In this week of massive 9/11 coverage, it’s important to keep terror threats in perspective. The recent hot threat seems to be “lone wolves” who become jihadists over the Internet while living somewhere in America. To be sure, there are such animals; Exhibit A is Army Major Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 at Fort Hood in 2009. …
Homeland Security
Taking Stock: The U.S. Military a Decade After 9/11
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 closes in on us this week. Try as you might, you will not be able to avoid it. Amid the pathos and bathos, it’s time to take a knee and conduct a map check.
Just to cut to the chase: you can’t argue with success, and on 9/12 most Americans were petrified a second wave of attacks was likely. It hasn’t …
Counterstrike: A Post-9/11 Report Card
There is a flood of 9/11 books now coming onto the market, but Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker of the New York Times should be atop the list of anyone curious about how the U.S. government has grappled with the challenges posed by al Qaeda.
Both authors …
“How Has U.S. National Security Changed Since 9/11?”
It’s hard to believe — at least for some of us — that it has been a decade since 9/11. Before then, covering the military meant going out to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, to witness future ways of war that, in hindsight, seem obsolete. For the past decade, the U.S. military — and indeed, the U.S. …
Who Is Terry A. Hogan?
Adam Zagorin, a former TIME correspondent who has covered the dark corners of the post-9/11 world, is asking that question because that’s the name behind more than a dozen U.S. extraordinary renditions — seizing suspected terrorists around the world and flying them where they could be encouraged to tell what they knew. Yet while the …
Smarter National-Security Spending: What a Concept
The nation’s approach to national security is warped by the way the different pieces of it — military, diplomatic, economic, development — are funded. Washington is a series of funnels and tubes — congressional committees, Pentagon rice bowls (a way of saying I’m keeping what’s mine!), and institutional inertia. It keeps the money …
Security: How Much Is Too Much?
The recent killings of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s deputy show the U.S. and its allies bringing the fight to the enemy. So why do we continue to button up like a five-year old being armored by her mother to face her first blizzard? Defense, which we have been playing robustly since 9/11, is an expensive game. Bad guys – if they …
“Cyber War: Fact or Fiction?”
Defending against the invisible menace of online cyber-attacks has become one of the Pentagon’s biggest growth areas. But should it be? Kristin Lord of the Center for a New American Security, who recently led a study into the issue, discusses the balancing act associated with this new way of war. She’s joined by colleague John …
“How Vulnerable Is Our Infrastructure to Cyber Attack?”
The folks who get paid to stay up at night worrying about cyber-security are always telling us that our basic infrastructure — the online computer networks that run our water, electricity, banking and other vital systems — are big fat targets just waiting to be taken down by skilled hackers. Well, it hasn’t happened yet. Are we …
“How Tough Is It to Tell Who Launched a Cyber Attack?”
The word attribution always crops up when experts debate the challenges of deterring a cyber attack. It simply means determining just who is responsible for nefarious acts online — where anonymity has long been a prized asset. Here, I discuss the challenge of finding such digital fingerprints with James Lewis, a cyberwar expert at …
“Is a Cyber Pearl Harbor on the Horizon?”
This week on Command Post, John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security and I discuss the potential horror — and the potential hype — of cyber war with James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Kristin Lord of CNAS. Key question: now that the Cold War has melted into history, is the …
Star Wars: Practice Makes Perfect
The nation has spent more than $100 billion on missile defense since President Reagan heralded it as the way to render nuclear-tipped missiles “impotent and obsolete” in 1983. But the mission is so complex and challenging, sometimes small elements can slip through the cracks, as the Government Accountability Office reported
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Internal Bomb Threats Exploding
Here’s a paper detailing everything from the Under Fat Roll Bomb (“suffers from a lack of candidate personnel fulfilling the delivery criteria since very few terrorist operatives are that significantly overweight”) to the Rectum/Large Intestines (Lower Digestive Track) bomb pioneered by — who else — the CIA, with its non-exploding …