Indian Strategic Studies

9 March 2026

The Shaksgam Valley in China’s Borderlands

Daniel Markey

The Shaksgam Valley—also referred to as the Trans-Karakoram Tract—is a sparsely populated region north of the Siachen Glacier disputed by China, India, and Pakistan. India considers the territory part of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and therefore asserts sovereignty over it, while Pakistan maintains its right to dictate its administration as a former piece of its broader Kashmir claim.

In 1963, Pakistan and China signed the Sino-Pakistan Boundary Agreement, under which Pakistan provisionally ceded control of the Shaksgam Valley to China, pending a final resolution of the Kashmir dispute. The 1962 Sino-Indian War over disputed border territory motivated Pakistan to seek peaceful negotiations to settle its own nondelineated border with China in the contested Kashmir region. The agreement enabled Pakistan to gain the upper hand against India in Kashmir while securing a stronger partnership with China in the aftermath of India’s 1962 defeat. India rejected the agreement as illegal, arguing that Pakistan lacked authority to transfer territory it did not sovereignly control. Today, China administers the area in practice, while India continues to contest both the boundary agreement and China’s presence there, making the Shaksgam Valley a politically sensitive flashpoint at the intersection of the China-India and India-Pakistan disputes.

Why China Won’t Help Iran

Yun Sun

China is watching carefully as the United States and Israel bombard Iran. Beijing is, after all, Tehran’s most important partner. The two countries grew close over shared history and goals: both trace their roots to leading ancient non-Western civilizations, and both oppose a Western-dominated global order today. China’s energy security is also connected to its relationship with Iran. More than 55 percent of China’s total oil imports in 2025 came from the Middle East (approximately 13 percent from Iran itself), most of which must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway bordered by Iran. Because the recent bombing

China Bulletin

China Escalates Drone Operations against Taiwan, Tests Deception Capabilities

China has intensified its use of military drones against Taiwan in recent weeks, with recent airspace violations and a sophisticated transponder-spoofing operation in what analysts describe as rehearsals for a potential conflict scenario.On January 17, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) WZ-7 “Soaring Dragon” surveillance drone entered the airspace over Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha) in the South China Sea for four minutes—“possibly the first confirmed PLA violation of Taiwan’s territorial airspace in decades.”[1] The drone flew at an altitude beyond the range of the island’s air defense systems and departed only after Taiwan broadcast warnings over international radio channels.[2] Analysts characterized the incursion as a deliberate probe of Taiwan’s rules of engagement, exploiting Pratas’ light defenses and remote location more than 250 miles from Taiwan’s main island.[3] The Atlantic Council’s Kitsch Liao noted Beijing can now repeat such flights to demonstrate it can enter this portion of Taiwan’s airspace with impunity, incrementally raising the stakes for any response.[4]

The Decapitation of Iran: What Tehran’s Chaos Means for China

Youlun Nie

On February 28, 2026, the geopolitical tectonic plates of the Middle East violently shifted. “Operation Epic Fury,” an unprecedented joint Israeli-U.S. military campaign, killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle in a devastating bunker strike, while a coordinated wave of bombardments decimated the broader ranks of Iran’s leadership. Today, the Islamic Republic is essentially a headless state, poised to rapidly devolve into an arena of factional survival. While surviving IRGC hardliners may cling to a fragmented authority – mirroring Venezuela’s hollowed-out autocracy – Iran’s utility as a strategic buffer against Washington is shattered.

For Beijing, this is a catastrophic geoeconomic earthquake. China’s entire Middle Eastern architecture has just suffered a fatal blow. As the shockwaves radiate from Tehran, Beijing faces the immediate fracturing of its energy security, the collapse of its defense exports, and the rupture of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Even more ominously, it must now confront a terrifying dual reality: a strategically unburdened Washington pivoting its military might toward the Indo-Pacific – accelerating the closing of the “Davidson Window” – and the rapid deflation of China’s own global influence across the Global South.

China military rapidly expands undersea warfare power

Bill Gertz

China’s military is expanding its forces with new submarines and drone weapons that threaten America’s undersea advantage, senior Navy officers disclosed this week.

