Indian Strategic Studies

5 November 2024

Trudeau’s Political Game With India Leaves Diplomatic Mess for the U.S.

Jamie Tronnes

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made global headlines by announcing the expulsion of six Indian diplomats. The drastic measure follows serious allegations of India’s repression of and violence against the Indian-Canadian community and interference in Canada’s democratic processes.

The accusations are sensational: “Indian diplomats and consular officials based in Canada leveraged their official positions to engage in clandestine activities.” Canada’s federal policing agency alleges that agents tied to the Indian government commissioned members of the India-based Bishnoi gang to target, harass, and murder activists. The murder-for-hire plot has extended its web to other countries, including ties to similar allegations in the US.

The use of networks like the Bishnoi gang to silence activists abroad, if true, moves India into the company of Russia and Iran, which have employed similar tactics, hiring Hells Angels and other organized crime syndicates to suppress dissent on foreign soil.

And like authoritarian regimes, India did not stop at physical intimidation against the diaspora community. It also interfered in the democratic processes of Canada, hoping to amplify sympathetic voices and suppress dissent.

US-India Economic Ties: To the Next Level and Beyond

Aparna Pande

Trade and Investment

Strengthening trade and investment ties between India and the United States requires a multifaceted approach. India has recently deployed schemes known as production-linked incentives (PLIs) to attract companies to set up manufacturing facilities in priority or strategic sectors—including electronics, pharmaceuticals, textiles, and white goods. Despite measures like PLIs, India’s manufacturing growth has remained relatively stagnant. India would benefit on a much broader scale by limiting PLIs and instead focusing on simplifying import and export processes and reducing import duties and tariffs to create a more open trade environment. The government’s recent announcement that it is simplifying processes through a single-window system, for example, will benefit not only large firms but also small firms that aspire to list on global platforms. India can also experiment with land acquisition and labor market reforms in select states before rolling them out countrywide. Additionally, New Delhi should invest more in critical infrastructure, such as freight rail and deep-water ports, to support economic expansion. To further attract investment and boost exports, at a time when there is a favorable geopolitical situation, the country would benefit from a regulatory system that is more predictable, transparent, and easier to navigate. Fostering state-level relationships and focusing on co-development could further enhance collaboration. For its part, the US should work to restore the effectiveness of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and avoid weaponizing international trade. Making globalization work more effectively is key to promoting interconnectivity and resilience.

China’s Next ‘Great Leap Forward’

Victoria Herczegh

Following a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and State Council, Beijing issued a new directive to develop an advanced industrial workforce aimed at driving Chinese-style modernization. The plan calls for organizing workers into groups and strengthening ideological and political guidance. To achieve this, central leadership will increase training and support for industrial workers to improve both the quality and quantity of production. Professional educators will lead these groups, providing both technical training and ideological instruction, while efforts will be made to make manufacturing jobs more attractive, especially for young people and migrant workers, potentially including “reeducation” programs.

For months, the government has emphasized boosting industrial production, especially in high-tech and innovation sectors, essential for economic recovery and modernization. This latest announcement, however, provides the first specific strategies from President Xi Jinping’s administration. Some details resemble aspects of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958-61), which tried to boost production through organized working groups and intense political education but ended in disastrous failure, famine, and 30 million to 45 million deaths. Despite this tragic legacy, the current leadership not only has adopted elements from that period but is even using similar language – terms like “great leap” and “leap forward” – to describe its plans. Facing Western export controls and diminished foreign investment, the Chinese government appears as committed as ever to self-sufficiency, and it sees the Great Leap Forward as a model of ambition, innovation and self-reliance.

Inside a Firewall Vendor's 5-Year War With the Chinese Hackers Hijacking Its Devices

Andy Greenberg

For years, it's been an inconvenient truth within the cybersecurity industry that the network security devices sold to protect customers from spies and cybercriminals are, themselves, often the machines those intruders hack to gain access to their targets. Again and again, vulnerabilities in “perimeter” devices like firewalls and VPN appliances have become footholds for sophisticated hackers trying to break into the very systems those appliances were designed to safeguard.

Now one cybersecurity vendor is revealing how intensely—and for how long—it has battled with one group of hackers that have sought to exploit its products to their own advantage. For more than five years, the UK cybersecurity firm Sophos engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with one loosely connected team of adversaries who targeted its firewalls. The company went so far as to track down and monitor the specific devices on which the hackers were testing their intrusion techniques, surveil the hackers at work, and ultimately trace that focused, years-long exploitation effort to a single network of vulnerability researchers in Chengdu, China.

On Thursday, Sophos chronicled that half-decade-long war with those Chinese hackers in a report that details its escalating tit-for-tat. The company went as far as discreetly installing its own “implants” on the Chinese hackers' Sophos devices to monitor and preempt their attempts at exploiting its firewalls. Sophos researchers even eventually obtained from the hackers' test machines a specimen of “bootkit” malware designed to hide undetectably in the firewalls' low-level code used to boot up the devices, a trick that has never been seen in the wild.

