Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space has secured a conditional commitment for a $150 million loan from the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital to build a second launch pad at Cape Canaveral for a larger version of its fully reusable rocket.

The loan isn’t final until Stoke meets a list of financial, legal, technical and due-diligence requirements. The announcement Monday comes less than two months after Stoke raised roughly $1 billion in a Series E round, bringing its total funding to about $2.3 billion.

The new pad would serve Stoke’s Nova Block 2 rocket, which is designed to carry up to 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit. That’s five times the capacity of Nova Pathfinder, which Stoke plans to launch for the first time from its existing pad in early 2027. Block 2 is slated to debut in 2029.

The loan would be paired with private capital to pay for the pad, according to the Department of War. Jordan Sebold, senior managing director for investments at the Office of Strategic Capital, said in a statement that adding launch infrastructure would “enhance the overall capacity and resilience of the commercial space industrial base.”

The Office of Strategic Capital was set up in 2022 to draw private investment into technologies seen as critical to national security. The following year, Congress gave it the power to make loans and loan guarantees to companies in those fields. Space launch is one of the technology categories it targets.

“By expanding domestic launch facility capacity, this investment enables launch service providers to ensure our commercial and defense partners have reliable, high-cadence access to space,” David Lorch, the office’s director, said in the news release.

Stoke is already lined up for military launch work. In 2025, the Space Force added the company to a pool of providers that can compete for national security missions under Lane 1 of the program’s third phase. Lane 1 is the tier meant for newer launch companies and less demanding payloads. Stoke can’t bid on those missions until it completes a successful orbital flight.

The company has other federal ties as well. The Defense Innovation Unit awarded Stoke a $4.5 million contract in 2024 to study rapid delivery of cargo to orbit, and possibly back to Earth. In June, Stoke was one of 37 companies NASA chose for unfunded partnerships. Stoke’s project focuses on returning Nova’s upper stage safely through the atmosphere.

Nova is designed so both of its stages can return and fly again. The booster flies itself back for recovery. The upper stage uses a metal heat shield cooled by liquid hydrogen that circulates through channels inside it, to survive the heat of reentry. Only SpaceX, with its much larger Starship, is pursuing the same goal, and it hasn’t fully achieved it yet. Stoke has yet to launch a rocket to orbit.

Stoke was founded in 2019 by two Blue Origin veterans: Andy Lapsa, the CEO, and Tom Feldman, the chief technology officer. The company has about 400 employees. Most work at its 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters in Kent, and about 50 are at its test site in Moses Lake, which is expanding from 75 to 550 acres. About 50 more work at Cape Canaveral.

GeekWire reached out to Stoke Space for comment and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

On the morning of October 23, the cargo ship Khoryv sent a distress call 13 nautical miles off Constanța, Romania. Territorial waters end at twelve. Whoever flew the drone that sank her knew where the line was, and chose to stand one mile outside it.

That mile is the story. It is the difference between an attack on a NATO member and an incident in a NATO member's exclusive economic zone. It is the difference between Article 5 and a press release. The London insurance market understood this before most capitals did. When the Joint War Committee extended its Black Sea listed area on September 16, it covered the entire sea except the territorial waters of Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania and Turkey. The underwriters drew the same line the drone operators did. Nobody should find that comforting.

This is what gray zone conflict looks like. Freighters burning off the coasts of two NATO allies, sailors lost in cold water, and attacks clustered around the Sulina Channel, which became the main outlet for Ukrainian grain after Russia hammered Ukraine's own ports. It is war at a time and place of the attacker's choosing, priced just below the point where anyone is obliged to do anything about it.

"The problem is that we cannot prove it"

Bulgaria's prime minister, Rumen Radev, is nobody's idea of a Russia hawk. He told his parliament the logic of the attacks points to Moscow, and then said the quiet part out loud: "The problem is that we cannot prove it."

NATO's response has been built to solve Radev's problem. After the North Atlantic Council met on October 20, the Alliance announced it would send maritime patrol aircraft, radar, drones, intelligence personnel and forensic teams to examine the explosives. A U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon is already flying the Black Sea. These are sensible deployments. They are also answers to the wrong question.

Play the scenario out. Grant NATO perfect attribution. The forensic teams recover a guidance board with Russian markings. The P-8 tracks a launch back to a known site. The Alliance announces, with high confidence, that the Russian Federation sank the ship. Now make it worse: the next drone hits a tanker alongside the pier at Constanța, the fire spreads, and thousands of civilians are dead.

The Kremlin denies it. Within the hour, Russian state media points at Kyiv, and it doesn't have to work hard to sell the story. Ukraine has been running its own maritime drone campaign since July, so the Black Sea is full of Ukrainian drones, and everyone knows it. A few Western commentators find the denial "plausible enough to warrant caution." Allies invoke Article 4 and consult. Statements are issued. Sanctions, already near their ceiling, are tightened at the margins. Then nothing happens, because every capital in the room is doing the same arithmetic: Russia has nuclear weapons, the Black Sea is not worth a war, and the dead are already dead.

You don't have to imagine that sequence. We ran it on July 17, 2014, when a Buk missile destroyed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine and killed everyone aboard. A Dutch-led investigation established in 2016 that the launcher had been delivered from Russia, and by 2018 that it came from a Russian army unit. The ICAO Council found Russia responsible in May 2025. The European Court of Human Rights did the same that July. Moscow denied all of it, spent years promoting theories that blamed Ukraine, and in 2022 invaded the country the missile had been fired over. Attribution was as good as attribution gets. The consequence, eleven years later, was an order to enter into good-faith negotiations on reparations.

That is the lesson Moscow took from MH17, and it is the one we refuse to learn. Deniability is not a shield for the attacker. It is a gift to the defender who would rather not act. Russia doesn't need us to believe its denials. It only needs us to want to.

Operational freedom is the target

The point of these strikes isn't the ships. It's the water around them. Every hull that burns off Sulina raises the premium on the next one, pushes a charterer toward a different route, and teaches a shipowner that a NATO coastline offers no protection. The attacker never has to declare a blockade. The market imposes it for him. Freedom of action shrinks by increments, each too small to justify a response, until the defender wakes up to find that the sea he was sure he controlled has a new landlord.

This is how Russia and China will impose costs on the West for the foreseeable future. Not with the decisive battle our doctrine, our budgets, and our military exercises are built around, but with a steady accumulation of incidents chosen for their deniability, timed to our distractions, and calibrated to our fear of escalation. Salami slicing is not a new idea; Beijing has practiced it in the South China Sea for more than a decade. What's new is the drone, which makes the slicing cheap, precise and anonymous.

The honest complication

The Black Sea gray zone is not one-sided, and pretending otherwise hands Moscow its talking points. Ukraine's Operation Molochka, launched in July, claims to have disabled 300 Russian-linked vessels in the Black and Azov Seas. Turkey's foreign minister says both sides are mounting heavy attacks to establish superiority before winter.

The distinction holds. Ukraine is striking the logistics of the country that invaded it, mostly sanctioned tankers serving Russian ports and occupied Crimea. Russia is striking grain ships in the economic zones of two NATO members that are not party to the war, with the apparent aim of making Ukraine's last reliable export route uninsurable. One is a belligerent waging war at sea. The other is exporting that war to the Alliance's doorstep and daring it to notice.

Taiwan won't look like Hellscape

If you want to know what a Taiwan conflict will look like, watch the Black Sea.

In 2024, Adm. Samuel Paparo said he wanted to "turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape" to defeat what he described as Beijing's likely plan: a massive attack with little warning. It's a sound concept, and the CNAS work that fleshed it out this year is serious. Hellscape is built to break an amphibious assault at the water's edge.

Beijing is rehearsing something else. The PLA's Justice Mission 2025 drills in December, run alongside the China Coast Guard, simulated a blockade of Taiwan's main ports and control of the waterways that carry its energy imports. This year the China Coast Guard and Maritime Safety Administration have run what the Jamestown Foundation calls a "quasi-quarantine" east of the island, creating the appearance of administrative control without declaring a blockade. Taiwan has already prosecuted a Chinese captain for severing an undersea cable. Each step is a law enforcement action, an inspection, an accident. None of them is an invasion.

A drone swarm waiting in the Strait for a landing force has nothing to shoot at when the adversary is a coast guard cutter boarding a container ship for a "safety inspection." The first Taiwanese or American drone to fire makes Taipei the aggressor. So Beijing won't cross the Strait. It will tighten the noose: a quarantine, a severed cable, an insurance listing, a shipping line that quietly decides Kaohsiung isn't worth the premium. It will bank on the world's risk aversion. It’s already working. After the May summit in Beijing, Washington paused a record $14 billion arms package for Taiwan, and the President described those sales as a "very good negotiating chip". Taiwan will not be conquered. It will be persuaded, one closed option at a time, that there is nothing left to defend.

Answering below the threshold

You cannot deter gray zone coercion with a capability designed for the war the adversary is careful never to start. The answer has to live in the same band the attacker does: below the threshold of general war, above the threshold of pain. Three steps would help in the Black Sea, and each has a Pacific twin.

Presence that denies, not presence that watches. Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria already run a Mine Countermeasures Task Group whose mandate was widened in July to cover undersea infrastructure. Montreux restricts warships of non-Black Sea states, not the littoral navies. Widen the mandate once more, to counter-drone escort of merchant traffic through allied economic zones, and buy the equipment from the Ukrainians who have kept their own grain corridor open under fire. In the Pacific, the equivalent is a convoy and escort plan for a quarantine, not only a kill chain for an invasion.

Decide the response before the incident. The moment of decision is where risk aversion wins, because it is always easier to wait for one more forensic report. Allies should agree in advance, and say publicly, what a verified strike on shipping in their waters will cost Moscow: a pre-approved tranche of capability released to Ukraine, a pre-agreed number of shadow fleet hulls detained. Attribution should trigger an equivalent consequence, not another discussion. Taipei and Washington need the same menu for a quarantine, written now, while no one is under pressure.

