A government watchdog is sounding the alarm about a growing national security threat online. Rather than a traditional cyberattack, however, this one comes from the everyday digital footprints service members and their families leave across the internet.
A new Government Accountability Office report warns that publicly accessible data — from social media posts and location tracking to Defense Department press releases — can be pieced together by malicious actors to identify military personnel, target their families and disrupt military operations.
According to GAO, while the Pentagon has taken some steps to address the threat, its efforts remain scattered, inconsistent and lack coordination.
“We found that the department recognized that there were security issues, but they weren’t necessarily well-prepared to respond to them because it was new, because it didn’t necessarily neatly fit into existing organizational structures or policies or doctrines, and that’s a consistent story with the department,” Joe Kirschbaum, director of the defense capabilities and management team at GAO, told Federal News Network.
To understand the risks posed to DoD personnel and operations that come from the aggregation of publicly accessible digital data, the watchdog conducted its own investigation and built notional threat scenarios showing how that information could be exploited. GAO began by surveying the types of data already available online and also assigned investigators to scour the dark web for information about service members.
In addition to basic social media posts, investigators found data brokers selling personal and even operational information about DoD personnel and their families — information that can be combined with other publicly available data to build a more complete profile.
“Once you start putting some of these things together, potentially, you start to see a pattern — whether it’s looking at individuals, whether it’s the individuals linked to military operational units or operations themselves, family members. Nefarious actors can take these things and build them into a profile that could be used for nefarious purposes,” Kirschbaum said.
One of GAO’s threat scenarios shows how publicly accessible information can expose sensitive military training materials and capabilities. Investigators found that social media posts, online forums and dark-web marketplaces contained everything from military equipment manuals, detailed training materials, and photos of facility and aircraft interiors. When combined, these digital footprints can reveal information about equipment modifications, strategic partnerships or potential vulnerabilities, which can be used to clone products, exploit weaknesses or undermine military operations.
And while DoD has identified the public accessibility of digital data as a “real and growing threat,” GAO found that DoD’s policies and guidance are narrowly focused on social media and email use rather than the full range of potential risks from aggregated digital footprints.
For instance, the DoD chief information officer has prohibited the use of personal email or messaging apps for official business involving controlled unclassified information. But that policy doesn’t address the use of personal accounts on personal devices for unofficial tasks involving unclassified information — such as booking travel, accessing military travel orders, or posting on social media — activities that can pose similar risks once aggregated.
In addition, DoD officials acknowledged that current policies and guidance do not fully address the range of risks created by publicly accessible digital information about DoD and its personnel. They said part of the challenge is that the department has limited authority to regulate actions of DoD personnel and contractors outside of an operational environment.
“In general, except for the operation security folks, the answer was they didn’t really consider this kind of publicly available information in their own sphere. It’s not like they didn’t recognize there’s an issue, but it was more like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a problem. But I think it’s handled in these other areas.’ Almost like passing the buck. They didn’t understand, necessarily, where it was handled. And the answer was, it should probably be handled collectively amidst this entire structure,” Kirschbaum said.
The officials also said that while they had planned to review current policies and guidance, they “had not collaborated to address digital profile risks because they did not believe the digital profile threat and its associated risks aligned with the Secretary of Defense’s priorities,” including reviving warrior ethos, restoring trust in the military and reestablishing deterrence by defending the homeland.
“One of our perspectives on this is we know we’re not sure where you would put this topic in terms of those priorities. I mean, this is a pretty clear case where it’s a threat to the stability and efficacy of our military forces. That kind of underlines all priorities — you can’t necessarily defend the homeland with forces that have maybe potential operational security weaknesses. So it would seem to kind of undergird all of those priorities,” Kirschbaum said.
“We also respect the fact that as the department’s making tough choices, whether it’s concentrations of policy, financial and things of that nature, they do have to figure out the most immediate ways to apply dollars. For example, we’re asking the department to look across all those security disciplines and more thoroughly incorporate these threats in that existing process. The extent they’re going to have to make investments in those, they do have to figure out what needs to be done first and where this fits in,” he added.
GAO issued 12 recommendations to individual components and agency heads, but at its core, Kirschbaum said, is the need for the department to incorporate the threat of publicly available information into its existing structure.
“In order to do that, we’re asking them to use those existing structures that they do have, like the security enterprise executive committee, as their collaborative mechanism. We want that body to really assess where the department is. And sometimes they’re better able to identify exactly what they need to do, rather than us telling them. We want them to identify what they need to do and conduct those efforts,” he said.
The post DoD failing to address growing security threats posed by publicly available data first appeared on Federal News Network.
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The core argument: if the U.S. wants to deter adversaries in today’s world of fast-moving threats that include gray-zone coercion, contested logistics and AI-enabled systems, it must accept more acquisition risk as a means to reduce operational risk later.
The Pentagon’s new plan pairs rhetorical urgency with specific structural changes. It proposes killing the legacy Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) and replacing it with a tighter, more centralized alignment, pushing commercial-first solutions even if they deliver an “85% solution” initially and forcing a cultural shift across both DoD and industry toward speed, volume, and continuous iteration. The plan also signals tougher expectations for primes to invest private capital and for government to send longer demand signals. It’s a tall order.
Here’s a look at the key ideas:
Why this matters now
Adversaries are iterating faster, supply chains are brittle, and the U.S. military’s ability to produce and sustain at volume - will decide deterrence credibility. The proposal promises measurable gains in lead times, throughput, and availability, but it also raises hard questions about safety, governance, industry incentives, and the talent pipeline.
In the sections that follow, we pressure-test these claims with former commanders and acquisition leaders: how to set guardrails around “good-enough,” where the new risks are and the impact on the industry.
Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian spoke with General Phil Breedlove (Ret.), Lt. General Mike Groen (Ret) and Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and Stanford Professor Steve Blank, who has recently published a Department of War Program Executive Office directory to help companies better navigate the complicated system for selling to government.
Christian: What was your reaction to last week’s announcement that we heard from the secretary?
Gen. Breedlove retired as the Commander, Supreme Allied Command, Europe, SHAPE, Belgium and Headquarters, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany. He also served as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; and Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff.
General Breedlove: There are things that I really am looking forward to, and there are some things that are a bit worrisome, the way they were rolled out. But you never really know what's going to happen until you start seeing it in action and the changes to the rules for how we do our acquisition.
But make no mistake, our acquisition system to date is moribund. It's horrible. We laugh now about this “Valley of Death” between when something is created in the laboratory and when it gets to the field, six, seven, eight years or more sometimes. And people who are at war and doing this very differently, they're doing it in weeks, sometimes days, but not years. So we definitely have to change.
Part of the reason our acquisition system is so slow is because in our past, maybe even decades and decades ago, people took advantage of the system and they made money in a bad or almost illegal way. And so lawmakers do what lawmakers do, and technocrats and bureaucrats do what they do, and they created layers and layers of oversight to try to protect against some of those bad acts that happened decades ago. And the result is an acquisition system that is completely unresponsive to the needs of the warfighter. And I'm glad that we're starting to change it.
Lt. Gen. Groen served over 36 years in the U.S. military, culminating his career as the senior executive for AI in the Department. Groen also served in the National Security Agency overseeing Computer Network Operations, and as the Director of Joint Staff Intelligence, working closely with the Chairman and Senior Leaders across the Department.
Lt. Gen. Groen: My immediate reaction, like everybody else, when somebody uses the word acquisition, you kind of cringe a little bit. And immediately you get the vent of, it takes too long, it's too expensive, the processes don't work, the people in the processes don't know what they're doing, the long litany of usual complaints. And most of them are actually true. What we have currently, I would articulate, is an unaccountable bureaucracy. It's a professional bureaucracy. They know the process. They build the process. They work the process. But the process doesn't necessarily meet our real war fighting objectives. And I think that is probably the most important thing here.
We'll talk about drones and technology and all these other things, but I think at its core, you actually do have to have a process for this. And just getting the credit cards out and buying stuff at Best Buy doesn't work either, right? So, I think it's a requirement for us. You can't just say, well, we're just gonna blow up all the rules and let people do whatever they want. Because as soon as you do that, you're gonna realize that if we didn't have a system, we wouldn't be able to do all these other things. How do you get to integration? How do you get to common standards? How do you get to the things that actually make weapon systems work effectively and with the caliber of ammunition that they use and the system that produces that and all of the other components? So it's easy, and I've done it probably more than anybody else, to just rant about the acquisition process.
But if you didn't have an acquisition process, you would need to invent one. So, our challenge really today is, okay, the one we have for a lot of reasons is not going to be the one that we will need tomorrow. It does okay on band-aids and making munitions for today. But it is certainly not a kind of process that enables war fighting flow. So I think we are very much at a transformation point, not just in the fact that the way we want to do acquisition must change, but more importantly, the way we do everything, the way we fight must change. And so naturally we have really an incredible opportunity. Let's build the system that enables the kind of fast moving, rapid innovation that we will want on the battlefield: AI driven, data driven. We know what the future looks like. Let's actually build to that and not let unaccountable bureaucracies get in the way.
Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. His book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He created the curriculum for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. At Stanford, he co-created the Department of Defense Hacking for Defense and Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy curriculums. He is co-author of The Startup Owner's Manual.
Blank: It was mind blowing - not because anything the Secretary said was new; they are things that people who are interested in acquisition reform have been asking for the last 10 years. But it was put in a single package and was clearly done by the infusion of people who have actually run large businesses and were used to all the language of organizations that already know how to deliver with speed and urgency.
The part that didn't get said is essentially the Department of War wants to adopt startup innovation techniques of lean iteration, pivots, incremental releases, good enough delivery, and that gets you what the Secretary asked for, which was speed of delivery. But all those are things that we lived with in Silicon Valley for the last 50 years, and it wasn't until we had people who worked outside of buildings with no windows inside the Pentagon to understand that those techniques could actually be applied. And it required blowing up the existing system. And they did that spectacularly well. Very few holes in those proposals.
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Christian: A central piece of the plan as it was explained on Friday is the idea of eliminating the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, which has long been criticized for some of the slow processes and the overly bureaucratic results that we have. The new approach seeks to centralize procurement and funding under the DOD senior leadership. Are you comfortable that this is the right approach?
General Breedlove: So this is one of those, like I opened up with, some good, some bad. There are elements of JCIDS that I think we should hold on to. We shouldn't throw the whole thing out with the bath water. But there are a lot of elements of JCIDS that we need to get rid of.
Much like the rules we just talked about that were created because of people and bad acts for acquisition, the same sort of thing has happened in the process of moving an idea from the lab to the field in that now there are layers and layers of people who can hold up the process or say no. And when they do that, it adds time, schedule delays, more testing, and much more money to the program. And these people bear zero responsibility for their actions. The people that end up getting blamed for the delays and increased costs are the services or the primes. And the people that have this authority now but hold no responsibility for what they do, we've got to get rid of them. We have to ensure that people who have decision authority are held accountable for what they do, to the point of maybe even not charging this off to primes or to the folks who are developing these things. If someone else is out there slowing things down and they don't have to worry about it because they're not accountable to it, we're not in a good place.
Lt. Gen. Groen: One issue is there isn’t a cadre of professionals in DOD leadership that will be able to take this mission on full time. If you consider a broad sweep of what we build and acquire and how we do that, how we innovate, they will just run out of hours in the day and minds to engage in order to build a replacement for what we have today.
The impulse to change the way we do things is the right impulse. Our impulse to be disciplined about the way we go about things, that's also correct. So it's not enough to say “let’s blow it all up, we don't need any rules”. We actually do need rules. Regulation actually is an enabler. It helps you flow. It lets you know how things can be done. That's a really powerful thing.
The problem is with humans involved, there is always a tendency to distort a process through petty bureaucracies, tribalism, ignorance and bad temper. It is really important for leaders to actually lead in this space and create accountability for the people that are actually working. What we have today is a derivative of it. We don't need too many history lessons here, but this is like General Motors in the 1960s, where we started to really do modern industrial design at scale. So if you understand where we’ve come from, you can see how important things like industrial processes and quality checks.
In a digital environment, a transformational environment that is driven by artificial intelligence and data availability, all the notes change. The music changes. And you still need a process for things like money so you can pay people to build things. But we're not building things on a conveyor belt anymore. We're building code. We're building code that changes by the hour. We're building code that builds its own code. This is where we are. So you can't do that in a completely undisciplined way, that says “have at it team and we'll see what we get at the end of the process”. What we’re doing here is too important.
Christian: Part of the new approach will involve increasing acquisition risk, to decrease operational risk with a focus on increased use of commercial solutions and of even fielding 85 % solutions. Where's the red line that you would want as a commander before fielding an 85% solution?
Gen. Breedlove: This is a concept which is extremely hard to criticize. But we have to be pretty serious here because you're saying increasing acquisition risk to decrease operational risk. Well, if the product isn't operational yet and we have increased the purchasing and acquisition risk, and in between that costs us the life of a soldier, sailor, airman, marine or guardian, we have messed it up. So the rules are there for a reason. I completely understand. I absolutely, 100% agree with the fact that we've got to start taking more risk, but we can't do that in a way that is reckless and puts the lives of our troops on the line.
And an example where I think this concept is working well is Ukraine. They get a new drone that is designed to get past a certain capability of the Russian defenses. And why should we do a two-year testing on that thing? If the testing is to fire it into Russia where it's not going to kill any friendlies and see what happens, let's fire it into Russia and get the testing done on the battlefield, where we're less concerned with what happens. So there are ways to shorten and to change the way that we do tests and other things on the acquisition side that gets us faster to the operational side. And if we can do that, again, without raising the risk to our troops, let's go for it. And we're seeing that done well by the Ukrainians, and to some degree by the Israelis.
Lt. Gen. Groen: The first thing that pops in my mind is- What does an 85 % solution look like? What is 85% of a truck? What is 85% of a battleship or a carrier? Pick your system. If you're just doing software, you can do a lot of things in software, but still, software that's 15 % buggy and doesn't work, because you've chosen 85%, that's almost like going right back to the industrial age process flow for code. And I think that the real magic here at its core is transforming the way we do our war fighting. We need new thinking about how to integrate capabilities and new thinking about how to build artificial intelligence modalities and then the systems.
Warfare is changing under our feet right now. Ukraine and drones, I accept that example, but it's so much more than that. We need a complete transformation in the way we understand the enemy, the way we understand our mission, the way we can use autonomy to integrate with humans, the way that we can build robotics, the way that we can now start what I like to call putting the mind of a commander on a pedestal by taking all the data environment and revealing that to a commander and everybody else who is working with the commander so that you have common situational awareness.
The opportunity here is enormous to transform our war fighting to the same degree we're transforming our industries. And you see the transformation every day when you drive through DC or Austin or San Francisco. Transformation is real and it's driving our economy today. What we haven't done is purposefully mapped out how we're going to drive our war fighting capability through this technology. And this is so important because we have to have a plan for how we build operational workflows. Where do we build those? Who builds those? And so I think moving from monitoring a process of manufacturing to really considering war fighting as the core element that the technology springs from.
