Indian Strategic Studies: 08/22/24

22 August 2024

Taliban weaker than they look after 3 years in power

Chris Fitzgerald

It has been three years since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan and the group is flying high, facing no legitimate challenge to its rule and courted by much of the international community.

The Taliban’s confidence was on full show celebrating the anniversary with a military parade that included fighter aircraft and weapons taken after the United States-led coalition hastily withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021. The display was a clear slap in Washington’s face.

The Taliban have also been able to build relationships with neighbors, a far cry from the group’s pariah status during its first stint in power. Chinese and Iranian diplomats attended the parade. Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov visited Kabul for high-level talks in August. This comes after China in January became the first country to officially host a Taliban envoy and after Beijing appointed its own ambassador to Kabul last December.

Trade has also increased, particularly with China. The Taliban and Chinese engineers officially broke ground in July at the Beijing-funded Aynak Mas mine, estimated to have the world’s second-largest deposit of copper. Chinese officials have also held several recent meetings with the Taliban, leading to hopes Afghanistan can join Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan

Jean-François Cautain & Sonia Cautain

On August 15, 2024, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan celebrated the third anniversary of the takeover of Kabul, ending years of conflict and the failure of twenty years of Western intervention and failed nation-building.

Thirty years ago, we were in Afghanistan, witnessing the rise of the Taliban and their first seizure of power in 1996. As a family, we also experienced the hope of the early years of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan that followed it after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Since 2022, we have returned to Kabul, trying, in our modest way, to bring support to an Afghan population severely damaged by over forty years of violence. We will not attempt here to analyze the causes of the fall of the previous regime and the return of the Taliban. History will apportion the blame among Afghans and foreigners alike and determine the victims and perpetrators.

Our aim, on this third anniversary of the second Emirate, is to report our impressions of a country that we have loved for decades and help ensure that Afghanistan is not forgotten. Despite its importance throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Afghanistan rarely makes the front pages of Western media anymore. Consequently, the lives of Afghans, especially women, grow ever more difficult. We aim to describe some aspects of everyday life in Afghanistan, which remain largely unmentioned in the Western press.

Bangladesh's Democracy in Peril—Minority Persecution Amid Political Upheaval | Opinion

Suvra Dev Kar

As Bangladesh grapples with its most significant political crisis since independence, a dark shadow looms over its religious minorities. The nation, once founded on principles of unity and secularism, has become a battleground, where the flames of change have ignited a dangerous surge of communal violence.

In early July 2024, a student-led movement erupted, challenging job quotas and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. What began as a call for accountability quickly evolved into a powerful force exposing deep-rooted issues of corruption, mismanagement, and injustice within the country's governance. The movement, dubbed "Bangladesh 2.0" or the "second independence," initially united citizens across religious lines in their quest for reform.

The situation took a dire turn on Aug. 5, when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled the country following a deadly crackdown by law enforcement that left hundreds dead. Her controversial 15-year rule came to an abrupt end, leaving a power vacuum that would soon be filled with chaos.

China’s Not-So-Secret Economic Weapon

Ben Solis

A new report has provided compelling evidence that China’s excess manufacturing capacity – long considered a potential weakness by many Western economists – may in fact be a critical part of Beijing’s efforts to undermine the United States by decimating the American manufacturing sector.

As the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) writes, “Overcapacity is a feature, not a bug, of China’s model of state capitalism.” While a production glut may be a serious problem in a free-market economy, Beijing’s willingness to heavily subsidize Chinese industry has allowed Chinese companies to continue pouring cheap goods into foreign markets – including using backdoors through countries like Vietnam and Mexico to skirt American tariffs.

The concept of the state using its control of markets to wield excess manufacturing output as an economic weapon against capitalist nations has a long history in communist thought. Mao Zedong, China’s first communist leader, was an avid proponent of the writings of early Soviet philosopher Lyubov Axelrod, who proposed that the oversupply of capitalist markets with cheaper products manufactured by the communist state-sponsored companies could undermine the power of Western capital.

