Science & Technology

This piece is a series in the Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy (DETS) Program’s analysis on the war in Ukraine, including a corresponding policy brief on Ukraine’s Battlefield Technologies and Lessons for the U.S. published in July 2023. 

On October 30, 2023, President Biden issued the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, aimed at realizing the benefits of AI, while mitigating critical risks. This article provides an overview of its key national security initiatives and explores issues relevant to implementation.

A future where A.I.s interpret, apply, and enforce most laws at societal scale like this will exponentially magnify problems around fairness, transparency, and freedom, warn Jonathon W. Penney and Bruce Schneier.

After the mistaken U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, China turned to information-age weapons to create a risk of escalation to nuclear war with the United States. This shift helps compensate for its conventional military inferiority.

Cyber attacks are both exciting and terrifying, but the ongoing obsession with ‘cyber warfare’ clouds analysis and hampers strategy development. Much commentary and analysis of cyber conflict continues to use the language of war, where actors use ‘offensive cyber operations’ to meet adversaries in ‘engagements’ striving for victory on the ‘battlefield’ in the ‘cyber domain’. This discourse persists despite a growing consensus that cyber operations are primarily relevant in conflict short of war.

Joel Clement writes that because the Biden administration  has moved to repair the damage done by the Trump administration, colleagues from around the global Arctic are optimistic once again about partnering with America on solutions to regional crises .

Guest Maximilian Kreter joins Right Rising to discuss how the white power music scene funds and sustains the extreme right.

The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has spoken frequently of restoring the United States’ credibility as a global leader. That task, which comes at a moment of global crisis, will require the United States to recommit to multilateral diplomacy, even while managing a dangerously deteriorating relationship with China. By acting on biosecurity—a neglected priority hiding in plain sight—Biden can make progress on all of these goals. Washington has an opportunity to lead in an era of heightened great-power competition, address the need for arms control measures that reduce the risk of biological weapons, and potentially even push China to cooperate to that end.  

The cryptocurrency depends on the integrity of the blockchain. But China's censors, the FBI, or powerful corporations could fragment it into oblivion, warn Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier.