Backstage at a Seattle tech event in the early 2000s, Chris Diorio was waiting his turn to speak. Next to him was Jeff Bezos, whose company was already becoming a household name.

Diorio, the leader of Impinj, then a tiny local startup, turned to the Amazon founder: “Jeff, you’ve got a much bigger near-term opportunity than we do,” Diorio recalls saying, “but we’ve got a much bigger long-term opportunity than you do.”

Before Bezos could respond, he was called onstage.

“The technology turned out to be way harder than I thought,” Diorio acknowledged after telling that story in a recent interview. “But that’s what I told him — and I still believe in those words. Our opportunity is to deliver physical intelligence for every item in the world.”

A quarter-century after that chance encounter, Diorio rang the Nasdaq opening bell Tuesday morning in New York City to mark the 10th anniversary of Impinj’s IPO. The company’s tiny, battery-free RFID chips — each smaller than a grain of sand — have been embedded in more than 160 billion items, including clothing, pharmaceuticals, airline luggage, and groceries.

Impinj commands nearly two-thirds of its market, won a patent war against a rival 15 times its size, and has grown from a $250 million IPO valuation to a market cap of more than $4.2 billion. Along the way, the company survived a billion-dollar industry hype cycle that killed nearly every competitor.

And yet, Impinj has posted exactly one profitable year since going public — thanks to a $45 million legal settlement at the time. Its accumulated deficit stands at $400 million, its financial reports show. Less than 1% of the items it envisions connecting are connected today. 

To Diorio, that speaks to the potential. The company is barely scratching the surface. He cited the 1% stat in his comments before ringing the Nasdaq bell on Tuesday morning, saying the “opportunity is so gigantic that we’ll still have a huge runway ahead of us 10 years from now.”

That the company has gotten to this point is as much a Seattle story as it is a technology story. Impinj has benefitted from a network of patient local investors, academic connections and supporters who gave the company the time that Silicon Valley never would have. 

But no one imagined it would take this long when they got started.

From Caltech to Seattle 

The origins of Impinj were at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., in the 1990s. Diorio was a graduate student working under Carver Mead, the physicist and engineer who helped coin the term Moore’s Law and helped lay the intellectual foundation for the modern semiconductor industry. 

Together, they discovered a way to change a transistor’s electrical properties after it had been manufactured — a quantum-mechanical phenomenon called “impact-ionized hot electron injection.” That made it possible to build chips so efficient and inexpensive that they could be embedded in disposable packaging. (“Impinj” is derived from that scientific name.)

In an oral history later recorded by the Science History Institute, Mead described Diorio as “a super-bright, super-high-energy guy” who “burned up the track” at Caltech.

After finishing his PhD, Diorio was recommended by Mead to the University of Washington’s computer science department. There was resistance among the UW faculty — his research in analog circuits wasn’t an obvious fit — but professor Larry Ruzzo carried the day. 

Ruzzo essentially said, “This guy is brilliant, and even if he is nothing other than our gift to the rest of the university, we should hire him,” recalled Ed Lazowska, the department chair at the time. 

Diorio joined the UW faculty in 1997. Over the next few years, his research earned a string of honors, including Packard and Sloan fellowships. A couple years later, Diorio met up with Mead on a trip to California, over dinner at Fresh Cream, a long-since-closed French restaurant in Monterey. Diorio asked Mead if it was time to start a company. 

“Are you up for it?” Mead asked. Diorio said yes. They started the paperwork the next day.

Impinj was incorporated in April 2000, headquartered in Seattle. It quickly got the attention of two local investment firms, with behind-the-scenes help from the everpresent Lazowska. 

On April 21, 2000, the UW computer science chair emailed Bob Nelsen at Arch Venture Partners and Tom Alberg at Madrona. He explained that he was urging Diorio and Mead “to get some local $ for the connections,” and that he had pointed them to Arch and Madrona. 

Patrick Ennis, then at Arch, reached out to Diorio that same day. As Ennis recalled in a recent interview, there were plenty of Silicon Valley firms that wanted in, thanks to Mead’s reputation, but Diorio and Mead decided to take Lazowska’s advice and go with Seattle investors. 

Diorio, who likes to take walking meetings, negotiated the terms with Ennis as they made their way on foot through the University of Washington Arboretum one day. The investment closed that summer: $15 million, split evenly between Arch and Madrona. 

Impinj at the time had patents, prototypes, and no real business plan. 

“That’s how venture capital should be done,” said Ennis, who has since become a Madrona venture partner. “You make big bets on great technology and great people.”

Betting the company on RFID

Bill Colleran joined Impinj as CEO in January 2001. He and Diorio had designed satellite chips together at defense contractor TRW in the 1980s. Colleran had just sold his Bluetooth startup, gotten married, and gone on his honeymoon. He came home to a message from Diorio: he’d started a company in Seattle and wanted Colleran to join. 

Colleran was soon in Seattle — one of six or eight people working out of what he warmly recalls as “a crappy little building” in the University District, several of them former TRW colleagues. 

“We were kind of getting the band back together,” he said. 

RFID wasn’t the original plan. Impinj’s first target was improving power efficiency for 3G wireless base stations, but the dot-com bust killed that market, and regardless, the company was too small to compete with the major chipmakers in the wireless industry.

The team spent two years exploring what to do with their technology. Cable modems required too much dependence on Intel, as Colleran recalled. Cell phone radios were dominated by players too big to compete against. GPS turned out to be a poor technical fit — Impinj’s chips excelled at low power, but GPS demanded low electrical noise, a different problem entirely. 

So they eventually settled on RFID, the technology that uses tiny wireless chips to identify and track physical objects. The industry was young, the standards were still being written, and Impinj’s low-power technology seemed tailor-made for it.

As Madrona’s Ennis and Tim Porter write in a piece pegged to the IPO anniversary, “When you have a truly powerful, groundbreaking deep technology, it behooves you to wander the product-market fit wilderness for a while, even when that is unsettling and downright frightening, and even when it runs contrary to what you learn in a VC class in business school.”

Then, a stroke of luck: In June 2003, Walmart announced it would require its top suppliers to tag every pallet and case with RFID chips. The Impinj team celebrated their good fortune. 

“We all high-fived,” Diorio recalled. “We did it. Eighteen months, we’re gonna IPO.”

In reality, it would be another 13 years.

Surviving the RFID hype cycle

Walmart’s announcement triggered a gold rush of venture capital investment into RFID technology startups. But there was no global spectrum allocated, no standard that worked, and no products ready to deliver on the promise. Walmart’s own January 2005 deadline came and went. Only half of its top suppliers could comply.

By 2008, the hype cycle had collapsed. Nearly every RFID startup died or got acquired. 

“More than $1 billion of VC money got poured into RFID,” Diorio recalled. “Way up, crashing down, and only one company that made it out the other side. … We were lucky enough that it was us.”

The real inflection didn’t come until around 2010, when retailers began tagging individual items, not just pallets. Knowing exactly which products were where, in real time, could lift same-store sales by as much as 10%, by solving a basic problem: getting items out of back rooms and onto shelves, making them available for purchase before customers gave up looking for them. 

Impinj filed to go public in April 2011, seeking to raise $100 million. But choppy markets — capped by the botched Facebook IPO in May 2012 — closed the window, and the company withdrew the filing that summer, raising $21 million privately instead.

After 14 years as CEO, Colleran stepped aside in 2014. 

“I didn’t know if I wanted to be a lifelong RFID guy,” he said. 

An exit wasn’t in sight — the IPO window was shut, and a sale didn’t make sense because Impinj made both chips and readers, and “any of the companies that would be interested in boxes weren’t chip companies, and the chip companies weren’t interested in boxes.”

Diorio took over as CEO that November. The venture investors were 14 years in and needed a path to liquidity. He spent the next two years sorting things out and getting the company ready.

The long road to IPO

Porter, now a Madrona managing director, who had worked closely with Alberg on the Impinj investment since 2007, recalled the final stretch. One of the first target dates for trading landed on the day Britain voted to leave the European Union, sending markets into a tailspin. 

“It was a little bit like, are you kidding — what next?” Porter said. 

But on July 21, 2016 — some 16 years after its founding — Impinj went public on the Nasdaq at $14 a share, raising $67 million at a market cap of just over $250 million. 

Alberg, the late, legendary investor, who was one of the first people to back Bezos’ fledgling online bookstore, personally invested $500,000 in the offering — a rare move among venture investors, who typically use IPOs to finally cash out, not double down. 

Porter called Alberg’s move “a really big signal” to the market that demonstrated his long-term belief in Impinj. It was also a smart investment, as it turned out. As noted during the Nasdaq bell-ringing Tuesday morning, Impinj’s share price has grown by nearly 900% since the IPO.

But there was one last hitch. On the night before trading began, the offering was so oversubscribed that the final allocation became a drawn-out negotiation between the board and the bankers over how many shares to issue. It dragged on so long that Diorio and CFO Evan Fein, stuck in Chicago for the roadshow, missed their flight to New York.

Fein had been one of the first people hired at Impinj, joining Colleran in the University District office in 2001 and staying through the whole ride. He was not about to miss the bell-ringing.

The CFO wanted to make a run for it, but Diorio told him there was no way — the flight departed in 30 minutes from O’Hare. Fein tried anyway. He didn’t make it. They stayed in Chicago overnight and caught a flight the next morning.

The company’s CTO at the time rang the bell in Diorio’s place. 

Trial by fire

The celebration was short-lived. After the IPO, demand for RFID surged — but Impinj, thinly capitalized after years of private fundraising, didn’t have the operational capacity to fill the orders. The stock quadrupled from its $14 IPO price to more than $60. Then it all came apart.

NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch chipmaker roughly 15 times Impinj’s size, moved aggressively on pricing and took business away. Customers who had been stockpiling RFID tags pulled back on orders. Revenue declined. On Feb. 2, 2018, the stock plunged 47% in a single day.

What followed was the darkest stretch in the company’s history. The company laid off 9% of its workforce. Then a former employee complaint triggered an audit committee investigation, forcing the company to miss an SEC filing deadline and drawing a deficiency notice from Nasdaq.

For months, the outcome was uncertain. Executives couldn’t trade their stock or issue grants to employees. The investigation cost $1.4 million. NXP, sensing an opportunity, continued to press its advantage.

