Asia’s Security Order According to India

Jagannath Panda and Richard Ghiasy

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In 2022, India’s Minister for External Affairs S. Jaishankar outlined India’s vision for Asia and, more broadly, the Indo-Pacific by stressing “more collaboration and more integration.” For India, that can only be achieved if Asian countries “consolidate” their independence and expand their “freedom of choice” – a likely reference to India’s hard-fought democracy.

Such Indian sentiment is not a current fad but is closely interlinked with the ramifications of hundreds of years of colonialism that, among other things, laid the framework for India’s unstable borders and the post-independence non-aligned past.

At the same time, India’s core security concerns directly result from its Asian rival China’s phenomenal rise and resultant intent to upend the regional security order, including the status quo along India’s borders. So even as India’s vision for an Asian security order is not yet entirely well-formed, China’s presence as a permanent adversary and its drive for a more Sino-centric Asian security order has given impetus to India’s rhetoric for a multipolar alternative. India’s Indo-Pacific convergence with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the United States, and Europe, as well as like-minded regional partners, many of whom are U.S. allies, such as Australia, Japan, France, the European Union, Vietnam, and the Philippines, must be seen through this lens.

How Effective Is The Latest China-India Border Patrol Agreement? – Analysis

Zhou Chao

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Indian media has recently reported that the Indian Ministry of External Affairs stated that China and India have reached an agreement on issues concerning border areas. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said on October 21 that Indian and Chinese diplomatic and military negotiators have been in close contact with each other, reaching the agreement “on patrolling arrangements along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in the India-China border areas, leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020”.

On the same day, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar also stated in an interview with New Delhi Television that the situation along the China-India border has returned to its 2020 status and that both sides have completed the disengagement. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian has also confirmed at a regular press conference that the two countries have reached a solution regarding border issues and that China will work with India to implement the agreement.

In response, some commentaries in China pointed out that the achievement of this agreement signifies a major improvement in China-India relations. Relevant analyses suggest that India has a high economic dependence on China, and since 2020, a series of measures targeting Chinese companies and capital have harmed India’s own economic interests. Additionally, India faces various disputes and conflicts with the West on issues such as human rights, and it needs to improve its relationship with China and strengthen cooperation to cope with Western pressure. While these analyses have their merits, their projection of the effectiveness of the latest China-India border patrol agreement may be overly optimistic, as the actual impact of it is likely to be relatively limited.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Solve India’s Water Utility Problem

Bhawna Prakash

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Senior government and industry leaders will gather in Washington in late October for annual meetings between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Water and digital solutions rank among the World Bank’s top priorities under its Global Challenge Programs and are expected to be highlighted during the meetings.

India has a unique opportunity to further build on global momentum and use artificial intelligence (AI) to transform its water and sanitation sectors. National policies so far have been ineffective in technology integration with utilities at scale. However, AI can assist the government in overcoming challenges within the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) value chain for utilities.

India should take three steps to modernize the WASH ecosystem: leverage and scale up AI to address nonrevenue water (NRW), augment private sector participation, and improve corporate reporting.

Setting the Context

NRW is water that is produced but cannot be billed because it is lost before it reaches customers or there is no mechanism to bill it. As of 2019, NRW costs the world $39 billion and India $5 billion annually. This issue arises from insufficient planning, faulty systems, inefficient utility operations—including theft, underbilling, and user nonpayment—and a lack of funding for infrastructure modernization. Indian utilities can leverage AI to identity redundancies and minimize NRW.

India’s Quest For Critical Minerals – OpEd

Prionka Jha

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India needs to carefully craft its import strategy to circumvent potential trade risks while balancing international ties for procuring minerals critical to accelerating its energy transition, a new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) states.

IEEFA’s report examines five critical minerals (and their compounds) – cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium and nickel – from the perspective of import dependency, trade dynamics, domestic availability and global price fluctuations. It finds that India remains largely dependent on imports for these minerals and their compounds, with 100% import dependency for minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel.

Further, the report notes that the demand for critical minerals is expected to more than double by 2030, while domestic mines will take more than a decade to start producing.

