When discussing the Pacific region, a frequently mentioned concern on the part of Department of Defense and other government officials is China’s lack of transparency about its military modernization. During a presentation given at the AFCEA West Conference last month Captain Jim Fanell, head of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet Intelligence Staff, remarked , “he didn’t know […]
On March 12, Congressman Adam B. Schiff’s op-ed “Let the Military Run Drone Warfare” ran in the New York Times, pushing an agenda that’s been on the lips of a number of wonks and politicians ever since Obama’s May 2013 “drone speech”: Transfer the U.S. drone program from the Central Intelligence Agency to Joint Special […]
Young eyes pull upward, searching for the man buried beneath thick matted grass. A soldier stands encircled by a small crowd draped in a sniper’s woodland ghillie suit, a disguise useless against the dusty soil of Horse Guards Parade. But that’s the point. For on a brisk London day last October, among parachuters and fly-overs, […]
One of the first experiments in the United States with remotely-controlled aerial warfare wasn’t in the ’90s or ’00s: It was back in World War II. During the London Disarmament Conference in 1935, Admiral William Standley, then Chief of Naval Operations, learned of the United Kingdom’s experiments with remotely-powered aircraft like the DH82B Queen Bee. […]
One of my all-time favorite movies is “Task Force” starring Gary Cooper. It came out in 1949 and details the birth of naval aviation. There’s a scene, where Cooper attends a fancy Washington, D.C. soiree. He’s uncomfortable and clearly out of his element. Matters are only made worse when a Senator comes up to him […]
The U.S. cannot address today’s Russian military threat against Ukraine without addressing what military resources we have to back our diplomacy and to deter hostile moves backed by force. Currently, no U.S. discourse guides policy makers toward an answer. The public expects a strong defense when we are afraid or when we are outraged […]
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the newest player in the U.S. Defense Department’s war on counterfeit* parts. Counterfeit parts, particularly electronics, have posed a huge threat for the Department of Defense for years, threatening the integrity a wide variety of systems, from helicopters to the computers for Missile Defense Agency’s Terminal High Altitude […]
In the first few months after Snowden’s leaks first exploded onto headlines, the public, and the media, struggled to fathom how private individuals figured into this story, and how close the U.S. had come to that “Orwellian state” Edward Snowden warned us of. If Google Trends are any indication, the story reached a peak in […]
We’re definitely not still stuck in the Cold War (although sometimes it feels that way), but there are some doozies from the mid-1900s that are worth remembering. In May 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency released a wave of highly-anticipated documents on some of the agency’s most infamous Cold War activities. One of the unveiled documents, entitled […]
This is the first in a series of blogs I’ll write on the annual maritime related conference I recently attended co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute. Both organizations are dedicated to providing forums for exchange of information on national security topics. The conferences they put on feature speakers who are key leaders […]
By Sarwar Kashmeri It is time to stop pretending that a residual American military presence in Afghanistan can make any difference to the future of that ancient and troubled land. The future of Afghanistan will be determined, as it has always been, by the Afghans, at their own pace and in conjunction with the countries […]
Angela Merkel wants to wall off European data from the NSA. If ever there was evidence of dysfunction in the free world, this is it. The technical foolhardiness of the idea, which the Financial Times noted in its report, makes the initiative more likely to launch a war of words than truly divide the internet. […]
Around this time every year the intelligence community gives a worldwide threat overview to Congress. As part of this process, they publish an unclassified Worldwide Threat Assessment that is available to the public. For the second year in a row, they identified cyber as the number one national security threat. “Several critical governmental, commercial, and […]
Last week I attended the Cyberspace Symposium 2014 in Colorado Springs. The topic was: Managing Cyber Chaos: Integrating education, industry and government into the anarchy of the virtual world. I thought it was an excellent venue and provided great insight into what approaches the military is taking toward cyberspace and why. I know for a […]
On Monday, February 10, the Associated Press broke a story that the Obama administration is mulling over potentially conducting a drone strike on a U.S. citizen in an unidentified country who is allegedly plotting terrorist attacks. The AP notes that it withheld the name of the country “because officials said publishing it could interrupt ongoing […]