Indian Strategic Studies: 09/06/24

6 September 2024

Taiwan-India Chips Cooperation and the Logic of Choosing India

Konark Bhandari

In recent years, Taiwan vaunted semiconductor industry has stepped into the limelight, as policy wonks discuss lessons derived from its technological prowess, artificial intelligence, and now even export control regulations. Lastly, no debate on de-risking and onshoring is complete without examining the role that Taiwanese electronics and semiconductor companies play in the ongoing recalibration of global supply chains.

At the same time, India has been keen to position itself as an alternative for companies that are pursuing a “China plus one” strategy. In light of this, India is increasingly seeking investment from Taiwanese companies to offset Chinese influence on its own industry. This article examines what India could do to enhance its engagement with Taiwan’s semiconductor industry—and why Taiwan should look favorably to India as a destination for investment. It outlines specific focus areas where India could elicit further investment from Taiwan, and offers recommendations for how to boost economic cooperation between the two nations.

The ideas presented in this article reflect discussions held during a virtual discussion hosted by Carnegie India in March 2024 on economic relations between Taiwan and India. The themes and suggestions presented in this article also take stock of both countries’ industrial policy frameworks and how to boost bilateral economic cooperation accordingly.

Thanks To U.S. & India, Israel’s Weapons Sale ‘Breaking Records’ Despite War On Multiple Fronts

Prakash Nanda

What is more noteworthy is that Israeli defense industries like Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and Elbit are not only producing a formidable list of advanced weapon systems for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but also finding increasing demand for their products in the international arms bazaars.

For instance, a just-released news report says that Rafael has attained robust financial results for the second quarter of 2024. The company achieved sales of NIS 3.9 billion ($1.1 billion), marking a 25% increase compared to the same period last year.

New orders in the second quarter reached NIS 6.4 billion ($1.7 billion), a 65% jump from the same quarter in 2023. For the first half of 2024, Rafael secured orders totaling NIS 14.2 billion ($3.8 billion), representing a 34% increase compared to the first half of 2023.

Rafael’s net profit for the first half of 2024 stood at NIS 364 million ($98 million), up from 110 million in the second half of 2023. In the second quarter alone, net profit reached NIS 132 million, compared to 61 million in the same period last year.

Bin Laden’s Catastrophic Success

Nelly Lahoud

On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda carried out the deadliest foreign terrorist attack the United States had ever experienced. To Osama bin Laden and the other men who planned it, however, the assault was no mere act of terrorism. To them, it represented something far grander: the opening salvo of a campaign of revolutionary violence that would usher in a new historical era. Although bin Laden was inspired by religion, his aims were geopolitical. Al Qaeda’s mission was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together

Al Qaeda Expands Its Footprint in Afghanistan

Jack Detsch

Al Qaeda has set up nine new terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2024, a sign of the Taliban’s increasing tolerance of terror groups in their backyard in spite of pledges to crack down, according to an Afghan resistance leader visiting Washington this week.

China’s Starlink-Rival Triggers Anxiety In Washington; Top U.S. Commander Wants To Keep A Tab On Qianfan G60

Sakshi Tiwari

As China ramps up satellite launches in an effort to develop its own version of the Starlink satellite network, the United States is faced with a new challenge: piles of space debris that would likely be generated in the process of releasing these satellites and the opacity surrounding such space trash.

The commander of the U.S. Space Command, Gen. Stephen N. Whiting, said he hopes Beijing will alert Washington the next time it launches a rocket that leaves behind persistent space debris instead of forcing the United States to figure out the orbital mess on its own.

Speaking last week at a forum in Colorado, General Stephen Whiting pointed to two instances in the previous two years where Chinese satellite launches left large amounts of trash in orbit.

“I hope next time there’s a rocket like that that leaves a lot of debris, it’s not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we’re getting communications that help us to understand that, just like we communicate with others,” the Space Command chief said at an event organized by Mitchell Institute of Aerospace Studies.

