India’s Quiet Bet On The Gulf After Gaza – Analysis

Shaunak Nath

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In the past year, the war in Gaza has pushed many governments to take clear public positions, often framing foreign policy as a question of moral alignment. India has responded differently. New Delhi has condemned civilian casualties, maintained its relationship with Israel, and continued diplomatic engagement with Gulf countries, while avoiding strong public statements that would place it firmly one either side of the conflict.

This restrained approach has drawn mixed reactions. Some observers see it as excessive caution, while others interpret it as deliberately ambiguous. India has neither stepped back from Israel nor openly aligned itself with Arab positions. Instead, it has limited its public messaging as tensions spread across the Middle East and begin to affect the wider region.

Pakistan’s JF-17 Thunder: The $30 Million Fighter Jet Rewriting the Arms Market

Brandon J. Weichert

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Pakistan’s JF-17 Thunder (or FC-1 Xiaolong) is a lightweight, affordable, single-engine, multirole combat aircraft that was jointly developed by Pakistan Aeronautical Complex and China’s Chengdu Aircraft Corporation. This bird is meant for maneuverability, and it features an advanced avionics suite to ensure that capability.

The plane also comes with highly effective beyond-visual-range (BVR) missile capabilities. There are currently three iterations of this plane (with the Block III being the most advanced and recent). More importantly, however, the JF-17 is combat tested and has a demonstrated success against advanced Western-made warplanes. That’s because the Pakistani Air Force (PAF) utilized these warplanes in their recent war with neighboring India.

Justice Mission–2025: The Narrative Battle Inside China’s Latest Taiwan Exercise

Jonathan Walberg

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When the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command launched its Justice Mission–2025 exercises around Taiwan on December 29th, the visible indicators were familiar: joint air and naval maneuvers,[1] expanded operating zones, and calibrated signaling toward Taipei and external actors.[2] What distinguished this iteration was not just the scale or geometry of the activity, but the depth and coherence of the narrative campaign that unfolded alongside it.

Rather than treating messaging as post hoc propaganda, Beijing used Justice Mission–2025 to actively storyboard a theory of coercion in real time. A coordinated series of posters released through PLA and affiliated channels visually depicted how Beijing intends to punish pro-independence forces; why such punishment is legitimate, and why resistance is futile. In the days immediately following the exercise, Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) press conferences reinforced and formalized those same narrative frames through authoritative political language.

Tokyo Has Stepped Up on China—Now It’s Washington’s Turn

Mike Kuiken and Randy Schriver

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In November, soon after taking office, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told parliament that a Chinese assault on Taiwan could constitute an existential threat to Japan and could warrant a military response. To China, which sees any commitment to supporting Taiwan as a provocation, these were fighting words. In response, Beijing stepped up military exercises near Japan, halted the imports of Japanese seafood, banned exports of dual-use goods—products that can be used for civilian and military purposes—to Japan, and advised its citizens not to travel there.

Takaichi’s comments are all the more worrying for China because Japan is undergoing a profound shift. Over the past four years, Tokyo has prepared itself to counter China’s coercive behavior by splurging on its armed forces, protecting its supply chains, and becoming more assertive in its neighborhood.

China counting how many missiles it needs to win a Taiwan war

Gabriel Honrada

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As modern warfare shifts toward attrition, China’s push for cheaper munitions raises a sharper question: can its missile industry sustain the scale and tempo a Taiwan war would demand?

This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China should consider adopting low-cost guided munitions to prepare for future large-scale drone and attrition warfare, according to an analysis in a Chinese military magazine that examines the US’s efforts to cut the soaring costs of modern conflict.

The article, published this month in Ordnance Science and Technology and cited by SCMP, says the US has found it financially unsustainable to counter low-cost threats with expensive precision weapons, pointing to US operations in the Red Sea, where missiles costing more than US$2.5 million each were used to intercept Houthi drones worth under $2,000, driving total costs to about $1 billion in 2023.

