A nation does not need to lose a battle to look weak. Sometimes it only needs to miss a paycheck.

Washington often treats budget shutdowns as partisan spectacle, but America’s adversaries see something far more useful: a live demonstration of self-inflicted fragility. When the federal government allows frontline security personnel to work unpaid it interrupts critical security and health functions and publicly advertises institutional dysfunction. It weakens more than morale, it weakens deterrence. That is the real national security cost of a prolonged budget lapse.

Deterrence rests on more than missiles, submarines, and strategic doctrine. It also depends on the visible reliability of state capacity. Allies and adversaries alike measure whether the U.S. can sustain operations under pressure, protect its population, and maintain continuity during disruption. A shutdown tells them the opposite. It signals that even absent enemy action; the U.S. is willing to degrade its own readiness through political dysfunction. Even short lapses in appropriations disrupt defense planning, contract execution, and the broader machinery that underwrites operational readiness.

The most immediate damage appears in aviation security. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is not simply a travel inconvenience buffer. It is part of the nation’s daily homeland defense posture. Every checkpoint, screening lane, and visible officer contributes to deterrence by signaling that attacks or probes are likely to be detected and disrupted. That visible consistency matters because deterrence at the tactical level often begins with routine friction imposed on hostile actors.

Friction weakens when the workforce begins to crack. More than 460 TSA officers have already quit during the current standoff, while absentee rates have climbed to 10 to 11 percent nationally. Repeated funding disruptions are damaging morale, retention, and long-term staffing stability across the Department of Homeland Security. That is not merely a workforce problem. It is a deterrence problem.

Fatigue measurably degrades visual search performance, which is directly relevant to screening-intensive environments such as aviation security. TSA screening is not just procedural. It is cognitive work performed under repetitive, high-stakes conditions. When officers are exhausted, financially strained, or distracted by uncertainty, the quality of that work can decline even if the checkpoint remains technically operational.

Equally important, deterrence at the checkpoint depends not only on actual performance but on what potential attackers believe about the system. Airport security screening is perceived as a stronger deterrent when it appears visible, universal, and credible. That matters because deterrence is partly psychological. A security system that appears chaotic, understaffed, and politically neglected may still function, but it no longer projects the same confidence.

This erosion has consequences beyond the checkpoint itself. Long lines spilling into terminal lobbies and pre-screening corridors create soft-target conditions that sophisticated attackers have historically exploited overseas. U.S. airports have warned Congress that the current operational strain is serious, worsening, and potentially long-lasting. In practical terms, a shutdown does not just reduce security throughput. It redistributes risk into large, dense, unsecured public spaces and creates opportunity.

More troubling still is that recurring shutdowns create patterns. Adversaries watch for patterns. If hostile actors can reliably anticipate periods when U.S. aviation security is underpaid, understaffed, and politically distracted, then Washington has unintentionally handed them a calendar of vulnerability. Strategic competitors, transnational terrorist networks, and opportunistic lone actors all benefit when a defender repeatedly broadcasts when its systems are under stress.

The same logic applies beyond airports. Health security is often treated separately from deterrence, but that is a categorical error. In an era defined by pandemics, synthetic biology, fragile supply chains, and the weaponization of disruption, public health capacity is national security capacity. A country that cannot sustain surveillance, biodefense coordination, and health system continuity under fiscal pressure is not demonstrating resilience. It demonstrates exploitable weaknesses.

That is precisely why the shutdown’s impact on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should concern strategists as much as its effect on TSA. HHS’s own FY 2026 contingency staffing plan states that 23,128 employees, roughly 31 percent of its workforce, would be furloughed during a lapse in appropriations. The plan further notes that numerous non-excepted functions would be paused or curtailed, including elements of grant oversight, data collection, validation, analysis, and portions of public communication. That may sound bureaucratic, but it is not.

