India's Armed Forces Must Stop Depending on US Jargon

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P.K. Mallick

'Hybrid warfare' is a new example of the Yankee jargon we are so enamoured with. If we cannot articulate ourselves, then we need some serious introspection.

Yanks are very fond of new terminology. Remember how COIN (counter-insurgency) ops became LICO (low-intensity conflict operations), MOOTW (military operations other than war), SASO (stability and support operations), asymmetric, long, small, unconventional, and 4GW (fourth-generation warfare)?

In between, Israelis coined ‘sub-conventional war’, which we happily copied. Two Chinese colonels used the term ‘unrestricted war’. Then the US Marine Corps Lt Col Frank G. Hoffman had the idea of ‘hybrid war’. We in India fell for that one hook, line and sinker. 

Signalling with INS Arihant: Import of the Message and the Messenger

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Manpreet Sethi

The announcement on 5 November regarding the completion of the first deterrent patrol of India’s first indigenous nuclear-powered submarine (SSBN), the INS Arihant, has evoked three kinds of reactions: a euphoric one from strategic analysts within the country; expressions of concern by those across the borders from India; and, a fair amount of derision from India- watchers in the US and elsewhere who have cast aspersions on the 'deterrent' value of one SSBN with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that have limited range. It is worth disaggregating and examining each of these reactions to understand the true significance of this development.

Can Pakistan Bring Tehreek-e-Labbaik to Justice?

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By Hannan R. Hussain

The Pakistani state’s efforts to contain Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) are both promising and complicated. They are promising for the way that key members of the party, including its chief Khadim Hussain Rizvi, are charged with treason and terrorism, and placed behind bars. They are complicated in the sense that the narrative on which TLP was founded – violent opposition to any change in Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws – remains very much intact.

The religio-political party made headlines this November, when it violently protested the Supreme Court’s decision to acquit Aasiya Noreen, also known as Asia Bibi. Aasiya, a Christian woman, was accused of blasphemy in 2010 and sentenced to death by a Punjab municipal court. The top court’s decision to reverse this sentence, citing insufficient evidence, gave strength to protest sit-ins across major cities in the country. TLP’s top command, including Pir Afzal Qadri, also called for the assassination of Pakistan’s chief justice, and demanded that Aasiya’s name be placed on the Exit Control List. Damage to state and private property was extensive.

Who Will Prevent the Next India-Pakistan War?

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BY HANNAH HAEGELAND

China’s stakes and vulnerabilities in South Asia have grown. U.S. leaders should make use of this. 

Ten years have passed since 26/11, the three-day assault by Pakistan-based terrorists in Mumbai that stands as India’s analogue to the 9/11 attacks in the United States. During and after the attack, U.S. officials were central to the crisis-management effort that prevented a larger conflict between India and Pakistan. Today, it is unclear whether the United States could play that role, thanks to the decline in its capacity for crisis management in South Asia. But as U.S.-Pakistan relations deteriorate, Chinese influence in Pakistan grows — as does Beijing’s economic and geostrategic stakes in maintaining stability in the region. Both U.S.and Chinese action may be necessary to walk the region back from a nuclear brink, and so U.S. leaders should adapt to changed circumstances by working with Chinese and other counterparts to shape co-management mechanisms.

How the Taliban gained the upper hand in a key province in Afghanistan

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By SHASHANK BENGALI

It was the deadliest incident involving U.S. troops in Afghanistan this year: An armored U.S. military vehicle struck a roadside bomb planted by the Taliban outside the city of Ghazni on Tuesday, killing three service members.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Eric Michael Emond of Brush Prairie, Wash., Army Capt. Andrew Patrick Ross of Lexington, Va., and Air Force Staff Sgt. Dylan J. Elchin of Hookstown, Pa., were elite special operations troops deployed to what has become one of the most intense theaters of fighting in the 18th year of the war.

The city is the capital of the rugged province that has the same name and has long been a center of Taliban influence. But in the last few months, the insurgent group has seriously threatened zones once considered safely in Afghan government hands.

Afghan government’s negotiating position completely at odds with Taliban’s

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BY BILL ROGGIO

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani laid out the government’s conditions for peace with the Taliban, and not surprisingly, its demands are completely at odds with those of the Taliban. Ghani called for negotiations that are driven by Afghans, which is the opposite of what is actually occurring today.

