A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer Holds

For three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic spectrum was a permissive sanctuary. Lulled into complacency by counter-terrorism campaigns that allowed precision strikes and networked command to go largely unchallenged, we forgot how to fight in the dark. The Russia-Ukraine war has violently corrected that amnesia. Today, electronic warfare is not an enabling function; it is the apex of modern combat power. If a force cannot survive in the spectrum, its sensors are blind, its networks collapse, and its kill chains are severed.

The Alliance stands at a critical inflection point. The time for incremental modernization has passed; this short piece is a call to arms to reclaim our operational advantage. The war in Ukraine has proven that the half-life of a technological advantage is measured in days, not decades. If we do not aggressively institutionalize agility across our warfighting commands, we risk entering the next conflict blind, deaf, and disconnected.

Russia’s Spectrum Offensive at Scale

Russia entered the war with a deep inventory of EW systems, rooted in Soviet-era investment and modernized over the past decade. From strategic GPS denial across Eastern Europe to tactical jamming of drones, radios, and artillery sensors, Russian forces use EW to degrade decision-making, disrupt fires, and blind ISR, continuously, at scale, across every echelon.

This is not a supplementary effort; it is a structural pillar of Russian combat operations. According to analyses by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Russia achieved a staggering density of EW coverage, deploying a major electronic warfare system approximately every 10 kilometers along the front line during peak operations. This continuous, layered spectrum defense can be understood across two distinct operational tiers:

1. Strategic and Operational Denial

At the macro level, Russia has deployed high-powered, truck-mounted systems designed to blind NATO and Ukrainian airborne intelligence and disrupt satellite architectures.

• The Krasukha-4: Designed to protect high-value assets, this system emits powerful jamming signals targeting airborne early warning and control aircraft (AWACS), radar reconnaissance drones, and low-Earth orbit spy satellites. By targeting X-band and Ku-band radars, it degrades long-range aerial surveillance, forcing ISR platforms to operate at suboptimal standoff distances.
• Murmansk-BN: Operating at the strategic level, this system targets high-frequency (HF) military communications up to thousands of kilometers away, aiming to disrupt the operational coordination of enemy forces on a theater-wide scale.

2. Tactical Interdiction and the Defeat of Precision Munitions

At the tactical edge, Russian EW is integrated down to the battalion level to create local bubbles of spectrum denial. This has profoundly affected the effectiveness of Western-supplied precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

• Neutralizing GPS-Guided Weapons: Systems like the R-330Zh Zhitel and Pole-21 have been explicitly used to create GPS-denied environments. Because GPS signals travelling from space are relatively weak by the time they reach Earth, localized jammers easily overpower them. RUSI has noted that this jamming significantly degraded the accuracy of key weapons, including Excalibur 155mm guided artillery shells, Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), and GMLRS rockets fired by HIMARS. Without GPS, these munitions must rely on inertial navigation, which drastically reduces their hit probability.
• Drone Suppression and ISR Severance: In the early months of the war, Ukrainian Bayraktar TB2s operated with near impunity. As Russian forces entrenched, their EW architecture caught up. By blasting the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies used by commercial and military drones, systems like the Borisoglebsk-2 sever the command links and video feeds between drones and their operators. This strips frontline units of their "eyes," returning artillery duels to grid-square estimations rather than precision strikes.

Ukraine’s Rapid Adaptation Under Fire

Ukraine’s response has been just as instructive. Forced to adapt under fire, its forces built a distributed EW ecosystem spanning national infrastructure to handheld infantry jammers, fielding and replacing thousands of systems in months, not years. EW operators are now embedded in maneuver, air defense, and fires units. The war has become a laboratory of spectrum conflict with drones jammed out of the sky, counter-battery radars blinded, munitions diverted, networks disrupted. EW is both shield and sword: protecting friendly systems while blinding the adversary.

While Russia relies heavily on legacy, mass-manufactured, centralized platforms, Ukraine’s survival has depended on democratizing the electromagnetic fight. By abandoning rigid peacetime acquisition processes, Ukraine has successfully pioneered a "DevOps" warfighting philosophy, prioritizing the rapid, iterative deployment of real-world software capabilities and commercial hardware modifications.

