Indian Strategic Studies: 05/06/26

6 May 2026

The Limits of Pakistan’s New Counterterrorism Doctrine Against the TTP

Bantirani Patro

That cross-border air strikes have become an integral part of Pakistan’s counter-insurgency playbook is clear from the number of such attacks that have taken place in recent years. The most recent was in late February 2026, in which multiple Afghan cities, including Kabul and Kandahar, were attacked, resulting in intense border skirmishes between the Taliban and Pakistani forces that continued into the month of March. As both sides battled each other, the Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif declared an “open war” on Afghanistan.

Yet the Pakistan Army’s approach to countering the group within its own territory has garnered comparatively less attention. This is equally important, if not as sensational, due to the lack of an overt regional aspect. Alongside air strikes designed to penalize the Afghan Taliban for their continued support of the Pakistani Taliban, Pakistan has concurrently pursued security operations at home to contain the group’s activities. This piece clinically examines these small-scale operations and argues that they have laid bare Pakistan’s interprovincial tensions – which will encumber concrete action against the TTP – and that they are, by themselves, insufficient to counter militancy.

The Qabza State In Force Land, Power, and the Clearance of Islamabad

Yasmeen Bibi is a widow who works as a domestic helper in Islamabad. The first house the state demolished was in Saidpur Village, in the Margalla foothills, where her family had lived for decades. Sh…

New Tanks Mark PLA Army’s Integration of System Warfare at the Tactical Level

Joaquin Camarena

The MBT instructors’ comments indicate that the 112th HCAB will play a significant role in developing the doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to employ the ZTZ-99B effectively during military operations. Furthermore, the unit will serve as a test bed to develop the necessary TTPs for the ZTZ-99B to operate alongside the new Type-100 tank and the Type-100 infantry support vehicle (ISV). Ding and Guo’s statements further indicate that the 112th HCAB will receive the ZTZ-99B after the Chinese New Year, likely in March or April 2026.

Previously a part of the 112th Mechanized Infantry Division (the unit initially tasked with fielding the PLAA’s first batches of digitized mechanized platforms and developing TTPs for the army to carry out informationized combat operations in the early 2010s), the 112th HCAB appears once again to be a test bed for new capabilities. Brigade leadership must develop new doctrine and TTPs for the ZTZ-99B MBT to address differences from its predecessor: the ZTZ-99A. For instance, the ZTZ-99B will act as a node within the brigade’s battlefield information network that would quickly analyze and share data it gathers with other armored vehicles, dismounted infantry, or other units. This data-sharing node capability—a significant improvement over the ZTZ-99A that lacks the man-machine-environment, communications, and information systems—enables the ZTZ-99B to operate effectively with the Type-100 tank and the Type-100 ISV. The Type-100 armored vehicles would conduct battlefield reconnaissance and transmit the information gathered to the ZTZ-99B for dissemination to other units. The new vehicles, however, could also act as information-sharing nodes enhancing the situational awareness of tactical units.

Strategic Spaces of the Sino-Nepali Borderlands: Making and Breaking Trans-Himalayan Trade Relations

Galen Murton

Chinese infrastructure investment and development in Nepal are critical to the territorial integrity of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and strategically extend the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into sensitive spaces of South Asia. While trade flows and investment patterns across the China-Nepal borderlands reflect asymmetrical power relations between Beijing and Kathmandu, a grounded, geographic review of the region reveals three key observations: a historical linkage between border resolutions and Chinese-facilitated infrastructure development in Nepal, an ongoing “corridorization” of Nepal that is both real and imagined, and a persistent oscillation of border openings and closings that challenges the mobility practices of local populations and yet also escapes the PRC’s enhanced controls. Attention to the Himalayan region, much like borderlands elsewhere in Asia, reinforces the adage to look to the margins to see the state in new and often overlooked ways, as “borders offer unique vantage points to produce decentered accounts of the state and denaturalized narratives of nationalist projects.”1

China’s “Fake” De-Dollarization

Brad W. Setser

That is the last disclosed data point, but careful analysis of the U.S. Treasury’s data essentially rules out a significant rise in the dollar share of China’s formal reserves. The U.S. data is consistent with either a bit of a fall or very aggressive use of non-U.S. custodians over the last five years.