Christian: Obviously the Pentagon procurement system that we have today is a product of decades of bureaucracy and rules. Are you hopeful that you're going to be able to see the kind of change in the rapid timeline that they've laid forth here?
Blank: Number one, this is a pretty extensive reorganization. Right now the Department of War is siloed between requirements and system centers for testing and prototyping and acquisition, which was the acquisition with a small A with the PEOs and program managers, and then it went to contracts and then it went to sustainment, et cetera. Those were silos. Now we're putting it all underneath a single portfolio acquisition executive. So, instead of making their offices 10,000 people, it's actually a matrix organization, much like a combatant command is. Most of those people will stay in their existing orgs but now be tasked to work on specific portfolios. And instead, the portfolios will no longer be arranged by weapon system. They're going to be arranged, for example, by war fighting concepts or technology concepts, et cetera.
That said, boy, try moving an elephant and making it dance. And at the same time, they recognized - this was one of the genius parts - people won't just get a memo and know what to do. Historically, they've depended on the Defense Acquisition University, which taught them, contracting officers and the rest, how to work with the 5,000 pages of the DFAR and FAR, Federal Acquisition, Defense Acquisition Regulations. One of the unnoticed things was they basically told the Defense Acquisition University, stop teaching that today. You now need to teach people this new methodology. That's not going to happen by telepathy. First of all, we need to train the trainers, then we need to train all the people who've grown up in their career following the paperwork.
So, I predict six months or a year of chaos and confusion. And probably, there's always in a large scale reorganization saboteurs who are angry that their cheese has been moved or worse, their authority has been diminished or the head count went somewhere else. This is going to be no different except maybe at a bigger scale.
In the end, if we pull this off, and I'll explain the only possible reason not to do this, the country will be much better for it. The other obstacle will be if you're on the board of directors and the exec staff of a prime, you're going to go through the 12 stages of denial and grief and whatever because I don't know how many times both Feinberg and Hegseth made it clear that the primes weren't delivering and they weren't investing in the things the country needed and they got used to the system and we were kind of mutually dependent on a broken system - and that's over. Well, you're not going to let your stockholders say you just went home and packed up. Obviously, it's pretty clear that appealing to the Pentagon isn't going to work, but Congress is “coin operated”. This is now going to be a race of lobbying cash from the primes versus lobbying cash for the first time from private equity and venture capital. So it's going to be, who has the biggest pile of cash to influence Congress and the executive branch to keep these rules in place or modify them?
Remember what a disaster this is if you're an existing large company selling to the DOD. It says number one, we're going to buy commercial off the shelf. Number two, we're going to buy commercial off the shelf and then modify it. If and only if either one and two work, we do some bespoke contracting with the existing organization. It's never happened before. Pretty clear, pretty direct. So, the easy thing would be for primes to change their business model. But my prediction is they're going to double and triple down the amount of lobbying and dollars spent.
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Christian: Secretary Hegseth also had some words of warning to the major U.S. defense contractors, the primes, to speed up weapons development and production, invest their own capital to increase capacity, or risk becoming obsolete. This is a relatively complicated issue for these companies. What are your thoughts on this?
General Breedlove: I think that our senior leaders, maybe to include the Secretary of War and others, have sort of allowed the verbiage around this topic to get a little loosey goosey. What happened in the past was that some primes used money out of existing contracts to create excess capacity that then saved them money the next time they had to build new equipment. And our government, Congress and others got tired of that and wrote laws that limit how much money you can spend out of existing contracts to create excess capacity. And the way I understand the laws, most of them are zero. If we pay you to build 100 B-21s and you create a line that could do 120, you're going to jail or you're going to court. And so I think that there's some imprecise language running around and we need to give some of this time to sort out when the dust settles to understand what they're really asking of the primes, because they are limited on one side, fiducially and fiscally, and they're limited on the other side by laws and sometimes regulations that have been created by the regulatory agencies to correct past [behaviors].
I applaud the ideas and the initiative that the Secretary laid out. But to the defense of the primes, they're going to need some regulatory or legal relief to be able to do most of the things being talked about under the new plan. They just can't snap their fingers and say, OK, we're going to do this because then they'll end up in court.
Christian: It's not going to be an overnight process to reboot the Pentagon's procurement system. The Department of Defense is the largest single organization within the US Government. The amount of products and services that flow through that system is enormous. You've clearly laid out the tremendous opportunity that exists to rebuild the system. What are you most worried about? What's the biggest risk that can impede progress as the Pentagon starts this journey?
Lt. Gen. Groen: Tribalism. Tribalism will sink us. We are so horrifically tribal that we can't think like an extended entity. We can't think like a singular organism that is really effective through data and our systems flowing together. Tribalism kills that. And I see it every day. I'm not in the Pentagon every day anymore, but I see it: the tribalism among services, the tribalism among components of services and the tribalism within the department. And all of that tribalism is an afterglow of our industrial might in the 1960s. Now is the time for thinkers that are wearing a uniform, it's not about buying stuff without asking. It's about thinking through the flow that you want to achieve and then building the capabilities that you need to do that. It's a mindset thing, but that’s all about what transformation is. The form changes. And so when we transform, we transform ourselves into this place where we leave that tribalism behind because we have integrated effectiveness.
Working with broad autonomy is gonna help us think that way. I think that there's a broader awareness of what the technology is able to do and how it will facilitate. We just have to be careful to make sure that that's not the end state. Technology is not the end state. It's humans, war fighters who are winning on the battlefield because they understand and they can make the right calls. That's what we're after. And so all of the stuff about acquisition and the rules and why people don't follow the rules and why is it so tribal that we can't get anything to be, I think all of that merits some dynamite, but it also merits some thinking about how do we better integrate our thinking and flows and how do we do that on the battlefield?
Christian: How much of a risk is the next administration coming in and potentially changing everything? And then in particular, if you're one of those big primes, are you baking that into your long-term planning that this might shift in a measurable way in the future? Or do you think these changes are going to be something that is so overwhelmingly positive that future administrations have to stick with it?
Blank: Well, if you were asking me this three years ago, I would have said, well, you should get all this done now because it's going to be flipped back in three years. What's changed now is the amount of capital available for startups, scale-ups, and private equity firms that can match or overpower the lobbying efforts of the primes. So as I said, both the executive branch and Congress are coin operated, even more so now than ever. And for the first time ever, the insurgents have as much or more coin than the incumbents. That's what's going to change this game.
So yes, of course, a Democratic administration or another Republican one might have a different opinion. But in this case, we're talking about piles of money flooding the streets in Washington to try to change the game. Think about who are now sitting in the cabinet. And other places have commercial experience for the first time ever at scale, inside the executive branch for sure and inside the Department of War which changes the nature of the conversation and as we're seeing the types of things they're recommending.
Again, it wasn't that people didn't recognize this before. It was kind of hard to explain this to people who had never run a business or who have been career successful. I've said for years, we had world class organizations, world class people for a world that no longer existed. And finally, we have people who understand what that world should be like because they've been operating in it. Secretary Feinberg has been writing checks of tens of billions of dollars- buying an aircraft carrier, okay, he’s written those kinds of checks before. Tell me who else ever had that position.
And again, it's not that the DOW should run like a corporation or startup, but having that experience sets a bar for what you know is possible for doing extraordinary things. It's what this country knew how to do in World War II and during the Cold War, and we just kind of lost it when Robert McNamara, an ex-chief financial officer of Ford, put in the first version of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System (PPBE) in 1962. We've been operating on that system for 63 years, or some variance of it. Basically, he imposed a chief financial officer's kind of strategy on budgeting and planning, which made sense at the time. It stopped making sense about 15 years ago, but no one inside the building knew what to do differently. That's changed.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
I’ve spent almost two decades living in other countries and can assure you that in most countries, there is no clear path for foreign-born inhabitants to acquire citizenship and hold office. In fact, even buying property is problematic in many of these countries.
Except for the president and vice president, who must be natural-born citizens (Article 11, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution), naturalized citizens can hold offices in the Congress and in federal, state and local governments. Indeed, Madeleine Albright, a naturalized citizen born in Czechoslovakia, was Secretary of State and Henry Kissinger, born in Germany, was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and Elaine Chao, born in Taiwan, was Secretary of Labor and Transportation. These are just a few prominent Americans who became naturalized citizens and went on to serve our country with distinction.
Currently, Ilhan Omar, born in Somalia, is a member of the House of Representatives from Minnesota and Senator Mazie K. Hirono, born in Japan and representing Hawaii, are two of 30 members of the 119th Congress who were not born in the U.S. The list of naturalized Americans who contributed to our nation’s economic growth, academic excellence, athletic prowess and the arts is awe-inspiring. Indeed, our country’s open-door policy has contributed to making the U.S. the “shining city on a hill.”
This open-door policy of legal migration has served our Republic well. What our elected officials must ensure is that we continue to care for all the people and that we ensure that terrorists, narco-traffickers, criminals and state-supported proxies are prevented from entering our country and causing harm to our people and institutions.
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This is a list of just a few of the domestic law enforcement issues requiring immediate attention from federal, state and local authorities, and the representatives elected by the people to ensure that the proliferation of crime in the U.S. is managed on a priority basis.
Despite the efforts of the FBI, DEA, DHS and Treasury, the adaptability of criminal groups and the global nature of technology and finance - and the support of countries determined to cause harm to the U.S. -- makes enforcement increasingly difficult.
The U.S. experiment with an “open door policy” for legal migration to the U.S. has been a great success. It is why the U.S. is the “shining city on a hill.” But we should not take this for granted. We and our elected representatives must work even harder to rid the country of organized crime and defeat our adversaries who wish for us harm.
This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times
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OPINION — Every mission begins with trust. In World War II, the U.S. government trusted private energy producers to deliver aviation gasoline at record scale, and those companies trusted Washington to stand behind them. That compact powered victory. Breaking it now with retroactive lawsuits betrays the trust we need for the challenges ahead.
For more than a century, America’s energy sector has been a vital partner in national defense. During the Second World War, operating under direct federal command, oil and gas companies increased production twelvefold to supply high-octane fuel that carried bombers over Europe, powered the ships that stormed Normandy, and drove the tanks that liberated the continent. As the Trump administration’s Department of Justice later acknowledged, it “was a war of oil,” and American producers supplied the lion’s share. Those barrels were more than statistics. They were the lifeblood of freedom.
Today, those same companies face lawsuits for actions carried out under wartime orders. Louisiana parishes, backed by trial lawyers and supported by Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, are seeking billions in damages. The theory behind these cases is corrosive. It tells American industry that even if you answer the government’s call in wartime, you may still be punished in peacetime. It tells veterans and workers who built the arsenal of democracy that their sacrifice can be rewritten as a liability.
That message strikes at the heart of the compact that binds our military, our industry, and our government. It also directly undermines President Donald Trump’s second-term priorities. His executive orders link military readiness and energy dominance, making clear that abundant domestic energy is a national security imperative.
A strong domestic energy base keeps costs down for American families and ensures that the Pentagon can surge capacity without relying on foreign suppliers. Deterrence depends not only on ships and planes but also on the affordable, reliable fuel that keeps them moving.
Without trust, the supply chain breaks. If refiners hold back on capacity for fear of retroactive liability, where will the Pentagon turn for jet fuel in a crisis? If contractors doubt that obeying federal orders will later be defended in court, how can America count on its industrial base when the nation is under fire?
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A $744 million verdict in one parish case already shows how these lawsuits could drain the capital needed to expand fuel reserves. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff leaders Adm. Michael Mullen and Gen. Richard Myers warned the Court that “our national security depends on encouraging—not discouraging—such private sector assistance.” If the precedent is set against energy companies, it will not stop there. Shipyards, aerospace firms, and logistics providers could also be targeted, leaving America’s armed forces dangerously isolated.
What makes Gov. Landry’s role especially troubling is that he knows better. Once a defender of Louisiana’s energy workers, he now sides with trial lawyers against the very companies that powered both his state’s economy and America’s victories abroad. At a time when China is racing to corner global oil and mineral supplies, Russia is using gas as a weapon, and Iran is funding terror with oil revenues, Gov. Landry’s choice to undermine Louisiana’s energy base is more than short-sighted. It is a betrayal of trust in his constituents, in America’s veterans, and in the compact that has kept this nation secure.
The Supreme Court will soon decide in Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish whether lawsuits tied to wartime production will proceed in federal or state court. The answer must be federal. Only a federal forum can ensure that decisions made under federal authority are not second-guessed by local juries decades later.
America cannot afford to cripple the public-private partnerships that powered victory in the past. The stakes are too high. Louisiana’s energy workers and America’s veterans have always answered the call when the nation needed them. They deserve leaders who will stand with them – at present, Gov. Landry and Attorney General Murrill stand opposed.
Our armed forces do not run on lawsuits. They run on reliable fuel, trust, and readiness. The sacred contract between America’s industry and its defenders must not be broken.
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DEEP DIVE – It’s the opening act in a potential public health nightmare: a chicken dies on a farm, for no apparent reason; another perishes at a farm hundreds of miles away; it takes time for the farm owners to notice, more time for tests to be conducted and different anomalies connected, and before the diagnostics are complete, the damage is done – the first wave of a bird flu pandemic has broken.
Beyond natural outbreaks, there are also concerns involving deliberate acts: This week the Department of Justice charged three Chinese nationals with smuggling biological materials into the U.S.; and in June two Chinese researchers were charged with trying to smuggle a fungus into the U.S. that can devastate grain crops.
Some experts are imagining a world in which technology is harnessed to ensure that such biosecurity nightmares don’t happen – or are dealt with much faster and more effectively.
“What we're promoting is a system that can look at things more holistically and on a much larger scale,” Robert Norton, a professor of veterinary infectious diseases and coordinator of national security and defense projects at Auburn University, told The Cipher Brief. “The system is designed to fill gaps in biosurveillance, looking for disease outbreaks, whether they be naturally occurring or induced through bioterrorism.”
That proposed system has a name – BISR, for Biosurveillance Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance – and its backers believe it would revolutionize the field of biosurveillance. The core concept is that sophisticated sensors and other tools used by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) can be leveraged to improve detection, and that artificial intelligence can be deployed to help fast-track diagnosis. The chicken-farm example is only one scenario; responses to a COVID-19-like outbreak or acts of bioterrorism would be improved as well.
Norton, Daniel Gerstein, a senior policy researcher at RAND, and Cris Young, professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Auburn, co-authored an article last year arguing that the creation of a BISR system was “a national security imperative at the crossroads of technology, public health, and intelligence.” The BISR, they wrote, “would be designed to address two mission-critical requirements for biosurveillance: rapid detection and predictive analysis.”
They have taken their plans to Capitol Hill – specifically, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where they say they have received “good reviews.” The Select Committee wouldn’t comment on the BISR proposal itself but in a statement to The Cipher Brief, a spokesperson said that “The Committee continues to explore various biosecurity initiatives and programs to ensure that the U.S. is postured sufficiently to combat and prevent any future biosecurity threats that could cause widespread harm.” The statement went on to say that the Committee is working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “to establish an Office of Intelligence within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to address threats to U.S. agriculture.”
