Cyber Wargame - An Indian Scenario

Maj Gen P K Mallick, VSM (Retd), Consultant, VIF

Immediately after the first gulf war in the early 1990’s the theories of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and Information Warfare were being studied all over the world as a new kind of warfare. During that time, a course on Information Warfare was conducted at the National Defense University of USA. The course participants were from senior officers of the armed forces, representatives of Department of Defence and Department of State and policy makers from the government. Rand Corporation of US was conducting this course. Continue reading.......

Trump or Biden? The Potential Impact of the US Election on India

Tridivesh Singh Maini 

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Key Points

Joe Biden’s remarks, as published on his campaign website, regarding India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), its National Register of Citizens (NRC) project and the restoration of liberties in Kashmir, have drawn ire in certain quarters in India.

It is important, however, not to take a simplistic view of the bilateral relationship using the lens of parties and individuals, but to understand that the relationship is driven by geopolitical dynamics and economics.

If Biden is elected, it may not result in an absolute convergence between India and the US, but it could pave the way for closer economic ties between both countries and ensure that their strategic ties continue to grow.

Summary

Democratic Party presidential nominee and former Vice-President Joe Biden’s remarks, in which he criticised the CAA, the NRC and the restrictions that New Delhi imposed in Kashmir, are being closely watched in India. Biden’s campaign website, referring to the need to lift security restrictions in Kashmir says:

How Pakistan Army Covered-Up Kharqamar Checkpost Genocide – OpEd

By Nilesh Kunwar
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If the Pakistan army is to be believed, then something unimaginable and unpardonable happened in the Boya area of North Waziristan on May 26 last year. On this fateful day, four unprecedented things happened- one, a mob of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) activists (in ISPR’s words), “assaulted” the army’s Kharqamar checkpost in broad daylight. Two, it was a brazen attempt by locals to (again in ISPR’s words) “exert pressure for release of suspected terrorists’ facilitator” who had been arrested a day earlier from Doga Macha Madakhel village after an encounter between Pakistan army and suspected terrorists, during which one soldier was injured (More about him later).Three, the mob was led by two serving legislators, Ali Wazir and Mohsin Javed Dawar who are Members of National Assembly (MNA), and lastly, (as per ISPR), the mob resorted to “direct firing on the post.” 

Those who know Pakistan army would have expected that with so many ‘firsts’ the army retaliation would have been massive. But ISPR stated that “Troops at the check post exercised maximum restraint in the face of provocation and direct firing on the post. Due to firing of the group, five Army soldiers got injured. In exchange of fire, three individuals who attacked the post lost their lives and 10 got injured.” Taking a very serious view of this incident, the army subsequently lodged a FIR with the Bannu Range Counter-Terrorism Department Police Station against multiple PTM workers (including MNAs Dawar and Wazir) under different sections of the Pakistan Penal Code, Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance and even the Anti-Terrorism Act. While a section of the media went along with the army’s version of this incident, but blatant misinformation of factual details in the ISPR’s narrative completely ruined its cooked-up story. 

Missile Wars in the Asia Pacific: The Threat of Chinese Regional Missiles and U.S.-Allied Missile Defense Response

Jaganath Sankaran

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China has amassed a large arsenal of regional ballistic missiles capable of ranging all of Asia-Pacific. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) has also developed detailed doctrines articulating the use of these missiles to deny the United States and allied nations’ freedom of action during a regional contingency. The PLARF practices many of its exercises based on these doctrines and under realistic conditions that mimic adversary counter-tactics. In response, the U.S. and allied states deploy significant ballistic missile defense assets to deter and defend against the use of missiles. In this paper, an empirical evaluation of the performance of these regional missile defenses is conducted. The results indicate that regional missile defense remain robust and effective against small coercive signaling strikes. Against a limited suppression strike campaign aiming to delay and disrupt military movements, missile defenses remain robust if an early warning is available. Finally, against a large-scale coordinated missile campaign, missile defense assets are spread thin, and marginal cost to the defense is substantially high. If China can launch multiples waves of large-scale missile salvos or if critical missile assets are rendered nonfunctional, it could cause severe damage to military capabilities.

Chinese Intentions Towards the Mekong River and Mainland South-East Asia

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The Mekong River is one of the most threatened rivers in the world, largely due to the rapid increase in the number of large operational hydropower dams.

