Berlin’s hurried shift to actively defending against hybrid threats shows the danger of cumulative under-reaction to hostile state-backed activity. Underreaction can leave democracies more vulnerable to sustained coercion, interference and sabotage, ultimately making them preferred …
Welcome to the latest edition of ASPI’s Fault Lines. Every fortnight, ASPI’s Defence Strategy Program monitors the actions and developments shaping the regional order and Australia’s security. This edition covers the period from 4 September to 17 September …
Donald Trump’s name won’t be on any more ballots, but his spirit will be. A lame duck president with relatively low approval ratings, Trump should be fading from view, and his fellow Republicans should be …
Forgive me my pedantry, but if Australia is going to regulate social media algorithms, we should be precise about what an algorithm actually is. Discussion of the government’s proposed digital duty of care has been …
Australia’s declared strategy of denial needs to become effective long before the powerful new nuclear submarines become meaningfully effective in the 2040s. This can be done in the 2030s with what I have called the …
As AUKUS reaches its fifth anniversary, a strong navy has never been more important for Australia. But that recognition is not what is remarkable five years on. It is a persistent, if often misunderstood, feature …
Last week in Darwin, I saw an example of what Australia needs more of: industry investing in sovereign capability before Defence has written the requirement or issued a tender. I watched Leidos’s Australian-built uncrewed surface …
Japan is moving from a defence buildup centered on adding hardware capacity to a defence transformation centered on integration with intangible force multipliers. This buildup comes with a record defence budget: Japan’s Ministry of Defense …
The tendency to treat universities in Hong Kong and Macau as somehow separated from the mainstream of Chinese research institutions is long out of date. Since the territories were handed over to China in the …
In 1942, scientists working on what became the Manhattan Project confronted a disturbing possibility: could an atomic explosion become hot enough to ignite a self-sustaining nuclear reaction in the atmosphere? They took the question seriously …
As Australia identifies national resilience and civil preparedness as key to national defence, it should learn from Norway, which has been living those concepts for decades. For Norway, preparedness extends well beyond its armed forces. …
If there’s one thing we hope attendees take away from ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue AI Masterclass, it’s to reflect on whether we’re prepared for artificial intelligence that is smarter than us. That, after all, is what …
Twenty-five years later, it’s easy to remember the images of September 11 but harder to reconstruct how that morning felt. The strongest memory is of people simply stopping and watching something almost incomprehensible unfold. The …
Australia and its democratic partners need to act promptly to avoid conceding the lead in quantum technologies to China. ASPI’s research shows that China is either already ahead or poised to take the lead in …
The argument in Washington over the past few months has been about whether to ban Chinese AI models or restrict them. What has been less examined is what Beijing intends to do with the open-weight …
It was 25 years ago today that the Western world completely changed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. The shock of these horrific terrorist attacks caused a …
Militaries rarely lose because they lack courage; they lose because they misread a moment. They lose because they categorise a disruptive technology as an incremental one, and by the time they see the error, the …
It’s no secret that data centres need a large amount of power and water. What is less discussed is the security needed to ensure those supplies and other support services keep flowing to the data …
AI is changing how states operationalise their cyber capabilities. In North Korea’s case, it’s transforming the country into a bigger cyber power by helping Pyongyang expand what it already does: generate revenue, obtain trusted access …
Australia isn’t prepared for conflict unless it can build and defend the will to fight. The national civil preparedness and resilience inquiry, adopted in July, is an opportunity to begin that conversation. The inquiry’s terms …
