The Cipher Brief

OPINION — In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “commands the gun”, and Chinese President Xi Jinping controls the one million members of the CCP. In October 2022, Mr. Xi was elected to an unprecedented third term as Secretary General of the CCP and President of the People’s Republic of China.

Mr. Xi succeeded Hu Jintao as Secretary General in November 2012 and immediately proceeded to expel Politburo member Bo Xilai from the CCP and Zhou Yongkang in 2014, responsible for China’s security services and one of nine-members of the powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo. This was the beginning of Mr. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign – and the removal of political rivals.

The anti-corruption campaign continues, with over 115 senior officials investigated in 2025 and reportedly over 60 punished.

But what got the public’s attention was the removal of defense ministers Wei Feng he and Li Shangfu in October 2023 and June 2024. Then in 2025 the removal of General He Wei Dong, Vice Chairman of the nine-member Central Military Commission (CMC), for “serious violations of Party discipline” and Admiral Miao Hua, Director of the CMC’s Political Work Department.

Also removed from the CCP in October 2025 were eight additional senior military officials, to include Lin Xiangyang, former commander of the Eastern Theatre Command responsible for Taiwan; Wang Houbin, former commander of the Rocket Force, responsible for China’s nuclear and missile programs and Wang Chunning, former commander of the People’s Armed Police.

During the 1970s and 80s, both General He Weidong and Admiral Miao Hua were assigned to the 31 Group Army in Fujian Province, responsible for any potential military operations against Taiwan.

And now, in January 2026, Mr. Xi continued with his purge of the military, with the removal of General Zhang Youxia, senior Vice Chairman of the CMC and China’s most senior general and General Liu Zhenli, Chief of CMC’s Joint Staff Department responsible for planning and operations. Both generals are accused of committing severe violations of party discipline and state laws.

General Zhang is also a member of the Politburo and a close associate of Mr. Xi. Their fathers fought together in the Chinese civil war with Mao Zedong’s forces that eventually prevailed in 1949. For Mr. Xi to purge a fellow “princeling” – descendants of revolutionary elders – must have shocked senior officials in Beijing wondering when does this hollowing-out of seniors in the military stop, and if they’re next.

General Zhang. as vice chairman of the CMC, had direct responsibility for military strategies concerning Taiwan. He was responsible for planning for potential conflict with Taiwan. General Zhang was an outspoken proponent of forceful unification, saying the military would “show no mercy” if Taiwan declared independence.

In late December 2025, China’s military conducted large-scale drills around Taiwan – “Justice Mission 2025.” This was the sixth major exercise since 2022, simulating a full blockade of Taiwan, with naval vessels and aircraft testing joint operational capabilities; deploying warships, bombers, and fighter jets to encircle Taiwan. The exercise was designed to test China’s ability to seal off Taiwan’s major ports, while simulating strikes on land and sea targets.

These “gray zone” tactics were meant to intimidate the public and exhaust Taiwan’s defense resources.

It is quite possible that Mr. Xi removed generals Zhang Youxia, He Wei Dong and Liu Zhenli, all members of the 7-member CMC designed for rapid decision-making and China’s highest military command, with Mr. Xi as its chairman, due to disagreements over Taiwan. All these generals, and general Lin Xiangyang, former commander of the Eastern Theatre Command responsible for Taiwan, were responsible for military operations against Taiwan.

Mr. Xi demands loyalty from all CCP and military colleagues. It’s possible that Mr. Xi’s military colleagues were pushing for a kinetic move against Taiwan in 2027, a date that Mr. Xi said China would have the military capability to kinetically move against Taiwan.

It appears to me that Mr. Xi was not prepared for a kinetic move against Taiwan, despite what his military generals were strongly advocating. And when Mr. Xi got push back from his generals, he removed them. In China, the CCP controls the gun, and Mr. Xi controls the CCP.

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

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times
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From Secrets to Sensors: Why Open Source Data Must Drive Modern Intelligence

THE BLUF / COLUMN — The Department of Defense is on a tear to revamp technology for warfighters. Secretary Hegseth signed an AI strategy on 9 January. Prior to that he called for an Enterprise Command and Control Program Office that would provide a real time battlespace picture for military commanders, something that has been talked about for years but never completed. The urgency is clear. The intelligence community must play a large part in this Department of Defense technology transformation if it wants to remain relevant to the warfighter and decision makers. Key for the intelligence community will be to fundamentally rethink its relationship with open-source data. To be most useful for the decision makers and operators, the intelligence community must rebuild itself on the backbone of open-source data and commercial technology.

Not only is data important but because of the volume and complexity of that data, so is the technology that can sift through the data. Public domain data must be the first place to gather trends and threat warnings that feed the many watch centers across the department of defense and intelligence community which should be the basis of the enterprise command and control picture. Much of the technology already exists for sifting through the data; fusing it into one picture will be a feat. The intelligence community, however, must make cultural changes first to accept the importance of the technology and public data, and secondly to acquire the technology and data on a timely basis.

Need for Change

The intelligence community has struggled with adopting the reality that to remain relevant, it must embrace publicly and commercially available data into its threat and warning process and use the powerful technologies that the commercial world is developing to sift through that data. There has been much work in this area across the intelligence community and some of it has been groundbreaking but the work has not been comprehensive, integrated, or fast. There are boutique enterprises that have developed their own high-tech way forward but when it comes to scaling such technology across the intelligence community or within the Defense Intelligence Enterprise, the hurdles are huge. Each intelligence agency claims its own security issues and erects fences against cross intelligence technology modernization. Even organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit or IN-Q-TEL focus on discreet requirements, not the wholesale cultural change needed to bring in the latest commercial technology that can support warning and security. Neither the Director of National Intelligence nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security have been able to lead the intelligence community to making this cultural and technology change a key priority. As the largest part of the intelligence community, the Defense Intelligence Enterprise needs to lead the way in developing a high tech, open source, data rich environment for its customer base. Military commanders need a real-time, complete, and high-quality battlespace picture to quickly make informed decisions, take direct actions, and assess the high volume of potential targets and threats.

The capabilities that are available for plugging into this warning and targeting picture are endless. For example:

Warning Against Biological Events: Technical sensors and human sensors worldwide record biological events and provide data on disease upticks and hazardous environments. Environmental & Biosensors are global and are critical tools for detecting, quantifying, and interpreting dynamic changes in environmental or biological systems. There are multiple crowd sourced disease outbreak platforms. Biosensors, local reporting, and crowdsourcing technologies monitor everything from air and water quality to metabolic and cellular activity in real time. Technology can combine these complex platforms and sensors to read the data and provide intelligence analysts a real time global map of trends ad anomalies, that once fused with other intelligence could lead to early detection of a pandemic, an industrial or environmental bio event, or development of a WMD. Such a real time platform, based on open source data would also support military and clandestine operations by providing information to the operator about the environment they will encounter. Such maps are currently available either through a subscription or to the public but not one that fuses all this data.

Humans as Sensors: Combing through social media to provide on the ground sentiment analysis can help intelligence analysts provide warning of threats or instability or to provide information on how populations are responding to real time events. This commercial tool, used heavily by marketing firms, can augment State Department and other reporting on in country sentiments and provide insights into socio cultural priorities and concerns.

BLOCK Chain Intelligence: Blockchain intelligence can enable proactive disruption and analysis of adversaries by providing data on how they are using virtual assets for revenue generation. This process allows provides a high-level overview of a country's cryptocurrency usage, which could provide valuable insights into the nation’s overall economic health and strategy. It also provides detailed information on an individual or entity’s financial activities that can illuminate patterns and processes. The importance of blockchain analysis was underscored in 2024 when the US Senate Committee on Armed Services recommended that the Department of Defense (DOD) explore blockchain technology to potentially revolutionize national security. In the committee’s 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), they instructed the Secretary of Defense to investigate and test potential blockchain applications for DoD.

As the Department of Defense has made clear, commercial solutions for trend analysis, finding anomalies, and providing data for decision makers are abundant. The intelligence community already has some of these abilities. What is missing is the fusion of this data into one picture and the ability to use the tools at scale.

Starting with Cultural Change

In order to provide the intelligence needed for an increasingly complex world, we need to fundamentally change the practice of intelligence to accept the importance of publicly available and commercially available data. Additionally, the intelligence cycle needs to change. The intelligence cycle needs to start with open source information and data. This means that the intelligence community also needs to incorporate the technology and the algorithms that will allow today’s intelligence professionals to see trends, anomalies, and threats in that data. This data then should be fused with intelligence collected by the traditional intelligence disciplines to provide decisionmakers and operators with all the information they need to perform their jobs.

Further, to demonstrate the importance of harnessing the publicly and commercially available data, the intelligence community must develop an open source center that brings together the myriad open source/PAI/CAI and data sifting technologies that industry currently is building. The high-tech center would be the first step for intelligence analysts of all types in building threat and warning analysis and targeting. This center would be a place where the US and its allies could share data and techniques to build a global warning picture. It would be the intelligence community’s beginning of the Enterprise Command and Control picture or the Common Intelligence Picture.

We will need creativity and leadership to move forward with this generational change in how the intelligence community does business. If this major shakeup does not begin soon, the US will lose its edge and remarkable, intelligence driven operations like Absolute Resolve will become amazing stories of American glory that we recount to our grandchildren. The change can happen now

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

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

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The Kremlin Files: Russian Double Agents and Operational Games

THE KREMLIN FILES / COLUMN — There are similarities among intelligence agencies worldwide. All professional services rely on tradecraft to recruit and manage assets. They all operate within bureaucratic systems and ultimately answer to political leaders. At a basic level, espionage tradecraft is a common professional language. However, Russian intelligence services (RIS) differ significantly from their Western counterparts in several key aspects. First, their primary mission is not to serve the interests of the Russian people, nor to protect the country's constitution; instead, their loyalty is to the regime and Putin’s personal political survival. And secondly, in terms of tradecraft, they differ from the CIA and other Western services in their approach and tactics. One of the most important—and often misunderstood—aspects of Russian intelligence is their use of double agents, known in Russian intelligence doctrine as operational games (operativnye igry).

For Russian intelligence, operational games are not just niche skills or occasional counterintelligence tactics. They are fundamental. Double agent operations are central to how Russian agencies define success, justify their importance, and maintain their institutional identity. Whether other collection methods succeed or fail, the RIS reliably and continually default back to operational games. Therefore, understanding how and why the RIS use double agents is essential to understanding Russian intelligence itself.

Before examining how these operations work, it is important to get the terminology right, and something that even experienced national security reporters, espionage writers, and analysts in the West frequently get wrong. The term double agent is often misapplied to describe penetrations of one intelligence service by another. In reality, these are two very different phenomena.

A penetration is an agent who betrays their own service to spy for a foreign power. Aldrich Ames, who recently passed away three decades after he was arrested, was a traitor and a penetration of the CIA by Russian intelligence. He was not a double agent.

A double agent, by contrast, is an intelligence asset who is knowingly and deliberately directed by one service to engage another in espionage. The controlling service uses that agent to feed information (called feed material) —true, false, or mixed—to the adversary. They do so to simultaneously study the adversary’s tradecraft, collection priorities, and decision-making.

In the Russian system, double agents also serve a bureaucratic function: they generate statistics, “success stories,” and operational narratives that demonstrate effectiveness to political overseers and ultimately to Putin himself. Putin knows this; after all, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB Second Chief Directorate (responsible for Counterintelligence for the USSR), and he later headed the FSB himself.

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Double agents are used in the West and by the U.S. services, but we don’t lie to our government about the origins of the cases or pretend they are real counterintelligence successes when they reach their conclusion. The distinction is not academic. It lies at the heart of how Russian intelligence thinks about espionage. Every year, the FSB publishes an annual report and claims statistics on hundreds of alleged spies it has caught. The vast majority of them are invented, manufactured, or the FSB’s own double agents. In other words, they are not real cases.

Russian services employ multiple varieties of double agents and operational games. They have many names, including the initsiativnik, which is a false volunteer who often “walks in” to an embassy. Also used is the podstava, or dangle, in which Russian services will use the routine of an intelligence officer, diplomat, or journalist and insert the “dangle” right in front of the target at a gym, reception, or other function to appeal to the target. There are still more different varieties and names for other types of double agents.

These operations are not limited to targeting foreign intelligence services. They are also used against businesspeople, journalists, diplomats, nongovernmental organizations, and even Russian citizens themselves. The objective is often not solely intelligence collection, but also control, as the Russians say, to have the target “pod kontrolem,” or under 100% operational control and influence. That is why the Russians prefer, though not exclusively, to carry out double agent operations on Russian soil. Abroad, they are less confident that the SVR or GRU can fully control their double agent during meetings with the adversary.

The end goal is to ensnare, compromise, manipulate, arrest, or extort targets for recruitment and long-term exploitation. A few examples from history help illustrate Russian intelligence’s fixation on double agents, dating back to its earliest institutional roots.

The Cheka and later the NKVD/OGPU perfected operational games in the 1920s through landmark deceptions such as Operation TRUST. With the TRUST operation, the OGPU (Soviet counterintelligence at the time, another forerunner of the KGB) created a fictitious anti-Bolshevik underground to lure in Western intelligence services and Russian émigrés. TRUST sent intelligence officers to the West, or cooptees, who they intimidated to pose as members of this fake organization that claimed to stand against the Bolsheviks.

The operation ran for years, successfully feeding disinformation to multiple foreign services while identifying, neutralizing, or recruiting their agents. They often lured Russians home to “help in operations” only to have them arrested, interrogated, and usually shot in the back of the head in a Chekist-style vyshaya mera (highest measure) execution. The TRUST culminated in the capture of the famous British intelligence officer Sidney Reilly, one of the most celebrated spies of the era, who was executed in a similar fashion.

That double-agent tradition continued throughout the Cold War, when Soviet intelligence used double agents not merely to mislead adversaries but also to validate its own competence. Kim Philby, while often remembered in the West as a Soviet penetration of British intelligence, was also used as part of broader operational games to shape Western threat perceptions and protect other Soviet assets. Scores of Western intelligence officers or special operations team members were wrapped up in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe immediately after World War II, the victims of KGB and OGPU/GRU operational games Philby had detailed to the USSR. Most were eventually executed.

In later decades, the KGB ran controlled double agents against Western services to exaggerate Soviet capabilities, mask vulnerabilities, and manipulate counterintelligence priorities. The Soviet KGB ran a wave of double-agents at the CIA in the late 1980s with false feed material to explain the 1985 U.S. intelligence losses. Rick Ames volunteered and compromised a dozen agents working for the CIA and FBI (Ames was not arrested till 1994). The KGB and later SVR used these operational games and false volunteers to protect him, trying to give CIA and the broader U.S. IC reasons why the compromise may have happened (Circle of Treason is a classic read on this period and all the various games the KGB was playing to protect Ames with false feeds to CIA and the FBI).

These operations reinforced an internal belief that intelligence success could be measured by how convincingly one could influence the enemy’s perception of reality. In Russian intelligence culture, the double agent is not an exception — it is the ideal. In today’s FSB, however, as well as their foreign counterparts, the SVR, the double agent too often is used to justify their very own existence, instead of paying dividends in terms of tradecraft learned or secrets protected. Operations like TRUST are mostly a relic of the past. Today, the FSB is too busy entrapping innocent foreigners like basketball players, teachers, and NGO workers.

The U.S. IC and our Western allies have learned over the decades that the FSB/SVR and GRU have presented double-agent cases to their political leadership as if they were genuine agents caught and arrested, all the while the case was simply that they were double agents. They feed statistics from the FSB each year about exaggerated intelligence operations—more than all the services in the world could carry out against Russia—and also claim to have thwarted all of them. These reports reach Putin and the Presidential Administration to justify larger budgets, which in turn breed more corruption and line the pockets of senior and middle managers.

