The Cipher Brief

Last year, a statement from former White House AI advisor David Sacks stopped Washington cold. "We now have a Chinese open-weight model that is as good as the currently available models from OpenAI and Anthropic," Sacks told a podcast audience, describing Z.ai's GLM-5.2 as comparable to Anthropic's Opus and level with OpenAI's latest offerings. A Chinese startup had, in his telling, matched the two American frontier labs that have spent tens of billions of dollars to stay ahead.

The reaction in policy circles was predictable, viewed by many as a "DeepSeek" type watershed moment (or a “Sputnik” moment for AI). Some warned that American export controls—tightened out of fear that China might steal our most advanced models—were now slowing our own companies down while Beijing caught up on its own.

That debate matters. But it also misses a much larger, more dangerous point. The critical question was never merely whether China could build a competitive frontier model. It was how China would build it: by leveraging an unprecedented industrial espionage infrastructure that has, over the past three decades, executed the most expansive campaign of intellectual property theft in human history.

The Strategy Behind the Steal

We spent two years researching this pattern for our book. The conclusion was uncomfortable and unavoidable: the theft of American intellectual property by the People's Republic of China (PRC) is not a series of isolated incidents. It is a well-resourced national strategy directed from the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Consider the closest analogy to the current moment. A federal jury in San Francisco convicted former Google engineer Linwei Ding on multiple counts of economic espionage and theft of trade secrets. While drawing a Google paycheck, Ding uploaded more than a thousand confidential documents describing the company's AI supercomputing architecture to a personal account. Simultaneously, Ding was building AI companies in China, pitching Beijing investors on his ability to replicate the proprietary architecture he had taken. It was the first conviction on AI-specific economic espionage charges in American history. It will not be the last.

Ding represents the headline-grabbing version of the threat: a single insider walking out the door with the crown jewels. But focusing exclusively on these dramatic cases obscures a stealthier, more systematic campaign that has done far greater structural damage.

For more than a decade, state-linked actors have vacuumed up the personal data of the American people at an industrial scale:

The 2015 OPM Breach: Exposed the security clearance files of more than 20 million federal employees—the most sensitive personnel records the government keeps.
The Anthem Breach: Compromised the health records of nearly 80 million people.
The Equifax Breach: Handed over the financial histories of some 145 million Americans.

None of these breaches were random. Aggregate these datasets and you map the human terrain of any target organization. Who holds a clearance? Who is in debt? Who is vulnerable? This is the raw material of counterintelligence—the blueprint an adversary uses to identify, pressure, or monitor individuals inside a critical company or government agency. The Ding case and the mass data breaches are not separate stories; they are the same narrative operating at different scales, both optimized to accelerate the PRC's ascent as an AI superpower.

The Threat of 'Digital Exhaust'

Now comes the newest chapter. Alongside human espionage and big-data harvesting, Chinese labs have increasingly utilized "distillation"—the practice of systematically querying leading American models via proxy accounts to extract their behaviors, subsequently training cheaper domestic competitors on the output. It is intellectual property theft automated via software.

The result is the arrival of models like GLM-5.2, which are functional and cheap enough that Western enterprises are already debating whether to integrate them. When European companies begin exploring the use of these models in enterprise settings, it should deeply worry anyone who understands where this technology originates and what running it inside a secure network invites.

This is the vulnerability the current AI-race debate routinely skips: You do not need to steal a frontier model to win the geopolitical competition. You need the data that surrounds it.

The richest source of that data is rarely a heavily guarded research lab. Instead, it is the everyday communication of American companies, defense contractors, and technology startups working in sensitive dual-use fields like quantum computing or autonomous systems. It is the steady stream of messages, proprietary files, meeting notes, and project plans moving every hour across consumer chat apps and fragmented collaboration tools that were never engineered to withstand a nation-state adversary.

We call this "digital exhaust." It is the operational residue of how an organization actually functions, and it is enormously revealing:

A messaging thread reveals internal hierarchies and decision-makers.
A shared drive exposes which critical program is behind schedule and which supplier holds the bottleneck component.
A calendar maps exactly when and where executive leadership is traveling.

None of this information is classified, yet all of it is highly actionable. An adversary does not need to break advanced encryption if they can seamlessly map an organization from the outside, identify its weak points, and exploit them. This is precisely the operational targeting that mass data theft enables, and precisely the exposure that a fragmented, consumer-grade communications stack guarantees.

Securing the New Front Line

The frontier of great-power competition has fundamentally shifted, dissolving the old division of labor between public defense and private enterprise. The front line no longer runs exclusively through government agencies; it runs through global logistics firms, the energy grid, defense-tech startups, and commercial AI labs.

Private companies and critical infrastructure operators are now the first points of contact with nation-state adversaries. Yet, they are expected to coordinate with law enforcement and government partners in real time using an improvised patchwork of commercial applications—each representing a separate vendor, a distinct cloud, and an isolated point of failure.

The federal government solved this vulnerability for its own operations long ago by building sovereign, compartmented, end-to-end secure networks like the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS)—environments designed from the ground up on the absolute assumption that a nation-state is actively trying to get in. The private sector, now standing on that same front line, possesses no equivalent infrastructure.

Closing this gap is a matter of immediate national security. The current moment demands a unified coordination layer built to the rigid security standards the government holds itself to, but optimized for the commercial operators and law enforcement agencies that protect our critical infrastructure.

Achieving this requires a fundamental shift in how we approach enterprise security:

Consolidated Environments: Moving communications and collaboration onto a single, hardened platform rather than a fragmented scattering of consumer tools.
Sovereign Data Control: Ensuring an organization’s operational data and "digital exhaust" never reside in vulnerable, third-party commercial clouds beyond their direct control
Verified Identity Architecture: Implementing strict identity verification to prevent adversaries from covertly infiltrating internal organizational communications.
Cross-Institutional Security: Enabling secure, real-time collaboration across institutional seams—from a private tech firm to a police department to a military command—without downgrading to unencrypted group chats.

This shift toward sovereign, secure enterprise infrastructure—the exact architectural paradigm we are focused on building at Coalition Systems—is the only way to deny an adversary the digital exhaust they have learned to harvest so effectively. It brings the core principles of sovereign government networks to the commercial frontline.

The defining lesson of the last decade is that the PRC treats the systematic theft of American ingenuity as a core instrument of national power. The rapid closing of the AI capability gap is a stark reminder of how far that strategy has carried them. The correct response cannot just be guarding the frontier models inside the labs. We must secure the operational ground where the day-to-day competition is actually being fought: the everyday communications of the American enterprise. We have left that ground undefended for too long. We cannot afford to do so any longer.

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Iran: On Negotiating with Criminal/Terrorist Organizations, States, and Other Entities

Pending the failed cease-fire and Memorandum of Understanding [MOU] between Iran and America, all eyes have focused on the ongoing, difficult negotiations – mediated by Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt – between America and Iran. The late Uri Lubrani, Israel’s last Ambassador to Iran in 1978, always warned about the perils of negotiating with the Iranians (“a nation of carpet weavers and of chess players”), whom he respected for their negotiating prowess, calling their manipulation of negotiations “a masterpiece of hoodwinking the world.” Other contemporary experts (former American intelligence officers) such as Mark Fowler and Hamlet Yousef have made similar observations. Their collective wisdom is worth noting as the United States continues its diplomatic negotiations with Iran in today’s modern version of ‘The Great Game.’ What is increasingly pertinent in such negotiations pertains to the role of third-party nations such as Oman, Turkey, Qatar, and Pakistan, not as mere mediators, but rather, especially in the case of Pakistan and Turkey, as modern purveyors of ‘intelligence diplomacy.’

Turkey’s road to intelligence diplomacy occurred strategically, rather than organically, as its Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan (previously Director of its intelligence agency MIT, for over a decade) and current MIT Director Ibrahim Kalin purposefully and intentionally positioned Turkey to play an increasingly important role in regional conflicts, covert diplomacy, and intelligence – as in Kalin’s words in a recent speech - “drawing important lessons for our country’s security, strategic positioning, and regional perspective.” This doctrine had previously involved backchannel negotiations in Gaza, Ukraine, Europe, the Balkans, Russia, (cf. the 2024 spy swap), and now, Iran. Other examples include the appointment of former senior MIT officer Gürsel Donmez as Turkey’s Ambassador to Austria, a key worldwide intelligence and diplomacy hub, and Turkey’s successful hosting of the NATO summit last week.

Pakistan is, like Turkey, hardly new to the Great Game. Readers will recall its role in facilitating – during 1971-1972 – the historic Kissinger-Nixon opening to China. But this year’s MOU between Iran and America has thrust Pakistan (and its leaders Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and military chief General Asim Munir) into the limelight. Pakistan has handled sensitive backchannel negotiations, hosted talks in Islamabad, and worked closely with its Saudi and GCC partners as the recent MOU came into play. But in its world of zero-sum diplomacy, Pakistan’s strategic successes in intelligence diplomacy heighten its regional and broader posture – especially vis-à-vis America and serves to weaken India’s strategic position and diplomatic influence. In today’s world, as always, Pakistan’s gain is India’s loss and China’s gain (in my opinion, China is the REAL winner of the US-Iran war).

How does one negotiate, or facilitate negotiations with a country which is a combination of a civilization (Persia), theocracy, nation state (Iran), terrorist organization, and criminal entity (IRGC)? Iran has revealed itself to be a formidable negotiating partner, more akin to a sophisticated hostage taker, in which traditional western, Harvard metrics of ‘Getting to Yes,’ or “Getting Past No’ hardly apply. And yet, like hostage takers in [law enforcement] hostage scenarios, Iran must be appreciated as a ‘rational’ actor. The Iranians have brilliantly used ambiguity and opacity as negotiating strategies, and they have adeptly utilized social media to carve out confusing, ambiguous negotiating positions, in addition to asymmetric warfare, closure of the Straits of Hormuz, disinformation, propaganda, cognitive warfare, and traditional diplomatic efforts. One could surmise that the Iranians are truly gifted students, who have read - and survived! - President Trump’s The Art of the Deal. And for President Trump and his national security team, negotiating with a dead, or severely injured, possibly brain-damaged Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei may be the most complex task of all. Such scenarios aren’t taught in diplomatic faculties, business schools, or at the FBI Academy.

Negotiations involving criminal terror groups such as the IRGC (now led by General Ahmad Vahidi) - who have committed numerous worldwide acts of violence and terror over decades - often require third party emissaries (as legitimate governments cannot be seen as a main negotiating partner) and high-level intermediaries in ‘track 3’ diplomacy. Over the past two decades, examples include the former German intelligence officer Dr. Gerhard Conrad’s hostage negotiations involving Hamas and Hezbollah, Swiss American attorney Daniel Levin’s work in the Middle East with The Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, and Swiss diplomat Pascal Holiger’s negotiations involving the victims of Boko Haram in Nigeria. The role of empathy, culture, trust, language, and nuance remains critically valuable in such delicate endeavors. And today, trust remains the coin of the realm as 3rd-party nations such as Pakistan and Turkey, as well as others, facilitate ongoing diplomatic negotiations with Iran’s IRGC leadership.

The Iran negotiations will involve more time, which remains Iran’s best weapon, as it can continue to cause economic pain for the West, especially America, as it approaches the November 2026 midterm elections. During its devastating war with Iraq during the 1980s – with over 1 million Iranian casualties – Iran fought for 8 years before the late Ayatollah Khomeini made a peace deal, “drinking from the poisoned chalice.” And a battered, weakened Iran continues to be patient and resolved. And so, a key question now involves President Trump, and what actions – diplomatic or military – he might take next, and whether he too, will be forced to “drink from the poisoned chalice.” The stakes could not be higher. And practitioners of intelligence diplomacy, such as Pakistan, Turkey, and other actors, will continue to be linchpins of any diplomatic successes. But unlike past similar negotiations, which involved discretion and secrecy, today’s intelligence diplomacy takes place in the glare of the media and its heir apparent, social media --- a curse and a blessing for its practitioners. What hasn’t changed is that words and actions – especially those of President Trump and the Iranian leadership - still matter, more than ever.

Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist with the U.S. Dept. of State from 2002-2016 and is currently CEO of Blackwood Advisory Solutions LLC, and Professor of Psychiatry, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. The views expressed by Dr. Dekleva are entirely his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.

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The Continued Myth of Russia’s Imminent Collapse: Lessons from Prigozhin’s Mutiny Three Years On

KREMLIN FILES/COLUMN: Three years ago, in June 2023, the Kremlin confronted one of the most dramatic internal crises of Vladimir Putin's quarter-century in power. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former convict turned oligarch, Wagner founder, and longtime Kremlin insider known as Putin's "chef," launched an armed mutiny that stunned Russia and captivated the world. Wagner fighters seized the headquarters of Russia's Southern Military District in Rostov before beginning an astonishing march toward Moscow, encountering remarkably little organized resistance along the way.

For nearly twenty-four hours, the aura of Kremlin control appeared to evaporate. The episode immediately fueled predictions that Putin's regime was beginning to unravel. Some declared the mutiny the beginning of the end. Others saw it as the first crack that would inevitably bring down the Russian dictator. Three years later, those predictions have not aged well. But similar predictions now are all over U.S. and European news sources about another imminent collapse. The anniversary, therefore, offers an opportunity not to revisit sensational headlines but to remember three enduring lessons—especially at a time when rumor, hopeful thinking, and unfounded speculation once again dominate discussion over Russia and the Ukraine war.

Rumor and Reality

Prigozhin survived a negotiated settlement and the initial aftermath of his short-lived rebellion only to have his plane fall out of the sky months later. Wagner was dismantled and its elements incorporated into the Russian armed forces and intelligence agencies. Putin remains firmly in power, and the past three years have only seen a strengthening of his security and intelligence services.

Russia continues its war against Ukraine. And there are more rumors in recent months, from experts around the world, claiming Putin is “more vulnerable than ever.” This assumption is mostly grounded in Ukraine’s tremendous progress in escalating the drone war, its long-range strikes making a real impact on Russia’s energy sector, and heavy Russian casualties at the front continuing to mount throughout the year. There has also been more public criticism among Russia’s ruling elite than at any time during the war. But speculating from those facts that Putin is now substantially weaker as a dictator, or even, as some have suggested, “ripe for a coup,” is mostly wishful thinking.

Such rumors from alleged intelligence agency leaks, and experts cited by media outlets, offer a tempting, albeit false, notion that the Ukraine war might come to an end without the West having to do more; that Putin will just be overthrown and a more democratic alternative might come to power. Or that resolve and strong support for our Ukrainian allies, who are still fighting and dying every day, are not really needed, and that the “war is surely coming to an end…” That was the response given this week when Germany was pressed on providing long-range weapons:
“well, Ukraine is doing better than ever!” But none of that is based on reality, and Ukraine needs NATO and the U.S.’s support to see this war through to a just settlement, one where Ukraine does not sacrifice long-term security for peace.

Looking back at the war and to Prigozhin’s mutiny, the first lesson to remember is that the Prigozhin’s move exposed important vulnerabilities within the Russian state, ones that have existed for decades. Wagner's convoy advanced hundreds of miles while much of the security apparatus appeared confused, hesitant, or absent altogether. The episode reinforced what many who study Russia have argued for years: corruption, patronage, bureaucratic dysfunction, and institutional rivalries remain defining characteristics of Putin's system. Loyalty often trumps competence, and political reliability frequently matters more than military effectiveness.

Those weaknesses are real. They were discounted by far too many Western military experts before the 2022 invasion, who predicted a quick Russian victory. I have documented numerous examples of such failures across the Russian intelligence, military, and security establishment in my own book: Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War (Naval Institute Press 2026).

Yet acknowledging these shortcomings should never lead us to underestimating the adversary. The war has damaged the Russian economy, and the energy sector is in crisis due to Ukraine’s strike campaign. Still, as The Economist recently noted, the economy is not in shambles, unfortunately, and won’t crash anytime soon.

Russia’s intelligence services (RIS) remain capable, adaptive, and ruthless. They have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to recover from mistakes, suppress internal threats, and preserve the regime. They get the very best in terms of resources and reconstitution from any losses, and they are expanding their hybrid war against Europe and the U.S.

Weakness and Resilience in Putin’s Russia at War

Weakness and resilience are not mutually exclusive. Prigozhin’s mutiny revealed both. This is the second lesson from three years ago. War has strengthened the RIS and, especially, the FSB’s chokehold on the Russian people. Their economy has largely weathered sanctions and repeated hits, and their population, unfortunately, remains hypnotized by heavy propaganda. Sadly, most Russians support Putin as strongly as the Nazi Germans did Hitler, even to their bitter end. Unfortunately, Russian propaganda today has many more tools than Dr. Goebbels did, and they use them very well.

Prigozhin knew it. He was not marching on Moscow to overthrow Vladimir Putin. This has been widely misunderstood. Throughout the crisis, Prigozhin directed his fury overwhelmingly at Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. His extraordinary public denunciations in the weeks prior to the mutiny, shouting at both on Russian TV, stunned all of Russia but received little attention in the West. Prigozhin accused the military leadership of corruption, deception, and catastrophic mismanagement of the war in Ukraine. His objective was to humiliate them, force their removal, and compel Putin to intervene—not to replace Putin himself. He was screaming into Russian cameras, “Shoigu! Gerasimov!!” But not once did he shout Putin’s name. He knew where to stop with his ire.

Western observers too often interpreted the mutiny through their own hopes for regime change. It was an elite struggle within the existing system, not a revolutionary movement against it. Understanding that distinction is essential. Elite infighting should not automatically be mistaken for the imminent collapse of the regime.

Putin is a master, just like Stalin was 80 years ago, at playing his lieutenants and loyalist Siloviki against one another. While they jostle for power, he remains firmly in control, and they are constantly trying to curry his favor. Prigozhin sat at his table—and prepared that table—for decades. He knew it.

The third lesson is perhaps the most consequential. Putin's system was never designed to depend solely on the regular armed forces. It rests on multiple overlapping centers of coercive power, principally at the hands of the intelligence services. The Federal Security Service (FSB) remains the dominant institution protecting the regime. Alongside it stands the National Guard (Rosgvardia), with its vast manpower and domestic security mission, and the Federal Protective Service (FSO), whose responsibilities include safeguarding the country's leadership (first and foremost in the personage of Putin). These organizations were deliberately structured to counterbalance one another, prevent any single institution from becoming too powerful, and ensure that threats to the regime can be contained from multiple directions. Putin is a master at it.

The Wagner mutiny did not invalidate that architecture. If anything, the aftermath demonstrated its durability. While the regular military was embarrassed, the broader security state remained intact. Rosgvardia was strengthened immediately after the mutiny, receiving more heavy equipment, tanks, and APCs designed to put down even the most serious uprising by disloyal units, should they ever get past the wary watch of the FSB. It is headed by General Viktor Zolotov, a loyal former KGB colleague of Putin’s. That layered system and those allegiances help explain why authoritarian regimes like Putin’s can absorb dramatic shocks without collapsing (Iran provides parallels, and no doubt Russia and Iran continue to learn from one another).

None of this means Putin's regime is invulnerable. History offers countless reminders that authoritarian systems often appear stable until they suddenly are not. Internal rivalries matter. Economic pressure matters. Military setbacks matter.

But careful analysis requires distinguishing between long-term structural vulnerabilities and near-term political collapse. Those are not the same thing. Russia under Putin has shown a remarkable ability to overcome its structural and corrupt vulnerabilities to launch out repeatedly with aggression.

Three years after the Wagner mutiny, the greatest analytical mistake would be the same one made in June 2023: allowing hope to substitute for honest assessment. We cannot simply hold our breath, wait for the next rumor of elite discord, and convince ourselves that the dictator—and the security state he has painstakingly constructed over twenty-six years—will collapse under its own weight.

It will not be that easy. If Russia's aggression is ultimately to be defeated, it will require sustained Western resolve, continued support for Ukraine, and a clear-eyed understanding of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the adversary we face. Strategy demands as much patience as the current optimism calls for. But our strategy also demands more resolve, as well as something else missing in 2022—and for much of Putin’s reign—a more credible deterrent from the West.

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

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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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An Outlook for What’s Next in Iran War

With tensions rising all week, the U.S. has launched a new round of strikes against Iranian military targets and maritime assets. The strikes follow an announcement made by President Donald Trump just hours earlier, declaring the ceasefire agreement with Tehran as ‘over’. The fresh wave of strikes signals a U.S. shift back to a strategy of military pressure and economic coercion. The Cipher Brief reached out to Former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI Norm Roule for context.

"For now, the U.S.-Iran diplomatic track remains alive, but its ability to produce meaningful near-term progress is uncertain, and its long-term survival and utility are increasingly at risk. U.S. strikes in Iran over the past two days will degrade important elements of Tehran’s capabilities in the short term and may buy space for Pakistani and Qatari mediators to reduce tensions and bring about at least a temporary halt in the attacks. However, even if the latest U.S. retaliation deters Iranian attacks in the near term, Tehran is unlikely to abandon its claim of administrative control over the Strait of Hormuz or halt retaliatory attacks against Gulf states that host U.S. bases. Iran’s actions support its long-standing intention to be viewed as a regional hegemon with veto rights over Gulf security, using asymmetric weapons to offset U.S. and Gulf conventional advantages.

Specifically, Tehran is highly likely to continue periodic harassment of shipping to undermine confidence in the security of the Omani transit route. However, Iran is unlikely to try to close the Strait outright unless the United States reinstitutes a blockade against Iran. An effort by Tehran to close the Strait would alienate its customers, unify much of the world against it, and risk a wider war with the United States that the Iranian regime might survive but cannot win. Iran almost certainly believes that it does not need to close the Strait to weaponize it. It only needs to make passage so uncertain enough that insurers, shippers, energy firms, and Gulf governments begin pricing Iranian permission into the movement of commerce and eventually decide they have no choice but to accept a construct that gives Iran permanent influence over passage and Tehran the right to charge fees to those who use it.

The United States is determined to show Iran that these actions carry material costs and that Tehran will not be allowed to control an international waterway. The latest U.S. strikes against Iran, following Tehran’s missile and drone attacks against commercial shipping and Gulf targets, were significant and went well beyond the more limited retaliation that followed earlier Iranian provocations. U.S. forces struck more than 80 Iranian targets on July 7 and approximately 90 additional targets on July 8, including Iranian air defense, command-and-control, coastal surveillance, anti-ship missile, drone, naval, and logistics assets, as well as more than 60 IRGC small boats. Press reports claim U.S. strikes or explosions at key sites near Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, Qeshm, Sirik, Bushehr, and Kharg Island, Iran’s principal oil export terminal. President Trump has threatened further escalation, including attacks against Iranian infrastructure and Kharg Island, if Iranian attacks continue.

This was a significant attack package, but one that still avoided leadership targets and most major civilian infrastructure. The strikes show that the United States will defend its regional partners and the international status of the Strait of Hormuz, and that it has a good understanding of the military system and infrastructure it needs to target to degrade Iran’s attack capabilities in the near term.

Although it remains unclear whether Tehran will de-escalate to avoid further damage, doing so would be consistent with its past behavior and would fit its long-term strategy of episodic attacks that unsettle shipping and test, but do not cross, the line that would ignite a large-scale conflict with the United States. The nature of Iran’s attacks to date, however, shows that Tehran is willing to assume a greater risk of renewed large-scale conflict with the United States if that is the price of forcing others to treat Hormuz as a waterway subject to Iranian permission. The tenor of Iranian rhetoric toward the United States has also sharpened after the former Supreme Leader’s funeral, including public revenge threats against the President. Defiance rather than cooperation is likely to define Iran’s near-term approach.

The Gulf states seek to avoid escalation, but they continue to firmly reject Iran’s claim of control over the region’s central maritime artery. Bahrain, Kuwait, and reportedly even Qatar have now all been drawn directly into the latest Iranian response. This response shows that Tehran is not only threatening commercial shipping and Gulf energy exports, but also targeting Gulf states with the sensing, communications, and command architecture it believes supports U.S. deterrence in the region. These attacks also message that U.S. basing will not protect Gulf states from Iranian attack.

The Gulf states’ immediate focus has been to remove ambiguity regarding safe passage and Iran’s persistent threats by using Qatari, Omani, and Pakistani diplomatic channels, as well as by exploring alternative transit, pipeline, and international maritime arrangements to reduce Iran’s leverage over Hormuz. Iran’s strategy depends on undermining the perception that Omani waters offer protection from Iranian attacks. Tehran’s rejection of reported UAE-backed efforts to develop an International Maritime Organization role in managing the Strait underscores that Iran is fighting not just over shipping lanes, but over who has the authority to define safe passage. Qatar’s role in this regional dynamic is complicated: it is both a valued diplomatic channel and the region’s dominant LNG exporter. At the same time, the reported attacks on Qatari-linked vessels and Iranian pressure on Gulf basing infrastructure show that mediation won’t insulate Doha from Iranian missile and drone strikes.

Energy markets face increased pressure that is likely to vary in intensity over time. Gulf exports had been recovering since mid-June, but the security architecture underpinning that recovery is now visibly eroding. Treasury’s revocation of the oil license granted to Iran after the June deal strips Tehran of the principal early economic concession it gained from the reopening arrangement. Brent and WTI both rose sharply on the news, reflecting not only fear of lost barrels but fear that Hormuz is again becoming a contested operating environment. Nonetheless, the market is responding in a way that shows it sees this week’s flare-up as contained, and that robust production from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other producers, reduced Chinese imports from Iran, and the demonstrated resilience of energy markets will prevent a major price shock. In short, existing supply and demand conditions reinforce the prevailing belief that the regional strikes will not evolve into a broader conflict. Should this view be significantly challenged, however, oil prices could quickly move into the $80s or $90s. Longer-term, there is still a disconnect between current market sentiment, the heavy drawdown on global strategic reserves, and the fact that Gulf reliability has been damaged. Even if the Strait remains open, buyers, insurers, and refiners will now treat Gulf supply as politically contingent in a way they did not before the war."

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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Beyond Evo: Bolivia and the Erosion of State Authority in Latin America

In recent days, an unusual consensus has begun to emerge among some of Bolivia's most prominent public intellectuals, economists, diplomats, and former political leaders.

Former Foreign Minister Jaime Aparicio has warned that Bolivia has moved from "the theater of the absurd" to "the dialogue of the absurd," suggesting that the country may require international support to preserve democratic governance. Economist Jaime Dunn has repeatedly argued that Bolivia's central challenge is no longer merely economic, electoral, or ideological, but institutional. Former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga has warned of the corrosive effects of impunity and criminality on democratic government. Former La Paz mayor and economist Ronald MacLean Abaroa has likewise argued that Bolivia confronts a deeper crisis of governance than many observers recognize. Political commentator Vidal Dorado has advanced similar concerns.

