Indian Strategic Studies: 02/20/26

20 February 2026

Civilian Authority Over The Army In China And India

P. K. Balachandran

Xi Jinping asserts it through purges while India’s leadership appears to dither

Except in military dictatorships, it is understood that a country’s civilian leadership must have strategic control or supremacy over the armed forces.

While China’s President Xi Jinping has been enforcing that principle through periodic purges in the top echelons of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), India seemed to have veered from the principle during the landmark clash with the PLA in Eastern Ladakh in May-June 2020.

When faced with the prospect of a Chinese intrusion and attack in Galwan in May 2020, the then Indian army chief, Gen. M.M.Naravane, desperately tried to get orders from the top political leadership but in vain. Governmental prevarication ended with Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying, “Do what you think is appropriate”.

A deeply frustrated Naravane wrote in his yet-unpublished book, “Four Stars of Destiny,” that he felt very lonely at the top at that time. He had to take a decision to fight China when India was facing a dire situation with COVID pandemic being at its height. In the Sino-Indian clash which took place in June 2020, 20 Indian soldiers were beaten to death.

In Pakistan, BLA Is Much Worse Than a Separatist Movement

Joe Buccino

For decades, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has been miscast as a “separatist insurgent group,” a label that is now outdated and misleading. What began as a movement propelled by political grievances and Cold War intrigue has been hijacked by something far more dangerous. Today, the group operates according to the methods of modern terrorism. It deliberately targets civilians and infrastructure, as illustrated once again by the coordinated attacks in Balochistan on 31 January that killed dozens of civilians and security personnel. Cut off from the aspirations of ordinary Baloch citizens and far removed from any genuine liberation struggle, the BLA now functions as a force of destabilization, systematically undermining peace, development, and regional connectivity. In doing so, it has become a force-multiplier for hostile external agendas seeking to cripple Pakistan and derail major strategic projects.

Gen Z Got Fair Elections in Bangladesh—but Got Crushed at the Ballot Box

Joshua Kurlantzick

In June and July 2024, massive protests broke out in Bangladesh, led mostly by students demanding an end to the increasingly authoritarian regime of then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League, and to the corruption that led to job quotas in many government agencies. The protests swelled and, while Hasina’s government had crushed previous dissent, these demonstrations eventually succeeded in forcing Hasina to flee (as the army refused to back her), leading to an interim government, advised by many of the students and led by Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus.

That interim government, following the celebrations in Dhaka and other places after Hasina fled, was supposed to usher in an era of reform in Bangladesh, creating a path to reduce violent political polarization, rebuild the state, reduce corruption, and end the two-party duopoly that had dominated politics for decades. That duopoly, consisting of the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, had in recent years been dominated by the Awami League, but in the past, the BNP, when in power, also had acted in corrupt, nepotistic, and authoritarian ways.

Shifting Balances in South Asia

Nicola Missaglia, Jagannath Panda and Michele Danesi

South Asia is undergoing a period of profound transformation, driven by climate stress, political instability, social unrest, and unresolved conflicts. Yet to what extent are these domestic turbulences shaped by the region’s shifting geopolitical environment? And how are South Asian states navigating an increasingly competitive regional order?

This Dossier explores how rivalry between India and China is redefining South Asia’s strategic landscape, from the stalled Himalayan border dispute to growing competition for influence through political backing, infrastructure, and energy investments. It examines the strategies of New Delhi and Beijing and the ways in which key countries in the region balance their relationships with both powers. The analysis also looks beyond regional dynamics, assessing the role of external actors such as the European Union and Japan. The signing today of the long-awaited EU-India trade agreement underscores South Asia’s rising relevance: not only as a theatre of regional competition, but as a central node in wider global economic and strategic networks.

After Bangladesh Votes: Stability Will Be Earned Through Delivery, Not Declarations

Anjali Kaur

Bangladesh’s February 12, 2026, election has resolved one question: who will be responsible for governing Bangladesh next. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies have won a decisive majority, securing 211 of 299 constituency seats according to provisional results. BNP Chairman Tarique Rahman, who won both constituencies he contested, will form the next government. But the harder question remains: whether the political system can now actually deliver stability, legitimacy, and tangible improvements in daily life. As with most elections held under strain, the real test begins after ballots are cast.

