The Cipher Brief

In the preface to volume one, “The Gathering Storm,” of his six-volume memoir of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill recalls a conversation with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, in which Roosevelt asked what the war should be called. Churchill responded instantly, “the unnecessary war,” noting that it was the easiest war to stop. The world is now at war in Europe and the Middle East and at risk of escalation that could become a world war. This escalation is unnecessary and could be stopped by relearning some of the lessons that led to the Second World War.

French President Macron called a meeting of French political leaders on Friday to receive briefings on the changing and more aggressive nature of Russian hybrid attacks against European states, citing the attempted explosives-laden drone attack against Leipzig airport. Macron also announced an upcoming G7 meeting to address energy security and joint measures to address Russian airspace violations, surveillance of defense sites, maritime meddling, and sabotage and assassination operations. Macron’s concerns reflect assessments in 2026 by the intelligence services of the Baltic States as well as Sweden and Finland that Russia is planning a provocation against a NATO state in the near term. These assessments, as well as information gathered by U.S. intelligence, may have contributed to the decision by the U.S. to send CIA Director Ratcliffe to Moscow to warn President Putin against such a provocation.

Putin intends to bring the war to the U.S. The September 15 indictments of five operatives linked to a Russian intelligence network in the U.S. for conspiring to finance terrorism and orchestrate a murder-for-hire plot against a Russian dissident in the U.S. may have been a bit of a wake-up call in Washington that the type of hybrid “grey zone” operations Europe has experienced from Russian intelligence in recent years is heading to the U.S. This should come as no surprise. To Putin, the U.S. is the “main enemy,” and anything to weaken the ability or willingness of the main enemy to stay in the fight is certain to be a key part of Putin’s escalation strategy. Messaging to Moscow is important, and President Trump should no longer be under any illusions about the nature of his relationship with the Russian dictator. Putin is his enemy.

President Trump’s choice of negotiators to send to Moscow to try and reach a negotiated solution to the conflict could not have been more poorly chosen. The Kushner-Witkoff team should not have been used to deliver the message Ratcliffe delivered because they do not have the standing or credibility in Moscow’s eyes. Witkoff’s sad gushing about the history of the moment and his memories of Putin are sad and embarrassing. More importantly, though, they deliver exactly the wrong message to Putin. Putin doesn’t respect flattery from characters like Kushner and Witkoff. Putin’s choice of their principal interlocutor from the Russian side, Kirill Dmitriev—the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund—shows that Putin has assessed accurately the real motivation of the Kushner-Witkoff team: business deals and money.

There is a reason for sending the CIA Director to deliver different messages. One might recall the visit of then-CIA Director Burns to Moscow in 2021 to warn Putin against again invading Ukraine. Burns clearly delivered a message based on intelligence information on Russian plans and intentions—which proved correct—and I suspect Ratcliffe delivered the same type of message based on similar intelligence. Using CIA Directors to deliver such messages is important because Putin mirror-images. He trusts information from his intelligence and security services far more than information from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs or other sources. If the information carried to Moscow comes from the CIA Director, it, by definition, has more credibility than information from any other source. This doesn’t mean Putin will heed the message, but it will reach his ear. But the key to the efficacy of messages delivered by CIA Directors is the credibility of consequences. Clearly, Putin correctly assessed that the consequences he would face from President Biden for invading Ukraine in February 2022 would be gradual and, in the end, inconsequential. He may believe the same will be the case with the Trump/Ratcliffe messaging.

If it hasn’t been clear for years, it should be absolutely clear now: Putin is all in on this war. There is no indication from Moscow of any change in Putin’s absolutist terms for ending the war. Putin cannot negotiate a peace short of capitulation by Kyiv. Ending the war short of Putin’s definition of victory risks a disgruntled army returning to Moscow, and history is not kind to Russia’s leaders in such a scenario. Perhaps as important, ending the war short of victory leaves Russia in a much worse strategic situation with Ukraine’s emergence as the preeminent military power in central Europe. Germany and the EU are rearming. NATO membership has increased with the addition of Sweden and Finland. Russia’s economy is in tatters as a result of sanctions and Ukrainian strikes against energy, military, and military support infrastructure deep in the territory of the Russian Federation. The war cannot be hidden from the Russian people any longer. The pressure of his handling of the war may possibly be starting to take a toll on Putin himself. His performance at the Navy Day celebration in St. Petersburg this July, where for the second consecutive year the parade of warships was cancelled and Putin’s appearance was indoors in front of a poster of a Russian submarine, was widely ridiculed. The city was essentially on lockdown for security reasons. Putin followed the widely ridiculed appearance in St. Petersburg with a highly staged visit to Russia’s Far East that was received locally with widespread cynicism but included a first visit to Iturup Island, triggering strong criticism from Japan but serving as a symbol of Putin’s determination to keep and increase the boundaries of the Russian Federation.

Putin’s determination and perhaps conviction that he is on a path to victory belies objective analysis of the war against Ukraine and Russia’s economic and strategic situation. Putin’s determination is likely reinforced by the approach the Trump Administration has taken, accommodating Moscow and putting pressure on the victim. This may be starting to change, and perhaps President Trump is starting to realize that Putin is his enemy, the enemy of the United States and the West, and a supporter of Iran—currently engaged in active military activity to kill Americans and wreck energy markets (among other markets) to undermine Western economies.

Trump signed the long-delayed sanctions legislation sponsored by the late Senator Lindsey Graham. This legislation allows for primary and secondary sanctions on Russia and other countries by allowing tariffs on the largest importers of Russian crude oil or gas and the top five countries that aid Russia’s energy sanctions evasion. There has been a suggestion that officials in the Trump Administration are trying to create more incentives for members of the Russian elite to seek peace. If true, this is an interesting change in the Administration’s approach, which has thus far been to ingratiate itself to Putin. Putin seems highly resistant to pressure from outside the Russian Federation, and there is no level of economic hardship or war casualties Putin is unwilling to inflict on the docile Russian population. His latitude to resist pressure from disenfranchised or recently relatively impoverished Russian elites may be less so.

There is a path to making the coming war unnecessary. The key to the problem is Putin. He is at the center of the spider’s web of the cabal acting against the free world. Iran, its surrogates, principally the Houthis at the moment, China, and North Korea are key pieces in Putin’s architecture of disruption. To destroy this architecture, you have to destroy its architect. Defeat Putin in Ukraine, and Iran’s position in the Middle East will surely erode, and a powerful message will have been sent to Chinese President Xi to keep his hands off Taiwan.

Unlike Churchill and Roosevelt at the onset of World War II, the free world has a valiant and effective military partner eroding Putin’s power: Ukraine. Therefore, the first step in deterring the coming unnecessary war is to provide Ukraine the military and financial support it needs to win. This starts with air defense to protect against Putin’s increasing use of modified drones and ballistic missiles to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and civilians in an attempt to erode Ukrainian willingness to resist—a problem which could become more acute as winter approaches.

Secondly, Ukraine should be encouraged to continue its effective targeting of Russian energy, economic, and military infrastructure, which is helping to erode support within Russia for Putin’s regime and his war of aggression. Ukraine should be encouraged and given the support it needs to continue its current offensive northeast of Lyman in the Donetsk Oblast. Ukraine should be encouraged to engage in operations to liberate Crimea, which is the jewel in the crown of Putin’s territorial “achievements.”

It would be well worth the effort of the U.S. and the West to put pressure on Russia’s periphery, starting with enhancing support for pro-Western elements in the Republic of Georgia—long an outlier of Western support in the Caucasus and itself a victim of Putin’s aggression in August 2008 and currently under pressure from pro-Russian elements supported by Russia’s intelligence services. The U.S. decision to deploy forces to Poland and NATO’s decision to deploy more forces to the Baltic States are another useful way to stretch Putin’s resources and pressure him.

The lessons of history are clear: appeasement of aggression brings more aggression. Strength and resolve are the key to avoiding unnecessary wars. It is time the Trump Administration learned history.

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

The Nations That Don’t Appear on the Map

The most influential media network operating inside a dozen allied countries today has no masthead, no headquarters and no country of incorporation. It has roughly 50 million members across more than 150 countries. It is the Chinese diaspora — and it is only one of several.

Since the Montevideo Convention of 1933, we have defined a state by four things: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to conduct relations with other states. Diasporas have the first and, increasingly, the fourth. They skipped the middle two. Territory and government were the parts that made power addressable — the parts you can sanction, summon, deter or simply find on a map.

Governments have borders and rules. Diasporas don’t.

For most of the modern era this was an academic distinction because distance did the work of containment. A community abroad drifted. The second generation lost the language. The third lost the news. Diaspora influence decayed on a predictable curve.

AI switched the curve off. Translation is now instant, free and good enough, which means homeland media reaches anyone of homeland descent regardless of what language they actually speak. Recommendation systems hand every member of a diaspora a personal news service tuned to their hometown, their history, their grievance or their passion. Generative tools manufacture culturally specific content at scale — messages, video, historical narrative, political framing.

Before long, a campaign will not send one message to 500,000 people. It will send 500,000 versions of one message, each optimized for a single person. The third generation will no longer lose the news. The news will find them in a language they never had to learn and in a context they appreciate.

TRUST IS THE ASSET, NOT REACH

What makes this strategically serious is not audience size. Meta and Alphabet have audience size. It is trust — and diaspora trust behaves differently from media trust. Shared identity works as a shortcut: people who are similar to us are presumed credible before they are evaluated. Distance from home raises the value of anyone who still has a connection to it. News about “us” is often processed emotionally, not analytically. And crucially, trust transfers to the sender. We may not extend our belief in a news anchor to the next story on the network, but we do extend our belief in a cousin to whatever the cousin forwards.

That is why interpretation beats reporting. The trusted person who adds forty seconds of commentary to a homeland story carries more weight than the outlet that reported it. It is also why false information moves so efficiently through these networks: forwarding is an act of care. People pass things along to protect each other, and accuracy is rarely the test.

The distribution system is private. Homeland media, host-country media and community media all feed into WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, KakaoTalk and Viber — closed groups that are, by design, invisible to nearly every monitoring apparatus we have built.

SIGNAL: READING A DIASPORA’S WIRING

Every diaspora has a signature. Six variables describe it.

S — Self-identity. Who are we, and what creates belonging?

I — Information. How do we understand the world?

G — Group network. How are we connected?

N — Network trust. Whom do we believe?

A — Activation. What moves us to act?

L — Limits and tensions. What divides or constrains us?

