Is the Destruction of Gaza Making Israel Any Safer? | Beijing Pushes for AI Regulation | Technology Alone Won’t Break the Stalemate in Ukraine, and more

Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, the Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command, noted in February that one would have to return to World War II to find naval battles of comparable size and scope. Over 7,000 sailors have been committed to the fight. As he put it, “they’re getting shot at, we’re getting shot at, and we’re shooting back.” 
Notwithstanding U.S. naval firepower, the Houthis are holding their own, still regularly attacking Red Sea commercial shipping and U.S. warships. In March, the Houthis shot an anti-ship missile at the USS Laboon, an Arleigh Burke-class warship that reportedly cost close to $1 billion to build. Guerilla warfare has spread from land to the seas.
What is happening in the Red Sea shows how the development of mobile, land-based, anti-ship missiles and cheap drones are revolutionizing naval warfare just as aircraft carriers did in the last century. Surface fighting ships, including carriers, can no longer lay absolute claim to ruling the seas. These surface platforms must keep a wary eye on shore-based weapons systems accessible to nation-states and even rebels. Ukraine’s success in beating back the Russian Navy with drones and missiles in the Black Sea has been copied in the Red Sea by the Houthis, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

Technology Alone Won’t Break the Stalemate in Ukraine  (Gavin Wilde, Foreign Policy)
With U.S. aid to Ukraine stalled in Congress by an entrenched Republican Party and the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled by entrenched Russian forces, Kyiv’s Western backers are grasping for ways to bolster its war effort. Since trained personnel and artillery are in short supply, their attention has turned to drones and artificial intelligence. However, overestimating the role such technologies can play in armed conflict risks solidifying the very stalemate that Ukraine needs to break.
In some ways, a focus on digital battlefield intelligence, automated targeting, and unmanned aerial vehicles by both the Russians and Ukrainians is unsurprising—neither side has many other options to work with at this point, as their respective presidents, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, both appear reticent to order new troop mobilizations. But it is also puzzling, since a techno-centric strategy seems to have played a major role in turning what the Kremlin predicted would be a three-day war into a now two-year-old war of attrition.

Beijing Pushes for AI Regulation  (James Palmer, Foreign Policy)
China’s internet regulator has announced a campaign to monitor and control generative artificial intelligence. The move comes amid a bout of online spring cleaning targeting content that the government dislikes, as well as Beijing forums with foreign experts on AI regulation. Chinese Premier Li Qiang has also carried out official inspection tours of AI firms and other technology businesses, while promising a looser regulatory regime that seems unlikely.
AI has been a focus of the Chinese state since 2017, when the State Council laid out a plan to become a world leader in the field by 2030.  But the rush of global interest in the technology in the last year, driven in large part by the publicity of generative models such as ChatGPT, has spurred worries among officials that China is falling behind U.S. competitors and that AI-generated content could overrun the country’s controlled internet environment.
One of the concerns is that generative AI could produce opinions that are unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the Chinese chatbot that was pulled offline after it expressed its opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
However, Chinese internet regulation goes beyond the straightforwardly political. There are fears about scams and crime. There is also paternalistic control tied up in the CCP’s vision of society that doesn’t directly target political dissidence—for example, crackdowns on displaying so-called vulgar wealth. Chinese censors are always fighting to de-sexualize streaming content and launching campaigns against overenthusiastic sports fans or celebrity gossip.