Ghani outlined his government’s roadmap for negotiations today during the Geneva Conference on Afghanistan.

“We seek a peace agreement in which the Afghan Taliban would be included in a democratic and inclusive society, Ghani said, according to TOLONews. The peace agreement would include “the following tenets” [note, the following bullet points are quoted directly from TOLONews]:

Asia’s Many Space Races

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By Joan Johnson-Freese

It’s not just the U.S. and China; there are other equally strategic space races going on in Asia as well.

Politicians, pundits and headlines have speculated for well over a decade regarding a space race between the United States and China. After a congressional hearing in 2006, Representative Tom DeLay said, “We have a space race going on right now and the American people are totally unaware of all this.” Representative Frank Wolf shared that view, specifically regarding a race to the moon, or back to the moon in the case of the United States. “If China beats us there, we will have lost the space program,” said Wolf. “They are basically, fundamentally in competition with us.”

China space analyst Dean Cheng posited in 2007 that the Chinese were “embarking on a systematic space program the world has not seen since the 1960s and for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States is facing real competition.” TIME ran a headline in 2008 stating, “The New Space Race: China vs US” while others speculated on China taking the competitive lead.

Bleak See On The Black Sea – Analysis

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By Prof Anis Bajrektarevic

Following the latest events in the Black Sea two old questions are reappearing. Both are inviting us for a repeated elaboration:

If a Monroe doctrine (about the hemispheric security exclusivity) is recognised at one corner of the globe, do we have a moral right or legal ground to negate it at the other corner?

Clearly, the ‘might-makes-right’ as a conduct in international relations cannot be selectively accepted. Either it is acknowledged to all who can effectively self-prescribe such a monopoly of coercion, or it is absolutely condemned as contrary to behaviour among the civilised nations.

Evangelist’s fatal exploits highlight threat to indigenous tribes

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Asia’s vulnerable peoples need protection for their own sake and as environmental guardians.

There are growing threats to the world’s dwindling indigenous people, who now make up less than 5% of the global population but manage 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. Their role as guardians of biodiversity is critical to our future.

The world’s indigenous communities are rapidly dwindling in numbers, with many classified as endangered, due to outsiders’ encroachments and exploitation of their natural resources. Indigenous tribes often lose out in battles to defend their lands and cultures from mining companies, dam builders, oil palm planters, pushy evangelists and military forces.

Nowhere are these battles more apparent than in Asia, home to almost two-thirds of the world’s indigenous populations. From the Philippines and Japan to Indonesia and Bangladesh, indigenous populations face mounting threats from discrimination and marginalization, forced assimilation or military repression.

Avoiding War Between America and China

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By Sulmaan Khan

U.S.-Chinese relations, the current wisdom goes, are in need of a fundamental rethink. In October, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence trumpeted the United States’ determination to compete relentlessly in order “to reset America’s economic and strategic relationship with China.” But even before Pence’s speech, there were calls to reexamine U.S. assumptions about China. The hopes of liberalization on which previous policy was based, the former Obama administration officials Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner recently argued, have proved ill-founded. It’s time, they say, to search for a “better approach.” Even if U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping reach a deal on the trade dispute, pundits warn, the broader relationship is unlikely to improve much. China’s assertiveness, its conduct in the South China Sea, and its internal repression render a genuine détente with the United States difficult, perhaps impossible. As with the Peloponnesian War or World War I, a rising power means trouble—and it is time that the United States recognized it. One can get behind Trump’s policy or search for an alternative. But either way, a new paradigm for the relationship is purportedly necessary. 

How the US can prevent a China-dominated Asia

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Brendan Taylor

The US military is dangerously under-funded and could lose the next big war it wages. That is the key message from a new report by the influential National Defense Strategy Commission.

Established by Congress to provide an independent, non-partisan assessment of the 2018 US National Defense Strategy (NDS), the Commission is comprised of respected Washington insiders.

Its report certainly reflects a clear strategic logic, keeping in mind that Strategy is fundamentally about aligning ends, ways, and means.

