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The $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Without a Strategy

“This is not at all a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget. This is a budget-driven budget. If you look at the Truth Social posts by the President [Trump] and the statements of the people around him, he [President Trump] makes very clear that this budget was driven by a budget number, a budget target, an arbitrary level that was set based on five percent of last year's GDPThey set this arbitrary level and then at relatively the last minute in the budget development process the [Defense] Department was told come up with a request that gets you to this number, this 1.5 trillion number. And so they did.”That was Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute and one of the nation's top experts on defense strategy and the defense budget, speaking last Tuesday at the Brookings Institution as part of a panel on The FY 2027 defense budget: How much is enough?Remember, as I wrote last week, the Trump FY 2027 defense request is for 1.15 trillion with another 350 billion request to be placed in a FY 2026 reconciliation package; and there now also is the new FY 2026 supplemental request, which has another 67 billion for the Defense Department.House members have been weighing all the defense numbers and this week may be voting on a FY 2026 reconciliation package of 95 billion with only 73 billion for defense – far less than what was being sought.Last Tuesday, Harrison went on to explain what may have been going on: “I say it is absolutely not a strategy-driven [FY 2027 defense] budget because they didn't have to make hard choices. They made some easy choices.”As an example, Harrison said, “Do you want, you know, a fourth generation fighter jet? Buy some new fourth generation [F-15s]; or do we want to continue buying the fifth-generation fighters like the F-35 we have in production; or do we want to invest in sixth generation fighters? Do all of them, right? You can do all three at once, if you have a virtually unlimited budget, you don't have to make those hard tradeoffs.”And, in fact, all three are included in the proposed FY2027 defense budget.But Harrison goes on to suggest another way to view this Trump defense budget giant increase saying, “There's still a limit to how much the department can consume in terms of this fundingbecause I don't think they [the Trump budgeteers] actually intend this to be like a one-year budget authority number, especially with the reconciliation [set at 350 billion]. I think it is actually more like a five-year budget number that they're trying to get pre-funded up front, but they actually plan to spend it at a slower pace over the next five years.”Harrison also looked at “the parts that I think absolutely don't belong in here are these big pots of money they created in defense-wide accounts that have very little description with them.”For example, he picked out “54 billion in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) line item. That is a single program element that's got 54 billion in it,” Harrison said. “That's unprecedented. If you read the budget description with it, it gives very little detail. You know, it's [clears throat] supposed to be investments in drones and things like that, but like tell usquantities, tell us specific types of drones, like tell us what you're going to be using it for, and that detail is not there.”Harrison went on, “It appears they haven't figured that out yet, so I think 54 billion is quite a reach, trying to ask for that much money for something that has not yet been well defined. So, I think that there are areas here where they've really overshot and they've tried to just throw everything in there and ask for a super high number. And I wonder if they almost expect that they're not going to get that full number -- that Congress will cut them back down quite a bit. But they were just trying to reach that overall 1.5 trillion level.”As Yahoo Finance pointed out earlier this month, the 54 billion for DAWG sought for FY 2027 is 243 times greater than what DAWG got this year, and “now exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of 52.8 billion and represents nearly 15 of the entire 350 billion reconciliation package.”Harrison’s view: “You get to the endgame, Congress is going to have to sort through this and say, ‘Okay, what are the what things in here are serious things that really do need to get funded one way or the other, and we'll have to figure out how to make that happen, and what are the other things that were just budget gimmicks or just filler?’Harrison was not the only expert on last Tuesday’s Brookings panel.Joining him were David Wessel, who runs Brookings’ tax and fiscal policy in the economic studies program; and Mara Karlin, professor at John's Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, who has worked for six Defense Secretaries over her career.Wessel took a broader financial view saying, “The President is proposing a big defense budget at a time when we have unsustainable fiscal trajectory, and so I think that raises an important question and that question isbudgeting is about tradeoffs and the President and Congress at the moment seem to be avoiding trade-offs. There are ways we could offset if defense spending is really important. We should think about ways to pay for some of it either by cutting some other places in defense or raising taxes. And there's some ideas floating around on that, but none of them are politically popular.”Wessel also raised two other issues: “I think it also requires some trust on the part of the public that the money is being well spent and that relies on Congress doing oversight. And secondly, that we are sticking with a military that is nonpartisan and follows the leadership of the President and the Congress, but is not totally politicized. And I'm afraid that the trust in the military is being eroded by some of the personnel decisions that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is making. And I think that's a problem.”As for Karlin, she referred to the Trump national strategy and focused on what she called “a break with the bipartisanship that has characterized how folks have thought about these threats for a long time.”Karlin noted, “The real emphasis of this [Trump national] strategy is on the Western Hemisphere, right? The real threat is seen in this strategy as these alleged narco-terrorists as they're so namedSo, that's the priority.”But, she adds, “You then see China mentioned, but in a pretty circumscribed way, just the first island chain. And in general, the language reads a lot softer than almost any recent defense strategy. You see a desire to downgrade involvement in European affairs, a little bit of mention of the Middle East, but in no way signaling that we would be starting this massive [Iran] conflict. And so here's where I think, there's some confusion worth highlighting because traditionally a national defense strategy is a decoder ring. It's going to tell you where the Secretary of Defense will put their energy and attention.”“When we look at this budget, this very large budget, that's really at kind of World War levels,” Karlin said, “and frankly, the number [1.5 trillion] isn't really merited by the strategy.”She explained, “If one were really to just prioritize the Western Hemisphere and this quite circumcised focus on China as a major threat, and not be involved in most other regions of the world, in fact, the Trump administration could have put out a quite tiny defense budget request. So I leave you with a bit of perplexity.”Two more things Harrison mentioned need recording.“I forgot to address the [Trump] battleship issue,” Harrison said at one point, “because you know that's in here and far from defending it, I think that's one of those examples of things that got thrown in because they didn't have to make tough choices.”Then he explained, “No one in the Navy can say with a straight face that we're going to go from starting a brand-new, clean-ship design in FY 2027, to procuring the lead-class [battle]ship in FY 2028, to going to all the way by FY 2031 being at full rate production, ready to buy them at one per year. That doesn't pass the laugh testAnd so are we just setting ourselves up to spend a few billion dollars chasing, you know, this weird idea before we eventually have to cancel it and then things go back to the way they were before.”Finally, Harrison said, “I think there needs to be some fundamental look on the congressional side at just how do we reform the budget process to get it working again; open the aperture to things like changing the start date of the fiscal year [which now begins October 1], re-jiggering the committee structure.”I believe Harrison is questioning why each year the Armed Services Committees in both the House and Senate each authorize spending programs, and then the House and Senate Appropriations Committees set the actual dollar-level of funds made available for that year.“You know,” Harrison said, “I'm talking a lot of third rails here, but I think we're at that kind of point like we were in the early 1970s where Congress realized it [the budgeting process] just wasn't working. I think that they need to do some serious inward-looking reform like that.”I agree, having twice worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, and followed defense spending over the past 60 years. Harrison is right – the Legislative Branch system for passing Executive Branch funding needs to be repaired.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

