75th Anniversary

Spotlight Series

Secret Soviet War Plans Hidden in Plain Sight

In the mid-1970s, CNA Sovietologists uncovered evidence "hidden in plain sight" that the Soviet Navy's plans for a war against the U.S. were totally unlike the war the Pentagon was expecting to fight. Greeted initially with skepticism, CNA's open-source "bastions" analysis was vindicated years later by intelligence intercepts. One of the primary analysts in this groundbreaking work, Brad Dismukes, returns to CNA to recount the tale. He is joined by CNA's Peter Swartz, who carries the story into the 1980s, as CNA helped the Navy revise its war plans to take on Soviet bastions.

Reliving the U-Boat War

Stephen Budiansky, author of Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare and our own Brian McCue, who has also written extensively on anti-submarine warfare in World War II, explore everything you never knew about the first days of CNA, the birth of operations research, and an underwater peril so menacing that Churchill said it "gnawed my bowels."

The Counter-IED Fight

In the summer of 2004, Ed Michlovich and two other CNA analysts were visiting a base when a Marine "practically grabbed us by the collar." His fellow Marines were getting blown up every day in Iraq, and he pleaded for analysis to demonstrate whether a new counter-IED effort that was about to be cancelled was actually saving lives. Within weeks, Ed was briefing an astounded CENTCOM commander, and a major CNA program was born. Ed tells the story with the help of two CNA analysts who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, David Broyles and Mary Lauer.