Army to develop new modular, interoperable EW kit amid Army Transformation Initiative

Carley Welch

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TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — The Army is planning to tinker with prototypes of a new electronic warfare kit in the next fiscal year that, if all goes well, eventually will be interoperable with just about any platform across the service, officials said this week.

The idea behind the Modular Mission Payload is that as the Army pursues a dramatic shake-up in the weapons, platforms and software it buys as part of the wider Army Transformation Initiative, the service could use a single capability that can plug-and-play with just about anything.

Col. Scott Shaffer, project manager for EW and cyber within the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, told Breaking Defense that it is still in the early days of development.

“I probably don’t have a lot of information on the production quantities and demand, because part of the prototyping process, which we’re going to dig really deep into next fiscal year, is understanding, how many do we need? And then where do they fit in the formations?” he said during an interview earlier this week.

The Army is expanding the number of soldiers devoted to EW operations, after deciding to establish 18 EW companies across the service’s divisions, said David May, the senior cyber intelligence advisor at the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence. That could change the calculous on how many EW kits the Army eventually needs.

But one aspect about the MMP that is known, according to Shaffer, is that it needs to be a commercial off the shelf (COTS) or government off the shelf (GOTS) product.

“A heavy lift going into next year is more COTS- or GOTS-based systems, where the challenge is really built into the integration thereof,” Shaffer said. “If we’re only hitting 60 percent of the requirements, that’s okay because we’re at least, we’re getting something out there and and it can be fielded very soon.

New Army PCA wants more AI-enabled cyber at the edge for offensive, defensive ops

Carley Welch

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TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — The Army’s new principal cyber advisor came into his role ready to align with the service’s overarching transformation initiative, and as part of this he’s set on enabling artificial intelligence for defensive and offensive cyber operations, he told Breaking Defense in an interview Wednesday.

Brandon Pugh, an Army reservist who formerly served as the director and a resident senior fellow for the R Street Institute’s Cybersecurity and Emerging Threats team, started in his role as PCA about eight weeks ago. The top advisor to the Army’s secretary and chief of staff on all things cyber, Pugh is the third person to serve in this congressionally mandated role, following Michael Sulmeyer who left his post in March 2024 to become the assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy in the Pentagon. Pugh is also the first in his role to be appointed by the president. Previously, those who held this role were appointed by officials within the service.

After meeting with various leaders across the service and the joint force, Pugh said what he’s come to realize is that the service needs to better leverage AI for cyber at the operational level instead of just at the enterprise level like the Pentagon and the services have been doing for a few years now.

“I think our CIO [chief information officer] is doing an exceptional job when it comes to AI at the enterprise level. Where I’m passionate about is, how do we leverage AI for cyber defense and offense? And in fairness, that is happening, Cyber Command is doing some of that. ARCYBER [Army Cyber Command] is doing some of that,” Pugh said. “But how do we take what they’re doing now and amplify that and continue to invest in it. I think that’s key, especially as threats continue to evolve.

“I think where the narrative and the conversation needs to go is if there is an operational use of AI, like bringing it to the warfighter, that’s where I think we should be,” he later added. But he emphasized that he doesn’t want this happening at the expense of utilizing AI at the service’s enterprise level.

AI ready to upend centuries-old military command structure

Benjamin Jensen

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This US Army command post, seen from a drone, is loaded with modern technology but uses a centuries-old structure. Image: Colonel Scott Woodward, US Army via The Conversation

Despite two centuries of evolution, the structure of a modern military staff would be recognizable to Napoleon. At the same time, military organizations have struggled to incorporate new technologies as they adapt to new domains – air, space and information – in modern war.

The sizes of military headquarters have grown to accommodate the expanded information flows and decision points of these new facets of warfare. The result is diminishing marginal returns and a coordination nightmare – too many cooks in the kitchen – that risks jeopardizing mission command.

AI agents – autonomous, goal-oriented software powered by large language models – can automate routine staff tasks, compress decision timelines and enable smaller, more resilient command posts. They can shrink the staff while also making it more effective.

As an international relations scholar and reserve officer in the US Army who studies military strategy, I see both the opportunity afforded by the technology and the acute need for change.

That need stems from the reality that today’s command structures still mirror Napoleon’s field headquarters in both form and function – industrial-age architectures built for massed armies.

Over time, these staffs have ballooned in size, making coordination cumbersome. They also result in sprawling command posts that modern precision artillery, missiles and drones can target effectively and electronic warfare can readily disrupt.

Russia’s so-called “Graveyard of Command Posts” in Ukraine vividly illustrates how static headquarters where opponents can mass precision artillery, missiles and drones become liabilities on a modern battlefield.

ARCYBER chief’s advice to industry: Make interoperable tech and start at the edge

Carley Welch

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TECHNET AUGUSTA 2025 — As the Army embarks on its modernization journey in line with the service’s recent transformation initiative, its cyber leader made clear that the service is seeking interoperable, off-the-shelf capabilities from industry to replace more bespoke, rigid offerings.

“The biggest opportunities that I see are from a modularity and platform independence standpoint. I think our approach is to use shared frameworks and APIs [application programming interfaces] in order to have cyber and EW [electronic warfare] effects be able to talk to each other,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, the commanding general of Army Cyber Command, said Tuesday during a fireside chat here in Augusta.

Army leaders have said that such interoperable capabilities will be vital in working with its sprawling Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative — the service’s plan to combine intelligence, C2 and fires all in one system so commanders can have information more readily available.

“If you’re a commander on the battlefield, I think that just means, you know, bottom line, it’s tactical flexibility. It’s the ability to take an effect and put it against any platform,” Barrett said. “If you’re able to do that, you’re able to really buy down some of the training that you might have to do because you’re able to reuse these effects and just plug them onto the platform according to the target that you want to prosecute.”

Another benefit to buying interoperable capabilities, she said, is that it will over time help decrease the Pentagon’s mounting technical debt, something the department has grappled with for some time.

