How 2025 will be a challenging year for India-Bangladesh ties - Opinion

Sayantan Ghosh

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2025 will be a year to watch for India-Bangladesh relations, with several critical developments that could redefine the bilateral ties between these two neighbouring nations. The political landscape in Bangladesh has undergone significant changes with the interim leadership of Muhammad Yunus, and the implications of these changes are far-reaching. From the contentious issue of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's deportation to the delay in elections, the protection of Hindu minorities, and the shifting alliances with Pakistan and China, the stakes have never been higher. The decisions made and actions taken in 2025 will have profound consequences for both countries, shaping their economic, strategic, and humanitarian futures.

One of the most pressing issues is the request for the deportation of Hasina, who fled to India amid widespread protests. India's response to this request will be a litmus test for its diplomatic stance and could either strengthen or strain the bilateral relationship. Additionally, the delay in elections in Bangladesh has created a power vacuum that hardline groups like Jamaat-e-Islami are eager to fill. The rise of these groups, which have historically been anti-India, could destabilise the region and undermine the progress made in recent years.

Bangladesh’s Political Storm: Regional Implications And India’s Strategic Imperative - Opinion

Prosenjit Nath

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Bangladesh is on the brink of significant political upheaval. The escalating tension between Muhammad Yunus’s interim government and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) signals a turbulent period ahead. With stakes high for domestic power dynamics and regional stability, the developments in Bangladesh demand scrutiny, particularly from neighbouring India.

Rising Tensions Between Yunus and the BNP

At the heart of Bangladesh’s political discord lies the clash between the interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, and the BNP, the dominant political force in the country. Following the ousting of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, Yunus assumed leadership of an interim government tasked with implementing electoral reforms and facilitating free and fair elections. However, his reluctance to outline a concrete timeline for elections has drawn sharp criticism from the BNP.

The BNP, emboldened by its strong grassroots support and organisational strength, has been pressing for elections by the end of 2025 at the latest. Any delay, the BNP fears, could undermine its momentum and strengthen the newly emerging political entities being nurtured by Yunus and his allies. This includes the Anti-Discrimination Students’ Movement (ADSM), whose leaders are reportedly in the process of forming a political party with Yunus’s backing.

Moscow–Pyongyang Partnership Could Derail Japan’s Indo-Pacific Strategy – Analysis

Ben Sando

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In November 2024, Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya stopped in Kyiv for a surprise meeting with his counterpart, Andrii Sybiha. Iwaya’s priority was to discuss the some 12,000 North Korean soldiers battling Ukrainian forces in the Kursk border region of Russia.

This burgeoning military alliance between Pyongyang and Moscow threatens to upset the security balance in Northeast Asia and may force Tokyo to scale back its engagement with maritime issues in East Asia.

For the past two decades, a new generation of political leadership in Tokyo has encouraged a pivot away from Japan’s insular, restrained defence posture towards greater engagement in defence multilateralism, led by the United States. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe signalled his resolve in 2014 by reinterpreting Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow greater leeway for the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to come to the aid of an ally under attack, an act Japan’s armed forces were previously unable to perform.

Rohingyas’ Return To Myanmar Uncertain, Despite Rebel Control Of Bangladesh Border

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The dream of returning home to Myanmar remains uncertain for hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh despite rebel control of the border, members of the ethnic group said Friday.

About 740,000 Rohingya fled from western Myanmar’s Rakhine state following a bloody crackdown against members of their stateless Muslim minority group in August 2017.

They joined other Rohingya who had settled in camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, bringing the total number of refugees in southeastern Bangladesh at the time to just over 1 million.

Years of negotiations to repatriate Rohingyas to Rakhine state have yielded little progress, in part because members of the community say their safety cannot be guaranteed back home after the military that targeted them seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat.

On Dec. 8, rebels known as the Arakan Army, or AA, which is battling the junta for self-determination in Rakhine state, captured Maungdaw township and took control of the region’s border with Bangladesh.

South China Sea: 5 Things To Watch In 2025

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The South China Sea has become one of the world’s most perilous geopolitical hot spots in recent years, with China stepping up the reinforcement of its expansive claims and countries from outside the region getting increasingly involved.

Here are five areas to watch in 2025:

Taiwan Strait

The situation in the Taiwan Strait has been becoming notably more tense, with nearly 3,000 incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone between January and November 2024, as well as two major military exercises – Joint Sword A and B – coinciding with important political events on the self-ruled island.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping reiterated in his New Year message that the unification of Taiwan was “inevitable.”