Government Cracks Down on SOEs but Runs Risks

Ann Listerud

On June 26 this year, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) issued a set of five case studies of corporate fraud that the court described as commonplace and a high priority for regulators to investigate and prosecute (STCN, June 27). In the opening paragraphs, the SPC says that these fraudulent cases appear in both private and state-owned enterprises, signaling that even companies owned and managed by local governments are not exempt from prosecution.

Three days later, the PRC’s financial regulatory bodies issued a co-signed guiding opinion on reducing financial fraud and implementing more comprehensive punishment for those caught in the act (MEE, July 17). Once again, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are called out alongside privately owned ones. The opinion was signed by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Finance, the People’s Bank of China, the Financial Regulatory Bureau, and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. On July 17, the State Council put its seal of approval on the statement and reissued it alongside a call for all provinces, ministries, commissions, and institutions that it oversees to carry out the contents of these opinions.

Amid coverage of attempts by Xi Jinping’s administration to tackle corruption within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the implications this could have for the PRC’s military ambitions, this latest dive into institutional corruption aimed at SOEs has received less international coverage. Though the latter does not directly affect the country’s military capabilities, the anticorruption campaign will have a huge effect on civil society and has long term implications for the PRC’s domestic stability and its prospects for research and development.

Diplomatic Dexterity - United States vs. China

Monte Erfourth

THE COMPETITION REPORT SERIES

The Strategy Central Great Power Competition report series details the United States and China’s great power competition in the first half 2024. It offers an analysis to help strategists grasp the current rivalry between these two superpowers regarding national power, economics, military power, and diplomacy. This is the last segment covering great power competition between the U.S. and China and will focus on diplomatic competition.

This article focuses on the diplomatic dynamics that have shaped U.S.-China relations throughout the first half of 2024. In the evolving landscape of great power competition, diplomacy emerges as a critical tool for both the United States and China, shaping their strategic maneuvers on the global stage. This article delves into the diplomatic efforts of these two superpowers in the first half of 2024, highlighting their contrasting approaches to asserting influence and managing global relations. While China has aggressively expanded its diplomatic footprint through high-profile events and strategic partnerships, the United States has focused on strengthening alliances, promoting democratic values, and addressing global security challenges. The report underscores that the United States holds a strategic advantage through its deep-rooted alliances and partnerships and its commitment to multilateral engagement. It offers a compelling analysis of how diplomacy continues to be a decisive factor in the rivalry between these great powers.

7 US troops hurt in raid that killed 15 ISIS fighters

Nicholas Slayton

American and Iraqi forces killed more than a dozen ISIS fighters in a raid this week targeting leaders of the terrorist group. The operation, done early in the morning on Aug. 29, killed 15 ISIS fighters, according to U.S. Central Command, but seven American service members were injured as well, according to reports.

The operation was done in western Iraq, according to CENTCOM, and the joint American and Iraqi force took on ISIS fighters armed with “numerous weapons, grenades, and explosive ‘suicide’ belts,” although the U.S. did not say how many total ISIS fighters were engaged. No civilians were reported injured in the raid.

“This operation targeted ISIS leaders to disrupt and degrade ISIS’ ability to plan, organize, and conduct attacks against Iraqi civilians, as well as U.S. citizens, allies, and partners throughout the region and beyond,” CENTCOM said in its statement.

CENTCOM, as it often does in these types of announcements, was vague on specifics of the operation. However, Iraqi security forces shared some details in their own statement. The mission involved airstrikes followed by an “airborne operation” in the Anbar Province. 14 ISIS members, including an unspecified number of “important leaders” were killed, the Iraqi military said on X.

Hostage deaths could pile pressure on Netanyahu to agree Gaza ceasefire

Bethan McKernan

Overnight, the rumours spread: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had found bodies in Gaza. Everyone in Israel knew the corpses were likely to be hostages seized on 7 October. The grim details – how many, their identities, and how and when they died – slowly emerged during the early hours of Sunday, to mounting sorrow and fury across the country.