Most of those dams are located within China and could be used to divert water out of the Mekong for use elsewhere in China.

It has long been assumed that Chinese dams would lower water levels in the lower Mekong. Recent scientific analysis has proved beyond reasonable doubt that those dams reduce water levels in the Mekong.

It is possible that Beijing will use the water stored behind its dams to coerce or pressure neighbouring countries in South-East Asia, to the detriment of US and broader Western interests.

Summary

Challenging China’s “Wolf Warrior” Diplomats

Dean Cheng
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As the world emerges from the lockdowns and disruptions caused by COVID-19, it will be a fundamentally new world in many ways. The economic and political impacts have yet to be fully assessed. What is clear is that the Chinese leadership intends to play a major role in shaping that post-COVID-19 world—and its diplomatic corps will aggressively assert China’s interests to that end. The U.S. should not expect to face a relatively low-profile Chinese effort that plies nations with economic aid in the background, but will instead confront a feisty cadre of diplomats equipped with a robust set of tools ranging from economic aid to social media accounts that will challenge them at every turn.

Why now? Understanding Beijing’s new assertiveness in Hong Kong

Ryan Hass

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An hour before the toll of the midnight bell on July 1, 2020 — the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China from British rule — Hong Kong authorities promulgated a new national security law that had been sent from Beijing. The law gave sweeping new powers to authorities to crack down on acts of “secession, subversion, terrorism, or collusion with foreign or external forces.” Chinese authorities defended the decision as necessary for returning stability to Hong Kong. Outside of mainland China, most commentators lamented the new law as a heavy-handed effort by Beijing to impose its authoritarian impulses on Hong Kong. They warned that by eroding Hong Kong’s unique attributes — its free speech, free assembly, and legal transparency — Chinese authorities were mortgaging Hong Kong’s dynamism in pursuit of greater societal control.

China’s opaque policymaking process makes it difficult to determine what precisely prompted Beijing to act on Hong Kong now, and it remains too early to draw final conclusions. What drove Beijing to impose the new national security law on Hong Kong? Why now? What are the potential implications for everyday life and commerce in Hong Kong? What will be the impact on U.S.-China relations?

WHAT CAUSED BEIJING TO IMPOSE A NATIONAL SECURITY LAW ON HONG KONG?

Innovation in a crisis: Why it is more critical than ever

By Jordan Bar Am, Laura Furstenthal, Felicitas Jorge, and Erik Roth
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John F. Kennedy once observed that the word “crisis” in Chinese is composed of two characters—one representing danger, the other opportunity. He may not have been entirely correct on the linguistics, but the sentiment is true enough: a crisis presents a choice. This is particularly true today.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of life, from the personal (how people live and work) to the professional (how companies interact with their customers, how customers choose and purchase products and services, how supply chains deliver them). In our recent survey of more than 200 organizations across industries, more than 90 percent of executives said they expect the fallout from COVID-19 to fundamentally change the way they do business over the next five years, with almost as many asserting that the crisis will have a lasting impact on their customers’ needs (Exhibit 1).

Global China: Regional influence and strategy

Tarun Chhabra, Rush Doshi, Ryan Hass, and Emilie Kimball

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Not long ago, China was viewed primarily as a regional actor with a predominant focus on events in its near abroad. In the span of a few short decades, China has established itself as a global actor. It has solidified its role as one of a small handful of countries with interests spanning the globe and the capacity to act on them. China’s presence is now felt in every corner of the world, from the South Pacific to South and Central Asia, the wider Middle East, Latin America, and points in between.

To explore the impact of China’s global activism, the papers in this installment of the Brookings Foreign Policy project “Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World” explore China’s efforts to expand its influence across different geographic regions, as well as implications of those efforts for the United States and for international order. These papers each reach initial conclusions about what tools China is relying upon to advance its interests, how China’s efforts are being met by local actors, and what options exist for those actors — and in some cases the United States — to respond. The papers demonstrate the diversity of methods China is employing to advance its interests. Taken as a whole, though, they highlight China’s heavy reliance on economic statecraft as a tool of first resort for pressing gains and for imposing penalties on countries that challenge its interests or push back on its agenda.

The papers also highlight the strategic calculations informing China’s ambitions, including in its efforts to develop force projection capabilities in the Indian Ocean region, its sensitivity to Afghanistan becoming a bastion of instability with potential spillover effects onto western China, and its efforts to establish its first overseas military base in the Horn of Africa. Lastly, in several instances, the papers spotlight uncertainties about whether China will be able to translate bold ambitions into realities.

