Commodore S.L. Deshmukh

China’s march into autonomous undersea warfare is reshaping the Indo-Pacific and forcing India to respond in kind. China is quietly transforming the ocean depths into a new theatre of strategic competition. Its rapid advances in unmanned and autonomous underwater vehicles (UUVs/AUVs) now extend to the development of so-called ‘extra-extra-large’ platforms - autonomous submarines longer than 40 metres, comparable in size to conventional diesel boats, yet unencumbered by human crews. Designed...

Beijing’s renewed claims over the Shaksgam Valley lay bare how quiet coercion is redrawing the India-China-Pakistan frontier. A barren tract of ice and rock high in the eastern Karakoram has again re-emerged as a geopolitical fault line at one of Asia’s most volatile junctions. China’s recent reassertion of its claim over the Shaksgam Valley, coupled with fresh justifications for infrastructure development there, has revived an old dispute that India insists is neither settled nor obscure....

A nascent Pakistan–Saudi–Turkey security pact is reshaping West Asia and narrowing India’s room for manoeuvre. Even before the ink on the recent Pakistan–Saudi Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement was dry, its implications were already reverberating across the region.  The pact, treating an attack on one as an attack on both, in language reminiscent of NATO’s Article 5, was Riyadh’s boldest bet yet that its future security no longer lies solely under an American umbrella. The decision now to...