
Amid Calls for ‘Overhaul,’ Challenges Facing the Intelligence Community
BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — President Donald Trump vowed throughout his 2024 campaign that if elected, he would initiate a revamp of the intelligence community (IC). […] More
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Michael Vickers had an unusual and almost unparalleled career in the U.S. intelligence community, having been deeply involved in both the efforts against the Soviets in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War, and then – more than two decades later – the operation to track and kill Osama Bin Laden.
During that career, Vickers rose from Green Beret at 19 to serve as Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, with decades of service to the CIA in between.
Vickers opened the 2024 Cipher Brief Threat Conference Saturday with a sweeping look at the threat landscape – a landscape that has changed dramatically since he left government. He spoke with Cipher Brief Suzanne Kelly as the Threat Conference began.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: I want to start off by asking, when you look at all the threats and how much the world has changed, what is top of mind for you?
Vickers: The thing I’m most concerned about is really the domestic basis of American power. Our political fragmentation, our social divisions, the receptiveness we seem to have for disinformation and fake news.
And so while the international environment is more dangerous than it’s been since the Cold War for a variety of reasons, job one is really strengthening our domestic environment, and then you can deal with the individual global challenges.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s talk about some of those individual challenges. I wonder how you are thinking about this new Cold War with China that many experts say that we’re already in?
Vickers: We have a lot of advantages in the competition with China, but it really is a new Cold War. We have China and Russia and then some others, Iran and North Korea, with them as well. And it’s similar to the Soviet-American Cold War in three respects: It’s a global competition; it’s largely bipolar, even though there are other actors; and then of course you have nuclear superpowers that can destroy each other’s homeland.
But in almost every other way — politically, economically, technologically, militarily – it’s very different.
Politically, we face competitors that might be described as autocratic capitalists, and that hurts us in the Global South, where the Chinese and Russians go to these other autocratic governments and say, Those Americans are a pain in the ass. They don’t really invest in you enough. They want to overthrow your government, not us. They don’t like you. And so we’ll help you stay in power and we’ll make money together. And we don’t really have a great counter to that.
On the economic side, in the 20th century, we never had an adversary that had more than 50% of our GDP. China’s already at 70% or so. And while they’ve sputtered a lot recently under Xi Jinping’s inept economic leadership – which is fortunate for us – they’ll recover at some point. And so that economic escalation dominance that we had, where we could buy ourself out of trouble, we don’t necessarily have that going forward.
And then technologically, we’ve got this revolution in technology that’s very different. We had the missile race and space race, but now you have AI, quantum computing, synthetic biology, nuclear fusion, green technologies, and that’s very different. And who wins that tech arms race will likely be the dominant power in 30 years or so.
And then militarily, while you had this big Soviet army in Europe at the end of World War II, now the threats are in East Asia – to island nations, more distributed and some require crossing the seas. And so that’s different. And of course you have these new domains, space and cyber, that are very different from the Cold War.
The Cipher Brief: Do you think there are ways that the U.S. can do well, when it comes to its competition with China?
Vickers: There’s four big challenges we’ve got to solve. One, our position in East Asia has deteriorated over the past 20 years. The Chinese, they’ve essentially demassed us in the Western Pacific, and are pushing us further back. And so that’s one challenge we want to address. And then an even bigger one is to prevent China’s military breakout from being a regional power to being able to challenge us globally. And the way you do that is space and cyber, so you can enable global power projection. But even if you’re successful at deterring a great power conflict, unique to this new Cold War is that we have challenges from China and Russia at the same time, and we could have a global war unlike anything people haven’t imagined since the early Cold War. It’s more plausible than it’s been in many decades.
And then finally, there’s this economic and technological competition, this revolution in technology that – even if you could take all that other stuff off the table – you’ve still got to win that.
The Cipher Brief: You mentioned the nuclear issue. And the fact that we now have a situation where you have a closer relationship between nuclear powers Russia and China, and then Iran, wanting to be a nuclear power. How are you thinking about the nuclear threat?
