“What does Ukraine really need? How do we make sure they're delivering what they actually need? And you know, right now those are air defense munitions, it's funding for drones, it's extended range artillery, electronic warfare, etc. And then the other big thing was to try to improve predictability because, you know, Ukraine could only plan operationally, if they knew what they were getting. And so how could we help better inform their planning efforts and their ability to operate together?”

That was just-retired -- on October 1-- Army Lt. Gen. Curtis Buzzard, most recently the former U.S. Commander of Security Assistance Group – Ukraine (SAG–U) and NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine (NSATU), speaking last Wednesday on the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) streaming podcast, The Last Line of Defense.

Being in charge of both these headquarters, located in Wiesbaden, Germany, Buzzard said he had traveled to Ukraine “some 30 times” over the past two years and was able to “develop close relationships with government officials, with the general staff, with units, and really watch them evolve over this period, visit the unmanned systems force, [and] visit some of these underground command posts.”

As a result, he said, “I think this is the most consequential environment to observe the evolution of warfare right now. And it really gave me firsthand observations about the future of war. It's really an action, reaction, counter-counter-reaction at an incredible pace.”

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Ukraine has turned it into “a brutal contest of wills,” Buzzard said, adding, “Who would have imagined they've [the Ukrainians] essentially halted the Russian offenses, and Russia's not accomplished a strategic objective in this war yet. And the Ukrainians have been doing this largely with innovations in unmanned systems, particularly drones.”

Buzzard confirmed reports that Ukrainians “largely have stopped Russian advances and these continued attacks are at great cost to Russia.” He continued, “You know over 30,000 [Russian] casualties a month generally and, from reporting, over 60 percent are fatalities. So this is incredibly lethal and that costs Russia money to recruit and to pay death gratuities.”

But it were the details that Gen. Buzzard went on to describe that made his presentation most interesting.

For example, Buzzard said, “When when anybody wants to talk about employing unmanned systems [in Ukraine]…I'd say the secret sauce is really Delta. It's this mission command system that enables them to be…fast, flat, and accurate [with] over 200,000 users -- on a handheld device like your cell phone or a tablet.”

Developed by Ukraine’s Centre of Innovations of the Ministry of Defense and Aerorozvidka, a prominent Ukrainian civic-tech volunteer NGO and military unit specializing in aerial reconnaissance, Delta is a cloud-based, modular situational awareness and battle management system that gathers and integrates data from diverse sources, and mapping it in real time.

Buzzard said, “I used to carry [a] tablet with layers of intelligence so you can see where the enemy is. You can coordinate missions. You can do targeting on there. You can also see every drone feed, and they've got an app called Vasia which allows you to ingest every drone feed, so you're not having to [deal with], you know, proprietary computers with imagery or whatever.”

Actually, Vasia, according to her Instagram, is the call sign of vasylynanakonechna, a well-known female drone operator and the Deputy Commander of a UAV unit within the Ukrainian Armed Forces called the White Demons. “War is brutal and dangerous,” she has written, “but our goal is simple: risk technology instead of people whenever possible.”

Buzzard last Wednesday continued saying of Delta, it “allows them to fight so fast and rapidly upload BDA. I mean battle damage assessment. Yeah, to rapidly upload what they've just done, and then using that data to better understand what tactical effects they've had on the battlefield.”

Buzzard identified “the guy that's really remarkable doing this” was Major Robert Yosypovych Brovdi , Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine, “who was a businessman three years ago, a grain trader, art dealer.”

Buzzard went on, “I mean, his [Brovdi’s] underground command posts are kind of a surreal experience because you're watching essentially like a Vegas stream of what effects they're having on the battlefield in terms of destruction of enemy. And then there's this incredible piece of art with a QR code [quick response matrix bar code] on it where I could look up the history of it.”

“You know,” Buzzard said, “they're sitting on the world's best combat data when you think about all the imagery feeds, all the understanding of Russian attacks into Ukraine and what routing speeds -- you know all this stuff. And so there's opportunities to work with them to use this to inform aided target recognition…to support Ukraine first and foremost, but also to learn ourselves. There's a professional responsibility to do that. This data in particular reinforces this idea of a lab, a battle lab that this fight in Ukraine is kind of like the Silicon Valley. I mean, they already had a real knack for technology and innovation.”

I should insert here that Buzzard also said Ukraine drone companies put a QR code on each drone.

“So, if you're out on the front,” he continued, “you get a drone from a company and there's something wrong with the drone, you scan the QR code; it'll go right back to a 24-hour op center of a Ukrainian company; then probably down to a team that's there to help you out; or you may even talk to them right away. And then, if it needs to be adjusted, they're probably changing the production line within 48 hours. So you know how to adjust that rapidly or if the [radio] frequencies change how rapidly they got to change what frequencies are on. So just an incredible amount of innovation [arrives] at a pace that is important and gives you combat advantage quite honestly. And so I got to think about how do we learn from this?”

At one point, Buzzard said, “The number one thing I've learned, and a lot of people would ask, is it technology, you know, drones, is it whatever? It's this velocity of learning that the Ukrainians demonstrate -- from observing, to learning, to adapting. to then fighting it again. This loop, action, reaction, counter-action, is just unbelievable. And I think it equates to combat power. And when you look at a lot of the success they've had on the battlefield, it's due to their own innovation.”

For example, he said the Ukrainians “didn't have enough mid-range strike capabilities, so they invented their own…There weren't enough interceptors to engage [Iranian-designed] shaheds.” These were one-way attack unmanned combat aerial vehicles and loitering munitions and now there are jet-powered shaheds.

Buzzard went on, “So they created their own. They created drone interceptors which actually from a cost standpoint are tremendously cheaper than what it would normally cost,” adding, “And they've really kind of mastered, I would argue, the cost of war -- developed cheap attritable [interceptors] because they haven't had expensive and exquisite. And I think that's an important lesson for us to learn, you know, what's the right balance of that, and how do you layer this capability with some of the very exquisite stuff that that we have also.”

Buzzard also noted, “It's just unbelievable how quick they iterate. As you look at some of the [Ukraine] long-range strike with drones, you know, even over the course of several months, it's a different drone, a different technique…What's used in the latter, you know, an earlier and a later one as you compare these things.”

He also noted “some incredible innovation particularly in the middle, deep-strike [drones], and then they're learning a lot just about how to do this. How do you weave through the electromagnetic signature, the EW [electronic warfare], the air defense; what's the right weapon to target pairing? What's the type of redundant network? How do you dynamically control all kinds of other things that I think would be hugely valuable for us, but again it all comes back to that velocity of learning from unit to industry to government funding.”

Buzzard also talked about some Ukraine counterattacks that have not gotten much public attention in the U.S.

“Right now,” he said, “there's one,Operation Vivaldi, a lot of folks are talking about with [Ukraine’s] Third Army, Gen. [Denys] Prokopenko down at Donetsk had done counterattacks, and Gen. Oleh Apostol, the Airborne Commander down south had done them in Zaporizhzhia.”

Buzzard continued, saying, “They've been taking back terrain too in the midstrike [areas] that's been very effective, about 20-to-30-to-150 kilometers, to help relieve pressure on the front so they've been very effective at striking logistics nodes, command and control, etc., electronic warfare.”

Buzzard also talked of “Ukrainians deep strike into Russia, most of that's with indigenous capabilities and a ton they've learned on just how to execute that. But that's clearly had an impact. Also, most recently, these huge logistics sites, Wildberries.” The latter, Wildberrries,

being Russia's largest online marketplace, and the attacks are part of a Ukraine campaign to disrupt Moscow's wartime economy.

Buzzard concluded, “So collectively I think this all aggregates to be military pressure, economic pressure [on Russia]…You know if I'm inflicting a lot of [Russian] casualties on the front, he's [Putin] potentially losing terrain. His economy is getting worse every day. Ideally at some point would he think that a deal today is better than a deal tomorrow?”

Buzzard went on to speculate, “And I don't know whether that'll actually end up happening or not, but they're [the Ukrainians] certainly in a position that in terms of what they're doing and I think these long-range strikes you're seeing from Russia to Ukraine now are really somewhat of desperation, because they're not achieving anything on the front or very little gains. And so the only thing they [the Russians] can do, and a lot of its impact is due to [shortage in Ukraine of] global supply of air defense interceptors, is [for Putin] to strike into Kiev and make it seem like they're more effective [against Ukraine] than what they really are.”

Buzzard presented a more optimistic view for Ukraine than I see, in part because he has left out President Trump’s recent moves that favor Putin and the Russian side. I don’t believe that either Putin or Trump know what’s going to happen next. Only Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky seems to have a set path, and that is to continue defending his country by seeking continuing aid from supportive countries.

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

On October 15, a Vietnamese state-owned tanker, the PVT Azura, departed St. Petersburg with 109,000 barrels of Russian diesel. It is due at Norfolk on November 2, at a facility that the shipping journal gCaptain reports serves the American military, a detail no official has confirmed. It will be the first Russian diesel to reach an American port since 2023. On October 23, Russia's deputy prime minister said three tankers were at sea, that supply contracts were being finalized, and that volumes would rise to 1 million tons in December and could reach 3 million a month. A week earlier, the United States had waived, by executive order, the duties Congress had required to punish Russia's energy customers. Within a week, the waiver became a contract.

Azura's cargo is about 40 minutes of American diesel demand; 3 million tons a month would be a fifth of it, and roughly four times what Russia exported in the third quarter. To deliver that, Russia must repair the refineries Ukraine has spent a year destroying, which Rosneft now says it cannot afford. The contract's first effect is to give Washington an interest in Russian refineries running, even as Ukraine's president says the interceptors it has already paid for "are still not coming."

