Indian Strategic Studies: 03/13/25

13 March 2025

Award-Winning Photographer Ashik Aseem Captures the World Through Travel and Landscape Photography

Photography is more than just capturing moments; it is about telling stories, preserving emotions, and showcasing the beauty of the world. Ashik Aseem, an award-winning Indian photographer based in Kerala, has mastered this art with his breathtaking landscape photography and compelling travel images. His lens has documented the beauty of India and beyond, capturing the essence of landscapes, architecture, and the human experience. Through his work, Ashik Aseem continues to inspire photography enthusiasts and art lovers worldwide.

The Journey of an Inspiring Talent

Ashik Aseem’s passion for photography began in the lush green landscapes of Kerala. His journey from an aspiring photographer to an award-winning artist was fueled by his relentless pursuit of excellence and a deep appreciation for nature and culture. His works have received critical acclaim, establishing him as one of the most sought-after photographers in India.

Capturing the Soul of Kerala’s Landscapes

As a Kerala-based photographer, Ashik Aseem has extensively documented the region’s rich landscapes. From the tranquil backwaters of Alleppey to the misty hills of Munnar, his photographs highlight the stunning beauty of Kerala’s natural wonders. His ability to blend light, composition, and perspective results in images that transport viewers into the heart of these scenic locations.

Before Gender Equality, Balochistan’s Women Must Fight for Basic Survival

Sabiha Baloch

The world marked International Women’s Day on March 8, under the theme of “For ALL Women and Girls: Accelerate Progress. Rights. Equality.” The global conversation focused on progress and equality.

In Pakistan’s Balochistan province, a large number of women, primarily mothers and children spent March 8 protesting on a major highway during a fasting day in the city of Mastung, 50 kilometers from provincial capital Quetta. Yet while the protest occurred on International Women’s Day, few of the women gave any special significance to the date. Instead, they were demanding the safe recovery of loved ones forcibly disappeared by security forces.

Balochistan, a region embroiled in conflict since the turn of the century, is no stranger to violence, much of it perpetrated by the state itself. Thousands of young Baloch men have been forcibly disappeared or killed, leaving their families in constant anguish. Against this backdrop Baloch women, despite hailing from a deeply conservative, tribal, and patriarchal society, have emerged as face of a vibrant and unique human rights struggle. Peaceful yet defiant protests, marches, and highway blockages have become a regular occurrence, as mothers, sisters, and daughters demand justice for their loved ones.

Corruption in Pakistan: A risk for South Asia’s stability and a threat for Europe

Konstantinos Bogdanos

As Pakistan backs away from its anti-corruption transparency pledge, the consequences could ripple beyond its $7 billion IMF loan programme, threatening regional stability in South Asia and causing repercussions in Europe.

Just months after committing to publish the full United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) Country Review Report, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government has formed a cabinet committee to reconsider. Instead of the full report, which could run up to 300 pages, the government may now opt for a 7-12 page summary.

This reversal comes at a critical time: an IMF mission is in Pakistan, assessing whether to approve the next $1.1 billion loan tranche. The cabinet committee’s recommendation – due March 13 – coincides with the IMF’s final assessment, making it a pivotal decision.

Of course, corruption has long hindered Pakistan. But this latest crisis comes at a particularly dangerous moment. The country is already facing severe economic distress, with foreign reserves barely covering a few weeks of imports, inflation exceeding 30 per cent, high unemployment worsened by IMF-imposed austerity measures, and escalating Islamist militancy, exploiting public frustration.

Could the Myanmar Junta Rapidly Collapse Like al-Assad?

Joshua Kurlantzick

With the sudden collapse of the al-Assad regime in Syria, after thirteen years of civil war and the seeming triumph of government forces, analysts and fighters in other long running civil wars are wondering whether their country could be next. Some have suggested that Myanmar, which has been at war essentially since the junta’s 2021 coup and where the military has steadily lost ground (it controls around twenty percent of the country's towns and townships now) could have its army and junta government collapse in a sudden rebel wave towards the capital.