On means, it contends that budget caps imposed by Congress in 2011 have brought the US military to the brink of “strategic insolvency”. The Commission suggests that the size of the US defence budget should increase by 3­–5% per year to fund a “rapid and substantial” augmentation in military capabilities.

When one nation’s dam-building rage threatens an entire continent’s future

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China is the world’s biggest dam builder, with the country boasting more dams than the rest of the world combined. China is also the world’s largest exporter of dams.

In Nepal, where China-backed communists are in power, Beijing has just succeeded in reviving a lucrative dam project, which was scrapped by the previous Nepalese government as China had won the contract without competitive bidding. The reversal of the previous government’s cancellation of the $2.5 billion Budhi-Gandaki Dam project has come after Nepal’s communist rulers implemented a transit transport agreement with China to cut dependence on India.

China is building dams in two other countries neighbouring India, Myanmar and Pakistan, including in areas torn by ethnic separatism (as in northern Myanmar) and in a United Nations-designated disputed territory like the Pakistan-occupied portion of Jammu and Kashmir. Yet it loudly protests when the Dalai Lama merely visits Arunachal Pradesh, claiming it to be a “disputed territory”, although only Beijing disputes India’s control over Arunachal. The UN does not recognize Arunachal as disputed.

China Expands Research Funding, Luring U.S. Scientists And Students

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In 2003, Jay Siegel was up for a new challenge. Siegel was a tenured professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, but he took a job at the University of Zurich.

"When I first moved, people said, 'Oh, you're crazy to leave San Diego; it's a paradise. Why would you go to Europe? Blah, blah blah,' "recalls Siegel. "And after 10 years people were saying, 'Oh, man, that was the smartest thing you ever did. Zurich is wonderful.' "

Then he told his friends he was moving to China. "And again, people said 'What? Are you crazy?' " Siegel says. But he thinks they'll soon realize he again made the smart choice.

In the past decade or so, China has been expanding its commitment to scientific research, and it shows. Chinese researchers now produce more scientific publicationsthan U.S. scientists do, and the global ratings of Chinese universities are rising.

Mark as favorite Be wary of spending on the Belt and Road

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From January 2014 to June 2018, construction activity ($256 billion) outpaced investment ($148 billion) in 75 Belt and Road countries. Activity across both construction and investment focused on energy first, then transport.

From the end of June to mid-October, the Belt and Road mushroomed to 117 countries, but construction and investment trends were unchanged.

The share of private investment in the Belt and Road fell by 12 percent in the first half of 2018 versus the first half of 2017. Private companies that were interested in participating have reconsidered.

This puts more pressure on the Chinese state. China’s foreign exchange reserves are no longer growing and are further threatened by a possible contraction in exports to the US. Beijing is more wary of spending to finance Belt and Road projects.

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Prospects for a Strategic Military Partnership Between Turkey and Ukraine

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By: Ridvan Bari Urcosta

One of the most undesirable geopolitical scenarios for Russia would be the establishment of a strategic alliance between the two other major Black Sea regional powers—Turkey and Ukraine. Such an outcome would not only hamper the Kremlin’s plans in Europe’s East and the wider Black Sea region but also undermine its ambitions in the Middle East. And though little noticed in the West, just such a process appears to quietly and gradually be underway between Ankara and Kyiv.

When relations between Moscow and Ankara rapidly deteriorated in late 2015, following Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian bomber that strayed into Turkish airspace near the border with Syria (see EDM, December 3, 2015), Kyiv and Ankara immediately commenced a broad range of cooperative initiatives across their military and economical spheres. That cooperation has persisted, even as Turkey’s relations with Russia improved since roughly the summer of 2016 (see EDM, June 30, 2016).

Russian Cyber Operations: State-led Organised Crime

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James Sullivan

Russia is emulating approaches used by cybercriminals as it blurs the line between state and non-state activities in cyberspace

The recent activities of the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation – Russia’s military intelligence, otherwise known by its traditional (if slightly inaccurate) acronym of the GRU – on the territories of the UK and other European countries are by now well documented. However, less media and public attention is paid to the GRU’s hostile cyber activities, despite the fact that last month, the UK and its allies directly attributed a series of hostile cyber attacks to the Russian military intelligence service. This provides a better understanding of some of the Russian offensive cyber attack tools, the nature of certain Russian cyber operations and a glimpse into future trends in Russian cyber activity. And here is a brief rundown through some of the tools at Moscow’s disposal.