Diorio described the investigation as mentally draining. The company was spending millions of dollars, the outside attorneys weren’t sharing their findings along the way, following the standard practice, and there was no way to know for certain how it would end. 

“You firmly believe you haven’t done anything wrong,” he said, “but who knows if somebody actually did something wrong that you don’t know about.” 

The investigation ultimately cleared the company, finding “no credible evidence” of wrongdoing, and Impinj received what Diorio called a rare letter from the SEC formally closing the matter. The stock surged 35% on the news.

Diorio called 2018 a turning point. “It was the year where everything got really difficult, the team and the company rallied, and it was the strength and the persistence of the team and their dedication that pulled us out the other side,” he said. “I’ll never forget that.”

The following year, Impinj went on offense. In June 2019, the company sued NXP, alleging it had copied 26 of Impinj’s patents. NXP countersued. The litigation stretched across five years and four lawsuits. In 2023, a federal jury found NXP had willfully infringed Impinj’s patents and awarded $18.5 million in damages. NXP settled in 2024, paying $45 million upfront and agreeing to ongoing royalties of roughly $17 million a year.

Where Impinj stands today

Diorio helped coin an industry term for the technology Impinj had built: RAIN RFID, short for “RAdio-frequency IdentificatioN.” It distinguished what Impinj does (using battery-free chips to identify and track individual items at scale) from other flavors of RFID used for key cards, animal tags, and contactless payments.

Today the company employs more than 450 people, most of them based in its headquarters at 400 Fairview Ave. N. in Seattle, with a test and development lab on Beacon Hill. The workforce is a fraction of NXP’s, which has more than 32,000 employees — a reminder that Impinj has built a market-leading position with a comparatively small team. 

Impinj holds an estimated 64% of the global market for RAIN RFID endpoint chips, up from 51% the year before, according to ABI Research. The company first overtook rival NXP for the market lead in 2024. The industry shipped nearly 53 billion chips in 2024, roughly one for every six or seven people on Earth. Impinj has connected more than 160 billion items cumulatively.

Each chip is battery-free, costs a few pennies, can be read wirelessly from 30 feet away, and identifies individual items at a rate of up to 1,000 per second. Vision systems can’t identify individual items. QR codes require line of sight. NFC has a range of four inches. Bluetooth requires a battery.

“Name any other technology that even gets close,” Diorio said. “You won’t come up with one.”

Privacy concerns nearly killed the RFID industry in its early years, when consumer groups campaigned against the technology in the mid-2000s. Although there’s privacy innovation still to come, Diorio said those fears have largely faded. The chips carry only a number, respond only when powered by an external reader, and don’t track people. 

One retailer already turns its tags invisible after the point of sale, though Diorio noted that’s “not the best solution because then that inhibits recycling.” 

His longer-term goal is cryptographic security, chips that can’t be cloned, putting “a dent in global counterfeiting” while keeping consumer data protected. 

Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is shifting. Diorio views NXP as the only real competitor — “everybody else in the market is a partner,” he said — but the competitor list in Impinj’s SEC filings has grown from two names at the time of the IPO to more than six, including four Chinese chipmakers. When a product costs pennies, low-cost competitors have a natural opening.

Retail apparel remains the core market. About 60% of all RAIN RFID tags go on clothing. But that reliance has made the business volatile. Three times in 10 years as a public company, demand from retailers has dropped sharply, dragging revenue and the stock with it. 

Earlier this year, Impinj’s stock plunged after the company issued guidance well below expectations. Part of the challenge: the company’s top three customers account for 61% of revenue.

The financial picture reflects a company that is still proving itself. Revenue has grown from $123 million in 2018 to $361 million last year, but Impinj has posted just one profitable year since going public — a $41 million gain in 2024, boosted by the NXP settlement.

To Diorio, all of this is prelude. Apparel, he said, is “tiny” compared to the total market of every item manufactured, transported, and sold. General merchandise, supply chain logistics, pharmaceuticals, food — each is an order of magnitude larger, or more.

“We have a gigantic blue ocean,” he said. “It’s the size of the Pacific.”

Machine learning and AI

The company is also using machine learning to move beyond handheld inventory scanning. Fixed readers mounted in ceiling tiles and other locations can track items autonomously at store choke points, from receiving docks to fitting rooms to exits, replacing employees who currently walk the aisles waving handheld scanners. 

More broadly, Diorio sees tagged items as a data source for AI, generating hard information at every point in a product’s journey from factory to shelf to recycling bin. 

“Most of the modeling that goes on today is based on guessing,” he said. “If the models are based on hard data, it’s immensely more valuable.” 

The biggest bet ahead is food. Three of the top five U.S. grocers (Kroger, Walmart, and Albertsons/Safeway) are piloting RFID for food freshness, according to Diorio, using tags to identify items approaching their expiration dates so they can be marked down before they end up in the trash. 

A European grocer is pushing toward fully automated checkout, where a basket of tagged items moves down a conveyor and is read instantly, no scanning required.

These are pilots, not deployments. The grocery market dwarfs apparel in volume, and Impinj has yet to prove it can crack it at scale. But here again, Diorio sees this as untapped potential. 

“My enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been,” he said. “We are just getting going.”

And this time, he made it to New York to ring the opening bell. 

During his Nasdaq remarks on Tuesday morning, Diorio told the story of getting stuck in Chicago for the IPO a decade ago, using the anecdote to make a larger point.

“The team stepped in,” he said. “The team that was here covered everything, rang the bell, did all the process, and did it beautifully. In fact, probably better than we could have. And that is the story of Impinj. It’s the team.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated July 23, 2026, to reflect ABI Research’s 2025 market share estimate of 64% for Impinj, up from 51% in 2024 as originally reported. The spelling of former CFO Evan Fein’s name was also corrected.

“This is not at all a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget. This is a budget-driven budget. If you look at the Truth Social posts by the President [Trump] and the statements of the people around him, he [President Trump] makes very clear that this budget was driven by a budget number, a budget target, an arbitrary level that was set based on five percent of last year's GDP…They set this arbitrary level and then at relatively the last minute in the budget development process the [Defense] Department was told come up with a request that gets you to this number, this $1.5 trillion number. And so they did.”

That was Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation's top experts on defense strategy and the defense budget, speaking last Tuesday at the Brookings Institution as part of a panel on The FY 2027 defense budget: How much is enough?

Remember, as I wrote last week, the Trump FY 2027 defense request is for $1.15 trillion with another $350 billion request to be placed in a FY 2026 reconciliation package; and there now also is the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has another $67 billion for the Defense Department.

House members have been weighing all the defense numbers and this week may be voting on a FY 2026 reconciliation package of $95 billion with only $73 billion for defense – far less than what was being sought.

Last Tuesday, Harrison went on to explain what may have been going on: “I say it is absolutely not a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget because they didn't have to make hard choices. They made some easy choices.”

As an example, Harrison said, “Do you want, you know, a fourth generation fighter jet? Buy some new fourth generation [F-15s]; or do we want to continue buying the fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 we have in production; or do we want to invest in sixth generation fighters? Do all of them, right? You can do all three at once, if you have a virtually unlimited budget, you don't have to make those hard tradeoffs.”

And, in fact, all three are included in the proposed FY2027 defense budget.

But Harrison goes on to suggest another way to view this Trump defense budget giant increase saying, “There's still a limit to how much the department can consume in terms of this funding…because I don't think they [the Trump budgeteers] actually intend this to be like a one-year budget authority number, especially with the reconciliation [set at $350 billion]. I think it is actually more like a five-year budget number that they're trying to get pre-funded up front, but they actually plan to spend it at a slower pace over the next five years.”

Harrison also looked at “the parts that I think absolutely don't belong in here are these big pots of money they created in defense-wide accounts that have very little description with them.”

For example, he picked out “$54 billion in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) line item. That is a single program element that's got $54 billion in it,” Harrison said. “That's unprecedented. If you read the budget description with it, it gives very little detail. You know, it's [clears throat] supposed to be investments in drones and things like that, but like tell us

quantities, tell us specific types of drones, like tell us what you're going to be using it for, and that detail is not there.”

Harrison went on, “It appears they haven't figured that out yet, so I think $54 billion is quite a reach, trying to ask for that much money for something that has not yet been well defined. So, I think that there are areas here where they've really overshot and they've tried to just throw everything in there and ask for a super high number. And I wonder if they almost expect that they're not going to get that full number -- that Congress will cut them back down quite a bit. But they were just trying to reach that overall $1.5 trillion level.”

As Yahoo Finance pointed out earlier this month, the $54 billion for DAWG sought for FY 2027 is 243 times greater than what DAWG got this year, and “now exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of $52.8 billion and represents nearly 15% of the entire $350 billion reconciliation package.”

Harrison’s view: “You get to the endgame, Congress is going to have to sort through this and say, ‘Okay, what are the what things in here are serious things that really do need to get funded one way or the other, and we'll have to figure out how to make that happen, and what are the other things that were just budget gimmicks or just filler?’"

Harrison was not the only expert on last Tuesday’s Brookings panel.

Joining him were David Wessel, who runs Brookings’ tax and fiscal policy in the economic studies program; and Mara Karlin, professor at John's Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who has worked for six Defense Secretaries over her career.

Wessel took a broader financial view saying, “The President is proposing a big defense budget at a time when we have unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and so I think that raises an important question and that question is…budgeting is about tradeoffs and the President and Congress at the moment seem to be avoiding trade-offs. There are ways we could offset if defense spending is really important. We should think about ways to pay for some of it either by cutting some other places in defense or raising taxes. And there's some ideas floating around on that, but none of them are politically popular.”

Wessel also raised two other issues: “I think it also requires some trust on the part of the public that the money is being well spent and that relies on Congress doing oversight. And secondly, that we are sticking with a military that is nonpartisan and follows the leadership of the President and the Congress, but is not totally politicized. And I'm afraid that the trust in the military is being eroded by some of the personnel decisions that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is making. And I think that's a problem.”

As for Karlin, she referred to the Trump national strategy and focused on what she called “a break with the bipartisanship that has characterized how folks have thought about these threats for a long time.”

Karlin noted, “The real emphasis of this [Trump national] strategy is on the Western Hemisphere, right? The real threat is seen in this strategy as these alleged narco-terrorists as they're so named…So, that's the priority.”