The threats are clear, to agriculture and beyond. The U.S. remains vulnerable to biologically driven disruption – be it from another COVID-like pandemic, an outbreak of bird flu that reaches humans, or bioterrorism. Anxiety over the latter has grown as experts worry that AI may be used to create dangerous biological pathogens.
At last year’s Cipher Brief Threat Conference, Jennifer Ewbank, a former CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation, warned of “the application of AI in biological weapons by unsavory actors.” And a 2024 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said that the same AI capabilities that might produce medical breakthroughs could – inadvertently or otherwise – lead to the creation of deadly pathogens. AI models may “accelerate or simplify the reintroduction of dangerous extinct viruses or dangerous viruses that only exist now within research labs,” the report found.
How prepared is the U.S. to counter such threats? And might a technology-driven “BISR” system revolutionize biosurveillance, as its backers contend?
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How a “BISR” might work
The crux of the case for a BISR system is twofold: first, that an array of sophisticated data-gathering tools – drones, satellites, hyperspectral sensors and others – can be mobilized to track biosecurity anomalies; and that trained AI models would analyze the data that the system collected. The system’s architects envision a BISR “dashboard” that provides first responders and decision makers in government, the military and business near-real time insight and analysis.
It’s a high-tech effort to gather clues – a change in a community’s waste water, a spike in the sales of certain medications, even the breathing or social behavior of animals – and assess their meaning more rapidly than current systems allow.
“Our system is agnostic,” Norton said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a natural disease outbreak or a terrorism event, it’s looking for those changes and then being able to rapidly detect them and rapidly alert the individuals that are responsible.”
To expand on the chicken-farm scenario: at the moment, one animal’s death might lead a farm worker to call the company veterinarian, the veterinarian would take samples, the farm would look at the flock as a whole, and samples would be brought to laboratories for tests. Ultimately the case might go to a national lab to determine whether avian influenza or another condition was present.
Public health officials say the current system works – but can be slow. Advocates for the BISR system say it would at minimum improve the speed of response, gaining valuable time to determine not only whether a virus was present, but also how it might be circulating in the broader environment. Sensors in and around the poultry houses would track not only a dead chicken, but also the emissions and even behavioral anomalies within the flock – “pattern-of-life” behavior, as the experts say. Any anomaly would be flagged and the system “tipped off,” as Auburn’s Cris Young put it, to alert sensors on other farms.
“The sensors would tip and cue other sensors that would then take a larger look at the larger area or even a state,” Young told The Cipher Brief, “to determine if those signatures coming off of that one particular house that's affected are similar to things happening in other houses.”
Given the sheer volume of data generated by a BISR system, AI models would be used to rapidly assess the data – and check anomalies against specific pathogens.
BISR’s proponents say a similar approach could be taken with viruses among humans, providing more rapid early-warning mechanisms and analysis.
“Advances in sensor capabilities, coupled with the use of AI platforms, provide new capabilities that could be applied to the detection of biological events in the early stages of an outbreak,” the authors of the BISR article wrote. “The concept would provide new tools for early detection, response, mitigations, and ultimately, recovery from an outbreak.”
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The tools of a BISR system
The system’s architects say most of its high-tech elements already exist – sensors in place on poultry farms or in public spaces, and various tools of ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) that are currently used across the IC. These might include multispectral and hyperspectral sensors, and many airborne assets – balloons, drones, aircraft and satellites – that have been used to detect concentrations of gases for national security purposes. The International Space Station, for instance, regularly uses hyperspectral imaging to map the earth’s surface, and the Department of Defense uses hyperspectral imaging for several purposes – including detection of chemical and biological hazards.
Norton cited the example of the IC’s use of satellite imagery to monitor concentrations of nitrate in Afghanistan – because high levels of nitrate often indicated the presence of bomb-making facilities. Nitrate is also a component found in animal waste – and so in the public health example, he said, satellite imagery could be used to monitor levels of nitrate and other compounds on a farm.
Ultimately, BISR’s proponents believe the system could also be used to monitor the volatilome (essentially, what humans and animals breathe out) of people at airports or stadiums or other crowded environments, and alert public health officials about anomalies in the data. Young described a scenario in which international arrivals at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport – the nation’s busiest – would be watched by hyperspectral sensors to detect anomalies in respiration.
“We might have sensors set up in multiple places as [people] disembark from their flight,” Young said. “There might be several places to take a different scan with multiple sensors, and we might be able to say with some certainty, this person is infected with let's say COVID, and this person is actually shedding the virus.”
The hope is that any anomaly – be it on a chicken farm or at a crowded airport – would tip the system to sweep up other relevant information: Have ER visits spiked in a community? Does social media from that community suggest related anomalies? And so forth. Ideally, a dangerous pathogen would be flagged and identified before it leads to a pandemic, or an act of bioterror would be detected at the earliest possible moment.
Michael Gates, CEO of GDX Development, a company that bills itself as “solving very complex national security challenges,” says he joined the BISR effort “from the technology side of the equation.” GDX has worked previously with the U.S. Special Operations Command. Gates says the key to BISR’s success will involve “sensor fusion” – the linking of a range of data-gathering mechanisms.
“If you think about the world of the Internet of Things, everything's a sensor, and there's not very many systems out there that have the ability to collect off of all of those sensors, bring that data payload in, and then push it into a single pane of glass that can be used for military operations, for intelligence sharing or more tactical things,” Gates told The Cipher Brief.
In the chicken farm example, Gates envisions “sensor fusion” ranging from a hyperspectral scan to “available drone assets” and ultimately “zeroing in down to sensors such as temperature, air purification, even cameras monitoring chicken behaviors.”
Once a problem has been identified, Gates said, “you can use open-source intelligence and other things to mine, let's say, a Reddit form for these things – is anybody talking on the internet about their chicken coops having issues? – and so on, for whatever the issue is.”
“There's already enough sensors out there,” he added. “The data is there. What's happening is that information's not being shared. It's not being centralized, meaning we're getting delayed responses...Nobody has a holistic picture right now on biosurveillance.”
In the early stages of a crisis, the BISR might do a lot of work before humans are engaged, though the Auburn professors stress that the system aims only to provide experts a head start, rather than cut them out of the proverbial “loop.”
“We support human-in-the-loop artificial intelligence systems,” Young said. “We want there to be a person that has to look at this screen at some point and say, okay, I understand what's going on here. Maybe that happens within minutes of an anomaly occurring, but regardless, at some point a person needs to decide, Yes, that's what this is, or No, we need further information.”
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The challenges
Norton and Young say they have presented their plans to the House Select Committee and are prepared to do the same to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). They believe their system can be 80 percent complete in three years and fully functional in five. As for costs, they say the first two years would require a budget of $10 million, and that the system’s operating costs would eventually be $300 million annually. They argue that billions of dollars have been spent in the biosurveillance domain, and that the BISR would be a major upgrade over existing capabilities.
It may sound like a no-brainer – the smart use of technology to guard against myriad biosecurity threats – but questions abound about BISR and its future. And many of the hurdles to its implementation involve, in one way or another, the human element.
Just as the Intelligence Community has struggled at times to share information and assess national security risks, the government architecture in biosurveillance is complex and often siloed. A host of agencies share responsibility for the nation’s biosecurity – the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), to name a few. Experts say they don’t always communicate effectively with one another – and that states don’t always share critical information effectively with the federal government.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, noted that in the most recent bird flu outbreak in the U.S., some states wanted to handle the information and response without involving the federal government.
“They weren't even very interested in USDA at times,” Inglesby told The Cipher Brief. “So they said, we'll handle this on our own and we'll let you know. Meanwhile, CDC has to wait for states to bring them the data and information. They don't have command authority to say you must deliver it. It's a voluntary basis.”
Norton says the BISR developers are hoping to partner with one “Mother Ship” agency within the IC – he wouldn’t say which one – because the IC controls the government’s most sophisticated satellites and other data-gathering systems. He also said that while the system involves high-tech elements and the building of the BISR “dashboard,” technology isn’t the primary hurdle.
“Biosurveillance is not a technology problem, but rather a permissions and authorities problem,” Norton said. That might involve permission to use a Pentagon satellite for biosecurity purposes, he said, or agreement from a major industrial farm to share its data or house sensors on its property.
Inglesby said that transparency and information-sharing would be critical for a BISR-like system to work – and that in the case of the chicken farm example, key stakeholders might be unwilling to cede control of the analytical process to a BISR “dashboard.”
“You have the farm owner who will want to make his or her own assessment, you have local government that may not want outsiders coming in and making a determination for them, and you might have unwillingness even at the federal level to do this,” Inglesby said. “You’re going to need an across-the-board buy-in that we haven’t always seen.”
There are also questions about technical implementation. In the Atlanta airport example, Norton acknowledged that even a highly sophisticated hyperspectral sensor wouldn’t be able to detect, say, COVID-19, unless passengers were directed to a discrete area close to the sensors – and here again, permissions would be needed to install such sensors. The post-COVID atmosphere has suggested less public appetite in the U.S. for intrusive screening, not more. The House Select Committee, in its statement to The Cipher Brief, included a reference to “ensuring any proposal balances privacy and the need to avoid the abuses of the COVID-19 period.”
Inglesby also stressed the importance of transparency on the global stage when it comes to public health crises. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, China failed to share the detailed casework of its first 500 patients in the “ground-zero” city of Wuhan – and more than five years later, it still hasn’t done so.
“In Wuhan, the data was very available, there were a lot of people dying, but the data was covered up,” Inglesby said. “And so even if you had installed the most sophisticated systems, if they're being run by people who don't want to share that information, it's not going to change anything.”
Some early-warning biosurveillance systems are already in place, in the world of what’s known as “Syndromic Surveillance” – and experts say many have worked well.
The CDC’s BioSense platform gathers health-related data from hospitals and clinics to detect potential outbreaks or bioterrorism events. As a part of BioSense, "Sentinel Alerts" are generated when reports involve high-concern viruses or diseases. In the case of influenza (the human variant), alerts are triggered when more than 3 % of ER visits are for the flu. Globally, satellites have been used to track dengue fever outbreaks by measuring water levels in the jungle. And wastewater surveillance systems exist to check on levels of bacteria or viruses.
A less positive precedent is the BioWatch program, which was created by DHS in 2001 and billed as "the nation's first early warning network of sensors to detect biological attack." The system tracks the air supply using Environmental Protection Agency air filters, and sends information to the CDC and – if warranted, to the FBI. The system has been blamed for generating dozens of false positives, and in an audit reported by the Associated Press in 2021, BioWatch was said to have failed in detecting known threats.
Norton told The Cipher Brief that today’s technologies are sophisticated enough to ensure that BISR would operate at a higher level than BioWatch. He added that rigorous standards in the AI models would “prevent AI hallucinations” that could cause false positives – or worse, false negatives.
And Inglesby was quick to note that any improvements in early warning and diagnostics would be welcome.
“There is no single system in the country, and people have been talking about building stronger biosurveillance for a long time,” he said. “Anything you can get done in this space would be super-valuable, assuming the costs aren’t prohibitive and you get the buy-in to use this information wisely.”
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OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTiVE — According to reports, the Trump administration informed Congress that the ongoing hostilities against alleged narco-terrorist groups does not fall within the scope of the War Powers Resolution (WPR). As a result, the administration does not believe the President’s authority to continue to wage this military campaign is in any way constrained by the law.
Trump is building on an interpretation of the law first advanced by the Obama administration to avoid WPR compliance in relation to the U.S. involvement in the NATO campaign against Libya in 2011. This interpretation posits that the WPR is inapplicable to hostilities that fall below the level of large-scale ‘war’ and involve minimal risk of U.S. casualties. Yet ironically, President Trump’s assertion of inherent constitutional authority to start and continue this military campaign is exactly what the law was intended to cover.
Enacted into law in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution was motivated by congressional determination to prevent future presidents dragging the nation into a war incrementally. The context was obvious: Vietnam. For a super-majority of legislators, that conflict began and slowly expanded under the same premise: presidential assertions of inherent constitutional authority to commit small numbers of U.S. armed forces to low-level operations with limited risk: first as advisors, then to engage in limited direct action, then through ‘limited risk’ air operations. What evolved was an escalation that most of these legislators believed was inconsistent with both presidential assurances and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – the statutory use of force authorization Congress enacted in 1965 to empower the President to respond to subsequent North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. assets. From 1964 to 1967, the number of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam had escalated from approximately 25,000 to almost 500,000.
Nothing in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution limited that escalation, and over the years Congress continued to provide presidents with the money and manpower to wage the war. Yet it was a different lesson from that experience that provided the true motivation for the WPR: the undeniable reality that it is far more difficult for Congress to force an end to a war than it is to prevent (or limit it) from inception.
Voting to cut off funding for an ongoing conflict is certainly a tool in the congressional arsenal to check presidential assertions of war power, but in the context of ongoing hostilities it is unrealistic to expect it will be useful. To begin with, restricting existing appropriations would require a veto-proof super-majority in both the House and Senate. But even mustering a simple majority to deny a continuation of appropriations for ongoing hostilities is politically unrealistic as it will be perceived as ‘abandoning’ or ‘betraying’ troops in the field.
The conflict in Southeast Asia proved this. Even after Congress revoked the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, it continued to provide fiscal and human resources in support of hostilities. And when service-members asked federal courts to rule that the President lacked constitutional authority to order them to war, judges consistently ruled that this continued support demonstrated joint action by the President and Congress, satisfying the Constitution’s war powers equation. Even when Congress enacted a Bill to cut off all funding for the bombing campaign in support of the Cambodian military’s struggle against the Khmer Rouge, President Nixon’s veto threat and the accordant compromise that extended that funding was enough to lead a federal appeals court to reach the same conclusion. In short, unless Congress could muster a sufficient majority to override a presidential veto and enact law prohibiting continued operations, a president’s unilateral decision to commit the nation to a conflict would effectively put Congress in a straitjacket.
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It was against this background the WPR was enacted. At its foundation is the assertion that the President’s authority to commit “United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances” requires either express statutory authorization (a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force) or “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” As a result, the law includes several essential provisions:
· The President must report any such commitment to congressional leadership within 48 hours.
· Once reported (or when such a report was required), the President has 60 days to persuade Congress to support the operation by enacting express statutory authority.
· If Congress fails to enact such an authorization, the operation must terminate (unless Congress grants the President a 30-day extension to bring the operation to an end).
· Congress may order termination of an operation at any time by concurrent resolution (a majority vote by the Senate and the House with no opportunity for a presidential veto).
· Congressional authorization may not be inferred from any appropriation or other law unless it expressly authorizes the operation.
· Nothing in the WPR – to include the 60-day grace period provision – may be interpreted as a grant of authority to the President to commit U.S. forces to hostilities or imminent hostilities.
