Indian Strategic Studies

24 June 2024

Ultrasecure comms could give special operators a leg up

LAUREN C. WILLIAMS

Quantum computing gets a lot of attention for its potential to break encryption, but it might also make special operators’ communications more secure than ever.

Late last year, a company called Rhea Space Activity demonstrated its quantum communications prototype, QLOAK, in Norway for representatives of U.S. Special Operations Command, Norwegian Special Operations Command, and the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

QLOAK promises the ability to “bolt on” to existing laser communications terminals and enable quantum communications, using free-space optics to establish secure links over large distances.

In the October 2023 demonstration, the the Washington, D.C.,-based company sent a simple, highly encrypted message: “grundighet gir trygghet”—or in English, “thoroughness gives security."

Cameo Lance, the company’s co-founder and COO, said the Norway demonstration was a “pivotal step” that “showed we were capable of free-space optical communications outside of a pure laboratory environment.”

It also nodded toward a similar capability to China, which in 2016 reportedly linked two ground stations 1,000 kilometers apart.

“Interoperable communication is critical in the Arctic but is extremely difficult to implement,” a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesperson said when asked about the demonstration. “The Arctic environment presents significant challenges for military operations – harsh temperatures, a predominantly sea and ice environment, poor terrestrial data and communications infrastructure due to a lack of large population centers, and complex ongoing climate, environmental, political, economic, and cultural developments.

RSA’s prototype uses lasers instead of radio signals to bounce signals off satellites, increasing the data rate and decreasing the likelihood of interception.

How AI is turning satellite imagery into a window on the future

PATRICK TUCKER

Satellite image providers say that new artificial intelligence tools, coupled with more and faster satellite data, will enable image providers to much better anticipate events of geopolitical significance and notify customers and operators of impending crises.

“Analysis is really great, but it's mainly retroactive, a forensic capability of looking back in time,” Planet CEO William Marshall said in an interview last week. “In principle, generative AI models…can leverage satellite data to predict what is likely to happen: ‘You're likely to have a drought here that might lead to civil unrest.’”

Today, relatively simple AI processes such as machine learning can pick out things like cars or ships, but identifying trends across large amounts of imagery remains a heavily human endeavor. Analysis of some image sets—say, to understand where an adversary force might attempt to stage an invasion—can take months.

Planet, whose satellite imagery helped the world understand the preparations for and execution of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has long experimented with various artificial intelligence models. But Marshall said that recent breakthroughs in large language models promise to enable AI to do more and more complex analysis—and far faster than humans.

“We're going with these large language models, I think is more and more towards getting that sort of accuracy within minutes or so—if you've already got the imagery,” he said.

Troy Tomon, Planet’s senior vice president of product and software engineering, said models can be trained not just to make sense of a given data set but to help humans find data relevant to their problems.

TikTok confirms it offered US government a 'kill switch'

Imran Rahman-Jones, Technology reporter

TikTok says it offered the US government the power to shut the platform down in an attempt to address lawmakers' data protection and national security concerns.

It disclosed the "kill switch" offer, which it made in 2022, as it began its legal fight against legislation that will ban the app in America unless Chinese parent company ByteDance sells it.

The law has been introduced because of concerns TikTok might share US user data with the Chinese government - claims it and ByteDance have always denied.

TikTok and ByteDance are urging the courts to strike the legislation down.

"This law is a radical departure from this country’s tradition of championing an open Internet, and sets a dangerous precedent allowing the political branches to target a disfavored speech platform and force it to sell or be shut down," they argued in their legal submission.

They also claimed the US government refused to engage in any serious settlement talks after 2022, and pointed to the "kill switch" offer as evidence of the lengths they had been prepared to go.

TikTok says the mechanism would have allowed the government the "explicit authority to suspend the platform in the United States at the US government's sole discretion" if it did not follow certain rules.

How AI Might Affect Decisionmaking in a National Security Crisis

Christopher S. Chivvis and Jennifer Kavanagh

The American Statecraft Program develops and advances ideas for a more disciplined U.S. foreign policy aligned with American values and cognizant of the limits of American power in a more competitive world.

Imagine a meeting of the U.S. president’s National Security Council where a new military adviser sits in one of the chairs—virtually, at least, because this adviser is an advanced AI system. This may seem like the stuff of fantasy, but the United States could at some point in the not-too-distant future have the capability to generate and deploy this type of technology. An AI adviser is unlikely to replace traditional members of the National Security Council—currently made up of the secretaries of defense, state, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But an AI presence at the table could have some fascinating—and challenging—implications for how decisions are made. The effects might be even more significant if the United States knew that its adversaries had similar technology at their disposal.

To get a grip on how the proliferation of artificial intelligence might affect national security decisionmaking at the highest levels of government, we designed a hypothetical crisis in which China imposed a blockade on Taiwan and then convened a group of technology and regional experts to think through the opportunities and challenges that the addition of AI would bring in such a scenario. We looked in particular at how the proliferation of advanced AI capabilities around the world could affect the speed of decisionmaking, perception and misperception, groupthink, and bureaucratic politics. Our conclusions were not always what we expected.

