Indian Strategic Studies: 03/21/26

21 March 2026

Defending the skies of the Arab Gulf states

Albert Vidal Ribe

Since the beginning of the current war in Iran on 28 February, the Arab Gulf states have used hundreds of missile interceptors to counter Iranian missiles and one-way attack uninhabited aerial vehicles (OWA UAVs). They have already consumed a significant portion of their stockpiles of long-range interceptors. These air-defence systems have protected the Arab Gulf states while the United States and Israel prioritised the destruction of Iran’s ballistic-missile launchers and effectively eliminated most of Iran’s launch capabilities, which led to a sharp drop in the rate of Iranian ballistic-missile fire after the first few days of hostilities.

Though Iran’s UAV attacks have also decreased in intensity, drones continue to enter the skies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states by the dozen. Compared with ballistic missiles, these are cheaper systems and easier to launch, and Iran possesses a much larger stockpile of them. In the absence of a durable diplomatic settlement to the conflict – which is unlikely, at least in the short term – Iran is likely to rely on UAVs as a major part of its harassment strategy.

You Cannot Bomb Iran Into Regime Change

Ericka Feusier

The killing of senior Iranian leaders may satisfy the fantasies of regime-change planners in Washington and Tel Aviv, but it will not deliver the political outcome they imagine. Assassinations can disrupt chains of command. They can deepen fear. They can even create moments of confusion at the top of a state. What they do not do, at least not in any stable or durable way, is erase a nation’s political identity or break a society into accepting foreign-engineered change. The U.S.-Israeli war has already entered a dangerous phase in which targeted strikes on Iran’s leadership are being treated as strategy rather than escalation. That is not strength. It is desperation disguised as doctrine.

There is a familiar arrogance behind this approach. It assumes that Iran is merely a collection of officials waiting to be removed, rather than a state with institutions, memory, ideology and a population that will respond to outside attack in ways outsiders rarely predict correctly. Washington has made this mistake before. It has confused shock with legitimacy, military reach with political intelligence, and coercion with consent. The result, again and again, has been a wider war, a harder adversary and a region pushed deeper into disorder.

How to Raise the Odds of Regime Change in Iran

Kenneth M. Pollack

The decision U.S. President Donald Trump made to attack Iran was a high-stakes gamble. The gamble is not really in the military campaign itself, which is unfolding in jaw-droppingly competent fashion. The two most capable, battle-tested air forces in the world, those of Israel and the United States, are working seamlessly together to hammer a variety of targets in Iran with remarkably few unintended civilian casualties or other gaffes. When the campaign ends, whether in a week or in a month, it seems highly likely that Iran will have been stripped of much of what was left of its

Death of Ali Larijani deepens crisis at heart of Iran's leadership

Amir Azimi

The Israeli air strike which killed Iran's security chief, Ali Larijani, has removed one of the Islamic Republic's most experienced and influential policymakers at a critical moment. Larijani was not a military commander, but he was a central figure in shaping Iran's strategic decisions. As secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, he sat at the heart of decision-making on war, diplomacy, and national security.

His voice carried weight across the system, particularly in managing Iran's confrontation with the United States and Israel. After the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on 28 February, Larijani struck a defiant tone, signalling that Iran was prepared for a long conflict. His death, now confirmed by state media, comes amid a broader campaign in which several senior Iranian officials and commanders have been killed within a matter of weeks. This pattern suggests a sustained effort to weaken Iran's leadership structure during wartime.

How Does Saudi Arabia See the War with Iran?

Michael Ratney

For Saudi Arabia, the Iran war in its scale, intensity, and potential impact is as unsettling as it is unprecedented. The Saudi leadership finds itself simultaneously trying to protect and prioritize its own economic and societal transformation, to navigate its relationship with an impulsive and unpredictable U.S. president, and to manage the geographic reality of living a drone’s flight away from a country that is likely to remain its principal antagonist for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, Saudi views of this war are complicated.

The question of how Saudi Arabia views this war has drawn considerable speculation, misunderstanding, and wishful thinking. The Saudi government communicates principally through official statements, and to the frustration of international journalists, unauthorized leaks are rare. Media reports citing unnamed and ambiguously defined sources with claims about Saudi intentions or their communications with President Donald Trump should be read cautiously. And so, to understand actual Saudi thinking, the best place to start is with what their government is saying publicly.

