Indian Strategic Studies: 10/18/21

18 October 2021

Deterrence Theory– Is it Applicable in Cyber Domain?

Maj Gen PK Mallick, VSM (Retd)

Introduction

The Deterrence Theory was developed in the 1950s, mainly to address new strategic challenges posed by nuclear weapons from the Cold War nuclear scenario. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union adopted a survivable nuclear force to present a ‘credible’ deterrent that maintained the ‘uncertainty’ inherent in a strategic balance as understood through the accepted theories of major theorists like Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, and Thomas Schelling.1 Nuclear deterrence was the art of convincing the enemy not to take a specific action by threatening it with an extreme punishment or an unacceptable failure.

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Cyber Weapons – A Weapon of War?

Maj Gen PK Mallick, VSM (Retd)

Introduction

The character of warfare has changed fundamentally over the last decade. In the past, it was essential for an adversary nation or insurgent to physically bring weapons to bear during combat. That requirement is no longer a necessity. In cyber operations, the only weapons that need to be used are bits and bytes. In this new era of warfare, logistics issues that often restrict and limit conventional warfare and weaponry are not impediments. This new weaponry moves at the speed of light, is available to every human on the planet and can be as surgical as a scalpel or as devastating as a nuclear bomb.

Cyber attacks in various forms have become a global problem. Cyber weapons are low-cost, low-risk, highly effective and easily deployable globally. This new class of weapons is within reach of many countries, extremist or terrorist groups, non-state actors, and even individuals. Cyber crime organisations are developing cyber weapons effectively. The use of offensive Cyber operations by nation-states directly against another or by co-opting cyber criminals has blurred the line between spies and non-state malicious hackers. New entrants, both nation-states and non-state actors have unmatched espionage and surveillance capabilities with significant capabilities. They are often the forerunners for criminal financial gain, destruction and disruption operations. Progressively, we see non-state actors including commercial entities, developing capabilities that were solely held by a handful of state actors.

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With all eyes on Taiwan, tensions are building on another Chinese frontier: India

Brad Lendon

Hong Kong (CNN)China's increased military activity in the Taiwan Strait may have grabbed all the headlines in recent weeks, but thousands of miles to the west, another simmering territorial dispute on the country's borders looks more likely to boil over first.

Just 16 months ago, Chinese and Indian troops fought a deadly hand-to-hand battle in the Himalayas along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the ill-defined de facto border between the two nuclear powers.

And now, tensions appear to be rising again.

According to unverified reports, troops from both sides have been briefly detained by the other, as military positions are fortified and talks to deescalate the situation seem at an impasse.

Post Afghanistan, US-Pakistan relations stand on the edge of a precipice

Madiha Afzal

With the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan, Pakistan may have come closer to achieving its long-sought “strategic depth” with respect to its western neighbor, with a Pakistan-friendly government in Kabul. But the Taliban’s victory is also seriously testing Pakistan’s long fraught bilateral relationship with America. For the last 20 years, U.S.-Pakistan relations have been defined by the needs of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. With that war having ended with an outcome as ignominious as a Taliban takeover, the relationship is at a clear crossroads. The outlook isn’t positive. Here’s where things stand.

THE MOOD IN WASHINGTON

In Washington, where policymakers have been grappling with the fallout from the sudden Taliban takeover of Kabul in August and the scrambled evacuation that followed, the focus has shifted to identifying the mistakes made in the war in Afghanistan. Washington is taking a hard look at where things went wrong — and Pakistan, given its long history with the Taliban, is part of that equation.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin must resign

ANDREW MILBURN

When I was a junior Marine, an oft-repeated joke among my peers went like this: “What’s the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts?” Answer: “The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.” It was funny at the time, in the half-bitter way that such jokes are funny as an outlet for resentment among young men frustrated at their perceived lack of agency. The joke would make an appearance after incidents seemed to reveal an institution that was capricious, even willfully negligent towards those at the bottom of the pyramid. Snafus we still called them back then: trucks that never showed up on time, formations that dragged on interminably, and the inevitable delays waiting to be allowed off base in the evening before sampling the dubious delights of a garrison town. When all was said and done, however, these jokes were no more than that. Because we were proud to wear the uniform, proud of the institution to which we belonged — and willing to put our lives on the line for what it stood for. Top Articlesby Task & Purpose

Taliban’s Afghanistan Takeover: Assessment of Regional Powers and Indian Interests

SHREY KHANNA

Executive Summary

This report argues that the Taliban victory in Afghanistan will impact the regional geopolitical dynamics and the interests of major regional powers. During the insurgency phase, most regional powers had maintained differential support to the Taliban to facilitate a common objective of the US withdrawal. However, the factional rivalries in a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan make it likely that the interests of regional powers would start diverging significantly. This report also examines India’s interests in the region – the impact of Taliban victory on the Islamist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir and New Delhi’s access and influence in Central Asia – which are likely to face challenges in a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Keeping this in mind, this paper argues the following:

India should cultivate a working relationship with the nationalist sections of the Taliban to take advantage of Islamabad’s growing inability to dominate Afghanistan.

India must continue to invest in counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation capabilities to offset the Jihadi threat to Jammu and Kashmir.

A close partnership with Tehran would allow New Delhi to utilise the Iranian influence in the Taliban to contain the influence of pro-ISI Taliban groups and regain its trade access to Afghanistan.

New Delhi must use all the tools available to encourage China to ensure political stability in Afghanistan.

India must act to strengthen and expand its role of being a maritime security provider in the northern Indo-Pacific.

