Wildfires throughout the western United States, typhoons in Oceania, economic upheaval and pandemic across the globe; violent extremism is only one of the many catastrophes that are unfolding around us in this strange and unpredictable year. What is predictable is that most of us will continue trying to live our lives the best we can. It is also predictable that certain groups of people will continue to tear at the structures of society in the mistaken belief that building something new is no harder than destroying what exists.

At around 11 O’Clock in the morning on 18 March 2019, a fellow Marine and I were running through the woods near our base  in the Netherlands, chatting as we ran. It was warm, beautiful weather and we had a lot to talk about because we had not spoken to each other for some time. Suddenly, my cell phone rang.

The purpose of this essay is to introduce special operators to the concept of “movements of rage,” a distinctive form of violent sociopolitical movement that does not fit well into the common categories of terrorism, fourth wave religious terrorism, new terrorism, cosmic war, or other existing definitions of forms of political violence. 

On 31 January 2020, the National Security Affairs department of the US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, hosted Ambassador Feisal al-Istrabadi for a guest lecture with students and faculty. Afterward, he sat for an interview with Dr. Craig  Whiteside and Colonel Ian Rice (Retired) to discuss the rise and fall of ISIS in Iraq and prospects for the future of the US-Iraqi relationship.

As I write this, in the spring of 2020, I am living through the third month of California’s state-wide shelter-in-place order to control the spread of the novel coronavirus. My neighbor remains convinced that measures to control the coronavirus pandemic are part of a political plot by persons nefarious and unidentified. 

Most current cyber warfare games are developed to help businesses think through cyber crisis and incident response scenarios. By delving into actions and reactions, these commercial games reveal their roots in traditional military wargames; however, the scenarios they address apply only to the organizations for which they are built, and thus do not have extensive training and education applications outside such organizations. 

How far is a nation willing to go to protect itself from terrorists? In 1973, in Lillehammer, Norway, Israeli agents gunned down Ahmed Bouchiki in front of his pregnant wife. A Moroccan national who was married to a Norwegian citizen, Bouchiki had become a victim  of Israel's global targeted-killing program.

I was intrigued the first time I witnessed the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) using unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to attack Iraqi and Kurdish forces. In early 2018, Syrian rebels carried out the first documented drone swarm at-tack, using 13 drones to target Russian forces at Khmeimim Air Base and Tartus Naval Facility in Syria

These recent Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) Press publications are available electronically on the USSOCOM Research Library website in the JSOU Press Publications 2019 and 2020 sections:  https://jsou.libguides.com/jsoupublications