President and Vice President routinely traveled with them. In addition to the PDB, there was “behind-the-tab” material for all recipients except the President. In Cheney’s case, I decided—with zero supervision or coordination—what he also needed to see, per my judgement. Raw intel, press pieces, book summaries, graphics, and anything else that I thought could be useful.

I generally briefed the then-Vice President at the Naval Observatory, the official residence for U.S. vice presidents. But just a week into the job, I accompanied him on Marine Two to Camp David, where he would attend some meetings. Thus began a rapid, daily learning curve into who this man was - starting with how he treated others.

“Others” fell generally into two categories with little gray area between—those he respected and those he did not. People in both categories usually knew where they stood, and Cheney didn’t manifest different orientations toward people based on their societal stations in life. This was a man whose default setting was to show courtesy and respect toward others unless they convinced him otherwise. Every one of his ushers, central members of the residence staff, told me individually - with zero nudging from me - that they liked the Cheneys much more than they liked their predecessors. Why, I asked. Because the Cheneys always showed respect to them, their time demands, they told me. As for those in the other category? Many of us recall Cheney telling Senator Patrick Leahy to “go f*** yourself” on the Senate floor in 2004. He also bluntly expressed his opinions on a wide range of actors and even nations to me during our time together. Few if any fell into gray area.

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Cheney consistently hosted the longest of the PDB sessions across all PDB recipients of that Administration, a reflection of his intellectual curiosity, the endless stacks of books and other things he read, his many years of navigating the U.S. Government and geopolitics, and the fact that on most mornings, he went from his briefings with me to attending PDB sessions with his boss. I always had at least 30 minutes with him, and on mornings when events or travel altered the President’s schedule, my sessions could stretch beyond 90 minutes.

Something that was reflected in his time commitment to those PDB sessions was that, among being many things, Dick Cheney was an overachiever of the world-class order. Whatever task, duty, mission, strategic pursuit that might be in his cross hairs, he would be utterly prepared. This part of him of course helped land his stint as the youngest White House Chief of Staff in history, under President Gerald Ford.

Much has been written about Cheney’s role and actions in the immediate wake of 9-11; I came after, during the run up to and consequences following America’s second invasion of Iraq. Because of when I briefed him and the job I took immediately afterward in July 2003 - Chief of CIA’s Iraq enterprise covering military, political, leadership, and economic analysis - I draw from a unique combination of perspectives to offer context on the Iraq, Dick Cheney story. Some will be surprised by what I saw including during NSC meetings chaired by President Bush and attended by Cheney when I sat in as the 'plus-one' for the CIA Director or for the Director of National Intelligence.

On March 16, 2002, Dick Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators . . . I think it [the invasion] will go relatively quickly . . . weeks rather than months.” As we now know, he - and other seniors in the Bush Administration - could not have been more wrong.

Not long after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003, violence there began to swell up, and soon thereafter the CIA enterprise I headed gave President Bush and Cheney - their first and highly unwelcome dose of the “I” word: insurgency. Early on, Bush and other Administration seniors explained the sources of the violence as “criminals, regime dead-enders, or trouble-makers” pushed into the country by Iraq and Syria as operatives. But in the summer of 2003, we put a PDB into the Oval Office arguing that an organized and indigenous insurgency was quickly developing. Feedback from Bush’s PDB briefer that morning was “The President was so angry he came off his chair. He wants a memo tomorrow morning recounting when we warned him this was coming.” A lot people worked overnight to produce that 4.5-page piece, which delivered what was asked.

At some point between that initial shock and late summer, fall of 2003, Cheney - whom we had briefed in more detail on the insurgency, told us “The President needs to hear this.” Consider that one of the Administration’s most vocal and influential advocates of invading Iraq, who had been on record saying the effort would be easy and short, had now turned to persuading Bush and his entire NSC that we faced an insurgency in Iraq. Cheney knew that this information, once it entered the public arena, would likely get himself as well as President Bush eviscerated by the media and by critics. But that seemed to matter little to him; the United States was underestimating what it was now facing in Iraq, and Cheney’s focus became aligning policy with reality.

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A few days before Veterans Day in 2003, someone in the CIA Director’s office told me there would be a briefing that day for Bush’s NSC on Iraq that I would lead. Cheney had facilitated this. I also was told I could take one analyst of my choice, but I knew some on the NSC would push back hard and would expect "in the weeds" details of our analysis, so I subbed myself out and sent two senior analysts who knew the weeds - a superlative military expert and a political-analyst counterpart.

It was a PhD and former Marine CIA military analyst in my Iraq enterprise who forced then Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and others to accept that an insurgency was emerging in Iraq. The analyst’s most persuasive moment came when Rumsfeld argued forcefully that there were several and differing definitions of insurgency, making use of the word confusing at best and inaccurate at worst. That military analyst calmly but firmly summarized the two most widely accepted definitions and illustrated that the CIA’s conclusion was based on the one observed by Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. The analyst also laid out premises needed to justify that definition, all of which all in the room were seeing. Bush declared acceptance, noted that NSC members had to be square with this reality among themselves, and requested all to avoid the word insurgency in public.

Let me close with an insight that sheds light on Cheney’s near obsession with going into Iraq to find WMD and then showing a level of comfort with enhanced interrogation techniques that many find appalling.

One morning after a PDB briefing with me, Cheney sat back and recounted some history following the Gulf War, during which he was Secretary of Defense. He reminded me with some energy that during interrogations of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who defected temporarily, we learned that Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program was further along than we had assessed. Rather than a form of scolding for off-the-mark CIA analysis back then, this perspective he was sharing signaled an acknowledgement that I knew the weight of his role in persuading Bush ’43 to invade Iraq—and in his mind, he had good reason. If we were underestimating Saddam’s WMD program again and Osama bin Laden gained access to any part of it, the consequences for Americans would be catastrophic.

The Economist Magazine recently summarized the unwavering sense of duty to nation felt by Cheney. In the closing words of its obituary in reference to criticism about his posture toward countering terrorism, and on being wrong about WMD in Iraq, The Economist wrote: “He was unmoved . . . He was, as always, just doing his job. Trying to protect America.”

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.

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How Myanmar’s Generals Crushed Democracy — And What Comes Next

OPINION — After decades of military rule in Myanmar, free and fair general elections were permitted in 2015 and the National League for Democracy and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, won by a landslide. In February 2021, a military coup d’etat installed General Min Aung Hlaing as the acting president, and imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto head of state and recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in Myanmar.

The military coup has brought death and suffering to the people of Myanmar. Recent figures from the United Nations estimate that over 6,000 civilians have been killed by the military, including over 1,000 women and 695 children. According to the United Nations, over 62% of verified civilian deaths result from airstrikes and artillery barrages by the military. And more than 3.5 million people have been displaced within Myanmar since the military coup, with hundreds of thousands more seeking refuge in neighboring countries.

Anti-coup resistance forces are active in Myanmar, to include the People’s Defense Forces and ethnic armed organizations. The National Unity Government, an exiled government of elected politicians who were ousted in the coup, provides leadership, funding and support to the various resistance groups that often coordinate activities to fight the military junta, to restore democracy to Myanmar.

According to the United Nations, since the February 2021 coup, the military junta has imported over $1 billion in weapons, raw materials, and dual-use goods from several countries, with Russia and China topping the list of suppliers. Russia’s state arms exporter, Rosoboronexorrt, was instrumental in providing the military junta with over $400 million of weaponry: attack helicopters, fighter jets, missiles, drones, and radar systems. And for the world to see, there were joint naval exercises between Russia and Myanmar’s military junta.

China has resumed normal relations with the military junta and its various ministries, in addition to providing Chinese Y-8 transport planes. China is quite open about its political engagement with the military junta and, working with Russia, resists United Nations efforts to condemn the junta.

What has been disappointing is the inability of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to influence Myanmar’s military junta and restore democracy to Myanmar. Indeed, in April 2021 ASEAN adopted a “Five-Point Consensus” to stop the violence, initiate a dialogue and appoint a special envoy to oversee progress in restoring democracy in Myanmar. The military junta has basically ignored ASEAN and the five-point consensus, despite ASEAN’s engagement with the military junta, thus providing legitimacy with a regime committing grave abuses.

Malaysia, as the 2025 ASEAN Chair, has been proactive in pushing for a ceasefire and meaningful dialogue with resistance forces. Indonesia has been supportive and hopefully other ASEAN members will be equally supportive of a cease fire and dialogue with multiple ethnic armed organizations, to include the National Unity Government and the People’s Defense Forces.

The military junta announced phased elections in December 2025 through January 2026. There is understandable concern that this will be a sham election, designed to legitimize the military junta and its leader, General Min Aung Hlaing.

The United Nations, ASEAN and the U.S. should demand that they be permitted to send election monitors to Myanmar to certify that the election was fair and open to all the people.

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

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Russia’s Intelligence Services After the War

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Russia’s intelligence services (RIS) have failed spectacularly in Ukraine: in planning, execution, and analysis, yet they will face no reckoning. Vladimir Putin cannot afford to hold the SVR, GRU, or FSB accountable because they are not merely instruments of the state; they are the pillars of his personal power. The RIS misled the Kremlin into believing Ukraine would fall in days, Europe would divide, and NATO would hesitate. Instead, they exposed the rot at the core of Russia’s national security system: corruption, internecine rivalry, and a profound detachment from reality. Understanding this dynamic matters for the West because it reveals not only how Russia fights its wars but how it fails, and how it will likely fight again.

As the war approaches its fourth year, the front lines have grown static, and speculation about an eventual end has returned. Certainly, the world hopes for peace and relief from the suffering that has defined Europe’s largest land conflict since 1945. Yet even when the drones stop flying, Ukraine’s struggle to rebuild will begin, and within the Russian government another kind of reckoning will unfold. The aggressor’s armed forces and intelligence services will take stock of losses and lessons learned. But unlike in the West, where failure invites inquiry and reform, Russia’s services are more likely to protect the system that failed them and pin any blame on each other.

Russian post-war accounting will not play out like we in the West might imagine. We are accustomed to commissions and legislative investigations after wars and major national security events, often resulting in harsh criticism for various agencies, and sweeping reforms. In Russia, however, Putin will largely give the RIS a pass.

To understand why, it is important to understand the roles the RIS played in the war and in the Russian government more broadly. The SVR (the Foreign Intelligence Service), the GRU (the Main Intelligence Directorate - military intelligence), and the FSB (the Federal Security Service), serve first and foremost as Putin’s Praetorian Guard. Their primary responsibility is securing his regime and hold on power. Moreover, Putin rose up through the RIS ranks in the KGB, and later held the post of FSB Director. His feelings toward the RIS are hardly objective. The reputations of Putin and the services are inextricably linked. Anything that significantly tarnishes the highly cultivated myth of RIS omnipotence inevitably damages his own hold on power.

If Putin and the “siloviki” (strongmen) who make up his inner circle try to call the RIS to account for their performance when the fighting stops, the one thing all three services will argue is that the war was an absolute success. Each will extoll their roles with little regard for the number of Russian lives lost and military assets squandered. Going back to Tsarist and Soviet times, casualties and human suffering were never a mark for a war’s success or failure in Russia. The RIS will focus on territory gained, Ukraine’s membership in NATO being halted (from their optic), and the alliance, they will claim, weakened. They will ignore the addition of two capable new members to the alliance (Finland and Sweden), the doubling of the length of NATO’s border with Russia, and the resuscitation of NATO’s military spending and defense industrial base. Facts will not stop the RIS from claiming success with Putin. But it is useful to further break down some of their likely claims, and actual performance, by service.

The SVR: “Speak up Sergey!”

Among the RIS, and especially relative to the FSB, Putin has never been particularly fond of the foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Its claims of success on Ukraine will likely not impress him or the other siloviki much. Recall Putin’s public dressing down of SVR Director Sergey Naryshkin on Russian TV in the days before the invasion for indecisiveness: “Come on Sergey, speak up, speak plainly!” But Sergey did not speak up, nor make much of a difference in the war.

Since they do not have troops or special ops elements in the war (their main Spec-Ops team, ZASLON, is used more for protection abroad), the SVR will likely try to boast of the success of its “active measures” operations. This is the traditional term the Russians have used for covert influence and disinformation activities intended to weaken, confuse, or disrupt their adversaries. Their modern term, however, is to refer to them as “measures of support” (MS). The SVR has an entire “Directorate MS” devoted to this line of operational work: using troll farms, social media, cyber operations, and recruited agents of influence to meddle in the internal politics, public opinion, and elite decision-making of its adversaries to Russia’s advantage. The Russians believe their active measures contributed to their successes in the Georgia invasion in 2008 and occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014. They believed they confused and stunted the West’s response and, to a degree, they were right.

But the SVR will have trouble claiming active measures succeeded in the current Ukraine war. They will perhaps try to sell Putin that the SVR sowed confusion at critical policy decision points when the U.S. and its European allies were not always in sync—hesitation in providing this or that weapons system, unity or lack thereof at times on sanctions, asset seizures, etc. Their efforts, however, did not materially alter Russia’s failure to achieve its war aims. If they were effective at all, it was only in the margins. There will be no dramatic accounting for the SVR but expect to see the SVR’s relative influence decline among the RIS, a continuation of trend since Putin’s rise to power.

GRU: Plowed into the Grinder, and Re-Special Purposed

The GRU will likely point to the various sabotage acts, conducted in Europe after the invasion, some successful but most not, including exploding packages, industrial arson, cable cuts in the Baltic Sea, and assassinations, or attempts at them. These are the purview of the GRU and its various numbered units, such as Unit 29155, which was behind both the attempted assassination of GRU defector Sergey Skripal in the UK in 2018, and likely also the thwarted assassination plot against the CEO of Germany’s Rheinmetall in 2024. The Lithuanian government is convinced the GRU also was behind the crash of a DHL plane that same year. But these actions failed in their primary mission, to intimidate and deter Europe and NATO from assisting Ukraine. If anything, the actions have only emboldened members to continue support for Ukraine.

Another shocking GRU failure, one heavily criticized in Russia’s pro-war blogosphere but receiving less attention in the West, was its squandering of precious, highly trained Spetsnaz units on the Ukrainian battlefield. There are nine Spetsnaz, or “Special Purpose,” brigades under the GRU’s 14th Directorate (roughly analogous to Tier 1 elements in the U.S. SOCOM). Nearly all were heavily deployed in Ukraine, and all suffered extremely heavy casualties. The planned decapitation strike against the Ukrainian leadership in the first days of the war, spearheaded by Spetsnaz units, was a complete and costly failure (the failed seizure of Hostomel airport was part of this). Many Spetsnaz were also used foolishly in frontal assaults and to plug gaps in forward lines when Russian “kontraktniki” (paid soldiers, but often supplemented in frontline units with conscripts) failed. GRU Spetsnaz have a storied history and culture. It will be hard for them to recover the reputation for being “elite” without notable successes to point to in Ukraine. They failed to impact the direction of the war in any significant way.

As with the SVR, the GRU will likely avoid any dramatic negative consequences. There will probably be some modest reorganizations, just as there have been since the collapse of the USSR. In fact, the GRU is technically not even called the GRU any longer. It was formally redesignated the “GU” (Main Directorate), although many stubborn officers still refer to themselves as “GRU-chniki.” One reorganization has already occurred since the war began, the standup of something called the Department for Special Tasks (SSD). Its function and exact composition are still not fully known, but it appears to combine various Russian-termed “direct actions” (e.g., assassinations, sabotage) units, such as Unit 29155, into a unified structure. The SSD is broadly equivalent to the CIA’s Special Activities Center in terms of covert action, but dwarfs it in size (and the CIA is bound by law not to carry out assassinations). The GRU is a mammoth bureaucracy and it will likely only grow more after the war.

FSB: Failed, But Still Putin’s Favorite

Despite their many failures, there will be few significant negative consequences for the FSB, which Putin once ran. In many ways, though, the FSB’s shortcomings in Ukraine were the most egregious and consequential. The FSB was in charge of the war’s planning, particularly the hybrid dimensions, or what Russian doctrine refers to more broadly as “non-contact war.” The FSB's lead for the Ukraine invasion was its Fifth Service, which heads up both operational analysis and reporting to the President on the war. The FSB has organizational primacy for RIS operations in the “near abroad,” i.e., the states of the former USSR, including Ukraine. In the pre-war planning phase, the Fifth Service was wrong about everything: wrong about Ukrainian resilience, wrong about how quickly and substantially Europe and NATO would react, and wrong about the FSB and Russian Armed Forces’ capabilities on the ground.

FSB Spetsnaz units Alpha and Vympel all participated in the war, but like their GRU cousins, they have not distinguished themselves. Still they are still frequently lauded in the Russian press for “actions that cannot be disclosed.” The FSB also has the lead for cyber operations against Ukraine with its 16th Center, but those cyber-attacks have not materially altered the direction of the war in Russia’s favor. The battle over bytes was not won in any way by Russian FSB hackers, whose ranks were bolstered by Russian criminal groups hacking for the state and their coffers.

The FSB will likely be the RIS agency most affected by the war. But instead of accountability for failure, its power and influence will likely only grow. First, because of all the services, the FSB, in its secret police role, is the critical player in securing Putin’s rule. In the bureaucratic pecking order, the FSB sits at the very top and will remain there. FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov holds the military rank of full General, and he is treated as such by Russian military generals, despite never having served in the military. Second, if there is a formal investigation or after-action when the fighting stops, the FSB will lead it, just as it did in the investigations of the 2002 Nord-Ost theater terrorist attack, the 2004 school seizure in Beslan, and the more recent Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in 2024, each of which involved breathtaking intelligence and operational failures, but did not have significant negative repercussions for the FSB. The FSB pretends to clean up after it performs incompetently.

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In conclusion, the one thing the West can count on is that the Russian services will continue to relentlessly compete with and back-stab one another. There is no “intelligence community” in Russia remotely similar to the one we have in the United States. The rivalries within our community pale in comparison. This presents opportunities to recruit personnel from all the RIS services, many of whom will have lost colleagues in the war for a cause and for leaders whose competence an increasing number of them will come to doubt. This and the pervasive corruption in Russia are still strong incentives for espionage against those who have led Russia down this disastrous path.

The RIS will not prevent another war for Russia; if anything, they will foment one. Before they do, the US and our allies must understand these failures, but also, and critically, the Russian services’ likely self-evaluation and the lessons they themselves will draw, or fail to draw, from those lessons. When the current war ends, Putin may plan another intervention or aggression--in Europe, again in Ukraine, or elsewhere. Before he does, we need to be ready to counter the next iteration of the FSB, GRU, and SVR tactics to encourage and support war. We can better do so by studying their playbook and some of their attempted actions, and dramatic failures.

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The Downside to Mission Focus: Why the Intelligence Community Should Not Forget to Look Inward

OPINION — Not long ago, I was talking to an old friend and China analyst about the need for Intelligence Community (IC) analysts to spend significantly more time looking at themselves and their own agencies, processes, procedures, habits, biases, etc.—in other words, to be more introspective. I thought this an uncontroversial assertion as it has been well established in management literature that healthy organizations have robust introspective proclivities. But his response proved me wrong: “Do you have any idea what my read pile looks like? I have no time for navel-gazing.”

The above comment beautifully captures not only the IC’s aversion to introspection but also what is probably the main reason for that aversion—our “mission focus.” In fact, for most of us “mission, mission, mission” becomes a mantra from the day we take our oaths. But that admirable mission focus also comes with a very real downside: we tend to see introspection as a distraction from the mission rather than as a prerequisite to mission success. Add to that another compelling reason for our aversion—our historical and cultural wariness about looking at “blue” (U.S.-related) issues—and the roots of our introspective deficiencies quickly become evident.

That said, our aversion to introspection might well be disputed by some observers. After all, most of us take multiple personality assessments (e.g., Myers Briggs, DISC, etc.) during the course of our service. Additionally, we do have many of the trappings of an introspective community: organizations (e.g., National Intelligence University, Center for the Study of Intelligence, etc.), personnel (e.g., methodologists, tradecraft specialists, historians, etc.), and publications (e.g., NIU’s Research Notes, Shorts and Monographs; CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, etc.) that are specifically dedicated to thinking about the practice of intelligence. Why, then, do I posit that we are not sufficiently introspective?

Well, relative to the IC’s size, the aforementioned trappings are, by any measure, tiny. Moreover, although a sub-community of extraordinarily introspective officers exists, the majority of them are at their most introspective when—and because—they are not working on the line. As part of my research, I talk to many intelligence officers, especially line analysts. And in doing so I never fail to be amazed at how few seem to view routine introspective activities as vital to high performance. Sure, they see value in the occasional class, tradecraft-focused article, or ticking off the boxes on an Intelligence Community Directive 203 (Analytic Standards) checklist. But as a systematic, thorough, and routine activity? Not so much.

Given this, the IC needs to fundamentally reassess its whole conception of introspection. No longer can it be sufficient to expect introspective initiatives to be carried out mostly by non-line or support entities, although their foundational introspective efforts will remain vital supports to mission. Rather, on top of that foundational work, the IC must start building introspective activity into the regular routines of officers actively and directly working on the mission. Just as practicing doctors and lawyers are required (at least on paper) to engage in self-assessment—”reflective practice”—even as they confront ever-increasing numbers of patients and caseloads, intelligence practitioners too must consciously invest time and thought in regularly reflecting on how we conduct our work and ways in which we could better achieve our mission.

There is no set form this reflective practice must take. It could be conducted in a group, individual and/or hybrid format. The only aspects that are non-negotiable are that it be regular, resourced (particularly with regard to time), and required.

Ultimately, and as mentioned at the outset, healthy organizations have strong introspective tendencies. It is crucial then, that the IC reconceives and incentivizes introspection as a fundamental prerequisite to mission success and not the distraction or “navel gazing” it too often is deemed to be.

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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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The Two-Front Nuclear Challenge: Iran, North Korea, and a New Era of U.S. Deterrence

DEEP DIVE — While Washington is focused on Iran’s accelerating uranium-enrichment program and increasingly aggressive regional posture, an equally consequential shift is unfolding with seemingly less fanfare: North Korea’s rapid nuclear and missile advancements are quietly reshaping the global threat landscape.

For U.S. policymakers, the danger is no longer a pair of isolated challenges but a converging two-front nuclear problem—one that threatens to push America’s deterrence posture, crisis-management capacity, and alliance coordination closer to a breaking point. To understand how these two fronts could interact, experts emphasize that Iran and North Korea share a long-standing strategic alignment.

“The Iran–North alliance represents a four-decade-long partnership driven by shared hostility toward the United States, economic needs, and strategic isolation,” Danny Citrinowicz, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and former head of the Iran Branch in the Research and Analysis Division (RAD) in Israeli defense intelligence, tells The Cipher Brief. “The Iranians need to rearm and prepare for another campaign, which requires additional and fresh thinking regarding the depth of the relationship between Tehran and Pyongyang.”

He also warns that this moment may become an inflection point.

“If Iran seeks to change its nuclear strategy, it could ask North Korea for nuclear bombs or highly enriched material or spare parts for the destroyed nuclear facilities, such as the conversion facility in Isfahan,” Citrinowicz continued. “The potential damage in the event of such an event is so severe that it is essential that the intelligence organizations of the United States, South Korea, and Israel identify signs of this.”

Pyongyang’s Nuclear Threat

Despite UN sanctions and diplomatic efforts, a recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) brief underscored that North Korea continues to surge forward with both nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile development. For Kim Jong Un, analysts note, nuclear weapons are a guarantor of regime security, and he has no intention of abandoning them.

North Korea’s nuclear doctrine and capability sets are evolving in troubling ways. The 2025 CRS brief states that a September 2023 law expanded the conditions under which Pyongyang would employ nuclear weapons, lowering what had been a high threshold for use. The same report noted the regime “promised to boost nuclear weapons production exponentially and diversify nuclear strike options.”

On the delivery side, the brief outlines how North Korea is fielding solid-fueled road-mobile ICBMs, sea-based launch systems, and pursuing multiple warheads on a single missile — all elements that raise the question not just of deterrence but of crisis stability and escalation control. In short, Pyongyang appears to be reaching toward a survivable deterrent — or perhaps a warfighting capability — that can impose calculations on the U.S. and its allies in a far more challenging way than before.

“Kim’s investment in new nuclear-capable delivery systems reflects the strategic importance of the country’s nuclear arsenal,” Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association, tells The Cipher Brief. “North Korea is better positioning itself to evade and overwhelm regional missile defenses and target the U.S. homeland.”

Treston Wheat, chief geopolitical officer at Insight Forward, reinforces that intelligence picture, stressing that open-source assessments now “frame North Korea as a maturing nuclear-warfighting state,” with doctrine “trending toward first-use options in extreme regime-threat scenarios.” He notes that U.S. intelligence already evaluates Pyongyang as having achieved miniaturization: “A 2017 DIA assessment judged DPRK miniaturization sufficient for SRBM-to-ICBM delivery.”

Taken together, those capabilities point to a shifting threat environment for Washington.

“North Korea has tested missiles with the range necessary to target the continental United States,” Davenport underscored. “U.S. military planners have to assume that North Korea can target the United States.”

Iran’s Nuclear Surge

Meanwhile, Iran is not standing still. Tehran has begun openly emulating aspects of Pyongyang’s nuclear playbook, indicating that if Western strikes against Iranian nuclear infrastructure forced Tehran to go underground, it could adapt quickly. That duality matters: Iran can arguably deploy its program overtly, under inspection and diplomatic cover, but at some threshold, it may decide the only path to survival is accelerated weaponization. If that happens while North Korea is already pushing new strategic capabilities, the U.S. is confronted with two simultaneous flashpoints — one in the Middle East, the other in Northeast Asia.

Deterrence, by definition, demands clarity of purpose, credible capabilities, and correctly calibrated signals. When the U.S. must manage a nuclear-armed North Korea and a near-breakout Iran at the same time, the risk is that strategic bandwidth becomes overstretched.

“Despite the failure of that approach, Iran maintains that its nuclear doctrine is unchanged and it does not intend to pursue nuclear weapons,” Davenport noted. “(But) without a pragmatic diplomatic approach that addresses Iranian economic and security concerns, Tehran’s thinking about nuclear weapons could shift.”

That potential shift in Tehran’s calculus becomes even more concerning when paired with broader warnings about Western inattention.

“If Western focus on the Iran threat dwindles, there is a risk the regime could take a new, covert path to nuclear weapons using remaining or reconstituted assets or foreign help,” Andrea Stricker, Deputy Director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells The Cipher Brief. “Such a lack of focus is similar to how North Korea became nuclear-armed.”

Tehran, experts caution, still retains deep technical capacity.

“Iran retained enough fissile stock and technical expertise to rebuild quickly, meaning the setback was tactical rather than strategic,” Wheat noted.

From Washington’s vantage point, the real danger is a dual crisis hitting at once — an Iranian enrichment surge or strike on its facilities in West Asia, paired with a North Korean missile volley or nuclear test in East Asia. That scenario forces the U.S. into parallel decision-cycles, stretching military, diplomatic, and intelligence resources, straining alliances, and creating openings that adversaries could exploit.

North Korea’s expanding warfighting delivery systems add another layer of risk: limited, precision escalation meant to test U.S. resolve. As the CRS notes, its ballistic-missile testing is designed to evade U.S. and regional defenses, putting American and allied forces at heightened risk. In effect, Pyongyang is developing not only a survivable deterrent but potential coercive leverage — just as Iran’s enrichment trajectory edges closer to a threshold that could trigger a U.S.-led military response.

“The possibility of Pyongyang providing nuclear assistance to Tehran is increasing,” Citrinowicz said. “The United States will need to focus its intelligence on this possibility, with the help of its allies who are monitoring developments.”

But that intelligence challenge intersects with another problem: mounting questions about U.S. credibility.

“President Trump has dealt a serious blow to U.S. credibility in both theaters,” Davenport asserted. “This risks adversaries attempting to exploit the credibility deficit to shift the security environment in their favor.”

