Threat Status for Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
Jay Clayton, President Trump’s nominee to take over as director of national intelligence, faced a confirmation hearing grilling Wednesday morning.
… Senate Intel Committee Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner, Virginia Democrat, reminded Mr. Clayton: “If you get this job, you’re gonna have intimacy with all of the nation’s top, closely guarded secrets.”
… U.S. forces for a fourth consecutive day carried out fresh airstrikes on Iranian targets.
… Mr. Trump is walking back his threat of tolls in the Strait of Hormuz but pushing ahead with a new blockade of Iranian ports.
… The U.S. Air Force says it wants to buy up to 11,200 copies of the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile and its anti-ship variant.
… Polish jet fighters intercepted a Russian reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic Sea on Tuesday.
… And Threat Status Special Ukraine Correspondent Guillaume Ptak was in Paris, where Ukrainian soldiers marched down the Champs-Elysees Tuesday as France turned its Bastille Day parade into a show of European military support for Kyiv.
The Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense project is expanding its secretive network of space-based, missile-detecting satellites with a dual contract for two defense technology companies, despite concerns on Capitol Hill about ballooning costs.
The Space Development Agency, an arm of the U.S. Space Force, has announced that roughly $955 million will go to Florida-based L3Harris Technologies for the production of 18 “Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor” satellites. The other roughly $798 million will go to Colorado-based Sierra Space “to provide 18 missile warning/missile tracking variant [space vehicles] across two orbital planes,” the agency said.
Mr. Trump’s January 2025 executive order for the system explicitly called for the “acceleration of the deployment” of an HBTSS satellite layer. L3Harris Vice President Ed Zoiss said in a Threat Status Influencers video interview last year that the HBTSS system tracks missiles using infrared technology, which can be tricky with futuristic hypersonic glide missiles, whose speeds change in more complex ways than conventional intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Three weeks before he is scheduled to be sworn into office, Colombia’s Vice President-elect Jose Manuel Restrepo says his nation hopes to turn around its fortunes by freeing up its economy and strengthening U.S. relations. He made the remarks at the Atlantic Council during a visit to Washington on Tuesday.
Colombia is the latest country shifting to the right as a populist-conservative wave sweeps across Central and South America — a wave that has empowered President Jose Antonio Kast in Chile and President Rodrigo Paz Pereira in Bolivia. Some hope the shift will bolster the Trump administration’s effort to counter the autocratic influence of China and Russia in the region, particularly in the national security realm, which includes space.
The latest edition of America’s Quarterly, published this week, calls space an increasingly “important theater in the strategic rivalry between China and the United States, with both superpowers vying in Latin America for allies and key geography.”
The Staff Judge Advocate office of the Hawaii-based U.S. Pacific Command has issued a graphic and talking points on the 2016 ruling by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration that ruled in favor of the Philippines in a key South China Sea territorial dispute and declared China’s “nine-dash line” covering 90% of the sea a violation of international law.
“China is using coercive, aggressive and dangerous actions in the South China Sea that are destabilizing and infringing on the sovereignty and sovereign rights of its neighboring states as well as all states entitled to UNCLOS freedoms of the high seas,” the PACOM graphic reads, referring to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz has a deep dive on the development, noting how the command document compares Chinese noncompliance with what is required. It follows a joint statement by the U.S. and 13 nations on Sunday affirming “there is no legal basis” for China’s claims over the sea.
By barring Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and sanctioning the military conglomerate that controls much of the island nation’s economy, the Trump administration has “brought the Cuban economy to the brink of collapse,” Jed Babbin writes.
But Cuba has “acquired about 300 drones from Russia and Iran,” writes Mr. Babbin, a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
“These have the range to reach targets deep in the United States and can carry a 100-pound or so explosive payload,” he writes. “We do not need another Cuban missile crisis, but the president should make clear that any drone launch from Cuba will be met militarily in a way that would destroy the regime.”
The memorandum of understanding signed in June was “supposed to restore freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz,” writes Aviva Klompas. “Instead, Iran continued targeting commercial shipping, prompting U.S. strikes on Iranian military targets,” with Iran, in turn, responding by “targeting U.S. military assets in Bahrain and Kuwait.
“For nearly half a century, Tehran has pursued the same goals: to preserve the regime, expand its influence and outlast its adversaries,” Ms. Klompas, CEO and co-founder of Boundless, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting antisemitism, writes in an op-ed for The Times.
“It has advanced its nuclear program while negotiating. It has armed terrorist proxies while negotiating. It has expanded its regional reach while negotiating,” she writes. “Diplomacy was always a means of managing pressure while preserving leverage. The memorandum of understanding did not change that.”
• July 15 — Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, Sen. Dave McCormick, Pennsylvania Republican, U.S. Army War College
• July 16 — A Nation at 15: South Sudan, Peacekeeping and the U.N. Funding Crisis, Stimson Center
• July 16 — The Western Balkans: A View from Vienna with Austrian Minister for Europe, Integration and Family Claudia Bauer, Hudson Institute
• July 16 — Navigating Strategic Competition: Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Illinois Democrat, on the Future of U.S. Indo-Pacific Engagement, Center for Strategic & International Studies
• July 17 — The NATO Summit and the Future of U.S.-Turkish Defense Relations, Atlantic Council
• July 22 — Expanding U.S. Investment in the Western Hemisphere, Atlantic Council
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