Although a dwindling number of Americans truly care about what happens elsewhere in the world, those who still do might believe, as former government officials have described it, that "the world is aflame," "there are fires burning everywhere," "many places around the world that we have interests ... are perilous," "the trend towards a more chaotic world is not going to change anytime soon," or "to put it mildly, the world is a mess." Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently declared: "The challenges and threats that face America today are the same challenges and threats that face the world. These are all borderless challenges.... Terrorism, fundamentalism, all these are threats, and they come from all parts of the world." Accordingly, somehow all countries are both unsafe and sources of all dangers.

Don't worry if you missed it. I mean, what do you buy for the drone war that has everything? Yes, the 10-year anniversary of the CIA's drone strike campaign in northwest Pakistan unsurprisingly passed without mention in Washington, but it has potential lessons for the unfolding deterioration of security in Iraq, as the Islamic State (formerly ISIS or ISIL) continues to seize territory, declaring an Islamic caliphate over portions of Iraq and Syria.

Just two days after the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) captured territory and military installations in Iraq, Washington foreign policy commentators and policymakers are considering options for responding. And unsurprisingly, the scope of the debate about what to do in Iraq has broken down into bombing, or not bombing. Sen. Lindsey Graham declared on the Senate floor, "I think American airpower is the only hope to change the battlefield equation in Iraq." President Barack Obama later said "I don't rule out anything," to which White House Press Secretary Jay Carney later explained, "We are not contemplating ground troops. The president was answering a question specifically about air strikes." The debate shrinks immediately around whether and how to use the tactic of force.

Since one-year anniversaries are deemed appropriate occasions to revisit major policy initiatives, get ready for a glut of articles reviewing U.S. drone strike policies since President Barack Obama's May 23, 2013, counterterrorism speech at the National Defense University (NDU). This speech was the culmination of a series of interagency reviews into controversial U.S. targeted killings policies, which the Obama administration decided to give because it was concerned that its ability to conduct drone strikes -- like other controversial counterterrorism tactics -- could become unduly constrained by domestic and international political pressure, or the denial of basing and overflight rights. The speech may have been criticized for being a whole lot of nothing, but the cynic could argue that it's been effective. Indeed, there is little domestic or international pressure to change anything; the drone strike program continues apace and the United States is reportedly likely to retain access to Jalalabad Airfield in Afghanistan to continue drone strikes into northwest Pakistan.

In my last column, I wrote about Gravity and the threat of thousands of shards of space debris ripping through America's orbiting satellites -- and the global governance challenge that poses. This column considers the more prosaic, though important, matter of how U.S. civilian and military officials think about national security space issues. Indeed, one common concern that I have heard from government space officials and staffers is that senior civilian officials rarely think about the domain at all. When they do, it is primarily about "stars and the space shuttle," as one State Department official described it, or that space is an unfettered celestial extension of the blue skies above them.