The State Department’s “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” report and the independent assessment by resilience and resistance interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Robert Burrell both address important but differing views. The State Department examines how Havana converted limited conventional power into a durable system of espionage, ideological influence, proxy relationships, and political subversion. Burrell examines why the Cuban regime continues to survive economic decline, sanctions, demographic pressure, and public unrest. One follows the outward projection of power, the other measures the internal foundations of authoritarian durability. Together, they offer a useful composite picture. Yet both stop short of the assessing what is most necessary, whether Cuba has contemporary value as a strategic access platform for Russia, China, and Iran. 

First is that Cuba has transitioned from a revolutionary exporter to an enabling platform. Cuba no longer needs to export revolution on the scale of the 1960s to remain strategically consequential. Instead, it can leverage geography, diplomatic cover, intelligence tradecraft, Spanish-language credibility, telecommunications access, port facilities, and a tightly controlled operating environment ninety miles from Florida. These activities connect to the modern cognitive warfare apparatus. NATO defines cognitive warfare as synchronized activity intended to influence, protect, or disrupt cognition to affect attitudes and behavior. Through that lens, Cuba is more than a messenger. It can serve as an intermediary that helps foreign narratives acquire regional identity, historical legitimacy, and attributional distance. 

Russia’s Cuban provision is one of proximity, access, and narrative localization. Russian information operations in Latin America benefit when themes originating in Moscow are restated through Cuban institutions, sympathetic regional outlets, diplomatic networks, or established anti-imperialist frames. These themes can appear less like foreign intervention and more like an indigenous critique of U.S. power. The 2025 U.S. Southern Command statement described Russian, Chinese, and Iranian cyber espionage and information operations across the region and discussed the 2024 Russian naval visit to Havana. That activity did not establish an imminent attack, but demonstrated how access, intelligence collection, and messaging can be leveraged. 

China’s Cuban provision is more infrastructural, known as cognitive infrastructure: the telecommunications, data, sensing, media, and analytical systems through which perceptions can be studied and influence delivered. CSIS satellite-imagery assessments have identified Cuban facilities containing equipment potentially capable of signals-intelligence collection while appropriately treating Chinese involvement as a possibility requiring continued evaluation rather than a conclusively established fact. 

At first glance, many access points Cuba provides to China may appear innocuous. They are simply telecommunications upgrades, academic exchanges, commercial partnerships, port visits, research cooperations, media engagements, or technical assistance. Individually, these activities can be explained as routine state-to-state transactional relations. Their strategic significance emerges through accumulation. Each interaction creates another opportunity to observe institutional routines, social networks, political reactions, military patterns, and regional audience vulnerabilities. Over time, persistent collection can transform ordinary access into a developing exploitation infrastructure. 

Cuba’s value in this process is not limited to geography. Its controlled political environment, security institutions, regional relationships, and proximity to the U.S. can provide China with a discreet platform from which engagements may gradually support intelligence partnerships, narrative targeting, and future cognitive influence. 

Iran’s Cuban provision is wholly different. It is built around sanctions solidarity, diplomatic reach, technical cooperation, and hemispheric access. Evidence does not indicate a substantial Iranian combat presence in Cuba.  

Iranian Spanish-language messaging, resistance narratives, and anti-sanction’s themes can reinforce Cuban and Russian accounts without requiring a single integrated command structure. The three states can repeat complementary claims portraying the U.S. as coercive, destabilizing, culturally hostile, or economically predatory. Repetition across separate national and media sources can produce narrative convergence, giving audiences the impression that multiple independent observers have reached the same conclusion. 

Second is the separation of Cuban regime resilience from external influence capacity. Intelligence services, security institutions, elite cohesion, and foreign assistance do not merely explain Cuban survival. They also make Cuba useful to foreign actors by protecting personnel, concealing sensitive agreements, disciplining state media, and preserving long-duration access. Economic weakness may therefore increase Havana’s willingness to exchange infrastructure access, intelligence cooperation, political support, or technological privileges for energy, credit, and regime security. 

Third is the absence of a Cuban campaign continuum. Cuba-enabled competition could progress from commercial investment, diplomatic exchanges, media partnerships, and technical assistance into secure facilities, persistent foreign personnel, expanded data access, port familiarity, intelligence sharing, cyber staging, and coordinated crisis narratives. Visible military deployment might appear only at the far end. By then, much of the cognitive preparation could already be complete. U.S. audiences may become divided over attribution. Regional governments may become reluctant to cooperate. And policymakers will become uncertain whether responding to a limited provocation would produce escalation. 

Fourth is the institutional perception risk inside the U.S. Cuba’s intelligence success has never depended solely on stealing secrets. Long-duration penetration can also shape what institutions believe is important, which warning indicators they discount, and how threats are categorized. The conviction of former U.S. ambassador and National Security Council official Victor Manuel Rocha for secretly acting for Cuba over decades demonstrates the patience and access Cuban intelligence can achieve. The cognitive effect of penetration is therefore larger than the information removed. 

CONCLUSION 

The State Department report and the Cuban independent assessment are useful, but each risks treating Cuba as an isolated problem rather than as a strategic access point for larger adversarial powers. Cuba is better understood as a strategic doorway, an authoritarian platform whose value increases when connected to the resources of larger powers. Russia can use it to localize narratives and signal proximity. China can use it to gain access to data, sensing, and infrastructure. Iran can use it to extend diplomatic and informational reach into the hemisphere. 

