Artificial Intelligence Cyber Security Defence Security Technology War

Race for Deploying Humanoid Soldiers Has Begun

The next soldier will not bleed, will not tire, and will not hesitate. It is already being built, and the race to send it to war is underway. Rahul PAWA | X – @imrahulpawa In late January 2026, three Russian soldiers emerged from a destroyed building to surrender. There was no Ukrainian infantryman waiting for them. There was an armed ground robot, holding the position. The humans were already behind the line. That moment was not a military curiosity. It was a marker of where war is heading, and how fast it is getting there. When U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran in February 2026, AI was embedded across the entire operation, from target identification to guiding autonomous drones through GPS-denied, signal-jammed environments. Nearly 900 strikes in the first 12 hours, a tempo no previous conflict had achieved.Two wars. Two continents. Same conclusion. The age of AI war is not arriving. It is already here. While Ukraine remains the world’s most consequential testing ground for autonomous war, its front line increasingly held not by soldiers but by machines and the skeleton crews that control them, Iran has shown what the next level looks like in combat. In the strikes on Iran, air defense networks, drone salvos, and electronic warfare operated simultaneously across multiple theatres at a speed and complexity that compressed years of strategic assumption into days. In both wars the pattern is identical. The human body has become the most vulnerable object in modern war. The machine has become the primary fighter. The soldier has become support. Every serious military establishment on earth is watching, and accelerating. What they are accelerating toward is a new generation of bipedal robots designed to do what a soldier does. Carry weapons. Breach doors. Move through terrain. Hold a position. Resupply under fire. The most advanced can pick up and operate rifles, pistols, shotguns, and grenade launchers already in service across existing armies. The design logic is deliberate. Decades of weapons, vehicles, and military infrastructure have been built for human hands and human bodies. A robot engineered to fit that existing architecture requires no new logistics chain. It steps into one already built. Ukraine proved these systems endure. Iran proved they can decide. The most advanced humanoid built explicitly for war is the Phantom MK-1, developed by Foundation, a San Francisco startup with U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force research contracts and approved military vendor status. At 5 feet 9 inches and 180 pounds, it is designed around one principle: operate with everything a soldier already carries. Two units are currently on reconnaissance trials in Ukraine. The Marine Corps is training them on breach entry, placing explosives on doors so troops stay back from the fatal funnel. Current per-unit cost sits at approximately $150,000, projected to fall below $100,000 by 2028 and below $20,000 at scale. Production targets for 2026 stand at 10,000 units, scaling to between 40,000 and 50,000 by end of 2027. At that price a robot battalion becomes economically competitive with a human one, without the casualties, the trauma, or the political cost of repatriated bodies. The United States is not alone in this. Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, builds autonomous drone interceptors, electromagnetic warfare systems capable of collapsing enemy drone swarms, and the Ghost Shark, a fully autonomous submarine already operational with the Australian Navy. Scout AI demonstrated in February 2026 a complete autonomous kill chain in which seven AI agents identified, located, and neutralized a target with no human involvement at any stage. Boston Dynamics, majority owned by Hyundai, has been testing its Atlas bipedal robot in environments with direct military adjacency since 2021. Figure AI is developing general purpose humanoids with clear dual-use potential. China’s People’s Liberation Army has been funding humanoid robotics research through state institutions including Beijing Institute of Technology and Zhejiang University since at least 2015. Russia is developing dual-use platforms under direct military sponsorship, with the Central Research Institute for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics in St. Petersburg among the primary state facilities. Iran unveiled Aria, a domestically built autonomous combat robot, in September 2025, built entirely under international sanctions. Goldman Sachs projected between 50,000 and 100,000 humanoid robots shipping globally in 2026 alone. Morgan Stanley forecasts the total humanoid market exceeding $5 trillion by 2050. The largest share of that growth is in defense. Every major power is building. None are waiting. While the race accelerates, the technology has real distance left to travel. A humanoid moves through roughly 20 individual motors, each a potential failure point under combat stress. The platforms are heavy, power dependent, and not yet proven against sustained rain, mud, extreme cold, and kinetic impact. A captured or compromised humanoid is not simply lost equipment. It carries intelligence, has potential software access points, and could in the wrong hands be turned. These are engineering problems, and engineering problems get solved. Expert consensus places initial combat deployment at two to three years for leading platforms, with broader fielding across multiple militaries by the early 2030s. The harder problem is judgment. International Humanitarian Law requires that any use of force distinguish between combatants and civilians, that it be proportionate, and that all feasible precautions be taken to avoid civilian harm. These obligations do not change because the trigger is pulled by a machine. But in both Ukraine and Iran that standard is already under pressure. In Ukraine, when communications are jammed, drones default to onboard AI targeting because the operational alternative is paralysis. In Iran, AI systems processed and prioritised over a thousand targets at a speed no human oversight structure was built to match. These are black box decisions, made by opaque models running on algorithms whose reasoning cannot be audited, reconstructed, or explained after the fact. The law says one thing. The war is doing another. That gap is where the most consequential argument of this era is playing out. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have jointly called for a binding treaty