Hybrid CoE Paper 21: China and space: How space technologies boost China’s intelligence capabilities as part of hybrid threats

Conlan Ellis, Theodora Ogden & James Black

Introduction

Over the last decade, the People’s Republic of China has emerged as a strategic competitor to the United States, the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), presenting a systemic challenge to the existing international order.1 This rebalancing of power is also acutely felt in the space domain, where China has invested heavily in developing a national space programme that aims to surpass Russia’s and rival that of the US.2 The dual-use nature of most space capabilities and China’s promotion of a ‘military-civil fusion’ (MCF) model – which promotes technology transfer between the military and civilian spheres3 – have raised concerns about the potential for China’s expanding space capabilities to contribute to hybrid threats.

As outlined by Hybrid CoE,5 hybrid threats are characterized by:

Coordinated and synchronized actions that deliberately target the systemic vulnerabilities of democratic states and institutions through a wide range of means.
Activities that exploit the thresholds of detection and attribution, as well as the different interfaces (e.g., war-peace, internal-external security, local-state, and national-international).
Activities aimed at influencing different forms of decision-making at the local (regional), state, or institutional level, and designed to further and/or fulfil the agent’s strategic goals while undermining and/or hurting the target.

Winning the Battery Race: How the United States Can Leapfrog China to Dominate Next-Generation Battery Technologies

Varun Sivaram, Noah Gordon, and Daniel Helmeci

Introduction

The United States battery industry has fallen dangerously behind the global leaders. A cornerstone of the modern economy, batteries are essential and ubiquitous across consumer electronics such as cellphones, military equipment such as drones, and clean energy products such as electric vehicles (EVs) and power grid storage installations.

Over the past decade, China has come to dominate this critical industry. Across every stage of the value chain for current-generation lithium-ion battery technologies, from mineral extraction and processing to battery manufacturing, China’s share of the global market is 70–90 percent.1 Japan and South Korea, once world leaders in battery technology and production, now hold minority market shares, and the United States is in a distant fourth place. As a result, the United States almost entirely relies on Asian imports for the batteries widely used today.

The Middle East’s deadly doom loop

Jamie Dettmer

Dazed and exhausted, a Lebanese Shiite mother of four gestures to her baby bump — her fifth child is weeks away from arriving.

For the past month, Samara and her young children have been sleeping rough in an abandoned, dilapidated shop front, a few hundred meters from the Grand Serial — the imposing building housing the offices of the Lebanese prime minister.

The country’s parliament is just a few blocks away. But it might as well be on another planet.

Since fleeing from the embattled border village of Ayta ash Shab early last month, Samara and her family have been receiving only a meal a day from the country’s cash-strapped and dysfunctional public authorities. “I don’t have a house, no. It’s gone,” she lamented. Most of the homes and buildings in her village have been destroyed, just as they were back in 2006, during the last war between Israel and Lebanon’s militant Shiite movement Hezbollah.

It’s as though the Levant is stuck in a time-loop, doomed to forever repeat the cycles of war and revenge. The weapons have evolved, of course — with the development of battlefield AI and drones — but the back-and-forth of attack and reprisal, and the general contours of the conflict have mainly remained the same, with minor variations depending on the involvement of outside powers or the regional ambitions and political makeup of neighboring countries.

The nations on the brink of going nuclear

John P Ruehl

Following Israel’s October 26, 2024, attack on Iranian energy facilities, Iran vowed to respond with “all available tools,” sparking fears it could soon produce a nuclear weapon to pose a more credible threat.

The country’s breakout time—the period required to develop a nuclear bomb—is now estimated in weeks and Tehran could proceed with weaponization if it believes itself or its proxies are losing ground to Israel.

Iran isn’t the only nation advancing its nuclear capabilities in recent years. In 2019, the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which banned intermediate-range land-based missiles, citing alleged Russian violations and China’s non-involvement. The US is also modernizing its nuclear arsenal, with plans to deploy nuclear weapons in more NATO states and proposals to extend its nuclear umbrella to Taiwan.

Russia, too, has intensified its nuclear posture, expanding nuclear military drills and updating its nuclear policies on first use. In 2023, it suspended participation in the New START missile treaty, which limited US and Russian deployed nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and stationed nuclear weapons in Belarus in 2024.

Did Israel conduct cyber attack on Iran's air defences before bombing?

Robert Tollast

Details are still emerging on Israel’s wave of air strikes against Iran on Saturday, including a claim reported by Israel’s Kan News that Iranian air defences were hacked in advance.

The tactic was also disclosed to The Independent's Farsi edition by purported security figures in Iran on Monday. Israel and Iran regularly exchange cyber attacks, including alleged attacks on civilian infrastructure such as banks and transport systems, and most famously, a 2010 cyber attack on Iranian uranium enrichment equipment, with the Stuxnet virus.