Tarique Rahman faces the dual challenge of consolidating authority within his own coalition while signaling restraint beyond it. Having spent nearly 17 years in exile and outside formal executive office, his early governing posture—toward institutions, security forces, minorities, and political rivals—will shape whether this transition is perceived as a reset or as the beginning of another cycle of confrontation. His immediate call for supporters to refrain from victory rallies and instead offer nationwide prayers signals awareness of this fragility. But winning an election is different from earning public trust, reducing polarization, or stabilizing people’s daily lives. In Bangladesh’s case, those challenges remain acute.

Why Sri Lanka Needs To Preserve Culture To Survive Post De-Globalized World?

Indika Hettiarachchi

Recent geopolitical, security and trade tensions between powerful nations accelerated the “de-globalization” momentum marked by a shift from rapid trade integration toward protectionism, economic nationalism, and fragmented supply chains. Global trade and investment are being reorganized around national security and resilience, regionalization and “friend-shoring”, rather than cost-driven integration.

Small and developing countries like Sri Lanka face significant and disproportionate challenges from de-globalization. These challenges include suppressed economic growth, increased vulnerability to external shocks, and reduced influence in global decision-making. Sri Lanka’s trade dependency, stagnant foreign inflows, small domestic markets, limited export product basket make Sri Lanka a highly vulnerable country.

The World Economic Forum, the world’s leading pro-globalization think tank calls de-globalization as “re-globalization” and forecasts the outcome of currently ongoing changes will be “a multi-nodal, regionally and politically clustered world that still operates on a global scale, but with resilience and security prioritized alongside cost and efficiency”.

Why a resurgent Japan is good for Asia

Ben Bland

Last weekend’s landslide election victory by Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, prompted China to warn Tokyo to ‘follow the path of peaceful development rather than return to militarism’. Beijing is wary of Takaichi’s right-wing, nationalist credentials, and had already launched a round of military provocations and coercive economic measures in response to comments she made about Taiwan in November.

But many Asian governments will welcome Takaichi’s victory – if she can use her unprecedented parliamentary majority to strengthen Japan’s economy, security and global role. Asia’s leaders do not want to see their region dominated by Beijing or at the mercy of Washington’s will. They see a resurgent Japan as a key partner to bring balance to the world’s most consequential continent.

China’s military reveals future air warfare plans

Bill Gertz

An internal Chinese military report has revealed that the People’s Liberation Army is placing a heavy emphasis on waging advanced air war using stealth, drones and high-technology weapons.

The report, “How Will the Form of Air Warfare Change in the Future?” was published in September in the Liberation Army News, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.

It was translated by the U.S. Air Force think tank China Aerospace Studies Institute, which described the report as having “the imprimatur of orthodoxy.”

The Chinese report was written by Chai Shan, a military author who has previously written about PLA air power control.

“The future form of air warfare is ultimately and inevitably intelligentized aerial combat,” the report stated.

China’s Green Energy Advantage Unravels

J.T. Young

China’s two-fold climate advantage over the West is unraveling. The Trump administration’s revocation of the 2009 climate endangerment finding, the UN’s COP30 failure in Brazil, the reappraisals of Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, and the frank admissions by some in Europe all point to an overdue shift in the West’s position. Beijing must be devastated because China has benefited absolutely from selling the West green energy technology and benefitted relatively as this technology has reduced the competitiveness of Western nations.

On February 12, the Trump administration revoked the EPA’s 2009 climate “endangerment finding” that classified CO-2 and five other greenhouse gases as public health threats. In contrast to his second-term’s first-day withdrawal (for the second time) from the 2015 Paris Agreement, this action had real teeth. The 2009 finding underpins a host of administration regulations (on vehicles, power facilities, and oil and gas operations). With the finding revoked, the regulations that relied on it could come down as well. Lawsuits are certain to follow from blue states and environmental groups.

Saudi Arabia vs. the UAE: The Other Gulf Crisis

Mohammed Ayoob

While the chances of direct conflict between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are slim, the emerging rivalry is reshaping the Middle East.

With a massive American armada in the Persian Gulf and defiant rhetoric pouring out of Tehran, strategic analysts are obsessed with assessing the possibility of an American attack on Iran and mapping its potential consequences. However, another crisis in the Gulf is brewing that is likely to erupt sooner rather than later. Although this crisis may not have the apocalyptic connotations of a US-Iranian standoff, it could still destabilize the energy-rich region and have major consequences for American policy.