The U.S. will very likely fight a 3-front war against Russia, China, and Iran, Palantir’s Alex Karp says

Jason Ma

The U.S. military has long prioritized being able to fight two wars simultaneously in different parts of the globe, similar to its efforts in the Pacific and European theaters during World War II.

But Alex Karp, CEO of the data-mining software company Palantir, which is known for its work in defense and intelligence, warned that the U.S. may have to wage war in three different theaters in the future.

He told the New York Times that he thinks the U.S. will “very likely” find itself in a three-front war with China, Russia, and Iran. As a result, he said, the Pentagon should continue developing autonomous weapons at full speed, pointing to big mismatches in how far the U.S. would be willing to go while fighting a war compared with other countries.

“I think we’re in an age when [a] nuclear deterrent is actually less effective, because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he added. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”

The Innovation Fallacy In the U.S.-Chinese Tech Race, Diffusion Matters More Than Invention

Jeffrey Ding

In remarks in 2018, Chinese leader Xi Jinping highlighted the potential of “disruptive technological innovation” to change history. Key advancements, Xi insisted, had remade the world. He listed the “mechanization” of the First Industrial Revolution, the “electrification” of the Second Industrial Revolution, and the “informatization” of the Third Industrial Revolution. Now, Xi said, breakthroughs in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence had brought the world to the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Those who pioneered the new technologies would be the winners of the era to come.

In the following months, Chinese analysts and scholars expounded on Xi’s speech, unpacking the connection between technological disruption and geopolitics. One commentary in an official Chinese Communist Party publication detailed the consequences of past technological revolutions: “Britain seized the opportunity of the first industrial revolution and established a world-leading productivity advantage. . . . After the second industrial revolution, the United States seized the dominance of advanced productivity from Britain.” In his analysis of Xi’s remarks, Jin Canrong, an influential Chinese international relations scholar, argued that China has a better chance than the United States of triumphing in the competition over the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

US Military Presence in Syria Carries Substantial Risks, But So Does Complete Withdrawal

Sefa Secen

U.S.-backed forces in eastern Syria launched a major attack on three posts manned by pro-government gunmen on Aug. 12, 2024, killing at least 18 fighters in a rare provocation near the border with Iraq.

The assault marked the worst clashes in eastern Syria in nearly a year. Earlier in August, eight U.S. personnel stationed in Syria were injured in a drone attack purportedly carried out by Iranian-backed militants.

These incidents highlight a fact that is often forgotten: The U.S. still has an active presence in Syria. The Deir ez-Zor Military Council behind the Aug. 12 attack is part of the Syrian Democratic Forces – a Kurdish-led alliance that has been a major U.S. partner in Syria. The group and its local affiliates now control much of the territory that the terrorist Islamic State group once controlled.

And as of the beginning of 2024, the U.S. still had close to 1,000 military personnel in the eastern part of Syria. Recent reports suggest that amid the growing tension in the region, additional resources and soldiers have made their way to the civil war-torn country.

The Perils of Isolationism The World Still Needs America—and America Still Needs the World

Condoleezza Rice

In times of uncertainty, people reach for historical analogies. After 9/11, George W. Bush administration officials invoked Pearl Harbor as a standard comparison in processing the intelligence failure that led to the attack. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to Imperial Japan’s attack in making the case that Washington should deliver an ultimatum to the Taliban, saying, “Decent countries don’t launch surprise attacks.” And as officials in the Situation Room tried to assess progress in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq, another analogy came up more than a few times: U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous reliance on body counts in Vietnam. Even if history doesn’t repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes.

Today’s favorite analogy is the Cold War. The United States again faces an adversary that has global reach and insatiable ambition, with China taking the place of the Soviet Union. This is a particularly attractive comparison, of course, because the United States and its allies won the Cold War. But the current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous.