U.S. Intelligence and Strategic Implications

Open-source intelligence paints a worrying picture: North Korea may have enough fissile material for perhaps up to 50 warheads, though the accuracy and reliability of delivery remain questions. It also signals Pyongyang’s development of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and multiple-warhead ICBMs. The regime has restored its nuclear test site and is now postured to conduct a seventh nuclear test at a time of its choosing.

The IAEA’s November 2025 report says it can no longer verify the status of Iran’s near–near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile after Tehran halted cooperation following the June 2025 Israeli and U.S. strikes on Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan.

The last confirmed data, from September, showed Iran holding 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent — a short step from weapons-grade and potentially enough for up to 10 bombs if fully processed. IAEA chief Rafael Grossi says most of this material is now entombed in damaged facilities. Moreover, satellite imagery activity around storage tunnels in Isfahan has raised serious red flags. The IAEA further cautions that oversight of this highly-enriched uranium site is “long overdue,” warning that the agency has lost “continuity of knowledge.”

Moreover, before the strikes, the IAEA assessed Iran could produce enough weapons-grade material for one bomb in about a week using part of its 60 percent stockpile at Fordow. Damage to centrifuges has likely slowed that timeline. Still, the larger question is political: whether Iran, under renewed UN sanctions and scrutiny, decides that staying within NPT safeguards costs more than openly moving toward a weapon, particularly if work resumes at undeclared or rebuilt sites.

“The U.S. and Israeli strikes have created a window of respite. What happens next depends greatly on Iran’s will to provoke new Israeli strikes,” Stricker said. “North Korea is a wild card and could provide nuclear fuel, facilities, and equipment to Iran.”

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Looking Ahead

For Washington, the takeaway is stark: systems designed to manage one nuclear threat at a time may crumble should two crises flare simultaneously. The U.S. would need tighter allied coordination, faster intelligence sharing, and stronger, more flexible military deployments to cope.

Yet above all, policymakers must anticipate the possibility of simultaneous escalation in different theatres.

In the coming months and years, key indicators will include North Korea’s choice to conduct a seventh nuclear test or field a credible submarine-launched nuclear force, and Iran’s enrichment trajectory or decision to strike a covert breakout path. The U.S. must also watch for signs of cross-coordination between Moscow and Pyongyang, or between Tehran and Pyongyang — though open links remain murky.

From a policy perspective, a dual-front scenario demands updated wargames, an inter-theatre force posture review, and close allied coordination across NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and Middle East partners. Washington must also guard against the “umbrella illusion” — the belief that the same deterrence logic will apply unchanged across two theatres facing two distinct adversaries with differing doctrine, capabilities, and thresholds.

Finally, media and public attention naturally tend to focus on Iran’s progress or North Korea’s missile launches — one at a time. However, deterring two simultaneous nuclear-adversary theatres demands strategic awareness that the world may not be sequentially configured. For the U.S., what happens in one theatre may shape adversary calculations in the other. The risk is that by the time Washington pivots from Iran, Pyongyang — or Tehran — may have forced a new reality.

In this two-front nuclear dilemma, the question is no longer whether to monitor Iran or North Korea, but how the U.S. will deter both at the same time — and whether its strategic framework is ready for that challenge.

Emerging forms of collaboration amplify that challenge.

“More concerning is that North Korea is positioning itself to benefit from Russian expertise and to further refine its missile systems using data collected from Russia’s use of North Korean systems against Ukraine,” Davenport added.

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What to Watch for in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Visit to Washington

EXPERT INTERVIEW — President Trump is welcoming Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House today with an announcement that he plans to approve the sale of F-35 fighter jets to the Kingdom, signaling a policy shift by the U.S. Administration.

The visit to Washington marks one of the most consequential moments in decades for the U.S.–Saudi relationship. Both governments see the meeting as a chance to cement the expansion of the U.S.-Saudi partnership from one focused on energy and security to include advanced technology, AI, critical minerals and defense cooperation.

The trip follows President Donald Trump’s high-profile visit to Saudi Arabia in May, when both countries announced a multibillion-dollar deal that could potentially give Riyadh access to advanced U.S. AI technology. While sources tell The Cipher Brief that many of the details of those deals remain in various stages of negotiation, the Crown Prince’s Washington visit aims to build off of that momentum.

More widely, the visit comes at the end of a year of rapid geopolitical and technological change for the Middle East. Through these shifts, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf leaders like the United Arab Emirates are positioning themselves as centers for AI infrastructure, diversified cheap energy, and global supply chains.

To help unpack the stakes and expectations behind the Crown Prince’s Washington visit, The Cipher Brief spoke with Norm Roule, who spent more than 34 years in the Intelligence Community and has been following regional developments for 43 years - including his time as a business consultant. Roule is in frequent contact with Gulf leaders on energy, security, finance and technology issues and travels frequently to the region. Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly began by asking Roule to summarize the expectations going into this visit. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

THE INTERVIEW

Roule: The visit of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to Washington will likely represent a transformational moment in Saudi-American relations that will stand out among the most important events in the 80-year relationship between the two countries. Each side will likely seek to use this visit to change the traditional relationship from one of oil and security to one that is more of a blend of advanced technology, mining, and energy, which includes nuclear, and defense.

Each side now sees the other as an indispensable partner and views this visit as a way of establishing an architecture that will ensure that periodic political difficulties don't destabilize a critical relationship that needs to last decades. The Saudis seek this more predictable relationship and assets that will allow them to accelerate their evolution toward becoming a global power center.

Washington seeks to revitalize and cement ties with a rising middle power that will certainly have considerably more influence in the Middle East and the Global South and will become an important link in the global energy and supply chain. Regional issues will be discussed during the visit, but I don't think it's likely we're going to see significant shifts outside of the ongoing trends.

Kelly: This visit, of course, does follow the visit by President Trump to Saudi Arabia in May of this year where some signficant deals were announced with regard to technology sharing and investment opportunities.

Roule: That is correct. In essence, what you're looking at is the other side of the coin from those visits. President Trump and a team of unprecedented stature of American cabinet members and highly consequential American business leaders traveled to the Kingdom and concluded a vast array of business deals over the months since that time. American diplomats and business leaders have met to finalize and further expand upon those deals. And now we're looking at a meeting that will, in essence, conclude those agreements or take them to the next stage of developing memorandums of understanding. These are very complicated agreements that in and of themselves will take months, if not years, to play out. But they are indeed transformational for the economies of each of the two partners.

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Saudi Arabia and its neighbor, the United Arab Emirates are drawing on an unprecedented and historic combination of very focused policy decisions, massive domestic and global investment flows that they are developing with themselves and partners, and domestic social engineering that's been something that is unique in the world based upon AI and multiculturalism to redefine themselves from hitherto reliable energy suppliers into world-class members of the global supply chain - architects of the next generation of AI manufacturing and new nodes of political influence in a non-polar Middle East.

Each of these two countries is positioning themselves as models of rule of law, stable governance, and an oasis of multicultural life, open for business, open for boldness. And these two countries have a strategy that relies upon a tight weave of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), chemicals, energy infrastructure, data centers, and finance. But each country also requires a deep, unprecedented and sustained access to the most advanced US AI technology.

So for this to happen, we're watching the Saudi Crown Prince come to Washington to build this new relationship with the United States. They know that this relationship brings tremendous benefits to the United States as well. It not only helps us build out our infrastructure, our employment at a time when we're having our own challenges, but in a way, it also sends a powerful message. They believe in us. They believe in the American future. They know that we will win, and often in ways that we sometimes don't express in ourselves.

Lastly, they're doing all of this in a way that means that they're not having to cut their commercial ties with China or offend Russia. In return for what they will give, they will receive technology that makes them global AI powers. And with the cheap energy that they are able to attach to that AI, they will be incredibly successful.

Kelly: Clearly, we're going through a dramatic shift in the Middle East right now. How important is this relationship to the United States?

Roule: It's critical. The Middle East remains vital to America's interest. The Middle East, as they say, it's in the middle. You look at any map and the Middle East is in the center of global trade, global transportation, multiple shipping routes move through the region, 80% of the data between Europe and Asia transit the region. You have global energy centered in the region. You have several of the world's major religions in the region. You have crossroads of multiple U.S. national interests.

At the same time, you're now looking at the development of an artificial intelligence infrastructure that is starting to blossom. And our ability to partner with that and to ensure that that technology does not threaten America's interests, and indeed sustains America's interest as that region partners with the Global South. It just protects our interest and expands our influence at a time when China would very much like to replace us.

Kelly: You talked about some of the ambitions of the Kingdom and the UAE, both in investment and AI. We've talked a lot in the past about their efforts and trying to lead when it comes to green energy. What do you think is driving their strategy?

Roule: Their strategy is driven by changes in the world that are just inevitable. If we were to go back one year and I were to tell you that knowledge is power, you would agree completely with me. But today, the adage is now, power is knowledge. The artificial intelligence system is inherently an energy system in and of itself. And artificial intelligence requires access to inexpensive, reliable 24-hour energy. And in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and the other Gulf Cooperation Council states have access to tremendously inexpensive energy, and the prospect of additional inexpensive energy through their expansion of solar power and nuclear energy, which they're seeking. Those with access to such tremendous cheap energy and artificial intelligence have access to the benefits of artificial intelligence, which will bring them enormous economic advantage in the future.

Now, look at the other end of that stick. In Sub-Saharan Africa, at least 600 million Africans lack access to a reliable source of electricity. Imagine the social and economic disadvantage of those various societies. But let's go forward, just thinking about where the world is moving. By 2040, data center energy needs will rise fourfold. 1.5 billion people are estimated to move to cities. That means 2 billion new air conditioners will come online. And when you're in Saudi Arabia, a large portion of their oil needs, their oil production, is actually used for air conditioners in the summer. And you see their oil production move up in the summer for air conditioners. Global fleets of aircraft are expected to double from 25,000 to 50,000 aircraft by 2040. Jet fuel demand will be up by 30%. Six million kilometers of electrical transmission lines are needed by 2040. Imagine what that means in terms of copper.

So if you're looking at something like this, we're now looking at $4 trillion of investment needed annually for this energy architecture. We can't do this without partners with capital - like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates - and the many partners they bring together into their ecosystem.

So now let's look at energy. In recent years, you've had this great contest between the people who correctly talk about the need for us to battle climate change, and those who have talked about the need for more energy. Both issues must be dealt with. Well, now we realize oil demand is not going to drop. In fact, oil demand is expected to remain above 100 million barrels a day through 2040. This demand is going to be needed for materials and petrochemicals. LNG demand is expected to grow by 50%. Renewables will double. In essence, the world needs more energy, not replacement for these other energy sources.

Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and Qatar and Kuwait see themselves as becoming islands of cheap energy working with the United States. They see themselves at this moment in history - where, if they can capture a certain amount of extraordinary technology and a strategic relationship with the United States, and this ecosystem of multicultural partnership with the world - they can become a very different society. It's a fascinating dynamic. It's a very exciting time in history.

Kelly: Do you think falling oil prices are going to impact this strategy?

Roule: Well, we're watching that play out. So in essence, what we've seen is very prudent decision making. They have slowed some of the execution of major projects, but they have not stopped the projects themselves. They have extended timelines. They have delayed the rollout of certain large programs. If it has to do with their visions of Vision 2030 or Vision 2040, they have different visions in the Gulf, the projects remain on track. And it's because those projects are critical to where they need to go. If you look, for example, at the city of Neom that is often talked about, well, the port of Oxagon, which is critical to the infrastructure of trade in the Northwest Arabian Peninsula, that’s still functioning, it’s still out there. They're just going to slow the build out of that city because it's reasonable to say to slow the build out to the city. It's just not reasonable to think that you can slow the build out of trade and infrastructure in the Arabian Peninsula. That's going to happen on a different timeline.

Now, we've also seen reports that the Saudis have withdrawn some of their capital from not less productive, but maybe investments in the United States that aren't as relevant to the core vision of equities as in the past. That I think you may see a little more of, but I don't see a massive withdrawal of those investments unless we saw oil prices drop into say the low $50s or $40s. So what we're watching is prudent focus. We're watching attention to timelines. We're watching attention to anti-corruption. I'm impressed. I've not seen anybody waste money or do anything that is injudicious. And I've not seen anybody make allegations that such things have been noted by others.

Kelly: What will make this a successful visit to Washington, both on behalf of the Saudis and on behalf of the U.S.?

Roule: Architecture. And what you're looking for is something that lasts beyond one month, one deal. You're looking for something that binds us together over time. I think what you're going to hear will be announcements of MOUs. You will hear announcements of deals. And as important as it is to focus on the numbers associated with the deals, and there will certainly be focus on that and questions regarding that, it's really more important to focus on the industries, the sectors associated with those deals, and then the depth that each of those MOUs brings to the various societies.

For example, let's say that we see an aviation deal that might bring employment to the United States but will set up a manufacturing node in Saudi Arabia. If something like that were to happen, that would make Saudi Arabia part of a global supply chain. So 20 years from now, we would have a more reliable source of parts or an alternative source of parts. If mining is developed within the kingdom, well, it takes years to develop a mine, but we will have an alternative source of minerals, and Saudi Arabia is a rich source of multiple minerals that are important to the United States. Or if the Saudis invest in minerals in the U.S., it may take years for those to play out. So the architecture associated with those deals will mean employment but it's the depth and the timelines with those deals that will determine the depth of that relationship.

In terms of defense deals, I don't want to downplay that, but America has always stood with Saudi Arabia. People have often asked, 'If there's a single attack did we respond in as well or to the extent that we should have?' That's open to question. But there is no doubt in my mind, nor in the minds of regional leaders, that if there were a serious attack on Saudi Arabia by Iran or another country, we are absolutely going to be there. And do we need a defense deal to say that? I'll leave that to others, but not in my mind. But in any case, we will see some sort of defense architecture develop.

Should the Saudis have nuclear energy? Why not? Every other country does. They're looking for additional technology and there's no reason we can't provide that to them to assist them. But again, it's that architecture and the relationship over years that you seek, vice one delivery, one deal, and the announcements that go with it.

Kelly: Where do you see the region going in 2026? What will be the big headlines and the big drivers next year in the Middle East?

Roule: There's a lot of good news in the Middle East. The U.S. remains the dominant great power. Americans are not and likely will not be the target of a major military confrontation in the region. But the region itself continues to lack a strong cohesive narrative that pulls it together.

The biggest point in the region is that it remains a non-polar region. There's no reason to believe that this administration will cease its vigorous focus on the region. And we must applaud this administration for, in its first 11 months, having multiple emissaries and making visits and sending many cabinet ministers to the region. If you look at the recent conferences that have taken place in Manama, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, we've had cabinet level representation at all of those events to include during a government shutdown, which is no small thing, with representatives from multiple government departments. America is back and Russia and China are not.

Gaza is going to sputter along, and the U.S. commitment remains and CENTCOM is performing marvelously as a key force bringing things together. I think we're going to see that continuing. Neither side, Israel or the Palestinians, have a reason to return to war, but violence will continue. The largest or most significant political shifts in the region likely would come from a change in the Israeli government.

Iran is fragile. Iran nuclear talks are unlikely to begin until the administration sees evidence that the talks will not be a waste of time. Right now, the Iranians seek talks, but that doesn't mean they want to do anything other than have talks, because if they have talks, the rial will be strengthened and the Iranians don't have to bring anything up. The Quds Force will remain active. They will continue to deliver weapons to the Yemenis. But it's unlikely they're interested in looking for a conflict. We can't rule out a sudden collapse of Iran in case of an environmental disaster such as an earthquake, but the regime appears fragile at present.

Syria continues to make progress and I think we're going to see the progress continue in its current trend. Arab infrastructure investment continues to progress. I would watch for telecommunications and port investment work. And the reason that's important is that you're watching the Biden administration IMEC plan in essence or IMEC cooperation be realized as Gulf states put their lines up through Europe and through Syria.

Lebanon will likely remain a greater challenge. I think we're watching a lot of Saudi quiet diplomacy with Yemen and that will continue. GCC infrastructure will continue to develop. I would be surprised if we didn't see more Saudi work with Bahrain and Saudi work between the GCC and the West.

Oil will remain stable likely and soft in coming months. I think you're going to see a lot more natural gas come online. OPEC will continue to do everything it can to prevent oil from falling into the 50s while maintaining a relatively soft position so they can recapture market share from India and other places lost to Russia.

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A Constitutional Clash Over Trump’s War Powers in Venezuela

OPINION — “The question before the body is, can the Congress stop a military conflict declared by the Commander-in- Chief because we don’t agree with the decision, and without our [Congress] approval it must end? The answer, unequivocally, to me is no. Under the Constitution, the authority to be Commander-in-Chief resides exclusively with the President. The power to declare war is exclusive to the Congress. Now, what could the Congress do constitutionally if they disagree with a military action that is not a declaration of war? We could cut off funding.”

That was Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) speaking on the Senate floor on the afternoon of November 6, when debate was to begin on S.J. Res. 90, legislation that was “to direct the President to terminate the use of U.S. Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.”

Graham’s remark that Congress could cut off funds to halt a President ordered foreign military action took me back 56 years to December 1969, when I was working for Sen. J.W. Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I had in late 1969 been to Laos where the Nixon administration was carrying out a secret bombing campaign in an attempt to limit weapons going from North Vietnam to pro-Communists in South Vietnam.

To halt the at-the-time classified Laos bombing program, Fulbright introduced an amendment to the fiscal 1970 Defense Appropriations Bill that prohibited the use of U.S. funds to send American ground combat troops into Laos or Thailand. To get his amendment debated and passed, Fulbright had to arrange for a closed-session of the Senate.

That closed session was held on December 16, 1969, with all 100 Senators present, a handful of staff – including me – but no one in the public galleries and no reporters in the press gallery. After a 90-minute debate, the amendment passed. The House accepted the amendment in conference and it was signed into law by President Nixon on December 29, 1969.

Fulbright’s purpose was to assert Congress’ Constitutional role when it came to a prospective military operation amid his concern that the Nixon administration was expanding the Vietnam War into neighboring countries without consulting Congress.

I describe that long-past activity to explain my continuing apprehension over today’s possible Trump administration military action against Venezuela. The Trump administration has already introduced deadly military operations against alleged narco-traffickers working from a secret list of drug cartels using a classified Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion which claims the drugs are to kill Americans and finance arms to terrorists who will destabilize the U.S. and other Western Hemisphere countries.

Last Thursday and Friday, President Trump met in the Oval Office to discuss a host of options for Venezuela with Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Friday night, in remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled for the weekend to his Mar-a-Lago estate, the President said he had “sort of made up my mind” about how he will proceed with the possibility of military action in Venezuela. On Sunday, flying home, Trump told reporters the U.S. “may be having some discussions with [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro,” adding that “they [the Venezuelans] would like to talk.”

Although he swings back and forth, it appears clear from President Trump’s point of view, he need not consult with Congress should he decide on any military action that targets the Venezuelan mainland. As Sen. Graham pointed out, “We have only declared war five times in 250 years, and we have had hundreds of military operations -- some authorized and some not.”

Opening the Senate debate on November 6, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a key sponsor of the congressional resolution, pointed out, “On October 31, public reporting shows that many Trump administration officials have told the press that a secret list of targets in Venezuela has been drawn up. All of this, together with the increased pace of strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific [21 attacks on alleged narco-trafficking boats, 83 individuals killed], suggests that we are on the verge of something that should not happen without a debate and vote in Congress before the American people.”

On November 6, after a relatively short debate, the Senate resolution to block the use of U.S. armed forces against Venezuela was defeated by a 49-to-51 vote.

But during that debate some important points were made, and they need some public exposure.

For example, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a military veteran herself, said, “Listen, if the Trump administration actually believes there is an ongoing credible threat of armed conflict, then they must bring their case to Congress and give the American people a say through their elected representatives. They must respect our service members enough to prove why war is worth turning more moms and dads into Gold Star parents. And they must testify about what the end state of these military operations would actually look like.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said, “Maduro is a murderous dictator. He is an illegitimate leader in having overturned the last election by the use of military force. He is a bad actor. But I do not believe the American people want to go to war to topple this regime in the hopes that something better might follow… Let them [the Trump administration] seek an authorization to use force to get rid of Maduro. But let us not abdicate our responsibility. Let us vote to say no to war without our approval. We don’t have to wait, nor should we wait for that war to begin before we vote.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pointed out, “Of course, we have the capability of overthrowing the Maduro regime, just like we had the power to overthrow Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi. But what comes next? Is anyone thinking about the potential blowback that such a campaign could entail? Overthrowing the Maduro regime risks creating more regional instability, not less. The breakdown of state authority may create a power vacuum that the very drug cartels the administration is ostensibly trying to destroy could exploit.”

“You cannot bomb your way out of a drug crisis,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The demand that motivates drug trafficking is not found in the Caribbean. It is located in communities across America where people are suffering from addiction, where economic opportunity has dried up, where the social fabric has frayed. Military strikes do nothing to address those root causes. Boats have been blown out of the water in videos released by the administration. But has the flow of fentanyl into America decreased? Has a single trafficking network been dismantled? The administration hasn’t provided any evidence that these strikes are achieving anything beyond the destruction they document on camera. This is not a strategy. This is violence without a strategic objective.”

Sen. Reed also pointed out how the Trump administration is expanding its war powers. “The White House is apparently now arguing that these strikes [on alleged narco-boats] don’t constitute ‘hostilities’ under the War Powers Act because American service members aren’t directly in harm’s way while operating standoff weapons and drones. This is ridiculous…They are very much in harm’s way, and to say that this operation is so safe that it doesn’t qualify as ‘hostilities’ is embarrassing…This new interpretation creates a dangerous precedent. If standoff weapons exempt military operations from congressional oversight, we have effectively granted the Executive Branch unlimited authority to wage war anywhere in the world so long as American forces can strike from a distance.”

Taking a different approach, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) pointed out an irony in Trump’s anti-drug argument. Van Hollen said, “I will tell you what you don’t do. You don’t submit a budget to the U.S. Congress that cuts the funding for the Drug Enforcement Agency and cuts funding for the task forces we developed to go after major organized crime syndicates involved in the drug business.” He added, “I happen to be the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee that oversees the Justice Department. And all my colleagues have to do is take a look at the request from the President of the United States when it comes to resources for fighting drugs coming to the United States. They cut them.”

Raising an additional problem, Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said, “Letting Donald Trump ignore the law abroad makes him think he has a free pass to do it right here at home. Donald Trump thinks if he can do this in the Caribbean, he can do it on the streets of Chicago. He could use the military for his own political retribution and consolidation of power in and outside our borders. After all, he [Trump] said in his own words: ‘We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.’ That is what the President said. We cannot be complacent as he sends troops into our cities as a tool of intimidation against his political enemies.”

While we await President Trump’s decision on what comes next, let me close with another ironic situation, created last Wednesday by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Giving the keynote address at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Homeland Security Summit, Noem celebrated recent successes in the counter-drug mission. She said that since January, the Coast Guard has stopped 91 metric tons of drugs, confiscated 1,067 weapons and seized more than $3.2 million in cash from terrorist cartels, thanks primarily due to Operation Pacific Viper, which Noem said is strategically designed to seize historic amounts of drugs from smugglers in the eastern Pacific. “Viper has saved millions of lives of individuals and Americans by stopping those drugs before they ever got to the U.S.,” Noem said.

Operation Pacific Viper, according to a Coast Guard press release, also resulted in the arrest of 86 alleged narco-traffickers as of October 15. A needed reminder: Viper was an interdiction program where narco-traffickers were intercepted, arrested and drugs seized – not boats blown up and people killed.

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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Can a “Flamingo” Cruise Missile Help Ukraine Turn the Tide?

DEEP DIVE – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky calls it “our most successful missile.” One expert says it’s "Ukraine’s strongest security guarantee.” And former CIA Director and Cipher Brief expert Gen. David Petraeus says it has the potential to be “a game changer” in the war against Russia.

They are talking about the FP-5 Flamingo, a ground-launched, subsonic, made-in-Ukraine cruise missile, built to hit targets deep in Russian territory.

Not since the first salvos of Russia’s 2022 invasion has Ukraine’s defense industry sounded so enthusiastic about a weapon manufactured on its soil. The successes of Ukrainian defense technology are well known; as The Cipher Brief reported last month, the country is now widely believed to have the world’s most innovative defense sector. Its drone technology in particular continues to earn rave reviews from experts and western defense companies alike.

But the Flamingo is something different – a missile with a reported range of 1800 miles and the ability to carry more than 2,000 pounds of munitions, meaning that in one strike it could cause greater damage than even a swarm of drones. Compared to the top-class American Tomahawk cruise missile, the Flamingo is believed to be less accurate but with a similar range and a much heavier payload. And because it is manufactured in Ukraine, the Flamingo can be launched against Russian targets without Western-imposed restrictions.

“The Flamingo may actually be a game changer,” Gen. Petraeus said at the Cipher Brief’s annual Threat Conference last month. “You add that capability to what Ukraine has already done,” he said, referring to the recent drone campaign against Russia’s oil sector, “and [the Flamingo] will extend this dramatically.”

Zelensky said last month that the Flamingos had carried out their first missions, including a three-missile attack on a Russian security base in northern Crimea. Last week, Ukraine’s General Staff said it had used Flamingos as part of a strike that targeted “several dozen” military and infrastructure sites inside Russia and in occupied Crimea.

The Flamingo’s manufacturer, the Ukrainian firm Fire Point, claims to be producing between 1-2 missiles per day, with plans to scale to 7 per day by year’s end, for a 2026 projected total of more than 2,500. "By December we’ll have many more of them,” Zelensky told reporters in August. “And by the end of December or in January–February, mass production should begin."

Experts say every one of those missiles will dwarf the power of a drone weapon.

“With the drone-strike campaign, you have the challenge that they mostly carry fairly small warheads,” John Hardie, Deputy Director of the Russia program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told The Cipher Brief. “The damage is far less than you could do with a one-time warhead that’s carried by the Flamingo.”

All of which raises the question: Might the Flamingo change the course of the war?

How the Flamingo was born

Even by the lofty standards of Ukraine’s recent defense-tech achievements, the Flamingo’s origin story is an inspiring one. And it dates to the last days of the Cold War.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Ukraine agreed to give up not only its nuclear weapons but also its considerable arsenal of Kh-55 cruise missiles. And after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders pressed constantly – and with mixed success – for western weaponry and security guarantees, they also began turbocharging their domestic defense industry.

“Ukrainians were authors of the Soviet space program and rocket program,” Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, told The Cipher Brief. “When you have a lot of experience and when your people are smart enough, then the result is obvious. You have technologies which other countries respect.”

For more than three years, however, Ukraine remained largely dependent on Western countries for high-end, long-range strike capabilities. That led to the creation of a made-in-Ukraine cruise missile program.

The result is the FP-5 Flamingo, developed by Fire Point, a former casting agency that spun itself into a defense firm in the summer of 2022. In 2023, Fire Point produced its first FP-1 attack drones, ultimately turning out 200 FP-1s that year; this year the figure is expected to hit 20,000. Its cruise missile project has moved at a similar warp speed: in August, less than a year after it began work on the cruise missile, the company was showing off the prototype; soon after that, the first Flamingos were flying.

“We came up with it pretty fast,” Iryna Terekh, the company's 33-year-old Chief Technical Officer, told Politico. “It took less than nine months to develop it from an idea to its first successful tests on the battlefield.”

Terekh and other Ukrainian defense entrepreneurs speak often about how the Russian invasion has motivated their work – what Goncharenko calls “the unfortunate inspiration of war.” Terekh fled a Russian-occupied village near Kyiv in the early days of the war, and says her car still has a hole from a Russian bullet. She joined FirePoint as a partner in June 2023.

Ralph Goff, a former Senior Intelligence Executive at the CIA, calls the Flamingo production story “combat Darwinism at its best.”

“If the West isn't going to give them the long-range weaponry that they want to carry out their strategic attacks, they'll develop them themselves,” Goff told the October Cipher Brief conference. The Flamingo, he said, “is a serious piece of offensive weaponry.”

As for the missile’s unusual name, that traces to an in-house story at Fire Point, about the day when someone painted a solid rocket booster prototype pink, in a nod to the women involved in the male-dominated world of weapons production. Later, when the missiles were ready for testing, the company needed a bright color to help locate post-launch debris. Pink paint was available – and that led to the Flamingo moniker. The Pink has gone – missiles used in actual strikes are colored less conspicuously – but “Flamingo” stuck.