Russia Tries to Strangle Ukraine with New Maritime Strategy

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By Christian Esch

Russia is adopting a new tactic in its ongoing conflict with Ukraine by cutting off the latter's access to its important ports in the Sea of Azov. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has tried to use the situation to his own advantage -- without much success.

This autumn, a patriotic feel-good comedy called "The Crimean Bridge -- Made with Love" played in Russian movie theaters. The head of RT (formerly, Russia Today), the Russian propaganda channel, wrote the screenplay. It depicts the Kerch Strait and the heroic workers building the most triumphant construction project of the Putin years -- a bridge connecting the annexed Crimean Peninsula to the Russian mainland.

In the film, however, bridges are also being built between hearts, between the old Crimean Tatar, the sexy archaeology student, the droll Ukrainian cook, between characters who love and taunt one another and, ultimately, stride across the freshly laid asphalt into Russia's bright future.

Europe hasn’t won the war on terror

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By PETTER NESSER

OSLO — A recent lull in the number and severity of jihadist attacks in Europe might lead one to conclude the worst is over. But it’s far too early to declare victory in the fight against terror.

The shock of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris jolted Europe into a new reality. Paris was hit again later that year, in attacks that killed more than 130. High-profile assaults in Brussels, Berlin and Barcelona soon followed, while a series of smaller-scale incidents in London and France killed dozens and created an atmosphere of fear that kept threat levels high.

But more recently — with no major attack causing more than 10 deaths since the summer of 2017 — terror has slipped from the headlines and the minds of most ordinary European citizens. Indeed, jihadist attacks in Europe are down just over 60 percent since their peak last year, suggesting Europe has fought back against the onslaught of attacks inspired by Islamic State.

Garry Kasparov Says We Are Living in Chaos, But Remains an Incorrigible Optimist

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By Masha Gessen

The chess grandmaster and political activist on Putin, Trump, and how we are living again through the eighteen-fifties.

Garry Kasparov has won more than two dozen world chess titles, emigrated twice, and launched movements to oppose two Presidents. Born in Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, to an Armenian mother and a Jewish father, Kasparov fled that city when anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in 1990. He was twenty-seven years old and had held the world-champion title in chess for five years; he was famous and, by Soviet standards, wealthy. He chartered a plane to Moscow and took nearly seventy people with him.

Kasparov announced his retirement from chess in 2005, when he was still ranked No. 1 in the world, and declared that he would devote himself to politics. He started a movement called The Other Russia, a broad coalition united in its opposition to President Vladimir Putin. After a series of street protests and a failed attempt to put Kasparov on the ballot for the 2008 Presidential election, the movement sputtered along until the mass protests of 2011–12, in which the movement’s activists—and Kasparov personally—played a key role. In the political crackdown that followed the protests, Kasparov was forced to leave Russia.

What's Next for the U.K. If Parliament Shoots Down the Brexit Deal?

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The United Kingdom is set to leave the European Union in March, but the terms of its departure are still under discussion. The government in London has reached an agreement with the bloc, but the ideologically fragmented British Parliament will be hard to sell on the deal. Though London's first choice is an orderly Brexit, political events in the United Kingdom could still lead to a no-deal exit.

Another critical vote on the Brexit deal is fast approaching. On Dec. 11, the British House of Commons will vote on the agreement that the United Kingdom and the European Union reached in mid-November. According to the deal, the British exit from the union on March 29 will be followed by a 21-month transition period, during which the United Kingdom will remain in the EU single market. (If both sides agree, they can extend this period by two more years.) If the United Kingdom and the European Union fail to find a way to keep the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland open by the end of the transition, the United Kingdom will stay in a customs arrangement with the European Union until they achieve a solution as part of a provision known as the Irish backstop. Effectively, the deal stipulates that the United Kingdom cannot unilaterally withdraw from the customs arrangement. 

Henry M. Paulson, Jr.: The United States and China at a Crossroads

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by Henry M. Paulson Jr.

Beijing is viewed—by a growing consensus—not just as a strategic challenge to Washington but as a country whose rise has come at our expense.