Health system functions form the connective tissue of national preparedness. Surveillance, analytics, research oversight, and continuity of clinical and administrative operations are what allow the U.S. to detect biological threats early, understand cascading risks, and sustain resilience under stress. Public health emergency management is foundational to biodefense capacity, particularly in areas such as interagency coordination, situational awareness, testing, surveillance, and surge resilience. When those systems are interrupted, the country does not simply lose paperwork, it loses awareness, agility, and recovery capacity.

This point is reinforced by broader preparedness of scholarship. Public health emergency preparedness in the U.S. has long suffered from uneven and declining support, leaving critical state and local response systems more vulnerable to disruption. In deterrence terms, disruptions lower the cost for an adversary seeking to exploit a biological event, amplify public panic, or overload institutional response capacity.

System disruption and deterrence is where budget shutdowns become strategically self-defeating. The U.S. invests heavily in advanced military capability, but periodically undermining the civilian systems that make that capability credible is defeatist. No adversary needs to destroy American resilience if Washington is willing to suspend parts of it on its own. That contradiction sends a damaging signal to both allies and competitors.

For adversaries such as China and Russia, recurring shutdowns offer a useful strategic readout. They reveal domestic political brittleness, weak continuity discipline, and a governing system vulnerable to self-imposed paralysis. That does not automatically invite direct confrontation, but it does encourage gray-zone opportunism. Cyber probing, disinformation, infrastructure stress campaigns, and strategic influence operations all become more attractive when the target appears distracted and internally divided. Shutdowns are self-inflicted wounds. In a deterrence environment, self-inflicted wounds are still wounds.

For U.S. allies, the signal is quieter but equally corrosive. Extended deterrence relies not only on military capability but also in the confidence of American competence and continuity. Partners want to know that the U.S. can manage crises at home while sustaining commitments abroad. A federal government that struggles to keep airport screening and health preparedness stable during a budget fight risk is undermining that confidence at exactly the wrong moment.

For these reasons, shutdowns should no longer be treated as routine political leverage when they affect core homeland security and resilience institutions. Congress should establish automatic continuing resolution mechanisms for agencies and functions that are central to deterrence. This includes transportation security, emergency preparedness, biodefense, and public health surveillance. Political disagreement is unavoidable; however, institutional self-sabotage is not.

Deterrence is often discussed in the language of force posture, strategic messaging, and escalation dominance. This all matters. Yet, deterrence lives in the ordinary machinery of a functioning state: an airport screening lane that stays open, a health surveillance system that keeps collecting data, and a workforce that knows the government will not ask it to defend the nation for free. When that machinery stalls, deterrence does not collapse overnight. It thins. It flickers. It becomes easier to stress. That is the danger of a shutdown. It does not merely interrupt government. It advertises vulnerability.

Brandon Toliver is a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. The views of the author are his own.

Deterrence on Layaway: A Shutdown’s Quiet Assault on American Security was originally published on Global Security Review.

After smallpox was officially eradicated, the world’s remaining samples of variola virus were locked away in vaults in biosafety level 4 laboratories at CDC Headquarters in Atlanta, GA, and the Vector Research Institute in Novosibirsk, Siberia. An estimated 5 million lives annually since the disease’s eradication have been saved, a testament to the awesome power and great lengths taken to end this disease. However, even though the last known naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977, smallpox still poses a dramatic risk to United States national security.

If only the United States and Russia have variola virus samples and the use of biological weapons has the potential to trigger an epidemic or pandemic, one might conclude that state use of smallpox as a weapon is not a significant threat. However, multiple countries have unofficial samples of the variola virus, including North Korea and Russia. Worse yet, the United States is not adequately prepared for a smallpox outbreak. Smallpox, a Category A agent, is considered easy to disseminate and transmits easily from person to person. Furthermore, despite the increased preparedness efforts taken after the 2001 Amerithrax attacks, the United States is not prepared for a bioterror attack. Though the United States stockpiles smallpox vaccines, the logistics of maintaining and rolling out the vaccine to the masses in a bioterror attack scenario would be incredibly difficult, as the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has demonstrated. This could be further exacerbated by growing anti-vaccine sentiments.