2 days ago

Ankara's Charm Offensive Should Not Buy Back the F-35

The choreography in Ankara last week was impressive, even by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's standards. Cannons fired, mounted honor guards paraded, and jets flew overhead trailing red, white, and blue smoke as Donald Trump arrived for the NATO summit. By the time the two leaders sat down together, the American President was already telling reportersthat Turkey has been much more loyal than other allies, and that reinstating Ankara into the F-35 program is certainly something we will consider. He went further, promising to lift the sanctions imposed under CAATSA after Turkey's 2019 purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system.Washington should slow down and reconsider any such move. The temptation to reward Erdogan for a good show of pageantry and for playing a useful back channel to Tehran is understandable. But the case for readmitting Turkey to America's most sensitive fighter jet program does not hold up, and the reasons go well beyond the S-400 that got Ankara expelled in the first place.Let’s start with Turkey’s original sin. Turkey was removed from the F-35 program precisely because the S-400 system stationed on Turkish soil poses a collection risk to the F-35's stealth signature and sensor data. Nothing about that system has left the country. Trump's own suggestion that he has no concerns at all about Turkey operating Russian and American systems side by side ignores the technical judgment his own administration reached in 2019: an S-400 battery within range of an F-35 is an intelligence-gathering platform aimed at the jet's most guarded secrets.Turkey now appears it wants to atone for its sins: In the days that followed the NATO summit, well-placed sources in Ankara announced Turkey’s intention to sell or transfer its S-400s to another country, possibly Qatar or the United Arab Emirates. Doing so may satisfy the letter of the law, section 1245 of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which bars F-35 transfers to Turkey unless Washington certifies Ankara no longer possesses the S-400.Then come regional concerns. Israel has lobbied hard against the F-35 sale, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that Turkish F-35s would erode the air superiority that guarantees Israeli and American posture across the Middle East. Athens and Nicosia have made similar appeals, citing Turkey's continued military pressure in the Aegean and its decades-long occupation of northern Cyprus. These are warnings from allies and partners who would sit on the receiving end of Turkish airpower upgraded with fifth-generation stealth.But there is a fourth danger that has drawn far less attention in Washington, and it may matter more than any of the others: Turkey's telecommunications backbone is no longer fully Turkish. The country's leading systems integrator, Netaş, is roughly 48 percent owned by ZTE, and Huawei is deeply embedded in the networks operated by Turkcell, Türk Telekom, and Vodafone Turkey. Under China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, that ownership is not a passive investment. Beijing can compel any Chinese firm, anywhere it operates, to hand over data on demand, and corporate assurances of independence carry no legal weight against that obligation.Washington has already treated this exact problem as disqualifying. In 2021, a 23 billion F-35 and drone package for the United Arab Emirates collapsed, in part because Huawei was building Abu Dhabi's 5G network and American intelligence had identified a suspected Chinese military-linked facility at Khalifa Port. Turkey’s embrace of Chinese telecoms also cuts against the Alliance’s moves towards securing the critical infrastructure underpinning its military mobility — the bridges, rail links, and digital networks that allow allies to uphold deterrence. Across the continent, these networks have become a critical target over the course of the war in Ukraine, as adversarial actors linked to Russia use grey zone tactics to undermine collective resilience and damage alliance cohesion. Washington increasingly views countering this threat as a top priority. In May, the Trump administration urged NATO members to spend a portion of the 1.5 percent of GDP allocated to defense-related spending on removing Huawei components from their domestic networks, highlighting the vulnerabilities posed by Chinese equipment and hacking campaigns such as Salt Typhoon. While that call is already being heeded by several NATO allies — Sweden and the UK have been particularly proactive in securing their systems — Ankara remains a laggard, undermining its contribution to alliance interoperability. The risks are not simply tied to the F-35 itself, but to its entire operating environment. If sold, the fighter will be operating within an ecosystem saturated by Chinese-produced telecom equipment, reliant on a deployment infrastructure whose roots directly tie back to Beijing, operated by a capital pulling in the opposite direction of a key Alliance priority. While the U.S. has heavily invested in protecting the F-35, no system is ever fully secure, and any sale would force the jet to operate in a vulnerable environment for decades to come. Turkey’s pending S-400 sale may remove dangerous hardware, but it does not eliminate the systemic risk associated with the deal.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

