The India–China Boundary Incidents Database is compiled exclusively from open-source intelligence, and is provided solely for academic and research purposes. All mapped locations are indicative only: the approximate area associated with an incident is shown (e.g., by an encircled zone) solely for contextualisation and analysis. These depictions must not be interpreted, cited, or relied upon as precise incident coordinates, definitive site locations, or authoritative determinations of where an incident occurred. Incident details are compiled from published, open-domain sources and are not attributable to the authors.
28 February 2026
Frustrating the Fait Accompli: How Rocket Artillery Changes the Taiwan Situation
Brennan Deveraux and Kyle Marcrum
Prior to 2022, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense boasted of its Overall Defense Concept, a plan for “force protection, decisive battle in littoral zone, and destruction of enemy at landing beach.”3 Taiwan claimed the concept applied “ ‘innovative/asymmetric’ operational thinking,” but the concept was a symmetric plan to fight the People’s Liberation Army head-to-head in a final, decisive battle at the beach on which Chinese forces landed.4 Despite talk about reforming the defense concept, and against the recommendations of retired admirals, Taiwan seemed to make little progress.5
The progress on reforms accelerated after a few key events. The 2019–20 deployment of the People’s Armed Police in Hong Kong signaled the end of “one country-two systems” and the viability of this concept for Taiwan.6 The deployment was followed by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and China’s reaction to the former speaker of the US House of Representatives’ 2022 visit to Taiwan. Taiwan realized major theater combat had not gone away, and China was readying for a cross-strait invasion.
China’s J-10 Fighter Jet Could Reshape the Indo-Pacific
Harrison Kass
The Chengdu J-10 represents a turning point in Chinese military aviation: the first truly modern, domestically designed multirole fighter fielded at scale. Often compared to the American F-16 or the Swedish Gripen, the J-10 symbolizes China’s transition from Soviet-derived platforms to indigenous design capability. And while the J-10 lacks stealth capabilities, it still serves as a central platform to the PLAAF’s force structure.
The J-10’s Origins and Development
Development of the J-10 began in the 1980s with the intent of replacing Beijing’s aging J-6 and J-7 fleets. The influences of the design are debated, with some suggesting that Israeli’s Lavi program provided technical inputs. The finished product entered service in the early 2000s, and was initially powered with the Russian AL-31FN engines, before being upgraded to Chinese WS-10s. The aircraft’s rollout (and the eventual engine upgrade) represented Chinese industrial maturation—and a stepping stone toward its eventual successor, the fifth-generation J-20.
China’s Military AI Wish List
Emelia Probasco, Sam Bresnick, and Cole McFaul
In analyzing these requests for proposal (RFPs), the authors find that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is pursuing AI-enabled capabilities across all domains. The applications include decision support systems (AI-DSS), sensor enhancement tools, data fusion algorithms, and much more.
The RFPs reflect China’s desire to generate, augment, and fuse increasing quantities of data to speed military decision-making and improve the precision and efficacy of the PLA’s operations. Specifically, the authors found requests for AI-DSS that can leverage open-source data for strategic decision-making. They also came across requests for AI-DSS to support tactical decisions, such as for targeting. While many militaries are investing in AI-DSS, these systems are of particular importance to the PLA, which views them as a means of compensating for perceived weaknesses in its officer corps.
How Trump’s Beijing bargaining could derail Taiwan’s multibillion-dollar defence budget
Lawrence Chung
Taiwan’s parliament is set to prioritise review of a disputed NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion) special defence budget bill when its new session begins on Tuesday, as pressure mounts from Washington. But US President Donald Trump’s recent remarks about consulting Chinese President Xi Jinping on arms sales could complicate the debate, potentially giving Taipei’s opposition parties greater room to manoeuvre and reshape the final version of the bill, according to analysts.
The renewed push follows an unusual bipartisan letter from 37 US lawmakers on February 12 urging Taiwan’s legislature to fully fund the eight-year package. The lawmakers warned that Beijing’s “military pressure is intensifying” and that approving only part of the budget proposed by Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te in November “could weaken deterrence”.
Orbital geopolitics: China's dual-use space internet
Altynay Junusova
China is investing massive resources into satellite internet infrastructure as part of a state-led vision for an integrated network linking land, sea, air, and space. This has been a priority since 2016, but high-bandwidth connections have come to the fore since the ascension of US Starlink.
As a strategic, dual-use civilian and military infrastructure, satellite internet has become a focal point in global competition. China’s military was surprised by Starlink’s extensive use in the war in Ukraine, heightening the urgency to develop its own constellation.
