While conflicts like the yearslong war in Ukraine or the shaky Gaza ceasefire seem comparatively far away, the weapons manufacturing capabilities of Sonoma County have brought the logistics—and potentially the threats—of war to Wine Country.
Keysight Technologies in Santa Rosa and General Dynamics Ordnance in Healdsburg are two large defense contractors that produce components and software for weapons that have been deployed in Ukraine and Gaza.
Ken McCallum, head of British intelligence agency MI5, noted in his annual speech to the Counter Terrorism Operation Center last October that defense contractors’ participation in these conflicts brings with it the risk of sabotage operations, as already seen in several European nations.
“Over the last year, the Russian government and its proxies have planned and directed sabotage attacks against European military installations, foreign defense companies, logistics facilities and public utilities in an effort to undermine Allied support to Ukraine,” a public release from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) warned in November of 2024.
The release cautioned that such activity could be repeated at defense industry base facilities in the United States.
Known as “hybrid warfare,” Russia’s tactics are thought to have included framing political parties for vandalism, destruction of undersea cables and a plot to assassinate the CEO of a German arms maker, resulting in the effects of the Ukraine war being felt far beyond the frontline. But Wine Country is also “fire country,” so it is the arson attacks that are of most concern when considering how Sonoma County’s businesses are embroiled in foreign policy.
Keysight Technologies is headquartered off Fountaingrove Parkway in northern Santa Rosa, sitting on a 200-acre campus nestled between oak trees and senior assisted living communities. The location is idyllic, and security is tight. The company’s website describes its mission to “connect and secure the world,” through hardware and software for electronic detection and emulation.
Essential capabilities on today’s high-tech battlefield.
“We do not make a single component that goes into a weapon,” said Hamish Gray, senior vice president of corporate services for Keysight, who has been with the company for 36 years. Nonetheless, he confirmed that Keysight is “absolutely a defense contractor.”
Gray added, as if to emphasize the point, “There’s not a single aircraft carrier that doesn’t have our tech on it.”
“We monitor the news constantly,” said Alicia Benson, vice president of workplace solutions for Keysight. “When the Ukraine war started, we had a Russian footprint. We got out. We have a big Israel headquarters as well.” She added that, because this monitoring is constant, they did not make any security changes based directly on the DNI release.
General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems is another powerful local contractor with reported revenues of $47.7 billion in 2024. The nondescript, almost homey-looking warehouse on Grove Street, less than a 15-minute walk from the well-dressed wine tasters in downtown Healdsburg, is one of 27 locations owned by the third-largest U.S. government aerospace and defense contractor, as of 2023.
According to GD-OTS’s website, its Healdsburg facility manufactures guidance components for precision munitions such as the Javelin anti-tank missile and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). Both weapon systems were publicly lauded as key to turning the tide of the war in Ukraine when sent as military aid.
Hybrid warfare isn’t limited to Russia. Iran has a long history of using international proxies for acts of sabotage and terrorism to further the state’s interests. As the U.S. becomes more deeply embroiled in the Middle East, the chances of those proxies taking aim at Americans goes up.
Whether munitions heading to Israel for use in the war in Gaza are manufactured in General Dynamics’ Healdsburg location specifically is unclear, but the company is known to produce the bodies of the MK-80 series of bombs, which has seen extensive use in that conflict, including in the 2024 bombing of the Jabalia Refugee Camp, according to American Friends Service Committee.
A shipment of 35,529 MK-84 bomb bodies manufactured by General Dynamics will be delivered next year as part of the latest round of military aid to Israel, according to a February press release from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The cost of these bombs and their ancillaries is more than $2 billion of the total $12 billion in arms authorized for Israel since President Donald Trump took office.
Last December, activists organized by the Jewish Voice for Peace Sonoma County, the Party for Socialism and Liberation of Sonoma County and Sonoma County for Palestine gathered outside of General Dynamics’ Healdsburg facility to protest what they deemed the company’s complicity in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
“General Dynamics makes bombs and artillery shells used against people in Gaza,” a poster on Sonoma County for Palestine’s Facebook page said.
Inhui Le, a community organizer with Sonoma County for Palestine, said her own experiences growing up in a ravaged postwar South Korea deeply impacted her views on the effects of war and defense contractors who profit from it.
“We want people to know that, even in Northern California, in the heart of Wine Country, there is a weapons industry,” Le said.
General Dynamics did not respond to attempts for comment.
The high stakes at which these companies play in the national security game came into focus in 2021 when the State Department fined Keysight Technologies $6.6 million for exports of unauthorized technical data, software used to test radar equipment, to 17 countries.
“Keysight’s exports to the PRC [China] and Russia harmed U.S. national security,” said the charging letter the State Department sent to call out the problem.
According to Gray, the incident was simply a case of an engineer misidentifying a line of code. “Technically it was dual-use anyway,” Gray said.
Negotiations to end the Russo-Ukrainian conflict are moving like molasses while hope for peace in Gaza languishes between ceasefires. But, escalations in Yemen notwithstanding, both of these firestorms are showing signs of cooling. That said, either could flare back up. And there are plenty of others brewing.
As John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor of international relations, said during a 2024 lecture at Notre Dame University’s International Security Center, the world is moving into an era of multipolarity and escalating militarization between three great powers, namely Russia, China and the United States. Some small countries will be made to choose which sphere of influence they fall under, but many, like Ukraine, will have the choice made for them.
World leaders, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, echoed this observation at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey recently. “Generally speaking about multipolarity, it is gaining ground, no doubt about this,” Lavrov said. “What we observe is fragmentation of the world economy. This is the time of uncertainty. I would say nobody knows how the situation with world trade and investment is going to evolve, because there would be new twists in this situation.”
Trump’s tariff war is another manifestation of this emerging power dynamic shaking out as the rules based international system gives way to a tangled web of trade and security agreements. As each great power jockeys to maximize their sphere of influence in this new world order, tensions between these alliances create trip wires for escalation.
Defense industrial base facilities that are the target of protestors and saboteurs today could be the targets of conventional military or even nuclear strikes should that escalation spiral out of control. This may sound dramatic. But since “war supporting and economic factories” are one of four categories of targets named in the United States General Accounting Office’s “Nuclear Weapons Targeting Process” fact sheet, we can assume the same applies for America’s adversaries.
“We have a lot of defense contractors in Sonoma County,” congressperson for California’s 4th district and former House Intelligence Committee member Mike Thompson told Santa Rosa Junior College students on April 15. “They fly under the radar.”
Adding to that, he blames the executive branch for elevating the threat to those facilities. “Part of the problem with this administration is we’ve told the world we are in chaos. And when we’re in chaos, we’re much more open to any type of attack,” Thompson said.
Though multipolarity suggests the world is dividing, ever-increasing technological interconnectivity is also shrinking it, bringing potential adversaries closer and blurring the lines between foreign and domestic concerns.
While the prospect of saboteurs setting fire to Sonoma County to disrupt the United States’ military industrial base remains relatively remote, the DNI’s warning serves as a reminder that the fear and consequences of conflict often reverberate far beyond the battlefield, touching communities much like our own.
If a distant threat can stir unease here, in one of the safest corners of the world, it may offer a glimpse—however faint—into the daily reality of people who live at the center of those conflicts, where policies shaped by our votes often disrupt their homes, families and futures.