In addition to concerns that the countries in possession of smallpox samples could deploy them as a weapon, there are further valid concerns that artificial gene synthesis could allow for the re-creation of smallpox. There is potentially precedence for this: in 2017, many scholars criticized a PLOS ONE article providing details of how one Canadian lab reconstructed an infectious horse pox virus using chemically synthesized DNA, arguably providing a roadmap of how one might do the same for smallpox. Dual-use research is certainly nothing new but, in a more interconnected world, the threats posed by infectious disease dual-use research are especially concerning. Furthermore, as community and private labs proliferate alongside concerns about who is in our university labs across the U.S., issues of who has access to this type of research could also pose greater national security risks than many presently estimate.

Today, a successful smallpox attack would be catastrophic, and ensuring we are prepared for an intentional release of variola virus will entail strengthening public health at all levels, ensuring the stability and efficacy of the Strategic National Stockpile, and making sure healthcare providers and private healthcare systems are prepared should they be presented with a case. These public health steps are vital to national biosecurity preparations as well. Furthermore, cross-disciplinary collaborations in academia, industry, and government are critical to facilitate this preparation and to achieve better biosecurity in this country, particularly as some public health scholars have argued that increased bio-preparedness has harmed public health.

Finally, while smallpox is a  unique case, this challenge highlights larger structural issues the United States and other countries must address such as the urban-rural healthcare divide, racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes, rising prescription drug prices, and ongoing crises like the opioid and obesity epidemics. While we lack clear, open-source information about smallpox and general biological weapons capabilities of other states and non-state actors, we can improve our preparedness for possible attacks by improving our overall public health. Regardless of if we face a future smallpox attack or not, and despite the lack of harmony between these two fields, such steps will improve our overall preparedness for future pandemics and emerging health threats.

The Overlooked, Dangerous Nexus Between National Security and Public Health: The Case of Smallpox was originally published on Global Security Review.

China’s Pivot: The Great Recession

The Great Recession of 2008 was America’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes, and trillions of dollars evaporated from U.S. stock markets. By several metrics, the U.S. has yet to recover some 12 years later.

What is frequently overlooked is how well China weathered the financial crisis. At its worst, China’s economic growth slowed from a high of 14% in 2007 to a low of 9.4% in 2009. Meanwhile, the American economy’s meager 1.8% growth in 2007 eventually bottomed out with a 2.5% contraction two years later.

The Great Recession became a pivotal moment for leaders and analysts in China. Many took note of the discrepancy between the performance of the two economies, attributing the difference to how each government responded to the crisis in their respective countries. The change that the PRC’s success induced was psychological. It marked the moment that many in China began to give more support to two interrelated propositions. The first being that China is on the rise. The second is that the U.S. is on the decline. Many people in China did not hide or mask this conclusion. For example, in 2017, China’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs He Yafei wrote that 2008 was possibly the “watershed year” that ushered in the end of the era of American hegemony, Pax Americana.

Given this assessment, the PRC likely saw the Great Recession as a strategic opportunity. Its government proceeded to shepherd through challenging and profound changes to its foreign policy approach. The most notable of these changes involve the gradual but continued shift from a restrained policy to a more assertive one. In the decade since China has shown its ambitions to reshape the international order more to its favor, press forward with unilateral claims in the South China Sea, assert itself more forcefully in diplomatic encounters and countenance the prospect of maintaining unstable relations with the U.S. to achieve other strategic interests.

China reaped enormous gains as a result of the distraction and momentary weakness of America and its allies. Chinese-led multilateral institutions are increasing in number. The PRC continues to maintain militarily uncontested control over its illegal maritime territories. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s landmark grand strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, has been pursued with vigor, mainly to the benefit of China’s economic, political, and security interests. Furthermore, China has yet to buckle under pressure from the U.S. to resolve the trade war.

