India Is Emerging as a Key Player in the Global AI Race

Astha Rajvanshi

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As Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, addressed his shareholders during a much-anticipated yearly address last Thursday, he also unveiled “JioBrain,” a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications that he says will transform a spate of businesses in energy, textiles, telecommunications and more that form his multinational conglomerate, Reliance Industries. “By perfecting JioBrain within Reliance, we will create a powerful AI service platform that we can offer to other enterprises as well,” Ambani said during his speech.

The Reliance Chairman’s latest offering comes as India emerges as a crucial player in the global AI ecosystem, boasting a high-powered IT industry worth $250 billion, which serves many of the world’s banks, manufacturers and firms. As the world’s most populous country, India also has a robust workforce population with nearly 5 million programmers at a time when AI talent is in short supply globally, with analysts predicting that India’s AI services could be worth $17 billion by 2027, according to a recent report by Nasscom and BCG.

Puneet Chandok, the President of Microsoft India & South Asia, points to research that finds India has one of the highest AI adoption rates among knowledge workers, with 92% using generative AI at work—significantly higher than the global average of 75%. “These insights highlight the significant impact of AI on the Indian workforce and the proactive steps being taken by both employees and leaders to integrate AI into their daily routines,” Chandok says, adding that the company is also powering initiatives that aim to equip 2 million people with AI skills by 2025.

Water Wars: New Fault Lines and Frictions, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific

Aaron Baum, Nikhita Salgame & Ania Zolyniak

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After announcing a provisional agreement addressing some differences over one territorial dispute, Second Thomas Shoal, China and the Philippines found themselves in a new row in August over a separate area in the South China Sea: Sabina Shoal. The Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations that have their own territorial disputes with China have also spent the month building new defense alliances and participating in joint exercises in the region. Some of these countries are also home to Chinese-owned or controlled ports, which may be facing increasing competition in the coming years due to U.S. and Indian efforts to diminish China’s port dominance in the Indo-Pacific.

On Aug. 19 at 3:24 a.m. local time, Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels collided near the Sabina Shoal—a disputed 14-mile stretch in the South China Sea approximately 86 miles west of the Philippine island of Palawan. Both countries’ ships sustained damage. A spokesperson for the Chinese Coast Guard said that two Philippine Coast Guard ships had “illegally intruded” into the waters near the shoal, during which one ship “deliberately collided” with the Chinese ship that was “safeguarding rights and enforcing the law.” The spokesperson said that incident “seriously violated China’s territorial sovereignty.” The Chinese Coast Guard also released a video on social media platform Weibo, which shows a Chinese boat driving away a Philipinne boat in waters near the island.

Washington’s hesitancy on digital-trade diplomacy

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On 26 July 2024, Australia, Japan and Singapore announced that 81 countries had consented to the release of a draft agreement that, once adopted, would facilitate global electronic commerce. This was the most notable achievement since formal negotiations began via the World Trade Organization (WTO) in January 2019. The negotiating group debating how best to harmonise digital-trade rules eventually grew to 91 countries and territories. The United States was among the ten that did not sign off on the draft, which was ‘due to domestic consultations and considerations’, as noted in a footnote.

At the time of the announcement, Washington released a statement from Ambassador María Pagán, the chief US envoy to the WTO, noting that ‘the current text falls short and more work is needed, including with respect to the essential security exception’. The type of security exception favoured by the US would allow signatories to bypass the terms of the agreement if following them would harm national security (by, for example, exposing sensitive software source code). In late 2023, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that Washington would withdraw its support for key items on the agenda of the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) on E-Commerce, as the initiative is called, so US abstention did not come as a surprise.

It will take further negotiations for the parties to reach a comprehensive agreement that can be implemented, a process that will likely take years, but US resistance casts some doubt on whether a broad global push to reform long-outdated digital-trade rules can succeed. Some had thought that the administration of US President Joe Biden would be able to resolve its major concerns regarding regulatory autonomy and security in 2024, but with less than five months remaining before the inauguration of a new president, this now appears unlikely.

Elon Musk vs. (Parts of) the World

Rishi Iyengar

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In April 2022, soon after announcing he would buy the platform then still known as Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk explained his definition of online free speech. “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law,” he wrote in a post on the platform, which he has since renamed X. “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.”

