Indian Strategic Studies: 06/20/24

20 June 2024

Accused Indian Murderer Back In US – OpEd

Subir Bhaumik

Indian national Nikhil Gupta, accused in US for involvement in the attempted murder of a Sikh extremist, has been extradited by the Czech Republic back to US to stand trial.

This case has caused considerable tensions in India-US bilateral relations with the Americans alleging involvement of Indian intelligence officials in the plot to kill ‘Sikh For Justice’ Gurupatwant Singh Pannun, who is a well known Khalistani separatist leader. Pannun has threatened Hindus and Indian diplomats in North America with violence and pivoted a referendum in Indian Punjab to determine the province’s future.

Gupta, 52, was arrested in the Czech Republic last year at the request of the US government on charges of hiring a professional killer to eliminate Pannun at the behest of India’s external intelligence agency RAW.

The Czech Constitutional Court last month rejected a petition by Gupta against his extradition to the US to face the charges.

US federal prosecutors allege that Gupta had been working on the orders of an unnamed Indian intelligence official, but India has denied any involvement in such a case and has instituted a high-level investigation to look into the allegations.

Pakistani Threat Actors Caught Targeting Indian Gov Entities

Ionut Arghire

One of the campaigns, called Operation Celestial Force, has been ongoing since at least 2018, relying on both Android and Windows malware to target individuals in the Indian defense, government, and related technology sectors.

Security researchers at Cisco Talos Intelligence track the threat actor as Cosmic Leopard, but warn that the activity overlaps in tactics, techniques, tooling, and victimology with Transparent Tribe, a known Pakistan-linked state-sponsored group also tracked as APT36 and Mythic Leopard.

“Operation Celestial Force has been active since at least 2018 and continues to operate today — increasingly utilizing an expanding and evolving malware suite — indicating that the operation has likely seen a high degree of success targeting users in the Indian subcontinent,” Cisco Talos said.

Initially, the threat actor was only using the GravityRAT malware to target Windows users, but has since expanded its arsenal to add an Android version of the remote access tool (RAT) and the Electron-based HeavyLift malware loader.

Will India’s Modi break the ice with Pakistan in his third term?

Abid Hussain

As Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third time as his country’s leader on June 9, seven counterparts from neighbouring nations joined a very select audience in marking the moment.

The setting — a summer evening, with an orangish dusk sky, and handpicked leaders from the region in attendance — carried echoes of Modi’s first oath-taking ceremony as India’s premier in 2014, which was repeated in 2019.

But there was one big difference from 2014: Missing from the lineup of visiting leaders was the prime minister of Pakistan.

A decade ago, images of Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif clasping Modi’s hands during his visit to attend the swearing-in event signalled a fresh hope for long-tortured India-Pakistan relations — hope that subsequent setbacks to ties have all but extinguished. Now, as Modi begins his third term in office, with a sharply reduced mandate that has left him dependent on coalition allies to stay in power, analysts expect the Indian leader to pursue a tough posture towards Pakistan, with little incentive to seek any easing in tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

Think China can already take Taiwan easily? Think again.

Brian Kerg

“All forms of media is propaganda, we’re just more honest about it.” So declares the social media profile of Zhao DaShuai, a member of the People’s Armed Police Propaganda Bureau. Chinese strategy is often characterized by its reliance on deception, but like so many authoritarian regimes, the Chinese Communist Party often says exactly what it’s doing and why it’s doing it.

It is through this lens of propaganda and political warfare that China watchers should analyze the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) “punishment exercises” around Taiwan, collectively referred to as Joint Sword 2024A. Billed by Beijing as a response to the inaugural address of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te on May 20, these exercises positioned Chinese air and naval assets in areas around Taiwan that would allow Beijing to isolate or impose a blockade on the island. These exercises were accompanied by a propaganda video, produced by China’s Eastern Theater Command, that showed an overwhelming volley of rockets striking targets in Taiwan. Slogans pronounced during the video state the intention of these strikes: “Destroy the pillar of Taiwanese independence! Strike the base camp of Taiwanese independence! Cut off the blood flow of Taiwanese independence!”

China can’t hide war preparations for potential Taiwan attack, Hill panel told

Bill Gertz

Stepped-up activities within China’s transportation network will provide American military planners with clear signs of impending military action against Taiwan, a congressional commission was told on Thursday.

