Indian Strategic Studies: 09/03/24

3 September 2024

How to secure the China front - Opinion

Lt Gen Harinder Singh (Retd)

India will have to make it clear to China that it opposes any unilateral military action. Any Chinese attempt to alter the status quo will be met with stiff resistance, and if necessary, with counter action.

China’s growing military might and its assertive posture along the Himalayas pose a tough challenge to India. It is incumbent upon India to craft a border guarding strategy that not only safeguards its rightful territorial claims, but deters China from undertaking any unilateral military action. Until a mutually acceptable boundary solution is found, India has no option but to build its capacity to deter China from altering the status quo.

Building India’s capacity would imply acquiring and deploying assets for strategic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), augmenting border infrastructure and troop habitat, fielding the right mix of weapon-platforms, creating an asymmetric edge, stockpiling strategic reserves of war material and restructuring the current force to provide high levels of military readiness and response action. But deterring the Chinese military is not simply a matter of restructuring, equipping and reorienting the border guarding force; it is also about signalling a strong military intent and willingness to use force.

What Would Trump Victory Mean For India? – Analysis

Subrata Majumder

Come September, global futurists are scrambling to anticipate how a second term of Trump’s Presidency bodes for the world and India. According to the latest opinion poll by New York Times, Kamla Harris has a marginal edge over Donald Trump. But, it does not foretell the demise of Trump chances for a second term.

Kamla Harris, though half Indian by heritage, does not augur well for special priority on USA-India relations. The reality lies with the background during the Biden administration, when strengthening of US-India relation was geared by President initiative, rather than Harris’ Indian heritage, the then Vice-President..

It is a mix of concern and comforts, If Trump comes back in power. Trump’s emphatic focus on protectionism is a matter of concern. At the same time Trump’s hard stand against China bodes well for India in the wake of Trump likely using India to counterbalance China in Indo Pacific region.

Donald Trump said he would impose a 10 percent import tariff on all nations and 60 percent on China. His America First policies will get a push to instill confidence of Americanization in every policy where “Every decision on trade, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families”, which was outlined during Trump’s first term

Taiwan — Lessons From Ukraine

Doug Livermore

As they gaze out at the straits separating their island state from China, the Taiwanese military can see an awful lot. It’s not a pretty picture. Radars detect whole squadrons of Chinese attack aircraft blithely crossing into Taiwan’s air defense zone, spy balloons drifting over the country, or naval and other vessels taking station to practice strangulation of the island state. Chinese propagandists make no secret of their goal — enforced Taiwanese capitulation or invasion.

How to fight this war, if and when it comes? Taiwan is preparing — see its increased orders of US equipment and its record defense budget — but it is also taking note of what is happening in Ukraine. Because the nature of war has changed and the old answers are very likely inadequate to meet the threat.

On the plus side, as the threat grows, so do the defensive possibilities. Ukraine is, in many ways, a completely different strategic challenge, but if the right lessons are drawn, it can help inform a smarter and more resilient approach to the Chinese menace. The war is, after all, the most recent large-scale, advanced tech war the world has seen.

How East Asia's Population Crunch Could Lead to Crisis

Micah McCartney

The fast-shifting demographic landscape of East Asia's top economies is a slow-moving crisis, one analyst said at a talk hosted by U.S. think tank the Asia Society Policy Institute last week.

Others said the economic and social impact of the trends in South Korea and its developed neighbors, driven by plummeting birthrates and aging workforces, could be offset if governments tackle the root issues and embrace labor-saving solutions.

South Korea's fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.72 births expected per woman during her lifetime, despite over $200 billion in government funding in the past 16 years on initiatives to encourage child-rearing. Neighboring China (1.0), Japan (1.2) and Taiwan (0.85) also rank near the bottom of fertility rate tables.

A fertility rate of 2.1 is considered necessary to replace a population.

Dwindling workforce

Two decades from now, "you're going to see (South Korea's) population of the working age side drop by about 10 and a half million people," Troy Stangarone, director of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy at Wilson Center, said citing South Korean government statistics. "So that's roughly one-third of the workforce will leave the workforce over the next two decades."

