CSS News and Impact

Military technology is advancing at a speed that established defence institutions struggle to match. Drones, AI, and autonomous systems can evolve within months, while doctrine, procurement, and force structures take years to change. The CSS Web Talk “Caught Between: Traditional Defence Bureaucracies and the Rise of AI-driven Warfare” highlighted these challenges and strategic imperatives. Michael Raska shares key takeaways.

Digital operations have become a routine feature of armed conflict, but they rarely produce the autonomous, decisive effects once associated with visions of “cyberwar”. Their significance lies instead in how they exploit, disrupt, or exercise control over the digital dependencies on which states, armed forces, and civilian populations rely.

Digital sovereignty is a highly ambiguous concept. Policymakers should separate its normative, economic, and geopolitical dimensions to balance competing interests and design coherent policy.

When high-level political negotiations stall, local and civil society actors still try to sustain ceasefires on the ground. Yemen shows how important it is that international support does not crowd out such processes and that these efforts cannot substitute for the political settlement the country still needs, as the recent escalation underlines.

Switzerland will host its first Union Civil Protection Mechanism exercise in autumn 2026. Its value lies not only in field cooperation but also in linking operational findings to the priorities of the Security Policy Strategy.

Military technology is advancing at a speed that established defence institutions struggle to match. Drones, AI, and autonomous systems can evolve within months, while doctrine, procurement, and force structures take years to change. The CSS Web Talk “Caught Between: Traditional Defence Bureaucracies and the Rise of AI-driven Warfare” highlighted these challenges and strategic imperatives. Michael Raska shares key takeaways.

Institutions and leadership have undergone profound changes since 2022 and hence led to a reorganisation of the European security order – but key factors shaping the continent’s security have also remained constant. Senior Researcher Dr. Gesine Weber shares key insights from her recently published study.

Cyber threats against the space sector are growing, but understanding of the threat landscape remains limited. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is scarce, difficult to access, insufficiently contextualised, and often unactionable. This open-source assessment finds a landscape dominated by attacks on ground infrastructure, hacktivism, DDoS operations, ransomware, and data theft. Yet what is visible today may represent only a fraction of the cyber activity affecting space systems.

The Agora project "Fired up!" will facilitate a multi-stage dialogue between science and society on the topic of wildfire preparedness. It builds on the findings of Christine Eriksen's SNSF-funded FiRES project to strengthen community wildfire resilience in Europe. The project responds to the growing need to complement top-down technical responses with social approaches that strengthen community preparedness and coping capacity through shared-responsibility measures.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence is raising security concerns. At the heart of the problem lies the interplay between the rapid pace of innovation and the difficulty of reliably predicting the increasing capabilities of new models. Effective regulations and agreements are likely to be difficult to implement for the time being; the immediate priority is, above all, to strengthen AI security research.