Indian Strategic Studies: 08/24/24

24 August 2024

India and Japan take small steps towards stronger ties

Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan

India and Japan have just concluded their 2+2 ministerial dialogue. On the one hand, the talks demonstrated significant progress in the relationship over the past few years—a positive trend from Australia’s point of view. On the other, it is difficult to avoid the sense that most of the accomplishments were the low-hanging fruit in the relationship, and progress in further deepening ties would require significant political investment on both sides, which is not yet visible.

The India-Japan 2+2 began in 2019, one of several such dialogues that India and its partners initiated in the Indo-Pacific. Though it was meant to be an annual affair, this was the only the third such meeting since 2019. Nevertheless, the joint statement listed an impressive set of achievements. These included Japanese participation in bilateral and multilateral air exercises hosted by the Indian Air Force, and bilateral military exercises by all three services in 2023—the first time this has happened in a single calendar year.

In addition, there has been a steady drumbeat of dialogues on issues including disarmament and non-proliferation; cyber security and counterterrorism. A particular emphasis for both countries is the UN Security Council reform. Even though this still seems a somewhat distant ambition, both sides continue to discuss pathways forward in promoting such reforms.

China Prods Pakistan to Ramp Up Security and Governance

James Durso

China is frustrated by Pakistan’s inability to protect Chinese workers on the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Aside from killing Chinese citizens, the violence has contributed to CPEC’s slow rollout in a country that needs more electricity, more clean water, more good roads, and, well, more everything, but is “out of friends and out of money,” according to The Economist.

In response to China’s scolding, Pakistan unveiled an anti-terrorism campaign to suppress the Pakistani Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an ally of the Afghan Taliban and responsible for 700 attacks that killed 1000 people in 2023. The TTP operates partly from Afghan territory so Pakistan will have to attack TTP hideouts on Afghan soil at a time when relations are smarting from Islamabad’s 2023 expulsion of over 540,000 Afghan refugees. (The next phase of the plan may see 800,000 Afghans deported.)

While in China, Sharif met Dr. Wu Fulin, chairman of the Export-Import Bank of China, and promised action to improve governance, increase tax revenue, and ensure ease of doing business to attract foreign direct investment.

Bangladesh In Transition: Facing Uncertainty Under The Transitional Regime – Analysis

K.M. Seethi

In the aftermath of Bangladesh’s political upheaval, a cloud of uncertainty gathers, casting an ominous shadow over the interim government. The transient regime, born out of chaos, now finds itself caught in a labyrinth of crises—political, administrative, and economic—that threaten the very structure of the state and society. The once-steady bureaucracy appears to be failing, the civil administration teeters on the brink, and across the nation, a wave of anxiety swells, threatening to drown any semblance of control. Reports say that the interim government reels under the mounting pressure, making the restoration of order a daunting task in a nation desperately struggling to regain stability.

Questions are emerging if the upheaval and its aftermath are steering Bangladesh in a precarious direction. For instance, The Daily Star editorial on August 20 expressed concern about the turmoil affecting the civil administration after the fall of the Awami League government, which caused significant disruptions in regular activities and services. A report by the newspaper highlighted that the disorder, largely due to a lack of competent leadership, has taken hold in the ministries located at the Secretariat Building, with frequent processions observed throughout the past week. The editorial stressed the need for careful management of this situation to prevent the chaos from escalating into a complete breakdown of public services. It concluded: “This state of affairs cannot continue. A civil administration cannot continue to be dysfunctional, just as the police force cannot wallow in uncertainty.” Thus, the nation appears to be grappling with an unprecedented bustle of uncertainty, leaving many to wonder if this sitation will further deepen the crisis.

The Future of Great Power Competition Trajectories, Transitions, and Prospects for Catastrophic War

Thomas F. Lynch III

The dominant geostrategic framework of international relations today is that of a Great Power competition (GPC) among three rivalrous, globally dominant states: the United States, Russia, and China. After more than two decades of mainly cooperation and collaboration, they drifted into de facto competition at the end of the 2000s.1 By the middle of the 2010s, their undeclared but obvious rivalry intensified.2 Fully acknowledged GPC arrived in late 2017 when the United States published its National Security Strategy and declared a formal end to the 25-year era of U.S.-led globalization and active American democratization initiatives.

This article focuses on the vital interactions of the three contemporary Great Powers. How will their relative power evolve? Where will they compete, and how will this impact geostrategic norms, institutions, and interstate alignments? Finally, will their competition spark direct—and likely catastrophic—armed conflict anytime soon?