The missed threat is therefore not a Cuban conventional assault. It is the gradual construction of an ecosystem in which foreign collection, political access, information laundering, cyber opportunity, and cognitive pressure converge near the American homeland. Cuba’s economy may be failing; its strategic utility is not. 

Greg Sharpe is a Fellow and the director of Communications and Marketing for the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and the Managing Design Editor for the Global Security Review. He has 25+ years in marketing and communications with a focus on digital communications, organizational and institutional change, and analysis. The views of the author are his own. 

Cognitive Warfare at America’s Edge was originally published on Global Security Review.

The foundational calculus of international security is undergoing a radical and technologically driven transformation. In the Pentagon’s latest strategic guidance, the traditional concept of deterrence has been elevated to a framework known as Integrated Deterrence. Driven heavily by initiatives like the Department of Defense’s Replicator program, the West is betting its long-term security on the mass deployment of low-cost, attritable autonomous systems to achieve deterrence by denial in highly contested environments like the Indo-Pacific. The logic behind this strategy is clear. By flooding a theater with resilient, algorithmic unmanned networks, we force near-peer adversaries to calculate that a rapid amphibious invasion or territorial seizure is mathematically impossible to achieve.

However, within the corridors of Washington and the innovation labs of Silicon Valley, this strategic architecture contains a catastrophic, structural blind spot. Military technology is only an effective deterrent if its operational parameters, source code, and behavioral algorithms remain secure from the adversary prior to deployment. If a rising power can utilize sophisticated economic statecraft, gray-zone collection, and corporate insider espionage to exfiltrate the software architecture of an autonomous fleet during its research and development cycle, its deterrent value drops significantly before a single unit is fielded. To survive this in the modern era of great power competition, structural International Relations (IR) theory must be reunited with a modernized doctrine of Counterintelligence (CI).

The Theoretical Failure: Shifting the Offense-Defense Balance

Classic structural realism dictating the balance of power assumes that military hardware possesses a predictable, measurable weight. If Nation A builds a fleet of ships, Nation B can see them, measure their displacement, and calculate an asymmetric countermeasure.

However, autonomous systems and algorithmic warfare are fundamentally different. Their strategic efficacy does not lie in the steel or the composite carbon of the drone itself; it lies in the software stack which houses the machine-learning models that govern swarm coordination, non-kinetic electronic warfare resilience, and automated command-and-control loops. This shifts what political scientists call the Offense-Defense Balance. In the physical world, defending an island chain against an aggressor is traditionally favored. In the digital world, the offense holds a severe asymmetric advantage.

When our adversaries, and specifically the People’s Republic of China and its explicitly mandated strategy of Civil-Military Fusion, target the defense innovation ecosystem, they are not looking to build a better drone. They are looking to achieve what can be best described as algorithmic deterrence instability. By utilizing non-traditional intelligence collection vectors to map out our autonomous networks, a multi-billion-dollar asymmetric deterrent becomes legacy hardware before a crisis triggers escalation.

The New Espionage Vector: The Corporate Perimeter

For decades, the mandate of national counterintelligence was straightforward. One must secure the military installation, protect the classified embassy cable, and vet the government official. Today, that perimeter has completely collapsed. The frontline of grand strategy is no longer a forward-deployed garrison. Instead, it is the decentralized corporate ecosystem of commercial tech giants and venture-backed defense primes. Adversaries are leveraging complex supply chains, corporate joint ventures, and sophisticated insider threat networks to target the intellectual property that sits completely outside the traditional classified architecture of the state.

While traditional IR theorists like Kenneth Waltz focused on physical state-level metrics, scholars like Amy Zegart and Jon Lindsay remind us that in the digital age, state power is directly tethered to corporate software integrity. If, as Anna Puglisi’s research warns, adversarial civil-military fusion programs can easily map these innovation loops via corporate insiders, our forward-deployed tech deterrents are compromised at inception.

This is where the practitioner’s reality clashes with academic theory. If our counterintelligence posture relies entirely on legacy physical security frameworks, including compliance protocols, badges, and base perimeters, it will consistently fail against an adversary executing systemic, identity-centric talent poaching and data exfiltration. True counterintelligence in the era of autonomous deterrence requires a shift from physical compliance to continuous behavioral authentication and structural asset protection deep within the private defense industrial base.

 Reconceptualizing the Escalation Ladder

If Integrated Deterrence is to succeed, the West must recognize that counterintelligence is not a passive, defensive support function. It is a primary instrument of statecraft that actively shapes an adversary’s information environment and perception of risk.

When a state successfully denies an adversary the ability to map its technological breakthroughs, it introduces massive psychological uncertainty into the adversary’s decision-making loop. This uncertainty alters their calculation on the escalation ladder. A rational actor will hesitate to launch a kinetic operation if they cannot accurately predict how their algorithms will interact with an unmapped, autonomous defensive swarm.

Conversely, failure in corporate counterespionage breeds dangerous predictability. When an adversary possesses the digital blueprints of your autonomous defense architecture, their threshold for aggression drops, drastically increasing the likelihood of strategic miscalculation.

