Securing India’s digital destiny: Cybersecurity as a sovereign imperative

Lt Gen M.U. Nair (Retd)

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As India steps into 2026, its digital public infrastructure stands unmatched: Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, FASTag, and CoWIN collectively serve more than a billion citizens. However, the same architecture powering national progress is now a prime target for cyber aggression.

According to the Seqrite India Cyber Threat Report 2026, India logged 265.52 million threat detections in a year—505 every minute. Check Point’s 2025 analysis places Indian organisations at 2,011 cyberattacks per week, one of the highest in the world.

This is no longer an IT problem. It is a national security issue, with economic, geopolitical, and strategic consequences.

The Dragon and the Clock—2027 as the Turning Point Year Between China and Taiwan

Edan Morag

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Many regard 2027 as the year in which the Chinese military could attack Taiwan—especially after former CIA Director William Burns said in 2023 that “as a matter of intelligence, we know that he [Xi Jinping] has instructed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion of Taiwan.” Western research institutes, including Brookings, have used 2027 as a reference point in their analyses. Likewise, in regional assessments by countries close to China and Taiwan—such as Japan and India—2027 repeatedly emerges as a point of departure. This is despite the fact that no official Chinese authority has publicly declared 2027 to be the target year for unification with Taiwan. US intelligence may be correct, or it may not be; therefore, it cannot be stated with certainty that this is indeed Beijing’s target year. Nevertheless, this article analyzes possible reasons for this assessment and discusses what a 2027 contingency would mean for Israel’s security, foreign policy, and economic systems.

The unification of Taiwan with mainland China has long been an important objective of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), but in recent years its importance seems to have increased, and it is now presented as part of China’s core national interests. However, at the same time, prospects for peaceful unification appear to be receding. In the past, Taiwan viewed itself as the “true China,” destined to reunite with the mainland and rule a unified China, but over the past few decades, this situation has changed. Taiwanese public opinion shows that more and more Taiwanese see themselves as a nation separate from mainland China: 64% in 2008, rising to 75% in 2015. According to a Pew Research Survey in 2024, the majority of Taiwanese are not interested in unification (60% prefer the status quo and about 26% prefer independence). In other words, the trend toward Taiwanese separation is expanding, while the desire for unification is steadily shrinking.

Military exercises seek to erase vital buffer zone between China and Taiwan.

Andrew Yeh

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For the thousands of frustrated travelers facing delayed and cancelled flights between Taiwan and its outlying Matsu Islands and Kinmen, there may have been a sense of déjà vu. Last week’s multi-domain Justice Mission 2025 exercises were not the first occasion on which China’s large-scale military drills have disrupted civilian air routes in the region. Yet the increasingly routine character of such exercises should not obscure their significance, nor the ways in which they are challenging long-standing cross-strait arrangements.

Beijing is, once again, testing a core element of the status quo that has underpinned a fragile peace across the Taiwan Strait for decades. This time, the focus is Taiwan’s contiguous zone – the 12-nautical-mile buffer surrounding its territorial waters. The steady normalization of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) military activity within this space marks a subtle but consequential shift, one that lowers thresholds, increases the risk of miscalculation, and sets a potentially destabilizing precedent for future Chinese military operations.

The West anticipates an invasion. Beijing trusts its 15th Five-Year Plan.

Ashton Ng

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The dawn of 2026 arrived in the Taiwan Strait with a thunderous dissonance. On the water, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was concluding Justice Mission 2025, a massive exercise involving 89 warplanes, drone swarms, and blockade simulations that Taipei rightly characterized as an unprecedented escalation. Yet, on the airwaves, President Xi Jinping’s New Year’s address offered a different frequency. While he reiterated that reunification is “unstoppable,” the context was not one of imminent fiery conquest, but of cool, historical inevitability.

For defense planners in Washington and Taipei, the impulse is to merge the drills and the speech into a single signal of accelerating aggression – a countdown to a D-Day scenario. Such a reading is superficially correct but strategically flawed. By misinterpreting Beijing’s confidence as urgency, the West risks preparing for the wrong war.

