Indian Strategic Studies: 06/26/19

26 June 2019

As Pompeo heads to Delhi, the US-India relationship is at a critical juncture

Tanvi Madan

From a glance at news headlines, you’d think the U.S.-India relationship is in crisis. It isn’t—not yet anyway. But it could be.

The partnership with India is one of the few U.S. relationships that has deepened notwithstanding transitions from the Bush to the Obama to the Trump administrations. But a number of differences are coming to a head over the next few months that could stall or even derail progress.

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to head to India next week, and President Donald Trump meets recently re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Japan during the G20 summit, both these convergences and divergences will be on the agenda. If not handled with care, the latter could overshadow the former, with lasting consequences.

THE POSITIVE SIDE OF THE LEDGER

Over the last two years, there has been steady progress in the U.S.-India relationship. Strategically, both sides have seen the other as playing a crucial role in their Asia strategies—for the U.S., its Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy; for India, its Act East policy. This has paved the way for deeper diplomatic, defense, and security cooperation. The two countries established a ministerial-level 2+2 defense and diplomatic dialogue last year, their highest-level institutionalized strategic dialogue. Senior bureaucrats and military officials now meet regularly, and their various security dialogues have continued to meet on issues such as defense technology, cyber security, and counterterrorism. Liaisons between the Indian navy and U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain, and the countries’ defense innovation units, are being established.

The Longer the US Sino-Tariff Wars Go On, the Harder It Will Be to Undo the Damage

By Dan Steinbock

Since spring 2017, the US-led tariff wars have effectively undermined the global recovery. In the past years, global economy has navigated across several scenarios. Now it is approaching the edge.

I have been following four generic scenarios on the prospects of global economic growth since the U.S. 2016 election. The first two scenarios represent variants of “recoupling.” In these cases, global integration prevails, despite tensions. In the next two scenarios, global integration will fail, either in part and regionally or fully and globally.

What should worry us all is that, during the past few years, real global growth prospects have slowly but surely moved from the ideal and preferable scenarios toward the worst and darkest.

The Return to Cooperation Scenario

In this scenario, U.S. and China achieve a trade agreement. Both agree to phase out additional tariffs, renounce trade threats and establish working groups to defuse other friction areas in intellectual property rights, social and political issues, and military matters. Global growth prospects could – in the best scenario – even exceed the old OECD/IMF baselines at more than 4%.

US blacklists 5 Chinese tech firms

The five blacklisted organizations placed on the so-called Entity List includes supercomputer maker Sugon, which is heavily dependent on U.S. suppliers.

The United States is blacklisting five Chinese organizations involved in supercomputing with military-related applications, citing national security as justification for denying its Asian geopolitical rival access to critical U.S. technology.

The move by the U.S. Commerce Department could complicate talks next week between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, aimed at de-escalating a trade dispute between the world’s two biggest economies.

The five blacklisted organizations placed on the so-called Entity List includes supercomputer maker Sugon, which is heavily dependent on U.S. suppliers, including chipmakers Intel, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

The Central Asian nodes in Belt and Road project

Atul Aneja

Ahead of the recently concluded summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Chinese state media provided extensive coverage of Beijing’s recent forays into Central Asia, including into Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

On its website, the state-run Xinhua news agency splashed pictures of the Irkeshtam pass, one of China’s gateways to Kyrgyzstan, a few days before planes ferrying leaders of the eight SCO member countries, apart from observers, flew into Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital.

Infographic Of The Day: In One Chart - A Decade Of The U.S. Trade Deficit With China

Since 2010, the United States and China have had the world's largest economies by GDP. But one interesting difference is that the U.S. is the world's biggest importer while China is the world's biggest exporter. The U.S. is currently China's biggest trade partner, but recent talks about tariffs have highlighted the imbalance of imports and exports between the two countries. As economic tensions continue to rise, here is a look at how the trade deficit between the U.S. and China has changed over the past ten years.

Qihoo 360, China’s biggest cybersecurity firm, wants to become China’s cyberwarfare defender

Qihoo 360 is the biggest cybersecurity company in China, but few people in the rest of the world know the name. These days, however, it’s taking an increasingly important role in China’s cybersecurity efforts.