China’s massive investments have so far underdelivered, which explains its renewed support for private space companies. One key challenge is the high cost of launching satellites due to the lack of reusable rockets, which private firms are working to overcome. In the past, including private companies in China’s strategic technology development has sped up progress significantly.
What Would War With Iran Look Like?
Nancy A. Youssef
During President Trump’s first term, Pentagon officials took a highly unusual step to diminish the likelihood of war: They shared their plans for a large-scale conflict with Iran with top White House officials. They reasoned that if advisers saw the risks that the plan entailed, they would choose another path, people familiar with the matter told me.
The gambit was successful. At least twice, the president weighed ordering an attack on Iran, only to be dissuaded by aides from moving forward. But America now appears to be on the brink of war with Iran again. And this time, instead of acting as a deterrent, the Pentagon’s war plans are being used to draw up options for the president to consider.
The Supreme Court’s IEEPA Tariff Ruling and What Comes Next
William Alan Reinsch
Well, it’s finally here. The moment trade wonks everywhere have been waiting for—the Supreme Court’s decision on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs. There is still a lot of dust to settle, but this column will get into the middle of it and look at three things: the decision itself, what might happen next domestically, and how foreign governments might react.
The court’s decision was clear, although the justices’ reasoning differed—the argument over which rationale to use to come to the same conclusion took up many of the 170 pages in opinions by seven justices. That probably explains the delay in issuing the decision. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 46-page concurrence, for example, was longer than the majority’s opinion. In the end, six justices agreed on a relatively simple outcome: IEEPA does not permit tariffs.
Have Drones Replaced Artillery in the Ukraine War?
Stavros Atlamazoglou
The Ukraine War has gone on for so long that one can draw important lessons about modern warfare. One of those lessons is about the ongoing utility of artillery in the 21st Century, even in the face of rapid technological advances in kamikaze drones.
Why Ukraine Relies So Heavily on Kamikaze Drones
Artillery is probably the most lethal weapon in Ukraine, but drones are quickly catching up. One-way attack unmanned aerial systems, also known as loitering munitions or kamikaze drones, account for an increasingly larger number of casualties on the battlefield.
Casualties from kamikaze drones are now as high as 80 percent for both sides, according to Latvia’s intelligence services. Moreover, in the past five months, Ukrainian kamikaze drones have hit 44,610 Russian troops, killing 24,731 and wounding 19,879, per official Ukrainian military data.
Trump renews attack on Taiwan’s chip sector after US Supreme Court tariff ruling
Ben Jiang
US President Donald Trump lashed out at Taiwan for undermining the US chip sector, sparking renewed unease in the global semiconductor industry despite the island’s earlier pledge to invest heavily in the US. “Taiwan came [into the chip sector and] they stole our chip business,” Trump said in a press conference on Saturday following the US Supreme Court’s ruling that he had exceeded his authority by imposing sweeping tariffs under a law designated for national emergencies.
Trump directed his ire at Taiwan’s chip industry after the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that his import tariffs violated the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, invalidating many of his tariffs. Trump has repeatedly claimed in the past that Taiwan stole the US’ chip business. Earlier this year, Taiwan committed to invest US$500 billion in return for lower tariffs of 15 per cent from 20 per cent.
Clausewitz on the Very Bad Ideas to Reform the War Colleges
Kiran Pfitzner
These come from the pictured article by a pseudonymous author, with the risible title “Making the War Colleges Great Again.” The author is apparently a retired officer who attended one of these institutions. Amongst his criticisms and suggestions, he calls for the purging of civilian faculty, at least partly on the basis of their “visceral and vocal hatred for the current administration.” This advocacy for Soviet-style “political correctness” from war college faculty is a view unfit for any American, let alone an officer, and gives you some idea of the tenor of the article.
The piece is banally shallow and incompetent, only worth reading in full if you have a sense of morbid curiosity. Nevertheless, we can still make use of it by following Clausewitz’s example of using the shoddy work of others to illustrate a better way to study war. Throughout this article, I will be juxtaposing arguments made in the essay with quotes from On War to elucidate Clausewitz’s concept of military education.
Maneuver Under a Lying Sky: Russia Tests NATO on the Baltic-Nordic Front
James J. Torrence
The first warning does not come from an intelligence summary. It comes from a missed approach over Vilnius. On the operations floor of the new Multi-Corps Land Component Command Northwest in Mikkeli, Finland, Captain Henrik Nyman watches a civil aviation display he is not supposed to care about. It lives in the corner of his screen as context, a way to judge how commercial traffic is flowing around military transit routes.
