National Security & Counter Terrorism

Anyone who has flown over the past year knows that face coverings are required in airports and on commercial flights. This has become the standard for air travel. Yet a mandate is only as good as its compliance and enforcement.

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) has been busy in recent months, as it should be. The stakes are high when you look at the role artificial intelligence will play at nearly every level of national security in the years ahead. To underestimate the impact of AI on our nation’s safety and security is to do so at great risk. The biggest risk would be to neglect the recruitment, retention and training of elite human warfighters who will drive the successful deployment of AI. Like many in the fields of operations research, analytics, and data science, we have been closely following the work and recommendations of the NSCAI  with a keen and specific eye as veterans.

We welcome the new year with nearly 22 million confirmed covid-19 cases and 365,000 deaths. The U.S. leads the world in total confirmed cases and deaths, while also ranking second in confirmed cases per capita and seventh in deaths per capita (for countries with a population over 10 million). The impact of covid-19 on our nation has not only been significant in absolute terms, but also significant relative to other countries. Even amid the covid-19 threat, air travel has grown steadily since the summer. In December 2020, over 26 million passengers were screened, slightly more than in November, and the highest monthly total since February 2020 before covid-19 reduced air travel.

The number of active cases of COVID-19 among Transportation Security Administration officers reached 886 people on Dec. 15. To date, over 4,000 officers have tested positive, with 11 fatalities. In addition, over 90% of infected TSA officers perform checkpoint screening, placing them in direct contact with passengers.

The number of people flying on commercial jetliners is down 75% from last summer, but the rate of those getting caught either inadvertently or deliberately trying to bring a gun on board is soaring. Transportation Security Administration officers are finding guns in carry on bags at security checkpoints at a rate three times higher than they did last summer. And 80% of those guns are loaded.

The coronavirus era has intensified the strategic decoupling between the United States and China. At this historical juncture, supply chains are now deemed the critical strategic drivers of regional and global security dynamics, business operations and the engine of economic activity.  

San Antonio received $9.2 billion in export revenue in 2017, which supported almost 28,000 jobs in the state, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Texas has enjoyed an annual 6 percent export growth rate since 2002 — almost double the national average of 3.6 percent, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Researchers from the U.S. Army and North Carolina State University have developed a computational model that can be used to expedite military operations aimed at evacuating noncombatants, disaster response or humanitarian relief.

The United States government is tightening security by providing a higher level of identification validation. This isn’t new -- the REAL ID Act passed in 2005 -- but it’s taking effect next year. It was passed in an effort are to make it more difficult to counterfeit peoples’ identity and personal information using their identification cards (IDs) like state driver’s licenses. The problem is, how much good will it do if people who need to update their IDs to this higher security format don’t know they need to do so?

According to new research in the INFORMS journal Organization Science, in countries facing severe threat of armed conflict, ties to military officers can help a company survive.