On June 19, 2019, as the tech war between China and US raged on, Qihoo 360 CEO Zhou Hongyi announced that the company has been developing a cyberspace radar system to fight sophisticated cyberwarfare attacks. During a talk at the China Internet Security Conference (ISC), Zhou said that Qihoo 360 had discovered 40 intrusions from hackers in other countries and regions.

The company has been vying to become a key member of the country’s national cybersecurity strategy since it abandoned the US stock market to perform a backdoor listing in China in 2018.

“(Cybersecurity) is a very special industry, no matter if it’s Chinese or Russian or American, as long as a cybersecurity firm grows big enough, it needs to be aligned with national interests,” Zhou said at the time.

The Jerusalem Talks

George Friedman

On Monday, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton will meet with his Israeli and Russian counterparts in Jerusalem. A trilateral meeting such as this is odd to begin with, and one taking place amid the situation currently unfolding in the Middle East even more so. Also interesting is that this meeting is taking place in Jerusalem. While Russia maintains decent relations with Israel, a meeting of this sort in Jerusalem would seem to indicate a Russian indifference to Muslim sensibilities – something Israel and the U.S. display regularly. Still, they’ve agreed to meet in Jerusalem this time, optics aside. Topping the meeting agenda, purportedly, is Syria. But there’s plenty else going on in the Middle East for the three to discuss.

The officials will meet in the midst of intensifying tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Last week, the U.S. blamed Iran for attacks on two tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, and this week Iran shot down an American drone. On Friday, news broke that the U.S. had been ready to launch airstrikes in response to the downed drone, but that U.S. President Donald Trump had called off the attacks at the last minute, feeling they would have caused disproportional casualties. That may be true, or the White House may have been bluffing an attack to unnerve the Iranians; Trump has been intimating a desire for talks with Iran and may have been trying to force Tehran to the table. Whatever the intent, tensions in the Persian Gulf remain high.

IRANIAN HACKERS LAUNCH A NEW US-TARGETED CAMPAIGN AS TENSIONS MOUNT

WHEN TWO COUNTRIES begin to threaten war in 2019, it's a safe bet that they've already been hacking each other's networks. Right on schedule, three different cybersecurity firms now say they've watched Iran's hackers try to gain access to a wide array of US organizations over the past few weeks, just as military tensions between the two countries rise to a breaking point—though it's not yet clear whether those hacker intrusions are aimed at intelligence gathering, laying the groundwork for a more disruptive cyberattack, or both.

Analysts at two security firms, Crowdstrike and Dragos, tell WIRED that they've seen a new campaign of targeted phishing emails sent to a variety of US targets last week from a hacker group known by the names APT33, Magnallium, or Refined Kitten and widely believed to be working in the service of the Iranian government. Dragos named the Department of Energy and US national labs as some of the half-dozen targeted organizations. A third security firm, FireEye, independently confirmed that it's seen a broad Iranian phishing campaign targeting both government agencies and private sector companies in the US and Europe, without naming APT33 specifically. None of the companies had any knowledge of successful intrusions.

IRAN'S MISSILES: WHY SHOOTING DOWN OF U.S. DRONE IS IMPORTANT AND WHAT IT MAY TELL US

BY TOM O'CONNOR

Iran's downing of a state-of-the-art U.S. military drone using what it claimed to be a natively produced defense system may illustrate the complexities of a potential conflict with the Islamic Republic.

Though many details of the recent incident involving an RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft (UAV) remained up for debate, the naval forces of U.S. Central Command have confirmed that Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards shot down the drone somewhere over the Strait of Hormuz.

Each country has branded the other's forces a terrorist organization and disputed other details, but two particular elements of Thursday's events have stood out.

For one, this is the first known downing of any U.S. RQ-4 variant. As non-proliferation and open-source intelligence analyst Fabian Hinz told Newsweek, this weapon is "no tiny Predator"⁠—a reference to the smaller, armed U.S. drones that have seen widespread global use in the post-9/11 "War on Terror." No, Hinz explained, the RQ-4A is one of "the largest and one of the most expensive drones the U.S. has."