Rear Adm. Mike Brookes, intelligence director at the Navy’s National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office, said during a congressional hearing that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is seeking to dominate the undersea warfare domain and in the coming years could pose a credible threat to America’s submarine advantage.

“PLA navy submarine modernization, rising threats to undersea infrastructure, and the push for deep-sea resources are part of a broader effort to expand China’s power and influence,” Adm. Brookes testified to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

The dry and the wet burn together

‘The dry and the wet burn together’ is a Persian expression invoked when a fire spreads without discrimination. Once the blaze begins, distinctions collapse: between the combustible and the damp, the guilty and the innocent, perpetrators and victims.

The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even the pretence that it was compelled by evidence of an Iranian dash for a bomb or an imminent attack. Such claims do not survive scrutiny; they barely withstand repetition. We are witnessing the realisation of a long-cherished ambition, a neoconservative fever dream that Benjamin Netanyahu has lobbied for, in one form or another, for decades. What sanctions could not achieve, what covert action, assassinations and cyber-warfare failed to deliver, direct military force would now accomplish, with the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as its centrepiece.

The Drone Attrition Trap

David Petraeus, and Clara Kaluderovic

Recent U.S. and Israeli operations against Iran and the latter’s retaliatory strikes have once again demonstrated the mathematics of modern air defense. Waves of Iranian-designed Shahed-136 drones—crude, slow, and estimated to cost as little as $20,000 apiece—have in a number of exchanges forced the United States and several Gulf partners to expend Patriot and SM-6 interceptors that cost millions of dollars each.

Interception rates have been impressive. A successful shoot-down that requires a high-end interceptor, however, can be a Pyrrhic victory. The defender burns through scarce and expensive munitions while the attacker draws from comparatively large stockpiles of low-cost systems. This is the drone attrition trap. And it is not new.

Bombing Campaigns Do Not Bring About Democracy. Nor Does Regime Change Without a Plan.

Marwan Muasher

As the war on Iran continues to engulf the Middle East, the scope and goals of the United States and Israel in the operation remain murky. President Donald Trump has oscillated between claiming he is not after regime change to later seeming to adopt the Israeli position that regime change was indeed a main target. But without clear objectives, the war will not bring peace to the region—only further instability and violence. The history of the region provides many examples of what happens without clear objectives or shifting goals. It should be a guide to roads to avoid, and those that should be taken, if peace and prosperity are to be the final objectives.

Take the Madrid process as an example. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush realized, even as he assembled a coalition of thirty countries to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, that the introduction of American forces in the region fighting an Arab country would not be popular among many Arabs. As a result, he decided that changing the Iraqi regime was not a desired U.S. objective and limited the scope of the U.S. forces’ presence.

The Gulf Monarchies Are Caught Between Iran’s Desperation and the U.S.’s Recklessness

Andrew Leber

Amid the open-ended war that the United States and Israel kicked off this weekend, each of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states has been targeted—and in some cases hit—by Iranian drone and missile strikes. The strikes sparked fires near luxury hotels in Dubai, caused panic at Kuwait’s international airport, and put Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery out of commission. In an interview with CNN, President Donald Trump called the attacks on the Gulf “probably the biggest surprise” of the war so far.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. During the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in the president’s first term, the Islamic Republic backed attacks on oil tankers near the Persian Gulf as well as Saudi oil infrastructure, each of which dampened GCC support for overt confrontation of Iran.

Since then, and especially since a 2023 rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the GCC states broadly prioritized diplomacy and dialogue in their dealings with Tehran. Although all of the Gulf states host U.S. military personnel in one way or another, each tried to publicly distance itself from U.S. and Israeli military action in the runup to the current hostilities (despite suggestions of private rhetoric to the contrary).

How Iran is using cheap drones to cause chaos across the Middle East

Donald Trump said Iran’s missiles and missile industry would be “totally obliterated” when the US began launching air strikes on the country on Saturday - but he didn’t mention its drones.

Six days on, Iran has launched more than 2,000 low-cost drones at targets across the Middle East in a bid to overwhelm defences and spark chaos in the region.

