The Space Industry After The Russo-Ukrainian War
Russia, and its quasi-civil space agency Roscosmos, have played a significant role in the commercial space market — particularly the global space launch-services market, valued at $12.42 billion in 2021 — for decades. In the wake of the Ukrainian conflict, Russia’s role in commercial space launch is likely to be diminished, to the benefit of alternative launch-service providers in the United States, Europe, and, potentially, nations like India and Japan. The war is also affecting space and technology import and export streams, with both commercial and national security effects. Most ominously, the Ukraine conflict has demonstrated the prominent military benefits of commercial space systems — likely making such systems targets for belligerents and potentially necessitating countermeasures, or at least consideration, from the private companies that control them.
~ READ MORE HERE (War On The Rocks) ~
SOS: Is The Pentagon Losing the U.S. to China?
Last July, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Burns, said that China is "the single biggest geopolitical challenge that the United States faces far out into the 21st century" and that "the main arena for competition and rivalry with China" is technology.
The Pentagon has been facing massive criticism for being unable properly, if at all, to meet that very technological challenge. "The U.S. government is not prepared to defend the United States in the coming artificial intelligence (AI) era," the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence warned in March 2021, while also saying that China was on its way to become the world's top AI superpower.
~ READ MORE HERE (Guardian) ~
Violent Extremists’ Use of Emerging Technologies
In a recent report published by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, researchers investigate how racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists are using new technologies in comparison with the Islamic State. Titled, Learning from Foes: How Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists Embrace and Mimic Islamic State’s Use of Emerging Technologies, the authors seek to better understand how terrorist organizations adopt new techniques and procedures.
The report features three case studies involving three different emerging technologies: cloud-based instant messaging services, unmanned aerial vehicles, and social media bots.
In sum, this report not only contributes to our understanding of how and why terrorist groups embrace emerging technologies, but also how the malevolent use of emerging technologies can spread from one ideologically motivated social movement to another, dramatically changing the security landscape.
~ READ MORE HERE (Gnet Research) ~ |