Is Punjanb “Suthra” Under CM Maryam Nawaz?

Brief

Punjab’s flagship Suthra Punjab sanitation programme, launched under Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz with a budget reaching 150 billion rupees annually, faces severe structural corruption, ghost payrolls, and multi-billion-rupee financial leaks across multiple districts. Anti-Corruption Establishment investigations in Faisalabad and Dera Ghazi Khan revealed widespread fraud by municipal officials and private contractors, including Care Services Consortium, who manipulated digital monitoring portals to bill phantom workers, non-existent waste containers, and unsupplied mini-dumpers.

Intended to modernize municipal waste management through artificial intelligence analytics and location tracking, the outsourced initiative instead produced severe service failures, irregular waste collection, and unpaid worker strikes across Sheikhupura, Pakpattan, and Sargodha. Financial strains have intensified as the provincial waste authority collected only 1 billion rupees against a 70 billion rupee fee target, forcing a pivot toward aggressive tax collection from commercial institutions. The province now faces mounting public protests, legal proceedings over withheld social security contributions, and persistent operational deficits.

China Isn’t Winning the Digital Order – Yet

The Diplomat  |  Ilaria Carrozza

Chinese firms expanding the Digital Silk Road are supplying 5G networks, fiber-optic cabling, smart-city platforms, and cloud infrastructure across Southeast Asia, raising concerns in Washington regarding the export of digital authoritarianism. However, key regional recipient nations including Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia are refusing to adopt Beijing’s cyber sovereignty regulatory model.

Instead, Indonesia enforces technical standards developed in Geneva, the Philippines aligns its data privacy laws with European standards, and Malaysia designs its artificial intelligence rules around United Nations principles. This regulatory divergence demonstrates that hardware adoption does not automatically translate into institutional or normative alignment with Beijing. While Chinese state-backed technological investments dominate physical construction contracts, local regulators maintain sovereign autonomy by integrating multilateral governance frameworks. Consequently, the geopolitical competition over global digital order remains unresolved, as Western policy reactions risk driving partner states toward Chinese norms if alternative regulatory standards and technology access are restricted.

China’s AI ‘Robotic Fortresses’ Could Transform South China Sea Warfare

Defence Security Asia

Chinese researchers affiliated with the China Coast Guard Academy and Dalian Maritime University have proposed converting contested South China Sea outposts into autonomous defensive hubs. The concept deploys distributed networks of uncrewed aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles to counter hostile saturation swarms through resilient cross-domain architecture. This proposal responds directly to Ukraine’s successful employment of Magura V5 uncrewed surface vessels against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which demonstrated how low-cost robotic platforms can threaten major surface combatants in contested littoral waters.

By distributing sensors, electronic warfare assets, and artificial-intelligence processors across three defensive rings, the architecture seeks to preserve island surveillance and targeting capabilities during high-intensity electromagnetic disruption. However, persistent maritime autonomous operations remain heavily constrained by energy, maintenance, ammunition replenishment, and systemic infrastructure vulnerabilities. Recent sea trials aboard Xinhongzhuan and infrastructure expansion at Antelope Reef highlight Beijing’s strategic trajectory toward hardening contested Indo-Pacific artificial island bases.

Electrostates vs. petrostates: The US, China, and the Hormuz energy shock

Brookings | Scott M. Moore

The U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, closed the Strait of Hormuz, triggering the largest oil supply disruption in history and pushing Brent crude to $100 per barrel. While the United States drew down reserves to export a record 5.6 million barrels per day in May 2026, China responded by slashing crude imports by 3.6 million barrels per day.

Beijing insulated its domestic market by drawing upon a 1.4 billion barrel crude stockpile, boosting coal generation from its 1,200-gigawatt fleet, and expanding Russian crude imports to replace 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian supply. Concurrently, electric vehicle adoption displaced over 1 million barrels per day of oil demand. Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan subsequently raised its 2030 renewable energy target to 25%. Consequently, American gains remain tethered to transient fossil fuel exports, whereas Chinese cleantech dominance positions Beijing to control post-crisis energy supply chains.