Predicting the future always is a fraught endeavor. It is an increasingly difficult task if one defines the future in terms of decades or generations. As a result, this article analyzes the future of contemporary Great Power competition for the remainder of the 2020s. It does so with frequent explicit references to historical patterns—touchpoints—associated with past multistate GPCs during the nation-state period that began in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia

China Has Built the Strongest Military in the Indo-Pacific

Mackenzie Eaglen

Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. has been the strongest military power in the Indo-Pacific. However, China’s rapid military growth in the Indo-Pacific is tipping the scales in regional strength. Too often, Chinese and U.S. military power is compared on a global scale, where the U.S. military, equipped and trained to project power across the planet, has the clear advantage.

But the military balance in Asia is becoming less clear. China has increasingly demonstrated its ability to build modern military capabilities at size and scale, and the ability to project that power regionally.

These shifting scales should be setting off alarm bells in Washington. The latest iteration of the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on the Chinese military has stated that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is evolving its capabilities and concepts to strengthen their ability to “fight and win wars” against the United States. House China Committee Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) has said that China “has enough weapons to overwhelm our air and missile defenses” that protect U.S. bases in the Pacific.

The Dictator’s Enabler Searching for the Real Zhou Enlai

Orville Schell

Is it possible for an intelligent, rational counterpart to work alongside an autocrat as ruthless as Mao Zedong without losing his soul? This is the Faustian question that hovers over Chen Jian’s new biography of China’s longtime premier, Zhou Enlai. Nearly 50 years after his death, Zhou still enjoys a reputation in China as a leader who valiantly constrained some of Mao’s worst excesses, managed to shield some colleagues from the most brutal aspects of his purges, and helped prevent the country from completely collapsing during his most tectonic revolutionary campaigns. Even some leaders outside China who worked with him remember Zhou as an important stabilizing presence: the American statesman Henry Kissinger, reminiscing about the role Zhou played in midwifing the 1970s rapprochement between China and the United States, described him not only as “one of the most intelligent people I have ever met” but also as “one of the most compassionate.” Such encomiums are hard to square, however, with the view of Zhou’s critics: that he was a sycophantic enabler who backed Mao even as Mao implemented some of the most irrational and savage political movements of the twentieth century.

In Zhou Enlai: A Life, Chen—an emeritus professor of history at Cornell who grew up in China—does not resolve this enigma. Instead, he vividly stages it in all its complexity so that readers are forced to wrestle with Zhou’s paradoxes on their own. Chen’s prodigious research using Chinese, English, and Russian sources helps him paint an old-fashioned but enthralling narrative. Free of the kind of jargon and theoretical gibberish that strangles much other academic writing, Chen’s biography brings twentieth-century Chinese history alive in new and very personal ways.

Russia and China Cheer UN Cybercrime Convention

Tobias B. Bacherle

The UN Convention on Cybercrime confirmed my worst worries. Digital authoritarianism won. Internet freedom and human rights lost.

The reactions puzzle me. This bad deal brought unconcealed joy, and happy tweets from diplomats. After three years, the ad hoc working group has agreed on a Cybercrime Convention. Hooray!? Unfortunately, not.

The convention touts creating an international set of rules that, at first glance, appear to complement the fight against crime in the digital space and translate it into international law. However, the agreed document has little to do with these decent goals.

Ever since Moscow first pushed for a Cybercrime Convention in 2017 at the UN, it has been clear that the autocratic dream team of Russia and China would use the negotiations. Worst of all, they used the convention to legitimize their ideas of mass surveillance.

To win the AI race, China aims for a controlled intelligence explosion

Nathan Attrill

China’s leader Xi Jinping has his eye on the transformative forces of artificial intelligence to revolutionise the country’s economy and society in the coming decades. But the disruptive, and potentially unforeseen, consequences of this technology may be more than the party-state can stomach.

While there are signs that the leadership is considering loosening the grip in this space, the Chinese Communist Party’s instincts towards overregulation, ideological conformity, and cautious incrementalism could stand in the way of China’s ambitions for global supremacy in AI.

Xi has made AI a strategic priority and wants its development to move quickly. Clearly frustrated by the perceived slow pace of China’s innovation and technological progress, Xi focused the third plenum meeting of the CCP on ways to accelerate his version of ‘Chinese modernisation’. At a politburo study session in January this year, he said he wanted China to ‘break away from the traditional economic growth model and productivity development path’ it has been on for the past 40 years.

