The People's Liberation Army's Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence Highlighting Integration as Key to "Intelligentization" Goals

Austin Horng-En Wang

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For China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into its military operations and strategy has become increasingly central to "intelligentization," a top priority of the Chinese Communist Party's General Secretary and Central Military Commission Chairman, Xi Jinping. The PLA views this initiative as essential to its short-, medium-, and long-term goals, the most ambitious of which is matching or exceeding the U.S. military's capabilities by mid-century.

To analyze the PLA's perspectives about working and planning toward this goal, the authors reviewed more than 100 articles from 16 academic journals and newspapers related to the PLA, as well as public statements by senior PLA officers.

When Does China Stop Growing (Entirely)?

Derek Scissors

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Key PointsThe Chinese economy has been generally weaker than acknowledged in the 2020s. The most frequently discussed solutions, such as stimulating consumption, cannot generate a sizable, sustained impact for more than a year or so.

Reinflating the property bubble would do so. It cannot be done immediately or easily but could for a multiyear period bring clearly faster economic growth without wrenching dislocation or automatically adding to the debt burden. In the longer term, even successful property reflation will not matter much. Unwillingness to reform, debt accumulation, and especially demography guarantee a China that essentially stops growing by the late 2030s.

Rare Earths and Strategic Competition

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For well over a decade, the U.S. has made negligible progress on reducing its dependence on Chinese rare earths. With its rare earth export controls of April and October 2025, Beijing laid that dependency bare and catalyzed a major mobilization by the Trump administration to seek a secure supply.

In this case study prepared for the Task Force on the U.S.-China Policy, Sam Chetwin George explains how China built this leverage, how the U.S. system failed to mobilize, and assesses the Trump administration's latest moves to de-risk its minerals supply chain. For Washington, the bill for years of policy failure is coming due. The deployment of China's rare earths dominance has weakened Trump's negotiating posture in trade and other domains. While the White House has now mobilized with serious intent, its belated initiatives will not yield substantive results until the late 2020s and early 2030s. This leaves open a window of vulnerability.

China’s Strategy in the Ukraine War and the Shaping of a Post-Conflict Order

Pierre Andrieu

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Despite ongoing peace talks spearheaded by U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues with seemingly no end in sight. While China might not play a primary role in peace negotiations, it nonetheless has an important stake in the outcome of the conflict. This paper seeks to assess Beijing’s calculus and potential role in brokering peace in the Ukraine conflict within the context of great power diplomacy among Moscow, Washington, Kyiv, and Brussels.

Faced with Russia’s unrelenting military campaign, Washington, Brussels and Beijing have each adopted distinct positions on the war. The United States, as the key peace broker, continues to shift its policies to accommodate competing peace deal demands from Kyiv and Moscow. Meanwhile, the EU is increasingly aligning itself with Ukraine’s position, while China promotes neutral diplomatic initiatives that merely amplify a pro-Russian stance.

China’s Transition to Scalable Intelligence

Ryan Fedasiuk

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The U.S.-China AI competition is becoming less about who can build the best models and more about who can deliver AI services, reliably and cheaply, to global publics. Absent federal intervention, the United States is at risk of losing its ability to steer the development and adoption of this extremely consequential technology, as Chinese open-weight models become “good enough” for large segments of white-collar work at significantly lower cost.

For most of the past decade, the “AI race” was defined by training—the one-time, massively expensive process of building a frontier model. Training is a discrete engineering project: a lab assembles thousands of chips in a centralized data center, runs them for weeks or months, and produces a model. It is a costly but finite event. The new phase of AI competition is about inference—the continuous, 24/7 process of serving a trained model to users, wherever they might be. Every time a customer asks a question of ChatGPT or Claude, generates a document, or debugs a line of code, a computer is processing that request—making an inference about how to respond. Unlike training, inference cannot be centralized. It must be geographically distributed to minimize latency, and it must run reliably around the clock. In 2026, the computational power required to serve a popular model to hundreds of millions of users dwarfs the compute required to train it in the first place—by one to two orders of magnitude.

Iran War’s Impact on the Red Sea and Horn of Africa: Africa File Special Edition

Liam Karr

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Key Takeaway: The Yemeni Houthis and Iran could target Emirati, Israeli, or US positions in the Horn of Africa and across the continent as part of the ongoing Iranian retaliatory campaign. The Iran war will likely have short-term effects on disputes in the Horn of Africa that are linked to Red Sea competition among Middle East actors, such as the Sudanese civil war and potential conflict in northern Ethiopia, although it is unclear whether the war will accelerate or dampen conflict in the short term. It is unclear how the Gulf states will prioritize countering any shared threat emanating from Iran versus their Red Sea competition in the long term, and Iran’s regional threat risk will heavily influence this decision.