China is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was self-isolating, preferring autarky to integration, whereas China ended its isolation in the late 1970s. A second difference between the Soviet Union and China is the role of ideology. Under the Brezhnev Doctrine that governed Eastern Europe, an ally had to be a carbon copy of Soviet-style communism. China, by contrast, is largely agnostic about the internal composition of other states. It fiercely defends the primacy and superiority of the Chinese Communist Party but does not insist that others do the equivalent, even if it is happy to support authoritarian states by exporting its surveillance technology and social media services.

A Double Funeral

William S. Lind

On July 29, I attended the funeral and interment at Arlington cemetery of General Alfred M. Gray, Jr., the 29th Commandant of the Marine Corps. Many of us present feared we were also witnessing the funeral of the Marine Corps itself.

I met General Gray in the mid-1970s when he was a new one-star and I had just launched a campaign to change U.S. military doctrine from the French to the German model, under the rubric “maneuver warfare.” General Gray signed on at once. He did so not because I was so persuasive but because what I was advocating resonated with his own military experiences, experience that began when he arrived in Korea in 1950 as a Marine private.

In 1981, General Gray became the Commanding General of the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune, NC. He promptly declared maneuver warfare the doctrine of his division, formed a Maneuver Warfare Board of young officers to make it happen (many were my former students) and began a series of free-play field exercises to develop and apply the new concepts. I attended many of those exercises and, at General Gray’s request, led the critiques. I made sure those critiques were Prussian, not the usual American variety where everybody leaves feeling good.

The appetite for US defence tech is growing - Opinion

John Thornhill

The symbolism could hardly be starker. Two American astronauts, who flew to the International Space Station in June on a Boeing Starliner spacecraft, may be stuck in space for months because their return vehicle has sprung a leak in its propulsion system. Nasa is now considering whether a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft can pick them up in February.

This unhappy incident highlights the extent to which the innovative, private space company run by the maverick Elon Musk has gained primacy over the problem-plagued, 108-year-old government contractor, in spite of Boeing’s glorious history in the US space programme. It is a lesson unlikely to be lost on the Pentagon as it allocates its $800bn-plus budget in future. Like Nasa, the US Department of Defense relies increasingly on a new generation of Silicon Valley start-ups to sharpen its edge. Traditional defence contractors, including Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, known as the primes, are being disrupted.

This month, one of the highest-profile of those disrupters, Anduril Industries, raised $1.5bn from venture capital investors, valuing the company at $14bn. Anduril will now build out Arsenal-1, a state-of-the-art factory to “hyperscale” the production of thousands of autonomous combat drones as part of the Pentagon’s Replicator programme. This initiative aims to deploy thousands of autonomous systems within 18 to 24 months.

Will the Kursk raid backfire on Ukraine?

Christopher McCallion and Ben Friedman

Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have established a 1,000-square-kilometre bulge in Russia’s Kursk region. An additional thrust to the south, in the Belgorod region, is also underway. Ukraine‘s foreign ministry says it aims to create a buffer zone to prevent missile attacks, but other objectives seem paramount: to draw Russian forces from the front lines, seize a bargaining chip for future negotiations, embarrass the Kremlin, and boost Ukrainian morale while heartening its Western backers.

The Kursk attacks are more akin to border raids than a genuine offensive campaign. As with Ukrainian missile attacks on Russian naval forces in the Black Sea or targets inside Russia, the raid serves to harass Russian forces and distract them from their main objective. But it cannot substitute for the combat power needed to exploit a breakthrough in Russia’s front lines — combat power that Kyiv does not possess and seems unable to generate.

Update on the War in Ukraine

George Friedman

Two and a half years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine, a former part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The reason for the invasion was geostrategic: Moscow justifiably feared that a hostile power could invade it from the west through Ukraine and up from the south. Such was the case for invasions by Napoleon and Hitler. Without strategic depth, Russia has no buffers.