Bharat Canada Hindus Khalistan Pakistan Security

105

Canada’s Khalistan Terror, A Line Has Been Crossed

Press Release Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies (CIHS) condemns cold blooded murder of Nancy Grewal in LaSalle, Ontario on March 3, 2026 and urges Canadian federal authorities to treat this case with full weight of counter-terrorism laws. She was targeted. She was a vocal critic of Khalistani extremism. A social media account affiliated with Khalistani extremist networks claimed responsibility and issued further threats. Whatever the final forensic verdict, her killing has been deployed as an instrument of intimidation and Canada’s silence is deafening. We must be precise: Khalistani extremists are not Sikhs. They do not represent Punjab. Sikh faith is a great Bharatiya civilizational tradition and Punjab is a pluralist region. Collapsing both into separatist terrorism insults millions and provides cover for Khalistani terrorists and their backers, a transnational intimidation group built on threats, diaspora coercion and violent silencing of dissent. This is not a foreign import. The 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, Kanishka, killed 329 people. It was planned and executed on Canadian soil by Khalistani extremists operating out of British Columbia. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack ever carried out on Canadian soil. That atrocity produced no lasting reckoning and forty years later the institutional tolerance that enabled it persists. Canada already lists Khalistani affiliates like Babbar Khalsa International and International Sikh Youth Federation as terrorist entities. Its own 2025 terrorist-financing assessment confirms these networks receive domestic financial support. Many organisations have flagged Pakistani intelligence using anti-India proxies and criminal syndicates on Canadian soil. Yet successive governments from Pierre Trudeau’s bloc-vote immigration calculus to Justin Trudeau’s willful blindness, enabled by Jagmeet Singh’s equivocation have treated this as a community-relations problem rather than a security emergency. Grewal’s murder is not an isolated incident. It is consequence of four decades of political cowardice. CIHS urges Parliament and RCMP to act decisively. Canada must choose to protect its citizens not look away in inaction.

Defence Geopolitics Policy Security Technology United States USA War World

125

Inside Iran’s Military Mosaic

Iran always knew this day would come. For two decades, it built a warfare architecture that could not be centred, could not be decapitated, could not be won from the air. Rahul PAWA | March 9, 2026 | x- imrahulpawa On the morning of March 8, 2026, black rain fell on Tehran. The Iranian capital was engulfed in a cloud of toxic smoke that unleashed oil-tainted rainfall dozens of miles away after overnight Israeli strikes hit several fuel depots, causing fires to burn for hours. Four oil depots and a petroleum products transfer center in the Tehran and Alborz provinces were under Israeli fire and damaged, and four personnel, including two oil tanker drivers, were killed. By 10:30 in the morning, cars on Valiasr Street, Tehran’s main north-south artery, still needed their headlights on to navigate the darkness. It was a catastrophic image, and it was designed to be one. But here is what the architects of this air campaign may be miscalculating: Iran was not built to survive this war from the top. It was built to survive it from the bottom. This is the Mosaic Defence, and it is arguably the most consequential military framework to emerge from the Middle East in the past two decades. Its origins trace back to 2009, when then-IRGC Commander Mohammad Ali Jafari formally reorganised the Revolutionary Guards around a single, haunting lesson drawn from watching American military power eviscerate two neighbouring states. Afghanistan fell in weeks. Baghdad collapsed in three. In both cases, destruction of centralised command produced almost immediate systemic failure. Tehran incorporated those lessons: don’t fight the enemy’s preferred war. The US advantage is high-end airpower, precision strikes, and intelligence dominance. Mosaic Defence tries to make those strengths less decisive by ensuring there is no single headquarters, city, or leader whose loss collapses the fight. The architecture that emerged is methodical. Each of Iran’s 31 provincial IRGC commanders operates with his own weapons arsenal, logistics chains, intelligence services, and Basij militias, explicitly trained to make independent military decisions, plan attacks, and wage guerrilla warfare without consulting Tehran. The formal language inside IRGC operational culture refers to this as the “operational autonomy protocol,” triggered automatically when central command goes dark. Iranian Deputy Defence Minister Reza Talaeinik confirmed publicly that each figure in the command structure has named successors stretching three ranks down. You kill the general, his brigadier already has orders. You kill the brigadier, the colonel carries on. On March 1, after Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X in direct, unflinching terms: “Bombings in our capital have no impact on our ability to conduct war. Decentralised Mosaic Defense enables us to decide when, and how, the war will end.” It was not bravado alone. It was a precise articulation of a deeply embedded strategic posture. The Basij is the human tissue that holds this organism together. Established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini as a people’s volunteer force and now operating as a subsidiary arm of the IRGC, its estimated one million members form the paramilitary backbone beneath the Revolutionary Guard’s 150,000 professional troops. In the coastal provinces, “Ashura” and “Imam Hussein” battalions are organised in towns to operate autonomously, defending designated geographic areas, leveraging proximity to logistics centers and coastal road networks to ensure flexible, rapid movement of combat assets between sectors. These are not conscript armies waiting for radio orders. They have pre-assigned mission packages. They know their terrain the way a farmer knows his field. The strategic calculation is brutally simple: to defeat Iran, you do not take Tehran. You take 31 separate, motivated, geographically embedded armies simultaneously. Operationally, this manifests in ways that have already unnerved American planners. In February’s “Smart Control” exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, IRGC fast-attack craft swarmed in coordinated patterns, electronic warfare systems blinded radars, and decentralised orders were executed without central authorisation. This is the rehearsal. The Strait, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s traded oil passes, is now overseen not by a single naval command in Tehran but by distributed coastal units that can independently initiate harassment, mining, or blockade operations. The UAE’s Ministry of Defence reported intercepting over 1,400 drones, eight cruise missiles, and 238 ballistic missiles from Iran in under a week of conflict. Some of that volume reflects this posture, not desperation: swarm the adversary’s interception capacity until something gets through. The darker edge of this framework is its unpredictability under pressure. While disciplined elite units will sustain coherent operations, less experienced units will fall victim to confusion and disorder, raising the risk of uncoordinated strikes and navigation errors that could trigger unintended escalation. The Iranian drone that reportedly struck Oman, a country actively mediating ceasefire talks, illustrated exactly this: autonomous units operating on pre-issued orders with no one in Tehran in a position to call them back in real time. The oil rain over Tehran, apocalyptic as it appeared, does not break this system. Iran’s oil distribution company confirmed that despite the strikes, sufficient gasoline reserves remained. Fuel disruption to a city of ten million is a genuine hardship and a psychological blow. But Mosaic Defence was never designed around keeping Tehran’s refineries lit. It was designed around the premise that even if Tehran burns, Khuzestan fights, Isfahan launches, and the IRGC navy at Bandar Abbas decides on its own when to close the Hormuz chokepoint. The question the US and Israel face is not whether they can win a battle. It is whether there is a battle to win. You cannot break a mosaic; you can only rearrange its pieces. And the pieces, right now, are fighting on their own. The author is an international criminal lawyer and director of research at New Delhi based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies (CIHS).