A recent wargame shines new light on China’s extensive dual-use infrastructure in the region.

R. Evan Ellis

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On December 19, an affiliate of the state-run China Central Television (CCTV) ran a story about a recent Chinese military wargame in the city of Xuchang, Henan Province, involving the simulation of combat operations by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Western Hemisphere. Images of the wargame carried by CCTV clearly showed simulated interactions between Red (Chinese) and Blue (Western) forces near Cuba, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean.

The screens shown by CCTV from the wargame, which also depicted PLA operations in the Sea of Okhotsk and near Taiwan, illustrate how Beijing is thinking about conducting military activities in the Western Hemisphere in the context of a broader war with the West.

Such evidence lends credence to numerous statements by senior U.S. military officials, including former heads of U.S. Southern Command General Laura Richardson and Admiral Alvin Holsey, regarding the risks of China’s “dual-use” infrastructure – including ports, space, telecommunications, and other projects – in times of war.

‘Enough Is Enough’: Greenland’s Prime Minister Issues Stark Warning as Trump Renews Annexation Threat

Callum Sutherland

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Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has warned the United States to stop its threats of annexation against the territory.

“No more pressure. No more hints. No more fantasies about annexation,” he urged on Sunday, emphasizing that while Greenland is open to a dialogue with the U.S., it will no longer stand for “pressure” or “disrespectful posts on social media.” Nielsen’s impassioned statement comes as President Donald Trump renews his annexation threat against Greenland in the wake of the Venezuela operation which saw Nicolás Maduro captured and brought to the U.S.

In comments that Nielsen labeled “utterly unacceptable,” Trump repeated his eagerness to oversee a U.S. annexation of Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. “We need Greenland from a national security situation. It’s so strategic,” the President told reporters aboard Air Force One over the weekend. “Right now Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it.” Trump claimed that the European Union “needs” the U.S. to “have” Greenland. (European leaders have previously shown support for Greenland against Trump’s annexation threats.)

The Next Evolution in Ukraine’s Drone Defense

David Kirichenko

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To keep pace with Russia’s drone tactics, Ukraine must expand its mid-range drone strike capabilities.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches its fifth year, the character of the war continues to evolve into a technical struggle shaped by drones, electronic warfare, and the ability to strike at depth.

Ukraine has compensated for its disadvantage in traditional firepower through innovation. Unmanned systems, particularly first-person-view (FPV) drones, allowed Ukrainian forces to blunt Russian offensives and impose high costs on attacking units. Over time, this approach hardened into a “drone wall,” a layered defensive zone that has turned many Russian assaults into fields of casualties.

That kill zone has expanded steadily, now stretching roughly 15 to 25 kilometers from the front line, with Ukrainian forces increasingly pushing its reach up to 40 kilometers.

In April 2025, I wrote that Ukraine had established its drone wall defenses and that a new kind of no man’s land was emerging. Battlefields would increasingly be saturated with semi-autonomous drones capable of detecting and striking exposed movement, foreshadowing the direction of automated warfare.

Trump Wants Venezuela’s Oil. Getting It Might Not Be So Simple

Molly Taft

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The administration has made it clear that Nicolás Maduro's capture was tied to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Much less certain is how US companies will actually access them—or if they even want to.

A view of the El Palito refinery of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.Photo: Jesus Vargas/picture alliance via Getty Images

President Donald Trump has made it clear: His vision for Venezuela’s future involves the US profiting from its oil.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies—the biggest anywhere in the world—go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,” the president told reporters at a news conference Saturday, following the shocking capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

Close Fighting Fundamentals: Tactical-Level Training Considerations to Prepare for Uncertain Future Battlefields

Lt. Gen. Gregory K. Anderson

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Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from LTG Anderson’s Command Note #7 — Enduring Training Guidance Supplemental. Although it was written for XVIII Airborne Corps Soldiers, LTG Anderson provides valuable insights that can benefit all Infantry leaders as they plan and execute training.