5 days ago

25 Years After 9/11, the Next Global Shock Could be Worse

The next 9/11 is unlikely to be another terrorist attack of equivalent scale nor a cyber-attack nor even another pandemic. The next global shock may be the use of nuclear weapons assisted by the more casual attitudes of less responsible world leaders and the lack of popular understanding and fear.Journalists around the world are already working on their articles for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this autumn. Most assume that the focus should be on Afghanistan and the renewed threat there from ISIS-K (the Khorasan province of the Islamic State terrorist group) and from the remaining elements of Al Qaida. A United Nations report alleges that both groups are surviving if not prospering in Afghanistan. But history tends not to repeat itself and, although President Biden's evacuation of Afghanistan following President Trump's Doha Agreement with the Taliban was a costly error, there are no signs that either group could carry out an attack of the magnitude of that terrible day in New York and Washington.the scourge of terrorism...is much closer to homeThe scourge of terrorism will, of course, continue and nowadays it is much closer to home, both in West Africa and inside our own countries where isolated young men self-radicalise in their bedrooms and then take a kitchen knife or the family car and attempt to do their worst.In the 1990s Western governments worried a great deal about chemical and biological (CB) terrorism, particularly after the Aun Shinrikyo attack on the Tokyo subway. In London there was concern about a mass casualty attack on the London Underground. But a CB attack is extremely hard to undertake and that very complexity means that security services should become aware of planning.Since 9/11 security services have become much more skilled at monitoring terrorist preparations. No agency on earth can expect to surveil every disgruntled loner (nor should that be the expectation) but Artificial Intelligence (AI) will greatly assist services around the world, flagging, for example, unusual travel patterns and the purchase of precursor materials.Indeed AI would surely have joined the dots prior to 9/11 after the British had warned of attacks in New York involving the hijacking of airliners by AQ and the Americans had other evidence including unusual flying school requests.So, if not terrorism, then what is going to provide the next global shock to rival Pearl Harbor and 9/11? In the mid-2000s the assumption was that it would be a cyber-attack. Richard Clarke, a special advisor on cyber security at the White House, wrote Cyber War (Harper Collins, 2010) which evoked an image of modern cities reduced to quasi stone age existence with air traffic control and hospitals paralysed, banks and financial transactions frozen, heating and air conditioning no longer functioning and fuel quickly running out. Cyber defences are now much stronger although AI will provide a boost to the capabilities of both attacker and defender. This is at the heart of the current debate about Anthropic's Mythos.Covid 19 could be viewed as the successor to 9/11 in terms of global shock. It was, of course, a tragic event and there is a danger of seeming callous when observing that the World Health Organization estimated that 0.09 of the global population died (although the real figure may be slightly higher). By contrast the Black Death between 1347 and 1352 is estimated to have killed 40 of Europe's population. However the impressive and fast development of vaccines during Covid and the value of AI in shortening timelines for vaccine development and testing suggests that another pandemic might be shorter and therefore less devastating. On the flip side malign actors could use AI to develop more virulent diseases.The extraordinary developments in warfare in Ukraine since 2022 should make governments and populations worry about the use of drones closer to home. They will surely become the routine tools of rogue states, terrorists and assassins. It is remarkable that the first (and so far only) drone assassination attempt took place back in 2018 against President Maduro of Venezuela since when Ukrainian development of drone technology has been exponential. It is only a matter of time before we see them used in a domestic context, perhaps against critical infrastructure such as nuclear reactors. All countries need to prioritize counter drone systems and some (particularly UK) require an emergency program to develop a coherent missile defence capability.a willingness to play nuclear rouletteHowever by far the greatest danger of a massive global shock would come from the use of a nuclear weapon in anger for the first time since 1945. From 1945 to 1990 the world lived in dread of nuclear war. Films like The War Game (1966), Fail Safe (1964) and even the darkly comedic Dr Strangelove (1964) achieved genuine popular traction. Hot lines and fail-safe mechanisms were devised to minimize the danger of accidental war. Politicians liked to believe that the non-use of these weapons was due to effective mutual deterrence but, in truth, there were too many near-misses (between 9 and 22 according to a scan of reputable think tanks) for that to be a convincing argument. 45 years of nuclear non-use may sound impressive but barely moves the needle when thinking of the future of the planet and humanity.Since the Cold War that fear of nuclear weapons seems (for no good reason) to have largely evaporated at a popular level and world leaders now make threats in a relatively casual manner. One must aim off for deterrence requiring leaders to assert their willingness to use such weapons in extremis but President Trump, President Putin, India's Prime Minister Modi and Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir have all been quoted indicating a willingness to use nuclear weapons in less than extreme circumstances.Furthermore there has been a willingness to play nuclear roulette by firing missiles and drones near nuclear facilities. The Russians did this before seizing the Zaporizhzhia power plant and have subsequently fired missiles near Chernobyl. Iran appears to have targeted sites in the vicinity of the Dimona nuclear facility and the Indians, on 10 May 2025, deliberately hit Pakistani bases (such as Sargodha) where nuclear capable aircraft are known to be based.In the 2000s much thought was given to preventing nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists with a particular worry about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal being accessed by AQ or other regional groups. Both Presidents Bush (junior) and Obama believed this to be a top global threat, Obama famously insisted that The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short term, medium term and long term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon. Fortunately the dual concerns about Pakistan descending into chaos and its army becoming Islamist have since receded.populist leaders cannot be trusted with weapons of such powerConcerns about rogue Islamists have been replaced by a wider concern that increasingly populist world leaders cannot be trusted with weapons of such devastating power. Since the Millennium there has been a tangible decline in the standards of global governance. Just compare the key leaders at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis (Kennedy, Khrushchev, MacMillan and De Gaulle) with some of those controlling nuclear arsenals today (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Modi, Asim Munir, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un). The former four had witnessed world wars at close quarters.In academic circles there is much debate about the dangers of AI being used inside nuclear decision-making with a particular insistence that there must always be a human in the loop. Faster missiles lead to shorter decision times, making serious and informed human consultation virtually impossible. A retired senior Pakistani officer told the author that Pakistan had 25 seconds to consider the implications of the eleven Indian cruise missiles launched against its air bases on 10 May 2025. (A quick check of AI gives a figure of 29.77 seconds). At the time Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was asleep. The temptation to delegate decision-making to AI could be hard to resist. However the AI debate is of secondary importance. AI might eventually mitigate human fallibility and anyway it hardly matters if the world is destroyed by a bad decision taken by AI or a human.The use of even one nuclear weapon might be enough to shake the world out of its astonishing apathy about the nuclear threat. Rutgers University demonstrated that a war between India and Pakistan involving 150 nuclear warheads would lead to over a hundred million deaths and a climatic and environmental disaster leading to mass global starvation. A report submitted to the 10th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2021 reiterated these risks and then, bizarrely, called for more research into the effects of such weapons (as if there was not enough evidence) and questioned their legality under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as if any user is going to summon their legal advisers.One thing is for sure. The use of modern nuclear weapons would relegate 9/11, Pearl Harbor and Covid 19 (and even Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to such a distant category of global shock that the very comparison would seem absurd.Remember March 2020 when nobody could believe that the world was locking down due to a pandemic. A nuclear war will not be about an inability to join dots but another massive failure of human imagination.Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Cipher Brief Expert. He was an advisor to the British government on overseas counter-terrorism from 1996 to 1999 before advising Ministers on Asia (including the Indian Subcontinent) from 2005 to 2008.This article first appeared on the website of RUSI-The Royal United Services InstituteThe 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

6 days ago

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Winning Battles, Losing Strategy: Why Military Superiority No Longer Guarantees Victory