“India should strive to de-risk its critical minerals sourcing by identifying new international resources and expediting domestic production. A concerted effort to partner with and foster bilateral relations with mineral-rich nations should be a priority for India,” says the report’s co-author Charith Konda, Energy Specialist, IEEFA.

My question on Canada: Are these spies really the best India can find in the 21st century? - Opinion

Vir Sanghvi

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Now that India has responded to allegations that it tried to organise assassinations in Canada and the United States, it is time to look at the issue with less emotion and more introspection.

Most Indians agree that Justin Trudeau’s accusations are part of a broader strategy—he wants to use an anti-India position to appeal to his pro-Khalistan voter base. The Canadian prime minister has been spoiling for a fight for several years now. When he extended his battle to include the Indian High Commissioner and other senior diplomats, it became obvious that he wanted a full-blown international incident.

Well, he’s got one now.

Whether it helps him in the forthcoming elections remains to be seen.

Evidence against Gupta

Canada’s allegations are based—as Trudeau himself has said—on intelligence rather than hard evidence. This kind of distinction is usually made when countries have access to chatter or phone intercepts passed on by other countries, but no hard evidence, let alone a smoking gun, a confession, or strong witness testimony.

The Cold War’s Strategic Significance Today: Is China A Sea Power Or A Land Power In Disguise? – OpEd

Bruce A. Elleman

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China has a pivotal decision to make soon. Will it continue to back the continentalist Putin? Or will Xi Jinping take advantage of Russia’s sudden weakness to reclaim China’s “lost territories,” thereby deescalating rising maritime tensions with the Anglo-American-led sea powers?

It is often overlooked that during the Cold War China was the biggest prize for the West, tying up as it did a quarter of the Soviet armed forces. To defeat the USSR, the U.S. and UK even helped build the modern Chinese Navy. This created new threats to the West, however, including encouraging the emergence of an imperialist China intent on satisfying its historical ambitions to dominate Southeast Asia.

Interestingly, on 10 April 1974, Deng Xiaoping foresaw this possible danger when he told a special session of the United Nations General Assembly: “If one day China should change her colour and turn into a Superpower, if she too should play the tyrant in the world, and everywhere subject others to her bullying, aggression and exploitation, the peoples of the world should identify her as social-imperialist, expose it and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”1

Why China Won’t Give Up on a Failing Economic Model

Zongyuan Zoe Liu

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In late September, after months of missing post-pandemic growth targets, the Chinese government began rolling out a broad set of economic stimulus measures. So far, these have included stock market support, monetary policy easing, the recapitalization of large state-owned banks, and some limited fiscal stimulus. The total amount and specifics of the fiscal stimulus will be revealed after the U.S. election, following the National People’s Congress Standing Committee meeting in early November, but Vice Finance Minister Liao Min has described it as “quite large scale.” By unveiling these measures, Beijing has finally acknowledged what the Chinese people and the world have known for some time: the Chinese economy is in deep trouble. The “China Dream”—Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision of doubling the size of the economy by 2035 and achieving broad-based prosperity—is slipping away. But will the stimulus work?

China’s most pressing short-term economic challenge is weak domestic demand, driven by a lack of consumer confidence. When Chinese consumers refuse to spend, they hoard cash, creating a savings glut that, coupled with government overinvestment in politically favored industries, exacerbates China’s most serious long-term structural issue: industrial overcapacity. As I argued in Foreign Affairs in August, the mutually reinforcing dynamics of flagging domestic demand and industrial overcapacity form an economic doom loop that China must escape to avoid stagnation. China’s leadership says the latest stimulus is meant to boost consumption. By largely excluding direct assistance to households as part of its stimulus plans, however, the government has demonstrated that it is still clinging to its old economic playbook of state-directed investment.

Xi Is Overcoming His Dislike of the Stock Market - Analysis

Lizzi C. Lee

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In late September, China’s stock market, beleaguered by weak economic indicators and a crumbling property sector, experienced an unexpected rally. After previous hesitation over major interventions, Beijing’s stimulus measures sparked a surge in Chinese equities, briefly reigniting optimism. Yet what truly puzzled market observers was Beijing’s newfound approach to managing the market itself.

