• The National Clandestine Service is growing

    ASPEN, Colo. — A military human intelligence organization that has faced headwinds in recent years is still growing in size, the Pentagon’s former intelligence chief said on Thursday. Michael Vickers, until recently the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that the Defense Clandestine Service is still expanding and will continue to work alongside the military and other agencies in national intelligence-gathering efforts. He said the agency would be crucial in the wide-ranging fights the U.S. faces. – Defense One

  • Freeman Dyson Takes on Climate Change alarmism

    On March 3, The New York Times Magazine created a major flap in the climate-change community by running a cover story on the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson that focused largely on his views of human-induced global warming. Basically, he doesn’t buy it. The climate models used to forecast what will happen as we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere are unreliable, Dyson claims, and so, therefore, are the projections. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, his first since the Times article appeared, Dyson contends that since carbon dioxide is good for plants, a warmer planet could be a very good thing. And if CO2 does get to be a problem, Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess. – Michael Lemonick for Yale

  • The Taliban Hunters(Video)

    Pakistanis have long been among the world’s biggest victims of terrorism, with only Iraq and Afghanistan suffering more fatalities as a result of terror attacks in recent years. For more than a decade the tribal belt in northern Pakistan has been the backdrop for the battle with the Taliban. More recently the militants have moved into Pakistan’s cities, with Karachi becoming a focal point. I spent three weeks on the frontline embedded with Karachi police with a squad that has become known as the Taliban hunters. – BBC

  • Canadian Jihad

    The border that terrorists are most likely to cross into the United States is not the one with Mexico, but Canada. Ignore growing Muslim fundamentalism and extremism in Canada at your peril. That’s the message an increasingly vocal number of moderate and secular Canadian Muslims and counterterrorism experts want to send to the United States and the rest of the world. The attention focused last week on the Ontario branch of al-Huda, the same religious school the San Bernardino killer Tashfeen Malik attended in Pakistan, is just one example of increasing Saudi-funded Islamic fundamentalism all over Canada. – The Daily Beast

  • America is not culturally ready for gray wars

    As Washington struggles to respond to brutal acts of violence from Syria to San Bernardino, much of the conversation is about the size and scope of our response to defeat our enemies. Although Americans by now understand that we are not in a traditional war against an armed state, we still fail to comprehend the true complexities and profound challenges of conducting a broad range of military and law enforcement actions in smaller, less straightforward operations against terrorists and their organizations. – Defense One

[Featured image: HARAZ N. GHANBARI/AP]