The bodies of six people kidnapped alive by Hamas – Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Master Sgt Ori Danino – were found in a Rafah tunnel 20 metres underground, a kilometre away from where another hostage, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found in relatively decent health last week. Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American citizen, appeared in a Hamas video in April. It was clear from the footage that his left hand had been amputated.

Initial autopsies indicated that all six had died from shots to the head and had otherwise been in frail but stable condition, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported. The IDF said it believed the hostages were killed on Friday or Saturday, shortly before troops arrived at the location, to prevent their rescue.

Hamas’s Devastating Murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin

Franklin Foer

There was a thin hope that despite everything, he might actually return home. It was stoked by a series of images that unexpectedly emerged.

Not long after Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s abduction on October 7, CNN stumbled on video of terrorists loading the Berkeley-born, Jerusalem-raised 24-year-old into a pickup truck, the stump of one of his arms wrapped in a tourniquet because a grenade had blown off the rest. It was proof of life.

In April, at the beginning of Passover, Hamas released a propaganda video. Then there was no doubting his full-blooded existence. Speaking to his captors’ camera, he rested the remnant of his arm in his lap. His once-wavy locks were clipped close to the scalp. Untangling his words from those imposed by the gun was impossible. But at the very end of the clip he addressed his mother and sister: “I know you’re doing everything possible to bring me home.”

As Shabbat descended this past Friday night and his parents turned off their phones for the day of rest, it was possible to imagine that Goldberg-Polin might finally emerge from the ultimate parental nightmare. Negotiations to end the war and bring home the hostages have been grinding along, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seemed intent on stalling a deal.

Publicizing the Bugs, Malfunctions, Failures, and Locations of Lethal AWS to Avoid Accidental Escalations

Zakariya Rahimi

What Are AI-Powered Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems

Lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) are defined by the DOD as “A weapon system that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by an operator”.[5] The DoD has also described multiple tiers of autonomy for lethal autonomous weapon systems.[6] The lower tier of semi-autonomous weapon systems is defined by the DoD as “Semi-autonomous weapon systems, which require human operator selection and authorization to engage specific targets (e.g., human-in-the-loop control)”.[7]

A human-supervised lethal autonomous weapon system is defined by the DoD as “Human-supervised autonomous weapon systems, which allow human intervention and, if needed, termination of the engagement, with the exception of time-critical attacks on platforms or installations (e.g., human on-the-loop control)”.[8] A fully autonomous lethal weapon system is a weapon system that can and will operate without any human intervention or supervision. All lethal autonomous weapon systems are powered or controlled by artificial intelligence.

How Can AWS Fail

There are various risks of AWS, one of which is the chance of accidental escalations or conflict. AWS like human beings are not infallible and are capable of failures, glitches, malfunctions, and mistakes. These failures, glitches, malfunctions, or mistakes can take many different forms such as engaging with supposed targets when they were not supposed to, crossing a border during a tense period, killing civilians, visibly targeting opponents, etc.

Kursk Offensive: West Heralds 'Rebirth' of Maneuver Warfare

Simplicius

This is a premium article for paid subscribers that covers the recent trend of declaring the rebirth of ‘maneuver warfare’ as product of the perceived “success” of the Ukrainian operation in Kursk. In the piece I refute these conclusions by explaining how maneuver warfare is in fact a misunderstood, and deliberately misleading, concept which uses outdated combat stereotypes from WWII and beyond in a disingenuous attempt to paper over shifting modern paradigms.

We utilize several sources including the latest Institute for the Study of War piece, as well as an article on ‘positional deadlock’ from the latest issue of one of Russia’s premier military journals, Армейский сборник, or Army Collection.

