Blog Profile / Abu Muqawama
| URL : | http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Industries / Military | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1078 | |
| Posts / Week: | 5.3 | |
| Archived Since: | July 25, 2009 | |
Blog Post Archive
Some thoughts on blowback
In the aftermath of two men brutally slaughtering Lee Rigby in Woolwih, Jonathan Freedland wrote this column on responding to the motives of murderers: ... It seems we're ready to listen when we have some sneaking sympathy, not for the act itself, but for the cause it seeks to highlight... Show More Summary
Through a Murky PRISM
Edward Snowden is one of history's great actors. But not at all in the way you think of him. This entry once looked at the leak, but not much useful things can really be written at this stage in what looks to be a fairly complicated game (see the "Leaks, Politics, and Power" entry for the general leak cycle and its discontents). Show More Summary
Cook It Down
I am staying away from Twitter and most social media today, which has become mostly dysfunctional over the NSA stories. As with any other complicated topic dealing with national security, the vast majority of immediate output is garbage. Show More Summary
How NOT To Argue About Women in Combat
My views on women in close combat once hewed pretty close to those of our great Blogfather Exum. However, after reading Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization (as well as his other corpus) and hearing some convincing (and pessimistic) arguments from friends with extensive and varied downrange experience I've gone back to being merely agnostic. Show More Summary
Local Partners, War, and TANSTAAFL
Earlier this year, the Colombian military whacked "32 high-value narco-terrorists" with the help of US Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconaissance (ISR) platforms. Today, we now know that they are all Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) members from FARC, ELN, and Peru's Shining Path. Of course, this is hardly anything new. Show More Summary
I Might Need You To Kill: Signatures, Patterns, and Alternatives
From what we know from seemingly deliberate leaks on the eve of Obama’s major counterterrorism speech at the National Defense University last week, the most widely criticized ongoing aspect of America’s counterterrorism program, theShow More Summary
Nature's Not In It: A Special In Memoriam
Running through much common misunderstanding of drones, autonomous weapons,and modern warfare is a romantic fetish of the "natural" and a demonization of the machine. Dan Trombly and I have talked about it from the perspective of drones,...Show More Summary
Leaks, Politics, and Power
The Obama Administration's aggressive anti-leak campaign has further polarized an already fractious community of national security commentators. On one side, as Joshua Foust noted, DC's national security press corps and many national...Show More Summary
I Got 200 Million Problems, But Multicollinearity Ain't One
When even David Brooks, Herodotus of the Bobos, is waxing lyrical about data and empiricism you know that data science has become mainstream. Drew Conway is right that the phrase is rather clumsy, but so are many other things in social science. Show More Summary
The Mattis Book Club
I've always admired USMC general General James Mattis. I first encountered him when I read his scathing takedown of Effects-Based Operations (EBO) in 2008, and soon became familiar with his operational record in Iraq and endlessly entertaining quotables. Show More Summary
Israeli Bombs and American Qualms: Assessing Syria
The recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria, through which the Israeli Air Force appears to target weapons shipments bound for Hezbollah, provoked an important debate among those concerned about a U.S. military intervention in Syria. Given...Show More Summary
Guest Post: Syria - Remembering Reality
Uditinder Thakur is a foreign affairs analyst, focused primarily on issues related to the broader Middle-East and South Asia. A graduate of American University’s School of International Service, he holds a degree in International Studies with concentrations in U.S. Show More Summary
Bringing Structure Back to Irregular Warfare
Structural approaches to international relations have gone somewhat out of fashion in recent years. Burdened with their associations with Cold War geopolitics and “billiard ball” realism, structural questions seem peripheral to the major...Show More Summary
Cracking Defense's Crystal Balls
It's the Sequestration Game of Thrones, and a careful observer of DC defense politics will glimpse much tumult as the Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force all battle for supremacy through both official channels and favored proxies in the defense punditosphere. Show More Summary
The Limits of Proxy Warfare in Syria
With the drumbeat for directly joining Syria’s civil war growing, it probably should not surprise us that the U.S. governments quiet efforts to aid the Syrian rebels are now coming to light. Alongside insistent denials that the U.S.Show More Summary
Raw Power
Dan Drezner, in light of Moises Naim eloping with a book title he came up with last year (NB: Undead Power is still available if he wants to change his narrative tack, and this one’s on the house), recapitulates his own and highlights Naim’s argument hat power as we understand it in international affairs is fading into the background. Show More Summary
A Rack City on a Hill: Unsolicited Advice to Landpower and Seapower
One of the most thoroughly annoying things about American strategic debate is its thoroughly theological character. Landpower advocates will whip out their T.H. Fehrenbach quotes, ignoring the fact that Americans found the idea of putting their young men in Korean mud to be a distinctly undesirable notion. Show More Summary
Beyond Disruption
America’s war in Iraq came at a strange moment in technological history. The 21st century saw mass proliferation of affordable cellular telephony, altering not simply he way people kept in touch, but did business and waged war. For the U.S. military, cell phones posed a potentially dangerous problem. Show More Summary
Malthus > Muburak
Thomas Friedman is often the target of intense criticism for overly simplistic akes on international relations, the Middle East, business, and society. But he also should be commended when he does right, and this weekend he used hisShow More Summary
Policy Puzzles
What is the relationship between videogames and violence? Popular Science, reviewing a new psychology report, noted the obvious: it's inderminate. There are two camps of researchers, neither of which can collect enough conclusive evidence o provide strong confirmation for their hypotheses. Show More Summary