A Boeing on final approach to Vilnius drops through one thousand feet, hesitates, then claws its way back into the sky and bends west. A few seconds later the Lithuanian aviation authority pushes an advisory into the Eurocontrol feed. Suspected GNSS (global navigation satellite system) interference on final approach. Aircraft diverting to Warsaw. Nyman tags the incident in the ever-growing PNT log—the staff has a whole column for disruptions to positioning, navigation, and timing systems now. His cursor slides to another window, a heat map that overlays the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland.
When the Fiction Ends: Lessons from “Maneuver Under a Lying Sky”
James J. Torrence
“Maneuver Under a Lying Sky” is a work of fiction. But the details the story weaves together are not. FICINT—fictional intelligence—offers a powerful means of anticipating and understanding threats because it blends imagination and reality. It secures our understanding of potential threats to ground truths while simultaneously freeing us to consider how those threats might present themselves before we face them in the real world. So what lessons emerge from the story?
1. Russia’s Existing Theater PNT Campaign
The pattern of Russian activity “Maneuver Under a Lying Sky” portrays is already visible in open sources. In April 2024, Finnair temporarily suspended flights to Tartu, Estonia after repeated GPS interference prevented safe landings, prompting Estonian officials to blame deliberate jamming from Russia. Later that year and into 2025, Baltic and Nordic authorities continued to report widespread disturbances to satellite navigation, particularly near Kaliningrad and the Gulf of Finland. A Ryanair flight to Vilnius, Lithuania was diverted to Poland in January 2025 because of GPS interference on approach, underscoring how safety margins for civil aviation can erode when position, navigation, and timing (PNT) are contested in peacetime.
Our Network Can’t Be the First Obstacle in the Fight
James Mingus, Berline Marcelin and Zak Daker
Cold light spills across a European plain, sixty-five kilometers of flat terrain that spans the territory of multiple nations. As the lead platoon moves forward, the squad leader scans the horizon while distant artillery zeroes in, guided by multiple drones stalking out front. He looks to his device for the picture that weaves together US and allied unit locations, overhead sensors, munitions stocks, and national-level intelligence, all in real time. Instead, the feed glitches, data lags, and systems refuse to speak to one another. In that fragile moment, trust breaks, the formation slows, and the enemy gains the upper hand. In modern warfare, where information and shared understanding rules, the network cannot be our opening obstacle.
Why The Need for Change
The current state of Army command and control (C2) reflects decades of incremental additions rather than deliberate design. Tactical networks grew in isolation, producing seventeen distinct battle command systems. Each new capability became a box within a box: One tool solved a specific problem while creating interoperability gaps, redundant data entry, increased maintenance demands, and heavier training loads. This complexity causes leaders to spend a majority of their time reconciling disparate feeds, troubleshooting links, or manually bridging systems instead of focusing on the fight, which results in slower decision cycles, eroded confidence in shared information, and unnecessary cognitive burden on every soldier. Our adversaries are operating on integrated, streamlined C2 architectures that enable swift and decisive action, which is why we are rapidly transforming our fragmented networks to ensure we maintain decision dominance.
Russia in the High North
Michelle Grisรฉ, Yuliya Shokh, Stephanie Pezard, Alexandra T. Evans, Joe Haberman, Miriam Pasternak Joergensen, Mark Cozad
In recent decades, the High North has played an increasingly important role in Russian strategic thinking. The region hosts an array of Russian military capabilities, including many of the country’s nuclear assets; provides a rich resource base for the Russian economy; and offers a gateway to strategically important sea lines of communication and transit routes that Russia expects will become increasingly contested because of the effects of climate change. Meanwhile, the accession of Finland and Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—on April 4, 2023, and March 7, 2024, respectively—has more than doubled Russia’s land border with the NATO alliance. This has contributed to changes in Russian perceptions of the risk of escalation and military confrontation in the High North, prompting shifts in Russia’s stated strategic objectives and military posture in the region.
In light of these changes in the security environment, RAND researchers examined Russian perspectives of the High North and considered the risk of escalation in the region in the coming years. They identified a variety of escalation scenarios involving a conflict between Russia and the West in the High North and conducted virtual workshops with experts on Russian foreign policy and Arctic affairs to analyze these scenarios and identify factors that could escalate or mitigate the situation.
Creating Conspiracy Theories: What Information Warriors Need to Know
Douglas Wilbur
Conspiracy theories play a growing role in modern conflict by shaping how audiences interpret threat, trust, and authority before overt action occurs. This essay examines conspiracy theories as cognitive environments rather than collections of false claims. Drawing on the Existential Threat Model and a political-psychological model of conspiracy belief formation, it explains how such beliefs are cultivated, why counter-messaging often fails, and what strategic risks weaponized conspiracy narratives pose for information warriors.