This report is another whoppingly descriptive ~6,800 words, of which I’ve left a small portion open to the public as a teaser for people to decide whether the topic’s premise interests them and is worth subscribing for.

Since the start of the Ukrainian Kursk offensive on August 6th, 2024, there have been innumerable claims from the pro-Ukrainian West heralding the rebirth of “maneuver warfare”. Several high-profile figures and publications declared that offensive warfare is back on the menu, as if Ukraine had finally solved the riddle of the modern positional stalemate which has vexed both sides for nearly the past two years.

Dispatch from Kyiv: How Ukraine’s incursion into Russia has changed the war

John E. Herbst

This week, the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center took sixteen of its congressional fellows, Senate and House staff members from both parties, on a whirlwind trip to Warsaw and Kyiv. We rode the train from Warsaw to Kyiv overnight and spent two full days meeting with Ukrainian government officials responsible for security, foreign policy, the economy, and energy. We also met with opposition leaders, including former President Petro Poroshenko and former prime ministers Volodymyr Groysman and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and civil society leaders. The realities of the conflict were immediately apparent. We arrived in Kyiv the day after one of Moscow’s largest air attacks on Ukraine since the war began, and we spent much of our first night in Kyiv in our hotel’s bomb shelter.

Without a doubt, our chief impression was the energy and renewed confidence Ukraine’s bold strike into Russia has provided the country’s leadership and people. They see the seizure of more than 460 square miles of Russian territory and the capture of hundreds of Russian soldiers as a clear victory, one that has changed the international conversation from a focus on peace talks or a ceasefire in place largely on Kremlin terms; they recognize that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s notion of a ceasefire in place is now much less attractive to the Kremlin.

Putin: 'A Very Savvy Gangster' Who Won't Stop at Ukraine, Says Former US Envoy to Russia John Sullivan

Michael Isikoff

During the height of the Vietnam War, the top American general William Westmoreland famously reassured policymakers in Washington that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” But today, when it comes to another seemingly endless war, this one in Ukraine, John Sullivan, who served both Presidents Trump and Biden as ambassador to Russia, sees no flicker of light at all—only pitch black darkness.

“This is gonna be a bloody sore on the face of Europe for a long time to come,” said Sullivan in an interview for the SpyTalk podcast when asked to assess the state of the conflict.

Sullivan is the author of a fascinating new book, Midnight in Moscow, that recounts his experiences overseeing the U.S. Embassy in Russia—“behind enemy lines,” as he puts it—while Vladimir Putin launched a naked war of aggression aimed at toppling the Kyiv government of Volodymyr Zelensky and turning Ukraine into a Russian vassal state.

It was a nail-biting experience, during which Sullivan was regularly piped into secure National Security Council conference calls as the Biden White House mobilized western support to punish Moscow with economic sanctions while rushing billions of dollars worth of military hardware to Ukraine to repel the Russian invaders.

America isn’t ready for another war — because it doesn’t have the troops

Gil Barndollar and Matthew C. Mai

Coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza is mostly dominated by talk of weapons. Reporters and analysts focus on suicide drones, on shell deficits, on targeting algorithms. But for all the attention devoted to modern weapons and munitions, both conflicts are proving that modern war still comes down to people.

In Ukraine, battlefield deaths on both sides were estimated to number more than 200,000 by the fall of 2023. Though US weapons and munitions have been critical to Kyiv’s war effort, it was territorial militias and hastily trained citizen-soldiers who helped save Ukraine from total conquest in 2022.

At the same time, it was a partial mobilization of more than 300,000 troops that stabilized Russia’s lines and prevented a potential collapse in late 2022. Today, the war has settled into an attritional slugfest, with both sides desperate to keep the flow of new recruits going, to the point where ranks have opened to older men, women, and convicts.

Why the U.S. isn't ready for wars of the future, according to experts

Mary Louise Kelly, Erika Ryan, Katia Riddle & Matt Ozug

Earlier this month, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs arguing that the future of warfare is here.

