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Cool videos of World War II-era drones

Cool videos of World War II-era drones

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. […]

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GailForce: Thoughts on Our Pacific Maritime Strategy from AFCEA WEST 2014 Conference Part One

GailForce:  Thoughts on Our Pacific Maritime Strategy from AFCEA WEST 2014 Conference Part One

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 […]

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Ukraine Crisis Raises the Question of Defense Capabilities

Ukraine Crisis Raises the Question of Defense Capabilities

  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 […]

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DARPA to take on counterfeit goods

DARPA to take on counterfeit goods

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 […]

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The Snowden Conversation We Aren’t Having

The Snowden Conversation We Aren’t Having

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 […]

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What a 1950s CIA manual say about today’s drone war

What a 1950s CIA manual say about today’s drone war

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 […]

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GailForce: AFCEA West 2014 Conference – Shaping the Maritime Strategy: How Do We Make It Work?

GailForce:  AFCEA West 2014 Conference – Shaping the Maritime Strategy:  How Do We Make It Work?

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 […]

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High Time to End the American Hustle of Afghanistan

High Time to End the American Hustle of Afghanistan

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 […]

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Walling off the internet: how should the U.S. respond?

Walling off the internet: how should the U.S. respond?

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.  […]

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GailForce: Latest Information from the Military on Its Cyberspace Operations Part Two

GailForce:  Latest Information from the Military on Its Cyberspace Operations Part Two

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 […]

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GailForce: Latest Information from the Military on Its Cyberspace Operations Part One

GailForce:  Latest Information from the Military on Its Cyberspace Operations Part One

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 […]

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Pakistan or “the country in question”?

Pakistan or “the country in question”?

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 […]

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How to track U.S. drone strikes from a mobile device

How to track U.S. drone strikes from a mobile device

Persistence proved to be a winning strategy for one app developer this weekend. Metadata+, data artist Josh Begley’s iOS app that presents “real-time updates on national security,” was approved and released by Apple. The app, formerly known as Drones+, had been rejected by Apple several times prior to its release. In one rejection letter, Apple noted […]

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Defending Gold and Ourselves: Terrorism and Putin’s Strained Olympic Games

Defending Gold and Ourselves: Terrorism and Putin’s Strained Olympic Games

A hum of activity pulls two cities together.  In one, the shuffle of feet and the rush of cars compose the soundtrack to a morning rush hour.  In the other we hear the excited bustling of a town nearing the end of long preparations for a shining, global sporting event.  From afar, the buzz that […]

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Four things the SOTU missed: Defense edition

Four things the SOTU missed: Defense edition

President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address on Tuesday, January 28, addressed a number of foreign policy issues, from Iran, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the winding down of a 13-year war in Afghanistan. There were, however, some significant gaps. Here are three of them: 1.) Military sexual assault Despite a heavy focus on […]

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