The Cipher Brief

The Army's Armored Force was born in July 1940, a few weeks after France fell. No act of Congress created it, and no budget line funded it. The Chief of Staff ordered it into being, took the tanks from the infantry and the cavalry, and placed them under a single commander. The money came later, once the force had demonstrated what it could do with what it already had. The idea had been waiting since 1928. The force did not wait for its appropriation.Last week, I argued that the Autonomous Warfar

The U.S. will be holding mid-term elections on November 3, to elect the people’s representatives to enact laws, provide oversight and represent the people. In sharp contrast, China’s ruling Communist Party (CCP) announced that it formally expelled 33 senior political and military officials, in line with President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption purges, as Mr. Xi prepares for a fourth term as President of China next year. This will give Mr. Xi twenty years unquestionable power.The U.S. and China obvi

CNN reported, citing four sources familiar with the episode, that the U.S. military prepared to intercept a Chinese vessel after an AI-assisted intelligence report misidentified its cargo. According to CNN, the report incorrectly concluded that the ship was carrying components of a nuclear weapons program. Some of CNN’s sources said troops prepared to board the vessel and military aircraft were already airborne. Officials discovered the error before the planned operation. CNN could not establish

The technical aspect of incident response can be immense. In extreme scenarios, such as the NotPetya incident in 2017, global organisations such as the shipping company Maersk found the speed and scale of the malware’s impact to be unlike anything they’d seen before.Computer screens turned black. Employees sprinted through the offices demanding that colleagues disconnect their devices. Almost immediately, the infrastructure and systems underpinning a vast network of port operations, vessels and

The Intelligence Community has decided AI agents are coming. It has not decided how they will be supervised, checked and held to analytic standards. In April, CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said analysts will soon work alongside AI “coworkers” that draft key judgments and check them against tradecraft standards, and that within a decade officers will manage teams of AI agents. In August, DIA’s Chief AI Officer, MG Robert Kinney described this path as “building agents, and then agents with age

A battalion of armed robots moves against a unit of soldiers, aiming to seize territory. In the ensuing battle, the robots open fire, communicate with one another and change tactics as needed. Air cover is provided by uncrewed drones; logistical support and supplies are delivered by a separate team of robots. Territory is taken, prisoners captured. When the battle is over, the attacking side has lost several drones and robots, but no human beings have been killed or wounded. Science fiction? Har

American access to Australian bases is only as valuable as Australia’s ability to keep them operating under attack. For Washington, expanding military cooperation raises an operational question: can Australia sustain an American campaign while defending its own territory, infrastructure and population?For Canberra, the corresponding question is whether investment in national resilience is keeping pace with Australia’s growing usefulness to American operations. Both governments need convincing an

“The [U.S. Naval Support Activity Bahrain] base and Fifth Fleet headquarters have been rendered largely inoperable for their original functions, with repairs estimated at $400 million… Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle and other senior defense officials stated that the Navy will not return to full normal operations at the Bahrain facility anytime soon…Because the Juffair surrounding area [to the U.S. Bahrain Navy facilities] is considered unsafe, [U.S. Navy] major logistical and por

In 1928, Secretary of War Dwight Davis ordered the Army to assemble an experimental mechanized force of tanks, armored cars, and motorized infantry at Camp Meade, Maryland. It was disbanded within months. A second attempt was dissolved in 1931, when the Army told each of its branches to mechanize itself. The infantry kept the tanks, the cavalry built “combat cars” to work around a law that gave tanks to the infantry, and the United States created its Armored Force in July 1940, weeks after Franc

Which came first: The Cloister at Sea Island, the Office of Strategic Services, or the CIA? The resort wins. The Cloister first opened in 1928, fourteen years before the OSS and nineteen before CIA. It was a fitting setting for The Cipher Brief’s 10th Threat Conference, where conversations returned repeatedly to a question familiar to generations of intelligence professionals: how do we adapt quickly enough to meet the threats ahead?Over three and a half days, national security practitioners (we