The U.N. Needs New Thinking on How to Prevent Civil Wars

Charli Carpenter

Up until the spring, the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar was mainly expressing its opposition to the military junta that seized power in February through peaceful protests. But over the summer, in reaction to the junta’s violent and often lethal response, hundreds of small, armed, civilian resistance groups popped up and begun to carry out ambushes on military convoys around the country. As Betcy Jose and Peace Medie have shown, this is typical of how civilians begin to protect themselves with force when faced with violence from their own government, and in the absence of adequate outside help.

And when peaceful protesters begin to turn violent, military regimes typically respond with an even worse crackdown, causing the violence to escalate and the political contestation to slide into civil war. Yet, the AP reports this week that the United Nations sees itself as hamstrung in the situation. Although the organization’s Credentials Committee is stalling a decision on whether to recognize the junta, “the UN is unlikely to take any meaningful action against Myanmar’s new rulers because they have the support of China and Russia.”

It is true that the U.N. remains notoriously poor at intervening in civil wars before they break out, or forestalling campaigns targeting civilians in their early stages. But criticisms of the U.N. for inaction in Myanmar are not quite fair. Some critics of the U.N.’s passivity would understand “meaningful action” to mean only humanitarian intervention. And clearly, a Chapter VII intervention is institutionally impossible given the array of great power interests. But that’s how the U.N. is supposed to work. And the idea that the U.N. cannot or will not “meaningfully” act overestimates the power of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, underestimates the U.N. as an institution and misreads the source of the U.N.’s political impotence.

First, in cases where humanitarian intervention is truly called for, the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, doctrine is flexible enough to leave open the possibility of one without the approval of the Security Council. To be sure, this approach has its downsides as well, as Russia and China like to argue. After all, human rights can be used as a smoke-screen for self-interested invasions, which potentially makes for a slippery slope to undermining the U.N. Charter.

But to some extent this can be mitigated by the emergent norm in international customary law that to be “humanitarian,” an intervention must be genuinely multilateral. The NATO intervention in Kosovo fit this description without a Security Council resolution, in the same way the intervention in Libya arguably did with one. By contrast, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and the United States’ equally self-serving invasion of Iraq both involved humanitarian justifications, but these were widely—and correctly—viewed as unwarranted violations of the U.N. Charter. In theory, however, atrocity prevention does not hinge on the Security Council.

Second, while the Responsibility to Protect doctrine is often associated with the idea of military intervention, the doctrine calls for significantly more factors to be taken into consideration than just whether atrocities have reached a threshold justifying the use of force to stop them. Among other things, there must be a proportionality analysis: Can more civilian lives be saved by acting than will be lost by the inevitable fallout of war? Will the humanitarian good of regime change or atrocity prevention outweigh the potential humanitarian cost of an escalating regional war, for example, should two nuclear-armed great power rivals fall afoul? In Syria, for example, the argument for humanitarian intervention was much stronger in 2011, when then-U.S. President Barack Obama first proposed it, or even earlier, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was dropping “mere” barrel bombs on civilians but had not yet escalated to using chemical weapons. By the time the Islamic State showed up and Russia was on the scene, however, the risk-to-benefit proportionality analysis became much more complicated and prohibitive.

Third, two other very important pillars of R2P are often unappreciated. One is the responsibility of states themselves to protect populations on their own territory. This is manifestly not happening in Myanmar, but in some respects that is equally true in other places, including China and the U.S., with regard to the former’s treatment of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations in Xinjiang and the latter’s treatment of refugees at the southern border. One lesson, then, is to use evidence from places like Myanmar to look for and address human rights abuses at home.

It is often easier for armed groups to find military support from the international community than it is for their nonviolent counterparts to receive protection and assistance.

The other unappreciated pillar of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine is the international community’s obligation to encourage and assist individual states in meeting that responsibility and building state capacity to do so. And on this second pillar, the international community is doing considerable meaningful work with regard to Myanmar, but also elsewhere. Arguably, this is precisely what China and the U.S. were doing in working together to delay recognition of the Myanmar junta by the Credentials Committee, as well as what several countries have attempted by withholding aid from Afghanistan unless the Taliban agree to educate girls. And it’s what is being done by the “other U.N.”—the civilian agencies like UNICEF, the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Development Fund for Women—in myriad places where development aid is combined with security assistance to support weak or failing states in building structures of governance and a culture of human rights.

But here, as Severine Autesserre’s new book “The Frontlines of Peace” shows, the U.N. overinvests in top-down, elite-run peacebuilding measures and underinvests in supporting everyday efforts by ordinary civilians to build and keep the peace at local levels. Moreover, this second pillar is not always enough to protect civilians against violence, as democratization itself can be destabilizing.

If there is a gap in international norms and institutions on conflict prevention, it is the lack of a norm on providing support and protection for nonviolent resistance movements that do not take up arms against their own government. In fact, it is often easier for armed groups to find military support from the international community than it is for their nonviolent counterparts to receive protection and assistance. And the best way for armed groups to provoke the kind of crackdown that will draw humanitarian intervention is to begin attacking the security forces of the state. Combined, these factors almost incentivize nonviolent groups to take up arms.

What this shows is that it may again be time to innovate in atrocity prevention. If the international community wants to simultaneously promote democracy, reward nonviolence and prevent civil wars, it needs a formula for light-footprint interventions in situations that fall short of war, but where an intervention can meaningfully protect civilians engaged in nonviolent opposition. This could have the simultaneous benefit of protecting civilians from the humanitarian impact of the crippling sanctions often imposed on dictatorships and military regimes as an alternative to the use of force. Coupled with a very high threshold for intervention once civilians begin taking up arms, this could incentivize nonviolence, ratchet down atrocities before they break out and protect civilians earlier when they do.