For Russia, that no one was currently planning such an invasion meant little. Geopolitics demands preparing to defend against an enemy before the enemy plans to attack. Moscow was, after all, painfully aware that pro-West forces supported an uprising that unseated a pro-Russia president several years earlier. The West’s support was based on the fear that Russia would invade Ukraine and, in time, the rest of Europe. Neither side’s fears were irrational.

The assumption of many was that Russia would rapidly crush the Ukrainian army and that a quick assault would close the door on U.S. intervention and supplies. If the logic was correct, the execution was not. The first foray into Ukraine consisted of tanks on multiple fronts, a show of force meant to sow panic among the public.

How Israel is clearing Hamas out of Rafah

Andrew Fox

The heat, the sand, the soldiers. I’m in Rafah, a war zone unlike any other. As a former soldier, it’s an unsettling experience. Every time we get out of a vehicle, I reach for a weapon I do not have. Instead of my army fatigues, I’m wearing lightweight trousers, a polo shirt and a blue helmet signifying I’m a civilian guest of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

There’s one thing that hits me more than anything else while I’m here: the damage to Gaza. It is appalling. Almost every building is damaged, and many are destroyed outright. After 7 October, Hamas had to be removed from Gaza. But they aren’t an easy adversary to take on.

There are 500 km of tunnels below Gaza, longer in distance than the entire London underground. In Rafah alone, the 162nd Division, who I’m alongside, have found ten tunnel-hidden rocket launching sites, 21 subterranean weapons production sites, and they have destroyed 200 tunnel entry shafts. Here’s the issue: each one of those tunnel shafts led to a mosque; a school; a person’s home. To destroy the tunnel system, there is inevitable damage to the buildings under which the tunnels run and to which they are connected.

The Folly of Ukraine’s Russia Incursion

Branko Marcetic

Only a few weeks ago, the Ukraine war seemed to be reaching some kind of diplomatic endgame: The war had long settled into what was more or less a bloody stalemate; Washington was distracted by events in the Middle East; and even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had long rejected any negotiations if they meant giving up territory, had publicly softened his stance on the idea.

Then the Kursk invasion happened. Barreling through miles of poorly defended and sparsely populated Russian borderlands, Ukrainian forces went close to eight miles into Russian territory. They took control of 28 settlements, according to Moscow (many more per Kiev), and forced more than 121,000 residents to be evacuated. Maybe most importantly, the Ukrainians have inflicted another painful humiliation upon President Vladimir Putin, while giving a shot in the arm to their own flagging morale at a time when Moscow seemed to hold all the cards.

The U.S. Military Is Quietly Reinventing Itself on the Great Lakes

Jerry Hendrix

For two weeks in July, over 40 companies, ranging from small start-ups to major defense “primes,” gathered in Alpena, Mich., on the banks of Lake Huron. They had come to conduct an exercise designed to test combinations of systems that operate in the electromagnetic spectrum. The effort was sponsored by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Ind., taking the on-scene lead on the exercise’s execution. Additionally, commercial participants got to interact with representatives of the Army’s C5ISR Center, the Air Force Test Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Michigan National Guard.

The testing range, which spanned the northeasternmost portion of Michigan’s mitten, was selected because the region and lake provided participants, who came from all over the United States, the ability to fully test their systems across the breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum without fear of interfering with any major population centers. The goals of the exercise were to gain rapid technological development through interactions with fellow subject-matter experts and to experiment within an operationally relevant environment created by the exercise managers.

The Kursk Offensive Dilemma

Mick Ryan

When observing the events, big and small, in contemporary wars, I find myself drawn back to the theory of war to provide the intellectual foundations to understand what is happening and why. Not everything can be explained by satellite images, newspaper articles or the online OSINT community (as good as it is). Military theory often provides context to better explain what we are seeing in the war in Ukraine. As Clausewitz’s quote above notes, the major campaigns of this war are always grounded in politics, not just the search for military advantage.