The Houthis could target Emirati, Israeli, or US military positions in the Horn of Africa if they join Iran’s regional retaliatory campaign. Iran has attacked Israel, US bases in the Middle East, and all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in response to the US-Israel strikes.[1] The United Arab Emirates (UAE), followed by Kuwait and Qatar, has predominantly borne the brunt of the hundreds of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones launched at the Arabian Peninsula. The campaign aims to exploit relatively soft GCC defenses compared with Israel and US bases in the Arabian Peninsula to force the GCC to pressure the United States to cease attacks on Iran and enter talks, despite the GCC countries refusing Israel and the United States permission to use their airspace to attack Iran.[2]

Fault Lines in the Horn of Africa: The Gulf States, Turkey, and Israel Battle for Red Sea Influence

Liam Karr

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Competition involving the Gulf states and Turkey in the Horn of Africa is exacerbating preexisting African conflicts and risking a regional proxy war on both sides of the Red Sea. A new era of middle-power competition since around 2020 has mapped onto already existing African conflicts and hardened the local and regional divide between an Emirati- and Israeli-backed axis of revisionists and a coalition of status quo African states aligned with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been an essential ally for an ambitious Ethiopia, the main patron of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, and the leading partner for local Somali governments pursuing greater autonomy. Israel has followed suit in Ethiopia and Somalia. Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have partnered with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and their internationally recognized government and the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS). Egypt and Saudi Arabia have grown additional ties with Djibouti and Ethiopia’s archrival, Eritrea, to contain Ethiopia and the UAE-Israel duo, respectively, across the region.

‘Designed to Wreak Havoc’: The Cheap Drones Shaping the War With Iran

Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano

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Long before Iranian drones rained down on airports, skyscrapers and embassies across the Persian Gulf this past week, the United States military was busy trying to find cheap ways to shoot them down. In 2024, the military’s research and development effort reverse-engineered the Shahed drone to use for target practice, aiming to develop new defenses against a weapon that Iran had been sharing with allies including Russia, Venezuela and Hezbollah.

Then came an idea. If the Iranian drone was so cheap and effective, why not just copy it?

Thus was born the United States low-cost unmanned combat system, or LUCAS. Over the past week, American forces used the drone for the first time in combat to hit infrastructure and overwhelm Iranian air defense systems. “These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution,” the U.S. Central Command said in a social media post.

Europe Didn’t Want War With Iran. But So Far, It Can’t Stay Out of It.

Mark Landler

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A week into the American-Israeli military campaign against Iran, Europe’s leaders remain united in their misgivings about an operation they never asked for. But the reality is, they are being dragged into it more by the day, and that is causing political and diplomatic headaches from London to Berlin. The tensions are visible in the growing gap between the words of European leaders and the orders they are giving their military commanders to send warships, planes and other combat equipment into the Middle East.

“We are not at war,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on social media Thursday. “We don’t want to go to war,” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy told broadcasters the same day. “We are not joining the U.S. and Israeli offensive strikes,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain said in Parliament on Monday. Europe is caught in a deepening dilemma. On the one hand, its leaders need to protect their citizens stranded in the region, honor defense pacts with Arab states and, in some cases, allow the United States to use their military bases to avoid antagonizing President Trump.

Mapping the MilTech War: Eight Lessons from Ukraine’s Battlefield

Élie TENENBAUM

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Through open-source research, defense technology data analysis, and in-the-field interviews in Ukraine and in NATO countries with the military, industry, civil society and government actors, the report dives into 8 groups of technologies.

The rise of autonomous warfare: UAVs, USVs and UVGs

Key takeaways: The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) evolved in 8 phases in the last 4 years, transforming from simple reconnaissance tools into sophisticated, partially AI-coordinated weapon systems. They have sparked the electronic warfare (EW) arms race between Russia and Ukraine, which in turn was rendered obsolete with the emergence of the fiber-optic cable drone in 2024. The following year, machine learning and Artificial intelligence (AI) integration emerged as the strategic game-changer and signaled the race toward AI coordination of multiple systems and eventually decision-making.