Indeed, some of the conditions for a complete junta collapse seem to exist. Most of the Myanmar population already hates the military, which has ruled the country on and off since the early 1960s, and generally has driven the economy into the ground. The military is struggling with high numbers of defections (defections were actually fairly rare in prior military battles with its own population), getting food, money and other basic items to its soldiers.

As in Syria, too, there appears to be a degree of chaos and lack of information among the top junta commanders in Myanmar, other than a small circle around junta leader Min Aung Hlaing. Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly fired and changed large numbers of senior officers, leaving many in the dark about the military’s future plans.

Can China’s Power Sector Walk the Tight-Rope Between Decarbonization and Market Liberalization?

Chris Hankin

On February 9, China’s National Development and Reform Commission and National Energy Agency jointly published a “Notice on Deepening Market-Based Reform of Renewable Energy On-Grid Tariffs to Promote High-Quality Renewable Energy Development.” Hereafter referred to as Document 136, this policy drastically changed the character of China’s power sector, advancing market liberalization reforms in one of the nation’s most stubbornly top-down sectors.

Document 136 is significant because it requires that by the end of 2025, provincial governments push all wind and solar electricity projects to sell their electricity production through the market. This is a huge change from today, when nearly 50 percent of all renewable energy is sold via guaranteed offtake agreements at predetermined volumes and prices to the grid, regardless of market dynamics like supply and demand.

According to Cosimo Ries, Renewable Energy Analyst at Trivium China, “this marks the end of an era.”

A Better Way To Handle The Panama Canal

John Kitch

During his inaugural address in January, President Trump proclaimed that “China is operating the Panama Canal” and promised that the United States would be “taking it back.” Shortly after his confirmation as Secretary of State, Marco Rubio traveled to Panama to meet with its president, José Raúl Mulino.

After the trip, the State Department’s official X account announced that U.S. warships would now be allowed to use the canal for free. Mulino quickly denied the report and said that there had been no new agreement between the United States and Panama to alter the usual fee structure for transiting ships. Rubio’s office noted that he pressed Mulino to reduce Chinese influence on the canal or face possible U.S. action. Mulino countered by publicly saying that the United States had not threatened to upend the treaty that underlies Panama’s operation of the canal.

For now, it appears that the Trump administration has shifted attention to other foreign policy issues. However, this chaotic episode is valuable in that it demonstrates a desire for imperialism under the guise of protecting America’s core security interests.

Law professors John Yoo and Robert Delahunty used this incident to argue that Trump should “consider reviving the Monroe Doctrine” and should consider military force “an extreme (but possible) option.”

Indonesia “Teaches” The U.S. How To Fight China! Will Pentagon Adopt Its Tactics To Flatten PLA’s “Cabbage Strategy”

Prakash Nanda

Colby is reportedly the loudest among Trump officials who have argued that the U.S. focus should shift away from Europe and Russia and be concentrated on China and its growing challenges in the Indo-Pacific.

For him, nothing else in the international system is as fundamentally dangerous to U.S. interests as a possible Chinese “hegemony” over the Indo-Pacific, “dramatically undermining Americans’ security, freedom, and prosperity”.

However, if Colby faced tough questions during his confirmation hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee meeting last week, that too from Republican Senators led by Tom Cotton (R-Ark), it was about his “shifting” thoughts about defending Taiwan.

Senator Cotton asked him, “Over the past couple years, you’ve started to say … that Taiwan is a vital interest, but it’s not [an] existential interest to us or it’s not essential to us. Could you explain to us why you’ve seemed to soften somewhat about the defense of Taiwan?”

Colby responded that he always has said that Taiwan is “very important” to the United States, but he argued it’s “not an existential interest”, given the change in the “military balance” between the United States and China.

How China Could ‘Win’ the War in Ukraine and Dominate Asia

Dan Blumenthal

A fracturing of the United States-NATO alliance and a Russia-favorable resolution of the war in Ukraine would represent a significant strategic victory for Xi Jinping, the apotheosis of an alliance sealed by Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Beijing Olympics in 2022.