America’s Iran policy a complete and utter failure - Opinion

Arie Perliger

The escalating conflict between Israel and Iran in recent months is frequently explained as another extension of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. After all, Hamas enjoys a close relationship with Iran, and both share the goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

But there’s more to it than that.

As a scholar of security studies who has researched conflicts in the Middle East for over 20 years, I would argue that a decade of US foreign policy in the region has failed to contain Iran’s ambitions and has instead substantially contributed to the current escalation.

As is clear from recent events along Israel’s northern border, Washington’s ability to project power and manage American interests in the Mideast has eroded so dramatically since 2010 that Iran has only limited concerns about the consequences of its proxies attacking US forces and directly attacking US allies such as Israel.

Iranian victories

The government of Iran, a Shia Muslim nation in a Sunni Muslim region, expands its regional influence by funding and militarily supporting violent proxy organizations in neighboring countries. Those groups, in turn, attack and destabilize those nations.

Gaza: Latest Evacuation Orders Leave Civilians Dangerously Close To Frontline

Daniel Johnson and Ziad Taleb

“Continuous” Israeli military evacuation orders in Gaza threaten already extremely vulnerable people in the enclave with further forced displacement, raising concerns that vital services could soon be cut off, UN humanitarians warned on Wednesday.

More than 10 months into the war in Gaza, sparked by Hamas-led terror attacks in Israel that left some 1,250 dead and more than 250 taken hostage, nearly all Gazans have been displaced at least once – and often multiple times – by repeated orders to evacuate and intense Israeli bombardment.

“Nowhere in the Gaza Strip is safe…It does feel like people are waiting for death,” said Louise Wateridge, spokesperson for the UN agency for Palestine refugees, in an online message on X.

“Areas that were (in) the humanitarian zone are now the frontline,” she told UN News, noting also that Gazans “are never more than a few blocks away from the frontline now”.

Israel Turns Attention To Targeting Hezbollah In Lebanon, Even As War In Gaza Rages

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says his military is gradually shifting its attention from Gaza to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, as Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants traded new cross-border attacks on Wednesday.

Later on Wednesday, President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone about the threats facing Israel.

The two leaders talked about efforts by the United States to support Israel “against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, to include ongoing defensive U.S. military deployments,” a White House statement about the call said.

Biden also “stressed the urgency of bringing the cease-fire and hostage release deal to closure and discussed upcoming talks in Cairo to remove any remaining obstacles,” the statement said.

In an overnight attack, Israel said it struck a weapons storage facility used by Hezbollah in eastern Lebanon close to the Syrian border. At least one person was killed and 30 injured, including children, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said in a statement.

Blown Bridges: As Ukraine’s Invasion Expands, Russia Closes In On Donbas City

Mike Eckel

Up until this weekend, the western reaches of the Seym River, a meandering waterway flowing west across the Kursk region into Ukraine, was spanned by three low, two-lane, concrete-and-asphalt bridges that served road traffic for the southern Russian territory.

As of August 20, however, those three bridges are now impassable, partially destroyed by a series of Ukrainian attacks that pose serious problems for Russian forces struggling to contain Ukraine’s two-week-old expanding invasion of Russia.

The goal of the effort — which has stunned Russia, surprised the West, and possibly rewritten the narrative of the entire war — remains uncertain, although President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signaled that at least one of the aims is to create a buffer zone.

The Difficulty of Decisive Victory in Ukraine

Benjamin Giltner

Once again, Ukraine is on the attack, launching a counter-offensive in Russia’s Kursk region—an all too familiar battlefield for the World War II historian. With the tactical success of this offensive, the Ukrainian military’s morale is bound to rise. Amid the analyses swirling around this ongoing battle, there is a subsection of defense scholars and policymakers who place a premium on achieving decisive victories on the battlefield. Specifically, they advocate for the U.S. send Ukraine more weapons to decisively defeat Russia. Taken at surface value, these proponents of decisive warfare have a point: the quicker Ukraine can win this war, the better. No one, especially the Ukrainians, wants to fight drawn-out wars. Yet, an extensive historical record shows multiple instances of attempts at decisive victories failing, and shows that Ukraine will unlikely be able to achieve blitzkrieg-like victory against Russia. To avoid a disastrous outcome from the pursuit of a decisive victory, Ukraine and its allies must begin some sort of peace process.

