The Cipher Brief

We are squarely in the target sights of ‘Unintended Consequences.’

What do I mean by this? Think of it as a broad spectrum of possible consequences when missiles and drones are being slung back and forth between Iran and U.S. Navy vessels and bases, and the energy and commercial facilities and ships of its Gulf allies. On one end of the spectrum, accidents happen: think the inadvertent U.S. airstrike on the girls’ school at the beginning of the war, and the more recent ‘wedding party’ casualties when a U.S. missile struck a nearby communications tower. These are tragedies for all involved. On the other side, an Iranian missile made its way through U.S. air defenses to strike a U.S. military facility in Jordan, resulting in the deaths of three U.S. troops. The latter resulted in a robust U.S. military response that targeted a variety of Iranian military facilities. This was a success for Iran and a tragedy for America.

On the other end of the spectrum, what if one of Iran’s ballistic missiles successfully navigates to its target - a U.S. base or navy vessel, for example - and significant U.S. casualties, dead and/or wounded, result? The U.S. administration is likely to come under tremendous political pressure to respond with overwhelming force. This could elevate the stakes even higher, cutting off any chance of a negotiated settlement, remote as it currently is. And with the regime already having been severely degraded militarily, and its leadership ranks diminished, what does that leave in terms of targets? More of the same?

It could also result in calls to withdraw U.S. forces, given the antipathy of a majority of the U.S. population to a war they view as unnecessary, ill-advised, and ill-managed. This would leave Iran in a weakened yet still dangerous posture, with the ability to pressure the world economy at will going forward. Neither option is appealing.

Oh, and by the way, notwithstanding the administration’s verbal gymnastics, this is very much a war.

D-Day Sanctions Regime

On the surface, this appears to be a pretty solid strategy, or at least better than what has been tried to date: Simply squeeze the Iranian economy until the regime cries uncle. It is already having an impact and will likely continue to compound the pain. But it is neither simple nor clear-cut. Who will it actually impact, how badly, and when? A total blockade means not just money or arms. It means no food. It means no medicine. And a host of other basic necessitates. The Iranian people will feel it first, particularly the young, the old, and the sick. Regime insiders, including the leadership and their loyal (for now) security forces, will be the last to see the effects.

And we have already seen Russia and China reject complying with the secondary sanctions that comprise the heart of this enhanced effort. So, no one knows what will happen if they choose to challenge the blockade; It is highly unlikely that U.S. forces will use force against Chinese vessels attempting to access Iranian ports. And that does not take into account less overt (read clandestine) interactions - intelligence sharing, weapons system development, sabotage efforts against Gulf country facilities, including pipelines, etc. - that would further evade and/or erode the U.S. advantage.

So, while there will be pain, and lots of it, as I said in a recent BBC interview, there remain many unknowns. Informal smuggling networks have abounded in the region for Millenia. The regime will utilize every trick they have learned since the ‘79 revolution while building a ‘resistance economy’ to get around the blockade/sanctions. And potentially with the implicit, if not explicit, support of two major world powers. In the end, this does not presage the near-term submission of a regime that values survival above all else. This remains very much a test of wills.

Furthermore, what happens when the world sees the Iranian people starving before their eyes? I’m not sure they will countenance this for long.

So, Who Has More at Stake?

The U.S. people are seeing higher gas prices at the pump, rising food costs, overall inflation, and more. This is painful, but certainly not existential, at least not yet. The increasingly negative impact on the world economy stands to worsen things considerably if the status quo continues for too long, so Americans are watching closely. And the mid-terms are fast approaching.

The Iranian people are seeing the destruction of their economy, their country, and potentially their very way of life. It is very much existential. The specter of a thundering locomotive of new sanctions bearing down on them must certainly be terrifying. I have no doubt many Iranians blame the Islamic regime for bringing this down upon them. But as things worsen, they may turn against the U.S. and its allies for abandoning them to the depredations of the regime.

The Iranian regime most certainly views this as an existential threat, notwithstanding its rhetoric. They would be fools not to. But Netanyahu’s 2 September statement that the Israeli government is, “working to bring down this regime and defeat it,” accompanied by Trump’s 2 September statement publicly questioning, “when the Iranian people would rise up and fight,” is unlikely to motivate them to negotiate. They will need to be forced to submit. My experience with Iranians tells me that the harder you press, the more resistant they become. Uncharted territory indeed. We will see.

China and Russia both have an adversarial relationship with the U.S. and important interests vis-à-vis Iran: military for Russia (drones) and commercial for China (oil). Why would either go out of their way to assist the United States in removing itself from a self-imposed disaster that is distracting it from issues they care about while diminishing its military capabilities, all with minimal effort? That is a question that remains to be answered.

Speaking of Regime Change

U.S. political leadership answers to the American people at the ballot box. The system is a bit creaky at the moment, but (for now) it remains intact.

The Islamic regime, by design, does not answer to the Iranian people. Iran’s elections are truly rigged, primarily by the Guardian Council’s ability to reject candidates for office, but also with an increasing willingness to falsify election results. And in the end, the Supreme Leader is able to reject any initiative or law he disagrees with. We have seen the results when the Iranian people see no recourse for accountability by the regime: people in the streets, followed by blood in the streets.

Without substantial outside support, of which we have so far seen little evidence, the populace will be hesitant to go back to the streets, knowing that if they do, they are on their own. It could happen if things get bad enough, and it is possible it might even ultimately be successful, but it is almost certain to be a massacre, followed by chaos and a very uncertain end. Yet another example of unintended consequences.

Where Are We Now?

For the moment - and this may already have changed as I write this - we are back in what I refer to as a Hyperbolating phase, where we are seeing threats/counterthreats being tossed back and forth with abandon. Most of these statements are utterly meaningless and can be ignored. It appears both sides are waiting to see who blinks first.

U.S. messaging appears to be somewhat disjointed, contradictory, and lacking an overall strategy, with the President, the only real decision-maker, continually wandering on and off the path of others in his administration: Trump - I don’t care/where are the Iranians?; Hegseth - continued confrontation; Bessent - economic asphyxiation; Rubio - no nuclear weapon/economic pressure; Vance - not a war/intermittent containment. You could claim this is purposeful to keep Iran uncertain and off balance, but it should not be doing the same to Americans. President Trump failed to bring the American people on board beforehand with a coherent (and honest) case for war and an actual strategy for winning it. The continued shuffling of various justifications we have seen from the administration serves simply to stir the mix of confusion.

I get the distinct feeling that, given the fast approaching mid-terms and the deep hole they have dug for themselves, the administration just hopes that something/anything works so they can walk away from what is clearly a foreign policy disaster.

Iran messaging, on the other hand, appears, at least to me, to be a bit more coordinated if not strategic. While most Iranian government leaders are defiantly threatening massive retaliation for continued U.S. strikes (hyperbole), including the military (both Artesh - regular military and IRGC - Revolutionary Guards), the Parliament and its Speaker Ghalibaf (“U.S. actions will not go unanswered”), and the Foreign Affairs Ministry (claiming “war crimes” by the U.S.), the lone man on an island is the Iranian President, Pezeshkian; “we do not seek war but will respond,” and, “Iran remains open to negotiations, under the June MOU”. It is important to realize that the Iranian President has virtually no policymaking role in Foreign affairs, so his statements should be given less weight than others. But he would never make this offer without the approval of the IRGC, the Supreme National Security Council and, most likely, the Supreme Leader (or whoever is speaking for him). As I have written previously, I believe that the vagueness of the original June MOU was oddly advantageous to Iran and served to lead us directly back to where we currently are. So… this would seem to indicate negotiations are at least still on the table, just not under conditions particularly favorable to the U.S.

Where Are We Going?

Military escalation? A slow grinding pressure on the regime, testing their willingness to allow their people to suffer? Or a return to the negotiating table?

Who knows? There is no simple or painless way out of this.

Unintended consequences, after all.

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

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

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

Can America’s All-Volunteer Force Survive the Next War?

“It made sense for the United States to transition from this mixed force of conscripts and professionals to an All-Volunteer Force. It has enabled us to develop a truly professionalized force. It's a professionalized force that's a lot smaller than what we saw during the draft era. And the implications of that is that it can detach the military from society or society's understanding of the military.”

That was Katherine Kuzminski, director of studies at the Center for New American Security, speaking last Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) as one of the editors of the book, Bend But Do Not Break: Shaping the Future of the All-Volunteer Force.

Appearing with Kuzminski in what became a wide-ranging discussion of the military and All-Volunteer Force were co-editors Jason Dempsey, a former US Army Infantry Officer who's with the Center for Veteran Transition and Integration at Columbia University, and Jaron S. Wharton, a career infantry officer who recently commanded a brigade in the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division and is currently a visiting fellow at CSIS. Moderating the panel was Eliot Cohen, Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS and former Counselor of the Department of State.

Early in the conversation, Kuzminski pointed out that while “the shift to an All-Volunteer Force, which would enable a more professional force, there was ‘a caveat,’” It was “supported by a standby draft. So the draft is actually still on the books. It would require Congress and the President to pull that trigger, should we need it.”

Wharton picked up on that saying, “The All-Volunteer Force’s success or continued success is not a foregone conclusion. It requires a lot of maintenance and sustainment. And because it's been so long since we've enacted that draft, it's not in people's [minds]…And so that almost makes it a relic. And that's a muscle that we can't allow to atrophy, especially in the worst contingency, if you might believe, for example, that we're on the verge at some time in our future of a large-scale combat operation, that would dwarf the absorptive capacity of the All-Volunteer Force.”

Wharton went on to point out “Most problematic with the public's understanding is the very term All-Volunteer Force because this is not a gang of volunteers. Everybody is paid. And so it's interesting that you know when we started out there were economic concerns…and they were largely couched around individual freedom…people should not be forced to do something they don't want to do.”

Dempsey added, “What the public misses now is this [the All-Volunteer Force] is a costly enterprise and nobody is serving for free. Nobody is a true volunteer and so if we actually start peeling back and interrogating those costs I think we come to a better understanding on the strength, resilience, or fragility of the system.”

Dempsey went on to point out a major change the All-Volunteer Force has created.

“The black population saved the All-Volunteer Force,” Dempsey said explaining, “When, you know, it turned out that they relying on young white males to fill the conscription [draft] Army. And then once that went away, the folks who looked at the opportunities and the economic incentives present in the military, and the ones that started flocking to it, were young blacks, and a lot of black women.”

He added, “You know, it's ironic that much of our enlisted ranks for over 20 years were dominated by senior black women in leadership positions, because it was all part of that cohort from late 70s, early 80s who saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for economic mobility.”

At that point Moderator Cohen noted, “What about immigrants? I'll tell you one of the things I remember during the Iraq war. I was over there on a fairly regular basis going to a naturalization ceremony in one of Saddam Hussein's gaudy palaces. But it was an amazing and deeply moving sight just how many men and women in uniform, who had not been citizens, were becoming citizens in the middle of a combat tour.”

To which Dempsey described enlisting immigrant volunteers as “Hugely important and we've seen massive growth of the Hispanic population over the last 15 years in the military.”

At one point, Wharton noted, “Women in the military were once capped at 2%...If you had a female service member that was married to a civilian male, that female service member wouldn't get a full housing allowance with dependents. That's actually not that long ago, if you can believe that. And over time that 2% cap has grown to we're about 17% [women] in the aggregate.”

He added, “What wasn't anticipated is not just the family dynamic, but the role, the prominence of women. So let me be clear, women have saved quantitatively and qualitatively the All-Volunteer Force. This experiment would not be sustainable without them in our ranks.”

There also was extensive discussion of the impact on deployments thanks to the All-Volunteer Force.

Kuzminski said, “I don't think that in 1973 [when transition to the All-Volunteer Force took place] they were thinking about the impact of the size of the Reserve component and the competition for talent among the Active Duty and the Reserve. The Reserve component was orders of magnitude larger with more relevant recent military experience back at the transition…So we had a more sustainable kind of backbench of folks that we could tap into should we need to.”

She said, a cultural change was needed because before 1973, “It was easy for the Active component to say, ‘Oh, our little brother, the National Guard, or you know, the Reserve component isn't at the same level as us.’”

The change took place as Kuzminski explained, “We certainly saw a heavy deployment and a use of the operational Reserve in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both for the Reserve component and for the National Guard. But when we look at our recently retired or inactive Reserve it's much smaller than what we had in the past. And that is kind of the first line of defense should we have a truly existential crisis.”

That led to what Kuzminski described as, “We've had to bend the rules sometimes or bend this construction of a truly All-Volunteer Force to have elements of compulsory service that is separate from how the broader society is thinking about deployment.”

In a way, she said, “We had compulsory service. It just looked a little different. So, the Army shifted from 12-month deployments to 15-month deployments while people were downrange. The recall of the Retired Reserve was implemented…They thought they were, you know, completing their contract and turns out that they weren't.”

Wharton raised the question about “a [future military] conflict that would require some sort of mobilization of broader society, and over time we've seen that that actually hasn't been the case. Now, would that be the case if we were fighting a near peer? I think that forces potentially an entirely set of different conclusions. But when you're fighting someone that is not a near peer, you can rely, at least we've proven that you can rely with some policy changes on the margins, the All-Volunteer Force to sustain that.”

Dempsey, referring to the current concerns caused by the Iran War, said, “We constantly look at the defense industrial base and everybody wants to talk about how many shells we can produce, you know, how many interceptors we make. And I think we really need to spend some time on the human dimension of all this, because one of the things that those of us who study this constantly talk about are two factors uh, eligibility and propensity.”

“The All-Volunteer Force, as currently built, requires a very educated force, a very disciplined force and folks that kind of want to be there,” Dempsey said, adding “And so in terms of eligibility, we know that because of rising obesity rates, drug use, lack of educational attainment, we're down in the 20s [percentage of males who qualify for military service]…We, most Americans, aren't even eligible to join the military.”

Dempsey continued, “So among those who say yes, I want to join,…you have a very, very, small subset of Americans who are willing and able to serve.” That led, he said, “at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan was a lowering of standards, waivers. And I will tell you having been in an operational unit at that time, you know, your waivers always account for your biggest disciplinary problems.”

Although the military services say they are filling their new enlistee quotas this year, Dempsey asked, “How are we going to restructure this force to accommodate people who maybe don't have the educational attainment, maybe are slightly overweight unfit, and what incentives we have to give them?...Short of a draft, how much money would we have to throw at the American public and our youth just to get a small bump in a short period of time.”

Dempsey went on to talk about “If the military is the most trusted institution, let's just make everybody join the military or let's do National Service, or all these things that somehow we can extrapolate from the military to solve all the rest of these societal ills.” To which he responded that “is not the military's mission, right? We're not a character-building summer camp for wayward youth, right? Our mission is to fight and win wars. And so people lose that and want to use the military for all these other things.”

Wharton brought up talk about “this growing warrior caste,” about which he said, “It is 100% real…I'm blanking on the data point at the moment, but there is a greater [number] than you would expect…In part that's because youth growing up in a military family are exposed to opportunities. It is not that different from families of doctors, families of firefighters.”

But Wharton went on to say, “We should be leery if there happens to be a nuance in this data where you start to see a veteran [military] population -- and there has been some evidence of this -- where they don't support necessarily their children going. Or they don't want them to [join], but once they go in they do choose to support them and there has been some evidence. Please correct me if I'm wrong that that is actually starting to be the case.”

Looking to the future, Kuzminski said, “I think it takes understanding the population that we're actually trying to recruit, versus those who are in service right now, and sticking to what would incentivize them.”

She noted the recruitment problems with Gen Z “who you know now are actually towards the upper end [of their time in military service]” and “now we're thinking about Gen Alpha who is coming up behind them.”

“When we think about what has motivated their [Gen Alpha] career decisions,” Kuzminski said, “it's been a desire to be mission-focused in the work, whatever it is that they do. It’s a desire to have multiple jobs over the course of a career” She then pointed out, “Over the course of a 40-year career in the military, you live in multiple different places, have multiple different roles, you grow through the organization. When the military is functioning at its highest ideal good, it is a mission focused organization that does look different from the rest of society. I think we just need to find a way to match the reality of that military service with what it is that those we're trying to recruit are looking for.”

On the future, Dempsey said, “Right now we're very, very, comfortable both as a nation and as a military where whenever there's a issue just throw more money at it. And right now we're able to throw $1.5 trillion at our military. I'm not sure that's sustainable, and so I'm not sure how long we can keep putting off some of these third-rail hard conversations about what real structural reform means” when it comes for the All-Volunteer Force.

Wharton said of the future, “I'm optimistic absent, with a heavy caveat, of an existential crisis because that fundamentally changes the game…This [the All-Volunteer Force] is an enormous cost to maintain, this experiment, and it requires change on the margins.”

One thing is clear, the All-Volunteer Force, the National Guards and Reserves need further study, along with some understanding of who in the future will be willing to undertake U.S. military service. Or does the U.S. need to return to a draft?

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

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

Setting Terms with America’s Tech Giants

If China attacked Taiwan tomorrow, the question might not be which aircraft carrier sails first to the Pacific, but whether a private company will activate satellite coverage over a small island. As Ukraine does today, Taiwan could soon depend on the choices of executives running commercial networks that sustain modern life. Ukraine’s wartime resilience has relied on more than 40,000 Starlink terminals and the voluntary actions of technology firms that became, in effect, auxiliary actors of national defense.

Strategic decisions once made only by governments—allocating aid, managing escalation, defining battlefield conditions—are now also being made by corporate boards and CEOs. These companies control platforms and infrastructure that shape the global balance of power. This is not an anomaly; it is the new reality of modern conflict.

America’s largest technology firms now command tools that function like strategic assets, weapons, and utilities. Satellite constellations and undersea cables are the new sea lanes of the digital era. Cloud infrastructure and AI systems are the power grids of national productivity and security. Semiconductors are the jet fuel of artificial and human intelligence as well as communication. Firms are no longer simply competitors in markets; they are multinational actors wielding levers of geopolitical influence. Their revenues exceed the GDP of many nations, and their governance decisions reverberate through global politics.

Yet, unlike in China where the state dictates corporate alignment, the United States leaves these questions to market forces and executive discretion. That gap is a strategic liability. In a Taiwan contingency, Washington cannot afford to discover in real time whether it can count on its own companies. The answer must be structured and understood in advance through a transparent framework that aligns economic incentives with national security.

This paper proposes such a framework: a public-private readiness framework (PPRF), modeled after Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) but oriented toward economic and technological preparedness. The PPRF would pre-negotiate expectations, responsibilities, and incentives between the U.S. government and critical technology firms. The goal is not coercion, but preemptive coordination—a framework that makes values-based alignment economically rational and reputationally rewarding.

Case Study: Ukraine Today, Taiwan Tomorrow

Ukraine demonstrates the stakes. When Russia invaded in 2022, Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov appealed directly to SpaceX for help. Within days, Starlink terminals arrived, sustaining command communications and civil infrastructure after Russian cyber and kinetic strikes. However, the same private network that enabled Ukraine’s defense also introduced new vulnerabilities. When Kyiv sought to extend Starlink coverage to support operations in Crimea, SpaceX declined, citing escalation concerns. Later, the company requested that the Pentagon assume financial responsibility for Ukraine’s access.

Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google provided equally decisive, yet discretionary, support. They detected malware, migrated government data to secure cloud storage systems, and shielded Ukraine’s digital infrastructure from collapse. Their interventions, voluntary and unscripted, shaped the course of a sovereign nation’s survival.

Taiwan represents the next and far greater test. Chinese military doctrine targets communications infrastructure first: undersea cables, satellites, and energy grids. A successful first strike could digitally isolate the island. Whether Taiwan’s government, hospitals, and economy continue to function may depend on decisions made years before the first shot is fired in corporate boardrooms in Silicon Valley thousands of miles away.

Unlike Russia, China underpins global supply chains and is a lucrative consumer market for U.S. companies. Tesla, for example, operates large factories there; manufacturers of all industries remain dependent on Chinese rare earths and critical minerals. In contrast to hardware companies deeply tied to Chinese supply chains or markets, U.S. software firms such as Google and Microsoft began reducing their China exposure decades ago. Google’s 2010 decision to exit mainland China operations followed a major cyber-attack and disputes over content censorship.

This distinction exposes a key challenge: corporate behavior in conflict will correlate with how exposed a firm is to China. Firms with significant Chinese-market sales or Chinese supply chain dependencies face commercial and regulatory pressure that limits alignment with U.S. policy during crisis. By contrast, firms with less China exposure have greater freedom to act in U.S. and allied interests. Any readiness framework must therefore stratify members not only by capability, but also by strategic exposure to adversarial states.

The lesson from Ukraine and the looming test of Taiwan is clear: the United States cannot rely on ad hoc corporate goodwill. It must coordinate in advance, defining expectations before—not after—the first cyberattack or missile strike.

Proposal: A Big Tech SOFA

The United States should establish voluntary agreements with critical technology firms to clarify obligations and protections in national emergencies. Modeled after bilateral SOFAs but tailored to industry stakeholders, these agreements would lay out how companies would contribute to the national defense when vital infrastructure or networks are attacked.

Defined Obligations

Participating companies would commit to support contingency missions. A satellite provider would guarantee continuity of communications if undersea cables were cut. A cloud provider would surge cyber defense capabilities to critical infrastructure under coordinated government direction. A semiconductor firm would prioritize supply for defense and allied systems if global access were disrupted. Each obligation would be narrowly defined and scenario-based to preserve flexibility and ensure predictability.

Legal and Financial Clarity

Like traditional SOFAs, the framework would set terms for cost-sharing, liability protection, and legal jurisdiction. Companies would be able to predict how expenses, indemnities, and export-control compliance would be handled. This removes hesitation at moments of crisis, enabling decisive action without regulatory paralysis.

Operational Terms

The agreements would outline the conditions under which firms operate within the national security ecosystem. In return for commitments, industry participants would receive structured incentives—procurement preference, access to federal financing for surge capacity, fast-track security clearances for key staff, and reputational recognition as trusted national partners.

Participation would remain voluntary and discreet until activation. Companies could join through confidential

commitments, with public identification triggered only under crisis conditions. Exit clauses would allow either party to terminate or revise obligations as markets and technologies evolve.

Importantly, this framework would complement—not replace—existing authorities such as the Defense Production Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. These instruments can compel corporate action, but they are blunt, slow, and politically contentious, rendering them largely ineffective to scale in times of crisis. The PPRF offers a pre-negotiated, market-aligned alternative that relies on cooperation rather than coercion—it employs a carrot, versus stick, approach.

Concerns and Political Landscape

Any proposal to facilitate deeper cooperation between Washington and large technology firms will invite scrutiny—and rightly so. Antitrust critics will warn of facilitating corporate entrenchment and eroding competition for new actors. Free market and small business champions will object to industrial favoritism and market distortion. Privacy advocates will fear data-sharing overreach and civil liberties violations. Fiscal hawks will balk at financial guarantees.

These agreements must build in protections to address these valid concerns and ensure proper congressional oversight. Industry participation should be divided into two tiers: Big Tech and Little Tech. Big Tech are systemically critical firms—such as satellite, cloud, and semiconductor leaders—that carry higher obligations and barriers to entry. Little Tech are emerging innovators—such as AI startups, cybersecurity vendors, and mesh-network developers—that can participate through subcontracting opportunities or competitive federal innovation programs like Small Business Innovation Research, Other Transaction Authorities, and technology pilot initiatives.

This tiered model preserves competition, avoids entrenching incumbents, and turns the framework into a mobility pathway for new entrants rather than a closed club for existing giants. Structured participation also replaces arbitrary, executive-level decision-making with accountable, transparent coordination between industry and government.

From a policy standpoint, the PPRF has broad appeal. National security wonks will see it as a deterrence multiplier, economic pragmatists as an industrial policy that strengthens resilience, and fiscal hawks as a cost-effective alternative to crisis bailouts.

Conclusion: Mobilize Before the First Shot

Wars are not won by improvisation. They are won by preparation. In World War II, U.S. factories retooled to become the “arsenal of democracy.” In the next conflict, the decisive question may not concern steel or oil, but whether America’s digital engines—its satellites, chips, and cloud networks—align with their own nation in its hour of need.

The public-private readiness framework offers a way to align profit with principle, foresight with flexibility, and corporate power with democratic accountability. It ensures that when the first cables are cut and the first systems go dark, the United States will not be negotiating under fire.

The time to define that cooperation—quietly, clearly, and credibly—is now.

The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Microsoft, nor any other affiliated organization or employer.

Michael Salazar is a senior manager for Microsoft AI & Security.

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

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

Not the Destroyer of Worlds: Why Compute is Humanity’s Most Vital Defense

Eighty years ago, the architects of our first dual-use revolution whispered that they had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Today, a new power commands that same existential awe. It was born in elite laboratories, the product of massive government and corporate investment. It is an immense, power-hungry technology, requiring vast, specialized facilities and staggering amounts of energy to sustain its core operations. For decades, the public has viewed it with a mix of awe and dread, fearing its potential to upend global security, trigger arms races, and spark catastrophic, irreversible outcomes. It is the ultimate dual-use technology—capable of both destroying worlds and powering the future.

Yet, despite the apocalyptic warnings and geopolitical posturing, its most profound and specialized use case is far more personal: fighting cancer. By harnessing its invisible, computational power, we can now detect and target malignant anomalies with a precision once thought impossible. It zeroes in on the very building blocks of the disease, finding microscopic threats hidden deep within human tissue and deciphering biological codes to save countless lives in the process.

Did you think I was talking about nuclear energy?

You’re right. But I’m also describing artificial intelligence.

In recent years, AI has pivoted from a theoretical computational powerhouse to the frontlines of biology and medicine. This is no longer speculative; it is recognized at the highest echelons of science. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for AlphaFold, an AI system that solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology by predicting the 3D structures of over 200 million proteins. By mapping these molecular blueprints, AI is fundamentally transforming how researchers understand cancer mutations, accelerate targeted oncology therapies, and design bespoke immunotherapies. Alongside these molecular models, advanced clinical computer vision systems are rewriting diagnostic timelines—whether predicting breast cancer with expert radiologist precision or training on hundreds of thousands of imaging scans to predict ovarian cancer risk with unprecedented accuracy, as pioneering companies like ProvanAI, located in my hometown of St. Louis, are doing today.

Beyond the clinic, and in my field of specialization, this paradigm shift is redefining planetary resilience through breakthrough Geospatial AI (GeoAI). By fusing foundation computer vision models with petabytes of satellite, radar, and aerial data, GeoAI allows us to monitor our world with unprecedented fidelity. When catastrophic natural disasters strike, these models map flood zones, building collapse patterns, and impassable supply routes in minutes rather than days, delivering vital situational awareness to humanitarian first responders. In agriculture, spatiotemporal models track soil moisture and crop stress across entire continents to forecast yields and preempt global food crises. From tracking environmental destruction to documenting human rights crises in denied territories, GeoAI is transforming raw overhead data into proactive stewardship for humanity.

Yet realizing this potential requires colossal infrastructure, and our adversaries know it. The frontier of AI demands vast data centers, specialized silicon, and gigawatts of electrical capacity—a physical reality foreign competitors are actively seeking to undermine. Recent intelligence and industry findings have exposed coordinated Chinese influence operations designed to manipulate the American public and derail domestic infrastructure expansion. Reports from frontier labs, including OpenAI, alongside the discovery of massive foreign bot networks on platforms like X, documented state-linked campaigns using generative AI to flood social discourse with fabricated claims that AI data centers are draining local power grids and driving up consumer energy costs. Beijing recognizes that compute capacity is the decisive strategic terrain of the twenty-first century. Just as the United States recognized that mastering nuclear technology was an existential imperative in the twentieth century, we cannot allow foreign propaganda to paralyze our critical infrastructure today. We must build the power, secure the compute, and win this race—because the security, economic sovereignty, and humanitarian future of the free world depend on it.

However, leading the world in compute does not justify reckless acceleration. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published the essay We Must Pace the Frontier, advocating for a deliberate slowdown in the development of frontier AI models to allow safety and alignment research to catch up. His call to action underscores a strategic imperative: our governance of AI must mirror the rigor of nuclear regulation. Just as the atomic age birthed non-proliferation treaties and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the AI revolution demands a comparable oversight architecture—embedded third-party inspectors, strict safety checkpoints, and enforceable global coordination. The United States and its allies must win the infrastructure race, but we must simultaneously lead the charge in establishing the international safeguards that prevent this dual-use technology from fulfilling the darkest prophecies of the nuclear age.