Diesel is one of four things the arsenal took this autumn from parties it does not control. The second is magnets: China exported 6,165 tons in September, its largest month this year, and they are the magnets in the motors of the drones the new Autonomous Warfare Command is to buy by the hundreds of thousands; Beijing's pause on its licensing rules lapses on November 10, with no notice published. The third is a room: the President said on October 19 that he would meet Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in China next month, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin had proposed a three-way meeting in Shenzhen to settle the war in Ukraine, without Ukraine. The fourth is money: on October 21, the Treasury sold 20-year bonds at a record 5.469 percent with foreign demand well below its average, and the 10-year fell below 5 percent the next day only because investors fled artificial-intelligence debt for the government's.

The one adversary with nothing to sell was squeezed: a third carrier group was ordered toward Iran on October 21, and Brent settled Friday at $116.72, its highest since April, which raised the price of everything the arsenal buys from the adversaries that do sell.

A sanction is the instrument of the party that sells. This autumn, the United States is the party that needs, and each supplier holds a date on which it can change the terms: October 31, when Russia's own fuel-export ban lapses; November 10 for Beijing's licenses; early November for the Treasury's refunding; November 18 for the summit. In economic warfare, the buyer takes the terms.

I write this from the Cipher Brief's Threat Conference at Sea Island, where General Bryan Fenton and I addressed the question of what the Department of War has to do with economic warfare. The week answered it before we spoke: the Department is now, by available reports, a customer of one adversary's refineries, a buyer of another's magnets, the holder of an ally's interceptors, and the owner of the carriers that set the price of oil. No office weighed those instruments against one another; the suppliers did.

For nine weeks in these pages, I have written about what the United States cannot do, from the army it cannot command to the day it cannot choose, and each piece ended at the same place: a decision no one was assigned to make. The diagnosis is complete, and the series turns here from what we cannot do to what we must. The place to start is the Autonomous Warfare Command: its plan is due on October 30, and it will be the government's largest buyer of the parts this piece is about.

Three things must be in that plan, and none of them is money.

First, the authority to decide. The Secretary's memorandum settles who buys. It has not settled who decides: one command-and-control architecture across every Service and domain, including space; who allocates among theaters when two ask for the same drones on the same day; who overrides at tempo; and whether the answer binds the Services. Congress granted those authorities to Special Operations Command in 1986, with its own budget line and acquisition power. The plan should name the same for this command, and add the paragraph Congress left out in 1986: command and control.

Second, the edge. Ukraine computes on the aircraft; we compute in Virginia and wait, and the Pacific cannot fight on a round trip. The plan must put the computing on the platform and the communications on a layer the force controls, so that no one else sets its speed.

Third, supply before the ban. The command's motors turn on Chinese magnets until American plants deliver, and the Pentagon's own ban takes effect on January 1. A Defense Production Act priority rating and a drawdown from the National Defense Stockpile, issued before November 10, stock what we need before we forbid what we depend on. The same plan is the demand signal industry has asked for: an architecture and a date.

—

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

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

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

The United States is racing to field AI and autonomous systems. It is not racing to figure out how to fight with them. This imbalance between technology and concepts is widening a gap the U.S. is ill prepared to close. Ukraine has shown us why this gap is a threat: every new capability breeds a countermeasure, and technological advantage now spoils in months. The answer is not just faster innovation. It is making concept development a continuous military function, one that ties new technology to experimentation, validation, and adoption at the speed the fight demands. Not just a function of schoolhouses and Headquarters.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 as a war of armored columns and maneuver. Today, trenches and minefields stretch for hundreds of miles, reminiscent of World War I; while drones, unmanned ground vehicles, precision munitions, and persistent surveillance hunt anything that moves.

The United States has poured considerable energy into buying and fielding new technologies faster, and has shown how we are endeavoring to learn from Ukraine. But the U.S. has put far less energy into the institutional processes we need to determine how we fight as technology and adversary behavior changes. This creates a consequential gap between what we build and how we fight.

This growing gap has two parts. The first is substance: technology and concepts need each other. A concept that ignores new technology will overlook new operational possibilities, while a new technology without a concept is a demonstration… not a warfighting capability.

The second is tempo: technology moves in weeks and months, while the processes that decide how formations should use it operate in years. Our fastest-ever concept cycle, from counterinsurgency doctrine to the Iraq Surge, took eighteen months. Most move slower still: gradual, methodical, and caked in decades of calcified bureaucracy.

The problem isn’t just that doctrine changes more slowly than technology. Units in combat adapt fast. The greater challenge is translating those adaptations into concepts that can be tested, refined, integrated into combined-arms operations, and adopted across the force.

That doesn’t mean rewriting concepts every time a new drone appears. It means recognizing when a change in technology (or in the enemy) breaks assumptions behind how we fight, then testing and spreading the fix before it goes stale.

Concept development must become a continuous military function, not a periodic publication. The winner won’t be the side that buys technology fastest, but the side that turns it into battlefield advantage before the enemy adapts. Today, the U.S. is not built to do that quickly.

Ukraine: Adaptation as Necessity

Ukraine illustrates the increasingly reciprocal nature of battlefield adaptation. To date, every advantage has invited an answer. Both sides have changed their technology and tactics again and again in response to each other, and neither has held an edge for long.

Consider the first-person-view (FPV) drone. Cheap, attritable, and easy to build, FPVs turned every squad into a precision strike force. Electronic jamming became its counterpoint. Fiber-optic drones, immune to jamming, then entered the field. Each move created new openings and new limits, and forced changes in both the technology and how it was used.

The operational consequences extend well beyond FPV drones. Persistent surveillance paired with cheap precision strike has changed where and how formations can move, mass, resupply, and survive. Concealment, dispersion, and deception matter more than ever. A unit that concentrates in a location, moves in the open, or runs a predictable supply route becomes a target.

This is the more consequential lesson from Ukraine: a technological innovation may initially improve the effectiveness of a particular weapon or unit, but its broader significance emerges when it changes the conditions under which formations operate. Then the enemy adapts, and the cycle starts again. And again.

In Ukraine, technological advantage is perishable. The hard part isn’t fielding new capabilities. It’s recognizing when they, or the enemy’s countermeasures, demand a different way of fighting.

The American Challenge: From Innovation to Institutional Learning

For the United States, Ukraine demonstrates why concept development cannot remain an episodic activity conducted in schoolhouses and periodically revisited. The lesson is not that Ukrainian solutions are universally applicable. It’s that new technology and countermeasures can break operational assumptions faster than our institutions are built to respond.

The United States cannot just replicate Ukraine’s approach. U.S. forces fight expeditionary campaigns, integrate across joint and coalition formations, and answer to policy, legal, and safety requirements that a nation like Ukraine, fighting for its survival and territorial integrity, does not. The goal is Ukraine’s capacity to adapt, built to American requirements.

Our gap isn’t a shortage of experiments or innovation offices; efforts like the Army’s “Transformation in Contact” are putting new capabilities into units and learning from them. Our gap is having a pathway from what one unit learns, to what the whole force learns. A concept that works in one brigade may fail against a different enemy, in different terrain, or at a higher echelon. And a successful experiment rarely changes training, force design, or acquisition on its own.

Autonomy has raised the stakes and made our pathway to institutional learning an even greater necessity. A software update, a retrained model, or a new way of employing a system can change how technology behaves, and can quietly invalidate the conditions under which it was tested and fielded.

That is the problem assured autonomy is meant to solve. Assured autonomy is justified confidence that an autonomous system will do what it is supposed to do. It must therefore account for the whole relationship: the technology, how it is employed, and the environment it operates in. Continuous, evidence-based assessments can tell commanders when a change requires fresh evaluation and where the boundaries of responsible use lie. Built into the adaptation process, assurance can support speed without abandoning safety, reliability, accountability, or established approval authorities.

Building an Adaptive Concept-Development Enterprise

The United States needs a repeatable process that links new technology, operational concepts, experimentation against a thinking enemy, validation, and adoption across the force.

We are suggesting neither a prototype nor a concept paper. It’s a validated, revisable concept of employment, backed by operational evidence: how a formation can fight differently, under what conditions that works, and what it takes to make it happen. Four functions are needed to get us there:

First, connect concept and technology development directly to operational formations.

Operators, technologists, testers, and concept developers should work alongside commanders. Their job goes beyond improving systems or inventing tactics: they should identify which operational assumptions a new capability breaks, and draft concepts to test.

Not every improvement demands a new concept. A better jammer may only need a new tactic; a capability that changes how a brigade moves, masses, or resupplies demands a new way of fighting. The force needs people close enough to the fight to tell the difference.

In Ukraine, operational units have designated innovation officers liaising directly with industry; industry partners provide prototypes, receive feedback on battlefield experimentation and adaptation. Through this relationship, operators, technologists, and testers converge on a specific requirement, and battalion-level Commanders have the authority to acquire the necessary prototypes to integrate into their formations.

Second, establish a persistent cycle of adversarial operational experimentation.

The question isn’t whether the technology works as designed. It’s whether the formation using it accomplishes the mission better against an opponent who adapts. Experiments should also find where a concept fails: what works against one threat may fail against another, and a promising system may impose unacceptable costs elsewhere in the formation.

Combat training centers, experimentation units, and operational formations already provide the foundation. The task is to link them into a persistent learning loop, fed by operational evidence and intelligence.

Ukraine offers a cautionary tale. For nearly three years, intelligence indicated Russia was developing jet-powered Shahed variants, by most accounts ample time to prepare countermeasures. But when Russia began launching these faster one-way attack systems, Ukraine had too few interceptors capable of that speed, and their previous interception tactics were insufficient to stop them. The warning did not sufficiently feed a cycle of experimentation before the threat was fielded. That gap cost lives.

