• Time for the Russian Army to Take Stock

    By Lawrence Freedman

    Late last week, Vladimir Putin insisted that there are no grounds for concern about Russia’s military performance. “Largely speaking,” he said last Thursday in a meeting with parliamentary leaders, “we haven’t even yet started anything in earnest.” This boosterism may be designed to deter NATO countries from even greater engagement, and also to reassure a domestic audience, although the more discerning will find such reassurances deeply worrying.

  • Diametrically Opposed Social Media Users Starting to Agree: Enough is Enough

    Despite major differences of opinion on the motives behind and solutions to mass gun violence, right-leaning respondents who favor gun rights and left-leaning proponents of gun control are starting to converge in their belief that enough is enough and change is needed.

  • D.B. Cooper, the Changing Nature of Hijackings and the Foundation for Today’s Airport Security

    By Janet Bednarek

    Many Americans may associate airport security with 9/11, but it was a wave of hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s that laid the foundation for today’s airport security protocols. Especially, the 24 November 1971 hijacking of a Northwest Orient 727 plane, after take-off from Portland, Oregon, by a man known to the American public as D. B. Cooper, captured the public’s imagination, and drove the U.S. government to establish the first anti-hijacking security protocols.

  • The Chinese Military’s Access to AI Chips

    The Chinese military has made rapid progress in artificial intelligence. This progress largely depends on continued access to high-end semiconductors designed by American companies and produced in Taiwan and South Korea. The aggressive moves by the Trump and Biden administrations to limit technology exports to the Chinese military notwithstanding, China continues to order large quantities of American-designed advanced semiconductors from manufacturers in Taiwan and South Korea.

  • Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings?

    There have already been more than 300 mass shootings in the United States this year—the latest at a 4th of July parade in the Highland Park suburb of Chicago. That shooting left seven dead, including both parents of a 2-year old toddler, and dozens injured – among them an 8-year old with a severed spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. As the United States reckons with these increasingly common public massacres, many blame mental illness as the fundamental cause. The reality, however, is that people with mental illness account for a very small proportion of perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States, says one expert.

  • American Gun Culture Is Based on Frontier Mythology – but Ignores How Common Gun Restrictions Were in the Old West

    By Pierre M. Atlas

    In large measure, America’s gun culture – that is, the willingness of many Americans to accept gun violence as an inevitable side effect of a free and armed, if more violent, society – is rooted in an image of the Wild West in which a lone, armed person could stand up and save the day. Many Americans see the gun as both symbolizing and guaranteeing individual liberty. But this image of America’s frontier past —and the mythology of the Wild West, which romanticizes guns, outlaws, and rugged individualism — ignore the fact the gun control was widespread and common in the Old West.

  • High Incarceration Rates May Not Help U.S. Citizens Feel Safer

    The U.S. is the world leader in incarceration rates, spending $80 billion a year to imprison 2 million people. But despite these practices aiming to help Americans feel safer, a new study suggests they may not result in the intended effect.

  • How Nuclear War Would Affect Earth Today

    Nine nations currently control more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world. A new study provides stark information on the global impact of nuclear war. Nuclear firestorms would release soot and smoke into the upper atmosphere that would block out the Sun resulting in crop failure around the world. In the first month following nuclear detonation, average global temperatures would plunge by about 13 degrees Fahrenheit, cooling the oceans and resulting in sea ice expanding by more than 6 million square miles and 6 feet deep in some basins, blocking major ports.

  • Another Mass Shooting Leaves U.S. Bracing for More

    By Jeff Seldin

    This week’s Independence Day massacre in a Chicago suburb is highlighting the challenge now facing U.S. law enforcement and homeland security officials — an environment in which almost any public event could come under attack with few, if any, signals for authorities to detect in advance. DHS has been warning for months of a “dynamic and complex” threat environment, most recently in a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin last month, yet even armed with that knowledge, authorities were not able to see any signs or find any evidence that might have allowed them to stop the mass shooting at the Highland Park, Illinois.

  • North Korea’s Military Capabilities

    North Korea could have the material for more than one hundred nuclear weapons, according to analysts’ estimates. It has successfully tested missiles that could strike the United States with a nuclear warhead. North Korea has the world’s fourth-largest military, with more than 1.2 million personnel, and is believed to possess chemical and biological weapons. Despite UN Security Council sanctions and past summits involving North Korea, South Korea, and the United States on denuclearization, Pyongyang continues to test ballistic missiles.

  • One Year On: Marking Progress on Biden’s Counter-Domestic Terrorism Strategy

    Early in the Biden administration, the president instructed the intelligence community to evaluate the domestic terrorist threat – and intelligence officials concluded that it’s severe. On 15 June 2021, the Biden administration released the National Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism. Ryan B. Greer writes that now that it has been a full year since the launch, there is an opportunity to review the administration’s progress made toward countering the threat of domestic violent extremism.

  • Siege Culture and Accelerationism in the U.K.

    Siege Culture, also referred to as accelerationism, has been on the rise in the U.K. and elsewhere since 2016. Both Siege Culture and accelerationism refer to a violent strategy in which terrorism is used to hasten societal collapse by provoking reactions from authorities and exacerbating existing social tensions.

  • Unprecedented Change in Europe’s Fire Regime Driven by Climate Change

    A new study reveals an unprecedented change in the fire regime in Europe which is related to climate change. The study detected summer and spring seasons with unprecedented values of fire risks over the last years, so many areas of southern Europe and the Mediterranean are reaching extreme conditions conducive to fires.

  • Alaska: U.S. Bolsters “Last Frontier” Bases on NATO's Western Flank

    By Carla Babb

    Despite Alaska’s geographic and environmental challenges, the U.S. military has staked its claim there since the 1860s, when the U.S. bought the territory from Russia and nearly a century before Alaska became a U.S. state. In the last decade, the military has redoubled its efforts in the far north, investing billions of dollars upgrading air and missile defenses while completely revamping the foundational structure of its Army forces.

  • The Department of the Navy Hosts Climate Tabletop Exercise

    The Department of the Navy hosted a first-of-its-kind Climate Tabletop Exercise to examine the impacts that climate change has on mission, readiness, and warfighting capacity.