Indian Strategic Studies: 11/11/25

11 November 2025

Hezbollah Is Down but Not Out

Michael Jacobson

A senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Matthew Levitt, the director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.Billboards show Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem (center) and his slain predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, during a ceremony marking the first anniversary of Nasrallah's death, in Deir Qanoun al-Nahr, Lebanon, on Sept. 27.Billboards show Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem (center) and his slain predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, during a ceremony marking the first anniversary of Nasrallah's death, in Deir Qanoun al-Nahr, Lebanon,

After being battered by Israel, Hezbollah is working to replenish its badly damaged capabilities. Morgan Ortagus, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, was in Beirut last month to press Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to disarm the Iran-backed group—but she found out, if she hadn’t suspected already, that it is easier said than done.

Iran remains Hezbollah’s primary patron, as underscored by the U.S. Treasury Department's announcement today that it is sanctioning operatives funneling Iranian money to the group. Beyond direct funding from Iran, however, the group also has its own extensive and independent global procurement and financial networks. If the past is precedent, then Hezbollah will rely heavily on those international networks to bounce back from its recent setbacks. To succeed in freeing Lebanon from Hezbollah’s iron grip, the United States and the international community must not only support the Lebanese government’s internal disarmament efforts but also thwart Hezbollah from operating freely abroad.

Pakistan nuclear weapons, 2025

Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight-Boyle

Pakistan continues to slowly modernize its nuclear arsenal with improved and new delivery systems, and a growing fissile material production industry. Analysis of commercial satellite images of construction at Pakistani army garrisons and air force bases shows what appear to be newer launchers and facilities that might be related to Pakistan’s nuclear forces, although authoritative information about Pakistan’s nuclear units is scarce.

We estimate that Pakistan has produced a nuclear weapons stockpile of approximately 170 warheads, which is unchanged since our last estimate in 2023 (see Table 1). The US Defense Intelligence Agency projected in 1999 that Pakistan would have 60 to 80 warheads by 2020 (US Defense Intelligence Agency (1999, 38), but several new weapon systems have been fielded and developed since then, which leads us to a higher estimate. Our estimate comes with considerable uncertainty because neither Pakistan nor other countries publish much information about the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.Table 1. Pakistan nuclear weapons, 2025. (Click to display full size with notes.)

With several new delivery systems in development, four plutonium production reactors, and an expanding uranium enrichment infrastructure, Pakistan’s stockpile has the potential to increase further over the next several years. The size of this increase will depend on several factors, including how many nuclear-capable launchers Pakistan plans to deploy, how its nuclear strategy evolves, and how much the Indian nuclear arsenal grows. We estimate that the country’s stockpile could potentially grow to around 200 warheads by the late 2020s. But unless India significantly expands its arsenal or further builds up its conventional forces, it seems reasonable to expect that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal will not grow significantly, but might level off as its current weapons programs are completed.

The US must not endorse Russia and China’s vision for cybersecurity

John Yoo and Ivana Stradner

Even as Russia and China wage a relentless cyber war against the West, the United Nations is celebrating a new cybercrime treaty whose chief architects were none other than Moscow and Beijing.

It should come as no surprise, then, that this U.N. convention, signed by 65 nations last month, is less about fighting cybercrime than about legitimizing authoritarian repression of free speech. Although his predecessor grudgingly supported the treaty, President Trump should lead the charge against it.

Russia’s and China’s efforts to shape global cyberspace norms stretch back decades. In 1999, Moscow proposed “principles of international information security,” although this initiative received little support. In 2001, Russia and China refused to ratify the first-ever international treaty on cybercrime, known as the Budapest Convention, viewing it as too intrusive and a threat to state sovereignty.

But Moscow and Beijing did not give up. In 2018, the Russians launched a fresh effort to replace the Budapest Convention. They formed a new U.N. working group on cyber as an alternative to a rival U.S.-favored forum.

The following year, the U.N. General Assembly passed a Russian resolution, cosponsored by China and other authoritarian countries and opposed by Washington and its allies, to begin drafting a new international treaty to counter cybercrime.