“If you nail this modularity piece really well, as you continue with that experimentation, and you learn things and you modify what you’re doing, you’re going to be able to future-proof whatever it is that you’re doing because of this aspect,” Barrett said. “You’re not going to be stuck with some sort of engineering tech debt that you have that has to be completely redone.”

DARPA: Closing the Open Source Security Gap With AI

Alexander Culafi

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Open source components continue to cause huge problems for security practitioners, and AIxCC was created to determine whether automation could help close the gap.

At DEF CON 33, DARPA announced the winners of its AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), a two-year program in which teams were tasked with using AI technology to secure the open source technology underlying critical infrastructure. Teams developed "cyber reasoning systems" (CRSes) to remediate vulnerabilities during a series of challenges.

In the Final Competition, teams were tasked with using their CRSes to identify and generate patches for synthetic vulnerabilities across 54 million lines of code. CRSes discovered 54 unique synthetic vulnerabilities in the final challenges of the competition, patching 43. And because the code was based on real software, teams discovered 18 additional real, non-synthetic vulnerabilities that were disclosed to open source project maintainers. Teams provided 11 patches for real vulnerabilities during the competition.

According to a press release announcing the winners, competition tasks cost an average of $152, compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars bug bounties can cost.

The winners were graded based on a system that rated CRS performance based on discovery speed, bug report analysis, patch generation speed, and patch quality. The winners were Team Atlanta, Trail of Bits, and Theori; the teams will receive $4 million, $3 million, and $1.5 million respectively.

Electronic warfare receiving more senior level attention within the Army

Mark Pomerleau

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AUGUSTA, Ga. — Electronic warfare is now getting more senior level recognition within the Army.

“The [chief of staff of the Army] in one of his recent briefs actually touched on the fact that electromagnetic warfare is a core competency,” Col. Leslie Gorman, Army capability manager for electromagnetic warfare, said during a presentation Tuesday at the TechNet Augusta conference. “The bottom line is EW is a cross-cutting function that we are observing actively every day, across every warfighting function.”

Other officials across the service have noted that the Army is placing more emphasis on the significance of electromagnetic warfare in modern conflict.

“I think it’s been pretty well known that the Army has, after facing 20 years of GWOT, or global war on terror, that we needed to retool our focus, as the chief has been doing with several of his initiatives, most recently, the Army Transformation Initiative,” Maj. Gen. Jake Kwon, director of the Department of the Army’s Management Office for Strategic Operations, said in an interview Aug. 14. “The direction that we were headed where we had these long lead-time programs of record, we had an electronic warfare enterprise that had been shaped by the global war on terror and the counterinsurgency, and that was incompatible for what we’re going to face in the future with large-scale combat operations.”

The service has been on a years-long journey to reinvigorate and reinvest in advanced EW capabilities, after having divested much of its arsenal after the Cold War. Adversaries, in that time, have recognized the importance of the spectrum and developed new capabilities, techniques and doctrine.

Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014 served as a bit of a wakeup call for the Army as it observed the Russian military’s tactics. Since then, it has sought to invest in capabilities and elevate the discipline — to include jamming techniques and signature management of friendly forces — to the highest levels of the service given if units are discovered in the spectrum based on their emissions, they can be fired upon in minutes.

Army looking to inject more cyber capabilities into formations at the division level

Mark Pomerleau

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AUGUSTA, Ga. — As the Army is reintroducing electronic warfare capability to formations, it’s looking to give them more cyber weapons as well.

Particularly, with divisions as the main units of action going forward, the service is aiming to add cyber tools at that echelon in the next two years.

While the Army has been on a path to introduce certain capabilities, largely through Radio Frequency-enabled cyber, it is building out new forces to provide cyber power for commanders on the battlefield.

“When we think about it today, we recognize that there needs to be something at division level, because your ability to understand the IP space, understand the networks that you’re operating within, while you’re defending your own and finding potential to work against an adversary’s, there needs to be something within the tactical formations,” Maj. Gen. Ryan Janovic, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, said in an interview this week at the TechNet Augusta conference. “We have the cyber mission force, but its ability to focus that level is challenged by the demand that’s put upon it for other priorities, serving geographic combatant commands.”

The cyber mission force includes the 147 teams that the military services provide to U.S. Cyber Command to conduct operations. They are largely aimed at the strategic level and have historically focused on Internet Protocol-based targets, conducting operations from remote locations.

Increasingly, there are targets that either aren’t reachable through IP networks or remote access might not be possible, necessitating the need for more expeditionary cyber capabilities and units. Additionally, maneuver commanders may need certain digital tools on the ground to support their activities.

The Sword and the Book

Eliot A. Cohen

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If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has some notions about strategy, he has been reticent in sharing them. But he does trumpet his commitment to restoring Confederate names to bases and their statues to national military cemeteries, which is absurd and vile. And we know that he thinks civilian academics have little if any place in military education, which is wrong and even more damaging.

Forty years ago, I turned down promotion from assistant to associate professor at Harvard to join the strategy department of the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. My academic mentors were baffled and dismayed by such a self-willed fall from grace, but in retrospect it was one of the best professional decisions of my life.

The Naval War College, not to be confused with the Naval Academy, was established in 1884 to prepare senior officers for the higher-level problems of warfare. For a service that, like the Royal Navy, believed in learning on the job rather than in classrooms, creating such a school was a remarkable thing to do. The War College immediately brought in as faculty members not only Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Navy captain who became the most prominent naval historian and naval publicist of his time, but a U.S. Army colonel, Tasker Bliss, to provide instruction beyond the maritime realm.

Can India and the U.S. Repair Their Relationship?

Rudra Chaudhuri

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On July 30, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a baseline tariff of 25 percent on Indian exports, along with “a penalty” for buying oil and military equipment from Russia. On Aug. 6, he signed an executive order (EO) placing “an additional ad valorem rate of duty of 25 percent” on India. It made clear that any retaliation against this order “may” lead to a modification of the order and would go into effect in 21 days. Furthermore, it said that if Russia or any foreign country impacted by the order were to “align sufficiently” with the United States on matters related to national security, foreign policy, and the economy, then the tariff rate could change again.

