A Tech Policy Planning Guide for India—Beyond the First 100 Days

Konark Bhandari, Ajay Kumar, Amlan Mohanty, Shatakratu Sahu, Arun K. Singh, Shruti Sharma, Tejas Bharadwaj, and Raj Shukla

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On June 9, 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took an oath to lead the new government for a third successive term. Earlier in the year, he had announced his administration’s desire to implement key policy decisions within the first hundred days of the new government, if elected. Since taking office in June 2024, the new government has unveiled a series of ambitious infrastructure and logistics projects, alongside other initiatives. The technology ecosystem has also seen significant developments, in the form of a policy to boost bio-manufacturing as well as the launch of a new venture capital fund for incubating space technology.

Clearly, this has set the tone for the government’s post-election agenda. As the newly elected administration completes its first hundred days in office, a more sustained and farsighted roadmap in the technology sphere will be required. Towards this end, scholars at Carnegie India have put together this compendium of nine chapters with pointed recommendations that the government may consider as it charts the course on a tech-first agenda. In doing so, this compendium also surveys the current landscape of their respective technological areas to arrive at a crisp evaluation of how existing schemes have played out. This is relevant as we approach the ten-year anniversary of Digital India, the current government’s tech-heavy agenda that was launched in 2015. The Carnegie India team has spent months and years tracking these ecosystems and has spoken extensively to stakeholders in government, academia, and the private sector to relay these findings.

The Once Wobbly Quad Is Here to Stay

Derek Grossman

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“The Quad is here to stay,” U.S. President Joe Biden confidently proclaimed during the group's final summit of his tenure in Wilmington, Delaware, on September 21. To most observers, Biden's claim may seem overly optimistic, especially because the Quad—a security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—has fallen apart once before, in 2008. But this time, for a number of reasons, the Quad is likely to endure well into the future.

For starters, the Quad has already weathered domestic power transitions—the key driver of its demise the first time around—in three of its participant states. The most important Quad participant, the United States, shifted from Republican to Democratic administrations (former President Donald Trump to Biden) with no corresponding downgrade in Quad participation. In fact, quite the opposite happened: After the Trump team revived the Quad in 2017, the Biden administration participated in not only the first in-person summit in 2021 but also five more summits, including two virtual ones. From the outset, the Biden team pledged to have the Quad play a “defining role in the region” in keeping China in check in the Indo-Pacific. Neither Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris has campaigned on changing anything about the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy if he or she wins the election this November.

Similarly, Australia in 2022 experienced a switch from Liberal to Labour Party prime ministers (Scott Morrison to Anthony Albanese), and Canberra has not dampened any of its Quad activities. Meanwhile, Japan has undergone three prime minister transitions (Shinzo Abe to Yoshihide Suga to Fumio Kishida to, now, Shigeru Ishiba), all from the Liberal Democratic Party, with no change in Tokyo's appetite to engage in the grouping. India is the only country where a domestic leadership change has not yet occurred, but even there, the opposition Indian National Congress party has not contested Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party's foreign policy, pledging before the last election in April to “uphold continuity.”

India’s Troubled Truce with China

SHASHI THAROOR

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In June 2020, incursions by Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops into the fraught borderlands of India’s Ladakh region triggered bloody clashes that killed 20 Indian soldiers, plunged bilateral relations to their lowest point in decades, and led to a prolonged military standoff. Now, China and India have reached a truce, though many in India would prefer to hold their applause until they see how it is implemented.

35 killed after driver plows car into crowds at sports center in China’s deadliest known attack in a decade

Nectar Gan

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Thirty-five people were killed in southern China after a man plowed his car into crowds exercising at an outdoor sports center on Monday evening, according to police, in the country’s deadliest known attack on the public in a decade.

Another 43 people were injured and hospitalized in the rampage in the southern city of Zhuhai, local police said in a statement Tuesday.

