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We Are In An Unpredictable War Of Attrition

We are squarely in the target sights of ‘Unintended Consequences.’What do I mean by this? Think of it as a broad spectrum of possible consequences [...] More

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25 years after 9/11. Whatever happened to mass-effect terrorism?

One remaining mystery about 9/11 is why there have been no attacks of comparable scale since. But, with the combination of new motivations, enhanced [...] More

Twenty-Five Years Later, Remembering 9/11

In “Aftermath,” a 1919 retrospective poem on his war, Siegfried Sassoon asked: “Have you forgotten yet?” “Look up,” he appealed, “and swear by the [...] More

China’s Challenge to Western Alliances

At the 25th anniversary session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an alternative model to Western [...] More

The AI We Cannot Deploy — And What Is at Stake

Last week, I argued in these pages that the United States is buying an army it cannot command — writing procurement checks at a scale its adversaries [...] More

Inside Trump’s Massive Venezuela Oil Deal

“A major oil agreement has been announced between the government of the United States and the [Venezuelan interim] regime of Delcy Rodriquez. I know [...] More

The New Economics of Warfare: David vs Goliath

The most important lesson emerging from the Iran conflict may not actually be about Iran. It is about the changing economics of warfare and what [...] More

The Nuclear Umbrella is Bent, Not Broken

Why Extended Nuclear Deterrence Still Matters Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press make a compelling argument in a recent article about the future [...] More

The Cost of Squandering America’s Reputation

Make no mistake: the United States is weaker today than it was yesterday, and the day before that.Many of our closest allies have moved from fear to [...] More

Blowing up Boats: The Numbing Effect of Repetitive Illegality

Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. campaign against alleged drug trafficking small boats off the coast of several South American nations, continues [...] More

America Is Buying an Army It Cannot Command

The U.S. Army has committed to a million small drones by 2028. The Department of Defense has not decided who will authorize how they fire.That is not [...] More

The Growing Cost of Keeping U.S. Submarines Idle

“Inactive idle time describes when a [U.S. Navy] attack submarine designated for decommissioning cannot be inducted into a dry dock in a shipyard. As [...] More

Modernizing the Aircraft Carrier—By Returning to 20th-Century Technology?

“During its 11-month deployment [mostly in the Middle East] which ended in May, and was the longest for an [aircraft] carrier since the Vietnam War, [...] More