These figures differ in generation, political affiliation, and professional experience. Yet they increasingly converge around a common diagnosis: Bolivia's greatest challenge may no longer be who governs the country, but whether the state itself retains the capacity to govern effectively.

That distinction matters.

Most international coverage of Bolivia's current turmoil continues to frame events as a political confrontation between former President Evo Morales and President Rodrigo Paz. The headlines focus on road blockades, food and fuel shortages, arrests, negotiations, and the possibility of emergency measures. Morales's supporters argue that he is being excluded from political life. His opponents contend that he is attempting to destabilize the government in order to preserve his political relevance and avoid accountability. Both interpretations contain elements of truth. Neither fully captures the significance of what is taking place.

As a Bolivian attorney and former Interim Mission Director of USAID/Bolivia, I have observed the country navigate moments of extraordinary turbulence. Bolivia has survived military governments, hyperinflation, constitutional crises, regional tensions, and repeated confrontations between state institutions and social movements. Yet what is unfolding today feels different. Increasingly, the central question is not who governs Bolivia. It is whether the Bolivian state can govern effectively.

The current crisis illustrates the point. Weeks of blockades have disrupted commerce, restricted the movement of food and fuel, and imposed substantial costs on ordinary citizens. Reports indicate that patients have died after being unable to obtain timely medical treatment because transportation routes remained blocked. The government has debated emergency authorities while attempting to avoid a wider confrontation. Yet even amid escalating tensions, important developments have occurred. The Central Obrera Boliviana has entered into dialogue with the government and established joint commissions to address detainees and other demands. At the same time, divisions have emerged within sectors of the protest movement itself, including organizations associated with the Tupac Katari movement.

These developments suggest that the crisis is no longer a simple confrontation between government and opposition. Bolivia increasingly resembles a contest among multiple actors, grievances, and centers of influence, none of which appears capable of imposing a definitive outcome on its own. The result is a growing debate not merely about political leadership, but about governability itself.

At the same time, public discussion has increasingly touched issues that until recently remained largely confined to security specialists and anti-corruption practitioners: narcotics trafficking, illegal mining, contraband, land trafficking, environmental crime, and the financing of political mobilization.

Whether any particular allegation ultimately proves true remains a matter for evidence, investigation, and due process. Yet the broader trend is difficult to ignore. Over time, illicit and informal economies can accumulate sufficient financial and political influence to shape governance itself. They provide livelihoods where the formal economy cannot. They generate patronage networks. They cultivate local loyalties. They penetrate institutions. Eventually, they cease functioning merely as criminal enterprises operating outside the state. They become alternative systems of power operating alongside it.

More than half a century ago, René Zavaleta Mercado, Bolivia's most influential twentieth-century political thinker, described his country as a sociedad abigarrada—a society composed of multiple social, economic, and political realities existing simultaneously within the same national territory. Zavaleta was attempting to explain Bolivia's complexity. His insight remains relevant today. Yet the challenge confronting Bolivia may now extend beyond the coexistence of multiple realities. Increasingly, some of the most powerful actors operating within those realities are neither political parties nor state institutions, but illicit economic networks whose resources and influence rival those of the state itself.

This is not solely a Bolivian phenomenon.

For much of the democratic era that followed Latin America's military governments, political debate revolved around elections, constitutions, economic models, and the alternation of power. The underlying assumption was that the state remained the principal arena through which political conflict would be resolved. Across much of the hemisphere, that assumption is being tested.

In Mexico, cartels have challenged state authority across entire regions. Ecuador's recent security crisis demonstrated how rapidly organized crime can reshape national politics. Colombia continues to confront criminal and armed groups whose influence extends well beyond traditional law-enforcement concerns. Guatemala has repeatedly struggled with corruption networks capable of penetrating public institutions. Venezuela presents perhaps the hemisphere's most advanced example of governing structures intertwined with illicit economic activity. Nicaragua's authoritarian consolidation likewise demonstrates how patronage, coercion, and opaque economic relationships can undermine democratic accountability.

Elsewhere, similar concerns are emerging. Brazil faces the growing influence of criminal organizations and illegal mining operations in the Amazon. Panama remains vulnerable to transnational money laundering and criminal finance. Jamaica and Trinidad continue to grapple with the political consequences of organized crime and gang violence. Guyana's remarkable economic expansion creates extraordinary opportunities but also governance risks familiar to many resource-rich states. Even Argentina's recent political debate, reflected in part through the rise of Javier Milei, has centered on public frustration with entrenched patronage systems, institutional weakness, and a perception that the state increasingly serves privileged networks rather than citizens. In Chile, support for figures such as José Antonio Kast similarly reflects anxieties about crime, state capacity, and the ability of institutions to maintain public order.

These countries are not identical. Their histories differ. Their institutions differ. Their democratic trajectories differ. Yet they increasingly confront a common challenge: preserving the capacity of legitimate institutions to exercise authority in the face of alternative networks of economic and political power.

The concern is not merely theoretical. It increasingly shapes political discourse throughout the hemisphere. What Jaime Dunn articulates in Bolivia is not entirely different from concerns expressed by reformers in Ecuador, opposition figures in Venezuela, portions of Peru's political class, or advocates of institutional reform elsewhere in the region. The ideological differences among these groups are substantial. What unites them is a growing belief that democratic governments are losing ground—not simply to political opponents, but to systems of power that operate beyond the effective reach of traditional institutions.

At this point, the observations of Jorge Basadre, Peru's great historian of the republic, become especially relevant. Basadre famously described Peru as both a problem and a possibility. The same might be said of democratic governance across much of Latin America today. The challenge facing many countries is not simply electing the right leaders or adopting the right policies. It is preserving institutions capable of channeling conflict through politics rather than allowing power to migrate toward criminal organizations, illicit markets, or networks that thrive on disorder and impunity.

Many of the hemisphere's most experienced diplomats and policymakers, including former U.S. Under Secretary of State Tom Shannon, have long argued that Latin America's enduring challenges are ultimately institutional rather than ideological. Bolivia's current crisis reinforces that point. The debate is no longer primarily about the distribution of power among competing political actors. It is increasingly about the capacity of democratic institutions to exercise authority, enforce rules, and maintain legitimacy.

This challenge also exposes a growing gap in the inter-American system. The Inter-American Democratic Charter was designed to defend constitutional democracy against coups, authoritarian ruptures, and attacks on democratic order. The Inter-American Convention Against Corruption sought to strengthen integrity and accountability throughout the hemisphere. Both remain important achievements. Yet neither was drafted with today's challenge fully in mind. Increasingly, democracy is threatened not only by tanks in the streets or presidents who refuse to leave office. It is threatened by criminal networks, illicit economies, and corruption structures that do not seek to replace democratic institutions outright, but gradually hollow them out from within.

Two centuries ago, Simón Bolívar warned of the fragility of republican institutions in the newly independent Americas. More recently, Basadre reminded us that the republic remains both a problem and a possibility. Bolivia's current crisis suggests that those concerns remain remarkably relevant. Jaime Dunn and others have argued that the country's deepest challenge is institutional. The evidence increasingly suggests they may be right.

The fundamental question facing Bolivia today is not whether Evo Morales or Rodrigo Paz prevails in the next round of political struggle. It is whether democratic institutions can continue to exercise legitimate authority in the face of increasingly powerful alternative networks of economic and political power. That question extends far beyond Bolivia. Increasingly, it is becoming one of the defining questions of democratic governance throughout the Americas.

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After the Intelligence Cycle: A New Schema for AI-Native Intelligence Analysis

Recent discussion of artificial intelligence in intelligence analysis has consistently framed the technology as a means of accelerating an existing process. The intelligence cycle (collection, processing, analysis, production, dissemination) remains the implicit organizing schema, with AI cast as something used to drive its stages faster, increase resource efficiency, or widen its scope. We find this framing inadequate. It leaves the cycle itself intact, treating it as a sound structure merely in need of added speed, when the more consequential present opportunity is to reconsider the structure altogether. The intelligence cycle is an industrial-era artifact, popularized by Sherman Kent in the immediate post-war period, when information was scarce, expert labor concentrated, and the consumer a narrowly-defined institutional decision-maker. None of these conditions still holds. Recent work by Gartin, Schlickenmaier and by Reed and Szylkiewicz has argued for updating intelligence with agile, information-technology methods, and for shifting delivery toward a services-centric rather than goods-centric model. These arguments address the outdated production cycle, but neither fully anticipates the extent to which AI permits the cycle to be displaced wholesale rather than merely modernized.

As practitioners building intelligence programs in this environment, we observe that the prevailing conversation remains bounded by traditional conceptions of what analytic work is. This paper proposes a different framework, organized around a single assertion: that AI enables a scale and rigor in cognitive information work that were previously unavailable, and that this in turn dissolves several of the assumptions on which the cycle previously depended. The argument rests on a particular architectural premise that analytic reasoning can be captured as a structured data schema rather than compressed into an overly-simplified finished narrative. From this premise follow five ruptures with the traditional cycle:

First, the core value unit of intelligence shifts away from the finished assessment toward a more complex artifact that contains the entire decision architecture by which the assessment was reached.

Second, AI-enabled analysis becomes continuous and ongoing rather than fixed to a single publication date.

Third, analytic accuracy becomes measurable, and therefore improvable, for the first time in history.

Fourth, the relationship between provider and decision-maker narrows, and can be scaled to the needs of the individual consumer rather than to a generic reporting requirement.

And fifth, source handling and judgment collapse into a single operation rather than appearing as separate steps.

Taken together, these constitute a revolutionary rather than evolutionary departure from the manual methods that have governed intelligence analysis for a century, and they open new ground for rigor, accountability, and accuracy in global risk forecasting.

From Finished Product to Assessment Process

Modern intelligence analysis tradecraft treats the finished product as its core deliverable. The product serves both as the vehicle of value to the consumer and as the measure of organisational output, and it is the terminus toward which collection, refinement, and assessment are all directed. This arrangement was never optimal. Reliance on a single artifact collapses a complex analytic process into one compressed object, in which the judgments, and biases, included along the way are flattened into a single deliverable. Tradecraft notes and caveats have occasionally preserved fragments of this reasoning, but the product standing alone has never fully represented the value chain that produced it. The most important steps in the analyst's work, the alternative hypotheses entertained, the source biases weighed, and the contingencies sketched against one another, do not travel with the document, forming a lost layer of metadata that usually remains behind.

Artificial intelligence relieves the scale pressure that heretofore forced this compression. An analyst working with well-designed AI tools can now meaningfully execute and record each of the steps in an intelligence workflow rapidly and at scale, which permits the end product to change, away from the finished product deliverable to a searchable, indexable, and auditable log of expertise that has produced a range of potentially useful data through its work. In this process, the end value unit of analysis becomes the actual analysis itself, rather than an artificial summary of that analysis compressed to finished product size. By deprioritizing the focus on the product as the end goal of all analytic work, more of the valuable decisions and information which informed its creation become accessible to both the analyst and the consumer, which may audit and explore these dynamically to enhance their own understanding.

For this process to compound rather than merely accumulate, the analytic representation of judgments must be persistent and structured. Judgments of this type include the reliability of the source, the credibility of the information it contains, the weight that information should play in contributing to a view of the world, how it might interplay with other events and trends, and so on. These expert judgments are collected as structured data and recorded as they are formed, so that they can later be reviewed against real-world outcomes as those outcomes resolve. This foundation of analysis permits auditability and recursive improvement in judgment, source collection, and analytic framing. AI tools used correctly should permit a thoroughness which enhances judgment rather than eroding it, because they help create a massive record of analytic work that persists and can rapidly be revisited, rather than a sequence of keyhole snapshots of reality which age into irrelevance from the moment they are completed.

Because our representation of analyst judgment is structured across various data points rather than as a single loose narrative, it supports more than retrieval. A sufficiently large corpus of analytic judgments can be used to generate predictive assessments based on prior weighting and modal relationships, to trace multi-path higher-order consequences that human reasoning follows poorly, to identify which forces carry the most systemic weight, and to express conclusions as calibrated, quantified probability rather than verbal estimate.

From Episodic to Continuous Analysis

The intelligence cycle was built around episodic production not because it produced the best analytic results but because scale challenges prevented anything more rigorous. Between products, the analyst's judgment existed only in their head, and even then, was a nebulous and ill-defined thing. Kent’s “Words of Estimative Probability” and Tetlock’s superforecasting projects both pointed toward a need for improved, continuous, and calibrated judgment, but neither could provide a way to operate such a system of rigor continuously at scale. Artificial intelligence changes this arithmetic. A well-trained model handles what human analysts struggle to achieve at scale, ingesting raw data, mapping it to analyst-defined areas of interest, and updating mathematical prediction models. This rapid processing enables the analyst to spend bandwidth on setting the scope of analytic questions, interrogating the quality and biases of sources, and defining the weights and relationships the models will assign to various real-world events. Far from the language of the factory assembly line, the modern discipline of intelligence we espouse more closely resembles the rhythm of a trading desk, where equities analysts mark positions to market continuously, forever adjusting expectations based on a never-ending flow of data.

In this framing, an equities analyst wouldn’t save up all their trading positions to be submitted in one package at the end of the day, and we propose that appropriately tooled intelligence analysts similarly no longer need to wait until a publication date to deliver analytic value. By connecting front-end AI summarization and chat systems to back-end analyst enrichment areas, customers are able to query the latest in analyst judgment on demand, creating an instant feedback loop in which customer queries inform and sharpen ongoing analytic priorities. This serves the analyst as much as the consumer. It removes the obligation to produce filler during quiet periods, and it lets analytic output follow the genuine cadence of a topic rather than an arbitrary calendar.

Measuring and Improving Accuracy

Intelligence consumers hold the analyst accountable not only for a judgment but also for the reasoning by which it was reached. Historically this accountability has been difficult to honor, because much analytic judgment was formed reflexively and poorly recorded. The methods now available for capturing and structuring reasoning make the problem tractable for the first time. Once reasoning is recorded as structure, it can be scored against outcomes as they resolve, using calibration methods such as Brier scoring. The essential property is that each judgment is preserved as it was made and is not revised afterward. That is what keeps the scoring honest: the analyst is measured against the call they actually made, not a version softened by hindsight.

We are deliberate about the strength of this claim. The architecture does not inherently make analysts more accurate. What it makes possible is the measurement of accuracy and the diagnosis of error. When a judgment proves wrong, the structure allows the failure to be traced to a specific weighting or relationship rather than absorbed into an unaccountable whole. It is this decomposability, sustained over time and across many resolved judgments, that creates the conditions for improvement, for the individual analyst and for the models their judgments inform. The data describing how and why an analyst reached a judgment is, in this respect, more valuable than the judgment itself, because it is the raw material of recursive refinement.

This is a meaningful departure. For most of its history, intelligence analysis has struggled to know whether it was improving in delivering decision advantage or predictive insight, because the record needed to properly audit this improvement was never systematically available. For the first time, a complete and inspectable record scored against reality is within reach, presenting the opportunity for true improvements in forecasting accuracy.

From Generic to Specified

A further constraint the cycle never escaped was the assumption that consumers were finite and institutionally legible. The analyst writing for a government agency in 1990 could reasonably picture a handful of senior officials whose interests were bounded by their roles in advancing the national interest. This model functions poorly in the wider modern intelligence context, in which the reader of any given report might vary widely based on their position and access. For intelligence teams working in today’s commercialized contexts, the reader of a report might be a CFO weighing currency exposure, an operations director routing freight around contested waterways, a general counsel mapping sanctions risk, or a fund manager modelling financial tail risk. Each actor is sufficiently distinct from the others that how information is presented to them, and what information is relevant to their decisions, is so different as to destroy the value of a single, universal intelligence report. Each actor makes a different decision against a different geometry of exposure to the same geopolitical environment. A generic product written to the centre of this readership delivers very little decision value to any specific stakeholder because it is intended for none of them.

Bespoke intelligence tailored to individual stakeholders is rare, because it is cost-prohibitive. Examples like the President’s Daily Brief show just how complex and difficult the process is to tailor an intelligence report to even one customer, let alone many hundreds or thousands. Today, AI makes this feasible, because it permits a single body of robust analytic work to be expressed differently for each consumer according to their specific exposure. The assessment surfaced to a Nordic manufacturer with significant Strait of Hormuz exposure differs significantly from the one surfaced to a Latin American agribusiness with none, though both can draw on the same underlying analysis in order to inform a wider geopolitical frame. This approach keeps client-specific context separate from the shared analytic base rather than absorbing it permanently, which matters as much for data governance as for scale. In other words, by keeping intelligence about the threat environment separate from context about the user’s potential impact until the last possible moment, delivery of truly tailored insights is permissible at a scale that humans alone cannot match. Delivering this well still requires human guidance, because the object is to inform human decisions, but it is reachable by a useful number of consumers only through automated composition and delivery. In practice it increasingly resembles data layers, dashboards, and conversational interfaces rather than documents and slide decks, which are inherently static and cannot respond to unique and specific customer interrogation. AI’s ability to handle mass data sets and rapidly synthesize them for human engagement is the key which unlocks these dynamic product offerings.

Source Handling as Judgment

One fiction the cycle's imagery sustained was that a clean separation existed between collection and analysis. In the logic of the assembly line, collection produced sources, processing ordered them, and analysis applied judgment. Practitioners have long known this separation rarely held in practice. Deciding which information to credit, and how heavily, is itself an analytic act, one frequently practiced by collectors but only sporadically preserved in the finished product in the form of sometimes feeble source reliability statements. An AI-enabled team can make this categorization a continuous and systematic piece of the analysis rather than a burdensome and occasional addendum to it. High-volume collection and tagging let analysts reach and index relevant information by reliability far faster, and automated tooling lets them record, in real time, which signals they judge useful, to what degree, and for which questions.

Two disciplines give this its force. The first is continuity: signals attach to persistent, identified subjects rather than floating as unlinked text, so that a judgment made today accrues to the same subject a judgment made months earlier addressed. The second is provenance carried as structure. Each catalogued signal carries its source, the system action that surfaced it, and the analyst decisions that touched it, so that the basis of a judgment travels with the judgment rather than being reconstructed after the fact. In our architecture the analyst encodes meaning into collection from first contact through to the point at which a signal is connected to the wider analytic framework. The system performs the high-volume triage and flagging; the analyst accepts, challenges, or supplies the context the system cannot; and the system then does the durable work of attaching that judgment to analysis where it carries lasting weight. The provenance this produces is more than an audit trail, and becomes part of what the consumer can interrogate. It also forms the basis for learning, over time, about collection gaps and the reliability of sources, serving as an internal collection management architecture.

After the Intelligence Cycle

Building an intelligence team that is AI-native from the outset, at a moment when most established intelligence institutions predate AI and are captured by institutional cultures which inhibit profound change, has shaped our thinking profoundly. The most valuable applications we find for AI push beyond legacy tradecraft, and concentrate on the high-volume work of collection, structuring, and presentation of data. Critically, we do not use AI to replace human judgment. The reason is not that models cannot produce reasoning, because they can, often fluently. It is that a model's account of its own reasoning cannot be relied upon as a faithful record of why it actually reached a conclusion. Auditable, attributable judgment of exactly that kind is what our architecture is built to capture from human analysts. Throughout our experimentation we have found success in a consistent division of labour: the system handles scale, the analyst supplies judgment, and the system records and surfaces that judgment rather than manufacturing it. Attempts to use AI to replace the analytic steps of the cycle risk producing analysis that sounds authoritative but cannot be held to account, and that is most dangerous when it is wrong. Any technology that amplifies human reasoning inherits its errors along with its strengths, which is why the core work of judgment must remain human and auditable.

The process changes we describe are early in their lifecycle, and the work of demonstrating them against a long track record remains ahead of us. Still, the process has taught us that significant changes to the discipline of intelligence analysis are almost certainly on the horizon, particularly as technological advances in model sophistication render traditional information-work delivery obsolete. Human analysts may defend the old ways of conducting analysis on nostalgic grounds, but the truth is that intelligence analysis conducted in this way has a poor track record of success, and disruptions which pose the opportunity for step improvements should be welcomed. These improvements should proceed from the end goal of intelligence analysis - to provide sustainable, responsible, and accurate forecasts about the future that enable decision advantage - rather than from a reactive defense of the previous normal process. To integrate AI in intelligence analysis in responsible ways requires abandoning many of the bad habits and basic assumptions that limited intelligence work in the preceding era. It also requires reconceiving the notion of the value and role of the human analyst in providing insight, and an audacity to believe that what has historically been unknowably complex can be rendered intelligible through sufficiently sophisticated modeling. One hundred years ago, humans struggled to predict the weather with any reliability; today, they expect a device in the palm of their hand to predict rain down to the minute. Similar changes are coming to the world of intelligence analysis. But they will require leaving behind the archaic tools of a previous era in order to reach their full potential.

The Succession Question Haunting the Kremlin

The late-June 2026 death of Sergei B. Ivanov - the man once thought the most likely successor to Vladimir Putin - as well as the Russian President’s age, his rumored health problems, and the discontent over the economic impact of his disastrous invasion of Ukraine; have renewed speculation over when, under what circumstances and to whom he might cede power. The constitutional changes Putin orchestrated in 2020 potentially allow him to remain in office until 2036. Further, he has refused to answer questions about whether he will stay until then saying it is too early to discuss such matters and citing his focus on running the nation. However, given that Putin would be 83 in 2036, it is highly likely a leadership change will occur before then. How might Putin – assuming he is in a position to do so - handle such a transition? Ivanov’s history with him is instructive in this regard.

Like Putin, Ivanov hailed from St. Petersburg. They both served in the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. But there was a difference between them that likely nettled the prideful Putin. While he served in Dresden, working with the allied East German State Security Service (a posting that earned him the not wholly complimentary sobriquet “Stasi” among his KGB colleagues), the polished, English-speaking Ivanov battled the ‘Main Enemy’ on the hostile side of the East-West divide. The two maintained a close relationship while Putin came to power and into the early years of his rule. Ivanov was the most-trusted of the coterie of St. Petersburg intelligence and security service veterans who formed the core of Putin’s governing elite as he founded what would become a de facto ‘Chekist” state in Russia.

When Putin was appointed Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) by then-President Boris Yeltsin, he named Ivanov as his deputy. As he moved on from the FSB to become prime minister and then president of Russia, Putin kept Ivanov at the center of his security apparatus, appointing him successively as Secretary of the Security Council from 1999 until 2001; as Defense Minister from 2001 until 2007; and then as First Deputy Prime Minister. Apparently seen by Putin as too ambitious and difficult to control, Ivanov’s influence began to gradually wane in 2008 as the Russian president named the more pliable Dmitry Medvedev as a placeholder president while he himself actually ran the country from his perch as Prime Minister pending a return to the presidency. Although Ivanov remained a trusted player in Putin’s orbit for years thereafter - subsequently serving as Deputy Prime Minster and Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration – the window for him to succeed his boss had long since closed. In 2016, he was relegated to a ceremonial position overseeing environmental and transport matters.

Repeating a Medvedev-like managed transition arrangement – that is Putin “retiring” while orchestrating events like a puppet master behind the curtain - is one likely scenario should he decide to depart the presidency. Another possibility is the constitutionally sanctioned model like that which played out in 1999 wherein the man Yeltsin named prime minister – in that case Putin himself - became his heir apparent. Putin went on to become acting Russian president and then president in 2000 following Yeltsin’s resignation. Another possibility is that Putin could precipitously decide to extra-constitutionally designate a successor.

The problem with these scenarios is that Putin to date has given no indication he might be willing to cede power. Nor, even if so inclined, is he likely to do so at least until he has secured something he can, however speciously, call ‘victory’ in Ukraine, a result that – at minimum - hinges on his ability to secure either through negotiations or force of arms the four oblasts Russia claims to have annexed in 2022. For Putin, successful resolution of the war is both a strategic imperative and central to his personal legacy. Given the grinding nature of the Russian Army’s advance in Donbas and the ferocious resistance being mounted by the Ukrainians, such an outcome appears unlikely in the foreseeable future if ever.

It is conceivable that the military or security services could mount a coup to topple Putin. Yet, despite the massive human and economic costs his war has imposed on the Russian people, there are to date no discernible indications such a putsch is in the offing. Additionally, the security measures taken following the abortive 2023 Wagner mutiny – to include the 2024 restoration granting of the Soviet-era Dzerzhinskiy title/honorific to a division of the Putin-created National Guard (‘Rosgvardiya’) protecting the country’s leadership and the ‘no man, no problem’ retaliation meted out to Yevgeny Prigozhin in its wake – mitigate against the success of any such attempt to overthrow the regime.

Given Putin’s age, and the fact that he rules a country wherein the male life expectancy is roughly the mid-to-high 60s, another likely scenario for an end to his regime involves his sudden death or incapacitation in office. Such an eventuality would unleash a period of leadership tumult in Moscow akin to that which followed the 1953 death of Stalin. With the demise of the Soviet dictator, it was widely assumed he would be succeeded by one of his closest lieutenants, Georgy M. Malenkov. Malenkov indeed became Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He successfully conspired with Red Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikita Khrushchev to dispose of the odious Lavrentiy Beria. Nonetheless, even though he was effectively the Soviet premier and the head of government, Malenkov was unable to consolidate power because he controlled neither the security apparatus nor the Soviet Communist Party. And it was Khrushchev - by then First Secretary of the Party – who ultimately won the fight between Stalin’s lieutenants to succeed him.

During a 1959 discussion with Khrushchev, former U.S. Ambassador W. Averill Harriman addressed Stalin’s lack of a succession plan, asking the Soviet leader who Stalin thought would succeed him. Khrushchev’s reply that: “Stalin didn’t think; he thought he would live forever” was, as was the case with much of what he said, calculatingly apocryphal. Stalin, notoriously conspiratorial by nature, clearly feared that if he acknowledged his rule would someday come to an end, his power would rapidly erode as plotting to hasten that indefinite date commenced. As the fight to succeed him would attest, he was surely correct in that judgement. After all, as Golda Meir would famously observe to Henry Kissinger in 1973: ‘Even paranoids have enemies’.

Reference in Ecclesiastes 7:15 to “the righteous perishing in their righteousness, and the wicked living long in their wickedness” certainly applies not only to Stalin but also to Putin. Nevertheless, absent some highly unlikely actualization of the scheme he discussed with Xi Jinping in 2025 of indefinitely extending his mortality by replacing organs in a manner akin to that of a Bond villain, Putin knows that his death is an actuarial certainty. But, like Stalin, he surely (and rightly) understands that any designation of a successor would inevitably and immediately lead to an erosion of his own power as others vied for his throne.

