Indian Strategic Studies: 05/26/20

26 May 2020

Not the ‘Spirit of Wuhan’: Skirmishes Between India and China

Walter C Ladwig

What explains the occurrence of multiple confrontations between Indian and Chinese forces at disparate points along their disputed border?

On 5 May, India and Chinese patrols engaged in physical altercation along their disputed border, first near Pangong lake in Ladakh and again five days later in Sikkim, some 800 miles away. Normally such encounters are resolved by so-called ‘banner drills’: the defender holds their position and displays a series of signs in the other side’s language informing them they are trespassing and asking them to leave. In these cases, Chinese soldiers took a stronger line and attempted to force Indian troops back, first throwing rocks, later punches. Although both episodes were resolved without a resort to deadly force, this marked the third physical confrontation at Pangong Lake in as many years and the first time patrols had confronted each other in the Sikkim sector. Moreover, both sides have reportedly reinforced their positions in the dispute zones. Do these episodes signal broader challenges for Asia’s two nuclear giants?

MUDDLED BORDERS, COMPETING INTERESTS

Colonial-era agreements and historical legacies have led China to assert that India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh – an area of more than 34,000 square miles – belongs to them, while India alleges that China occupies more than 14,000 square miles of Indian territory in the Aksai Chin along the eastern border of Ladakh. In addition, the poorly demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC) separating the two countries runs for more than 2,000 miles across difficult terrain. Conception of the border’s exact location diverge in twenty separate places, creating numerous points of friction. Since the early 1980s, 22 rounds of talks have been held to resolve the border issue, but little progress has been made.

New Pentagon report says Pakistan continues to harbour Taliban, Haqqani Network

Rezaul H Laskar

Pakistan continues to focus on countering Indian influence in Afghanistan and harbours the Taliban and groups such as the Haqqani Network, which have the ability to engage in violence on Afghan soil, according to a new Pentagon report.

The report by the inspector general of the US Department of Defense for the January-March quarter, issued on Monday, pointed to a continuation of Pakistan’s efforts to achieve its strategic objectives in Afghanistan, including shutting out India from the war-torn country.

The report is the first one to be issued since the US and the Taliban signed an agreement on February 29 to facilitate the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. The deal has stalled due to differences between the Taliban and the Afghan government on prisoner releases and intra-Afghan dialogue.

There was no immediate response to the report from Indian officials.

“According to the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], Pakistan’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan continue to be countering Indian influence and mitigating spillover of instability into its territory,” the report said.

U.S.-Taliban Peace Deal: What to Know

by Lindsay Maizland

After more than eighteen years of war in Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban reached an agreement in what were both sides’ most intensive efforts yet to end the war. Central to the deal is a significant drawdown of U.S. troops and guarantees from the Taliban that the country will not become a safe haven for terrorists.

However, experts stress that the deal between U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s administration and the Taliban leadership is only the first step to achieving lasting peace. The bigger challenge, they say, will be negotiating an agreement between the Islamist fundamentalist group and the Afghan government on Afghanistan’s future. Many Afghans, exhausted by a war that has killed thousands of people and forced millions to flee as refugees, fear that a U.S. withdrawal could spark new conflict and eventually allow the Taliban to regain control.

What did the United States and the Taliban agree to?

China Issues New Cybersecurity Review Measures

On April 27, 2020, twelve Chinese government departments led by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC)1 jointly promulgated the Measures for Cybersecurity Review (the “Measures”) effective June 1, 2020 under the joint letterhead of the Party’s Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission and CAC.

The Measures, consisting of 22 articles, were promulgated under the authority of the National Security Law and the Cyber Security Law to implement Articles 35 and 59 of the latter statute which established a cybersecurity review requirement on network products and services procured by operators of critical information infrastructure (“CII”) which bears upon national security.

What do the Measures regulate?

The Measures require that CII operators conduct an assessment of potential national security risk exposure prior to procurement of network products or services. If it is determined based on such assessment that the products or services to be procured present potential national security concerns, the CII operator must apply to CAC’s Cybersecurity Examination Office (CEO) for a cybersecurity review.

Growth in China's military budget slows to 6.6%

BEIJING – China will increase its military budget by a slower 6.6 percent this year, the government announced Friday at the opening session of its annual National People’s Congress.