America’s battlefield dominance remains unmatched, but Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran shows that tactical success increasingly fails when military power is not matched by a coherent political strategy.No military in modern history has possessed the technological reach, global mobility and combat capability of the United States. Yet, its greatest battlefield victories have increasingly produced some of its most difficult strategic dilemmas.This contradiction lies at the heart of American military intervention over the past several decades. Washington has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to defeat formidable opponents, overthrow governments and deploy troops across vast distances. But military supremacy has not always produced the stability, legitimacy or political order American policymakers sought.Afghanistan revealed the limits of occupation and state-building, ending not in lasting transformation but in the return of the Taliban in 2021 after their initial ouster by American forces twenty years earlier. Iraq showed how removing a hostile regime could unintentionally strengthen Iran’s strategic position and deepen regional instability. Iran itself has proven resilient, with external pressure often hardening rather than weakening its strategic posture. Meanwhile, the Arabian Gulf has become an unpredictable region, where security, energy and great-power rivalry intersect with global consequences.These cases raise a central question: why do tactical victories so often produce strategic setbacks?The answer lies in the changing character of ‘limited war,’ in which military superiority remains decisive on the battlefield, but political endurance increasingly determines strategic outcomes.The Post-War Pattern: Tactical Success, Strategic FrustrationThe paradox at the heart of American military intervention is neither new nor uniquely American.Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has repeatedly demonstrated an unparalleled ability to project power globally. From Korea and Vietnam to the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, no nation has matched America’s technological sophistication, logistical reach, intelligence capabilities, or ability to sustain expeditionary operations over long distances. This record is well documented in studies published by the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Army War College Press.Yet history demonstrates that battlefield dominance alone does not guarantee political success.The Korean War (1950-53) ended in containment rather than reunification, while Vietnam (1965-75) exposed the limitations of overwhelming firepower against an adversary willing to absorb enormous losses in pursuit of political objectives. The Coalition victory in the 1991 Gulf War reinforced the belief that precision-guided weapons, advanced command-and-control systems, and overwhelming technological superiority had fundamentally transformed warfare.Following the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), many policymakers concluded that American military superiority could reshape political realities well beyond the battlefield. Historical assessments by the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian and the U.S. Army Center of Military History trace the evolution of these campaigns and their strategic consequences.While military force remains highly effective at defeating conventional armies, destroying infrastructure, and removing governments. It has proven considerably less effective at building legitimate political institutions that can endure after foreign forces depart. As Carl von Clausewitz argued in his classic work, On War, war is an extension of politics by other means. Military victory therefore achieves little if political objectives remain undefined, unrealistic, or ultimately unattainable.The challenge confronting modern intervention is not one of military capability but of strategic translation. Tactical victories increasingly fail to produce durable political outcomes because the post-intervention political environment is often more complex than the military campaign itself. As scholars of strategy, such as Lawrence Freedman, and the research communities at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) have argued, the decisive challenge for modern military power is no longer winning the battle but securing a sustainable political end state.Iraq: Breaking the Anti-Iran BulwarkThe invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein from power but also eliminated Iran’s principal regional counterweight.What Washington saw as a decisive blow against a hostile regime became, in strategic terms, a gift to Tehran.The collapse of Iraqi state institutions created a vacuum filled by sectarian competition, militia politics, and external influence. As Iraqi institutions weakened and political fragmentation deepened, sectarian identities grew more powerful, armed groups gained legitimacy, and the state’s monopoly on force eroded.Iranian influence expanded through political allies, security networks, and Shia militias that embedded themselves in Iraq’s evolving political, post-Saddam order.In an ironic twist, the U.S. intervention in Iraq was meant to reduce internal danger and violence; instead, it fostered a more favourable environment for Iran and the country’s political influence.The United States spent enormous blood and treasure removing a regime that had contained Iran for decades. In seeking to eliminate one threat, Washington disrupted the regional balance and inadvertently strengthened another. Historically, Iraq stands not only as an example of a military campaign governed by ‘shock and awe,’ but remains a stark warning about the unintended consequences of overthrowing a state without understanding what will replace it.The occupation of Iraq damaged U.S. credibility in the Middle East by disrupting power balances without a clear post-war strategy.It increased uncertainty among allies, created opportunities for rivals, and enabled Iran to expand its influence, reshaping the strategic landscape and contributing to greater instability.Afghanistan: The Limits of Military OccupationNowhere is this paradox of modern limited war intervention more apparent than in Afghanistan.The United States and its allies rapidly dismantled Taliban rule following the attacks of 11 September 2001. Within months, al-Qaeda’s sanctuary had been destroyed, Taliban formations dispersed, and a new Afghan government established under international protection. Militarily, the campaign was remarkably successful. Contemporary assessments of the campaign and its objectives are documented by the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian and the CFR.The challenge emerged only after the battlefield had been won.Over the next two decades, Coalition forces invested enormous resources attempting to build functioning political institutions, professional security forces, and a democratic state capable of sustaining itself. Yet legitimacy proved far more difficult to establish and sustain than military capability. Extensive investigations by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) repeatedly highlighted the disconnect between military achievements, governance reform, corruption, and institutional resilience.Corruption, weak governance, factional politics, and ongoing insurgent pressure steadily eroded public confidence in Kabul’s authority. The human, financial and strategic costs of the intervention have been comprehensively documented by the Brown University Costs of War Project.The Taliban understood a fundamental principle of limited war: they did not need to defeat NATO militarily, only to outlast the West’s commitment to supporting Kabul.As domestic political support in Coalition capitals diminished, strategic patience shifted in favour of the Taliban-led insurgency. The collapse of the Afghan government in 2021 demonstrated that two decades of military success could not compensate for the absence of enduring political legitimacy. Subsequent analyses by the CFR and the SIGAR conclude that institutional fragility ultimately proved more decisive than Coalition military capability.Afghanistan, therefore, offers a broader lesson. In modern limited wars, technologically superior powers often discover that destroying hostile forces is considerably easier than replacing the political order those forces once sustained.The lesson from Afghanistan is not unique.In modern conflicts, technologically advanced militaries increasingly find that battlefield success is becoming decoupled from political outcomes. This reflects a broader evolution in limited war, where endurance, legitimacy and the capacity to impose continuing costs frequently outweigh conventional military superiority.Recent assessments by the RUSI, the CSIS and the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI) increasingly argue that political resilience and strategic endurance have become as important as battlefield dominance in determining the outcomes of contemporary conflicts.Conclusion: Rethinking Military SuccessThere is an old regional saying that, rather than killing the snake, repeated attempts to strike it often make it more dangerous.The 2026 Iran War is the starkest test of that proposition in a generation.The US-Israeli military campaign that began on 28 February inflicted severe damage on Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure and, according to multiple reports, killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Judged by the metrics Washington and Jerusalem set—degrading capability and decapitating leadership—the campaign appeared to succeed.Yet strategic outcomes are far less straightforward.Reporting from Reuters, the BBC, and other outlets indicated that despite the shock of the strikes, the Iranian system moved quickly to preserve continuity. The Revolutionary Guard and other coercive institutions positioned themselves as defenders of a nation under attack. This pattern aligns with longstanding scholarship on external pressure and authoritarian resilience, which shows that coercion may consolidate regimes as easily as it weakens them. Iran’s economy was battered, its proxies pressured, and its deterrent credibility damaged, but the outcome Washington most wanted to prevent—regime survival—persisted.This is not a defence of the regime, nor an argument that the strikes were unjustified.Rather, it is an argument that force applied without a coherent theory of political aftermath can entrench the very resilience it seeks to break.Iran has been hit hard, but it has also adapted, hardened, and become more difficult to read strategically. That unpredictability does not stop at Iran's borders; it radiates outward, especially across the waterway connecting Iran to global markets.The lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran is not that military intervention should never occur, nor that the United States should retreat from its global responsibilities.Instead, the character of limited war is evolving in ways that increasingly favour politically resilient adversaries over technologically superior expeditionary powers.This shift has become a recurring theme in contemporary strategic analysis published by the RUSI, the CSIS, and the MWI.Cheap autonomous systems have fundamentally altered the economics of military power.During the Cold War, technological superiority rested upon expensive platforms fielded by a handful of industrialised states. Today, relatively inexpensive drones, AI-enabled targeting systems and commercial technologies have dramatically lowered the barriers to resistance, enabling weaker actors to impose disproportionate costs upon militarily superior opponents.Recent assessments by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), CSIS, and RUSI suggest that the strategic premium once attached to technological superiority is steadily being eroded.Meanwhile, democratic powers continue to operate under political constraints imposed by public opinion, electoral cycles, international law, alliance commitments, and coalition management.Their adversaries often face far fewer such limitations.Victory is therefore no longer determined solely by military technology, but increasingly by which political system can sustain the contest for longer.This observation reflects the enduring insights of Carl von Clausewitz and later strategic thinkers such as Robert Endicott Osgood, whose work Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (1957) emphasised the intimate relationship between military operations and political objectives.The United States remains the world’s most capable military power.Nothing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran diminishes that reality. These conflicts, however, reveal that military superiority alone no longer guarantees strategic success.The ability to destroy an adversary’s military capability is no longer synonymous with the ability to shape the political environment that follows. As recent analyses by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and RUSI continue to argue, the decisive challenge for modern armed forces increasingly lies in translating battlefield success into enduring political outcomes.The challenge for American policymakers is therefore not simply how to strike harder or faster, but how to ensure that military action serves coherent political objectives capable of enduring long after the shooting stops.Great powers rarely decline because they lose battles.More often, they decline because they mistake military victory for strategic success.Military technology can destroy armies. It cannot, by itself, create political legitimacy.Until strategy gives equal weight to what happens after the battlefield falls silent, even the most technologically advanced militaries will continue to confuse tactical victory with strategic success.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

