In case you missed it: What’s been in the news?

Joshua Foust, who writes the excellent Registan.net blog, testified before the Senate about intelligence community contractors (his full comments are available in the link).  Meanwhile, Irvin Charles McCullough III promises to look into the activities of contractors if confirmed as the first Inspector General of the intelligence community.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal addressing past (and present) criticisms about the intelligence community’s inability to work as an integrated team and talks a bit about how 9/11 changed the IC’s mindset.

Admiral Mullen, who is retiring next week, is likely not amused by Pakistan's antics

Foreign Policy magazine has a very incomplete history of war games that illustrates how games that served as mental exercise became a valuable military tool in the Western world. (For a reminder of the importance of wargaming to the modern military, see this article from 2003 about Millennium Challenge 02 in the run up to the Iraq War.)

At the UN General Assembly, Iran is being Iran while PM Erdogan of Turkey is changing the formula of international relations in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Pakistan is barely pretending anymore as Admiral Mike Mullen says our ostensible ally’s Inter-Services Intelligence played a direct role in the attack against the US Embassy in Kabul last week. The Economist’s Clausewitz blog weighs in on the state of the US-Pakistan relationship.

The Bottom Line

The times they are a-changin’—unless you’re Iran or a government contractor, in which case you’re still crazy and raking in the dough.