China’s Views on AI Safety Are Changing—Quickly

Matt Sheehan

Over the past two years, China’s artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem has undergone a significant shift in how it views and discusses AI safety. For many years, some of the leading AI scientists in Western countries have been warning that future AI systems could become powerful enough to pose catastrophic risks to humanity. Concern over these risks—often grouped under the umbrella term “AI safety”—has sparked new fields of technical research and led to the creation of governmental AI safety institutes in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. But for most of the past five years, it was unclear whether these concerns about extreme risks were shared by Chinese scientists or policymakers.

Today, there is mounting evidence that China does indeed share these concerns. A growing number of research papers, public statements, and government documents suggest that China is treating AI safety as an increasingly urgent concern, one worthy of significant technical investment and potential regulatory interventions. Momentum around AI safety first began to build within China’s elite technical community, and it now appears to be gaining some traction in the country’s top policy circles. In a potentially significant move, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) released a major policy document in July 2024 that included a call to create “oversight systems to ensure the safety of artificial intelligence.”

China’s new stealth warship unveiled in leaked images

Dylan Malyasov

The vessel, identified as a next-generation corvette, represents a significant development for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), being the first of its kind in their fleet.

The warship, which appears to be a successor to the Type 056 corvettes (NATO reporting name: Jiangdao-class), has drawn considerable attention from defense analysts. Some speculate that the vessel may serve as a test platform for new technologies, while others suggest it could be part of an export order for an undisclosed foreign buyer.

Andreas Rupprecht, an experienced observer of China’s defense sector, commented on the development: “The ship could serve as a comprehensive test platform, which would align with its advanced design and capabilities.”

The corvette’s design emphasizes stealth, incorporating large, flat, angled surfaces that are meticulously crafted to reduce various signatures. These features include minimizing optical, infrared, acoustic, and radar signatures, enhancing the ship’s ability to evade detection in hostile environments. The advanced hull design further highlights the PLAN’s focus on survivability and effectiveness in potential combat situations.

Hong Kong’s New Strategic Role After the Third Plenum

Sunny Cheung

The Third Plenary Session (三中全会) of the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) signaled an evolving role for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) in the national strategy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). At a recent forum held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre a month after the meetings in Beijing, key figures such as Shen Chunyao (沈春耀), Deputy Director of the Constitution and Law Committee of the National People’s Congress, and Wang Wentao (王文涛), Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Minister of Commerce, went to Hong Kong and outlined Hong Kong’s future responsibilities in the context of the country’s broader reforms (Hong Kong Government [HKG], August 26).

With over 500 attendees, including government officials, Executive Council members, and Legislative Council members, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu (李家超) emphasized that the third plenum had put forward over 300 reform measures covering political, economic, cultural, social, ecological, and national security areas. He called on all sectors in Hong Kong to deeply study the directives and apply them in their respective roles (HKG, August 26).

Iran cyber operations exposed in reports from Google, Microsoft

Jonathan Greig

Iran’s military is using an array of cyber campaigns to root out people accused of helping the country’s adversaries, according to a new report from Google.

Researchers at the company’s Mandiant unit uncovered a web of social media accounts, fake websites and more used by Iran’s military to gain information on “Iranians and domestic threats who may be collaborating with intelligence and security agencies abroad, particularly in Israel.”

“The collected data may be leveraged to uncover human intelligence (HUMINT) operations conducted against Iran and to persecute any Iranians suspected to be involved in these operations,” the researchers explained.

Mandiant attributed the campaign to Iran’s government based on the tactics, techniques and targeting seen. The security company noted that it saw no relation between this campaign and the recently discovered operations targeting U.S. elections.

More than 40 fake recruiting websites written in Farsi and Arabic were discovered, with most offering jobs in Israel. Visitors of the website were asked to enter their personal information and other data.

Four Geopolitical Disruptions and How to Exploit Them

Nadia Schadlow

In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about a breakthrough promising “a new and important source of energy.” The scientist cautioned that it could “conceivably” be weaponized into an extremely powerful bomb, a conclusion Nazi Germany might have also reached. More than eight decades later, technological breakthroughs and geopolitical shifts are still disrupting the world—for better or worse. Today, four emerging disruptions will demand the attention of whomever the American people choose as their president:

1. An authoritarian axis is rapidly coalescing around China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, disrupting the belief that an international community has taken shape in the aftermath of the Cold War.

2. Climate alarmism and the prohibitively expensive green transition will give way to energy sobriety, which recognizes the need for abundant, reliable, and cheap power.

