• The Signal in the Noise: The 2023 Threats and Those on the Horizon

    We enter the new year with “blinking lights everywhere,” Austin Doctor writes. “From a U.S. homeland security perspective, the terrorism threat in 2023 can be summarized as diverse, diffuse, and active. In 2024, we are likely to continue to see signs of continuing shifts in the terrorism landscape—such as the threats posed by lone juvenile offenders, the malign use of democratized technologies, and ‘violent resistance’ narratives adopted across the extremist ecosystem.”

  • How Far-Right Terrorists Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave the Bomb

    There used to be a time that domestic terrorists favored bombing as their preferred method. “Today, however, the terrorists’ preferred tactic is the mass shooting,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware write. “Assault-style rifles have replaced explosives.”

  • NYC Sues Bus Companies that Texas Hired to Transport Migrants

    More than 33,000 migrants have arrived from Texas since August 2022. The city wants the 17 bus and transportation companies twhich contracted with Texas to take the migrants to New York City to pay more than $700 million in damages.

  • Extreme Weather Cost $80 Billion in 2023. The True Price Is Far Higher.

    The U.S. saw 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than ever before. 2024 could be worse. Congress has long punted on reforming FEMA and the nation’s disaster relief policy, but it’s only a matter of time before there’s a disaster bad enough that legislators feel pressure to act. That catastrophe didn’t arrive in in 2023, but it is surely coming.

  • Jan. 6 Was an Example of Networked Incitement − a Media and Disinformation Expert Explains the Danger of Political Violence Orchestrated Over Social Media

    The shocking events of Jan. 6, 2021 were an example of a new phenomenon: influential figures inciting large-scale political violence via social media, and insurgents communicating across multiple platforms to command and coordinate mobilized social movements in the moment of action. We call this phenomenon “networked incitement.” The use of social media for networked incitement foreshadows a dark future for democracies. Rulers could well come to power by manipulating mass social movements via social media, directing a movement’s members to serve as the leaders’ shock troops, online and off.

  • The True Dangers of Long Trains

    Trains are getting longer. Rail companies had recently adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history. Railroads are getting richer, but these “monster trains” are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators are doing little to curb the risk.

  • American Victims of Hamas Attack on Israel Plan to Sue North Korea

    Families of Americans killed and injured in Hamas’ October 7 terror attack in Israel are contemplating a lawsuit against North Korea for indirectly supplying the Palestinian militant group with weapons, according to an Israeli attorney representing the families.

  • Ukraine, Gaza, and the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Legacy

    It makes perfect sense for American military organizations to study both the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza, and to draw insights from both. But as the U.S. Army studies these two wars for insights, let’s drop the “learned” from the phrase “lessons learned.” Lessons learned assumes that an insight—a “lesson”—from these current wars can also, at the same time, be “learned”—that is, incorporated into the training and strategies of another military. This is a highly problematic assumption.

  • Why Have Authoritarianism and Libertarianism Merged? A Political Psychologist on “the Vulnerability of the Modern Self”

    Logically, authoritarianism and libertarianism are contradictory. Yet there is a history of these two outlooks being intertwined. A psychological approach can help us to understand the dynamics of this puzzling fusion. As Erich Fromm and others have shown, our ideological affinities are linked to unconscious structures of feeling. At this level, authoritarianism and libertarianism are the interchangeable products of the same underlying psychological difficulty: the vulnerability of the modern self.

  • Growing Number of Migrants Highlights Border Crisis

    U.S. officials processed an estimated 300,000 people at the U.S. border with Mexico in December, which would be the highest number ever recorded, according to multiple news organizations. While DHS will release the December numbers later this month, Reuters and other news organizations estimate that 300,000 people attempted to cross the border in the final month of 2023, with about 50,000 of them coming through designated points of entry.

  • The Organized Crime Threat to Latin American Democracies

    Latin America’s democracies and democrats don’t get enough credit for weathering inequality, violence, and economic stagnation. Miraculously, only two of the region’s former democracies, Venezuela and Nicaragua, have collapsed into full-fledged authoritarianism. In no other part of the world have so many democracies held up under such pressures for so long. Governments have learned to manage many threats, but they are failing to curb the growing power of organized crime.

  • IDF’s Subterranean Challenge: Profiling Gaza Metro, Hamas’s Center of Gravity

    The subterranean infrastructure developed by Hamas, popularly known as the Gaza Metro, consists of tunnels, command and control centers, living spaces, stores and contingency fighting positions. The infrastructure is the pivot of Hamas’s irregular warfare strategy and allows it to undertake both offensive and defensive operations and has been assessed as one of its centers of gravity. Israel has been aware of the infrastructure but has possibly been surprised by the scale and sophistication achieved by Hamas in tunnel construction. The IDF’s technologies and doctrinal concepts are being tested every day in the ongoing war and will have a number of lessons for other armies.  

  • Legal Questions Answered and Unanswered in Israel’s Air War in Gaza

    The Israeli Air Force’s (IAF’s) bombing of Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, has been widely criticized for the extreme level of civilian deaths, the choices of weapons used, and the way in which those weapons have been employed. Marc Garlasco writes that the Israel Air Force (IAF) dropped a staggering number of bombs on Gaza, and, what’s more, many of these bombs were “dumb bombs” which cause wide-area damage. Garlasco writes that that question “is how the IAF is assessing proportionality, which is the amount of civilian harm acceptable for a military target. To date, that appears to be heavily skewed to a point where Israel will accept extreme levels of civilian harm for questionable military value.”

  • Vietnam Isn’t North Korea—and 50 Years of Australian Aid Has Helped

    How have Australia and Vietnam, two countries with extremely different political systems, built such a successful partnership? It was done through long-term investment across all the tools of statecraft—including diplomacy, trade and defense—with development cooperation as a key element. This enabled a progression from battlefield enemy to major economic and development partner in a surprisingly short period.

  • Fighting European Threats to Encryption: 2023 Year in Review

    Private communication is a fundamental human right. In the online world, the best tool we have to defend this right is end-to-end encryption. Yet throughout 2023, politicians across Europe attempted to undermine encryption, seeking to access and scan our private messages and pictures.