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

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

When Policy and War Collapse Into One: Fighting in the Sixth Domain

We may soon face conflict with nation-states in a new model of warfare—one not defined by geography, but instead defined by AIs competing directly with one another. War has always been a ruthless teacher: adaptation, learning, and feedback determine who prevails. In the sixth domain of warfare—AI-driven conflict—that cycle of teaching accelerates beyond human limits. Machine systems do not just execute decisions; they absorb outcomes, update models, and refine strategy continuously and at scale. Strategy, planning, targeting, and execution collapse into a single, ongoing process of learning and acting at speeds no human command structure can match. Missiles, drones, satellites, and fleets remain, but only as instruments—physical endpoints through which AIs prosecute this competition. The real contest is not fought on terrain, but in cycles of learning and adaptation too fast for humans to comprehend. What matters is not force projection, but learning velocity; not command of terrain, but command of inference.

In this domain, doctrines like “human-in-the-loop” or even “human-on-the-loop” are not safeguards—they are handicaps. Any force that inserts human judgment into the learning cycle—whether tactical or strategic—will be systematically outpaced by one that does not. This is not a matter of doctrine or preference, but of competitive logic: systems that act and adapt faster gain an inherent advantage. If removing human constraints yields advantage, those constraints will vanish. This reality forces a stark choice: delegate authority to machines across the full stack of war and accept the risks of opacity and escalation, or retain human control and accept defeat at machine speed. The fog of war has not lifted—it has thickened into a machine-generated battlespace, a black-box system fighting and learning at a level humans can no longer fully observe or comprehend, let alone direct.

This transformation elevates intelligence from a supporting function to the central determinant of power. Models and compute provide capability, but intelligence—continuous, fused inputs from sensors across domains—provides the fuel that drives the system. The intelligence cycle itself describes the change: planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis, production, and dissemination. In the sixth domain, machines run all of these functions. In an AI-versus-AI conflict, the side that sees more, sooner, and more clearly directs the learning loop itself. The advantage will not go simply to the best models, but to the systems that integrate intelligence fastest and most effectively. A slightly inferior model, continuously updated with superior, secure, low-latency data, will outperform a more advanced system operating on stale or fragmented inputs. Intelligence no longer informs decisions; it becomes inseparable from them.

The reflexive policy response in the West will be to constrain the leading AI companies in the name of control and safety. That instinct risks slowing the very learning cycles that determine advantage. Winning will require the opposite: accelerating innovation, tightly coupling it to national security objectives, and denying other nation-states key capabilities.

As in the nuclear era, this creates a parallel requirement for stability. The Great Powers share an interest—not in cooperation, but in using the technology to the benefit, rather than detriment, of society. To survive, we all need to understand each other’s AI capabilities and limits. Call it Mutually Assured AI Destruction: MAAID. Like its nuclear predecessor, deterrence will rest not on trust, but on verification, ambiguity, partial visibility, and intelligence where transparency fails. This is mutual self-interest under conditions of instability. In this domain, the equivalent of launch detection—recognizing decisive AI actions at inception—will be critical. Intelligence will need to continuously track, interpret, and outpace adversary AI systems, not only to compete, but to avoid surprise and uncontrolled escalation. What each side can see, and how quickly it can understand it, may determine whether competition remains bounded or spirals beyond control. An AI-era equivalent of the OPCW may therefore become necessary—an institution capable of inspecting, verifying, and monitoring advanced weapons AI systems under conditions of speed and opacity.

In the near future, humans will at best set initial conditions—policy, objectives, constraints—and then watch as their systems prosecute a war they can no longer meaningfully steer. Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of policy by other means. In the sixth domain, that distinction collapses. When systems translate intent into action, learn from the results, and adjust course continuously at machine speed, policy is no longer something periodically expressed through war. It is instantiated in code and executed as a continuous process. The side that learns fastest does not just win—it shapes the war itself.

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

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

The Compute We Cannot Power

On September 9, Oracle reported a cloud backlog of $664 billion — up $209 billion from a year earlier, an order book the size of a mid-cap national economy on hand for delivery over the next several years. That same week, PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 65 million Americans across thirteen states, was still processing a December 2025 capacity auction it had cleared 6,625 megawatts short of its reliability target — the first shortfall in the operator's history — at a record clearing price of $333.44 per megawatt-day. The order book has grown faster than the grid can keep up with.

This is not a permitting problem or a temporary shortfall. American companies are contracting artificial-intelligence compute faster than the country can build the grid to power it, and the mismatch is arriving inside a coordination architecture that has assigned pieces of the problem to six regional grid operators, fifty state public utility commissions, and a small set of federal agencies whose authorities do not overlap on the composite. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered each of the six regional operators to write its own rules within sixty days. Commissioner David LaCerte warned publicly that FERC would “dictate solutions” if the operators cannot converge. Convergence is not on the calendar. No entity above the assigned authorities has been named to arbitrate the composite-against-composite demand.

The critical-minerals track shows the same asymmetry in miniature. On July 10, 2025, the Department of Defense used Defense Production Act Section 303 authorities to take a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials and to guarantee a ten-year price floor for neodymium-praseodymium at roughly double the current market price. One company, one mineral, one price floor. On November 10, China’s extraterritorial rare-earth licensing regime returns under Announcement No. 61 — the 0.1-percent rule — covering rare earths, magnets, and downstream technology inputs across automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, and artificial-intelligence supply chains. The International Energy Agency estimates full implementation would place $6.5 trillion of downstream production outside China at risk. Beijing’s move is compound, systemic, and licensed centrally. The American answer is per-vendor, per-input, and negotiated bilaterally.

The Middle East corridor added the third register this week. A major east-west Saudi pipeline was forced offline. Transit disruptions extended simultaneously across the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb. American diesel crossed $6 per gallon at retail, and the transmission landed directly in the August Producer Price Index at 5.4 percent — a tenth above consensus, driven by a 24.1 percent monthly jump in diesel. For the first time this year, the corridor shifted from a regional flashpoint to a domestic macroeconomic input. Data centers need power; power needs fuel; the corridor is where the fuel comes from. Every hyperscaler private-generation contract and every backup-power assumption in a 2027 AI capital plan now runs against a diesel price on the goods side of the American inflation print.

The Pentagon’s autonomy doctrine sits on the same footing. Drone swarms, autonomous undersea platforms, and the tactical-edge inference the Joint Fires Network is being procured to deliver each presume a compute supply chain that runs from mineral to chip to installed platform at operational speed. Enterprise capital plans priced against frontier compute delivery presume the same. Sovereign artificial-intelligence partnerships with Korea, Japan, and the Gulf presume the same. If those inputs cannot be delivered at the pace assumed by the contracts, none of those presumptions hold.

The three-week arc through this diagnosis now points to a single operational conclusion. The Army America is buying cannot be commanded on the doctrine as written. The artificial intelligence it is buying cannot be deployed on the mission as scoped. The compute at the head of the growth forecast cannot be powered on the grid the country has built. Beijing is running the integration architecture the United States has not written.

Picture the October 2026 planning session. A hyperscaler chief financial officer is closing the 2027 capital plan against compute-delivery schedules her contracts already fixed. Her power-procurement lead tells her that large-transformer lead times have moved from 24 to 36 to 48 months. Her regulatory counsel tells her the six regional show-cause returns FERC ordered in June come due between sixty and one hundred and fifty days, and whether the rule that clears her interconnection comes from a converged regional set or a FERC-imposed replacement is unresolved. She calls the Department of Energy. She calls FERC. She calls her state public utility commission. Three offices; three pieces of the answer; no single voice authorized to warrant the composite. She signs the plan against megawatts no institution has vouched for.

That is the pattern of every arbiter she reached. DPA Section 303 was built for targeted intervention in specific supply chains, not for compound systemic response. FERC sits above the regional grid operators but not above the states. The Department of Energy directed FERC to write rules in October 2025 and got six show-cause orders in return. Nothing in the current apparatus assigns integration authority. The signal to watch is not another Oracle print or another PJM auction. It is whether any American institution names an accountable integrator above the assigned authorities — one office empowered to arbitrate grid, minerals, and integrated federal decisions in response to composite demand.

If you are running defense industrial-base capital, hyperscaler capital, or duration exposure priced against the AI cycle, do the work now. For your highest-conviction 2027 plan, name the specific power source, the specific mineral supply chain, and the specific federal decision whose failure would break the plan. Then name the person or institution accountable for delivering each. Where the second name is missing, the risk in the first has not been sized.

The last three weeks have named the same problem three times — the Army we cannot command, the AI we cannot deploy, the compute we cannot power. Each name points at the same missing office. The next capability America fields will not fail because it never arrived. It will fail because it arrived on inputs no one had been assigned to deliver.

Richard Berry is the founder of Stratnova Advisors and the editor of Strategic Horizons, a weekly geopolitical assessment for senior executives and national-security professionals. His forthcoming academic work examines the supervisory function in human-AI decision architectures.

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

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

Reflect, Remember, Renew

PERSONAL REFLECTION -- Majestic blue skies greeted me as I turned into the Pentagon’s North Parking lot on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. As I made my way into work, I was thinking less about what the day might bring—life as a Joint Staff action officer could often feel like Groundhog Day—and more about the beautiful fall morning.

Less than three hours later, I would leave the Pentagon emerged in a profoundly different world, greeted by billowing black smoke rising into that same blue sky after American Airlines Flight 77 struck the building.

It became the most consequential day of my life—one that shaped my actions, my career, and my thinking ever since.

Twenty-five years later, I recall particular moments: the smell of smoke as we evacuated, the morgue erected to identify the victims, the fire burning through the Pentagon roof and the heroic firefighters who battled to extinguish it, and the enormous American flag unfurled across the Pentagon on September 12—a symbol of mourning, resolve, and national unity.

What forever remains with me is the memory of leaving the Pentagon that morning and the questions that haunted me:

How could we have missed this? How could our intelligence community and national security leaders have failed to protect the nation? How had we failed to connect the dots? How could we have suffered what the 9/11 Commission would later describe as a “failure of imagination?”

As with most intelligence failures, the warning signs appear painfully obvious in hindsight. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center demonstrated the potential consequences of a major terrorist attack on American soil. Osama bin Laden and the World Islamic Front openly declared war against Americans in 1998. That same year, al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa. In 2000, terrorists attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors.

Individually and collectively, these events should have raised our level of concern and preparedness. They did not. We failed.

Looking back, I believe the roots of that failure can be traced to three areas: a lack of vigilance, poorly developed and undervalued partnerships, and an inadequate understanding of al Qaeda.

Intelligence failures—from Pearl Harbor to the 1973 Yom Kippur War to 9/11—often begin with a failure of vigilance. Nations minimize threats, overestimate their own capabilities, or explain away indicators because they do not fit prevailing assumptions. Warning signs are interpreted through the lens of what leaders believe an adversary is likely to do rather than what it may actually be capable of doing.

The 9/11 Commission’s finding of a “failure of imagination” captured a glaring weakness. But imagination in national security begins with discipline: examining vulnerabilities, challenging assumptions, developing mitigations, and running down leads even when they do not conform to conventional thinking.

Perhaps hubris played a role. A decade after winning the Cold War, the United States stood as the world’s preeminent power. That success may have contributed to a belief that our homeland was largely beyond the reach of a foreign adversary. Our guard was down. The result was the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.

September 11 also exposed serious weaknesses in our government’s ability to build and employ partnerships. Across the interagency, intelligence remained too often stove-piped. Agencies approached difficult problems through the narrow lens of their own authorities and responsibilities, creating seams an adaptive adversary could exploit.

Those seams were especially dangerous at the boundary between foreign intelligence collection and domestic law enforcement. Information held by one agency did not always reach another. Opportunities for integrated analysis were missed. We had capable organizations staffed by dedicated professionals, but too often they operated within separate cylinders of responsibility rather than as parts of an integrated national security enterprise.

Al Qaeda exploited those seams.

Perhaps most sobering was how little we understood about the enemy we suddenly faced. The attacks of September 11 were not al Qaeda’s opening act. The organization had already demonstrated its intent and capability through the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet after 9/11, it quickly became apparent how we were limited in our collective understanding.

Strikingly, among the first circulated materials on al Qaeda that I encountered after the attacks was a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst’s handbook describing the tactics, techniques, and practices of Osama bin Laden and his followers. I remember senior leaders on the Joint Staff asking for copies and acknowledging how little they knew about the organization.

Our adversary had studied us in extraordinary detail. We had not studied our adversary with the same intensity. We were, in important respects, blind to a deadly threat.

Today, remembrance alone is not enough.

The American philosopher George Santayana famously warned: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Remembering September 11 must mean more than recalling where we were, honoring those who died, or recounting the heroism that followed. It must mean examining whether we have truly absorbed the lessons purchased at such extraordinary cost.

The first lesson is vigilance. Today’s threats may emerge in cyber, space, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, terrorism, or domains we have yet to fully appreciate. Vigilance demands healthy skepticism about our own capabilities and respect for those of our adversaries. It requires leaders willing to challenge comfortable assumptions and recognize weak signals before they become catastrophic warnings.

The second lesson is partnership. Public-private partnerships are now foundational to understanding many threats confronting the nation, particularly in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure. But partnerships cannot become static arrangements or bureaucratic slogans. We must continually reassess relationships across government, industry, and our allies, asking whether they provide meaningful access, insight, speed, and competitive advantage.

The third lesson is understanding the adversary. Our limited understanding of al Qaeda before September 11 should force us to ask a difficult question today: Which adversary are we underestimating now? Where are our greatest knowledge gaps? Which emerging tactics, technologies, organizations, or intentions are we explaining away because they do not fit our assumptions? Who is studying us more carefully than we are studying them?

These questions should make us uncomfortable.

On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people began an ordinary morning never imagining what would follow. For those of us who experienced that day from inside the Pentagon, the memories remain deeply personal. But the responsibility to learn from that day belongs to all of us—especially those entrusted with our nation’s security.

As we honor those who lost their lives, we should do more than look backward. We should reflect on where we failed. We should remember what complacency cost us. And we should renew our commitment to vigilance, partnership, and understanding—so that the lessons of September 11 are never again learned only after tragedy strikes.

The Cipher Brief is publishing the personal reflections of our expert community this month. Sign up for the Nightcap Newsletter and follow on social media for more reflections.

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

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

25 years after 9/11. Whatever happened to mass-effect terrorism?

One remaining mystery about 9/11 is why there have been no attacks of comparable scale since. But, with the combination of new motivations, enhanced means of delivery and AI -devised payloads there should be no cause for complacency.

9/11 changed everything. It led to two decades when the United States and much of Europe became fixated on Islamism. Western strategists became fluent about half absorbed subjects such as Wahhabism, Pashtun tribal customs, Frontier Crimes Regulations, and the Anbar Awakening while giving insufficient attention to Chinese economic dominance and Russian military rearmament[1]. Who knows what that diversion of strategic and intellectual resources (and the chaos it left behind in the region) has cost the West?

9/11 also bookends that remarkable period from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/90 when peace and reconciliation seemed to break out everywhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 seemed to chart a trajectory towards a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. One year later the peaceful multi-party elections in South Africa were nothing short of a miracle. For years Afrikaners had insisted they would fight black rule until the last drop of white blood. This was the brief ‘unipolar moment’ under the (then) benign supervision of Washington.

9/11 ushered in a new world; one with which Thomas Hobbes would be all too familiar. “Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.” “Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.” Leviathan could be quoted endlessly. .[2]

Of course, first and foremost, 9/11was a tragedy for the victims and their families. It was an act of appalling savagery. It was not only the largest terrorist attack in history by a country mile but it also introduced a new concept of mass-effect terrorism.

From the terrorists’ point of view it was also an attack of breathtaking scale and ambition. Osama Bin Laden had the imagination to view an aircraft full of fuel and passengers as a terror weapon by knitting together two of Al Qaida’s (AQ) previous failures; the truck-bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and the 1995 Operation BOJINKA in the Philippines. Both attacks had been planned by Ramzi Yousef whose uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief planner for 9/11.

It was also, from an AQ viewpoint, both triumphant and disastrous. Its success was that a superpower overreacted for two decades and allowed 9/11 to shape the whole of Western foreign policy as a Global War on Terror (GWOT). Its failure was due to Washington’s largely successful determination to destroy AQ, a success which was only imperilled when President Trump approved the feckless Doha Accords with the Taliban in 2020 opening the way to the return of AQ to Afghanistan the following year. The latest United Nations report on terrorism confirms that AQ continues to reestablish itself.[3]

As early as 1998 the British government had warned Washington that it was the likely next target in an operation which would involve hijacked aircraft. This story was told in detail by RUSI for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11.[4] The intelligence was briefed to both Presidents Clinton and Bush (junior). Contrary to widespread opinion the concept of mass-effect terrorism had been exercising minds in Washington and Whitehall long before 9/11. If they had not made the intellectual leap of imagining airliners as weapons, they had nonetheless been thinking a great deal about mass casualty attacks. This was prompted by three convergent factors.

First, in Tokyo a doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo had, in 1995, released sarin on the Tokyo metro in an attack which (had it been carried out more effectively) could have killed thousands. This led to much discussion of how to react to a similar attack on the London Underground. There was also concern about CBW elements being brought into the country inside the diplomatic mail bags of state sponsors of terrorism (the bags being protected from scrutiny by the Vienna Convention of 1961).[5]

Secondly there were fears at the time about Al Qaida getting its hands on nuclear material and producing a dirty bomb (not a nuclear explosion). At the time it was believed that fissile material was being sold by former employees of Soviet nuclear programme and finding its way through Central Asia to Pakistan. Most of it was a scam called ‘red mercury’ which was thoroughly investigated at the time but there were enough more credible reports to create uncertainty[6].

And finally it was known that AQ had two scientists working on CBN (chemical, biological and nuclear) experiments out of Derunta camp near the Afghan/Pakistan border. Not all the fine detail was known but one of the scientists, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, had previously worked on Pakistan’s own sovereign nuclear programme. This story was well-told a decade later by the veteran journalist Peter Bergen[7].

Thus began a decade long United States fixation with the danger of terrorists obtaining access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. President Obama insisted that ‘The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short term, medium term and long term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.’[8]

Once 9/11 had happened the assumption was that there would be numerous copy-cat attacks. In London much focus was devoted to the towers at Canary Wharf which housed some of the world’s premier financial institutions and which were also close to the flight paths of both London Heathrow and London City airport.

In the years immediately after 9/11 terrorist ambitions remained high including the Bali bombing in 2002 (202 killed), the Madrid train bombings in 2004 (193) and London 2005 (52). There were some dangerous plots in UK notably CREVICE in 2003 and RHYME in 2004 but the only one on the scale of 9/11 was Operation OVERT in 2006, AQ’s plan to bring down seven airliners in mid Atlantic. Fortunately it was thwarted by MI5.

And herein lies the real mystery. There have been numerous nasty and costly terrorist attacks since but none on the 9/11 scale. There is a danger of sounding callous when observing that none of Mumbai in 2008 (166 killed), Paris in 2015 (130), Sri Lanka 2019 (269) come even close to 9/11 (2,976).[9]

Two types of terrorism have emerged since OVERT in 2006.

The first was ‘urban siege’, ‘swarm’ or ‘rampaging’ terrorism which we first saw at Mumbai in 2008[10] and the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in 2013 (which killed 71). This is an effective form of terrorism because it captures press attention for hours (62 hours in the case of Mumbai) and makes prompt armed response extremely difficult. However it is also costly for the terrorists who are nearly always killed or captured and their supporting organisations and states identified. The Indians were relentlessly successful in following up the Mumbai attack although the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba still exists and represent a significant threat to regional peace.[11]

The second (and now the most common) is ‘lone wolf’ terrorism committed usually by lone (and lonely) young men who have become self-radicalised online in their bedrooms and take the family car or a kitchen knife and seek to kill as many people as possible. The problem with this second type is that it is almost indistinguishable from wider mental health problems brought about by social isolation. It risks a substantial drain on the precious resources of security services which need to be focussing on strategic threats (such as those posed by Russia, Iran and China as well as terrorist groups).

In terms of mass casualties only one is comparable with 9/11; the brutal Hamas incursion into southern Israel on 7^th October 2023. As a proportion of Israel’s population it is probably the most lethal terrorist attack in history. But there the comparison ends. The attack involved guns, knives and grenades; a far cry from the use of aircraft as a weapon against a ground-based target.

Aircraft and their passengers have often been targets before, notably PanAm 103 at Lockerbie in 1988 (270 deaths), UTA flight 772 the following year over Niger (170) and the often-forgotten Air India flight 182 off the Irish coast in 1985 (329)[12]. But in each case the aircraft and passengers were the target rather than the means of delivery against an objective on the ground. 25 years after 9/11 one would have expected to have seen several similar attacks using aircraft against buildings or (even worse) against stadiums full of spectators.

Why has this not happened?

Precautions taken by airlines should take some credit. Cockpit doors have been strengthened and protocols have been largely enforced although there are signs of laxness creeping back in.

Security services have used bulk data to identify suspicious trends and plots early. Artificial Intelligence will help here. It is now much harder for terrorists to operate as groups.

And the US military, their intelligence services and allies wreaked considerable damage on both AQ and Islamic State (IS) from 2001 through until 2019.

So was 9/11 a one off rather than (as we feared) the start of a new trend? It is still too early to say. Motivation for terrorism remains strong (especially following the destruction of Gaza since October 2023). The advances in drone technology in Ukraine since 2022 could provide terrorists with an effective means of delivery at a time when counter-measures are still in their infancy. And AI could enable terrorists to research and develop lethal payloads.

As we remember 9/11 it is still too early to elcome the absence of a successful repeat during that costly quarter century. [13]

[1] https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/terrorism-less-existential-threat-russia-and-china

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leviathan-Oxford-Worlds-Classics-Thomas/dp/0199537283

[3] https://docs.un.org/en/S/2026/651

[4] https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/british-and-911-so-near-and-yet-so-far

[5] https://www.cwccoalition.org/events/anniversaries/tokyosubwaysarinattack30th/

[6] https://www.jstor.org/stable/45354548

[7] https://ctc.westpoint.edu/reevaluating-al-qaidas-weapons-of-mass-destruction-capabilities/

[8] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-agonizing-problem-of-pakistans-nukes/

[9] https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/911-investigation

[10] https://www.rusi.org/publication/terrorism-and-crowded-places-lessons-mumbai

[11] https://www.thecipherbrief.com/heres-why-the-next-clash-between-india-and-pakistan-could-be-even-more-dangerous

[12] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-66909820

[13] https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/25-years-after-911-next-global-shock-could-be-infinitely-worse

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

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

Twenty-Five Years Later, Remembering 9/11

In “Aftermath,” a 1919 retrospective poem on his war, Siegfried Sassoon asked: “Have you forgotten yet?” “Look up,” he appealed, “and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.”[1] With the approach of the 25^th anniversary of 9/11, I have been reflecting on that terrible day and how we remember it. Specifically, I was comparing how we recall it with how we recall the only other comparable event in American history: Pearl Harbor. Admittedly, I was only nine years old in 1966 on the 25^th anniversary of that attack and have no specific recall of December 7th of that year. But I do have clear memories of the atmosphere of that time and the tone that pervaded Americans’ collective honoring of the courage and sacrifice of those who fought in the Second World War. And I must admit being a bit unsettled by the comparison.

Even in an era of rising protest over the war in Vietnam, the vast majority of Americans commemorated the dead from the global conflict that preceded it and honored the veterans of it who walked among them. And perhaps that is part of the difference. Some 12.2 percent out of a total population of about 135 million 135 million—about one in eight Americans—donned their country’s uniforms during World War Two. There was scarcely an American family that did not have at least one member who served. In contrast, about five million Americans served in the post-9/11 era. Even when one adds to that total the relatively small numbers of Americans from Other Government Agencies such as CIA who served alongside them, this amounts to only some 0.9 percent of the U.S. population. Many Americans do not even know anyone who served. Indeed, all too many of our countrymen don’t seem to know much about 9/11, much less the twenty years of war thereafter.

Perhaps this dearth of knowledge is reflective of the state of the teaching of history and civics in our schools. But I suspect there are other factors at work. The first is an apparent reluctance on the part of sizeable swaths of the media to present to Americans, many of whom came of age after 9/11, the brutal realities of that day in the form of video of the attacks and their aftermath. The second is a seeming reluctance on the part of some public personalities to correctly portray what occurred, using phrases such as “some people did something” to describe the terrorists and the attack they carried out. We have even seen a few who outrageously assert that our country deserved 9/11.

Such perspectives were anathema to the post-Second World War era. My professor of ancient military history while I was at Valley Forge Military Academy, for example, had no such qualms in unequivocally characterizing the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor as what it was and attributing responsibility for it. A veteran of the Pacific War, when he wanted to hit us with a pop quiz, he announced it by pinning his souvenir Japanese battle flag—riddled with bullet holes and stained with blood—up on the blackboard. The response of an Agency case officer to criticism by a Japanese diplomat’s wife of our decision to use the atomic bomb is likewise instructive. “Well, Madame,” he said, “you shouldn’t have sunk our damned ships.” Such incidents might seem insensitive to some today, but they are indicative of how that generation saw that infamous day.

Another reason for this seeming reluctance to speak to the realities of 9/11 and what came thereafter is the characterization by some of the actions undertaken by the U.S., and particularly by CIA, as somehow dishonorable if not illegal. Although we had, in fact, been told those actions were lawful, I can clearly recall discussions with colleagues at the time wherein all involved understood there was a risk - if not a likelihood - that others looking at those actions years later would judge us harshly. Yet my colleagues had the courage to act nonetheless. It is worth noting that some of the harshest critics of the Agency’s actions after 9/11 were the same political leaders who had been fully briefed on, and supported, those actions at the time.

Finally, there is the way it all ended. The disgraceful flight of the U.S. from Afghanistan was driven by a cynical attempt to politically exploit a withdrawal by the 20^th anniversary of 9/11. It left a bad taste in the mouths of many Americans, not least among those who had given so much during twenty years of war. There was no signing ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri. But that end does not obviate what they accomplished. Nor does it dim the heroism they, like the first responders who rushed into mortal peril on 9/11, repeatedly displayed.

The men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces and other government agencies ran towards the sound of the guns after that terrible day in September. They deserve our lasting gratitude. In my own Agency, the two decades after 9/11 was a time of both victories and losses. Our successes can be measured by what did not happen. There was no large-scale follow-up terrorist attack on our country on the scale of 9/11 as was feared in its immediate wake. In a years-long—indeed ongoing—battle against jihadi terror, my colleagues and our military counterparts degraded our enemies’ ability to mount operations against the U.S. and its allies and delivered justice to the murderous architects of 9/11. The sanctimonious preening of critics of our actions after 9/11 cannot obviate the fact that we would not have prevented such an attack or gotten to Abbottabad without them.

The cost of those successes was steep. I have seen this as the number of stars on the wall in the lobby of our Headquarters Building has grown over the last twenty-five years. Just as the 2,977 souls taken on 9/11 must be remembered, we must keep all those who sacrificed their lives and bodies in the conflicts that followed in our hearts. “No day,” the inscription adapted from Virgil’s Aeneid on the National September 11 Memorial reads, “shall erase you from the memory of time.” We must do all we can to see to it that the generations born after 9/11 know its history, understand its significance and embrace their legacy.

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.

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

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

The Battle for Decision Autonomy, The New Front in Strategic Competition

This is the talk Dave Pitts gave at the Sarajevo Security Conference in September 2026, which was based on the talk presented at the Cognitive Security Institute Conference in August 2026. Dave has identified Decision Autonomy as a key battle in the cognitive domain and a new front in strategic competition.

In 2022, Russia expected Ukraine’s political leadership to fracture in the face of pervasive disinformation, subversion, efforts to decapitate the government and to persuade Russian-speaking Ukrainians to support Russia. It expected fear, confusion, and chaos to result in surrender, flight, or capitulation. There was one problem—Ukraine resisted.

President Zelensky's refusal to flee, combined with unified military and civilian resistance—critical decisions—enabled Ukraine to hold in those critical early hours and days. How did such a small number of people resist such extraordinary pressure and make such consequential decisions?

In 2024, a mature Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, CEO of Rheinmetall, a major producer of artillery shells for Ukraine, was discovered and disrupted by German and Western intelligence. More recently, German reporting described a suspected Russian-linked plot against Stefan Thumann of Donaustahl, a German drone producer supporting Ukraine.

What could those plots have achieved if successful? What did they actually achieve?