In Myanmar, the country is in the early stages of what may metastasize into a civil war. But the civilian side of this brewing conflict was not long ago—and to a large degree still is—a nonviolent resistance movement. Suppose this movement had been supported with a no-fly/no-go zone to ensure safe haven for its activities, combined with a humanitarian airlift of aid into the protected zone to protect nonviolent protesters from the humanitarian effects of a sanctions regime against the junta? This is the least invasive form of military intervention, one that worked well, for example, in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991.

If these approaches seem too coercive, there are other tools at the disposal of third-party states to protect civilians when the early warning signs of violence have not yet escalated to mass atrocities. One is to fulfill their own obligations collectively under the international refugee regime. Countries contiguous to conflicts often bear the brunt of refugee flows, but the humanitarian evacuation from Afghanistan demonstrates what the international community can do with a refugee crisis if it chooses to enable civilians to flee by air to a broader geographic array of third-party countries.

The evacuation of Kabul, like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, may have been the province of retreating occupiers. But there is no reason such operations could not also be organized by the U.N., as occurred to some extent in Bosnia, or by civilian NGOs with the support of governments, as the NGO Refugee Air attempted during the early days of the Syrian refugee crisis. Such efforts are only as humanitarian as the states that receive these refugees, however. So this option requires a recommitment to refugee norms worldwide, but especially in the Global North, and a mechanism for resolving the collective action problem that prevents the majority of the world’s countries from taking in their share of refugees.

Of course, such a set of norms and practices would include their own externalities and dilemmas, in some ways enabling and incentivizing tyrants to create conditions that effectively “cleanse” opposition movements out of the country. Nevertheless, much more could be done by the international community to support nonviolent movements and give them a voice in preventive diplomacy efforts, before situations rise to the level requiring humanitarian war. And this is where the international community is truly missing its chance in Myanmar.

Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massac

China’s Influence in South Asia: Vulnerabilities and Resilience in Four Countries

China’s economic and political footprint has expanded so quickly that many countries, even those with relatively strong state and civil society institutions, have struggled to grapple with the implications. There has been growing attention to this issue in the United States and the advanced industrial democracies of Japan and Western Europe. But “vulnerable” countries—those where the gap is greatest between the scope and intensity of Chinese activism, on the one hand, and, on the other, local capacity to manage and mitigate political and economic risks—face special challenges. In these countries, the tools and tactics of China’s activism and influence activities remain poorly understood among local experts and elites. Both within and beyond these countries, meanwhile, policy too often transposes Western solutions and is not well adapted to local realities.

This is especially notable in two strategic regions: Southeastern, Central, and Eastern Europe; and South Asia. China’s economic and political profile has expanded unusually quickly in these two regions, but many countries lack a deep bench of local experts who can match analysis of the domestic implications of Chinese activism to policy recommendations that reflect domestic political and economic ground truth.

ESCALATION TO NUCLEAR WAR IN THE DIGITAL AGE: RISK OF INADVERTENT ESCALATION IN THE EMERGING INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM

James Johnson

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We are in an era of rapid disruptive technological change, especially in artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AI technology is already being infused into military hardware, and armed forces are continually furthering their planning, research and development, and in some cases deployment of AI-enabled capabilities. Therefore, the embryonic journey to reorient military forces to prepare for the future digitized battlefield is no longer merely the stuff of speculation or science fiction. This essay revisits Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Barry Posen’s analytical framework to examine the psychological features of the security dilemma to consider how and why the novel characteristics of AI and the emerging digital information ecosystem may impact crisis stability and increase inadvertent escalation risk. Will AI-enabled capabilities increase inadvertent escalation risk? How might AI be incorporated into nuclear and conventional operations in ways that affect escalation risk? Are existing notions of inadvertent escalation still relevant in the digital age?

How the U.S. government can deter China’s threat in Taiwan

The skies around Taiwan are thick with Chinese fighter jets and nuclear-capable bombers, with Beijing flying 150 sorties through the edge of the island’s air defense identification zone in early October alone. Whatever President Xi Jinping’s precise intention — to bully Taiwan and its allies, the United States included; to provoke them; or to inflame domestic nationalism — it is not benign.

As Mr. Xi’s crushing of Hong Kong’s free institutions shows, the “peaceful” reunification between his communist state and democratic Taiwan that he called for once again on Oct. 9 inherently threatens all 23 million people who live on the island. A hegemonic China would menace Japan, Australia and the Philippines, destabilizing the entire Indo-Pacific region. “There should be absolutely no illusions that the Taiwanese people will bow to pressure,” President Tsai Ing-wen responded, appropriately, on Oct 10. President Biden’s top foreign policy aides have also registered their disapproval.

China’s Influence in Southeastern, Central, and Eastern Europe: Vulnerabilities and Resilience in Four Countries

ERIK BRATTBERG, PHILIPPE LE CORRE, PAUL STRONSKI, THOMAS DE WAAL

INTRODUCTION

As China’s footprint in Europe has expanded over the last decade, many countries—even those with relatively strong state and civil society institutions—have struggled to grapple with the implications and consequences. Central and Eastern Europe (sometimes referred to as CEE) as well as Southeastern Europe is often seen as particularly vulnerable to Chinese political, economic, or soft power influence. Policymakers in the United States and the European Union have at times expressed concern that China’s influence in this region could help exacerbate governance shortfalls, undermine political and economic stability, and complicate the EU’s ability to reach consensus on key issues.