Pressure on the Periphery: China’s Economic Coercion in the Borderlands

Victor A. Ferguson, Viking Bohman, and Audrye Wong

Over the past two decades, economic sanctions have emerged as a central instrument in the foreign policy toolkit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As the most valuable export destination for many countries and a central hub in global supply chains for critical materials and intermediate inputs, China’s economy provides policymakers with a versatile foundation for statecraft. By imposing sanctions and restricting the ability of foreign governments, firms, or individuals to access the Chinese market, Beijing can compel, deter, or otherwise signal dissatisfaction with actors that cross its red lines.

This essay focuses specifically on economic coercion in the PRC’s borderlands: the twenty countries with which it shares land or maritime borders.1 Using a unique dataset of over two hundred economic restrictions imposed globally between 2010 and August 2025,2 we trace Beijing’s sanctioning behavior in the borderlands and argue that the region served as an important testing ground for Beijing’s initial sanction experimentation, especially through “informal” methods. That borderland countries served as proverbial canaries in a coal mine may be hardly surprising, given that geographic proximity means they are inherently more closely connected to, and therefore more likely to affect, interests of immediate importance to China like territory and borders. However, we also find that sanctioning activity in the PRC’s immediate neighborhood sharply declined after peaking in 2017. We argue that this is because Beijing has been driven to shift its focus toward using economic restrictions to counter pressure from more distant actors like the United States and members of the European Union.

Taiwan, want to stop the gray-zone? Put your money where your mouth is.

Jonathan Walberg

When a Togo-flagged freighter with a Chinese crew severed Taiwan’s TP3 undersea cable this year, Taipei did something unusual: it built a case, prosecuted the captain, and won a prison sentence. Gray-zone activity is supposed to be deniable; a judge’s verdict is not. That ruling should be read as more than a local story about a damaged line: it’s a proof of concept that the right mix of policing, monitoring, and law can raise the costs of below-the-threshold coercion. If Taipei wants less gray-zone harassment, it can’t just call for vigilance — it must pay for it, systematically and for the long haul.

Gray-zone campaigns thrive in ambiguity: actions that are “not quite war” but erosive over time — coast-guard pushes, maritime-militia swarms, “fishing” sorties, sand dredging, cable strikes, and propaganda that muddies facts faster than governments can clarify them. For the PRC, the formula has been clear for years: coordinated pressure by coast guards and “civilian” vessels, layered with disinformation and legal salami-slicing, designed to exhaust and outmaneuver defenders without triggering a treaty response. The near-term effect is friction; the long-term effect is desensitization. Unchallenged encounters raise the informal response threshold inside agencies and cabinets, makes media coverage feel like “old news,” and conditions local communities to treat incursions as background noise. Over time, that drip-drip creates a narrative of normalcy. Maps get redrawn in practice, if not on paper, and it becomes politically harder for Taipei to call out a violation or mobilize partners without sounding alarmist.

That is the point of the strategy: to shift the burden of proof onto Taiwan, sap bandwidth, and narrow the space for timely action. If every incident is “ambiguous,” then every response must clear a higher evidentiary bar, pass more reviews, and compete with other priorities in a finite budget. Meanwhile, administrative precedents stack up: “routine patrols,” “safety inspections,” “fisheries management” that look bureaucratic but function as creeping jurisdiction that China uses to push their agenda. The remedy, therefore, isn’t just more destroyers; it’s more prosecutors, patrol hulls, sensors, and joint law-enforcement mechanisms, to document patterns, attribute intent, impose consequences, and keep the narrative honest.

Beijing’s Growing Power Over Global Gas Markets

Elizabeth Frost, Angela Glowacki, and Jia-Shen Tsai

The governments of Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have signed a legally binding agreement to build the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, according to Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller (Bloomberg, September 2). The pipeline signals deepening energy ties between Beijing and Moscow at a time when the PRC has suspended imports of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) in retaliation to President Trump’s tariffs (Bloomberg, March 18; Natural Gas Intelligence, October 29).

Despite steady growth in domestic production, the PRC remains externally dependent on LNG and pipeline gas for around 40 percent of its supply. Beijing’s approach to diversifying suppliers, including with Russia, is motivated by both economic and geopolitical concerns. These include desires to maintain competitive pricing, develop its position as a re-seller of LNG, respond to trade wars, and enhance strategic partnerships with key partners.