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From inception, presidents (and many experts) have criticized the WPR as self-contradictory, most notably because it also includes a provision that indicates nothing in the law “is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President…” These critics argue the law does just that by unconstitutionally intruding upon the inherent war powers vested in the President and the prerogative of Congress to indicate support for presidential war powers initiatives by implication. And there are other defects. For example, the law omitted the well-established inherent authority of presidents to use military force to rescue U.S. nationals abroad (the Senate version included such a provision but it was removed during conference negotiations). And the provision allowing Congress to order termination of an ongoing military operation by concurrent resolution arguably runs afoul of a subsequent Supreme Court decision invalidating what is known as a legislative veto – use of a concurrent resolution to revoke a delegation of authority to the President enacted by law (although there is a question of whether the WPR concurrent resolution provision falls into that category as it is not withdrawing any prior statutory delegation of authority).
And then there is the so-called 60-day clock, perhaps the most misunderstood and at the same time perplexing provision of the law: misunderstood because it is often asserted as a statutory grant of authority to the President to conduct any military operation for up to 60 days (which contradicts Section 8 of the WPR); perplexing because if it is not a grant of authority, then what exactly did it mean?
The answer to the second question is ironically highlighted by the current counter-narcotic military campaign. Because it may not be interpreted as an express grant of constitutional authority to engage in hostilities (or situations of imminent hostilities), it is best understood as a failsafe – an acknowledgment that presidents will likely initiate combat operations on the belief they are acting pursuant to constitutional authority. If they do so, however, the law requires such an assertion of authority be validated by express congressional endorsement within 60 days. If a President is unable to secure such validation, congressional inaction functions as opposition, requiring termination of the operation.
There are, of course, problems with this equation. First, from a president’s perspective, if he is acting pursuant to valid constitutional authority on day 59, how does it evaporate on day 61? And if it was valid on day 59, a mere statute cannot dictate its invalidity. Second, there is something troubling about allowing Congress to require a president to terminate a military operation by inaction. Finally, as noted above, this provision ignores the frequently utilized congressional practice of expressing its support for a presidentially initiated military campaign by implication – primarily through funding and providing necessary resources (including manpower). Examples include not only the Korean War, but also the two post-WPR campaigns that exceeded 60 days without express statutory authorization: the Serbian air campaign in 1999, and the Libyan air campaign in 2011.
Nonetheless, the process of at least seeking congressional endorsement of a military campaign that extends beyond 60 days acknowledges a critically important premise: that the Constitution diffuses war powers between Congress and the President. While the requirement for express statutory authorization may have been constitutionally overbroad from inception of the WPR, seeking some manifestation of congressional support preserves this important war powers balance between the two political branches. Perhaps more importantly, it acknowledges the Congress’ constitutional authority to impose limits on – or even prohibit – commitment of the nation to hostilities.
Instead of acknowledging this shared constitutional role in authorizing war, the Trump administration is staking a claim of unilateral presidential authority. Because we are told there is little risk of U.S. casualties, Congress ostensibly has no role, and the WPR is inapplicable. But it is precisely because, “From small things, big things someday come” that Congress enacted the WPR. Acknowledging a congressional role now – while perhaps not necessarily express authorization – will advance the necessity that the administration make its case for the necessity, morality, and legality of this campaign before the representatives of We the People; give Congress the opportunity to exercise its constitutional role in war powers; and most importantly protect the nation from being dragged, incrementally, into a war Congress may find near impossible to get us out of.
This is a genuine War Powers Resolution moment.
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DEEP DIVE – By any traditional definition, the city of Ryazan doesn’t belong on a list of battlegrounds in the Ukraine war. There are no Ukrainian soldiers or tanks deployed there, and it’s in western Russia, roughly 600 miles from the active front lines of Pokrovsk or Kupiansk.
But residents and officials in Ryazan – population 550,000 – wouldn’t be surprised to find their city on such a list. Ukraine has attacked Ryazan at least a half dozen times, as part of an escalating drone-and-missile campaign against Russia’s oil sector. Most recently, an oil refinery in Ryazan – Russia’s fourth-largest – was forced to shut down after an Oct. 23 attack by Ukrainian drones.
Ryazan is hardly alone.
Lt. Gen. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, said last week that Ukraine has carried out more than 160 successful attacks on Russian refineries and other energy targets this year; an Open Source Centre investigation identified more than 90 strikes between Aug. 2 and Oct. 14. In the last week alone, Ukraine has struck an oil terminal and tanker in Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse; energy facilities in Russia's Oryol, Vladimir, and Yaroslavl regions; and the Koltsevoy, or “ring,” pipeline, which links refineries in Moscow, Ryazan, and Nizhny Novgorod, and supplies fuel to the Russian military. Earlier strikes damaged one of Russia's biggest oil refineries near St. Petersburg, and perhaps most impressive – from the Ukrainian point of view – the campaign has reached as far as the Siberian city of Tyumen, some 1200 miles east of Moscow.
Stretching the conventional notion of front lines is clearly part of the Ukrainian strategy; the strikes have forced the Kremlin to worry about drone and missile attacks across a broad swath of Russian territory. But the main aim is to hurt the Russian oil sector – the country’s richest revenue source, and a key reason why the Kremlin has been able to maintain the funding of its war machine.
“Ukraine’s theory of victory now includes destroying Russia’s energy sector,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, told The Cipher Brief. “They’ve developed capabilities that can reach great distances with precision, exposing Russia’s vulnerability – its inability to protect critical infrastructure across its vast landscape.”
Last week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to intensify the pace and scope of the campaign. “We must work every day to weaken the Russians. Their money for the war comes from oil refining,” Zelensky said in an Oct. 27 address to the nation. “The most effective sanctions - the ones that work the fastest - are the fires at Russia’s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots.”
Zelensky also noted that 90 percent of the strikes have been carried out by Ukrainian-made drones and missiles – a not-so-subtle message to Europe and the U.S.: get us more of your long-range weapons, and we can help bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
“It’s very impressive,” said Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat and analyst for RPolitik, said of Ukraine’s campaign against the Russian energy sector. In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Jarabik said the attacks have “had an impact in terms of getting headlines, making the Russian war effort more expensive, and creating shortages so the Russian people feel the pain of the war.”
That’s also the aim of the recent U.S. sanctions against energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil, the first American economic penalties imposed on Russia since Donald Trump returned to office. The Treasury Department said the sanctions would “increase pressure on Russia’s energy sector and degrade the Kremlin’s ability to raise revenue for its war machine.”
While Ukrainian officials have welcomed the sanctions, they have also said that their drone and missile attacks pack a more powerful punch.
“Our strikes have already had more impact than sanctions,” Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of Military Intelligence, said on Telegram following last week’s spate of attacks.
For their part, Putin and other Russian officials have downplayed the impact of the strikes while at the same time warning that they are dangerously escalatory. The Kremlin has also said that neither the attacks nor the sanctions will move them to change course in the war.
Experts say both sides may be right – that in the short term, the Kremlin can probably ride out the impact of the Ukrainian campaign, but that Russia may feel significant pain if the sanctions are enforced and the oil sector strikes continue.
“Russia’s oil refineries are a bit like a man who is being repeatedly punched,” Sergey Vakulenko, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in a recent assessment for Carnegie Politika. “He will not die from one punch, or even half a dozen punches. But it becomes harder and harder for him to recover after each subsequent blow. Although no single punch is fatal, he could end up being beaten to death.”
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Assessing the damage
To date, the Ukrainian strikes have hit 21 of Russia's 38 large oil refineries, according to the BBC, and several have been struck more than once. Roughly 20% of the nation’s refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed, and last month the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that Russia's revenues from crude oil and refined products had fallen to their lowest level in a decade – excluding the period immediately following the COVID-19 outbreak.
"Persistent attacks on Russian energy infrastructure have cut Russian crude processing by an estimated 500,000 barrels per day, resulting in domestic fuel shortages and lower product exports," the IEA said. In an accompanying forecast, the agency said that if the sanctions remain in place and the attacks continue – even without Zelensky’s promised scaling-up of their cadence – the impact to Russia’s refining would stretch to at least mid-2026.
Beyond the macroeconomic impact, the Ukrainian campaign has also been felt by Russian citizens, in the form of higher fuel prices and – in some regions – shortages and long lines for gas.
“The economic impact of strikes against Russian energy infrastructure is beginning to be felt outside of Moscow, as Russia diverts available energy from the regions to keep Moscow supplied,” Rob Dannenberg, a former chief of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division, wrote last week in The Cipher Brief. “There are shortages and energy price hikes that the Kremlin can no longer conceal.”
And in a broader reflection of Russia’s economic woes, this week the central bank downgraded the country’s growth forecast. Experts say the sanctions and Ukrainian strikes are a big part of the problem for Moscow.
“Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure are strategically meaningful and increasingly so,” Jacek Siewiera, a former head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, told The Cipher Brief. He said the strikes are serving three strategic functions: forcing Russia to divert efforts to rear-area defense; raising the overall cost of war by creating new logistical costs inside Russia; and a less tangible, more symbolic impact.
“These attacks send a message to Moscow and its economy that Ukraine – and its backers – can reach deep,” Siewiera said. “That has symbolic as well as material value.”
What comes next
Might the Ukrainian campaign alter the course of the war? Experts are divided on the question.
On the one hand, dozens of Russian oil sector targets are now within reach of Ukrainian missiles and drones – and it’s clear that Zelensky’s vow to expand and intensify the campaign is underway. An already-bruised industry in Russia is surely girding for more punishment.
But several experts said that in order to sustain the tempo and volume of the attacks, Ukraine will need help from the West or a significant boost to its own capabilities.
“Ukraine has made impressive inroads but it’s not yet clear whether the strikes will fundamentally degrade Russia’s war-fighting capacity,” Siewiera said. He and others echoed Zelensky’s point – that the West should support Ukraine’s deep-strike capabilities to boost the impact of the current attacks, and improve the odds that they will effect change in Moscow. Until then, Siewiera said, it’s unlikely that the campaign can deliver “a knockout blow.”
Jarabik agreed, noting that Ukrainian drones typically carry payloads of only 50-60 kilograms (roughly 110-130 pounds); long-range missile systems can inflict far greater damage. He and others said that much will depend on the success of the Ukrainian-made Flamingo missile – which has been touted as a homegrown alternative to western long-range weapons. Officials say the Flamingo is now operational, and that it can carry more than 1,000 kilos (2000+ pounds), with a range of roughly 1800 miles.
“I think we are going to see the Ukrainian strikes increasing,” Jarabik said. “The big question here is whether Ukrainians are going to have the missile capabilities to scale the attack.” At the current rate, he said, Ukraine cannot compel the Kremlin to alter its approach. “So far, neither the sanctions nor this (campaign of strikes) is actually enough to bring the end of the war. Russia has the means to continue.”
All those interviewed for this piece agreed that the success of the Ukrainian campaign will depend on whether Ukraine can hit more targets, more frequently, and with heavier payloads.
“As Ukraine continues to improve its long-range precision strike capability – and if the West adds its own weapons to Ukraine’s arsenal – the impact is going to increase significantly,” Lt. Gen. Hodges said. And that, he said, “could lead to a successful outcome for Ukraine.”
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OPINION — “What should the U.S. role in the world be right now? We're waiting for the [Trump administration] National Security Strategy to come out from the White House, which should come out in the next couple of months, which will be really interesting to see what they have to say. We are in the post-post-Cold War world. You know we had that brief period at the end of the Cold War when it was like, yeah, we won, everything's good -- and then no it's not. So now we're like accepting that it is a complicated world. So what role do we play?”
That was Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) last Wednesday as The Brookings Institution’s keynote speaker at the 2025 Knight Forum on Geopolitics. Elected to Congress in 1996, Rep. Smith has served on the House Armed Services Committee since 1997. He was committee chairman from 2019-to-2023, and today is the ranking Democrat. He has also previously served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Smith, who has focused on national and international security strategy during most of his 28 years in Congress, is someone I believe should be listened to in this controversial time in our history. And during his Brookings appearance, he not only touched on the key issues today, but also put them in an historic context that makes for a better understanding of them.
For example, Rep. Smith said, “We did a masterful job in my humble opinion post World War II of figuring out what is our role in the world and then playing that role to a very effective degree. It's not perfect. Certainly there were mistakes. I think we need to do that again. And the number one biggest theme for me is we have to get rid of the idea that we are going to dominate the rest of the world.”
Instead, he said, “We have to be engaged, but we have to embrace the idea of a multi-polar world that we can influence, but not control. And that I think was the biggest downside to the end of the Cold War -- it gave us grandiose ambition, delusions of grandeur, if you will, and the notion that our mission was to make sure that no pure competitor emerged. You remember that philosophy? That's a really hard thing to do. We're not going to be able to do it, just like we're not going to be able to defeat China.”
So how does Rep. Smith suggest we deal with China?
“We really need to talk with China,” he emphasized last week. “I think the relationship with China is the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world right now and will be for decades to come. The two most powerful economies [and] increasingly pretty close to the two most powerful militaries, as China has ramped up [militarily]. And I think we need to find a way to get along with China.”
However, he said, “The focus in Washington D.C. is very much how do we beat China? And that you see in Congress all the time. You certainly see it from the [House] China Select Committee. What I want to know is what is our plan for coexisting with China? Because that's what we're going to have to do. We're not going anywhere. They're not going anywhere.”
Rep. Smith acknowledged that China, along with what he called the “cringe” people -- Russia, Iran and North Korea – are threats. But, he added, “of that group, China is the most invested in a global order. I mean, their economy is dependent upon it. They have slightly different views for how that global order should be run. But we are a lot closer to aligned in that than we are certainly with Russia or North Korea or Iran or your average ISIS or al-Qaeda [terrorist] group. So I think there was an opportunity there to have a dialogue with China that could bring the tension down and get to a better relationship.”
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At another point, Rep. Smith said, “If China wants those [global order] rules to be changed to help them, they're going to have to show that they're something other than a belligerent aggressive actor just trying to gobble up as much as they can gobble up. Because people forget we had to do a lot of crap that was just helping other people, all right? You know, the Marshall Plan in Europe, we rebuilt Japan, earthquakes, tsunamis all over the world. You know, we've done that. You know, that's part of it. All right, China, you want to be the big global player. Part of it is not just looking at the rest of the world as a resource opportunity. Not that we haven't done that, too, but we've balanced that out with helping people.”
Rep. Smith described something he said “the Biden administration did really, really well… I know there are a lot of people who are critical of a lot of different things the Biden administration did, but the alliances that we built up around China during his Presidency were really consequential and very important. Certainly, the Quad with Japan, Australia, India and the U.S. was important. Japan has become a much better partner. South Korea, the Philippines, these are areas where we built partnerships that strengthened us.”
“China looks at the U.S. and sees us as having three great advantages,” Rep. Smith said. “One, we got partners and alliances that no other nation in the world has. Two, we do research better than anybody. And three, people want to come here. You know, we're damaging all three of those to one degree or another at the moment. But taking advantage of those partnerships and alliances to strengthen ourselves, I think needs to be part of the solution.”
He went on saying, “Maintaining and building on those partnerships is crucial. Obviously, [President] Trump has a slightly different approach, more confrontational. I worry about how that's going to impact it.”
Noting that President Trump “has a slightly different approach, more confrontational,” and was at that moment in Asia “trying to patch that up,” Rep. Smith advised, “I would say figure out how to get along with China, maintain and build alliances with as many other nations in that part of the world as possible.”