“The defence radar systems were hacked in several places. The screens of these radars were frozen and the possibility of tracking the attackers was denied from more advanced radars in some defence systems,” The Independent reported.

Both publications said there had been an attempt to breach air defences using a cyber attack, without elaborating.

The tactic of using cyber warfare in air battles is not new. The National previously reported how Israel is thought to have used a cyber attack to disable Syrian air defences in a 2007 operation to bomb a nuclear research site in the east of the country at Deir Ezzor.

The Defense Reformation

Shyam Sankar

Introduction

As a nation, we are in an undeclared state of emergency.

Around 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, China militarized the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and Iran was allowed to pursue the bomb. A decade later, we have had more than 300 attacks on U.S. bases by Iran, 1,200 people slaughtered in a pogrom in Israel, an estimated 1 million casualties in brutal combat in Ukraine, and an unprecedented tempo of CCP phase zero operations in the Taiwan Straits.

This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it.

We have a peer adversary: China. “Near-Peer” is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America’s national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes. In the current environment, American industries can’t produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we’re in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems.

Penetrate, Disintegrate, and Exploit: The Israeli Counteroffensive at the Suez Canal, 1973

Nathan Jennings

With the adoption of multidomain operations (MDO) as its central operational concept, the US Army is modernizing its approach to more effectively compete against a variety of state and nonstate adversaries. This development offers a pathway forward for the service to, as argued by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, Jr., “keep focus on what is essential in Jointness—working seamlessly across domains, Services, and the Total Force.” Seeking to compel decision on increasingly lethal battlefields that challenge operational maneuver and formation endurance, the MDO concept—now codified in the Army’s capstone doctrine with corresponding changes in force structure—calls for novel interplay across the land, air, maritime, space, and cyber domains in order, as argued by the chairman, “to fight today’s battles but also to prepare for tomorrow’s wars.”

While the Army must implement MDO and prepare to fight across the spectrum of conflict, conventional and large-scale combat operations pose a particularly important set of challenges. The rise of peer threats around the world and their involvement in such conflicts raise the possibility that the United States may, if deterrence fails, need to fight a war of expanded scale and intensity. At the same time, there is gradually diminishing institutional memory or experience the United States military can draw on to know what to expect during large-scale combat operations. Thus, it is important to balance the requirement to retain hard-won counterinsurgency competencies learned in Iraq and Afghanistan with emerging imperatives to prepare for expeditionary campaigns against peer adversaries.

Lasers, Microwaves, Missiles, Guns Not On The Table For Domestic Drone Defense

Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman & Tyler Rogoway

The U.S. military isn’t currently interested in fielding kinetic and directed energy capabilities, such as laser and high-power microwave weapons, surface-to-air interceptors, and gun systems, for defending domestic bases and other critical infrastructure from rapidly growing and evolving drone threats. Instead, the focus is on electronic warfare and cyber warfare, and other ‘soft-kill’ options, at least for the time being.

Still often confusing legal and regulatory hurdles that limit how and when counter-drone systems of any kind can be employed within the homeland are key drivers behind the U.S. military’s current plans. Concerns about risks of collateral damage resulting from the use of anti-drone capabilities factor in heavily, too. This all, in turn, raises questions about the potential for serious gaps in the currently allowable but still largely non-existent domestic drone defense ecosystem.

U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) Deputy Test Director Jason Mayes spoke yesterday about these plans and related issues with a small group of reporters including from The War Zone at Falcon Peak 2025, a counter-drone experiment at Peterson Space Force Base. NORTHCOM is headquartered at Peterson, as is the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and the two share the same commander.

JUST IN: Air Force Activates New Command to Integrate Them All

Laura Heckmann

First announced in February, the Air Force activated a provisional Integrated Capabilities Command in September as a single entity to lead the service’s ambitious modernization efforts.

Gen. David Allvin, Air Force chief of staff, said during a fireside chat at the American Enterprise Institute Oct. 31 that the new command is “will be one of the most challenging to actually put into action, but it might be the most impactful thing we do in our Air Force for a while.”

The Integrated Capabilities Command was a response to a threat landscape that evolved from what Allvin called a single, “galvanizing” threat to a more complex landscape that stretched across multiple capabilities and commands that were not talking to each other.

An Air Force press release described the command as a means to accelerate force modernization efforts “against a backdrop of evolving global threats.” The provisional command will eventually activate operating locations and integrate modernization and sustainment subject matter experts “aligned in new teams focused on mission integration and operational concept definition, integrated capability development as well as force analysis and planning.”

Map Shows Russia's Biggest Ukraine Targets as Winter Approaches

Brendan Cole AND John Feng

Russian forces are likely to try to "exploit the cracks" in Kyiv's operations in the Donetsk region as the war heads into a third winter, a military analyst whose map shows what might be in store on the front in the coming months told Newsweek.