For starters, the success or failure of a decisive offensive depends on whether an attacking force can launch a rapid surprise attack. The last thing an attacking force wants is for the enemy to know where it will strike. Otherwise, the defender will have the time to fortify its defenses to counter these attacking forces. In war, defense typically has the advantage over offense. Defending forces can remain concealed throughout its home terrain, draw the enemy’s attacking forces further into its territory to overextend the attacking forces logistical lines, launch preemptive attacks, and use suppressive fires to prevent the attacker from advancing. This means that while an attacking military might try to knock out the enemy military in a swift attack, a capable defending force can force an attack into a battle of attrition.

From Middle-earth to Ukraine, the Enduring Value of Wylie’s General Theory of Power Control

Joe McGiffin

In the Lord of the Rings universe, Sauron sought dominion over Middle-earth by using overwhelming military force and superior technology—the one ring to rule them all. Once the ring was taken from him, he was temporarily defeated, but the geopolitical landscape eventually reverted to a lengthy stalemate. In the real world, scholarship is vivisecting the war in Ukraine to identify the one ring—the key to securing victory in the next conflict and achieving objectives in strategic competition. For instance, a recent monograph from the Institute for the Study of War makes a compelling case for the “tactical reconnaissance strike complex,” a synthesis of old-school military platforms integrated with drones to create the pinnacle of dominant battlespace knowledge.

However, this quest for the one ring is likely to end in anticlimax. There is no ring of power that will assure victory in future conflicts and investing time and effort in questing after one will only lead to frustration at best—and mass casualties at worst—in the next conflict. The chief problem with this quest is that it myopically focuses attention on the battlefields and not the greater strategic picture. This explains, in part, why the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive has been so surprising and successful. Winning a war is not about battlefield victories; it is about control.

Territorial integrity is the base of European security

Carl Bildt

Since 2014, Russia has brazenly violated Ukraine’s territorial integrity with incursions, illegal annexations and a full-scale invasion. And now Ukraine is violating Russia’s territorial integrity with its own incursion into the Kursk region.

There is, of course, a substantial difference between the two cases. The Russian Federation has officially, albeit illegally, absorbed Crimea and conquered territory in Ukraine’s Donbas region, and Vladimir Putin makes no secret of his intention to subjugate all of Ukraine. By contrast, Ukraine has made no territorial claims on any Russian land.

Still, for Europeans, territorial integrity is key, and Ukraine’s counteroffensive has brought the issue back into focus. While countries may have different reasons for supporting Ukraine in the conflict, defending the principle of territorial integrity is a shared imperative. After all, most of Europe’s borders were drawn in blood, and allowing them to be redrawn now would invite even more bloodshed. For decades, the current borders have been sacrosanct, because everyone understands that territorial integrity is the foundation underpinning peace on a continent that, until 1945, had been ravaged by centuries of war.

The Truth About the Nord Stream Pipelines Comes Out

Doug Bandow

Most wars are destructive and pointless. Such is the Russo–Ukrainian conflict. However it ends, little will have been gained for the mass death and destruction inflicted.

Moreover, the war could have been easily avoided. Russia’s Vladimir Putin should not have invaded Moscow’s neighbor. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky could have pursued the peace policy on which he ran. The allies had no cause to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders or absorb Kiev into their sphere of interest. So many people have suffered for so little reason.

As expected, truth was one of the war’s first victims. American and European officials assiduously sought to avoid responsibility for the conflict they encouraged. Having essentially brought NATO into Ukraine after promising to bring Ukraine into NATO, they denied the many assurances to the contrary they offered to and the many protests about their duplicity they received from Moscow.

Kiev, too, dispensed with the truth when in its interest and attempted to manipulate Washington and other NATO members. For instance, in November 2022 Zelensky urged NATO to attack Russia in response to an errant Ukrainian missile strike in Poland. If the American and Polish militaries knew the launch came from Ukraine, surely the Ukrainian military did so as well.

How Gaza war will affect the US election – and vice versa

Scott Lucas

As delegates assembled in Chicago for the start of the Democratic National Convention on August 19, something surreal was happening 6,000 miles away in Israel.

In Tel Aviv, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, declared that Israel had accepted a “bridging proposal” to move towards a ceasefire. He insisted that it was now up to Gaza’s Hamas leadership to say yes. Yet even as he spoke, officials from both the Israeli government and Hamas said there had been no movement in the peace talks in Qatar.

