David E. Firester, Ph.D.

Political scientist. Senior intelligence analyst. U.S. Army veteran.

I write about intelligence failure, terrorism, and the moral reflexes that distort how the West reads conflict. My current writing is published on Substack; this site is the front door to it and the archive of the blog that preceded it.


Recent on Substack


Published Elsewhere

  • “A Target-Centric Approach to Distinguishing Between Terrorism and Guerrilla Warfare,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, January 2026. Read
  • “Congress Ordered an Annual Accounting of Terrorism. The Counting Has Stopped.” RealClearDefense, September 28, 2026. Read
  • “Hormuz to Nuclear Blackmail: Iran’s Targeting Strategy.” inFOCUS Quarterly, Jewish Policy Center, July 2026. Read
  • “The West Still Confuses Weakness with Virtue.” American Thinker, July 2, 2026. Read
  • “Iran Was Never Just Israel’s Problem.” The Algemeiner, March 26, 2026. Read
  • “How to Respond When Your Friends Cite Hamas’ Casualty Numbers.” The Algemeiner, February 17, 2026. Read

Full portfolio: Muck Rack


Books and Research

Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (TRAC Intelligence Press, 2025). Companion site | Amazon

“The Underdog Heuristic: Perceived Power Position and the Threshold of Moral Scrutiny.” Pre-registered experiment, preprint on Zenodo, September 2026. Read the preprint

The Underdog Heuristic: Power, Morality, and the Left’s Cognitive Shortcut. Book in preparation.


The posts I published here from 2012 to 2023 remain available in the Archive.