Indian Strategic Studies: 09/11/24

11 September 2024

India and collective defence in the Indo-Pacific: Possibilities, prospects and challenges

Dr Prakash Gopal

Introduction

In an increasingly contested multipolar regional order, India’s role in shaping the Indo-Pacific security environment is undeniably important. The United States, Australia and Japan, in particular, view India as a critical defence partner and a valuable bulwark against China’s increasingly assertive efforts to alter the regional strategic balance in its favour.1 Concurrently, India views an increasingly revisionist and aggressive China as a threat to its growing economic interests and ambitions to be a regional power.2 Notwithstanding a history of non-alignment, and an avowed commitment to strategic autonomy, it is evident that the evolving Indo-Pacific environment is stimulating greater strategic alignment and military engagement between India and the political West.3

However, even as India’s security outlook for the Indo-Pacific aligns considerably with that of the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies, India’s military contributions to a potential collective defence scenario have been the subject of much speculation and discussion.4 As the only Quad country to share a land boundary with China, there are limits to India’s potential contributions to imaginable collective military efforts, particularly those that may involve direct engagement with Chinese forces. The challenge, therefore, is to imagine the “art of the possible” when it comes to India’s participation in a range of potential collective deterrence and defence futures. For the United States and its allies, thinking through ways in which to maximise India’s contributions in a range of imaginable future contingencies ahead of time could significantly bolster collective defence outcomes in crisis situations, particularly in the IOR where India’s strategic interests would be most immutable and, importantly, where the resources of its partners could be considerably overextended.

Burma’s Quest for Drone Supremacy: A Cautionary Tale

Beau Chapman, Alexander Suster, Steven Ahart

In the heart of Southeast Asia, a desperate struggle for power has been unfolding. The Burmese (Myanmar) military junta, facing its most significant challenge since seizing control in 2021, is struggling to maintain its grip on the country. As rebel forces gain ground, the junta has needed to rapidly modernize its approach to the threats posed by Burmese groups opposed to the regime.

Recent research conducted at the Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL) at The University of Texas at Austin has shed new light on the junta’s drone pursuits. Through analysis of commercial satellite imagery, ground photography, and open-source intelligence, our team has pieced together a clearer picture of Burma’s drone program. Our findings form the backbone of this article, offering new insights into the junta’s military aspirations and the stark realities on the ground.

For irregular warfare practitioners, this analysis offers several insights. It highlights the increasing accessibility of drone technology to non-state actors and authoritarian regimes, emphasizing the need for adaptive counter-drone strategies. The case of Burma demonstrates how even technologically limited actors can leverage a mix of foreign-sourced drones and domestically produced munitions to significant effect. Furthermore, it underscores the importance of comprehensive intelligence gathering on adversaries’ drone capabilities, including their supply chains and manufacturing processes. Lastly, it serves as a reminder that in modern conflicts, the technological playing field is rapidly leveling, necessitating constant innovation in offensive and defensive irregular warfare tactics.

Is Southeast Asia’s Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone the Key to Indo-Pacific Stability?

Nigel Li

Over five decades into the “Asian peace,” there are reasons to be pessimistic about the future security of the Indo-Pacific. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ignited concerns of conflict in Asia and Moscow’s nuclear threats have unearthed the specter of nuclear war as China rapidly augments its nuclear capabilities. An escalating arms race between the U.S. and China will inevitably leave non-nuclear weapon states caught in the middle. But all is not lost. In Asia, there are existing security mechanisms that could be revitalized to reinforce strategic stability. One of those mechanisms is the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ).

SEANWFZ, otherwise known as the Bangkok Treaty, was a product of the early post-Cold War era when arms control and disarmament were on a positive trajectory. Entering into force in 1997, the 10 member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) vowed to not develop, manufacture, acquire, possess or control nuclear weapons within the zone. It also includes protocols, still awaiting the signatures of the five permanent (P5) members of the U.N. Security Council, that would obligate them to forgo the threat or use of nuclear weapons against members of the treaty. Only after the 2021 founding of AUKUS — a U.S.-UK-Australian security partnership — did China express its interest in signing the protocols provided the other P5 states did the same.