Bharat Education Hindus Human Rights Leadership

Naari Shakti: Story of Rashtra Sevika Samiti

Indian women have never been mere silent participants in society; they have always been carriers of strength, wisdom and leadership. From ancient times to the present, their role has evolved in form but not in significance. What is often described as a transition from silent strength to strategic force is, in reality, the visible emergence of a power that has long shaped families, communities and the nation. For generations, Indian women have sustained social and cultural foundations through resilience, sacrifice, and quiet determination. Their contributions, though not always publicly recognized, have nurtured institutions, preserved traditions and strengthened the social fabric. Today, that enduring strength is increasingly expressed through decisive leadership and visible participation in nation-building, policy, innovation and governance. At CIHS, we view this evolution not merely as social change but as the natural unfolding of India’s civilizational ethos, where women have always held a place of dignity and influence. When women move from the margins of visibility to the center of decision-making, perspectives deepen, policies become more inclusive and solutions grow more sustainable. Strengthening institutions that enable this participation is essential for shaping a resilient and progressive future. This journey—from silent strength to strategic force echoes the vision of the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, which has long worked to awaken and organize the inherent leadership of women. Empowering women in India is not merely about equity; it is about recognizing and channeling a timeless source of national strength that continues to drive transformative progress.

China Defence Security Technology

China’s Defence Ministry Releases Counter-drone Video as Shaheds Saturate West Asia

Beijing did not send troops to West Asia. It sent a marketing clip. Rahul PAWA | x – @imrahulpawa On 6 March 2026, as Iranian Shaheds continued to breach air defences across six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states simultaneously, China’s Ministry of National Defence posted a 35-second clip on its official English-language website. With few sentences about detecting “low-altitude, low-speed, and small aerial targets such as drones.” The timing was surgical. The product was not. This is what Chinese defence marketing looks like in 2026: exploit a live war, insert an unproven system into a panic-driven procurement conversation, and bank on customers too frightened, too indebted, or too technically unsophisticated to ask the right questions. War That Created the Window On 28 February 2026, Israel and the United States struck Iran’s military infrastructure under Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Epic Fury. Tehran answered within hours. Operation True Promise IV sent ballistic missiles and UAS simultaneously into Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the UAE. Within 36 hours, all six GCC states had been struck by Iran. No drill. No simulation. Nightmare Gulf war planners had war gamed for twenty years arrived at once. Iran’s UAS campaign did not relent. By 5 March, UAE alone had tracked 1,072 inbound UAS and 196 ballistic missiles. On that single day, 131 aerial threats were engaged over Emirati airspace. Iran’s Shahed variants, types 136, 107, and 238, constituted the bulk of confirmed rounds. The economics were catastrophic for defenders. Gulf interceptors ran between three million and twelve million dollars a shot. A Shahed costs hundreds. Iran could sustain the arithmetic indefinitely. Gulf capitals could not. Defence ministries across Asia, Africa, and the West Asia drew the same conclusion simultaneously: counter-UAS capability was no longer optional. They needed a system. They needed to procure one publicly. They needed it now. Beijing had been waiting for precisely this moment. What the Release Actually Says The MND release is worth reading with forensic care. The Radar-Video Fusion Platform, it states, “combines radar and video means” and is “capable of guiding the video system to conduct real-time tracking once targets are detected by radar.” It identifies “moving ground targets within the designated area” and “low-altitude, low-speed, and small aerial targets such as drones” as its detection targets. Strip the language and what remains is this: a fixed post, a radar that cues a camera, operating within a bounded area. The system detects and tracks. It does not intercept. It does not jam. It does not kill. No engagement range. No reaction time. No kill mechanism of any kind. This is the front end of a kill chain presented without the kill chain. Against 131 inbound Shaheds in a single operational day, a border camera that hands off to a video tracker is not a counter-UAS solution. It is a perimeter sensor with a marketing budget. PLA Combat Record That Should End the Conversation The question of whether Chinese military technology performs under fire is no longer theoretical. It has been answered, repeatedly, in the field, by China’s own export customers. Operation Sindoor, May 2025. Pakistan deployed its Chinese-supplied air defence grid against Indian Air Force strikes. Chinese-made HQ-9 and HQ-16 surface-to-air missile systems failed to intercept a single incoming missile. The YLC-8E anti-stealth radar at Chunian Air Base was destroyed. Wing Loong-II UAS were shot down by Indian air defences. Indian Rafale jets using SCALP precision missiles bypassed the Chinese-supplied grid entirely. PL-15 air-to-air missiles fired by Pakistani J-10C jets either missed or malfunctioned, with some reportedly landing in Indian territory. Pakistan’s defeat was total. Its arsenal was 81 percent Chinese-supplied. The pattern did not begin in 2025. Myanmar grounded the majority of its Chinese-supplied jets due to radar defects and unresolved structural faults years after delivery. Nigeria returned seven of nine Chengdu F-7 fighters to China for urgent repairs after a series of crashes, then abandoned the fleet entirely and purchased Italian M-346 aircraft instead. Pakistan’s F-22P frigates reported radar degradation, engine overheating, faulty Gimbal Assembly motors, and compromised missile guidance. Chinese manufacturers acknowledged the defects and declined to repair them on any workable timeline. Saudi Arabia acquired China’s SkyShield laser counter-drone system. In desert operational conditions it experienced significant performance degradation. A laser counter-drone platform that fails in desert heat is not a serious military proposition. This is not a pattern of isolated incidents. It is a pattern of systemic failure across platforms, across countries, across years. A Camera on a Stick China’s approach to military exports relies on perception management over battlefield performance. Advanced-looking systems. Orchestrated reveals. English-language portal releases timed to maximum global anxiety. The 6 March video is the template made visible: a border post dressed as a solution, a sensor dressed as a kill chain, published at the precise moment that counter-UAS procurement panic was highest in recorded history. Radar-Video Fusion Platform may perform adequately on a quiet frontier against a lone surveillance UAS in permissive conditions. That is what it was built for. It was not built to operate inside a Shahed saturation campaign. It cannot engage. It cannot degrade. It cannot stop a single inbound round. Against 131 aerial threats in a single day it can watch and record them arriving. In the Gulf war of 2026, that is not a military capability. It is a camera on a stick. The release was not written for engineers. Any competent defence engineer notes the absence of an engagement mechanism, reads “within the designated area,” and closes the browser. It was written for procurement officials in anxious capitals under political pressure to show populations that something is being acquired. In that market, Beijing is not selling a solution. It is selling the appearance of one. Based on the record from Islamabad to Lagos to Naypyidaw, the customers are still buying. They just keep finding out what they actually paid for. (The author is an international criminal lawyer and director of research at New Delhi based think tank Centre for Integrated

