Swiss ambassador Sabrina Dallafior, the newly elected director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), traveled to Damascusin mid-October. As the head of the international organization charged with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that bans chemical weapons, her visit marked Syria’s progress in closing the book on the nation’s decades-long chemical weapons program.

read more

On Monday, October 19, the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense hosted the virtual event “Russia’s Bioweapons Legacy and the Plague Scare.” The panel examined the death of a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia a

read more

Russian hostile activity costs the UK at least £2 billion annually, according to a recent report by Scottish MP Graeme Downie, who has called on the government to measure what these actions cost Britain. But this figure is just the baseline. In reality, a profound shift in Moscow’s approach to sabotage means the true cost is set to climb higher.

read more

In the day-to-day of the Iran war, it’s natural to feel a touch of whiplash. Are we on the verge of agreement or at the dawn of escalation? Is Iran on the edge of collapse, or is it expanding the conflict? Will the Strait of Hormuz return to the status quo ante, or will tolling and periodic attacks on shipping be the new normal? These are important issues but there are larger, more fundamental strategic shifts underway as well. Not since 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq has the Middle East been in this degree of strategic flux.

read more

Passive resistance to Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea is not working. If the United States wants to win in the region, it needs a grey-zone strategy of its own.

Beijing has spent a decade refining a playbook that stays deliberately below the threshold of armed conflict. Chinese coast guard ships ram Philippine vessels, maritime militia swarm disputed reefs, and drones shadow foreign ships. Washington’s response – patrols, joint statements and expressions of concern – has imposed few costs and changed little.

read more

Significant debates remain underway on some of the most essential aspects of the U.S. contest with China: the nature of the competitor, the main elements of the competition, a sense of what the competition is truly about, what success looks like, and a theory of success to bring about that end. What is clear is that the United States is dealing with a rival whose dynamism derives not from ideological expansion but from economic development, a growing influence in international institutions and processes, and an increasingly strong position in the fields of science and technology.

read more

AI weapons systems that are designed to learn and adapt could become increasingly difficult for humans to predict, explain and control. This creates an accountability gap that existing oversight mechanisms may not be equipped to close.

read more

There is a distinct possibility of an enormous war breaking out in the next few years over a Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan. To prevent such a catastrophe, the world’s leading democracies need to establish an alliance formidable enough to deter China from any such use of force.

The international situation at present bears some alarming similarities with the prelude to World War II. There has been a contest between democracy and autocracy, with autocracy advancing and democracy going slowly backwards for the past 20 years, according to Freedom House.

read more

At Gov. Greg Abbott’s direction, the Texas Department of Transportation has stopped issuing permits allowing Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers to be installed along state roads.

read more

A grassroots revolt against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has gained momentum across the United States.

ALPRs are AI-powered cameras that capture images of all passing vehicles. The camera systems turn details into datapoints searchable by anyone with access to the information.

read more

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a humanoid robot named Tiangong Ultra ran the 100-metre sprint in a staggering 8.64 seconds, shattering Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s legendary human world record of 9.58 seconds.

The internet laughed at the robots’ awkward, lurching finishes and spectacular falls – but the laughter masked a chilling reality.

read more

A series of developments over the past month has raised questions over how serious the U.S. Army is about integrating lessons on the changing character of warfare, and how it plans to fight in the future.

read more

September 11 marks one of the darkest days in US history. Terrorists murdered thousands of people on American soil, put countless people in fear for their safety, and left a scar in American history that can still be felt to this day. Yet what is less known is the financial surveillance that was expanded in the wake of the attack.

read more

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.

read more

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

read more