So, China has de-dollarized? Not exactly.

The big fall in the dollar share of China reserves (from 79 to 59 percent) occurred between 2005 and 2012 (though China only disclosed the 2015 number) and during that period China’s toal reserves went from $800 to close to well over $3 trillion and its actual dollars continued to rise.

The Strange Case of Lebanon’s 'Ceasefire'

Guy P. Nohra

If you follow the Middle East, you have likely heard about Lebanon’s “ceasefire” with Israel.

Think about that for a moment. A country whose army, the Lebanese Armed Forces, has not been in direct military combat with Israel since 1948 is now negotiating a ceasefire and engaging in peace talks. To the untrained eye, this sounds like progress. The Lebanese people have suffered continuously since the civil war began in 1975. War, corruption, economic collapse—just about every hardship imaginable has touched the country.

So any mention of peace is naturally welcomed. But this is not what it seems. This is a shadow peace. The actual fighting is not between Lebanon and Israel. It is between Israel and a non-state actor: Hezbollah.

Can Space Be Disrupted Like the Strait of Hormuz?

Clayton Swope

During the conflict in the Middle East, Iran has exploited its location next to a transit corridor vital to international commerce and energy markets, effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz to international maritime traffic. To achieve this feat, Iran neither established sea control nor air superiority over the strait; instead, it applied a relatively small amount of force—and the threat of using more—to achieve its goals. A nation applying this playbook to outer space could produce equally consequential results. Similar to transit rights through the strait, all nations have the right to freely use space—a right that is perhaps taken for granted. Unlike the Strait of Hormuz, all countries border space and, with the right technology, can threaten it. Nearly 80 percent of all operational satellites orbit less than 800 km from the Earth’s surface, a distance within reach of many ballistic missiles. The fact that space is under threat has been known for years. The lesson on display in the Strait of Hormuz is that disruption can be achieved and sustained without having domain superiority, and that, once disrupted, it is hard to return things to the old normal.

Although the Strait of Hormuz is located in the territorial waters of both Oman and Iran, it is recognized under customary international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as an international strait, which means ships from any nation are guaranteed the right of transit passage. All nations enjoy similar rights to send spacecraft through outer space.

On Islands, Straits, and Strategy: The United States, Iran, and the Islands of the Persian Gulf

Jacob Stoil

There are three strategic rationales for seizing one or more islands, along with critical risks in the tactical and narrative spaces that warrant substantial consideration. The first reason for seizing one or more islands is to influence Iran toward ceasefire negotiations or to trade for concessions during negotiations. In such a case, the ideal territory to seize would be relatively easy to take and hold and valuable to Iran.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz provides a second rationale. The positions of the islands mean that whoever controls the islands around the strait can interdict anyone attempting to close or cross through the strait. Iran uses several island positions to reinforce its defensive and blocking positions around the strait. It does this by positioning military systems (such as small boats and weapons systems integral to closing the straits), together with garrisons and surveillance and targeting systems on some of the islands astride and proximate to the shipping routes.

The Chokepoint Doctrine

The Strait of Hormuz runs twenty-one miles at its narrowest, and through it, before February 2026, moved approximately 20 percent of the world’s seaborne oil, 20 percent of its liquefied natural gas,…

Disappearing Gulf Capital: The Iran War Risk Wall Street Isn’t Watching

Rebecca Patterson

Economic concerns about the spillovers from the Iran war have focused on the global flow and availability of critical materials. There is, however, another, much less appreciated war risk for the United States: the supply of dollars from the Gulf, especially to capital-hungry U.S. tech firms and their financial intermediaries.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) economies—including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—have dramatically grown and transformed their sovereign wealth fund (SWF) vehicles over the last decade, as part of efforts to diversify away from volatile energy-price cycles. Today, the region hosts some of the world’s largest SWFs, with around a dozen sovereign funds (led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE) managing somewhere between $4 –$6 trillion in assets, according to estimates from SWF trackers and the International Monetary Fund.