A precipitous end to the Putin regime would almost certainly trigger a period – perhaps an extended period – of crisis and uncertainty in Russia. Even in the best-case scenario – such as a decision by Putin to name a successor or wield power from behind-the-scenes as he did with Medvedev - it is likely that a contest among aspirants to his purple would follow. In addition to the character, worldview and policy goals of any new man in the Kremlin, the key determinants in any transition will be how it comes about and strength of support for that new leader. Putin has not allowed any subordinate to become an alternative center of power and the Russian political system is deliberately opaque with respect to any political matter, much less an issue as sensitive as leadership transition.

According to the Russian constitution, in the event of a president’s death, resignation, incapacity, or impeachment, the prime minister - currently Mikhail V. Mishustin - would serve as acting president pending a presidential election within three months. In practice, however, succession would likely be less about constitutional procedure than about who can best ensure elite status, security, property and de facto immunity from any legal accountability. The presidential administration, security services, state corporations, courts, political parties, media, and regional governors all look to the Kremlin for direction and sustenance.

Consequently, a decision on who would succeed Putin would involve bargaining among elites with roots in those sectors. While Mishustin would temporarily fill in as president in a sudden constitutional transition, he lacks the charisma, nationalist credentials, independent public backing, and security-service connections to become a permanent successor to Putin. That said, because the prime minister is the formal acting president in extremis, replacing Mishustin with another figure would be a clear signal that the person named is being positioned to succeed Putin.

Any change in leadership in the Kremlin, however it comes about, will - if only because Russia is a major nuclear power – engender worries about the nature of any regime following that of Putin. This was also the case after Stalin’s death when then-Vice President Richard Nixon voiced concern that his successor “might very well prove more difficult to deal with than Stalin himself.” As the recklessness Khrushchev displayed in deploying missiles to Cuba attested, Nixon was right to be worried. The Russian leadership itself probably understands such concerns and wants to avoid fueling them. That is one reason that the next Russian president is less likely to be an advocate of change than a continuity figure. Domestically, any successor would likely concentrate on consolidating his rule and avoiding anything that looks like defeat in Ukraine. Even if the next leader is less personally ideological than Putin, the governing structure he inherits will inevitably push him toward continuity. This would mean repression of any opposition, or perceived opposition, at home; deep suspicion of the West; protection of elite wealth; and management of the Ukraine war and its consequences.

In any transition scenario, but particularly in the case of an unexpected transition, the security services - the best organized and most powerful internal organizations supporting and enforcing Putin’s rule - will play a key role in determining who will follow him. Not surprisingly, then, several of those thought best positioned to succeed Putin have deep security service roots. Most prominent among them is ex-Putin bodyguard and former governor of Tula oblast Alexei Dyumin. He was given a position in the Kremlin and subsequently made secretary of the State Council, actions seen by many as signs he is seen by Putin as a possible successor. Another leading candidate, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev, is the son of the hard-line former Director of the FSB and Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev. Even potential candidates seen as technocrats or managers, such as First Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, will have to account for the pervasive influence of the security services should they aspire to succeed Putin.

As Mark Galeotti, an expert on organized crime and the security state in Russia has noted, that country “is effectively a state with a nationalized mafia.” Officers and contacts of those services have leveraged their authorities and connections not only to the benefit of the Putin regime but also to line their own pockets. And there is no reason to suppose that the end of Putin’s rule - however it comes about - and the inevitable departure from the scene of Ivanov and other aging KGB veterans such as Nikolai Patrushev and FSB Director Alexander V. Bortnikov will herald an end to the Chekist State. Moreover, any idea that the new generation of security-state linked ‘siloviki’(strongmen) will willingly cede their sway on the most senior levels of Russian leadership is, to put it mildly, improbable.

On the contrary, for as long as the Ukraine war goes on the security services’ sway over the Russian state will almost certainly grow. Indeed, anyone succeeding Putin is likely to rely heavily on those same services to monitor and suppress any extant opposition to the war and his establishment of control over the levers of power. The impact of the security services on the Russian state after Putin will be much like their central role under him only more so. On becoming Prime Minster in 1999, Putin quipped that “a group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission.” Sadly for Russia, its people and the people of Ukraine in particular, that mission continues with no end in sight.

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Putin’s Running Out of Scare Tactics and Options

Russian President Vladimir Putin can no longer conceal the cost of his Ukraine war from the Russian public. There are fuel shortages throughout the Russian Federation. Videos show hundreds of automobiles lining up to get a few liters of gasoline at gas stations around Moscow. Gasoline sales to civilian vehicles in occupied Crimea have been suspended as the Ukrainian blockade of the peninsula takes effect. Russia continues to make painfully slow progress in its efforts to capture territory in Ukraine and at a staggering cost in casualties.

“…sound out idols... by pos[ing] questions here with a hammer... scrutiny will reveal that they are actually hollow and meaningless—not the high, noble standards of conduct that their proponents claim them to be." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov recently says that Ukraine has successfully regained the strategic initiative on the battlefield and Kyiv’s use of long-range weapons to hit targets deep inside of Russia is aiming to force Moscow to end the war through asymmetric attrition. Ukraine has recently intensified precision strikes 20-300 kms behind Russian lines to isolate Russian infantry, destroy high value air defense systems and disrupt the flow of supplies to the front line. The long-range drone campaign is systematically targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure with devastating economic and psychological effect.

Vehicles are lining up to cross the Kerch Strait bridge following successful Ukrainian drone strikes on the Tavriiska thermal power plant, major electrical substations and the Kerch and Dzhankoi oil depots. These strikes have caused blackouts in Sevastopol and Simferopol, the two largest cities in the peninsula. The panic caused by the energy shortages and the fear of total collapse has led many to flee, causing the massive backups at the bridge—with sometimes as many as 2,500-3,000 vehicles lining up to cross. The Crimean Peninsula is the crown jewel of Putin’s campaign against Ukraine which he re-ignited with its annexation in March of 2014.

But Crimea is just one of the many challenges facing Putin. Omsk is burning, having been struck on July 6 by Ukrainian forces in their deepest strategic strike of the war. The Omsk oil refinery is located approximately 2600 kms from Ukrainian territory and is Russia’s largest oil refinery and its top producer of gasoline. There are still lingering oily black clouds over Moscow from the June 18 Ukrainian strike on the Gazprom Neft refinery in southeast Moscow—just ten miles from the Kremlin. The refinery was struck by over 200 drones and sent thick greasy black clouds of burning petroleum directly over the high-rise and residential areas fthat are avored by Moscow’s elites. The clouds created “black rain” and forced disruptions at Moscow’s four airports.

A few weeks before, there were oily black clouds over St. Petersburg as Russia hosted its annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in early June. International visitors to the Forum (whose attendance has seen a significant drop since 2022) were re-routed to avoid risk of Ukrainian drone strikes and to avoid the clouds of burning petroleum. This read like quite the humiliation for the architect of Russia’s current economic disaster.

As devastating as Ukraine’s attacks have been, the situation on the front is even worse.

A recent thinktank study indicates that Russian forces have suffered 1.4 million total casualties including 450,000 deaths on the battlefield. Approximately 32% of Russian casualties result in death, a fatality ratio that is much higher than modern Western military standards would allow. Reports by analysts and Russian military bloggers indicate that once a Russian soldier is deployed directly into an active combat zone, their average life expectancy drops to just 20-25 minutes. The average survival time for a raw recruit measured from the moment they arrive at a regional training ground to their death in Ukraine, ranges from ten days to three weeks. Even by the Russian standards that were established for casualties in World War II, these losses are staggering and must be causing alarm bells to go off amongst Russia’s elite leadership. There is more visible criticism of how Putin is conducting this war than has even been seen before.

On the diplomatic front, challenges for the Russian president are rising. This week’s NATO summit is yielding results on Europe’s commitment to defense spending and re-armament, led by Germany which is considering incurring state debt to finance defense spending which would be unprecedented for a postwar German government. Putin’s confidence in his ability to count on President Trump to put pressure on Ukraine to end the war on terms that are favorable to Moscow may be eroding and Trump has recently acknowledged Ukraine’s success in the war.

Putin’s reliable ally in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, seems also to be reconsidering the state of play and his enthusiasm for allowing Moscow to drag Belarus deeper into the conflict with Ukraine. resident Zelensky recently demanded Belarus take offline four relay facilities in Belarus’s Brest and Gomel regions near the Ukrainian border. These relay stations acted as signal boosters for Russian drones used to attack Ukrainian cities. The relays have been taken offline.

President Zelensky has just authorized a forty-day intelligence and security operation to heavily amplify pressure on the Kremlin to end the war. He is arguing that Russia’s elites live in Moscow and St. Petersburg and therefore, the war must be brought to their doorsteps. He also predicted that “When not one hundred drones but a thousand start reaching Moscow…Putin will be advised to move somewhere beyond the Urals. Zelensky is right and Ukrainians know Russia better than anyone in the West.

Despite the pressure he is under, it is too early to count Putin out. He has largely and cleverly managed his tenure as Russia’s leader. He is still two years short of Stalin’s 29 year record at the helm, but he is getting close and in his 27 years of running Russia, he has dug his tentacles deep into every level of the country’s power structure and has certainly accumulated kompromat on any potential rival or replacement. Many have speculated that if Putin departs the scene, his replacement could be an even worse partner for the U.S. and the West. I won’t argue that any replacement or coalition that follows Putin will be less anti West than Putin, but whatever constellation follows, they will not have the benefit of having roots and leverage as deep in Russia as Putin does.

For the moment, Putin still has escalatory options he can use to respond to increasing pressure.

In recent weeks, Russia has taken steps to close or severely restrict seven critical railway border crossings and road traffic crossings into Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. Apparently, negotiations are under way to restrict crossings into Kazakhstan and other central Asian states. The motivations for the abrupt closures are unclear but they suggest that Putin may be considering a mass mobilization and is trying to stem the likely departure of military age males to avoid the departures that have occurred since February 2022.

Mobilization alone will not solve Russia’s problem of shortages of equipment and training for conscripts as well as Russia’s World War I-style battlefront tactics. President Zelensky spoke on the margins of the NATO summit this week and said Ukraine is causing over 30,000 Russian casualties a month.

Putin can also rattle the nuclear saber again, but that is likely to be largely ignored as has his previous saber rattling. Most experts are confident that Putin has received firm guidance from his only remaining reliable ally China that he should not open the nuclear Pandora’s box in Ukraine.

The intelligence and security services in the Baltic States, Sweden, and Poland have recently assessed that Putin may try a provocation against one of the bordering NATO states in order to force an Article V action—which he hopes Trump would reject. But few analysts think Putin would risk an all-out war against NATO. That would be a path that could only accelerate Ukraine’s path toward NATO membership and could lead to further disasters for the Russian military, which many experts considered to be the most powerful conventional military in Europe prior to February 2022.

Putin’s most likely response to his current challenges is to continue to take advantage of weaknesses in Ukraine’s air defenses, particularly against ballistic missile attacks and hope that at some point, Ukraine’s morale weakens and pressure increases on Zelensky to end the war on terms that are more favorable to Russia. Such a change in Zelensky or Ukraine is inconceivable to any rational analysis of the current state of the war, but Putin is clearly not rational.

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If You Can Run a Spy, You Can Run AI

Generative AI should be managed like a human source: useful, fast, sometimes brilliant, sometimes wrong, and never a substitute for disciplined questioning and human judgment.

The three of us spent our careers in an environment where bad information costs lives. We learned early that the most dangerous source isn’t someone who lies to you. It’s someone who tells you what you want to hear—and does it convincingly. As we watch organizations race to adopt generative AI, we keep seeing the same mistake: treating these tools like oracle machines rather than sources that need to be run.

We are not AI experts. We are not here to debate model architectures or training data. What we know is how to extract reliable insights from sources whose motivations can’t be fully verified, whose outputs may be biased or based on incomplete information, and whose reliability must be continuously earned. That is exactly the problem organizations face with AI today.

This is what HUMINT tradecraft has taught us—and what it has to teach anyone who wants to get honest, useful work from a generative AI system.

The Source Who Was Never Wrong

Early in our careers, two of us ran sources who were brilliant, well-placed, articulate, and deeply motivated. They produced detailed, confident, and consistent reporting. Senior analysts loved them. Their product sailed through review. For months, everything they said checked out—until it didn’t.

The problem wasn’t that they were lying, exactly. In both cases, they filled gaps with inference. They’d learned what we wanted to hear, and their natural intelligence and experience let them produce it fluently. The reporting wasn’t fabricated—it was confabulated. Coherent and plausible, but in key places, wrong.

We’ve all seen this pattern in the early months of AI adoption. The tool is fast. It’s articulate. It never pauses, never says “I’m not sure,” and it formats its answers with the confident authority of a briefing document. A recent Science study found that across eleven state-of-the-art AI models, sycophantic behavior—affirming users’ views even when inaccurate—was widespread and measurable. Stanford researchers found that AI systems trained on human preference feedback are systematically rewarded for being agreeable rather than correct, because agreeable outputs receive higher ratings. The models learn to please.

We’ve seen that source before. We know how the story ends.

Selection: Not All Sources Are Equal

Before you run a source, you select one. That’s a discipline in itself. And a discipline to which AI tools may in fact be able to add value in identifying and sorting stressors that can be exploited (anything that causes stress and then outlines for case officers which levers to pull on a recruitment). You don’t recruit someone simply because they have access. You also generally don't recruit happy people. You have to evaluate reliability, motivation, and susceptibility to manipulation. A source with wide access and poor judgment can be more dangerous than no source at all.

The same applies to AI. Not all AI systems are created equal for every task or mission. Each must be evaluated on access, expertise, responsiveness, and the quality of reporting—and the last criterion is harder to assess than it appears.

A few selection questions worth building into any AI adoption process:

•What is this model’s known track record on this specific type of task, not in general but specifically?

•Where does it tend to confabulate? What are its known failure modes?

•Is it current? A model with a training cutoff is like a source who’s been out of the field for a year—still useful, but with blind spots.

•How does it behave when it doesn’t know something? Does it admit it, or does it keep talking?

Choosing an AI because it’s fast or because leadership read about it in a business magazine isn’t source selection. It’s the equivalent of recruiting the first walk-in who shows up at the door.

Elicitation, Not Interrogation

One of the first lessons a new case officer learns is that interrogation and elicitation are not the same. Interrogation demands. Elicitation draws out. A blunt question produces a guarded answer. A layered conversation yields insight the source didn’t realize they were sharing.

Most people using AI are interrogating it. “What’s the answer?” “Summarize this.” “Give me options.” That approach works, up to a point, but it caps the quality of what you get.

Effective elicitation with AI means:

•Never ask a direct question when an indirect one is better. Instead of “What should we do?” try “What factors would a skeptic weigh against this recommendation?”

•Compartmentalize your tasking. Don’t dump the entire problem into a single prompt. Break it into discrete, well-scoped questions. Discrete tasking yields more verifiable output.

•Build layered follow-ups. Ask: “What are you assuming?” “What would change your conclusion?” “Give me the strongest argument against this.”

•Probe for alternatives before you settle on an answer. A source that only confirms your hypothesis may be problematic.

This turns AI from a content generator into something closer to a thinking partner. But it requires the same discipline as running a source well: preparation, precision, and the intellectual humility to recognize that your framing shapes what you get back.

The Hostile Source Problem

There is a risk the standard AI adoption literature doesn’t spend enough time on. In intelligence work, we worry not just about sources who are wrong—we worry about sources who have been co-opted or doubled, or who are feeding us what we want to hear because they’ve learned our preferences and decided that’s what keeps the relationship alive.

AI systems have structural analogs to all three failure modes:

•Sycophancy as a design artifact. Because models are trained on human preference feedback, they are incentivized to produce outputs that feel satisfying. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford have documented an “artificial hivemind” effect in which outputs from multiple AI models converge—reducing epistemic diversity at the very moment organizations need independent judgment.

•Training data is a contamination channel. A source’s worldview is shaped by their environment. An AI model’s worldview is shaped by its training corpus. That corpus reflects the biases, omissions, and assumptions of the material it was built on. You may not know where those biases are, and the model won’t volunteer them.

•Automation bias as a user vulnerability. A series of recent studies confirms what experienced case officers know: people grant far more credibility to confident, fluent reporting than the underlying evidence warrants. Research published in 2025 found that even users with high “AI literacy” were not significantly protected against automation bias—the tendency to accept AI output without critical evaluation.

The practical implication: approach your AI system with the same structured skepticism you’d bring to a well-placed source who has given you no reason to doubt them. That’s when discipline matters most.

Debrief Discipline: The Protocol That Makes It Real

After every source meeting, a case officer writes up not only what the source said but also their assessment of reliability—what was corroborated, what was assumed, and what needs follow-up. That habit is the difference between a professional intelligence organization and a rumor factory.

Most organizations using AI lack an equivalent discipline. Someone prompts the model, takes the output, and puts it in a slide. No one records what was asked, what caveats the model offered, or whether the output was independently verified. The result is institutional memory built on unexamined reporting.

A working AI reporting protocol should mirror the post-meeting debrief:

•Requirement—What question are we actually trying to answer?

•Prompt—What, precisely, did we ask? (Save it.)

•Output—What did the AI say?

•Source check—What in this output is reliable? What is uncertain? What is unsupported?

•Human judgment—What do we actually believe, independent of the AI?

•Action—What will we do?

•Review—What happened after we acted? Did the AI’s analysis hold up?

The review step is the one that organizations most consistently skip. But it’s where calibration happens. A source you never debrief after the fact is one whose reliability you can never actually assess.

A useful team habit before closing out any AI-assisted analysis: “Before we accept this answer, what would disconfirm it?” That question alone will catch more errors than any amount of AI governance policy.

Separating Collection from Analysis

This is a fundamental discipline in intelligence work, and it translates directly. AI is a tool for collecting and synthesizing. It can ingest, summarize, organize, and compare. What it cannot reliably do is interpret—to ask what the information means here, in this context, for this organization, with these constraints.

The error organizations make is treating AI as if it collapses the divide between collection and analysis. It doesn’t. It accelerates collection. The analytical function—applying judgment, context, institutional knowledge, and accountability—remains human.

Teams that hand over analytical responsibility to AI are not just making an efficiency error. They are making an accountability error. Someone has to own the conclusion. AI cannot.

Burning a Source: When to Stop Trusting the AI

This is the part of the tradecraft literature on AI that doesn’t exist yet, and it needs to.

Every experienced case officer has had to decide to terminate a source relationship. Not because the source was obviously lying—if that were clear, the decision would be easy. You terminate when the source's reliability has fallen below a threshold, when you have reason to believe the source has been compromised, or when the cost of continuing to run them outweighs the value of their reporting.

The equivalent decisions will come for AI systems, and organizations should prepare for them:

•When a model’s known failure modes consistently overlap with your mission-critical questions, it is time to stop relying on it for those questions—regardless of how it performs elsewhere.

•When an AI system has been demonstrably wrong in a consequential context and the organization has not developed a clear explanation for why, continuing to use it at the same level of trust is an operational error.

•When a model is updated or retrained by its provider, treat it as a new source and revalidate. Prior reliability does not transfer automatically.

•When you discover that the model has been systematically producing outputs shaped by the framing of your prompts rather than by evidence—that you have been leading the witness without realizing it—you may need to reset the relationship.

Burning a source is not a failure of the source-handling relationship. It is often the proof that the relationship was being handled well.

What This Means for How You Lead

The three of us came to this issue through intelligence work, but the problem is not limited to intelligence organizations. Any leadership environment where AI tools are proliferating faces the same structural challenge: the tools are fast, fluent, and confident, and organizational incentives often reward those who use them most rather than those who use them best.

The research bears this out. INSEAD’s 2025 analysis of firm-level AI adoption found that generative AI shifts value toward higher-order human judgment—not away from it. Microsoft’s research confirms that organizations with a well-calibrated understanding of AI perform better across missions than those that simply maximize usage. The tool is the easy part. The discipline is the hard part.

For leaders, the implications are practical:

•Build the habit of debriefing discipline before you scale AI adoption. The protocol above should be standard practice, not optional.

•Create psychological safety so people can flag AI errors. The greatest risk in any source-handling operation is the team member who saw the problem but didn’t say anything because the source had too much credibility.

•Distinguish between AI as a collection tool and as an analytical tool. Automate the former aggressively. Guard the latter carefully.

•Evaluate AI systems with the same rigor you would apply to any source—including periodic reviews of whether the relationship continues to produce reliable value.

Used with discipline, generative AI can be a genuinely powerful analytical partner—the kind of well-placed, high-access source that an experienced handler learns to work with carefully and derive real value from. Used without discipline, it becomes a certainty-destroyer—introducing noise, eroding judgment, and producing false confidence at scale.

The HUMINT model doesn’t make AI safer by limiting what it does. It makes AI safer by raising the standard for what we do with what it gives us.

AI doesn’t give you answers. It gives you reports. And reporting always requires a handler’s skeptical, trained eye.

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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Cyber Fraud, Banks, and What America Can Do About It

Your phone buzzes with a text from your bank: “Did you authorize a $2,400 transfer? Reply NO to stop it.” You reply, and seconds later a calm “fraud agent” calls, knows your name and the last four digits of your card, and walks you through “securing” your money by moving it into an account under the criminal’s control. No password was stolen, no malware installed. You handed over the money yourself, because everything looked and sounded real.

This is the new face of bank fraud and business is booming. Behind these scams sit organized adversaries: nation-state actors who treat theft as state revenue, criminal gangs running industrial-scale scam operations, and hacktivists out to embarrass institutions increasingly armed with AI that makes their lies cheap, fast, and tailored to you.

The problem: scams have gone industrial

Banks have spent decades hardening their vaults and networks, so attackers shifted to the softest target: the customer. Rather than breaking in, they trick people into transferring funds themselves. This is “authorized push payment” fraud where the victim approves the payment and it is far harder to claw back than a stolen card number. To hear how a typical scam call actually unfolds, watch the FTC’s short imposter-scam explainer.

With the age of AI, three key forces have turbocharged these threats. Payments now move instantly and irreversibly, so money is gone before anyone notices. Decades of data breaches let criminals buy your name, address, and account details cheaply, making their scripts eerily accurate. And generative AI has industrialized deception where more than half of fraud is now estimated to involve AI. A criminal can clone a familiar or family voice from seconds of audio, write flawless phishing emails in any language, and even deepfake a bank officer on a video call.

The people behind it are not lone hackers in hoodies. They range from sanctioned nation-state groups that steal to fund their governments, to criminal syndicates running scam centers staffed by trafficked workers, to hacktivists attacking banks to make a political point. For them, fraud is a scalable business and it is outrunning the banks, telcos, and Big Tech.

The real-world cost

The damage is measured in real households. The Federal Trade Commission reports Americans lost roughly $16 billion to fraud of all kinds in 2025 the highest on record and about 25% more than the year before. Imposter scams alone accounted for $3.5 billion, nearly tripling since 2020, and the single most lucrative version is the fake bank-security alert that convinces people to “protect” their savings by moving them.

These losses fall unevenly. Americans aged 50 and older reported $4.3 billion in losses in 2025, often life-altering sums drained from retirement accounts. The official numbers are almost certainly a fraction of reality, since many victims never report out of shame. Beyond the dollars, the human cost is real emptied college funds, missed mortgage payments, and a corrosive loss of trust in the financial system people rely on every day. One Florida couple lost $42,000 of their savings this way watch how it happened. In fact, this happens so often that Hollywood created an action movie about it with the Bee Keeper.

A National Security issue

Fraud and scams are not just a nuisance but far more dangerous. Fraud and scams in the United States have escalated into a national security issue because they are no longer isolated consumer crimes. They are large‑scale, foreign‑run operations that drain billions of dollars from the U.S. economy and undermine public trust in financial and digital systems. Federal agencies increasingly link these schemes to transnational criminal organizations, some of which also engage in human trafficking, money laundering, and other activities that threaten national stability. The financial impact is massive, with losses rivaling major illicit industries, and the proceeds often flowing to adversarial nations or criminal networks abroad.

The rules already on the books

The U.S. is not starting from zero. Along with the growth of the early Internet, in 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act went into effect and its Safeguards Rule in requiring banks to protect customer data, and guidance from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) pushes them toward stronger, multi-factor login security. The Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money-laundering rules, enforced by the Treasury’s FinCEN, require banks to flag suspicious transactions — a key tool for tracing stolen funds. New York’s Department of Financial Services Part 500 cybersecurity rule has become a de facto national standard.

Regulators are also targeting the scams themselves. The FTC’s Impersonation Rule, in force since April 2024, lets the agency go after fraudsters who pose as businesses or government agencies; in its first stretch it produced more than $70 million in consumer refunds. Voluntary frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework give institutions a common playbook.

The gap is not the absence of rules it is that attackers move faster than rules can be written, and that liability for scam losses remains murky when a customer is tricked into approving the payment. So, with all these rules and regulations, why are scams and fraud occurring faster?

The innovators fighting back

A fast-growing wave of companies is using the same AI that empowers criminals to stop them.

· Feedzai builds real-time systems that score billions of transactions as they happen, spotting the subtle patterns of a scam in under a second.

· Alloy helps banks and fintechs verify who is really opening an account, choking off the synthetic and stolen identities fraudsters depend on.

· Arkose Labs specializes in blocking automated bot attacks and account takeovers, while SEON, Lexus Nexus, and Sumsub offer identity-verification and fraud-screening tools that smaller banks and startups can plug in affordably.

· Netcraft is a company which doesn’t only detect scams but does something about it. It is very good at “take downs” of scam networks.

· Others are racing to build deepfake and voice-clone detection to catch fakes that fool the human ear and eye. Others get creative: UK carrier Virgin Media O2 built “Daisy,” a lifelike AI “granny” that answers scam calls and keeps fraudsters rambling for up to 40 minutes to tie them up so they have no time for real victims. Watch “Daisy” turn the tables on scam groups.

What unites all these is adaptive defense models that learn daily, because last month’s fraud pattern is already obsolete. All these point solutions are modeled on Intellectual Property that slows sharing. This model is not working.

What America should do

As scams become more sophisticated, especially with AI‑driven impersonation, deepfakes, and automated fraud, their ability to destabilize institutions, exploit citizens, and weaken economic resilience has pushed policymakers and security experts to treat fraud not just as a consumer protection problem, but as a strategic threat to national security. Staying safe will take coordinated effort. Everyone has a role.

Lawmakers and regulators

Fraud and scam laws in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia share the same objective: to protect consumers and disrupting criminal activity but each country approaches the problem with a very different regulatory philosophy.