The U.S. Air Force Has a Plan to Escape the ‘Doom Loop’

Mackenzie Eaglen

A 96th Test Wing F-15E Strike Eagle flies during a test mission May 22, 2025 over Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The 96 TW and the 53rd Wing teamed up to test AGR-20F Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II laser-guided rockets on the F-15E in May in an effort to get the capability to the warfighter as quickly as possible. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Thomas Barley)

Key Points and Summary – U.S. Air Force leaders briefed Congress on a 10-year fighter recapitalization to escape a readiness “doom loop” created by aging fleets, parts shortages, and high sustainment costs.

-The plan grows capacity while diversifying capability: retain select legacy jets, divest oldest tails, accelerate F-35 and F-15EX buys, push a 6th-gen fighter, and field Collaborative Combat Aircraft as a cheaper force-multiplier.

-Success hinges on solving pilot shortages, boosting mission-capable rates, expanding industrial throughput, and locking sustained funding. With adversaries fielding dense IADS, EW, and hypersonics, officials urge multi-year resources to give industry confidence to scale production and restore credible deterrence.

Demilitarization in Gaza: Could the Palestinian Authority Be Part of the Solution?

David Makovsky and Shira Efron

After the ceasefire in Gaza, the first phase of President Donald Trump's Gaza peace plan is nearing completion. All surviving Israeli hostages have returned home after two hellish years in Hamas's tunnels; the remains of the dead hostages are being retrieved—too slowly, but with the dignity their families deserve. In return, Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners serving long prison sentences for violent attacks and 1,700 more detainees. More than two years after Hamas's October 7, 2023, assault on Israel, the worst and most vicious fighting in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict has stopped, giving both exhausted and traumatized societies a measure of respite.

The second phase hinges on Hamas's disarmament. Only after verifiable demilitarization will the IDF withdraw from Gaza and let reconstruction of the razed and battered Strip begin in earnest. The plan calls for the deployment of an international stabilization force, while a temporary, technocratic Palestinian administration manages day-to-day affairs.

Why the fall of this city would matter to Ukraine and Russia

Laura Gozzi and Paul Kirby

On Wednesday, Kyiv's General Staff denied its forces in and around the town had been encircled and maintained they were still involved in "active resistance" and blocking out Russian troops. One Ukrainian regiment said it had cleared the city council and posted a video of a Ukrainian flag hung on the building.

Skelya regiment

Ukraine's "Skelya" assault regiment said they had cleared the city council building in Pokrovsk and raised the national flag

While Ukraine's official position is that it is holding its own against Russia, military personnel cited by a war correspondent for Ukraine's Hromadske website said Ukrainian troops were outnumbered and more than 1,000 soldiers were at risk of becoming surrounded.

For its part Russia said it was continuing to advance northwards and thwarting attempts by Ukraine to break its troops out of encirclement. Ukrainian units were trapped in "cauldrons", the defence ministry said, although several commentators said that was not the case.

The Slow Death of Russian Oil

Tatiana Mitrova and Sergey Vakulenko

In considering the many effects of the war in Ukraine on the Russian economy, few suspected that fuel shortages would be one of them. After all, Russia is an oil-rich country whose energy infrastructure is far from the frontlines; for most of the war, it has been Ukraine, not Russia, whose energy grid has been in the line of fire. Yet since August, when Ukraine began a concerted campaign to strike oil refineries deep inside Russia, fuel shortages have come to preoccupy Russians. By late October, Ukrainian drone

COP30: World leaders take aim at Trump for climate inaction

Esme Stallard, and Matt McGrath

Brazilian President Lula warned of "extremist forces" when he addressed world leaders at the global climate summit

US President Donald Trump has been criticised by world leaders for his stance on climate change, ahead of the global COP30 summit.

President Trump, who is not attending the meeting in the Amazonian city of Belém, was called a liar by the leaders of Colombia and Chile for his rejection of climate science.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer acknowledged the waning political support on climate change. He said it had been a unity issue internationally and in the UK but "today sadly that consensus is gone".

Over the next two weeks countries will try and negotiate a new deal on climate change, with a particular focus on channelling more money to forest protection.

Many leaders from the world's largest nations – India, Russia, US and China - are notably absent from this year's summit.

And while Trump isn't attending this meeting in Belém, his views on climate change are certainly on the minds of many of the other leaders present.