Describe those six and you can predict more accurately how a diaspora behaves under pressure. The Ukrainian signature runs on national identity, war-focused information, advocacy networks and trusted veterans and volunteers, activated by threat and solidarity, bounded by war fatigue. The Indian signature runs through professional and alumni networks. The Chinese signature runs through a single application.

That last point deserves more time. WeChat is not a platform the Chinese diaspora uses; it is the infrastructure the diaspora is made of. Payments, news, family, business, community governance — one application, one jurisdiction, one set of rules. When the channel that connects a community is also the channel for reaching it, surveillance, influence and intimidation stop being separate activities.

Russia has demonstrated the adjacent move. Russian-aligned operations have produced fabricated video built to imitate AFP, Deutsche Welle, Euronews and Le Figaro, circulating stories that cast Ukrainian refugees as violent and economically burdensome. Notice the target. The objective was not to persuade the Ukrainian diaspora. It was to shape how host countries perceive it.

And none of it is uniform. Two Russian speakers in the same German city: one consuming state television and Telegram, the other consuming Meduza, Dozhd and YouTube. Same language, same street, two different realities. It is why we must remember that a diaspora is not a monolithic audience. It is contested ground.

WHOSE ACCOUNT IS THIS?

So ask the question that should be uncomfortable: which office in the U.S. government owns this problem?

The most consequential influence terrain of the next decade runs through encrypted private networks in Mandarin, Hindi, Farsi, Russian, Arabic and Punjabi — and institutionally, it is nobody’s account. A narrative can run its full course in those networks and never once surface in English.

A serious response starts with three admissions. First, that diaspora networks are an intelligence and policy subject in their own right, with an owner and a budget line, not a footnote in someone else’s report. Second, that the unit of analysis are the trusted nodes, not the platform — which means people who speak the language and are known in the community. Third, that a diaspora is a constituency whose trust must be earned rather than a target to be managed, because the communities in question can tell the difference immediately and our competitors are already making the offer.

The gap is not only defensive. The United States hosts the largest concentration of diaspora communities on earth: tens of millions of people with language, relationships and standing inside countries where American institutions have almost none. Media flow is two-way — a Ukrainian-American shapes opinion in Ukraine, a Nigerian-American in Lagos. We file that under demographics. Beijing built a permanent apparatus for its version of it.

The leader of tomorrow’s diaspora will not run an organization. They will run a network of trusted nodes. You will not find that person on an org chart, a masthead or a lobbying disclosure.

The map on the wall still shows the world territories. Influence is moving somewhere else. It’s deserving of a new map.

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

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

The Military’s Race to Operationalize AI

“I feel as though I was catapulted into a dystopian future in which the battlefield (or ‘kill zone’ as Ukrainians call it) is dominated by drones and sensors, and will increasingly be shaped by AI [Artificial Intelligence], too. It’s where those in command centers digest huge quantities of data to plan operations, allocate drones to target areas, and hunt Russian soldiers and their supplies on myriad computer screens. It’s a type of warfare where the speed of innovation and the ability to scale those innovations are critical assets.”

That was Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief of The Economist, writing last week about a recent trip she and several of her colleagues took to Ukraine, where they were the first foreign journalists to spend a day at the command headquarters of the Nemesis Brigade, one that nation’s top drone units.

She said it felt like being in “a cross between a Silicon Valley startup and a gamers’ gathering,” where, “in the ‘battle room,’ a cavernous space full of banks of monitors and men with consoles, Pavlo Laktionov, the brigade’s deputy commander, explained to me the ‘e-point’ system: The unit can upload video evidence of successful strikes to win points. The value of the Russian target determines the number of points awarded and a leader-board displays which brigade is ahead. He [also] talked me through the way the unit was structured to optimize the speed of speed-back loops between front-line units, the command center, and the brigade’s R&D [research and development] facilities.”

I was fascinated by Beddoes’ modern warfare description coming to me last week at the same time that Air Force Secretary Dr. Troy Meink and Joint Chief Chairman Gen. Dan Caine spoke publicly at an Air & Space Forces Association conference about U.S. gains in developing autonomous warfare capabilities. Meanwhile, I must add, runaway AI has emerged as a new national concern.

When Secretary Meink spoke last Wednesday, most press coverage was directed at his saying, “The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

What caught my eye was Meink’s earlier observation: “In the European theater, one-way attack drones have replaced artillery as the primary killer on the battlefield, while armor often sits idle on the side. When I first came into this office, AI really wasn't a commercial thing. Today, it competes with some of the world's top programmers, cyber operators, and hackers. And these technologies are revolutionizing the battlefield.”

He went on to say, “We will be dramatically increasing our combat power by adding large numbers of highly autonomous systems,” and “using novel concepts such as [AI] open systems

architecture to accelerate procurement which has also increased competition from industry resulting in better choices, better prices and in the end more combat power.”

Meink talked about having a significantly different force by 2032, describing “special operators,” not pilots, who will “have the ability to employ thousands of autonomous one-way attack systems, and we will have autonomous fighters like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft or CCAs,” which are un-crewed aircraft powered by jet engines, and potentially equipped for missions including air-to-air combat; air-to-ground combat; electronic warfare; targeting; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

He said, “We intend to have at least 500 of these in service by 2032, and they'll be performing many of the same missions that we do with manned fighters today,” adding, “The first FQ42 and FQ44 increments are already rolling off the assembly line, and I'm excited to name them here for the first time…Fury [FQ-44] and Vengeance [FQ-42].”

Meink pointed out, “These aircraft went from contract award to first flight in 18 months or under; 18 months or under, that's almost unheard of in aircraft development.”

He also said, “And this is not the only class of autonomous aircraft we are aggressively pursuing,” indicating that in the joint U.S.-Israeli Epic Fury, against Iran, “ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] strike platforms have been essential.”

“Building on these lessons,” Meink continued, “we are developing a family of low-cost, multi-role, strike platforms called the Mass Modular Aircraft or MMAs [that] will provide affordable attritable [low-cost enough to lose in combat], long-range strike, and we will be able to field them at scale.”

He added, “Our intent is to field 100 MMAs in 2029 at even a lower cost than the CCAs, and a fraction of cost of air-manned aircraft we build today. Then by 2032, 500 of these [unmanned] platforms will join our force operational field fleet.”

Meink also noted, “We are making…progress in our space data network and we are launching our [initial] AMTI [satellites] for our Air Moving Target Indication constellation this month.” AMTI satellites will track airborne threats, such as drones, missiles and aircraft from Low Earth Orbit and replace surveillance aircraft such as the E-3 AWACS. The operational goal is 2028.

“When people look back at this moment,” Meink said, “they will not judge us on whether or not we implemented these autonomous systems, because eventually we're going to. But what we're going to be judged on is how quickly we operationalize them, right? That is whether we operationalize them fast enough to maintain our advantage.”

Meink noted, “We've had autonomous weapons -- I mean whether it's a Tomahawk [long-range, subsonic, precision-guided missile] or any of our air missiles that operate independently at some point in time -- terminal guidance things like that. But the big difference here is really taking

advance advantage of the autonomous capability that the deep-learning [computers] and all these other things [AI] offer.”

He then described having “more autonomy both in the platform as well as in the weapon system itself where even if the weapon loses its outside information stream” but having “enough autonomy to do what we've told it to do in absence of that.”

Reflecting today’s public debate about AI, Meink said, “That's where people start getting nervous, but that is something we have to figure out -- how to get comfortable [with], how to test it, how to verify, certify, that these weapons are going to do what they want when they go into an autonomous mode.”

In his speech last Thursday, Gen. Caine said, “While the fundamental nature of war will always remain the same, a clash of human wills, the character of war, how we fight, the speed at which we fight is changing really, really fast.”

He pointed out, “Information moves so fast that leader decision times has compressed from weeks, down to days, down to seconds. In the future fight, advantage will go to the side who can see first, who can understand first, decide first, and act first -- and along the way be a learning organization. And no factor is accelerating change as fast as Artificial Intelligence and advancing cyber capabilities.”

As Meink had done, Caine said, “AI is here now and it's already changing the way militaries see, sense, decide, and act. And across the joint force, we're putting AI to work every single day to move faster, to make better decisions through active adaptation on every single battlefield by leaders in your joint force.”

As an example, he spoke of what happed last June 8, after a U.S. Army Apache AH64 helicopter on patrol went down near the coast of Oman.

“U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) launched a rapid, responsive, joint search-and-rescue effort to recover the [two-man] crew,” Caine said, adding, “That response drew on the totality of the joint force and ultimately was required to use enabled, unmanned, vessels to participate in the rescue of [the] downed U.S. service members for the first time ever.”

He explained, “That capacity did not appear overnight. It came from the men and women of Task Force 59, CENTCOM's forward-leaning, unmanned, joint maritime unit, who spent the last several years testing, integrating, and operationalizing unmanned systems and AI, in one of the most demanding and kinetic environments on Earth right now.”

Caine added, “What made this possible was a bunch of entrepreneurial sailors and members of

the joint force on watch floors… managing networks of unmanned systems across thousands of miles of water and using AI to turn massive amounts of data into a crisp, clear, perfect maritime picture that allowed us to go grab those two soldiers in the water.”

He then described Ukraine where, he said, “We see first-person-view drones operating in heavily contested [electromagnetic] environments. Some now using AI-enabled computer vision to continue to drive towards targets even when there's no GPS [Global Positioning System] or the [computer] links are cut. That gives small units affordable precision and shows how quickly software and autonomy are changing what is possible at the tactical edge.”

Caine described the stark result: “In certain locations on the front line of troops right now, the life expectancy of a new Russian recruit arriving on the front lines is as little as 20-to-30 minutes. Think about that. This is what happens when low-cost precision is fielded fast, adapted quickly, and scaled across the battlefield.”

“From the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine,” Caine said, “show how quickly technology is changing the character of war…We must move together because the window to build the force that we need is closing. We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time."

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

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

The Authority We Cannot Keep

Washington announced permanent control of Greenland on Friday. The two governments that must ratify it announced, in the same breath, that the text recognizes their sovereignty. Both ideas cannot be the settled meaning of an agreement neither parliament has seen.

The President’s post gave the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland,” with no adversary permitted a base or a “sensitive investment” on the island without American approval; the Defense Secretary said Northern Command would “immediately begin” building “a large military presence.” Copenhagen and Nuuk responded the same day: the agreement would be signed next week at the United Nations General Assembly, must still pass both parliaments, and recognizes “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination.” In a January poll, 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed going further.