These ‘kamikaze’ Shahed drones carry explosives that detonate on impact and can cause significant damage. The deadliest strike on US forces so far was from a drone hitting a base in Kuwait in which six US troops were killed.

Iran's high-risk war strategy seems to centre on endurance and deterrence

Amir Azimi

Iran's military posture in a widening conflict with Israel and the US suggests it is not fighting for victory in any conventional sense. It is fighting for survival, and survival on its own terms.

The Islamic Republic's leaders and commanders have been preparing for this moment for years.

They understood that their regional ambitions could eventually trigger a direct confrontation with Israel or the US, and that a war with one would almost certainly draw in the other. That pattern was evident in the 12-day war last summer, when Israel struck first and the US joined days later.

In the current round of fighting, they launched strikes on Iran simultaneously.

Given the technological superiority, intelligence capabilities and advanced military hardware of the US and Israel, it would be naive to think Iranian strategists were planning for a straightforward battlefield victory.

What Are Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities?

Mariel Ferragamo, Will Merrow

Many foreign policy experts warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would destabilize the Middle East and nearby regions. A first-order concern is that Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons would pose a major, perhaps existential, threat to Israel—a worry that drove Israel to launch a full-scale attack on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities in June 2025 and another larger, joint attack with the United States in February 2026.

Other experts say Iran would be assuring its own demise if it were to launch a nuclear strike on Israel, a close U.S. defense partner and possessor of its own nuclear weapons arsenal, which is undeclared. Either way, there would be a dangerous potential for miscalculation that could result in a nuclear exchange, analysts say. An added concern is that Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon could spur other regional rivals, including Saudi Arabia, to pursue their own program.

Is Hezbollah Still a Threat?

Daniel Byman

Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, has joined the war against the United States and Israel, launching missiles and drones at Israeli military sites in response to the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader and other senior officials. Israel promptly responded by killing Hezbollah’s intelligence chief and bombing Hezbollah positions in Lebanon. On Tuesday, Israel sent more ground forces into southern Lebanon and warned 80 villages to evacuate.

Israel’s fight against Hezbollah will not be easy. Hezbollah remains deeply embedded in Lebanon, and the dysfunction of the Lebanese army and political system stands in the way of defeating the group. Hezbollah is adapting to war by promoting new leaders to replace those who have fallen and decentralizing its military operations. The group also still has rockets, drones, and missiles to launch and can likely mount overseas terrorist attacks, as it has in the past. Israel has fought Hezbollah for over 40 years—sometimes with on-again, off-again strikes and in other cases with massive bombings and limited invasions of Lebanon—and the group, while battered, survived.

Tell Me How This Ends: Six Questions That Will Shape the Outcome of the US-Israeli Operations Against Iran

Sydney Laite, Haleigh Bartos and Buckley DeJardin

“Tell me how this ends.”

Those were the words of David Petraeus, then a major general and the commander of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, uttered just days after his division entered Iraq as part of the US-led invasion.

Fast-forward twenty-three years, look one country to the east, and Petraeus’s comment feels remarkably applicable. Once again, just days after commencing combat operations, the challenge of predicting what outcomes US military power will achieve, what unforeseen forces (whether violent, political, or other) it might unleash, and how it will impact the regional balance is a virtually impossible one. There are clear information gaps regarding what’s going on inside Iran. But amid the many questions, several stand out as particularly illuminating. As answers to these questions emerge, we will be given some glimpse of—if not the final outcome—at least what comes next.

Defense executives plan to meet at White House as strikes on Iran diminish stockpiles

Mike Stone

WASHINGTON, March 3 (Reuters) - The Trump administration plans to meet with executives from the biggest U.S. defense contractors at the White House on Friday to discuss ‌accelerating weapons production, as the Pentagon works to replenish supplies after strikes on Iran and several other recent military efforts, five people familiar with the plan told Reuters.

Companies including Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), opens new tab and Raytheon parent RTX (RTX.N), opens new tab, along with other key suppliers, have been invited to attend the meeting, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.