Speaking at the UN in September, the US president said that climate change was "the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world".

He said: "The entire globalist concept, asking successful industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies, must be rejected completely and totally."

The Desperate Search for Gaza Peacekeepers

Anchal Vohra

A columnist at Foreign Policy.Spanish soldiers with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) stand guard at the entrance of their base near the southern Lebanese village of Taibeh, 18 September 2006.Spanish soldiers with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) stand guard at the entrance of their base near the southern Lebanese village of Taibeh, 18 September 2006. THOMAS COEX / AFP

About 20 miles from Gaza, the United States has taken over a large and long-vacated industrial complex, where it has set up a civil-military coordination center. At any given time, approximately 200 American soldiers and officials are milling about in the facility in Kiryat Gat, a town in southern Israel. They are the United States’ eyes and ears, monitoring the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.

It’s clear that they are not meant to be deployed as a combat team to enforce the next stages of the Trump administration’s peace plan. But neither is anyone else. None of the United States’ allies or Arab partners have signaled any willingness to send troops to police Hamas if it refuses to disarm.

Why Countries Keep Making Deals With Trump, Despite the Supreme Court Tariff Case

Jon Bateman and Peter Harrell

On this week’s episode of The World Unpacked, host Jon Bateman discussed the Supreme Court case challenging President Donald Trump’s tariffs with Peter Harrell, a nonresident scholar with Carnegie’s American Statecraft Program and one of the lawyers fighting the tariffs on behalf of some members of Congress.

A portion of their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

Jon Bateman: [Let’s] start with the question of why and how the legal authority that Trump used for these tariffs is unprecedented. We know that the U.S. has had tariffs before, and in the first Trump administration, the president imposed tariffs, but this time he did it in a different way, and that’s why he’s in the Supreme Court now.

Peter Harrell: The Constitution gives Congress in Article I the power to levy tariffs and duties and to “regulate commerce.” So these things like imposing tariffs very clearly [are] Congress’s authority. So then the question becomes, for the president: Did Congress delegate to the president?

Starting in the 1930s, Congress has over the years given presidents various legal ways to raise tariffs. But those lawful delegations would not let Trump impose tariffs sort of overnight on the entire world the way he has wanted to. So what he did back in April with Liberation Day, he used this 1977 emergency powers statute called IEEPA, which Congress had passed mostly to let presidents impose sanctions—like Carter imposing sanctions on Iran in 1979 and Obama imposing sanctions on Russia when it took over Crimea in 2014. Trump used the statute, which had been used many times for sanctions, to impose all these tariffs. It had never been used for tariffs before.

The Regime Change Temptation in Venezuela

Alexander B. Downes and Lindsey A. O’Rourke

Alexander B. Downes is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University and author of Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College, a Nonresident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and author of Covert

What began in early September as a series of American airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean—which U.S. officials alleged were trafficking drugs from Venezuela—now seems to have morphed into a campaign to overthrow Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Over the course of two months, President Donald Trump’s administration has deployed 10,000 U.S. troops to the region, amassed at least eight U.S. Navy surface vessels and a submarine around South America’s northern coast, directed B-52 and B-1 bombers to fly near the Venezuelan coastline, and ordered the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group—which the

The Computing Arms Race of Cold War 2.0

Michael Wilkerson

It is difficult to overstate the sea change that the world is facing as a result of the rapid acceleration of advanced computing technologies and their applications—especially in AI, robotics, quantum computing, and micro-nuclear power. Thanks to a generation of human invention and innovation, the long-imagined world of science fiction writers is now here. A consequence of this faster-than-expected advent is that world leaders are scrambling to ensure their nations are not left behind.

Advances in AI and other computing-based technology have gone parabolic. The computational power of the world’s 500 largest supercomputers has grown from one teraflop in 1995 to 10 exaflops in 2025. These strange-sounding figures represent an astronomical increase in calculations per second amounting to an 18 million-time increase in computing power over three decades. Already a $60 billion revenue market today, the supercomputing market is projected to grow by 7.5 percent per year over the next decade, to nearly $125 billion by 2035.

The U.S., China, and other competing countries are now in a Cold War 2.0 arms race. Their leaders firmly believe that whichever country dominates AI and advanced computing will have a substantial strategic, economic, and military advantage over its adversaries.