But, she adds, “You then see China mentioned, but in a pretty circumscribed way, just the first island chain. And in general, the language reads a lot softer than almost any recent defense strategy. You see a desire to downgrade involvement in European affairs, a little bit of mention of the Middle East, but in no way signaling that we would be starting this massive [Iran] conflict. And so here's where I think, there's some confusion worth highlighting because traditionally a national defense strategy is a decoder ring. It's going to tell you where the Secretary of Defense will put their energy and attention.”

“When we look at this budget, this very large budget, that's really at kind of World War levels,” Karlin said, “and frankly, the number [$1.5 trillion] isn't really merited by the strategy.”

She explained, “If one were really to just prioritize the Western Hemisphere and this quite circumcised focus on China as a major threat, and not be involved in most other regions of the world, in fact, the Trump administration could have put out a quite tiny defense budget request. So I leave you with a bit of perplexity.”

Two more things Harrison mentioned need recording.

“I forgot to address the [Trump] battleship issue,” Harrison said at one point, “because you know that's in here and far from defending it, I think that's one of those examples of things that got thrown in because they didn't have to make tough choices.”

Then he explained, “No one in the Navy can say with a straight face that we're going to go from starting a brand-new, clean-ship design in FY 2027, to procuring the lead-class [battle]ship in FY 2028, to going to all the way by FY 2031 being at full rate production, ready to buy them at one per year. That doesn't pass the laugh test…And so are we just setting ourselves up to spend a few billion dollars chasing, you know, this weird idea before we eventually have to cancel it and then things go back to the way they were before.”

Finally, Harrison said, “I think there needs to be some fundamental look on the congressional side at just how do we reform the budget process to get it working again; open the aperture to things like changing the start date of the fiscal year [which now begins October 1], re-jiggering the committee structure.”

I believe Harrison is questioning why each year the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate each authorize spending programs, and then the House and Senate Appropriations Committees set the actual dollar-level of funds made available for that year.

“You know,” Harrison said, “I'm talking a lot of third rails here, but I think we're at that kind of point like we were in the early 1970s where Congress realized it [the budgeting process] just wasn't working. I think that they need to do some serious inward-looking reform like that.”

I agree, having twice worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, and followed defense spending over the past 60 years. Harrison is right – the Legislative Branch system for passing Executive Branch funding needs to be repaired.

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The Department of War has just executed the most ambitious acquisition reform in six decades. It scrapped JCIDS — the requirements process that ossified innovation for a generation; replaced program offices with portfolio executives, and built a Warfighting Acquisition System designed for speed.

The changes deliver on years of reform proposals. They also risk repeating a costly mistake of the post-9/11 wars: chasing evolving threats with rapid fixes while no one is responsible for understanding them. Industry will help determine which path prevails.

Counter-drone fight as test case. We’ve seen this movie before

Consider the counter-drone fight, the clearest test of the new system. Washington treats it as an engineering puzzle: build a better jammer, field a cheaper interceptor. The technology shelf is full — directed-energy weapons at $12 a shot, drone-on-drone interceptors with more than a thousand kills in Ukraine.

While the technology works, the process for getting it to the warfighter does not.

Soldiers today engage FPV drones that cost a few hundred dollars with $400,000 Stinger missiles, because the cheap interceptors proven in Ukraine still have no fast path into U.S. formations. A new drone variant appears on the battlefield every week, built from commercial parts and open-source software. A firmware update that defeats a jammer costs nothing and takes hours. Our counter, even through the reformed system, takes months.

This is not a technology gap. It is a cycle-time gap. And I have seen it before. From 2010 to 2013, I led the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force at the height of the counter-IED campaign in Afghanistan. The structural parallels are exact: cheap dual-use components, knowledge that spreads faster than countermeasures, adaptation at near-zero cost, tactical variation that defeats one-size-fits-all solutions, and an institutional reflex to throw technology at a systems problem. We spent $75 billion on counter-IED and lost that fight anyway. Drones are IEDs that fly.

The part nobody owns

Here is what the reforms miss: Successful innovation runs in six phases — detect, define, develop, deploy, assess, distribute. The reforms invested almost entirely in the middle two, develop and deploy. Nobody persistently monitors how the threat evolves at the tactical edge. Nobody scopes each unit’s problem with enough precision to drive useful solutions. Nobody measures whether fielded systems actually work against an adversary who adapts after every engagement. And nobody moves what one unit learns to every other unit facing the same threat at operational speed. Three of the six phases have no organizational owner.

The department built a faster engine. Nobody built the steering — the mechanism that decides which problems the engine should be pointed at, whether the solutions worked, and who else needs to know.

Industry’s new role

That gap is the industry's opportunity — and its obligation. The DoW can’t solve this problem by itself. Companies that want to matter in this market need to do their part. They should start by doing three things differently.

First, invest in problem discovery, not product pitches. Requirements still originate in headquarters, not from soldiers watching the problem in context. The companies that win the next decade will be the ones that put engineers and business developers forward with operational units to understand problems before proposing solutions. The quality of your solution is determined by the quality of the problem you choose to solve. Einstein’s formula applies: 55 minutes on the problem, five on the solution. Most of industry has that ratio inverted.

Second, build for adaptation, not for the requirement. If your product cannot change in weeks — modular hardware, software-defined behavior, upgrades at firmware speed — it is obsolete on delivery. The adversary’s development cycle runs in days. A requirement frozen at contract award is a snapshot of a threat that no longer exists.

Third, plug into the new portfolio structure as a sensor, not just a supplier. Industry keeps asking the department for a clearer demand signal, and fairly so. But the demand signal has to come from somewhere, and the fusion cells that Portfolio Acquisition Executives need — nodes that merge ground truth from the field with what industry and the labs know is possible — cannot function without industry feeding data in and absorbing assessment data out. Companies that operate at that tempo will define the portfolios. Companies that wait for RFPs will trail them.

Doing these three things means stopping three others. Stop building to frozen requirements and calling it responsiveness. Stop treating a prototype contract or a demo-day win as the finish line — it is the starting line of the assessment the department never runs. And stop spending capture budgets decoding what headquarters wants instead of discovering what the warfighter needs. The hours are the same; the direction is not.

New authorities need new operators

None of this works without people, and people are where the reform agenda is thinnest. The department is converting the Defense Acquisition University into a Warfighting Acquisition University, trading compliance training for scenario-based judgment. That is the right instinct. But this year’s defense authorization offered little else on workforce, which means the authorities changed faster than the people who must wield them.

We know what works: experiential, problem-first education. Hacking for Defense has spent a decade putting university students to work on real national security problems alongside the people who own them. It has produced a generation of founders and public servants who know how to interrogate a problem before building a solution. That model needs to scale — into the department’s schoolhouses, into two-way exchanges between government and industry, and into industry’s own training pipelines, which today produce engineers who have never seen the field and capture teams fluent in the FAR but not in the mission.

The department has reformed how it acquires. It has not yet reformed what it acquires, whether it worked, or who else needs to know. Industry can wait – and hope – the government will close that gap, or it can help close it — by discovering problems & opportunities at the edge, building for adaptation, and educating a workforce trained to out-cycle an adversary rather than out-comply a regulation.

In this fight, the adversary does not need to out-technology us. He only needs to out-cycle us. We have already paid $75 billion to learn where that leads.

Pete Newell is a retired U.S. Army colonel, former director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, and CEO of BMNT. He co-created Hacking for Defense with Steve Blank and is the author of “The Innovation Targeting Cycle.”

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

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It was with alarm that I read the recent New York Times article reporting the regurgitation of a truly terrible idea that, like a bad meal, continues to come up every several years.

The Times reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence

is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list, to avoid inadvertent conflicts between agencies and to better track foreign intelligence threats in real time.

A primary task of any corporate security department or Federal counterintelligence activity is to prevent, deter, and detect human and technical compromises of sensitive information. Even innocent errors can result in massive damage when they reveal sensitive information. Nor is it a secret that any large organization, no matter how carefully it screens its people, may have persons in its ranks who would betray their colleagues and their country. And of course, malign foreign actors routinely seek to access U.S. information systems and classified computing resources.

Just as a comprehensive list of CIA employees, including covert officers serving in dangerous locations, would be of great value to any number of foreign adversaries, so too would the proposed list of espionage targets, suspected spies, and potential recruits. And the drawbacks associated with creating such a list are significant - and potentially catastrophic.

The mere process of assembling the relevant data from within separate departments and agencies would require the assembling of multiple intermediate lists -for example, all subjects of interest from multiple operating components of the FBI, CIA, and additional agencies, each one of which would pose a separate significant and potentially catastrophic counterintelligence vulnerability. Compiled into a single comprehensive set, the theft or leak of the combined list would work incalculable damage to the United States.

Similar proposals have been made for decades. At the very best, they are a solution in search of a problem; for every time two or more agencies trip over one another in the pursuit of intelligence opportunities, there are literally hundreds more occasions in which the existing deconfliction arrangements work exactly as they should.

I spent several years in an ODNI policy position when the Office was first created. From time to time I encountered colleagues from one or another part of the Government, or from outside the Government completely, who sought to establish policies and procedures to address some obscure, long-since resolved, or simply imagined pet peeve. While some concerns truly reflect structural obstacles and warrant serious consideration, sometimes the most responsible thing to do is simply draw the line and withdraw a truly bad proposal. This is one of those times.

Jonathan M. Fredman is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. He spent 36 years in legal and policy positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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

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

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Agent 711 was one of the most effective and least known spies in our nation's history. He used dead drops to communicate about enemy plans. He used secret chemical processes to create new forms of invisible ink. He spread disinformation to disguise his own troops' movements and confuse the enemy. The year was 1778. Agent 711 was George Washington. He was our nation's first spymaster, and his network of informants was the Culper spy ring. It was one of several that he ran through the war and also during his time as president. Washington's army was undermanned, underfunded, frequently on the run. He knew he needed an edge, and he found it with intelligence. A British intelligence officer later said Washington did not really outfight the British — he simply outspied us.

At the same time, as a young nation was leaning heavily into its very first intelligence community, Thomas Paine was inspiring a nation to democracy. He had ideas about equality, rights, and the limits of government — revolutionary ideas for the time. He had ideas about power: it was not a divine right handed down to a monarch, but power rested in the hands of the people. Government borrows that power for a time, within limits. The representatives of that government are meant to be of the people and return to lives among the people, not to be separate or above or disconnected from what's going on among them.