“China will continue to hold exercises in 2025 if senior Taiwanese officials visit the United States or top U.S. officials visit Taiwan,” said Shen Ming-Shih, a research fellow at the top Taiwan government think tank, the Institute for National Defense Security Research (INDSR).

Chinese war games system sees surprise US attack on PLA carrier group in South China Sea

Stephen Chen

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Chinese scientists claim to have obtained key parameters of the US military’s latest stealth anti-ship missile and applied them to a warfare simulation.

Boasting unparalleled realism, the enhanced warfare simulation platform reproduces the US military’s most powerful offensive weapons in unprecedented detail, helping the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) formulate more effective countermeasures and tactics to deal with potential military conflicts.

Better understanding the strengths of the enemy will only make China stronger, according to the project team led by researcher Wang Tianxiao with the North China Institute of Computing Technology, a supplier of the PLA’s war gaming system in Beijing.

Wang and his colleagues simulated a large-scale naval battle between China and the United States and revealed some key details in a paper published last month.

China Is No Longer Driving Global Oil Demand

Greg Priddy

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For many years, the outlook for the world oil market has rested heavily on China, as it has been by far the most significant driver of demand growth in this century. But now, twenty years after the landmark 2004 surprise, when Chinese demand reached over 3 million barrels per day year-on-year, stoked fears of scarcity and drove up prices, there is a growing consensus that China’s oil demand will soon peak. That does not necessarily mean that global demand will peak shortly thereafter, as it reflects the specifics of the policy context in China. Still, it makes it a lot harder to envision a period of lasting market tightening in the future, which many oil bulls and OPEC+ producers had predicted would take place in the mid-to-late 2020s.

The two largest state-owned oil companies in China, CNPC and Sinopec, both issued studies in December that showed that the demand for transportation-sector goods has already peaked, with total demand set to peak soon. Both expect full-year data for 2024, when released, to show declines in gasoline and highway diesel usage, which has been accelerated by the faster-than-previously-expected gains in sales of electric vehicles (EVs) and the increasing use of natural gas as an alternative fuel for heavy trucks. The only oil-based transportation fuels that are still growing are jet fuel and kerosene. Sinopec forecasts diesel use to fall by 5.5 percent in 2025 from 2024 levels and gasoline use to fall by 2.4 percent. Fully 22 percent of new heavy trucks sold in the first three quarters of 2024 used natural gas as a fuel, and EVs are expected to displace 15 percent of gasoline consumption in 2025 relative to where it would have been otherwise.

China’s Paper Boat Navy: A Colossus At Risk Of Capsizing – Analysis

Aritra Banerjee

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China’s naval expansion has been nothing short of staggering. In just two decades, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has transformed into the world’s largest maritime force by fleet size. This dramatic growth underpins Beijing’s ambitions to project power and challenge the established dominance of the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific. Yet, beneath the veneer of strength lies a navy grappling with critical vulnerabilities—untested in combat, reliant on unproven technology, and overstretched in its strategic reach.

The PLAN may appear formidable on paper, but is a colossus with clay feet. Its vulnerabilities expose it as a paper tiger, raising serious doubts about its ability to sustain dominance during prolonged maritime conflict.

A Force Without a Fight: The PLAN’s Combat Deficiency

Military power is measured in numbers and tested in the crucible of battle. By this metric, the PLAN is strikingly deficient. Since the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, China has not engaged in significant armed conflict, leaving its military leadership and personnel devoid of the experience that underpins effective combat readiness. Decades of peace have created a theoretically powerful but operationally unproven force.

How Stealthy F-22 Raptors Learned to Take on Elusive Iranian Threats in the Middle East

Chris Gordon

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When Lt. Col. Dustin Johnson was ordered to deploy to the Middle East last year, he and his fellow F-22 Raptor pilots prepared for an unusual challenge.

As America’s premier air superiority fighter, the F-22 was designed to take on advanced enemy aircraft, capable of maneuvering stealthily and cruising at supersonic speeds. But the dangers that most concerned Johnson and his Airmen included Iranian-designed drones and cruise missiles that Tehran and its proxies have employed during the most recent stretch of unrest in the Middle East.

“We were not necessarily worried about shooting down anybody else’s airplanes,” Johnson said in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine. “We were primarily there to defend our ground forces against the threats that were being posed by the UAVs in the AOR, as well as the cruise missiles that we’ve seen become more prevalent, both from the Houthis as well as militia groups in the region.”