Great Power Competition Report - United States & China

Monte Erfourth

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INTRODUCTION

The Strategy Central Great Power Competition report details the United States and China competition in the first half of 2024. It offers an analysis to help strategists grasp the current state of rivalry between these two superpowers in terms of power, economics, military power, and diplomacy. The conclusion is more than a summary; it will contain additional points and recommendations. The report will first examine the power dynamics in the Indo-Pacific as a way to explore the region of greatest tension between the U.S. and China. This does not mean that the rest of the world is not at play. It very much is. The world will also be discussed, just in less detail.

The report is broken into distinct sections:

• Power Politics. Explores the interplay of nations employing their powers to create advantage through influence and leverage to protect and advance their interests.
• Economic. Explores the ongoing trade disputes, technological restrictions, and collaborative efforts.
• Military. Delves into strategic deterrence, strategic approach, and the complex dynamics of military engagement in several regions.
• Diplomacy. Discusses high-level diplomatic initiatives, conflict resolution efforts, and the impact of strategic alliances.
• Conclusion. Synthesizes insights and offers strategic recommendations, aiming to inform strategy development or, at the very least, serve as an informative overview of the evolving U.S.-China relations.

The reader can skip to any one section to learn about a particular area of concern. Going directly to the conclusion may be best if the reader is looking for a synthesis of the primary facets of great power politics and where the competition currently stands.

Chinese State-Linked Influence Operation Spamouflage Masquerades as U.S. Voters to Push Divisive Online Narratives Ahead of 2024 Election

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Spamouflage (also tracked as Dragonbridge, Taizi Flood, and Empire Dragon) is an influence operation that Graphika has monitored since 2019. It is active across more than 40 online platforms where it employs inauthentic accounts to seed and amplify videos and cartoons that promote pro-China and anti-Western narratives. Based on open-source indicators and assessments shared by industry partners, Graphika attributes this activity with high confidence to Chinese state-linked actors. 

Spamouflage’s tactics have evolved over the last five years, including engaging with broader geopolitical topics, producing content in multiple languages across mainstream and alternative social media platforms, experimenting with persona building, and leveraging AI tools to create content. In that time, our monitoring shows the operation has become markedly more aggressive in its attempts to influence online discourse about U.S. politics.

● In 2020, the operation frequently criticized the U.S. political system and policies but rarely directly referenced U.S. elections.

● In the months before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, the operation began to engage explicitly with election-related topics. It spread content that directly criticized the Republican and Democratic parties and their leaders, and cast U.S. domestic and foreign policy “failures” as a product of the country’s political system.

● Since mid-2023, we have observed Spamouflage accounts increasingly seed and amplify content denigrating U.S. election candidates, sowing doubt in the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral process, and spreading divisive narratives about sensitive social issues including gun control, homelessness, drug abuse, racial inequality, and the Israel-Hamas conflict. This content, some of which was almost certainly AI-generated, has targeted President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, and, more recently, Vice President Kamala Harris

A Fight Is Brewing Over Chinese Money in Norway

Elisabeth Braw

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It’s back to the good old days of globalization in Norway—at least for some. A small town needs an investor for a major piece of infrastructure, and in certain foreign nations there are investors with deep pockets to be found. Local politicians energetically court the investor, who has money to spare and is keen to spread it around the world. Hooray! There’s hope for the town’s future!

China’s robotics future is fast approaching - Opinion

Gerui Wang

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Last week, the 2024 World Robot Conference took place in Beijing, featuring over 600 robotic products from around the world, attracting over 1.3 million attendees. There were 27 humanoid robots on display, capable of applications in manufacturing, healthcare, household management and entertainment.

As embodied artificial intelligence (AI) becomes the next technological frontier after large language models, researchers suggest that competition in robotics might become the new global space race in this century. Entrepreneurs in humanoid robotics are optimistic that within the next five to 10 years, robots could achieve mass production, potentially marking a ChatGPT moment for this technology.

In recent years, venture capitalists and businesspeople in Silicon Valley and beyond have spotted humanoid robots as a key industry that could drive tens of billions of dollars in growth in the coming years.

China has a long-term vision for the development of robots and broad applications in daily life. As such, it has designed policies that could stimulate and sustain innovations over the next few years. In addition to state-level guidelines, major cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo have established humanoid robots innovation centres.