Thus, our nation was born, not out of a tension between intelligence and democracy, but as an alchemical mix of both. We carry these ideas forward into a modern context. Power rests with the people. They loan it to the government. We trade some of our liberty for things that no one person can provide — roads, the power grid, police, submarines, national security. In exchange, we demand things of our government: accountability, adjustments, change, transparency. But we also demand security, and we demand economic prosperity. That's the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness part.

It's easy to forget that there are still those in the world who wish to take these things away from us. It's also in part generational — today’s college graduates were not alive during 9/11 or had maybe just been born. There are still terrorists and cartels who wish to take life. China seeks to take liberty — they want to subjugate people to their will, as they've done in Tibet, in Hong Kong, as they're attempting to do in Taiwan. Russia wants to end the pursuit of happiness. Some men truly do just want to watch the whole world burn to make themselves feel better, and Putin is one of those. Rather, they want happiness on their terms. This looks like power for the elite few oligarchs around Vladimir Putin, while he sends the poor to fight his war in Ukraine. It looks like the ruling elite of the CCP and their little princelings. They want order. They want to take liberty to hold power. The state has shown, in their case, security, but only for the few.

Why? Because liberty is messy. It is a struggle. It's making our own way while everyone else does the same. It's making space for ourselves and for each other, and when those spaces conflict, we figure it out. Thomas Paine wrote that “when we speak of rights, we ought always to unite them with the idea of duties — rights become duties by reciprocity: the right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee to others, and he to me.” So today we are the guarantors of each other's rights. In Paine's time that looked like representative democracy and a little bit of revolution. Today, specifically with regard to spy work, it is a hard concept to wrap your head around — it's actually protection of rights by proxy.

In my pocket I carry a coin — the first one made for the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which I served for six years. On one side is Washington's seal, to represent our very first spymaster and to honor the intelligence officers who were so instrumental to the birth of this nation. But there are also two sets of stars on this coin. There's a set of 15 around the outside that represents the 15 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who represent the entirety of the Senate. And then on the other side there are a hundred stars representing the Senate as a whole.

Why are there two layers? The 100 senators represent the entire country. The 15 members of the committee represent the Senate. Just as Washington went to great pains to encode secret messages and hide what he knew from the British army, secrets today must stay secret — the more people who know a thing, the less likely something is to stay secret. The intel committees are there to be the eyes and ears of the entire Senate or the House, and by extension the nation. These committees were designed to bring things back into balance.

During the 1960s and 1970s, another time of intense national upheaval, the IC got way out of hand — spying on political figures like Martin Luther King, attempting assassinations of foreign leaders, and engaging in massive propaganda campaigns. The Church and Pike committees united to investigate and create both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, to provide permanent, comprehensive oversight to keep this balance.

People who don't know intelligence work think that it's all-powerful and full of abuse. They see the spy thrillers that are in the movies. They think the 1970s continue today. But people who do know it, know it's a microcosm of liberty. It's messy. It's flawed. But it's also full of checks, balances, and people doing the right thing. These are my friends and former colleagues. They look like me. They look like you. They miss dinners with families. They put themselves in harm's way. They don't get parades. They don't get early boarding on flights. They don't get military discounts. They just do the work.

For us as a country, I fear there are rough seas ahead. We face two revisionist powers that, like King George III, believed that one person should be in charge through might alone. These people want to set up a false choice: freedom or security, not both. But the truth is that freedom and security are deeply intertwined. It is fear that leads to that false choice. On the one hand, dictators fear chaos — they think that people will come to understand that their oppressive dear leader does not, in fact, have their interests at heart. The supposed strongman is actually terrified. He's desperate to hold on to power. On the other hand, amongst some, there is fear the security mission will take over and become too big, too powerful, lodged in the hands of someone who is too power-hungry. But the goal is balance. We need Washington's spy ring. We also need Paine's ideals. And we need them working together.

One further reflection on that Paine quote: the rights I enjoy, I also guarantee to others. This is perhaps most true for those who operate in the shadows. They guarantee the rights of fellow citizens day in and day out, with a million small decisions, even when no one is watching. Democracy enables good spy work — only in a democracy can you walk into the Oval Office and deliver truly terrible news to power, tell the president things have gone sideways, and work together to fix it.

Spy work also makes democracy possible. I look forward to a day where there are no enemies; no one who seeks to assert ultimate power over others. That day I will have happily worked myself out of a job. But it is not today. Today I am fully employed attempting to create deterrence, know our adversaries, create a future of peace through strength. I have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution four times in my life, and hopefully one day I'll do it a fifth, but inside government or out, trying to work for democracy, for freedom, for a secure America and a secure world is the mission.

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

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“In addition to supporting OEF (Operation Epic Fury, the Iran War) costs incurred by DOW (Department of War), the [$87.6 billion Fiscal Year FY 2026 Supplemental Trump administration] request provides $768 million to the Department of Energy to support nuclear and other energy security requirements, primarily for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for OEF-related activities.”

I was intrigued by that segment, from a June 24 letter to House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director Russell T. Vought, because I could not imagine what costly “nuclear and other energy security requirements” NNSA – the U.S. nuclear weapons complex – could be playing in the Iran War.

However, a chart attached to Vought’s letter said that $672 million was for NNSA to fund “activities for complete and verifiable termination of Iran’s ability to develop or acquire a nuclear weapon, including the disposition of proliferation sensitive material, technology, equipment, and infrastructure.”

Another $95.5 million, destined for the Department of Energy’s Environmental and Other Defense Activities elements, was listed for “support of Operation Epic Fury and other classified purposes.”

Perhaps members of the Senate Armed Services Committee can find out about the plans behind this $782 million package for NNSA and Energy this morning [July 14], when they question Jules W. Hurst III, who is up for confirmation as Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller).

By the way, when was the last time a U.S. President went to war and added a tax to help pay for it? As an old-timer I remember – it was 1968, when then-President Lyndon Johnson got Congress to pass a nine-month, 10 percent surcharge on individual and corporate taxpayers to help pay for the Vietnam War. Low-income individual taxpayers were entirely exempt from the surcharge.

Since then, both Republican and Democratic Presidents used deficit spending and borrowing to pay for military conflicts. So far this year, the nation’s total deficit has increased through May 2026 by $1.25 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, with Defense Department spending running $20 billion more through May 2026, than it was last year.

But I remind you, Congress now has three defense funding requests before it: a $1.1 trillion FY 2027 base budget request; an additional $350 billion request to be placed in a 2026 reconciliation package; and now the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has $67 billion for the Defense Department.

No one can say for sure how Congress will deal with these requests that total over $1.5 trillion.

For comparison, I point out that according to a December 8, 2014, Congressional Research Service study, Congress, over the prior 13 years, approved total appropriations of $1.6 trillion for Afghan and Iraq “military operations, base support, weapons maintenance, training of Afghan and Iraq security forces, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the war operations initiated since the 9/11[2001] attacks.”

What the Vought chart also shows is that almost 23 percent of the funds in what has been described as the Iran War supplemental, went for different and, in some cases, totally unrelated purposes that I will describe below.

As for the NNSA money, a FoxNews story June 24, said, “The funding would support the removal and elimination of Iranian nuclear materials, including uranium hexafluoride (UF6), uranium in various forms and research reactor fuel, including highly-enriched uranium, according to details shared by a White House official.”

FoxNews also said, “The request also would fund U.S. verification activities inside Iran, support inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, strengthen nuclear-smuggling detection efforts and expand Nuclear Emergency Support Team operations across the Middle East.”

In short, Trump is asking for funds to deal with Iran’s enriched uranium before he has any agreement with Tehran that gives the U.S. access to that material.

Perhaps Trump thinks in the end he will have immediate success with Tehran as in he did in Venezuela. There, after the U.S. seized President Nicolas Maduro in January 2026, and four months later, in May, NNSA removed from Venezuela 13.54 kilograms – approximately 30 pounds – of highly-enriched uranium from a legacy research reactor in that country which had been shut down since the early 1990s.

The supplemental request also contains $1.5 billion for the State Department’s of which $850 million is for the Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems program at high-risk diplomatic posts overseas along with security upgrades and equipment replacement. Another $300 million for Embassy construction and maintenance would be used to address needs following the start of the Iran war in Bahrain, Dubai, Karachi, Lahore and Riyadh, according to the Vought chart.

The State request also includes $100 million for the Diplomatic and Consular Service account to meet unanticipated needs related to the Middle East situation including departure assistance to U.S. citizens seeking to leave the region with their families. Transfer authority and an increase in repatriation loan level is also being requested to meet the needs of destitute U.S. citizens.

Another $1.35 billion for the State Department is sought to deal with the Ebola Virus, or as Vought put it in his letter to Speaker Johnson, “These funds would be used to limit the spread of Ebola beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda to other vulnerable nations and ensure the virus does not reach U.S. shores.”

Some $800 million for State is proposed for the International Humanitarian Assistance account, formerly managed by USAID, and another $550 million for Global Health Security, which funds “would support contact tracing, personal protective equipment and commodity procurement, disease surveillance, laboratory capacity, and cross-border coordination,” according to the Vought chart.

There is another $2 billion for the U.S. Coast Guard to support OEF where Pentagon “assets are not available to support Western Hemisphere operations. This includes funding for operations at the Southern Border, ” according to the Vought chart.

Meanwhile, the largest amount, other than for OEF in the supplemental, is $11.1 billion for the Agriculture Department, the bulk of which, $10 billion, would be for American farmers as “temporary economic assistance for row and specialty crops planted in crop year 2026,” according to the Vought chart. An additional $1.1 billion is being requested specifically for farmers in Florida “to rebound from devastating losses that were the result of crippling storms this past winter.”

I believe that money has political implications because rural Americans are pulling away from the President. As Brookings Institution polling recently showed, “Only 24% of white rural voters think that the condition of the economy is excellent or good, while 77% rate it as fair or poor. Just 16% say their family’s financial situation is better than it was two years ago (near the end of the Biden administration), compared to 49% who say they are worse off.”