Ukraine has mastered the art of using the electromagnetic spectrum not just for defense, but to actively hunt Russian forces. By integrating EW operators directly into fires and maneuver units, the spectrum has become the primary hunting ground for target acquisition.

EW as a Mass Capability

The scale is the lesson. Both sides are fielding equipment and training operators at a pace NATO hasn’t matched since the Cold War. EW is no longer a boutique, specialized function; it’s a mass capability woven into daily battle rhythm and treated as a core determinant of survivability and lethality. In Ukraine, EW isn’t an adjunct to maneuver or fires. It’s inseparable from them.

For NATO and allied forces, Ukraine's experience demonstrates that surviving a high-intensity conflict requires transitioning from static, hardware-centric platforms to data-centric environments where software updates can be continuously deployed to the tactical edge under fire.

NATO’s Vulnerability Without EW Dominance

The implications for NATO are stark. Precision fires need assured spectrum access. Air defense needs resilient sensors and networks. ISR needs unjammed collection. Command and control needs protected communications. Without robust EW, all of it evaporates. This war shows EW is both the first layer of protection and the first layer of lethality, the foundation everything else rests on.

Rebuilding EW as a Core Competency

Reconstituting EW will take more than new hardware, it demands a cultural shift. Commanders must think in terms of spectrum maneuver, fires, and protection as naturally as kinetic operations. Exercises need realistic EW conditions, not sanitized ranges. Training pipelines must expand, and offensive and defensive EW forces must be rebuilt at every echelon, from squad to strategic level. Doctrine must treat EW as a decisive domain, not a supporting function.

The Essential Art Returns

The essential art of warfare in the twenty-first century has been violently reintroduced, and the electromagnetic spectrum is no longer an invisible enabler; it is the primary maneuver space where the first shots are fired, and the deepest vulnerabilities are exposed. NATO must reclaim this domain fully, urgently, and at scale.

For too long, the Alliance rested on the laurels of post-Cold War permissive environments, operating under the dangerous assumption that our networks would always connect, our drones would always fly, and our precision munitions would always find their mark. The battlefields of Ukraine have permanently shattered that assumption. We can no longer afford the luxury of rigid, decade-long peacetime acquisition cycles. Surviving the modern fight requires a fundamental paradigm shift: embracing a "DevOps" warfighting philosophy that prioritizes rapid, iterative deployment of software-defined capabilities directly to the tactical edge.

Lethality today is inextricably linked to digital survival. If we cannot protect our data lineage, secure our networks, and continuously update our countermeasures under fire, we will cede the kill chain to our adversaries. The next fight will be decided not just by who holds the physical terrain, but by who dominates the spectrum.

NATO must institutionalize this reality across every echelon. Electronic warfare is not an adjunct to maneuver; it is the very foundation of our combat credibility. We must transition our defense structures to data-centric environments, integrate our joint capabilities, and ensure that when the next conflict erupts, the Alliance dictates the spectrum and the adversary is left blind, disrupted, and defeated.

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

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

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“To me, the biggest way that we're doing this is introducing technology into the [U.S. Army] formations that is not fully baked. And so all of us who were in the Army in the 90s, the 2000s, even the 2010s, you were issued a piece of equipment and that was it -- maybe a TM (technical manual) and you didn't have any say in how it was made or how it should be altered. And today in a number of different [Army] organizations, we're putting the tech in an immature state in front of the soldiers -- and industry is with them -- to be able to iterate and make things so much better, so much faster. So that to me is compelling to them and they can give very real feedback and everybody that's dealt with soldiers knows they're not going to pull any punches, right?”

That was Under Secretary of the Army Michael Obadal speaking July 30, on The Future of U.S. Land Powerat the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) along with former-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who held that job during the first Trump administration.

Together, the two provided insightful looks at how the Army is dealing with the introduction of new technology.

Obadal, for example, described a personal experience from a day or two earlier when he got into an autonomous vehicle with a staff sergeant. “We're getting ready and he's showing me all this stuff, and I said, ‘This is incredible. What do you think?’ And he said, "Yeah, I don't like it.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’"

Obadal then recalled he and the sergeant had a 15minute conversation and he learned when the sergeant told him “I think this is really cool tech, but it's the integration of that tech” that bothered him. For Obadal that was something “that you don't get in a lab, you get it only by putting those things in the hands of soldiers.”

