Deepfake Season Is Here, and It’s Targeting Power
The deepfake problem is no longer hypothetical. It has crossed into real-world operations aimed at people who hold authority, control information, or move money. Elections are one target. Military personnel and government officials are another. The method is simple. If you cannot hack the system, impersonate someone inside it.
In 2025, an attacker used AI-generated voice and text to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and contacted at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a member of Congress, attempting to establish communications on Signal and other channels. That incident was widely reported and treated as a serious counterintelligence concern, not a prank. It showed that synthetic voice and text can now pass an initial credibility test with senior decision-makers.
The FBI has separately warned that malicious actors are conducting ongoing campaigns using AI-generated voice messages and texts to impersonate senior U.S. officials. The goal is to build rapport, move targets onto trusted or encrypted platforms, and then gain access to accounts, contacts, or sensitive information. The Bureau’s guidance stresses that these impersonation attempts are becoming more convincing and more frequent, and that identity verification must now assume voice and text can be spoofed.
Malicious actors are impersonating senior U.S. officials via text and AI-generated voice messages and targeting their contacts, including family members.
Advertisement🚨 In this scheme, actors reach out to victims and engage them in a brief conversation on a topic they are knowledgeable… pic.twitter.com/k2gSEKEF8W
— FBI (@FBI) December 19, 2025
Advertisement
Election security officials are also treating synthetic media as an active threat vector. Federal public-service announcements from the FBI and CISA warn that foreign threat actors are likely to use fabricated or manipulated content to influence public opinion and undermine confidence during election cycles. The concern is not that a fake video must hold up for days. It only has to circulate long enough to shape perception before corrections catch up.
Within the military community, officials have begun warning about feeding sensitive material into commercial AI systems. In February 2026, the military’s top explosive-ordnance technology authority cautioned bomb technicians not to upload highly sensitive data into generative AI tools, including approved government systems, because of the risk that information could be exposed or repurposed. The more audio, video, and written material that exists online, the easier it becomes for adversaries to build convincing impersonations.
The mitigation is old-school discipline. Verify identity on a second channel. Use known contact information, not the number that reached out. Treat sudden urgency and requests to switch platforms as red flags. According to federal guidance, voice alone can no longer be treated as proof of identity. In the era of synthetic media, trust is the target, and it is already under attack.
US Boots on the Ground in Nigeria
The United States is sending roughly 200 troops to Nigeria, and while the footprint is small, the signal is not. This is an advisory deployment, not a combat mission, but it marks a renewed U.S. military presence in West Africa at a time when extremist violence and geopolitical competition are both trending upward.
According to U.S. and Nigerian officials, the deployment will consist primarily of trainers, advisers, and intelligence personnel supporting Nigerian security forces. The troops are being sent at the request of Nigeria’s government to bolster training, intelligence sharing, and technical support as Nigerian forces continue fighting Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province. U.S. personnel will not conduct combat operations and will remain in support roles, with Nigerian commanders retaining operational control.
Initial reporting indicates that the first elements of the deployment have already begun arriving. Nigerian media and U.S. officials say U.S. military aircraft carrying personnel and equipment landed in northeastern Nigeria, including Maiduguri, a long-time hub for counterterrorism operations against jihadist groups in Borno State. Officials have not confirmed a permanent base location, but early arrivals suggest at least part of the mission will operate in the northeast where the insurgency is most active.
U.S. Troops Arrive In Nigeria To Train Soldiers — U.S. forces have arrived in Nigeria at the request of the Nigerian government to provide training, technical support and intelligence-sharing, the country’s military said. The deployment is intended…https://t.co/S7YvqBKXmN
— BizToc (@biztoc) February 16, 2026
No official timeline has been announced for how long the deployment will last. Pentagon statements frame it as part of an ongoing training and advisory partnership rather than a fixed-term operation, suggesting a rotational presence rather than a permanent expansion. That structure mirrors past U.S. advisory missions across Africa, where small teams cycle through partner nations to build capacity without establishing large forward bases.
The mission follows a series of coordinated counterterrorism efforts between Washington and Abuja, including U.S. strikes against Islamic State–linked targets in Nigeria in late 2025. It also comes as the United States recalibrates its posture in West Africa after losing key basing access in neighboring Niger and watching Russian security partnerships expand across parts of the Sahel.
