Indian Strategic Studies: 08/05/24

5 August 2024

Unravelling Geopolitics

Tanmay Kadam

The trajectory of Sino-Indian relations in recent months has raised expectations of a potential thaw between the two countries. Nothing wrong with seeking stable relations with neighbors but New Delhi should exercise caution, as the discourse within the Chinese strategic community has been suggestive of further deterioration of relations in the coming months.

Officials from Indian and China held the 30th meeting of the Working Mechanism for Consultation & Coordination on India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) in New Delhi on July 31st, to discuss the “early resolution of the outstanding issues” in their ongoing stand-off along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

The meeting comes days after talks held between the Indian External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on July 25, on the sidelines of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Laos, where the two had decided on an “early meeting” of the WMCC for the speedy resolution of the border dispute.

The EAM Jaishankar had expressed hope that the meeting on July 25 would allow the two ministers to “give stronger guidance” to officials to complete the disengagement process which had “cast a shadow” over India-China ties.

Most notably, the meeting between the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers on July 25 was the second such meeting between the two in less than a month, and the occurrence of the 30th WMCC meeting mere days after that is indicative of a sense of urgency in efforts to resolve the border issue.

India Moves in on Southeast Asia

Victoria Herczegh

Last week, the foreign ministers of India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations met in Vientiane to discuss ways to enhance political, security and economic relations and to address regional issues, including China’s assertiveness and the crisis in Myanmar. In his address, India’s top diplomat said ASEAN was the cornerstone of India’s vision for an open, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.

It was, to some extent, in keeping with precedent. India-ASEAN relations have been on sound footing since 1995. But things started to change during China’s economic explosion in the early 2010s. Its unprecedented growth was attractive to ASEAN’s ambitious developing members (Indonesia and Thailand), while poorer countries (Cambodia and Myanmar) saw trade with the rising superpower as a remedy to their economic and financial problems. Though it was easier to do business with China than with India, where efficient economic reforms were introduced much later, Beijing also began working against India by entering into small regional networks and partnerships, integrating itself into as many economic schemes as it could. China outmatched India to become the top trade and security partner for ASEAN – a position that seemed secure and fruitful for both sides.

Then came India’s own rapid economic ascent. Though its rise was slower than China’s, India is now seen the world over as a viable competitor to China, one capable of defeating the East Asian giant and leading economic growth by the end of the decade. Indeed, China is not as reliable as it once was, its economic decline marked by unkept promises on investment and dozens of unfinished or stalled infrastructure projects all over Southeast Asia. Beijing’s assertive military presence and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea have also strained ties with the bloc. India has thus seized the opportunity to improve its standing with ASEAN, openly advocating “ASEAN centrality” as the best way to promote stability and growth in the region.

China needs to pick a side, and it just might pick the Wes

Chee Meng Tan

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a group photo during the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019.

For the Kremlin, its “partner of no limits”, China, isn’t doing enough to aid Russia’s war against Ukraine. So, Russia has signed a peace treaty with North Korea, hoping to pressure China into backing Moscow’s war effort further.

Meanwhile, the West sees China as far too helpful to Russia. The sentiment in the West was best captured on July 10, 2024, during a summit in Washington DC.

Heads of state and governments of NATO countries jointly proclaimed that China is a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war against the Ukraine, and also called on China “to cease all material and political support to Russia’s war effort.”

To the West, China’s aid, though short of actual weapons supply, is more than enough to fuel Russia’s war machine. This in turn poses a security threat to Europe.

But NATO’s message and Russia’s implicit code to China seem to indicate one thing: Beijing’s fence-sitting days are numbered, and it needs to choose a side. Unfortunately for Russia, China may be forced to pick the West.

Signs that China is already pivoting to the West have started to appear. Speculation was rife in late 2023 that China’s panda diplomacy (where it gifts the lease of the bears to foreign zoos) was on the way out amid worsening ties with the West.

But in mid-2024, Beijing sent more pandas to Spain and Vienna, as well as the US tech center of California. President Xi Jinping also went on state visits to the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand to mend ties with the West.