Special ops general says autonomous systems are key to countering ‘gray-zone’ tactics

Stars and Stripes  |  Wyatt Olson

Army Brig. Gen. Michael Rose, commander of Special Operations Command Pacific, stated at the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, on August 20, 2026, that the United States military must deploy distributed networks of affordable autonomous systems to counter gray-zone coercion by adversaries. Rose emphasized that conventional military dominance alone is insufficient against state and non-state actors operating below the threshold of traditional warfare through asymmetric tactics such as maritime swarming and economic pressure.

This strategic shift addresses a paradox where American conventional superiority incentivizes competitors like China—whose commercial fishing vessels harass Philippine ships in the South China Sea—to exploit operational seams, ambiguity, and delayed attribution. Rather than viewing platforms like the MQ-9 Reaper drone, which has a range exceeding 1,000 miles, or Switchblade 600 loitering munitions strictly as strike weapons, Rose advocated integrating partner-operated sensor networks to immediately detect, document, and expose gray-zone activity, reshaping persistent competition.

In Focus How Pacific nations walk a tightrope between Western security and Chinese trade

South China Morning Post  |  Fan Chen, Laura Zhou

Western nations led by Australia are rapidly expanding their security presence in the South Pacific by pursuing formal bilateral agreements, highlighted by Australia and Fiji moving to sign defence pacts on 23 August 2026. This security push seeks to counter Beijing's expanding footprint across vital maritime corridors where regional influence remains intensely contested.

Despite these high-level defense commitments from Western partners, Pacific island governments continue to cultivate deep economic ties with China to secure critical infrastructure funding, trade access, and direct bilateral development assistance. Beijing has strategically tailored its regional diplomatic approach by shifting toward targeted "small and beautiful" community-level aid projects designed to address local economic needs while minimizing friction with Western security initiatives. Consequently, Pacific island leaders actively balance major-power competition to maximize domestic economic benefits while avoiding exclusive security commitments, preserving strategic flexibility between Western defense partnerships and Chinese commercial trade networks.

Out of Ammo: A Two-Year Sprint to Rebuild the American Arsenal and Deter China

Council on Foreign Relations | Rush Doshi

The United States Department of Defense faces severe shortages in high-end precision-guided munitions and critical air defense interceptors, impairing its capacity to deter a potential People’s Liberation Army assault on Taiwan by 2027. Depleted by recent operational commitments like Operation Epic Fury, American stockpiles cannot be replenished rapidly through legacy defense manufacturing channels alone.

To bridge this critical capacity gap within a two-year window, the Pentagon is accelerating procurement of low-cost, expendable "precise mass" capabilities—including short-range attack drones, low-cost containerized cruise missiles, and uncrewed autonomous sensors. Funded partly through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and organized under a dedicated direct reporting portfolio manager for unmanned systems, this acquisition shift prioritizes manufacturing speed and production volume over high-end performance specifications. By deploying non-traditional defense vendors and expanding initiatives like the Gauntlets program, Washington aims to establish a rapid deterrence posture across the Taiwan Strait before conventional industrial base expansions mature.

Taiwan’s Whole-of-Society Exercise: What Han Kuang 42 Should Teach the Rest of Us

Mick Ryan's Substack  |  Mick Ryan

Taiwan executed the forty-second iteration of its annual Han Kuang exercise between 5 and 14 August 2026, marking its first full whole-of-society mobilization to deter potential aggression from Chinese military planners. The ten-day exercise combined live-fire military operations with civilian resilience drills to demonstrate national defense readiness to regional allies and the United States.