“You don’t need a scary name for a missile that can fly 3,000 kilometers," Terekh said. "The main goal is for a missile to be effective.”

Reality check

If Fire Point’s claims are borne out, the Flamingo will have a reach and power on par with western cruise missiles, and an arsenal to match any European nation’s other than Russia.

Experts warn that behind that “If” lie multiple concerns – most of them due to the fact that there has been minimal independent verification of the company’s claims.

“In the defense industry, it’s easier to make statements than to actually implement them,” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko said of the Flamingo’s potential, speaking to Radio NV last month.

One issue involves accuracy, which experts say Fire Point had to sacrifice to a degree in its push for a low-cost, fast-to-market weapon. In the Crimea strike, one missile reportedly landed some 100 meters from its target.

“Because it's low-cost, you kind of skimp on some of the more high-end features you might see in a more exquisite missile, guidance and accuracy being one of them,” Hardie said. “It's a relatively inaccurate missile at least by modern standards.” But he added that if the pace of manufacturing ultimately yields the high numbers Fire Point has promised, then “that tradeoff [high volume for accuracy] makes sense.”

Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat and analyst for RPolitik, has studied the Flamingo project since its early days. He doubts that Fire Point can reach its production goals.

“The Flamingo is real, but the production capacity is overstated, at least so far,” Jarabik told The Cipher Brief. He noted that an earlier Ukrainian-made missile, the Neptune, has yet to reach its promised scale, and that for all its defense-sector successes, Ukraine must contend with wartime supply-chain issues that would bedevil any weapons manufacturers. He and Hardie said that scaling to hundreds of Flamingos per month will require consistent supplies of everything from engines to warheads to electronics for guidance systems.

“I'm a little skeptical, but it's possible the Ukrainians will get there,” Hardie said, and Gen. Petraeus said that the Ukrainians “really need to double down” on the pace of the Flamingo manufacturing. “They're trying to get that into full production.”

Fire Point must do so while Russia targets Ukraine’s young defense companies as well as the country’s energy infrastructure. The latter is critical, given the defense sector’s high demand for energy. For one piece of the Flamingo supply chain, the company has already found a workaround: in September, Fire Point announced that Denmark had agreed to produce fuel for the Flamingo, effectively removing a key production facility from the war zone. The announcement provoked a warning from the Kremlin, which called the Danish plans “hostile.”

That response raises the question of Russian retaliation – a concern that has accompanied the delivery of virtually every new weapons system to the Ukrainian side. Some experts fear that any successful, high-impact Flamingo strike against Russia, carried out with help from Western intelligence – the destruction of a weapons factory deep in Russian territory, for example – would risk a NATO-Russia fight that the West has been desperate to avoid. Others doubt that Vladimir Putin has any interest – at least not in the current moment – in any escalation that might lead to conflict with the West.

“The Russians have been consistently more bark than bite,” Hardie said. “They know that attacking a NATO country in an overt military way – not the sort of gray-zone, below-the-threshold-of-war stuff they've been doing, but an overt military missile strike – that's an act of war. And Putin doesn't want any part of a direct conventional fight with the United States and NATO allies.”

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What to watch for

Even analysts who are skeptical about the Flamingo’s future note that it would take only a few successful strikes to inflict severe damage, and that if Fire Point can get anywhere close to its 2500-missile-per-year pledge for 2026, the battlefield impact could be profound. Beyond the Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities the Ukrainians have attacked lately, the Flamingo will put more military targets in range as well. The holy grail might be the joint Russia-Iran manufacturing facility in Tatarstan that is turning out the deadly Shahed drones, at a scale that the Ukrainians must envy.

Experts say that with hundreds of Flamingos at the ready, Ukraine might achieve what Jarabik refers to as “mass saturation,” an ability to bring a heavy and varied drone-and-missile threat to military and energy targets across all of European Russia.

“If you're Ukraine,” Hardie said, “you'd like to be able to combine these missiles and drones into a complex strike package much as the Russians are currently doing, and keep the Russian air defense on its toes.”

“The Flamingo is heavy, and it’s also relatively easy to shoot down,” Jarabik said. “And so they will need mass saturation – a lot of these missiles, but with drones or other weapons too, to get through to the targets. They're going to have to produce enough that they can have a sustained impact, …and I don't think we're going to be there anytime soon.”

Then Jarabik added: “All that said, you have to acknowledge Ukraine’s innovation and skill. And I think [the Flamingo] is a big thing. Absolutely.”

As for the accuracy concerns, Ukrainian officials noted that while one of the Flamingos fired at Crimea did miss its mark, the two others leveled a barracks and brought a “massive destructive power,” with craters measuring 15 meters in diameter.

No one is touting the Flamingo as a replacement for the array of Western missiles that have been delivered to Kyiv. The Ukrainians will still covet the German Taurus, and the British-French Storm Shadow/Scalp cruise missiles, which are more accurate, though they come with conditions attached to their use. The diversity and volume of weapons systems, experts say, are what could make a real difference. And the Flamingo adds a powerful new element to the Ukrainian arsenal.

“No one system or weapon is going to be the decisive game changer,” Hardie said. “I don't think there's any such thing as a wonder weapon. That being said, for a supporter of Ukraine, it's really encouraging to see Ukraine being able to move out on its own more in terms of long-range strike capabilities. They are taking these steps forward and really taking it to the Russians right now with this campaign against energy infrastructure. That's been impressive to see and I think it kind of augurs more to come. So if I were the Russians, I would be worried about that.”

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Q&A: Interpol’s Cybercrime Chief on How AI is Driving Borderless Cyber Threats

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — Anthropic’s announcement that Chinese state-sponsored hackers used its Claude AI technology for a largely automated cyberattack underscores how cybercriminals are becoming faster, stronger and more organized, driven by advances in technology like artificial intelligence. Criminal networks are now blending phishing, fraud and ransomware with other enterprises like trafficking and money laundering, making this borderless threat even more complex and serious.

The Cipher Brief spoke with Dr. Neal Jetton, the Cybercrime Director of Interpol, to discuss how the world’s largest international police organization is taking on the threat. Speaking from last month’s Global Cybersecurity Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Dr. Jetton said Interpol-driven efforts like information-sharing, cross-border cooperation and law enforcement training are critical in countering emboldened cybercriminals.

The Cipher Brief: Can you tell us what kind of buzz has been there? Have there been key themes or issues at this very point in time among the cyber experts that you've been talking to?

Dr. Jetton: I think you can't get away from AI here. Every panel, every discussion has an AI focus, and you think, "Ugh, more AI." But, it's here. It does impact probably everything. We have a lot of cyber threat intel companies here from the private sector who are working with it every day for their means.

And then from a law enforcement perspective, we look at it kind of as a double-edged sword. I'm from INTERPOL, so we look at how AI can benefit law enforcement in the long run. But as a cybercrime director, I also see how cyber criminals are also utilizing AI to enhance the effectiveness of their criminal activities.

The Cipher Brief: What can you tell us about the role that INTERPOL plays in countering these threats?

Dr. Jetton: So, just a little bit about INTERPOL because maybe there's some misconceptions about what it is. Even my neighbors sometimes think, "What do you actually do, Neal?" So in INTERPOL, there are 196 member countries. We are focused on law enforcement to law enforcement connections. So what we want to do in the Cybercrime Directorate is understand what our membership is suffering from as far as the type of crimes that they are seeing the most.

So we will send out yearly threat assessments because we think we might have a good idea of what a particular region is suffering from, but we need to hear it directly from the law enforcement officers and experts on the ground. We'll get that information, and then we'll turn that around and we'll try to base our training, our coordination meetings, and then our operations focused on the threats that they, our members, see most commonly.

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The Cipher Brief: When we talk about things like attribution, going after threat actors and bolstering cybersecurity, where do those rank on the priority scale for INTERPOL?

Dr. Jetton: Within the Cybercrime Directorate, we have three goals. I tell my team, what we want to do is we want to build up the capacity for our country. So we have to understand what they need, what they're lacking in terms of tools and training. We then want to provide accurate, useful intelligence to our member countries that they can use and turn into evidence that then helps drive their investigations to be more successful.

But my goal is to increase the capacity for our member countries, to provide relevant intelligence to them so that we have operational success, and we've done that. I think we've done more than 10 operations this year within the Cybercrime Directorate, both global and regional, focused on the threats that our members are seeing most.

What we will do is, in a lot of instances, we will bring the countries that are participating in our operations all together at one point. We'll then bring relevant private sector partners, many of them here at GCF, to come and provide training to them on the ground. We will do tabletop exercises, and then at the end of that week, it's usually a five-day process, we'll kick everybody out and we'll just focus on the operation at hand. We'll say, "We're going after this malware or these threats. These are the types of steps that we think you should take that would help you in your investigation."

So we really do want to benefit our members. I want to say though that the success that these operations have had—we've had some big wins recently—the lion's share of the success goes to our member countries, the law enforcement on the ground who are doing the actual investigations, who are going and making the arrests and seeing those things through. We've done several recently with great success.

The Cipher Brief: We asked Chris Inglis, who is the former National Security or Cybersecurity Director in the United States, about the connections between nation states and cyber criminal groups. How do you see INTERPOL playing a role in this area? Are there both challenges and opportunities when you're talking about cybercrime that may be backed by nation states?

Dr. Jetton: That's one of the misnomers with INTERPOL. The big thing with INTERPOL is neutrality. I came from a task force where we looked at nation state transnational cybercrime. But within INTERPOL, I just have to state that our constitution does not really allow us to focus on investigative matters of a religious, racial, political, or military nature. So we know that that limits the nation state actors, and I'm very aware of that. It's not like I'm naive to understand who's behind a lot of these cyber criminal activities. But to maintain that neutrality and trust with 196 members, there is a limit to what INTERPOL is allowed to do. Countries will reach out to you and they will say, "Hey, our government networks have been breached," and I know automatically this is not your usual financially motivated cyber criminals, there's something there. So I have to work hand in hand with my legal affairs team to say, "Where can we draw the line?" I don't just want to say, "No, we're not doing anything," but can we provide something, at least the starting point, but we don't want to provide attribution or state like, "Hey, it's this person.” But maybe give them a little bit of a head start and then hand off to the countries that provided the intel or are having the issues and then help them along the way.

So I just want to be clear. Nation state actors, there are a lot of organizations that are focused on that, including where I was previously. But INTERPOL, we are really focused on the financially motivated cyber criminals.

The Cipher Brief: It's such an interesting patchwork of expertise that it is critical for collective defense. What vulnerabilities do you see from your perch at INTERPOL right now in cyberspace, and where do you think defenses are failing?

Dr. Jetton: For us, when we're asking countries, "What are the biggest issues that are preventing you from being more successful in combating cybercrime?" A lot of it is the tools and the training, just having insufficient funds to actually drive up their investigative know-how or expertise. But also I think between countries, it's just the rapid ability to share information.

There are what we call MLATS, Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. A lot of times it just takes a long time to ask for information. And we know in cybercrime, we need instantaneous help. So I would always encourage countries to reach out to INTERPOL. We have a 24/7 network. That's why we're there. I can't promise we can do everything in every situation, but we will do our very best to make the connection between which countries you need or if you need a particular company. We can't compel, but we'd put you in touch and at least let you have that conversation.

The Cipher Brief: What are the trends you are seeing right now in cybercrime?

Dr. Jetton: What we're seeing primarily is the use of AI in increasing the efficiency, scope, and effectiveness of emails and the phishing scams. They're using this phishing as a platform. You can just blank X as a platform. So it's these tools that you didn't have to have a really sophisticated technical level of abilities, and you can have these tools that allow you to then go out and commit fraud at scale. And so we are seeing that.

Also, what we're seeing is a convergence of different crimes. So cyber is poly-criminal. I live in Singapore, and one of the big things in Southeast Asia are the cybercrime centers. You hear about that all the time. What happens is you have these organized crime groups that are using cybercrime as fraudulent job applications, the emails, things like that, recruiting, and then the human trafficking aspect of it, and then forcing the people to commit the cybercrime while they're there. So we see that as a huge issue, the poly-criminal aspect of cyberware. It doesn't matter if it's human trafficking, drugs, guns—there's going to be some sort of cyber element to all those crimes.

The Cipher Brief: What are some of the most interesting conversations that you've had on the sidelines there? Has there been anything that's surprised you from some of the other guests and speakers?

Dr. Jetton: We were talking about the use of AI and where we think it's going, whether it's kind of positive or negative. What I was surprised at was, I was on a panel and I was the only person that had the glass half empty. I realized that there are some obvious useful uses for AI, and it's a game changer already for law enforcement. But what I see is these technologies being utilized by criminals at a faster rate than what law enforcement can usually do. So I see it as somewhat of a negative knowing that we're going to have to catch up like with AI-produced malware. I think that will be an issue in the future.

Whereas my other panelists were all from the private sector, and they were all like, "No, no, AI is great. It's going to allow us to use it in these positive directions," which is true, but I'm the negative, the Grinch here talking about it from saying that. So I would say that that was probably the most surprising thing.

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Hezbollah’s Quiet Rebuild

DEEP DIVE — Tucked deep into the cragged hills of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, the once powerful Iranian-backed militia brought to its knees by a war with Israel, has spent the past year meticulously gouging its way back to relevancy.

For Western and Israeli security forces, the designated terrorist group’s covert but influential resurgence establishes a precarious problem: a persistent, low-level threat that could instantly trigger a wider conflict, critically testing the resilience of any ceasefires and the existing, fragile statehood.

Financial Lifelines and Sanctions

The November 5 announcement from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) targeted key elements of Hezbollah’s financial network. Two operatives — Ossama Jaber, a Hezbollah financier who personally collected tens of millions via Lebanese exchange houses from September 2024 to February 2025, and Ja’far Muhammad Qasir, a sanctioned terrorist collaborating with Syrian oil magnate Yasar Husayn Ibrahim — were blacklisted for laundering Iranian cash into Hezbollah’s war chest.

These funds, exploiting Lebanon’s cash-heavy, regulation-light economy, bankrolled everything from paramilitary salaries to the reconstruction of terror infrastructure battered by Israeli strikes. Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, John Hurley, didn’t mince words: For Lebanon to emerge “free, prosperous, and secure,” Hezbollah must be “fully disarmed and cut off from Iran’s funding and control.”

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow and director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and a former counterterrorism intelligence analyst for the FBI, points out that despite sanctions, Iran’s financial backing is pivotal to Hezbollah’s survival and operational reach.

“We assume Iran still provides about the same amount of money, but Hezbollah is having a harder time getting it through on a timely basis. They can’t just ship it from Iran or Iraq anymore without inspections, so they rely more on diaspora networks in South America and Africa,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “All of this is against the backdrop of severe setbacks. Hezbollah intends to continue positioning itself to not only fight militarily but also assert an oversized, dominant position within Lebanon by virtue of force.”

A Battered Front, But Not Broken

The Israel-Hezbollah war, which ignited in 2023 alongside the war in Gaza, decimated the organization’s leadership, weapons arsenal, and fighting ranks, with more than 3,000 of its fighters killed. The decapitation strikes were surgical: On September 27 last year, an Israeli airstrike flattened Hezbollah’s Beirut headquarters, killing Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s iron-fisted architect of asymmetric warfare. In the ensuing ground incursion, Israeli forces dismantled border launch sites and command bunkers, leaving Hezbollah’s Radwan Force, the elite unit tasked with infiltrating Galilee, reeling.

Yet, as analysts caution, Hezbollah is battered but not broken. A number of its battle-hardened fighters, who cut their teeth supporting the Assad regime in Syria, are now integrating into civilian life, ready to rearm at any time. Furthermore, the group’s Shia base, which comprises roughly 31 percent of the Lebanese population, remains loyal to Hezbollah, upheld by its wide-reaching welfare networks amid a country grappling with a crumbling economy.

These moves indicate that Hezbollah’s military recovery is already well underway.

“Hezbollah is giving much more attention than before the war to its Badr Unit, positioned north of the Litani River, and strengthening it with Radwan forces,” Sarít Zehavi, senior researcher at the Alma Research and Educational Center, tells The Cipher Brief. “They are also shifting from smuggling to local manufacturing of drones and missiles. Even though some brigades are not yet redeployed to the border, they continue training and rebuilding capabilities.”

The Badr Unit, a key element of Hezbollah’s northern forces, has become the group’s tactical spearhead along the Litani River and near the Israeli border. Tasked with reconnaissance, border infiltration, and rapid response, the unit has been reinforced with Radwan-trained fighters and advanced drone capabilities. Badr is central to Hezbollah’s evolving doctrine of “strategic latency,” maintaining a persistent threat without provoking full-scale war, and acts as a bridge between conventional militia operations and the group’s clandestine drone and cyber activities.

Moreover, Lebanon’s political deadlock increases the risk that Hezbollah will maintain its military dominance.

The Beirut government, assembled hastily earlier this year under President Joseph Aoun, is characterized as the least Hezbollah-affiliated in years, with a focus on reclaiming national independence from the dominant insurgents. There is, however, significant skepticism about how such a push is enforced. Hezbollah continues to rebuff key appointments, and its diminished but growing stockpile, estimated at 20,000 remaining rockets, hangs over Beirut’s ambitions.

This hybrid threat presents a national security nightmare for Washington: a non-state actor wielding state power, rendering diplomacy incredibly difficult.

Iran’s Evolving Logistical Pipelines

Tehran’s shadow looms largest. The IRGC-Quds Force, Hezbollah’s ideological leader since 1982, has poured over $1 billion into the group this year alone, per Treasury disclosures — despite layered U.S. sanctions biting into Iran’s oil exports. However, a source familiar with the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control told The Cipher Brief on background that tracking Iran’s funds has become increasingly challenging in recent months.

“The Treasury and State Departments need more resources to track violations, and the government shutdown left many investigators sidelined,” the source observed. “Congress can help by requiring reports on Iranian weapons shipments and funding enforcement teams.”

The Iranian cash flows through hawala networks and Beirut’s labyrinthine exchange houses, where operatives like Jaber convert petrodollars into untraceable Lebanese pounds. It’s a masterclass in sanctions evasion: Iran’s regime, squeezed by domestic protests and a rial in freefall, prioritizes its “Axis of Resistance” over breadlines at home.

“Assad’s downfall severely crimped Hezbollah’s pipeline from Tehran, but even so, Hezbollah and Iran remain adept at exploiting fragile states. Beirut and Damascus show some interest in interdiction. Still, both are weak governments, and they have other priorities,” Jonathan Ruhe, Director of Foreign Policy at the JINSA Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy, tells The Cipher Brief. “Iran also exploits power vacuums in Sudan and Libya to resupply Hezbollah from the sea, using surreptitious maritime tactics like Iran’s sanctions-busting ‘shadow fleets.’”

Post-war Syria has forced Tehran to improvise. The once-feared land bridge — stretching from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon — has been battered by Israeli airstrikes and rebel attacks, yet parts of it still survive. To bolster its Middle East proxy, the Iranian regime has upped its use of maritime routes. Iranian cargo ships dock at Syria’s Tartus port under civilian manifests, offloading drone kits and rocket fuel disguised as fertilizer. Trucks then traverse the unguarded border into Lebanon’s Qalamoun Mountains, often chaperoned by IRGC advisors.

Domestically, however, Hezbollah is reducing reliance on imports. Clandestine factories in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburbs and Bekaa orchards churn out refurbished Kornet anti-tank missiles and Ababil drones from scavenged parts. There is a reported network of 50-plus workshops, some powered by smuggled Chinese microchips, slashing reliance on vulnerable sea lanes. Despite its own economic ailments, Tehran continues to give precedence to Hezbollah’s position as a frontline deterrent over short-term financial stability.

Rebuilding the Arsenal: From Ashes to Drones

Israeli assessments estimate Hezbollah has reclaimed just 20 percent of its pre-war precision arsenal, but what emerges is nimbler and deadlier in specific domains. Drones top the list: low-cost Shahed-136 clones, assembled from Iranian blueprints and Syrian-sourced engines, can loiter over Galilee for hours, scouting IDF positions or delivering 50 kg (110pounds) warheads. Short-range Fajr-5 rockets, concealable in olive groves, are proliferating under civilian camouflage — mosques, schools, even UNIFIL outposts.

Smuggling remains vital. Iran’s military equipment, including advanced components for precision-guided missiles (PGMs), is first transported into Syria using an array of methods designed to evade international scrutiny. Non-descript convoys then travel from Syria’s Homs City to the border city of Al-Qusayr near Lebanon. The Syrian-Lebanese border in the Homs/Al-Qusayr area is porous, mountainous, and complex to police. Over the course of this year, Israel has conducted more than 40 strikes intercepting shipments near the southern coast of the city of Tyre. Yet the cat-and-mouse game favors smugglers. Private companies, fronts for IRGC logistics, reportedly run nighttime operations mixing weapons with sacks of flour labeled as aid.

“Even before October 7, Hezbollah tried to make precision munitions with Iranian help,” Ruhe noted. “Tehran is now redoubling these efforts. For all Israel’s successes over the last two years, it struggled to wage a multifront war of attrition, and it struggled to defeat Hezbollah’s drones. Hezbollah and Iran want to exploit this exact weakness by being able to oversaturate Israeli defenses with mass drone swarms, similar to what Iran helps Russia do against Ukraine.”

Indeed, Hezbollah’s rebuilding of its ranks is quieter but no less strategic. After losing an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 fighters, the group now runs “resistance summer camps” in the Litani Valley, teaching teenagers bomb-making and cyber tactics under the guise of community service. Morale has waned, but ideology endures: recruits draw strength from chants of Nasrallah’s martyrdom.

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The Long Game: Shadows on the Northern Border

For Israel, the situation is a high-stakes strategic battle. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet has stepped up its drone strikes into Lebanon in recent weeks, and preemptive raids to enforce ceasefire arms restrictions are not off the table. Nonetheless, Hezbollah leaders in November rejected talks, and in an official letter to the Lebanese government, insisted that “any attempt at political negotiations with Israel does not serve Lebanon’s national interest.” The statement both rallies supporters and signals Tehran’s firm stance. Iran’s approach is one of “strategic latency” — maintaining a constant, restrained threat to deter Israel without triggering all-out war.

The United States also has global interests at risk. Hezbollah’s networks extend into Latin America and Africa, where they help launder money through drug and diamond trades. Those funds could support operations that reach U.S. soil. Washington’s current strategy — including a $230 million-plus aid package to Lebanon tied to reforms — aims to cut off Hezbollah’s financial base.

This fragile financial and operational landscape underscores that, despite international efforts, Hezbollah’s on-the-ground capabilities remain resilient and difficult to fully contain. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State tells The Cipher Brief that while “the Government of Lebanon made a courageous and historic decision to restore state authority by ordering the disarming of Hezbollah and establishing the Lebanese Armed Forces and Internal Security Forces as the legitimate forces for Lebanon, the credibility of Lebanon’s government rests on its ability to transform words into action.”

“The region and world are watching carefully,” the spokesperson continued. “Disarming Hezbollah and other non-state actors, as well as ending Iran’s proxy activities, is crucial to ensuring peace in Lebanon and across the region. The United States of America commends the Government of Lebanon’s efforts to ensure Lebanon is sovereign, peaceful, prosperous, and safe for all Lebanese people.”

Zehavi also pointed to the gap between hopes for disarmament and reality.

“The Lebanese Army is not entering villages and into the private properties where Hezbollah is actually hiding its weapons down,” she explained. “If this continues this way, and it looks like this is where it is going, what we will see is a very unstable situation.”

Lebanon, however, may face the most direct consequences. Hezbollah functions as both a militia and a provider of social services. Several of its clinics are also used as bunkers, and Tehran-financed roads routinely lead to new depots and launch locations. As Zehavi highlights, Hezbollah is rebuilding on two fronts: strengthening its military infrastructure while expanding civilian programs to maintain local support.

The organization, experts say, is not right now preparing for a major offensive but focuses on smaller, ongoing operations — perhaps cyberattacks on Haifa’s ports, sniper fire along the border, and drone swarms testing Israel’s defenses. Iran’s proxy strategy remains intact despite sanctions and setbacks.

Yet, according to Ruhe, if the United States, Europe, and Arab partners enforce UN sanctions on Iran’s rearming of Hezbollah and back Beirut, a better-than-status-quo scenario is possible.

“(But) if Hezbollah and Iran believe Beirut is alone, and that Israel will be isolated for acting militarily, then it’s a matter of when — not if — Hezbollah recovers,” he continued. “And the more successfully it helps Hezbollah rebuild, the more likely Iran will test Israeli and U.S. resolve with its own rearmament.”

For Western policymakers, the objectives are clear: disrupt Hezbollah’s finances, bolster Lebanon’s government, and limit the group’s military power. Otherwise, the risk grows of a wider northern conflict that could draw in larger powers.

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Understanding the U.S. Military Mobilization in the Caribbean

OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — The armada the U.S. has assembled in the Caribbean is more formidable than anything the region has seen in decades. What is going on? The administration says it is targeting drug trafficking through the Caribbean. Is that it? Is that really all we are doing? Trump administration officials insist that it is but also acknowledge that strikes on land targets may be necessary to achieve the administration’s goals. Skeptics suggest that regime change in Venezuela is part of the administration’s plan. Is it?

Early in 2025, shortly after taking office, the Trump administration designated several drug cartels as terrorist organizations. This signaled the administration’s intention to escalate U.S. efforts to fight trafficking beyond the usual efforts of the Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Administration and Border Patrol. It also presaged the use of the military.

Combating narco-trafficking remains the administration’s declared purpose. Implicitly, the decision to escalate U.S. efforts is based on several key points. First, drug abuse in the United States remains at epidemic levels despite decades of efforts to control it. Second, previous efforts to suppress drug smuggling into the U.S. have not been successful. Third, because the cartels smuggling drugs into the U.S. are not merely drug traffickers but large terrorist organizations, they need to be confronted as forcefully as terrorist groups elsewhere. This, effectively, means employing military force.

The administration contends that Venezuela is the country from which much of the illicit boat and air traffic carrying cocaine emanates and that Venezuela’s long-time strong man is really the head of a cartel and “a fugitive from American justice.” On August 7, the administration announced a 50-million-dollar bounty on Venezuela’s long-time strong man, Nicolas Maduro. It is this view of the Venezuelan regime and its leader, in combination with the size and capabilities of the deployed U.S. military in the Caribbean, that suggests the administration’s goals are more ambitious than just striking alleged traffickers on the high seas.

The question then is, how would the Trump administration define regime change? New leadership or something more extensive? If regime change is a goal, how does the administration hope to achieve that result? Would a combination of intimidation, enhanced economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure from the world’s democratic community convince Maduro to abandon power? Can the Venezuelan military, which in 2002 temporarily removed Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chavez, be persuaded to act once again? Or is the U.S. administration contemplating military strikes inside of Venezuela? If so, how extensively? Would a targeted attack of regime leadership result in regime change or would the U.S. need to hit various elements of the military plus drug labs? The scope of any U.S. kinetic actions would likely affect the way Venezuelans – who overwhelmingly rejected Maduro in last year’s presidential election, react. It would also affect how the region and the rest of the world regard the U.S. campaign.

If the U.S. were able to oust Maduro what would follow? There is a legitimate government in waiting. Former diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez won last year’s presidential election by a huge margin despite regime efforts to sabotage the democratic opposition. Would anything short of the installation of the democratic opposition be considered an acceptable outcome to Venezuelans or the United States? Would a government of national unity which included some of the Venezuelan dictator’s base and elements of the military be acceptable to the democratic opposition? To the U.S? The Venezuelan military has been deeply compromised by the Maduro regime’s criminal activity and is believed to be complicit at the highest levels in drug trafficking. The Cartel de los Soles is thought to include many high-ranking military personnel. Would the U.S.be prepared to put troops on the ground to prevent criminal elements of the Venezuelan military from regrouping even if current regime leadership were forced out?