This is not unique to Russia; it is often the case across the former Soviet countries of Central Asia, where many of the services remain close and subservient to the Russian FSB and SVR. These services, often serving despotic regimes, swear by double agent operations because, in many cases and over many years, the only “spies” they can really uncover are those they falsely created under a double agent operation. They use them against a range of unwitting foreign citizens, including in legitimate business practices, to extort them and their companies for money when brought up on false charges.

The practice has been expanded in recent years by the Russian FSB, particularly its counterintelligence division, DKRO (the Department of Counterintelligence Operations), which uses double agents against journalists, businesspeople, and others to trap them and hold them hostage for exchanges with the West. DKRO was responsible for the false arrest and imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich before his 2024 swap with the West.

In sum, operational games and the double agents associated with them allow Russian intelligence to shape narratives, manufacture threats, and create the appearance of omnipresence. They are dirty tricks elevated to doctrine. And they remain one of Moscow’s most effective tools for compensating for broader institutional weaknesses.

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

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EU Takes Aim at Tehran: IRGC Terror Listing Opens New Front in Europe’s Iran Policy

OPINION — On January 29, Europe found its voice against Iran’s apparatus of terror. The European Union (EU) announced that it is adding Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to its list of designated terrorist entities. The EU spent years mulling this step and taking half measures. Now, the EU and its member states must use this new much-needed tool broadly and effectively. The EU’s designation should mark the start of Europe’s campaign against the IRGC, not its end.

Formally listing the IRGC will give Europe important new authorities to limit Iranian attacks and plotting on their soil. The EU’s move also has major symbolic value, particularly at a time when the Iranian regime is under pressure at home and abroad.

The EU previously sanctioned some of the IRGC’s branches, leaders, and operatives. But EU member states resisted taking action against the IRGC in its entirety for several reasons, including European fears of Tehran’s reaction. Iran has long been vocal in its opposition to an IRGC designation, warning in recent days that an EU label would have “destructive consequences.” The U.S. unwillingness to lift its own Foreign Terrorist Organization listing of the IRGC was reportedly a key reason why U.S.-Iran negotiations fell apart during the Biden administration.

The EU designation comes on the heels of the Iranian regime’s bloody crackdown against its own outraged people. The EU’s decision—reached by consensus among its 27 member states—lends Europe’s united voice to the Iranian protestors’ indignation against their oppressors.

The EU action also sends a powerful message to Tehran that it should refrain from conducting attacks on European soil against its perceived enemies, particularly Iranian dissidents and Israeli and Jewish targets. European security officials express great concern about that risk now. Both the IRGC’s deadly Quds Force and Iran’s notorious Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) have conducted numerous terrorist plots in recent years in Europe, including in Sweden, Germany, Cyprus, and Belgium. Individual European governments have disrupted and prosecuted these networks and issued statements condemning Iranian behavior, but this is the most unified and strongest European stance to date.

With the EU designation, any IRGC assets in Europe are now subject to an asset freeze. It is now illegal to provide the group with funds or resources. The designation also requires EU member states to increase police and judicial cooperation on IRGC-related criminal matters. And the EU will impose a travel ban on IRGC members hoping to visit Europe.

The Europeans should now aim to use these tools vigorously. The IRGC has historically had near global reach, not only with its terrorist cells but with its procurement and financial networks. Uncovering and disrupting the IRGC’s networks and freezing their assets would weaken the corps’ capabilities to rearm, profit, and funnel materiel and finances to its proxies.

Europe can and should do much more to maximize the impact of the designation and impose real costs on the IRGC and its overlords. The EU’s 2013 designation of Hezbollah’s so-called “military wing” offers a good model for how an EU designation can empower both the EU and its member states.

First, the EU should ensure that Europol – the EU’s umbrella police agency – gets a key role in coordinating and supporting IRGC-related investigations across Europe, as Europol has done with Hezbollah. Before the EU’s designation, Europol’s ability to police the IRGC’s operatives in Europe was greatly limited. The IRGC’s many European plots often have a consistent modus operandi, including using criminal actors not associated with Iran to carry out attacks and thus offer Tehran a figleaf of deniability. Europol is uniquely positioned to see the whole picture and share relevant information with all EU member states.

For one model, look to Europol’s involvement in the complex multi-jurisdictional investigation of the Hezbollah financier Mohamad Nourredine, which involved multiple European governments as well as several U.S. law enforcement agencies. In 2018, he was convicted in a French court on multiple charges and sentenced to seven years in prison as part of a multi-country investigation codenamed “Operation Cedar.” Europol could use provide similar support in international investigations against IRGC operatives.

Since 2014, Europol has also played an integral role, along with the United States, in the Law Enforcement Coordination Group, the sole international body dedicated to countering Hezbollah’s terrorist and illicit activity. The EU should empower Europol to do likewise for the U.S.-led Countering Transnational Terrorism Forum, which focuses on Iran-linked terrorism.

Second, European governments must follow up on the EU’s actions and impose their own national bans and designations. Many European countries did just this against Hezbollah, including Germany, Slovenia, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the Baltics.

Take Germany, which shows how national-level actions can strengthen law enforcement and build on Brussels’s actions. In May 2020, Germany formally banned Hezbollah and conducted near simultaneous raids on several Hezbollah-linked organizations in the country. Germany is now prosecuting a Lebanese national allegedly tied to Hezbollah for procuring drone components for the terrorist group – a scheme that also took place in the U.K. and Spain.

The EU’s IRGC designation won’t tip the balance of power within Iran in favor of the protestors, but it can still help reduce Iran’s ability to stage vicious attacks abroad. The EU and its member states must robustly implement these new authorities for them to have the desperately needed effect.

Michael Jacobson, a senior fellow in The Washington Institute’s Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, formerly served as director of strategy, plans, and initiatives in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau.

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Should Western Tech Giants Partner With Pro-Hamas Network Al Jazeera?

OPINION — A few weeks ago, Al Jazeera named Google Cloud as its primary technology provider for “The Core,” a sweeping program designed to integrate generative artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its production process. The move, which further deepened the relationship between the two companies, should sound alarm bells for policymakers and anyone concerned with the accuracy, credibility, and transparency of the news media and information space, which impacts nearly every aspect of society.

The Core enables more efficient reporting and even drafts scripts that humans generally would otherwise write. Reporters can pull archival material in seconds, generate compelling data visualizations — visual stories — and synthetic images at planetary scale, and automate story planning, all through AI platforms built by Google.

However, it’s not the innovation that’s the problem but rather its use to generate and amplify adversarial state-funded and directed news with no warning labels to its global audience.

The Qatari state funds and oversees Al Jazeera, shaping editorial output. Because of its shared ideology with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera’s content often reflects the lens of the Muslim Brotherhood, three branches of which the United States just designated as a terrorist organization. The Qatari outlet also has a history of producing content that glorifies terrorism. Tech companies that help Al Jazeera amplify its content using algorithms, AI, or other methods, advance Qatari foreign policy rather than reflecting independent media assessments on a wide range of worldviews.

Part of the Al Jazeera-Google program is “AJ-LLM,” described as the editorial brain of the system that will be trained on Al Jazeera’s archives and connected to Gemini Enterprise, according to the companies. Al Jazeera is already very prominently cited in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude in questions about the Gaza war, and Gemini could very well follow that trajectory with this expanded partnership.

While one reason Al Jazeera features prominently in LLM answers is because it has no paywall, new partnerships, including Google’s major expansion with Al Jazeera, may fuel its presence even more.

Al Jazeera assures there will be sufficient human oversight in the process. However, Al Jazeera’s current and historic content, with its anti-Western bias that amplifies the likes of Hamas, loaded into its LLM platform, will churn out faster, flashier versions of the same editorial product, in countless formats.

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When users worldwide ask LLM’s about the conflict, they are frequently fed content from a media company that celebrates Hamas terrorist attacks and frames Israeli self-defense as aggression. Because these AI systems operate as black boxes with limited transparency, audiences may receive algorithmically amplified narratives that systematically favor Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood perspectives while appearing to be the product of neutral technological systems.

In May 2025, Google partnered with the Qatari Government Communications Office and the Al Jazeera Media Institute to train journalists in building digital-focused newsrooms. Participants included news directors, journalists, and representatives from various media organizations across Qatar’s media landscape.

What kind of messages do Al Jazeera trainers convey to journalists and diplomats who take their courses? The case of Muhammed Khamaiseh from the Al Jazeera Media Institute is instructive. In 2018, Khamaiseh posted, “Jews have been known for centuries to be cunning thinkers, and currently, the entire global economic system is under their control.” Khamaiseh had previously celebrated Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians in 2014 and offered affection for Hamas after its kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. “This is why we love Hamas :D,” he wrote. Ironically, Khamaiseh is the author of “A Guide Avoiding Discrimination and Hate Speech in the Media, published by the Al Jazeera Media Institute.”

Qatar is an authoritarian nation, whose stringent media laws prohibit any criticism of Qatari leadership or policy, making Al Jazeera’s output anything but independent. The Department of Justice has determined that Al Jazeera is owned and directed by a foreign government. Congress has asked Justice to review whether the Qatari government should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. DOJ has already required Al Jazeera’s AJ+ to register but the Qatari network has failed to do so.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq are among the countries that have placed bans on Al Jazeera. Some bans remain on the Qatari channel. In addition, despite Al Jazeera posing as a savior of Palestinians, prominent Palestinians have long expressed concerns that Al Jazeera has stirred up regional hostilities and fomented violence, a problem that would be amplified if Al Jazeera’s cleverly designed content is recast as neutral algorithmic outputs. News consumers would be hard-pressed to find examples of Al Jazeera criticizing Hamas’s atrocities.

U.S. regulators should regard AI partnerships with foreign state-directed authoritarian media as they would regard sensitive technologies. They should trigger formal risk assessments. Congress should require companies with AI products to disclose the extent to which foreign state-directed media sources are used in training data, retrieval systems, or generated outputs. Absent such transparency, lawmakers and the public cannot evaluate the scale of foreign state influence embedded in AI-driven information systems.

Google should also require clear labeling when AI-generated news summaries or analytical outputs rely on content from foreign state-directed media organizations. Users should not be left to assume neutrality.

Preventing Americans and the global community from being manipulated by the Qatari state’s anti-Western, pro-extremist Al Jazeera content, even though it may be cloaked in high-tech flash, should be a top priority for both technology companies and policymakers. It’s time to pull back the curtain.

Toby Dershowitz is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Asher Boiskin is an intern. Follow them on X @TobyDersh and @asherboiskin.

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

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

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

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

Inside the $35 Billion Plan to Track Hypersonic Missiles from Space

OPINION — “The Department of Defense’s Space Development Agency (SDA) is developing a new space-based architecture comprised of a large constellation of at least 300-500 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to detect and track potential missile threats. This system will complement other space systems currently providing this capability. SDA is developing this new system in part in response to peer and near-peer competitors that are designing strategic and tactical hypersonic weapons that are not easily detected, identified, or tracked by current space-based missile warning systems.”

That’s a quote from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report sent to Congress last Wednesday entitled MISSILE WARNING SATELLITES, Space Development Agency Should Be More Realistic and Transparent About Risks to Capability Delivery.

I’ve chosen to write about this report because it contains not only the best description of how complicated and costly just one aspect of missile defense has become, but also it provides the most understandable history of what’s been done up to now, along with the threats we face.

Known within the Defense Department (DoD) as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) – and started in 2020 -- the plan, according to the GAO report, is “intended to provide space surveillance and communications for persistent, timely, global awareness [of missile threats] that is designed to operate in an increasingly contested space environment.”

DoD so far has committed nearly $11 billion to this effort, which is programmed to cost near $35 billion through fiscal year 2029.

While the PWSA deals with tracking an already launched missile and its warhead, there are two other elements of a missile warning system: Detecting the launch and communicating information within elements of the system.

Traditionally, missile threats have been detected and tracked because they are launched using powerful rocket boosters which produce heat and light making them easy to initially see and follow and predict their ballistic trajectories. Infrared sensors on space satellites can detect heat from launched missiles and booster plumes against Earth’s background

In 1970, DoD put in place the first Defense Support Program satellites, which used infrared sensors. These first satellites with infrared sensors, and the infrared systems that have followed, have operated from geosynchronous Earth orbits (GEO), which allow those satellites to stay fixed over a single, longitudinal spot located about 22,000 miles above Earth. This results in each GEO satellite maintaining constant observation of a specific area of the globe and collectively monitoring the entire planet.

In the mid-1990s, DoD developed the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) to replace and provide significantly more robust data than the Defense Support Program.

Wednesday’s GAO report said, “In recent years, DoD has identified emerging threats that these [SBIRS] systems may be unable to effectively warn or defend against. For example, Russia and China have successfully demonstrated hypersonic missile capabilities. In addition to new missile threats posed by potential adversaries, DoD has also publicly acknowledged emerging threats to our space assets. For example, DoD reported that China is developing additional counterspace capabilities including directed energy weapons, electronic warfare, and other anti-satellite weapons.”

According to the GAO, “U.S. missile warning satellites currently operating in GEO may be particularly vulnerable to these emerging threats because there are relatively few of them -- making them high-value targets -- and their location above Earth is effectively stationary and predictable.”

Approximately three DSP satellites of the original 23 DSP system remain in orbit with one maybe still operational. In addition, beginning in 2011 there have been six SBIR satellites put in orbit and SBIRS sensors placed on four additional host satellites.

The GAO report said, “SBIRS will soon be followed by the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next Gen OPIR) system, designed as an upgraded replacement for SBIRS, with sensors that are expected to have even greater sensitivity than current SBIRS sensors. While providing some enhanced capabilities, such as greater sensitivity, the Next Gen OPIR system is built around an architecture similar to existing systems now in GEO orbit.

DoD is also developing space-based laser communications technology to support large constellations of satellites for missions, including missile warning and data transport. However, a February 2025 GAO report found that DoD had “made progress in developing this technology, but it also faced delays and other issues -- and hasn't fully demonstrated that it works in space. Despite these challenges, DOD plans to continue to develop and launch hundreds of satellites worth billions of dollars that require the use of laser communications.”

DoD’s plan for the new PWSA missile satellites in LEO, internally referred to as the Tracking Layer, will complement the Next Gen OPIR satellites for what is termed missile warning/missile tracking (MW/MT) functions, and will use laser technology to communicate.

Because satellites in LEO are much closer to Earth than those in GEO, many more satellites are needed in a LEO-based constellation to achieve the same coverage as a single one in GEO.

The missile tracking satellites in LEO are traveling much faster relative to Earth’s surface and therefore each satellite can only observe a small section of Earth’s surface for a short time -- only about 10 minutes. This makes constellation development more complicated if constant global coverage is required.

“Some DoD officials say having a greater number of satellites performing MW/MT in LEO will result in greater resiliency for the constellation as a whole and the capability it provides,” the GAO report says, adding, “For example, if one satellite in a proliferated constellation is damaged -- whether intentionally or by natural environmental effects -- the constellation’s capability is degraded by a smaller margin than if the entire constellation was made up of only a handful of satellites.”

The current plan has been to develop a large constellation of tracking satellites in LEO, along with data transport layer satellites forming a communications network to provide mission data directly that will enable advanced missile tracking from LEO to ground stations.

A tracking satellite, according to the GAO report, is “comprised of a spacecraft – referred to as a bus -- plus other components such as infrared sensors, on-board mission data processors, and communication payloads, together with a ground segment to manage the constellation and receive and process track data to send to the wider DoD and intelligence community.”

There will be some 600 satellites in all, with plans then to replenish each tranche every two years in perpetuity, along with associated ground systems, according to the GAO report. As the LEO-orbiting tracking satellites approach the end of their life, “SDA will deorbit them,” the report says.

SDA has been acquiring tranches of both tracking and data transport layer satellites beginning with a demonstration tranche, called Tranche 0 (T0) that was launched in April 2023. Of the 27 satellites in T0, 19 performed data transport and communications, while eight did missile warning. One additional satellite remained on the ground as a test bed.