The same shape ran through the week’s other arrangements. Riyadh asked Washington for direct strikes on the Houthis, who took the islands guarding the Bab el-Mandeb and reached Mecca’s air defenses; the request was refused, and in the same week American officials opened their own talks with the Houthis in Muscat and approved 48 F-35s for the kingdom. The Crown Prince has since canvassed Pakistan and Turkey for a guarantee he can call his own. In Europe, the Pentagon studied withdrawing as many as 40,000 troops while the President announced a base in Poland; Brussels, told to absorb a drawdown it did not shape, offered Canada associate membership in a defense-industrial bloc without consulting its member states. In each case, one party decided how the shared capability would be used and informed the others afterward. In each case, the others have begun to respond.

For three weeks I have argued that the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history is being contracted without any institutional authority named to decide how any of it fires: the drone force, the AI stack, the power that runs both. That was an argument about the inside of the American system. This week, the same gap opened on the outside. A capability fielded with an ally, on an ally’s territory, or in an ally’s defense raises a second question beyond who inside Washington decides its use: whether the ally gets a vote. The Greenland text, the Saudi request, and the European drawdown are three answers of “not yet,” and three allies declining to accept that answer. The price of arranging around a partner rather than with one is not paid in dollars; the President stressed that the Greenland deal comes at no cost. It is paid in authority, and the bill arrives when the partner asks for it back.

Picture the spring. Off Greenland, an American-integrated force is running as one system at machine speed: allied sensors, American targeting, autonomous platforms. A Danish frigate is inside its envelope. The system commits to a contact the frigate’s captain reads as civilian. Who can tell it to stop, and how fast? Under the text signed this week, no page answers that, because no one wrote one. That is the demand for a say, arriving at the capability that will decide the next war. The integrated force only works if the allies field it, and no ally will field a force whose targeting and autonomy Washington reserves the right to settle alone, because the ally’s territory, ships, and citizens are in the line of fire. Saudi Arabia will not fly American aircraft against a militia the United States is negotiating with. Europe will not integrate its industrial base into an architecture whose force posture it learns about from NBC.

Wednesday is when the largest version of the question gets its first answer. Xi Jinping arrives at the White House with a 7.5 percent Section 301 tariff pending, the Russia-oil sanctions act on the President’s desk, and the trade and export-control truces both expiring on November 10, the day China’s extraterritorial rare-earth licensing regime returns. He holds the one lever on the table that can end an arrangement on a schedule: from November 10, a license required for any product built with Chinese rare earths or the magnets made from them, and almost nothing outside China to replace them. The summit will not settle the relationship; it will show whether the terms of a shared supply chain are agreed by both parties or imposed by one, and which. The allies watching from Copenhagen, Riyadh, and Brussels will read the answer as a preview of their own.

Three signals will show by year-end whether the gap is closing or widening. Whether the Greenland text signed at the General Assembly gives Copenhagen a veto over how the presence on its territory is used, or only a right to be informed. Whether the Saudi F-35 notification carries an end-use restriction Riyadh helped write, or one Washington wrote alone. And whether the November 6 force-posture recommendation reaches allied capitals before it reaches the President, or after. As of this week, none of the three has been written.

The decision you owe this quarter is specific. Take the one program in your portfolio that fields American capability with an ally, on an ally’s soil, or in an ally’s defense, and find the document that specifies who decides how it is used. Not the basing agreement, the sales notification, or the industrial-participation clause; the release-authority annex, the page that names who can commit the system, who can override it, at what tempo, and what the partner can refuse. If that page does not exist, write it now, with the partner in the room, and sign it before Wednesday’s readout gives the partner’s parliament a reason to write it for you. The arrangement announced alone is the arrangement that comes back for renegotiation. The one written together is the only kind that survives the day the other side stops being patient.

Richard Berry is the founder of Stratnova Advisors and the editor of Strategic Horizons, a weekly geopolitical assessment for senior executives and national-security professionals. He served as Commander’s Action Group Director at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and helped author the AUKUS Pillar II autonomy-and-integration construct.

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

Heads They Win, Tails They Win: The CMMC Trap and the Way Out

Here is a prediction from inside the compliance trenches: the CMMC Reform Task Force closed its sixty-day review on September 11 and is now finalizing recommendations for the Department of War's Chief Information Officer, with a public report expected within weeks. When that report lands, read it knowing what its authors cannot quite say aloud — there is no good answer. Every option in front of them loses. The program they were convened to fix is not a regulation that went wrong. It is one move in a game an adversary designed.

The task force was stood up on July 13, when the Department abruptly suspended Phase 2 of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program — the requirement, set to begin appearing in contracts this November, that companies handling controlled unclassified information (CUI) pass a third-party certification before winning defense work. The Department's stated reasons: prohibitive compliance costs, a severe shortage of assessment capacity, and a Small Business Administration finding that the program is structurally incompatible with rapidly expanding the defense industrial base. The task force spent the summer digesting more than 1,100 responses to its request for information, and the department is reportedly moving to codify the pause in binding regulation — not the behavior of an institution planning a tune-up. The CIO herself has described the assessments as a 'burdensome, red-tape ridden, check-the-box, point-in-time view' of contractor security: the program's owner, describing her own program in the language of its critics. The patient's physician is confirming the diagnosis. Understanding why none of the options can work — and what to do instead — requires seeing the whole game.

The dial that cannot be tuned

The task force's mandate frames the problem as a tradeoff: cybersecurity assurance on one side, small-business burden on the other. Turn the dial toward assurance and the math is grim. The Pentagon's own rulemaking priced a single Level 2 assessment at roughly $102,000 for a small business, every three years — a floor, since the government counted only the assessment itself and treated the underlying security work as a cost contractors already owed. Real first-year figures run two or three times higher.

Spread across roughly 80,000 companies in scope — nearly three-quarters of them small businesses — the program costs, every year, what a major weapons system costs. Companies at the bottom of the supply chain do the arithmetic and exit defense work entirely, shrinking the industrial base the Department has declared it must grow.

Turn the dial the other way — relieve the burden, rely on self-attestation. We ran that experiment. NIST SP 800-171 has been contractually mandatory for defense contractors handling covered defense information since the end of 2017, enforced by self-attestation. When the government's own assessors began checking, self-reported scores collapsed on contact: companies attesting to full implementation were found, on inspection, to be far from it. Eight years of the honor system produced paperwork, not protection. That failure is the reason CMMC exists.

And here is the part the certification debate politely ignores: the assurance being purchased is weaker than advertised. A Level 2 assessment fans 110 security controls into 320 individually judged objectives. Only nine of the 110 can be satisfied by configuring a system; after two years of industry effort to automate verification, barely a quarter have any machine-checkable test at all. The rest — 85 of 110 — turn on an assessor reading documents, weighing evidence, and interviewing people.

Judgment at that volume carries an irreducible error rate, and errors compound across 320 determinations: even a superb assessor is unlikely to get all 320 calls right. The certification is a probabilistic judgment dressed as a binary guarantee — and we are proposing to charge small businesses six figures for it.

Every setting of the dial loses. That is not because the rule-writers were careless. It is because the dial's axis — assurance versus burden — was chosen by the adversary.

Their coin, our coin

Consider the campaign from the adversary's side of the table. A sustained intelligence effort against the defense supply chain wins on either branch. If exfiltration succeeds, the adversary harvests the output of America's research enterprise — the Department's research, development, test, and evaluation accounts now run to roughly $150 billion a year, and nearly all that work materializes as CUI on contractor networks: designs, test data, specifications. The results are visible in the air: F-35 design data stolen in the operation behind Su Bin's 2016 federal conviction later resurfaced in the lines of a rival stealth fighter. If exfiltration is resisted, the United States burns weapons-system-scale money on compliance overhead, small suppliers flee the industrial base, and defense modernization slows under its own administrative weight. Heads they win, tails they win.

This is cost imposition — the competitive-strategies logic the United States once ran against the Soviet Union, most famously with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which threatened to obsolete Moscow's missile force and pulled it toward countermeasure spending it could not afford. The same logic now runs against us at machine speed and negligible marginal cost. An intrusion attempt costs the attacker thousands of dollars; the defensive apparatus it provokes costs the defender billions. The exchange ratio is the attack. And no certification regime, however well designed, changes that ratio. It just selects which branch of the adversary's win condition we take. That is why the task force cannot regulate its way out: it is being asked to find the winning setting on a dial that has none.

The solution we forgot

The way out is not a better tradeoff. It is to stop playing this game — and the United States already knows how, because it solved this exact problem once and then forgot.

For eight decades, the National Industrial Security Program and its predecessors handled sensitive information in contractor hands on a simple two-tier logic. Information that genuinely mattered was classified: the government cleared the facilities, inspected them, provided counterintelligence support, and bore the cost — because assurance of its own supply chain was understood to be the government's problem, a cost of defense like any other. Information that did not rise to that level circulated freely. Both tiers were coherent, and the system carried the country through a fifty-year great-power competition.

Then came CUI — a third tier of 'sensitive but unclassified' created by executive order in 2010 — and with it a decision that looks stranger every year: push national-security-relevant information onto 80,000 private networks with none of the industrial security program's machinery. No facility oversight, no counterintelligence support, no government cost-sharing, and for eight years no verification at all.

CMMC is the decade-late patch on that omission — an attempt to rebuild a shadow industrial-security program on contractor money and commercial assessors. It is failing because the original lesson still holds: protecting information at national-security scale requires the government to run and fund the assurance, or the information does not stay protected.

Restore, don't invent

The reform the task force should recommend is not a better CUI regime. It is the end of CUI as a protection category — a return to the binary the country defended for eighty years: classified, or released.

The government has been trying to triage CUI honestly for sixteen years and has proven incapable of it. Since the 2010 executive order, the registry has swelled to dozens of categories applied so promiscuously that routine engineering data carries the same handling burden as weapon-system design detail. The incentive structure guarantees the outcome: marking is free, unmarking is career risk, and no official is ever punished for protecting too much. A bureaucracy that could not resist over-marking will not now triage its way to discipline. The proof arrived on September 2, mid-review: sixteen years after the executive order created CUI, the National Archives had to issue fresh guidance re-teaching agencies day one of the program — how to designate and mark consistently, and how to tell contractors what is actually controlled. A program whose executive agent must re-explain its founding act sixteen years in is not maturing toward discipline; it is demonstrating that it cannot get there.

So retire the category. Information whose loss would buy an adversary military capability moves up into classified channels, where cleared facilities, real defenses, and counterintelligence support already exist. The rest is released and protected by ordinary commercial hygiene. The classified system has room for this: every review from the Moynihan Commission onward has found it bloated with material of merely sensitive grade — declassify downward as the crown jewels move up, and the classified world need not grow at all. And to the objection that unclassified details aggregate into sensitive wholes: we ran the aggregate-everything experiment. It produced an unpayable mandate, an unprotectable perimeter, and eight years of uncontested collection. That is not risk management; it is risk relabeling.