Low Turnout, High Drama

HARITH HASAN

One conclusion that can be drawn from the early parliamentary elections in Iraq, which were held on October 10, is that while the results of the voting alone cannot determine who will rule the country, they still do matter.

The main story was the low turnout, which Iraq’s Independent Higher Electoral Commission estimated at 41 percent, using a dubious formula that most international and local monitoring organizations rejected. A coalition of these organizations estimated turnout at an even lower 38 percent. Regardless of which number is the more precise, the participation level replicated a pattern visible since 2018, showing that a majority of Iraqis are disenchanted with the political system and have little hope that elections will make a difference.

The elections, which had been seen as a way out of the crisis that followed the mass protests in 2019, were intended to relegitimize the system and allow better conditions for free and fair competition. Yet these conditions have not been fully met. Armed groups have continued to assassinate and intimidate activists, while there are no implementable rules to rein them in, nor to monitor the financing of major political parties. This reality pushed several of the new parties linked to the protest movement to boycott the election.

Yale’s Grand Strategy Program Has Always Been Broken

Jim Sleeper

Yale history professor Beverly Gage has been praised widely for defending academic freedom by announcing her resignation (effective in December) from the directorship of Yale University’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, which she took over in 2017 from Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. But there are more politically urgent, and arguably profound, questions at issue here beyond professors’ right to design their courses free of outside interference.

Since the program’s inception more than two decades ago, Grand Strategy’s intensive seminars have engaged undergraduate as well as graduate students with close readings of classical works on strategy, stressful crisis decision-making simulations, and meetings with accomplished policymakers. In 2010, David Petraeus, at the time the four-star Army general commanding U.S. military operations in the Middle East (and later to become director of the CIA), visited the seminar, as did former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, observers from the CIA, and U.S. Military Academy cadets.

Air Force general becomes second woman to head US military command

ELLEN MITCHELL

Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost on Friday took over U.S. Transportation Command, becoming the second woman ever to lead one of the Defense Department’s 11 combatant commands.

Ovost will now oversee the military’s global transportation network, which led the evacuation of more than 124,000 people during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, during a change-of-command ceremony, called Ovost “a legend of a leader” and said she “played a pivotal role” in the Afghanistan airlift, which she aided as the head of Air Force Air Mobility Command.

“We need every Jackie Van Ovost we can get,” Austin said at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. “As she likes to say, 'As young women looking up, it’s hard to be what you can't see.' So General Van Ovost knows the importance of breaking barriers.”

Ovost, who is the only female four-star general in the U.S. military, graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1988 and was previously the vice director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. President Biden nominated her for the combatant command role in March along with Army Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson who will become the next head of U.S. Southern Command later this month.

She takes over Transcom from Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, who will retire.

Before Ovost, the first woman to lead a combatant command is retired Army Gen. Lori Robinson, who was the head of U.S. Northern Command in 2016.

Why Australia Spurned France

George Friedman

The decision by the Australian government to join a U.S.-British consortium to help construct a nuclear submarine capability enraged France, whose previous efforts to that end were abandoned. To smooth things over, Australia explained that there had been significant delays in France’s work, citing cultural issues such as France’s propensity to take the month of August for vacation and to fail to show up at meetings on time. (More important is that Canberra believed a nuclear sub program met its needs better than diesel-electric ones did.) It was a huge contract, and I always enjoy France’s ability to be outraged, as well as Australia’s inability to match it.

Behind the noise, Australia’s decision was about geopolitics, not contracts. When the agreement with France was signed in 2016, and in the years prior to 2016 when the deal was negotiated, the world looked different than it does today. According to some, China was evolving economically, focusing on international trade and evolving toward some sort of internal liberalism. China was a huge customer for Australian minerals, and Chinese students were flooding Australian universities. Australia saw the decision to build a nuclear submarine fleet as part of the modernization of its fleet rather than a preparation for some battle to come. The Australians were aligned with the United States but were not obliged to buy American technology. Nor did Canberra have to consider the issue in the context of maintaining its supply lines.

‘Absolutely Not True’: Army CIO Answers Claim US Has Already Lost To China In AI

COLIN CLARK

AUSA: In the face of bold claims by a former senior Air Force official that the United States has “no competing fighting chance” against the Chinese military, the Army’s CIO rejected the idea when asked about it here.

“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” the former first chief software officer of the Air Force, Nicolas Chaillan, in an interview with the Financial Times.

Chaillan told the FT that the US failure to tackle Chinese advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cyber capabilities was “putting his children’s future at risk.” Some US cyber defense efforts were, he said, at “kindergarten level.” (Chaillan later took to social media to say he “never said [the US] lost” already, but would if it didn’t take action.)

Will Europe Ever Really Confront China?

Stephen M. Walt

The Biden administration has made no secret of its desire to enlist America’s extensive array of allies in the “strategic competition” against China. This approach makes good sense in Asia: Most Asian countries have ample reason to worry about a Chinese drive for regional hegemony, and the United States cannot counter such an attempt without extensive cooperation from Japan, Australia, South Korea, India, and others. Managing these relationships effectively will require attentive U.S. diplomacy, but in the Asian context the common interest in balancing China is obvious.

U.S. President Joe Biden & Co. would also like America’s European partners to be part of this effort, however, and that’s a rather different kettle of herring. I’m not referring to the recent defense agreement among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known as AUKUS, which has little to do with a European effort to balance China and everything to do with Britain’s desire to preserve its so-called special relationship with America and Canberra’s interest in deepening its own ties to Washington. Following America’s lead has been a knee-jerk response for every British prime minister since Winston Churchill, but it remains to be seen if London will put more than a token effort into the new partnership.