AI Could Slow Down Decisionmaking

Because AI systems may be able to accumulate and synthesize information more quickly than humans and identify trends in large datasets that humans might miss, it could save valuable analytic time while offering human decisionmakers better-informed grounds for their judgements. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks argued in November 2023, “AI-enabled systems can help accelerate the speed of commanders’ decisions and improve the quality and accuracy of those decisions.”

The Art of Irregular Warfare Campaigning: A Job for Which Headquarters or Agency?

Paul Burton

Irregular Warfare (IW) Campaigning is the art of using available resources by the Department of Defense and other Agencies in a series of linked actions, over an extended period, to eventually gain a marked advantage over your adversary, who will also be referred to as peer competitors. This long-term strategy requires continuity of desired end states through both political administrations and military command rotations. This was done by and large during the Cold War, albeit with course adjustments; the key was that the majority of America never questioned that the Soviet Union was our number one enemy. This basic common focus during the Cold War helped facilitate a unity of purpose and effort from different organizations, if not a unity of command and priority of tasks. So, the question is what agency or headquarters should take the lead in IW campaigning in the present multi-polar complex world?

Campaigning for conventional warfare is complex, but campaigning for IW is rocket science. Presently, we are without a school to teach this type of rocket science, and an organization to launch the rocket. The complexities of IW campaigning require staffs and agencies that understand IW. It necessitates that the organizations conducting the campaign design to make a mental and cultural shift from the last 30 years from what they have done. For example, there are only a couple of individuals on active duty that served in junior positions during the Cold War and the concepts of IW are not taught in sufficient breadth and depth by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the other agencies to staff the organizations that will be conducting the campaigns. It also implies that the executing organizations will underwrite risk and failures. Additionally, there is the age-old problem of different guidance and doctrine from different organizations and time periods. The new JP 1-1 published August 2023, states “Campaigning is the persistent conduct and sequencing of military activities aligned with other instruments of national power to achieve prioritized objectives over time through global campaigns, combatant command (CCMD) campaigns, and associated families of contingency plans. Combatant commanders (CCDRs) campaign to deter attacks, assure allies and partners, compete below armed conflict, prepare for and respond to threats, protect internationally agreed-upon norms, and, when necessary, prevail.” This implies that the CCMD is responsible for the regional IW campaign drawing on interagency support across the instruments of national power to win the campaign. Ultimately, the CCMD has the responsibility for their theater, but which sub-unified commander should be the main effort and in what phase? Additionally, should the DOD be a supporting agency short of armed conflict? This necessitates an agency that both understands the roles and missions of DOD resources and can appropriately assign objectives to the DOD in support of broader IW objectives.

23 June 2024

The J-20 Challenge: Can India Bridge the Fighter Jet Gap With China?

Karan Sharma

Recent developments have highlighted a growing strategic concern for India as China has deployed its Chengdu J-20, a fifth-generation twin-engine stealth fighter, in Shigatse, a strategic airbase in Tibet with close proximity to the eastern sector of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) the de facto and highly contested border between China and India. This stealthy air superiority fighter, designed with precision strike capabilities, represents a significant advancement in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). With the J-20’s increasing presence near the LAC, India faces a new set of challenges that require a comprehensive reassessment of its aerial defense capabilities and strategic planning.

The Rise of the J-20: China’s Stealth Powerhouse

The J-20 program has progressed at an impressive rate since its inception, resulting in the production of approximately 250 aircraft, with over 200 currently in active service. The J-20 series includes three main variants: the initial production model J-20, the thrust-vectoring J-20A, and the twin-seat J-20S. The latter two remain in development, although the J-20A may soon be entering the early production phase.

Production rates have increased from 30 to 100 aircraft per year, and conservative estimates suggest that the PLAAF’s J-20 fleet could surpass 800 aircraft by 2030. This would potentially outnumber the entire fighter jet fleet of the Indian Air Force (IAF), posing a significant strategic challenge.

Terrorist Attack at Reasi Sets Alarm Bells Ringing in India’s Security Establishment

Sudha Ramachandran

Last week was a bloody one in Jammu and Kashmir. Between June 9 and 12, militants carried out four attacks in the union territory’s Jammu region, three of them in a span of 24 hours.

A fifth attack happened in Bandipora in the Kashmir region on June 17.

The serial bloodletting began in Reasi district on June 9, when terrorists opened fire on a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims to the Vaishno Devi shrine. The driver lost control of the bus, causing it to veer off the road and plunge into a gorge. Nine people were killed and 33 others injured.

The attack in Reasi happened at around 6:15 p.m., less than an hour before Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third consecutive term in New Delhi.

Three attacks followed in quick succession on June 11-12. One was at a village in Kathua near the International Border between India and Pakistan. Two militants and a Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed in the gunfight that followed. There were two separate attacks on checkpoints at Gandoh and Chattergala in Doda district resulting in injury to seven security personnel.