Integrating unscripted, decentralized training based on a US model, the armed forces deployed M1A2T Abrams tanks and Clouded Leopard vehicles at Taoyuan International Airport, established a blockade at Hsuehshan Tunnel, closed Danjiang Bridge, and operated the Littoral Combat Command in Penghu. Civil participation encompassed an approximately 20,000-reservist mobilization, mobile-network slowdowns across 14 administrative regions, emergency operation centers, underground medical support, and civilian transport requisitioning. Military liaison officers coordinated directly within civilian command centers as President Lai Ching-te conducted continuity-of-government drills, highlighting critical lessons for Western nations that traditionally prioritize pure military planning over total civil defense preparation.

Hezbollah’s shift to attrition offers Iran a lasting tool to pressure Israel and the US

ACLED | Nasser Khdour

Hezbollah has transitioned to a decentralized attritional strategy against Israeli forces in Lebanon since March 2026, increasingly deploying low-cost fiber-optic first-person view (FPV) and suicide drones to bypass traditional defense buffers. The group utilized FPV drones in 21% of its attacks in Lebanon between March and July 2026, expanding its strike radius up to 20 kilometers to target personnel and vehicles despite heavy command disruption by the Israel Defense Forces.

This shift from direct armed clashes, which dropped from 34% during the 2024 ground invasion to 11% in recent months, adapts to degraded stockpiles following high-profile leadership assassinations. Concurrently, Hezbollah launched at least 821 rocket attacks into northern Israel to sustain political pressure and signal wider conflict potential during sensitive United States-Iran diplomatic negotiations. While large-scale offensives remain unlikely without Iranian coordination, continued clashes near the Ali al-Taher Ridge and al-Mansouri village highlight persistent operational friction along the border.

The U.S. accepts killing more than 140 civilians in just two strikes

Airwars

The United States Department of Defense conceded in its annual Section 1057 report that American airstrikes killed over 140 civilians in two separate 2025 incidents in Yemen. The admitted strikes targeted Ras Isa Port and a Houthi-controlled detention facility, killing 80 and 68 civilians respectively during intensive military operations against Houthi targets.

This marked a dramatic escalation in officially acknowledged non-combatant casualties, contrasting sharply with recent budget cuts across internal Pentagon civilian protection units. The seven-week 2025 campaign in Yemen involved over 1,000 U.S. strikes using air-delivered precision munitions like GBU-39 small diameter bombs, resulting in at least 224 civilian deaths documented by independent monitors. While the report acknowledged selected historical casualties in Iraq and Somalia, it completely omitted contentious counter-narcotics maritime strikes in Latin America and recent air operations in Nigeria, signaling persistent legal and structural exclusions in official Department of Defense civilian harm reporting mechanisms.

The End of the American Middle East: Iran and the Last Gasp of a Failed Order

Foreign Affairs  |  Marc Lynch

President Donald Trump’s military confrontation with Iran exposed the structural bankruptcy of Washington’s decades-long Middle East security architecture. The subsequent inability of the United States to shield its Gulf partners from Iranian strikes or keep the Strait of Hormuz open has fatally fractured the foundational bargain underpinning its regional military presence.

Established following the 1990–91 Gulf War, this regional order relied on forward military bases to contain Tehran while attempting to integrate Arab partners alongside Israel. However, decades of militarized containment, uncritical backing of autocratic regimes, and expanding gray-zone warfare by regional adversaries steadily eroded this framework. As Israel pursues territorial expansion and Tehran leverages low-cost asymmetric weapons like ballistic missiles and drones, American strategic options are rapidly dwindling. Unless Washington abandons punitive sanctions and endless military interventionism, the final collapse of its regional primacy will leave behind an increasingly unmanageable and dangerous strategic landscape.

US Reaper drones near end of the line in a new war era

Asia Times | Gabriel Honrada

The US Air Force is accelerating plans to replace its MQ-9 Reaper fleet after losing at least 45 aircraft—roughly a quarter of its active inventory—during combat operations in Iran and Yemen. To counter high-threat anti-access environments, General Atomics unveiled the Wildfire drone under the Defense Innovation Unit’s Massed Modular Aircraft program, offering a scalable platform carrying a 1,270-kilogram payload with an 18,520-kilometer ferry range.

