US Annual Threat Assessment is a Hot Mess

If you had any doubts about the incompetence of the US intelligence community, this week’s publication of the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community should erase them. In general, it is a banal presentation of the usual tropes designed to justify increased military defense spending. This publication is best characterized as drearily commonplace and often predictable. But there are a couple of bright spots, most importantly, the conclusion about Iran’s nuclear program:

We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decisionmaking apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decisionmaker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.

What’s missing in this assessment? Lots! Absurdly, the intel assessment says nothing about the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty that Russia and Iran signed on 17 January 2025. Surely that is relevant to any assessment of security threats from Russia and Iran. Also missing is any discussion of the Iran-Russia-China annual joint-military exercises. These weak analysts virtually ignore BRICS, giving it only two mentions in the section of the report devoted to Russia:

Finally, Moscow is increasingly willing to play spoiler in Western-centric forums such as the UN as well as use non-Western organizations like the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) group to press policies such as de-dollarization. . . .

While largely cut-off from Western supply chains, Russia has significantly expanded and deepened cooperation in several technical sectors with international partners. Russia seeks to further align its S&T efforts with China and BRICS allies in areas such as AI development and governance and semiconductor production to advance its own capabilities as well as broadly decrease Western influence.

Where the hell are the editors? Take a look at the last sentence in the preceding paragraph: “Russia seeks to further align its S&T efforts with China and BRICS allies.” Hello, China is part of BRICS (It is the “C” in BRICS in case you don’t know).

The entire document reflects a lack of understanding of how the world has changed since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation, particularly with respect to the rapid strengthening of BRICS and the growing interest in the Global South to align themselves with Russia and China while eschewing the West. The analysis is stovepiped — i.e., the states identified as major threats are treated as isolated entities. There is no attempt to explain how the dramatic increase in collaboration among Russia, China, Iran, India and other countries in the Global South is altering the international security environment.

The publication also confirms what I have said for several months — i.e., that the US intel community is taking information from Ukraine about Russian casualties and regurgitating that propaganda without subjecting it to actual empirical analysis. Here is the intel community’s “assessment” of Russian casualties from the war in Ukraine:

Russia’s military has suffered more casualties in Ukraine than in all of its other wars since World War II (750,000-plus dead and wounded), and its economy faces significant long-term
macroeconomic headwinds and is increasingly dependent on China.

Mediazona, by contrast, actually employs a sound methodology by tracking obituaries. They have identified 97,994 Russian military fatalities, and project a potential of 165,000 losses. Based on past data from combat operations around the world, there are normally three wounded for every KIA. If you accept the 97,994 as an accurate count, then the projected total wounded is 293,982. Total casualties, 391,976. That is still a big number, but it is half of the US intel community’s wild-ass guess.

Another example of the shallow analysis in this assessment is the failure to note that Russia’s army has grown to 1.5 million soldiers, most of whom are veterans of combat.

Instead of acknowledging that NATO faces growing internal divisions, the analysts who wrote this tripe don their cheerleader outfits and channel the ghost of Joe Biden with this ridiculous paragraph:

Russia’s aggression has strengthened European unity and prompted Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Efforts by Armenia, Moldova, and some Central Asian states to seek alternative partners highlight how the war has hurt Moscow’s influence, even in the post-Soviet space, and derailed Putin’s vision of a greater Eurasian union.

This is imbecilic nonsense and demonstrates that our supposedly enlightened intelligence community analysts are not reading the newspapers. Hell, they don’t even acknowledge the growing rift between the Trump administration and many of the NATO partners. Just ask Denmark how it is feeling these days, with Trump scheming to snatch Greenland from them. Keir Starmer just held a disastrous conference, where he failed to rally key European states to his crazy plan to put NATO troops into Ukraine. Yeah, Moscow’s influence is really suffering.

This is the unclassified version of the report. I suspect that the classified version is worse. Instead of shedding real light on the changed security landscape of the world today, the analysts and their bosses are playing it safe and telling the politicians what they want to hear, not what they need to know.

I had a nice chat today with Danny Davis’ producer, Gary, about the Signalgate fiasco:

I also had a conversation on Monday with Alastair Crooke about the deteriorating situation in West Asia: