• China’s Military Tech Ambitions – What’s the U.S.- EU Gameplan?

    A key test of the Biden era of transatlantic relations will be the issue of how the United States and the European Union respond to China’s aggressive efforts to seize market share and industrial knowledge in areas of technology that are critical to national security. Kathleen Doherty writes that the Europeans are divided and have been reluctant to rein in Chinese technological capabilities and ambitions. “The United States and the European Union (EU) have no time to waste in finding a common (or at least complementary) approach.”

  • Economics, National Security, and the Competition with China

    The world has faced the financial crisis and the coronavirus epidemic, but now, George Magnus, writes, it has been presented with a third existential shock that is the defining drama of these early decades of the 21st century: a more truculent and assertive China. China, once viewed by liberal-leaning democracies simply as a formidable consumer and feisty competitor, has also grown and changed over the last decade to become an economic and national security adversary with which the United States has locked horns in ideological and strategic competition.

  • Biden Orders Review to Bolster Supply Chain Resiliency

    President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday to formally order a 100-day government review of global supply chains and potential U.S. vulnerabilities in key industries including computer chips, electric vehicle batteries, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals used in electronics. On top of the 100-day review of these four key industries, Biden’s order also directs yearlong reviews for six sectors: defense, public health, information technology, transportation, energy and food production.

  • Security Threats which Bind Us

    The Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) released a report last week which identifies ecological disruption as a major and underappreciated security threat and calls on the United States to reboot its national security architecture and doctrine to better respond to this evolving threat landscape.

  • Swarming Drones Concept Flies Closer to Reality

    A swarm of twenty drones has recently completed the largest collaborative, military-focused evaluation of swarming uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the U.K. The exercise was the culmination of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory’s (DSTL) “Many Drones Make Light Work” competition

  • Robot Seeks Out Chemical Agents

    Scientists have successfully tested a fully autonomous robot that will help defense and security personnel dealing with hazardous scenes. The development of the robot means that humans and machines can now share the burden of detecting and report dangerous chemicals over large areas.

  • U.S. Grand Strategy of Restraint: Advocates Need to Provide More Details

    As the Biden Administration takes over, some U.S. policymakers have expressed interest in a new approach to America’s role in the world: a realist grand strategy of restraint under which the United States would cooperate more with other powers, reduce its forward military presence and end or renegotiate some security commitments. A new report explains how U.S. regional security policies would change if this strategy were adopted.

  • An Avalanche of Violence: Revealing Predictable Patterns in Armed Conflicts

    New research finds that human conflict exhibits remarkable regularity despite substantial geographic and cultural differences.

  • Israel, Cyberattacks and International Law

    Recently, several cyberattacks have hit Israeli companies. While Israel has not yet publicly attributed the attacks to any foreign state, media outlets report that Israeli cybersecurity experts have tied the operations of the main hacker groups behind these attacks—BlackShadow and Pay2Kitten—to Iran. Tal Mimran and Yuval Shany write that in response, Israel seems to be increasingly turning toward international law to guide its approach to hostile activities in cyberspace

  • Israel, Cyberattacks and International Law

    Recently, several cyberattacks have hit Israeli companies. While Israel has not yet publicly attributed the attacks to any foreign state, media outlets report that Israeli cybersecurity experts have tied the operations of the main hacker groups behind these attacks—BlackShadow and Pay2Kitten—to Iran. Tal Mimran and Yuval Shany write that in response, Israel seems to be increasingly turning toward international law to guide its approach to hostile activities in cyberspace

  • Guns, Drones and Poison: The New Age of Assassination

    We are living in the greatest-ever age of assassination as states, fearful of the twin threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, are using increasingly sophisticated intelligence to track and kill dangerous people and deprive other states of dangerous knowledge.

  • Virtual Reality Battlefield Technology Designed to Train Military Leaders

    Researchers have developed battlefield simulation technology that they used to produce a virtual reality tour of the D-Day beaches in Normandy, France. Their work is part of the FORCES (4S) – Strategy, Security and Social Systems Initiative at Purdue University. The initiative supports the use of social scientific research in strategy and security activities to shape long-range and global military, political and organizational decision-making.

  • Cause of Mystery Illness of U.S. Diplomats in U.S. Embassies in Cuba, China

    Government personnel and their families at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, in late 2016 and the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China, in early 2017 began suffering from a range of unusual — and in some cases suddenly occurring — symptoms such as a perceived loud noise, ear pain, intense head pressure or vibration, dizziness, visual problems, and cognitive difficulties, and many still continue to experience these or other health problems. A new scientific report says that directed, pulsed radio frequency energy appears to be the most plausible mechanism in explaining these cases, especially in individuals with the distinct early symptoms.

  • How Easy Is it to Build a Robot Assassin?

    Someone—almost certainly Israel—recently assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the leading scientist behind the Iranian nuclear program. The latest reporting from Iran suggests that the assassins employed a remotely controlled machine gun mounted on a pickup truck. So how hard is it to build such a tool? How expensive? Nicholas Weaver writes that “Unfortunately, the answer is “hard but doable” and “not much money”—with the further complication that in a few years, it will probably be possible to pick up the necessary equipment online from vendors like Banggood.”

  • A New World of Warcraft

    In the past decade, high tech tools have proliferated in the world’s fighting forces. At least 80 nations can now deploy remote-controlled drones. Will the widespread use of digitally enhanced arsenals prove a destabilizing, if not destructive, element in the complex struggles among states? Not necessarily, argues MIT assistant professor Erik Lin-Greenberg.