The Cipher Brief

Washington announced permanent control of Greenland on Friday. The two governments that must ratify it announced, in the same breath, that the text recognizes their sovereignty. Both ideas cannot be the settled meaning of an agreement neither parliament has seen.The President’s post gave the United States “permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland,” with no adversary permitted a base or a “sensitive investment” on the island without American approval; the Defense Secreta

Here is a prediction from inside the compliance trenches: the CMMC Reform Task Force closed its sixty-day review on September 11 and is now finalizing recommendations for the Department of War's Chief Information Officer, with a public report expected within weeks. When that report lands, read it knowing what its authors cannot quite say aloud — there is no good answer. Every option in front of them loses. The program they were convened to fix is not a regulation that went wrong. It is one move

Excerpt from Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and WestWhen Spies was first published in 2023, it made front-page news with the chilling revelation that the Russian government had reached an advanced stage in planning an assassination on American soil.Russia's target was Alexander Poteyev, a former officer in the SVR, Russia's foreign intelligence service, whom the FBI and CIA had recruited as a spy. Poteyev betrayed one of Moscow's most closely guarded secrets: its network of deep-c

Having spent most of my life working in “advanced nations” that have strategically accentuated financial and professional services growth while outsourcing manufacturing to the lowest cost jurisdiction, the rise of reindustrialization policies has shocked many by its rapid ascension and acceleration of mission investment.Reindustrialisation is core to the sovereign aspirations of many nations driven by the need for national, economic and societal security underpinned by supply chain diversity an

In the years following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, much of the world treated the region as strategically peripheral - unstable, exhausted, and largely disconnected from the future of global security. Policymakers assumed the consequences of state collapse and civil war would remain regionally contained.They did not.The vacuum that emerged across Afghanistan and its surrounding region ultimately produced transnational terrorism on a scale that reshaped global security for two decades.

Washington has accomplished an important feat by stealthily moving oil through the Persian Gulf despite Iran’s proclaimed closure. But the means it has relied on can’t become normal maritime behavior.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on August 27 that the United States had facilitated the movement of 130 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in the preceding two weeks. That amounts to over 9 million barrels per day (bpd), roughly half of pre-war exports through the chokepoint.M

For the first time in years, large swaths of Yemeni territory are changing hands. The Houthis’ recent losses in the east of the country were quickly followed by a string of victories along the Red Sea coast that brought the group closer to the Bab al-Mandeb strait. Early readings that the eastern losses marked the beginning of the regime’s collapse have since proved premature. Yet the regime’s latest expansion does not resolve its core problems either, at best it mitigates them.What has emerged

President Trump announced this weekend that the United States had secured majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves through a partnership with private business.That is a big number. But it is not the number the oil and gas industry will be focused on.Venezuela already has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. It produces only about 1.25 million barrels a day. That gap tells you a lot about what comes next.Sixty-five billion barrels of reserves

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 be

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

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

If China attacked Taiwan tomorrow, the question might not be which aircraft carrier sails first to the Pacific, but whether a private company will activate satellite coverage over a small island. As Ukraine does today, Taiwan could soon depend on the choices of executives running commercial networks that sustain modern life. Ukraine’s wartime resilience has relied on more than 40,000 Starlink terminals and the voluntary actions of technology firms that became, in effect, auxiliary actors of nati

Eighty years ago, the architects of our first dual-use revolution whispered that they had “become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Today, a new power commands that same existential awe. It was born in elite laboratories, the product of massive government and corporate investment. It is an immense, power-hungry technology, requiring vast, specialized facilities and staggering amounts of energy to sustain its core operations. For decades, the public has viewed it with a mix of awe and dread, feari

We may soon face conflict with nation-states in a new model of warfare—one not defined by geography, but instead defined by AIs competing directly with one another. War has always been a ruthless teacher: adaptation, learning, and feedback determine who prevails. In the sixth domain of warfare—AI-driven conflict—that cycle of teaching accelerates beyond human limits. Machine systems do not just execute decisions; they absorb outcomes, update models, and refine strategy continuously and at scale.

On September 9, Oracle reported a cloud backlog of $664 billion — up $209 billion from a year earlier, an order book the size of a mid-cap national economy on hand for delivery over the next several years. That same week, PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 65 million Americans across thirteen states, was still processing a December 2025 capacity auction it had cleared 6,625 megawatts short of its reliability target — the first shortfall in the operator's history — at a record clearin

PERSONAL REFLECTION -- Majestic blue skies greeted me as I turned into the Pentagon’s North Parking lot on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. As I made my way into work, I was thinking less about what the day might bring—life as a Joint Staff action officer could often feel like Groundhog Day—and more about the beautiful fall morning.Less than three hours later, I would leave the Pentagon emerged in a profoundly different world, greeted by billowing black smoke rising into that same blue sky a

One remaining mystery about 9/11 is why there have been no attacks of comparable scale since. But, with the combination of new motivations, enhanced means of delivery and AI -devised payloads there should be no cause for complacency.9/11 changed everything. It led to two decades when the United States and much of Europe became fixated on Islamism. Western strategists became fluent about half absorbed subjects such as Wahhabism, Pashtun tribal customs, Frontier Crimes Regulations, and the Anbar A

In “Aftermath,” a 1919 retrospective poem on his war, Siegfried Sassoon asked: “Have you forgotten yet?” “Look up,” he appealed, “and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.”[1] With the approach of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I have been reflecting on that terrible day and how we remember it. Specifically, I was comparing how we recall it with how we recall the only other comparable event in American history: Pearl Harbor. Admittedly, I was only nine years old in 1966 on th

This is the talk Dave Pitts gave at the Sarajevo Security Conference in September 2026, which was based on the talk presented at the Cognitive Security Institute Conference in August 2026. Dave has identified Decision Autonomy as a key battle in the cognitive domain and a new front in strategic competition.In 2022, Russia expected Ukraine’s political leadership to fracture in the face of pervasive disinformation, subversion, efforts to decapitate the government and to persuade Russian-speaking U

At the 25th anniversary session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an alternative model to Western alliances.Mr. Xi urged developing nations and the Global South to leverage “SCO wisdom” to argue for a more equitable and orderly multipolar world and reform of global governance institutions like the United Nations. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, and other guest delegations were in attendance for this anniversary se