National Security

“The last Fleet was lost to me for want of Frigates; God forbid this should.” Lord Horatio Nelson, letter to Viscount Castlereagh, Oct. 5, 1805   The US Navy is hitting the reset button on its next round of...

In 2021, open-source intelligence efforts revealed a surprising discovery using commercial satellite imagery: China was building at least two silo fields for nuclear missiles. By 2022, a third field was identified. Intelligence experts even speculated that a field in...

  On a cool night in April 2024, the Iranian military surprised American and coalition war planners. It launched a massive salvo of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at Israel, following an Israeli air attack on an Iranian...

USNORTHCOM’s Role and Place in a Changing Circumpolar Security Environment Executive Summary The United States has quickly adapted to the new security environment in a changing Arctic, as the region must deal with geopolitical tension stemming from Russia, the...

On October 20, 2025, a glitch at an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in northern Virginia triggered more than 6.5 million website outages, disrupting banking, logistics, and government operations. What appeared to be a software fault was, in...

NATO has finally unveiled its new Alliance Maritime Strategy, refreshing a document that had not been publicly updated since 2011. While high-level strategy texts of this kind tend not to be riveting reads, the new strategy stands out in...

Nearly a year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime at the hands of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its rebel allies in December 2024, Syria remains in a fragile and uncertain transition. A mosaic of ethnic and religious...

For much of the last century, the American state has intervened directly in the economy only in times of extraordinary crisis. During World War II, Washington commandeered entire industries to serve the war effort. In 2008, it took ownership...

  The 12-Day War between Iran and Israel in June 2025 exposed critical weaknesses in the Islamic Republic’s military, strategic, and ideological frameworks, marking a turning point for the regime. The Iranian government’s failure to achieve its political and...

  Introduction There are two remarkable stories about defenses during the war between Israel and Iran in June 2025. One is the failure of Iran’s much-discussed air defense system; the other, the success of the Israeli missile defense system....