But their 2024 pledge of a “new era” between the two powers is about more than the support that is helping Russia sustain its war in Ukraine; fundamentally, it is about diminishing the American dominance that prevailed after World War II and ushering in a new global writ, authored and underpinned by Chinese power. “The world is going through changes unseen in a hundred years,” Xi told Putin at the BRICS summit. And, he might have added, we are delighted.

Thinking Beyond the Ukraine War: The Impact on Asia and Beyond

Putin’s 2022 march on Ukraine was a signal Xi was quick to exploit: a “once in a century” opportunity, he believed, to hasten the inevitable decline of the West and build a new world order helmed by Beijing. Xi embraced the Russian dictator’s upending of the post-World War II order, helping to sustain Moscow’s onslaught with critical dual-use inputs, such as microelectronics, precision machine tools, spare parts, titanium and magnesium alloys, and chemical inputs for munitions production and components essential for weapons manufacturing. China has also buttressed Russia’s economy in the face of international sanctions, purchasing energy and increasing trade to record levels.

Can China keep winning without fighting? - Opinion

Tang Meng Kit

China’s global expansion under President Xi Jinping reflects Sun Tzu’s principle of “subduing the enemy without fighting.”

Instead of direct military conflict, China relies on economic, diplomatic and technological influence. Through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), economic coercion and cyber operations, China has reshaped the geopolitical landscape.

However, this strategy is facing rising resistance. The United States and its allies have increased economic decoupling and military countermeasures.

At the same time, China’s internal challenges, including an economic slowdown and demographic decline, raise questions about whether this strategy remains sustainable.

As tensions rise in the Indo-Pacific and global power shifts continue, can China maintain its rise without provoking the very conflicts it seeks to avoid?

Sun Tzu emphasized winning through strategy, deception and psychological warfare rather than brute force. Xi has embraced these ideas, using economic dependencies and political maneuvering to expand influence without direct confrontation.

Unlike his predecessors, who prioritized cautious economic growth, Xi has taken a more aggressive stance in asserting China’s dominance on the world stage.

Geometries of Chaos: America’s Future in World Politics

Prof. Louis René Beres

Normally, geometry and chaos are mutually exclusive. Still, when applied to complex considerations of American national security and foreign policy, this juxtaposition could make perfect sense. Even in chaos, prima facie, there can be sense and form. Accordingly, for those seeking optimal national security postures for the United States, the key task must be to (1) uncover component parts of world system chaos; and (2) “navigate” through these interrelated parts toward more conspicuously promising global futures.

Sometimes, the strategist can learn from then poet. Recalling TS. Eliot’s The Family Reunion (1939), it has always been a “world of insanity.” Today, however, the perils are both universal and existential. Now, the ultimate task is to avoid “the other side of despair.”[1]

American National Security Policy as Intellectual Responsibility

How to proceed? Core answers lie in concept formation, hypotheses and theories. Theories are “nets,” observes the German poet Novalis: “Only those who cast, can catch.”

It would be hard enough for the United States to deal singly with each prospective threat to national security, but the challenge will be even more daunting because these threats are multiple, intersecting and “force-multiplying.” Among other things, this greater difficulty could include widening ambits of synergy[2] within our extant system of global anarchy or chaos.[3] In any such hard to decipher expansions, the calculable “whole” of all plausible harms would be greater than the sum of its “parts.”

Russia Refuses to Make Meaningful Step on Road to Peace

Pavel K. Baev

U.S., European, and Ukrainian peace-making policies are now aligned at a possible breakthrough point, as differences in means and methods transmute into complementarities. This fast evolution starkly contrasts with the immobility of Russia’s position. This resolve, so long as it exists, prohibits any discussion of possible compromises for peace (see Strategic Snapshot, February 24). Russian President Vladimir Putin declares readiness to end the war, but uses every occasion to assert that no concessions are under consideration. Putin’s most recent effort at this was when meeting with women of the foundation, “Defenders of the Fatherland.” During the meeting, Putin claimed, “We do not need what is not ours, but we will not give up what is ours. We need an option that ensures the stable development of our country in terms of peace and security” (Kremlin.ru; Meduza, March 6).