Tranche 0 was designed to be a “warfighter immersion” tranche, giving service members the opportunity to work with the systems, understand their capabilities, and to develop operational concepts for their use.

An SDA official told the GAO T0 demonstrated “the ability to track a short-range ballistic missile throughout its flight and into its terminal phase and then transmit raw data to the ground from space.” It also connected the tactical data link network used by NATO, from space to specific ships and military airplanes and established the first satellite-to-satellite demonstration of optical links between two of the four T0 contractors.

In September 2025, Tranche 1 of the PWSA program, put 21 tracking satellites into orbit, followed the next month by another 21 data transport layer satellites. Overall, Tranche 1 is scheduled to consist of 128 satellites for the Transport Layer and 26 for the Tracking Layer.

SDA said back in October 2025, “Beginning in 2027, T1 will provide an initial warfighting capability through the PWSA to deliver regional persistence for tactical military data channels…along with advanced missile tracking and missile warning, and beyond-line-of-sight targeting.”

Wednesday’s GAO report said, “According to SDA, T1 will establish the PWSA ground and operations baseline, or the foundation upon which SDA plans to add capabilities in future tranches. To reduce risk, SDA is taking an incremental approach to delivering these ground operations.”

However the next T1 satellite launches have been delayed to sometime this year.

Wednesday’s GAO report raised significant issues in the ongoing PWSA program.

For example, it said, “SDA had planned to allow the warfighter to provide feedback on capabilities prior to a larger SDA investment in T1 and future tranches, but officials from combatant commands we spoke to told us that they have not been asked to provide feedback on T0 MW/MT demonstrations.”

In a broader sense, the GAO said, “SDA has not taken steps to understand the range of risks to delivering MW/MT capabilities by assessing the technological maturity -- such as by conducting a technology readiness assessment -- of critical technology elements included in its satellite development given required modifications and use in new environments. Absent such assessments, SDA remains overly reliant on technology maturity estimates provided by contractors and lacks key insights to better develop realistic development timelines.”

In short, as with many needed highly-technical and complex defense systems, this new space-based, large constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit to detect and track potential missile threats appears to be developing higher costs and a delay before it is fully operational.

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The U.S.-China Economic Cold War Is No Longer Silent

OPINION — For decades, the United States (U.S.) operated under a fatal delusion that free trade with China would liberalize its politics and that the global market was a neutral playing field. We were profoundly wrong. In 2000, the U.S. controlled 37% of global semiconductor fabrication. Today, we control less than 12%, while China is on track for 40% by 2030. While we played by the rules of Adam Smith, Beijing played by the rules of Sun Tzu.

We are now in the midst of a silent asymmetric economic war. China does not have a private sector in the American sense. Under its strategy of Civil Military Fusion, every ByteDance algorithm and every ton of refined lithium is a dual use asset of the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, the U.S. encouraged the atrophy of its industrial base by prioritizing short term profits from outsourcing to China instead of securing our own economic and national security future. The West created this irrational strategic vulnerability where Beijing now controls 80% of refined rare earth supplies and more than 60% of the magnets in actuation systems for the F35.

Recognizing that economic security is national security, the Trump administration has installed a genuine war cabinet for economic conflict. This includes the Treasury and Commerce Secretaries, but the pivot is most visible at the Department of War. There the Deputy Secretary, is a battle- tested private equity leader who left his firm in order to bring his skills to fight and has operationalized a new offensive strategy to link private sector dynamism with state imperatives.

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The tip of this spear is the newly chartered Economic Defense Unit or EDU.

Directly overseen by the Deputy Secretary of War and run by another private equity industry specialist in industrial consolidation, the EDU is not another regulator. It functions as an internal merchant bank designed to bypass the Pentagon’s notoriously slow procurement cycles. The EDU has replaced compliance- based bureaucracy with commercial first financing. Its mandate is to generate investable demand signals using the government balance sheet to de-risk private capital investment in the defense industrial base.

Instead of vague promises, the EDU now utilizes Advance Market Commitments. These are binding contracts to purchase critical technologies such as solid rocket motors or autonomous drones before the factories are even built. This transforms government contracts into bankable assets that companies can use to secure private loans. Furthermore, the EDU has restructured acquisition management, replacing narrow Program Executive Officers with Portfolio Acquisition Executives who are authorized to move capital rapidly across capability sets much like a private equity managing partner.

Complementing this is the transformed Office of Strategic Capital or OSC. Once merely an advisory body, the OSC has been re codified by the FY2026 NDAA into a direct capital allocator. It is aggressively bridging the valley of death not just for software but for heavy manufacturing. By offering direct loans and guarantees specifically for equipment finance, the OSC ensures that American companies can afford the high capital machinery needed to onshore production of semiconductors and batteries.

This architecture represents a total departure from the status quo. We are moving from a system that audits costs to a system that finances outcomes. The Army parallel initiative to grant Direct Commissions to Silicon Valley engineers further reinforces this culture shift – destroying the wall between the Pentagon and Palo Alto.

The message to the American private sector is clear. The era of neutrality is over. There is no free market left to win if China ends up owning the building blocks of every major industry. Wall Street and Silicon Valley must partner with the USG not out of charity, but out of necessity.

The administration has built the financial and policy architecture for economic sovereignty. American capital now faces the simplest decision in its history, which is to deploy here and own the 21st century, or deploy elsewhere and become its tenant.

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Greenland’s Worth a Fight and Russia’s Trying to Start One

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — The “quickest way for Russia to penetrate our naval defenses is steaming from the Arctic to the North Atlantic.” The Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap is the last place allied forces “have any hope of detecting a Russian sub before it’s in the vast Atlantic barreling toward New York.” These insightful comments were spoken not by President Donald Trump but by fictional President Grace Penn in Netflix’s The Diplomat. By contrast Trump’s rhetoric and attempts to gain leverage on Denmark have been appalling and unhelpful. But Trump and “President Penn” are both right about one thing — although the Arctic island is remote, Greenland’s location makes it fundamental to U.S. and NATO naval intelligence and missile defense missions.

Russia knows this as well and is using the Trump-inspired kerfuffle to drive a disinformation narrative intended to further weaken Euro-Atlantic relations. Kremlin-aligned sources have been circulating social media posts suggesting that Western aid to Ukraine has weakened European countries and that weaponry committed to Kyiv may be redistributed to Greenland. A deepfake of a Danish newscaster stating that Denmark plans to recall all F-16s given to Ukraine to be redeployed to Greenland was circulated by Russian influence accounts and received over 45.3K views on X.

Another video, which received over 254.3K views on X, imitated the Institute for the Study of War and claimed that Europeans siding with Ukraine in 2022 is costing them Greenland now and that NATO will be destroyed soon, thereby forcing Europeans to align with Moscow. This Russian tactic of riffing off legitimate think tanks and news channels to validate Russian lies is essential to making their false pro-Kremlin narratives appear more credible and increase the likelihood of their posts spreading across social media.

Moscow is trying to use the divide between the United States and Europe to sow confusion, degrade support for Ukraine, and rupture NATO. What Putin forgets is that disagreements between allies are common and constructively overcoming them builds stronger relationships. The strategic importance of Greenland demands the alliance work through its disagreement.

There are significant reasons why Russia is trying so hard to split NATO over Greenland. Nuuk holds significant naval intelligence value. Moscow’s Northern Fleet and nuclear submarine HQ are on the Kola Peninsula, located near the Russia-Finland border. For Russian (RU) forces to reach the North and Baltic Seas, and beyond into the North Atlantic Ocean, RU submarines must transit through the GIUK Gap; making the two stretches of water critical for monitoring RU subsea activity, just as “President Penn” demonstrated.

Moreover, the growing partnership between Beijing and Moscow in the Arctic and China’s increasing interest in the region over the past decade should raise red flags for NATO. In 2018, China released their first Arctic white paper, in which they called themselves a “near-Arctic state” and detailed a desire to establish a “polar silk road.” Since then, China and Russia have performed numerous joint air and naval patrols in Arctic waters. Coordination between U.S. adversaries in the High North places an even higher value on NATO Arctic maritime intelligence capabilities.

Greenland is also strategically important for missile defense operations. Nuuk is a prime location for American early warning systems to track intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with trajectories that arch over the High North. The Pentagon currently operates a variety of early warning radars and communications systems at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. These radars work in tandem with systems in Alaska and Canada to provide essential early warning capabilities for U.S. missile defense.

ICBMs launched by Moscow can reach the United States in approximately 40 minutes, offering the Pentagon’s command and control centers, and the president himself, extremely limited time to detect, decide, and respond. This mission set will expand as Russia develops long-range conventional hypersonic missiles that will also use a High North flight route.

Prioritizing and expanding U.S. military radar and communication systems in Greenland will certainly be part of the “underlayer” elements of the Golden Dome missile defense effort, allowing for Russian missiles of all varieties to be detected earlier and provide U.S. and Canadian warfighters additional reaction time.

Russia will always be a malevolent actor and adversary in the High North, and the Kremlin will utilize any advantage and division among Arctic allies to sow disinformation, destabilize alliance efforts, and advance its own interests. Although the political particularities of Nuuk lie in the hands of Greenland, Denmark, and the United States, the geostrategic and deterrence value of the island is shared among all NATO allies; and should be a factor that unifies and strengthens the alliance, not something that divides Western partners and advances adversarial interests.

Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (U.S. Navy, ret.) is the Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Emmerson Overell is a project coordinator.

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

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

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Export Controls Backfire: The China Innovation Paradox

DEEP DIVE — When the Biden administration rolled out its semiconductor export restrictions in October 2022, the logic seemed airtight: cut off Beijing’s access to advanced AI chips, and you’d put the brakes on China’s tech ambitions. Three years on, that bet looks a lot shakier than anyone in Washington expected.

Instead of paralyzing China’s AI sector, these controls have promoted domestic self-reliance. With no choice but to develop indigenous workarounds and architectural innovations, Chinese businesses are rapidly decoupling AI progress from sheer hardware volume. U.S. policies have undoubtedly bought time, but they have also ushered in a parallel innovation ecosystem totally independent of Western influence.

Now the Trump administration is trying a different tack. By allowing conditional chip exports to approved Chinese customers, complete with revenue-sharing arrangements, the White House appears to be hedging its bets. The strategy banks on maintaining some leverage through controlled access rather than outright denial. Yet critics caution this could backfire spectacularly: American companies might be financing the very Chinese AI capabilities designed to render them obsolete.

Both strategies, it seems, lead to uncomfortable places.

The DeepSeek Shock and Algorithmic Efficiency

A year ago, DeepSeek’s new R1 model sent tremors through Silicon Valley and Washington. The Chinese startup demonstrated AI reasoning capabilities closely mirroring those of OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1, without access to cutting-edge chips restricted by U.S. export controls.

“Algorithmic efficiency is a useful technique that enables developers to achieve reasonable performance compared to frontier models through inference-time optimization—essentially adapting the achievements of others for your own purposes,” Martijn Rasser, Vice President of Tech Leadership at the Special Competitive Studies Project, tells The Cipher Brief. “DeepSeek’s engineering is genuinely impressive, and this ‘fast follower’ strategy is very attractive for price-sensitive, commoditized AI applications.”

By optimizing inter-chip memory bandwidth on less sophisticated H800 chips, DeepSeek achieved competitive performance through algorithmic efficiency rather than brute force. According to the MIT Technology Review, Chinese startups are responding to export restrictions by prioritizing efficiency, resource pooling, and collaboration, thereby gaining an edge over competitors.

The breakthrough, however, should not be overinterpreted, Rasser warns.

“Algorithmic efficiency and raw compute aren’t substitutes at the frontier — you need both,” he says. “Training next-generation foundation models, achieving breakthroughs in areas like protein folding or materials science, and developing the most advanced autonomous systems all require massive compute that efficiency gains alone cannot replicate.”

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Other analysts see the dynamic playing out along different timelines.

“AI progress is shaped by two concurrent trends: pushing the capability frontier requires ever-greater computing power, yet over time, reaching any given capability level requires less and less computing power,” James Sanders, Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security, tells The Cipher Brief.

While American AI companies continue advancing along the compute-intensive frontier, Chinese firms constrained by chip shortages focus instead on the lower-cost, lower-capability portion of the market.

“If the U.S. continues to maintain its computational dominance, China will likely continue to play a role as a fast follower, rather than leader, in AI capabilities,” Sanders explains.

Smuggling Networks and Systematic Circumvention

Aside from inventiveness under constraints, Chinese companies have also shown remarkable versatility by smuggling goods through shell companies and elaborate smuggling operations. The procurement of chips for Huawei’s Ascend 910 AI processor is one of the most dramatic examples.

According to Congressional testimony, Huawei used shell companies to deceive Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company into manufacturing approximately 2 million computer chiplets.

In 2024, a smuggling ring operating under the company name “Luxuriate Your Life” reportedly purchased $390 million worth of servers from Dell and Supermicro containing banned Nvidia graphics processing units, then smuggled them into Malaysia for ultimate delivery to Chinese customers. Hundreds of controlled chips have subsequently been sold in Shenzhen markets as vendors trade restricted AI technology.

The dramatic scale of smuggling operations thus raises fundamental questions about enforceability.

“No export control regime is 100% leakproof,” Rasser acknowledges. “But the goal should be making evasion costly, risky, and limited in scale rather than expecting perfect enforcement.”

He contends that the most effective approach is drawing a clear line: semiconductors exceeding certain performance thresholds should not be sold to end users in countries of concern at all, regardless of stated end use.

Sanders takes a more optimistic view.

“America has the ability to reduce AI chip smuggling to negligible levels if it wanted to. It only requires the political will to do so,” he says.

Technology that verifies a chip’s location could reduce smuggling to negligible levels, Sanders argues, noting that Nvidia has reportedly built such a capability and several congressional bills have proposed mandating location verification for exports.

“Even with the level of smuggling we see today, export controls on advanced AI chips are still effective,” Sanders insists. “They impose a large differential cost on China’s AI development and make it much harder for these chips to be obtained and used by adversaries.”

The Self-Sufficiency Acceleration

Perhaps most significantly for long-term strategic competition, export controls have supercharged China’s decades-long quest for semiconductor self-sufficiency. At a February 2025 meeting between Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping and technology executives, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei reported that his previous concerns about domestic advanced semiconductor production had eased due to recent breakthroughs.

A CSIS analysis underscores that Ren stated he is leading a network of more than 2,000 Chinese companies working collectively to ensure that China achieves self-sufficiency of more than 70 percent across the entire semiconductor value chain by 2028.

Rasser is skeptical of the ambitious timeline.

“This timeline is not credible for leading-edge semiconductors,” Rasser observes. “If he means trailing-edge components and packaging, 2028 might be achievable. But if he means the advanced logic chips that power AI training and high-performance computing, it isn’t.”

Chinese firms still can't build the ultra-precise manufacturing equipment needed to produce chips at the most advanced nodes, he points out. But that hasn't stopped Beijing from doubling down. Overall chip investment dipped slightly in early 2025, yet spending on semiconductor equipment jumped more than 53 percent, a clear signal that China is dead serious about building out a complete domestic supply chain.

The Chinese government has channeled well over $150 billion into semiconductor development from 2014 through 2030, according to Semiconductor Industry Association analysis — an investment equivalent to the U.S. CHIPS Act virtually every year since 2014.

The Bifurcation Dilemma

The unintended consequence of U.S. export controls may be accelerating the bifurcation of global technology ecosystems into incompatible, competing supply chains.

Consequently, we are faced with a strategic paradox: Does a China that relies on Western chips but is constrained by American controls pose a lower long-term risk than one that operates in a technologically autonomous fashion beyond American eyesight?

“A technologically autonomous China certainly poses a greater risk of strategic surprise,” Rasser concedes. “But the alternative framing — that we could maintain Chinese dependency on Western technology indefinitely—isn’t realistic. It ignores history, Chinese strategy, decades of mercantilist industrial policy, and the inherent difficulty of controlling technology diffusion over long time horizons.”