China Can Buy Influence, but It Can’t Buy Love

BY ELISABETH BRAW
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Thanks to its large foreign investments and its global Belt and Road Initiative, China is winning plenty of friends around the world. Western policymakers, meanwhile, are struggling to compete with a country that has deep pockets, little interest in human rights, and no qualms about bullying countries into becoming its allies. And with economies around the world weakened by the coronavirus, the Chinese engine seems unstoppable. But China’s supposed friends are beginning to rebel, as last week’s retreat from Huawei 5G networks showed. If the mighty China wants to make a run for the United States’ superpower-with-lots-of-friends throne, it should learn from the much-maligned East Germans, who lacked both cash and prestige but won friends by offering training—and friendship.

When, a number of years ago, I went with a group of Ethiopian long-distance runners on a pre-dawn training run in the hills outside Addis Ababa, I was surprised to stumble on a construction project staffed by Chinese construction workers. In recent years, such projects have proliferated. According to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Belt and Road Tracker, between 2014 and 2017 alone China made loans worth over $120 billion to countries eager to build new infrastructure. The countries have—often using Chinese firms, as per the terms of their contracts with China—built highways and power plants, among other things.China has won new friends around the world. Western countries, by contrast, have lost opportunities for friendships.

What is China's War Plan In a Conflict? Here are a Few Operations Xi Would Likely Follow

by Ian Easton
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Here's What You Need to Remember: Available sources support a belief that these five are the main drivers of China's military reforms and buildup, and they will continue to shape the way Chinese authorities, including Xi Jinping, invest their time and energies in the national security arena.

On December 31, 2015, the People's Republic of China (PRC, or China) began a sweeping military reorganization and reform program. The stated objective of this program was to produce a "joint force" capable of fighting and winning China's future wars. This development raised a number of intriguing questions. What compelled the occupants of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing to gamble on a sudden, and potentially destabilizing, shake-up of the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? What wars do Xi Jinping and the CCP elite envision fighting? Assuming reforms are successful, how might Chinese military power be used in future joint operations?

To understand what may be driving China's military reorganization and reform campaign, we must first understand the nature of the PRC's war plans. Planners in Beijing appear to make decisions regarding China's overall military buildup and armaments program based on a limited number of future conflict scenarios. According to the writings of People's Liberation Army (PLA) strategists and military theorists, Beijing's foremost objective is preparing to conquer the Republic of China (ROC, or Taiwan), while deterring, delaying, or destroying U.S. military actions to assist in the defense of the island. This is something authoritative Chinese military writings refer to as China's "Main Strategic Direction (主要战略方向)."[i] PLA writings available to us indicate that military conflicts around China's land borders represent secondary, but still important, planning scenarios. In particular, Chinese military writings describe the India border as a flashpoint and paint India as a dangerous future enemy.[ii]

A global strategy for shaping the post-COVID-19 world

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The COVID-19 pandemic is an acute public health and economic crisis that is further destabilizing an already weakened rules-based international system. With cooperation, determination, and resolve, however, the United States and its allies can recover from the crisis and revitalize an adapted rules-based system to bring about decades of future freedom, peace, and prosperity.

1. The System

The Headline: Since the end of World War II, the free world has been governed by a system of rules—some formal, others informal. This system has been sustained by determined leadership on the part of the United States and its allies and partners across the globe.

These rules—which shape financial systems, trade, diplomacy, and the resolution of disputes between nations—have led to what generations before us would have believed impossible.

Over the past seventy-five years, democracy and freedom have expanded, a smaller percentage of people have been killed in war than in any other period in modern history, and the world’s wealth has grown like never before.

