Threat Status for Wednesday, December 11, 2024. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Army Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, who heads the Pentagon’s Mideast operation, has visited “several bases” in Syria since the Bashar Assad regime’s ouster. Commanders on the ground have briefed Gen. Kurilla in person on efforts by roughly the 1,000 American troops in the country to prevent the extremist Islamic State terror group from “exploiting the current situation.”
… If U.S. forces get drawn into deeper engagement in Syria, it could derail President-elect Donald Trump’s desire to untangle them from the region and pursue a more robust American counter to China’s military expansion in the Indo-Pacific, where Taiwanese officials demanded Wednesday that Beijing end its surging drills near the island democracy.
… Meanwhile, the U.S. military has successfully intercepted an air-launched midrange ballistic missile in a test off the coast of Guam, and North Korea’s tightly controlled state media is finally reporting on the martial law fiasco that’s gripped South Korea for more than a week.
… Jared Isaacman is giving a highly anticipated speech at the Spacepower 2024 Conference in Orlando on Wednesday afternoon, his first major public address since being tapped by Mr. Trump to be the next NASA administrator. There’s excitement in national security circles about what his appointment means for the future of the American space program. Threat Status is on the ground in Orlando tracking developments there.
… Here’s a look inside Google’s claim to have made a major quantum computing breakthrough.
… And Rep. Brian Mast, Florida Republican and an opponent of open-ended U.S. aid to Ukraine, has been tapped to head the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The U.S. Justice Department’s crackdown on Chinese hackers is intensifying. An indictment filed this week targets alleged hacker Guan Tianfeng, who, along with others working for the China-based firm Sichuan Silence Information Technology (SSIT), is accused of breaching scores of computer systems tied to U.S. critical infrastructure, including energy production, electric grids, communications and financial networks.
SSIT and Mr. Tianfeng, a Chinese national, face sanctions and charges for hacking into some 81,000 firewall devices around the world — some 23,000 of them in the U.S. — and obtaining information for Beijing’s intelligence services, according to a federal indictment announced Tuesday. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz offers a deeper look at SSIT’s operations.
The development comes less than a week after a less technical intelligence-related case saw a Chinese national and U.S. legal resident charged with stealing sensitive U.S. military weapons designs. That case alleges that an individual known as Hang Sun violated the Arms Export Control Act by conspiring to send roughly 70 drawings relating to aviation, submarine, radar, missiles, infrared and thermal imaging targeting systems, and other sensitive systems to a company located in China.
When Javier Milei was sworn in as Argentina’s president on Dec. 10, 2023, critics who predicted he would be booted out of office within months joked that his fate was about as much of a mystery as the date of Easter: “April or May,” they quipped, “you never quite know when they fall.”
Instead, the 54-year-old political outsider has fulfilled key campaign promises by clamping down on runaway inflation and shrinking the bloated public sector, while forging close ties with fellow maverick Donald Trump. According to the official account of the Argentine government, Mr. Trump has dubbed Mr. Milei his “favorite president.”
Washington Times Special Correspondent Frederic Puglie goes inside the topsy-turvy politics surrounding the rise of the Argentine president, an economist with the trademark helmet of unkempt hair. While once known to Argentine voters as a flashy, foul-mouthed TV commentator, Mr. Milei reinvented himself before ascending to the country’s highest office. Now speculation swirls over how the U.S.-Argentina relationship could be reshaped once Mr. Trump takes office in Washington.
U.S. officials are not sure what to make of the swarms of drones flying over New Jersey in recent weeks, sparking outrage from lawmakers who said during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Tuesday that the situation makes the government look incompetent.
The drones have been spotted in the general area of Picatinny Arsenal, an Army research complex, and Mr. Trump’s home at Bedminster. Some have been fixed-wing aircraft, and others are rotary. Some are larger than the typical commercially available size. Robert Wheeler Jr., who runs the FBI’s critical incident response group, testified at Tuesday’s hearing that no evidence suggests a nefarious motive, but he hasn’t ruled it out.
“Why are we not taking action?” demanded Rep. August Pfluger, the Texas Republican who convened Tuesday’s hearing. Mr. Wheeler offered a bureaucratically intricate response, saying “authority exists to mitigate” a drone while in flight, but he didn’t explain why it hasn’t happened.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, has called the drones “sophisticated” and said they “go dark” once detected. “We’re most concerned about sensitive targets and sensitive critical infrastructure,” he said this week. “We’ve military assets, we’ve got utility assets.”
Given the developments in Syria and the wider Middle East, Clifford D. May writes that the U.S., on its own or in cooperation with Israel, could now make the world a safer place by making plans to “derail Iran’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.”
The fall of the Assad regime and the fracturing of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei’s “anti-American and anti-Israeli axis have created a chance to restructure the Middle East,” writes Mr. May, opinion contributor to Threat Status.
“This lesson should be clear: Though might may not make right, it is might that alters reality in ways that diplomats, peace processors and calls for ‘de-escalation’ and ‘ceasefire’ do not,” he writes. “That suggests that President-elect Donald Trump’s most essential mission should be to rebuild U.S. military strength and to ensure that America’s capabilities are sufficient to overwhelm any enemy or combination of enemies.”
If Mr. Trump could broker a deal to end Ukraine’s war with Russia, what would it look like? Charles V. Peña, a nonresident fellow at Defense Priorities, examines that question, noting that “Russia has said it wants to retain territory in Ukraine already occupied by its forces.”
“Ukraine has rejected such proposals, and many in the West would be reluctant to accept this because it would be seen as giving Mr. Putin a victory, and many do not trust that Mr. Putin would not attempt further expansion into Ukraine at a later date,” writes Mr. Peña.
“What could Mr. Trump propose to alleviate this concern? As an extreme possibility, Mr. Putin might have to acquiesce to Ukraine joining NATO in exchange for Russia gaining territory,” Mr. Peña writes. “Even if NATO didn’t admit Ukraine, a fortified border and Ukrainian military heavily armed with Western weapons to defend against Russia is a prospect Mr. Putin might have to accept as a quid pro quo.”
• Dec. 12 — Developments in India’s Foreign Policy Toward Myanmar, Stimson Center
• Dec. 12 — Accelerating Replicator and Fielding Technologies for Today’s Fight, Hudson Institute
• Dec. 12 — What’s Ahead for Innovators and Creators in the New Trump Administration? Hudson Institute
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