The beat Minister arrested amid constitutional crisis in Sri Lanka Sri Lankan police have arrested the country’s sacked petroleum minister Arjuna Ranatunga over allegations that he ordered a bodyguard to fire shots into a crowd that …
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) has long been undervalued; elbowed out by sexier-sounding ‘secret intelligence’, it has also often been overlooked. But what is intelligence? For the answer, let’s go straight to the wisdom of the Middle …
Worry abounds. There are calls for radically new defence policies, a defence Plan B, a doubling of defence spending, a nuclear deterrent, a conventional one and, most recently, a national security strategy. However, before jumping …
Research by Chinese scientists in Australian and other Five Eyes nations’ universities increases China’s military capability and is not in our national interest. China sends its military scientists into our universities for one reason—because it …
Donald Trump may not want to launch wars in the Middle East, but that doesn’t mean he’s getting the United States out of the regime-change business. His administration has made it clear that it wants …
President Donald Trump’s announcement earlier this year that the US planned to establish a space force prompted discussion about the overt militarisation of the rhetoric surrounding the international use of space. While some have argued …
The Hesse elections were the last straw. Even though it looks like the ruling Christian Democratic Union – Greens coalition in this Bundesland (federal state) in central Germany will remain in power, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s …
Being seen as the global champion of democratic values has underpinned US global leadership as much as its economic and military preponderance. As this perception ebbs, the accompanying erosion of domestic support among European allies …
The ‘grey zone’ has received much publicity over the past decade as certain nation-states have employed indirect methods to gain advantages over their opponents without resorting to open kinetic warfare. Grey zones can be an …
Sea state The Royal Australian Navy has commissioned an experimental squadron called 822X to test the use of unmanned aircraft at sea. The Schiebel Camcopter S-100 and the Insitu ScanEagle are being trialled for use …
What should come first in international politics: values or interests? For the West, this dilemma has been thrown into sharp relief by the murder of the self-exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of …
So, 71 years after its creation, the Australian Signals Directorate has stepped out of the shadows. Last night ASD Director-General Mike Burgess gave probably the most broad-ranging public outline of the work of a modern, …
In 2016, Chinese student Huang Xianjun completed his PhD at the University of Manchester, working with the discoverers of graphene, a material with incredible strength, electrical conductivity and flexibility. Then he returned to China to …
Rod Lyon’s recent analysis on the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia concludes with a sober warning of more intense nuclear competition on the horizon. So what …
There’s been a lot of talk on The Strategist lately about a Plan B for Australia’s defence. Much of the discussion has called for increased defence spending and greater action by Australia to support the …
The Foreign Affairs team conducting Australia’s soft power review has been travelling the country to invite a national conversation about influence and persuasion. In Hobart, for example, interlocutors ranged widely from public, commercial and educational …
Competition and confrontation build between China and the US. The era of engagement fades. Superpower rivalry returns. Great power challenges great power. The world’s biggest economy faces off against the second biggest. The descriptor of …
Keeping the nation safe requires the Australian Defence Force to maximise the advantages of closely working on operations with a broad range of government agencies and allies, says the ADF’s new chief, General Angus Campbell. …
The world US President Donald Trump’s next target in a growing list of international agreements is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Commentators in the Washington Post and The National Interest contend that Trump is right …
America’s greatest error was not the Iraq war, calamitous self-inflicted wound though it was. Rather, it was adopting Francis Fukuyama’s now discredited idea that the end of the Cold War marked ‘the universalization of Western …