EPINOVA Research Signals

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The Decoupling of Geographic and Strategic Distance: 

Homeland Vulnerability, Effect Projection, and System Defense in Networked Warfare 

This working paper develops a framework for analyzing the partial decoupling of geographic distance from strategic distance in networked warfare. It argues that an actor may lack the capacity to deliver sustained conventional firepower against a distant homeland while retaining the ability to generate strategically consequential effects through interconnected military, logistical, industrial, digital, financial, energy, maritime, and informational systems. The paper introduces strategic distance, systemic connectivity, effect projection, the system homeland, and system defense as related concepts. Using Iran’s confrontation with the United States as an illustrative case, it shows how maritime uncertainty, cyber and informational pressure, threats to external operational nodes, and cumulative demands on logistics, inventories, alliances, markets, and political attention can generate homeland-relevant effects without direct territorial penetration. 

India’s AI Power in a Distributed and Uneven Technological Order: 

Boundary Control, Strategic Autonomy, and Cognitive Security 

This research report examines India’s emerging AI power through the interaction of usable national capacity, technological dependence, boundary control, strategic autonomy, and cognitive security. It argues that India’s position is best understood as a distributed and vertically uneven mixed-control system: strong software capacity, digital public infrastructure, multilingual public technology, a large technical workforce, expanding compute access, and globally distributed technical networks coexist with dependence on externally controlled upstream technologies. The report distinguishes access from mobilizable capability, territorial presence from control, boundary power from boundary autonomy, and systemic influence from narrower bilateral effects. It concludes that India’s long-term AI power will depend on conversion, substitutability, resilient public infrastructure, selective boundary control, and the ability to preserve agency without full technological autarky.

Two Structures of AI Power: 

National Capacity, Relational Boundary Control, and Systemic Influence in the Emerging AI Order 

This working paper develops a two-structure framework for analyzing AI power in the emerging AI order. It distinguishes AI National Power, defined as the usable capacity of a national system to generate, mobilize, govern, and sustain AI-relevant resources, from AI Boundary Power, defined as an actor-level relational capacity to alter another actor’s access to AI-relevant resources at a specified interface. The paper further separates boundary control from target-side boundary autonomy and from systemic influence as a later outcome. Through mechanism illustrations involving advanced-computing export controls and European Union AI regulation, it argues that national depth and boundary control are distinct but potentially complementary forms of AI power. 

Beyond Centrality: 

Conditional Connectivity and Boundary Control in Interdependent Networks 

This working paper develops a Node-Boundary-Network-System framework for analyzing conditional connectivity and boundary control in interdependent networks. It argues that power cannot be inferred from centrality, brokerage, dependence, jurisdiction, or cross-network position alone when the usability of a relation varies by actor, function, direction, and time. The paper defines boundaries as indexed admissibility states, distinguishes rules from implementation interfaces, decomposes control into rights bundles, and separates structural exposure, available leverage, boundary action, admissible capacity, target response, network adaptation, and system transformation. A semiconductor-export-control walkthrough using NVIDIA A100/H100 product-time evidence illustrates the coding logic without claiming a causal estimate of policy effectiveness. 

Japan's Rising Strategic Value and the Potential Restructuring of the Asia-Pacific Order

 This policy brief examines Japan’s rising strategic value and its potential role in restructuring the Asia-Pacific order. It argues that Japan’s geographic position is increasingly reinforced by indigenous military capability, U.S. forward presence, advanced industry, technology, logistics, and expanding regional security ties. For the United States, Japan functions as a strategic distance compressor and regional power-conversion platform, reducing the distance, cost, and friction of sustaining U.S. power in Northeast Asia. For China and Russia, a major change in Japan’s alignment could generate substantial denial value and, under more demanding conditions, potential transfer value. The brief distinguishes denial, neutralization, and Japan System Transfer, and argues that a Japan-system shock would reprice strategic value across the Asia-Pacific by altering the geography, connectivity, and cost of regional power projection. 

Toward Measuring AI Infrastructure Investment and Economic Resilience Across Ten Economies: 

Financing Architectures, Capital Formation, and Deployment Timing

This working paper develops a measurement framework for comparing AI infrastructure investment and economic resilience across ten economies. It argues that Public AI Infrastructure Investment Share, Private AI Infrastructure Investment Share, and AI infrastructure investment intensity cannot yet be treated as directly comparable national statistics because investment records differ in source quality, realization status, AI specificity, accounting basis, capital-formation eligibility, national coverage, and deployment timing. The study compares financing architectures across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, Singapore, China, and India, while distinguishing realized monetary evidence from procurement awards, mission-wide expenditure, broader-compute CAPEX, and announcements. It concludes that scope, accounting treatment, realization status, deployment timing, and coverage must be aligned before meaningful cross-country investment rankings or resilience analysis can be undertaken. 