As China Buys Less Oil, Angola Struggles To Repay Debt

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Angola’s long-running financial relationship with China has been built on a simple equation: Angola would repay its growing Chinese debt with oil, a strategy that became known as the Angola Model.

The strategy is faltering, however, as China has begun importing less oil from Angola and other African nations and more from Russia, the Persian Gulf and Asia. The shift has been driven, in part, by African countries’ lack of investment in new oilfields and infrastructure. Aging equipment and shrinking oilfields make the continent’s oil producers, including Angola, less reliable as exporters, according to researchers with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The shift also reflects the lopsided relationship between China and African countries. While China remains the largest export market for Angola and other African nations, Africa as a whole amounts to less than 5% of China’s imports, according to Carnegie Endowment researchers.

“The case of Angola is particularly striking,” the researchers wrote in a recent report on China’s shifting relations with African nations. In 2010, Angola was China’s second-largest oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia. By 2023, Angola had fallen to eighth place. Between 2019 and 2023, Angola’s exports to China fell 20%, according to the Carnegie report.

How China and North Korea Are Saving Russia's Military Machine From Grinding to a Halt

Reuben F. Johnson

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Ukraine's bold incursion into the Kursk region of Russia on August 6 has—as one correspondent covering the conflict described—"upend[ed] assumptions" about Russia's capacity to continue prosecuting this war.

This is not an outlook prompted by Ukraine's surprising territorial gains. In February 2022 Russians were promised a lightning-speed takeover of Ukraine that never came to pass. Hundreds of thousands are now dead, and among the Russian population, there are increasing negative impressions of the efficacy of President Vladimir Putin's rule.

A first-order consequence of this public mood is a dampening effect on Putin's efforts to mobilize more military manpower. The Russian Army requires 25,000 new replacements per month, which are increasingly difficult to come by.

In parallel, a shortage of 400,000 workers for the defense industry slows down replacing military hardware destroyed in battle. The combination could force Moscow to either reduce its war effort or risk a collapse of its military—or even a breakup of Russia itself.

Can the U.S. and China Avoid a Catastrophic Clash?

Daniel DePetris

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Last week, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

The consequences of a direct U.S.-China conflict, either over Taiwan, the disputed shoals of the South China Sea or by sheer miscalculation, are unfathomable. One war-game conducted earlier in the year assessed that tens of thousands of U.S. service members would be lost in addition to dozens of ships and hundreds of aircraft. The economic repercussions would be just as gargantuan, with perhaps as much as 10 per cent of global gross domestic product wiped out.

The New Gods of Weather Can Make Rain on Demand—or So They Want You to Believe

Amit Katwala

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In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.

A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.

This is cloud seeding. It’s one of hundreds of missions that Newman and his fellow pilots will fly this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade-long attempt to increase rainfall in its desert lands. Sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat, I can see red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh’s palace, shimmering like a jewel.

Iran Update, September 6, 2024

Annika Ganzeveld, Kelly Campa, Kathryn Tyson, Carolyn Moorman, Alexandra Braverman, Ria Reddy, Johanna Moore, Davit Gasparyan, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Nicholas Carl

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Iran has sent hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles to Russia to support Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Wall Street Journal.[1] An anonymous European official told the outlet that more shipments of Iranian missiles to Russia are expected.[2] Iran and Russia previously signed a contract in December 2023 to send Iranian Ababil close-range ballistic missiles and Fateh-360 short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.[3] Ababil missiles have a range of around 86 kilometers and can carry a payload of 45 kilograms, while Fateh-360 missiles have a range of around 120 kilometers and can carry a payload of 150 kilograms.[4] It is unclear, however, exactly what kind of missiles are included in the recently delivered shipment to Russia. Iran has meanwhile expanded at least two of its defense industrial sites outside Tehran throughout 2024 to support the production of drones and missiles, some of which are meant to go to Russia, according to Reuters.[5] Russia has recently intensified drone and missile attacks into Ukraine, notably continuing to use Iranian-developed Shahed-131/136 drones and North Korean ballistic missiles.[6] Russia will likely use Iranian-provided ballistic missiles to target Ukrainian energy, military, and civilian infrastructure over the coming fall and winter to further destabilize Ukrainian society and to disrupt Ukraine’s defense industrial base.