After allowing the market to lose trillions of dollars in value, with only limited state fund interventions when key psychological benchmarks were breached, Beijing abruptly shifted to a full-scale rescue. This involved forward guidance through press conferences, policy adjustments, and media engagements to restore market confidence. For the first time, stock market performance appeared to be a direct policy target—marking a sharp departure from President Xi Jinping’s usual stance of keeping financial markets at arm’s length.

Recent Hezbollah Pager Explosions Remind Us We're in a Cyberwar

Rob Cheng

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As the Cyberwar Escalates, Let's Not Forget We're in One

Unlike a traditional war, the conflict plays out over decades and impacts every human yet escapes the grasp of a myopic society robotically staring at screens never questioning the security of those very screens.

Should a few pagers and walkie-talkies exploding on the other end of the planet give pause to our halcyon life?

Could the device you're holding in your hand explode?

Not because of a product defect.

We have lawyers for that.

Is it even remotely possible for perpetrators to pull off a horrific cyber 9/11 without ever setting foot in the country?

In cybersecurity parlance, this is a supply chain attack.

Israel did not attack Hezbollah directly.

‘The Iranian Period Is Finished’

Robert F. Worth

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At the end of September, when Israel’s campaign to destroy Hezbollah was reaching its height, I met one of the group’s supporters in a seaside café in western Beirut. He was a middle-aged man with a thin white beard and the spent look of someone who had not slept for days. He was an academic of sorts, not a fighter, but his ties to Hezbollah were deep and long-standing.

“We’re in a big battle, like never before,” he said as soon as he sat down. “Hezbollah has not faced what Israel is now waging, not in 1982, not in 2006. It is a total war.”

He talked quickly, anxiously. Only a few days earlier, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, had been killed in a bombardment of the group’s south-Beirut stronghold, and my companion—he asked that I not name him, because he is not authorized to speak on the group’s behalf—made clear that he was still in a state of shock and grief. Israeli bombs were destroying houses and rocket-launch sites across southern Lebanon, in the Bekaa valley, and in Beirut; many of his friends had been killed or maimed. He had even heard talk of something that had seemed unthinkable until now: Iran, which created Hezbollah around 1982, might cut off support to the group, a decision that could reconfigure the politics of the Middle East.

The Least Bad Option for Lebanon

Steven Simon and Jeffrey Feltman

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The Middle East is where clever foreign policy initiatives go to die. This has been the case since at least the Cairo Conference of 1921, at which British Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill—who had to be reminded repeatedly who was Shiite and who was Sunni, and what the difference was between them—devised a plan, in the space of ten days, to ensure long-term British interests in the region. Among other things, he created the state of Iraq, to minimize the cost of occupying the area while protecting British access to India; embraced British mandatory rule over Palestine, to secure the right flank of Egypt and the Suez Canal; and strangled Syrian independence by handing the territory to the French, in exchange for French acquiescence to Britain’s control over Iraq and Palestine. But instead of saving money and preserving British influence, these moves eventually ignited strife across the region and led to the end of British authority in the Middle East.

The truth is that, except for the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt and a 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, through which the United States fostered enduring peace among the three countries, it is not easy to identify a successful Western policy initiative in the Middle East. And the list of failures is long indeed.

Despite this dismal track record, there are crises that still demand a U.S. policy response. The spiraling conflict in Lebanon, which pits the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah against Israel, is one of them. As is typically the case, the United States, owing to its self-conceived indispensability, as well as its influence with key belligerents, a willing American electorate, and an immense military capability, is the only actor capable of formulating a response that could prevent further escalation and suffering in Lebanon.

The Chip War Turns Two

KEUN LEE

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Two years have passed since US President Joe Biden’s administration pushed through the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated $52 billion in subsidies to encourage semiconductor manufacturers to build up their capacity within the United States. Over this period, the US also imposed broad restrictions on the export of chip-related technology to China. The goal of these measures was to achieve US self-sufficiency in microchips and to impede China’s quest to achieve the same. Have they succeeded?