“We're introducing them [new Army enlistees] at the very onset of their Army career to technologies being pushed down in[to military] units.” Obadal said, adding, “There is additional skill-type, identifier-training that they can go to. We have a software factory in Austin, Texas [Army Software Factory of the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command] that's incredibly capable. It's a two-year program where they really are able to code and create new applications, all really software based.”

McCarthy recalled, “If you go back to 2017, there was nowhere near the emphasis on pushing autonomous systems into the formations. A lot of that's cultural. If you go even back to like 2008 and the Air Force's resistance to taking on more Predator [an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft] caps in the Middle East, my former boss, [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates, making it a priority with the department. So, culture is a big part of it. The good thing is it's 10 years later, we have younger people, much more technologically savvy than I ever was.”

As with most people, Obadal starts his discussion of change with Ukraine, which he described as an “incredible battle lab,” about which he said, “not just the Army, the entire [Defense] Department has gone to great lengths to understand what are the lessons that are coming out of there, because no one is iterating technology faster than the Ukrainians.”

He then described the initial Russian-Ukraine fighting as “positional warfare, because neither side possessed an actual maneuver, combined-arms, army.” Instead, Obadal said, “two uncoordinated armies really came together, got into positional warfare, and then we saw the innovation of the drones and a number of other things, but specific is the drones.”

Currently in the Russian-Ukraine war, Obadal said, “You have a dead zone of several kilometers between these two positions and it's very reminiscent of World War I,” where artillery was introduced, and “now the drone…is an enabler of soldiers. So how do you deny terrain with drones? How do you actually take terrain with drones?”

“We've taken all of those lessons and incorporated [them] in,” Obadal said, “so now at this point in basic training our soldiers are actually operating drones. Not something that was happening two or five years ago. But they get that familiarization as soon as they are coming into the Army in our training centers.”

At the Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, Obadal said he watched U.S. operational forces conducting exercises “utilizing a number of different drones to have certain effects – electronic warfare, observation, calling-for-fire, and first-person, viewer-kinetic action. That's the ‘operationalization’ of it [drone warfare].”

But Obadal was most interesting to me when he expanded on how the Army had “spent billions on buying commercial off-the-shelf drones that are customized for military use,” and shipped them to “almost every [Army] division and even down in regiments.” There, he continued, “We have small groups of soldiers that have been pulled in by the leadership, given some budget, small budget, and given a facility and said, ‘Put together drones that we can go out on our training areas and utilize.’”

The result of this localized drone creation was, Obadal said, “They [the drones] are not exquisite. They cost very little to make. It's okay to crash them. But what it's doing is not just the technology, the other thing we're learning, [as] from the Ukraine, is you have an incredibly capable core [of Army personnel] that knows how to utilize drones in every aspect of it.”

Another purpose, Obadal explained, “It's not about flying an FPV [first-person view/controlled] drone that's part of it, it's about how do you team them together; how do you do all of the things that we're watching the Ukrainians do; so we we're baking that in into our organizations by letting them…mass-produce as many low-cost drones as they can so that they can get the repetitions…We have to go through hundreds of repetitions a day in our Army to build that repository of knowledge, turn that into doctrine, which is constantly evolving, and then spread it throughout our Army.”

Commenting on the Army drone system, McCarthy said, “They're allowing leaders at every level to be entrepreneurial in nature, to look at the capability, to learn the technology, and make recommendations to the changes in task organization. They're going to have to change the

business model of the Army. There might not be 40 people in a rifle platoon five or 10 years from now. There might be half as many. So we have the luxury where we can be a little deliberate. We may want to go faster. The world's complicated, but doing it the right way, the smart way, they're going to make better choices.”

For example, at a February 2026 exercise at Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldiers experimented with electronic warfare payloads on medium-range reconnaissance systems and tested various configurations on FPV drones to determine system limitations and capabilities, according to an

Army press release. “The ongoing innovation includes stressing equipment through rigorous training to understand what works best for operational units,” the release said.

