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One of my all-time favorite movies is “Task Force” starring Gary Cooper.  It came out in 1949 and details the birth of naval aviation.  There’s a scene, where Cooper attends a fancy Washington, D.C. soiree.  He’s uncomfortable and clearly out of his element.  Matters are only made worse when a Senator comes up to him […]

There is always a danger in economies that are heavily dependent on one commodity to become states where conflict and power vacuums arise due to the concentration of power in one industry, and that industry having control of a large part of a national economy. External pressures for countries that are oil producers are the […]

  The U.S. cannot address today’s Russian military threat against Ukraine without addressing what military resources we have to back our diplomacy and to deter hostile moves backed by force.  Currently, no U.S. discourse guides policy makers toward an answer. The public expects a strong defense when we are afraid or when we are outraged […]

Following the release of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new energy plan, nuclear reactors are set to restart across the island nation three years after the Fukushima disaster, leaving many fearing another radioactive plume. Citing economic and environmental concerns, Abe unveiled his government’s 20-year Basic Energy Plan on February 25, which aims to restart at […]

Like many other African countries, Mozambique has enormous potential, but there are many gaps to fill. Led by its natural resources, the economy has been booming with real GDP growth reaching 7.4 percent in 2012, seven percent in 2013 and is predicted to reach 8.5 percent between 2014–16, according to the World Bank. London based […]

Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare, is a renowned investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy. Porter was the 2012 winner of the Gellhorn Prize for journalism awarded by the Gellhorn Trust in the U.K.  His previous book was Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the newest player in the U.S. Defense Department’s war on counterfeit* parts. Counterfeit parts, particularly electronics, have posed a huge threat for the Department of Defense for years, threatening the integrity a wide variety of systems, from helicopters to the computers for Missile Defense Agency’s Terminal High Altitude […]

In the first few months after Snowden’s leaks first exploded onto headlines, the public, and the media, struggled to fathom how private individuals figured into this story, and how close the U.S. had come to that “Orwellian state” Edward Snowden warned us of. If Google Trends are any indication, the story reached a peak in […]

We’re definitely not still stuck in the Cold War (although sometimes it feels that way), but there are some doozies from the mid-1900s that are worth remembering. In May 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency released a wave of highly-anticipated documents on some of the agency’s most infamous Cold War activities. One of the unveiled documents, entitled […]

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s major policy reform proposals, on everything from new taxes on soda pop to amending the 70-year constitutional prohibition on foreign investment in Mexico’s petroleum sector, have swept through that nation’s congress with breathtaking speed.

This is the first in a series of blogs I’ll write on the annual maritime related conference I recently attended co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute.  Both organizations are dedicated to providing forums for exchange of information on national security topics.  The conferences they put on feature speakers who are key leaders […]

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that more crude oil is being sent by sea and inland waterways as a supplement to railways and pipelines. Since 2010, the amount of oil shipped on barges from the Midwest down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico has increased 13 times. Much of this […]