OPINION — A recent survey of African youth challenges conventional wisdom on foreign aid. Policymakers should take heed of their views as they design the future of U.S. foreign assistance to increase effectiveness and American soft power on the continent.We ask a lot of our aid to Africa. Over the years, it has saved countless lives from HIV/AIDS and malaria, fed the hungry, stopped pandemics, and increased farmers’ yields. We take it for granted that our good intentions are appreciated by Afric

NATO Allies have bet the future of European skies on the world’s most sophisticated combat aircraft. NATO Allies are buying the world's most advanced fighter but many are neglecting vital investments in hard security, ground crews, and support systems that will keep it flying.By 2028, European flight lines will host upwards of 700 F-35 Lightning jets. On paper, this inventory represents an insurmountable technological edge: a sensor-fused, fifth-generation fleet that outmatches any potential adv

“We never fight alone. We've never done that. You can go all the way back to the days of Revolutionary War. The United States has never gone into conflict on its own. We've always built coalitions. We've always involved partners and allies. And we'll continue to do so going forward.”That was Gen. Ronald P. Clark, Commanding General, U.S. Army Pacific Command, speaking last Tuesday at a contemporary military forum, Decisive Landpower -- Deterrence and Partner Integration Against the Pacing Threat

On October 15, a Vietnamese state-owned tanker, the PVT Azura, departed St. Petersburg with 109,000 barrels of Russian diesel. It is due at Norfolk on November 2, at a facility that the shipping journal gCaptain reports serves the American military, a detail no official has confirmed. It will be the first Russian diesel to reach an American port since 2023. On October 23, Russia's deputy prime minister said three tankers were at sea, that supply contracts were being finalized, and that volumes w

On the morning of October 23, the cargo ship Khoryv sent a distress call 13 nautical miles off Constanța, Romania. Territorial waters end at twelve. Whoever flew the drone that sank her knew where the line was, and chose to stand one mile outside it.That mile is the story. It is the difference between an attack on a NATO member and an incident in a NATO member's exclusive economic zone. It is the difference between Article 5 and a press release. The London insurance market understood this before

Economic statecraft has become a primary instrument of US national security, deployed with a frequency and ambition that outpaces the intelligence architecture built to support it. For sanctions, tariffs, investment screening, export controls, and development finance to succeed, the United States must fully leverage the data and intelligence available to it. Now is the time for the IC to organize itself around the discipline of economic and financial intelligence. The IC has long struggled to pr

Over the last century, modern medicine achieved a historic feat. We increased the human lifespan by 33%. But at the same time, we completely failed to defend our brain healthspan. Today, a silent gap of 15 to 30 years exists between the time our bodies survive and the time our brains remain vibrant, innovative, and fully functional. It is a terrifying paradox. Medical science has advanced so much that a newborn today can realistically expect to live to 100, if not 120 years old. Yet, we passivel

A7’s OpenAI prompt was six words long: "Translate [name] to [language]. Answer only translated text."Developer code leaked in 2025 from A7—the Kremlin-linked payment network designated by Treasury on October 1 as “a significant transnational criminal organization”—shows A7 used this prompt with OpenAI's API to create fake invoices, fake stamps, and a complex ledger that made Russian procurement look like ordinary trade.Our investigative work, as featured originally in the “Big Shor” investigatio

Earlier this month, Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford got a notice from X: her account was being blocked in Turkey. She asked the Turkish presidency why and has yet to get an answer. She isn’t the only one.Crawford is one of at least 1,270 accounts Turkish courts ordered X to block in September. X made roughly 90% of them unavailable in Turkey, according to the Freedom of Expression Association. Weeks before X began blocking these accounts in Turkey, Elon Musk declared that “any censorship re

The United States is racing to field AI and autonomous systems. It is not racing to figure out how to fight with them. This imbalance between technology and concepts is widening a gap the U.S. is ill prepared to close. Ukraine has shown us why this gap is a threat: every new capability breeds a countermeasure, and technological advantage now spoils in months. The answer is not just faster innovation. It is making concept development a continuous military function, one that ties new technology to