Third, connect operational validation to adaptive fielding.

Today, a system is typically tested, approved, and fielded as a finished product. But in a fight like Ukraine’s, nothing stays finished: software is updated, models are retrained, and units find new ways to employ what they have. Each change can quietly invalidate the evidence behind the original fielding decision. Adaptive fielding treats validation as continuous, asking what has changed and whether the earlier evidence still holds.

For autonomous systems, this is where assured autonomy matters most, and where scrutiny should match the modification. A minor software patch for a drone flying the same mission in the same conditions may need only a quick check. Retraining its targeting model, sending it into a new environment, or reducing human supervision demands full re-evaluation. This doesn’t bypass approval authorities or testing requirements. It gives them a faster, evidence-based way to decide when more evaluation is needed.

Fourth, institutionalize validated concepts across the force.

This is the decisive step. Experimentation produces evidence; learning happens only when that evidence changes how the force trains, organizes, equips, and fights.

A counter-drone tactic proven in one division should appear in the next combat training center rotation, the next force design update, and the next acquisition…not in an after-action report on a shelf.

This change requires a defined pathway and clear authorities. Commanders, testers, capability developers, and acquisition officials each own different decisions, but those decisions must draw on a common body of operational evidence, with clear decision points for when the evidence is strong enough to act. The result is a continuous cycle: develop, experiment, validate, field, learn, institutionalize, adapt. Then repeat, as the technology and the enemy change.

In Ukraine, Aerorozvidka, a non-governmental organization, plays this role: not a think tank but an empowered change agent -- capturing evidence from the field and shepherding it through commanders, technologists, and acquisition officials until new tech is deployed or new concepts (like deep strike) are fielded.

Operational Advantage Depends on the Capacity to Learn

The United States possesses substantial technological, industrial, and innovative capacity to compete in AI and autonomous warfare. But technological leadership alone will not produce operational advantage. Adapting a system isn’t the same as adapting a force, and a better-performing unit doesn’t change the course of a campaign.

Four questions will dictate our capacity to learn: The technical question is what a system can do. The tactical question is how formations should employ it. The operational question is how it changes the way maneuver, fires, intelligence, protection, sustainment, and command combine to win. The strategic question is whether the institution can answer all three, again and again, faster than the enemy.

The race isn’t to build the best autonomous systems or to field them first. It’s to turn technological change into operational advantage, faster than the enemy can take it away. In the age of AI and autonomy, the force that learns fastest wins.

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

“We never fight alone. We've never done that. You can go all the way back to the days of Revolutionary War. The United States has never gone into conflict on its own. We've always built coalitions. We've always involved partners and allies. And we'll continue to do so going forward.”

That was Gen. Ronald P. Clark, Commanding General, U.S. Army Pacific Command, speaking last Tuesday at a contemporary military forum, Decisive Landpower -- Deterrence and Partner Integration Against the Pacing Threat, as part of the 2026 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Conference in Washington, D.C.

On the panel with Clark was Army Gen. Xavier T. Brunson, Commander, United Nations Command, U.S. Forces Korea, and Tara Murphy Dougherty, Chief Executive Officer of Air, a leading AI software firm that specializes in national security readiness.

The two Army generals spent a good deal of their time talking about lessons learned from Ukraine and the benefits to the U.S. of allies – specifically in the Pacific. That struck me as something to further explore, since one day later, on Wednesday, President Trump continued his running criticism of allies with an October 14, Truth Social screed.

Trump said in part: “Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

On the other hand, Gen. Brunson had told the AUSA audience one day earlier, “Everything that we do is intricately woven around the ROK (Republic of Korea)-U.S. alliance. That alliance has stood for some 75 years and it is an example or a paragon, if you will, of all that's right when folk work in alliance together. The problems that we solve are joint problems. They're not just U.S. problems. They're not just Republic of Korea problems. What they are is great opportunities for two nations to work in concert with one another in order to arrive at solutions that are beneficial for both countries.”

Gen. Clark explained further, “So our ability to be able to work with partners and allies on their sovereign soil, to be able to share procedures that we build through [military] exercises over the course of a year, some joint, some army-to-army, but always integrated with our partners. It gives us the opportunity to have our systems work technically, to have our procedures nested, and to get to know one another in a way that allows us to build the trust that's necessary in training. Because if we wait until crisis or conflict, it's too late to ask the question, can I trust

you? But because we've been working together, because we've exercised at scale, because we're modernizing our forces alongside one another, it works.”

Clark added, “We've really worked hard at building those relationships at scale inside of the land forces. We have a land forces dialogue that meets multiple times a year -- chiefs of army of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the U.S. We've invited the ROKs in, we've invited India in, and it continues to grow. So those relationships built army-to-army are what allows us to really integrate across interoperability, and integrate it really across our formations and with our partners in all.”

Brunson described how he and Korean Gen. Kim Sung-min, Deputy Commander of the U.S.-ROK Combined Forces Command, discussed training differently “taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of the threats that exist or that prevail in the Ukraine fight.”

Brunson said, “We talk about how we would operate in a distributed fashion…Just imagine if we trained across the entirety of the [Korean] Peninsula and got ourselves in a shape where we would say you can't utilize the things that you've learned in the fight in the battlefield in Ukraine on us, because we learned the same lessons and we've distributed ourselves in such a way that we don't make ourselves the target. We won't be moored in place.”

Clark talked about Russia, North Korea and China “learning from watching us partner, but the partnerships that our adversaries have built are transactional versus the transformational relationships that we build as a security partner of choice globally…for us it's really transformational relationships that we look to cultivate with partners and allies over time.”

Brunson described how the North Koreans, fighting for the Russians in Ukraine were “able to test systems there…and then bring that back home. So, in one aspect, they've shortened their RDT&E cycle.” He also pointed out, “The fact that you have a combat trained force with recent

combat on the [Korean] Peninsula for the first time since 1953..[and] are now bringing those lessons learned back into their own training cycle, it's shortened their time to develop them.”

Clark said that U.S. forces had also learned from Ukraine about the need for mobility and camouflage, which he described as “age-old army forgotten sciences of how to hide in plain sight and how to camouflage ourselves from observation...Our ability to be able to use electronic warfare, to be able to use just good, old-fashioned camouflage and the ability to deceive our adversary is a must. In those two theaters [Ukraine and Iran] it's not a near-peer adversary that we would be working against -- whereas, in our theater [the Pacific] it absolutely is.”

For Clark, the questions were: “How do we fight, you know, Type One, Type Two UAS [unmanned aerial system, drones]; how do we think through ballistic missile defense holistically in the region. We spend a lot of time working again with the joint force for solutions associated with that. How do we maneuver?”

Brunson raised a new issue by pointing out that, “Our old system was something [a weapons system] breaks, we send it all the way back CONUS [Continental U.S.] in order to fix it so we can then bring it all the way back out again.” That used to take 29 days by ship.

However, he added, “In the ally that we have in Korea we have a an absolutely premier industrial base, if you look at the Korea defense industry, some of the kit that we're producing right now sits along our friends, allies and partners.” Brunson said, “The Army’s new infantry squad vehicle (ISV), for example, is produced by GM Defense and GM Defense is also in the Republic of Korea.”

“So the idea of a regional sustainment hub would simply be…to bring those means of production to the theater,” Brunson suggested, noting, “In the maritime domain, when we look at maintenance, repair, and overhaul, which is being done forward alongside the Koreans, you know that 15 percent of global ship building is done in Korea. And, oh by the way, we've got an ally with a mutual defense treaty in Japan that has 10% of global ship building. And if we take these cases forward, we're able to stay in theater longer.”

The answer, Brunson said, “We've got to try to achieve admirable endurance in theater by partnering alongside our allies, seeing the things that they can do better than we can right now at distance and then keeping them right where they belong. That keeps our [military] forces forward.”

Dougherty chipped in saying: “Tens of millions of dollars saved by simply identifying things like unfilled requisitions or parts that are obsolete that can be replaced with something not obsolete and also less expensive. I think that this is it. This is part of how you generate lethality. You get readiness to pay for itself, because otherwise sustainment is too expensive when it has to be done for the entirety of the joint force all the way on the other side of the world.”

At one point, Clark said, “The secret sauce for us as an Army is our Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) corps, reflecting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s September 30 speech praising the same group.

Clark noted that both he and Brunson were sons of NCOs, and that “with the assistance of our senior non-commissioned officers, senior enlisted leaders across the [PACOM] region have embarked upon conducting assessments with our partners and developing strategies to help them build their NCO development programs inside of their formations.”

To illustrate his point, Clark said his units had just finished an assessment in Cambodia of its army and the Commander, Gen. Mao Sophan, “basically said, ‘Hey, whatever you're asking us to do, we're going to do it because we want to get to a level of proficiency with our Non-Commissioned Officer core that we see in yours.’"

I must point out that during the one-hour-and-thirty-minute session neither General -- Clark nor Brunson -- came near to mentioning President Trump’s repeated critical views about U.S. allies.

The closest anyone came was Dougherty, who at one point said diplomatically, “We'll head into midterm elections here [in the U.S.] in November, obviously as you know, and I think we expect some variation in the political dynamic in the United States, and our allies and partners all navigate their own political changes as well.”

She then added, “If you look over the course of history, however, at least modern history, certainly the United States has invested in those partnerships. And today, we still are -- maybe with a different flavor or a different attitude. And that's not really for me to say. I'm simply observing. But we haven't lost sight of the importance of allies and partners to securing U.S. national interests.”

I would bet Clark and Brunson – along with most U.S. military professionals – would silently agree with her statement.