The binary has one irreducible residue: export-controlled technical data. ITAR and the Export Administration Regulations restrict the largest slice of defense CUI by statute — the Department cannot release it by memo, and it cannot all be classified. That residue is where the second move lives: defend it wholesale, not retail. Eighty thousand self-defended machine shops is retail defense at the worst possible exchange ratio. A few hundred hardened, government-assured environments — enclaves and authorized platforms in which small contractors work with controlled technical data rather than each hosting it themselves — is wholesale defense: the defender finally gets economies of scale, verification shrinks to a population the assessment ecosystem can actually service, and the attacker's cost per useful intrusion rises instead of falling. Concentration creates high-value targets, yes. But a few hundred professionally defended environments with real detection beat 80,000 undefended networks even against a focused adversary — we know, because the adversary has treated the current arrangement as a self-service library since 2017.

Third, verify by sampling, with consequences. Keep self-attestation for the residual population, but back it with random government-led assessment at a rate high enough to deter — the model that keeps the tax system honest without auditing every return.

None of this is invention. Each element has decades of precedent; the task force is being asked to remember, not to imagine. The suspension of CMMC was not an admission that cybersecurity costs too much. It was an admission — perhaps not yet a conscious one — that the game as structured cannot be won at any price. The only winning move is to change the game: shrink what needs protecting, protect it the way we protected what mattered for eighty years, and stop letting an adversary's cost-imposition strategy set the terms of our industrial policy.

James Novakoff, MSTM, CCA, is an enterprise computer and security architect and Certified CMMC Assessor who provides engineering and security services to defense industrial base contractors. The views expressed are his own.

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

How America Appeased Putin

Excerpt from Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

When Spies was first published in 2023, it made front-page news with the chilling revelation that the Russian government had reached an advanced stage in planning an assassination on American soil.

Russia's target was Alexander Poteyev, a former officer in the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, whom the FBI and CIA had recruited as a spy. Poteyev betrayed one of Moscow's most closely guarded secrets: its network of deep-cover "illegals" living in the United States. His intelligence allowed the FBI to arrest ten Russian operatives in 2010, including the glamorous Anna Chapman.

The United States exchanged the illegals for Western agents imprisoned in Russia. Among those released was Sergei Skripal, the former Russian military intelligence officer whom the Kremlin later attempted to murder in Salisbury, England, with the nerve agent Novichok.

The CIA extracted Poteyev from Russia and resettled him under a new identity in the United States. Putin did not hide the fact that he wanted him dead. A Kremlin spokesman warned that Russia knew the traitor's identity and that an assassin would be sent after him.

That was precisely what happened.

Russian intelligence recruited Hector Fuentes, a Mexican microbiologist with a Russian wife and another family in Mexico. His handlers exploited his private life to blackmail him into identifying and surveilling Poteyev in Miami. They gave Fuentes $20,000 to rent an apartment there, but the operation foundered on poor tradecraft. Fuentes photographed the license plate of Poteyev's car and attracted the attention of security guards at Poteyev's apartment complex. When he attempted to leave for Mexico, American border officials discovered the photograph. Fuentes was arrested and disclosed the operation to US investigators.

By authorizing the plot, Putin had crossed an important red line. Europe had already witnessed Russian assassinations and attempted assassinations, including the attack on Skripal. But the Kremlin had previously stopped short of authorising a killing inside the United States. Putin was now demonstrating his willingness to tear up the remaining restraints governing relations with Washington.

Yet the American response was remarkably weak.

The New York Times subsequently reported that Washington retaliated harshly, imposing sanctions and expelling ten Russian intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover in April 2021. But according to someone intimately involved in the events, when the United States informed the Kremlin about the expulsions, its message did not even mention the planned murder. Instead, Washington concentrated on Russia's SolarWinds cyberattack.

The penalties imposed were hardly sufficient to alter Putin's behaviour. Russian intelligence officers sometimes regard expulsion as a badge of honour. Putin had also insulated much of the Russian economy from American sanctions. A more serious response might have publicly exposed his immense wealth and corruption - subjects about which the Kremlin leader is notoriously sensitive.

The assassination plot was only the first of four events that, viewed from Moscow, advertised American weakness.

The second emerged in 2020, when reports alleged that Russian military intelligence was paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American service personnel in Afghanistan. The story appeared during the presidential election campaign but then largely disappeared, supposedly because the US intelligence community could not reach a consensus about the underlying evidence.

There should have been little doubt. John J. Sullivan, the former American ambassador in Moscow, has written that he examined the intelligence and found the proof persuasive. According to a source with knowledge of the events, American authorities possessed intelligence about a Russian officer travelling to Dubai to meet an Afghan contractor who facilitated payments to the Taliban. At the centre of the scheme was an Afghan-Russian gem smuggler, Rahmatullah Azizi, who acted as an intermediary.

The intelligence reached the President's Daily Brief in February 2020. Donald Trump nevertheless denied having been briefed and dismissed the story as "fake news." As with the assassination plot, the Russian bounty program provoked no meaningful American response.

The third demonstration of weakness was Washington's withdrawal from Afghanistan, negotiated by Trump and executed by Joe Biden in August 2021. The operation was handled disastrously. The world watched desperate Afghans cling to an American C-17 as it taxied along the runway at Kabul airport. Some fell to their deaths after the aircraft took off. A suicide bombing killed thirteen American service personnel and approximately 170 Afghan civilians. Soon the Taliban controlled the country once more.

From the Kremlin's perspective, the images suggested that the United States no longer possessed the will or competence of a superpower.

The fourth episode concerned Havana Syndrome - the mysterious neurological symptoms suffered by American officials since 2016. The US government repeatedly denied that a foreign power was responsible. A 2023 intelligence assessment judged it "very unlikely" that an adversary lay behind the incidents.

Investigative reporting later revealed compelling evidence of Russian involvement. Members of Unit 29155, a Russian military intelligence black-operations squad, were present near several incidents involving American personnel. The operatives appear to have used some form of electronic weapon.

Two reliable sources familiar with the matter told me that Russian involvement was regarded as almost certain, but that elements of the American intelligence community - particularly the CIA - had suppressed evidence pointing towards Moscow. Their apparent calculation was that doing nothing was preferable to revealing an attack that might constitute an act of war.

In December 2024, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that a foreign adversary was increasingly likely to have caused at least some of the incidents. It criticised the previous intelligence assessment for lacking analytic integrity and being highly irregular in its formulation.

If Russia was responsible, the lesson for the Kremlin was unmistakable: it had attacked American government personnel and escaped without punishment.

Taken together, the assassination plot, the bounties on American soldiers, the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and Washington's refusal to confront the evidence surrounding Havana Syndrome all made the United States appear emasculated in the Kremlin's eyes.

It was in this context that Putin decided to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. America appeared weak. The opportunity for military action had arrived.

The analogy with Munich in 1938 has become an overused cliché. In this instance, however, it is unfortunately appropriate. Through their repeated failure to counter Russian aggression before February 2022, the Trump and Biden administrations effectively appeased Putin's worst ambitions.

Putin's actions must be understood through his background as a KGB officer. He remains an unreformed Chekist, steeped in the mentality of the Soviet security services. He has never abandoned the KGB's view of the United States as Russia's "main adversary," nor his conviction that Washington and the CIA are engaged in a conspiracy to weaken Russia.

His strategy has consistently been revanchist: to regain the territory, influence and prestige lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. His invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 follow logically from that worldview. According to Putin's distorted version of history, Ukraine is an artificial country created by hostile Western powers. He regards its conquest and reincorporation into Russia as an almost sacred duty.

This is a gross misreading of history. But it is nevertheless what Putin believes - and Western governments must take it seriously.

Putin and the hardliners surrounding him believe themselves to be at war with NATO and, above all, with the United States. That conviction will not disappear with a ceasefire in Ukraine. Nor will the danger necessarily vanish when Putin leaves power. The nationalist resentments he has exploited are larger than the man himself, while his regime has systematically eliminated alternative leaders.

The West therefore faces a Russia problem, not merely a Putin problem. The events preceding the invasion of Ukraine offer an enduring warning: deterrence fails when threats carry no consequences. Dictators interpret silence not as prudence, but as permission.

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

Will Physical AI Underpin the Reindustrialization Win that Western Allies Need?

Having spent most of my life working in “advanced nations” that have strategically accentuated financial and professional services growth while outsourcing manufacturing to the lowest cost jurisdiction, the rise of reindustrialization policies has shocked many by its rapid ascension and acceleration of mission investment.

Reindustrialisation is core to the sovereign aspirations of many nations driven by the need for national, economic and societal security underpinned by supply chain diversity and independence and real challenges for workforce growth now and into the future. Key delivery pillars include defence tech, energy sovereignty, critical mineral supply and advanced manufacturing.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang declared at CES 2026 that Physical AI (robots that perceive, reason and act in the real world) are having their inflective "ChatGPT moment" and the numbers back the rhetoric with the sector projected to grow from roughly $138 billion in 2026 to over $500 billion by 2030. Not only are the numbers extraordinary, but the pace of functional improvement has also been remarkable. Almost overnight we’ve gone from laughing at robots falling over to the recent Robot Games in China with AI-powered machines jumping, running and somersaulting better than humans.

Governments from Canberra to Whitehall are betting that robotics will do for reindustrialization what tariffs and subsidies alone couldn't ie. bring manufacturing back onshore. Similar to the AI-related discussion about Data Centres, that bet may be right about the factories and wrong about who controls and captures the resulting value.

There is little structural awareness that Physical AI is on the same path to evolving sovereign cloud and AI strategies doomed to partial success – only wearing a proverbial hard hat.

Until recently, the gap between digital and physical AI has been somewhat of a running joke. How can the technology that can solve advanced mathematics or write a brilliant poem not figure out how to fold a towel? That gap is closing fast. Vision-language-action models pioneered by the likes of Nvidia and Google DeepMind allows robots to reason the principles of physics rather than execute rigid, pre-programmed motion. Generalist recently reported their GEN-1 model lifted task success rates from 64% to 99% at a rate 300% faster on standard benchmarks in a single release proving a “significant step towards our mission of creating generalist intelligence for the physical world.”

