The Department of Homeland Security yesterday slashed anti-terrorism money for Washington and New York, part of an immediately controversial decision to reduce grant funds for major urban areas in the Northeast while providing more to mid-size cities from Jacksonville to Sacramento. The announcement that the two cities targeted on Sept. 11, 2001, would suffer 40…

They have a plan, they have a pattern . . . Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the…

Gamers quibble over trees while missing a forest: Was an elite congressional intelligence committee shown video footage from an off-the-shelf retail game and told by the Pentagon and a highly-paid defense contractor that it was a jihadist creation designed to recruit and indoctrinate terrorists? It’s looking more and more like that is the case. The…

A long post derived from Inside the Pentagon (subscription): Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who led a “red team” of notional enemy forces at the outset of JFCOM’s Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, is calling on the command to spell out publicly how the experiment has influenced the Defense Department view of…

Acting on Assumptions with Iran & Iraq: To learn lessons from history, including recent history, it’s essential to get the history right. That’s why, in order to understand what to do about the mullahs’ regime in Iran, it’s worth revisiting the debate over the intelligence in Iraq. . . . and that’s just the first…

Work (I won’t call it duty) calls and finds me at the keyboard when I should be doing something that a lot of brothers are unable to do today: enjoying their families. In between flashes of corporate panic I find myself visiting the ‘sphere and taking note of those who are intentionally still blogging today,…

A very interesting entry at Strategy Page, with the most significant points brought out in the second paragraph: DoD is overhauling its entire intelligence apparatus …The plans are pretty ambitious, and are partially implemented. The basic idea is to take advantage of abundant computer power, and affordable networking, to tie together as many troops, vehicles…

Not that he needs it but . . . Misleading Intel: Everyone (not just some US political cabal) thought Iraq had WMD. We’ve found arty shells with nerve-agent (sarin) in them; documents placing orders for precursor chemicals used to make this thing called Zyklon-B (famously used by another tyrant decades ago); and shady-looking mobile labs…

One of the better attempts to critique the NSA’s efforts today in the NY Times: If the program is along the lines described by USA Today — with the security agency receiving complete lists of who called whom from each of the phone companies — the object is probably to collect data and draw a…

So the other day I tried to use my credit card to buy something, and it was denied even though I knew perfectly well my credit card was just fine. So I called my credit-card company to find out what was up with all this, and it turned out I had made the unpardonable mistake…