The Limits of the China–Russia Strategic Partnership in Military Space Cooperation

Tahir Azad

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China and Russia are increasingly portraying their relationship as a stabilizing “strategic partnership”, defined by mutual resistance to US hegemony, and what both characterize as Western-led containment. This alignment is especially appealing in space because it is both symbolic and strategic, and it can be used for both military and civilian purposes. For example, satellites support precision strikes, intelligence, communications, missile warnings, and the resilience of command-and-control. They are also allowing civilians to navigate, monitor disasters, and provide commercial services. The official language stresses working together for a long time on lunar and deep-space exploration and getting China’s BeiDou and Russia’s GLONASS navigation systems to work better together. 

However, the same things that make space cooperation useful also make it risky. Military space capabilities are an important part of national security. They make countries more vulnerable to spying, technology leaks, operational dependence, and strategic weakness. So, China and Russia still work together a lot in military space, but only in certain areas. This is because of ongoing problems like differences in capacity and sanctions exposure, different strategic priorities, competition between bureaucracies and industries, and a long-standing lack of trust over the most sensitive technologies and operational concepts.

Fighting with Live Data

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Victory in modern warfare requires commanders to make better decisions faster than their adversaries. The news drives this home every day, whether it be from Ukraine, the Red Sea, Gaza, Iraq, or Syria. We exist in an age where accelerated data and platform development are integral to our warfighting capabilities. Achieving Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2)—the Department of War’s (DOW) current mission command approach for achieving decision dominance—requires adapting new technologies and synchronizing systems to provide, exploit, and visualize the right data rapidly.1 Critical to enabling CJADC2 is the ability to manipulate and utilize a variety of data sources to develop tools that support the commander’s data-driven decision cycle.2 The importance of this effort only grows as DOW establishes a foundation upon which to build future artificial intelligence/machine learning tools.

Even given this imperative, the Army has struggled with how best to leverage access to live datasets; new and emerging data-centric platforms; and a growing talent base of officers, warrant officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers to solve its most challenging operational problems. Current efforts associated with “transformation in contact” and the Army transformation initiative will not just rely on the integration of new technologies and data streams but will ultimately require a data-centric foundation to enable true continuous transformation.3 Understanding how best to build an enduring data-development capability within our formations while sustaining the unique manpower and skills required to employ this capability will remain one of the Army’s chief concerns over the next decade.

Japan Can’t Go It Alone Tokyo Has Stepped Up on China—Now It’s Washington’s Turn

Dan Blumenthal, Mike Kuiken, and Randy Schriver

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In November, soon after taking office, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told parliament that a Chinese assault on Taiwan could constitute an existential threat to Japan and could warrant a military response. To China, which sees any commitment to supporting Taiwan as a provocation, these were fighting words. In response, Beijing stepped up military exercises near Japan, halted the imports of Japanese seafood, banned exports of dual-use goods—products that can be used for civilian and military purposes—to Japan, and advised its citizens not to travel there.

Why Economic Pain Won’t Stop Russia’s War

Dr Richard Connolly

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One of the enduring beliefs of liberal internationalism is that economic pressure can substitute for military force. Sanctions, trade restrictions and financial isolation are supposed to raise the costs of aggression to such an extent that governments eventually revise their aims. This faith has been widely applied to Russia’s war against Ukraine. As Russia’s economy shows signs of strain – slowing growth, persistent inflation, high interest rates and deteriorating investment prospects – hopes periodically re-emerge that economic pain will compel Moscow to change course.

History, however, offers limited comfort for this view. Wars are rarely abandoned because they become expensive. They are more often terminated when states are defeated militarily, when ruling coalitions fracture, or when regimes themselves collapse. Economic pressure, where it matters, tends to operate through these channels rather than through persuasion alone. The experience of Russia today fits this broader pattern. Its economy is under strain, but that strain is unlikely to prove decisive.

Naval Leaders Need to Think Fast, Slow, and Augmented

Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman

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This is an age of potentially disruptive technologies. The emerging revolution centered around artificial intelligence (AI) could restore the U.S. competitive edge in naval warfighting. Yet victory will not be gained solely by investing in AI or another advanced technology. Success in future conflicts will not be driven by exquisite platforms or AI systems. Instead, victory will be the product of an effective nexus between human minds and machines.