The Malaria Vaccine Is a Big Deal, but Not a Silver Bullet

WHEN PATRICK DUFFY started his career at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1991, scientists were already a few years into testing a first-of-its-kind vaccine that would protect against malaria. Thirty years later, the World Health Organization has finally recommended the product of that research as a malaria intervention for children under age 5 in Africa. The RTS,S vaccine, also called Mosquirix, is the first vaccine to protect against a parasite.

Duffy, now the chief of the Laboratory of Malaria Immunology and Vaccinology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is excited about its potential to reduce the toll of a disease that kills more than 400,000 people every year. But he’s well aware that this vaccine isn’t a universal solution. “This prevents clinical malaria in children,” he says. But it doesn’t stop transmission of the parasite from mosquitoes to humans, and it doesn’t protect everyone who is vulnerable. “What about pregnant women? What about elimination?” he asks. “I feel as though this is a base upon which improvements can be made.”

European Gas Crisis: Russia to the Rescue?

Sergei Kapitonov

With gas prices in Europe exceeding $1,000 per 1,000 cubic meters, and European fertilizer and steel manufacturers stopping production and reducing exports because of the soaring costs, what has led to the crisis, and how can it be resolved?

The current turbulence on the gas market is largely down to Europe itself. Over the last fifteen years, it was the EU countries that built the model of pricing that ensures low prices when demand is low (like last year, due to the pandemic), but means that when demand is high, prices soar.

Historically, Europe had both its own gas industry and imported gas from the Soviet Union, Norway, and North Africa. Since gas producers need some kind of payback guarantee after investing millions in developing deposits and building pipelines, a system was established of long-term, twenty-to-thirty-year contracts that would guarantee sales of gas for decades ahead.

Poland Tests the EU’s Future

JUDY DEMPSEY

This past week, Poland, whose successive governments since 1989 have been staunch supporters of the EU, turned its back on the EU treaty by rejecting several of its articles.

This decision will make or break the EU’s ability to become more integrated, defend its values, and provide a beacon to other countries that aspire to join the bloc. It is decision time for the EU—and Poland.

POLAND’S LEGAL CHALLENGE TO THE EU

The EU is founded on a treaty that is based, among other things, on creating “an ever closer union”; defending the rule of law; solidarity during financial, security and health crises; and upholding human rights. Member states like Poland agree, as a condition of EU membership, to uphold these basic principles.

But Poland—with support from Hungary—is testing the legal and political integrity of the EU by ruling that its own constitution supersedes the EU articles.

Can Putin Change Russia’s Role From Spoiler to Global Power?

Russia occupies an unusual position on the world stage. Under President Vladimir Putin, Moscow has repeatedly demonstrated that it has the capacity to destabilize the international order. While Russia lacks the military strength to challenge U.S. supremacy, no one—particularly not the NATO alliance—is ignoring its capabilities. Moscow’s use of arms sales and military engagements to build ties to countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and especially the Middle East has also attracted attention. And its massive exports of fossil fuels to Europe offers Russia additional leverage. But for all its ability to upend power dynamics in places like Libya and Ukraine, Moscow has so far not demonstrated the capacity to fill the vacuums it creates.

Even as Moscow maintains an outsized influence on the global stage, discontent is brewing at home. Putin has dominated the Russian political scene for more than two decades, but his popularity is waning amid a slowing economy and following a deeply unpopular pension reform effort. That didn’t stop him from engineering a way to hold onto power after his current presidential term ends in 2024, despite a constitutional term limit. But it has opened space for Putin’s long-suffering political opponents to call attention to the corruption and violence that have marked his tenure. The most prominent among them, Alexei Navalny, almost paid for his life for doing so, and is now paying with his freedom.

These are the top 10 tech trends that will shape the coming decade, according to McKinsey

Sean Fleming
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The pace of change in the technology sector has always been brisk. As much as 10 years worth of growth in e-commerce may have been compressed into just three months in late 2019, according to McKinsey & Company, which predicts that we’ll experience more technological progress in the coming decade than we did in the preceding 100 years put together.

Any change can be unsettling and keeping pace with developments even more so. Part of the challenge is knowing which are the most significant changes and which are the ones that are less likely to bear fruit.

According to McKinsey, these are the 10 top technologies attracting the attention and funds of investors and technologists. They are also the ones most likely to feature prominently in the changing face of the modern workplace. Understanding the impact they will have on organizations and on the people whose jobs will be affected, could be key to avoiding any of the worst downsides of the disruption that may follow.

Technology trends and underlying technologies. Image: McKinsey & Co

1. Process automation and virtualization

Around half of all existing work activities could be automated in the next few decades, as next-level process automation and virtualization become more commonplace.

“By 2025, more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT),” McKinsey predicts. Robots, automation, 3D-printing, and more will generate around 79.4 zettabytes of data per year.

2. The future of connectivity

Faster digital connections, powered by 5G and the IoT, have the potential to unlock economic activity. So much so that McKinsey says implementing faster connections in “mobility, healthcare, manufacturing and retail could increase global GDP by $1.2 trillion to $2 trillion by 2030.”

“Far-greater network availability and capability will drive broad shifts in the business landscape, from the digitization of manufacturing (through wireless control of mobile tools, machines and robots) to decentralized energy delivery and remote patient monitoring.”

3. Distributed infrastructure

By 2022, 70% of companies will be using hybrid-cloud or multi-cloud platforms as part of a distributed IT infrastructure. It will mean data and processing can be handled in the cloud but made accessible to devices faster.