6 days ago

Cold War 2.0 Will Be Won by Private Capital

The next Arsenal of Democracy will be built as much by investors, entrepreneurs, and operators as by government.Cold War 2.0 is not coming, it’s already here. This version will not be fought only with tanks, missiles, ships, and proxy armies. Those still matter, but much of the real competition is taking place through capital markets, technology, critical minerals, supply chains, ports, telecommunications, manufacturing, energy, intellectual property, and information.Put simply, much of the modern battlefield now sits in the private sector.China understood this years ago. The Chinese Communist Party does not separate commercial activity from national strategy the way we often do in the West. Beijing treats finance, industry, technology, diplomacy, intelligence, media, and military power as parts of the same system.The United States should not copy that model. But we do need to recognize what we are competing against. Our answer should be to unleash something authoritarian systems struggle to replicate deep, innovative, risk-tolerant capital markets. Unleash free market capitalism!Economic security and national security are now inseparable. Government cannot realistically compete across every company, transaction, technology, and supply chain. Private capital, industry, and experienced national-security professionals must become a much larger part of the response.China has already weaponized capitalThe CCP Belt and Road Initiative is probably the clearest example.It is usually described as an infrastructure and development program. That is true yet incomplete statement. It also combines state-backed financing, ports, telecommunications, mining rights, construction, energy, logistics, commodity access, and political/media influence.A port is not just a port when it sits on a critical trade route. A telecom network is not merely commercial infrastructure when it carries government and economic data. A mine is not just a commodity asset when it controls access to materials needed for semiconductors, weapons, batteries, and advanced manufacturing.Beijing understands that capital can create strategic leverage without firing a shot. It can lock up supply chains, shape political decisions, create economic dependencies, and establish long-term access.The West has spent too much time debating whether this is development, competition, or coercion. China has simply kept investing. The answer is not more bureaucracy or a watered-down version of Chinese state capitalism. The answer is Western capital showing up with a better proposition: better governance, stronger local partnerships, durable jobs, superior technology, and financing that does not come with hidden strategic strings.You cannot warn countries away from Chinese money while offering nothing credible in its place.Private capital is ready for the next chapterOver the last decade, private capital poured into early-stage companies across defense, AI, autonomy, cyber, space, communications, robotics, energy, and advanced manufacturing.That movement mattered. It helped create a new generation of national-security companies outside the traditional defense-industrial base.But startup land is no longer the only opportunity.A much larger pool of capital is now looking for what comes next. That includes growth equity, private equity, infrastructure funds, family offices, pension capital, and institutional investors that may not want early-stage technology risk but understand industrial businesses, hard assets, recurring cash flow, and long-duration infrastructure.The next phase is not just building new companies. It is acquiring, recapitalizing, modernizing, and scaling strategic assets that already exist.That includes mines, processing facilities, ports, defense suppliers, energy infrastructure, semiconductor capacity, logistics networks, telecommunications, and advanced manufacturing.It also includes rebuilding advanced and autonomous shipbuilding capabilities. The United States does not simply need better ship designs. It needs modern yards, modular production, digital engineering, robotic fabrication, advanced materials, and the ability to produce autonomous surface and undersea systems at scale.Capital that modernizes shipyards and expands autonomous maritime production is not investing in just another industrial theme. It is investing directly in deterrence.These sectors are not merely investment categories. They are components of national power.Private equity already knows how to fightNone of this requires inventing a new financial discipline.Private equity firms, distressed investors, activist funds, and turnaround specialists already know how to identify weak assets, acquire companies during periods of dislocation, restructure liabilities, replace poor management, consolidate industries, and create value where others see a mess.In many ways, corporate raiding and economic warfare are already part of the private-equity world. The terminology may be different, but the mechanics are familiar: pressure, leverage, information, timing, capital, and execution. The opportunity now is to pursue profit while also strengthening the economic and national security of the United States and its allies.That does not mean investors should accept poor returns in the name of patriotism. The model only works if the investments are commercially sound.Buy the mine because it is undervalued and strategically important. Recapitalize the manufacturer because it can generate a return and rebuild domestic capacity. Finance the port because it is a good asset and reduces adversarial leverage. Modernize the shipyard because it can become profitable while restoring critical naval capacity.Profit and patriotism do not have to be competing ideas.A modern Letter of MarqueThere is a useful historical precedent.In the early United States, Congress could issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Privately financed vessels were authorized to capture enemy shipping under a legal framework established by government.The private sector supplied the ships, crews, and capital and accepted the risk. Government defined the adversary, set the rules, and provided legal authority.The modern lesson is not that investors should be turned loose to seize assets outside the law. It is that America has used public authority before to direct private risk-taking toward national objectives.A modern equivalent would be financial, legal, and commercial. It could include tax-advantaged national-security funds, political-risk insurance, export-credit support, allied co-investment vehicles, faster regulatory review for strategic acquisitions, purchasing commitments, and carefully managed threat briefings for vetted investors.Government sets the conditions.Private capital finds the opportunity, performs the diligence, assumes the risk, improves the asset, and earns the return.That is not piracy. It is economic statecraft through markets.Government should set the objective, not run the dealGovernment has an important role, but it needs to understand its limitations.It should identify strategic priorities, provide clear demand signals, enforce laws, share appropriate threat information, and create incentives where markets are not properly pricing national-security risk.What it should not do is try to become a venture capitalist, private-equity manager, or operating executive. A venture-capital model is useful: signal the problem, invite multiple solutions, fund in stages, establish measurable milestones, scale what works, and stop funding what does not.We do not need another innovation command or working group that spends two years admiring the problem.We need clear objectives, credible markets, and room for professionals to execute.The Americas should be the first major testThis approach is especially important in Latin America.Chinese capital has expanded across the region through mining, energy, ports, telecommunications, logistics, agriculture, and manufacturing. Washington cannot simply warn governments and business families about Chinese influence and expect them to walk away from available financing.Western capital must compete.A modern economic Marshall Plan for the Americas should be driven largely by private investment, working alongside aligned governments, local families, entrepreneurs, and industrial groups.The pitch should be practical: better capital, better governance, stronger local partnerships, more jobs, and a business model that leaves more value in the country.That is how Chinese influence gets displaced—by offering something better, not simply issuing warnings from Washington.The fiscal argument mattersThere is also a major federal-budget advantage.Under the traditional model, government identifies a strategic need, appropriates taxpayer money, creates a program office, hires contractors, and carries most of the financial risk.Private capital changes that equation.Investors fund the companies and acquisitions. They absorb losses when investments fail. When they succeed, they create jobs, profits, tax revenue, industrial capacity, and stronger supply chains.Government gains capability without paying the entire bill.This does not eliminate the need for defense budgets, grants, procurement, or public infrastructure. Some missions only the government can perform. But every strategic capability financed primarily by private investors is one less burden placed entirely on the federal balance sheet.That is not deficit reduction through austerity. It is deficit reduction through growth, investment, and a larger tax base.Capital is becoming an instrument of national powerCold War 2.0 will be shaped by AI, autonomy, cyber, space, critical minerals, energy, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, autonomous shipbuilding, logistics, and financial networks.The next Manhattan Project will not be one building or weapons program. It will be an ecosystem of investors, entrepreneurs, private-equity firms, family offices, corporations, universities, operators, and national-security professionals working toward aligned outcomes.The CCP has shown what centralized state power can do when fused with capital.The West’s answer should be the full mobilization of free enterprise.Cold War 2.0 will be won as much in boardrooms, factories, ports, shipyards, bankruptcy courts, and investmentcommittees as on traditional battlefields.Capital is not simply financing the arsenal anymore.Capital is becoming the arsenal.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