They say that the U.S. is not ready for it.

Their article opens with Ukraine and describes warfare that features thousands of drones in the sky, as AI helps soldiers with targeting and robots with clearing mines.

The authors argue technological developments have changed warfare more in the past several years than the decades — spanning from the introduction of the airplane, radio and mechanization to the battlefield. And while this new tech has been used minimally in current conflicts, it is only the beginning.

“Today, what we're experiencing is the introduction of drones on the ground and drones at sea, and also driven by artificial intelligence and the extraordinary capability that that's going to bring,” General Milley told NPR.

“Now, it's not here in full yet, but what we're seeing are snippets, some movie trailers, if you will, of future warfare. And you're seeing that play out in Gaza. You're seeing it play out in Ukraine. You're seeing it play out elsewhere around the world.”

What are the lessons from Ukraine's Russia incursion

Joel Mathis

The best defense is a good offense. At least, that's what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to think. His country's shocking incursion into the Kursk region of Russia is part of a "victory plan" designed to force Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table after two years of war, said the BBC. "It may sound too ambitious for some," Zelenskyy told a news conference this week, "but it is an important plan for us."

"Ukraine has scrambled assumptions with its push into Kursk," Max Boot said at The Washington Post. Putin had long vowed that any threat to Russia's territorial integrity would be crossing a "red line" that could end with the use of nuclear weapons — and possibly the outbreak of World War III. That, in turn, prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to put limits on U.S. aid to Ukraine. Now? Putin is acting as though it's "it's business as usual for the Kremlin" even though Ukraine has captured 500 square miles of Russian land. Maybe those red lines are "not as menacing as President Joe Biden seems to imagine."

'Far short of nuclear escalation'

"Did Ukraine just call Putin's nuclear bluff?" Joshua Keating said at Vox. Kyiv's leaders "likely hoped to send a message" that American and European allies have been "overly cautious" about crossing Putin's red lines. Moscow has launched missile and drone barrages at Ukraine in response. That's "far short of the nuclear escalation" that Putin had threatened. Zelenskyy's argument now is that Western leaders can become "much more aggressive" in helping Ukraine win the war.

American Stockholm syndrome: When politics becomes psychological warfare

Richard Carmona

Many years ago, when I was a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier in combat, we used covert dissemination of disinformation to disrupt our adversaries or even cause them to align with U.S. interests. These psychological operations or psyops techniques, when used effectively, can become invisible weapons by mobilizing civil unrest and undermining trust in organizational structures.

Decades later, as the U.S. surgeon general, I began to notice these psychological warfare techniques being used increasingly on an unsuspecting U.S. electorate by domestic political operators attempting to capture their political allegiance. Now, the seeds of this psychological warfare have germinated and grown, threatening the security of our fragile, ever evolving democracy.

In recent years, a new variant of Stockholm syndrome has emerged — one that doesn’t involve physical captivity but mental ensnarement through misinformation and disinformation, spread through tabloid media, online platforms and cable news.

From Drones to AI: The Future of Global Military Engagement

Mohammad Umar

The technological progress that has taken place in the recent past and perhaps the most recent advancements that have occurred in the 21st century have highly influenced warfare in its tactics and even its definition. Technology has taken the world by storm and has been developing at an alarming rate in things like biotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and information technology, whereby the advancement has been most revolutionary. IT continues to improve data sharing, real-time information, and precision instruments like computers, satellites, the internet, and UAVs that enable commanders to make quick decisions based on satellite perception. UGVs, UUVs, and UAVs are now logistical support, strike, and reconnaissance. Robotics and autonomous vehicles now conduct transport, attack, and surveillance. AI takes contemporary warfare to another level by offering smart guidance of munitions, analytical functions, and even independent decision-making while boosting the security of communications and threat identification. Both biotechnology and biometrics could enhance military forces and the state’s ability to treat illnesses and enhance the population’s well-being, but they are associated with ethical and legal problems. The contemporary war setting is defined by hybrid threats that are attributed to asymmetric warfare, cyber threats, and attacks from non-state and, sometimes, non-traditional state actors. To this end, it is important for military forces to constantly update their approaches regarding technological advancements while also striving to stay ethical, legal, and strategic. Its purpose is to disseminate information to government decision-makers, the armed forces, and the defense sciences on how to utilize modern technologies as tools without compromising the security of a nation or ethics.