Forecasting Hezbollah’s Next Move

Rany Ballout

Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, and reportedly Hamas, on Tuesday and Wednesday mark a significant escalation in the Gaza war and bring Israel and Iran’s “axis of resistance” closer to all-out war than at any time since the October 7 Hamas attack. An Israeli airstrike on Tuesday killed Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut, in response to an attack (reportedly by Hezbollah, although the militant group denied it) on an Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on Saturday that killed twelve children and teenagers. On Wednesday, a detonation by an explosive device, reportedly by Israel, killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

The world is now watching how Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran will respond to such attacks. Iran has reportedly vowed a direct retaliation to Haniyeh’s assassination. Yesterday, Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah indicated that Hezbollah is probing “a studied response” in the next few days to the killing of Shukr and what he characterized as Israeli aggression against Lebanon.

Understanding the information warfare and narratives of “purported” deterrence conducted by Hezbollah against Israel and the United States in the leading up to Israel’s recent attacks is critical since it may help provide insight into the nature of Hezbollah’s response to Israel’s attack. Such information warfare was in response to Israel’s persistent warning of a major military operation against the militant group. In particular, the scale of Hezbollah’s response, given its geostrategic proximity to Israel—and especially if it is coordinated with a direct attack by Iran—would determine if the low-level conflict will slide into a full-scale war.

Waging the Wrong War in Yemen

Alexandra Stark

The Iranian-backed Houthis are proving to be a stubborn problem for the United States and its allies. Ever since Hamas’s October 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent offensive in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group that controls a substantial portion of Yemen after a nearly decade-long civil war, have lashed out at Israel and tried to use their perch on the Red Sea to disrupt business as usual. They have attacked commercial and military ships in the region, stirring a U.S.-led coalition to try to rein them in. But the best efforts of this coalition

Ismail Haniyeh’s Assassination Will Expand the Israel-Iran Conflict

Alexander Langlois

Israel’s decision to assassinate Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, although not yet claimed by Tel Aviv, and Lebanese Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr on July 30 and 31 is sending shockwaves throughout the Middle East. The twin assassinations mark another dangerous inflection point for the region as Iran and Israel continue to escalate their shadow war increasingly into open military exchanges. Yet the assassinations, alongside broader violence, will not end what is already a regional war or the conflict in Gaza. Instead, these actions will likely produce more instability while expanding opportunities for miscalculation.

Israel assassinated Shukr in the southern Beirut suburb of Dahieh, a Hezbollah stronghold. The strike targeted his high-rise residence, killing at least seven people and injuring roughly seventy. Although Israel has not claimed it, a bomb that it planted weeks prior in a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries and Iranian allies in northern Tehran likely killed Haniyeh and his bodyguard. The latter attack aims to pigeonhole Iran while embarrassing it by killing a major figure in Iran’s capital following the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian—hardly a coincidence considering his reformist platform calling for talks with the West.

Iran and its so-called “Axis of Resistance” leaders pledged revenge against Israel for the assassinations, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declaring that war with Israel has now entered a “new phase.” The United States continues to claim that it was “not aware” of the strike in Tehran, although it has remained relatively quiet about the Beirut strike while arguing Israel has a right to defend itself.

The Middle East Is Inching Toward Another War

Trita Parsi

There is little doubt that Israel was behind the audacious assassination of Hamas’ hostage-deal negotiator and political head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on Wednesday. By deliberately maximizing Tehran’s embarrassment—Haniyeh was killed only hours after the inauguration of Iran’s new reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian—the Israeli government also maximized the likelihood of Iranian retaliation. That is—at least in the view of a former Deputy Head of the Israeli National Security Council—because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to spark a larger war and drag the U.S. into it.

Though Israel itself would pay a high price in a region-wide war, it would serve Netanyahu’s interests in numerous ways.

Firstly, Haniyeh’s assassination kills the prospect of an imminent ceasefire deal. Netanyahu has consistently opposed a deal that would end the war. The Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that, in prior rounds of negotiations, he strategically leaked sensitive information to the media at crucial moments to sabotage talks. As President Biden told TIME when asked whether Netanyahu was prolonging the war for the sake of his political career, “There is every reason to draw that conclusion.” Netanyahu knows that a hostage deal will collapse his government and end his reign as Prime Minister. It would also likely mean the expedition of his ongoing corruption trial, which may very well land him in jail. Nothing kills these talks more effectively than ending the life of the negotiator on the other side of the table.