6 days ago

The Pentagon Built a Faster Engine, Nobody Built the Steering

The Department of War has just executed the most ambitious acquisition reform in six decades. It scrapped JCIDS — the requirements process that ossified innovation for a generation; replaced program offices with portfolio executives, and built a Warfighting Acquisition System designed for speed. The changes deliver on years of reform proposals. They also risk repeating a costly mistake of the post-9/11 wars: chasing evolving threats with rapid fixes while no one is responsible for understanding them. Industry will help determine which path prevails.Counter-drone fight as test case. We’ve seen this movie beforeConsider the counter-drone fight, the clearest test of the new system. Washington treats it as an engineering puzzle: build a better jammer, field a cheaper interceptor. The technology shelf is full — directed-energy weapons at 12 a shot, drone-on-drone interceptors with more than a thousand kills in Ukraine. While the technology works, the process for getting it to the warfighter does not. Soldiers today engage FPV drones that cost a few hundred dollars with 400,000 Stinger missiles, because the cheap interceptors proven in Ukraine still have no fast path into U.S. formations. A new drone variant appears on the battlefield every week, built from commercial parts and open-source software. A firmware update that defeats a jammer costs nothing and takes hours. Our counter, even through the reformed system, takes months.This is not a technology gap. It is a cycle-time gap. And I have seen it before. From 2010 to 2013, I led the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force at the height of the counter-IED campaign in Afghanistan. The structural parallels are exact: cheap dual-use components, knowledge that spreads faster than countermeasures, adaptation at near-zero cost, tactical variation that defeats one-size-fits-all solutions, and an institutional reflex to throw technology at a systems problem. We spent 75 billion on counter-IED and lost that fight anyway. Drones are IEDs that fly.The part nobody owns Here is what the reforms miss: Successful innovation runs in six phases — detect, define, develop, deploy, assess, distribute. The reforms invested almost entirely in the middle two, develop and deploy. Nobody persistently monitors how the threat evolves at the tactical edge. Nobody scopes each unit’s problem with enough precision to drive useful solutions. Nobody measures whether fielded systems actually work against an adversary who adapts after every engagement. And nobody moves what one unit learns to every other unit facing the same threat at operational speed. Three of the six phases have no organizational owner. The department built a faster engine. Nobody built the steering — the mechanism that decides which problems the engine should be pointed at, whether the solutions worked, and who else needs to know. Industry’s new roleThat gap is the industry's opportunity — and its obligation. The DoW can’t solve this problem by itself. Companies that want to matter in this market need to do their part. They should start by doing three things differently.First, invest in problem discovery, not product pitches. Requirements still originate in headquarters, not from soldiers watching the problem in context. The companies that win the next decade will be the ones that put engineers and business developers forward with operational units to understand problems before proposing solutions. The quality of your solution is determined by the quality of the problem you choose to solve. Einstein’s formula applies: 55 minutes on the problem, five on the solution. Most of industry has that ratio inverted.Second, build for adaptation, not for the requirement. If your product cannot change in weeks — modular hardware, software-defined behavior, upgrades at firmware speed — it is obsolete on delivery. The adversary’s development cycle runs in days. A requirement frozen at contract award is a snapshot of a threat that no longer exists.Third, plug into the new portfolio structure as a sensor, not just a supplier. Industry keeps asking the department for a clearer demand signal, and fairly so. But the demand signal has to come from somewhere, and the fusion cells that Portfolio Acquisition Executives need — nodes that merge ground truth from the field with what industry and the labs know is possible — cannot function without industry feeding data in and absorbing assessment data out. Companies that operate at that tempo will define the portfolios. Companies that wait for RFPs will trail them.Doing these three things means stopping three others. Stop building to frozen requirements and calling it responsiveness. Stop treating a prototype contract or a demo-day win as the finish line — it is the starting line of the assessment the department never runs. And stop spending capture budgets decoding what headquarters wants instead of discovering what the warfighter needs. The hours are the same; the direction is not.New authorities need new operatorsNone of this works without people, and people are where the reform agenda is thinnest. The department is converting the Defense Acquisition University into a Warfighting Acquisition University, trading compliance training for scenario-based judgment. That is the right instinct. But this year’s defense authorization offered little else on workforce, which means the authorities changed faster than the people who must wield them. We know what works: experiential, problem-first education. Hacking for Defense has spent a decade putting university students to work on real national security problems alongside the people who own them. It has produced a generation of founders and public servants who know how to interrogate a problem before building a solution. That model needs to scale — into the department’s schoolhouses, into two-way exchanges between government and industry, and into industry’s own training pipelines, which today produce engineers who have never seen the field and capture teams fluent in the FAR but not in the mission.The department has reformed how it acquires. It has not yet reformed what it acquires, whether it worked, or who else needs to know. Industry can wait – and hope – the government will close that gap, or it can help close it — by discovering problems opportunities at the edge, building for adaptation, and educating a workforce trained to out-cycle an adversary rather than out-comply a regulation. In this fight, the adversary does not need to out-technology us. He only needs to out-cycle us. We have already paid 75 billion to learn where that leads.Pete Newell is a retired U.S. Army colonel, former director of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, and CEO of BMNT. He co-created Hacking for Defense with Steve Blank and is the author of “The Innovation Targeting Cycle.”The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.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

6 days ago

The West Must Tell Russians the Truth About the War

Tell the Russian people about the carnage in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Tell them about the Russian lives lost and the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of a sovereign nation. Former President Ronald Reagan ensured that he got information into the former Soviet Union to truthfully speak to the people about their government’s lies about the cost – in lives and money – of their war in Afghanistan. After ten years, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the final chapter in the Cold War.Russia’s Vladimi Putin seemingly doesn’t care about the Russian lives lost or the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of Ukraine. Over 1.4 million Russian casualties (killed, wounded, missing, or captured), and over 500,000 killed at a cost of over 500 billion. Are the people in Russia aware of the magnitude of this tragedy? Are they aware of Mr. Putin’s view that Ukraine has no right to exist and he is justified in invading a sovereign Ukraine that gave up its nuclear weapons for security assurances?Indeed, Ukraine’s casualties are over 600,000, with close to 140,000 killed, including 16,000 civilians. The cost so far is close to 600 billion, with a price tag of U.S. 1 trillion to reconstruct a devastated Ukraine. This is the price Ukraine is paying because of the Russian invasion and Mr. Putin’s goal of attempting to recreate the Russian empire.President Donald Trump has reached out to Mr. Putin numerous times to secure a cease fire and an eventual peace treaty. To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful, but Mr. Trump persists, fortunately. But until we secure a cease fire, Ukraine needs the support of the U.S. and the European Union, for the weapons and missile defense systems needed for its survival. Fortunately, the recent NATO Summit of 32 allied countries reaffirmed their strong support to Ukraine, pledging 70 billion Euros to Ukraine and giving Ukraine a green light to produce PATRIOT missile interceptors.But the U.S. – and our NATO allies -- can do more to get the truth to the Russian people. The truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians killed in Ukraine and the bereaved families that are paying the ultimate price.Although the United States Information Agency closed in October 1999, it transferred its important mission to the Department of State. And hopefully our colleagues at State are working hard to ensure that we are getting the message to the Russian people that the war must end; that they and the people in Ukraine have suffered enough. That Mr. Putin and his cronies need to explain why so many men and women died, in a war Mr. Putin created, as he enriches himself. A war that has made the Russian Federation a pariah state.This should be a whole government mission: to disseminate primarily in Russia the truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians (and Ukrainians) killed and maimed in a war created by an arrogant and inept Putin. Although the audience for this important message is the Russian people, China should also be mindful of the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, China is aligned with a Russian pariah state, heavily sanctioned by the international community. Is this the image China wants to share with the world? The NATO Summit was clear in its support of Ukraine, the victim of a cruel and brutal Russian invasion. It’s time for the Russian government to listen to the Russian people and end this bloody war.The author is the former associate director of national intelligence. All statement of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

