• China’s Nuclear Buildup is About More Than Nukes

    U.S.-China nuclear and strategic stability will be tested in the coming year after a series of revelations in 2021 about Beijing’s nuclear program. Jacob Stokes writes that “The U.S.-China nuclear and strategic relationship has entered a new stage.” He adds: “Pursuing nuclear and strategic stability between the United States and China will likely prove harder than ever — but it is perhaps more important than ever, too.”

  • The Big Promises and Potentially Bigger Consequences of Neurotechnology

    Neurotechnology is an umbrella term for a range of technologies which interact directly with the brain or nervous system. This can include systems which passively scan, map or interpret brain activity, or systems which actively influence the state of the brain or nervous system. There are growing excitement and growing concern about the potential applications of neurotechnology for everything from defense to health care to entertainment.

  • Examining the Denver Shooter’s Ideological Views

    On 27 December 2021, Lyndon McLeod shot and killed five individuals in Denver, Colorado before being shot and killed by a Denver police officer. Matthew Kriner, H. E. Upchurch and W. Aaron write that “Evidence suggests McLeod was deeply influenced by the misogynistic pro-masculinity culture which pervades the alt-right’s so-called manosphere.” Describing himself and his fellow extremists on his social media blog, McLeod wrote: “There are certain men who maybe only represent[s] a small percentage of men – maybe only 10-15% – but who have a disproportionate impact on the world when they get even with their enemies.”

  • In 2021, the Police Took a Page Out of the NSA’s Playbook: 2021 in Review

    Dragnet searches were once thought to be just the province of the NSA, but they are now easier than ever for domestic law enforcement to conduct as well. With increasing frequency, law enforcement has been using unconstitutional, suspicionless digital dragnet searches in an attempt to identify unknown suspects in criminal cases.

  • Are New and Emerging Technologies Game-Changers for Smaller Powers?

    We are now entering into what is usually referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, which is characterized by the fusion of technologies and platforms in the form of a “system of systems.” Michael Claesson and Zebulon Carlander write that “In previous industrial revolutions, innovation was integrated into military capabilities, such as weapons systems, logistics, and organization. The fourth industrial revolution will be no different.” The add that “New and emerging technologies might therefore offer a new arena for small and medium states in which they can exploit possibilities to offset the capabilities of bigger and better-resourced adversaries.”

  • Autonomous Air and Ground Vehicles Swarms Take Flight in Final Field Experiment

    DARPA’s OFFSET program envisions future small-unit infantry forces employing large-scale teams of unmanned air and/or ground robots to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. OFFSET specifically focused on advancements in collaborative swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming capabilities.

  • Meet the Maggot: How This Flesh-Loving, Butt-Breathing Marvel Helps Us Solve Murders

    Not all superheroes wear capes – some live in rubbish bins, garbage dumps and on dead bodies. Maggots, the humble little legless larvae, are actually nature’s antibacterial soldiers. Their ability to survive and thrive in decomposing matter is making them our new secret weapon in forensic entomology – the science of using insects to solve crimes.

  • Controlled Burning of Natural Environments Could Help Offset Carbon Emissions

    Planting trees and suppressing wildfires do not necessarily maximize the carbon storage of natural ecosystems. A new study has found that prescribed burning can actually lock in or increase carbon in the soils of temperate forests, savannahs and grasslands.

  • DOD Releases Report on Countering Extremist Activities

    DOD last week issued a report on addressing the challenge of extremist activities in the ranks. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that “We believe only a very few violate this oath by participating in extremist activities, but even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness - and the physical harm some of these activities can engender can undermine the safety of our people.”

  • Blurry Ideologies and Strange Coalitions: The Evolving Landscape of Domestic Extremism

    Students of extremism and domestic terrorism have noticed an intriguing phenomenon: the convergence of far right and far left extremists and the breakdown of old ideological walls. Far-right extremists have valorized the Unabomber and praised the Taliban; a re-launched white supremacist group announced a new “Bolshevik focus” calling for the liquidation of the capitalist class; a growing ecofascist youth subculture joins with extreme racists in a call for the creation of a white ethnostate. “These trends highlight the strange and unanticipated ways in which domestic violent extremism scenes in the United States are fragmenting and reassembling,” they write.

  • What Will Taiwan Do If China Invades?

    China claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island 160 kilometers away and has not dropped the threat of force, if needed, to capture it. The two sides have been separately ruled since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s. The specter of a war has captured attention since mid-2020 when the People’s Liberation Army began almost daily military aircraft flyovers over a sea west of the island, which experts said is China’s attempt to normalize its military operations near Taiwan.

  • U.S. Guns Sales Have Been Surging: Study

    An estimated 7.5 million U.S. adults became new gun owners over a recent 28-month span, sharply increasing the prospects for home accidents or people taking their own lives, according to new research.

  • Increasingly Frequent Wildfires Linked to Human-Caused Climate Change: Study

    New research strengthens the case that climate change has been the main cause of the growing amount of land in the western U.S. that has been destroyed by large wildfires over the past two decades.

  • Train Engineer Inspired by Covid-19 Conspiracy Theory to Intentionally Derail Locomotive

    A train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles pleaded guilty last week to a federal terrorism charge for intentionally running a locomotive at full speed off the end of railroad to “wake people up” to a government plot to use Covid-19 as a pretext to “take over” the country.

  • UN Fails to Agree on “Killer Robot” Ban While Nations Pour Billions into Autonomous Weapons Research

    Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent UN Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.