What do Mexican civil instability and an increasingly well-armed narco-insurgency mean for homeland defense? What lessons about confronting U.S. military power might the drug networks have learned from those other malevolent networks, the same ones responsible for 9/11? And while we have always assumed a neat institutional distinction between the United States’ internal defenses and the military power mobilized to protect its international interests, are porous borders and trans-national syndicates blurring those boundaries? These questions become more urgent with the growth of affluent, aggressive, and highly networked groups where the traditional distinctions between criminal and terrorist are often rendered meaningless.

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