Secondly, Haniyeh’s killing may corner a future President Kamala Harris. While the Biden Administration has consistently blamed Hamas for the failure to reach a deal, there are signs Harris could take a different approach to Biden’s near-complete deference to Israel. “As I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” she said after he visited Washington last week, pinning the blame for the lack of progress at his feet. Her cold body language, her expression of empathy for the suffering of Palestinians, and her willingness to publicly point to Israel’s obfuscation were hard for Netanyahu to miss.

Tech Failings Plagued Secret Service at Trump Rally

C. Ryan Barber

TAP FOR SOUNDActing Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said that technical issues contributed to a massive communications failure at the July 13 rally where a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump. Photo: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters

WASHINGTON—Spotty cellular service, malfunctioning technology and unused equipment contributed to a major communications breakdown during the rally where a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump, just when law enforcement needed to share information the most, the top Secret Service official said Friday.

Among other problems, there were no Secret Service agents inside a command post set up by local police ahead of the July 13 rally, meaning critical information couldn’t easily get to the agency protecting the former president.

“It is plainly obvious to me that we didn’t have access to certain information,” acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said.

Urged by lawmakers to share more information publicly, Rowe offered new glimpses into the security failure at the rally in western Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old gunman was able to access a rooftop with a clear line of sight to Trump and open fire with an AR-15 rifle. A spectator was killed, two others were injured and Trump suffered a bullet wound to the ear.

Inside the Secret Service Failures That Led to Trump Shooting

Inside the Secret Service Failures That Led to Trump ShootingPlay video: Inside the Secret Service Failures That Led to Trump Shooting

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is the biggest Secret Service crisis in decades. Two former agents explain what went wrong. Photo: JJ Lin

Economic and Technological Zones: Economic Strategy in the Tibet Autonomous Region

Devendra Kumar

Executive Summary:New Economic and Technology Development Zones (ETDZs) in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) are focused on pockets of the Han population, which will exacerbate tensions within the region. The Tibetan economy is already largely under Han control (except for in the agriculture and livestock sectors), and Han people constitute the majority group in many of Tiber’s urban centers.

The TAR government has set up the zones to import practices from elsewhere in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and shift the region’s economy away from traditional sectors and toward export-oriented industries, construction, and even high-tech manufacturing.

The TAR’s external trade is currently limited to Nepal, due to ongoing border tensions with India. Meanwhile, infrastructural challenges hampering the development of the Sichuan-Tibet railway or national highways connecting the TAR with other provinces suggest that further integration with the rest of the PRC remains some way off.

In a related policy, the PRC has developed border towns strategically located near land border ports that it has built along its borders with India, Nepal, and Bhutan. Infrastructure buildup on the border could also serve a dual-use purpose in the case of a conflict, as has been the case in India in recent years.

Russia vs Ukraine: the biggest war of the fake news era

Max Hunder

KHARKIV, Ukraine, July 31 (Reuters) - In early April, some residents of Kharkiv received a series of chilling text messages from government officials telling them to flee the city before Russian forces surrounded it.

"Due to the threat of enemy encirclement, we urge the civilian population of Kharkiv leave the city by April 22," said one alert, which bore the logo of the State Emergencies Service of Ukraine and mapped out safe escape routes on a slick infographic.

It was fake. Volodymyr Tymoshko knew immediately. He's the police chief of Kharkiv region and would have been one of the first to find out about any official evacuation plans.

"Residents started getting these notifications en masse," the 50-year-old told Reuters as he shared a screenshot of the alert, sent as Russian troops were massing at the border 30 km away.

"This is a psychological operation, it triggers panic. What would an average citizen think when they receive such a message?"

Disinformation and propaganda, long mainstays of war, have been digitally supercharged in the battle for Ukraine, the biggest conflict the world has seen since the advent of smartphones and social media.