The most recent nuclear weapon-free zone, the Central Asian Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (CANWFZ), which entered into force in March 2009, has been ratified by all of the P5 except the United States (the United States has signed the Protocol but has yet to ratify it). This shows that interest remains in realizing the aspirations of non-nuclear weapon states and their desire to secure regional neighborhoods free of nuclear weapons.

Why Catching Up to Starlink Is a Priority for Beijing

Steven Feldstein

Early in the morning on August 9, a Long March 6A rocket blasted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi. The rocket carried eighteen low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites from the government-backed company Qianfan. State media hailed the launch as China’s answer to Starlink, the U.S.-based satellite internet pioneer, and the first step toward breaking America’s dominance in this market. Qianfan intends to grow its constellation to more than 600 satellites by the end of 2025 and to eventually place 14,000 satellites into orbit.

Qianfan isn’t the only Chinese company with satellite internet ambitions. Several other Chinese outfits are also racing to launch their own megaconstellations—large pools of satellites that work together to deliver broadband internet access. The Guowang project, for example, run by state-owned China Satellite Network Group, has announced plans to create a constellation of 13,000 satellites—although it has yet to send any into space. Overall, China’s leaders hope to launch 40,000 LEO satellites in the coming decade.

China’s push to enter the satellite internet market shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has poured significant resources into closing the gap with America’s space-based technologies, and its efforts are starting to pay off. In June, Chinese scientists oversaw an ambitious effort to land a space probe on the far side of the moon—representing the first successful attempt by any country to place a probe on the moon’s distant corner, a feat fraught with technical complications. China plans to send crewed missions to the moon by 2030 and build a lunar base on the moon’s south pole by 2035. As geopolitical rivalry between the two nations heats up, Beijing is determined to keep pace with America’s satellites.

Killing them softly: China’s counterspace developments and force posture in space

Jonas Vidhammer Berge & Henrik Stålhane Hiim

Introduction

In November 2021, General David Thompson of the US Space Force revealed that the United States is dealing with ‘reversible attacks’ against its satellites from China and Russia ‘every single day’.Footnote1 Such reversible or soft-kill attacks are part of what Thompson referred to ‘a whole host of ways’ states can now employ to threaten space systems. In addition to kinetic, hard-kill weapons such as ground-launched missiles, states can target satellites with a range of soft-kill capabilities such as lasers, electronic warfare (EW), or cyber weapons. Unlike kinetic weapons, soft-kill capabilities often leave no trace: They do not create space debris and provide states with plausible deniability.

Beyond the United States, the country making the largest advances in its pursuit of advanced counterspace capabilities is China.Footnote2 Recently, several key US documents have described China as a threat to the US command of space. For example, the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment from 2022 asserted that China ‘has counterspace weapons capabilities intended to target US and allied satellites’,Footnote3 whereas the US Department of Defense (DOD) claimed China had ‘weaponized space and turned it into a warfighting domain’.Footnote4 Moreover, analysts have long feared that China’s threshold for employing such weapons first in a crisis may be low, portraying it as a potential culprit in a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ attack.Footnote5 In other words, these analysts fear that first-strike stability in the space domain – that is, a situation where none of the actors perceives the other as motivated to launch first in a crisis – is low.Footnote6

A War With Iran Is the Last Thing the U.S. Should Want | Opinion

Daniel R. DePetris

Should the United States take military action against Iran? While this may sound like a random question without much context, it's one that often pops up whenever something horrible happens in the Middle East.

Some lawmakers are on record advocating for the use of force. Two days after Hamas slaughtered approximately 1,200 people in southern Israel and took another 240 captive last year, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went on TV and advised President Joe Biden to hit Tehran hard. "If there is an escalation in this conflict, if hostages start getting killed, if Hezbollah in the north attacks Israel in strength, we should tell the Ayatollah we will destroy your oil refineries and your oil infrastructure," he said.

