Critical Threats

Critical Threats is a project of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington think tank, run in partnership with the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Together they publish daily open-source assessments of active conflicts, including the Iran Update and the Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, the latter cited directly in Lowdown's Ukraine coverage.

The project's method is open-source intelligence (OSINT) tracking: satellite imagery, social media footage, local reporting and battlefield claims cross-referenced into a running map of who controls what and which forces are moving where. It was built to track threats to US national security across the Middle East, and its Iran Update has become one of the more granular English-language trackers of the current conflict, filling in operational detail that wire coverage often skips.

Its analytical posture leans towards the hawkish, US-security-establishment end of the spectrum, associated with analysts who have generally argued for robust American military engagement abroad. A reader encountering a Critical Threats citation should treat it as detailed, methodologically transparent open-source tracking, useful for granular fact but worth reading alongside other-tier sources rather than as a neutral wire report.