Threat Status for Friday, May 9, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
China’s Xi Jinping and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were among Russian President Vladimir Putin’s guests at Russia’s Red Square military parade celebrating the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
… Register here for the “Golden Dome for America” event being hosted by Threat Status on May 13 to examine President Trump’s call for a next-generation missile defense shield.
… Ukrainian authorities have arrested two Hungarian nationals accused of running a spy network.
… The bipartisan group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) put Iran’s Shahed-136 kamikaze drone on display on Capitol Hill.
… Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered Pentagon officials to start separating transgender service members from the military starting early next month.
… And here’s a look inside Denmark’s outrage over allegations that U.S. spy agencies have been directed to spy on Greenland’s independence movement.
The Treasury Department on Thursday slapped sanctions on several Chinese companies that the department said are involved in buying millions of dollars’ worth of Iranian oil. The sanctions were imposed on China’s Hebei Xinhai Chemical Group Co., described as a “teapot refinery,” and three port terminal operators in Shandong province.
Others sanctioned included vessels and their captains believed to be part of an Iranian “shadow fleet” used to covertly sell oil and circumvent international sanctions. “As part of President Trump’s broad and aggressive maximum pressure campaign, Treasury today is targeting another teapot refinery that imported Iranian oil,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
It was the third action against a Chinese refinery in Shandong province and the first against port operators. In total, seven Chinese companies and six oil ships have been hit with the sanctions. The Chinese companies were sanctioned for supporting the state-owned National Iranian Oil Co., which funds Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force, which was designated a supporter of terrorism in 2020.
National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang spent the week at the Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week convention in Tampa, Florida where Ryan Gury, co-founder and CEO of the drone company PDW, joined the Threat Status Weekly Podcast for an exclusive discussion on the fast-evolving realities of drone warfare, asserting that “the cat’s out of the bag” with regard to “automatic target recognition.”
“Drones are set out to survey a piece of land. They’re looking at that land for targets. They’re assessing whether that target is a friend or foe, and then they’re striking that target automatically,” says Mr. Gury. “That’s already getting done with commercial technology that you can buy off of Amazon.”
“The cat’s out of the bag,” he says. “We see warfare evolving, especially with our adversaries already executing this, where terminal guidance and automatic target recognition is going to be par for the course.”
Tory Bruno, president and CEO of aerospace company United Launch Alliance (ULA), tells the Threat Status Influencers video series that the U.S. is behind China and Russia in hypersonic weaponry and will need to catch up rapidly if it hopes to compete globally.
“China is using their technologies to create space weaponry, which we are not doing. So in regard to that application, they are definitely pretty far ahead of us, and we’re playing catch up right now,” Mr. Bruno says in the video, sponsored by ULA. “In terms of the ballistic missile threat and the hypersonic threat, we, of course, have very sophisticated missile defense systems, the most effective ones in the world. But what’s changing is there are a lot more people with ballistic missiles now than there used to be.”
ULA was founded as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The company has emerged as one of the most prominent players in commercial space production and is seen as vital to U.S. competitiveness in the evolving great power race for dominance in space. Last year, ULA launched its Vulcan Centaur rocket, which could be used to launch space-based components of the “Golden Dome” missile shield called for by Mr. Trump.
The military’s most elite units may operate in future scenarios without the advantages that U.S. forces have traditionally enjoyed, according to acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Colby Jenkins, who says air superiority, reliable communications and logistical support may not be guaranteed, putting a heavy burden on units tasked with “operating independently” in the field.
Speaking at the Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week conference in Tampa, Mr. Jenkins said U.S. military leaders “need to rethink how we command, control and enable forces that must survive and operate without a vast overhead structure.” He added that the “demands on our people are evolving, faster and more severely than ever before.”
“Future SOF operators must be technologically fluent, culturally agile, psychologically resilient, physically and mentally adaptable, and capable of thriving in isolated, denied and high-pressure environments,” said Mr. Jenkins, who served as a Green Beret and led SOF teams on missions in Afghanistan, South America and elsewhere. A key theme at SOF Week was that Special Forces will be asked to do far more than the raids and counterterrorism missions that largely defined their roles in the post-9/11 era.
Mr. Trump’s statement that the U.S. will accept nothing less than “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, along with the administration’s threat of sanctions and warning that Iran will “pay the consequences” for supporting the Yemen-based Houthis, are welcome signals that the U.S. will be in a position to reverse the mistakes of the Iran negotiations of 2015, writes Yossi Kuperwasser.
“As the world awaits the next step in the face-off with Iran, the U.S. must continue wielding the big stick of a credible military threat and undo past negotiating errors in light of today’s global realities,” writes Mr. Kuperwasser, a retired Israeli brigadier general.
“At the same time, Europe must be willing to trigger a viable ‘snapback’ of all international sanctions on Iran,” he writes. “The U.S. and Europe must be fully prepared to carry through on these threats if Iran fails to agree to U.S. requirements that would reverse the mistakes of 2015 and deprive Iran of the capability to produce nuclear weapons once and for all.”
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