Tymoshko said he received about 10 similar messages via SMS and Telegram messenger in April and early May, the weeks leading up to Russia's offensive in northeastern Ukraine that began on May 10 and opened up a new front in the war.

A Ukrainian security official, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the Russians frequently sent large numbers of text messages from devices attached to an Orlan-10 long-range reconnaissance drone which can penetrate dozens of kilometres into Ukrainian airspace.

Russia Is Desperate in Ukraine: Now Using North Korea 'Tank-Killer' Weapons

Stavros Atlamazoglou

Summary and Key Points: The war in Ukraine has taken an unexpected turn, forcing Russia to scramble for military resources and turn to allies like Iran and North Korea for support. Isolated on the global stage due to its illegal invasion and allegations of war crimes, Russia has received suicide drones from Iran and artillery shells from North Korea.

-Recent frontline videos reveal that North Korea has also supplied Russia with Bulsae-4 anti-tank missile vehicles, likely to compensate for significant losses in armored vehicles. The Bulsae-4, based on the Russian BTR-80 chassis, is designed to target enemy tanks, a crucial role in the ongoing conflict where tanks remain central to ground combat.

-The high number of Russian tank losses, estimated between 3,000 and 8,000, underscores the severity of the situation.

Russia Needs Help for the Ukraine War: North Korea Is the Answer

The war in Ukraine took an unanticipated trajectory, and it has thrown the Russian military off guard, forcing it to resort to emergency solutions to remain in the fight.

Russia’s illegal invasion and its cruel behavior in Ukraine – evidence from multiple sources suggests that Russian troops have engaged in repeated war crimes – have marginalized it in the international community.

As such, Moscow has turned to unsavory bedfellows to find military support for its war. Iran and North Korea have provided assistance to the Russian military.

Tehran has provided thousands of suicide drones to Moscow, many of which have been used against Ukrainian urban centers and critical infrastructure. Pyongyang sends artillery shells, and now, anti-tank missile vehicles.

The Problem of US Military Access in a Non-Aligned Indo-Pacific

Lucas Myers

A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 242 hovers during an aerial demonstration at the Singapore Airshow 2022 near Changi Exhibition Center, Republic of Singapore, Feb 15, 2022.Credit: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Bryant Rodriguez

When escalating tensions between Israel and Iran in April 2024 spurred fears of a wider Middle Eastern war, U.S. partners in the region reportedly attempted to limit the United States’ ability to attack Iranian forces from their territory. In an increasingly non-aligned world, and where U.S. influence is relatively less than in the Cold War, military access and logistics should not be taken for granted. This is not because of any insurmountable military problems but rather political ones as many countries hedge between great powers.

This issue is perhaps most urgent in the Indo-Pacific. U.S. force projection in the critical region relies upon overseas bases and military access agreements. Although the United States has strong alliances with Australia, Japan, and South Korea, other U.S. partners are considerably more reluctant to outwardly go against Beijing, especially in South and Southeast Asia.

While the United States has steadily improved relations with many important regional allies and partners, a persistent commitment to hedging in South and Southeast Asia raises concerns about U.S. force projection into the region during a potential conflict with China. Only by putting in real effort to enhance trust and providing greater, more reliable economic incentives can the United States improve the likelihood that key “swing states” are amendable to U.S. military access and logistics support in an Indo-Pacific crisis.

How Simone Biles and Team U.S.A. Gymnastics Came Soaring Bac

A sense of doubt had plagued the sport since Biles’s withdrawal from the Tokyo Games. The team’s success in Paris should definitively quash it.

The U.S. women’s gymnastics team has been calling this year’s Olympic Games its “redemption tour.” With the exception of a single newcomer, the sixteen-year-old Hezly Rivera, every gymnast who qualified for Paris was a member of the team that competed, three years ago, in Tokyo: Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey, Sunisa Lee, and, of course, Simone Biles, who entered this year’s Games with thirty world medals and seven Olympic medals to her name. They make up the oldest U.S. women’s gymnastics team, by average age, in more than half a century, and together they’ve had the chance to achieve some of what they missed in 2021. That year, in what became the defining story of the Games, Biles withdrew from most of the competition, citing a debilitating case of the “twisties,” a sort of midair vertigo that’s far more dangerous than it sounds. The U.S. women’s team, which was widely expected to win, finished instead in second place. At this year’s team final, on Tuesday, they once again began the competition on the vault, the same event in which Biles’s trouble in Tokyo had come to a head.