The XVIII Airborne Corps will be called to fight, with little advance warning, to a conflict and an enemy for which we do not yet know. Presently, we do not have the clarity, precision, or detail in war plans and contingency plans to know specifically what tasks to train for or what conditions to train against. As such, our Corps needs to possess strong teams, leaders that can think, a mastery of basic skills, and excellence in night fighting to hedge against the uncertainty and full spectrum of what we could (and will) be called to execute. This article is meant to help you visualize the types of skills we need to develop at the tactical level as part of the hedge against uncertainty. THIS IS NOT TRAINING GUIDANCE FOR FIRE TEAMS, SQUADS, and PLATOONS. It is based on my experience and thus has a strong light infantry flavor to it, but if we are going to fight in small units, decentralized, and potentially isolated, then it applies across the entire formation. As we look to fix training management at echelon, I encourage you to develop your visualization of what you want your formation to train towards. Be it artillery tables, forward arming and refueling point (FARP) operations at night, expeditionary logistics, military police (MP) security missions, chemical decontamination, or unmanned breaching operations, commanders must be able to visualize and then describe the training end state to subordinates for them to have a shared reference point as they plan and execute training. After you read this supplemental, ask yourself if it helped you visualize what our training outcomes should look like to be ready for combat. This is “my” description of what I want our formations who might engage in close fighting to be able to achieve, be it infantry, engineers, logistics convoys, or while defending a perimeter in the Corps rear area. Again, this is not guidance; it is a supplemental reference for your consideration as you set out to train your units for uncertainty.

Operation Absolute Resolve: Anatomy of a Modern Decapitation Strike

Josh Luberisse

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At 0201 local time this morning, helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—the Night Stalkers—crossed into Venezuelan airspace carrying Delta Force operators toward a target in Caracas. Less than three hours later, they were back over water with Nicolás Maduro in custody. The operation, codenamed Absolute Resolve, represents the most significant U.S. direct action operation in Latin America since Panama in 1989.

This analysis examines the operation through an asymmetric warfare lens: the intelligence architecture that enabled it, the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) campaign that protected it, and the doctrinal implications for future operations. The purpose is not political commentary but operational education.

Taiwan’s £7.5tn secret weapon is disintegrating

Allegra Mendelson

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Behind the nondescript grey buildings that line the streets of Hsinchu lies one of the most important pieces of technology in the world.

Whirring away inside are rows of white machines that are so advanced – and so secretive – that a select few are allowed inside.

This is Taiwan’s “Silicon Valley” and these facilities produce the majority of the world’s semiconductors – small chips that power virtually every electronic device in use today, from coffee machines to fighter jets.

Every country in the world relies on these chips, including China, which despite threatening to “reunify” Taiwan by force, imports nearly half of the island’s semiconductors

Bold Delta Force raid leads to capture and arrest of Maduro

Jack Murphy

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A bold nighttime raid in Caracas executed by Delta Force and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment with an air package overhead totaling more than 150 aircraft captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores last night. The mission, called Operation Absolute Resolve, was not a typical JSOC capture/kill raid but rather was designed to serve an arrest warrant based on a Department of Justice indictment against Maduro and his regime. In this sense, the Delta operators were escorts to federal law enforcement officers.

The preparation for Absolute Resolve took months, involving mission rehearsals held in the area of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and involved a robust inter-agency process conducted in coordination with the CIA, the National Security Agency the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a press conference today alongside President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

‘Razin’ Caine spills details on Maduro capture in Venezuela attack

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The mission involved more than 150 aircraft “launching across the Western Hemisphere in close coordination,” to extract Maduro and his wife from their residence in downtown Caracas while maintaining “the element of tactical surprise,” Caine said.

“Operation Absolute Resolve, was discreet, precise, and conducted during the darkest hours of January 2, and was the culmination of months of planning and rehearsal. An operation that, frankly, only the United States military could undertake,” Caine told reporters at Mar-a-Lago.

