• NATIONAL SECURITY“Warrior Ethos” Mistakes Military Might for True Security – and Ignores the Wisdom of Eisenhower

    By Monica Duffy Toft

    Renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War” represents far more than rebranding –it signals an escalation in the administration’s embrace of a militaristic mindset that, as long ago as 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, and that the nation’s founders deliberately aimed to constrain.

  • DRONE WARFAREHow Can Europe Fight Back Against Incursions by Drone Aircraft?

    By Matthew Powell

    Russian drones have violated the airspace of several NATO members, flying near critical infrastructure facilities, military bases, and airports. Questions are now being raised about what can be done to either suppress or destroy drones and prevent future attacks.

  • ARGUMENT: THE POLITICIZATION OF THE FBI Making a Scarecrow of the Law: A Former Agent’s Reaction to Recent Events at the FBI

    FBI Director Kash Patel’s ongoing campaign of political purges at the FBI leads former FBI agent Michael Feinberg to lament the assault on the Bureau’s integrity, professionalism, and political impartiality. He writes that “Right now there is some new agent trainee at Quantico, going through her paces at the FBI Academy, who will never know the honor of serving a Bureau unblemished by the taint of political weaponization. Her loss is something worth noting, and it is certainly something worth mourning.”

  • POLITICAL VIOLENCEProtecting the Public from the Risk of Political Violence

    By John S. Hollywood

    The nation’s strength lies in its ability to confront political violence not with despair, but with resolve and unity. Americans overwhelmingly reject political violence by a ratio of millions to one. Remaining vigilant, supporting one another, and refusing to succumb to online rage and despair can ensure that acts of violence do not define America’s future.

  • DEMOCRACY WATCHTrump’s Targeting of “Enemies” Like James Comey Echoes FBI’s Dark History of Mass Surveillance, Dirty Tricks, and Perversion of Justice Under J. Edgar Hoover

    By Betty Medsger

    As a candidate last year, Donald Trump promised retribution against his perceived enemies. As president, he is doing that. His campaign of vengeance will be helped by the FBI, the independence of which has been sacrificed by Director Kash Patel, who has, essentially, made the bureau an arm of the White House. It marks the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year reign as FBI director that the FBI has been used to target people perceived to be political enemies.

  • SHOOTING AT ICE FACILITYOne Detainee Dead, Two Critically Wounded After Shooting at Dallas ICE Facility

    By Uriel J. García, Colleen DeGuzman and Nicholas Gutteridge

    Officials said the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and no ICE personnel were among the victims. FBI Director Kash Patel said an anti-ICE message was found on an unspent shell casing.

  • DEMOCRACY WATCHPoliticizing Federal Troops in U.S. Mirrors Use of Military in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s

    By Kristina Mani

    In his second term as president, Donald Trump has deployed U.S. military forces in rarely used roles in domestic law enforcement. As a political scientist who studies civil-military relations, I recognize the fundamental problems of militarizing domestic law enforcement, which the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits. With Trump’s continued militarization of law enforcement, the United States is entering largely uncharted waters. But in other countries, including Chile and Argentina, this is familiar territory.

  • Quote of the Day

    “[Antifa] is essentially a kind of coalition politics of all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists and more independent radicals,” says historian Mark Bray.
    “Sometimes I compare it to feminism. There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group,” he said.
    “Insofar as terrorism is setting off explosives and killing people, that’s not what these groups ever do,” Bray said.

    — Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, quoted in the Washington Post, 22 September 2025

  • RDIOLOGICAL THREATSU.S. Army Taps INL’s Nuclear Expertise, Capabilities to Strengthen Radiological Response and Readiness

    The mission of the U.S. Army’s Nuclear Disablement Team (NDT) is to disable potential enemies’nuclear capabilities. INL’s experts help train NDT team members for that mission.

  • ANTIFAIs Antifa a Terrorist Organization?

    The question of whether Antifa qualifies as a terrorist organization has been the subject of intense political, legal, and academic debate in the United States and abroad. President Trump’s 22 September designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is problematic on legal and operational grounds.

  • ANTIFAArgument: Deal with Antifa Without Designating Them

    By National Review

    In an Editorial, the editors of the conservative National Review argue that “We’ve seen before what happens when there is an over-insistence by political leaders on supposed domestic political threats —you get cock-up investigations and confusing plots where it is unclear whether FBI agents and informers are investigating actual domestic terrorists, or merely seducing and entrapping people into plans mostly hatched by the agents and informers.”

  • POLITICAL VIOLENCEPolitically Motivated Terrorist Killings in the US: Answering the Critics

    By Alex Nowrasteh

    My recent posts about politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States revealed surprising findings. There are a few politically motivated killings. If we examine politically motivated terrorist killings perpetrated by domestic terrorists (thus excluding the 9/11 attacks, which were perpetrated by foreign terrorists), the left-right political distribution of murders skews decisively right, even in recent years, but the numbers are minuscule.

  • NUCLEAR EXPLOSION DETECTIONSpace-Based Nuclear Detonation Detection Mission Endures

    By Kristen Meub

    Final Global Burst Detection system from current series launches as next series prepares for future launches. The network of satellites, sensors, and ground stations can detect, time-stamp, and record electromagnetic pulse energy in specific bands, and X-ray and optical signals.

  • POLITICAL VIOLENCE Right-Wing Extremist Violence Is More Frequent and More Deadly Than Left-Wing Violence − What the Data Shows

    By Art Jipson and Paul J. Becker

    After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump and members of his administration claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the U.S. But all research on the subject conclusively shows that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and that right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.

  • PERSISTENT SURVEILLANCEThe Toxic Legacy of 9/11…and How to End It

    By Patrick G. Eddington

    Restoring the Bill of Rights to its proper shape and place in our civic life would be one way to honor those killed on 9/11 and in the wars that followed.