Twenty-five years after 9/11, the surveillance infrastructure built and expanded in its aftermath has become part of a far larger digital ecosystem — producing tools that can collect and analyze information on a scale unimaginable in 2001.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did more than reshape the nation’s approach to terrorism. They changed the architecture of American intelligence and policing. They expanded how government agencies collect, share and analyze information, and brought national security tools deeper into ordinary law enforcement.

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The case for racing to dominate the cognitive domain is, by now, familiar.

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Belated parliamentary funding for Taiwan’s drone program isn’t likely to satisfy President Lai Ching-te. Nonetheless, pressure from Washington has evidently helped achieve spending authorization for this key part of the government’s effort to adopt a hedgehog defense strategy.

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Operation Epic Fury and the ongoing conflict with Iran have pushed a long-simmering problem onto the front page: the U.S. military does not have enough of the weapons and platforms it needs to deter and fight wars. The consequences are reverberating not just in the Middle East, but around the world. 

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Reports from the USS Abraham Lincoln describe a crew running on almost no sleep and suffering mental strain.

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According to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, North Korea is preparing to send as many as 50,000 fresh troops to support Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. While the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been unable to verify Zelensky’s claim, it has not fallen on deaf ears in Seoul.

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President Donald Trump’s instruction to the Pentagon on Sunday to ‘substantially reduce’ joint military exercises with South Korea comes at a particularly difficult moment.

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As vice president and director of RAND Global and Emerging Risks, Matan Chorev oversees research on some of the most consequential challenges facing the United States and the world. That portfolio ranges from the rapid advance of artificial intelligence to growing 

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In October 2022, Biden administration officials feared that Russia might use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. For more than a decade prior, Western strategists had debated whether Russia’s nuclear strategy included an option to “escalate to deescalate” a conflict using a nuclear weapon.

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The Trump administration’s decision to put $85.5 million of U.S. government money into a bauxite operation in Guyana looks, at first glance, like an oddity. Bauxite is not itself on the U.S. government’s list of critical minerals; Guinea, not Guyana, is the world’s largest bauxite producer; and Guinea is an Atlantic-facing country with which Washington has been seeking closer economic ties. Why, then, is the Pentagon putting equity capital into a Guyanese mine?

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In an essay in The Atlantic titled “In Defense of Flock,” the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman rightly recognizes a foundational principle of criminology: The certainty of apprehension serves as a potent crime deterrent. Yet, in framing automated surveillance as a technological panacea, Lehman ignores the critical trade-off at the heart of a free society.

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A robot was on fire. Again.

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The following is a speech delivered by ASPI executive director Justin Bassi at the Australian Defense Science, Technology and Research Summit, held in Adelaide from 4 to 6 August 2026.

Just over 10 years ago, I sat in the oval office with my then boss Malcolm Turnbull and President Obama listening to them debate the Thucydides Trap. This is a theory that has made Graham Allison famous but for which, in my view, there is no modern-day example – where the established power is so anxious about the rising power that it strikes at the rising power and starts a war.

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When a blue force commander says during an after-action review, “We are f—cked,” you know there’s a huge problem.

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Military protection has never existed simply to keep soldiers alive or platforms intact. Its enduring purpose has always been to preserve freedom of action: the ability of a force to maneuver, fight and impose its will despite enemy action. Rather than being ends themselves, armor, fortifications, missile defenses, electronic warfare and deception have preserved combat power by preserving the force’s freedom to act.

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Operation Epic Fury, which began on Feb. 28, has showcased a formidable display of airpower. U.S. aircraft have struck targets including air defenses, coastal surveillance systems, command and control facilities, missile and drone sites, naval forces, and communications networks.

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Today, before a tank explodes, before a trench is overrun, and before an artillery battery is silenced, someone is usually recording.

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Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are changing the nature of modern warfare through AI-enabled decision-making.

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