Publication: From Risk to Resilience: Helping People and Firms Adapt in South Asia

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South Asia is the most climate-vulnerable region among emerging market and developing economies. With governments having limited room to act due to fiscal constraints, the burden of climate adaptation will fall primarily on households and firms. Awareness of climate risks is high; more than three-quarters of households and firms expect a weather shock in the next 10 years. Climate adaptation is widespread, with 63 percent of firms and 80 percent of households having taken action. However, most rely on basic, low-cost solutions rather than leveraging advanced technologies and public infrastructure. Market imperfections and income constraints limit access to information, finance, and technologies needed for more effective adaptation. If these obstacles were removed, private sector adaptation could offset about one-third of the potential damage from rising global temperatures on South Asian economies. 

The policy priority for governments is therefore to facilitate private sector adaptation through a comprehensive policy package. The package includes climate-specific measures such as improving weather information access, promoting resilient technologies and weather insurance, and investing in protective infrastructure in a targeted manner. Equally important are broader developmental initiatives with resilience co-benefits: in other words, policies that generate double dividends. These include strengthening core public goods like transportation, water systems, and healthcare; addressing barriers to accessing markets, inputs, and finance without causing unintended responses that increase vulnerabilities; and supporting vulnerable groups through shock-responsive social protection.

Beyond Myanmar’s borders: the use of transnational repression and creation of new state spaces within ASEAN

Naung Naung

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On 1 February 2021, the Myanmar military (Sit-Tat) staged a coup d’état, which resulted in extensive political, social, and economic disruption (Antiquerra et al. Citation2021). The coup unified Myanmar's diverse diaspora communities to collectively oppose the military regime and provide humanitarian assistance amid widespread human rights violations and escalating violence (Olliff et al. Citation2023). In response, Sit-Tat has expanded the use of transnational repression, defined as the practice of states extending their influence across national borders to suppress dissent among diaspora and exile communities (Schenkkan and Linzer Citation2021), to silence opposition among Myanmar diaspora and exile communities. 

Although repression in Myanmar has drawn international focus, the junta's transnational repression efforts remain largely overlooked. This article addresses that gap by examining the regime’s evolving and complex strategies to suppress dissent abroad. The use of transnational repression by Sit-Tat is not a recent development (The Irrawaddy Citation2021), but by integrating digital technologies with traditional coercive measures, the military's tactics highlight the growing complexity of repression in the age of globalisation.

Evolution of US Congressional perspectives towards India: 1947-2024

Abhishek Kadiyala

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This document examines the evolution of the US Congressional perspectives towards India from 1947 to 2024. It identifies key institutional determinants and systemic determinants, which have contributed to the evolving approach of the legislature towards India. Institutional determinants refer to internal dynamics within Congress, including the Congressional structure, executive-legislative alignment and pressure-group interests. Systemic determinants refer to the conditions in the international system, such as derivative bilateralism, economic exchange and regional security, guiding these perspectives.

This historical analysis categorises Congressional thinking on India into four phases:- 1947 to 1974, 1974 to 1991, 1991 to 2008 and 2008 to 2024. While the institutional determinants take precedence in the first two phases, systemic determinants drive the Congressional perspectives in the later phases. The study identifies a persistent lack of an organised long-term policy approach of the Congress towards India as a hurdle for strengthening India-US ties. It concludes that in the contemporary phase, the Congress is actively attempting to amend this approach.

Breaking the Double Bind: U.S. Defense Strategy and Multi-Theater Deterrence

Evan B. Montgomery

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For years, the United States has tried to put China front and center, from the rebalance to more recent calls for prioritization. Yet it has never truly reconciled the limits of a one-major-war force with the reality of a multi-theater, multi-rival world—let alone a world in which U.S. rivals across different regions have growing incentives to support one another.

In Breaking the Double Bind: U.S. Defense Strategy and Multi-Theater Deterrence, CSBA’s Vice President for Research and Studies, Evan Montgomery, argues that the Pentagon should downgrade its emphasis on denial of a Taiwan invasion, along with its implicit reliance on rapid decisive battle against China as the key to addressing the risks posed by other adversaries. The ability to quickly and conclusively defeat the pacing threat might be an understandable goal, and the rationale that restoring overmatch will keep other rivals in check may be appealing. But the likely cost and duration of a conflict with Beijing are making this logic less tenable. Not only is rapid decisive battle becoming more difficult to achieve, but heavy losses in a denial campaign would decrement Washington’s ability to carry out a long fight and keep enough capability in reserve to manage the dangers of opportunism.

Assuring Allies and Partners: The Utility of Ballistic Missile Defense

Maj Courtney A. Moorman

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The contemporary multipolar environment heightens threats from nuclear‑armed states such as Russia, China, and North Korea, raising doubts about US resolve in extended deterrence. Legal and policy constraints prevent Washington from transferring nuclear weapons and require reducing their role in strategy, even as the nuclear umbrella supports nonproliferation while complicating negative security assurances. 