Geopolitics Pakistan Security Terrorism

A Mirage: Islamic Unity & Security

Pakistan trashed global Ummah at altar of its own selfish interests. Afghan fighters reframed to justify its attacks N. C. Bipindra At the very outset of holy month of Ramadan in February 2026, Pakistan carried out a series of overnight airstrikes across Afghan border characterizing them as “Intelligence-Based, Selective Operations” against seven alleged militant camps linked to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Islamabad stated that the strikes were a retributive response to a wave of recent attacks, including suicide bombings in Bannu, Bajaur and bombing of Khadija Tul Kubra Mosque in Islamabad that killed dozens of worshippers. Pakistani officials claimed that they possessed “conclusive evidence” that these attacks were orchestrated from Afghan soil and framed cross-border operation as an exercise of state’s intrinsic right to self-defense. Taliban administration in Kabul, on the other hand, emphatically refuted Islamabad’s claims. Ministry of Defence in Afghanistan asserted that airstrikes targeted civilian residences and a religious educational institution in the provinces of Nangarhar and Paktika, condemning these actions as infringements upon territorial integrity and violations of international law. In Behsud district of Nangarhar, local authorities and humanitarian organisations reported that between 16 and 18 members of a single family were killed, including an infant aged one year, as their residences were destroyed. Additional casualties were recorded in other areas, with several individuals presumed missing under debris. International Human Rights Foundation characterised the event as a total “destruction of a familial lineage” and advocated for an independent inquiry into potential violations of international humanitarian law. Timing of these attacks that coincided with beginning of Ramadan, a month associated with piety, gratitude and community unity, renders the incident of considerable analytical importance. It exemplifies how, in periods of heightened insecurity, strategic considerations may eclipse religious symbolism, thereby highlighting predominance of national security imperatives over Islamic moral frameworks in the conduct of state affairs. For decades, Pakistan has projected itself as custodian of Islamic solidarity and proponent of global ‘Ummah’. Through vocal advocacy regarding matters impacting Muslim communities and proposals for collective security frameworks akin to an “Islamic NATO,” Islamabad has meticulously crafted an image of authority and strategic importance. The term “Islamic NATO” typically denotes a prospective security coalition among nations such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, drawing inspiration from NATO’s principle of collective defence. This line is most pronounced in Pakistan’s intricate engagement with Afghanistan. Throughout two-decade-long US-led military intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistan publicly conformed to counterterrorism objectives while concurrently facing allegations from international analysts regarding its maintenance of links withTaliban as a strategic contingency. The disparity between its collective-security posturing on international stage and its selective partnerships locally has reinforced the perception that such alignments are motivated more by deterrent considerations than by ideological commitments in a dynamically evolving regional context. However, a meticulous examination of its regional conduct unveils a recurring pattern of inconsistencies, wherein ideological discourse frequently diverges markedly from geopolitical actions. This dissonance prompts essential inquiries: If Islamic unity and collective security serve as the foundational principles underlying proposals such as an “Islamic NATO,” how can one reconcile these ideals with military operations against a neighbouring Islamic nation? The resolution resides not in ideological frameworks, but in strategic calculations. Historically, Pakistan’s foreign and security policy has been primarily influenced by national interests, managing border security and ensuring internal stability, rather than adhering to a coherent Pan-Islamic solidarity. During Soviet–Afghan conflict of ‘80s, Pakistan seemed desperate to lead as principal operational base for Afghan mujahedin, accommodating millions of refugees while acting as primary channel for international assistance. Islamabad allocated billions in covert financing and expedited training of anti-Soviet fighters. This era significantly entrenched influence of security establishment in Afghan affairs and institutionalized Pakistan’s enduring engagement in cross-border militancy. Pakistan’s involvement with Taliban transcended passive tolerance. Throughout 1990s and again post-2001, it afforded diplomatic leeway and established cross-border networks that enabled the movement’s consolidation, viewing a favourable regime in Kabul as pivotal to curtailing Indian influence and ensuring strategic depth. The presence of Taliban leadership on Pakistani territory and the group’s battlefield capabilities were inextricably linked to these supportive frameworks. Nevertheless, following Taliban’s resurgence in power during 2021, bilateral relations soured. Instead of providing strategic depth and border stability, Taliban administration opposed Pakistan’s intent to control the regime and increased cases of border fortifications along Durand Line. As assaults within Pakistan escalated, Islamabad’s rhetoric underwent a pronounced transformation. Officials and state-affiliated clerics commenced labelling anti-state militants as “Khawarij,” invoking a classical Islamic term historically linked to an early sect that opposed authority of Hazrat Ali (RA). By employing this designation, the state aimed to religiously delegitimise TTP, framing it not merely as a militant entity, but as a deviant faction that had drifted from doctrinal tenets of Islam. This terminological shift holds considerable political implications. A movement once framed within narratives of Islamic resistance was recast as religiously deviant once it threatened Pakistan’s internal security, illustrating how ideological language adapts to strategic necessity. The state has formalised this rebranding effort by prohibiting religious honorifics such as “Mufti” and “Hafiz” for individuals associated with proscribed organisations and by officially appending the designation “Khariji” to their identities. By reframing counter-insurgency as a safeguard of Islamic authenticity rather than merely a security campaign, authorities sought to strip militants of symbolic religious capital, undermine their claim to “defensive jiha” and mobilise clerical support, proving once again that while religious framing shifts with circumstance, national interest remains the steadfast constant. Ultimately, Pakistan’s strategic stance embodies not merely a selective approach but rather a manifestation of strategic amnesia. The rhetoric surrounding ‘Ummah’, Islamic unity, shared dignity and mutual security, is invoked when it enhances diplomatic stature, yet recedes when it impedes critical security decisions. Ramadan airstrikes into Afghanistan, undertaken during a month associated with piety, restraint, forgiveness, and communal solidarity, illustrate this contradiction starkly: Religious symbolism yielded to national security doctrine. From advocacy concerning Muslim issues to proposition of an “Islamic NATO”, a collective defence arrangement among Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, modelled after NATO’s principle of mutual defence,