The budget will be set at 1.268 trillion yuan ($178 billion) for the year — the second-biggest in the world after the United States — continuing a downward trend in military spending and lower than last year’s increase of 7.5 percent.

Beijing’s defense budget pales in comparison to the $738 billion allotted for this year’s U.S. military budget.

The announcement comes as Sino-U.S. tensions rise due to the coronavirus pandemic and as China remains locked in territorial disputes with neighboring countries including India, Japan and Vietnam over the South China Sea.

In recent years, China has poured trillions of yuan into the modernization of its military, which it aims to transform into a world-class force rivaling that of the U.S. and other Western powers.

Taiwan’s president begins her second term with a call for unity

Richard C. Bush

Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, was sworn in for a second term at the office of the president on the morning of May 20. Shortly thereafter, she gave her inaugural address to a relatively small audience on the grounds of the nearby Taipei Guest House. Instead of the traditional celebration with thousands of people in the public square, COVID-19 restricted the ceremony to the basics.

Yet the dialed-down affair should not detract from the significance of the event. My colleague Ryan Hass’ review of the last year of Tsai’s first term highlights how she and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) overcame their stunning defeat in local elections in November 2018. At that time, political prognosticators were betting that someone besides Tsai Ing-wen would be giving the inaugural address in May 2020. But after the DPP’s strong victory in the January 2020 presidential and legislative elections, she again stood at the podium.

Tsai Ing-wen’s speech was also important. Her first inaugural speech heralded the victory she and the DPP had won in the January 2016 elections. It both presented ambitious goals and promised a commitment to competence in governance. As she said at the time: “The people elected a new president and a new government with one single expectation: solving problems.”

Chronicle of a Pandemic Foretold

By Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker

Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose. Someday, after the next pandemic has come and gone, a commission much like the 9/11 Commission will be charged with determining how well government, business, and public health leaders prepared the world for the catastrophe when they had clear warning. What will be the verdict?”

That is from the concluding paragraph of an essay entitled “Preparing for the Next Pandemic” that one of us, Michael Osterholm, published in these pages in 2005. The next pandemic has now come, and even though COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus that emerged in late 2019, is far from gone, it is not too soon to reach a verdict on the world’s collective preparation. That verdict is a damning one.

There are two levels of preparation, long range and short range, and government, business, and public health leaders largely failed on both. Failure on the first level is akin to having been warned by meteorologists that a Category 5 hurricane would one day make a direct hit on New Orleans and doing nothing to strengthen levies, construct water-diversion systems, or develop a comprehensive emergency plan. Failure on the second is akin to knowing that a massive low-pressure system is moving across the Atlantic toward the Gulf of Mexico and not promptly issuing evacuation orders or adequately stocking emergency shelters. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, preparation on both levels was inadequate, and the region suffered massive losses of life and property as a result. The analogous failure both over recent decades to prepare for an eventual pandemic and over recent months to prepare for the spread of this particular pandemic has had an even steeper toll, on a national and global scale.

China to impose sweeping security law in Hong Kong, heralding end of city’s autonomy

By Shibani Mahtani, Anna Fifield, Tiffany Liang and Timothy McLaughlin
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HONG KONG — China's Communist Party will impose a sweeping national security law in Hong Kong by fiat during the annual meeting of its top political body, officials said Thursday, criminalizing "foreign interference" along with secessionist activities and subversion of state power.

The move is the boldest yet from Beijing to undercut Hong Kong’s autonomy and bring the global financial hub under its full control, as it works to rewrite the “one country, two systems” framework that has allowed the territory to enjoy a level of autonomy for the past 23 years.

After steadily eroding Hong Kong’s political freedoms, Beijing signaled that the national security law will be a new tool that allows it to directly tackle the political dissent that erupted on Hong Kong’s streets last year. The months-long and sometimes violent protests began last June and fizzled out only over public health concerns related to the coronavirus outbreak.

The new tactic marks an escalation in Beijing’s crackdown in the former British colony and the clearest indication that it views Hong Kong as a restive region to be brought to heel after last year’s protests.