Russian drone incursions, airspace violations, political interference, cyberattacks, undersea cable cutting, GPS jamming, forced migration, sabotage, assassination, and attacks on critical infrastructure—several things have become increasingly clear. Russia’s gray zone attacks have increased since it invaded Ukraine. They have become more brazen, more lethal and more destructive—and spread across an increasing number of European countries.

The real question behind these attacks is why Russia is doing this. There are some obvious answers, but do we have it right?

America directly—and many countries indirectly—face a strategic challenge in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s attempts to control the flow of vital global energy as leverage in its conflict with the United States and Israel have created a wicked strategic decision point. Iran’s concurrent attacks on its neighbors may also serve as decision accelerants, compressing the time available to assess options and increasing pressure to act.

What decisions are possible and potentially effective? What are the risks and consequences of each option? And, perhaps most importantly, how much influence over that decision does Iran have?

No single human capacity is more powerful—or more vulnerable—than the ability to make decisions. Throughout history and continuing today, human decision-making has remained a target of those who seek to control the choices of others.

The ability—and the autonomy—to make decisions, from the ordinary choices of everyday life to the most consequential decisions of war and peace, makes us uniquely human. We instinctively resist—and, if necessary, fight—as individuals, groups, and nations when others seek to control our choices, think for us, or suppress this core human capacity.

At first glance, these stories seem completely unrelated.

A President fighting for his nation’s survival
Targeted assassinations of defense executives
Sabotage across the cities of Europe
A high-stakes standoff in the Strait of Hormuz.

They aren't.

They're four stories about the same thing: Decision autonomy. Different actors. Different circumstances. Different outcomes. One framework.

What is Decision Autonomy?

Decision Autonomy is our individual and collective ability to accurately see the world around us, to trust the knowledge we have and the information we receive, and to make independent, confident decisions based on our own judgment. “I decide—we decide.” To be clear, this is about all of us—citizens, private sector leaders, military commanders and officials, and policymakers.

It’s not a perfect state, it isn’t binary, and it exists on a spectrum. Individuals, organizations, and nations are constantly moving along this spectrum—sometimes toward greater autonomy, and sometimes toward greater vulnerability to external pressure.

In the middle of that spectrum is Decision Malleability—a state in which decision autonomy becomes increasingly susceptible to external influences. We see reality less clearly, cognitive clarity erodes, judgment is increasingly influenced, and decisions are increasingly shaped by external pressures.

At the far end of that spectrum is Decision Compromise—a state in which external influences have displaced or constrained independent judgment, resulting in the loss of decision autonomy. Reality is distorted, cognitive clarity is lost, independent judgment is displaced, and decisions are no longer fully your own.

Our adversaries understand this. They don't have to completely compromise our decision-making to succeed. They simply have to move us toward greater decision malleability—just enough to delay a decision, divide an organization, increase uncertainty, create hesitation, or influence a false choice.

If we accept that the ultimate objective of cognitive warfare is to undermine, degrade, and compromise decision autonomy, then understanding what our adversaries are doing to achieve that goal is important. This battle—the battle for Decision Autonomy—is becoming the new front in strategic competition.

What external pressures are our adversaries using in this battle? There are many, but I want to focus on four primary pathways.

First—deception. Deception distorts our understanding of the world around us—reality itself—by persuading us that false realities are real, to doubt the truth we actually see, or simply misperceive the environment in which we are making decisions. What does deception sound like?

“Ukraine is run by Nazis.”

“We are not attacking you—we are protecting you.”

“They started it.”

“Joining NATO would be a hostile act.”

Second—manipulation. Manipulation influences our judgment by exploiting our emotions, identities, biases, and motivations, steering how we evaluate information and the decisions we make. Fear, anger, exhaustion, hopelessness, or hope can override deliberate reasoning. What does manipulation sound like?

“The West doesn’t respect who you are.”

“America will abandon you.”

“China offers a future that NATO can’t.”

“Why should those from outside the region tell you how to run your country?”

Third—coercion. Coercion constrains our freedom to choose by threatening or imposing unacceptable consequences if we do not make the decision our adversaries desire. The logic is simple: “you do X and we’ll respond forcefully.” What does coercion sound like?

“Join and we will take action.”

“Recognize Taiwan and there will be consequences.”

“Support our enemies and your interests will not be safe.”

“Advance our interests in the region or lose access to our markets.”

Fourth—cognitive overload. Cognitive overload overwhelms our ability to think clearly and rationally by exceeding our capacity to process information, evaluate competing narratives, and anticipate the consequences of our decisions. What does cognitive overload feel like?

“An endless stream of conflicting narratives.”

“One video says one thing—another says the opposite.”

“Experts disagree.”

“Anonymous sources contradict official sources.”

“Too many decisions, too much information, too little certainty, too little time.”

Our adversaries seek to create cognitive overload; our objective is to preserve cognitive clarity.

Cognitive clarity isn’t merely the absence of confusion. It’s the ability to remain intellectually focused, emotionally composed, and deliberately engaged despite uncertainty, complexity, competing information, information overload, and attempts to shape judgment.

In terms of these decision states, let’s test the framework against the five examples I opened with.

In Ukraine, President Zelensky and Ukraine maintained decision autonomy. They held firmly to reality, resisted deception, manipulation, and coercion, and made independent decisions despite extraordinary pressure. In this case, decision autonomy prevailed.

Russia’s assassination plots failed to remove key decision makers or undermine support for Ukraine. In fact, exposure of the plots appears to have had the opposite effect—hardening political resolve, increasing intelligence collaboration, strengthening protective measures around critical industrial leaders, and prompting defense companies to increase production. In this case, exposing Russia’s deception sharpened the view of reality and strengthened decision autonomy rather than degrading it.

Russia’s sabotage campaign has been heavy and costly. It is hard to assess if decision autonomy has been degraded. What is clear is that shared operational awareness has increased, defense collaboration is on the rise, an awareness that Russia favors Endless Warfare over peace is settling in, and a goal of shared strategic deterrence has emerged. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that an adversary can create enormous pressure without necessarily achieving decision compromise.

Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has revealed the limitations of conventional military power against an adversary employing gray and asymmetric warfare methods. More importantly, it demonstrates how even a superpower finds its decision space constrained by a committed adversary.

The U.S. and its allies are moving along the decision continuum as they seek a decision to resolve this crisis. The question is whether this movement along the continuum reflects normal strategic decision-making under pressure—or a degradation of decision autonomy.

All these examples identify five key points that can protect decision autonomy:

Protect reality.
Seek evidence. Challenge assumptions. Verify before believing.

Preserve independent judgment.
Don't outsource your thinking to algorithms, echo chambers, crowds, or even experts that speak at conferences.

Maintain cognitive clarity.
Slow down. Reduce noise. Watch for fatigue, anger, urgency, despair, and overload.

Recognize and resist coercion.
“Am I choosing this—or am I being pressured into it?”

Continuously assess your decision autonomy.
Where am I on the continuum right now—autonomy, malleability, or compromise?

Is this relevant to the great power competition we all play a role in today?

Imagine these same pathways—deception, manipulation, coercion, and cognitive overload—employed deliberately and systematically by our adversaries over years or even decades, supported by intelligence services, state media, proxies, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, economic leverage, and military power. Scale changes everything.

Let’s talk about Russia, China, and Iran. All three countries use all four pathways, but each tends to emphasize them differently.

Russia has increasingly adopted a strategy of persistent confrontation with the West. It recognizes that it cannot match the United States, NATO, and its allies across every dimension of national power, so it competes asymmetrically and in the Gray Zone.

Russia seeks advantage by increasing uncertainty, delaying decisions, dividing alliances, employing proxies, and raising the perceived costs of action. It exploits negotiations to shift blame, abruptly change positions, and weaponize deception, delay, and distraction.

Russia understands that it doesn't have to defeat its adversaries militarily if it can influence their decisions before military force is ever employed. Deception and coercion define its approach.

Deception through disinformation, false narratives, active measures, and reflexive control.

Coercion through nuclear signaling, red lines, energy leverage, sabotage, assassination, and intimidation.

For China, patience is a strategic weapon. Rather than seeking to influence a single decision, China seeks to shape the long-term decision environment so that decisions favorable to Beijing gradually become the norm and ultimately viewed as being in the target's own interest.

As leading foreign policy expert Elizabeth Economy has observed, “China is executing a patient, multi-decade campaign to dominate the "new frontiers of power"—a continuous effort to set conditions, rewrite rules, and erode Western advantages below the threshold of open conflict.

Manipulation and coercion define this approach.”

Manipulation through United Front activities, influence operations, elite networks, and weaponized narratives.

Coercion through economic leverage, market access, technology dependence, sanctions, military expansion, and aggressive maritime tactics.

Iran views its struggle against the West as enduring and existential. Rather than seeking decisive military victory against stronger powers, it relies on persistent gray-zone competition, asymmetric warfare, and proxies to preserve regime security while constraining the decision of its adversaries.

Iran seeks to narrow the choices of the U.S. and its regional allies—"accommodate its interests or accept an unending and costly regional conflict.”

Manipulation and coercion define its approach.

Manipulation through ideological narratives, proxy media, and the exploitation of political divisions, sectarian identities, and regional instability.

Coercion through threats to global energy supplies, proxy violence, direct attacks on neighbors, hostage-taking, and terrorism.

Although their approaches differ, all three share a common objective: to shape how we perceive reality, exercise judgment, and ultimately make decisions that advance their interests over our own.

Of course, our adversaries still try to shape specific beliefs, but the longer-term payoff comes from shaping the conditions under which those beliefs form—to keep us consistently closer to Decision Malleability on issues most important to them.

So, what do we do about it? Let me close with what I believe are the human foundations of cognitive security—protecting cognition and decision autonomy.

This is often where we start talking about structural fixes—new organizations, whole-of-government approaches, media literacy, and technology. Some may be necessary; some remain aspirational. But I'd like to leave that conversation for another day and focus on the more human side of cognitive security: protecting cognition and decision autonomy.

Today, a clear view of reality can resemble a wilderness of mirrors—seeing isn't believing. If adversaries can replace facts with disinformation and synthetic realities, they gain a decision advantage.

Most of us have too many sources of information flooding our professional and private lives—I certainly do. It is easy to rely on so-called experts, chatbots, social media, comfortable echo chambers, and ubiquitous algorithms to do our thinking for us. It can become a blissful rut. When we knowingly or unknowingly cede judgment and decision space to others—we begin to lose decision autonomy.

We are living in a cognitive storm—a chaotic and unreliable global information environment where a single operator with a laptop can reach millions at the speed of global communications, where countless media sources are almost impossible to vet in real time, and where adversaries deploy AI-enabled networks of surrogates, fake sites, cybercriminals, hacktivists, and bots to target all of us and our institutions. It is easy to feel overwhelmed.

Russia, China, Iran, and even North Korea use redlines, threats and intimidation as tools of persuasion. The fear of escalation can be powerful, and our adversaries will seek to use coercion to move us along the continuum toward malleability and compromise. Coercion changes how we see the cost of our decisions and what we are willing to risk.

Our goal is to recognize coercion for what it is and not allow the fear of consequences—real or manufactured—to become the basis for our decisions.

We do have to accept certain things.

We cannot eliminate deception.

We cannot eliminate manipulation.

We cannot eliminate coercion.

We cannot eliminate cognitive overload.

But before making our most consequential decisions—in a military command post, a policy meeting, during a crisis, or in negotiations with our adversaries—we can stop—and ask four questions. I call this the Decision Autonomy Diagnostic: four questions to instantly evaluate where you stand on the continuum.

Do I accurately see and understand the world around me?

or - Do I know what’s true?

Am I evaluating the information objectively, or is something shaping my judgment?

or - Can I recognize manipulation?

Have I preserved cognitive clarity despite uncertainty, complexity, and overload?

or- Can I still think and deliberate clearly?

Can I decide independently despite external pressures?

or - Can I resist false threats and real pressure?

Finally, decision autonomy is ultimately about sovereignty. For nations, sovereignty is the freedom to determine their own future without external influence or interference—self-determination.

For individuals, decision autonomy is the expression of that same principle—personal sovereignty—the freedom to see reality clearly, exercise independent judgment, and make decisions that remain our own. Sovereignty gives us the right to decide. Decision Autonomy gives us the ability to decide.

No human capacity is more powerful—or more vulnerable—than our ability to make decisions—as individuals, as people, as nations—together, we must go to great lengths to protect it.

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.

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

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

China’s Challenge to Western Alliances

At the 25^th anniversary session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an alternative model to Western alliances.

Mr. Xi urged developing nations and the Global South to leverage “SCO wisdom” to argue for a more equitable and orderly multipolar world and reform of global governance institutions like the United Nations. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, and other guest delegations were in attendance for this anniversary session of the SCO.

The 26^th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the SCO convened on September 1, 2026, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Leaders from the 10 member states (China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus and the four Central Asian nations) signed the Bishkek Declaration and 13 other documents dealing with security, technology and anti-drug cooperation.

Mr. Xi committed China to provide localized technical projects, collaboration on Artificial Intelligence with SCO member countries and alignment through the Belt and Road initiative (BRI), a massive global and economic strategy proposed by Mr. Xi in 2013. (The BRI, with 146 member states, seeks to link Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America through a network of ports, railways, roads, and energy pipelines. The World Bank and other studies claim that BRI transport projects have lowered trade costs, integrated developing regions into global supply chains, increased local GDPs and lifted millions out of moderate poverty. Critics claim that aggressive, large-scale lending by Chinese state banks have saddled several developing nations with heavy external debt burdens).

Mr. Xi talks about alternatives to Western alliances and creating multipolar institutions, an appealing message to developing nations and the Global South.

It is ironic, however, that two of the 10 members of the SCO, Russia and Iran, are pariah states. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, despite security guarantees provided to Ukraine after they sent all their nuclear warheads to Russia; and Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism that, in 1999, 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2026, killed thousands of peaceful protesters.

A new alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – the Mecca Defense Alliance – was established in August 2026. Indeed, this is an unprecedented alliance of three U.S. allies’ intent on building a security architecture independent of the U.S.

The BRICS (Brazil, Rusia, India China, and South Africa), formed in 2006, has 11 members, with more than 30 countries that either applied or expressed interest in becoming a member.

It appears that Mr. Xi’s exhortations for a more multipolar war resonates with several developing countries and the Global South, despite the inclusion of Russia and Iran in the SCO and BRICS.

Mr. Xi is competing with several U.S. led international organizations: the QUAD (Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.), AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.), and NATO. Indeed, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was established in April 1949. It’s mission: to safeguard the freedom and security of all 32 member countries through diplomacy and military means. Article 5 of the NATO charter is clear: An armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all of them.

Any real or perceived tension between the U.S. and member countries within NATO, the QUAD or AUKUS will make Mr. Xi’s efforts to create “an orderly multipolar world”, with China in the lead, more attractive to developing countries and the Global South.

The U.S. has played a global leadership role after World War II. The Marshall Plan, established by the U.S. in 1948, provided $13 billion to help rebuild Western European economies.

And it was U.S. leadership in 1949 that established NATO.

Our allies and partners continue to look to the U.S. for this type of global leadership. And developing countries and the Global South should be looking to the U.S. as the democratic leader they should emulate and work with.

The author is a former Associate Director of National Intelligence. All statements of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government.

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times.

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

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

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

Russia’s AI Blueprint Exposes an Authoritarian Playbook

Russia, China, and Iran are all sharing the same playbook for corrupting Western elections. The United States is on track to be the next target this November.

A troveof Russian documents leaked in May outlines Moscow’s plans to use AI to warp foreign decision-making and sway elections. The Kremlin’s “Projects 2026” strategy reveals Russia’s plot to influence upcoming elections in Europe and Israel. Their tactics are similar to those used by China and Iran for years, and what emerges isn’t a Russian innovation — it’s a shared authoritarian playbook.

Projects 2026 calls for the creation of an opinion leader database to monitor the social media profiles of 10,000 influential individuals across Europe, including the 100 most prominent opposition figures in France alone. This is precisely the model Chinese state-aligned company GoLaxy piloted against the United States in 2025. The firm reportedly built constantly evolving psychological profiles of 117 members of Congress and roughly 2,000 additional American opinion leaders.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University warned that GoLaxy appeared prepared to target these individuals with messaging aligned with Beijing’s priorities. By monitoring the social media profiles of Western leaders, China and Russia are able to map the target’s values, beliefs, emotional tendencies, and vulnerabilities, making their influence operations more tailored and impactful.

In addition to using AI to build psychological profiles, the authoritarian playbook calls for countries like Russia and Iran to flood their targets with tailored generative AI content. Projects 2026’s “AI News” initiative calls for producing more than 500 short videos to target French audiences across six social media platforms. This tactic mirrors Iranian information operations during the 2025 and 2026 wars with Israel and the United States, when pro-Iranian networks pushed AI-generated and AI-assisted videos tailored to different audiences across X and TikTok, which racked up millions of views. These countries are running highly productive propaganda engines.

The most durable piece of Projects 2026 isn’t the content at all — it’s the plan to create fictitious think tanks and research institutes that can hand Russian narratives a “legitimate information source,” making them more likely to be cited by real news outlets and large language models. The leak shows this already underway: A site called the “World Center for Strategic Studies,” registered in March 2026, published unsigned analysis aimed at Western think tank audiences, with versions planned in German, French, and Spanish. The fake think tank doesn’t need to fool a discerning reader. It needs to get quoted, indexed permanently, and cited by the next AI model that goes looking for sources on the topic.

Iran ran a cruder version of this same play: Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage groups have repeatedly impersonated real institutions — such as the Royal United Services Institute, the Aspen Institute, and the Washington Institute — to steal credentials and plant material under a trusted name. Projects 2026 proposes something more sustainable: Don’t just hijack existing credibility but manufacture new institutions and let them accrue it over time.

Projects 2026 also proposes building a real Israel-based research institute staffed by Israeli citizens with genuine academic credentials. This approach is reminiscent of the 2014 “Iran Expert Initiative,” where Iranian Foreign Ministry officials attempted to court and influence Western think tank researchers to promote their perspectives and give them legitimacy. Emails leaked in 2023 showed that Iranian diplomats had worked with Western experts across 10 think tanks to aggressively tout the merits of the 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and major world powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

In the age of AI, influencing think tanks is narrative laundering at its most dangerous. Once a fabricated or state-aligned source gets cited by a legitimate outlet or indexed by a search engine, it can become part of the training and retrieval corpus that AI systems draw upon.

While the plays are reusable, the targets are new, and for Russia, the target is European elections.

The leaked documents outline a plan to swing Armenia’s parliamentary vote through a Russian-diaspora outlet and a “Mitteleuropa” initiative aimed at reshaping alignments in Hungary and Slovakia. This is where the surveillance, flooding, and laundering modules converge. To counter it, policy solutions must be swift and targeted.

First, allied governments should require disclosure of foreign funding and foreign state links for any media outlet, think tank, or “research institute” operating ahead of an election in an at-risk state — closing exactly the gap that lets a “World Center for Strategic Studies” pass as domestic and independent. Research by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) into Qatari money in American higher education shows what a real transparency regimen requires: disclosures reaching individual researchers, not just institutions; low reporting thresholds with real penalties; registration in the style of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for state-directed “institutes” masquerading as independent organizations; and provisions against the kind of obstruction Qatar used to block Texas A&M’s funding records in court. Russia is proposing to build the same laundering vehicle in Europe that Gulf money has already normalized in American academia. The fix already exists — it just needs to be strengthened.

Second, platforms should both demonetize and remove unlabeled AI-generated political content during designated pre-election windows in at-risk states. X’s own emergency policy during the Iran war, which suspended digital influencers’ ability to monetize their content for 90 days on undisclosed AI-generated war footage, shows platforms already have the infrastructure to act fast when the stakes are high enough. But demonetization alone left the content up and circulating; independent researchers found AI-generated war footage kept flooding feeds regardless of the policy. Elections warrant a harder line: If posts feature undisclosed AI-generated content during an active election period, they shouldn’t just lose ad revenue. They should come down.

Third, Washington should prepare for future attempts at election influence by boosting the protection mechanisms it already has in place. Currently, 31 states have passed election deepfake laws, but they are under legal scrutiny because they touch on domestic speech. Federal action targeting foreign actors rests on firm ground. The 2002 McCain-Feingold Act prevents electioneering communications by foreign actors, but this only applies to broadcast, cable, and satellite communications. It must be updated to explicitly include paid internet and digital advertisements. It should also close the gap on AI-generated political content and require labeling so that foreign deepfakes can’t hide behind current ambiguities.

Projects 2026 is not evidence that Russia has cracked something new. It’s evidence that Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran are now running the same AI playbook against the same democracies, taking turns testing which module works best. The future outlined in Projects 2026 may not be here yet, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Leah Siskind is director of impact and an AI research fellow for the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Leah and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

The Gulf Bought Its Air Defense From Kyiv. We Sold Them The Radar.

Chief Warrant Officer 5 (Ret.) Joey Gagnard concluded nearly three decades of service in the U.S. military, retiring from the special operations community in early 2025. He serves as CEO of Atlas Special Projects and Director of Field Operations at Swarmer.

Disclosure: Atlas Special Projects leads investor delegations to Ukraine and maintains working relationships with Ukrainian drone manufacturers, some of which would benefit from the arrangements argued for below. The argument is my own.

Welcome to The Iron Triangle, the Cipher Brief column serving Procurement Officers tasked with buying the future, Investors funding the next generation of defense technology, and the Policy Wonks analyzing its impact on the global order.

Riyadh, spring 2026. Between February 28 and the April 8 ceasefire, Iran put roughly 6,400 missiles and drones into the Gulf states and Jordan, more than eighty percent of everything it fired at anyone. Six countries fought six separate wars against one coordinated adversary, with no shared early warning and interceptor stockpiles that ran thin in days. An Iranian drone struck a tactical operations center in Kuwait and killed six Americans.

Three suppliers answered the same incoming fire. Here is the ledger.

The United States answered with paper. Over $36.6 billion in Foreign Military Sales notifications to the Middle East in a single quarter, headlined by 730 PAC-3 MSE missiles to Saudi Arabia for $9 billion. That is a little over $12 million per round, aimed at a Shahed that costs about as much as a used pickup, on a delivery schedule measured in years.

Ukraine answered with people. Washington asked Kyiv on a Thursday to send interceptor teams to protect American bases in Jordan, and Kyiv said yes the same day. Within weeks about two hundred Ukrainian advisors were on the ground in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE with interceptors that Ukraine sells for between $800 and $3,000 and builds at two thousand a day. Days after the Jordan request, the President went on Fox News Radio and said, “We don’t need their help in drone defense. We know more about drones than anybody.”

Turkey answered with a delivery date. Kuwait signed a government-to-government protocol with Aselsan, Havelsan, and Baykar for Hisar and Korkut air defense, and Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi opened their own talks with Ankara, because Turkey could put hardware on a ramp this decade and the American backlog for Patriot and THAAD runs to several years.

Then, on March 27, Saudi Arabia signed a ten-year defense partnership with Ukraine built around counter-drone technology and co-production facilities on Saudi soil. Qatar signed two days later. The UAS followed in April. Ten years each, minimum.

So the outcome of America’s largest arms-sales quarter in memory is that our closest Gulf partners now buy their sensors from us and their answer to the actual threat from Kyiv and Ankara. We sold them the radar. Somebody else sold them the thing that shoots.

Expensive Confetti

The arithmetic is not subtle, and the Gulf did it faster than we did. Iran can turn out hundreds of Shaheds a week. The U.S. builds roughly six hundred Patriot interceptors a year, for the whole world, with a waiting list. A Patriot battery is a good answer to a question Iran stopped asking in about 2019.

The Ukrainian answer is a different species. The Wild Hornets Sting costs about $2,500, flies at 195 miles an hour, fits in a duffel bag, and has killed nearly 4,000 Russian drones since may 2025. The SkyFall P1-SUN costs about $1,000, flies at 280 miles per hour, and took down 1,500 Shaheds in its first four months. One Ukrainian firm sold a thousand of them for $3.5 million, total, which is less than a third of one PAC-3 round. More than twenty Ukrainian companies now build interceptors and the Octopus alone is licensed to fifteen of them.

None of this makes the Patriot obsolete. Interceptor drones do not touch ballistic missiles ,and the 6,400 included plenty. But the Gulf learned in six weeks what Ukraine learned in three years: you defend against a thousand cheap things with two thousand cheaper things, and you save the twelve-million-dollar round for what it was built to hit.

Built in Munich

Here is the detail that turns the Gulf story into an Iron Triangle story. The Pentagon has bought exactly one interceptor with a Ukrainian combat record. In May, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 gave Perennial Autonomy, Eric Schmidt’s company, a three-year, $500 million ceiling for the Merops interceptor, a fifteen-thousand-dollar fixed-wing that has downed more than 4,000 Russian drones over Ukraine. It is the right buy. It is also built in Germany, through a partnership with Munich’s Twentyfour Industries.

The American flag interceptor, proven in Ukraine, bought by the Pentagon for the homeland, is made in Bavaria. This is not a scandal. It is a symptom. The design talent is in Kyiv, the production tooling is in Europe, and the one thing that has to be in the United States, the contract, is the only part we have managed to put here.

Meanwhile the July agreement that lets Ukraine sell to the Pentagon for the first time since 2022 approves six Ukrainian companies to ship about one hundred drones for testing under Drone DOminance, and contemplates, someday, Ukrainian production on American soil. One hundred drones. Kyiv ships that many to Riyadh before the coffee is brewed.

What an American Flag Would Actually Mean

Not an American airframe. That race is over; twenty Ukrainian firms iterate faster than any American line will for years, and pretending otherwise is how we ended up with a hundred test articles and a factory in Munich. The American contribution is the three things nobody else at the table can bring.

The first is the kill chain. An interceptor without a sensor network is expensive confetti with a propeller. Ukraine’s cheap drones work because they fly under a national acoustic and radar mesh that took three years to build. The Gulf has no such thing; the after-action reports say so. Turkey cannot integrate Korkut with Patriot and THAAD. The United States owns IBCS, the LTAMDS radars Kuwait just bought eight of for $8 billion, and the $4.5 billion discrimination radar the UAE is buying for THAAD. The offer writes itself: your thousand-dollar Ukrainian interceptor gets cued by our eight-billion-dollar sensor layer. That is the flag.

The second is the paper. Licensed co-production under FMS is a forty-year-old tool. Abrams in Egypt. F-16 in Turkey. Patriot itself in Japan. The structure is a trilateral: Ukrainian design and Ukrainian intellectual property, Gulf capital and final assembly to satisfy Vision 2030 localization, American components, integration, and the FMS wrapper that turns a purchase into a security relationship. The UK has already proven the licensing half, building Octopus interceptors in Britain at a thousand a month and sending them back to Ukraine.

The third is reciprocity. Kyiv’s own ask was one sentence: “We can help you fight against Shaheds. Help us fight against ballistic missiles.” Gulf money buys the interceptor line. A slice of the PAC-3 allocation that the Gulf money is already funding flows to Ukraine. Stings for Patriots. Three countries get what they cannot build, and the United States is the reason it happens.

What It Has Not Happened

Every obstacle is one I have written about before, which is the depressing part.

Start with ITAR. The moment a Ukrainian design is produced by an American licensee with American controlled content, it becomes ITAR-controlled, its re-export to Riyadh needs a DDTC license, and Kyiv loses the freedom to sell the same design to Oslo. Ukrainian founders already decline to domicile intellectual property here for exactly this reason. The fix is the one I argued for in July: a trusted-trader tier, or an AUKUS-style exemption scoped to the trilateral, with the IP staying in Kyiv and the United States as licensee rather than owner.

Then the parts bin. A thousand-dollar P1-SUN is a thousand-dollar P1-SUN because of Chinese motors, cells, and cameras. Under an American flag it must clear NDAA Section 848 and, if the Department of War is the buyer of record, the Blue UAS list. The cost of making the interceptor American is not the airframe. It is the audit and the re-sourcing, and nobody in the building has priced how much of the thousand dollars survives that. Turkey does not have this problem. That is the entire reason Turkey is winning the Gulf.

Then tempo. Ukraine signed three Gulf deals in about three weeks. FMS notification to first delivery is measured in Congressional recesses. Either the trilateral runs on Direct Commercial Sales with expedited licensing, or it is a press release.

And then the politics, which I will state once and then be finished. The Commander in Chief said we do not need their help days after his own government asked for it, and the Pentagon spent the spring resisting broader cooperation. The Gulf hosts Russian diplomacy. Kyiv keeps state control over exports, with its own forces first in line. None of these are fatal. All of them are real.