The Army, Obadal said, is “trying to encourage small [drone making] companies, new entrants that have compelling technology. We're trying to leverage as much external capital, because there is a large amount of external capital that's invested in the defense technology industry, but we just haven't rewarded it at the right level.”

Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology Brent Ingraham is changing acquisition processes that are intended to foster rapid prototyping, rapid fielding and rapid acquisition of new capabilities, Obadal said.

He continued, “What it's about is continuing to prototype and experiment at scale and then feed all of that into our Combined Arms Center (CAC).” There, he said, Lt. Gen. James P. Isenhower III, CAC Commanding General will determine “now how do we put our findings back into areas that will change force management or capability requirements.”

Summing up, Obadal said, “Today we have young men and women that I see out in the organizations with highly technical capabilities that allow them to do direction-finding, to do pinpoint locations of enemy emissions, and then utilizing other capabilities to visually confirm feeding all of that back into a data-centric C2 [communications] system. So it's that human machine teaming of giving the right capabilities to our soldiers allows them to be far more effective than they were just a couple years ago.”

Obadal added, “It's an important thing to remember right now we're not replacing soldiers with autonomous or unmanned weapons. What we're doing is we are unburdening the soldier from the mundane tasks or the most dangerous tasks so that they can take a step back and they can do the things that only humans -- whether it's soldiers, commanders -- can do.”

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

The South Korean Buddhist monk, the Venerable Pomnyun Sunimin, in his book “What is Happiness?” introduces us to his philosophy of life: “Everyone born into this world has the right to be happy … and being helpful to the world and to others around us increases our own personal happiness.”

The U.S. is now ranked 24 out of the 147 countries surveyed by the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup. Factors that contribute to this ranking include higher GDP per capita, a strong social support system, higher life expectancy, greater freedom, absence of government and corporate corruption and charitable giving. The U.S. ranking has dropped each year since 2011, with a significant decline between 2022 (ranked 15) and 2025 (ranked 24).

As a world leader, the U.S. is concerned with the world around us: With the wars in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza and the innocent people killed; with the terrorism of October 7 and the innocent Israelis killed; armed conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar; insurgencies in Africa and Asia, and the criminal conflicts and the drug cartel violence in the Americas.

With this concern, there are understandable debates and doubts in the U.S. about a myriad of issues: the amount of aid we are providing to Ukraine, to defend itself from an invading Russia that’s receiving troops and weaponry from North Korea; efforts to peacefully negotiate a ceasefire with an Iran that says it has the right to enrich uranium and kill innocent peaceful protesters; an elusive peace in Gaza when Hamas refuses to disarm and tension in the West Bank intensifies; and a nuclear North Korea building more nuclear weapons and aligned with a revanchist Russian Federation. Helplessness with the conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar and the jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State operating throughout Africa. Security concerns in Haiti and Ecuador due to gang violence and our inability to effectively counter the flow of illicit drugs coming into the U.S., primarily from Mexico, Columbia, and China. It’s hard to find happiness when assessing the world around us and the absence of peace.

Working with our allies and partners is an integral part of diplomacy and conflict resolution. NATO, AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.) and allies like South Korea, Japan and the Philippines are key to managing the ever-increasing security threats around the world. How we manage these relationships with our allies and partners is important.

Domestically, extreme political polarization has replaced polite political debate. A myriad of issues contribute to anxiety among the people: reported cuts to food stamps, Medicaid and social programs, with the rise in food and gas prices that receives daily media coverage. Nicolas Kristof of the New York Times reports a rise in homelessness in California, Oregon, and Hawaii and the plight of the Americans left behind. There’s extensive media coverage to rescind a planned $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and whether it was vandalism or shoddy construction of the Reflecting Pool in our Nation’s capital. Indeed, there are other political and social issues, like AI, that the average informed American is exposed to daily. Following these and other foreign and domestic issues is important for an informed electorate that will be voting in November and in 2028, but are we on overload? Of concern is the extreme polarization of views on these issues and the government’s responsibility to inform and seek the public’s support on these important issues, without adding to the polemics.