The meeting underscores the urgency felt in Washington to shore up weapons stocks after the Iran operation ⁠drew heavily on munitions. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and Israel began military operations in Gaza, the U.S. has drawn down billions of dollars' worth of weapons stockpiles, including artillery systems, ammunition and anti-tank missiles. The conflict in Iran has consumed longer-range missiles than those furnished to Kyiv.

Why Trump wants Ukraine’s interceptor drones in Iran war

Veronika Melkozerova and Victor Jack

KYIV — Donald Trump's attack on Iran reveals that Ukraine does have some cards to play, after all.

The U.S. president lambasted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year in the White House, telling him: "You don't have the cards right now." One year on, Ukraine is holding talks with polite American officials in Kyiv keen to get a look-in on Ukraine's world-leading anti-drone technology.

“Partners are turning to us, to Ukraine, for help,” Zelenskyy said on Wednesday night. “Requests on this matter have also come from the American side.”

How depleted weapons stockpiles could affect the Iran conflict

Jonathan Beale

US President Donald Trump claims his country has a "virtually unlimited supply" of key weapons. Iran's defence ministry says it has "the capacity to resist the enemy" for longer than the US had planned.

Weapons stocks and supplies alone will not decide the outcome of this conflict – Ukraine has long been outnumbered and outgunned by Russia – but it's certainly a significant factor.

The tempo of operations has been high from the start. Both sides will already be using up weapons faster than they can be produced.

The Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) estimates that the US and Israel have already carried out more than 2,000 strikes, each involving multiple munitions.

The INSS says Iran has already launched 571 missiles and 1,391 drones. Many will have been intercepted. For both sides, this level of combat will become harder to sustain the longer the war drags on.

Invincible Defense Technology: A Strategic Asset for Ending the War with Iran and Stabilizing the Middle East

Dr. David Leffler

The conflict with Iran continues to strain military resources, elevate geopolitical risk, and destabilize the Middle East. Policymakers and defense leaders face a strategic environment where conventional tools alone cannot resolve the deeper forces driving hostility. Invincible Defense Technology (IDT), a non-religious, field-tested, scientifically validated approach offers a practical and cost-effective method for reducing societal stress and preventing conflict escalation. The evidence supporting this approach is robust, peer-reviewed, and directly relevant to national security planning.

IDT is not a replacement for conventional defense. It is a force-multiplier that reduces the underlying social stress that fuels extremism, insurgency, and interstate conflict. By lowering the ambient level of tension in a population, IDT helps create conditions where diplomacy and stabilization efforts can succeed.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Power Centers

Iran’s system of government is not quite a democracy, nor a theocracy. Founding Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini developed its animating doctrine, known as guardianship of the jurist, in the years before the Islamic Republic’s establishment in 1979. Khomeini posited that a just government was possible if religious scholars sat atop it to ensure consistency with Islamic law. This system was put into place with a constitutional referendum after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The organs of a modern republic—a unicameral legislature (the majlis), executive led by the president, and judiciary—were enveloped by a clerical system. (Most of Iran’s clerical hierarchy, however, remains outside this official structure, based in Qom rather than the capital, Tehran.)

Regime hard-liners have further consolidated power across these institutions in recent years. They won control of parliament in the 2020 and 2024 elections, neither of which were considered free or fair. The regime has often state-managed presidential elections in Iran. However, the 2024 election, triggered by the sudden death of President Ebrahim Raisi, yielded a surprise result, with Masoud Pezeshkian becoming the country’s first so-called reformist leader in two decades.

If Unrest Comes To Riyadh, Will Saudi Civilians Face The Fate Of Iran’s Protesters?

Maryam Mahmud

War has once again come to be front and centre of Middle Eastern politics. As open confrontation between the United States, Israel, the Gulf and Iran redraw the region’s security map, governments across the region are not only recalibrating their defence policy, but also, internal security doctrines. History has shown it to be the case, time and time again that when regimes feel threatened by external forces, it becomes only natural for them to harden internally, with citizens bearing the brunt of this burden. While the world continues to reel from the horrors that the Iranian regime has unleashed on its own citizens, with mounting evidence of mass killings and violent repression in a country of almost 90 million people, the unhinged nature of the violence has provoked global outrage. Human rights defenders, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with UN officials, have documented unlawful use of force, extrajudicial killings, and widespread crackdowns on unarmed protesters in early 2026 by the Iranian regime. Verified reports accusing the late Ayatollah’s regime of systemic brutality are a chilling reminder of how far state repression can go when power operates without accountability.