Take the market off the adversary's side. When insurers and charterers do the attacker's work, governments need a sovereign war-risk backstop for vessels trading to allied ports, so the next listed-area extension doesn't function as a blockade by spreadsheet. Taiwan will need that backstop on the first day of a quarantine, not the ninetieth.

None of this is escalation. It is the minimum required to make the gray zone cost something.

The Thirteenth Mile

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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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Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.

As the world’s largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operations—and has also expanded the Ukrainian military’s capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.

“Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,” according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. “In practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.”

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Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing—taking a step beyond the US military’s decades of experimentation with similar concepts.

The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety.

“This is a historic event, the next stage of evacuating the wounded, which we will all come to,” said Napalm, a programmer of the 92nd separate assault brigade's unmanned ground systems company, who went by his callsign per Ukrainian military practice, in a statement. “Now the serious systematic work begins, so that such missions are carried out constantly.”

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Picture an intelligent analyst's screen. Data about troop movements, a port closure, a terrorist attack, or a weapons transfer sits at the center of a clean interface, with a confidence indicator glowing green. Two hundred outlets are carrying it, and the platform has counted every one. It looks like a corroboration. In many cases, it is a single Telegram post, copied, translated, summarized, and republished until its origin disappeared behind its own echo.

Nobody must be negligent for this to happen. It is what you get when a product or platform is built to measure volume and the user is tempted to read volume as truth.

I say this as someone who works with open-source material and believes in it. Commercial imagery, ship-tracking data, procurement records, leaked databases, and social media have changed what is knowable about conflicts and illicit networks; but the market that has grown up around these sources is selling something different from the discipline that makes them valuable, and governments and companies are buying it without noticing the difference.

A Crowded Market and a Thin Product

Open-source intelligence platforms are multiplying quickly. Walk through the company stands at any security conference and you will find dozens of them, each promising to fuse, monitor, and surface threats across the open internet, now almost always with an AI layer that summarizes, ranks, and alerts.

Strip away the interface and most of them offer little that a competent analyst couldn't already do with a search engine, a handful of specialist tools, and some patience. Reverse image searching, scraping social platforms, pulling corporate registry data, and geolocating an image are all learnable skills, and many of the best practitioners picked them up in public, often as volunteers. What the platforms add is convenience and scale, which is genuinely useful, but convenience is not analysis. The real product, in most cases, is the dashboard.

Dashboards are persuasive by design. They squeeze a messy information environment into something that looks like a picture of the world, with counts, trend lines, heat maps, and sentiment scores. Each of those findings implies that someone has already done the hard work of deciding what matters and what is true. Usually, no one has. The system has counted things, and counting is the easy part.

Counting Sources Is Not Testing Them

The core flaw is in what these systems reward. They tend to measure the number of sources behind a claim, not the independence of those sources. The two are very different things.

Independence is the foundation of corroboration. Two witnesses who saw an event separately make a claim stronger. Two witnesses who heard about it from the same third person do not. The same logic applies to reporting. A claim that traces back to a single channel but appears in two hundred outlets has one source and two hundred echoes.

Intelligence tradecraft has a name for this: circular reporting. It is among the oldest and best-documented ways analysts go wrong. The failures that most damaged the credibility of Western intelligence in the past generation involved, among other things, uncorroborated claims that were repeated, cross-referenced, and eventually treated as established because they seemed to come from many places. The lesson drawn at the time was that provenance matters more than prevalence. An aggregator that treats prevalence as confirmation is rebuilding the vulnerability that analysts spent years learning to guard against.

AI makes this problem fourfold. First, language models summarize and synthesize, and in doing so they take away the provenance trail that an analyst needs. A fluent paragraph that blends fifteen sources does not tell you that twelve of them are derivative. Second, the cost of generating plausible content has collapsed. Fabricated articles, cloned news sites, and coordinated amplification networks can now create the appearance of breadth cheaply, which is exactly the signal these platforms are built to count. Third, as more web content is produced or recycled by automated systems, the pool that analytics tools draw from becomes more self-referential. The echo chamber is increasingly populated by machines quoting each other. Lastly, AI can make uncertainty harder to see. Language models are designed to produce coherent answers, not to preserve the ambiguity of the evidence on which those answers are based. Contradictory sources can be reconciled into a smooth narrative, gaps can disappear beneath plausible inference, and tentative conclusions can acquire the tone of established fact. The danger is therefore not simply that an analyst receives false information, but that the uncertainty surrounding otherwise legitimate information becomes less visible.

None of this means the technology is useless. Entity extraction, translation, deduplication, and pattern detection across large data sets are real contributions. But the same tools that can help trace a claim to its origin are too often deployed to certify it instead.

Information Is Not Intelligence

The deeper problem is what happens after the dashboard produces its output. Companies market it as intelligence, and buyers, including government agencies, intelligence firms, financial institutions, and corporate security teams, purchase it as intelligence, then act on it.

However, open-source material is raw information. It becomes intelligence only after a process that no interface can fully automate. Someone has to establish where the material came from, grade how reliable the source has been, assess how credible the specific claim is, and test it against other collection. Established standards exist for this. Grading systems that rate source reliability separately from information credibility have been used for decades, and analytic standards require analysts to describe the quality and credibility of their sources, to distinguish between underlying evidence and judgment, and to account for alternative explanations. These are not bureaucratic formalities. They are the mechanism by which an organization knows how much weight a conclusion can bear.

When that step is skipped, the result is aggregated internet content with a confident interface. The output reads like a finished product, but the epistemic work behind it is missing, and the person reading it often can't see that. A decisionmaker shown a green indicator does not know whether it reflects three independent confirmations or one rumor with good distribution.

The consequences are practical. A government that bases sanctions designations, force posture, or diplomatic messaging on an unverified claim risks embarrassment at best and escalation at worst. A company that reroutes shipments or exits a market because a risk platform flagged a rumor can lose real money; and an agency that comes to rely on commercial feeds may quietly stop investing in the capabilities that would let it check them.

What Should Change

I would offer the following two principles.

One, to treat provenance and independence as essential to intelligence. Open-source material should be treated as a cue and a corroborator, not a conclusion. Open sources are at their best when they point collection in a useful direction or when they test and strengthen what other sources have suggested. A satellite image that shows construction at a site tells analysts where to look and what to ask. A procurement database entry might confirm a pattern already suspected. Neither is a finding on its own. The workflow should run from open-source lead to targeted collection to assessment, not from dashboard alert to briefing slide. As AI makes it easier to summarize, reproduce and generate information, analysts need to know not only what a source says, but where the information originated and whether apparently separate sources are actually independent. A fluent paragraph that blends fifteen sources does not tell an analyst that twelve of them are derivative. Likewise, a cluster of articles, websites or database entries may create the appearance of broad corroboration while ultimately tracing back to a single underlying claim. Platforms should therefore preserve provenance wherever possible and make the distinction between original reporting, derivative content and AI-generated material visible to the user. The workflow should run from open-source lead to targeted collection to assessment, not from dashboard alert to briefing slide.

Two, protect human assessment and the collection that supports it. AI can make uncertainty harder to see. Language models are designed to produce coherent answers, not to preserve the ambiguity of the evidence on which those answers are based. Contradictory sources can be reconciled into a smooth narrative, gaps can disappear beneath plausible inference, and tentative conclusions can acquire the tone of established fact. Human analysts therefore need both the time and the authority to question what automated systems produce rather than simply validate it. That also means protecting the collection capabilities that AI cannot replace. As open-source material becomes more abundant, the value of what cannot be found online rises. Human sources, financial intelligence, law enforcement access and legal process take years to cultivate and moments to lose. A budget cycle that trims them in favor of subscriptions is trading durable capability for a license that expires. The objective should not be to remove automation from intelligence work, but to ensure that automation remains subordinate to collection, verification and human judgment.

What Open Sources Cannot Close

I learned the limits of open-source work firsthand while researching foreign components in Russian strike drones. Open sources got me a long way. Recovered wreckage data, teardown imagery, part markings, and manufacturer documentation could establish what was inside these systems and who made it. That is valuable, and it was achievable by skilled analysts working in public.

But the questions that mattered most were different. Who actually bought a given part? Through which intermediaries did it move? Who paid for it, and through which accounts? Those gaps could not be closed by any amount of scraping. They required the tools that sit behind a legal threshold or inside a trusted relationship: law enforcement access to shipping and customs records, financial intelligence on transactions, and human sources with knowledge of how the networks operate. A dashboard could tell us a component existed. Only that other collection could tell us how it got there and who was responsible, which is the information policymakers need if they want to disrupt the supply chain rather than simply describe it.

That experience shaped how I think about the current issue. Open sources and closed collection are not competitors. The first made the second more efficient, because it let investigators ask better questions. The second made the first more meaningful, because it turned an interesting observation into an attributable finding. Treating either as a substitute for the other would have left us with a weaker product.

Defending the Analytical Craft

None of this is an argument against open-source intelligence. It is an argument for it, properly understood.

The practitioners who built the field's reputation, whether in newsrooms, nonprofits, academia, or government, are rigorous precisely because they distrust easy answers. They document their methods, show their chains of evidence, and say so when something can't be confirmed. That culture is the real asset. It is also what the commercial market is most at risk of undermining, because rigor is slow and expensive to sell, while a dashboard can be demoed in ten minutes.

The test I would offer any buyer, policymaker, or analyst is simple. When you are shown a claim, ask where it began, who else has independent knowledge of it, and what other collection could confirm or contradict it. If the system in front of you cannot answer those questions, it hasn't given you intelligence. It has given you a well-organized rumor.