Conclusion

The West cannot innovate its way out of a counterintelligence deficit. Mass-producing thousands of attritable autonomous systems means nothing if the underlying algorithms are already archived in Beijing or Moscow.

As scholars and policymakers refine the grand strategies of the 21st century, we must expand our conceptual framework. National security requires looking past the hardware rolling out of Silicon Valley labs and recognizing that robust, aggressive, and modernized counterintelligence doctrine is the ultimate prerequisite for strategic stability in the autonomous age.

Joshua Thibert is a Senior Analyst at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS) with an MA in Defense & Strategic Studies from the University of Missouri and completing an MS in International Security at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His extensive academic and practitioner experience spans CBRN, strategic intelligence, multiple domains within defense and strategic studies, and critical infrastructure protection. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The Blind Spot of Integrated Deterrence: Modern Defense Tech Requires a Counterintelligence Revival was originally published on Global Security Review.

Russia’s nuclear strategy occupies a central place in global security debates. With the world’s largest and most diverse nuclear arsenal and a leadership that frequently employs nuclear rhetoric, Russia’s approach to deterrence is both consequential and deeply rooted in its historical experience. Scholars often analyze Russian nuclear doctrine through the lens of post–Cold War geopolitics or contemporary military reforms, but such approaches overlook the deeper historical foundations of Russian strategic culture. 

For better or worse, the origins of Russian nuclear deterrence lie in the Stalinist heritage, a political and strategic worldview forged in the crucible of revolution, civil war, industrialization, and global conflict. Stalin’s rule created the institutional, psychological, and ideological foundations that shaped the Soviet nuclear program and continue to influence Russian nuclear policy today. 

Stalin’s Strategic Mindset 

Joseph Stalin’s approach to security was shaped by a profound sense of vulnerability. He believed the Soviet Union was encircled by hostile capitalist powers and that survival required absolute centralization, militarization, and coercive statecraft. This worldview justified: rapid industrialization to support military power; expansion of the security apparatus; preemptive and punitive measures against perceived enemies; and readiness to accept extreme risks. Stalin’s strategic thinking fused Marxist-Leninist ideology, personal paranoia, and geopolitical realism. 

Stalin believed that only an overwhelming force could guarantee the survival of the Soviet state. This belief drove the massive industrialization campaigns of the 1930s, which prioritized heavy industry, armaments, and military infrastructure. This logic later translated into the nuclear age: nuclear weapons became symbols of national greatness and instruments of political leverage. Stalin’s domestic use of terror—purges, show trials, mass repression—was mirrored in his foreign policy. He believed that intimidation could shape adversaries’ behavior. 

The Soviet Atomic Project: Stalinist Governance in Science 

The Soviet atomic project began during World War II, but it accelerated dramatically after the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stalin immediately recognized the political significance of nuclear weapons. For Stalin, nuclear weapons were not simply military tools; they were instruments of political prestige and strategic leverage. The atomic project was organized into secret research centers, such as Arzamas-16, where scientists lived under surveillance and strict information controls. This system mirrored the broader Stalinist model of compartmentalization, elite isolation, centralized oversight, and security-service dominance. 

Despite postwar devastation, Stalin prioritized the nuclear program above all other sectors. Archival evidence shows that the atomic project received unlimited access to manpower, materials and funding, even during famine conditions. 

This reflected Stalin’s belief that nuclear weapons were essential to state survival, international prestige, and strategic parity with the United States. Soviet espionage in the Manhattan Project was central to the rapid development of the Soviet bomb. Agents such as Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall provided critical information that accelerated Soviet progress. Stalin’s reliance on intelligence reflected his broader belief that security depended on outmaneuvering adversaries through covert means. 

When the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, Stalin’s response was characteristically understated but strategically significant. He viewed the bomb not only as a weapon of war but also as a political instrument that elevated the USSR to superpower status. This symbolic dimension remains central to Russian nuclear identity. Nuclear weapons are not merely tools of deterrence; they are markers of national greatness and geopolitical relevance. 

The Evolution of Soviet and Russian Nuclear Doctrine 

Stalin’s belief in overwhelming force evolved into the Soviet commitment to massive nuclear arsenals, redundant delivery systems, and the capability for assured retaliation. By the 1970s, the USSR possessed thousands of warheads, an approach rooted in Stalinist thinking about security through quantitative superiority. Stalin’s insistence on political supremacy over the military carried into the nuclear age. The Soviet command-and-control system was designed to ensure that only the top political leadership could authorize nuclear use. Modern Russia’s “nuclear briefcase” (cheget) is a direct institutional descendant of this model. 

For Stalin, industrial and military achievements were markers of national greatness. Nuclear weapons became the ultimate symbol of superpower status. This symbolic dimension remains central to Russian identity and foreign policy, as seen in Vladimir Putin’s emphasis on “invincible” new nuclear systems. Russian leaders continue to view the world as a hostile environment in which Western powers seek to weaken or encircle Russia. This worldview, rooted in Stalin’s belief in external hostility, justifies reliance on nuclear deterrence as the ultimate guarantor of sovereignty. Russia’s willingness to threaten limited nuclear use to compel adversaries to back down reflects a Stalinist belief in the coercive power of fear. Putin’s nuclear signaling by alerting forces, showcasing new systems, and issuing veiled threats echoes Stalin’s use of intimidation as a diplomatic tool. As Leon Aron has noted: 

Russia’s resorting to a nuclear strike to terminate a conventional conflict that was not going its way became known as an “escalate to de-escalate” theory. Intended to scare the enemy and coerce armistice rather than inflict massive damage and precipitate an open-ended strategic nuclear exchange, a “de-escalation” is likely to involve low-yield tactical weapons detonated away from densely populated areas.” 

