This story is being cross-posted with Foreign Policy.
Inside the White House, opponents of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s second national security adviser, want him out. This week, they’ve made their campaign against him public, leaking to reporters details about the rocky relationship he has with his boss and trying to paint him as someone hell-bent on overseas nation-building projects that are doomed to fail.… continue »
The Massive Ordnance Air Blast Weapon (MOAB, known informally as the “Mother of All Bombs” and formally as the Guided Bomb Unit, or GBU, 43/B) has attracted a great deal of attention since it was dropped on ISIS fighters in eastern Afghanistan on 13 April. … continue »
President Donald Trump has been in office for 83 days, and almost everywhere you look, the US military is escalating its operations. US warships are steaming toward North Korea, airstrikes against al-Qaeda in Yemen have ramped up, and, in the biggest show of force so far, the Trump administration bombed a Syrian airfield last week.… continue »
When I graduated from West Point in 2009, the war in Afghanistan was one of the hottest topics. President Barack Obama’s campaign and young presidency had been defined, in large part, by the debate about what should be done in Afghanistan.… continue »
Today, the UK Supreme Court gave judgment (full text) in the joined appeals of Al Waheed v Ministry of Defence and Serdar Mohammed v Ministry of Defence (in which I represented the First Interveners, with Paul Luckhurst). It is the latest in the post-Al Skeini line of cases in which English courts, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have grappled with the application of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to extra-territorial military operations carried out pursuant to UN Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs).… continue »
The election of Donald Trump has triggered an anxious conversation about how President Obama can entrench some of his accomplishments before January 21, 2017. Importantly, given the Trump campaign’s embrace of waterboarding and “worse”, President Obama would do well to ensure that he has fully dismantled the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation system.… continue »
The Pentagon will soon have permission from Congress to make condolence payments to the families of civilians killed or injured by American airstrikes in Syria, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. The new funding is buried deep in the annual defense policy bill, which is quickly on its way to becoming law.… continue »
Given the importance of tonight’s prime-time debate between US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, we’re again running our list of vital national security questions we want to see both candidates answer. The list below was originally compiled by a group of Just Security’s editors and contributors ahead the Commander-in-Chief Forum that took place earlier this month.… continue »
A few days ago, it was reported that British special forces had used a deadly new weapon, nicknamed the Punisher, in a confrontation with ISIL in the Libyan city of Sirte (see here and here (“Who Dares Punishes” in the usual subtle tone of the Sun)).… continue »
This post is the latest installment of our “Monday Reflections” feature, in which a different Just Security editor examines the big stories from the previous week or looks ahead to key developments on the horizon.
So it has come to this.… continue »