But Iran is not the only authoritarian state navigating wartime insecurity, and the question is whether others might follow the same trajectory if confronted with mass unrest. The precarious state of human rights in Saudi Arabia has not, for a long time, been nearly as high on the global agenda. The desert kingdom, often considered a Western-aligned nation despite failing to uphold Western standards of human rights protection, continues to preside over a deeply entrenched system of repression that, although far less widely discussed, is no less severe in its disregard for basic human rights principles.

The US–Israel campaign in Iran – further assessments

Michael Carpenter

The implications of the war against Iran for transatlantic relations will become clearer as the United States–Israel campaign progresses. The European response to the US–Israel strikes on Iran has so far been cautious. Most European governments have distanced themselves from the operation, calling for restraint and a return to diplomacy. European leaders have mostly stressed the critical importance of resolving the nuclear issue and have made clear their preference for a return to negotiations. Many have also explicitly signalled to domestic audiences that this is not their conflict. A small number of European governments have welcomed Iranian Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei’s removal, though Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, is the only transatlantic leader to have publicly supported a governance transition in Tehran.

For many Europeans the Iran war is further evidence of the fundamental unpredictability of the administration of US President Donald Trump (even if war seemed increasingly likely in recent weeks). Trump had pledged during his 2024 presidential campaign to avoid Middle Eastern wars, and both he and Vice President JD Vance have sharply criticised previous US leaders for the mere possibility of contemplating a conflict with Iran. The administration’s National Security Strategy also explicitly de-prioritised the Middle East in favour of renewed attention to the Western Hemisphere. Yet despite being released only a few months ago, it too is proving a poor guide to the administration’s next moves. Europeans are therefore concluding they must look beyond Washington's rhetoric and focus on actions.

The United States Could Lose the Gulf

Marc Lynch

Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbors has inexorably dragged them into a war that they had desperately hoped to avoid. The potential entry of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia into direct war alongside Israel and the United States represents the first full-scale manifestation of America’s ambitions for the Middle Eastern order it has overseen for decades. Washington has always dreamed of Arab-Israeli cooperation against Iran without resolving the Palestinian issue. Here it is. It would be no small irony if America’s Middle East reached its apotheosis just as the entire region collapsed into the abyss. But that day may be coming. The Gulf states can no longer believe that the United States can or will protect them from existential threats. And even as they are forced to openly cooperate with Israel in its war, they will increasingly view it as a threat rather than a potential ally.

Iran’s targeting of the Gulf states in the face of the U.S.-Israeli attack shattered the hard-won regional rapprochement that had taken hold over the last three years. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had long been aligned with Israel on the need for a confrontational strategy toward Iran. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, early in his de facto reign, had fulminated against the Islamic Republic and signaled a readiness for military action. Gulf leaders were reliable voices for more aggressive policies toward Iran and vocal skeptics of nuclear diplomacy, as their allies and proxies did battle with Iran across a broad swath of the Levant, Iraq, and Yemen.

Iran and the Taliban: An Axis of Convenience the United States Cannot Ignore

Wahab Azizi, Christopher P. Costa

At a time when Washington is deemphasizing the Middle East—while remaining committed to Israel’s security—it is crucial to pay closer attention to Iran’s evolving relationship with the Taliban. Iranian leadership remains committed to the destruction of Israel, and the Taliban are hostile toward Israel as well. Beyond ideology however, the deeper concern for U.S. policymakers is how Tehran and Kabul are aligning pragmatically to undermine American influence in South and Central Asia.

For nearly a quarter-century after the September 11 attacks, U.S. policy rested on a useful assumption: that Iran and the Taliban were irreconcilable enemies whose ideological and sectarian differences would prevent meaningful cooperation. That assumption was convenient for a time—but it is no longer valid.