Given the changing character of war, the episode shows that even a high-end fighter needs to be prepared for low-end threats.

U.S. Defense Policy in Central and Eastern Europe

Logan C. West

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Geopolitically speaking, things have not been going America’s way. Considering the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and China’s continued economic and military expansion across the globe, waning U.S. influence has precipitated a rise in global instability. The trend is bad enough that its impact has reached European borders with the Ukraine conflict, where large scale state-on-state wars were thought to be a thing of the past. The detrimental impact on Washington’s standing in Central and Eastern Europe has been particularly noticeable.

Russia’s military adventurism in Ukraine came on the heels of Biden’s pullout of coalition forces in Afghanistan. One could argue that the Afghan debacle was a moment of U.S. weakness exploited by the Putin regime. Meanwhile, China is increasing its investment foothold in the small nation of Hungary. Particular targets have been manufacturing, logistics, telecommunications infrastructure, and artificial intelligence research and development. Along with the influx of financial capital, a series of new memorandums of understanding were signed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Chinese President Xi during a recent visit to Budapest by the latter. One of the accords established a joint policing agreement between the two nations on Hungarian soil while another provides a platform for cooperation on the use of nuclear energy.

Canada’s Army Is Slowly Rotting Away

Andrew Latham

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How Canada’s Army Reached Crisis Mode—and What Must Happen Next

The Canadian Army faces a confluence of crises that threaten its ability to recruit, retain, equip, and train warfighters relevant to the character of war in the 2020s.

These challenges are not merely logistical or administrative; they fundamentally undermine the Army’s capacity to defend Canada and contribute to collective security alongside its allies. Addressing these issues demands both a candid acknowledgment of the systemic dysfunctions and a bold commitment to reform. A future Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre might provide the necessary political will to tackle these shortcomings, but the solutions will require sustained focus and resources.

The Army’s recruitment and retention crisis is a critical vulnerability. The military consistently fails to meet recruitment targets, with some estimates suggesting a shortfall of over 10,000 personnel across the Armed Forces. This is not merely a numbers issue; it is a capability crisis. Without sufficient personnel, the Army cannot staff its units, maintain training cycles, or prepare for deployments. Retention compounds the problem.

Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military - Opinion

Phil Klay

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In September 2016 I went to a televised forum with the two leading presidential candidates and asked Donald Trump about military policy in Iraq, where I served with the Marine Corps several years earlier. He told me America should “take the oil.” Then he said it again: “Take the oil.”

A dumb answer, but a clear one. If we’re going to put American lives at risk, let’s get something out of it. Something concrete, something valuable. You can’t touch an ideal, but you can shove your grasping hands deep into a black pool of liquid gold. A few years later, explaining our military presence in Syria, Mr. Trump said he was keeping troops there “only for the oil.” What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.

When it comes to articulating a vision of American warfare, Mr. Trump is the least hypocritical president of my adult life. He does not promise to spread democracy or human rights or a liberal, international rules-based order. He does not claim we’re a shining city on a hill. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he has said instead. “What? You think our country’s so innocent?” He has stated smaller, less idealistic goals: our borders, secure; our economy, soaring; our wars, ended. These are most presidents’ goals, of course, but Mr. Trump expresses them plainly, even crassly.

Will Reform Kill the Tory Party?

Sam Freedman

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According to betting markets Nigel Farage is currently favourite to be Prime Minister after Keir Starmer. Even for the overexcitable world of political gambling this is not so much due to a belief that Farage will actually be PM as a vote of no confidence in Kemi Badenoch. All logic suggests she has a much better chance – if still a longshot – at the top job. Reform has just five seats in Parliament and is second in fewer than 100 other constituencies. Extraordinary shifts are always possible in politics but becoming the largest party in Parliament is a distance prospect.

But Badenoch has had a poor start as leader, indulging in pointless fights and typically unnecessary rudeness towards interviewers. What’s most concerning to her colleagues is that these flaws have been pointed out to her but she either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand the problem. Another silly row with Farage over the Christmas break suggests she has no intention of changing approach. Meanwhile she remains largely unknown to most of the public. Labour are doing a more effective job of opposing themselves than the nominal opposition.

It's early days, and even the regicidal Tories will give her more time but in the meantime the Reform leadership are playing a clever game by appealing to the Lobby’s desperation for a narrative during a period of relative political calm. The excitements of the 2016-2024 era have left Westminster even more addicted to drama than usual and Farage is good at telling a story.