Capability demonstrations have moved from highly controlled labs to live on stage and arenas showing a level of confidence the industry hasn't seen before. The greatest proof perhaps being the broadcast of China’s Humanoid Games – not a country that takes technological or reputational risk lightly! While Elon gets the headlines with his “1 billion humanoid robots in 10 years”, conservative manufacturers like Hyundai are targeting 30,000 humanoid robots a year by 2028. Funding into physical AI start-ups jumped 400% in H1, 2026 according to Crunchbase while the Wall Street Journal reported that many of those investors were the founders of the software and AI industries previously providing a clear pathway to digital/physical AI engineering and manufacturing integration.

McClure, Dave. "Physical AI Large Fundings In H1 2026." Crunchbase News, 18 Aug. 2026, crunchbase.com.

Politically, this is landing at the perfect moment. Reindustrialization has become a universal policy theme across the Western alliance and robotics are being pitched as the enabling technology. Humanoid and purpose-built machines that let Western economies rebuild factories without rebuilding a 1990s-scale labour cost base or the politically maligned immigration policies needed to resource them.

As Andreesen Horowitz Head of Global Affairs (former Whitehouse and NSA senior leader) Anne Neuberger illustrated, this advanced manufacturing revolution is spawning the necessary development of highly detailed digital twins to better understand, architect, build, test and upgrade critical infrastructure with global leaders like Belden, Caterpillar, Foxconn, Toyota and TSMC already building AI-driven digital twins of their factories on Nvidia's Omniverse platform.

Here is the uncomfortable part – politically, economically and socially. The entire pitch for reindustrialization has been implicitly, and often explicitly, about jobs and restoring a middle-class industrial base giving politicians a factory to place a plaque or cut a ribbon. Physical AI does not deliver that. A robot capable enough to fold laundry, pack boxes and operate coffee machines across different physical forms is capable enough to replace the very workforce reindustrialization was promised to restore. We are reshoring output, not jobs, by automating the labour out of it. The politics of reindustrialization and the economics of physical AI are pulling in opposite directions with little recognition of this at policy levels.

The implications will vary by nation and region. While Goldman Sachs reports the US has a gap to fill of 13million open manufacturing jobs ripe for robotic fulfillment, many allies have relatively high inflation and growing unemployment driven by legacy debt and technological disruption.

That's the first trap. The second is more familiar, and more dangerous, because we've built it before. Just as sovereign cloud infrastructure means little if a nation doesn't control the token pricing running on top of it, a reshored factory means little if the nation doesn't own the foundation model, the world-simulation data, or the "brain" directing the robots inside it. Nvidia's Cosmos and GR00T models, and the open foundation models rapidly becoming the default substrate for robotics development, are following the exact ownership pattern that concentrated cloud and AI value in a handful of American platforms. A factory built at home, running on embodied intelligence licensed from offshore, is not reindustrialization, it’s simply a very expensive lease.

In their recent report “Harnessing AI for the Physical Economy” Goldmans additionally pointed out that physical AI deployment, sovereign capital programs and strategic supply chains all coalesce around Defense with an uncomfortable conclusion that fully autonomous AI-executed warfare is an inevitability. Much like recent diplomatic engagement about weaponization in the space domain, this is a joint Allied discussion which can NOT be put on the backburner.

For Western Allies, it will be critical over the next 5 years to build national strategies around developing and controlling the physical AI IP and models, the physical-world training data, and the "sim-to-real" simulation infrastructure those robots depend on rather than simply the location of the manufacturing centers and number of robots deployed.

Nations should treat embodied-AI foundation models (the physical-world equivalent of the large language model) as a sovereign capability requiring the same deliberate investment as fabs or power grids, not an app layer to be simply imported off the shelf.

The collective challenge for allied nations is that physical AI will very likely reindustrialize the West's factories while perhaps further deindustrializing our workforce and destabilizing societal cohesion, and no amount of reshoring rhetoric changes that arithmetic. The real conundrum for sovereign policymakers is whether they own and control the intelligence running the machine revolution or merely rent the floor space the machines stand on.

The positive news is that the issues are foreseeable and controllable and we have time to do address them all before AI (in all its guises) reaches self-propagating scale and becomes turbocharged by the rapidly advancing quantum, space and 6G revolutions.

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

How China Is Building an Architecture of Control Across the Heart of Asia

In the years following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, much of the world treated the region as strategically peripheral - unstable, exhausted, and largely disconnected from the future of global security. Policymakers assumed the consequences of state collapse and civil war would remain regionally contained.

They did not.

The vacuum that emerged across Afghanistan and its surrounding region ultimately produced transnational terrorism on a scale that reshaped global security for two decades. By the time the world recognized the strategic implications of instability in the Heart of Asia, the consequences had already spread far beyond the region itself.

Today, another transformation is unfolding across the same geography. Once again, much of Washington views the region primarily through narrow lenses: humanitarian crisis, counterterrorism management, refugee flows, or strategic fatigue after two decades of war. Yet beneath the surface, a far more consequential shift is underway - the emergence of an interconnected architecture of surveillance systems, cognitive warfare capabilities, AI-enabled governance, and digital infrastructure stretching from Xinjiang through Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.

This is not merely a story about Afghanistan or even about China’s expanding regional influence. It is the story of how authoritarian technological ecosystems are gradually reshaping one of the world’s most fragile and strategically important regions, and how the United States risks misunderstanding the implications until the consequences extend far beyond Eurasia.

The future threat emerging from the Heart of Asia may not resemble the threats of the past. It may not require large training camps, centralized organizations, or physical sanctuaries alone. Instead, it may emerge through digitally networked ecosystems built on AI-enabled surveillance, synthetic media, autonomous influence operations, predictive governance systems, and machine-readable societies operating across the gray zone between peace and conflict.

The region surrounding Afghanistan is increasingly becoming a laboratory for that future.

The Rise of Informational Gravity

China’s expanding role across the Heart of Asia is often described in economic terms: roads, railways, mining contracts, telecommunications infrastructure, and the Belt and Road Initiative. But this framing misses the deeper strategic transformation underway. Beijing is not simply investing in physical infrastructure. It is gradually building informational gravity across the region.

Telecommunications systems, Safe City surveillance platforms, AI-assisted facial recognition networks, smart-city technologies, digital payment systems, media ecosystems, and cross-border security cooperation are converging into a broader regional architecture that extends far beyond any individual country. Afghanistan is no longer the center of the story. It is one node within a wider system.

The clearest model for understanding this architecture exists inside China itself.

In Xinjiang, Beijing constructed what may be the most comprehensive AI-enabled population monitoring system in modern history. Facial recognition cameras, biometric databases, predictive policing algorithms, integrated behavioral tracking systems, and AI-assisted security platforms transformed the region into what many analysts now describe as a machine-readable society. The Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) aggregates enormous quantities of behavioral data - movement patterns, communications, social interactions, purchases, travel activity, and digital behavior - to identify perceived risks before they materialize.

What matters strategically is that the technologies, companies, governance concepts, and security logic developed in Xinjiang are no longer confined within China’s borders.

Across Pakistan, Chinese-built Safe City systems now monitor major urban centers through Huawei-supported command platforms, facial recognition systems, and expanding digital interception capabilities. In Iran, Chinese surveillance technologies have become increasingly integrated into domestic security and protest-monitoring systems. Across Central Asia, Chinese telecommunications infrastructure, smart-city ecosystems, and surveillance exports have become embedded within the digital foundations of multiple states.

Individually, these developments may appear disconnected. Collectively, they form something far more consequential: an emerging Ring of Control around the Heart of Asia.

Building the Ring of Control

This ring is not coordinated through a single master plan. Rather, it emerges through the convergence of multiple strategic interests. China seeks to secure Belt and Road investments, contain Uyghur militancy, protect trade corridors, expand the Digital Silk Road, and establish informational advantages across strategically sensitive regions. The result, however, is systemic. Telecommunications infrastructure, AI-enabled surveillance systems, media ecosystems, and cognitive-domain operations increasingly reinforce one another across borders.

Pakistan demonstrates how economic infrastructure and surveillance infrastructure merge into a single strategic ecosystem. Chinese-funded Safe City projects in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, and other major urban centers increasingly integrate population monitoring with economic-security priorities tied to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). At the same time, internet-monitoring systems modeled on China’s own censorship architecture are gradually reshaping the digital environment through which information flows.

The implications extend beyond domestic governance. Surveillance systems originally justified as anti-crime or counterterrorism tools gradually evolve into mechanisms for political management, social monitoring, and information control. As these systems become normalized, governments gain unprecedented visibility into the behavior of their populations.

Iran demonstrates a different dimension of the model: how surveillance ecosystems evolve from security tools into political-control mechanisms. Chinese technologies have increasingly supported AI-assisted monitoring of protests, facial-recognition deployments, and population-management systems designed to maintain regime stability during periods of unrest. During waves of anti-government demonstrations, Iranian authorities increasingly relied on digital monitoring, internet restrictions, and AI-assisted identification systems to suppress dissent.

Central Asia represents perhaps the quietest transformation of all. Huawei telecommunications infrastructure, smart-city surveillance systems, and Chinese-built digital architecture now underpin significant portions of regional connectivity across Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Border-security cooperation near the Wakhan Corridor, expanding Chinese security facilities, and growing digital dependency further deepen Beijing’s structural influence.

What emerges is not traditional imperialism. It is infrastructural cognition.

Whoever controls the communications architecture, surveillance systems, digital ecosystems, and AI-enabled information environments of a region gradually acquires influence over how societies perceive, communicate, organize, and govern themselves. In the twenty-first century, power increasingly operates not only through territory or military presence, but through data flows, algorithmic visibility, and cognitive infrastructure.

Afghanistan’s Cognitive Vacuum

This transformation becomes even more significant when paired with the collapse of independent information ecosystems across parts of the region.

In Afghanistan, the destruction of independent journalism following the Taliban’s return created an enormous cognitive vacuum. Hundreds of journalists fled the country, media outlets collapsed, and independent reporting networks deteriorated under political pressure and economic collapse. Into that vacuum moved state-backed narratives, sponsored media relationships, and externally influenced information ecosystems.

Chinese state media expansion and narrative-management initiatives increasingly operate in environments where alternative information infrastructures have largely disappeared. Similar pressures exist elsewhere across the region, where fragile media systems increasingly compete against state-backed digital ecosystems supported by far greater resources and technological capacity.

Surveillance infrastructure and narrative infrastructure reinforce one another. Data shapes messaging. Messaging normalizes surveillance. Together, they create environments where behavioral monitoring and information management become mutually sustaining systems.

This matters because modern authoritarian influence no longer depends solely on censorship. Increasingly, it depends on shaping the informational environment itself — determining what populations see, what narratives dominate, and which voices disappear from public discourse.