‘I warned the CIA about Afghanistan’s collapse — and was ignored’ Biden only enflamed the situation

Tam Hussein

On 26 August 2021, shortly after the Taliban conquered Kabul, Abdur Rahman Logari detonated his suicide vest near the Abbey Gate in the city’s airport, killing 170 men, women and children who were trying to flee the country. Two days later, a US drone strike killed an entire Afghan family in the mistaken belief that the target was Logari. Joe Biden would later describe the Abbey Gate attack — Isis’s most successful operation in Afghanistan - as "the hardest of the hard days" of his presidency. Harder days, however, were soon to come.

While a recent US military review concluded that Logari's plot was not preventable, the findings were less a vindication of America's chaotic withdrawal than a reminder of how the US- Afghan relationship had broken down. As US forces withdrew, many afghan government officials told me that they had warned their US counterparts about the threat of Islamic State.

Vietnam Welcomes Putin for State Visit Criticized by U.S.

NGUYEN DIEU TU UYEN AND JOHN BOUDREAU

Vietnam welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin, underlining its decades-old relationship with Moscow in the face of U.S. criticism over the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Putin arrived in Hanoi on Thursday from North Korea, where he signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Kim Jong Un who vowed to “unconditionally” support Russia in the war.

“The visit demonstrates that Vietnam actively implements its foreign policy with the spirit of independence, self-reliance, diversification, multilateralism,” according to a statement on Vietnam’s government website.

Vietnam and Russia have ties going back decades to the Soviet Union. Hanoi is brushing aside Western criticism of its invitation to Putin, who last visited Vietnam in 2017 when it hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.

The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, in a statement Monday, said “no country should give Putin a platform to promote his war of aggression and otherwise allow him to normalize his atrocities.”

This Is What Would Happen if China Invaded Taiwan

DMITRI ALPEROVITCH

The winter season in Taiwan—lasting from November till March—is great for surfers. It’s no Bali or Hawaii, as the size of the waves and their consistency may vary, but the Northeast Monsoon, which brings in the cold China Coastal Current water into the Taiwan Strait, where it meets the warm Kuroshio Branch Current coming from the south, is known to form some significant waves. The Taiwan Strait is only about a hundred meters deep—shallow enough that during ice ages and the time of glaciers the island of Taiwan was physically connected to the Chinese mainland; but even in the modern era the 200-mile-long passage—which varies in width from about 100 nautical miles down to just 70 nautical miles and is one of the most vital shipping routes in the world—is known for frequent storms, large swells, and blinding fog and is bedeviled by annual summer typhoons from roughly May to October. Between the typhoons in the summer and the stormy high-wave winter season, there is no predictably perfect and easy time to launch a large-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, especially with the strait registering about 150 days a year of winds above 20 knots, rough seas for amphibious ships and landing craft. Any landing on Taiwan’s windy, shallow, and rocky beaches during that time is fraught and risky. Which is why, in the end, China decided to forego a beach landing and attempt an air assault on the island’s port and airfield facilities, the seizure of which would allow for rapid arrival of follow-on troops and logistical supplies to facilitate a successful occupation.

Singapore Is in Perfect Position to Court AI Companies From China

Grace Shao

Singapore is once again attracting talent and capital from the wider Asian region, especially from China, as artificial intelligence companies race to develop the next super app. The Lion City has in the last few years been a top destination for big tech firms to set up their Asia-Pacific headquarters as geopolitical tension heats up between the United States and China, and domestic regulations intensifies in China. Singapore is now a major hub for ByteDance, Google, Netflix, Shein, and others.

The Singapore Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) announced a GenAI Sandbox program in February to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across industries in adopting AI and offering a grant to be part of a three-month trial run program.

Tribe, a “startup ecosystem builder,” and Digital Industry Singapore, a joint office between the Economic Development Board, Enterprise Singapore, and the IMDA, also recently announced a collaboration with U.S. tech giant Nvidia in establishing an AI-focused accelerator program, showcasing multiple arms of the government bolstering the enhancement of the AI ecosystem in Singapore.

CHEAP AND LETHAL: THE PENTAGON’S PLAN FOR THE NEXT DRONE WAR

Nick Turse

WORRIED ABOUT a potential war with China, the Pentagon is turning to a new class of weapons to fight the numerically superior People’s Liberation Army: drones, lots and lots of drones.

In August 2023, the Defense Department unveiled Replicator, its initiative to field thousands of “all-domain, attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems”: Pentagon-speak for low-cost (and potentially AI-driven) machines — in the form of self-piloting ships, large robot aircraft, and swarms of smaller kamikaze drones — that they can use and lose en masse to overwhelm Chinese forces.

