US Marines – Marines Dispute Accounts of Excessive Force in Afghans' Deaths

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New York Times – When a suicide bomber struck a convoy carrying special operations marines along a highway in northeastern Afghanistan in March, the blast killed one bystander and wounded one marine and three Afghans in a nearby vehicle, a military police report said.

What came next – a lethal response by the Marine platoon along a seven-mile stretch of road that American military commanders say killed about a dozen civilians – caused outrage among Afghan villagers and criticism from high-ranking Afghan officials about the rising civilian toll in American military operations.

But as a Marine general is mulling whether to bring charges against a handful of the 30 Americans involved in the episode, lawyers for two of the marines, including a company commander riding in the convoy, are disputing the official military and Afghan descriptions of their actions that morning.
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Intelligence – Virtual Earth image reveals Trident sub's secret propeller

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Navy Times – This month, a photograph appeared on the Internet of the propeller on an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at Trident Submarine Base in Bangor. A key to the submarine’s ability to deploy and remain undetected, propeller designs have been kept under wraps for years, literally. When out of the water, the propellers typically are draped with tarps. The propeller image appeared on Microsoft’s mapping tool, Virtual Earth.
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Fourth Generation Warfare – The Coming Urban Terror

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City Journal – John Robb nicely summarizes his work on Global Guerrilas in this essay where he notes that for the first time in history, a majority of the worldís population is living in urban environments. Cities – efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital – are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.
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Intelligence – Overhauling Intelligence

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Foreign Affairs – Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.
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Information Warfare – Arab Media and the Battle for Ideas

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First Monday – David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, authors of Netwar, write:

As the information age deepens, a globe-circling realm of the mind is being created – the ìnoosphereî that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified 80 years ago. This will increasingly affect the nature of grand strategy and diplomacy. Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noˆpolitik (or noˆspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authorsí views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non-state actors – unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates – are using the Internet and other new media to practice noˆpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins – the essence of noˆpolitik – is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas
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