The result is a region where governance, surveillance, and information control are becoming increasingly integrated through digital systems powered by artificial intelligence.

AI and the Future of Gray-Zone Conflict

This is where the region’s future intersects with broader global security concerns.

The world after 9/11 was shaped by physical sanctuaries: training camps, insurgent safe havens, ungoverned territory, and militant mobility across borders. But the emerging threat landscape of the coming decades may look fundamentally different.

Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of asymmetric influence.

AI-assisted propaganda, synthetic media, autonomous disinformation networks, digitally coordinated extremist ecosystems, predictive behavioral analysis, biometric governance systems, and drone-enabled proxy operations no longer require the same physical infrastructure that earlier generations of transnational threats depended upon. Influence operations can now scale globally through digital ecosystems that transcend geography.

The next sanctuary may not train hijackers in remote camps. It may train algorithms, autonomous systems, and synthetic narratives capable of shaping perceptions, destabilizing societies, and amplifying conflict far beyond the region itself.

This is particularly important because modern gray-zone competition increasingly operates through cognitive pressure rather than direct confrontation. China’s Three Warfares doctrine, Russia’s concepts of Reflexive Control and Active Measures, and broader state-backed influence operations all reflect a strategic understanding that future competition will target perception, trust, decision-making, and societal cohesion as much as physical infrastructure.

The Heart of Asia is becoming one of the environments where these concepts are converging operationally.

The convergence of AI, surveillance systems, and cognitive warfare creates a new strategic reality. States no longer need to occupy territory physically to shape political outcomes. Influence can increasingly be exercised through algorithmic visibility, digital dependency, and information dominance.

That transformation carries implications far beyond the region itself.

Washington’s Strategic Blind Spot

Yet Washington still tends to analyze terrorism, artificial intelligence, surveillance technology, regional instability, and great-power competition as separate categories. The emerging architecture across the region suggests adversaries increasingly view them as interconnected systems.

That strategic blind spot carries risks.

The lesson of the 1990s was not simply that Afghanistan became a sanctuary for terrorism. The deeper lesson was that strategically ignored regions can evolve into generators of global instability when major powers fail to recognize transformations early enough.

Today, the transformation underway is different - more technological, more cognitive, and more structurally embedded.

The long-term risk is not merely the expansion of authoritarian influence across the Heart of Asia. It is the gradual emergence of interconnected machine-readable societies whose surveillance systems, telecommunications infrastructure, media ecosystems, and behavioral data environments become increasingly interoperable across borders.

In such an environment, the distinction between domestic governance, cognitive warfare, and strategic competition begins to blur.

The consequences may not remain regional.

The next phase of instability emerging from the Heart of Asia may not arrive through conventional terrorism alone. It may emerge through AI-enabled cognitive operations, synthetic media ecosystems, autonomous influence architectures, and digitally amplified disorder operating at a scale that previous generations of extremist or authoritarian movements could never achieve.

Afghanistan is no longer merely a battlefield of territory.

The wider region surrounding it is becoming a contested frontier of cognition, surveillance, infrastructure, and machine-driven influence — and the strategic consequences of losing that contest may not remain confined to the region for long.

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

Dark Transits are a Stopgap not a Solution

Washington has accomplished an important feat by stealthily moving oil through the Persian Gulf despite Iran’s proclaimed closure. But the means it has relied on can’t become normal maritime behavior.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on August 27 that the United States had facilitated the movement of 130 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in the preceding two weeks. That amounts to over 9 million barrels per day (bpd), roughly half of pre-war exports through the chokepoint.

Most of these vessels make “dark transits,” when ships sail with their automatic identification system (AIS) turned off. A ship’s AIS transponder broadcasts its location, course, speed, and other data via dedicated maritime radio frequencies to nearby ships, shore-based AIS receivers, and low-earth satellites, which convey that data globally. Dark transits are typically used by sanctioned vessels or ships moving illicit cargo because standard maritime trade, under normal conditions, doesn’t derive benefit from sailing without AIS. But licit maritime trade has increasingly been forced to move through the Middle East waterways on dark trips to avoid attack.

Kpler data identified more than 1,500 dark transits through Hormuz between March 1 and late August. Saudi Arabia’s tankers are also transiting the Red Sea without AIS after the Iran-backed Houthis announced a maritime blockade of the kingdom on July 20. Riyadh rerouted most of its oil exports from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea using the country’s east-west pipeline after Iran closed Hormuz.

Washington needs to move Gulf oil through both waterways to market to reduce Tehran’s economic leverage. Dark transits are an important tool to accomplish this, but they are not a long-term solution in the Middle East.

The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), the most important maritime treaty on vessel safety, requires ships, with very limited exceptions, to use AIS for safety reasons. Most importantly, the technology is used to prevent collisions, but it also improves a ship’s navigation capacity and knowledge of its environment.

Given the potential safety implications, the shipping industry traditionally eschews dark transits. In many instances, sailing without AIS will void a ship’s insurance policy as it is a violation of international standards. While there can be legitimate reasons for a ship to disable its AIS — including for its own safety — this does not necessarily compel the insurance company to continue coverage.

Furthermore, transiting without AIS does not guarantee a ship won’t be attacked, as Iran’s recent attacks on Emirati vessels demonstrates. United Arab Emirates’ state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has been shuttling oil through the Persian Gulf — sending vessels through Hormuz on dark transits to offload their product onto larger ships waiting outside the strait that then travel onto buyers. While a successful mission — ADNOC is expanding this service to Iraq and Saudi Arabia appears to be replicating the practice — it is not without danger. Abu Dhabi said that Tehran attacked seven Emirati ships in roughly the first half of August alone.

Ships can be tracked by radar or satellite even when their AIS is disabled. The confined space of the Strait of Hormuz enables drone and fast attack crafts to more easily surveil and attack vessels. While the United States has targeted Iranian coastal radars, small craft, and drone capabilities, these can all be replenished. Iranian partners would likely support this effort.

China considered giving Iran advanced radar technology early in the conflict, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. Russia has allegedly been supporting Iran’s ability to build ram jets to propel hypersonic anti-ship missiles. Both China and Russia have also provided the regime with targeting support via access to satellites or their data intelligence. Iran possesses anti-ship missiles that are launched based on satellite or radar data but lock onto a ship’s heat or electronic signature for terminal guidance, enabling them to target a dark vessel. So long as Iran retains both the desire and residual capability to strike—bolstered by partners willing to assist—even dark transits through the strait carry some risk.

Similar threats exist in the Red Sea, where the Houthis utilize Iranian anti-ship missiles, but they also attack ships using small arms and RPGs from small vessels. Dark transits through the Red Sea grew substantially following Houthi attacks on commercial shipping over the war in Gaza in late 2023. This has given the group experience in monitoring and menacing vessels moving through the waterway without AIS.

These ongoing maritime threats are, in part, the cost of not decisively defeating the Houthis when they spent two years menacing commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Gulf countries and Washington should not repeat that mistake in the Persian Gulf. The lasting solution is the removal of Iranian threats to maritime shipping and the restoration of freedom of navigation in both critical waterways of the Middle East.

Bridget Toomey is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery serves as senior director of FDD’s Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) and as an FDD senior fellow.

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

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

The Houthis’ Coastal Gambit

For the first time in years, large swaths of Yemeni territory are changing hands. The Houthis’ recent losses in the east of the country were quickly followed by a string of victories along the Red Sea coast that brought the group closer to the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Early readings that the eastern losses marked the beginning of the regime’s collapse have since proved premature. Yet the regime’s latest expansion does not resolve its core problems either, at best it mitigates them.

What has emerged over the summer is not a regime in free fall but one that is consolidating. Pulling back from the periphery, concentrating its forces where they matter most, and using battlefield momentum to paper over economic and political weaknesses.

The current escalation began in July 2026, when the Houthis tried to break what they call the “Saudi blockade” of Yemen by chartering an Iranian airliner for a roundtrip from Sanaa to Tehran. Riyadh has controlled Yemen’s airspace since 2015, when it launched its campaign to unseat the Houthis, and air traffic to and from Sanaa has been limited ever since. It diminished further in 2025, when Israel put Sanaa Airport and the Houthis’ fleet of airliners out of commission because the group had been using them to transport weapons and operatives. The blockade has never been airtight, though, as UN flights have reportedly continued in apparent secrecy and without any clear declaration of cargo or purpose.

Riyadh had folded under Houthi pressure many times before. Until 2023, the Saudis were desperate for a way out of Yemen, and the Houthis set out to extract every possible concession before running out the clock on a deal. The group’s Red Sea campaign, launched in November 2023, made any agreement far more difficult for the kingdom to stomach. Even so, Houthi threats against Saudi infrastructure continued to yield concessions or at least a softening of Saudi policy.

This time, Riyadh did not fold. On July 13, as an inbound flight from Tehran approached Sanaa, a coalition strike cratered the runway and forced the aircraft to divert to Hodeidah. The Houthis answered by declaring a “naval blockade” of Saudi shipping and attacking the kingdom’s energy infrastructure. Saudi Arabia hit back with airstrikes on Houthi-held territory, and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces went on the offensive.

The coalition’s pushback was limited, and it did not cow the Houthis who retain considerable will to fight. Its leaders are mostly in their 30s and 40s and remain filled with extremist fervor. They are not the aging cadres of the hollowed-out Assad regime. They are also accustomed to a ruthless and competitive environment in which the last thing anyone can afford to display is weakness.

Instead, the group recalibrated by absorbing losses in the east while going on the offensive in the west. In the northeastern governorate of al-Jawf, the Houthis have reportedly lost territory, including the al-Labanat military camp. They apparently did not commit the resources required to hold those positions.

That is surprising given al-Jawf’s history with the movement. Roughly two decades ago, when the Houthis had only just begun their revolt against the Yemeni government, al-Jawf became their second foothold. It is also a valuable smuggling hub and a likely entry point for materiel smuggled overland to the regime via Oman.

Yet al-Jawf has also been a thorn in the Houthis’ side for years because of its demography and topography, and it will remain one for whoever is left to govern its unruly tribes. The defeats there may therefore reflect a decision as much as a failure. Constrained by scarce resources, the Houthis appear to be consolidating around the assets they value most, accepting losses in al-Jawf in order to concentrate on the more strategically valuable western governorates. This does entail some risk as losing ground in the east strips away some of the group’s strategic depth.

That reading fits developments in Taiz and along the Red Sea coast. On September 3, the Houthis launched a ground offensive across western Taiz and southern Hodeidah against the National Resistance Forces of Tareq Saleh, nephew of the late President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Within a week, the key port city of Mokha had fallen.