North Korea Sends Troops to Ukraine in a Deal with Russia: A Repeat of History?

Denny Roy

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Once again, Koreans Will Fight In Someone Else’s War: For the fourth time in recent history, Korean soldiers are fighting in another country’s war. Those destinations have all been at the behest of regional major powers: Japan, China, the United States, and now Russia. Historically, the consequences for Korea of its young men fighting outside the Peninsula have been a complicated mix of good and bad.

The reasons Koreans went abroad to fight were both financial and political.

During the Pacific War, when Korea was under a Japanese colonial government, many Koreans volunteered to join Japan’s armed forces. Their principal motivation was to escape poverty, as nearly all of them were from peasant families. Recruiters promised that volunteers would get priority consideration for government jobs after finishing their military service.

At the same time, various groups of Koreans traveled to China and joined guerrilla groups fighting against the invading Japanese Army. Their motivation was to degrade Japan’s military strength and thereby indirectly help liberate Korea from occupation by Japan.

Spectrum Allocations and Twenty-First-Century National Security

James Andrew Lewis

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The weapons of the twentieth century are not as important as they once were for national security. The United States is in a global competition with China over markets, rule setting, and technological leadership. Networks and telecommunications, particularly wireless telecom like 5G, are essential tools in this competition, but current U.S. spectrum allocations are not optimized for the contest the United States is in now. Changing this requires rethinking national security to emphasize technological leadership and the ability to innovate, something the current administration has done well, except in spectrum. The United States is falling behind. To remain competitive, the United States will need to adjust how it has allocated radio spectrum to emphasize commercial innovation. The government-centric spectrum allocations of the last century will need to change if we are not to fall behind.

The spectrum issue is not about mobile phones and consumers. It is about the enterprise uses mobility will create in factories, hospitals, and businesses writ large. Earlier CSIS reports explain the value and use of spectrum. Spectrum-using technologies are crucial for the next phase of innovation and economic growth, but the United States is so preoccupied with its domestic battles over spectrum that it has lost sight of the larger contest over who will build the global infrastructures for the digital economy. If the current trend continues, China will be the builder of this century’s digital infrastructure.

North Korean Troops in Ukraine: Are We on the Path to World War III?

Boaz Golany & Jacob Nagel

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North Korean Troops Joining the War in Ukraine: A Step Towards WWIII? - Recent reports indicate that up to 10,000 elite North Korean troops are undergoing a quick training session in Russia and are on their way to join Russian troops in their effort to push back Ukrainian units that invaded Kursk Oblast a few weeks ago. This reinforcement is too small to cause a dramatic change in the battlefield but it’s a move that should set alarm bells ringing in Washington, Taipei, Jerusalem, and other Western-oriented capitols.

Why Should We Worry?

First, it’s an indication of how desperate Putin is as he faces ever-increasing challenges in recruiting soldiers from within Russia to substitute for the large number of casualties that the Red Army has already sustained since the war started in February 2022. The more desperate he becomes, the higher the likelihood that he will consider using nuclear weapons to achieve his goals.

Second, this deployment can serve as a pilot towards a much larger involvement of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in the Russia-Ukraine war and perhaps also in other wars. With an estimated 1.3 million soldiers, the KPA is numerically one of the largest military forces in the world. A scenario in which hundreds of thousands of KPA soldiers are sent to battle, first in Ukraine and later in other arenas, should not be underestimated.

The case for geopolitical optimism

Gabriel Elefteriu

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There is no question that the world is spinning out of control, hurtling towards the catastrophe of major power war – which would likely see nuclear exchanges. Of course, the future is not pre-determined. But the Ukraine situation, with North Korean troops now taking the field in Kursk, risks a critical escalation. Israel is fighting on seven fronts against an almost-nuclear Iran. The Chinese military is getting ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, as ordered by Xi Jinping. In addition, the BRICS bloc is expanding, while the Eurasian Axis centred on China, Russia and Iran is becoming more coherent and effective.