Interests and Armageddon: The Third Gulf War Shakes West Asia

Jose Miguel Alonso-Trabanco

War has broken out in the Middle East once again, but this time the writing on the wall brings an unusually ominous message. Although the Third Gulf War is unlikely to be the last showdown between Iranian and Israeli-US forces, this ongoing conflict is heading in a dangerous direction. What both sides are fighting over is the strategic prerogative to redraw the very balance of power in West Asia, so the aftermath could produce a prolonged local ‘Cold War,’ a new hegemonic cycle, or widespread anarchy.

The ripple effects are not just encouraging the proliferation of regional seismicity in multiple overlapping layers. This front is a facet of a broader chessboard in which the multipolar great game of high politics plays out. But perhaps the most troubling aspect of the war is that its politico-strategic logic of statecraft is interwoven with the incendiary grammar of religious millenarianism.

How the Iran War Ignited a Geoeconomic Firestorm

Edward Fishman

The economic consequences of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran are coming into sharper focus as the conflict enters its third week. As the fallout expands beyond the Middle East and ripples through the global economy, markets and supply chains are being increasingly reshaped by the drones and missiles buzzing over the Gulf—and the United States has few options to de-escalate the conflict.

The Strait of Hormuz, which is critical to the oil and gas industry, is at the center of this disruption. But it’s not just energy markets that depend on the strait. Fertilizer and high-tech supply chains are also negatively affected, widening the crisis further. If the war develops into a protracted conflict, these issues could become lasting structural shocks to the world economy.

Gen. Wesley Clark: This is how Iran war could end, but not the best way

Wesley Clark

More than two weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, no end is in sight. But all wars do; this one will eventually end. So how did we get to this point, and how will the conflict be stopped? As NATO Supreme Allied commander in Europe in 1999, I led a sophisticated air campaign against Serbia to halt ethnic cleansing and faced continuing questions of how long it would last and how it might end. With that experience, I have thoughts about where this is heading.

In this campaign against Iran, American and Israeli airpower has been dazzlingly efficient. Having largely eliminated Iran’s air defenses in June, U.S. and Israeli aircraft now have free rein in the skies over most of Iran. Iran’s ballistic and drone strikes have been greatly reduced, and U.S. and Israeli air strikes are working up the supply chain to destroy storage sites, factories and workshops. Israel is targeting the regime itself by attacking police stations and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions.

Trump’s coalition of the unwilling: a long time in the making

Swaran Singh

There is a certain historical irony unfolding in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, the United States has been the principal architect of maritime security in this narrow artery through which a fifth of the world’s oil and quarter of gas flows, mostly to various rapidly growing Asian nations.

However, as President Donald Trump last week called upon nations to help secure shipping lanes amid escalating tensions with Iran, the response has been tellingly muted. This silence is beginning to speak louder than words. What is emerging is not a “coalition of the willing” but something far more revealing of our times: a coalition of the unwilling.

The Lasting Wounds of the War in Ukraine Both Sides Will Struggle to Reintegrate Millions of Veterans

Dara Massicot

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, it remains unclear when or how the conflict will end. But it will end, as all wars do, and when it does, both Ukraine and Russia will face the challenge of reintegrating thousands of soldiers back into their societies. Some veterans will return home resilient and ready to rejoin their communities; others will need physical, mental, and financial support for the rest of their lives. Both countries will face reintegration challenges requiring significant policy attention and financial resources, and Kyiv and Moscow are aware that there is no alternative to tackling

How Iran’s ‘forward defence’ became a strategic boomerang

Dr Sanam Vakil

The war between the United States and Israel and their enemy Iran marks the most consequential turning point in the 47-year history of the Islamic Republic. For decades tensions between Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran played out across the Middle East through proxy conflicts, indirect confrontation and competing security strategies.

Today, thanks to the US–Israel strikes that started on 28 February and Iran’s retaliation, that long-running rivalry has exploded into open war, embroiled Arab states and placed the Islamic Republic in greater danger than ever before. Washington aims to degrade Iran’s nuclear programme, weaken its missile and military capabilities and roll back the network of armed groups Tehran cultivated across the region. Israel’s leadership has voiced broader ambitions, and some officials openly argue that sustained military pressure could weaken the Iranian regime itself. Yet the consequences of this war extend far beyond these immediate objectives.