The author of “What is Happiness?” tells us: “Between 1995 and 1998, about three million people died of hunger and disease in North Korea and those who survived also suffered greatly as their family members, friends and neighbors died.” Despite North Korea’s formidable nuclear and missile capabilities, there are exigent health and food issues that continue to demand attention. The U.S. previously helped with these humanitarian issues because it was the correct thing to do. Returning to talks with North Korea to halt their nuclear and missile programs, with the lifting of sanctions and no longer demanding denuclearization as a condition for talks, would be the correct thing to do. It would be a positive development for Northeast Asia and the Korean people and hopefully contribute to the eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

Progress with North Korea should bring some form of happiness to the Korean people and to the people in the U.S. who cry out for a more peaceful world.

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

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times and is republished here with permission.

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

The South Korean Buddhist monk, the Venerable Pomnyun Sunimin, in his book “What is Happiness?” introduces us to his philosophy of life: “Everyone born into this world has the right to be happy … and being helpful to the world and to others around us increases our own personal happiness.”

The U.S. is now ranked 24 out of the 147 countries surveyed by the Wellbeing Research Center at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup. Factors that contribute to this ranking include higher GDP per capita, a strong social support system, higher life expectancy, greater freedom, absence of government and corporate corruption and charitable giving. The U.S. ranking has dropped each year since 2011, with a significant decline between 2022 (ranked 15) and 2025 (ranked 24).

As a world leader, the U.S. is concerned with the world around us: With the wars in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza and the innocent people killed; with the terrorism of October 7 and the innocent Israelis killed; armed conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar; insurgencies in Africa and Asia, and the criminal conflicts and the drug cartel violence in the Americas.

With this concern, there are understandable debates and doubts in the U.S. about a myriad of issues: the amount of aid we are providing to Ukraine, to defend itself from an invading Russia that’s receiving troops and weaponry from North Korea; efforts to peacefully negotiate a ceasefire with an Iran that says it has the right to enrich uranium and kill innocent peaceful protesters; an elusive peace in Gaza when Hamas refuses to disarm and tension in the West Bank intensifies; and a nuclear North Korea building more nuclear weapons and aligned with a revanchist Russian Federation. Helplessness with the conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar and the jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State operating throughout Africa. Security concerns in Haiti and Ecuador due to gang violence and our inability to effectively counter the flow of illicit drugs coming into the U.S., primarily from Mexico, Columbia, and China. It’s hard to find happiness when assessing the world around us and the absence of peace.

Working with our allies and partners is an integral part of diplomacy and conflict resolution. NATO, AUKUS (Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.) and allies like South Korea, Japan and the Philippines are key to managing the ever-increasing security threats around the world. How we manage these relationships with our allies and partners is important.

Domestically, extreme political polarization has replaced polite political debate. A myriad of issues contribute to anxiety among the people: reported cuts to food stamps, Medicaid and social programs, with the rise in food and gas prices that receives daily media coverage. Nicolas Kristof of the New York Times reports a rise in homelessness in California, Oregon, and Hawaii and the plight of the Americans left behind. There’s extensive media coverage to rescind a planned $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and whether it was vandalism or shoddy construction of the Reflecting Pool in our Nation’s capital. Indeed, there are other political and social issues, like AI, that the average informed American is exposed to daily. Following these and other foreign and domestic issues is important for an informed electorate that will be voting in November and in 2028, but are we on overload? Of concern is the extreme polarization of views on these issues and the government’s responsibility to inform and seek the public’s support on these important issues, without adding to the polemics.

The author of “What is Happiness?” tells us: “Between 1995 and 1998, about three million people died of hunger and disease in North Korea and those who survived also suffered greatly as their family members, friends and neighbors died.” Despite North Korea’s formidable nuclear and missile capabilities, there are exigent health and food issues that continue to demand attention. The U.S. previously helped with these humanitarian issues because it was the correct thing to do. Returning to talks with North Korea to halt their nuclear and missile programs, with the lifting of sanctions and no longer demanding denuclearization as a condition for talks, would be the correct thing to do. It would be a positive development for Northeast Asia and the Korean people and hopefully contribute to the eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula.

Progress with North Korea should bring some form of happiness to the Korean people and to the people in the U.S. who cry out for a more peaceful world.