1 week ago

A Master List of Espionage Targets, Suspected Spies, and Potential Recruits

It was with alarm that I read the recent New York Times article reporting the regurgitation of a truly terrible idea that, like a bad meal, continues to come up every several years. The Times reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligenceis demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list, to avoid inadvertent conflicts between agencies and to better track foreign intelligence threats in real time.A primary task of any corporate security department or Federal counterintelligence activity is to prevent, deter, and detect human and technical compromises of sensitive information. Even innocent errors can result in massive damage when they reveal sensitive information. Nor is it a secret that any large organization, no matter how carefully it screens its people, may have persons in its ranks who would betray their colleagues and their country. And of course, malign foreign actors routinely seek to access U.S. information systems and classified computing resources. Just as a comprehensive list of CIA employees, including covert officers serving in dangerous locations, would be of great value to any number of foreign adversaries, so too would the proposed list of espionage targets, suspected spies, and potential recruits. And the drawbacks associated with creating such a list are significant - and potentially catastrophic. The mere process of assembling the relevant data from within separate departments and agencies would require the assembling of multiple intermediate lists -for example, all subjects of interest from multiple operating components of the FBI, CIA, and additional agencies, each one of which would pose a separate significant and potentially catastrophic counterintelligence vulnerability. Compiled into a single comprehensive set, the theft or leak of the combined list would work incalculable damage to the United States. Similar proposals have been made for decades. At the very best, they are a solution in search of a problem; for every time two or more agencies trip over one another in the pursuit of intelligence opportunities, there are literally hundreds more occasions in which the existing deconfliction arrangements work exactly as they should. I spent several years in an ODNI policy position when the Office was first created. From time to time I encountered colleagues from one or another part of the Government, or from outside the Government completely, who sought to establish policies and procedures to address some obscure, long-since resolved, or simply imagined pet peeve. While some concerns truly reflect structural obstacles and warrant serious consideration, sometimes the most responsible thing to do is simply draw the line and withdraw a truly bad proposal. This is one of those times. Jonathan M. Fredman is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. He spent 36 years in legal and policy positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author's views. The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.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

1 week ago

Afghanistan Lost the Cognitive War Before It Lost the State

The collapse of Afghanistan in August 2021 is still widely interpreted as a military or political failure. That interpretation is incomplete.Afghanistan collapsed because it lost the cognitive war long before it lost territory.Inside the system, we did not face a simple insurgency. We faced a persistent contest over how reality was defined, how legitimacy was perceived, and how decisions were made. The Taliban did not defeat the Afghan state by force alone. Regional actors did not undermine it through proxies alone. The deeper failure was this: the Afghan state never fully aligned its political identity with the way its people understood themselves.That misalignment became a vulnerability - and in the gray zone, vulnerabilities are not observed; they are exploited.The Cognitive Gap at the Center of the StateEvery state rests on an implicit agreement between its people and its institutions: a shared understanding of identity, legitimacy, and purpose. In Afghanistan, that agreement was never fully stabilized.The modern state carried the name “Afghanistan,” historically associated with a specific ethnopolitical identity. Yet the lived reality of the country was far more complex-linguistically, culturally, and historically. For many citizens, identity was rooted not in the modern state construct, but in a deeper civilizational memory: Khurasan.This was not nostalgia. It was cognition.Khurasan represented a mental map that connected Herat to Nishapur, Balkh to Bukhara, Kabul to a wider intellectual and cultural ecosystem. It was inclusive, fluid, and expansive. Afghanistan, by contrast, became a bounded political construct, defined by borders drawn through imperial competition and reinforced through centralized power struggles.This divergence created a cognitive gap: the state operated under one identity framework, while large parts of society operated under another.In a stable environment, such gaps can be managed. In a contested environment - especially under gray zone pressure - they become strategic liabilities.From Identity Misalignment to Decision FailureCognitive gaps do not remain abstract. They translate directly into how decisions are made.Inside government, this misalignment manifested in three critical ways.First, trust was fragmented. Decisions that should have been based on competence and mission effectiveness were filtered through identity, faction, and perceived alignment. This weakened institutions at their core.Second, intelligence was politicized. When leadership does not share a stable understanding of the state it governs, intelligence becomes contested terrain. Information is not only collected - it is interpreted through competing lenses of identity and interest.Third, legitimacy was shallow. Citizens interacted with the state, but many did not internalize it as fully their own. That distinction is decisive. A state that is not cognitively owned cannot be strategically defended.These were not theoretical weaknesses. They shaped daily governance, security coordination, and strategic planning. And they created the conditions for external actors to operate with precision.Gray Zone Exploitation: Attacking the Mind, Not the BorderAfghanistan became a textbook case of gray zone competition.Regional actors did not need to defeat the state conventionally. They exploited its cognitive vulnerabilities.Pakistan leveraged identity divisions through the Taliban, framing them as authentic defenders of religion and tradition. Iran used cultural and sectarian narratives to extend influence in parallel networks. Russia and China approached Afghanistan as a space of managed instability, where influence could be expanded without direct confrontation.These were not isolated actions. They were coordinated forms of cognitive warfare - targeting how citizens perceived their state, their leadership, and their future.As one senior U.S. official recently noted, modern adversaries are engaged in a “persistent, persuasive campaign of cognitive warfare shaping how societies see reality, trust, and decide.”Afghanistan was already vulnerable to such campaigns because its internal narrative was never fully consolidated.The Taliban’s Cognitive StrategyThe Taliban’s success cannot be understood without recognizing its cognitive dimension.They did not present themselves only as a fighting force. They presented themselves as a corrective identity, a return to authenticity, faith, and order. At the same time, they framed the Republic as externally imposed, corrupt, and disconnected from the society.This narrative was not universally accepted. But it did not need to be. It only needed to create doubt.Cognitive warfare is not about replacing reality. It is about degrading confidence in reality.As trust in institutions eroded, as leadership appeared divided, and as international commitment became uncertain, the Taliban’s narrative gained relative strength. The battlefield shifted from territory to perception. By the time military collapse came, cognitive collapse had already taken place.The Strategic Vacuum: Who Defines Khurasan?One of the most dangerous developments today is the appropriation of the term “Khorasan” by extremist groups such as ISIS-K.This is not accidental. It is strategic.When legitimate actors fail to define identity, adversaries will weaponize it. ISIS-K uses “Khorasan” to project a mythical, apocalyptic narrative designed to attract recruits and legitimize violence.This creates a second-order threat. Not only is the state weakened, but its deeper civilizational identity is being redefined by actors who reject its intellectual, cultural, and inclusive legacy.In cognitive warfare, naming is power.If Khurasan is defined by extremists, it becomes a tool of radicalization. If it is reclaimed as a civilizational identity rooted in knowledge, trade, and coexistence, it becomes a counterweight to both extremism and fragmentation.The Failure of State-Building as Cognitive StrategyThe international intervention between 2001 and 2021 achieved significant tactical and developmental gains. But it failed to address the cognitive dimension of state-building.Institutions were built. Capacity was developed. Elections were held. But the deeper question - how the state was understood and internalized by its people - was never fully resolved.This produced a structural imbalance:A state that functioned administratively but not psychologicallyA security force that fought effectively but lacked a unified narrativeA political system that operated formally but remained contested internallyIn effect, we built a state without fully securing its cognitive foundation.Toward Cognitive RealignmentAny future strategy for Afghanistan - and the broader region - must begin with cognitive realism.First, policymakers must recognize that identity is not symbolic. It is operational. It shapes legitimacy, decision-making, and resilience under pressure.Second, engagement must move beyond traditional state-building toward cognitive alignment. Governance structures must reflect the diversity and lived reality of the population, not impose narrow frameworks that generate resistance.Third, investment in cognitive infrastructure is essential. Education, narrative development, and diaspora engagement are not secondary tools, they are central to long-term stability.Fourth, the region must be reframed. Afghanistan should not be treated solely as a battlefield or buffer. Historically, as Khurasan, it functioned as a connector of regions, ideas, and economies. That perspective remains strategically relevant.Conclusion: Stabilizing MeaningThe lesson of Afghanistan is not that state-building is impossible. It is that state-building without cognitive alignment is unsustainable.For two decades, we focused on stabilizing territory, institutions, and security forces. We underestimated the importance of stabilizing meaning - how people understood the state, and whether they believed in it.In modern competition, that is where advantage is decided.The next battlefield is not territory. It is perception. It is cognition. It is the ability to shape how societies interpret reality and make decisions.Afghanistan did not lose only because it was attacked. It lost because it could not fully define itself in a contested cognitive environment.Reclaiming Khurasan, therefore, is not about returning to the past. It is about restoring a coherent, inclusive framework of identity that can withstand manipulation, resist fragmentation, and support legitimate governance.Until that alignment is achieved, any political structure - no matter how well funded or defended - will remain vulnerable.Because in the end, states do not collapse only when they lose control of land.They collapse when they lose control of meaning.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

