Drone warfare has quickly become the norm. Since taking office, President Obama has carried out 300 more covert strikes than President Bush did in Pakistan alone, and he has opened new fronts in Yemen and Somalia. Meanwhile armed drones are taking on Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria, alongside manned aircraft. These new campaigns present importation questions about the way governments are using drones, where they are using them, and who is being affected. For instance, are drone strikes truly ‘risk free’? And are they lowering the threshold for war?
In 2014, ISIS shocked the world with their brutality and the speed with which they took a large swath of Iraqi and Syrian territory. One year later, most countries, including the United States, are still trying to figure out what is driving this group and how best they can be defeated.
Hostage-taking, particularly the capture of Westerners, has emerged as a prominent jihadist tactic in recent years. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS has executed four Americans it took hostage. In Pakistan, Al Qaeda has held Warren Weinstein, a 73-year-old aid worker and contractor, hostage since 2011. Many European countries have agreed to pay the demanded ransoms for their kidnapped citizens, while the United States refuses to do so. With the Obama administration conducting a months-long review of American hostage policy, what can be done to return Americans held hostage abroad?
In July 1997, Thomas E. Ricks wrote an article for the Atlantic that detailed the widening gap between the U.S. military and the American public. After following a platoon of Marine recruits through basic training and their post-graduation leave, he found that many of them felt alienated from their families and their friends – indeed, the very society they had sworn to defend.
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, thousands of digital volunteers mobilized online to support search and rescue efforts and human relief operations on the ground. These digital humanitarians used crowdsourcing to make sense of social media, text messages and satellite imagery, creating unique digital crisis maps that reflected the situation on the ground in near real-time.
The spring of 2015 marks the 4th anniversary of the Syrian Revolution. While current developments leave little hope for an end of the conflict in the near future, individual stories are often overshadowed by political battles. What started as a pacifist movement has transformed into a civil war earmarked by destruction and brutality of the Syrian regime and ISIS.
The US Department of Defense (DOD) has recently release a new Cyber Strategy, which provides the rationale for the DOD’s establishment of 133 Cyber Mission Team co-ordinated by a growing Cyber Command. Experts and government officials alike regularly point to the disruptive nature of new information technology and the potential for cyber conflict to transform warfare. But what changes are happening in practice? What is the actual impact that cyber conflict will have on international relations? Is that dialogue about cyber conflict in line with the reality?
When President George W. Bush ordered U.S. troops to invade Afghanistan in 2001, Robert Grenier, then the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, found himself directing the country’s “southern campaign” -- orchestrating the final defeat of the Taliban and Hamid Karzai’s rise to power in 88 chaotic days. What results is a post-9/11 race to unseat the Taliban and al Qaeda that forever changes the United States’ relationship with Afghanistan.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (often referred to as ISIS, ISIL, or The Islamic State) is becoming increasingly technically sophisticated in the way they target their adversaries. In late November 2014, a Syrian activist group running the non-violent campaign “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently,” which documents ISIS’s human rights abuses in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, received an anonymous email containing advanced malware.
Over the past year, much ink has been spilled on how women need to speak up and lean in – on how they need to be represented more and better across foreign policy institutions and in and on the media. According to the Op-Ed Project, women author only 10-20% of op-eds. Another way to look at the status quo: a woman over 65 is less likely to be cited as an expert in the media as a boy in the 13 to 18 age group. We can do better than this. But how?