U.S.-India relations stumbled badly during the second half of 2025, marked by a breach of trust over the May 10, 2025, India-Pakistan ceasefire and President Donald Trump’s imposition of 50 percent tariffs on Indian exports in August 2025. The February 6, 2026, interim trade deal provides an opportunity to repair ties, crucial for India's role in shaping the Indo-Pacific and competing against China.
India's space sector is undergoing a significant transformation, shifting from its historical government-centric model to one increasingly accommodating private enterprise following the 2020 space reforms and the Indian Space Policy (ISP) 2023. This policy redrew boundaries, allowing non-government entities (NGEs) to undertake end-to-end activities like building, launching, and operating satellites and launch vehicles, even engaging in asteroid mining, subject to IN-SPACe authorization.
China's expanding digital trade network, including platforms like LOGINK, eWTP, and Cainiao Network Technology, significantly challenges the enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). Forensic firm Oritain found that exposure to prohibited cotton among surveyed companies returned to pre-UFLPA levels, indicating a growing "gap between supply chain documentation and supply chain truth."
In 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) chip production has become a binding constraint on the pace of the AI compute buildout, with demand for computing power to train and deploy advanced AI models growing exponentially and outpacing manufacturing capacity. This scarcity elevates AI chips to a strategic resource for the United States, necessitating policy adjustments.
The 2025 U.S.-Chinese trade war, initiated by President Donald Trump's nearly 75 percent tariffs, quickly concluded with the U.S. folding due to China's strategic leverage over rare-earth elements. Beijing, controlling 90 percent of global rare-earth processing, retaliated with export controls, threatening American manufacturing and the U.S. defense industrial base.
China is actively engaged in adversarial distillation, a technique involving the unauthorized extraction of AI model capabilities from U.S. systems to enhance its own AI development, circumventing U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors. This strategic vulnerability allows Chinese developers to make faster and larger capability gains by leveraging U.S.
Gulf states' ambitious investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure, aiming for technological independence, paradoxically creates significant jurisdictional, technological, and security dependencies on the United States. The Trump administration's 'AI sovereignty' concept promotes deep reliance on US technology as a necessary cost for access to world-leading capabilities, backed by programs like the American AI Exports Program.
The private sector is playing a leading role in advancing artificial intelligence (AI), with commercial incentives significantly influencing how AI capabilities develop and diffuse, impacting U.S. national security interests. These interests include enabling beneficial AI uses, limiting misuse risks, ensuring reliable system behavior, and maintaining strategic geopolitical advantage.
The United States needs the trust of its allies and partners, not its adversaries, to effectively manage international conflicts like the one with Iran. While negotiations with adversaries require verification and clear costs/benefits, trust with friends is a massive amplifier, fostering common purpose, information sharing, and willingness to impose consequences.
Electricity has become a decisive enabler in contemporary warfare, with modern forces depending on its uninterrupted flow for operational tempo, sustaining radios, drones, C2 systems, EW equipment, and precision-guided weapons. In the ongoing Ukraine War, electricity is both a strategic target and a tactical necessity, as Russia deliberately strikes Ukraine’s national power grid.
On June 8, Yemen’s Houthis fired missiles at central Israel as the Jewish state and Iran exchanged fire for the first time since the April 7 ceasefire between the US, Israel, and Iran. The Houthis launched two missiles, one intercepted and one falling short, targeting the Tel Aviv area.
Ukraine's escalating campaign inside Russia, involving deep drone strikes on oil infrastructure, attacks on military airfields, logistics interdiction, and the assassination of senior Russian military figures like Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, aims to impose significant costs. While these actions, including targeting Moscow-area and St. Petersburg refineries, create command disruption and economic pressure, the author argues they are unlikely to force President Putin to negotiate peace.
The United States requires an economic pressure doctrine to guide its adversarial economic statecraft, based on an analysis of 20 prior and ongoing U.S. cases including embargoes, modern sanctions, technology denial, and trade coercion. This report proposes nine principles for American economic pressure, categorized into strategic and operational levels.
The 7 October 2023 Hamas attack prompted the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to launch Operation Swords of Iron in Gaza, confronting an extensive, complex tunnel system. This "Gaza Metro," estimated at 350-450 miles with 5,700 shafts integrated into civilian infrastructure, facilitates Hamas's offensive, defensive, logistical, and command and control operations, challenging IDF conventional superiority.
China is actively contesting information control across the Taiwan Strait through targeting undersea cables, satellite communication systems, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Taiwan, primarily connected by 15 undersea cables, experienced 28 human-caused incidents from 2022-2025, with three suspected as deliberate PRC sabotage. Taipei is hardening infrastructure and improving monitoring to deter further cuts, which could reduce bandwidth but not fully sever connectivity.
Terrorist groups such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, and ISIS are increasingly leveraging modern technologies, including social media and generative AI, to drastically shorten the time between radicalization, recruitment, and violent action. This digital shift allows them to operate effectively without physical caliphates, exposing many more people to propaganda and enabling rapid mobilization.
The United States security documents typically describe adversaries as threats or competitors, but rarely acknowledge that behavior patterns among interstate rivals, such as China, Russia, and Iran, differ fundamentally from those of mere threats or competitors. This article explores the advantages and risks associated with leveraging interstate rivalry frameworks for strategy development and planning.
On June 5, 2026, a new National Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-11, directed the secretary of defense to update Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 within 90 days, explicitly to keep pace with rapidly evolving AI capabilities. The article argues this update must expand the definition of a lethal autonomous weapon system beyond physical effectors like drones to include the AI software orchestrating the kill chain, which selects and engages targets without human intervention.
Turkey has frequently generated concern among Western analysts regarding its alignment with the United States and Europe over the past two and a half decades. These anxieties first arose in 2003 when the Turkish parliament voted against granting U.S. forces access to Turkish territory for the invasion of Iraq.
China began testing a different approach along the disputed Sino-Indian border in the Himalayas in 2020, using ten uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver supplies to soldiers in Tibet, replacing a 120-soldier, two-to-three-day journey. This demonstrates how drone logistics can reshape military deployment and sustainment, enabling forces to disperse into smaller, more remote units operating farther from established logistics hubs.
John Warden's five-ring model, which posits that targeting enemy leadership can cause regime collapse, is challenged by Jacob Stoil regarding its applicability to Iran. Stoil argues that while a recent effective decapitation strike in Iran caused temporary paralysis, it neither brought down the regime nor secured victory.
Keith Burkepile, after four years at the U.S. Army War College, strongly advocates for wargames, moving from a "maybe" to an "enthusiastic 'Yes.'" Wargames bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world pressure, allowing leaders to experience decision consequences. They provide an experiential learning environment fostering strategic thinking, operational planning, and joint force integration, which is difficult to assess through Socratic dialogue alone.
Modern warfare has transitioned from raw firepower to absolute information dominance, establishing space as the foundation of U.S. military power. Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025 exemplified this shift, as 125 American aircraft, including seven B-2 stealth bombers, conducted precision strikes against fortified Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
Russia has demonstrated a masterclass in integrating cyber capabilities into modern conflicts, viewing cyberspace operations as a primary means of force projection rather than merely supporting kinetic forces. General Valery Gerasimov's 2013 article, "The Value of Science is in the Foresight," suggested "contactless actions" through cyber or electronic means would become main military tools, a concept dubbed the Gerasimov Doctrine.