Combat losses highlighted severe structural vulnerabilities in legacy platforms whose unit costs can cost up to US$50 million, making high attrition rates unsustainable during high-intensity conflict. Although modernizations like 30-hour fuel pods extended endurance, the official closure of the Reaper production line in 2025 pushed military planners toward open-architecture attritable systems. However, chronic defense-industrial bottlenecks and compressed acquisition schedules—giving commercial vendors just 16 days to respond—threaten the Pentagon's goal of achieving full operational capability ahead of its planned 2031 deployment timeline.

Why Iran has not folded yet

Atlantic Council | Andrew L. Peek and Jonathan Panikoff

US President Donald Trump announced an escalation toward unprecedented economic warfare and isolation against Tehran, raising the prospect of direct military strikes following Iran’s refusal to negotiate a new bilateral agreement. Iranian leadership under Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and senior IRGC veterans of the Iran-Iraq War continue resisting concessions, aiming to inflict short-term operational costs while disrupting regional opposition coalitions.

Decades of war-forged endurance define Tehran’s command posture, with security forces prioritizing regime survival over widespread popular economic relief. Shrinking accessible foreign currency reserves, previously collapsing from $120 billion to under $13 billion under past maximum-pressure campaigns, severely constrain domestic stabilization if petroleum exports via the Strait of Hormuz remain restricted. As Saudi Arabia signs a new defense pact with Turkey and Pakistan to hedge against escalating regional volatility, Washington’s strategy relies on sustained long-term enforcement of financial sanctions to exploit Tehran’s structural economic vulnerabilities.

Trump is Combining Geoeconomic and Kinetic Warfare Against Iran

The American Spectator  |  Francis P. Sempa

United States naval forces are blockading the Strait of Hormuz alongside intensified geoeconomic measures against Iran, following initial 2025 strikes on nuclear targets and six months of renewed kinetic warfare. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced unprecedented sanctions designed as an economic siege, forcing Tehran's economy to contract by nearly three percent while pushing inflation above 60 percent.

Previous American military interventions, including the 1991 Gulf War's 42-day campaign and 100-hour ground fight, fostered public expectations of rapid, low-casualty victories, which sharply contrasted with prolonged counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although recent American strikes inflicted severe damage on Iranian infrastructure and military capabilities, Washington is prioritizing prolonged maritime blockades and financial isolation over expanded ground operations to achieve its overarching strategic objectives. Successfully collapsing the adversary's economic stability through siege warfare requires domestic political endurance to counter rising domestic impatience and public perceptions of a strategic quagmire in the Middle East.

Pentagon fires Stars and Stripes' top editor, publisher and a reporter

AP News | JOCELYN NOVECK

The U.S. Department of Defense on August 21, 2026, dismissed the top editor, publisher, and a staff reporter at Stars and Stripes, marking a significant escalation in institutional friction between military leadership and independent editorial oversight. The high-level personnel removals target key decision-makers at the editorially independent publication, directly impacting newsroom operations and editorial control across its global operational footprint.

Operational independence for the military news organization has long relied on statutory protections designed to shield journalists from command interference while serving deployed service members globally. By terminating executive editorial personnel simultaneously, defense officials have raised immediate concerns regarding press freedom, civil-military transparency, and internal censorship protocols within federally funded media institutions. This governance shift risks altering institutional reporting standards, compromising oversight of defense policy, and disrupting established editorial protocols that govern military publishing. The trajectory of these administrative terminations points toward heightened legislative and public scrutiny surrounding executive authority over military media operations and structural editorial independence.