“But I would love to see a world 10, 20, 30 years from now,” Rep. Smith said, “where China and the U.S., if there's some disaster in the world, if there's a famine, if there's a natural disaster, if there's just a country that's infrastructure is crumbling, are sitting at the same table talking about how do we handle this? Okay, that is a better world. Now, to get there, we have to get off of this zero sum competition.”
It was in dealing with allies and partner countries that Rep. Smith said, “Trump came in with his uniquely bullying approach to try to get them [allies and partner countries] to do more. And what I worry about there is if you're just trying to get them to do more as part of a collective understanding of what our national security interests are -- great. You know, be as aggressive as you have to be, make it work. But there is considerable concern that isolationism is pushing Trump's viewpoint as much as a desire for greater burden sharing, which is to say, ‘We don't care. We're out. Good luck.’"
“That is where we don't want to go,” Rep. Smith said, “And that's where a lot of the Trumpian rhetoric is troubling to me because on the Trump side…is the argument that somehow the
United States of America has been taken advantage of for the last 80 years. All these European countries, these Asian countries, we provided security to them. I think [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth had the unique way of saying it, you know, Uncle Sam shouldn't be Uncle Sucker.”
Rep. Smith explained, “Those partnerships, those alliances that we built benefited us more than any other country in the world. We had the biggest, most powerful economy ever because we had a relatively peaceful world. We had a lot of partners and friends. We weren't doing it out of some generosity. We didn't want to be dragged into another world war, which would be costly to us. And we wanted a reasonably prosperous world to do business with. That's what we wanted.
And that's what we got. Now how we divided that wealth back here at home has certainly raised some issues, but the basic point is that we generated a very robust global economy that we benefited from.”
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Pointing out that after WWII, “we didn't want those countries [Germany, Japan] building up their militaries and doing more, because we saw how that had played out over the course of the previous thousand years,” Rep. Smith said. But, he added, “We're right now in the midst of a huge debate over the U.S. presence in Eastern Europe, and are we going to maintain it? A lot of mutterings…[are] that we're going to be pulling out, which can undermine the [NATO] alliance. So, I'm worried about it.”
His worry, he said, “is this administration going to remain committed to the concept of why these alliances are important, not just for our partners, but for us as well?”
But Rep. Smith explained, “Now is not the time to signal weakness to [Russian President] Vladimir Putin in Eastern Europe. Now, that's kind of hard to argue with, so why are they doing it? And that gets back to sort of the concern about their world view. The way they [the Trump administration officials] try to pitch it is we can only do so many things at once. So we're trying to prioritize in different places.”
Rep. Smith went on, “I guess the argument there would be they're prioritizing in Asia. But the world is connected. Sorry, but what's happening in Europe has a profound impact on what's
happening [in Asia]. In fact, you know, if we want to stop China from being overly aggressive in terms of taking the territory of other nations and militarily, the single best thing we can do is make sure that Putin fails in Ukraine, to make it clear that that type of aggression to expand territory doesn't work. So, we're not helping Asia by looking weak in Eastern Europe.”
Rep. Smith also looked at other parts of the world.
He said, “Israel's consistent effort, with our help through multiple administrations, [led to] weakening Hezbollah, you know, weakening Hamas and weakening Iran, certainly put them in a vastly weaker position as a regional player. And [that] has created the opportunity to get a stable government in Syria and a stable government in Lebanon and an increasingly stable government in Iraq.”
He added. “That's where we want to get to. And we've made a large amount of progress on that. Now again, Donald Trump is going to take absolutely 100% of the credit for that. and he deserves maybe five percent of the credit for that. But that puts us in a better position on that.”
Closer to home, Rep. Smith said, “I do worry about the Trumpian Monroe Doctrine approach here. We're spending a heck of a lot of money out of the [U.S.] military to secure a border that Trump says is already secure. That is a distraction financially. Then, picking a war with Venezuela and Colombia and randomly blowing up people down in the Caribbean, in the Pacific -- that's expensive, destabilizing, and I don't see it having the positive impact that they claim it is. And it also undermines our credibility if we are engaging in what most of the world views as extrajudicial killings.”
I must add here as a closing, something Rep. Smith said two days later during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s the best summation I’ve seen of all the issues involved in the Trump administration’s self-started drug war.
“Basically,” Rep. Smith said, “the President of the United States has decided that he will institute the death penalty for drug dealing. Now that’s an interesting policy question. It’s been debated. There are some countries that have gone to different places on it, but it is not a policy question that we’ve had in the United States of America. That’s not legal. That’s not something we’ve decided to do. Not only has the President of the United States decided to circumvent all of that, and say, ‘Yes we’re going to have the death penalty,’ but he’s decided to do it without any due process. He’s appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. And who are they targeting? From what we can glean from the briefing yesterday [last Thursday by Pentagon officials], and what they have said publicly, there are 24 different narco-terrorist groups, as they called them. We have no details on who’s in the 24. But it’s also, not just the people who are part of the 24 drug cartels, but anyone who is affiliated with the drug cartels which also comes with not much of a definition.”
Rep. Smith concluded, “So the President basically empowers himself to use the United States military to do lethal strikes against tens-of-thousands of ill defined people without the oversight [needed]. That is a clear abuse of power and a massive expansion of the power for the President of the United States and I believe that undermines the Constitution and the rule of law to people who care about those things anymore.”
I fully agree.
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DEEP DIVE — Eight weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to Mexico City, the epicenter of the global illegal drug trade, and declared, “The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations.”
Since then, the administration’s military counter-drug offensive in Latin America and the Caribbean has destroyed at least 15 small boats and killed at least 61 people – but none of them were drug kingpins or senior, irreplaceable figures in the transnational organized crime cartels that make and move fentanyl and other lethal opioids that have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“Targeting fast boat operators will not stop major drug trafficking kingpins from sending multi-ton quantities of drugs to our country and around the world,” Michael Chavarria, a former DEA supervisor who spent 26 years investigating drug cartels in Mexico, the Caribbean and the Southwest border, told The Cipher Brief. “The drug trade is the most profitable business in the world, without equal. The minions currently targeted on the high seas will continue risking their lives because kingpins pay them more than they could ever earn pursuing legal options. Now, on the high seas, they’re being extrajudicially murdered, in a campaign that will have no impact on the global drug trade.”
Like other veterans of the DEA, Chavarria suspects that if the boats blown up so far contained contraband, it was likely marijuana or cocaine, a stimulant manufactured in Colombia from coca plants grown in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Many of the small boats plying the Caribbean are believed to be supplying the European market, where cocaine brings double or triple U.S. prices. While hardly benign, cocaine is not considered a major overdose danger, and it has fallen out of fashion among many American drug users, who have increasingly turned to far riskier substances — particularly fentanyl, a synthetic opioid painkiller much stronger than heroin, and the synthetic stimulant methamphetamine. Both are manufactured mostly in Mexico, in cartel “superlabs,” with precursor chemicals imported from China and India.
“I doubt these decisions [to attack small boats] involve input from DEA leadership, who I believe serve the American public as best as resources allow,” Chavarria said. “Instead, let’s focus on the Chinese fentanyl sources responsible for threatening our citizens’ lives. The new deadly triangle is China-Mexico-United States.”
Despite objections from Congress, legal scholars and foreign governments, President Trump has announced he may soon authorize strikes inside Venezuela. Many experts believe his agenda in that country is about forcing President Nicolas Maduro out of office, rather than stopping drugs, because Venezuela is not known for producing massive quantities of illegal drugs. The U.S. government's most authoritative annual intelligence assessments – the Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment and the State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy Report – characterize Venezuela as a transshipment hub. Maduro himself and a number current and former Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 for conspiring with Colombia’s leftist FARC insurgents to transport cocaine produced in the guerillas’ jungle labs in Colombia.
The problem is in Mexico
The world’s richest, most powerful drug lords are Mexican citizens, with well-armed private armies, dynasties and bases of operations nestled deep in the Mexican countryside. Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has absolutely ruled out the idea of American boots on Mexican soil. Will the U.S. defy her wishes by ordering American armed drones or special operations teams into Mexico to conduct unilateral commando raids? So far, Trump and his senior advisors have not signaled that such incursions are imminent – but they’ve never said never. In Ecuador two months ago, Rubio said the administration would continue to target and kill suspected traffickers without their homelands’ consent, if those countries didn’t participate in Trump’s new war on drugs by mounting their own attacks on cartels. “For cooperative governments, there’s no need because those governments are going to help us,” he said. “They’re going to help us find these people and blow them up, if that’s what it takes.”
Mexican security forces have repeatedly tried and failed to arrest El Mencho, real name Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, Mexico’s kingpin of kingpins. Oseguera is the 59-year-old founder and leader of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Mexico’s, and the world's most successful and feared organized crime enterprise. The CJNG, which emerged from the western state of Michoacán, famed for its avocados, is now a multinational billion-dollar business with a presence in nearly every state in the U.S.and at least 40 countries, according to DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment. The U.S. has put a $15 million bounty on Oseguera’s head.
“The CJNG is probably the wealthiest criminal group in the world, maybe even more than the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] in Iran,” Paul Craine, formerly DEA’s regional director for Mexico, Central America, and Canada, told The Cipher Brief. “It’s the biggest terrorist organization in the Western hemisphere. The CJNG is now right on the border, which no one ever expected. Plus, they have the U.S. infiltrated with their elements for smuggling guns, drugs and other businesses.”
Reward poster for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of “El Mencho”. (State Department)
In second place is the older, fragmented but still powerful Sinaloa cartel. Sinaloa cartel leaders Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesus Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as the Chapitos, are sons of the infamous cartel founder Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, now serving time in a U.S. prison. They are credited with creating the fentanyl craze by promoting it in their distribution systems, alongside cocaine, meth and marijuana. The U.S. is offering rewards of $10 million apiece for them.
In an interview with The Cipher Brief, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Tex., who recently led the Congressional task force on cartels to Mexico to confer with Sheinbaum’s senior security officials, said he would not advise Trump to try a unilateral incursion on Mexican soil without that nation’s full agreement and active participation. Such an act would explicitly violate the two nations’ joint agreement signed last month pledging “respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Both nations promised to fight drug trafficking and other crimes “each in our own territory,” Mexican foreign secretary foreign secretary Juan Ramon de la Fuente emphasized.
To dismantle the cartels and destroy their sanctuaries in Mexico, Crenshaw, a former lieutenant commander in the Navy SEALs, and other members of Congress are pushing for a massive joint U.S.-Mexico initiative modeled on the U.S.-Colombian military-intelligence relationship in the 1990s and early 2000s. In those operations, Colombian commandos were the point of the spear, with advisors and trainers from U.S. special operations, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration working behind the scenes, providing training, communications intercepts, human intelligence, tracking technology, financial analyses and other technical assistance. As a result, in 1993, the joint effort tracked signals from a radio phone wielded by legendary Medellin cartel founder Pablo Escobar to the roof of a dingy building in downtown Medellin. A Colombian military marksman shot him dead. The rest of the Medellin cartel crumbled. By 1995, the Cali cartel had fallen. FARC guerillas soon stepped into the breach by setting up jungle labs and taking over the cocaine manufacturing business. The CIA covertly supplied U.S.-made precision-guided munitions that the Colombians used in a series of air strikes that decimated the FARC leadership. In 2016, surviving FARC guerillas made a peace accord with Bogotá and agreed to demobilize.
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What the fight would look like
Any commando team that tries to take on Mexico’s drug bosses and their large, well-armed paramilitary forces can expect ferocious resistance financed by very deep pockets. CJNG territory covers thousands of square miles in the western Mexican state of Michoacán, where Oseguera was born, and in neighboring Jalisco state. His domain is rugged countryside, dotted with ranches and laced with hidden trails, caves and mines. Oseguera has even built his own hospital, according to DEA intelligence, so he can undergo treatment for chronic kidney disease.
The Chapitos are similarly well-protected in Sinaloa state. Experts warn that a joint Mexican-U.S. special operations assault would raise the specter of possible “blue-on-blue”or “green-on-green” firefights a with corrupt elements of Mexico’s security forces defending the narco leaders. “They travel in hordes of security,” says a senior DEA agent who has investigated them for many years. “And not just hordes of security, but you're talking about a paid-off military that's protecting them, paid-off police protecting them. The corruption is just so rampant, and this is why a lot of these people can't get caught.”
“Whether you call it counterterrorism or counterinsurgency, that is what we're dealing with in Mexico,” Crenshaw told the Cipher Brief. “They use terroristic tactics. They terrorize their own people. They are an insurgency, in the sense that they're integrated into every level of society, from government to their own military, to security, to pop culture… The Mexican military has some very, very elite units that I think would be respected anywhere in the world. But there's not many of them. They need more, and additional training, additional pipelines into those elite units. Basic aircraft, ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance], close air support, things that are largely lacking. When they do go into these very dangerous areas and try to go after some of these dangerous kingpins, they're doing so without the kind of support that U.S. special operations would be used to.”
Violence on the Mexico-United States border continues to rise. Just 10 days into the month, nearly 21 homicides are recorded. On Monday, March 10, seven people are shot and killed in separate incidents. (Photo by David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The CJNG’s defenses are considered particularly militarized and formidable. According to current and former U.S. officials who have investigated the cartel, Mencho roams about his domain via four-wheel-drive convoys or small aircraft, always surrounded by large numbers of heavily-armed paramilitary fighters who wear insignia identifying them as FEM, Fuerzas Especiales Mencho or Grupo X, which specializes in fighting rival cartels. Like Osama Bin Laden, he avoids using phones and instead uses messengers.
For a commando team, armed drone or precision-guided munition to find Mencho and his party, precise GPS coordinates would be needed, and they’ll be hard to come by.
“He moves pretty often,” a U.S. expert who has recently assessed the kingpin’s vulnerabilities told The Cipher Brief. “So the intelligence on his location would have to be extremely good. Which it’s not.”
Whether surveillance drones could obtain reliable coordinates on Mencho’s position in real time is questionable. “Where Mencho is hiding they can hear drones coming,” the U.S. expert said. “It’s so quiet out there there’s no noise pollution. They’ve been successfully avoiding SEMAR’s drones for years.” SEMAR is U.S. military shorthand for a Mexican navy/marines special operations unit that has trained with the U.S. Navy SEALs and worked closely with the U.S.
The cartel has its own drone unit, called the Operadores Droneros, complete with badges. Cartel operatives also set up security cameras, like hunting cameras, to detect the presence of outsiders.
“They have a lot of early warning capability,” said Chavarria, who used to run the DEA’s office in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, then ran investigations of the Gulf cartel out of Houston. “I don't think that we have the type of precise intelligence that would allow us to effect an operation. And even if it's available, it's time-sensitive, it's perishable. If you're not there on top of your objective, you're going to miss. And then there's going to be gunfights and a lot of innocent people are going to get killed. Mencho hangs out in cities, he bounces around because he's untouchable. He's got police escorts, he's got state cops and municipal cops protecting him. His men have ringed perimeters of security, where they're communicating with one another on various frequencies that are digitally encrypted. So it's very difficult for the U.S. to crack those encryptions, and obviously for the Mexican security forces as well.”