The volume of open information will keep growing, and the tools to process it will keep improving. The scarce resource will not be data. It will be judgment, along with the access and tradecraft that make judgment possible. Agencies and firms that remember that, and invest accordingly, will see more clearly than those who confuse a full screen with a full picture.

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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Russia has demonstrated a growing willingness to use hybrid tactics – including sabotage, cyberattacks, information operations, and the use of deniable or “throwaway” agents – to create disruption and uncertainty across Europe. This paper examines how those tactics could be combined in a hypothetical Russian operation against Estonia designed not to defeat NATO militarily, but to create a crisis that tests the Alliance’s ability to respond quickly and collectively.

The scenario is deliberately constructed as a red-team exercise rather than a prediction. It envisions Russia exploiting the existence of Estonia’s Russian-speaking population, infiltrating operatives into the Schengen Area through legitimate visa channels, allowing those operatives to move through the largely borderless Schengen zone, and exploiting gaps in European immigration enforcement. The scenario culminates in a deliberately ambiguous armed crisis in Narva, accompanied by cyberattacks and a coordinated information campaign intended to complicate attribution and slow NATO decision-making.

The exercise identified several vulnerabilities. Some elements of the scenario are highly speculative, particularly Russian operatives' ability to obtain weapons once inside Estonia. Other elements, however, reflect existing conditions: Estonia’s large Russian-speaking population, the continued issuance of Schengen visas to Russian nationals, the decentralized nature of internal immigration enforcement, and the absence of a clearly identifiable EU-level capability dedicated to systematically analyzing the EES overstayer population for emerging national-security threats.

The paper therefore recommends three measures: continued EU-wide efforts to disrupt organized criminal networks that could provide support to hostile actors; eliminating tourist visas for Russian nationals except in limited humanitarian circumstances while developing a forward-deployed EU visa-security capability; and establishing a national-security immigration coordination center capable of analyzing immigration data against emerging threats and coordinating responses among Member States.

The central conclusion is that NATO’s military deterrence remains essential, but military strength alone cannot close every avenue through which a sophisticated hybrid operation could develop. Preventing such a crisis requires identifying and closing the less visible vulnerabilities that could allow hostile actors to establish themselves inside Europe before a crisis begins.

I. Introduction

Drones at Leipzig Airport. Drone incursions of NATO airspace. Throwaway agents. Arson and sabotage at facilities throughout Europe. 2026 has been a busy year, and it appears that Russia is engaged in an ongoing hybrid campaign on the European continent. The EU says that Russia’s goal is to spread fear, distrust, and undermine European unity. Additionally, just this Sunday, September 20, European security officials raised alarm that Russia is testing NATO resolve and could potentially even attempt a limited incursion into NATO territory.

This paper takes the current situation and threat picture as a starting baseline and imagines a scenario in which Russia creates a strategic crisis in Estonia, a NATO member, to discredit NATO collective defense and distract from the war in Ukraine by creating a sort of second front for NATO. In working through this thought exercise, the article examines what Russia could gain from escalation, how it might carry it out, and what security gaps the scenario identifies. Like with any hypothetical scenario, I suspect some will wholeheartedly disagree with my assertions. Still, I ask you to think of this as a red teaming exercise designed to identify vulnerabilities, and not an effort at forecasting.

II. Why might Putin want to escalate?

The “special military operation” that was supposed to take Kyiv in 6 days is going on for four years. Russia is not making significant gains on the battlefield, and whatever small gains it makes come at a prohibitive cost. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that, since the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has suffered 450,000 dead and 1.4 million battlefield casualties. Moreover, Russian control of Ukrainian territory actually shrank in the Spring of 2026. The situation is so unfavorable that the Russian MoD now resorts to outright fabrication to claim battlefield gains that have not occurred.

Ukraine, on the other hand, seems to have stabilized its position after 4 years of war. It is becoming ever more adept at using drone technology and can finally bring the war home to Russia. Ukrainian long-range drones are now striking infrastructure deep inside Russia every week, including Russian oil refineries. This matters because Russian oil is the last remaining cash cow keeping the Russian economy afloat. And even though official Russian government numbers purport to show economic stability, a June report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy concludes that “the Russian economy is showing clear signs of structural exhaustion.” Meanwhile, European support for Ukraine is strong across the continent, at least among mainstream political parties. On September 17, the EU Commission disbursed 3.3 billion euros to Ukraine – part of the 90-billion-euro Ukraine support loan. So in this war that increasingly looks like a war of attrition, it is Ukraine, and not Russia, that appears to be coming out on top.

In my assessment, these factors are gradually painting Putin into a corner, where he is slowly running out of options and may be forced to “flip the script.” In theory, one option Putin always has is a genuine move towards peace on fair terms, which should at minimum include a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine. But he is stuck in a trap of his own making. If he relents on his maximalist demands and opts for fair peace, the entire very expensive and painful 4-year war would appear to have been fought for naught. That might very well threaten his political, or even personal, survival in a cutthroat political system. So, he is not willing to make peace. And sticking to business as usual looks like an eventual dead end as well.

In my imagined scenario, Putin invents a third option and chooses to escalate by launching a proxy military operation in Estonia. The operation has several goals. First, it aims to create a crisis NATO must solve on alliance territory, competing with NATO support for Ukraine. NATO would have to decide how to react to the crisis, and balance the reaction with the risk of escalation and full-blown war with Russia. Thus, as a second goal, Putin might succeed in discrediting Article 5 provisions of the defensive alliance if NATO’s response were to be slow or ineffective. Third, a military operation on NATO territory could force NATO partners to focus on their own defense rather than continuing to support Ukraine.

At first glance, this scenario may seem implausible or even reckless. After all, we have been almost conditioned to see NATO and Article 5 collective defense as an ironclad guarantee. This is one reason why countries that were formerly part of the Warsaw Pact flocked to NATO in the 1990s. But we also need to keep in mind that the concept of collective defense has not been routinely tested. Article 5 was invoked only one time – in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks against the United States. NATO has never dealt with a situation where an opponent seeks to test NATO boundaries by mapping out red lines, which I believe is exactly what Russia is doing. In other words, NATO has not yet been fully tested in hybrid war.

III. What might Putin assume about NATO?

We have discussed how the West views NATO. But what might Putin assume about the alliance, especially NATO’s willingness to go to war?

NATO is focused on defense and may prefer to avoid war. First, NATO explicitly describes itself as a defensive alliance and identifies preventing conflict and war as a core purpose of its deterrence and defense strategy. Putin could reasonably assume that NATO governments strongly prefer to resolve a confrontation without escalating it into a direct war with Russia. This does not mean NATO would fail to respond to an attack; rather, it creates a potential vulnerability that Russia could exploit by presenting NATO with an ambiguous crisis in which the costs of escalation are apparent, but the attribution of Russian responsibility remains contested.

NATO may be slow to act. An armed NATO response requires deliberation and consensus among alliance members. Article 5 obligations are triggered in instances of an armed attack, and determining whether an action is an armed attack is addressed on a case-by-case basis. NATO’s own materials note that “events that lack an international element, such as purely domestic acts of terrorism, do not trigger Article.” In Putin’s view, he could see case-by-case deliberations as a vulnerability and conclude that a deliberately vague scenario would make it difficult for the alliance to reach consensus quickly, keeping the window of action open for Russia.

Information operations may complicate consensus. NATO is a collective alliance of democracies, and democratic governments depend to some degree on public support and political legitimacy. In Putin’s assessment of the political situation, he may conclude that Moscow does not need to persuade NATO governments that Russia is innocent. It may only need to create enough confusion and debate within NATO populations to make decisive action more politically difficult. Russia has both the tools and demonstrated experience to flood the information environment with contradictory narratives. The U.S. State Department has documented Russian use of multiple, sometimes contradictory narratives specifically to generate confusion and discourage responses. NATO likewise describes hostile information operations as activities designed to “create confusion, deepen divisions, destabilize societies and ultimately weaken the Alliance,” and notes that such operations are not always intended to persuade audiences of a particular falsehood; they can instead be designed to muddy the information environment and make it more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.

From Moscow’s perspective, the objective therefore need not be to achieve consensus around a pro-Russian narrative. It may be sufficient to prevent consensus around a coordinated response. If a crisis involving Estonia produced competing narratives about what happened, who was responsible, and whether Russia was directly involved, political divisions within individual NATO member states could complicate the Alliance’s response and make consensus harder to achieve.

Nuclear intimidation may complicate consensus. Putin may believe that nuclear signaling can amplify Western caution. Russia has repeatedly used explicit and implicit nuclear threats during the war in Ukraine. Evidence suggests these threats can have effects beyond traditional military deterrence, including a Chatham House assessment that Russian nuclear threats contributed to Western concerns about escalation and constrained some governments' willingness to provide Ukraine with certain forms of military support. This does not mean that Western populations will automatically oppose confrontation with Russia. Public attitudes toward nuclear deterrence have, in some cases, become more supportive since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Rather, the point is that nuclear signaling adds an extra political cost to any decision to escalate a confrontation with Moscow. A Russian leadership that believes Western governments are highly sensitive to the prospect of nuclear escalation may therefore conclude that even an ambiguous or limited confrontation could be accompanied by nuclear rhetoric designed to encourage caution, delay, or disagreement within the Alliance.

Taken together, these assumptions suggest that what may appear from NATO’s perspective to be an irrational and extraordinarily risky decision—deliberately creating a crisis on NATO territory—could look considerably more rational from Moscow. Russia would not necessarily need to believe that NATO would stand aside. It would need to believe that NATO’s preference to avoid war, consensus-based decision-making, democratic political constraints, vulnerability to information manipulation, and sensitivity to nuclear escalation could create enough hesitation and disagreement to complicate a unified response. In this model, the objective would not necessarily be to defeat NATO militarily. It would be to create a crisis in which NATO’s overwhelming military advantage becomes difficult to translate into timely, unified political action. If Moscow believed such a crisis could fracture Alliance cohesion, force NATO to divert attention and resources from Ukraine, or show that Article 5 could be challenged without producing an immediate, unified response, the potential payoff might outweigh the risks in the Kremlin’s calculus.