The Inversion of Soft Power: America’s Reversal at 250

Small Wars Journal | Antonia-Laura Pup, by Lidia Bernd

The United States is experiencing a rapid inversion of its traditional soft power model as domestic institutions face budget cuts and political fragmentation, while foreign nations actively acquire influence inside American research and policy networks. Longstanding instruments of American public diplomacy, including the Fulbright Program, USAID, and Radio Free Europe, have suffered severe structural rollbacks, including $75 billion in USAID project terminations and a 17% drop in international student enrollment.

Concurrently, Gulf monarchies led by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are transforming soft power into strategic infrastructure by funding higher education, artificial intelligence initiatives, and think tanks. Qatar alone contributed over $1.1 billion in reportable university gifts and contracts in 2025, while the UAE positioned institutions like the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence within global tech governance ecosystems. This systematic institutional integration embeds foreign interests directly into future decision-making systems, shifting global influence from an outward American export to an inward foreign leverage mechanism.

The Great Monetary Reset: Gold, Digital Dollars and Engineering the Next Global Monetary Order

Niti Shastra  |  Navroop Singh, Himja Parekh

The United States government faces an escalating sovereign debt trap as rising interest costs threaten fiscal stability and reserve currency privileges. To avert explicit default or extreme austerity, policymakers could execute a controlled monetary reset by revaluing official gold reserves from the statutory $42.22 per ounce to market rates such as $20,000 per ounce.

This statutory adjustment would instantly unlock over $5 trillion in dormant balance-sheet capacity without requiring new debt issuance. The Treasury could subsequently deploy these newly monetized reserves into large-scale buybacks of 10-year and 30-year Treasury bonds, compressing the term premium and engineering yield curves at the long end. Meanwhile, short-term fiscal deficits would be absorbed by expanding a highly regulated digital dollar ecosystem, where stablecoin issuers serve as captive institutional buyers of short-duration Treasury bills. This dual strategy effectively monetizes underutilized sovereign assets, reduces long-duration liabilities, and enforces financial repression to inflate away debt.

Building the Army’s Human Advantage: A Vision of Readiness for the Future of Autonomous Warfare

Modern War Institute | Lucas Ziller

The US Army faces a critical operational challenge in adapting its personnel management system to sustain AI-enabled autonomous warfare across tactical formations. Although investments in software, computing hardware, and tactical networks accelerate rapidly, soldiers continue to operate complex unmanned aerial systems as additional duties rather than inside dedicated professional specialties.

Operational lessons from Ukraine and the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division's deployment to US Central Command demonstrate that technological superiority depends on human capital capable of integrating autonomous capabilities into combined arms maneuver. As autonomous software assumes control over basic flight and target detection, human expertise shifts toward managing distributed data networks, validating machine-generated recommendations, and countering electronic warfare. Assigning responsibility to traditional aviation branches misaligns with small tactical assets like Group 1 drones. Creating dedicated maneuver specialists ensures organic, low-echelon integration of sensor feeds, edge processing, and strike capabilities.

Is the tide at home turning against President Zelensky?

The Times

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faces mounting domestic political pressure as ongoing corruption scandals, severe manpower shortages, and a rising civilian death toll from relentless Russian missile strikes erode internal stability. Former allies are mounting open political challenges against the presidential administration, signaling potential shifts in Ukraine's wartime leadership dynamics ahead of prospective elections.

This convergence of domestic opposition and military strain complicates Kyiv's governance while armed forces battle persistent Russian offensives along the front lines. High-profile political figures, including Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, navigate an increasingly fractured landscape where public frustration over draft enforcement and official malfeasance intensifies. The compounding crisis testing Zelensky's executive authority threatens cohesive decision-making during high-intensity combat operations. As missile strikes inflict heavy casualties, the political leadership must balance internal stability against operational necessities to sustain long-term resistance and prevent systemic political fragmentation under total war conditions across the nation.