This insistence on a peace arrangement that would fully conform with Russia’s interests, and essentially amount to a victory, clashes with U.S. President Donald Trump’s stance on the peace deal (RBC, March 2). In this case, all parties would leave somewhat dissatisfied. Trump’s promise to help Ukraine regain as much territory as possible is particularly disagreeable for Moscow. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pre-emptively ruled out any discussion on territorial concessions (Kommersant, February 17; Vedomosti, February 27). To make the demand for full control over four Ukrainian regions annexed in September 2022 more plausible, Moscow has redoubled its military efforts aimed at expelling Ukrainian troops from Kursk oblast (The Insider, March 7). The casualties are devastating, but the Kremlin is firmly set on denying Ukraine the trump card of holding Russian territory during the bargaining on an armistice (Re: Russia, March 4).

The Populist vs. the Billionaire: Bannon, Musk and the Battle Within MAGA

Tyler Pager and Maggie Haberman

After word leaked out about a clash at the White House where members of President Trump’s cabinet challenged the authority of Elon Musk to reshape their departments, one of the president’s top allies, Stephen K. Bannon, quickly piled on.

Mr. Bannon, who has characterized Mr. Musk as an interloper, a “parasitic illegal immigrant” and a “truly evil person,” suggested the world’s richest man was weighing Mr. Trump down.

“I don’t want to say an anchor or lodestone,” Mr. Bannon said on Friday of Mr. Musk on his show “War Room,” which is watched closely by a number of Trump allies, as well as the president himself. “It’s not that yet, but it’s trending — that is starting to affect everybody.”

The longstanding animus between Mr. Bannon and Mr. Musk encapsulates a key tension at the heart of Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. It pits those like Mr. Bannon, who want Mr. Trump to carry out a more fully populist agenda, against ultrawealthy interests, epitomized by Mr. Musk, who occupy key positions in the president’s orbit.

The Geopolitical Fallout of a Potential US Cyber Stand-Down

Zi Yang

In late February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth instructed the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) to halt offensive cyber operations against Russia. Although the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) pledged to continue defending U.S. critical infrastructure from Russian threats, reports surfaced by March 2 that CISA analysts have been verbally ordered to pause monitoring and reporting on Russian cyber activities, and even abandon a project relating to Russia.

However, by March 3, a CISA spokesperson denied the agency’s shift in cybersecurity priorities and affirmed that it will continue to monitor Russian threats. The Pentagon also issued a similar denial regarding the pause of offensive USCYBERCOM operations against Russia. There have been no reports to date on the National Security Agency pausing its offensive operations against Russia.

These confusing developments match the Trump administration’s pattern of frequent policy flip-flops, lack of transparency, and a tendency to gaslight the press. So far, major news agencies, such as The Guardian, BBC, New York Times, and the Associated Press have stood by their reports on the pause in offensive cyber operations against Russia, raising further questions regarding the current U.S. cybersecurity posture. To err on the side of caution, this article will describe the reported pause as a “potential pause.”

'Massive cyberattack': Elon Musk blames 'coordinated group or country' for global X outage

Elon Musk, owner of X, on March 10 alleged that the social media platform was facing outages because of a "massive cyberattack". The billionaire owner and ally of US President Donald Trump also claimed that a large, coordinated group or a country was involved in the cyberattack against X.

"There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …," Musk said in response to a post on the social media platform.

According to Downdetector, Musk-owned X was facing intermittent outages on Monday, restricting thousands of US and global users from accessing the social media platform.

The number of outage reports rose to around 26,579 after falling briefly, user-submitted data on the outage-tracking website showed. The number was as high as 40,000 earlier in the day.

More than 10,800 X users in the UK also reported the outage earlier in the day, according to the website.

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear, and X did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Why Interest Rates Matter

Milton Ezrati

These days, the Federal Reserve faces a balancing act on how to use its interest rate policy tools. Continuing inflation concerns have, for the time being, led monetary policymakers to hold off on further interest rate cuts. Fed policymakers may even regret the aggressive interest rate cuts of late last year.