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

Washington made three decisions this week, and none of them has an end date. On the night of October 14, Ukrainian units in the field found that their Starshield terminals had been capped at a speed, 160 kilometers an hour by the published figure, 70 by President Zelensky's account two days later, which cuts off any strike drone that flies faster than the cap. Reuters reported, citing American and Western officials, that the order came from inside the White House; a senior official said the President had made no such request. Service was reported partly restored by October 15. No terms were ever published. The restriction followed a week in which American negotiators had warned Kyiv that intelligence sharing could be suspended if strikes on Russian energy targets continued, and in which the President announced an "energy ceasefire," which President Zelensky said was "news for me." Ukraine paused its refinery campaign for three days. On October 15, Zelensky told the Financial Times, "We're done," and that morning Rosneft's Ryazan refinery burned. The same day, CNN reported that Ukraine had run out of Patriot interceptors.

Two days later, on Friday afternoon, the President signed an executive order implementing the sanctions act passed by Congress in September. Its second section imposes what the law required by October 18: a 500 percent duty on Russian goods and a 100 percent duty on goods from any country that continues buying Russian crude or gas. Its fourth section waives both, along with eleven other sections of the act, until the President or the Secretary of State decides otherwise. The order names no country, mentions no fuel, and sets no date. The White House said enforcement now "would impede" the search for peace. Diesel in the United States stood at $6.33 a gallon on Saturday, higher than on the day the Russian diesel license was issued.

Last week, in these pages, I argued that no single authority in Washington was charged with weighing the sanctions against the price of fuel, and that whichever claim had the nearest deadline would win. This week, the President himself weighed the claims, and the ranking is visible in the two documents: the diesel license and the peace track outranked the statute, and the ally's campaign was slowed to protect them. Washington gave the peace track as its reason for the first and denied ordering the second. Whatever each was meant to do, both eased the pressure on Moscow in the weeks before November 3. That is a decision, and it bound the only party it could reach, the ally. It is also the week's lesson, because of what it did not contain.

It contained no horizon. The waiver has no end date. The throttle has no published terms. The diesel license runs through April. Each can be reversed by the same hand on any morning, which means none of them bind the party across the table; they inform him. Moscow learned that a license and a telephone call can buy a pause in the campaign against its refineries. Beijing, which must decide by November 10 whether to extend the suspension of its rare-earth licensing rules for American buyers, learned the price at which American pressure lifts, a month before the President arrives in Shenzhen. New Delhi, the act's principal target, received a waiver that asks nothing of it. And every ally that fights on an American-controlled communications or targeting layer learned that the layer can be set to a speed, without announcement, and that the setting is deniable. The European Union's foreign policy chief said the following day that Europe cannot replace Starshield in the short term.

The parties for whom the pressure was built spent the week waiting. Russia's first licensed diesel cargo, 40,000 tons loaded at Primorsk, sailed for Morocco. The volumes could not have moved the American price in any case: the 300,000 tons promised "immediately" are less than a day of American consumption. Tehran kept the American counterproposal under review and held to its sequence, the strait first and enrichment after, while flows through Hormuz ran at 11.6 million barrels a day, down from a pre-war 17.2, and a Singapore-flagged container ship sank, its port authority confirmed, after being struck. The International Energy Agency reported the world's oil stocks 509 million barrels below their pre-war level and agreed on Thursday to release what remains of the barrels pledged in March. Economic warfare is now being fought on two clocks. The West's runs to its elections and its inventories. The other side's runs to neither.

There is precedent for winning a contest of this kind, and it was won by time rather than force. In June 1948, the Soviet Union closed the roads and railways to West Berlin. The Western allies responded with an airlift. The blockade was lifted on May 12, 1949, after eleven months, not because the aircraft had defeated anything, but because Moscow concluded that the West could hold its position longer than Moscow could sustain the blockade. The instrument that prevailed was the horizon, and the West had shown it could keep it.

The remedy I named last week, a single authority to rank competing claims, turns out to be necessary but not sufficient. The authority existed this week and used itself. What it lacked was a commitment that outlasts the next election: a stated date and condition under which the pressure lifts, a provision of fuel and interceptors that carries the country to that date, and an officer beneath the President charged with holding the ranking when the price of diesel argues for changing it. In practice that is a sunset clause: the waiver expires on a date unless the President certifies to Congress why it should not. A sanction without a horizon is a disclosure. A satellite link without published terms is a lever on the ally rather than the adversary.

If you advise on these instruments, the decision you owe this quarter is a horizon. Before the next sanction is signed, the next license issued, or the next allied system switched on, put the date in the document: the condition under which the pressure ends, the provision that carries you there, and the office that holds the line until it arrives. The side that can wait chooses the day. This week, it was not ours.

Richard Berry is the founder and principal of Stratnova Advisors and a former Senior Executive who led the Commander's Action Group at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; he publishes the weekly assessment Strategic Horizons.

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

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

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

“The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Global Positioning System (GPS) is the principal source of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) information for the U.S. military and civilian users. Due to DoD’s reliance on it, GPS also represents a potential single point of failure for DoD. We [the Government Accountability Office (GAO)] previously reported on DoD’s efforts to modernize GPS with a more jam resistant, encrypted, military-specific signal, referred to as military code (M-code), and we found that DoD is years away from fielding this capability after spending more than two decades and billions of dollars.”

That was the opening of a GAO letter sent last Wednesday to Congress accompanying a 58-page report titled PRECISION NAVIGATION SYSTEMS: Challenges Remain with Fielding New Capabilities, which explains the key role that GPS delivery of PNT data plays in this country’s military and civilian activities -- and the need to update the system.

The M-code secure, jam-resistant GPS signal is designed to be used by roughly 700 U.S. weapons systems deployed by Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Space Force services, but because of a limited supply of specialized microchip sets and production bottlenecks of other key elements, some M-code deployments have been pushed back to 2049, according to the GAO.

I will discuss this more below. Meanwhile, the U.S. military services continue to rely on legacy GPS receivers or alternative systems for PNT-guided operations. For example, the GAO report described “non-satellite-based PNT using data derived from internal or external sources of information to sensors, from geophysical sources, or from celestial sources (e.g., inertial measurement units, cameras or terrain sensors, magnetic or gravity sensors, and celestial sensors).”

First, a bit of GPS background and history supplied in part by the GAO.

GPS consists of three segments: a constellation of approximately 31 medium Earth-orbiting satellites, with at least 24 continuously broadcasting their position and time data; a ground control segment – Space Command’s Delta 8 at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo. -- for command and control of the satellite constellation; a user segment, comprising receivers used globally by military and civilians in aircraft, ships, land vehicles, precision-guided munitions, and handheld devices.

The user equipment receives signals from four GPS satellites and, with that transmitted data, instantly calculates the user’s location and precise time.

Although the U.S. Government created and continues to control and maintain GPS, it is freely accessible to anyone with a GPS receiver. There are three other similar global systems: Russia’s GLONASS was developed during the Cold War; the European Union manages Galileo, and China operates the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System.

Today’s U.S. GPS originated in 1973 when the Defense Navigation System, later named NAVSTARS GPS, was approved, primarily to guide ships. In 1978, the first GPS satellite was launched into orbit, with the full satellite complement not reaching initial operational capability until 1993. By then, it had been made available for civilian use as well as military, a decision made by President Reagan in 1983 after the Russian downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

By the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the GAO report said, “GPS equipment was small and inexpensive enough to also be used on aircraft and other military vehicles. Since then, further advances, such as the development of even smaller microchip-sized receivers, have allowed GPS to provide precise PNT information for individual soldiers, munitions, smaller weapons technology applications, and civilian applications, like smart phones.”

Meanwhile, according to the GAO report, “GPS signals are being actively targeted by adversaries who seek to disrupt or deny GPS to U.S. warfighters. These threats include (1) jamming, (2) spoofing, (3) cyber, and (4) direct attacks on satellites or satellite infrastructure.”

DoD is mitigating jamming attacks “by installing specialized antennae -- referred to as controlled reception pattern antennae (CRPA) -- on weapon systems and munitions,” according to the GAO report, which added, “These antennae provide the ability to identify and filter out the jamming signals.”

Spoofing is being dealt with “in part by developing and installing receivers with M-code capability, which will provide more secure encryption,” the report said. As for cyberattacks, DoD is “ensuring that computer systems and networks are protected against cyber attacks that can target satellites and their associated ground control systems,” according to the GAO.

Since 2000, the Air Force -- and later the Space Force – have pursued a multibillion-dollar effort to modernize the existing GPS capability. The modernization effort included adding the more robust and more securely encrypted GPS military signal capability, known as M-code. It also included: 1) satellites that broadcast the M-code signal, 2) a ground system that controls both the existing and new M-code GPS satellites, and 3) user equipment to receive the M-code signals.

The first satellites capable of broadcasting M-code have been on orbit since 2005, with upgraded versions referred to as GPS III.

The launch of the GPS III third generation of 24 M-code satellites was completed on April 21 of this year, providing eight times the anti-jamming capability and four times the accuracy of previous iterations. “The next generation of satellites, known as GPS III Follow-on, or GPS IIIF, are in production by Lockheed Martin, and will begin launching as early as 2028,” according to a Space Systems Command press release.

However, it’s a different story with the new generation ground system, referred to as Next Generation Operational Control System (OCX). It began development in 2010 and was supposed to achieve transition to operations by June 2017. Instead, there were numerous technical problems and protracted delays. Costs rose from $3.7 billion to almost $7 billion or more, and in April 2026, DoD directed the Air Force to formally terminate the OCX program, according to the GAO report.

Despite the cancellation of the OCX program, then-Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in April the new ground control system needs to be prepared to support future GPS satellites, including GPS IIIF and beyond.

