Defense Intelligence Agency: "2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment (11 May 2025)

 

 Jeffrey Kruse, Lieutenant General, U.S. Air Force and Director if the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has transmitted to the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations of the United States House of Representatives a document that was made publicly available. It is entitled "2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment" (11 May 2025). It is also available on the website of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee website. The DIA 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment" is one of several produced by State organs: See  Homeland Security 2025 Threat Assessment; DEA 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment; 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The U.S. Secret Service runs a National Threat Assessment Center "provide research and guidance in direct support of the Secret Service protective mission, and to others with public safety  responsibilities." And so on.  The extent to which these are coordinated remains a mystery though one would expect both inter-agency rivalry, competition and cooperation. More important are questions of transposition--are the threat reports using the same language and assessing using the same values and analytics at least with respect to impacts assessment.

 The object of the publication and its public circulation was described in its Introduction:

Thank you for the invitation to provide the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA’s) assessment
of the global security environment. This year, more than in years past, the threat landscape is
changing rapidly and we are using this Statement for the Record to convey not only what we see as the current threats, but also to illuminate the trends and threats we see going forward that we must address. While additional details are available at higher classifications, we believe that providing this opening statement is a critical service for the Congress and the American public.

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It makes for interesting reading, though there are no surprises.  It is more a summary of what has been seeping out of the intelligence establishment to its favored (or disfavored) channels of communication for quite some time.  But it is no less necessary for that.  The constitution of an effective narrative requires both repetition and performance. Performances, like Greek tragedy, or mid 20th century musical comedy, requires both a well known framework full of familiar characters and some plot twists to make the performance feel fresh and contemporary--especially for public facing performance that may become part of the political discourse. It also requires continuity--even as the "tone at the top" changes with administration.  Presidents come and go--and members of the Congress come and go usually at longer intervals given the nature of the electoral system from the middle of the last century--but threats are forever. The most significant consequence of the notion of the eternal threat at the macro level (not an unreasonable baseline premise and one that accords with thee times) is the perhaps fatal transposition of that major major into its minor forms--application to micro level threats in situ against a host of identified threat agents, usually grouped around increasingly old-fashioned notions that there is a hierarchy of threat starting with what now passes for UN worthy-of-recognition States, and then followed by a motley crew of so-called bandits, criminal elements, out-of-state-control organization, zealots in various stages of psychosis lumped together as non-State actors. The result appears to be a desire not to end threat but to manage threat that one assumes will never go away. The organization of the State, and its economic, social, cultural, and normative lives appear now wrapped around both the major premise and its application in micro-situations.  

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Forever threats, then, are managed, they are not extinguished; and one can organize an international order around those premises. The idea is not unreasonable where the baseline for threat assessment springs from irreconcilable differences among collective forces. That forever nature of threat is enhanced since the end of the last global war in 1945(ish) as a consequence of the architecture developed to end threat.  The effort toward global convergence perhaps unconsciously but certainly with enough arrogance to produce its own resistance, was meant perhaps to overcome this problem of the eternal threat, the phenomenology of which was expressed in managing all threat rather than considering alternatives. In this respect, humans are not anything if not brilliant magicians in the art of irony and self-defeating structuralist idealism. Or even better magicians in veiling the essence of the operational precises of collective interaction with the soothing normative constructs of a converging ideal in which threat might be managed away to insignificance. Either way, the result was the same, and not unreasonable, though difficult to discuss bluntly with democratic populations. In this case one has constructed a set of relationships, structures, and expectations directed toward preserving a (the) status quo, and tolerating periodic eruptions, but never decisively enough to end threat, produces a situation in which threat is hardly ever existential (as that may be defined) but always bubbling. The object is to prevent major eruption but to tolerate and perhaps make instruments of minor ones. One need not read much to understand that this has been the phenomenology of peace since the 1950s, replacing the older model which always looking for total victory, achieved neither totality nor victory that could be savored for long. The result is the construction of systems of threat management which aligns with power hierarchies among states.  