Meanwhile, the West is viciously divided politically, hollowed-out culturally, declining demographically, incompetently led, insufficiently armed, unwilling to fight, industrially decimated – and technologically-suicidal, perhaps via AI but certainly via “green tech”. The West retains its primacy in the international system, but through inertia – and courtesy of past accumulations of wealth and intellectual capital – rather than through present performance.

In these conditions it is hard to discern a near-, medium- or long-term future evolution of the global picture that would be particularly favourable to the Western Alliance. Even if major war is averted, the general degradation of our societies and economic systems, coupled with the chaos spreading across the Third World – from the terrorism of Africa and Middle East, to civil wars, unrest or mass migration – makes it difficult to see how we will climb out of the hole dug for us by Davos Man and the “elites” who’ve been running our countries since the Cold War.

Why sanctions on Russia are literally backfiring

Ariel Petrovics

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The U.S. and its allies have relied on sanctions as one of the primary tools for curtailing Russia's military operations in Ukraine.

Running the gamut from individual limits against Russian leaders and businesses, to comprehensive restrictions on key sectors like Russian oil and natural gas, these sanctions are intended to impose unacceptable economic costs that directly hinder Russia’s war effort and indirectly incentivize Russia to end its campaign.

However, experts have been debating whether and how well they have worked. Some argue that the comprehensive sanctions, and in particular the widespread restrictions against its oil and gas revenue, are bringing Russia’s economy — and therefore its military campaign — to its knees. Others concede that sanctions may not successfully end the war outright, but contend they at least offer an inexpensive and low-risk way to slow Russian advances and take a public stand against the invasion. And yet, after nearly three years, the war still rages, Russia’s economy has rebounded, and Russian domestic support for Putin and the Kremlin are at an all-time high.

The problem with this solely economic debate is that it overlooks the risk for more serious counterproductive consequences. Sanctions are not just failing to end the war in Ukraine or weaken the Kremlin’s warfighting currency, they’ve also backfired, inadvertently strengthening Moscow’s hardline position, undermining the utility of alternative strategies, and shoring up the Kremlin against future international coercion. As a result, the fallback position that sanctions are at least better than nothing ignores their long-term perverse consequences for regional peace and international stability.

The Cure for Cancer? From Imhotep to Immunotherapy

JP Errico

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Earlier this year, two small cancer research companies merged: one public, the other private. The public company, Kintara had just published negative results in a clinical trial, which predictably turned the pre-revenue biotech into a financial zombie, unable to raise capital. It was a shame because Kintara had other promising programs … but this isn’t their story. Rather, it’s the tale of the private company, now called TuHura Biosciences, and the brilliant idea that their founder plucked from ancient history to create what may actually be the cure for cancer.

Do I have your attention?

The full story requires a quick journey through the history of cancer treatment, beginning nearly five thousand years ago in the Egyptian court of the very first physician … ever. I’m speaking, of course, of Imhotep, who lived so long ago that, today, we’re closer to Julius Caesar than he was! Amazingly, surviving papyrus writings describe Imhotep inducing infections in cancer patients to activate their immune systems to treat tumors. All signs are … it worked!

Fast forwarding some 3,500 years, we meet Peregrine, an Italian priest. Church records (admittedly, not exactly electronic medical charts) indicate that Peregrine suffered with an aggressive tumor in his leg, which had burst through his skin. In extreme pain, Peregrine faced amputation as his only option. Legend has it Peregrine prayed fervently, fell into a deep dream state in which Jesus touched his leg, and woke to his leg healed. The Catholic Church proclaimed it miraculous and promptly canonized him Saint Peregrine. Medical historians, being a bit more skeptical, speculate that an infection (a common complication of tumors breaching the skin) triggered an immune-based tumor regression.

‘Double Standards and Hypocrisy’: The Dissent at Cisco Over the War in Gaza

Paresh Dave

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Over the past year, Cisco publicly looked like one of the few tech companies that had avoided internal backlash over its response to the war in Gaza. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of the Silicon Valley giant known for its routers, cybersecurity services, and WebEx video calling, issued a statement last November acknowledging the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.

And as recently as two months ago, Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people, policy, and purpose officer, smiled as she posed for photos with many of the company’s employee organizations, including the one for Palestinians. However, this photo later became a source of significant contention within the company.