Reopening China’s Economy: Tracking the Heartbeat of a Recovering Nation

By Cheng Li and Jian Chen

Cheng Li is director and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. Jian Chen is president of CreditWise Technologies and senior adviser to Caixin Insight Group.

Any comparative analysis of China and the United States — and any lessons or experiences that either country may learn from the other –– should recognize the profound differences between these two nations in terms of their political systems, economic structures, social fabric and cultural norms. Yet, as the world’s two largest economies, with vast territories and substantial populations, China and the United States often confront similar challenges. When it comes to the impact of the novel coronavirus, both countries have been devastated by its outbreak and the searing speed of its spread, though the developments have been experienced at different time intervals.

Playing with fire Italy, China, and Europe

Giovanna De Maio

Italy's decision to endorse China's Belt and Road Initiative in 2019 was the result of years of growing Chinese presence in the country, previous difficulties in attracting foreign direct investment, intra-European competition for Chinese money, and Italy's history of openness to China, argues Giovanna De Maio in a report for the Brookings - Robert Bosch Foundation Transatlantic Initiative (BBTI).

The most significant event for Italian foreign policy in 2019 was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China endorsing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which marked a break in the ranks of G-7, raising important concerns from Washington that Italy would become an entry point for Chinese influence in Europe. In reality, Chinese investment in Italy’s key industries, including energy and telecommunications, has been growing since 2013.

The Coronavirus Vaccine Is on Track to Be the Fastest Ever Developed

By Carolyn Kormann

In early April, as covid-19 cases and deaths in New York City were rising to horrifying numbers, Tal Zaks, the chief medical officer of Moderna, a Cambridge-based biotech company, was concerned about time. In just three months, his company had created an experimental vaccine to inoculate against covid-19, and begun to inject the vaccine into humans, under the guidance of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a Phase I clinical trial involving forty-five healthy men and women. This kind of speed in vaccine development was unprecedented, and largely derived from the revolutionary—and yet, on a large scale, untested—biomedical technology behind the Moderna vaccine. Still, if there was any chance of getting the vaccine federally licensed, and then manufactured into hundreds of millions of doses, in twelve to eighteen months—as Anthony Fauci, the director of the N.I.A.I.D., has said is the fastest possible timeline—Zaks knew that the company would have to be able to prove the vaccine’s potential, or an “expectation of benefit,” as he put it, by this summer.

To accomplish this, Moderna would have to demonstrate three things: first, that the vaccine causes no significant adverse side effects in the healthy people dosed; second, that the vaccine can prevent disease in other mammals, such as mice and monkeys; and, third, that the vaccine induces neutralizing antibodies in trial participants’ blood, which is tested by adding inoculated blood to a petri dish and seeing if the virus is prevented from infecting and killing cells in a tissue culture. “In virology,” Zaks told me, “generating neutralizing antibodies is a pretty good surrogate of your ability to eventually protect the human being from becoming sick.” Once you have these Phase I results, “it becomes a judgment call,” he said. “When does that expectation of benefit actually become strong enough to warrant exposing more and more people to an unknown risk?”

China-led Globalization Is Coming To An End

Kenneth Rapoza

Talk to someone in politics or in the markets about the possibility of a second wave of coronavirus infections in the winter and they will all say if that happens, China is toast. Or at least in very big trouble with its Western trade partners. Those partnerships matter to China. They matter to the existing system of trade and finance even more.

Maybe there is a second wave, and it is not as deadly. Maybe the virus itself, as contagious as anything we have ever seen before, is not as deadly as we thought. If so, China can breathe a sigh of relief there. It suffered as much as anyone, too. Let’s move on.

Even so, moving on means moving on from China as the spearhead of global manufacturing. Those days are coming to an end.

“The companies I have heard the most from, anecdotally to me and whom I represent, are manufacturers of auto parts in China,” says John Scannapieco, a trade attorney and head of the Covid-19 task force at Baker Donelson in Nashville. “They are all really thinking about rejiggering their supply. They’re looking now at reducing their reliance on China and want to hedge their risks. To do it, they have to go somewhere else.”

