Begin- Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA)

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,407, September 3, 2026 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel’s failed 2006 war against Hezbollah spurred IDF doctrinal and force structure changes that were ultimately embodied in its Momentum Multiyear Plan of 2020. The resulting full spectrum multi-domain warfare strategy contributed to Israel’s 2024 military success against Iran’s strongest proxy.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 228 (August 31, 2026) The “Access to Leadership Positions and Career Trajectories among Georgian and American Women in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,”   authored by Salome Tcharbadze, PhD Student at the International Black Sea University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Prof.

Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 215 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The collapse of strategic warning—the “fundamental surprise” written about by Dr. Zvi Lanir—is no longer a localized intelligence failure but rather a profound conceptual one. It is defined by the loss of the ability to identify the enemy’s changes in intent and pattern in time, within the framework of outdated conceptual models.

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,406, August 27, 2026 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Increasingly well-coordinated and deadly rebel assaults on Pakistani security forces in Balochistan have revealed the extreme vulnerability of the Pakistani military in the province. The enormity of the territory, lack of local support, inability to commit sufficient forces, and porous borders with Iran and Afghanistan render the Baloch challenge to the Pakistani army nearly impossible to counter.

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,405, August 25, 2026 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In a coordinated offensive, cyber actors directly linked to the Iranian regime recently executed a series of targeted digital intrusions against water infrastructure in the US. This aggressive campaign focused on the operational technology networks of municipal drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities across seven to twelve states.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 226 (August 24, 2026) Diplomatic Prelude Since their restoration on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, one can conventionally divide relations between Russia and Israel into three main stages. The first, covering Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in the 1990s and Vladimir Putin’s first term in the early 2000s, was characterized by rather restrained relations between the two countries.

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,403, August 19, 2026 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: India’s emerging private space sector is often presented as a story of entrepreneurship and market liberalization, but there is more to it than that. It reflects a broader reorganization of national capability in which commercialization, security imperatives, industrial policy and status ambitions converge.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 225 (August 17, 2026) Twelve months after the White House ceremony that startled the Caucasus, Yerevan and Baku are trading grain, oil, and even goodwill — an outcome that owes less to diplomacy-as-usual than to Ilham Aliyev’s decision to finish a war Moscow preferred to keep simmering. A year ago this month, Ilham Aliyev and Nikol Pashinyan stood at the White House and initialed a peace agreement that ended, on paper, one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes.

BESA Geo-Energy Insights No. 10, August 16, 2026 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Electricity cooperation between Israel and Syria is technically possible, but would be considerably more difficult than the indirect gas exports that are already taking place via Jordan. Unlike natural gas, electricity trade must be balanced in real time, creating immediate dependence on shared infrastructure.

PSCRP-BESA Reports No 225 (August 14, 2026) Kazakhstan is the second-largest state by area (after the Russian Federation) to have emerged as a result of the collapse of the USSR. At the time it gained independence, it was also the only post-Soviet state in which the titular nation constituted a minority.