Despite persistent friction and mutual distrust, Tehran and the Taliban have demonstrated that shared interests—above all, opposition to U.S. presence and influence—can outweigh historical animosities. What has emerged is not an alliance of shared values, but an axis of convenience with tangible consequences for American security interests.

How the Iran War Will Undermine US Competition with China

Michael Schiffer

A war with Iran will be a disastrous strategic detour for the United States as it seeks to compete diplomatically, economically, militarily, and technologically with China.

In the span of a few months, President Donald Trump has threatened to seize Greenland, staged a military raid on Venezuela—hauling its president to New York to face trial and claiming its oil fields as the spoils—and has now launched a war with Iran aimed at dismantling its nuclear and missile programs and toppling its government. His defenders call this strength. His critics call it recklessness. Both are missing a more fundamental problem: these moves reflect a worldview built for a world that no longer exists.

President Trump sees power the way some 19th-century geostrategists did, in terms of territory, fossil fuels, corruption, and coercive military dominance over rivals. Control the Arctic routes. Control the oil. Suppress a hostile regime’s most dangerous capabilities. Each of these objectives has a certain logic. The problem is that logic made more sense in a different century, not the current one.

$3.7 Billion: Estimated Cost of Epic Fury’s First 100 Hours

Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park

As Operation Epic Fury—the U.S. military campaign against Iran—entered its sixth day on March 5, both President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth indicated that the conflict could continue for weeks. Members of Congress, the media, and the public are increasingly asking about the cost of this operation, with a wide range of estimates now being circulated. The first 100 hours (H+100) of the operation are estimated to cost $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million each day. Some of these costs are already budgeted, but most ($3.5 billion) are not. The shift of U.S. forces to less expensive munitions and the steep decline of Iranian drone and missile launches will drive costs down. However, future costs will depend mostly on the intensity of operations and the effectiveness of Iranian retaliation.

Table 1 summarizes the costs in three categories: operational costs (approximately $196 million total, with $178 million budgeted and the rest unbudgeted); munitions replacement (approximately $3.1 billion), none of which is currently budgeted; and replacing combat losses and repairing infrastructure damage (approximately $350 million), also unbudgeted. The unbudgeted costs will likely require additional Department of Defense (DOD) funding, either through a supplemental appropriation or another reconciliation bill.

US launches Precision Strike Missiles in Iran war in first combat use

Zita Ballinger Fletcher

The U.S. military recently deployed Lockheed Martin’s long-range Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, for the first time in combat against Iranian targets, U.S. Central Command announced.

Video released Wednesday shows the next-gen munitions being launched in open desert terrain from M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems as part of Operation Epic Fury. The operation against Iran has seen a variety of precision munitions launched from land, sea and air, according to CENTCOM.

“I just could not be prouder of our men and women in uniform leveraging innovation to create dilemmas for the enemy,” Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, said in a release.

Protecting Americans from China-Linked Scam Centers: An Update on Emerging Trends

In July 2025, a Florida woman named Sharon received what appeared to be a distraught call from her daughter, who had been detained after a car accident and urgently needed $15,000 to pay bail. “There is nobody that could convince me that it wasn’t her,” Sharon said later. “I know my daughter’s cry.”[1] As it turns out, Sharon had fallen victim to a sophisticated scam that used AI-powered voice cloning technology to replicate her daughter’s voice, likely using snippets of audio from social media.[2]Her case illustrates a disturbing trend. The crime syndicates behind these operations are rapidly embracing AI tools—among other new tactics—to create dramatically faster and effective scamming operations and stay ahead of the possible crackdowns.