Finally, what effect will current U.S. operations in the Caribbean have on U.S. relations with the rest of Western Hemisphere especially if U.S. military strikes Venezuela directly? What effect have U.S. operations already had? The answers to these questions are not all obvious.

The Trump team has never mentioned regime change as a campaign goal. The size and nature of the deployed U.S. forces, however, make speculation on the U.S. administration’s real intentions inevitable. The number of ships, aircraft, sailors and marines appeared to be substantially greater than required to combat narcotrafficking through the Caribbean and eastern pacific even before the ordered deployment of the U.S.’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford. The messaging from Washington, moreover, focuses squarely on the Venezuelan regime.

What we have been hearing from Washington about operations in the Caribbean is a logical extension of steps taken by the Trump administration prior to the start of current operations. While President Obama first called Venezuela a threat to national security in 2015, it was only earlier this year that the U.S. designated the cartels as terrorist organizations. The designation of the cartels as terrorists was a necessary step to operationalize the shift from a law enforcement effort to a military one.

The new militarized U.S. strategy in the Caribbean has had an effect. Drug trafficking by sea is apparently way down. That said, this new strategy has not diminished trafficking by land nor reduced the flow of deadly fentanyl into the country. It has, on the other hand, generated concern in some countries about the return of American gunboat diplomacy. Domestically, the president’s new approach resonates well in some quarters but has incensed many Democrats in the U.S. Congress and even worried some Republicans. British concern about the legality of the U.S. strikes on the high seas is now so acute that the United Kingdom has ended intelligence sharing on Venezuela. The Trump administration has, however, given no indication that either international concern or congressional criticism will precipitate a change in policy.

President Trump’s change of the U.S strategy for fighting the cartels and maybe for achieving regime change in Venezuela has important implications for U.S. relations with its allies everywhere but especially within the region. The Trump administration has clearly made the Western Hemisphere a national security priority but there are many other vitally important arenas in which U.S. interests are affected by developments in this hemisphere – both positively and negatively.

Accordingly, the administration’s agenda in Latin America must include more than just winning the drug fight and controlling our Southern border. More than 40% of all U.S. manufacturing goods are sold into the Western Hemisphere and the U.S. has a positive trade balance with many countries in the region, including Brazil, Chile, Peru, Panama and others. Millions of American jobs depend on trade with the region. Energy production in the region is also significant; Canada is our largest foreign supplier but there are other key players including Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Trinity and Tobago and, more recently, Guyana. Guyana’s oil production, in fact, is exploding. The country’s GDP grew by over 25% in 2023 and by more than 30% in 2024. On the other hand, China’s influence continues to surge and China is now the largest trading partner for South America in the aggregate. The U.S. clearly needs to do what it can to strengthen the value proposition for the countries of Central and South American to see the U.S. as their commercial partner of choice.

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It is, at this point, not clear what the Trump administration’s end game is in the Caribbean. What is clear is that the U.S. cannot ignore other issues around the region or other views on how challenges should be met. Neither should we naively assume that success in suppressing the trafficking of cocaine out of South America is assured even temporarily, however many go-fast boats the U.S. military sinks. Transit by land, which the Trump administration has indicated it may take on next, is still robust. Demand for illegal drugs is still strong in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. has recently made progress in engaging Mexico, especially on combating the Mexican cartels, but how effective joint efforts will be remains to be seen. Relations with Colombia, the source of most of the world’s cocaine, on the other hand, have deteriorated dramatically. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has characterized U.S. attacks on the drug boats as atrocities, called President Trump a criminal and encouraged American military personnel to defy his orders. The U.S., for its part, has decertified Colombia for failing to cooperate fully with U.S. counternarcotics efforts and cancelled Petro’s visa.

The U.S. still has partners in Latin America, especially trade partners, but there is also, always, concern over U.S. unilateralism. Moreover, President Trump’s announcement that he has authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to become active in Venezuela inevitably recalls for some an earlier and darker time in U.S. relations with Latin America. That said, criticism of U.S. operations in the region has been surprisingly muted – and some countries have been explicitly supportive.

Still, many in the region have been left wondering where multilateral cooperation, diplomacy, democracy support and human rights, pillars of U.S.-Latin American policy since at least the 1980s, fit in America’s new more muscular policy toward the region. At the same time, most of the region agrees that the cartels are a grievous problem, and recognize that Venezuela is a dictatorship and that it has become an epicenter for a great deal of the most pernicious activity in the region. I expect they are dubious about the likelihood of the U.S. eradicating all drug trafficking from South America because so much of the trafficking is by land. They are also unconvinced that combatting drug trafficking per se is the U.S.’s only goal. They do not wish to see a war in either South or Central America but they are also profoundly tired of living with the consequences of the growing and corrosive power of the cartels.

The Trump administration’s campaign to date has had some success and may have put Russia, China and Iran – Venezuela’s extra-regional allies -- on notice that the U.S. has decided to counter malign activity and actors in the region forcefully. But this is a high stakes game for the U.S. A U.S. escalation to ground operations could catalyze world-wide criticism of the U.S. Success with targeted strikes is not assured. At present, we are left to wrestle with the question of whether the campaign to date is a preamble to even more ambitious operations. And, can what has been accomplished to date be sustained at a time when coca cultivation in source countries like Peru and Colombia is increasing and the head of a cartel – which is how the administration has characterized Maduro – remains in control of the government of Venezuela?

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Assessing the Pentagon’s Mission to Rebuild the ‘Arsenal of Freedom'

DEEP DIVE — The Pentagon is waging war against its own acquisition bureaucracy. In a sweeping speech on Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth described the “adversary”, not as a foreign power but as a process: decades-old requirements and procurement rules that reward paperwork over outcomes.

The core argument: if the U.S. wants to deter adversaries in today’s world of fast-moving threats that include gray-zone coercion, contested logistics and AI-enabled systems, it must accept more acquisition risk as a means to reduce operational risk later.

The Pentagon’s new plan pairs rhetorical urgency with specific structural changes. It proposes killing the legacy Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) and replacing it with a tighter, more centralized alignment, pushing commercial-first solutions even if they deliver an “85% solution” initially and forcing a cultural shift across both DoD and industry toward speed, volume, and continuous iteration. The plan also signals tougher expectations for primes to invest private capital and for government to send longer demand signals. It’s a tall order.

Here’s a look at the key ideas:

“Increase acquisition risk to decrease operational risk”: field good-enough capabilities faster, iterate in production, and stop chasing perfect specs that arrive too late.
JCIDS → RRAB / MEIA / JAR: cancel the slow, document-heavy requirements process; stand up a Requirements & Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB) to tie priorities to funds, a Mission Engineering & Integration Activity (MEIA) to co-design/experiment with industry early, and a Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR) to bridge the “valley of death.”
War-fighting Acquisition System & PAEs: rebrand and reorganize acquisition around Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs) who have end-to-end authority to trade cost/schedule/performance for time-to-field, with embedded contracting and fixed delivery cycles.
Modular Open Systems + multi-source: mandate modular architectures, maintain at least two qualified sources on critical components, and enable third-party integration to avoid vendor lock and accelerate upgrades.
Commercial-first, 85% solution: accept non-perfect bids that meet the mission faster, then iterate software and components continuously.
Wartime Production Unit (WPU): a deal-team model to negotiate across a contractor’s total DoD portfolio, create incentives for on-time delivery, and unlock surge capacity.
Workforce & Culture shift: convert the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) into a “Warfighting Acquisition University,” lengthen leader tenures, and evaluate contracting/program teams on mission outcomes rather than compliance metrics.
Foreign Military Sales realignment: move DSCA/DTSA under Acquisition & Sustainment to unify planning, contracting, and delivery so allies get kit faster without undercutting U.S. readiness.

Why this matters now

Adversaries are iterating faster, supply chains are brittle, and the U.S. military’s ability to produce and sustain at volume - will decide deterrence credibility. The proposal promises measurable gains in lead times, throughput, and availability, but it also raises hard questions about safety, governance, industry incentives, and the talent pipeline.

In the sections that follow, we pressure-test these claims with former commanders and acquisition leaders: how to set guardrails around “good-enough,” where the new risks are and the impact on the industry.

Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian spoke with General Phil Breedlove (Ret.), Lt. General Mike Groen (Ret) and Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and Stanford Professor Steve Blank, who has recently published a Department of War Program Executive Office directory to help companies better navigate the complicated system for selling to government.

Christian: What was your reaction to last week’s announcement that we heard from the secretary?

General Philip M. Breedlove

Gen. Breedlove retired as the Commander, Supreme Allied Command, Europe, SHAPE, Belgium and Headquarters, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany. He also served as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; and Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff.

General Breedlove: There are things that I really am looking forward to, and there are some things that are a bit worrisome, the way they were rolled out. But you never really know what's going to happen until you start seeing it in action and the changes to the rules for how we do our acquisition.

But make no mistake, our acquisition system to date is moribund. It's horrible. We laugh now about this “Valley of Death” between when something is created in the laboratory and when it gets to the field, six, seven, eight years or more sometimes. And people who are at war and doing this very differently, they're doing it in weeks, sometimes days, but not years. So we definitely have to change.

Part of the reason our acquisition system is so slow is because in our past, maybe even decades and decades ago, people took advantage of the system and they made money in a bad or almost illegal way. And so lawmakers do what lawmakers do, and technocrats and bureaucrats do what they do, and they created layers and layers of oversight to try to protect against some of those bad acts that happened decades ago. And the result is an acquisition system that is completely unresponsive to the needs of the warfighter. And I'm glad that we're starting to change it.

Lt. Gen. Michael Groen (US Marine Corps, Ret.)

Lt. Gen. Groen served over 36 years in the U.S. military, culminating his career as the senior executive for AI in the Department. Groen also served in the National Security Agency overseeing Computer Network Operations, and as the Director of Joint Staff Intelligence, working closely with the Chairman and Senior Leaders across the Department.

Lt. Gen. Groen: My immediate reaction, like everybody else, when somebody uses the word acquisition, you kind of cringe a little bit. And immediately you get the vent of, it takes too long, it's too expensive, the processes don't work, the people in the processes don't know what they're doing, the long litany of usual complaints. And most of them are actually true. What we have currently, I would articulate, is an unaccountable bureaucracy. It's a professional bureaucracy. They know the process. They build the process. They work the process. But the process doesn't necessarily meet our real war fighting objectives. And I think that is probably the most important thing here.

We'll talk about drones and technology and all these other things, but I think at its core, you actually do have to have a process for this. And just getting the credit cards out and buying stuff at Best Buy doesn't work either, right? So, I think it's a requirement for us. You can't just say, well, we're just gonna blow up all the rules and let people do whatever they want. Because as soon as you do that, you're gonna realize that if we didn't have a system, we wouldn't be able to do all these other things. How do you get to integration? How do you get to common standards? How do you get to the things that actually make weapon systems work effectively and with the caliber of ammunition that they use and the system that produces that and all of the other components? So it's easy, and I've done it probably more than anybody else, to just rant about the acquisition process.

But if you didn't have an acquisition process, you would need to invent one. So, our challenge really today is, okay, the one we have for a lot of reasons is not going to be the one that we will need tomorrow. It does okay on band-aids and making munitions for today. But it is certainly not a kind of process that enables war fighting flow. So I think we are very much at a transformation point, not just in the fact that the way we want to do acquisition must change, but more importantly, the way we do everything, the way we fight must change. And so naturally we have really an incredible opportunity. Let's build the system that enables the kind of fast moving, rapid innovation that we will want on the battlefield: AI driven, data driven. We know what the future looks like. Let's actually build to that and not let unaccountable bureaucracies get in the way.

Steve Blank

Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. His book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He created the curriculum for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. At Stanford, he co-created the Department of Defense Hacking for Defense and Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy curriculums. He is co-author of The Startup Owner's Manual.

Blank: It was mind blowing - not because anything the Secretary said was new; they are things that people who are interested in acquisition reform have been asking for the last 10 years. But it was put in a single package and was clearly done by the infusion of people who have actually run large businesses and were used to all the language of organizations that already know how to deliver with speed and urgency.

The part that didn't get said is essentially the Department of War wants to adopt startup innovation techniques of lean iteration, pivots, incremental releases, good enough delivery, and that gets you what the Secretary asked for, which was speed of delivery. But all those are things that we lived with in Silicon Valley for the last 50 years, and it wasn't until we had people who worked outside of buildings with no windows inside the Pentagon to understand that those techniques could actually be applied. And it required blowing up the existing system. And they did that spectacularly well. Very few holes in those proposals.

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Christian: A central piece of the plan as it was explained on Friday is the idea of eliminating the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, which has long been criticized for some of the slow processes and the overly bureaucratic results that we have. The new approach seeks to centralize procurement and funding under the DOD senior leadership. Are you comfortable that this is the right approach?

General Breedlove: So this is one of those, like I opened up with, some good, some bad. There are elements of JCIDS that I think we should hold on to. We shouldn't throw the whole thing out with the bath water. But there are a lot of elements of JCIDS that we need to get rid of.

Much like the rules we just talked about that were created because of people and bad acts for acquisition, the same sort of thing has happened in the process of moving an idea from the lab to the field in that now there are layers and layers of people who can hold up the process or say no. And when they do that, it adds time, schedule delays, more testing, and much more money to the program. And these people bear zero responsibility for their actions. The people that end up getting blamed for the delays and increased costs are the services or the primes. And the people that have this authority now but hold no responsibility for what they do, we've got to get rid of them. We have to ensure that people who have decision authority are held accountable for what they do, to the point of maybe even not charging this off to primes or to the folks who are developing these things. If someone else is out there slowing things down and they don't have to worry about it because they're not accountable to it, we're not in a good place.

Lt. Gen. Groen: One issue is there isn’t a cadre of professionals in DOD leadership that will be able to take this mission on full time. If you consider a broad sweep of what we build and acquire and how we do that, how we innovate, they will just run out of hours in the day and minds to engage in order to build a replacement for what we have today.

The impulse to change the way we do things is the right impulse. Our impulse to be disciplined about the way we go about things, that's also correct. So it's not enough to say “let’s blow it all up, we don't need any rules”. We actually do need rules. Regulation actually is an enabler. It helps you flow. It lets you know how things can be done. That's a really powerful thing.

The problem is with humans involved, there is always a tendency to distort a process through petty bureaucracies, tribalism, ignorance and bad temper. It is really important for leaders to actually lead in this space and create accountability for the people that are actually working. What we have today is a derivative of it. We don't need too many history lessons here, but this is like General Motors in the 1960s, where we started to really do modern industrial design at scale. So if you understand where we’ve come from, you can see how important things like industrial processes and quality checks.

In a digital environment, a transformational environment that is driven by artificial intelligence and data availability, all the notes change. The music changes. And you still need a process for things like money so you can pay people to build things. But we're not building things on a conveyor belt anymore. We're building code. We're building code that changes by the hour. We're building code that builds its own code. This is where we are. So you can't do that in a completely undisciplined way, that says “have at it team and we'll see what we get at the end of the process”. What we’re doing here is too important.

Christian: Part of the new approach will involve increasing acquisition risk, to decrease operational risk with a focus on increased use of commercial solutions and of even fielding 85 % solutions. Where's the red line that you would want as a commander before fielding an 85% solution?

Gen. Breedlove: This is a concept which is extremely hard to criticize. But we have to be pretty serious here because you're saying increasing acquisition risk to decrease operational risk. Well, if the product isn't operational yet and we have increased the purchasing and acquisition risk, and in between that costs us the life of a soldier, sailor, airman, marine or guardian, we have messed it up. So the rules are there for a reason. I completely understand. I absolutely, 100% agree with the fact that we've got to start taking more risk, but we can't do that in a way that is reckless and puts the lives of our troops on the line.

And an example where I think this concept is working well is Ukraine. They get a new drone that is designed to get past a certain capability of the Russian defenses. And why should we do a two-year testing on that thing? If the testing is to fire it into Russia where it's not going to kill any friendlies and see what happens, let's fire it into Russia and get the testing done on the battlefield, where we're less concerned with what happens. So there are ways to shorten and to change the way that we do tests and other things on the acquisition side that gets us faster to the operational side. And if we can do that, again, without raising the risk to our troops, let's go for it. And we're seeing that done well by the Ukrainians, and to some degree by the Israelis.

Lt. Gen. Groen: The first thing that pops in my mind is- What does an 85 % solution look like? What is 85% of a truck? What is 85% of a battleship or a carrier? Pick your system. If you're just doing software, you can do a lot of things in software, but still, software that's 15 % buggy and doesn't work, because you've chosen 85%, that's almost like going right back to the industrial age process flow for code. And I think that the real magic here at its core is transforming the way we do our war fighting. We need new thinking about how to integrate capabilities and new thinking about how to build artificial intelligence modalities and then the systems.

Warfare is changing under our feet right now. Ukraine and drones, I accept that example, but it's so much more than that. We need a complete transformation in the way we understand the enemy, the way we understand our mission, the way we can use autonomy to integrate with humans, the way that we can build robotics, the way that we can now start what I like to call putting the mind of a commander on a pedestal by taking all the data environment and revealing that to a commander and everybody else who is working with the commander so that you have common situational awareness.

The opportunity here is enormous to transform our war fighting to the same degree we're transforming our industries. And you see the transformation every day when you drive through DC or Austin or San Francisco. Transformation is real and it's driving our economy today. What we haven't done is purposefully mapped out how we're going to drive our war fighting capability through this technology. And this is so important because we have to have a plan for how we build operational workflows. Where do we build those? Who builds those? And so I think moving from monitoring a process of manufacturing to really considering war fighting as the core element that the technology springs from.

Christian: Obviously the Pentagon procurement system that we have today is a product of decades of bureaucracy and rules. Are you hopeful that you're going to be able to see the kind of change in the rapid timeline that they've laid forth here?

Blank: Number one, this is a pretty extensive reorganization. Right now the Department of War is siloed between requirements and system centers for testing and prototyping and acquisition, which was the acquisition with a small A with the PEOs and program managers, and then it went to contracts and then it went to sustainment, et cetera. Those were silos. Now we're putting it all underneath a single portfolio acquisition executive. So, instead of making their offices 10,000 people, it's actually a matrix organization, much like a combatant command is. Most of those people will stay in their existing orgs but now be tasked to work on specific portfolios. And instead, the portfolios will no longer be arranged by weapon system. They're going to be arranged, for example, by war fighting concepts or technology concepts, et cetera.

That said, boy, try moving an elephant and making it dance. And at the same time, they recognized - this was one of the genius parts - people won't just get a memo and know what to do. Historically, they've depended on the Defense Acquisition University, which taught them, contracting officers and the rest, how to work with the 5,000 pages of the DFAR and FAR, Federal Acquisition, Defense Acquisition Regulations. One of the unnoticed things was they basically told the Defense Acquisition University, stop teaching that today. You now need to teach people this new methodology. That's not going to happen by telepathy. First of all, we need to train the trainers, then we need to train all the people who've grown up in their career following the paperwork.

So, I predict six months or a year of chaos and confusion. And probably, there's always in a large scale reorganization saboteurs who are angry that their cheese has been moved or worse, their authority has been diminished or the head count went somewhere else. This is going to be no different except maybe at a bigger scale.

In the end, if we pull this off, and I'll explain the only possible reason not to do this, the country will be much better for it. The other obstacle will be if you're on the board of directors and the exec staff of a prime, you're going to go through the 12 stages of denial and grief and whatever because I don't know how many times both Feinberg and Hegseth made it clear that the primes weren't delivering and they weren't investing in the things the country needed and they got used to the system and we were kind of mutually dependent on a broken system - and that's over. Well, you're not going to let your stockholders say you just went home and packed up. Obviously, it's pretty clear that appealing to the Pentagon isn't going to work, but Congress is “coin operated”. This is now going to be a race of lobbying cash from the primes versus lobbying cash for the first time from private equity and venture capital. So it's going to be, who has the biggest pile of cash to influence Congress and the executive branch to keep these rules in place or modify them?

Remember what a disaster this is if you're an existing large company selling to the DOD. It says number one, we're going to buy commercial off the shelf. Number two, we're going to buy commercial off the shelf and then modify it. If and only if either one and two work, we do some bespoke contracting with the existing organization. It's never happened before. Pretty clear, pretty direct. So, the easy thing would be for primes to change their business model. But my prediction is they're going to double and triple down the amount of lobbying and dollars spent.

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Christian: Secretary Hegseth also had some words of warning to the major U.S. defense contractors, the primes, to speed up weapons development and production, invest their own capital to increase capacity, or risk becoming obsolete. This is a relatively complicated issue for these companies. What are your thoughts on this?

General Breedlove: I think that our senior leaders, maybe to include the Secretary of War and others, have sort of allowed the verbiage around this topic to get a little loosey goosey. What happened in the past was that some primes used money out of existing contracts to create excess capacity that then saved them money the next time they had to build new equipment. And our government, Congress and others got tired of that and wrote laws that limit how much money you can spend out of existing contracts to create excess capacity. And the way I understand the laws, most of them are zero. If we pay you to build 100 B-21s and you create a line that could do 120, you're going to jail or you're going to court. And so I think that there's some imprecise language running around and we need to give some of this time to sort out when the dust settles to understand what they're really asking of the primes, because they are limited on one side, fiducially and fiscally, and they're limited on the other side by laws and sometimes regulations that have been created by the regulatory agencies to correct past [behaviors].

I applaud the ideas and the initiative that the Secretary laid out. But to the defense of the primes, they're going to need some regulatory or legal relief to be able to do most of the things being talked about under the new plan. They just can't snap their fingers and say, OK, we're going to do this because then they'll end up in court.

Christian: It's not going to be an overnight process to reboot the Pentagon's procurement system. The Department of Defense is the largest single organization within the US Government. The amount of products and services that flow through that system is enormous. You've clearly laid out the tremendous opportunity that exists to rebuild the system. What are you most worried about? What's the biggest risk that can impede progress as the Pentagon starts this journey?

Lt. Gen. Groen: Tribalism. Tribalism will sink us. We are so horrifically tribal that we can't think like an extended entity. We can't think like a singular organism that is really effective through data and our systems flowing together. Tribalism kills that. And I see it every day. I'm not in the Pentagon every day anymore, but I see it: the tribalism among services, the tribalism among components of services and the tribalism within the department. And all of that tribalism is an afterglow of our industrial might in the 1960s. Now is the time for thinkers that are wearing a uniform, it's not about buying stuff without asking. It's about thinking through the flow that you want to achieve and then building the capabilities that you need to do that. It's a mindset thing, but that’s all about what transformation is. The form changes. And so when we transform, we transform ourselves into this place where we leave that tribalism behind because we have integrated effectiveness.

Working with broad autonomy is gonna help us think that way. I think that there's a broader awareness of what the technology is able to do and how it will facilitate. We just have to be careful to make sure that that's not the end state. Technology is not the end state. It's humans, war fighters who are winning on the battlefield because they understand and they can make the right calls. That's what we're after. And so all of the stuff about acquisition and the rules and why people don't follow the rules and why is it so tribal that we can't get anything to be, I think all of that merits some dynamite, but it also merits some thinking about how do we better integrate our thinking and flows and how do we do that on the battlefield?

Christian: How much of a risk is the next administration coming in and potentially changing everything? And then in particular, if you're one of those big primes, are you baking that into your long-term planning that this might shift in a measurable way in the future? Or do you think these changes are going to be something that is so overwhelmingly positive that future administrations have to stick with it?

Blank: Well, if you were asking me this three years ago, I would have said, well, you should get all this done now because it's going to be flipped back in three years. What's changed now is the amount of capital available for startups, scale-ups, and private equity firms that can match or overpower the lobbying efforts of the primes. So as I said, both the executive branch and Congress are coin operated, even more so now than ever. And for the first time ever, the insurgents have as much or more coin than the incumbents. That's what's going to change this game.

So yes, of course, a Democratic administration or another Republican one might have a different opinion. But in this case, we're talking about piles of money flooding the streets in Washington to try to change the game. Think about who are now sitting in the cabinet. And other places have commercial experience for the first time ever at scale, inside the executive branch for sure and inside the Department of War which changes the nature of the conversation and as we're seeing the types of things they're recommending.

Again, it wasn't that people didn't recognize this before. It was kind of hard to explain this to people who had never run a business or who have been career successful. I've said for years, we had world class organizations, world class people for a world that no longer existed. And finally, we have people who understand what that world should be like because they've been operating in it. Secretary Feinberg has been writing checks of tens of billions of dollars- buying an aircraft carrier, okay, he’s written those kinds of checks before. Tell me who else ever had that position.

And again, it's not that the DOW should run like a corporation or startup, but having that experience sets a bar for what you know is possible for doing extraordinary things. It's what this country knew how to do in World War II and during the Cold War, and we just kind of lost it when Robert McNamara, an ex-chief financial officer of Ford, put in the first version of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBE) in 1962. We've been operating on that system for 63 years, or some variance of it. Basically, he imposed a chief financial officer's kind of strategy on budgeting and planning, which made sense at the time. It stopped making sense about 15 years ago, but no one inside the building knew what to do differently. That's changed.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.

How America Can Balance Legal Migration with Strong National Security

OPINION — Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan-born New York State Assembly member, was just elected Mayor of New York City, the largest city in the U.S. We in the U.S. take this for granted that a naturalized U.S. citizen could aspire to hold prominent federal, state and local positions. But this is unique for the U.S. and a select few countries that welcome legal migration and provide naturalized citizens with the same rights available to natural-born citizens.

I’ve spent almost two decades living in other countries and can assure you that in most countries, there is no clear path for foreign-born inhabitants to acquire citizenship and hold office. In fact, even buying property is problematic in many of these countries.

Except for the president and vice president, who must be natural-born citizens (Article 11, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution), naturalized citizens can hold offices in the Congress and in federal, state and local governments. Indeed, Madeleine Albright, a naturalized citizen born in Czechoslovakia, was Secretary of State and Henry Kissinger, born in Germany, was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and Elaine Chao, born in Taiwan, was Secretary of Labor and Transportation. These are just a few prominent Americans who became naturalized citizens and went on to serve our country with distinction.

Currently, Ilhan Omar, born in Somalia, is a member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota and Senator Mazie K. Hirono, born in Japan and representing Hawaii, are two of 30 members of the 119th Congress who were not born in the U.S. The list of naturalized Americans who contributed to our nation’s economic growth, academic excellence, athletic prowess and the arts is awe-inspiring. Indeed, our country’s open-door policy has contributed to making the U.S. the “shining city on a hill.”

This open-door policy of legal migration has served our Republic well. What our elected officials must ensure is that we continue to care for all the people and that we ensure that terrorists, narco-traffickers, criminals and state-supported proxies are prevented from entering our country and causing harm to our people and institutions.

This is a list of just a few of the domestic law enforcement issues requiring immediate attention from federal, state and local authorities, and the representatives elected by the people to ensure that the proliferation of crime in the U.S. is managed on a priority basis.

Drug Trafficking: There are over 100,000 overdose deaths annually, largely driven by synthetic opioids like fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin entering the U.S. from Mexico, Columbia and South American cartels.
Human Trafficking and Exploitation: Transnational criminal networks traffic migrants, women, and children for labor and sex across borders, including into the U.S.
Cybercrime and Financial Theft: Russian, Chinese, North Korean and East European cybercriminal groups target U.S. individuals, corporations, and infrastructure with ransomware attacks, identity theft, and bank fraud, costing U.S. companies and consumers tens of billions of dollars annually. Such cyberattacks also threaten critical infrastructure – energy grids, hospitals, and water systems.
Money Laundering and Corruption: Criminal organizations launder billions through U.S. real estate, shell companies, cryptocurrency, and luxury goods.
Threats to National Security: Transnational criminal groups often collaborate with hostile states or terrorist networks, often blurring the line between organized crime and geopolitical conflict.
Economic and Social Costs: Drug deaths, cyber losses, law enforcement costs, and social disruption likely exceed hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with communities suffering from increased violence, addiction, and corruption.

Despite the efforts of the FBI, DEA, DHS and Treasury, the adaptability of criminal groups and the global nature of technology and finance - and the support of countries determined to cause harm to the U.S. -- makes enforcement increasingly difficult.