However, despite the OCX problems, the Space Force has been making upgrades to the existing GPS ground control segment through Lockheed Martin. Last week, an Air and Space Forces Magazine daily report said, “Since April, the Space Force has awarded Lockheed an additional $199 million…to support launch and command and control for GPS IIIF satellites…and to begin a full technology refresh of the GPS ground segment hardware and software.”

The final problems harming total GPS modernization – including delays and mounting costs – are best portrayed in the GAO report’s description of the military services’ development and procurement of separate receivers for the M-code data.

While development of the M-code-capable receiver cards has been led by the Space Force and Air Force, the eventual fielding of receivers to specific operational platforms, such as weapons, has remained the responsibility of the individual services.

According to the GAO report, “Currently, there are more than 50 priority weapon systems [considered in the GPS modernization programs]. The largest numbers of priority weapon systems are in munitions and aviation systems. The Navy has the highest number of systems, followed by the Army…Priorities for M-code modernization take into account the needs of the specific classified operational scenario as well as the expected life spans of the weapon systems involved. Weapon systems that are expected to no longer be in use around or before 2030 are not priority weapon systems.”

Congress mandated the PNT Oversight Council in the Fiscal Year 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, and DoD established it with the mission of overseeing the department’s GPS modernization portfolio.

However, as the GAO report explains, “Budget authority for key aspects of DoD’s PNT efforts remains under the control of the [separate military] services. This budgetary fragmentation complicates efforts to align interdependent PNT capability development and fielding efforts to ensure timely delivery to the warfighter.”

For example, the GAO found that despite recommendations from the PNT Oversight Council concerning inadequate Air Force funding for aviation receiver programs, “chronic underfunding” continued and the Air Force aviation receiver programs did not meet their development goals on their expected timelines.

“Pursuing modernized GPS and complementary PNT technologies to augment GPS,” the GAO report concludes at one point, “requires foresight and planning. Integration timelines for weapon systems are often lengthy, and schedules must be properly aligned for the development of such modernized PNT technologies and their integration into weapon systems. Additionally, these timelines for integrating new PNT technologies can be further complicated by the interdependence of systems. For example, the military services will likely upgrade some munitions to use M-code before the capability is integrated into weapon systems that fire those munitions.”

Since, as the GAO points out, the GPS system “is vast and touches almost all vehicles, ships, aircraft, precision-guided munitions, and dismounted personnel within the [Defense] Department,” I would say more DoD attention needs to be paid to getting this modernization back on track.

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

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

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

The DoW urgently needs to organize its scattered subterranean warfare assets into a single unified organization. Ideally, a Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager (DRPM) for Subterranean Warfare, reporting to the Deputy Secretary of War. (The Department already uses this model for unmanned systems, critical weapons and Golden Dome.) This group would have three portfolios: Subterranean Resilience, Subterranean Sensing and Subterranean Defeat. The office would integrate validated requirements, experimentation, testing, acquisition, and fielding.

Subterranean Resilience

During the 2026 Iran conflict, Iranian ballistic missiles and low-cost drones hit U.S. installations across eight Middle Eastern countries. Hundreds of buildings and structures were damaged or destroyed. The Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was among the installations hit hard. Iranian weapons damaged one E-3 airborne early-warning aircraft and five KC-135 tankers on the ground in Saudi Arabia. (The official inspector-general report documents the damage.) Despite thousands of successful interceptions, the attacks exposed the vulnerability of concentrated, above-ground assets.

The rapid redeployment of the B-1s from RAF Fairford in the UK after warnings of an Iran-linked threat (reported as a possible drone attack) made the point: unsheltered concentrated high-value aircraft are vulnerable even way outside the theater.

The assumptions the U.S. has made about air superiority, missile defense, aircraft dispersal, building hardening, and the survivability of concentrated forward bases were all flawed. While we were prepared for ballistic missiles and hostile aircraft, drone swarms combined with ballistic missiles saturated and got through our defenses.

Washington’s reaction has been to invest billions of dollars in counter-drone and missile defense systems. Yet public budget documents reveal no comparable effort to put vulnerable aircraft, fuel, command-and-control nodes, and munitions out of harm’s way – sheltered, underground (or in space). (Agile Combat Employment, dispersal, hardening, deception, shelters, and rapid runway repair were never designed for a combined drone and missile onslaught.)

The Pentagon has recognized for decades that underground facilities are among the most effective ways an adversary can blunt U.S. conventional superiority. It described that problem explicitly in 1999. Gaza and Ukraine should have made it abundantly clear.

China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran use underground facilities, dispersal, hardening, and deception to make their own high-value assets harder to find, assess, and disable. We need to underground assets that cannot be quickly replaced: command posts, comms nodes, ammunition, fuel distribution points, repair facilities, key power systems, maintenance spares, and high-value aircraft or drones. The department needs an integrator that coordinates resilience across the Military Departments, Joint Staff, combatant commands, defense agencies, and intelligence community and provides Subterranean Resilience.

However, resilience is only one part of subterranean warfare.

Subterranean Sensing and Defeat

The U.S. needs to know where adversaries' underground facilities are located, and the internal layout of those facilities. Today, these bespoke exquisite systems for tunnel detection, robotic mapping of accessible tunnels, Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBT) characterization, and target defeat are siloed in organizations scattered across the DoW. Most of these systems still require boots on the ground. Once a target is found, Combatant Commands need an integrated system that can characterize and destroy these targets, without first gaining physical access. Today, for the deepest facilities that means bombing from the air. Iran is the case in point.

Background. Iran's route to a nuclear weapon is by enriching uranium. Natural uranium is composed of 0.71% uranium-235 (U235) and it’s only the U235 that is used to build a bomb.

Iran uses centrifuges to separate U235 and increase its concentration (enriching it.) One centrifuge won’t do much, but connecting thousands of centrifuges together into cascades and running them for months can produce pounds of U235.

Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment site at Natanz had well over 10,000 centrifuges installed across dozens of cascades, and their Fordow nuclear enrichment site was built for 16 cascades, roughly 3,000 machines. Before the June 2025 strikes, Iran’s three declared enrichment facilities contained more than 20,000 centrifuges in 125 full-sized cascades.

The rough estimate needed for one Iranian nuclear weapon is ~100 lbs of U-235 at 60% enrichment or 55 lbs of U-235 at 90% enrichment (modern designs use less.) The difference is important, the lighter the weapon the easier it is to fit on a missile.

At its peak (Feb 2025 to June 2025) Iran’s cascades were delivering ~86 lbs of uranium enriched to 60% which is about 50 lbs of U-235 per month, which is just under one potential weapon every month. (Most weapons use U235 enriched to 90+% because that permits a smaller, more reliable design. Getting to that level in Iran might take days or weeks running the cascades, but building it into a weapon would still be needed.)

Deeply Buried Targets Versus Bunker Busters. One of the stated goals of the U.S. strikes on Iran was to remove their capacity to build nuclear weapons. This required the U.S. to destroy their deeply buried underground nuclear enrichment sites. The largest conventional bomb in the U.S. military’s arsenal is the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, carried by the B-2 Bomber. A 2019 description said it could reach targets as far as 200 feet underground (its actual effectiveness depends on geology, concrete, facility design, entry points, and the use of multiple weapons). The Iranians knew this and built their nuclear enrichment sites underground. The Fordow site is ~260 to 300 feet under limestone and dolomite. The Natanz site is 25 to 160 feet underground, protected by a 25-foot concrete shield. (But public estimates are over the place.)

Iran declared Isfahan as an enrichment complex to the IAEA the day before the June 2025 strikes; inspectors never got inside it, therefore its depth and geology are unknown, but speculation is that the enrichment complex is 260 to 330 feet underground. Another suspected enrichment facility is in Pickaxe Mountain, where the exact depths, geology, are unknown but estimates put the facility 250 – 330 feet below the summit. Both Isfahan and Pickaxe were Iran’s shift toward "deep mountain basing" to escape the reach of conventional military strikes.

In June 2025 in Operation Midnight Hammer U.S. B-2 bombers dropped 14 GBU-57 bombs on top of Fordow and Natanz. At Isfahan (Esfahan) more than two-dozen submarine-launched Tomahawks hit tunnel entrances and surface targets. In March 2026, strikes at Natanz hit its entrance.

According to the Institute for Science and International Security, the 22,000 centrifuges at Natanz, the Natanz pilot plant, and Fordow are almost certainly wrecked. What may have survived is the enriched uranium, the spare parts, and the people, and that is the problem. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimated (in June 2025) that Iran had about 970 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%; it has since lost track of where it is. Iran's known uranium conversion capability at Isfahan was damaged, which it needed to turn the stockpile of enriched uranium into a weapon, and there is no public evidence that enrichment has resumed at Natanz, Fordow or Isfahan. We never hit Pickaxe Mountain or the Isfahan enrichment facility with the GBU-57. The strikes have set Iran back, but no one knows for how long.

While the GBU-57 MOP cannot cleanly punch through solid rock, the debate has shifted from an absolute physical destruction calculation to a functional denial calculation—meaning the military's goal would be to seal Iran's nuclear assets in a mountain tomb rather than blowing them up directly.

Did We Succeed? Our stated goal was to prevent Iran from rapidly rebuilding the capability to build nuclear weapons, but there’s no certainty that we did that. Repeated airstrikes may have damaged the buried enrichment plants, but we can’t prove it or account for the buried enriched uranium inside. The fact is that it’s extremely difficult to see how much damage the bombs did to Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs) from the air, and without inspectors on the ground, knowing for sure is guesswork. Putting boots on the ground would carry enormous costs and risks. Negotiating the removal and inspection of weapons grade uranium would depend on Iranian cooperation and a way to verify we got it all. All bad choices.

There is another emerging option: autonomous drilling equipment.

