Medill graduate students explore the issues — and impact — of the NATO summit in Chicago and G8 meeting at Camp David, from the protests to the economy and military. → Complete package
Spend some time learning how to use Excel to analyze national security data in our new interactive guide. Your instructor: Brendan McGarry of Bloomberg News in Washington.
Introducing our first “NSZ Debrief,” a new series that focuses on how reporters got their stories. The inaugural edition examines the background of a new book on the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” by 27 veterans and service members, a think-tank expert, a professor and a journalist. It was published by the Marine Corps, which had urged Congress not to repeal the law. → Full Story
A new book from Josh Meyer of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative is “a gripping tale of international intrigue and a compelling portrait of one of the most evil men in history,” its publisher promises.
“The Hunt for KSM reads like a thriller but is all too real. It provides a window into the deep dysfunction that plagued the intelligence community before and after 9/11.”
Meyer and co-author Terry McDermott say Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the focus of the book, “is the prototype of the modern, stateless enemy likely to haunt the United States for decades to come.”
A three-month investigation by a team of Medill student reporters has found significant gaps between the health care and support for the 665,000 National Guardsmen and Reservists who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and their active-duty counterparts.
The project, called Hidden Surge, found that many have been hastily channeled through a post-deployment process that has been plagued with difficulties, including reliance on self-reporting to identify health problems.
These service members face unique challenges and report higher rates of some mental health problems and related ills than active-duty troops.
Work by the team of 10 students in Medill’s graduate journalism program was published The Washington Post and is available on the Hidden Surge web site. Students interviewed more than 80 current and former military and health officials and experts, and National Guard and Reserve troops and their families, and reviewed scores of official documents and reports. They traveled to military bases, National Guard installations and medical centers in nine states to do on-the-ground reporting.
→ Read Full Story
(Now Live!) We are pleased to present National Security Zone: War 2.0, a special report by NSZ Carnegie Fellow Sharon Weinberger, who spent the six months investigating social media and its opportunity to predict and perhaps even influence, future international events.
The Pentagon is now funding efforts to develop models that can predict rising insurgencies, or even identify ways to undermine covert terrorist networks. Military-funded researchers and private companies are looking at how to apply these models to cell phone records, online social networks, and data collected from numerous other online and public sources. This burgeoning field, which we call “War 2.0,” is a fast growing, but little examined phenomenon.
War 2.0 includes extensive original research on the growth of this field and catalogues the research projects run by various parts of the national security community; reports on how they’re being used operationally; and shows the connections between the entities funding and performing work in this burgeoning area.
Whether such efforts are successful or not, they are likely to influence national security strategy in the years ahead. See the complete package.
Josh Meyer, left, co-author of The Hunt for KSM, discusses his reporting for the book during his Crain Lecture Series appearance at Northwestern University in Early May. Both are faculty members of the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. Watch the video.