1 week ago

Washington’s Spy Ring and Paine’s Democracy

Agent 711 was one of the most effective and least known spies in our nation's history. He used dead drops to communicate about enemy plans. He used secret chemical processes to create new forms of invisible ink. He spread disinformation to disguise his own troops' movements and confuse the enemy. The year was 1778. Agent 711 was George Washington. He was our nation's first spymaster, and his network of informants was the Culper spy ring. It was one of several that he ran through the war and also during his time as president. Washington's army was undermanned, underfunded, frequently on the run. He knew he needed an edge, and he found it with intelligence. A British intelligence officer later said Washington did not really outfight the British — he simply outspied us.At the same time, as a young nation was leaning heavily into its very first intelligence community, Thomas Paine was inspiring a nation to democracy. He had ideas about equality, rights, and the limits of government — revolutionary ideas for the time. He had ideas about power: it was not a divine right handed down to a monarch, but power rested in the hands of the people. Government borrows that power for a time, within limits. The representatives of that government are meant to be of the people and return to lives among the people, not to be separate or above or disconnected from what's going on among them.Thus, our nation was born, not out of a tension between intelligence and democracy, but as an alchemical mix of both. We carry these ideas forward into a modern context. Power rests with the people. They loan it to the government. We trade some of our liberty for things that no one person can provide — roads, the power grid, police, submarines, national security. In exchange, we demand things of our government: accountability, adjustments, change, transparency. But we also demand security, and we demand economic prosperity. That's the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness part.It's easy to forget that there are still those in the world who wish to take these things away from us. It's also in part generational — today’s college graduates were not alive during 9/11 or had maybe just been born. There are still terrorists and cartels who wish to take life. China seeks to take liberty — they want to subjugate people to their will, as they've done in Tibet, in Hong Kong, as they're attempting to do in Taiwan. Russia wants to end the pursuit of happiness. Some men truly do just want to watch the whole world burn to make themselves feel better, and Putin is one of those. Rather, they want happiness on their terms. This looks like power for the elite few oligarchs around Vladimir Putin, while he sends the poor to fight his war in Ukraine. It looks like the ruling elite of the CCP and their little princelings. They want order. They want to take liberty to hold power. The state has shown, in their case, security, but only for the few.Why? Because liberty is messy. It is a struggle. It's making our own way while everyone else does the same. It's making space for ourselves and for each other, and when those spaces conflict, we figure it out. Thomas Paine wrote that “when we speak of rights, we ought always to unite them with the idea of duties — rights become duties by reciprocity: the right which I enjoy becomes my duty to guarantee to others, and he to me.” So today we are the guarantors of each other's rights. In Paine's time that looked like representative democracy and a little bit of revolution. Today, specifically with regard to spy work, it is a hard concept to wrap your head around — it's actually protection of rights by proxy.In my pocket I carry a coin — the first one made for the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which I served for six years. On one side is Washington's seal, to represent our very first spymaster and to honor the intelligence officers who were so instrumental to the birth of this nation. But there are also two sets of stars on this coin. There's a set of 15 around the outside that represents the 15 members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who represent the entirety of the Senate. And then on the other side there are a hundred stars representing the Senate as a whole.Why are there two layers? The 100 senators represent the entire country. The 15 members of the committee represent the Senate. Just as Washington went to great pains to encode secret messages and hide what he knew from the British army, secrets today must stay secret — the more people who know a thing, the less likely something is to stay secret. The intel committees are there to be the eyes and ears of the entire Senate or the House, and by extension the nation. These committees were designed to bring things back into balance.During the 1960s and 1970s, another time of intense national upheaval, the IC got way out of hand — spying on political figures like Martin Luther King, attempting assassinations of foreign leaders, and engaging in massive propaganda campaigns. The Church and Pike committees united to investigate and create both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, to provide permanent, comprehensive oversight to keep this balance.People who don't know intelligence work think that it's all-powerful and full of abuse. They see the spy thrillers that are in the movies. They think the 1970s continue today. But people who do know it, know it's a microcosm of liberty. It's messy. It's flawed. But it's also full of checks, balances, and people doing the right thing. These are my friends and former colleagues. They look like me. They look like you. They miss dinners with families. They put themselves in harm's way. They don't get parades. They don't get early boarding on flights. They don't get military discounts. They just do the work.For us as a country, I fear there are rough seas ahead. We face two revisionist powers that, like King George III, believed that one person should be in charge through might alone. These people want to set up a false choice: freedom or security, not both. But the truth is that freedom and security are deeply intertwined. It is fear that leads to that false choice. On the one hand, dictators fear chaos — they think that people will come to understand that their oppressive dear leader does not, in fact, have their interests at heart. The supposed strongman is actually terrified. He's desperate to hold on to power. On the other hand, amongst some, there is fear the security mission will take over and become too big, too powerful, lodged in the hands of someone who is too power-hungry. But the goal is balance. We need Washington's spy ring. We also need Paine's ideals. And we need them working together.One further reflection on that Paine quote: the rights I enjoy, I also guarantee to others. This is perhaps most true for those who operate in the shadows. They guarantee the rights of fellow citizens day in and day out, with a million small decisions, even when no one is watching. Democracy enables good spy work — only in a democracy can you walk into the Oval Office and deliver truly terrible news to power, tell the president things have gone sideways, and work together to fix it.Spy work also makes democracy possible. I look forward to a day where there are no enemies; no one who seeks to assert ultimate power over others. That day I will have happily worked myself out of a job. But it is not today. Today I am fully employed attempting to create deterrence, know our adversaries, create a future of peace through strength. I have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution four times in my life, and hopefully one day I'll do it a fifth, but inside government or out, trying to work for democracy, for freedom, for a secure America and a secure world is the mission.The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.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

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