Elon Musk Calls Out NASA’s Moon Ambitions: ‘We’re Going Straight to Mars’

Eric Berger

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Although SpaceX founder Elon Musk is known for outspokenness and controversial comments on his social media site X, he has been relatively restrained when it comes to US space policy in recent years.

For example, he has rarely criticized NASA or its overall goal to return humans to the moon through the Artemis program. Rather, Musk, who has long preferred Mars as a destination for humans, has more or less been a team player when it comes to the space agency's lunar-focused plans.

This is understandable from a financial perspective, as SpaceX has contracts worth billions of dollars to not only build a Human Landing System as part of the Artemis program but also to supply food, cargo, and other logistics services to a planned Lunar Gateway in orbit around the moon.

But privately, Musk has been critical of NASA's plans, suggesting that the Artemis Program has been moving too slowly and is too reliant on contractors who seek cost-plus government contracts and are less interested in delivering results.

The Rush for AI-Enabled Drones on Ukrainian Battlefields

David Kirichenko

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In the battle for Chasiv Yar, the constant hum of drones—both enemy and friendly—fills the air. The occasional explosion illuminates them overhead: As the Russia-Ukraine war grinds on, Ukraine’s skies grow increasingly crowded with this new technology. With troops and ammunition in short supply, the country has turned necessity into a strategic asset, relying heavily on cheap drones. This approach has demanded rapid innovation and an all-out push to leverage technology. Now, the stakes in the Russia-Ukraine war have intensified as both sides race to gain an edge through artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drones. Warfare is steadily transforming into a “clash between algorithms.”

Drones serve a wide range of purposes, from reconnaissance and artillery direction to evacuations and direct attacks. First-person-view (FPV) drones, capable of dropping explosives or acting as kamikaze units, have become especially destructive on the battlefield. In one instance, a Russian soldier pleaded on social media for pump shotguns to counter Ukrainian drones, admitting, “they’re simply burning us.” Both armies now favor motorcycles over armored vehicles, as they create less dust and offer better mobility with a lower profile. Tanks, once the pillars of ground combat, are increasingly overshadowed by unmanned aerial vehicles.

Kyiv Plays Games With Russian Gas Transit – OpEd

M.K. Bhadrakumar

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The dataset by the Brussels-based think tank Brugel aggregating the data on European natural gas import flows and storage levels puts in perspective Ukraine’s decision to halt the transit of Russian gas to Europe. The statistics reveal that as of end-2024, Russia had become the second largest gas supplier to the EU after Norway, overtaking the United States — now, that’s 3 years into the Ukraine war and the Western ‘sanctions from hell’ notwithstanding.

In particular, in December 2024, Russian LNG was delivered to Europe in an amount of 2.16 billion cubic meters — an all-time record since 2019. The European Union’s import of Russian LNG in 2024 amounted to almost 21.5 bcm against 17.8 bcm a year earlier and 19 bcm in 2022.

What does this mean? First, EU countries find its irresistible to source LNG from Russia, which is reliable, abundant and cheap. Second, Ukraine’s decision, coming in the middle of the winter heating season, will trigger a price spiral for natural gas on the whole in Europe, but in immediate terms only. To borrow the words of Ralph Nader, if the use of solar energy has not been opened up, that’s because the (Russian) oil industry does not own the sun!

Geopolitics | A world between orders

Shivshankar Menon

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Each generation is convinced that it faces a more uncertain and threatening world than any before it, a crisis of unprecedented proportions, and that man's very survival is at stake. We are no exception, judging by the commentaries in the media. And yet, mankind has not only survived but steadily improved its lot. More people live longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than ever before in history.

One explanation for this paradox or contradiction between our objective condition and the way we perceive it is the idea of a world order. We have been conditioned into assuming that a world order is normal and beneficial by the bipolar Cold War and the subsequent unipolar moment, when first two and then one superpower dominated and ordered the world. One can understand why a hegemon would want us to think so.

But what do history and experience tell us? In fact, world orders have been the exception in history. For most of history, there has not been a world order. It is only when there is a tremendous imbalance in the distribution of power, as under the Mongols in the 13th century, with Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and with the US and, briefly, the USSR after World War II, that there has been a world order. And those were not necessarily the most peaceful times. Unlike the Cold War, when over 80 per cent of world military and economic power was controlled by the two superpowers through their blocs, the two largest powers, the US and China, control less than 50 per cent of world GDP and military power today. Power, therefore, is much more evenly distributed in the world than in periods when a world order obtained.