Who Owns the Drones? Why Modernization of Army Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Should Be a Maneuver Responsibility

John Dudas

At first glance, placing Army modernization of small unmanned aircraft systems—sUAS—under the leadership of the aviation branch seems reasonable. After all, sUAS fly and share battlefield airspace with crewed aircraft, so it is logical for the Army to charge the Aviation Center of Excellence to manage the modernization of all sUAS platforms (including Groups 1 and 2).

But beyond the fact that sUAS, like the crewed aircraft that belong to the aviation branch, fly, there is good reason for the Maneuver Center of Excellence (MCoE) to assume responsibility for the management of modernizing and integrating sUAS, which are inextricably linked to ground maneuver forces’ missions. These systems are fielded and employed almost exclusively at maneuver battalion formations and below, in both conventional and special operations units.

3 costly mistakes Trump has already made in Iranby Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor

Americans and foreigners alike have questioned the wisdom, necessity and international law justification for the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. They tend to ignore the reality that, in one form or another, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with both countries — which it calls “the Great Satan” and “Little Satan,” respectively — since it seized power in 1979 under the slogan, “Death to America, Death to Israel.”

Iran shares its violent enmity toward the U.S-led rules-based order with the criminal regimes of Russia, China and North Korea, all three armed with nuclear weapons and supportive of Iran’s efforts to become a nuclear power itself, in violation of international law. The four members of this axis of evil exchange mutual economic, diplomatic and military assistance in their individual and collective animus toward the West.

America’s Semiconductor Blind Spot Requires Presidential Action—Now

Ross Miller

Imagine a military commander preparing for battle, ready to deploy forces with the intelligence, personnel, and plans in place, only to be stopped not by enemy action, but by equipment. Otherwise mission-capable platforms sit idle because a single uncertified microelectronic component cannot be replaced or trusted.

That scenario is likely, not because of a sudden crisis or battlefield failure, but because the United States remains overwhelmingly dependent on foreign-produced foundational-node semiconductors that are embedded across nearly every defense platform.

Today, U.S. companies account for nearly half of the world’s chip sales, but U.S. semiconductor manufacturing represents only about 12 percent of global capacity. Most semiconductor production still occurs overseas, concentrated in East Asia, including Taiwan and China, which supply the same commercial components embedded across U.S. defense and critical infrastructure systems. This dependence exposes commanders and maintainers to delays, certification bottlenecks, and persistent supply uncertainty long before a crisis emerges. It also aligns Beijing’s deliberate effort to shape industrial capacity, supply chains, and technology ecosystems to build long-term military advantage. Foundational semiconductor manufacturing — particularly high-volume, foundational production — is central to that effort.

The Lasting Wounds of the War in Ukraine

Dara Massicot

As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, it remains unclear when or how the conflict will end. But it will end, as all wars do, and when it does, both Ukraine and Russia will face the challenge of reintegrating thousands of soldiers back into their societies. Some veterans will return home resilient and ready to rejoin their communities; others will need physical, mental, and financial support for the rest of their lives. Both countries will face reintegration challenges requiring significant policy attention and financial resources, and Kyiv and Moscow are aware that there is no alternative to tackling

Trump needs China’s help fixing the global oil crisis. It’s unlikely to play along

Stephanie Yang

Two weeks before President Donald Trump is scheduled to hash out critical US-China disputes in Beijing, he has set a new condition for the negotiations: help reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

China has little incentive to concede to his demands.

By closing the major shipping channel, Iran has effectively choked off one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, triggering price spikes and fears of energy shortages that could upend the global economy. Now facing the worst oil crisis in history, Trump is calling on other nations, including France, Japan, South Korea and Britain, to work together to secure the strait.

To persuade China, Trump is exerting additional pressure. In an interview with the Financial Times published Sunday, he said he wants to know whether China will provide assistance before his planned summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the end of the month. Without an answer, Trump added, he may decide to delay his trip.

A New Government In Nepal: What Lies Ahead

Amit Ranjan

In the first parliamentary elections in March 2026, following the Gen-Z protest in September last year, an engineer, rapper and former mayor of Kathmandu, Balendra Shah (popularly known as Balen), led the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), formed in 2022, to a landslide victory. The party won 124 out of 164 seats, for which votes have been counted. There are 275 seats in the House of Representatives. Out of the total, 165 members of the House of Representatives are elected under the first-past-the-post system, while 110 are elected through proportional representation. Around 60 per cent of the voters cast their votes in this election.

