In late October 2018, Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena set off a constitutional crisis by sacking Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and replacing him by Sirisena’s predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa. i With Sirisena later dissolving Parliament, even members of the Sri Lankan Election Commission declared the President’s action illegaliibefore the country’s Supreme Court finally overturned the President’s […]
The spectre of the takeover of another strategically located port by China in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is looming large these days. In Kenya, a leaked report from the Auditor-General’s office states that the terms of a loan taken by Nairobi from China’s EXIM Bank make the port a collateral in case of a […]
On 04 Jun this year, the US Navy (USN) took a rather unusual step in reintroducing the Warrant Officer-I (W-I) rank and inviting applicants in this rank for cyber warfare. The USN has had a complex history of warrant ranks as opposed to commissioned and non-commissioned ranks. The details of this history are not of […]
Introduction Five years ago, in September and October of the year 2013, the ‘Chinese Marshall Plan’ or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was unveiled in Kazakhstan and Indonesia by Premier Xi Jinping. Done to ‘enhance regional connectivity’, the delayering of the ‘belts’ and ‘roads’ mechanism mapped expansively through Asia, Europe, and Africa will tell one […]
On December 16 2016, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) seized an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) in the EEZ of the Philippines, approximately 50 nautical miles North-West of the Subic Bay. The UUV belonged to the United States (US) Navy. The US government condemned the Chinese action. It claimed that the People’s Republic of China […]
In an imprudent move, India abstained from a United Nations resolution brought to the General Assembly by United States of America on 6th December. The harmless resolution condemned Hamas for firing rockets into Israel which endangered the lives of civilians. It called for the cessation of provocative and violent activities by all militant groups including […]