Human-machine teaming is the future. While totally autonomous systems may be needed in some contexts, intensive and interactive human-machine teaming is more powerful—and more likely—as Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has argued.1 While chess programming models have long surpassed human capabilities, the conduct of war is significantly more complicated and requires judgments that should not be ceded to machines. The history of technology should shape a clear understanding that the higher realms of leadership in war, such as making strategy, are going to be subject to an “indelibly human element.”2 The goal should be to make sure the contributions humans make in war are as timely and creative as needed.

Data Defeat: What if the Army’s New Command-and-Control Tools Overwhelm Company Commanders at the Tactical Edge?

C. Wayne Culbreth 

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On the approaches to Pokrovsk in late 2025, the battlefield looked nothing like the doctrinal diagrams in most command-post exercises. Reuters described stretches of eastern Ukraine as a “drone-infested” twenty-kilometer kill zone, where small Russian assault groups creep forward under constant observation from Ukrainian quadcopters and first-person-view strike drones, and any movement risks immediate detection and fire. Inside Pokrovsk itself, Ukrainian defenders told reporters that drones alone could not hold the city: They could see Russian forces infiltrating block by block, but still lacked the infantry and the command bandwidth to turn that visibility into coherent, timely action.

That is the world US Army company commanders are preparing for. At the same time, Army formations, like the 4th Infantry Division through its Ivy Sting exercises, are fielding the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototype—a unified data and software ecosystem that ties together fires, intelligence, movement and maneuver, logistics, and airspace management. NGC2 and related efforts like TITAN, data fabrics, and division-wide kill webs are doing exactly what they are supposed to do at the enterprise level: collapsing sensor-to-shooter timelines and giving commanders access to more data than ever before.

China has spent decades making inroads in Latin America. Will the ‘Donroe doctrine’ push it out?

Simone McCarthy

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As the dust cleared around the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a surprise military strike earlier this month, US officials left little question that they had another target too: China.

A longtime friend to the government in Caracas, China has for years pumped money into the oil fields and infrastructure of the South American country. Maduro’s ouster is a blow to that partnership that could leave Chinese banks facing billions in unpaid Venezuelan debt.

But viewed from Beijing, the stakes are much higher than that. The shake-up was also the loudest warning shot yet of a deeper campaign for the Trump administration: to root out China’s influence across Latin America.

Is Trump's foreign policy really realist?

Leon Hadar

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Trump’s second-term foreign policy presents a complex picture when evaluated against classical realist principles. While certain elements align with realist thinking—particularly its emphasis on power politics and national interest—others reveal significant departures from the restraint and prudence that define the realist tradition.

The administration’s explicit embrace of spheres of influence represents perhaps the clearest realist turn in American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The 2025 National Security Strategy openly acknowledges “the outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations” as “a timeless truth” and rejects “global domination” in favor of “global and regional balances of power.”

This fundamentally realist worldview breaks decisively with the post-Cold War liberal internationalist consensus that sought to export democracy and integrate rising powers into a rules-based international order. Instead, Trump’s strategy accepts the world as it is—a competitive arena where great powers inevitably dominate their regions.

As Washington unsettles its partners, Beijing is reaping diplomatic gains, without backing down on human rights, trade or security.

David Pierson and Berry Wang

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When President Trump upended global trade with his “Liberation Day” tariffs last year, China could have seized the moment to win over bewildered U.S. allies and partners with a charm offensive. Instead, it did the opposite. Beijing threatened countries that dared to cooperate with the Trump administration in restricting trade with China. And when China unveiled a plan to choke exports of its critical supplies of rare earths, it targeted the world, not just the United States.

It was a high-stakes gamble by President Xi Jinping of China. Rather than provide relief to spurned American allies, Beijing wanted to compound their dilemma, analysts say, so that countries unnerved by Washington would learn that crossing China also carried economic pain. The calculation was that those countries would eventually seek closer ties to China to hedge against the United States, and that when they did so, they would be more accommodating of Beijing’s interests.

The Maduro Operation: Five Insights On Power And International Relations

Ernesto Talvi

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A turning point in the Venezuelan crisis was reached on 3 January 2026. The US operation that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro not only abruptly altered Venezuela’s internal political balance; it also sharply exposed some of the structural tensions that now run through the international system.

