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CRS Report – U.S. Military Withdrawal and Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan: Frequently Asked Questions, August 20, 2021: “On August 15, 2021, the Taliban entered the Afghan capital of Kabul, completing a rapid takeover over the country that surprised many Afghans and Americans alike. The Taliban’s advance came as the United States was completing the military …
Follow up to previous posting – The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war – see also two new reports from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR): SIGAR released its 11th lessons learned report examining the past 20 years of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. After spending $145 billion trying to rebuild …
“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals [Dec. 9, 2019] that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by …
RAND – Combating Foreign Disinformation on Social Media Study Overview and Conclusions by Raphael S. Cohen, Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, Joe Cheravitch, Alyssa Demus, Scott W. Harold, Jeffrey W. Hornung, Jenny Jun, Michael Schwille, Elina Treyger, Nathan Vest “How are state adversaries using disinformation on social media to advance their interests? What does the Joint Force—and the …
National Law Review: “On July 28, 2021, President Biden signed a National Security Memorandum entitled “Improving Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems” (the “Memorandum”). The Memorandum formally establishes an Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Initiative and directs the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”) and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of …
The Drive: “We are excited to announce the launch of our new interactive tool that maps and makes searchable thousands of unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and unidentified aircraft incident reports. The vast dataset is drawn from information compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration. Some of the reports are highly unusual, going far beyond typical low-altitude …
Virtual Capitalist: “Today’s infographic, created all the way back in 1931 by a man named John B. Sparks, maps the ebb and flow of global power going all the way back to 2,000 B.C. on one coherent timeline. Histomap, published by Rand McNally in 1931, is an ambitious attempt at fitting a mountain of historical …
CREW: Nearly 900 Secret Service employees tested positive for COVID-19 between March 1, 2020 and March 9, 2021, according to government records obtained by CREW. The vast majority served in protection jobs, either as Special Agents or in the Uniformed Division. The records obtained by CREW show that in the first year of the pandemic, …
ZDNet – “How the internet’s biggest security problem has grown and what happens next. A string of high-profile cyberattacks has made ransomware an impossible issue to ignore – in fact, even world leaders are talking about it. Will this be enough to make cyber criminals think twice? Ransomware has become such a significant problem that …
“There is a lot of discussion these days about China’s growing influence around the world relative to America’s—and how this sprawling contest for clout is shaping the future of geopolitics.Now we have a way to track and quantify this intensifying competition across time using the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) Index, a new measure of …
CRS In Focus – Deep Fakes and National Security, Updated June 8, 2021: “Deep fakes”—a term that first emerged in 2017 to describe realistic photo, audio, video, and other forgeries generated with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies—could present a variety of national security challenges in the years to come. As these technologies continue to mature, they …
CRS In Focus – Defense Primer: Emerging Technologies, Updated June 8, 2021: “Both U.S. national strategy documents and Congress’s own bipartisan Future of Defense Task Force Report have identified a number of emerging technologies that could have a disruptive impact on U.S. national security in the years to come. These technologies include artificial intelligence, lethal …