2. The Problem

A comprehensive EU strategy for Africa

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The new EU-Africa Strategy presented by the Commission on 9 March puts a reinforced emphasis on the creation of a real partnership with a continent whose relevance for Europe is growing by the day. The three briefings focus on different aspects of this new partnership, the first one dealing with the implications for the political dialogue with a focus on (good) governance and the even bigger

challenge of security and migration. The second briefing has a look at more ‘traditional’ aspects of this relationship, development and humanitarian aid, complemented with the rising challenge of climate change. The new approach is also illustrated by the emphasis put on the promotion of bilateral trade and investment relations, the topic of the third briefing. All these briefings also try to incorporate first elements on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the bilateral relationship

Innovation and Its Discontents: National Models of Military Innovation and the Dual-Use Conundrum

Amy J. Nelson

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This study explores variations in national models of innovation, as well as the pathways or levers those models afford in controlling innovation’s end product. This report focuses on dual-use, emerging technologies’ “origin stories” and takes a big picture view of their emergence. It is bookended by an exploration of where these dual-use technologies come from and by an assessment of where they are going. The report uses case studies of both U.S. and German investment in artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing to highlight national approaches to innovation, assessing each country’s approach to regulating sensitive and dual-use technologies once they have been developed. 

The report argues that within a national model of innovation, the way in which technology is procured by a state’s military is linked with that state’s ability to control or regulate an end-product and, in turn, prevent diffusion or proliferation. On national models of innovation, their evolution and variation, it finds: 

The United States has restructured its innovation model with “military edge” in mind, seeking to “out innovate” rival states in the security domain, and, at the national level, is currently debating “how to get innovation right” for defense purposes. Meanwhile, Germany has refocused its model to address retraining its workforce and maximizing market share. Both countries face high uncertainty about the future. We do not yet know what a successful model for innovation looks like in this technological and political ecosystem, but every state’s model can be understood as some combination of state-level investment in and the military integration of dual-use technologies. 

Emerging technologies: new challenges to global stability

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Cover image: ThisisEngineering RAEng, Unsplash

The world may be fast approaching the perfect storm, with the intersection of two major global trends. At a moment of historic transition, when the post-WWII and post-Cold War international order is eroding amid competing visions of world order and renewed geopolitical rivalries, the world is also in the early stages of an unprecedented technological transformation. It promises to be a period of exponential change, the second—and far more disruptive—chapter of the digital revolution that began with the Internet in the 1990s. Historically, technology usually races ahead of institutions, rules, and norms. The extraordinary magnitude of change at a time of global institutional fraying and disorder, however, portends a particularly dangerous gap in global governance impacting economies, societies, and the future of war.

Substantially more technology-driven change will take place during the coming two decades than in the first ICT (information and communications technology)-based revolution, with profound social, economic, and geopolitical ramifications. This new wave is a convergence of technologies, a digital synergy of artificial intelligence (AI), big data (the cloud), robotics, biotech/biosciences, three-dimensional (3D) printing, advanced manufacturing, new materials, fifth-generation (5G) powering the Internet of Things (IoT), nanoengineering and nanomanufacturing, and, over the horizon, quantum computing. It is a still thickening merger of the digital and physical economies (called “online-to-offline,” or O2O), transforming business models, transport, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, agriculture, warfare, and the very nature of work itself.

Japan’s Space Program: Shifting Away from “Non-Offensive” Purposes?

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Japan’s space program has evolved greatly since the end of the Cold War, driven by a rapidly changing geopolitical environment and tailored by the emergence of an “intra-alliance hedging strategy”.

Concerns about the United States’ readiness and ability to fulfill its security commitments have led Tokyo to enact security reforms to enhance its value as an ally while moving toward a more autonomous defense posture to prepare for the worst-case scenario of abandonment. This has transformed the Japanese space program from one based on the principle of peaceful use of space to a program aimed at ensuring national security through non-offensive means.

The security track of Japan’s space program currently aims at boosting the combat prowess of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in accordance with the non-offensive principle, and at maintaining in all circumstances the ability to use space-based assets for this purpose. Therefore, the country is not militarizing outer space beyond what is necessary to guarantee the proper functioning of the SDF.

The US Is Out of Position in the Indo-Pacific Region

BY NATHAN FREIER
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The Secretary of State’s recent dismissal of Beijing’s South China Sea claims is just the latest way U.S. officials are calling out Chinese rhetoric and military activity as a threat to a “free and open Indo Pacific.” But from a military perspective, the United States is not well positioned to affect favorable change or moderate Beijing’s aggressive behavior. Indeed, America’s once-unassailable competitive military advantage is eroding, and nowhere faster than in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility. Joint forces there are physically out of position, conceptually unprepared, and lacking leverage in deployed and anticipated capabilities for hypercompetition with China’s ever-improving People’s Liberation Army.