Such an approach involves deterrence as ustrashenie (a sense of intimidation or scaring) rather than deterrence as sderzhivanie (a sense of holding back or restraining). Thus, one enduring Stalinist inheritance is psychological rather than doctrinal. This aspect includes security through strength, instead of trust; fear as a legitimate instrument of statecraft; occasional acceptance of extreme risk; and ambiguity as strategy. These attitudes shape how Russian leaders interpret international crises and how they wield nuclear threats. 

Conclusion 

Russia’s nuclear deterrence strategy is not merely a product of modern geopolitics or technological capability. It is also at least partly the continuation of a Stalinist worldview that equates security with dominance, deterrence with fear, and state survival with centralized, militarized power. Understanding this heritage is essential for interpreting Russia’s behavior today—from its latent and manifest use of coercive nuclear strategy to its insistence on maintaining a vast and diverse nuclear arsenal. 

Stephen J. Cimbala is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State Brandywine and the author of numerous works on nuclear deterrence, arms control, and military strategy. He is a senior fellow at NIDS and a recent contributor to the Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies edited by Dr. Alexander Hill (Routledge: 2025). The views of the author are his own. 

Russian Nuclear Deterrence and the Ghost of Stalin was originally published on Global Security Review.

The international system is undergoing a profound global power shift characterized by the resurgence of great power competition and a broad diffusion of technical capabilities. This environment is intensifying security competition across all domains. Concurrently, the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) and other disruptive technologies has fundamentally transformed espionage and defense. The traditional landscape of counterintelligence (CI) is obsolete and requires rapid, systemic overhaul to address the increasingly amplified, technologically enabled threats posed by state and non-state actors.

Specifically, the shift to great power technological competition has expanded CI’s mandate from protecting military secrets to securing critical infrastructure, intellectual property (IP), and the integrity of the information domain. The dual-use nature of AI functions as both in support of automated espionage and a critical mechanism for preemptively anticipating and mitigating threats. The failure of the United States to strategically integrate AI into CI methodologies will result in the systemic erosion of national technological and economic advantage.

The Expanded Mandate of Modern Counterintelligence

CI functions to protect a nation’s secrets, personnel, and systems from foreign intelligence entities (FIEs). Yet today, CI must also confront a threat matrix dramatically enlarged in scope, sophistication, and velocity. The current geopolitical climate has necessitated a significant expansion of the traditional CI mission. In the context of great power competition, the most significant threat has shifted from the theft of classified military and diplomatic secrets to the large-scale acquisition of IP, trade secrets, and technological data, as highlighted in the recently released Annual Threat Assessment.

FIEs are aggressively targeting the private sector, academia, and research institutions, the very engines of national innovation through sophisticated economic espionage. Their strategic goal is not merely to obtain information, but to erode a nation’s competitive advantage and accelerate the adversary’s technological timetable, thereby shifting the global balance of power. CI must establish robust protective mechanisms that extend deep into the non-governmental technology and research ecosystem.

The dissolution of a clear distinction between peacetime competition and active conflict has resulted in a continuous state of confrontation known as the ‘gray zone’. This strategic domain is characterized by persistent, non-lethal, yet tactically damaging activities designed to achieve political objectives without triggering traditional military responses. CI must now defend against a spectrum of subtle subversion, including large-scale cyber operations, persistent penetration of networks for reconnaissance and preparatory measures, and covert attempts to manipulate political discourse and decision-making.

The globalization of commerce and technology has created intricate, interconnected supply chains. These networks present significant CI risks, as adversaries seek to compromise the integrity, trustworthiness, and authenticity of products and services. By inserting “backdoors” or creating exploitable “choke points” at various nodes, adversaries establish capabilities for future exploitation. CI efforts are essential to conduct comprehensive due diligence and risk mitigation, securing these complex networks against both hardware and software compromise.

Artificial Intelligence: The Dual-Use Catalyst

AI and emerging technologies are not merely targets of modern espionage; they are simultaneously the most potent tools and the most necessary defenses in the counterintelligence battleground. This dual-use dynamic creates a challenging “AI vs. AI” scenario that demands immediate, radical adaptation. Adversaries are leveraging AI to dramatically enhance the speed, scale, and sophistication of their intelligence operations:

Automated Espionage and Big Data Analysis: AI-powered tools can automate and scale the processing, translation, and analysis of vast, heterogeneous datasets (Big Data), vastly increasing the volume and velocity of intelligence collection from both open-source intelligence and classified sources.

Adaptive Cyberattacks: Machine learning (ML) algorithms enable the development of more elusive and adaptive cyber threats. This includes automated exploitation of vulnerabilities, dynamic creation of polymorphic malware, and rapid penetration of defenses, operating at speeds that effectively outpace traditional, human-centric cybersecurity responses.