The U.S. experiment with an “open door policy” for legal migration to the U.S. has been a great success. It is why the U.S. is the “shining city on a hill.” But we should not take this for granted. We and our elected representatives must work even harder to rid the country of organized crime and defeat our adversaries who wish for us harm.

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

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Uncovering the Truth Behind Trump’s Call to Resume Nuclear Testing

OPINION — “Nearly 1,000 feet below the Nevada desert, [U.S.] scientists and engineers are conducting groundbreaking nuclear weapons research. Subcritical experiments, or ‘subcrits’ for short, play a crucial role in ensuring national security. Subcritical experiments are a key part of the [National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)] science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, which is the way America ensures that our nuclear weapons are safe, secure, and reliable -- without conducting full-scale nuclear weapons tests.”

That was a quote from Don Haynes, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) senior director at the Nevada National Security Sites, from an article published in LANL’s National Security Science magazine just 13 days ago on October 29, 2025.

The article goes on to explain, “Subcritical experiments allow researchers to evaluate the behavior of nuclear materials (usually plutonium) in combination with high explosives. This configuration mimics the fission stage of a modern nuclear weapon. However, subcrits remain below the threshold of reaching criticality. No critical mass is formed, and no self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurs -- there is no nuclear explosion.”

I’m going to quote more from the LANL article because it shows what subcritical testing the U.S. has been doing for years. For example, I wrote a Cipher Brief column in July 2021 that described subcrits this way: “Put simply, inside a steel container, a chemical high-explosive is detonated around a coin-like, small sample of plutonium [less than eight ounces] to simulate aspects of a nuclear explosion. No actual chain reaction or nuclear explosion occurs. But this contained detonation, with the assistance of computers, has helped scientists determine how plutonium behaves under the extreme pressures that do occur during detonation of a nuclear weapon.”

I further explained four years ago, “The main purpose, up to now, of subcritical experiments has been to identify and decrease uncertainties in the performance of currently deployed U.S. nuclear weapons, at a time when actual testing is not being done.”

I write this to deal with President Trump’s rather confused – and at times inaccurate -- series of recent statements about restarting U.S. nuclear testing. The President’s words have caused varied responses from his own officials – some of whom apparently did not want to appear correcting him. And the President’s words have gone so far as to encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to convene a publicized Kremlin meeting last Wednesday where senior Russian national security officials discussed the possibility of Russia exploring the restart of their own full-scale underground nuclear testing.

To make it clear, the U.S. and Russia, by agreement, conducted their last underground nuclear tests in 1992. China did their last one in 1996. All three were signatories to the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which prohibited “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.” However, under the treaty, as the U.S. State Department explains on its website, the CTBT “does not prohibit subcritical experiments to help ensure the continued safety and reliability of nuclear weapons.”

Russia has conducted at least 25 subcritical experiments at its Novaya Zemlya test site, according to past statements by U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Russian authorities. As of May 2024, the U.S. had conducted some 34 subcrits at the Nevada test site, according to DOE.

In 2022, a spokesperson for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages the nuclear program, told Kyodo News that in June and September 2021, the U.S. conducted two subcritical tests, the first under the Biden administration. Three rounds of subcritical nuclear tests were conducted under the first Trump administration, and four rounds under Obama, according to other sources.

Currently, LANL has subcritical experiments scheduled into the year 2032, according to the recent National Security Science magazine article.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is developing several new warheads including the W93, which is intended for deployment on U.S. sub-launched ballistic missiles by 2040, according to NNSA. The NNSA website said of the W93, “Key nuclear components will be based on currently deployed and/or previously tested nuclear designs…The W93 will not require additional nuclear testing.”

Against that background, let’s review what President Trump has been saying, along with some of the responses.

The testing issue began with Trump in Korea on the evening of October 29. He had a meeting scheduled for 11 a.m. the next morning with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping. At 9 p.m., Trump sent off a message on his Truth Social public website that said: “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”

What triggered Trump’s message has not yet been explained. Three days earlier, Putin, dressed in a military uniform, had publicly announced with some fanfare that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered missile over the Arctic Ocean after years of development.

It may have been just competitiveness, but Trump was not clear what he was talking about when he wrote “testing our nuclear weapons.” Was he talking about nuclear delivery systems, as Putin had just been? Or was he talking about testing nuclear warheads or bombs?

If it were the latter, Russia actually has more nuclear weapons than the U.S., primarily because the U.S. has retired most of its tactical nuclear weapons. But if Trump meant strategic nuclear delivery systems, he was correct.

Then there was the ambiguity of what kind of testing Trump was talking about? He mentions instructing the Pentagon to “start testing,” which implied nuclear delivery systems, such as missiles, which the military controls. DOE’s NNSA tests the nuclear portion of warheads and bombs.

The next day, October 30, hours after the Xi meeting, Trump was flying back to the U.S. from Korea aboard Air Force One, and held an impromptu press conference. After 10 minutes of questions about meeting Xi, Trump was asked why he wrote the Truth Social piece about nuclear testing, Trump initially replied, “Well, that had nothing to do with them,” meaning the Chinese.

Trump went on, “It had to do with others.” He paused and then continued, “They seem to all be nuclear testing. We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don't do testing. You know, we've halted it years, many years ago, but with others doing testing, I think it's appropriate that we do.”

Since Trump mentioned the U.S. had halted the testing “years ago,” he created the impression at that moment he must have been thinking of explosive underground nuclear testing. When asked a follow-up question on where or when such testing would take place, Trump waved it off saying, “It will be announced. You know, we have test sites. It'll be announced.”

Having given the idea that he had ordered the resumption of explosive underground nuclear tests, it was no surprise that the next day, Friday, October 31, when Trump sat down at Mar-a-Lago with Norah O’Donnell for the 60 Minutes CBS News television program to be aired two days later.

Here I am using the CBS transcript of the entire one-hour, thirteen-minute Trump/O’Donnell interview and not the shorter, edited version shown on Sunday night, October 31.

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Well into the interview, after covering Trump’s Asia trip and meeting with China’s Xi, O’Donnell referred to his October 29, Truth Social message where he mentioned new nuclear testing and asked Trump, “What did you mean?”

Trump initially gave this wide-ranging response: “Well, we have more nuclear weapons than any other country. Russia's second. China's a very distant third, but they'll be even in five years. You know, they're making them rapidly, and I think we should do something about denuclearization, which is going to be some-- and I did actually discuss that with both President Putin and President Xi. Denuclearization's a very big thing. We have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world 150 times. Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons, and China will have a lot. They have some. They have quite a bit, but…”

At that point, O’Donnell interrupted and asked specifically, “So why do we need to test our nuclear weapons?”

This time Trump answered, “Well, because you have to see how they work. You know, you do have to-- and the reason I'm saying-- testing is because Russia announced that they were going be doing a test. If you notice, North Korea's testing constantly. Other countries are testing. We're the only country that doesn't test, and I don’t want to be the only country that doesn't test.”

As I have pointed out above, other than North Korea’s six underground nuclear tests beginning in 2006 and ending in September 2017, there have been none confirmed, other than Russia’s acknowledged subcritical nuclear tests. So it again is unclear what Trump was mentioning.

Trump actually went on saying, “We have tremendous nuclear power that was given to us largely because when I was President (and I hated to do it, but you have to do it)-- I rebuilt the military during my first term. My first term was a tremendous success. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country.”

Trump then tried to turn the conversation to the economy, but O’Donnell brought him back to the subject by asking, “Are you saying that after more than 30 years, the United States is going to start detonating nuclear weapons for testing?”

This time Trump insisted, “I'm saying that we're going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes,” and went on saying “Russia's testing nuclear weapons...And China's testing them too. You just don't know about it.”

Trump claimed the U.S. is an open society, but “they [Russia, China] don't go and tell you about it. And, you know, as powerful as they are, this is a big world. You don't necessarily know where they're testing. They test way underground where people don't know exactly what's happening with the test. You feel a little bit of a vibration. They test and we don't test. We have to test.”

That same day of the Trump/O’Donnell interview, October 30, Vice Admiral Richard Correll, Trump’s nominee to be head of Strategic Command, was having his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Asked if he knew whether Russia, China or any other country were doing explosive testing of nuclear warheads, Correll answered, “No.”

Asked whether Trump could have been talking about nuclear delivery systems, Correll said, “I don't have insight into the President's intent. I agree that could be an interpretation.”

On November 2, Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared on Fox News and was asked about the new nuclear tests mentioned by the President. Wright replied, “I think the tests we're talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call non-critical explosions.”

Asked whether the tests involve the existing stockpile weapons or new systems, Wright said, “The testing that we'll be doing is on new systems, and again these will be non-nuclear explosions.”

Wright explained that thanks to the nation’s national laboratories “the U.S. actually has a great advantage with our science and our computation power. We can simulate incredibly accurately exactly what will happen in a nuclear explosion. And we can do that because in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we did nuclear test explosions. We had them detailed and instrumented and we measured exactly what happened. Now we simulate what were the conditions that delivered that and as we change bomb designs, what will they deliver. We have a reasonable advantage today in nuclear weapons design over all of our adversaries.”

On November 3, CIA Director John Ratcliffe came to Trump’s defense on the Russia, China testing issue, writing a Tweet on X saying the President “is right.” To back it up, Ratcliffe cited a May 2019 quote from then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley Jr. saying Russia “probably” was conducting low-yield tests although Ashley did not claim to have specific evidence. He stated that Russia had the "capability" to conduct very low-yield nuclear tests.

Ratcliffe also cited a 2020 Wall Street Journal article that said the U.S. believed China may have secretly conducted a low-yield nuclear test based on circumstantial evidence, such as increased excavation, activity in containment chambers, and a lack of transparency at the site.

That same day, Sen. Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put out his own Tweet on X saying, “After consultations with Director Ratcliffe and his team, they have confirmed to me that the CIA assesses that both Russia and China have conducted super-critical nuclear weapons tests in excess of the U.S. zero-yield standard. These tests are not historic and are part of their nuclear modernization programs.”

Despite all this Trumpian back and forth, I strongly doubt the U.S. will return to explosive nuclear testing, but rather remain with subcritical experiments as currently planned.

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Sudan’s War Without Borders: How Global Powers Turned Darfur into a Proxy Battleground

DEEP DIVE — Entire cities in the Darfur region of Sudan have been burned and razed, millions have fled their homes, and unspeakable terror and violence plague those left behind. When fighting erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Abdel Fattah al‑Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, few predicted the conflict would become one of Africa’s worst humanitarian disasters.

There is, however, more to this war than just an internal battleground. The war in Darfur is no longer simply a domestic power struggle. It has become a multilayered proxy battlefield involving Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran and more — each supporting rival Sudanese actors to secure strategic footholds.

“The current phase has Darfur as a killing field. The Sudanese protagonists have sorted out somewhat the areas each controls. Still, on the political front, both are committed to eliminating the other in a fight to the finish,” United States Ambassador to Sudan during the George W. Bush administration, Cameron Hume, tells The Cipher Brief. “There may be agreement on a time-limited humanitarian ceasefire, but no one is aiming at a durable political settlement between the two main parties.”

Infographic with a map showing areas controlled by the army, the Rapid Support Forces and neutral groups in Sudan as of September 23, 2025, according to the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and the AFP. (Infographic with a map showing areas controlled by the army, the Rapid Support Forces and neutral groups in Sudan as of September 23, 2025, according to the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and the AFP (Graphic by AFP) (Graphic by Olivia Bugault, Valentina Breschi, Nalini Lepetit-Chella/AFP via Getty Images)

United Arab Emirates

Despite official denials, the UAE remains the RSF’s cornerstone patron in Darfur, suspected of funneling advanced weaponry — including Chinese CH-95 and “Long Wang 2” strategic drones for 24-hour surveillance and strikes, Norinco-guided bombs, howitzers, and thermobaric munitions —via a covert air bridge of more than 240 UAE-chartered flights from November 2024, often landing at Chad’s Amdjarass airfield or South Darfur’s Nyala base.

These supplies, additionally routed through Libyan intermediaries like Khalifa Haftar’s networks and Ugandan/Somali airfields, have empowered RSF assaults, such as the latest siege and takeover of El Fasher. Economically, UAE-based firms like Hemedti’s Al-Junaid control Darfur’s Jebel Amer and Songo gold mines, exporting $1.6B in 2024, reportedly laundered via seven sanctioned Dubai entities to fund RSF salaries, Colombian mercenaries and further arms.

“The United Arab Emirates is the key sponsor of the RSF in strategic terms. Its interest is to convert influence in western Sudan into leverage over corridors, gold monetization and logistics, and to prevent an outcome in which Islamists consolidate in Khartoum,” Dr. Andreas Krieg, Associate Professor at King’s College London, tells The Cipher Brief.

Sudan’s gold — its primary export — has also become a lifeline for the UAE, feeding Dubai’s markets with more than ten tons a year from RSF-controlled areas. The trade aligns with Abu Dhabi’s long-term ambitions and its stance against the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as its past reliance on RSF fighters in Yemen. Despite Emirati denials and Sudan’s failed genocide case against the UAE at the ICJ, evidence ties the UAE directly to embargo breaches, from passports recovered in Omdurman to Emirati-made vehicles found at RSF sites.

As the UAE expands its influence through RSF control of Darfur’s 700-kilometer Red Sea corridor, reviving stalled DP World and AD Ports projects to rival Saudi NEOM, it effectively uses the militia as a proxy to secure resources and block SAF dominance. Approximately 70 percent of Sudan’s gold production from RSF-controlled areas is smuggled through Dubai, while overall illicit exports account for around 40 percent of the country’s total gold output.

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Turkey

Ankara, seeing the Darfurian conflict as both a threat to its regional ambitions and a challenge to Islamist allies, has backed al-Burhan’s forces with drones worth $120 million, delivered through Egypt. Their weapons supply assisted SAF in retaking Khartoum earlier this year but comes with deeper incentives: ideological ties with Burhan’s Islamist faction and strategic objectives for Red Sea access.

“Turkey’s quiet intelligence-sharing and counterterrorism pacts give it outsized sway over local regimes,” John Thomas, managing director of strategic policy firm Nestpoint Associates, tells The Cipher Brief.

The result, experts say, is a dangerous and growing proxy war between the UAE and Turkey — one now fought with advanced drones and air defenses across Sudan’s skies. The stalemate has fractured the country, spilled instability into Chad and Libya, and left tens of thousands dead, a toll experts warn could further destabilize the Horn of Africa.

Beyond the pace and scale of Turkish arms transfers, the presence of Turkish private military contractors (PMCs) in Africa merits closer scrutiny.

“In addition to the pace and spread of Turkey’s arms flow, I would say the presence of Turkish PMCs in Africa is something policymakers really ought to focus on more closely,” Will Doran, Turkey researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells The Cipher Brief. “A lot of these PMCs, like Erdogan himself, are warm towards the Muslim Brotherhood and have some questionable ties to Islamist militias on the ground in the Sahel. This isn’t to say Turkey is backing the region’s big names in terrorism. For one, Ankara’s deployed against al-Shabaab in Somalia, but the PMC trend is worrisome nonetheless.”

Egypt

Egypt views Sudan as a vital flank for its national interests. The Nile River flows from Sudan into Egypt, and Cairo has long been vigilant about any instability upstream. Egypt supports General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) because Cairo views them as the most dependable group to safeguard Egypt’s key national interests — namely, the Nile River corridor, which is Egypt’s sustenance for water and trade, and the southern border, which it shares with Sudan.

According to Dr. Krieg, “Egypt is the principal state backer of the army.”

“Its strategic priorities are the security of the Nile heartland, avoidance of an Islamist resurgence, and denial of hostile basing or rival influence along the Red Sea,” he continued.

Egypt, already hosting more than a million refugees, also fears that if Khartoum collapses into chaos, the resulting instability — such as refugee flows, arms trafficking, or militant activity — could spill over the border into its territory. Diplomatically, Cairo has kept direct intervention limited and insists on a Sudan-led solution, yet it retains close military and political ties to Burhan.

Saudi Arabia

Riyadh shares a parallel concern: as the Gulf kingdom pursues its Vision 2030 and Red Sea coastal investments, it has an interest in a stable Sudan firmly aligned with its regional agenda. Riyadh has backed the SAF via financial and diplomatic support, while also positioning itself as a mediator.

“Saudi Arabia is perhaps the outside player with potential influence that gets the least attention,” said Amb. Hume.

Dr. Krieg also observed that “Saudi Arabia has positioned itself as a convenor and would prefer a unified state that secures the Red Sea.”

“Chad and the Haftar camp in eastern Libya function as corridors and logistics enablers, and their choices directly affect the intensity of fighting in Darfur,” he explained. “Those intermediaries in Libya and Chad are all part of the UAE’s Axis of Secessionists; a network of non-state actors that are all tied to Abu Dhabi directly or indirectly.”

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Iran

Since late 2023, Iran has resumed ties with SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan after a seven-year break, sending Mohajer-6 and Ababil drones, artillery, and intel via seven Qeshm Fars Air flights to Port Sudan from December 2023 through July 2024. This aid helped SAF retake Khartoum in March 2025 and strike RSF in Darfur. In addition, Iran uses Sudan’s Yarmouk arms factory to counter the UAE-backed RSF. Tehran’s overarching goal? Access to Port Sudan to support the Houthis in Yemen and spread Shiite influence — risking wider regional proxy conflict.

“Iran’s military support has helped shift momentum toward the SAF. As one of many foreign actors exacerbating Sudan’s internal tensions, Iran contributes to the country’s unfolding humanitarian disaster,” Jonathan Ruhe, Director of Foreign Policy at the JINSA Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy, tells The Cipher Brief. “And as one of many foreign actors trying to claim concessions from the government and vying to exploit Sudan’s natural resources, Iran helps worsen the country’s already high levels of impoverishment.

Research Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Husain Abdul-Hussain, also underscored that while Iranian involvement in Sudan is still in its infancy, “it will certainly grow as the war grinds on.”

“The more reliant Islamist militias become on Iran, the stronger they become and the more indebted to Tehran,” he explained. “Eventually, relations between Iran and Sudanese Islamist militias will be similar to its relations with Islamist militias in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (Hashd Shaabi), Gaza (Hamas) and Yemen (Houthis). Note that Sudan Islamist militias are Sunni (like Hamas in Gaza), and unlike Shia Iran and its Lebanese and Iraqi Shia militias. The Houthis are their own breed of Islam (Yazidis) but are allied with Shia Iran.”

Russia

Moscow, meanwhile, has played both sides in Sudan’s civil war for profit and power. Before 2024, the Wagner Group, now under Russia’s Defense Ministry, backed the RSF with arms like surface-to-air missiles, in return for gold from RSF-held mines like Jebel Amer — smuggling up to 32.7 tons worth $1.9 billion via Dubai from 2022 to 2023 to skirt Ukraine war sanctions and fund operations. This fueled RSF violence, including the 2023 to 2025 massacres in el-Geneina and el-Fasher.

Around midway through last year, in the aftermath of Prigozhin’s demise, Moscow flipped to bolstering the SAF in its quest for a Port Sudan naval base. Russia subsequently vetoed a UN ceasefire resolution last November to keep up its influence in Khartoum, while reports emerged of Russian mercenaries operating in West Darfur, worsening the fear and displacement.

“Russia linked commercial and security networks remain present around gold flows and in facilitation roles close to the RSF camp,” said Dr. Krieg.

Why So Many Foreign Players?

At the heart of Sudan’s crisis lie three intertwined forces: geography, resources, and regional rivalry. Poised along the Nile, the Red Sea, and the Horn of Africa, Sudan is pivotal to everything from Cairo’s water security to the maritime goals of Gulf States to the influence ambitions of Moscow and Ankara. Moreover, its ports and resource-rich land have morphed domestic infighting into a lucrative war economy.

“Material backing has lengthened the war and structured its geography,” Mr. Krieg said. “The result is not a decisive victory for either side but a hardening of zones, with the RSF advantaged in a peripheral theatre where it can police corridors and extract revenue, and the army entrenched where the state’s core institutions, population and donor attention reside.”

Why It’s So Hard to End the War

With so many players in the field and a deep distrust among warring parties, ending the war in Sudan has become extraordinarily difficult. The United States, for its part, leads the “Quad” alongside the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, pushing for a three-month humanitarian truce. The RSF agreed to a deal on November 6, and Washington is now pressing the Sudanese army to do the same in hopes of easing the fighting and starting talks on the war’s deeper causes.

If the war in Sudan continues, the U.S. faces a growing humanitarian catastrophe: estimates suggest more than 150,000 deaths and over 14 million people displaced, with nearly 25 million facing acute hunger. Regionally, unchecked control of the RSF in Darfur could destabilize the Red Sea corridor, a vital route for global trade and U.S. allies. Domestically, failure to resolve the conflict would erode U.S. credibility on human rights and genocide prevention, heighten refugee pressures in North Africa and Europe, and contradict the moral precedent set during the 2003 Darfur genocide.

“Washington will be paying more attention,” one White House-connected source tells The Cipher Brief. “It isn’t ignored. It is a conflict Trump wants to see ended.”

Dr. Krieg asserted that Sudan is entering a consolidation phase in which the Rapid Support Forces have turned Darfur into a defensible rear area and administrative base. The fall of El Fasher removed the last significant government foothold in the region. It gave the RSF control of the interior lines across West, South, Central, and much of North Darfur, as well as access to Libya and Chad for resupply and commerce.

He thus asserts that Sudan’s future is likely to go one of two ways.

“The Sudanese Armed Forces still hold the Nile corridor, the capital area and much of the east, which creates a west versus centre geography. That configuration points to two near-term paths. Either the front stabilises into a frozen conflict that resembles an informal partition, or the RSF seeks to push east through North Kordofan and test the approaches to the center,” Dr. Krieg added. “Humanitarian conditions are acute, with siege tactics, displacement and food insecurity now baked into the conflict economy. The political tempo has slowed rather than accelerated, since battlefield gains in Darfur give the RSF reasons to bank advantages before contemplating concessions.”

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Why Putin Is Losing The War In Ukraine That He Thinks He Is Winning

OPINION — The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in January 2022 is now approaching its fourth year. The cost for Ukraine has been very high, but the cost for Russia has been astronomical. Russian forces have been pushed back nearly to the territory they controlled at the end of 2021. According to British Intelligence, by October 14, 2025, Russian casualties (killed and wounded) since January 2022 totaled 1,118,000 military personnel. This figure is only slightly lower than the Ukrainian estimate made on the same day of 1,125,150 Russian casualties. Ukraine also estimates Russian losses over the same period of 11,256 tanks, 23,345 armored combat vehicles, and 33,628 artillery systems. The scale of these losses can be compared with Russia’s force structure (FS) at the start of the invasion, which included 900,000 active duty personnel, 3,417 active tanks, 11,000 armored combat vehicles, and 5,000 active artillery systems. In short, Russia has lost more than twice its entire 1992 army force structure since the invasion.

Yet the Russian army continues to engage in desperate efforts to regain limited territory to the west. British intelligence estimates that since the start of 2025 Russia has suffered 332,000 casualties, the highest loss rate since the invasion. Russia has made only marginal gains, which Putin trumpets as victories as he throws more men and equipment into the Ukraine meatgrinder.

Of course, Putin cannot afford to admit failure, but it nonetheless seems as if he actually believes his strategy is succeeding. Why?

The answer lies in the perverse incentives of Russian command and control (C2), which conceal the weaknesses of Russian FS. Russian C2 is concentrated in one civilian with no military training (Putin), and his small circle of advisers.

Putin’s leadership discourages innovation by field officers and welcomes blind obedience. Bad news from field officers of all ranks is punished with demotion or arrest. Good news is rewarded with promotion. As a result, field officers routinely lie about their failures in hopes of promotion and reassignment. There is almost no active search for information by headquarters to correct misinformation sent by field officers.

Russian force structures are notoriously corrupt—a corruption that is expected and tolerated, but also can be an excuse for punishment. Officers steal from their units by exaggerating the size of the unit and pocketing the unused pay. Hence, many Russian units are severely understaffed. Soldiers steal from their units by selling weapons, ammunition, and fuel, leaving their units under-equipped. The vast majority of battle-hardened soldiers are long gone, as are military trainers, who were all sent to the front lines. New Russian recruits are untrained and unaware of the risks they face.

Russia's C2 and FS Problems from the Start of the Invasion

A brief review makes it clear that C2 and FS problems have bedeviled the Russian invasion from the start of the 2022 invasion. Planning for the invasion ignored standard military doctrine, which emphasizes that successful invasions require sufficient scale, speed, and force. The considerable literature on the force differentials needed for an invasion, including Soviet doctrine, agrees on the classic rule that a frontal assault requires a 3:1 force ratio to compensate for the higher casualties suffered by the invaders.

Effective command and control are also essential for the success of an invasion. This includes accurate intelligence about enemy forces, freedom for field officers to improvise as needed, rapid field intelligence upward to inform tactics and strategy as the invasion proceeds, and quick top-down decisions in response to field intelligence.

The 2022 invasion violated all these requirements. In order to conceal its intentions and achieve an operational surprise, the planning of the invasion was limited to a very small group led by Putin. Not even Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, was included in this group. The Russian field commanders on the ground in Belarus for military exercises had no idea that they would be leading an invasion. The success of this secrecy came at a high cost: there was no opportunity for critiquing the invasion plan and no consideration of fall-back strategies.

Russian intelligence about the Ukraine’s response was based entirely on faulty assumptions that a high-speed invasion would demoralize the Ukrainian military, the Russian military would easily defeat the Ukrainian military on the battlefield, the top Ukrainian leaders would be quickly captured and executed, and that the vast majority of Ukrainians would either welcome the Russian invaders or remain passive.

The 3:1 force differential rule should have required an invasion of 590,000 Russian, given that the Russians knew the Ukrainian military had 196,600 active-duty personnel. Instead, the Russians planned an invasion of 190,000 personnel, actually smaller than the combined Ukrainian armed forces. Even worse, instead of massing its invasion force at one point to achieve a breakthrough, the Russians decided to attack on six different axes: from the Black Sea in the southeast, from Crimea in the south, from Donbas in the east, from Belgorod in the northeast (towards Kharkiv), from Kursk in the northeast (towards Kyiv), and from Gomel, Belarus, in the north (towards Kyiv).

All the Russian invasion routes faced unexpected problems, but the flaws in Russian C2 and FS can be illustrated by the fate of Russia’s most promising attack, coming from Gomel, Belarus, and aimed at Kyiv. This included an airborne assault on Antonov airport, in the Kyiv suburb of Hostumel. The Ukrainians had not expected an attack from Belarus and were unprepared for both the land invasion and the airborne assault.

Why did these attacks fail? Russian secrecy about the invasion had left the Russian ground forces in Belarus completely unprepared. They were informed of their roles in the invasion only 24 hours before the invasion. As a result, they lacked ammunition, fuel, food, and communications. They did not anticipate heavy fighting. Mud forced their armor to use the few roads, causing traffic jams. They encountered entire towns that were not on their maps, requiring them to stop and ask civilians where they were. Residents reported the Russian positions to Ukrainian authorities.

The Ukrainians acted swiftly to confront the Russian assault from Gomel, which was approaching the outskirts of Kyiv. They committed most of their available special forces and special units of other security units, called up all their reserve units, and mobilized the cadets and staff of their military academies into new battalions, supported by two brigades of artillery and one mechanized brigade. Even so, the Russians had a 12:1 troop advantage on the Gomel axis. On 27 February, their advance units were able to capture the suburb of Bucha, just west of Kyiv.

However, the phone calls from residents from towns in the Russian path permitted Ukrainian artillery to target the Russian columns. The Ukrainian forces knew the territory well, giving them a huge tactical advantage, and they were able to assault the slow-moving Russian columns almost at will, causing panic, abandonment of equipment, and blockage of the roads. As the Russian columns stopped moving, their losses multiplied. The Russian advance units that had reached Bucha were short on fuel, ammunition, and manpower. They assumed defensive positions, waiting for reinforcements that never arrived.