The big development in the war in Ukraine in the past two weeks has been Ukraine’s Kursk offensive and the seizing of over 1100 square kilometres of Russian territory. This has been an impressively planned and executed Ukrainian ground operation. It has demonstrated Ukrainian learning and adaptation after the failure of its 2023 counteroffensive, which will be the topic of a future article here. The Kursk operation may also change the direction of the war.

Ukrainian objectives for the Kursk operation have gained some recent clarity with statements by the Ukrainian President, as well as other Ukrainian officials. In the past 24 hours, President Zelenskyy has spoken of how the Kursk operation seeks to achieve several objectives.

Ukraine's Incursion Into Kursk - Tactical Genius?

Stefan Wolff

The Ukrainian operation in Russia’s Kursk region began in late July with several days of airstrikes before Kyiv’s ground forces quickly advanced several miles deep into Russian territory on August 6, 2024. Since then, according to various reports, they have established an expanded foothold of as much as 1,000 square kilometres. They have destroyed a lot of Russian equipment and inflicted heavy casualties on Russian forces.

The Kremlin has rushed forces to the region but has so far failed to halt the Ukrainian advance, let alone drive Ukrainian forces from Russian soil. Now, according to as yet unconfirmed but credible reports, Putin has appointed Alexei Dyumin to head up what it calls its “counter-terrorist” response to the Ukrainian incursion. This is significant in several ways.

First, there is the personnel dimension. Dyumin is Putin’s former bodyguard, but also served as deputy head of the GRU military intelligence service, deputy defence minister and, until the end of May 2024, as governor of the Tula region, south of Moscow.

Michael Handel, October 7, and The Theory of Surprise

James J. Wirtz

The place to begin is with a chance encounter with Tom Mahnken in the lobby of San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko in August 2001. Tom mentioned that he was working on a festschrift for Michael Handel, his colleague at the U.S. Naval War College, who had recently passed away tragically from an especially aggressive form of cancer. Handel had been kind to me as a graduate student, offering advice, opportunities, and introductions – I immediately asked if I could contribute a chapter on his “Theory of Surprise.” Tom said he never heard of the theory, but I reassured him that it was embedded in Handel’s many works on intelligence failure and strategic surprise. Contemporary events gave the project a sense of urgency. “The Theory of Surprise” focused on the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks. It was published along with other essays in Paradoxes of Intelligence, which honored Handel’s contribution to the field of intelligence studies.[i]

Today’s reader might be unaware of Handel’s link to the intelligence field; he is probably best remembered for his comparative study of strategy, especially the works of “classical strategic thought.” He began with a volume on Clausewitz,[ii] followed by a comparison of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz,[iii] and then by increasingly comprehensive editions of his monograph Masters of War, which surveyed the ideas of Mau Zedong, Antoine-Henri Jomini, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alfred T. Mahan, Julian Corbett and even Casper Weinberger, among others.[iv] Nevertheless, as a founding editor of the journal Intelligence and National Security, Handel was an early leader in the field of intelligence studies, scholarship that was energized by the searing experience of the surprise suffered by Israel at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He wrote extensively about the subjects of intelligence analysis, intelligence failure, and strategic surprise, including unique treatments of military intelligence, and technological surprise.[v]

The Dwindling Strategic Flame: Reviving Creative Defense Planning

Phillip Dolitsky

Strategy and defense planning belong to the realm of the unknown. There is nothing as certain as the uncertainty of the future and yet all polities depend on their safety and survival by striving to meet the challenge of uncertainty. All nations must attempt, in the words of the late British strategist Colin Gray, “to get the biggest issues right enough” and to “seek good enough answers to the right questions.”[i] As such, strategy necessitates a rigorous and often uncomfortable examination of potential threats, no matter how improbable they may seem. It involves moving beyond the conventional wisdom and exploring scenarios that stretch the boundaries of our current understanding of, and hope for, the world. It requires navigating a delicate balance between caution and creativity, with deep roots in history, where planners must envision not just the likely developments but also the wild cards that could disrupt the status quo. In other words, it requires that strategists and defense planners think about the unthinkable. This particular aspect of the strategic flame is dwindling. The current war in Israel and the discussions surrounding the looming conflict with China over Taiwan should serve as warnings for what might occur if we completely extinguish the strategic imperative to think about the unthinkable. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to identify this unfortunate trend in strategic thinking, describe an approach to defense planning called “strategic prophylaxis” and offer a few potential remedies to the malady.