IV. Free Narva – a Baltic hybrid war scenario

With the analysis of the previous sections in mind, I constructed a scenario in which Russia executes a deliberately ambiguous and confusing operation designed to threaten Estonia’s territorial integrity and test NATO’s resolve. In developing the scenario, I considered Russia’s potential objectives, lessons from previous Russian operations, the defensive measures Estonia and NATO have already adopted, and how Moscow might circumvent or exploit those defenses. This paper discusses the vulnerabilities identified through this process in a later section.

Phase 1 – Propaganda and throwaway agents

In October 2026, with the September Duma elections behind him and a comfortable supermajority win for his United Russia party, Putin decides to launch Operation “Narva Spring.” Analysts and think tanks pick up on increased messaging about the so-called “People’s Republic of Narva.” This is an entirely fictitious concept created by Russian intelligence, with a flag, notional borders, and a capital in Narva, a city of about 50,000 residents, 97% of whom are Russian speakers. The online narratives shared on Telegram, TikTok, and other platforms are the usual assortment of Kremlin grievance narratives about marginalized Russian minorities. Ongoing Estonian reforms that aim to make Estonian the official language of education in the country are weaponized and portrayed as “linguistic genocide” against Russian speakers.

The online propaganda campaign is amplified by Kremlin-controlled trolls and shared with pro-Russian Western influencers and political factions who decry Estonian government abuses of the Russian-speaking population. With the propaganda campaign at a fever pitch, the Kremlin is ready to escalate physically. But Russia cannot simply repeat the Crimea or Donbas scenario against Estonia. The Estonian border is one of the most heavily monitored frontiers in the world, where NATO has implemented a “deterrence by denial” strategy. This doctrine holds that defensive measures are so formidable the enemy sees an operation as too costly to attempt. Infiltrating several hundred “little green men” into Narva from Russia just across the river, while maintaining deniability, is not plausible. The Estonian side of the border is teeming with sensors.

But the Russians have been practicing another gray zone tactic recently – the use of “throwaway agents.” So, the Kremlin uses its network of low-level recruits to spray graffiti, place posters and stickers with QR codes, and eventually commit acts of arson and sabotage against local infrastructure and public property – and especially anything linked to law enforcement, security agencies and the courts. The goal is to create the appearance of local resistance against Estonian authority, while staying well beneath the threshold of armed conflict. But propaganda, graffiti, arson, and low-level sabotage are not the intensity of crisis the Kremlin needs. At this point, Russia needs to use specialists trained in fomenting armed violence on the ground.

Phase 2 – Infiltration

In 2014, Igor Strelkov emerged as the face of the armed separatist movement in Donbas, providing Moscow with something enormously valuable: an apparent local actor around whom an armed conflict could coalesce. To bring the Estonia situation from a nuisance to a crisis for NATO, Moscow needs people trained in violence, and a few Strelkov types to direct them. But how to bring them in? Estonia hasn’t allowed free travel for Russian citizens since 2022, and applications for entry for the few exceptions are closely scrutinized.

So, the Kremlin probes for weaknesses in the Schengen zone, and it finds these in Italy, France and Spain. In 2025, France, Italy and Spain collectively issued more than 441,000 Schengen visas to Russian nationals, while more than 477,000 Russian nationals received tourist visas across the entire Schengen zone. The refusal rate for Schengen visas for Russian nationals in 2025 was a mere 6.4%. The Schengen creates an interesting counterintelligence problem for Europe. Once a person has legitimately crossed the EU's external border, Europe's internal geography largely disappears.

In this scenario, Russia begins to infiltrate intelligence and military specialists from units like GRU’s Unit 29155 and the 390th Special Purpose Reconnaissance Point into the Schengen area starting in June 2026, before the launch of the Narva propaganda campaign and increased tensions. Even with the extra scrutiny for Russian visa applicants and shorter admission periods, the Russian operatives obtain tourist visas, enter Italy, and move with ease through Austria, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia via the excellent European train network and private commercial bus services. Once in Estonia, the operatives blend into the large Russian-speaking population and make their way to Narva. In total, just under a hundred Russian operatives follow this and other routes into Estonia over the summer months, and go to ground in the Narva region, supported by a tiny group of local sympathizers and a network of throwaway agents.

Even once the tourist visas of the Russian operatives expire, and they become illegal immigrants within the EU, nothing causes the system to blink red in reaction to this. In a way, no centralized, integrated system focuses specifically on immigration, so no lights blink red. Unlike the United States, Europe does not have an EU-wide interior immigration enforcement agency, and it currently lacks a central entity to monitor immigration violations against emerging national security risks, although that gap has been acknowledged. In terms of what exists today, in 2026, the EU rolled out the Entry/Exit System (EES), which captures biometrics from non-EU nationals entering the EU on short stays. So, in theory, the EES captures the biometrics of the Russian operatives in our scenario. And once their period of admission to the EU ends, typically at 90 days, the operatives are added to the EES “overstayer” list. But at present, unless the overstayer is also matched to additional alerts in the Schengen Information System – an EU-wide law enforcement database – no specific actions are automatically triggered, and law enforcement is not alerted.

Any interior immigration enforcement beyond this point is the responsibility of law enforcement within individual EU member states. If one of the operatives has the bad luck of being stopped by police and this results in a document check, the EES hit would likely show, and he would be detained. But the EES list is not proactively pushed to law enforcement for action. It is simply available to query. And importantly, EES is managed by eu-LISA – the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice – which is an agency focused on IT systems management and not law enforcement or security. In other words, no analysts are scouring the EES list for a sudden uptick in Russian nationals of military age being added to the overstayer list. Unless they attract attention to themselves, no one is coming for the Russian operatives. And in a city with a 97% Russian-speaking population, they don’t attract attention. Meanwhile, they quietly get to work acquiring small arms and mapping out critical infrastructure, communications, and defense and law enforcement sites.

Phase 3 – Estonian Donbas

By the end of 2026, the ground is set to initiate a crisis in earnest, in a way that gets NATO’s full attention. On January 2, 2027, a Saturday, Estonians are still recovering from the raucous New Year’s Eve celebrations. At 0700, Estonia's Information System Authority (RIA) Operations Center in Tallinn begins receiving simultaneous alerts indicating disruptions across government and critical infrastructure networks from unattributed sources. Analysts and incident handlers track the situation as key government and private-sector websites become unreachable due to denial-of-service attacks. Physical equipment begins to act erratically as unknown actors hack industrial control systems. Rail networks are disrupted. Traffic lights rapidly cycle in bizarre patterns. A few urban areas across Estonia lose electricity.

At the same time, radar operators identify air signatures from Russia, apparently heading toward Estonian airspace. Alert aircraft are scrambled. But the real crisis kicks off on the ground in Narva. Masked armed men, dressed in civilian clothing and wearing tricolor armbands, break into the empty Narva City Government building at Peetri Platz 5, climb their way to the top of the tower, and unfurl a green, black, and white flag. As the city government building is occupied and barricaded, another group of armed men attacks a nearby police station, overwhelms the skeleton crew, and takes a handful of hostages.

The last two groups are tasked with seizing the two border crossings across the Narva River. Narva 1 is the main border crossing point between Russia and Estonia, across the Friendship Bridge. A smaller, rarely used secondary crossing, Narva 2, sits about a mile south in a mixed industrial and residential area. The armed group attacking Narva 1 engages the border station building, about 380 meters from the foot of the bridge, drawing Estonian police defenders into a firefight. A second section of attackers takes up positions in the Narva Museum, a complex of 14th-century stone fortification with a commanding view of Friendship Bridge and the surrounding area, and supports the assault. Further south at Narva 2, the attackers similarly engage the border station, while setting up overwatch positions in the massive abandoned Kreenholm textile manufacturing complex.

While Estonian police defenders focus on attacks from the Estonian side of the border, additional attackers cross the bridges on foot and join the fight. These groups of men dressed in plain clothes are armed with heavier weapons including RPGs, squad machine guns and MANPADS. By 0800, both border crossings and bridges across the Narva River are seized, securing a thin but steady supply line from Russia. Reinforcements continue to stream into the city across the two bridges, and attackers strengthen their key defensive positions. Meanwhile, hundreds of small FPV drones appear in the skies above and begin hunting Estonian defenders. Anyone in a police or military uniform becomes a target.

Phase 4 – Information war

The chaos and fighting across Narva make for online content that quickly goes viral. With the hashtag #FreeNarva, videos of the chaos are shared across social media platforms, and pro-Kremlin trolls immediately label the situation as an uprising of the local population. A network of pro-Kremlin influencers in the West amplifies the content, then mainstream media in Europe and around the world pick it up. At 0900 local time, while the Estonian government and NATO are still trying to determine exactly what is happening in Narva and how to respond, the “separatist government” broadcasts its first official message from the seized City Government building.

Sitting behind a desk, with a black, green and white tricolor flag behind him, and flanked by armed men, the spokesperson announces the establishment of the Narva People’s Republic. In a short speech, delivered intentionally in Russian, he cites grievances against the Estonian government. He says the uprising is an act of self-preservation for Russian speakers in the region. Social media networks and news outlets quickly pick up the speech, adding to the moment's confusion. Kremlin trolls and their proxies call for support for the “world’s newest nation,” while cautioning against being pulled into World War Three by “Estonian fascists.” Memes quickly circulate featuring the mushroom cloud. Meanwhile, Russia expresses understanding of the separatist grievances but categorically denies having taken any part in the events. Putin appears on Russian television from a nuclear launch center and warns that an attack against Russian territory will result in a response using all available means.

