💡Moving on to some of our most popular intel articles, first up we have James Ramsey and Andrew Macpherson, who asked "Is the academy equipping tomorrow’s intelligence
professionals to analyze data-centric threats?" Read it here & in our upcoming 20th bday collection! 🎉 ➡️ doi.org/10.1080/1833...

Next up in our most popular and noteworthy policing articles, we have Sophia Yakhlef with "Humour, trust and tacit knowledge of police and border officers in international police collaboration". This one is open access & free to read! ➡️ doi.org/10.1080/1833...

Thanks so much Melanie, I’m extremely excited to be presenting there with you.

Yes, that’s exactly the one. But it also turned out that there‘s an extremely famous photo of a (non-foreign) militiaman playing a piano during the Lebanese civil war, so I wonder if a few different stories were just conflated together.

I remember a similar story, about a French sniper tourist in the Lebanese civil war, but the source was Robert Young Pelton so I can‘t put much stock in it.

From the ASIO DG’s Lowy speech: www.lowyinstitute.org/2025-lowy-le...

Out of interest what is the WOTR melodrama? (I’ve been looking for some explanation as to why it has changed in the way it has)

Little blast from the last there, I think I can remember you proposing that WOTR should have footnotes way back when it was first established.

Good luck!!

Just Security? Lawfare? Both more law-focused though. I would have said The Strategy Bridge if still around.

They were a brilliant publication for many years, but this year (and probably building up earlier) it has felt like they exist in a different reality.

Yeah, and this paragraph was just a rant of “realist warriors being sidelined by bean-counting managerialists”, which is such a widespread cliche that I saw almost the exact same claim being made a day a two earlier in an article by MLR Smith and someone else in Military Strategy Magazine.

That was what I initially hoped the article would be!

Oh that’s a good article, much more grounded.

I tend to resist “they’ve sold out” as explanations for intellectual changes. But their identity has noticeably changed in a way that, say, Lawfare’s hasn’t. And their articles often indeed tend to feel like they have a far weaker relationship with reality than before.