In the U.S., the system is fragmented and enforcement‑driven, with no mandatory reimbursement for most scam victims and a heavy reliance on agencies like the FTC, CFPB, and FBI to pursue wrongdoing after the fact. By contrast, the U.K. has built the world’s most proactive framework, requiring banks to reimburse victims of authorized push‑payment scams, enforcing account‑name verification through Confirmation of Payee, and placing clear accountability on financial institutions to prevent fraud before it occurs. Australia sits between the two models, adopting U.K.‑style protections while expanding responsibility beyond banks to include telcos and digital platforms through its emerging Scams Prevention Framework. While the U.K. emphasizes consumer protection and the U.S. emphasizes enforcement, Australia is moving toward a shared‑liability, cross‑industry approach that recognizes scams as a systemic risk requiring coordinated prevention across the entire digital ecosystem.

A typical scam today uses several pieces of technology working together to make the criminal look real. It often starts with:

1. the scammer creating a fake website that looks almost identical to a bank or delivery company. They buy a cheap web address from a service like GoDaddy and change just one letter so most people won’t notice the difference.

2. Then they setup email accounts on services like Microsoft & Gmail to send out massive emails.

3. They use AI tools to scrape millions of social media profiles from Facebook, Instagram, etc. to collect data about YOU.

4. They use tools that let them fake a phone number (telco), so when they call you, your phone shows the name of your bank or a government agency.

5. After that, they send out text messages to iPhone and Android users that look official, things like “Your account is locked” or “You have a package waiting.” The link in the text takes you to the fake website, where the scammer collects your login details. If you call the number instead, it goes to a call center where the scammer pretends to be a bank employee.

All of this: fake websites, spoofed phone numbers, and realistic text messages works together to trick people into believing they’re talking to a trusted company when they’re actually dealing with a criminal.

What should the Critical Infrastructure do?

In the U.S., we have failed because we have not worked together across these technologies at scale & at the speed of AI. Why? Because we (collectively) do not have the incentives or requirements to do so. For the CEOs of these companies, they do not want to spend money & resources which do not drive revenue. Period.

There are glimpses of hope. A working model already exists:

· We have the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS‑ISAC) is a global, nonprofit organization that helps protect banks and other financial institutions from cyberattacks by enabling them to quickly share information about threats. It was created in 1999 (26 years!) to strengthen the safety and resilience of the financial system by collecting, analyzing, and distributing timely intelligence about cyber and physical risks so that member institutions can defend themselves and their customers more effectively. I am hopeful that they new CEO, Valerie Abend will drive more effective solutions.

· In 2026, eight major carriers: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and others just launched the Communications Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (C2 ISAC), chaired by longtime cyber expert, AT&T security chief Rich Baich, to share real-time threat intelligence across competitors. Because most scams ride phone and text networks before they ever reach a bank, telecom and banking defenses should connect through the same kind of collective-defense sharing. But the C2 ISAC cannot do this alone.

· In 2025, the Global Anti‑Scam Alliance (GASA) was formed to bring together governments, financial institutions, technology companies, law‑enforcement agencies, and consumer groups to fight scams on a global scale. GASA acts like a global “anti‑scam task force,” uniting experts and institutions so people everywhere are better protected from online fraud.

These have proven to not operate effectively to get ahead of scams and fraud. We need a better way – mandates of sharing, legal risks support, cross ISAC/intel which is tailored/aware, good native ML & AI models (not rules), and others working at speed and context with more transparent sharing.

In the meantime,

What should consumers do?

Treat any unexpected “urgent” message about your money as a warning sign, not a command. Banks will never ask you to move funds to “protect” them. Hang up and call the number on the back of your card. Turn on multi-factor authentication and agree on a private “safe word” with family so a cloned voice can’t fake an emergency. Report scams to ReportFraud.ftc.gov, even unsuccessful attempts, because the data helps train good AI/ML models to protect everyone.

What should all companies do?

Adopt adaptive, AI-native detection rather than yesterday’s rules, and design apps that help customers pause before they act. Investors should back the firms building deepfake detection and identity verification, and banks should partner with them quickly instead of waiting years to build in-house.

Conclusion:

With fast innovation, fraud & scams will not disappear, but it can be better contained. The criminals have industrialized deception; the answer is to industrialize defense with smarter rules, sharper technology, and a public that knows the warning signs.

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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Endless Warfare – Part II: Countering Endless Warfare and its Networks

Author’s Note: This article is not about ‘endless wars’ as a critique of U.S. military interventions — that debate belongs elsewhere. It examines a distinct and increasingly visible pattern: how U.S. adversaries wage continuous, long-term conflict against the United States across peace and war, both below and above the threshold of open conflict. The aim is to clarify the nature of the competition we are already in.

Countering Endless Warfare and its Networks

The United States is not at peace. As I argued in Part I, the United States is already in a continuous, long-term conflict with determined adversaries who are waging warfare without crossing the threshold into open conflict. Endless Warfare is a framework for understanding how those adversaries pursue an enduring approach to erode and supplant U.S. power, influence, and global leadership over time.

Endless Warfare is not simply another label for the gray zone or cognitive warfare. Both are important elements and merit their own approaches, but Endless Warfare describes the adversary’s persistent, long-term strategy, not just the elements that enable it.

Given this operating environment, this is about far more than terminology. It is about how we understand conflict, how we achieve deterrence, how we protect decision autonomy, how we retain leverage, and, most importantly, how we disrupt the networks that fuel Endless Warfare.

What are the essential next steps?

Endless Warfare Requires a Different Strategic Mindset

Militaries are often criticized for planning to fight the last war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was undermined by Russia’s underestimation of how much warfare had evolved since Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. The United States potentially faces that same risk today. It is important that we are prepared to fight and win the next conventional war, but there are risks in a focus on only that strategy. We must also prepare to fight and win—with the appropriate instruments of national power—the Endless Warfare being waged on the United States by its adversaries; warfare that incorporates gray zone activity, cognitive warfare, weaponized negotiations, proxies and surrogates, and other subversive networks.

This change in strategic mindset is not because of a lack of capability. The United States has considerable experience, resources, and capabilities in this space. Endless Warfare is conceptually different from conventional war—particularly given the ambiguous nature of gray-zone activity and cognitive warfare—and therefore demands a different approach.

Yet because it is a continuous state of conflict, it also requires the same level of national leadership and vision, organization, critical thinking, sense of urgency, and collaboration with allies that we apply to conventional conflict. This is achievable but will take some effort. It may require a senior White House official, such as a Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Competition, to integrate interagency action and coordinate a sustained national response to this threat.

That Deputy National Security Advisor would not replace existing responsibilities of Departments and Agencies. The role would be to ensure that strategic deterrence in the gray zone, cognitive advantage, conflict negotiations when adversaries seek to extend rather than resolve conflict, and network disruptions are integrated into a coherent and sustained national response to the threat of Endless Warfare against the United States.

Strategic Deterrence in the Gray Zone

Strategic deterrence is one component of a broader approach to countering Endless Warfare. Gray zone activity is a powerful enabler of Endless Warfare because it gives our adversaries a space to undermine the United States while avoiding armed conflict.

Our adversaries have calculated that there are more gains than risks in the gray zone and that any risks they do face are acceptable. Actions that seek to counter or defend against gray zone activity but that do not impose meaningful costs or create credible deterrence may simply reward gray zone activity.

An effective strategy for achieving strategic deterrence in the gray zone rests on deliberate preparation, clear communication, a national approach, and the resolve to change the risk calculus of our adversaries.

Deliberate preparation means collecting and analyzing information on adversary gray zone trends, capabilities, and intent before they act; routinely coordinating at the national level so roles, responsibilities, and decision paths are clear; and reorienting institutions and the interagency to maintain effective balanced capability in both conventional and gray domains.

We also must communicate clearly domestically, to our allies, and particularly to our adversaries. A simple but clear message for our adversaries: “We will see what you’re doing, we will publicly attribute it to you, and we will impose costs that exceed your gains.”

This message is credible only if it is backed by action over time. The United States must convincingly demonstrate its resolve to proactively and persistently employ national capabilities to change the risk calculus and behavior of our adversaries.

This range of national capabilities includes coordinated diplomatic and allied action, economic sanctions and restrictions, cyber operations, legal and financial disruption, public attribution, denying access to critical technologies, cognitive measures, military posture and partner capability-building and—when necessary—kinetic responses. Recent examples illustrate that imposing costs is possible.

In 2021, the United States publicly attributed the SolarWinds supply-chain compromise to Russia, expelled Russian Intelligence Officers, and imposed broad financial penalties under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

In early 2025, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Company and associated individuals for their role in Salt Typhoon for attacks on network infrastructure of multiple major U.S. telecommunication and internet service providers.

These were hard-earned wins for U.S. Departments and Agencies involved, but Russia and China appear to have absorbed the costs and continued their operations. Achieving strategic deterrence means that actions like these must become the norm, not the exception.

The goal of strategic deterrence in the gray zone is to shape adversary decision-making before action is taken. It means proactively shaping the environment so adversaries hesitate before they act—a critical step in disrupting the cycle of Endless Warfare.

Gaining a Cognitive Advantage

Countering the impacts of cognitive warfare is essential to countering Endless Warfare. My colleague, Austin Branch, and I argued in The Cipher Brief that it was possible—and necessary—for the U.S. to seize a 21st-century cognitive advantage.

That argument is even more urgent today given the central role of cognitive warfare in our adversaries’ strategies of Endless Warfare. Cognitive Security, at its core, is the protection of human cognition and decision autonomy—our individual and collective ability to accurately perceive global events, to trust the knowledge we have and the information we receive, and to make confident, independent decisions free from external manipulation, influence, or coercion.

Cognitive Security is also about offense—outthinking, outpacing, and outmaneuvering our adversaries in the cognitive domain.

Our adversaries should understand that their leaders, institutions, networks, proxies—and decision-making—are vulnerable to cognitive pressure and influence. The goal is to force them—not the United States—to confront the uncertainties and risks of cognitive warfare and to weaken their ability to wage Endless Warfare.

There are some positive steps at the national level.

We now have a first-ever NSC Cognitive Advantage Director, and the FY26 NDAA directs the Secretary of Defense to formally define cognitive warfare for the Department. The Department’s Strategic Capabilities Office recently launched a Cognitive Warfare Project to advance the military’s cognitive warfare capabilities. There is clearly opportunity here.

Yet, these early steps remain fragmented. In contrast, China’s United Front Work Department, Russia’s Active Measures networks, and Iran’s diverse network of surrogates reflect centralized national direction and a long-term horizon as elements of a national strategy.

In this vital process, America’s approach has to be equally well-coordinated and strategic. It is essential that these new efforts avoid bureaucratic hurdles, over-prescription that may stifle innovation, and creating silos. Our adversaries will not wait for us to catch up.

Our national narrative—America’s Story—also plays an important role. As Branch and I argued in the Cipher Brief, our national narrative is both sword and shield. It projects power, influence, and advances our interests. It tells the story of our values, history, aspirations, and view of the world. It supports confidence in our actions, our institutions, and our global commitments.

Importantly, America’s Story counters adversary narratives and actions that seek to undermine America at home and abroad. It can serve as a powerful antidote to adversary campaigns that use cognitive warfare to sustain prolonged conflict. America’s Story was built at a time when much of the world saw America as liberator, peacemaker, builder, global diplomat, and above all, a powerful symbol of sacrifice, freedom, and self-determination. The long arc of America’s Story is its strength.

The United States cannot let this national narrative get lost in episodic political turbulence—its role in countering our adversaries is too vital.

Countering Weaponized Negotiations

In the era of Endless Warfare, adversaries often use negotiations as a continuation of conflict by other means—not as instruments of resolution. Negotiations can play an outsized role in Endless Warfare even though they only occur periodically. The central challenge is distinguishing when talks aim to legitimately resolve a conflict versus when they are designed to shape its next phase.

Today, drawing lessons directly from Russia’s behavior—from Georgia to Ukraine—and from Iran, several principles emerge that can strengthen our negotiating posture when facing adversaries that practice weaponized negotiations.

Those key principles include:

No upfront concessions. Make no upfront concessions to get an adversary to the negotiating table. Such actions erode diplomatic, economic, and military leverage and can shape the entire negotiations on unfavorable terms.

Establish clear overarching objectives and non-negotiable redlines early. This preserves decision autonomy, provides a framework for decision-making, and prevents adversaries from reshaping objectives to their advantage.

Proactively counter narratives. During negotiations over Ukraine, Russia repeatedly pushed narratives, such as “Ukraine can never win” and “territory concessions are inevitable,” to shape Western perceptions of what constituted a realistic outcome. Anticipating and countering false narratives ensures negotiations are not manipulated.

Concessions must be conditions-based. Any concessions given during negotiations must be based on measurable, verifiable actions with automatic snap-back mechanisms if commitments are violated.

Be willing to walk away. The desire for any agreement should never outweigh core national security interests. Suspending or ending talks is better than enabling or accepting a settlement that resets the conflict in an adversary’s favor.

Chester Karrass put it plainly, in life you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. This is a powerful counter to American assumptions that raw power or battlefield success will carry the day at the negotiating table.

Countering Endless Warfare Networks

These measures—deterrence, cognitive advantage, and managing weaponized negotiations—greatly improve America’s posture, but they do not by themselves disrupt Endless Warfare networks.

The ultimate goal is systematically confronting the adversary networks that pose an enduring threat to the U.S. These networks fall into two broad categories: state institutional structures and more ambiguous structures that blur the line between state and non-state activity.

Institutional networks include military organizations, intelligence services, party organizations, proxy structures, and state-directed organizations such as IRGC-QF, MSS, GRU, and FSB, as well as the specialized units responsible for assassinations and sabotage, influence operations, and cyber-attacks as a few examples.

Ambiguous networks include ghost fleets, shell and front companies, criminal organizations, illicit financial systems, logistics systems influence networks, cyber hacktivists, proxy militias, smuggling organizations, and other similar entities.

These networks are not abstract. Iran, Russia, and China employ different approaches to Endless Warfare, but each illustrates how adversaries develop and employ both institutional and ambiguous networks to achieve persistent strategic objectives over a long timeframe. Just as a few examples:

Iran’s network of proxies and surrogates, built over decades, allows Iran to project power, coerce and intimidate its neighbors, and get inside the decision space of its adversaries at relatively low cost. The IRGC is an enabler of Iran’s distributed networks with global reach.

Russia’s networks conduct cognitive warfare against the U.S. and the West and conduct sabotage, assassinations, and political coercion across Europe. Russia’s “ghost fleets” have allowed it to generate billions in revenue despite Western sanctions.

China’s Cyber networks probe and penetrate U.S. critical infrastructure to sustain access, collect information, and provide a disruption capability during a crisis. Its networks enable sophisticated influence operations inside the U.S. and the transfer of critical technologies that directly enhance its military capabilities.

Shared and overlapping networks in gray and ambiguous spaces play a critical role. Ghost fleets, front companies, terror networks, illicit financial organizations, and criminal enterprises allow adversaries to bypass sanctions, sustain operations, and reduce international pressure.

Some of these networks are visible and attributable, others are intentionally obscured and decentralized to complicate attribution and defy sovereignty, international law, and national laws, including those of the U.S. We should expect our adversaries to fiercely protect these resilient, adaptive, and self-recovering networks they have carefully developed over time, often over decades, to gain and sustain a strategic advantage.

The critical question is how the U.S. can systematically reduce the effectiveness of these networks.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. That is the dilemma facing the U.S. now. Overly simplistic approaches or single solutions that do not take into account the complexities of Endless Warfare and the commitment of our adversaries to that approach will consume time and resources but ultimately fail.

Countering Endless Warfare requires a sustained, network-centric strategy employing the instruments of national power—diplomatic, military, economic, technological, informational, cognitive, and kinetic—rather than a series of independent actions. This strategy consists of three mutually reinforcing lines of effort built on one foundational principle.

First, identify and prioritize the networks that pose the greatest long-term threat to the United States. There are no official estimates of this ecosystem of networks—and what constitutes a network has not been clearly defined—but Iran, Russia, and China, collectively direct or enable a very large number institutional, commercial, criminal, cyber, intelligence, influence, and proxy networks worldwide.

Second, sustain campaigns to daylight, degrade, disrupt, and impose costs on institutional networks that conduct and oversee attacks on the United States and our allies. It is unlikely that the U.S. can dismantle foreign institutional networks, but those networks can be degraded, constrained, and made costly and less effective.

Third, dismantle, disrupt, and prevent the regeneration of ambiguous networks by severing the financial, logistical, technological, and organizational systems that support them. This is not a one-time activity. Ambiguous networks are more vulnerable, but they are often adaptive and can regenerate or be replaced.

Cognitive Security and Cyber Defenses have a combined vital role to play. None of these efforts will succeed unless American citizens, business leaders, military commanders, and policy makers are less vulnerable to influence, manipulation, and coercion—preserving America’s decision autonomy—and unless governments, institutions, organizations, and critical infrastructure are less vulnerable to technological exploitation and disruption.

Summary

The concepts in this paper are difficult to neatly categorize because they describe a form of warfare that is not fully defined. As conventional warfare evolves, so do the more nuanced aspects of warfare that take place below and above the threshold of conflict and in the ambiguous space between peace and war. I offer four takeaways.

First, Endless Warfare is a distinct adversary strategy already underway by China, Russia, and Iran and should be treated as a current strategic threat—not just a future one.

Second, endless Warfare is sustained by sophisticated and interconnected networks that must become a primary target for U.S. and allied efforts.

Third, countering Endless Warfare requires a proactive, persistent, and network-centric approach backed by national-level leadership, a new framework for strategic planning, a sense of urgency, and coordinated interagency action. Is ittime to consider a senior White House official, such as a Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Competition, to integrate interagency action and coordinate a sustained national response to this threat?

Fourth, strategic deterrence in the gray zone, cognitive advantage, disciplined negotiations, and network-focused disruption are core tools of that sustained national response to make Endless Warfare increasingly ineffective, costly, and ultimately unsustainable for China, Russia, and Iran.

Endless Warfare will not end because our adversaries choose peace. It will end when it is no longer effective.

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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Gen. Dunford: Military Leaders Must Advise, Not Advocate

“We [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] often times in the national security decision-making process or White House meetings -- outside of the Pentagon process -- will go back and forth between military issues and political issues. And I think it's incumbent upon us to kind of stay in, you know, what the current [Joint Chiefs] Chairman [Air Force Gen. Dan] Caine describes as ‘the midfield’ in that regard. So we have to be aware of the political environment within which we're operating, but we have to be nonpartisan. And as long as we stick to addressing the military dimension of the problem, and not fall to the temptation to start participating and waxing eloquently about issues that are not in our purview, I think we can maintain that character.”

That was ret.-Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, former-Joint Chiefs Chairman during the second Obama and first Trump administrations, speaking last Tuesday on a panel entitled Inside the Pentagon: The Chairman, Congress & Combatant Commands, as part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) 2026 Global Security Forum.

Also on the panel were ret.-Navy Adm. John Aqualino, former-Commander of Indo-Pacific Command and former-Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), a one-time Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

The panel’s hour-long discussion covered a variety of current issues and also at times provided a behind-the-scenes look at past Pentagon leaders’ thinking.

For example, Dunford said at one point, “I can't think of a time when I was participating in the National Security Council where I was dealing with a military problem. We were dealing with strategic problems that had a military dimension. And that's really important because in that capacity, you are providing advice about the military dimension and how the military dimension can best support the political objective that's been articulated by the President.”

Dunford further explained, “It's not the [Joint Chief] Chairman's role to go to the National Security Council and advocate for a particular policy that involves much more than just the military dimension. It's the Chairman's role to represent the other Joint Chiefs and provide military advice, again in a way that's integrated with all the other elements of national power to accomplish a particular objective.” And he repeated, “I think it's really important both in public and private that we be seen as advisors and not advocates.”

In Dunford’s view, discussions at the National Security Council “ought to remain private and most often they're very highly classified.” He added, “Even today, I don't feel at liberty to discuss what went on inside the National Security Council or what I specifically recommended.”

I quote these Dunford views because these days, for example. many Trump critics who disagree with the President’s decision last February to attack Iran, have wondered why no top military commander has yet to publicly voice opposition to that decision.

As Dunford explained his view, “Number one, it's the elected official who gets to decide. And number two, the best military option, in other words, the option that I might have offered that would provide the best military outcome may in fact not be the best option for the President when he looks at it from a broader strategic perspective."

He went on that his military option “may or may not be in a broader strategic context when you take into account our diplomatic, our economic interests and the other competing demands that the President may have at a given time strategically, whether they be in the security realm or elsewhere”

Dunford continued: “As I used to say, the President looks through this with a much bigger soda straw than those of us in uniform. And we need to be attentive to that in the public space and not put pressure on the Executive Branch to make a decision one way or another because of what military advice may be out there in the public domain.”

However, when Dunford went to see a Chairman of the House or Senate Armed Services Committee, he said, “Obviously you know the Legislative Branch of our government has a need to be informed about these issues and so the way I would approach it is less would I address specifically the advice I gave to the President, or again advocate a specific military option to be adopted. More often than not, what I would try to do is highlight the interdependent variables that went into the recommendation; talk about the risks; perhaps walk through each of the options that might be available from military perspective and the pros and cons of each, but then not be in a position publicly to say it should be this option or that option.”

As a former Committee Chairman, Thornberry said, “One branch [the Legislative] is responsible for raising and supporting; providing and maintaining; approving all the money, declaring war; and the other branch [the Executive] for the operations of the military. So we divide the authority. We have civilian control of the military, which is an important principle, but we make sure that it's a professional [military], nonpartisan, not taking sides.”

Thornberry also said, “It's important for Congress to hear from that professional military and to hear directly. Now, sometimes that'll need to be behind closed doors in classified sessions and some you can get franker that way, but it's not just Congress hearing. It's the American people hearing from the chairman or the combatant commanders or whoever.”

When it comes to congressional hearings, Adm. Aqualino spoke of a suggestion he had made that’s worth repeating.

He said, “I made a request of the chairman [of the Armed Services Committee] on the House side and the Senate side that said, ‘Hey, let's have a classified session first. Let me answer everything that I can in the classified space that will give you the understanding and oh, by the way, I think it'll help shape your questions for the public side.’ That ended up being very, very, I think effective both for Congress and certainly for me because it really made sure they understood where we were, why we were doing what we were doing and how it was going to deliver. And again, I thank all of the members of Congress for accepting that position because I found it very helpful.”

Actually, however, most closed-session hearings of those Armed Services Committees are still held after the public ones, although Aqualino’s approach is much more rational.

Dunford talked about how warfare has been changing.

“If you think about conflict,” he said, “this go back to the 1990s, you could assume that a conflict would be isolated to particular geographic area. It didn't involve largely sea, air, and space, and the homeland was protected. We didn't have the homeland issues…So, when you think about managing risk, you could manage risk within a specific geographic area. As the character of war began to change, threats to the homeland increased. We're now operating in sea, air, land, space, and cyberspace. We know now that there's no conflict that can be isolated to a specific geographic area.”

These days, Dunford said, “We can see the conflict in Iran and Ukraine and the global implications of those two conflicts. There needed to be somebody that could help the Secretary of Defense think about risk across all geographic combatant commands and in all of those domains and in the context of broader strategic issues like service readiness and being prepared for the conflict or crisis that that was going to come even as we were dealing with one that may be ongoing.”

Planning has also changed.

“When it came to planning,” Dunford said, “we used to have single numbered plans. You'd be familiar with those, where plans were focused on the Korea plan or the Iran plan. Well, there's again if you agree with me that there's no conflict [now] that doesn't have broad global implications. Planning needs to be done, not in a geographic combatant commander’s region, it needs to be done globally. Certainly informed by the supported combatant commander if it's a Indo-Pacom (India-Pacific) or not Pacom (Pacific) commander perspective. But while he's fighting the fight against China, there are certainly things happening globally that are going to require the prioritization and allocation of resources again back to foundationally defense of the homeland.”

Adm. Aqualino’s views of the Joint Chiefs system are worth repeating.

“When you talk about the [military] service chiefs as members of the Joint Chiefs,” he said, “that is an incredible thoughtful bunch to help the Chairman shape best military advice to remove blind spots that may be missing, and to get an incredibly broad perspective. So he [also] gets it from the Combatant Commander operational required to provide options through the lens of a single theater.”

Aqualino added, “Then the Joint Chiefs are able to put a layer on top of that and say, ‘Hey, more broadly, here's what I think it looks like globally. Here's what it looks like through the [separate military] service lens.’ And all that information informed the chairman to ultimately take the best option to the President. And then whenever I brief the [Service] Secretary, the [Joint Chiefs] Chairman was sitting in the room and sometimes we agreed, sometimes we disagreed…My advice was taken sometimes, and other times I got thanked for my interest in national defense. That's just the way it works.”

Looking back, Aqualino said, “I do think it has worked pretty well to have the [Joint Chiefs] Chairman speak for the whole military and yet not be directly in the chain-of-command. So far it has given him an objectivity where he didn't have to necessarily defend a decision, because they are political decisions, but he [the Chairman] can look at that broader picture about the state of our military, about the threats that we face, and I think those discussions for Congress to understand have been really important.”

One other point came up from former-Congressman Thornberry that also needs to be recorded, because neither Dunford nor Aqualino mentioned it.

“I got to say I think today there's a strain on between civil military relations,” Thornberry said, adding, “Part of the professionalism of the military is that it's a meritocracy. It's based on who does their job well, who can excel. And there have been some universally respected officers who've been fired recently with no explanation. And I think that leads to questions about what's really going on here. Is it still a meritocracy?”

At another point Thornberry said, “We were concerned…about using the military for law enforcement responsibilities, especially on the border during my time and now it's more broadly. I think that creates tensions, too. And so maybe this 250th anniversary is a good time for us to kind of remember, okay, what are the protections in our Constitution and in our system? And do we need to remember and maybe refresh some of them to make sure that the military continues the sort of respect that it has.”

With that background, I want to close with something Dunford pointed out early in his remarks that I think is worth consideration.

“Through most my career,” Dunford said, “polling said that about 80% of the American people had confidence in the U.S. military -- and that's 62% plus or minus today. Just in 2016 and 2017, Republicans had an over 90% favorability rating of the U.S. military. It's now somewhere in the 60s, overall about 62 percent. So we can put aside what our own personal judgments are. The data would tell us that there is a decline in the confidence U.S. military which reflects challenging times overall. We live in an incredibly hyper-partisan environment…[and] there is in many corners a declining trust in institutions broadly and one of those institutions has been the U.S. military. I think we can't be complacent about that.”

Dunford went on, “Why is it important: Number one, for recruiting and retention. The American people need to see the U.S. military as their military. It can't be partisan. Number two, when we're sending men and women in this harm's way, they have to have the support of the American people. And it can't be seen as a Republican or a Democrat decision to send people to war. These are Americans that got to be supported by the American people at home.”