Several months after the January 2018 release of the National Defense Strategy, our group of U.S. Army War College researchers began to look at the role of the U.S. Army in INDOPACOM, drawing upon our earlier study of this hypercompetitive environment. Our research suggests that the Joint Force needs fundamental changes — in strategy and operational concepts, forces and capabilities, footprints and presence, authorities and agreements, and theater command and control — to meet the challenges of what the Joint Concept for Integrated Campaigning calls the “competition continuum.” In our new report, ”An Army Transformed: USINDOPACOM Hypercompetition and US Army Theater Design,” we recommend that the service help lead this transformation by assuming four roles: the Grid, the Enabler, the Multi-Domain Warfighter, and the Capability and Capacity Generator.

America’s war on Huawei nears its endgame

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On may 15th the American government announced a startling escalation in its campaign against Huawei, a Chinese company which is the largest provider of telecoms equipment in the world. American politicians and officials have long expressed concerns that mobile networks which rely on Huawei could allow snooping and sabotage by China. In May 2019, citing alleged violations of sanctions against Iran—charges Huawei denies—America used powers designed to stop the transfer of military technology to bar the company from receiving American components vital to the systems it sells.

Those measures had loopholes: suppliers could keep on selling Huawei many components as long as they were made in facilities outside America. So this year America targeted the whole supply chain: as of September it will be seeking to stop companies around the world from using software or hardware that originally comes from America to manufacture components based on Huawei’s designs.

Infographic Of The Day: Charting The Massive Scale Of The Digital Cloud

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Today's infographic provides an overview of the fast-changing cloud computing landscape, showcasing the industry's growth and its evolution in scale. It also touches on what's next for the cloud.

The Uneven Global Response to Climate Change

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Recently published climate science ultimately underscores the same points: The impacts of climate change are advancing faster than experts had previously predicted, and they are increasingly irreversible. One blockbuster report, from a United Nations grouping of biodiversity experts in May 2019, found that 1 million species are now in danger of extinction unless dramatic changes are made to everything from fuel sources to agricultural production. Despite these warnings, however, scientists confirm that the world remains on pace to blow past the goal of restricting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, likely with catastrophic consequences.

Persistent climate skepticism from key global figures, motivated in part by national economic interests, is slowing diplomatic efforts to systematically address the drivers of climate change. In particular, U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement immediately undermined the pact. But it has also had long-term implications, giving cover to countries that were never eager to participate in the first place to back away from their commitments.

Terrorism Monitor, July 15, 2020, v. 18, no. 14

How Will Khadimi Confront Kata’ib Hezbollah?

Libyan War Upsets Fragile Tunisian Government 

Gateway to Yemen: The Battle for the Tihama 

TRACKING COVID-19 IN THE AGE OF AI AND TECH WARS

by June Park
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June Park, political economist at the National Research Foundation of Korea, explains that “even the like-minded countries of GPAI have revealed their differences and institutional variance in deploying digital technology to fight COVID-19 at a time of grave national emergency and public health crisis.”   

On June 15, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, 11 founding members – Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – came together to launch the first ever global regulatory regime on artificial intelligence (AI) called the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), hosted by the OECD as the Secretariat.

The contactless environment propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly broken the ice on a long-awaited conversation. The launch, in the absence of China, came amid brewing tensions across the Atlantic in the digital realm. The GPAI was launched in the midst of trade wars expanding into tech wars for digital technology and AI: notably, U.S. pressures on Europe to block the adoption of Huawei equipment for 5G roll-outs, Europe’s moves for digital taxation of ‘the Big Four’– U.S. tech firms Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook, and the U.S. targeting of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, effective since May 2018), Europe’s powerful legal tool equipped with strong punitive measures for global companies in breach of data protection.

Cyber Warfare is the New Warfare

Tyler Elliot Bettilyon

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In the last few months we’ve seen a number of examples of the increasingly blurred line between conventional force and cyber attacks. After Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone the U.S. disabled Iranian missile capabilities by hacking their computer systems. In response to a conventional missile attack, the U.S. deployed a cyber attack. An example of the opposite played out earlier this year when Israeli forces used missiles to destroy a Hamas controlled hacking den.

These two examples are part of a larger trend in the use of computers as weapons of war. Hackers are no longer confined to the world of intelligence and espionage. Instead, we can expect a future where cyber attacks will routinely be a component of conventional warfare and where the hackers who deploy these attacks will be increasingly subject to retaliation in the form of conventional weapons. The continued internetification of everything from missile systems to electric grids has resulted in an attack surface too juicy for military actors to ignore.

