NATSEC-TECH THURSDAY — May 15, 2025: Every Thursday’s edition of Threat Status highlights the intersection between national security and advanced technology, from AI to cyber threats and the battle for global data dominance.
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President Trump says Iranian officials have “sort of” agreed to the terms of a nuclear deal.
… The Defense Intelligence Agency predicts China will have 4,000 hypersonic missiles by 2035.
… The Senate has confirmed Troy Meink, former air crewman and space expert, as the new secretary of the Air Force.
… Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces Chair Deb Fischer told Threat Status’ “Golden Dome for America” this week that the Pentagon needs special electromagnetic spectrum access for next-generation missile defense.
… Pope Leo XIV is raising concerns about how artificial intelligence could overhaul life on earth.
… The Trump administration is halting President Biden’s artificial intelligence diffusion rule and formulating new policy.
… Elon Musk envisions a world with tens of billions of personal robots accompanying humans around the globe.
… Anduril’s Palmer Luckey wants to turn Guantanamo Bay into a “gilded megafortress broadcasting capitalism’s bounty” to accelerate the collapse of the regime in Havana.
… Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is reportedly pushing to consolidate control over the President’s Daily Brief.
Retired Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the former commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the “Golden Dome for America” event hosted by Threat Status this week that a comprehensive missile defense shield over the U.S. is essential, especially in the face of emerging threats from China and Russia.
Debate has swirled since Mr. Trump’s Golden Dome executive order in January over the feasibility and affordability of such a system. Some have argued that a U.S. move to build a foolproof missile defense system could upset the international deterrence order and lead to a preemptive strike from a rival. Mr. VanHerck told the Threat Status event that such fears are unreasonable, adding any potential Golden Dome system should prioritize domain awareness as opposed to complete defense of the U.S. homeland.
“Now, there are many people who say, ‘Won’t you rock the boat on strategic stability?’ Well, I would say we open the door if we don’t defend ourselves,” the retired general said. “We need to figure out from a policy perspective what achieves deterrence by denial. How many bullets [are] in the magazine to go after a ballistic missile or a hypersonic missile or a cruise missile? But if you get in a race to go after every potential threat to your homeland, it’s gonna become unaffordable.”
With plans to regulate artificial intelligence on shaky ground across the Western world, the Trump administration said this week that it would formally revoke the Biden administration’s AI diffusion rule, a regulatory framework that would have imposed new controls on chips and model weights. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said it plans to issue a replacement rule in the future.
“The Trump Administration will pursue a bold, inclusive strategy to American AI technology with trusted foreign countries around the world, while keeping the technology out of the hands of our adversaries,” Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler said in a statement. “At the same time, we reject the Biden Administration’s attempt to impose its own ill-conceived and counterproductive AI policies on the American people.”
Just before Mr. Biden left office in January, his administration proposed a new regulatory framework for AI diffusion. The interim final rule gave the new administration fewer than four months to respond. The semiconductor industry vehemently opposed the Biden team’s plans. AI safety company Anthropic, however, urged stronger export controls on advanced semiconductors.
The tech mogul told an audience in Saudi Arabia this week that the world is headed for a “Star Wars”-like future in which everyone will want their own personal robot. After demonstrating his Tesla Optimus robots for Mr. Trump and Saudi officials on Tuesday, Mr. Musk said: “My prediction actually for humanoid robots is that ultimately there will be tens of billions.”
“You can think of it like as though you had your own personal C-3PO or R2-D2 but even better,” said Mr. Musk, who acknowledged there would be risks, opining that if the development of new tech went wrong, the world might look more like “a James Cameron movie, ‘Terminator.’”
China has plans for two to three humanoid robot firms that would eventually emerge as global leaders, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The congressionally chartered commission said in an October 2024 report that leading U.S. and Chinese AI firms are racing to produce the tech needed for humanoid robots.
Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are weighing whether to rewrite federal rules on information sharing between national security agencies and cyber firms. The lawmakers met privately last week to discuss new policy with officials from the FBI, National Security Agency, Department of Justice and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The bipartisan meeting focused on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which developed a framework for the private sector and federal, state and local governments to share cyber threat data. Provisions of the law are set to expire at the end of September. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, Arkansas Republican, said adversaries’ spying and attack capabilities have rapidly advanced since 2015 — but so have America’s info-sharing operations.
“Ten years in cybersecurity advancement is an eternity, during which there have been a lot of changes, including the threat landscape,” Mr. Crawford said in a statement. “As we review proposals to reauthorize CISA 2015, we will continue to conduct oversight over the intelligence community’s collection, analysis, and dissemination efforts to ensure cyber threat indicators are shared in real-time with state, local, private sector, and international partners.”
The short answer is: reality, and it can’t be soon enough, according to United Launch Alliance President and CEO Tory Bruno, who writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times that lasers in space “could completely nullify the long-range, maneuvering hypersonic threat to the U.S. homeland.”
“As debate advances around the technological aspects of President Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield, there are real questions about the extent to which next-generation missile defense should incorporate non-kinetic energy weapons to neutralize advanced adversarial missile threats,” writes Mr. Bruno.
“Lasers in space would be truly disruptive,” he writes, asserting that “when properly orbited and powered, they would send China’s new anti-satellite weapons program back to the showers.”
• May 15 — Committee hearing, DoD Responsibilities Related to Foreign Military Sales System and International Armaments Cooperation, Senate Armed Services Committee
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