Army senior open-source intelligence adviser Dennis Eger says the U.S. needs to quickly come to grips with the weaponization of social media, particularly by Russia and China.

“The next two wars we’re going to fight are either in space or in this information environment, before we ever fight kinetically,” Mr. Eger said at a recent Association of the U.S. Army event.

“If you were to get inside the minds of the Chinese or the Russians, they would view this in the long game, in the long term, as conflict,” he said. “But we continue to … look at conflict in terms of kinetic rather than what this is in this space. I think if we don’t change, we’re going to look up five to 10 years from now and think, ‘What did we do wrong?’”

National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace reports that Mr. Eger’s perspective is not isolated at the Pentagon. In 2021, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said it would spend $59.5 million over four years on researchers making algorithms and gathering content including memes, political ads and social media posts.

Moscow is cobbling together military forces to defend against Ukraine’s cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

British military officials say a Specialized Motor Rifle Regiment of Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) personnel is among the non-infantry units being thrown into the fray. The VKS troops now battling Ukrainian forces on the front line in Kursk include those previously trained as early warning radar operators and members of long-range bomber units, U.K. military intelligence officials posted this week on X.

The posting dovetailed with an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War, which asserted that the Russian military command recently “redeployed elements of at least one Russian airborne (VDV) regiment from western Zaporizhia Oblast in response to Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast, possibly in an effort to stabilize the lines and improve command and control (C2) over Russian conscripts.”

The looming North Korean nuclear threat isn’t being talked about much by either Republicans or Democrats ahead of the Nov. 5 elections, but South Korean Unification Minister Kim Yung-ho says he hopes that no matter who wins, the issue gets more attention.

“Whichever party comes in, there will be a North Korea policy review. … During this process we hope there will be a mention of the complete denuclearization of North Korea,” he told journalists in Seoul this week.

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports that Mr. Kim doesn’t agree with arguments from some analysts that the time may have come to be pragmatic and switch to arms-limitation talks with Pyongyang. Seoul’s stance remains a call for the “complete denuclearization of North Korea,” the South Korean unification minister said this week, adding “we will work closely with like-minded allies” toward that goal.

“If we recognize North Korea as a nuclear state, there will be regional instability and a ‘nuclear domino effect,’” Mr. Kim argued, warning that such a development could lead to the “fall” of the global nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

Retired CIA officer and regular Threat Status contributor Daniel N. Hoffman delivers an eye-opening analysis of the recent U.S.-Russia prisoner swap involving 24 people, including unlawfully detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and two deep undercover Russian intelligence officers, who had been posing as an Argentinian family living in Slovenia.

The swap was a success on multiple fronts, argues Mr. Hoffman, who writes that “the U.S. and Russia demonstrated that even when our bilateral relations are arguably at their lowest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the two sides can still find some common ground and settle a complex and acrimonious issue of mutual interest at the negotiating table.”

“Negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine might be a bridge too far in the near term, especially while [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is occupying the Kremlin,” Mr. Hoffman writes. “But perhaps there might be a sliver of opportunity for more robust counterterrorism exchanges and strategic arms control talks.”

Ted Lipien, a former chief of Voice of America’s Polish Service, goes inside problems plaguing the U.S. government-funded network, with a particular focus on the “embarrassing” manner in which it has handled the 2022 case of Pablo Rubtsov González, dual Russian-Spanish citizen accused of spying for Russia.

“It is disturbing that VOA newsroom editors and reporters have shown much greater willingness to listen and repeat Russia-inspired propaganda about their freelancer than to believe the governments in Poland and Ukraine or independent Russian journalists in exile opposed to Mr. Putin,” Mr. Lipien writes.

• Aug. 27 — U.S.-Mexico Relations: Addressing Challenges at the Border, Brookings Institution

• Aug. 28 — Weapons in Space: A Book Talk with Dr. Aaron Bateman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Aug. 28 — Military Expenditure in MENA: Implications for Human Rights, Governance, and Socio-Economic Development, Arab Center Washington DC

• Sept. 3-6 — Billington CyberSecurity Summit

• Sept. 4 — The American Dream Lecture Series: Walter Russell Mead on American Foreign Policy in the Next Presidency, American Enterprise Institute

• Sept. 9 — The Role of China in Africa’s Just Energy Transition, Wilson Center