Are Israel and Iran Headed for All Out War?

Steven A. Cook

Steven Cook is Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This is now more likely. The Israelis have been under attack from Iranian proxies since October 7. In recent weeks, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has clearly gone on the offensive with a raid on the port of Hodeida in Yemen that is under control of rebel Houthis, the strike Tuesday that killed Hezbollah military official Fuad Shukr in the suburbs of Lebanon’s capital Beirut, and the overnight assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

The Israelis—who have not yet taken responsibility for the Haniyeh assassination—are demonstrating both technical prowess and that they are serious about “changing the rules of the game” with the axis of resistance. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed revenge for Haniyeh’s killing, which took place after the inauguration of the new Iranian president in the capital. There is little doubt that Hezbollah will also want revenge for the killing of Fuad Shukr. The Houthis will also no doubt take part in any retaliation that Iran plans. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, as well as militias in both Iraq and Syria under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), make up Iran’s axis of resistance. The IRGC leadership has, since at least mid-2023, encouraged coordination among those groups. The conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has at times provided opportunity for this collaboration.

The Assassinations in Beirut and Tehran: The Tactical Advantages and Disadvantages

Yoram Schweitzer

Israel is in a prolonged war on seven fronts, and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, and Fuad Shukr, the senior Hezbollah official, is part of this situation. The message to Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, and its partners in the axis is that Israel has not lost its power and is not the new “weak kid” in the region. Rather, it demonstrates determination and willingness to strike at the heart of its enemies’ strongholds with boldness, originality, and a demonstration of intelligence and precise operational capability. Moreover, the actions are intended not only for the enemies who are watching the military campaign but also for Israel’s partners and allies, in addition to strengthening the security and sense of security of the residents of Israel and the Jews in the diaspora.

But, as in any action, the two operations we saw yesterday have both advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages of Fuad Shukr’s assassination:

1. This was a strong and necessary response to the murder of the youth in Majdal Shams. This was apparently the least powerful choice among the alternatives, and its probability of “ending” the event by mitigating this specific conflict is higher than the other alternatives.

2. Shukr’s assassination sent a clear message to Nasrallah about the exposure of his organization and its vulnerability; about completely changing the game of balancing the equations; and the determination to continue the “harvest of senior commanders.”

3. It also sent a clear message to Iran and its partners (as a reminder, a few hours later, the assassination of Haniyeh happened in Tehran).

Production and Proliferation: The Risks of the Burgeoning Iranian Drone Industry

Insikt Group

The physical threat of Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, has been evident in conflict zones over Israel, the Red Sea, and Ukraine. Iran’s burgeoning drone industry also poses significant challenges to global businesses and Western governments. Insikt Group identifies five primary risks: compliance violations due to illicit procurement networks, reputational harm from the use of Western components in drones, technology transfer through reverse engineering, global proliferation of drone technology, and heightened cybersecurity threats. Despite international sanctions, Iran’s drone production and export have expanded, involving partnerships with countries like Russia.

A Global Security Threat

Iranian UAVs have proliferated as a global security threat over the past year. In April 2024, Tehran launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel involving the launch of 170 drones, and by the start of 2024, Russia had reportedly launched over 3,700 Iranian-made Shahed drones to devastating effect on the front lines in Ukraine. Iran and its proxies have used these unmanned aircraft across the Middle East, including targeting United States military bases in the region, striking critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and attacking Western naval ships and international commercial vessels from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. The broad use of Iranian drones across regional conflicts almost certainly reflects the strategic prioritization — at the highest levels of the Iranian government — of developing, producing, and proliferating these systems.