Generative AI for Influence: Generative AI can create highly realistic deepfakes (synthetic videos and audio) and synthetic narratives at scale. This facilitates sophisticated disinformation and propaganda campaigns to manipulate public opinion and conduct advanced social engineering, severely compromising the ability of institutions to discern truth from falsehood.

Three interconnected factors fundamentally redefine the scope of CI responsibility: target expansion, the blurring of conflict lines, and supply chain vulnerabilities. To effectively counter these technologically enabled threats, CI must aggressively embrace and integrate these same technologies, transforming them into proactive defensive tools:

Threat Anticipation and Predictive Analysis: AI can process and analyze massive amounts of threat data, identifying subtle, non-obvious patterns, trends, and anomalies. This capability allows CI to transition from merely reacting to threats toward predictive modeling, allowing one to forecast adversary actions before they materialize and enabling preemptive defense.

Enhanced Surveillance and Anomaly Detection: ML algorithms are crucial for the detection of subtle anomalies in network traffic, user behavior, and physical security systems that a human operator would miss. AI-driven monitoring provides real-time, large-scale pattern-of-life analysis that significantly exceeds human cognitive capacity.

Counter-Disinformation and Integrity Checks: CI requires AI-driven tools to effectively identify, analyze, and flag AI-generated propaganda, deepfakes, and synthetic media. Systems designed for content provenance and authenticity verification are essential to safeguard the integrity of the information domain and maintain public trust.

Insider Threat Mitigation: Defensively, AI can monitor internal networks to flag anomalous user behaviors such as unusual data access attempts, large data transfers, or deviations in an employee’s digital pattern-of-life. As such they assist in identifying potential insider threats before significant compromise occurs.

The Strategic Imperative

The shift of global powers and the proliferation of disruptive technologies have thrust counterintelligence into an even more important aspect of national security. The stakes of this technological arms race transcend traditional security concerns, encompassing the integrity of a nation’s innovative ecosystem, its economic competitiveness, and the resilience of its democratic institutions.

CI must rapidly evolve its strategies to prioritize the defense of economic and technological assets, and it must integrate AI as a foundational defensive technology to achieve predictive, scalable threat mitigation. Failure to aggressively master and deploy AI defenses against technologically augmented adversaries risks the systemic erosion of national advantage in a world where technological leadership is increasingly synonymous with global power. The future success of great power competition hinges directly on the adaptive capacity and technological sophistication of CI’s function.

Joshua Thibert is a Senior Analyst at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS) with over 30 years of comprehensive expertise. His background encompasses roles as a former counterintelligence special agent within the Department of Defense and as a practitioner in compliance, security, and insider risk management in the private sector. His extensive academic and practitioner experience spans strategic intelligence, multiple domains within defense and strategic studies, and critical infrastructure protection. The views of the author are his own.

Redefining Espionage: The Unseen War for Technological Dominance was originally published on Global Security Review.

AI has improved intelligence operations in developing nations, but it has also created a new intelligence gap due to disjointed technological implementation, political exploitation of surveillance, reliance on foreign suppliers, and insufficient integration between HUMINT and AI-driven systems. Pakistan and India have large human resources and developing technological ecosystems, but institutional fragmentation and political agendas prevent the development of integrated, modern intelligence frameworks.

The problems that South Asian intelligence services are having are part of a larger global transformation. AI is now a segment of intelligence operation in the US, China, Israel, and some European countries. This includes automated translation, pattern-of-life analysis, algorithmic triage of intercepted data, commercial satellite imagery analytics, and cyber-enabled anomaly detection. China’s surveillance state uses AI-powered facial recognition, behavior prediction, and nationwide data fusion to show what a fully integrated intelligence model looks like. The U.S. is pushing for automated signals intelligence (SIGINT) processing and predictive analysis in all its intelligence agencies in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). As shown in studies of its military AI systems, Israel uses AI in real-time targeting and ISR fusion.

Developing countries are just as vulnerable to cyber-attacks, terrorism, and false information, but they do not have the institutional frameworks that let AI grow. This global gap is what makes the changes in intelligence in Pakistan and India so important for strategy. Pakistan and India have both spent resources on AI-enabled surveillance systems like ID databases, CCTV networks, predictive policing tools, interception systems, and cyber technologies that come from other countries. The NADRA database and Safe City projects in Pakistan give a lot of biometric and real-time data. India has made the Central Monitoring System (CMS) and the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) to connect databases between state agencies. The ministry, military, police, and intelligence systems are separate. Legacy bureaucracies promote compartmentalization over integration. AI needs centralized databases, clean data, agency cooperation, and agreed analysis criteria. These requirements are missing; hence, AI systems exhibit limited and inconsistent intelligence. Agencies are collecting more data than ever but lack the framework to analyze it.

Pakistan and India still value HUMINT for intelligence. It is crucial for counterterrorism, political spying, and regional operations. HUMINT alone can’t compete with hybrid enemies who use AI-driven processing. Strategically, China’s integrated military and civilian AI ecosystem is advantageous. Developing states are stuck between two sources of intelligence: First is a legacy HUMINT system with deep networks and second is an AI ecosystem that is fragmented and not fully developed, so it cannot support strategic analysis. In cross-border threat assessments, cyber invasions, and emerging non-traditional security issues like information warfare, this mismatch causes delays, blind spots, and analytical distortions.