According to Chavarria and other current and former officials, the CJNG has extensive counter-surveillance capabilities. Cartel security officers, known as sicarios, literally, assassins, issue mobile phones with heavily encrypted voice-over-internet and radio-over-internet apps to hundreds of human lookouts, called halcones, meaning hawks, spies, who are under orders to report any strangers showing up in cartel territory.
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Mexican security forces have been driven back every time they’ve tried to get close to Mencho. Notoriously, on May 1, 2015, a Mexican military helicopter that flew over his convoy in Jalisco state was shot down by the cartel paramilitary force with an Iranian-made rocket-propelled grenade and .50 caliber belt-fed machine gun. Nine Mexican soldiers and federal police died, and others were severely wounded. Rubén Oseguera González, AKA Menchito, Mencho’s California-born son and second-in-command, then 25, was accused of ordering the attack on the helicopter. The Mexican military and police mounted a massive operation to track him to a wealthy suburb of Guadalajara. Menchito was extradited to Los Angeles, prosecuted for violating U.S. drug laws, convicted last September and on March 7, sentenced to life plus 30 years in a U.S. prison.
The U.S. victory was short-lived. Mencho’s stepson Juan Carlos Valencia González, a California-born U.S. citizen who is the son of Oseguera’s wife, Rosalinda González Valencia and has emerged as Mencho’s heir-apparent. A leader in the cartel’s elite commando force, he’s known as R-3. The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for him. ( His mother Rosalinda, AKA La Jefa, comes from a powerful cartel dynasty, the Valencias. Her uncle is Armando Valencia, AKA El Maradona, founder of the Milenio Cartel, the predecessor of the CJNG. A major player in her own right, Rosalinda spent time in a Mexican prison for money laundering but was released last February, according to news reports in Mexico.)
Sheinbaum has convinced many in Washington that she is sincere in her determination to break the power of the cartels, especially the CJNG, which has menaced her administration unceasingly.
In 2020, Sheinbaum’s trusted advisor Omar García Harfuch, then Mexico City’s chief of police, narrowly survived a CJNG assasination attempt. Sheinbaum was Mexico City’s mayor at the time. When Sheinbaum became president in October 2024, she named Harfuch national security minister and accelerated military raids on CJNG labs and other sites.
But so far, the cartel has proved stronger. Last March, Mexican soldiers and national guardsmen driving in a convoy near CJNG territory on the border between Jalisco and Michoacán states were ambushed, and six security force officers and three CJNG hitmen were killed. Three days later, security forces in the area were again ambushed, two of their number killed and the rest forced to retreat.
On May 1, exactly 10 years to the day after the helicopter downing, Oseguera staged a flamboyant retribution for the incarceration of his son Menchito. Iván Morales Corrales, a Mexican policeman who survived the crash, badly burned, was decorated as a national hero and testified against Menchito in the U.S. trial in Los Angeles, was gunned down with his wife while driving on a quiet street in a town far from the CJNG’s turf. This was an unmistakable statement that the cartel could reach anyone, anywhere, anytime.
David Cristobal Barraza Sainz, known as Commander "Nitro" within the Sinaloa State Police, was shot and killed after an attack that took place on Pedro Infante Boulevard at around 1:00 p.m in Sinaloa, Mexico on July 15, 2025. (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Derek Maltz, who served as DEA administrator until June and before that ran the agency’s elite Special Operations Division for a decade, believes that if the Mexican army fails to mount more operations against the CJNG and other cartel strongholds, the Trump team will seriously consider unilateral operations, despite Sheinbaum’s vocal objections. “If the U.S. government doesn't perceive that Mexico has the will or capabilities to literally take them off the playing field, I wouldn't be surprised that the administration is looking at targeted strikes on the [cartel] leadership,” Maltz told The Cipher Brief. “ I would personally encourage it. The president has made it clear that he's going to place American families first, trying to keep everyone safe and secure. So if it means taking out some kingpins in the narco-terrorist world, I would fully support that.”
As a practical matter, a raid or two wouldn’t solve the problem. Mexico’s cartels, like major corporations, could survive the loss of a few key executives. “Killing Mencho would be significant, but it's not going to take out the organization,” Craine said. “You're going to have to have sustained operations against the whole network.”
A global syndicate of evil
The CJNG has built out a complicated and durable executive structure in recent years as it has gone global and diversified.
“Mencho is expanding around the world,” Maltz told The Cipher Brief. He and his allies “have recognized the threat to their business enterprise with the increased attention by the Trump administration. So they're adjusting strategies, realigning, identifying new partnerships, being strategic in some of their global routes and capitalizing on the market in different areas of the world.” Maltz and other DEA veterans say Mencho has cemented international alliances with organized crime syndicates, from motorcycle gangs in the U.S to the Japanese Yakuza. When the profits to be made from human trafficking dwindled due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on the border, the CJNG developed other robust cash streams, including stealing fuel from the Mexican oil company PEMEX and other energy outlets, extorting avocado farmers, and even smuggling mercury, a pricey, poisonous by-product of gold-mining, according to the DEA and news reports.
“The CJNG is the first international criminal conglomerate,” Craine said. “It’s the first ICC to operate worldwide and to have criminal control of legal commodities and services as well, such as oil, gasoline, minerals, chemicals, timber, government funding, infrastructure and resources, armed forces, weapons, politics, police services, judicial systems, international financial services, and so forth.”
What’s most alarming is the significant CJNG and Sinaloa cartel presence in the U.S.
“What we face today in Southern California is a full-scale infiltration by foreign criminal empires, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel – paramilitary organizations with global supply chains, corporate level logistics, and battlefield tactics,” Matthew Allen, DEA’s chief of operations, told the Senate Judiciary committee last June.
Allen testified that a few weeks earlier, a DEA team had raided an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks from the agency’s big Southern California office. Hidden inside, the agents discovered, was a luxurious CJNG safe house with places for cartel operatives to lounge, a pool table, polished floors and, presiding over it all, a floor-to-ceiling mural of El Mencho, depicted in a bulletproof vest emblazoned with the CJNG insignia and Mencho’s personal symbol, a bloody cockfight.
It was, Allen said, “a shrine, not hidden in the jungle or some remote compound but right in the heart of the heart of America’s second-largest city. The message was clear: ‘We are here. We are among you’.”
Image of Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación safe house in Los Angeles.(DEA Official)
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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — When we think about the arteries of global power, images of oil pipelines or shipping lanes often come to mind. They are visible, tangible, and easy to picture on a map. The digital world has its own arteries, equally vital but far less visible: undersea cables, satellites, and semiconductor supply chains. These systems allow our economies to function, our militaries to coordinate, and our societies to remain connected.
We rarely stop to consider how very fragile they are. A fiber-optic cable lying quietly on the seabed, a satellite orbiting high above, or a single Dutch firm making the machines that build the world’s most advanced chips? Each represents a potential point of failure. And when one of them falters, whether by accident or design, the consequences ripple instantly across the globe. What makes this even more concerning is that adversaries understand their potential value. They have studied the geography of our digital world with the same intensity that past powers studied maritime routes. Increasingly, they are testing ways to hold these chokepoints at risk, not in open war, but in the murky space called the gray zone.
Consider the seabed. Nearly all intercontinental internet traffic runs not through satellites, as many imagine, but along the ocean floor. The “cloud” is, in truth, anchored to the seabed. These cables are resilient in some respects, yet highly vulnerable in others. Russia has long deployed specialized vessels (such as the Yantar) to loiter near critical routes, mapping them and raising concerns about sabotage. The People’s Republic of China has taken subtler approaches. On several occasions, cables linking Taiwan’s outlying islands have been cut by Chinese vessels in incidents they described as accidental. Taipei viewed them, by contrast, as deliberate acts of pressure that left communities offline for weeks.
Nature has been no less disruptive. A volcanic eruption severed Tonga’s only international cable in 2022, cutting off connectivity entirely. A landslide off Côte d’Ivoire in 2024 damaged four cables at once, leaving more than a dozen African states scrambling to restore service. These episodes remind us that chokepoints need not be destroyed to reveal their importance.
For China, the issue is a strategic one. Through its Digital Silk Road initiative, Beijing has financed and built cables across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Chinese firms now sit at landing stations and repair depots. In times of peace these investments look like connectivity. In times of crisis, they can become instruments of leverage or coercion.
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The same logic applies in orbit. Satellites and global navigation systems act as the nervous system of modern life. They time banking transactions, guide aircraft, and support military operations. Disrupting them unsettles the rhythms of daily existence. Russia previewed this dynamic in 2022 when it launched a cyberattack against the Viasat KA-SAT network on the first day of its invasion of Ukraine. Thousands of modems across Europe went dark, cutting off critical communications. More routinely, Russian jamming and spoofing around Kaliningrad and Moscow have disoriented navigation systems, with civilian pilots suddenly reporting the loss of GPS mid-flight.
China has created its own path through BeiDou, a rival to GPS that is already woven into infrastructure and commerce across large swaths of the world. Countries adopting BeiDou for civilian uses also create dependencies that, in a crisis, could become channels of influence. China’s so-called inspector satellites, capable of shadowing Western systems in orbit, serve as a reminder that the domain is contested and difficult to police. Jamming, spoofing, or orbital surveillance are rarely attributable in real time. They can be dismissed as interference or technical glitches even when deliberate. That ambiguity is precisely what makes them effective tools of gray-zone leverage.
Vulnerability also extends to the factories that produce the silicon chips powering the digital age. No chokepoint illustrates fragility more starkly than semiconductors. Advanced chips are the foundation of artificial intelligence, modern weapons systems, consumer electronics, modern automobiles, and more. Yet their production is concentrated in very few hands. One company in Taiwan manufactures most of the world’s leading-edge chips. A single Dutch firm produces the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines needed to make them. And China has demonstrated repeatedly how control over upstream minerals can be wielded as leverage. Restrictions on gallium, germanium, and graphite have caused immediate price spikes and sent Western companies scrambling for alternatives.
The global chip shortage during the pandemic provided a glimpse of how disruption can have cascading impacts. Automotive plants shut down, electronics prices soared, and entire supply chains stalled. That was the result of market forces. In a geopolitical crisis, disruption would be intentional, targeted, and likely more devastating.
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None of these vulnerabilities exist in isolation. Together, they form part of a broader and comprehensive strategy, particularly for China, where digital infrastructure has become a deliberate instrument of national power. Through the Digital Silk Road, through export controls on critical minerals, through investments in semiconductor capacity, through an ambitious national AI strategy, and BeiDou’s global adoption, Beijing is systematically building positions of leverage.
Is this preparation for an open assault on global systems? Maybe not, but it is a strategy designed for options in the gray zone. By holding digital chokepoints at risk, China can complicate allied decision-making and cast doubt on the reliability of critical systems, thereby slowing or obstructing responses at moments when speed is decisive. The ambiguity of each incident – whether it appears to be an accident, a policy choice, or something more calculated – becomes a tool of coercion.
The reality is that these risks cannot be eliminated. The very efficiency of the digital age depends on concentration. A single company leads in chipmaking, a limited set of satellites provides global timing, and relatively few cables carry the world’s data vast distances across the open ocean. Efficiency brings tremendous capability, but it also brings fragility. And fragility invites exploitation.
The counterweight must be resilience. That means redundant routes and suppliers, pre-positioned repair capacity, diversified supply chains, hardened infrastructure, and rehearsed recovery plans. The point is to recover and regain capacity as quickly as possible. To do so requires deeper public-private partnerships and closer coordination among allies, since no nation can protect these domains on its own. Resilience is not a one-time investment but a cultural shift. A culture that assumes disruption will come, prepares for it, and ensures that no single outage or shortage can paralyze us.
History offers some perspective. Nations once fought to control straits, canals, and oil fields. They still do so today, but increasingly our chokepoints are digital, hidden from sight yet just as consequential. Whoever shapes them, shapes the balance of global power.
Global stability today depends on foundations that are often invisible. Fiber-optic cables under the sea, satellites crossing the skies, and factories producing chips with microscopic precision form the backbone of our digital age. They showcase human ingenuity while highlighting profound vulnerabilities. Recognizing the duality of innovation’s promise alongside its fragility may be the most important step toward protecting what matters most in the digital age. And, yes, we must defend these technologies. But it’s about something bigger. It’s about ensuring that the digital world we depend on remains a source of strength, and not a lever of coercion.
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.
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
“Dictators,” Churchill observed, “ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount.” “And,” he added, “the tigers are getting hungry.”
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION -- Churchill penned those words when mankind was on the precipice of what would be the most devastating conflict in human history. The men who took it over the edge - Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and a leadership in Japan that would increasingly take on the characteristics of a military dictatorship under men such as General Hideki Tojo - were driven by ambition; animus for their enemies, real, imagined and contrived; and a will to use any means at their disposal to ensure their countries assumed what they saw as their rightful places in the world.
The leaders of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan took their countries into war because of conditions they had fomented. Cynically exploiting political radicalization, economic pressures, and societal fervor stoked by authoritarian leadership and militarist-nationalist ideology, they dismantled democratic institutions – thus removing the brakes on both repression and aggression - and promulgated pervasive propaganda that created a climate where war appeared both inevitable and justified.
Once at war, they desperately clung to their illusions of national greatness and delusions of personal grandeur as their countrymen were killed, their nations devastated and their militaries defeated. In the end; with Hitler’s suicide in a dank bunker; the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hanging in a Milan square; and Tojo’s drop through a trapdoor with a hangman’s noose around his neck; the tigers feasted.
The nature of the relationship among the Axis powers of the Second World War is worth considering within the context of the recent meeting of the leaders of the ‘Axis of Autocracies’ in Beijing. The extension by Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping of invitations to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit and a massive military parade celebrating the end of the Second World War to Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was in keeping with Xi’s intent to send a signal of unity in opposition to the so-called ‘rules-based’ international order dominated by the U.S. Further, the Chinese leader will have seen the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Erdogan among some twenty invitees to the Beijing festivities – coming, as they did, amid trade tensions with Washington and with the 2027 deadline he has set for his military to be ready to act against Taiwan nearing - as evidence his message is finding broader resonance.
"Global governance,” Xi said, “has reached a new crossroads." The new order he envisions would, the Chinese leader said in comments clearly directed at the U.S., “take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics, and practice true multilateralism."
What he did not say, and did not need to say, was that his country and party would be at the center of a realignment of global power that would bear little similarity to the current world order for which the Chinese leader has nothing but contempt.
As China has long demonstrated, it has no regard for adherence to norms of behavior that the failed U.S. policy of engagement was intended to promote. Indeed, its aggressive and expansionist policies vis-à-vis its neighbors; its disregarding of treaty obligations in the case of Hong Kong; its resort to influence operations to suborn foreign governments and international institutions; its exploitation of Belt and Road initiative projects that turn recipients into debtor nations; its use of espionage means to steal the intellectual property and national wealth from rival nations, their businesses and industries; and its brutal repression of political opponents and ethnic minorities demonstrate that Beijing neither recognizes nor accepts any international rules of conduct.