Days after Vladimir Putin's troops were pictured raising their flags over a municipal building in Selydove, the defense ministry in Moscow said Tuesday its troops had captured the important staging area for Ukraine's defenses.

Selydove is the largest town seized by Russia since the fall of Avdiivka and it is around 11 miles southeast of the logistics hub of Pokrovsk—a focus for Russian forces to meet one of Moscow's war aims of controlling the whole of the Donetsk oblast and the wider Donbas region.

Push for Pokrovsk

Emil Kastehelmi, an open-source intelligence expert with the Finland-based Black Bird Group, said that Russia is conducting an offensive in eastern and southern Donetsk on a 30-40 mile wide front—from Selydove to the villages east of Velyka Novosilka.

How America benefits from its security partnership with Israel

Bradley Bowman

Anyone who has spent time on a playground knows it is good to have friends when bullies come along. That also holds true in international relations.

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are increasingly cooperating with one another to undermine the United States and its interests. Unfortunately, despite our large economy and powerful military, the U.S. lacks sufficient resources to confront this growing axis of aggressors alone.

Fortunately, the United States has an unparalleled network of allies with whom we can work to defend common interests and counter common adversaries. In the Middle East, America’s most reliable, capable and motivated ally is Israel.

Years ago, while working as a Senate national security adviser accompanying a congressional delegation to Israel, I asked a U.S. military colonel assigned as an attache to the Israeli military what Americans should know about our relationship with Israel. He told me that we Americans get far more than we give in the relationship with Israel.

This Is Your Body on Sugar

Alice Callahan

For all of human history, the natural sugars in fruits, vegetables and other plants have served us well. They have provided essential fuel for our body’s most important processes.

But now that sugars have been processed into more potent forms and added to so many foods and drinks — sodas, candies, breakfast cereals, salad dressings, breads — most of us are getting more sugar than our bodies were meant to handle.

Over time, excess consumption of these added sugars can increase the risk of health problems. Here’s how that may play out in various parts of your body.

The Mouth

The potential issues from added sugars start in your mouth. Here, certain bacteria break sugars down and produce acids, which can eventually erode your tooth enamel.

Your saliva is able to neutralize these acids, but if you keep consuming sugary foods and drinks throughout the day, it won’t be able to keep up. Acid levels will remain high, increasing your risk for cavities.

Space and Cyber Warfare as One

John J. Klein

Russian aggression against Ukraine highlights the interconnectedness of the space and cyberspace domains. In 2022, Russia conducted a cyberattack against Viasat, a California-based provider of high-speed satellite broadband services and secure networking systems covering military and commercial markets worldwide. The cyberattack against Viasat was meant to cripple Ukrainian command and control ahead of the ground invasion of Russian forces the following day. Lessons learned from this event include that conflicts may begin in the space and cyberspace domains before the ground war and that integrated space and cyberspace operations can work together to achieve combined military effect. As a result, the next administration must focus on combined space-cyberspace national policies and defense strategies addressing the interconnectedness between the two operational domains.

Of all the operational domains, cyberspace has the most significance for space operations. Generally understood, cyberspace is the world’s computer networks (both open and closed), the computers themselves, the transactional networks that send data for financial transactions, and the networks comprising control systems that enable machines to interact with one another. Space capabilities and services often rely on these same computer networks, information systems, and communication architectures to exchange space-enabled data and information.

The Case for a New Arab Peace Initiative

Marwan Muasher

Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, American officials have insisted that the eventual creation of a Palestinian state that would exist side by side with Israel is the only way to end the conflict in the Middle East. “The only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution,” declared President Joe Biden during his March 2024 State of the Union address. In May, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that “a two-state solution is the only way to ensure a strong, secure, Jewish, democratic state of Israel, as well as a future of dignity, security, and prosperity for the Palestinian people.” And throughout her presidential campaign this year, including after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July, Vice President Kamala Harris has promoted a two-state solution, describing it as the “only path” forward.

But to many people—especially Palestinians—these calls feel divorced from reality. After suffering years of death and destruction and decades of repression, most Palestinians do not believe that a two-state solution is viable or forthcoming. In fact, polls have suggested that a majority of Palestinians now support armed resistance as the way to end the conflict. It is easy to see why, even without a year of war, they might be disillusioned. The United States has spent decades peddling a two-state solution while supplying Israel with arms, allowing it to expand settlements in the occupied territories, and permitting it to seize more Palestinian land and natural resources. Washington has backed Israel internationally almost no matter what the country does. It has, in other words, consistently ignored the rights of the Palestinian people.

Four scenarios for the end of the war in Ukraine

John Lough

An endless war?

