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They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it.

They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.

The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work. Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll farms

Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers.

The West has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.

What was first perceived as a targeted attack — Russia attempting to hack the U.S. election — is proving to be a broader and bolder war.

Seeking to weaken and discredit the Western alliance that has constrained Russia’s global ambitions for 70 years, Putin pushed the Brexit vote that rattled the European Union.

His cyber-sappers have also aided nationalist movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary

Russia did not need to collude with Trump. He was already an ideal host for the virus they are spreading. Putin’s goal, in May’s words, is to “sow discord in the West,” and Trump eats, sleeps and breathes discord. He understands that our siloed, targeted, algorithmic media feeds on conflict and outrage, and he is happy to dish it up.

We can’t defend ourselves until we see clearly what is happening, and understand that fact-checking, truth-telling and goodwill are more than virtues now. They are patriotic duties. Pogo’s words were never so true: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

But other experts have grown increasingly skeptical of the new approach, arguing that manufacturing errors, disgruntled insiders and sheer incompetence can also send missiles awry.

Advocates of the sophisticated effort to remotely manipulate data inside North Korea’s missile systems argue the United States has no real alternative because the effort to stop the North from learning the secrets of making nuclear weapons has already failed. The only hope now is stopping the country from developing an intercontinental missile, and demonstrating that destructive threat to the world.

The White House is also looking at pre-emptive military strike options, a senior Trump administration official said, though the challenge is huge given the country’s mountainous terrain and deep tunnels and bunkers. Putting American tactical nuclear weapons back in South Korea — they were withdrawn a quarter-century ago — is also under consideration, even if that step could accelerate an arms race with the North. 548 Comments Mr. Trump’s “It won’t happen!” post on Twitter about the North’s ICBM threat suggests a larger confrontation could be looming.“Regardless of Trump’s actual intentions,” James M. Acton, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recently noted, “the tweet could come to be seen as a ‘red line’ and hence set up a potential test of his credibility.”

a failure of imagination about the motives and plans of a longtime adversary meant that government officials were not fully alert to the possibility that Mr. Putin might try tactics here that have worked so well for him in Ukraine, the Baltics and other parts of Europe.

while American intelligence officials — who were focused primarily on the Islamic State and other urgent threats like China’s action in the South China Sea and North Korea’s nuclear and missile threat — saw what was happening, they came late to its broader implications

It was telling that within an hour of the release of the report on Friday, the secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, declared for the first time that America’s election system — the underpinning of its democracy — would be added to the list of “critical infrastructure.” This after years of cyberattacks on campaigns and government agencies.

“in July 2015, Russian intelligence gained access to Democratic National Committee networks” and stayed there for 11 months, roaming freely and copying the contents of emails that it ultimately released in the midst of the election. Classified briefings circulating in Washington indicate that British intelligence had alerted the United States to the intrusion by fall 2015.

Almost immediately, a low-level special agent with the F.B.I. alerted the Democratic National Committee’s information technology contractor, which doubted the call and did nothing for months. The F.B.I. failed to escalate the issue, even though it was clear from the start that the attackers were almost certainly the same Russians who had mounted similar campaigns against the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It was not until Oct. 7, 2016, 15 months after the initial hacking attack, that the intelligence agencies first publicly blamed Russia. Even then, Mr. Obama made it clear that he did not want to escalate the situation before the election, for fear of getting into a tit-for-tat cyberwar in which Russia might try to alter the actual vote tallying. (It did not.)

“The biggest frustration to me is speed, speed, speed,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, in response to a question from Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the panel, about the obstacles to seeing a threat from abroad and acting on it here in the United States.

It is clear that Mr. Putin saw a huge vulnerability in the American system that was ripe to be exploited.

The country’s highly partisan politics, with cable channels and websites devoted to pressing an agenda for the fully convinced and the half-convinced, made it more vulnerable to any disclosures that could capture a news cycle

Add to that the uniquely Russian combination of covert espionage and the disclosure of the emails it harvested, as well as the release of “kompromat” — compromising information about politicians and policy makers — and “fake news,” a tactic not above American officials at times.

The Trump Administration’s top two goals in Iran have also been undermined.

The nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned in May, 2018, on the ground that he wanted something broader, is now unravelling. Iran’s breakout time has begun to tick down again.

It has evolved into the world’s leading practitioner of “gray zone” activities—covert and unacknowledged military operations, proxy attacks and cyberwar—Michael Eisenstadt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said last week. “The United States has struggled to respond effectively to this asymmetric way of war.”

Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.

But at what cost?

Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash.

Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending.

It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”

This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later.

Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.

, technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war

the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.

For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military.

From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions.

Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics.

How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly

It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice.

Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives

Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.

But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one.

How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.

In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost

For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.

Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290.

it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers.

Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies.

After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security

Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.

it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror,

The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.

Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.

When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.

Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability.

This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression

It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.

U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion.

From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me

Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”

Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.

When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:

No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Since 2014, the U.S. has spent tens of millions of dollars toward arming Ukraine with hardware, software and training to secure its critical infrastructure. Those efforts have ramped up in recent months.

But Russian disinformation has become less effective

When war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, fake news from Russia flooded over the border with the aim of instilling panic in parts of the country with greater sympathy for Russia, like Crimea, turning them away from the Ukrainian government and toward Russia.

Russian state-owned TV broadcast false stories about "fascists" in the streets of Kyiv, a ban on the Russian language in Ukraine, and looming food riots and rationing. One story, broadcast on Russian state TV, claimed that Ukrainian soldiers had brutally murdered and crucified a three-year-old boy.

One example: A series of bomb scares were called into Ukrainian schools in recent weeks, but many parents shrugged them off.

Authorities in Kyiv are working to prepare the city

Although an invasion feels unlikely to many who live in Kyiv, city officials say they are not as prepared as they'd like to be.

Kyiv has thousands of bomb shelters that date back to the Soviet era, when some of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was based in Ukraine. Over the past several months, authorities have been working to bring as many shelters as possible back into operation. But many are still unusable. Some have been flooded, others are inaccessible. Some shelters have even been taken over by barbershops or bakeries that have set up shop inside. "Authorities will have to take care of this situation and take it more seriously," Mykhailova said.

Ukraine's military has strengthened since 2014

"Ukrainian troops are well-trained, they're well-equipped and they're very motivated. Ukrainians in general and the Ukrainian military are very patriotic. They love Ukraine. They're willing to fight to save it," said Kristina Kvien, the top U.S. diplomat in Kyiv, in an interview with All Things Considered on Friday.

That improvement has come with major help from international donors, primarily the United States. The U.S. has committed more than $5.4 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2014, according to the State Department. About half that total has been security assistance, with the Biden administration announcing another $200 million on Wednesday. Over the years, that military aid has taken many forms: Humvees, patrol boats, counter-artillery radar, a joint training center in western Ukraine.