Why Trump’s Blame-China Strategy Is Dangerous and Misguided

BY T.A. FRANK

Everyone has encountered this formula: Look, I’m not denying the badness of [some bad regime], but that doesn’t mean the United States should [bomb it/sanction it/insult it/topple it]. In each of its variants, it tends to be correct, which we know because it tends to get ignored. Then we run into some predicted bad thing [chaos/blowback/strained alliance/increased nuclear proliferation], and we shrug and find a new bad guy and repeat. Belligerence—or “moral clarity,” if you’re a pious ninny—has become a staple of our foreign relations, achieving a pinnacle under George W. Bush but never fading away. Perhaps it is mad, then, to keep repeating the “Look, I know monsters are bad, but” formula and hoping for a different result. But madness has its place. It’s at least saner than what we’re about to embark on with our latest bad guy of the day, China.

As we can read in a recent memo sent out to candidates by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, hitting China hard is going to be a campaign strategy for Republicans in 2020. “China is not an ally, and they’re not just a rival—they are an adversary and the Chinese Communist Party is our enemy,” goes the recommended messaging. Candidates are also encouraged to say, “I will stand up to China,” and, of course, “my opponent is soft on China.” As for the topic of Donald Trump’s handling of this pandemic? The memo stresses, in italics: “Note - don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban—attack China.” Great. We can already see this at work, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accusing China of cover-ups and claiming to have intelligence that the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab.

CHINA HAS TWO PATHS TO GLOBAL DOMINATION

BY HAL BRANDS AND JAKE SULLIVAN

Xi Jinping’s China is displaying a superpower’s ambition. Only a few years ago, many American observers still hoped that China would reconcile itself to a supporting role in the liberal international order or would pose—at most—a challenge to U.S. influence in the Western Pacific. The conventional wisdom was that China would seek an expanded regional role—and a reduced U.S. role—but would defer to the distant future any global ambitions. Now, however, the signs that China is gearing up to contest America’s global leadership are unmistakable, and they are ubiquitous.

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Jake Sullivan is a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was a deputy assistant to President Barack Obama and national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden from 2013 to 2014, as well as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department from 2011 to 2013.

China Declares Victory Over Both the Coronavirus and Critics of the Communist Party at the Biggest Political Event of the Year

By Barbara Demick

If there was a moment during the coronavirus crisis when the Chinese Communist Party looked as if it was losing its grip, it came on the night of February 6th, as the ophthalmologist turned whistle-blower Li Wenliang lay dying in a Wuhan hospital. In a small act of bravery that is now legend, Li had warned fellow-doctors in an internal chat group, in late December, of the impending contagion, which earned him a reprimand and a threat of arrest for spreading rumors. Li’s death was first reported at 9:30 p.m., but government censors quickly ordered the reports amended to say that he was still undergoing treatment; his death was not confirmed until just before three o’clock the next morning, when most of the country was asleep.

Nevertheless, virtually the entire online population followed Li’s death. The hashtag #LiWenliangDies received six hundred and seventy million views. People blamed the government’s coverup for what was by then a full-blown epidemic. They demanded free speech. They quoted from the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings on totalitarianism and lying. They called for the Communist Party to be held accountable.

China As COVID-19 Scapegoat

by Dan Steinbock

After the disastrous mishandling of its COVID-19 battle, the Trump White House blames China for the virus, at the cost of American lives and worst contraction since the 1930s.

Ironically, President Trump thanked President Xi for China’s success in the virus battle in late January. But he adopted a very different tone as the White House mishandled the outbreak permitting the virus to spread in America [for the full story, see my COVID-19 report, The Tragedy of Missed Opportunities].

In fact, Trump’s own cabinet took an adversarial stance from the beginning. If the escalation will continue, that stance could result in a new Cold War and the Second Global Depression in the coming years.

Blaming China for Trump’s COVID-19 mishandling

China-Taiwan Relations

by Eleanor Albert

Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China (ROC), is an island off the southern coast of China that has been governed independently from mainland China since 1949. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) views the island as a province, while in Taiwan—a territory with its own democratically elected government that is home to twenty-three million people—political leaders have differing views on the island’s status and relations with the mainland.

Despite the sovereignty dispute, the economic ties between the island and the mainland have thrived in recent years. Yet political frictions still shadow the relationship, and China and Taiwan have experienced a renewal in tensions under new leadership.

