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CTC: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, your military career, and the work you've done over the past several years? Specifically, how did you come into [...]

Mr. Caulfield's career in the United States Intelligence Community spanned approximately 39 years as a U.S. Navy Officer, civilian Senior Executive, and intelligence professional. Previous civilian Senior Executive positions include Chief of the DIA Forward Element Afghanistan, Chief of the DIA Liaison Office - Berlin, and Senior Defense Intelligence Expert for Strategy, Plans and Policy in DIA's Office of the Chief of Staff. Other positions involved all-source analysis, congressional testimony and speech writing, international partner engagement, human intelligence collection, targeting and battle damage assessment, operational support, and intelligence collection management. He is the recipient of numerous civilian and military awards and medals from the U.S. Navy, Defense Intelligence Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He earned a master's degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College and a bachelor's degree in Government and International Studies from the University of South Carolina., CTC: You have worked in the field of intelligence for nearly four decades, including considerable time spent with the U.S. Navy and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). What led you [...]

In a period of ongoing tensions between the United States and Iran, several practitioners have forecasted Iranian retaliation via proxy group. This article offers a high-level analysis of attack trends from 2008 to 2019 of Iranian proxies in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, using several open-source datasets. This study separates trends for Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) from other Iranian proxies given LH's unique partnership and organizational strength relative to other proxies. In a limited capacity, this study also compares and contrasts attacks and fatalities between LH, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and other non-LH proxies in Iraq and Syria for a handful of years, 2013 to 2019. First, the analysis highlights that LH, other Iranian proxies, and the IRGC entered and exited the Iraqi and Syrian conflict theaters at different times from 2013 to 2019: in Syria, LH-linked attacks preceded those attributed to the IRGC; meanwhile, other proxies focused attacks on the conflict in Iraq more so than in Syria. Second, when looking at the Middle East writ large, LH's annual attack and fatalities counts at times exceeded all other proxies' combined, in some years more than four-fold, while proxies and the IRGC had the top annual count twice. Finally, by way of comparison, there are fewer non-LH proxies and attacks in South Asia and Africa, regions where Iranian involvement is less tactical and more strategic, and seemingly managed through LH, formal politics, or other legitimate means, such as religious, educational, or cultural programs., The January 2020 strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF) commander Major General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi official Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy chief of the Popular Mobilization [...]

The launch of the Islamic State Khorasan (ISK) brand in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in 2014-2015 attracted droves of opportunistic and disgruntled militants from local groups. But the arrival of a new entrant in a crowded space also threatened existing groups' regional power and resources, leading to the inception of multiple rivalries, as evidenced via expressions of leaders' disapprovals and warnings toward ISK between 2014 and 2017. A close look at the incompatibilities between ISK and its rivals suggests continued resistance by groups whose relevance and resources are directly threatened by ISK's mission of a global caliphate., Expanding into new operational theaters can be a rewarding yet risky venture for transnational terrorist groups. Establishing a meaningful presence in a new region often depends on a new entrant's [...]