The captured territory secures the Houthis’ own ports, at least from a land invasion, and could allow the group to expand smuggling operations via the Horn of Africa. It may eventually position them to move on the city of Taiz itself. But the advance toward Bab al-Mandeb is less dramatic than it might appear, as shipping through the strait has been within Houthi reach for years so holding more coastline does not dramatically extend that threat.

The timing of the offensive may not be incidental. September is typically a tense month for the Houthis, as their level of popular support is put to the test. The regime seeks to bring Yemenis into the streets to celebrate its September 21, 2014, coup while silencing any celebration of the founding of the Yemeni Republic on September 26, 1962. The quick and surprising capture of Mokha from Saleh’s forces sustains the myth that the group is on the rise. That does nothing to alleviate discontent, but raising public fear of the regime helps keep discontent from turning into open dissent.

In doing so, the regime has used its primary tool, military power, to compensate for its other weaknesses. But this consolidation looks like crisis management. The regime’s central problems are economic as its main sources of revenue are drying up and it needs money and resources to keep its war machine going.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, finds itself dealing with Yemen largely on its own. It has pushed out its Emirati partners, and its American, Turkish, and Pakistani allies appear reluctant to commit to direct military intervention. Sidelining the Emiratis and disbanding the Southern Transitional Council gave Riyadh greater influence over the full spectrum of anti-Houthi forces, which it has since co-opted, but it is not clear that the Saudis are managing these relationships effectively.

The Houthi regime is neither a paper tiger nor ten feet tall. It should be assessed as a foe that is, above all, capable of surprise. Its summer offensive also shows that it can still generate momentum on the battlefield even as its economic base declines. Seeking to strike deals with or ignore this terrorist group has afforded it the luxury of preparing and then launching attacks at the time and place of its choosing.

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

65 Billion Barrels Is Only the Beginning

President Trump announced this weekend that the United States had secured majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business.

That is a big number. But it is not the number the oil and gas industry will be focused on.

Venezuela already has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. It produces only about 1.25 million barrels a day. That gap tells you a lot about what comes next.

Sixty-five billion barrels of reserves is not 65 billion barrels of supply.

The oil is there. The harder question is what it takes to actually produce it.

Existing wells may need work. Infrastructure needs investment. Equipment and people have to move into the country. Companies have to decide the economics work. And before anyone commits billions of dollars, they have to be comfortable that the agreements they sign today will still be enforceable years from now.

That is the part experts in this industry will be watching.

My firm works with oil and gas companies on the agreements behind development. Most people will never read those agreements, but they matter. Companies need to understand what they own, what they control, what they are obligated to spend and what protections they have if circumstances change.

Boards do not invest billions based on an announcement. They invest when they have enough confidence in the contracts and the economics to put capital at risk.

Contracts drive capital. Capital drives production.

And none of that happens overnight.

There may be opportunities to improve production from existing Venezuelan fields relatively quickly. But in the oil business, relatively quickly can still mean years. Larger redevelopment projects can take much longer.

That matters when talking about oil prices too.

Markets can react to an announcement immediately because markets react to expectations. But if the question is whether this will have a lasting effect on oil prices, actual production matters. More barrels reaching the global market means more supply and, all else being equal, downward pressure on prices.

But first you have to get the barrels to market.

For perspective, the world consumes roughly 100 million barrels of oil every day. The United States alone consumes around 20 million barrels per day. Roughly 20 million barrels per day move through the Strait of Hormuz.

So the important question is not simply how many barrels Venezuela has underground. We already know it has an enormous amount of oil. The question is how much additional oil can actually be produced, how much investment that will require, and how long it will take.

Oil companies are accustomed to evaluating political, legal and commercial risk around the world. Venezuela is obviously not the first place where those risks have existed. Companies deal with them through contracts, economics and legal protections. If they can get comfortable with those things, capital can move. If they cannot, it does not.

That is why the agreements behind this announcement may ultimately be more important than the headline number.

If those agreements create enough confidence for significant private capital to move into Venezuela, this could become a very significant development for Venezuela, U.S. companies and the global energy market.

But in a country as chaotic as Venezuela, with uncertainty as to the future resilience of its government and institutions and reports of consensus opposition to the agreement, that is a big ‘if’. In short, we are not there yet.

There are a lot of steps between announcing access to reserves and producing oil from those reserves. This seems to be a first step, but not much else.

The Bells are Ringing Again, and This Time Sweden is Inside the Alliance

On August 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe landed in Moscow. He met Russian officials, warned them against attacking NATO, raised Moscow’s support for Iran, and flew home. Allies and Kyiv were briefed before and after. It was the first trip of its kind since the former CIA Director William Burns made the same flight in November 2021, fifteen weeks before Russia crossed into Ukraine. As one former CIA operations officer put it, the fact that a director gets on a plane at all suggests the threat behind the trip was judged credible.

The warning had gone public three weeks earlier. US intelligence assessed that Putin could order a limited attack on a NATO member, most likely against the Baltics or Poland, at some point between this autumn and 2029. The assessed purpose is to test Article 5’s, and to fragment the alliance by proving it lacks a response.

The location for that scenario is Sweden’s front yard. Gotland sits in the middle of the Baltic Sea. Sweden’s air and naval reach covers the sea lines that would carry reinforcements to the Baltic states in the first week of a crisis, and Swedish territory is key for air superiority.

In 2022, Sweden’s intelligence failures were Sweden’s. The country was outside NATO, and a wrong Swedish assessment was not changed after American influence. But Sweden joined NATO in March 2024. Swedish capability will now feed an alliance and Swedish blind spots will become an alliance wide liability.

Sweden is rebuilding its intelligence architecture directly into this warning. A new civilian foreign intelligence service, Sveriges utrikesunderrattelsetjanst (UND), opens January 1, 2027.

Not the First Warning to Go Unheeded

The winter of 2021 into 2022 was not a case of intelligence that wasn’t shared in time. In fact, Washington and London put detailed intelligence assessments on the table publicly, repeatedly, and with a specificity that made professionals uncomfortable.

The influence operation was also conducted privately. Burns flew to Moscow in November 2021 to deliver warnings to the Kremlin, then made repeated trips to Kyiv and allied capitals.

These efforts unfortunately were partly in vain. The French and German services judged a full invasion too irrational and too costly for Putin to attempt. Several capitals read the American warnings through the memory of Iraq weapons of mass destruction and discounted them accordingly. The gap between what US intelligence believed and what European governments were willing to act on became one of the more consequential intelligence failures of the post-Cold War era. It was not a failure of collection; it was a failure of influence.

The analytic error underneath this failure is known as mirror-imaging; the assumption that your adversary weighs cost the same way that you do. European intelligence services were good at counting tanks, tracking movement and mapping order of battle. They were far less equipped to model what was happening inside the Kremlin, and when they tried, they substituted their own arithmetic for Putin’s.

Sweden’s record is part of that story. In the month before the attack, MUST assessed that a major assault was unlikely. Foreign Minister Add Linde questioned American intelligence directly to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, leaning on her own service’s skepticism.

FOI, the Swedish civilian defense research agency, did not forecast a full-scale war either, but its Russia and Eurasia analysts raised the alarm publicly and privately. But the warnings sat outside MUST’s military remit and had no route into the warning chain.

Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis, called MUST’s miss a textbook error: analysts reasoned that invasion was unlikely because the consequences would be too severe. That was an assessment of what a rational Swedish planner would do in Putin’s position, not of Putin himself.

Why Military Intelligence Could Not Have Gotten this Right

The standard account of Russian deception before February 2022 is that Moscow hid its intentions from the West by dressing the buildup as an exercise. That is true and it is the less interesting half.

The more consequential fact is that Moscow hid its intentions from its own army. Captured Russian soldiers told interviewers they believed they were on a routine exercise until hours before they crossed the border. Their officers reportedly withheld the truth because they doubted the men would fight if they knew. The deception was not aimed outward alone, but at the force that was executing Putin’s orders.

The same held on the other side. The former commander of Ukraine’s Joint Forces has said he received no official written warning on the eve of the invasion and acted on an informal tip.

A military intelligence service collects against a military. It reads order of battle, logistics, movement, readiness, signals traffic, and where it can, human sources inside the structure. Every one of those disciplines was pointed at Russian forces in the winter of 2021, and every one of them was working.

They were also, on the question that mattered, reporting accurately. The units were postured for an exercise because the units believed they were on an exercise. The logistics looked thin for an invasion because the supply staff had not been told they were invading. A colonel asked in early February what his regiment was doing would have given an honest answer, and the honest answer was wrong.

The buildup was visible; but what was not visible was the decision. Putin realized his opponents intelligence weakness, and made the decision in a room that his wider military had no access to. Thus, collection against an army cannot retrieve a judgment that the army has not been told.

MUST did not miss the invasion because its analysts were incompetent or because collection was thin. It missed because it was asked a political question and had been built, staffed, tasked, and funded to answer a military one. Working harder inside that structure would have produced more detail about an exercise.

A design problem does not yield to effort. It yields to design. If intent lives in the politics of a regime rather than in its order of battle, then somebody has to be built to read the politics, and that somebody cannot report up a military chain to a military customer asking military questions.

The American Half of the Ledger

Washington read Russian intent correctly, but got the second question wrong.

Almost every Western service, American ones included, assessed that Kyiv would fall in days. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told members of Congress that the capital could be taken in seventy-two-hours. The day after the invasion began, US officials were still assessing that Kyiv could fall within days. The intelligence community later reviewed what went wrong, and the answer was not the Russian side of the equation.

Examine how that assessment was built. Analysts counted Russian formations and Ukrainian formations, compared readiness and equipment, ran the correlation of forces, and derived an outcome. It was rigorous, and every input was real. What it failed to weigh was whether Ukrainians would fight for their country, and misjudged the national will of resistance.

That is mirror-imaging pointed at a friend instead of an adversary. In the European case, services assumed Putin would calculate cost the way a Western government would and concluded he would not invade. In the American case, services assumed Ukrainians would calculate survival the way a defeated army could and concluded they would not hold. Both times, the arithmetic was correct and the human judgment underneath was imported from somewhere else.

Within two weeks of the invasion, the United States and its allies were quietly planning for a Ukrainian government in exile and an insurgency, which is the posture you adopt when you have concluded that the state will stop existing. Zelensky was reportedly offered evacuation and answered that he needed ammunition rather than a ride. The pessimism shaped what was planned, what was offered, and how fast it moved, in the weeks when speed mattered.