This impending crisis concerns the fraying relationship between two of America’s closest allies in the Gulf—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The effects of this crisis will be felt not only in the region but also much farther afield and will affect US security concerns in the energy-rich region, its strategic interests in the broader Middle East, and oil prices across the globe.

When Trump’s bluff meets reality on Iran

Leon Hadar

Another US-Iran crisis, another round of carrier deployments and ultimatums, another set of predictions about imminent warfare. Yet here we are again, watching Washington and Tehran engage in their familiar dance of brinkmanship—a choreography that has become depressingly predictable over the past four decades.

The current confrontation, triggered by Iran’s brutal crackdown on domestic protests and America’s deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, follows a script we’ve seen before.

President Trump threatens “something very tough” while simultaneously acknowledging talks are underway. Iran’s Supreme Leader warns of “regional war” while his foreign minister pursues “fair and equitable” negotiations through Omani intermediaries. Regional powers—Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia—scramble to prevent a conflict none of them want.

Promoting Stability on the Path to Superintelligence

Michael Mazarr

As the world confronts the prospect of AI superintelligence—highly advanced AI capable of performing thousands of functions as well as or in some cases dramatically better than humans—the question of strategic stability during the transition period is becoming a real concern. If either the United States or China thinks that the other is on the verge of AI superintelligence, it may fear being subjugated in economic, technological, and military terms, or that superintelligence once unleashed will pose myriad threats to humanity. Great powers facing such threats have sometimes lashed out in preventive wars.

The obvious risk in such a power-rearranging transition is that the race to superintelligence could prompt instability and conflict. Probably the most widely-discussed diagnosis of and prescription for this challenge is the concept of “mutual assured AI malfunction,” or MAIM, proposed in the 2025 report Superintelligence Strategy by Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt, and Alexander Wang. (Hendrycks and Adam Khoja later added a response to critics.) They argue that superintelligence could pose multiple dangers. “In the hands of state actors,” they argue, “it can lead to disruptive military capabilities and transform economic competition. At the same time, terrorists may exploit its dual-use nature to orchestrate attacks once within the exclusive domain of great powers. It could also slip free of human oversight.” As superintelligence looms on the horizon, great power relationships could become more volatile.

Anthropic Blasts Pentagon’s Use of Its AI Tool in Venezuela Raid—May Void $200 Million Contract

KEVIN HAYNES

The revelation that Anthropic’s artificial intelligence tool Claude played a key role in the U.S. military’s recent capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has ratcheted up tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic CEO Dario Amoedi, an ardent foe of using AI in lethal operations and domestic surveillance.

At stake is Anthropic’s $200 million contract with the Defense Department, which is now reportedly considering voiding the deal signed last summer. Both parties have already drawn clear lines in the sand.

“Any use of Claude—whether in the private sector or across government—is required to comply with our Usage Policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed,” an Anthropic spokesman told The Wall Street Journal.

Pentagon threatens to cut off Anthropic in AI safeguards dispute

Dave Lawler, Maria Curi

The Pentagon is considering severing its relationship with Anthropic over the AI firm's insistence on maintaining some limitations on how the military uses its models, a senior administration official told Axios.

Why it matters: The Pentagon is pushing four leading AI labs to let the military use their tools for "all lawful purposes," even in the most sensitive areas of weapons development, intelligence collection, and battlefield operations. Anthropic has not agreed to those terms, and the Pentagon is getting fed up after months of difficult negotiations.

Anthropic insists that two areas remain off limits: the mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weaponry.

The big picture: The senior administration official argued there is considerable gray area around what would and wouldn't fall into those categories, and that it's unworkable for the Pentagon to have to negotiate individual use-cases with Anthropic — or have Claude unexpectedly block certain applications.

Space Race 2.0: The Competition for the Future Operating System of Space

Igor Sevenard, Richard J. Cook, and Mateus Bilhar

The launch of Artemis II may have slipped on the calendar, but it has not lost its geopolitical meaning. While the highly anticipated blast-off of NASA’s Space Launch System from Kennedy Space Center has been pushed to March 2026 due to technical hurdles, the space mission remains undiminished in its significance.

Artemis II, of course, signifies humanity’s return to lunar orbit for the first time since Apollo 17, after a 54-years hiatus. The mission serves as a highly visible marker that the United States intends to lead the next phase of space exploration.