During the Algerian War of Independence, French counterinsurgency forces exploited a psychological vulnerability within the ranks of the National Liberation Front (FLN) by creating a conspiracy theory. Through a deception operation known as La Bleuite, the French generated the fear of betrayal and increased risk amongst the Algerian revolutionaries. The conspiracy held that French intelligence had deeply infiltrated the FLN movement. Suspicion spread through the ranks, causing trust and cohesion to collapse in some cases. The perceived threat was existential. If traitors were everywhere, the movement’s identity and moral authority were at risk. This resulted in purging of the ranks in an effort to sift out traitors. Many otherwise loyal revolutionaries were persecuted and murdered. This weakened the FLN more effectively than direct military action. It succeeded because it leveraged existing fears, redefined uncertainty as hostile intent, and imposed social and operational costs on disbelief.
America Needs Cognitive Civil Defense
David Maxwell
Thucydides showed that fear, honor, and interest move states. Clausewitz taught that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Mao described politics as war without bloodshed and war as politics with bloodshed. Sun Tzu wrote what is of supreme importance is to attack the enemy’s strategy. These were not ancient observations. They are field manuals for today. The battlefield has expanded. It now sits inside the mind.
A democracy stands on what its citizens believe is true. If they cannot judge truth, they cannot judge policy. If they cannot judge policy, they cannot guide power. An adversary does not need to win elections or battles. He only needs to erode trust. Russia proved this. Its operations did not seek one vote or one law. They sought doubt. Doubt in media. Doubt in institutions. Doubt in each other.
Staff Processes in LSCO Part III: Division Planning
John R. Harrell, James Villanueva,Joe Hammond
On June 10, 1944, the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry Division (ID), veterans of earlier campaigns in North Africa and Sicily, arrived on Utah Beach in Normandy, France. After the division assembled several miles inland, the 9th ID conducted a forward passage of lines through the 90th Infantry Division on June 14. Moving through difficult hedgerow terrain, the 9th, along with the 82nd Airborne Division to its south, attacked across the Douve River and seized crucial bridgeheads on June 16. The 9th ID continued to advance west and reached Barneville on the western coast of the Cotentin Peninsula by June 18, effectively cutting off German forces in the peninsula.
Quickly moving north, the 9th ID began an attack to seize the port city of Cherbourg on June 19 in concert with other units of the VII Corps. VII Corps seized Cherbourg on June 27 after a series of deliberate attacks with extensive air and artillery support. The 9th ID turned over control of its sector of Cherbourg to the 4th ID to allow it to continue clearing German forces to the west of the city.
Genocide in the New Geopolitics
Martin Shaw
In the late 2020s, we hear increasingly of the demise of international law and “the rules-based international order.” Donald Trump’s use of force against Iran and Venezuela and threat to use it against Greenland, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are widely seen as representing a turning point in international relations, linked to the rise of authoritarianism in domestic politics. No episode in the new world disorder speaks more to this sense of change than Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which Trump has also played a major role. It is over Gaza that the USA has most definitively rejected international law, even sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its judges.
Yet many IR commentators, like Western political leaders, see Trump’s threat to the transatlantic alliance as the key dimension of international change, and increasingly argue for an alternative to Trump’s USA without confronting it over Gaza. Indeed, most of the leaders who are being forced to confront the need for such an alternative are themselves complicit in the Israeli-US genocide. Gaza therefore appears to be the Achilles’ heel of the idea that the liberal order can be salvaged from the Trumpian onslaught. The reason for this is that although international order and international law both have broader foundations than the norms and laws around genocide, the public international morality of the West has come to centre on them.
The Munich Security Conference marks the end of the US-led order
Carol Schaeffer
The future of “Davos with guns” has never been more in doubt since its founding 1963 by the national-conservative publisher and World War II German resistance member, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist. President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that he would invade Greenland and Vice President JD Vance’s antagonistic speech last year have made the transatlantic alliance feel more uncertain than ever. According to the headline of the official security report released by the conference, “the world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics.”
This did not stop US lawmakers from making an appearance, especially Democrats, including several 2028 presidential contenders, who were eager to signal an alternative foreign policy to the one promoted by Trump. At one point, a panel attendee quipped, “It seems that Munich is the new Iowa.”