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

Read more national security insights from experienced experts exclusively in The Cipher Brief.

Tell the Russian people about the carnage in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Tell them about the Russian lives lost and the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of a sovereign nation. Former President Ronald Reagan ensured that he got information into the former Soviet Union to truthfully speak to the people about their government’s lies about the cost – in lives and money – of their war in Afghanistan. After ten years, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the final chapter in the Cold War.

Russia’s Vladimi Putin seemingly doesn’t care about the Russian lives lost or the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of Ukraine. Over 1.4 million Russian casualties (killed, wounded, missing, or captured), and over 500,000 killed at a cost of over $500 billion. Are the people in Russia aware of the magnitude of this tragedy? Are they aware of Mr. Putin’s view that Ukraine has no right to exist and he is justified in invading a sovereign Ukraine that gave up its nuclear weapons for security assurances?

Indeed, Ukraine’s casualties are over 600,000, with close to 140,000 killed, including 16,000 civilians. The cost so far is close to $600 billion, with a price tag of $U.S. 1 trillion to reconstruct a devastated Ukraine. This is the price Ukraine is paying because of the Russian invasion and Mr. Putin’s goal of attempting to recreate the Russian empire.

President Donald Trump has reached out to Mr. Putin numerous times to secure a cease fire and an eventual peace treaty. To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful, but Mr. Trump persists, fortunately. But until we secure a cease fire, Ukraine needs the support of the U.S. and the European Union, for the weapons and missile defense systems needed for its survival.

Fortunately, the recent NATO Summit of 32 allied countries reaffirmed their strong support to Ukraine, pledging 70 billion Euros to Ukraine and giving Ukraine a green light to produce PATRIOT missile interceptors.

But the U.S. – and our NATO allies -- can do more to get the truth to the Russian people. The truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians killed in Ukraine and the bereaved families that are paying the ultimate price.

Although the United States Information Agency closed in October 1999, it transferred its important mission to the Department of State. And hopefully our colleagues at State are working hard to ensure that we are getting the message to the Russian people that the war must end; that they and the people in Ukraine have suffered enough. That Mr. Putin and his cronies need to explain why so many men and women died, in a war Mr. Putin created, as he enriches himself. A war that has made the Russian Federation a pariah state.

This should be a whole government mission: to disseminate primarily in Russia the truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians (and Ukrainians) killed and maimed in a war created by an arrogant and inept Putin.

Although the audience for this important message is the Russian people, China should also be mindful of the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, China is aligned with a Russian pariah state, heavily sanctioned by the international community. Is this the image China wants to share with the world?

The NATO Summit was clear in its support of Ukraine, the victim of a cruel and brutal Russian invasion. It’s time for the Russian government to listen to the Russian people and end this bloody war.

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

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

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

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

We are good at winning wars and generally bad at what comes after. Far from a partisan observation; this is a pattern with receipts. We removed Saddam Hussein in three weeks and then spent eight years discovering that we had no plan for Iraq. We helped topple Qaddafi in 2011 and left Libya to sort itself out, which it did into a decade of competing militias and open-air slave markets. We spent twenty years in Afghanistan and still managed to be surprised when the government we built collapsed in eleven days. The American way of war ends at the moment of victory. The credits roll, everyone goes home, and the sequel is a disaster nobody bothered to consider.

There is exactly one modern exception, and it is instructive. When the Soviet Union came apart in 1991, a Democratic senator from Georgia and a Republican senator from Indiana looked at roughly 30,000 nuclear warheads scattered across four newly independent, newly broke republics and decided, radically, to think ahead. The Nunn-Lugar program spent American money to secure, consolidate, and dismantle those weapons before they could walk out the door to Tehran or to a bidder we would like even less. It was unglamorous, it was expensive, and it worked. Three decades after the largest state collapse in modern history, there has been no loose-nuke catastrophe. We planned once. It went well. We have not repeated the experiment since.

I raise this because we may be about to need it again, and the warning lights are coming on faster than the planning is.