Where does the scenario go from here? At minimum, Estonia would seek Article 5 consultations, but beyond that, the crisis could unfold in many different ways. I am not trying to explore every possible path. This hypothetical illustrates one way Russia could attack NATO territory while preserving enough ambiguity to complicate the Alliance’s response.

V. What gaps were identified?

Let us now examine how much of the hypothetical scenario reflects real-world vulnerabilities, how much was speculative, and what potential gaps the exercise identified.

Speculative Risk: Russian operatives' ability to acquire small arms once on the ground. The most speculative element of this scenario is the ability of Russian intelligence officers to acquire weapons through illicit means. While criminal networks trafficking illegal weapons exist and may extend into the Baltics, there is no basis to assume Russian operatives could readily access such networks without increasing the risk of detection. In the hypothetical scenario, weapons acquisition would therefore represent a significant uncertainty and a potential point of failure.

Confirmed Risk: Estonia has a large ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population, with some evidence of social tensions in Narva, but the situation is nuanced. Official Estonian statistics show that ethnic Russians comprise about 20 percent of the country’s population. In Narva, approximately 97 percent of residents speak Russian. The relationship with Russia in Narva, however, is nuanced. After Estonia regained independence in 1991, many ethnic Russians who had settled in Estonia during the Soviet period did not automatically acquire Estonian citizenship and instead had to obtain citizenship through naturalization. Consequently, in 2014, only about 46 percent of Narva’s residents held Estonian citizenship, while 36 percent held Russian citizenship. Some Estonian government policies have contributed to local resentment, and these kinds of social friction points attract the attention of Russian intelligence services. However, there is no evidence of broad support in Narva for joining Russia, and documented reports indicate otherwise.

Confirmed Risk: The “Narva People’s Republic” is thought to be a Russian information operation. The idea of a “Narva People’s Republic” is not purely hypothetical. The current online campaign appears to have emerged in 2025 and became active in February 2026, when social-media accounts began promoting the idea of Narva and Ida-Viru County separating from Estonia. In March 2026, Estonia’s Internal Security Service characterized the activity as an information operation intended to sow confusion and undermine social cohesion.

Confirmed Risk: Russian nationals continue to receive Schengen visas with a relatively low refusal rate. Russians continue to receive short-stay visas into the Schengen zone. Although applications from Russian nationals receive more scrutiny now than in previous years, in 2025 Russian nationals applied for 679,425 short-stay visas, and 630,641 were issued, including 175,862 multiple-entry visas. The refusal rate for Russian visa applicants was only 6.4 percent according to official European Commission statistics.

Confirmed Risk: Absence of coordinated internal immigration enforcement and interoperability challenges. In our scenario, the fragmented nature of internal immigration enforcement in the EU was the biggest identified risk, as it allowed Russian operatives to move from their initial countries of admission to other parts of the Schengen area. The Entry/Exit (EES) system, fully deployed in April 2026, is a significant step toward gaining an operational picture of who enters and exits the Schengen area. Still, it works best for securing the EU’s external borders and preventing re-entry by previous violators. Individuals who do not leave the EU on time are added to the EES “overstayers” list, which is available to the member state competent authorities. But the overstayer list is just that – a list. To move from list to action, an individual on the overstayer list would need to have a “return order” (the EU version of a deportation order) issued by the competent member state authority. The order would need to be entered in the Schengen Information System (SIS) promptly. At that point, member states would need to coordinate to share SIS alerts and apprehend the individual. That could be facilitated through the SIRENE (Supplementary Information Request at the National Entries) bureaus, 24/7 centers each member state operates to facilitate information exchange. All that is possible if the system works without flaws, but that is not the current operational reality. The European Commission acknowledged in its 2026 State of Schengen report that interoperability and coordination remain challenging. The report specifically points out that “further efforts are required across all Member States to address challenges related to the timely issuance of return decisions, the streamlining of procedures and the implementation of measures to prevent absconding and unauthorized secondary movements.”

Confirmed Risk: Absence of a single entity that monitors the EES overstayer list for emerging security threats. Building on the previous risk factor, I could not confirm in my research the existence of a single EU entity that systematically monitors the EES overstayer population for emerging national-security threats based on targeting criteria. While extensive mechanisms exist for sharing information once a person becomes the subject of a relevant alert, it remains less clear who is systematically examining the EES overstayer population for national-security significance before that threshold is reached. The EU has an entity with extensive experience coordinating Member State investigations and criminal intelligence: EUROPOL, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. EUROPOL has access to EES data for law-enforcement purposes, but its current EES capabilities are primarily integrated into existing investigative and analytical functions. EUROPOL itself identifies the need for greater interoperability among the EU's large-scale information systems and states that, once the planned changes are implemented by 2027, it will be able to use EES and other systems to “support assessing the security risks associated with third country nationals arriving to Europe.” At present, therefore, I found no evidence of a centralized process dedicated to systematically screening the EES overstayer population for national-security indicators. In other words, the EU has built the haystack and mechanisms for sharing information about individual needles, but it is less clear who is systematically looking for the needles. And because the EES is still new, the size and characteristics of the haystack are not yet fully established.

VI. Recommendations

I deliberately fashioned this scenario to unfold as a Russian operation against NATO might: deliberately ambiguous, difficult to attribute, and accompanied by an aggressive information campaign designed to complicate the Alliance’s response. The incursion itself would not necessarily need to be militarily successful. If Russia could create a crisis that divided NATO, delayed a unified response, or exposed weaknesses in the Alliance’s ability to defend its territory, the crisis itself could constitute a strategic success. For that reason, the most effective defense is to prevent the scenario from occurring in the first place—by identifying the vulnerabilities that could make such an operation possible and closing those gaps before Russia can exploit them.

NATO and Estonia are doing many things well, including their strategy of “deterrence by denial,” and I will not spend time analyzing those efforts here. They should continue. My recommendations instead focus on less frequently recognized vulnerabilities outside the traditional military sphere that could still be exploited in a hybrid conflict.

Recommendation 1: Continue EU-wide coordination targeting organized criminal activity. A key element of the hypothetical scenario depended on Russian operatives gaining access to firearms through criminal networks. Organized crime can provide illicit infrastructure that terrorists, intelligence services, and other national-security threats may exploit. Continued EU-wide efforts to disrupt these networks therefore serve a purpose beyond traditional crime reduction: they deny hostile actors access to networks, resources, and capabilities that could facilitate operations inside Europe.

Recommendation 2: Eliminate tourist visas for Russian nationals and create a forward-deployed EU visa security program for high-threat regions. One of the larger gaps identified in this scenario is that Russian nationals still have legal avenues to obtain visas to enter the EU. My recommendation would be to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian nationals, with exceptions for limited humanitarian circumstances. The EU should also consider a uniform, EU-wide mechanism to systematically assess the security risks posed by visa applicants and incorporate those assessments into visa issuance decisions. While the EU has a sophisticated common visa-information system, including biometric screening and mechanisms for sharing information among Member States, responsibility for visa adjudication and national-security assessment remains distributed among national authorities. The United States provides one potential model. Through HSI’s Visa Security Program, trained special agents are assigned to diplomatic posts overseas to conduct law-enforcement interviews and identify terrorists and other national-security threats before they enter the United States. A comparable EU capability, whether centralized or deployed through participating Member States, could add an investigative and intelligence dimension to the existing European visa-screening architecture.

Recommendation 3: Establish a national-security immigration coordination center within an appropriate European agency. The EU should consider establishing a dedicated national-security immigration coordination capability within an existing agency such as EUROPOL. The center would proactively analyze the EES overstayer list and other relevant databases against current threats, identify concerning emerging patterns, centralize alerts concerning visa overstays and other significant immigration violations, and provide a mechanism for Member State coordination. Where an overstay or other immigration violation involves additional security indicators, the center could elevate the case for immediate coordination with the appropriate law-enforcement and intelligence authorities in the affected Member State. The objective would be to move beyond simply recording immigration violations toward proactively identifying those that may represent emerging national-security threats.

VII. Conclusion

The purpose of this exercise was not to predict that Russia will attack Narva, or that events would unfold exactly as described. It was to show how a deliberately ambiguous hybrid operation could exploit vulnerabilities outside the traditional military sphere. Russia would not necessarily need to defeat NATO on the battlefield. It could seek to create a crisis in which attribution is uncertain, information is contested, political leaders face competing pressures, and the Alliance must make consequential decisions under extreme uncertainty.

That is why prevention matters. Once armed men are occupying buildings in a NATO member state and information operations are shaping the narrative faster than governments can establish the facts, the opportunity to prevent the crisis has already passed. The objective should therefore be to identify the vulnerabilities that make such a scenario possible while there is still time to address them. NATO's military deterrence and Estonia's defenses remain essential, but closing the less visible gaps in Europe's immigration, intelligence, law-enforcement, and information-security architecture may be just as important in preventing the next hybrid crisis from becoming a reality.

At minimum, these measures would make it significantly harder for Russia, or any hostile actor, to establish the personnel, infrastructure, and freedom of movement needed to conduct such an operation inside Europe.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, or the U.S. government.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian drones are suspected of sinking a cargo ship and leaving chemical tankers ablaze near the Black Sea coasts of Bulgaria and Romania, respectively. The latest attacks mean that at least seven ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—and even within Romania's territorial waters if Russian involvement is confirmed in the case of the chemical tankers.

Such attacks have spurred requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection. In a social media post on October 15, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that NATO had increased "counter-drone capabilities" along the alliance's eastern flank after meeting with the leaders of Bulgaria and Romania.

The latest attacks this week occurred within 24 hours between October 14 and October 15, when the two chemical tankers were set afire after Russian drones were detected in Romanian airspace, according to Deutsche Welle. Both ships were sitting at anchor near the mouth of the Sulina canal that connects the Black Sea to the Danube River, which has become a crucial shipping export route for Ukraine, Reuters reported.