It is difficult to imagine peace during war. This is particularly true at present when Russia has dug in for a long war and continues to target drones and missiles on Ukrainian cities, killing and maiming civilians and inflicting untold damage on the country’s economy.

Understandably, many Ukrainians fear not just a long war, but a potentially ‘endless’ war. As the Russian historian Sergei Medvedev has observed, Russia finally found its ultimate national idea after a search lasting three decades – since the collapse of the USSR – and that idea is war.

For today’s Russian authorities, war is a tool for preserving the cohesion of society and ensuring the legitimacy of their rule even if this requires increased repression. However, although the Putin regime is brittle like most personal autocracies that lack reliable mechanisms for succession, the country appears far from a situation comparable to 1917 when war weakened Tsar Nicolas II’s grip on power and made revolution unstoppable. On the surface, Russia appears both equipped and motivated to continue the war for several years if necessary.

America’s Containment Foreign Policy No Longer Works – OpEd

F. Andrew Wolf, Jr.

Forget the ‘Grand Schemes,’ he said, the world was now too complex. Try, instead, he suggested, “for a thoughtful paragraph or two.” – George F. Kennan (1994)

Why is it that American foreign policy experts continue to reiterate (perhaps regurgitate would be more apt) a seemingly inherited trait that has lost its relevance? Moreover, this trait perpetuates a widespread belief that protecting vital U.S. interests abroad depends on the perception that America is willing to intervene irrespective of the magnitude of the interests, the power of the perceived adversary, or on whose territory the engagement might occur.

This mantra of the foreign policy elite sounds suspiciously like something George F. Kennan might have uttered back when I was old enough to fight in Vietnam – but too consumed with Cold War propaganda to know better (and this continues today with many young Americans). Ed Hermann and Noam Chomsky would later call this propaganda effect ‘manufactured consent’ in their 1988 seminal text, Manufacturing Consent.

Containment

The narrative and its attendant propaganda have their genesis in a Cold War era initiative called ‘Containment.’ The latter was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the post-World War II era – ostensibly to prevent the spread of communism.

The theory asserted that if any country in a region fell to communism, other and potentially more strategically significant states would soon follow. The experience of the Vietnam War and its aftermath should have dissuaded American policymakers today from accepting this principle. The latter, after years of ineffectiveness (and afraid politically to lose face by admitting victory was impossible) pointlessly wreaked destruction on Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia and Laos

Vietnam ultimately fell to communist Hanoi in 1975 after a 10-year US military campaign fought mostly from the Pentagon with 50,000+ American soldiers dead and millions of Vietnamese. The overarching result was a somewhat humbled US and a foreign policy based on “containment” that would eventually reveal its ‘non universal applicability.’

A Woman in the White House

Linda Robinson

For the United States to have a woman president come January would be consequential, perhaps even transformational. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has not emphasized her gender or her biracial identity during her campaign or, indeed, her career. Like other women leaders I have interviewed in the past two years and all over the world, from Denmark and Estonia to Malawi and Nigeria, she wants to be seen simply as a leader who happens to be a woman. Forty percent of countries have had a woman leader, but Harris’s governance of one of the world’s most powerful states would send a thundering message across the globe. According to the 2023 Gender Social Norms Index, a UN project that compiles survey data from more than 90 countries, 49 percent of people around the world still think that men make better political leaders than women. A Harris presidency would be an opportunity to put this persistent prejudice to rest—and to give women and girls everywhere the confidence that they, too, can run for and win high office.

The message that a Harris victory would send would be even more resonant at this existential juncture in U.S. and world history. Americans face a stark choice between Harris and former President Donald Trump. Harris is a former prosecutor who emphasizes that her entire career has been devoted to upholding U.S. law; her opponent, Trump, has blatantly disregarded the Constitution, laws, and social norms that have long defined American democracy. Many U.S. allies and partners are now striving to defend their democracies against internal and external threats while the autocrats who lead many of the world’s largest countries are trampling on human rights, invading their neighbors, and destabilizing the rules-based global order. A Trump victory would be a boon to this axis of autocrats, whereas Harris would undoubtedly champion the defense of democracy and firmly position the United States on the side of international norms. She would bolster those fighting against tyranny, including the democratic movements in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and elsewhere that have women at their helms.