Japan & American: The Economic Hostage Crisis

FrameTheGlobeNews  |  The Ren Way, TheGlobalChief

Japan's financial capacity to cheaply support United States public debt has reached an operational breaking point, threatening broader bilateral economic stability. On August 22, 2026, structural fiscal pressures forced Tokyo to adjust its capital allocation strategy, ending decades of low-cost financing for Washington's sovereign debt obligations. This shift forces American debt markets to absorb significantly higher borrowing costs while simultaneously eroding Japanese domestic household purchasing power.

The structural dependency created by long-standing capital flows historically allowed the United States to fund budget deficits cheaply while Tokyo anchored its exchange rate strategy around Treasury purchases. However, rising yields and domestic inflation in Japan have compromised this reciprocal arrangement, leaving both economies vulnerable to severe macroeconomic spillovers. Consequently, policymakers face heightened systemic risks, as attempts to preserve legacy financial mechanics threaten to trigger inflationary pressures and consumer hardship in both nations. The developing dynamic signals a major realignment in global capital movements and bilateral economic posture.

Beyond Victory: How Should Israel’s War Against Iran Be Assessed?

BESA Center | Dr. Eado Hecht and Prof. Eitan Shamir

Iran's grand strategy against Israel relied on three mutually reinforcing pillars: the multi-front "Ring of Fire" proxy network, long-range ballistic missile arsenals, and a nuclear program designed to secure strategic immunity. Following Yahya Sinwar's premature October 7, 2023 offensive, sustained Israeli military campaigns severely degraded proxy capabilities across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria by December 2024.

This structural breakdown compelled Tehran to shift from an integrated offensive posture to a defensive strategy by accelerating its nuclear breakout timeline and long-range missile production throughout 2025. In response, Israeli and joint American military operations in June 2025 and March 2026 targeted these critical facilities to prevent Iran from reconstructing its regional threat architecture. Ultimately, Israeli strategic success cannot be measured by immediate regime change or battlefield destruction tallies, but by how effectively these preventive campaigns disrupted Tehran’s long-term capability to project force and pose an existential threat.

El Niño set to be 'strongest in living memory', says Met Office

BBC  |  Ben Rich, Mark Poynting

The UK Met Office has issued an urgent warning that a developing El Niño event in the Pacific Ocean could become the strongest in living memory, with ocean surface temperatures exceeding 2C above normal and potentially reaching 3C or 4C later in 2026. This natural atmospheric heating phenomenon, combined with deep-ocean warming of up to 8C at a depth of 100 metres, is very likely to make 2027 the hottest calendar year on record, surpassing 2024.

The phenomenon is already suppressing India’s southwest monsoon precipitation and Atlantic hurricane activity while significantly amplifying risks of severe drought and wildfires in northern South America and Australia, alongside flooding across Peru, Ecuador, and the southern United States. With global baseline warming already up 1.4C since the late nineteenth century, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns that this climate shock threatens tens of millions with acute food insecurity while incurring hundreds of billions of dollars in agricultural yield losses.

The Eras of Francis Fukuyama: Building Things

Persuasion  |  Yascha Mounk

Francis Fukuyama highlighted how Ukrainian forces successfully leveraged low-cost commercial robotics, Arduino microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi single-board computers, and custom command-and-control networks to counter a superior Russian military invasion following the 2022 escalation. This localized technological adaptation illustrates how practical engineering skills and modular hardware design foster operational autonomy during crisis scenarios.

As modern societies grow increasingly reliant on proprietary technological ecosystems and generative artificial intelligence tools like Claude and ChatGPT, fundamental technical self-reliance faces critical erosion. The widespread adoption of closed, non-modular hardware architectures and automated coding assistants risks causing rapid skill atrophy across future civilian and defense workforces. When critical global infrastructure or satellite navigation systems experience disruption, populations lacking practical software manipulation and hardware repair capabilities face severe operational vulnerabilities. Maintaining basic technical literacy in hardware fabrication, open-source programming in Python, and sensor integration provides essential resilience, ensuring societies retain critical problem-solving capacities when external technological dependencies suddenly fail during high-intensity conflict or systemic breakdown.