Start with the battlefield. Russia has absorbed somewhere near 1.4 million casualties since February 2022 in order to advance, in its showcase offensives, at a pace measured in tens of meters a day. That is more than any major power has taken in any conflict since the Second World War. In early 2026 that grinding pace stalled outright, and for the first time since 2023 Ukraine recaptured more ground than it lost. Russian military recruitment fell twenty percent in the first quarter of this year, into the teeth of the worst labor shortage the Russian economy has ever recorded. An army that cannot recruit and an economy that cannot spare the men are not a combination that trends toward Berlin.

Then follow the money, because wars end when the money does. Russia's federal budget deficit hit 5.9 trillion rubles in just the first four months of 2026. That is larger than the entire deficit it ran in all of 2025, and against a full-year plan of 3.9 trillion. The liquid portion of the sovereign wealth fund, the rainy-day cushion, has shrunk from 6.5 percent of GDP at the start of the war to 1.8 percent this April. Oil and gas revenue in 2025 fell to its lowest level since 2020, and in the first two months of 2026 it dropped nearly by half year-on-year. The Kremlin is raising its value-added tax from 20 to 22 percent and cannot borrow abroad, because we long ago cut it off from the markets. Putin is a man selling his furniture to make rent.

And here is the part that should be keeping planners awake at night: Ukraine has learned to hit the one thing Russia cannot armor. Kyiv's drones have taken more than a third of Russia's oil-refining capacity offline, roughly 38 percent by some counts. Gasoline output is down seventeen percent from a year ago. Refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, and outside Moscow itself have been forced to halt or throttle production. Russia, one of the largest oil producers on earth, has banned gasoline exports and is now rationing fuel to its own citizens, who are queuing at pumps in a country that floats on crude. A petrostate that cannot keep its own drivers in gasoline is a petrostate whose social contract is running on fumes.

Now the honest caveat, because I have watched too many confident men predict Moscow's collapse and end up eating the prediction. Russia has a genius for absorbing punishment that would break others, and "the regime is about to fall" has been the graveyard of Western analysis for a century. Vladimir Putin may well hang on for years. I am not promising you a collapse. I am telling you that a Russian defeat, a real one, military exhaustion bleeding into political rupture, inside the next two years, has moved from a fringe scenario to one that a serious government insures against. You do not buy fire insurance because you expect to burn. You buy it because you cannot afford the one time you do.

So what does the insurance look like in this case? A few things, none of which require us to want Russia to come apart.

First, dust off Nunn-Lugar and write the sequel now, before the crisis. Russia has roughly 1,800 strategic warheads today. If central authority in Moscow wobbles, the question of who controls them becomes the only question that matters. What’s worse, New START quietly expired this past February and is no longer around to give us the courtesy of counting them. We need pre-negotiated channels for securing those weapons, ideally including China and India, whose interest in not having loose Russian nukes on the market is every bit as sharp as ours.

Second, decide in advance what we will and will not recognize. A fragmenting Russian Federation could throw off breakaway republics the way the USSR did in 1991. The moment to agree on which borders and which authorities we will treat as legitimate is before a dozen regional governors declare themselves president, not while it is happening. Improvised recognition is how you turn a collapse into a set of proxy wars that makes Putin’s destabilizing behaviors look like child’s play.

Third, keep the technocrats employed. The most dangerous export of a collapsing weapons state is not a warhead; it is the underpaid engineer who knows how to build one. In 1992 we worried about Russian scientists boarding flights to Iran, Iraq, and Libya. This time we should build the landing pads, research funding, visas, civilian projects, before they start looking for the exits.

Fourth, tell Ukraine and our European allies what "victory" actually means, so that we are not improvising the peace the way we improvised Baghdad. A defeated Russia is not a solved Russia. It will still have grievances, a reconstituting army, and a long memory. The objective is a Russia that loses this war and cannot start the next one, a vacuum we will spend the 2030s regretting.

None of this is a prediction that Moscow falls next spring. It is the recognition that we have been surprised by nearly every ending we should have seen coming, and that the cost of preparing for a Russian defeat that never arrives is a few think-tank salaries and some awkward classified memos. The cost of not preparing for one that does is measured in warheads we cannot account for.

We have the receipts on what happens when we refuse to think ahead. We also have a single example of what happens when we do. Let’s choose the sequel we actually storyboarded.

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