Devin Thorne, a private threat intelligence analyst, said that U.S. analysts would be able to detect any preparations for a major conflict against Taiwan through military mobilization activities inside China.

Mr. Thorne told a hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission that a People’s Liberation Army logistic report outlined the transportation requirements for a Taiwan attack, including some 3,000 train trips, 1 million vehicle trips, 2,100 aircraft sorties, 15 oil pipeline battalions and more than 8,000 ship voyages, according to the PLA Logistics Academic Research Center.

“In a major conflict, such as against Taiwan, mobilization to a wartime footing would likely create observable distortions or anomalies in the PRC transportation sector despite possible PLA efforts to conceal such irregularities,” Mr. Thorne stated.

Xi Jinping claimed US wants China to attack Taiwan

Demetri Sevastopulo

China’s President Xi Jinping told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Washington was trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Chinese leader has also delivered the warning to domestic officials in his own country, one person said.

Xi issued the warning in a meeting with von der Leyen in April 2023 that was described to the Financial Times by several people. He said the US was trying to trick China into invading Taiwan, but that he would not take the bait. Another person said he had issued similar warnings to his officials.

The comments provide a window into Xi’s thinking on Taiwan — the most thorny issue in US-China relations.

Playing Catch-up? West-China Competition in the Global South

Nicola Stoev

China decided to instrumentalize its overseas reserves in 2013 by announcing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and putting its overseas assets to sharper geopolitical application, shifting the mix from foreign exchange reserves to overseas lending and direct investment. The economic cost has been high because the yield from China’s overseas assets has not increased to match the new assets mix’s higher financial and liquidity risk. The opportunity cost of this re-orientated overseas balance sheet is now running at about 1.5% of China’s gross domestic product.

Although China has managed to increase its soft power among ruling elites in many countries, especially in the Global South, this can prove fleeting, as the Philippines demonstrates when underlying national interests are not aligned.

China has reoriented its trade toward less geopolitically distant countries, such as Russia, but at the expense of augmenting its geopolitical distance from liberal democracies. However, it remains dependent on liberal democracies as export destinations and for the supply of some critical goods, including technology, food, and iron ore.

Meanwhile, the European Union announced its Global Gateway in 2021 and the United States announced its Build Back Better World and Indo-Pacific Economic Partnership, as well as the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and Blue Dot Network, as responses and attempts to emulate China’s BRI.

Let Slip the Robot Dogs of War

Jared Keller

The Chinese military recently unveiled a new kind of battle buddy for its soldiers: a “robot dog” with a machine gun strapped to its back.

In video distributed by the state-run news agency CCTV, People's Liberation Army personnel are shown operating on a testing range alongside a four-legged robot with what appears to be a variant of the standard-issue 5.8 x 42-mm QBZ-95 assault rifle mounted on it as part of China’s recent Golden Dragon 24 joint military exercises with Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. In one scenario, Chinese soldiers stand on either side of a doorway while the robot dog enters the building ahead of them; in another, the robot fires off a burst of bullets as it advances on a target.

“It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations, replacing our members to conduct reconnaissance and identify enemy [sic] and strike the target during our training,” one Chinese soldier shown operating the robot told CCTV.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place in the South China Sea

Timothy McLaughlin

On Thitu, a tiny dot of coral reef and palm trees in the South China Sea about 300 miles off the coast of the Philippines, the inaugural Mrs. Kalayaan Pageant was the event of the night, the week, and quite possibly the month. When I was there in May, the entire island’s population, some 250 people, seemed to have gathered around a nautical-themed stage to see who would win the sash and crown. You might think that a local beauty contest would not involve geopolitics. You would be wrong.

“Given the current situation, if your child wanted to join the navy or coast guard, would you let them?” one of the judges asked a contestant who was dressed in a floor-length red gown and a tiara. “They give a lot to this community,” she responded, “so if that is what they want, they should do it.” The crowd applauded and cheered with approval.

The oblique reference to the “current situation” was lost on no one. As the pageant proceeded, more than a dozen Chinese-militia vessels loitered offshore; closest at hand, a sleek Chinese-coast-guard ship patrolled back and forth.