Editor's note: For those who are still just awakening to the sea change that has occurred in the American establishment’s thinking about China, former Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson Jr.’s speech at the November Bloomberg Conference in Singapore warrants attention. Having invested over the course of his career in the hope that by building economic relations with China, the United States would create a more constructive, peaceful relationship with China, this unquestionable friend of good China-U.S. relations spoke candidly about where the relationship stands today.

The audience included Chinese President Xi Jinping’s closest associate, vice president of China, Wang Qishan.

Revealed: US Intelligence Chief Clarifies the Nature of Russia's INF Treaty Violation

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By Ankit Panda

The head of the U.S. intelligence community discussed Russia’s treaty violation in more detail than ever before.

Beginning in 2014, the U.S. State Department has noted repeatedly in its annual arms control compliance report that it had assessed that Russia was in violation of its commitments under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Earlier this year, the Trump administration made clear that it would soon be withdrawing from the treaty. (Background on what the INF Treaty does is available here.)

While the United States has yet to give its formal withdrawal notice, there appears to be no real prospect of saving the INF Treaty. The alleged Russian violation has been cited by the administration as one of the reasons for U.S. withdrawal, but the truth is likely simpler: John Bolton, the current U.S. national security adviser, hasn’t seen an arms control agreement that he likes and has been a driver behind the withdrawal process.

Mark as favorite It’s still unclear what the US-China trade war is really all about

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“Jaw, jaw is better than war, war” is one of those well known Winston Churchill quotes that Churchill apparently never said. (Or at least not exactly like that.) But it’s still a pretty catchy phrase and not a bad first instinct. So from that perspective, perhaps, the results from the US-China trade negotiations in Buenos Aires are to be welcomed. Talks resulting in an agreement for more talks over the next three months is a pretty good alternative to a severe intensification in the ongoing trade conflict between the nations.

So here we are: The American tariff rate on $200 billion in imports from China will stay at 10 percent rather than rising to 25 percent. And China, according to the Trump administration, will “purchase a very substantial amount of agricultural, industrial and energy, products.”

Global Warming Is Setting Fire to American Leadership

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BY STEPHEN M. WALT

U.S. President Donald Trump has said, “I don’t believe” climate change is real. Guess what? The global environment doesn’t care. The condition of the planet will be determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, not by Trump’s tweets, denials, bluster, or relentlessly head-in-the-sand approach to a rapidly warming planet. Trump will no longer be with us by the time the worst effects are realized, of course; it is future generations who will suffer the consequences.

And make no mistake: Those consequences are going to significant. As reported over Thanksgiving weekend, the latest U.S. government “National Climate Assessment” report makes it abundantly clear that rising average temperatures are going to have far-reaching and damaging effects. The report was a collaborative effort by 13 federal agencies, and it offers a sobering portrait of our likely future. Storms will be more intense and dangerous. Agricultural productivity will decline. Certain diseases and pests will be more numerous and bothersome, and heat-related deaths will increase significantly. Trump may not believe it, but what he does or does not believe is irrelevant, except as it affects what we do (or don’t do) today and thus how serious the problem is down the road.

The Anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine

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By Matthew Waxman

Today is the 195th birthday of the Monroe Doctrine. On December 2, 1823, President James Monroe proclaimed in his Seventh Annual Message to Congress that the United States would oppose any European efforts to colonize or reassert control in the Western Hemisphere:

[T]he American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers . . . . We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

In rare speech, MI6 chief says cyber brings ‘potentially existential challenge’

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By: Justin Lynch 

His specialty is secrecy, yet his warning was blunt.

In his second public speech in more than four years, the head of the British intelligence service said that a fourth industrial revolution is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological domains, a change that could present a “potentially existential challenge” to liberal democracies.

The rise of big data and other technologies present a call to arms for MI6 and its allies, Alex Younger, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, said during a Dec. 3 speech at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

“We and our allies face a battle to make sure technology works to our advantage, not to that of our opponents,” Younger said. “There will be a dividing line between those intelligence services that grasp this, as the UK agencies have, and those services that don’t.

Younger presented MI6 as an organization in the midst of tranforming from a human intelligence agency to one that embraces technological innovation.