Police said the driver, identified as a 62-year-old man surnamed Fan, was apprehended while trying to flee the scene. An initial investigation suggested he was unhappy with the outcome of a divorce settlement, they added.

The death toll is the highest China has seen since 2014, when a string of terrorist attacks rocked the far western region of Xinjiang. But sudden episodes of violence in recent months targeting random members of the public – including school children – have surged across the country as economic growth stutters, unnerving a public long accustomed low violent crime rates and ubiquitous surveillance.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping described the the mass hit-and-run in Zhuhai as “extremely vicious,” calling for the perpetrator to be severely punished in accordance with the law, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Police said Fan’s small off-road vehicle forced its way into the grounds of the sports complex and hit people exercising around a track at around 7:48 p.m. Monday.

When police intercepted his escape, Fan was found self-harming with a knife in the car and taken to hospital for treatment, the statement said.

“Due to severe self-inflicted neck injuries, Fan is currently unconscious, still undergoing emergency treatment and unable to be interrogated,” police said.

How to Prepare a Country for ‘Zero Day’ of Invasio

Heather A. Conley

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In a small town, a kindergarten teacher leads an effort to evacuate more than 200 women, children, and older people to a local shelter. Using the training she received before the war, she binds wounds and guides the vulnerable along a practiced evacuation route. In this case, it’s just a training exercise in a town of 1,000 people in southern Estonia—one that’s attracted hundreds of volunteers, nervous about the very real war in nearby Ukraine.

Nearly 5,000 miles away, another group of civilians have signed up for a training course on basic first-aid skills, first-responder management, and evacuation planning. Kuma Academy, the Taiwanese organization providing these skills was created in 2021 to help citizens better prepare to respond to natural disasters. But today, the disaster they anticipate most is an invasion by China. Public interest in training courses surged after Russia’s 2022 full-scale war against Ukraine and remains strong due in part to China’s frequent military exercises. The public is also keenly interested in a forthcoming television series that dramatizes events days before an invasion by China called Zero Day.

China’s new hypersonic weapon could black out US, Taiwa

Gabriel Honrada

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China’s new GDF-600 hypersonic weapon could redefine warfare with its fast, multi-target strike and electronic attack capabilities, posing a serious challenge to Taiwan and US forces in the Pacific.

This month, The War Zone reported that China unveiled its new concept for an unpowered hypersonic boost-glide weapon, conceived by the Guangdong Aerodynamic Research Academy (GARA), at the Zhuhai Airshow.

The hypersonic vehicle, which can reach speeds up to Mach 7 and ranges between 200 and 600 kilometers, can carry various submunitions, including supersonic missiles, drones and loitering munitions.

The report says that the GDF-600’s ability to release these payloads mid-flight enhances its operational versatility, allowing it to conduct kinetic strikes, electronic warfare (EW) and reconnaissance across multiple targets.

However, The War Zone points out that the technological challenges of deploying payloads at hypersonic speeds remain significant. The report underscores China’s continued investment in hypersonic technology, contrasting with the US military’s struggles with similar systems.

The report says that the GDF-600, if realized, could significantly bolster China’s hypersonic arsenal, particularly in regional contexts like the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea.

Integrating EW weapons into the HGV’s payload could conceivably disrupt enemy communications and radar, complicating and compromising defensive responses. The mid-flight deployment of EW assets would also enhance the HGV’s effectiveness in neutralizing tactical targets.

Chinese hackers target Tibetan websites in malware attack, cybersecurity group says

DAVID RISING

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BANGKOK (AP) — A hacking group that is believed to be Chinese state-sponsored has compromised two websites with ties to the Tibetan community in an attack meant to install malware on users’ computers, according to findings released Wednesday by a private cybersecurity firm.

The hack of the Tibet Post and Gyudmed Tantric University websites appears geared toward obtaining access to the computers of people visiting to obtain information on them and their activities, according to the analysis by the Insikt Group, the threat research division of the Massachusetts-based cybersecurity consultancy Recorded Future.