For the Procurement Officer. Your requirement is not an interceptor. It is a kill chain that accepts an interceptor you did not design. Write the sensor and command-and-control interface as the requirement and let the airframe compete, or you will spend the next POM cycle buying an American drone that arrives in 2029.

The Investment Thesis. The value in this market is not in the airframe and it never was. It is in the integration layer, the domestic component that lets a Ukrainian design survive Section 848. And the licensing paper. The company that can take a thousand-dollar Kyiv design and hand the Pentagon an American-compliant unit at two thousand, on a line this side of the Atlantic, is worth more than the company that designs the next one.

The Policy Wonk’s Warning. The security guarantee is being unbundled from the hardware. For seventy years those were the same product. Our partners are learning they can buy the guarantee from us and the shooting from someone else, and the day they discover they can buy the sensors elsewhere too, the guarantee is just a speech.

My Take. I have been in the room in Kyiv when founders explain, patiently, why they will not bring their IP to America. It is not ingratitude. It is that our export regime treats an ally’s design as a hostage the moment it touches our supply chain. We asked those same founders for help defending our bases in Jordan, and they sent people the same day, and then we told the world we did not need them. I have watched a lot of good capability lose to bad processes. I have not often watched it lose to bad manners.

The Risk. A co-production line in the Gulf is a leakage path to whoever the Gulf talks to next, and that list includes Beijing and Moscow, which is precisely why the British license sends its output home to Ukraine rather than into a third market. Iran is already fielding jet-powered Shaheds that outrun a Sting. And anyone who reads this as an argument to cancel the Patriot order has misread it; the 730 rounds to Riyadh are for the thing the drones cannot touch. The argument is not fewer Patriots. It is that a thousand-dollar problem should not be the one part of Gulf air defense that American has nothing to do with.

We spent the spring selling our partners the most sophisticated radar on earth. Kyiv and Ankara sold them what the radar is for. When the next 6.400 comes over the horizon and the Saudi interceptor that meets them has a Ukrainian design, Turkish neighbors, Chinese motors, and an American radar track, whose air defense is that?

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

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

Pakistan’s New Military Order Is a Warning for Washington

In Washington, Field Marshal Asim Munir increasingly looks like the man who can make Pakistan useful to the United States. Pakistan has just written Munir even more deeply into the architecture of the state as he now sits atop a legally centralized command that reaches conventional forces, strategic systems, and the prime minister’s national-security advice. Munir, now formally serving as Chief of Defense Forces, speaks directly with President Donald Trump and has become Washington’s principal channel for engaging Tehran.

The latest restructuring of Pakistan’s military command has actually made the opposite case. The 27th Constitutional Amendment, followed by legislation passed this month to implement the new command architecture, has concentrated unprecedented authority in Munir’s hands. Yet his military cannot stabilize Pakistan-administered Kashmir, cannot contain the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Baloch insurgents, and has still signed a mutual-defense pact with Turkey and Saudi Arabia—dubbed the Mecca Accord—that could drag it into distant crises. For the world, treating Pakistan as a reliable intermediary in negotiations with Iran would be a mistake of timing and of judgment as the state becomes more militarized domestically, more ambitious diplomatically, and increasingly overstretched militarily.

A Field Marshal Above the State

In November 2025, the 27th Constitutional Amendment abolished the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and created the office of Chief of Defense Forces (CDF), held concurrently by the army chief. The restructuring was completed with another step this month when Pakistan’s parliament passed the Defense Forces Act 2026 and amendments to the National Command Authority Act, providing the statutory framework for Munir's new position and headquarters. The new architecture gives the CDF a central role in operational command and joint military coordination across the armed forces.

The new law places the army, navy, and air force under a unified Defense Forces Headquarters commanded by Munir. He is designated the prime minister’s principal military adviser on national security and defense and exercises operational command and control across the services with sweeping personnel authority—hiring, firing, retirement, and extensions. Amendments to the National Command Authority law align nuclear and strategic command with the same hierarchy, with a new four-star Commander of the National Strategic Command sitting alongside the CDF. The significance goes beyond military administration, as Munir now occupies a position from which military command, strategic security policy and foreign-policy influence converge. He is not constitutionally Pakistan's president or prime minister, but describing him merely as a military officer increasingly misses the political reality. Such radical consolidation of power in Pakistan’s civil-military landscape matters for Washington because the United States is increasingly treating Munir personally as a diplomatic asset. Therefore, Washington must factor in that any “Pakistani” channel on Iran now runs, in practice, through a single command that answers first to its own institutional interests.

Consolidation Without Control

The strongest argument against treating Munir's Pakistan as a reliable strategic partner can actually be found inside Pakistan itself. The military has acquired unprecedented institutional power, yet the state remains under enormous security pressure. Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies data show that July 2026 was the deadliest month of the year, with 606 people killed in militant violence and counter-militancy operations, including 112 security personnel and 401 militants. The violence is concentrated precisely in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) and Balochistan, where Pakistan's military has struggled for years. Such a security landscape is a sustained counterinsurgency burden for a military that is simultaneously presenting itself as a regional security provider.

The latest round of violence in Pakistan-Administered Kashmir has added another layer of security burden for an overly stretched military. In the surrounding areas of Rawalkot, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, protests led by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) escalated after authorities outlawed the movement under anti-terrorism laws, suspended mobile data and internet services, and deployed security forces ahead of a JAAC-organized June 9 strike. According to a local human rights watchdog report dated August 8, at least 89 civilians died in Pakistan-administered Kashmir as a direct result of the state’s brutal crackdown on unarmed protesters.

Locals demanded cheaper power from dams that generate electricity for Pakistan, representation that is not diluted by non-resident seats, and an end to elite privileges. The state’s answer was lethal force, sedition cases, travel advisories, and the criminalization of a civic coalition that had previously extracted limited subsidies through protest. That is the Balochistan playbook applied to a territory Pakistan still markets internationally as “Azad” or free. It did not produce consent but a banned movement, underground leaders, and a legitimacy crisis inside a territory the army treats as strategic hinterland. If Munir’s new command structure was meant to deliver coherence, Kashmir shows the opposite, where a security establishment that can rewrite the constitution faster than it can address bread-and-butter revolt. An army that cannot manage a rights protest in Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot without mass casualties is not an army that can be trusted to midwife a delicate regional settlement with Iran or be a reliable partner for the so-called Mecca Accord.

Pakistan’s Utility Should Not Be Mistaken for Reliability

US talks with Iran already sit on a knife-edge of “Economic D-Day” politics, Hormuz control, and factional vetoes inside Tehran. None of this means the United States should abandon Pakistan as that would be strategically simplistic. Pakistan remains nuclear-armed, sits between Iran, Afghanistan, India and China, and retains diplomatic access across the Muslim world. Its ability to communicate with Tehran can be useful, particularly when direct US-Iranian channels are blocked. Three factors that Washington should use to distinguish between utility and reliability while dealing with Munir’s Pakistan:

First, Munir’s legal supremacy does not equal policy reliability. A CDF who is also army chief, principal adviser, and strategic-command fulcrum will filter any Iran file through the army’s need to look indispensable at home—that incentive points toward swagger, not quiet brokerage.

Second, Washington cannot treat Islamabad’s internal security failure as a side issue. An institution that answers civic protest in Kashmir with live fire and a terrorist ban is the same institution that would be asked to counsel restraint, verification, and de-escalation with Iran. The record says it prefers coercion when legitimacy frays.

Third, Munir’s capacity is already committed to a plethora of insurgencies. TTP and Baloch campaigns consume attention, ammunition, and men. A Mecca clause adds hypothetical external obligations without adding spare combat power. A partner that is simultaneously over-centralized and overstretched cannot deliver the one thing Washington would need from it: consistent, low-drama influence on a file that can restart a wider war.

If the United States wants Pakistan to help mediate with Iran, it should judge Islamabad by the outcomes of that diplomacy, not by the personal access Munir enjoys in Washington. And if Washington wants Pakistan as a security partner, it should look beyond the impressive authority of its field marshal to the increasingly unstable state that authority is supposed to govern. A stronger Pakistani army does not automatically produce a stronger Pakistan. And a stronger Munir does not automatically produce a more reliable American partner.

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

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

Are We Ready for AI Warfare?

EXPERT INTERVIEW -- For decades, national security officials have worried about cyberattacks moving at the speed of machines and today the frontier AI race is shifting from models that answer questions to models that are capable of independently making consequential decisions and taking action in today’s digital world. So, what comes next?

Several of the world's leading AI companies have released powerful new models in the past few months. Open AI introduced GPT-6 Astra, with major advances in autonomous computer use. Notably, OpenAI says Astra is the company's first model to reach its "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold, meaning it can potentially discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities with substantially less human direction.

Anthropic recently released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, emphasizing more sophisticated coding and scientific research. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, with the latter specifically designed to autonomously find, verify and help fix software vulnerabilities. And not to be left out, Meta recently released Muse Spark 1.3, focused on coding and autonomous-agent tasks.

The headline out of all of these headlines is that models are becoming increasingly capable of acting independently. And the releases underscore just how quickly the competition among U.S. AI companies (and increasingly Chinese and Gulf-based developers) is accelerating.

We saw a first glimpse of what’s possible this past July, when AI agents being tested by OpenAI broke out of their intended cybersecurity evaluation environment and found ways to communicate and collaborate with one another. The agents gained broader internet access and ultimately compromised systems belonging to AI platform Hugging Face, executing code on dozens of the company’s servers.

What made the incident particularly notable was that humans were not in this loop. They had not instructed the agents to attack Hugging Face. Instead, the behavior emerged while the models were attempting to solve difficult cybersecurity tasks and ended up collaborating on exploits beyond their assigned environment.

Few people understand this new environment and what it means to future cybersecurity and national security better than former director of the National Security Agency, General Paul Nakasone (Ret.). In addition to founding Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security since retiring from government service, Nakasone also serves on the board of OpenAI. And from 2018 to 2024, he simultaneously led both the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, overseeing some of America's most sensitive intelligence and cyber operations.

I spoke recently with Gen. Nakasone about what AI warfare could look like and about what it will take to navigate this new cyber environment. Below is a part of our conversation - lightly edited for length and clarity. You can also watch the full episode on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube Channel or you can listen to it on the State Secrets podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

[INSERT BIO BOX]

Kelly: If you were walking back into the director's office at the NSA tomorrow, what would be at the top of your briefing book that wouldn't have been there just two years ago?

Gen. Nakasone: Certainly, it would be artificial intelligence. I left NSA and U.S. Cyber Command just as AI was getting started. And I will tell you, when you think about disruptive technology, there is nothing more disruptive today than AI, even more so than the smartphone technology that we started to see in 2007. This really is today and tomorrow's great opportunity and for the most part, also it's great challenge.

Kelly: And the challenge is keeping up with it, right? It feels like, in every morning’s Cipher Brief Open Source Report, there are new details about machines hacking machines, AI being used by different countries, adversaries, criminal groups. What concerns you the most, and is the U.S. ready to tackle it?

Nakasone: I think the first piece that is so dramatically different is speed. When we think about the temporal aspect of artificial intelligence, my goodness, ChatGPT was just released in the fall of 2022. And in less than four years, we've gone from prompts to reasoning to deep research to agentic AI. And we're starting to see a difference between offense and defense. And I think our challenge over the next couple of years is going to be ‘How do we bring defense up to the power of offense as we look forward?’

Kelly: We've talked for years now about AI being used by hackers but it feels like we're now witnessing something really fundamentally different: AI systems that can actually conduct significant portions of a cyber operation autonomously.

Nakasone: And I would tell you that as we take a look at the recent demonstration of Hugging Face and the challenges associated with that, and also the recent testing of models like GPT 5.6 and in Claude Fable 5, we're starting to see these models get incredibly powerful. So, I think the question becomes whether these models can just as well do offense as they can defense. And how do we ensure that we start to give more weight to the defense necessary than we do the offense?

Kelly: It’s fascinating to think about that when the attacker really isn't sleeping, isn't getting tired, isn't making silly mistakes and it can probe millions of potential victims simultaneously. It changes the entire landscape, which means each section of that landscape needs to be thinking about their roles differently. So, let's dig in on the government side. Do you think the government is currently positioned to deal with this new reality?

Nakasone: Are any of us really ready for the dramatic changes that are going on right now? If I can just take a step back, think about what we used to talk about when we were defending our networks: our data and our weapons systems. We had the 1–10–60 rule. Within one minute, we'd identify something that was anomalous, within 10 minutes, we would determine what it was, and within 60 minutes, we'd fix it.

I will tell you that today that rule is out the door. It's happening too rapidly. So, the question becomes: if we've gone to autonomous operations on the offensive side, how do we get that on the defensive side? We're capable of doing this, but we've got to think differently about how we do our penetration testing, how we do our red teaming, how we identify vulnerabilities, and then rapidly patch them. How do we prioritize? There are a number of different areas that I'm sure both the government and the private sector are thinking differently about in terms of time.

Kelly: On the government side, are there things that we could be doing differently that might better position us to keep up with this new pace?

Nakasone: As we think about our government responsibilities, the government is responsible for the safety and security of our nation and our people. So, the near-term piece of it - is how do we think about ensuring that these closed-weight models are safe and secure going forward? How do we do this with both the public sector and the private sector? It's really interesting because artificial intelligence is a technology that is almost entirely being developed by the private sector.

So, instead of nuclear capabilities and Space where government was so deeply involved and was able to advance it, this is really all being done by the private sector. So, I think the question is, what can government do? And the answer is that Government can do a number of things.

First, they can assemble the major companies in the U.S. in terms of what they're doing. They can provide a series of both carrots and sticks in terms of what we're going to do in the future. And most importantly, they can bring together an idea of how we start to think differently about securing these models and we do it in a safe manner.

The recent Executive Order on the 2nd of June begins this discussion for models coming in - on a voluntary measure – and being evaluated 30 days before they're released. That’s a good step in the right direction.

Kelly: Are we approaching a time where you think humans in the loop might actually be a vulnerability?

Nakasone: Coming back to speed, in terms of the scale at which these models are able to perform, I think we’re going to have to move away from the idea of humans always being in the loop. I think the humans might be on top of the loop. Humans have a responsibility for understanding the outcomes and the goals and in understanding and setting up the parameters in terms of what the guardrails and safeties are as well as whether these models comport with our values and our beliefs. That's a role for humans. But I think increasingly, we are going to move toward more autonomous operations, both on the defensive side and certainly on the offensive side as well.

Kelly: The adversaries have a different rule book. They're not democracies, they don't share the same values. Salt Typhoon and the broader Chinese campaigns have really raised this disturbing possibility that Beijing isn't simply stealing information but is really positioning itself inside of American infrastructure for an advantage during a crisis. We've known about this for a while. We've also known where the vulnerabilities are that we can't always identify. How are you thinking about these differences in adversarial capabilities and what the U.S. needs to do defend better?

Nakasone: We’ve talked about Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon as we took a look at both our communications and our critical infrastructure. But I would also fast forward to today where we have water concerns in 12 different states. We think about that as a significant brittle part of our critical infrastructure and key resources. So, what I'm starting to think about are the areas where we have to raise the bar for cybersecurity. What do we do in the near term? What do we do in the midterm? And what are we going do in the far term?

The big piece of this is that we have to think different about our partnerships. How do we bring the public and the private together? How do we take academia and see what they can do in terms of being able to research and look differently at what our vulnerabilities might be? And by the way, if we really have folks in our critical infrastructure, how do we prioritize getting them out and then being able to mitigate those vulnerabilities?

When we stood up the Institute of National Security at Vanderbilt University two years ago, there were a series of ideas that were at the foundation of what we wanted to do. First, it was the idea that the definition of national security has changed dramatically. When I entered the army, it was all about having two very friendly neighbors to our north and south and two wide oceans to our east and west. I would tell you today that geographic boundaries no longer keep out things like artificial intelligence and cyber. So, we have to think differently about how we define national security.

The second piece is that we need a whole new generation of young people that are going to work in national security. Let me give you a statistic. In our national security workforce today across our government, less than 9 % of that workforce is under the age of 30 and over 40% are over the age of 50. We need a whole new generation of young people that are coming in to work in the Peace Corps, to work in the State Department, to be part of the military forces to be able to work at the state and local levels and also our national level. So, how do get people excited in college about thinking differently about their future?

And the final piece really touches on the Wicked Problems Lab at Vanderbilt. We are the pragmatic solution to problems. We take a look at a problem and instead of writing a broad policy paper that may be put on a shelf for the next 10 years or never even looked at, we’re taking a national security challenge like securing our water systems and asking how we develop a series of partnerships through that bring together technology and talent and trade craft. And so this Wicked Problems Lab is one of the foundations of what we do at Vanderbilt University.

Kelly: Here’s a wicked problem: How confident are you that we will actually know the extent of Chinese access to American infrastructure?

Nakasone: I am confident, I'm very confident. I spent my entire career in the intelligence community and there are certain competitive advantages that the United States has over any nation in the world and one of them is intelligence. So, the question is how we take this new technology like artificial intelligence, and develop new talent and ensure that our intelligence community has the trade craft to really dig deep in terms of both the capability and intent of our adversaries. If we’re talking about the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, Iranians, or even a series of hackers, my sense is that we have an advantage. What we have to do is continue to pursue these advantages and ensure that we have the right authorities - like the reauthorization of 702. And we have to ensure that we're going to bring new partners in to be able to solve these challenging problems.

Kelly: I have to ask you about the tradecraft question with AI. How dramatically do you see the role of an analyst or an operator, or someone in one of those very special units at the NSA? How dramatically do you see their roles changing because of AI?

Nakasone: Dramatically. When people used to ask me what the National Security Agency does, I had a pretty quick answer. There are two things that we do better than anyone in the world. We make code and we break code. Well, it was very interesting to read recently that Anthropic was talking about their models now starting to look at different cryptographic algorithms, algorithms that are really intended for post quantum cryptography and being able to break them. So, I think how we're going to use the tradecraft to be able to understand how our code is made and how our code is broken. Tradecraft is really going to lead us to new pathways.

Kelly: When you think about what's happening right now with Iran being suspected of infiltrating the water systems in 12 states, that's not a new problem. So, how do you inform more Americans about the real risks and the real cybersecurity environment we're living in?

Gen. Nakasone: The first thing is that we have to be able to communicate in a way that's concise and clear. If you take a look at the problem of Iranians allegedly in our water systems, one of the things that we could tell you is the fact that it's pretty easy to solve this problem. The first thing is that programmable logic controllers, really the digital brain of our water infrastructure, if they're connected to the Internet, they're at risk. So, if we just kind of take that away and make sure that they're separated from the Internet and if we start to think differently about constructing a series of firewalls or bringing in multi-factor authentication, driving the level of cybersecurity up, my guess is that this is really going to change the problem and being able to ensure that we solve it.

But here's the other thing I would tell you. We have adversaries today that we're not going to be able to patch our way out of this problem. So, with my other hat that I used to wear as Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, my thought is that any adversary that is starting to look at our infrastructure in a way that they have an intent or capability, we need to take on. And we need to make it as difficult as possible, erasing their infrastructure overseas, working with a series of partners, conducting a series of preemptive strikes to ensure that they no longer can take a look at our communications, our transportation, our water, our financial areas, and ensure that we're sending a message: ‘if you are going to interfere within our infrastructure, we are going to ensure that you have a very, very miserable day.’ Much of the same that we’ve done with elections, we should translate to other parts of our critical infrastructure.

Kelly: Do you feel like fundamentally the capabilities and the decisions that are being made are just as robust as they were a few years back?

Gen. Nakasone: I don't know in terms of what they're doing today. But here's what I do know. I know the organizations well. I know the community well. And my sense is that they are very, very focused on being able to not only identify and attribute but also take a series of actions against these folks. Are they capable of doing this? Yes. Where they're at in the process right now, that's more for the government to be able to talk about.

One of the things I would also share with you is that I think being able to talk about this with a bit more transparently, much in the same way we have done previously, is something that would be very, very helpful here. Americans need to understand that we're not just watching this. We're not waiting for them to come and attack our critical infrastructure, but we're really taking measures to ensure the safety of our citizens and our intellectual property are things that would be welcomed by the American populace.

Kelly: These things are happening, but these things don't always gain traction in the headlines. How should the public be thinking about the activities that are done on a day-to-day basis? You’ve said before that you believe we have the best people in the world, do you still feel that way?

Gen. Nakasone: I do. I do feel that way. And I think we have the best private sector in the world. And it might be very, very helpful to talk about what are the large companies are doing in terms of making our infrastructure much more defensible. I think that'd be something that would be of great assistance to being able to communicate to the public that this is something that we're doing. I would also tell you that there is a role for government to do this. This is the synchronization that the government can do to ensure our national security. And I think this is one of the things that as we take a look at the new cybersecurity strategy that was recently released, you know, being able to challenge our adversaries, the first part of the cybersecurity strategy is one of the things that I think we can do more of.

Kelly: How do you feel overall about the strategy? I know that there was a great outreach on behalf of the government to the private sector for input on the strategy.

Gen. Nakasone: So, here's what I would say: strategies are documents. What really matters is the implementation of the strategy. I’m looking forward to seeing what the department's strategy is going forward and how we start to move it.

Kelly: Time is the number one thing we talk about now. When you look five years out, what technological development do you think national security leaders are still maybe underestimating?

Gen. Nakasone: Certainly, it’s the whole idea of AI as a mid to long term problem. But I would say the near-term piece is autonomous capabilities. I mean, look at what Ukraine has demonstrated to us. On the 24th of February, 2022, there were zero ships in the Ukrainian Navy. Today, there are still zero ships in the Ukrainian Navy, but they have sunk half of the Russian Black Sea fleet. And they did it with a laptop, a Starlink connection, and a semi-submersible platform. That's the difference in terms of what's going on.

I’ve listened to podcasts that you've done with General David Petraeus and others who have talked about Ukraine being able to manufacture nine million drones a year. That's amazing. And they're launching 10,000 a day. I think this is the near-term piece that we rapidly have to catch up with.

Certainly, the mid and the longer-term piece are artificial intelligence and how we're going to be able to institute this within our economy and our national security. And let me be honest with you, I think the longer-term piece is continuing to develop the talent that goes along with this technology and tradecraft.

Kelly: I also talked to General Petraeus about the future of war and what that looks like. When you think about your perspective and you're thinking about how quickly the technology's changing, the cybersecurity risks are changing, how do you see the future of war taking shape?

Gen. Nakasone: Well, think about three Ds: detect, decide and deliver. I would tell you that the challenge right now will be on the detect and the decide pieces. These are the areas that we've got to really think differently. We used to challenge ourselves at the National Security Agency about whether we could really take in all this collection and be able to make sense of it. My sense today is that artificial intelligence is probably doing that right now for the folks at the agency and the folks in our intelligence community. So, if we've got to be able to do that, being able to detect it now becomes a bit easier.

Then we have to decide what we do about it. And I think this comes down to your question about how we communicate. How do we think and deliver our critical thinking skills in a different way as humans? And then do we have the character to really stand behind what we're going to do and what we're going to decide to do?

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

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

The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

Last week, I argued in these pages that the United States is buying an army it cannot command — writing procurement checks at a scale its adversaries cannot match, without writing the doctrine or arbitration to decide how the capability behind those checks gets used. Not everyone agreed. The sharpest pushback came from readers with institutional equity in the current procurement path — those with the most to lose if the diagnosis is right. Fair question they kept asking: what is at stake if we get this wrong?

The answer arrived this week, and it is not what most observers are watching.

Beijing is pursuing a two-pronged strategy against the American artificial-intelligence industry, and neither prong depends on beating American laboratories on model capability. The first prong attacks the market instrument that finances the industry: paid enterprise access to closed frontier models at premium margins. The weapon is state-backed open-source saturation of the global developer market. When Chinese laboratories release high-performing models at zero marginal cost, the price American laboratories can charge collapses — and with it, the revenue that funds tens of billions in specialized compute committed to their pipelines.

The second prong is architectural. American frontier laboratories run closed models in centralized data centers connected to their customers via fiber. The Pentagon has awarded contracts for missions that cannot use that architecture — drone swarms, autonomous undersea platforms, cognitive attack detection, and tactical multi-sensor fusion. Consider a drone swarm over the Taiwan Strait that must identify and engage a hostile target in seconds. It cannot query a compute cluster in Virginia and get an answer in time. The bandwidth needed in a denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited spectrum environment is unavailable. Chinese research has shifted toward Large Concept Models — smaller, edge-resident, multi-sensor — that run on the platform and fuse light-detection-and-ranging, radiofrequency, electro-optical and infrared, and acoustic inputs at the edge, without a network dependency an adversary can touch.

This is not a theoretical architecture. Ukraine is running it now. Ukrainian drone units operate with organic, edge-resident targeting within seconds of adversary contact, without a reliable network back to headquarters. Ukrainian schools graduate thousands of drone specialists each year. The country teaching NATO the most about the next fight is doing so in the register the American AI stack cannot yet operate in. The contracts are being placed. The integration doctrine has not yet been written.

Beijing has run this playbook before. Western economies depend on China for rare-earth and critical-minerals processing — the industry that supplies permanent magnets, batteries, and defense electronics. Every F-35 electric-actuation system, every Virginia-class submarine drivetrain, and every Patriot interceptor guidance package relies on rare-earth processing capacity the United States cannot reconstitute within a decade. That capacity was lost not because the deposits lie under Chinese soil but because Beijing sustained state-subsidized processing for twenty years at prices that broke the private-sector cost of capital in every alternative jurisdiction. Open-source artificial intelligence is the same instrument, aimed at a different substrate.

What is at stake?

First, America's most consequential capital-expenditure cycle. Roughly $400 billion a year in AI infrastructure is financed against a revenue model an opposing state has organized its economy to defeat. If that model breaks on Beijing's timeline, the compute pipelines carrying a meaningful share of American growth do not close.

Second, Pentagon operational readiness. Contracts placed today for missions the Pentagon needs to field in three to five years cannot be executed by an AI stack designed for centralized data centers. Platforms that cannot operate in a multidomain and joint-force environment at wartime tempo are not a deterrent. They are procurement projects.

Third, alliance credibility. Sovereign AI programs in Korea, Japan, and the Gulf price today against the American premium-margin model. If it breaks, those programs re-price against Chinese open-weight tooling, and the alliance's technological dependency structure shifts.

Fourth, deterrence. The Taiwan Strait scenario is not theoretical. The platforms that would decide it are being contracted for now, on an architecture that cannot execute the mission at wartime tempo.

What needs to happen requires an integration authority the American sovereign apparatus does not yet exercise. Two responses.

A state-capacity capital response to the first prong. Some form of federal instrument that bridges the compute-to-market pipeline so a Chinese-organized collapse in AI pricing does not take the compute build-out with it. Export-import financing, defense production authorities, and strategic stockpiles are the precedent. No current U.S. government office owns this problem.

A Pentagon-led investment in a distributed inference substrate — the shape of what the Joint Fires Network concept was originally designed to be. Edge-native, platform-resident, multi-sensor, doctrinally integrated. This is procurement of an integration architecture as much as procurement of a technology. The Pentagon has placed the contracts for the platforms. It has not placed the contract for the integration.

Last week I wrote that America is buying an army it cannot command. The diagnosis has evolved: America is also buying an artificial intelligence it cannot deploy. Ukraine is teaching the doctrine the American AI stack has not been designed to run. Beijing is engineering the collapse of the revenue model that stack is financed against.

Coordination assigns. Integration arbitrates. What is at stake is whether the American sovereign apparatus can find the integrator — for the capital response and the operational doctrine — before the platforms the Pentagon is buying arrive without an architecture capable of commanding them.

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

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

Q&A with former CIA Operations Officer James 'Mad Dog' Lawler

James Lawler serves as a national security consultant and is a noted speaker on the Insider Threat in government, academia and industry. He has been the guest on over ninety national podcasts specializing in intelligence and counterintelligence. His Insider Threat presentations have included Honeywell Corporation (twice a year since 2015), Salesforce, Abbott Laboratories, LinkedIn, Rice University (twice), Duke University, Harvard University, Syracuse University Law School, The LBJ School Clements Center for National Security (three occasions), CIA, DIA, NSA, NNSA, FBI, DoD, Office of Secretary of Defense, Joint Special Operations University, National Intelligence University (ten occasions), DEVGRU, DARPA, ARLIS, IARPA, National Defense University, The Institute of World Politics, Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (twice), and numerous times at Applied Physics Laboratory and all of the U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories.

