Executive Summary
The strategic convergence of People’s Republic of China economic statecraft and Russian Federation military operationalization has fundamentally altered the Euro-Atlantic security architecture by the second quarter of 2026. Empirical trade telemetry indicates an unprecedented European Union goods deficit with China reaching EUR...
Executive Summary
BLUF: Submarine cable infrastructure has supplanted hydrocarbon pipelines as the primary determinant of 21st-century geopolitical leverage, with West Asia's Red Sea corridor now carrying 17 to 20 percent of global internet traffic through a 14-mile-wide chokepoint vulnerable to single-point failure. The 2024 Red...
Executive Summary
BLUF: The Corsair has crossed the decisive threshold from experimental unmanned vessel to operational combat system.On 13 July 2026, USCENTCOM documented three Corsair autonomous surface vessels striking Bandar Abbas Naval Base—the first acknowledged American employment of sea drones in combat.The platform combines 1,000+...
Executive Summary
BLUF: The Baltic Sea is not a consolidated “NATO inland sea”; it is a compressed hybrid battlespace in which military superiority coexists with legal ambiguity, fragmented national authority, vulnerable infrastructure and incomplete attribution.
ORKAN 26 indicates an emerging Polish model that integrates diplomacy, intelligence...
Executive Summary
BLUF: Frontier AI is moving from an information tool toward an autonomous capability layer able to compress the time, expertise, and organizational resources required for cyber operations, scientific discovery, and potentially dangerous dual-use activity.The Mythos episode exposed a governance deficit: neither model laboratories...
Executive Summary
BLUF: The Afghan heroin system is not collapsing; it is being re-engineered into a lower-volume, higher-opacity, multi-commodity trafficking architecture.Afghan opium production fell to an estimated 296 tonnes in 2025, compared with 6,200 tonnes in 2022, but stockpiles, adulteration and displaced cultivation continue to...