America's Blind Spot: Ignore Africa, and Cede the 21st Century to China
Andrea Peters
Africa is no longer a peripheral theater but the decisive arena where the United States will either reset a broken relationship and reclaim strategic relevance—or cede the future to China's entrenched, long-game presence on the continent. America's diplomatic engagements with Africa have historically been characterized as episodic and self-serving, although Africa is one of the world's last frontiers of critical development with significant strategic implications. This tacit relationship developed during the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 16th century and remains relevant today.
Behavior gives credence to the underlying unresolved racial tensions and misunderstood political and cultural complexities of the continent. Policymakers have historically prioritized other regions of the world based on confirmed pacing threats, while largely ignoring Africa, which created a power vacuum for rogue actors and known adversaries. The United States' inconsistent diplomatic engagement with Africa continues to reflect enduring racial tensions and a persistent misreading of the continent's political and cultural complexity, contributing to a steady decline in America's strategic influence as China consolidates a more structured and durable presence across the continent.
Ai and the future
Three years since ChatGPT launched, a combination of hype and fear has made it hard to think clearly about our new age of artificial intelligence (AI). But AI has the potential to change the world—from energy to geopolitics to the global economy to the very production and application of human knowledge. If ever we needed clear-eyed analysis, it’s now.
At the Atlantic Council, our experts in the Atlantic Council Technology Programs spend a lot of their time thinking about how AI will shape our future—and they have the technical literacy essential to the task. So, as part of our annual Global Foresight report on the decade to come, we asked them our most pressing questions: How will AI evolve over the next ten years and beyond? How can we use AI to forecast global affairs? And—let’s be real—will this thing replace us?
Is AI sovereignty possible? Balancing autonomy and interdependence
Brooke Tanner, Cameron F. Kerry, Andrew W. Wyckoff, Nicoleta Kyosovska, Andrea Renda, and Elham Tabassi
The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) sovereignty has entered policy discussions as governments confront the strategic importance of AI infrastructure, data, and models amid rising dependence on a small number of firms and jurisdictions. This report defines AI sovereignty as a spectrum of strategies to enhance a country’s capacity to make independent decisions about critical AI infrastructure deployment, use, and adoption, rather than literal autarky. Motivations vary— from protecting national security and resilience and supporting economic competitiveness, to ensuring cultural and linguistic inclusion in model training and datasets and strengthening influence in global governance. These aims are often legitimate, but “sovereign AI” can also become a vehicle for protectionism, fragmented markets and standards, and duplicative or stranded public investment.
The central finding is that full-stack AI sovereignty is structurally infeasible for almost any country because AI is a transnational stack with concentrated choke points across minerals, energy, compute hardware, networks, digital infrastructure, data assets, models, applications, and the crosscutting enablers of talent and governance. The practical alternative is “managed interdependence,” an approach that relies on strategic alliances and partnerships to reduce risks throughout the AI stack. Countries can operationalize managed interdependence by mapping dependencies by layer, prioritizing feasible interventions, diversifying suppliers and partners, and embedding interoperability and portability through technical standards, procurement, and governance. Done well, managed interdependence can strengthen resiliency and agency while preserving the benefits of open markets and cross-border collaboration.
Congress—Not the Pentagon or Anthropic—Should Set Military AI Rules
Alan Z. Rozenshtein
The Department of Defense is threatening to designate Anthropic, the maker of Claude, a "supply chain risk," which would not only bar Anthropic from government contracts but also force Pentagon contractors to cut ties with the company. That's a crippling penalty reserved normally for foreign adversaries such as the Chinese telecom company Huawei and the Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky. Anthropic's offense is insisting that any military use of its artificial intelligence (AI) adhere to Anthropic’s two red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans and no fully autonomous weapons. In response, a senior Pentagon official told Axios, the Defense Department will "make sure they pay a price."
Both sides have real claims here—though the way the government is pressing its position is, to put it mildly, disproportionate. But the deeper problem isn't who's right in this negotiation; it's that the negotiation is happening at all. The terms governing how the military uses the most transformative technology of the century are being set through bilateral haggling between a defense secretary and a startup CEO, with no democratic input and no durable constraints. Congress should be setting these rules. And it should do so in a hurry.
Batteries Are the Next Fault Line in the Defense Supply Chain
Saurabh Ullal
When China announced export controls on rare earth materials last October, Washington reacted with appropriate alarm. Editorial boards warned of supply disruptions, defense analysts warned of national security implications, and automakers throttled production lines.
What received far less attention: China simultaneously imposed export controls on lithium-ion batteries, cathode materials, and graphite anode materials. Those battery controls, which were temporarily suspended for one year alongside the rare earth curbs as part of a negotiated truce between the two countries, threaten an equally critical supply chain.
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