Threat Status for Wednesday, February 25, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Correspondent Ben Wolfgang.
President Trump drew a red line on Iran during his State of the Union address, vowing that he won’t allow Tehran to acquire a nuclear weapon and is ready to use military force to prevent it.
… Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a Friday deadline to open up the company’s artificial intelligence technology to unlimited military use. It’s the latest twist in an escalating feud between the Pentagon and the San Francisco-based firm.
… A U.S. military plane hit a concrete barrier during a training exercise in the Philippines. Five Americans were injured.
… Air Force Secretary Troy Meink laid out the service’s priorities — including homeland missile defense — in a major speech at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Colorado.
… The House narrowly blocked an aviation bill that supporters say would fix the root causes of last year’s deadly collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The Pentagon opposed the measure.
… China warned the U.S. against imposing new tariffs on its goods.
… And the U.S. and South Korean militaries plan to hold annual joint exercises next month.
It’s an under-the-radar development in the West. But Belarus, a key ally of the Kremlin, is rapidly accelerating the integration of its military-industrial machine into Russia’s, giving Moscow what amounts to a rear base for its war in Ukraine.
Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak has more details from Kyiv on what some Ukrainian intelligence officials say has been the steady repurposing of Belarus’ civilian economy, industrial base and logistics infrastructure to support Moscow’s war effort. That has allowed Belarus to act as a vital logistics hub that supplies ammunition, unmanned systems and repair services for Russian military equipment while helping Moscow circumvent Western economic sanctions.
To get a better sense of just how deep the cooperation goes, consider this: Latvia’s Constitution Protection Bureau estimates that roughly 500 Belarusian companies are now integrated into Russia’s military-industrial production system, many after receiving state subsidies to reprofile their output.
The multibillion-dollar companies that help make up America’s defense industrial base are, of course, in many ways competitors. But some defense insiders say some of the Pentagon’s most ambitious projects have spawned a new era of cooperation between those firms.
There’s no better example than the Golden Dome for America missile shield, the Trump administration’s plan to build a cutting-edge system to protect the entire continental U.S. from modern missile threats. On the latest episode of the Threat Status weekly podcast, Liz Martin, the managing director and general manager for global defense at Amazon Web Services, explains why initiatives such as the Golden Dome require defense companies to work together in ways never seen before.
“The concept of large mega-programs like Golden Dome for America … they’re really systems of systems, the way the government is thinking about them. That takes a portfolio of capabilities to deliver those systems of systems, which means cooperation needs to happen between different capability providers,” she said.
AWS, Ms. Martin said, provides the kind of secure cloud infrastructure upon which other key pieces of the Golden Dome — from radars and tracking capabilities to 21st-century command and control, and potentially space-based missile interceptors — will be built.
Asia Editor Andrew Salmon is tracking the Ninth Workers’ Party Congress in North Korea this week and one of the major questions hanging over it: Will North Korean leader Kim Jong-un present his teenage daughter, Kim Ju-ae, as the nation’s next leader?
The move would break a tradition of male succession established at the 1994 death of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, and would introduce the secretive, nuclear-armed dictatorship’s first female leader. Women have led the region’s three democracies — South Korea, Taiwan and Japan — but the region’s communist states, China and North Korea, have had only male rulers.
The question has surged into the spotlight in recent weeks after the South Korean National Intelligence Service said it believed Mr. Kim’s daughter was being groomed as the fourth Kim and the first female leader.
Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward has spent the past week with the U.S. Army in frigid northern Alaska, where the military is making high-stakes preparations for potential combat in subzero temperatures. Mr. Seward’s first-person Arctic Notebook from Alaska has offered a unique window into those preparations and into what it’s like to work in one of the world’s most extreme environments.
His latest account offers this insight into a reality that on its surface may seem counterintuitive: Warmer temperatures can actually make the terrain even more dangerous. Mr. Seward dives into why military leaders and soldiers believe it’s better for the temperatures to stay cold, rather than having 50-degree temperature swings.
The dry snow compresses and is almost more maneuverable as it packs down, but at warmer temperatures, the snow gets slushy under foot and vehicle traffic, Mr. Seward explains.
Top Trump administration officials are pushing an overhaul of the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program, which some officials have cast as a longstanding “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiative that favors businesses deemed to be socially or economically disadvantaged. But in targeting that program, that administration could deeply damage Alaska Native corporations, which play a crucial role in the Alaskan economy and the state’s role in U.S. national security.
Jared Whitley, who has worked on Capitol Hill, in the White House and in the U.S. defense industry, makes that case in a new piece for The Washington Times. He contends that “slashing the program would kill the state’s economy, cut off vital natural resources and cripple our northern line of defense.” As just one example, he notes that Alaska’s Fort Greely — a key cog in, among other things, American missile defense systems — heavily relies on Alaska Native corporations’ contractors for almost all essential maintenance and operational readiness.
“There are elements of the federal budget that demand a butcher knife … but Alaska Native corporations aren’t one of them,” Mr. Whitley writes. “They are not the Boeing CEO collecting a $32 million salary. They are critical investments by Uncle Sam in a part of the country so remote, so distant, that it couldn’t survive without that investment. Increasingly, it seems we couldn’t survive without Alaska.”
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