If you do ever get the time, I recommend the masters degree program that I recently completed - a Masters of Strategic Planning for Critical Infrastructures - taught entirely on line by the University of Washington. The Constitutional Issues in Homeland Security was particularly fascinating.
Take a look here: http://www.criticalinfrastructures.wash ... ourses.asp" target="_blank" target="_blank
The cohort of people I took the class with consisted of about half engineers, half National Guard officers. I was, at one point, called a "cave dwelling hypocrite" for my pacifist assertions, but in general, the discussions were very lively and respectful.
The key element I learned from that course of study, and from my half century of life, and from other sources, is that it is best to build a resilient, redundant, flexible infrastructure and society, in which a certain level of disaster can occur without bringing down the whole structure. The other thing I learned is that violence is cheating. Violence is a short cut to get what you want, at the expense of ripping apart the carefully constructed fabric of civilization. It is better to work 10 hours on civilization's fabric than a few minutes in violence to get what you want, because in the end, you'll have a great civilization, not shreds.
Let me give you an example (taken from a recent lecture I heard on non-violence): What if a person came into the room right now with a gun, and threatened to kill everyone? If I just happened to have a gun in the drawer, I could kill him, and save everyone's life, right? That would be the easy, "cheater's" way of solving the Gordian Knot problem. But there is another way. And that's the way I'm taking. I volunteer every week at a crisis hot line. I listen to people who are on the ragged edge and thinking of doing something crazy, and I talk with them as soothingly as I can. I don't know, in the next ten years of volunteering, if I and my fellow workers may avert another Columbine, simply by de-frazzling a person who wants to commit suicide in a dramatic way, or even by helping a mom get psychiatric help before she starts abusing her kid and molding him to be a future torturer of others. It's the long slow way, but it is the only way to build a civilization on a firm foundation.
Another example - I do not know the details on this one, but from what little I heard, the conscientious objectors of WWII were few and far between. They each decided on their own to go to prison rather than go to war because of their convictions. The government put them together (bad idea ) and they formed a fledgling peace movement. The gov't didnt' know what to do with them, so stuck some of them in prisons, and some of them in insane assylums, where they succeeded in exposing the appalling conditions there and starting the reform of the mental health system and the prison system. Who knows how many lives that saved. You just never know who will be fed by the seeds of integrity that you plant.