In the battle for Antonov airport on the edge of Kyiv, the Russians used helicopters and elite airborne troops. These troops were to capture and execute the Ukrainian leadership. But the Ukrainians surrounded the airport with heavy armor, pounding the Russians. They were able to capture the airport, driving the Russians into the surrounding woods. While the Russians were able to recapture the airport after a couple of days, the Ukrainians had time to destroy the runways, making impossible the landing of reinforcements and preventing the Russians from capturing the Ukrainian leadership.

On March 16th the Ukrainian government announced a counteroffensive in the Kyiv region, and by the end of March, Russian ground forces were retreating north from the Bucha area. By April 2nd the entire Kyiv oblast was back in Ukrainian hands, including the area bordering Belarus.

What was the Russian response to this humiliating defeat? Those Russian generals who were not killed, were mostly cashiered or arrested, as were many of the colonels. The disaster resulted largely from Putin’s leadership, but the defeated units took the blame. This added to the incentive for officers to lie about failure and pretend achievement.

The First Stalemate

The war has continued through various phases. The second phase, from early April through the end of August, 2022, was marked by active fighting along front lines, with heavy Russian losses, but was a relative stalemate in terms of territorial gains by either side.

The Second Ukrainian Offensive

The third phase began on September 6, 2022, when Ukrainian troops attacked the Kharkiv front near the Russian border. On September 9, Ukrainian mechanized units broke through. Ukrainian forces raced north and east. The cities of Kupiansk and Izium fell to the Ukrainians on 10 September. By the next day the Russian forces north of Kharkiv had retreated over the border, leaving all of the Kharkiv Oblast under Ukrainian control. Pressing on to the east, Ukrainian forces on 12 September crossed the Siverskyi Donets, and on 1 October the Ukrainians recaptured Lyman, a major railway hub, and took as prisoners an estimated 5,000 Russian troops.

As Russian forces rushed to the northeast front, Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in the Kherson region on October 2. By 9 October Ukrainian forces had retaken 1,170 square kilometers of territory, pressing on toward the Dnieper River and the city of Kherson. On 11 November, Kherson was occupied by the Ukrainians.

The Second Stalemate

The second period of stalemate dates from 12 November 2022 until the present. During this three-year period, the war has seen the introduction of drone warfare on a massive scale, first by Ukraine and then by Russia. As a result of the drone warfare, the entire conflict has changed in character. Drones have made assaults by armored vehicles so costly that the war has reverted to trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. Drones now account for two-thirds or more of front-line casualties in the war.

Ukraine’s government discarded Soviet-era regulations to provide tax breaks and profit incentives to independent Ukrainian drone producers, authorizing the Ukrainian military to contract with them. These independent companies have made good use of Ukraine’s large cadre of skilled aeronautical engineers and information technology specialists. About 200 of these companies are officially recognized to receive military contracts, and as many as 300 other groups manufacture drones and donate them directly to military units. However, financial resources remain a limiting factor.

Russia has rapidly developed its own drone capacity. Moreover, Russia has the resources to outproduce Ukraine, even if its drones are less sophisticated. Russian drone production is limited less by finances than by the search for microchips, smuggled from the west or bought from China. Russia also has ballistic and airborne missile systems that are hard for Ukraine to bring down. Russia has been using massive barrages of drones and missiles to demoralize Ukraine. But this effort is counterproductive. Bombings anger enemy populations and stiffen resistance, as shown in WWII by the Blitz of London and Allied carpet bombings of Germany. Russian barrages may have strained Ukraine’s economy, but they have not lessened resistance.

While the drone/missile war is well known, Ukraine’s other defense industry growth is less known. Ukraine now produces more artillery shells than all of NATO’s 32 members and Europe. Since 2022, domestic production of armored personnel carriers has increased by 400 percent, artillery by 200 percent, ammunition by 150 percent, and anti-tank weapons by 100 percent. By 2025, a single Ukrainian factory was producing 20 Bohdana howitzers each month, similar in specifications to the French Caesar. Ukrainian defense companies deliver howitzers in 60 days for $2.5 million compared to a several-year wait and a cost of $4.3 million in the West.

Russia has had to develop a new tactical approach for the active fronts. Groups of two or three soldiers are forced (by firing squads) to run towards Ukrainian lines and if they live, conceal themselves to fight later. Specialized units such as snipers, artillery spotters, or drone operators try to identify and target the sources of firing at these individuals. Then larger assault units move forward to capture territory. However, these assault units are now poorly trained, and their equipment is obsolete armor or more often simply cars, vans, and motorcycles, often heavily camouflaged. Ukrainian spotter drones are waiting for these assaults, and once the Russian vehicles are in motion and supported by Russian artillery, Ukrainian drones blow up both the vehicles and the artillery. On a typical day in autumn 2025, the Russians were losing 1,000 soldiers, 10 armored units, 25 artillery barrels, and 100 vehicles. By offering increasingly high incentives, Russia was recruiting 30,000 soldiers a month, barely enough to cover losses.

Russian electronic warfare has improved dramatically, with a focus on disrupting Ukrainian drones. As a result, Ukrainian forces are now losing about 10,000 drones per month. Russian air defenses also have improved, reducing the ability of Ukrainian fighter jets to attack. Russian engineers have been effective in designing and building defensive trenchworks, minefields, and tank traps in areas they control.

However, Ukraine air defenses have also improved. Russian airplanes now must launch airborne missiles from Russian territory, with a considerable loss of accuracy. Russian ground to ground ballistic missiles are hard to bring down, but also lack accuracy.

Faced with the hardening of Russian front lines, Ukrainian forces are focused on inflicting high Russian casualties, rather than attacking themselves. The exception occurs when the Ukrainians decide to roll back a Russian salient to prevent it from being hardened. The massive Russian missile and drone attacks deep in Ukraine have required the Ukrainians to invest heavily in missile and drone defenses of all types, which have something like a 90% success rate. Nonetheless, Ukraine suffers considerable damage. This serves as a constant reminder to Ukrainians of what is at stake.

Conclusion

Putin’s war in Ukraine has provided him with a rationale for stifling dissent in Russia, redirecting vast resources to turn Russia’s economy to military production, sponsoring efforts to overturn governments that support Ukraine, and preparing for additional invasions that will re-establish the Russian empire and cement his legacy as a modern Stalin.

In spite of all this, Putin is still losing the war in Ukraine. That conflict is chewing up men and equipment at an unsustainable rate. Moreover, it has been a strategic disaster. The war strengthened Ukrainian nationalism. It energized the European members of NATO and caused Finland and Sweden to join NATO, which doubled the length of NATO’s frontier with Russia. It destroyed the myth of Russian military superiority. It ended Russian natural gas exports to the European Union, which had been carefully cultivated for decades. It led to the emigration of more than half a million of Russia’s best and brightest.

Most NATO countries are now rearming and expanding their militaries. The E.U. countries combined gross domestic income EU GDP of $19.4 trillion in 2024 added to the UK GDP of $3.6 trillion totaled over 23 trillion dollars, whereas the gross domestic income of the Russian Federation RF GDP in 2024 was 2.1 trillion. Over the long run, Russia cannot compete with Western Europe. Europe can afford to support Ukraine’s economy and war effort while European countries ramp up their defense industries and military infrastructure. Putin will eventually lose not only his Ukraine War, but also his dream of a new Russian empire.

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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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The Brave New World of Drone Swarms

DEEP DIVE – A drone weapon heads behind enemy lines, on a mission to kill troops and destroy equipment. To its left and right are a dozen other armed drones, and as the mission unfolds they compare notes – on enemy positions, the success or failure of their strikes, and their next tactical moves. There are no humans involved – other than the people who programmed the drones and launched them on their way.

It may sound like a wild premise, but swarms of drone weapons that use artificial intelligence to “think” for themselves are no longer a subject for science fiction; they are in the advanced stages of testing and in one instance at least – according to a recent report – they are already operational.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Ukraine has begun deploying AI–powered drone swarms in combat – using software developed by the Ukrainian company Swarmer. Battlefield units have used the system more than 100 times, according to the report, in deployments of between three to eight drones at a time against Russian positions.

“The technology is upon us,” Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mike Studeman, who served as Commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, told The Cipher Brief. “There are many miles to go in terms of the most sophisticated swarm abilities, but there are plenty of reasons to fear even where we are today.”

Not long ago, the mere existence of drone weapons was a battlefield game-changer; this latest paradigm shift involves entire units of drones that carry out operations with humans almost entirely out of the loop.

“If there were a battle to go down today, some of the first engagements might be with unmanned systems,” Studeman said. “The most central engagements would involve a lot of them. The race is on.”

It’s a “race” both in terms of offensive “swarm” capabilities and the technologies to counter them.

“It's an absolute game-changer for any campaign,” Joey Gagnard, a former senior Army Chief Warrant Officer, told The Cipher Brief. “It’s a force multiplier for special operations forces or for any military element. Now it becomes incumbent on the defender to figure out a way to down all of those drones, while not also hurting his own capabilities.”

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What’s in a “swarm”?

Experts define drone swarms as coordinated systems of at least three drones that act autonomously and with “swarm intelligence,” mirroring the behavior of birds or insects when they travel in groups. An effective drone swarm will use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to navigate obstacles and communicate changes in the environment to other drones in the group.

Experts draw a distinction between swarms in number only, and those with the ability to operate in dynamic conditions. A 2022 test in China, in which dozens of drones navigated their way through a bamboo forest, demonstrated the difference. The drones were able to move in and around the forest (you can watch the video here), but there was nothing more than the bamboo stalks to stop them – no defense systems, no one shooting at them.

“So we have the components in place such as microchips and microprocessors, we have battlefield experimentation and battlefield data that can enable these groups and swarms to operate,” Samuel Bendett, an adviser to the CNA’s Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs Center, told The Cipher Brief. “But none of it has really come together yet to form a full picture from that mosaic that would spell a swarm.”

The biggest challenge lies in the dynamism of a battlefield. A static environment – say a military base or airfield, or a bamboo forest – will be easier for a drone swarm to navigate than a moving force. “If something changes, is the swarm intelligent enough to adapt and then attack?” Bendett asked. “How is it going to adapt and attack if there are changes?”

Even Ukraine’s complex June drone strike, dubbed "Spider Web", which deployed more than 100 first-person-view (FPV) drones against Russian air bases, still relied heavily on human direction.

For a swarm to operate successfully, Bendett said, “there needs to be secure communication between members; they need to pass data to each other about their state of being, about their flight to target, about the conditions that affect their flight to target, about any movements or changes on the ground or with a target, obviously communication with ground control stations and those that launched them and so on.”

Studeman noted that in a fluid combat situation, “you have all sorts of other challenges that exist, including somebody who wants to jam you, using a high-power laser or microwave weapons, and you're encountering all sorts of things that maybe were not planned for at launch, may not actually be in the software parameters of the drones.” For complex operational scenarios, he said that true swarms are “probably a bridge too far today,” but he and other experts stressed that the battlefield application is coming soon.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn, Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, envisions scenarios in which drones in a swarm display “command and control” capabilities, “not only acting on their own, but coordinating their behavior, without any human involved, with a bunch of other drones.”

In such an operation, “the swarm as a whole makes decisions about how to modify its operations in the best way to achieve its objective,” Pettyjohn told The Cipher Brief. “Another drone might take its place, or the collective might decide that they realized there were air defenses in place and they needed to flush those out and actually send a wave of them to attack the air defenses, force them to engage a few of the targets, which would then create a gap that the others could exploit to hit their actual objective.”

Gagnard said that drone swarms will soon be doing the work of dozens – perhaps hundreds – of drone operators.

“Instead of one guy piloting one drone for a limited duration and being able to go through the entire targeting cycle, you would have a whole swarm of drones doing all of those mission functions simultaneously,” he said. “You’ll have drones conducting reconnaissance, tagging off to other drones that are going to conduct strikes or one-way attacks, tagging off to other drones that are going to do logistics. So they would make decisions on their own, and operate freely on their own, based on the stimulus and the feedback that they're getting in the environment.”

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Coming soon

Whether true AI-driven drone swarms hit the battlefield next month, next year, or three years from now, this much is clear: the technology is already part of the planning for nearly every advanced military, and as a result, it’s a booming business. Everyone, it seems, is training and experimenting with swarm technology – beginning on the battlefield where drone innovation is most apparent.

“Both Russians and Ukrainians are really busy trying to develop swarm technologies,” Bendett said, and both sides are benefiting from outside help – the Russian military from China, the Ukrainians from the U.S. and Europe – to obtain the microprocessors and microelectronics that enable their operations.

Other militaries and defense tech companies have watched the Ukraine theater and entered the drone-swarm “race.”

In the U.S., the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative to fast-track innovation includes multiple drone swarm projects. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has awarded contracts to Anduril Industries, L3Harris Technologies, and Swarm Aero to produce prototype software for drone swarms. The contracts are part of the DoD’s “Autonomous Collaborative Teaming” (ACT) program, which seeks “automated coordination of swarms of hundreds or thousands of uncrewed assets,” according to the DIU. Meanwhile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been testing swarms for years, and says that by 2027, the U.S. could deploy swarms of as many as 1,000 armed drones. The DoD has also mandated the creation of dedicated drone testing ranges to support live swarm exercises.

The U.S. hardly has a monopoly in the field, even in the West. One of NATO’s newest members, Sweden, is fast-tracking drone-swarm development, in what Defense Minister Pål Jonson said was a response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine. In January, the Swedish Armed Forces unveiled a drone swarm program, developed by defense giant Saab, that would allow soldiers to control 100 drone weapons simultaneously. Elsewhere in Europe, the German drone manufacturer Quantum Systems has conducted tests on AI-controlled drones with the German military; Britain’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has awarded contracts for “Mixed Multi-Domain Swarms”; the Dutch Research Council has funded an exploration of drone swarm technology; and Hungarian researchers reported the design of a 100‑drone swarm operating without a central controller—based on algorithms inspired by flocking behavior in animals.

Countering the swarms

Every military innovation – from gunpowder to the tank to the stealth bomber – prompts efforts to counter it, and AI-driven drone swarms are no exception.

“We're going to have to be as good on the defense as we are on the offense for how we use drones,” Studeman said. Asked about U.S. counter-drone efforts, he cited partnerships between the Pentagon and the private sector and said, “I think we're moving as fast as we can.”

If the world needed a reminder of the need for counter-drone capabilities, it got a stark one in July from Robert Brovdi, Ukraine’s newly appointed drone boss, who told NATO commanders that his crews could turn a NATO base into “another Pearl Harbor” in 15 minutes, without coming closer than 10km (6 miles). “I’m not saying this to scare anyone,” Brovdi said, “only to point out that these technologies are now so accessible and cheap.”

He went on to warn NATO: you are unprepared.

“I don’t know of a single NATO country capable of defending its cities if faced with 200-300 Shaheds (drones) every day, seven days a week,” Brovdi told the LANDEURO conference. “Your national security urgently requires a strategic reassessment.”

Bendett agreed, citing Brovdi’s warning as well as the damage Hamas inflicted with drones against Israeli forces in the early days of the 2023 Israel incursion into Gaza. “So the question,” Bendett said, “is what would it take for us to realize that we are facing the same threat and what would it take for our military to make these appropriate changes?”

As a starting point, he said that U.S. military facilities will need to guard against what he called the “Ukraine-type threat” of small groups using multiple drones to go after targets. “They only have to be used once, and you only have to be successful once,” Bendett said. “I know the U.S. military is learning, and internalizing these lessons, and people are trying to understand what kind of threats they're facing. Is it happening fast enough?”

The U.S. military has worked for at least three years on counter-swarm defense – mostly involving high-energy lasers and high-power microwave (HPM) systems.

Recently the head of the Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) announced a competition for high-energy laser weapon systems focused on countering drone swarms. The RCCTO has already built several directed energy prototypes; this would be a higher-level weapon, and hopefully one that would move from prototype to operational system.

“We have to continue to work harder,” Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, the RCCTO director, said at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in August. “We have to continue to work with industry to develop our directed-energy platforms and focus on the areas of reliability.”

Among other American swarm-defense projects: The Air Force’s THOR, an HPM directed energy weapon, and the Leonidas HPM system, developed by Epirus and fielded with the U.S. Army, both of which emit electromagnetic pulses capable of disabling multiple drones simultaneously.

On August 26, the Leonidas system defeated a swarm of 49 quadcopter drones in a test conducted at an Indiana National Guard base. Axios reported that “suddenly, all 49 — like a flock of stricken birds — crashed into a grassy field.” Their circuits had been overwhelmed by the system’s electromagnetic waves.

Epirus’s CEO, Andy Lowery, says Leonidas creates an “electronic dead zone” that disables anything that carries computer chips.

“It works for drones, which are like flying computers,” Lowery told Defense One. “It will stop a Tesla in its tracks, it’ll stop a boat motor in its tracks, anything with a computer inside of it.”

Other NATO members are working on counter-swarm technology as well. The German startup Alpine Eagle has developed a system known as Sentinel – a platform that deploys drone swarms against other drone swarms. Sentinel has been tested by the German Armed Forces and in Ukraine against FPV (first-person view) drone threats; Poland has deployed SKYctrl, which sends drones to collide in “non-explosive” fashion with other drones; and the British U.K. Ministry of Defense said recently that its “Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapon,” mounted on a truck chassis, had successfully “defeated” swarms of drones. Far from Europe, India's Bhargavastra, developed by Solar Defence & Aerospace, used unguided rockets to eradicate swarms of drones at close range.

“The more sophisticated, latest versions are the ones that can actually interfere with the commands inside the unmanned drones,” Studeman said. “This smart neutralization, through a kind of electronic interference that goes after the actual logic and the commands of the UAS unmanned aerial system itself, shows you where this is going.”

All that said, some experts worry that the U.S. military isn’t adequately prepared for the drone-swarm threat.

“The U.S. is not ready,” Pettyjohn said. “It has begun to procure some defenses that were specifically made to counter small drones…and that's good. But you really need these layered defenses, where you have cost-effective interceptors.” She and other experts say that for all the tests and pledges, the U.S. has yet to show that it has an effective multi-layered defense against potential swarm attacks.

“High-powered microwaves are the one emerging technology that the U.S. Army has fielded a few prototypes that hold the promise of actually being able to knock out a true swarm,” she said. “The challenge is it requires a lot of energy. It's a very short-range weapon, so it's like your final force field. You need those longer layers of kinetic and EW interceptors to try to thin out the herd. And you have to figure out how to use the high-power microwave in a way that doesn't fry the electronics of US military equipment that it's trying to defend.”

Gagnard agrees that more work needs to be done.

“I'd say we have weapon systems that can defeat drones on a small scale,” he said, “but on a large scale, right now the aggressor is going to have the decisive advantage if they're incorporating this swarm technology into their repertoire.”

China’s drone-swarm advantage

Military experts – including the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command – have said that the opening salvos in any Pacific war would almost certainly involve cutting edge drone-swarm technologies. And last November, China unveiled a potentially devastating tool in the drone-swarm ecosystem. Experts called it a "drone mothership."

The Jiu Tian, introduced at the Zhuhai Air Show, China’s biggest aerospace trade fair, is an 11-ton aircraft billed as the world’s largest drone carrier. It is itself a drone, an enormous one, operating without a crew. According to several reports, the Jiu Tian can carry as many as 100 smaller UAVs more than 4,000 miles and unleash them against a target. Essentially, it’s a delivery vehicle for a drone swarm.

“China is going like gangbusters right now” in the drone space, Studeman said. “They have the manufacturing capability. They've built thousands of armed drones, and they’ve built the equivalent of motherships, where the intent is to throw lethal capability forward.”

As The Cipher Brief reported earlier this year, China’s military is in the throes of an innovation and manufacturing boom in drone weaponry to prepare Beijing for a potential war over Taiwan. China already produces some 70% of the world’s commercial drones – and is building a rapidly growing AI industry.

“They have the production, they have large inventory and now they also have the AI,” Dr. Michael Raska, a professor at the Military Transformation Programme at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told The Cipher Brief. “With all these combined, they have been experiencing a leap forward in the quality and quantity of all the drones across the different domains.”

China also has more than 3,000 manufacturers producing anti-drone equipment. In 2024, Beijing issued 205 procurement notices related to counter-drone technology; the figure was 122 in 2023, and only 87 in 2022.

“Our manufacturing is weaker than the Chinese manufacturing in this regard, and scale matters,” Studeman said. “Even with simpler technology. If somebody puts more robots on the front lines, we've got a problem, Houston.”

”This is definitely one area where China has an upper hand with the numbers,” Bendett said. “If Ukraine and Russia can manufacture millions (of drone weapons), then China can manufacture tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of UAVs.”

It’s not a stretch, Bendett said, to imagine China launching, in the early hours or days of a conflict over Taiwan, “10,000 mid-range UAVs at a suspected American carrier battle group east of Taiwan. Do we have enough to defend against that group?” he asked. “What do we have in our arsenal?”

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The terror threat

Beyond the military applications for drone swarms, there are important civilian uses. Disaster relief, search and rescue missions, and fighting wildfires are often mentioned, given the ability of drone swarms to map affected areas and conduct support operations in dangerous conditions.

Then there are the nightmare applications – primarily, the fear that as the ease and accessibility of drone-swarm technology grows, so will the odds that it will land in the hands of terrorists.

In March 2025, the U.S. conducted a war game that envisioned multiple drone attacks against U.S. military facilities. The exercise, which involved more than 100 participants from 30 agencies, uncovered deficiencies in response and highlighted the need for coordination among federal, state, and local authorities. A lack of clear rules of engagement across nearly 500 U.S. military installations was identified as a major concern.

Experts also worry about attacks on non-military sites – which as a rule are far less well defended.

“They could be at different sporting events or other large gatherings,” Pettyjohn said. “Obviously, as with any form of terrorism, you're not going to be able to protect people everywhere, but there needs to be a lot more counter-drone defenses for the homeland to prevent terrorist attacks from succeeding in really critical locations, either in terms of infrastructure or where there are large numbers of people.”

“American infrastructure is very vulnerable,” Gagnard said. “We don't have solid defenses that are institutionalized, that are in use everywhere, and American infrastructure is a prime target for that type of attack.”

He added that drone technology – and lax U.S. laws – could allow a would-be terrorist to conduct reconnaissance on a target without being noticed. “In America, we have a relatively free sky,” he said. “You could fly drones all day long over certain things and never really raise anyone's radar.”

In the nightmare scenario for a drone-swarm terror attack, Gagnard said, the target would be assessed, the swarms well “briefed,” and – depending on the target – defenses might be porous.

“You wouldn't need very smart drones in order to do that,” he said. A drone swarm attack, he said, “could be very successful in America.”

Gagnard, who serves as a senior advisor at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, has argued for a “national counter-drone doctrine.”

“How are we going to counter drones? What's acceptable, what isn't acceptable? And then we need some sort of unified command. Someone needs to determine exactly how we're going to counter drones.”

Several experts cited Ukraine’s June Spider Web operation as a reason for concern – given how deeply it penetrated Russian territory, even without using the AI tools that might produce a “thinking” drone swarm.

“We should really, really worry” about a drone-swarm terror attack, Bendett said, “because if anything, the Spider Web operation showed that a well-organized effort that is enabled by commercial technologies can be devastating against an unprepared target.”

David Ochmanek, Senior International Defense Researcher at RAND, said that the U.S. has been “a little slow to recognize the magnitude of the threat” of drone attacks, in part because Americans are so far from Russia and Ukraine, where the drone-war realities play out on a daily basis.

“We've seen how clever adversaries can smuggle these kinds of capabilities,” Ochmanek told The Cipher Brief. “So we shouldn't be lulled into a false sense of security that our oceans will protect us, even from attacks by fairly short range. The Houthis have shown us that they can launch these things. One can imagine an enemy loading them onto ships off our coast that would be indistinguishable from merchant ships, and launching from there.”

While this year’s White House executive order for a “Golden Dome” mandated a defense against all air threats, the order specifically referenced sophisticated missiles – not swarms of inexpensive drones.

Pettyjohn and other experts said that for domestic drone-swarm defense, the preference will be for non-kinetic systems – microwaves, lasers and so forth – to avoid shoot-downs that result in explosions or damage from falling debris. “In the homeland, there are a lot more restrictions on how you can take down foreign objects in the sky,” she said. “The FAA gets involved, Homeland Security, local authorities – the U.S. needs to work through all of these issues and figure out bureaucratically how it would respond and what the policies and procedures are that are in place.”

Studeman raised another concern – that drone swarms would be particularly effective if tasked with pursuing an individual.

“You think about protection of senior principals in government – a president, prime minister and on down,” he said. “There could be a swarm of drones coming to simply do one thing: keep pounding until just one penetrates while one principal leader is exposed.”

It’s a collection of worrisome scenarios, few of which can be dealt with by even the most sophisticated “Golden Dome” defense – which of course is years if not decades away.

As Pettyjohn put it, “there is no easy fix to this challenge.”

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America’s Next National Security Crisis: A War on Its Own Energy Base

OPINION — Every mission begins with trust. In World War II, the U.S. government trusted private energy producers to deliver aviation gasoline at record scale, and those companies trusted Washington to stand behind them. That compact powered victory. Breaking it now with retroactive lawsuits betrays the trust we need for the challenges ahead.

For more than a century, America’s energy sector has been a vital partner in national defense. During the Second World War, operating under direct federal command, oil and gas companies increased production twelvefold to supply high-octane fuel that carried bombers over Europe, powered the ships that stormed Normandy, and drove the tanks that liberated the continent. As the Trump administration’s Department of Justice later acknowledged, it “was a war of oil,” and American producers supplied the lion’s share. Those barrels were more than statistics. They were the lifeblood of freedom.

Today, those same companies face lawsuits for actions carried out under wartime orders. Louisiana parishes, backed by trial lawyers and supported by Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, are seeking billions in damages. The theory behind these cases is corrosive. It tells American industry that even if you answer the government’s call in wartime, you may still be punished in peacetime. It tells veterans and workers who built the arsenal of democracy that their sacrifice can be rewritten as a liability.

That message strikes at the heart of the compact that binds our military, our industry, and our government. It also directly undermines President Donald Trump’s second-term priorities. His executive orders link military readiness and energy dominance, making clear that abundant domestic energy is a national security imperative.

A strong domestic energy base keeps costs down for American families and ensures that the Pentagon can surge capacity without relying on foreign suppliers. Deterrence depends not only on ships and planes but also on the affordable, reliable fuel that keeps them moving.

Without trust, the supply chain breaks. If refiners hold back on capacity for fear of retroactive liability, where will the Pentagon turn for jet fuel in a crisis? If contractors doubt that obeying federal orders will later be defended in court, how can America count on its industrial base when the nation is under fire?

A $744 million verdict in one parish case already shows how these lawsuits could drain the capital needed to expand fuel reserves. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff leaders Adm. Michael Mullen and Gen. Richard Myers warned the Court that “our national security depends on encouraging—not discouraging—such private sector assistance.” If the precedent is set against energy companies, it will not stop there. Shipyards, aerospace firms, and logistics providers could also be targeted, leaving America’s armed forces dangerously isolated.

What makes Gov. Landry’s role especially troubling is that he knows better. Once a defender of Louisiana’s energy workers, he now sides with trial lawyers against the very companies that powered both his state’s economy and America’s victories abroad. At a time when China is racing to corner global oil and mineral supplies, Russia is using gas as a weapon, and Iran is funding terror with oil revenues, Gov. Landry’s choice to undermine Louisiana’s energy base is more than short-sighted. It is a betrayal of trust in his constituents, in America’s veterans, and in the compact that has kept this nation secure.

The Supreme Court will soon decide in Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish whether lawsuits tied to wartime production will proceed in federal or state court. The answer must be federal. Only a federal forum can ensure that decisions made under federal authority are not second-guessed by local juries decades later.

America cannot afford to cripple the public-private partnerships that powered victory in the past. The stakes are too high. Louisiana’s energy workers and America’s veterans have always answered the call when the nation needed them. They deserve leaders who will stand with them – at present, Gov. Landry and Attorney General Murrill stand opposed.

Our armed forces do not run on lawsuits. They run on reliable fuel, trust, and readiness. The sacred contract between America’s industry and its defenders must not be broken.

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Can High-Tech “Sensor Fusion” Revolutionize Biosurveillance?