Behind the scenes, eight current and one former employee who spoke with WIRED allege, Cisco has marginalized its internal Palestinian advocacy groups and their hundreds of members. Throughout a turbulent period beginning this past July, the people allege that the company has failed to promptly and adequately police harassment of Palestinian employees and their allies on its intra-company forums despite detailed complaints. They further allege that Cisco halted an internal petition calling for limiting sales to Israel over potential human rights concerns.

Persuade, Change, and Influence with AI: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Information Environment

Austin Coombs

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US adversaries are weaponizing artificial intelligence to unleash a new wave of psychological warfare. Russia, through its troll factories and bot farms, has adopted a new AI-driven asymmetric warfare strategy, using generative models to amplify disinformation efforts on an unprecedented scale. A striking example was the AI-generated image of a false Pentagon explosion, which caused a rapid and dramatic (albeit temporary) drop in the US stock market. This incident highlights the catastrophic potential of AI-driven propaganda to destabilize critical systems, making it imperative for the United States to adapt. While the Department of Defense’s AI Adoption Strategy is a step forward, gaps remain in training US forces to fully harness AI for information warfare and to counter these evolving threats, particularly those from Russia and China.

Russia is using AI to enhance its disinformation campaigns, particularly through the evolution of bot accounts that now produce more human-like and persuasive content. Ahead of the coming November US presidential election, Russian actors have sought to leverage AI to enhance the scope and scalability of their influence operation efforts, some of which specifically aim to shape public opinion toward candidates, sway US electoral outcomes, undermine public confidence, and sow discord both within the United States and globally. The integration of AI has allowed Russia to monitor the information environment in real time, enabling rapid adaptation of disinformation tactics.

From the Space Age to the Anti-Satellite Age

Jim Cooper

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We are so accustomed to the Space Age that we assume it will last forever. At least 5 billion people benefit from satellites every day—for internet, communications, shipping, banking, electric grids, and so on—and the remaining 3 billion want access. Everyone wants a smartphone, but those phones are dumb without satellites.

There is increasing evidence, however, that we are living in an Anti-Satellite (ASAT) Age, a time when nations are no longer confident that their satellites are safe, or that they can add as many satellites as they want. Today, nations fear that their satellites will be subtracted. Space is no longer a sanctuary. This is why Congress and the White House took the extraordinary step in 2019 of creating a new Space Force. Unfortunately, this was years late, after rival nations had created their own space forces.

Kinetic threats, those taken through physical means to destroy or damage, are the most obvious. China’s first ASAT launch in 2007, then its geosynchronous ASAT launch in 2013—not to mention its flagrant hypersonic test in 2021—prove that China is perfecting kill shots. Its first test was also the most irresponsible. That test put a target on every single satellite and sharply increased debris in low Earth orbit, putting all satellites at risk.

Unleashing Quantum’s Potential

Julia Dickson and Emily Harding

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Quantum technologies will revolutionize computing power, encryption and decryption, and sensing, potentially creating a crucial advantage or a critical failure in strategic competition. Experts assess that the United States leads China overall in quantum technologies, but that lead is in peril. The U.S. government must work closely with industry and its allies to stay ahead. To discuss opportunities for the U.S. government to collaborate with industry and its partners and allies on the development of quantum technologies, CSIS convened experts from the U.S. and Five Eyes (FVEY) governments, industry, and the think tank community.

The conversation identified four key challenges to collaboration and potential ways to mitigate them: acquiring sufficient capital, supporting the supply chain, addressing human capital scarcity, navigating export controls, and strengthening partnerships.

Challenge 1: Acquiring Sufficient Capital

The emerging quantum computing industry faces a particular challenge of securing sufficient, patient, trusted capital for two related reasons. First, specific use cases for quantum computing are real but unproven; communicating them is a challenge. Participants discussed extensively the challenge of expressing that quantum does not have a specific special use case but that powerful computing can solve problems in many industries, ranging from aerospace to pharma to finance, and generate billions of dollars in net income for end users. Still, clearly defining use cases will better draw in equity, funding investments from the fundamental science to devices, prototypes, and supporting technologies.