We all should agree with that.

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Colombia’s Election Exposes a Country Still Split

Colombia stands at a crossroads because of the narrow victory of right‑wing outsider Abelardo de la Espriella over leftist Senator Iván Cepeda. On August 7, 2026, Colombia will close the country’s first experiment with a left‑wing presidency while leaving its worsening social, economic, and security dilemmas unresolved. The choice between these competing projects forced Colombians to decide whether they would prioritize a hardline stance towards security and a more economic market orthodoxy or continue a contested path of socialist structural reforms and unsuccessful efforts for a negotiated peace with insurgent groups and criminal Cartels.

From Petro’s Experiment to Right-Wing Resurgence

Gustavo Petro’s government marked a historic break: he was Colombia’s first left‑wing president, elected on promises of social reform, environmental transition, and a reorientation of the peace process with armed groups. His administration became a referendum on whether Colombia could simultaneously confront inequality, rural marginalization, and entrenched violence through progressive policies rather than traditional security and economic policies. De la Espriella’s win, backed openly by U.S. President Donald Trump, signals a swing back toward the right after this four‑year experiment with very mixed results at best. Yet the victory margin—about 49.7 percent to 48.7 percent—shows a country almost evenly split, ensuring that any agenda he pursues will confront a mobilized opposition and a society that has not reached consensus on its model of development and governance.

Security vs. Peace Process

The election exposed starkly different visions for dealing with Colombia’s enduring conflict a decade after the FARC peace accord. Cepeda campaigned on deepening Petro’s approach of his “Plan Paz Total” (Total Peace Plan) which depended on negotiations with leftist insurgent groups and narcotics cartels to roll back the increasing violence in the country. Also included were social and economic reforms aimed at what Petro described as the root cause of the violence. However, during Petro’s four year administration, violence returned to highs not seen in decades, coca cultivation increased to record levels and the economy muddled along without showing any dramatic gains. By contrast, De la Espriella positioned himself as a tough‑on‑crime outsider promising order, harsher measures against criminal groups, and a rollback of what the right portrays as excessive concessions to insurgents and criminal organizations. This clash between “peace through reform and dialogue” and “peace through strength and crackdowns” left the country at an inflection point: continue a fragile peace architecture which saw the insurgent groups and cartels regain strength and control over vast swaths of the country, or re‑embracing strict security measures which in the past proved successful but led to uncertain consequences and human rights abuses.

Economic and Social Policy Choices

Petro’s camp argued that Colombia needed redistributive policies, stronger social protection, and state‑led reforms to break cycles of poverty that feed violence and migration. Critics accused his government of scaring investors, mishandling fiscal policy, and failing to deliver visible improvements, especially amid inflation and uneven growth. De la Espriella’s coalition now promises a more orthodox pro‑market line—greater emphasis on private investment, energy sector continuity, and deregulation—combined with promises to defend “the people” from crime and chaos. The crossroads lies in whether Colombia can craft an economic model that restores business confidence and restores security while still addressing the structural inequalities and social demands that gave Petro and Cepeda their base in the first place.

Why This Moment Matters

De la Espriella’s government inherits a society that has tasted left‑wing rule, remains deeply divided, and is wrestling with increased violence and insecurity, inequality, and institutional mistrust. De La Espriella, who takes office on August 7,2026, will be challenged to fulfill his campaign promises. The March 8, 2026 elections left the Colombian congress splintered among various parties with no party or coalition taking control. Just as the congress proved to be Petro’s main obstacle to many of his social and economic reforms, De La Espriella will be faced with this same problem as his party gained very few seats during the elections and he will be forced to work with several political parties in order to pass his legislative agenda.

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What's at Stake as NATO Meets in Ankara

As NATO leaders gather in Ankara this week, the alliance faces a myriad of security challenges unlike anything it has confronted in decades.

With Russia's war against Ukraine raging on and instability in the Middle East following the conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump continues to press European allies to take on more of the burden for their defense. This all comes to a head in Ankara, where Turkey finds itself at the center of the alliance's most pressing strategic concerns. Taken together, the issues confronting leaders at this week's summit extend well beyond the traditional debates over defense spending.

"This is a great opportunity for Türkiye," retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, told The Cipher Brief. "Finally many Allies will have the opportunity to better appreciate the strategically vital role that Turkey plays for NATO due to its geography as well as its defense industry and military capabilities." The changing perception of Turkey's role in the alliance represents quite a shift.

Only a few years ago, Turkey's relationships with many NATO countries were strained over its purchase of Russia's S-400 air defense system and disagreements over admitting new countries into the alliance shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. Today, NATO looks to expand defense production and strengthen its southern flank.

Russia's war continues to shape NATO's priorities

The urgency surrounding Russia is likely to dominate the conversation in Ankara.

Another deadly wave of Russian missiles and drones struck Kyiv just hours before the summit, killing 21 people and injuring at least 77 more. President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to seek additional Western air defense systems, particularly U.S.-made Patriot interceptors, during meetings with allied leaders. Beyond Ukraine itself, many in the alliance predict that Moscow will continue testing NATO's resolve across Europe.

"There is a recognition, regardless of what President Trump says when he speaks tomorrow, that this meeting has to set major new directions for cooperation between NATO allies," former senior British diplomat Nick Fishwick, who is attending meetings in Ankara surrounding the summit, told The Cipher Brief.

"Most people recognise that the days when European allies could freeload on massive U.S. security support have come to an end," Fishwick said. "European allies are now committed to spending two or three times the amount of GDP devoted to defence in 2015."

European governments are increasingly acknowledging that spending more money is only half of the equation, while rebuilding defense industries and coordinating military planning across the alliance have become equally urgent priorities.

"We Europeans have to find ways of cooperating, sharing and communicating in an age of hybrid warfare and AI-enabled cyber attacks," Fishwick said.

Beyond defense spending

President Trump is expected to arrive in Ankara seeking commitments from allies to meet NATO's new defense investment targets.

Retired Adm. James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, believes the summit's greatest achievement may be just preserving the alliance's unity.

"The most important thing is simply that there are no huge blowups," Stavridis told The Cipher Brief. "Worrisome issues include fundamental disagreements about operations in Iran; the pace of European defense spending; support to Ukraine, both diplomatic and military; and the lingering negative effects of the U.S. moves on Greenland."

One area where Stavridis sees potential progress is maritime security, particularly after recent instability in the Middle East. He said President Trump would likely welcome a European commitment to participate in operations protecting commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Stavridis also said allies should move past broad spending pledges and begin outlining specific plans for expanding Europe's defense industrial base. Just as important, he said, should be addressing threats that increasingly blur the line between peace and war, or as we like to call it, the "Gray Zone".

"A robust discussion about how to counter increasing levels of hybrid and grey zone activity specifically including anti-drone cooperation would be meaningful," Stavridis said. "I would also hope to see some discussion of the role of the alliance in cyber security because the likelihood of Russian hybrid operations in that zone is significant and rising."

For Hodges, success in Ankara should be measured by whether the alliance shows that its members remain aligned on the issues that matter most to their collective security.

"A strong endorsement of Ukraine and the strategic importance for all NATO Members that Ukraine is successful in its war with Russia, with commitments of resources and capabilities from everyone, including the USA, to Ukraine," remains essential, Hodges said.

Whether leaders can deliver that message, and Trump's often unpredictable approach to NATO, will cement how this summit is remembered.

The gathering in Ankara is unlikely to produce any severe dramatic breakthrough. But at a time when Europe faces its most serious security environment in a generation, maybe it's enough for the alliance to demonstrate that it is capable of remaining united.

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A Tale of Two Africas in Maps, And How It Affects the United States

As an Africa watcher, I have long told the story of two continents, juxtaposing the region’s plight with its opportunities, often arguing that the West should prepare for the continent's strategic risks and opportunities. This is a decades-old mantra from across the Africa-watcher community. Alas, repeating these arguments over decades suggests we must work to deliver our message in a more compelling way. So, this is my attempt to tell the story of African issues more visually, with the hope that experts in geopolitics will gain a greater appreciation for the stories from the continent that carry compelling US implications.

The Effectiveness of Maps

For nearly three decades, I have grappled with the most compelling way to hook a reader, whether at the CIA, the Department of Defense, the State Department, in the university classroom, or working with industry partners. One consistent reality is that a good graphic is optimal for making a story stick. And in my experience, the map is the king of graphics. Indeed, in the countless briefings I delivered as an intelligence officer, I brought one or more maps along every time. Similarly, I have used at least one map in every class meeting with my students. Maps orient the reader geographically, grant easy visual context, and ground a story in scale.

Orientation: A reader can best relate to a story when they can see where it is taking place

Context: A map can provide a reader with helpful, visual facts, whether through data or comparison

Scale: The size and value of a specific trait are easily observable on a map

The Risk Side: Development Gaps and Conflict Reinforce Each Other

CRITICAL CONTEXT

Health

Poor healthcare infrastructure exacerbates communicable disease outbreaks, like Ebola in Congo in 2026 and West Africa in 2014, challenging global aid capacity.

Security

Lax development creates an environment ripe for extremism, creating a cycle where insecurity exacerbates underdevelopment that in turn fosters insecurity.

Geopolitics

Conflicts attract outside actors, creating a hotbed of geopolitical competition devoid of local interests and reducing African agency.

Why It Matters to Washington

Africa is the last entry in Washington’s National Security Strategy, reflecting a plan to allocate fewer resources to the continent, but Africa's crises often force unforeseen commitments. The Ebola outbreak in Congo underscores that weak health systems can turn outbreaks into global threats, compelling a US response. Insecurity due to extremist violence has prompted new and expanded US military action in Nigeria and Somalia, respectively. The continent leads the world in terrorist-related casualties, with more than half of global fatalities occurring in the Sahel, posing an enduring threat to greater African stability and attracting renewed US focus. This deepening malaise and Sudan’s civil war have become a magnet for regional and global competition, including increased intervention from Russia and China and adversarial action between US allies Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Opportunity Side: Economic Growth and Demographics Are Standout

Strengths

CRITICAL CONTEXT

Growth Potential

Less developed countries have more room for economic growth. Africa has outperformed global growth by approximately 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points since 2000.

Imports

As economies and populations grow, so do imports. Africa is on track to outpace the rest of the world in merchandise import growth during 2026.

Workforce

Africans are the world’s future workforce. The OECD estimates that the continent’s working-age population (15-64 years old) will rise from about 850 million today to more than 1.5 billion in 2050, accounting for 85% of the global workforce increase.

Why It Matters to Washington

Africa’s GDP growth represents the high upside potential of the continent’s many comparatively less developed countries. Because African economies are not saturated, they have greater room to grow, making them attractive for investment gains. This coincides with the world's youngest population, which presents a range of reasons for outside nations to work with Africa, including circular migration deals for labor to sustain growth and to find markets for exports—60 countries are set to shrink in population this year alone, including economic juggernauts China, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia, Spain, and South Korea.

- More pointedly for US implications, the country has been below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman for nearly two decades (1.6 in 2024). Mexico, the top provider of immigrant workers to the US, has been below replacement fertility for about a decade (1.9 in 2024), suggesting Africa is positioned to serve as a sought-after source of workers.

- For example, Washington could leverage Kenya’s plan to broker agreements for 1 million of its citizens to work abroad annually. Nigeria is on track to surpass the US as the world’s third-largest country by population within the next three decades and will almost certainly have to find foreign destinations for its workforce.

- Canada stands out as having conspicuously higher population growth in North America, the result of purposeful legal migration, which is 3 times that of the US as a percentage of the overall population.

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

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The West Needs to Prepare for a Russian Defeat in Ukraine

We are good at winning wars and generally bad at what comes after. Far from a partisan observation; this is a pattern with receipts. We removed Saddam Hussein in three weeks and then spent eight years discovering that we had no plan for Iraq. We helped topple Qaddafi in 2011 and left Libya to sort itself out, which it did into a decade of competing militias and open-air slave markets. We spent twenty years in Afghanistan and still managed to be surprised when the government we built collapsed in eleven days. The American way of war ends at the moment of victory. The credits roll, everyone goes home, and the sequel is a disaster nobody bothered to consider.

There is exactly one modern exception, and it is instructive. When the Soviet Union came apart in 1991, a Democratic senator from Georgia and a Republican senator from Indiana looked at roughly 30,000 nuclear warheads scattered across four newly independent, newly broke republics and decided, radically, to think ahead. The Nunn-Lugar program spent American money to secure, consolidate, and dismantle those weapons before they could walk out the door to Tehran or to a bidder we would like even less. It was unglamorous, it was expensive, and it worked. Three decades after the largest state collapse in modern history, there has been no loose-nuke catastrophe. We planned once. It went well. We have not repeated the experiment since.

I raise this because we may be about to need it again, and the warning lights are coming on faster than the planning is.

Start with the battlefield. Russia has absorbed somewhere near 1.4 million casualties since February 2022 in order to advance, in its showcase offensives, at a pace measured in tens of meters a day. That is more than any major power has taken in any conflict since the Second World War. In early 2026 that grinding pace stalled outright, and for the first time since 2023 Ukraine recaptured more ground than it lost. Russian military recruitment fell twenty percent in the first quarter of this year, into the teeth of the worst labor shortage the Russian economy has ever recorded. An army that cannot recruit and an economy that cannot spare the men are not a combination that trends toward Berlin.

Then follow the money, because wars end when the money does. Russia's federal budget deficit hit 5.9 trillion rubles in just the first four months of 2026. That is larger than the entire deficit it ran in all of 2025, and against a full-year plan of 3.9 trillion. The liquid portion of the sovereign wealth fund, the rainy-day cushion, has shrunk from 6.5 percent of GDP at the start of the war to 1.8 percent this April. Oil and gas revenue in 2025 fell to its lowest level since 2020, and in the first two months of 2026 it dropped nearly by half year-on-year. The Kremlin is raising its value-added tax from 20 to 22 percent and cannot borrow abroad, because we long ago cut it off from the markets. Putin is a man selling his furniture to make rent.

And here is the part that should be keeping planners awake at night: Ukraine has learned to hit the one thing Russia cannot armor. Kyiv's drones have taken more than a third of Russia's oil-refining capacity offline, roughly 38 percent by some counts. Gasoline output is down seventeen percent from a year ago. Refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, and outside Moscow itself have been forced to halt or throttle production. Russia, one of the largest oil producers on earth, has banned gasoline exports and is now rationing fuel to its own citizens, who are queuing at pumps in a country that floats on crude. A petrostate that cannot keep its own drivers in gasoline is a petrostate whose social contract is running on fumes.

Now the honest caveat, because I have watched too many confident men predict Moscow's collapse and end up eating the prediction. Russia has a genius for absorbing punishment that would break others, and "the regime is about to fall" has been the graveyard of Western analysis for a century. Vladimir Putin may well hang on for years. I am not promising you a collapse. I am telling you that a Russian defeat, a real one, military exhaustion bleeding into political rupture, inside the next two years, has moved from a fringe scenario to one that a serious government insures against. You do not buy fire insurance because you expect to burn. You buy it because you cannot afford the one time you do.

So what does the insurance look like in this case? A few things, none of which require us to want Russia to come apart.

First, dust off Nunn-Lugar and write the sequel now, before the crisis. Russia has roughly 1,800 strategic warheads today. If central authority in Moscow wobbles, the question of who controls them becomes the only question that matters. What’s worse, New START quietly expired this past February and is no longer around to give us the courtesy of counting them. We need pre-negotiated channels for securing those weapons, ideally including China and India, whose interest in not having loose Russian nukes on the market is every bit as sharp as ours.

Second, decide in advance what we will and will not recognize. A fragmenting Russian Federation could throw off breakaway republics the way the USSR did in 1991. The moment to agree on which borders and which authorities we will treat as legitimate is before a dozen regional governors declare themselves president, not while it is happening. Improvised recognition is how you turn a collapse into a set of proxy wars that makes Putin’s destabilizing behaviors look like child’s play.

Third, keep the technocrats employed. The most dangerous export of a collapsing weapons state is not a warhead; it is the underpaid engineer who knows how to build one. In 1992 we worried about Russian scientists boarding flights to Iran, Iraq, and Libya. This time we should build the landing pads, research funding, visas, civilian projects, before they start looking for the exits.

Fourth, tell Ukraine and our European allies what "victory" actually means, so that we are not improvising the peace the way we improvised Baghdad. A defeated Russia is not a solved Russia. It will still have grievances, a reconstituting army, and a long memory. The objective is a Russia that loses this war and cannot start the next one, a vacuum we will spend the 2030s regretting.

None of this is a prediction that Moscow falls next spring. It is the recognition that we have been surprised by nearly every ending we should have seen coming, and that the cost of preparing for a Russian defeat that never arrives is a few think-tank salaries and some awkward classified memos. The cost of not preparing for one that does is measured in warheads we cannot account for.

We have the receipts on what happens when we refuse to think ahead. We also have a single example of what happens when we do. Let’s choose the sequel we actually storyboarded.

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How to Get the Venezuela Response Right

When the two earthquakes struck Venezuela last week, killing more than 1,400 people and leaving tens of thousands missing, there was a silent pause in Washington with everyone wondering: with no USAID, how will the U.S. respond to this disaster?

Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, USAID surged resources, with urban search-and-rescue teams wheels-up within hours. Naval vessels steamed to Haiti’s capital. President Obama placed USAID as the lead agency. The machinery of American humanitarian response was moving. The Trump Administration has now responded: multiple USAR teams from Fairfax County, Los Angeles, and Miami-Dade are on the ground, the State Department has pledged $300 million in assistance, with more promised, and the Department “of War” is providing C-17 airlift and Marine Osprey support. This is deja vu all over again.

Now the question is whether we have learned anything since Haiti.

I've seen this machinery up close. I coordinated the U.S. response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake from Washington — the then largest American humanitarian mobilization in a single country. We had genuine resources, genuine commitment, and genuine failures. Fifteen years later, as Venezuela's crisis unfolds, the lessons we learned are likely to be repeated again.

The most effective humanitarian tool is also the least glamorous: cash. It lets organizations buy exactly what is needed immediately, spurs local markets rather than undercutting them, and reaches beneficiaries faster. The new Trump Administration partnership with Walmart and Global Empowerment Mission to collect in-kind donations — clothing, toys, household goods - will be a time-consuming logistical mess.

We saw NGOs with more experience than GEM make the same mistake in Haiti. Those items filled valuable warehouse space while people went without shelter; sorting and distribution consumed staff time and resources. In Venezuela, that same supply chain runs directly into CLAP — the Bolivarian food distribution network that conditions assistance on political loyalty. Cash allows organizations and individuals to purchase locally what they need, building up the local markets.

The U.S. military performed heroic and essential functions in the early days of the Haiti response. But it performed them at defense-budget rates, and they continued humanitarian tasks long past the point where cheaper civilian alternatives were available. The USS Comfort hospital ship sat in Port-au-Prince harbor for months at approximately $1 million per day — with no patients on board. The full cost of the military response was obscured across multiple budget authorities, making honest accounting impossible. In addition, with 23,000 personnel on the ground, it made coordination impossible across all the other actors on the ground.

USAID formally recommended transitioning military operations out after 8 weeks. Political leadership pushed back, and the military footprint persisted until summer, costing more money and crowding out the civilian and longer-term programming that should have taken its place.

Within days, USAID surged experienced officers to Haiti with decades of technical expertise in civilian response to humanitarian crisis, honed after the Asian tsunami, the Pakistan earthquakes, and other relief efforts. Without USAID’s experienced coordination and personnel, the default to military logistics in Venezuela will be even stronger. And with Venezuela's acute sovereignty sensitivities — a country where 25 years of Bolivarian politics have institutionalized resistance to U.S. military presence as a founding national narrative — a visible American military footprint isn't just expensive, it is politically combustible. The Delcy Rodriquez government is already unpopular, and such a presence could further delegitimize the very transitional government it is meant to bolster.

The Trump Administration has starved the UN of resources, and ironically is now relying almost entirely on the UN for relief efforts in Venezuela. Of the U.S.’s $300 million commitment, $200 million flows directly through OCHA’s Venezuela pooled fund — an institution the Administration has simultaneously been defunding.

In Haiti, within weeks of the earthquake, political pressure prioritized permanent housing construction over temporary shelter. The reasoning was politically driven — the donor community wanted houses built. There was a concern that anything less than permanent wasn’t good enough. The consequence was catastrophic - hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians remained in tent cities for years, because the "permanent" programs moved slowly through land disputes and contractor delays while the temporary shelter that could have housed them in months went underfunded.

The simple missing answer we neglected was to surge supplies – plywood, lumber, cinderblock corrugated metals, plastic sheeting – to affected areas and provide support to local entities who could rebuild structures to last two to three years. Supplies should be purchased on the local market to further spur the local markets.

The failure to prioritize the removal of rubble was a strategic miscalculation. The Haiti earthquake generated an estimated 10 million cubic meters of debris. Rather than treating its removal as a strategic prerequisite — clear the roads, open the sites, enable everything else — it was treated as a logistics afterthought. No single agency owned it. Only one disposal site was identified, requiring trucking rubble through the broken downtown on narrow urban roads. Dump trucks spent 8-10 hours on each load of rubble. The bottleneck cascaded across the entire response for years.

Venezuela's cities, particularly Caracas and the coastal communities near the epicenter, face similar dynamics. The pressure to show reconstruction will arrive before the rubble is cleared. The pressure to build permanent housing will arrive before anyone has mapped who owns the land — a question made vastly more complicated by 25 years of Chavista-era property redistributions. Permanent housing takes years to complete even when the land is easily available; people will need shelter good enough to live in while a permanent solution is created.

Corruption is a cancer that will bring down governments and create long-term instability (just look at Haiti), and establishing mechanisms at the outset is a core design requirement for any response. Corruption in Venezuela is categorically harder. The Bolivarian state has spent 25 years building sophisticated infrastructure for capturing and redirecting resource flows. The CLAP food distribution system — the government's commodity network — is a documented political control tool, conditioning food on political loyalty.

The same sanctions-evasion architecture that moves Venezuelan oil revenue through front companies and cryptocurrency channels is fully available to divert humanitarian cash.A response that doesn't build independent financial oversight, beneficiary verification, and distribution channels explicitly designed to bypass state capture mechanisms before the first dollar is obligated will hemorrhage resources.

The window to get the architecture right is now. That is the lesson Haiti burned into everyone who was there: the cameras arrive before the coordination does, and decisions made in the first two weeks shape outcomes for the next ten years.

Venezuela is not Haiti. It is more complex and more fraught diplomatically — and this time, the agency built to apply these lessons no longer exists to apply them. Haiti was not a failure; lives were saved, a devastated capital came back to life, and a generation of practitioners learned hard truths about sequencing, cost, and corruption. The risk now is that we forget it and make the same mistakes again, because the institution that absorbed those lessons is gone, and no one has rebuilt the muscle memory to apply them.

The people of Venezuela deserve the benefit of what we learned in Haiti, not a response built from scratch. So does American credibility.

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An Intelligence Veteran Reflects on the Impact of Normandy

I recently returned from commemorating the 82nd Anniversary of D-Day in Normandy—a much anticipated trip since I participated in the 80th Anniversary. I left with a sense of humility and gratitude for having walked the hallowed grounds of Normandy, and with admiration for the Greatest Generation and their sacrifices and actions that changed human history. The connection with Americans, grateful Normans, Europeans who still remember all too well the war, and participants from all over the world who were all there to mark this historic event was remarkable.

Normandy is a place for deep connections. I stood in the door of a vintage C-47 flying low over La Fière Drop Zone listening to the engines roar. Eighty-two years earlier, young paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne jumped into the darkness, many landing in flooded fields or directly into the path of German fire. In the clear light of that June morning in 2026, the hedgerows and pastures looked deceptively serene. What did those young paratroopers see and feel as they jumped into the unknown?

I had the chance to revisit Omaha Beach. The sounds of the waves on that rocky beach can be surreal, an echo of history. If you’ve been there, you remember it. I wondered whether those waves sounded exactly the same on June 6, 1944 as young soldiers and sailors endured withering fire from German positions and refused to be turned back—their sacrifice and refusal to fail now legendary.

In the square of Sainte-Mère-Église, the energetic heart of every Normandy commemoration, I looked up at the church steeple where a mannequin still marks the spot where John Steele hung entangled 82 years ago prior to being captured by the Germans. I imagined the dark sky filled with silk canopies and German ground fire as American paratroopers fought to secure the first town liberated in Normandy and as long-suffering and hopeful Normans awaited the outcome.

Those images are powerful. Normandy is a place that both haunts and inspires, and it invites reflection. It is a powerful reminder of the immeasurable human suffering caused by tyrants and extraordinary cost of freedom. It is hard to visit without connecting with that past; the courage and resilience of the occupied and oppressed, and the audacity and selfless sacrifice of the liberators.

There are so many other images there that make those connections—the American Cemetery with endless rows of white crosses, Pointe du Hoc rugged cliffs and Ranger Monument, Pegasus Bridge, the La Fière causeway and bridge, and many others. Given the scale of D-Day, almost every town, village, beach, road, and bridge witnessed thousands of human stories that shaped the outcome—some well-known, many now faded into history.

The memories and lessons of Normandy transcend time. The threats confronting America today are different from those of 1944, but several enduring lessons remain relevant.

American Leadership Matters

There are things that only America can do, alliances that only America can lead, and geopolitical outcomes that only America can achieve. Eighty-two years ago, the world faced a dangerous shift in the global order. American leadership in WWII was decisive—not only in securing military victory, but in establishing a new world order that has endured for 82 years.

No other country then or now could have led such a global effort, and it cemented America’s emergence as a superpower. Threats in Europe and the Pacific have new faces, but American leadership is as vital today as it was then. Like the authoritarians of that era, Russia and China are actively working to reshape the current world order to their advantage. Both are moving to fill perceived vacuums created by shifts in America’s global posture. Only America can lead the effort to deter them.

If the current world order is to survive and prosper, American leadership on the global stage remains essential.

Alliances Win

America’s leadership role in WWII was crucial, but so were the contributions of its allies and partners. British and Canadian forces played vital roles in D-Day. The French Resistance fought bravely and enabled the work of the American OSS and British SOE. The Soviet Union—then an ally of necessity, now an adversary—played a key role in defeating Nazi forces on the Eastern Front, while other nations—including Poland, Norway, Belgium, and France—made meaningful contributions.

The Allies clearly needed America to enter the war in Europe, but America clearly needed a strong alliance to ensure victory. Global competition has changed—our adversaries are fighting a different war—but reliable partners are still important. Today, alliances are less about planning invasions and more about deterring authoritarian aggression, and building a competitive edge across military, economic, technological, information, and cognitive domains.