Why the Strong Lose and the Weak Become Strong

Scott Atran

Contemporary warfare’s emphasis on destruction capacity and cost imposition rests on a fundamental misreading of what sustains the will to fight. Drawing on behavioral and brain research and historical cases, it shows that “devoted actors” whose personal and collective identity is fused with sacred values will sustain extreme sacrifice and mobilize broader populations. As a result, they can blunt coercion and sometimes reverse asymmetries of power. The Revolutionary Guard’s cohesion, forged in the Iran–Iraq War, and Hamas’s sustained popular base despite military attrition, both illustrate why strategies of overwhelming force tend to fortify rather than fracture resistance; and why the decisive variable in protracted conflict often is not the scale of violence applied but—similar to Britain and Russia in the early stages of World War II and later with Vietnam and Afghanistan—the depth of commitment sustained and the tactical and strategic creativity that commitment engenders.

The early course of the U.S.–Israeli war with Iran reflects a recurring strategic illusion: that superiority in destructive capacity can be converted into rapid political collapse. Instead, initial operational success widened the conflict, hardened resistance, and drawn the attackers into a longer and more uncertain struggle.

Chernobyl Is Still a Current Event, Forty Years Later

Corey Hinderstein

On April 26, 1986, a routine safety exercise at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Unit 4 in Soviet Ukraine ended in the most consequential nuclear accident of the atomic age. Forty years later, huge swaths of land remain uninhabitable, and thousands of people are still dealing with long-term health effects. Nearly a trillion dollars has been spent on remediation and compensation, and public opinion around the world remains sharply divided on the value of nuclear power as a clean energy source to combat the climate crisis. These political and physical effects demonstrate that the Chernobyl accident is not yet history and is still a current event.

Multiple external investigations in the immediate aftermath and the following years attempted to identify the accident’s root causes. They found that the accident resulted from technical overconfidence, lack of information sharing, and the inability of contrary views to be heard within the Soviet Union’s oversight and regulatory system.

China and America Are Courting Nuclear Catastrophe

Tong Zhao

Over the past decade, China has been steadily reshaping the global nuclear order. According to U.S. government assessments, Beijing has almost tripled its stockpile of nuclear warheads since 2019. It has rapidly increased its nuclear capabilities on land, in the air, and at sea. It has significantly expanded its infrastructure for the research, development, and assembly of nuclear warheads. And Beijing shows no intention of slowing down. In mid-March, the country announced that it would “strengthen and enlarge” its strategic deterrence capabilities, reaffirming its commitment to qualitatively and quantitatively enhance its nuclear arsenal.

American officials have certainly taken notice. They worry that the bipolar nuclear world—where almost all the globe’s warheads are controlled by either Moscow or Washington—is being replaced by a tripolar one. In response, they are trying to strengthen Washington’s own nuclear stockpile while attempting to negotiate with Beijing.

Masters of Mayhem: A Landmark Study in the Birth of Modern Unconventional Warfare

James Stejskal

Stejskal brings unique credibility to this historical analysis. As a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who served thirty-five years as a "Green Beret" and CIA case officer, he understands unconventional warfare not merely as an academic concept but as a lived reality[2].

His career included two tours with the elite Special Forces Berlin unit during the Cold War, where he conducted clandestine operations behind potential Warsaw Pact lines, and later service with the CIA in numerous high-risk environments worldwide[3]. This operational background allows Stejskal to read the historical record with an expert's eye, recognizing in the actions of Lawrence, Stewart Newcombe, Pierce Joyce, and their Arab allies the fundamental principles that would later underpin British SAS operations, American Special Forces doctrine, and modern counterinsurgency campaigns.

