by Scott W. Ruston
Recent headlines revealed that video feeds from the Predator, the US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used for surveillance and targeting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, have been intercepted by insurgents in Iraq.  Early follow up analysis focuses on whether the intercept of Predator video feeds qualifies as a “hack” or whether that [...]

by Mark Woodward and Mariani Yahya*
Thai-Buddhist colonialism? That is a strange concept, but it is reality as far as the Malay-Muslims of the “Deep South” of Thailand are concerned.
Edward Said noted that the representation of political- and military-subject people as less than fully human is among the basic elements of the culture and ideology of [...]

by Chris Lundry
In the aftermath of the 17 July bombings at the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, some interesting developments have emerged in Indonesia’s anti-terrorism efforts.
The incident has shattered the illusion that Indonesia was safe from the threat of terrorism following four years without a major terrorist incident.  It also led to some puzzling rhetoric from [...]

by Steven R. Corman
Yesterday that the DoD Office of Inspector General released a report with the unparsimonious title “Organizational Structure and Managers’ Internal Control Program for the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) and American Forces Information Service” (H/T WaPo).
It’s main conclusion has to do with the “Managers’ Internal Control Program established at the Office [...]

by Steven R. Corman
The Advanced Research and Assessment Group of the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom has just released a new primer on Strategic Communication.  The executive summary says:
This paper attempts to address a perceived gap in UK defence thinking which currently has little documentation, on the emerging and cross governmental art of Strategic [...]

By Edward T. Palazzolo and Dawn Gilpin (With analysis support from Nick Brody, Jesse Herrera, Krista McNaughton, and Jordan Wolff)
This is the third post in a series about the one-year anniversary of the State Department’s Dipnote blog. In Part 1 we focused on reviewing DipNote management and processes. In Part 2 we looked [...]

by Monika Maslikowski
The Global War on Terror has been accurately described by some as a global counterinsurgency against the groups and individuals that promote the ideology of violent Islamic extremism. Unlike traditional counterinsurgency campaigns, however, there is no single host-nation (HN) in this fight; the enemy is disparate, networked, transnational, and bound together by [...]

by Mark Woodward*
On May 3, 2008 Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy delta in Southern Burma with devastating force. Nargis was a killer. The Burma government did not warn people in the region that the storm was coming or how severe it would be, though they clearly knew. According to some reports wind speeds of forty [...]

by Ed Palazzolo

Senior Hezbollah leader, Imad Mughniyeh, was killed Tuesday, 12 February 2008, by a car bomb in Damascus.
Mughniyeh has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for over 20 years. Mughniyeh was an intelligence leader for Hezbollah’s secretive military branch, he was believed to be responsible for taking Western hostages in Lebanon, he had [...]

by Steven R. Corman
Yesterday the pay-per-view service Inside Defense released a story about a memo sent on December 14 from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. The Admiral is (rightly) concerned about the military’s approach to strategic communication. Sounding themes from recent CSC [...]