Noteworthy new directives and instructions issued by the Department of Defense, of interest to some, include the following. DoD Space Enterprise Governance and Principal DoD Space Advisor (PDSA), DOD Directive 5100.96, June 9, 2017 Global Health Engagement (GHE) Activities, DOD Instruction 2000.30, July 12, 2017 Assessment of Significant Long-Term Health Risks from Past Environmental Exposures […]
The nominee to lead the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel acknowledged that all members of Congress have the authority to conduct oversight of the executive branch, and that agencies have a responsibility to accommodate requests by members for information needed to perform their oversight function. That might seem like a statement of the obvious. […]
Last year, the National Archives (NARA) acquired a large number of historically valuable National Security Agency records. But they remain inaccessible to researchers, at least for the time being. David Langbart of NARA described the situation at a closed meeting of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee late last year. According to recently published minutes […]
Parliaments around the world have moved online, placing legislative information and other resources on public-facing websites. Fifty countries’ parliamentary websites — of differing degrees of depth and sophistication — were surveyed in a new publication from the Law Library of Congress. “While the information on the parliamentary websites is primarily in the national language of […]
By Hans M. Kristensen While defense hawks try to block funding for implementing the US-Russian New START treaty, the US military is making rapid process toward meeting the treaty limits by February 2018. The latest full declassified aggregate data for the US force structure under New START shows that both the ICBMs and bombers appear […]
Executive branch agencies that are not part of the US Intelligence Community (IC) can still get access to classified intelligence and to IC information technology systems under certain conditions. But they must follow procedures that were spelled out last month in new policy guidance from Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats. In a nutshell, […]
Some American cities and states are committing to pursue the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change despite President Trump’s repudiation of that policy. But a new brief from the Congressional Research Service said the US Constitution may limit the ability of states to formally adopt such a course. In particular, the Constitution appears […]
Cyberspace has increasingly become an arena of national self-assertion and international conflict instead of the transnational global commons it once seemed to be. Preserving the vision and the possibility of a free internet is an urgent task. That is the basic thrust of a new book called The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace by […]
Countering weapons of mass destruction is “an enduring mission of the U.S. Armed forces,” the US Army said last week in a new doctrinal publication. Counter-WMD operations are defined as actions taken “against actors of concern to curtail the research, development, possession, proliferation, use, and effects of WMD, related expertise, materials, technologies, and means of […]
After nearly six months in office, President Trump has not yet issued a classified presidential directive on national security. On June 16, Trump issued an unclassified National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on US policy towards Cuba, reversing or limiting some of the steps towards normalization of relations with that country that were undertaken by the […]
By Hans M. Kristensen The National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) at Wright-Patterson AFB has updated and published its periodic Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat report. The new report updates the previous version from 2013. At a time when public government intelligence resources are being curtailed, the NASIC report provides a rare and invaluable […]
By Hans M. Kristensen Voices in the United States are once again calling for new and better nuclear weapons. The claim is that adversaries somehow would no longer be deterred by existing capabilities and that new or significantly modified weapons are needed to better match the adversaries and more efficiently destroy targets with lower yield […]