Beyond the valid and necessary normative debate on the legality and legitimacy of intervention, this article proposes a deliberately analytical exercise. Based on this episode, five key insights are offered that aim to understand not so much how international actors should behave, but how they are actually behaving. In other words, it is an analysis of the reality, rather than the ideal, of international relations in a context of competition between blocs.

We’ve Probably Just Seen the USAF’s Secret Electromagnetic Attacker

Bill Sweetman

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Another element in the U.S. Air Force’s plans for long-range operations, essential for Asia-Pacific deterrence, may have emerged from under cover of secrecy.

It looks like we’ve just got a good view of a shadowy uncrewed aircraft designed to fly far and slip into an enemy’s defended zone, undetected until it starts jamming radars. Quite likely, it would carry missiles to knock out radars.

Put another way, the evidence adds up to an electromagnetic attack aircraft—like the Boeing EA-18G Growler but highly stealthy and uncrewed. Northrop Grumman or, more likely, Boeing would seem to be the prime contractor. And the evidence suggests that the aircraft is not new: it was glimpsed a decade ago and was an active program in 2010, so either development has been in fits and starts or the type is operational.

Here’s what military equipment the US has positioned in the Middle East as Trump considers an Iran strike

Haley Britzky, Avery Schmitz, Brad Lendon

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As President Donald Trump considers a major strike on Iran after discussions about limiting that nation’s nuclear program and ballistic missile production haven’t progressed, the US military has accelerated a weekslong buildup of military hardware in the Middle East, open-source data shows.

That includes near-constant surveillance flights and dozens of C-17 and C-5 military planes dropping off loads of cargo at US bases across the region.

The arrival of the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, now in the northern Arabian Sea, represents the most substantial shift in military positioning. The group includes the USS Abraham Lincoln along with three guided-missile destroyers and the carrier air wing which includes squadrons of F/A-18E Super Hornet fighters, F-35C Lightning II fighters, and EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets.

Leading the Digital Fight: How the Navy’s IW Community Must Innovate to Win

Shane Halton and Adam Reiffen

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“When companies spend millions of dollars on new information technologies but don’t change anything else, there are usually barely detectable productivity improvements. In contrast, when they also invest similar amounts in business process changes and in worker training, productivity can double or more.”-The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson

In the last year, Israel disabled all of Iran and Hezbollah’s senior military leadership at a stroke with a series of audacious precision strikes. Ukraine launched hundreds of small drones against Russia’s strategic air assets from clandestine launch locations deep inside Russian territory. Though the weaponry and tactics employed in these strikes varied wildly from explosive pagers to first person view (FPV) drones, one common thread tied these operations together – innovation in the realm of Information Warfare (IW). From the Levant to the Black Sea, the crucial role played by IW (hereafter used collectively to refer to the intelligence, cryptology, information technology, meteorology/oceanography, cyber, and space communities) has never been more impactful to warfighting than it is today.

Trump’s Iran Dilemma: Strike, or Lose Face?

Arman Mahmoudian

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President Donald Trump delivered that warning on the evening of January 22, six days after publicly thanking Iran for reportedly halting its scheduled mass executions of political prisoners. A few years ago, such juxtaposition would have been written off as Trumpian unpredictability. Now it reads more like method: strategic ambiguity applied to adversaries, especially the Islamic Republic.

Trump’s seeming ambiguity has collided with an Iranian crisis of extraordinary magnitude. What began as a series of demonstrations over economic woes quickly turned political, with chants aimed at the overthrow of the regime itself. The crackdown has been bloody. Iran’s government has put the death toll from the recent protests at 3,117, while the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) NGO has reported at least 5,002 killed and tens of thousands detained; other estimates circulated by activists and media range in the tens of thousands. But even without an agreed-upon tally, the direction is clear: the state has used extraordinary brutality to stop the demonstrations, and then attempted to cover it up. Iran’s prolonged internet blackout, paired with broader disruptions to communications, has made independent verification difficult and collective response harder.

Why NATO Won’t Collapse

Ramon Marks

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NATO Europeans are reluctantly facing the fact that they must assume, after more than 75 years, the primary responsibility for their own defense under the NATO framework. They can no longer expect the United States to remain their overarching protector. The controversy over Greenland has even heightened concern that the United States may withdraw from the NATO alliance altogether.

