Category: Featured

In 2014, ISIS racked up a series of stunning successes as it pushed through Iraq and Syria, gaining momentum and new recruits with each victory. But in recent weeks, Syrian government forces liberated the city of Palmyra from ISIS, signifying a broader retreat for the extremist group over the past year. Can ISIS survive the […]

The CIA unearths some pretty interesting materials and this week it was touting the oldest once-classified documents in is collection. The mostly cryptic documents, from 1917 and 1918 describe secret writing techniques are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Any documents describing secret writing fall under the […]

In a speech entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered April 23, 1910 in Paris, President Theodore Roosevelt said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is […]

ISIS has been generating millions of dollars through the sale of women and children abducted from the regions it has conquered. While the Yazidi slave trade is well publicized in the West, we also chillingly learned through our ISIS Defectors Interview Project, that ISIS has not only enslaved Yazidi women (who they claim as devil worshippers), […]

MARSOC Fox Company received an official “gag order” preventing any communication with the media—until now.

Last summer I paid a visit to Georgetown University’s Lauinger Libraryas part of my research on legendary CIA counterspy James Jesus Angleton. I went there to investigate Angleton’s famous mole hunt, one of the least flattering episodes of his eventful career. By the early 1960s, Angleton was convinced the KGB had managed to insert a penetration agent […]

The first position that I held in Ranger Battalion was light/heavy machine gunner.  It was our job to become efficient with just about every light or heavy machine gun in our arsenal, including various grenade launchers. The majority of the time, we would carry our ammo in a small backpack and only feed the gun a 50-100 […]

Jordan’s special forces team, grouped under Jordan’s Joint Special Operations Command, is 14,000 strong and is one of the most effectivefighting and intelligence forces in the region. Jordanian special forces frequently train alongsideUS forces. Meanwhile, Jordan is a global center for special forces training operations. Jordan’s King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) is the centerpiece of the country’s Special Operations capabilities […]

Army CPT Bradley Grimm received the Danish Defense Medal for Special Meritorious Effort for his role in stopping an attack on a school in Denmark.

In armed conflicts of the past, the “fog of war” meant a lack of data. In the era of ubiquitous pocket-sized cameras, it often means an information overload. Four years ago, when analysts at the non-profit Carter Center began using YouTube videos to analyze the escalating conflicts in Syria and Libya, they found that, in […]

Reza, a 20-something mechanical engineer working at an automotive parts factory in the northeastern Iranian city of Sabzevar, takes his web videos seriously. He’s watched the TED talk of amputee snowboarding champion Amy Purdy“over and over again.” The YouTube videos of Boston Dynamics robots Big Dog and Cheetah, which most of us find creepy, he describes as inspirational. “I […]

Media leaks have revealed that Pakistan’s powerful army chief General Raheel Sharif has sacked at least twelve senior army officers because of their involvement in ‘corruption’. The army has not provided more details about the nature and scale of corruption these officers were involved in. This is an extraordinary development given the fact that the military, the […]