Bharat Business Cyber Security Defence Economy Geopolitics International Policy Politics Technology Trade United States USA War World

Iran’s War Aim Is Not Israel or US, It is Global Economy

By Rahul PAWA | X – @imrahulpawa The war began at 02:14 Tehran time on 28 February. Operation Roaring Lion and Operation Epic Fury decapitated Iran’s leadership, gutted its air defence architecture, and announced to the world that the post-1979 regional order was finished. Washington and Tel Aviv pulled the trigger. What followed was not what either capital planned for. Iran did not fold. A regime collapse as anticipated never materialised. In six days, the Islamic Republic of Iran has fired over 400 ballistic missiles and close to 1,000 drones across the Persian Gulf. The targets tell the story: Dubai International Airport, Jebel Ali port, Ras Tanura refinery, Hamad International in Doha, the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Israel, by comparison, has absorbed a fraction of that volume. Tehran has made its calculus explicit. This is not a war Iran intends to fight against Israel or US. It is a war Iran intends to fight through the Gulf. This is not improvisation. It is strategy. Military planners have long understood doctrines where targeting civilian infrastructure to maximise chaos, delegitimise adversaries, and accelerate international pressure for a ceasefire. Iran has now adopted the same logic. Airports, ports, oil facilities, and luxury hotels are not military objectives in the conventional sense. They are the load-bearing pillars of Gulf economic identity. Iran is not trying to destroy them. It is making them ungovernable under fire, forcing every airline, insurer, and sovereign wealth fund to recalculate their exposure. The Strait of Hormuz closure clinches the argument. Twenty per cent of global oil and gas passes through that chokepoint. It is now shut. Oil markets have spiked. Bond yields are moving. Iran does not need to win a single air engagement to prosecute this strategy. It needs only to sustain pressure long enough for the global economic cost to exceed Washington’s political appetite for the campaign. The GCC’s Trilemma The Gulf states spent three years doing what may seem “everything right”. Qatar mediated. Oman back-channelled. Riyadh quietly denied offensive basing rights to US and Israeli aircraft. These were calculated risks taken at real political cost. None of it mattered. Iran has now struck every GCC member state within a single operational sequence. This is historically unprecedented. The Gulf’s core brand proposition, stability as a geopolitical product, has been punctured. The GCC faces a trilemma. They cannot retaliate alongside Israel without catastrophic domestic legitimacy costs; the Palestinian cause remains the organising moral framework for Arab public opinion, and any ruler seen fighting Tehran on Tel Aviv’s behalf risks street-level pressure that authoritarian stability cannot easily absorb. They cannot remain passive indefinitely as their cities burn. And they cannot negotiate from visible weakness without undermining the deterrent architecture they have spent hundreds of billions constructing. Interception is holding for now. But the economics of missile defence are brutally asymmetric. Iran’s Shahed-class drones and short-range ballistic missiles cost a fraction of the interceptors being expended against them. Analysts assess Iran can sustain the current rate of fire for approximately one month. The stockpile problem is real and worsening daily. The Decentralisation Problem Iran’s military planners anticipated regime decapitation. The IRGC has shifted to a mosaic defence posture, dispersed launch cells, mobile platforms, decentralised command. B-2 strikes on fixed facilities cannot suppress a doctrine built on mobility and redundancy. CENTCOM claims 17 Iranian naval vessels destroyed and Iran’s conventional air force eliminated. What it has not suppressed is the IRGC’s distributed short-range strike capacity, because that capacity was designed precisely to survive this campaign. Killing Khamenei removed the supreme decision-maker. It did not remove institutional will. Larijani’s Interim Leadership Council, announced on 1 March, confirmed what analysts feared: the succession mechanism is functioning and signalling continuity, not collapse. Real Target Was Always the Global Economy Strip away the operational detail and Iran’s strategy reduces to a single proposition. It cannot defeat Israel or the United States militarily. What it can do is make the cost of this war prohibitive for everyone else. By striking the Gulf rather than concentrating on Israel or US targets, Tehran has taken the war to the one geography where economic contagion is immediate and globally felt. Dubai going dark sends a signal that no missile hitting Tel Aviv can replicate. Gulf states are not Iran’s enemy. They are Iran’s instrument of leverage. Tehran is squeezing them to make their pain loud enough to force Washington’s hand. Trump’s contradictory signals on 1 March — simultaneously announcing Iranian negotiation outreach and claiming Iran has no navy remaining — suggest the economic pressure is already registering at the White House. GCC understands the game Iran is playing. The question is whether they can hold their nerve, sustain their defences, and resist being drawn into a military response that would finally give Iran the regional war framing it needs. That answer will determine not just this war’s outcome, but the shape of West Asia for a generation. (Rahul Pawa is an international criminal lawyer and Director of Research at the Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies, New Delhi.) Share this:

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109

As Iran Fights the Allies, China Learns from It

China did not start this war and will not finish it. What it will do is walk away with something more valuable than victory; the data, the proof, the blueprint for the confrontation it is quietly rehearsing on the other side of the world in the western Pacific. Rahul PAWA | March 3, 2026 | x- imrahulpawa When three American F-15E Strike Eagles spiralled out of the sky over Kuwait on the night of March 1, the story that dominated headlines was one of tragic friendly fire. Kuwaiti Patriot batteries, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles crisscrossing the Gulf, misidentified their own side’s aircraft in a chaotic, saturated battlespace. All six aircrew ejected safely. The jets did not survive. CENTCOM was unambiguous: friendly fire in a saturated sky, not Iranian action. Iranian state media claimed otherwise. The Pentagon held its line. But the deeper question remains: why that sky was so saturated in the first place. The answer leads not to Tehran. It leads to Beijing. China has not fired a single shot in this war. It has condemned the strikes on Tehran as violations of international law. And yet the weapons flying over the Gulf, the drones that refused to be jammed, the missiles that found their targets, the internet blackout sealing 93 million Iranians from the outside world, all rest on a technological architecture Beijing spent a decade carefully constructing. Not as charity. As a field test. This is the war behind the war. China using Iran as a live laboratory for systems it will one day need against adversaries whose weapons it is now learning to defeat. Every drone that navigates through Western jamming. Every radar that acquires a stealth aircraft. Every $20,000 drone that forces the expenditure of a $4 million Patriot interceptor. Beijing is watching, logging, and learning. The most operationally significant Chinese technology active in this conflict is BeiDou-3, China’s sovereign alternative to GPS. Following Isreal-Iran’s Twelve-Day War last year, in which GPS spoofing partially blinded Iran’s guided munitions, Iran drew a hard lesson. It formally abandoned the American system and transitioned its military navigation architecture to BeiDou. The encrypted network resists allied electronic warfare; its integrated short-message service sustains command node communication even when terrestrial infrastructure is destroyed. Iran’s 2026 missile campaign has demonstrated navigational resilience its 2025 predecessor lacked, striking targets across all six GCC states simultaneously and forcing the UAE alone to intercept 161 of 174 ballistic missiles fired at it. But BeiDou is not merely Iran’s tool. It is China’s proof of concept, a navigation system battle-hardened against the world’s most sophisticated jamming apparatus, stress-tested under real combat conditions. The telemetry flowing back to Beijing from every Iranian strike package is worth more than any simulation its engineers could run. The same scenario applies to the YLC-8B anti-stealth radar, reportedly transferred to Iran after the 2025 war. Engineered to operate on VHF frequencies that defeat radar-absorbent coatings, it addresses the defining challenge of modern air warfare: how do you acquire what your adversary designed to be invisible? Whether the YLC-8B batteries survived the opening strikes of Operation Epic Fury remains unclear, the IDF claims over 200 Iranian air defence systems destroyed. But even degraded performance data feeds directly into China’s own development cycle. Iran is the test range. The PLA is the end customer. This Chinese pattern of real-world testing was visible long before this war. Last May, during India’s Operation Sindoor strikes on terrorist and Pakistani army infrastructure, Chinese-origin PL-15 beyond-visual-range missiles and HQ-9 surface-to-air systems were active on the Pakistani side. Beijing opportunistically leveraged the conflict to test its weapons in live combat. It did not stop at data collection. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission confirmed that China deployed fake social media accounts to circulate AI-generated imagery purporting to show debris from aircraft destroyed by Chinese weapons. A deliberate campaign to discredit India’s Rafale purchase and advance sales of China’s J-35. Chinese embassy officials reportedly persuaded Indonesia to pause a Rafale procurement already in process. Beijing said nothing publicly. It did not need to. Iran and Pakistan have become China’s two most valuable proving grounds. One tests area-denial and air defence against American and Israeli platforms. The other tests beyond-visual-range air combat against Indian platforms. China supplied roughly 82% of Pakistan’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, it had substantial strategic investment in the outcome. Together, both theatres are delivering what no exercise can replicate: live performance data against real Western hardware. The supply chain completes the picture. On February 25, three days before the strikes began, the US Treasury sanctioned procurement networks supplying precursor chemicals and sensitive machinery to Iran’s IRGC missile and drone programmes, following 2025 designations of six Hong Kong and PRC-based entities feeding Iranian arms production. The $20,000 drones flooding the Gulf, cheap enough to force the expenditure of interceptors costing two hundred times more are products of that chain. A think tank report warned that US high-end interceptors including SM-3, PAC-3 MSE and THAAD could be depleted within days of sustained high-tempo operations. That attrition calculus is now live. Away from the battlefield, Iranian internet connectivity has collapsed to roughly 4% of normal levels. The tools enforcing that blackout bear Chinese brand names: Huawei and ZTE deep-packet-inspection platforms, Tiandy facial-recognition hardware explicitly supplying the IRGC. The function is unambiguous; seal the population off, suppress evidence of military degradation, keep the regime viable long enough to matter. Prima facie, none of this has made Iran invincible. Khamenei is dead. The IDF has conducted over 700 strike missions. What Chinese technology has done, in both theatres, is keep the fight going longer than it otherwise would have, and send data back to Beijing that no laboratory can replicate. The drones are still flying. The missiles are still navigating. The lights inside Iran are still off. And in Beijing, someone is taking very careful notes. Preparing for the western Pacific. (Rahul Pawa is an international criminal lawyer and