The senator repeated that recommendation on Aug. 25, arguing that it was the best way to compel the Iranians into forcing Hamas to free the remaining hostages. Others have written that the U.S. should give Iran an ultimatum—eliminate the nuclear program—and pursue a military campaign if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei refuses it.

Phase Zero of the Coming War

Andrew A. Michta

The world today is more fractured and unstable than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and by all indications we are heading for a period of protracted systemic instability, with Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific increasingly at risk of descending into a wider general war. The war in Ukraine is in its third year since Russia’s second invasion, and the war in the Middle East threatens to escalate into a major regional conflict between Israel and Iran. China and Russia are arming at speed and scale, while the United States and its European allies continue to lag when it comes to defense spending and defense production. Russia and China are de facto allies, having openly declared a “no-limits” partnerships that forms the core of the new “Axis of Dictatorships,” aided and supported by Iran and North Korea. China, which has surpassed the United States as the manufacturing powerhouse, continues to bid for regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific as it works to unravel the power balance in Asia. For its part, Russia continues to pursue its revisionist course in an attempt to re-litigate the post-Cold War settlement and re-establish its empire in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the United States is politically split, threatened both from within and without. And while NATO maintains its political support for Ukraine, Europe remains divided when it comes to appetite for risk-taking, with countries further away from the eastern flank reluctant to spend the money to rearm.

A Pragmatic Shift? What Kamala Harris Might Do on North Korea

Sangsoo Lee

In her acceptance speech as the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris strongly opposed authoritarian leaders, specifically stating she would not "cozy up" to dictators like North Korea's Kim Jong Un. She criticized Donald Trump for his willingness to engage with such leaders and emphasized her commitment to U.S. democratic values and global leadership.

Despite her differing political views from Trump, Harris's will to resolve North Korea's nuclear issue remains uncertain. She might continue a policy of strategic patience while focusing more on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. However, North Korea's advancing nuclear missile technology, potentially accelerated by Russia, poses a growing threat to the U.S., and the risk of nuclear proliferation in Northeast Asia is increasing. Given this situation, Harris may soon be compelled to address these threats directly, beyond merely increasing deterrence with allies. The question remains whether Harris will consider a more proactive approach, balancing deterrence with diplomacy to manage the growing nuclear risks in the region.

Pyongyang’s Opening up

North Korea has recently shown tentative signs of re-engaging with the international community beyond its close ties with China and Russia, following four years of isolation due to COVID-19. Its participation in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games marked a return to the global stage, along with inviting European and American professors to teach at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Additionally, Swedish diplomats are expected to return to Pyongyang soon to resume their work.

Niall Ferguson: The Return of Anti-History

Niall Ferguson

According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper is “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” I had never heard of Cooper until this week and was none the wiser when I went to look for his books. There are none.

According to Wikipedia, “he is author of Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide (2011) and the editor of Bush Yarns and Other Offences (2022).” These are scarcely works of history. It turns out that, as Carlson put it in his wildly popular conversation with Cooper, this historian works “in a different medium—on Substack, X, podcasts.”

The problem, as swiftly became apparent on Carlson’s podcast, is that you cannot do history that way. What we are dealing with in this conversation is the opposite of history: call it anti-history.

True history proceeds from an accumulation of evidence, some in the form of written records, some in other forms, to a reconstitution of past thought, in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, and from there to a rendition of Leopold von Ranke’s was eigentlich gewesen: what essentially happened. By contrast, Darryl Cooper offers a series of wild assertions that are almost entirely divorced from historical evidence and can be of interest only to those so ignorant of the past that they mistake them for daring revisionism, as opposed to base neo-Nazism.

Planning for a Post-American NATO

Phillips P. O’Brien and Edward Stringer

Europe may soon find itself in a tight spot. By the end of January 2025, the continent’s most important partner, the United States, could be led by former President Donald Trump, who has said that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell it wanted” to European countries that did not do what he wanted: spend more on defense. The previous Trump administration strained the transatlantic relationship, and the next iteration would almost certainly be worse.

Ukraine’s Kursk incursion: A fool’s errand that may allow a Russian victory

Andrew Latham

In his classic text “On War,” the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz introduced the concept of the “center of gravity.”