While North Korea and Iran play lesser, supporting roles in this Axis, the relationship with between Russia and China is central to Xi’s desire to put together a global system of strategic and economic ties that supersedes the post-war, U.S.-dominated world order.
Xi’s message clearly resonated with Putin. Addressing his Chinese counterpart as “dear friend,” the Russian President said that Moscow’s ties with Beijing are “at an unprecedentedly high level.” Citing Soviet assistance to China during the war, going on that: “We were always together then, we remain together now.” Putin’s avowals of what he would have termed ‘fraternal friendship’ in his earlier life notwithstanding, Russia likely sees its reliance on Beijing for support as being driven by the necessities of the Ukraine war and surely does not envision long-term dependence on China.
However, what Putin also surely understands - if Xi did not make the point explicitly clear to him in conversations between the two - is that the state of the Ukraine war is a significant factor in the timing and nature of Chinese planning for ‘reunification’ of Taiwan with the mainland insofar as it serves to distract and diffuse any Western – read U.S. – response to such an undertaking.
Consequently, there is every incentive for Beijing to ensure there is no resolution of that war prior to any move it makes against Taiwan. In such an instance, the U.S. would find itself having to contend with China backed by Russia should it choose to counter a move by Xi to seize the island. It is, of course, unclear what form Beijing-Moscow war-time cooperation would take. But ties between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan might be instructive in this regard.
As is the case with relations between Moscow and Beijing today, the connection between the two most powerful Axis powers was rooted in a desire to undo the existing – then Anglo-American and now U.S. led - world order. Germany and Japan fought their war as ostensible allies. But it was a strangely distant union. They were bound together more by de facto strategic interdependence than by formal alliance. The two countries did sign a series of compacts. Chief among these were 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact (according to which both parties agreed to work against the Soviet-directed ‘Comintern’, or Communist International), and the Tripartite Pact of 1940, establishing an “Axis” alliance which also included Italy.
There were also several supporting economic and military cooperation agreements, the most significant of which was the "No Separate Peace” agreement of 11 December 1941. Signed following U.S. entry into the war, it formalized joint prosecution of the war against the U.S. and Britain by the Axis, pledging that the signatories would not seek a separate peace without mutual consent.
These arrangements were integral to the wartime calculations of Germany and Japan. But none of them formally bound either country to come to the aid of the other in event of war. Moreover, their ability and willingness to develop and implement a joint strategy for waging the war was hampered by geographical distance, divergent interests, and occasionally conflicting operational priorities.
There is, for instance, no evidence that the timing of Tokyo’s December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was coordinated with Berlin. The attack’s timing was primarily dictated by Japan’s urgent need to break U.S.-led embargoes and secure critical resources, rather than a calculated move to exploit any German "distraction" of the Allies.
But Germany’s war in Europe did create opportunity for Japan in the Asia-Pacific by significantly weakening the Western colonial presence in the region, indirectly making a Japanese attack more viable and thus influencing Tokyo’s risk calculus.
With major Western powers preoccupied—Britain fully engaged in Europe and North Africa, and the U.S. focused on supporting Britain and preparing for possible conflict—Japanese leaders judged that the Western colonial powers in Asia (Britain, the Netherlands, and France) were vulnerable to rapid Japanese offensives. That assessment enhanced Japan’s confidence in the success of those operations but was not the determining factor in their timing.
Moreover, Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor puzzled Allied leaders and historians since given America’s massive industrial potential; his own experience in the First World War when entry of America into the war tipped the balance against Germany; and the fact that Tokyo did not join the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, a non-decision that allowed Stalin to shift reserves from Siberia to confront the German army threatening Moscow.
It appears the German dictator declared war on the U.S. - even though the declaration removed any remaining obstacles to full American involvement against him in Europe - primarily because he thought war with America inevitable, wanted to unleash his U-Boats on ships carrying Lend-Lease material to Britain, and sought to present the Axis as a united front. He also saw the U.S. as a decadent, racially mixed nation and underestimated its capacity to quickly gear up for war, believing Germany could defeat the Allies before significant American power could be brought to bear. His decision proved a crucial strategic blunder as it unified America’s population and industries behind a total war effort that was ultimately decisive.
The February 2022 promulgation of a “Partnership Without Limits” by Xi and Putin on the margins of the Winter Olympics not only signaled a warming of relations between their countries. It also implied at least tacit Chinese backing for the Russian invasion of Ukraine that occurred just a few days later.
As was the case with the Axis powers, that announcement was presaged by other agreements between Beijing and Moscow. The establishment of formal diplomatic ties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the 2001 signing of a ‘Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation’ set the stage for strategic, economic, and security collaboration between the two countries. Over the following years, they resolved border disputes, held joint military exercises, expanded energy trade, and cooperated within such international organizations as the SCO.
While ties between Russia and China on economic, diplomatic and military matters have deepened, the relationship – as was the case with the Axis - is marked more by a joint desire to challenge the U.S. than by deep mutual affinity. Despite declarations in the 2022 joint statement that the friendship between the two countries “has no limits” and that there are “no forbidden areas of cooperation,” Putin is no doubt well aware that Xi has other motives in supporting Russia.
Not least among them are using the Ukraine war to draw down Western military stockpiles and taking advantage of Moscow’s relative loss of influence in Central Asia. And Russia remains deeply wary of Chinese strategic intentions and intelligence activities. Notably, recently leaked Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) documents indicate Moscow’s growing concern over Chinese espionage targeting Russian military, scientific, and geopolitical assets. The FSB has labeled China as an "enemy" and initiated counterintelligence programs designed to counter aggressive Chinese recruitment of Russian scientists, officials, and businessmen—especially those with access to sensitive state institutions.
Like the (successful) intelligence operations mounted by Stalin’s Soviet Union against its erstwhile Western allies during World War Two, Chinese intelligence has intensified its attempts to gain insight into Russia’s military operations in Ukraine and its knowledge of Western combat systems.
The FSB has documented Chinese front organizations—including corporate and academic groups—seeking access to information on Russian technological advancements, as well as covert Chinese activities in the Arctic and Russia’s Far East. Moscow has responded by restricting the access of foreign researchers, monitoring users of Chinese platforms like WeChat, and increasing face-to-face warnings to vulnerable officials. These security concerns underscore the reality of the relationship: while Russia and China publicly coordinate on economic and military fronts, deep mutual suspicion and competing strategic ambitions complicate their alliance.
In spurring his country towards war, Hitler exploited economic instability, the national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, fears of internal enemies in the form of Jews and communists, and a desire to restore German national power by re-building the military and expanding the country to develop a totalitarian, militarized, racially pure state under a supreme leader able to act decisively in his quest to dominate Europe.
The German dictator seized on an opportunity to play on what he rightly perceived as weakness on the part of his potential adversaries to fulfill his dark version of his country’s national destiny. Likewise, the leaders of Imperial Japan exerted enormous influence over the country’s domestic and foreign policy, seizing an opportunity to press for an expansionist war to address economic pressures and resource scarcity. Often acting independently of - and sometimes overruling - civilian authorities, the militarists used propaganda, suppression of political dissent and racialist exhortations to national destiny to justify expansionary war as the only viable path to Japanese strength and salvation, as well as their own power.
Similarly, both Xi and Putin are driven by imperatives; in their cases – assuming their revealing conversation about organ harvesting and eternal life was just aspirational – in the form of actuarial calendars. The former has committed to resolving the Taiwan issue during his time as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary. And the latter undertook the Ukraine invasion as part of an effort to restore Russian power and influence world-wide, but particularly in the former Soviet “the near abroad,” while at the helm in the Kremlin. Both are building up their militaries – Putin out of immediate necessity and Xi to actualize expansionist aspirations - while stoking nationalism to at once garner support for those endeavors and to defray potential domestic threats to their rule.
Although Xi maintains a strong grip on power as China’s paramount leader, internal tensions are rising due to the absence of a succession mechanism, demographic decline and, most importantly, increased public discontent engendered by weak economic growth, prolonged real estate market weakness, record youth unemployment, deflationary pressures, and ballooning government debt.
He faces also elite dissatisfaction fueled by his reluctance to initiate necessary market reforms. Party insiders are said to be concerned over the sustainability of the state-led model and its impact on global competitiveness, as well as the political risk of widespread public dissatisfaction in an environment where social mobility appears impossible and wealth gaps are evident.
In response, the Chinese leader has used surveillance, purges, ideological education, and anti-Western messaging to silence dissent. This approach has made him over-reliant on what the Soviets called ‘the instruments of state repression.”
Even though overt dissent is suppressed, the risk of future instability is rising beneath the surface. Unrest could rapidly appear if economic or political crises dramatically worsen. To avoid the fate of those who ruled the Soviet Union, Xi’s approach over the coming years may be shaped by the need to adapt by opening the economy to some degree to vent off steam while trying. Confronted with such circumstances, he could well be tempted to further ramp up repression while whipping up nationalist fervor around the Taiwan issue. Although adopting such a course might obscure economic difficulties and bolster his authority, it could also increase the risk of reckless foreign policy steps.
The potential for, and the possible consequences of, a rash move by Xi are increasing. China is engaged in intensifying competition that is generating friction with the U.S., especially around Taiwan, the South China Sea and the race to dominate the emerging realm of AI. Regional tensions are likewise intensifying as China’s increasingly aggressive stance has prompted growing concern and coalition-building by Japan, India, Australia and the U.S.
Pushback to China’s exploitive Belt and Road Initiative in the form of growing recipient-country debt and local resentment are complicating Beijing's ambitions and increasing its frustration.
Finally, Beijing has been impacted by American economic decoupling and sanctions. Export restrictions, technological bans, and tariffs imposed by the U.S. are beginning to bite, challenging China’s drive to seize global leadership in AI, semiconductors, and green technology.
Putin, playing on nationalist sentiment over claimed repression of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and a desire to reassert Moscow’s dominion over that nation, plunged his country into a regional war that could – like the Japanese assault on China in the 1930’s – be a prelude to a larger conflict.
The Russian leader faces mounting internal pressures as the war he unleashed grinds into its fourth year. His invasion has devolved into a slogging match that has cost his country immense amounts of blood and treasure for relatively little recompense.
Although the Kremlin has retained control through coercion, propaganda, and material incentives, challenges are surfacing from multiple directions. The costs in blood and treasure of waging a seemingly endless war are straining the economy, rising inflation, and reducing living standards. Importantly, frustration within elite circles is rising due to the costs and duration of a war waged for insufficient territorial gains.
Moreover, Russia is struggling with the spiraling costs and military overstretch of its commitment in Ukraine, which has limited its ability to project power elsewhere. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and Armenia’s distancing from Russia after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have weakened Russia’s network of regional allies. Its position in Belarus and in other former Soviet states is increasingly precarious, with popular uprisings and anti-Russian sentiment rising. This, coupled with sustained Western sanctions and relative international isolation, has resulted in reduced Russian influence on the world stage.
The Kremlin continues to call its Ukraine invasion a "special military operation" rather than issuing a formal declaration of war due to fears of backlash. It has, to date, successfully isolated most of society from the war’s worst impact, suppressed dissent, and delayed difficult political choices. The Kremlin portrays all of this as the consequences of a U.S.-led proxy war targeting the Russian nation and its people. But internal pressures from war fatigue, economic strain, and elite tensions are quietly growing. And the longer the war persists without a decisive victory or settlement, the risk of cracks—in the form of elite disaffection and public unrest —will continue to rise.
Finally, like his Chinese counterpart, Putin could be tempted to engage in more external adventurism to divert attention away from the internal pressure building within his country.
Their mutual antipathy for the U.S. aside, another thing the two modern-day dictators have in common is that both are taking steps to prepare their militaries and people for possible large-scale conflict by intensifying military reforms, working to enhance readiness and developing more advanced weapons systems. Having already put his economy on a war footing, Putin is doing this both to enable operations in Ukraine and to prepare for a possible wider war.
Xi, for his part, has embarked on military modernization and shows of force such as the massive parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II to undergird his strategic messaging regarding his intent to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland and to ready their militaries for active operations to that end if needed. Finally, China and Russia have engaged in a series of joint military exercises, including recent and upcoming naval drills in the Sea of Japan and Pacific emphasizing anti-submarine warfare, missile defense, and combined arms tactics to counter the U.S. and its allies.
Those exercises may signal something more than theater in terms of cooperation between the two militaries. But they have not shown that ties between the two countries have progressed to the point that they are prepared to implement a joint plan for waging war against the U.S.
Like their Axis forbearers, their strategic interests are likely too disparate to allow for anything more than strategic coordination in broad terms between them. This does not mean the U.S. and its allies would find it easy to confront both adversaries at once. Nazi Germany and Japan did not fight jointly, but Allied victory came at huge cost, nonetheless.
At this stage, the key question is whether, when and how Putin intends to end his assault on Ukraine. At present, the Kremlin is publicly evincing no willingness to end this war absent the achievement of at least his minimalist demands: no NATO membership for Ukraine and occupation of the four Russian-annexed regions of that country (in addition to Crimea).
If Ukraine does not cede control over those territories, it appears Putin intends to pursue a fight and negotiate strategy until his goals are achieved. However the war ends, the U.S. will then have to decide if it is prepared to try to engage Russia with an eye towards creating a rift between it and China.
With the latter on a course that appears to be inexorably leading to a confrontation with the U.S. over Taiwan, and Washington clearly preferring not to have to simultaneously deal with two adversaries on different fronts, the questions of whether, how and how soon the war in Ukraine can be ended, and what tack the Russian leader will take thereafter are of great significance to U.S. national security.
In the years since Churchill wrote about the dangers for and from dictators in riding a tiger, others have used the same analogy. Jefferson Starship even wrote a song about it. Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein cautioned all who would try it that “the first principle in riding a tiger is to hold on tight to its ears.” But it was John F. Kennedy who most succinctly addressed the perils past leaders courted by engaging in the practice. “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger,” he cautioned, “ended up inside.” One wonders how tight a grip the dictators in Beijing and Moscow have on the big cats they sit astride.
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.
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
EXPERT INTERVIEW – More Western leaders and national security experts are now saying that Russia’s recent drone incursion into Poland was not a mission gone wrong as Moscow suggested but was more likely an intended probe to determine how quickly the NATO alliance – created to safeguard security - might rally in the face of an expanded Russian attack.
President Vladimir Putin now has his answer.
In a swift response, NATO announced that it is bolstering it’s eastern flank defenses. Germany is expanding air policing over Poland. France is sending 3 Rafale fighter jets and The Netherlands is sending two Patriot air defenses, NASAMS and counter drone systems to Warsaw. The Czech Republic is sending additional helicopters and up to 150 soldiers to help defend Poland’s borders.
In this expert weekend interview, The Cipher Brief spoke with General David Petraus (Ret.) who was on the ground in Kyiv this week, talking with senior leaders - not only about the seriousness of Russia’s incursion into NATO territory - but also about how technology continues to dramatically alter the battlespace in Ukraine and how Moscow is now using its troops on the ground.
