by Bradley Hood, Student Contributor
American Military University

When I transferred to American Military University in 2009, I had a year of credits from a traditional brick-and-mortar university and the vague impression that my military training was worth something. At the time I was a junior Marine in the Selected Marine Corps Reserve, with only a few PME courses under my belt, and no idea where to even find a record or the value of these courses. Fortunately I had excellent leadership, and I was directed to acquire what was then known as a SMART Transcript. SMART stands for: Sailor/Marine American Council on Education Registry Transcript, the name fully explaining the use of its acronym.

by Kirk R GrayInMilitaryEducation.com Contributor

Today in my Google Alerts, I got an interesting alert. It’s for a report published by the Gov’t Accounting Office (GAO) and their findings of the VA’s administration of Education Benefits. Veteran education benefits came to the forefront of the media in the past couple of months, so the GAO publishing this report is very timely indeed.

One of the most important technological advancements to enhance the capabilities of law enforcement is the use of crime mapping software, which allows agencies to track crimes occurring in a jurisdiction. By plotting what, when, and where crimes are occurring, law enforcement executives can use the resulting visual data to identify crime hotspots and use this information to allocate resources to areas of repeated criminal activity.

There has been a major shift in national security thinking among many intellectuals and practitioners regarding the role of intelligence. Intelligence is not a replacement for national security policy, yet that seems to be what is happening today. AMU’s Dr. Lamont Colucci discusses the role of intelligence as the servant of a strategic national security policy not a replacement.

In June, AMU faculty joined a group of maritime and cybersecurity professionals to help the U.S. Coast Guard identify research topics needed to protect the nation’s ports and maritime environment from cyber attacks. Read more from AMU’s Dr. Joe DiRenzo about his experience at the Maritime Cyber Research Summit (MCRS) and the six research topics that were identified during the summit.