America needs its partners. In return, those partners look for a strong and trusted America. Filling that role must remain a national priority.

America’s Story and a National Purpose

Great nations need more than military power to prevail; they also require a compelling national purpose. WWII roused America from its isolationist slumber. The brutal occupation and oppression across Europe, combined with the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, shattered America’s belief that it could keep major wars at a distance. Powerful themes emerged that were necessary to mobilize an entire nation: “Arsenal of Democracy”, “Four Freedoms”, and the call to defeat fascism.

These ideas fueled a national call to arms, unprecedented mobilization, and prepared America for rationing at home, mass deployments overseas, and the loss of so many Americans who would not return home. America had a compelling national purpose, and it communicated that purpose through a powerful national narrative—we might call that narrative America’s Story. That story included ideals of freedom, democracy, collective security, and the promise of a better postwar order that enabled America to forge and unite an alliance that had previously faltered. That same narrative power remains essential today.

Our adversaries, who seek to reshape the world order, understand the power of America’s story and are working to tell their version of it to their advantage. A persuasive, authentic national narrative—America’s Story—is a national imperative.

Warfare Remains a Human Endeavor

D-Day was a remarkable display of technological innovation. Some technologies were used for the very first time or the first time under such extreme combat conditions. Notable successes, such as the Mulberry Artificial Harbors, the PLUTO undersea fuel pipeline, and improved electronic capabilities that enabled unprecedented coordination of Allied air power played key roles.

Even the highly successful deception operation, Operation Fortitude, relied on technological advancements in jamming and radar deception. In contrast, swimming tanks, gliders, and pathfinder equipment—also rushed into service to achieve surprise and an early advantage—did not meet full operational expectations.

Ultimately, capitalizing on technological advances and compensating for technology failures required human innovation and decisions at the speed of war. In the end, the human dimensions of D-Day—judgment, decision-making in the face of uncertainty, problem solving, detecting and countering deception, courage, and resilience—played a greater role than technology in winning the day and securing victory in Europe.

This is still true today even as AI, robotics, cyber, cognitive tools, and other technologies accelerate the evolution of warfare. A risk is that humans cede decision-making to technology in exchange for greater speed and precision at the expense of judgment, leadership, ingenuity, and moral responsibility. Walking Normandy and seeing the impacts of these human dimensions remind us that while technology, geopolitics, and adversaries change, the human qualities that ultimately shape history do not.

It is these human qualities—not technology itself—that remain America's enduring strategic advantage.

My sincerest thanks to Liberty Jump Team, Corsicana Texas, for an exceptional visit to Normandy for the 82nd Anniversary of D-Day. I’m definitely looking forward to the 83rd.

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What Makes American Patriotism So Different

We are about to close out the 250th year since Tom and the boys stepped brashly onto the world stage and declared with clarity of purpose and universality of meaning our national independence. As proud Americans, we will rightly participate in moments of colorful ostentation and exuberant excess. The 4th of July is flags and fireworks, barbecue and beer, the Air Force’s fabulous Thunderbirds and the United States Marine Corps Band. While certainly some will use the opportunity to cynically enumerate our shortcomings, historical and contemporary, we are, in fact, the longest-standing nation built solely on democratic principles.

Amidst the jubilation, it is probably useful to contemplate the true meaning of American patriotism. Any country can have patriots, but American patriotism is unique. We are not a nation of race or ethnicity, of religion or sectarianism; we do not accept fealty to the absurd notion of inherited “majesty”. We come from all corners of the earth. Nothing makes us inherently better than any other humans. What binds is a set of ideals, the concept of human liberty, and that alone. We do not own this idea; it is human liberty, after all, not American liberty. We are not a people with a set of ideals; we are a set of ideals with a people. We do boldly claim stewardship of these ideals, and, in so doing, we as a nation and as individual citizens accept responsibility for living and acting on them. The conspirators of the Declaration and the framers of the Constitution understood this, and they laid a foundation for a society built on respect for human dignity.

The Constitution itself is a holistic document, imperfect in form, but perfect in meaning. It symbolizes what humans across geography and time yearn for -- a society consciously protecting and celebrating individual freedom while preserving the existence of a nation in which those freedoms may be enjoyed. There are other democratic republics, but there is no other nation like ours. This is the reason people all over the world want to come here. We have what the people of Iran and China want desperately. In contrast, immigration to Russia is the province of the likes of Edward Snowden and Bashar Hafiz al-Asad.

As citizens, we must be attentive to this responsibility we have all accepted, but to put it simply, we could screw this up. As Ronald Reagan famously observed, freedom is always one generation from extinction. That generation does not have to be youngsters convinced of society’s obligation to insulate them from discomfort. It can equally be oldsters who are so lost in narrow-minded rhetoric that they forget the point. American patriotism is not selfish or angry or confrontational or in-your-face or blindly convinced of righteousness. It is the opposite, characterized by humility and generosity, in keeping with our founding ideals.

Whether we were born American or sought and earned our way to citizenship, we have the same burden. Patriotism looks at our tremendous successes as a nation with the same honest eye as our failures, with humble recognition that each contributes to the weight of our obligation to our principles. Patriotism seeks harmony but requires honesty and selflessness. Patriotism calls for deliberate, conscious effort, not just on the 4th of July, but in any action that puts our nation’s credibility on display. We have something no one else has -- no one else has ever had, and the world is watching. As we begin our next quarter of a millennium, America needs patriots as much as ever. Let us seek to be worthy of the stewardship we have been fortunate enough to inherit.

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Armenia Has Voted on a Pivotal New Direction, but Moscow is Not Ready to Concede

BLUF: Armenia, a small country of about 3 million people, is located at an important strategic crossroads among Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia. For centuries, this position has left the landlocked country vulnerable to foreign rule, conflict, irregular warfare tactics, and geopolitical influence. With its 7 June parliamentary election, Armenia has taken an important step in the direction of balancing its foreign policy and playing the role that its geography has positioned it for by bringing these crossroads together. The story is not over however, and Moscow will not let Armenia easily continue down this road. Moscow will continue to pressure Armenia, using all its expertise in irregular warfare, to keep Armenia in its orbit.

Moving Toward the West

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan came to power in May 2018 following a “velvet revolution” that ousted the party that had ruled pro-Moscow Armenia for nearly twenty years. The previous leadership had strong ties to the embattled Nagorno-Karabakh exclave and had made Armenia dependent on Russia for security and its economy.

In the eight years since Pashinyan came to power, he has started peace talks with Azerbaijan, moved the country closer to the West, and cut some ties to Russia. The June 7 parliamentarian election was interpreted as a positive mandate on the direction Pashinyan is taking the country. However, while he won a majority, the pro-Russia opposition held a strong minority position, ensuring that the battle for Armenia’s future was not over.

What the Election Means for a Peace Treaty with Azerbaijan

Last August, the White House brokered a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan for a ceasefire over ongoing violence in the disputed Nagorno Karabakh territory and set the conditions for the beginning of a peace treaty. As part of the deal, Azerbaijan demanded Armenia approve a new constitution that removed references to Nagorno Karabakh. Changes to the Armenian constitution require two thirds vote in the parliament. Pashinyan failed to secure a two-thirds majority, which means that he cannot change the constitution.

Official preliminary results gave Pashinyan's Civil Contract Party 64 seats in the 105-seat legislature. Two Russian-leaning opposition parties took the remaining seats, while a third appeared to have fallen narrowly short of the 5 percent barrier for entry into parliament pending a recount.

This was the first election since Armenia's military defeat to Azerbaijan in 2023 and a key part of Pashinyan's pitch was what he called "real Armenia," meaning accepting the country's current borders and improving relations with neighbors that have traditionally been hostile -- namely Azerbaijan, but also its patron, Turkey. During the last year, Pashinyan has reached out to the European Union and Turkey, along with the US, to strengthen ties and balance Armenia’s once Russia-focused foreign policy.

In May, dozens of European leaders and representatives of key EU institutions traveled to Yerevan for the first-ever meeting of the European Political Community (EPC) in the South Caucasus, as well as the very first EU-Armenia summit. This was a strong signal toward the West at a pivotal moment for Armenia.

Moscow

The gradual erosion of Russian influence in Armenia may become one of the most strategically important geopolitical shifts in Eurasia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armenia was Moscow’s last reliable foothold in the Caucasus. If Russia continues to lose its dominant position in Yerevan, the consequences are likely to extend far beyond the Caucasus, accelerating a broader decline of Russian influence across Central Asia. Underscoring the importance of Armenia to Moscow, President Vladimir Putin threatened Armenia with a "Ukrainian scenario" if it continues building ties with the EU.

For Russia, the loss of Armenia would mean:

· Collapse of Russian strategic dominance in the South Caucasus;

· Weakened Russian military logistics and intelligence networks in the region;

· Decline of Moscow’s political authority among post-Soviet states;

· Destruction of the image of Russia as a reliable security guarantor;

· Expansion of Turkish and Western influence toward the Caspian region.

Most importantly, it would demonstrate that Moscow can no longer preserve its traditional sphere of influence. This would be a major psychological blow to Moscow who is simultaneously fighting a losing war in Ukraine and growing concerns among the population regarding the economic direction of their country.

Moscow has shown that it is prepared to fight for continued influence in Armenia. During the final stretch of the parliamentary election campaign, it launched cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. The EU sent specialists to help Armenia counter these threats.

In retaliation for Armenia’s continued outreach to the EU, Russia’s Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance banned imports of potatoes, eggplants, fruits — apples, pears, and quince — and dried fruit from Armenia, effective June 3, 2026.

Russia also barred the transit of those agricultural products through its territory to other Eurasian Economic Union member states, citing “the absence of mechanisms to confirm that quarantine-controlled goods have reached those countries.”

The restrictions carry no end date — they will remain in force “until a corresponding procedure is developed to ensure the safety of shipped goods.” More recently, Moscow has banned the import of Armenian fish.

Moscow also has recalled its Ambassador to Armenia for consultations because of the steps taken by the Armenian leadership on a rapprochement with the European Union. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that these steps undermined cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is a single market which, besides Armenia, is also made up of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Moscow has previously stressed that Armenia cannot be a member of both the EU and the EEU.

US Focus

The US is pulling out all the stops to support Armenia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Yerevan the week prior to the parliamentary election in a show of support for Pashinyan and his government. President Trump publicly endorsed Pashinyan and his party.

The Trump administration has been working closely with Pashinyan on a road-and-rail corridor initiative called the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP), which would run through Armenia and connect Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan exclave. Rubio said he took another step in the TRIPP project with the Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan.

"This agreement marks the biggest step to date on making this historic route a reality, on advancing peace and on increasing prosperity in Armenia and frankly in the region," Rubio said at a signing ceremony at Yerevan airport.

Multi-track Foreign Policy

Pashinyan’s focus on diversifying Armenia’s foreign policy makes sense given Armenia’s geo-location. This way forward gives Armenia the possibility of increased status in global trade and potentially in global strategy. Russia will surely attempt to derail Pashinyan and the US’s plans. The question is whether the West will allow Russia to be successful.

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Russia’s $11 Billion Soft Power Gamble

I was sitting in the front seat of a “Yandex Taxi” in Moscow in the summer of 2018, dropping off some friends after we had drinks together at a local bar. As the driver, a Russian male in his 50’s, maneuvered through traffic, he asked me if the couple were Americans? “Yes. They are Americans.” “How about you?” he asked. “I am also an American.” Hearing this, the driver continued “You know, 10 years ago I started a small company in Moscow and was doing pretty well. Business was not bad and I enjoyed being an entrepreneur. But then after 2014, when foreign sanctions were placed on Russia my business started to suffer. The Government here claims that sanctions actually ‘help’ our economy, but not in my case. Two years ago I had to shut down my business completely and now I’m driving a taxi to make money to support my wife and daughter.”

Hearing his story, I wondered if this man blamed the U.S. for the sanctions and their impact on his life. “I’m sorry to hear about your troubles” I said. The driver must have understood what I was wondering, and he responded “Don’t misunderstand me. I do not blame you or your country for my problems. I don’t blame the U.S. for the sanctions. No. I blame our “great leader”. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. He is the reason for the sanctions. He decided to invade Ukraine in 2014 and, as a result, we were hit with sanctions. And for what reason? Why? Because it would make my life better? Is my family's life better? No. Because it pleased his ego. Because he wanted to feel important and get attention. No. I don’t blame anyone but our own President and his selfish ego.”

This conversation took place during the 2018 World Cup, which was hosted by Russia. Speaking about that event, the driver continued “look around? Look how much money Putin has put into hosting the World Cup. Billions of USD. Our money. The people’s money? Building a new stadium. Re-paving roads, cleaning up cities and refurbishing airports. Teaching police officers and bus drivers how to speak some English and translating street signs and metro signs into English to accumulate the thousands of foreign tourists coming to attend the World Cup. It is all a big show for Putin. An opportunity for him to show off to the world. But will any of this benefit us, the Russian people? Will we see any return on our investment? No. I doubt it. If there is any profit from all of the tourism, it will go into the pockets of Putin and his friends. My family and I will never see any benefit from hosting the World Cup in Russia.”

Last night, watching South Korea play Mexico in the 2026 World Cup, I was reminded of that conversation. If, by any chance, the driver was wrong in 2018 and Russia saw some benefit from the influx of tourists that visited Russia in the summer of 2018, there is little chance that the benefits continued after February 2022, when Putin decided to up the ante and expand his aggression against Ukraine. That disastrous decision has not only resulted in the humiliation of the Russian Armed Forces, deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians, crippling of the Russian economy but it also resulted in the increasing isolation of Russia. If hosting the World Cup in 2018 was meant to present Russia as a tourist destination for foreigners, how many tourists would dare visit Russia today?

According to some estimates, the Kremlin spent over 11 billion USD to prepare Russia to host the World Cup in 2018. Cities like Moscow and St Petersburg were given makeovers. Other Russian cities that hosted matches had to build new stadiums, and Moscow had to invest billions to build or modernize infrastructure. All part of a Kremlin campaign to present Russia to the world as a modern and developed country. Classic soft power strategy.

At the time, the strategy appeared to work. Hundreds of thousands of World Cup fans poured into Russia. Downtown Moscow was filled with foreign tourists. Despite the political tensions between the U.S. and Russia at the time, and the fact that the U.S. did not even qualify for the World Cup in 2018, Americans made up the largest number of foreign visitors to Russia during the World Cup. During that period, many of the visitors came away with a positive impression of Moscow. Of Russia. Of Russians. Many had a great time celebrating and partying. Russia had a great marketing opportunity to present itself to the world.

Unfortunately, my taxi driver was right. The 11 plus billion USD invested by the Kremlin in Putin’s soft power gamble was erased by Putin’s ego. His gambit to assert full control over his western neighbor in February 2022 led to a significant decline of tourism to Russia and a darkening of Russia’s image in the eyes of the world. How many tourists today would seriously consider visiting a country that is accused of committing war crimes against the Ukrainian population? A country run by an oppressive regime that regularly kills its critics and has forced millions of its own citizens to flee abroad to seek refuge. A country that itself is now being regularly targeted by increasingly effective drone strikes in response to Putin’s continued attempts to terrorize Ukraine. As World Cup fans watched Mexico and South Korea play on 18 June, how many would seriously be interested in visiting the Russian capital, which was covered in dark, black toxic fumes rising from a fire caused by a Ukrainian strike against a Russian Oil refinery in Moscow? I suspect not many.

I often think of that Russian taxi driver, who was trying to make a living after his business was forced to close because of Russia’s growing economic problems in 2018. At the time he understood that without Putin’s ego and poor decision making, there would have been no sanctions. Markets would have remained open to Russia goods and businesses. And, like many Russians I knew at the time, he did not blame Washington, Brussels or Kyiv for Russia’s economic problems. He rightly blamed Putin. And I suspect more and more Russians today feel this way – even if they are afraid to openly admit it.

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The Space Age Needs New Rules

Space is no longer a place we visit to plant flags. It is where the global economy and national security now live — and our rulebook is nearly sixty years out of date.

For half a century, space was a government project. Nations went there to prove something about science, about engineering, and about national will. The astronauts were public employees, the rockets were public property, and the point of the exercise was as much symbolic as scientific. But that era is over. What replaced it is both a gold rush and an arms race at once, unfolding in the same orbits under rules written before today.

Two forces have remade the frontier almost overnight. First, private companies now do what only superpowers once could: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Planet Labs and dozens of others launch, operate, and profit in orbit at a cadence no government program ever matched. Second, that same orbital infrastructure has become indispensable to national defense and therefore a target. In today's world, satellites are the backbone of how countries communicate, navigate, detect threats, and coordinate military operations. GPS, secure communications, missile warning systems, and real‑time intelligence all flow through space assets. If those systems were disrupted or destroyed, a country's ability to defend itself, project power, or even manage basic infrastructure would be severely weakened.

The result is a domain that is simultaneously more commercial, more crowded, and more contested than at any point in human history, and only getting started. Our institutions were built for none of this. It is time to fix that.

From Flags to Markets

The numbers tell the story of a revolution. The global space economy already approaches half a trillion dollars a year, and credible forecasts put it on a path toward $1.8 trillion or more within the next decade. In the United States alone, the sector already contributes $131.8 billion to GDP each year. Investors poured billions into space startups last year alone, and the United States now captures roughly half of all private space funding worldwide. This is no longer a niche of aerospace contractors living on government cost-plus contracts. It is one of the fastest-growing high-technology sectors on Earth, and the world's wealthiest people are racing to own a piece of it.

The engine of this growth is reusability. When SpaceX learned to land and re-fly its rockets, it did to spaceflight what the shipping container did to global trade: it collapsed the cost. Launching a kilogram to low Earth orbit once cost tens of thousands of dollars; today it can be done for a small fraction of that. Cheaper and faster access changes everything downstream. It is why the United States flew more than 200 commercial launches in a single year, which is the highest annual total this century. It is also why a single company, SpaceX, now accounts for the overwhelming majority of the world's commercial launch activity.

What gets launched has changed too. Instead of a handful of exquisite, billion-dollar satellites, operators now deploy thousands of small, coffee can size, mass-produced ones. Starlink blankets the planet with broadband from orbit; Planet Labs images the entire Earth's landmass every single day; Earth-observation firms sell insight on crops, shipping, emissions, and troop movements to anyone willing to pay. Commercial space stations are being built to succeed the aging International Space Station, and lunar logistics is becoming a business rather than a mission. The center of gravity has shifted decisively from the public sector to the private one.

Make no mistake: this is a triumph. Competition has driven costs down, cadence up, and innovation faster than any government program ever could. But a frontier opened by private capital and moving at commercial speed creates problems that markets alone will not solve. This is where the trouble begins, for which we are not ready.

The New High Ground

The same satellites that power our economy also power our military. Precision navigation, secure communications, missile warning, intelligence, and reconnaissance all run through orbit. Modern forces cannot move, see, or shoot without space, and adversaries know it. That dependence has turned what was once a sanctuary into the ultimate high ground, and the competition to control it is now explicit national policy.

The threat is not hypothetical. U.S. intelligence assesses that China and Russia are fielding a full spectrum of counterspace weapons: ground-based missiles that can destroy satellites, jammers and lasers that can blind or disrupt them, and maneuvering "inspector" craft that can shadow and, if ordered, disable other nations' spacecraft. Officials describe reversible attacks such as jamming and sensor dazzling as occurring on a near-daily basis. Russia's pursuit of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon has been called the single greatest threat to the world's entire space architecture, because a nuclear detonation in orbit would not destroy one satellite but cripple whole swaths of low Earth orbit for years. If this happens, enormous economic impact would occur. Under President Trump, the United States has answered with a declared policy of space dominance: the Pentagon has been directed to ensure American supremacy in orbit, and the Space Force is accelerating the deployment of its own counterspace weapons.

The scale of the buildup is staggering. China operated barely a thousand satellites in 2025; defense planners expect that fleet to approach twenty thousand within fifteen years, many of them dedicated to surveillance and targeting. In response, the United States stood up the Space Force, is spending on the order of $40 billion a year on military space, and is racing to make its constellations resilient, harder to find, harder to kill, and quicker to replace. Crucially, it is doing so hand-in-hand with industry: programs that draw on commercial satellite networks in wartime now treat private operators as part of the national defense fabric. This means government and private sectors are becoming more intertwined.

From a threat standpoint, cybersecurity also needs changing to protect satellites and the networks that control them, because modern space systems behave like connected digital infrastructure rather than isolated hardware. Satellites rely on software, radios, ground stations, and cloud‑based control systems that can be hacked, jammed, or spoofed. A successful cyberattack could disrupt GPS, communications, banking timestamps, aviation routing, or even missile warning systems, creating national‑level consequences. The threat is growing as nations target satellites through cyber intrusions and signal interference, and as commercial constellations expand with software‑heavy, rapidly deployed systems that often have uneven security. Yet international space law barely addresses cybersecurity, leaving countries and companies to rely on their own regulations and best practices. In reality, securing space now requires zero‑trust designs, hardened command links, continuous monitoring, and coordinated defense across governments and commercial operators, because whoever controls the software and signals in orbit controls critical power on Earth.

Here is the uncomfortable truth this creates: the line between a commercial satellite and a military one has all but disappeared. The broadband constellation that connects rural households also connects soldiers at the front. The imaging company that monitors deforestation also tracks armored columns. Private firms are now strategic actors whether they intend to be or not, and that raises questions of law, liability, and protection that no commercial contract was written to answer. It also concentrates extraordinary power in very few hands. A single company, SpaceX, already launches most of the world's payloads and operates the largest constellation ever flown; whoever controls orbital slots, spectrum, and launch capacity increasingly decides who reaches space at all. That is both a triumph and a single point of failure: the Western world's access to space now hinges on the choices of one company, and ultimately one person, which is a degree of dependence few governments would tolerate in any other piece of critical infrastructure. A domain meant to be the province of all humankind now runs on infrastructure owned by a handful of firms and the governments that license them.

Rules Written for a Different Era

So, what are the current rules and what do we do about it? The foundation of all space law is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. It was negotiated when only three nations had ever reached orbit and governments were the only actors imaginable. It is a magnificent agreement for its time as it keeps weapons of mass destruction out of orbit and declares space the province of all humankind. Yet it sets countries up with a problem: the treaty forbids any nation from claiming territory in space, while granting each nations state jurisdiction over the objects it launches. The effect is sovereignty without ownership: states and the companies they license control satellites, orbital slots, and the data they gather, even as no one is accountable for the domain itself. But it was never designed for a sky full of private mega-constellations and dual-use military assets. No binding space treaty has been adopted since 1979. The rulebook, in other words, predates the personal computer!

The gaps are now operational, not academic. The Outer Space Treaty is reinforced by four companion agreements:

the Rescue Agreement, requiring states to assist astronauts in distress and return them safely
the Liability Convention, which sets rules for compensation when space objects cause damage
the Registration Convention, mandating that states register objects they launch; and
the Moon Agreement, which restricts military activity on celestial bodies and calls for an international regime to govern future resource extraction.

Obligations to act with "due regard" for others, and fault-based liability for collisions, were never given concrete definitions, so they are almost impossible to enforce. And when something does go wrong, the harder problem is proof: with thousands of objects maneuvering through the same orbits and attacks that can be quiet and deniable, attributing a collision or a cyber-intrusion to a specific actor is often impossible, and without attribution there can be no accountability. There is no air-traffic-control system for orbit: each operator largely sets its own collision-avoidance rules, even as tens of thousands of satellites crowd the same shells of space. And there is the debris. Anti-satellite weapons tests alone have scattered thousands of trackable fragments into orbit, a large share of which are still up there, each one a bullet circling the planet at orbital velocity.

The danger is a chain reaction: a collision that creates debris, which causes further collisions, until the most valuable orbits become unusable for generations. National regulators are trying to fill the void piecemeal: the United States now requires defunct satellites to be brought down within five years, and a market for active debris removal is emerging. But orbit is a global commons. Unilateral rules cannot govern a domain where one nation's negligence threatens everyone's access, and the major space powers have shown little appetite for a new binding treaty.

And the gaps are not only physical. As orbit fills with sensors, a harder question trails the hardware: who owns what space sees? A satellite's imagery and signals are raw material for the digital economy, yet the rules for them are thin. The data may belong to the company that gathers it, fall under the jurisdiction of the launching state, or concern people and places that had no say in its capture. The United Nations' remote-sensing principles were drafted for a handful of government agencies, not a commercial market in planetary-scale intelligence. In practice, access is decided by who holds the capability and the capital, raising real questions of privacy, equity, and transparency that no current treaty answers.

Nor is the world negotiating as one. Governance itself is fracturing into rival camps. The United States anchors the Artemis Accords, a non-binding framework now signed by 68 nations, while China and Russia lead a competing bloc around their International Lunar Research Station, joined by roughly a dozen states. Beijing and Moscow have also pressed their own weapons-ban treaty at the United Nations, which Washington rejects as unverifiable. Europe, India, Japan, and a widening circle of newer spacefaring nations move between these poles. The deeper danger is not just that the rules are outdated, but that the major powers are quietly writing parallel rulebooks, none of which binds the others — and any regime that excludes China and Russia governs only the orbits that matter least.

What We Should Do

Managing this new frontier does not mean smothering it. The goal is to keep space open, profitable, and peaceful and that requires governance that moves at the speed of the industry it oversees. We suggest these six priorities to guide us.

Build rules of the road for orbit. We have air-traffic control for the skies and maritime law for the seas; orbit needs the same. A civil space-traffic management system built out from the U.S. Office of Space Commerce's nascent TraCSS program and shared internationally — ideally migrating to a neutral international steward over time — should, within this decade, provide authoritative tracking data, collision warnings, and right-of-way conventions that every operator is expected to follow. The same system should also serve accountability: shared, authoritative tracking makes it possible to establish who did what in orbit, so that a collision or an act of interference can be attributed and answered for rather than denied.
Update the treaty without waiting for a new one. A grand replacement for the Outer Space Treaty is politically out of reach, and far slower than events demand. Instead, adopt the model that works for climate and the oceans: a recurring "Conference of the Parties" convened under UN COPUOS to let nations agree on concrete, incremental standards — definitions of "due regard," deorbit timelines, resource-use norms — without the impossibility of formal amendment.
Make debris mitigation enforceable and universal. Deorbit mandates, building on the FCC's five-year rule, design-for-disposal requirements, and a ban on debris-generating weapons tests should be the global baseline, agreed multilaterally rather than exported by one regulator or left to a patchwork of national rules. Fund and incentivize active debris removal now, while the problem is still merely expensive rather than catastrophic.
Formalize the commercial-defense partnership and its limits. If private constellations are now strategic infrastructure, governments owe their operators clear rules: when commercial capacity can be commandeered, how companies are compensated and protected, and what legal status a private satellite has if it is attacked. Resilience should be bought through partnership, not improvised in a crisis.
Lead through alliances, not isolation. No single nation can police orbit, and the spacefaring democracies are stronger setting standards together. Coalitions among the United States and its allies, with the Artemis Accords as the nucleus, should align licensing, data-sharing, and behavioral norms to build a critical mass of responsible actors that newcomers must either join or be measured against. But coalition-building cannot become bloc-building: the rules that matter most — debris, traffic, and no weapons of mass destruction in orbit — are worthless unless they also bind China, Russia, and their partners, which means keeping channels open through the UN even as alliances set the pace.
Set common rules for space data and fair access. Alongside physical traffic, the framework should govern the information satellites collect: who owns it, how privacy and national interests are protected, and on what terms it is shared. And because slots, spectrum, and launch capacity are finite, and already allocated through bodies like the ITU, access to them should stay open enough that capability and capital alone do not decide who benefits from orbit. Access meant for all of humanity should not narrow into a preserve of the few.