Subterranean Sensing and Defeat. It’s not hard to imagine that with enough boots on the ground the U.S. could secure a landing zone, fly in drilling equipment and have crews drill hundreds of feet vertically or thousands horizontally to either place sensors and/or explosives. The U.S. has had organizations building specialized equipment and training for breaching tunnels in Combatant Commands and scattered across the DoW for years (DTRA, DARPA, Army ERDC and CAVES and CZ5 programs, SOCOM, Sandia and the Army's half-billion-dollar underground-training push (2018) and ATP 3-21.51 Subterranean Operations.) One can even imagine that there are teams already trained and equipment ready to go. And one can equally imagine the Iranians are waiting for them.

What’s new is autonomous drills that could provide post-strike bomb damage assessments and/or destroy Hard and Deeply Buried Targets (HDBTs) without seizing the site. They might be inserted covertly; more likely they'd need air cover while they work.

The combination of AI, robotics and autonomy moves this from science fiction to the possible.

Anduril, The Boring Company, Exodigo, Phoenix Boring, Earthgrid and Traysar are possible candidates to deliver these systems. There are likely others as well.

(Disclosure: after my first blog about undergrounding critical assets, I invested and have a financial interest in companies in this space.)

Surface survivability and subterranean sensing and defeat are no longer one Service's problem, and they won't be solved by a single system or an incremental fix. Something fundamentally disruptive has changed in the nature of asymmetric warfare and there’s no going back. While we’re actively chasing immediate solutions (Golden Dome, JIATF-401, et al), we need to rethink the nature of force protection, and military and civilian infrastructure protection.

The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize it, how we budget and pay for it, and how we rapidly deploy it.

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

“It's worth saying again so that the fake news understands it. We are no longer the woke department or the weak department. Simple translation of that: No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors -- just tough, ready, committed troops. The War Department, as you know, is colorblind, gender neutral, and merit-based. Or, as the President likes to say to me: ‘Pete, central casting. I want central casting.’”

That was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaking on The State of the Force last Wednesday at the Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia to a group of 600 selected O-3 junior officers (Captains in the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force; Lieutenants in the Navy and Coast Guard) and E-6 enlisted service personnel (Staff Sergeants in the Army and Marine Corps; Petty Officers First Class in the Navy and Coast Guard; Technical Sergeants in the Air Force and Space Force).

President Trump wants a military that looks like “central casting,” and Defense Secretary Hegseth, who looks and acts as if he, himself, came out of central casting, gave last week’s speech, reminiscent to anyone over 45 of the 1970 movie Patton, where George C. Scott playing Gen. George S. Patton also spoke before a full-screen American flag.

“The ideological clowns are out,” Hegseth said, “The patriotic cowboys are in with testosterone testing on top.”

He is correct.

He spoke of bringing back PT (physical training) “for every combat MOS (military occupational specialty),” adding, “We now have a combat field test, again, set at the highest male standard, only because combat doesn't care. That means two PT tests every year for every unit.”

As for picking senior leaders, Hegseth said, “We got rid of the DEI-based (diversity, equity and inclusion), social, emotional, evaluations known in the Army as BCAP [Battalion Commander Assessment Program] and CCAP [Colonels Command Assessment Program]. You won't have to endure them. They were [former-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark A.] Milley and [former Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin specials, intended to create politically-correct quotas for race and gender. Under the guise of double-blind psychology assessments, the previous administration forced out so-called toxic leaders in favor of promoting risk-averse, get-along to go-along conformists.”

However, Hegseth left out the important fact that BCAP and CCAP were products of the first Trump administration, put together by Casey Wardynski, then-President Trump’s appointed Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

In prepared testimony for a March 11, 2020, Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, Wardynski said, “The Army is currently prototyping, piloting, or implementing talent management initiatives from Talent Based Branching (TBB) to Battalion Commander

Assessment Program (BCAP), with the goal of implementing most of these initiatives by December 2020… Exit interviews and surveys from participants, board members, and distinguished visitors indicate BCAP is better than the legacy system for selecting battalion commanders and other key Lieutenant Colonel positions. Seven hundred and fifty candidates participated in the first iteration of the BCAP in January and February 2020.”

In a September 21, 2020, Army release about testing the new Colonels Command Assessment Program (CCAP) for bias at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Wardynski is quoted saying of the CCAP program, “When we started things like talent management and then this [CCAP], the question of fairness came up. A lot of the focus of fairness was to the individual.”

Although Milley was Army Chief of Staff at the time Wardynski’s BCAP and CCAP were being introduced, then Gen. Austin was head of Central Command and not involved.

Since January 25, 2025, when he became Defense Secretary, Hegseth has changed the senior leadership of the military and even has plans that could affect the leadership in years to come, and I will discuss that below.

First I want to point out that Wardynski was not the only originator that Hegseth ignored during last week’s speech.

For example, former-Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work in 2015 established the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) which was the initial effort to bridge the gap between the Defense Department and commercial technology through rapid investments in autonomous systems, human-machine teaming, and even early Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Project Maven, linked to DIU in 2017, focused on integrating computer vision and AI into drone operations, allowing computer algorithms to autonomously scan hours of aerial drone video footage to detect and tag potential tactical targets.

This sounds a lot like Hegseth’s new Autonomous Warfare Command (AutoWarCom). And to tie the connection further to Carter and Work’s DIU, Hegseth named Owen West, who up-to-now has been DIU’s Director, to be Chief Executive Officer of AutoWarCom.

Then there is Project Meridian, which is supposed to -- in Hegseth’s words -- “Creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master.”

We old-timers knew Andrew (Andy) Marshall and his Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon which was started in 1973. With a small staff and a wide range of consultants, Marshall covered many areas related to national security. When he retired in 2015, his work was carried on until Hegseth disestablished it in March 2025.

Hegseth’s March 2025 memo called for a plan to rebuild the Marshall office in a manner “consistent with [Hegseth’s] priorities.”

Project Meridian may be that. As Hegseth described it last week, “We need to be looking forward into the future to achieve technological and military dominance on the battlefield for

decades to come. It is futuristic on purpose. Their work will be focused on discovering, developing, and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes without any creative limitations or restrictions.”

Hegseth said last week that he has from the beginning wanted a 20 percent reduction of flag officers “across the board,” adding, “Now, the media calls that a purge. I call it accountability, long overdue and frankly the bare minimum…You see you can't change a culture with the same people who enabled it.”

A list of those fired, compiled by CBS, is impressive: Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations; General James Slife, Air Force vice chief of staff; General Randy George, Army chief of staff; General David Allvin, Air Force chief of staff; Army Lieutenant General Joseph B. Berger III, Army Judge Advocate General; Air Force Lieutenant General Charles Plummer, Air Force Judge Advocate General of the Air Force; Admiral Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command; General Christopher Donahue, head of U.S. Army Europe and Africa; Air Force General Timothy Haugh, NSA director and head of U.S. Cyber Command; Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; Air Force Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, senior military assistant to Defense Secretary; Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore, Navy Reserve chief; Rear Admiral Milton Sands, head of Naval Special Warfare Command; General David Hodne, Army Transformation and Training Command; and Major General William Green, head of the Army Chaplain Corps.

In addition, I add Navy Secretary John Phelan and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.

Needless to say, nothing like this has happened in the past to the U.S. military, and it doesn’t end there. We don’t know the full extent of the individuals Hegseth has knocked off promotion lists, although indications are clear they are most often women and minorities.

In another effort to affect the future, Hegseth not only has sought to force changes in the Service Academies’ curricula and civilian tenured teaching staffs, he announced in last week’s speech an attempt to influence college ROTC units and thus the future generation of young officers.

He also announced establishment of a new program, America’s Core of Cadets, to be initiated at five specified institutions: Louisiana State University (LSU), Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University, and Hillsdale College.

The publication Inside Higher Ed reported last week that LSU will establish a four-year military or national security program; create a self-governed student military organization – a cadet corps -- led by an independent commandant who reports to LSU’s president; and cadet members will be required to wear uniforms during all academic hours.

On top of all this, Hegseth also announced establishment of an Office of Religious Affairs, which will report straight to the Defense Secretary, or as he put it: “No staff filters, no bureaucratic dilution, a direct line to the Secretary. This is not going to be a paper-pushing shop. It's going to have real teeth. They'll protect budgets, demand infrastructure, and strengthen religious support.”

To justify this religious office, Hegseth pointed out, “Less than five percent of our force identifies as non-religious. Less than five percent. Meaning 95 percent of our force recognizes an almighty God.”

As with other statements made by Hegseth, this is not totally true.

According to a 2019 study conducted by the Congressional Research Service, approximately 73 percent of all military service members identify as people of faith, compared to less than three percent who are atheist or agnostic. Religious diversity in the military is broadly representative of the U.S. population, with nearly 70 percent of active duty military personnel who consider themselves to be Christian.

Hegseth said last week, “Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God, because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.”

Reviewing all Hegseth is doing, as a drafted, two-year Army veteran from the 1950s, I would say our Defense Secretary is taking the spirit of true government service out of the military I have known.

Update: We corrected an earlier misquote from Pete Hegseth.

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

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

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

The U.S. must set dominance of global AI sector as a strategic economic and national security priority. If the PRC becomes the dominant provider of AI infrastructure and LLM model development, this will have dire consequences for the U.S. and allow the PRC to embed itself in many foreign countries, especially across developing economies. Developing economies, which have a more positive view of AI than their more developed counterparts, face increased risks and less ability to counter them.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is actively working to shape technological choices, including those related to AI through its Digital Silk Road. While the stated purpose of the program is to enhance global connectivity, it carries strings. The program embeds Chinese tech standards and companies on participants, which expands Beijing’s economic, geopolitical, and directive influence in cyberspace. These investments include hardware and software infrastructure that can lead to an effective long-term lockout of other competitors in this space. The U.S cannot let this happen.