Vickers: China for the longest time relied on a small arsenal of nuclear weapons, and now they’re expanding as well as modernizing their force, and aiming for parity in a decade and a half or so with where we and the Russians are. So when you look at arms control with the Russians, you think, Well, now I’ve got this other guy who may have a thousand weapons.
No one likes to think about nuclear war. I used to oversee nuclear strategy in the Pentagon, and you have to think about this. It’s a very different nuclear environment today. And then of course there’s North Korea and Iran as well.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s move to counter terrorism. We’re seeing a heightened threat once again from ISIS – not in the official government sense of “heightened threat,” but they are coming back, posing more of a threat on the world stage. How do you think about terrorism, and the decisions you made when you were dismantling Al Qaeda, versus what you would say today?
Vickers: We had a very successful campaign to overthrow the Taliban and essentially kick Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan in 2001. But a bunch of them went to Iran, some of them are still in Iran, and most of the others went to Pakistan.
The environment today, I don’t think is at pre-9/11 levels, but the conditions for it are certainly there. And now with the war in the Middle East and the situation in Gaza, this will accelerate global jihadism again. The question is where they can find some kind of sanctuary – and the threat will rise rapidly after that. One of the things we learned in our long war is that whenever we gave an adversary a couple years to develop, the threat went way up. And so you don’t want to be lackadaisical about it as you see that developing. That’s the danger.
In Ukraine, “God’s still on the side of the big battalions”
The Cipher Brief: When we interviewed you early on after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you made a point of saying how important deterrence is, and that the U.S. should have provided more deterrence early on. At this point, what do you think is at stake, in terms of U.S. leadership on the world stage?
Vickers: I think one of the reasons we got into this is that deterrence failed over the course of a decade. You had the Russian incursions and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and we did essentially nothing to help them at the time. We gave the Ukrainians some non-lethal equipment. A number of us argued for lethal weapons but that didn’t prevail in the White House. And then in 2015, the Russians went into Syria and by then, we were talking about getting out of Syria. And then they intervene in our presidential election, and then finally they look at our retreat from Afghanistan and just think, Well, I can do whatever I want and these folks aren’t going to do anything. And so I think that set the stage.
There was an expectation, I think, that Ukraine would fall quickly, and one of the first surprises was really how resilient the Ukrainians were. And they have fought fantastically and been very innovative. On the other hand, God’s unfortunately still on the side of the big battalions. And when you’re outnumbered twelve to one in artillery shells, you’re going to take a pounding. And it’s another area where I scratch my head and I think, What happened to the “arsenal of democracy” in World War II, a big source of escalation dominance for us that we could out-produce our adversaries? How is it that two years into this war, we and our allies are not able to out-produce Russia?
And then there are the restraints. One of the ways you win is by shocking your enemy and doing stuff faster, on a greater scale. We’ve done well by the Ukrainians, but we’ve done it too incrementally, with all sorts of weapons systems and restrictions on what they could do with them.
I hope we stand by them. I think one of the principles of grand strategy in my mind, looking back at the Cold War and looking forward, is that you don’t want to overreach strategically and think you can do anything, but you also don’t want to underreach, thinking you can do nothing – because vacuums will get filled by bad people.
When your adversary makes a mistake, you need the boldness to take advantage of that. And we did that in Afghanistan and we did this against Al-Qaeda in various ways. We haven’t really done that enough in Ukraine. We’ve ceded escalation dominance to Putin. All he has to do is say nuclear weapons and we get kind of nervous.
The Cipher Brief: What decision could we make today that would impact the war in ways that you think it needs to be impacted?
Vickers: It’s supplying Ukraine more fully, and then lifting some of the restrictions on longer-range weapons. The idea right now is, You can shoot me, but I can’t shoot you, because as soon as you step on that side of the line, it’s going to trigger something bad from the Russians. That’s crazy strategy.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.
Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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