Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Thursday that the Mecca defense agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is purely defensive and would not require Turkey to deploy troops to another country to carry out attacks. His comments come at a moment of uncertainty over how deeply Turkey and Pakistan could be drawn into Saudi Arabia’s war with Houthi militants from Yemen. 

Regional analysts have predicted the Mecca pact could institute a Middle East-centric alliance akin to NATO — a theory that’s being tested as the Houthis launch attacks on Saudi Arabia. Turkey has sent air defense systems, technical personnel and a limited number of troops with the express purpose of defending Saudi Arabian territory from the Houthi attacks. 

Pakistan, meanwhile, has deployed at least 8,000 troops, two squadrons of drones, air defense systems and more than a dozen fighter jets. Those jets were used to strike Houthi targets in Yemen this week, according to an unnamed Pakistani military source cited by The New York Times.

Mr. Trump said Thursday he is not planning new military strikes on Iran ahead of the Nov. 3 midterms, citing “productive discussions” with Tehran and asserting that the Iranian regime is near collapse, both militarily and economically.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz has significantly weakened, as oil flowing through the strategic waterway approaches prewar levels and an ongoing U.S. naval blockade intercepts Iranian tankers.

There is concern, however, that the war is escalating between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. There is also concern that Iranian military attacks are increasing in the Strait of Hormuz. U.K. Maritime Trade Operations reported this week that 12 tankers were struck by Iranian missiles or drones in the strait between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5.

The process of training artificial intelligence how to find information that is valuable to U.S. intelligence involves a process of human in-the-loop data labeling for AI models that is “very, very similar” to training a police dog how to find drugs at an airport, according to Peter Kant, the founder and CEO of Virginia-based company Enabled Intelligence.

In an exclusive interview on the latest episode of the Threat Status podcast that dropped Friday morning, Mr. Kant takes us inside the world of teaching AI to do everything from learning how to read Chinese and search for keywords in Mandarin to sifting through mountains of radio frequencies and sonar signals to find specific pieces of sought-after information. 

He also weighs in on societal unease over the potential dangers associated with AI. “I actually don’t think the public misgivings are misplaced,” Mr. Kant says on the podcast. “This backlash, this reticence or whatever it may be, I think is very fair. There are very powerful tools being put out into the public sphere and into these domains that aren’t well understood, that aren’t well tested.”

With North Korea having revised its constitution to say South Korea is a hostile state and its principal enemy, an incident such as the recent land mine blasts that injured South Korean soldiers “could escalate quickly” in the absence of dialogue between the two Koreas, writes Joseph R. DeTrani, an opinion contributor to Threat Status. 

“South Korea and the United Nations Command said North Korea violated the Korean War armistice,” Mr. DeTrani, a former associate director of national intelligence, writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times. 

“An emboldened leadership in Pyongyang could seize on an incident of this type to escalate tensions with South Korea, potentially triggering another war on the Korean Peninsula,” he writes. “Resuming an unconditional dialogue with North Korea should be our primary goal.”

The National Wastewater Surveillance System has become a “critical component of our nation’s defense against infectious disease” since its inception in 2020, writes Jared Whitley, who warns in an op-ed for The Times that “without congressional action to restore it, wastewater monitoring has already gone dark, putting Americans at greater risk.

“Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating concerns about the development of bioweapons by bad actors,” writes Mr. Whitley, who asserts that “in the next era of biological warfare, wastewater monitoring is a frontline defense.

“Congress should fund wastewater monitoring now,” writes Mr. Whitley, who worked in the U.S. Senate, White House and defense industry. “The bipartisan PREDICT Act, introduced by Sen. Tim Scott, South Carolina Republican, is a step in the right direction and demonstrates support for expanded wastewater monitoring to safeguard our country against future public health emergencies.”

• Oct. 12-14 — AUSA Annual Meeting and Expo, Association of the U.S. Army

• Oct. 14 — The Future of the U.S. AI ‘Stack’ in the Middle East, Middle East Institute

• Oct. 15 — The Rise and Fall of the U.S.-Pakistan Relationship After 9/11, Stimson Center

• Oct. 21 — A Discussion with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Andrew Puzder, Hudson Institute

• Oct. 27 — Chemistry of Combat: Rebuilding America’s Energetics Base, Hudson Institute

• Nov. 20-22 — Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada, HFX