3. A new realism about trade will see beliefs about free trade cast aside in favor of addressing imbalanced trade and the mercantilist practices of countries like China.

4. The transformational potential of artificial intelligence will affect individuals, societies, economies, and political systems in ways no one can foresee. It could be the most disruptive development of all.

U.S. Military Benefit from Next Generation of Weapons

Thomas Kafka

Time marches on, and those who can take advantage of generational changes stand to benefit, while those who remain stuck in the past will soon find themselves obsolete.

Think of how that looks in the workforce. “Four generations—baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, and Generation Z—coexist in today’s workplace,” the Marsh McLennan Agency writes. “Employers are tasked with understanding and managing each cohort’s unique expectations and needs, delivering a workplace experience and benefits package that keeps them engaged and validated.” Those generational differences are a strength.

Employers are not forcing Gen Z to use the steel filing cabinets that greeted Boomers when they entered the workforce. The new technology that younger workers are skilled at is an advantage, and employers are exploiting that advantage to race forward.

There should be a similar approach in national defense. It is time for the Pentagon and White House to move ahead with the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. Instead, too many are trying to cling to the fifth generation of weapons, as represented by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program.

Ukraine Strikes Distant Russian Region for First Time

Andrew Stanton

Using drones, Ukraine this week hit a Russian region hundreds of miles from the border for the first time.

The drone strike targeted the Zenit oil depot in Russia's Kirov region on Wednesday, reported The Kyiv Independent, an online Ukrainian newspaper. Russia shot down two of the drones, while three others fell and started a fire in a nearby town.

There were no injuries reported, but the strike caused fires at two oil depots, according to the report.

The strike marks the first time Ukraine has attacked the Kirov region, which is more than 700 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border, since the war began more than two years ago, the newspaper said.

Kirov Governor Alexander Sokolov said there was no damage or disruption to operations after the strike, reported The Moscow Times, an online newspaper.

The Crumbling Foundations of American Strength

Amy Zegart

When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appeared imminent in early 2022, U.S. intelligence officials were so confident that Russian tanks would roll quickly to victory that staff evacuated the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. Based on traditional measures of power, the intelligence assessment made sense. In 2021, Russia ranked fifth in the world in defense spending, whereas Ukraine was a distant 36th, behind Thailand and Belgium. Yet more than two years later, Russia and Ukraine are still fighting their brutal war to a standstill.

The Misguided Emphasis on U.S. Political Campaign Hacks

Gavin Wilde

The United States currently has over three dozen active, ongoing national emergencies on issues ranging from transnational narco-trafficking to political repression in Belarus. One of them, initially declared by former president Donald Trump in 2018, is due to be renewed by the White House in coming weeks: It addresses foreign interference in U.S. elections. The original executive order, which deems “the unauthorized accessing of election and campaign infrastructure” and “the covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation” as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security, gained renewed urgency in August when Iran attempted to hack the accounts of the U.S. presidential candidates’ advisers.

However, as this particular emergency stretches into a seventh year, which aspects of the threat truly remain unusual and extraordinary? More critically, the latest hacking attempt offers a reason to question the wisdom of linking the technical mechanics of the vote and the integrity of the campaigns themselves under a single “election security” umbrella.

Will Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Change the Trajectory of the War

Isaac Chotiner

Less than a month ago, Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, overwhelming Russian border defenses and taking hundreds of soldiers captive. The move has boosted Ukrainian spirits during a year in which Russia has made steady gains on the battlefield. Vladimir Putin has not responded with any significant counterassaults—surely to the relief of Ukraine’s Western allies, who had worried that any Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil could be met with a devastating response. But Putin’s next moves remain uncertain, as does the effect this attack will have on the Russian public’s perceptions of the war, which is now in its third year.

Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, founded, in 2018, R. Politik, a political-analysis firm, which is based in France. I recently reached out to Stanovaya, who is more comfortable corresponding in English via e-mail; we exchanged a few rounds of questions and answers. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below. In it, we discuss whether Putin truly has any red lines, why the Ukrainian incursion may be less of a threat to Putin than it appears, and the odds for any sort of negotiated end to the war.

There have been many events—economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the West, initial Ukrainian successes on the battlefield—that have made people think Putin might need to change course. He hasn’t. Do you have any reason to think this latest incursion is different?