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Battlefield dynamics in Yemen shift quickly, but Houthi aims do not. A movement organized around radical ideology and perpetual conflict now shares a border with a state organized around modernization and prosperity. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis both have formidable but very different military capabilities, and neither can force a quick decision on the other. That is the recipe for a long war of attrition. The closest precedent is the war in Ukraine, to which the Yemen war is increasingly linked, and which may be instructive for the Kingdom on how best to prepare.

There is also a parallel to be made with the related conflict between Iran and the United States, the fallout from which has severely affected the GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia. Essentially, we are witnessing the leverage of a lesser military force when that party has a much higher threshold for pain and disruption than the stronger party. Iran and the Houthis are both betting that the Saudis are sufficiently anxious to hold on to their peaceful model of business, tourism, energy and investment to settle at almost any price and end the present conflict.

The Houthi mindset

The Houthi ideological program is anti-Saudi, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, anti-liberal and antisemitic. It has long cast the Saudi monarchy as an American-Israeli puppet unworthy of the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Some of this is personal: The father of Abdelmalek al-Houthi, the group's leader, clashed for years with Saudi-backed clerics and was rumored to have been targeted for assassination at their behest.

But the grievances against the Kingdom also has a territorial dimension. In the 1934 Treaty of Taif,

Imam Yahya of northern Yemen settled the border with the Saudi state and ceded Jizan, Asir, and Najran provinces. The Houthis, who present themselves somewhat ambiguously as heirs to the imamate, have revived claims to all three provinces. The purpose is to stoke resentment of the Saudis and to leave the Kingdom's southern border unsettled. This territorial dimension intersects with the allegation that the Saudis are not fit to control Mecca and Medina: Abdelmalik recently reiterated that Mecca belongs to the Islamic Umma, rather than being a province of Saudi Arabia. The Houthis implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – claim the whole of the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula, “from Mecca to Mahra”.

The deeper reason the Houthis cannot stop is structural. The Houthis depend on mobilization, and for a movement of that kind peace is a threat rather than a reward. Conflict is what holds the project together, as it justifies extracting resources from an impoverished population, excuses unpaid salaries and collapsed services, and lets the security apparatus treat every critic as a collaborator. For a deeply unpopular regime, war with Saudi Arabia and its local Yemeni partners is the most useful conflict available and could yield significant returns if the Houthis can extract concessions at the negotiating table. It was already clear during Ambassador Fitton-Brown’s period of responsibility for Yemen that the perverse incentives of the war economy meant that Houthi negotiator Muhammad Abdelsalam was viewed with suspicion by Houthi field commanders, who were benefitting from the war economy and associated “respect”, and had no interest in being transformed into administrators with responsibility to balance their power.

The Houthi menu

The Houthis approach is predatory: isolate each victim and deal with it alone. They pursue bilateral deals that peel off potential adversaries, and calibrate each attack so the victim would conclude that a limited response is cheaper than a sustained one. They have cultivated the sense that they are somebody else's problem, Israel's when they fire missiles at Eilat, Riyadh's when they strike Abha, etc. A decade on, the Houthis have have attacked many different states, and yet no one has owned the problem.

It is troubling that US negotiators have recently sat with the Houthis in Muscat and apparently taken at face value Houthi assurances that their quarrel is only with the Saudis, not with American – or even the Israelis! All this while threatening the US economy and risking the lives of US nationals at civilian infrastructure in the Kingdom.

In the current round of fighting, the Houthis have three key options for escalation.

The first is domestic expansion within Yemen. It is the least risky for the regime because it stays within a conflict the world has learned to ignore. New territory brings new populations to tax, new ports and crossings to control, and new momentum to display at home. The drawback is that this also pushes the Zaidi Houthis deeper and deeper into Shafa’I (Sunni) territory, where the population is hostile to their agenda.

The second option is maritime. Attacks on commercial vessels and Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab inflict harm, especially in the economic realm, and they are extremely difficult to deter and defend against. The drawback is that shipping is a global interest, albeit somewhat elastic, and so a sustained campaign against it may invite the involvement of states with maritime commercial interests that would otherwise stay out of a Saudi-Houthi war. It also, by violating the Law of the Sea, provides an unimpeachable legal basis to build an international military coalition against them.

The third option, targeting civilian aviation, is the riskiest. A recent Houthi attack, on October 10, killed at least twelve people in the deadliest attack on the Kingdom in more than a decade. One US national was among the dead. The strikes came with a threat to airlines, "for the last time," to stay out of Saudi airspace. This type of attack is probably the most likely to galvanize an international coalition and demonstrates that the Houthis have an extremely high appetite for risk.

The Houthis are testing how far they can take this. Downing a passenger aircraft would almost certainly bring the overwhelming response, including direct American strikes, that the Houthis have spent recent decades seeking to avoid (albeit with an imperfect record). The threat alone can inflict some damage to Saudi Arabia, so the threats will continue. Whether the Houthis will continue or even take escalation in this realm even further will depend on whether they believe anyone would make them pay.

The wars are already connected

It might be tempting to treat the Russia-Ukraine and Houthi-Saudi comparison as merely illustrative, but the two wars are materially linked in both directions.

Russia’s involvement with the Houthis is the most direct link thus far. By mid-2024, Russia had recruited hundreds, possibly even thousands, of Yemeni men for the Ukrainian front through a Houthi-linked network operating out of Oman. Also, during the Houthi Red Sea campaign of 2023 to 2025, Russia reportedly passed satellite targeting data to the Houthis. And the Shahed-136 that Iran supplied to Russia, which Russia now mass-produces and improved upon, belongs to the same family of weapon the Houthis fire at Saudi infrastructure. Russian innovation may yet flow back through Tehran to Sanaa.

Russia’s public posture toward the Houthi problem has been one of ostensible concern. In September, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Houthi attacks on Saudi civilian targets “unacceptable,” and President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed freedom of navigation through the Bab al-Mandab by phone. Riyadh should not mistake this for neutrality: Moscow treats the Houthis as a pawn in a larger game.

The mechanism is not complicated. A crisis on the Arabian Peninsula drains Western attention and, perhaps more importantly, Western munitions. In late March, the Pentagon was reported to be weighing whether to divert air defense interceptors bought for Ukraine to the Middle East, because the war with Iran was straining stocks of critical American munitions. This is the outcome Moscow has been working toward since it abstained on the 2015 arms embargo against the Houthis and then spent a decade obstructing the UN panel that documented its violations. Russia does not need the Houthis to win; it needs them to keep fighting. It makes a similar calculation over supporting continuing Iranian resistance to the Americans.

The link is starting to run the other way too. Kyiv’s growing ties with Saudi Arabia are more recent but no less consequential. On March 27, the two countries signed a defense cooperation agreement centered on counter-drone expertise. More than two hundred Ukrainian anti-drone specialists are now deployed in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and Riyadh is reportedly negotiating a large purchase of Ukrainian interceptor drones that cost between one and three thousand dollars each. Until recently Riyadh was deepening ties with Moscow through OPEC+ and BRICS, and yet it is now importing Ukrainian expertise to defend against weapons Moscow helped perfect.

Saudi Arabia's dilemma

As in Eastern Europe, no quick decision is likely in the Saudi-Houthi conflict. The Houthis cannot be bombed out of Sanaa, as the coalition learned between 2015 and 2022. While the Yemeni government’s counteroffensive along the coast has stabilized the front and claimed gains around Mokha, it remains a long way from the capital. That leaves Riyadh with three paths, none of them are likely to be easy.

The first is appeasement, which would feed the movement. Since June, the Houthis have demanded a deal that lifts the blockade on their ports and airports and restores the flow of cash into Sanaa. Such a deal would ease the regime’s revenue crisis and pay for its next tranche of weapons. The Kingdom tried a version of this approach after 2022, and the result is the war it is fighting now.

The second is deterrence, which fails against an adversary that seeks out perpetual conflict. Deterrence assumes an enemy that weighs costs and benefits in measurements that the Saudis understand, and that appears not to be the case. For a movement like the Houthis whose legitimacy rests on “resistance,” conflict is not only a hazard but also a realization of an extremist aspiration.

The third is defeating the Houthis outright, which means returning to a war Saudi Arabia already fought and abandoned. A strategy that could succeed does exist: cut Houthi supply lines of cash and other material while backing a unified Yemeni ground campaign under a single command. But this will require sustained pressure over time in order to crack the Houthi defenses and then ultimately the regime.

Attrition, then, is the most reasonable path forward. The question is not whether Saudi Arabia will be in a long war but whether it will be prepared for one. Attrition is survivable for the side that innovates and devastating for the side that assumes the war will end in a quick and decisive maneuver. The length of the war also introduces uncertainties about changes in the posture of allies, especially the US. There is a need to bake in bipartisan agreement in Washington, DC, that it is a US national security interest to ensure that the Saudis, and the Internationally Recognized Government of Yemen, and the Law of the Sea prevail in this conflict.

Two Ukrainian lessons

Ukraine survived attrition against a far larger adversary for two reasons, and both apply to Riyadh.

The first is adaptation. It built a drone industry from almost nothing into one producing millions of systems a year, fielded interceptor drones costing a small fraction of a Patriot missile, and compressed production and procurement timelines.

The Saudi-Ukranian March agreement imports some of that expertise but may not necessarily transfer all of the knowledge necessary to built its own industry. A defense that depends on imports from a country at war is precarious at the best of times.

Riyadh has the money and the stated intent, and Vision 2030 set a goal of localizing half of military spending by the end of the decade. But localization so far has meant licensed assembly of foreign designs rather than innovation under fire. The Kingdom has not reached a wartime tempo in which a new counter-drone system is conceived, tested against live Houthi attacks, and fielded within weeks. That is the capability Ukraine built and Saudi Arabia lacks.