The center of gravity in war is “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. That is the point against which all [one’s] energies should be directed,” Clausewitz wrote. Political and military leaders should not imprudently disperse their military forces, sending them on fools’ errands beyond the decisive theater of conflict.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky and the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces seem either not to have read “On War” or forgotten this key insight.

Ukraine’s Kursk operation has, unfortunately, devolved into a fools’ errand — a glorified light-cavalry raid or medieval chevauchée that has diverted Ukrainian energies away from the center of gravity in the war against Russia. Rather than drawing Russian forces away from more critical battlefronts in Donetsk, the incursion has dispersed Ukrainian forces, allowing the Russian military to focus on the current center of gravity in this conflict and accelerate its push towards the strategically vital city of Pokrovsk.

The Kursk Offensive: A Net Assessment

Mark N. Katz

There have been widely differing assessments of the impact of Kyiv’s surprise military offensive, resulting in Ukrainian forces occupying territory inside the Kursk region, which Russian forces there did little to resist.

Some see it as a great triumph for Kyiv, which has humiliated Putin, bolstered Ukrainian morale, and given Kyiv a bargaining chip for seeking Russian withdrawal from internationally recognized Ukrainian territory now occupied by Putin’s forces. The large number of Russian soldiers who were captured by or just surrendered to Ukraine also gives Kyiv leverage for seeking the return of Ukrainian soldiers captured by Russia.

Others, however, see the Ukrainian occupation of Russian territory in the Kursk region as a forlorn hope since it has not stopped Russia’s grinding advance against Kyiv’s forces inside Ukraine. They point out that Kyiv’s Kursk offensive has taken forces away from the ranks of those Ukrainian forces defending against Russia’s advance in Donetsk.

How will this situation play out? It seems highly likely that if Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine continues, then Kyiv will have to redeploy its forces now in Kursk back to eastern Ukraine. A Ukrainian push to occupy even more Russian territory, even if successful, would take more Ukrainian troops away from eastern Ukraine, thus facilitating Putin’s advance there. None of this bodes well for the Ukrainian position.

Commentary: Can the US and China avoid a catastrophic clash?

Daniel R DePetris

Last week, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan travelled to China for a multi-day trip in an attempt to keep relations between Washington and Beijing on a somewhat even-keel as the United States prepares for a political transition in several months’ time.

The trip was notable in several respects. It was the first time in eight years that a US national security adviser made the trip to Beijing, and Sullivan managed to grab a meeting with General Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The mere fact that this specific meeting occurred, after a two-year freeze in communications with its military officials, suggests that China’s President Xi Jinping is as interested in maintaining stability over the proceeding months as the Biden administration is.

The readouts of the conversations don’t tell us much. On the US side, the word of the day was “responsibility,” as in both superpowers have a responsibility to ensure the competition between them doesn’t veer into a conflict. While this phrase has taken on a robotic-like character over the years, it happens to be true.

Ukrainian Resistance to Russian Disinformation

Todd C. Helmus & Khrystyna Holynska

Introduction

Nation-states have increasingly turned to the sowing of false narratives and online influence operations as a tool of statecraft. The Oxford Internet Institute, for example, identified 81 nations that used government or political party actors to manipulate online opinions. This figure is up from 70 identified in 2019, 48 in 2018, and 28 in 2017.1 In addition, Diego Martin and colleagues documented a significant rise in the number of influence campaigns “advocating controversial viewpoints and spreading disinformation,” from 1 detected in 2011, to 18 and 16 in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Thirty such campaigns were ongoing as of 2020. Russia, Iran, and China key U.S. adversaries—were among the most prolific in authoring such campaigns.