DEEP DIVE – It’s the opening act in a potential public health nightmare: a chicken dies on a farm, for no apparent reason; another perishes at a farm hundreds of miles away; it takes time for the farm owners to notice, more time for tests to be conducted and different anomalies connected, and before the diagnostics are complete, the damage is done – the first wave of a bird flu pandemic has broken.

Beyond natural outbreaks, there are also concerns involving deliberate acts: This week the Department of Justice charged three Chinese nationals with smuggling biological materials into the U.S.; and in June two Chinese researchers were charged with trying to smuggle a fungus into the U.S. that can devastate grain crops.

Some experts are imagining a world in which technology is harnessed to ensure that such biosecurity nightmares don’t happen – or are dealt with much faster and more effectively.

“What we're promoting is a system that can look at things more holistically and on a much larger scale,” Robert Norton, a professor of veterinary infectious diseases and coordinator of national security and defense projects at Auburn University, told The Cipher Brief. “The system is designed to fill gaps in biosurveillance, looking for disease outbreaks, whether they be naturally occurring or induced through bioterrorism.”

That proposed system has a name – BISR, for Biosurveillance Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – and its backers believe it would revolutionize the field of biosurveillance. The core concept is that sophisticated sensors and other tools used by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) can be leveraged to improve detection, and that artificial intelligence can be deployed to help fast-track diagnosis. The chicken-farm example is only one scenario; responses to a COVID-19-like outbreak or acts of bioterrorism would be improved as well.

Norton, Daniel Gerstein, a senior policy researcher at RAND, and Cris Young, professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Auburn, co-authored an article last year arguing that the creation of a BISR system was “a national security imperative at the crossroads of technology, public health, and intelligence.” The BISR, they wrote, “would be designed to address two mission-critical requirements for biosurveillance: rapid detection and predictive analysis.”

They have taken their plans to Capitol Hill – specifically, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where they say they have received “good reviews.” The Select Committee wouldn’t comment on the BISR proposal itself but in a statement to The Cipher Brief, a spokesperson said that “The Committee continues to explore various biosecurity initiatives and programs to ensure that the U.S. is postured sufficiently to combat and prevent any future biosecurity threats that could cause widespread harm.” The statement went on to say that the Committee is working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “to establish an Office of Intelligence within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to address threats to U.S. agriculture.”

The threats are clear, to agriculture and beyond. The U.S. remains vulnerable to biologically driven disruption – be it from another COVID-like pandemic, an outbreak of bird flu that reaches humans, or bioterrorism. Anxiety over the latter has grown as experts worry that AI may be used to create dangerous biological pathogens.

At last year’s Cipher Brief Threat Conference, Jennifer Ewbank, a former CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation, warned of “the application of AI in biological weapons by unsavory actors.” And a 2024 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that the same AI capabilities that might produce medical breakthroughs could – inadvertently or otherwise – lead to the creation of deadly pathogens. AI models may “accelerate or simplify the reintroduction of dangerous extinct viruses or dangerous viruses that only exist now within research labs,” the report found.

How prepared is the U.S. to counter such threats? And might a technology-driven “BISR” system revolutionize biosurveillance, as its backers contend?

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How a “BISR” might work

The crux of the case for a BISR system is twofold: first, that an array of sophisticated data-gathering tools – drones, satellites, hyperspectral sensors and others – can be mobilized to track biosecurity anomalies; and that trained AI models would analyze the data that the system collected. The system’s architects envision a BISR “dashboard” that provides first responders and decision makers in government, the military and business near-real time insight and analysis.

It’s a high-tech effort to gather clues – a change in a community’s waste water, a spike in the sales of certain medications, even the breathing or social behavior of animals – and assess their meaning more rapidly than current systems allow.

“Our system is agnostic,” Norton said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a natural disease outbreak or a terrorism event, it’s looking for those changes and then being able to rapidly detect them and rapidly alert the individuals that are responsible.”

To expand on the chicken-farm scenario: at the moment, one animal’s death might lead a farm worker to call the company veterinarian, the veterinarian would take samples, the farm would look at the flock as a whole, and samples would be brought to laboratories for tests. Ultimately the case might go to a national lab to determine whether avian influenza or another condition was present.

Public health officials say the current system works – but can be slow. Advocates for the BISR system say it would at minimum improve the speed of response, gaining valuable time to determine not only whether a virus was present, but also how it might be circulating in the broader environment. Sensors in and around the poultry houses would track not only a dead chicken, but also the emissions and even behavioral anomalies within the flock – “pattern-of-life” behavior, as the experts say. Any anomaly would be flagged and the system “tipped off,” as Auburn’s Cris Young put it, to alert sensors on other farms.

“The sensors would tip and cue other sensors that would then take a larger look at the larger area or even a state,” Young told The Cipher Brief, “to determine if those signatures coming off of that one particular house that's affected are similar to things happening in other houses.”

Given the sheer volume of data generated by a BISR system, AI models would be used to rapidly assess the data – and check anomalies against specific pathogens.

BISR’s proponents say a similar approach could be taken with viruses among humans, providing more rapid early-warning mechanisms and analysis.

“Advances in sensor capabilities, coupled with the use of AI platforms, provide new capabilities that could be applied to the detection of biological events in the early stages of an outbreak,” the authors of the BISR article wrote. “The concept would provide new tools for early detection, response, mitigations, and ultimately, recovery from an outbreak.”

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The tools of a BISR system

The system’s architects say most of its high-tech elements already exist – sensors in place on poultry farms or in public spaces, and various tools of ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) that are currently used across the IC. These might include multispectral and hyperspectral sensors, and many airborne assets – balloons, drones, aircraft and satellites – that have been used to detect concentrations of gases for national security purposes. The International Space Station, for instance, regularly uses hyperspectral imaging to map the earth’s surface, and the Department of Defense uses hyperspectral imaging for several purposes – including detection of chemical and biological hazards.

Norton cited the example of the IC’s use of satellite imagery to monitor concentrations of nitrate in Afghanistan – because high levels of nitrate often indicated the presence of bomb-making facilities. Nitrate is also a component found in animal waste – and so in the public health example, he said, satellite imagery could be used to monitor levels of nitrate and other compounds on a farm.

Ultimately, BISR’s proponents believe the system could also be used to monitor the volatilome (essentially, what humans and animals breathe out) of people at airports or stadiums or other crowded environments, and alert public health officials about anomalies in the data. Young described a scenario in which international arrivals at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport – the nation’s busiest – would be watched by hyperspectral sensors to detect anomalies in respiration.

“We might have sensors set up in multiple places as [people] disembark from their flight,” Young said. “There might be several places to take a different scan with multiple sensors, and we might be able to say with some certainty, this person is infected with let's say COVID, and this person is actually shedding the virus.”

The hope is that any anomaly – be it on a chicken farm or at a crowded airport – would tip the system to sweep up other relevant information: Have ER visits spiked in a community? Does social media from that community suggest related anomalies? And so forth. Ideally, a dangerous pathogen would be flagged and identified before it leads to a pandemic, or an act of bioterror would be detected at the earliest possible moment.

Michael Gates, CEO of GDX Development, a company that bills itself as “solving very complex national security challenges,” says he joined the BISR effort “from the technology side of the equation.” GDX has worked previously with the U.S. Special Operations Command. Gates says the key to BISR’s success will involve “sensor fusion” – the linking of a range of data-gathering mechanisms.

“If you think about the world of the Internet of Things, everything's a sensor, and there's not very many systems out there that have the ability to collect off of all of those sensors, bring that data payload in, and then push it into a single pane of glass that can be used for military operations, for intelligence sharing or more tactical things,” Gates told The Cipher Brief.

In the chicken farm example, Gates envisions “sensor fusion” ranging from a hyperspectral scan to “available drone assets” and ultimately “zeroing in down to sensors such as temperature, air purification, even cameras monitoring chicken behaviors.”

Once a problem has been identified, Gates said, “you can use open-source intelligence and other things to mine, let's say, a Reddit form for these things – is anybody talking on the internet about their chicken coops having issues? – and so on, for whatever the issue is.”

“There's already enough sensors out there,” he added. “The data is there. What's happening is that information's not being shared. It's not being centralized, meaning we're getting delayed responses...Nobody has a holistic picture right now on biosurveillance.”

In the early stages of a crisis, the BISR might do a lot of work before humans are engaged, though the Auburn professors stress that the system aims only to provide experts a head start, rather than cut them out of the proverbial “loop.”

“We support human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence systems,” Young said. “We want there to be a person that has to look at this screen at some point and say, okay, I understand what's going on here. Maybe that happens within minutes of an anomaly occurring, but regardless, at some point a person needs to decide, Yes, that's what this is, or No, we need further information.”

The challenges

Norton and Young say they have presented their plans to the House Select Committee and are prepared to do the same to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). They believe their system can be 80 percent complete in three years and fully functional in five. As for costs, they say the first two years would require a budget of $10 million, and that the system’s operating costs would eventually be $300 million annually. They argue that billions of dollars have been spent in the biosurveillance domain, and that the BISR would be a major upgrade over existing capabilities.

It may sound like a no-brainer – the smart use of technology to guard against myriad biosecurity threats – but questions abound about BISR and its future. And many of the hurdles to its implementation involve, in one way or another, the human element.

Just as the Intelligence Community has struggled at times to share information and assess national security risks, the government architecture in biosurveillance is complex and often siloed. A host of agencies share responsibility for the nation’s biosecurity – the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), to name a few. Experts say they don’t always communicate effectively with one another – and that states don’t always share critical information effectively with the federal government.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, noted that in the most recent bird flu outbreak in the U.S., some states wanted to handle the information and response without involving the federal government.

“They weren't even very interested in USDA at times,” Inglesby told The Cipher Brief. “So they said, we'll handle this on our own and we'll let you know. Meanwhile, CDC has to wait for states to bring them the data and information. They don't have command authority to say you must deliver it. It's a voluntary basis.”

Norton says the BISR developers are hoping to partner with one “Mother Ship” agency within the IC – he wouldn’t say which one – because the IC controls the government’s most sophisticated satellites and other data-gathering systems. He also said that while the system involves high-tech elements and the building of the BISR “dashboard,” technology isn’t the primary hurdle.

“Biosurveillance is not a technology problem, but rather a permissions and authorities problem,” Norton said. That might involve permission to use a Pentagon satellite for biosecurity purposes, he said, or agreement from a major industrial farm to share its data or house sensors on its property.

Inglesby said that transparency and information-sharing would be critical for a BISR-like system to work – and that in the case of the chicken farm example, key stakeholders might be unwilling to cede control of the analytical process to a BISR “dashboard.”

“You have the farm owner who will want to make his or her own assessment, you have local government that may not want outsiders coming in and making a determination for them, and you might have unwillingness even at the federal level to do this,” Inglesby said. “You’re going to need an across-the-board buy-in that we haven’t always seen.”

There are also questions about technical implementation. In the Atlanta airport example, Norton acknowledged that even a highly sophisticated hyperspectral sensor wouldn’t be able to detect, say, COVID-19, unless passengers were directed to a discrete area close to the sensors – and here again, permissions would be needed to install such sensors. The post-COVID atmosphere has suggested less public appetite in the U.S. for intrusive screening, not more. The House Select Committee, in its statement to The Cipher Brief, included a reference to “ensuring any proposal balances privacy and the need to avoid the abuses of the COVID-19 period.”

Inglesby also stressed the importance of transparency on the global stage when it comes to public health crises. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China failed to share the detailed casework of its first 500 patients in the “ground-zero” city of Wuhan – and more than five years later, it still hasn’t done so.

“In Wuhan, the data was very available, there were a lot of people dying, but the data was covered up,” Inglesby said. “And so even if you had installed the most sophisticated systems, if they're being run by people who don't want to share that information, it's not going to change anything.”

Some early-warning biosurveillance systems are already in place, in the world of what’s known as “Syndromic Surveillance” – and experts say many have worked well.

The CDC’s BioSense platform gathers health-related data from hospitals and clinics to detect potential outbreaks or bioterrorism events. As a part of BioSense, "Sentinel Alerts" are generated when reports involve high-concern viruses or diseases. In the case of influenza (the human variant), alerts are triggered when more than 3 % of ER visits are for the flu. Globally, satellites have been used to track dengue fever outbreaks by measuring water levels in the jungle. And wastewater surveillance systems exist to check on levels of bacteria or viruses.

A less positive precedent is the BioWatch program, which was created by DHS in 2001 and billed as "the nation's first early warning network of sensors to detect biological attack." The system tracks the air supply using Environmental Protection Agency air filters, and sends information to the CDC and – if warranted, to the FBI. The system has been blamed for generating dozens of false positives, and in an audit reported by the Associated Press in 2021, BioWatch was said to have failed in detecting known threats.

Norton told The Cipher Brief that today’s technologies are sophisticated enough to ensure that BISR would operate at a higher level than BioWatch. He added that rigorous standards in the AI models would “prevent AI hallucinations” that could cause false positives – or worse, false negatives.

And Inglesby was quick to note that any improvements in early warning and diagnostics would be welcome.

“There is no single system in the country, and people have been talking about building stronger biosurveillance for a long time,” he said. “Anything you can get done in this space would be super-valuable, assuming the costs aren’t prohibitive and you get the buy-in to use this information wisely.”

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Trump’s Trip Was a True “Pivot” to East Asia

OPINION — President Trump’s meetings in East Asia last week did more to enhance our relationship with a few allies and partners in the region than the past fifteen years of talking about a “pivot to Asia”.

Yes, showing the flag and having the President interact with counterparts is an important part of diplomacy, at the highest level. It has impact because it shows that the U.S. cares about allies and partners, that the U.S. values this relationship and will be there for allies and partners, regardless of the cost.

So, Mr. Trump’s visit to the region was more than tariffs and trade. It was about relationships that principally deal with national security,

Mr. Trump’s meetings with Japan’s new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, and South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung were particularly noteworthy. The U.S. and Japan signed security and economic measures – and a Memorandum of Cooperation – to expand cooperation on shipbuilding and critical-minerals supply chains, an apparent initiative to reduce reliance on China for rare earth and other critical minerals. More importantly, it established a relationship with Japan’s new prime minister that will ensure we remain close allies.

With South Korea, U.S. approval to develop nuclear-powered submarines using U.S. technology and facilities was a major U.S. decision, with South Korea joining a select few states that operate nuclear-propulsion submarines. There are a few particulars related to the fuel and safeguard agreements that will have to be addressed, but the bottom line is that South Korea, within a few years, will have nuclear-powered submarines (with conventional weapons), a major enhancement of their deterrent capabilities. South Korea also committed to purchasing large quantities of U.S. energy – oil and gas – and a $350 billion trade and investment agreement.

The highly touted meeting of Mr. Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping was important because it happened, while underwhelming for the substantive progress. Yes, China did agree to resume purchasing U.S. soybeans and agreed to suspend planned export restrictions on rare earth minerals for one year, while also committing to greater cooperation on the trafficking of fentanyl precursor chemicals into the U.S. In return, the U.S. reduced tariffs on Chinese products from 57% to 47%.

The U.S. also said it discussed the possible sale of U.S. computer chips to China, although not the newest AI chips. For many, Mr. Trump’s announcement that he will visit China in April 2026, with a subsequent trip to the U.S. by Mr. Xi was welcomed by many, hoping that a more robust dialogue with China would be in our respective countries’ interest.

Interestingly, there was no mention of Taiwan or potential conflict in the South China Sea. Apparently, the Trump-Xi meeting dealt exclusively with trade and fentanyl-related issues. Or, if these issues were discussed, both agreed that there would be no public statement documenting these discussions.

Mr. Trump’s visit to Malaysia, Japan and South Korea was an important visit of a U.S. president who prides himself on being a peacemaker. In Malaysia Mr. Trump witnessed the signing of a peace accord between Cambodia and Thailand that he personally brokered. Indeed, that’s how Mr. Trump started his five-day trip to East Asia. He ended it with a request that the U.S. and China help end the war in Ukraine. This has been a heavy lift for the U.S. and Mr. Trump personally, who tried to end this war. It’s also a challenge for China, given that China continues to buy Russian oil, and reportedly provides machine tools, semiconductors and other dual-use items that help Russia rebuild its defense industry.

Mr. Trump’s trip to East Asia was a success, especially for what he accomplished in South Korea and Japan.

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

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Former GCHQ Chief: Cybersecurity, AI, and the New Age of Multilateral Defense

EXPERT INTERVIEW — The last few months have seen a series of major cyber incidents which have frozen airports, crippled companies, compromised government systems, and stolen millions from unwitting victims. Cyber leaders are warning that the threat is being worsened as hackers leverage new technology like artificial intelligence for more potent attacks.

The Cipher Brief spoke with Robert Hannigan, who served as Director of GCHQ, the UK’s largest intelligence agency, which provides signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA), about the nature of the cyber threat, and why everything from supply chain security to cross-sector cooperation is needed for a strong defense. We caught up with him from Riyadh’s Global Cybersecurity Forum (GCF).

The Cipher Brief: I'm curious if you could tell us right off the top, with so many different countries represented, so many different areas of expertise, what is the buzz there, Robert? What are people really most concerned about?

Hannigan: I think the big cyber incidents happening in the Middle East and Europe in recent months, particularly ransomware as a service, so big names like Jaguar Land Rover and others, have kind of given this meeting an extra buzz just before we met. Quite a few people flew in from airports that have been affected by the supply chain attack on baggage handling software. So it was very relevant and topical.

I think that's touched on a broader theme for the last couple of days, which is about supply chain. This is a global supply chain in many cases. So how do we secure that? It's a challenge, but it's no longer enough for companies or governments to secure their own perimeters. They have to worry about the tens of thousands of suppliers and vendors attached to them, their ecosystem, if you like. So regulators are getting there, and the EU has already regulated this and said we're all responsible. Other countries like the UK are getting there. So I think supply chain has been a big theme.

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The Cipher Brief: Ransomware supply chain has been around forever. They're very difficult in their own right, but now we're looking at a world where AI is impacting everything. How concerned are you about that?

Hannigan: I'm really concerned that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past with AI. So as we rush to adopt AI and to use it in our applications across business and government, can we make sure we do it securely? We learned the lessons of cybersecurity because we're all paying the price in a way for 20, 30 years of building a digital economy on software, particularly, but also hardware that was not designed with security in mind. So again, regulators are getting there. They're mandating Secure by Design in most countries, but that's going to take years to follow through. So can we make sure that when we adopt AI, we're doing it safely and securely? And I think there are some big risks in AI, particularly in data poisoning.

The Cipher Brief: Sam Altman did an interview just recently saying the horse is out of the barn, so to speak. And he's not even sure where this is going when it comes to building in kind of more secure ethical processes into using AI.

You sat on a panel there talking about converging crises, the future of cyberspace and complex global dynamics. And boy, are they complex. I'm really curious to hear how all of these different countries are coming together to talk about working together in cyber when some of the countries have closer relationships to China than other countries do. How are you looking at that complex landscape for both risk and opportunity?

Hannigan: It’s a great question. I think the other theme of these last two days has been multilateralism under pressure. This is not a great time for cooperation between states. And that's a problem for cyber because as you know, from your background, cyber is a team sport. You can't do this within one country. And so we really need to approach this multilaterally. I think on our panel this morning, we weren't pessimistic. Yes, it's difficult in geopolitical terms, but actually it's in everyone's interests to try and secure cyberspace. And there are plenty of initiatives going across countries that are working. Secure by Design is one, trying to improve the standard of secure software development. Some of the security work on AI is going across countries. So I haven't given up hope on that working, but it's really essential and why it's great to have people from all over the world at this kind of meeting.

The Cipher Brief: One of the other things I always love to ask you about because it's always extremely relevant is the relationships with the private sector. As former head of GCHQ, this is something that you're very close to. You have a deep understanding of what needs to happen to make these work. How do you take private sector-government relationships in one country and then sort of scale that, if you will, with other trusted partners?

Hannigan: I think it's a great question. I think The Cipher Brief is a great example of an organization that's tried to bring together government and companies in a really effective way. I've just come from the UK where I've done lots of interviews on our recent big retail, ransomware attacks, Jaguar Land Rover and others. It's striking that people still expect government to be able to defend everybody. We all know that that's just not possible.

Government has very limited resources; it can advise, it can regulate. But actually it's up to the private sector companies to defend themselves and to prepare for resilience. And one of the frustrating things for me is that this is possible, this is an achievable goal. We hear about the failures, but actually there are thousands of companies protecting themselves very well and preparing for resilience in case there is an attack so they can contain it and get back up and running very quickly. So there are a lot of people doing the right thing, some people who aren't, and we need to help them get better.

The Cipher Brief: I think you're absolutely right in saying that some of these larger companies that really have the resources to put into cybersecurity and information sharing have a lot more responsibility on their shoulders than those medium and smaller companies which sort of have to wait to see what comes down to them.

Have you been involved in any conversations there that have surprised you or made you think differently about any part of what you focus on every day when it comes to cybersecurity and all of these complex issues?

Hannigan: I think we've had a really good conversation about the positive lessons coming out of Ukraine. And Chris Inglis, who you know very well, was talking about this on his panel. And I think it's a really good point that there are so many positive things coming out of that terrible situation in Ukraine on the cyber side. So why has Ukraine managed to keep going in cyberspace to resist this avalanche of attacks coming from Russia? It's because they've had a partnership with private sector companies, big tech and small companies, with allied countries, in Europe and the U.S. in particular, and there has been a coalition of defense. And there's something really interesting there about the model for how if you get together, private and public, across different allies, you really can defend. And as Chris and one or two others put it, defense is the new attack. It's really powerful when you do it properly.

The Cipher Brief: That was such an interesting time when the full scale invasion started because you did see it's a volunteer army of all of these companies. And the important thing I think to look at there is it was very values based. That landscape is also changing. Are you concerned at all about that in the future?

Hannigan: I think we're all concerned about polarization and some of those companies being torn between East and West and, as you say, closer to China or indeed closer to Russia. I think what's powerful though in Ukraine is they not only used companies and, as you say, volunteers, they also looked to their own citizens and they used very talented people, whatever their backgrounds, to get involved in this great effort to defend Ukraine. So you can achieve good things if you can organize people together. And it's amazing they're still up and running.

And it’s also a victory for cloud. I remember 10 years ago when governments were very nervous about putting anything in the cloud. Ukraine's a great example of where cloud has saved them essentially by putting stuff outside the country. They've managed to keep going and that's impressive and a great vote of confidence.

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A New Frontline: How Digital Identity Fraud Redefines National Security Threats

DEEP DIVE — From stolen military credentials to AI-generated personas seamlessly breaching critical infrastructure, digital identity fraud is rapidly escalating into a frontline national security threat. This sophisticated form of deception allows adversaries to bypass traditional defenses, making it an increasingly potent weapon.

The 2025 Identity Breach Report, published by AI-driven identity risk firm Constella Intelligence, reveals a staggering increase in the circulation of stolen credentials and synthetic identities. The findings warn that this invisible epidemic, meaning it's harder to detect than traditional malware, or it blends in with legitimate activity, is no longer just a commercial concern—it now poses a serious threat to U.S. national security.

“Identity verification is the foundation of virtually all security systems, digital and physical, and AI is making it easier than ever to undermine this process,” Mike Sexton, a Senior Policy Advisor for AI & Digital Technology at national think tank Third Way, tells The Cipher Brief. “AI makes it easier for attackers to simulate real voices or hack and steal private credentials at unprecedented scale. This is poised to exacerbate the cyberthreats the United States faces broadly, especially civilians, underscoring the danger of Donald Trump’s sweeping job cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”

The Trump administration’s proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget would eliminate 1,083 positions at CISA, reducing staffing by nearly 30 percent from roughly 3,732 roles to around 2,649.

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The Industrialization of Identity Theft

The Constella report, based on analysis of 80 billion breached records from 2016 to 2024, highlights a growing reliance on synthetic identities—fake personas created from both real and fabricated data. Once limited to financial scams, these identities are now being used for far more dangerous purposes, including espionage, infrastructure sabotage, and disinformation campaigns.

State-backed actors and criminal groups are increasingly using identity fraud to bypass traditional cybersecurity defenses. In one case, hackers used stolen administrator credentials at an energy sector company to silently monitor internal communications for more than a year, mapping both its digital and physical operations.

“In 2024, identity moved further into the crosshairs of cybercriminal operations,” the report states. “From mass-scale infostealer infections to the recycling of decade-old credentials, attackers are industrializing identity compromise with unprecedented efficiency and reach. This year’s data exposes a machine-scale identity threat economy, where automation and near-zero cost tactics turn identities into the enterprise’s most targeted assets.”

Dave Chronister, CEO of Parameter Security and a prominent ethical hacker, links the rise in identity-based threats to broader social changes.

“Many companies operate with teams that have never met face-to-face. Business is conducted over LinkedIn, decisions authorized via messaging apps, and meetings are held on Zoom instead of in physical conference rooms,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “This has created an environment where identities are increasingly accepted at face value, and that’s exactly what adversaries are exploiting.”

When Identities Become Weapons

This threat isn’t hypothetical. In early July, a breach by the China-linked hacking group Volt Typhoon exposed Army National Guard network diagrams and administrative credentials. U.S. officials confirmed the hackers used stolen credentials and “living off the land” techniques—relying on legitimate admin tools to avoid detection.

In the context of cybersecurity, “living off the land” refers to attackers (like the China-linked hacking group Volt Typhoon) don't bring their own malicious software or tools into a compromised network. Instead, they use the legitimate software, tools, and functionalities that are already present on the victim's systems and within their network.

“It’s far more difficult to detect a fake worker or the misuse of legitimate credentials than to flag malware on a network,” Chronister explained.

Unlike traditional identity theft, which hijacks existing identities, synthetic identity fraud creates entirely new ones using a blend of real and fake data—such as Social Security numbers from minors or the deceased. These identities can be used to obtain official documents, government benefits, or even access secure networks while posing as real people.

“Insider threats, whether fully synthetic or stolen identities, are among the most dangerous types of attacks an organization can face, because they grant adversaries unfettered access to sensitive information and systems,” Chronister continued.

Insider threats involve attacks that come from individuals with legitimate access, such as employees or fake identities posing as trusted users, making them harder to detect and often more damaging.

Constella reports these identities are 20 times harder to detect than traditional fraud. Once established with a digital history, a synthetic identity can even appear more trustworthy than a real person with limited online presence.

“GenAI tools now enable foreign actors to communicate in pitch-perfect English while adopting realistic personas. Deepfake technology makes it possible to create convincing visual identities from just a single photo,” Chronister said. “When used together, these technologies blur the line between real and fake in ways that legacy security models were never designed to address.”

Washington Lags Behind

U.S. officials acknowledge that the country remains underprepared. Multiple recent hearings and reports from the Department of Homeland Security and the House Homeland Security Committee have flagged digital identity as a growing national security vulnerability—driven by threats from China, transnational cybercrime groups, and the rise of synthetic identities.

The committee has urged urgent reforms, including mandatory quarterly “identity hygiene” audits for organizations managing critical infrastructure, modernized authentication protocols, and stronger public-private intelligence sharing.

Meanwhile, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2025 Global Threat Assessment warns:

“Advanced technology is also enabling foreign intelligence services to target our personnel and activities in new ways. The rapid pace of innovation will only accelerate in the coming years, continually generating means for our adversaries to threaten U.S. interests.”

An intelligence official not authorized to speak publicly told The Cipher Brief that identity manipulation will increasingly serve as a primary attack vector to exploit political divisions, hijack supply chains, or infiltrate democratic processes.

Private Sector on the Frontline

For now, much of the responsibility falls on private companies—especially those in banking, healthcare, and energy. According to Constella, nearly one in three breaches last year targeted sectors classified as critical infrastructure.

“It's never easy to replace a core technology, particularly in critical infrastructure sectors. That’s why these systems often stay in place for many years if not decades,” said Chronister.

Experts warn that reacting to threats after they’ve occurred is no longer sufficient. Companies must adopt proactive defenses, including constant identity verification, behavioral analytics, and zero-trust models that treat every user as untrusted by default.