The second lesson is diplomatic. Ukraine did not survive alone. It built a coalition of dozens of states that supplied weapons, trained its forces, financed its budget, and shared intelligence. For the Houthis, a coalition of this kind is the worst possible development, and it is exactly what their strategy of isolating victims and claiming false symmetry is meant to prevent.

The current war gives Riyadh the chance to build one, but the pieces remain fragmented. Ukraine's example is that a coalition does not assemble itself. It must be rallied, placed under a single command, and given a shared objective beyond absorbing attacks. The Houthis' own escalation, which has now killed citizens of a dozen countries at a single airport, is doing part of that work for Riyadh. The Kingdom's task is to turn condemnation into commitment before the moment passes.

So what would this coalition look like? The Saudis already have a maritime group of 14 that opposes Houthi blackmail against them in the Red Sea. But the US, UAE, UK and the other European powers are not part of it. With US leadership and assistance, this needs to be remedied. This is achievable, on the basis of three compelling legal bases: enforcement of the Law of the Sea; the legitimacy of the Yemeni government (and illegitimacy of the Houthis); and the legitimate defense and self-defense of Saudi Arabia.

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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Suspected Russian drone attacks sank a cargo ship and forced the evacuation of another vessel within two dozen miles of the coast of Bulgaria in the Black Sea on October 13. The latest attacks mean that five ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—spurring requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection.

Although there is no hard proof that the drone attacks originated from Russia, one of the ships that came under attack was the Ukrainian-operated coastal freighter Chelsea 3, registered under the flag of Malta. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev told the Russian ambassador in Sofia that “it makes no sense for Ukraine to destroy its own ships in the Black Sea, and the results of these strikes favor Russia’s interests,” according to The Associated Press.

All 15 members of the Ukrainian-owned Chelsea 3 were safely evacuated by Bulgarian rescue operations after the ship was reportedly struck by three aerial drones.

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Ukrainian troops have been caught off guard by restrictions on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet systems that disrupted frontline operations, while Kyiv received no warning from its partners of a Russian missile attack on its energy facilities for the second day running, according to Ukrainian officials.

Starlink terminals used by Ukrainian drone units began experiencing signal failures at speeds above 160 km/h, disrupting several missions early on Wednesday morning, according to military personnel and senior Ukrainian officials.

“Logistics at the frontline and middle strikes are badly limited,” one senior official familiar with the situation on the front told the FT. Ukraine’s middle strikes target Russian military supply lines and logistics. The limitations came with “no warning, just in the middle of the night,” the official said.

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Despite the expansion of Starlink and other communications satellite services, most of the world’s Internet traffic still travels through subsea cables crisscrossing the ocean floors. Those fiber-optic cables coexist with a network of oil and gas pipelines and submarine power cables—and all these crucial links connecting countries and continents now face growing sabotage risks as gray-zone warfare and open conflicts have become widespread.

The rising risks to the world’s invisible infrastructure beneath the waves are the main subject of a new book by Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who leads the Threats to the Global Maritime Order Initiative. Her book, titled Undersea War, explores the modern rise in suspicious incidents in which ships dragging their anchors for unusually long periods have cut or damaged undersea cables and pipelines, from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Braw acknowledges that about 60 percent of undersea cable damage is primarily due to human error during fishing and shipping activities, when weighted nets or anchors drag across the seabed. Natural hazards like storms and undersea landslides also account for a smaller proportion of such incidents. In total, between 150 and 200 cables are damaged each year and usually repaired quickly.

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When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.

Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.

Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.

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Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.

The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.

“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”

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Operation Vivaldi, a Ukrainian military effort to repel Russian forces in the Donbas, has done much more than push back Moscow’s offensive in the region. The operation is credited with the liberation of dozens of square miles of once Russian held territory because of its mastermind use of drones and robotics on the battlefield. The operation has also ignited a firestorm of debate over the future of war and the human role. What follows is independent analysis of Operation Vivaldi by two Cipher Brief contributors who are actively engaged in the region.

INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS – Some Western commentators have suggested that Ukraine’s successful limited counteroffensive, Operation Vivaldi, by the 3rd Army Corps (3AC) has demonstrated the continued relevance of human maneuver in the face of drone technology, downplaying the ascendancy of drone warfare. In fact, Operation Vivaldi demonstrates just the opposite: the inexorable erosion of the usefulness of humans in direct contact with the enemy.

While isolated videos on social media may be found of direct fires exchanged between small elements of humans during the ongoing counteroffensive, the bulk of OSINT footage, as well as comments from Ukrainian commanders and soldiers, indicates that a new, systematic doctrine for the use of UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) has been critical to operational success, and that humans generally advance only into lower-risk areas in the wake of waves of ground-drone advances.

The key to this doctrine is a fusion of classic American warfighting principles (taught to Ukrainians) with new tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), together with a recognition of the changing spatial dimensions of modern warfare. In Operation Vivaldi, the aforementioned TTPs notably included the use of air-dropped UGVs to strike Russian positions, sow chaos behind enemy lines, take and hold ground, and clear lanes through minefields ahead of human advances.

According to “Darwin,” commander of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the 3AC, Russian soldiers and drones were suppressed by artillery, strike drones, and electronic warfare in order to prevent them from noticing night flights of repurposed heavy bomber drones carrying UGVs up to 19 kilometers deep into Russian lines. Some air-dropped UGVs with bombs struck Russian positions, while other UGVs with small arms would take and hold ground, sometimes killing and sometimes capturing the enemy in the process. Only then would humans incrementally advance: “We go forward, making a defense line, then waiting until artillery, flying drones and robots do their work, and then go in again.”

His men still only did this in small groups, with no restoration of large simultaneous human maneuver: “If before we moved with big battalion groups with mechanized forces, now we should use only small groups because of drones.” While this new pattern is currently only reported in use by 3AC, Darwin “said his corps was already teaching it to other brigades,” but noted that it required “a command structure ‘qualified enough as we are’ to run an operation with that many moving parts.”

But Ukraine still needed to degrade Russian operations before attempting to advance. Besides utilizing kinetic strikes, Ukrainian forces also deployed an electronic warfare “curtain” over parts of the battlefield, masking some Ukrainian movements and preventing Russian reconnaissance drones from operating. According to the Third Army Corps, its comprehensive “Defensive Dome” eliminated around 20,000 Russian drones during the operation, including via the use of interceptor drones, freeing Ukrainian armor to conduct mechanized assaults.

“Makar,” commander of the UGV unit “NG13” of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade of the 3AC, says that air-dropped UGVs were used for months by his unit as “part of a systematic approach to sabotage operations, as such missions are aimed at eliminating the enemy deep behind their lines and in hideouts, capturing enemy pilots, disrupting logistics, and so on.” While the air-dropping technique itself may be a temporary novelty, the systematic large-scale use of UGVs ahead of humans may lead to a situation that he says “changes the rules of war.”

Makar continues: “We are developing a global doctrine for the use of UGVs... by the end of 2026, we’ll carry out a number of crazy operations the world... can’t even imagine are possible.” Regarding the military structure required, he mentions “strong coordination between the units we work with on these missions” and “the work of the workshop, planning group, command staff, and operators on duty.” He also notes the particular usefulness of UGVs--typically equipped with Starlink, hard to notice by the enemy, and not limited by station time like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)--in enemy-held areas “where we have limited observation, limited FPV range, restricted operating distances, or where the enemy has strong air defense teams.”

Russian infantry has seen some success with infiltration tactics, able to slip through gaps in the thin Ukrainian lines singly or in pairs, due to the Russian tolerance for horrific casualties among such drone fodder.

Ukrainian UGVs, which need not be conserved like humans, are now performing similar infiltration missions against the Russians, but at even greater depth and sowing even greater disruption. “A UGV armed with a machine gun is probably more intimidating than an infantryman in many situations,” Obi, a soldier from Ukraine’s 3rd Special Operations Regiment, told the authors.

Makar described how in one episode, a single UGV caused disproportionate chaos: “They were freaking out over the radio, ‘A toy car flew in, then drove around, and then exploded...’ Well, their command doesn’t believe them, all hell breaks loose, and movement along that logistics route is immediately banned. All positions were placed on full combat alert... There were many times when they said, ‘No, we won’t go there because it’s unclear what’s going on there,’ and so on.” In another episode, “a single small UGV, airdropped some distance away, eliminated one enemy soldier and as a result, a full-scale enemy assault they’d been planning for days, if not weeks, was called off.”

Finally, Makar specifically refers to UGVs as a kind of replacement for infantry, saying: “Paratroopers used to drop from planes. Now UGVs are dropped from heavy bombers... I would like to address all the commanders... Emphasize ground robotic complexes... because robots don’t bleed, and human life is priceless.” Still, although they aren’t priceless like humans, drones need protection too: during Operation Vivaldi, relatively expendable UAVs were used to scout ahead of and escort UGVs.

Dmytro, a soldier with Ukraine’s Third Separate Assault Brigade, told the authors that drones and ground robots play a key role in supporting the infantry and also remove humans from some of the most dangerous tasks. “There are also many strike ground robots that drive in and destroy enemy shelters, killing the personnel inside,” he said. Some robots are meant to engage in assault operations, while others are sent behind enemy lines to conduct ambushes.

Additionally, as Ukrainian infantry and drone operators move forward, ground robots handle much of the logistics. “Ground robots make all kinds of deliveries to positions, including supplies for drone crews,” said Dmytro. “They deliver ammunition to artillery positions and supplies to the front line, and they carry out many evacuations.” In fact, 80% of tactical logistics and 90% of casualty evacuations during Operation Vivaldi were done by UGVs.

Former American soldier “Jackie,” who volunteered to serve with and advise 3AC, emphasizes that the American style of warfighting and command culture is critical to the integration of the emerging doctrine and new technologies seen in Operation Vivaldi.

