Overseas malign information operations by foreign actors seek to undermine the strategic interests of the United States. These operations are intended to manipulate the global information environment for geostrategic purposes by disseminating false or misleading information to shape narratives, shift public discourse, and undermine other nations' national security. These operations often leverage classical propaganda techniques, such as name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain-folk, card-stacking, and bandwagon. In this report, the authors explore methods to detect underlying instances of propaganda devices that might be indicative of broader malign information operations abroad by analyzing hundreds of articles from multiple overseas media outlets. Specifically, the authors explore using large language models (LLMs), which present an opportunity for the detection of overseas propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation targeting foreign audiences. These instances can be indicative of broader attempts by foreign adversaries to undermine U.S. credibility, influence, and alliances abroad. Unlike traditional methods that rely heavily on specific linguistic indicators or network analysis, LLMs have increasingly large context windows, which offer the ability to incorporate the broader context of the text. The authors assess the performance of these detection tools to gain insights into the capabilities of these technologies to identify overseas propaganda. This represents a first step in preventing malign actors from exploiting the overseas information environment to pursue their strategic goals at the expense of other nations.

Proliferated constellations in low earth orbit (LEO) have demonstrated significant battlefield utility in the Russia-Ukraine war and are likely to continue serving as an important component of space power in wartime. How Chinese leaders view these continued developments will have important implications for managing military escalation in space. The authors draw on open-source literature across the Chinese defense enterprise to assess People's Liberation Army (PLA) perspectives of LEO as a warfighting domain and the systems being deployed in LEO. The authors highlight Starlink as an influential development shaping Chinese views of LEO to contextualize their findings.

In recent years, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has shown a rising propensity to resort to so-called "gray zone" (huise didai 灰色地帶) operations against the Republic of China (ROC) government on Taiwan. Gray zone tactics are non-military coercive actions beyond normal diplomatic, economic, and security measures that remain below the threshold of war. Led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the PRC has ramped up its use of gray zone tactics versus Taiwan in order to shift the power balance of the dispute and gain strategic advantages—whether to convince Taipei that it must expeditiously "reunify" with the mainland, or else enable a future PRC war against the island. Gray zone operations serve as one of the seven core elements of CCP political warfare—alongside information manipulation, "lawfare," economic coercion, united front work, espionage,and cyber operations—and are intended to reinforce the others by eroding Taiwan's exercise of territorial sovereignty, wearing down its military and law enforcement resources, and eroding the sense of security held by its citizens.

The Sukkur–Multan motorway (M5) in Pakistan, which connects the city of Sukkur in northern Sindh with the city of Multan in southern Punjab, opened in 2019. In this report, the authors examine the private and social effects that the M5 has had on the two cities’ religious tourism sectors since its opening. Using key business performance indicators (KBPIs), the authors assess selected components of the religious tourism supply chain through in-person interviews with regional service providers. The authors then aggregated provider responses to infer key social performance indicators and compare them with national averages. Through this research, the authors seek to understand how new supply chains develop around a transport corridor and affect the value added at each node of the supply chain. The authors found that positive private and social benefits resulted in both cities from the reshaping of the supply chain with the opening of the M5. Specifically, private benefits include an increase in access provided by the motorway, investments in online services, and specialization within the supply chain. The public benefits of the M5 include an improvement in the economic growth of the Sukkur and Multan districts relative to the country and an improvement in the economic growth of the poorer city, Sukkur, relative to that of Multan.

As ample wargaming and analysis have shown, any war with China would be economically and strategically costly, as well as fraught with the risk of escalation to nuclear war. In addition, any U.S.-China military conflict could very likely last longer than envisioned by traditional force planning scenarios, which often are designed around relatively limited objectives and call for U.S. forces and capabilities that could bring a war to a quick, decisive conclusion. This report describes a set of scenarios of such protracted conflicts and provides what could be a foundation for more-detailed planning or analysis. To allow free creative scope for the scenario development process, the authors did not place a priori constraints on the meaning of “protracted,” and therefore, the resulting scenarios feature a variety of circumstances in which the United States and China could be required to sustain military operations on much longer time frames.