This study evaluates ballistic missile defense (BMD) as a non‑nuclear assurance tool through case studies of the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Poland. Examining foreign military sales, technology‑sharing, and each state’s strategic and domestic context, it finds that BMD can contribute to assurance but only under specific conditions: trust in the United States, threat perception, preferred defensive strategy, and US willingness to tailor systems to partner needs. BMD cannot substitute for offensive capabilities; sustaining credible extended deterrence remains essential to prevent allies from pursuing nuclear hosting or indigenous nuclear options.

Russia Expects Iran to Endure U.S.–Israeli Strikes

Pavel K. Baev

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Russian media and commentators argue that U.S.–Israeli airstrikes alone are unlikely to defeat the Iranian regime, predicting that Tehran can outlast political resolve in Washington. Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded cautiously to the war, condemning the killing of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but otherwise staying largely silent to balance Russia’s partnership with Iran while avoiding confrontation with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Russian analysts predict mixed consequences from the conflict in Iran. The Kremlin may see short-term gains from higher oil prices, but it is also facing disruptions to its sanction-bypassing trade networks and uncertainty about how the conflict could affect its war against Ukraine.

The Hormuz Crisis: America’s Suez Moment in the Persian Gulf

Navroop Singh and Himja Parekh

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The crisis unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz reveals far more than a localized conflict; it is a microcosm of shifting global power. As Iran’s IRGC employs low-cost drones and missile swarms to disrupt one of the world’s most critical oil arteries, global energy markets and geopolitical alignments teeter. The U.S., once dominant, now faces a modern-day Suez dilemma either double down or find a face-saving exit. Gulf states, long reliant on American security, are questioning their future, while China and Russia, having brokered past deals and offered mediation, stand to gain. This crisis will not only determine the immediate outcome but may reshape the balance of power in West Asia and beyond.

The Strait of Hormuz has once again become the epicentre of global economic anxiety. Iranian-backed forces, particularly the IRGC, have leveraged low-cost drones and missiles to threaten shipping lanes. Backed tacitly by Russia and China, the IRGC has effectively created a modern-day Suez crisis for the U.S. The disruption has displaced roughly 6 million barrels of oil per day, pushing crude prices to $120 per barrel. 

Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise has been hard won. War in the Middle East may reveal its silver lining

Nathan Hodge

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As Iran unleashes a wave of retaliatory drones strikes on critical infrastructure around the Persian Gulf, Ukrainian expertise in countering those drones appears to be in demand.

Days into the war with Iran, the Trump administration has identified Tehran’s arsenal of Shahed one-way attack drones as a serious military challenge. In a closed-door briefing earlier this week on Capitol Hill, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the relatively cheap and low-flying drones, which can saturate and overwhelm air defenses, have been a bigger problem than anticipated, according to two sources that were present.

A Guide to the Pentagon’s Dance With Anthropic and OpenAI

Cade Metz

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Late last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered an ultimatum to Anthropic, the only company that had provided the Pentagon with artificial intelligence technologies for use on classified systems. If Anthropic did not allow the Pentagon to deploy these technologies for “all lawful uses,” Mr. Hegseth said, he would sever ties with the San Francisco start-up.

The threat set off a chain of events that resulted in the Defense Department’s labeling Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which would prevent all military contractors from using the company’s technologies, and signing an agreement with OpenAI, its biggest rival.

Sanctions 2.0 Thwarting the Myanmar Junta’s Rebranding and Cutting Off Their International Enablers

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On February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military launched a coup, ending the country’s limited political reform process. Myanmar’s people rose up against the military’s attempt to grab power and further shift the country towards heightened authoritarianism, first through peaceful means and then, when faced with brutal repression, through armed conflict.

The military junta has since plunged the country into a deadly civil war, and it has seen its political and territorial control significantly reduced. Yet, by using extreme brutality and receiving vital support from external actors, the junta has clung on to its deadly tactics of oppression and avoided total collapse.

Middle Powers Must Win the AI Deployment Race

Broderick McDonald, Connor Attridge and Alexandra MacEachern

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The AI Race is often framed as a contest over which countries – primarily the US and China – can develop ever larger and more powerful models. But this overlooks a more mundane reality: deploying AI at scale often matters as much, or more, than a slightly more powerful model. In certain military domains, models which are milliseconds faster than adversaries may be required. But for the overwhelming majority of use cases – from manufacturing, to healthcare, to shipping – models that are simply near the front of the pack can unlock the benefits of AI when they are meaningfully integrated into existing workstreams at scale.

