We may have just entered a new era of modern warfare.

CNN dropped an explosive story this week that made me do a double-take. It’s the kind of development that changes the whole atmosphere of a longstanding debate.

According to CNN, the U.S. government has been testing a device “purchased in an undercover operation” that “some investigators think could be the cause” of Havana Syndrome — those mysterious “anomalous health incidents” that have affected American diplomats, spies, and troops over the past decade.

Wow.

The Pentagon, CNN reports, has spent “more than a year” studying the device. Homeland Security Investigations allegedly bought it “in the waning days of the Biden administration” using Defense Department funding. The price tag was “eight figures.” And here’s the line that should stop you cold: the device “produces pulsed radio waves” and “could fit in a backpack.”

Read that again. A backpack.

For years, Havana Syndrome has lived in a liminal space. Nebulous reports about Havana Syndrome have surfaced then disappeared. Real people report sudden, severe symptoms: vertigo, headaches, nausea, tinnitus, cognitive fog. And yet the public narrative has seesawed between two extremes: either this was a coordinated foreign attack using exotic technology, or it was a mass psychosomatic event that got amplified by stress, misinterpretation, and fear.

CNN’s reporting doesn’t settle that argument. But it changes the stakes.

Because for the first time, we’re not talking only about “theories.” We’re talking about a physical object that the U.S. government was apparently willing to spend enormous money to obtain and test.

That alone is a meaningful fact — even if we don’t know what the device can actually do.

We should, of course, be careful before drawing any conclusions. The CNN story is full of attribution language for a reason. It relies on “four sources briefed on the matter.” CNN says the device is “still being studied” and that there is “ongoing debate — and in some quarters of government, skepticism — over its link” to the remaining unexplained cases. CNN also admits it “was not able to learn where — or from whom — HSI purchased the device.”

So the case isn’t exactly closed. But if your instinct is to shrug and say Havana Syndrome was never real, you shouldn’t do that either.

The truth is: something happened to these people. The U.S. government has acknowledged enough of it to set up compensation mechanisms for injured personnel. Multiple investigations have taken the complaints seriously. The debate has never been about whether victims are making it up. The debate has been about what caused it — and whether there was intent behind it.

Which is where the official intelligence posture comes in.

CNN notes that in 2023 the intelligence community said it “could not link any cases to a foreign adversary,” calling it unlikely that the illness was “the result of a targeted campaign by an enemy of the US.” And as recently as January 2025, CNN writes, the “broader intelligence community assessment remained that it was very unlikely that the symptoms were caused by a foreign actor” — even as ODNI stressed analysts cannot “rule out” a foreign role “in some small number of cases.”

That tension — very unlikely overall, but not ruled out in a subset — is exactly why this story has stayed radioactive.

It’s also why the existence of a portable device that “produces pulsed radio waves” hits like a brick through a window.

Because one of the most persistent objections to the “directed energy” theory has always been practical: show me the mechanism. Show me something portable enough to deploy, powerful enough to matter, and discreet enough to use without drawing attention. The idea has sounded like science fiction for a reason.

Now CNN is suggesting the U.S. government has acquired something that at least resembles the hypothetical.

And that raises a darker possibility — one the U.S. government is clearly thinking about, because CNN says officials are worried the technology could have “proliferated,” meaning “more than one country could now have access to a device that may be capable of causing career-ending injuries to US officials.”

Yeah. No kidding. If the U.S. government can purchase a directed energy pulse weapon on the black market, others may have done the same.

And that phrase — “career-ending injuries” — is key. We’re not talking about a weapon that blows up a building. We’re talking about a weapon that removes a person from the board.

Which brings me to the part of this story that matters even if the device ends up being a dead end: Modern warfare is evolving into something less visible, less attributable, and far more psychologically corrosive.

The old model of conflict — especially between major powers — had a certain grim clarity. You could point to troop movements, missile launches, intercepted communications, crater patterns, casualty counts. There were signatures. There were thresholds. There were red lines.

But what do you do with a weapon that can plausibly hide inside the category of “mysterious illness”?

What do you do when the attack looks like vertigo?

How do you deter something you can’t confidently attribute?

That is the nightmare embedded in this story. Not that Havana Syndrome is one neat explanation. It probably isn’t. Even CNN acknowledges how messy the category is, noting there still isn’t “a clear definition” of anomalous health incidents — and that tests were sometimes done long after symptoms began, making causation harder to untangle.

This is what uncertainty looks like in the real world: blurred timelines, inconsistent diagnostics, competing institutional incentives, and people who feel their government has left them twisting in the wind.

Which is why the quote CNN included from former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos is so raw. If the government truly has uncovered such devices, he said, “then the CIA owes all the victims a f**king major and public apology for how we have been treated as pariahs.”

You don’t have to agree with every claim to understand the anger behind that sentence. When your health collapses in a way that feels sudden and abnormal — when you believe it happened while serving your country — and the official line becomes “very unlikely,” it’s hard not to hear that as dismissal.

So where does that leave us?

CNN’s report does not “prove” Havana Syndrome was a directed-energy weapon campaign. But it does confirm something important about the world we live in now. The U.S. government is not acting like this is a joke.

You don’t spend “eight figures” and run “more than a year” of testing because you’re mildly curious. You do it because the possibility, even if it’s rare, even if it’s only a subset, is too dangerous to ignore.

And if portable, pulsed-radio-wave devices are real — and even potentially effective — then yes, we may be looking at the early stages of a new era. One where the battlefield includes invisible systems designed not to kill you, but to disable you. Quietly. Deniably. Without leaving a crater or a headline.

That’s not science fiction anymore.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)