How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine

C.J. Chivers

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The suicide drone beelined toward a strip of forest separating two agricultural fields. A remotely piloted quadcopter with a wingspan narrower than that of a duck, a camera in its nose and an antenna protruding from its tail, it crossed into Russian airspace unchallenged minutes before. An armor-piercing warhead hung from its underside. Now, about 18 miles south of Belgorod, it descended toward cropland with about five minutes of battery power remaining. It was time to hunt.

Several miles away, in the basement of an abandoned home inside Ukraine, the drone’s pilot, who uses the name Prorok, Ukrainian for “Prophet,” clutched the miniaircraft’s controller with both hands and gazed into goggles displaying its live video feed. His team leader, who uses the name Buryi, or “Brown,” sat to his right, monitoring the flight on the bright screens of two tablets while communicating with a distant lieutenant via a laptop. Minutes earlier, a bomb-laden quadcopter flown by another team slammed against a howitzer hidden in the tree line. Prorok and Buryi’s mission was to assess damage, find survivors and kill them. Russian artillery pieces were rarely unattended or alone.

Smoke rose from vegetation where the cannon had been. “Fly to the target,” Buryi said.

Prorok’s fingers manipulated the tiny flight controls. Moving about 30 miles per hour, the drone slipped below the tree line’s canopy, pointed its lens at the smoke and slowly approached. Nearing the plume, it banked left with its nose angled down.

Giving Our “Paper Tiger” Real Teeth Fixing the U.S. Military’s Plans for Contested Logistics Against China

Zachary S. Hughes

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There is growing concern that the U.S. military is unable to deter or win a conflict with China in the Western Pacific. China’s sophisticated arsenal of long-range missiles is a lethal threat to America’s traditional way of deploying and employing expeditionary forces. With a rising sense of urgency, three U.S. military Services (Marines, Army, and Air Force) have embraced new concepts of operations that favor dispersed operations. On the surface, these ideas appear to restore survivability within the Pacific’s first island chain by making American formations harder to find and target. Unfortunately, these concepts are astonishingly logistics-intensive. Worse still, America’s military committed itself to these demanding concepts without full consideration of whether they were even logistically supportable. Now, evidence is emerging suggesting that each Service’s individual concept is probably logistically unsustainable. Even worse, each Service concept implicitly transfers risk from the Service to the joint force but without a clear accounting of how all these risks aggregate together. This is even more disturbing because a survey of historical Great Power wars—and a specific study of China’s likely military options—strongly suggests that logistics is likely to be the primary determinant of military success or failure. For dispersed operations to succeed in a contested logistics environment, the U.S. military must address the problem coherently as a joint force. This requires facilitating a culture and organizations that integrate logistics jointly at every level of warfare, while giving logistics pride of place in both force design and campaign planning.

Defense Tech and Acquisition News

Matt MacGregor and Pete Modigliani

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Happy New Year and welcome to the latest edition of Defense Tech and Acquisition. With the new year, brings optimism for defense tech modernization and enterprise reforms.

• This includes harnessing more of America’s and allies innovation from tech to efficiencies for national security.
• The Indo-Pacific region continues to be the top priority and the military services are hyper focused on modernization and readiness for that fight.
• Industry must continue to make strategic investments and inroads, aided by OSC and private capital. AI, autonomy, software, and quantum will be at the forefront of defense modernization, future warfare, and our Substack posts.

The next defense reform must fully bring the US tech sector on board

Ellen Lord and Tyler Sweatt

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The American defense community is balancing a robust yet aging defense industrial base with an emerging $130 billion-dollar defense tech ecosystem. We have the opportunity to increase our military might if we embrace the moment and inject modern cyber, software, materials and electronics technology to enhance our traditional defense industrial base.

Instead, we are wasting the talents of America’s world-class tech sector and, in doing so, putting our country and allies at risk.

That’s because we have an ecosystem without a marketplace. The Department of Defense won’t buy commercial capability at scale from Silicon Valley. The result is fighting with one arm behind our back.

What’s at the root of the problem? Warfighting and deterrence capabilities are typically hardware-enabled and software-defined, but the Pentagon treats those attributes as though they evolve at the same pace.

This paradigm does not work in today’s geopolitical reality where wars are fought both on and off the battlefield. It actively harms our warfighters and disincentivizes the U.S. tech industry from joining the defense industrial base.