‘One China’ Principle

Beijing and Taipei sharply disagree on the island’s status. The PRC asserts that there is only “one China” and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of it. Beijing says Taiwan is bound by an understanding reached in 1992 between representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) political party then ruling Taiwan. Referred to as the 1992 Consensus, it states that there is only “one China” but allows for differing interpretations, by which both Beijing and Taipei agree that Taiwan belongs to China, while the two still disagree on which entity is China’s legitimate governing body. The tacit agreement underlying the 1992 Consensus is that Taiwan will not seek independence.

Iraq and the US still need each other

Michael E. O’Hanlon and Sara Allawi

After months of being run by a caretaker government, Iraq’s Parliament has finally approved a new prime minister, the former intelligence chief Mustafa Kadhimi. To succeed, Kadhimi will need to make progress on two policy fronts: finding a way, with Washington, to sustain the U.S. military partnership, and developing a plan for economic reform and renewal.

Iraq’s problems are even more daunting now than they have been in recent years. After the U.S killing in January of Qassam Suleimani, the Iranian military mastermind, as well as an Iraqi militia leader, Iraq’s parliament approved a nonbinding resolution that American forces should leave the country. After rocket attacks on March 11 killed two Americans and a British soldier, the U.S. retaliated against the suspected perpetrator, an Iran-backed militia.

American forces are taking precautions and consolidating positions in fewer, better-protected bases, but the situation remains highly fraught. It is not clear if the government, as opposed to the parliament, will now support the American military presence.

There is little doubt that Iraqis and Americans are better off working together, especially now.

For Iraqis, the American presence is an important counterweight to Iran and Islamic State. Americans are also helpful with Iraqi internal politics, especially with sectarian divisions in the security forces, often defusing tensions and mistrust between them. That was true during the surge of 2007-08. With Islamic State stepping up attacks during the COVID-19 lockdown, this concern is again acute.

How the Hollowing Out of the State Department Could Fuel a New Arms Race

Caroline Dorminey, Sumaya Malas

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration found itself defending proposed cuts in funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its 2021 budget request to Congress. The cuts, which were the latest in a consistent pattern of reductions in CDC funding over the past 10 years, threaten to further hamper the government’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak. But they are part of a much broader trend of gradually deprioritizing critical institutions, one that threatens key government functions meant to provide stability in an unpredictable world.

Like the CDC, the State Department in recent years has endured a gradual reduction in funding and resources as a share of the total federal budget. More and more missions that were traditionally carried out by diplomats are now moving, either formally or informally, over to the Pentagon. In theory, there is a measure of bipartisan agreement on the value of diplomacy, but there is no bipartisan plan to mitigate the effects of this chronic underfunding, which has resulted in leadership turnover and persistent vacancies. These problems reflect, and are further compounded by, an overarching lack of strategic planning. ...

Philippine Embassy defends proposed $1.5-B US arms sale to Duterte admin

By MICHAELA DEL CALLAR

The Philippine Embassy in Washington on Friday defended the United States’ decision to sell $1.5 billion worth of military equipment and weapons to the Duterte administration as some groups expressed fears that it will contribute to human rights violations in the country.

In a statement, the embassy accused certain groups criticizing the military deal of “advancing their own political agenda, even to the detriment of the long-standing alliance between the Philippines and the United States.”

“It is unfortunate that certain groups seek to take advantage of this issue,” it said, explaining that Manila’s proposed move to buy defense materiel from Washington is part of an ongoing program to modernize the Philippine military – one of Asia’s weakest.

On April 30, the US State Department announced the approval of a possible Foreign Military Sale to the Philippine government, which includes six AH-64E Apache attack helicopters and related equipment for an estimated cost of $1.5 billion.

Trump Should Address the Nation About Winning the China Challenge | Opinion

REBECCAH HEINRICHS

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the China challenge into fuller view. A new Pew Research poll shows 66 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the communist country, the highest percentage since Pew began tracking in 2005. President Donald Trump should give a major national address and outline the breadth of the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and outline his administration's efforts to galvanize domestic and global support with the ultimate goal of winning that challenge.