China and the Global Culture War: Western Civilizational Turmoil and Beijing’s Strategic Calculus

Nathan Levine

The study of great-power competition between China and the broader West (including the United States, Europe, and the Anglosphere) today tends toward tunnel vision with its focus fixed on the narrow range of issues most familiar to geopolitical analysts in Washington, including economic and security affairs. Less tangible issues of culture, society, morality, and ideology are largely ignored—even though it is precisely such issues that are now driving increasingly ferocious and fundamental political debates within the West over the future of our civilization. This narrow focus is a dangerous mistake.

Already viewing geopolitics through a more holistic lens of what might be called “civilizational competition,” Chinese analysts have no similar misconceptions. In fact, there is reason to believe that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has identified these cultural or civilizational struggles as central and potentially determinative factors in China’s long-term strategic competition with the West. At the least, we can say with certainty that many analysts in Beijing are demonstrably paying close attention to the “culture war” wracking the West and take it quite seriously—seriously enough that it already has seemingly influenced China’s own domestic and foreign policy decisions.

The opacity of CCP internal politics renders Beijing’s decision-making process something of a black box and makes it difficult for outside observers to isolate and determine with certainty those factors that go into the calculus behind any specific policy. Nonetheless, through official party discourse and the work of associated scholars and think tanks, we can obtain glimpses of how China’s leadership may be weighing these issues in their decision-making. More significantly, it is possible to identify and trace a direct conceptual line between past work by some of the CCP’s most influential theorists critiquing American and Western cultures—in particular chief party ideologist Wang Huning—and the strategic logic of a number of key decisions being made by Beijing today.

One Island, Two Countries: A Look At How Chinese-Russian Relations Are Playing Out In The Far East

Ekaterina Venkina

Not too long ago, tension over possession of islands in the rivers that form the Russian-Chinese frontier led to armed confrontation. These days the same islands are declared “a place of friendship.” But those feelings of amity may not run deep.

Heixiazi, the Chinese half of a divided island at the confluence of the Ussuri and Amur rivers, looks “like Disneyland,” according to Akihiro Iwashita, a Japanese scholar who is an experton Russia’s border issues with China and Japan.

He first visited the island, known on the Russian side as Bolshoy Ussuriysky, in 2008. At that time, the Chinese had made major improvements to its side, building a large nature reserve, border defenses, including a watchtower, and a bridge from the mainland to the island, Iwashita told Eurasianet in an email interview.

China’s Rise in the Global South - Review

Matt Kuhlman

The geo-political tension between the United States and China is often framed in the context of the rivalry in the Pacific region. Dawn Murphy contributes to this conversation with a refreshing analysis by focusing on China’s efforts in Africa and the Middle East. In these regions, she convincingly argues, China is establishing spheres of influence and is increasingly competitive against the United States and the West, challenging the rules of the Liberal International Order (p.8). Beijing’s goal is to build an alternative order that can one day displace the United States as the pre-eminent power. Murphy offers a helpful framework that conceptualizes China’s efforts into a cooperative or competitive categories of political, economic, and military actions in relation to US efforts, and whether those efforts are norm convergent or norm divergent from the Liberal International Order (p.9).

In China’s Rise in the Global South, Murphy shines light on an increasingly relevant and discussed topic in academia and in policy circles. Rush Doshi and Ketian Zhang draw similar attention to China’s efforts and global ambition. While Doshi offers a broad perspective of China’s ambitions, and Zhang provides a refined understanding of a specific foreign policy tool, Murphy’s contributions to this discussion provides a middle-ground comparative aspect of China’s foreign policy efforts in two regions of importance, Africa and the Middle East.

How the Sino-American rivalry is reshaping the world order

William R. Rhodes and Stuart P.M. Mackintosh

Tensions between the United States and China continue to flare, even as Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and several other senior U.S. officials visit the country for talks. The two sides may disagree on most things, but maintaining dialogue is an essential part of geopolitics. The breakdown in communication last year, following visits to Taiwan by prominent American politicians and the U.S. downing of a Chinese spy balloon, was dangerous and destabilizing, because when adversaries do not engage, misperceptions – and the risk of a clash – mount.

But, midway through 2024, dialogue is proving unable to bridge deep divides. This major superpower conflict looks set to continue, and may even worsen, as positions on the war in Ukraine, national-security concerns, and trade tensions harden into a long-term standoff. Global institutions, forums, and solutions will be among the biggest losers in an ongoing U.S.-China decoupling, while regional alliances will increase in importance.