At the moment, the economy is coping well enough, despite the absence of additional rate cuts. That is a good sign. It is, of course, comforting that the country appears to have avoided recession. But more than this, the economy’s ability to cope without further rate cuts speaks well of its fundamentals. In this sense, the interest rate picture is more than just a policy tool; it offers a guide to the economy’s needs. If the economy were unable to sustain growth without radical cuts, it would suggest that something was fundamentally wrong and serve as a call for additional measures beyond rate cuts, actions that directly address underlying economic fundamentals.

This second perspective on interest rates—as an indicator of economic health—grows out of the underlying link between rates and economic prospects. Because a healthy economy promises businesspeople attractive returns on investments and economic endeavor generally, they will happily pay high rates to borrow capital to take advantage of these attractive returns.

How Hamas Can Be Destroyed With Military Force | Opinion

John Spencer

Recent events have reignited the debate over whether Hamas can be defeated militarily. Following President Donald Trump's meeting with freed Israeli hostages in the Oval Office, he warned Hamas to release all captives or face severe consequences.

He also promised to send Israel "everything it needs to finish the job." This pledge likely includes military supplies that were previously withheld under the Biden administration—such as large-diameter bombs and bulldozer parts—items Trump promptly released after the elections. The implicit message is clear: renewed military operations aimed at dismantling Hamas are on the table.

Some argue that Hamas cannot be destroyed through military means. This assertion not only misrepresents history but also ignores the shifting political and military realities of the battlefield. Dismissing Israel's ability to dismantle Hamas militarily fails to account for the constraints the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) faced in the past 16 months and the unprecedented opportunities it may have in the future.

Dealmaker, Peacemaker, President

John J. Waters

“What the f— are we doing here?” asked President Trump in the summer of 2017.

Nearly a year into his first term, Trump’s national security adviser had just proposed sending an additional 3,000 to 5,000 troops to Afghanistan, prompting his boss’s frustration that his Cabinet still hadn’t gotten the message. Trump had repeatedly conveyed that he wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, not prolong it.

Between 2012 and 2013, Trump tweeted about the loss of lives, waste of taxpayer dollars, and apparent absence of a strategy to get any value from our investment in the country.

“Afghanistan is a total disaster,” Trump said in 2012. “We don’t know what we are doing. They are, in addition to everything else, robbing us blind."

“Rebuild the U.S. first. Our government is so pathetic that some of the billions being wasted in Afghanistan are ending up with terrorists.”

The $50 billion we poured into Afghanistan annually was having little effect on the country’s long-term security, and it fueled corruption at the highest levels of Afghan government and military. America committed time, troops, and money to a country and, somehow, got nothing in return beyond a vague sense that America was “safer” for having fought the war. For a dealmaker like Trump, these terms were worse than unfair, they were unconscionable—all benefits of the bargain went to them, none to us.

How the globalists dug their own grave

Tim Black

So this is how the so-called liberal international order ends. Not with a bang, but with a Trump.

That, at least, is how Western and especially European elites perceive the crumbling of the Western alliance and the decay of assorted international conventions – as the world-destroying handiwork of the disruptor-in-chief and his gang of vandals. In the US’s new tariff-charged trade wars with allies and, above all, in the seeming abandonment of Ukraine and perhaps even America’s fellow NATO members in Europe, they see a US administration determined to ‘destroy the rules-based world order’ and replace it with one based on ‘might is right’, as one liberal pundit has it. The Trump administration is not so much ushering in a ‘brave new world’, argues another, as ‘reverting to a dangerous old one’, dominated by great-power rivalries.

In one regard, they’re right. We are in the midst of a tectonic shift in international relations. A rebalancing of global power as potentially significant as that which finally undid the world order of the 19th century. Established after the Napoleonic Wars, and semi-formalised in the Concert of Europe in 1820, that world order, originally dominated by Britain, France, Austria and Prussia, came undone as vast empires rotted from within and a unified Germany rose during the long 19th century. Indeed, today’s American-dominated world order, which has held since the end of the Second World War, does now seem to be buckling, as Western nations’ relative decline fuels the assertiveness of regional powers and, in the shape of China, a global superpower.

Improving U.S. Intelligence Sharing With Allies and Partners

Daniel Byman

The Trump administration’s recent decision to cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine will get less attention than its halting of military aid, but it will also be consequential. If anything, the United States should be increasing intelligence cooperation not only with Ukraine, but also with other key partners.

