Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery serves as senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s (FDD) Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) and as an FDD senior fellow. Mark served for more than three decades in the U.S. Navy, held senior leadership roles in Congress, and is a recognized expert on cyber and technology policy. He is co-author of the book Axis of Aggressors: Countering the Cooperation of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Prior to joining FDD, Mark was policy director for the Senate Armed Services Committee under Sen. John S. McCain, where he coordinated efforts on national security strategy, force posture, capabilities, and cyber policy.
Mark served 32 years in the U.S. Navy as a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer, retiring as a rear admiral in 2017. His flag officer assignments included director of operations (J3) at U.S. Pacific Command; commander of Carrier Strike Group 5 aboard the USS George Washington in Japan; and deputy director for plans, policy, and strategy (J5) at U.S. European Command. From 1998 to 2000, he served at the National Security Council as director for transnational threats.
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have never signed a treaty binding the four of them together. They haven't needed to. Over two years of research for Axis of Aggressors, along with his co-authors Bradley Bowman, Elaine K. Dezenski, Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery documented more than 600 instances of cooperation among the four governments.
What emerges is something looser than a formal alliance, and in some ways more dangerous: a working partnership in which each member supplies what the others lack.
That partnership is already shaping the war in Ukraine and the military balance in the Pacific, and it reaches into the water and power systems of ordinary American towns.
Meet the Future spoke with Montgomery about what the research revealed, what Congress should do next, and the question he wishes Washington would ask more often.
What Russia is paying back
Most coverage of the axis focuses on what Russia has received for its war on Ukraine. Montgomery is more concerned with what Moscow is handing back.
"A lot of people spend time on what everyone's given Russia," he said. "But what Russia's giving back is equally interesting." To China, Russia is allegedly providing submarine quieting technology. "That's a big deal," Montgomery said. "That gets at one of our few asymmetric advantages we still have in a conflict with them."
Russia has also spent the last three or four years training Chinese forces in large-scale helicopter and airborne assault, a capability Montgomery says only two militaries in the world have truly mastered: Russia's and America's. Think of the helicopter assault in Apocalypse Now. For Taiwan, the implications are direct. "That one really affects Taiwan," he said. "The submarine one really affects us. Those two affect me the most."
North Korea is collecting its own payment. Moscow describes the help as space technology. "Our military would call it ICBM technology," Montgomery said, technology that allows North Korean missiles to reach the United States "more comprehensively and more effectively."
What the axis gives Russia
The flow in the other direction is just as substantial, and Montgomery ran through it quickly.
• Iran supplied thousands of Shahed drones, along with the designs and intellectual property Russia now uses to build its own Geran-series drones.
• North Korea sent roughly 12,000 troops to fight for Russia and is now providing more, some of whom may enter Ukrainian sovereign territory. Pyongyang has also shipped about 6 million rounds of artillery and mortar ammunition, "more than NATO's built in 20 years," by Montgomery's count, and is now supplying short-range ballistic missiles.
• China has backstopped the entire effort. Chinese trade has offset much of what Russia lost to sanctions and helped fund its war machine, and Chinese microelectronics end up inside Russian cruise and ballistic missiles.
"That's a pretty big set of friends," he said.
If Congress passes one bill
Asked what a single bill from the 120th Congress should accomplish, Montgomery offered two answers: the dramatic one and the practical one.
The dramatic one is a dedicated U.S. Cyber Force. "We need that to defend our own country," he said. "We need it to help defend Taiwan, to help defend Japan, to help defend Ukraine." The United States does not have one.
The practical one is money for Ukraine through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion. "We cut our security assistance to Ukraine 98% in one year," Montgomery said. He would restore it.
What Washington doesn't see from Ukraine
Montgomery has spent time on the ground in Ukraine, where it is plain that the country is fighting not just Russia but the whole axis. His assessment is blunt on both sides.
"They're not going to lose, the Ukrainians," he said. But if the war drags on for another three years, civilian deaths will climb sharply. Ukraine is nearly out of Patriot interceptors. And because Washington has restricted Ukraine from targeting Russian launchers on Russian soil, Russian forces sit just across the border and fire into Ukrainian cities.
"I don't think their civilian resilience will break," he said. But the civilian death rate "is going to increase markedly over the next one to two to three years if we don't intervene and do something. And this president doesn't appear to be willing to do that."
The flawed assumption about resources
Every administration inherits assumptions from the one before. The one Montgomery thinks is most wrong concerns money. The current defense budget request looks large, about 32% above the Biden administration's last budget. But Montgomery points to where the baseline started.