Earlier this month, two Pentagon offices leading this charge announced that four nontraditional weapons makers had been chosen for another drone program, with test flights planned for later this year. The companies building this “Enterprise Test Vehicle,” or ETV, will have to prove that their drone can fly over 500 miles and deliver a “kinetic payload,” with a focus on weapons that are low-cost, quick to build, and modular, according to a 2023 solicitation for proposals and a recent announcement from the Air Force Armament Directorate and the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s off-the-shelf acceleration arm. Many analysts believe that the ETV initiative may be connected to the Replicator program. DIU did not return a request for clarification prior to publication.

China's demographics will be fine through mid-century

NOAH SMITH

In discussions about China’s economy, the issue of demographics comes up quite a lot. In 2022, China’s population began to decrease (and coincidentally, India’s population surpassed China’s). The country’s fertility rate, which had already fallen below replacement levels decades earlier, fell again recently, to just 1.09 — one of the lowest rates in the world, and even lower than Japan.

Now, I absolutely do think this is a problem for China in the long term. In fact, China is far from unique in this regard — every developed country is aging rapidly, and most developing countries aren’t far behind.

In fact, the shrinking of the population isn’t actually the problem — it’s the aging. Rising old-age dependency ratios do put a huge economic burden on working people, and an aging workforce probably does reduce innovation and productivity growth. This is true despite automation. A world top-heavy with old people will be a world where young people have to toil harder and harder, all over the globe.

A Global South with Chinese characteristics

Niva Yau

Introduction

At the peak of China’s economic growth toward the end of the 2010s, Beijing began to advocate for an alternative model of governance that prioritizes economic development and rejects the centrality of the protection of individual rights and “Western” democratic processes. At the heart of this new push to legitimize authoritarian governance was the example of China’s own remarkably rapid economic development under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership and an implicit assertion that such successful growth legitimizes not only China’s own autocratic system, but also other non-democratic political systems. The global implications of this development have grown clearer as Beijing has embarked on a steadily expanding mission to promote its political system alongside its economic success in countries across the Global South.

As early as 1985, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping explained, in plain language, that the Chinese political system would resist changes despite economic integration with the world. He told the Tanzanian president at the time, “Our reform is an experiment not only in China but also internationally, and we believe it will be successful. If we are successful, it can provide some experience for developing countries.”1 In 2017, a new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, repeated this sentiment using similar language.

EXPOSED! China’s Digital Program Using AI & OSINT To Unmask US Navy Warships Revealed In New Report

Shubhangi Palve

A recent report by the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab (BRSL) at the University of California, Berkeley, titled ‘Open-Source Assessments of AI Capabilities,’ claims that China is using open-source intelligence (OSINT) images of U.S. warships to develop AI training datasets. The report also demonstrates how OSINT tools can be leveraged to assess and understand key military capabilities through AI technology.

The report exposes the peculiar ‘Zhousidun’ dataset, which includes over 600 images exhaustively detailing the inner workings of American Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and other allied naval vessels.

Culled from public satellite imagery and media sources, this highly specialized catalog seems too specialized for mere academic interests. By scrutinizing this data, China could be feverishly training computer vision algorithms to automatically identify, track, and potentially neutralize opponents’ maritime forces.

Research Paper By BRSL

The Research paper by BRSL shows an open-source methodology for analyzing military AI models through a detailed examination of the ‘Zhousidun’ – a Chinese-originated dataset that exhaustively labels critical components on American and Allied destroyers.

What Are China’s Nuclear Weapons For?

Ashley J. Tellis & Tong Zhao

The recent expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been a striking feature of its progress toward great-power status. Even during the most intense periods of Cold War rivalry, Beijing maintained a small and remarkably vulnerable nuclear force that probably did not exceed 200 warheads. Although Chinese nuclear modernization continued after the Cold War ended, it has truly accelerated only over the last decade or so—with Beijing more than doubling the number of warheads deployed since 2020.

Fear A Militarily Weak China

David Hutt

Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed just how weak the Russian military is. This wasn’t a surprise to some historians; the first year or two of any Russian war, going back centuries, is marked by unparalleled losses before the sheer size of Russia’s population and manufacturing capacity comes into play (which may be happening now). But the present-day weakness also shows what happens when you let one person, Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister sacked last month, steal most of the defense budget.

Over in the Middle East, the October 7 pogrom was obviously a result of Israeli intelligence and political failures. There’s reason to believe that there had been warnings of such an attack for a year prior, but a cohort of ultranationalists who now occupy several ministries and claim to be security hawks are among the least competent officials, having effectively been raised in state-subsidized environments where they have gained no real-world experience before taking over government departments. The latest assault on Rafah is necessitated because Israeli intelligence has underestimated the percentage of Hamas soldiers it thought had been killed elsewhere.

Which brings us to China. There is no way of knowing whether the Chinese military is the juggernaut some imagine or is the paper tiger akin to Moscow’s degraded armed forces. Either way, the revelation would be terrible for almost everyone.

