Threat Status for Wednesday, November 5, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in South Korea that U.S. forces there could be used in a regional conflict with China.
… It’s a subtle point, but it signals a potentially major policy shift for American troops on the Korean Peninsula.
… Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, says CIA Director John Ratcliffe personally confirmed to him that both Russia and China have “conducted super-critical nuclear weapons tests in excess of the U.S. zero-yield standard.”
… The assertion came after President Trump’s recent announcement the U.S. will begin testing again after a 33-year hiatus on the grounds that adversaries have conducted tests.
… It’s notable that Energy Secretary Chris Wright has said Mr. Trump’s testing plans for U.S. nuclear weapons won’t include actual explosions.
… The U.S. is circulating a draft U.N. Security Council resolution to create an international stabilization force for Gaza.
… France said Tuesday Iran has released two French citizens who had been imprisoned since 2022..
… Hudson Institute China Center Director and Threat Status opinion contributor Miles Yu says in an exclusive interview on Cheryl Chumley’s “Bold and Blunt” podcast that Mr. Trump has succeeded in putting the Chinese Communist Party on defense.
… And a new U.S. Army policy says family must be notified within eight hours if a soldier is reported missing.
American forces in South Korea could be used outside the peninsula if a conflict erupts with China, but their main focus is confronting threats from North Korea. Mr. Hegseth told reporters after high-level U.S.-South Korea defense and military talks in Seoul that the core of the alliance is “holding the line protecting our ally from the DPRK,” referring to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea.
“That is what we have been and continue to be oriented on,” Mr. Hegseth said. “But there is no doubt flexibility for regional contingencies is something we would take a look at.” The comments come amid potential tension over the status of the some 28,000 U.S. troops in South Korea. The Trump administration has been pressing U.S. allies, including South Korea, to sharply increase defense spending to reduce U.S. costs.
The notion of using the U.S. troops for regional conflicts would be a new mission. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said in May that all U.S. troops on the peninsula are for the defense of South Korea. But the Pentagon is working on a concept called strategic flexibility, which would allow some of the U.S. troops to participate in regional conflicts outside the country, such as in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait or the East China Sea.
The Pentagon will radically speed up the way it purchases weapons and platforms by rewarding contractors who deliver on time, slashing review processes and offering new incentives to staffers, a leaked memo revealed this week. The memo, titled “Transforming the Warfighting Acquisition System to Accelerate Fielding of Capabilities,” outlines how speed will be emphasized above all else under the new acquisition regime.
“Speed to capability delivery is now our organizing principle: the decisive factor in maintaining deterrence and warfighting advantage,” reads the memo, first reported on by Politico. “The core principle of this transformation is simple: place accountable decision makers as close as possible to program execution, eliminate non value added layers of bureaucracy, and prioritize flexible trades and timely delivery at the speed of relevance.”
The Pentagon has declined to comment on the memo. However, the defense secretary is expected to discuss it in a speech to top military acquisition officials and defense industrial base leaders on Friday.
New Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi talked up defense spending and got along famously with Mr. Trump on his recent Asian tour, but delivering on her promise to rearm Japan is far from assured, even with growing concerns in Tokyo about China, North Korea and Russia. Reaction in Japan to last week’s meeting between the two leaders has been generally positive, but some warn Tokyo’s rearmament drive may be not viable, due to the nation’s economic, demographic and spiritual malaise.
“Japan cannot sustain the remilitarization agenda being proposed,” said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Japan’s Sophia University who added that plans to accelerate defense spending from 1.4% of gross domestic product in 2024 — itself a 21% annual increase — to 2% on defense are “not going to go down very well with elderly voters.”
Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon digs into the situation, writing that Japan Inc.’s industrial glories are fading, as it fails to identify new growth engines. Once the world’s second-largest economy, it fell to third, behind China, in 2010, then to fourth, behind Germany, in 2024, and may drop to fifth, behind India, next year. Japan’s population, meanwhile, peaked in 2008 at 128 million, but now stands at 123 million — a decline that could present challenges to any remilitarization goals.
An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile traveled 4,200 miles from California on Wednesday as part of an evaluation of the readiness of the nation’s ICBM system. U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command said the test launch — designated GT 254 — took place at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The ICBM’s reentry vehicle came down at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command’s Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
A team from the Air Force’s 625th Strategic Operations Squadron initiated the mission from aboard a Navy E-6B Mercury aircraft to test the effectiveness of the Airborne Launch Control System, a backup command and control system for the nation’s ICBM force. “GT 254 is not just a launch. It’s a comprehensive assessment to verify and validate the ICBM system’s ability to perform its critical mission,” Lt. Col. Karrie Wray, commander of the 576th Flight Test Squadron, said in a statement.
Vandenberg Space Force Base serves as the testing ground for what officials said are routine and periodic activities crucial for assessing the Minuteman III. The missiles will continue to be operated by the Air Force until they are replaced by the new Sentinel ICBMs, which is expected to happen around 2050. The extended service life is due to delays in the Sentinel program, which has experienced cost overruns and scheduling issues.
Western scholars and policymakers were “uninterested” in 1928, when Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, according to Clifford D. May, who writes in a Times op-ed that they regarded it as “nothing more than a religious-social welfare organization and therefore no threat to free nations.
“For nearly a century, that view has persisted despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. Now, finally, clearer perceptions are emerging,” writes Mr. May, an opinion contributor to Threat Status. “One example: Last week, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the think tank over which I’m proud to preside, published a monograph titled ‘Patient Extremism: The Many Faces of the Muslim Brotherhood.’
“First, to comprehend what motivated al-Banna, you need to consider what happened in 1922: The Ottoman Empire, having made the mistake of siding with Germany in World War I, collapsed when Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, abolished the Ottoman Sultanate,” writes Mr. May. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s mission: to establish an even mightier empire and caliphate based on Islamic supremacy, the expansion of the Dar al-Islam (the lands of Islam, contrasted with the Dar-al-harb, where wars must be waged) and the conviction that ‘Islam is a faith and a ritual, a nation and a nationality, a religion and a state, spirit and deed, holy text and sword.’”
• Nov. 11 — Free Showing of the Award-winning Documentary ‘Honor in the Air: Remembering Captain Scott Alwin and the 68th Assault Helicopter Company,’ Washington Policy Institute
• Nov. 13 — The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: Anthony Vinci on Artificial Intelligence, Geopolitics and the Future of Espionage, Hudson Institute
• Nov. 13 — Meeting the U.S. Defense Imperative: Challenges and Opportunities in the Development of the Defense Industrial Base Workforce, Center for Strategic & International Studies
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