“What good did social media actually do for the people of Iran?” TechCrunch‘s Paul Carr asks. “Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power.” While harsh, this criticism is essentially correct. New technologies,…

In the finger-pointing-fest after 9/11, the US Intelligence Community was blamed for failing to “connect the dots.” As incomplete a description of the intelligence analysis process as that may be, it brought to the fore a point that many of us in the business had been complaining about for years: stovepipes and parochial interests inhibited…

Among defense insiders, Millennium Challenge 2002 stands out as one of the most controversial red team exercises in American military history. MC2002 suspiciously resembled the looming invasion of Iraq, as it involved a conventional BLUE force facing RED military forces of a small Middle Eastern nation. In theory, either side could win the free play…

Mexico, and the cross-border region that embraces the frontier between Mexico and the United States, are embroiled in a series of interlocking, networked criminal insurgencies. These criminal insurgencies are essentially battles for dominance of the plazas, or corridors for the shipment of drugs into the United States. They are battles for profit and power. Cartels…

In Gaza, a tentative ceasefire has been declared. But the war in cyberspace continues. Israel and its adversaries have taken to the global cyber commons to wage cyberwar against each other, deploying crowdsourced information militias. The Israeli Consulate and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) extensively utilize Youtube and Twitter to make their case, boiling complicated…