Coronavirus: A Second Opportunity?

China reported an outbreak of a new contagion to the World Health Organization (WHO) in December 2019. This virus subsequently came to be known as COVID-19. After initially bungling its response, the PRC snapped into action and took drastic measures, enacting the most widespread and comprehensive lockdown of its population in the country’s history. Months later, the final weeks of March have demonstrated the effectiveness of its approach. China regularly reports that homegrown cases are down to zero. Life in Wuhan will soon return to normal. And China is dispatching medical supplies and hundreds of doctors to Italy to help the country’s beleaguered hospitals.

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Meanwhile, almost 90 days after China’s first report to WHO, the U.S. has continued to struggle on nearly all fronts. The United States took virtually no action in the lead-up to its own outbreak and has had a disjointed and spastic response since. The process of manufacturing and procuring ventilators from the private sector has been marred by vacillations within the Trump administration. Efforts to obtain test kits and put them to use have faced complications due to uncertainties about financing and eligibility. Congress spent weeks haggling over much-needed bailout provisions. As of March 26, the U.S. has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases of any country in the world. Meanwhile, Americans are left confused by the tangled web of preventive measures that can differ from state to state, county to county, or even city to city.

If the United States’ response fails to adequately address the crisis, the damage to the economy, people’s livelihoods, government credibility, and even international reputation could be tremendous. This, of course, is all in addition to the tragic loss of human life that would result.

In contrast, China has recently gone on a propaganda blitz. PRC Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang has stressed that the coronavirus will be a “major impetus” for friendship and cooperation. In phone calls with world leaders, Chairman Xi Jinping of the Chinese Communist Party has preached his country’s desire to offer assistance and cooperation. And Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese internet juggernaut Alibaba, has pledged to send 500,000 test kits and one million masks to the U.S. China, in effect, is trying to frame itself as a global leader, a capable partner, and a steadfast friend in the fight to contain the coronavirus.

Apart from some criticism by Western officials such as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and EU High Representative Josep Borrell, China has faced little resistance in promoting its narrative as the world’s savior. One reason is that China’s help is genuinely needed in many countries struggling to battle the epidemic. But another reason is that China effortlessly stepped into a gaping leadership vacuum left by the U.S., Europe, and their allies. This may only be the first (and most innocuous) step in an intensified effort by the PRC to pursue greater strategic objectives.

Implications

It is still too early to say how this epidemic will play out in the United States. A lot may depend on what the U.S. government does—and does not do—in the coming weeks. However, it is not too early to speculate about how a perceived success by the PRC coupled with the perception of a U.S. failure could impact the former’s calculus. Similar to the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic could yet again provide evidence to China’s leaders and analysts that their country is rising while the U.S. is falling. And just like the developments that followed in the wake of the Great Recession, this could once again energize China to take advantage of a relatively weakened and distracted West by doubling down on its commitment to proactive foreign policy pursuits.

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At the same time, other factors could further facilitate Beijing’s ambitions. Reputationally, China may score additional gains among countries that recognize China’s response and recovery as more effective. Economically, U.S. businesses may be hit twice. First, American companies will suffer the direct effects of an economic slowdown at home. Second, U.S. businesses operating in a prolonged recession may be at a disadvantage to Chinese businesses enjoying the benefits of an earlier economic recovery, resulting in the potential loss of billions in missed business opportunities.

However, China’s own rapid recovery is far from guaranteed, and the U.S. still has time to respond. As Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said in a televised CNBC interview on March 10, COVID-19 is “a test of preparedness on all fronts […] The United States has got enormous resources at its disposal […] I would never count the Americans out.”

COVID-19: Crisis or Strategic Opportunity for China? was originally published on Global Security Review.