Then there is $1 billion in the war supplemental to assist in the final design and construction for renovation of New York City’s Penn Station. In a New York Times op-ed last Friday, Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said that the White House last year took control of the $8 billion Penn Station project from the [New York] Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Rep. Nadler wrote, “Behind closed doors, Mr. Trump has already attempted a quid-pro-quo, offering federal funding for New York’s transit needs only if Penn Station and [Virginia’s] Dulles Airport are renamed for him.”

However, Nadler also noted, “It’s still $7 billion short, and with top appropriators already opposing the supplemental funding request, it’s unlikely to be approved anyway.”

Another $1 billion in the war supplemental, according to the Vought chart, is for the Labor Department’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation “to increase the benefit levels for participants of certain pension plans that were sponsored by Delphi Corporation and terminated as a result of General Motors ' bankruptcy in 2009.”

The money would reverse pension reductions for some 20,000 retirees that have spent years arguing their pensions were unfairly reduced after the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation assumed responsibility for the company’s pension plans during GM’s 2009 financial crisis.

According to the Detroit Free Press, “Various legislative efforts to restore the benefits have failed or stalled, despite bipartisan support. Perhaps knowing it's a potentially powerful issue in the Midwest, Trump (and President Joe Biden before him) has signaled his support of the workers in politically sensitive moments such as just before the 2020 election.”

Then there is $500 million for the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. for, as the Vought chart explains, improvements to the World War II Memorial on the Mall and restoration and construction for the Tidal Basin Seawall along West Potomac Park to include the planting of hundreds of new cherry trees and stabilizing the surrounding grounds.

Last Friday, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity pointed out that even the supplemental’s defense and Iran-related spending “deserve further scrutiny,” noting that $15.6 billion for the Pentagon are justified by Vought simply as “Administration priorities,” “Readiness,” and “Classified Programs.”

In fact, I think the whole package needs congressional oversight, and from the reactions of some key Senate and House leaders, that’s what it’s going to get.

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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Military power is meaningless if it cannot move.

Every American war plan, from deterring aggression in Europe to prevailing in the Indo-Pacific, depends on our ability to maneuver people, equipment, fuel, information and combat power faster than any adversary can react. We invest billions in advanced aircraft, ships, satellites and weapons systems, yet every one of these assets depends on transportation and communications networks that the Department of Defense does not own. Washington needs to invest in the cybersecurity of these assets otherwise we risk having troops and materiel that can’t get off the base to the front line.

A tank leaving Fort Cavazos does not magically appear in Europe. An Air Force squadron deploying to the Pacific does not simply launch into combat. Every deployment begins on commercial railroads, moves through civilian ports and airports, depends on privately owned communications networks and increasingly relies on digital logistics systems that connect government and commercial partners.

That is America’s strategic advantage. It is also one of our greatest vulnerabilities.

China does not need to destroy American combat power to gain an advantage. It simply needs to delay it. Every day that equipment sits in a rail yard, every hour a port is offline, every aircraft waylaid by corrupted logistics data or disrupted communications creates exactly the kind of friction an adversary seeks during the opening days of a conflict.

This is not theoretical.

For more than two years, top U.S. intelligence officials have warned that Chinese cyber operators are compromising hundreds of American transportation, communications, energy and logistics systems. They gain persistent access, so that Beijing can disrupt and destroy system at the time of its choosing.

Russia’s cyberattacks against Ukraine’s transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure reveal what this looks like in practice: modern wars are fought as much against the systems that sustain military power as the military itself.

Today’s military power is no longer built solely on concrete, steel and fuel. It is built on networks and connectivity.

Ports rely on automated cranes and digital cargo management systems. Railroads depend on computerized dispatching and signaling. Airports operate through integrated flight planning, air traffic management and logistics software. Fuel distribution, maintenance scheduling, cargo visibility and command and control all depend on data moving securely across interconnected networks.

Imagine a deployment where cargo manifests are corrupted, rail dispatch systems slow movement, satellite communications are degraded and fuel deliveries are redirected through manipulated logistics data. Aircraft still exist. Ships still sail. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Guardians remain ready to fight. But when the Joint Force begins arriving late and incomplete, the operational tempo required to seize the initiative is lost.

History reminds us why speed matters.

During humanitarian operations following Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the systems underpinning military mobility were the lifeline connecting isolated communities to food, water and medical care. Every hour mattered. Delays translated directly into human suffering.

Combat operations are no different. Time is often the most valuable resource a commander possesses. The same lesson applies in deterrence. The faster America can generate and maneuver combat power, the less likely an adversary is to miscalculate.

Military and commercial networks need to work together to dynamically reroute forces around cyberattacks, infrastructure failures or contested logistics. Decision advantage will increasingly come not from owning more platforms, but from orchestrating movement better than our adversaries can disrupt it.

The problem is that military planners have spent decades assuming that civilian infrastructure will simply be available when mobilization orders are issued. That assumption deserves renewed scrutiny.

The Defense Department has publicly identified which ports, rail corridors and airports are “strategic” and indispensable to national defense. The Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Coast Guard and transportation agencies have been tasked to understand the infrastructure. Commercial operators understand their own networks better than anyone. But somehow the needed public private collaboration to protect these national assets has not occurred and, as a result, many of these communities will come together for the first time during a national emergency.

Congress and the executive branch should establish and harmonize cybersecurity standards across transportation sectors so operators spend more time improving security than satisfying overlapping regulations.

Infrastructure directly supporting military mobility deserves dedicated cybersecurity investment. Smaller ports, airports and rail operators cannot reasonably defend themselves against nation-state adversaries without federal partnership. Congress should provide cybersecurity grant programs for the under-resourced transportation infrastructure operators to address identified vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, America must begin exercising the way it expects to fight.

National, regional and local exercises should assume degraded communications, cyberattacks against transportation systems, corrupted logistics data and contested movement inside the United States. We should practice fighting through disruption instead of assuming perfect connectivity.

There is an old military saying: amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.

The next war demands we take one step further.

Victors study maneuver.

America’s adversaries already understand that mobility is our greatest strategic advantage. That is precisely why they are targeting the networks that make it possible.

If America cannot connect, America cannot maneuver. If America cannot move, America cannot fight.

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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Author’s Note: This article is not about ‘endless wars’ as a critique of U.S. military interventions — that debate belongs elsewhere. It examines a distinct and increasingly visible pattern: how U.S. adversaries wage continuous, long-term conflict against the United States across peace and war, both below and above the threshold of open conflict. The aim is to clarify the nature of the competition we are already in.

Countering Endless Warfare and its Networks

The United States is not at peace. As I argued in Part I, the United States is already in a continuous, long-term conflict with determined adversaries who are waging warfare without crossing the threshold into open conflict. Endless Warfare is a framework for understanding how those adversaries pursue an enduring approach to erode and supplant U.S. power, influence, and global leadership over time.

Endless Warfare is not simply another label for the gray zone or cognitive warfare. Both are important elements and merit their own approaches, but Endless Warfare describes the adversary’s persistent, long-term strategy, not just the elements that enable it.

Given this operating environment, this is about far more than terminology. It is about how we understand conflict, how we achieve deterrence, how we protect decision autonomy, how we retain leverage, and, most importantly, how we disrupt the networks that fuel Endless Warfare.

What are the essential next steps?

Endless Warfare Requires a Different Strategic Mindset

Militaries are often criticized for planning to fight the last war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was undermined by Russia’s underestimation of how much warfare had evolved since Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014. The United States potentially faces that same risk today. It is important that we are prepared to fight and win the next conventional war, but there are risks in a focus on only that strategy. We must also prepare to fight and win—with the appropriate instruments of national power—the Endless Warfare being waged on the United States by its adversaries; warfare that incorporates gray zone activity, cognitive warfare, weaponized negotiations, proxies and surrogates, and other subversive networks.

This change in strategic mindset is not because of a lack of capability. The United States has considerable experience, resources, and capabilities in this space. Endless Warfare is conceptually different from conventional war—particularly given the ambiguous nature of gray-zone activity and cognitive warfare—and therefore demands a different approach.

Yet because it is a continuous state of conflict, it also requires the same level of national leadership and vision, organization, critical thinking, sense of urgency, and collaboration with allies that we apply to conventional conflict. This is achievable but will take some effort. It may require a senior White House official, such as a Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Competition, to integrate interagency action and coordinate a sustained national response to this threat.

That Deputy National Security Advisor would not replace existing responsibilities of Departments and Agencies. The role would be to ensure that strategic deterrence in the gray zone, cognitive advantage, conflict negotiations when adversaries seek to extend rather than resolve conflict, and network disruptions are integrated into a coherent and sustained national response to the threat of Endless Warfare against the United States.

Strategic Deterrence in the Gray Zone

Strategic deterrence is one component of a broader approach to countering Endless Warfare. Gray zone activity is a powerful enabler of Endless Warfare because it gives our adversaries a space to undermine the United States while avoiding armed conflict.

Our adversaries have calculated that there are more gains than risks in the gray zone and that any risks they do face are acceptable. Actions that seek to counter or defend against gray zone activity but that do not impose meaningful costs or create credible deterrence may simply reward gray zone activity.

An effective strategy for achieving strategic deterrence in the gray zone rests on deliberate preparation, clear communication, a national approach, and the resolve to change the risk calculus of our adversaries.

Deliberate preparation means collecting and analyzing information on adversary gray zone trends, capabilities, and intent before they act; routinely coordinating at the national level so roles, responsibilities, and decision paths are clear; and reorienting institutions and the interagency to maintain effective balanced capability in both conventional and gray domains.

We also must communicate clearly domestically, to our allies, and particularly to our adversaries. A simple but clear message for our adversaries: “We will see what you’re doing, we will publicly attribute it to you, and we will impose costs that exceed your gains.”

This message is credible only if it is backed by action over time. The United States must convincingly demonstrate its resolve to proactively and persistently employ national capabilities to change the risk calculus and behavior of our adversaries.

This range of national capabilities includes coordinated diplomatic and allied action, economic sanctions and restrictions, cyber operations, legal and financial disruption, public attribution, denying access to critical technologies, cognitive measures, military posture and partner capability-building and—when necessary—kinetic responses. Recent examples illustrate that imposing costs is possible.

In 2021, the United States publicly attributed the SolarWinds supply-chain compromise to Russia, expelled Russian Intelligence Officers, and imposed broad financial penalties under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

In early 2025, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Company and associated individuals for their role in Salt Typhoon for attacks on network infrastructure of multiple major U.S. telecommunication and internet service providers.

