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Opinion

What It Means Now that Fentanyl is Designated a “WMD”

OPINION — “There's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States in part because they want to kill Americans. [...] More

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A Blueprint for Next-Generation Defense Production

OPINION — The Pentagon’s push to overhaul its slow, specification-driven procurement system is an overdue acknowledgment that our defense industrial [...] More

The Next Nuclear Proliferation Crisis Is Already Here

OPINION — Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened that Russia might use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty or territory is [...] More

Anti-Semitism is a National Security Issue: It’s Time to Treat it Like One

EXPERT OPINION / PERSPECTIVE -- Less than three months ago, two people were killed in a terrorist attack on Jewish people in a synagogue in [...] More

How the U.S. Military’s Top Officer is Looking at the World’s Hotspots

OPINION — “Our [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] job is to present and my job with the Joint Chiefs and others is to present the range of [military] [...] More

The Cipher Brief's Recommended Reads for the Holidays

BOOK REVIEWS & RECOMMENDATIONS -- Welcome to our annual holiday book review and recommendations list, where we highlight some of the terrific books [...] More

Why an Unmanned Mission May be Most Effective in Venezuela

OPINION — Wars are increasingly fought by unconventional means. A recent example is Ukrainian insertion of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to attack [...] More

America’s Antibiotic Weakness Is a National Security Blindspot

OPINION – Offshoring and outsourcing antibiotic production to China and India is putting America’s access to lifesaving medicines at risk. It’s time [...] More

Can Europe Survive the New Multipolar World?

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — For more than three decades after the Cold War, Europe lived under the illusion that history had settled in its favor. Liberal [...] More

Inside the Pentagon IG’s Findings on Signalgate

OPINION — “The [Defense] Secretary [Pete Hegseth] sent nonpublic DoD information [on March 15 at 11:44 EDT] identifying the quantity and strike times [...] More

Putin Sees “Useful Meetings”, the U.S. Should See a Trap Set for Inexperienced Negotiators

EXPERT OPINION / PERSPECTIVE -- Reports from Moscow suggest that U.S. representatives Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are “optimistic” about the [...] More

The Strategic Failure on North Korea’s Nuclear Rise

EXPERT OPINION — South Korea’s Korea Institute for Defense Analysis recently publicly stated that we underestimated North Korea’s nuclear weapons [...] More

Second Strike, No Survivors: The Legal and Political Questions Around Trump’s Narco-Boat Killings

OPINION — “As we’ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be ‘lethal, kinetic [...] More