Caine said work planning the operation began months ago in collaboration with multiple agencies, including the CIA, National Security Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as the intelligence community worked “to find Maduro and understand how he moved, where he lived, where he traveled, what he ate, what he wore, [and] what were his pets.”

How Multilateralism Can Survive

Monica Herz and Selina Ho

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Within hours of returning to office, in January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump took an axe to multilateralism by pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. The following month, Washington withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council and ordered a review of U.S. commitments to other international institutions, such as UNESCO. In April, Trump took aim at the global trading system, issuing his “Liberation Day” tariffs in violation of World Trade Organization (WTO) principles.

Trump is not the first American president to attack international institutions, nor are his actions the only cause of their declining relevance. Rising domestic inequality, a consequence of hyperglobalization without adequate support for workers, has fueled discontent with multilateralism in many countries. Most of these organizations, moreover, were established in the twentieth century, and insufficient reform has left them bloated, outdated, and siloed, offering one-size-fits-all remedies for complex problems such as climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and a new nuclear arms race. Still dominated by their creators in North America and Europe, these institutions are poorly suited to govern a world where more and more economic activity and political decision-making happen in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

A year of strikes: US military operations surge under Trump

Tanya Noury

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President Donald Trump has presided over a rapid surge of U.S. military activity abroad since returning to the Oval Office. In the first year of his second term, he has authorized a series of strikes ranging from the unprecedented use of bunker-buster bombs against Iran’s most fortified nuclear sites to a sustained counternarcotics campaign off the Venezuelan coast.

Trump, who has labeled himself a “peace president,” frames the expansion of force as a strategy of “peace through strength.” At his inaugural ball in January, he declared, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

Why We Must Be Concerned About The Attack On Putin’s Residence – OpEd

Murray Hunter

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Just after the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was at Mar-a-Lagi talking about a peace with US President Donald Trump, elements within the Ukraine armed forces with assistance from British intelligence (not fully substantiated) launched a drone attack targeting Russian President Putin’s state residence in the Novgorod region on the night of December 28-29.

This drone attack on Putin’s residence involved 91 drones according to Russian media, which were all reported intercepted. Ukraine has strongly denied such claims, calling it a fabrication to undermine peace negotiations. However, its clear a third party most probably rogue elements within the Ukrainian military with some “European” collaborations are trying to sabotage any plans. RT claims the Russian authorities found a flight plan file in the drone wreckage to prove the origin of the attack.

Delta Force, other special operations soldiers carried out Venezuela raid

Jeff Schogol, Nicholas Slayton

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Delta Force and soldiers with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were involved in the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in the early hours of Saturday, Task & Purpose has learned.

In a press conference Saturday morning, President Donald Trump said that no U.S. personnel were killed in the attack, which saw airstrikes hit several sites in Venezuela. U.S. special operations forces moved in by helicopter into the capital of Caracas and captured Maduro and his wife Celia Flores. They are now being held on a U.S. Navy ship in the Caribbean.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, speaking with Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said that the attack — Operation Absolute Resolve — was a “culmination of months of planning and rehearsal.”

How Trump’s Venezuela Takeover Could Change the World

Richard Hall

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Speaking just hours after the successful operation to depose Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump issued a stark warning: “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

But the swift removal of Venezuela’s president, and Trump’s promise to “run” the country while extracting its oil wealth for the benefit of American companies, are likely to have ramifications far beyond the Americas.

Venezuela’s importance lies not just in its proximity to the United States, but also in its role as a geopolitical centre of great power competition. It is an energy superpower, a symbol of ideological opposition to the U.S., and it has forged close relations with its enemies. It has also witnessed one of the largest refugee crises in modern history—one that could worsen.

Venezuela Isn’t Panama—No Matter How Much Trump Wishes It Were

Bobby Ghosh

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The last time an American president ordered troops to snatch a Latin American strongman, I was a young journalist half a world away, watching grainy footage of Operation Just Cause on a bulky television set. The 1989 invasion of Panama, which resulted in the capture and eventual trial of Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges, is remembered in Washington as a model intervention: quick, decisive, and blessedly free of the quagmire that would come to define American military adventures in the decades that followed.