The Tension Between the US and Iran

By Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Raphael Ofek

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In the Persian Gulf, tensions are rising over the sanctions recently imposed by the US on Iran in the wake of its refusal to comply with Washington’s demand that the nuclear agreement signed by Barack Obama be reopened. Tehran does not wish to submit to this demand, as it would suggest weakness on the part of the regime and would inhibit Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But its refusal could lead to the collapse of the Iranian economy, war, and possibly the overthrow of the regime.

The current crisis between the US and Iran is the most severe since the Iranian 1979 revolution and the attendant establishment of the Islamic Republic. The revolution ended the close relations that had existed between the two countries up to that point. The regime of the ayatollahs remains in place, and the relationship between the countries has never recovered.

The Saudi-UAE axis has destabilising plans beyond the Gulf

Ali Bakeer

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are putting their bets on Trump's re-election to realise their vision for regional hegemony.

As the situation in the Middle East continues to escalate, with Iran and the US-Saudi axis trading accusations over sabotaged vessels in the Gulf, Qataris quietly marked two years of living under siege.

Although the land, sea and air blockade the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt imposed on Qatar in June 2017 has taken a backseat because of the Iranian crisis, the confrontation at its heart has by far not diminished.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi continue lobbying against Doha on international platforms and are showing no sign of easing their economic siege. This became apparent once again at the three summits the Saudi king hosted in Mecca last month, to which Qatar was invited.

During the proceedings, Saudi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf said a solution to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) crisis would only be possible if Doha goes back to the "right path" - that is, if it heeds to the Saudi and Emirati regional agenda.

Europe is starting to tackle disinformation.

Alina Polyakova

Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election woke up Americans to the threat of disinformation, especially from Vladimir Putin's Russia. But almost three years and many more interference campaigns later, the United States still lags in responding to malign foreign influence in the information space, argue Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried. This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.

Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election woke up Americans to the threat of disinformation, especially from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But almost three years and many more interference campaigns later, the United States still lags in responding to malign foreign influence in the information space.

In a new report for the Atlantic Council, we looked into how European and U.S. authorities are addressing the challenge of disinformation — and found that the Europeans come out on top.

First, the good news. Democracies on both sides of the Atlantic have moved beyond “admiring the problem” — or reacting with a sort of existential despair in the face of a new threat — and have entered a new “trial and error” phase, testing new policy responses, technical fixes, and educational tools for strengthening resistance and building resilience against disinformation.

Russian Information Warfare in Central and Eastern Europe: Strategies, Impact, and Counter-Measures

Download the full paper »

Information warfare operates in a fast-paced and quickly changing environment. Partly as a result, it is more opportunistic than strategic. The dynamism of Russia’s information warfare is best illustrated by the fact that over the last decade it underwent at least two strategic shifts—after the Russian-Georgian war in 2008 and in 2014 when Russia went from being risk-averse and stealthy to increasingly aggressive and risk-taking. Effective countermeasures, especially those applied in Central and Eastern Europe, must reflect this reality by being highly adaptable and agile—a factor that local anti-information-warfare capacities often lack.

Central and Eastern Europe is a unique space within the Euro-Atlantic area. It can be perceived as intrinsically more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, especially because of the wider range of narratives that Russia can exploit there for such a purpose. Simultaneously, the region faces numerous deleterious trends that are favorable to information warfare tactics. The most evident one is the continuous decline in citizens’ trust in traditional media platforms, which are the least likely to be polluted with disinformation. The inherent risks in such a trend have been exacerbated by increasing trust in online media platforms and reliance on social media networks for news, both of which are far more susceptible to disinformation and misinformation.

Conflict and Competition in Sudan Middle Eastern powers are closely monitoring the protests in Sudan.

Protests erupted in Sudan in December after the cost of food rose dramatically. In April, after 30 years of dictatorial rule, Omar al-Bashir was removed from power by a military coup, whose leaders promised a quick transition to civilian rule. But when they formed a Transitional Military Council and announced that the transition would take two years, protesters again took to the streets to demand faster change.

The Costs of Confrontation with Iran Are Mounting

Dalia Dassa Kaye

Recent diplomatic efforts to save the Iran nuclear agreement and de-escalate rising tensions between the United States and Iran—including the first visit by a Japanese prime minister to Iran since the revolution—only gave a brief respite from talk of war.