Intelligence sharing is a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to ensure its own security and that of key allies and partners. Effective sharing enhances strategic coordination, enables timely responses to threats, and strengthens trust between nations. Despite its importance, intelligence sharing does not live up to its potential. As Sean Corbett and James Danoy—former senior British and U.S. intelligence officials, respectively—have written, “With few exceptions, and despite the best of intentions, intelligence sharing is uneven, remains the exception rather than the norm, and the prospect of simultaneity at the point of need is remote.” Drawing on a larger research project that drew heavily on interviews with U.S. and allied officials and experts, this piece critically examines the current state of U.S. intelligence sharing, identifies key challenges, and proposes solutions to improve the effectiveness of these partnerships.

As a former head of the U.K. Secret Intelligence Service put it, intelligence is “a team sport.” The U.S. intelligence community operates within a complex web of alliances, including the Five Eyes (composed of the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom). The Five Eyes, however, are an exception: Bilateral cooperation is the preferred form of intelligence liaison, primarily for security reasons. The more widely information is disseminated, the more likely it is to be revealed through spying, media leaks, or other unauthorized disclosures.

Should Beijing Get Credit for Incubating DeepSeek?

Zhen Zhang and Adam Y. Liu

To many, the meteoric rise of DeepSeek is a “Sputnik moment.” Despite its modest scale and resources, the Hangzhou-based AI startup has come a long way, surmounting tech barriers, export controls, and trade restrictions. Chinese media and tech insiders have hailed its emergence as a “historic moment” for China’s innovation model.

Much of the discussion thus far has centered on the company’s founders and team members, and on whether U.S. semiconductor restrictions have failed to curb China’s AI ambitions. However, these narratives generally miss a bigger question: who actually incubated DeepSeek and other Chinese AI startups?

We know that Beijing’s state-led industrial mobilization has played a pivotal role in shaping such transformative industries as solar power and electric vehicles. Through early-stage subsidies, tax incentives, and large-scale infrastructure projects – hallmarks of China’s industrial policies – Beijing catalyzed market growth and spurred technological innovation.

Yet, China’s tech startups have followed a distinct development path – one shaped by local governments, who have tried to build localized incubation ecosystems. High-quality innovation does not require many winners, and inefficiency needn’t mean failure: a single outlier, such as DeepSeek, can be enough to trigger an AI tsunami.

Air Traffic Control For Drones: Engineers Introduce Low-Cost UAV Detection Technology

With the exponential rise in drone activity, safely managing low-flying airspace has become challenging — especially in highly populated areas. Just last month an unauthorized drone collided with a ‘Super Scooper’ aircraft above the Los Angeles wildfires, grounding the aircraft for several days and hampering the firefighting efforts.

Traditional radar systems are powerful but cannot effectively detect low-flying aircraft below 400 feet. While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has some regulations to manage small, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or drones, tracking and safety can be problematic – especially in congested or restricted airspaces. BYU researchers may have the solution.

Using a network of small, low-cost radars, engineering professor Cammy Peterson and her colleagues have built an air traffic control system for drones that can effectively and accurately track anything in an identified low-altitude airspace.

“Radar has been around for a long time,” said Karl Warnick, co-author and BYU professor of electrical and computer engineering. “Instead of having a $10 million spinning dish like you’d see at an airport, we have a simple thing that could be built for a few hundred dollars. The small radars don’t have all the capabilities of a higher-end radar, but a network of small radars can work together effectively.”

The Pentagon Needs A Software Update—Literally

William C. Greenwalt, Samantha Clark, and Greg Little

A draft memo from the Secretary of Defense on how to buy software could finally herald the Pentagon’s entrance into the information age. Or, like so many other acquisition reforms of the past, it could just as easily be overtaken by inertia and founder on the rocks of the bureaucracy. The stakes for getting this right couldn’t be higher. Software offers perhaps the most compelling way to close current and future gaps between the United States and its adversaries.