US military says it killed a senior ISIS official in Syria airstrike

Haley Britzky

A senior ISIS official was killed in a US airstrike on Sunday in Syria, the US military said Wednesday in a post on X.

“On June 16, US Central Command conducted an airstrike in Syria, killing Usamah Jamal Muhammad Ibrahim al-Janabi, a senior ISIS official and facilitator,” the post from US Central Command said. “His death will disrupt ISIS’s ability to resource and conduct terror attacks.”

CENTCOM added that there was “no indication” any civilians were harmed in the strike, which had not been previously announced.

The US military has continued going after ISIS officials in Africa and the Middle East. Nearly three weeks ago, an airstrike in a remote area near Dhaardaar in Somalia was assessed to have killed three ISIS militants, according to US Africa Command.

Between January and March 2024, CENTCOM and its partners killed seven ISIS operatives in Syria and detained 27 more. In Iraq during the same time period, 11 operatives were killed and 36 people were detained.

The Credibility Trap

Keren Yarhi-Milo

Does a reputation for weakness invite aggression? Many analysts have suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine in 2022 after inferring that the United States and the rest of NATO lacked resolve. The West had imposed only weak sanctions on the Kremlin in response to its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its 2018 poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom. Then came the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a chaotic evacuation that seemed to demonstrate Washington’s lack of commitment.

On the day Russia invaded, U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Putin launched his attack to “test the resolve of the West.” Now, many believe that the United States must incur significant costs—sending billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine and risking nuclear escalation—in part to prove to Putin that it is resolute. But the audience Washington is performing for goes well beyond Putin. Across the world, it can seem as if American credibility is constantly being questioned, with the United States’ adversaries challenging U.S. hegemony, and its allies worrying whether Washington will come to their aid. The potential for another Trump presidency and a more isolationist approach to foreign policy only adds to these allies’ concerns. In the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly scorned Washington’s requests for restraint in his assault on the Palestinian militant group Hamas after its terror attack on his country last year, while Iran’s proxies are brazenly attacking U.S. targets. In the global South, the United States is struggling to convince countries to take its side in the emerging struggle between democracies and autocracies. “Nobody seems to be afraid of us,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented in a February interview with Foreign Affairs.

Small drones will soon lose combat advantage, French Army chief says

RUDY RUITENBERG

The advantage now enjoyed by small aerial drones on battlefields including in Ukraine is but “a moment in history,” French Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pierre Schill said at the Eurosatory defense show in Paris

While anti-drone systems are lagging and “leave the sky open to things that are cobbled together but which are extremely fragile,” countermeasures are being developed, Schill told reporters during a tour of the French Army stand at the show June 19. Already today, 75% of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine are lost to electronic warfare, the general said.

”The life of impunity of small, very simple drones over the battlefield is a snapshot in time,” Schill said. “Right now it’s being exploited, that’s clear, and we have to protect ourselves. Today, the sword, in the sense of the aerial drone, is powerful, more powerful than the shield. The shield is going to grow.”

Putin’s Hybrid War Opens a Second Front on NATO’s Eastern Border

Kati Pohjanpalo, Aaron Eglitis, Milda Seputyte, and Ott Tammik

Shortly after midnight, several masked men in boats began removing orange navigational aids on the Narva River that separates Estonia from Russia — a watercourse which demarcates the extent of NATO’s reach.

Even that late in the day it’s twilight in northern Europe at the end of May, leaving the Russian border guards who were working to lift the markers clearly visible to the watching Estonian authorities.

Then again, Russia’s actions in the early hours of May 23 weren’t necessarily meant to be conducted under cover of darkness; Estonia took it as an explicit signal of intent to the Baltic states and the West more broadly.

Israeli Military Says Hamas Can’t Be Destroyed, Escalating Feud With Netanyahu

Jared Malsin & Anat Peled

A rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership is spilling increasingly into the open after the armed forces’ top spokesman said Netanyahu’s aim of destroying Hamas in Gaza is unachievable.

Military spokesman Daniel Hagari told Israeli television on Wednesday night, “The idea that we can destroy Hamas or make Hamas disappear is misleading to the public.”

The comment was a rare direct rebuke from the military of how Netanyahu has delineated the main aim of the war in Gaza, which he says is “total victory” over Hamas and returning Israeli hostages held by the group. The prime minister has said repeatedly that he won’t accept an end to the war without the group’s eradication as a military and governing power.

When the Only Escape From War in Gaza Is to Buy a Way Out

Adam Rasgon

The only way for almost all people in Gaza to escape the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas is by leaving through neighboring Egypt.

And that is usually a complicated and expensive ordeal, involving the payment of thousands of dollars to an Egyptian company that can get Palestinians on an approved travel list to cross the border.

Confronting the company’s stiff fees, as well as the widespread hunger in Gaza where there is no end in sight to Israel’s military campaign, many Palestinians have resorted to trying to raise money with desperate appeals on digital platforms like GoFundMe.