The missile shipment is part of the deepening strategic partnership between Iran and Russia. CTP-ISW has reported extensively on how Moscow and Tehran have expanded their economic, media, military, and political cooperation since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022.[7] That cooperation has included, among other things, the heavily scrutinized sale of Iranian drones to Russia to use against Ukrainian civilian and military targets.

How secure and reliable are US elections? You’d be surprised

Zachary B. Wolf

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With election season underway, you’re bound to hear from former President Donald Trump that an army of undocumented immigrants is trying to vote in the presidential election. You may hear from Democrats that GOP efforts to pass new voting laws is a form of voter suppression.

Despite that rhetoric, you might be surprised to hear the argument that voting in the US — the act of casting a ballot and the guarantee it will be counted — is better now than at any time in the country’s history.

That’s what you’ll get from David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group that gets most of its funding from charitable foundations and aims to improve and build confidence in US elections.

I had a long phone conversation with Becker, a former senior attorney in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division who has been working for decades to improve US elections. Our conversation, edited for length, is below:

Actually, voting in the US is better than ever

WOLF: Your first point in talking about US elections is that the system we have is really good and has never been better. Explain that.

BECKER: The fact is, our elections right now — as voters are thinking about whether it’s worthwhile to cast a ballot in this election — our elections right now are as secure, transparent and verifiable as they’ve ever been.

The battle of Kursk hinges on the Russian railroad

Michael Peck 

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Ukraine's Kursk offensive has done more than seize a Los Angeles-size territory and embarrass Russia. It also appears to be disrupting Russia's railroad system. And if the US accedes to Ukrainian demands to allow deeper strikes into Russia using American-made rockets, Russia's ability to move troops and supplies could be seriously damaged.

Much more so than in Western armies, Russia depends on railroads to transport troops and supplies rather than using trucks. Russian units don't have the organic transport capacity to operate far from railheads. The problem today is that assembling forces from around Russia — some 30,000 troops, according to Ukrainian estimates — to seal off the Ukrainian penetration is overloading rail stations in the Kursk area and creating shortages of locomotives.

BelZhD, the union representing Belarusian railway workers, announced that as of August 12, Russian railway authority had asked its Belarusian counterpart not to dispatch trains to stations on the Orel-Kursk lines. This essentially severs rail links between Belarus and Russia.

"There is an accumulation of a large number of 'abandoned' trains (according to code 12 - the lack of a locomotive) at the stations of the Smolensk region of the Moscow Railway," the Belarusian union said.

World order 'under threat not seen since Cold War

Gordon Corera

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The international world order is "under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War", the heads of the UK and US foreign intelligence services have warned.

The chiefs of MI6 and the CIA also said both countries stand together in "resisting an assertive Russia and Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine".

In a first-ever joint article, Sir Richard Moore and William Burns wrote in the Financial Times that they saw the war in Ukraine coming "and were able to warn the international community", in part by declassifying secrets to help Kyiv.

And they said there was work being done to "disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage" across Europe by Russia, push for de-escalation in the Israel-Gaza war, and counterterrorism to thwart the resurgent Islamic State (IS).

The NSA Has a Podcast—Here's How to Decode It

Steven Levy

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My first story for WIRED—yep, 31 years ago—looked at a group of “crypto rebels” who were trying to pry strong encryption technology from the government-classified world and send it into the mainstream. Naturally I attempted to speak to someone at the National Security Agency for comment and ideally get a window into its thinking. Unsurprisingly, that was a no-go, because the NSA was famous for its reticence. Eventually we agreed that I could fax (!) a list of questions. In return I got an unsigned response in unhelpful bureaucratese that didn’t address my queries. Even that represented a loosening of what once was total blackout on anything having to do with this ultra-secretive intelligence agency. For decades after its post–World War II founding, the government revealed nothing, not even the name, of this agency and its activities. Those in the know referred to it as “No Such Agency.”