The late-stage Cold War arms race initiated by President Ronald Reagan against the USSR in the early 1980s was so expensive that it eventually led the Soviet Union to the edge of bankruptcy and brought down the Communist regime. Today, both the spending required and the emergent risks of the AI and computing wars threaten to make the stakes of that era feel like child’s play.

Kremlin Shifts Focus to Information Warfare

Yuri Lapaiev

Russian President Vladimir Putin shows no sign of giving up on his war against Ukraine despite limited battlefield gains. As Russia begins to experience a shortage of certain types of military equipment, its propaganda machine continues unabated and may have even expanded. Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrii Sybiha, stated that Russia’s draft budget for 2026 would reduce military spending by approximately $2.4 billion compared to 2025, while increasing funding for state-run media by 54 percent, an additional $458 million. In Sybiha’s opinion, this draft budget realignment shows that the Kremlin is prioritizing informational warfare going forward (The New Voice of Ukraine, September 30; Telegram/@Ukraine_MFA, October 19). The target audience—including the population of the Russian Federation, citizens of Ukraine, and residents of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries and allies—dictates Moscow’s strategy.

The Kremlin’s domestic propaganda machine is designed to sustain public support for the regime and its war against Ukraine. It is designed to convince Russians that the so-called “special military operation (SVO)” has been successful and needs to continue (Lenta, October 26; President of Russia, October 29). Other narratives try to create a positive perception of the Russian economy and portray Western sanctions as ineffective (RIA Novosti, June 19, July 6; The Moscow Times, August 8). Domestic propaganda also downplays the scale and consequences of Ukrainian attacks inside Russia, for example, by falsely stating that the military shot down all Ukrainian strike drones and that only debris reached targets during a September attack (Regnum, September 12; Russian Ministry of Defense, November 1).

PLA Insights from Ukraine’s Asymmetric USV Operations

Sunny Cheung and Owen Au

In September, Zhuhai Yunzhou Intelligence Technology launched a new type of dual-mode naval platform. “Blue Whale” an unmanned surface vehicle (USV), is capable of operating both on the surface and underwater, where it can remain submerged for over a month. It represents an advance in the country’s innovation capabilities, as well as signalling a growing demand for unmanned systems (Zhuhai City Innovation Bureau, September 12). [1] This demand is shaped by a focus within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on maritime warfare, especially in preparation for a Taiwan contingency, as evidenced by numerous naval trainings and drills in recent years. The influence of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is also a clear influence on decisions for PLA equipment procurement.

Since February 2022, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has closely followed developments both on and off the battlefield in Russia and Ukraine (China Brief, March 28, July 18). One area that has attracted attention from Chinese military analysts is Naval combat in the Black Sea. Academics have estimated that roughly half of Ukraine’s USV attacks by the end of 2024 achieved significant military results, sabotaging Russian warships and logistical infrastructure. [2] Analysis by military experts, scholars, and practitioners from leading PRC defense institutes over the past three years shows that the PRC is moving decisively toward embracing USVs, but that technological hurdles remain and not all scenarios necessarily favor their deployment.

Inside Gaza, BBC sees total devastation after two years of war

Lucy Williamson

The Gaza of maps and memories is gone, replaced by a monochrome landscape of rubble stretching flat and still for 180 degrees, from Beit Hanoun on one side to Gaza City on the other.

Beyond the distant shapes of buildings still standing inside Gaza City, there's almost nothing left to orient you here, or identify the neighbourhoods that once held tens of thousands of people.

This was one of the first areas Israeli ground troops entered in the early weeks of the war. Since then they have been back multiple times, as Hamas regrouped around its strongholds in the area.

Israel does not allow news organisations to report independently from Gaza. Today it took a group of journalists, including the BBC, into the area of the Strip occupied by Israeli forces.

The brief visit was highly controlled and offered no access to Palestinians, or other areas of Gaza.

Military censorship laws in Israel mean that military personnel were shown our material before publication. The BBC maintained editorial control of this report at all times.

Asked about the level of destruction in the area we visited, Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani said it was "not a goal".

"The goal is to combat terrorists. Almost every house had a tunnel shaft or was booby-trapped or had an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] or sniper station," he said.

