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Learning from When the Earth Moves: Protecting Indonesia’s New Capital City
Indonesia plans to build a new capital city from scratch. Protecting the new city from the effects of earthquakes will be crucial. Here’s how researchers are helping.
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Outsourcing Surveillance: A Cost-Effective Strategy to Maintain Maritime Supremacy
Persistent surveillance is one of the most valuable types of surveillance missions. But, Josh Portzer and Aaron Stein write, “Persistent surveillance is a challenging problem for two reasons: capacity and cost. In today’s budgetary climate, “simply increasing U.S. military capacity is not tenable. [But] by increasing the number of sensors globally, the Department of Defense would not only gain valuable, near-persistent surveillance data in areas of interest at (relatively) affordable prices, but also would enjoy the option of gray-zone operations given the strategic ambiguity that outsourcing provides.”
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How Do Civilians Respond to Political Violence?
When conflict breaks out, civilians inevitably suffer. But they do not react uniformly, with some fleeing, others staying, and still others joining the fray. Civilians’ perceptions of their own agency often shape their behavior. Aidan Milliff writes that this understanding has implications for policy: The United States and other countries, in their efforts to help civilians who face political violence, should focus more on changing these civilians’ perceptions.
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Preparing U.S., Partners for Radiological Response
After the September 11th attacks, security professionals worried that terrorists might detonate a “dirty bomb” – an explosive device enhanced with radiological source materials. Responders for this type of event had to be trained.
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Los Alamos National Lab Safely Shipping Radiological and Hazardous Waste Off-Site
A substantial amount of Los Alamos National Lab’s radiological and hazardous waste from years past was permanently disposed of at off-site facilities — a move in step with the Lab’s goal to mitigate hazards to workers, the community, and the environment while carrying out its national security mission.
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The Path to Peace in Gaza Lies in Defeating Hamas
Israel cannot continue living with a Hamas-controlled Gaza. The untenability of having Hamas on Israel’s border has long been clear. However, to dismantle and disarm the group was always going to involve grievous civilian bloodshed and the inflaming of anti-Israeli opinion—a prohibitive proposition for Israel prior to 7 October. Yet now Israel finds itself facing this task anyway, which is a reminder to the world that tolerating the intolerable—even grudgingly, because the alternatives are too difficult—is never sustainable in the long term. This was demonstrated on 7 October.
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Regional Security Analysts Say Africa at Risk of Drone Terrorism
African terrorist groups are using global affiliations to acquire and modify drones for their own needs. Though the drones are not yet being used to launch attacks, the growing use of drones by terrorist groups is only a question of time, and analysts worry that in the long run, they could change the balance of power with governments.
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Japan Military Aid Expands Southeast Asia Footprint
A new security assistance scheme is allowing Japan to expand its role in helping smaller countries like the Philippines cope with China’s military ambitions.
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EFF to Supreme Court: Fifth Amendment Protects People from Being Forced to Enter or Hand Over Cell Phone Passcodes to the Police
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) last week asked the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling undermining Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination and find that constitutional safeguards prevent police from forcing people to provide or use passcodes for their cell phones so officers can access the tremendous amount of private information on phones.
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“Rogue” Security Officers Pose a Threat to Life and Public Safety
Halo Solutions, a British security and safety technology firm helps stamp out fraudulent security guards at events and gigs. The issue of qualified and certified security officers becomes even more important now, ads the U.K. is about to mandate robust public security measures at public events.
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Analysis of IAEA Iran Verification and Monitoring Report — November 2023
Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium and its centrifuge capacity combined are sufficient to make enough weapon-grade uranium (WGU), taken as 25 kilograms (kg) of WGU, for six nuclear weapons in one month, eight in two months, ten in three months, eleven in four months, and twelve in five months.
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Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Hate Are Surging. Here's How to Curb the Worst American Tradition.
As violence escalates in Israel’s struggle with Hamas, the potential for hate-based violence in the United States grows, too. American leaders need to step in to defuse tensions – with the awareness that the United States has a history of mirroring overseas conflicts in its own communities.
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Reforms Needed to Expand Prescribed Burns
Prescribed fire, which mimics natural fire regimes, can help improve forest health and reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfire. But this management tool is underused in the fire-prone U.S. West and Baja California, Mexico, due to several barriers. Study highlights four strategies to overcome barriers to prescribed fire in the West.
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Hamas Isn’t the First Military Group to Hide Behind Civilians as a Way to Wage War
Using places and things civilians need, like hospitals, as a means to fight a war is considered a weapon of the weak. It is a way to use another side’s values against it. I think it is clear that Hamas has – in this war and historically – tried to embed themselves and weapons in places civilians live or visit, in order to make it more difficult for the Israelis to target them. But using civilians to further a military advantage is not a new phenomenon.
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Forensic Science Method for Firearm Identification Is Flawed
Like fingerprints, a firearm’s discarded shell casings have unique markings. This allows forensic experts to compare casings from a crime scene with those from a suspect’s gun. Finding and reporting a mismatch can help free the innocent, just as a match can incriminate the guilty. But a new study reveals mismatches are more likely than matches to be reported as “inconclusive” in cartridge-case comparisons.
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More headlines
The long view
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.
Using Drone Swarms to Fight Forest Fires
Forest fires are becoming increasingly catastrophic across the world, accelerated by climate change. Researchers are using multiple swarms of drones to tackle natural disasters like forest fires.
Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology
Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.
European Arms Imports Nearly Double, U.S. and French Exports Rise, and Russian Exports Fall Sharply
States in Europe almost doubled their imports of major arms (+94 per cent) between 2014–18 and 2019–23. The United States increased its arms exports by 17 per cent between 2014–18 and 2019–23, while Russia’s arms exports halved. Russia was for the first time the third largest arms exporter, falling just behind France.
How Climate Change Will Affect Conflict and U.S. Military Operations
“People talk about climate change as a threat multiplier,” said Karen Sudkamp, an associate director of the Infrastructure, Immigration, and Security Operations Program within the RAND Homeland Security Research Division. “But at what point do we need to start talking about the threat multiplier actually becoming a significant threat all its own?”
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.