The hackers, known in the report as TAG-112, compromised the websites so that visitors are prompted to download a malicious executable file disguised as a security certificate, Insikt Group said. Once opened, the file loads Cobalt Strike Beacon malware on the user’s computer that can be used for key logging, file transferring and other purposes, including deploying additional malware.

“While we do not have visibility into the activity that TAG-112 conducted on compromised devices in this campaign, given their likely cyber espionage remit and the targeting of the Tibetan community, it is almost certain that they were engaged in information collection and/or surveillance rather than destructive attacks,” Insikt Group senior director Jon Condra told The Associated Press.

Chinese authorities have consistently denied any form of state-sponsored hacking, saying China itself is a major target of cyberattacks.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of the hacking of the two websites reported by the Insikt Group.

“China’s stance on the issue of cybersecurity is consistent and clear,” the ministry said in a faxed reply to a request for comment without elaborating.

According to the Insikt group research, the sites were first compromised in late May and the attacks bear many overlaps with a previously tracked hacker group known as TAG-102, leading analysts to conclude it is a subgroup of the already known group “working toward the same or similar intelligence requirements,” Insikt Group said.

When the People's Republic turns 100: Assessing China's development and relations with the United States towards 2050

Oscar Almén and Johan Englund

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This is an executive summary of a research report that explores China’s future development and relations with the United States leading to 2050.1 It examines China’s potential trajectory in six key areas: demography, economy, politics, foreign policy, military, and technology.

Baseline scenario

The study outlines a baseline scenario based on the assumption that the current development continues without major disruptive changes. According to the scenario, by 2050, China, led by the Communist Party, has continued to develop its economic, military, and technological capabilities, as it has become the world’s largest economy. At the same time, China’s population, particularly the proportion of the working-age population, has declined. Together with the inability to implement necessary reforms, this causes economic development to stall, and China has not become the dominant world power. After Xi Jinping’s death, a power struggle ensues, followed by an expected return to a more collective leadership where the various factions within the party share power. Far-reaching authoritarian and controlling measures still govern China, but the end of Xi Jinping’s era of strong power concentration has partially eased repression. Towards 2050, China is a globally competitive and advanced technological power. However, it has yet to become a leading innovative actor spurring disruptive cutting-edge technology across the broad technological forefront.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

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Created after the 1979 revolution, the IRGC answers directly to the Supreme Leader.

The IRGC supports militant groups in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Yemen. This “axis of resistance” aims to rid the region of Western and Israeli influence.

Its control over large sectors of the Iranian economy, including massive illicit gains from sanctions evasion, helps fund its myriad activities.

Introduction

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is one of the most powerful and feared organizations in Iran, playing central roles in the country’s projection of power, internal security, and economy.

Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s clerical leaders created the IRGC outside—and as a counterweight to—the country’s traditional armed services, which they distrusted. Today, it reports directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and its size and powers have expanded immensely. Among its many prominent military duties, the corps operates Iran’s formidable ballistic missile arsenal and oversees the Quds Force, an expeditionary arm that partners with Iran’s various regional affiliates, including Hamas and Hezbollah. As of late 2024, Israel was waging major conflicts with both of these militant groups, in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, respectively, and had conducted direct retaliatory strikes on Iran.

The IRGC is also highly influential in Iran’s national politics. Many corps veterans have moved on to senior government roles, including in the cabinet, parliament, and provinces. The corps has meanwhile enriched itself with billions of dollars by running illicit commercial and financial networks around international sanctions. Many regional experts expect the IRGC to play a pivotal role in selecting a successor to the aging Khamenei, which could further consolidate the group’s power and increase barriers to political reform.

What Trump Inherits in Gaza

Daniel Byman

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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to stop the war in Gaza, ending over a year of fighting that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, devastated the region, and spread to Lebanon, Yemen, and other countries nearby. Even if Trump is serious about keeping his promise, the chances of ending Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza are low and fighting is likely to continue.