These were hard-earned wins for U.S. Departments and Agencies involved, but Russia and China appear to have absorbed the costs and continued their operations. Achieving strategic deterrence means that actions like these must become the norm, not the exception.

The goal of strategic deterrence in the gray zone is to shape adversary decision-making before action is taken. It means proactively shaping the environment so adversaries hesitate before they act—a critical step in disrupting the cycle of Endless Warfare.

Gaining a Cognitive Advantage

Countering the impacts of cognitive warfare is essential to countering Endless Warfare. My colleague, Austin Branch, and I argued in The Cipher Brief that it was possible—and necessary—for the U.S. to seize a 21st-century cognitive advantage.

That argument is even more urgent today given the central role of cognitive warfare in our adversaries’ strategies of Endless Warfare. Cognitive Security, at its core, is the protection of human cognition and decision autonomy—our individual and collective ability to accurately perceive global events, to trust the knowledge we have and the information we receive, and to make confident, independent decisions free from external manipulation, influence, or coercion.

Cognitive Security is also about offense—outthinking, outpacing, and outmaneuvering our adversaries in the cognitive domain.

Our adversaries should understand that their leaders, institutions, networks, proxies—and decision-making—are vulnerable to cognitive pressure and influence. The goal is to force them—not the United States—to confront the uncertainties and risks of cognitive warfare and to weaken their ability to wage Endless Warfare.

There are some positive steps at the national level.

We now have a first-ever NSC Cognitive Advantage Director, and the FY26 NDAA directs the Secretary of Defense to formally define cognitive warfare for the Department. The Department’s Strategic Capabilities Office recently launched a Cognitive Warfare Project to advance the military’s cognitive warfare capabilities. There is clearly opportunity here.

Yet, these early steps remain fragmented. In contrast, China’s United Front Work Department, Russia’s Active Measures networks, and Iran’s diverse network of surrogates reflect centralized national direction and a long-term horizon as elements of a national strategy.

In this vital process, America’s approach has to be equally well-coordinated and strategic. It is essential that these new efforts avoid bureaucratic hurdles, over-prescription that may stifle innovation, and creating silos. Our adversaries will not wait for us to catch up.

Our national narrative—America’s Story—also plays an important role. As Branch and I argued in the Cipher Brief, our national narrative is both sword and shield. It projects power, influence, and advances our interests. It tells the story of our values, history, aspirations, and view of the world. It supports confidence in our actions, our institutions, and our global commitments.

Importantly, America’s Story counters adversary narratives and actions that seek to undermine America at home and abroad. It can serve as a powerful antidote to adversary campaigns that use cognitive warfare to sustain prolonged conflict. America’s Story was built at a time when much of the world saw America as liberator, peacemaker, builder, global diplomat, and above all, a powerful symbol of sacrifice, freedom, and self-determination. The long arc of America’s Story is its strength.

The United States cannot let this national narrative get lost in episodic political turbulence—its role in countering our adversaries is too vital.

Countering Weaponized Negotiations

In the era of Endless Warfare, adversaries often use negotiations as a continuation of conflict by other means—not as instruments of resolution. Negotiations can play an outsized role in Endless Warfare even though they only occur periodically. The central challenge is distinguishing when talks aim to legitimately resolve a conflict versus when they are designed to shape its next phase.

Today, drawing lessons directly from Russia’s behavior—from Georgia to Ukraine—and from Iran, several principles emerge that can strengthen our negotiating posture when facing adversaries that practice weaponized negotiations.

Those key principles include:

No upfront concessions. Make no upfront concessions to get an adversary to the negotiating table. Such actions erode diplomatic, economic, and military leverage and can shape the entire negotiations on unfavorable terms.

Establish clear overarching objectives and non-negotiable redlines early. This preserves decision autonomy, provides a framework for decision-making, and prevents adversaries from reshaping objectives to their advantage.

Proactively counter narratives. During negotiations over Ukraine, Russia repeatedly pushed narratives, such as “Ukraine can never win” and “territory concessions are inevitable,” to shape Western perceptions of what constituted a realistic outcome. Anticipating and countering false narratives ensures negotiations are not manipulated.

Concessions must be conditions-based. Any concessions given during negotiations must be based on measurable, verifiable actions with automatic snap-back mechanisms if commitments are violated.

Be willing to walk away. The desire for any agreement should never outweigh core national security interests. Suspending or ending talks is better than enabling or accepting a settlement that resets the conflict in an adversary’s favor.

Chester Karrass put it plainly, in life you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate. This is a powerful counter to American assumptions that raw power or battlefield success will carry the day at the negotiating table.

Countering Endless Warfare Networks

These measures—deterrence, cognitive advantage, and managing weaponized negotiations—greatly improve America’s posture, but they do not by themselves disrupt Endless Warfare networks.

The ultimate goal is systematically confronting the adversary networks that pose an enduring threat to the U.S. These networks fall into two broad categories: state institutional structures and more ambiguous structures that blur the line between state and non-state activity.

Institutional networks include military organizations, intelligence services, party organizations, proxy structures, and state-directed organizations such as IRGC-QF, MSS, GRU, and FSB, as well as the specialized units responsible for assassinations and sabotage, influence operations, and cyber-attacks as a few examples.

Ambiguous networks include ghost fleets, shell and front companies, criminal organizations, illicit financial systems, logistics systems influence networks, cyber hacktivists, proxy militias, smuggling organizations, and other similar entities.

These networks are not abstract. Iran, Russia, and China employ different approaches to Endless Warfare, but each illustrates how adversaries develop and employ both institutional and ambiguous networks to achieve persistent strategic objectives over a long timeframe. Just as a few examples:

Iran’s network of proxies and surrogates, built over decades, allows Iran to project power, coerce and intimidate its neighbors, and get inside the decision space of its adversaries at relatively low cost. The IRGC is an enabler of Iran’s distributed networks with global reach.

Russia’s networks conduct cognitive warfare against the U.S. and the West and conduct sabotage, assassinations, and political coercion across Europe. Russia’s “ghost fleets” have allowed it to generate billions in revenue despite Western sanctions.

China’s Cyber networks probe and penetrate U.S. critical infrastructure to sustain access, collect information, and provide a disruption capability during a crisis. Its networks enable sophisticated influence operations inside the U.S. and the transfer of critical technologies that directly enhance its military capabilities.

Shared and overlapping networks in gray and ambiguous spaces play a critical role. Ghost fleets, front companies, terror networks, illicit financial organizations, and criminal enterprises allow adversaries to bypass sanctions, sustain operations, and reduce international pressure.

Some of these networks are visible and attributable, others are intentionally obscured and decentralized to complicate attribution and defy sovereignty, international law, and national laws, including those of the U.S. We should expect our adversaries to fiercely protect these resilient, adaptive, and self-recovering networks they have carefully developed over time, often over decades, to gain and sustain a strategic advantage.

The critical question is how the U.S. can systematically reduce the effectiveness of these networks.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. That is the dilemma facing the U.S. now. Overly simplistic approaches or single solutions that do not take into account the complexities of Endless Warfare and the commitment of our adversaries to that approach will consume time and resources but ultimately fail.

Countering Endless Warfare requires a sustained, network-centric strategy employing the instruments of national power—diplomatic, military, economic, technological, informational, cognitive, and kinetic—rather than a series of independent actions. This strategy consists of three mutually reinforcing lines of effort built on one foundational principle.

First, identify and prioritize the networks that pose the greatest long-term threat to the United States. There are no official estimates of this ecosystem of networks—and what constitutes a network has not been clearly defined—but Iran, Russia, and China, collectively direct or enable a very large number institutional, commercial, criminal, cyber, intelligence, influence, and proxy networks worldwide.

Second, sustain campaigns to daylight, degrade, disrupt, and impose costs on institutional networks that conduct and oversee attacks on the United States and our allies. It is unlikely that the U.S. can dismantle foreign institutional networks, but those networks can be degraded, constrained, and made costly and less effective.

Third, dismantle, disrupt, and prevent the regeneration of ambiguous networks by severing the financial, logistical, technological, and organizational systems that support them. This is not a one-time activity. Ambiguous networks are more vulnerable, but they are often adaptive and can regenerate or be replaced.

Cognitive Security and Cyber Defenses have a combined vital role to play. None of these efforts will succeed unless American citizens, business leaders, military commanders, and policy makers are less vulnerable to influence, manipulation, and coercion—preserving America’s decision autonomy—and unless governments, institutions, organizations, and critical infrastructure are less vulnerable to technological exploitation and disruption.

Summary

The concepts in this paper are difficult to neatly categorize because they describe a form of warfare that is not fully defined. As conventional warfare evolves, so do the more nuanced aspects of warfare that take place below and above the threshold of conflict and in the ambiguous space between peace and war. I offer four takeaways.

First, Endless Warfare is a distinct adversary strategy already underway by China, Russia, and Iran and should be treated as a current strategic threat—not just a future one.

Second, endless Warfare is sustained by sophisticated and interconnected networks that must become a primary target for U.S. and allied efforts.

Third, countering Endless Warfare requires a proactive, persistent, and network-centric approach backed by national-level leadership, a new framework for strategic planning, a sense of urgency, and coordinated interagency action. Is ittime to consider a senior White House official, such as a Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Competition, to integrate interagency action and coordinate a sustained national response to this threat?

Fourth, strategic deterrence in the gray zone, cognitive advantage, disciplined negotiations, and network-focused disruption are core tools of that sustained national response to make Endless Warfare increasingly ineffective, costly, and ultimately unsustainable for China, Russia, and Iran.

Endless Warfare will not end because our adversaries choose peace. It will end when it is no longer effective.

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

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

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

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

The University of Washington’s CoMotion program announced 10 startups that secured UW-licensed intellectual property over the past year. Eight are in healthcare, spanning diagnostic tools, medical devices and new therapeutics. The other two focus on K-12 education or climate change.

CoMotion, which operates as a collaborative innovation hub, reports that it and its predecessors have fostered 310 deep-tech companies over the past three decades, more than one-third of which are still active. Those businesses have raised $1.8 billion from investors in the past five years alone.

