The Director of National Intelligence last week named Roslyn A. Mazer of the Department of Justice to be the next Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. What makes this an intriguing appointment is that from 1996 to 2000 Ms. Mazer was the first chair of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals […]
“Tactics in Counterinsurgency” (large pdf), a new Army Field Manual that was published on the website of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and then removed from public access, is now available on the FAS website. The new manual, a substantial addition to the literature of counterinsurgency, was reported last week in the Washington Post […]
The curious refusal of the Central Intelligence Agency to provide online access to its “CREST” database of declassified documents was examined last week in Mother Jones magazine. “In a quiet, fluorescently lit room in the National Archives’ auxiliary campus in suburban College Park, Maryland, 10 miles outside of Washington, are four computer terminals, each providing […]
Despite a world of advice to the contrary, the North Koreans launched their Taepodong-2 or Unha rocket yesterday morning. Recent reports are that the first two stages operated correctly but the third stage failed. Reading between the lines a bit, it might have failed to ignite rather than exploding. This seems to be a replay […]
Though the nuclear arsenal of the United States is smaller than it was during the Cold War, the day-to-day deployment of forces has changed very little. The United States still has weapons ready to launch at a moment’s notice at all times. This report describes how to reduce the nuclear missions to one: a minimal deterrence of nuclear attack.
Indications are that North Korea is moving ahead with its planned launch of a missile with the intent of placing a satellite into orbit. The North Koreans are portraying the launch in purely innocuous, civilian terms even naming the rocket “Unha,” which means “Milky Way” in Korean, to emphasize its space-oriented function. In the West, […]
The Director of National Intelligence has failed to exercise adequate leadership of the Intelligence Community (IC), which continues to suffer from poor integration, unjustified barriers to information sharing, and other defects, according to a remarkably critical November 2008 report of the ODNI Inspector General (pdf) that was released yesterday. Even within the Office of the […]
The Department of Energy this week released its most recent compilation of all decisions to declassify nuclear weapons-related information. The new release (pdf), dated 2002, is the eighth and the last in what had been an annual series of such compilations. Unlike the others, however, it was marked “Official Use Only” and was not made […]
Noteworthy new documents on military doctrine of one sort or another include the following (all pdf). The participation of U.S. armed forces in humanitarian assistance operations abroad is governed by “Foreign Humanitarian Assistance,” Joint Publication 3-29, 17 March 2009, 223 pages. Almost every function or task performed by the U.S. Army is captured and organized […]
Last month, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana announced the adoption of what it calls a “100 percent shred policy for all paperwork and materials generated on base” as a way of eliminating unauthorized disclosures. “Shredding is vital to the overall security of our base and our mission,” said Eileen Gallagher, 341st Communications Squadron Base […]
When Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year, it enacted a requirement that the Inspectors General of agencies that participated in the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program must prepare a comprehensive review of that program, which was conducted from 2001 to 2007 outside of the FISA legal framework that normally regulates intelligence surveillance. […]
The structure and operation of China’s growing news media sector were examined by the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Open Source Center in two previously unpublished reports. “Sweeping social and economic changes triggered by more than two decades of reform in China have led to equally sweeping changes in China’s vast, state-controlled media environment, particularly in the […]