Israel Brings Its Gaza Strategy to Lebanon

Mohanad Hage Ali

During the past month, Israel has surprised Hezbollah—along with Iran, its sponsor, and the rest of the world—with several high-profile intelligence and military successes. A technically sophisticated sabotage of Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie-talkies enabled Israel to cripple the organization’s communications network. What’s more, Israel claims that its airstrikes have destroyed a significant portion of Hezbollah’s missile stockpiles, which had been intended to deter another destructive cross-border war. And perhaps most consequentially, a broad Israeli assassination campaign has wiped out much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including its popular and charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel’s tactical accomplishments in Lebanon have been widely acknowledged. Yet many observers have been puzzled by the absence of any practical Israeli plan for ending the conflict, particularly one that might lead to a lasting political settlement. The apparent disjunction between means and ends is especially notable given the steep toll that Israel’s recent military successes have exacted on Lebanon’s Shiite communities. Much as Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas have been ruinous for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Israel appears to be conducting its operations in Lebanon with little concern for the harm to civilian populations or infrastructure. Entire Shiite towns and neighborhoods have been destroyed, and according to the Lebanese health ministry, 127 children and 261 women were killed during the first five weeks of the recent Israeli campaign. In Lebanon as in Gaza—albeit on a lesser scale, so far—Israel appears to have settled on a strategy of collective punishment that holds civilian populations responsible for the actions of the militant groups that operate in their midst.

This Is a Glimpse of the Future of AI Robots

Will Knight

The idea of a robot that does a wide range of household chores, from unloading the dryer to folding laundry to cleaning up a messy table, has long seemed like pure science fiction—perhaps most famously embodied by the 1960s fantasy that was Rosey in The Jetsons.

Physical Intelligence, a startup in San Francisco, has shown that such a dream might actually not be so far off, demonstrating a single artificial intelligence model that has learned to do a wide range of useful home chores—including all of the above—by being trained on an unprecedented amount of data.

The feat raises the prospect of bringing something as magical and generally capable as other AI models like ChatGPT into the physical world.

The advent of large language models (LLMs)—general-purpose learning algorithms fed vast swaths of text from books and the internet—has given chatbots vastly more general capabilities. Physical Intelligence aims to create something similarly capable in the physical world by training a similar kind of algorithm with enormous amounts of robotic data instead.

3D-Printing in Conflict Zones: A Game-Changer?

Rueben Dass

Introduction

While 3D printing has largely been used for peaceful purposes in both commercial and engineering applications, it has also been used by state and non-state actors to develop and manufacture weapons. 3D printing is rapidly becoming a key aspect in security and military-related affairs as it is being adopted in conflict zones such as Ukraine and Myanmar to aid military forces in battle. This Insight highlights some of the ways in which 3D printing has been used in conflict zones, the advantages and disadvantages of this technology, and its future projection, particularly within the sphere of war and conflict.

Types of Use in Conflict Zones

The use of 3D printing in conflict zones can be broadly divided into two categories: offensive and non-offensive. This Insight will only focus on offensive use. Non-offensive uses of 3D printing in conflict zones include medical applications to manufacture tourniquets and construction.

Obstructive Warfare: Applications and Risks for AI in Future Military Operations

Amos C. Fox

Introduction

This paper introduces a new theory of warfare — obstructive warfare — to sidestep the wide-ranging sensationalism associated with today’s new and emerging technology and instead provide an alternative assessment, based in causal logic, for how AI can be used in military operations. Obstructive warfare is anchored in the belief that all land wars carry with them a set of nearly unavoidable challenges, which are outlined later in this paper. Military forces cannot overcome these challenges solely with “attacks from above,” nor can battlefield transparency prevent these challenges from materializing. The challenges of land war often cause states to fight wars positionally, or through the purposeful use of movement in combination with location(s) to dislocate an adversary’s strength, accentuate one’s own power and generate favourable situational warfighting asymmetries to defeat or destroy the adversary (Fox 2017, 18). Considering positional warfare’s proclivity for forceoriented military operations that use movement, location and the application of power (i.e., military firepower), it is easy to understand how this type of warfare accelerates wars to an attritional character.

4 November 2024

Having Secured External Budgetary Support, Maldives Plans Sweeping Reforms – Analysis

P. K. Balachandran

Of the US$168 million budget for 2025, Indian aid accounts for US$104 million

Backed by substantial foreign budgetary assistance, Maldivian President Dr.Mohamed Muizzu has announced sweeping administrative and judicial reforms.

The Maldivian budget for 2025 is for MVR 2.5 billion (US$ 168 million). MVR 2.3 billion (US$ 149.8 million) is expected to be received from friendly countries with India accounting for US$ 104 million of it.

Backed financially by friendly countries and international institutions and facing no geopolitical tensions, President Muizzu has declared a commitment to rectifying the missteps of previous administrations, a top official said.

“The aim is to restore public trust besides improving the lives of Maldivians across the 1200 island Indian Ocean archipelago,” the official said.

Dr. Muizzu identified several critical areas that had suffered neglect. To restore economic stability, he is mulling stimulants to growth, reduction in unemployment, and encouraging foreign investment. He plans to expand access to essential services, improving hospital infrastructure, and introduce programs aimed at reducing healthcare costs for citizens. “No one should have to choose between financial stability and their health,” the President stated.

Recognizing the importance of education in fostering national development, Dr. Muizzu has proposed increasing the funding for schools, improving teacher training, and enhancing curriculum standards.

