Our picksWhat the hell happened in Hawaii?; American leader for ISIS; unknown unknowns, and more

What the hell happened in Hawaii? (Ankit Panda, Defense One)
False alarms aren’t just terrifying—they’re dangerous.

Want to strike North Korea? It’s not going to go the way you think. (Van Jackson, Politico)
Trust me: I was a nuclear strategist for the Pentagon.

Waiting for the bomb to drop (Eliot A. Cohen, Defense One)
There are sounds, for those who can hear them, of the preliminary and muffled drumbeats of war.

5 ways nuclear Armageddon was almost unleashed (or World War III) (Tom Nichols, National Interest)
During the Cold War, “crisis” had a special connotation, because each moment of political conflict raised the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Every confrontation carried the potential not only for war, but for the extermination of human civilization. While we look back on these periods now as something like curios in a museum, they were moments of existential fear for both American and Soviet leaders.

A new American leader rises in ISIS(Seamus Hughes, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, and Bennett Clifford, The Atlantic)
A two-year investigation identifies one of the very few Americans in the Islamic State’s upper ranks—and sheds light on the dynamics of radicalization.

Managing the risk of the ISIS’ diaspora in the Caribbean (Serena Joseph-Harris, Cipher Brief)
With the winding down of the war against ISIS in Syria, many Caribbean governments worry about the possible impact that returning fighters could have on domestic and regional security.

The revolution of obfuscation for cybersecurity and threat intelligence (Tom Badders, FCW)
Without the proper protections, threat intelligence can do more harm than good.

The state of Israel’s cybersecurity market (Ofer Schreiber, Iren Reznikov, Techcrunch)
Second only to the U.S., in terms of cybersecurity investment 2017 was another excellent year for Israeli cybersecurity startups, with dozens of companies being formed, breaking fundraising records and producing solid exits. The 2017 data also suggest that the Israeli cybersecurity industry is maturing, as we see a shift in funding towards later stage companies.

How dirt could save humanity from an infectious apocalypse (Peter Andrey Smith, New Yorker)
Scientists believe that the world’s topsoils contain incredible, practically inexhaustible reservoirs of undiscovered antibiotics, the chemical weapons bacteria use to fend off other microorganisms.

The real news we ignore at our peril (Andrew J. Bacevich, The American Conservative)
This is the threat to our democracy, not Fake News. And Exhibit A is our failed war in Afghanistan.