🔥 Prolonged Wars Raise Stakes in the Abay Blue Nile's Ancient Game

Good Morning. 

The Frontsight team is in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico this week for the Spaceport America Cup, the world's largest intercollegiate rocketry competition. We’re excited to see what the teams have built this year and if you’re on site we hope you’ll stop by and say hello.

— 🐈‍⬛ Acoustic Kitty

THE BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT

Prolonged Wars Raise Stakes in the Abay Blue Nile's Ancient Game

Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam (GERD) is nearing completion. Massive in both size and geopolitical context, the hydroelectric feat is the greatest in African history, and will likely set the stage for a shift in the African contribution to the power competition calculus.

The Blue Nile-based dam has been a point of contention, particularly with downstream nations Sudan and Egypt, who fear it will affect their water supply. Ethiopian authorities emphasize that the dam will provide significant benefits, including electricity generation and regional development. Despite ongoing negotiations and tensions, the project continues to progress towards its operational phase.

For Ethiopia and Sudan, civil wars within their nations raise the stakes of any potential military action Egypt may take against Ethiopia, as the fifth and final filling of the dam commences. In Ethiopia, a brutal power struggle with the Tigray has created mass disruption, casting a pallor over the future Ethiopia imagines will come from the GERD. In the case of chronic war in Sudan, analysts note that the longer the war continues, the more prolonged the nature of the potential spillover conflict.

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY & DIPLOMACY

Counterterrorism

• An Indian man suspected by the US of involvement in an unsuccessful plot to kill a Sikh separatist on American soil has pleaded not guilty to murder-for-hire conspiracy charges in a federal court in Manhattan.

• A group linked to al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for an attack earlier this month that killed 107 Burkina Faso soldiers in the Mansila area.

• DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said his department has noticed “a resurgence in recruiting of ISIS” and also warned of growing dangers from disinformation spread by foreign actors heading into the November presidential election.

Military & Defense

• Israeli defense exports reached a record $13.073 billion in 2023. Defense exports have doubled over the last half decade, with over a third of the export agreements over that timeframe having been signed last year.

• A report released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said the world’s nine nuclear-armed states increased their spending on modernizing their atomic arsenals by one-third last year, with China’s arsenal growing faster than any other nation.

• The G7 warned Iran against advancing its nuclear enrichment program and said it would be ready to enforce new measures if Tehran were to transfer ballistic missiles to Russia.

Cybersecurity

• A group of suspected Chinese cyberespionage actors named 'Velvet Ant' are deploying custom malware on F5 Networks’ BIG-IP appliances to gain a persistent connection to the internal network and steal sensitive customer and financial data from the company.

• An espionage campaign with suspected links to Pakistan is using emojis on the messaging service Discord for C2 communications to evade text-based detection while operating malware within infected Indian government systems.

• A ransomware attack by the Russian Qilin group took out pathology services provider Synnovis in UK, which processes blood tests for a large number of NHS clients in the south-east of the country, resulting in 1500 canceled operations and appointments.

Counterintelligence & Espionage

• The United States Army issued a warning outlining how China and other adversaries are exploiting platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, and Discord to establish contact with US soldiers, their families, and civilian employees with enticing job offers and financial opportunities that could serve as conduits for foreign espionage.

• A classified trial is expected to deliver its first judgment in the coming weeks on an Argentine couple charged with conducting espionage as “illegals,” or deep-penetration agents—two crucial cogs in Vladimir Putin’s fast-expanding shadow war with the West.

• A former opposition lawmaker in Britain’s House of Commons has alleged that the UK’s domestic spy agency MI5 may have issued a rare alert notice in 2022 about an alleged Chinese agent as a distraction from the so-called Partygate scandal, according to testimony before a tribunal looking into the alert.

Transnational Organized Crime

• German investigators say they discovered 35.5 metric tons of cocaine worth $2.78 billion on different container ships and made seven arrests in connection with what they called the largest cocaine find in the country ever.

• About one firearm is being seized from London’s streets every day according to the Met Police, which attributed over half of shootings in the capital to gangs or organized crime.

• Some cocaine production has shifted from Latin America to Europe, as criminal groups explore new trafficking methods and authorities boost transatlantic cooperation, according to the latest EU drug report.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

NASA announced plans to place an artificial star — a small satellite called Landolt — in Earth orbit to help calibrate terrestrial telescopes and create new, more accurate catalogs of the brightness of real stars.

Once in orbit, the satellite will beam eight onboard lasers at ground-based telescopes, which will observe the "artificial star" in the same frame as their science targets. After measuring how much of the lasers' light gets absorbed by our planet's atmosphere, astronomers can compare it with about 60 real stars, to catalog stellar brightness more precisely than ever before.

In other news…

Researchers led by have discovered a new type of powder for dusting fingerprints that allowed them to image their nanoscale details more clearly and could help forensic investigators solve crimes more easily.

The missile manufacturer MBDA unveiled an AI-based missile capability to allow military forces to see hidden targets in challenging combat environments. When the first missile is launched, it processes images in real time during its flight trajectory and that data is then fed to the new man-portable module to inform any subsequent missiles of concealed threats.

DEALS & FUNDING

Redwire announced a contract to serve as prime mission integrator for a DARPA satellite with a novel “air-breathing” electric propulsion system for government intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions as part of the agency’s Otter program.

Redwire did not disclose the value of the multi-year contract, which includes pricing for design through on-orbit operations.

In other news…

LeoLabs received a $1.245M AFWERX contract to build a new type of radar that is adept at tracking rocket launches and spacecraft in very low Earth orbit.

The Department of Defense awarded a $982M contract to 49 defense and technology firms to develop systems for its current and future unmanned surface vehicles. Saab, Anduril, Bollinger, Teledyne, Honeywell, Microsoft, and General Atomics topped the list of selected contractors.