U.S. failure to lead risks both the economic advantages, including market access, of the largest AI ecosystem and the ability to shape global standards, governance, norms and values (including privacy). In the absence of U.S. leadership, this space is likely to be filled by a nation with differing standards, norms, and values. When the U.S. engages, it can offer transparent partnership with auditable open models, reducing the chance that partners turn to less safe alternatives, and strengthening U.S. partnerships with those countries going forward.

If Beijing's systems become the default, it may not only provide data to improve their own AI capabilities, but also potentially exposes the purchasing country, and U.S. interests in that country, to disruption or espionage risk. These risks grow exponentially if these either adversarial or compromised AI systems are used in ports, grids, communications or other critical systems.

AI is not physical infrastructure, but when widely embedded it becomes infrastructural -- hard to replace, a key foundation for economic activity, and subject to resilience, security and lock-in dynamics that give the provider geopolitical leverage.

This combination of risks and opportunities makes U.S. leadership in developing-economy AI investments essential, not only for American economic interests, but also for the long-term national security and sovereignty of developing economies themselves. Converting those advantages into durable influence in the developing world requires deliberate engagement, including efforts like Pax Silica. The window for trusted U.S. partnerships on secure infrastructure, open and auditable models, and capacity building is open but narrowing.

Notable trends in AI investments in the Developing World

Across the world, governments are seeking to leverage AI for public and private sector gains, but funding sources and the types of AI models employed diverge significantly. These choices have large short- and long-term impacts. Between 2017 and 2025 more than 80 countries published national AI strategies. As of 2023 developing countries were less than half as likely (just 30 percent) to have these strategies as developed countries (more than 60 percent).

While national AI strategies are expanding across developing economies, follow-through including funding - varies. For example, India’s IndiaAI Mission has committed substantial resources to infrastructure and ecosystem development aimed at sovereign capabilities. Kenya has adopted a National AI Strategy (2025–2030) alongside skilling initiatives and public-private AI hubs. The African Union’s Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy provides a regional framework, while countries such as Nigeria and Rwanda are advancing targeted investments in AI centers and applications.

Many of these efforts are public-private partnerships with both domestic and foreign funding. A PRC company has positioned itself as Rwanda’s digital transformation infrastructure partner on projects including but not limited to AI. The PRC is also building key parts of Kenya’s AI infrastructure and providing funding to support it through loans.

A key trend is the choice between open-source, open-weight and closed, or proprietary models. Open-source and open-weight offer customizability, including linguistically, increased data control and sovereignty, and the ability to self-host, meaning the owner controls the infrastructure and can better control the costs. Fully open-source models go further by also releasing training data and code, allowing deeper inspection. Open-weight models require less upfront costs than open-source, which requires training from scratch.

Closed or proprietary models usually deliver out-of-the-box performance, require less infrastructure and come with providers who support continuous updates. However, they offer far less customizability and higher, as well as less predictable costs driven by usage volume. They can also create dependence on the provider for access, security, and future capabilities. These choices will shape data flows, as well as technological and geopolitical dependencies, for decades. Proactive U.S. leadership can help ensure AI becomes a source of shared prosperity and security rather than risking a new avenue of vulnerability and influence.

Unique challenges of AI in the developing world

Most low- and lower-middle-income countries face challenges in finding talent to support AI and other ICT needs, limiting local ability to design or train models. Developing markets also face private sector hesitancy to finance large-scale AI infrastructure given low demand and less reliable power which reduce guarantees that returns will justify the capital outlay. This makes government investment and use of AI for services a potentially critical anchor for AI infrastructure and adoption by creating the initial demand that later attracts broader private investment.

Developing countries are also more likely to have weaker legal and regulatory frameworks, creating uncertainty for AI investment and implementation. Lack of clarity around liability and enforcement raise costs and uncertainty which deters investments, since risk is more challenging to reliably assess or manage. Weak frameworks can also lead to AI exacerbating underlying issues by making processes, such as authoritarian surveillance, more efficient.

AI usage presents privacy risks that are heightened in lower capacity environments common in the developing world. AI models require massive amounts of data often including sensitive personal information such as location, biometrics, and communications to support pattern recognition that lets them serve users. Uses such as healthcare, smart cities, and surveillance infrastructure, require collecting and leveraging huge amounts of highly sensitive data. AI models also require auditing including for bias, which exposes the data and may let vendors or governments repurpose it.

Whenever large amounts of data are collected, privacy is at risk, making it important to minimize inadvertent exposure. Strong cybersecurity standards are essential for protecting this data. This makes it essential that privacy is included by design – from the outset – in AI efforts. These principles must be coupled with broader secure-by-design cybersecurity principles and leveraged into frameworks that are incorporated into all implementation.

For example, many countries lack comprehensive data protection laws, and enforcement mechanisms may be especially weak in developing economies, making it difficult to impose meaningful constraints on data collection, use, or cross-border transfer. Countries with weaker institutions and legal foundations face increased risks. These factors make privacy principles both more essential and more challenging to implement in developing countries.

Different Model Types as Developing Countries Adopt AI at the Government Level

Open-source and open-weight models are the primary ones being adopted by developing economies at the government level, chosen to support sovereignty and reduce dependency risk. Closed or proprietary models often involve data flowing outside the sovereign country, risking access by another state and passage into jurisdictions with different safeguards. But localized data alone does solve for data security, and even with self-hosting, limited local cybersecurity remains a risk.

Data centers being located physically in country does not necessarily give control over the technology, data, or strategic assets. For example, across Southeast Asia especially Malaysia and Indonesia the rapid expansion has been driven largely by foreign hyperscalers, but the underlying technology and decision rights are outside the host-country’s control. This can also create risk of export-control diversion, for example Singapore’s 2025 prosecution around misrepresentation of the end-users of servers containing U.S.-controlled Nvidia chips.

It is likely that open-source and open-weight models will remain the primary choice for high-volume and self-hosted use driven by cost and return on investment. Open models achieve approximately 90 percent of the performance of closed models at release and quickly make up the difference. This performance gap is continuing to narrow, and costs for comparative open models can be 17 percent that of the alternatives.

Across developing economies, AI models from the PRC are gaining traction more quickly than Western models. DeepSeek is being adopted across Africa at a rate two to four times that of Western alternatives, likely because of the cost and openness, key factors in resource constrained environments. Of note, Australia, Taiwan and South Korea have all issued public warnings around the security risks of DeepSeek, including banning its use on government devices. Some U.S. models are competing, such as Meta's open-source Llama which is used for purposes including to deliver agricultural advisory services in Kenya, Nigeria, and India. But AI adoption and development across the world are evolving, leaving opportunity for market capture still in flux.

Current Impacts of PRC Investment in AI in Developing Countries

The PRC has been focused on advancing its global digital infrastructure footprint for more than a decade through a Belt and Road linked Digital Silk Road (DSR). The DSR covers a broad range of investments from surveillance technology to cloud computing and AI, from infrastructure to LLMs. Infrastructure support of any kind is uniquely difficult to reverse, locking in relationships between the two countries even if the geopolitical landscape shifts. This can open the door to coercive leverage should the providing country wish to exert it.

The PRC has already built significant parts of digital infrastructure across the Global South, especially across Africa and Asia, including telecommunications networks, fiber-optic cables, data centers, cloud services, and smart cities. By building this infrastructure, providing software and setting operating standards, the PRC creates systems that their state actors understand completely posing significant risk for penetration and influence. PRC’s national security laws require Chinese firms to cooperate with the state, meaning that the use of even supposedly private-sector technology from the PRC presents government surveillance risks. This poses a risk as the U.S. attempts to engage with these countries across sectors.

AI is likely to be foundational for the global economy over the next century. When countries adopt an AI product in partnership with another country they at least informally adhere to the standards of the producer. PRC leadership on AI opens the door for Beijing to set global standards on detecting bias and training models that are likely to think about the world the way the CCP does. The U.S. not leading in this space does not just risk U.S. market share but also the U.S. ability to set the operational and cultural standards for AI. If a U.S. adversary captures this market and sets these standards the U.S. will face long-term national security challenges.

How to Win

The U.S. does not need to match the PRC dollar for dollar but must arrive with solutions and credible long-term funding packages to the global south. The PRC’s own neighborhood, the Indo-Pacific, can offer a model for how this might function. In 2022, Solomon Islands took a PRC concessional loan to build 161 Huawei telecommunications towers. Yet when Australia funded the Coral Sea Cable in 2018 in place of a Huawei proposal to connect Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, and when Australia, Japan and the U.S. committed to jointly finance the East Micronesia Cable, allies showed that a trusted, competitive alternative can win when it is financed and offered early.

On September 30, at Quantico, the Secretary of War announced a four-star command for autonomous warfare. The memorandum behind it is two pages long. It gives two officials 30 days to produce a plan and sets October 1, 2027, as the day the Autonomous Warfare Command stands up. “We do not have a decade,” it says.

On the same day, a California company announced a Pentagon order for 14,000 small attack drones, along with 800 more reallocated from competitors that could not meet their production deadlines. First-round deliveries had been running late, the trade press reported, because the motors, batteries, sensors, and chips that American law will accept were in short supply.

Five weeks ago in these pages I argued that America was buying an army it could not command. The Hegseth memorandum is the most serious answer that argument has received. It settles who buys, and it leaves to the 30-day plan who decides between theaters when the systems run short. It is silent on a prior question. Before a force can be commanded, it has to be built, and this one is being built from parts supplied by the adversary.