“This trend will help companies boost their speed and agility, reduce complexity, save costs and strengthen their cybersecurity defenses,” McKinsey says.

Tech trends affect all sectors, but their impact varies by industry.

4. Next-generation computing

Next-generation computing will, McKinsey believes, “help find answers to problems that have bedevilled science and society for years, unlocking unprecedented capabilities for businesses”.

It includes a host of far-reaching developments, from quantum AI to fully autonomous vehicles, and as such won’t be an immediate concern for all organizations. “Preparing for next-generation computing requires identifying whether you’re in a first-wave industry (such as finance, travel, logistics, global energy and materials, and advanced industries),” McKinsey says, or “whether your business depends on trade secrets and other data that must be safeguarded during the shift from current to quantum cryptography.”

5. Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We are still only in the early days of the development of AI. As the technology becomes more sophisticated, it will be applied to further develop tech-based tools, such as training machines to recognize patterns, then act upon what it has detected.

By 2024, McKinsey estimates AI-generated speech will be behind more than 50% of people’s interactions with computers. Companies are still searching for ways to use AI effectively though, the consultancy says: “While any company can get good value from AI if it’s applied effectively and in a repeatable way, less than one-quarter of respondents report significant bottom-line impact.”

Effects of technology trends in 2050.

6. Future of programming

Get ready for Software 2.0, where neural networks and machine learning write code and create new software. “This trend makes possible the rapid scaling and diffusion of new data-rich, AI-driven applications,” according to McKinsey.

In part, it could see the creation of software applications far more powerful and capable than anything available today. But it will also make it possible for existing software and coding processes to be standardized and automated.

7. Trust architecture

In 2019, more than 8.5 billion data records were compromised. Despite advances in cybersecurity, criminals continue to redouble their efforts. Trust architectures will help in the fight against cybercrime, McKinsey says.

One approach to building a trust architecture is the use of distributed ledgers, such as blockchain. “In addition to lowering the risk of breaches, trust architectures reduce the cost of complying with security regulations, lower the operating and capital expenditures associated with cybersecurity, and enable more cost-efficient transactions, for instance, between buyers and sellers,” McKinsey notes.

8. Bio Revolution

There is, McKinsey says, a “confluence of advances in biological science” that “promises a significant impact on economies and our lives and will affect industries from health and agriculture to consumer goods, energy and materials.”

Propelled by AI, automation and DNA sequencing, the bio revolution promises the development of gene-therapies, hyper-personalized medicines and genetics-based guidance on food and exercise. These developments will create new markets but will also raise some important ethical questions. “Organizations need to assess their bQ or biological quotient – the extent to which they understand biological science and its implications. They should then sort out the resources they need to allocate to biological technologies and capabilities and whether to integrate those into their existing R&D or partner with science-based start-ups,” McKinsey says.

9. Next-generation materials

Developments in materials science have the potential to transform multiple market sectors, including pharma, energy, transportation, health, semiconductors and manufacturing. Such materials include graphene – a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice configuration, which is around 200 times stronger than steel, despite its incredible thinness. It is also a very efficient conductor and promises to revolutionize semiconductor performance. Another is molybdenum disulfide – nanoparticles of which are already being used in flexible electronics.

“By changing the economics of a wide range of products and services, next-generation materials with significantly higher efficiency in many as-yet-untouched application areas may well change industry economics and reconfigure companies within them,” McKinsey says.

10. Future of clean technologies

Renewable energy, cleaner/greener transport, energy-efficient buildings and sustainable water consumption are at the heart of the clean-tech trend. As the costs associated with clean-tech fall, their use becomes more widespread and their disruption is felt across a growing number of industries, McKinsey says.

“Companies must keep pace with emerging business-building opportunities by designing operational-improvement programmes relating to technology development, procurement, manufacturing and cost reduction,” McKinsey believes. “Advancing clean technologies also promises an abundant supply of green energy to sustain exponential technology growth, for instance, in high-power computing.”

Central Europe’s Populists Took a Hit This Week

Frida Ghitis

For those who have worried about the illiberal, populist drift in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, events of the past few days have brought some rare good news. Recent political tremors have shaken several governments in the European region that led the populist wave now gaining ground across much of the world.

Despite the series of setbacks, there’s still a chance—in every instance—that when the current convulsions stop, the populist right could remain in place. But it does seem that the region is now in play.

What’s remarkable is that these developments have occurred almost simultaneously. It could be a coincidence, but perhaps it’s an early indicator, the leading edge of a coming shift.

In the Czech Republic, Austria and even in Poland, liberal forces may not be ready to declare themselves optimistic, much less victorious, but there’s an air of renewed possibility.

Facebook Uses Deceptive Math to Hide Its Hate Speech Problem

IN PUBLIC, FACEBOOK seems to claim that it removes more than 90 percent of hate speech on its platform, but in private internal communications the company says the figure is only an atrocious 3 to 5 percent. Facebook wants us to believe that almost all hate speech is taken down, when in reality almost all of it remains on the platform.

This obscene hypocrisy was revealed amid the numerous complaints, based on thousands of pages of leaked internal documents, which Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen and her legal team filed to the SEC earlier this month. While public attention on these leaks has focused on Instagram’s impact on teen health (which is hardly the smoking gun it’s been touted as) and on the News Feed algorithm’s role in amplifying misinformation (hardly a revelation), Facebook’s utter failure to limit hate speech and the simple deceptive trick it’s consistently relied on to hide this failure is shocking. It exposes just how much Facebook relies on AI for content moderation, just how ineffective that AI is, and the necessity to force Facebook to come clean.