Since the pandemic began, there has been a renewed sense of urgency to strengthen U.S. sovereignty and end its dependence on China. Some of those efforts include moving critical supply chains to American soil, ending dependence on China for rare earth minerals used for manufacturing everything from missiles and munitions to batteries and motors, and barring Chinese telecom giant Huawei and its suppliers from using American technology and software. Elected officials are urging greater scrutiny of Chinese student visas, as U.S. prosecutors aggressively work to crack down on Chinese spying and intellectual property theft in our academic and scientific institutions.

President Trump has mostly left straight talk about China to his deputies. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, "the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist Party focused on struggle and international domination." Attorney General William Barr warned that, "as a dictatorship, China can marshal an all-of-country approach" as it seeks to dominate other nations and destroy capitalism. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, "They have said that by 2035, the [People's Republic of China] intends to complete its military modernization and, by 2049, it seeks to dominate Asia as the preeminent global military power."

America’s Opportunity in the Middle East

By Daniel Benaim and Jake Sullivan

U.S. foreign policy hands are rightly grappling with how engaged the United States should be in the Middle East. Thought-provoking essays by Martin Indyk (in The Wall Street Journal) and Mara Karlin and Tamara Cofman Wittes (in Foreign Affairs) have argued that the United States has few remaining vital interests—those worth going to war over—in the region. Washington should “do less” in the Middle East, as Karlin and Wittes put it, and lighten the U.S. footprint because, as the headline of Indyk’s essay noted, it “isn’t worth it.” Gone are the days when 180,000 U.S. troops fought in Iraq or when spiking oil prices held the U.S. economy over a proverbial barrel. And the terrifying outbreak of a global pandemic has been the starkest reminder yet that the United States has work to do to refocus its priorities on the most pressing current and future challenges.

Yet while the trend toward Middle East minimalism is broad based—both U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic opponents talk about “ending endless wars”—it remains ill-defined, the start of the conversation rather than the end of it. Above all, downsizing the U.S. presence in the Middle East will require striking a tricky balance: reducing an outdated U.S. military footprint without creating fresh insecurity, while maintaining deterrence and influence where needed to address those key U.S. interests that remain.

Why Britain is so powerful — and how Brexit could make it stronger

Dave Olsen

Soft power and hard power are very different, hence why the UK can beat out the US in the former. The difference isn’t whether or not they involve military force — although that is a characteristic of hard power, and not one of soft power. Soft power is the strength of a country to get others to co-opt their pursuits, whereas hard power is the strength to force countries to submit to your nation.

Understandably, the US has by far the most hard power due to its immense military presence all over the world, but the UK, due to its very good relations with former colonies and ability to stand up to the US, for example on Iran, means that it leads the way in soft power, and is one of only two global powers, the UK and China (the US is a superpower).

The UK’s only adversary over which it has very little soft power is Russia, and even then, it undoubtedly has much more sway than the US, for example, in spite of the current and growing tensions between the two countries.

Global Migration Is Not Abating. Neither Is the Backlash Against It

Around the world, the popular backlash against global migration has fueled the rise of far-right populist parties and driven some centrist governments to adopt a tougher line on immigration. But with short-term strategies dominating the debate, many of the persistent drivers of migration go unaddressed, even as efforts to craft a global consensus on migration are hobbled by demands for quick solutions.

Around the world, migration continues to figure prominently in political debates. In Europe, far-right populist parties have used the Migrant Crisis of 2015 and latent fears of immigrants to fuel their rise and introduce increasingly restrictive border policies in countries, like Italy, where they entered government. The popular backlash against immigrants has also pushed centrist governments to adopt a tougher line on immigration at home, while working with countries of origin and transit to restrict migration, whether through improving border controls or strengthening economic incentives for potential emigres to stay in their home countries.

Researchers ask defense industry for technologies leading to next generation secure military tactical radio

John Keller

ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are asking industry to develop secure radio frequency (RF) transmitter and receiver technologies to enable the next generation of secure military tactical radio systems.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., have issued a solicitation (HR001120S0030) for the Wideband Secure and Protected Emitter and Receiver (WiSPER) project.

Today's military secure tactical radios achieve security by spreading transmitted content over time and operating frequency in attempts to reduce transmitted power density and operate below the adversary's receiver detection limit.

Still, spread-spectrum techniques lack sufficient complexity to evade detection by modern signals intelligence (SIGINT) receivers or interception by compromised devices.

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