Here’s a look at the 10 startups:

CathConnect is a Seattle-based startup making urinary catheters that are easy to insert into a patient’s bladder and will safely disconnect if pulled out accidentally. The devices could help prevent the 450,000 traumatic catheter removals that occur in the U.S. each year, which lead to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs and increased infection risk.

CathConnect was launched by Joelle Tudor, a former UW undergraduate researcher and Michael Malone, a UW doctoral candidate.

Climate Solutions International offers a software platform that helps government employees analyze factors like climate resilience, cost and carbon emissions for proposed infrastructure projects. The startup is the brainchild of Jan Whittington, a UW urban planning professor who previously received funding from the World Bank to apply these strategies across 300 cities in 30 countries.

Climate Solutions International was selected for CoMotion’s second Climate Tech Incubator, a six-month program located at the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, a public-private partnership in the city’s downtown.

Colleague AI created an AI tool and chatbots to assist K-12 teachers craft lesson plans and streamline other classroom operations. The technology was developed by Min Sun, a UW professor of education and Colleague AI co-founder, with substantial research and testing by educators.

The UW College of Education was selected two years ago as a national center for research and development on using generative AI as a teaching tool, a designation that included a $10 million grant to support Sun’s work.

DetellaDx is using AI and single-cell technology — a research tool that allows scientists to analyze genetic information in individual cells — to detect early stage cancers with a high degree of accuracy.  The diagnostic approach is based on research by Scott Kennedy, an associate professor in the UW Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology. DetellaDx’s initial focus is on women with a genetic predisposition for ovarian cancer. 

KeenSight Health aims to help clinicians communicate better with patients through its Clinical Intelligence Engine, a coaching software that reviews doctor-patient conversations and gives physicians practical feedback. The platform also incorporates patient history stored in electronic records and other resources.

KeenSight was co-founded by past and current UW professors Dr. Ian Bennett, Dr. Misbah Keen and Larry Mauksch. The startup is based in Bellevue, Wash.

Nanosync Labs has created wearable sensors that monitor brain health and sleep without invasive procedures. The devices and platform allow for continuous tracking of changes in brain pressure and deep sleep, a restorative stage essential for brain health. The sensors enable earlier detection of neurological conditions, benefiting patients with traumatic brain injury and sleep disorders.

The technology was developed in the UW lab of Jae-Hyun Chung, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Viggy Sakthivelpathi, who earned a PhD from the UW, is Nanosync’s co-founder and CEO.

PEAR-Net Society provides resources to help medical and public-health experts understand whether medications, chemicals, infections, vaccines, or other exposures may harm a fetus during pregnancy.

The organization relies on two well-established databases documenting teratogens, factors that can cause birth defects. These include the Teratogen Information System, or TERIS, developed by Dr. Jan Friedman, a UW graduate, and Shepard’s Catalog of Teratogenic Agents.

Precision Cognition Labs has developed a tool for memory assessment that can detect mild dysfunction and track changes in cognitive performance. The assessment is faster and easier to use than tools that require in-person, clinical evaluations, allowing for more frequent checkups and longitudinal studies.

The startup is a joint venture between the UW and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where it is based. Andrea Stocco, a UW associate professor and expert in computational psychiatry, is a co-founder and scientific director.

Prosthetic Fit 360 is building sensors that improve outcomes for patients with lower-limb prosthetics. The devices use trilateration, a technology that measures an object’s precise location by calculating distances from multiple known reference points. The startup was founded by Conor Lanahan, who earned his bioengineering and biomedical engineering doctorate degree from the UW.

Skape Bio is using AI to create new therapeutics that target G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs. The receptors, which are located on cell membranes, detect hormones, neurotransmitters and other signals that trigger biological responses.

The Copenhagen-based startup was founded by Chris Norn in partnership with UW Nobel laureate David Baker and scientists from the UW’s Institute for Protein Design and the BioInnovation Institute in Copenhagen.

Seattle-based Overland AI has landed a U.S. Marine Corps contract to produce autonomous ground vehicles, a milestone the defense-tech startup says makes it the first ground autonomy company to serve as the prime contractor on a military production deal. 

The nearly $20 million agreement — $19.7 million, according to the Department of War — calls for Overland to deliver more than a dozen autonomous ground vehicles, along with the software that runs them. Initial deliveries are expected to begin sometime in early 2027.

The agreement was announced June 29. The vehicles will work with a Marine Corps system that shoots down enemy drones. Overland’s vehicles will initially handle resupply for those crews rather than replace any existing vehicles, co-founder and CEO Byron Boots said in a media briefing, as reported by trade publications DefenseScoop and Defense One. 

Boots is a University of Washington machine-learning professor who leads the school’s Robot Learning Laboratory and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the UW’s Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He co-founded Overland in 2022 with Stephanie Bonk, the company’s president, spinning it out of the UW. 

The company’s technology is designed to let military vehicles drive themselves across rough, off-road terrain in places where GPS isn’t available. 

Overland has grown to more than 100 employees and raised over $140 million in venture funding, including a $100 million round in February led by the venture firm 8VC. It opened a 22,000-square-foot production facility in Seattle last year, and ranks No. 9 on the GeekWire 200, our index of the top privately held Pacific Northwest tech companies. 

The company isn’t alone in chasing military ground autonomy. One of its rivals, Maryland-based Forterra, won a larger, $92 million Marine Corps production deal earlier in June — but as the autonomy supplier under prime contractor Oshkosh Defense, rather than holding the contract itself. That’s the distinction Overland is claiming as a first. 

Overland’s deal came through a Pentagon program called APFIT — short for Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies — which fast-tracks funding to move promising technology from prototypes into production. For Overland, it marks a step from testing and demonstrations into building vehicles at scale for the military. 

“We’re registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation,” Boots said in the briefing, pointing to the war in Ukraine as evidence of a growing role for uncrewed vehicles.

Overland has been working for years with the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, also completing a multiyear DARPA autonomy program. The new contract builds on recent work integrating its self-driving technology into Marine Corps vehicles.

I recently returned from commemorating the 82nd Anniversary of D-Day in Normandy—a much anticipated trip since I participated in the 80th Anniversary. I left with a sense of humility and gratitude for having walked the hallowed grounds of Normandy, and with admiration for the Greatest Generation and their sacrifices and actions that changed human history. The connection with Americans, grateful Normans, Europeans who still remember all too well the war, and participants from all over the world who were all there to mark this historic event was remarkable.

Normandy is a place for deep connections. I stood in the door of a vintage C-47 flying low over La Fière Drop Zone listening to the engines roar. Eighty-two years earlier, young paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne jumped into the darkness, many landing in flooded fields or directly into the path of German fire. In the clear light of that June morning in 2026, the hedgerows and pastures looked deceptively serene. What did those young paratroopers see and feel as they jumped into the unknown?

I had the chance to revisit Omaha Beach. The sounds of the waves on that rocky beach can be surreal, an echo of history. If you’ve been there, you remember it. I wondered whether those waves sounded exactly the same on June 6, 1944 as young soldiers and sailors endured withering fire from German positions and refused to be turned back—their sacrifice and refusal to fail now legendary.

In the square of Sainte-Mère-Église, the energetic heart of every Normandy commemoration, I looked up at the church steeple where a mannequin still marks the spot where John Steele hung entangled 82 years ago prior to being captured by the Germans. I imagined the dark sky filled with silk canopies and German ground fire as American paratroopers fought to secure the first town liberated in Normandy and as long-suffering and hopeful Normans awaited the outcome.

Those images are powerful. Normandy is a place that both haunts and inspires, and it invites reflection. It is a powerful reminder of the immeasurable human suffering caused by tyrants and extraordinary cost of freedom. It is hard to visit without connecting with that past; the courage and resilience of the occupied and oppressed, and the audacity and selfless sacrifice of the liberators.

There are so many other images there that make those connections—the American Cemetery with endless rows of white crosses, Pointe du Hoc rugged cliffs and Ranger Monument, Pegasus Bridge, the La Fière causeway and bridge, and many others. Given the scale of D-Day, almost every town, village, beach, road, and bridge witnessed thousands of human stories that shaped the outcome—some well-known, many now faded into history.

The memories and lessons of Normandy transcend time. The threats confronting America today are different from those of 1944, but several enduring lessons remain relevant.

American Leadership Matters

There are things that only America can do, alliances that only America can lead, and geopolitical outcomes that only America can achieve. Eighty-two years ago, the world faced a dangerous shift in the global order. American leadership in WWII was decisive—not only in securing military victory, but in establishing a new world order that has endured for 82 years.

No other country then or now could have led such a global effort, and it cemented America’s emergence as a superpower. Threats in Europe and the Pacific have new faces, but American leadership is as vital today as it was then. Like the authoritarians of that era, Russia and China are actively working to reshape the current world order to their advantage. Both are moving to fill perceived vacuums created by shifts in America’s global posture. Only America can lead the effort to deter them.

If the current world order is to survive and prosper, American leadership on the global stage remains essential.

Alliances Win

America’s leadership role in WWII was crucial, but so were the contributions of its allies and partners. British and Canadian forces played vital roles in D-Day. The French Resistance fought bravely and enabled the work of the American OSS and British SOE. The Soviet Union—then an ally of necessity, now an adversary—played a key role in defeating Nazi forces on the Eastern Front, while other nations—including Poland, Norway, Belgium, and France—made meaningful contributions.

The Allies clearly needed America to enter the war in Europe, but America clearly needed a strong alliance to ensure victory. Global competition has changed—our adversaries are fighting a different war—but reliable partners are still important. Today, alliances are less about planning invasions and more about deterring authoritarian aggression, and building a competitive edge across military, economic, technological, information, and cognitive domains.

America needs its partners. In return, those partners look for a strong and trusted America. Filling that role must remain a national priority.

America’s Story and a National Purpose

Great nations need more than military power to prevail; they also require a compelling national purpose. WWII roused America from its isolationist slumber. The brutal occupation and oppression across Europe, combined with the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, shattered America’s belief that it could keep major wars at a distance. Powerful themes emerged that were necessary to mobilize an entire nation: “Arsenal of Democracy”, “Four Freedoms”, and the call to defeat fascism.