However, technical upgrades aren’t enough. Sexton argues the United States needs a national digital identity framework that moves beyond outdated systems like Social Security numbers and weak passwords.

“The adherence to best-in-class identity management solutions is critical. In practice for the private sector, this means relying on trusted third parties like Google, Meta, Apple, and others for identity verification,” he explained. “For the U.S. government, these are systems like REAL ID, ID.me, and Login.gov. We must also be mindful that heavy reliance on these identity hubs creates concentration risk, making their security a critical national security chokepoint.”

Building a National Identity Defense

Some progress is underway. The federal Login.gov platform is expanding its fraud prevention capabilities, with plans to incorporate Mobile Driver’s Licenses and biometric logins by early 2026. But implementation remains limited in scale, and many agencies still rely on outdated systems that don’t support basic protections like multi-factor authentication.

“I would like to see the US government further develop and scale solutions like Login.gov and ID.me and then interoperate with credit agencies and law enforcement to respond to identity theft in real time,” Sexton said. “While securing those systems will always be a moving target, users’ data is ultimately safer in the hands of a well-resourced public entity than in those of private firms already struggling to defend their infrastructure.”

John Dwyer, Deputy CTO of Binary Defense and former Head of Research at IBM X-Force, agreed that a unified national system is needed.

“The United States needs a national digital identity framework—but one built with a balance of security, privacy, and interoperability,” Dwyer told The Cipher Brief. “As threat actors increasingly target digital identities to compromise critical infrastructure, the stakes for getting identity right have never been higher.”

He emphasized that any framework must be built on multi-factor authentication, phishing resistance, cryptographic proofs, and decentralized systems—not centralized databases.

“Public-private collaboration is crucial: government agencies can serve as trusted identity verification sources (e.g., DMV, passport authorities), while the private sector can drive innovation in delivery and authentication,” Dwyer added. “A governance board with cross-sector representation should oversee policy and trust models.”

Digital identities are no longer just a privacy concern—they’re weapons, vulnerabilities, and battlegrounds in 21st-century conflict. As foreign adversaries grow more sophisticated and U.S. defenses lag behind, the question is no longer if, but how fast America can respond.

The question now is whether the United States can shift fast enough to keep up.

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Why Are There No U.S. Offensive Cyber Unicorns?

OPINION -- I recently had a conversation with senior intelligence community leaders about their desire to build stronger partnerships with private-sector technology companies—the so-called “Silicon Valley” ecosystem. They were asking for advice on how to engage, build relationships, and ultimately establish strategic partnerships.

But the companies they were most interested in? They were largely consumer-facing platforms. Innovative, yes—but not mission-aligned. That conversation highlighted a broader, more fundamental gap I’ve been thinking about for a long time: Why are there no U.S. offensive cyber unicorns?

We certainly have defense contractors who do cyber work—on site, on contract, embedded with the government. And we have standout cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and Dragos focused on detection, response, and resilience. But where are the startups building offensive cyber tools and platforms? Where’s the VC-backed innovation model we’ve seen in drones, hypersonics, and space?

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Companies like Anduril and SpaceX have proven that Silicon Valley-style innovation—product-focused, capital-efficient, fast-moving—can thrive in the national security space. So why hasn’t that approach been applied to offensive cyber? Yes, there are legal and secrecy constraints. But those same constraints haven’t stopped commercial companies from building weapons systems or highly classified ISR platforms.

Take a look at the NatSec100 - a curated list of top defense and national security startups. You’ll find companies working on AI, autonomy, sensing, and cybersecurity. But not a single one focused on offensive cyber. Why not?

Shouldn’t we want the best minds at CrowdStrike or Mandiant to spin off and build next-generation offensive platforms? Shouldn’t the DOD and IC be seeding these ideas and building an ecosystem that encourages this kind of innovation?

I believe we should.

Follow Bryan on LinkedIn or right here at The Cipher Brief.

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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Trump’s Latest Military Campaign Tests the Limits of Presidential War Powers

OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTiVE — According to reports, the Trump administration informed Congress that the ongoing hostilities against alleged narco-terrorist groups does not fall within the scope of the War Powers Resolution (WPR). As a result, the administration does not believe the President’s authority to continue to wage this military campaign is in any way constrained by the law.

Trump is building on an interpretation of the law first advanced by the Obama administration to avoid WPR compliance in relation to the U.S. involvement in the NATO campaign against Libya in 2011. This interpretation posits that the WPR is inapplicable to hostilities that fall below the level of large-scale ‘war’ and involve minimal risk of U.S. casualties. Yet ironically, President Trump’s assertion of inherent constitutional authority to start and continue this military campaign is exactly what the law was intended to cover.

Enacted into law in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution was motivated by congressional determination to prevent future presidents dragging the nation into a war incrementally. The context was obvious: Vietnam. For a super-majority of legislators, that conflict began and slowly expanded under the same premise: presidential assertions of inherent constitutional authority to commit small numbers of U.S. armed forces to low-level operations with limited risk: first as advisors, then to engage in limited direct action, then through ‘limited risk’ air operations. What evolved was an escalation that most of these legislators believed was inconsistent with both presidential assurances and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – the statutory use of force authorization Congress enacted in 1965 to empower the President to respond to subsequent North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. assets. From 1964 to 1967, the number of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam had escalated from approximately 25,000 to almost 500,000.

Nothing in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution limited that escalation, and over the years Congress continued to provide presidents with the money and manpower to wage the war. Yet it was a different lesson from that experience that provided the true motivation for the WPR: the undeniable reality that it is far more difficult for Congress to force an end to a war than it is to prevent (or limit it) from inception.

Voting to cut off funding for an ongoing conflict is certainly a tool in the congressional arsenal to check presidential assertions of war power, but in the context of ongoing hostilities it is unrealistic to expect it will be useful. To begin with, restricting existing appropriations would require a veto-proof super-majority in both the House and Senate. But even mustering a simple majority to deny a continuation of appropriations for ongoing hostilities is politically unrealistic as it will be perceived as ‘abandoning’ or ‘betraying’ troops in the field.

The conflict in Southeast Asia proved this. Even after Congress revoked the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it continued to provide fiscal and human resources in support of hostilities. And when service-members asked federal courts to rule that the President lacked constitutional authority to order them to war, judges consistently ruled that this continued support demonstrated joint action by the President and Congress, satisfying the Constitution’s war powers equation. Even when Congress enacted a Bill to cut off all funding for the bombing campaign in support of the Cambodian military’s struggle against the Khmer Rouge, President Nixon’s veto threat and the accordant compromise that extended that funding was enough to lead a federal appeals court to reach the same conclusion. In short, unless Congress could muster a sufficient majority to override a presidential veto and enact law prohibiting continued operations, a president’s unilateral decision to commit the nation to a conflict would effectively put Congress in a straitjacket.

It was against this background the WPR was enacted. At its foundation is the assertion that the President’s authority to commit “United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances” requires either express statutory authorization (a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force) or “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” As a result, the law includes several essential provisions:

· The President must report any such commitment to congressional leadership within 48 hours.

· Once reported (or when such a report was required), the President has 60 days to persuade Congress to support the operation by enacting express statutory authority.

· If Congress fails to enact such an authorization, the operation must terminate (unless Congress grants the President a 30-day extension to bring the operation to an end).

· Congress may order termination of an operation at any time by concurrent resolution (a majority vote by the Senate and the House with no opportunity for a presidential veto).

· Congressional authorization may not be inferred from any appropriation or other law unless it expressly authorizes the operation.

· Nothing in the WPR – to include the 60-day grace period provision – may be interpreted as a grant of authority to the President to commit U.S. forces to hostilities or imminent hostilities.

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From inception, presidents (and many experts) have criticized the WPR as self-contradictory, most notably because it also includes a provision that indicates nothing in the law “is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President…” These critics argue the law does just that by unconstitutionally intruding upon the inherent war powers vested in the President and the prerogative of Congress to indicate support for presidential war powers initiatives by implication. And there are other defects. For example, the law omitted the well-established inherent authority of presidents to use military force to rescue U.S. nationals abroad (the Senate version included such a provision but it was removed during conference negotiations). And the provision allowing Congress to order termination of an ongoing military operation by concurrent resolution arguably runs afoul of a subsequent Supreme Court decision invalidating what is known as a legislative veto – use of a concurrent resolution to revoke a delegation of authority to the President enacted by law (although there is a question of whether the WPR concurrent resolution provision falls into that category as it is not withdrawing any prior statutory delegation of authority).

And then there is the so-called 60-day clock, perhaps the most misunderstood and at the same time perplexing provision of the law: misunderstood because it is often asserted as a statutory grant of authority to the President to conduct any military operation for up to 60 days (which contradicts Section 8 of the WPR); perplexing because if it is not a grant of authority, then what exactly did it mean?

The answer to the second question is ironically highlighted by the current counter-narcotic military campaign. Because it may not be interpreted as an express grant of constitutional authority to engage in hostilities (or situations of imminent hostilities), it is best understood as a failsafe – an acknowledgment that presidents will likely initiate combat operations on the belief they are acting pursuant to constitutional authority. If they do so, however, the law requires such an assertion of authority be validated by express congressional endorsement within 60 days. If a President is unable to secure such validation, congressional inaction functions as opposition, requiring termination of the operation.

There are, of course, problems with this equation. First, from a president’s perspective, if he is acting pursuant to valid constitutional authority on day 59, how does it evaporate on day 61? And if it was valid on day 59, a mere statute cannot dictate its invalidity. Second, there is something troubling about allowing Congress to require a president to terminate a military operation by inaction. Finally, as noted above, this provision ignores the frequently utilized congressional practice of expressing its support for a presidentially initiated military campaign by implication – primarily through funding and providing necessary resources (including manpower). Examples include not only the Korean War, but also the two post-WPR campaigns that exceeded 60 days without express statutory authorization: the Serbian air campaign in 1999, and the Libyan air campaign in 2011.

Nonetheless, the process of at least seeking congressional endorsement of a military campaign that extends beyond 60 days acknowledges a critically important premise: that the Constitution diffuses war powers between Congress and the President. While the requirement for express statutory authorization may have been constitutionally overbroad from inception of the WPR, seeking some manifestation of congressional support preserves this important war powers balance between the two political branches. Perhaps more importantly, it acknowledges the Congress’ constitutional authority to impose limits on – or even prohibit – commitment of the nation to hostilities.

Instead of acknowledging this shared constitutional role in authorizing war, the Trump administration is staking a claim of unilateral presidential authority. Because we are told there is little risk of U.S. casualties, Congress ostensibly has no role, and the WPR is inapplicable. But it is precisely because, “From small things, big things someday come” that Congress enacted the WPR. Acknowledging a congressional role now – while perhaps not necessarily express authorization – will advance the necessity that the administration make its case for the necessity, morality, and legality of this campaign before the representatives of We the People; give Congress the opportunity to exercise its constitutional role in war powers; and most importantly protect the nation from being dragged, incrementally, into a war Congress may find near impossible to get us out of.

This is a genuine War Powers Resolution moment.

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Ukraine’s Long-Range War: How Drone & Missile Strikes Are Taking the Fight Deep Inside Russia

DEEP DIVE – By any traditional definition, the city of Ryazan doesn’t belong on a list of battlegrounds in the Ukraine war. There are no Ukrainian soldiers or tanks deployed there, and it’s in western Russia, roughly 600 miles from the active front lines of Pokrovsk or Kupiansk.

But residents and officials in Ryazan – population 550,000 – wouldn’t be surprised to find their city on such a list. Ukraine has attacked Ryazan at least a half dozen times, as part of an escalating drone-and-missile campaign against Russia’s oil sector. Most recently, an oil refinery in Ryazan – Russia’s fourth-largest – was forced to shut down after an Oct. 23 attack by Ukrainian drones.

Ryazan is hardly alone.

Lt. Gen. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, said last week that Ukraine has carried out more than 160 successful attacks on Russian refineries and other energy targets this year; an Open Source Centre investigation identified more than 90 strikes between Aug. 2 and Oct. 14. In the last week alone, Ukraine has struck an oil terminal and tanker in Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse; energy facilities in Russia's Oryol, Vladimir, and Yaroslavl regions; and the Koltsevoy, or “ring,” pipeline, which links refineries in Moscow, Ryazan, and Nizhny Novgorod, and supplies fuel to the Russian military. Earlier strikes damaged one of Russia's biggest oil refineries near St. Petersburg, and perhaps most impressive – from the Ukrainian point of view – the campaign has reached as far as the Siberian city of Tyumen, some 1200 miles east of Moscow.

Stretching the conventional notion of front lines is clearly part of the Ukrainian strategy; the strikes have forced the Kremlin to worry about drone and missile attacks across a broad swath of Russian territory. But the main aim is to hurt the Russian oil sector – the country’s richest revenue source, and a key reason why the Kremlin has been able to maintain the funding of its war machine.

“Ukraine’s theory of victory now includes destroying Russia’s energy sector,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, told The Cipher Brief. “They’ve developed capabilities that can reach great distances with precision, exposing Russia’s vulnerability – its inability to protect critical infrastructure across its vast landscape.”

Last week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to intensify the pace and scope of the campaign. “We must work every day to weaken the Russians. Their money for the war comes from oil refining,” Zelensky said in an Oct. 27 address to the nation. “The most effective sanctions - the ones that work the fastest - are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots.”

Zelensky also noted that 90 percent of the strikes have been carried out by Ukrainian-made drones and missiles – a not-so-subtle message to Europe and the U.S.: get us more of your long-range weapons, and we can help bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.

“It’s very impressive,” said Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat and analyst for RPolitik, said of Ukraine’s campaign against the Russian energy sector. In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Jarabik said the attacks have “had an impact in terms of getting headlines, making the Russian war effort more expensive, and creating shortages so the Russian people feel the pain of the war.”

That’s also the aim of the recent U.S. sanctions against energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil, the first American economic penalties imposed on Russia since Donald Trump returned to office. The Treasury Department said the sanctions would “increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector and degrade the Kremlin’s ability to raise revenue for its war machine.”

While Ukrainian officials have welcomed the sanctions, they have also said that their drone and missile attacks pack a more powerful punch.

“Our strikes have already had more impact than sanctions,” Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of Military Intelligence, said on Telegram following last week’s spate of attacks.

For their part, Putin and other Russian officials have downplayed the impact of the strikes while at the same time warning that they are dangerously escalatory. The Kremlin has also said that neither the attacks nor the sanctions will move them to change course in the war.

Experts say both sides may be right – that in the short term, the Kremlin can probably ride out the impact of the Ukrainian campaign, but that Russia may feel significant pain if the sanctions are enforced and the oil sector strikes continue.

“Russia’s oil refineries are a bit like a man who is being repeatedly punched,” Sergey Vakulenko, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in a recent assessment for Carnegie Politika. “He will not die from one punch, or even half a dozen punches. But it becomes harder and harder for him to recover after each subsequent blow. Although no single punch is fatal, he could end up being beaten to death.”

Assessing the damage

To date, the Ukrainian strikes have hit 21 of Russia's 38 large oil refineries, according to the BBC, and several have been struck more than once. Roughly 20% of the nation’s refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed, and last month the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that Russia's revenues from crude oil and refined products had fallen to their lowest level in a decade – excluding the period immediately following the COVID-19 outbreak.

"Persistent attacks on Russian energy infrastructure have cut Russian crude processing by an estimated 500,000 barrels per day, resulting in domestic fuel shortages and lower product exports," the IEA said. In an accompanying forecast, the agency said that if the sanctions remain in place and the attacks continue – even without Zelensky’s promised scaling-up of their cadence – the impact to Russia’s refining would stretch to at least mid-2026.

Beyond the macroeconomic impact, the Ukrainian campaign has also been felt by Russian citizens, in the form of higher fuel prices and – in some regions – shortages and long lines for gas.

“The economic impact of strikes against Russian energy infrastructure is beginning to be felt outside of Moscow, as Russia diverts available energy from the regions to keep Moscow supplied,” Rob Dannenberg, a former chief of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division, wrote last week in The Cipher Brief. “There are shortages and energy price hikes that the Kremlin can no longer conceal.”

And in a broader reflection of Russia’s economic woes, this week the central bank downgraded the country’s growth forecast. Experts say the sanctions and Ukrainian strikes are a big part of the problem for Moscow.

“Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure are strategically meaningful and increasingly so,” Jacek Siewiera, a former head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, told The Cipher Brief. He said the strikes are serving three strategic functions: forcing Russia to divert efforts to rear-area defense; raising the overall cost of war by creating new logistical costs inside Russia; and a less tangible, more symbolic impact.

“These attacks send a message to Moscow and its economy that Ukraine – and its backers – can reach deep,” Siewiera said. “That has symbolic as well as material value.”

What comes next

Might the Ukrainian campaign alter the course of the war? Experts are divided on the question.

On the one hand, dozens of Russian oil sector targets are now within reach of Ukrainian missiles and drones – and it’s clear that Zelensky’s vow to expand and intensify the campaign is underway. An already-bruised industry in Russia is surely girding for more punishment.

But several experts said that in order to sustain the tempo and volume of the attacks, Ukraine will need help from the West or a significant boost to its own capabilities.

“Ukraine has made impressive inroads but it’s not yet clear whether the strikes will fundamentally degrade Russia’s war-fighting capacity,” Siewiera said. He and others echoed Zelensky’s point – that the West should support Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities to boost the impact of the current attacks, and improve the odds that they will effect change in Moscow. Until then, Siewiera said, it’s unlikely that the campaign can deliver “a knockout blow.”

Jarabik agreed, noting that Ukrainian drones typically carry payloads of only 50-60 kilograms (roughly 110-130 pounds); long-range missile systems can inflict far greater damage. He and others said that much will depend on the success of the Ukrainian-made Flamingo missile – which has been touted as a homegrown alternative to western long-range weapons. Officials say the Flamingo is now operational, and that it can carry more than 1,000 kilos (2000+ pounds), with a range of roughly 1800 miles.

“I think we are going to see the Ukrainian strikes increasing,” Jarabik said. “The big question here is whether Ukrainians are going to have the missile capabilities to scale the attack.” At the current rate, he said, Ukraine cannot compel the Kremlin to alter its approach. “So far, neither the sanctions nor this (campaign of strikes) is actually enough to bring the end of the war. Russia has the means to continue.”

All those interviewed for this piece agreed that the success of the Ukrainian campaign will depend on whether Ukraine can hit more targets, more frequently, and with heavier payloads.

“As Ukraine continues to improve its long-range precision strike capability – and if the West adds its own weapons to Ukraine’s arsenal – the impact is going to increase significantly,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. And that, he said, “could lead to a successful outcome for Ukraine.”

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The U.S. Role in a Multipolar World - and the Dangers of Isolationism

OPINION — “What should the U.S. role in the world be right now? We're waiting for the [Trump administration] National Security Strategy to come out from the White House, which should come out in the next couple of months, which will be really interesting to see what they have to say. We are in the post-post-Cold War world. You know we had that brief period at the end of the Cold War when it was like, yeah, we won, everything's good -- and then no it's not. So now we're like accepting that it is a complicated world. So what role do we play?”

That was Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) last Wednesday as The Brookings Institution’s keynote speaker at the 2025 Knight Forum on Geopolitics. Elected to Congress in 1996, Rep. Smith has served on the House Armed Services Committee since 1997. He was committee chairman from 2019-to-2023, and today is the ranking Democrat. He has also previously served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Smith, who has focused on national and international security strategy during most of his 28 years in Congress, is someone I believe should be listened to in this controversial time in our history. And during his Brookings appearance, he not only touched on the key issues today, but also put them in an historic context that makes for a better understanding of them.

For example, Rep. Smith said, “We did a masterful job in my humble opinion post World War II of figuring out what is our role in the world and then playing that role to a very effective degree. It's not perfect. Certainly there were mistakes. I think we need to do that again. And the number one biggest theme for me is we have to get rid of the idea that we are going to dominate the rest of the world.”

Instead, he said, “We have to be engaged, but we have to embrace the idea of a multi-polar world that we can influence, but not control. And that I think was the biggest downside to the end of the Cold War -- it gave us grandiose ambition, delusions of grandeur, if you will, and the notion that our mission was to make sure that no pure competitor emerged. You remember that philosophy? That's a really hard thing to do. We're not going to be able to do it, just like we're not going to be able to defeat China.”

So how does Rep. Smith suggest we deal with China?

“We really need to talk with China,” he emphasized last week. “I think the relationship with China is the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world right now and will be for decades to come. The two most powerful economies [and] increasingly pretty close to the two most powerful militaries, as China has ramped up [militarily]. And I think we need to find a way to get along with China.”

However, he said, “The focus in Washington D.C. is very much how do we beat China? And that you see in Congress all the time. You certainly see it from the [House] China Select Committee. What I want to know is what is our plan for coexisting with China? Because that's what we're going to have to do. We're not going anywhere. They're not going anywhere.”

Rep. Smith acknowledged that China, along with what he called the “cringe” people -- Russia, Iran and North Korea – are threats. But, he added, “of that group, China is the most invested in a global order. I mean, their economy is dependent upon it. They have slightly different views for how that global order should be run. But we are a lot closer to aligned in that than we are certainly with Russia or North Korea or Iran or your average ISIS or al-Qaeda [terrorist] group. So I think there was an opportunity there to have a dialogue with China that could bring the tension down and get to a better relationship.”

At another point, Rep. Smith said, “If China wants those [global order] rules to be changed to help them, they're going to have to show that they're something other than a belligerent aggressive actor just trying to gobble up as much as they can gobble up. Because people forget we had to do a lot of crap that was just helping other people, all right? You know, the Marshall Plan in Europe, we rebuilt Japan, earthquakes, tsunamis all over the world. You know, we've done that. You know, that's part of it. All right, China, you want to be the big global player. Part of it is not just looking at the rest of the world as a resource opportunity. Not that we haven't done that, too, but we've balanced that out with helping people.”

Rep. Smith described something he said “the Biden administration did really, really well… I know there are a lot of people who are critical of a lot of different things the Biden administration did, but the alliances that we built up around China during his Presidency were really consequential and very important. Certainly, the Quad with Japan, Australia, India and the U.S. was important. Japan has become a much better partner. South Korea, the Philippines, these are areas where we built partnerships that strengthened us.”

“China looks at the U.S. and sees us as having three great advantages,” Rep. Smith said. “One, we got partners and alliances that no other nation in the world has. Two, we do research better than anybody. And three, people want to come here. You know, we're damaging all three of those to one degree or another at the moment. But taking advantage of those partnerships and alliances to strengthen ourselves, I think needs to be part of the solution.”

He went on saying, “Maintaining and building on those partnerships is crucial. Obviously, [President] Trump has a slightly different approach, more confrontational. I worry about how that's going to impact it.”

Noting that President Trump “has a slightly different approach, more confrontational,” and was at that moment in Asia “trying to patch that up,” Rep. Smith advised, “I would say figure out how to get along with China, maintain and build alliances with as many other nations in that part of the world as possible.”

“But I would love to see a world 10, 20, 30 years from now,” Rep. Smith said, “where China and the U.S., if there's some disaster in the world, if there's a famine, if there's a natural disaster, if there's just a country that's infrastructure is crumbling, are sitting at the same table talking about how do we handle this? Okay, that is a better world. Now, to get there, we have to get off of this zero sum competition.”

It was in dealing with allies and partner countries that Rep. Smith said, “Trump came in with his uniquely bullying approach to try to get them [allies and partner countries] to do more. And what I worry about there is if you're just trying to get them to do more as part of a collective understanding of what our national security interests are -- great. You know, be as aggressive as you have to be, make it work. But there is considerable concern that isolationism is pushing Trump's viewpoint as much as a desire for greater burden sharing, which is to say, ‘We don't care. We're out. Good luck.’"

“That is where we don't want to go,” Rep. Smith said, “And that's where a lot of the Trumpian rhetoric is troubling to me because on the Trump side…is the argument that somehow the

United States of America has been taken advantage of for the last 80 years. All these European countries, these Asian countries, we provided security to them. I think [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth had the unique way of saying it, you know, Uncle Sam shouldn't be Uncle Sucker.”

Rep. Smith explained, “Those partnerships, those alliances that we built benefited us more than any other country in the world. We had the biggest, most powerful economy ever because we had a relatively peaceful world. We had a lot of partners and friends. We weren't doing it out of some generosity. We didn't want to be dragged into another world war, which would be costly to us. And we wanted a reasonably prosperous world to do business with. That's what we wanted.

And that's what we got. Now how we divided that wealth back here at home has certainly raised some issues, but the basic point is that we generated a very robust global economy that we benefited from.”

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Pointing out that after WWII, “we didn't want those countries [Germany, Japan] building up their militaries and doing more, because we saw how that had played out over the course of the previous thousand years,” Rep. Smith said. But, he added, “We're right now in the midst of a huge debate over the U.S. presence in Eastern Europe, and are we going to maintain it? A lot of mutterings…[are] that we're going to be pulling out, which can undermine the [NATO] alliance. So, I'm worried about it.”

His worry, he said, “is this administration going to remain committed to the concept of why these alliances are important, not just for our partners, but for us as well?”

But Rep. Smith explained, “Now is not the time to signal weakness to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin in Eastern Europe. Now, that's kind of hard to argue with, so why are they doing it? And that gets back to sort of the concern about their world view. The way they [the Trump administration officials] try to pitch it is we can only do so many things at once. So we're trying to prioritize in different places.”

Rep. Smith went on, “I guess the argument there would be they're prioritizing in Asia. But the world is connected. Sorry, but what's happening in Europe has a profound impact on what's

happening [in Asia]. In fact, you know, if we want to stop China from being overly aggressive in terms of taking the territory of other nations and militarily, the single best thing we can do is make sure that Putin fails in Ukraine, to make it clear that that type of aggression to expand territory doesn't work. So, we're not helping Asia by looking weak in Eastern Europe.”

Rep. Smith also looked at other parts of the world.

He said, “Israel's consistent effort, with our help through multiple administrations, [led to] weakening Hezbollah, you know, weakening Hamas and weakening Iran, certainly put them in a vastly weaker position as a regional player. And [that] has created the opportunity to get a stable government in Syria and a stable government in Lebanon and an increasingly stable government in Iraq.”

He added. “That's where we want to get to. And we've made a large amount of progress on that. Now again, Donald Trump is going to take absolutely 100% of the credit for that. and he deserves maybe five percent of the credit for that. But that puts us in a better position on that.”

Closer to home, Rep. Smith said, “I do worry about the Trumpian Monroe Doctrine approach here. We're spending a heck of a lot of money out of the [U.S.] military to secure a border that Trump says is already secure. That is a distraction financially. Then, picking a war with Venezuela and Colombia and randomly blowing up people down in the Caribbean, in the Pacific -- that's expensive, destabilizing, and I don't see it having the positive impact that they claim it is. And it also undermines our credibility if we are engaging in what most of the world views as extrajudicial killings.”

I must add here as a closing, something Rep. Smith said two days later during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s the best summation I’ve seen of all the issues involved in the Trump administration’s self-started drug war.

“Basically,” Rep. Smith said, “the President of the United States has decided that he will institute the death penalty for drug dealing. Now that’s an interesting policy question. It’s been debated. There are some countries that have gone to different places on it, but it is not a policy question that we’ve had in the United States of America. That’s not legal. That’s not something we’ve decided to do. Not only has the President of the United States decided to circumvent all of that, and say, ‘Yes we’re going to have the death penalty,’ but he’s decided to do it without any due process. He’s appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. And who are they targeting? From what we can glean from the briefing yesterday [last Thursday by Pentagon officials], and what they have said publicly, there are 24 different narco-terrorist groups, as they called them. We have no details on who’s in the 24. But it’s also, not just the people who are part of the 24 drug cartels, but anyone who is affiliated with the drug cartels which also comes with not much of a definition.”

Rep. Smith concluded, “So the President basically empowers himself to use the United States military to do lethal strikes against tens-of-thousands of ill defined people without the oversight [needed]. That is a clear abuse of power and a massive expansion of the power for the President of the United States and I believe that undermines the Constitution and the rule of law to people who care about those things anymore.”

I fully agree.

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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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