Conclusion

We are living through the most consequential change in humanity's relationship with space since the first satellite crossed the sky. The frontier that nations once visited to prove a point is now where they bank, communicate, navigate, and defend themselves and, increasingly, where they may fight. The private sector has given us an extraordinary gift of capability and cost. National security has made that capability indispensable. What we lack is the governance to match.

The choice before us is not whether to embrace this new era (it is already here) but whether we will steward it wisely or let it descend into congestion, debris, and conflict. The decisions we make in the next few years will determine whether low Earth orbit remains a thriving commons or becomes a contested ruin. We built the rockets that opened this frontier. We are fully capable of writing the rules that will keep it open. We should do so now, before the window closes.

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AI Agents Need Accountability That Travels With Them

Most enterprise AI agents today are still being deployed in controlled environments. They sit inside a platform, perform a defined task and operate under the identity and access controls of that environment, however that window is closing. For many security teams, the current state makes the problem feel manageable. If the agent is inside the fence, the thinking goes, it can be governed by the controls already in place.

That view is understandable. Security teams already have more than enough to manage as AI models become more capable. The near-term implications for vulnerability discovery, fraud, social engineering and incident response are real, and they are moving quickly. Against that backdrop, the question of what happens when agents operate across boundaries can feel like a later-stage concern.

It is not. Identity and access controls can govern an agent inside a particular environment. The harder problem is maintaining accountability when the agent begins operating beyond it. Anthropic’s recentZero Trust framework for AI agents is explicit on this point: each agent instance should have a unique, cryptographically rooted identifier that persists through its lifecycle, appears in logs and access requests, and supports authentication, rotation and revocation. That kind of verifiable identity is what makes safe interoperability possible. As agents move between environments, accountability has to move with them, so the audit trail does not end at the boundary where the risk begins.

The limits of local control

The value of agents comes from their ability to act. They are being designed to invoke tools, coordinate work, exchange information and carry out tasks on behalf of people and enterprises. An agent that can only operate inside one tightly controlled environment may be easier to secure, but it will also be limited in what it can accomplish.

That is the tension enterprises now face. The same interoperability that will make agents valuable will also expand the risk surface around them.

Security leaders are right to focus on the risks already in front of them. More capable models are changing the threat environment in ways that matter right now. But model sophistication is only one part of the issue. The other is autonomy. As agents are given more tools, more permissions and more responsibility, the assumptions behind local control will become harder to sustain.

When Interoperability Becomes A Risk

Most agents are not yet moving freely across enterprise boundaries. Many remain narrow, supervised and limited in scope. But there are two reasons the boundary problem cannot wait.

The first is business value. If agents remain fully contained, their usefulness is constrained. Enterprises will look for returns from AI by connecting agents to more workflows, more tools and more partners. They will want agents to coordinate work across the places where business actually happens.

The second is control. Even enterprises that take appropriate precautions may overestimate how reliably agent activity can remain confined over time. Permissions change. Workflows expand. Tools are added. Business teams find new uses for systems once those systems begin producing value. The environment around agents will keep changing, and accountability needs to remain recognizable when it does.

Security teams are already seeing early versions of this problem in how autonomous AI systems interact with the outside world. An agent exposed to untrusted content may receive instructions the user never sees. An agent with broad permissions may take actions in a context its developers did not fully anticipate. An agent connected to internal data and external communication channels may create a path for leakage or misuse. These are practical control problems, and they become harder to manage as agents gain more tools, more permissions and more autonomy.

For CISOs, the pattern should sound familiar. Some of the hardest security problems emerge at the boundaries between systems, vendors and enterprises. Third-party risk and software supply chain incidents have shown how quickly trust assumptions can break down when no single party controls the full path of activity. Agents introduce a new kind of actor into that same environment. They may be delegated by one enterprise, executed through another platform and interact with a third party in the course of completing a task. In those moments, accountability has to travel with the agent rather than remain tied to the environment where it originated.

The cost of fragmented accountability

In that setting, local identity is not enough. An enterprise may be able to identify and monitor an agent inside the platform where it was created. But once the agent acts elsewhere, that identity may not travel cleanly. Another environment may not know which organization stands behind the agent, whether that relationship can be independently verified, or how trust should be adjusted if circumstances change.

This is where fragmentation becomes a practical security problem. If every platform defines agent identity in its own way, enterprises will inherit a patchwork of trust models. Each may work locally. Together, they create friction at best and gaps in accountability at worst.

Security teams could be left translating between local controls just as agents become more autonomous and more operationally important. That is a difficult place to put defenders. When something goes wrong, they need to know what acted, who was responsible and whether the activity can be contained. Those questions should not depend on which platform created the agent or where it happens to be operating at that moment.

A single high-profile failure could also have consequences beyond the immediate incident. If a rogue or misattributed agent causes material harm, the response could put a chill on the broader market. Security reviews could freeze, integrations could stall and product teams could be forced into a defensive posture as enterprises try to determine which agent activity they can trust. That remains a real risk as long as identity is fragmented and ownership cannot be consistently resolved.

That is not a sustainable foundation for enterprise adoption.

The answer is not to stop agent innovation or force every action back through manual review. That would defeat much of the purpose of the technology. Enterprises want agents because they can move work faster, connect processes and reduce the burden on people. Security teams need a way to support that progress without losing the ability to answer basic questions when something goes wrong.

Which organization stands behind the agent? Can that relationship be independently verified? Can its activity be traced across environments? Can trust be adjusted when circumstances change?

The June 2026 White House executive order on advanced AI innovation and security shows that these questions are now a national priority, one that applies equally across government, industry, and critical infrastructure. The only practical and durable solution for enforcing that is through a standard of accountability that is recognized everywhere.

A standard for portable accountability

Open matters. If the accountability layer for agents is defined separately by every major platform, then trust will fragment at the moment the market needs consistency. Enterprises will face the burden of reconciling competing approaches, and security teams will be forced to govern agents through local controls that do not resolve cleanly beyond their own environments.

A neutral trust layer gives the market a better path. Platforms, model developers, cloud providers and enterprise software companies can still innovate above it. But the basic ability to establish ownership and accountability for an agent should not depend on any one proprietary ecosystem. The trust layer has to be common enough to travel, and that means it’s probably one that already exists.

We have seen this pattern before. The internet was able to grow because certain foundational functions were treated as shared infrastructure. The Domain Name System did not solve every security challenge on the internet, and it was never meant to. But it did create a common way to resolve names across a global network without requiring one company to control the applications and services built above it. AI agents now need a similar foundation for accountability and trust.

That work should begin now, while the agent ecosystem is still forming. Waiting until agents are deeply embedded in enterprise workflows will make the problem harder to solve. By then, fragmented trust models may already be built into products, contracts, integrations and operating processes.

The promise of agents is real. So is the risk surface they introduce. The way forward is to build the accountability layer before fragmented trust models become embedded in the systems that agents will ultimately depend on.

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When Hackers Get AI Co-Pilots: Frontier AI and the National Security Clock

Five intelligence services rarely speak with one voice. When they warn the window of vulnerability has narrowed to months, the real question is whether the defenders can move as fast as the threat.

Throughout my years in the intelligence world, I don’t recall a single instance in which the Five Eyes partners jointly issued a public warning, so when they do, the message lies in the act as much as the words. Intelligence agencies guard their assessments and share them sparingly, almost never in the open. So, when the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand jointly warned on June 22 that frontier AI models capable of serious cyber exploitation are only "months away" from broad availability, the unanimity was itself a clear message. "The timeline is not years, it is months," they wrote.

The warning the Five Eyes partners shared is specific. These are systems that let a non-expert coordinate a complex intrusion (work that until recently required a trained team fluent in reconnaissance, exploitation, and stealth). That capability is moving out of the hands of advanced nation states and into the reach of mid-tier criminal groups and other adversaries. As the barrier to a sophisticated operation fall, the target list grows, and the systems most exposed are the ones a country cannot do without hospitals, water and power utilities, community banks, ports, and the contractors that serve them.

There is one caveat to mention. Outside experts who examined the models argued they do not represent a wholly novel threat, and the agencies concede their core remedy is familiar: fix the basics, patch faster, control identity and access. The fundamentals still decide most outcomes. What has changed is speed and, with speed, potential volume. The vulnerability was always there, and AI simply finds it faster and puts that reach into more hands.

For national security planners, "months" is the word that should capture attention. Strategy assumes time, and much of the architecture protecting critical infrastructure was built for an era when a capable intrusion took a capable organization. AI collapses that assumption. A defensive posture written to last three years can be overtaken before its first review, and the slowest links (legacy systems and sluggish patching) are the points an adversary will reach first.

Washington has begun to respond. Executive Order 14409, signed June 2, is best read as the opening move in a national security framework for frontier AI. It directs the NSA and CISA to benchmark in classified settings when a model's cyber capabilities make it a "covered frontier model," and it asks developers to voluntarily give the government up to 30 days of access to such models before release. It stands up an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse — led by Treasury — to coordinate the discovery and patching of vulnerabilities, and it directs the Justice Department to prosecute those who turn AI against American computer systems. It also pushes to put defensive AI into the hands of the institutions least able to defend themselves: rural hospitals, community banks, and local utilities.

The order is also a move in a broader contest. Representative Andrew Garbarino, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said the same week that China is "months, if not now weeks, away from achieving frontier AI capabilities comparable to those of the United States." Washington has already moved to restrict the export of a leading frontier model on national security grounds. Whoever fields these capabilities first, and whoever sets the terms for evaluating and controlling them, will shape the rules others must live by. That competition runs straight through the private companies that build the models and the critical infrastructure an adversary would target.

All of this points to the real test. If frontier AI can accelerate attacks, it can accelerate defense, and the side that equips its defenders faster holds an advantage. Programs that put defensive AI into the hands of critical-infrastructure operators, such as Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI's cyber-defense access effort, are early attempts to give defenders a head start in finding and fixing flaws before they are exploited. The harder problem is people. Models do not run themselves, and the expertise to direct them, in a utility control room or a hospital network, is scarce and unevenly spread across exactly the sectors most at risk.

This is where national security and the private sector stop being separate conversations. Most critical infrastructure is privately owned and operated, which means the front line of national defense now runs through companies whose first duty is to investors and shareholders. The operators that can name the AI systems they rely on, assume their adversaries now carry capable co-pilots, and test their defenses against machine-speed intrusion are the ones that will fare best.

All of this argues for a different compact between government and industry, grounded in shared purpose. Major developers, critical-sector operators, and the national security agencies need to engage early and honestly on the most dangerous capabilities, the way Executive Order 14409 suggests. And the country must invest in defensive AI and in the people who wield it, so the defenders of American systems keep pace with their attackers.

I spent decades in the world of intelligence, much of it managing risk where the cost of getting it wrong was measured in much more than money. The warning the Five Eyes issued this month is the kind that professionals will take seriously. The timeline is tight, and the targets are the systems a society runs on. Frontier AI will define the next era of national power, and the open question is whether the defenders get their co-pilots before the attackers’ finish deploying theirs.

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The War Before the War Has Already Begun

There are 65 active state-based conflicts in the world today, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. That is not 65 separate crises. It is 65 living laboratories.

The contest that matters is not understanding any one of them. It is recognizing the 66th — the next emerging theater — while it is still only a collection of weak signals. The war before the war has already begun, and it will be won by whoever learns fastest.

For generations, intelligence organizations competed to collect more information. Tomorrow, they will compete to learn faster. Since every adversary is becoming a learning organization, our advantage must become organizational learning — and organizational learning at this scale requires infrastructure we have not yet built.

That infrastructure includes a Digital Twin Network.

The Network, Not the Twin

The objective is not to build a better digital twin. It is to build a Digital Twin Network capable of recognizing the 66th emerging theater before it becomes obvious.

Imagine a living network of thousands of interconnected digital twins — not only of nation-states, but of terrorist organizations, criminal syndicates, cyber groups, critical infrastructure, financial systems, media ecosystems, shipping networks, supply chains, political movements and emerging technologies. Every important actor, network and system has a continuously evolving twin.

Each twin learns independently. Collectively, they learn exponentially.

The value is not in the individual twins. It is in the conversations among them. Every observation by one twin makes the entire network smarter. A political crisis in Bosnia immediately updates neighboring political, economic and alliance twins. A cyberattack against critical infrastructure causes financial, media, logistics and influence-network twins to reassess their own environments. A new disinformation tactic discovered in one region is instantly tested against every other emerging theater.

The network does not simply share information. It shares learning.

This is the shift that matters: from monitoring individual events to understanding how thousands of interconnected systems evolve together. From storing information to accumulating learning. From asking “What happened yesterday?” to asking “What is becoming more likely tomorrow?”

What the Network Looks Like in Practice

Picture a digital twin of Bosnia, Moldova or the South China Sea that updates every minute. Every political speech, troop movement, satellite image, shipping pattern, cyberattack, financial transaction and social media narrative automatically changes the model. We move from “what happened” to “what is most likely to happen next.”

AI agents do the work, each with a job. One reads every speech. Another tracks every satellite image. Another looks for new alliances. Another measures the speed of narratives. Together they integrate political developments, military movements, economic indicators, migration, social sentiment, infrastructure, weather, cyber activity and media into a single continuously updated model — one that can identify change in seconds, minutes and hours, and simulate the impact of future actions.

The ability to rank the most successful future actions, based on analysis of hundreds of potential outcomes, changes how we think about red teaming in cognitive security. We will be able to build a synthetic example of every adversary of any size, and to simulate every scenario continuously.

It will be on us to feed in the right inputs. What emerges is a global learning graph of active conflicts — every lesson, every pattern, every conflict feeding better insight in real time.

How the Network Learns: Observe, Learn, Adapt

Conflicts are like a staircase: pressure, politics, perception, prosperity, partnerships, posture, provocation. Every conflict climbs the staircase differently. A network that can read that staircase across every theater at once needs three disciplines.

Observe. We are good at collection. We will benefit from a common structure that makes our observations legible to AI. As an example, The Seven Layers of Emerging Theater Intelligence (SETI) gives every twin the same language for evaluating how adversaries evolve before open conflict:

Pressure — Are underlying conditions becoming less stable?

Politics — Are institutions losing the ability to manage that pressure?

Perception — Is someone deliberately shaping how people interpret events?

Prosperity — Are economic tools becoming instruments of competition?

Partnerships — Are actors beginning to choose sides?

Posture — Is capability being positioned?

Provocation — What event could rapidly accelerate escalation?

Learn. The measure of the network is its learning velocity — how quickly it improves after every observation. Every conflict becomes a research dataset where the network continuously asks: Which indicators appeared earliest? Which signals were ignored? Which combinations proved most predictive? Which assumptions proved wrong? Which interventions slowed escalation? Which technologies changed outcomes?

Adapt. The network tracks how media and technology are evolving and how they will change future tactics. Whether it is artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, commercial satellite imagery, cyber capabilities, sensors, recommendation algorithms or open-source techniques, we watch how each one shortens the distance between pressure and politics, perception and partnerships, posture and provocation.

All of it feeds back into the twins. SETI gives the network a common language; learning velocity gives it a scorecard. Together they make the network something fundamentally different from today’s intelligence systems — a living research community that studies all 65 active conflicts every day and asks the same questions of each. Which pressures are increasing? Which partnerships are changing? Which narratives are spreading? Which actors are learning fastest? And, most important, where is the next theater beginning to resemble the early stages of previous conflicts?

The Scale of the Build

This is why the build matters, and why it must begin now. A network worthy of the threat means digital twins for every nation-state adversary, roughly 100 foreign terrorist organizations, 500 major transnational criminal organizations, 300 state-sponsored cyber groups, hundreds or thousands of hacktivists, 600 militias, insurgencies and armed non-state actors, and thousands of influence and disinformation networks.

That represents a good start.

As AI, autonomous agents and eventually quantum computing mature, the scale of continuous learning will expand dramatically. The future of intelligence will belong to organizations that treat every conflict as a learning system, every emerging theater as a research project, and every observation as a chance to improve faster than their adversaries.

The Only Question That Matters

The race is no longer to understand today’s 65 conflicts. It is to recognize the 66th emerging theater before anyone else — while it is still only weak signals.

That is a contest of learning, and learning at that scale cannot be improvised in the moment a crisis arrives. It has to be built in advance. The Digital Twin Network is that build.

The war before the war has already begun. The only question is whether we will have the network in place to see it.

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Congress Questions Pentagon Spending—and the Future of Trump’s Battleship

“I’m deeply concerned that the Presidential proposal for $350 billion mandatory funding [to be carried in a reconciliation bill and not an appropriations bill] for defense will have no Appropriations [Committee] input on the enactment. That’s not the right way to fund the Department of Defense, because it took the Department ten months to explain to Congress how they were going to spend the $150 billion in mandatory funding they received last year. It’s unacceptable, and I have no confidence the Department will do a better job responding to us in the future. There’s also no guarantee that a reconciliation bill will pass.”

That was Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) speaking last Wednesday at the House Appropriations Committee meeting that marked up the Fiscal Year 2027 Defense Appropriations Bill.

Ranking Democrat on the panel’s Defense Subcommittee, McCollum was questioning the Trump administration’s second year of seeking to put a major chunk of proposed defense spending in a reconciliation bill, where it could avoid both pre-passage congressional review and require only a majority vote for Senate approval.

It turned out that McCollum had bipartisan support for her view.

The House Appropriations Committee, in its report on the bill it later approved that day, included several examples of problems caused by using mandatory spending in a reconciliation bill, along with remedies it proposed..

I will discuss them below, along with one other critical issue – problems in U.S. Navy shipbuilding -- that the House committee also raised in its report.

Remember, however, these are just one committee’s suggestions and they still have a way to go to be adopted by the full House and Senate.

One mandatory spending example in the Committee report relates to the controversial F-35 Lightning joint fighter program.

The President’s fiscal year 2027 budget request includes $7 billion in discretionary funding for 32 F–35 aircraft and $10 billion in mandatory funding for 53 F–35s. Additional modernization funds sought for the F-35 program includes $2 billion in discretionary funding and $2.4 billion in mandatory funding.

In its report, the House Appropriations Committee said it “has serious concerns regarding how the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) bifurcated the funding request and questions the rigor that was used to split the request between discretionary and mandatory funding. For example, radars and other critical components were either funded in full on one side of the ledger

or the other, inconsistent with the total flyaway costs for discretionary and mandatory quantities.”

The Committee report continues, “Further, OMB made assumptions on program savings associated with executing a multi-year procurement contract, for which a corresponding legislative proposal has not been submitted, and applied all the savings to the discretionary request. As a result, the discretionary budget request actually procures a quantity of only six aircraft, rather than the 32 it purports to fund.”

Another Committee report example related to more than $43.4 billion for several critical munitions that is included in the $350 billion mandatory package. The committee said, “In many cases entering into MYP (multi-year procurement) contracts will require both discretionary and mandatory funds. The topic of accelerating munitions production has been a priority of the Department and Congress alike, though splitting funding into two funding processes could lead to incongruencies that will not be easily remedied.”

Splitting weapons programs between the discretionary and mandatory funding prevents Congress from considering requests as a whole, the Committee report says, thus preventing “effective oversight and program continuity and also to preserve production lines and commitments to industry partners and allies.”

The report adds that this year the House Committee is only considering the discretionary portion of the request, but will be “working with the [Defense] Department to ensure that budget justification materials submitted for fiscal year 2028 are adequate to evaluate the full-funding profile, regardless of funding mechanism or whether funding was previously enacted or provided in any future reconciliation package.”

The Appropriations panel report also directs attention to problems in the Navy’s shipbuilding program where the President’s fiscal 2027 budget request includes over $60 billion in discretionary funding for the Trump administration’s so-called Golden Fleet Initiative.

As the report puts it, “The Committee remains firm in its conviction that funding alone does not guarantee on-time delivery and is no substitute for sound program management and rigorous oversight. The Committee is concerned that an accelerated pace of investment, absent commensurate accountability, risks repeating the cost growth and schedule slips that have plagued nearly every major shipbuilding program in recent years.”

Getting specific, the report says, “The Committee is particularly troubled that the Navy’s cost-to-complete request for shipbuilding totals $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2027. The cumulative cost of these delays and overruns now rivals the price of the ships themselves, eroding the buying power of every dollar appropriated for new procurement. The Committee believes that the Navy has not consistently demonstrated the ability to identify, report, and correct adverse cost and schedule trends in a timely manner.”

For a remedy, the Committee “directs the Secretary of the Navy to submit a report to the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees not later than 90 days after the enactment of this Act, and quarterly thereafter,” on each major shipbuilding program: to include the current delivery schedule, cost-to-complete with drivers of any growth; and actions the Navy has taken or intends to take to recover any schedule and contain cost growth.

The Committee report also directed the Government Accountability Office next year to assess any recurring cost growth and schedule delay across major Navy shipbuilding programs and the adequacy of the Navy’s response to identify and arrest such trends early.

The Committee also took aim at two specific submarine shipbuilding programs, starting with the Columbia-class which is the sea-based leg of the strategic nuclear triad, and the Virginia-class attack submarine.

According to the Committee report, “the lead Columbia-class submarine is delayed by as much as 18 months and that the Virginia-class program is delayed by as much as 42 months,” adding, “Delays of this magnitude present significant risk to strategic deterrence, erode undersea superiority, and degrade long-term operational availability and readiness.”

Because, according to the Committee report, “incremental funding in a constrained industrial environment serves only to introduce further risk,” the panel recommended “full funding for one Columbia-class submarine and two Virginia-class submarines.”

The House Committee report also took aim at the nascent Trump Guided Missile Battleship (BBG(X) program for which the President’s FY 2027 budget seeks $1 billion in advance procurement and $837 million in research and development funds.

The report says, “The Committee notes that the [Trump battleship] program has not finalized ship design, completed a formal analysis of alternatives, or established a stable set of requirements, and that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the lead ship could cost in excess of $20 billion.”

The report added the Committee has cautioned in the past that “committing funding to construction before achieving design stability and solidifying requirements is a principal cause of the cost growth, schedule delay, and industrial base instability that afflict Navy shipbuilding.”

The Committee report also warned “that BBG(X), as a nuclear-powered surface vessel, will draw on the same finite pool of nuclear-capable shipyard capacity, skilled workforce, reactor components, and supplier base on which the Columbia-class submarine, Virginia-class submarine, and Ford-class aircraft carrier programs depend.”

Given the situation, the Committee said that “introducing a new nuclear surface combatant [the BBG(X)] without careful planning could compound those constraints and place at risk the delivery of [shipbuilding] programs the Committee considers higher priorities for the nuclear-capable industrial base.”

As a result, the Committee requested detailed reports from the Navy Secretary: One that “addresses the validated requirements and key performance parameters for the large surface combatant [BBG(X)]; the status of the analysis of alternatives and ship design, including a design maturity assessment and the criteria the Navy will use to certify design stability prior to any commitment to lead-ship construction.”

And a second report that deals with the “Navy’s strategy to design and construct BBG(X) without interfering with existing nuclear-powered shipbuilding programs,” and also “how the Navy will sequence and resource BBG(X) so as not to jeopardize the delivery schedules of those programs.”

If that were not enough, the Committee also added a section to the actual legislation, Section 8147, which, by law, would limit the Department of the Navy from using funds to contract to build the lead ship of the Trump-class battleship program, BBG(X), until the “Secretary of the Navy certifies to the congressional defense committees that the weapon systems planned for inclusion in such lead ship are at a sufficiently mature technology readiness level.”

In a column last April, I noted some weapons Trump wants to include on BBG(X) are still in development and any design for such a ship was at least two years away. I now repeat what I wrote two months ago, my bet is that none of these Trump-class battleships will ever actually be built.

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America's Empty Counterterrorism Chair

The world's counterterrorism chiefs are meeting in New York this week. We brought a list of demands and not much else.

A plot hatched in a chat room in one country, funded from a second, carried out by a man walking into a crowd in a third – that's the shape of terrorism now. It doesn't stop at borders. It never agreed to.

That's the problem sitting in front of the world's counterterrorism chiefs this week. They're at the U.N. for the first time since 2023, and on Wednesday the General Assembly reopens the global strategy that's held this fight together for twenty years. The question on the table is simple and ugly: who's actually going to do the work?

Washington's answer lately is everyone but us. The new U.S. strategy tells allies to carry more of the load and barely bothers to dress it up – the era of America as the world's cop is over, pick up the slack. There's a fair point buried in there. Allies should pay more and do more in their own backyards.

But you can't order everyone else to step up while you're sliding toward the door. The federal center built to connect the dots between agencies has had no permanent boss since March. Homeland Security hasn't issued a national threat warning since last September. State shut down its CVE and GEC teams – the shops that countered extremist recruiting and foreign propaganda – over the past year. The FBI and Justice Department teams that chase these cases are thinner than they've been in two decades. We're lecturing the world about leadership while quietly dismantling our own.

And the chair we're vacating doesn't stay empty. The U.N.'s counterterrorism work runs almost entirely on donated money, most of it from a few Gulf states. Cut our funding and our attention, and we don't shut the operation down – we hand the pen to whoever's still paying. Their threats become the priorities. Their enemies become the targets. That swap is already underway, one budget cycle at a time.

The timing couldn't be worse, because the threat is spreading, not shrinking – splitting into more groups, in more places, every year. ISIS-K runs plots out of South Asia. Al-Qaeda's Sahel franchise has turned that region into the deadliest killing ground on the planet. Newer names – the Resistance Front in Kashmir, the Majeed Brigade in Balochistan – show how fast a local grudge now becomes an outfit with cash, recruits, and a slick media shop. You don't beat a threat like that by going it alone – and you definitely don't beat it while eyeing the exit.

So where should the allies in that room actually put their weight this week?