In both Pakistan and India, AI-enabled surveillance has been used more for political purposes than for improving strategic intelligence. Amnesty International reported that India’s use of Pegasus spyware targeted journalists, activists, and political opponents. Pakistan has been criticized for using automated social media monitoring and political profiling, which often focuses on threats from within the country rather than threats from other countries. When surveillance tools are used to control political competition within a party, two things happen. First, institutional resources prioritize domestic control over strategic analysis. Second, technology investments strengthen policing instead of updating intelligence. This challenges national security by making it harder for the intelligence system to predict cyberattacks, regional crises, and threats from outside the country.

South Asia has a lot of foreign AI and cyber infrastructure. Pakistan employs Chinese surveillance equipment (Hikvision, Huawei), while India uses Israeli, US, and European and American forensics platforms. This increases structural risks, including data exfiltration and espionage due to entrenched vulnerabilities, strategic reliance on foreign updates, and weakened sovereignty over vital intelligence activities.

Two traditional rivals, nuclear-weapon states, are weakened by this reliance. AI-powered surveillance systems increase digital access points for assault. Big national data repositories attract attackers. Pakistan has had multiple government system hacks, and India has had large breaches that compromised critical infrastructure and government information.  Failures in the past were largely caused by human error, but in the AI era, bias in algorithms, data manipulation, hostile and automated cyberattacks, and misclassification can lead to erroneous operational decisions. These dangers make the strategy unstable.

Increasing intelligence gaps between Pakistan and India jeopardize national and regional security. More likely to misjudge opponents: In fast-moving crises, agencies may miss signals, misjudge threats, or misread trends without AI–HUMINT fusion. Cross-border escalation risks rise; poor intelligence integration in nuclearized environments may aggravate misperceptions during crises like the 2019 Pulwama–Balakot incident or the May 2025 standoff. Cyber attacks expose national secrets. Easy-to-get digital network intelligence can have fatal repercussions. China-asymmetric strategic competition: China is decades ahead in intelligence upgrading, and Pakistan and India may fall further. Domestic AI reduces institutional capacity: political survival trumps strategic intelligence.

In summary, countries that do not update their intelligence risk being caught off guard, making mistakes, and becoming more vulnerable. The myths of shadows, secrecy, and huge people networks that fueled emerging country intelligence organizations are gone. AI has highlighted bureaucratic opacity’s long-hidden structural flaws: dysfunctional systems, politicized surveillance, reliance on foreign technology, and a lack of HUMINT-AI integration. Thus, Pakistan and India’s new intelligence divide is not about data or resources. It is about institutions’ failure to transition from analogue intelligence to AI-connected ecosystems. State and non-state adversaries that accelerate this transformation will benefit.

In nuclearized, crisis-prone South Asia, small misunderstandings could lead to massive wars. Pakistan and India need more than AI tools to stay competitive strategically. They need data architectures that work together, technical specialists, protocols to prevent politicians from abusing their authority, and strategic AI–HUMINT fusion.

Dr. Tahir Mahmood Azad is currently a research scholar at the Department of Politics & International Relations, the University of Reading, UK.  Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. 

The Intelligence Illusion: How AI is Exposing Strategic Vulnerabilities in the Developing World was originally published on Global Security Review.

This was not an isolated incident. Civilian-grade drones and other dual-use technologies are increasingly being used to survey or target public infrastructure. From energy grids to airports, the connective tissue of modern life is exposed to risks once confined to traditional warzones. These developments are reshaping global security policies and blurring the boundary between civilian and military domains.

Civilian Tech, Strategic Impact

Cheap unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are now accessible worldwide. While drones were initially developed for military use, the most commonly deployed platforms today, such as DJI’s Mavic series, were originally built for civilian applications like aerial photography and videography. Their affordability, portability, and high-spec cameras made them commercially popular, but those same features have made them easy to repurpose for military contexts.

In particular, first-person view (FPV) drones, designed for immersive recreational flying, were rapidly adapted for frontline use in conflict. These drones are now routinely deployed with improvised explosives or used for precision reconnaissance. In Ukraine, both sides repurposed off-the-shelf drones in vast numbers; nearly two million were produced in 2024 alone. Many of these are equipped with AI-enabled navigation and targeting, underscoring how quickly civilian tech can be weaponised.

Non-state actors are following suit. Armed groups are using FPV drones for low-cost, high impact strikes on infrastructure, blurring the lines between military and civilian threats. This second drone age shows that national security vulnerabilities now stem as much from consumer technology as from conventional arsenals.

The broader implication is clear: private-sector innovations, often created without any defense intent, are shaping the battlefield. These companies bring novel use cases, technical advantages, or agile design processes that legacy defense contractors may overlook. Civilian tech is not just a risk; it is a potential strategic asset. Tapping into this ecosystem, especially among start-ups and experts, could redefine how the country protects critical infrastructure in an era of hybrid conflict.

Infrastructure in the Crosshairs

Modern infrastructure is a key target in modern conflicts or hybrid attacks, just like military bases traditionally were. In 2022, after the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, over 70 drone sightings were reported near Norwegian offshore oil platforms. Oslo feared Russian-linked hybrid operations targeting Europe’s energy supply and deployed naval assets and invited NATO allies to assist in patrols.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s energy grid suffered repeated drone and missile attacks, with waves of low-cost Shahed drones used to disable power plants. By spring 2024, roughly half of Ukraine’s electricity capacity was destroyed, forcing nationwide blackouts.