With new attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman last week that American officials are attributing to Iran, tensions are flaring up again.

Even if the United States and Iran avoid a direct military clash, the escalation and the U.S. maximum pressure campaign are exacting long-term costs for U.S. interests and regional stability in ways that may be difficult if not impossible to reverse.

The first casualty is likely to be the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The Trump administration's decision to leave the deal has likely caused irreparable damage to the agreement and possibly to the American interest in preventing a nuclear-armed Iran in the future.

US cyber attack on Russia’s power grid is an ‘act of war’ (according to the US)

By Dave Lindorff

How about an international negotiation to end mutual cyber attacks that would include international controls and monitoring, and penalties for violations?

Russia and the U.S. are engaging in tit-for-tat hacking of each others’ power grid, the New York Times is reporting, in what is really a kind of cyber “cold war” where the hackers from each country’s military and intelligence services load electronic “explosives” in the computer systems of critical infrastructure of the other, that in a crisis or war could be “detonated” to create chaos or bring down electric grids.

The Times article, the publication of which President Trump decried in a tweet as a “virtual act of treason,” was disturbing for a number or reasons. One was that sources told the Times the hacking by the U.S. Cyber Command of Russia’s power grid had been conducted without the president’s knowledge, for fear that he might act to prevent it or might disclose it.

In other words, an action — the hostile hacking of another rival country’s essential infrastructure, which the U.S. government has warned other nations would be viewed as an “act of war,” is being taken by the U.S. military, without the President’s or Congress’s knowledge!

Beating the Americans at Their Own Game

During the Cold War, the U.S. military relied on technological superiority to “offset” the Soviet Union’s advantages in time, space, and force size. Our military-technical edge allowed the U.S. Joint Force to adopt force postures and operational concepts that largely compensated for the Soviet military’s numerical conventional advantage without needing to match it man-for-man or tank-for-tank. After the Cold War ended, this same military-technical advantage provided the U.S. military a decisive conventional overmatch against regional adversaries for over two decades.

Chinese technological capabilities are growing as rapidly as its economic power. The Soviets were never able to match, much less overcome, America’s technological superiority. The same may not be true for China.

Now, however, the “rogue” regional powers that have preoccupied U.S. attention for so long have been replaced by two great powers with substantially greater capabilities. A resurgent and revanchist Russia and a rising, increasingly more powerful China are taking aggressive actions that threaten regional security and stability and challenge the existing international order. Without question, of these two great-power competitors, China poses the greater challenge over the long term. Since about 1885, the United States never has faced a competitor or even group of competitors with a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) larger than its own. China surpassed the United States in purchasing power parity in 2014 and is on track to have the world’s largest GDP in absolute terms by 2030. In comparison, our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, was hobbled by unsustainable economic contradictions that ultimately crumbled under pressure. At the height of its power, its GDP was roughly 40 percent the size of the United States’.1

Will Worsening U.S.-Cuba Relations Undermine Havana’s Economic Reforms?

In April 2018, Cuba experienced a watershed moment when Miguel Diaz-Canel was inaugurated as president. That marked the first time in nearly six decades that a Castro had not led the country. And Diaz-Canel is slowly starting to put his stamp on the nation, beginning with the adoption of a new constitution in April 2019 that includes some structural reforms, including the creation of a prime ministerial position, and some attempts to embed market economics within a socialist state. But worsening U.S.-Cuba relations could jeopardize the effort.

It is unclear whether those reforms will be enough to jumpstart Cuba’s economy, which continues to sputter. The island enjoyed a surge in tourism when former U.S. President Barack Obama normalized relations between the two countries, but more systemic reforms were necessary even then to unleash the country’s younger generation of entrepreneurs. Since his election, President Donald Trump has reversed many of the steps Obama took to relax U.S. policy on Cuba, tightening restrictions on commerce with military-owned businesses, and more recently on remittances and travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens, meaning economic conditions on the island are likely to become even tougher.