In July 2025, the Commission published a report on China’s Exploitation of Scam Centers in Southeast Asia, which analyzed how scam centers operated by Chinese criminal groups defraud Americans of billions of dollars annually. The Commission found that Beijing is exploiting the growing crisis of scam centers—which spread across Southeast Asia with at least implicit backing from elements of the Chinese government—to expand its security footprint in the region. As with the fentanyl crisis, Chinese criminal networks are inflicting enormous harm on Americans while Beijing selectively enforces only when it serves its own interests. Since the Commission published its findings, the U.S. government has sanctioned individuals and entities involved in scam centers and announced the formation of an interagency Scam Center Strike Force. Nevertheless, the scam crisis only continues to escalate. The U.S. Department of the Treasury now estimates that Americans lost $10 billion to Southeast Asia-based scams in 2024—and losses are projected to have exceeded that figure in 2025.[3]

Trump’s Iran Campaign Ignores the Lessons of the Iraq War

Linda Robinson

The one certainty about war is its unpredictability. I saw this firsthand in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. In March 2003, after reporting on special operations forces during the major combat phase of operations, I attended a desert ceremony to inaugurate the Iraq Governing Council in a tent next to the imposing Mesopotamian Temple of Ur. The council, composed of expats who had not been to their home country of Iraq for many years, gave me the feeling that the plans for a new government might not materialize. Within the month, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s fedayeen and dismissed soldiers were in a full-blown insurgent mode, punctuated by the bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq’s capital Baghdad and the death of the UN Special Representative to Iraq Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The experience in Iraq, a case study for many in poor handling of regime change and nation building, resonates as the world reacts to the strikes on Iran. Three days into Operation Epic Fury, launched by President Donald Trump to neutralize Iranian threats, the end game plan is unclear and U.S. casualties are beginning to mount. Three U.S. fighter jets were shot down by friendly fire, and luckily their crews were rescued unscathed. But the war has quickly spread, with hundreds of casualties from over a thousand Iranian missiles and drones into ten countries. Lebanon-based Hezbollah, despite its weakened state, launched rockets into Israel.

People are selling your home address online. This privacy tool will help

Thomas Germain

There's a free automated tool that removes information about you from Google search results. For some reason, most people don't use it.

Did you know an untold number of companies are selling your name, home address, phone number and more online? Data brokers, as they're called, hand your information to anyone who wants it dirt cheap, from telemarketers and jealous exes to identity thieves. It puts your safety at risk.

But there's a tool that makes this information harder to find. It's a free service run by Google called Results About You. The problem is a lot of people don't seem to know about it.

Google constantly scrapes the internet to fuel its search engine, including sensitive details swept up from data brokers that you may want to keep secret. Through this process, the company inadvertently exposes you to all kinds of serious risks. But with one button, Results About You lets you ask Google to take your information down. It's that easy. And the company just updated the service to make it even more useful.

Space and AI – the final frontier

Nayef Al-Rodhan

More than a century ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, widely regarded as the father of astronautics, declared that ‘the Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever’. His words express the inevitability of expansion, but not the nature of the intelligence that will accompany it. Today, as humanity moves beyond Earth, the challenge is no longer purely technological, it is also ethical, geopolitical and existential: is humanity ready to govern the forms of intelligence it is unleashing – including the possibility that critical digital infrastructure may begin migrating into orbit?

For decades, space was defined by propulsion systems, satellites, and the human pioneering spirit. Now, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, advanced robotics and synthetic biology are converging in a phenomenon I call the era of Disruptive Techno-Convergence (DTC). This fusion reshapes not only tools but the very nature of agency in space. It may even relocate the infrastructure of intelligence itself, as proposals emerge to externalise energy-intensive computation into orbital data centres powered by near-continuous solar exposure. DTC promises to overcome historic constraints on long-duration missions and extraterrestrial settlement, yet it also introduces cascading risks to astronaut safety, geopolitical stability, and fragile cosmic environments. The future of space will not be determined solely by launch capability but by whether ethical foresight and governance evolve as rapidly as technological power, and by how prudently mankind manages the transition toward a hybrid human-machine civilisation.

8 March 2026

After Khamenei: China Is Watching, and So Should Taiwan

Charles Lyons Jones

The harder lesson from Iran may be what comes after a decapitation strike.

U.S.-led military operations against Iran – which began with a decapitation strike that killed the regime’s most senior leadership figures including Ayatollah Khamenei – will have far-reaching implications beyond the Middle East. For China, the U.S.-led campaign may prove a valuable lesson in how to disrupt continuity of government and the military chain-of-command during an invasion of Taiwan. But it may yet become a cautionary tale of what can go wrong after a successful decapitation strike.