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US Tech Stack That Took Out Khamenei and Why It Matters to India

The joint US-Israeli strike of February 28, 2026 that killed Khamenei was full-spectrum corporate warfighting; satellites, AI, cloud, autonomous swarms, and information dominance working as one lethal system. India watched. It must now evolve. Rahul PAWA | x – iamrahulpawa In the predawn hours of Saturday, February 28, 2026, something extraordinary happened in the Shemiran district of northern Tehran. Khamenei, Iran’s Leader for 37 years, the man who had survived assassinations, wars, and decades of sanctions, was killed not primarily by a bomb, but by an algorithm. The operation, codenamed Epic Fury, was the first high-level decapitation strike in military history to be substantially driven by artificial intelligence across the kill chain. By the time Israeli aircraft and American munitions found their target, Palantir’s software had fused the intelligence, Anduril’s autonomous drone swarms had penetrated Iran’s air defences, Starlink had held communications together across a contested electromagnetic environment, and Claude’s Anthropic’s AI model, deployed on classified US defence networks had processed petabytes of intercepted Persian-language communications and generated targeting scenarios that human analysts would have taken weeks to produce. Ukraine had proved that Silicon Valley could hold a frontline. Venezuela had proved it could topple a government and secure an oil state. Iran was where both lessons converged into a single, decapitating strike. Invisible Architecture of a Visible Strike When news of Khamenei’s death broke, global attention fixed on the ordnance: 200 Israeli fighter jets in the largest military flyover in Israeli Air Force history, US bunker-busters, strikes across 24 Iranian provinces. What received less coverage was the invisible architecture that made it possible. Starlink was central long before the first missile launched. The Trump administration had covertly smuggled thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran in the months prior, sustaining a communications corridor for intelligence sources inside the country even as the Iranian regime drove national internet connectivity down to 4% of normal levels. When Iranian forces shut down Starlink networks, they were confiscating the same infrastructure that was feeding real-time intelligence upstream to US planners. Satellite connectivity was not a supporting element; it was the nervous system of the operation. Palantir provided the operational software layer; sensor fusion, targeting architecture, and the command-and-control framework that translated intelligence into actionable strike packages. Its Lattice system enabled autonomous drone swarms to communicate threat data laterally: when Iranian air-defence radar locked onto one drone, the entire swarm adapted, dispatching subgroups for electronic deception and anti-radiation strikes in real time. This is software-driven warfare weapons that are, as defence-tech investors now openly describe them, “code wrapped in aluminium shells.” Anduril’s YFQ-44A drones, operating through Hivemind AI pilots capable of executing complex missions without GPS, satellite communication, or human operators, demonstrated capabilities that rendered Iran’s hardware-centric air defences clumsy against algorithmic iteration. Shield AI’s autonomous systems operated in environments where traditional military drones would have been jammed and blinded. Amazon Web Services provided the cloud backbone, data continuity, logistics support, and the secure infrastructure that kept coalition planning intact against Iranian cyber-retaliation, which simultaneously targeted US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Anthropic’s Claude AI, which had already proven itself in Venezuela processing intelligence, mapping command chains, and generating scenario simulations that compressed weeks of human analysis into hours, ran the same playbook on Iran, this time trawling Persian communications and mapping fractures in the Revolutionary Guard’s targeting structure. Trump banned Anthropic the day before the strikes. US Central Command used Claude anyway, through Palantir and AWS, as bombs fell on Tehran. The corporate stack had become so load-bearing that a presidential order could not sever it mid-operation. It was not peripheral to American military power. It was the operation. From Sindoor to Stack For Indian strategic planners watching the war in West Asia unfold, the lesson is not comfortable. India has pieces of this architecture. It does not have the stack. India’s defence-industrial base is strongest where the old model still dominates: physical production. Native manufacturing capability is real, and Atmanirbhar Bharat has added momentum. But industrial production is the bottom layer of the stack US operation in West Asia demonstrated. Everything above it; connectivity, cloud, AI, autonomous systems, information operations is where India’s ambition is still catching up with requirement. India is building a commercial space sector, with domestic satellite launches accelerating and a small but growing constellation in development. It is not yet capable of blanketing a contested theatre with resilient satcom, let alone covertly sustaining intelligence networks inside an adversary state but the foundation is being laid. In operational software and autonomous systems, an iDEX-incubated startup ecosystem is producing native drones and ISR platforms, promising early capability, not yet embedded in classified pipelines at wartime depth. In frontier AI, India has launched sovereign large language model initiatives and is developing government-facing AI infrastructure but the institutional pathway from commercial deployment to classified defence integration remains nascent. In the information domain, digital public infrastructure is maturing, though platform-level influence at global strategic scale remains beyond reach. Iran’s near-total internet blackout could not sever the intelligence flow because a commercial satellite alternative existed. India is working toward equivalent resilience. However, it is not there yet. The operation that killed Khamenei was not a triumph of numbers. Iran was never going to match US and Israeli firepower. It was a triumph of the stack; satellites, AI, autonomous systems, cloud, and information dominance mobilised as one unified architecture. India already knows this, because it has lived it. Operation Sindoor 2025 was India’s own inflection point. AI fused multi-source battlefield data in real time. Native electronic intelligence software evolved mid-operation to pinpoint and rank threats. Over 600 drones were defeated in a single wave. Loitering munitions and FPV strike drones executed precision hits on high-value targets. The instinct was right. The native capability was real. But Sindoor also exposed the distance still to travel. The stack America deployed over Tehran was embedded in doctrine. India’s is battle-proven but not yet fully built. India need not replicate America’s model. But the underlying