The better frame, he suggests, is that export controls buy time.

“The question is what we do with that time,” Rasser continues. “Years of constrained Chinese progress are years during which the United States and allies can extend their own technological lead, build more resilient supply chains, strengthen alliances with key semiconductor nations, and shape the trajectory of AI governance.”

Sanders echoes this assessment.

“China is determined to develop a fully domestic AI chip industry, and will likely eventually be able to do so,” he notes. “The real question is whether we equip China to compete with American AI leadership today.”

The fundamental constraint on Chinese domestic AI chip production, Sanders points out, isn’t the lack of logic chips but access to advanced manufacturing equipment.

“Strengthening and fully enforcing current export restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is the most important step in preventing China from developing an AI chip industry that could outcompete America’s,” he says.

Yet the competitive landscape extends beyond manufacturing capacity alone.

The Supply Chain War

Leland Miller, co-founder and CEO of China Beige Book, who serves on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, however, sees the entire framework shifting.

“The trade war is dead,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “This is a supply chain war. Beijing wants to weaponize supply chains for leverage. Tariffs are background noise now.”

Miller notes that China has advantages in data, talent, energy, and scale. Their weakness remains computing — advanced chips and lithography.

“That’s why H100s matter so much,” he says, referring to Nvidia’s high-end processors. On open-source AI platforms like Hugging Face, Chinese dominance is already evident. “Seventeen of the top 20 models are Chinese,” Mike Kuiken, Vice Chair of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, tells The Cipher Brief. “Software plus enough hardware can close gaps. That’s why this moment is dangerous.”

The Trump administration’s December 2025 decision to allow conditional exports of Nvidia H200 chips to approved Chinese customers in exchange for a 25 percent revenue stake represents recognition that absolute denial may be neither achievable nor desirable. Yet Beijing has reportedly discouraged state-linked firms from adopting these chips, while Chinese companies like Huawei and Alibaba continue to advance domestic AI alternatives.

The controls have bought time — China’s AI development has slowed, and the U.S. still holds the edge in cutting-edge tech. The more complex question is whether Washington can consolidate that lead before Beijing circumvents the restrictions entirely, potentially causing an even bigger crisis.

“The goal isn’t perpetual dependency, it’s ensuring that when China does achieve greater autonomy, the strategic balance still favors us,” Rasser concludes.

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The Rise of China's Strategic Soft Power and its Global Impact

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE – The United States is currently mired in a cycle of aggressive trade renegotiations and a transactional foreign policy that has alienated its most critical allies. By perceiving partners as free riders on American defense investments, Washington is increasingly defaulting to raw financial and military coercion, or hard power. While cultural attraction remains a core Western strength, this shift toward transactionalism is allowing the global power balance to tilt decisively in China’s favor.

China has successfully evolved from the world’s manufacturing engine into an innovation powerhouse, with massive investments in research and development now yielding strategic dividends. The old adage, "USA innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates," is being rendered obsolete as Beijing takes the lead in high-tech research, dominates renewable energy supply chains, and weaponizes its monopoly on rare earth materials. This is not just a technological shift; it is the foundation of a new form of systemic influence.

By the Numbers

Soft power, the ability to influence through attraction rather than coercion, is now a primary battleground for Beijing. In its 2010-2015 5-Year Plan, China explicitly identified cultural products like computer animation, books, and social media as strategic priorities, and is expected to spend over $10Bn per year. Today, that strategy is manifest in TikTok, where international audiences are fed a curated diet of technological wonders and friendly diplomacy, while the domestic version (Douyin) remains strictly regulated. This curated reality leverages Western influencers paid to travel to China to marvel at bullet trains and flying cars, effectively masking the tightening grip of government control and persistent domestic poverty.

The silver screen has become a frontier for this historical revisionism. The evolution of Oriental Dreamworks illustrates the point: after the original Kung Fu Panda sparked national soul-searching in China over why a Western studio told their story better, Beijing forced a co-production model. This ensured that subsequent global hits, like The Abominable, which sparked international backlash for including the nine-dash line, served as vehicles for Chinese territorial and cultural narratives. Similarly, the success of The Three-Body Problem on platforms like Netflix signals a shift from passive consumption to the strategic export of techno-optimism, reshaping how the West perceives China’s past and future.

Lately one of China’s most potent soft power assets, however, is its strategic silence. In a world defined by shock events, from the 2025 Indo-Pakistani conflict to the Venezuelan raids to arguing over Greenland, Beijing projects a calculated lack of surprise. While United States foreign policy is viewed as an erratic series of active disruptions, China markets itself as a pillar of stability. By refusing the role of global savior, Beijing avoids the inevitable backlash of interventions while presenting its intentions, most notably regarding Taiwan, as historic certainties rather than chaotic ruptures. This perceived predictability is the velvet glove that makes its authoritarian consistency look like a safe harbor for global markets.

The change in soft power execution (or lack thereof), both by the United States and China, has yielded quantifiable results. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 28,000 adults shows the favorability gap between Washington and Beijing closing fast. Even inner circle partners are decoupling: in Australia, importance placed on economic ties with China (53%) has eclipsed the U.S. (42%) for the first time. In Canada, reeling from American rhetoric regarding annexation and the Greenland crisis, favorability for the United States plummeted from 87% to 67%. Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina all view the United States as their highest threat, while the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Germany and Sweden think of the United States as their second highest threat, only surpassed by Russia. When the world’s most stable democracies begin to view the United States as a greater threat to their sovereignty than China, the global architecture of power has already moved.

This erosion between the United States and its NATO allies is precipitating a tangible financial and geopolitical divorce. As European pension funds signal a pivot toward non-American assets and gold to hedge against United States volatility, Washington has resorted to hard-power retaliation, to counter rising interest costs on its own federal debt, but risks further alienating allies. This shift is giving rise to a Western middle-power bloc, where leaders from Canada to the U.K. are bypassing United States hegemony to secure autonomous ties with Beijing, most recently shown in a Canadian trade deal with China, and London approving a new embassy before their prime minister is set to visit China next month.

The Domestic Crisis of American Soft Power

The United States faces a disadvantage in this competition that is as much internal as it is external. While cultural attraction remains a Western strength, America is stuck in a cycle of political division and a pervasive internal culture war. This domestic fragmentation has direct geopolitical consequences, creating a soft power deficit by eroding internal stability and the reliability that allies previously took for granted. When a superpower’s domestic policy is defined by institutional distrust and crippling polarization, its foreign policy becomes erratic, swinging violently between administrations and leaving partners to wonder if today’s agreement will survive tomorrow’s election.

In this climate, Washington is increasingly defaulting to financial and military coercion, hard power, to maintain influence. By viewing alliances through a purely transactional lens, the United States signals that its leadership is no longer based on shared values, but on momentary leverage.

The Authoritarian Impact of the Chinese Model

Conversely, China’s authoritarian system provides a strategic soft power advantage by ensuring internal dissent never detracts from international ambitions. While the United States is distracted by internal quibbling over social issues, Beijing’s centralized control allows it to project a facade of unwavering stability and consistency. The CCP’s absolute control over society prevents political in-fighting from slowing its global expansion.

This marketed reliability is a powerful tool. To many developing nations, the Chinese model, which prioritizes state security and economic growth over the perceived chaos of liberal democracy, looks increasingly attractive. China is expertly using this image to mask the reality of structural debt traps and economic coercion they have expertly laid in the Global South, particularly in Africa and Central Asia.

However, this is also China’s greatest weakness. Democratic values, such as a free press, labor rights, data and public privacy and private ownership are values where the West, and America in particular, still is attractive and acts as a magnet. While China might be a partner, they might not be a role model.

A Collision Course with an Existential Vacuum

The Transatlantic alliance is now on a collision course with an existential power vacuum. If the West fails to move past aggressive theater and nurture shared security architectures, it will cede the century to a model that demands compliance in exchange for short-term financial benefits.

For any nation flirting with realignment toward China, the warning is stark: China offers immediate liquidity, but demands a level of sovereign collateral that eventually leaves the partner more vulnerable than it was before the investment began, as Lithuania’s experience with economic sanctions has shown. Old alliances between America and Europe should not be so quickly forgotten. All indications are that Chinese soft power, backed by an undistracted authoritarian state, could eventually be followed by hard power.

Soft power should not be discarded so quickly. There is strength in a shared Western cultural heritage that attracts nations precisely because it avoids totalitarianism. However, if America cannot find a way to resolve its internal dissent and project a unified front, it risks losing the very American Example that once served as its greatest global asset, and part of its allies with it.

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America’s Intelligence Satellites are Proliferating: Their Protection is Not, With Exceptions

OPINION — The pace of U.S. national-security launches over the past several months has been staggering. But buried beneath the impressive cadence is an uncomfortable truth: many of the most sensitive intelligence assets now orbiting Earth remain dangerously exposed to enemy action by hostile actors.

These assets are launched primarily by the National Reconnaissance Office and the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, operating under the National Security Space Launch program (NSSL). The government’s private-sector partners - SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (a joint-venture by Lockheed Martin and Boeing) provide the lift capacity using Falcon 9, the soon to enter operations Falcon Heavy (SpaceX), and the newly introduced Vulcan Centaur rocket (ULA).

Congress has long recognized the importance of assured access to space. As the Congressional Research Service notes, U.S. law mandates maintaining at least two launch vehicles capable of delivering any national-security payload to orbit. That policy has worked. The problem is what happens after launch.

Over the past four years, most NRO launches fall into three categories. First are signals-intelligence satellites (SIGINT). Second are large, electro-optical imaging satellites (IMINT) - capable of extraordinary resolution, as the public briefly glimpsed when Donald Trump released an undegraded intelligence image in a startling lapse of operational security. Third are the Starshield (the name of the program) satellites.

Proliferated Architecture represents a strategic shift; its goal is to establish “the largest government constellation in history” consisting of hundreds of satellites with launches planned through 2029. There are roughly half a dozen missions planned for 2026. This project replaces the model of few exquisite, irreplaceable satellites, in favor of resilience through numbers.

That logic is sound - but it applies unevenly.

Proliferation ensures continuity if adversaries degrade or destroy some satellites. Yet the most sensitive NRO platforms - large SIGINT collectors and high-resolution imaging satellites - remain singular, expensive, and irreplaceable. They are also increasingly vulnerable. Both China and Russia are fielding counterspace capabilities that include electronic warfare, cyber intrusion, co-orbital inspection satellites, and direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons.

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In other words, America is hardening its communications backbone while leaving its crown jewels exposed.

Deterrence in space no longer comes from secrecy alone. It requires active protection: improved space-domain awareness, on-orbit maneuverability, electronic countermeasures, rapid reconstitution plans, and – ultimately - the willingness to impose costs on adversaries who threaten U.S. space assets.

The United States has demonstrated it can launch fast, often, and at scale. The next challenge is more difficult and more urgent: ensuring that the satellites underpinning American military power and intelligence dominance can survive in a contested orbital environment.

Starshield redundancy is a start. Protection of existing assets must be the next step. if a rival has the ability to blind, deceive, or degrade satellites, then a lack of clarity may emerge exactly when clarity is most needed. A lack of clarity in a crisis is a catalyst. In fact, space is crowded, competitive, and, more to the point, contested. The dangers?

First, kinetic anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) and debris. Anti-satellite weapons, such as one that was tested by China in 2007 are some of the most threatening because they have the capability to destroy a satellite.

Second, non-kinetic attacks, like dazzling, jamming, cyber-tampering, and spoofing. The greatest threats on a daily basis are also likely to be non-kinetic, meaning they are temporary or reversible, although still potentially operationally decisive. A threat assessment has found categories of threats such as electronic warfare, cyber, and directed-energy effects that are being developed and employed by hostile nations as part of their counter-space capabilities.

Third, co-orbital proximity operations and grey-zone activity. Proximity operations are activities that are legitimate in themselves. However, the same activities can be used for coercion, interference, and “accidents on purpose.” The issue in this regard is one of attribution. This leads to a gray zone in which norms are important in addition to deterrence. In this regard, the U.S. Space Force has described space domain awareness (SDA) as “the ability to perceive and understand the nature of space-based phenomena to inform decisions.”

The policy should be to combine these elite systems with more distributed architectures: more nodes, more paths, and more means of recovery. Resilience is about the need to ensure that the loss of one satellite’s signal does not cause the end of the entire mission. The Proliferated Architecture (Starshield) program is a step towards that direction. But it’s only one NRO project in place and has redundancies set in place. What can be done to protect other multi-billion satellites already in orbit and not part of a constellation of satellites?

First, apply maneuver, unpredictability and mobility in space, which comes down to strong cyber protection for mission systems and ground networks, encryption and authentication to protect command and telemetry, anti-jamming techniques and alternative communication routes and rigorous integrity checks, such that analysts can rely on the data generated.

Second, engage in rapid reconstitution and continuity of operations including: pre-planned fallback modes, alternate tasking workflows, ground processing surge capacity, and alternatives for reconstituting capability with allied or commercial sources if needed.

When the problem is narrowed down to its core, ensuring the protection of single-operated NRO satellites can be achieved via better access to sensor data and faster decision cycles and a resilient architecture (combination of high-end assets and proliferated assets).

Equally important are end-to-end cybersecurity and integrity controls, debris-conscious operations & sustainability in coordination with civilian agencies such as NASA where necessary and proactive deterrence through resilience and consequence.

NRO satellites are strategic tools, as they reduce uncertainties, detect deception, and enable decision advantage. The threats to these satellites, which are both kinetic and non-kinetic, are rapidly increasing in their sophistication and frequency.

The protection of such satellites has nothing to do with making space a battlefield for its own sake. It has to do with being able to see clearly enough to avoid mistakes that could escalate quickly in space.

The best way to ensure such protection is not through a single technology but through a comprehensive approach that involves situational awareness, resilience, secure data communication, sustainable operations, deterrence and dispersion.

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

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

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The 2026 National Defense Strategy: No Surprises but Plenty of Mandate

OPINION — The 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) follows closely the 2025 National Security Strategy, as it should. It also falls in line with the Department of Defense’s narrative and the actions they have taken regarding priorities. The NDS has four lines of effort:

Defending the U.S. Homeland - Homeland defense is the top priority, with the Western Hemisphere elevated above other regions. This includes border security, open lines of transportation (Panama Canal and Greenland), counter-narcotics operations, and countering adversary influence. This is not a surprise.

Deterring China in the Indo-Pacific - The approach focuses on deterrence through military strength rather than confrontation, aiming to prevent Chinese dominance while avoiding conflict. The strategy emphasizes expanded military-to-military communication with Beijing to reduce conflict risks. It still cites China’s predatory behaviors and makes clear that China is the second highest priority.

Increasing Burden-Sharing with Allies - The document argues that allies must significantly increase defense spending, pointing to a new global benchmark of 5% of GDP for defense-related expenditures. It also calls on allies to keep watch against threats in their part of the world so that the US can focus on the Western Hemisphere.
Revitalizing the U.S. Defense Industrial Base - Described as a once-in-a-century effort essential for military readiness, providing strength to deter the US from getting embroiled in a war, and, if needed, the ability to produce weapons at scale during crises.

Notable Omissions

The strategy makes no specific mention of or guarantee to Taiwan, unlike the 2022 Biden era strategy which explicitly supported Taiwan's self-defense. It also omits climate change as a security threat, which the Biden administration had identified.
Perhaps, the most concerning issue is that the NDS does not mention Ukraine. It would have been easy to call out Ukraine’s successes against Russia as the example for how the strategy forecasts the behaviors it seeks from our allies. It also characterizes Russia as a persistent but manageable threat, in effect relegating Russia at the end of the day as inconsequential to the US. This underestimates Moscow’s ability to cause havoc beyond Ukraine. It also is much like waving the red flag at the bull. Moscow will not like being considered a minor player on the world stage.

Is Cognitive Warfare Still a Thing?