Shaping U.S. Strategy to Meet America's Real-World Needs

By Anthony H. Cordesman

It is all too easy to talk about strategy in broad conceptual terms, but strategy does not consist of what people say, it consists of what they actually do. The is not a minor issue as the United States shifts back from the period in which the Cold War ended and it had no serious peer competitors, and ideas like "the end of history" and "Globalism" seemed to promise a steady march towards development, peace, and democracy.

It is all too clear that the U.S. must now a focus on major competitors like China and Russia, deal with more limited regional threats like Iran and North Korea, and deal with broad areas of global instability due to threats from extremists and terrorists. These challenges are further compounded by ongoing U.S. wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and the challenge of meeting defense costs that total $750 billion in the President's defense budget request for FY2020.

So far, however, the U.S. government has done far more by way of talk and stating broad goals than providing practical analysis and net assessments that shape and justify a given course of action. It has failed to develop well-defined strategic goals and effective plans, programs, and budgets to implement them. U.S. strategy documents lack a clear focus on specific key issues, regions, threat countries, and strategic partners.

Shaping U.S. Strategy to Meet America's Real-World Needs

By Anthony H. Cordesman

It is all too easy to talk about strategy in broad conceptual terms, but strategy does not consist of what people say, it consists of what they actually do. The is not a minor issue as the United States shifts back from the period in which the Cold War ended and it had no serious peer competitors, and ideas like "the end of history" and "Globalism" seemed to promise a steady march towards development, peace, and democracy.

It is all too clear that the U.S. must now a focus on major competitors like China and Russia, deal with more limited regional threats like Iran and North Korea, and deal with broad areas of global instability due to threats from extremists and terrorists. These challenges are further compounded by ongoing U.S. wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and the challenge of meeting defense costs that total $750 billion in the President's defense budget request for FY2020.

So far, however, the U.S. government has done far more by way of talk and stating broad goals than providing practical analysis and net assessments that shape and justify a given course of action. It has failed to develop well-defined strategic goals and effective plans, programs, and budgets to implement them. U.S. strategy documents lack a clear focus on specific key issues, regions, threat countries, and strategic partners.

Sustaining Multilateralism in a Multipolar World

While international multilateralism is under strain, it is vital for France and Germany to defend it, since it is the most appropriate system for preserving their interests – particularly in terms of welfare, security, prosperity and environmental protection. Against this backdrop, three political fields offer opportunities for joint initiatives: trade, conventional arms control and climate change.

Sustaining Multilateralism in a Multipolar World (PDF 969.29 kB)

Cyber Bombs, the Russian Grid and the Threat of War

Prabir Purkayastha

The NYT report shows what the doctrine of “deep forward defence” adopted by the US Cyber Command really is: planting cyber bombs in its opponents’ infrastructure, leading to grid failures that can paralyse the country.

The New York Times (NYT) recent report that the United States Cyber Command has planted “malware” – read cyber bombs – deep into the Russian grid, should worry not just the Russian people, but all of us. Taking down a country’s grid leads to blackouts, and disrupts a country’s vital infrastructure: communication networks such as metros, railways, airports, hospitals, telecommunications including cell phones; it can lead to failure of hydroelectric plants and dams causing devastating floods, nuclear plants’ outages and possible meltdown. As we have seen in India, grid failures of the kind we saw in 2012 are major events that can paralyse any country.

The US itself has signalled the importance it attaches to its electrical grid. In its Nuclear Posture Review, 2018, it made explicit that any country attacking its grid – either physically or with cyber weapons – would face US retaliation including even a nuclear response. The US Cyber Command, set up in 2017 as an independent command on par with its Strategic Command that controls its nuclear weapons, had formulated its doctrine of “deep forward defence”. The NYT report shows what the doctrine of “deep forward defence” for what it really is: planting cyber bombs in its opponents’ infrastructure.

The age of interdependence: Global digital cooperation in the 21st century

Emilie Kimball and Jesse I. Kornbluth

In July 2018, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres convened a High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation co-chaired by Melinda Gates and Jack Ma. Created in response to the unprecedented scale and speed of change brought about by digital technologies, the panel has sought to provide a framework to promote the Sustainable Development Goalsthrough digital cooperation and the protection of human rights and values on the internet.