Outside conflict zones, attacks on infrastructure are also rising. In Sudan, a drone strike on a power station caused regional outages, and other drone attacks on water purification stations left the country on the brink of a significant Cholera outbreak. In the US, federal officials stopped an attack on a power grid by a man using an explosive-carrying drone.

Transportation hubs are vulnerable, too. In January 2025, drone activity shut down Riga Airport, disrupting dozens of flights.

 Gaps in Governance

 Despite growing risks, legal and operational frameworks remain fragmented. Drones and AI-driven surveillance systems often fall outside traditional arms control regimes. As a recent executive order put it, “Criminals, terrorists, and hostile foreign actors have intensified their weaponization of drone technologies, creating new and serious threats to our homeland.”

Jurisdictional confusion is common. In many countries, local authorities lack legal authority to respond to rogue drones above critical sites. Aviation safety rules and privacy laws create hesitation, giving bad actors a head start.

Even when threat awareness exists, coordination is inconsistent. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warns that drones are used for surveillance and sabotage, yet they lack the comprehensive tools to oversee private-sector resilience or cross-border response.

 A Global Security Challenge

 Drone and AI threats are not confined by borders. In 2023, the European Commission launched a new counter-drone strategy, urging member states to harden infrastructure and coordinate airspace protections. NATO has added counter-UAS exercises to its joint drills, while AUKUS partners are beginning to share emerging drone and AI tactics.

But international law is lagging. There is still no global treaty governing the use of armed drones or autonomous surveillance. Export control regimes struggle to manage proliferation of AI-enabling components. At the UN, efforts to establish binding norms on autonomous weapons are stalled. Ad hoc coordination is, however, slowly improving.

When Norway’s oil platforms were threatened, NATO allies were called in within days. After drone sightings near Dutch and Belgian ports, neighboring governments exchanged countermeasure plans. These models suggest a path forward: rapid and collective responses based on shared tools, shared doctrine, and shared threat intelligence.

The future of civilian dual-use technologies will not be defined by innovators alone. Whether drones or AI software, these tools are already reshaping how adversaries threaten public safety and economic continuity. What is at stake is not just national security, but the resilience of infrastructure that supports daily life.

The Crucial Role of Start-ups in National Defense

 Civilian-origin technologies are now driving the next wave of defense capability. From FPV drones to AI surveillance tools, some of the most disruptive military applications today are emerging not from traditional defense primes but from commercial markets, often developed by start-ups with no military background.

A coordinated international framework is urgently needed, one that does not just support innovation and infrastructure protection but actively integrates civilian tech into defense planning. This means lowering the barriers for experts and start-ups to meaningfully contribute alongside legacy contractors. The United Kingdom’s recent Defence Review hinted at this shift, recognising that smaller firms are vital to national resilience, particularly when civilian infrastructure is under threat.

What is truly needed is a NATO-wide or broader allied framework that enables cross-border collaboration, streamlines regulation, and opens up procurement pathways.

Today, many start-ups working at the intersection of security and technology face steep hurdles: limited access to capital, opaque compliance regimes, and procurement processes designed around, and for, large incumbents. Yet by creating space for their innovation, we can modernize collective defense from the ground up, using the very same civilian tools that adversaries are already turning into weapons.

A coordinated international framework is urgently needed, one that not only supports innovation and infrastructure protection but also lowers barriers to experts and start-ups to contribute more meaningfully alongside traditional defense primes. The UK’s recent Defence Review hinted at this shift, recognizing the value smaller firms bring to national resilience. It is time to take similar action at home.

Harry Geisler is the CEO of YAVA.

How Civilian Dual-Use Technologies Are Reshaping Global Security Policies was originally published on Global Security Review.

5GW includes information dominance and manipulation, social engineering, economic coercion, cyber sabotage, and hybrid influence operations. It thrives on ambiguity, exploiting vulnerabilities without traditional combat. In 5GW, the lines between war and peace are blurred. No declarations, no clear enemies, just a relentless assault on stability. The goal is not to conquer land or destroy armies, but to cripple a nation’s spirit, economy, and infrastructure from within.

One of the most potent asymmetric tools of 5GW is economic manipulation. Palau, a serene archipelago of over 500 islands, were untouched by war until 2017. Palau dared to reject Beijing’s “One China Policy.” This move sent shockwaves through its fragile economy in the form of economic strangulation. In a masterstroke of economic coercion, China’s state-backed tour operators erased Palau from the Web.

Travel agencies stopped selling trips. Online searches yielded no results. Palau’s tourism industry, which accounted for 45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), collapsed. Hotels emptied, airlines shut down, and the once-thriving economy suffocated.

This was not an anomaly, but a pattern. In 2016, South Korea agreed to facilitate the American THAAD missile defense system. China retaliated not with weapons but with economic muscle. Mysterious “fire and safety” violations suddenly appeared in South Korean businesses across China. A nine-month ban on Chinese tourism cost Seoul $6.5 billion. Retail giants like Lotte crumbled, thousands lost jobs, and yet, no war was declared.