America Is More Desperate for a Cease-Fire Than Israel and Hamas

Anchal Vohra

Last weekend’s negotiations in Cairo for a cease-fire in Gaza collapsed as both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas’s leadership refused to budge on key differences. An Arab official aware of the ongoing negotiations told Foreign Policy that the technical teams are meeting in Doha this week but that he didn’t expect a cease-fire “anytime soon.”

Could Civil War Erupt in America?

Ravi Agrawal

Whenever the United States encounters a tragedy, politicians and commentators find themselves reaching for a lazy platitude: “This is not America.” In other words, bad things don’t happen here—they happen there.

Exploring Ukraine’s Future: Alternative Scenarios

Frank Hoffman

Wise leaders recognize that history does not follow a fixed linear path, and that the greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of examining alternative futures. The use (and the abuse) of scenarios is well established in the corporate world. Scenarios are used to explore the range of possible futures in the defense-planning business, as they help address the plausible multiple futures that policymakers may have to face. This article addresses potentially troubling scenarios involving the Russo-Ukrainian war that will impact US policy in the near future.

As the noted futurist Peter Schwartz stresses, scenario planning is purpose-built for uncertain times. Scenarios are not predictions, instead they are an antidote against false certainty and presumption predictions by policymakers. They best serve as a catalyst for serious reflection about critical assumptions. This prepares decision-makers for inevitable surprises that may arise, making their institutions more resilient and responsive. I fear the war in Ukraine will not continue as a stalemate for long, and US decision-makers need to be prepared to adapt quickly to changing circumstances.

There has been a proliferation of scenario-based assessments about Ukraine recently, indicating a high degree of uncertainty in today’s security environment. Strategic analysts at the Stimson Center have explored scenarios centered around a US retrenchment from Europe. A European think tank has posited six “scary policy scenarios” anticipating a change in the US government. Another excellent product was produced by the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy in Brussels titled Shades of Grim: Scenarios for Ukraine and Global Order.

Ukraine in Kursk: a lesson in strategic audacity

Mick Ryan

The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians. There are many reasons for this, including Russia not assembling all the available pieces of intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian attack, the Ukrainian deception plan, and a failure of humility on the part of Putin’s regime and military.

The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.

Ukraine has shown that, fortunately, strategic audacity is not entirely dead in democratic nations.

In early August, reports emerged of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast. For the first 24 hours, most observers – and the Russian high command – assumed that this was just another small-scale, unconventional Ukrainian operations of the kind it has mounted twice into Belgorod.

Pentagon’s CJADC2 dreams ‘very aspirational’ right now, Marine Corps general says

Lee Ferran

As hard as the military services have been working for years towards the Pentagon’s dream of an all-seeing, all-connected battle network, inside the Marine Corps it’s all looking “very aspirational at best, right now,” according to a senior Marine officer.

“Within our own service, if we’re trying to get unit A to talk to unit B in the same organization, sometimes we struggle,” said Brig. Gen. William Wilburn, Jr., currently serving as the deputy director for Combat Support at the National Security Agency. “When we have a joint exercise [and] we bring in a different service, the shortcomings are even more glaring. … It’s going to be even harder when we’re trying to talk to our coalition partners.

“So it’s a goal for the Marine Corps. We’re driving toward that goal. We’ve made some strides, but we started first making sure within our own organization that we can talk,” he said on a panel at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance summit here Tuesday.

Haiti’s Window of Opportunity

Renata Segura and Diego Da Rin

In late July, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield visited Haiti and sounded an upbeat note. “I do have a sense of hope,” she said at a press conference, citing the “many people here on the ground” who were “working every day to create a better future for the Haitian people.” She was referring, in part, to the roughly 400 Kenyan police officers who have arrived in Port-au-Prince as part of an international peacekeeping force that is eventually projected to number 2,500. The hope is that this UN Security Council–approved mission—formally referred to as the Multinational Security Support mission (MSS)—will allow Haiti to assert control over the country’s gangs, which have established de facto control over much of the capital’s neighborhoods and plunged the country into a dramatic humanitarian crisis. “This mission has opened a door to progress,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

Haiti could certainly use more progress. Since even before President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in July 2021, the country has been suffering from intense violence. In the past three years, around 12,000 people have been killed, and some 600,000 have been displaced across the country. Gangs have established control or influence over around 80 percent of Port-au-Prince and have been spreading their presence to other regions.