Strategic Alliances in Space Exploration and Militarization: The New Frontier of Geopolitics

Aqsa Ghauri

Whilst humanity reaches further into the cosmos, the exploration and militarization of space have become defining features of modern geopolitics. The growing importance of space as a domain of power projection has led to the formation of strategic alliances among nations, each vying for dominance in this final frontier. The implications of these alliances extend beyond scientific advancement and into the realms of resource exploitation, national security, and global power dynamics. This article delves into the emerging alliances in space exploration and militarization, examining their geopolitical implications and the potential for future conflicts in space.

The Emergence of Strategic Alliances in Space

The space race that began during the Cold War was primarily a bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, the contemporary space environment tends to be multipolar, with numerous countries and private entities entering the arena. Strategic alliances in space exploration have emerged as key drivers of technological advancement and geopolitical strategy.

One of the most prominent alliances in space exploration today is the collaboration between the United States and its traditional allies through the Artemis Accords. Initiated by NASA, the Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon and establish a sustainable presence there by the end of this decade. The Artemis Accords, signed by over 20 countries, represent a coalition committed to the peaceful exploration and utilization of space resources. However, underlying this collaboration is a clear intent to secure strategic advantages in space, particularly concerning lunar resources.

The Double-Edged Sword in Cyber Warfare

Noureen Akhtar

Now technology evolves at a breakneck pace, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a double-edged sword. It is lamentable that, while AI has opened an astonishing panorama of possibilities across almost every sector, it has also found its way to the cybercriminal universe to fuel new, more professional, complex, and effective cyberattacks. Consequently, it is challenging to overstate the categorical threat of AI-based cyber threats rising within the companies all over the world, so the defense strategy has to be integrated and multilayered.

Ever since AI began penetrating the dark web and other criminal activities, the threats have shifted. These attacks, hitherto, involved human participation and operation of the attack tools, but, the utilization of the still budding AI technologies makes such attacks more automatic, more specific, and more flexible. While human-operated attacks rely on their ability to learn about the target and are hence depended upon their experience, AI-operated attacks can gather huge sets of data in a very short time in addition to which these systems can adjust their operating parameters as per the goal, which in this case is to launch a phishing attack, which also makes these systems smart enough to learn the results of previous attempts and incorporate them into their operating system.

AI-Fakes Detection Is Failing Voters in the Global South

Vittoria Elliott

Recently, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump posted a series of photos that appeared to show fans of pop star Taylor Swift supporting his bid for the US presidency. The pictures looked AI-generated, and WIRED was able to confirm they probably were by running them through the nonprofit True Media’s detection tool to confirm that they showed “substantial evidence of manipulation.”

Things aren’t always that easy. The use of generative AI, including for political purposes, has become increasingly common, and WIRED has been tracking its use in elections around the world. But in much of the world outside the US and parts of Europe, detecting AI-generated content is difficult because of biases in the training of systems, leaving journalists and researchers with few resources to address the deluge of disinformation headed their way.

Detecting media generated or manipulated using AI is still a burgeoning field, a response to the sudden explosion of generative AI companies. (AI startups pulled in over $21 billion in investment in 2023 alone.) “There's a lot more easily accessible tools and tech available that actually allows someone to create synthetic media than the ones that are available to actually detect it,” says Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, founder of the Tech Global Institute, a think tank focused on tech policy in the Global South.

Hacking Blame Games Don’t Work – Will Anything?