Furthermore, the evolution of cyber attacks has forced nations to change the way they respond to a network intrusion, consider the malware known as Triton. This virus is designed to disable industrial safety controls and is capable causing significant loss of life, diminished defensive capabilities, and destruction of critical infrastructure. Triton was first discovered on the network of a Saudi petrochemical plant, and researchers say that the malware could have been used to cause the plant to explode. Taking the threat one step further: The infamous Stuxnet virus — which was successfully used to cripple an Iranian nuclear facility — was mercifully designed to achieve its goals without any loss of life, but imagine if it had been designed to cause another Chernobyl instead.

We need tougher action against disinformation and propaganda

Emma L. Briant

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Twitter finally started fact checking Trump’s tweets in May, but their fact-checking is unlikely to have much effect given the president’s parallel attacks against the media and platforms. Such attacks reduce trust among the very audience following his disinformation, and credibility of the source with the audience is vital to their believing the fact checking.

Two years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, propaganda, data misuse, disinformation, and strategic influence present some of the most complex and rapidly evolving challenges for researchers, civil society, and policymakers in our time. But how well are we tackling this problem, and what’s left to do? Efforts at the policy level to regulate, legislate data privacy, and pressure platforms to remove noncompliant content are making baby steps forward but still have a long way to go.

The public response to Cambridge Analytica and disinformation online has been almost entirely reactive. Most noticeably, we have seen researchers and journalists focus on identifying examples of disinformation and notifying platforms. Tens of millions of dollars are spent by platforms on disinformation research tracking online campaign messaging dissemination and consumption on social media. While these efforts can be valuable, a focus solely on tracking content will tend toward solutions such as content removal. This approach ignores the issue of what motivates platforms to act and may miss other ideas and responsible parties.

Regulating AI: A Success Story for the European Union?

Eduard Hovsepyan

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has in the last few years become one of the most topical subjects among policymakers all over the world. It is developing fast and despite some concerns as to its potential negative implications, it seems that it is here to stay. In this context, states face numerous novel challenges. On the one hand, the race to advancing artificial intelligence and reaping its full potential has become one of the primary political goals of today’s global powers such as China and the United States (US). On the other hand, AI showcases the growing influence of multinational corporations and their growing involvement in world affairs. States have acknowledged the need to step up their efforts in adopting adequate strategic documents corresponding to the dynamic development of AI technologies and their potential large-scale impacts in the near future. In this context, the European Union (EU) is pressured to act and focus its efforts and resources in staying competitive with the global superpowers.

Starting with some context; in 2017 China adopted its strategy entitled A New Generation of Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, while the president of the US issued his Executive Order 13859 of 11th February 2019 on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. The importance of taking action in relation to AI is best illustrated in the Russian National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence for the period until 2030 where it is emphasised that the implementation of the strategy is a prerequisite for Russia’s entry into the group of world leaders in the development and implementation of AI technologies and, as a result, the country’s technological independence and competitiveness. The first step by the EU was taken in 2018 when the European Commission published the EU AI strategy Artificial Intelligence for Europe. The strategy proposes 3 main objectives:

Does the Chinese Communist Party Need Military Confrontation?

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Background

Much time and (news)space has been devoted to the recent clash between Chinese and Indian troops in the Galwan River valley in India’s union territory of Ladakh, which adjoins China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in that clash, together with an undisclosed number of Chinese troops, causing, according to one unconfirmed report, the Chinese troops to flee and to remain in a state of panic, fearing retribution from the Indian troops. (That Indian report claims that at least twenty Chinese personnel, including officers, were killed but other media outlets – see here and here, for example – put that number at forty-three but provide vague substantiation of their claim.) The clash was the result of a border dispute between the two countries.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Ladakh recently to meet the wounded troops there and to thank them for their service. In a speech he delivered on that occasion, he stated that the age of expansionism had passed, which was generally seen as being targeted at China. That led a spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in India to comment on social media that the implication that China sought to expand its territory was “groundless”. As he tweeted:

#China has demarcated boundary with 12 of its 14 neighboring countries through peaceful negotiations, turning land borders into bonds of friendly cooperation. It’s groundless to view China as “expansionist”, exaggerate & fabricate its disputes with neighbours.

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