Balen defeated the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) chair and former prime minister of Nepal, K P Oli, in his own constituency, Jhapa-5, by a large margin. The RSP’s victory is largely built on support from young voters who were unhappy with the political old guard. Balen’s slogan of “time for change” attracted many voters disillusioned with the old leadership. His social media popularity in Nepal is unmatched. He has 3.5 million followers on Facebook, one million on Instagram, 400,000 on X (formerly Twitter) and nearly one million on YouTube.

The Munition Trap: Reassessing Asymmetric Warfare And Fiscal Sovereignty In 2026

Kanan Heydarov

The current escalations in the Middle East and the vulnerabilities of energy hubs like Kharg Island have exposed a critical flaw in Western military doctrine. We are witnessing a catastrophic Cost-Exchange Ratio. While a basic loitering munition costs approximately $20,000 to produce, a kinetic interception via a Standard Missile-2 (SM-2) or a PAC-3 MSE can exceed $2 million to $4 million per unit.

This 200:1 deficit is the mathematical engine of the Munition Trap. It is no longer a tactical challenge; it is a systemic fiscal threat. When the interest on sovereign debt surpasses the $1.2 trillion mark effectively exceeding the total national defense budget the Munition Trap ceases to be a military problem and becomes a threat to the state’s fiscal sovereignty. The Military-Industrial Complex’s reliance on high-cost, high-margin platforms creates a “Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone” that hollows out the economy from within while failing to provide security against low-cost swarms.

Why has Trump eased sanctions on Russian oil - and will it help Putin?

Archie Mitchell

The Trump administration's decision to ease sanctions on countries buying Russian oil has been welcomed by the Kremlin and has sparked deep concern among pro-Ukraine campaigners. The US waiver, active for one month, will let countries buy up Russian oil which, under current sanctions, has been floating at sea, unable to be sold. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the "tailored, short-term" policy move would reduce the economic impact of the US-Israel war with Iran.

But Bill Browder, a sanctions campaigner and leading critic of Putin's regime, told the BBC the move was "a terrible decision that will enrich Vladimir Putin and prolong the war in Ukraine".

The new policy marks a sharp about-turn for US policy.

Previously Washington came down hard on countries purchasing Russian oil, slapping a huge 50% tariff on imports from India in August, over allegations the country was buying Russian oil, and thereby helping to finance the war in Ukraine. As a result, much of the sanctioned oil was left on tankers off the coast of India and other Asian countries, with traders searching for buyers willing to take it.

Next Gen Propulsion – the Time Is Now

Timothy Murphy

In recent months, Iranian drone and missile attacks have pushed U.S. and allied aircrews to operate at the edge of their range and survivability. The next crisis, whether in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, or over Taiwan, will demand fighters that can fly farther, stay on station longer, and power more advanced defenses than today’s engines allow.

We have already seen how quickly these threats can escalate. In March 2025, Lt. Col William “Skate” Parks, commander of the 480th Fighter Squadron, narrowly survived a deadly salvo of enemy surface-to-air missiles during an undisclosed operation in the Middle East. He successfully deployed defensive countermeasures and skillfully maneuvered his F-16 through violent threat reactions. Parks’ heroic efforts have been rare over the last three decades due to the United States’ dominance in the air domain. In the years ahead, these harrowing scenarios will become far more common, and success in defeating these future threats will rely heavily on the engine powering the aircraft.

Israel’s Forever Wars

Nathan J. Brown

In launching war against Iran, Israel has made unmistakably clear that it is operating according to a strategic logic very different from the one that has long guided its statecraft. The United States may be participating in the war, but American officials have offered a baffling series of explanations of their aims and have been consistent only in denying that they have entered a “forever war.” Israel’s leaders have been far less equivocal. They seem to have concluded that they are already in a forever war—and that the task is not to end it, but to manage it on tolerable terms.

