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The Morning Brief: What the PDB Can Offer the Corporate Leadership Team

CEOs of major corporations need to make hugely consequential decisions every day, but many start their mornings in fragmented and reactive [...] More

The Latest

Alex Younger: An Unusually Likeable Human Being, And A Spy

Sir Alex Younger died earlier this week at the age of 62. He had been fighting cancer for some time. Alex was Chief of the Secret Intelligence [...] More

Remembering Alex Younger: The Intelligence Chief Who Shaped a Generation

I don't want to write about Sir Alex Younger, my predecessor as Chief of SIS.I want to write about my friend.I had known about Alex's cancer from the [...] More

Why the U.S. Cannot Afford to Lose Intelligence Partners

THE BLUF: Working with partners is a key intelligence tool. While the US has one of the best if not the best intelligence organizations in the world, [...] More

Radical Empathy: The Counterintuitive Skill That Made Me Better at Everything Else

There's a moment in every intelligence officer's career when they realize something uncomfortable: to be effective at their job, they must genuinely [...] More

China’s Uneasy Partnerships With Russia and North Korea

China’s summit with Russia last month and the reported likely upcoming visit of President Xi Jinping to North Korea are tactical moves that ignore [...] More

From Terror Networks to Hybrid Threats: A Partner Approach to a Growing Threat

The hybrid threat challenge facing Europe today is reminiscent of the terrorist threat challenge of the post-9/11 Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) era. [...] More

Put the Next Generation to Work: Digital Transformation Has Only Just Begun

Put the Next Generation to Work: Digital Transformation Has Only Just BegunWe are witnessing a historic bottleneck in the technology sector. [...] More

Before Funding a Record Defense Budget, Congress Should Demand Answers on Iran

As I listened to Defense Secretary Hegseth testify about the proposed $1.5 Trillion defense budget, the quote from Robert Heinlein, the science [...] More

Part II: When a Machiavellian and a Charismatic Met

In our pre-summit piece on the Xi/Trump meeting [When a Charismatic and a Machiavellian Meet 12 May] we wrote: "When a gifted political charismatic [...] More

AI, Autonomous Weapons, and the Pentagon’s $55 Billion Bet on Future War

“The [Defense] Department (DoD) is requesting a massive increase for DAWG. For those in the audience that may not know, DAWG is the Defense [...] More

Sweden and Denmark are in a Position of Power Over Russia

Two straits, six thousand kilometers apart, are defining the global balance of power in 2026. The first, Hormuz, is closed by force and heavily [...] More

Rethinking the Intelligence Cycle for the AI Era

There’s a profound assumption embedded in much of today’s conversation about AI and intelligence: better technology will solve our core problems. We [...] More