Threat Status for Tuesday, December 9, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
New defense tech and the integration of artificial intelligence across U.S. military weapons systems were central themes of the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum.
… Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, described AI as a megatrend linking information warfare, drone strikes and advanced weapons to provide key advantages in any future war with China or other adversaries.
… Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is openly resisting U.S. pressure to cede territory to Russia as he meets with European leaders to rally support for Kyiv.
… Unidentified drones were spotted above a French military intelligence base three times late last month.
… Russia previously denied involvement in mysterious drone activity over NATO military sites across Europe.
… The Pentagon has combined three major units into a single organization responsible for all Army operations in support of both U.S. Northern and U.S. Southern commands.
… Gulf Arab leaders speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar said President Trump’s Middle East “reset” needs clarity and firm commitments from Washington.
… And the Trump administration’s push to deport hundreds of Iranian prisoners back to the Islamic republic is advancing.
The notion of actual kinetic warfare in space — perhaps a Chinese attack on satellites to cripple the U.S. military as the precursor to an invasion of Taiwan — is fueling a high-stakes debate in national security circles over how to best protect valuable assets in orbit from adversaries with increasingly dangerous space capabilities.
It’s a debate that will course through the U.S. Space Force Association’s three-day Spacepower 2025 Conference that opens Wednesday in Orlando, Florida, bringing together key stakeholders from across the U.S. military and defense industry. National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang will be reporting from the conference, where many conversations are expected to center on whether the U.S. should pursue offensive weapons or restrict its space-based assets to defensive capabilities.
The U.S. Space Force, which has existed as its own military branch for less than six years, has been thrust into the center of major military and national security planning across virtually all domains. Analysts predict that conflicts on Earth may begin in space. Enemies may assess that the best way to keep the U.S. military out of a fight is to eliminate much of its communications, logistics, surveillance and targeting infrastructure. That means a 21st-century attack on satellites that could be difficult to predict and even more difficult to stop.
The Trump administration’s new national security strategy has rejected what it calls America’s “misguided experiment” of hectoring Gulf monarchies and declared “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
The administration currently offers the “G3” — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — partnerships built on burden-sharing and mutual respect. But Gulf officials want evidence that as Washington steps back, it grasps the region they’re managing: one where Iran struck Al Udeid Air Base in June, where Israel struck central Doha in September and where mediation has become a high-risk proposition.
Washington Times Correspondent Jacob Wirtschafter digs into the situation with a dispatch from the 2025 Doha Forum in Qatar. Tension was unmistakable at the forum, where Gulf Arab officials said the regional security landscape has become more dangerous as the U.S. de-prioritizes the region. Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani put it plainly: “We cannot mediate if we are turned into a party to the conflict. Mediation requires trust — especially from partners who rely on us.”
Pentagon Under Secretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told a panel at the forum held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library over the weekend that the integration of AI on multiple levels will be his “number one priority for the rest of my term.” That sentiment was shared by other top U.S. military officials and defense industry players at the forum, where many argued that the flexibility to “fail forward” with more rapid defense tech testing will be critical to the U.S. military’s ability to maintain an edge over China.
Sen. Mike Rounds, South Dakota Republican and a key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Threat Status in an exclusive interview at the forum that U.S. adversaries are racing to implement new advanced tech. “The question,” he said, “is do we want to fall behind and give them the opportunities to put us at risk, our families at risk by having weapon systems that move faster and are more capable than ours?”
National Security Correspondent John T. Seward covered defense-tech discussions at the Reagan forum, noting that the upcoming Capitol Hill vote on the annual defense authorization bill will be a test of whether Congress is ready to deliver on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push for major reforms to accelerate the Pentagon’s acquisition of new advanced tech weaponry.
During one Reagan forum panel, Adm. Paparo, the Hawaii-based head of the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command, described in detail how information warfare, drone strikes and advanced weapons are becoming more lethal through AI and will provide key advantages in a future war with China or other adversaries.
At the strategic level, AI power will provide decision superiority — defined as “who understands best what the nature of the conflict is, who is making the best decisions, who is best able to see, understand, decide, act, learn and assess,” said Adm. Paparo, who asserted that “it will be our intention in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to put that to the best use in order to prevail on the battlefield.”
The result, he said, will be seen in swarms of attack drones, advanced data analysis for pinpoint targeting and force movement. Adm. Paparo did not mention China specifically, but the topic of a panel of experts and officials appearing with the admiral was “Deterrence by Design: Advancing AI for Competitive Advantage Over China.”
The ongoing federal criminal trial of Linda Sun, a former aide to two New York governors, on illegal foreign agent charges highlights what prosecutors say is China’s large-scale operations to influence the U.S. government and the public at large to back Chinese Communist Party policies.
Ms. Sun worked for former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo and current Gov. Kathy Hochul and is charged with using her official position to illegally promote China’s interests by blocking officials from Taiwan and curbing statements related to China’s human rights abuses of Uyghur minorities. The trial in Brooklyn federal court is part of a multiyear Justice Department campaign to crack down on CCP influence peddling and transnational repression.
Similar CCP influence campaigns targeting state and local governments have been identified by U.S. officials. Grant Newsham, a retired Marine Corps colonel and expert on China security affairs, tells Threat Status the CCP is active in seeking to influence all levels of the United States, including at the town level in “flyover” country. “Spotting Chinese influence efforts in the U.S. is like shooting fish in a barrel,” he said. “It’s everywhere. Sometimes you have to step back in awe at the scale of it.”
• Dec. 11 — NATO and the Cloud: A Conversation with Assistant Secretary-General Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, Royal United Services Institute
• Dec. 11 — Building U.S.-Taiwan Defense Supply Chain Collaboration: Opportunities for Codevelopment and Coproduction, Hudson Institute
• Dec. 12 — The Energy Challenges of Taiwan and Asia’s Artificial Intelligence Ambitions, Brookings Institution
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