This is far from surprising, given that just three weeks before, Hamas’s chief negotiator and political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had been assassinated in Tehran, almost certainly by Israel.

Then, when Israel’s negotiators told their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on August 18 that they needed some room to maneuver – and that after months of negotiations, a deal based on his positions could not be agreed – he reportedly refused to budge.

So, as Blinken made his statement that a deal was within reach, Netanyahu was telling the families of hostages held by Hamas that he was “not sure there will be a deal.”

The US divide on foreign policy

Ivo Daalder

As Democrats gather in Chicago this week for their quadrennial convention, the mood is markedly different than it was just a month ago. At that time, the party’s presidential candidate was dropping in the polls after a disastrous debate performance and facing the prospect of defeat. Now, their candidate is riding a wave of enthusiasm, improving polling numbers and almost smelling victory in November.

However, though President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris has fundamentally altered the electoral contest, much remains the same. This is still a close election where a few thousand votes in a few battleground states will likely determine the outcome — and the country itself remains deeply divided and polarized.

This division concerns not only voter preferences for parties and their candidates but also major issues like foreign and security policy — long an area of much greater agreement across the political spectrum.

The change is especially apparent among Republican voters. The views of Reagan Republicans, who favor strong alliances, free markets and support democracy and freedom abroad, are now increasingly scarce among the party’s supporters. And the latest annual survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, conducted in late June, affirms this remarkable gap in how Republicans and Democrats see the world and America’s role in it.

A New Age of Extremes?

John O. McGinnis

Across the West, extremes on the political spectrum are surging. In last June’s election in France, the far-right National Front and the leftist Popular National Front secured 322 of the 577 seats and a commanding majority of the popular vote between them. While a minority of the Popular National Front are traditional French social democrats, the coalition was dominated by the far left and ran on a program of reckless spending and immiserating taxation. In Germany, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) has garnered attention, but now a new far-left party led by Sahra Wagenknecht is also on the rise. These trends are not isolated to France and Germany: in Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Austria, the fringes are gaining strength, reshaping the political landscape.

The two-party structure in the United States does provide some checks on extremism, but political scientists have shown that both Republicans and Democrats are drifting away from the center. An indication of this shift is the choice of vice-presidential candidates in our current election; while these candidates have strengths, they were selected over other candidates that would have stronger appeal to centrist voters. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, in particular, passed over candidates who were not only more moderate but from swing states that would help her avoid the fate of winning the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.

Ukraine's Invasion of Kursk

Lawrence Freedman

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia provides a salutary lesson for pundits, including me. However diligent we are in trying to follow events, and however good we may be in explaining what has already happened and drawing conclusions for the future, our appreciation of a developing situation is unavoidably circumscribed. We tend to respond to disruptive moves such as this in ways that reflect our established views.

Those convinced that Ukraine can turn the tide of war see the attack on Kursk as an exciting indication that at last this may be happening; those who believe that Russia is bound to prevail insist that this is a monumental blunder that will hasten Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. The positive can note the boost to Ukrainian morale and compare favourably the amount of Russian territory acquired by Ukraine in a matter of days with the amount of Ukrainian territory captured by Russia at huge cost over months. The negative warn about the vulnerability of the soldiers now in exposed positions in Kursk while those defending tenuous positions in Donetsk are denied desperately needed reinforcements.

After two and a half years of war we should all be wary by now of coming to quick judgements. This is not because we dare not comment until this operation has run its course. There are still things that are worth noting about what has already happened. It is more the need to respect the dialectics of war, the duel between two opposing sides, so that ends shift according to available means. In long-standing and intense conflicts, such as that between Russia and Ukraine, particular moves are rarely decisive.

How Artificial Intelligence Challenges The Concept Of Authorship – Analysis

Leslie Alan Horvitz

If AI creates the content, who owns the work? Answering this complex question is crucial to understanding the legal and ethical implications of AI-generated content.

Producing art and text using computers is not new. It has been happening since the 1970s. What is new is that computers are acting independently—without programmers providing any input; the computer program generates the work, even if programmers have set the parameters.

Not only are computers acting more independently but the quality of the content being generated has also increased. How this content is used has changed, too, and it may not always be created with the best motives. This is the new frontier of artificial intelligence or AI.