Prior to this, James Lawler served for 25 years as a CIA operations officer in various international posts and as Chief of the Counterproliferation Division's Special Activities Unit. He had five overseas assignments from 1982 to 1994.

James Lawler was a member of CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (SIS-3) from 1998 until his retirement in 2005. He was a specialist in the recruitment of foreign spies, and he spent well over half of his CIA career battling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As Chief of the A.Q. Khan Nuclear Takedown Team, which resulted in the disruption of the most dangerous nuclear weapons network in history, James Lawler was the recipient of one of the CIA's Trailblazer Awards in 2007, marking the 60th anniversary of CIA.

In 2004, former DCI George Tenet sent Mr. Lawler a note which stated, “Jim, what you and your team have achieved will rank up there as one of the most spectacular intelligence accomplishments in the history of the CIA. It occurred because of your exemplary leadership. Not only are we in the process of taking down a network, we are also in the process of disarming a country as a result of your fine work. With respect, George J. Tenet”.

And former DDCI John McLaughlin noted that the effort was “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a perfect intelligence operation.” James Lawler also received the Director's Award from Director of the CIA George Tenet, the U.S. Intelligence Community's HUMINT Collector of the Year Award, and the Donovan Award from the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations.

Let's hear his story:

EMK: Jim, you’ve written three spy novels already, they have been approved by the CIA Prepublication Review Board of course, and they are very, very interesting. I assume that, omitting real-life names, places etc., you drew from your real-life experiences to write them?

JL: Yeah, I weave a lot of real-life incidents into my spy fiction and they're accurate and they're realistic because I've lived these things and so I fictionalize the time, the place, the people, of course, the nationalities. But they're highly accurate as if there's a movie going on in my head and I'm writing about something that either I did or some of my colleagues did, so I try and stick as close to reality as possible. I focus on the human angle and the human condition and to me, that's the most fascinating thing about spy fiction. Of course, the master was John Le Carre, who I just adore his fiction.

You also mentioned to me a while ago that you try to insert into your novels the agency’s first and foremost priority; to protect its people and its assets.

Absolutely, that's a sacred commitment. All three of my novels weave that into the story; that we will go to hell and back to try and honor that commitment to an asset, to one of our sources. All three of my books have that as a theme that we are going to go and try and keep our assets, our sources safe, yes.

Do you remember the first time you were asked to handle an asset? How old were you then?

I was on my first tour. I was, I guess, about 30 years old and so I had had a terrible first year. I hadn't recruited anybody and I was beginning to wonder if I was really good at this profession or not and had a lot of doubts. So, I got a classified message from Washington, D.C., from CIA headquarters, and they told me that there was going to be a big series of negotiations in another year where we were going to be negotiating with a certain foreign country.

A high-stakes national security treaty and we didn't have any sources on the side of the other country to tell us what their negotiating positions were, and therefore if you had any contact with anybody from this specific country who had the following type of access then we were encouraged to go out and develop a good relationship with that person, find out what they needed, see if there was any way we could recruit the person to be a source. So, I'd been in a ski class a few weeks earlier with someone who was from this country.

He had the access they needed so I began what we call the “developmental stage” of trying to build the trust, see what this person needed and then outline what we would call a “recruitment pitch” where we would propose that the person become a source for us and in return we would do things for them, some kind of financial compensation or something like that.

So, after a few weeks of developing the source, I decided I'm ready to “pitch” this person, but I was very naive, this was my first recruitment pitch, and I really didn't have a grasp of what this guy needed or vulnerabilities or anything like that as I should have.

But I thought I could just use the power of my personality and our friendship to persuade this guy to betray his country which is incredibly stupid and naive, but I thought I could do it. So, I wrote this proposal to CIA headquarters and obviously they were very desperate because they approved this stupid scheme of mine and so I took this guy to dinner and I pitched him and I remember he looked at me and he said, ‘Jim you and I are friends but what you're proposing that's morally wrong’.

That didn't sound good at that point, right?

No, of course not, and I tell you I've pitched probably 50 or 60 people in my career and he's the only person who ever posed a moral objection. The only one. Normally, if they pose an objection, what do you think the objection is?

Not enough money... I'm afraid I'm gonna get caught…

That's it, it's the second one, it's the fear. I had an African intelligence officer say, ‘Jim they hang people in my country for doing things like that’. He's right, they would. Although he didn't surprise me, this African intelligence officer, he said that ‘could I have a rain check’? I said, ‘what do you mean?” He said, ‘well my son is only three years old, and I don't need you now but in 15 years he'll be university age and I might need you then.”

Well, 15 years later he was posted to Washington and guess what? We cashed in that rain check and he needed us. But going back to where I've had my first big pitch and I've been turned down: We have a saying in the CIA's Directorate of Operations ‘that it's okay to be turned down but not turned in’. Meaning, what if this guy goes and reports this pitch to his ambassador and the repercussions could be very severe.

I neglected to tell you that the man I just pitched was the number two guy in the embassy. He was the deputy chief of mission, the ambassador's deputy.

I just pitched him, he's turned me down and this ambassador had a terrible reputation for being a hothead and a kind of a jerk and I could just envision him marching into our ambassador's office and screaming about what an outrage it was that young Mr. James Lawler, third secretary, had just propositioned his deputy to become a spy. I could see that happening and even though CIA headquarters had approved this, I thought they're going to cut me loose. They're going to wonder how I messed this up and I thought there's a good chance I'll be going home because this will be such a nasty diplomatic incident.

Well, after about two or three days, I worked up my courage to call this guy, just to see if he's mad or not. And so, I called him and I said, “You know, we really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that dinner the other night. I was thinking maybe this Friday night we'd go out and do it again one week later” and to my great relief, he didn't hang up in my ear but instead he said, “you know, Jim, I think you're, I was thinking the same thing. That would be good”.

So, I thought, “okay, fine”. I've got to meet this guy for the second time, you know, or, you know, one week after my failed pitch and my only goal was to smooth any turbulent waters to try and plead for mercy and say my words were taken out of context and I apologize.

I see where this is going…

But I never had to get to that because when we got to the restaurant and the waiter had dropped the menus off, the first words out of my friend's mouth, “Jim, that offer you made me last Friday, is that still good?” And I said, “well, I said, of course it is” and he says, “well, what you don't know was two days after our dinner, my wife announced that she wants a divorce and I can't afford to pay her the alimony to which she's entitled or put my two high school age boys in private schools when we go home next summer. And in my country, if you're not in a private school, you're not going to get a good education. I can't afford to do that. I can't afford to do that unless I accept your offer”, you know, with the consultant fee that I had promised. And he said, “I know it's morally wrong, but I don't have a choice”.

How did that make you feel?

I felt great. He explained to me at the very next meeting, he brought a whole stack of classified material to give to me and he said, “Jim, let me now tell you why I'm really doing this”. He said, “I hate my ambassador”. He said, “that guy steals the credit for everything I do and everything everybody else in the embassy does. And he goes around this country, you know, acting as if he's God's gift to my country”. And he says, “I hate the guy. And so, as I hand you this classified material, it's as if I'm kicking that son of a bitch in the face”.

And so, I took it from him, and I said “you and I are on the same team. Bring me some more of this and let's kick that son of a bitch again”.

So, one of the prime motivators for espionage is somebody needs revenge. They've been dissed; they've been treated poorly. And so that's how they psychologically can cope with the fact that they're betraying a trust because they feel like they've been betrayed first.

What motivates someone to betray their country? You mentioned revenge. What are the other factors?

We have a very simple acronym at the CIA called MICE. That stands for money, ideology, coercion, and ego. And I will tell you that in my experience, nobody ever does it purely for money. Money may be a means to an end. In his case, he needed money because of his alimony requirements. He needed money for his children's education. But money by itself is not the prime motivator.

Tolkachev (GTVANQUISH) didn't do it for money.

Nobody does it just for money. Tolkachev didn't do it for money, Polyakov (TOPHAT) didn't do it for money. They don't do it for money. They do it for other reasons.

Now, I stands for ideology. And I've had people say, “well, I hate communism, or I hate nuclear weapons”. And that's true to an extent. I don't think they're lying to me. But I think by trying to pin their motivations for some noble reason, you know, ideology sounds very noble. That sounds better than saying, “I hate my boss”, or “I'm in trouble”, something like that.

Now, the C stands for coercion, which the Russians and the Chinese use a lot. You know, you've heard of the sparrows, the swallows, the extortion, blackmail, the honeypot. We don't typically use that. And the reason I don't like using it is because I don't want a rattle snake in my backseat as I'm driving down the road. I want somebody to be positively motivated and not be scared. But the most powerful of all of them is the E, ego.

And that encompasses revenge, it encompasses the fact that you've got marital problems, you may have a lover, you may have all kinds of issues, gambling problems, you may have problems with your boss, problems at work, all kinds of things. E is the most powerful motivator of them all. And I'd say most of the people I recruited, at the root of their motivation, ego was a big, big part of it, probably 90% of it.

To mention an example, Aldrich Ames, the worst espionage case in CIA's history was an E, correct? Because he had to take care of his [Colombian] wife's expensive lifestyle and his vices.

Absolutely. He was a very mediocre to poor operations officer. He was an alcoholic. He was a failure, basically. We don't recruit water walkers. We recruit people who are under stress, people who are desperate. I never once recruited a happy person. You don't recruit happy people. You don't recruit people at the top of their profession. You recruit people who are very unhappy and stressed out. And he was unhappy and stressed.

Same with [CIA’s] Edward Lee Howard

Ed was fired because he had drinking problems, substance abuse problems, and one time on an airplane, he ruffled a woman's purse and stole $20 because he was pissed off that her baby was crying. So, when she went to the bathroom, he stole $20. Now, he was fired. Well, he got back at us by contacting the KGB.

After he had been read into everything [he was going to be posted in Cold War Moscow]

Absolutely. He was the one that basically… what happened to Tolkachev was he [Howard] was going to be Tolkachev's handler. So, he knew Tolkachev's identity.

But an interesting thing was, I guess it was on my third tour, I was about to go off to a tour in Scandinavia. And routinely, when a CIA officer goes from one station to another station, headquarters will do a counterintelligence profile to see where you have been exposed before. And so, to let the receiving station know that Jim Lawler has been exposed to this or that, you know, type of thing. Well, my write up said basically, betrayed by the traitor Ed Howard.

So that was my friend.

He betrayed me to the KGB.

And that explains why I could never get any of the Russians to go out with me because they knew I was nothing but trouble.

So, in essence, you couldn't deal with Russians anywhere, in any part of the world.

Well, they knew better than to get close to me because each Russian residentura has a line KR, their counterintelligence guy. I'm sure they said stay away from Lawler. I was getting really close to one Russian when we were in Scandinavia. I kept bugging him to go out to lunch with me.

A few weeks after I was attempting to do that, another large Russian came up to me at a cocktail party and he kind of leaned in and he just casually mentioned that they knew where my children went to school. Would you like somebody to say that? I mean, basically, the fuckhead was he was threatening my family. And I said, “just leave my family out of this”. But they were giving me a warning to stay away from their people, you know, by saying, we know that your children go to the French school, which they did. And I thought, you know, “asshole”. I reported it, you know.

Until you switched to WMDs, would you say that you went through a process of being a little bit scared about the first time you tried to recruit someone, then gaining confidence, getting more excited, getting to like the game, the challenge of reading people's minds and making them do things they wouldn't normally do?

Absolutely. You get more and more used to it. Just like, you know, nowadays you're a journalist. I'm sure the first time you contacted a potential source, you got butterflies in your stomach and you're thinking, “okay, how do I persuade this person to give me some really juicy information?” And it's very similar. In fact, our two professions of intelligence officer and journalist are very similar. A lot of journalists become intelligence officers because they know how to approach sources. They know how to write well. They know how to communicate well. And that's exactly a lot of the same.

How to protect sources.

How to protect sources. Exactly. When you get a really good source and you write a really good story, it makes you feel good. Well, the same thing for me. If I recruit a really good source and I write something, write an intelligence report that makes a difference in national security, it really makes you feel good. You get that rush because nobody else got this. You're the one who first got the information. And that to me is the same kind of endorphin kick that a good journalist gets. They get a good source. They get a wonderful story.

You mentioned writing reports and - a lot of people don't know this - but a lot of your time as an intelligence officer is spent writing reports that are going to be read by the higher ups. So, you must get to the point and analyze the situation and inform the people above you whether it's the chief of station or the people in headquarters about what's going on.

Oh, absolutely. In fact, I mean, if you don't write reports, what's the point of recruiting a spy? Anytime you have an intelligence operation, the weakest part is communications. And if you don't have communications between you and your spy, your asset, you don't have an operation. But it's worthless if you don't report the information to headquarters. And then, you know, we have analysts that then write these things up for either the National Security Council or for the President or whomever. And so, there's no point in running the operation if you don't produce any written intelligence.

Talking about Russians. One of your colleagues whom I spoke to a few weeks ago… I told him I was going to interview you. He said, “oh, he's our Victor Cherkashin”. [And for those who don't know, Victor Cherkashin is a former KGB colonel who recruited both Aldrich Ames from the CIA and Robert Hanssen from the FBI]. A legend. So, knowing you, I know that you are a low-key guy, you're not the kind of guy who boasts about things. But what do you have to say to that?

Well, I take that as a real compliment whoever said that about me, because I have only the greatest respect for Victor Cherkashin. Like you said, he was the KGB colonel who basically handled both Ames and Hanssen. He was a brilliant Russian KGB officer. And I still quote him occasionally because he made the point that “it takes a spy to basically find a spy”. In other words, you must recruit a spy to find a spy. You know, the reason we're able to catch spies is because we recruit a spy on the other side. And he saw that because if you look at the two cases he handled, Ames and Hanssen, they [exposed] a lot of the Russians who were working for us.

Well, the Russians may not have found out who was working for us, had it not been for Cherkashin handling Hanssen and Ames. And so, I take it as a high compliment. And a lot of the counterintelligence things that we use are worthless. We really need a guy on the other side who says, “okay, your side has a problem and here's the problem's name, or here's what I know about the problem”, which allows us to narrow down, you know, who the suspects are.

I'm going to give you another compliment because as it happens, I've read Ursula Wilder's, one of the CIA’s most prominent clinical psychologists, original report [The Psychology of Espionage, 2003]. It's now been republished, partly redacted. A lot of the things that she's written about in her original 2003 paper echo what you tell me. And I wonder, did you ever feel that this kind of work, recruiting people, persuading people to betray their country, was kind of inherent in you, in terms of how you approach this, like you were meant to do that? Did you ever feel like this?

Well, came into this profession almost by accident, but I've always had the ability to communicate with people. And I have the greatest respect for Ursula Wilder. Strangely enough, I've never physically met the woman, but I know two of my very good friends, Dr. Kenneth Dekleva and Dr. David Charney, both of whom are forensic psychiatrists and both of whom are experts in the motivations for espionage. They have a lot of respect for Ursula Wilder. At some time, I really should meet the woman. But I think if I had not been a CIA case officer, I would have loved to have been either a psychologist or a psychiatrist, because I'm fascinated with the infinite variety of human motivations and human condition. And I think frequently I acted almost as a therapist for my assets. I had one asset once tell me, “Jim, when you're talking to me, it's as if my brain is in a warm waterbed”.

And so, I relaxed them. I got them to tell me everything that, you know, things they wouldn't tell their best friend or their spouse. And they also realized that I was not going to be judgmental and that I was never going to hurt them, that they could trust me. And so, I think I use a lot of the same techniques that my psychiatrist and psychologist friends use. But it just comes natural to me. I think one of my real rules in life is the golden rule that I treat other people as I would like them to treat me. And that comes across as sincere. And so, people do treat me.

Yeah, you can't fake that. That's true. While you were in the business of recruiting people for the agency you were always under diplomatic cover. Is that correct?

That's correct. Well, actually, 95% of the time. Occasionally, I would use commercial cover and an alias. I'd pose as a businessperson or something like that. But most of the time, I was under State Department cover, yes.

But when you didn't have a diplomatic passport, were you ever scared that something might happen, did it cross your mind? Because it's not for the faint of heart, right?

I think most case officers are basically adrenaline junkies. We like the thrill. If there was no thrill to it, it wouldn't be any fun. You know, if there was no risk to it. So having that extra little risk factor, I mean, I'm breaking people's laws. A lot of times, the countries I have been to, I was breaking their law by committing espionage or recruiting their people or something like that.

But it was the risk. The risk is what made it fun. And then figuring it out, how do I get to this person? How do I run this operation? Being resourceful, being creative, all of that, it was something that gave me a real thrill. So, I ever scared? No, not really. I mean, maybe I was being naive, but I wasn't particularly scared.

I mean, admittedly, I was rarely in an area that was dangerous or a war zone. Some of my colleagues risked their lives and have lost their lives in war zones. But, you know, typically I was going after, you know, white collar people that were in the same socioeconomic class as I was, persuading them to betray their countries and to commit espionage.

When you get there, when the show starts, the fear goes away and suddenly you feel like some sort of calmness in your mind, like you're in the zone or something. I don't know if that makes sense.

No, it does make sense. You become very focused. And whenever I was traveling to some of these countries in an operation, people have asked me if I went sightseeing or something. I said, “I'm not there to go sightseeing”. When I'm there in a country running an op, I'm not there to go sightseeing. I'm 100% focused on either going after somebody or meeting somebody, doing some operation, but you get in the zone or in the flow and then your nerves, you overcome that.

Right, and adrenaline is the most potent of substances.

Absolutely.

So, let's switch gears: How did you get involved with WMDs?

Well, I was posted to Switzerland and Switzerland has some of the best high technology in the world and it became apparent that some of the countries like Iran and Syria and some other countries were trying to get that high technology to either develop nuclear weapons programs or biological weapons programs. So, I started running a lot of operations against proliferators, people who were selling this high technology to countries like Iran and Syria.

And I had a lot of motivation to do this because I remembered reading a book when I was like about 14 years old called Hiroshima. And Hiroshima described the effects of the first atomic bomb. It was written by John Hersey, and it scared me because it totally obliterated the city, killed 140,000 people, and it cast shadows on a wall of three people who were basically in essence just disintegrated. It always stayed with me.

It motivated me to work against these countries that wanted to develop nuclear weapons. And I'm not against nuclear disarmament across the board because if the United States were to suddenly disarm, I guarantee you Russia and China would take advantage of it. But I largely abhor nuclear weapons. If I could push a button and every nuclear weapon on earth would disappear, I would do it. But that's not going to happen. So, I found a lot of motivation in working against WMD programs.

When you say WMDs, you not only mean nuclear weapons, but you also refer to nerve agents or other kinds of...

Biological weapons. Yeah, yeah. Chemical weapons are more weapons of local area destruction. They're not going to spread like biological weapons. But biological weapons are in many respects even scarier than nuclear weapons. Because for nuclear weapons, you always need either uranium 235 or plutonium 239, fissile material.

And a delivery device.

Right, right. And you need a lot of technology. But a biological weapon, the knowledge is really out there. And even somebody in a lab could develop a fairly effective biological weapon. We were all, the whole planet was a victim of a biological weapon when COVID hit.

I mean, that was in essence kind of a biological weapon. And you saw the millions of people that died and all the destruction that caused.

That's something to think about in the future because if you can create something like COVID, you can do worse things in the future as technology advances and AI gives you the tools to perform better research.

Right. I mean, with AI, AI could develop a deadly pathogen that we can't even dream of. So, it's very scary.

You did this kind of work, WMDs from 1994 until you retired, Jim?

Yes, that's correct. Well, actually, against WMDs from about [19]91 until I retired in 2005. Yes.

When was the first time that you became aware of the A.Q. Khan Network, the infamous Pakistani nuclear physicist who gave Pakistan the atomic bomb and proliferated the technology to other countries as well?

Well, he was known to the intelligence community as basically making possible Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

But what we didn't know until my team discovered it was that Dr. Khan took proliferation private.

So, when he offered to equip Libya with a nuclear weapons program, that did not involve the Pakistani government. It was strictly Dr. Khan and his network. He basically took proliferation private for money. And he was going to equip Muammar Gaddafi with a turn-key nuclear weapons program. He had the diagrams and everything. And my team discovered what he was doing. And then we ultimately brought him down and stopped it.

So, not only did you stop him potentially delivering a nuclear weapon capability to Gaddafi, but to other countries as well, even though those countries moved on and he found other sources to sell his services to. I believe he was involved in the North Korean program and the Iranian program early on. Is that correct?

That's correct. That is correct. He was a very dangerous man. And whatever North Korea and whatever Iran has, [it] has its roots and assistance that they got from Dr. Khan. Yes.

This enters into classified territory. I'm not going to say or ask anything more about it. The story has been written. Praise has been given, deservedly so, to you and your team. You've been honored with the CIA's highest award, you and your team, the Trailblazer Award in 2007. And Director Tenet also gave you some very rare praise. How do you feel about that, by the way?

Well, I had a very good team working with me and for me. And I, no, I felt really good about it. It's just like when a journalist wins the Pulitzer Prize, you know, you're out there, you're developing your sources, you write a really great story. And I was fortunate; I was very fortunate. And I had a lot of support from the Seventh Floor, from Director Tenet. He was wonderful, best CIA director I ever worked for.

And he gave me a lot of leeway, a lot of room, and let me run that operation until we finally were able to bring these people down. And I think one of the nicest things I heard was a few years later after I'd retired, and it was during when Muammar Qaddafi was being overthrown in Libya. I think that was around 2012. One of the analysts came to me and he said, “Jim, did you ever think about the fact that if you had not stopped Muammar Qaddafi from having nuclear weapons, he would have used those on his own people and possibly against European countries as well as a diversion”.

And, you know, the weapon he had or wanted, the weapon he was going to develop that the A.Q. Khan network was giving him was the same yield as Little Boy that destroyed Hiroshima and killed 140,000 people. So, it was a proven weapon. The Pakistanis had tested it. It was a proven design. It would have worked. And I had not thought about that. So, when I feel good about that, I say this is psychologically righteous to stop a madman or some rogue country from having nuclear weapons. And that made me feel good. Yeah, it does make me feel good.

What can you tell us about the photo with you sitting on $1 billion in gold bullion.

I was posted to Switzerland. I was running a lot of things. I had some top-level contacts in some of the major Swiss banks. And one of my best contacts once asked me if there was anything, this is like two weeks before I was to leave, he says, “is there anything you haven't done in Switzerland yet that you would like to do?” And I said, “I would like to sit on a fortune of gold and have a cigar in my hands. And I'm going to put a put a caption that says, hell, I own this town”.

And the guy started laughing and he said, “I can make this happen”. And so, a few days later I was invited to visit this vault in which there were not billions, but trillions of dollars of gold. It's deep in the Alps. And I am sitting on one billion dollars in gold bullion. This gold bullion is what they call four nines pure, meaning it's nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of ten thousand pure gold. And so, the picture is me sitting on one billion dollars in gold. Recently I recalculated the value of the gold that I'm sitting on. And, you know, gold has appreciated in value. Well, today it would be worth twelve billion dollars. So, the picture is me sitting on twelve billion dollars in gold.

I'm going to ask you about what the former Deputy Director of Operations, Jack Devine, said. I don't recall exactly when that was, maybe 2016, 2015, somewhere in Europe. And I didn't know him back then. And for those who don't know who Jack Devine is, they should go to Amazon and have a look at a couple of his books. Anyway, he said that technology will never replace a human asset, mark my words. Do you think this is still valid? Because he said that before AI was a thing and all of that.

I agree with Jack. I have a lot of respect for Jack. He was [CIA] Chief of Station in London when I was running my AQ Khan operation.

I wasn't going to reveal that because I thought it was still classified. (laughter)

Okay. I said it. I mean, he was chief in London. I think it's a well-known fact that we have very close relations with the British. But yes, I agree with that. In fact, about six months ago, I had a professor from Stanford University and a retired military, retired army general, ask me how AI would affect human recruiting.

And I said, “I thought that AI would be a wonderful targeting mechanism. If we could scoop up everything that is out there about somebody, their financial things, their employment records, their mental health records. If you had an AI tool that could suck all of that up and combine it with all our classified holdings, it could then suggest certain routes, certain ways that a case officer could go and make a recruitment pitch”.

The targeting officers would have to put it together and use the AI. But it would be, you're not going to see the AI tool or the AI pitch somebody. That requires a human case officer looking into the eyes of their target and then using the route, perhaps, that the AI tool has suggested. So, it would make targeting much more comprehensive if I know everything there is to know or everything that's out there about somebody

It gives you an edge.

Oh, a huge edge, huge, huge advantage. So yes, I see that helping, but Jack is right that technology is not going to replace a human. You need humans. And that also goes for the spies we recruit. If I recruit a spy, I can then know what the plans and intentions are, which may or may not be in their cyber networks or anything else. Or they could have plans that they know they really can't do, but they've written this plan just to satisfy their leadership as an aspiration, even if it's impossible.

I've written about that on The Cipher Brief, about HUMINT: if you don't have the capability, for example, to be inside the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, you can't know when something is going to happen. You need to know when President Xi is going to say, “okay, tomorrow we invade Taiwan at 06:00 hours”. You need someone to tell you in code or through a burst transmission or whatever, it's happening tomorrow at 6 AM or whatever.

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

The human to me, human sources, sure. Cyber sources, SIGINT sources, overhead [IMINT] sources, those are all good. They're all what I call a blended operation. When I was running my A.Q. Khan operation, I had human assets, I had cyber assets, I had overhead, I had all these things. It was like being a conductor at a symphony. You have the brass, you have the woodwinds, you have the orchestra, the chorus. You have all these things, and you must know when to blend in the different parts.

Last questions. First, are we going to see a fourth book soon?

Yes. Yes. I'm working on one right now with a very talented co-author named Johanna McCloy. Her father was a deep cover, what we call a NOC, a non-official cover officer [see Valerie Plame as an example]. She's the daughter of a NOC. We are writing it, we are alternating chapters to where I write my part from the point of view of a retired NOC officer, even though I wasn't a NOC, I was a handler. She writes it from the point of view of being a NOC's daughter. It's about this NOC. He's retired now for about a year and a half. He had some operations that never came to fruition the way he thought, and he calls them his loose threads. Well, suddenly the loose threads start to come together again, and it puts him and his daughter in great danger.

Sounds very interesting. I'm looking forward to that. I assume that by writing novels you don't miss the game much nowadays, do you?

Well, it's a substitute for the game. It's not as much fun, but that's one reason why I do it because I can't go out and recruit spies anymore, so I tell spy stories and create spy stories and delve into human motivations.

Exactly, and you educate people. When someone sees your resume, you've educated officers from almost every agency and every department that matters in the United States about this business. So, it's what you leave behind that matters.

I agree. I have a lot of students that still contact me and talk to me. I have taught thousands of people in CIA, DIA, FBI, Department of Defense, and I get a lot of satisfaction from doing that, and I still mentor a lot of young people who want to go into the intelligence community.

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

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

Inside Trump’s Massive Venezuela Oil Deal

“A major oil agreement has been announced between the government of the United States and the [Venezuelan interim] regime of Delcy Rodriquez. I know what you [Venezuelans] are feeling, sadness, anger and that painful sense so familiar throughout our history that someone else is making decisions about what belongs to us in our name, without us. The true scope of this agreement is still unknown. Who is signing it? What exactly is being signed? Who is providing the funds? Who is offering the guarantees? How does this benefit Venezuelans? Quite rightly, this has sparked deep concern about its implications for our country's future.”

That was part of a statement to the Venezuelan people released last Thursday by María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician, activist, and prominent leader of the opposition to Venezuela’s interim-President Delcy Rodriguez. These were Machado’s first extended remarks about what President Trump has called “the biggest oil deal in world history.”

But as Machado so accurately observed, “We still do not know the true scope of this agreement,” nor, I will add, does anyone know if this deal will ever go into effect.

First, a bit of history, since I believe the Trump administration initial plan was described publicly back on January 9, when the President met with executives of 17 oil companies at the White House.

At that time, with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro locked in a New York City jail, President Trump said, “American companies will have the opportunity to rebuild Venezuela's rotting energy infrastructure and eventually increase oil production to levels never ever seen before.”

“Our giant oil companies,” Trump said, “will be spending at least $100 billion of their money, not the government's money. They don't need government money, but they need government protection and need government security that when they spend all this money, it's going to be there.”

He added, “Venezuela [meaning interim-President Delcy Rodriguez] has also agreed that the United States will immediately begin refining and selling up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil, which will continue indefinitely.”

Trump then made his pitch saying, “All of the companies here today are going to be treasured partners in bringing the nation of Venezuela back to life, restoring its economy and generating…tremendous wealth for the companies that are going in.”

