Threat Status for Friday, July 25, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
U.S. Central Command says American forces killed a senior Islamic State leader, Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani, and his two adult ISIS-affiliated sons during an early morning raid in Syria on Friday.
… The State Department says the U.S. has delivered a $4 billion Foreign Military Financing loan guarantee to Poland to advance strategic partnerships and strengthen NATO’s eastern flank.
… National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has a major scoop on the hack of a key intelligence website used by the CIA.
… The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is holding a “Golden Dome for American Industry Summit” on June 11 to engage “non-traditional and traditional companies.”
… Questions swirled over the extent to which the Trump administration is being squeezed out of multinational Iran nuclear talks as Iranian and European delegations gathered Friday in Turkey.
… Al Jazeera reports that the death toll from starvation in Gaza has risen to 115. PBS Newshour carried disturbing images of the situation on Thursday.
… The U.S. and its allies are flexing multi-domain combat muscle in war games across the Indo-Pacific amid a backdrop of trade and political spats between Washington, South Korea, Japan and others.
… And the Thailand-Cambodia military clash this week signals that a new proxy war may be erupting in Southeast Asia with ties to the U.S., China and Russia.
Unidentified hackers recently compromised a major intelligence website used by the CIA and other agencies to submit details of sensitive contracts, according to the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite service that runs the site. People familiar with the hacking say data from one highly sensitive program, Digital Hammer, was compromised.
Mr. Gertz reports that the breach targeted proprietary intellectual property and personal information submitted on the Acquisition Research Center website in support of several innovative CIA spying programs. In addition to the intelligence website hack, Microsoft revealed this week that Chinese state hackers compromised the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, a central nuclear weapons agency.
The extent of the NRO breach is not fully known, but people familiar with the activity said hackers likely obtained information on key technologies for CIA operations. Other potential areas of compromise could include the Space Force, its efforts to build surveillance satellites and space weapons and the Golden Dome missile defense program.
Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman emeritus of both the Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees, joined the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast for an exclusive interview on a range of issues, including lessons U.S. security officials have learned from past incidents at major events.
The Texas Republican, who currently leads a House task force studying incidents at previous large events, says “the biggest threat and emerging threat that we have to be ready for, are these drones, these unmanned aerial vehicles, that could cross over into a stadium with an explosive device.
“Our ability to take that out is very limited right now,” said Mr. McCaul, who emphasized that intelligence will be essential to defending attendees at soccer’s 2026 World Cup in North America and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The congressman separately penned an op-ed on the matter for The Washington Times, titled “Preventing another Boston Marathon bombing.”
U.S.-trained Thai military pilots of F-16 warplanes bombed Cambodia on Thursday as Cambodia blasted truck-mounted Soviet-era artillery rockets across a disputed border region with its Southeast Asian rival, killing 12 Thai civilians, including an 8-year-old boy. Bangkok and Phnom Penh blame each other for the fighting and accuse each other of targeting civilians in what has become a widening conflict with ties to great power geopolitics involving the U.S., Russia and China.
Media tied to the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing warns there could be “further escalation” going forward. Threat Status Special Correspondent Richard S. Ehrlich reports in a dispatch from Bangkok that Thailand and Cambodia blame each other for starting the latest clash — a dangerous feature of which centers on a dispute over landmines along the border between the two nations. Cambodia has said the mines are left over from a decades-old civil war, but Thailand claims Cambodia has secretly planted new Russian-made mines.
Thailand is a non-NATO U.S. ally and fought alongside U.S. forces during the regional Vietnam War. Bangkok hosts the Pentagon’s biggest international military exercise in Asia each year: Cobra Gold. The Chinese play a broader role in Cambodia, funding huge investments, training Cambodia’s military, and developing the country’s infrastructure, including ports and shipping canals.
It takes more than 200,000 suppliers to produce the advanced weapon systems for the U.S. military. However, it remains a mystery whether components are manufactured in the U.S., by allies or even adversaries like China, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
The Pentagon’s most recent National Defense Industrial Strategy document identified the U.S. dependence on adversarial sources for goods it procures as a mounting national security challenge. The more recent GAO report warns that “these suppliers may cut off U.S. access to critical materials or provide ‘back doors’ in their technology that serve as intelligence pathways.”
Analysts with the congressional watchdog agency studied 2020-24 procurement data, reviewed Pentagon documents and interviewed Defense Department officials and contractors while preparing their report. Last year, China imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium — two elements critical for military-grade electronics.
The latest violence in Syria “confirms a hard truth: The current regime has neither the capacity nor the will to rebuild a unified, pluralistic state,” according to Loqman Radpey, who argues that the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group and tribal militias loyal to Damascus have massacred Alawis and are “now targeting another minority: the Druze.”
“There is no sign the regime intends to share power or protect minority communities through federalism or territorial autonomy,” Mr. Radpey, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, writes in an op-ed.
“Years ago, Walid Phares, former foreign policy adviser to President Trump, argued for a ‘freedom corridor’ connecting Kurdish and Druze regions through a secure zone, from Abu Kamal to the Golan Heights, passing near the U.S. base at Tanf. He presented this plan to the House Counterterrorism Caucus in 2009,” writes Mr. Radpey. “The moment has arrived to put that idea into action.”
• Aug. 5 — Misinformation: What Is It and What Should We Do About It? Cato Institute
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