Coursera, a for-profit open online course provider, stated, “Artificial intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems capable of performing tasks that historically required human intelligence, such as recognizing speech, making decisions, and identifying patterns. AI is an umbrella term encompassing various technologies, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.”

Army wraps up 100-day sprint, plots next steps for AI

Jared Serbu

Fresh off of 100 days of “sprints” designed to eliminate stumbling blocks toward artificial intelligence adoption, the Army says it’s developed a clearer picture of what it wants to achieve between now and 2026, when it plans to become the first military service with a formal program of record specifically for AI.

Next up will be another 500 days of planning work as the Army builds out what it learned during the first series of sprints, and also adds two new objectives to its study plan: one initiative dubbed “Break AI,” and another called “Counter AI.”

The Break AI line of effort is based on the assumption that the technology space will continue to move toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence — models whose behavior might resemble human thinking — rather than current technologies that tend to generate predictable outcomes, given the same data inputs.

“It’s about the notion of how we actually test and evaluate artificial intelligence,” Young Bang, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology told attendees at AFCEA’s TechNet conference in Augusta, Ga. Wednesday. “As we move towards AGI, how do we actually test something that we don’t know what the outcome of, or what the behaviors are going to be? You can’t test it the way that we test deterministic models, and we need industry’s help here.”

Artificial intelligence at war

Peter Layton

There’s a global arms race under way to work out how best to use artificial intelligence for military purposes. The Gaza and Ukraine wars are now accelerating this. These conflicts might inform Australia and others in the region as they prepare for a possible AI-fuelled ‘hyperwar’ closer to home, given that China envisages fighting wars using automated decision-making under the rubric of what it calls ‘intelligentization’.

The Gaza war has shown that the use of AI in tactical targeting can drive military strategy by encouraging decision-making bias. At the start of the conflict, an Israeli Defence Force AI system called Lavender apparently identified 37,000 people linked to Hamas. Its function quickly shifted from gathering long-term intelligence to rapidly identifying individual operatives to target. Foot soldiers were easier to swiftly locate and attack than senior commanders, so they dominated the attack schedule.

Lavender created a simplified digital model of the battlefield, allowing dramatically faster targeting and much higher rates of attacks than in earlier conflicts. Human analysts did review Lavender’s recommendations before authorising attacks, but they quickly grew to trust it, considering it more reliable. Humans often spent only 20 seconds considering Lavender’s target recommendations before approving them.

Too Much of a Good Thing? The Armed Forces’ “Can-Do” Culture

Cdre Steve Prest RN (Retd)

Our ‘Can-Do’ culture needs to go. Defence is simultaneously trying to do too much and yet not achieving enough. Almost as paradoxically, the solution lies in trying to do less and achieving more.

This is the secret to success in Agile methodologies like Scrum, so beloved of senior leaders in Defence at the moment. In his book SCRUM (the Gospel according to St Jeff, Chapter 5), Jeff Sutherland exhorts teams not to multi-task. Focusing on the highest priority and then moving to the next one once it’s completed in successive sprints, with multi-disciplinary teams dedicated to rapidly developing the product. That’s the key. The book claims that applying this, and other elements of the methodology, will allow organisations to achieve ”twice as much in half the time”.

Defence is its own worst enemy

Perhaps so, but Defence has an extremely large and complicated portfolio and needs to do lots all at once. It’s hard to find someone in Defence who only has one job! Nonetheless, in trying to apply such lessons, Defence is its own worst enemy. We always try to do too much. We just can’t help ourselves, which is why we end up with an overheated equipment programme and burnt-out Armed Forces that have a dreadful material state, overworked people, and poorly provisioned stockpiles.

Army pursuing new electronic warfare architecture

Mark Pomerleau

After deciding to split up its integrated signals intelligence and electronic warfare platform, the Army is pursuing a new architecture for its EW suite.

Following operational demonstrations, the service determined that the concept for the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team was not going to work the way it was intended or gain the efficiencies desired.

TLS-BCT was designed as the first integrated signals intelligence, cyber and electronic warfare platform, devised roughly six years ago. It has been described as a key enabler of Army priorities — considering the service has been without a program-of-record jammer for decades — that will support multi-domain operations. As initially conceived, it was to be mounted on Strykers and then Army Multi-Purpose Vehicle variant prototypes.

Outside experts had always voiced concern with such a setup given the highly classified nature and authorities that come with signals intelligence and the issues associated with putting that on the same platform as electronic warfare tools.