• Floating Piers and Sinking Hopes: China’s Logistics Challenge in Invading Taiwan

    Last month the United States disassembled and removed the floating pier it had assembled at a Gaza beach to take aid deliveries. It took almost a month to assemble, waves damaged it and almost destroyed it, and waves drove ashore boats that serviced it. And all that was nothing compared with the challenges that China’s armed forces would face in trying to deliver a mountain of personnel, equipment and supplies in an invasion of Taiwan.

  • Space Militarization Could Pose a Challenge to Global Security

    Typically, we would not be thinking of killer satellites, space nukes, and orbital debris fields that could lead to global collapse. But maybe we should. In May 2024, Russia launched a satellite that some observers believe is a weapon system that could allow the targeted destruction of other satellites in orbit.

  • China May Be Putting the Great Firewall into Orbit

    The first satellites for China’s ambitious G60 mega-constellation are in orbit in preparation for offering global satellite internet services—and we should worry about how this will help Beijing export its model of digital authoritarianism around the world.

  • Artificial Intelligence at War

    The Gaza war has shown that the use of AI in tactical targeting can drive military strategy by encouraging decision-making bias. At the start of the conflict, an Israeli Defense Force AI system called Lavender apparently identified 37,000 people linked to Hamas. Its function quickly shifted from gathering long-term intelligence to rapidly identifying individual operatives to target.

  • A New U.S. Russia, China Nuclear Arms Race Spells Danger

    Unlike in the Cold War, the United States faces the prospect in the next decade of two peer nuclear adversaries, which will together have twice as many strategic nuclear weapons as it does. While extended nuclear assurance and persuasion have been important factors in the US for a long time, there does not appear to be any widely accepted methodology for reaching a decision on how many weapons are needed for these purposes.

  • ‘Killer Robots’ Are Becoming a Real Threat in Africa

    The use of drones in the Sahel, a region of Africa that has been plagued by violence driven by jihadist insurgency for much of the past decade, has become a real problem. But even more concerning is the fact that their AI-powered variants, which are known as lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), have been deployed in Africa in recent years.

  • Insights on Valuable Byproduct Minerals

    Byproduct minerals are not the main target of the mining operation but are obtained as a result of processing the primary ore. Many critical minerals are byproducts of mining other minerals like copper, gold, and zinc.

  • Engineers Debut New Drone ID Tech After Yemen Strikes Israel

    Tel Aviv University researchers unveil an AI-powered drone ID radar system that enhances detection in challenging urban environments.

  • Resourcing the Ramp-Up: NATO and the Challenge of a Coherent Industrial Response to Russia's War in Ukraine

    Near the top of the new NATO Secretary-General’s in-tray will be an urgent question: why are efforts to mobilize the alliance’s industrial base and ramp up production still yielding underwhelming results, over two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

  • Taiwan May Yet Become a Porcupine

    It’s early days, but the signs are strong that Taiwan’s new government will insist on much more of a porcupine strategy for national defense than many officers in the country’s hidebound armed forces have been willing to accept.

  • New U.S. Arctic Strategy Focused on Russian, Chinese Inroads

    The United States is looking to boost intelligence collection in the Arctic and enhance cooperation with allies in the region, to prevent Russia and China from exploiting the cold and icy northern region at America’s expense.

  • Russia Spreads Disinformation to Cover Up Its Use of Chemical Weapons in Ukraine

    The United States determined Russia used the chemical weapon chloropicrin against Ukrainian troops and riot control agents (RCA) as a method of warfare in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

  • Germany Foils Russian Plot to Assassinate German Arms Company Chief

    German politicians have voiced horror over a report that Russia planned to murder a German arms company boss. US intelligence is said to have uncovered the plot against Rheinmetall chief Armin Papperger.

  • To Guard Against Cyberattacks in Space, Researchers Ask ‘What If?’

    If space systems such as GPS were hacked and knocked offline, much of the world would instantly be returned to the communications and navigation technologies of the 1950s. Yet space cybersecurity is largely invisible to the public at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

  • How to Equip the U.S. Coast Guard Against China’s Grey-Zone Operations

    America’s allies in the Indo-Pacific are getting pretty familiar with China’s grey-zone maritime behavior, but the United States itself is ill-prepared for dealing with it. Yet it should be prepared. The U.S. must not only counter the threat to its national security posed by China’s coercive operations, but also support its allies against Chinese efforts to rewrite the rule of law in the region.