It’s no surprise, then, that the architects of President Trump’s “large-scale strike” on Venezuela are inviting comparisons to Panama. The framing is almost identical: a corrupt narco-dictator, a surgical operation, an extraction to face American justice. On Saturday morning, as smoke rose over Caracas and Venezuelans ran through darkened streets, Trump hailed what he called a “brilliant operation” with “great, great troops.” Nicolás Maduro and his wife, he announced, had been captured and flown out of the country.

A President Captured: How the Elite Delta Force Raid in Caracas Unfolded

Nik Popli

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By early Saturday morning, the United States had taken a step not seen in more than three decades: capturing a sitting foreign leader and flying him out of the country to face criminal charges in New York.

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized in a pre-dawn raid in Caracas by American special operations forces, the culmination of months of covert intelligence work and steadily escalating military pressure ordered by President Donald Trump to oust the authoritarian leader. The operation, officials said, unfolded in less than half an hour overnight but drew on weeks of rehearsals and a vast armada of aircraft and intelligence assets that tracked Maduro’s behavioral habits.

Maduro Is Gone—Venezuela’s Dictatorship Is Not

Quico Toro

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First things first: the stunningly audacious raid that extracted Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela is a genuinely history-making victory for Donald Trump. At a cost of zero American lives, the United States captured a singularly destructive force: a dictator whose record of criminality and misrule blighted millions of Venezuelan lives and destabilized politics in the entire Western hemisphere.

After clumsily stealing an election he had plainly lost by a landslide eighteen months ago, Nicolás Maduro kept running the Venezuelan state as a sprawling criminal syndicate. Along with his powerbroker wife, Cilia Flores, he belongs in a prison cell as surely as anyone I can think of. Which is why you’ll be hard pressed to find a Venezuelan who doesn’t, on some level, rejoice at last night’s news

How to Topple Maduro And Why Regime Change Is the Only Way Forward in Venezuela

Elliott Abrams

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On the last day of October, CBS’s 60 Minutes asked U.S. President Donald Trump about his policy on Venezuela and his thoughts about that country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro. “Are Maduro’s days as president numbered?” asked Norah O’Donnell. “I would say yeah,” Trump replied. “I think so, yeah.”

This phlegmatic response was a good summary of current U.S. policy: Washington favors Maduro’s downfall, but its position lacks clarity and is not backed by the actions—including military strikes inside Venezuela—that would bring about the outcome U.S. officials appear to want. And therein lies the danger for Trump and his administration: that after a great deal of chest-thumping and a show of naval force aimed at Maduro, they will leave him in place. In that scenario, Maduro would emerge as the survivor who bested Trump and showed that American influence in the Western Hemisphere is limited at best.

A New Year, a "New" Weapon, & an Old Tale

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What is one of the fundamentals that we keep returning to here? If you want to know what will be important in and needed for the next large war, look closely at the most advanced small and medium sized wars happening now.

There is no better judge, test, or simulation to help you see the utility of a weapon system than actually having it perform in sustained combat conditions against a non-cooperative target.

As we approach the 4th anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022, untold pages of text have been written about FPV and other drones. Yes, these are important and are a new tool for war—but they are not the answer to all.

AI teachers and cybernetics - what could the world look like in 2050?

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The last 25 years has seen some mind-bending technological changes.

At the start of the century, most computers connected to the internet with noisy dial-up connections, Netflix was an online DVD rental company, and the vast majority of people hadn't even heard of a smartphone.

Fast forward two and a half decades, and innovations in AI, robotics and much else besides are emerging at an incredible rate.

So we decided to ask experts what the next 25 years could bring.

Here are their predictions for the technology we'll be using by 2050 - and how it could reshape our lives.

2025 was a terrible year for the ‘Four Families’ accused of running global cyber scam operations

Helen Regan

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People traded as commodities, iron cages used for punishment, severed fingers and even human sacrifice.