With this rise in internet-enabled disinformation, we can already observe that warfare will not be immune from such efforts. Russia famously and systematically operationalized disinformation in its cold war against the United States.3 False narratives were a common refrain in the Syrian war and included false claims about the White Helmets, the Syrian humanitarian organization that worked to save victims of Syrian air strikes, as well as denials about Syrian use of chemical weapons.4 False narratives about the threats to Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east and south of Ukraine fueled the annexation of Crimea and start of the war in Donbas.5 The Israeli war against Hamas, spurred by the October 7 Hamas attack against Israeli settlers, has also proved a breeding ground for false claims.6 Indeed, the 2,500-year-old maxim “In war, truth is the first casualty,” attributed to Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, remains as true as it ever was.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Truth About World War II

Victor Davis Hanson

In a recent and now widely seen Tucker Carlson interview, a guest historian named Darryl Cooper casually presented a surprising number of flawed theories about World War II. He focused his misstatements on the respective roles of Winston Churchill’s Britain and Adolf Hitler’s Germany—especially in matters of the treatment and fate of Russian prisoners, the Holocaust, the systematic slaughtering of Jews, strategic bombing, and the nature of Winston Churchill.

Because of the size of the audience Carlson introduced him to, and because of the gravity of Cooper’s falsehoods, his assertions deserve a response.

On the Treatment of Russian Prisoners

It is simply not true, as Cooper alleges, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was completely surprised and unprepared for the mass capitulation of the Red Army and some two million Russian prisoners who fell into German hands in summer 1941.

The virtual extinction of these POWs in the first six months of the war was a natural consequence of a series of infamous and so-called “criminal orders” issued by Hitler in spring 1941 to be immediately implemented in his planned “war of extermination” in the East.

Biden Expected to Block U.S. Steel Takeover

Andrew Duehren, Alan Rappeport and Lauren Hirsch

President Biden is preparing to soon block an attempt by Japan’s Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel on national security grounds, according to three people familiar with the matter, likely sinking a merger that became entangled in election-year politics in the United States.

A decision to block the takeover would come after months of wrangling among lawmakers, business leaders and labor officials over whether a corporate acquisition by a company based in Japan — a key U.S. ally — could pose a threat to national security. A move by Mr. Biden to block the deal on those grounds could roil relations between the two nations at a moment when the United States has been trying to deepen ties with Japan amid China’s growing influence in East Asia.

For months, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, has been scrutinizing the deal over potential risks. There has been mounting speculation that the Biden administration could intervene before the November election.

A White House official told The New York Times that CFIUS “hasn’t transmitted a recommendation to the president, and that’s the next step in this process.”

Teasing Putin says Russia backs Kamala Harris, cites her 'infectious' laugh

Vladimir Soldatkin

Russia wants Kamala Harris to win the U.S. presidential election, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday in a teasing comment that cited her "infectious" laugh as a reason to prefer her over Donald Trump.

Putin made the ironic remark a day after the U.S. Justice Department charged two Russian media executives over an alleged illegal scheme to influence the November election with pro-Russian propaganda.

Before President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, Putin had said earlier this year - in another comment widely seen as not to be taken at face value - that he preferred Biden over Trump because the former was a more predictable "old school" politician.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Moscow actually wants Trump to win because he is less committed to supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Asked how he viewed the election now, Putin told an economic forum in Russia's far east that it was the choice of the American people.

US forces should consider Ukraine’s freewheeling model for social media messaging, analysts say

JOHN VANDIVER

Ukrainian efforts at countering Russian disinformation campaigns have seen success because their troops aren’t bogged down by an overly cautious U.S.-style chain of command, according to a new report that suggests the American military needs to loosen up.

Fear of embarrassing publicity if communication efforts go wrong is one of the driving factors that is holding back the U.S. military, the Rand Corp. said in a study of Ukrainian communication tactics released Tuesday.

“The result of such concerns over risk is that senior (U.S.) government leaders and military commanders often implement cumbersome approval processes that slow response times and are emblematic of a reluctance to take risks in implementing programs,” the report said.

By contrast, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s flexibility enabled it to give various outside communication specialists control of its account on Twitter, now known as X, which was a key part of its success in attracting a large audience, Rand said.

“The United States will need to assess its own doctrine, training, and wargaming efforts to ensure it is able to counter disinformation during conflict,” Rand said.

A Ukrainian officer supporting his defense ministry’s communication efforts told Rand that their approach was “trust based” and that it freed up troops to “leverage soldier creativity.”