The official now charged with building the command has said so to the Senate. “Many of the subcomponents,” Owen West told the Armed Services Committee in March, “do today come from China,” and he put American or allied supply “deep in 2027.” China makes roughly nine of every ten rare-earth magnets in the world. The largest American producer told investors in August that demand for the magnets inside drone motors is met “essentially 100 percent in China.” An American-made drone motor costs $100 to $225; the Chinese equivalent costs $12 to $25. The memorandum asks for a force on “the right side of the cost exchange.” For now, that exchange is priced in Chinese factories.

The trade truce does not reach any of this. Beijing’s ban on dual-use exports to American military users has been in effect since December 2024 and has never been suspended. In June, China added two American magnet makers and a drone manufacturer to its export-control list. The truce itself was extended in September to January 10, yet the notice that suspends China’s rare-earth licensing rules still expires, on paper, on November 10. That is eight days before the President is due in Shenzhen, where he will arrive as the customer for the magnets his own deterrent requires. Beijing does not need an embargo to use this. It needs only to let a notice lapse, and its magnet shipments to the United States had already fallen 21 percent in August.

Washington has set a date of its own. On January 1, the Pentagon’s rule barring Chinese-origin magnets from defense supply chains takes effect. For most of next year, Chinese parts will be barred by both governments while American ones are not yet made in volume. That stretch falls in 2027, the close of the Davidson Window, the year American commanders have named since 2021 as the one by which Beijing wants the option of force against Taiwan. The force meant to deter China in 2027 depends, through 2027, on China’s willingness to keep selling to it.

The picture is not hopeless. Magnet plants in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas are shipping or commissioning, the Army has contracted for millions of magnet segments for drone motors, and in March Ukraine built a drone with no Chinese components at all. The capacity is real. It is also early and expensive, and no one has been given the authority to decide who gets it first.

The money runs through the same gap. In the week the command was ordered, hiring all but stalled, and the 30-year Treasury still ended near its highest yield in 24 years, while France, Germany, and Japan set multi-decade highs. The savers who finance American deficits can now earn more at home. In the same fortnight, Washington threatened to cut anyone servicing Iranian airlines out of the dollar system and warned two allies that American diesel might stop coming. The country is spending the dollar’s leverage abroad while asking the world to finance its rearmament.

That is the economic-warfare lesson inside a defense memorandum. China’s leverage is exercised by a commerce ministry, with a notice, at a time of its choosing. America’s answer is divided among a portfolio office that buys, Services that supply the forces, a Congress that has not written the law or appropriated $53.6 billion of the $54.6 billion requested, and a Treasury borrowing at its highest long-term rates since 2002. Each is competent. As I wrote here last week on the economic front, none is in command.

The plan due around October 30 is the place to change that, and it turns on two decisions. The first is supply. When American-made magnets, motors, and batteries are scarce, as they will be for most of 2027, someone must decide which programs and which theaters receive them, and that decision must bind the Services and suppliers alike. The instrument exists; the priority ratings of the Defense Production Act were written for exactly this.

The second is integration. As this series has argued, the artificial intelligence on which such a force depends must operate at the tactical edge. A drone that cannot compute there and is not connected through a common command-and-control architecture to everything else in the fight is not a capability. It is one more unintegrated system handed to the warfighter, another problem to manage under fire, and one the adversary will render obsolete, because what cannot be integrated cannot adapt.

Supply, integration, and deployment are one problem. Washington has divided it among separate offices, and no one owns the whole. If you have a hand in that plan, see that it names who holds each authority and sets the supply and integration schedules beside the fielding schedule. Otherwise, the command will stand up on time next October with an order book and no arsenal.

Richard Berry is the founder and principal of Stratnova Advisors and a former Commander’s Action Group Director at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; he publishes the weekly assessment Strategic Horizons.

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

“Twenty years ago, the state of North Dakota poured in multiple millions of dollars to figure out what it looks like to do beyond visual line-of-sight operations for Class One, Two, and Three Drones. That was just the very nascent stage. Just a decade ago, ten years ago, they figured out that they can do this. They could do this at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Right across from our [air base] runway, on the active duty side, is a place called Grand Sky. It is an innovation research park for all counter-drone operations. It is one of the largest in the United States. They rent the space on our base. It's legitimately federal property that they lease for the research park.”

That was Air Force Col. Alfred J. Rosales, Commander, 319th Reconnaissance Wing, based at Grand Forks Air Force Base, speaking on September 14, at the 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, as moderator of a panel on Counter-Drone Defense.

I had never heard about what the Grand Forks locals call GrandSKY as a home for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), where for a decade major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and General Atomics have been flight testing and carrying out drone research and development.

Back in May, the Defense Department’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, central authority for the counter-small unmanned aircraft systems program, selected five installations to participate in the directed-energy counter-unmanned aircraft systems pilot program, of which Grand Forks was one.

More recently, as Rosales put it, at the Grand Forks Base, they have been “strapping on vendor equipment” to “build tactics and techniques.” That process will help determine, he said, “How do we want directed-energy weapons to be used inside the United States in FAA [Federal Aviation Agency] controlled airspace, not in the restricted ranges of our Air Force.”

Rosales introduced his September 14, panel whom he said were industry leaders who were “translating technology into trust to allow us to win in the future.”

They were:

Dr. Ben Van Roo, Chief Executive Officer, Legion Intelligence, who, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) was working to get the equipment needed at the tactical level to be able to provide decision-making space without being connected to the Cloud the entire time.

Early on Van Roo said, “We're really still in the infancy right now of how we think about where we're going to use [computer] agents [AI]. What are we going to allow them to decide on? How do they work their way into our TTPs [Tactics, Techniques and Procedures] into our doctrine? And then, the other side, and the big question that we also think about is are they even going to be available?”

Van Roo continued, “The way that we want to use Artificial Intelligence is going to be one, it's still got to be sorted out. What are we going to allow these things [AI] decide to do? Where are they going to work? Into everything from the kill chain to just basic intelligence gathering? And then how are we going to make them more resilient? These are the next layers of challenges that are ahead of us.”

Adam Mohamed, Chief Technology Officer, Asylon Robotics, a Boston Dynamics Partner, who works on autonomous robotics, figuring out how we can layer base defense architecture with our air domain experts.

“Situational awareness is king,” Mohamed said, “because everything else flows from that. And having static situation awareness, mobile situational awareness, being able to understand your battle space is going to take precedence over everything else. The sensor fusion will happen. We'll have the AI. We'll have the ability to operate without a Cloud. But we need to be able to operate when we start losing our sensors, we start losing our radars, we start losing our shooters, and how do we adapt and how does the system adapt for you, because there won't be time for you to make the change to switch over.”

Colton Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Force Technologies, who works on multi-sensor integration. How do we use AI to get the common operating pictures we so desperately desire -- the integration piece that's going to help defeat drones.

Wood said, “Talking about human in the loop is okay. I got a target, I need to go through the process of actually engaging and affecting that target. As we see the threat evolving, that is going to be an incredibly difficult thing to do if I have, you know, multiple threats, multiple targets, multiple different engagement systems…I've set all the rules of engagement. I've set the governance on the systems and then I have a strong decision supported by tools in front of me. But once I've made that decision, I need to be able to engage the systems and machines need to be able to engage the threats, almost autonomously.”

Therefore, Wood explained, “And so I think a lot of simulations, understanding how these systems operate, where the left and right limits are and then allowing these systems to be as effective as they can be without us having to shepherd the process is a very thing that we have to think about [in the] very near future here.”

And finally, Michael Hiatt, Chief Technology Officer, Epirus, who works with Directed-Energy weapons, lasers, the essence of kill-chain dynamics. He comes with skill sets on how to integrate and work in that space.

Hiatt said, “Your risk is very different if you have to literally put metal [kinetic weapons] in the air, you know, with kinetics or, you know, proximate-burst rounds or whatever the kinetic options are. If you can have an option that has lower collateral effects and no collateral damage, you know, which is what the Directed-Energy [DE, laser] weapons offer, you start to be able to change your risk calculation.”

Hiatt continued, “But when for the folks that are on the ground, you know, the battle captain trying to trying to make that assessment, it's not a cost asymmetry problem. It's a magazine depth issue because, you know, what's the reload time on my kinetic? What's the, you know, what's the fly-out time? How many do I, you know, what's my shot doctrine? Do I do a shoot, look, shoot? Do I do a shoot, shoot, look? You know, those are the things that affect magazine consumption.”

Hiatt added, “The reality is you know DE weapons aren't out-ranging kinetic [weapons]. And so when you start to say, ‘All right, I'm going to hold fire on my kinetics. I'm going to let that threat come in closer than I would like because I trust that my DE weapons are going to take it out.’ That's the level of trust that we got to get to.”

At the end of the 41-minute session, Col. Rosales tried to sum it up saying, “This space in counter drones is not a spectator sport. It's for all of us to think through it, industry, academia, the United States Air Force. What I hear is that we are beyond asking what these things are, AI agents, as they incorporate into this picture. We're at the point where we're figuring out what it could look like in terms of policy [so] that we can then get to the next step -- in training and exercising with a rigor to ensure that we have the trust to have our airmen engage when those courses of action are recommended.”

My guess is we are nowhere close to deciding policies where AI fits into the counter-drone fight, nor in warfare itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D-Day Sanctions Regime

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

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

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

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

So, Who Has More at Stake?

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

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

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

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

Speaking of Regime Change

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

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

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

Where Are We Now?

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

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

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

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

Where Are We Going?

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

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

Unintended consequences, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is at stake?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Still Matters

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

The Nuclear Umbrella Still Exists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Matters

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

The Strategic Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Superpower in Transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iranian D-Day Sanctions

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

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

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

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

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

When Rhetoric Crashes on the Shores of Reality

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

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

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

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

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