preempting terrorist activity, and the role of women and business in the campaign against terrorism. Its activities included the creation of a database that collected historical data on the life paths of hundreds of terrorists and analyzed their letters, wills, and interviews. This information, based on open-source data, was used to identify the factors that tend to predict terrorist acts. Russell D. Howard, a retired U.S. Army general and Founding Director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, was appointed as the director of the center. The center was funded by Jan Henrik Jebsen, a Norwegian businessman and philanthropist, with a three-year grant of $1.5 million. The center closed in 2008, after three years of activity. Scope and methodology ISSP places security studies within the broader framework of international relations. It offers courses on time-tested subjects, namely role of force, crisis management, military strategy, decision making, intelligence, civil-military relations. It also has followed the contemporary developments, studying salient issues of each period like the Cold War, wars of national liberation, nuclear proliferation, collective security, low-intensity conflict, non-state actors. These studies have benefited of being in conjunction with the other fields of study in the school, including regional studies, and courses of political science, history, economics, and law, as the set of factors that either condition, influence or limit armed conflict. An emphasis is placed in the civil-military exchanges as well as fomenting interactions between US and foreign students. Professor Robert L. Pfaltzgraff highlighted the importance of the international aspect of the school by pointing that "It's much more beneficial for the students from the US to have experience with students from elsewhere," arguing that the "US national security is set within an international security setting." Activities Simulex Since 1974 ISSP has conducted annually an international crisis simulation, called Simulex, that spans over two days. The simulation puts real countries in hypothetical but realistic crisis situations. Students are teamed into the civil and military leadership of each country involved, need to react to sudden and mounting crises, make decisions, and report those to the Control Team, who oversees and manages the evolution of the entire scenario. These decisions can be of economic, military or diplomatic nature. Organizers and participants in the simulation also include members of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, from multiple institutions including the continuing involvement of the United States Army War College. Since