If all threat, then, must be managed, the issue for the managers revolves around the premises, analytics and fulfillment of welfare maximizing management, as well as the development of a narrative architecture around all of these activities. The fundamental issue for policy is to define the parameters within which assessment of an optimum level and force of threat may be achieved. That produces an analytical cocktail of ideology, politics, security, and objectives that are both offensive and defensive. These, in turn, are shaped by the political worldviews of those shaping the approach to such analytics (see, e.g., The "Merchant" (商), the "Bureaucrat" (士) and the "Tariff War"--The Cognitive Cages of the New Apex Post-Global and the Condition of the U.S. and China in their Folie à Deux). Nonetheless, the agitation of threat, and the nature of its management depends in large part on its risk and severity. And risk and severity is measured as a function of impact. Eradication of threat upsets the global order and requires action that is now impossible given the defining parameters of the global order and its expectations built around ceasefire, negotiation and a preference for even a hostile status quo where the value producing assets which are the objects to which threat is directed can be protected (Cf here). Within this broader framework, the notion of threat and its management is highly contextual, and the more powerful the state the more likely that the context will affect not just the State but all other States connected to it.

None of this is good or bad, and it is certainly not unique to the intelligence establishment in the U.S. But it does help situate the 2025 DIA Worldwide Threat Assessment study and perhaps to be able to read it more intelligently. Beyond the usual actors, the most interesting aspect of the 2025 Assessment, and one in line with the Trump Administration's effort to help the the legal establishment understand that threat can no longer be understood in 18th century terms (see e.g.Invasion or Incursion by Non-State Actors: President Trump Issues "Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua") is the focus on non-state actors as an organized threat force with capabilities that may effectively match those of States. But that focus is largely confined to the category "National Security Threats Expanding Fueled by Advanced Technology" (Assessment pp. 1 et seq.) and "Foreign Intelligence Threats" (Assessment pp. 36 et seq.). Yet the focus is still on states--and principally peer and quasi-peer States. That makes sense in large part-- States still represent the principal source of organized threat; States also still manage non-State organizations with threat capabilities in ways that are similar to the way that States use State based proxies to project power (see, e.g., Assessment pp. 18-20).  But it is now more pressing to begin to consider these non-State actors as autonomous, at least to some extent--autonomous enough to both please themselves and their masters. That merits more more a small section on "Terrorism" (Assessment pp. 24-26). Beyond that the Assessment suggests the not unexpected--threat levels are rising, they exist everywhere, they are driven through hierarchies of power, and motivated both by those who would see the United States destroyed, to those who would see the Republic merely made irrelevant and useful for its resources and productivity. 

And lurking beneath all of this are three critical threat sources none of which can be well managed today: legal structures and habits that are historically anchored; technology; and the structural inhibitions of a global ordering that remains useful now as a framework but also serves increasingly as an instrument for strategic destabilization (perhaps a fancy way of suggesting that the classification system that starts with a distinction between domestic and foreign threat is now as outmoded  as dial up internet services). But most of all,  in threat management regimes, even ones that are guided by principles of transactions rather than normative vision, it may be necessary for States like the U.S. to re-order their threat analysis from state-centered to one in which  one can start from the presumption that dominant States are apex powers, but that below perhaps second rank states, the difference between state and non-state actors disappears. In that context one might, at a certain level, understand the equivalence of the threat of global criminal organizations, global enterprises, global identity movements, and States. At the most granular level, a group of teenagers working in the basement of their parents or friends and with access to appropriate knowledge, may pose as great a threat as middling States.  That threat architecture is on the radar here, but the analytics of threat and its management strategies is still in its infancy. The problem isn't the capabilities of threat assessment, rather it is the inhibitions on that assessment by the premises and expectations on which it is currently understood and data is valued and analytics are constructed. One ought to be able to imagine that in the secret parts of the Report and within the assessment groups within these services, these are the questions answers to which are being sought, and with them suggestions about the need to evolve the threat response architecture of the Republic to suit the times. And with those changes might have to come substantial rethinking of the normative conceits (all necessary in any point in the historical development of a State) that brought the nation through threats after 1945 but which appear increasingly of relevance only to historians (and for policymakers perhaps an informed basis for moving forward).