Here’s How Much Sleep You Need According to Your Age

Jeffrey Kluger

Sleep is a moving target. When you were a newborn, you slept for most of the day, then less as an older child; as a teen, you slept later. A senior’s bedtime is earlier—part of a lifetime journey of rising and falling sleep needs depending on age. How much sleep do you need at the various stages of life, and why do our requirements shift all the time?

Newborns and babies

Babies aged zero to three months sleep 14 to 17 hours out of every 24—partly a function of the newborn’s introduction to the world after three trimesters in the darkness of the womb. A large share of time in the womb is spent sleeping, and the reason for so much slumber is the same both before and after birth: growth. Babies triple their weight between birth and one year old, and it’s during sleep—especially the deep cycle called slow-wave sleep—that growth hormone is most prodigiously released. Adding bulk is not the only thing the youngest babies are doing.

“There are a lot of new neural connections forming,” says Dr. Yi Cai, director of sleep surgery at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, “and a lot of new learning going on. Everything’s new, and that’s a prominent driver of sleep needs for that age.”

UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY

The Marine Corps artificial intelligence (Al) strategy is a milestone in the Service's digital modernization effort. This strategy provides a framework for integrating Al across all levels of the Marine Corps to support better and faster decision making, reducing minutes to seconds across a myriad of functions. There are five goals, each supporting the creation and exploitation of optimizing decision advantage. The Marine Corps total force will come to understand that transformation to responsible Al models will improve how we access the right data, at the right time, and in the right place.

Success on the modern battlefield depends on several critical requirements, one of which is a comprehensive understanding of the operational environment. This understanding enables military forces to adapt, prepare for multi-domain operations, and enhance situational awareness. The war in Ukraine continues to demonstrate that Al is improving decision-making speed. This strategy sets the conditions for delivering modern Al capabilities to support decision advantage in expeditionary advanced base operations and littoral operations in contested environments.

Marines understand innovation, and this strategy will provide the pathway to invest in Marines with an aptitude for data analytics and data-centric operations.1 I am confident our Marines have the knowledge and ability to enable the commanders' decision making across each war fighting function. On the digital battlefield, from receipt of mission to the execution of tactical tasks, Al is an enabler for faster decision making and success.

The Challenges of Nuclear Security

S. Paul Kapur, Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan & Diana Wueger

Introduction

Nuclear safety and security—the protection of nuclear facilities, weapons, technologies, and materials against accidents or attacks—is an under-studied area of international security studies.1 Periodically, the subject has received high levels of attention. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, scholars and policymakers worried intensely about the fate of its nuclear arsenal and infrastructure.2 The problem again came to the fore following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which raised the specter of terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons or materials.3 Much of this post-9/11 focus was directed at South Asia, where the Pakistani nuclear program’s potential vulnerabilities to militants and other religious extrem-ists were a major concern for the United States and the international community.

Despite these periods of interest, however, the problem of nuclear safety and security has generally received only modest scholarly atten-tion. Most scholars and analysts of nuclear-related matters have focused their attention elsewhere, such as the ways in which nuclear weapons can generate deterrence and how they might contribute to coercive success in the event of conflict.5 A significant cohort studies nuclear proliferation, including the reasons why states acquire nuclear weapons, ways to prevent them from doing so, and proliferation’s effects on the behavior of newly nuclear states.6 Others study the normative aspects of nuclear weapons, debating whether their use can ever be justified, as well as the role of moral concerns in preventing their use in the past.

Decoding Kursk: Is the End in Sight in Ukraine?

Dr Greg Mills, Alfonso Prat Gay, Juan-Carlos Pinzon and Dr Karin von Hippel

Underground in an anonymous building in the Kharkiv Oblast is one reason for Ukraine’s defensive prowess against a numerically stronger and well-armed aggressor. Military teams work from makeshift briefing and ops rooms leading off corridors stacked with dusty and discarded office furniture, intently focused on an array of computers that access, control and act on live feeds from the battlefield.