Zero Botnets

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Jason Healey

Botnets are the bane of the internet. Criminals use these groups of computers infected with malicious software to propagate spam, send phishing emails, guess passwords, impersonate users, and break encryption. Their most pernicious use, however, is to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks harness the power of the individual computers that make up the botnet to send internet traffic to a target, thereby blocking legitimate traffic. As much as 30 percent of all internet traffic may be attributable to botnets, and most of that traffic is from DDoS attacks.

Most DDoS attacks are criminal in nature, often used by companies to take down their competitors’ websites or servers; however, China, Russia, and Iran have all harnessed botnets for geopolitical purposes. A motivated nation-state actor could easily harness millions of systems to shut down countries’ domestic networks or target core internet infrastructure and shut the internet down globally. Foreign governments certainly might judge such actions to be to their advantage in some scenarios.

THE US LEANS ON PRIVATE FIRMS TO EXPOSE FOREIGN HACKERS

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WHEN THE DEMOCRATIC National Committee realized they had been hacked in April 2016, they turned to experts from a private company: the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Within a day, the company had identified two Russian state-sponsored hacking groups inside the DNC network. Within a few weeks, it publicly explained its analysis in a detailed blog post. It wasn’t until months later that the US government publicly confirmed Russia’s role.

William G. Rich is an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2015 to 2018, he served as the US Treasury Attaché to the UAE and Oman. He previously held counterterrorism and intelligence roles for the US government overseas and domestically.

As government-backed hackers in Russia, China, Iran, and North Koreacontinue to infiltrate and attack American companies, it’s often private cybersecurity firms, rather than the US government, that are publicly assigning blame. By stepping aside to let private firms expose nation-state hackers, the US government preserves its intelligence capabilities and options to retaliate. It’s an informal arrangement that has been good for business and government and bad for state-sponsored hackers.

Recap of the 2018 ITU Plenipotentiary: From Connecting the World to Investigating Digital Applications and Services

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ITU’s role in internet-related activities have long been among the most divisive issues among its member states. But at this year's plenipotentiary a new area of intense debate emerged. 

The International Telecommunications Union’s quadrennial plenipotentiary conference (“plenipot” for short) concluded two weeks ago in Dubai. ITU’s role in internet-related activities, including the domain name system, have long been amongst the most divisive issues among its member states, but in Dubai, a new area of intense debate emerged: ITU’s role in digital applications and services that often travel over the internet’s infrastructure.

As expected, ITU member states in Dubai debated internet infrastructure-related resolutions about domain names, IPv6 and international public policies pertaining to the internet for days, nights, and weekends. But ultimately, given the basic infrastructure of the internet works, governments agreed to live with no major changes to these internet resolutions, which have remained substantively unchanged since 2010.

The Geopolitics of 5G

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BY: PAUL TRIOLO, KEVIN ALLISON

The global race to install next-generation 5G mobile networks is already underway and will be one of the most geopolitically significant technology projects ever undertaken. 5G's high data speeds and other revolutionary features will make economy-changing technology applications such as driverless cars, smart cities, and advanced factory automation feasible on a commercial scale for the first time.

This report by Eurasia Group's Geo-technology practice provides a comprehensive analysis of the political forces that will influence the creation of 5G standards and deployment in key markets. It addresses how the political struggle over 5G and the technologies and services that will be built on top of the new networks will shape the competition for 21st-century dominance between the world's leading technology superpowers, the US and China. It also assesses the difficult choices that third countries will face to determine their own 5G strategies amid an ongoing confrontation between Washington and Beijing over technology and trade.

Microsoft will give the U.S. military access to 'all the technology we create'

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By SAMANTHA MASUNAGA

As tech companies such as Google wrestle with employee objections to working with the U.S. military, Microsoft Corp.’s president is throwing his company’s support behind the Pentagon.

Microsoft is “going to provide the U.S. military with access to the best technology … all the technology we create. Full stop,” Brad Smith said Saturday during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.

Smith acknowledged that “there is some angst” in some workforces, including Microsoft’s, about tech companies’ involvement in military contracts.

In June, after thousands of employees voiced objections to a contract that allowed the military to use Google’s artificial intelligence tools to analyze drone footage, Google decided not to renew the contract.