The Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS) is not defeated despite the loss of the territory it claimed as its so-called ‘Caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria. It is stronger today than its predecessor Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was in 2011, when the U.S. withdrew from Iraq. AQI had around 700-1000 fighters then. ISIS had as many as 30,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria in August 2018 according to a Defense Intelligence Agency estimate. ISIS built from the small remnant left in 2011 an army ...Read more >

Politics are politics, but there are serious dangers in making claims about the ability to defeat terrorism in general – and ISIS in particular. One of the most critical limits to the way both Democratic and Republican Administrations have fought the “war” on terrorism is that they have treated it largely as a military struggle against individual terrorist and extremist movements, rather than as a broader campaign to deal with a range of threats that cannot be defeated without ...Read more >

The U.S. State Department has just published its annual country reports on terrorism. In the past, most of the resulting commentary has focused on the narratives in the main ...Read more >

In recent years, the United States military has become increasingly interested in military operations on urbanized terrain ...Read more >

The contemporary international security environment has become a frustrating place for Western powers. Even with great technological and military advances, British and U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) operations have been slow ...Read more >

The financing of terrorism and its related activities may be ages old, however, formal direction to counter this threat is a relatively new phenomenon.While initiatives commenced internationally in ...Read more >

This is the second edition of the Global Terrorism Index (GTI)report which provides a comprehensive summary of the key global trends and patterns in terrorism over the last 14 years beginning in 2000 and ending in 2013. ...Read more >

Countering terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) today is a complex endeavor. Heightened political turmoil combined with socioeconomic pressures creates conditions conducive to armed militant activity. ...Read more >

Terrorists are known to use the Internet for communications, planning, recruitment, propaganda, and reconnaissance.They have shown interest in carrying out cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructures, although no such serious attacks are known publicly to have ...Read more >

Terrorists are known to use the Internet for communications, planning, recruitment, propaganda, and ...Read more >

The Navy for several years has carried out a variety of irregular warfare (IW) and counterterrorism (CT) activities. Among the most readily visible of the Navys recent IW operations have been those carried out by Navy sailors serving ashore in Afghanistan and ...Read more >

Counterterrorism professionals routinely face decisions that appear to require trade-offs between moral values such as privacy, liberty and security, and broader human rights ...Read more >

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. ...Read more >

This artile address why counterinsurgency is not, in fact, a strategy and why the United States will neverthless need to retain a counterinsurgency capability. It futher examines the drivers of modern insurgency; the range of counterinsurgency approaches that have worked ...Read more >