In recent years, the widespread adoption of encryption technology and the vital need for cybersecurity has led to more openness. Its directors began to speak in public; in 2012, NSA director Keith Alexander actually keynoted Defcon. I’d spent the entire 1990s lobbying to visit the agency for my book Crypto; in 2013, I finally crossed the threshold of its iconic Fort Meade Headquarters for an on-the-record conversation with officials, including Alexander. NSA now has social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. And there is a form on the agency website for podcasters to request guest appearances by an actual NSA-ite.

So it shouldn’t be a total shock that NSA is now doing its own podcast. You don’t need to be an intelligence agency to know that pods are a unique way to tell stories and hold people’s attention. The first two episodes of the seven-part season dropped this week. It’s called No Such Podcast, earning some self-irony points from the get-go.

U.S. Strategy Should Be Europe First, Then Asia

A. Wess Mitchell

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The United States’ ability to cope with the pressures of great-power competition hinges on securing Europe and preserving the trans-Atlantic alliance. While it is true that there are serious and pressing national security problems in Asia and the Middle East, these can only be dealt with effectively once the Atlantic foundation of Washington’s global strength is secure. To conduct a future pivot to Asia, the United States needs a fulcrum in Europe—not vice versa.

New Political Lines Are Drawn in Germany

Antonia Colibasanu

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Voters in the German states of Thuringia and Saxony turned out in large numbers on Sunday against the parties that presently constitute Germany’s federal coalition government: the Social Democratic Party, the Free Democratic Party and the Greens, giving most of their votes to the opposition Christian Democrat Union but also to anti-establishment parties Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the newly established Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Though these are regional elections, they reveal much about the future of German stability and thus European stability.

In some ways, the results should not be surprising. Like the rest of Europe, Germany is facing the daunting economic challenge of balancing unemployment and inflation. The ruling coalition agreed in July to spur economic growth beyond 1 percent through tax breaks for companies in research and development, perks for pensioners who combine their pension with a job, and incentives for the long-term unemployed to find work. (Although this is hardly the first time it has struggled to solve serious economic problems.)

All the while, changes in foreign policy were slowly forming. The malaise of the 2010s, an immigration crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic called into question the reliability of supply chains over which Berlin has little control. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fundamentally challenged German conceptions of how the world worked. Thus came the Zeitenwende, a dramatic policy shift conceived by Chancellor Olaf Scholz that essentially pledged to upgrade German defense capabilities.

Russia’s Most Notorious Special Forces Unit Now Has Its Own Cyber Warfare Team

Andy Greenberg

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Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, has long had a reputation as one of the world's most aggressive practitioners of sabotage, assassination, and cyber warfare, with hackers who take pride in working under the same banner as violent special forces operators. But one new group within that agency shows how the GRU may be intertwining physical and digital tactics more tightly than ever before: a hacking team, which has emerged from the same unit responsible for Russia's most notorious physical tactics, including poisonings, attempted coups, and bombings inside Western countries.

A broad group of Western government agencies from countries including the US, the UK, Ukraine, Australia, Canada, and five European countries on Thursday revealed that a hacker group known as Cadet Blizzard, Bleeding Bear, or Greyscale—one that has launched multiple hacking operations targeting Ukraine, the US, and other countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—is in fact part of the GRU's Unit 29155, the division of the spy agency known for its brazen acts of physical sabotage and politically motivated murder. That unit has been tied in the past, for instance, to the attempted poisoning of GRU defector Sergei Skripal with the Novichok nerve agent in the UK, which led to the death of a bystander, as well as another assassination plot in Bulgaria, the explosion of an arms depot in the Czech Republic, and a failed coup attempt in Montenegro.

Could AI and Deepfakes Sway the US Election?

Leah Feiger

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A few months ago, everyone was worried about how AI would impact the 2024 election. It seems like some of the angst has dissipated, but political deepfakes—including pornographic images and video—are still everywhere. Today on the show, WIRED reporters Vittoria Elliott and Will Knight talk about what has changed with AI and what we should worry about.

Leah Feiger is @. Vittoria Elliott is @telliotter. Will Knight is @willknight. Or you can write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.

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Sex and Consent in the Military

Rachel E. VanLandingham

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The U.S. military has been rocked by sexual assault and harassment scandals going back to Tailhook in the early 1990s. As a result, Congress has attempted to make the military a safer place for all by reforming military criminal law in piecemeal fashion while mandating a raft of prevention programs. The most significant recent criminal procedural reform—removing commanders’ prosecutorial authority regarding sexual assault and a small collection of other crimes—followed the #MeToo movement and shocking murder of Army soldier Vanessa Guillen.

