The United States regularly tests its ability to respond to disasters, cyber incidents, terrorist attacks, financial shocks, and military crises. The Department of War exercises combat forces, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) works with critical infrastructure operators, states rehearse emergency response, and financial regulators stress-test banks. These efforts often involve multiple agencies, regional partners, and pre-positioned resources. Yet...

The security environment across Africa has undergone profound changes over the past two decades. While conventional interstate warfare remains relatively rare, African countries increasingly face a broad spectrum of irregular threats that challenge state authority, undermine economic development, and threaten regional stability. These threats extend beyond traditional military concerns, encompassing violent extremism, organized crime, cybercrime, piracy, human trafficking, disinformation, climate-related...

A “convergent” process is one built to narrow a range of possibilities down to a single answer. The joint doctrine of the United States military is one such convergent process. However, the act of attempting to reduce a complex problem set down to a single “right” answer is a fool’s errand, a gap that joint doctrine actually admits. Joint Publication...

In 2005, in The Singularity Is Near, computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil re-iterated his prediction that we would reach human level Artificial Intelligence (AI) by 2029. That prediction may yet come to pass, as current trends suggest that frontier AI models being built by U.S. private industry today are at least approaching human-level intelligence. Here, frontier AI models are...

This is Part II of a two-part article. Part I provides a very brief history of post-World War II regime change operations and identifies the four factors that make U.S.-sponsored regime change most likely to succeed in the long term. Three of these factors concern the means and motives for sponsors of the old regime and spoilers of the new...