Lynn Schmidt8 min readIn 2025, U.S. defense spending stood at 2.9% of GDP, below the level Washington regularly demands of its European allies. During the Cold War, the United States spent around 6%. Much of the decline came under the Budget Control Act during the Obama years, which Montgomery says took spending from 4.8% to 3.3%. Congress was party to that law, but the administration pushed it hard.
"People want our military to be able to do certain things," he said. "At some point, resources matter. I think there's an assumption about our resources that is fundamentally flawed."
The question nobody asks: simultaneity
Asked what question he wishes congressional staffers and reporters would ask more often, Montgomery didn't hesitate: simultaneity. What happens if Russia and China, or China and Iran, or Russia and North Korea, move at the same time?
"Because then you have to tell the truth," he said. The capacity of the U.S. military is such that it "can barely potentially handle one," especially if that one is Russia or China.
The shortfall isn't only in fighters and ships. It's in what Montgomery calls the "blocking and tackling of logistics": C-17 airlifters, aerial refueling tankers, Navy logistics ships, Army sustainment commands. "We don't have near enough for one war," he said, "much less a war with a big one and a war with Iran or North Korea. And certainly not for Russia and China together."
What towns across America would notice if a Taiwan crisis took place tomorrow
Chinese malware has reportedly been pre-positioned inside U.S. water, power, and pipeline systems. Montgomery was careful to frame it that way. So what would a Taiwan crisis look like from an ordinary American town?
The first effects would land on national security. The same infrastructure that supports the economy and public health also moves the military: rail, aviation, and ports. "The first thing we'll see is an inability of our military to move from forts to ports to overseas," he said.
After that, it depends on where you live. A town far from military installations and major industry may see little. A town near a base or a large factory should expect outages in water and electrical power, and the consequences arrive fast.
"When water goes away, your hospital shuts down 12 hours later, or less," Montgomery said. "When power goes away, your hospital shuts down 12 to 18 hours later, and stops taking new non-emergency people right away."
The arithmetic is unforgiving. Each hospital inpatient requires roughly 150 gallons of water a day across all the ways care depends on it. The tank on a hospital roof can support about ten people, so it would be reserved for the emergency room. ICU patients would be loaded into ambulances and sent elsewhere. "It's going to be a dangerous event," he said, "with some mortality." The hit to national security and public health would come immediately.
Where government ends and the private sector begins
Most critical infrastructure in the United States is privately owned, which raises what Montgomery called "the $64,000 question in cyber resilience": who is responsible for defending it?
He breaks the problem into three phases.
Prevention is mostly the private sector's job: investing properly in defensive systems. The government can help with intelligence, assessments, and standards.
Response during a crisis is where the government should have real capability, and right now it doesn't. That gap is why some have floated letters of marque, licensing private companies to help defend networks or strike back at attackers. Montgomery isn't a fan. He would rather see the government get better at this, including through the National Guard.
Recovery is again mostly a company responsibility, with government support.
Over all three, he argues, the country needs a prioritization system that decides who gets help first in a crisis. "We don't have a prioritization system," he said, "and I don't think we have a good system for the prevent, mitigate, and recover phases."
The one thing to get right
If the United States got one thing right over the next decade, what would matter most when the axis is finally tested? Montgomery's answer was something he says used to be a given.
"The most important thing I have to have is an effective system of allies and partners," he said: allies who invest enough in their own defense and are integrated with American forces on key capabilities, "so that when our two and their two are added together, two plus two equals five instead of three."
That system, he said, "has been jeopardized greatly by the President over the last 18 months." Worse, nothing new has been built, and alliances only stay strong by constantly improving. "Our alliance structure is weakened and failing," he said. "And that needs to get strong."
What would progress look like three years from now? Allies and partners spending around 3.5% on defense, working to defend themselves, and supporting the United States when it conducts military operations "because they respect you."
One idea to help America win the future
Montgomery's closing idea was a military one: a better mix of high-cost and low-cost weapons.
The United States is short on Patriot interceptors, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and other munitions, and every one of them costs more than $2 million per missile. Pairing those exquisite systems with cheaper, more plentiful ones, he said, "will help us win."
The axis has spent years learning how to work together, trading drones for designs, shells for submarine secrets, and microchips for missiles. Montgomery's warning is that the United States has spent those same years assuming its resources, its logistics, and its alliances would be there when needed. On his account, none of those assumptions can be taken for granted anymore.