Some weakness was evident at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings in Washington. The International Monetary and Financial Committee did not issue a communiqué, as it normally would, because China and its allies refused to include a reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. U.S. and European shareholders, for their part, wanted to recognize the war and its impact. The resulting silence was a victory for both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

U.S. Must Adapt, Not Abandon the Sahel - OPINION

Hafed Al Ghwell

The U.S. has been engaged in Niger for nearly two decades, significantly ramping up its presence in 2013, when it established a drone base. There was a recognition of the strategic importance of Niger due to its location and the escalating threat of terrorism in the region at the height of the global War on Terror. These threats stem from a nexus of militant groups that have found a foothold across the Sahel, most prominently Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), and Boko Haram, among others. To date, these organizations spearhead a complex and adaptive insurgency, exploiting ungoverned spaces, inter-communal conflicts, and the persistent fragility of Sahelian states, whose security forces have often been overwhelmed by the militants’ operational tempo.

The scale of the groups’ operations has escalated over the years, with the number of violent events linked to these militant groups in the Sahel increasing fivefold since 2016. Their activities have had a devastating impact, displaced millions, and spawned new crises as far as southern Europe owing to a surge in migrant arrivals from North African shores. Furthermore, the violence perpetrated by these groups – including IED attacks, kidnappings, and targeted killings – has taken a grave toll on vulnerable civilian populations, directly challenging the counterterrorism efforts of a once Western-led global coalition that included the Sahelian states.

In Niger, US counterterrorism assistance has been critical in developing local force capabilities to confront these threats. However, the effectiveness of this assistance has been tested by the mutating threat landscape and by shifts in US strategic priorities. A recent coup wave followed by the swift arrival of Russian mercenaries created new complications, exacerbated by an equally fast-paced withdrawal of French and European forces from the area.

The Iran-Israel War And The Clash Of Civilizations – Analysis

Shaul Bartal

CIA Director William J. Burns has declared that the “key to Israel’s—and the region’s—security is dealing with Iran. The Iranian regime has been emboldened by the crisis and seems ready to fight to its last regional proxy, all while expanding its nuclear program and enabling Russian aggression.” [1] Hamas’ invasion of Israel is part of a broad attack by Iran and its proxies. How does the war on Israel fit into the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regional and global goals?

The South-North Background of the Gaza Conflict

The clash of civilizations, predicted in 1993 by Samuel Huntington, asserted that “A West at the peak of its power” would face “non-Western countries that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.” [2] Iran, according to former CIA Deputy Director, Michael Morell is one of those non-Western countries: “Iran wants to be the hegemonic power in the Middle East, it wants, in short, to reestablish the Persian Empire, which at its height in 500 BCE controlled 45 percent of the world’s population.” [3]

Israel and Ukraine, both pro-Western countries, face extensive attacks on their territories, the targeting of civilians, and the commission of war crimes by non- Western countries. Russia, Iran, and Iran’s proxies—which include Hamas,

Saudi Arabia Drifts Away From Washington And The Dollar – Analysis

Ryan McMaken

Earlier this week, those of us who follow news about the US dollar’s global status noticed numerous claims that the US-Saudi petrodollar agreement had “expired” and that the Saudis would now sell oil for many currencies other than dollars. Some versions of the story even claimed the Chinese yuan would replace the dollar.

The reports appear to have originated either in India or in publications that cater to crypto investors. Fervor over the story was large enough that economist Paul Donovan at UBS felt the need to clarify that there have not actually been any big, new developments in Saudi-US currency relations.

It now seems clear that these reports of an alleged formal petrodollar “contract” did indeed get several key facts wrong. First of all, the Saudis’ turn toward embracing currencies other than dollars is not new. Moreover, there is no known formal treaty or contract between the US and Saudi Arabia—least of all one with an expiration date.

Satellite Images Show Aftermath of Hit on Russian Airfield Hosting Su-34s

Jordan King

Satellite cameras showed the before and after pictures of an airfield reportedly stuck by Ukrainian forces.

In a post shared by open-source intelligence analyst Brady Africk, the Morozovsk air base in Russia can be seen pictured on June 4. It has its roof and runway intact, with several planes parked outside of it. However, on June 14, the roof is seemingly smashed in, with major damage to the runway, and no plane can be seen outside it.