Israel believes it is riding high, and even if Hamas offered a hostages-for-withdrawal deal—the core of cease-fire proposals in the past year—on favorable terms to Israel, it is unlikely that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would agree. Israel has decimated Hamas’s leadership and disrupted much of its military capacity. Although it has not destroyed Hamas completely, as Netanyahu has vowed, the group is on its heels, and Netanyahu contends that a cease-fire would allow the group to recover. Israel appears to have settled for a grinding conflict in Gaza with the goal of keeping Hamas weak, even if it prevents any larger political deal in the strip that would end the suffering there.

Iran and War

George Friedman

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Last week, I wrote on the Middle East and promised a follow-up piece would come next. The U.S. election intruded. Now I’ll return to the second part on the Middle East.

We tend to view unrest as an internal event, usually contained in a given nation or region. But sometimes there are cases in which unrest spreads through fear or greed beyond a nation’s terminus, thereby changing the region and even the world beyond. Such is the case in the Middle East.

The process goes something like this: Internal unrest in a country creates fear in another country that the unrest will spread there. The fear then is that the unrest will generate military action in the other country. Both nations may adopt a defensive posture or be frightened enough to act aggressively. Fear and hope are the foundation and engine of war. Unrest is the generator.

It is commonly said that war is unlikely in this region because its nations are weak. Strength and weakness are relative, and these nations should be compared not to the United States but to each other. How strong one nation is relative to the other determines the outcome. Terrain and geography are constants, but fear has a remarkable historical ability to overcome them and does not make war impossible. Wars are the most possible human thing.

Iran, which lies in the middle of the Middle East, is a country at distant war with the United States and Israel. Iran has the largest army in the Middle East, a substantial armored force and what appears to be a significant missile arsenal. It has been argued that it doesn’t have the ability to move its armored forces into combat because of the surrounding terrain, the distance to its enemies and its inability to supply fuel to the battlefield. (I am skeptical; Iran is a major oil producer and I expect it has enough refining capabilities to deliver fuel where it needs to go.) In looking at Iran’s terrain and road access with neighboring states, I think the obvious conclusion is that Iran does, in fact, have the ability to project power in the region and strike with missiles effectively. At a minimum, planners must assume that Iran’s military can operate at distance. Its strategic position may allow it to strike in multiple directions, including northward to Russia, and face a possible Russian move south.

Iran's Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Yea

Raphael S. Cohen

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There is no shortage of misery in the Middle East today. As the region marked the one-year anniversary of Hamas's October 7 massacre, Israel mourned the murder of around 1,200 Israelis and worried about the fate of the remaining 100 hostages held by Hamas. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent war, hundreds of thousands are currently homeless, and much of Gaza lies in ruins. Lebanon, too, is now devolving into a war zone.

Often overlooked amid all this misery is Iran, which is also having a terrible, horrible, very bad year. But unlike most of the other actors here, it has only itself to blame.

Consider where Iran was strategically on October 6, 2023. The United States, torn between competing demands for its military forces, was looking to reduce its military presence in the Middle East. That brought Iran closer than ever to achieving one of its long-term goals: ridding the region of U.S. influence. Israel, meanwhile, was tearing itself apart at home over controversial judicial reforms. Iran had suffered a strategic blow a few years prior with the passage of the Abraham Accords, which promoted Israel-Arab ties, but Tehran had arguably countered this in part by forging closer military ties to Moscow. True, Iran remained under significant sanctions, but the Biden administration unfroze some $6 billion in Iranian funds in exchange for freeing American prisoners.

Often overlooked amid all the misery in the Middle East is Iran, which is also having a terrible, horrible, very bad year.Share on Twitter

How to End the Third Lebanon War—and Prevent the Fourth

Assaf Orion

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One year ago, Hezbollah started what has morphed into the third Lebanon war with Israel, exposing the international failure to implement security arrangements mandated after their second war in 2006. On the ground, this failure can be attributed to the Lebanese government, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), but the Security Council and UN secretary-general bear heavy responsibility as well. To end the current war and prevent the next one, any new security arrangements must acknowledge and correct the roots of this failure.

