Insights

Ukraine strikes tankers in the Black Sea Bottom line The week's defining feature was the widening of the war beyond the air campaign that has dominated recent reporting. Ukraine's strategy of degrading Russia's war-sustaining capacity is biting harder: Russian oil refining has fallen to a 21-year low, fuel queues have formed across Russia, and Ukrainian strikes have knocked out roughly half of occupied Crimea's electricity. Russia's answer has been to open an economic front,

6 July Kyiv Attack Bottom line The defining development of the week is the collapse of Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian ballistic missiles. Ukraine’s Patriot PAC-3 interceptor stocks are effectively exhausted, and in the two most recent mass strikes, on 1 to 2 and 5 to 6 July, none of the ballistic missiles fired at Kyiv were stopped, against an interception rate of roughly one-third earlier in the war. Russia has recognized this and is now leading its strike packages w

Georgia is buying an anti-drone system. Read that as a defense upgrade and you'll get the story wrong. What was actually announced On July 1, 2026, Mamuka Mdinaradze, Georgia's Minister of State for Coordination of Law Enforcement Bodies, confirmed the government is acquiring a counter-UAV system alongside a nationwide expansion of facial recognition cameras. The system is described as capable of detecting and neutralizing several dozen drones within a fixed radius around a p

Russian strike on Kyiv kills at least 30 and injures 92, damaging more than 30 sites Bottom line The past week marked an escalation in kind, not only in degree. Ukraine formalized its coercion strategy with a 40-day campaign of mid and long-range strikes, announced on 25 June and intended to pressure Russia toward ending the war, and its campaign against Crimea moved from gradual isolation to a functional siege. Russia answered not with sustained tempo but with a single, exce

Thesis: The core failure mode in intelligence work is not a shortage of data but the inability to separate a meaningful signal from an ocean of irrelevant noise — and the 2020 seismic event at Lop Nur, only publicly attributed to a covert Chinese nuclear test in 2026, is a live case study of a signal that took years to be heard at all. The Problem Is Not Secrecy. It's Volume. The classic starting point for this argument is Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decis

Introduction Few claims circulate as confidently in contemporary defence commentary as the assertion that uncrewed aerial systems represent “the future of warfare.” The proliferation of first-person-view (FPV) drones in Ukraine and the employment of long-range loitering munitions across the Gulf have lent this view an air of inevitability. This article argues the opposite. Drones are not the future of warfare but the latest expression of a recurring historical pattern in whic

Introduction Security Risk Assessment is one of the central tools of security risk management. It is expected to help organizations understand threats, identify vulnerabilities, assess potential consequences, and make informed decisions about how to protect people, assets, and operations. However, in practice, many security risk assessments become overly standardized documents. They follow a familiar format, use a standard risk matrix, assign likelihood and impact scores, and

Bottom line The defining feature of the period since late May is a mutual escalation of deep-strike campaigns, each driving the other. Ukrainian forces are systematically degrading Russia's oil infrastructure and rear-area logistics, while Russia is answering with mass missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian cities and high-value symbolic targets. The Belarus signal-repeater confrontation and the Crimea isolation campaign are extensions of the same logic: Ukraine is widen

Mitigate Risk | Security Briefing | 24 June 2026 What Is Happening Multiple ceasefire attempts in Lebanon have failed to take hold. A US-brokered truce came into effect on 17 April 2026, was renewed on 3 June, and on 15 June the US-Iran agreement announced a "permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon." In practice, none of these frameworks has stopped the fighting. Israel's position has been consistent throughout: its forces will remain in

(Creator: Amr Alfiky | Credit: REUTERS) When the Islamic Republic of Iran initiated its retaliatory air campaign against Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states on 28 February 2026, the early performance metrics suggested a vindication of two decades of regional defense investment. The United Arab Emirates' Ministry of Defence reported the interception of more than 530 ballistic missiles and over 2,200 one-way attack drones during the campaign's first six weeks, with reported G

The Scene Nobody Connected A pharmacist in Germantown, Ohio fills prescriptions on a Tuesday morning. Shelves are stocked. Business is normal. Half a world away, 230 oil tankers sit stranded in the Persian Gulf, unable to move. These two scenes look unrelated. They are not. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury. Within days, Iran responded by effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow wa

We all believe we can spot danger before it strikes—until we realize that our methods for judging risk are often flawed. Let’s fix that. What Is Risk? In professional fields, risk is typically defined as likelihood × impact —a helpful formula for estimating how probable an event is and how severe its consequences might be. Essentially, during risk assessment, you assign a number to both the likelihood and the impact across different scenarios to guide decisions. ISACA Why We

At first glance, two squares on a chessboard seem completely different in color. But place them in a different context, and you realize they’re exactly the same. Our eyes were tricked by the surroundings. Risk assessments work much the same way — without context, what we think we “see” is often misleading. And just like the illusion, the consequences of misreading reality can be serious. In contemporary security practice, risk assessment is often portrayed as a rational, data

When we think of intelligence failure, we often focus on the intelligence cycle itself—collection, analysis, assessment, and dissemination. This cycle isn’t complete without feedback from the decision-maker to the intelligence apparatus, closing the loop. The implication here is straightforward: if a failure occurs at any stage—whether during collection, analysis, or dissemination—it falls under the umbrella of an intelligence failure. However, things get murky when issues ar

When conducting a security risk assessment, one of the most critical yet often overlooked elements is defining the timeline of the assessment. Is the assessment aimed at risks over the next two weeks, six months, or the next five years? The answer fundamentally shapes the outcome. In humanitarian work, where organizations operate in volatile regions like the Middle East, an accurate timeline can spell the difference between a plan that protects staff and assets effectively an