In the other direction, Zelensky spent the run-up publicly disputing American warnings, arguing that the alarm was doing more damage to his economy than the threat. Biden later said Zelensky simply “didn’t want to hear” it.

Washington was right about Russia and could not get Kyiv, Berlin, Paris or Stockholm to act. Kyiv was right about Ukraine and could not get Washington to believe it. The problem caused both an unprepared Europe and delayed American aid.

What Sweden is Actually Building

Former Prime Minister Carl Bildt led the review of Sweden’s Intelligence Failure, “En reformerad underrattelseverksamhet”. The report stated that Sweden was unusual among comparable allies in having no foreign intelligence service outside of the military chain of command reporting to the elected government. The country had excellent military intelligence, a capable security service (Sapo), and one of Europe’s better signals organizations (FRA), but no institution capable of reading political intent. The report recommended a civilian agency directly under the Foreign Minister, which was later approved.

Sveriges utrikesunderrattesetjanst, UND, will sit alongside MUST, Sapo and FRA rather than replacing any of them, and is meant to be a senior shop rather than a second MUST, growing over several years.

UND takes over KSI, the Office for Special Collection, which is Sweden’s clandestine human collection and which operates in other countries under cover employment and false identity. It also takes over the production and management of qualified protected identities, previously run by the Armed Forces. The legal architecture moves with it: the Defense Intelligence Court is renamed and the oversight body redesignated, moving Sweden closer to the structures of MI6 or Estonia’s Valisluureamet: a small, civilian, politically literate foreign service.

The government named Andreas von Beckerath director-general and Annika Brandstrom his deputy, both running from January 1, 2027 for six years. Von Becherath is a diplomat: with ambassadorships in Ukraine and Poland, deputy director-general and head of the Foreign Ministry’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia department, with earlier postings in Moscow, Bucharest, London, Berlin, and New York. He is currently serving as the European Union’s ambassador in Belgrade, head of the EU delegation to Serbia, a post he has held for a year.

Brandstrom ran the inquiry that stood the agency up and served as deputy national security advisor. She has a long history of working in crisis management, preparedness and security, working directly for the Prime Ministers office.

The diagnosis was that Sweden could count Russian tanks but not read Russian politics. The team hired to fix it spent their careers reading politics and managing crises. Sweden did not appoint a general, nor an intelligence officer. It appointed a diplomat and a bureaucrat, showing that the government took the review seriously.

Frictions and Objections

Thomas Nilsson, who runs MUST, said that in the current security situation Sweden cannot afford to let anything fall through the cracks. Supreme Commander Michael Claesson has noted that UND’s civilian funding may not count toward NATO spending targets. Analysts have pointed to the seam that any civil-military split creates, which a capable adversary will probe.

All of Sweden's eight parties on the foreign affairs committee backed the legal changes. Four of them, the Social Democrats, the Left, the Greens and the Center, filed seven reservations and three separate statements. The Social Democrats called four months an extremely brief period for a reorganization of this size. The Left said the process may create more problems than it solves. The Center Party called it democratically flawed.

Underneath the procedural language is a specific operational worry: KSI leaves MUST. The Social Democrats’ objection is that the military loses a capability and is not compensated for the loss. Clandestine human collection is not a function that transfers on an effective date. Cover takes years to build and one administrative error to destroy. Officers working abroad under false identity are being re-subordinated to an agency that does not exist yet, whose director arrives on the day it opens, in the same window in which US intelligence says Russia may test the alliance.

Recruitment began before parliament formally approved the agency. The Social Democrats' complaint was tied to former hiring flaws for the National Security Advisor. Naming a year leadership team weeks before a national election, after declining to seek cross-party agreement, was provocative. They have a point; the decision was taken hastily in a political setting that often favors alignment across the aisle.

As a result the opposition signaled it may revisit elements of the reform, and the Swedish reporting has been blunt that if an incoming government shelves the service, three years of work goes with it. While the diagnosis is correct and the institutional design is sound, the infrastructure has to survive the people who built it, and whoever wins the next election. Sweden’s diagnosis was that its intelligence architecture was wrong for the threat. The risk now is that the new institution is not properly aligned across the aisle.

What Washington Should Do, and What Stockholm Should Ask For

Sweden is fixing the half of 2022 that was Sweden’s. Nothing in the American half has been fixed, and standing up a new allied service is a rare occasion when that half becomes cheap. None of what follows requires an appropriation.

Engage the institution, not the government. The appointed leaders will outlast the government that named them. American engagement pitched at the service and its career leadership must survive a change in Stockholm. Engagement pitched at the ministers who created UND does not, and given how the reform was legislated, engagement that looks like an endorsement of the current coalition would actively damage the agency’s standing with the parties most likely to inherit it. The correct posture toward a new foreign intelligence service in an election year is professional and studiously boring.

Establish liaison at the founding. A service’s analytic culture and its foreign relationships set early and then harden. What UND treats as a finished intelligence product, how it handles dissent, what it considers sufficient evidence to warn a prime minister, and whose reporting it trusts will all be settled in 2027 and 2028 by people who are being hired. Washington should be in the room while the habits are forming, and the subject of that liaison should be intent rather than order of battle, because reading intent is the entire reason the agency exists.

Make the 2022 improvisation permanent. The declassify-to-persuade campaign that Washington and London ran that winter was invented under pressure, with skill, and then set aside. A standing mechanism for releasing intent-grade material to allies at speed, with the handling rules and the release authorities agreed in advance would mean the next warning arrives in a form that an ally can act on. The lesson of 2022 was that being right in February is worth little if the ally does not move until April.

Settle the accounting question now. Claesson’s concern that UND’s civilian budget may not count toward NATO spending targets is an alliance question. The Hague summit’s target splits into 3.5 percent for core defense and 1.5 percent for defense-related spending, and the substance of that 1.5 percent has not been well-defined. Washington has more influence over that definition than any other member. A civilian foreign intelligence service whose product feeds alliance warning belongs in the basket. If it does not, the alliance will have told every member that the safe answer is to keep intelligence in uniform, maintaining the structure that failed in 2022.

Clarify Expectations. Sweden should ask for written handling and onward-sharing terms at the foundation, when it has maximum leverage and when the terms can be built into the agency rather than bolted onto it. It should ask for reciprocal analytic exchanges, including joint red-teaming aimed specifically at mirror-imaging, which is the failure both services can share and neither can audit alone.

Assign UND a responsibility in NATO. A small service does not compete across the whole target set, but Sweden has geography, language, history, and now a reputable and capable director. UND should come to the table as the alliance’s lead on a defined portion of the Russian problem rather than as a recipient of American products. Partners who bring something are listened to.

A Warning is Not a Decision

Sweden has looked hard at their failure and built an institution in response, which is more than most European governments have done with the same four years. The review named the problem, the legislation moved clandestine collection out of uniform and under civilian control, and the government hired a team with experience reading exactly the kind of politics that can accurately foresee an invasion.

The failure of influencing has no institution behind it in Washington or elsewhere. It was solved once, improvised under pressure in the winter of 2022, and allowed to lapse. That is the part of 2022 that is genuinely fixable, but it needs to be assigned. The American task is to build a relationship durable enough that whoever party runs Sweden does not matter.

Burns flew to Moscow in November 2021 and came home with a warning that proved correct, and it moved nobody in time. Ratcliffe made the same flight in August. The question worth asking is not whether the assessment behind it was accurate. The question is what happens after he lands, and whether four years, a war, and a new agency in Stockholm have changed the answer at all.

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

We Are In An Unpredictable War Of Attrition

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

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

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

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

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

D-Day Sanctions Regime

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

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

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

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

So, Who Has More at Stake?

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

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

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

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

Speaking of Regime Change

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

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

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

Where Are We Now?

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

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

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

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

Where Are We Going?

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

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

Unintended consequences, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setting Terms with America’s Tech Giants

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

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

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

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

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

Case Study: Ukraine Today, Taiwan Tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proposal: A Big Tech SOFA

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

Defined Obligations

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

Legal and Financial Clarity

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

Operational Terms

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

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

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

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

Concerns and Political Landscape

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Mobilize Before the First Shot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you think I was talking about nuclear energy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Compute We Cannot Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflect, Remember, Renew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Al Qaeda exploited those seams.

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

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

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

Today, remembrance alone is not enough.

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

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

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

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

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

These questions should make us uncomfortable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two types of terrorism have emerged since OVERT in 2006.

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

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

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

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

Why has this not happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty-Five Years Later, Remembering 9/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At first glance, these stories seem completely unrelated.

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

They aren't.

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

What is Decision Autonomy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ukraine is run by Nazis.”

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

“They started it.”

“Joining NATO would be a hostile act.”

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

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

“America will abandon you.”

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

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

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

“Join and we will take action.”

“Recognize Taiwan and there will be consequences.”

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

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

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

“An endless stream of conflicting narratives.”

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

“Experts disagree.”

“Anonymous sources contradict official sources.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manipulation and coercion define this approach.”

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

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

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

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

Manipulation and coercion define its approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do have to accept certain things.

We cannot eliminate deception.

We cannot eliminate manipulation.

We cannot eliminate coercion.

We cannot eliminate cognitive overload.

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

Do I accurately see and understand the world around me?

or - Do I know what’s true?

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

or - Can I recognize manipulation?

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

or- Can I still think and deliberate clearly?

Can I decide independently despite external pressures?

or - Can I resist false threats and real pressure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

China’s Challenge to Western Alliances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times.

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

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

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

Russia’s AI Blueprint Exposes an Authoritarian Playbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expensive Confetti

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

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

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

Built in Munich

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

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

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

What an American Flag Would Actually Mean

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

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

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

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

What It Has Not Happened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pakistan’s New Military Order Is a Warning for Washington

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

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

A Field Marshal Above the State

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

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

Consolidation Without Control

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

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

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

Pakistan’s Utility Should Not Be Mistaken for Reliability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are We Ready for AI Warfare?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[INSERT BIO BOX]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is at stake?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's hear his story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see where this is going…

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

How did that make you feel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same with [CIA’s] Edward Lee Howard

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

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

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

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

So that was my friend.

He betrayed me to the KGB.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to protect sources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right, and adrenaline is the most potent of substances.

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a delivery device.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gives you an edge.

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

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

That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Trump’s Massive Venezuela Oil Deal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just want to read the news

Get the news and only the news!

Guardian

Back to top

Kaupunki

Back to top

Yle

Back to top

CNN

Back to top

Hesari

Back to top

Al Jazeera

Back to top

New York Times

Back to top

Reuters

Back to top

NPR

Back to top

The Cipher Brief

Back to top