Emilio Iasiello

This is something that prominent cyber thinker James Lewis acknowledged in the article, saying, “You know it’s them, and they know you’re not going to do anything, so it really doesn’t have any effect.” And while this revelation is bearing out to be the case, it begs the question if it was any real tool that states could be used to affect change. Critics of this line of thought are quick to point out how the September 2015 summit between then President Obama and Xi Jinping at least temporarily achieved that very objective. That agreement between the two governments stipulated that neither would engage in economic cyber espionage with the intent of providing competitive advantages to their respective companies or commercial sectors. This was largely viewed as a huge accomplishment, given at this point, China was already largely perceived as the leading pervasive cyber threat to steal sensitive information and intellectual property. China even signedsimilar deals in November 2015 with G20 nations, suggesting a positive change was occurring.

For a brief period, direct, diplomatic confrontation seemed to be a watershed moment. Indeed, one U.S. cybersecurity vendor claimed that China-linked cyber activity decreased between September 2015 and June 2016, not only against the United States but other foreign countries, per the vendor’s findings. But any gains were short lived as China quickly resumed the volume and scope of its proficient cyber espionage, finding immense return in the information it stole, as well as gaining footholds into high-value networks for further exploitation or other objectives. A different U.S. cybersecurity vendor maintained that China was still conducting cyber espionage even after the Obama-Xi summit. Despite the international publicity created by government accusations of Chinese cyber espionage, and private sector vendor reports echoing U.S. government intelligence language attributing cyber activity to China, and the United States charging Chinese military state actors with hacking, none had achieved the goal of deterrence.

AI is cannibalizing itself. And creating more AI.

Devika Rao

Artificial intelligence is trained on data that is largely taken from the internet. However, with the volume of data required to school AI, many models end up consuming other AI-generated data, which can in turn negatively affect the model as a whole. With AI both producing and consuming data, the internet has the potential to become overrun with bots, with far less content being produced by humans.

Is AI cannibalization bad?

AI is eating itself. Currently, artificial intelligence is growing at a rapid rate and human-created data needed to train models is running out. "As they trawl the web for new data to train their next models on — an increasingly challenging task — [AI bots are] likely to ingest some of their own AI-generated content, creating an unintentional feedback loop in which what was once the output from one AI becomes the input for another," said The New York Times. "When generative AI is trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality." This is known as model collapse.

Still, AI companies have their hands tied. "To develop ever more advanced AI products, Big Tech might have no choice but to feed its programs AI-generated content, or just might not be able to sift human fodder from the synthetic," said The Atlantic. As it stands, synthetic data is necessary to keep up with the growing technology. "Despite stunning advances, chatbots and other generative tools such as the image-making Midjourney and Stable Diffusion remain sometimes shockingly dysfunctional — their outputs filled with biases, falsehoods and absurdities." These inaccuracies then carry through to the next iteration of the AI model.

Has High Tech Made Artillery Obsolete?

Bing West

For the past fifteen decades, explosives, not bullets, have inflicted most of the destruction in a land war. In the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, Krupp's breech-loading cannon annihilated the French army. His enormous guns were featured at the World’s Fair in 1876, leading to the sobriquet that artillery was the “king of battle.”

The Germans fired one million shells on the opening day at Verdun in 1916. During World War II, the Red Army fired two million rounds into Berlin, a city about to collapse from airstrikes. In three weeks at Hue City in 1968, one U.S. Army brigade fired 52,000 rounds. The volume of artillery in Vietnam was prodigious. In the two-month incursion into Cambodia in 1970, for instance, 847,558 rounds were expended.

Artillery doesn’t require sophisticated communications, or clearance through several echelons of command in the rear. It responds immediately, 24 hours a day, regardless of weather. Artillery protects your flanks, your rear, and your frontlines. Troops can never have enough fire on call. It is inexpensive and expendable. Fire and forget; force the enemy to remember to duck.

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