Dr. Salim Ghayyda, a pediatrician in northern Scotland, posted one such plea in January after his sister texted from Gaza to say that their father had suffered seizures.

Their father made it to a hospital and survived, but Dr. Ghayyda, 52, who left Gaza in 2003, said the episode convinced him he had to evacuate his family at any cost.

“I thought I’d go to sleep one night and wake up to the news that my family is gone,” he said. “I felt helpless and hopeless, but I knew I had to do something.”

Soaring U.S. Debt Is a Spending Problem

You may have heard that the 2017 GOP tax cuts blew a giant hole in the federal budget—or so Democrats tell voters. The Congressional Budget Office’s revised 10-year budget forecast out Tuesday offers a reality check. Spending is the real problem, and it’s getting worse.

CBO projects that this year’s budget deficit will clock in at roughly $2 trillion, some $400 billion more than it forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit. This is unprecedented when the economy is growing and defense spending is nearly flat. The deficit this fiscal year will be 7% of GDP, which is more than during some recessions.

CBO says deficits will stay nearly this high for years, and the total over the next decade is now expected to total $21.9 trillion compared to $19.8 trillion in its February forecast. Debt held by the public will grow to 122.4% of GDP in 2034 from 97.3% last year.

Notably, CBO’s revenue projections are little changed. Revenue is expected to total 17.2% of GDP this year—roughly the 50-year average before the pandemic, as the nearby chart shows. But CBO significantly revised up projections for federal spending. Outlays are now expected to hit 24.2% of GDP this year and average 24% over the next decade. Wow.

A Disaster of the U.S. Military’s Own Making

Janet Reitman

Austin Valley had just arrived at his Army base in Poland, last March, when he knocked on his buddy Adrian Sly’s door to borrow a knife. The base plate of his helmet was loose and needed fixing, he told Sly. The soldiers had spent most of their day on a bus, traveling from their former base to this new outpost in Nowa Deba, near the border with Ukraine. It had been a monotonous 12-hour journey with no stops and nothing to eat but military rations. Sly thought his friend looked exhausted, but then so did everyone else. He handed Valley an old hunting knife, and Valley offered an earnest smile. “Really appreciate it, man,” he said. Then he disappeared.

A boyish-looking 21-year-old, Valley grew up in a military family in rural Wisconsin and declared his intention to join the Army at age 7. He enlisted on his 18th birthday, so intent on a military career that he tried to sign a six-year contract until his father, a Gulf War veteran, persuaded him to take it more slowly and commit to three. Stationed at Fort Riley, in Kansas, he made an immediate impression on his superiors. “He was one of the best workers that I’ve seen in the military,” a squadmate says, recalling how Valley, who drove an armored troop carrier, thought nothing of crawling into its guts to check for broken parts, emerging covered in grease, a flash of mischief in his deep brown eyes.

Late-stage Putinism: The war in Ukraine and Russia’s shifting ideology

Mikhail Komin

At the end of last year, a scandal erupted in Russia over a new phase of the state’s promotion of traditional and conservative values. Prominent figures from the Russian cultural sphere were denounced by pro-war activists and the Russian media for their attendance at a “almost naked” party. The event was privately organised, but the dissemination of images online led to the ostracising of these celebrities. The fallout included financial losses approximating €3m from cancelled appearances at new year events and shows, one attendee sentenced to 25 days in detention, and the event’s organiser facing scrutiny from the Federal Tax Service. Subsequently, a Russian court characterised the gathering as “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations,” associating it with the LGBT movement, which Russia declared “extremist” in autumn 2023.

This incident underscores a significant ideological shift in the Russian political landscape, in the third year of the country’s extensive conflict in Ukraine, which those involved had doubtless failed to notice and adapt to promptly. Members of the cultural elite who chose to remain in Russia after the country’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine without explicitly supporting the war believed they could maintain their pre-war lifestyles and business activities. Yet practices once deemed standard in the cosmopolitan cultural life, where state intervention was minimal, must now adapt to the transformed ideological landscape.

As Goes Ukraine, so Goes the Black Sea

Matthew Boyse

Ukraine continues to rack up successes against Russian military assets in the Black Sea region. The list of sunk or damaged ships near occupied Crimea and in Novorossiysk is growing ever longer by the day.

In recent weeks, Kyiv has hit Russian rail ferry assets on both sides of the Kerch Strait, a tugboat, the Tsyklon corvette, the Kovrovets minesweeper, and the Kommuna salvage ship in Sevastopol, as well as the Dzhankoi airfield and multiple other locations in occupied Crimea and Novorossiysk. An estimated one-third of the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) is now sunk or damaged.

Kyiv has Moscow on the defensive in the maritime domain, where its assets are increasingly vulnerable. The BSF no longer operates in some areas of the Black Sea. The grain corridor is currently operating well, with exports nearing pre-2022 levels. These developments have led to the narrative that Kyiv is “winning the battle of the Black Sea.”