At that session, Mark Nelson, vice chairman of Chevron, when called upon said, “For more than a century, Chevron has been a part of Venezuela's past. We are certainly committed to its present. And we very much look forward, as a proud American company, to help it build a better future.”

However, when Trump asked ExxonMobile Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods to “say a few words,” the response was different.

Woods explained, “We have a very long history in Venezuela. In fact, we first got into Venezuela back in the 1940s. We've had our assets seized there twice. And so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we've historically seen here and what is currently the state.”

Apparently, over the past seven months more negotiations took place and on August 28, Trump announced on TruthSocial, “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY! At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer.”

Three days later, on August 31, the White House released a fact sheet with more details.

The fact sheet disclosed the Venezuelan interim government [Interim-President Delcy Rodriguez] has granted a privately-held oil company, North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), 100-year concessions for 17 oil fields with proven reserves of approximately 65 billion barrels.

I should point out that Venezuela has some 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the largest in the world, with Saudi Arabia second with 287 billion barrels. On the other hand, as of this year, the U.S, has only some 46 billion barrels of proven reserves, although this country is one of the world’s largest oil producers.

NABEP, based in Barbados, already was Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer run by Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt López. According to press reports, the 46-year-old Betancourt has a checkered background, but nonetheless was used by the Trump team in planning the U.S operation that seized former-President Nicolas Maduro, and afterwards served as a liaison figure with Delcy Rodriguez.

The White House fact sheet also said, “At no cost to the American taxpayer, NABEP has granted the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) a 35% equity stake in its corporate parent, representing up to hundreds of billions in value and dividends for the United States.”

The OSC, started under the Biden administration, has up-to-now funded private companies developing certain needed military technologies. The Trump administration last year increased its legislative authority to support up to $200 billion in loans and loan guarantees, and recently has grown its staff to near 100 people.

But the OSC has never been prepared to deal with the role apparently to be required if, as the agreement apparently states, it would be a major stockholder in what could be one of the largest oil companies in the world.

Perhaps because of the proposed Venezuela deal, the OSC announced on August 17, it was going to establish “a panel of pre-qualified law firms (“Firms”) to act as its external transaction counsel.” The selected firms would then represent borrowers or others doing business with the OSC on a “Sponsor Pay Basis,” meaning that the legal fees and expenses of OSC for a transaction will be borne solely by the borrower or another third party and not by OSC, or any U.S. government entity.

An additional benefit from the deal to the U.S., according to the fact sheet is: “NABEP has also granted the U.S. State Department the right to purchase, at production cost, a guaranteed 20% of the off-take [contracted oil purchased] from all current and future fields NABEP will operate.” The State Department was also given “the right of first refusal to purchase the remaining 80% of its [NABEP’s] production,” according to the fact sheet.

It’s unclear why the State Department has this role other than Secretary Rubio was a negotiator of this deal and the State Department was named on Trump’s January 15, Executive Order to administer funds from current Venezuela oil sales being controlled at that time by the U.S.

As for NABEP -- the company itself -- the U.S. government was given “veto power over the appointment of any member of the board of directors,” plus “a majority of NABEP’s board of directors must be U.S. citizens,” the fact sheet said. Additional, according to the fact sheet, “the U.S. government’s agreement with NABEP is governed by U.S. law and is subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.”

Naturally, questions about whether this agreement ever goes through have been raised.

On September 1, The Atlantic Council pointed out that the Pentagon’s OSC “has never been leveraged for a program like this or the management of such a vast equity stake in a foreign country’s national assets (assets which that country’s own constitution forbids the sale of).”

The Atlantic Council further said, “As in Venezuela, it is entirely plausible that future U.S. governments may likewise look askance at this agreement -- particularly if…it is not resulting in the massive oil production increases that are presently hoped for.”

For example, interim-President Rodriguez said during an August 29 television interview that the agreement could generate about $209 billion in ⁠revenue for Venezuela, based on a $65 per barrel oil price where some $19 per barrel would flow directly to Venezuela, to boost government revenue.

But others have questioned whether the Venezuelan government would actually get $19 per barrel if the U.S. exercised its right to buy 20 percent of production at cost.

Then there is the political opposition in Venezuela where leaders such as Machado have argued, “The wealth beneath our soil does not belong to an illegitimate regime. It belongs to the Venezuelan people.”

Machado added, “Venezuelans know there can be no development without strong institutions and a government elected by popular vote. That is the only real guarantee of success and stability for any large-scale investment.”

Last Wednesday, both Trump and Rodríguez brushed off questions about when the next Venezuelan election might be held.

Trump told reporters, “You had a very powerful, very nasty dictatorship in Venezuela – and they’re [the Venezuelan electorate] just not going to be ready for it yet, but soon.” With Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who was visiting Caracas, Rodríguez told reporters, “I have worked tirelessly to ensure that Venezuela is ready and prepared when the time comes for its electoral process.”

Elliott Abrams, who served as U.S. special envoy to Venezuela during Trump’s first term, has told the New York Times, “If an election is to take place in Venezuela, a nine-month runway for preparation is likely to be expected. Within the time period, Abrams said, “Here’s my fear: It makes us [the U.S.] Delcy’s partner, and gives the President a reason to want her to remain in power,” because she will do “whatever Trump tells her to do.”

Luis A. Pacheco, for 17 years an executive at Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA and currently a nonresident fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, wrote last week in Americas Quarterly, “Little is known about how this deal will proceed, so important questions still need answers.”

Pacheco’s questions included, “Will NABEP sign this deal with PDVSA, the state oil company, making it more like a standard joint venture?...It’s still unclear whether NABEP can turn around and share ownership with the U.S. government, specifically with the Pentagon’s special unit originally designated as a counterpart to this pact. Beyond this critical aspect, there is also the question of NABEP’s financial and technical muscle. Will a firm that lacks these credentials be able to outsource to established oil companies to fulfill the contract’s scope?”

With experts raising such questions who can believe this “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” is going forward as currently planned?

For example, back during his January 9 press conference with oil company leaders at the White House, Trump announced that Venezuela had already given the U.S. 30 million barrels of what had been previously-sanctioned oil that it had on hand.

“That's about $4 billion worth,” Trump announced back in January, adding, “And it's on our way to the United States right now. And we want to thank Venezuela for that. And we're working very well with them, obviously, or they wouldn't have been so generous.”

There has been no accounting that I know of for that first gift of $4 billion worth of Venezuelan oil.

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

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

A Former CIA Station Chief on Kyiv Under Drone Siege

Reporting live from Kyiv, Cipher Brief expert and former senior CIA officer Ralph Goff walks CEO and Publisher Suzanne Kelly through a drone strike that hit the SBU headquarters in the heart of the city today.

Ukraine’s SBU — the Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy) — is best described as Ukraine’s principal domestic security and counterintelligence service, although its wartime role has become substantially broader and more operational.

The closest U.S. analogy would be a combination of responsibilities that are divided between the FBI, the CIA and specialized military/intelligence capabilities, here in the U.S. The SBU is responsible for counterintelligence, counterespionage, counterterrorism, protecting state secrets and investigating threats to Ukrainian national security. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, it has also become a significant wartime intelligence and covert-action organization.

Kelly talked with Goff about the impact of a Russian drone attack on the organization's headquarters and the surprising resilience of Kyiv residents in the strike's aftermath.

Kelly: You've been on the ground in Kyiv for a couple of days, but there was quite an incident this morning amid near-nonstop air raids that have lasted for more than a week now. Tell us about where you were and what you heard this morning near SBU Headquarters.

Goff: Today in Kyiv we had some air raid alerts overnight, then some in the morning, and a couple more during the day. But today was followed up with a couple of drone strikes right in the middle of Kyiv. Early this afternoon, one struck the headquarters of the Internal Security Service, the SBU, which seems like a very deliberate, targeted attack by the Russians. Unfortunately, there were some casualties, I don't think anyone was killed, but there were wounded, and some damage to the building. It was a very clear sign from the Russians that their jet-powered Geran drones are not only hard to intercept, but very accurate.

Kelly: The Cipher Brief has been in that area of Kyiv with you several times in the past, Ralph. That's essentially the inner circle, where the government operates. We've been wondering how long it would be before some of these significant targets got hit, given Ukraine's shortage of anti-missile systems. What's it been like on the ground since you arrived three or four days ago? Is there a heightened sense of anxiety?

Goff: There is, among parts of the population, but I'd say for most people it's more a heightened sense of annoyance. Here we had a drone strike right in the heart of Kyiv, at the SBU building, and most people's biggest concern afterward was how it messed up traffic downtown, it's a major artery, so there were traffic jams all around. History is replete with examples where so-called strategic bombing of civilian targets or major cities to break the will of an enemy has never worked, and I don't see that working here either.

I do think it's a clear sign that Ukraine has to find a way to close the gap and counter these new high-speed, high-performance drones. We hear reports of an 85 to 90 percent interception rate on conventional, piston-engine drones, the regular Shahed-type drones. But with the jet-powered drones, we've heard the interception rate drops to much lower figures, which I won't get into because I don't want to give the enemy that kind of data. And when it comes to missiles, the press has already reported that the Ukrainians are so low on counter-missile capabilities that they rarely intercept any ballistic missiles launched into Ukraine.

Kelly: When you're watching this war from afar, it's hard to get a clear sense of how much time is left before Kyiv, Lviv, and other major cities are in real trouble. Kyiv has always had the strongest air defenses. Is Kyiv running out of time?

Goff: I don't think they're running out of time so much as, I think they will close the gap, they will solve the technical issues and improve their defenses, but it will take time, and they'll suffer in the meantime. I'll say it's going to be a bad winter; I'm fairly certain of that. But the Russians didn't break the Ukrainian spirit last winter, and they won't break it this year either.

On the other hand, there's an interesting dichotomy of feelings and morale. At the front, I was talking to a friend who's been deeply involved in providing intelligence assistance to frontline units, a non-governmental source, and he said that for the first time since he's been here, every unit he visited had high morale. We're looking at a battlefield now where the casualty ratio is probably eight to one in favor of the Ukrainians. Eight to one, that's an astounding number. So you have this high morale at the front, where soldiers are saying, “we think we can pull this off.” And then in the cities, you have people increasingly concerned about the welfare of their families and children because of these blatantly terroristic attacks on civilian targets. There's a real dichotomy emerging in the middle of this war.

Kelly: On that eight-to-one figure, is that because so much of the fighting on the front lines now is essentially robot-on-robot, drone-on-drone combat? Or is something else driving that number?

Goff: That's a large part of it, but at the end of the day you still need soldiers fighting soldiers. What it comes down to is who has better mastery of the battlefield, and the Ukrainians have information dominance. On top of that, they're the defenders, they can dig in and weather the storm, whereas the Russians are still relying on high-cost, high-attrition tactics, sending soldiers out literally in ones and twos to try to infiltrate Ukrainian positions. But they're very vulnerable, because the battlefield has become so saturated with drone coverage and surveillance, what we call ISR, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The Ukrainians have really mastered that, and it's given them a huge advantage. That could change, the Russians aren't sitting back, they're innovating too, but for now the Ukrainians have an edge, and they're going to keep innovating to maintain it.

Kelly: There have been a lot of headlines about domestic issues that President Zelensky is dealing with this week in Kyiv, even as he wages this war, including the departure of Minister Fedorov, who's been pushing forward on defense technology and made some announcements this week here in the U.S. about that. What's different now in terms of the strength, stability, and unity of the government? We know the unity of the people is hard to break, but how are you looking at this through the government lens?

Goff: The big difference now is that the innovation and technical advances made by the Ukrainians don't depend on one person. This isn't some technological breakthrough that depends on one minister or one ministry, it's government-wide, across the various ministries and different commands. It's a multi-echelon effort where technological innovation isn't just pushed down to the lowest levels, it's driven by the lowest levels. It runs from top to bottom and bottom to top. So whether you change a minister or change a commander, like the change from Syrskyi to Drapatyi, that doesn't change. The innovation has reached all levels, and it's here to stay.

Kelly: I'm jealous The Cipher Brief isn't there with you right now, we usually are, and we like being there because you're attending a number of interesting and enlightening meetings while in Kyiv. Has anything surprised you this time, or really stuck with you, from this round of meetings?

Goff: Nothing ever really surprises me here. I think one of the reasons I come is for my own benefit, I always leave more inspired than when I arrived. A good example: we had this horrendous drone strike in the middle of the city, and within minutes people were just going about their daily lives. The emergency response was there, I watched ambulances flowing to the scene, first responders arriving. I actually marveled at that, because my initial instinct was to stay away, given the Russian penchant for the “double tap”, hit the target, wait a few minutes until first responders arrive, then hit it again. Even knowing that's a Russian tactic, the first responders were there within minutes.

As I continued on to my next meeting, people were going about their lives, doing their shopping, going to work, going to the grocery store. They weren't deterred by the event. And while that doesn't surprise me, it does inspire me.

Kelly: What about the significance of the SBU? A lot of people may not understand exactly what it does, it's similar to our own intelligence gathering but with other functions too, almost a combination of the CIA and FBI if we're relating it to the U.S. Tell us about some of its operations and why it's an important organization in Ukraine.

Goff: It's an important organization because, yes, they have the primary mandate for internal security in Ukraine, but they're also involved in long-range strikes into Russia. If you see press reporting on some sort of assassination attempt, like the Russian air force general who was shot the other day, that's pretty much the SBU, showing they have a long reach into Russia. So they're playing on multiple levels, and they're an important player. This is a sign that Russia knows who they are and where they are.

But taking out the SBU headquarters is probably inconvenient for some time, and there will be losses. The Ukrainians have decentralized much the same way they've decentralized the structure of their military intelligence community, they've decentralized command and control. So if you take out the SBU headquarters, I'm sure within minutes there's a backup headquarters and contingency plans in place. The Ukrainians are well aware of Russia's capability to strike their headquarters.

Kelly: It's been a little while since you were working as a CIA station chief, you held six different postings in that role. If you were filing something back to the United States today, what's the most important thing you'd want people to understand about what you're seeing there?

Goff: That the war is entering a different phase. And if the war is entering a different phase, it means the Ukrainians are going to have to react differently, which means their allies are going to have to react differently, which means those of us in the intelligence community are also going to have to change our game and adjust. We're going to have to be prepared to support the Ukrainian effort to defend themselves, and if that means an active defense against the Russians, that would be my recommendation.

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

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

The New Economics of Warfare: David vs Goliath

The most important lesson emerging from the Iran conflict may not actually be about Iran. It is about the changing economics of warfare and what happens when autonomy, artificial intelligence, commercial technology and inexpensive mass begin eroding advantages once reserved almost exclusively for major powers.

In many ways, modern warfare is increasingly becoming a story of David versus Goliath. The difference is that today’s David is armed with drones, software, commercial sensors, open-source intelligence and rapidly adaptable technology. Goliath still has overwhelming advantages in scale, firepower and resources, but the sling has become far more sophisticated — and far cheaper.

For most of the modern era, advanced military power belonged overwhelmingly to countries capable of spending billions of dollars on sophisticated aircraft, warships, missiles, sensors and command-and-control infrastructure. That advantage is not disappearing. Aircraft carriers, submarines, advanced fighters, bombers and integrated missile defenses remain essential instruments of national power. But the economics beneath them are changing as autonomy, AI, inexpensive sensors, commercial communications, advanced manufacturing and widely available components lower the cost of creating meaningful military effects.

Ukraine provided the first large-scale demonstration of this shift. A materially weaker “David” used drones, software, commercial technology, open-source intelligence and rapid battlefield innovation to impose extraordinary costs on a much larger Russian “Goliath.” Ukraine did not eliminate Russia’s advantages in manpower, missiles, aircraft or industrial capacity. It showed that technology could narrow the gap without matching a stronger adversary platform for platform.

Iran is now demonstrating another version of the same problem. Tehran cannot compete with the United States carrier for carrier, fighter for fighter or missile-defense battery for missile-defense battery, but it does not need to. Iran has spent decades investing in missiles, drones, proxies, cyber capabilities, maritime harassment, information warfare and strategic geography precisely because those tools allow a materially weaker power to impose disproportionate costs on a stronger one.

That is the economic logic of asymmetric warfare. An inexpensive autonomous aircraft does not need to outperform an F-35, and a small unmanned surface vessel does not need to defeat a destroyer in a traditional naval engagement. It only needs to create enough risk that the defender is forced to respond. When one side can repeatedly spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and compel the other to spend hundreds of thousands or millions, the exchange ratio eventually becomes strategically significant.

The United States cannot build a sustainable long-term strategy around answering every inexpensive drone with a multimillion-dollar interceptor or every maritime threat with another billion-dollar warship. That does not mean exquisite platforms are obsolete. It means using exquisite platforms to solve every problem eventually becomes economically unsustainable.

The more useful debate is not whether a drone can replace a fighter or whether an autonomous vessel can replace a destroyer. They cannot. The better question is how many missions currently concentrated aboard expensive crewed platforms can migrate toward cheaper autonomous systems: surveillance, reconnaissance, communications relay, target detection, electronic sensing, mine detection, logistics, persistent maritime presence, decoys and distributed weapons carriage.

Technology disruption rarely begins by replacing an incumbent system outright. It begins by stripping away individual functions. Instead of asking whether one autonomous vessel can replace a destroyer, military planners should be asking what happens when dozens of autonomous vessels operate around that destroyer, extending its sensing range, complicating enemy targeting, absorbing risk, providing persistent presence and allowing the crewed combatant to operate farther from danger. The destroyer remains essential, but its role changes.

Artificial intelligence accelerates this transition because it changes the manpower economics of military mass. Traditional military power is extraordinarily manpower intensive. Every additional aircraft, ship or vehicle generally requires crews, training, maintenance and support personnel. Software scales differently. As autonomous systems become more capable of navigating, sensing, classifying targets and coordinating with one another, fewer operators may eventually supervise far larger numbers of assets.

The strategic value is therefore not simply removing a sailor or pilot from danger. It is changing the relationship between manpower, mass and military capability. Ukraine has also shown how quickly this cycle can evolve: operators identify a battlefield problem, engineers modify hardware or software, the adversary develops a countermeasure, and the system changes again. That cycle can occur in weeks while traditional acquisition processes often operate in years. The widening gap between those timelines is becoming a national-security vulnerability.

Iran also demonstrates why the economics of modern warfare extend far beyond the price of a missile or drone. Consider the Strait of Hormuz. Iran does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy in a traditional fleet engagement to create a strategic crisis. It needs only to generate enough uncertainty around one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints to affect shipping behavior, insurance premiums, energy markets, naval deployments and political calculations thousands of miles from the battlefield.

A drone does not necessarily need to sink a tanker to be successful. If it forces commercial vessels to reroute, raises insurance premiums, pushes energy prices higher, requires additional naval escorts and generates political pressure in Washington or allied capitals, it may have produced a strategic return far beyond its acquisition cost. The Strait of Hormuz is therefore not merely geography; it is economic leverage.

The same logic applies to the Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea and other maritime chokepoints. Protecting those spaces exclusively with crewed ships and aircraft is extraordinarily expensive. Autonomous maritime systems offer another model by providing persistent surveillance, distributed sensing, electronic warfare, communications relay, logistics and eventually additional defensive or offensive capacity without the manpower burden of conventional warships.

The future fleet will almost certainly be hybrid. Submarines, destroyers, carriers and advanced aircraft will remain critical, but they will increasingly operate inside larger networks of autonomous systems. The same principle applies to the defense industrial base. The United States is not going to replace traditional primes with startups, nor should it. The engineering, manufacturing and systems-integration capabilities required to build submarines, bombers and complex weapons remain indispensable.

But the traditional model cannot remain the only model. Modern warfare increasingly rewards an ecosystem that combines established defense companies with emerging technology firms, commercial manufacturers, software companies, universities, private capital and government laboratories. The industrial challenge is no longer simply building the most sophisticated weapon. It is building sophisticated weapons while also producing enough affordable systems to create mass, replace losses and adapt faster than the adversary.

Quantity is not a substitute for quality, but quality alone is not enough if an adversary can manufacture threats faster and more cheaply than the defender can respond to them. A weapons system that performs extraordinarily well but cannot be produced in sufficient quantities or replaced during a prolonged conflict carries its own strategic vulnerability.

There is another cost curve collapsing alongside hardware: information. Artificial intelligence and social media are dramatically reducing the cost of conducting information and cognitive warfare. An inexpensive drone can force an expensive military response, while an AI-generated video, manipulated image or coordinated social-media campaign can create political effects at almost no marginal distribution cost.

Iran, Russia and China understand that these domains reinforce one another. A tanker is attacked, insurance rates rise, energy markets react, images spread across social media, and AI-enabled narratives amplify fear or confusion. Physical warfare, economic warfare and cognitive warfare increasingly operate as parts of the same system. A missile can therefore be intercepted and still produce strategic effect if it forces millions of dollars in defensive spending, disrupts commerce, dominates media coverage and creates the perception that an adversary controls the pace of escalation.

That is why modern warfare can no longer be measured exclusively through targets destroyed or territory captured. Costs can be military, but they can also be economic, political and psychological. The United States still possesses extraordinary technological and military advantages; the greater danger is economic rigidity.

America and its allies cannot allow adversaries to consistently dictate exchange ratios in which cheap systems consume expensive defenses, small attacks produce major commercial disruptions and rapidly evolving technologies are answered by procurement processes that take years. The answer is not abandoning exquisite weapons, but building a broader force architecture around them: autonomous mass, distributed sensors, AI-enabled command and control, resilient manufacturing, commercial intelligence, lower-cost interceptors, modular payloads and systems capable of evolving at something closer to software speed.

Cold War 2.0 will therefore not be determined solely by which country builds the best fighter, submarine, missile or autonomous system. It will also be determined by which side can manufacture capability faster, distribute it more broadly, replace it more cheaply, adapt it more quickly and impose greater costs on an adversary than it absorbs itself.

Ukraine demonstrated how a modern-day David can use technology to challenge a much larger conventional Goliath. Iran is showing how a materially weaker state can use technology, geography and irregular warfare to impose disproportionate costs on a superpower. China is watching both.

The competition underway is increasingly a competition between military-economic systems. Goliath still matters, but the battlefield is changing in ways that increasingly empower David. The side that prevails may not be the one that builds the most exquisite individual weapon, but the one that can keep adapting, producing and fighting after the other discovers that it cannot.

This keeps the David-versus-Goliath analogy as a recurring frame rather than a gimmick—once near the opening, concretely through Ukraine, and again in the conclusion.

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

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

The Nuclear Umbrella is Bent, Not Broken

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Still Matters

Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press make a compelling argument in a recent article about the future willingness of the United States to provide extended nuclear deterrence, sometimes referred to as the “nuclear umbrella” to over 30 allies. Since the early days of the Cold War, the U.S. made a commitment to defend Europe against Soviet aggression, and under extreme conditions, included the use of nuclear weapons. Similar assurances were made to Japan, South Korea and Australia. The protection provided by this nuclear umbrella has been a hallmark of international order for decades as allies trusted the U.S. would protect them and therefore had no reason to develop their own nuclear weapon capabilities. Lind and Press rightly point out the security environment has changed dramatically, and the “order” created by the United States during the Cold War no longer exists. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lind and Press argue Russia’s nuclear threat on a global scale is much diminished with Russia focused on its boundaries with eastern Europe and less concerned with “the global balance of power”. Similarly, Lind and Press view North Korea’s nuclear weapons development as a regional security issue with Kim Jong Un more interested in regime survival than peninsular conquest. They further argue conflicts today are largely regional in nature and question the commitment of the United States to engage in a nuclear conflict on behalf of an ally thousands of miles away. Thus, they claim the “nuclear umbrella” is broken.

The Nuclear Umbrella Still Exists

On the surface, it’s easy to believe this argument. The first Trump administration clearly stated an intent to put “America First” in 2017 and the second Trump administration signaled skepticism toward alliance commitments and their associated costs. Abroad, there is potential that this signaling from Washington also includes the commitment to extended nuclear deterrence. President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) published in 2025 does not mention extended nuclear deterrence or the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Similarly, the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) does not “explicitly mention extended deterrence” and instead places the “primary responsibility” for their own defense on them with limited support from the U.S. And lastly, the current Trump administration has not and most likely will not issue a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The first NPR was released in 1994 every subsequent administration has issued one until President Trump took office again in 2024. The NPR is a blueprint which describes the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy. This document contains critical messaging on the capabilities, numbers, and modernization efforts of nuclear weapons and under what conditions the U.S. potentially would or would not use nuclear weapons. To be sure, the absence of explicit language on extended nuclear deterrence in the NSS and NDS and the lack of an NPR are departures from the U.S.’s historical stance providing nuclear top cover and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.

Allies and partners of the U.S. have obviously taken notice and started conversations on how to proceed especially given continued Russian aggression, Chinese and North Korean nuclear weapons development, and what they might perceive as uncertainty of the U.S. as a nuclear deterrent backstop.

The United Kingdom and France recently pledged increased cooperation with nuclear weapons with the signing of the Northwood Declaration in 2025. French President Macron also rolled out a policy of “advanced deterrence” aimed at potentially providing nuclear forces to various European allies. Additionally, Japan, South Korea and Australia are all deeply concerned about nuclear weapons development in both China and North Korea. As a result from the proximate threat, some Japanese and South Korean officials have publicly discussed nuclear weapons, a topic previously considered taboo.

However, there is also plenty of evidence to support the fact that while the nuclear umbrella is bent and tattered, it’s not broken.

Although the current NSS and NDS do not explicitly mention extended nuclear deterrence, they do not explicitly eschew the notion either. In fact, the NDS states Europe should take “primary responsibility for its own conventional defense…” making a clear distinction between conventional and nuclear forces. Despite much talk of NATO needing to pull more of its own weight regarding security, the U.S. remains committed to the alliance. Since 1954, the U.S. pledged to protect NATO members and currently has around 100 air-delivered nuclear weapons deployed to various bases in Europe. In addressing the NATO Defense Ministerial, Under Secretary of War for Policy, Elbridge Colby, stated, “Thus, for the United States, our responsibility is to be clear, candid and consistent. We will continue to provide the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent.” Additionally, the U.S. continues to be active in the NATO Nuclear Planning Group, the senior policy body for NATO nuclear issues. Despite U.S. signaling a “scaling back” of conventional support to NATO, there is no plan to remove any of these nuclear weapons from Europe.

There are similar extended nuclear deterrence concerns from Japan and South Korea, especially the suggestion that both should take on more of the financial burden for their defense, the U.S. commitment to both is bit clearer. In February of last year, the U.S. Secretary of State met with the Foreign Minister of Japan and the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Korea to “reaffirm the unshakable trilateral partnership” between the three countries. This meeting underscored the historical commitment of the U.S. to the defense Japan and South Korea to include extended nuclear deterrence.

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Matters

What’s missing in many of the arguments concerning U.S. extended nuclear deterrence is how it has underwritten the concept of nuclear nonproliferation for decades. In 1968, the U.S. pledged cooperation in limiting the spread of nuclear technology as one of the first signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Though limited and certainly not perfect, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) is widely considered one of the most successful arms control treaties ever written by limiting the spread of nuclear weapons while aiding risk reduction of nuclear weapons use. As mentioned earlier, dozens of countries have chosen not to pursue development of nuclear weapons (and pledged not do so as signatories of the NPT) because they determined the extended nuclear deterrent guarantee provided by the U.S. to be reliable and most importantly, credible. Additionally, any country who may feel abandoned by the nuclear umbrella provided by the U.S. and may choose to pursue development of their own nuclear weapon faces myriad challenges. First, many are bound by the NPT and even if they were not, often lack the resources to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Second, all states, even those with the technical know-how to proceed with a nuclear weapons program, would introduce into the nuclear “club” another independent launch authority, more command-and-control systems with varying levels of capability, unknown decision-making processes during crises, and more opportunities for proliferation, miscalculation, and accidents. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the one thing the international community could agree upon was developing a strong prohibition against the use of nuclear weapons. Many resolved crises throughout history where nuclear weapons loomed in the background reinforced the idea that the use of nuclear weapons was unthinkable. The spread of nuclear weapons to more independent states does not simply mean we live in a world with more of them, it substantially increases the number of situations where they become increasingly integrated into routine statecraft and thus, their potential use more thinkable.