Why 1701 Failed to Prevent War

Upon its adoption in 2006, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 ably diagnosed the main reasons for the outbreak of the second war: Hezbollah’s possession of military weapons outside the government’s control, and its deployment of forces in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel. To prevent a third war, 1701 wisely called on Beirut to extend its sovereignty via the LAF (supported by UNIFIL) and to establish a zone south of the Litani River that was free of any nongovernmental armed forces. The government was also asked to disarm all militias in accordance with the Taif Accord and Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1680. And the UN secretary-general was tasked with developing proposals for implementing these resolutions.

Russia’s Latest Large Strategic Nuclear Exercise and Russia’s Nuclear Doctrine

Mark B. Schneider

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Russia’s Latest Large Strategic Nuclear Exercise and Russia’s Nuclear Doctrine: The Implications for U.S. Nuclear Deterrence

In late October 2024, Russia conducted its normally annual large strategic nuclear exercise. Russia frequently calls it Grom (Thunder in Russian) although this latest exercise was unnamed.

Many announced aspects of it were similar to past Grom exercises, particularly those conducted over the last five years or so. The main target of Russia’s simulated nuclear strikes was almost certainly the United States.

In a program hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov, Russian state television Rossiya 1 (Channel 1) declared the exercise represented, “Nuclear greetings from Putin exactly a week before the U.S. election.”[1] Russia normally avoids doing conducting these exercises before a U.S. election. While they apparently conducted a strategic nuclear exercise in late October 2016, they did not announce it. In 2020, Russia delayed it until December.

According to Kiselyov, “It is important to note that our nuclear triad is the most modern and the most advanced on the planet.”[2] Moreover, he said, “One way or another, the Pentagon could not help but consider the capabilities of our nuclear triad and the readiness to use it in extremis.”[3]

Another program on Rossiya 1 said that “The current training exercise is the fourth of this level in two years.”[4] This apparently counts this year’s non-strategic nuclear exercise but not the large number of smaller Russian single service nuclear exercises. There was also an announced Strategic Missile Forces (ICBM force) exercise in October 2024 and others in July and March.[5]

Syria Has Never Really Cared About Israel

Anchal Vohra

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At the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict in October last year, while some suspected that Syria could join the war against Israel and open another front, none of the Syrians I had been in touch with believed President Bashar al-Assad would become a party to the conflict—especially not on behalf of Hamas.

Information Warfare: Hunt For The Russian Cyberwarrior

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November 13, 2024: the United States continues to hunt down and prosecute Russian hackers that were responsible for Cyber War attacks on Ukraine just before the Russians invaded in 2022. Five suspects are members of the Russian military and in Russia. The United States has offered a $60 million reward for those who make possible the arrest of the Russian hackers. This is the largest reward the United States has ever offered. These rewards work and the Americans keep quiet about who received an award and how the U.S. often arranged to have the award winners and their families relocated and sometimes put in a form of the U.S. witness protection program.

The Russian cyber-attacks on Ukraine were known as Whisper Gate and were carried out by the Russian GRU military intelligence organization. The GRU, in one form or another, has been around for 300 years. Espionage and dirty tricks are a long Russian tradition.

The GRU Cyber War offensive on the eve of the Ukraine invasion was directed against NATO supporters of Ukraine, including the United States. This triggered an aggressive and ongoing American response. This appears to have encouraged the GRU to try harder and the Cyber War goes on.

Since 2022 the Ukrainian GRU has been fighting back at the Russian Cyber War efforts and had some success damaging Russian Cyber War assets and stealing Russian government and military data. In July 2024 Ukraine carried out a surprise electronic attack on Russian internet access. This was accomplished by using the largest DDOS distributed denial of service attack ever. The attack disrupted all major Russian internet systems, including financial institutions, government networks and internet-based communications. This included messaging apps and social networks.

