WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- For years, I have warned in these columns and elsewhere that the future weapon of mass destruction we should most fear is not a nuke. Rather, it is a genetically engineered plague, a plague no one has ever seen before and against which no one has any immunity. In the time it would take to identify the new disease, develop a vaccine, distribute the vaccine and have it become effective, modern societies could suffer death rates equivalent to those of the Black Death: up to two-thirds of the population.

WASHINGTON, May 14 (UPI) -- A story I read years ago culminated with the protagonist holed up in a cheap hotel in the Balkans, listening unwillingly through the paper-thin wall as the man in the room next door beat his wife. As he pummeled her, she cried again and again, "Balkan! Balkan!" "Balkan," it seems, may be a term of opprobrium even in the Balkans.

WASHINGTON, May 8 (UPI) -- Small professional armies are much more popular for large, prosperous, secure nations and empires to run than massive conscript armies. That is why the army of the Roman Empire for hundreds of years was far smaller than the enormous citizen armies that the old Roman Republic was able to raise in earlier centuries from a seemingly limitless reservoir of sturdy yeoman farmers in the Italian peninsula.

WASHINGTON, May 6 (UPI) -- Getting a plague started is tricky. It needs to achieve critical mass before it is detected. Mexico is just the petri dish that a fourth-generation war attacker wanting to destroy the United States would need.

WASHINGTON, May 5 (UPI) -- Thus far, the great swine flu "pandemic" exists mainly in newspaper headlines. "World ends tomorrow" always sells a few extra papers. I'm waiting for The Onion: "Pigs flu."

WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- Why are U.S. soldiers blocked from accessing useful sources of information from many reputable institutions, including from some Washington-based think tanks, on computers that are operated by the U.S. Department of Defense itself?

WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) -- As we have witnessed in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, our satellite-photo-addicted intel shops can't tell us much. But there is a vast amount of fourth-generation war material available through open sources: Web sites by and about our opponents, works by civilian academics, material from think tanks, reports from businessmen who travel in areas we are interested in. The pile is almost bottomless.

WASHINGTON, April 27 (UPI) -- The current political establishment of the United States -- both Republican and Democratic, liberal and supposedly conservative -- is drunk on hubris, cut off from the world beyond court politics and thoroughly corrupted by Pentagon "business as usual," which knows how to buy whatever political support it needs.

WASHINGTON, April 24 (UPI) -- Much valuable work has been done on the increasingly widespread phenomenon of fourth-generation war, often referred to as 4GW, over the past decade.