US Army to Stage Largest Robot Tank Experiment Ever

PATRICK TUCKER

The U.S. Army intends to test an entire company of unmanned combat vehicles in simulated battle next year, a wargame that leaders called unprecedented and a big step toward refining the hardware and software that will one day enable wheeled robots to take the battlefield.

Gen. Ross Coffman, the director of Army Futures Command’s Next Generation Combat Cross-Functional Team, told reporters at AUSA this week that the closest thing to the Army’s upcoming robot exercise at Fort Hood, Texas, was last year’s platoon-sized effort at Fort Carson, Colorado.

For that exercise, the Army turned some old M113 armored personnel carriers into robots. “You can imagine that if you can turn a 113, you can turn anything into a robot,” Coffman said. “We learned a ton. There were some clear winners in the technology base. There were some that weren't as great.” Among the winners was the human-machine interface, he said.

Military judge blasts Marine Corps's handling of officer who criticized Afghanistan withdrawal

ELLEN MITCHELL

A military judge on Friday blasted the Marine Corps’ handling of the case of an officer who criticized the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan via videos posted to social media.

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller a day earlier had pleaded guilty to six charges stemming from videos he posted to Facebook and LinkedIn in which he demanded accountability from those in leadership over the messy evacuation.

But instead of taking the prosecution’s punishment request — where Scheller would have had to forfeit $5,000 of pay a month for six months and receive a letter of reprimand — Marine Corps judge Col. Glen Hines Hines only directed he forfeit $5,000 pay for one month, Military Times reported.

In explaining his decision, Hines said in Scheller’s videos showed a “confused” and “significantly frustrated” man instead of a potentially violent service member the military portrayed Scheller as in charge sheets, according to the outlet.

The U.N. Needs New Thinking on How to Prevent Civil Wars

Charli Carpenter

Up until the spring, the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar was mainly expressing its opposition to the military junta that seized power in February through peaceful protests. But over the summer, in reaction to the junta’s violent and often lethal response, hundreds of small, armed, civilian resistance groups popped up and begun to carry out ambushes on military convoys around the country. As Betcy Jose and Peace Medie have shown, this is typical of how civilians begin to protect themselves with force when faced with violence from their own government, and in the absence of adequate outside help.

And when peaceful protesters begin to turn violent, military regimes typically respond with an even worse crackdown, causing the violence to escalate and the political contestation to slide into civil war. Yet, the AP reports this week that the United Nations sees itself as hamstrung in the situation. Although the organization’s Credentials Committee is stalling a decision on whether to recognize the junta, “the UN is unlikely to take any meaningful action against Myanmar’s new rulers because they have the support of China and Russia.”

It is true that the U.N. remains notoriously poor at intervening in civil wars before they break out, or forestalling campaigns targeting civilians in their early stages. But criticisms of the U.N. for inaction in Myanmar are not quite fair. Some critics of the U.N.’s passivity would understand “meaningful action” to mean only humanitarian intervention. And clearly, a Chapter VII intervention is institutionally impossible given the array of great power interests. But that’s how the U.N. is supposed to work. And the idea that the U.N. cannot or will not “meaningfully” act overestimates the power of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, underestimates the U.N. as an institution and misreads the source of the U.N.’s political impotence.

First, in cases where humanitarian intervention is truly called for, the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, doctrine is flexible enough to leave open the possibility of one without the approval of the Security Council. To be sure, this approach has its downsides as well, as Russia and China like to argue. After all, human rights can be used as a smoke-screen for self-interested invasions, which potentially makes for a slippery slope to undermining the U.N. Charter.

But to some extent this can be mitigated by the emergent norm in international customary law that to be “humanitarian,” an intervention must be genuinely multilateral. The NATO intervention in Kosovo fit this description without a Security Council resolution, in the same way the intervention in Libya arguably did with one. By contrast, Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and the United States’ equally self-serving invasion of Iraq both involved humanitarian justifications, but these were widely—and correctly—viewed as unwarranted violations of the U.N. Charter. In theory, however, atrocity prevention does not hinge on the Security Council.

Second, while the Responsibility to Protect doctrine is often associated with the idea of military intervention, the doctrine calls for significantly more factors to be taken into consideration than just whether atrocities have reached a threshold justifying the use of force to stop them. Among other things, there must be a proportionality analysis: Can more civilian lives be saved by acting than will be lost by the inevitable fallout of war? Will the humanitarian good of regime change or atrocity prevention outweigh the potential humanitarian cost of an escalating regional war, for example, should two nuclear-armed great power rivals fall afoul? In Syria, for example, the argument for humanitarian intervention was much stronger in 2011, when then-U.S. President Barack Obama first proposed it, or even earlier, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was dropping “mere” barrel bombs on civilians but had not yet escalated to using chemical weapons. By the time the Islamic State showed up and Russia was on the scene, however, the risk-to-benefit proportionality analysis became much more complicated and prohibitive.

Third, two other very important pillars of R2P are often unappreciated. One is the responsibility of states themselves to protect populations on their own territory. This is manifestly not happening in Myanmar, but in some respects that is equally true in other places, including China and the U.S., with regard to the former’s treatment of Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations in Xinjiang and the latter’s treatment of refugees at the southern border. One lesson, then, is to use evidence from places like Myanmar to look for and address human rights abuses at home.

