Threat Status for Friday, August 29, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Note: Threat Status will be on hiatus Monday, Sept. 1, in recognition of Labor Day. We’ll be back on Tuesday.
Russia has lured an estimated 7,000 Cuban mercenaries to Ukraine, and Kyiv’s special representative to Latin America tells Threat Status they are “taking part in the killing.”
… Washington has signed off on an $825 million long-range missiles sale for Ukraine as the Trump administration struggles to achieve leverage over Russian President Vladimir Putin in its end-of-war push.
… Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says Chinese coders accessed sensitive Pentagon data through Microsoft.
… Mr. Hegseth has separately ordered the secretary of the Army to set up a special task force to eliminate threats from the types of drones wreaking havoc in the Russia-Ukraine war.
… Britain, France and Germany have begun the process to reimpose United Nations “snap-back” sanctions on Iran.
… Israel, which recovered the remains Friday of two hostages who had been held by Hamas, says it is in the “initial stages” of a major new offensive in Gaza.
… And Rwanda has accepted seven deportees from the U.S. as part of a deal with the Trump administration.
Mr. Hegseth disclosed this week that a breach of the Defense Department program known as “digital escort” was discovered last month and has been canceled after a review. “For nearly a decade, Microsoft has used Chinese coders, remotely supervised by U.S. contractors, to support sensitive [Defense Department] cloud systems,” Mr. Hegseth said in a video message, adding that the program was designed to comply with defense contracting rules.
However, the use of Chinese technicians “exposed the department to unacceptable risk,” he said, adding that “it blows my mind that I’m even saying these things … [or] that we ever allowed it to happen.” Mr. Hegseth blamed the questionable program on the Biden and Obama administrations.
An outside agency is conducting an audit to check on software code submitted by Chinese nationals, and a separate Pentagon investigation is underway on Microsoft’s use of Chinese nationals. The Pentagon also has ordered all software vendors to identify and terminate any Chinese involvement in defense networks.
No country other than North Korea has contributed more manpower to Russia’s armed forces than the estimated 7,000 Cuban mercenaries now fighting and dying in Ukraine. Washington Times special contributor Joseph Hammond reports that while Cuba denies its nationals are being deployed as part of government policy, trained Cuban soldiers and guns for hire are present around the globe, earning hard cash for Havana.
Not all are military. Cuban hospital workers, sports trainers and professionals are working alongside peers in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The communist government in Havana presents it as a sign of solidarity with developing nations, although affluent countries such as Italy and Qatar also employ Cuban medical staff.
With the war in Ukraine, however, Cuba’s contribution has been increasingly lethal, not humanitarian. Ruslan Spirin, Ukraine’s special representative to Latin America, says “Russia has recruited young Cubans and deceived them with false promises of work and citizenship. Many have ended up as cannon fodder on the front lines.”
NATO announced this week that all member nations will spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by the end of 2025, according to new data on allied defense spending. The development, which follows more than three years of heightened western European security anxiety triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, marks the first time all NATO members have met the 2% spending target, which was set in 2014.
NATO had set the goal in response to Russia’s annexation that year of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, but member nations initially struggled to keep up, with only seven reaching the target as of 2022.
Following intense criticism from President Trump and Russia’s full-scale February 2022 military invasion of Ukraine, NATO allies have steadily increased defense spending. Last year, 18 members reached the 2% goal and 31 of 32 are on target for 2025, according to data released by NATO. Iceland, which does not have a traditional defense budget and has no armed forces, is excluded from the data despite being a NATO member.
Over the past two decades, SpaceX has “grown from flying some orbits to reaching the full national security mission set, enabling the retirement of the Delta rocket and the transition from the Atlas to the newer, more efficient Vulcan rocket,” writes Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“With any luck, Blue Origin will join the heavy-lift provider club shortly, giving the United States a robust and resilient three-company industrial base,” writes Mr. Bruno. “Although this is good news, some would argue that it would be simpler and more cost effective to conduct a winner-take-all down-select and pick one launch provider.
“The first contract would almost certainly be low-cost, but after that, it would be a monopoly, which is never the path to sustaining low prices or innovation,” he writes. “Competition is a good thing; it disciplines costs while driving performance. Abandoning this principle would leave the nation in a severely weakened and brittle defensive state.”
The United Nations is making food aid distribution to Gaza “more difficult by demanding that [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency] be in charge, despite UNRWA’s letting Hamas take a cut to feed its leaders in the tunnels and to resell for cash to pay its troops on the streets above,” writes Clifford D. May, founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“The United Nations adamantly refuses to work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American/Israeli project delivering free food directly to Gaza residents, with Hamas excluded,” he writes, noting U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s recent observation on X that “Hostages ARE starving, Hamas is getting fat, & the UN declares famine while 92% of THEIR food is stolen to be sold by Hamas.’”
“Why,” asks Mr. May, “are American taxpayers still spending roughly $13 billion annually on the most globalist of institutions, which for half a century has been waging a disinformation war — including bogus charges of racism, apartheid, genocide and intentional starvation — against the only democracy in the Middle East, which also is America’s most reliable ally in the world?”
• Sept. 4 — The Digital Front Line: Building a Cyber-Resilient Taiwan, Hudson Institute
• Sept. 9 — From Monroe to The Golden Age: Charting America’s Path in Latin America, Alexander Hamilton Society
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