Nixon-era spies, it seems, were less inclined to spy on Americans than many Bush-era ones.

Let me explain: During the 1960s and 1970s, newly-released CIA documents reveal, the Agency mingled with mafiosi to off Fidel Castro, routinely spied on reporters, and detained a Soviet agent for more than five...

Improvised explosives are the biggest threat to U.S. troops in Iraq. So why is the Pentagon's premiere bomb-fighting organization only spending a quarter of its $4.4 billion budget? And why doesn't it have a clear plan for battling the deadly devices yet?

The U.S. military spends more on missile defense -- $9 billion a year -- than almost any other weapons system. So you'd think the missile shield might be able to take a little rain. But last summer, right as North Korea was prepping an advanced missile launch, floods

Alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an evil, evil guy, no doubt. But was he personally responsible for everything from Daniel Pearl's beheading to an African missile attack to an assassination attempt on Bill Clinton? Or was he deluded -- possibly by torture? Or even making an attempt...

The world is a complicated place. And the American government is having a tough time figuring out who's really on its side, these days. So I guess it makes sense that the Pentagon wants a software tool for determining the amount of "political will for reform and collaboration with...

For years, there wasn't much of anything a military bigwig could do to lose his job - well, nothing except contradict Donald Rumsfeld in public. But now that Rummy's gone, that may just be starting to change. Army secretary Francis Harvey has been pushed out, over the Walter...

The military is notorious for its lame, completely uninformative websites. Can you find the worst one?

We've got a new contest over at the DANGER ROOM, Wired's new national security blog. It's a hunt, to find the most mind-bendingly awful sites on the military web: the ones that...

The Defense Department is trying -- again -- to prove that Iraq's superbombs were made by weaponeers in Tehran. But the fact is, many, many groups now know how to make these deadly "explosively formed penetrators," or EFPs, which use an explosive charge to convert metal discs high-velocity,...

The Iran situation is looking worse and worse: Tehran is defiant about pushing ahead with its nuclear program; the White House is rattling sabers, loud.

But in the new International Atomic Energy Agency report, there are some glimmers of hope, amid the gloom. Center for Defense...

A little more than four years after I founded DefenseTech.org, I'm moving on, to work on a new project. And I think HuffPo readers are really going to dig it.

I'm starting a new blog for Wired. It's called DANGER ROOM. And it'll cover "what's next in national...

In its new budget for fiscal year 2008, the Pentagon says it'll parcel out about $142 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Defense Department doesn't really believe in its own figures, apparently. The number was was calculated before the new 35,00-48,000 troop...

There's been immediate fallout -- both physical and political -- from China's satellite killer test.

Debris from the orbital collision has already been spotted, the M-T Milcom blog notes. "As of this writing NORAD has officially cataloged 32 objects... that now pollute a vital area of space...

China has shown it can destroy a satellite in orbit. What could the U.S. do to stop Beijing, if it decided to attack an American orbiter next? Short answer: nothing.

It takes about 20 minutes to fire a ballistic missile...

Obviously, the giant news of the day is Bush's plan for more troops in Iraq. And I have to say, I'm having trouble getting my arms around the story. Because I can't find anyone -- anyone -- that thinks this "surge," this "escalation," is a good idea. That believes...

Since the start of the Iraq war, tens of thousands of heavily-armed military contractors have been roaming the country -- without any law, or any court to control them. Despite abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib and at Gitmo, despite springing an ex-minister from a Green Zone jail,...

In a war filled with too-strange-for-fiction tales, this may be the strangest yet. Was Iraq's former electricity minister, jailed on corruption charges, really "sprung from a Green Zone prison this weekend by U.S. security contractors?" If so, it's the latest chapter in an ugly story: guns-for-hire running...

Jeff Jonas is one of the country's leading practitioners of the dark art of data analysis. Casino chiefs and government spooks alike have used his CIA-funded "Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness" software to scour databases for hidden connections.

So you'd think that Jonas would be all into the idea...