"If you're driving fast, within a minute you can be inside of a living room of an Israeli grandmother or child. That's what happened on October 7."

More than 1,100 people were killed in the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, and 251 others taken hostage.

The Three Technologies Disrupting the Global Order

MARK BLYTH and DANIEL DRISCOLL

The great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that you could spot a fundamental economic transition by the arrival of new types of goods, new production methods, and new forms of industrial organization. The spread of cheap drones, phones, and solar checks all of these boxes.

PROVIDENCE/CHARLOTTESVILLE – News media tend to focus on the world’s major powers, because they command more resources by dint of their relatively larger economies, militaries, and energy endowments. But there are costs to such dominance. For example, a single American Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier costs $13 billion, while the F-35 fighter jet costs around $100 million. So, if you can build your military equipment for less than your opponent, you can gain a strategic advantage.

America’s Future Is Being Sacrificed for Short-Term “Wins”

IAN BREMMER

Despite a tumultuous year, markets continue to bet on American liquidity and growth. But while the outlook looks promising, the United States is systematically trading strategic advantages for tactical gains, and the costs are accumulating in ways that won’t become apparent until it’s too late.

NEW YORK – The United States is winning. Or at least that is how it looks if you’re tracking market indices and the parade of countries lining up to cut deals with President Donald Trump. The US economy is outpacing its allies. Stocks keep hitting record highs. And Asian and Gulf countries have pledged trillions of dollars in foreign direct investment in the US during the Trump presidency.

Space Force astronauts? New report says guardians in space would be asset for future ops

THOMAS NOVELLY

Today, guardians go to space only in popular misconception, but tomorrow? There might be solid tactical reasons to put Space Force personnel in orbit, argues a new report from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

“The adaptability and flexibility of human decision-making, as well as their ability to conduct a variety of mission operations, could present fundamental challenges to an adversary’s decision calculations,” the report said.

Thursday’s report, titled “A Broader Look at Dynamic Space Operations: Creating Multi-Dimensional Dilemmas for Adversaries,” says the Space Force must make all of its systems, not just its satellites, more maneuverable, flexible, and survivable amid China’s rapid push to improve technology for tracking and targeting U.S. military forces.

Charles Galbreath, the former Space Force officer and current senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute who wrote the report said putting guardians physically in space may also give the military an advantage.

“It is important to remember the fact that the most flexible system ever launched into space by the United States is the human being,” the report said. “Just as human astronauts were essential to the repair of and upgrades to the Hubble Space Telescope and the rescue of several other satellites, guardians in space may be essential for future Space Force missions.”

Humans Are Still the Weakest Link in the AI Cyber War

Marcel Calef

AI has become the weapon of choice for cyber criminals for crafting new attacks through a variety of tactics and they’re very successful. An MIT Sloan and Safe Security research project found 80% of 2,800 ransomware attacks were powered by artificial intelligence. Malware, phishing, and deepfake-driven social engineering are popular schemes. A major difference is that AI based attacks move at lightning speed. AI-powered malware can dynamically rewrite code, making attacks harder to detect. It can analyze network behavior in real time, looking for vulnerability points to infiltrate. Fighting back against AI will require a defense that combines technology with the recognition that human behavior enables AI cyber-attacks just as humans enabled attacks in the pre-AI era. A business’s best defense is mobilization on three fronts: people, permission control, and technology.

The number one point of security failure is a person clicking on a site, page or application that houses a threat. The opportunities for this increase with the pace and volume at which AI can generate new threats and process these links, creating an urgent need for advanced defenses. Phishing scams through social engineering are a main source of attacks. The difference is that AI is far more sophisticated, sending an email, for example, which looks identical to a person’s account. If an employee is tired, and some of this fatigue is caused by performance issues at their desktop, they are more likely to click on this communication. If they are unsatisfied with their company’s response to previous concerns, they may delay reporting the issue or not report it all.

AI Wants Our Water

FRIEDERIKE ROHDE and PAZ PEÑA

BERLIN/SANTIAGO – AI is often portrayed as the harbinger of a prosperous, more efficient future. But the machines driving this revolution depend on a resource far older – and far more contested – than data or electricity: water.

