Opinion

The 2026 exercises of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO)- were held in Russia from September 28 to October 3. The CSTO’s members are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Its collective forces...

The Iran war has exposed a paradox at the heart of the emerging international order: American power can be weakened without an alternative power being ready to replace it. Washington has paid a substantial...

The Hand on the Himalayas: The Himalayas can be read as a mountain wall, a civilisational frontier or a military theatre. This region can also be imagined as a strategic hand: Tibet as the...

India's latest defence procurement announcement carries the kind of number that immediately attracts attention: ₹1.10 lakh crore. On September 7, the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, accorded Acceptance of...

Airbus Defence and Space has published a photograph of the second A400M in Kazakhstani livery. The aircraft is built and undergoing technical acceptance. It is the second of two ordered in 2021; the first...

The battlefield front line, once a fixed geographic feature, is blurring. For two centuries, it meant a place: a trench, a ridge, or a river line where armies met. Recent operations in Ukraine show...

"Et Tu Brute” – so goes the expression. It seemed this way when news broke that an American company has now interfaced with senior officials of Pakistan’s military establishment for supplying power systems related...

Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ was designed to keep war away from Iranian territory. The irony of the recent conflict is that when Iran came under direct attack, the network did not respond as a...

Civil-military fusion has become an increasingly important phrase in India's strategic vocabulary. It recognises a fundamental reality of modern warfare: the technologies that determine military advantage are no longer developed exclusively inside defence laboratories....

The most dangerous decision in the next major war may not be made by a machine. It may be made by a human who has been given only seconds to decide. For a decade, the...

This was a rare spectacle in the US.  On September 23, President Donald Trump went to the Joint Base Andrews, a highly important military base in Maryland, to receive his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. After...

The Trump-Xi summit in Washington has ended, but its strategic consequences are only beginning. Over three days, President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping extended their trade truce by two months, opened a channel...

The earlier drama concerned acquisition; the new reality concerns access. This distinction matters more than the political theatre suggested. Ownership carries administrative, legal and political burdens. Strategic access can deliver many of ownership’s benefits...