I’ve been a keen follower of the Lockheed Blackbird family since the headline ‘We have Mach 3 plane, says US’ appeared above a short item in London’s Daily Express in March 1964. The coolest thing ...

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 18 September to 1 October ...

With China posing a threat to Indonesia’s interests in the South China Sea, Indonesia needs a clear maritime cooperation strategy. It should itself set the cooperation agenda with China, insist that j...

Australia is accepting significant risk in mine countermeasures, a capability once seen as essential. While investing heavily in submarines and warships, Australia has allowed its dedicated mine count...

‘There are weeks when decades happen’ has been a stock phrase to remember this summer. The missile wars between Ukraine and Russia and between Iran and the United States (and its nervous Middle Easter...

The Australian Army’s workforce is more educated, technically proficient and connected to emerging technology than any previous generation. Its people challenge assumptions, experiment with new capabilities and increasingly recognise learning as a warfighting function. The ...

AI weapons systems that are designed to learn and adapt could become increasingly difficult for humans to predict, explain and control. This creates an accountability gap that existing oversight mecha...

Potential Japanese acquisition of nuclear weapons is an under-appreciated deterrent to a Chinese attempt at seizing Taiwan. If China took Taiwan, Japan would surely activate what we must presume to be...

At Davos this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said ‘middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.’ Nowhere is the case stronger than in ...

Over the past few months, New Delhi’s relations with Beijing have improved. It would be a mistake to read this as a sign of greater strategic trust. A better explanation is that India is managing ...

Australia and Canada are separated by half a world, but a new defence partnership is exposing an unexpected similarity. Canada is buying Australian surveillance technology developed to monitor the vas...

Australia is spending heavily on military AI and, separately, on building the capabilities and interoperability of its Indo-Pacific partners, yet we are paying too little attention to what happens as ...

China is seeking to exploit perceived Western missteps in the Middle East, including the Iran war, by turning societies against the United States and other western nations. As part of this, the Chines...

The stakes will be high in expected talks between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi on AI safety and governance during Xi’s state visit to Washington on 24 September. AI and tech company ex...

We spend enormous amounts of money protecting the networks around our most important people. Then, at the end of the day, we send those people home. There they find a car that logs where it ...

Today, ASPI is expanding its globally-recognised data offering by launching the China Little Giants Tracker – a searchable database of the high-tech small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that Beijing ha...

When I arrived in 1981 as a 12-year-old from Greece, I could not have imagined that three decades later I would return to the country of my birth as Australia’s ambassador. My family already had ...

Future warfare won’t be entirely robotic. Yes, people will gradually disappear from battlefield environments where speed, endurance, distance, precision or physical danger overwhelmingly favour use of...

On 14 September, US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink publicly announced that the US Space Force had deployed ‘space control weapons’ in response to growing threats to American and allied space sy...

The Australian defence establishment should urgently work with commercial providers to deliver military and dual-use capabilities that can be deployed in months, not years or decades. Government procu...

Scholars named in public for entanglement with a foreign regime, international research collaborations quietly binned, and institutional partnerships needing to be torn up by the government – such eve...

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 ed...

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...

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 misunderst...

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 Aust...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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: gene...

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 convers...

Casual observers of Venezuelan politics might have assumed that the US capture and removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January would guarantee the dismantling of his authoritarian...

The Australia–Japan partnership stands out because the two countries bring complementary strengths across the economic, political and security spheres. As leading Indo-Pacific democracies, the two are...

Analysts and policymakers increasingly need to consider unprecedented events. Science fiction offers an underutilised but accessible method for exploring and planning for possible futures. When confro...

At the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was asked whether it was appropriate for China to warn of ‘consequences’ over Taiwan’s presence. ‘The Pacifi...