These successes challenge the narrative that a Russian victory is inevitable. The battlespace is dynamic, and Ukraine can inflict significant damage on superior Russian forces through ingenuity and the right kind of foreign support, particularly long-range U.S., UK, and French missiles.

Vladimir Putin’s dangerous bromance with Kim Jong Un

Kim jong un has a new best friend. Out is Donald Trump, who exchanged saccharine letters but spurned him at a summit in Hanoi in 2019. In is Vladimir Putin, who has courted Mr Kim for weapons to fuel his war in Ukraine. Mr Kim has made two trips to Russia’s Far East to meet Mr Putin since 2019. On June 19th Mr Putin arrived in Pyongyang for his first visit since 2000, the year he made his debut as president. Though he landed at close to 3am local time, Mr Kim was waiting on a red carpet on the tarmac to meet him. The two leaders later signed a strategic partnership agreement, promising to come to each other’s aid when facing aggression.

The relationship has blossomed thanks to geopolitical shifts. Mr Kim turned away from talks with America following the failed summit in Hanoi and began making fresh overtures to Russia. The response was lukewarm—until Mr Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine floundered and Russia came to need munitions, one of the few things Mr Kim’s regime has in abundance. But the implications of the realignment go beyond the weapons trade. “It’s a mistake to think about it simply as an arms deal,” says Jenny Town of the Stimson Centre, an American think-tank.

Not all ‘open source’ AI models are actually open: here’s a ranking

Elizabeth Gibney

Technology giants such as Meta and Microsoft are describing their artificial intelligence (AI) models as ‘open source’ while failing to disclose important information about the underlying technology, say researchers who analysed a host of popular chatbot models.

The definition of open source when it comes to AI models is not yet agreed, but advocates say that ’full’ openness boosts science, and is crucial for efforts to make AI accountable. What counts as open source is likely to take on increased importance when the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act comes into force. The legislation will apply less strict regulations to models that are classed as open.

Some big firms are reaping the benefits of claiming to have open-source models, while trying “to get away with disclosing as little as possible”, says Mark Dingemanse, a language scientist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. This practice is known as open-washing.

“To our surprise, it was the small players, with relatively few resources, that go the extra mile,” says Dingemanse, who together with his colleague Andreas Liesenfeld, a computational linguist, created a league table that identifies the most and least open models (see table). They published their findings on 5 June in the conference proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency1.

Is It Time to Step Up Defense Spending?

Anika Horowitz

Disarmament and Diplomacy Won’t Work

Increased military spending is dismissed from two directions. The left has adopted a postmodern, self-loathing pacifism characterized by moral relativism and failed appeasement. Meantime, right-wing isolationism has re-emerged, pandering to a populist base. Many progressives view war itself, rather than malign powers, as the enemy. This lack of moral clarity perpetuates the belief that conflict can be avoided through disarmament and diplomacy.

Yet history shows that adversaries take advantage of delusions and military unpreparedness. Germany began to rearm soon after World War I. The Allies responded by signing the Washington Naval Treaty, significantly limiting their naval power. Japan, which had also signed the treaty, invaded Manchuria in 1931. Soon after Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland, Hitler invaded Poland. By contrast, deterrence won the Cold War and has prevented World War III.

22 June 2024

The Modi 3.0 coalition government: challenges and priorities

Rahul Roy-Chaudhury

On 9 June, Narendra Modi was sworn in as India’s prime minister for a third consecutive term, unprecedented in 62 years. A day later, the government’s top four ministers – for defence, home affairs, finance, and external affairs – and the powerful national-security advisor were reappointed to their posts, signalling stability and continuity from the previous government. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), holds 240 seats, a plurality in the lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha). The BJP is in power in 13 of India’s 29 provinces which possess legislative assemblies, with its allies ruling in an additional six provinces.

Yet the new Modi government is weaker than its predecessor, having failed unexpectedly to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha. The BJP lost 63 seats from its previous tally achieved in 2019 (303), falling 32 short of a majority (272 seats). With the support of its coalition partners, which provided an additional 53 seats, it was able to form a coalition government as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), but it now relies on the support of these partners to govern.

The BJP’s losses were primarily in Uttar Pradesh (29 seats), Maharashtra (14) and West Bengal (six), accounting for a total of 49 seats. These losses were likely the result of multiple local factors rather than any single national issue. The BJP’s loss in Uttar Pradesh in the north can be attributed to voters’ perceptions of the BJP’s arrogance, the party’s failure to address rising unemployment and inflation, and its anti-Muslim rhetoric (employed to seek the Hindu vote by polarising communities). The BJP’s defeat in the Faizabad constituency, home to the recently constructed temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, which had long been the locus of sectarian tensions, showed this push-back. There was also concern among the low-caste Dalit voters about the BJP’s perceived intention to roll back affirmative-action policies if it secured a resounding victory.