Hamas claims Tel Aviv attack as Blinken promotes cease-fire in Israel

John Hudson, Rachel Pannett, Annabelle Timsit, Loveday Morris and Jennifer Hassan

Hamas claimed responsibility for a bombing that shook Tel Aviv on Sunday night as Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived to promote a U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal in Gaza, which he described as potentially a last-ditch chance to restore calm to the Middle East.

“This is a decisive moment — probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a cease-fire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security,” Blinken said Monday, alongside Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Later, after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Blinken told reporters that “Israel accepts the bridging proposal,” an effort by mediators in Doha last week to close the remaining gaps between the two sides. “It’s now incumbent upon Hamas to do the same,” he said.

While the Biden administration has said that a deal could be concluded as early as this week, the explosion in Tel Aviv on Sunday night — about an hour after Blinken touched down in the city — underscored the peril of the moment and the risk of escalation. Israelis feared the attack presaged a dark shift in the conflict, sparking memories of the second intifada, the armed Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation between 2000 and 2005 that was marked with bombings in malls, on buses and outside nightclubs.

The Trouble With Allies

Richard Haass

Immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, U.S. President Joe Biden agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel had the right to defend itself. But in the months that followed, disagreements mounted over how that right was exercised. The Biden administration disapproved of Israel’s at times indiscriminate military campaign in Gaza, its restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid, its failure to stop the construction of new Jewish settlements and settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, and its prioritization of the war on Hamas over negotiations to release hostages. Above all, the administration was frustrated with Israel’s utter failure to put forth a viable strategy for governing Gaza once Hamas is degraded, an omission compounded by its refusal to advance any plan to address the Palestinian desire for self-rule.

Israel receives $3.8 billion annually in U.S. military aid, and the United States has been the country’s most dependable supporter for decades. And yet the United States was remarkably reluctant to publicly confront Israel over Gaza. Only after more than four months of seeing its private advice mostly rebuffed did the Biden administration openly break with Israel—and even then, it acted at the margins. It placed sanctions on a few extremist settlers, airdropped food into Gaza, built a floating pier on Gaza’s coast to facilitate aid shipments, and went against Israeli preferences on two largely symbolic UN Security Council resolutions.

Symposium: What does Ukraine's incursion into Russia really mean?

Beginning Aug. 6, the Ukrainian military launched a surprise, cross-border offensive against Russia in the eastern Kursk region, seemingly flipping the script on the war’s current trajectory.

Kyiv claims its units have pushed more than 20 miles into Russian territory, taking over 74 settlements and towns encompassing some 400 square miles, as well as over 100 Russian prisoners of war.

For its part, Moscow has acknowledged the incursion but as of Wednesday said its military has stabilized the border and is actively fighting to wrest control over those contested areas. Meanwhile, the fog of war has settled in and there is no official confirmation on the number of casualties or actual territorial gains by Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced the incursion as a “large-scale provocation.” For its part the Ukraine Foreign Ministry is saying this isn’t about holding territory but stopping long-range missile strikes by Russia into Ukraine from the Kursk region by creating a “buffer zone” there.

Pentagon unveils new biodefense-focused supercomputer

NATALIE ALMS

The Defense Department and National Nuclear Security Administration have a new supercomputing system focused on biological defense at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Inaugurated on August 1, the system will “provide unique capabilities for large-scale simulation and AI-based modeling for a variety of defensive activities, including bio surveillance, threat characterization, advanced materials development and accelerated medical countermeasures,” per a readout from DOD spokesperson Robert L. Ditchey II.