From AI-Enabled Weapons to AI-Orchestrated Warfare:

The Emerging Global Military AI Stack in 2026

This policy brief develops a domain-based framework for mapping global AI power beyond public model rankings, firm valuations, or market share. It argues that AI power is distributed through overlapping domains shaped by states, platforms, cloud infrastructure, data regimes, standards, capital networks, language communities, industrial systems, public institutions, and security architectures. The brief identifies seven proposed AI power domains—the U.S.-Backed AI Domain, China-Backed AI Domain, EU Regulatory Domain, India Service and Language Domain, Gulf Capital and Compute Nodes, Russian Sovereign Security AI Domain, and Global South AI Application Zones—and examines how overlap zones may become key arenas of AI infrastructure, standards, localization, data governance, and geopolitical competition. 

Iran After Succession: 

Power, Access, and Institutional Rebalancing under Mojtaba Khamenei 

This policy brief examines Iran’s post-succession order under Mojtaba Khamenei as a contested institutional rebalancing rather than a simple hard-line or military takeover. It argues that Mojtaba’s limited visibility and wartime delegation have increased the importance of access, gatekeeping, information flow, institutional control, and security coordination. The brief analyzes how the August 9–10 reshuffle reorganizes power interfaces among the Supreme Leader’s office, SNSC, General Staff, Khatam al-Anbiya, IRGC, Basij, and the elected executive. It concludes that Iran’s central post-succession question is whether wartime authority will be recentralized under the Supreme Leader or institutionalized into a more security-centered political order. 

Rerouting the Gulf: 

Bypass Infrastructure and the Changing Strategic Value of the Strait of Hormuz

This policy brief examines how Gulf bypass infrastructure is changing the strategic value of the Strait of Hormuz. It argues that the transition is from chokepoint indispensability toward differentiated bypassability, not from strategic importance to irrelevance. Crude oil can acquire substantial non-Hormuz capacity faster than petroleum products, while LNG remains structurally harder to substitute. The brief assesses Saudi westward pipeline options, UAE east-coast crude and port expansion, Hafeet Rail and Oman’s Gulf of Oman gateway role, crisis-era commercial rerouting, and the limits of claims that 50–70 percent of total energy flows could bypass Hormuz within two years. It concludes that bypass investment redistributes chokepoint risk across a wider network of pipelines, ports, railways, roads, terminals, and secondary maritime chokepoints. 

The Evolving Structure of the U.S.–Iran–Israel Conflict: 

MCEA and NMF Analysis of Analytical Days 1–159 Using MCCM v2.3.4

This policy brief examines the evolving structure of the U.S.–Iran–Israel conflict across 159 analytical days using MCCM v2.3.4, MCEA, NMF, and exploratory k-means clustering. It finds that Phase III marked the conflict’s decisive structural shift, with mean MCEA rising from 0.716 in Phase II to 0.840 in Phase III and peaking at 0.980 on Day 140. The brief argues that this shift was systemic rather than purely military, as kinetic escalation, rule contestation, information amplification, uncertainty, resilience erosion, and external-node exposure intensified together. It concludes that effective warning requires monitoring cross-layer configurations, mechanism composition, and resilience loss rather than visible strike intensity alone. 

Multiverse Path Encryption for Securing Interpretation under Adversarial Access

This conference paper, published in the Proceedings of IMNS 2026 by IEEE, introduces Multiverse Path Encryption (MPE), an interpretation-control framework for post-compromise environments in which adversaries may observe ciphertext-derived outputs or queryable system states. Rather than mapping a ciphertext to a single plaintext, MPE uses key-conditioned traversal over a shared semantic graph to generate multiple coherent, query-consistent worlds. The paper formalizes world non-identifiability and decision uncertainty, explains how global coherence preserves structured ambiguity, and evaluates MPE against heuristic and adaptive querying attackers. Experimental results show sustained target-selection error, high path-reconstruction error, and substantial decision-ranking distortion, demonstrating that adversarial access does not necessarily produce reliable interpretation. 

Operational Control versus Systemic Connectivity:

The Emerging Structure of U.S.–China Competition under Networked Warfare

This policy brief examines the emerging structure of U.S.–China competition under networked warfare. It argues that the United States and China can shape the same cross-theater conflict environment without becoming opposing belligerents in the same war. The brief distinguishes two forms of functional centrality: the United States as an operational-control center, able to organize alliances, intelligence, bases, logistics, targeting, and scarce high-end forces across theaters; and China as a systemic-connectivity node, whose influence rests on industrial depth, energy and trade relationships, logistics alternatives, and diplomatic access. It concludes that long-war advantage will depend on the ability to combine high-end military control with sustainable production, repair, rerouting, recovery, and systemic adaptability.