Essentially, if India continues to purchase Russian oil, the tariff stays and may be increased. If it starts to diversify away from buying Russian oil, then it could be reduced or removed. The EO has moved the goalpost beyond trade negotiations. Even if the first tranche of a trade agreement were to be reached, which is looking unlikely, India will still have to deal with the issue of its Russian oil purchases. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro has argued that “India’s oil lobby is funding Putin’s war machine.” Yet an attempt to force India to diversify away from Russia—effectively dictating its foreign policy—is a nonstarter. In fact, it only makes it more difficult to do what Indian firms may have already wanted to do, which is find alternative vendors in the global oil market.

Mahan, Mackinder, and the New ‘Problem of Asia’

Francis P. Sempa

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In 1900, the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) wrote a series of articles that were later collected into a book titled The Problem of Asia. In Mahan’s time, the problem of Asia was the growing power of Russia and the unstable “debatable and debated ground” which stretched from the islands offshore of East Asia to the Middle East—roughly between 30degrees and 40 degrees north latitude.This broader central Asian belt today includes the South China Sea, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, all of China, much of India, Pakistan, the Bay of Bengal, Afghanistan, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, Iran, the oil-rich Caspian Sea basin, the Red Sea, the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Levant, and modern-day Turkey. It roughly tracks the Asian geography of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Today, China, not Russia, is the problem of Asia.

In Mahan’s time, the geopolitical struggle over this Asian region (the “great game”) was waged by Great Britain and Russia. Today, the geopolitical struggle over this region is waged by the United States and China. And this new great game will determine the global balance of power into the foreseeable future.

China launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, using economic leverage to further its geopolitical ambitions. Those ambitions include the unfinished business of the Communist Revolution of 1949, i.e., gaining control of Taiwan, which the U.S. prevented by inserting the 7th Fleet between China and Taiwan at the beginning of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. China’s goals entail nothing less than what they see as full redemption from the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949) through the attainment of super power status by 2049. President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” described by Michael Pillsbury in The Hundred-Year Marathon as “a resurgent China that would reclaim its rightful place atop the global hierarchy,” could soon be a reality.

The Other Archipelago: Latin America’s Gray-Zone Conflicts in a Multipolar World

Jeffery A. Tobin

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The South China Sea has long stood as the world’s premier case study in maritime gray-zone conflict. It is where sovereignty gets stretched, international law gets tested, and presence—not principle—determines control. For years, strategists analyzed the region for what it reveals about China’s ambitions, US deterrence, and the weakening of global norms. But the story of the South China Sea is no longer just about Asia. Its lessons now surface across the Western Hemisphere.

Latin America and the Caribbean, while rarely treated as maritime flashpoints, face sovereignty challenges paralleling those in Southeast Asia. They unfold not through missiles or standoffs but via offshore oil licenses in contested waters, industrial fishing fleets under flags of convenience, and infrastructure projects that blur the line between development and surveillance. From Guyana’s coast to Peru’s ports and Argentina’s space stations, the region faces a quiet test of resilience.

Five parallels stand out: contested maritime zones, dual-use infrastructure, fragile alliances, narrative power, and the rise of strategic ambiguity. Each reflects how power operates today—less through force, more through friction. The gray zone extends across oceans and narratives, reshaping the Americas.

Competing Maritime Sovereignties and Resource Control

China advances sweeping claims with harassment of foreign vessels, maritime militias, and symbolic gestures like naming underwater features. These do not necessarily spark war but steadily erode legal norms. A similar dynamic plays out in Latin America.

The clearest parallel lies off Guyana. Venezuela has claimed the Essequibo region for more than a century, but the dispute escalated after ExxonMobil’s 2015 oil discoveries offshore. By late 2023, Venezuela held a referendum to formalize its claim and issued exploration licenses in waters already contracted by Guyana. Though the International Court of Justice ruled Caracas cannot act unilaterally, the maneuver reflects the same “administrative assertion” China uses to normalize disputed claims.

China’s Policymakers Are Reportedly Pushing to Completely Ban NVIDIA’s AI Chips in the Country, But Weak Domestic Alternatives Are Holding Them Back

Muhammad Zuhair

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It seems that Beijing is now concerned with the domestic industry's reliance on American AI technology and is exploring newer options.

Chinese Big Tech Has Reportedly Cancelled Or Significantly Reduced NVIDIA's H20 AI Chip Orders

Well, there's no doubt that China heavily relies on AI chips and equipment from the US, mainly because domestic options cannot serve the nation's needs. However, recent events have forced Beijing to counter the influence of NVIDIA's chips in the region, which is why China's Cyberspace Administration opened up a regulatory investigation to determine the presence of security backdoors in the H20 AI accelerators. In a report by Financial Times, it is claimed that China's lawmakers are proposing an 'outright ban' of the H20 AI chip, but it isn't as easy as it might sound.

It is claimed that Chinese officials are voicing opposition to NVIDIA's AI chips after the recent remarks by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, where he stated that the US should make Chinese developers "addicted" to American technology, and that the nation isn't getting the "best stuff". China's senior leaders have found these comments insulting, and they are now convincing local tech giants to slow down their pursuit of NVIDIA's H20 AI chips.

Many Chinese firms claim to have significantly downsized their H20 orders or completely abandoned them, which shows that there is a growing resistance to adopting the American AI tech stack. Moreover, it is also reported that domestic firms favor switching to Chinese platforms such as those from Huawei and Cambricon, given that the solutions from these companies are said to be decent enough for inferencing workloads.

China hopes to address its AI computing needs through domestic offerings by next year once production lines scale up, but for now, the region has no other option than NVIDIA. We recently reported on how DeepSeek's next AI model, the R2, was delayed due to the use of domestic AI chips, and the firm later switched to NVIDIA's tech stack, which shows that China's AI advancements are in dire need of American chips for now.