The other unappreciated pillar of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine is the international community’s obligation to encourage and assist individual states in meeting that responsibility and building state capacity to do so. And on this second pillar, the international community is doing considerable meaningful work with regard to Myanmar, but also elsewhere. Arguably, this is precisely what China and the U.S. were doing in working together to delay recognition of the Myanmar junta by the Credentials Committee, as well as what several countries have attempted by withholding aid from Afghanistan unless the Taliban agree to educate girls. And it’s what is being done by the “other U.N.”—the civilian agencies like UNICEF, the U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Development Fund for Women—in myriad places where development aid is combined with security assistance to support weak or failing states in building structures of governance and a culture of human rights.

But here, as Severine Autesserre’s new book “The Frontlines of Peace” shows, the U.N. overinvests in top-down, elite-run peacebuilding measures and underinvests in supporting everyday efforts by ordinary civilians to build and keep the peace at local levels. Moreover, this second pillar is not always enough to protect civilians against violence, as democratization itself can be destabilizing.

If there is a gap in international norms and institutions on conflict prevention, it is the lack of a norm on providing support and protection for nonviolent resistance movements that do not take up arms against their own government. In fact, it is often easier for armed groups to find military support from the international community than it is for their nonviolent counterparts to receive protection and assistance. And the best way for armed groups to provoke the kind of crackdown that will draw humanitarian intervention is to begin attacking the security forces of the state. Combined, these factors almost incentivize nonviolent groups to take up arms.

What this shows is that it may again be time to innovate in atrocity prevention. If the international community wants to simultaneously promote democracy, reward nonviolence and prevent civil wars, it needs a formula for light-footprint interventions in situations that fall short of war, but where an intervention can meaningfully protect civilians engaged in nonviolent opposition. This could have the simultaneous benefit of protecting civilians from the humanitarian impact of the crippling sanctions often imposed on dictatorships and military regimes as an alternative to the use of force. Coupled with a very high threshold for intervention once civilians begin taking up arms, this could incentivize nonviolence, ratchet down atrocities before they break out and protect civilians earlier when they do.

In Myanmar, the country is in the early stages of what may metastasize into a civil war. But the civilian side of this brewing conflict was not long ago—and to a large degree still is—a nonviolent resistance movement. Suppose this movement had been supported with a no-fly/no-go zone to ensure safe haven for its activities, combined with a humanitarian airlift of aid into the protected zone to protect nonviolent protesters from the humanitarian effects of a sanctions regime against the junta? This is the least invasive form of military intervention, one that worked well, for example, in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991.

If these approaches seem too coercive, there are other tools at the disposal of third-party states to protect civilians when the early warning signs of violence have not yet escalated to mass atrocities. One is to fulfill their own obligations collectively under the international refugee regime. Countries contiguous to conflicts often bear the brunt of refugee flows, but the humanitarian evacuation from Afghanistan demonstrates what the international community can do with a refugee crisis if it chooses to enable civilians to flee by air to a broader geographic array of third-party countries.

The evacuation of Kabul, like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War, may have been the province of retreating occupiers. But there is no reason such operations could not also be organized by the U.N., as occurred to some extent in Bosnia, or by civilian NGOs with the support of governments, as the NGO Refugee Air attempted during the early days of the Syrian refugee crisis. Such efforts are only as humanitarian as the states that receive these refugees, however. So this option requires a recommitment to refugee norms worldwide, but especially in the Global North, and a mechanism for resolving the collective action problem that prevents the majority of the world’s countries from taking in their share of refugees.

Of course, such a set of norms and practices would include their own externalities and dilemmas, in some ways enabling and incentivizing tyrants to create conditions that effectively “cleanse” opposition movements out of the country. Nevertheless, much more could be done by the international community to support nonviolent movements and give them a voice in preventive diplomacy efforts, before situations rise to the level requiring humanitarian war. And this is where the international community is truly missing its chance in Myanmar.

Winning is the only thing

MACKUBIN OWENS

The United States spends a great deal of money on its military. But public acquiescence in this funding could collapse if people come to believe that the U.S. military is not a profession based on honor and duty, the purpose of which is to ensure the security of the United States, but rather just another self-interested bureaucracy.

That is not an idle concern. People notice the conspicuous lack of success in our post-9/11 wars in Iraq and especially Afghanistan. They look with horror as the United States executes a disastrous exit from Kabul and wonder about accountability.

At the same time, they are subjected to stories about how the military is making “diversity” rather than military effectiveness its primary goal. Or stressing “climate change.” They rightly wonder if there might be some connection between the Pentagon’s pushing such fads and the lack of military success in recent years. Does the Pentagon even care about military success anymore?

SAS secrets revealed by cut-and-paste error:

BRENDAN CARLIN and MARK HOOKHAM

They're our elite fighting force but it seems even the world-beating SAS can be outwitted by a simple pen-pusher's error.

Secret plans for a suite of enhanced weapons, potentially for use by Britain's Special Forces, have been revealed in an astonishing new security blunder by defence officials.

Details of research into the next generation of munitions appeared to have been safely redacted in a document marked 'Official Sensitive' and posted on a Government website.

Treasury: $590M paid out by victims of ransomware attacks in first half of 2021

MAGGIE MILLER

A report released by the Treasury Department Friday found that around $590 million had been paid by victims of ransomware to their attackers in the first six months of 2021, as such attacks skyrocketed.

The findings were part of a report released by the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which concluded that based on suspicious activity reports filed during the first half of 2021, “ransomware is an increasing threat to the U.S. financial sector, businesses, and the public.”

Just over 450 ransomware payments were reported to FinCEN from the beginning of January through end of June, with the amount of suspicious activity reports increasing by 30 percent from last year. The amount paid by victims also massively increased compared to 2020, when $416 million was paid out over the entire year.