Perhaps the most radical military reform measure in this arena is one that has flown largely under the radar…

Until now.

Like many jurisdictions around the country, the military has struggled with how to fairly define and prove consent to sex, and the lack thereof. In essence: “No” means no, but what does “yes” look like?

It’s been 10 years since I urged Congress to change military law to require affirmative consent to sex. Silence and passivity—particularly in circumstances of differences in military rank—should never be permitted to be construed as authorization to invade another person’s body. It was seemingly obvious that the military, with its obedience to orders-driven hierarchy, urgently needed to reverse the assumption that a woman walks around consenting to sex—the archaic default position of American rape law. (As summarized by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence, “A history of sexual violence, and of the status of women as the sexual property of men, still informs the law governing sexual assault.”) Rather, the military needed updated laws and policies to reflect the reality that no one walks around automatically consenting to anything regarding their bodies.

When will the war in Ukraine end?

Anatol Lieven

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Some Western supporters of Ukraine have been presenting the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian province of Kursk as a great victory that will significantly change the course and outcome of the war. They are deceiving themselves. While legally and morally justified, the attack has failed in all its main objectives, and may indeed turn out to have done serious damage to Ukraine’s position on the battlefield. One U.S. analyst has compared it to the Confederate invasion of the North that led to the battle of Gettysburg — a brilliant tactical stroke that however ended in losses that crippled the Army of Northern Virginia.

The Ukrainian attack has not captured any significant Russian population center or transport hub. It has embarrassed Putin, but there is no evidence that it has significantly shaken his hold on power in Russia. It may have done something to raise the spirits of the Ukrainian population in general; but, as Western reports from eastern Ukraine make clear, it has done nothing to raise the morale of Ukrainian troops there.

Understandably, they are focused on the situation on their own front; and that situation is deteriorating sharply, in part it seems because many of Ukraine’s best units were diverted to the attack on Kursk, and new Ukrainian conscripts are inadequately trained and poorly motivated.

"One of the objectives of the offensive operation in the Kursk direction was to divert significant enemy forces from other directions, primarily from the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove directions,” Ukrainian commander in chief General Alexander Syrsky said.

The Story Of Sailors Secretly Installing Starlink On Their Littoral Combat Ship Is Truly Bonkers

Howard Altman, Joseph Trevithick

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As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, that it is hard to believe.

It was all so that the chiefs on the ship’s ‘gold crew’ (the LCS alternates between two crews) could check sports scores, text home, and stream movies, investigators learned, according to Navy Times. However, that required a conspiracy involving gathering funds, purchasing the service, and installing the antenna on the 0-5 weatherdeck where it couldn’t easily be seen.

The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management, according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme.

Demographic Diversity Is Not Our Strength

Phillip Keuhlen

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There is an old saw in leadership circles, “You get what you inspect.” It recognizes that what you choose to measure and what you ignore conveys to your team what aspects of any situation are important to you. Nowhere is this more evident than in Navy Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs. As reflected in those programs’ origin document, the Task Force One Navy Final Report (TF1N) of January 2021, U.S. Navy DEI programs focus exclusively on demographic diversity of race, ethnicity, and gender. Likewise, the lopsidedly one-sided bias of reference material recommended to Naval Academy educators on the topic of “diversity” clearly conveys that the Navy’s Diversity enterprise does not value diversity of thought with respect to its indoctrination.

One of the earliest critiques of TF1N and its underpinning references identified four critical flaws that compromise the intellectual integrity of the study and its conclusions.

The first critical flaw was that it was an inquiry that started with its conclusion dictated by the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). Its Chartered purpose was to, “analyze and evaluate factors in our society and military that detract from Navy readiness, such as racism, sexism and other structural and interpersonal biases.” The CNO continued, “TF One Navy will seek to promptly address the full spectrum of systemic racism, advocate for the needs of underserved communities, and work to dismantle barriers and equalize professional development frameworks and opportunities within our Navy.” Any Officer assigned to execute the CNO tasking could only understand it as directing a final report that portrayed the Navy as systemically racist and sexist.