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Bharat May Brace Up for Post-War Economic Impact

Currency, oil, bullion, commodities markets volatility, contraction in consumption demand, disruption in supply chain, uncertainty on external front may be felt in medium term across geographies. K.A.Badarinath None can vouch for global economic certainty in medium term given about half a dozen conflicts happening simultaneously. Most of them are bloody and involve loss in large number of human lives, property, infrastructure and stunting military capabilities. While Russia – Ukraine conflict has done four years and there’s no sign of end coming anytime soon, several analysts have reason to believe that Iran, US – Israel war may continue for quite a while with ripple effect. Refrain in most circles is that US will not have a cake walk in meeting its avowedly stated objective of change in regime run by the religious leadership with political authority since the revolution of 1979 in Iran. It’s not like paying off the security apparatus, walking into Venezuelan President’s home on January 3, 2026 and bundling off the incumbent head of the state Nicholas Maduro and fly him off to an unknown destination. US must have prepared itself for a long haul given the kind of naval mobilization it has done around Iran in conjunction with Israel’s leadership led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Stated objective of both US and Israel is to deny Iran the capability to produce nuclear arsenal and redraw power equations in West Asia thereby trimming the Russia – China axis in the region. Other theory is that President Trump and his Republican ‘A’ team running the White House was after huge hydrocarbon reserves that Iran holds with its oil wealth exceeding 157 billion barrels. It’s also to secure complete authority on movement of commercial and naval ships in the narrow lanes of Gulf of Hormuz. Quixotic President Trump seems to have tasted blood by taking control of Venezuelan oil industry for American deep state and its cohorts. Even if high pitched, technology driven war comes to a close in couple of weeks – twelve days it took to end the conflict between Iran and Israel during June 13 – 26 last year – repercussions will be for the entire humanity to be felt while it’s become a virtual mute spectator as of now. Though some countries in Europe have threatened to join the bloody war, others have mostly been watching destruction of city after city in entire West Asia including Israel from side lines as of now. Especially after reported death of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the war has spread its destructive tentacles across West Asia thereby bringing entire air travel, common waterways, ports, airports and transport infrastructure to a virtual standstill. Over last two days alone over 2000 flights in the region were impacted due to the war. Travel on roads, rail and waterways network has become insecure and unpredictable with missiles flying across zones. Hospitality industry has been halted. Commercial enterprises dealing with goods and services across the region have been impacted big time. Millions of professionals running commercial enterprises in the region have suddenly become vulnerable and restless. Even as painful process of electing a new supreme leader supported by three member council in Iran got into motion, there seems to be no let-up in bombardments by US and Israel while Shia leadership of Iran retaliated with large bouquet of missiles targeting half a dozen capitals, ports and airports apart from energy facilities in eleven countries. Oil markets with epicentre in West Asia have fluctuated wildly with Brent crude quoted at US $ 78.72 – 81 in the spot market on Monday, cargo insurance risks hitting the roof. Currency markets also experienced huge fluctuations given that financial capital in West Asia, Dubai came under missiles attack from Iran. For instance the green buck was quoted at 91.45 apiece against Indian rupee on Monday as markets opened for nervous trading across the region. From Indian perspective, alarm bells on possible economic impact are yet to ring in. Currency and oil markets fluctuations may not make adverse impact on Bharat’s economy with the financial year closing this month end. Given that the country holds over 74-days strategic and commercial crude reserves, oil prices crossing US $ 80 per barrel may not be felt big. Reports and independent analysts hint that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had factored oil prices of US $ 60 – 62 per barrel when she presented her federal budget on March 1. In case, volatility in both spot market and long term crude contracts persisted, India would feel the heat in medium term. Given its huge import dependency in crude, the country will have to cough up an additional US $ one billion against every dollar hike in oil prices. Thankfully, Bharat’s economy has the resilience to absorb temporary shocks in oil and currency markets as fall out of bloody confrontation in West Asia, Russia – Ukraine and Afghanistan – Pakistan. Given increasing future premiums on cargo movement, currency swaps and oil going forward, combined impact of wars are likely to reflect in medium term. As the federal borrowings were much below budgeted Rs 14.82 lakh crore, bountiful goods and services tax (GST) collection of Rs 1.83 – 1.93 lakh crore each month, Narendra Modi government is on top of the situation to overcome combined impact of wars at least for next two quarters. Also, since federal expenses were much within the budgeted Rs 50.65 lakh crore and even if last two months (February – March 2026) spending rush was experienced, macro-economic numbers may not go haywire. During April 2025 – January 2026, federal expenditure has not crossed Rs 36.90 lakh crore. Weakest link in managing aftermath of wars would be external trade sector where export of services and merchandise goods may face uncertainty with sentiment being very low, demand contraction for consumption and payment crises looming large. A part of demand contraction can be made up by India’s infrastructure majors that could tango with international partners to strike post-war reconstruction deals spilling over billions

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