Ukraine's defense intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said that his forces used at least 70 drones to strike the air base on the night of June 13 to 14. He told The War Zone Project that the operation was launched from Ukraine, using Ukrainian Dragon and Splash drones.

The Russian Ministry of Defence also reported a major Ukrainian drone attack that night, but it said its air defense forces intercepted and destroyed 87 drones in total. Newsweek has been unable to verify these figures,

How Much of a Threat Does Hamas Still Pose to Israel?

Bruce Hoffman

What do we know about Hamas’s status as a fighting force at this point in the war?

Hamas has suffered a grievous but not a crushing blow as a result of Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip. American officials are reported to believe that Hamas now has between 9,000 and 12,000 fighters—about half of the number at the start of the war. That means that the Palestinian militant group can field some twelve to fifteen battalions, a considerably larger number than the handful of remaining battalions that Israel said there was to justify its ongoing operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. For its part, Hamas claims to have lost no more than six thousand men. And, for a movement that depends on tunnels for its survival, perhaps as many as 80 percent of Hamas’s tunnels remained intact as of January 2024.

According to U.S. President Joe Biden, Hamas has been “devastated” and is “no longer capable of carrying out another October 7” attack. That is without any doubt a core requirement to fulfill Israel’s strategic objectives in waging this war. But the big question is whether it is a sufficient one. It is akin to the United States claiming, for example, in 2002 that al-Qaeda was no longer capable of launching another September 11, 2001-like attack and, therefore, that the threat from the terrorist group had receded enough that a cease-fire was possible. In Israel’s case, as long as Hamas’s senior command survives and a core of combat-seasoned fighters remain, Israel will consider the Palestinian militant group to be in a position to, at minimum, continue to lob missiles and rockets onto Israeli communities, harass Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operating in Gaza, and plot even more serious attacks.

Israel’s War of Regime Change Is Repeating America’s Mistakes

David Petraeus, Meghan L. O’Sullivan, and Richard Fontaine

The term “regime change” has fallen out of favor in the past two decades, and it is not a term that Israelis use to describe the war they are waging in Gaza. But regime change is precisely what Israel is seeking. Its military operation in Gaza aims to destroy Hamas as a political and military entity and eliminate the de facto government the group has overseen for nearly two decades.

The Israeli campaign is an understandable response to the horrific attacks of October 7, in which Hamas-led terrorists killed around 1,200 Israelis, took some 250 hostage, and deeply traumatized the Israeli public. In the aftermath of the attacks, Israeli leaders rightly concluded that it was unacceptable for Hamas to continue running Gaza—just as American leaders decided after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 that they could no longer accept the status quo in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was harboring al Qaeda, and that they had no choice but to carry out regime change there.

Of course, Afghanistan was not the only place in the greater Middle East where the United States sought regime change after 9/11. In the years that followed the attacks, U.S.-led coalitions also toppled regimes in Iraq and Libya, and helped (albeit modestly and inadequately) Syrian opposition forces seeking to overthrow the dictator Bashar al-Assad. These were searing experiences for Washington: bloody, costly, and humbling. The most consequential of those campaigns—the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq—were shaped by a number of fateful strategic errors, as well as a smaller number of important successes.

Security News This Week: Ransomware Attacks Are Getting Worse

DELL CAMERON

Despite years worth of efforts to eliminate the scourge of ransomware targeting schools, hospitals, and critical infrastructure worldwide, experts are warning that the crisis is only heating up, with criminal gangs growing ever more aggressive in their tactics. The threat of real-world violence now looms, some experts warn, as the data stolen grows increasingly sensitive and millions in potential profits hang in the balance. “We know where your CEO lives,” read a message reportedly received by one victim. Attacks targeting the medical sector are blooming in response to the $44 million payout by Change Healthcare this March.

United States lawmakers and intelligence officials are circling their wagons following the revelation of Israel’s involvement in a malign influence campaign that targeted US voters—an attempt by America’s Middle East ally to artificially boost support for an increasingly unpopular war that was kicked off by Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7th attack. The sock-puppet operation, which was launched by an Israeli contractor on X, Facebook, and Instagram and utilized OpenAI’s ChatGPT software, impersonated mostly Black Americans and targeted “Black and Democratic” lawmakers. A weeks’ worth of efforts by WIRED to get answers from US officials who may have been notified about the operation prior to a vote on enhancing military aide to Israel went ignored. Strikingly, the National Security Council denied having ever heard of it.