While the Defense Industrial Base is called out as important as is the need for weapons systems and platforms, there is nothing in the document about increasing activities in the cognitive warfare area. This is an area where the US needs to step up. There are statements throughout the NDS where one can read into the need for cognitive warfare. The NDS talks about providing options in the spaces prior to war and being ready if the US must go to war. These statements support increasing intelligence support and non-kinetic options for decision makers. Specifically, the NDS says:

…this Strategy will ensure that we see things and the choices we need to make clearly.

For decisionmakers to “see things” and understand the landscape and to provide them options or choices they will need a strong intelligence community that can collect the information needed to provide warning and articulate the threats we are facing. This same community will then be able to analyze the adversaries’ responses to choices that we make and help inform decisionmakers on what path might work best.

….including by leading efforts to deter or defend against other, lesser threats

Again, to deter adversaries, not only does the adversary have to fear your kinetic response but also what you can do behind the scene. Additionally, cognitive warfare can prep the battle space, even if we do not ultimately resort to a battle space. Influence operations could play a huge role in deterrence.

· ….partner with ….other federal departments and agencies to reinvigorate and mobilize our great nation’s unrivaled creativity and ingenuity, re-spark our innovative spirit….

This statement seems to be here to support calls for increased irregular warfare activities. Creativity and ingenuity are the hallmark for cognitive warfare and the Department can best support activities within the cognitive warfare or irregular warfare space by partnering with other federal departments and agencies.

Conclusion

There is nothing surprising in the NDS and that is a good thing. If the NDS had not closely matched the National Security Strategy or the direction we have witnessed the Department headed in the last year, something would have been off. What the NDS does do is provide the military and the Defense Intelligence Enterprise with a strategic framework for priorities. The National Intelligence Strategy should follow next. While the regional priorities in a National Intelligence Strategy should not be surprising, it will be illuminating to see the strategic direction that the Director of National Intelligence sets for how the intelligence community should move forward.

The NDS priorities mean that there will be some adjustments to resources. Reporting indicates that there may soon be changes to the unified command plan whereby US SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM will be combined into an America’s Command. There will also need to be an adjustment to resources, both money and people to be able to fulfill the NDS mandate. Such a change will take time to build. Expertise does not come overnight.

The Department will need to make major changes in acquisition and contracting to be able to develop the capabilities the NDS has called out and in the time frame it demands. It is clear that the Department is moving in that direction.

There are repercussions for our partners and our adversaries. More will be expected of our partners but again, the administration has been clear on that issue and when pressed, our partners have shown that they can step up.

Finally, the NDS is clear that the US is not looking for a fight. However, it is also clear that if our adversaries move in that direction, we will be prepared to push back. We need to make sure that we are and put more focus on cognitive warfare to help us be prepared but also to keep us out of a kinetic fight!

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China’s Stunning Military Purge – and What It Means For Taiwan

DEEP DIVE – President Xi Jinping’s latest purge of generals has eviscerated China’s military leadership, drawn comparisons to crackdowns carried out by Chairman Mao Zedong a half century ago, and raised questions about China’s military plans for a takeover of Taiwan.

Xi moved in the past week against China’s most senior military official, General Zhang Youxai, and General Liu Zhenli, who heads the Joint Staff Department, which oversees operations, intelligence and training. Zhang and Liu were members of the Central Military Commission, or CMC, China’s most important military body – and Xi’s campaign has now claimed all but two of the CMC’s six leaders (one of whom is Xi himself). Xi’s earlier purges have ended the careers of dozens of lower-ranking generals.

“The PLA’s core command has been mutilated by these purges,” Dr. Zi Yang, an expert on China’s military at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), told The Cipher Brief. As for the CMC, he said that “this organization…that is supposed to oversee quality military advice is more or less gutted. Who’s giving Xi advice on running an organization of two million military personnel?”

Imagine an American president firing all but one member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with several other high-ranking generals, while simultaneously preparing for a major military contingency, and you have some sense of what’s happening in China.

Dennis Wilder, who served as a senior CIA official and a top White House adviser on China, called the moves against Generals Zhang and Liu the “most stunning developments in Chinese politics” since Xi’s rise to power – and said the purges would almost certainly affect the timing of any action against Taiwan.

“If Xi had plans for 2027, I think they’re delayed,” Wilder told The Cipher Brief, referring to Xi’s directive that the military be prepared by 2027 to take taiwan by force. “I don't know for how long but they have to be delayed at this point. There's no way that they're ready to take on a major military confrontation in these circumstances.”

Gen. Zhang was widely considered Xi’s most trusted military aide. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who attended a meeting with Zhang in 2024, told The New York Times that he “spoke in an unvarnished way that was typical of a military guy, but also reflective of someone who didn’t feel like he had to be cautious.” Now Gen. Zhang is the latest and most consequential casualty of Xi’s widening purge.

“It’s fair to say this is a seismic event,” Sullivan said. For Xi to “take out somebody who he had such a long history with is striking, and raises a lot of questions.”

Anatomy of a crackdown

On January 24th the Defense Ministry announced that Generals Zhang and Liu had been placed under investigation for “suspected serious discipline and law violations”. An editorial in China’s Liberation Army Daily said the two men had “trampled on” Xi’s authority and “severely undermined the party’s absolute leadership over the military.” Their actions, the paper said, had caused “massive damage” to the military’s political strength and combat readiness. The Wall Street Journal reported that General Zhang has been accused of leaking nuclear secrets to the United States.

Experts had assumed that Gen. Zhang would avoid the purges, given his rare combination of attributes: a decades-long close relationship with Xi; and a decorated record during the 1979 border war with Vietnam.

“Zhang matters, both as a combat-tested veteran – which is a very rare commodity within the PLA – but also because he truly understands war,” Shanshan Mei, a China defense expert at RAND and former advisor to the U.S. Air Force on China, told The Cipher Brief. “He truly understands tactics and morale and real combat issues.”

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Since taking power in 2012, Xi Jinping has prioritized a revamping of the military, which was widely seen as beset by corruption and outmoded thinking. He fired dozens of generals and began an overhaul of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which was ultimately led by Gen. Zhang. Xi’s purging of the CMC leadership began in 2023 and culminated in last week’s moves against Zhang and Liu.

Last year, Dr. Zi – the RSIS expert – wrote an article about the purges and argued that Zhang Youxia’s removal would likely trigger a crisis within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Now, Zi says, that moment has arrived.

“It's going to have trickle-down effects for sure to the operational level,” Zi told The Cipher Brief. “All of Zhang’s associates are going to be put under suspicion. All of Zhang’s underlings are going to feel the pressure as well.”

What it means for Taiwan – and beyond

Experts told The Cipher Brief that the latest ousters will likely have several immediate effects: a drop in PLA morale; less high-level risk-taking and innovation; a disruption in decision-making – involving everything from procurement to high-tech modernization to actual priorities and battle plans; and an almost-certain delay in any military operations against Taiwan.

Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA director of East Asia operations, wrote an article for The Cipher Brief in October in which he warned that the high-level upheaval within the PLA might impact decisions involving Taiwan. Now he says that delays are inevitable.

“You’ve got to say this is not going to happen [by 2027],” Amb. DeTrani told The Cipher Brief. “And if it is, you have got to wonder, what sort of planning and what sort of leadership would go in? I just don't see how President Xi Jinping could feel even remotely confident that China’s military would be prepared, or is prepared, to use kinetic means to take over Taiwan.”

Zi said that the purging of the two top generals “has clearly damaged the PLA’s operational capacity,” and he, too, doubted that the military could move against Taiwan until the internal turbulence passes and new leadership is put in place.

“Any war in the Taiwan Strait is going to be an extremely complex large-scale military operation,” Zi said. “It will require the mobilization of China’s resources in all realms and mobilization of basically all military services and forces. You need people who are capable and talented in positions to plan and lead these operations.”

Wilder said that while China’s basic military readiness is not in question – “pilots know how to fly their planes…(and) naval and infantry commanders know how to lead their units,” he said – the latest purges will compromise the oversight and execution of any major operations in the near term.

“I don’t think this changes the readiness of PLA forces,” he said. “It’s really about the command structure. I think execution is a problem, because your command structure has been so disrupted.”

That “command structure” has been housed within the CMC, whose only remaining uniformed officer is Gen. Zhang Shengmin, who Zi described as a “political commissar with next to no operational command experience.”

“He’s not a combat veteran,” Wilder said of Zhang Shengmin. “You have to find a general in charge, if you're going to go forward with a plan. Who’s your operational commander?”

Beyond Taiwan, Wilder said the purges risk a broader “paralysis” within the military’s top echelons. “You don't know what's safe anymore, and whether you might be investigated,” he said. “Officers will want to keep their heads down. They won’t want to propose anything. They will simply wait for instructions.” That, he added, will render the military leadership “dysfunctional for a while. It becomes incapable of serious decision-making.”

Experts said decision-making wasn’t a problem for Gen. Zhang Youxia, who was seen as a straight-shooting advisor who wouldn’t hesitate to give Xi less-than-rosy assessments.

“Zhang could give Xi Jinping critical advice and know that Xi would listen,” RAND’s Mei said. “A key question now is: Who is going to give Xi Jinping the Zhang Youxai-style, informed and combat-tested advice, if Xi decides to make any big moves militarily? Who’s going to give him the honest opinion?”

Amb. DeTrani said that morale at lower ranks will be challenged as well.

“It's got to affect the troops,” DeTrani said. “What is the message that Xi Jinping is sending to the troops – that his leaders are all either corrupt or involved in other nefarious activities? It's got to be very demoralizing for the core of the People's Liberation Army.” He said frontline soldiers may go so far as to question their own commitments. “I've been taking orders from these people and told to potentially give up my life to serve the country – and these people are feeding off the trough?" DeTrani said. "They're corrupt and we're hearing that from our supreme leader? How could they expect us to sacrifice so much if they're not invested the same way as we are?”

Who will take their place?

In the near term, all eyes will be on the generals Xi taps to fill the vacancies – and how soon he does so. Wilder said that one of his “best contacts” inside China told him in the wake of the moves against Zhang and Liu that “there’s more coming. There are going to be other generals that go.” Any further bloodletting would suggest an extended period without a fully reconstituted top brass.

Whenever Xi chooses to fill the top-tier positions, he will presumably be looking for loyalists who also bring experience and expertise. But experts said that the trickle-down effect of the purges means that many candidates may be tainted by association to the ousted generals.

“In China, when you take down one person, everything about that person is wrong,” Mei said. “Who is going to replace Zhang? We keep looking one level down, to the theater commanders and political commissars. But many of these people were Zhang Youxian proteges. You take him out, it doesn’t mean that you will have a big collection of qualified, loyal military leaders ready to take over.” She added that among China’s ten theater commanders, “at least 4 or 5 are Zhang Youxian’s people.”

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Several analysts referenced Mao’s 1950s “Red” versus “Expert” ideological formula, in which fealty to the Communist Party (i.e., “Red”) was prized above technical skills. The ideal citizens were "Red and Expert" – people who brought both elements to their work.

“The real question is, can he find the loyalists he needs in those jobs?” Wilder said. “Does he have a slate of candidates? I would presume he cannot leave these positions open for too long.”

“My gut feeling tells me that Xi is valuing loyalty over professionalism,” Zi said. “A military professional may tell you things that you don’t want to hear. If he cannot find someone who is both ‘Red’ and ‘expert,’ he is going to choose someone who is loyal.”

Zi and others added that whoever lands in these positions will have to tread carefully.

“They will have to be extremely cautious about their behavior, their words, they must carry themselves in a more subservient way,” Zi said. “Maybe even total obedience to Xi’s will and Xi’s mind. Because you don't want to put yourself in the same position as Zhang. And they won’t have anything like his capital.”

Outside China, watching with interest

Officials in Taiwan said this week that they were closely monitoring what they called “abnormal shifts” within China’s senior military leadership. That said, Defense Minister Wellington Koo projected a nothing-has-changed approach, saying Taipei would not relax its guard, and noting that China’s war games have continued and Beijing has not changed its position vis-a-vis Taiwan.

Mei, Zi and Wilder all raised concerns about another regional flashpoint: The South China Sea. In their view, Xi may seek to quiet domestic unease about the PLA – and send the rest of the world a message – by initiating a smaller-scale conflict involving those disputed waters.

“I would worry about the South China Sea, because Xi might want to prove that he’s still strong,” Wilder said. “So what do you do? You pick on a small guy. I’d worry about the Philippines. I think we’re going to have to watch for muscle-flexing of some sort.”

Zi voiced the same concern, suggesting Xi might seek a “rally-the-flag” operation in the South China Sea – a “small conflict that might be viewed as easy pickings.”

As for the U.S., the chaos in China’s military leadership offers at least one benefit: the gift of time, as Xi maps out his next steps, and Washington and its Asian allies consider the range of contingencies involving Taiwan.

“You've got a wonderful opportunity,” Wilder said. “Number one, you have time that you didn't have before. We have all these Indo-Pacom plans, we're trying to get AI in the field, drone swarms into the field. It gives us a longer timeline for working with the Japanese, the Philippines, the Australians. That's the good news.”

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Signs of Trouble from Venezuela's Regime Could Be Subtle at First

OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Turmoil in Minneapolis and the unprecedented friction within NATO over President Trump’s effort to secure control over Greenland have, predictably, displaced headlines about Venezuela in much of the daily press. But there have been at least a number of important statements from the U.S. and one disturbing statement, reportedly, by Venezuela’s interim president since the U.S. apprehended Maduro and his wife.

”Now, this is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end”. Winston Churchill, 1942

On January 20^th, in a press conference, President Trump said he was considering a role for Venezuela’s democratic opposition leader, Nobel laureate Maria Corina Machado. This was a very encouraging statement. The opposition has the support of the vast majority of Venezuelans. As has been widely reported and well documented, they won the July 24 national election by an enormous margin despite regime efforts to undermine their campaign.

Maria Corina Machado is the leader of the opposition and a national hero. She is committed to rebuilding her country’s democracy and to reconstructing Venezuela’s dysfunctional and corruption-ridden economy. She is pro-American, pro-private sector and open to foreign direct investment.”

The regime, now being led on an interim basis by Delcy Rodriquez, held on to power after the July 2024 vote through intimidation. The Venezuelan public knows this. And, despite assurances of cooperation to President Trump, there are already signs that the character of this authoritarian regime’s approach to governance has not changed. The regime moved quickly after the U.S. removed Maduro to squelch public expressions of relief that Maduro had been taken into U.S. custody. Left to their own devices, Delcy Rodriquez and company will do everything in their power to consolidate their hold on power. Indeed, this is clear from Rodriguez’s recent public statement that she has had “enough already of Washington’s orders over Venezuelan politicians.”

Integrating Maria Corina Machado into the transition process would reassure her supporters and help to counter the impression that the U.S. is indifferent to the plight of the Venezuelan democratic opposition. It would also contribute to the establishment of the kind of security on the ground that the American oil majors have said must be achieved before they commit to the immense investments necessary to resurrect the country much diminished and dilapidated oil sector.

President Trump says the U.S. will manage the receipts for Venezuelan oil sales and direct some of that money back into Venezuela. Good but these funds should be channeled mostly into the hands of the opposition rather than the regime. Indeed, the last thing that should be done with the oil receipts is giving them to the regime. The regime’s managerial incompetence and corrupt practices are precisely what caused the effective collapse of the economy! As I and others have noted in the past, oil production in Venezuela has shrunk by two thirds since Hugo Chavez was elected. Things got even worse under Nicolas Maduro. The Venezuelan economy contracted by around 70 percent between 2013, when Maduro assumed the presidency, and 2023.

The Trump administration’s decision to work with remaining elements of the Maduro regime’s leadership cadre was and remains understandable. The U.S. wants to avoid the mistakes we made after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The regime’s remaining leaders, however, are never going to be willing partners in the reconstruction of, Venezuela if that means empowering their adversaries – as Delcy Rodriguez’s recent comment makes clear. They are counting on the U.S. losing interest or being distracted by other crises. The United States needs to be prepared to counter this heretofore unstated impression.