On June 13, the Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy program hosted a roundtable to discuss the panel’s first report, “The Age of Digital Interdependence.” The event featured a presentation by Amandeep Singh Gill, Executive Director of the Secretariat of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, and Vinton Cerf, popularly known as one of the “fathers of the internet” and vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Nicol Turner-Lee, Brookings Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation, served as discussant, and Brookings Fellow Chris Meserole moderated. The event was held under the Chatham House rule.

Ronald Powell (Harvard PhD): Oppose 5G on Health Grounds

The international biomedical research community is increasingly linking radiofrequency radiation from wireless devices to adverse health effects. Among the devices of concern are cell towers and cell phones. Most recently, in 2016, the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health linked cellular radiofrequency radiation to malignant brain tumors (gliomas) and malignant nerve tumors (schwannomas) of the heart in rats.2,3

This growing understanding of the adverse health effects of cellular radiation means that the expansion of cellular technology should be HALTED. However, the proponents of expansion, including the Federal Communications Commission, see billions of dollars of profits at stake for the wireless industries. They are pressing for ACCELERATED IMPLEMENTATION of cellular technology, especially the new Fifth Generation (5G) of cellular technology,4 and with no further testing for health consequences. 5G will employ higher frequencies to enable faster data rates. These frequencies are useful for short distances only, so 5G cell towers must be closely spaced. They will be placed up and down residential and business streets, spaced several houses or businesses apart, and will beam radiofrequency radiation directly into every occupant. Such placement threatens health, aesthetics, and property values. Little wonder that 5G is viewed as outrageous by so much of the public.5

5G Health Risks; The War Between Technology And Human Beings

By: Paul Wagner

Over 180 scientists and doctors in almost 40 countries are warning the world about 5G health risks. “Resolution 1815 of the Council of Europe” spells it out quite succinctly:

“We, the undersigned scientists, recommend a moratorium on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, until potential hazards for human health and the environment have been fully investigated by scientists independent from industry. 5G will substantially increase exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF)… and has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.”

If you’re not alarmed about 5G radiation dangers, you should be…

With download speeds up to 20 to 30X faster than 4G, 5G promises a new world, including becoming the foundation for self-driving cars while also causing a long list of potential health risks. “5G Cancer” is actually a thing. The cities of Brussels and Geneva have even blocked trials and banned upgrades to 5G out of this concern.

The difference between 4G and 5G in terms of gigahertz, the unit of alternating current (AC) or electromagnetic (EM) waves that affect the transmission speeds of devices, is significant. 5G technology promises radio millimeter bands in the 30 to 300 GHz range, while 4G tops out at around 6GHz. When applied to video latency, this translates to speeds up to 60 to 120 times faster.

Cyberspace is the new Cold War: ANALYSIS

DONALD J. MIHALEK

One of the most unsettling things about the Mueller report and Russian investigation concerning the 2016 presidential campaign was the depth and breadth of espionage committed by the Russian government against our electoral process. Many viewed this as not only an attack on our electoral process, but an attack on our national security and integrity. Imagine a foreign government manipulating one of its “agents” into our nation’s presidency? That story usually resides in spy novels.

These types of attacks aren’t limited to our enemies alone. Israel has been accused of -- and hasn’t denied -- cyberattacking the Iranian communications system. This type of attack, rightly or wrongly, would impact a nation’s security. If the communications system is compromised, a nation can’t protect itself.

Which brings us to this new type of “cold warfare” that many nations are participating in: cyber warfare.

As the world has become more and more connected -- and nations continue to communicate, manage national strategy and use cloud based platforms to effectively run nations -- the cyber world has become the new base of operations to attack, influence and disrupt a nation’s business. To do so, many nations including the United States have created military units with a focus on identifying national security vulnerabilities and launching attacks on adversaries. In China, the greatest cyber threat housed their force in the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. The Iranians created the Iranian Cyber Army, composed mostly of hackers that try to interrupt their adversaries cyber platforms.

THE POWER, AND LIMITS, OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

SO, YOU’VE HEARD about this thing called artificial intelligence. It’s changing the world, you’ve been told. It’s going to drive your car, grow your food, maybe even take your job. You’ll be forgiven for having some questions about this chaotic, AI-driven world that’s predicted to unfold.