The Meeting of the Mavericks: North Korea and Russia

Benjamin R. Young

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One of the more unexpected outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian war has been the revitalized partnership between Russia and North Korea. For Pyongyang, this renewed relationship is particularly advantageous as it reduces North Korea's dependence on China. For Moscow, North Korea's stockpiles of artillery are crucial to Russia's war effort in Ukraine, as well as a blatant and defiant violation of international sanctions.

Under Kim Jong-un's byungin line, the North Korean regime has prioritized the parallel development of both military and economic sectors. Arms sales to Russia serve a dual purpose, advancing North Korea's military ambitions while generating much-needed economic resources. Historically, North Korea has been uneasy aligning itself too closely within a Sinocentric sphere of influence.

Arms sales to Russia serve a dual purpose, advancing North Korea's military ambitions while generating much-needed economic resources.Share on Twitter

With Russia's war in Ukraine, Pyongyang no longer needs to rely almost entirely on China for foreign currency or its development needs. In exchange for North Korea's artillery ammunition, Russia is supplying (PDF) hard currency, foodstuffs, and possibly missile technology to the North Koreans. This financial boost has significantly benefited Kim Jong-un's domestic 20x10 economic strategy, which aims to enhance growth in rural areas while centralizing economic power in the party elite, away from regional authorities and local administrators.

Russia has acquired critical artillery ammunition from North Korean stockpiles, bolstering its heavy artillery bombardment strategy in Ukraine. Ukraine's intelligence chief recently commented that North Korea, rather than China or Iran, is Russia's most significant ally for their war machine.

A Vocabulary of Escalation

Andrew Radin, Alyssa Demus, Alexandra T. Evans

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Escalation is an important consideration in U.S. military activities, but U.S. Army and joint planning doctrine and manuals do not provide focused guidance on how to account for escalation risks across the competition-conflict spectrum. The academic literature on escalation does offer useful frameworks, and many of the concepts are applicable to concrete military problems at the tactical and operational levels. This report contains insights from four prominent academic schools of thought on the actions, attributes, and dilemmas that characterize escalation and deescalation processes and provides military planners and staff officers a vocabulary to describe the benefits, costs, and risks of potential military options.

Academic theories of escalation offer ways to think about when, why, and how escalation may unfold.

These theories offer additional considerations for military officers to incorporate when they develop potential courses of action or advise on military options. However, the theories are often incomplete, are difficult to apply, and suggest contradictory implications for practitioners.

The literature on the offense-defense balance suggests that the challenges in distinguishing offensive and defensive capabilities may reduce the deterrent value of deploying offensive capabilities and lead an adversary to undertake undesired actions.

The literature on bargaining highlights the importance of the information and signaling. Costlier military actions that reveal a state's capability and commitment can help that state prevail without conflict, for example.

The literature on emerging domains highlights the new opportunities in such areas as cyber and space. However, because operational effects in these domains vary in scale, kind, and target, it may be difficult to calibrate proportionality or accurately convey intent. The resulting ambiguity can encourage escalation.

Will Elon Musk be able to cut $2 trillion from US government spending?

Ben Chu

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The boss of Tesla and the social media site X, Elon Musk, suggested last month at Donald Trump’s rally in New York City that it would be possible to cut “at least $2 trillion” from US government spending by eradicating “waste”.

Musk has now been appointed to co-head a new Department of Government Efficiency by the incoming US president, giving him an opportunity to try to put his plans into action.

In the most recent fiscal year (from October 2023 to September 2024) the US federal government spent $6.75 trillion (£5.3 trillion) according to the US Treasury.

This means Musk’s proposed cuts of $2 trillion would represent around a cut of around 30% of total federal government spending — also known as national spending in other countries.