Two hundred advisers will not transform the situation overnight. But their presence reinforces intelligence cooperation, training pipelines, and the broader U.S.–Nigeria security relationship.
In a region where influence often travels with uniforms, even a small advisory force carries weight.
The C-17 Nuclear Airlift That’s Quietly About to Change How We Power War
On February 16, 2026, the Department of War and the Department of Energy did something that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago. They airlifted a deployable nuclear microreactor aboard U.S. Air Force C-17s from March Air Reserve Base in California to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. It was the first time a next-generation microreactor designed for rapid deployment had been flown by military transport aircraft, and the move was less about theatrics than proof of mobility.
The reactor is Valar Atomics’ Ward 250, transported in modular components and, importantly, without nuclear fuel. The demonstration was about showing that a compact reactor can be moved quickly by air and assembled near where power is needed, not about running a reactor over the American West.
The underlying idea is straightforward. Modern military operations run on electricity, and forward bases often depend on diesel convoys and fragile local grids. A deployable microreactor offers a way to generate reliable power in remote locations without hauling fuel across contested terrain.
Technically, Ward 250 uses TRISO fuel in a high-temperature gas-cooled design with helium as the coolant. That configuration is intended to be more resilient and compact than traditional reactor systems. Output is projected to scale to roughly five megawatts of electricity, enough to power thousands of homes or a sizeable forward operating base.
Initial testing will be far more modest. Current reporting indicates early operations could begin in mid-2026 at low power levels, on the order of 100 to 250 kilowatts, with gradual scaling if testing and regulatory approvals proceed as planned.
After arrival at Hill Air Force Base, the reactor components are expected to move to Utah’s San Rafael Energy Lab for further assembly and testing under the Department of Energy’s pilot program. The goal is to demonstrate that small reactors can be deployed, installed, and eventually operated in support of military or remote civilian infrastructure.
Not everyone is on board. Critics have raised questions about cost, safety, and long-term waste handling. Federal officials acknowledge those concerns and say fuel disposal and reprocessing options are being worked through with state authorities. For now, the program remains in the testing phase, and the hardware that flew this week carried no nuclear fuel.
The takeaway is simple. This was not a publicity stunt. It was a logistics drill with strategic implications. If deployable microreactors become routine, future bases may run on something more reliable than diesel and a prayer.
Robert Duvall Has Left Us
Robert Duvall died this week at 95, and with him goes one of the last actors who could put on a uniform and make it feel lived in. He did not posture. He did not try to sell toughness. He carried it the way professionals carry it, quietly, as if it had been earned long before the cameras rolled.
Most will remember him as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. The Stetson. The helicopters skimming treetops. The line about napalm that will outlive all of us. But what made Kilgore memorable was not the bravado. It was the command presence. He moved and spoke like a man who had been in charge of things that mattered. He felt like someone you might actually meet in a field-grade command post, equal parts lethal and oddly calm when everything around him was coming apart.
Loved Robert Duvall as LTC Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. RIP. https://t.co/ttmGP7FvqT
— SOFREP (@sofrepofficial) February 16, 2026
He returned to that same credibility decades later in We Were Soldiers, this time as Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley. No speeches. No theatrics. Just the steady presence of a senior NCO who understood that panic spreads faster than bullets and that calm can be contagious. Many veterans have pointed to that performance as one of the most believable portrayals of a command sergeant major ever put on screen.
In The Great Santini, Duvall gave us a Marine Corps fighter pilot whose expectations in the cockpit followed him home. It was less about combat and more about the cost of command, the way discipline and duty can shape a family as much as a unit. For many who served, it rang uncomfortably true. He also appeared early in his career in MASH* as Maj. Frank Burns, a very different kind of officer, but one grounded in the rhythms and hierarchies of wartime service. And later, he portrayed Gen. Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals and a German officer in The Eagle Has Landed, continuing a career-long pattern of inhabiting military characters with quiet authority.
Duvall served in the U.S. Army after college and grew up in a military family, the son of a Navy admiral. Perhaps that background explains why his performances felt so grounded. He understood how officers speak when they are not giving speeches and how senior enlisted leaders carry themselves when no one is watching.
Tonight, we remember an actor who made military characters feel human, flawed, capable, and real. Hollywood will keep making war films.
There will be more uniforms, more helicopters, more dramatic monologues. But there will not be another Robert Duvall.
COMMENTS