How the War Saved the Iranian Regime

Danny Citrinowicz

In early February, according to The New York Times and other outlets, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced U.S. President Donald Trump that airstrikes could help catalyze an anti-regime rebellion within Iran. But after the Israeli and U.S. militaries launched a war on the Islamic Republic at the end of the month, eliminating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other key regime figures, the Islamic Republic did not collapse. Instead, internal pressure appears to have consolidated it around hard-line elements.

The Real Threat to Taiwan America Is Preparing for the Wrong Kind of Crisis

Eyck Freymann

It begins not with missiles but with cutter ships. One morning, dozens of Chinese coast guard vessels start conducting “routine customs inspections” of merchant ships approaching Taiwan’s major ports. Chinese civil aviation authorities begin to demand manifests from flights entering and leaving Taiwan. Beijing insists it is merely asserting existing Chinese customs law, which claims the right to regulate the flow of people and goods in and out of “Taiwan Province.”

Immediately, nearly all airlines and shipping companies decide to comply. These private operators have no interest in seeing their ships or aircraft seized, detained, or worse. Nor do

Hitting Where it Hurts: Deep Strikes, Oil Infrastructure, and Kyiv’s Theory of Victory

Jefferson Burges and John Nagl

With the Russian-Ukrainian War now well into its fifth year, the ground war remains characteristically intense. Both sides have experienced significant losses in personnel and equipment. And yet, the front line has seen relatively minor adjustments. In November 2023, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, described how the war had become a positional-centric form of warfare. The war’s new character, including a host of unmanned systems, has limited the ability to execute large-scale maneuver. And attritional warfare based on limited maneuver and fought along a relatively static line of contact tends to favor the side with more resources—in this case, Russia.

Recent estimates put total Russian casualties for the year 2025 at 416,570. Despite these losses, Russia has continued to regenerate its combat power. Through 2025, Russia could still recruit 35,000 people per month, principally through financial incentives of around 2 million rubles ($24,612). Ukraine’s capability to inflict significant casualties is impressive, but it has resulted in no change to the Russian will or ability to wage war.

Let Iran Defeat Itself America Should End the War but Keep Up the Pressure

Richard Nephew

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States was at war with Iran, he called on the country’s people to rise in revolt. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said on February 28. “This will be probably your only chance for generations.” But in the days after, his administration backed away from calls for regime change. “This is not a so-called regime change war,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on March 2. Vice President JD Vance reinforced this message: “Whatever happens with the regime in one form or another, it’s incidental to

Selective Virtue: Anthropic, the Pentagon, and the Contradictions of AI Governance in Wartime

Scott Rutter

Anthropic presents itself as a company that takes the risks of artificial intelligence seriously, but its record does not support that claim. The company occupies a position of fundamental ethical contradiction: its CEO has publicly and specifically predicted that AI will eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, drive unemployment to 20 percent, and cause an “unusually painful” shock to society, yet Anthropic continues to build, deploy, and profit from the technology responsible for that harm at maximum commercial speed.

At the same time, when the Department of War demanded unrestricted use of that same technology for autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance, Anthropic refused, sued the federal government, and positioned itself as an ethical actor. A company cannot credibly claim moral authority over the military uses of its technology while simultaneously accelerating the civilian displacement it has already predicted and quantified. The virtue is selective. The contradiction is structural.

Sabotage from Afar: How Undeclared Drone Armies Prolong War and Derail Peace

Zaid Al-Ali

The covert deployment of advanced drones to countries in conflict by third-party states is intensifying modern warfare and undermining international peace-making in ways that are not yet fully understood. It is now well established that they can be mass-produced by middle powers such as Türkiye and Iran and deployed in swarms. What is less appreciated is how third-party states can now deploy drone armies to engage in warfare in other countries without publicly disclosing their involvement, and in ways that can delay peace negotiations for years at a time.