“That’s been my job primarily is installing Western mission command trust and initiative.” Such concepts are embraced by 3AC, but don’t work at all for Russians: “It wouldn’t matter if I gave [them] a perfect lecture on Western Mission Command because they’re asking their guys to go die for nothing constantly... you can’t have initiative and trust in that environment... they misreport and they lie all the time.”

The effective military culture together with scaled drone use has resulted in three Russian field armies being pushed back by the much smaller 3AC, which consistently achieves an astonishingly favorable exchange ratio of 20:1 against the Russians (a claim backed up by OSINT as well as Ukraine’s battle “points” awarded according to provable kills, in which 3AC is usually leading when compared to other Ukrainian units).

Jackie points out, however, that Ukrainians have advanced past legacy doctrine and that Western commanders and planners need a feedback loop with people on the ground to keep up with what’s happening: “We’ve all been doing this for four and a half years. We are super experienced now. The operational planners who did this are elite. Sometimes you get a graduate of some war college somewhere with two pumps in the Middle East that says ‘I know everything about war and the Ukrainians should do this and that’... if you want to learn something by the way you actually have to participate in this fight. And I’m trying to constantly give out calls to Western forces... to come over here and do some work with us.”

“The theory of battle for the Ukrainians is really good. So they have a strategic deep strike campaign that’s punishing the Russian economy. At the operational level we have the midstrike campaign” targeting Russian logistics, “forcing them to have to vacate” their forward positions due to the extension of the gray zone. He adds: “The ground game is really important. If we lose the fortress belt, there will not be time for the midstrike campaign to pull Russians back. There will not be time to continue to do damage on the deep strike campaign and make the political actors in Russia pay.”

One new element of Ukrainian doctrine Jackie mentions is the need for standoff. 3AC maintains “control of ground space that enables us to continue to intercept Russian drones overhead. Russians are not able to get rocket artillery and other mass fires in range of the city of Izium.”

He says, “There is no contact line. There’s like a contact zone and that zone is 30 km across.” He emphasizes that this contact zone or “gray zone” is not a confused or messy jumble on the ground; Ukrainian commanders know where their men are positioned. But in this zone, human maneuver and logistics are severely constrained.

Dmytro said that Ukrainian forces attempted to bypass wooded areas and cut off Russian logistics, instead of sending infantry first. Ukrainian forces also continued shooting down the larger drones the Russians were using for resupply, which had a crippling effect on morale. “The enemy infantry begins to feel that no one needs them and that no help or support is coming,” he said. “Their morale becomes very low, and we make progress. Then they surrender or start fleeing.”

The principle behind the aforementioned infiltration tactics applies also to the enemy’s defense, as Jackie explains: “Where there’s just Russians all over the place that nobody cares about, and clearing them out is a pain... Driving a column across the gray zone is not an option to make an assault. That’s definitely not what we did for Vivaldi. So we had the ground drones on logistics, but also attack ground drones that were being air dropped behind the Russian line and then isolating and either fixing or destroying in many cases those isolated pockets of Russians on defense.”

UGVs are also more effective in this role than UAVs because “The Russians are going to have to fight that drone for a period of time. They’re going to have to resource Russian effectors to support the Russian fight against that drone. So in that local area this is creating ... massive chaos for whatever company’s area that drone got dropped into... they’re going to totally miss the infantry assault that’s actually approaching and being shaped towards them... some of those ground drop drones were technically like objectives for assault units to go and support... It gives everybody a lot of confidence on the assault to know that we already have a friendly force in the local area and so everybody gets moving faster as well.”

Jackie says that the soldier’s primary weapon is becoming the drone, and his pistol (secondary weapon) is being replaced by the shotgun for defensive use against drones. Yet he concedes that “there’s only one job in the military and that’s infantry. Nothing has changed about that. For all the drones... [What matters is] the ground game right in front of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk with those infantrymen.” But clearly, from all the other quotes above, we can gather that the nature of the infantryman’s work is rapidly transforming into something entirely different from closing with and destroying other infantry with rifle fire and grenades.Therefore Jackie’s point is taken to be that humans and the ground they occupy remain the ultimate tactical objective of the drones that increasingly occupy the buffer zone between them and the enemy’s forward line of humans.

Applying this notion back to the larger operational concept, we can say that combined unmanned-systems warfare, together with advanced mission command and a proper military culture based on initiative and trust, can allow unmanned systems to maneuver through the enemy’s tactical depth before human forces ever advance into the resultant pre-cleared areas.

Take it from the 3rd Army Corps: “Infantry wins wars, but we protect our infantry, which is why the robots go to the enemy first."

For deeper dives from Xen, you can follow him on X, Substack, or his personal site.

David Kirichenko is a Ukrainian-American freelance journalist who has been covering Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, and is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X: @DVKirichenko.

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

Beijing says artificial intelligence will give the state a visible hand to allocate capital. Here’s the rub: Washington’s economic authority sits in five places, and none of them is in command.

This column begins a four-week series ahead of The Cipher Brief Threat Conference on economic-warfare. The author is hosting a live session on this topic with former Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, General Bryan Fenton (Ret.). Apply now to attend.

On September 26, the President answered the week's largest security question in just four words: "I'm rejecting their deal." Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days, in exchange for lifting the blockade and waiving oil sanctions, had been on the table since September 24. It received its answer in public, from the one official authorized to give it, inside forty-eight hours.

The week's economic questions received no answer of that kind. The trade truce with China, and the pause on Beijing's rare-earth licensing regime tied to it, moved from November 10 to January 10 on the strength of a Treasury Secretary's statement; Beijing has yet to publish a matching notice.

The Russia sanctions act the President signed on September 18 requires determinations on the largest buyers of Russian energy by October 18, a deadline set by Congress rather than the executive, with waivers broad enough to let it pass unenforced. In February, the Supreme Court ruled six to three in Learning Resources v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize tariffs, removing the instrument the executive had used for its broadest tariffs.

This is important because Washington can decide a war in a sentence. But on the economic front, authority rests with Treasury, Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative, Congress, and the courts. Each is competent. None is in command. The arrangement is by design and has served the country well for most of the last eighty years. But not anymore.

Beijing is now claiming a different design. In a recent lecture on Xi Jinping's economic strategy, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who has tracked Chinese ideology for fifty years, described a shift in the Communist Party's theoretical literature. Artificial intelligence (AI) and other "new quality productive forces" are portrayed not only as sources of productivity but also as "a superior macro-allocation mechanism for resources," driven by algorithms. Rudd says the literature now uses the term "the visible hand of the state," offered for the first time as a rival to the market's invisible one. He is careful about its status: the idea sits in the ideological literature, "not yet in the policy literature," and not yet in the behavior of firms. But in his reading, ideology in China is where policy begins.

The hand is already visible without the algorithm. The rare-earth regime now paused until January, the Ministry of Commerce's Announcement No. 61, applies to any product anywhere that carries more than 0.1 percent Chinese-origin rare-earth content by value. One ministry notice imposed it; one more can reimpose it. The capital moves the same way. Chinese households, burned by property and wary of equities, hold record savings in low-yield bank deposits, and the state draws on those deposits through local, provincial, and national loan instruments to fund its technology bet. Rhodium Group puts China's AI capital spending at 932 billion renminbi this year, double last year's, financed by state banks and equity placements rather than bond markets.

America's AI buildout is financed the other way. Its five largest builders raised a net $163 billion in debt in the first half of this year, compared with $90 billion in all of 2025, in a bond market where the ten-year Treasury has reached 5.18 percent, its highest since 2007. No ministry allocated that capital. The market did, and the market will reprice it.

Neither design is simply superior, and the distinction matters more than the verdict. A single allocator is fast and brittle. It can direct capital, licenses, and supply to a strategic target within a week, and it can misallocate at the same speed. The household savings now financing the AI bet were poured into a property boom that left many of those households with assets worth only a fraction of what they paid. A distributed system is slow and resilient. Its errors stay local, its capital carries a price, and no single notice can switch it off. In peacetime competition, resilience compounds. In economic warfare, tempo is the contested variable, and the side that can decide within the other's cycle sets the terms. Beijing has already shown what that looks like. It imposed its rare-earth regime by notice on October 9 of last year and suspended it by another on November 7, having collected in between Washington's agreement to delay its own rule extending export controls to the affiliates of blacklisted firms. Two notices, one month, one American concession.

This column has traced the same gap from the drone fleet to the power grid: the capacity exists, and the decision does not. The economic front shows it at national scale. Washington holds the reserve currency, the deepest capital markets, and the reach of the dollar system. What it lacks is a place to settle competing claims on those instruments and to make them binding on the timeline decided by an adversary.

October 18 is the first live test. The sanctions act's determinations are due that day, just sixteen days before the midterm elections. They will be imposed, waived, or deferred, and whichever it is will say more about the American economic hand than any strategy document published this year. Beijing will be watching the same date, holding a notice it can publish on any morning it chooses.

The question for Washington is who, when economic warfare requires a decision, is empowered to make it, and whether that decision can arrive before the adversary's action. Coordination assigns. Integration arbitrates.

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

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

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

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

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

Not the First Warning to Go Unheeded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Military Intelligence Could Not Have Gotten this Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Half of the Ledger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Sweden is Actually Building

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frictions and Objections

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

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

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

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

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

What Washington Should Do, and What Stockholm Should Ask For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Warning is Not a Decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D-Day Sanctions Regime

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

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

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

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

So, Who Has More at Stake?

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

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

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

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

Speaking of Regime Change

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

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

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

Where Are We Now?

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

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

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

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

Where Are We Going?

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

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

Unintended consequences, after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expensive Confetti

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

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

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

Built in Munich

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

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

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

What an American Flag Would Actually Mean

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

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

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

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

What It Has Not Happened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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