India’s Ascending Role for U.S. Economic Security

Richard M. Rossow

While U.S. elections are primarily driven by domestic issues, the policy positions taken by the winner are relevant for a wide array of global partners. In the case of India, for example, the United States and India share concerns about overreliance on China as a dominant supplier of manufactured goods. Consequently, Indian firms have been ramping up investments in the United States, actions significant for both countries moving forward. The next U.S. administration should take the time to meet with international partners such as India before staking out policy positions related to domestic industrial and trade policy. Ignoring U.S. partners in the early days could have repercussions when U.S. officials engage on vital global issues later.

A deeper economic relationship with India is in the United States’ interests for several reasons. First, India is expected to continue growing faster than any other large nation in the foreseeable future, with growth expected to top 7 percent in 2024. BlackRock recently predicted that India will leap over Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy in just three years. In 2023, Goldman Sachs predicted that the Indian economy will be the world’s second-largest by 2075, at an estimated $52.5 trillion. For U.S. companies looking to grow, India’s topline numbers draw attention—even if the practicalities of doing business in India remain challenging at times.

The Tamil Tigers Were Completely Crushed. Is Hamas Next? - Analysis

Ajai Sahni

The trajectory of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka—widely known as the Tamil Tigers—is often cited by proponents of Israel’s stated war aim of entirely eliminating Hamas from Gaza. The Tamil Tigers were one of the most effective and brutal terrorist formations in the world, responsible for the murder of a sitting Sri Lankan president, a former Indian prime minister on Indian soil, and an unending array of prominent Sri Lankans. Eventually, a decimating war waged by the Sri Lankan state between 2006 and 2009—known as the Eelam IV war—resulted in the LTTE’s comprehensive defeat.

But the Tamil precedent is much more ambivalent than the most common references suggest. The precedent indicates that the survival of Hamas will largely be determined by two factors that are themselves still undetermined, and which may operate in tension with one another.

Erosion Of Women’s Rights And Gender Equality In Afghanistan: Impact Of Taliban Governance Since 2021- Analysis

Abdul Wasi Popalzay, Sofia Aslam and Sakshi Sharma

I. Introduction

The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021 brought about a significant regression in women’s rights and gender equality, dismantling two decades of progress made in education, employment, and public life. Afghanistan, once on a path toward greater gender inclusivity, saw its social and political landscape shift dramatically as the Taliban imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Human Rights Watch (2021) reported that girls were barred from secondary education, and women were excluded from most public sector jobs.

Prior to the Taliban’s return, around 3.5 million girls were enrolled in schools, and women made up 28% of Afghanistan’s parliament, showcasing the advancements achieved by 2020 (World Bank, 2020). These gains, however, were quickly reversed under the Taliban’s regime, which has enforced policies of exclusion and repression, resulting in what scholars like Kandiyoti (2022) describe as “gender apartheid.”

The denial of women’s rights not only affects their personal freedoms but also threatens Afghanistan’s socio-economic stability. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) projected that Afghanistan’s GDP could shrink by 20% within the first year of Taliban rule, with women disproportionately impacted by their exclusion from the workforce (UNDP, 2021). This erosion of rights raises important research questions: what are the specific impacts of Taliban governance on women’s rights and gender equality, and how do these restrictions affect Afghanistan’s broader socio-economic fabric? Addressing these questions is crucial for understanding the intersection between governance, gender oppression, and human rights under Taliban rule. The international community has condemned the Taliban’s actions, yet global responses have often been inconsistent due to geopolitical interests (Human Rights Watch, 2022).

Xi Jinping’s Axis of Losers

Stephen Hadley

The United States is contending with the most challenging international environment it has faced since at least the Cold War and perhaps since World War II. One of the most disconcerting features of this environment is the burgeoning cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some policymakers and commentators see in this cooperation the beginnings of a twenty-first-century axis, one that, like the German-Italian-Japanese axis of the twentieth century, will plunge the world into a global war. Others foresee not World War III but a slew of separate conflicts scattered around the globe. Either way, the result is a world at war—the situation is that serious.

What should be done about this cooperation is another matter. Some strategists argue for ruthless prioritization, focusing on the members of the axis that represent the greatest threats. Others believe that only a comprehensive effort will succeed. But the best strategy would borrow elements of both approaches, acknowledging that China is the primary long-term concern for U.S. national security strategy—“the pacing threat,” in the U.S. Defense Department’s framing—but also a different kind of global actor than its rogue-state partners. Accordingly, Washington’s aim should be to make clear to Chinese President Xi Jinping how counterproductive and costly to Beijing’s interests these new relationships will turn out to be. That means effectively countering Iran, North Korea, and Russia in their own regions, thereby demonstrating to China that tethering itself to a bunch of losers is hardly a path to global influence.