The more interconnected the world economy becomes, the more vulnerable nations are to economic blackmail. Even Venezuela, despite its fiery anti-American rhetoric, was bound to the US economy. In 2018, despite Washington branding Nicolás Maduro a dictator and Caracas calling the US a “white supremacist regime,” the two nations still had $24 billion in trade, a quarter of Venezuela’s GDP.

Yet, when Washington imposed sweeping financial sanctions, Venezuela’s economy shrunk by 35 percent in a single year. After all, the United States does not just impose sanctions; it controls the very financial system that runs the world. The US dollar is the bloodline of global trade, and those who defy it find themselves cut off from international markets, unable to access capital or even conduct basic transactions. However, economic warfare breeds resistance.

Russia and China saw the writing on the wall. Between 2017 and 2020, Moscow slashed its holdings of US Treasury securities from $105 billion to just $3.8 billion and shifted towards China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), sidestepping American financial hegemony.

The true commanding heights of global dominance lie at the intersection of technology, finance, and unchecked ambition. China is not just selling 5G networks, it is embedding itself into the nervous system of global communication. On the other hand, the US does not just dominate finance, it controls the SWIFT banking system, ensuring economic warfare is just a sanction away. Similarly, corporations do not just innovate, they monopolize, influence, and quietly dictate policy behind closed doors.

“Surge forward, killing as you go, to blaze us a trail of blood.” A battle cry? Indeed. Not from a general on the battlefield, but from Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, a company waging a war not just against competitors but against entire nations. Britain’s telecom networks are suspected to have Chinese backdoors.

Information is now what oil was in the 1970s, a critical commodity to be controlled. Today, data is the new crude, and the battle to monopolize its flow has already begun. Quantum computing, AI, and machine learning are the new oil rigs, and the nations that dominate these technologies will dictate the future. Unlike oil, information is easily stolen, manipulated, or even weaponized in ways no physical resource ever could.

The first lethal autonomous drone strike in Libya, recorded in March 2020, was a grim reminder of what is to come. A suicide drone, powered by AI, needed no human command—just a target. Fire and forget was the name of the game. Imagine the next phase: terrorist organizations deploying AI-powered swarms, able to strike with precision, invulnerability, and zero risk to human operatives. They would not negotiate, would not retreat, and would prove hard to stop.  

In a world where biological warfare is outlawed, the selective control of food, aid, and healthcare has replaced mass destruction with slow, calculated suffocation. Nations can now deny access to the very essentials of life to break their adversaries in a siege without walls and a war without battlefields. Over 40 percent of the world’s population faces water scarcity, and by 2030, drought could displace 700 million people. The Turkish-backed militias that had control over the Alouk water station in Syria in 2020 was a stark reminder—when resources are weaponized, suffering becomes policy.

Interestingly, the battle of perception is gaining momentum more than ever. In an era of clickbait headlines and disinformation campaigns, lies travel faster than truth. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false news spreads 70 percent faster than real news. From the Soviet KGB planting the rumor in the 1980s that the US government created AIDS to modern deepfake propaganda, deception is the new artillery.

Even culture is not immune. Hollywood exported American ideals, Bollywood spread Indian influence, and K-pop turned South Korea into a global powerhouse. For instance, the Cold War was not just won by missiles, it was won when a West German band sang “Wind of Change,” which then became the anthem of the Berlin Wall’s collapse.

If hunger, water, and financial systems hare already weaponized, the next battlefield is clear—space and the seabed. Subsea communication cables are responsible for carrying 97 percent of global data traffic and are the arteries of the modern economy. They enable over $10 trillion in financial transactions every single day. Yet, these vital lifelines remain shockingly unprotected and are vulnerable to sabotage, espionage, and strategic disruption. A targeted attack on just a handful of these cables could cripple stock markets, paralyze banking systems, and sever military command structures—all without a single warship being deployed.

Meanwhile, the race for space dominance is accelerating. From $63.66 billion in 2024 to an estimated $74.4 billion by 2028, the global military satellite market is growing, fueled by the realization that power no longer lies in boots on the ground, but in eyes in the sky. Satellites provide precision-strike capabilities, secure communication, and real-time battlefield intelligence. The Pentagon warns that the US is already vulnerable, with China and Russia developing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.

In this realm, one can say that modern states wage wars without battlefields, where the goal is not to destroy but to subdue—crippling economies, infiltrating cyber networks, and manipulating narratives without a single shot fired. What is never openly begun is rarely officially ended. In 5th-generation warfare, silence is a weapon, perception is the battlefield, and survival means accepting that war never truly ends.

Syeda Fizzah Shuja is a Research Associate at Pakistan Navy War College and an Mphil scholar in Peace and Counter Terrorism. Her work focuses on hybrid warfare and maritime terrorism. She can be contacted at fizzasyed2k@gmail.com.

The 5GW Playbook: Silent Wars and Invisible Battlefields was originally published on Global Security Review.

Read More

Chinese ‘Police Station Spy Network in the U.S. was originally published on Global Security Review.

Read More

The Cubans are more disciplined and more effective pound-for-pound than the KGB ever was was originally published on Global Security Review.

Read More

Ties to Russian Military and Russian Intelligence Agencies was originally published on Global Security Review.