The lessons for China’s military are clear. U.S. and Israeli forces were able to glean exquisite, time-sensitive and operationally relevant intelligence, which likely required a deft integration of signals intelligence, geospatial capabilities and well-placed human sources inside the orbit of Iran’s most senior leadership. Quick, streamlined processes for the collection, processing and assessment of intelligence, combined with seamless joint operations between U.S. and Israeli forces, likely proved critical to the success of recent decapitation strikes in Iran. Such capabilities will matter for any military operation against Taiwan.

Thirty Days: How Pakistan's Borrowed Energy Economy Meets America's War on Iran

The lights went out first in the power-loom streets of Faisalabad, then in a Karachi katchi abadi where a cheap Chinese fan froze above a child’s bed, and finally in the control room of a small textile mill in Lahore where the owner watched the gas pressure fall on a borrowed computer he could no longer afford to upgrade. In each place the explanation was the same: Pakistan’s energy system depends on imported fuel paid for with money it does not have, and the Iran-US-Israel war is turning that dependence into a noose.

Somewhere near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, a vessel named for that city of twenty million people sits at anchor, going nowhere. The MT Karachi, operated by the Pakistan National Shipping Corporation, is carrying the fuel those twenty million people need. A second PNSC tanker is stranded alongside it. A third cargo, mid-loading when American and Israeli aircraft struck Iran on February 28, will not sail under any condition the insurance market is currently willing to cover.

In Islamabad, a second emergency meeting has been convened. Petroleum Minister Ali Pervaiz Malik sits across from Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb. The agenda is simple and terrible: what does Pakistan have, how long will it last, and what happens when it runs out.

China is about to show the world its plan to win the future

Simone McCarthy

China spent the last five years cultivating innovation and new technology at home. The next half decade will be dedicated to deploying the fruits of its labor to transform its economy – and its place in the world.

That’s set to be an overarching message as thousands of delegates from across China gather in the nation’s capital for the “Two Sessions” – a carefully choreographed annual meeting where the country’s leadership signals its priorities for the year ahead, and its rubber-stamp legislature approves them.

The pomp and ceremony of the gathering has long stood as a symbol of China’s tightly controlled political process, and Beijing’s authoritarian leaders are well aware of the juxtaposition that creates as the US, the world’s most powerful democracy, is riven with partisan infighting and engaged in another spiraling conflict in the Middle East.

The Costs of Militarized Rivalry with China: A First Estimate

This report provides the first estimate of the amount the U.S. has spent competing with China in the military domain over the period between 2012 and 2024. This period follows then-President Barack Obama’s November 2011 announcement of his intention to “pivot” U.S. attention from the Middle East toward Asia. In addition to Department of Defense spending, the analysis also includes relevant expenditures by the intelligence agencies, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and the State Department. The estimate is a best approximation of total spending focused on military competition with China – and excludes costs associated with economic or technological competition, for example. It also likely represents an undercount of the actual total China-focused military spending due to conservative methodological decisions made throughout the analysis.

Broken down by government agency, the Navy and Marine Corps are responsible for an estimated 33% of the total cost estimate for spending on militarized rivalry with China, followed by Defense Agencies (25%), the Air Force and Space Force (15%) and the Army (14%).

Iran Strike Exposes U.S. Capacity Vulnerabilities, Experts Say

Laura Heckmann

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Following the United States and Israel’s joint attack on Iran, known as Operation Epic Fury, experts speculated that the strike exposed weaknesses in U.S. capacity that could affect a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

The Heritage Foundation recently released its annual index on U.S. military strength, with analysis divided into three sections: the global operating environment, threats to U.S. vital interests and U.S. military power.

In the 2026 analysis — the think tank’s 11th iteration — the report identified capacity as one of the military’s biggest hindrances to countering current threats, a vulnerability exposed by the recent Operation Epic Fury. The massive campaign launched Feb. 28 against Iran involved stealth bombers, fighter jets, drones and aircraft carriers across the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

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