DOD says it’s working with NNSA to up the computing capability for national biodefense systems — and that “the collaboration has enabled expanding systems of the same system architecture as LLNL's upcoming exascale supercomputer, El Capitan, which is projected to be the world's most powerful supercomputer when it becomes operational later this year,” the readout states.

How the Pentagon built Silicon Valley - Analysis

Stavroula Pabst

These days, tech companies are publicly warming up to the defense sector. Department of Defense spending is increasingly going to large tech companies including Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM. Open AI recently brought on former U.S. Army general and National Security Agency Director Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors. And a growing clan of Silicon Valley-based “techno-patriots,” including the likes of Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and Andreessen-Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, seem eager to prove that the technology industry can alleviate the United States’ geostrategic and economic weaknesses — if awarded the military contracts to do so.

But the increasingly public relationship Silicon Valley enjoys with the Pentagon is no sudden development. Rather, Silicon Valley was made by — and in the service of — a U.S. government and military eager to establish dominance over its adversaries in the Cold War and beyond. Namely, extensive and consistent post-war era government funds, and especially military contracting, overhauled the American technology industry, transforming the once-quiet region surrounding Mountain View, California into the bustling tech metropolis it is today.

A (military) history of Silicon Valley

Tech industry enthusiasts are eager to attribute Silicon Valley’s success to free market entrepreneurship, where great ideas born in suburban California garages took off through hard work and grit. In reality, regional post-war era entrepreneurs and researchers had help from a U.S. government eager to spend on research and development: in a sustained Cold War with the Soviet Union, competition in the technology, space, and arms sectors was stiff.

3 Ways to Protect Your Network

Lida Citroën

While the headline to this article might suggest I’m offering important technical tips to safeguard your internet service, home Wi-Fi network or VPN account, that’s not the network I’m speaking of. While your professional network is equally important as the data you store on your computer, we often leave this network exposed and vulnerable to risk, deterioration and intrusion.

Your professional network consists of the contacts you intentionally curate relationships with to serve your career growth, philanthropic pursuits and interests. Sometimes a contact becomes part of your network online only, sometimes in person only and often in both ways. Guarding the relationships you’ve spent time developing is vital to ensure your network serves you in the ways that matter most.

1. Be Clear on Your Goals for the Relationship

With each contact to whom you pursue a networking relationship, decide how they’ll best serve you. Can they connect you to people of influence? Do they possess valuable and unique information? Are they supportive and encouraging?

Each contact in your network doesn’t need to fulfill the same expectations, but there should be a clear value to you. You will spend a lot of time and resources to build a fruitful relationship, so ensure the goal is clear, measurable and meaningful to you.

Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

Maureen Dowd

Alex Karp never learned to drive.

“I was too poor,” he said. “And then I was too rich.”

In fact, Mr. Karp, a co-founder and the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies, the mysterious and powerful data analytics firm, doesn’t trust himself to drive. Or ride a bike. Or ski downhill.

“I’m a dreamer,” he said. “I’ll start dreaming and then I fall over. I started doing tai chi to prevent that. It’s really, really helped with focusing on one thing at a time. If you had met me 15 years ago, two-thirds of the conversation, I’d just be dreaming.”

What would he dream about?

“Literally, it could be a walk I did five years ago,” he said. “It could be some conversation I had in grad school. Could be my family member annoyed me. Something a colleague said, like: ‘Why did they say this? What does it actually mean?’”

Mr. Karp is a lean, extremely fit billionaire with unruly salt-and-pepper curls. He is introvert-charming (something I aspire to myself). He has A.D.H.D. and can’t hide it if he is not interested in what someone is saying. After a hyper spurt of talking, he loses energy and has to recharge on the stationary bike or by reading. Even though he thinks of himself as different, he seems to like being different. He enjoys being a provocateur onstage and in interviews.

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