This is particularly critical for middle powers, like the UK and Canada, who lack the scale and resources needed to keep pace with the US and China. Instead of trying to compete with superpowers to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), middle powers must focus on winning the deployment race. This means embedding AI across our economies and militaries through narrower and less flashy applications that solve specific, real-world problems – from automating labour-intensive agricultural practices, to improving productivity in ship building, or expanding access to high-quality personalised healthcare. However, for AI adoption to be trusted and accepted, it must be deployed with safety front-of-mind. Safety is not orthogonal to integrating AI, it is the tracks on which it progresses.

State of AI Governance, 2025

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The year 2025 was defined by high volatility in AI policy. As industry leaders balanced “bubble” anxieties and circular investments against the promise of massive productivity gains, governments have pivoted toward a high-stakes geopolitical innovation race. The race to lead in AI is reshaping global power, and the rules governing it are fracturing along geopolitical fault lines. In 2025, every major power chose innovation over accountability, betting that winning the AI race matters more than governing it responsibly. This report analyses how the AI governance landscape evolved in 2025 amid the rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Countries

In the past year, major countries have handled AI in different ways. In the US, the Trump administration rolled back most Biden-era safety rules and focused more on infrastructure and global competition. Meanwhile, individual states took over as main regulators, resulting in a patchwork of laws across the country. The EU has continued building the framework for implementing its wide-ranging AI Act, while also committing resources and outlining strategies to promote European innovation and technological sovereignty. Pushback from industry and some member states has led to calls for simplification of rules through the Digital Omnibus proposal.

How to Build Digital Citizenship in the 21st Century

Alessia Chiriatti, Benjamin Stewart, Janis van der Westhuizen, Juliana Mansur

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Digitalisation is reshaping economies, politics and societies worldwide, creating both opportunities for inclusion and risks of deepening inequality. While digital literacy frameworks exist, they remain fragmented and insufficiently connected to broader goals of citizenship education. Without equipping teachers and learners with the competencies to think critically, act ethically and participate constructively in digital spaces, democratic institutions and individual well-being are at risk. Building on UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education and Digital Literacy Global frameworks, this brief argues that integrating digital literacy into citizenship education, standardising teacher training across contexts and promoting international cooperation – particularly through the G20 – are key to ensuring that all citizens become empowered, responsible and globally connected digital actors.

Current state of digitalisation and citizenship education

The transformation of the global economy and international relations by digitalisation and emerging technologies[1] mandates that digital literacy education be linked to global citizenship education by a standard that is internationally transferable and operable. Online disinformation campaigns, viral conspiracy theories and cyberwarfare threaten democracy by eroding trust in institutions. Cyberbullying, hate speech and ill-defined work-life relationships with technology erode each individual’s mental and emotional well-being.

Attributes of Digital Sovereignty: A Conceptual Framework

Mauro Santaniello

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This paper explores digital sovereignty as a pivotal element of contemporary politics. Drawing upon a constructivist perspective, it proposes a conceptual framework for studying the policy discourse on digital sovereignty. The framework is structured around five core attributes – adversariality, multiversity, latency, instrumentality, and hypocrisy – that characterise sovereignty claims in the digital sphere. These attributes serve as analytical categories to understand digital sovereignty as a discursive resource employed in political struggles over the control of digital networks. 

Digital sovereignty emerges as a contested concept, central to competition among nation-states, regional blocs, corporate entities, epistemic communities and social groups. The study highlights the contradictory and often fragmented nature of digital sovereignty claims, revealing how they intersect with broader geopolitical ambitions and challenges. By situating digital sovereignty within global power rivalries and historically-determined social relations, this analysis develops a critical understanding of digital sovereignty, which embraces its inherently contested and evolving nature.

Responsible Procurement of Military Artificial Intelligence

Netta Goussac and Dr Vincent Boulanin

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This report examines the intersection of military procurement and responsible military artificial intelligence (AI). The primary function of military procurement is to bridge a military’s strategic needs and its operational capabilities. In practice, however, procurement is also a mechanism by which states implement political commitments and legal obligations. For that reason, procurement can serve as a mechanism for implementing responsible military AI, but only if deliberately structured to do so.

The report investigates why and how states are adapting their procurement processes to accelerate military AI adoption, and why and how states should seize these opportunities to give effect to their legal obligations and high-level political commitments related to responsible military AI.