The Coming Drone Wars

Paul Schwennesen

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Tennyson’s haunting lines, indelibly printed into Western military consciousness, portray a disastrous British light cavalry attack against Russian artillery positions in the midst of the Crimean War. While generally read as a paean to disciplined combat courage, it in fact presents a not-so-veiled warning—a reference to muddled orders (“some one had blunder’d”) and obsolete tactics in the face of technical superiority. Horses and sabers, after all, were no match for canister and grapeshot from well-entrenched artillery.

Psychologist Norman Dixon, a specialist in the psychology of military incompetence, says that the implied heroism in The Charge of the Light Brigade rather gets things backward—the event should have opened discerning eyes to the changing nature of warfare. Instead, it “did much to strengthen those very forms of tradition which put such an incapacitating stranglehold on military endeavor for the next eighty or so years.”

Today, after another frontline trip to Ukraine, I think it can honestly be said that the United States military faces a similar “incapacitating stranglehold” in its collective understanding of the changing nature of warfare. If we do not adjust (quickly) to the threat of drone warfare, we may well end up writing nostalgically of noble but futile charges of legacy weapons against better-adapted adversaries.

Cockpit or Command Center? C2 Options for Collaborative Combat Aircraft

Benjamin Jensen, Christopher Koeltzow, Allen Agnes, and Eric Williams

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Introduction

There is a new theory of airpower on the horizon. Over the next five years, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) plans to invest billions in research and development for a force of over 1,000 collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). The vision includes working with allies and partners to pair fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft with versatile unmanned systems, creating aerial networks that can rapidly adapt to changes in the battlespace. Multiple reports and war games portend a new future in which unmanned systems will replace an aging, expensive manned aircraft and create entirely new mission profiles optimized for peer conflict. The fate of these unmanned systems is critical, given both the Air Force’s decision in July 2024 to reevaluate its sixth-generation aircraft and the emergence of new Air Task Forces.

Yet how will military organizations command and control distributed networks of CCAs in future air operations? Will such networks be proverbial “loyal wingmen,” subject only to the tactical commands of a pilot in a cockpit? Or will drones do the bidding of the command centers, like Combined Air Operations Centers (CAOCs)? The command and control (C2) architecture surrounding CCAs will almost certainly prove to be as consequential as the systems themselves in forging the future of air power. The U.S. military needs a clear concept of mission command for autonomous aircraft, executed across multidomain battle networks and tailored to different mission types.

Why I Hate Sun Tzu

Maj James M. Stephens

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The Art of War does not offer bad advice, quite the opposite. It has had a profound effect on the 20th century through men like Mao Zedong and Vo Nguyen Giap; that is unquestioned. The Art of War is the definitive work on war in some parts of the world—but not here. The problem with Sun Tzu is two-fold. First, the influence of Sun Tzu is wildly overemphasized in Western military education since The Art of War is a relatively recent addition to the Western strategic canon. Second, his Confucian philosophy is antithetical to the philosophies that shaped the American way of war. Ultimately, Sun Tzu is an outsider whose work has limited applicability to the Marine Corps.

New Kid on the Block

Sun Tzu is typically covered first when studying the theory of war. This makes sense, as he is chronologically the earliest great theorist. Yet, when the historicity is considered, Sun Tzu is a relatively recent addition. French Jesuits brought the first translations of The Art of War to Europe in the late 18th century, but when The Art of War entered into the Western zeitgeist is up for debate. Just because translations were available did not mean they were utilized. B.H. Liddell-Hart, whose indirect approach bears some similarities to The Art of War, was already working on his ideas when he was introduced to Sun Tzu in 1927.1 It was Marine Gen Samuel B. Griffith’s translation and commentary alongside Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare in 1963 that finally brought the text to wider attention in the West. Griffith even observes in his translation’s appendix that, despite European theorists having access to the text, they either had little knowledge or regard for it.2 Sun Tzu did not even make the cut for the definitive Makers of Modern Strategy, first released in 1986, though he did make the cut in the 2023 edition.3