‘Attention’, says one member, standing up, his voice slightly raised, and the room instantly stills. ‘There will be a Russian helicopter attack at 1230’. His warning gives soldiers on the front a mere 10 minutes to pack up their artillery and move it discretely away.

It is a high-stakes gaming saloon, complete with Ninja-pro gaming chairs and many donning heavy metal goth T-shirts. ‘The toughest lesson’, remarks one commander, codenamed ‘Cuba’, is the ‘cost of a mistake, in many cases irreversible’.

The previous day, 11 Russian tanks had attacked the Khartiia Brigade positioned north of Kharkiv. Five tanks were knocked out by a mix of missiles, artillery and mines dropped by drones.

Seriously, Use Encrypted Messaging

Lauren Goode & Michael Calore

Encrypted messaging is a godsend for mobile communications, whether you’re sending texts to your friends that you want kept private, or engaging in interactions that are better kept secret for safety reasons. Apps like Signal and Telegram offer users the ability to trade messages that can be read by only the sender and the receiver. Of course, people can also use that privacy as a way to conduct unsavory dealings without having to worry about their communications getting exposed.

Encrypted messaging has been in the news for the past couple weeks, largely because of the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who is being accused by the French government of failing to comply with law enforcement demands to help catch some people who are using the app for criminal activity. Durov’s arrest also casts a light on the rising profile of Signal, a fully encrypted messaging app that’s always taken a stance against the collection of its users’ data.

Using Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing to Enhance U.S. Department of Homeland Security Mission Capabilities

Nicolas M. Robles, Elie Alhajjar, Jesse Geneson, Alvin Moon, Christopher Scott Adams, Kristin J. Leuschner & Joshua Steier

T he U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the third-largest cabinet department in the federal government, bringing together multiple components, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Office, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and the U.S. Secret Service (USSS), among others. These components are charged with carrying out a diverse array of missions: protecting the United States against terrorism, securing U.S. borders, securing cyberspace and critical infrastructure, preserving U.S. economic security, and strengthening disaster preparedness and resilience.1 To successfully achieve these missions, DHS must leverage technologies to the fullest extent possible.

DHS employs well-tested technologies to manage the complexity and resource the costs of its missions. However, two powerful emerging technologies—artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing (QC)—might have the potential to significantly expand the capabilities available to DHS in the future. AI—in particular, its subfield of machine learning (ML)—is an umbrella concept of using computers to rapidly solve problems for which the development of algorithms by human programmers would be costprohibitive or otherwise extremely difficult (Murphy, 2012).

QC attempts to leverage the principles of quantum mechanics (QM) to obtain quantifiable advantages over traditional computing, both in terms of speed and in the ability to solve very complex problems. Unlike previous leaps in the progress or advancement of science, such as the nuclear program or the space program, which were state sponsored, QC is, for the most part, incentivized and pioneered by private and for-profit companies and by academic institutions (Parker, 2021; Parker et al., 2022). AI is more mature than QC as a domain, and research in AI is distributed widely through academia and industry.

Small Units Need Protection from Drones—But What Capabilities Should a Light, Maneuverable Counter-UAS Platform Include?

Iain Herring and Gavin Berke

Imagine you are an infantry platoon leader, moving with your soldiers in a tactical formation toward your objective. Suddenly, indirect fire is raining down on your position. You have a plan to react to indirect fire, and you order your formation to execute the plan. Your soldiers are well trained and well led by their capable squad leaders, and they start to move, immediately and rapidly, from the impact area. But as you move, you realize the indirect fire is walking with you—your soldiers can’t escape it. What you haven’t realized is that there is a small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) observing your movement, allowing the indirect fire to follow you and your soldiers through the woods.

Now imagine the same scenario, except this time you have a mobile counter-UAS (C-UAS) system that can track and shoot UAS on the move. Once again, your platoon is engaged with indirect fire. And once again, your platoon has a plan and executes it on your order, Your light, maneuverable C-UAS vehicle can move with you, detect the UAS observing your platoon’s movement, and neutralize it. Within a matter of seconds, the indirect fire ceases. Your platoon can safely regroup and continue mission.