Sixty years after the pronouncement of Moore’s Law, the Department of Defense still struggles with the implications of unfettered advances in commercial technology. Though the Pentagon has historically been a research and development leader, recent decades have seen federal acquisition processes and culture lag far behind commercial advances in information technology. As commercial software continues to transform global business, the slow government rate of adoption risks holding back our national security. A change in mindset and approach is urgently needed to supercharge defense by taking advantage of the revolutionary changes occurring in the commercial market.

‘Data Colonialism’ and the Political Economy of Big Tech

Chinmayi Arun

Last year, I carried Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry’s new book “Data Grab” with me to two formerly colonizing and two formerly colonized countries. In Amsterdam’s imposing Rijksmuseum, my Dutch-Indian friend said, “You’ve seen the beauty; now comes the horror,” and he led me to the painting of a Dutch sugar factory in Java, with a slave bell for the enslaved workers. He showed me beautiful seascapes of ships and said that one of the museum’s exhibits marked out several as slave ships. Without the annotations and commentary, I might have missed the violence hidden in the art. For the tech industry, Couldry and Mejias do the same kind of valuable work my friend did for me in the museum, by highlighting the colonial, extractive violence that underlies and defines our digital lives, both historically and in the present. They started this project in a co-authored article and in their previous co-authored book, “Costs of Connection.” Their latest book, titled “Data Grab” to invoke colonialism’s land and resource grabs, continues their compelling work. “Data Grab” presents a more accessible, reorganized exposition of the authors’ views.

Mejias and Couldry’s account of the capitalism-driven “social quantification” sector (as they call it) fills gaps in Shoshana Zuboff’s compelling and popular “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” Zuboff did the valuable work of making mainstream the idea that we, the datafied subjects, stand in an asymmetric relationship with “surveillance capitalist” companies. Although powerful and influential, Zuboff’s account of the Big Tech companies’ business models does not engage with how far their harmful characteristics come from capitalism, their disparate impact on different groups of people, or their reliance on law for their power. Julie Cohen has offered a magisterial account, framed as “informational capitalism” (from Manuel Castells’s “The Rise of the Network Society”), covering this ground in a book more suitable for academic readers. However, Zuboff’s book captured the public imagination, and her discussion of colonialism is confined to Britain’s relationship with the United States, eliding the slavery and worldwide extraction and exploitation integral to European colonialism.

What happens if the robot army is defeated?

Dan Grazier

Many of the national security establishment’s leading voices say America’s military needs to rapidly modernize by embracing the digital future through adopting Artificial Intelligence, network-centric warfare, and uncrewed weapons.

Some even claim that such technology has already fundamentally changed the nature of war. The Pentagon’s technologists and the leaders of the tech industry envision a future of an AI-enabled military force wielding swarms of autonomous weapons on land, at sea, and in the skies.

However, before the United States fully mortgages its security to software code and integrated circuits, several questions must be addressed. Assuming the military does one day build a force with an uncrewed front rank, what happens if the robot army is defeated? Will the nation’s leaders surrender at that point, or do they then send in the humans?

The next major question is, what weapons will the humans wield? It is difficult to imagine the services will maintain parallel fleets of digital and analog weapons. Judging by current trends, Pentagon leaders are much more likely to invest the bulk of their procurement budgets in purchasing autonomous or “optionally manned” systems like the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle.

The NGAD Fighter Will Fight Alongside a Fleet of Drones

Maya Carlin

While the Air Force’s upcoming Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program may technically be paused, the service’s first two prototype aircraft have been designated. Manufacturers General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Anduril have proposed models to uncrewed compete for the collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs) project, labeled YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, respectively. “For the first time in our history, we have a fighter designation in the YFQ-42 Alpha and YFQ-44 Alpha,” Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Allvin said. “It may just be symbolic, but we are telling the world we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare.” As part of the service’s sixth-generation fighter project, CCAs are expected to fly alongside the jets as autonomous drone wingmen. Perhaps until NGAD is more finalized, these CCAs could fly alongside the fifth-generation F-35 Lightning platform. While no other military fields such technology to date, China is racing to develop its own sixth-generation fighter and fleet of accompanying combat drones simultaneously.

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