How realistic is that proposal?

To answer that, it’s helpful to break down the total spending figure.

Around $880bn (13% of total US government spending) goes on interest payments on the national debt, which means that line of expenditure cannot be reduced without putting the US government in default.

Around $1.46 trillion (22%) goes on Social Security, which primarily means pensions for Americans over the retirement age. This is a line of spending which is “mandatory”, meaning it must be spent by law on those eligible.

Other large mandatory lines of government expenditure include Medicare - a government-funded health insurance program primarily serving Americans aged over 65.

'It flew right into her room': Ukrainian girl killed by Russian drone as attacks surge

James Waterhouse, Toby Luckhurst

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Maria Troyanivska had come home early the night a Russian drone hit her bedroom.

“It flew in through the window, right into her room,” her mother Viktoria tells the BBC. After the explosion, she and her husband Volodymyr ran from the next room to find their daughter’s room on fire.

“We tried to put it out, but everything was burning so strongly,” she says through tears. “It was impossible to breathe – we had to leave.”

The Russian Shahed drone killed the 14-year-old in her bed, in her suburban apartment in Kyiv, last month.

“She died immediately, and then burned,” her mother said. “We had to bury her in a closed coffin. She had no chance of surviving.”

Russia is massively increasing drone strikes on Ukraine. More than 2,000 were launched in October, according to Ukraine’s general staff - a record number in this war.

The same report says Russia fired 1,410 drones in September, and 818 in August - compared with around 1,100 for the entire three-month period before that.

It’s part of a wider resurgence for Russian forces. The invaders are advancing all along the front lines. North Korean troops have joined the war on Moscow’s side. And with the election of Donald Trump for a second term as US president, Ukraine’s depleted and war-weary forces are facing uncertain support from their biggest military donor.

The majority of the Russian drones raining down on Ukraine are Iranian-designed Shaheds: propeller-driven, with a distinctive wing shape and a deadly warhead packed into the nose cone.

Russia has also started to launch fake drones, without any explosives, to confuse Ukraine’s air defence units and force them to waste ammunition.

Jamestown FoundationChina Brief, November 1, 2024, v. 24, no. 21

The Art of War: PRC Weaponizes Culture to Galvanize the People

Joint Sword-2024B: Quarantining Key Ports and Seizing Comprehensive Superiority

The PRC’s Overcapacity Problem Depends on Who You Ask

PRC Adapts Llama for Military and Security AI Applications

PRC-Manufactured Weapons Abound Among African Militant Group

America Must Stand Up to Asia's Bully

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

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For over a decade, China has been using an increasingly aggressive hybrid-warfare strategy to increase its power and influence in the strategically important South China Sea. Countering it will be one of the defining challenges for US President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” of global preeminence depends significantly on achieving dominance in the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging global economic and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to use coercive tactics in service of these objectives.

In recent years, boats belonging to countries whose territorial claims China disregards, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, have faced blockades, ramming, water-cannon attacks, and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese vessels. Offshore energy operations endure regular harassment. Simply fishing in waters China calls its own can expose a person to a Chinese attack with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a crucial corridor linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

On the Precipice of a New Era of Warfare? Reflections on Military Revolutions, Past and Future

John F. Morris

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The literature on military revolutions and revolutions in military affairs has proliferated since historian Michael Roberts coined the former term in 1956. Among the most clear and compelling examples is MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray’s 2001 sketch of the historiography of both concepts. First, they define military revolutions as fundamental changes to the framework of war, recasting societies and states in addition to military organizations. Revolutions in military affairs, or RMAs, on the other hand, are less dramatic; they are “clusters” of technological, tactical, doctrinal, or organizational changes that are confined to the military sphere. Knox and Murray then summarize the consensus among historians that—preceded by “anticipatory RMAs of the Middle Ages and early modern era”—five military revolutions occurred in the West from about 1618 to the present. The first was “the seventeenth-century creation of the modern state and of modern military institutions”; the second, the French Revolution; the third, the Industrial Revolution; the fourth, the combination of the first three revolutions during World War I; and the fifth, “nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems” development from the end of World War II. Each of these military revolutions was associated with and resulted in certain RMAs. I should like to modify Knox and Murray’s narrative by grouping the first three and the last two of their military revolutions into what may be termed two fairly distinct paradigms of warfare. By doing so, and then examining today’s sociopolitical, strategic, and technological landscapes, it becomes clear that we may be on the precipice of a third.