These ideas fueled a national call to arms, unprecedented mobilization, and prepared America for rationing at home, mass deployments overseas, and the loss of so many Americans who would not return home. America had a compelling national purpose, and it communicated that purpose through a powerful national narrative—we might call that narrative America’s Story. That story included ideals of freedom, democracy, collective security, and the promise of a better postwar order that enabled America to forge and unite an alliance that had previously faltered. That same narrative power remains essential today.

Our adversaries, who seek to reshape the world order, understand the power of America’s story and are working to tell their version of it to their advantage. A persuasive, authentic national narrative—America’s Story—is a national imperative.

Warfare Remains a Human Endeavor

D-Day was a remarkable display of technological innovation. Some technologies were used for the very first time or the first time under such extreme combat conditions. Notable successes, such as the Mulberry Artificial Harbors, the PLUTO undersea fuel pipeline, and improved electronic capabilities that enabled unprecedented coordination of Allied air power played key roles.

Even the highly successful deception operation, Operation Fortitude, relied on technological advancements in jamming and radar deception. In contrast, swimming tanks, gliders, and pathfinder equipment—also rushed into service to achieve surprise and an early advantage—did not meet full operational expectations.

Ultimately, capitalizing on technological advances and compensating for technology failures required human innovation and decisions at the speed of war. In the end, the human dimensions of D-Day—judgment, decision-making in the face of uncertainty, problem solving, detecting and countering deception, courage, and resilience—played a greater role than technology in winning the day and securing victory in Europe.

This is still true today even as AI, robotics, cyber, cognitive tools, and other technologies accelerate the evolution of warfare. A risk is that humans cede decision-making to technology in exchange for greater speed and precision at the expense of judgment, leadership, ingenuity, and moral responsibility. Walking Normandy and seeing the impacts of these human dimensions remind us that while technology, geopolitics, and adversaries change, the human qualities that ultimately shape history do not.

It is these human qualities—not technology itself—that remain America's enduring strategic advantage.

My sincerest thanks to Liberty Jump Team, Corsicana Texas, for an exceptional visit to Normandy for the 82nd Anniversary of D-Day. I’m definitely looking forward to the 83rd.

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 about to close out the 250th year since Tom and the boys stepped brashly onto the world stage and declared with clarity of purpose and universality of meaning our national independence. As proud Americans, we will rightly participate in moments of colorful ostentation and exuberant excess. The 4th of July is flags and fireworks, barbecue and beer, the Air Force’s fabulous Thunderbirds and the United States Marine Corps Band. While certainly some will use the opportunity to cynically enumerate our shortcomings, historical and contemporary, we are, in fact, the longest-standing nation built solely on democratic principles.

Amidst the jubilation, it is probably useful to contemplate the true meaning of American patriotism. Any country can have patriots, but American patriotism is unique. We are not a nation of race or ethnicity, of religion or sectarianism; we do not accept fealty to the absurd notion of inherited “majesty”. We come from all corners of the earth. Nothing makes us inherently better than any other humans. What binds is a set of ideals, the concept of human liberty, and that alone. We do not own this idea; it is human liberty, after all, not American liberty. We are not a people with a set of ideals; we are a set of ideals with a people. We do boldly claim stewardship of these ideals, and, in so doing, we as a nation and as individual citizens accept responsibility for living and acting on them. The conspirators of the Declaration and the framers of the Constitution understood this, and they laid a foundation for a society built on respect for human dignity.

The Constitution itself is a holistic document, imperfect in form, but perfect in meaning. It symbolizes what humans across geography and time yearn for -- a society consciously protecting and celebrating individual freedom while preserving the existence of a nation in which those freedoms may be enjoyed. There are other democratic republics, but there is no other nation like ours. This is the reason people all over the world want to come here. We have what the people of Iran and China want desperately. In contrast, immigration to Russia is the province of the likes of Edward Snowden and Bashar Hafiz al-Asad.

As citizens, we must be attentive to this responsibility we have all accepted, but to put it simply, we could screw this up. As Ronald Reagan famously observed, freedom is always one generation from extinction. That generation does not have to be youngsters convinced of society’s obligation to insulate them from discomfort. It can equally be oldsters who are so lost in narrow-minded rhetoric that they forget the point. American patriotism is not selfish or angry or confrontational or in-your-face or blindly convinced of righteousness. It is the opposite, characterized by humility and generosity, in keeping with our founding ideals.

Whether we were born American or sought and earned our way to citizenship, we have the same burden. Patriotism looks at our tremendous successes as a nation with the same honest eye as our failures, with humble recognition that each contributes to the weight of our obligation to our principles. Patriotism seeks harmony but requires honesty and selflessness. Patriotism calls for deliberate, conscious effort, not just on the 4th of July, but in any action that puts our nation’s credibility on display. We have something no one else has -- no one else has ever had, and the world is watching. As we begin our next quarter of a millennium, America needs patriots as much as ever. Let us seek to be worthy of the stewardship we have been fortunate enough to inherit.

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

Ballmer Group, the Bellevue, Wash.-based philanthropy founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, is spinning out its Washington state work into an independent organization, one of three new regional groups launched Wednesday as part of a broader restructuring.

The new organization, MoveUp Washington, will be led by Andi Smith, who currently heads Ballmer Group’s Washington regional office. It will operate independently from Ballmer Group but continue to be funded by the Ballmers, carrying on the philanthropy’s existing mission of improving economic mobility for kids and families in the state.

Similar organizations are launching in Southeast Michigan and Los Angeles County — MoveUp Southeast Michigan and MoveUp LA — led by Kylee Mitchell Wells and Nina Revoyr, respectively, who currently lead Ballmer Group’s regional offices in those areas.

As the three regional groups become independent, Ballmer Group said in a news release that it will narrow its own focus to a smaller set of large, scalable initiatives aimed at improving economic mobility for kids and families nationally.

“Our intention is to ensure that these local philanthropies can be permanent, ongoing resources in each region, while we concentrate our national efforts on advancing economic mobility in new ways,” the Ballmers said in a statement.

Ballmer Group CEO Terri Ludwig, who helped guide the shift, will serve as a founding board member for all three new organizations while continuing to lead Ballmer Group.

Each organization will establish its own independent board and continue its existing regional work while evolving to meet local needs, according to Ballmer Group.

“Across these regions, our teams have demonstrated exceptional leadership and have distributed more than $1.5 billion in grants over the past decade,” Ludwig said in a statement.

Examples of past giving include:

• $38 million to strengthen mental health services in Washington, including graduate-level clinical education scholarships coordinated through the University of Washington’s School of Social Work.
• $43 million to the UW and other groups to boost early childhood education, including more than 1,500 scholarships over eight years.
• $400 million toward Black investment fund managers and Black businesses, working with firms including Fairview Capital and Goldman Sachs.

Ballmer Group team members currently working in Washington, Southeast Michigan and Los Angeles County will transition to the new organizations over the next year. Current grantees will continue to be supported throughout the process, with no disruption to existing commitments, according to Ballmer Group.

The Ballmers are still determining the long-term financial structure for the new organizations — an endowment is one option under consideration, though not something being established at launch.

Steve Ballmer, who served as Microsoft CEO from 2000–2014, is founder of USAFacts, a nonpartisan organization founded in 2017 to make government data more accessible and understandable. He’s also chairman of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team.

The science team behind the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially launched a decade-long survey of the southern sky — an ambitious project three decades in the making.

The start of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, follows years of planning and construction of the billion-dollar observatory in Chile. Scientists celebrated the completion of the construction phase with a “First Look” batch of pictures a year ago, and then turned to preparing for the LSST in earnest.

In February, the Rubin team turned on the observatory’s Alert Production Pipeline, which can send out millions of notifications about potentially noteworthy astronomical phenomena. That set the stage for what some have compared to filming a time-lapse movie of the cosmos.

“Today, we begin filming the greatest cosmic movie ever made. This moment reflects decades of vision, innovation and the power of federal investment in science through the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy,” acting NSF Director Brian Stone said in a news release. “Every night, NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory will expand the frontiers of knowledge and strengthen America’s global leadership in science and innovation.”

Researchers at the University of Washington have played a key role in the project, primarily by developing software tools for analyzing the terabytes of data that the observatory is expected to produce on a nightly basis. That work is done at UW’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology, also known as the DiRAC Institute.

UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezić, who heads up the LSST campaign, helped determine when the observatory was ready for the survey.

“The decision to officially begin the LSST was made after a period of system optimization and a careful operational review of technical readiness, data system performance and scientific validation,” he said. Among the factors considered were image quality, effective survey speed, system reliability and calibration accuracy.

The observatory makes use of the world’s largest digital camera (3,200 megapixels per image) to capture a fresh picture every 40 seconds. If the skies over Chile are clear, the entire southern sky can be photographed over the course of just a few nights. Then Rubin begins the next round of picture-taking.

The concept for the observatory began with discussions among astronomers in the 1990s, and picked up steam in 2007 when Seattle-area tech pioneer Charles Simonyi and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates contributed a total of $30 million to the project. In 2020, the observatory was named after the late astronomer Vera Rubin — and its 8.4-meter (27.5-foot) telescope was dubbed the Simonyi Survey Telescope in honor of Simonyi’s family.

To celebrate the start of the survey, the Rubin Observatory team released a 1.7-gigapixel image featuring an “ocean of stars” in the constellation Lupus. “The faint, glowing clouds spread across this image are galactic cirrus: clouds of interstellar gas and dust that can be seen in the foreground of the Milky Way,” the team said in an image advisory.

Distant stars aren’t Rubin’s only targets. The survey is also expected to supercharge the search for small bodies in our own solar system. During preparations for the LSST, the Rubin team reported the discovery of more than 11,000 previously unseen asteroids. And that’s just the start: A computer simulation suggests that the survey could map more than 5 million asteroids.

Rubin’s observations could even shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, invisible components of the cosmos that together make up more than 95 percent of the universe’s mass-energy content.

Scientists say the key to Rubin’s success will be the ability to track changes in the night sky over the course of 10 years.

“With its world-class design and tools, Rubin Observatory will capture the dynamic nature of our cosmos and reveal unimagined insights into our universe’s biggest mysteries, from our own solar system to the very structure of the universe,” said Dario Gil, undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy. “By seeking to understand the enigmatic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter, we are not just observing the stars; we are striving to grasp the fundamental laws that govern our existence.”

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a joint initiative of NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and is operated jointly by NSF NOIRLab and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.