Understanding the Middle Corridor

Axel de Vernou

On October 21, Bahnoperator Austria and KTZ Express, a subsidiary of Kazakhstan Railways, signed a memorandum outlining their intention to regularly ship cargo to one another through the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), also known as the Middle Corridor. This is the latest development in the vertiginous growth of the TITR, already circumventing trade via Russia and laying the groundwork for further cooperation between the West and Central Asia.

Goods originating in China that flow through the TITR can expect to traverse Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, where they then either branch off to Turkiye or travel across the Black Sea, finishing in Bulgaria, Romania, or Ukraine. From Turkiye, these goods can be expedited to the Mediterranean, and from Ukraine, they can move forward to Poland. Conspicuously absent from this arrangement is Russia, which remains the bastion of the Northern Corridor.

As Rovshan Rustamov, Chairman of Azerbaijan Railways CJSC, pointed out in an interview last month, significant shifts are taking place in global logistics markets. Persistent sanctions from the Ukraine War have dissuaded companies from trading with Russia. Accordingly, the TITR saw an incredible 70 percent surge in freight volumes from January to September 2024.

Countries adjacent to the corridor have demonstrated interest in increasing their involvement. For instance, Turkmenistan and the European Union (EU) launched a Coordination Platform to integrate Central Asian countries into the TITR further and advance the infrastructure projects that make the corridor possible in the first place. Indeed, congestion points, especially in Kazakhstan, have produced undesirable border wait times that may push companies to look for alternative routes.

America’s “One Somalia” Policy is a Gift to China

Michael Rubin

On December 13, 2018, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the Trump administration’s new Africa strategy. “Great power competitors, namely China and Russia, are rapidly expanding their financial and political influence across Africa,” he said, adding, “China uses bribes, opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands.” He cited Djibouti, whose debt to China was nearly half the country’s gross domestic product, and noted that after China inaugurated its first overseas naval base in Djibouti, it began blinding U.S. pilots landing nearby with lasers.

While President Joe Biden sought to define his administration in opposition to Donald Trump, he accepted the Trump team’s concern about China in Africa. “The People’s Republic of China…sees the region as an important arena to challenge the rules-based international order, advance its own narrow commercial and geopolitical interests, undermine transparency and openness, and weaken U.S. relations with African peoples and governments,” Biden’s own Africa strategy declared, even as the Biden team chose to emphasize global problems like climate change and global health.

It is easy to voice an agenda and policy priorities; it is harder to implement them. Absent continuous effort from the National Security Council, institutional inertia triumphs, and individual biases overshadow the national interest. This has been the case with the Horn of Africa, where shortsighted agendas and ham-handed implementation have empowered China at the expense of U.S. national interests, counterterrorism, and democracy.

How Does This End? The Future of the U.S.-China Competition

Hal Brands, Jude Blanchette & Lily McElwee

This new report explores whether the United States should more clearly define the end goals for its China policy. While some argue that the United States should aim to “win” in the strategic competition against China, others advocate for a managed competition, avoiding conflict while strengthening the global rules-based order. This report advances the debate with contributions from over 20 leading experts on China and grand strategy, aiming to deepen discussion on how the United States should navigate an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape.

Capture the (red) flag: An inside look into China’s hacking contest ecosystem

Dakota Cary and Eugenio Benincasa

Introduction

Boxers do not train by reading books. Instead of in a library, they are found floating around the ring, throwing punches into bags, dodging their coach’s padded hands, and repeating their moves for hundreds of hours—all for a fight that lasts up to thirty-six minutes. Training in the ring is crucial for a fighter.

That same exposure to hands-on practice, in addition to classroom learning, is critical for cyber operators. While a degree from a prestigious institution can help someone land an interview at a tech company, companies screen candidates via coding interviews to check for actual, demonstrable capabilities. In cybersecurity, hacking competitions often serve this same role—letting students and experts prove their abilities in a safe, legal environment.

China has built the world’s most comprehensive ecosystem for CTF competitions. Hacking competitions build community, showcase talent, stimulate innovation, and allow participants to get hands-on experience.

New Vehicles, Face Paint and a 1,200-Foot Fall: The U.S. Army Prepares for War With China

Helene Cooper

Early one morning this month, 864 Army paratroopers bundled into C-17 transport planes at a base in Alaska and took off for a Great Power War exercise between three volcanic mountains on Hawaii’s Big Island.

Only 492 made it. Some of the C-17s had trouble with their doors, while others were forced to land early. A few of the parachutists who did make it sprained ankles or suffered head trauma. And one — a 19-year-old private — began to fall quickly when his chute did not open.

Across the field, shouts of “pull your reserve” could be heard before the young private hit the ground and medics ran to treat him. The horrifying scene and its aftermath encapsulate every jumper’s worst nightmare.

But Pvt. Second Class Erik Partida’s 1,200-foot fall was also a stark reality check as the U.S. Army transforms itself, and its hundreds of thousands of young men and women, for yet another war, this one a potential conflict with China.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)