The decentralization of the ability to disseminate information at scale poses a challenge in the event of national and global security threats and incidents like terrorism, instability in post-conflict states, natural disasters, and public health crises, such as the pandemic we are currently experiencing. In all the examples above, without exception, individuals use social media to share opinions, news, photos, and videos of the incident and its aftermath. First responders and the relevant authorities—whether defense, intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and public health agencies—require accurate information in real-time, and can use social media as a tool for such information to assist in planning and response.

While social media is already widely used by law enforcement and national security agencies as to gather and disseminate information, this author argues there is an essential need to advance the use of social media in the public sector as a source of real-time information to enhance situational awareness, crisis preparedness, and disaster response efforts.

Social media is already utilized in counter-terrorism, criminal investigations, threat forecasting, and information operations. However, social networks can be even further harnessed by public sector agencies as a continuous, real-time source of intelligence, if leveraged appropriately, particularly given that improvements in technology applications mean that any individual with a basic camera-equipped smartphone can serve as a source of on-the-ground information at the epicenter of a significant incident.

Many would argue that continuous, in-depth analysis of social media content infringes on civil liberties and is invasive to the privacy of individuals, yet such an argument exposes a double standard relating to the use of information on social networks by public sector agencies. Many social media users share content publicly, therefore, analysis of publicly-available social media content by public sector agencies wouldn’t be a violation of user privacy. In the Intelligence Community, the use of social networks as a source of intelligence falls into the OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) category.

Regardless, whether used by law enforcement, defense agencies, the intelligence community, or the general public, social media is an immeasurably powerful tool for reaching and connecting people at scale. Relevant social media content and “hashtags” trend around the globe within minutes of a crisis event—such as an act of terrorism, political violence, a natural disaster, or a public health emergency—particularly when an incident rapidly escalates and is unpredictable in nature.

It’s therefore critical that defense, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, as well as first responders, maintain and have access to continuous monitoring of social media trends as they develop in real-time. In high priority incidents, individuals on the scene are likely to share photographs, videos, and text updates—information of great value in a crisis. Intelligence gathered from real-time analysis of social networks would include, but not be limited to, preliminary assessments of the situation’s complexity and the response required, as well as forecasting future consequences that could arise.

Citizen journalism and “whistleblowing” over social media can also serve as a critical indicator and a warning sign of worsening situations. A recent example of this was Dr. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who issued a warning in a message shared on the Chinese social media platform Weibo on December 30th, 2019 about a “strange new virus,” which is now a pandemic impacting nearly every country in some way. In hindsight, had his post been viewed by intelligence agencies as an early warning sign, many states may have taken stricter measures earlier on to limit the impact of COVID-19.

In addition to systematic social media monitoring, automated text, and sentiment analysis of publicly shared user posts can provide crucial insights into the attitude of the general public and reactions towards an incident. This would further help first responders and security authorities when communicating with the public in an emergency, such as implementing enhanced security screening, border closures, and evacuations. Moreover, automated analysis of social media posts would assist first responders in their response factoring to avoid contributing to a public panic.

Social media in a crisis is a double-edged sword. As a crisis takes hold, a state’s adversaries are likely to take advantage of the situation and unleash a barrage of online disinformation and propaganda through social media channels in an attempt to foment public unrest. Such campaigns, usually initiated with a political agenda in mind to use the general public as unwitting proxy actors, present an additional challenge that further emphasizes the importance of maintaining continuous, real-time monitoring of publicly available user-generated social media content. Such a capability would effectively reinforce the efforts of first responders on-the-ground, and allow for public sector authorities to better mitigate the consequences of malicious disinformation campaigns.

Furthermore, continuous monitoring of social media platforms by a state’s security agencies enables those agencies to anticipate and counter unintentional misinformation. The spread of inaccurate rumors may have an adverse impact on public safety, a possible reason for the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Ghrebreysus, advocated for urgent measures to be taken to mitigate the fallout from the coronavirus “infodemic.”

Social Media’s Role in Disaster Preparedness & Crisis Management was originally published on Global Security Review.