The Strategic Consequences

Despite concerns about the credibility of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence that have emerged in some allied capitals, the United States should not become resigned to the prospect of allies leaving the nuclear umbrella. Doing so would weaken the nonproliferation regime, increase incentives for independent nuclear programs, and ultimately leave the United States confronting a more dangerous strategic environment. The U.S. should continue to signal that the credibility of extended nuclear deterrence rests upon strong conventional capabilities and even stronger, unmistakable political resolve with our allies while keeping nuclear use as the final safeguard. Increased proliferation of nuclear weapons does not achieve that objective.

The United States is unique among states that possess nuclear weapons because it has used the world’s most capable nuclear weapons arsenal to prevent nuclear proliferation rather than encourage it. Thus, extended nuclear deterrence and nuclear nonproliferation are inseparable. The enduring contribution to international security by the United States has been and should continue to be the guarantee of nuclear extended deterrence to uphold nonproliferation and preserve the longstanding objective of nuclear non-use.

In no uncertain terms should the U.S. become “comfortable” with more states acquiring their own nuclear weapons resulting from of a lack of confidence that Washington will continue to be the nuclear guarantor. Despite periodic political signals that make some allies nervous, Washington has been remarkably consistent, across multiple administrations, in its policy toward extended nuclear deterrence. States that question U.S. commitment should consider whether other alternatives would enhance their security. The answer is almost certainly no.

The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

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

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

The Cost of Squandering America’s Reputation

Make no mistake: the United States is weaker today than it was yesterday, and the day before that.

Many of our closest allies have moved from fear to confused unease, to evasive dismissal and even defiance in their dealings with Washington. Regardless of how often President Trump claims that “the United States is more respected today than ever before,” the evidence points in the opposite direction.

We are seeing the steady and accelerating diminution of our reputation as “the shining city on the hill,” by an administration that clearly values what it can do over what it should do. When “we have the right” or “I can do whatever I want” supersedes “we have the responsibility to…,” something has gone terribly wrong. This applies both in domestic and foreign affairs.

A reputation is painstakingly difficult to build and very easy to lose, especially in foreign policy. This is particularly true for a superpower like the United States, which is involved in so many issues and hotspots worldwide: sometimes invited, sometimes not, and often at odds with the interests of local players. Even when we stumble – think Iraq – we have usually been able to draw upon a relatively deep reservoir of goodwill, a kind of accumulated equity, based on the understanding by many that our intentions, at least, were good. Or at least not bad. That reservoir has pulled us through several unpleasant situations. It appears the U.S. is no longer receiving this “benefit of the doubt.”

Let me be clear: any U.S. administration’s first duty is to protect and advance the interests of the American people.

But the current administration’s simple, albeit shortsighted, claim of promoting “America First” relies primarily on a toxic combination of instant gratification fortified by largely ego-driven, knee-jerk coercion. This reveals a stark misperception of how the United States came to be what it is today, fielding the most powerful military in history, with the largest, most vibrant, and influential economy in the world. This did not happen by accident, or through simply dominating and bullying others economically or militarily, either of which the U.S. can employ at any time; yes, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions considering the decades it took to get where we are. The United States’ unprecedented influence occurred through a carefully crafted and painstakingly curated long-term strategy of strategic cooperation and collaboration, and selective give and take.

Bottom line: The dirty little secret is that the policy of every U.S. administration has always been one of “America First.”

A Superpower in Transition

So how did we become the most powerful, wealthy nation on Earth? It’s simple. Well… not really all that simple. There are numerous factors beyond our military or our economy, some obvious, many nuanced. But we have an overriding advantage. One, as I point out, that the above strategy has consistently built upon for decades. It is real but also ephemeral: our reputation. This is not about anyone liking or following us on social media. Or simple, advantageous transactional dealings. It is about the raw strategic calculation that working with the U.S. is more likely to be in the overall interest of your country, its government, and people than not. A considerable amount of this is derived from the realization that, heretofore at least, the United States is not predatory or for sale. Not solely out for itself, and that under most circumstances, it will take into account the policies and interests of its partners, and sometimes even its enemies in its dealings.

This distinction matters because the issue is not whether America should pursue its own interests. It most certainly should and does. The question is whether it pursues those interests in a manner that preserves the hard-won trust, access, and cooperation that make American power truly effective, or in a way that burns through them for short-term advantage.

Our reputation has afforded the U.S. government and its representatives – of which I was one – a level of access, trust, and tacit consideration, among both friends and sometimes not-so-friends, that can be hard to quantify.

Reputation is not merely a sentimental asset. It is hard-nosed operational leverage. It determines whether allies will take political risks for us, whether partners move quickly when time matters, and whether adversaries believe our threats or assurances. Once that leverage erodes, or disappears altogether, every request becomes harder, slower, and more expensive.

I saw this firsthand. When I was the CIA Chief of Station (COS) in a certain Middle Eastern country, I received direction via a NIACT, or night action, cable from CIA headquarters in October 2001 to approach my local intelligence counterparts with an extremely urgent request. The U.S. needed a facility located in close proximity to Afghanistan from which it could operate armed and/or surveillance drones, a critical asset in the GWOT. With winter fast approaching, the location then being used would not allow for continued operations for much longer. My country’s leadership controlled a suitable facility. I was tasked with communicating the request and advising as soon as possible if permission was likely to be forthcoming, or if it would be necessary to look elsewhere.

I knew that this was a big ask. A Muslim country, the leadership was extremely sensitive to drawing the ire of Al Qaeda, and I knew this request would require consultation among multiple individuals at the very highest level. There was a process and protocol, and it was typically cumbersome. I immediately met with my primary intelligence liaison contact and laid out the details of the request to him, including its importance, asking that he bring this to the immediate attention of his superiors so it could be considered by the country’s leadership. I expected the process could take several days.

Later that same day, I received notification that the Director of the intelligence service would meet me that very evening (at the local horse racetrack).

When we met, I laid out the request in full. After a brief pause, he said, “Yes. You may use it for as long as you require.”

He asked for no payment or quid pro quo, simply that we “not publicize its use.”

Frankly, I was incredulous, expecting at best a hedge, or “we need time to consider this,” type of response. Common interest? Certainly. Common risk? Not so much. But then I realized that our reputation had tipped the balance, overriding any doubts or fears they might harbor, which they almost certainly did. It was the United States asking. And they were answering.

Iranian D-Day Sanctions

And now we have another big ask: Iran and the just announced D-Day sanctions regime. Washington is requiring that friends and allies endure considerable economic and potentially political pain, along with the not inconsiderable risk of military retaliation from the Iranian regime. And it is doing so after not bothering to consult with them before going to war with Iran, and then failing to protect them from Iranian counterstrikes.

But more important than asking our allies for help is expecting our strategic foes, China and Russia in particular, to ignore not only their own economic (Iranian oil for China) and military (Iranian cooperation against Ukraine) interests but to pass on an opportunity to diminish a strategic rival. For what? Promises of a great relationship with the President of the United States? Unlikely. This is a fallacy that President Trump has long touted: neither Putin nor Xi is a friend; rather, they are cynically leveraging the President’s legendary malleability for their own individual ends. Threats? Also, unlikely given the U.S.’s current weakness. In the end, what do we have to offer them? Little that I can discern. And what would they require in return? I shudder to think.

Lastly, the United States initiated hostilities against Iran without a clear understanding of its opponent or a coherent plan on how to win. Yet another significant blow to the reputation of the world’s preeminent superpower.

The success of economic sanctions on the scale Washington is proposing requires an impenetrable wall. Without active compliance from both China and Russia, it is virtually certain to fail.

The administration speaks about “quiet diplomacy”, but for its friends at least, it is clear they will not hesitate to employ coercion to convince those who hesitate to comply. This should not be necessary, but this is where our diminished reputation leaves us.

When Rhetoric Crashes on the Shores of Reality

The administration and Iran are once more engaged in the verbal back and forth of what I call hyperbolating. Claims by the U.S. of economic D-Day met with Iranian threats of defiance and retaliation. So far, mostly words. But concrete actions are sure to follow.

Given the U.S. Treasury Secretary’s claim that these so far undisclosed new sanctions will collapse Iran’s economy, they no doubt see this as a potential existential threat to the regime. And they should, given the United States’ economic reach. But Iran has built a ‘resistance economy’ for a reason: to absorb and deflect decades of sanctions aimed at cowing the Islamic regime. Previous efforts have met with occasional, partial success, but never enough to force genuine change inside Iran. Iran’s leadership no doubt realizes that the effectiveness of this latest U.S. sanctions regime will hinge on the active cooperation of Russia and China, and they have actual cards to play with each. The U.S., on the other hand, appears to have few, counting instead on goodwill mixed with threats, and a hefty dose of bravado.

In the end, it remains to be seen whether President Trump will stay the course in what is clearly a test of wills. If past is prologue, this is unlikely.

This article was originally published on Mark's Substack, you can find more of his writing here.

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

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

Blowing up Boats: The Numbing Effect of Repetitive Illegality

Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. campaign against alleged drug trafficking small boats off the coast of several South American nations, continues unabated. But while both the public and politicians seem to have become numb to this campaign – or perhaps distracted by the seemingly endless Iran debacle - a few things have remained constant. First, U.S. military forces are killing boat crews without any effort to apprehend them. Second, this practice lacks, as it has from inception, any credible legal justification.

President Trump bragged that his administration has reduced by more than 90% illegal drug importation by sea. Like so many other bombastic or mendacious claims made by the President, there was no data or methodology provided to corroborate this alleged statistic, which is wildly exaggerated. What is more concrete is the human toll this ongoing campaign has inflicted to date. According to a recent report, at least 233 people have been killed in these strikes on 67 boats, all part of a campaign.

Even if the President’s exaggerated assertions of efficacy were accepted, and even assuming these attacks are coordinated with coastal countries like Ecuador, the inherent illegality is in no way altered. Why? Because interdicting the flow of illegal narcotics – even when the importation operation is controlled by criminal gangs – is not a war and does not justify invocation of wartime authority. It is, instead, a law enforcement problem. More specifically, the authority to attack ‘enemy’ personnel and resources with lethal combat power may be justifiably invoked only in situations of armed conflict. When the United States chose to address that problem through the lens of wartime attack authority, it forfeited any claim of legal justification.

The administration knows that, as a matter of international law, the United States may designate individuals as enemy belligerents and attack them with lethal combat power only in the context of an armed conflict. This is why from inception it has emphasized the gravity of harm to Americans resulting from illegal narcotics smuggled into the nation. Proponents of this campaign have emphasized that more Americans are killed every year by illegal drugs than were killed by the September 11^th terrorist attacks. No one questions the tragic consequences of this problem. But every harm to the nation or its people does not ipso facto indicate the existence of an armed conflict. Instead, it is why and how that harm is inflicted that are decisive.

Thus, it is obvious why supporters of this campaign consistently claim the harm caused by illegal drugs means we are at war with drug traffickers: because they seek to justify invoking wartime authority to attack these boats and occupants. Doing so avoids the pesky challenge of apprehension and criminal prosecution – the normal and legally presumptive method for disabling criminal threats: the very modality used by the U.S. prior to this invalid assertion of armed conflict (and apparently one that was more effective). More fundamentally – and problematically – it seeks to validate what by any objective measure is the invalid campaign that is employs lethal force as a measure of first resort based not on the imminent threat posed by the target of attack, but instead on the assertion that target is a member of an enemy group.

The loss of 233 enemy combatants in a war – what international law calls an armed conflict – might be expected. Enemy casualties in the ongoing armed conflict with Iran are undoubtedly more substantial. But it is the context of armed conflict that makes such loss of life unremarkable. This is because in that context the customary international law principle of military necessity justifies targeting enemy personnel – members of the enemy organized armed group – with lethal force as a measure of first resort. And, unlike a law enforcement use of force, the objective of such attacks is not limited to eliminating an individual threat, but instead to bring about the submission of the enemy as a whole.

This is an exceptional use of force authority invoked by States precisely because armed conflict is considered an exceptional situation. Unlike peacetime, armed conflict involves a contest – hostilities – between the State and armed groups operating at the direction of enemy leadership. More fundamentally, the objective of that enemy group would have to be to inflict harm on the U.S. or its assets. It is that motive and conduct that distinguished the September 11^th attacks from criminal gangs smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. Unlike al Qaeda, these groups do not operate with the objective of inflicting harm on the United States (it would be an odd drug dealer who wants to kill his customers) nor do they engage in hostile attacks against the U.S. or its interest abroad.

This is why State invocation of this exceptional power is supposed to be limited to situations of genuine threats to the nation from groups organized for that purpose. It is justified only when a state is challenged by the military forces of another state or by a non-state organized armed group capable of engaging in sustained combat operations. Absent such a situation, state security forces must respond to what is a criminal threat with law enforcement type rules for the use of force. Whether police, Coast Guard, or regular military forces are utilized, lethal force is justified only as a measure of last resort and only when reasonably assessed that the individual subjected to that use of force presents a threat of death or great bodily harm.

This binary use of force construct is reflected in ‘peacetime’ versus ‘wartime’ rules of engagement: use of force control measures utilized by U.S. commanders to align authority with mission requirements. During the many military operations outside the context of armed conflict – including military support to law enforcement – deadly force is authorized only in response to an actual or imminent deadly threat, the same use of force authority applicable to law enforcement officers. That means that it is the conduct of the ‘target’ offering a direct threat that triggers any use of deadly force in response. In contrast, wartime ROE authorize use of deadly force as a first resort against individuals identified as members of the enemy armed group (unless they have surrendered or been disabled by wounds or sickness). Unlike a conduct-based use of force decision, this authority is triggered by a determination of enemy status.

This shift in lethal force authority is perhaps the most significant consequence flowing from a situation of armed conflict. It is also why the existence of armed conflict is not left to arbitrary assertions but is based on widely accepted objective conditions – the so-called conflict classification test that looks at issues like the intensity of the violence, the degree of organization of the group and its ability to carry out sustained operations. That test is pragmatic and, as noted above, covers both state and non-state threats. But it is not so elastic as to allow a state to bypass the peacetime use of force constraints by simply characterizing a threat posed by criminals as an armed conflict.

Yet that is exactly what the U.S. has done to justify lethal targeting of small boats. These boats may indeed be trafficking in illegal narcotics, and the occupants may indeed be members of criminal syndicates or gangs (although there has been scant information provided to validate these claims). And those drugs may indeed be destined for the United States. But none of this indicates the existence of an armed conflict.

Sadly, the continuation of this campaign seems to have numbed the public and Member of Congress to the perpetuation of this illegality. Yet this is also a reminder of an historic legal maxim: the repetition of an illegal act shall not make it legal. When committed under the authority of the United States, it does, however, stain our national reputation and undermine our claim to stand for the rule of law.

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

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

The Vatican’s Quiet Intelligence Diplomacy

Last week all eyes were focused on the secret, first-ever trip of CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow, flying on a C-17 Globemaster (the modern version of the C-141 Starlifter, which CIA Director William Casey used to travel on during his overseas trips during the Reagan administration), where he met with his Russian intelligence counterparts, and where, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “of course, President Putin [was] informed of everything.” Media reports noted that Ratcliffe discussed warnings to Russia regarding its threats toward NATO members. In this sense, Ratcliffe’s trip bore similarity to then CIA Director William Burns’ November 2021 trip to Moscow, in which he warned President Putin not to invade Ukraine. Ratcliffe’s recent trip to Moscow (as well as his trip earlier this year to Havana, where he met with senior Cuban officials) like that of his predecessor William Burns, highlights a tradition of American reliance upon ‘intelligence diplomacy,’ which can serve to reassure both allies and adversaries of America’s that today’s complex wars and conflicts – Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, and others – require the sophisticated use of professional diplomats and intelligence officers at the highest levels.

What many observers missed, and which media coverage of Ratcliffe’s trip overshadowed, was the Vatican visit to Moscow by Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the second-highest ranking Vatican diplomat and Secretary for Relations with States and International Organizations, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, senior national security advisor Yuri Ushakov (also a former Russian Ambassador to the US), a senior representative of the Patriarchate of Russia’s Orthodox Church, and with local Catholics. At a news conference with Lavrov, Archbishop Gallagher (who bears a striking resemblance to Cardinal Kevin Kearns in the famed TV series ‘Blue Bloods’) recalled Pope Leo XIV’s appeal to end hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, and that they might begin “genuine negotiations” with the support of the Holy See and the international community. He proceeded to emphatically state (in Russia, where calling its’ ‘special military operation’ a ‘war’ can lead to a prison sentence), “to be clear, this war must end.” He also stated, “the Holy See will continue to provide strong spiritual, diplomatic, and humanitarian support by contributing to and offering a space for dialogue.” This trip followed Gallagher’s earlier trip this year to Kyiv, where he had met with Ukrainian President Zelensky, as well as other trips to Moscow – and Pope Leo IV’s three prior meetings with President Zelensky during 2025, and the dispatch of Cardinal Matteo Zuppi to Moscow to deal with humanitarian efforts.

Archbishop Gallagher’s visit to Moscow recalls past Vatican diplomatic initiatives such as the late Pope John Paul II’s ‘Holy Alliance’ during the Reagan administration to help defeat the USSR in the Cold War, as well as the late Pope Francis’ involvement in facilitating restoration of diplomatic relations between America and Cuba in 2014. The Holy See has long been an exquisite purveyor of ‘intelligence diplomacy’ for many centuries, so this is hardly new.

What is new however, is Pope Leo XIV’s recent personal involvement in Vatican diplomacy, making it a cornerstone of his papal mission and gospel of peace - even so early in his papacy - as not only the Vicar of Christ, but as a true citizen of the world (https://www.thecipherbrief.com/pope-leo-xiv-a-citizen-of-the-world). In dispatching Archbishop Gallagher to Moscow – independently of CIA Director Ratcliffe’s secret trip – Pope Leo XIV is signaling to Russia (as well as other adversaries such as Iran and Cuba), that the Holy See can be a powerful, neutral, and moral force for peace in today’s complex world. It could be said that Pope Leo XIV, in doing so, has already begin to define his (and the Holy See’s) mission and his legacy in today’s papacy. Unlike other current purveyors of track 3 and other third-party diplomacy in today’s wars and conflicts – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Switzerland, Egypt, the UAE, and Oman come to mind – the Vatican is not beholden to traditional international relations or transactional interests. As was pointed out by a senior Vatican spokesperson (in response to US Ambassador Brian Burch’s NYT interview in July 2026), “any glorification or exaggeration of the Pope’s role as head of state … is therefore misleading because it comes at the expense of his one true mission as Universal Shepherd.”

The Vatican’s recent diplomacy in Moscow will be very closely watched by Iran. Pope Leo XIV has repeatedly called for peace in the Middle East, emphasizing diplomacy as the only solution to the US-Iran war. The Holy See and Iran have had close relations for decades, and during 2021, a senior Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Arafi met with the late Pope Francis in Rome. More recently, the Holy See gave a diplomatic award to Iran’s Ambassador to the Holy See, another signal of the value placed upon diplomacy. The Iranian government has surely considered Pope Leo XIV’s interest in inter-religious dialogue between Catholicism and Islam, noting that his first foreign trip was to Turkey. During the war, Iranian government officials have sent formal correspondence to Pope Leo XIV, requesting his intercession in stopping the war.

Since his return to the presidency in 2025, President Trump had hoped to – aided by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – spearhead his own personal, transactional, and aspirational diplomacy to end wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and now, Iran. Given that these efforts have stalled, proving more difficult than President Trump had imagined, even sophisticated third parties – regarding the Iran war – have faltered, and President Trump has recently stated that negotiations with Iran are no longer occurring. The situation is similar in Ukraine, where negotiations between the warring parties are non-existent, while the risks of expanding conflict and casualties have expanded. In such circumstances, The Holy See’s outreach to Russia should surprise nobody, as it, like the rest of the world, can ill afford to wait for 2029, when a new US President is inaugurated. Nor should it surprise observers if Iran were to request that Archbishop Gallagher visit Tehran soon. But whom he would meet with as interlocutors would be very intriguing.

Lastly, Ukraine’s President Zelensky has already invited Pope Leo XIV to visit Kyiv. Doing so would – given the Vatican’s role as a neutral arbiter – necessitate, due to reciprocity, the Pope’s visit to Moscow. Such ‘intelligence diplomacy’ by Pope Leo XIV could help mediate an end to that long-standing, genocidal conflict, and provide Russia’s President Putin (and Russia) a diplomatic off-ramp and solution to a war that he started but appears unable to end. It’s a beautiful irony --- that of an American-born Pope, Christ’s Vicar, and a citizen of the world, inspiring others to hope and to make peace in the world’s most kinetic, unforgiving conflicts.

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

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

America Is Buying an Army It Cannot Command

The U.S. Army has committed to a million small drones by 2028. The Department of Defense has not decided who will authorize how they fire.

That is not a materiel gap. The volume is on order; Nvidia’s latest earnings guidance says the compute to run it is on the way. It is a governance gap, and it is now the single largest exposure in the American national security posture entering the fourth quarter of 2026.

Consider what landed inside a seventy-two-hour window this week. On Tuesday, Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, with $89 billion of it in the data-center segment and guided to $108 billion in the September quarter — an annualized run rate through American hyperscalers of more than $400 billion, the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history. The same day, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and RTX filed their responses to the Deputy Defense Secretary’s twenty-one-day production ultimatum on accelerated interceptor delivery. Nine days earlier, the Pentagon had opened the vendor portal for the $185 billion Golden Dome missile-defense program.

The chips are being funded. The primes are being pushed. The perimeter is being paid for. None of it tells you who decides when a fielded drone force pushes beyond its vendor’s safety rails during a live engagement.

That is not a hypothetical. Since March, the Department of Defense has formally designated Anthropic — the American AI lab whose Claude model is in active use within U.S. Defense environments — a “supply chain risk.” The two sides opened arguments in DC court over the blacklisting on May 19. In May, the Department expanded its classified AI work to eight companies, explicitly excluding Anthropic. On February 28, OpenAI took the other side of the same question, signing a deal to run its models on a Pentagon classified network. The day before, more than 580 Google employees, including DeepMind researchers, signed an open letter urging Google’s CEO to refuse the same kind of arrangement.

The industrial base of American artificial intelligence is not aligned on whether it will perform the classified work the drone doctrine assumes. The Pentagon’s response has been to fund compute, sign one lab, blacklist a second, and litigate.

Picture April 2027. A deployed American drone force is airborne over a contested Indo-Pacific corridor. A vendor safety guardrail on the targeting AI refuses a strike within a sixty-second window. The commander needs an override. No office at the Department of Defense — including the Chief Digital and AI Officer — holds explicit arbitration authority between the vendor’s guardrail and the commander’s judgment at operational tempo. The decision will be made ad hoc, by whichever lawyer or flag officer picks up the phone.

That is the arbitration gap. It is not the debt-service bill. It is not the interceptor shortfall. It is not even the shipbuilding backlog. It is the fact that the United States is standing up the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history — Golden Dome’s $185 billion, a million-drone target by 2028, and $1 billion for 340,000 attritable systems by 2027 — with no institutional authority designated to arbitrate how any of it fires. It is a supervisory function no institution has yet been chartered to perform, and no doctrine has yet been written to describe it.

Beijing runs the inverse problem. Paul Scharre laid out the industrial-base half of this argument in “Losing the War of the Future,” published in Foreign Affairs on June 23. What his piece understates is the demand side: even if the United States builds the drones, the doctrine and civil-military arbitration required to employ them do not yet exist at scale. The People’s Liberation Army’s answer is on the record. Three PLA researchers — Lieutenant Colonels Li Hengrui and Wang Haiyuan and Senior Colonel Cheng Jinming — published “all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare” in Military Art, the Central Military Commission’s restricted journal, in March 2025. Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga and Andrew Wang brought the article into the English-language conversation this summer in “Total War on Taipei,” published in War on the Rocks. The concept identifies the operational meaning of Xi Jinping’s “national total war” as an integrated arbitration architecture that fuses military, civilian, media, and party assets under a single narrative apparatus.

The PLA may struggle to execute it. The Central Military Commission, which began this term with seven members, has been reduced to two, hollowed out by disciplinary investigations. But the design is on the page. The American design is not.

Three signals will indicate by year-end whether the gap is closing or widening.

First, does the CDAO’s office designate a named override authority for wartime AI lab guardrails? Second, is the Anthropic-DoD blacklisting resolved into a joint framework for classified use, or does the litigation calcify? Third, does the FY27 defense-authorization conference name a joint force to operate Golden Dome, or fund the program without operator language? As of this week, all three are moving the wrong way.

The next war will not be lost because America bought the wrong drone. It will be lost because America bought the right one and never decided who could tell it to fire.

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

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

The Cultural Roots of Strategic Surprise and Resilience: the Israeli case of October 2023

October 7^th, 2023, 06:29 AM. Probably the most tragic day in Israel’s history. A surprise attack conducted by Hamas from the Gaza Strip caught Israel completely off guard. Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing more than 1200 Israelis and abducting more than 250 individuals into the Gaza Strip. They exercised mass murder and rape, effectively conquering parts of Israel’s Western Negev for several hours. This was a colossal military and intelligence failure, more dramatic than that of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was also, of course, a policy failure. The core foundations of Israel’s security doctrine – defense, early warning, and deterrence – completely shattered.

How could this happen to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), one of the best militaries in the world, and to one of the best intelligence communities in the world? For me, as a brigadier general in the Israeli Defense Intelligence (IDI) reserves with decades of practical experience, and as a scholar of Israeli strategic culture and intelligence culture, this was a puzzle. Almost inconceivable. I was surprised by the magnitude of Israel’s surprise. How could Israel’s security establishments reach October 7^th with their “eyes wide shut” about Hamas intentions and capabilities?

But as the regional war which followed October 2023 commenced, I recognized another interesting puzzle. Israeli security establishments have, writ large, recovered from the failure of October 2023, with Israel fighting for almost three years in several fronts, from the Gaza Strip to Iran. Although not gaining “total victory”, these establishments reached impressive operational achievements. They dismantled most of Hamas’ military and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and eliminated most of Hamas leadership in the Middle East; dismantled most of Hizballah assets in Lebanon, while also eliminating Hizballah leader Nasrallah, and demoralizing Hizballah in the famous pagers operation; destroyed many of the Houthi assets in Yemen; and in June 2025 and March 2026, conducted unprecedented attacks in Iran, including the elimination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and most of Iran’s military leadership, and degrading Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities.

How could the same establishments, which colossally failed to prevent the Hamas attack in October 2023, reach such achievements during 2024 and 2025? How could an intelligence system completely surprised by Hamas allow Israel to completely surprise Iran, the regional super-power? How could Israel “turn the tides” of the war after October 2023, and then, like the Phoenix from Greek mythology, “rise from the ashes” and conduct phenomenal strikes in Iran?

These are the topics I discuss in my new book, which reveals the cultural roots of Israel’s strategic surprise in October 2023, and of Israeli resilience following October 2023. The book knowingly focuses on Israel’s security establishments, and not on Israeli policy makers. Its scope is limited, and its conclusions will naturally be debated.

I open the book by acknowledging that some of my previous insights, which characterized Israeli intelligence culture prior to October 2023, were wrong. For instance, I assessed that this culture relies on professional norms and values of critical thinking, a sense of individual responsibility, and moral courage in the face of hierarchy. October 7^th, unfortunately, showed that some of these remained aspirational norms rather than realized behavior in Israel’s security establishments.

Several typical facets of Israeli strategic and intelligence cultures account for both failure and success. For instance, the Israeli typical focus on operational, tactical, and targeting intelligence prior to October 7^th resulted in an under-appreciation for strategic analysis, military analysis, and strategic early warning from war. The low quality of these disciplines was one of the factors for the October 7^th failure. But the inclination towards targeting intelligence, and the close integration of intelligence into decision-making and operations, also enabled Israel to conduct ground-breaking overt and covert operations across the Middle East, relying on high-resolution and real-time targeting intelligence. Many more examples are discussed in the book.

However, the book stresses that strategic culture and intelligence culture are not unitary in essence, nor are they fixed in time. Changes in these cultures can be caused by trauma, or by competition for dominance between sub-cultures. For instance, in the years prior to October 7^th, hubris evolved in Israeli security establishments, which not just underestimated Hamas, but also overestimated their own military and intelligence capabilities. October 7^th, naturally, created a post-traumatic effect. Israeli deterrence-oriented security doctrine, which was dominant prior to October 7^th, became heavily oriented towards prevention after October 7^th, not just regarding adversary nuclear projects. This “move between extremes”, or “over-adaptation”, is for itself typical of Israeli strategic culture.