Access Denied? Non-Aligned State Decisions to Grant Access During War

Access decisions play a crucial role in war, with belligerent states employing various methods to gain access into neutral states. Yet, the decision-making process of potential host nations has largely been unexplored for modern, large-scale conflicts. This gap is addressed by exploring three themes — political survival, economic consequences, and the risk of retaliation — through two historical cases: Greece in World War I and Sweden in World War II. Internal division in Greece enabled access through inaction, while Sweden denied access to maintain neutrality. These cases emphasize the importance of understanding historical access decisions to inform future engagement strategies in potential conflicts.

How do state leaders determine whether they should grant military access to outside powers during a war in which their country is not involved? In many cases, leaders may feel they have pre-committed to a decision either through an existing alliance with a foreign power or through their own involvement in the conflict. The decision to grant access therefore becomes secondary to the decision to become directly involved. But for states that are neutral and still have the option of remaining uninvolved, the decision to grant access becomes harder. During a large-scale war involving multiple states and fronts, a would-be host nation must weigh the potential benefits and costs of providing access in a condensed, high-pressure timeline. While examples of such decisions are rare, they can offer valuable insights into the behavior of state leaders whose countries are perceived as being strategically located.

To examine how outside powers negotiate access to neutral states during war, I chose two historical cases: British efforts to gain access to Greece in World War I and to Sweden in World War II. In both cases, the potential host country faced possible retaliation for their decision from belligerents on both sides through punitive economic, political, or military actions. Greek and Swedish state leaders had to carefully consider this possibility while simultaneously evaluating how their decisions would affect their country’s economic well-being as well as their own political survival.

France has sided with Morocco on the Western Sahara. How might Algeria respond?

Sarah Zaaimi

On Tuesday, France moved toward recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territories of Western Sahara in a historic diplomatic shift for Paris and a major diplomatic victory for Rabat. Morocco’s neighbor Algeria was quick to signal its displeasure, saying that France’s decision was “the result of a dubious political calculation” and a “morally questionable judgment.” Will this realignment turn the page of the long-running Sahara conflict once and for all? Or will it further destabilize an already volatile region?

The news broke after the Moroccan royal palace released a communiqué that referenced a letter from French President Emmanuel Macron to the king of Morocco on the commemoration of the silver jubilee of his coronation. The letter states that the “present and future of Western Sahara fall within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty.” In his correspondence with the Moroccan king, Macron added that “France intends to act consistently with this position at both national and international levels.” Although the French position explicitly references Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, it will need more clarification and translation into concrete policies in the coming months.

Nonetheless, the French decision is particularly significant given its colonial past in North Africa and its shared responsibility with Spain in largely determining the postcolonial borders of Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania. These borders are the origin of many of the current territorial disputes in the region. France’s endorsement of the Moroccan autonomy plan this week follows similar support from Spain in 2022 and recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara expressed by the United States in 2020 and Israel in 2023, along with a growing list of Arab and African nations.

Experts react: Two top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed. What’s next for Israel, Iran, and the war in Gaza?

Atlantic Council experts

Israel widened its range of targets. Will it lead to a wider regional war? On Wednesday, a strike killed Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was visiting Tehran for the Iranian presidential inauguration. Haniyeh’s death, and resulting threats of harsh responses against Israel from Iran and its proxies, comes one day after Israel claimed that it killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukur in Beirut in retaliation for an alleged Hezbollah attack that killed twelve children in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams. What will these two apparent assassinations mean for the broader regional conflict in the Middle East? And how might Haniyeh’s death and the response from the Axis of Resistance affect Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations? Our experts delve into the possibilities below.

With the parties eager to avoid a wider war, the primary danger remains miscalculation

It was a bad day to be an Iranian proxy. From Tehran’s perspective, the significance wasn’t only the importance of the targets—Hamas’s Haniyeh, Lebanese Hezbollah’s Shukur, and Kataib Hezbollah’s drone bases—but the locations, the near simultaneous timing, and what they demonstrate about the reach of Israel and the United States.

Israel was able to find, fix, and finish Shukur in Beirut, in a building close to Hezbollah’s Shura Council. It was able to do the same (presumably, as Jerusalem hasn’t confirmed this action) to Haniyeh in Tehran, at his state-provided residence while he was visiting to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. And the US strikes in Iraq, the first since February, took place south of Baghdad against a key element of the Iranian-backed umbrella organization Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which has taken credit for attacks on US forces and on Israel.