As the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s recent Water Atlas makes clear, AI’s rapid growth is depleting local water reserves around the world, from drought-stricken Chile to South Africa. Its physical footprint reflects a new form of colonial extraction; instead of silver and soy, now it is the cooling water that keeps the digital economy running.

While the debate about AI’s energy use focuses on the power needed to train and operate large language models, what is often overlooked is the vast amount of water required to cool data centers, not to mention the water used in energy production and hardware manufacturing.

ChatGPT is a prime example. Training GPT-3 required roughly 700,000 liters of water for cooling alone. A Greenpeace study estimates that data centers will consume 664 billion liters annually by 2030, compared to 239 billion liters in 2024.

AI’s benefits are concentrated in the Global North, yet its environmental costs increasingly fall on the Global South. In 2023, mass protests erupted in Uruguay over a proposed Google data center as the country suffered its worst drought in 70 years. With reservoirs running dry, authorities began pumping brackish water from the Río de la Plata estuary into public systems, granting Google permits to draw from the remaining freshwater reserves even as working-class families boiled salty tap water to drink.

Targeting Palantir And Nvidia: Profits, Prophets And Overvalued AI Stocks

Binoy Kampmark

In an industry of seedy soothsayers, cocksure charlatans and resourceful rogues, honest and accurate appraisals are exquisitely rare. When it comes to economics, investments and finance, this is particularly so. Certitude, however, tends to be in abundance for those predicting the next financial crash, the sort that will singe earnings and strafe savings. Take, for instance, hedge fund investor Michael Burry, a man of sufficient notoriety to warrant a celluloid depiction of himself by Christian Bale in the 2015 film The Big Short.

On that occasion, Burry’s hunch, albeit an educated one, was that the US housing bubble would implode in what became the Great Recession of 2007-9. The buccaneering investor shorted mortgage-backed securities ahead of the collapse, raking in profits as the subprime mortgage sundered. But his record is by no means immaculate, seeing falls when they have not eventuated, especially on tech stocks. For him, the language of catastrophe is never far away. An April 7 post on X this year is fabulously bleak: “Millennials going through 9/11, two economic recessions, a pandemic, the looming threat of WW3, AI job automation, and now facing the ‘biggest crash in history’.”

Towards the end of October, he felt in an oracular mood: “Sometimes we see bubbles,” he wrote in another post. “Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” His Scion Asset Management hedge fund subsequently moved 80% of its US$1.1 billion portfolio to place options against Palantir (PTLR) and Nvidia (NVDA). These will pay handsomely should shares in these AI-linked companies fall. Burry remains convinced that technology stocks, certainly when it comes to artificial intelligence, are overvalued and set for the precipitous plummet. Whether this is due to growing scepticism about the herd-like rush to adopt AI, the debate about necessary regulation, or that broader sensibility that what rises or swells so rapidly must fall or puncture, is impossible to know. Certainly, the incestuous circular financing tech companies have been engaging in is crying out for a stinging correction. But it is precisely moves of this nature by Scion Asset Management that send jitters through the market, turning preaching prophets into market saboteurs.

A Solar-Powered Hydrogen Station Could Let Military Drones Fly for Months Without Resupply

Allen Frazier

A Michigan defense contractor has developed a mobile refueling system that generates hydrogen fuel from solar power and atmospheric moisture, enabling military drones to operate continuously for up to six months in remote areas without fuel resupply.

Sesame Solar and hydrogen drone manufacturer Heven AeroTech announced the Drone Refueling Nanogrid last week, a trailer-sized system designed to address fuel logistics challenges in contested or remote environments. A prime contractor is already marketing the technology to War Department customers and allied nations, with particular interest from the Indo-Pacific region.

The system pairs with Heven's Z-1 vertical takeoff and landing drones, which run on hydrogen fuel cells instead of batteries or gasoline. The combination delivers significant tactical advantages.

“Silent, hydrogen-powered drones outperform traditional battery-powered or gas-powered drones for several reasons,” said Lauren Flanagan, CEO of Sesame Solar. “First, most battery-powered drones can only run for an hour or two before needing to be recharged. Both battery and gas-powered drones have higher thermal and acoustic signatures, which increase enemy detection.”

The Z-1 can fly for over eight hours per mission—roughly six times longer than battery-powered systems—while the hydrogen fuel cells produce lower heat and noise signatures that make the drones harder to detect and target.

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