First off, it’s true that AI is overhyped. But it’s improving rapidly, and in some ways catching up to the hype. Part of that is a natural evolution: AI improves at a given task when it learns from new data, and the world is producing more data every second. New techniques developed in academic labs and at tech companies lead to jumps in performance, too. That’s led to cars that can drive themselves in some situations, to medical diagnoses that have beaten the accuracy of human doctors, and to facial recognition that’s reliable enough to unlock your iPhone.

AI, in other words, is getting really good at some specific tasks. “The nice thing about AI is that it gets better with every iteration,” AI researcher and Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun says. He believes it might just “free humanity from the burden of repetitive work.” But on the lofty goal of so-called “general” AI intelligence that deftly switches between tasks just like a human? Please don’t hold your breath. Preserve those brain cells; you’ll need them to out-think the machines.

The New War of Ideas

A new battlespace emerged in the post-9/11 counterterrorism era, encompassing the halls of U.S. technology companies and the alleys of Raqqa alike. Today, the United States is engaged in an expansive conflict that requires solutions from the same key players—the private tech industry and the U.S. government. They cannot afford to waste the digital, organizational, and strategic lessons learned from nearly two decades of countering terrorism.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) questions representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google during a U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing. The October 31, 2017, hearing “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online: Working with Tech to Find Solutions” featured examples of Russian-purchased ads on Facebook. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Learning from specific successes in tech sector and U.S. government counterterrorism efforts will optimize the United States’ collective response to the digital disinformation challenges of the future. Private and public actors should consider five important lessons from countering terrorism: (1) improve technical methods for identifying foreign influence campaign content; (2) increase collaboration among companies; (3) build partnerships between government and the technology sector via public and private analyst exchanges; (4) maintain an offensive posture and devote the resources necessary to keep the adversary on the back foot; and (5) take advantage of U.S. allies’ knowledge.

What Will Russian Military Capabilities Look Like in the Future?

PDF file 0.2 MB

Because of conflicting interests between Russia and the West and because Russia's future intentions are uncertain, how Russia develops its military presents real challenges to the United States and its allies. Russia's military appears to have improved significantly since the war in Georgia in 2008. Uncertainty about the future strength of the Russian military poses challenges for Western defense planners. Russia could seek to strengthen its numerous ground forces to achieve greater parity with the West, or its economy and demographics may force it to constrain the size and quality of its forces. Russia may also focus its military investment across competing priorities, including preparing for war with NATO, military dominance against former Soviet republics, or global power projection.

This brief summarizes a report analyzing the development of Russia's military capabilities over the next 20 years — with a focus on ground combat — and the implications of that development for U.S.-Russian competition and for the U.S. Army. RAND researchers designed a two-part theoretical framework to analyze the development of Russia's military forces relevant to ground combat: (1) identify and make forecasts about the political, economic, demographic, and societal factors underlying Russian military power, and (2) analyze the likely future development of key military capability areas. This framework provides a transparent, flexible, and systematic approach for making forecasts over the short term (next 5 years), medium term (5–10 years), or long term (10–20 years).

I watched my friend die in Vietnam 50 years ago. Leaders must understand the cost of combat.

By Robert H. Scales

Robert H. Scales, a retired Army major general, is a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College.

Fifty years ago Friday, I stood over my friend and West Point classmate Mike Snell moments after he died. I wish I could write that it was a dramatic and memorable event, but it wasn’t. He just lay there in a pool of his own blood and stared at me with glassy, empty eyes.

Mike and I shared a fondness for disobedience at West Point. In the 1960s, many of us smuggled an occasional beer into the barracks. But Mike and I too often got caught, so we bonded while walking punishment tours. Mike was an easygoing guy with a Texas accent and a cynical sense of humor. He tolerated West Point discipline because, like me, he wanted to go to war and lead soldiers.

He got his chance — twice. His back-to-back tours of duty in the 101st Airborne Division came as a result of too many beers and driving his Corvette too fast around Fort Campbell, Ky. The division commander gave him a choice: face official punishment or “volunteer” for a second tour. He chose option two.