THE CONTEXT
THE EXPERT INTERVIEW
General David Petraeus served more than 37 years in the U.S. military with six consecutive commands, five of which were combat, including command of the Multi-National Force-Iraq during the Surge, U.S. Central Command, and Coalition and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He is a partner in the KKR global investment firm and chairs the firm’s global institute.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s talk about this week’s Russian drone incursion into Poland, whether you believe it was an accident on Moscow’s behalf or a calculated probe, how significant of an event was this?
General Petraeus: It was a very significant episode. Again, 19 drones entered Polish airspace. The bottom line is that this could not have been a mistake. These aren't on autopilot. They may have way points from which they're flying to and from, but there were pilots behind this significant incursion. Just recently, I saw a report that five of the drones were actually headed for a major base, which is one of the hubs from which a lot of the NATO equipment is transported into Ukraine. It's one of the big areas for trans-shipment.
The NATO response was impressive, in my view. Keep in mind, you had Dutch F-35s, Polish F-16s in the air very rapidly. They clearly must have seen this coming. They've rehearsed this in the past. There was an AWACS up there to help them also with the command and control and early warning, and aerial refueling tankers were flying so they could refuel as required. At least several of the drones were shot down. So, again, an impressive response.
And then as a result of that, Poland called for an Article Four gathering. Keep in mind, Article Five is a call to arms, Article Four is a call to meet. They did that at the North Atlantic Council, of course, in Brussels at NATO headquarters. And out of that, came a very comprehensive set of actions that NATO will take, which apparently includes the U.S. as some part of the air component, but it's going to beef up all of the different capabilities that would be needed, including anti-air and anti-ballistic missile defenses for those countries on the eastern front and a number of other capabilities as well. This is now Operation Eastern Sentry.
This wasn't a wake-up call because clearly, they were already awake to the threat, but it was a significant incursion that has generated a significant response. I think the tactical response was quite impressive. The operational response - not quite strategic - perhaps you could describe it as that by NATO, was very significant, as well and quick, too.
I'm hoping that there are even bigger strategic responses though, and that this might be the catalyst in Washington for Congress to work with the White House on the sanctions package that Senator Lindsey Graham and others have been working for a number of months, which would add substantial U.S. sanctions to those already imposed by the EU and European countries [on Russia].
And then on the European side, for this to galvanize support for what is now termed the von der Leyen plan or concept, which is of course Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who, by the way, gave a stirring State of the Union address written before the incursion, but delivered after it.
Her concept is to use those frozen hundreds of billions of dollars, of euros really, of frozen Russian reserves in European banks as collateral to give money to Ukraine now to help them. And as you know, the Ukrainians could build even more drones than the 3.5 million that they're going to build this year, if they had more money. And additional fundingwould be a huge help for them also in terms of their fiscal situation.
And then the frozen funds go back to Russia once Russia pays reparations to Ukraine for all the damage and destruction they have wrought in the country here. That's quite an artful approach because it avoids the actual seizure of these assets, which again, a number of European countries, I think rightly have concern about, that it might undermine the euro attractiveness for this kind of reserve.
I'd love to see those two actions on top of the very quick response and the very quick decisions by the North Atlantic Council to carry out the military actions announced. These would be very, very complimentery to the military actions and show Russia just how serious this was.
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I think in this case, Russia has vastly overplayed its hand, just as I think it has, frankly, in terms of the huge numbers of drones and missiles that have been launched into Ukraine in recent nights that we've seen in the Institute for the Study War statistics and so forth that show the highest ever numbers. In the sense that this shows very clearly if there were any remaining possibility of whether Vladimir Putin was willing to negotiate a ceasefire and agree to some kind of sustained and just peace, as President Trump sought to achieve, that clearly is not in the cards.
The Cipher Brief: General Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said recently that the direct technological race is accelerating in the battlespace. The technology that is being put into battlefield drones, is being adapted very quickly by Russia. The Cipher Brief visited the Nemesis Regiment with you earlier this year – the separate battalion of the Unmanned Systems Forces that specializes in the use of bomber drones -what has changed on that front over the past few months?
General Petraeus: The Nemesis Regiment, now, having expanded from a battalion, is well known here in Ukraine because it (and all of the military units] is trying to compete for talent, and they have billboards that say, "Sign up for the Nemesis Regiment." They're now able to recruit directly. They now are able to do basic military training themselves as well. The workarounds that they have developed to get talent into uniform as rapidly as possible to make a difference, is really quite impressive. Only a country that is fighting for its very independence, it’s very survival, would be able to do all of this.
You'll recall that when I was last here and I talked to General Syrskyi and asked just roughly, "How many drones did you use yesterday of all types?" Because of course, they have air and ground and maritime drones (indeed, the maritime drones have been so effective that they have sunk one third of the Black Sea Fleet). His answer was, “Nearly 7,000.” And many of those flew multiple missions.
By the way, one of the briefings we had informed us that the entire remaining Black Sea Fleet is all completely in one Russian harbor as far as you can get away from Ukraine, in the eastern part of the Black Sea, with lots of defenses around it. So, the Ukrainians have basically forced it to bottle itself up just to survive, because the Ukrainians are still out there picking off occasional Russian patrol boats or carrying out other kinds of action at sea whenever they find Russian ships at sea.
The Ukrainians also have land drones of all types, remotely driven vehicles that do a lot of the back and forth from the rear to the front lines with logistics and taking casualties and so forth. And also, increasingly, remotely operated machine guns, grenade launchers, and other weapons systems, often on remotely driven vehicles.
And, of course, Ukraine has tons of all different types of aerial drones, including some now that very publicly are out there that reportedly can fly thousands of kilometers into the Russian Federation.
And long-range missiles are also now in production in Ukraine , and the numbers of these being produced are beginning to ramp up very substantially, in addition to the 3.5 million drones that will be produced this year.
I also met with the individuals that have developed the command, control, communications, intelligence and battle management intelligence - and knitting all of this together into a common operational picture/battle management system that is truly extraordinary. And the 7,000 drones doesn't quite capture all of this. They said, "In a 12-hour shift there are 40,000 flights." And again, all of this is being tracked. There are crews that are sending these out very quickly. Some come back, some does not. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the technology race. We learned last time that we were here, that to combat the Russian electronic warfare and jamming, as many as a quarter of the drones that go out from the Ukrainian side have tiny fiber optic cable that spools out behind them so that they can maintain the critical command and control links to fly these right into the enemy, regardless of the EW and jamming. A lot of these are first-person view suicide drones, as they're termed.
There are also other advances. The Russians, for example, now are putting jet engines on some of their Shahed drones. And because the way that you knock down drones encompasses all types of different systems - everything from a quite skillful use of heavy machine guns, laser designators, acoustic sensors, all kinds of radars, everything working together - but if they fly faster and higher, it's harder to counter. There are now also Ukrainian drones that run into the Russian drones, and again, hundreds of these are out there every night.
The skill involved in all of this is extraordinary, but the increased speed makes that much more difficult. So, what you have is a constant back and forth, where one side develops something new and innovative, the other side sees it, reverse engineers it, and adapts it. And while, of course, on the Russian side, it's much more top down than bottom up (as on the Ukrainian side), when they go top down, they can produce huge quantities very quickly. On the Ukrainian side, it's a lot more like a ‘let 1,000 flowers bloom’ initiative. There is tremendous innovation, but then you've got to figure out how to scale it. And Ukraine is doing that now, too.
Each side is very much going about this in a whole variety of different ways. The sensor component of this is particularly interesting, and then the fusion of all of the different reports. You might get a human intelligence report derived from a number of different methods. How do you then get that into the system, immediately alert those who have the means to actually deal with it, who then delivers this to those who can actually take action against it, kinetic action in many cases?
And what they're doing through their battle management system is shrinking the time from the so-called sensor to shooter, the ‘kill chain’, as Chris Brose wrote a book with that title. These are just breathtaking kinds of advances. And as you know – because you’ve been here with us - every four or five months or so, you see breathtaking new advances.
The very first time we spent time with Nemesis, and you and Brad were with us, it was a Battalion. Now it's the regiment, and it's going to be a brigade. And of course, it was founded by and still commanded by a former prime minister, the first one under President Zelensky - so everybody's in this fight. But the first time we were here, I think the drones they had were using had one antenna. Last time, I think there were three or four. Now, it's up to six. And of course, you also have the Starlink big board on top of it to communicate with what Elon Musk has put up in the constellation.
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So, Ukraine is where the most advanced innovation in the world can be found.
I also spent time with all of the defense security assistance folks in the U.S. embassy, which included more than just Americans, by the way. So, many allied countries were there as well. And while they are doing great work, we should also be doing much more, the U.S., NATO countries, and other allies and partners around the world that might be threatened by aggression, can learn huge lessons from here. But of course, the lessons aren’t really learned until they are institutionalized in some way in the military services in the form of doctrine, organizational changes, training, leader development courses, and the rest of that. And we're not doing that at all as assiduously and aggressively as we should be.
I know the US military service chiefs recognize the imperative of much more rapid innovation, but when you think that nearly 7,000 individual drones are used every day, many of which are on multiple missions, and you hear the scale of what it is they're doing, we're not remotely doing what we should be.
In terms of their organizations, the Ukrainians now have a drone platoon in every infantry company, a drone company in every infantry battalion, a drone battalion in every brigade. The new corps have their own drone units. And then there are the independent drone organizations like the Nemesis Regiment, which are active in all kinds of different ways and are apportioned according to the priorities on the battlefield, the most significant threats, the most lucrative targets and so forth.
And as you recall, drone units get points for the different targets that they strike. The strikes are all validated because you have drones watching drones. And those points can be redeemed for equipment and components that you need via an Amazon-like system that was established by Brave One (a Ukrainian government-funded organization that supports innovation) as an adjunct to the DELTA system, which is the overall software platform that is used by all of the elements of their Ministry of Defense and all their services. Noting that Ukraine don't just have an army, navy, air force and marine corps, they also now have an unmanned systems force, and the commander of that is incredibly aggressive and innovative.
The Cipher Brief: Given all of the focus on the technology, I think it's difficult for some people to understand what the front line still looks like today. Russia is still recruiting an incredible number of people with a very tight turnaround time between recruitment and when they're actually deploy. Can you just give us a picture of what that looks like today?
General Petraeus: Well, in fact, several of our other fellow travelers, as you know, Ralph Goff, Glenn Corn, and Joey Gagnard have been out to the front lines. They were down in the south. The commander down there said there are Russian soldiers who have gone from recruitment to deployment in considerably less than 20 days. In other words, recruits aren’t even getting 30 days of basic training before being integrated into a unit. No time to build cohesion and all the rest of that stuff. This is extraordinary, stunning, actually. Moscow is literally taking these individuals off the street, luring them in with huge enlistment bonuses, often from rural areas where the job opportunities are not all that great. And in many cases, the families actually celebrate that they're doing this because it leads to a massive financial windfall.
The recruits go in very quickly, are issued weapons, uniform, et cetera, and then shoved into the front lines and right into an offensive - keeping in mind that the offensives now are not combined arms as we have known them in the past. They're not tanks and armor personnel carriers supported by engineers, infantry, air defense, electronic warfare, artillery, and all the rest. They're infantrymen on foot, essentially running across a street or a field and trying to establish a foothold in the next block of buildings or treeline. It's literally proceeding at infantry pace, because the drones are so ubiquitous, the surveillance is so constant. At the minute that they're spotted, or if they get tanks moving, immediately the suicide drones will come out and take them out. So, you have almost blanket coverage except for really extreme weather when drones can't stay up or they can't see. The rest of the time, it's impossible for the kind of combined arms attacks that launched this invasion by Russia in the beginning. As you'll recall then, there were huge columns of tanks and other vehicles, and frankly, even into the second summer of the counteroffensive that was mounted by the Ukrainians. And now, you actually don't even have as clearly defined front lines as you had then with trench lines and almost World War I-like fortifications. Now you have outposts, and they'll actually allow the enemy to flow around them a bit because the drones will eventually police them up.
But this is hugely costly to the Russians. And for those Ukrainian units that are using the different command and control and intelligence and battle management systems, tools that are fusing the intelligence and enabling them to be even more effective with the drones than they otherwise would be, the exchange ratio is 10 to 1. And that's what it needs to be given how much the Russians outman and outgun the Ukrainian forces.
The Cipher Brief: What the sense of urgency now among European leaders you’ve talked to?
General Petraeus: I suspect that the events of the past number of months have probably been pretty sobering. There was some hope. President Trump made a valiant effort to try to bring this war to an end by engaging Putin, engaging the Europeans and President Zelensky. But it was for nought, it appears. And now on the NATO side, inn a lot of ways, there is renewed confidence because of the improvement in the relationship between President Trump and President Zelensky and the interation between President Trump and key European leaders.
European leaders are, of course, trying to come up with a security guarantee – which I think is quite elusive, frankly, as unless you put your forces in the front lines, you might as well just give all your stuff to the Ukrainians and arm them to the teeth. They're the security guarantee, I think, for Ukraine’s defense.
So, I think there's increasingly a more sober analysis of the prospects for some kind of ceasefire. Washington has actually gotten the Europeans – in a huge success for the White House, frankly - to increase their defense spending to 3.5% of GDP rather than the 2% that was the old standard. And even 5% when you take into account other investments in infrastructure to push the forces further out to the east and that kind of activity. And to see, again, the continued American commitment in eastern Poland and elsewhere, and the air commitment to what is going on in response to the Russian drone incursion, is very encouraging.
So, I think there's a degree of confidence that the Europeans are picking up their share of this load. The Germans, in particular, are doubling defense spending in the next 10 years or so, and that is between 700 billion and a trillion euros more than they would've spent otherwise. Other European countries are also stepping up impressively – and with swift diplomatic action, as well as much additional security assistance to Ukraine and in spending on national defense.
Washington has tried and done everything they could. President Trump engaged personally, repeatedly, and it should be clear to all now that Putin is just not really serious about negotiating an end to this war. He still has his maximalist objectives of replacing President Zelensky with a pro-Russian figure, essentially demilitarizing Ukraine to the extent that would be possible, and seeking additional land that they haven't even been able to seize. They haven't even yet gotten to the so-called fortified cities in the southeastern part of the country, in Donetsk Province in particular. And agreeing to any of those is not acceptable to Ukraine or to its leader. In fact, the Constitution of Ukraine does not allow a leader to give away territory or redraw borders.
The Cipher Brief: What else is top of mind for you as you’re on the ground there in Kyiv?
General Petraeus: I'm keen to hear from European and NATO leaders about how much this drone incursion has galvanized additional action. How much European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's stirring European Union address has reinforced that new determination, and to get a sense of where that is headed. Because there's a seriousness of purpose right now that is even greater than it was just days ago. And to put a finger on the pulse of that, I think will be very important and could produce a number of insights. Needless to say, that is very heartening to the Ukrainians who are seeing the prospect of this substantial additional European commitment. They are also heartened by recognition that Washington has done everything it can to try to be the catalyst to bring about a ceasefire. That's not going to happen, it doesn't appear. And now, I think there's a seriousness of purpose in Washington, reinforced, I hope, by this incursion to get that sanctions package through Congress to the White House and into law.
Cipher Brief Writer and Editor Ethan Masucol contributed research for this report.
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