Dispatch from Munich: The Future of Transatlantic Relations

Michael Froman

Over the last three days, I joined heads of state, foreign ministers, military officers, intelligence officials, businesspeople, journalists, and foreign policy scholars in Bavaria for the 62nd Munich Security Conference (MSC). Rather than wait until Friday, I thought I’d share some early impressions.

Security is the operative word at this confab. There are special entrances and exits to conference halls for the considerable number of participants who carry firearms. Balaclava-clad snipers man the local rooftops. Police helicopters regularly circle overhead, and one is occasionally cut off—or brushed aside—by hulking security guards who surround key leaders like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the modern equivalent of a Roman phalanx, working its way through the narrow hallways of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.

Tracking R&D Leadership: US Advantage Narrowing as China Gains Ground

Trelysa Long

Advanced, traded-sector industries power the U.S. economy’s global competitiveness.1 A key indicator of strength in these industries is the amount firms invest in research and development (R&D) to produce new innovations. As China vigorously challenges the United States for global leadership in the innovation economy, it is important to assess where the two countries stand in their advanced industries’ private R&D investments.2

This report uses the EU R&D Industrial Scoreboard, which tracks the R&D investments (in euros) of the world’s top R&D investors, covering about 90 percent of the world’s private sector R&D investments, to compare U.S.- and Chinese-headquartered firms’ R&D investments in nine advanced sectors.[3] These nine sectors are aerospace and defense, electronic and electrical equipment, general industrials, industrial engineering, pharmaceutical and biotechnology, software and computer services, technology and hardware equipment, alternative energy, and automobiles and parts. The Scoreboard covers 2,000 companies from 2024 and 2,500 from 2014 because it took 2,500 companies to cover 90 percent of the world’s private sector R&D investments in 2014 but only 2,000 in 2024. Moreover, there are other caveats about this dataset. (See appendix for details.)

Military Strategy Magazine

Winter 2026, v. 10, no. 4

AI Command and Staff—Operational Evidence and Insights from Wargaming
Attacking Russia’s Center of Gravity: A Clausewitzian Answer
Warfare of Position: When the Decisive Struggle Precedes the First Shot
British Special Forces in the 2030s: UKSF, ‘Special Operations’ and ‘NATO First’
How the Congolese Wazalendo Illustrate the Importance of Strategy
Informational Coercion and the Defense of Democracy

Misplaced Mourning: Farewelling The CIA World Factbook

Binoy Kampmark

For those with a sense of humour, consulting alleged facts compiled by an agency specialising in subterfuge, subversion, deception and plain mendacity must surely have been a delightful exercise. That delightful exercise would seem to have concluded earlier this month with an announcement by the US Central Intelligence Agency that it would no longer be publishing its World Factbook. Presumably the publication did not fall within what Director John Ratcliffe sees as a core mission of the agency.

The World Factbook was initially published in classified form in 1962 as “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook” intended for officials in the military and government. In 1971, an unclassified version was released, with a print version made available to the public in 1975. In 1981, it was renamed “The World Factbook” and became a web publication in 1997. “The World Factbook,” the announcement mentions, “served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.” That any reference about countries should be strapped to a one-stop point of reference compiled by an intelligence agency already bedevils the learning exercise with precarious shallowness. But scribblers, hacks and travellers often like the curated shortcut.

A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web

Zeyi Yang

For a brief moment in October, Alejandro Quintero thought he had made it big in China. The Bogotá-based data analyst owns and manages a website that publishes articles about paranormal activities, like ghosts and aliens. The content is written in “Spanglish,” he says, and was never intended for an Asian audience. But last fall, Quintero’s site suddenly began receiving a large volume of visits from China and Singapore. The amount of traffic coming from the two countries was so high and consistent that it now accounts for more than half of total visits to Quintero’s site over the past 12 months.

When he first noticed the traffic spike, Quintero thought he’d found an audience on the other side of the world. “I need to travel to China right now because I’m the bomb there,” Quintero says he recalls thinking. But as soon as he dug into the data, he knew something was wrong. Google Analytics, a common tool used by website owners to parse web traffic, shows that all the Chinese visitors are from one specific city: Lanzhou. They are unlikely to be real humans, because they stay on the page for an average of 0 seconds and don’t scroll or click. Quintero quickly realized his website was actually being bombarded by bots.

