On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War – as hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops streamed toward Iraq-occupied Kuwait – a U.S. Army officer remarked how much easier all this would be if someone – a Saddam Hussein turncoat, …
Intelligence
Cold War Calculations
Fascinating study out from the folks up at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. George J. Borjas (of Harvard’s Kennedy School) and Kirk B. Doran (of Notre Dame) studied U.S. mathematicians to see what impact the collapse of the Soviet Union 20 years ago had on their work.
They were interested in exploring …
Death to “Resource Wars”!
Nice Washington Post piece on Saturday about how the “center of gravity” in global oil exploration and production is shifting to the Western hemisphere. No, the bulk of global conventional oil reserves still sits in the Persian …
NoKo Non-Nuclear Blast: A Secret Plea for Help?
North Korea has reacted sharply to criticism over the weekend from the working G8 lunch at Camp David. “All of us agree that North Korea is violating its international obligations and that there is a path for them to rejoin the international community,” President Obama said. “But that objective will not be achieved if they continue …
Private Bradley Manning: Hero or Traitor?
Army Private Bradley Manning represents a Rorschach tests for many Americans. The Army arrested the 24-year-old two years ago after classified material he allegedly downloaded from a military intelligence network while serving in Iraq ended up being made public by WikiLeaks. His supporters laud him for exposing war-crime atrocities, …
Winning Hearts and Minds, One Eyeball Scan at a Time
Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden’s Bleak Final Days
The latest batch of Osama bin Laden documents shows what you’d expect from a one-time terror mastermind whose best years were behind him. He’d spent six years confined to a house with several of his wives, and where the only way he could get outside was to walk inside the walled compound, or atop the walled rooftop.
Nearly 200 …
Operation Neptune Spear: The New Textbook for Special Operators
One year removed from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, hundreds of hours of programing and print pages are being devoted to to telling us what it all means. In this week’s issue of TIME, journalist Peter Bergen and historian …
Growth Industry
This chart from a new Government Accountability briefing shows the increase in cyber attacks on U.S. government agencies. The number of attacks have jumped from 5,503 in 2006 to 42,887 in 2011, an increase of nearly 680 percent.
“GAO has identified vulnerabilities in systems that monitor and control sensitive processes and …
Navy Looking Skyward to Tame Pirates
Pirates are funny when they’re portrayed by a rum-soaked Johnny Depp. In real life, however, they pose a serious problem, with around 160 ships and 4,000 sailors affected by pirates in the last decade. Last year, three American tourists were killed by Somali pirates after an unsuccessful raid by Navy SEALS.
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Final Dive
Christian Lambertsen, a World War II combat diver from the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, conducted his final mission March 10 when his ashes were committed to the Atlantic Ocean. There was a small …
Global Hawk: “Thar She Blow$!”
In a recent Battleland post, Mark Thompson noted the cost of a crashed Global Hawk: $72.8 million according to the Air Force. Some will automatically think that price equates to the unit cost for the drone. As they say, that’s …
“Warning! The Nation Is Under Missile Attack!”
Always best when those kinds of disconcerting messages turn out to be false alarms. The ace FOIAers over at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University have just released a two-page once-SECRET memo that then-defense secretary Harold Brown sent to President Carter in 1980 over such a couple of false alarms that …