The Real China Model

Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber

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Adecade ago, planners in Beijing unveiled Made in China 2025, an ambitious scheme to take leadership of the industries of the future. The plan identified ten sectors for investment, including energy, semiconductors, industrial automation, and high-tech materials. It aimed to upgrade China’s manufacturing in these sectors and others, reduce the country’s dependence on imports and foreign firms, and improve the competitiveness of Chinese companies in global markets. The overarching goal was to transform China into a technological leader and turn China’s national champion firms into global ones. The government backed this vision with enormous financial support, spending one to two percent of GDP each year on direct and indirect subsidies, cheap credit, and tax breaks.

China has been wildly successful in these efforts. It not only leads the world in electric vehicles and clean technology power generation; it is also dominant in drones, industrial automation, and other electronics products. Its lock on rare-earth magnets produced a quick trade deal with U.S. President Donald Trump. Chinese firms are on track to master the more sophisticated technological goods produced by the United States, Europe, and other parts of Asia.

And yet China’s model still has many skeptics. Lavish funding, they point out, has led to waste and corruption. It has created industries in which dozens of competitors manufacture similar products and struggle to make a profit. The resulting deflation makes companies wary of hiring new staff or raising wages, leading to lower consumer confidence and weaker growth. China’s economy, which once looked poised to overtake the United States’ as the world’s biggest, is mired in a slowdown and may never match the American one in total output.

These problems are not trivial. But it is a serious error to think they are big enough to derail China’s technological momentum. Beijing’s industrial policy succeeded not simply because planners picked the right sectors and subsidized them. It worked because the state built out the deep infrastructure needed to become a resilient technological powerhouse. It created an innovation ecosystem centered on powerful electricity and digital networks, and it established a massive workforce with advanced manufacturing knowledge. Call it an all-of-the-above technology strategy. This approach has enabled China to develop new technologies and scale them up faster than any other country. Its model is unlikely to be pushed off course by sluggish economic growth or U.S. sanctions.

The Weaponized World Economy

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

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When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was the true opening of the age of weaponized interdependence, in which the United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others.

This new era will be shaped by weapons of economic and technological coercion—sanctions, supply chain attacks, and export measures—that repurpose the many points of control in the infrastructure that underpins the interdependent global economy. For over two decades, the United States has unilaterally weaponized these chokepoints in finance, information flows, and technology for strategic advantage. But market exchange has become hopelessly entangled with national security, and the United States must now defend its interests in a world in which other powers can leverage chokepoints of their own.

That is why the Trump administration had to make a deal with China. Administration officials now acknowledge that they made concessions on semiconductor export controls in return for China’s easing restrictions on rare-earth minerals that were crippling the United States’ auto industry. U.S. companies that provide chip design software, such as Synopsys and Cadence, can once again sell their technology in China. This concession will help the Chinese semiconductor industry wriggle out of the bind it found itself in when the Biden administration started limiting China’s ability to build advanced semiconductors. And the U.S. firm Nvidia can again sell H20 chips for training artificial intelligence to Chinese customers.

In a little-noticed speech in June, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hinted at the administration’s reasoning. China had “cornered the market” for rare earths, putting the United States and the world in a “crunch,” he said. The administration had come to realize “that our industrial capability is deeply dependent on a number of potential adversary nation-states, including China, who can hold it over our head,” shifting the “nature of geopolitics,” in “one of the great challenges of the new century.”

Facing China on two fronts, the US needs strategic focus

Patrick Cronin

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Washington must regain its strategic focus. The Trump administration’s penchant for disruptive policymaking conveys ad hockery rather than deliberate strategy. Worse, strategic incoherence risks crippling the US’s ability to meet the twin geopolitical imperatives posed by an increasingly assertive and innovative China: deterring aggression and winning the race for technological dominance.

Forthcoming strategy documents may restore some clarity to US declaratory policy, but they must go further, linking concrete aims—such as securing technological primacy and preventing conflict, especially a hostile takeover of Taiwan—to realistic ways and means. Success will depend on Washington’s ability to integrate economic and security objectives into a coherent whole. Equally essential is for the Trump administration to accept that victory is impossible without trusted allies, and for those allies to commit greater resources and unite behind a shared plan of action.

Both aims fit within the longstanding strategy of preventing adversarial hegemony over Eurasia. Allowing China to dominate land and sea would threaten the US; allowing it to control AI, quantum, biotechnology and other critical technologies would be equally unacceptable. Yet this strategy leaves room for China to prosper in peace, so long as it does not achieve a decisive advantage.

The most dangerous moments will come when China believes it holds an unassailable upper hand, or the US concludes it has only one last chance to avert catastrophic decline. The first imperative, deterring conflict, demands urgent action. President Xi Jinping’s approach to Taiwan and other core interests suggests that if gradual power accumulation fails to deliver, China may seek a decisive military advantage through rapid escalation. This risk requires credible, forward-looking military investments to dissuade aggression and prevent miscalculation.

China’s North Korea Problem

Shuxian Luo

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Since talks collapsed between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, in 2019, North Korea’s reckless drive for long-range nuclear capabilities has fueled tensions on the Korean Peninsula to new heights. But Pyongyang’s provocations obscure a deeper shift in the region: China’s growing reluctance to rein in its troublesome ally. For years, Beijing has played a crucial role in bringing North Korea to the negotiating table, and it has at times been a key partner in international efforts to curb North Korea’s nuclear and missile ambitions. China has supported UN

China’s Cyber Playbook for the Indo-Pacific

Nathan Lee

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Cyber operations are now a defining feature of modern warfare, as the war in Ukraine has demonstrated—and China is taking note. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has served as a testing ground for the integration of emerging technologies into hybrid warfare. Drawing from the lessons of the Ukraine war, China’s new military strategy establishes a joint and multi-domain doctrine that prioritizes a modernized wartime cyber approach, targeting key future conflicts such as a Taiwan contingency.