The U.S. considered this a criminal regime before Maduro was apprehended. Rodriquez and the ministers of Defense and Interior were all a part of Maduro’s inner circle. They are miscreants who will revert to their previous patterns of repression and malfeasance absent close vigilance by the U.S. and the democratic opposition. This is why President Trump’s decision to get American diplomats back into the country and name a tough, experienced ambassador to lead the Venezuelan interest section presently located in Bogota was so important.

The U.S. has a long list of issues to work through with the Rodriquez team. Following Maduro’s capture, Rodriguez, on behalf of the regime, agreed to work with the U.S. to avoid further U.S. military action. We will need to watch carefully to be assured that commitments are met. We should also communicate persuasively that the U.S. is willing to act forcefully again if the circumstances warrant it.

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Inside Trump’s New ‘Board of Peace’

OPINION — “Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural Chairman of the Board of Peace, and he shall separately serve as inaugural representative of the United States of America…The Chairman [Trump] shall have exclusive authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary entities as necessary or appropriate to fulfill the Board of Peace’s mission…The Chairman [Trump] shall at all times designate a successor for the role of Chairman. Replacement of the Chairman [Trump] may occur only following voluntary resignation or as a result of incapacity, as determined by a unanimous vote of the Executive Board, at which time the Chairman’s [Trump’s] designated successor shall immediately assume the position of the Chairman and all associated duties and authorities of the Chairman.”

Those are quotes from the charter of the new, so-called Bureau of Peace (BOP) established by President Trump and signed January 22, at Davos, Switzerland by Trump for the United States and the leaders or representatives of 19 other countries.

On January 16, White House announcement of BOP said the organization would provide “strategic oversight, mobilizing international resources, and ensuring accountability as Gaza transitions from conflict to peace and development.”

However, six days later the BOP charter that President Trump released at Davos described its purpose in Chapter I this way: “The Board of Peace is an international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

No mention of Gaza, as BOP’s sole focus, but rather the far broader “areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

BOP’s expansion to a worldwide peacekeeping role provides President Trump with a new way to involve himself in international affairs, not just while he is U.S. President, but even after he leaves the White House.

I will discuss below how President Trump sees all this happening and what it may mean. First, however, it’s worth seeing how BOP’s charter, gives its Chairman, Trump, total power over the organization even beyond what’s mentioned above.

For example,, the charter says. “Membership in the Board of Peace is limited to States invited to participate by the Chairman…Each Member State shall serve a term of no more than three years from this Charter’s entry into force, subject to renewal by the Chairman…The Executive Board shall be selected by the Chairman…shall serve two-year terms, subject to removal by the Chairman and renewable at his discretion…[and] shall be led by a Chief Executive nominated by the Chairman and confirmed by a majority vote of the Executive Board…Decisions of the Executive Board shall be made by a majority of its members present and voting, including the

Chief Executive. Such decisions shall go into effect immediately, subject to veto by the Chairman at any time thereafter.”

Beyond that, Chairman Trump, under the charter, shall convene BOP meetings, establish their locations, must approve the agendas and the persons from all states attending those meeting.

Individually, the charter says Chairman Trump, “acting on behalf of the Board of Peace, is authorized to adopt resolutions or other directives, consistent with this Charter, to implement the Board of Peace’s mission.”

As Chairman, Trump can also “dissolve [BOP] at such time as the Chairman considers necessary or appropriate, or at the end of every odd-numbered calendar year, unless renewed by the Chairman no later than November 21 of such odd-numbered calendar year.”

The charter says, “The Executive Board shall provide for the rules and procedures with respect to the settling of all assets, liabilities, and obligations upon [BOP’s] dissolution,” but remember, decisions of the Executive Board are “subject to veto by the Chairman at any time.”

In short, the BOP charter gives Trump total control over the organization and all its activities.

At last Thursday’s press conference introducing BOP, Trump said, “This Board [BOP] has the chance to be one of the most consequential bodies ever created and it's my enormous honor to serve as its chairman. I was very honored when they asked me to do it. We had an idea to do it, and then they came. They said, "You be the chairman."

Trump never explained who “they” were.

Although 50 nations had been invited to join BOP, only 19 showed up to attend last Thursday’s announcement. Major Western allies, such as Canada, France and Germany have balked and voiced concerns that the body is designed to replace the United Nations.

Trump, who just recently had the U.S. withdraw from many U.N. organizations, said at last Thursday BOP press conference, “I've always said the United Nations has got tremendous potential, has not used it, but there's tremendous potential in the United Nations and you have some great people at the United Nations, but so far it hasn't.”

He repeated, “There's tremendous potential with the United Nations and I think the combination of the Board of Peace with the kind of people we have here coupled with the United Nations can be something very, very unique for the world, for the world.”

It is worth noting that the Trump approved as the BOP seal something in gold that’s very similar to that of the U.N. seal.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who helped put together BOP and is a founding member of its Executive Board, said at last Thursday’s event, he had put together a plan for rebuilding Gaza with the help of the U.N. as the Security Council had originally voted.

But then Kushner added, “We've worked very, very well with them, this is why you need a new organization like the Board of Peace to work with the U.N.”

Kushner specifically thanked U.N.’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, who it turns out gave an interview to Sky News at the time of the BOP announcement.

Fletcher insisted, “The U.N. is not going anywhere…We’ve got to get out there, end wars, save lives, and we’re doing that.” Asked if Trump’s organization would replace the U.N., Fletcher responded, “Now I think we’re seeing America wanting to play a part in ending some of these conflicts and they want us [the U.N.] to be as effective as we can be.”

Fletcher then gave a description of what I judge he sees as Trump’s different way of looking at how he, Trump, works with world leaders.

Fletcher said. “There’s a difference between the old school statecraft that’s familiar to many people here at Davos and a sort of real estate craft, which is coming into this conversation now, which is more transactional. It’s very focused on results, not process. It’s focused on personal relationships and not always institutions. Yes, there’s an aspect of cliff-hanger and jeopardy to it. We never quite know what’s coming next, but it is part of the conversation. And if it can save lives and it ends wars then that is fine.”

To me that is roll-the-dice diplomacy – in effect gambling on national security and foreign policy outcomes. Remember, Trump’s Atlantic City ventures that started in the 1980s. By 2004, all three Trump casinos and Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. were bankrupt.

Trump, has rolled the dice on Venezuela, let’s see how that turns out. And hopefully, BOP won’t be like Trump’s casinos, although right now it does not look to me like a good gamble.

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Russia’s War Economy Lifeline: Inside the Sanctions Evasion Network

DEEP DIVE — Nearly three years into the most comprehensive sanctions regime ever imposed on a significant economy, Russia’s defense industrial base has not just survived — it has expanded at a rate that has stunned Western officials.

In spite of Western import controls, Moscow maintains wartime levels of military production by using shell companies, third-country middlemen, and financial workarounds.

In early 2026, the war will enter its fourth year, and Russia will still have access to critical battlefield technology that was banned by Western authorities. These components power the Lancet loitering munitions hitting Ukrainian positions, Kalibr cruise missiles striking infrastructure, and electronic warfare systems jamming NATO communications.

Throughout 2025, Russia produced an estimated 250,000 artillery shells monthly — 3 million annually — according to NATO intelligence, while manufacturing over 1.5 million drones and more than 2,400 cruise and ballistic missiles per year. President Vladimir Putin claimed in April that Russia’s defense industry more than doubled production of weapons, communications, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare systems over the previous year, with ammunition production increasing more than 22-fold since 2022.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte also assessed in January 2025 that Russia has fully switched to a “war economy” and produces, in three months, the weapons and ammunition that the European Union makes in a year; a production advantage enabled by sanctions-evasion networks spanning three continents.

“Evasion of Western restrictions has helped Russia ramp up production of certain military equipment and munitions, such as cruise and ballistic missiles, to a greater degree than Western governments initially expected,” John Hardie, Deputy Director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells The Cipher Brief.

The Turkey-UAE-China Triangle

Three countries have emerged as critical nodes in Russia’s procurement network. Over the past year, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and China continued to dominate Russia’s sanctions evasion infrastructure, collectively accounting for 86.2 percent of total battlefield goods shipments and 78.6 percent of critical components shipments to Russia.

The trade patterns reveal how entrenched these channels have become, and how enforcement efforts under the Trump administration have largely stalled. In the first nine months of his administration, President Trump imposed no new sanctions on Russia and declined to join the UK, EU, and other allies in targeting Russian evasion networks. Only in October 2025, after canceling peace talks with Putin, did the Trump team impose its first direct sanctions on Russia, targeting oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil while threatening secondary sanctions primarily against India, despite China being the largest importer of Russian oil globally.

“China is by far the most important enabler of that evasion,” Hardie explained. “China serves as both a direct supplier of critical inputs — such as CNC machines, microelectronics, and nitrocellulose — as well as a jurisdiction for Russian illicit procurement of Western products.”

China remains the dominant supplier, accounting for up to 90 percent of Russia’s microelectronics imports. By August last year, Beijing exported a record 328,000 miles of fiber-optic cable and nearly $50 million worth of lithium-ion batteries to Moscow in a single month. According to Germany’s Foreign Ministry, up to 80 percent of Russia’s sanctions circumvention now involves Chinese entities. Russia is paying the price for this dependence: Chinese suppliers charged Russia an 87 percent markup on sanctioned goods between 2021 and 2024, compared to just 9 percent from other suppliers.

In addition, the UAE has become the primary transshipment hub, with electronic component exports to Russia growing more than fifteenfold since the invasion. Dubai-based companies supply everything from aviation parts to Starlink terminals, which Russian forces buy for around $2,200 each. By mid-2024, UAE imports of EU airplane parts hit 23.6 million euros — a fifteenfold jump — while Turkey’s climbed by a third to 12.7 million euros, even as Russia’s direct purchases fell to zero.

Central Asia’s Shell Company Explosion

Central Asian states have become essential transit corridors, with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan serving as primary hubs. Throughout 2025, these channels have grown more sophisticated rather than diminished. From 2021 to 2022, Kyrgyzstan’s exports to Russia exploded by 250 percent, with machinery exports to Russia spiking by 41,000 percent — a figure that “cannot be attributed to market demand” but represents “economic statecraft hidden in plain sight,” according to analysis published in June 2025.

Russian buyers keep setting up shell companies in Kazakhstan to purchase electronics and drones from Europe, China, and the United States, then ship them home to Russia’s defense industry. Throughout 2025, Kazakhstan became one of Moscow’s primary backdoors for sanctioned goods. Moreover, Russian marketplace OZON has invested significantly in logistics infrastructure across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia to consolidate parallel-import cargo.

The diversions are obvious. Landlocked Kyrgyzstan continues importing EU maritime navigation equipment with no plausible domestic use — equipment destined for Russian naval systems. Over the course of last year, Western authorities intensified enforcement. In June, the UK warned businesses in five countries that those aiding sanctions evasion would face sanctions themselves.

In October, the EU’s 19th sanctions package targeted eight financial institutions in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, the UAE, and Hong Kong for facilitating circumvention, while four banks in Belarus and Kazakhstan were designated for using Russian payment infrastructures. In January 2025, the UK published enhanced guidance identifying 15 high-risk countries, including Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, the UAE, and Turkey, for which exporters must conduct enhanced due diligence.

When asked how difficult it is to distinguish legitimate trade from sanctions evasion in Central Asia, Ambassador Daniel Fried, a forty-year career diplomat and Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council, acknowledged the complexity.

“Such action is labor-intensive but worth the effort,” he tells The Cipher Brief. “We should go after the most impactful technologies and targets.”

The Yuan Lifeline: Russia’s Financial Engineering

Meanwhile, the Chinese yuan props up Moscow’s parallel financial system. As of November 2025, 99.1 percent of Russia-China trade settles in rubles and yuan — up from less than 2 percent before the invasion.

When major Chinese banks like Ping An and Bank of Ningbo stopped accepting Russian payments in mid-2024, smaller regional banks stepped in to fill the gap. These “burner banks” can shut down and reopen under new names if sanctioned.

The workaround was part of a broader effort to rewire Russia’s financial system away from the West.

The share of Western currencies in Russian trade decreased from 87 percent to 18 percent between January 2022 and December 2024. Yuan and ruble filled the gap, eliminating Western oversight from the financial system.

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Energy exports remain the bedrock. Beijing became the anchor buyer for Moscow’s hydrocarbons, with crude oil shipments exceeding 108 million tonnes in 2024 — a 30 percent increase since 2022. The Power of Siberia pipeline is reaching full capacity of 38 billion cubic meters annually.

China-Russia bilateral trade hit $245 billion in 2024, more than double 2020 levels, with 99.1 percent now settled in yuan and rubles as of late 2024, creating a sanctions-resistant corridor completely insulated from dollar oversight. Though trade dipped slightly in early 2025 — Russian officials projected around $220 billion for the year due to market adjustments — the financial architecture remains entrenched, with the yuan accounting for 99.8 percent of Moscow Exchange foreign currency trading after summer 2024 U.S. sanctions targeted the platform.

The Enforcement Challenge

There are structural limitations to Western enforcement. The EU lacks the capacity to check each and every export to a third country. Washington’s secondary sanctions strategy aims to catch violators, but effectiveness is uncertain.

Fried suggested targeted measures to disrupt these supply chains. Western enforcement faces structural limitations.

“Targeted sanctions and penalties from the Commerce Department,” he noted. “These are labor-intensive and only partially successful at best, but partial success can have an impact.”

The January 2025 sanctions package targeted nearly 400 entities across more than 20 jurisdictions. Throughout 2024, 70 percent of U.S. designations were Russia-related, with almost 33 percent targeting entities outside Russia — China accounting for 36 percent of third-country designations.

“This is not to say Western sanctions and export controls are useless,” Hardie underscored. “They do make life harder and more expensive for the Russian defense industry. And they have a greater effect on products with obvious military uses, e.g., radiation-hardened “hips for satellites. Sanctions also hamper Russian defense exports, which are an important source of revenue for the Russian defense industry.”

Chinese compliance is particularly complex. Beijing publicly respects Western sanctions yet operates on a principle of “everything not banned is allowed.” Smaller Chinese companies and regional banks keep supplying Russia while staying just within the letter of Chinese law. Beijing tolerates the arrangement as long as it doesn’t constitute a technical violation.

Hardie noted that enforcement strategies must be sustained to be effective.

“Aggressive, consistent sanctions enforcement — i.e., designating third-country companies and banks supporting the Russian defense industry — is important and should be coupled with diplomatic pressure on foreign governments to crack down on sanctions busting,” he said.

However, political will appears inconsistent.

“Whereas the Biden Treasury Department routinely issued Russia sanctions enforcement packages, the Trump administration hasn’t issued a single one,” Hardie observed. “The Trump administration is especially reluctant to punish Chinese entities involved in Russia sanctions evasion, as it doesn’t want to strain relations with Beijing.”

Hardie also emphasized the role of the private sector.

“Western companies need to be good corporate citizens and invest in strong due diligence, which isn’t always the case,” he said. “One idea FDD has been working on is to require U.S. companies to perform’ enhanced due diligence for shipments of sensitive goods to countries known to be high-risk jurisdictions for Russian evasion.”

The result is a war economy that has adapted to intense pressure. Russia has expanded its defense industry despite sweeping sanctions, leveraging enforcement gaps, asymmetries in global trade, and non-Western intermediaries that facilitate transactions for profit.

Yet, analysts warn that structural strains are increasing.

“While there is evidence for both trends, the stresses on the Russian economy are becoming larger,” Fried noted. “The Soviet experience is instructive; the USSR managed to continue its priority programs through the end, but the overall economy deteriorated little by little, and then all at once.”