These grisly details, revealed during interrogations of some of Asia’s most notorious criminal magnates, expose the horror of life in the many scam factories that dot Myanmar’s rugged and lawless border with China.

The suspects were alleged members of powerful crime families whose political connections, wealth and thousand-strong private armies allowed them to build multibillion-dollar empires on illegal gambling, telecoms and internet fraud, drug production, prostitution, and other illicit activities with impunity.

Now behind bars in Chinese prisons, more than a dozen on death row, their confessions have been beamed through TV screens across China and their alleged crimes detailed in lengthy investigations in Chinese state media.

China reduced troops in Ladakh by half in last one year, says The Economist

Debdutta Chakraborty

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New Delhi: China reduced its forward troop presence in eastern Ladakh by half over the last one year, reports The Economist.

It also added that China is building infrastructure at four times the pace of India.

Satellite imagery reviewed by Indian officials shows a tenfold increase in permanent Chinese structures since 2020, the report also said. Indian and Western officials report a quiet de-escalation by China post 2024, since a diplomatic breakthrough between New Delhi and Beijing.

As ThePrint reported then, India and China, back in 2024, entered an agreement on the “agreed perceived Line of Actual Control”, including in Depsang and Demchok, even as there was unlikely to be any immediate thinning of troops other than those pulled back in the winter under norms. According to the latest Economist report, a fragile calm now prevails, with patrols resumed across the LAC, commanders of both sides speaking regularly, and even soldiers exchanging “waves”. So much so that even during Operation Sindoor, India felt “confident enough to divert two brigades from the LAC to the border with Pakistan”, according to a Western official quoted in the report.

China drills feed info war targeting faith in Taiwan’s defenses

Jeff Pao

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The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) this week launched new military exercises near Taiwan, stepping up pressure on the self-governing island after Washington announced a US$11 billion arms sale to Taipei.

Alongside the shows of force, Beijing has also ramped up information warfare aimed at undermining confidence in Taiwan’s defenses. An overseas Chinese military commentator said the campaign seeks to persuade overseas audiences that Taiwan’s forces and equipment would be unable to withstand a PLA attack.

On Monday (December 29), the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command carried out joint drills involving naval vessels and aircraft in waters and airspace around Taiwan. The exercises focused on simulated strikes against sea and land targets, air‑control operations and anti‑submarine missions.

China’s 6G surface could convert enemy radar beams into power for stealth jets

Aman Tripathi

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Researchers in China have reportedly developed a smart electromagnetic surface capable of converting ambient electromagnetic waves into electrical power.

This development represents an integration of electromagnetic engineering and communication principles.

“In the case studies, by jointly optimizing parameters such as transceiver beamforming, robot trajectories, and RIS coefficients, solutions based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning and multi-objective optimization are proposed to solve problems such as beamforming design, path planning, target sensing, and data aggregation,” said the researchers in a new paper

Sixth-gen fighter: China speeds up development of J-36, J-50 jet; challenge US’ air dominance

Prabhat Ranjan Mishra

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China is reportedly accelerating the development of two advanced fighter jets, according to the U.S. Department of War report released in December 2025. Often referred to as the J-36 and J-50, these aircraft are widely believed to represent China’s vision for future air dominance and naval aviation, potentially placing the country among the first to test sixth-generation combat aircraft.

In recent years, competition among major powers has increasingly shifted toward the development of next-generation military aviation. One of the most significant developments in this area is China’s reported acceleration of its sixth-generation fighter aircraft programs.

Xi Jinping vows to reunify China and Taiwan in New Year’s Eve speech

Amy Hawkins and Helen Davidson

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China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to reunify China and Taiwan in his annual New Year’s Eve speech in Beijing.

Speaking the day after the conclusion of intense Chinese military drills around Taiwan, Xi said: “The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable.”

China claims Taiwan, a self-governing island, as part of its territory and has long vowed to annex it, using force if necessary.