China’s Great Cyber Rejuvenation

Modern Chinese national military strategy seeks to leverage cyber power through constant readiness and information technology to enhance information dominance—the operational advantage gained from the ability to control, manipulate, and defend information to maximize warfighting effects. Starting in 2014, Xi Jinping began ambitiously envisioning China as a “cyber great power” capable of defending critical infrastructure from cyber intrusions, ensuring internal stability, and launching offensive operations against foreign adversaries. Critically, this shift affected People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military doctrine on cyber warfare.

The PLA’s focus on cyber power traces back to its study of the US military’s technological dominance in the Gulf War, primarily in information technologies, to control the battlefield. Cyber capabilities were subsequently incorporated into PLA doctrine and formally articulated in major policy documents such as the 2013 Science of Military Strategy, which emphasized the significant role of cyber in command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems. As military technology has advanced, Chinese military doctrine has become increasingly focused on information operations within the “three dominances” (三权), achieving superiority in the information, air, and sea domains, to determine the viability of a successful military operation, specifically against Taiwan, the United States, and its allies. In the 2020 Science of Military Strategy, the PLA states that cyberspace is the “basic platform for information warfare” because blinding cyberattacks on an adversary’s computer C4ISR networks can paralyze its combat processes at the outset of a conflict, thereby ensuring one’s own information dominance. To operationalize this strategy, the PLA advanced the doctrine of “peacetime-wartime integration,” a central principle under its military-civil fusion strategy. Designed to secure prepositioned information dominance, peacetime-wartime integration streamlines cyber operations by maintaining a constant state of readiness, ensuring these assets can be rapidly leveraged during wartime. Thus, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has increasingly designated cyber as a central cornerstone of military power in attaining information dominance, soon accelerating these reforms based on lessons from the Ukraine war.

The Next Israel-Iran War Is Coming

Trita Pars

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Israel is likely to launch another war with Iran before December—perhaps even as early as late August.

Iran is expecting and preparing for the attack. It played the long game in the first war, pacing its missile attacks as it anticipated a protracted conflict. In the next round, however, Iran is likely to strike decisively from the outset, aiming to dispel any notion that it can be subdued under Israeli military dominance.

What It Would Actually Take to End the War in Ukraine

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Last Friday, President Donald Trump hosted Vladimir Putin for a bilateral summit in Alaska and then, on Monday, received Volodymyr Zelensky and a half-dozen European heads of state at the White House. It was the latest attempt by Trump to bring the war in Ukraine to a close through diplomatic intervention. “While difficult, peace is within reach,” he said, on Monday. “The war is going to end.” Zelensky and Putin, he went on, “are going to work something out.” Trump, famously, has made such promises before—on the campaign trail, he declared that he would end the war within twenty-four hours of taking office—but is there reason to think that it might be different this time?

Russia–Ukraine: peace looks more remote than ever

Nigel Gould-Davies

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United States President Donald Trump’s meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders on 18 June 2025 confounded fears of failure or worse. There was no dust-up, no early departure and no crisis. The conversations were cordial, even lively. Trump was far more relaxed than he had been with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska three days earlier, where he had radiated expectant, and then disappointed, anxiety.

Atmospherics always matter. For Trump, more than most leaders, the personal is the geopolitical. But what matters far more are the underlying positions of the key actors. Policies and resources, not handshakes and humour, will shape the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine. After the diplomacy of the past few days, peace looks more remote than ever.

Diplomatic outcomesThree defining facts have emerged from a hectic week of diplomacy. Firstly, Trump has definitively abandoned his repeated demands on Russia for an immediate ceasefire. He has also ruled out further sanctions. These amount to further concessions to Russia. He has accepted Putin’s argument that the war can only end when a comprehensive settlement has been agreed. And he has discarded the only weapon he had argued could pressure Putin to compromise.

Secondly, Putin’s position, unlike Trump’s, remains firm and consistent. He has not moderated his position in any significant way. This is why the Alaska summit ended in half the time scheduled for it. As before, Putin insists on a settlement that goes far beyond questions of territory to address the ‘root causes’ of the war. This would lead to the subordination of Ukrainian statehood and identity, and advance his long-term goal of reshaping European security on terms dictated by Russia.

Thirdly, it follows that questions of territory – the main focus of Europe’s talks with Trump – are at this stage largely irrelevant. They will matter when conditions for a genuine peace process emerge. But they are currently a distraction that risks obscuring the deeper intractability of the war. It is not to gain a tiny sliver of territory – occupied Ukraine amounts to 0.7% of Russia’s internationally recognised landmass – that Putin has mobilised a war economy and lost over a million troops. There is currently no sign he will scale back his expansive ambitions unless he concludes that continuing to pursue them may call into question the security of his regime.

A vision for US hypersonic weapons

Edward Brady and Michael E. White

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Any future large-scale conflict in the Pacific will be in a highly contested environment where US capability will be aggressively challenged in the air, on land, at sea, and in space. The US military must have the ability to rapidly deliver lethal effects at range in a timescale of relevance. On their own, traditional strike weapons do not have sufficient speed or range to enable effective operation on what will be the highly contested battlefield of the future. Hypersonic weapons, if fielded in sufficient numbers to defeat critical targets necessary to degrade adversary capabilities, will enable effective use of traditional weapon systems and allow for future battlefield dominance. A layered defeat construct must be deployed to defend against ballistic and hypersonic missiles targeting US assets.

How do hypersonic weapons fit into weapons evolution?

For centuries, weapons have trended toward increasing speed, range, and accuracy. Hypersonic weapons build on these trends. Advanced engine technology and improved materials enable missiles to travel at hypersonic speeds (above Mach 5) while maintaining meaningful maneuverability. Because of their speed, hypersonic weapons, especially hypersonic cruise missiles, tend to have greater ranges than similarly sized weapons.

Faster weapons with longer ranges are more lethal than slower, shorter-range weapons. The faster speeds mean that targets have less time to evade or defend themselves. Hypersonic weapons are more likely to penetrate enemy defenses optimized for slower munitions, meaning missile salvos can comprise fewer missiles. Longer ranges mean that shooters can engage from farther away, potentially outside detection or engagement range of enemy defenses, depending on launch platform capabilities.