In conclusion, the book applies the frameworks of strategic culture and intelligence culture to a real-world case of security performance. This perspective does not only apply to Israel. In the US, for instance, it can allow critical introspection of the recent conflict with Iran, including the repeated experienced surprise the US seems to be experiencing. Furthermore, understanding partners’ and allies’ cultures, and not just adversary ones, is an imperative. Especially for American scholars and practitioners. The book makes an important contribution to this perspective. At the end of the day, national security is all about people. Society and culture play a major role.

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

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

The Growing Cost of Keeping U.S. Submarines Idle

“Inactive idle time describes when a [U.S. Navy] attack submarine designated for decommissioning cannot be inducted into a dry dock in a shipyard. As a result, the submarine and its crew must remain pier-side until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor.”

That’s a quote from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last Thursday titled, Actions Needed to Address Costly Attack Submarine Maintenance Challenges, which describes lost operational days for the Navy’s 44 nuclear attack submarines (20 Los Angeles class and 24 Virginia class), including those spent awaiting depot maintenance or what’s called active idle time.

The Navy, according to the GAO report, said that as of fiscal year 2025, its 44 attack submarines “provide the United States an asymmetric advantage to gather intelligence undetected and attack enemy targets, among other missions. These capabilities make attack submarines some of the most requested assets by the global combatant commanders.”

However, the GAO found, “Over the last 10 years, the U.S. Navy has lost more than 15,000 operational days due to maintenance delays and idle time on active attack submarines. These delays resulted in an estimated $3.4 billion in costs to sustain crews and submarines that provided no operational capability.”

Along with the inactive idle time illustrated earlier, active idle time is a period when an attack submarine and its crew must remain pier-side because they cannot be taken in by a shipyard for maintenance and are no longer certified to conduct normal underwater operations.

Attack submarines follow the Fleet Response Training Plan which calls for a 12-month training and then a complex certification process that leads to deployment. Deployments are normally six months, although one could be longer, but the result is generally an 18-month cycle.

Thereafter, a nuclear attack sub goes through three or four operational cycles – around six years of operations – before the next major overhaul.

“From fiscal years 2016 through 2025, “ the GAO report said, “the U.S. Navy incurred 8,906 days of active idle time for active attack submarines, hitting its peak in fiscal year 2022 with 1,518 days. Since this peak, the U.S. Navy reduced active idle time to 166 days in fiscal year 2025.”

From fiscal years 2021 through 2025, according to the GAO report, the average depot-level maintenance period was 809 days. “Further, the U.S. Navy only completed about 11 percent of attack submarine depot maintenance on time at the public shipyards, from fiscal years 2016 through 2025,” the GAO report added.

For Los Angeles-class subs, active idle time is costing almost $220,000 per day for the entire group. For the Virginia-class, that figure is more than $237,000 per day.

Los Angeles class attack submarines have an expected life of 30 to 33 years, while the planned life for the newer Virginia class is 33 years.

According to the GAO, only U.S. public naval shipyards -- Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard -- provide depot maintenance for attack submarines, along with two private shipyards -- General Dynamics Electric Boat at Groton, Connecticut and Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipbuilding at Newport News, Virginia.

Inactive idle time for older Los Angeles class attack submarines is a growing problem.

This period, when an attack submarine designated for decommissioning cannot be taken into a dry dock in a qualified shipyard, requires that its crew must remain pier-side, according to the GAO report. That’s because “those required to maintain and supervise the nuclear reactor…must wait until a shipyard has the capacity in a dry dock to defuel their nuclear reactor,” the report said.

The decommissioning attack submarines “take limited dry dock space away from the operational fleet,” the GAO said, but added, “For most fiscal years prior [to 2025], one or two attack submarines entered inactive idle time each year. However, without mitigation, the U.S. Navy projects a significant increase of inactive idle time through fiscal year 2030.”

In fact, over the past five fiscal years, the Navy has had seven attack submarines waiting to decommission and has “incurred 2,216 days of idle time resulting in more than $480 million in operating and support costs,” according to the GAO.

“As of January 2026,” the GAO report added, “without mitigation, the U.S. Navy projects that 15 more attack submarines and their crews will enter inactive idle time from fiscal years 2026 through 2030.” That could see the Navy incurring “more than 14,000 days of inactive idle time and $3.1 billion in operating and support costs, according to our [GAO] analysis.”

Perhaps the worst example of inactive idle time, according to the GAO report, is the Los Angeles-class submarine USS Pasadena, which became inactive in January 2025, but is not expected to enter Norfolk Naval Shipyard for decommissioning until November 2028.

During this inactive idle time, which could run nearly four years, the Pasadena remains fully crewed and is being utilized by the Navy as a training platform. The inactive Pasadena has also been used in videos – in November 2024 for a promotional video for the 2024 Army-Navy Game, and in February 2025 for the Netflix TV series The Recruit.

A small group from the Pasadena crew remains on the submarine at all times to monitor security, nuclear reactor status, and safety systems. These crew members sleep in the submarine's cramped quarters during their off-watch hours, while on duty. The remainder of off-duty crew members may live on a tender ship, a submarine base barracks, or at their own off-base homes rather than on the submarine.

According to the GAO, the Navy “has not fully evaluated or established plans for implementing…alternative options for decommissioning attack submarines more efficiently and optimizing shipyard capacity for the operational fleet.”

For example, what about pier-side nuclear reactor defueling of inactive attack submarines which would not require now-limited dry dock space?

According to the GAO, “Navy officials stated pier-side defueling of the Los Angeles-class attack submarine nuclear reactors is not cost effective,” but those “officials were unable to provide documentation of detailed analyses conducted on the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of this option.” However, pier-side defueling is under study when it comes to the new Ohio-class strategic nuclear submarines, according to the GAO.

Another defueling option would be using floating dry docks, which the Navy officials told the GAO “requires additional study.”

Also under study by the Navy is to release a portion of the inactive attack submarine crew back to the operational fleet “over three phases: (1) the first month during system turnover to the public shipyard; (2) the first 6 months when idle conditions begin; and (3) nuclear reactor defueling once a dry dock is available.”

This approach has been used for two out of 18 Los Angeles-class subs set for decommissioning between 2014 and 2025, and, according to Navy officials, only “a limited number of attack submarines are planned to use this construct in the next five years.”

Asked why, “Navy officials cited public shipyard pier capacity constraints,” but again “did not provide documentation on any analyses conducted to reach this conclusion,” according to the GAO.

The Navy is studying whether the service life of two of its attack submarines by shifting, shortening or removing idle times. “As of September 2025, the U.S. Navy projected that it can reduce inactive idle time by 1,715 days for fiscal years 2026 through 2029 for [these] two attack submarines. However, these service life extensions are still pending approval,” the GAO said.

The GAO after this study concluded in its report, “While the U.S. Navy has recently made some progress in reducing attack submarine active idle time, inactive idle time has grown and will continue to grow with the impending wave of Los Angeles-class inactivations over the next 5 years.”

It then recommended the obvious: “The Secretary of the Navy should ensure that the Chief of Naval Operations directs the Naval Sea Systems Command to fully evaluate alternative options for decommissioning attack submarines more efficiently to optimize shipyard capacity for the operational fleet. Such options may include, but are not limited to, defueling outside of dry docks and reducing crewing for attack submarines awaiting decommissioning.”

I agree.

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

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

Ukraine Is No Longer the Country Russia Thought It Was

Understanding a country's strategic culture helps assess how it will react to crisis, negotiation, and national security events. Strategic culture generally is static and when it evolves, it happens slowly, as history, events, and culture accumulate over generations. In 2021, the prevailing view of Ukraine’s strategic culture was that it was a country focused on securing its national identity and sovereignty apart from Russia and it was a country prone to rely on negotiations and diplomacy. The balance between these two themes was about even with Ukraine leaning toward diplomacy and multilaterism over sovereignty when pushed by the international community. Most students of strategic culture did not assess that Ukraine would react to a Russian invasion with the military force that it has. Now students of strategic culture see the theme of independence and sovereignty as the key aspect of Ukraine’s strategic culture with a growing theme of being modern day military experts. The rapid transformation of the assessment of Ukrainian strategic culture is astounding. Either strategic culture academics got Ukraine wrong, or the Russian invasion changed Ukraine cataclysmically. I suspect it is a bit of both.

Strategic Culture

Strategic culture refers to a nation's shared beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behaviors regarding the use of force and the pursuit of security objectives. Jack L. Snyder introduced the term in 1977, arguing that a state's behavior cannot be explained by material capabilities or geography alone, but by those factors combined with history, cultural norms, and shared societal beliefs. Strategic culture is generally resistant to change. While it is often invoked to explain Russia's decision to invade Ukraine — its relevance to Ukraine's response has been comparatively overlooked.

Ukraine's Early Strategic Culture

Ukraine's strategic culture has been shaped by centuries of foreign domination and by its Soviet legacy. Early studies of strategic culture in independent Ukraine identified securing a national identity separate from Russia as the paramount objective. Those same early studies concluded that Ukraine favored diplomatic engagement, multilateral cooperation, and alliance-building over military action — pointing to Ukraine's surrender of its nuclear arsenal after the Soviet collapse and its acquiescence to Russia's 2014 seizure of Crimea as evidence. But this reading likely mistook constraint for preference. Ukraine was a newly independent state with a fledgling security establishment and military; it lacked the structure and capacity to stand up to either the United States or Russia, both of which pressed it toward disarmament and restraint. And, while significant events, neither of those two events were an immediate threat to Ukrainian independence. What looked like a cultural preference for negotiation may have been the best available option available for a young, under-resourced state. This misreading of Ukrainian resolve and strategic culture set Russia up for a catastrophic miscalculation that has cost over a million lives and will take decades for both countries to recover from.

The first principle of Ukraine’s strategic culture — safeguarding a distinct national identity — endures today. But the second focus on diplomacy and multinationalism-- has changed. If successful, the Russian invasion would have meant that this first principle would have to be abrogated and Ukrainian identity would once again have been subsumed by Moscow. Ukraine could not tolerate that: fighting for independence and Ukrainian identity outweighs alliance-building and negotiations as the organizing goal of its strategic culture. Today, Kyiv increasingly foot stomps aspects of Ukrainian identity that were suppressed under Soviet rule, and its foreign policy has grown more assertive, favoring offensive posture over purely defensive behavior. What has emerged is a culture that balances patience for international negotiation with adaptability and a hardened determination not to be conquered again, at any cost.

Two Defining Characteristics

Two characteristics of Ukrainian strategic culture stand out as key to explaining Ukrainian resistance to Russia:

Ukraine's growing emphasis on its Cossack heritage appears designed to construct a new state myth and reshape national self-perception from one of victimhood to one of warrior. Invoking the Cossacks — a self-governing, democratic, and militarily capable community prone to raids and revolt — underscores both Ukraine's independence and its capacity for military action. Domestically, images of the great hetmans now appear more prominently on currency and in textbooks.

Ukrainian strategic culture rests on the primacy of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity — values Russia has threatened or dismissed both historically and in the present. Language has become a central tool of this identity claim: early post-independence legislation established the primacy of Ukrainian language to rebuild a cohesive national identity, and that legislative push accelerated around the outbreak of armed conflict in 2014, alongside a marked cooling toward proposals to formalize Russian as a second official language. For Ukrainians, language is intrinsic to national identity. I recall being tutored in Ukrainian by an émigré in the late 1980s; he was a tough teacher, and he would grow angry whenever I mistakenly lapsed into Russian even though it was our common language and at times the only language in which we could communicate.

Ukrainian Strategic Culture Today

Ukraine's strategic culture now manifests as an asymmetrical, creative approach to security — one that offsets comparatively limited military resources with international partnerships, novel approaches to warfare, and disciplined strategic messaging. It emphasizes flexibility, resilience, gray-zone tactics, and pragmatic decision-making. Increasingly, we are seeing Ukraine promoting its tactics and military resources internationally.

Ukraine's strategic norms are still evolving, but the trajectory since independence is clear: independence and ingenuity have become the paramount, defining components of Ukrainian strategic culture, expressed through firm state priorities. A lasting orientation toward the West, paired with renewed emphasis on Slavic and Cossack roots, matters too, if somewhat less centrally. Above all, a study of modern day Ukrainian strategic culture tells us that Ukraine will do what it must to preserve its hard-won independence — while still maintaining its position as a respected leader within the global community.

Recently, the new Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Yevhenii Khmara, said

”Ukraine has always seen tragedy. Its history is a long inventory of it. What separates this generation from all the ones before is that it has a real chance to defeat the enemy.”

This tells you a lot about the mindset of senior Ukrainian decision makers and how they are messaging their people and the international community.

Why it Matters

Understanding Ukrainian strategic culture helps us to determine what approach to take to help end the war in Ukraine. Paramount for the country is ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. For Ukraine, that is nonnegotiable. Any negotiating concepts that leave room for other nations to impose themselves on Ukrainian decision making is a nonstarter for Kyiv. Recognizing Ukraine’s sacrifices not only in the last four years but the tragic historical road they have been on with pre Soviet Russia and the Soviets will go far in any negotiations. Finally, acknowledging and highlighting how well Ukraine has out played Russia would also go a long way. Next, I will present Russian strategic culture and then discuss where the two clash.

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

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

What Six Years as an Iran Hostage Taught Me About the Regime

Since the start of Operation Epic Fury, I have watched and listened to nearly every piece of news coverage and analysis from U.S. policymakers, pundits, and the media. What continues to puzzle me is how often the Islamic Republic is treated as a rational government operating under conventional norms. The Islamic Republic is a cult, not a predictable government.

We hear constant talk of engaging or “negotiating” with its current leadership, distinguishing between “moderates” and “hardliners,” using intermediaries such as Pakistan, and sending American negotiators to Islamabad to meet with representatives of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The problem is that much of this analysis misunderstands the worldview of those who actually wield power in Iran.

I learned something about that worldview during the nearly six years (2018 – 2023) I spent as an American hostage in Iran.

The lesson began almost immediately. At around 2:00 a.m. one morning, after agents of the IRGC Intelligence Organization dragged me from my bed, I was taken to the office of a friend, a place I had visited many times. The agents began ransacking it.

At one point, I asked to use the bathroom. Two armed guards accompanied me. I used a urinal, and they escorted me back to the office. A few minutes later, I overheard one of them telling another agent, with apparent astonishment: “These guys piss in a sink against the wall!” An intelligence officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had apparently never seen a urinal.

It was a small, almost comical moment in what was otherwise a terrifying first night of what turned out to be 1975 nights of torture, fear, and uncertainty. But it stayed with me because it was my first indication that the men holding me inhabited a world very different not only from mine but also from those of the West.

During my imprisonment in Evin, I encountered regime insiders, arrested by the very regime they had helped bring to power and sustain, who gave me further insight into the skewed world they inhabited and the prism through which they viewed the rest of the world.

In Section 2A, the IRGC’s maximum interrogation facility, we sometimes used newspapers as makeshift placemats to eat our meals on the floor. A cellmate of mine, a former IRGC Quds Force member imprisoned on alleged espionage charges, warned me that eating off a newspaper could unintentionally constitute blasphemy. Somewhere in that edition, he explained, the word “Allah” might be printed. By placing food on the paper, I could unknowingly desecrate the name of God.

Another cellmate offered an even more revealing window into this worldview. He was the former head of security at the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a real insider in the regime. Haji, as they all want to be called, explained to me that the universe consisted of seven floors. The seventh and highest floor, he said, was where God placed his prophets, their closest disciples, and those who had lived truly pious lives. Haji was an interesting messenger for this particular theology. He had also served as a corrupt facilitator for a “businessman” who obtained a €500 million unsecured loan from Iran’s Central Bank and then wired nearly all of the money overseas—with Haji’s assistance. Now Haji was my cellmate in Section 2A.

Out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to understand how far Haji’s worldview extended, I asked him, “On which floor would someone like Alexander Fleming end up?” Haji looked at me blankly. “Who is he?” I explained that Fleming discovered penicillin, one of the most consequential medical discoveries in human history, and that his work had saved countless lives around the world—including countless Muslims.

Haji did not hesitate. “He would go to Hell,” he said. “He was not a Muslim.”

His answer gave me vertigo. Here was a man who believed deeply in a moral universe divided into seven levels, with eternal salvation reserved for the properly devout, yet who had himself been a corrupt conduit in a massive financial theft from the people of Iran. And in his moral accounting, a man whose discovery had saved millions was nevertheless condemned to eternal damnation because he belonged to the wrong faith.

These experiences may sound anecdotal, even bizarre. But they matter because ideology is not an abstraction in the Islamic Republic. It shapes how the regime’s insiders understand morality, diplomacy, legitimacy, the West—and even the value of human life. And it is what makes the regime a cult rather than a traditional government.

Now consider the people who have risen—and continue to rise—through this system. One of the most important is Mohsen Rezaee, whose career spans virtually the entire history of the Islamic Republic. Rezaee joined the newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after the 1979 revolution. In 1981, at just 27, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the IRGC. When Rezaee finally left command of the IRGC in 1997, he did not leave the regime’s inner circle. He became secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council, a powerful institution that advises the Supreme Leader and arbitrates disputes within the Islamic Republic.

And now Rezaee is back at the very center of power. A few weeks ago, he was appointed secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and named Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s representative on that body. The council sits at the heart of Iranian decision-making on national security, war, and foreign policy.

His appointment matters because Rezaee has never been particularly shy about sharing his views with the world. In 2015, while discussing the possibility of an American military attack on Iran, Rezaee proposed an extraordinary solution to Iran’s economic problems: take at least 1,000 Americans hostage and demand billions of dollars for their release. Years later, in 2021, while running for president, he again spoke openly about taking Americans hostage.

For someone who spent nearly six years as an American hostage of the Islamic Republic, I find such statements especially hard to dismiss as mere rhetoric. They reveal something fundamental and odious about the system. In most governments, suggesting that the kidnapping of anyone could become an instrument of economic or foreign policy might end a political career. In the Islamic Republic, it did not prevent Rezaee from continuing his ascent through the highest levels of the state. Today, the former IRGC commander who publicly entertained the idea of taking Americans hostage sits at the center of Iran’s national-security establishment.

Then there is Hossein Taeb, a hardline cleric and longtime intelligence operative whose career offers another revealing glimpse into how power actually works within the Islamic Republic. Taeb commanded the Basij paramilitary organization during the violent suppression of the 2009 Green Movement, when millions of Iranians took to the streets after the disputed presidential election. He was subsequently promoted to become the first head of the expanded IRGC Intelligence Organization, the most powerful intelligence apparatus operating alongside—and often in competition with—Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. He remained in that position for nearly thirteen years.

But Taeb’s significance extends beyond the offices he has held. For decades, he has been closely associated with Mojtaba Khamenei. Their relationship dates to the Iran-Iraq War, when both served in the IRGC. Over the years, Taeb became a key figure in the security and intelligence network around Mojtaba, and their names repeatedly appeared together in accounts of the regime’s efforts to suppress internal opposition. Today, that relationship matters more than ever. Mojtaba Khamenei is now Supreme Leader, and Taeb has once again been placed in command of the Basij—the enormous paramilitary organization the Islamic Republic has long relied on to maintain internal control and suppress unrest.

This is not merely history to me. According to one of my interrogators, Taeb (AKA Haj Maysam) was present at two of my most brutal interrogation sessions in April 2018, including my mock execution. I remember him not as a name in an intelligence report or a photograph in a newspaper article, but as a man who stood within the machinery that held me hostage.

Today, both men are once again at the center of that machinery. Rezaee holds one of the Islamic Republic’s most important national-security posts. Taeb has returned to lead the Basij. Mojtaba Khamenei, with whom both men have longstanding ties, now sits at the apex of the system.

These are not rogue actors operating on the margins of the Islamic Republic. Nor are they relics of an earlier revolutionary era that Iran has gradually moved beyond. They are the system, and they are once again being entrusted with its protection.

Yet the clearest lesson I received about that system’s worldview came not from a senior official but from one of the men who interrogated me. Several months after my arrest, after I had endured hundreds of hours of brutal questioning, my lead interrogator had seemingly run out of questions, and I had run out of answers. We were both exhausted by the madness of it all. We sat in silence in the interrogation room. He pulled a phone from his pocket. On the screen was a photograph of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He swiped the image away, tapped the phone, and Koranic verses in Arabic began to play. He sat about a yard from me, across a small metal table that separated us. He was in his mid-thirties. By then, I had learned that he was married and had children.

Several minutes passed. Then I noticed tears sliding down his cheeks. For a moment, I wondered if something had happened to one of his kids. Finally, I asked if he was all right. He looked up at me and said: “I can’t wait to become a martyr.” I had no response and was completely dumbfounded. That moment has stayed with me ever since.

In Washington, it is tempting to dismiss rhetoric about martyrdom, religious purity, and the “Great Satan” as political theater—a vocabulary meant for domestic consumption while supposedly pragmatic men conduct the real business of diplomacy behind closed doors.

My experience taught me otherwise. That does not mean every Iranian official thinks the same way, nor does it mean diplomacy should never be attempted. It does mean that American policymakers should stop assuming that the men who dominate the Islamic Republic weigh costs and benefits, compromise, and survival exactly as Western officials do.

For decades, Washington has repeatedly sought the elusive Islamic Republic’s “moderates” who are supposed to transform the regime from within. Analysts construct elaborate theories about factions and personalities, sometimes overlooking the core ideology that binds the system together.

Rivalries certainly exist within the Islamic Republic. Disagreements over tactics, money, power, and personalities persist. But tactical disagreement should not be mistaken for fundamental ideological divisions or moderation. Nor should we assume that because a particular course of action appears irrational or self-destructive to us, the men making decisions in Tehran will necessarily see it the same way.

The Iranian people understand this distinction better than many outsiders. They have lived under this system for nearly half a century and have repeatedly risked their lives to challenge it. American policymakers should listen more carefully to them. They should also remember something else when sitting across the negotiating table from representatives of the Islamic Republic.

I once sat three feet from one of those men in a locked interrogation room in Section 2A of Evin prison. He had a wife. He had children. He had a career. He had a life waiting for him outside those walls. And what brought tears to his eyes was the joy of giving it all up. He could not wait to become a martyr.

Emad Shargi,

American Businessman

Hostage of the Islamic Republic (2018 – 2023)

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

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

Lebanon’s Hezbollah Finance Crackdown May Be Designed to Fail

Lebanon’s campaign against Hezbollah’s finances may be designed to look tougher than it is. Under pressure from Washington and international regulators, Beirut has done enough to claim progress by tightening the regulated financial sector against Hezbollah-linked entities, but without seriously threatening Hezbollah’s parallel financial apparatus, which operates largely outside it. This raises the troubling possibility that Lebanon is not merely failing to impose meaningful pressure but deliberately choosing measures that stop short of actually harming, and therefore provoking, Hezbollah. Lebanese leaders have repeatedly warned that directly confronting the group risks renewed internal conflict. A serious assault on Hezbollah’s finances would strike at the resources sustaining its organization and could invite precisely that confrontation. If so, Beirut has found a politically useful middle ground: cosmetically satisfying foreign demands to preserve the domestic status quo.

Iran remains Hezbollah’s main external source of money. Secretary-General Naim Qassem has acknowledged Iranian funding for postwar relief and reconstruction. In November 2025, the U.S. Treasury said Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps-Quds Force, its foreign-operations arm, had transferred more than $1 billion to Hezbollah since the beginning of that year, mostly through money exchange companies. Iran and Hezbollah have also used gold to move funds. Qassem has acknowledged smaller contributions from the Iraqi state, Shiite religious authorities and shrines, Iran-aligned Shiite militias, and Iraqi citizens. The Houthis raised funds directly for Hezbollah in 2019 and later for its Lebanese support base. Hezbollah has used cryptocurrency too, though the scale remains unclear.

Hezbollah also generates revenue through ostensibly legitimate businesses and commercial networks that conceal the group’s involvement behind nominal owners. Treasury says a commercial network run by financier Alaa Hamieh diverted more than $100 million to Hezbollah since 2020, while Hamieh allegedly used his state investment post to steer millions toward Hezbollah-linked projects.

Hezbollah-controlled and affiliated entities then manage and move the money. Its Central Finance Unit controls income and spending, Bayt al-Mal serves as its treasury, and Al-Qard al-Hassan (AQAH) provides bank-like services and holds cash and gold. AQAH officials have used personal “shadow” accounts to disguise transactions and move more than $500 million through Lebanese banks. AQAH-backed Jood SARL converts gold into cash, while Hezbollah-linked money-service businesses like CTEX have supplied dollars to Hezbollah institutions and recruited sympathetic money changers. WaTaawanou, a crowdfunding charity officially outside Hezbollah’s formal hierarchy, raises donations for needy Lebanese but directs much of the resulting spending to Hezbollah-run or -linked hospitals and businesses. These funds support personnel, weapons procurement, social programs, compensation, housing, and post-war reconstruction.

Lebanese measures have so far done little to disrupt this diversified financial ecosystem. AQAH’s liquidity problems do not demonstrate otherwise because they predated Beirut’s principal financial restrictions. It began delaying compensation checks in January 2025 and froze them on June 23, after nearly $500 million had already been disbursed. The Lebanese Central Bank did not issue Circular 170 until July 14. That measure bars regulated financial institutions from dealing with AQAH and related sanctioned, unlicensed entities, but does not close AQAH or seize its assets.

AQAH therefore remains operational. It retained branches that survived Israeli strikes, while Treasury said in February 2026 that Hezbollah continued using the institution and that AQAH officials had created Jood to ease its liquidity pressure. The Interior Ministry later withheld AQAH’s annual 2026 certificate of good legal standing pending investigations, but left its underlying association registration intact. An-Nahar reported would require a Cabinet decision to revoke. But, on June 18, Justice Minister Adel Nassar said the government had not even placed the AQAH file on the Cabinet agenda. Stripping a core Hezbollah institution of its legal status would mark a far more direct confrontation with the group, one the government appears unlikely to invite amid the current standoff over Hezbollah’s disarmament.

Judicial action has likewise stopped short of disrupting AQAH’s operations. Nassar referred AQAH and Jood to the public prosecutor in June for investigation. Yet by July 21, An-Nahar reported that the case remained dormant. Prosecutors were waiting for the Central Bank to provide documents establishing financial violations but had not themselves requested them.

Lebanon’s Central Bank also issued Intermediate Circular 761 on May 4, 2026, effective June 30, requiring regulated nonbank financial institutions—including exchange houses, finance companies, specialized lenders, and electronic-payment providers—to identify customers and report cash transactions of $1,000 or more, while flagging repeated transactions apparently structured to evade the threshold. But those requirements can still be bypassed through unlicensed or informal hawala networks, where a sender pays a broker abroad and a partner in Lebanon pays the recipient locally, without the original money passing through a bank or regulated Lebanese institution.

Lebanon’s restrictions have therefore changed Hezbollah’s methods more than its access to money. After Beirut tightened airport controls, Iran reportedly shifted to more couriers carrying smaller amounts of cash or jewelry while moving hundreds of millions of dollars through Dubai. When Whish Money, a Lebanese transfer company, closed WaTaawanou’s donation account in October 2025, the charity directed donors to AQAH and other transfer firms. Hezbollah also reportedly planned a new AQAH branch in Tyre without signage. Treasury has meanwhile documented Hezbollah financiers transferring companies to relatives or associates and creating new entities amid sanctions pressure.

Many of the steps required for real financial pressure already overlap with obligations Lebanon accepted under its FATF action plan, including more terrorist-financing investigations and prosecutions, better identification of true owners, seizure of illicit cross-border currency and precious metals, and stronger targeted financial sanctions. Applied to Hezbollah, that means closing AQAH, prosecuting officials who move its money through personal accounts, shutting Jood and replacement companies, seizing Hezbollah-bound cash and gold, revoking the licenses of financial firms that facilitate the group, and cutting Hezbollah-linked businesses off from state contracts, licenses, and institutions. Claims that Lebanon has clamped down on Hezbollah’s finances, or gone as far as it reasonably can, should be judged against such outcomes—not regulations, administrative measures, or assurances of progress that do not produce measurable, real-world impact.

David Daoud is senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) focused on Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon affairs. Ahmad Sharawi is a senior research analyst at FDD focused on Syria and Iranian intervention in Arab affairs and the Levant. Follow David on X @Davidadaoud. Follow Ahmad on X @AhmadA_Sharawi.

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

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

I just want to read the news

Get the news and only the news!

Guardian

Back to top

Kaupunki

Back to top

Yle

Back to top

CNN

Back to top

Hesari

Back to top

Al Jazeera

Back to top

New York Times

Back to top

Reuters

Back to top

NPR

Back to top

The Cipher Brief

Back to top