Army Fast-Tracks AI-Enabled Laser Counter-Drone Weapons

Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

The Army is refining an AI-enabled laser system able to identify, discriminate and incinerate enemy drone targets in milliseconds using high speed computer processing, advanced algorithms and a new generation of laser weapons.

The services’ Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) is fast-tracking the LOCUST Laser Weapon System, a counter unmanned aerial system weapon engineered to instantly identify then eliminate drone threats at the speed of AI. The LOCUST system, made by BlueHalo, integrates with the Army’s truck-mounted High Energy Laser using an advanced gimbaled electro-optical tracking system, ISR unit, laser rangefinder and target tracking system to “neutralize” threats, according to BlueHalo. It leverages a multiple-camera payload system to provide a wide field of view to expand a defensive targeting envelope. The LOCUST LWS includes a radar and surveillance module on an extendable mast secured to a “463L compliant pallet” for easy mobility including a tailorable payload to include electronic attack technology and a 360-degree radar.

The human body is the next cyber battlefield — and I’m living proof

Len Noe

Espionage and cyberwar activities are increasingly conducted remotely, via phishing, spyware, software supply chain attacks, malware attacks on electric grids and nuclear plants, and drones. But in the future, we can expect to see threat actors turn to technology that puts the attack power into their own hands — literally.

We’re entering the age of bio-hacking, also called body hacking or human augmentation, to distinguish it from other types of biological experimentation like DNA hacking. In the context of cybersecurity, bio-hacking enables the creation of new stealthy attack capabilities by using chip implants inside bodies and wireless technologies to conduct spying and cyberattacks that today are done over the internet.

This isn’t science-fiction or just another “Terminator” reference. Research into using bodies as spying devices and weapons is happening right now. I should know, because I’m a Walking Zero Day cyber exploit.

I’m a transhumanist, which means I am using technology to expand my capabilities beyond those I was born with. In this case, I’m hacking my body for security research, to see how easily I can conduct certain types of attacks using chips in my body and wireless technology instead of the internet.

I have implanted nine microchips and one magnet in my hand and fingers over the past five years. In numerous demonstrations, I’ve showcased the ability to wirelessly download malware onto an Android (Apple’s security protections block this attack). In another type of attack, I’ve proven I can skim a badge and then write the data directly to my implant in order to enter restricted areas. The chips in my hand communicate to the devices via Near Field Communication (NFC) or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) wireless protocols. Military IDs, for example, have embedded chips that use RFID.

The cybersecurity plan for what to do when adversaries breach the networ

Barry Rosenberg

Moderator: Barry Rosenberg, Technology & Special Projects Editor, Breaking Defense. Speakers: Gurpreet Bhatia, DoD Principal Director for Cybersecurity, DoD CIO; Army Brig. Gen. Mark Miles, Director, Command, Control, Communications & Cyber (J-6), U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; Sean Manning, Assistant Program Area Manager, Cyber Operations & Intelligence, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Defending defense networks from cyberattack has often meant erecting firewalls — the digital version of what militaries have done time immemorial by building fortifications and defending borders and boundaries. Those walls, however, are invariably breached, in the same way that adversaries have and continue to infiltrate networks to steal data and disrupt command, control, and communications.

That means there need to be additional layers of cybersecurity to augment the firewalls, so that when they are compromised and the bad guys are inside the network the damage that they inflict can be minimized.

“We’re good at the boundary, but we’re not good once they get inside our infrastructure or networks,” noted Gurpreet Bhatia, DoD principal director for Cybersecurity and deputy chief information security officer, speaking during a recent Breaking Defense webinar. “That’s the goal, to prevent data loss so we don’t lose troves of our sensitive, critical information [and to] protect against threats to our critical infrastructure.

“As our ecosystem evolves over time and becomes more integrated, we [also] want to make sure our industrial base, our critical partners, are part of that ecosystem [to address] that threat landscape. How do we think about this global supply chain challenge that we have today? [There are] lots of threat vectors that we think through, and at the end of the day how do we take all those threats in concert and figure out what is the acceptable risk that we want to operate within.”