Why the Donbas Matters to Putin So Much

John Haltiwanger

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At a summit in Alaska last Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly told U.S. President Donald Trump that Ukraine must cede control of the country’s eastern Donbas region as a condition for ending the war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that he will not make territorial concessions in exchange for a peace agreement, while underscoring that it’s not within his constitutional authority to do so.

Is Trump’s Push for Peace in Ukraine a Fantasy?

Eric Ciaramella, Aaron David Miller, and Andrew S. Weiss

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Andrew S. Weiss: I wish I could give you a bumper-sticker assessment without putting it in a bigger frame. And the bigger frame is that Trump has been trying to put Ukraine on the back burner and get on to some bigger reconciliation or relaunch of the U.S.-Russia relationship since he became a candidate for president in 2016. At every turn, he tries to overcorrect or simplify U.S.-Russian relations, and the reason for that has never been well-defined either by him or members of his administration. Alaska’s the most recent manifestation of that effort.

Every single time Trump tries to say, “Let’s solve the Ukraine problem,” he keeps being hit upside the head by reality, which is that this is a major point of departure in Russia’s relationship with the outside world to launch a war of aggression of this scale. Ending it is not something that’s really in the hands of the United States president unless he’s willing to throw Ukraine under the bus. In Alaska there seems to have been yet another attempt by the Russians to say, “This could all be over really quickly if Ukraine would either surrender territory or agree to give up its sovereignty.” That’s not easy for Ukraine’s leaders to sign off on unless they wanted to commit political suicide. It was yet again one of these moments of false overpromising by the president and his team.

They seem in Alaska to have heard a couple things from Putin that, upon close scrutiny, just don’t check out. One, this is not a war about territory, and if it was just about where you draw the line of control in Eastern Ukraine, this war probably could have been resolved some time ago. Two, the terms of what the U.S. side was portraying as a big Russian concession and that there’s now some new opening for a security guarantee by the United States—that’s just not there as well. And then lastly, the president seems to think that this is a crisis that could be resolved simply by putting people in a room. This is not a situation that is going to lend itself to an emergency set of convenings and be resolved quickly.

Meet the New Middle East, Same as the Old Middle East

Stephen M. Walt

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Given the tumultuous events of the past several years, it is tempting to herald the emergence of a “new Middle East.” But how many times have we heard that? The Six-Day War was thought by some to be a critical turning point—surely Israel’s Arab opponents would make peace now?—and it didn’t happen. Ditto the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the first Gulf War, the Oslo Accords, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the Arab Spring. And yet events like the Sept. 11 attacks, the Syrian civil war, the Oct. 7, 2023, assault by Hamas, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the recurring destruction of Lebanon, the Houthis’ attacks on Red Sea shipping, and the recent airstrikes on Iran keep happening.

We have seen extraordinary developments over the past decade—and especially since Oct. 7, 2023—but the underlying conditions that have made the region so conflict-ridden for so long remain unchanged. Some of the players are gone, others have gained or lost power, and several have embraced different policies, but the more fundamental sources of instability are still intact.

What Was the Tipping Point on Gaza?

Emma Ashford

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In July, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France plans to recognize a Palestinian state—joining the ranks of more than 100 global states, mostly non-European, that have already done so. His decision was a clear shot across the bow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli conduct in Gaza. The point was made even more blunt in the following days by the news that the United Kingdom also intends to recognize a Palestinian state if no progress is made toward a cease-fire before the United Nations General Assembly in September.

For France and the U.K., the choice to recognize a Palestinian state comes less from any sense that this mostly symbolic gesture will work, and more from the fact that it will increase the pressure on Netanyahu to change course. Yet these are only the headline developments of a period of several weeks in which it feels as if the tide of global public opinion and governmental action has swung from indecision and apathy toward Gaza, to a more open sense of popular disgust and a willingness to critique Israel. Even Bari Weiss’s Free Press, long a stalwart of pro-Israel journalism, published an article arguing that while there is no way to know if crimes against humanity are being committed in Gaza, the possibility exists.

Russia–Ukraine: peace looks more remote than ever

Nigel Gould-Davies

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United States President Donald Trump’s meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders on 18 June 2025 confounded fears of failure or worse. There was no dust-up, no early departure and no crisis. The conversations were cordial, even lively. Trump was far more relaxed than he had been with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska three days earlier, where he had radiated expectant, and then disappointed, anxiety.

Atmospherics always matter. For Trump, more than most leaders, the personal is the geopolitical. But what matters far more are the underlying positions of the key actors. Policies and resources, not handshakes and humour, will shape the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine. After the diplomacy of the past few days, peace looks more remote than ever.

Diplomatic outcomesThree defining facts have emerged from a hectic week of diplomacy. Firstly, Trump has definitively abandoned his repeated demands on Russia for an immediate ceasefire. He has also ruled out further sanctions. These amount to further concessions to Russia. He has accepted Putin’s argument that the war can only end when a comprehensive settlement has been agreed. And he has discarded the only weapon he had argued could pressure Putin to compromise.

Secondly, Putin’s position, unlike Trump’s, remains firm and consistent. He has not moderated his position in any significant way. This is why the Alaska summit ended in half the time scheduled for it. As before, Putin insists on a settlement that goes far beyond questions of territory to address the ‘root causes’ of the war. This would lead to the subordination of Ukrainian statehood and identity, and advance his long-term goal of reshaping European security on terms dictated by Russia.

Thirdly, it follows that questions of territory – the main focus of Europe’s talks with Trump – are at this stage largely irrelevant. They will matter when conditions for a genuine peace process emerge. But they are currently a distraction that risks obscuring the deeper intractability of the war. It is not to gain a tiny sliver of territory – occupied Ukraine amounts to 0.7% of Russia’s internationally recognised landmass – that Putin has mobilised a war economy and lost over a million troops. There is currently no sign he will scale back his expansive ambitions unless he concludes that continuing to pursue them may call into question the security of his regime.