The just-released 2026 National Defense Strategy, however, points to the opposite: the United States is not abandoning NATO. Roughly 80,000 US troops are based in Europe, and there is no indication that bases will be closed or that personnel and supplies will be returned to the United States. Ironically, the biggest military base in Germany is still American, not German. US forces remain fully engaged with European allies, whether conducting joint infantry maneuvers and operations in Poland and Latvia, or conducting sorties with NATO allies’ warships in the Baltic Sea or the Mediterranean. The United States has not gone quiet in NATO.

Myanmar’s war headed for a tipping point in 2026

Anthony Davis

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In the backwash of Myanmar’s protracted exercise in military-engineered elections, the coming months will see much media commentary on the new frontmen of the junta’s “civilian” government and the degree of warmth that greets their efforts to establish the international legitimacy they will lack at home.

None of it will reflect the bedrock reality of the crisis: the viability of the new line-up in Naypyidaw, its struggle for credibility and its efforts to rescue a crippled economy will be measured not in air-conditioned ministries and think tanks around the region, but by the course of a war waged across the country’s rice paddies and hills.

In a conflict about to enter its sixth year with few certainties beyond an unbridgeable political divide and further human suffering, daunting challenges confront both belligerents: a military, or Tatmadaw, driven by a centralized vision of praetorian governance, and a loose alliance of ethnic minority and majority Bamar factions united around a federal-democratic banner.

What’s Next for the U.S. Military in Latin America?

John Haltiwanger

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It’s been nearly a month since Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured in the dead of the night by elite U.S. forces during a stunning raid in Caracas. The extraordinary, unilateral military operation sent shock waves across the globe and marked the first-ever direct attack on a South American country by the United States. Latin America is facing an unsettling new reality undergirded by rising fears that no country is considered off-limits to U.S. President Donald Trump.

The shifting justifications that the Trump administration has offered in recent months for its actions, which have ranged from a focus on taking the fight to so-called narcoterrorists to gaining control over Venezuela’s oil, are “really quite terrifying from a Latin American perspective,” Oliver Stuenkel, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy.

Cognitive Warfare Is Cheap—and That’s the Problem

Sara Russo

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Cognitive warfare is frequently referred to as a derivative of influence, information, or emerging technologies. This essay, instead, posits that one of its most destabilizing aspects, often an untouched aspect, is economic: Cognitive warfare is relatively cheap to initiate but rather costly to counter. This disparity in costs subverts conventional deterrence logic and compels military and policy institutions to consider different ways of reacting to challenges that remain below the level of armed conflict.

Introduction: The Wrong Question

Much of the debate around cognitive warfare has been largely revolved around definitions. Is it merely a continuation of information operations? A kind of psychological warfare that uses digital technologies? Or is it a completely new domain? These questions have been at the center of policy debates, doctrinal documents, and public discussions. However, by focusing on these questions, an additional issue that is as significant as the starting point of a common definition has been overlooked.

Cyber Security Report 2026

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Check Point Research continuously investigates real-world attacks, vulnerabilities, attackers’ infrastructure, and emerging techniques across global networks and environments. The Cyber Security Report 2026 consolidates our research efforts throughout 2025 to deliver a clear, data-driven view of the current threat landscape and its trajectory in 2026.

As Check Point’s flagship annual research publication, the report serves as a reference point for security teams, researchers, and industry leaders seeking to understand how attacker behavior is evolving in practice, not just theory. The findings below highlight the most significant shifts shaping the threat landscape today.

New National Defense Strategy could leave adversaries, and allies, guessing: Analysts

Ashley Roque

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WASHINGTON — As analysts digest the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, one theme seems to be coming up again and again: “ambiguity.” The NDS is traditionally viewed as a guiding light for how the Pentagon will execute the geopolitical goals set out in the White House’s National Security Strategy. The public discussion around the NDS, therefore, tends to look for indications as to policy and investments that are to come.

But according to four analysts who talked with Breaking Defense, the 2026 version of the NDS obscures more than it clarifies — leaving a lot of space for allies, enemies and national security watchers to try and fill in the blanks. “It’s very ambiguous, and I don’t know if they even recognize the contradictions that they’re creating,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center, told Breaking Defense on Monday.