AI and the Global South’s Next Leap Forward

NANDAN NILEKANI and ASHISH KHANNA

The next phase of the clean-energy revolution will be led not by those who build more solar panels, but by those who modernize their grids, markets, and institutions accordingly. In fact, AI-ready grids will be as crucial to the Global South’s development as traditional infrastructure like roads and ports.

For much of the Global South, electricity is destiny. While the energy transition is often framed in climate terms, billions of people understand it primarily as a means of expanding opportunity, ensuring affordability, and improving service delivery.

Understanding Space Frontier Areas

Todd Pennington

Distant reaches of space loom as a strategic horizon. The vast majority of space operations have, so far, been limited to a few families of near-Earth orbits. However, space beyond geostationary Earth orbit, or xGEO, is likely to become important for strategic purposes in the near future. This is especially true of cislunar space, that region of space in which the gravity of Earth’s moon is significant. This paper refers to xGEO and cislunar space as Space Frontier Areas, since missions there have not yet reached sufficient scale to cluster into patterns of use.

Current strategic thought on activities in Space Frontier Areas is largely bipolar, with some experts emphasizing their near-term security implications and others emphasizing much longer term economic potential. This bipolarity tends to suggest a zero-sum choice between imminent security needs or long-term economic opportunity, constraining policymakers’ ability to identify trade-offs and make nuanced choices about risk and priorities in space operations.

Cognitive Warfare Fails the Cognitive Test

Matt Armstrong

Contemporary security discourse is frequently captured by a false narrative on new forms of warfare. The recent emergence of the term “cognitive warfare” is a symptom of this misconception, suggesting a novel evolution in warfare that does not exist. This form of non-military aggression was not unknown to us; on the contrary, at the onset of the Cold War, the United States profoundly understood the critical importance of public opinion to national security, both domestically and within nations abroad. American leadership recognized that the Soviet Union, and later China, waged political warfare that specifically targeted these populations to undermine the United States without firing a shot.

However, despite this early recognition, American strategic thought succumbed to a “Maginot mentality”—a term Henry Kissinger used in 1955 to describe a rigid belief in a strategy that precluded the consideration of alternatives. As Kissinger argued, this mentality fostered an “all-or-nothing” military policy that relied heavily on the threat of general war, leaving the United States paralyzed in the face of “gray area” aggressions that fell short of total conflict. This strategic paralysis was not limited to nuclear deterrence; it extended to conventional military operations as well. Political and economic barriers rightly limited the United States’ ability to deploy troops abroad, but the real failure lay in failing to recognize that the threats in these areas were political rather than military.

Driving PME Transformation for the Total Force: CGSS’s Modernization of the ADL Common Core

Thomas A. Crowson, Brian Lust

For almost a century and a half, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) has shaped the intellectual foundations of the Army’s warfighting excellence. As America’s School for War, the institution has repeatedly adapted to changes in the character of conflict, from the mechanization and mass mobilization of the 20th century to the complex, multidomain operational environment of today. As a pioneer in distance education for over 100 years, CGSC has continually evolved its methods to reach officers wherever they serve, ensuring access to high-quality professional military education regardless of location or component.

Today, under the Army’s mandate for continuous transformation and the reorganization of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) to Transformation and Training Command (T2Com), CGSC is undertaking one of the most significant reforms to professional military education (PME) in its modern history: a comprehensive redesign of the Command and General Staff School’s Asynchronous Distance Learning Common Core (ADL-CC) program. This reform is not merely a pedagogical update. It is a deliberate structural transformation designed to enable more officers to rapidly complete the common core curriculum, producing more Military Education Level 4 (MEL 4, the Army’s intermediate level education qualification) qualified officers with relevant warfighting skills aligned with large scale combat operations (LSCO) and multi domain operations (MDO).

Every Marine a Rifleman and Now, A Drone Operator

Laura Heckmann

The Marine Corps recently launched a new training program focused on turning hundreds of Marines into small drone operators.

At the Marine Corps Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, a foundational philosophy is that every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman, said Col. Scott Cuomo, commanding officer of Training Command’s Weapons Training Battalion.

“So, we started there to make sure that they understood how to integrate” the training — and make every Marine a drone operator.

The program — a framework established by Training and Education Command consisting of six pilot courses and eight certifications — is meant to address a critical need for standardized training, particularly with first-person view attack drones.

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