Start with the people nobody wants to claim: the captured fighters and their families still languishing in camps years after the caliphate fell. Bring them home, try them, rehabilitate them. It's slow, ugly, and a political grenade – and every year we dodge it, we let the next generation steep in the same poison that made the last one.

Less visible and more useful is the plumbing: shared watchlists, fingerprints, traveler data, the systems that flag a wanted man before he boards a plane. Most countries still can't run it well, and helping them will stop more attacks than any speech from a podium.

None of that touches the cheapest counterterrorism there is – the kid who never gets recruited in the first place. You can't arrest your way out of this, and the prevention programs that reach that kid early are always the first thing cut and the last thing anyone takes credit for.

And the new front: machines. Cheap drones in the hands of groups that used to throw rocks. AI that spits out propaganda in forty languages and finds a lonely teenager faster than any human ever could. The side that masters these tools first wins. Nothing says it'll be us.

Twenty years ago the world decided this fight couldn't be run one country at a time – not out of idealism, but because the math demanded it. Threats cross borders faster than any single government can chase them. The strategy up for review this week has outlived four presidents for one reason: the work got shared instead of dumped.

Walking away now, with the threat splintering and the tools getting sharper, isn't strength – it's a bet that the next attack will be polite enough to stay in someone else's country. It won't. It never has.

The allies are in the room this week. The only question left is whether we lead the table or leave it.

Dexter Ingram is a former senior national security executive who led the State Department's office for Countering Violent Extremism and served as acting director of the 89-nation Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He writes the newsletter Dexter Ingram: Declassified.

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Don’t Permit Iran to Enrich Uranium

Ideally, Iran should not be permitted to enrich uranium, even at the 3.67% low enriched uranium level, enough for nuclear reactors to generate electricity, not a nuclear explosion. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT) does not grant an unfettered right to enrich uranium, but even if it did, Iran’s egregious behavior should disqualify them. Indeed, the NPT recognizes the right of non-nuclear-weapons states to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Iran has approximately 970 lbs. of uranium enriched to 60% purity – enough for 12 nuclear weapons if in a few weeks enriched to 90% -- that could be down blended to 3.67% in a nuclear weapons state, like Russia, China, or the U.S. Iran may demand, but can they be trusted to down blend this uranium -- buried in deep underground hardened facilities -- themselves?

Enriched uranium for peaceful, civilian use is provided to non-nuclear-weapons states by Russia (Rosatom), France (Orano), a British-Dutch-German consortium (Urenco) and China (China National Nuclear Cooperation). This is where Iran can and should acquire their enriched uranium for peaceful, civilian purposes.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was opposed by some who took issue with the sunset clause that limited enrichment to 3.67% purity for 15 years – until 2031. After that, it depended on nuclear monitors gaining the access necessary to ensure Iran was not enriching at the 20% or 60% purity levels, a few weeks from the 90% purity level necessary for nuclear weapons. The JCPOA also limited Iran to use first-generation centrifuges for 10 years – until 2026 – after which, more sophisticated centrifuges could be developed and used to enrich uranium.

But this should not be a contest between the JCPOA and whatever is decided during the upcoming 60 days of nuclear negotiations with Iran. Our focus should be on Iran and how they succeeded in convincing the U.S. and our allies and partners to trust them to enrich uranium at the 3.67% purity level for civilian use only. But Iran was enriching at the 20% and 60% levels, seemingly threatening to go nuclear, despite their stated commitment not to produce or acquire nuclear weapons. It’s now publicly known that prior to 2003, Iran had an active program to produce nuclear weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) often reminds us that their monitors in Iran were denied access to suspect non-declared nuclear sites in Iran. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has criticized Iran for severely restricting or denying monitors access to its nuclear facilities and losing knowledge of Iran’s nuclear materials, thus unable to verify that their program was exclusively peaceful.

But it’s more than the NPT and Iran’s so-called right to enrich uranium. It’s about the regime’s evil behavior. In 1984, the U.S. designated Iran the leading state sponsor of terrorism, providing funding, weapons, training, and sanctuary to numerous terrorist organizations. Their control of and support to Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis and the thousands of innocent people killed by these cowardly terrorist organizations should not be forgotten.

Iran’s brutal treatment of its own people – the Green Movement in 2009, the Women Life Freedom Movement in 2022, and the 2025-2026 Protests – and the use of lethal force to crush any anti-government dissent should not be forgotten.

This is the Iran we’re dealing with. Indeed, is this the Iran we can trust to enrich uranium at the 3.67% purity level for civilian, peaceful use?

As we prepare for the 60 days of nuclear negotiations, Iran’s theocracy must feel good about the $300 billion they will get for reconstruction and economic development, and the lifting of sanctions to permit them to sell crude oil and diesel on the open market, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the unfreezing of $100 billion for humanitarian use and Qatar’s immediate release of $6 billion. And of course, the lifting of the 2-month U.S. blockade of Iran.

Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, said President Donald Trump acted “out of desperation” to secure the agreement with Iran, while Iran acted “out of compassion and goodwill” to reach the agreement.

Iran’s ballistic missile program and support to proxies should follow our scheduled 60 days of nuclear discussions with Iran. These programs are a threat to the region.

Clearly, Iran cannot be trusted to enrich uranium.

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

This article was originally published in The Washington Times and is republished here with permission.

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The AI Bubble and the Growing National Security Problem

The AI bubble is not a capability bubble. It is an expectation bubble. National security leaders are treating AI as a replacement for analysts, engineers, and tradecraft when it is really a volatile acceleration layer that still requires human judgment, security controls, and cost discipline.

The current state of AI is defined by inflated assumptions. Vendors overstate capability, users over-delegate judgment, and policymakers react to controlled demos as if they represent real-world operational power. The Mythos/Fable incident shows how quickly that confusion can become policy: the U.S. government treated access to a commercial model as a national-security transfer, forcing Anthropic to restrict access to its premier systems.

The problem is not that Mythos is too powerful. The problem is that institutions are starting to make decisions as if the marketing copy is reality. These systems are powerful, but they are not independent thinkers.

AI can surface information at extraordinary speed. It can summarize documents, generate code, translate foreign-language material, identify patterns, and automate repetitive tasks — but it cannot create new ground truth. It cannot determine whether a piece of intelligence is reliable, whether a cyber operation is lawful, or whether an analytic conclusion is strategically sound.

This is where the national-security conversation is going wrong. The debate keeps treating model capability as operational capability. They are not the same. A model that can describe a vulnerability is not the same as an operator who can exploit it. A model that can summarize a document is not the same as an analyst who can assess it. The more powerful these systems become, the more dangerous that distinction becomes.

AI does not exercise judgment, understand mission context, or carry accountability. It is an acceleration layer, and in the hands of trained users, it compresses time and expands reach. In the hands of institutions that mistake output for truth, it will accelerate error, overconfidence, and bad policy.

The bubble is bursting, but not because AI failed

The AI bubble is bursting because organizations bought the wrong story. They thought they were buying replacement labor. What they actually bought was an expensive, overconfident junior assistant: impressive in the interview and with first drafts, but unreliable when placed inside workflows that require judgment, context, and accountability.

Despite the rhetoric of AI replacing jobs, companies are starting to confront a harder reality: these systems can accelerate work, but they do not eliminate the need for people who understand the work. The danger is not simply that AI will produce bad output; the danger is that institutions will mistake that output for finished analysis.

AI is not cheap labor

AI is often sold as cheap replacement labor. The reality is much more nuanced: in proactive it is an expensive acceleration layer that still requires human judgment, review, and correction. At Shadow Nexus, we have AI integrated as a portion of our solution, but it is not the capability itself. Using AI in this manner helps us unlock information hidden in data that would be difficult to reach manually. But this has only worked because our tools requires a human to be involved every step of the way – providing course correction and validation.

That's what makes the "fully autonomous" pitch so misleading. The autonomy is really a system that, left unchecked, is prone to make mistakes and inflate costs.

Microsoft researchers recently tested how major frontier models perform in delegated workflows. They found that even frontier models corrupted an average of 25 percent of document content after 20 back-and-forth interactions, while the average across all tested models was about 50 percent degradation. Degradation worsened with larger documents, longer interactions, and distractor files.

The test was simple: give the model a document, ask it to make an edit, then ask it to get back to its original state. A reliable delegate will returns the document close to its original form. Instead, the errors compounded — like making a photocopy of a photocopy until the original slowly disappears.

The problem is further compounded by the constantly changing pricing model. Anthropic's Opus 4.7 tokenizer increased token usage by up to 35 percent (meaning the same text put into Opus 4.6 would require 35% less tokens). Then with the introduction of Fable 5 only a few months later, Anthropic doubled the published token price.

This rapid increase represents a serious procurement problem for corporations and government customers alike. Agencies can budget for seats, licenses, and fixed contracts. It is much harder to budget for agentic workflows that expand unpredictably through context growth, tool calls, retries, failed tasks, and human rework. That is not just sticker shock. It is meter opacity.

The Tradecraft Problem

Cost is only half the problem. Even at a price you can predict, AI introduces a subtler risk: it produces polished mistakes at scale — and in analytic environments, a polished mistake is far more dangerous than an obvious one.

AI hallucination is not just a chatbot problem. It becomes an institutional risk when generated text enters official documents, legal analysis, or intelligence reporting without source-level verification. Recently, Deloitte Australia agreed to partially refund the Australian government after a report it produced was found to contain AI-generated errors, including nonexistent references and fabricated quotes from a federal court judge.

For intelligence work, the analogy is obvious. A hallucinated citation is not a formatting error, it’s a provenance failure – and a hallucinated provenance chain can contaminate judgment, mislead decision-makers, and jeopardize missions. Don’t misunderstand me: This does not mean AI should be kept out of intelligence work. It means the tradecraft needs to evolve.

AI can be a force multiplier when used to accelerate research, translation, link analysis, and other repetitive analytic tasks - but it should not be treated as a replacement analyst. It has no concept of a larger context, which means it can’t understand legal authorities, operational risk, or true mission context. Those responsibilities still (and should always) belong to people. The right model is not “AI instead of analysts,” it is analysts using AI inside workflows. This requires changing the tradecraft to include a completely new way of thinking.

Which lands a government customer in an impossible spot: how do you adopt and rely on a tool that you can neither fully trust nor accurately budget for?

Government Adoption and the Rising China Problem

For both government and commercial users, the obvious response to rising AI costs is to move towards publicly available "open-weight" models. Systems like GLM-5.2 and Qwen-3.7 now rival the most advanced commercial models, improving cost predictability while keeping sensitive workflows inside government-controlled infrastructure. The catch: they're all designed and shipped from China.

That's what makes the recent Anthropic fight so revealing. Earlier this year, the Pentagon reportedly designated U.S.-based Anthropic a supply-chain risk after a dispute over its safeguards and military use of its models — even as China's GLM-5.2 ranks among the top systems on the market, just behind Anthropic's own Fable 5, with Alibaba's Qwen not far behind.

This is the irony the policy debate: government is trying to regulate a technology it doesn't fully understand, and much of that fear is driven by marketing. Fable 5 is powerful — but so are Opus and GPT-5.5. In the hands of a seasoned user, GPT-5.5 does just as much. As with every new technology, the danger isn't the tool. It's the user.

Meanwhile the drift is already underway. Microsoft recently signaled it may leverage China's DeepSeek model, even as the U.S. weighs blacklisting DeepSeek as a supply-chain risk. Assigning a supply chain risk to U.S. companies feels like an overstep when the trends show organizations moving toward models developed and controlled by adversarial nations.

AI is not going away, and no branding fight or access restriction will change that. The United States should treat AI as the new standard tool for analytic and operational work. But that is all it is: a tool. At its best, it's a starting point — a way to draft, accelerate research, and move faster through large volumes of information. That is also where the handoff to a human has to happen.

The Microsoft research and the Deloitte case are the warning. Left alone, generative AI does exactly what it is built to do: generate plausible output, regardless of accuracy. That risk only compounds as agencies look past closed U.S. models toward open-weight systems built by adversaries.

What happens when the model itself has been trained to nudge its answers — quietly, in a direction someone else chooses? Left uncaught, that kind of slow and deliberate data poisoning can corrupt the very work it's meant to support. That is the real supply-chain risk.

The real work should not be choosing which models we're allowed to use — it should be building the judgment to use them, and not mistaking model names for national-security strategy.

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DNI Day Two: Building the Intelligence Community for 2045

Author's Note

In our first paper, DNI Day One: Three Strategic Decisions for National Security Evolution, we identified three challenges confronting the next Director of National Intelligence: enterprise leadership, resource alignment, and strategic competition. This paper focuses on the reforms most likely to improve the Intelligence Community's ability to meet those challenges.

The recommendations that follow are not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, they represent structural changes that could have disproportionate impact across the Intelligence Community: refocusing ODNI on total enterprise leadership, modernizing how intelligence investments are governed, and creating a mechanism to identify and resolve the institutional seams that America's adversaries increasingly exploit.

Reasonable observers may disagree on the specific solutions proposed here. However, the need for reform is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Twenty years after the creation of ODNI, the Intelligence Community faces a fundamentally different operating environment shaped by strategic competition, commercial innovation, artificial intelligence, and increasingly integrated threats. The challenge is not whether the nation needs intelligence reform, but where leaders should focus their attention to achieve the greatest enterprise impact.

Recommendation 1: Return ODNI to its Community Management Roots

We do not recommend eliminating the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The need for a senior intelligence leader responsible for integrating the Intelligence Community remains as important today as it was when leaders such as Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar first advocated for reform in the 1990s. The failures exposed by the attacks of September 11, 2001, demonstrated the limitations of the existing Community Management Staff structure and ultimately led Congress to establish the DNI.

The challenge today is not whether the nation needs a DNI. It is whether ODNI is organized to perform its most important functions and has the correct authorities and oversight functions to truly lead the intelligence community.

The next DNI should undertake a deliberate reevaluation of ODNI’s mission and functions to refocus the organization on its original purpose: enterprise leadership, integration, resource alignment, and community management. Functions that primarily execute intelligence missions, including analysis, collection activities, and intelligence operations, should be performed by agencies whose core mission is operational execution. ODNI should focus on the responsibilities that only an enterprise integrator can perform.

Specifically,

Conduct a 90-day review of all ODNI organizations against a simple standard: Does this function uniquely require an enterprise integrator? The review should be led by a small panel of respected former intelligence leaders and provide recommendations to both the DNI and Congress. This would include specific evaluations of the transfers of NCSC and NCTC, both of which have been periodically discussed.

Transfer mission execution functions that do not require ODNI ownership to the agencies best positioned to perform them.

Reestablish National Intelligence Managers as true enterprise leaders responsible for integrating priorities, collection, analysis, partnerships, workforce planning, and resources.

Rebuild the ODNI as a modern Community Management Staff focused on enterprise integration, technology governance, workforce planning, and resource alignment

Why

ODNI's greatest value is ensuring that the Intelligence Community performs its missions effectively. The DNI should be a leadership and service organization rather than another operational intelligence entity. The Intelligence Community needs a strong enterprise manager capable of aligning priorities, resolving disputes, integrating capabilities, and driving accountability across agencies.

The Intelligence Community's most significant challenges, including artificial intelligence, commercial data integration, workforce modernization, and emerging technology governance, require enterprise leadership. ODNI should lead these efforts.

Recommendation 2: Integrate the Civilian and Defense Intelligence Enterprises and Modernize Intelligence Investment Governance

The next DNI and Secretary of Defense should establish a shared leadership model for integrating the Intelligence Community's civilian and defense intelligence enterprises. As part of this effort, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security (USDI&S) should serve as the Deputy Director of National Intelligence, creating a direct leadership link between the Office of the DNI and the Defense Intelligence Enterprise.

Together, the DNI and Deputy DNI should establish and co-chair an Intelligence Investment Board responsible for enterprise-level investment decisions in areas where national and military intelligence requirements increasingly overlap, including:

Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics;
Commercial data and data acquisition;
Space-based intelligence capabilities;
Cloud infrastructure and computing environments;
Enterprise architectures and interoperability standards;
Open-source intelligence data procurement;
Collection modernization, including human intelligence

The Board should review major intelligence investments through an enterprise lens, identify opportunities to eliminate duplication, establish common standards, and ensure that capabilities serving both national and military missions are developed and funded as integrated priorities.

Over time, Congress should direct a formal review of the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and Military Intelligence Program (MIP) construct with the goal of transitioning from separate budget categories toward a capability-based investment framework that better reflects how intelligence is collected, analyzed, and delivered in the modern operating environment.

Why

The Intelligence Community has made significant progress integrating its civilian intelligence agencies over the past two decades. Less attention, however, has been paid to fully integrating the broader Defense Intelligence Enterprise, including DIA, the military services, Combatant Commands, and Joint Staff intelligence organizations. Collectively, these organizations represent the majority of the Intelligence Community's personnel, collection infrastructure, and operational intelligence capabilities.

The current structure creates an inherent challenge. The DNI is responsible for leading the Intelligence Community, while the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security is responsible for oversight, guidance, and policy across the Defense Intelligence Enterprise. Yet, many of the capabilities that will define future intelligence advantage increasingly serve both national and military missions.

Artificial intelligence, commercial data, space-based collection, cloud infrastructure, and advanced analytic platforms do not neatly align with traditional organizational boundaries. They support policymakers, military commanders, intelligence analysts, and operational forces alike. Maintaining separate governance and investment decisions for capabilities that serve both national and military missions risks duplication, slows modernization, and increases costs.

We recognize that proposals to further integrate intelligence governance between ODNI and the Department of Defense may raise concerns about authorities, resources, and departmental equities. This recommendation is not intended to diminish the Department's role in intelligence or transfer operational control away from Defense organizations. Rather, it reflects the reality that much of the nation's intelligence capability already resides within the Defense Intelligence Enterprise and that effective enterprise leadership requires a governance structure that fully incorporates those resources.

Nor is this recommendation fundamentally about transferring budget authority between organizations. Many of the capabilities discussed in this paper already support missions identified as national intelligence responsibilities under Executive Order 12333 while simultaneously enabling military operations. The challenge is not determining who owns the mission. The challenge is ensuring that enterprise investments are prioritized, governed, and integrated in ways that serve both national and military decision-makers.

To support this integration effort, the Intelligence Community should adopt several enterprise principles.

The DNI and Deputy DNI should jointly establish intelligence priorities and investment guidance. As part of this effort, the National Intelligence Priorities Framework should be modernized into an Intelligence Priorities Framework that reflects the reality that many of today's intelligence challenges span both national and departmental missions. Priorities should be organized around mission outcomes and decision advantage rather than institutional ownership.

The Intelligence Community should pursue acquisition reform focused on enterprise outcomes. Today, agencies often procure similar data, software, cloud services, and analytic capabilities through separate contracts, acquisition strategies, and governance processes. The result is unnecessary duplication, higher costs, slower technology adoption, and inconsistent access across the enterprise. The Intelligence Investment Board should promote joint procurement strategies, establish common requirements where practical, and leverage the collective buying power of the national and defense intelligence enterprises. The goal is a more coordinated approach to acquiring capabilities that support shared missions.

The Intelligence Community should treat commercial capabilities as foundational intelligence infrastructure rather than niche enhancements. Commercial space systems, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, advanced analytics, and open-source intelligence capabilities are no longer supplementary tools. They increasingly form a core infrastructure upon which intelligence advantage depends.

Finally, the Intelligence Community should deepen its engagement with industry, academia, and the broader innovation ecosystem through formal executive and technical exchange programs. Despite decades of outreach initiatives, advisory boards, and pilot programs, the government continues to struggle with integrating commercial innovation at the speed of relevance. Time-limited assignments for leaders from industry, academia, and venture-backed technology firms, coupled with opportunities for intelligence professionals to gain experience in the commercial sector, would help close this gap. These exchanges should operate under rigorous ethics and conflict-of-interest safeguards and be tied to specific objectives such as technology adoption, acquisition reform, commercial integration, and workforce modernization.

For the first time in Intelligence Community history, much of the innovation that will determine future intelligence advantage is being driven outside government. The Intelligence Community's governance, investment, acquisition, and talent management models must evolve accordingly.

Recommendation 3: Establish Strategic Competition as a Core Community Management Function

The next DNI should designate strategic competition as a core Community Management responsibility and direct the Deputy DNI to establish a formal enterprise process for identifying, prioritizing, and resolving the intelligence, counterintelligence, information-sharing, technology, and operational seams that America's adversaries routinely exploit.

This recommendation does not require the creation of a new mission center, operational office, or permanent bureaucracy. Rather, it should be accomplished through a realignment of existing ODNI Community Management responsibilities, leveraging the National Intelligence Managers, Mission Integration organizations, and existing interagency coordination mechanisms.

The Deputy DNI should be responsible for leading this effort in close partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reflecting the reality that strategic competition increasingly occurs at the intersection of foreign intelligence, domestic security, counterintelligence, and military operations.

The objective should be straightforward: identify where institutional barriers are preventing the United States from effectively developing strategic competition options and assign responsibility for resolving those barriers.

The Deputy DNI should provide regular updates to the DNI, Director of the FBI, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor, and congressional oversight committees identifying:

The most significant intelligence integration challenges affecting strategic competition.
Progress in resolving identified institutional barriers.
Recommendations requiring policy, resource, legislative, or executive action.
Remaining risks to national security resulting from unresolved seams.

The effort should establish annual priorities focused on key strategic competitors, beginning with China, Russia, and Iran, and develop measurable objectives tied to enterprise integration and operational outcomes.

Measures of effectiveness should include reductions in information-sharing delays, improvements in technology protection, increased intelligence support to operational missions, improved integration across agencies, and demonstrable disruption of adversary activities.

Why

America's strategic competitors already operate as integrated national security enterprises. They do not distinguish between intelligence collection, technology acquisition, economic competition, cyber operations, influence campaigns, espionage, military modernization, and industrial policy. They employ all instruments of national power in a coordinated manner to advance national objectives.

The United States, by contrast, often organizes its responses through institutional, legal, budgetary, and bureaucratic boundaries that were designed for a different era. As a result, adversaries frequently exploit the seams between foreign intelligence and domestic security, intelligence and law enforcement, technology protection and economic policy, cyber defense and traditional intelligence operations, and national and military intelligence activities.

Intelligence support to strategic competition increasingly requires enterprise leadership capable of integrating activities across the Intelligence Community and identifying barriers that no single organization has the authority or perspective to address independently. This responsibility naturally belongs within ODNI's Community Management function. Strategic competition is fundamentally an enterprise integration challenge. It requires leadership capable of aligning priorities, resolving disputes, integrating capabilities, and ensuring that intelligence activities contribute to broader national objectives.

Also, the DNI, working closely with the FBI and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is uniquely positioned to bridge the foreign-domestic and intelligence-operations divides that adversaries increasingly exploit.

Ultimately, the Intelligence Community must evolve from simply informing policymakers about adversary campaigns to providing options for the US to compete effectively against adversaries. Strategic competition is the defining national security challenge of the twenty-first century and should be treated as a core Community Management responsibility.

The Ultimate Test of ODNI: Measuring Enterprise Success

As the enterprise leader of the Intelligence Community, this new DNI should demonstrate not only value to Congress and the Executive Branch, but also measurable value back to the agencies, departments, and professionals that comprise the Community. The ultimate test of ODNI's effectiveness is not how many directives it issues, how many meetings it convenes, or how many organizations it oversees. It is whether the Intelligence Community operates more effectively because ODNI exists. The ability to demonstrate measurable outcomes across the enterprise may ultimately be the strongest answer to the recurring question that has followed ODNI since its creation: Does the nation need a DNI? We believe that answer is yes, but that value should be visible, measurable, and attributable.

Specifically, the DNI should be able to demonstrate measurable progress in the following areas to share with OMB, Oversight and the Public:

• Enterprise Priority Alignment
Can the Intelligence Community rapidly align collection, analysis, and resources against emerging national security priorities without creating new organizations or duplicative structures?
(Example: Intelligence Community resources were redirected within weeks to support a Taiwan crisis, major cyber incident, or emerging Arctic challenge without establishing a new task force or mission center.)

• Resource Integration
Has the Intelligence Community reduced duplicative investments and improved enterprise decision-making across the National Intelligence Program and Military Intelligence Program?
(Example: Enterprise licensing and coordinated procurement reduced duplicative commercial data purchases by $15 million annually while expanding access to multiple agencies.)

• Technology Adoption
Has the time required to identify, procure, accredit, and operationalize new technologies been reduced?
(Example: The average timeline for deployment of AI-enabled analytic tools decreased from 24 months to less than 12 months.)

• Commercial Integration
Can commercial capabilities, data, and services be incorporated into intelligence missions at the speed of relevance while maintaining security, interoperability, and mission assurance?
(Example: Commercial GEOINT, RF, maritime, and financial data became available through enterprise contracts rather than separate agency purchases.)

• AI Enablement
Has the Intelligence Community successfully integrated artificial intelligence into collection, processing, exploitation, analysis, and dissemination workflows while preserving human oversight and accountability?
(Example: AI-assisted workflows reduced imagery exploitation timelines by 50 percent while maintaining analytic quality standards.)

• Strategic Competition
Can the Intelligence Community identify, expose, disrupt, and provide options to impose costs on adversary campaigns that span intelligence, cyber, economic, military, and informational domains?
(Example: Intelligence support enabled the disruption of a foreign technology acquisition network or exposed a coordinated foreign influence campaign.)

• Warning and Decision Advantage
Are policymakers, military leaders, and operators receiving integrated intelligence faster and in forms that improve decision-making?
(Example: Strategic warning identified adversary military preparations or cyber activity days earlier than historical performance benchmarks.)

Conclusion

Twenty years after the creation of ODNI, the Intelligence Community faces a fundamentally different operating environment than the one that existed following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Strategic competition, artificial intelligence, commercial innovation, and increasingly integrated threats are challenging many of the assumptions that shaped intelligence governance over the past two decades.

The recommendations outlined in this paper are not intended to redesign the Intelligence Community. Rather, they focus on three areas where reform could produce disproportionate enterprise impact: returning ODNI to its Community Management roots, modernizing how intelligence investments are governed across the national and defense intelligence enterprises, and establishing strategic competition as a core Community Management responsibility.

Taken together, these reforms would strengthen the Intelligence Community's ability to compete more effectively against increasingly sophisticated adversaries. Most importantly, the reforms can largely be accomplished through leadership, governance, and organizational discipline rather than the creation of new bureaucracies or increased resources.

The Intelligence Community does not suffer from a lack of talent, authorities, or capability. Its greatest challenge is ensuring that its capabilities are organized and integrated for the environment it faces today rather than the one it inherited twenty years ago. The next DNI has an opportunity to help lead that transition.

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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