The national security implications of building frontier AI data centers overseas

Brookings Institution | Derek Belle, Nitya Nadgir, Alejandra Rocha, Elham Tabassi, Valerie Wirtschafter, and Thomas Wright

Iranian drone strikes during Operation Epic Fury damaged three Amazon Web Services facilities in Bahrain on March 1, demonstrating the vulnerability of overseas tech assets. Hyperscaler capital expenditure is projected to top $1 trillion by 2027, but domestic power grid delays push computing infrastructure abroad. Agreements signed by President Donald Trump in May 2025 with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates place advanced computing hubs in volatile zones.

Siting compute capacity overseas exposes model weights, specialized chips, and proprietary training data to host-government legal compulsion, adversary espionage, and physical destruction. While real-time inference requires proximity to end users, centralized model training clusters remain vulnerable to political coercion and targeted attacks. Foreign hosting creates structural dependencies that constrain diplomatic flexibility and risk transferring technological advantages to rivals like China, mirroring supply vulnerabilities in semiconductor manufacturing while forcing additional defense commitments to safeguard vulnerable remote facilities.

The critical tech staying safe by going underground

BBC  |  Chris Baraniuk

EarthGrid tested a plasma-torch tunnel boring machine in January 2026 that reaches 27,000°C to melt granite, reflecting a broader surge in demand for undergrounding critical infrastructure. Russian drone strikes during the war in Ukraine have exposed the severe vulnerability of above-ground energy networks and telecommunications, accelerating efforts to protect vital assets subterraneanly.

Engineering firms like Joseph Gallagher report increased interest from European states bordering Russia seeking to bury energy cables, pipelines, and data infrastructure against physical and electronic attacks. Facilities such as the Trentino DataMine in Italy's Dolomite Mountains now house servers 100 metres underground in naturally cooled caverns protected by 90 million cubic metres of rock. Meanwhile, subsea internet cables are increasingly buried up to 3 metres deep to prevent physical damage, while projects like London's £1bn, 18-mile power tunnel demonstrate urban adoption. Despite high excavation costs and technical risks like gas release, undergrounding is emerging as a crucial physical defence strategy for irreplaceable technological assets.

Under Pakistan’s new defence Act, CDF Asim Munir can hire, fire and retire armed forces personnel

ThePrint | Debdutta Chakraborty

Pakistan's National Assembly approved the Defence Forces Act 2026 and amended the National Command Authority Act 2010 on 20 August 2026, granting Chief of Defence Forces Asim Munir unprecedented statutory authority across the armed forces. Munir, who concurrently serves as Chief of Army Staff, now holds exclusive administrative power to hire, retain, discharge, or alter retirement limits for personnel across tri-service commands.

This legislative overhaul codifies structural shifts initiated under the 27th Constitutional Amendment, which previously abolished the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee to create the Chief of Defence Forces position. Concurrently, the legislation establishes the National Strategic Command under newly appointed Commander Lt. Gen. Aamer Raza while centralizing nuclear command oversight and military advisory roles under the army chief. By applying retrospectively to November 2025, the new statutory framework consolidates operational command, civil-military dominance, and strategic decision-making directly within the army chief's office, institutionalizing complete military primacy over Pakistan's national security architecture.

Why Criminals Love the Chinese Economy: And Why Beijing Can’t—or Won’t—Crack Down

Foreign Affairs | Alvin Camba

China’s illicit global economy generates nearly $1 trillion annually, leveraging strict domestic capital controls, industrial overcapacity, and underground banking networks to move capital worldwide. Criminal syndicates and state-backed actors exploit these financial channels to launder drug proceeds, execute Southeast Asian scam operations generating $40 billion annually, and facilitate sanctions evasion for Iranian oil, North Korean cryptocurrency, and Russian dual-use military exports.