The AI Search War Has Begun

Matteo Wong

Every second of every day, people across the world type tens of thousands of queries into Google, adding up to trillions of searches a year. Google and a few other search engines are the portal through which several billion people navigate the internet. Many of the world’s most powerful tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have recently spotted an opportunity to remake that gateway with generative AI, and they are racing to seize it. And as of this week, the generative-AI search wars are in full swing.

The value of an AI-powered search bar is straightforward: Instead of having to open and read multiple links, wouldn’t it be better to type your query into a chatbot and receive an immediate, comprehensive answer? In order for this approach to work, though, AI models have to be able to scrape the web for relevant information. Nearly two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, and with users growing aware that many generative-AI products have effectively been built on stolen information, tech companies are trying to play nice with the media outlets that supply the content these machines need.

This morning, the start-up Perplexity, which offers an AI-powered “answer engine,” announced revenue-sharing deals with Time, Fortune, and several other publishers. Moving forward, these publishers will be compensated when Perplexity earns ad revenue from AI-generated answers that cite partner content. The site does not currently run ads, but will begin doing so in the form of sponsored “related follow-up questions” this fall—a sportswear brand could pay for a follow-up question to appear in response to a query about Babe Ruth, and if the AI used Time in its answer, then Time would get a cut of the ad revenue for every citation. OpenAI has been building its own roster of media partners, including News Corp, Vox Media, and The Atlantic, and last week announced its own AI-search prototype, SearchGPT.

Cyber Effects in Warfare: Categorizing the Where, What, and Why

For decades, military practitioners and academics have come up with theories, evidence, and examples that indicate that offensive cyber operations might revolutionize modern warfare. Others have made an equally impressive case that refutes that such operations would even be relevant, making it hard to reach any definite conclusions. This paper introduces a novel analytical framework to assess offensive cyber operations based on the circumstances of their use across the different phases of war, from shaping operations prior to the conflict to the actual battlefield. This framework substantially simplifies the key questions of practitioners and academics in order to pose the more direct question: Where, when, and how might offensive cyber operations affect warfare outcomes, both today and in the future?

Within 15 years of the invention of powered flight, nearly all of the doctrinal missions of an air force had been not just discovered but integrated under a single commander in battle: Billy Mitchell at the 1918 battle of Saint-Mihiel.1 The pressure of extended high-intensity combat drove innovations in the use of airpower that were hard to imagine before World War I, when planes seemed fragile and of limited use on the battlefield. During that war, airpower started to come into its own, due to technological improvements, doctrinal advancements, and coordinated use by a single commander charged with integrating airpower with other combined arms to triumph in a major battle.

Adversaries in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine have similarly been pushing offensive cyber operations, discovering new relevance and missions — driven by those same pressures of combat — and hinting that there are more possibilities to come. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raises a critical question: Where, when, and how might offensive cyber operations impact the outcomes of war?

Army Desperately Seeking Small, Affordable Drones

Sean Carberry

Three soldiers are sitting at a long table underneath a pair of rickety green awnings in danger of flying away in the biting wind. Small aerial and ground drones along with miscellaneous electronic components and 3D printed attachments are scattered across the table for senior officers from NATO nations to examine before a thunderous live fire exercise on the adjacent range in northeast Poland.

The 1st Squadron War Eagles of the U.S. Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment were showing off some of their experiments and innovations to address the increasing drone threat on the modern battlefield, Lt. Col. Matt Piosa, the squadron’s commander, explained in an interview.

“Our soldiers are observing trends on the battlefield. They’re then seeing where we have capability gaps, and they’re finding low-cost solutions to innovate,” he said. “So really, we’re going from battlefield observations to small-unit innovation. And we think that is about as close as you can get to transforming in contact without actually being in contact.”

“Transforming in contact” is the initiative launched by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George whereby innovators, developers and testers are being pushed out into the field to assess changes to warfare — largely driven by the war in Ukraine — and develop solutions on the spot.

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