Right-wing media outlets use deceptively cropped video to misleadingly claim Biden wandered off at G7 summit

Michael Williams and Samantha Waldenberg

Right-wing media outlets used a deceptively cropped video to misleadingly claim President Joe Biden wandered off during an event with other world leaders at the G7 summit in Italy on Thursday.

Video shared by the New York Post on X showed part of a skydiving demonstration in front of several world leaders in Italy that involved several parachutists landing near the group, with each skydiver carrying a flag representing the different G7 countries.

In the full, unedited video, Biden – who was standing with the group of leaders as a parachutist carrying a G7 banner landed in front of them – briefly turned away to give a thumbs-up to several parachutists who had landed behind the group, along with a parachute rigger who was kneeling on the ground to pack up one of the skydiver’s chutes and the French flag.

Other leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron, also briefly look toward that group. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni then walks toward Biden, taps him on the arm, and motions for him to join the other leaders who were being briefed by an Italian Army officer about the demonstration they just watched.

25 Incredible Winning Photos From The 1839 Color Photography Awards

The 1839 Color Photography Awards have once again unveiled a stunning collection of winning photographs that capture the world’s beauty and complexity through vibrant hues and masterful compositions.

This prestigious competition, named in honor of the year color photography was pioneered, celebrates the finest talents in the field, showcasing images that range from breathtaking landscapes to intimate human moments. Each winning photograph is a testament to the skill and creativity of photographers who push the boundaries of visual storytelling.

Quantum AI And Cognitive Robotics: The Future Of Intelligent Machines

In an era of unprecedented technological advancements, the fusion of quantum AI and cognitive robotics emerges as a groundbreaking development. As someone deeply involved in AI, robotics and neuroscience, I am thrilled to share insights into how these areas are merging to develop smart machines capable of thinking, learning and engaging with the world in ways that were once considered the realm of science fiction.

The Evolution Of AI And Robotics

AI and robotics have both come a long way. The journey has been remarkable, from simple automated systems to complex machines capable of learning and adapting. My career has allowed me to lead transformative projects that have pushed the boundaries of what these technologies can achieve by developing applications that integrate AI into everyday life, enhancing efficiency and creating new possibilities.

Quantum AI: The Next Frontier

Quantum AI represents a revolutionary leap in computational power and efficiency. Unlike classical AI, which relies on binary logic, quantum AI harnesses the principles of quantum mechanics to perform complex calculations at unprecedented speeds. This capability is crucial for processing vast amounts of data and solving complex problems that classical computers struggle with.

Microsoft president tells lawmakers 'red lines' needed for nation-state attacks

Jonathan Greig

Microsoft president Brad Smith testified before a congressional committee on Thursday, at times accepting responsibility for the company’s recent cybersecurity mistakes while simultaneously deflecting criticism of the tech giant’s practices. He also called on the government to create "consequences" for nation-state hackers who compromise U.S. systems.

The House Homeland Security Committee brought Smith in to discuss a recent DHS report on a 2023 incident where hackers allegedly tied to China’s government breached the email accounts of senior U.S. government leaders.

The Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) behind the report concluded the intrusion “should never have happened,” and throughout their review they “identified a series of Microsoft operational and strategic decisions that collectively point to a corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.”

How to use automation and AI to give warfighters a strategic edge

Christopher Yates

Earlier this year, the Department of Defense announced it had achieved a “minimum viable” version of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2). It was a significant step toward interconnecting troops across land, sea, air, space and cyber, providing warfighters with fast access to intelligence that could make a significant impact.

As CJADC2 evolves, so must the DoD’s edge infrastructure. The organization must ensure that the infrastructure it uses to deliver accurate intelligence in all situations, regardless of the environment or the allies involved. That infrastructure must be resilient in harsh and remote environments and dynamically composable so that intelligence is delivered quickly and without fail as operations and objectives change.

AI and automation can help the DoD achieve both of these objectives. But first, it must overcome the limitations of legacy hardware that make it challenging to get data to warfighters.

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