Defense Tech Scaling New Heights With Incoming Administration

Michael Brown

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The recent run up in the stock market—especially for tech stocks—signals a stimulative business climate during the second Trump Administration which should fuel a continued rise for defense tech—the incorporation of new technologies such as AI, cyber, autonomy and space for military applications. The first Trump Administration saw an S&P 500 increase of 50%, a much larger tech stock increase of 138%, and 380% for the Magnificent 7 stocks. Looking forward, the combination of extended rate reductions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), a lighter regulatory environment, and likely lower interest rates with easing inflation all create a positive economic outlook.

This economic outlook provides fertile ground for gains in the defense tech sector which has already been one of the most promising areas for venture investors. Since 2021, venture investment in defense tech totals more than $100 billion, 40% more than the previous seven years combined. The factors driving increased investment are likely to intensify during the next four years: first, rising geopolitical tensions and, second, the technologies which militaries need are increasingly developed by the private sector rather than government labs.

With growing presence, DIU continues efforts to lower barriers for new entrants

Mikayla Easley

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Less than a year since the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit entered its new era dubbed DIU 3.0, the innovation hub has its eyes set on further scaling operations and bringing more non-traditional contractors into the department’s ecosystem.

DIU Director Doug Beck unveiled his updated strategic vision in early 2024 as a way to address a number of challenges that have kept the organization from accelerating the Defense Department’s adoption of dual-use, commercial technologies. A significant part of the new vision focused on both growing DIU and improving its ability to work with the commercial sector, Liz Young McNally, the organization’s deputy director for commercial operations, told DefenseScoop.

Hired in April 2024 to spearhead the unit’s collaboration with the commercial sector and investment community, McNally has spent the last several months integrating different components within DIU into a more unified commercial ops center while also helping the organization build out its regional infrastructure.

“DIU has folks all across the country helping to galvanize the defense innovation ecosystem,” she said in a recent interview. “We have onramp hubs, we have individuals — both government and contractor — bringing in talent, new companies [and] new technology into the department.”

Project 33 Is Enabling Joint All-Domain Operations in the Indo-Pacific

Admiral Sam Paparo

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The United States strives to maintain regional stability and safeguard the sovereign rights of all nations in the Indo-Pacific—the most consequential theater of operations for the 21st century. China, Russia, and North Korea are threatening that stability and security.1 These states create instability to try to change the current rules-based international system to their advantage, but the U.S. joint force, working with increasingly capable allies and partners, is constantly preparing to deter them from upending the regional order.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is the theater joint force commander, employing Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force capabilities bolstered by service initiatives such as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Lisa Franchetti’s new Navigation Plan 2024 (NavPlan) and its implementation plan, Project 33. Those service capabilities—knitted together as a joint force—strengthen assurance and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific by expanding the battlespace to deter conflict, respond to crises, and, if necessary, fight and win.

Core to the capabilities of the joint force and its interoperability with allies and partners are the readiness and modernization of each U.S. military service. Project 33 provides a clear path to improve the Navy as an individual service and enhance its contributions to the joint warfighting ecosystem.

Dual-Use Is a Strategy, Not a Category (Nor a Trap)

Gene Keselman and Fiona Murray

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The term “dual-use” is something of a lightning rod in the startup world, sparking debates about its meaning and usefulness. In these virtual pages, Jake Chapman wrote that “reliance on dual-use technology is a trap,” arguing that timing issues, intellectual property controls, and commercial interests undermine the essential prioritization of defense needs. Others have worried that categorizing projects as dual-use excludes them from a range of funding sources or banking services. Some founders have even discovered that if they are categorized as having dual-use technology, they are assumed to be working in conflict with environmental, social, and governance guidelines. These barriers stymie our ability to invest in and build solutions for our collective security.

Our experience from MIT, working with startups across a range of critical technologies exploring defense and commercial civilian markets, is to define dual-use as a strategy, not a category. The technologies that can serve both military and civilian purposes are so wide that as a category, dual-use has a diminishing meaning. In reality, early stage founders build a capability and, as good entrepreneurs, consider the best market fit across commercial and military markets as necessary and with a clear focus. In other words, dual-use is a market strategy that might be deployed defense-first, commercial-first, or both (when economically effective due to scale constraints in some niche defense markets). This is not a cop-out. To assume up front which strategy an entrepreneur might take is to remove their agency and expertise and the fundamentally exploratory nature of venture building.