Cost-benefit of European mass migration: mostly just crime and billions spent on welfare

Ralph Schoellhammer

We need to redefine the term terrorism. After 9/11 a common assertion was that, while terrorism certainly is tragic, the risk of dying in a car accident was still significantly higher than in a terrorist attack. Twenty-three years have passed since Al-Qaeda attacked the United States, and despite the threats made by the late Osama bin Laden and his followers, there has been no other attack of such dimensions. Yet somehow the sense of insecurity has not disappeared, and as it turned out violent terrorism is only a symptom of a much broader issue.

The comparison with traffic accidents was always frivolous. Accidents are by nature tragic because nobody involved wants them to happen. Even reckless drivers or careless car manufacturers do not intentionally plan to kill people, and if it happens, they do not celebrate it. Therefore, most people accept the risks of traffic as an acceptable trade-off compared with all the benefits that modern transportation entails. Although accidents involving cars could be brought down to zero via banning cars, nobody would seriously entertain such a measure. The conveniences brought by the automobile far exceed our fear of the risk that also comes with it.

In Europe, a growing number of people is now asking which conveniences have been achieved by mass-immigration from non-Western countries, and what are the countervailing benefits that justify the ever-growing risks that come with it. A cost-benefit analysis of the kind of migration Europe is experiencing at the moment reveals that it is almost all cost, with hardly any benefits.

Technofascism: The Government Pressured Tech Companies To Censor Users – OpEd

John and Nisha Whitehead

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

We Are All Agents: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration

Thom Hawkins

If you could invite anyone to a dinner party, alive or dead, who would it be? Ghandi? Albert Einstein? Dorothy Parker? Just imagine the conversation! Walter Landor did, in the 1820s, in a series of published “Imaginary Conversations.” In these dialogues, Socrates talks with Cicero, Shakespeare with Ben Jonson, and Michelangelo with Raphael. Landor (as did others who worked in this form) put in the effort to represent the figures appropriate to their respective personalities and philosophical stances, like a fantasy league for intellectuals.

Today, we can prompt a large language model (LLM) and, assuming that the corpus it was trained on includes work by and about the selected individuals, it can create a passable dialogue in seconds. (Thanks anyway for your labors, Walter—you could have saved yourself the effort if you simply waited two hundred years.) The result won’t necessarily generate new insights—yet—but the models are improving daily.

New Research Finds Stark Global Divide in Ownership of Powerful AI Chips

Billy Perrigo

When we think of the “cloud,” we often imagine data floating invisibly in the ether. But the reality is far more tangible: the cloud is located in huge buildings called data centers, filled with powerful, energy-hungry computer chips. Those chips, particularly graphics processing units (GPUs), have become a critical piece of infrastructure for the world of AI, as they are required to build and run powerful chatbots like ChatGPT.

As the number of things you can do with AI grows, so does the geopolitical importance of high-end chips—and where they are located in the world. The U.S. and China are competing to amass stockpiles, with Washington enacting sanctions aimed at preventing Beijing from buying the most cutting-edge varieties. But despite the stakes, there is a surprising lack of public data on where exactly the world’s AI chips are located.

A new peer-reviewed paper, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication, aims to fill that gap. “We set out to find: Where is AI?” says Vili Lehdonvirta, the lead author of the paper and a professor at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. Their findings were stark: GPUs are highly concentrated in only 30 countries in the world, with the U.S. and China far out ahead. Much of the world lies in what the authors call “Compute Deserts:” areas where there are no GPUs for hire at all.

ACE Calls for More Air Bases. Can Air Force and Army Find a Way to Defend Them All?

Chris Gordon

The U.S. Air Force’s plan to operate from an expanded network of bases around the Pacific is facing a familiar but fundamental challenge: how to protect those locations from a Chinese missile attack.

Service leaders have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of Agile Combat Employment that calls for more operating locations, even those that are austere or remote. The idea is to make it more difficult for China to target American airpower in a potential fight, as the Air Force moves its planes from base to base.

But since China boasts a growing arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles that could put many airfields within its reach, shifting aircraft from base to base is only part of the solution. The service also needs a way to protect its fleet and its Airmen on the ground.

“I would feel more confident if we had a more robust, active base defense, quite frankly,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin told reporters recently. “That’s one of those where we’ve been working with the Army, and that’s something that the Department has taken on as a joint requirement that we need to improve our base defenses.”