From the early 1600s until the early 1900s, what I shall call the Westphalian paradigm transformed warfare in the West and allowed a handful of Western states to conquer most of the world. This paradigm included three military revolutions, the first of which began during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and came to fruition in the decades that followed. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia inaugurated a system of states and of balance of power in Europe that would last until the first sounds of the guns of August in 1914. Most of the successful states in this system concentrated power in the hands of absolute monarchs, who created modern military institutions, such as standing regiments and technical academies, composed of forces loyal to them rather than to individual nobles and mercenary chiefs. They grouped themselves into temporary alliances to further their realist foreign-policy goals and conducted mercantilist exploitation of their overseas possessions to finance wars. Under the command of professional officer corps, armies incorporated Maurice of Orange’s and Gustavus Adolphus’s tactical reforms, improved the use of combined arms, and inculcated in their soldiers via drill what John A. Lynn has called the “battle culture of forbearance”—the ability to withstand indiscriminate musket and artillery fire without breaking and sometimes without even responding. Military engineers like the Marquis of Vauban in France both utilized trace italienne design techniques to build the star-shaped fortresses that still mark the European landscape today and developed siege warfare tactics to reduce them. Victory in continental war, which during the eighteenth century usually meant no more than a slight readjustment of state borders, relied on perfection of these methods. King Frederick II exemplified this mastery, managing to expand his Prussian realm despite being surrounded by foes.

Quantum Sensing for Position, Navigation and Timing Use Cases

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Introduction

The demand for precise and reliable position, navigation, and timing (PNT) information has driven innovation in increasingly advanced measurement tools for centuries, and the importance of these systems in today’s highly interconnected, technology-dependent world has never been higher. The value of sophisticated PNT measurement tools extends far beyond basic Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, the most popular PNT service. Nearly every industry — including health, defense, communications, transportation, finance, manufacturing, and energy — has some need for PNT tools.

The more advanced measurement enabled by PNT can increase reliability and resilience when GPS service is lost or denied. PNT infrastructure can offer a range of capabilities by providing information such as location, orientation, altitude, tilt, directional movement, acceleration, and timing. A wide array of technology systems — including those for navigation, military operations, telecommunications, energy, and financial networks, among others — benefit from or rely on PNT

What we disagree about when we disagree about doctrine

Søren Sjøgren

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Introduction

It is generally accepted that sound doctrine is a critical component of military efficiency. Its purpose to standardise the thoughts of officers who ‘have to think along the same lines to get the machinery to work well’.Footnote1 But when it comes to its subsequent application, the consensus stops. What is at stake is more than disagreement about a word. It concerns the role of doctrine in the planning of, justification for, and ultimately conduct of military operations. For example, Lieutenant General Michael C. Short, who commanded NATO’s air forces in the campaign against Serbia in 1999, was frustrated with how the political leadership interfered in target selection. Air power was used to hit tactical-level Serbian forces in Kosovo and not strategic targets in Serbia, as contemporary doctrine suggested.Footnote2 Another example is the bombing campaign against Iraq in 1991. Scholars have argued that doctrine and not strategy drove operations.Footnote3 In the spirit of this article, these could also be understood as two very different ways of conceptualising what doctrine is and how it should be applied; something to adhere to or depart from. These underlying beliefs about doctrine, its relations to operations and its intended role in the planning and conduct of operations are what I label ‘imaginaries’ in this article.