Indeed, since October 7, 2023, Israeli leaders have embraced a strategic logic that departs sharply from the way deterrence, domination, and diplomacy have long blended in Israeli statecraft. What some took to be an immediate and traumatized response to October 7 was actually more durable. Deterrence and diplomacy have been eclipsed by something harsher: a preference for domination, degradation, and the prevention of the adversaries’ recovery. That shift is now driving a broad set of military actions that are reshaping the region.

Geopolitics, War and Iran

George Friedman

In 1940, the United States placed Japan in a difficult position. Japan was a country with very limited resources. It had to import oil, steel and other goods from other Asian countries and, to some extent, from the United States. To secure access to these resources, it had tried, years earlier, to build an empire. The U.S. used its economic power to block the sale of oil from what we now call Indonesia, to name just one country, and refused to sell steel to Japan. The U.S. feared that a Japanese Empire would threaten U.S. military command of the Pacific, making the homeland vulnerable to Japanese military power.

This culminated in a U.S. blockade of Japanese imports critical to its industrial survival. Japan could either capitulate to the U.S. or go to war. Tokyo chose war, attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941 in an attempt to cripple U.S. power in the Pacific and force the U.S. to negotiate a new understanding with Japan. Given the antiwar sentiment in the U.S., this was not an outlandish thought, but it was an incorrect one. It’s reported that the commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who had spent time in the United States, opposed the attack, believing it would not lead to negotiation, but was overridden.

Ukraine Shows AI Changing How Coalitions Fight

Courtney Stewart , Carl Janz

Coalition warfare has always been messy. Different procedures, systems, standards, doctrines, and operational caveats complicate and slow coordination at every level of conflict. AI may finally cut through that dynamic to become the connective tissue that makes multinational forces more cohesive and coherent. AI’s role in assisting coalition forces adapt to the modern battlefield was a key topic of the ‘Revolutions in military technology: lessons from Ukraine’ panel session at ASPI’s December 2025 Sydney Dialogue.

Marco Criscuolo, NATO’s acting deputy assistant secretary general and director for strategy and policy with the Cyber and Digital Transformation Division, likened managing NATO’s multi-domain operations to solving a three-pronged problem. On one axis lie the ‘five operational domains’, on another the ‘strategic, tactical, and operational levels’ and finally ‘the five classification domains, from NATO unclassified up to top secret’. The challenge of making real-time decisions is complicated not only by coordinating these domains, but also by the presence of multiple militaries. According to Criscuolo, it ‘is not possible’ to do so effectively without AI capable of quickly processing mass data points.

Eurasia Review Interviews: Creativity, Cognitive Systems, And Human–AI Collaboration

Aritra Banerjee

A Conversation with Dr Tony McCaffrey, Co-founder of BrainSwarm AI

The growing complexity of contemporary global challenges has led to renewed interest in how knowledge, creativity, and problem-solving are organised within modern societies. Issues such as climate adaptation, technological governance, space sustainability, and large-scale social systems increasingly require solutions that cannot be derived solely from expertise. In this context, researchers in cognitive science and innovation studies have begun to examine whether the limitations of current institutions lie not in the absence of information, but in the structure of the thinking processes used to generate new ideas.

Dr Tony McCaffrey, a cognitive scientist whose work focuses on creative cognition and problem-solving systems, has proposed that many breakthrough solutions remain undiscovered because individuals fail to notice what he terms the “obscure features” of objects and systems. Through the development of structured creativity methods such as BrainSwarming, his research explores how innovation can be deliberately engineered as a process, rather than treated as a rare outcome of individual talent. His work also investigates the cognitive limits of both human experts and artificial intelligence, raising questions about how human–AI collaboration might expand the range of problems that can be addressed.

Army’s new, flexible approach to EW could lead to programmatic changes: Official

Mark Pomerleau

WASHINGTON — The Army’s recently released request to industry for broad electronic warfare capabilities could reshape ongoing programs and change the way the service outfits units with emerging technology, a service official revealed this week.

In the past, the Army limited itself to some degree, outlining specifications to capabilities for which industry would design bespoke and exquisite solutions. But many of the technologies in electronic warfare, to also include signals intelligence, are software and radio-based, meaning a solution for one capability could have applicability elsewhere, according to Joseph Welch, Program Acquisition Executive for Command and Control (C2)/Counter C2.

Now, Welch told Breaking Defense the Army is trying to take advantage of these technological similarities and populate them across the force, which could have implications for existing programs and capabilities.

Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)