Historically, third‑party states have often supported warring factions abroad—whether by deploying full ground armies, conducting traditional air force bombing campaigns, or carrying out covert air and ground operations. Drones represent a distinct class of weaponry that is giving third‑party states, including middle powers such as Türkiye, Iran, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, the ability to sustain direct involvement in multiple distant conflicts at the same time. Their lethality is the result of several factors. Many models are powered by artificial intelligence, which means that they can operate fully autonomously and in coordinated swarming tactics. But it is their low cost, the ease with which they can be transferred to local allies, and their ability to be deployed from afar that is making this particular technology so impactful.

Microsoft, Amazon Hand Pentagon More Control Over AI Systems

Katrina Manson

The Pentagon has struck agreements with more technology companies for expanded use of advanced artificial intelligence tools on classified military networks, according to a Defense Department statement and two defense officials briefed on the matter.

Nvidia Corp., Microsoft Corp., Reflection AI Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have all newly struck agreements with the US Defense Department “for lawful operational use,” according to the statement. The officials asked not to be named to discuss internal discussions. On Friday, the Pentagon posted on X that Oracle Corp. had also joined the roster of technology companies that had agreed to deploy their AI tools on classified networks.

Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass

Jasmine Sun

Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic leverage as their jobs are automated away.

Whether you talk with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians, the so-called San Francisco consensus on the impact of A.I. for workers is bleak. Many are convinced that advanced A.I. will soon surpass human capabilities. This would produce tremendous growth and scientific achievement, but it would also displace millions of jobs as fewer humans are needed to make the economy run. The technology will depress economic mobility and exacerbate inequality, while ferrying power and wealth to the A.I. companies and the existing owners of capital.

The US Army War College Tested Four AI Systems on Its Capstone Exam. They All Passed.

This latest US Army War College report finds that all four commercial AI systems they tested in early 2026 passed the rigorous USAWC oral comprehensive examination. The authors designed “MilBench,” a domain-specific benchmark that applied the War College’s standard capstone assessment to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok in conversational mode.

Three faculty panels administered the examination, scoring Claude at a mean GPA of 3.98 (A) and placing ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini in a statistically indistinguishable B+ cluster. The multi-turn dialogue format exposed performance patterns, including brevity, sycophancy under pressure, and degradation over time, that static benchmarks fail to surface. The authors argue that the results shown below challenge the Department of War’s evaluation of commercial AI for strategic applications and call for domain-specific, dialogue-based assessment standards.

The Grievance Economy

Frederick Gregory, Wesley Winkler

Last month, Jack Dorsey, as CEO of Block, announced layoffs of nearly 40% of the workforce, citing AI as the reason. IBM, UPS, and Klarna had already done the same. Last week, President Trump ordered federal agencies to cease business with Anthropic after a dispute with the Pentagon, where the AI company insisted on restrictions preventing their products’ use in mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapon systems. Corporate leaders made unilateral decisions about AI deployment. A president used an executive directive to punish an AI company for insisting on restrictions. Neither decision was governed by law, regulation, or democratic process. They exposed a deeper problem: the institutions that might constrain such decisions are absent or unwilling to act.

When power over AI deployment is exercised without institutional guardrails, and millions face economic displacement from decisions they cannot appeal, the breeding ground for radicalization forms. Not violent extremism necessarily, but despondency and hopelessness transforming into the conviction that the system is rigged. That conviction becomes the justification for justice taken into one’s own hands. It manifests as withdrawal from civic participation, deepening distrust of institutions, and a generation disengaging from the very mechanisms that might address their grievance.

Reid Hoffman Thinks Doctors Should Ask AI for a Second Opinion

David Cox

Following a three-decade career at the helm of some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies—cofounding LinkedIn and sitting on the boards of PayPal and OpenAI—Reid Hoffman recently turned his attention to health care.

Hoffman’s startup, Manas AI, is building an AI engine that aims to fast-track the traditionally slow process of drug discovery for various cancers. Inspired by a dinner with renowned cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, the company’s cofounder and CEO, its mission statement is to “shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years.”

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