Chinese armed forces have been upgrading. India must keep up

Anushka Saxena

As part of the reforms in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since 2015, China has focussed on preparing for combat keeping conditions of the “Information Age” in mind. It is doing so by integrating its services, arms and systems into a joint, network-centric fighting force. The PLA Western Theater Command (WTC) has played a proactive role in securing China’s southern and southwestern borders, preparing for conventional and non-conventional warfighting, and acclimatising its personnel to the rough terrains and harsh altitudes of Xinjiang and Tibet. India is one of the principal operational directions in which the WTC is mandated to act. India needs to assess the WTC’s operational structure, training mandates and warfighting priorities, especially the theatre’s “multi-domain integrated joint operations” (MDIJO) efforts.

The WTC has focussed on three key factors. These include conducting combat training and preparedness exercises, getting acquainted with WTC’s harsh terrain bordering India; and building air superiority and transportation capabilities.

The WTC invests significantly in combat training and simulation. Accounts of such exercises feature both its successes and failures. In August 2018, an anti-aircraft artillery unit of Xinjiang Military District (MD) conducted a live-fire exercise in the Tian Shan mountains to refine the troops’ integrated combat capabilities. This was a test of the interplay between Command and Control (C2) and ground-based air defence units. The evaluation stage which assessed damage revealed that many anti-aircraft positions were in flames — indicating a failure on the surprise attack test. An assessment like this may give the Indian security apparatus clues as to the WTC’s weaknesses and what it should focus on.

One Year of the INDUS-X: Defense Innovation Between India and the U.S.

Ajay Kumar and Tejas Bharadwaj

Background

One of the most transformational geopolitical relationships since the beginning of the twenty-first century has been that of India and the United States in defense. Following minimal exchange during the Cold War, the relationship thawed on the back of a strong information technology (IT) outsourcing relationship that developed in the 1990s. In 2002, the two countries signed the General Security of Military Information Agreement to permit the exchange of military intelligence. In 2005, the New Framework for the India-U.S. Defence Relationship was signed which delineated some common areas of interest—defeating terrorism, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and protecting the free flow of commerce via land, air, and sea. These developments were followed by the landmark Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative in 2008 that deepened strategic cooperation between the two countries in energy security and non-proliferation.

In 2011, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed to promote cooperation in cyber security and establish best practices to exchange critical information on cybersecurity and expertise between CERT-In (the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) and the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (U.S.-CERT). September 2013 saw the release of a Joint Declaration on Defence Cooperation, placing both countries “at the same level as their closest partners.” In 2016, India was recognized as a “Major Defense Partner” of the United States. Both countries followed it up by signing a series of foundational agreements from 2016 to 2023 in military logistics, communications security, and geospatial intelligence, increasing the synergy and interoperability between the two militaries. In 2018, India was granted Strategic Trade Authority-1 (STA-1) status by the United States, permitting it to receive license-free access to advanced dual-use technologies from entities in the United States. The Industry Security Annexe signed in December 2019 was particularly important as it enabled collaboration between private industries of the two countries and offered greater access to defense industrial information.

Who will win a post-heroic war?

Edward Luttwak

Neither the West not its enemies are prepared to fight. Some 30 years ago, I coined the phrase “post-heroic warfare” to acknowledge a new phenomenon: the very sharp reduction in the tolerance of war casualties. My starting point was President Clinton’s 1993 decision to abandon Somalia after 18 American soldiers were killed in a failed raid. But in truth, post-heroic attitudes had already emerged — and not just in affluent democracies. In 1989, the Soviet Union, whose generals could once lose 15,000 men before breakfast without batting an eyelid, abandoned Afghanistan after 14,453 of its soldiers were killed over almost a decade.

Nor was the post-heroic phenomenon strictly related to the merits, or lack thereof, of any particular act of war. Margaret Thatcher stayed up all night writing personal letters to the families of every one of Britain’s 255 dead in the Falklands. But it did not mollify her critics, who argued that Britain should never have used force, even if it meant that Argentina would be allowed to conquer the islands.

Four decades later, it is even more obvious that we are living in a post-heroic age, to the great benefit of the West — at least for now. In 2022, Ukraine found itself fighting an enemy that could have mobilised its regular army formations, each with its quota of 18-year-old conscripts, and also recalled two million reservists. But Putin did neither, fearing the fury of Russia’s mothers, who even under the restrictions of Soviet rule had successfully pressed for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

China-Philippines one step closer to armed conflict

RICHARD JAVAD HEYDARIAN

Barely one month since China imposed new maritime regulations for the South China Sea and yet another major incident involving Philippine and Chinese maritime forces has erupted in the disputed waters.

Manila and Beijing have traded accusations following a collision on Monday (June 17) between their vessels over the Second Thomas Shoal, a feature which hosts a de facto Philippine naval outpost aboard the grounded BRP Sierra Madre vessel.

The Philippines’ interagency task force overseeing the country’s waters in the South China Sea, known by Manila as the “West Philippine Sea”, accused Chinese maritime forces of ramming and towing a Philippine resupply vessel en route to the disputed land feature.

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