US intelligence is increasingly concerned about the advancing capabilities of China’s armed forces to launch such an attack if Xi decides the time is right.

On Monday and Tuesday, China’s People’s Liberation Army launched live-fire military drills around Taiwan, simulating a blockade of main ports and sending its navy, air force, rocket force and coastguard to encircle Taiwan’s main island. The drills, called “Justice Mission 2025”, came closer to Taiwan than previous exercises, and involved at least 200 warplanes across the two days, the highest tally for more than a year. Taiwan said 27 missiles were also fired towards Taiwan, with several landing within 27 nautical miles of its coastline.

US to ‘run’ Venezuela after Maduro captured, says Trump: Early analysis from Chatham House experts

Dr Christopher Sabatini

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On Saturday 3 January US President Donald Trump announced a large-scale US strike on Venezuela – and stated that the US had also captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

US Attorney General Pamela Bondi later posted on X that Maduro and his wife had been charged with drugs-related offences and would ‘face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts. At a press conference later on Saturday, President Trump said the US was ‘going to run the country’ until a transition could be safely arranged.

Here is early, provisional, analysis from Chatham House experts, who will monitor developments over the weekend with updates, additions and further commentary to follow.

Joint Ukraine-NATO training and analysis team gets classified, AI-enabled Google Cloud

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

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WASHINGTON — Google has been tapped to provide classified cloud services, including AI, to a unique collaboration between NATO and Ukraine whose mission is to analyze data and lessons-learned from the ongoing war with Russia, the company announced Monday.

Google said the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) had awarded a “multi-million dollar” contract for its Google Distributed Cloud to “handle classified workloads” for the nearly year-old Joint Analysis, Training and Education Centre (JATEC), which formally opened this February in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz, already a growing hub of NATO training, tech, and other alliance activities.

As a “unique” NATO partnership with a foreign country, according to its website, “JATEC identifies and supports the [application of] lessons from Russia’s war against Ukraine.” It also claims a leading role in NATO’s adoption of cloud computing: “The first place NATO will see these technologies at work is at JATEC.”

What’s next for Army’s ambitious Next Gen C2 effort: 2026 preview

Mark Pomerleau

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One major Army initiative that’s expected to pick up speed in 2026 is its Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort, specifically through a series of experiments designed to slowly expand the scope of the new tech before a single culminating exercise.

Two of the goals for 2026: kick off smaller-scale experiments for one NGC2 prototype, and expand experiments of another prototype to test it with an entire division in 2026, since going forward the division will be the unit of action for the Army.

Described as a clean-slate approach, for NGC2 the service wants to essentially start from scratch and develop a holistic architecture for how soldiers and commanders ingest, visualize and share battlefield information, all with the goal of providing decision advantage and being faster than the adversary on a dynamic battlefield.

150 aircraft, cyber effects and ‘overwhelming force:’ How the Venezuela operation unfolded

Aaron Mehta 

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WASHINGTON — The surprise, complex operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was the result of long-term planning between the US military and its intelligence agencies, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine said today.

“The word integration does not explain the sheer complexity of such a mission, an extraction so precise it involved more than 150 aircraft launching across the western hemisphere in close coordination, all coming together in time and place to layer effects for a single purpose, to get an interdiction force into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise,” he said. “Failure of one component of this well-oiled machine would have endangered the entire mission.”

Speaking after President Donald Trump announced the results of what was termed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” Caine laid out details of the operation while noting he would only speak in generalities because “there is always a chance that we’ll be tasked to do this type of mission again.”

Disinformation Floods Social Media After Nicolás Maduro’s Capture

David Gilbert

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Within minutes of Donald Trump announcing in the early hours of Saturday morning that US troops had captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social medi Some people shared old videos across social platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, people shared AI-generated images and videos that claimed to show US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.

In recent years, major global incidents have triggered huge amounts of disinformation on social media as tech companies have pulled back efforts to moderate their platforms. Many accounts have sought to take advantage of these lax rules to boost engagement and gain followers. “The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the early hours of Saturday morning.