Russia’s “Monroe Doctrine”: After Ukraine, Who Will Be Next In “Firing Line” As Putin Vows To Defend Russian Speakers?

Sumit Ahlawat

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In his high-stakes Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin has spelled out his list of non-negotiable demands for ending his three-and-a-half-year-old war in Ukraine.

The list includes three kinds of demands: No NATO membership for Ukraine, which by extension means an end to NATO’s eastward expansion, territorial gains for Russia, including Ukraine’s withdrawal from Donbas, and formal recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, and religious and cultural rights for Russian speakers in Ukraine.

While most of the commentators, including in the US, the EU, and Ukraine itself, have focused on the territorial aspect of Putin’s demands and how his forceful changing of international borders hurts at the very heart of rules-based international order and the UN charter, it is the third aspect of Putin’s demnds – a guarntee for safeguarding the religious and cultural rights for Russian speakers in Ukraine – which is most dangreous.

With this demand, Russia is perpetually establishing itself as a party to internal political dynamics within Ukraine. If Moscow ever feels that the religious and cultural rights of Russian speakers are threatened in Ukraine, as Putin claimed he felt first in 2014 and then again in 2022, which forced him to invade Ukraine, he might take the same step again, notwithstanding the security guarantees given to Kyiv.

This, in effect, puts the onus on Kyiv for not provoking Moscow to invade it again.

In fact, not just Ukraine, this logic – that Russia is a natural protector and guarantor of religious and cultural rights for Russian speakers all over the world, especially in former Soviet Union states, and can use the full spectrum of diplomatic/economic/military means for their protection – establishes Russia as a party not just in the internal politics of Ukraine but in a host of former Soviet Union states from Lativia to Kazakhstan, and from Moldova to Estonia.

Sino-Russian Relations in Central Asia

Natasha Kuhrt

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Executive SummaryDespite the challenge from China, Russia continues to wield influence in the region.

Russia and China have a comprehensive strategic partnership based on a relationship that has developed over 30 years, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

They are largely able to manage their relations within the region, in part via the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and partly due to their shared antipathy to Western norms.

This antipathy is shared by Central Asian states, although they also seek to diversify economic relations away from an overreliance on either Russia or China.

There are no glaring disagreements between Russia and China, but the war in Ukraine highlights some pre-existing and some new challenges, including on issues of sovereignty. 

Sino-Russian relations have reached the point of a comprehensive strategic partnership. The relationship raises important questions regarding the nature of their cooperation in key areas — whether Russia is using the relationship to hedge against the United States, or whether it is more a question of mutual status exchange.1 Both countries appear to be questioning the current international order, and their interactions in Central Asia partly raise the question of Russia’s own place in an order that is increasingly dominated by China. At the Beijing Olympics in February 2022, shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia and China declared a no limits partnership, one which was “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War Era.” The declaration noted their joint opposition to NATO enlargement, describing it as U.S. hegemonism. They also vowed to oppose attempts to undermine security and stability in their “common adjacent regions.”2 The common adjacent regions must surely have been referring to Central Asia. Both Russia and China agree broadly on the normative aspects of their interactions in the region, and in general have collaborated on security issues, including on the threat from fundamentalism and terrorism. On these, they can count on the support of the Central Asian regimes, whose leaders largely hold similar beliefs about human rights and democratization. Nevertheless, Central Asian states themselves continue to practice multi-vector policies to avoid an over-reliance on either Russia or China, in particular in the economic sphere. Russia has learned to accommodate China in Central Asia, reflecting its high economic dependence on China. In Central Asia, however, Russia remains the preeminent power and China does not yet challenge this preeminence in any overt way.

As Israel begins offensive on Gaza City, an exhausted military may face a manpower problem

Tal Shalev, Tamar Michaelis, Oren Liebermann

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As the earliest stages of a massive assault on Gaza City take shape, Israel is calling up tens of thousands of reservists to take part in the impending military operation.

The takeover and occupation of the largest city in northern Gaza, which Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was one of the last Hamas strongholds, will require the military to bring in 60,000 more reserve troops and extend the service of another 20,000.

Those plans have sparked growing condemnation both internationally and domestically over fears that the spiraling humanitarian and hunger crisis in Gaza will worsen – and that the lives of the remaining hostages will be further at risk from an expanded military operation.

The Israeli military is already on the outskirts of Gaza City, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin said Wednesday, in what he described as the first steps of the larger operation.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military also said it has begun warning medical officials and international aid organizations in northern Gaza to plan for mass evacuation and displacement of the Palestinian population ahead of the planned Gaza City takeover.

The forced evacuation of the healthcare system risks worsening an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis gripping the besieged territory.

An Israeli military official told CNN that there will be “several steps” before Israeli ground forces move into the city. It is partially encircled by Israeli troops, the official said, and some forces are already operating in the area of Zeitoun, west of the city center. The IDF has begun preparing for the city’s evacuation by sending in more tents for displaced Palestinians, but evacuation warnings have not yet been issued.

When Israel’s security cabinet first approved the takeover of Gaza City, Israeli officials estimated the plan could take five months or more. But on Wednesday, Netanyahu instructed the military to shorten the timeline.

Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger?

Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bernhard WarnerSarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Danielle Kaye and Vivienne Walt

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Andrew here. The Trump administration is reportedly considering taking stakes in semiconductor companies — beyond Intel — that were granted money as part of the CHIPS and Science Act, in a major shift toward industrial policy.

Cabinet members have said that U.S. taxpayers should have received shares in exchange for funding chipmakers. But there’s some important missing context: At the time, companies like TSMC probably wouldn’t have taken CHIPS Act money if they had to give up equity. The law was meant to persuade such companies to do something that they believed wasn’t economical, namely building factories in the U.S.