For these gaps to be closed, secondary sanctions risk must be dramatically increased, import quotas must be imposed on third countries, or Russia must be granted access to critical technology at a higher cost and with greater complexity.

Hardie, however, warned against relaxing pressure at a critical moment.

“When you need leverage to get Moscow to accept a peace deal, that’s hardly a smart time to make life easier for the Russian war machine,” he added.

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They're Coming for Our Kids: How Extremists Target Children Online

OPINION — September is National Preparedness Month - when we check our emergency kits, review evacuation routes, and prepare for natural disasters. But this year, as I sat in conference rooms at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit in Pittsburgh, I couldn't stop thinking about a different kind of storm brewing in our communities. One that doesn't announce itself with weather alerts or sirens.

It targets our children in their digital third spaces - Discord servers where they chat with friends, Instagram feeds where they scroll for hours, Reddit forums where they seek community, gaming platforms where they unwind, and the sprawling ecosystem of social media where teenagers spend most of their waking hours.

In 2024, teenagers accounted for up to two-thirds of ISIS-linked arrests in Europe, with children as young as 11 involved in recent terrorist plots. But Islamic extremists aren't the only ones hunting in these digital spaces. White supremacist groups, neo-Nazi organizations, and other far-right movements have turned every corner of the internet where young people gather into potential recruitment centers.

What unites these predators across the ideological spectrum isn't their beliefs - it's their understanding that vulnerable children make easy targets. And while they've perfected their hunting techniques, we've dismantled our defenses.

The State Department issued a call for proposals in July 2025 to fund programs preventing terrorists from recruiting young people online. One month later, they canceled the entire initiative due to funding cuts. The very expertise needed to design and manage such responses had been dismantled when my office - the Office of Countering Violent Extremism - was shuttered along with similar prevention teams across the federal government.

We're watching the storm approach, and we're sending the meteorologists home.

The New Hunting Grounds

Every platform where teenagers gather has become a recruitment center for extremist movements. Neo-Nazi groups use gaming chats to spread white supremacist messaging. Islamic extremists exploit social media algorithms to target vulnerable youth. Far-right militias recruit through conspiracy theory forums. Anti-government extremists find followers in survivalist communities.

The tactics mirror those used by online predators - build trust, isolate targets, gradually introduce radical ideas, and exploit vulnerabilities. A teenager struggling with social isolation logs into Discord seeking connection and community. Instead, they find recruiters who validate their frustrations while slowly introducing conspiracy theories, hate-filled content, and calls for violence.

The progression is methodical. First comes the meme that seems edgy but harmless. Then the private message offering "real truth" about current events. Next, the invitation to a smaller, more exclusive group where radical content flows freely. Finally, the encouragement to take action—whether spreading propaganda, targeting individuals, or planning violence.

These aren't random encounters. Extremist recruiters study adolescent psychology, identifying kids who show signs of depression, social anxiety, or family conflict. They understand that teenagers are naturally questioning authority and seeking identity—normal developmental phases that can be exploited.

History's Warning Signs

This exploitation of youth isn't new - only the technology has changed.

The Hitler Youth movement systematically recruited children through youth organizations. The Red Army Faction in 1970s Germany drew from disaffected university students. The Irish Republican Army found fertile recruiting ground among marginalized teenagers in Belfast.

What these historical cases teach us is that extremist movements succeed when they fill voids left by failing institutions. When young people can't find meaning, purpose, or belonging through legitimate channels, they become vulnerable to those offering simple explanations for complex problems.

Today's digital environment amplifies these vulnerabilities exponentially. Where previous extremists recruited face-to-face in specific locations, online recruiters can reach millions simultaneously, test messaging in real-time, and operate across borders with minimal detection risk.

The Programs We Dismantled

The prevention infrastructure dismantled over the past year wasn't theoretical—it was saving lives.

At the State Department, our team worked with tech companies to identify recruitment tactics and develop content policies that protected legitimate speech while removing extremist material. We helped content moderators recognize subtle grooming techniques that avoid automated detection.

The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at DHS built relationships with schools and community organizations to identify early warning signs. Their approach was therapeutic, not punitive—providing intervention resources that addressed underlying issues rather than criminalization.

At the FBI, specialized teams tracked recruitment networks and distinguished between teenage edginess and genuine threats. The Department of Health and Human Services funded research into psychological vulnerabilities that informed prevention strategies.

All shared common principles: early intervention beats prosecution; community solutions work better than federal enforcement; understanding radicalization psychology is essential for prevention.

The Disinformation Amplifier

What makes today's threat environment particularly dangerous is how disinformation amplifies extremist recruitment while major platforms fail to enforce their own policies.

As I write this, Houthi-linked arms dealers openly sell weapons on verified X accounts, advertising Kalashnikovs and equipment marked "Property of U.S. Govt." The Tech Transparency Project identified 130 Yemen-based accounts advertising weapons, some with verification checkmarks. X even ran advertisements beneath these posts, generating revenue from terrorist-linked content.

A teenager exposed to election fraud conspiracies becomes more susceptible to political violence messaging. Young people fed disinformation about minority communities become easier targets for white supremacist recruitment. Disinformation serves as a gateway drug to radicalization.

The Cost of Inaction

At the Pittsburgh summit, I heard from parents whose children had been radicalized online, officers investigating cases without prevention resources, and community leaders watching young people disappear into digital hate.

One mother found extremist content on her 14-year-old son's computer. When she sought help, local resources that might have provided intervention had lost federal funding. A police officer described investigating a high school attack plot that might have been prevented if early warning systems remained operational.

These costs are measured in broken families, traumatized communities, and young lives destroyed by preventable radicalization.

What Preparedness Really Means

We don't wait for hurricanes before planning—we build early warning systems and maintain emergency capabilities. The same logic should apply to extremist recruitment.

We need systems detecting concerning behavioral changes before they become threats. We need intervention addressing psychological vulnerabilities before recruiters exploit them. We need community responses providing support when families encounter these issues.

The good news: we know what works. Community-based prevention programs have demonstrated success in interrupting radicalization. EXIT programs in Germany and Sweden help individuals leave extremist groups through mentorship and psychological support. The Against Violent Extremism network connects former extremists with at-risk youth. Montreal's Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence has successfully intervened in over 1,000 cases through family counseling and community partnerships.

The Path Forward

Rebuilding prevention infrastructure requires immediate action and long-term commitment.

Congress must restore funding for prevention programs at State, DHS, FBI, and HHS. These aren't luxury programs—they're essential public safety capabilities protecting vulnerable citizens.

We must rebuild scattered expertise by bringing prevention professionals back from think tanks, universities, and private companies through sustained investment commitments.

We need stronger partnerships between agencies, tech companies, schools, and communities. Prevention works best at multiple levels simultaneously.

Parents and educators need training to recognize early warning signs. This means providing basic digital literacy and threat awareness to identify concerning behavioral changes.

Finally, we need counter-messaging strategies competing with extremist propaganda for young people's attention—empowering communities to tell better stories about identity, purpose, and belonging.

Field Notes

Prevention vs. Reaction: Preventing one radicalized individual costs approximately $30,000. Investigating, prosecuting, and incarcerating them after violence costs over $3 million—not counting human costs to victims and communities.

Community Resilience: The most effective programs work through trusted institutions—schools, religious organizations, sports teams, youth groups. Federal resources can support but can't replace local relationships and trust.

Reader Challenge

Check Your Circle: Talk with young people about their online experiences—not to interrogate, but to understand their digital worlds.

Support Local Programs: Find prevention resources in your community. School counselors and youth organizations often spot concerning trends before law enforcement.

Practice Digital Hygiene: Model good information consumption. Fact-check claims before sharing them. Ask questions about sources when your teen shows you "shocking" content. Demonstrate critical thinking by saying "That sounds concerning—let's look up where this information comes from" rather than immediately reacting emotionally. Young people learn more from observation than instruction.

As I flew home from Pittsburgh, I thought about my children and their digital world. The threats they face aren't visible from satellites or predictable through models. They emerge from the intersection of human psychology and technology in ways we're only beginning to understand.

But September's preparedness lessons still apply: early warning, community response, and sustained vigilance. The storms targeting our children won't announce themselves with sirens, but they can be detected, understood, and prevented—if we're willing to invest in the tools and expertise necessary to protect what matters most.

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

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The Next FATF Test: Can the West Demand Results from Pakistan?

OPINION — In the shadow of Mexico City's historic Palacio de Bellas Artes, global financial watchdogs will convene in February 2026 for the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Plenary and Working Group Meetings. In conference rooms far removed from South Asia’s violence, Pakistan will once again present itself as a responsible counterterrorism partner, armed with compliance reports, legislative amendments, and assurances of reform. On paper, Pakistan’s financial regulations increasingly resemble those of many developing democracies. On the ground, however, the networks that finance and enable terrorism continue to adapt and operate with troubling resilience. The widening gap between form and function is precisely what Western policymakers must confront as FATF prepares its next round of assessments.

The Compliance Illusion

Pakistan’s removal from the FATF grey list in 2022 was widely portrayed as a success story. Officials pointed to new anti-money laundering laws, terrorist financing prosecutions, and institutional reforms as evidence of a course correction. FATF itself acknowledged technical improvements, yet it also emphasized that effectiveness, not legislation, remains the ultimate benchmark. That distinction has proven critical.

Open-source reporting and documented financial intelligence patterns suggest that terrorist organizations such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) have not been dismantled but rather modernized. Recent documents reveal how these UN-designated outfits exploit humanitarian crises, such as the Gaza conflict, to funnel funds into terror activities. Under the guise of aid appeals and mosque reconstructions, figures like Hammad Azhar, son of JeM leader Masood Azhar, and Azhar’s brother Talha al-Saif orchestrate campaigns using digital wallets like EasyPaisa, SadaPay, and JazzCash, aggregating micro-donations and cryptocurrencies to evade detection. These efforts aggregate micro-donations and cryptocurrency transfers, often employing fragmented wallet structures and chain-hopping across platforms to avoid detection. Funds have reportedly supported militant infrastructure, including the establishment of more than 300 Mosques and the reconstruction of locations historically linked to LeT training facilities damaged during India’s 2025 Operation Sindoor.

This pattern reflects more than opportunism. Pakistan’s legal framework may align with FATF’s 40 recommendations on paper, but operational enforcement remains deeply inconsistent. Sanctioned individuals such as Hafiz Talha Saeed have led public rallies in Lahore under police protection, issuing threats against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In 2025, senior Pakistani legislature Rana Muhammad Qasim Noon reportedly visited militant-affiliated reconstruction sites alongside local officials, revealing overt collaboration between state and non-state actors. Recruitment drives disguised as religious gatherings, often coordinated with Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam networks, have featured speeches praising Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, delivered by JeM commander Masood Ilyas Kashmiri at facilities such as Markaz Shohada-e-Islam in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Together, these cases point to a long-standing “management” model of extremism. Militant groups are not dismantled but rebranded, with political fronts such as the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League contesting elections while violence is normalized as a political instrument. As Greece-based policy analyst Dimitra Staikou has argued, this model exports instability through regional alignments and shields militancy behind formal democratic processes.

Why Mexico City Matters

The February 2026 FATF meetings come at a moment when Pakistan’s engagement with the United States and Europe is deepening even as its internal security situation deteriorates. Militant violence has surged significantly, driven by attacks from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and Baloch insurgent groups. Rather than prompting a clean break with all forms of militancy, this instability risks reinforcing the proxy logic that FATF scrutiny is meant to dismantle. For Western policymakers, the danger lies in conflating cooperation with convergence in security priorities. Intelligence sharing, access agreements, or economic partnerships do not necessarily reflect aligned counterterrorism priorities. As I argued previously in The Milli Chronicle, Pakistan’s strategic incentives continue to reward selective tolerance of militant actors, particularly those oriented toward India. FATF’s effectiveness framework exists to test whether states are willing to disrupt these incentives, not simply mask them with procedural compliance.

FATF’s 2025 Comprehensive Update on Terrorist Financing Risks underscores the urgency. The report highlights a marked increase in hybrid digital methods, consistent with Pakistan-linked entities shifting from banks to fintech platforms to evade oversight. Although Pakistan exited the grey list in 2022 after four years of economic strain, FATF President Elisa de Anda Madrazo warned in October 2025 that the removal was “not bulletproof,” citing unregulated digital transactions as a continuing vulnerability.

Mexico City should therefore serve as a turning point. US and EU delegations should press for outcome-based evaluations focused on sustained investigations, verifiable asset seizures, and the dismantling of facilitation networks. Particular scrutiny must be directed toward digital payment systems, informal charities, and micro-donation models that exploit regulatory blind spots. Western governments should also coordinate more closely to monitor cross-border flows linked to high-risk jurisdictions, ensuring that Pakistan’s reforms translate into measurable disruption rather than rhetorical reassurance.

Conclusion: Choosing Substance Over Stability Theater

Pakistan will argue that renewed scrutiny risks destabilizing a fragile state. That argument has been persuasive before, and it has failed before. Stability built on tolerated militancy is not stability at all; it is deferred risk. Western capitals should therefore anchor their engagement around two imperatives.

First, international partners should move beyond accepting legislative reforms and instead condition high-level diplomatic, security, and economic engagement with Pakistan on verifiable enforcement outcomes. This means tying cooperation to demonstrable actions such as sustained terrorist-financing prosecutions, asset freezes against UN- and US-designated individuals, and the disruption of digital fundraising networks linked to groups like JeM and LeT.

Second, Washington and Brussels should treat Pakistan-linked terrorist financing as a transnational financial integrity threat, not a regional security issue. This requires enhanced monitoring of fintech platforms, mobile wallets, charities, and micro-donation systems used by diaspora-linked networks in Europe and North America. FATF has repeatedly warned that terrorist groups increasingly exploit digital payments and new financial technologies to evade traditional controls. The EU and US should expand joint typology sharing, require higher due-diligence thresholds for transactions linked to high-risk jurisdictions, and protect activists and journalists targeted by transnational repression tied to Pakistan’s security apparatus.

In Mexico City, Pakistan will speak in the language of compliance and reform. Beyond the conference halls, the true test will be whether the networks that finance violence are finally dismantled or quietly allowed to endure. If Western governments choose substance over symbolism, this moment can mark a turning point. If not, the paperwork will pass, and the risks will return—more adaptive, more opaque, and more dangerous than before.

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Russia is Targeting Civilians in Ukraine

OPINION — The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported that 14,383 civilians were killed in Ukraine, 673 of them children, as of late 2025. Russia has intensified attacks on Ukraine’s power grid, generating facilities, and heating infrastructure, in efforts to disrupt electricity, heat, and water services – especially in winter. Clearly, Russia is targeting Ukraine’s civilian population.

The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, recently told Reuters that Kyiv, with a population of 3.6 million people, has only about half the electricity that it needs as it faces its most severe wartime energy crisis, following waves of Russian attacks on its infrastructure.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth year, Ukrainian casualties are estimated at around 400,000, with civilian casualties rising, according to the United Nations.

The Laws of War are clear: intentionally targeting civilians is prohibited; civilians should never be the objective of an attack. Even more specifically, a combatant should avoid or reduce harm to civilian infrastructure.

The International Criminal Court has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes for the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russia, while a few UN entities, and other civilian organizations monitoring the war in Ukraine, maintain that Mr. Putin is also guilty of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure.

It’s clear: Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s power grid, generation facilities, and heating infrastructure, aiming to disrupt electricity, heat, and water services – especially in winter. These attacks are not isolated to the Kyiv, but, rather, part of a large, coordinated plan to target all regions in Ukraine.