This shadow economy thrives because Beijing selectively tolerates cross-border illicit flows that advance its strategic and diplomatic goals while shielding state institutions from Western enforcement. Domestic industrial gluts in electronics and construction further reduce operational costs for illicit enterprises operating at an industrial scale. Although Chinese authorities sporadically conduct targeted crackdowns, such as the repatriation of over 57,000 fraud suspects from Myanmar, systemic incentives prevent comprehensive enforcement. Washington and its regional allies must coordinate operational intelligence to target these underground banking networks and constrain Beijing’s strategic exploitation of global illicit finance.

Taiwan’s Whole-of-Society Exercise: What Han Kuang 42 Should Teach the Rest of Us

Mick Ryan's Substack  |  Mick Ryan

Taiwan conducted the forty-second iteration of its annual Han Kuang exercise from 5 to 14 August 2026, executing an island-wide whole-of-society defense mobilization alongside live-fire drills. This expanded ten-day exercise aimed to signal national defensive readiness to Chinese military planners while demonstrating operational resolve to international partners, including the United States.

Military maneuvers integrated newly delivered M1A2T Abrams tanks at Taoyuan International Airport, coastal missile targeting by the Littoral Combat Command, and a tunnel blockade drill at the Hsuehshan Tunnel. Beyond tactical engagements, civil authorities deployed emergency operations centers, managed drone resupply, mobilized 20,000 reservists, and initiated deliberate mobile-network slowdowns across fourteen administrative regions. Commanders also introduced unscripted, decentralized scenarios and executed continuity-of-government drills, moving President Lai Ching-te to the National Political and Military Operations Command Centre. These combined civil-military activities address critical gaps in Western defense planning, proving that civil resilience, information warfare, and industrial preparedness remain essential components of comprehensive deterrence.

The Top 10 Ways Trump Has Made America Weaker

Foreign Policy | Stephen M. Walt

U.S. President Donald Trump's second-term policies have systematically weakened American global standing and military readiness while escalating a conflict with Iran that depleted critical munitions stockpiles. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's efforts to purge non-aligned officers and force ideological conformity have eroded military professionalism, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw withdrawal from over 60 international organizations, leaving crucial diplomatic positions vacant.

Under this administration, an American Foreign Service Association survey revealed 98 percent low morale and 86 percent operational impairment among diplomatic personnel. Concurrently, cuts to federal research funding and the appointment of science skeptics like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accelerated a severe brain drain of physics doctoral graduates, benefiting potential adversaries like China. These compounding actions—alongside trade disputes with allies Canada and Mexico, reversed arms commitments to Ukraine, and politicization of the justice system under Attorney General Todd Blanche—threaten foundational elements of American national security, economic competitiveness, and global deterrence.

How AI Could Hollow Out the U.S. Military: The Best Soldiers Know How to Think for Themselves

Foreign Affairs | Emelia S. Probasco

The United States Department of Defense faces strategic risks as rapid artificial intelligence integration degrades human cognitive capacity, operational judgment, and command decision-making across military personnel. Relying on automated algorithmic systems risks instilling severe automation bias, impairing critical battlefield skills among junior officers and senior commanders. Earlier non-autonomous software like the Maven Smart System already demonstrated how automated targeting workflows reduce staffing requirements by over 1,000 soldiers per unit.

However, modern commercial models evolve faster than Pentagon policy updates, exposing overworked service members to escalatory algorithmic recommendations and cognitive skill degradation. To preserve critical operational oversight without forfeiting technological efficiency, the Defense Department must overhaul traditional training into field-centric, continuous learning networks while deploying embedded technical experts to monitor human-machine interactions. Balancing rapid procurement with rigorous cognitive safeguards remains essential to prevent automated recommendations from eroding human command authority in future high-intensity conflicts.