But the landscape has changed amid President Trump’s tariffs, which has made producing chips abroad much more expensive — and made CHIPS Act money more valuable. It appears that the administration’s approach has been more stick than carrot. What are the implications? Will U.S. companies take government money in the future? And will this approach get the right results? Tell us what you think.

Is the A.I. pendulum swinging again?

For years now, investors have clambered to get a piece of the action in artificial intelligence. That’s pushed up valuations to nosebleed-inducing levels, even as some market observers (and Sam Altman) warn that things are getting out of hand.

For now, private-market investors still appear to be eager to bid up the value of A.I. start-ups. But Tuesday’s market moves suggest that public investors are getting more jittery, raising at least some questions about the future of the tech boom.

Things still look bubbly for privately held start-ups — including OpenAI, which is in talks to let current and former employees sell about $6 billion worth of stock at an astonishing roughly $500 billion valuation. That’s nearly twice the market capitalization of Salesforce.

Army plays ‘catch up’ on drone warfare with new operator course

Patty Nieberg

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Soldiers will have the chance to attend the Army’s first official drone course to become experts in flying, building, and repairing them in combat.

Officials at the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, Alabama, announced the launch of its Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course this week. The training is just one part of the U.S. military’s recent efforts to catch up on unmanned systems, which have seen wide use on battlefields across the globe for the past decade.

For the Army’s course, soldiers first attend three weeks of classroom instruction on a variety of commercial drones and complete 20 to 25 hours of simulated flying. The course uses commercially available simulators — “essentially, video games” — to build foundational flying skills, said Leslie Herlick, a spokesperson for the Army Aviation Center of Excellence and Fort Rucker.

“Research indicates that dedicating 25 or more hours to simulators like Liftoff, VelociDrone, or the Drone Racing League can demonstrably improve real-world flight performance,” Herlick said.

After playing drone video games, soldiers head out to the field and practice flying in urban warfare settings. One scenario that soldiers face includes receiving specific enemy target locations and having to employ a reconnaissance or surveillance drone.

After positively identifying a target, soldiers practice taking them out with First Person Viewer, FPV, or one-way attack drones, Herlick said, noting that the course is currently using balloons to “simulate the effects of drone strikes,” to minimize destroying “valuable” drone systems during the training — basically to save money.

Students also learn how to manufacture and repair drone parts with computer-aided design software and 3D printers that use resin, filament, and carbon fiber materials.

How AI and surveillance capitalism are undermining democracy

Suresh Venkatasubramanian

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On March 6, 2025, Axios reported that the State Department had launched a new social media surveillance program called “Catch and Revoke.” The intended goal of this program was to use artificial intelligence to assist in reviewing “tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media footprints” to find “evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’ attack on Israel.”

Whether you find this a horrifying development, an exciting application of AI, a flagrant violation of First Amendment rights, or even just a headscratcher, this incident captures the dynamics of how artificial intelligence, surveillance, and threats to democracy all come together. In a nutshell: AI’s promise of behavior prediction and control fuels a vicious cycle of surveillance which inevitably triggers abuses of power.

Throughout history, humans have always searched for ways to predict (and control) behavior, whether this constituted consulting an oracle, throwing bones, reading tea leaves, or even examining the shape of a person’s face and body to determine personality traits (which seems awfully contemporary if you start diving into the literature on “emotion AI”). As people became more adept at collecting data of various kinds, the field of statistics emerged to aid them in using data for prediction. (One of the amusing facts about AI research is that virtually every debate one encounters about the appropriate use of artificial intelligence in some social setting has parallels in history, often much earlier, which make it clear that efforts to predict and control behavior was never about AI at all.)

The problem with using data to make predictions is that the process can be used as a weapon against society, threatening democratic values. As the lines between private and public data are blurred in modern society, many won’t realize that their private lives are becoming data points used to make decisions about them. AI has supercharged these capabilities, smoothing out people’s individuality and instead placing each person into a group that’s deemed to behave a certain way. And while data and AI can be used for good, the only way these beneficial outcomes can be achieved is with restrictive, well-designed controls to prevent damage to democracy, much like humans did with nuclear energy.

Army Rifle-Mounted Drone-Shooting Scopes Leverage AI

Kris Osborn

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High powered counter-drone targeting scopes for the M4 rifle, tank protecting “cage” armor to create explosions “away” from an armored vehicles under drone attack, tailored EW transmissions designed to disable or “jam” drone swarms and even power-scaled laser weapons built to incinerate enemy drones …..are all critical topics now being analyzed in great depth by combat experts, weapons developers, Army academics and experienced combat operators at the service’s fast-evolving Counter UAS University at Fort Sill Okla.

The focus of the University is multifaceted in that it incorporates conceptual, strategic, tactical and operational variables … and the intersections between them … as areas of focused analysis. The scholars at C-UAS focus on new technologies employed in current wars such as Ukraine with a mind to better understanding modern threats and emerging concepts of operation.

“The threat is evolving so quickly. It's, you know, what we always say is what we learn today will be irrelevant tomorrow…. and that's kind of the way it is. Electronic warfare, high powered microwave and directed energy lasers are all capabilities that are being developed and obviously all at different stages of development,” Lt. Col. John Peterson, Director, Joint Counter UAS University, told Warrior in an interview. “We do primarily use both non kinetic and kinetic capabilities, and that's what we train here, EW is, you know, a capability that we focus on with the systems that we train on here at the schoolhouse along with some handheld kinetic weapons. We also train through simulation.”

Small Arms to Counter Drones

Peterson emphasized that, oftentimes, a combination or series of layered countermeasures is the optimal or most effective defense against incoming drone attacks. For closer-in attack drones approaching convoys, dismounted troops or vehicle formations, the Army now has hand-held and crew-served counter-drone weapon scopes called “Smart Shooters.” There are several different kinds of Smart shooters now at various stages of development, one of which is built by Israeli-based SmartShooter called the “SMASH” 200L . The Army has formally acquired the SMASH 200L and is currently experimenting with several kinds of AI-enabled, weapon-mounted counter-drone technologies.