Ukraine has reported tens of thousands of energy infrastructure facilities have been damaged since 2022, damaging generation plants, substations, heating plants, and transmission lines. And at least 18 major combined heat and power plants have been destroyed or seriously damaged, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Russian strikes have left hundreds of thousands of people with no central heating during sub-zero weather, a widespread development throughout Ukraine. Indeed, officials and humanitarian groups are warning that millions of Ukrainians are at heightened risk this winter due to lack of heat, electricity, and water amid the intense cold. UN officials described the situation as a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Russia has systematically targeted civilian energy and heating infrastructure, not just military sites, with repeated missile and drone strikes aimed at power plants, grids, and heating systems, affecting thousands of facilities. The result is widespread blackouts and heating loss for civilians, especially during harsh winter with sub-zero temperatures, creating a serious humanitarian situation.

Mr. Putin’s strategy is to target civilians with the intensification of bombings against Ukraine’s infrastructure that provides heat, water, and electricity to the Ukrainian people. These are violations of the Laws of War, and the International Criminal Court should immediately commence with hearings on Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, resulting in the death of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Clearly, Mr. Putin is targeting Ukraine’s civilian population, a war crime.

Joseph R. DeTrani

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

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

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Loosening the Gordian Knot of Global Terrorism: Why Legitimacy Must Anchor a Counterterrorism Strategy

OPINION — The global terrorism landscape in 2026 — the 25^thanniversary year of the 9/11 terrorism attacks — is more uncertain, hybridized, and combustible than at any point since 9/11. Framing a sound U.S. counterterrorism strategy — especially in the second year of a Trump administration — will require more than isolated strikes against ISIS in Nigeria, punitive counterterrorism operations in Syria, or a tougher rhetorical posture.

A Trump administration counterterrorism strategy will require legitimacy: the domestic, international, and legal credibility that leverages a wide-range of counterterrorism tools, while engendering international counterterrorism cooperation. Without legitimacy, even tactically successful counterterrorism operations risk becoming illusory, politicized, and ultimately self-defeating.

The terrorist threat landscape

Extremist violence no longer conforms to clean ideological lines. Terrorist objectives and drivers are muddled in ways that are hard to understand — but evolving. There’s little ideological purity with those radicalizing in today’s extremist milieu.

At the same time, state-directed intelligence officers increasingly behave like terrorists. Russian intelligence-linked sabotage plots blur the line between terrorism and hybrid warfare. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers provide hands-on training to Lebanese Hizballah commanders. Addressing these kinds of risks requires legitimacy, too, especially among allies whose intelligence cooperation, legal authorities, and public support are indispensable.

Nowhere is this threat picture more tenuous than in the Middle East. Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks triggered a profound rebalancing of power in the region. Yet, Syria remains unfinished business. Power vacuums there invite foreign jihadists, threaten Israel's border communities, and create future opportunities for Iranian influence to rebound.

A modest but persistent U.S. presence in Syria with a friendly Ahmed al-Sharaa-led government remains a strategic hedge against an Islamic State resurgence, and is a strong signal of U.S. commitment that helps sustain partner confidence. The U.S. counterterrorism presence and alignment with al-Sharaa is not without its risks, though: in December, three Americans were killed by a lone ISIS gunman in central Syria. The country is, and will continue to be, plagued by sectarianism and terrorism, which means that restoring control over a deeply fractured Syria remains fraught.

Taken together, the current transnational terrorism threat landscape is volatile and difficult to predict, a challenge compounded by resource constraints. In such an environment, legitimacy becomes a force multiplier. A belief that America is a ‘force for good’, credible messaging, and confidence that U.S. government action is perceived as just, can go a long way.

This is not an abstract concern. Terrorism today thrives in contested information environments, polarized societies, and fragile states. In short, transnational jihadist networks now coexist with domestic violent extremists, and online radicalization ecosystems that blur the line between terrorism, insurgency, and hybrid warfare. Terrorist propaganda continues to resonate with individuals in the West, especially younger generations who radicalize online. In this environment, legitimacy is no longer a secondary benefit of sound strategy—it is a core guiding principle.

The Trump administration's counterterrorism approach

We are looking for more clarity on the trajectory of Trump 2.0 counterterrorism efforts. It’s still, premature to consider a strategy that has yet to be formally articulated, as many in the counterterrorism community eagerly await its release. History offers a useful reminder. The first Trump administration did not publish its National Strategy for Counterterrorism until its second year. When it appeared in 2018, critics and supporters alike acknowledged that it reflected professional judgment rather than ideological excess. That document recognized terrorism’s evolution and called for strengthening counterterrorism partnerships within the U.S. government, but abroad as well, with a range of longstanding allies.

What gave that strategy durability was its legitimacy. Authorities were grounded in law, threat assessments were evidence-based, policies were stress-tested for faulty assumptions, and foreign partnerships were treated as strategic assets rather than transactional relationships.

When the Biden administration publicly released a set of redacted rules secretly issued by President Trump in 2017 for counterterrorism operations — such as “direct action” strikes and special operations raids outside conventional war zones — those guidelines explicitly acknowledged the power of legitimacy. Counterterrorism succeeds when allies trust the U.S., and the American public believes force is used proportionately and lawfully.

That legacy of trust matters now more than ever, given signals that a second Trump administration could overcorrect on its counterterrorism priorities by redirecting and focusing resources on far-left extremist groups such as the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF) or Antifa, while downplaying far-right extremism—or being distracted from the more dangerous terrorism threats from ISIS and other violent jihadists. As the world recently witnessed during the holidays, from Bondi Beach to Syria, ISIS remains a threat. Far-Left terrorism in the U.S. is on the rise, but far-right terrorism accounts for greater lethality than did the left. And still, after 25 years, it’s ISIS and al-Qa’ida that remain the most persistent and enduring transnational terrorism threat against U.S interests.

The Trump National Security Strategy

It’s concerning that the recently published National Security Strategy (NSS) only tepidly addresses transnational terrorism, but notably links terrorism with cross-border threats and hemispheric cooperation against things like “narco-terrorists,” blurring the traditional separation between transnational organized crime and terrorism.

Still, the Trump administration’s emphasis on drug cartels is justifiable, if it does not detract from broader counterterrorism objectives, such as the ISIS or hybridizing terrorist threats that continue to emerge. Commentators claim, however, that the Trump administration is already losing sight of the ISIS and al-Qa’ida threats, though settling that debate here is quixotic at best — only time will tell.

Besides jihadi threats, the U.S. does not need the unintended consequences and risks of triggering a cycle of cartel retaliation – or provoking greater far-left violence – down-the-line in the U.S. homeland.

Contrastingly, the 2017 National Security Strategy saw radical Islamist terrorism as one of the priority transnational threats that could undermine U.S. security and stability. The strategy highlighted groups such as ISIS and al-Qa’ida as continuing dangers, stressing that terrorists had taken control of parts of the Middle East and remained a threat globally.

Addressing transnational terrorism during the first Trump administration required discipline and steadiness amid predictable frictions at the National Security Council (NSC) among policymakers who wanted a more rapid shift toward other priorities, such as great power competition. Still, terrorist labeling and designations, strategic messaging, and resource allocation for counterterrorism were grounded in evidence rather than politics.

So, overhyping some threats while minimizing others undermines legitimacy, invites backlash, and weakens the very moral authority needed to operationalize a cogent, thoughtful national security strategy. It also erodes trust between the government and the public and leads citizens to second-guess whether they are being told the truth or being led astray. The 2017 NSS carried weight precisely because it was grounded in intelligence, not politics. Moreover, the NSS helped frame the counterterrorism strategy that followed and proved highly effective in keeping Americans safe.

Drawing lessons from the 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism

The 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism (NSCT) remains a useful foundation for the second Trump administration—not because the world is unchanged, but because it embraced balance. The strategy emphasized foreign partnerships, non-military tools, and targeted direct action when necessary. It recognized a central legitimacy principle: the United States cannot and should not fight every terrorist everywhere with American troops when capable counterterrorism partners can do so in their own backyards, with local consent, and a more granular understanding of the grievances that motivate these terrorist groups and their supporters.

And still, U.S. counterterrorism pressure through direct action remains a necessary tool to disrupt terrorism planning. It seems that the second Trump Administration is following the playbook of the first Trump administration in terms of aggressive counterterrorism kinetic strikes in places like Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq.

President Trump rescinded Biden-era limits on counterterrorism drone strikes, allowing the kind of flexible operational framework used for counterterrorism throughout the President’s first term. Thus far, in the aggressive counter-narcotic campaign in international waters off Venezuela, the standoff U.S. strikes resemble counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia during the first Trump administration. Operationally, direct action remains an indispensable counterterrorism tool for disrupting terror groups overseas, and more U.S. direct action will likely be necessary in West Africa and the Sahel to keep jihadist groups operating there off balance, forcing them to devote more time and resources to operational security.

But pressure without legitimacy is counterproductive. What works against jihadist networks does not necessarily translate cleanly to drug cartels or transnational criminal gangs. So, policymakers must be circumspect that expanding the scope of counterterrorism authorities and terrorist designations to canvas drug cartels, risks the unintended consequences of triggering destabilizing cycles of violence in the future, and straining more traditional counterterrorism resources.

Coming full circle, in light of the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro for narcoterrorism-related offenses, the idea of legitimacy will be fiercely debated in the days and weeks ahead. If the Trump National Security Strategy is the roadmap for focusing on narcoterrorism in the Western Hemisphere, then the need for publishing a clarifying and rational U.S. counterterrorism strategy for the rest of the world takes on even greater sense of urgency.

Pushing a boulder uphill

Drawing on past counterterrorism lessons to find a comprehensive strategy—from the Bush administration’s wartime footing, through 8 years of Obama counterterrorism work, to President Trump’s "war on terror" — is a Sisyphean task. But, in the wake of over two decades of relentless overseas counterterrorism work, a few ideas have come into sharper focus:

After more than two decades of counterterrorism, loosening the Gordian knot of modern terrorism requires balance, far greater clarity, and consistent, predictable national leadership.

Above all, counterterrorism strategy requires legitimacy. Without it, counterterrorism becomes reactive and politicized. With it, a Trump 2.0 counterterrorism strategy can still be firm, flexible, and credible in a far more dangerous world.

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Iran at the Breaking Point: How Afghanistan and Iraq Still Inform U.S. Strategy

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Iran is experiencing its most consequential period of internal unrest in years. Nationwide demonstrations driven by economic collapse, social grievance, and political frustration have been met with force, mass arrests, and near-total information control. The scale and coordination of the response suggest a regime that feels threatened but not unmoored, confident in its ability to absorb pressure while preventing fragmentation.

This moment has reignited debate in Washington about escalation, leverage, and the possibility—explicit or implicit—of regime collapse. That debate is familiar. The United States has confronted similar moments before, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq, where early assumptions about pressure, legitimacy, and endurance proved wrong.

This article is not an argument for restraint or intervention. It is a warning drawn from experience: without understanding how competition unfolds below the level of open conflict - the gray zone - pressure alone does not produce favorable outcomes. Iran today sits at the center of a problem the United States has repeatedly misunderstood - not the use of force, but what comes before and after it.

Afghanistan and Iraq: Where Strategy Slipped

In Afghanistan, the United States removed the Taliban from power quickly. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed even faster. In both cases, the decisive phase of the conflict ended early. What followed was the harder contest—one defined less by firepower and more by local power structures, informal authority, and external interference operating quietly and persistently.

In Afghanistan, as I witnessed firsthand, regional actors adapted faster than Washington. Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and later China treated the conflict as a long game. They invested in relationships, cultivated influence, and positioned themselves for the post-U.S. environment years before the withdrawal. The result was not an immediate defeat on the battlefield, but a strategic hollowing-out of the state.

Iraq followed a similar trajectory. Iranian-aligned militias embedded themselves within neighborhoods, religious institutions, and political parties. Over time, they became inseparable from the state itself. U.S. military dominance did not prevent this. In fact, it often obscured it, until the architecture of influence was already in place.

The lesson from both cases is straightforward: control of territory is temporary; control of networks endures.

Iran Is Not Afghanistan or Iraq — But the Pattern Rhymes

Iran today is often discussed as if pressure will produce rapid political change. That assumption ignores how power is organized inside the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s security model is deliberately social. The Basij is not simply a paramilitary force; it is embedded across society—universities, workplaces, neighborhoods, religious institutions. Its purpose is not only repression, but surveillance, mobilization, and ideological reinforcement. This structure was built to survive unrest, sanctions, and isolation.

Externally, Iran has exported the same logic. In Iraq, allied militias function simultaneously as armed actors, political movements, and social providers. In Afghanistan, Iran preserved influence across regime changes, maintaining access to key actors even after the fall of the Republic. These are not improvisations; they are the product of decades of learning.

It is worth remembering that Iran was not a spectator during the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. It observed American methods up close—what worked, what failed, and where patience outperformed power. Tehran adapted accordingly.

Why Escalation Without Preparation Backfires

Moments of internal unrest often create pressure for external action. Yet Afghanistan and Iraq show that collapse—real or perceived—creates its own risks.

Removing a regime does not dismantle informal power structures. It often accelerates their consolidation. Networks that survive pressure are the ones that define what comes next. Iran’s internal system is designed precisely for this kind of stress: decentralized, redundant, and socially embedded.

There is also a strategic paradox at play. External pressure can validate internal narratives of siege and foreign threat, strengthening coercive institutions rather than weakening them. Information controls, security mobilization, and proxy signaling are not reactions; they are rehearsed responses.

This is why simplistic comparisons—whether to Eastern Europe, Latin America, or past protest movements, are misleading. Iran’s political ecosystem is closer to the environments the United States faced in Kabul and Baghdad than many in Washington are willing to admit.

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None of this suggests that Iran is immune to pressure or that its current trajectory is stable. Economic distress, generational change, and legitimacy erosion are real. But history cautions against assuming that pressure equals control or that unrest equals opportunity.

The more relevant question for U.S. policymakers is not whether Iran is vulnerable, but whether the United States is prepared to operate effectively in the space that follows vulnerability.

That preparation requires understanding how authority is distributed beneath formal institutions, recognizing how coercive and social systems reinforce one another, and anticipating how regional actors adapt during periods of instability.

These are the same lessons Afghanistan and Iraq offered lessons learned too late.

Iran’s current unrest has reopened a familiar debate in Washington about pressure, leverage, and escalation. But Afghanistan and Iraq should have settled that debate long ago. The United States did not lose those conflicts because it lacked military power; it lost because it underestimated how authority, loyalty, and influence actually function inside contested societies.

Iran is not a blank slate, nor is it a fragile state waiting to collapse under external strain. It is a system built to absorb pressure, manage unrest, and outlast moments of crisis. Any approach that treats unrest as an opportunity without first understanding what follows it risks repeating the same strategic error the United States has already made—twice.

The choice facing U.S. policymakers is therefore not whether to act, but how to act without misunderstanding the terrain. Escalation without preparation does not produce control; it produces consequences that others are better positioned to manage. If Washington has truly learned from Afghanistan and Iraq, it will recognize that the most dangerous moment is not the collapse of order, but the false confidence that comes before it.

History will not judge the United States on whether it applied pressure. It will judge whether it understood what that pressure would unleash.

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The Kremlin Files: Russia’s Way to the Gray Zone

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

This is the first in a two-part series by Sean Wiswesser on Russian gray zone, or hybrid warfare

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

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

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

Non-Contact Warfare: Origins and Russian Military Necessities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Long Arc Of American Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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New Reports Reveal Years of Unaddressed Osprey Safety Risks

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

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

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

The Deadly Track Record

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

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

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

Unresolved Problems

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

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

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

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

A Broken System: Poor Communication Between Services

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

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

Fixes May Take a Decade

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

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

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Osprey's Unmatched Capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chronic Readiness Problems

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

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

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

Conflicting Views on Safety

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

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

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

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

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

An Uncertain Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Coast Guard's Mission in the Gray Zone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shawn Chenoweth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are other areas where that applies across the spectrum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities to Further Enhance Bilateral Cooperation for the Common Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Remembering Aldrich Ames and the Lives He Destroyed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Russia Signals Minimal Desire for Peace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tested Playbook

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

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

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

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

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

A Hesitant West

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

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

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

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

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

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The Road Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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