Cool NYT story on the US military’s use of biometrics (eye scans, etc.) to create unforgeable identification records of roughly one-in-five fighting-age Iraqi and Afghani males, creating databases that can be perused in seconds by a handheld device at a border crossing. Naturally, there is much interest and some desire to use the …
Wash Times piece on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen’s counterpart in China (Chen Bingde) saying that US naval ex’s in regional waters with local friends (Vietnam, Philippines, etc.) are “inappropriate.” Mullen replies that they’re not directed at China, which, of course, is the whitest of lies. The US sells beaucoup …
Mark Thompson picks up on Chins’s cheeky advice to visiting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen regarding our coupling of world-class defense spending with our world-class national debt/faltering economy. We can brush it aside, of course, seeing that it’s coming from our #1 excuse for defense spending (Mustn’t let those …
Financial Times story last week (US urged to rethink export controls on drones) re: Paris Air Show cites multiple US defense corporate sources complaining that unless the US Government lifts some of the restrictions, the world’s “insatiable appetite” for drones will be exploited by other nations’ military-industrial complexes. The …
Economist story (6/18) about the recent wave of high-profile attacks by hacker collectives references “SQL injections,” or the technique of penetrating databases of companies, agencies, etc. McAfee, the web security firm, says about half of those it tracked over the first quarter of 2011 were made by Chinese “cyberspies” – a rather …
Hailing again from Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition (30 teams of grad students/interns from elite universities and think tanks around the world), where I serve as head judge (and I get paid), I wanted to share the decidedly provocative vision of Russia’s long-term future security paradigm as crafted by the New …
In my continuing role as Head Judge for the online strategy community Wikistrat‘s month-long International Grand Strategy Competition featuring roughly 30 teams from top-flight universities and think tanks around the world, I get to peruse all manner of provocative thought from some of tomorrow’s best and brightest thinkers. And …
Reader Brad Hancock jumps at the chance to compare my recent Battleland post on the new US cyber strategy with my just-published World Politics Review column.
Mr. Hancock comments at my Globlogization site that:
Compare this piece in WPR to the one Barnett wrote for Time on the same subject three weeks ago. Time readers were
…
Nice piece in WAPO about Ayman al-Zawahiri taking over al-Qaeda from the recently assassinated Osama bin Laden. Story leads with remembrances from a guy who knew him back in the day:
He was arrogant, angry and extreme in his ideas,” said Azzam, 40, son of a radical Palestinian ideologue who had become bin Laden’s mentor. “He
…
Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure: he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough on …
Waiting on the Obama speech explaining this one.
Guardian piece Monday predicts that current US-Afghan talks will cement a very long-term deal on presence [hat tip to World Politics Review Media Roundup].
American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which
…
As the Pentagon’s “efficiencies review” unfolds, one Cold War mainstay of the US military posture is inevitably going to be retired – namely, the land-based portion of the strategic missile triad. The Pentagon is tasked with coming up with $400 billion in savings over the next decade, and so this long-discussed option (and old Mark …
NYT story describing how Obama administration is funding all sorts of shadow networks to thwart government censorship overseas. I think this is fine. [Blank] ’em if they can’t take the Web – a Defense Department creation, BTW.
But understand this: we get all jacked about cyber warfare against our infrastructure (How dare people …